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Friday, December 28, 2007

the obligatory year-end survey meme

1. What did you do in 2007 that you’d never done before? Enrolled in college. Bought a house. Participated in SERIOUS DIY (or DIWTHOYDAMF --that's Do It With The Help Of Your Dad And Many Friends) renovations.

2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year? I don't remember if I made any resolutions last year. (Gee, Rachel, maybe you should check for the last time you did this survey?) I haven't thought far enough ahead to make any yet for next year, but I'm thinking maybe the standard what-the-heck-I'll-only-break-them-anyway resolutions will do: Lose weight and get in better shape, have more financial discipline (actually, this one I will have to keep or they will take away our house, and that's not pretty), keep the house tidy. I hear you laughing.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth? Susan did! Greetings, Tabitha! Susan provides me with fodder for this question pretty much every year. Go Susan! :)

4. Did anyone close to you die? Our next-door neighbor (at the time) did. I don't think there was anyone else.

5. What countries did you visit? HA! Har har. Tee hee. You so funny.

6. What would you like to have in 2008 that you lacked in 2007? Great faith (sigh) and, as always, discipline.

7. What dates from 2007 will remain etched upon your memory, and why? June 20th: the day our landlord dropped the bomb. October 5th: The day our offer was accepted on the house. November 29th: The day we closed escrow, finally.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? Not killing our landlord. What. OK, I think I made straight A's in my college classes (for all nine units I completed during the year), and I know I did every assignment in every class, which I haven't done since sometime in the third grade, or maybe before.

9. What was your biggest failure? I was, generally speaking, a slob.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury? Nothing serious. The miserable stomach bug that has just departed only seems serious because it was so recent, right?

11. What was the best thing you bought? A house.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration? My parents deserve a medal. They have put us up since mid-September, tolerating our extremely annoying here-just-long-enough-to-eat-and-make-a-mess status for the first few weeks of that time as well as the past month; they've watched our kids while we were off gallivanting working and/or painting; they've pretty much made the work on the house possible with their expertise, tools and help. There are other friends who are also contributing to our well-being in huge and selfless ways, like our friends who have lent us a vehicle and many power tools and bought us an engine and helped with tons of stuff on the house, and Tolley's dad who donated his real estate commission for our closing costs, and other friends who have saved us tons of money by telling us what to do and/or helping us do it, and of course there are lots of people who have been awesome just in general ways that have nothing to do with us. Anyone with creative ideas for how to thank these people beyond holding a barbecue and giving a teary-eyed speech over dessert? *snif*

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed? My own, at times.

14. Where did most of your money go? Ordinary bills, Lowes, and Home Depot.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about? The house, for the about three seconds that it was neither a paperwork nightmare nor a huge monumental task to be completed. Seeing Jenn in Morro Bay. Going to Morro Bay in general.

16. What song will always remind you of 2007? Well, 2007 was The First Year of the iPod, so I listened to a LOT of new-to-me music. Maybe "Fidelity".

17. Compared to this time last year, are you: a) happier or sadder? b) thinner or fatter? c) richer or poorer?? a) don't remember how I felt this time last year b) maybe a wee bit fatter and c) richer in assets (thanks to a good amount of sweat equity), poorer in cash

18. What do you wish you’d done more of? Spent time with my friends. Also, I feel like for the past few months, since I've had free-and-easy babysitting, ESPECIALLY for the last month which is about the only time we've actually taken advantage of the above, I haven't seen my kids as much as I'm used to. I'm looking forward to getting back into our routine.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of? Griped.

20. How did you spend Christmas? Here at my parents', with much eating.

21. Did you fall in love in 2007? Over and over again, with the same person.

22. What was your favorite TV program? I only watched one (Jericho, via the Internet).

23. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year? No. I find it hard to hate pretty much anyone for more than a few seconds at a time.

24. What was the best book you read? Nineteen Minutes, Jodi Picoult.

25. What was your greatest musical discovery? Regina Spektor.

26. What did you want and get? oh gosh. So, so much.

27. What did you want and not get? Nothing worth having that isn't worth waiting for.

28. What was your favorite film of this year? I have only watched one film that was actually made in 2007 (people, I am so cultured, no?), and it was just eh-ok. (Martian Child.)

29. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you? I celebrated turning 33 with my family here at home.

30. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying? If I had suddenly been transformed into a size-eight, disciplined, more cheerful version of myself. Or if the house thing had gone more smoothly and we hadn't had to impose on my parents for so long. Otherwise, nothing.

31. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2007? Well, I finally started wearing jeans that SIT SLIGHTLY BELOW WAIST. Still overall rather Mom-ish, though.

32. What kept you sane? Sometimes it was the grace of God and nothing else, and that only by a hair. (Also, there's the fact that if I really do have a genuine nervous breakdown, it will scar the poor kids for life.)

33. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most? I do not fancy celebrities or public figures.

34. What political issue stirred you the most? I have become nearly apolitical as a general rule. I mean, I have firm positions on issues, but I don't get riled about them.

35. Whom did you miss? Lots of people.

36. Who was a nice new person you met? Sarah, a friend in my English class.

37. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2007. NEVAH, NEVAH, NEVAH give up. OK, so I didn't hear the WORDS in 2007, but I certainly took them to heart in a very real way.

38. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year. Oh, I am so bad at this. Let me rummage through my iTunes playlists... hmm... OK, this one, as a prayer for what should be, as the rest of the song intends, and not necessarily a statement of current affairs:

Riches I heed not, nor man’s empty praise,
Thou my inheritance, now and always:
Thou and thou only, first in my heart,
High king of Heaven, my treasure thou art.

(from "Be Thou My Vision").

**********************

OK, everyone, your turn now. whew.

well!

After making a big deal (to put it lightly) out of how miserable I was, I feel compelled to post and inform my vast Internet public that I feel all better now.

Thank you for caring.

P.S. It warms the cockles of my cockle-laden little heart (whatever cockles are) to see that the Gospel of Nikon is spreading among my friends. Congratulations!

Thursday, December 27, 2007

four out of six

...of us are sicksicksick. It started last night with Mom and me, and then today Dad went down and now C is starting to. I think it's only a matter of time before we are all incapacitated by this terrible bug that sucks away all our energy and makes our bodies do unmentionable things at all hours of the day and night. SOS! SOS! Send soup! Send fuzzy pajamas and slippers! Send people to empty our storage unit, which must be emptied by the thirty-first and there's a very cold, wet storm slated to last through the twenty-ninth, while T does not have Monday off! And for pete's sake send someone to do laundry or we are all doomed!

Me? Hyperbole? NEVAH. (Just in case you wondered where C got it. You didn't wonder? Oh.)

But seriously, ohmygosh I haven't been this miserable in YEARS. Ugh.

Monday, December 24, 2007

very quick little tidbits

Guess what I did today? I used the table saw to cut trim! For three whole rooms! (Good thing most of the mistakes I made were of the trim-too-long variety. Ahem. At least there were no mistakes that involved, say, copious quantities of blood.)

And (drumroll please) all of the floor, window, and door trim in the bedrooms is DONE. Donedonedone!! That leaves ceiling moulding, which is not a high priority and which we will probably do one room at a time as we can afford to buy good stuff, rather than trying to put back the cheap stuff that was there before.

Aaand this Friday we are emptying a storage unit (one of two), and then Saturday we are LAYING THE FLOORS YES YES YAY.

Also, I still have not found out my grades because the college's grade-checking site won't let me in to see them. What kind of Communist conspiracy is this??

We are all ready for Christmas and even excited. Dinner is on the table so I must not elaborate.

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Christmas meme

1. Wrapping paper or gift bags?
Wrapping paper. This year, my son is wrapping almost everything! YES! Stuff's a little lumpy but he's getting better and better and I don't have to do it so yay!

2. Real tree or artificial?
Artificial. Sometimes I get a hankering for the smell of a real tree, but my practical side wins out and we go with the cheap -- we've had our tree since Christmas 1995, so it's down to, what, $2.50 a year now. I can't bring myself to go buy a tree with money that could be spent on more stuff for my kids to play with and eventually forget about and leave lying around in their rooms so as to help Mommy have that genuine nervous breakdown just thaaaat much sooner. (Also, the fire hazard. And the needles. And the sap. And the need to water it which face it I would always forget to do and we would die in a fiery inferno as a result. Rachel = Scrooge.)

3. When do you put up the tree?
The day after Thanksgiving without fail, except this year when we are not putting up our own tree, so we convinced my parents to let us put up their tree on the day after Thanksgiving, even though that was more than a month before Christmas.

4. When do you take the tree down?
I try for New Years' Day but sometimes I lapse.

5. Do you like eggnog?
NO. Beck, best description of eggnog EVER: chilled phlegm. I am going to use that for the rest of my life. (Also, the paint we were putting on our living room walls was exactly eggnog-color and eggnog-consistency, although it dried a tiny bit darker, so now there's the whole negative *twitch* painting *twitch* association too.)

6. Favorite gift received as a child?
Favorite in retrospect: A giant rag doll that I played with for years and wish I had to give to my daughter. Favorite at the time: The Dr. Drill & Fill play-dough toy that I begged incessantly for and then played with for maybe four nanoseconds before I lost all the pieces and ground the play-dough into the rug.

7. Do you have a nativity scene?
My parents have a full set. We have a small one, given to us by a friend this fall, made of wood and very nice. C has adopted it as her Very Own and it will have pride of place on her bookshelf year-round, I'm thinking.

8. Hardest person to buy for?
My husband. I want to be all original and genius-y with the gift-giving like he is, but it's hard. He has a very specific list of things that he wants/needs for his various projects, and while, yes, I could go online and order the grommet for his fuel tank thingamabob for his Charger, it just feels kind of unwifely. So I try to find something that he'll absolutely LOVE that's not so ... practical ... and yet can be opened around the tree in front of the kids, and it's difficult. He doesn't need clothes -- he already has a ready supply of the black turtlenecks, checked flannel shirts, and black polos that make my heart beat faster. I got him cologne last year and he still has almost all of that. He has a few collections of "toys" -- die-cast Mopars and the like -- but he has all the ones I've ever seen already. Last year I gave him a hundred dollars and a trip to the Telescope Store at the coast to spend it -- which went over well, but now that's been Done, and besides I don't have a hundred dollars unless I forego paying my college tuition with my transcribing money which I swore I would do, and to give him a hundred dollars that he earned seems a little... eh. Yet he is a GENIUS at gift-giving. He always gets me things I love whether they were on my list or not.

9. Easiest person to buy for?
The kids. Even in years when we hold to our No New Toys rule -- there are just so many things they like.

10. Worst Christmas gift you ever received?
I can't think of anything.

11. Mail or email Christmas cards?
This year I thought with all the moving and stuff that we wouldn't bother, but now I'm feeling guilty about that, so I am seeing a family photo session and a trip to the valley to buy cards in my future.

12. Favorite Christmas Movie?
It's a Wonderful Life and While You Were Sleeping.

13. When do you start shopping for Christmas?
Usually in the early autumn. This year, not so much.

14. Have you ever recycled a Christmas present?
I plead the fifth.

15. Favorite thing to eat at Christmas?
Anything that is not nailed down.

16. Clear lights or colored on the tree?
Colored colored colored. They photograph much better. :)

17. What is your favorite Christmas song?
This year for some reason I am all about Chanticleer's version of "Silent Night" from Sing We Christmas, where they sing the first verse in German, the second verse in French, and the third verse in English, at which point I start bawling like a baby and feel like my chest is going to explode.

I also like "Carol of the Bells" as performed by the Bel Canto Women's Choir from Azusa Pacific University. And "Christmas At Ground Zero" by Weird Al.

18. Travel at Christmas or stay home?
Home. Or within fifteen miles of home.

19. Can you name all of Santa's reindeer?
Yes. When I was a girl I was the type who was excited to get a Social Security number because it was something new to memorize. (OK, so maybe that's not exactly a type, it's just nerdy little old awkward strange me.) In my secret heart, denied to the meanies at school who somehow thought it was inappropriate to like anything but The Right Music and The Right Clothes and The Right People, I loved memorizing. So yes. Thanks to my nerdy childhood, I can recite all the names of the reindeer, as well as all the levels of biological classification and all the dwarfs and all the books of the Bible and probably some other stuff too.

20. Angel on the tree top or a star?
Star.

21. Open the presents Christmas Eve or morning?
Christmas morning.

22. What I love most about Christmas?
Well, I'm feeling Christmasy enough now not to say at this point, "the moment when it's over and quiet and all the mess is cleaned up." So. What I love most about it is the anticipation, and reliving my own childhood through the kids' excitement, and making people happy by giving them STUFF that they will like.

Thursday, December 13, 2007

the neverending PAINTING. and other stuff.

oh my gosh I hate painting. Have I mentioned that? Hate. hate hate hate.

The good news is that, relatively speaking, it's almost done. I have painted LT's room, C's room (with a little help from T), our room, and the living room, which took THREE **** COATS because KILZ PAINT LIES. Also, I have painted most of the trim in the living room/dining area/kitchen. Still to do: the window, door, floor, and ceiling trim (which has been removed) for the bedrooms, the drawer fronts and cabinet doors, and the (millions of miles of) ceiling and floor moulding for the front room.

So yeah. Sometime around the time the kids graduate and move out, we should be done. Or maybe this weekend, if the weather holds and nothing stupid happens.

I am liking the colors. Off-white begone! LT's room is kind of khaki, and should look great with the camouflage bedding I think he's getting for Christmas from my mother-in-law. C's is PURPLE. I mean, techically it's lavender, but it's PURPLE. When the light comes in her window in the afternoon, the whole hallway outside her room has this purple glow thing going on. Ours is very blue. Those of you who may have been around since we painted our room at the other house, before we gave it to C -- it's a little more blue and a little less gray than that. And the living room is a nice sunny, creamy yellow. FIVE GALLONS of paint later. One coat coverage my eye. At least the mint-chocolate-chip-green color is banished forever.

All trim is white.

Not that you care. In fact, let's face it, you all took off two paragraphs ago and here I am talking to myself. I know this because even I am bored. Rachel, nobody cares about the painting except you. Accept it and move on.

Um. What else to talk about... Christmas is coming? I am still not really feeling that. No idea why -- it's not like I have anything else on my mind. And Christmas coming means that I have a birthday coming too, doesn't it. Also not feeling that, although I've been thinking of myself as 33 (when I haven't been thinking of myself as 68) for at least the last few months, so maybe that's why. The shopping is done, and thanks to LT most of the wrapping is done, and now Christmas is kind of on a shelf until the morning of the 25th, when we will bustle around and make a big dinner and then, in a manifestation of one of the most disappointing aspects of adulthood for me personally, I will heave a sigh of relief that it's over until next year. I swear I am not Scrooge. It's just that the work factor outpaced the fun factor of Christmas about the time the kids got old enough to lose the starry-eyed-wonder thing, which was also around the time that I got fed up with all the STUFF they had... and yet here we all are trapped in a tradition where, no matter how much we deny it, Christmas is very much about getting STUFF.

I am not knitting much. I started a really pretty scarf with a celtic knotty braidish kind of pattern that I lifted from somewhere, thinking to maybe give it to my grandmother for Christmas, but at the rate I'm going it'll be Christmas 2011.

I am done with school for the semester, as of last night. I am 100% sure I have an A in the music class, and relatively sure I have one in the dreaded English class as well, which is something I was not at ALL sure was possible at the beginning of the semester. This will teach me to freak out about stuff. That class was a lot of work, and the subject matter was annoying, but the grading was very fair -- even generous, in some instances -- so I have no complaints.

Also, I have a transcribing job, which I work on very late at night until I collapse into bed to get up and start it all over again the next day. One by one these various occupations will drop off as they get finished (hallelujah!), at which point I will probably find out that I don't at all remember how to relax. I am really looking forward to relearning that very admirable skill, oh yes I am.

Thursday, December 06, 2007

I think I may be the only person in Western civilization to say this, but...

...this annoys me very, very much. (Beautiful and all as it is.)