I'm going crazy; want to come along? Archives | Page 3 of 5

previous ten entries | 1 2 3 4 5 | next ten entries

Wednesday, January 12, 2005

not the kind of day homeschoolers brag about

This was one of those days. By that I mean, it's the kind of day which I think those few bitter individuals who think mothers can't teach their children and shouldn't try to do so would wish on me, if they had a little Rachel voodoo doll (let's not give them that idea, shall we?). It's Wednesday, which means chapter summaries. Ordinarily these go very smoothly. LT has become pretty good at them; the format's simple and anyone from a 5-year-old (C does one too) to a professional Bible scholar can get a lot out of it. Today, I think maybe because he got up early, but maybe because he decided subconsciously that this had to be a day to make Mommy alternate between doubting her calling as a mother, and fantasizing about running for the hills, arms flailing wildly, not looking back -- today he just DID NOT WANT to cooperate. So instead of going to Bible study with T and C tonight, we stayed home, and he went to bed after dinner. Apparently he's not TOO sleepy; he's in there reading. That's my boy.


I really hope tomorrow's better. Meanwhile I'm going to go drown my sorrows in a Jane Austen adaptation (P&P, the standby? Or should I branch out into the Kate Beckinsale version of Emma? Or maybe I'll just keep listening to Yahoo Launch's "Big Hits of the 80's" station -- when was the last time I heard a Heart song? Decisions, decisions...) and some crocheting.

Friday, January 07, 2005

an exercise in telephone patience

Update on the asterisk situation: I heard from T at ten this morning. They had reached the equipment without incident after only an hour on the snowmobiles, and were waiting for batteries to charge before heading back to their truck to drive down the hill. Now I feel like I need to tell God I'm sorry for thinking swear words and having a world-class bad attitude, before I can tell Him a big THANK YOU for getting T safely this far.

I finally gave up waiting to hear from T again and got in the shower.
Which meant, of course, that it was time for the phone to start ringing, and of course I had to answer it every time because what if it was T?.

• Call #1: C brings me the cordless, saying that it's ringing but she's "too shy to answer it." I turn off the water and push TALK, getting the phone all wet, and get a dial tone. I dry off the phone and set it on the toilet lid so that if it rings again I can just answer it, in case it's T.
• Call #2: Phone rings. I turn off water, swipe hand against
  towel, pick up phone, getting it all wet, push TALK.
  

  Computerized female
  Prozac voice: "This is the
  TeleCirc library system. You have (ONE) item being held at this time..."

• Call #3: Phone rings. I turn off water, swipe hand on
  towel, pick up phone, push TALK.
  

  Accented
  female voice: Good morning, may I speak to [gross mispronunciation of T's name, which, granted, happens a lot]?
  I: He's not here; may I
  ask who's calling?
  Voice: This is a courtesy
  call from [some credit card company].
  I [deciding to forego the
  usually-quite-amusing discussion of exactly why it is called a
  "courtesy call" when it interrupts my life to try to sell me something I don't want and which involves an enormous corporation profiting from human weakness, since the phone is getting wet]: Please remove us from your list, thank you.
  Voice: All right, as of
  January 7 2005 I am adding your name to our do not call list blah blah blah blah blah thirty seconds of small print while the phone continues to get wet and I begin to shiver because I can't bring myself to just hang up on the person; after all she's just doing her [albeit very annoying] job

• Call #4: Phone
  rings. I turn off water, swipe hand against towel -- you get it.
  

  My grandmother (the
  self-sufficient spunky one, not the whiny one or the dead one): Are your parents there?
  I: No.
  [sixty seconds of shivering, phone-soaking small talk]

  
  

Now. Guess how long I was in the shower, start to finish. Did you guess seven minutes? Because if you did, you would be right. And of course the phone hasn't rung since I got out, what, forty minutes ago now. Why should it, when it would be completely convenient for me to answer? That would be boring.

Friday, December 17, 2004

oh dear, another ramble. And it started out so... organized.

I don't think I have the energy to really type a real entry. So here, the abbreviated version of my day, in list form:

1. My feet hurt.

2. I found a sweater of the type I've wanted my entire adult life (soft, cashmere-ish, off-shoulder) and found that it was utterly unflattering on me. Of course, it was white, and ugh, white is, as aforementioned the epitome of "not my color." Someday maybe I'll try a black one, but I'm not holding out much hope. So there's another dream smashed. "'My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes.' That's a sentence I read in a book once, and I say it over to comfort myself whenever I'm disappointed in anything."

3. Also, it itched.

4. I. Hate. Crowded. Stores.

5. Especially when THE AISLES ARE TOO DARN NARROW and PEOPLE PARK THEIR CARTS IN MY WAY.

6. I was "that person" whose problem with her receipt held up the grocery store line. I will never feel quite so malevolently toward "that person" again. It wasn't MY fault; it was the idiotic cashier (sigh. OK, that's not nice. It was the poor overworked idiotic cashier) who couldn't understand the fact that, when there are three cases of Diet Coke on my receipt and only two in my cart, he indeed had (inadvertently and with no malice aforethought, of course) overcharged me, or that I was entitled to either another case of soda or a refund for $5.99 plus CRV.

7. I did not blow anybody up today. (pats self on back.)

8. I didn't even swear. Not out loud, anyway. (pats self again, goes to get self a diet Cherry Coke from the fridge as a reward)

9. Something I ate did not agree with my lower intestinal tract, let's just say that. And it being a prime Christmas shopping day, the public ladies' room at Penney's was full. So my annoyed lower intestine had an audience. Beautiful.

10. Men's slippers are either way too cheesy, or they cost too much, especially when slippers are just something your husband kind of wants, and not something he's really really hoping to find underneath the tree.

11. I finally wised up and bought two tubes of toothpaste instead of one. That way, when either T or I (probably T; I rarely go anywhere overnight without him) has to travel somewhere, either the traveler or the person at home isn't stuck using blecchy bubble-gum flavored kids' toothpaste.

12. When you're in a hurry and you go to pick up takeout which you've ordered on the phone, it takes forever. Everybody knows this. If, however, you should happen to sort of look forward to a solo trip to the local "diner" (and I use this term loosely, and anyone who is familiar with the diner to which I'm referring will know why) to use your husband's birthday gift certificates to get a free and easy dinner at the end of a day from hell, and you've brought a book in anticipation of twenty minutes of sitting at a table, listening to songs you've chosen on the jukebox, the food will be done before you sit down. I just thought I would warn you.

OK, I think that's all.

Oh. Wait, no it's not. I have a survey of sorts for you people who read this. I had a nightmare the other night, in which my husband was leaving me for the accompanist for our community chorus (I will leave for another time the discussion of the huge billboards my dreams may as well have rented lately, to plaster with the gargantuan text "YOU ARE INSECURE". Or maybe I won't), and in my sleep (as well as in the dream), I distinctly -- well, I said, "You son of a b***h!" T was quite shocked by this. He says that that particular phrase is a swear on a level with the Big One. Whereas I think it's below the mid-grade swears, somewhere on a level juuuuust above "crap" on the shock scale. What do you all think? On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being "darn" and 10 being, well, we all know what 10 is; it's the one my mom told me I must never even spell, it was so bad, after a kindergarten classmate had yelled it -- not spelling it -- at the teacher and I'd come home and asked my mom what those particular four letters meant -- anyway. Wow, what a convoluted sentence, I'm afraid to go back and try to fix it for fear I might get lost. On such a scale, where is that particular swear which I called my husband in my sleep when I thought he was a philandering homewrecker? Input please.

Saturday, December 11, 2004

car-dancing fool

Today I drove down to the valley to buy more Christmas lights, as mentioned in my previous post. I went... ALONE. Now, to a lot of people -- a staggering quantity, really, judging by how few vehicles qualify for the carpool lane on city freeways -- being alone in the car is just part of daily life. However, for a full-time homeschooling mom, it's a rare event. I almost always have my children with me, and frequently my husband too, or occasionally we leave the kids with my parents and it's just T and myself in the car. Maybe five times a year I am actually in the car alone for any extended period of time (i.e. longer than it takes to drive to the podunk grocery store in town for an emergency evening shopping expedition). So when it happens, I go... a little crazy. Today I car danced to 80's songs for half an hour, and sang at the top of my lungs, and oh gaw, I am sure I gave the people in the car behind me something to laugh about for years. ("Remember that time we were on our way to the city and there was that total spazz of a woman in the car in front of us?") I lay all the blame at the feet of Men At Work, because if I hadn't started out the trip with "Down Under" I probably would not have been put into such a slap-happy mood. But then that was followed by 99 Luftballons. Now, you generally wouldn't think that a song about nuclear annihilation would be so darn dance-able. But that song's not just a late-Cold War classic; it's my childhood. Also, I sing along with the German version even though I have no idea what I'm saying and only catch every tenth word or so, and then I think about how funny that would be to someone who actually spoke German, and ack. The thing is that when I get into that kind of mood it just sort of spirals out of control. (ask anyone who's ever chatted with me at one o'clock in the morning).

And I won't even bother telling you about going stoplight-to-stoplight listening to "Sweet Dreams Are Made of This" at volume setting 24 (25 is "shatter glass", I think), which is one of the two songs composed during the 1980's which, IMO, validate the existence of the electronic synthesizer, which was used so criminally by many, many "musicians" of that era. (the other song is "Axel F", by the way. SHUT UP.)

Shopping killed my buzz pretty thoroughly, though. We have always bought Christmas lights at Big Lots, and Big Lots was an utter zoo. ZOO. And they were also completely cleaned out of the kind of Christmas lights we use, so I had to go to (cue sinister music) Wal-Mart. Two Saturdays before Christmas. I actually had to perform deep-breathing relaxation exercises several times as I went around in that store. Also, I was looking at purses and found a box cutter, with its handle wrapped in black tape, inside a really cute little clutch wallet thing. There's a story there, and it could be creepy, but I have no idea what it is.

Sunday, November 07, 2004

holding onto sanity by my fingernails

This last week has made me eat every word I ever said about my children's utter lack of sibling rivalry. It is as if they have been possessed by the spirits of my brother at 8 and me at 5. In other words, you know they love each other, but they keep driving each other (and hence their mother) absolutely bananas. I think it was Thursday, or maybe it was Tuesday, when I was awakened at around eight o'clock by my son's voice: "MOMMY! C said [swear word beginning with S, and yes, this is all my fault, because I am the best mom ever]!!" Of course that meant he had said it too, so I let him know that he would share her punishment, which was to have to write forty nice words, in addition to their schoolwork. He called her a name for "getting him into trouble", so in addition to the forty pleasant words, he had to write ten nice words about his sister. All in his best handwriting. C's words were largely illegible, and very faint, but they ran heavy to horses and names of flowers. Here is LT's list, spelling intact:


10 NICE THINGS ABOUT C

1. Prety
   
2. Swete
3. nice
4. cute
5. smart
6. good
7. sciny ["skinny" (!!)]
8. Gubby (one of her nicknames)
9. Hoy (another nickname, because she used to get up in the morning, stumble into our room, and say, "Hoy, Daddy")
10. C-girl (did I mention T gives out nicknames like some dads give out noogies?)

OTHER NICE WORDS

1. happy
2. rainy day
3. cheerful
4. Morobay
5. soft
6. dry
7. warm
8. flours (flowers)
9. fun
10. games
11. elifent
12. ducks
13. crusht tranchlas
14. playing
15. frends
16. love
17. singing
18. Mopar
19. Legos
20. choclit
21. snoeflakes
22. grene
23. moon
24. rose
25. ladybugs
26. grass
27. trees
28. cute
29. crusht joonbugs
30. swimming
31. no school
32. Daddy home
33. holiday
34. thanksgiveing
35. reeding
36. drawing
37. creeks
38. rivers
39. lakes
40. frendly

Hey, I'll take my parenting high points where I can get them, in a week like that one.

Tuesday, November 02, 2004

going crazy; wanna come along?

Why on earth did I sign up for this?. Really it's not that bad. It's kind of fun. And it's not like I have anything else to do besides spending more time sitting in front of this time-eating machine, right?

Stats to date:

Words written (and saved, as opposed to words written, read, selected, and deleted en masse): 600.
Times I've changed my mind about the main point of my book: 3.
Times I've contemplated tossing out this whole idea and frantically tried to figure out something else to write about: I can't count that high.

And because my life is not crazy enough, my kids have decided to spend the last two days driving me completely out of my mind, with everything from traditional sibling rivalry, to accidental clumsy injuries, to absolutely involuntary stuff like noisily snotty noses and repetitive coughs. And LT just finally dragged all the dirty clothes out of his room -- I had been wondering a) why my hamper looked like I was caught up on laundry and also b) why his room smelled like it did. I just can't wait till he's a teenager. And it's not her fault, and I'm actually a little bit worried about it, but my daughter is like half-deaf right now. I think it has to do with this massive cold that she has, but I'm about on the point of taking her to the doctor about it and not waiting for the cold to go away like T and I had previously planned. Until we figured out yesterday that she really couldn't hear us, we were laying down punishments left and right because we thought she was just ignoring us and lying about not being able to hear us. Parents of the Year award, right there.

Also, for the What Was I Thinking category: You all know by now exactly what kind of housekeeper I am, right? I'm somewhere between your average male college student and, say, Oscar Madison. Then why, WHY, when one of my fellow altos suggested to the other altos that we use my house for a sectional rehearsal this weekend, because I live in town and I have a piano, did I not do something besides go completely tharn (read Watership Down if you don't know what that means; it's such a great word that it ought to be in regular circulation) and stammer, "Um, OK. Sure. Sunday afternoon good for you?" Because now I have to clean my house. Really REALLY clean it, because people are coming over who are not related to me in any way. And my couch. Oh good Lord, my freaky ugly couch. I wonder how long it would take my husband to forgive me if I called one of those Twelve Months No Payments No Interest places and ordered a new living room set to be delivered by the weekend?

Saturday, October 23, 2004

what. a. day.

Ever have one of those days where the ending scene in "Thelma and Louise" not only makes total sense, but seems to present a plausible, acceptable, even pleasant solution for what ails you?


Yeah. Me too.

I'm taking my stress headache, two Advil, and a diet Coke to my bedroom, and I'm going to try to drown my sorrows in a paperback novel until I can't keep my eyes open anymore. Tomorrow will be better, I am sure. (this is because I won't be going anywhere near the automotive department of Wal-Mart, or our screwed-up local Burger King which tends to run out of things like hamburger meat precisely on the days when I NEED to magically exchange a twenty-dollar bill for a completely unhealthy but refreshingly effortless dinner solution. It is my fond hope, in fact, that I won't be going near those places ever again.)

Friday, October 08, 2004

if bad things come in threes...

Did I mention that the engine in T's truck died an inglorious death on Sunday? It did.

Did I tell you that we accepted a hand-me-down couch from my aunt and uncle who are remodeling, sight unseen because they always have good taste and it would HAVE to be better than the one we had, and then after we moved the old couch into the schoolroom where, basically, we won't be getting it out again unless we just want to destroy it -- anyway, after that, my parents brought over the new couch and it is totally, wretchedly ugly? Yeah, that too.

And then today, our dryer died. It has always been an old, noisy dryer; we got it for free when we moved into this house eight years ago. Today I turned it on and the noise changed, increased, and then was accompanied by a suspicious burning odor. So I just spent two hours and TWENTY FREAKING DOLLARS at the laundromat tonight, because wouldn't you know this would happen when the laundry had, er, been backing up for a while.

If bad things really do go in threes, I sure hope the couch counts and we're done. sigh.

Tuesday, July 27, 2004

more snippets

just a bunch of little things, no one thing warranting its own entry...

snippet 1:
I remembered the second stupid thing from my camping trip. It involved a pan of spaghetti sauce, and one metal handle that wasn't hot, and one handle that was, and a really freakishly enormous blister on the pad of my thumb, and a relatively phenomenal amount of pain. I say "relatively" because I've had worse (um, c-sections), but for the amount of tissue involved, a burn packs quite a punch.

snippet 2:
We walked outside our house on Saturday morning to find a dead cat in our yard. It wasn't one of ours; it was one of the feral toms who wander around our neighborhood waiting for us to let our sweet young thangs outside (not gonna happen until they're spayed; a surprising amount of time and effort goes into making sure the cats don't escape the house). Anyway. So we had a dead cat to deal with; T used the shovel to take it into the bushes in the field near our house. And gee, I'm glad he did that, because we're supposed to learn something new every day, and now I know the direction of the prevailing wind (what little wind there is) around our house in the summer. The weather report helps with this:

GAG

Nothing like a little whiff of something dead coming in through the evaporative cooler to make your day special.

snippet 3:
I gained three pounds on vacation. Which is less than it feels like I've gained. Amazing how there's no good thing about how weight feels. You don't want to feel heavier than you are, but you don't want to be heavier than you feel either.

snippet 4:
My reading life has been a study in contrasts lately. Just before we left for vacation I read my advance readers' copy of Fire Along The Sky -- if you like historical fiction, romance, New York State, the early nineteenth century, Native American cultures, or just a ripping good story, you should pre-order this book TODAY, by the way. Then on vacation I read Northanger Abbey (Jane Austen*) and The Glass Lake (Maeve Binchy). THEN in the last week at home I've been reading the first Stephanie Plum mystery, The Fellowship of the Ring, and Ring of Bright Water, which is, so far, essentially an anthem to the natural scenery of the Western Scottish Highlands, although supposedly soon it will involve otter antics (unless the movie was an even worse adaptation than usual). Nobody can say I'm in a rut, anyway.

snippet 5:
All my nice ephemeral revolutionary thoughts about somehow finding a way for me to go back to college now instead of in eight or so years, as has been my plan since before my marriage, are becoming slightly less ephemeral. Suffice to say that T's boss is making me think that any life where T can be far from him would be way better than the alternative. He makes me say words that would never ordinarily come out of my mouth. I'm serious, he just MAKES me say them. Fortunately not to his face, but then I try to spend as little time around him as possible. See, there, I just had to stop one of those nasty words from spilling right out of my fingers onto the keyboard and into this journal. I am not sure yet what, if anything, will come of the revolutionary ideas. Realistically, since I've sworn a solemn vow that neither of my children will ever be enrolled in a public school and I intend to stand by that (not that T would let me change my mind on it even if, for some reason that would have to include either alien abduction or a frontal lobotomy or both, I should want to do so), there are a lot of obstacles to overcome if anything's going to change. But obstacles have been overcome before, so we'll see what happens.

Friday, May 07, 2004

blissful contentment, my %*#

If I believed in astrology I would say that there was something really screwed up in the sky last night. Because yesterday and today? they just bite. (Maybe it's the comets?). Yesterday was just an all-around general kids-crazy mom-crazy every-freaking-child-in-the-Awana-program-crazy day. Then I came home from being The Happiest Awana Leader On Earth, and smelled propane in the house, and to make a long story short, we're totally out of propane and they'll have to deliver some today and our bill will be astronomical and I don't even want to THINK about that because our OTHER bills (like, say, GASOLINE) are also freaking enormous, and now! now! I just went to check the amount of overtime in my husband's check, in their handy-dandy online service thingie, and EVERYTHING SAYS ZERO. Zero hours worked (instead of, hello, ninety?), zero dollars hitting our bank account on Monday, zero zero zero. I don't like all those zeroes. Of all the weeks for them to screw up! This is juuuuust fantastic. Also, poor C is sick, and she coughed all night, and she's been dry at night for weeks, but last night she wasn't, and it wasn't like I didn't already have enough laundry piling up. You know. Even the KITTENS are joining in by having diarrhea ("diary", as C calls it, and, well, the way today's entry is going, I can see the similarity).

I have got to try to pull this day out of the suck tank. Any ideas how (aside from packing the hubby, the kids, and the cats into the car and fleeing without leaving a forwarding address), please pass them on. For right now I'm going to try a diet Coke and a fluff novel, with a cat on my lap. I'll let you know how it goes.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Update item 1: Our landlord is coming up today. This would be the landlord who doesn't know we have cats. Ordinarily he doesn't come in the house. But you just know that today he will.

Update item 2: Immediately after I arranged for the propane guy to come give us some hot water and oven-ly goodness, the propane BILLING department called to let me know just exactly how high my account balance is. Which I knew. The thing is, there's a big check in the mail to them (really!), and my landlord is going to pay the bill for the new tank for the apartment TODAY, yes TODAY (that is unless he gets killed in an auto accident on the way here, and his children decide to move into this house, thus rendering us homeless, because after all, this is the suckiest day EVER and who knows what you can expect). I know this. But they didn't. And getting a phone call like that is Just No Fun.

Update item 3: The paycheck will indeed be late, thanks to a bureaucratic screwup in T's payroll office. Fun stuff.

I'm telling you, the "no forwarding address" thing is looking better by the minute.

--------
I'm going crazy; want to come along? Archives | Page 3 of 5

previous ten entries | 1 2 3 4 5 | next ten entries