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Sunday, November 28, 2004

tomorrow is another day

Well, I am going to be all plain-vanilla for a while; my supergold membership is about to lapse if it hasn't already. No pictures, no comments. :( The notes function is still available, though. Not going to spend money on that right now.


Our Thanksgiving Day was... ehhh. Not horrible, just not what we'd have wanted if we could have chosen. Basically, being the only two conservatives in a room full of ex-hippies and current socialists when the war news is on does not make for a very comfortable holiday atmosphere. Energizing, yes. Comfortable, no. So we weren't exactly sad when it was time to leave. At least I did get to go to sleep at the nearly-obscenely-early hour of eight-fifty-five. In the evening. It felt so good I almost cried.


I've been away from the computer a lot over the past week. This is partly because I've been doing other things, and partly because T has become a total computer HOG. It's all about the project cars. A while ago I had the idea to look for a project car which could be gradually and cheaply fixed up, to serve as a replacement for our current car when it eventually reaches the "would cost more to repair it than it is worth" stage. Which could be tomorrow, or five years from now, who knows. Anyway. T thought this was a fantastic idea -- and I think he even found it a little sexy that I would come up with it; you know how some guys are about cars -- and lately he's started actually looking around on ebay and other sources for cars. To the point where if I did not have other things to do, I'd wish I'd never thought up the darn scheme.

"Other things" include: Finishing THREE BOOKS in the past week. (yay!) In addition to the Marian Keyes, I finished Watership Down -- a beautiful book, Read This Now, This Means You -- and Little HOuse on the Prairie, which we'd started as a family months ago and never finished. I am feeling like going through those again. It doesn't help that we have the first season of the TV show on DVD, borrowed from the library. Oh, and I also read most of A Christmas Carol before I misplaced my copy (in the car, maybe?). Oh how I love that book.

Also, I went shopping Friday morning, and got fabric for a dress for C. I was in the city at 6 am, and it was truly eerie to see the streets as full of traffic as they are at rush hour. I spent an hour and a half in line at the fabric store, first waiting for my fabric to be cut, and then waiting to pay for it. I braved Wal-Mart, as well, and was in and out in fifteen minutes (all I needed was cat food, aquarium filter cartridges, and a printer cartridge), and then I endured Sears which was probably the worst experience of all of them. Ugh. When I came home from that we raked all our leaves and got them moved to the backyard where they'll serve the dual purpose of keeping grass from growing in our garden area, and turning into nice rich mulch by spring. SO nice to listen to the rain on Friday night and know that we would not have to deal with wet soggy leaves this year, like we have had to every single other year we've lived here. And it felt so good to accomplish something that the next afternoon, we rearranged furniture in the living room, and then worked on organization projects (T: garage. I: schoolroom) until bedtime. Wow. Aren't we busy little bees.

Notice I didn't mention catching up on the laundry or having a sparkly clean kitchen. That would be because I didn't, and don't. Ugh again. There's always tomorrow, right...

Thursday, November 18, 2004

ooh goody a list, and my slackerness

Things I should buy in bulk and store in 55-gallon drums around the house, so as to avoid near-constant searching for one item or another:

• Hairbrushes
  
• Hair elastics
  
• Hair claw clips
  
• cordless phones
  
• remote controls
  
• when C was a baby, pacifiers would have been on this list
  
• sponges
  
• garlic presses
  
• salt shakers (full)
  
• sharp pencils
  
• working pens
  
• those butane hand-held bbq lighter thingies

And I know I'm forgetting some things.

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

We had a wild night last night. Well, wild for us; not very wild for most people my age, I don't think. Because I am Miss Muffet. I'd planned for a week to cook a turkey for our usual Wednesday-night dinner with my parents before Bible study. I decided, not at the last minute but near it, that I would also invite our neighbor family up to join us and help us eat it. There are two parents and four kids in that family; the kids are all good friends with my kids, and I would say we're probably friends with the parents by now, and not just acquaintances. Anyway. So that meant we had six kids at a kids' table and six adults at the adult table, and I couldn't find the dang salt, and I overcooked the brown-and-serve rolls. At least the house was pretty clean when we started. It was fun, but unlike Thanksgiving last year, things did NOT get done early; we ran about half an hour late, and I ended up staying home from Bible study with the kids to do the cleanup. (oops). But our friends stayed too, so we had a nice chat, above the noise the kids were making with swordfights and Battleship games and My Little Pony (Gag) videos and what not.

Then my pinky-swear best friend called from Florida, and we talked until eleven. It was one of those times when I genuinely had no idea how late it was when I got off the phone. THEN I put the kids to bed and read a new Marian Keyes book until about 1 a.m., and THEN I went on the computer and spent some time looking at old emails from the early days of the pinky-swear best friendship. Can I just say right now that I totally despise my twenty-two-year-old self? Ouch. And I won't say how late I was up doing that, or how long I read the Marian Keyes book afterward, but I will say that this morning when the phone rang at 8:15 I was not terribly chipper when I answered. I am such a slacker.

Monday, November 15, 2004

late night ramble ack

I am a failure at some things. This cannot be denied. I could not write a novel in a month. I frankly don't think I have it in me to write a novel given an infinite amount of time, because every time I open the file to add anything to the story, I'd naturally re-read what I'd written so far, and then I'd end up spending the time I had intended to spend writing new stuff in attempting to undo the suckiness of what had already been written. I think this would be a neverending cycle. Plus it's not that important and the stories were both kind of pedantic and I don't feel any kind of real urge to ever write a book ever. And that's fine.

I also was a failure at analytic geometry, during the second half of my junior year in high school. I'm actually sad about this. Not because I particularly enjoyed that class or because I think it would have been useful in my daily life (but hey, you never know when you'll have to draw a perfect freaking rose curve which I could never do never ever ever no matter how hard I tried my rose curves always looked like something a four-year-old colored with a fat crayon), but because, man, I got an F on my report card. Only bona fide slackers do that, right? That was the class where my cruddy study skills caught up with me and I could no longer sail through with Bs and As (and the occasional C) on the strength of my test scores, while virtually ignoring homework and any real studying. Whoops.

Also, I don't know if I will ever succeed at learning to knit. And I'm not good at social stuff.

But. BUT.

I can figure out how to make pinch-pleat drapes, all by myself, and construct a set that looks like it was bought at the store, without any instructions at all! See? See?


Now is not the time to tell me that even your GRANDMOTHER has finally figured out that pinch-pleats were oh-so-over fifteen years ago. I don't like valances and T doesn't like tab-tops and some ladies from chorus were coming over for a sectional rehearsal so I needed something on that sliding-glass door besides the who-knows-how-old tattered, old, dirty, ugly, beige pinch-pleat drapes that were there when we moved in eight years ago. And the hardware was all in place, and white muslin was 99c a yard on sale.

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

in other news.

Isn't it funny how a family can go for a long time without any medical problems to speak of, and then all of a sudden, WHAM, they start coming in one after the other? We had C's whole super-head-congestion-ear-infection-temporary-loss-of-hearing thing going on for a few weeks. Then yesterday T complained of a burning feeling on the back of his leg, and when I checked it for him I found a tick chowing down on the blood vessels behind his knee (thanks to the Internet, by the way, I now finally know the best way to remove a tick. It really works. Too gross to go into here, though). Since we live in Lyme Disease Central, now we have that to worry about. Also this weekend, a little bump on the inside of my elbow, which I'd been kind of keeping an eye on in a general way because I thought maybe it was a wart or something, suddenly got way, way bigger than it had been. It's not tender, isn't a boil or a pimple or any of those pleasant things. And oddly enough, if you look up "wart change size" in Google, a little man in a white coat leaps out of your computer and says "GET YOURSELF TO THE DOCTOR PRONTO!!!". Well, not quite. But close. So I'm going to get that looked at tomorrow. It's probably nothing at all but I'd rather KNOW that it was nothing at all, than wonder, the way things have been going.

Also. Can I just say something? NOVEMBER IS HALFWAY OVER AUUUGGGGHHHH!

Saturday, November 13, 2004

you may not know it, but you're glad this is short

I just typed a long post updating about a few things, but seeing as how it's after midnight and I'm tired, it was, well, really stupid. So here's the abbreviated version:

C's hearing: pretty much back to normal. Thank you all for your well-wishes and prayers for her.

NaNoWriMo: not happening. Basically because I suck at writing books, is why.

Stupid Things I Did Today: I finally made new curtains to replace the ones the cats destroyed, back when they were kittens. The new curtains look only marginally better than if I'd thumb-tacked white bedsheets over the windows. But they have to stay up until we can manage something better.

Off to bed to seek some much-needed oblivion. (In all honesty, today really has not been bad. I am just tired, and the sucky waste-of-time-and-effort sewing project gave me a crick in my back that makes me grumpy).

Wednesday, November 10, 2004

the conspiracy of depraved inanimate objects

The conspiracy on the part of inanimate things, against me personally, has progressed to an outright rebellion. Today, if it could slip between my fingers, it would. If it could fall in the butter at dinner, it did. And needless to say, whenever it was possible for something to spill, smash, shatter, or explode (OK, so maybe 'explode' is a bit of an exaggeration), it did. In spades. Even my nice cozy jammies snickered at me every time I tried to wipe my hands on their acrylicness and got, instead of dry hands (I have discovered, by the way, thanks to these jammies, that I wipe my hands on my clothes, um, way too much), that shuddery wet acrylic feeling. I shudder again now, just thinking about it. And the refrigerator has become especially crafty. I've had an ongoing feud with it for, what, a year? And tonight T pointed out that I needed to defrost it. Now. Not tomorrow, when our milk has been sitting at 55 degrees for another eighteen hours or so, but now. He wasn't so forceful about it as it sounds, he just kind of guilted me into it. So I played the martyr card -- "OK, you just go on to bed while I stay up for two more hours defrosting the freezer. You didn't know it takes that long? Well, it DOES, and if it weren't MY SOLE RESPONSIBILITY to do this task, you would have known. Go, go, off to bed, I don't need you resenting me on top of the lack of sleep and everything else, go on." (Yes, as a matter of fact, I did say every word of that. Not all together. But still. Cripes.) And then it only took ten minutes to defrost the freezer, thanks to my patented "Two Liter Bottle Filled With Hot Tap Water And Fitted With A Squirt Lid" method. So I had to putter around in the kitchen doing a lot of other stuff so that T (who probably was still awake when I finished) wouldn't hear me come over here and start typing after such a distinctly un-martyrish expanse of time. And of course it was all the refrigerator's fault. Cocky piece of... machinery.

And now the B key on my keyboard is acting all sticky. Fantastic. Now I can add that to my list. Nothing like having to spend an entire data entry paycheck on our, what, fourth ergonomic keyboard in thirteen months? so that I can keep doing data entry (and, well, everything else too, to be fair).

While I was going about my beleaguered existence today, I had the most fantastic ideas for my NaNoWriMo book -- which, by the way, is still laughably short. It's the data entry, see. Maybe if someone was paying me, what, about a quarter of a cent per keystroke? I'd be more motivated to spend time working on the novel. Anyway. I had all these great ideas and I thought, I can't wait till the kids are in bed and I can sit down and actually bang out a few thousand words, and then as soon as I sat at the computer, the whole defrosting saga began. And now that I'm at leisure to sit here if I want to, and it's "only" almost 1 AM, the ideas are fleeing my brain like it's the site of an impending nuclear attack.

On a more serious note, I'm starting to actually worry about C's hearing. The medication they gave her cleared up her congestion completely, and very quickly. She no longer has a stuffy or runny nose, or a cough. The thing is, though, that her hearing is almost no better at all. So my worry is that the hearing thing may be completely unrelated to the congestion and maybe she needs to get into a specialist, like, NOW, before it gets worse. The pediatrician thinks it's just a lingering infection (note: C has no pain or feeling of pressure in her ears) and wants to try another round of stiffer antibiotics before we move on to a specialist. I am giving it five days. If she is not 100% better on Monday she's going to an ENT whether her ped (whom, by the way, we like a great deal; she's been the kids' doctor since LT was born; in fact, she was the pediatrician in the room when they removed him from my body) thinks she needs to or not.

I'll close with one picture:


This is a self-portrait: the back of my head after spending about fifteen minutes at Salon Chez C, who says (at least while she's at it) that her "very favorite thing to do in the whole world is fix Mommy's hair." Who could say no to that?

Friday, November 05, 2004

NaNoWriMo, and other stuff

NaNoWriMo update
I had about 1100 words done on my NaNoWriMo novel, the one I'd finally settled on doing, about the group of junior high rejects ("minimal research required" being part of the appeal there). I got to a point where I was second-guessing my plot twist, reworking my idea for the middle of the book, and tearing my hair out trying to figure out how to write the darn thing without having it all be either a) a big ripoff of a Babysitter's Club Meets Sweet Valley High coming-of-age novel, or b) a thinly-veiled autobiography. Then last night I was rereading an L.M. Montgomery novel, A Tangled Web, and came across the following character:

"She was only 'old Margaret Penhallow,' with fifty drab, snubbed years behind her and nothing ahead of her but drab, snubbed old age."

All of a sudden I remembered a news story a few years ago in our little town about a double suicide -- the people were really into the Hemlock Society -- which had failed: the husband had died and the wife had lived. I have wondered often since then what the woman's life has been like since that happened. Judging by the lack of sensationally mis-spelled headlines in our local newspaper, she didn't just keep trying until she got it right, which is what you might expect. Anyway, Margaret Penhallow combined with this woman in my mind to give me a whole new idea. So now I have 2500 words written... in two separate stories, because I'm not ready to give up on the first idea yet. I think I may qualify as clinically insane at this point.

Politics
yay.

Other stuff
I took C to the doctor on Wednesday because of the hearing thing. I wrote up a long description of that frustrating day and then ended up not posting it. Suffice to say it involved a rainstorm, non-functioning windshield wipers, an hour spent waiting with the kids in a Verizon store while my faulty phone was replaced (yippee!), and more Hometown Buffet hot wings than were probably good for me. The doctor prescribed two medications: one is an asthma medication, and one's an allergy medication. When the pharmacist told me this, I went, "wha...?" and called the doctor, thus starting a two-day marathon session of phone tag, because -- newsflash -- C has neither asthma or allergies. Turns out that the doctor didn't have her mixed up with someone else's child after all; she just prescribed those drugs because they'll address her symptoms. What-ever. I hope they work really, really well. And that's not just because we're at a total of $70 for this round, either. My poor girl NEEDS TO HEAR. It's, you know, kind of important to me.

Also, T has been really having a bad few weeks of it. Ever since his truck's engine blew, he's been a bit depressed. We're trying to figure out what to do about that. It is such a good feeling to not be in debt. Such a good feeling. I mean, we have a credit card with a thousand-dollar limit that's closer to the top than to the bottom of its capacity, but to be normal people and not have five figures of consumer debt hanging over us has been almost euphorically good, this past year and a half or so. And we have become pretty adamant that we will keep it that way. But for T, if his truck's going to be disabled, you might as well castrate him and get it over with, almost, is his feeling. And it's all well and good to say we'll just hand it all over to God and see what He does, and that's what we're doing, but every once in a while the Signature Loan Devil sticks his head up and cackles at us in a really provoking way. We try to ignore that, because we've been on that slippery slope so many times before -- it starts out as just a couple thousand for a new engine and whatever else you use to fix a truck (I personally still believe there must be some white magic involved, but I digress), and before you know it you're looking at bills that say you owe a total of twenty-something thousand dollars going, "how the heck did THAT happen?" Been there, done that, bought the T-shirt (which says on the front, "Flush Eight Years of Your Financial Life Down the Toilet Now. Ask Me How!"). If only there was a Truck Fairy, eh?

Monday, November 01, 2004

I don't even know WHAT to call this one

Can someone please tell me: Where did November come from this year? As I get older and the years do their clichéd-but-true (after all, most clichés are true) speeding-up thing, I find myself sometimes having to think to remember not just the date, not just the MONTH even, but the season. Mentally I'm still adjusting to the fact that it's 2004. And it's about to be 2005, in two short months. Two short months, may I add, which are always the most frantic months of the year for just about everybody, and we're no exception, with a whole slew of family birthdays, and pretty much every weekend taken up between now and New Year's. So I fully expect to step outside tomorrow, feel that the air is cool, and have to look at the leaves to remember if it's fall or early spring.


I think I am going to do NaNoWriMo this year. Shut UP, just SHUT UP, I do not want to hear it. I am such a lemming.

Things we did this last weekend:

At the last minute, invited my parents to hold my grandmother's birthday party at our house instead of theirs, for some complicated reasons I won't go into here. This meant that my house went from "pigs wouldn't claim it" to "ready for a family gathering" in two hours. It was a transformation to behold. And yes, my grandmother was born on the exact day of the stock-market crash which catapulted the nation into the Great Depression. It's almost enough to make me believe in astrology, that is. Did I just SAY that?

Spilled water in our keyboard. We air-dried it, and then I used the blow-dryer for a while, and it works almost perfectly, just a little stiff with the SHIFTing.

Played probably twelve hours of board games lying in front of the fire on the hardwood floor, including an actual complete game of Monopoly, played until one person had all the money and stuff. I've done this maybe twice in my life before. (I lost first). We also played two matches of Trivial Pursuit. I won the first one and T won the second one. (Has anyone seen the BOok Lovers' Version of Trivial Pursuit at Barnes and Noble? Omigosh I WANT THAT. Except there's nobody to play it with me.)

Drove to the city to buy school supplies. Well, C and I did. T was otherwise occupied...

Built a pig pen. T did this (thank God) while I drove to the city. And not at our house (thank God again, many times over, because pigs? they stink). Someone is giving us and his boss's family two piglets. They're going to be raised at the boss's house. I think we'll name ours Loin Roast.

Went over all our ballot propositions and decided how we're going to vote on them. Ironically, we're Republicans (more because America is enslaved to the two-party system, than because we actually agree with everything in the platform; we're considerably to the right of Republican on several issues), but I think we are going perpendicular to the party line on all but one or two of the long list of propositions. We don't expect them to go our way, however, because we so do not fit in politically in California. Talk about "disenfranchised". Yet we still vote, every single time. Both of us have voted every time it was possible since we've been old enough to do so.

Cut wood. Well, I got out of most of this (cackles with glee). I love wood heat. I really do. I also really don't like cutting wood. I mean, viewed from a distance, it's an invigorating family activity for a brisk fall day, with the smell of wood and the camaraderie and blah blah blah burning brush piles of sawdust. When you're doing it, however, you notice that stuff less than you do the noise and the muscle strain and the squished fingers. And it wasn't my fault that my dad decided to change the day for wood cutting to a day when I'd had a lunch date with a girlfriend since the summer. It really wasn't. So I hauled about ten very heavy rounds of pine, and then got back in the car, drove 45 minutes back to town with the radio up very loud, took a shower, got dressed up, and went to my favorite restaurant to talk for an hour with a friend who now lives across the country with her army husband, about girl stuff and the Iraq war and our husbands and kids and our ex-boyfriends and stuff. Then I got to go home and help stack the wood, just so that I could meet the requisite smashed-finger quota for a winter's worth of wood. (actually there will be many more days of this delightful kind of exercise before spring, and you can bet I won't get out of those. sigh.)

One of my favorite things about autumn is the way the light slants, even in the middle of the day. This picture was taken at almost ten a.m. In the summer, it's already prime sunburn time at ten, with the sun beating down on your head and crisp, ugly, short shadows squatting under everything. On the 29th of October, however, you have dew on the grass and lovely, long, blurry, cool shadows everywhere. No contest at all, if you ask me.

'Tis the season. You can't drive anywhere around here right now without encountering about a tarantula per mile. I am genuinely ambivalent about the creatures -- they don't freak me out like they do some people to whom I may or may not be married, but I am not a staunch tarantula advocate like nearly everyone else seems to be who isn't freaked out by them. I don't cringe when T purposefully runs them over (backing up if necessary) -- I just laugh. I was glad to have the opportunity to photograph this one, though, creeping his mechanical legs across the dirt road. If T sees this page he may well file for divorce. I'll keep you posted.

Thursday, October 28, 2004

ALSO.

Tonight I wore this outfit. I think from now on I'll wear it every day. I went from zero "what a cute outfit!"s from strangers in the past five years, to three tonight. Plus I saw a few heads turn casually and stuff. Not that I'm letting this go to my head. But maybe my usual policy of "if I'm not dirty and my clothes aren't stained I'm OK to go out" needs a little updating. Or something.

Also tonight I'm finding out what happens when you eat hot links for three meals in two days. Intestinally speaking, this is not a great idea and I don't recommend it. There's your public service announcement for this evening

ALSO tonight, I am going to fold laundry instead of reading or putzing around on the Internet while I wait to take C for her midnight wet-bed-prevention pee. I SWEAR I AM. As much more fun as it would be to read or even do data entry or (heaven forbid) wash the dishes... must. do. laundry. I am getting those mountains of laundry in the laundry room again. I am pretty well convinced that the clothes are breeding in there.

Monday, October 25, 2004

yay for fall!

Usually my self-image is pretty ordinary. I think of myself physically as a kind of ubermom; the way I look doesn't really matter because most people, as soon as they see me, see my mom-ness, and that's all. And that's fine. Then there are days when I think of myself as looking more like, oh, say, something that was once alive (and probably furry) but then was run over by a truck.

And then there are the weirdest days. Days like today, when I get dressed and look in the mirror and think, wow, I'm actually really good-looking. All day I've felt like this about myself. To commemorate the occasion I put on makeup and wore my red plaid skirt and a cozy, thick, cable-knit red sweater and black tights... all day long. And all day I was very aware of my legs and my hair and my cute little outfit. And the thing is, I look just exactly like I do every other day, except the clothes. I have no idea what it is that gives me a mood like this, but I am grateful to God that it's rare, because I would annoy the living daylights out of myself if I went around thinking like this all the time. I wonder if it's hormonal. I should track my moods like some women do their bodily fluids and basal body temperatures, and see if this goes in, ahem, a cycle.

We have been having such fantastic fall weather. Red-sweater-and-bowl-of-apples weather. Soup-and-French-bread weather. Snuggling-down-by-the-woodstove-with-a-book weather. My goodness, no wonder people gain weight in the wintertime; everything that sounds appealing involves eating and relaxing. Tonight there's supposed to be a good cold storm coming in. Tomorrow we should have really nice hard cold driving rain. T gives me the evil eye every time I say stuff like this, because while I get to sit by the woodstove in my red sweater with my apples, soup, French bread, and book, (oh, and kids), he has to go out and do who knows what uncomfortable work sort of things, in the nasty cold wet (or snowy) weather. Then I feel all guilty... for about three seconds. I just can't help it. Autumn just suits me.


Meanwhile, even though (or maybe because) I got an obscenely luxurious quantity of solid sleep last night, I am really very tired. So I am going to very virtuously not forget to wash my makeup off, like I usually do on the rare occasions I wear any, and I am going to go snuggle up under a nice thick stack of blankets, next to my nice warm husband. yay for fall. :)

Tuesday, October 19, 2004

thank you kitty. also plumbing. and other stuff.

Our bigger, more aggressive cat has strong hunting instincts. However, due to the dearth of mice at her location, she's turned to June bugs. And I hate Junebugs. So I will leave you to imagine my reaction when she hops up on our bed and offers me an enormous, twitching, oozing, spiky-legged, furry-antennaed specimen, like a gift.

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

Also, our plumbing (actually the town sewer system) is freaking out again. It happens when we get a lot of rain. Last spring we called a plumber, and he and the public utilities people passed the buck back and forth like it was some kind of new rainy-day elementary-school game. So today, when the washer drained onto the utility-room floor instead of into the sewer system like it's supposed to, I took matters into my own hands, and went out and checked the sewage access myself, while it was (here's a brainwave for the public utilities people) actually still raining. And lo and behold the pipe was full to the brim of rainwater, along with a lot of other nasty stuff. THEN I called them, told them it was definitively their problem, and supposedly they're going come out as soon as possible. I've no idea what they're going to be able to do about the situation, though. The water and sewer systems in this town were outdated in the forties when this development was built.

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

Dawn got me thinking yesterday about things I've lost. I started to make a mental list and I know I'm forgetting a lot of things, or blocking them out, more likely. But here are a few memorable ones.

• My high-school class ring. Last time I absolutely knew I had it was when I got engaged (October of 1993). The first time I missed it and absolutely couldn't find it was when I got back from my honeymoon (March of 1994). So there are six months during which, at some point, it vanished into thin air. For years after the wedding I would remember yet another place where I thought maybe I remembered setting it aside to keep it safe; I would check that spot next time I was at my parents', and I would be wrong. Finally I gave up. Old habits die hard, though; the other day I found myself wondering if Mom and Dad had ever had the traps out of their drains since then. Nevermind that the house was new when we moved in, and the drain covers have all been intact the entire time; the brain of a chronic thing-loser doesn't care about things like that.
  
• A ring my mom gave me in high school. This one makes me just sick. The ring wasn't worth much monetarily, but my mom bought it for me when she was on a work-related trip, and brought it home and gave it to me during one of the rare periods of my adolescence when we were just not getting along at all. I was so touched by the gesture, and then I lost the ring not two weeks later at a beach by the river, when I went there with "friends" late at night (that whole night was a total disaster). The next day I went back and looked for it for hours, but it was gone.
  
• A Zip-loc bag of crochet squares. This is the biggie. This is the item that we are still kind of actively looking for, because it just HAS to be somewhere, a gallon ziploc bag full to bursting with six months' worth of work doesn't just disappear. Except apparently it does.

Like I said, I know there are more things for this list. Someday when I die I will march straight up to God and ask Him where the vast repository is for all this kind of stuff that people lose and never find again. Because surely at least He must know.

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

Yesterday I was looking over my shoulder to back up while I was driving, and my neck totally spazzed. The pain got worse for an hour or so until I just couldn't move my head at all. So I spent the day lying around on a heating pad, reading. You may or may not recall that Sunday afternoon was spent the same way, minus the heating pad. Interestingly enough, one day of lying around leisurely plowing through a library book feels pleasantly decadent. Two days feels like I'm a lazy bum who needs to get off her couch and get something done, for crying out loud. Who knew my laziness tolerance would be quite so low? I've always craved a week where I could just do whatever I wanted, that being mostly sitting around and reading. And yet I get the opportunity and I can't even last two days without getting fidgety. Another of life's little dreams destroyed. **sigh**

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