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Thursday, January 20, 2005

I can't possibly come up with a title for this one

note to self: when using Mozilla Firefox DO NOT ATTEMPT TO USE THE GOOGLE SEARCH WINDOW THINGIE WHEN TYPING A DIARYLAND ENTRY. Because the entry disappears. And the really bad thing is, that's the third time I've done this today. You'd think I'd have learned by now. I hate having to try to re-create what I'd already had typed out. Good thing I've had some diet Coke -- we were out of my crack substitute earlier today, which was part of why I was so crabby, I think -- or I would not have handled that as well as I did.

The new cat's name is (drumroll please) Henry. It was the first name we could all agree on; LT came up with it. And he already seems Henryish. And we don't know any Henrys, which is good, and nobody would agree to Fitzwilliam, Wentworth, or Rochester, which were my three suggestions. Frankly he doesn't LOOK like a nineteenth-century romantic hero -- but a girl has to try. Hmm, maybe I should have tried Frederick.

And now I am going to go to bed in my (never again to be painted by me) bedroom, in my own bed. It was a little weird, sleeping in C's bed and having T come lie down with me in the mornings, because hello, I slept on that bed from the age of 12 until I got married, and it was just a little... squeeby. I love our room right now, hospital-colored ceiling and all, because all it has in it is the bed and a small dresser on its beautiful hardwood floor. I wish it could be that minimalist all the time. Just being surrounded by clutter, before I even get out of bed in the morning, shoves my stress level up a few notches.

I plan to spend a lot of time this weekend reading and crocheting. The dratted bedroom is done, the house is "clean enough" -- I'm going to spend my time at home this weekend (which won't be as much as I like) folding laundry to the accompaniment of Austen adaptations, plowing into my new stack of library books (Ann Patchett, Maeve Binchy, Elizabeth Berg, and one I'd never heard of but it sounded interesting), and seeing how much of that blanket I can get done. ahhh. :) Of course I shouldn't plan for this, because as soon as I do that means it can't come to pass. Hmm. Maybe I'll figure on spending the weekend cleaning instead. ;-)

Tuesday, January 11, 2005

snowing

Surprisingly enough, it's snowing here right now. (the snow level was supposed to stay about 1000 feet above our town). The kids noticed it first. The ground is soaked and the snow is wet and it's not sticking at ALL and I'm guessing it'll stop within the next hour. C's comment? "Now it is real winter, Mommy!" I must confess that it's cozy. Makes me want to curl up by the fire and read (but then that doesn't take much).


Those of you in the Midwest and Northeast may come and kill me now.

Sunday, January 09, 2005

a lazy Sunday

Today I got up at 10. That's ten in the morning, you know, that time that is only two hours before noon. And the thing is that aside from waking briefly to say "no" and roll back over and go back to sleep, at 7:30 when the alarm went off and T (who was really sore all yesterday afternoon and last night from the snow escapade on Friday) explained sleepily that he'd just set it in case we changed our minds and decided not to ditch church and did I want to go, I'd slept solidly from the time I'd gone to bed (which was, granted, 1:30 a.m.) until then. I felt like a teenaged boy. Well, except for the raging-hormones-huge-appetite-voice-changing-girl-crazy thing.

When I finally stumbled out to the living room, my prince of a husband had built a fire, fed the kids breakfast, and set up a little Sunday school for them, with questions on sheets of paper like "What is your favorite Bible verse?" and "What is your favorite thing about being a Christian?", which they had to answer with a paragraph (LT) or a sentence (C) and a picture. The kids spent two happy hours bent over their work, and the results were suitable for framing in that "so cute and quintessentially childish that it causes a beautiful little ache in your chest" kind of way. Which proved once and for all that if our roles had to reverse, T would do just fine at the whole homeschooling thing.


We had one of those really refreshing days spent at home being semi-productive (T and LT worked on a model car project; LT made up a board game; T went out in the pouring rain to rake over the mess our truck tires made yesterday when we drove in the field next to our house to unload wood; I cleaned and crocheted and read and folded laundry and EMPTIED MY IRONING BASKET, go me; C played dolls and horsies and cleaned her room without complaining; the kids emptied the dishwasher) but not busy enough that you don't feel like you've also been pleasantly lazy. It was exactly the kind of day we needed, especially T, who has to go back to the grind and probably go out in the snow again tomorrow, although I hope the ox-headed boss learned his lesson about snowmobiling in blizzards. If he didn't I may just have to kill him. Slowly.

Monday, January 03, 2005

resolutions. I am such a sheep.

One nice thing about being an adult is that it's OK for Christmastime to end. When I was little there were very few days sadder than the one on which the tree came down -- although it doesn't seem to bother my kids much (maybe that's because they have birthdays to look forward to in the middle of the year. Unlike some people I know). Now it's... not exactly a relief; I wouldn't say that, but it's just nice to move on and get on with regular life, I guess.


I think our Christmas decorations breed while they're out of their boxes. I swear we could fit everything in that crate last year, but this year there was just no way. And I don't think we bought anything new to go in it. It is an odd phenomenon and I think someone should look into it. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has to deal with it, right?


Remember last year when I swore I didn't make resolutions? I lied. I have made three. Baaa.

1. The housecleaning thing I mentioned in that survey the other day. Of course, I, er, haven't started this one yet. So technically I've already broken it, haven't I. Darn. But I wonder if that gets me off the hook for the rest of the year?
   
2. I'm going to keep track of the books I read. I have a lot of online acquaintances who do this, and it seems like such a nice thing to be able to look back at the end of a year or a month and actually remember what you've read. I forget, and if for some reason I want to remember (like, for example, for that survey thing), I have to go through my journal and my emails and look for places where I just happen to mention books I've read. So I'll make a little text file and try to remember to add to it every time I finish a book.
   
3. 1300 calories, 64 oz. of water, and a walk every day (weather permitting on the walk -- it has been delightfully rainy for over a week here, and I won't go so far as to commit myself to an exercise video or anything drastic like that on days when I can't go for a walk outside. I'm not that crazy). Again. Sigh.
   

The kids and I did do a bang-up job of cleaning the living room before we took the decorations down tonight. T was late getting home from work, and I looked around the house and thought, 'if I were coming home from a sixteen-hour day of working in near-blizzard conditions and encountering unexpected obstacles and a whole bunch of stressful stuff like that, would I want to walk into a cluttery disaster like this?' And after I narrowly avoided a panic attack just at the thought of such a circumstance, we all three got to work and made the place more livable. For the next eight hours anyway -- and that's only because people will be asleep. And do me a favor and don't look in the kitchen, OK?

Monday, December 27, 2004

In which Rachel is not Martha

Before I go one step (er, keystroke?) further, I must pause to clear up a gross misconception. Here is an example, from Dawn:

Happy Happy and a Merry Merry to you, Miss Rach! Beautiful job on the clothes and the kids too! You're giving me extreeeeme Martha envy, though.

ackity ack ack. You know that little plaque you can get from catalogs that says "Martha Stewart Doesn't Live Here"? That belongs on the wall of my living room. I sew like some people watch TV, because it soothes and relaxes me; I sew because it's a quiet way to spend some time alone doing something I enjoy; I sew because my kids need clothes and it's cheaper to sew them than it is to buy them already made; I sew because I don't like modern fashions for kids and like to be able to get them more traditional-looking things without spending three arms and two legs. Note the absence of "I sew because I am the Queen of Domesticity" on that list, because I SO am not.

Here is a list of things that do not relax or soothe me, and which I do not enjoy, and hence which only get done in this house in a tardy, haphazard manner until there's a reason to do them any other way:

• Dishes. I do them, but generally there's at least a small stack of them on the counter.
  
• Floors.
  
• Laundry. I am perenially behind and it's a really great day when nobody has to come to me and ask where s/he could find clean underwear, other than Wal-mart.
  
• Tidying up. See picture below for example, and note that while my kitchen/dining area is in such a state of disarray, where am I? I am at the computer. Typing a diaryland entry.
  

I doubt Martha's house ever looked like this, even after dinner for 19, including eight kids:

Those are TOY guns on the chair. Mostly not from Christmas; the kids (including the 35-year-old one) have quite a collection.

So. I hope that clears things up for everyone.

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

If I were the person solely responsible for defining what is traditional in my extended family, I would decree that from now on, we would be celebrating Christmas on two separate days: One day for the big dinner with grandparents and cousins and friends, and with the presents to and from those people being exchanged, and another day (Christmas itself) would be reserved just for the small family celebration. It made this weekend SO much nicer, that things ended up that way. It was my favorite Christmas yet, even though it was one of our more broke ones.

Also? it is raining. So my life is totally complete. I think I'll read Jane Eyre this week.

Saturday, December 25, 2004

the best-laid plans

You know how sometimes you say, "This is so not my day..."? Well, it would seem logically to indicate that there must be such a thing as a day that is one's day, or it wouldn't be worth noting when it wasn't, right? Well, finally it came. Today was my day. It really was. And how fitting that this should happen on my birthday, no?

It started off with presents this morning. Just as we were about to start opening things, my mom called to tell us that she and my dad couldn't be here for Christmas dinner because she had some sort of stomach bug. (As an aside, I am offering up a huge apostrophic apology to my mom, for the fact that My Day hinged on her feeling so miserable. I'm sorry, Mom. But if you HAD to feel miserable, at least some good came of it, right?). So we decided to put off Christmas dinner until tomorrow, to give Mom a chance to feel better, which only involved calling two households, and everyone seemed agreeable to it. So I proceeded to have, for the first time, a birthday that actually felt like a birthday. I have never had the day of my birthday itself be a day when there was the luxury of just doing what I wanted, just because the nature of the day involves a big family dinner and a lot of preparation and stuff. With that gone from the day, we just hung around home doing what we (I) wanted to do. We played a game; we watched a few movies; we went for a walk. It was perfect; if I could have been given a day to spend in any way I chose, it's what I would have chosen. And we still have the fun of the family-and-friends gathering tomorrow afternoon. I'm just (again) sorry that it was my mom's misery that brought it all about. I DO REALLY LOVE MY MOM. I promise.

It's just as well that we didn't try to cook that turkey today anyway, since it is too big for the roaster oven, and I would have been unable to buy a roasting bag without traveling 45 miles to the city, so we'd have had to just make do with the ham by itself, and then the side dishes. (yes, as a matter of fact, a 25-lb turkey and a 13-lb ham for 13 people does make for an enormous quantity of leftovers; why do you ask? There were going to be 19 people, not 21 as we were just confused about the in-laws coming, but our friends' family of 6 is ill.) Tomorrow I'll get a roasting bag on the way to church, and the turkey will be done to a turn by 3:00. YUM.

And here's a C-ism for today, before I sign off with pictures.

We got C a video for Christmas. It had one of those flyers in the packaging, advertising other movies you can buy from the distributor or studio or whatever. C was looking at the flyer, reading the names of the movies, and she laughed out loud and said, "This one's called 'Tomb Sewer'!" We went, whaaat? until T figured out, just before she brought me the flyer to show me, that she meant "Tom Sawyer".

C's hand is really stronger than you might think, when she is using it to cover your mouth to keep you from laughing out loud at her cute little 5-year-old reading mistakes. I just thought I should warn you. Not that I would know from experience or anything...

C with her new dress held up over her nightgown

actually wearing the dress. Whenever I see this dress, until I die, I will be nearly overcome with the desire to speak with a French accent, because I sewed it while listening to A Tale of Two Cities on CD.

LT in his bathrobe. (My back is cramping up just looking at these pictures.) I had some of the space-themed flannel left over from the pajamas I made him last spring, so I used it as accent material on the robe.

anyone says "merry birthday" and they get smacked. In a loving, friendly way, of course.

When I was a little girl, if I was awake at midnight Christmas Eve (and most of the time I was, because, hello, CHRISTMAS EVE), I would watch the clock until it said 12:15 and then hum "Happy Birthday" to myself, because at that time I was precisely another year older. So, as of the time of my sitting down at the computer to write this entry before going to bed (wrapping presents = work. Nobody tell the kids though), I am exactly thirty years old. Funny. I don't feel any older. ;-)

(which was also exactly the same feeling I had on every birthday for my entire childhood. Ten should feel different from nine. What a rip-off.)

So we're all ready for the kids to tumble out of bed at some awful hour in the morning. Up until now on Christmas morning we have always had to drag LT out of his bed at 7:00, still sleeping, and deposit him on the couch to start waking up so that we could open presents. He is not a morning person, let's just say that. Once he's awake he's quite personable, but the transition from sleeping to waking sometimes requires some pretty extreme measures, even on Christmas. This year might be different. We shall see.

By the way, I finished all my last-minute projects on time. LT's robe (and a new Christmas stocking too -- he says he's too old for the one I made him for his second Christmas, with construction equipment on it, so now he has a camouflage one like Daddy's, *snif*) and C's dress/pinafore are wrapped neatly under the tree. Well, the stocking's not wrapped... you know what I mean. The dress only narrowly escaped being wrapped up with the buttons on the pinafore sewn on inside-out. Because I am Suzy Domestic, that's why. I'll try to get good pictures tomorrow, so that when I wonder when I'm fifty why my shoulders are permanently hunched over, I will be able to look at the photos and remember: oh yeah. It dates back to that Christmas when I spent the three days beforehand hunched over my sewing machine like a crone.

Merry Christmas everyone. And I mean that, I hope you are having a day filled with family and joy and memories, and with a very real sense of the reason for this whole celebration (go read Valerie for more eloquence than I feel capable of at this precise sleepy moment on that topic). Thank you all for making me feel like writing in this thing is worthwhile. It's been a lot of fun, and I am so glad that I'm doing it, but if I knew nobody was reading it, I'd have given up long ago. So if you get bored and leave, just don't tell me, and I'll sit here talking to the empty room like I've been known to do in real life from time to time, only this time I'll never know any different. So that's cool.

Thursday, December 16, 2004

just odds and ends

We have installed a pet door for our cats. One cat has adjusted to it fine, although she didn't like it for the first couple of days. The other cat still protests by standing outside it (it's one of the type that goes into a sliding glass door, and is itself made of glass), meowing plaintively at us for several minutes before she finally gives in and paws at the pet door until she gets it to open toward her enough to stick her head in and wriggle through. She has a decided look of contempt for us in her eyes these days. How dare we subject her to such an indignity any time she wants in or out, she says as she turns her back on us and washes her face meticulously as soon as she's finally inside.

C is watching Ben Hur. She has loved this movie since she was probably three, especially the chariot race. I guess it's just the horses, I don't know. She is not your typical child in many ways, I don't suppose.

Also in the "not your typical child" category -- my son earnestly wants to crochet a blanket for his cousin who's due to arrive next June. His efforts are adorable. And again I'm lost between the desire to encourage him to be creative by leaving him somewhat alone with it, and my desire to help him make something that will be of higher quality by correcting him more often than would be ideal. I'm leaning toward the granola-mom unschooling "leave him be" side for the time being.

Today I had another of those episodes that some people call panic attacks, but I don't because I do not have any sense of panic when I'm having one, and that's a pretty central symptom. My heart pounds and races, I get weak and sweaty and trembly and my throat constricts and my extremities tingle. It is Not Fun. And so far I've never had one when there was an adult around to help me. Fortunately LT is a great hulking eight-year-old who is actually big enough to be helpful in supporting me when I walk, and whose natural tendency when either of his parents is having a problem is to FIX IT FIX IT ANYTHING TO FIX IT. His anxiety has ebbed to the point where I don't mentally call him Anxiety Boy anymore. He's still not terribly comfortable in new situations, but he's much improved overall as far as that goes.

AND speaking of panic, I have to go clothes shopping tomorrow -- for myself. This is trying enough in the best of circumstances (oh, wow, I am so turning into my mother). To make things worse, right now I have two rather prominent "spots" (I love the British way of saying this; so much more dignified than "zits" or "pimples"), and I feel fat, and ick. But I need a new white blouse, or sweater, or whatever I find that is please God not TOO unflattering -- I do not like myself in white -- for chorus concerts, one of which I have on Saturday. My preferred concert blouse got washed in the wrong load, because I am the new Martha Stewart, and it is definitely more gray than white now. And my backup shirts (three Land's End white button-downs which my mom got as uniform shirts in 1989, and which I got from her before I finished high school) are, well, fifteen years old and getting rather threadbare. They also have some of the kinds of stains that never show up in my house, but mutate into glaring atrocities under the lights of whatever my destination may be. So I have to shop. I always feel like such a dowd in clothing stores -- with everything except me all clean and new and perfect-looking. ah well. By this time tomorrow it will all be over, right? :)

Saturday, December 11, 2004

such sticks in the mud as we are

I grew up in a household where we didn't have a lot of money and generally our houses were small, but gas was relatively cheap, and so one of our favorite ways to enjoy ourselves was to just go rambling in the car. We were a spontaneous bunch and we'd take off on a weekend trip to the Bay Area to visit my mom's sister's family with very little more than a phone call to say we were on the way. So I have this gene, strengthened by my upbringing, which makes me want to be spontaneous. Often.

However, T is different. His nature and nurture push him in the other direction. He is a big planner, and sudden changes in plans stress him out A LOT, even if the change is for the better. This means that in the past ten years my spontaneity has been squelched to the point where we have gone beyond not-spontaneous and into the realm where even fun things we've had planned for months don't happen.

OK, now I'm being unfair. We're not so bad as that, and a lot of our fun plans do come to pass. But the thing is, there's this really really high tide this weekend, see? It's a proxigean spring tide (there's your vocabulary word of the day), where the earth is close to the sun and it's a new moon and so the high tide gets really high and the low tide gets really low. This happens every few years or so, for a couple of months in a row. And ever since the summer I've wanted to drive to Morro Bay for the proxigean tide and see the ocean come clear up across the beach to the dunes. Sounds silly but I'm silly in general so that's OK, right? But now the weekend has actually arrived, and T has a really unpleasant cold so he's exhausted, and we just bought this 1969 Dart and he wants to stay home and play with it, and plus we spent seven hours in the car(s) yesterday as well as seven hours in the car the previous Friday, and blah blah blah no Morro Bay trip blah.

Grr.

I could go by myself, but honestly, I would be so lonely for ten hours in the car and all night in a hotel room (but oh! the reading! it almost sways me...) that even the tide thingie wouldn't make it worthwhile, I don't think. Oh well, there's another identical tide next month. So what if it's a Monday, and the chances of T being allowed to take a day or two off work to go over there with me are laughable, and the weather's good this weekend but who knows what it will be in 29 days, and so on and so forth. I can still pin my hopes to that. And I can also (this is the really fun part) milk my disappointment for all its worth, and imply to T that because we're not spending money on my long-planned Morro Bay trip, I have the right to buy more Christmas lights and put them up, and the right to renew my gold Diaryland membership, and to go out to dinner instead of cooking, and to also hold this over his head and use it as a bargaining chip for months to come. Oh, it takes practice to be the kind of wife I am, and after ten years, I'm beginning to really get good at it.

Monday, December 06, 2004

busy days

Yesterday we drove to the Bay Area (twitch. twitch) to look at a car
we've been thinking about buying. We didn't end up getting it (although we're still thinking about it) but we had a nice long drive and a mostly-pleasant day. Except for the wretched 580/680 interchange which is everything that people who hate freeway interchanges hate about freeway interchanges. Ack. And for some strange reason, even though I always plan to have T* drive in places like that, I end up being the one with my white knuckles clamped to the wheel trying to look in four or five directions at once, so as to be able to merge without becoming part of a horrific mangled freeway accident. Because that would make the traffic even worse, with all the rubber-necking.

Then today we cut wood (and I did not skip out this time!) before
having T's birthday dinner at my parents' house. He wanted spaghetti, which is, hallelujah, something I'm good at making and I can do it reliably and it doesn't take a gazillion pots and pans or have to be kept warm in the oven while I cook it in batches or ANYTHING. Good old spaghetti. But T always gets (meaning I always make) German chocolate cake for his birthday. Eew. The cake part is bland and the frosting has (puke) coconut. Ah well, it's only once a year, and it makes the chances of my blowing my diet on leftovers virtually nonexistent. Which will not be the case after my birthday (which is in three weeks), because I am all about either a) a Costco cake, which is the be-all and end-all of cakes, or, if we can't spring for that, b) chocolate cake from a mix with chocolate frosting from a can. What other kind of cake does there really need to be, after all? And Dulce de Leche (Spanish
for "Let's Make Rachel Fat") ice cream. mmm.

I can tell that I've been reading the Little House books too much when I really start obsessing about food. Next time you read those, pay attention to how few pages can go by without a description of some kind of hearty Early American meal. Even during The Long Winter there's all that talk about grinding wheat to make nutty-tasting whole-wheat bread. And when they're not on the verge of starvation it's even worse. The roast geese! The fried chicken! The venison! Oh good Lord, the blackbird pie!! I think I maybe gained five pounds this past week just reading about it all.

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