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Tuesday, April 06, 2004
my skin is still crawling
My skin is still crawling. We were walking back at dusk from the street where the kids ride their bikes (we live in a hilly neighborhood and this is the only accessible level street; it also has minimal traffic) when we noticed a veritable swarm of huge carpenter ants on the rail fence around our front yard. Carpenter ants are bad enough singly -- when they are seething, oh eew. I mean, it could be worse. It could be centipedes. (oh no it couldn't, no no no, banish that thought, the nightmares! the horror-movie-worthy nightmares!).
Anyway, this is another Good Time To Be Renting -- I called the landlord and he'll be sending the Orkin man around to our carpenter-ant smorgasbord of a house as soon as possible.
Oh eew.
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Wednesday, March 31, 2004
long rambles about many assorted unrelated topics
My research has proved successfully that clumsy people are normal, and people who never make stupid physical errors are a bizarre anomaly who should be psychologically examined. Or at least, that's how I am choosing to interpret the results of my in-depth unbiased survey conducted earlier this week. Thank you to all who participated and hence made me feel more at home in this huge cold cruel world full of things for me to stub my toe against or hit my head on. Clumsy people unite! Perhaps we should make tomorrow National Stand Up Into A Cupboard Door Day to celebrate.
Oh wait, I forgot, tomorrow already has a holiday. Ahem. Nevermind.
Which reminds me that tomorrow is also the 30th birthday of the second serious boyfriend I ever had. Even when we were dating I found it appropriate that his birthday was on April Fools' Day. Ahem again.
I have always wished I was better at April Fools kind of things. Beyond calling my parents the first year I was married and telling them I was pregnant, which was pretty obviously a sham (and not only because I'd only been sexually active for twelve days at the time and twelve days is Too Soon To Know) I've never done much for it. I know people who hatch elaborate plans and pull them off successfully on large groups of their friends and I'm always a little bit envious. I lack the devious creativity to come up with things like that. Now my husband -- he is ALL THE TIME doing that sort of thing, but never on April Fools' Day, I think because he thinks of that as a silly excuse for a holiday. You know how there are people who are into things like school spirit and small holidays, and people who aren't? He's one of the aren'ts. But he'd be very good at it.
On a completely, totally unrelated note, I saw a whole flowerbed full of tulips exactly like the one on this page while I was on a walk today. It gave me a diaryland-addict kind of glowing feeling of rightness, and I narrowly escaped exclaiming aloud about it, which would have been stupid since I'd then have had to explain to my parents (who were walking with me at the time) what an online diary is, and why they can't read mine but the entire remainder of Western civilization is allowed to (although there are certainly other people who I hope never stumble across it, that's for sure).
Yet another completely, totally unrelated note (OK, if you must know, it came to mind because I was trying desperately to figure out if that last parenthetical statement should use who or whom. I think who is correct but I wouldn't stake anything on it): I was reading an article about that "Eats, Shoots, and Leaves" book yesterday and I have found a kindred spirit in its author. I have got to feel fond affection for anyone who is as angry as I am when Hollywood misplaces or leaves out an apostrophe. I'll bet we could have a nice bitter vindictive ramble together about the way the English language is being dismantled and destroyed. She probably cringes whenever she sees "Honey, I Shrunk The Kids" at the video store, just like me. We should get together for coffee. I hope I could keep her from finding out about my parentheses addiction, though.
Friday, March 26, 2004
places I've called home
Because I lack the creativity, wit, cleverness, and motivation to do a real post, and have suffered from this lack for quite some time, here is my response to today's spark from diarist.net, just so I don't forget how Diaryland works.
What are the different places you've called home? Be it specific buildings and rooms, or cities and towns. Which was your favorite, and why? Did they each signify a beginning, an ending, or growing? Would you, or could you, ever go back?
1. The first place I remember living was "the yellow house." We moved in when I was three and moved out before I started kindergarten. This was probably actually the sixth or seventh house we lived in but I don't remember any of the previous ones. It seemed like a normal house to me at the time, but in retrospect I think it was quite small and old; you might even call it ramshackle. It had a big porch (at least it seemed big then), and a front yard with an old pump in it (I cranked the handle once and a bee came out and stung me). I learned right and left in the yard of that house and for years -- until I was at least ten, I'd guess -- anytime I needed to remember which was which I'd have to mentally put myself back in the garden, facing the bean-plant teepee, and remember that left was toward the house and right was toward town. I remember at least one Christmas here, when my dad built my brother and me a house out of our new Lincoln Logs -- and I got a doll crib, and my brother and I also got a typewriter. Almost as soon as we moved out of this house, the owner painted it dark gray, almost black. It looked like a haunted house for years until it was painted white with green trim (and black undertones). It was demolished five years ago or so, which was sad.
2. We moved from "the yellow house" to "the Plant", so called because we occupied the apartment above the garage at the sand and gravel plant where my father worked. We lived there till I was ten. Again, this apartment was really small, I guess (the property was sold a few years back and the ad mentioned a "possible upstairs apartment?"). And I suppose to most people it was a strange place to live -- but we loved it. We played in the rock and sand piles, and floated our decrepit old boat on the pond, where we also raised ducks. We started out with a few of our own and our flock grew effortlessly, because people would drop off ducks in the night once they knew this was a decent place to leave those ducklings which had been so cute at Easter but which had quickly become annoying. This was the best place in the world to ride a bike.
3. The summer before fifth grade we moved in with my maternal grandparents. I was excited about the move, and enjoyed living there for a while, but then two things happened: 1) I became painfully conscious of what other people thought, and realized that to an objective observer, the house was old, and... a little strange. (Pink, with a mint-green tin roof, for starters, and my bedroom had once been a breezeway and then been enclosed; much bare concrete was involved, and the chimney from the fireplace stuck out into my room) and 2) I became a teenager and had daily conflicts with my grandmother, increasing in intensity until I was fifteen and we moved out. Looking back, this was a wonderful place to live. Acres and acres of nothing around you but grass and cows -- which of course was another problem when I was a teenager and wanted to go go go and see people. But my brother and I had a wonderful time there, riding our horses from breakfast to supper in the summertime. This is the ranch where I would love to live again someday.
4. Next we lived in "the blue house" -- a new mobile home on my paternal grandparents' property. This was also a fun place to live -- I spent three years there and this was where most of my teenaged shenanigans with friends took place. It was the first place where I had a bedroom I could really personalize, so I had the stereotypical teenaged girl's wall covered with scraps of everything that had sentimental value to me -- dried roses, greeting cards, photographs, pictures, posters, banana stickers, and a strip of adding-machine tape going around the ceiling with socialist, falsely-deep quotes written on it in black Magic Marker. ("Man was the pariah dog, the moral leper...the muddier of crystal waters, the despoiler of forests, the murderer of the innocent" was one of my favorites at the time). I loved that room.
5. When that grandmother died and her will was a mess and her property got sold we moved back out to my other grandmother's ranch, except in our own house this time. I loved living there this time -- I was eighteen and appreciated everything (including my grandmother) much more. I only lived there a year before I got married and moved in with my husband into...
6. ... his little apartment over a garage in town -- the first time I had ever lived "in town" -- although the yellow house was pretty close. This place was a great little love nest and of course I have hundreds of happy memories centering around it -- the little bitty alcove of a room which we used for our books until we made it over into a tiny nursery -- the garage where where our cats had kittens and where we set up our computer, so that our mouse hands reached absolute zero when we played a game late on winter nights -- the little kitchen with its obligatory landlord-furnished glass-topped octagonal dinette table -- the nifty and ingenious built-in cupboards in the hall between the living room and the bathroom, which were practically responsible for the place being habitable at all. We lived there together for over two years, until our son was six weeks old.
7. Then we moved into the house we're in now, which is the "main house" about fifteen feet from the garage/apartment in #6. Anyone who saw it before we lived here would hardly recognize it on the inside -- when we moved in, it had new linoleum in the kitchen, but the bathroom was really bizarre, and the flooring throughout the house was in very sad shape. Not to mention the irregularly-shaped patch of orange, yellow, and brown shag carpet in the living room, which harmonized in a very 60's way with the dark knotty pine walls and wall sconces (these last two items are unchanged). Then it went through a wall-to-wall-carpet stage (meanwhile the bathroom got remodeled), until two years ago when the landlord (bless him!) paid to have the hardwood floors in the whole house refinished. yay, I am still besotted with them even today. :) We never thought we'd live here this long, and this was the year we'd planned to buy a house outside of town, but our housing market has gone completely insane so we decided to stay here where the rent's really reasonable and wait a while to see if the real estate bubble bursts, before we lock ourselves into a mortgage. In keeping with that decision, when the most recent tenants moved out of our little love nest next door, we started renting it also, so as to have a garage and a LOT more space. Now our son has a bedroom instead of an alcove in our school room, and we have space for guests and an amazingly cool, large, storage-bliss schoolroom. Aren't we lucky little homeschoolers. ;-) Meanwhile over the course of the almost eight years we've lived in this house, it's become "home" in a big, big way. All of our family's memories of home involve this little piece of property. Secretly I wouldn't mind buying it, but T's car hobby does not lend itself to permanent residence in town, so we have to at least hold out the possibility of buying a place with space around it.
And there you have it, whew! Maybe now that my fingers remember how to type I'll manage to post a "real" entry this weekend. ;-).
Sunday, March 21, 2004
camping questions and observations
I just finished a very nice weekend. T totally surprised me with A CELL PHONE for an anniversary present ("Welcome to the nineties!" was the greeting I got from my best friend when I told her) And yes, I'm so cool and thoughtful that I didn't get him anything; we've never done anniversary presents before, however, to be fair. We went on a little date on Saturday, and then the whole family camped overnight with my parents at a lake near here and had a good time. And since I am an official Diaryland Addict, you know I've been thinking all weekend about a few questions and observations to put in this entry:
- I spent most of today hanging around in the semi-shade outdoors, wearing shorts, not wearing sunscreen. As a result I am really pink around the neck and face but my legs are still fish-belly white. WHY IS THIS?? It is patently unfair.
- Good way to get lots of exercise: Have the worst 24 hours of your period whilst camping three or four hundred yards from the nearest bathroom. Walking back and forth every hour is great for your legs. Also a good way to practice women's safety tactics, since it involves walking said hundreds of yards at least a few times in the wee hours of the morning, when almost everyone around you is asleep but those few who aren't are certain to be highly intoxicated.
- I don't think there's a spot on my daughter that was both clean and un-scraped by the time we left. (note: she had a shower last night before going to sleep in the tent; I had to tell you that lest you think I let her -- eew -- go to bed filthy). Even though she fell asleep in the car on the way home, we simply had to wake her up for a bath before we could put her in her bed tonight, poor girl. She is a dirt and injury magnet (yes, we're talking about this little girl; it's like she has a split personality; her "Pig-Pen From 'Peanuts' With A Side of Accident-Proneness" self alternates with her "Fairy Princess of the World" self in a shocking manner). At least she didn't get sunburned.
- There ought to be a law whereby fish have to bite on a boy's first fishing expedition. But there isn't. :(
- Inline skates work a certain set of muscles, very very well. Overall, what with the period and the skating, my poor lower body is feeling so abused that I couldn't even read the title of Mom-on-Roof's entry from Friday (it involves magic fingers and hot lotions) without having a momentary massage fantasy which almost took my breath away. I think I'll have to get as close as I can with a heating pad and a few Advil.
Sunday, March 14, 2004
this will help you get your zzz's
I had just popped open a diet Coke in anticipation of sitting and reading for an hour but I CAN'T FIND MY BOOK. (The Two Towers, and I'm liking it OK). And now since I have this nice beverage o' bliss to keep me company, I can't just go to bed, now can I, so here I am typing an entry. I remember in junior high, notes written when bored were always the most boring ones. So, if you are prone to insomnia, perhaps you should save this entry to read in the middle of the night -- and in any case, make sure not to operate any heavy machinery after reading. OK?
I've been spending a lot of time away from the computer being, well, productive. In fact, this weekend overall has been a good one with lots of things getting accomplished that have been a long time coming. Ooh, a LIST!
- On Friday I finished a sewing project for the first time since last May: a denim blanket intended for picnics.
- Time spent collecting old jeans and letting them lie around in an old military laundry bag, figuring that "someday" I would make a quilt out of them: Ten years.
- Total days elapsed from starting cutting to finishing the project: about 15
- Total hours involved: Maybe 35? 40?
- Other miscellaneous costs: much frustration with my sewing machine, until we reached a truce and worked things out between us; one cassette in a 25-cassette book on tape owned by my local library, "eaten" by my extremely inexpensive generic cassette player (Light a Penny Candle by Maeve Binchy, and I was so engrossed in it that I had to check out the book at the same time as I confessed the depravity and misadventures of my cassette player to the librarian who's known me since I was a baby, and stay up till all hours reading instead of sewing to find out what happened), replacement $8.
- Saturday T put the engine in his truck. This is a big, big deal. I won't go into the mechanic-y greasy details, nor will I tell you how long the truck's been sitting in our driveway waiting for said engine (partly because I can't remember, it seems like it's always been there), but trust me, a big big deal. Yay hubby. :)
- Also Saturday I started a new sewing project (I am liking this books on tape thing, and sewing is a good excuse), this one being a dress for my daughter. I have had this very very expensive fabric stored for eight years -- since I bought more than I needed to for a maternity dress -- and have planned since then that I would eventually make a dress for my daughter (mind you, this was before I HAD a daughter) from it. I bought the pattern for the dress last spring. So after eight years of waiting and two and a half days (about eight or ten hours) of work, here it is:
- On Friday, LT had the shining moment of his life to date (or close enough anyway) when he took his savings to Target and bought THE LEGO AT-AT. He'd been coveting one for a year or so, and saving his recycling money for months. And now through the miracle of modern technology (including my new-to-me, functional digital camera! woo hoo!), you, yes, YOU, diaryland reader, can be witness to the creation of a Star Wars legend. (can you tell it's late?)
Early in the project, Friday night...
Daddy of course had to get in on this (talk about bonding! ;-)
After just a few hours' sleep, I don't think I have to tell you about the first thing he looked at when he got out of bed on Saturday...
The finished product, Saturday morning.
It was a little smaller than I expected for $100 -choke- but the owner is extremely well-pleased.
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Wednesday, March 03, 2004
random thoughts, ebay addiction, weight loss
A few thoughts that have rattled around in my head over the last few days:
- Do the makers of those flashy, jiggly ads designed to look like Windows error messages (comics.com usually has at least one going) honestly think we're going to fall for their scheme? I have more faith in my fellow man than to believe that ANYONE would be clueless enough to go around clicking on those, especially more than once. All they do is give me a headache.
- If you happen to watch the original 70's version of "The Love Bug", and you are for one second fooled by the scrub-brush laden location (with a very cheezy cardboard mock-up of the corner of the Ahwahnee Hotel in one scene; this is boggling, since anyone who knows what that hotel looks like would presumably also know what its setting looks like) which was used to stand in as "Yosemite Valley", you need to take a four-day weekend and take a vacation to Yosemite RIGHT NOW, that is an order.
- This is a genuine question. What's up with everyone disguising the names of places and businesses in their diaries/journals/weblogs? (KM@rt, TuIsa, etc) Is this to avoid having search engines find those terms? Why? I'm not being facetious here; I'm genuinely curious.
My seven-year-old son has discovered eBay. It must be a genetic thing, since his father is clinically addicted to that site and can sit there for hours looking at Dodge Charger stuff, most of which he will never buy, "just to see what they're going for." However, it's not MoPar parts that draw my son; it's Legos. And Star Wars stuff. And generally anything else he thinks up that would be fun. ("Hey, Mommy, let's see if doubleyou doubleyou doubleyou dot ebay dot com has any light sabers.") And women are supposed to be the ones who love to shop! T was setting up a computer for a friend of his; when he was testing it in our garage, our son saw it and asked if THAT computer has an eBay in it.
This is the first time since mid-January that our seven-day forecast doesn't have rain in it. We celebrated yesterday by going for not one but TWO walks around town. Today the kids will ride bikes and I will break out my inline skates. Stay tuned for reports of tomorrow's celebration; I'm sure it will be equally riveting. ;-) Seriously, though, we've enjoyed the rain, but we're really glad to be able to see the sun for a few days. I don't know how larger families do it -- it's hard enough cooping up just my two kids inside all day.
I sang in a chorus concert on Saturday. This was the first one I've done since last spring, so it was also the first one I've done since losing weight. It certainly was nice not having that extra thirty pounds pressing down on my feet for an hour and a half. It didn't help with singing "Stomp Your Foot" (WHY did Aaron Copland write that song? And WHY do chorus directors insist on including it in programs season after season? aargh!!), but a girl can't have everything. I still have fifteen pounds to go (and may decide to lose more once I get there -- I'm not sure fifteen pounds will be enough to solve some of my more problematic problem areas) but it is a nice feeling of accomplishment to be where I am. When I was weighing our luggage for our trip to Florida, I stood on the scale with a huge duffel bag packed full of my kids' clothes, and the number on the scale was the same as it was last summer, only that had been without the duffel bag. It was a mental image that will stay before my eyes every time I feel like slacking on my diet, that's for sure. Ack. --------
Thursday, February 19, 2004
not the most scintillating entry you'll ever read
I just got an email survey of a different kind, and it's one, for once, that I'm NOT going to fill out (I am a sucker for all kinds of surveys... except this one). Remember slam books? There were different varieties of them when I was in school -- one type involved writing a person's name on each page and then passing the book around to everyone and each person would write a comment about each other person. The idea was that you would be honest and nobody was supposed to get offended. Except, come on, nobody thinks anyone's PERFECT, and as soon as teenage girl A found out that teenage girl B thought that she had a funny-looking nose, there went their friendship. And this would happen a dozen times over every time the slam book made the rounds. (for a great literary treatment of this concept read Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great). Nobody turned out to be as thick-skinned as they thought. This email I got was of a similar nature -- the recipient is supposed to answer a lot of questions about the sender: Do you think I'm pretty/crazy/kind/clever... and on down the line. Now this isn't saying anything about the person who sent the email to ME. Frankly, I like her, but I haven't spent enough time around her in the past ten years to be able to answer a lot of questions about her. But there is no way I'm sending that on to anyone. Just uh-uh. I am sensitive enough without doing something stupid like that.
Speaking of sensitive, I'm feeling a good deal better today, overall, but I am kicking myself seriously about my diet. I've spent the last two days in the following pattern:
6 am - 3 pm: eat very conscientiously, count all my calories, virtuously drink a ton of water and avoid all temptation.
3 pm - bedtime: to heck with it, one serving of ice cream won't hurt me. Well, now that I've had ice cream I may as well finish the job and have some chips. Mmm, salt. More chips. Yum. Well, I've totally blown it for today already, I'll have some cookies. Oh, and dinner too.
bedtime: guilt guilt guilt guilt.
To try (unsuccessfully) to motivate myself to be good today, I took a progress picture and sat and looked for a while at the progress I've made so far. This is supposed to help me feel a sense of accomplishment and drive which will buoy me past temptations and make me enjoy dieting. Except today, it didn't. But for your edification, here are the pictures. (dang, I hate that before picture. I really really HATE it.)
last summer ~~~ today
So now, I'm going to try a different tack. I'm going to tape a Fatter Me picture on the fridge with the caption, "Do you want to go back here? Do you REALLY?" And if that doesn't work I'll have to get really extreme and actually --horrors-- exercise. I have been so not interested in exercising lately.
My next entry will be my 200th and I am planning an extravaGANza to celebrate. (you have to say that word like George Carlin to understand). I've been keeping this diary for about 190 days. This means that even with all the days I skipped, I still did enough multiples-in-one-day to bring my average above one entry per day. That is just. sick. ack. --------
Wednesday, February 18, 2004
pity party
One disadvantage of having a (generally accurate) reputation for being a level-headed logical person, whatever my multitudinous other faults may be, is that when I have a slump and seem more "typically" feminine as far as emotions go, I get a definite sense of letting people down. When I get hormonal or otherwise illogically emotional, T, who has often congratulated himself on finding such a straightforward wife who "thinks like a man" (his words) and doesn't generally even get real PMS, gets this "this isn't what I signed up for" kind of edge to his voice -- in the nicest possible way. My parents look at me like I'm a changeling and my kids don't know how to take this person who has taken over their mother's body. Today is one of those days. My impulse no matter what I'm doing is to find a surface to fold my arms on, and to lay my head down in them and either cry or sleep. Or maybe both. I'll look around at my life and mentally kick myself, because damn, my life is good. It really, really is. But today for some unknown reason it seems like I'm looking at my wonderful life through glass and I can't really get into it or live it. There's no reason for me to feel this way, and plenty of reasons for me NOT to feel this way, and yet there it is. ack. I hope tomorrow will be better.
--------Monday, February 09, 2004
recap of our vacation
Ways In Which My Fabulous Vacation in Florida Totally Ruined My Life:
- My house sucks now. My best friend (with whom we stayed in FL) has, well, the most awesome house I think I have ever been in personally. Or at least, the most awesome house I've ever been in where I wasn't being paid to wait tables and clean up for an enormous Christmas party where the hostess nearly had fisticuffs with her two daughters-in-law over which of their four exhorbitantly elegant and expensive sets of family Christmas silver they should use. So, the most awesome house of any normal human being I've ever known, how's that? And it's not that Susan is wealthy, it's just that her house is laid out exactly like the ones in all those dream-house blueprints I invent, and it's all bright and airy and clutter-free and just plain wonderful. Anyway. I came home from that house, where my entire family of four was made to feel perfectly comfortable and at home and just generally all happy in many ways, to my now-hovel. Mind you, I didn't mind my house terribly before we left. I kind of liked it, except for the 1970's dungeon atmosphere brought about by the dark knotty pine walls and cruddy wall lighting. But now my house is depressing and I hate it, because I Have Seen Perfection.
- I am a total slob. This is somewhat related to item 1. Too much stuff and nowhere to put it, combined with a severe case of slothfulness, combine to make my house a virtual eyesore. As a family, we have now begun the process of un-hoveling ourselves, but it's a slow road. My housecleaning mantra is now, "What would Susan do?" And aside from the instances where I realize that Susan would put the item in question neatly away in one of her five-zillion-more-than-I-have cupboards, it really does help. So this at least we're working on.
- My long-standing love of winter is in jeopardy. Now, I fully realize that, having lived in California since birth, I've never actually experienced winter, but I have always enjoyed our paltry 45-degree-high-for-the-day semblance of that season. Not anymore. The weather in Florida, well, it just excelled. It started out at about 68 degrees on Sunday and went up throughout the week until it was a brilliantly sunny eighty-degree day on the last day we were there. It never got cold at night; we could be outside at midnight in t-shirts, which won't happen until sometime in May here. We got off the plane in sixty-degree Sacramento, drove an hour and a half, got out to eat, and almost died, because the sun had gone down and the temperature had plummeted to all of 48 degrees. It was all I could do not to get directly back in the car and return to the airport. I'm acclimating to it again now but it's not easy.
- I have minivan envy. We rented one for the week and I was fully smitten. Now I drool watching them go down the road, thinking of all that open space, of the way-back seat, of the capability to carry two small families at once. I'll get over it, but that's not easy, either.
That said, there was one annoying thing about Florida. Can you say, "tolls"? My goodness, it was like driving back and forth over the Golden Gate Bridge for seven days. And I just know that all the locals, who knew which back roads were quick and which ones would add two hours to your travel time (and that's if you didn't get lost) and could thus travel unimpeded by the dreaded "exact change" sign (what happens if you don't have exact change? Do you go to jail? Do you face a firing squad? I shudder to think), laughed raucously in their cars watching the hapless tourists pay for their highway system for them.
Also, I magically managed to gain five pounds over the course of the week. This came as a total shock to me, because I thought I was eating really reasonably, considering that I was on vacation. Can I just blame all that on Chick-fil-A right now? Actually we only ate there twice, so maybe the weight gain was water. (yeah, that sounds good). Or maybe it had something to do with the nightly bowl of ice cream, and the Olive Garden trip and the stop for fries at Denny's (which was a harrowing experience, really, from a personal safety standpoint, for this bucolic rube; that Denny's was not in the best of neighborhoods) after watching Phantom of the Opera, and so on... no, it couldn't be that, I like the water idea much better.
Things I did for the first time on this trip:
- Placed a call on a cell phone, alone and unaided. Yes, you read that right.
- Valet parked.
- Had a real honest-to-God girls' night out with my best friend while our hubbies watched the kids (and the Super Bowl); we went to the aforementioned production of Phantom and had The Best Time.
- Saw the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico.
- Traveled east of the state of Kansas.
- Flew in an airplane.
- Watched VH1 Classic. (this really belongs in the list at the top of the page, because I now have to daily talk myself out of calling and ordering digital cable RIGHT NOW).
- Rented a car.
- Bought something at an outlet mall. (not as exciting as it is made out to be, in my opinion, but whatever makes you happy...)
- Saw a swamp. Several small patches of swamp as a matter of fact.
- Experienced eighty-degree temperatures during a rainstorm.
- Ate at Chick-fil-A. I love their kids' meal goodies.
I know there are more things for that list, but it's hard to think of them right now what with having to croak (I am so congested and sniffly and sinusy right now, it's not even funny) passionately along with Christine on my Phantom CD, and with my son asking me every three seconds if he can play Starfighter yet (a week without it wasn't a problem but he'd love to be able to make up for lost time). I give up, the computer is his for now. ;-)
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Monday, January 19, 2004
paintball and procrastination
My New Experience For The Month was playing paintball on Saturday. I've only been watching/hearing about/spending money on my husband's paintball habit (well, it's money HE earns; I don't complain) since 1994; totally reasonable that it would be ten years before I joined him, right? It was... interesting. (which means, I sucked, but perhaps not as badly as I thought I would). As I kept repeating in the days leading up to Saturday (starting about Tuesday when T simply announced that It Was Time and that I would be trying paintball that weekend, no excuses), I do not sneak well. I am, well, like a galumphing ox or something -- I'm bulky enough that I can just dominate anything in my path (except for the corner posts on beds; they always win in their frequent confrontations with my thighs), so sneaking has never been an issue. The result of this lack of skill was that in the first FOUR of the six games played on Saturday, I did not fire a single shot before I got hit and went out of the game. Pathetic, no? By the fourth game I was sneaking a bit better, and even making and executing some bare-bones strategic plans (about as skilled as those I make and execute while playing chess, which is to say, a maximum of two turns ahead, and not very subtle), but stupid things kept getting me out before I shot at anyone. Even in the last two games, I never did take anyone out or capture the flag or otherwise cover myself in glory, but I did have a decent time. The area where we played is basically a hanging valley on the side of a steep hill, and I did enough hill-walking to make my legs very, very angry with me the next day. I admitted to T that I was glad he'd convinced (coerced!) me to do it, which of course meant that today he had to go buy me a paintball gun. Hmm. At least it's a used one.
And today, aside from a shopping trip to the valley, I filed papers. I hate filing, I really really do. This is how badly I hate it: Anytime I encounter a piece of paper which should be filed away (credit card or bank statements, phone bills, doctor bills, insurance paperwork, stuff like that) I toss it into a drawer in our filing cabinet. When the heap of paper is so enormous that the drawer can't shut properly, I file the papers neatly and in order in their proper folders in the other drawers of the cabinet. As I work down through the stack, it's like an archaeological dig: I'll encounter stuff from this month, then last month, and so on, until at the bottom I finally find out how long it's been since my last filing-drudgery day (in this case, it was apparently sometime in October 2002). And always as I'm going to all this work, I wonder, what are the possibilities that I will EVER need, oh, say, more than 2% of this paperwork? But you know if I threw any of it out, I'd find out very quickly just exactly how necessary it was to keep it all, in some very unpleasant way.
And now there's school stuff added into the mix. I use the same tried-and-true system with completed schoolwork as I do with other filing: pile it in a heap. A big, big heap, full of paragraphs written with many backward letters on newsprint paper with absurdly wide lines, and rough drafts of the Star Wars Episode VII script, and pages of addition facts and subtraction facts and multiplication facts, and preschool papers where the groups with more are circled and the groups with less are crossed out, and artwork of varying degrees of skill but universally unparallelled adorableness, and all manner of other early elementary educational stuff. I have the best intentions of filing this away consecutively by student, subject, and date, but the best I usually end up with is four folders for each school year: [LT] Art, [LT] Academic, [C] Art, and [C] Academic. And generally, there is, again, one big filing day per semester or so. blecch. Procrastination, thy name is Rachel.
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