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Tuesday, January 31, 2006

crafty/miscellaneous sort of survey

lifted from Michael.

1. Are you a yarn snob (do you prefer higher quality and/or natural fibers)? Do you avoid Red Heart and Lion Brand?
Oh dear me no. I don't think I've ever owned anything other than Red Heart and Lion Brand, except for whatever the generic yarn is that Mary Maxim sells. (honestly I didn't like that; the texture of it gave me the chills. It was just too acrylic-y). Oh, wait, I bought one $5 skein of Christmas yarn to make C a stocking a few years ago.

2. Do you spin? Crochet? Knit?
I crochet. I can knit -- that is, I know how to do the stitches, but ugh. I am bad at it. Knitting is much less tolerant of mistakes or over-tension.

3. Do you have an Amazon or other online wish list?
I do. I'm kind of bummed, though, because I accidentally deleted my main wishlist a month or so ago, and I had to rebuild it. I KNOW I'm missing some things I really liked having on there. Ah well.

4. What's your favorite scent? (for candles, etc)
As long as it's not overpowering or noxious I like just about anything.

5. Do you have a sweet tooth? Favorite candy?
Oh gosh yes. I like caramel and chocolate best (lately I've been in love with Goetze's "bullseye" caramel creams), but I also like fruity candy or anything that will make me fat and rot my teeth.

6. What other crafts or Do-It-Yourself things do you like to do?
I sew decently and when I can do it I really enjoy it. I had a sewing room for a year and THAT was bliss. I could get a project out and not have to worry about putting it away every time I had to quit working on it to keep it from looking untidy/keep it safe from the cat/keep it a secret from its intended recipient. BLISS I TELL YOU. Ah well.

7. What kind of music do you like?
I like lots of kinds. I mostly listen to classical again these days, although I like some 90's alternative/rock, lots of 80's rock (nostalgia), old country music (nostalgia again), good a capella choral music, praise and worship songs -- the list could go on and on.

8. What's your favorite color? Or--do you have a color family/season/palette you prefer?
To wear, I like red. Also black. I'm supposed to wear autumnal colors; I just don't own very many of them. For painting rooms I like rich, subdued colors. Just to look at, I like just about anything but I think navy blue is probably my favorite. Or red.

9. Do you wear scarves, hats, mittens or ponchos?
No, only when I have to, no, and no. I do have a couple pairs of nice gloves, including one baby-soft leather pair lined with cashmere that T bought me for our first Christmas together. I have a pair of cheap imitation Isotoners that I keep meaning to replace with the real thing, for photography in the cold.

10. What is your favorite animated character or a favorite animal/bird?
Interesting combination of questions. I'm having a hard time thinking of a favorite animated character. For favorite animal I'd have to say horses. I'm a ten-year-old girl at heart when it comes to horses.

11. What is your favorite holiday?
Christmas. There's a big shocker.

12. Is there anything that you collect?
Turtles. Books. Bookmarks. Messes. Clean but unfolded laundry (I generally have an extensive display of this particular collection available for viewing in laundry baskets throughout my house). Unmated socks.

Sunday, January 29, 2006

How I Know

Jenn made a comment on my last post, and I thought it would be fitting to give my response to it a post of its own.

Jenn wrote:

...I also wanted to tell you I envy you so much in that you know where you are going when you die. I mean, I know some pretty faithful Christians and even THEY don't know for sure...They *hope* they make it to heaven but really just aren't sure if they are good enough. I have no idea personally...I suppose knowing in your heart that God will find you worthy after you die might be the reason you sleep so well at night ;-) I'm very happy for you that you have that confidence and I wish everyone had it.

Wow. First of all I have to say that if my eternal destiny relied on me being good enough, I wouldn't just wonder, I would know I was toast. Burnt toast. (ooh, that was a bad one, Rachel).

But it doesn't. And therein lies the reason I can know -- I know that Jesus took my sins to the cross, and that when I placed my faith in him for my salvation, they were separated as far from me "as the east is from the west." (Psalm 103:12). I am not good enough to bring this about, no. I never could be. Nobody is, nobody could be, except Him. Titus 3:5 tells us the following:

"It is not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us."

In other words, no matter how many good works we do, no matter what good people we are, that's not what makes us, to use Jenn's term, worthy. If we think we can count on such things to get us into heaven, we're wrong. If we hope we can manage it, we're hoping the impossible. This is what religion has historically been about: Do. Do this and do that, and hope that what you do is good enough. Whereas this relationship we have with God through his son Jesus isn't about doing; it's about faith, and trust, and love. The things we do as a part of that relationship are a byproduct of it, not a cause or a condition of its existence. The faith comes first -- then the works.

Col 1:13-14 For He rescued us from the domain of darkness, and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. (NAU)

We don't rescue ourselves. We can't. Romans 3:23 tells us that all have sinned (and do we really need it to tell us that?); Romans 6:23 tells us that the wages of sin is death (but then comes the good news, if you keep reading: The gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus. Whew!).

So what can we count on, then? Can we know where we're going when we die?

Yes. We can have faith that trusting in Jesus will save us. To put it in beautifully familiar terms:

John 3:16 "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believed in him might not perish but have everlasting life."

A little more about that eternal life:

I Jn 5:11-13 And the testimony is this, that God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He who has the Son has the life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have the life. These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, so that you may know that you have eternal life. [emphasis mine] (NAU)

God didn't want us to wonder. He didn't want us to struggle through life trying our best and hoping that it would be good enough. He wanted us to trust in His sacrifice on the cross, to give ourselves to Him, and to know.

I know. I really, really do. And most importantly I know that it's not because of me or because of anything I could ever do or be. It's because He loved me enough to die for me, and because I trust in that love to save me.

Saturday, January 28, 2006

continuing with the theme. also, my funeral.

Today we meant to go to a car show (hey, nothing is boring when the family and THE NIKON are around), but the NWS thought it looked like rain, so we went thing-shopping instead. You know, thing-shopping, where you don't have a list exactly but you have this sense that in spite of the fact that you are already incapable of putting away all your belongings in your house, there are things you need to buy. Things like a bigger toolbox for gunsmithing supplies, and a set of shelves to organize stuff in the laundry room, and picture frames, and casual-dressy shoes, and ... things. On the way to Thing-Mart, we passed a Toys R Us that was closing and stopped in for the clearance sale, emerging with a sort of appetizer sampler of Things -- including the Book Lovers' Edition of Trivial Pursuit, which I couldn't pass up at $7 even though I'm not sure who'll ever play it with me.

Then we came home and had an evening-long struggle to get C to put away the Things she already had. This process is even more depressing because of the absolute certitude with which I can state that within two weeks -- probably sooner -- there will be no sign that we ever did anything. That said, We're trying a new motivator. A dollar from Grandpa every time he came over and the room was clean stopped working after about the second visit. Now if her room's not passable when Daddy gets home from work, she loses an armload of toys for as long as Daddy sees fit. We can't just do the hip-parent thing and say "hey, it's your room, close the door and I don't care what it looks like in there," because we have to go through her room to get to the laundry room or to LT's room. Which last is actually against housing code, so actually we have to go through her room to get to the room where we store a bunk bed and where LT happens to occasionally sleep. Um, yeah. Not to mention that within a week she'd never be able to find clothes, or possibly to leave her bed, if she wasn't expected to clean it at all.

Also, just so you know I'm not an imposter, I will tell you that this afternoon I managed to break a 36"x45" sheet of anti-glare frame glass, when I decided to un-mount the Titanic poster that we had framed years ago in a haze of midlife-crisis-preview Titanic mania (we watched it after Natalie died and it resonated with us in some very interesting but short-lived ways). I figured that now that I know how to mat and mount pictures and have the necessary equipment, we'd use the frame for something else. Whoops. Guess we'll be buying a sheet of acrylic for that. It was satisfying, though, to set the quite-large remnants on top of a trash can and smash them to smithereens (carefully, so that said smithereens fell into the trash can and not around it) with a piece of pipe. I needed that.

After all that (just typing about it, let alone living through it) I'm exhausted and ready for bed, but I wanted to oblige Jenn and do a little thing she put up in one of her (dazzling array of) blogs. The idea is that I'm supposed to write about my funeral and my will. Morbid maybe, but anything for a friend. :)

1) My funeral: really I don't care much; I won't be there. The funeral's not for me, it's for the people I leave behind. So other than the fact that I want someone (my kids maybe? or the whole group?) to sing this one particular gospel hymn ("I'll Meet You In The Morning"), and that I want the gospel given loud and clear by someone who loves me and Jesus both (I know where I'll be; I want everyone else to hear at least once how to get there too), my survivors can set things up however they see fit.

2) My earthly remains: I'm torn re:cremation vs. burial. Cremation is tidier and more efficient (and cheaper); however, burial provides a grassy place where my family can go to remember me if they want to. So again -- whatever they want is fine with me. I won't be in that body anymore.

2) My will, specifically the 'to such a person I leave such a thing' part. Ech. I don't have a lot of special Things, and I'd probably want them (my books, my cameras, my flute maybe, my photos) to go to my kids and husband, with the understanding that they were free to give things away if they didn't want them and someone else did. Again, once I'm gone, I don't care, but I don't want people to fight or have their feelings hurt. So what I'd probably specify is the order in which people were to go through my belongings and take things they want. I dunno.

And on that cheery note, I'm taking my tired old bones to bed. Can you hear me creaking?

Thursday, January 26, 2006

motherhood again

LT and C arranged that in its entirety, from the picking (every narcissus in the backyard; ah well, there'll be more), to the arranging, to the marbles in the bottom (LT's doing. Pretty, no? Even my SON has a more decorative touch than I do), to the worn potholder underneath. Contributions to the Get Rachel New Potholders Fund are now being accepted. ;) It brightened my day yesterday, even though we had to move them to my room as soon as my dad arrived for dinner because the narcissus (narcissi?) give him a headache.

This week has been an enormous improvement over the terrible-mother despair that was last week. A few rough spots (LT got depressed last night again; we're thinking there's a connection to sugar consumption. With his genes, I'm not terribly surprised. We're going to experiment with his diet and see what happens) but overall very nice. We had a trip to the Valley to make on Tuesday -- that's the San Joaquin Valley, not Yosemite Valley -- and so we stopped off at the zoo since we have a family membership. The entire day turned out to be a golden kind of magic happy day -- good weather, everyone in a good mood, everyone getting along, everyone enthusiastic about the places we went and the things we did. Bliss. (That, and I took three hundred pictures in three hours. I only posted fourteen of them in the photo blog; you should be proud of my restraint. I know I am.)

Monday, January 23, 2006

"Motherhood is hard," she rambled.

Old-timers here (perhaps even back to the Blissful Contentment days) may recall that LT, who is now 9 1/2, has struggled with anxiety off and on. He wavers from simple caution, much like his father's, to anxiety (especially at bedtime) so severe that I contemplate finding a Christian counselor for him (except that it would scare him to death to go see one).

For the last few nights he has again been coming out of his bed to tell us he can't sleep, he feels anxious. I go in and talk to him and pray with him, cuddle his head, talk about things like "Be still and know that I am God" and "Be anxious for nothing", and try to get to the bottom of what's bothering him. Which has an additional wrinkle this time around, it would appear.

I'll backtrack for a sentence and say that I've always felt very blessed, having two children who completely adored each other from day one, and who never had serious sibling rivalry at any stage. Until now, when apparently LT is so bothered by his sister's dramatic tendencies that, according to him, he thinks about hitting her, a lot (I was a bit shocked to hear this, but quickly praised him for not hitting her, since I as a little sister and T as an older brother are both familiar with this particular aspect of growing up -- him far more than me). He feels that she gets far too much attention and wants us to give him more attention. He'll openly say that he likes to pester his sister, he likes to boss her around. Hey, at least he's honest. But I feel like I'm at my wits' end. I thought parenting newborns and toddlers was the hard part, with their constant neediness, and I would look forward to adolescence as this hazy foggy far-distant time when, yeah, we could expect some troubles, but surely for us things wouldn't be like for all those other people -- people who don't homeschool, who send their kids out to a rebellion-festering world from a very early, tender age, whose kids are influenced more by their peers than their parents, etc. And yet here I am, with adolescence supposedly still three or four years away, at a loss. This is where the rubber meets the road and I feel like a flat failure as a parent. If I can't make my son feel loved enough, then what can I do?

Well, there are a few things we've thought of in the week or so since this came up. We're going to make sure, as much as we can, even more than we've been doing, not to cater to C's dramatic whims. If she has a genuine problem, obviously we'll deal with it, and of course we'll love her and give her plenty of positive attention just like we do her brother, but her DQ antics have stopped being so funny and become downright annoying. We've been talking to her about this for a while, trying to help her to understand that she doesn't need to act more hurt or more scared than she really is. We're going to continue.

Also, we're going to set aside some special father/son time. We've always been advocates of both quantity and quality time with our kids, and we're all together as a family probably quite a bit more than most families we know, but LT is getting to an age where there are going to be things that his Dad needs to discuss with him anyway, and how better to make sure that can happen than to have a weekly date set up for them to do guy stuff together? With the added bonus that it will help LT to have something concretely memorable that's about him, without his little sister coming along and stealing his thunder.

And I'm trying to think of something service-oriented but still fun, where he could simultaneously use his skills, focus on someone besides himself, and get a little positive recognition (without being in front of people, which he hates). Maybe he and his dad and friends could refurbish donated bicycles for kids who can't afford new ones, or something. Still very much up in the air, that thought is.

I remember being the little sister. I remember distinctly when my brother was probably fifteen, and he was in the Sea Cadets, and he was really good at it. I was twelve or thirteen and I told Mom and Dad that I wanted to be in the Sea Cadets too, and my brother said (quite reasonably, as I recall) that no, he didn't want me to join, because this was one thing he could do where I couldn't come along and do it too. At the time I went along with it, and was (because C comes by her drama-queen tendencies honestly) a little flattered. Looking back now, I wish I could apologize to that teenaged boy, and the boy he'd been before that, for being such an inconvenience to his life. Just like with my own kids, he was more quiet and reserved; I was talkative and melodramatic. He was a quite decent student and knowledgeable about computers and a ton of other things, a really smart guy, but I was the prim, well-behaved little attention-hog nerd girl, and I think I overshadowed him in some ways, or at least I could see how maybe he felt like I did. I never thought to wonder if that was part of the reason he got in with The Wrong Crowd and had a bit of a hard time of it when he was in high school. (He's fine now, one of my heroes and one of my best friends.)

Maybe it's just human nature -- there's all kinds of documentation about birth order and its impact on personality. Maybe I'd be fighting an impossible battle, to try to get both my kids to realize they're on the same team and don't have to compete for our attention or love. The boy's fine at this moment; he and his sister are having a rousing light-saber battle, after having just sat down and drawn pictures to show what the Allegretto Scherzando from Beethoven's Eighth Symphony made them think of; his drawing did not involve any decapitated little sisters, or even any blood at all. Maybe I'm overanalyzing this, and worrying too much; you experienced moms are welcome (PLEASE) to give me advice. But I can't not try, you know? I just want the poor boy to be able to sleep. And, OK, I'd like for him to grow up as a normal, well-adjusted person, and not get into self-destructive hobbies, and it'd be great if as an adult he'd call his mom every week, and give me grandkids, and live near enough for me to see them, and maybe win the Nobel Prize for Literature or something.

Joking, joking. The prize for Physics would be fine.

Friday, January 20, 2006

what the doctor ordered

You know what I'd forgotten about myself? That for all my gregarious blabbermouth tendencies, I'm actually an introvert, if you define an introvert as someone who finds refreshment in solitude -- and solitude has been in short supply lately around here, since staying up late can't count because of all the darned guilt.

Today, though, I drove to Yosemite, thanks to dpchallenge.com (I am totally dpchallenge's slave). I went by myself, because Jenn couldn't come up after all, and T had the day off and never sets foot in Yosemite unless he has to (and he frequently does have to, since he, er, works there), and why torture the kids with one of Mom's photography trips if it's not absolutely necessary, right? And it was perfect. The park's quiet this time of year, and largely empty, and there was snow, and solitude, and silence, and I didn't have to worry about pestering any companions with my frequent shutter-junkie fixes. I took about two hundred and twenty pictures (lots of bracketing; I think I kept about forty of them, maybe fifty). I hiked about two and a half miles; I stopped to take pictures whenever I wanted to, and I took as long as I wanted to before moving on. I set up my tripod and I tried different lenses and I bracketed and I stood and just stared, and thought, and smiled. And I listened to The Four Seasons, and "Winter" was just starting as I crossed the Pohono Bridge coming into a frosty, snowy valley, and I got an Anne-Shirley-ish 'queer ache' and I almost cried.

I feel so much better. Now if only those elves would show up and do all that laundry for me....

Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Romans 7:19 (the story of my life)

Rom 7:19 For the good that I wish, I do not do....

• Read the Bible enthusiastically
• Keep my floors shiny
• Smile at my children as much as humanly possible
• Show my husband in word and deed how much I love him
• Get enough sleep
• Finish one project before starting another
• Be attentive when I should be
• Catch up on laundry
• Keep my room clean
• Stay within a budget
• Pray without ceasing
• Think on these things
• Update this page, which means more to me than I thought it did
• Keep in contact with beloved but distant friends

...but I practice the very evil that I do not wish. (NAS)

• Borrow money from future paydays
• Sit here at this darned machine too much
• Tune out voices and wander in la-la land
• Read junk
• Speak clumsily
• Move clumsily
• Heck, live clumsily
• Gossip
• Complain
• Overeat
• Oversleep
• Overspend
• Loathe myself
• Muddle along in a funk without asking God, my husband, or my friends for help and/or inspiration

So, um, yeah. That's where I've been. :)

Thursday, January 12, 2006

thank you all

I told you all you'd make me cry.

Today was a much better day than I've had in a while. I don't want to say that it's because I got up at 5:45 and got some stuff done (even though I didn't get to bed last night till a little after eleven), because that might, you know, obligate me or something -- but it was much better. My bathroom is clean, my dishes are done, I'm closer to caught up on laundry, my bed's made (or was until my husband got in it about ten minutes ago), and I feel a bit more worthwhile as a human being, and a lot more sane, largely because people have been so nice to me. Bless you all. I even found myself thinking journalish thoughts today as I was going about my business -- which hasn't happened in quite some time.

Remember the before/after pictures I did a few times? Remember the piano, how I didn't think it was messy until I took the picture and started cleaning it? No pictures (you're glad about this, trust me) but oh my gosh the bathroom was, um, much more dirty than I had ever noticed, when I started cleaning it this morning. Clumping cat litter, once it's been allowed to sit back in the corner behind the toilet in a fine layer, where it gets lightly moist each time someone bathes or showers -- I think they could use that to stick a space station together or something; it's amazing.

It was while I was scrubbing the bathroom that I realized that I should be the poster child for the phrase "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing" -- or at least "A little knowledge can make you look pretty darn idiotic." I was going along with my Clorox-Clean-Up-dampened rag, scraping and wiping, when I started to smell a really rank, odd smell. Now, there are several things* about which I am perhaps unnecessarily cautious (OK, freaked out); one of them is that whole chemical-weapon-gas thing that happens when you mix bleach and ammonia. I actually called poison control when I was a new mother, to find out if it was risky to wash my son's diapers in bleach, because of the ammonia in the urine. They generously waited to laugh at me until after I hung up the phone. Anyway. I confess than when I smelled that rank, odd smell, the first thing to pop into my head was that I was wiping up cat litter, possibly infused with a tiny quantity of ammonia because it says right on the box that it absorbs the ammonia in the cat urine, with a bleachy rag. I did not freak out. Much. I threw away the rag and took the trash right out -- at which time I noticed that the smell was definitely coming from outdoors. Probably somebody burning a milk carton in his woodstove. It's a good thing nobody knew how stupid I was about that. Until now.

*another thing on this list: electricity. For example: while I am perfectly capable of jumping the battery in someone's car, and have done it several times, every time I do it, I read the instructions four or five times and walk around like a maniac with my arms outstretched to avoid the slightest possibility of the electrodes touching each other sometimes even when they're not plugged in to either battery. When I'm done I get this rush of appreciation for life, as if I've just had a near-death experience. Shall we talk about how I feel when my husband (an electronics/telecommunication technician who could wire just about anything blindfolded) changes a light switch without turning off the main breaker to the house? No, let's not.

Didn't want to close without saying thank you again. Even though it ruins my humorous exit. I truly didn't expect that I would be so affected by you ladies' comments; thank you for taking the time to make them. Hugs all around. :)

P.S. Denise, I have an idea about a thin slice of kiwi, backlit, but I haven't worked out details yet or actually tried it. Thanks for the nudge. :)

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Why I've not been posting

Well, it's because I've been sort of drowning, for quite a while, in this ugly murky nasty kind of sea of my unmet expectations for myself, and my frustration with this nasty old cluttered cave of a house, and a good amount of shame, and anger at my total inability to do what it seems like every other person on the planet can do just fine. It doesn't help that our family does not include one (1) person who is tidy by nature; we all like to collect stuff, and in some cases the stuff is quite large, and none of us seems to be able to part with much of anything once we have it, and much of the time we are too lazy to put stuff away. And then I compound things for myself by having the most un-Godly, unladylike, unhelpful reaction possible -- that is, I yell, and then I cry, and then I sit, defeatedly staring into space. And I most definitely do not blog about this, because then I wind up with a bunch of sympathetic emails that make me cry, and at least one recommendation of a System That Works (oh please don't mention Flylady to me, OK?), when I know what works, and that's, well, work. Reading and IMing and Internetting until the wee hours, sleeping till eight-thirty or nine, and then spending a goodly portion of the morning looking at people's blogs and reading comics and news and who knows what all is not really the way to go about maintaining a house, I know this -- and yet it's what I do.

So. Tonight I'm going to bed by ten, and I'm getting up with T in the morning, and I'm going for a walk, and then I'm coming home and doing a couple hours' worth of housework before the kids get up to start school. Sounds a bit more... boring... than what I'm used to these days, but hey, better bored than utterly and completely insane, right?

Saturday, January 07, 2006

Elizabeth again

Nothing special about this picture except that it was taken with a Nikon D70s. With my Nikon D70s. THE NIKON, as opposed to The Nikon, which is of course still an awesome little camera. (lest you think I'm joking with the capitalization, pay attention; those are their actual nicknames and there will be a test later).

This is, of course, the obligatory I-just-got-my-camera-set-up-now-what-can-I-photograph photo. I had all these grandiose ideas for what I'd point it at when I clicked the shutter for that momentous first time, but the UPS driver inadvertently shattered all my plans by arriving after dark. And then we had to drive to the valley (very, very foggy oh my gosh how I hate driving in thick fog). And the gorgeous half-moon was behind clouds when I got home and refused to poke out. So you get Elizabeth, because the kids wouldn't appreciate the flash in their faces. (tripod and 1600 speed, though, I don't think they could mind -- right? stay tuned...)

Wednesday, January 04, 2006

If this were my first time here...

You know how sometimes you go into a restaurant that you normally really like, and they're just having an off day? The service might be sullen, or the food a little less perfect? When T and I have that experience we usually say (almost in unison) as we're heading to the car -- "Well, if this were our first time there, I wouldn't go back."

Which implies, correctly, that we do go back. We know that things aren't usually that way, and we have a fair level of confidence that next time everything will be back to normal and we'll have a fantastic time.

Sometimes motherhood is like that. Today motherhood is like that, for me. I have a six-year-old who has basically spent the past five hours forgetting to clean her room. (I wonder if a propensity for being easily sidetracked is genetically inherited?). I have had to take away her three very favorite toys for a week, because I told her I would take them away -- one at a time -- if she didn't get down to business and do the jobs I'd told her to do. I am now sitting here quietly relaxing, letting the kids play. This is the second day we're supposed to be back from vacation into school, and it's the second day we've not done a thing that's scholarly. (well. Yesterday evening they did their chapter summaries, and now that C is finally done with that bedroom, she's playing an educational computer game. Um... LT swept the floor and shifted the laundry? Life training? I really hope my inlaws don't read this journal.) I'm calling today a mental health day for myself. I even called off our nearly-weekly pre-Bible-study dinner with my parents.

Anyway. I digress. What I started out to say was that if this was my first experience with motherhood, I would most likely be seeking other employment. It's a good thing that I know about the ordinary good days -- the snuggles in bed in the mornings -- the spontaneous kisses on the cheek from the antikiss that is my 9-year-old son -- the notes like this one that I found on C's bedroom door (spelling original, made by C when she and LT both had friends over):

RULeS To Come IN
1 KNocK
2 STATe YouR BuisNess
3 SAY THe PAsswoRD
4 If we TELL You T CoMe iN THeN COM iN
5 i we TELL You To Go AWAY fRm THe RooM THeN Do AS YouR TOLD
6 SAY WHO YOU WANT

THe PAsswoRD iS CAT

Yeah, it's worth sticking around. Especially now that the kids made me lunch (pb&j, two chocolate caramels, and a diet cherry Coke).

Tuesday, January 03, 2006

Dismantled, by the numbers

• Height of our Christmas tree, in feet: 4 1/2
• Number of strings of lights on said tree: 5 (not short ones, either)
• Number of branches disconnected from the base by our cat who discovered the joy of climbing up the fake trunk: I neglected to count; I'd guess 8 (so roughly 1/3)
• Ornament casualties (not counting those that were broken before it was time to start taking it apart): 5
• Knowing that your husband is snickering with glee over having got out of taking the dratted Christmas tree apart for yet another year: priceless.