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Thursday, November 30, 2006

a million snippets. Or eight. Whatever.

Hmm. List, or rows of asterisks? decisions, decisions.

• You know what is really good? Or... are really good? But that construction is very awkward. The thing is, it's plural, but -- oh, shut up, Rachel. Hershey's kisses with peanut butter are extremely, extremely good. Oh my gosh. I needed a little bit of chocolate to use while transcribing, and as I reached out my hand for the Roast Almond bar (the Jolly Ranchers were already in my basket), I saw Hershey's Kisses with Peanut Butter and couldn't resist. Like I wasn't fat enough already! Guess what I'm going to buy to give to T to put in my stocking!

• Something else that's really good: "White and Nerdy". I have always loved Weird Al, but he has totally surpassed himself here. I can embarrass myself in record time (which, considering my history, is quite an accomplishment) singing this song aloud, especially at, say, a Bible-study potluck when Debi is showing me her iPod. Not that I've DONE that, of course, that's a purely hypothetical example. Even my kids can sing along, and they get the humor although they don't quite get the concept of "nerdy". 'Why can't people just like what they like?' That's homeschooled social deprivation for you.

• I have been sewing sewing sewing. Actually I have a little nightly All-Christmas-All-The-Time routine going (just when I had firmly resolved to start going to bed when normal people go to bed, instead of when some normal people get out of bed! Oh well. December 26th, maybe). As soon as the kids are in bed (which has to happen actually on time for a change or the whole thing falls apart), I transcribe my one file a day for this really well-timed job I've got going, which will hopefully enable me to purchase my husband's birthday and Christmas presents with money that he himself did not work to earn, for a change. This takes anywhere from an hour for a shorty where people speak clearly and the background noise is minimized, to two or three hours if it's a long one recorded inside a jet engine which I SWEAR I have had to do in the past. Or maybe it was a food court, or a trade show, or something. Same difference.
  
  So. I transcribe. Then I get up from the computer where I've fallen into a kind of dozing-while-typing thing (the chocolate helps keep this at bay, honest, I swear that's precisely why I bought it; it was a medical/occupational necessity, see) and I go into the dining room where my sewing machine currently lives because we are RENTING OUT my SEWING ROOM (sob), and I work on whatever project is current. I just finished [whispering] a Jedi bathrobe for LT, and now I'm working on a nightgown for C, after which I'll make a robe for my mom (guess I don't have to whisper that one... she doesn't even have Internet access) and then matching aprons for myself and C and then if I have time a Jedi tunic pajama top and possibly some doll clothes. Also, on Saturday C and I made five adorable fleece hats (we fringed the tops) for her friends for Christmas. I am a busy bee, no?
  
  So. I transcribe, and then I sew, and then I head back to the computer to read a chapter of Anne of Green Gables for Librivox/my dad. I have fifteen chapters to go if I'm going to give it to Dad for Christmas. I love, love, love that book, so it's not really a hardship; it's a great way to fit in some reading before I go collapse in bed, generally sometime between 2 and 3, but it has on occasion been as late as 4.

• In case the above paragraph didn't convince you that I've gone around the bend, I was at Joann (fabric/craft store) at 6 a.m. on the day after Thanksgiving. The dollar-a-yard flannel sucks me in every year. I had a great day shopping, I really did. Even buying a washing machine went smoothly. (what an UNsatisfying thing to spend money on, though. Ugh.)

• I've kind of given up on the bouclé sweater for now (got tired of it, honestly, and I think it's going to be too small, and it wouldn't be ready by Christmas anyway so it got bumped). Now I'm working on a camouflage-colored hat that I'm sure Kat would have had done in an hour but on which I have been doggedly working (in my vast stretches of spare time, of course) for almost a week. I LOVE CIRCULAR NEEDLES. They solve the biggest problem I have with knitting, to wit: I am extremely, terribly uncoordinated, as anyone who has ever read two words of this blog knows. Figuring out how to control the 14" needles weighted down by all that yarn while simultaneously making the two inches at the tips do what I wanted them to do was sometimes a bit of a stumbling block. The circular needles kind of hold onto themselves (itself?), leaving my hands free to mess up stitches with abandon.

• Because I am so awesome, I cooked a turkey on Monday. The thing is, I really don't like turkey. I like the stuff that goes along with it, but the bird itself I could take or leave, and I get so tired of it this time of year*, but honestly I just couldn't pass up $7 for a week's worth of food at Vons. And I couldn't keep it in the freezer until Christmas (which I am hosting, ack, in my cave of a house) because it took up too much space, and Thanksgiving was at my in-laws' so we didn't have any leftovers from that, so I made a big bang-up turkey dinner this week. Because two in the space of a month apparently just isn't enough.
  
  *Because of this turkey-related ennui, one year when I hosted Christmas I had the brilliant idea to make lasagna and its fixings instead. If I do say so myself, I make really good lasagna, yet this went over like the heaviest, hugest, fattest, most solid of lead balloons. So much for bucking tradition in this family.

• Somehow what was supposed to be very strictly a two-week trial membership to Netflix turned into $20 a month and a queue as long as my arm, with selections ranging from the first season of "The Muppet Show" to Bride and Prejudice which I've always wanted to watch and something called Junebug which I had never ever heard of but it looked really good. I think it started because the kids and T ran out of time on the Star Blazers series, so we were going to keep it for Just One Month so that they could finish. And then I started watching movie trailers one after the other one night. Is there some kind of award for the most insidious, clever marketing technique ever invented? Because that should win, hands-down. EAT MORE POPCORN has absolutely nothing on it. You just sit there, and movie previews just flow by one after the other in front of you (doesn't help that I LOVE previews, actually seek them out on DVDs, and am always bummed if I'm too late for them at the movie theater), and there's this ADD button, and... wow. Before you know it it's three AM (this was before the All Christmas All The Time routine got started) and you have at least five months' worth of movies lined up that you just can't not watch. Brilliant.

• You know, I've been a mother for over ten years now (sniff), and just yesterday I finally figured out how to elucidate something that should have been really simple. All stay-at-home moms, as well as all people who have ever spoken to a stay-at-home mom or, heaven forbid, insulted a SAHM by saying that she 'doesn't work' or that her 'life is a weekend' (Susan, I'm still flabbergasted by this one) know that the hardest aspect of our chosen career is the neverendingness of it. You're always on duty blah blah blah you've heard this all before. Of course I am familiar with the head-exploding frustration of this problem. And yet I chose this life and I truly love it and you couldn't pay me enough to give it up, and I don't want to sound like I don't love my kids or that I regret for a minute the decision to devote the most energetic years of my life to their care and education. Last night as I was dealing with bedtime, two tightly-wound offspring, and two of the possibly messiest bedrooms I have ever personally encountered, I thought, I need a vacation. Not -- this is key, this is where the guilt thing always came in before when I would let that beautiful V word pop into my brain -- not from my kids. I want them around. I just need a vacation (very brief -- and the thought of anyone else filling the position while I'm gone actually makes me, well, jealous, which probably means I have some undiagnosed psychiatric disorder) from being responsible for them, from being the person who has to bear the brunt of their messes and noises and feed them and wash and fold their neverfreakingending laundry.

Ha. Like that will ever happen.

Sunday, November 26, 2006

whizzing through

I am frightfully busy, making things for Christmas presents. Then (hallelujah!) tonight I got a big transcribing job, so I have to add that into the mix somewhere. It's always nice to be able to buy T's Christmas and birthday presents with money I earn, instead of money he earns.

I went shopping on Black Friday and had a blast -- it was just invigorating enough without being stressful. I had to buy a washing machine (SUCH an unexciting thing to spend $350 on, but mine went to the Appliance Graveyard in the Sky, good riddance, cranky old thing with a bearing going out making it sound like aliens landing in the utility room, spewing water all over the floor from its stupid leaky pump AGAIN) and even that went smoothly. I bought many many yards of flannel which I am hoping to transform into (top-secret list follows; good thing my children don't read my blog) a Jedi bathrobe (that's a Jedi robe made of flannel, of course) and tunic, a nightgown and an apron for C, a coordinating apron for myself (actually the aprons are calico, not flannel), and a bathrobe for my mom, all before Christmas. Also bought some fleece on a really good sale and made five adorable hats for C's friends for under $5 in under four hours. Also bought a couple of new bicycles for some children who really need them, and finished almost all our shopping except for the things I'm going to buy for T which are TOP TOP SECRET.

So things are going well. We put the Christmas tree up and did all this fun shopping stuff just in time to banish a case of the blahs that was kind of hanging around ready to pounce, and I feel fine and happy and productive. I'm just frenetically busy. I just finished an hour or so of transcribing, so now I'm off to go sew the hood on the Jedi robe, record a chapter of a book for Librivox and for my dad, and knit a bit while I proof-listen. JUST when I thought it would be a lot more grown-up and reasonable to start getting to bed before midnight every night. Maybe on December 26th.

Saturday, November 18, 2006

remedying the situation

I took pictures today. yay! Nothing brilliant, but oh, it felt good. And also, now the photoblog queue is loaded until sometime around December 1st, so if I run dry again in the interim, at least that won't sit there with the same sad picture the whole time.

Ooh, another thing! I re-covered a chair. Yes, me, I, with my own two hands, did this. Our chairs are in such sad, sad shape. They're upholstered, and the upholstery is... destroyed is the word I would choose, I think. Completely wrecked. In shreds. Seriously, most people would have thrown them away and bought new chairs months ago but have you any idea how much chairs COST? They cost a LOT! I could buy A LOT of books with what I would spend on four (or, oh heavens, six) new chairs. Someday, like when I win the lottery (which I don't play) or when someone just decides out of a clear blue sky to give us a lot of money, maybe we'll buy new ones with that. Meanwhile, today I was at a rummage sale, and in addition to four nice retro-ish black folding chairs, they also had upholstery fabric, about seven yards for $2. I bought the chairs and the fabric both, figuring I'd try re-covering our sad, sad chairs, and if I failed then even those black folding chairs would be better for daily use than what we have. (We needed them anyway, since I haven't progressed in my madd houshold skillz to making chairs, and we'll need more than we have for the Christmas dinner which I am hosting this year). But it worked. I dismantled the saddest chair and used the tattered remnants of upholstery fabric nagahyde plastic as a pattern, and I cut, and I sewed and stapled, and voila, a chair that doesn't look like we pulled it out of the dump. When it had been sitting there for several years.

Now I just have to devote the next several days of my life to doing the other three chairs, and continue to not accidentally use the staple gun on my leg (so far so good, but it was kind of close) and I'll be all set!

Thursday, November 16, 2006

Things I have not been doing

• Blogging. As is obvious.

• NaNoWriMo. I hadn't planned on doing this, but in case you all thought I'd vanished (if you noticed I'd vanished) because I was busy writing The Great American Novella, nope.

• Taking pictures. Except for the ones I took at a wedding on Saturday, as a favor to a friend, confirming in my mind that I do not want to pursue a career in wedding photography. MY GOSH THE PRESSURE! The terrible lighting and stark white walls that you can't do anything about! The dilemma: Do I bob around the building getting good shots and annoying the living daylights out of all the guests, or do I try to be unobtrusive and get a lot of great shots of the bride's and groom's backs?! The barely-eighteen-year-old bride and her bevy of high-school friends who give endless toasts consisting of long strings of inside jokes while everyone else looks first baffled and then bored!

  I don't know what's up with the lack of plain old recreational photography. Maybe I can blame it on the fact that the sun goes down at 4:20 (thank you hill to the west), leaving me no time to go for a nice walk and take pictures unless I want to forcibly drag along my kids. Or on the fact that even if I do drag them along on a walk, I have taken pictures of EV ER Y THING within walking distance over the course of the last eighteen months. Or on the fact that my beloved and beautiful Dart will not have its brakes repaired until tomorrow, and I've been too skeered to go for long drives with the skeery non-power-assist brakes it has had for the past few weeks. High gas prices! El Niño! I don't know. I'm kind of getting the itch again anyway. I'm thinking Yosemite on Saturday. We'll see if I can get pulled over again; that was fabulous.

• Communicating with anyone not residing in my home. I don't call. I don't IM. I feel like a heel because there are people I love very much who never hear from me because I am so lazy and, I dunno, kind of... blah. Which probably also explains the rest of this list.

• Folding laundry. But then that's no surprise.

• Knitting. I keep meaning to. But then I don't.

However, all is not lost. Some things I have been doing:

• Reading. I all of a sudden got a hankering for Pat of Silver Bush and Mistress Pat a couple of weeks ago, so I read them. And I have a stack of library books, thanks to this site and this one too.

• Working on my husband's car webpage, whose link I won't share for Creepy Internet Stalker reasons. As soon as Google starts picking it up (who knows when that will be), if you know my husband's super-secret first name and, say, the kind of car he's restoring, you might be able to find it. If you cared. Not that you care.

• Stumbling. If you don't know what I'm talking about, get Firefox and then go here. Proceed at your own risk; do not blame me if you never work again.
  

And that's just about it. I had hoped to reach a total of thirteen, and this could be a weak attempt at a Thursday Thirteen, but I guess I'm just not cool enough for that.

Monday, November 06, 2006

it's a mystery!

We are attempting to use Netflix's free two-week trial to get through the entire second series of "Star Blazers" AND the entire first season of "Who's the Boss?" (because, of course, we are so happening). We don't watch enough movies on a regular basis to make it worth paying $24 a month to be able to watch whichever ones we want, four at a time, but"Star Blazers" is a series that T has been telling the kids about for years, and the library only has the first series. (my personal mental jury is still out on why they're called series instead of seasons. Did they take more than one year to air, is that it? Or is it just those wacky Japanese being inscrutable again?). Also, I have always had a not-so-secret affection for "Who's The Boss?" (and "Coach", too... hmm... maybe ONE month at $24), which makes me extra frustrated that only the first season is available on DVD. What is WITH those people?

Anyway. The mystery to which I alluded in the title of this post has nothing to do with anything in the preceding rambling paragraph. The mystery is this: How does Netflix get those movies back and forth so fast? They're just using regular US Mail -- the same US Mail that ordinarily takes two or three days for a letter to move from my local post office to the one 25 miles away where my husband works, the same US Mail that can't guarantee overnight shipping even with their guaranteed overnight shipping if one of the addresses involved is in my dinky rural ZIP code. So how is it that one measly workday after dropping that magic red envelope into a mail slot, it arrives at a facility that's a three-hour drive away -- which, in Postal Service time, should merit at least a two-, possibly a four-day transit for lowly ordinary mail? Do they bribe the employees with chocolate? My personal theory involves benevolent little elves.

Friday, November 03, 2006

aren't emergency rooms fun?

We spent the afternoon at the ER, because all of a sudden in the past two weeks T has started to have episodes of cardiac arrhythmia -- as in one or two episodes a day -- when he had previously had no issues in that department at all. When he had one today we didn't have anything else pressing to do, so we thought, hey, let's pack everyone up and spend the afternoon watching cable TV. Or rather the kids and I watched cable TV in the waiting room* while T sat on a hospital bed wearing a fetching gown (Angelica: Always Rented, Never Sold. WHY is that a selling point? Cleanliness? Someday when I'm a nurse I'll find this out), rigged up with a maze of wires and tubes and stuff, with his heart behaving perfectly normally, because of course the episode ended about three minutes before they got him into a room, but after he had been called back into the check-in and prep area.

The kids were very good. Eventually my parents were able to pick them up, but they spent a good solid two or two and a half hours sitting quietly and behaving. And I knit for a while on the back of a sweater I'm trying to make for C with the bouclé yarn, which I have tamed to such a degree that I can knit OK with it (although I am still very obviously a total beginner. The woman sitting next to me in the waiting room watched me knit for a few minutes and then asked politely, "Are you just learning?" Maybe it was the tongue sticking out of the corner of my mouth that gave it away), but heaven forbid I drop a stitch or have to backtrack for any reason because then I'm just totally lost and I can never get all the stitches back on the needle right.

Anyway. So now T and I will have coordinating Heart Issues. Me with my tachycardia and he with his arrhythmia. Boy will WE be a hit at parties. When I realized that T is only three years younger than my dad was when his episodes of arrhythmia became severe enough to warrant medication and then a pacemaker, it made me feel like we're maybe a little bit... mature. Not in a bad way, just in that dang-we-are-really-not-kids-anymore way. At least he'll always be five years older than me, so that I have plenty of time to adjust to the idea of being whatever age he happens to be before I actually reach that age. Thirty-one, for example, felt way older when he was thirty-one than it does now that I am.

*get this: because the window between the waiting area and the work area is not soundproof, the TV has to be on constantly for patient privacy purposes. It's a hospital regulation that you have to sit there and let TV drone on and on at you, or else go outside. At least we got them to change it from CNN after a couple of hours of one political ad after another -- plus the commercials which were just as bad -- when the newsperson decided it was time to give my children an impromptu education about g a y s e x, so we could watch an episode of "Little House on the Prairie" and then a show on Animal Planet about animals in Namibia hosted by some guy with a death wish.

Thursday, November 02, 2006

things that make you say grr duh

Let's say you're walking along somewhere in a small town and you see a cell phone lying somewhere, all lonely and abandoned. And let's say it's on and the battery is charged and everything. Do you:

a) leave it there and keep walking, assuming someone will come back for it?

b) pick it up, find an address book entry marked, say, HOME, hit SEND, and say to the person who answers, "Hey, I think I found your cell phone."?

or

c) pick it up, take it with you, and use it freely until the owner realizes it's really and truly lost and notices that she has a whole lot of recent calls and text messages and who knows what all on her online statement that she didn't make, and she calls customer service to have it suspended?

I'm a letter B person myself. I'm nosy. Maybe you're more of a letter A person. But whoever the jerk was who found MY cell phone obviously went for letter C. With gusto.

Oh, well, good thing I was way overdue for my new-every-two free phone anyway. Except that now I have to start all over buying accessories and spare batteries and all that fun stuff. yay.

This also means that if I had your phone number(s) (Susan and Jenn, I am totally talking to you. Kristen, I think I still have an email with yours somewhere), I probably don't now, and you should email me with it(them). I don't even have my brother-in-law's phone number, or T's best friend's. I hope he wrote that one down somewhere, otherwise we'll just have to wait for him to call us because the guy doesn't even have e-mail and I became super lazy about writing important stuff down if I have an electronic device in which to save it instead (Please Lord don't let Microsoft Money crash and burn anytime soon).

******************updated to add***********************

I so totally hesitated to write this update, but in the spirit of full bloggerish disclosure and honesty among friends I feel that I must.

Guess what I found under the armrest in my car when we went to go to Awana tonight? (note: I had driven the car twice already today for short distances. I am SO SO OBSERVANT.)

Um, yeah.

What remains a mystery is the fact that when I logged into my account this morning online to check and see if anyone had been using my phone in the last couple of days, when I'd not seen or used it, the website said that someone had. There were more minutes than there had been, and it said that the last call made had been this morning at 8:30, when I hadn't had my hands on my phone since Monday afternoon. In fact I can be relatively certain that my phone battery was dead at 8:30 this morning, because the battery lasts a max of like a day and a half on standby. After I called and suspended the use of the phone, the minutes rolled back and the last-call date and time did too; I assumed this was the little telecom gnomes wiping my account clean of all those nasty evil stolen minutes.

You can hum the Twilight Zone theme now if you want. Or else the Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum one. You choose.

At least the replacement phone didn't cost me anything. I guess now I have a spare, at any rate, and woo hoo, am I glad I didn't already dump all those chargers and accessories and stuff. Can you imagine if I'd had insurance on the silly thing and filed a claim? I'm SO GLAD I didn't pay the extra $6 a month for insurance, or else I would be in the seventh level of hellish embarrassment right now. Instead of only the third.