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Thursday, August 14, 2008

little things

I've been feeling snippety for DAYS but I don't know how many of them I'll remember.

• Chinese Olympic gymnasts: No way (in my opinion) are some of those girls sixteen years of age. JUST NO WAY. I can't watch the Olympics from home, so I haven't seen them in action (bummer, because that's my favorite part of the summer Olympics) but just looking at pictures, um. No. (Still, if they're that talented -- is it easier to do gymnastics like that when you're prepubescent? Cause unless it's an unfair advantage, or bad for their little bodies, or something, I guess it would be reasonable to open the games to anyone who can compete. Maybe I just totally sounded stupid right then, too, though, because people, I have no idea what I'm talking about. "Ooh, flipping! Oooh, flipping around the BARS! That is impressive. The end." That is the extent of my knowledge about gymnastics, other than that I completely suck at it and not just because I'm closer to the Amazon than the petite department when it comes to my luuurvely feminine physique.)

  
  

• Yesterday I took my kids to the valley because I had to do a lot of shopping and I like to torment them like that, and we had the BEST. TIME. EVER. You know what's really awesome, is when your kids grow up and have these very individualized senses of humor, and my goodness, they are so FUNNY. I laughed till I cried at some of the jokes we made in the car (not, by the way, the safest possible thing to do when you're driving). Highlight: Scanning through Sirius radio stations (the rental is absolutely loaded, and yes we're still in the rental, more on that later) and appending "Dead Clowns" to the end of whatever part of the song title showed in the display. "32 Acres of Dead Clowns" was our favorite. WE ARE A RIOT OF LAUGHS I TELL YOU.

  
  

• The garden is slowing down and becoming persnickety. It seems to need a lot of water, and yet when I give it enough water it seems to develop symptoms of overwatering. The corn is worrying me (but then the corn always worries me, and usually it turns out fine). The tomatoes, on the bright side, are doing OK, after a worrying episode when every single ripe tomato had bad blossom-end rot. The cherry tomatoes are also doing fine. The pepperoncini -- well, I blogged about that particular issue already. The yellow squash and zucchini are as dependable as ever, but the melons are ... not growing. They all achieved a certain size and then stopped. A lot of the fun has gone out of the enterprise, is what I'm saying here. But I'm still glad I did it (um, am still doing it) and Next Year Will Be Better.

  
  

• I baked five million (or, OK, fifteen dozen) cookies today, because I am starting The Fair Baking. I froze a half-dozen cookies' worth of pre-shaped dough from each of the four variety of cookies I made today to put in the fair (and half a dozen baked cookies as back-up in case this never-before-tried experiment goes badly awry), and baked the rest, and now we are up to our ears in cookies. And I still have ten other entries to do in the next two weeks.

  
  

• It is hot. Really, really hot.

  
  

• The car dealership was supposed to have our car done last week. Then it was supposed to be done yesterday. Now it might, if things go extraordinarily well, be done tomorrow. All this annoyance to replace (or I guess now rebuild) the transmission in a car with under 2200 miles on it. This should not have to happen.

  
  

• Did you notice that there's not one adjective in the above paragraph? That's because I don't use those words and no others would do. (At least they pay for the rental.)

  
  

• The sweater from the last post is coming along fine. It has been an enormous learning experience and I feel all designerish now. I even discovered why knitting charts (which I still don't know if I'll ever be able to read) are considered useful things. People, I kind of designed my own cable-y thing. This is a big milestone. Big. Huge. I have to go shopping now. (Sorry, inadvertent 1991 flashback. Oh, how I loved the clothes in that movie. Well, some of them.)

I know I wanted to ramble on and on about more things but I can't remember what they were. I know, I know, the hardship. I'm sorry. Maybe I'll do better next time.

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

freaky.

So half our county is on fire again, except this time it really seems to actually almost be half the county. (Instead of, you know, a few hundred acres plus a sizable portion of hyperbole on my part.) I don't remember ever seeing a fire that grew this fast and did this much damage. People's houses have actually burned down, which almost never happens when we have a wildland fire. It sucks. I don't know what else to say about it other than that succinct little phrase. And it would be really lame of me to spend any time complaining about the smoke or the ash or the traffic or the fact that complications from the fire take up so much of my husband's would-be free time, when people are losing their homes and when this place will pretty much never look the same again. So I don't.

Fortunately for our family, at least, this particular fire is in the other half of the county, and we're in no immediate danger from it. It has put the fear of God in us, though, and we've spent several hours this week working on finishing up our own fire clearance. We're not done yet -- the "forest" that abuts our house still has just a couple of low branches, and I need to weed-eat again -- but we're a lot safer than we were on, say, Saturday morning. And that was a lot safer than we were when we moved in, because nobody had apparently ever worked on trimming the trees here -- well, except that when we moved in it was the middle of winter and we had like three snowstorms right on top of each other, but whatever.

Other news: I made blackberry jam just now, out of blackberries we picked this afternoon. Everything went swimmingly except for that one time when I thought I was standing on a tree branch under the blackberry vines and... I wasn't. Just FYI, it's really hard to get up when you're sitting among waist-deep thorny vines, surrounded by more of the same, and out of reach of both of your children who are under strict orders not to come closer lest they suffer the same fate. Also: blackberry thorns love to hide out in your jeans and then viciously attack you later when you least expect it. Just a warning. (The jam is so, so worth it.)

Saturday, July 26, 2008

tell me again *why* I pay for this thing?

I swear that I really really want to post more than once a week. I do. I feel terribly guilty for letting so much time go by between posts. Not because I am concerned that my thousands of loyal readers (SNORT) will be disappointed, but because this thing costs me money, by golly. Maybe I need to impose a post-a-day rule on myself again, strictly as an exercise. An exercise in rationalizing procrastination, that is.

ANyway. I did have a couple of listish kinds of snippets floating around in my head that were too long for Twitter*, and I have a few minutes to fill in (ever since I read The Phantom Tollbooth in the fourth grade, I have a hard time saying that I'm "killing time". Poor Tock!) while I upload some chapters to Librivox, so I'll grace the Internet with more of my madd blogging skillz.

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Snippet the First: THINGS I LOATHE. (ooh, goody! a list!)

• Use of the word "architecting". People, an architect (n.) does not architect (v.). There is no such (v.). He/She designs. So does anyone else whose activities you might be tempted to describe with that not-word. Please, for the sake of my sanity, stop. Just stop. There are other perfectly good verbs and gerunds you can use that won't cause me to go into spasms of uncontrollable twitching in the middle of a late-night transcribing session. Thank you. (PW: It wasn't you.)

• Cheetos.

• 95-degree days during which it RAINS. (OK, sprinkles.) This is California. I should not have to deal with this.

• Stupid expletive-deleted blossom-end rot. Every one of my full-sized tomatoes has this. It's all my fault, apparently -- I overwatered them when they were little baby tomato plants -- but that is no excuse. (Besides, the cherry tomatoes, which I also overwatered, are JUST FINE.)

• Automatic spell-checking in text fields. Yes, Firefox, "overwatered" is a word. So is Librivox. (You're right about "architecting", though, which makes me a wee bit less annoyed with you. I may let you live. For today, at least.)

• Library Elf's new email format. All of a sudden they only tell me what's due or what's on hold, without giving me a full list of everything I have checked out every time. Now how am I supposed to remember what I've read at the end of the month when I go to write a book post? Am I supposed to save actual paper library receipts? Surely I can't be expected to keep track of the books as I go? Sigh.

• Weeds. I turn my back for SIX DANG MINUTES (or, um. Cough. Six dang weeks. Cough.) and they take over every spare inch of my garden.

• The nightly chain reaction wherein one set of neighborhood dogs gets started barking and then others join in until it's this enormous cacophony of woofing and yipping and how-how-hooowwling that I think you can hear from space. How do the owners sleep through that when it's right outside their windows? (Scout, being indoors, just lifts her head for a brief growl and then goes back to sleep. Good dog.)

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Snippet the Second: THINGS I LOVE:

• Steamed yellow crookneck squash with just a dash of salt.

• Summer vacation.

• The fact that at 1:30 AM I just had to go wrestle a book out of my son's hands and force him to turn off his light and go to sleep.

• The little itty bitty tiny frogs that live in my garden.

• Sitting on the porch swing just before sunset in a tank top and capris and feeling completely comfortable. (Notice how I'm trying not to hate summer?)

• Letting the sun heat our water and dry our clothes, so that our utility bills in summer are slightly more than half what they are in winter. (See? Again.)

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And with that, the uploader is 15 seconds from finishing the last file, and I have less than five hours before I need to be up in the morning, and I still want to lie awake and read some Jane Austen for a while. I am SUCH a REBEL. Goodnight.

*if you actually are interested in the events of my life or simply miss my self-deprecating, sarcastic sense of humor -- what? you don't? -- when I'm not posting here, you can follow me on twitter. I do generally put up at least one or two little micro-posts each day. Followers are treated to snippets about how awesomely cool our family's DVD watching habits are, the occasional fascinating garden update, and of course complaints about the weather. Aren't you itching to go click "Follow" RIGHT NOW? You know you are.

Monday, July 21, 2008

weekend snippets

We fetched LT home from camp on Saturday. Originally we were not going to have to drive any boys other than our own, but then one of the other drivers had car trouble so we ended up making the trip in my parents' van and coming home with it stuffed full of sweaty, dirty boys -- some of whom were sweatier and dirtier than others, for example my son, who took the opportunity of a week away to avoid showering for six solid days. (Really, he just smelled like camping, as far as I could tell.) (Also, this was his first encounter with group showers -- "just-- showers in a room with no stalls, Mom" -- and his reaction to this encounter was a resounding I DON'T THINK SO.) Anyway, he had a good time, and the boys were perfectly friendly to him, and he branched out in some new ways (ghost stories! Wilderness survival merit badge! Archery!), and he's looking forward to next year when maybe his Dad can go.

It's really providential when you think about it that the van waited through that 240-mile drive before it died, completely and irreversibly, a quarter-mile (a downhill quarter-mile, no less!) from the chapel where the boys were to be collected by their parents. Sigh. My poor parents. I think that's the fourth or fifth time the fuel pump has gone belly-up in their (11-year-old, 180K-mile) van.

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Sunday we had the third meeting of our new fellowship in town, and I really liked it, even better than the first one. (I wasn't at the second; see above re: driving Scouts to camp.) Afterward we headed to my parents' place for the first time in a shamefully long amount of time, where the major excitement of the day was the search for my cousin's 7-year-old daughter. She and her dad are visiting from out of state, and she got lost while she was out for a walk. My dad and brother and cousin headed in one direction in trucks, while C and I and our dog and my parents' dog and my two nephews went the other direction on foot. My nephews had never met the little girl, and C had, which played into her sense of the dramatic nicely since she could fill them in: "She's SEVEN. She is ONE YEAR YOUNGER THAN ME. She is JUST A LITTLE GIRL and she DOESN'T KNOW HER WAY AROUND HERE VERY WELL. She may have been SNAKEBITTEN or KIDNAPPED. Mom, how can you be so CALM?" We found her, safe and sound and thirsty and footsore, after a passing motorist told us she'd seen a lost little girl wandering in the same direction we were but that the little girl (understandably) would not get into a car with a stranger.

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But my prolapsing mitral valve, which had not been happy all morning yesterday, protested loudly against all the jogging I did along the road during the Very Dramatic Search Effort, and I have been maddeningly annoyed by a symptom flare-up ever since.

This drives me bananas. I am SO not the invalid type. And I hate going to the cardiologist, which is why I haven't been to see one in a couple of years, and I don't want to start going again now so just GET BETTER ALREADY.

(I have a sneaking suspicion that the fact that my pants don't fit so well anymore and the fact that my stupid heart is grumpy with me may be mysteriously related to one another. Must investigate. But not too closely. Speaking of which, anyone have any chocolate?)

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

home again, home again

I'm feeling very boring and unwitty and generally not like blogging. Just to warn you. I just wanted people to know I was still alive.

We came home today from a short four-plus day stay in Morro Bay. Usually we stay longer, but this year with the garden and our general lack of funds, we decided to make it a short stay. But we had a fantastic time, even including Scout who turns out to be a great traveler and who adjusted fine to camping life (and who never once pottied in the tent). (Yay for the Caliber, too. Thirty-two MPG there and back = way way better than twelve.) Not long after we left, we had a lightning storm here at home that started a few majorish fires, the most worrisome of which is very near my brother and SIL's house. They've not been evacuated, but they were told to be ready to evacuate just in case. It's very smoky here.

The garden is fine. On my dad's advice, I started watering it less often a few weeks ago and it has been LOVING it. Who knew that I could take TOO good care of something green? This mean, happily, that we only had to ask friends to water it once while we were gone. We now have a whole bunch of little bitty green tomatoes and some peapods and some tiny baby zucchini and carrots that are edible small carrots (not ready to harvest, though. I just thin one every now and then.) As soon as I get my pictures sorted, there will be photos of the garden (including last week's, which I took but didn't upload) and of our vacation at Flickr. (Look out for the very cool sand castle. The Ts have once more surpassed themselves.)

And I think thatisall. More later, maybe, if my brain comes back.

Wednesday, June 04, 2008

little updates and miscellanea

Still not the big post. I really, really thought about sitting here and fleshing out my notes and coming up with an articulate post about something that really matters to me, but that felt too much like school and darnit, I'm on vacation. So it's snippety updates instead. For now.

The garden is going like gangbusters (that is, if gangbusters go in a green, thriving, and surprisingly not-dead manner). We had our first little mini-harvest from it this weekend, when we ate spinach on our hamburgers, which is surprisingly good. There's more spinach ready (begging) to be picked but there's not enough to freeze and I don't have lettuce on hand to make a salad and we've never been cooked-spinach-as-a-side-dish people, although we may have to start or else the spinach will rot on the plants and that would be a shame. The only puzzling thing about the garden (other than the fact that I have personally touched, breathed on, and handled every plant in it and yet none have died) is that I'm getting these little mounds, like gopher mounds but with no holes and no plant damage, here and there in the garden. Do toads do this? We've recently transplanted some toads to the garden to help keep the eeeevil grasshoppers at bay. I will have to research this.

Hey, remember that couch-to-5K thing? I'm pretty much still on the couch. Well, on the computer chair, anyway. The fact is, I did it twice, on a Friday and a Sunday when T was home to ride herd on the kids, and then what with him working and all of our evening commitments, I couldn't find a way (barring getting up with T at 4:30: not happening) to squeeze in the third weekly workout. Now, however, we only have one weeknight commitment per week, and I am determined to start afresh (oh, this is killing me: what Austen adaptation is that from? or am I delusional? it would kind of defeat the purpose here if I were to sit and watch all of them this afternoon). So last night I stayed up until 2 AM making the obviously very necessary iTunes playlists for the first week. See, the thing about C25K is that you start out doing 60 seconds of running and then 90 seconds of walking, repeated for 20 minutes, which means that you either:

• a) fumble with the buttons on your daughter's watch trying to make the timer function work, something that's increasingly hard to do as my eyes get older buttons and labels and stuff keep getting smaller
  
• b) clip your kitchen timer to your shorts, which also entails much fumbling and also possible battery loss
  
• c) hire a trainer or your former PE teacher to run alongside you with a watch and a whistle -- too expensive, not to mention, hello, embarrassing, but really, we didn't know how lucky we were, being forced to do PE for free every day, did we? or
  
• d) spend a huge amount of time creating 90- or 60-second snippets of appropriately-paced songs and compiling them into a playlist that will not only motivate you to run EVERY SINGLE DAY but also magically melt fat off your thighs while you just sit there and listen to them.

The choice is obvious, no? (Actually, for the walking portions for the first week I used Librivox recordings, except that then I realized that I would have to make three daily playlists instead of one weekly one, unless I wanted to listen to the same story every day. Oops.)

I don't think I ever posted about the end of school. It ended. The end. OK, OK, seriously, I really enjoyed both my classes this semester, and my grades were good (easy when you're taking six units! I'm telling you, people, this is the way to go!). However, I don't see how I'm going to make it through next semester, when my two classes are both online to save on gas (and because there's nothing offered locally that will do me any good), so I'll only have one classroom meeting per month, and both of the classes sound a little... boring. Especially Principles of Interpersonal Communication. The description sounds like it'll involve a whole bunch of I-statements-instead-of-you-statements kind of stuff. I wanted to take Fundamentals of Speech for that requirement instead, because for all my talkativeness I really get nervous when it's time to do any public speaking and I could use the practice, but that class meets every week, and every trip to the main campus costs $40 at current gas prices. I just couldn't bring myself to do it.

Also, good news: T finally got the promotion he's deserved for the past seven years, so that he is now actually being paid for the job he does (I know, what a novel concept!). Not that we get to go have a fun time with that money, or, you know, pay extra on our mortgage or buy yarn or anything, since it will juuuust allow us enough breathing room to be able to pay our gas bill if we're very careful and maybe put a tiny bit in savings. It's definitely a welcome help, though.

In all other areas of life, there's nothing new to report, really. I mean, there's little stuff, like how I managed to spill a pint of very messy, sticky stir-fry sauce all over the counter while I was cooking dinner the other night, or how I mistakenly poured a quart or so of nasty used deep-frying oil into the quarter-full (big) container of new, clean oil instead of into the OLD OIL container kept below the sink -- a mistake I didn't discover until I went to stir-fry the abovementioned dinner -- or how Scout got our hopes all up by not barking/growling at T once all last weekend, but then apparently once more mistook him for an intruder with Evil Intentions when he came home from work on Monday. Or -- ooh -- how I actually finished two knitting projects last week. Two! Finished! Knitting! Including [fanfare] THE ELEPHANT!

But that's all. Really.

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

playing catch-up

I had a post almost ready to go today, and then I forgot I hadn't quite finished it, let LT have a computer turn, and told him to close all the browser windows. Oops. I hate rewriting stuff so I'll try to just hit the high points. I'm nearing the point where if I don't post now I'll never post again. (Considering my diary-writing history, I'm frankly quite surprised I've kept going as long as I have.)

Um. The dog is a pain in the behind with her chewing. She particularly likes to chew on C's clothes. Not the clean ones. And not necessarily always the ones that are suitable for bringing out in front of company, either. Eew. It is costing us money now (even at Target jeans are $10 a pair and her size is in short supply at Goodwill) and money is not something we have a lot of.

Speaking of which, ohmygosh food prices. Thank you, biofuels researchers! Thank you, burgeoning overseas markets! Here, why don't I just set up the direct deposit to be divided between the grocery store and the gas company and we'll just go live in a cardboard box. Goody! The economy gets to have its severe 1929-style cyclical correction when we just got a mortgage! Fabulous. Gas prices have hit the much-feared $4/gallon here. At least for mid-grade -- regular unleaded was still only $3.90 the last time I looked. (I feel truly sorry for the diesel people, good mileage and all. $4.50. Ouch.) Can I just say how tired I am of people talking about how now we'll all use public transportation or walk? HELLO. Not everyone lives in the freaking CITY, people. It is six miles of narrow, fast highways over steep hills from here to the nearest grocery store, and there is no public transportation. WE'RE DOOOOOOOMED.

Wow, I'm gripy right now.

Um. Claire was sick all weekend, sick enough that I took her to the ER on Sunday on the advice of the on-call pediatrician only to be brusquely and rudely informed by a doctor who spent all of five seconds with my child that since the strep culture was negative it was just a viral sore throat except she didn't have a sore throat. (The ped thought it might be mono. So far I'm thinking no, but I'm still not 100% sure.) HATE HATE HATE our emergency room. HATE.

We're doing a lot of work in the garden. (I know I have never posted pictures. They'd be really boring.) Right now we're filling the raised beds with dirt. Oh, I thought I'd told you about the raised beds but I just remembered that that was in the post that got eaten. We had this old rickety deck (one of those "no permit required because no segment is 8' or larger and nothing's attached to the house" construction deals) ouside our back door, and we'd meant to take it down for months but never got around to it until we realized how utterly perfect it would be if we "repurposed" (thank you craftzine) it into the raised garden beds we needed. Perfect. So much easier than starting from scratch, and as a bonus we evicted (and squished) a whole bunch of black widows and gave ourselves more backyard in the process. Filling the raised beds is a lot of hard work and oh my gosh the mosquitoes are awful in the evenings and oh my gosh it was hot during the days this weekend, but it's going OK. OK and slowly.

Also over the weekend (it was a very busy weekend), I qualified for my concealed-carry permit. It's something I've meant to do for a very long time and T finally made me stop putting it off. So that was good.

AND I spent much of my "free" time last week -- up through Sunday night -- writing a history paper. It was supposed to be 7-10 pages in 12-point type and it ended up being ten full pages in 11-point type and I still felt like I was leaving a lot of stuff out. Note to self: Next time pick a nice tidy topic like World War II or European history, and not the International Geophysical Year. That'll be easy, because I never want to hear the phrase "International Geophysical Year" again. Ever. Starting now.

I am all twitterfied. No, not the Bambi kind, the twitter.com kind. There's a link over there --> which you can use to "follow" me, if you like. Twitter is handy because I can do a quick little update without having to do the whole Major Blog Post (Must Be Coherent) thing. You might try it. It's not addictive per se because I just use it in conjunction with my Google Reader and Facebook so it hardly adds any time at all to my Wasted Hours Sucked Away By The Internet tally.

I got a whole bunch of TV seasons on DVD from the library today. When I reserved them I kind of figured they'd arrive all staggered-like, but noooo, now I have like forty gajillion hours of old TV to watch in three weeks. Can I just say that I have no idea why "Full House" was ever so popular? STUPID. GAG. And yet I can't -- look -- away. Maybe they have inserted subliminally-perceptible images of Cadbury Roast Almond bars between the frames, or something.

OK, now I'm hungry.

And I think thatisall. Goodnight.

Monday, March 31, 2008

weekend

Jenn was here for the weekend. YAY! I have decided, though, that Jenn needs to live closer, so that we don't have to feel pushed to cram every fun thing we ever want to do into a 50-hour visit but can spread it out a bit. We ate Indian food (a first for me), walked around shopping in thrift stores and used-book stores and a really giant and very interesting antique store, took many pictures of green grass and happy cows, rode the bus to Yosemite and back with the most insane and rude bus driver in the universe, hiked around the aforementioned Yosemite and ate deli sandwiches (simultaneously), visited with our mutual friend Shea, tried and failed to watch some movies and do some crocheting, ate lots of junk, and oh yeah, talked each other's ears off. It was a very full 50 hours.

Meanwhile the Ts were gone at a Boy Scout camping outing, which was convenient because it meant there was room for Jenn to stay, but it was also very sad. I am still not done catching up on the hugs they missed.

Also, I finally got my ravelry invitation. No, this doesn't mean somehow became cool or found my way into the In crowd or anything -- just that ravelry, a wonderful community full of knittery goodness, is growing slowly on purpose so that the whole system doesn't implode in a shower of $20-a-skein wool-and-silk blends. (My username is mrsrachel.) I did start a knitting project while failing to watch a movie on Friday night, but it's a BIG TOP SECRET that might involve, say, something GRAY with a TRUNK. For someone who is really too old for stuffed animals, but this is an heirloom, right?

And I think thatisall. Even if it's not, it's time to fix supper for hungry people. Didn't I just feed them LAST night?

Thursday, March 13, 2008

post something -- ANYTHING

Let's see how short I can make the snippets:

I planted two kinds of tomatoes, three kinds of peppers, and broccoli in little seedling trays last week. Almost immediately, the broccoli popped up, and today we have little sprouts of everything else. Pictures soon. Maybe.

T made our little side-porch, which had previously been just kind of a non-navigable catchall closet cluttered up with garden hoses, rubber boots, tarpaulins, rags, and sundry other items, into a lovely little plant room for me. He cleaned it out, covered the excess openings to the outside with plastic sheeting, put in a shelf at just the right height, and added a fluorescent fixture with grow-light tubes as well as a clamp light for additional light and warmth. I put my trays of seedlings in there at night. I think they like it. I know I do. I like to stand in there and putter around, thinning the broccoli and sorting seeds into groups based on planting dates and such.

That one wasn't very short at all.

Speaking of T, last week he had the flu. He came home with it from a work trip to Vegas that lasted the entire previous week. This week, C had her turn (with the flu, not Vegas). And I mean THE FLU, not the kind of stuff (usually involving digestive upset) that most people call the flu. Here's hoping that LT and I continue to fight off all invading germs with our patented Immune Systems Of Steel.

Maybe brevity is overrated.

I watched Akeelah and the Bee over the weekend. As a former spelling-bee nerd, can I just say that I loved that movie and Akeelah is my new little fictional hero?

Also, I now have a new hobby: ogling sock yarn on the Internet and fine-tuning my Knitpicks.com wishlist, in anticipation of the day when I will stimulate the economy by making a somewhat sizeable purchase there. Just doing my patriotic duty as an American! I now feel that I cannot be a complete person without knowing how to knit socks. It's all Kat's fault. I am even thinking of trying my hand at dyeing my own yarn, though I can't blame that on Kat.

Jenn is coming for a visit in two weeks. I'm so excited! I'm also a little freaked out, because the whole "we can paint the bathrooms after we're moved in" thing has turned (as I secretly feared it would even as I uttered the aforementioned rationalization) into "hey, we've lived with the ugly walls in the bathrooms this long; how bad can they be?" (Answer: very, very bad. As Jenn will soon be able to tell you.) We are going to take a trip to Yosemite and possibly also a separate flower-ogling picture-taking road trip to maybe Columbia State Historical Park or something. (I so would love to do Bodie and Mono Lake, but the nearest open highway across the Sierras at this time of year is... not very near.) And we are just generally going to gab each other's ears off and also maybe do some crocheting and watching of Lost, which I have never seen even thirty seconds of in my life before, but I want to. Oh, dear, what am I getting myself into? Jericho was addictive enough, and there were (will be) only ever something on the order of twenty episodes of that.

School is going well. I find that carrying only six units at a time is definitely the best way to maintain a 4.0 average. And at this rate it would only take me six or eight years to earn an associates' degree!

Scout is doing much better. No more dog-logs or puddles in the house (yay!). She's more comfortable and relaxed overall (yay!), but she STILL growls at my husband whenever he walks into the room. She never acts like she's going to bite him, and as soon as he approaches her and she smells him she's fine, and if he sits or lies down, she is all about the love and kisses and snuggles. But the growling really hurts his feelings (à la that annoying miniature cowboy in Night at the Museum, which I also watched over the weekend, but not for the first time).

And I think that is all. If it isn't, judging by the time (2:39 and hello the time change is killing me AGAIN), it should be.

Sunday, March 02, 2008

it's crowded in there

I've been quiet, but not because I didn't have anything to say. Really it's because I have too much to say, and I can't begin to say it all decently and in order, and in some cases I don't have the energy to slog through the effort of recording a whole bunch of bothersome emotions for posterity. So I've been in blog avoidance mode. Maybe if I give a bare-bones synopsis of the past week, I'll be able to make a fresh start and move on.

• Kids' social issues: We're going to keep trying. I wasn't serious about barricading ourselves in the house. Quite.

• My uncle died on Wednesday. He was my father's nearest-in-age brother. He was... oh, see, here's all that emotional stuff I didn't want to mess with. He made a lot of stupid choices in his life and caused himself a lot of unnecessary heartache, not to mention a death from diabetes, MRSA, cirrhosis, liver cancer, and hepatitis combined at the age of not-quite-57. But he was a gentle, generous, loving, affectionate, charming, kindhearted man who spent his whole life here in this little town, and we will miss him very much. His funeral was yesterday.

• Also on Wednesday, my sister-in-law and her kids moved to town. This is much happier news. Her kids and mine have hit it off splendidly, especially her boy and mine, who are a scant year apart in age and have all the important things (Airsoft, Lego, Mopars, and hunting) in common. The kids spent Wednesday through Friday with us, while their mom was driving down here and getting things settled in their apartment. We had a blast.

• It's been ten years today since our infant daughter Natalie died. A whole decade between us -- it just doesn't seem possible.

• As I mentioned before, our eight years of involvement with the congregation we've been attending came to an end this winter. Now it appears that our five years of service at AWANA will also be ending, against our will. See, MORE blathering about emotional stuff is about to happen here if I don't get control of myself. Can I just say how much I hate the fact that Christians don't TALK to each other? When I was a new believer I would hear unbelievers say that they hated the idea of organized religion and I would smugly and sorrowfully assume that they just didn't know how loving God's people really were. Then when I'd been in a church for about three years we went through a really ugly time (no Bereans need apply, basically), and I walked away hurt but assuming that that one problem had been an anomaly. Now, a dozenish years later, I have reached a point where I am as disillusioned and disgusted with the behavior of "organized" Christians toward each other as any nonbeliever could ever be. I know it sounds like I'm being mysterious and evasive, but really I'm just... too tired to go into further detail about it. And too disgusted. And too hurt. And probably still too angry, to boot.

Now there's a cheerful note to end on. I promise I'll try to be back with your regularly scheduled self-deprecating humor as soon as I can, now that I've got this whole week off my chest.

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