thptpth

I feel the earth move under my feet

2011-08-23T14:57:00.004-04:00

EARTHQUAKE!!!

EVERYBODY PANIC!!!

Or not. Although it is unusual to experience a magnitude 5.9 earthquake in Richmond, Virginia, it is apparently not unheard of, since that's what just happened.

I was sitting at my desk when the shaking started, and my first thought was that the kids were horsing around in the playroom next door. I was about to yell, "What's going on in there?" when I remembered that they were playing outside. Then I thought it was the spin cycle on the washer, because it had that rhythmic sort of chugga-chugga-CHUGGA quality to it, and I was trying to remember if I had put anything heavy (like a comforter) in that last load. THEN, finally, it dawned on me that it was an earthquake and I was like, 'Holy shit!' and ran outside to see if the kids were okay.

And they were. They are. We're all fine.

This was, by my count, my fifth earthquake. Or fifth that was big enough to really count for something, I guess. I lived in Southern California for seven years, and during that time there were countless little ones, little trembles that made you sort of cock your head like a dog listening for a whistle and go, "Was that...?" before you moved on with your day.

But the ones that I distinctly remember as Events are as follows:

1) Rawlins, Wyoming - I was in fifth grade, so it would have been 1984 or so. My reading group and I are all sitting around the half-moon shaped table, with our teacher sitting in the little cut-out on the flat side. She accuses us all, in turn, of being the naughty kid who is kicking the table hard enough to make it shake. This is tough for us, because in my reading group we are the nerds, the well-behaved Lisa Simpsons of our day, and to be accused of acting out is highly unusual for us. And then we all realize that it's actually an earthquake. (Which is highly unusual for Wyoming.) One of the walls of the school cracked, I remember, making a neat zig-zag right along the fault lines of the mortar between the bricks. Other seismic events that year include my parents' divorce, which I found out about from one of my teachers, when she asked me if I was okay, and I was like, "Yeah. Why?" and she told me. Gotta love a small town. (Or not.)

2) Los Angeles, California - The first of my three L.A. quakes (1999?) comes in the middle of the night, approximately 2 a.m. I wake up disoriented, wondering why my bed is moving one direction and I am moving the other. A couple pictures on my desk fall over and I realize what is going on. I rush out into the hallway where my grad-school roommate has just emerged from her bedroom. We smile goofily at each other and she yells, "Earthquake!" like a soccer announcer yelling, "Goal!" We are strangely giddy, as it's the first one for both of us since moving to Southern California, and it somehow doesn't seem like it's serious enough to warrant panic. A couple small aftershocks keep us awake the rest of the night, but other than that, nothing else really happened.

3) Los Angeles, California - The second quake comes in 2000, during the day, while I am at work at HBO in one of the twin towers of Century City. The entire development team is sitting around the big table in the conference room having a meeting. The NYC branch of HBO has recently merged with the LA branch and all the NY execs have moved out to LA within the last couple months. When the quake hits, every single LA exec is sitting calmly at the table waiting to see how bad it will be, and every single NY exec is underneath the table, freaking out. The building is on rollers and is built to withstand quakes (the tower is triangle-shaped, which apparently helps in quakes because every wall has a stabilizing vertical beam exactly opposite it, whereas a square or rectangular building shakes more), but because we are on the 36th floor, there is a queasy sort of time-delayed swaying sensation happening. Like, the bottom of the building is moving one way, and 30 seconds later the movement ripples up to the top of the building and we sway in the opposite direction. That one went on for a LONG time, but again, it never really seemed like we were in terrible danger. After it stopped, the NY execs took the rest of the day off. The HR department instituted regular earthquake-preparedness drills after that and we all had the chance to purchase an earthquake "kit" at a special discounted price.

4) Los Angeles, California - The final big quake I experienced in L.A. was also the most severe. I had just recently found out that I was invited to the Emmys, and was in the mall shopping for a strapless bra to wear with my fancy dress. I had just come out of the dressing room in Victoria's Secret and gotten in line to buy my bra when the shaking started. There was a big fancy crystal chandelier directly above my head, and I remember staring at it and being amazed at how far horizontally it was swinging during the shaking. The suspending chain seemed to be almost parallel to the floor at one point. Bras and panties were falling off of the shelves, people were screaming, some dust started to come down from the ceiling, and I remember being like, 'Great. This is where I'm going to die? In a Victoria's Secret? Suffocated in a giant pile of lingerie?' That was the only quake strong enough to make me doubt that we would be okay. But then, the shaking subsided, everybody picked themselves up, offered each other some shaky smiles and just went on with their day. Other seismic events that year included 9/11, which postponed and then downgraded the Emmys from Black Tie to Business Casual, so I didn't end up wearing the bra, or the dress, at all. (I don't mean to be flippant or blase about September 11th, but I figure there's nothing I can tell you about that day that you don't already know.)

5) Richmond, Virginia - 2011. Ten years since my last quake, I almost don't recognize what it is. Now I kind of feel like I do when I see a couple or three highway patrolmen on the interstate in a short space of road, pulling people over for speeding. Does that make it more likely that I will see another one? Are they out in force, handing out tickets galore? Should I be extra careful to obey the speed limit so I don't get nabbed? Or is it less likely that I'll see another one, since I've just seen a few in a row? Is the probability of another one lower, because there are only so many highway patrolmen out there? Hard to say. Should I be relieved that my family has safely experienced a "major" quake here in VA and from here on out it will be even more unlikely that we'll get another one? I mean, this one happening at all was pretty fucking unlikely, right? Or does having one big one mean another one is now more likely to occur? (I mean, aside from aftershocks and all that.) Hard to say.

Maybe I'll dig out that old earthquake-preparedness kit.

Thanks for reading.

Everybody's working for the weekend

2011-08-15T16:22:00.004-04:00

I, through the gracious consent of my husband and the superior knowledge of my friend Elena, was able to go on a two-day writing retreat this past weekend. E and I drove two hours and checked in to a lovely old Southern home overlooking the James River with grand porches running the length of the first and second floors. We brought our own food, our computers, and the essentials for clothes, etc. and then we did nothing but write, eat, pee and sleep for the next 48 hours. It was heavenly. (I also, with the assistance of Jim the Songwriter who was also there on retreat, retrieved a five-foot-long black snake skin from a tree outside my window and brought it home for Nolan. You know, like you do.)

I worked on my screenplay for Night Tour, which I had previously, I don't know, not abandoned, but stopped working on in any meaningful way about a year ago. And taking it out again and really trying to buckle down and FINISH THE FUCKER reminded me of why I quit on it before. It's a mess. There's a lot of good stuff, if I do say so myself, but there's also a ton of chaff, and it needs more than just a weekend writer's retreat to fix, sad to say.

I was thinking about it again because I recently sent it to a friend-of-a-friend (who I hope will now consider me also a friend) whose opinion I respect, and he really enjoyed it. He thought there was something worthwhile there, and it got me excited to work on it again and really try to make it work this time. So I dove back in, and spent a goodly amount of time re-acquainting myself with the world and the characters. I only wanted to write an ending, which it didn't (and still doesn't) have, during this retreat. I figured that was reasonable. Just finish it, however you can, and then go back and try to fix all the other problems.

And I couldn't. I tried, but what I ended up doing was kind of like a logic problem from a book of puzzles. You know, the ones that are like "Five friends live on Walnut Street. Tom lives in a red house next to the house with the tire swing. Mary's house is not next to Sally's house." and blah blah blah so you have to try to figure out who lives where. Doing that with my script. Trying out different possibilities. If I do this, what happens then over here? Can I combine these two scenes? No, because then that line of dialogue that refers to the other thing that happens will come too late. How about if I move this over here? Hmmm...

No! You know what it was like? It was like building a house out of Legos. Not the big chunky Duplos but the little intricate fuckers that only come in red, yellow, blue, white, green and black, with a big green plate to build it on. My screenplay was 3/4 of a Lego house, built really tall for some reason, with ragged edges of bricks and no fourth wall (no pun intended). So, looking at it from the outside after having been away from it for a while, it was like, "This should be a snap! It just needs to have those last few pieces tacked onto the end. Maybe stick a window in that other wall. No problem!" And I got all enthusiastic and ready to tackle it, and then discovered what most 6-year-olds already know: You can't just cut a window into a Lego wall. That's not how they work. First you have to take off all the pieces that are above the ones you want to remove. Then you have to smooth out the edges by pulling off all the pieces that stick out and replacing them with ones that end where you want them to in order to form the shape of the window. Then you put the top layer of bricks back on. And sometimes when you pull one brick out, three other bricks are stuck to it and you accidentally rip out a whole section when you only meant to trim. So it ends up taking a lot longer than you thought, and you keep fucking up the parts you don't mean to by taking out other pieces, and sometimes you don't even have a brick with the right number of dots on it - you need a six-er when all you've got are fours and eights. You know what you need to put there, but you don't have it, and what you do have won't fit.

Sigh.

So I didn't finish it. But I'm not giving up. I will keep plugging away.

Thanks for reading.

No one to tell us no, or where to go

2010-09-21T14:01:00.005-04:00

One thing that's been on my mind a lot recently: children.

"No duh,* " I hear you saying. "You're a stay-at-home-mom, Caroline. Of course you're thinking about children."

And you would be right. I do think about children a lot. (Although most of the time when I'm with my children I'm actually thinking of other deep, meaningful, important things, like 'When can I make an appointment to get my eyebrows waxed?' and 'I hope my UPS package comes today.' It seems I have to go away [and get away] from my children in order to have them return to the forefront of my thoughts. Which is what I did this past weekend - go away, that is - and as such I pined for my children as though they were gone forever.)

But I'm talking specifically about the NUMBER of children we have, which is two.

And that question that friends new and old (and well-meaning/pushy family members) ask you with increasing frequency:

"Are you done?"

Meaning, "Will you be having any more children?"

And I don't really have an answer for them.

KB has mentioned several times that he is quite happy with our quota of offspring. Two's good for him - we've got the heir and the spare, so to speak. I think this is a common position for the breadwinner in the family (if your family is so structured). They are worried about the bottom line, and three kids are more expensive than two kids.

Me? I am not so sure. Part of me wants very much to have another child. I am one of three, KB is one of three...it feels like the right number, the perfect number, the magic number. (Right about now, you should have De La Soul's "Three Is The Magic Number" stuck in your head...you're welcome.)

[Also, to be honest, I would like to have a girl. I've written about this in the past, and my want/need to have a girl has not waned. I have a good relationship with my mother, for the most part, and I'd like to have a daughter in my life. I like the idea of a built-in female friend and of having someone I can mentor. Of course, I also tell myself that maybe my very need is the reason I shouldn't have a girl child - my idea of what it's going to be like (and why I want to have one) is probably not going to line up with reality all too well. And having a child should be about wanting to bring another person into the world, whomever that person may turn out to be, not about my own personal yearnings. Right? Plus there's no guarantee a third baby would be a girl...]

I recently turned 36 years old, which, while not technically ancient, is getting up there in terms of ease of procreation. If I were to have another child now I would be dubbed a woman of Advanced Maternal Age and subjected to extra rounds of fun pre-natal testing events that weren't deemed necessary when I had Miles and was a spring chicken of 34. Amniocentesis, anyone?

So part of me feels like, if we're gonna do it, we should probably do it soon. It's not going to get any easier, both in terms of the actual conception and pregnancy, and also in terms of how tired we're going to be when the baby is a newborn. (See what I did there? I started talking as if it were already a foregone conclusion. I should have said "how tired we would be if we had another newborn.")

Another argument in favor of getting on the stick (so to speak) sooner rather than later is that I often feel now, as a Stay At Home Mom, that my life is not my own. My life is almost totally devoted to the care and feeding of two small human beings, and when that starts to change back into a more half-and-half situation (i.e., when both boys are in school part or most of the day) I'm not sure how willing I'll be to return to the land of the enslaved after having a brief taste of freedom. The real world! Adult conversation! Working on my writing more than once a week! I can...almost...touch it...

Of course, the flip side of that argument is that maybe after I've had a couple years of more regular, reliable "me time," (god how I hate that phrase) in the mornings while the boys are at school, I'll feel more relaxed and groovy and ready to handle another baby. So maybe we should wait. Who knows?

Or maybe we shouldn't have another baby at all.

My trusty brain likes to remind me of things like massive, crushing sleep deprivation, varicose veins and unwanted C-sections after 36 hours of labor. Sibling rivalry, carpooling and endless dirty diapers. Toilet training. Spit-up. Post-partum depression. Massive, crushing sleep deprivation.

Do I really want to put myself through all that again? I had Nolan a year almost to the day after KB and I got married - we didn't have a lot of together time before we had kids, and our marriage could certainly use some Us Time. Another baby will bring up all the old "Whose sleep is more important, yours or mine?" arguments that pit us against each other, instead of reminding us that we're on the same team. (Him: "I'm a doctor! People's lives depend on me! What if I'm sleep deprived and I make a mistake and someone DIES because of me?" Me: "I'm a mother! Our children's lives depend on me! What if I'm sleep deprived and crash the car and we ALL DIE?")

Essentially, I think it comes down to a war between my head and my heart (or perhaps my head and my ovaries.)

The desire for another baby is strongest when I'm doing something like putting Miles down for his nap, and Miles is doing something lovely like falling asleep on my shoulder and snoring softly. Then all the More Baby! cavewoman hormones cascade through my system and make me KNOW, for sure, that I definitely want another baby. It will happen. How can it not? Babies are lovely and I want another one.

And then, an hour later, I have to wake Miles up from that same nap even though he's not done sleeping because it's time to go pick up Nolan from school. And he's cranky. And we get in the car and drive 20 minutes and I forgot to bring milk or a toy, so he's miserable. And then we come home with Nolan and they start fighting. And I have to cook dinner while holding a 25-pound toddler in my arms who's screaming because his brother won't let him play with his Transformers car. And when KB (finally!) gets home we try to eat together and have some conversation before the boys start to fall apart and we have to split up, one parent per kid, and wrestle them into and out of the bath and into PJs so we can get them to bed before it's time for US to go to bed. There's no room for a third kid in that scenario, is there?

It's like my mom always said about having three kids versus two: You have to switch from man-to-man to zone defense.

Sigh.

No easy answers. I'm stopping there because Hey, Guess What? It's time to go wake up Miles and pick up Nolan from school!

Thanks for reading.

* Total linguistic tangent - why do the phrases "Duh," and "No duh" mean exactly the same thing? Shouldn't they be opposites? Am I exposing my grammatical ineptitude when I use "No duh," like people who say "irregardless" when they really mean "regardless?"

Sail on, silver girl

2010-08-23T15:12:00.002-04:00

Oh lordy, how I do not want to write.

It is a lovely sunny day here in Berkeley, the first sunny day they've had in months, according to Ann. It is 80 degrees and I am sitting in Ann's backyard garden in the shade under the bougainvillea tree with my laptop. Kevin took the boys to the playground and I have just come from having a pedicure, where I had my toenails painted a lovely light sparkling teal blue. I had a coffee from the original Peet's and a cheddar roll from the Cheese Board for breakfast this morning. The coffee was strong and thick, and the scone had a nice lacy crust of cheese from where it melted onto the baking sheet and then cooled into a perfect salty, cheesy crunchiness. I have already read not one, not two, but three books ("The Innocent," by Ian McEwan, "Love Is A Mix Tape," by Rob Sheffield, and "City of Thieves," by David Benioff) from Ann's bookshelf in the last four days and have started on a fourth ("Lark and Termite" by Jayne Anne Phillips).

How little do I want to write? So, so, little.

The only thing disturbing my peace right now is an alarm clock from a neighbor's apartment that seems to have been set and forgotten - it has been peep-peep-peep-ing for the last twenty minutes and shows no sign of stopping. It is very much like the voice of my conscience in my head telling me I need to write - almost ignorable; just a little annoying noise in the background of all this loveliness. But it persists. It keeps on peep-peep-peep-ing, relentlessly. It will not stop, not ever.

So, I shut my e-mail window. I close Facebook. I open Final Draft. I open my script notes in Google Docs. Ah, yes. Page 108 - Misty frees the deer and realizes what it is she has to do (or thinks she has to) to free herself.

Back to it.

FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY WILL YOU STOP WITH THAT MOTHERFUCKING PEEPING ALREADY.

We can't rewind, we've gone too far

2010-07-30T14:53:00.004-04:00

Facebook killed my blog.

I know that sounds like a cop-out, and in some ways it is, but I think it's also very true. Today is July - let's see, what day is it? - July 30th and I have not updated this blog since March. Now, I was never the most prolific or reliable blog updater to begin with, but four months is really pretty sad.

Has nothing been going on worth blogging about? Has Miles not learned to walk and has Nolan not learned to put his face in the water in the swimming pool? Why yes, they have. Have we not gone on vacation to Washington D.C. and seen the National Zoo and the Portrait Gallery? Why yes, we have. Have I written a blog post about any of these momentous events? Why no, I have not.

And I was thinking about it and rationalizing to myself and blaming my busy busy busy life, and my kids, and my kids' busy busy busy lives. But the truth is, I have always been busy (or perceived my life as being busy) and I have always had kids (since I started this blog) so there's really nothing different there.

Any my life is actually, finally, a bit more settled now that we've been in Richmond for not-quite-two years. We've met some great people and found a neighborhood we really like. I've got membership cards in my wallet for no less than seven local museums, parks and attractions. I'm volunteering for Nolan's school, I've got most of the playgrounds in town on my radar, and K and I are even having quasi-regular "date nights" and attending actual cultural events.

So what's different?

And I was, as I said, rationalizing to myself and thinking about my big writing project that I've currently got going and how maybe all my writing "urges" are being funneled into that. And my BFF 4-evah, Erica, and I are keeping a running document that, well, uh, documents our progress on our individual projects. (She's not writing, she's more of an artiste, but we're trying to hold ourselves accountable to each other and subvert our usual procrastinatory ways.) And that document has sort of morphed into a bit of an online diary where we tell each other what's going on and bitch about our husbands and also do a bit of, you know, documenting of our progress.

So maybe all of my writing "urges" are being funneled into that.

Or maybe, just maybe, it's Facebook. What with the status updates and the long-lost friends, the cute links and the political rants, the self-censoring (my mom's on there!) and the cyber-stalking and the frequent checking, I think Facebook has sort of obviated my need to connect with the world "out there" through this blog.

And I'm not saying Facebook is a bad thing, necessarily. Do I check it too often? Yes. Do I go through days of self-imposed exile to try to combat the checking-it-too-often-ness? Yes. Do I then fall off the wagon and compulsively check it 17 times in an hour? Yes.

But it's not all bad. I get a sense of connection there. I find out how my long-lost friends are doing and feel like I'm a teeny bit more involved in their lives. I find out about things my local friends are doing and invite myself along. It serves a definite purpose in my life.

But I was thinking about it, and feeling guilty for not posting more on this blog, and then chiding myself for feeling guilty and blah blah shame spiral blah and I realized - you know what Facebook can't do?

No, not toast your cheese sandwich.

It can't provide a forum for the lengthy examination of a particular thought.

Think about it:

You're limited by the format to a certain number of characters.
You can only really post in your status update, or in comments on your friends' status updates. (Sure, there's "notes," but who the hell uses those anyway?)
People sometimes have a little back-and-forth in the comments, but then you end up using a lot of "@" symbols and scrolling up and down to see who said what and it's so fragmented that it rarely makes sense.

There's no way to really, I don't know, DIG IN to a line of inquiry. There's no room for considered thought. You post, then you forget about it. Half the time when I get comments on my status update (and I can't for the life of me figure out how to get my phone to STOP SENDING THEM TO ME ALREADY) I've already forgotten what I posted and have to check my own status to make sense of the comments.

Some of it may be just a generational inability on my part to adjust to this new format. I grew up in the age of three-hour phone calls to my best friend to re-hash the day. With a corded phone, mind you, dragged all the way around the corner from the kitchen and into the bathroom so I could shut the door and have some friggin' privacy. I wrote all of my high school papers and research reports on a typewriter. When my grandfather gave me a computer to take to college, it was the size of microwave oven, and that's without the monitor.

So maybe some of it is just that I can't quite cram my thoughts down to Facebook size (don't even get me started on Twitter) because I'm Generation X and not a Millenial, or whatever they're called. Maybe I need to stretch out a bit and meander and have some virtual Tourette's in order to get my thoughts in order. I like to spell out the whole words "you" and "are" when I'm texting, God help me.

I'm not going to go cold turkey on Facebook or shut down my account completely, because I think there's definitely a place for it. What I am going to try to do is be a better blogger.

Heck, even once a month would be an improvement, right?

Thanks for reading.

He ain't heavy

2010-03-15T10:46:00.006-04:00

Miles turned one on the first of March.

We just had a little family party with my Mom and us. Cupcakes, balloons, presents and all that, but pretty low key overall.

While his presence in our lives has had effects, both joyful and not-so-much, on all of us, I think it's fair to say that the person most impacted by Miles's arrival has been Nolan.

Nolan loves his brother, of this I am certain, but I also know that a lot of the time, Nolan hates his brother. Or rather, he hates that all of my attention and love is not focused solely on him any longer.

I suppose this is quite natural and something that happens with all siblings, and indeed must have happened to my brothers and I growing up, but there are times when I am blown away by the sheer force of his rage. Thankfully, he mostly directs that rage at me, rather than Miles. There are occasional "Oops, I didn't realize that spinning him so hard in his jumper would cause his head to crash into the door frame" moments, of course, but they seem to be genuinely accidental for the most part.

It is only recently that it's dawned on me and KB that this is the reason for Nolan's rather precipitous slide into violent behavior in the last few months. (We're a bit slow on the uptake sometimes - this whole two kids thing is new to us.) Over just the last couple weeks I have been bitten, punched, kicked, pinched, screamed at and more, as Nolan seems to be saying, "Damn you, woman! Damn you for bringing that other baby into this house!" (The conflict at hand is never about Miles, of course - it's usually about why I won't let him watch more TV or how come I cleaned up his super-cool train track before he had a chance to take a picture of it. Perhaps that's why it took us so long to figure it out - he can't come right out and say he's pissed at us for having another baby, so he expresses it in other ways.) It wasn't so bad at the beginning, when Miles was just a little podling, but now that he's a full-fledged one-year-old (he hasn't quite qualified for official "toddler" status, yet) Nolan is having a very hard time.

I suppose we should have known the jig was up last fall, when Nolan wrote a play at his school. (His school, if I haven't mentioned it before, is a kick-ass Reggio Emilia-inspired preschool that really lets the kids expend their creative energies in a variety of ways. Check out the atelierista's blog. You'll get to see pics of Nolan in action at school.)
The play was basically just a cast of characters and some pictures illustrating the action (no dialogue or stage directions just yet), but the cast of characters was as follows:

The Only Baby.......................Nolan
The Mother............................Caroline
The Father.............................Kevin
The Dog..................................Miles

(There was also a special guest appearance by a boy from another classroom as Santa Claus.) Now, if that doesn't tell you that Nolan is having some adjustment issues, I don't know what would. But we just laughed about it and told our parents and friends in an "Isn't this cute?" kind of way, and I think we failed to really take seriously Nolan's deep ambivalence toward his brother.

So we'll be trying harder. I'm going to make a special effort to carve out some Nolan-and-Mommy time, and I won't make the mistake of sending him to (or, actually, picking him up and forcing him into) his room when he gets angry and violent. That just makes him more angry - probably because he doesn't want to be separated from me. Sigh. Poor Noney.

Thanks for reading.

Domo arigato

2009-10-31T21:52:00.011-04:00

Well, the robot costume was a hit. We finished the helmet portion today by gluing some "buttons" (actually painted bottle caps - this robot costume brought to you by Yuengling) onto it and letting them dry. Incidentally, I learned something new - perhaps if y'all are the crafty type you knew this already - rubber cement and styrofoam don't mix. The noxious chemicals in the rubber cement totally dissolve the styrofoam into a sticky puddle of goo. Lesson learned. Elmer's glue used on styrofoam helmet.

Lemme back up a minute, give you the play-by-play on the robot costume (I'm pretty proud of it, actually - I enjoyed working on it with Nolan and it was fun to see it take shape.) We started about a week ago with a trip to first Lowe's and then Ben Franklin Crafts. Nolan had some very specific things he wanted - red "fuzzballs" and two "straight wires" for the robot's antennae. We got red pom-poms and silver pipe cleaners at Ben Franklin, along with some acrylic paints and paint brushes. At Lowe's we procured silver spray paint, an eight-foot section of dryer vent, silver "metal repair" tape (I had no idea such a thing existed!) and rubber cement.

We began with the body of the robot. We had TONS of boxes of various sizes, as you might expect, but it seemed best to go with a smallish box, one just big enough to fit Nolan's body. I wanted him to still be able to see where he was going and have a relatively easy time walking, so we picked a small book box. First we taped the box shut with the metal repair tape and cut a hole for his body/legs and a hole for his head:

Then we made some armholes and attached a couple lengths of dryer vent for the arms.

(Nolan was very patient. I had to periodically call a halt to the proceedings to go find things like wire cutters for the dryer vent and a pencil to trace where the holes should go. One of the most frustrating things about moving is when you KNOW you've seen something in one of the boxes you've opened but you just can't find the frickin' thing. Nolan was very good about laying on the floor playing with Legos for 15 minutes or so while Mommy went in search of her tool bag or the contents of the junk drawer.)

Then we took the box and the styrofoam six-pack cooler we used for the helmet out into the alley and spray-painted them silver.

(Something about that picture makes me want to waggle my hands frantically by the sides of my face and shout, "It's the wrong trousers! They've gone wrong!")

They had to dry for a while, so we painted bottle caps and baby-food jar lids (saved over the past few weeks) with the acrylic paints. These were going to be our buttons and dials.
Once the buttons were dry, we rubber-cemented them onto the robot body.

Then I cut the face portion out of the helmet so Nolan could see through it.

We stuck the antennae through the top of the helmet and glued some buttons onto it, too.

You can't see it very well, but the buttons have numbers painted onto them - 11, 33, 44 and 55. Not sure why he requested those specific numbers, but that's what they say.

That was this morning. (I am a Grade A procrastinator in all things, but I think this time at least I have a semi-excuse: we just moved, dammit!)

Here's the finished costume:

We got some nice early trick-or-treating done and were home by 5:30. We started giving out candy at 5:45 and were completely cleaned out by 6:30. Oops.

Nolan got lots of compliments on his costume.

I'd write more, but I'm totally fried now. I'll leave you with Miles in his "costume."

Hope you all had a happy Halloween!

Thanks for reading.

The distant future, the year 2000

2009-10-08T11:36:00.004-04:00

Nolan wants to be a robot for Halloween. We're going to make his costume this time (contrary to every non-crafty bone in my body) instead of buying a pre-made one. I figure, how hard could it be, right? It's not like there's ONE acceptable way to make a kid look like a robot. Last year, when he wanted to be a giraffe, I was like, 'Yo, costume catalog, here I come.' Because everyone knows what a giraffe looks like, and if you fuck it up, your kid is in for a lonnnnng night of "And what are you supposed to be, sweetie?" over and over and over again. I will happily pay $39.95 so my kid can avoid that fate.

But not so with a robot. There are many acceptable forms, shapes, sizes, and finishes for robots. It's not too hard to recognize that when a child rings your bell on Halloween wearing a silver spray-painted box with some bottle caps glued to it, he is supposed to be a robot.

We have been working on the "design" of the robot, and Nolan has sketched out some ideas. His first attempt ended up with the robot looking inordinately sad, for some reason:
(The figure to the left of the sad robot is Mickey Mouse, in case you were wondering...)

I asked him why he drew the robot looking sad and he said, "I didn't TRY to draw him sad, Mommy, he just turned out that way."

We've been talking a lot about feelings recently. Nolan knows we're moving again soon, and although we've tried to emphasize to him that it's only our house that will be different, that he will have the same school and the same friends and the same playgrounds and all that, he is still pretty anxious about the whole thing. Not that I blame him. I'm pretty anxious myself.

So I totally over-analyzed the sad robot and was like, "My child is so upset that even his drawings are subconsciously coming out sad!" Never mind that Nolan has basically just started even trying to do intentional representational drawings.

So he drew another "design" for his robot costume:
(He tried to draw it in green because that's my favorite color, but then realized that since this was his robot costume, he should draw it in red because that's HIS favorite color. Note the buttons on the front of the robot's body and the very deliberate smiley face the robot has.)

So now I'm afraid because I made such a big deal about the sad robot, Nolan's going to think that it's not okay to show when you're feeling sad. Sigh. It's so easy to over-think things as a parent.

I will post pictures of the finished robot costume once it exists. We are not going to even attempt to start it until after the big move (which is next weekend) because I figure we'll have so many boxes at that point that we'll have plenty of room for error.

Thanks for reading.

She wears high heels when she exercises

2009-08-26T21:24:00.005-04:00

Every now and again, while I'm tooling around at home or in the car, for no particular reason, I am struck by the fact that we live in Richmond. Virginia. We live in Richmond, Virginia. It's like when you repeat a word over and over and over again until it starts to sound like it's not really a word at all. I was driving back from my fiddle lesson tonight, and on the way back over the bridge I saw the whole city laid out next to the water, lights on in the dusk (coming earlier and earlier now, alas), and was struck, once again, by the weirdness of the fact of where we live. Not that the city of Richmond itself is weird, but that we, our family, have ended up here, of all the places in the world. I was riding along in the car with the windows down, looking at the lights, wind blowing through my hair, saying over and over again, "We live in Richmond, Virginia. We live in Richmond, Virginia."

We are getting more and more settled in as time goes by, of course, but I am struck by the differences between here and many other places we have lived.

In Princeton, the streets are all named after trees - Walnut Lane, Maple Street. They cut down the trees and then name the streets after them. In Boston, the streets are all named after either presidents - Adams, Washington - or again, some landscape feature that was despoiled when the street was created - Granite, Quarry, etc. Here in Richmond, although you also get the trees and the presidents, they also name the streets after the Native American tribes they stole the land from - Matoaca, Kanawha, Seneca.

We have a highway called the Powhite Parkway, for which our running joke is that that's where the po' white folks live. What also screws me up is when there's a street name that is exactly the same as one from a place we've lived previously - there's a Commonwealth Avenue right near our house, and every time I drive by I think of Boston.

(Fun fact from the Useless Trivia Girl: I have now lived in three of the four states in the Union that are actually Commonwealths, not states - Virginia, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. Can anyone name the fourth? No fair Googling...)

We are also lacking in good radio stations here in Richmond. There is one independent station and one college station from the University of Richmond...and that's about it. The rest are either generic classic rock (I can only listen to Free's "All Right Now" so many times, thank you), aggro "nu-rock" alternative stations that play crap like Staind and Adema, or those robot stations that advertise themselves as playing anything, but which are really a pre-programmed list of stuff, some good and some very, very bad. We end up streaming a lot of KCRW and WXPN on our internet radio at home, but in the car you're basically screwed. Thank you, 6-CD changer.

Here, a "VT" sticker on someone's car doesn't mean Vermont, it means Virginia Tech. "LAX" doesn't mean Los Angeles International Airport, it means lacrosse. "OBX" is outer banks. I thought a lot of people here were New Orleans Saints fans until I realized that that sticker on their cars is also representative of two of the local private schools' mascots, also called the Saints.

Nothing opens before 10 am on Sundays. Except the churches, of course. We tried to go out for brunch one Sunday, showed up at the restaurant at 9:25, saw the sign on the door and turned around and went home for cold cereal. Nolan will not wait 35 minutes at a restaurant, no way, no how.

So we're adjusting. Some times I feel that we are definitely finding our way and becoming part of the community, and then sometimes...not so much.

Thanks for reading.

I got damaged, I lost myself in you

2009-07-20T07:36:00.009-04:00

Some Thoughts On Breaking My Ankle:

-I really need to come up with a better story as to how it happened. I mean, how many times in my life have I wiped out snowboarding? At least it could have been something semi-righteous like that. "I was walking" is just so...lame.*

-I guess I will have to revise my "25 Things" list on Facebook, because one of the things was "I've never had a cavity or a broken bone." So much for that.

-Have you ever wondered if my hair would do dreadlocks? I can answer that for you, and the answer is...Yes. Quite easily, in fact. All I have to do is not wash it for a little over a week (I was taking spongebaths instead of showers), and it starts to spontaneously dreadlock.

-Apparently, if you're going to break your ankle, this is the way to do it. A Weber Type A transverse fracture of the distal fibula/lateral malleolus, a typical avulsion fracture, nondisplaced (no surgery or screws necessary, thank goodness).

This is much better than tearing a ligament, because bones, once healed, are basically as good as new, while ligaments can get scarred and much less flexible after they heal. You learn something new every day! (Insert your own "lucky break" pun here.)

-I am not a good invalid. Terrible, in fact. We have home health care aides coming in to help us during the day while Kevin goes to work, and while they are generally very helpful and nice, I hate hate HATE having to ask for help. So I try to do things myself and stupidly risk falling and injuring myself again, or I just sit here on the computer, morose and cranky. (And sad that I can't pick up my boys!)

-Crutches suck. Particularly when you are breastfeeding. That whole armpit/upper breast area is quite sensitive, and stumping around on crutches can be excruciating. Thankfully, there are medical supply rental places in Richmond, and I rented one of thes e babies. It makes getting around a wee bit more tolerable. (The only drawback is our long narrow kitchen makes turning around practically impossible. I feel like I'm doing this.)

-I am married to the greatest guy in the world. Kevin has been Busting. His. Ass. for the last two weeks. Even the health care aides helping during the day does not really cover all the stuff I usually do, so when he comes home at night from nine hours at his regular job, he's finishing the dinner prep and cooking, cleaning up after dinner, giving the boys their baths, getting them in PJs, et cetera. Every night. He's also been getting up at night with Miles, who is only intermittently sleeping through the night. So I expect him to be nominated for sainthood any day now.

But other than that, we are all doing well. (Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?) Nolan is "reading" street signs like crazy and will shout them out to you as you drive along. "No U-Turn!" "Right lane must turn right!" "No Parking!" Miles is cooing and rolling over and eating rice cereal. Kevin is loving his job and looking for a way to start playing tennis again. And I am counting the days...

Thanks for reading.

*So yeah, I was walking on a bike path with Nolan on his bike and Miles in the Baby Bjorn. Thankfully, Kevin and another friend (her son was riding his bike with Nolan) were with us at the time. If I had been alone with the boys it would have been a much bigger problem. So we're all walking on this asphalt path that's built up about 3 inches above the ground, and I couldn't see my feet because of the Bjorn, and I stepped right on the edge of the path with my right foot. My ankle rolled down and outwards, I felt a "pop!" and I went down. I tried to roll to my left side so I wouldn't fall face down on top of Miles, and I ended up taking the brunt of the fall on my left knee. Miles unfortunately still bumped his head, but at least I didn't squash him completely. So I'm laying there screaming, "Take the baby! Take the baby!" and Kevin got him out of the Bjorn. He was crying, but then he smiled at Kevin right away, so we knew he was going to be okay. Our friend helped me up and I hobbled to a picnic table to sit down. She got me some ice from some nearby picnic-ers, and we got my shoe and sock off to look at the damage. I knew it was bad when it happened, since I couldn't put any weight on it at all without shrieking pain from my ankle. When we got to the ER (and the doctor confirmed that Miles was okay) and found out it was broken, I wasn't surprised at all. Bummed, yes, but not surprised.

[Insert theme from "The Odd Couple" here]

2009-05-13T12:53:00.005-04:00

Nolan and his baby brother.

Miles and his big brother.

Yes, we have no jealousy issues!

Nolan came downstairs on this particular day dressed in plaid shorts and dark socks. All he needs now is to move to Florida for a canasta game and the early bird special at Denny's.

Jen, that's the "Terra Cotta Warriors" shirt you sent him...

And here's baby Miles at two months:
He's still not sleeping very well, but we think we'll keep him...

Thanks for "reading."

And the ones that mother gives you don't do anything at all

2009-04-17T11:22:00.005-04:00

Happy Easter! Only five days late. Hey, you gotta take what you can get from a mom of a preschooler and a six-week old, am I right? Of course I'm right. Don't talk back to me, you!

Here's more pics (aka the lazy blogger's way of filling up a post):

Nolan's Easter Egg hunt. The Bunny was good to him this year, and wouldn't you know, that thoughtful bunny bought candy that Mommy can't stand, Spree and Smarties, so there is no risk of her eating all of the candy out of Nolan's basket. Thank you, Easter Bunny!

Nolan and his little brother. He's getting better about holding Miles - at first he wanted nothing to do with having the baby in his lap. He would give him kisses while someone else was holding him, and "hug" him while he was in his car seat or bouncer, but if you suggested he sit down and hold Miles on his lap he was like, "I don't think so." Now he'll do it, but not for very long. Which is fine, since we're still a little unclear on the concept of "gentle."

Miles' first Easter. The Bunny didn't bring him anything except for a hat, hastily shoved into big brother Nolan's basket, because the Bunny realized at 10pm the night before that Miles not only didn't have any presents, he didn't even have his own basket. So the Bunny quickly grabbed a hat purchased at Target earlier in the week and smushed it in there with Nolan's kite and wiffle bat and balls. Ta da!

We are slowly, slowly achieving a new version of normal for us. KB returned to work this week after a week off (huzzah!) and Nolan started a new preschool this week since the other one wasn't working out so well. (More on that whole drama later.) Miles is growing, eating, pooping, sleeping and doing all the things a six-week old should be doing. At his one month check-up he was 11 pounds, 6 ounces and 23 inches long. (At birth he was 8 lbs 11 oz and 21.5 inches long.) So he's gained almost three pounds and grown an inch and a half in a month. No wonder he's nursing every hour and a half!

We are all well, just a wee bit sleep-deprived and scruffy.

How are you?

Thanks for reading.

A tummy without you just wouldn't be right

2009-03-17T11:36:00.005-04:00

Miles' umbilical stump fell off this morning. He officially has a belly button!

That was the happy surprise this morning when I came down from the bedroom. The not-so happy surprise was that the refrigerator isn't working. I swear, we must have some kind of bad kitchen appliance ju-ju surrounding us in a cloud that follows us around the country. So now we have lots of quickly-growing-warm foodstuffs sitting out on the kitchen counter, along with the cooler and the insulated shopping bag out on the porch packed full of all the meat and dairy. Thank god the freezer is still working, what with my hard-earned four bags of pumped breastmilk in there, not to mention the freezer meals I cooked so we'd have some quick things to eat after KB's mom leaves next week.

*sigh*

But anyway. The good things, must focus on the good things.

"I Lost 30 Pounds in Two Weeks! Ask Me How!"

Yes, I've lost a good share of the pregnancy weight, thankfully. The swelling from all the IV fluids they pumped into me during the delivery is finally going down and my feet and hands have returned to a normal size. (My feet totally looked like this up until a few days ago.) Yesterday I peeled off the Steri-Strips that were holding my incision closed, and it looks pretty...okay. I guess. All the nurses who checked the incision in the hospital were like, "Oh, that's a great-looking incision! You'll be back in your bikini in no time!" and I was like, "Back?" It's itchy as all hell, but it's not swollen or infected or anything, so that's good.

Miles is still eating like a champ - we haven't had any of the latching-on problems like we did when Nolan was a newborn. He's been sleeping okay at night - not great, but not horrible, either. I'm typically getting one longer stretch of about 3 hours each night, and then the rest of the night is the same every hour and a half of feeding as it is during the day. So far KB is off the hook for feeding since we haven't introduced the bottle yet, but one day soon...

We go back to the pediatrician tomorrow to confirm that he's gaining weight and thriving, but I'm not too worried. I think I'm-

Argh. I think I'm going to cut this post short, seeing as how I started it two weeks ago and haven't worked on it since then. I can't even remember how I was going to finish that sentence.

Here, I know what you want:

There. That should hold you for awhile...

Thanks for reading.

Just as long as I'm in this world, I'll be, I'll be a light of this world

2009-03-12T14:18:00.007-04:00

Well, here he is at last:

Mr. Miles Bradford Hoover, born at 10:57 pm on March 1st, 2009. He weighed 8 pounds, 11 ounces, and was 21.5 inches long. Big boy! Mommy had a C-section after 35 hours of labor, which was a major bummer, but I am choosing instead to focus on how lucky we are to have such a beautiful, healthy baby boy in our family. You will get a full gory play-by-play one of these days, I'm sure, but for now, let's just think positively, shall we?

He is a fairly relaxed and groovy little dude - he usually only cries when he's hungry, which is about every hour and a half at the moment. He took to breastfeeding like a champ and hasn't really given us any major problems so far. Maybe he's trying to make up for the harrowing delivery.

Nolan seems to be doing fine with his baby brother so far. He got to take pictures of Miles in to school for show and tell, and he likes to kiss and pat him on the head. (He also likes to "help" me nurse Miles by patting my boob to make the milk go down into Miles' mouth faster. Yeah.)

We can't get over how much Miles looks like Nolan when he was a newborn. (I guess most newborns look alike, don't they? - like angry, befuddled old men.) He is slowly starting to differentiate, but at first he was totally Nolan 2: Electric Boogaloo. With the exception of his fingers and toes, that is. He's got some craaaaazy long skinny fingers and enormous monkey toes. Check it out:
When he was first born his big toe was even farther away from the other toes. He looked like he had baboon feet, like he could use that big toe as an opposable thumb, almost. So I've been calling him Miles Monkeytoes.

Sweet baby.

More baby pix soon!

Thanks for reading.

Let's get this party started

2009-02-25T04:42:00.002-05:00

Hi! Let me introduce myself. I'm Sadly. Sadly Mistaken? Remember me? From my last post? The one where I said the baby was most likely coming soon? Yeah. He's not here yet.

I guess I'm already making the classic parental mistake of comparing the first kid to the second kid (or in this case, the first pregnancy/labor to the second one) in assuming that just because I've had some spotting and some contractions like I did with Nolan, the baby is imminent. Just because his due date has come and gone, just because my mom has already been here for four days, just because I am desperately, desperately ready to be done with this pregnancy, I shouldn't assume. You know what happens when you assume, right? You end up awake at 4:30 a.m. four days past your due date watching Beyonce's Single Ladies on YouTube because you can't go back to sleep and your befuddled mind can't think of anything else to do.

I know what it is. I'm supposed to be getting my new MacBook soon. Like, maybe tomorrow (according to FedEx tracking, that is). Doodle's just waiting for it to arrive and for me to get all excited about playing with it and being able to stop using KB's computer, and THEN he's gonna show up.

Sigh.

We'll keep you posted.

Thanks for reading.

Something's happening here, what it is ain't exactly clear

2009-02-21T16:21:00.004-05:00

I think Doodle's arrival is imminent.

I was reading back through my post about Nolan's birth and some things that happened that time around about two days before he was born happened yesterday. (Bodily function type things - if you really want to know exactly what, please feel free to re-read that post.) So unless I am sadly mistaken, I think there will be a baby soon. Like, in the next forty-eight hours.

Watch this space.

Thanks for reading.

People, people, we got to get over before we go under

2009-02-18T10:23:00.004-05:00

First things first: Nolan is fine. The surgery went off without a hitch yesterday, he is back at school today and all is well. I continue to be amazed at what a sanguine kid we are raising. I don't know how my hypochondriacal-ass self ended up with such an incredibly unflappable boy.

We kept him up late (for him) Monday night, he slept in (a bit) Tuesday morning, played with KB for a couple hours, and generally wasn't too bitchy about not being able to eat or drink anything. (We had previously prepped him with the explanation that the dentist would be giving him some medicine so he could fix his tooth, and if there was any food in his stomach it could make him very sick. He seemed okay with that.)

We went to the dentist's office at 10:30 and they gave him a little cup of medicine with Demerol and other good stuff (chloral hydrate maybe? I kind of blanked there for a bit, because while he was taking the medicine I was signing a form that said I understood that there was a [very small but definitely still there] risk of SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH with the anesthesia. That'll give you pause.) in it to make him drowsy. Then we got to hang out in the waiting room for about 45 minutes while the drugs took effect. Sorry I have no video goodness for you, Broc - we have no camera at the moment, so YouTube fame shall have to wait. But he was generally very floppy and cute and drowsy and kept saying, "Mommy, my head is too heavy for me to hold up."

Then the doctor's assistant came out to get him, and when she took him out of KB's lap and carried him back through the waiting room door it was all I could do not to tackle her and run away with him. Thankfully, I restrained myself. The actual surgery only took about half an hour, and then they were calling us back to get him. He was sitting in the assistant's lap looking very flushed and tired, but he seemed in good spirits. We got to quiz the doctor on all our post-op concerns, and he was very reassuring, almost blase about it all. The newly stabilized tooth should hopefully last Pickle another year or two, and the adult tooth behind it looks pretty healthy, just a little crooked from the injury. We got a souveneir x-ray to take home with us, and Nolan got a bunch of stickers and a balloon.

We went home and made him a strawberry milkshake, and then he slept for five hours straight. We woke him up for dinner, he ate heartily including ice cream for dessert and then didn't want to go back to bed. So he was up late again, but he still woke up at 6:30 this morning. Perhaps he shall take another nap today...

So he's good. I am immensely relieved, and I feel like now Doodle can come whenever he wants and I won't care because this giant nerve-wracking experience is behind us.

In other news, we decided to do our part to support the crumbling US economy and buy a second car. I was kind of bummed out about it, because we'd done so well for so long with one car, but the public transportation options here in Richmond are sadly pretty limited. KB rides his bike to work as often as he can (which is usually when he works downtown, about 2-3 days a week) but there's no safe way for him to get to his other worksite on the bike. The second car will eliminate a lot of the stress and hassles caused by us having to drop KB off and pick him up on those days - we were eating dinner late because I'd have to stop whatever cooking I was doing to go get KB, and then Nolan was getting to bed late. Or we'd be out at the playground and I'd decide to just drop by to see if KB was ready since we were already out with the car, and then KB would feel all stressed if he wasn't done with work since we were sitting there waiting for him. You know, that kind of crap.

So we are now the proud owners of a used 2007 Honda Accord, a nice, safe, reliable family sedan. We've moved Nolan's car seat over to the right hand side and put Doodle's new car seat on the left side. We have yet to transfer the James Brown and Jazz for Kids cds to the Honda - we'll see how long we can hold him off.

Also-

I keep meaning to mention how, when we were watching Obama's inauguration on TV, Nolan asked me if they were going to play "Funky President." This is hilarious, I think, but not so unlikely when you consider that that is the only song he knows with the word "president" in the lyrics, so all the talk of our new president this and our new president that surely brought the association to mind for him. I responded that I thought that would be cool, but that they probably wouldn't. And, sadly, they didn't. But it would have been cool.

(I also thought, during Obama's speech when he was talking about soldiers who had given their lives for our country and he listed various places and then mentioned Khe San, somewhere out there Walter Sobchak was going, 'Right on!')

So, yeah. No baby yet. We'll keep you posted.

Thanks for reading.

Look at my circumstance (and the bulge in my big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big)

2009-02-13T09:56:00.005-05:00

Whoooo nelly. I am tired of being pregnant. I am the largest, most ungainly, bloated, swollen giantess in the world. Pretty soon I will be affecting the earth's rotation with my own gravitational pull. My knees hurt, my feet hurt, my hands are puffy (they look like the "man hands" from that Seinfeld episode.) I have outgrown all but my most gigantic maternity pants, so I am wearing the same five pairs over and over and over again. And doing frequent laundry. I haven't shaved my legs in months. Once I put my shoes on in the morning, I don't take them off again until that night, because I'm afraid I won't be able to get them on again if I do.

Yeah, I'm ready to be done with this. Not that I'm necessarily ready to have a newborn yet, you understand. I just want to be over the pregnant part.

We took a tour of the maternity ward at the hospital where I will be delivering last week, so I've at least scoped out the territory. My mom is coming down on the 21st to stay for two weeks, and then KB's mom comes on March 8th to stay for two weeks as well, so I will thankfully have some help on hand for that first few weeks. I am frantically cooking and freezing food (let the nesting begin!) to be reheated later on. I have washed all the infant clothes in the infant laundry detergent, set up the cradle/mattress/bumper sleep center, and washed and sterilized all the bottles and breast pump accessories (oh, joy) and pacifiers. I have packed my suitcase for the hospital, laid in a supply of size one diapers (they are so tiny!) and arranged for a cleaning person to come once a week (yay!) for a while.

AND YET. There is more to do. I forgot to buy wipes. Our friggin' car needs a new catalytic converter, so we have to go in sometime next week (when the part comes in) to have that replaced.

Worst of all, Nolan has to have dental surgery next Tuesday. Remember last summer? Our vacation in Canada? Nolan fell on a rock and hurt his tooth? The blood and the screaming and the maternal guilt and the cheap Canadian emergency dental care? Yes. That tooth that we thought wouldn't die? It's dying. He went to the dentist last week, they took x-rays, it's not good. They're going to "clean out" the dead root tissue and try to stabilize what's left of the tooth so he can keep it another year or two. He basically is going to have a pediatric root canal. So he has to be sedated, which means no food or drink for twelve hours before the surgery, scheduled for 11 am. That's going to be a fun morning. "No honey, you can't have any juice. Mommy and Daddy can have cereal, but you are not allowed. Trust me, it's for your own health and safety. Really." Plus I'm probably going to need to be sedated in order to let him go INTO SURGERY. My three year old son, having a root canal. Give me a call and let me know where and when I can pick up my Mother of the Year award, I'll be there.

And, as you already know if you are my Facebook friend, my poor laptop was killed in a tragic accident earlier this week. KB, for reasons known only to himself, left a glass of water on top of a teetering pile of Montessori-related paperwork directly next to my TiBook while he looked in the closet for a towel. The water glass fell over. Onto my computer. Which proceeded to pop and sizzle and generally make noises like the short-order cook's griddle in a diner. We mopped it up as best we could, I gave it a few days to dry out and tried to boot it up, but it will only give me The Grey Screen of Death. Of course, I had not backed it up onto my external hard drive since, oh, October or thereabouts, so I don't know exactly how much writing and how many photos I lost. Sad, really. I got that computer in 2001, and have only replaced the DVD drive once and the battery once. Otherwise, it was the same piece of equipment. You gotta love Macs. And, on the plus side, I get to pick out a new one in the next couple weeks.

You know, in my spare time.

Thanks for reading.

P.S. Good thoughts going out to Lucy, who was scheduled to have her little girl via c-section on Tuesday the 10th. Hope it all went well! Send pictures!

I do declare, there were times when I was so lonesome I took some comfort there

2009-02-03T16:11:00.006-05:00

Hey y'all.

(Let me just interrupt myself [only two words in! a new record!] with the first of what is sure to be many parentheticals to say this: I was saying "y'all" waaaay before we moved to Virginia. So don't let me hear any crap from youse guys hassling me about my usage thereof and its significance of my being somehow corrupted, language-wise, by The South. But I did learn something new: Apparently, "y'all" is the singular, while "all y'all" is the plural.)

We are doing fine. Sorry if we've worried anyone with my lack of posting. Things are getting down to the wire with the pregnancy (less than three weeks to go!) and KB and I are working like crazy to have as much settled as we possibly can in our lives so things can come to a screeching halt (as they will, whether we're ready or not) once Doodle makes his grand debut.

What kind of things, you say? Nothing very interesting, unfortunately. A lot of bureaucratic crapola, really. Things where you look at your to-do list and go, "Is this why I got up this morning? Really? To inform our auto insurance company of our new license plate number? To make a dentist appointment for Nolan? This is my grand mission in the world today? 'Take car for oil change?'"

We got a renter for the house in Princeton, which is a good thing, income-wise, but a pain in the ass otherwise. I'm hoping things will smooth out once we get over the "getting started" phase and having a tenant becomes more of a routine thing. I swear, we talk to our property manager/real estate agent up there more than we talk to our friends and family. Not that she's not a lovely person, but it's getting kind of old. The refrigerator up there broke (for those of you who are keeping track, that's four major appliances to go kerflooey in that fabulous space-age kitchen in less than a year) and we've been going back and forth with our agent, the repair place, and the tenant, trying to get things fixed. It's a part-time job, really.

Down here in Virginnie we are slowly assimilating into the local culture. We decided to join the Unitarian Universalist church (a.k.a. the Unie-Toonies) and went to our first service this past Sunday. It was pretty awesome. The sermon, delivered by a lesbian minister, was on Charles Darwin and his contribution to society. That's my kind of religion! They have lots of local service/charity work that they're involved in, and they give classes in Bhuddism, yoga and Wicca. I'm looking forward to having a connection to an open-minded spiritual community without all the Jesus and the Guilt and the look-upon-his-bloody-visage-he-died-a-horrible-painful-death-for-your-sins and the glaven. (Can you tell I was raised Roman Catholic? Is it that obvious?) So the Unie-Toonies are pretty much the maximum amount of religion I can handle without having an allergic reaction.

That being said, I have also joined a support group run through a nearby Presbyterian church that is for women who have recently moved and need...well, support. It is a little more Jaheezeus Christ than I would ordinarily have in my life (which is, you know, none) but I find that the group leader does an excellent job of keeping things very open and neutral and not proselytizing or trying to convert people. It is mostly just a varied group of women eating snacks and talking about how hard the transition period is and helping each other find ways to make the best of it. I figure beggars can't be chosers. I do occasionally have to restrain many of my natural impulses toward eye-rolling and snorting (and quoting Chris Rock), but there are definite pay-offs, in the form of recommendations on where to find the best New York-style pizza, or how to get a discount at the drug store. Is that cynical of me? Well, so be it. I am also trying to "pay it forward," as they say, put some good karma out there, by helping bring dinners to another woman in the group who recently moved and also just had a baby.

Nolan seems to be settling in fairly well. We have met a couple of other mommies with boys around his age and had a few playdates, and he's enjoyed himself immensely. Things are smoothing out at his school, too, although I find I'm having a harder time getting used to it than he is. It's a fairly parentally hands-off school philosophy, Montessori is, and I guess it's tough for me to give up that much control. I drive him up to the school in the morning and a volunteer helps him get out of the car, and then I drive up at noon and a teacher helps buckle him into his seat. I never even get out of the car. I don't see or speak to his teacher at all unless I call her at home, which I have a hard time doing. Nolan is not the most forthcoming about his days (what three-year-old is, really?) and so I find myself obsessing over the littlest utterance from him. But they (Montessori) are all about building self-reliance and independence and such, so I guess that's good. We're still investigating other pre-school options for the fall, and we have a classroom visit tomorrow, so we'll see. The jury's still out, in my mind.

KB is enjoying his job, which is nice for me to hear. He comes home every day talking about how much he's learning, how much he's enjoying himself, how many interesting cases he saw that day. It's a definite relief. He's working long hours right now, mostly because he's just getting started and the other doc in the MSK service finally got to take a vacation (he'd been the solo attending since the person KB replaced left six months ago), but things should hopefully settle down a bit soon.

We are toying with the idea of buying a second car, because right now he is only biking/riding the bus to one of his work sites - the other one Nolan and I have to drop him off and pick him up, which isn't such a pain right now, but when Doodle arrives it's going to get more difficult. We just fought for so long not to buy a second car (and having one car is enough of a pain in the ass) that it's hard to admit we need another one. Not to mention expensive. And polluting. Sigh.

So I guess that's all I got, for now. I promise to keep you posted on Doodle's progress. Please let me know how y'all are doing. I know I'm not the best at keeping in touch, but I always love to hear from you.

Thanks for reading.

How many times must we say, this kind of inflation cannot kill us

2009-01-05T09:36:00.002-05:00

Well.

We're here, we made it, we're not dead.

And in truth, we are better than not dead, we are settling in fairly nicely.

Today is Nolan's first day of school at his new pre-school (only one this time, so no need to distinguish between English school and Chinese school) and KB's second day at work.

We had about a week to unpack after we moved in on the 15th, and then we spent six days with my dad and stepmother up in Delaware for Christmas - got to see lots of family, which was good, and our visit was actually quite relaxing. They had all the Christmas accoutrements set up so Nolan got a proper holiday. We weren't around all the half-empty boxes so we didn't feel bad about not working on getting things unpacked, and we were able to vegetate a little bit. Dad and Ann (aka Grandma and Pappy) took Nolan for a ride on the "Christmas Train" to look at lights on the 23rd, so KB and I got to have a Date Night. Probably our last one for a while. Then we drove back down to VA and had another week to continue to get settled before KB started work.

And now, it seems, we are into The Swing of Things. There's still lots to do, of course, but now that Nolan has started school I feel like I have some of my own time back again (for another seven weeks, that is) to do what I want to do. We talked over the last month about how Daddy was on vacation from work and Nolan was on vacation from school, but as you might suspect, Mommy doesn't really get a vacation. Mommy does the same things she always does. Such is the way of our world right now.

The move itself was about as painless as these things can go, really, which was a pleasant surprise. The company we picked, while not the cheapest, was very professional and organized. Nothing was damaged or lost that we've been able to discover, and we've pretty much at least opened (if not fully unpacked) every box, so I think we're in the clear there.

Over the last several times we've moved, I've noticed that the process of moving causes your belongings to undergo a sort of churning, whereby items that you probably had forgotten you owned and don't really need somehow end up in the top part of a box of other, more important things. You open the box that says "Office" looking for your external hard drive and find instead random items the movers threw in to fill up the box.

For instance:

-One tape cassette of R.E.M.'s "Life's Rich Pageant" with no case or paper cover in evidence.

-One "Hollywood" snow globe with miniature actors, director and cameraman that used to sit on my desk at H.B.O.

-One can of Meltonian shoe polish in bright green, the exact shade of my Doc Martens, which have not been polished in years.

-One "Afro Chops" novelty wig given to KB for his 40th birthday last October.

-One mini Zen calligraphy board

-One wired-together human skull (this would be more disconcerting were it not for the fact that KB is a doctor)

-One rubber duck bath toy

-One canister of "Create Your Own Shakespearean Insults" word magnets

-One Polaroid close up attachment kit #583 for the Automatic 100 Polaroid Land Camera

Why are these things out on our kitchen counter right now? We don't know what to do with them. They belong somewhere, we're just not sure where that somewhere is right now. They are the odds and ends, the forgotten extras, the items you keep because you're sure that you will use them at some point, you just don't know when (or if) that time will roll around. Meanwhile, the items you really need to find, like the sugar bowl and the band-aids, continue to elude you.

Such is moving. Every time we do it, I'm certain that THIS time we've separated the wheat from the chaff and only kept what we really, truly need, and every time I'm surprised.

But we are here, we are safe, we are not men, we are Devo. I hope you all had a Happy New Year and a fabulous holiday season.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

Thanks for reading.

Everything seems to be up in the air at this point

2008-12-11T11:00:00.002-05:00

Just a quick note to say I'll be on hiatus for a week-ish. We're moving this weekend and we won't have internet (aieee!) in Richmond until the 27th. Friggin' Verizon. But we'll be staying with my dad and stepmom for a few days over Christmas, so there should be some opportunity to get online then, I hope.

In case I don't get to say it at the appropriate time, have a Merry Christmas and a Happy Hanukah and a Kickin' Kwanzaa and a Groovy Winter Solstice and all that. Nolan knows that Santa will be looking for him at Grandma and Pappy's house, so don't worry about him. They will have a tree and decorations up, and we'll bring our stockings.

Hope y'all's holidays are happy and healthy. Best wishes for 2009.

Thanks for reading.

Shellfish is an abomination

2008-12-08T11:22:00.002-05:00

Just in case y'all haven't seen this yet...

See more Jack Black videos at Funny or Die

JB as JC. Awesome.

Thanks for reading.

Sleep on the left side, keep your sword hand free

2008-12-05T22:12:00.005-05:00

Yes, we're all still alive. Sorry for the lack of updates (is it my imagination, or is that phrase in every third post on this blog?) but we've been crazy busy lately. We're arranging movers and signing a lease, connecting utilities and making doctor's appointments, returning rental cars and packing boxes. Yea, I say unto thee, we are busy as fuck.

But enough about all that. What I really want to do today is chronicle more...

[insert 60s educational filmstrip music]

...Indignities Of Pregnancy!

Yay!

Starting with boobs.

Now, don't get me wrong, I am a fan of boobs, they are one of the pinnacles of human evolution, I agree with you there. Playthings, food sources, sex signifiers...is there anything boobs can't do?

But occasionally, as when you are pregnant and throbbing with 33% more fluid volume than in your non-pregnant state, the boobs can become...a bit much. Take my boobs, for example. Please. (Ba-dum-bum.) No really, I would give anything to have detachable boobs right at this moment. (That was the alternate song lyric title source for this post - King Missile's "Detachable Penis." But I wasn't sure anyone would get the connection.) They are so incredibly, enormously unwieldy and...big. They're heavy. They're itchy. They're cumbersome. It would be a relief to just rip them off via a handy velcro strip and put them on the nightstand while I sleep.

I have had to buy new bras, of course, but not too many new bras, because you don't want to go investing in the complete spectrum of 38 DDDs when a month later you will have outgrown them and need to invest in even larger bras. (The advice for new bras whilst pregnant is completely contradictory to new bra advice normally - you want to buy them so that the bra fits well on the smallest set of hooks, giving you theoretical room to expand as your boobs expand, whereas in a normal new bra situation, you want the bra to fit well on the largest set so you can tighten the bra as the elastic starts to stretch out and not support as well. Or something like that. And lingerie purveyors of the world, can we please standardize our friggin' bra sizing already? Is it an F cup? Or a DDD? Consistency, please, people!)

KB put one of my newer bras on his head the other night (yes, his entire head fit in one cup - granted, he has a smallish head, but still) and starting shouting, "Pilot to bombadier, pilot to bombadier, we've reached altitude! Fire away!" All he needed was a scarf and some goggles.

But he is quite happy with the boobage, he says. There are men out there, I'm told, who are truly not fans of the generous cleavage, who much prefer their women to be card-carrying members of the Itty Bitty Titty Committee, but luckily for me KB is not one of them.

The only good thing about having ginormous boobs is that they make my ginormous belly look somewhat proportional. And even that benefit will go away as I hit months 8 & 9 and proportionality goes out the window - total strangers start to look worried about sharing the subway with you, lest they be unwillingly conscripted into service as midwives.

(And no, I haven't taken any belly pictures this time around. It just hasn't seemed as novel. Or necessary.)

And...let's see, what else, besides the standard heartburn, insomnia, frequent urination? Oh, there's the pregnancy-induced carpal tunnel syndrome. That's fun. Because of the afore-mentioned increased fluid volume, the nerves that pass through the wrist are squeezed, causing shooting pain, numbness, and that lovely pins-and-needles feeling. That'll wake you up at night. So now I wear a nice beige elastic "wrist positioner" to bed every night, with velcro tightening straps that always manage to get caught in the sheets. Yay!

Plus there's the fact that I now weigh more than my husband. Granted, this is not difficult when you are married to a beanpole like KB, as I am, but it is sobering nonetheless. I have gained less weight this time around than I did with Nolan (a fairly universal trend, it seems, gaining less weight in a second pregnancy - perhaps because Mommy is too busy chasing Offspring #1 all over hither and yon to put up her feet and eat some bonbons), but I have gained a fair amount. There must be some subconscious inherited-from-the-cavemen genetic edict that states that the "natural balance" of things is Man: Big :: Woman: Smaller making me feel bad for being more massive.

Pretty soon there'll be no room left in the bed for KB. I've got The Belly, The Boobs, and 47 pillows strategically stacked, folded, layered and tucked to create the optimal sleeping environment for me and Doodle. Sleep on your left side, so as not to put pressure on the inferior vena cava. Elevate your right arm, to try to reduce the carpal tunnel symptoms. Strap on your wrist positioner. Tuck a pillow under your giant belly to support it so your back muscles aren't twisted too much. Tuck another pillow between your knees so your hips aren't torqued. Now, don't move. Breathe deeply. Try to get as much sleep as possible before you have to get up to pee in four hours.

Enjoy!

Thanks for reading.

It's black, it's white

2008-11-05T10:16:00.000-05:00

As usual, the Onion said it better than I ever could...

http://www.theonion.com/content/news_briefs/black_man_given_nations?utm_source=EMTF_Onion

He's been king now for so long; his days are numbered

2008-11-04T11:12:00.002-05:00

Just came from doing my patriotic duty and voting.

Polls weren't too crowded - I went at 10:30 am to avoid the pre-work rush and the lunch-break rush. Saw a neighbor working one of the tables and was momentarily envious. I feel like this is the kind of thing all this moving around shit has robbed me of - the chance to get settled enough to actually start living life and doing things I want to be doing, like volunteering at the polls, rather than busting my ass polishing the fucking stainless steel in my kitchen every time some yahoo wants to take a look at our house.

But anyway. I digress. (No! Me?)

It's weird to me to think of anyone actually wanting to be president, especially with our country in the condition it is now. I think you have to have some kind of low-level insanity going on to even consider taking on that kind of stress. "Economy in ruins? International regard for our country at an all-time low? Health care a shambles? Sign me up!" Fucking crazy, man. So the idea of intentionally voting for someone who not only wants to be president but thinks they can DO something about all that shit...it's just amazing.

We need to figure out a way to get the most qualified person who couldn't want the job less into office. The guy* who just wants to be at home with his spouse playing Scrabble or whatever. Who's not interested in establishing some sort of Washington legacy of power to continue his "vision." Who would be motivated to get things done quickly with minimal bullshit so he could go watch the football game. (Who also, of course, happens to have decades of experience dealing with economic issues, international governments, and multi-billion dollar corporations. You know, that guy.) Someone who would have to be nominated by his peers, not someone who would announce his candidacy on a televised talk show with a series of bulleted talking points. And the panel of peers who nominated him would have to explain why he was the best choice, rather than have the guy himself do it. (I think that's what bothers me about McCain's incessant repetition of his supposed "maverick" status. If you have to say it about yourself, dude...I just don't buy it.)

I think that may be what's appealing to some people about Sarah Palin (not to me, mind you...I'm just saying.) That "regular Joe" shit. "Hey, she has a vagina...I have a vagina...she's just like me!" Of course with Palin it's all marketing, she's just as much into cronyism and under-the-table dealings as any other politician. But there's definitely an appeal to having someone represent us who's just like us. I think that's what McCain was hoping for - an identification that would go beyond politics.

That also may be why Obama does so well even with people who have no idea what his policies are or what effect electing him will have on the country. People see a multi-racial man raised by a single mother who has worked hard and ascended the ranks of society to become a candidate for President. That's the embodiment of the American dream, right there, is what that is. He is more like the population of this country than the decades of old white men who have been representing us for so long are.

Will he be a good president? I hope so. I just voted for the man. But he obviously wants it, too. He's not going to be dragged kicking and screaming into the White House going, "Nooooo! I just bought Cubs season tickets!"

This theory (such as it is) also applies to parenting, by the way. I now have several acquaintances, both friends and family, who have announced their decision to deliberately remain childless. And I totally respect that - kids upend your life, in more ways than you can ever hope to predict. But I also feel like it's a bit of a loss for the kids, because at least these people have thought about it, you know? They took the time to look at the pros and cons and decide what was best for themselves, and someone who can do that could do the same for children. And probably do a lot better job than the nineteen-year-old and her boyfriend who go "Oops, we're pregnant...guess we'll get married."

Ummmm...no offense, Mom.

OK, I'll shut up, now.

Except to say to Dru and Rose and Ebony I wish I could be voting in Cali today, man.** My NO ON 8 would be heard 'round the world.

Thanks for reading.

*I mean that in a pan-sexual way, of course. Can we all just agree that "guy" means any person? Male or female? I appreciate that some people have tried really hard to have "gal" mean the same sort of thing, only for women, but it just ain't working, folks.

**Ditto for "man."

This town ain't never been my home

2008-10-22T17:03:00.002-04:00

So it's decided. We are definitely moving to Richmond, Virginia. We are driving down again the weekend of the 8th and 9th to look at rental houses and preschools, and we will most likely be moving the second week of December. (Awww, yeah....moving during the holidays. Sweet!)

I am sad about leaving Princeton. The town itself has been a really good fit for us - if KB's job had been more his cup of tea, I have no doubt that we'd have stayed here for good. I dropped off Nolan at his English school this morning, and as I was driving home admiring all the fall leaves, I noticed the entire block of the street I was on had Obama signs in their front yards. Every single home. And I smiled. (I would have taken a picture, but as New Jersey just passed legislation allowing cops to ticket you for driving while talking on the phone, I'm pretty sure driving while trying to take a cell-phone picture is, you know, bad.) Not that I'm into conformity or group-think kinda politics, but it was sure nice to see.

But I think Richmond is going to be good as well. It's a good-sized city, it's pretty cosmopolitan, lots of cultural stuff. It is The South, though. It's not the deep south, not by any means, but it is most definitely The South. This is the region of our country that I know the least about and have the least experience with, so this should be interesting. I've been calling folks in the 804 trying to find us some rental houses to check out, and for awhile there no one I talked to really sounded like they were from the south (or sounded like my stereotypical idea of what people from the south talk like - think Sally Field in Steel Magnolias) until I got one guy named Birch who said, "Yes, ma'am" after every sentence out of his mouth. I got off the phone and said, "Now that's what I'm talking about!" to KB.

So please forgive me if I slack off on the posts for a bit. (I know, I know, excuses excuses.) I need to find a home for us and a preschool for Nolan and an OB for myself and work on getting this house ready to sell (ugh) and still keep doing all the stuff I normally do every day for our family. So I may be infected with slackitude for the next little while.

Thanks for reading.

Let's hear it for my baby

2008-10-14T21:43:00.004-04:00

Welp, it's another boy.

In case you can't see it, the ultrasound tech helpfully labeled the picture "Boy!!!" and inserted an arrow pointing to the, uh...area of interest.

He is healthy, has all his parts - good palate, good brain, good spine, good heart. He's very active, apparently - I can feel some movements, but both the ultrasound tech on Friday and my OB on Monday were like, "Whoa! What's he doing in there?" As if I have some idea. Knitting? Rearranging the furniture?

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't disappointed that it's not a girl. So why can't I just come right out and say, "I'm disappointed"? Because that sounds so fucking...harsh. I have to couch it in semi-polite terms and say, "If you asked me, if you really want to know, if I'm being honest...I'd be lying if I said I wasn't disappointed." Somehow that seems more palatable.

And it's not just that I want another girl on the "team" in our household, although that's part of it. I'll be surrounded by penises and I'll never win the Toilet Seat Default Mode war now. ("Down!" "Up!" "Down!" "Up!" "Duck season!" "Rabbit season!") Right now my only ally on the feminine side of things is Lola, and if you've ever met Lola, you know that she's not exactly an asset on the balance sheet of life - she shits on the rug and her favorite hobby is chewing her toes.

It's more that I'd really like to have a girl so I can teach her all the things I think are important about being a girl and then being a woman - all the stuff I screwed up or wished I had known more about or fought harder for (or against). Then again, maybe it's best that I don't have a daughter - I just re-read that last sentence and it sounds like I'd be trying to live my life over again through my daughter. Not a recipe for success. (Whatever "success" is when you're raising kids.)

I was really hoping for a girl, I guess. I just looked at my list of possible baby names for this kid, and there were 11 girls' names and 2 boys' names, both of which are leftovers from the list we made for Nolan. That's a pretty good indicator.

Another big thing is that if we want to try again (for a girl) after this baby, that will just delay my return to the real world by another few years. Sigh.

I'm sure I'll get over it. I'm sure I'll love this kid just as much as I love Nolan.

And I know Nolan's going to be a great older brother, notwithstanding tonight's going-to-bed conversation. We were sitting in the rocking chair, talking about our day, our usual nighttime routine, and in the middle of his typical stall tactics, he comes out with "I don't want your belly to get bigger and bigger and bigger." So I say, "Why?" thinking it will have something to do with him not fitting on my lap anymore. And he says, "Because I'm not ready for all the crying."

Me either, kid. But it comes with the territory.

Thanks for reading.

Judy in disguise

2008-10-03T11:04:00.003-04:00

Well, you knew it was inevitable. KB is nearsighted, I'm nearsighted, now we come to find that The Boy is nearsighted.

We went to a pediatric opthamologist last week, and her exact words were, "This isn't the strongest prescription I've ever written for a three year old...but it's close." So we went to the optician the next day and Nolan picked out frames - it was a close decision between purple Power Rangers frames and the bronze ones he eventually decided on. I would have gotten him the purple ones if he really wanted them, since he's the one that has to wear the things, but in my heart of hearts I'm glad he picked the plain bronze ones.

Isn't he painfully, painfully adorable?

*sigh*

My little nerdling.

Thanks for reading.

Livin' it up at the Hotel California

2008-09-26T10:27:00.002-04:00

So I'm sure you've all heard about this.

My first thought upon hearing he wanted to delay the debate was this.

It's bush-league psych-out stuff.

Woo! You got a date Wednesday, McCain!

Thanks for reading.

I've given up fags and drugs now, baby

2008-09-23T10:54:00.003-04:00

Welcome to Caroline's Cavalcade of Random Occurrences and Tidbits

or

What I Would Be Twittering Were I The Twittering Type, Which I'm Not

-A crow died in our backyard last weekend. It was the strangest thing. I was taking a nap (huzzah!) in our bedroom, which is at the back of the house with windows facing the backyard. I wasn't quite asleep and I heard this commotion of squirrels chattering with that angry noise they make when there's a neighborhood cat perched on the ground underneath them. I didn't think much of it until I heard this big THUMP on the ground shortly thereafter. I looked out the window and saw this dark, unidentifiable shape on the ground and figured I'd better take a look. KB and Nolan were outside raking leaves (in the front) so they didn't see anything, of course. I put on some pants (I get comfy when I nap) and shoes and went out in the back to find a giant, recently dead crow on the ground under one of the trees. (I'm not sure what distinguishes a crow from a raven from a blackbird, exactly - if it's only size, then this bird was on the large crow/small raven end of the spectrum, I'd say.) It didn't appear to be injured or mangled in any way. It was just dead. I don't know what the squirrel commotion had to do with the crow's death, if anything. I made KB come around and pick it up with a shovel and put it in a garbage bag.

Dead crow. Gotta be bad karma or bad feng shui or something. Yeesh.

-At lunch the other day Nolan kept making this "Ffffffffffff" noise with his teeth and lips. I tried to ignore it at first because I thought it was his way of provoking me - we've had a lot of discussion lately about why spitting at the table is Not Appropriate Behavior and I was pretty sure he was trying to see how close he could come to spitting before I started telling him not to do it. So he's going, "Fffffffffff" and concentrating really hard and I'm ignoring him and finally he looks at me and says, "Mommy, why are there no flames coming out of my mouth?" Apparently he was trying to breathe fire.

-Nolan is attending pre-school five mornings a week now - two at his Chinese pre-school (where he went to summer "camp") and three at a regular old pre-school. We've taken to calling the regular pre-school his "English" school to distinguish it from his Chinese school. I feel like we're Amish. "Be careful out there among them English, son!"

-There was a sign on the door of Nolan's (English) pre-school classroom the other morning that said "[this class] has 1 case of head lice." All I could think was "Already? Already with the head lice?" Next up: Pink eye!

-My Omega-3 vitamin supplement is made from fish, flax and safflower oils, but somehow, it's only the fish oil I taste when I burp later.

-If any one of the four of you who read this blog knows anything about Richmond, Virginia, please pass it along with all haste. Richmond is next up on our list of Places We May Move To. We're going down there the weekend of the 4th and 5th to check out the living situation (KB has already had one successful interview) and my assignment is researching beforehand to find out what, exactly, we might like to check out whilst down there.

-The ice maker on our fridge broke. This is the third kitchen appliance to break down in the nine months we've owned this house. Remember how awesome the kitchen looked in those pictures? How space-age and modern and upscale? Yeah, that's 'cause all the appliances are friggin' "prestige" brands like Miele and Sub-Zero and Wolf and cost like, three times as much to repair. So, we are back to making ice in trays, since $400 to repair an icemaker seemed a bit steep, considering we'll probably be moving in a few months. (What was also a pain was that we had to actually go out and buy new ice cube trays to use. What happened to all those stray ice cube trays we accumulated over years of moving from apartment to apartment? Who actually has to BUY ice cube trays? Don't they just reproduce on their own in the privacy of the freezer compartment, like wire hangers do in the closet?)

-My birthday was good. I got to go into NYC for a haircut at Devachan, which specializes in curly hair. Not only specializes in it, but proselytizes for it. They are very pro-curly. They don't want you to straighten your hair. They want you to be happy with your curly hair. The owner of the salon wrote a book about curly hair. They have their own special line of products for curly hair. I like them a lot, but a haircut alone is upwards of $120, so this was a rare and wonderful birthday treat for me. Now my hair has an actual shape to it, much more vertical volume and much less Rosanne Rosannadanna action going on.

Yay!

Thanks for reading.

You were bigger and brighter and whiter than snow

2008-09-10T07:01:00.004-04:00

Okay, so these pictures are about three weeks old, but since I hadn't put them up yet, I figured what the hey.

It's nice that the baby is looking more like an actual fetus and less like a cheese doodle (which, incidentally, is what we've been calling it - "Doodle.")

I won't have the ultrasound that everybody's interested in - the one that determines the sex - until October, so my four loyal readers will have to wait a few more weeks for that information, I'm afraid.

Everything went very smoothly - this ultrasound was looking at the brain and the spinal cord to check for defects like spina bifida - and the baby looks completely normal thus far. I'm not considered a "high risk" pregnancy because I'm 33 (for a few more days!) and will be 34 when the baby is due. Once you're 35, that's the magic cut-off date when you're considered "high risk," for some reason. Like so many things in life, the magic age when you're suddenly deemed qualified for something (to vote, to drink alcohol, unknowingly put your fetus at risk for Down Syndrome) is pretty damned arbitrary.

I love this close-up of the baby's head. That swirly thing in front of the baby's face is not, in fact, the umbilical cord, although it does kind of look like that. It's the baby's two hands held up right in front of his/her face.

There were a couple times during the exam when it looked like the baby was trying to get his/her thumb or hand into his/her mouth, which was pretty cool to see. It's amazing how early they start making voluntary movements like that.

Also, look at the schnozz! This time around the kid definitely got Kevin's nose.

Alrighty, that's all I got for now.

Thanks for reading.

Don't you know which clothes even fit me?

2008-08-26T09:32:00.007-04:00

In which post I try to link disparate topics and sum up the past few weeks without having any reliable segues whatsoever.

Alllllllrighty then.

So: We went to Canada for a week, stopping along the way (okay, so it wasn't really along the way so much as it was a giant detour) in Boston to visit friends we hadn't seen since we'd moved last year. We tried to cram too much into our 24-hour visit to Beantown, and so left ourselves feeling rushed and almost as if we hadn't really seen much of our friends. But, short as it was, it was great to see everyone, and it did make me a bit nostalgic for Boston. And god, how I wish we had had the GPS when we lived there. It would have saved many hours and tears.

Then, we drove to Canada. Or, to be more accurate, we drove as far as we could and stopped to spend the night in Utica, New York because we were tired and the drive that should have taken two hours on the Mass Pike instead took four.

(Note: When you are road-tripping with a pregnant woman and a recently potty-trained toddler, your bathroom stop quota will rise not linearly, as you might expect, but exponentially, since no one in the car ever has to pee at the same time and all sudden urges to pee must be treated as emergencies.)

We got to Alan and Kathleen's house on Charleston Lake in Ontario the next day around lunchtime and hung out for a few hours, and then KB turned around and drove BACK to Syracuse for a second interview there and a first interview in Rochester. So he was basically working the first two days of our vacation week, and since I was stuck in the house all day with Nolan, I was working too. (I think I need to get better at communicating my expectations to people - I was sort of envisioning, "Ah, vacation! Relaxing on the porch with a trashy magazine and a glass of iced tea! Maybe KB and I can get a date night in!" and instead it was more like being at home, except without any of the familiar resources of home like the library and the car.) We definitely did have some good times later in the week - going out on Alan's boat and going to the beach, that kind of stuff, but then we had a

MAJOR TRAGEDY. Well, okay, it was, in retrospect, more of a minor tragedy, but it was horrific at the time. We were going to the beach with Kathleen and her grandson Duncan, who is 4 (and a younger brother to Alexander, 5, so he delighted in having someone younger to play with [read: boss around], and Nolan was thrilled to try and keep up with him). We had just parked the car and gotten to the beach and were walking along to a picnic table (when I say "beach" you have to picture a forest-y rocky hilly weedy lakeside beach, not a big open sandy ocean beach) when Nolan slipped on a rock and hit his mouth. Big-time. On the rock. Screaming, bloody, wailing horrible horrible-ness. When we finally got him calmed down enough to look in his mouth, one of his two front teeth was chipped and the other was at a wonky angle. We didn't know what to do. We're in the middle of rural Ontario, Canada, and our son had some apparently disfiguring damage to his mouth. Kathleen told us about a dentist she'd gone to in this tiny neighboring town, so we decided to try there and see if they'd take us as an emergency. So we drove for about 35 of the longest minutes of my life with Nolan wailing the whole way, "I don't wanna go to the doctor! I don't wanna go!" and me sitting in the backseat trying to comfort him.

But when we did get there (and I gotta be honest, the town looked like a shithole) the dentist was great. Nolan totally calmed down and she was very good with him. She gently took a look and cleaned his mouth a bit, and then we had an x-ray taken. She said it didn't look like the tooth's root was broken, so it probably won't die, but it will be crooked (and may possibly discolor) until his baby teeth fall out when he's six or seven. She said the only big problem will be if the jawbone ankyloses around the injured tooth, which will make it hard if not impossible for the adult tooth to push its way out, so if that happens we may have to have it extracted.

So we left the dentist's office with a prescription for ice cream and popsicles to reduce the swelling (the first time in my life I've ever gotten THAT from a dentist) and a recommendation to check in with our regular dentist when we got home. (And a bill for $139.95. For everything. Emergency exam, x-rays, everything. Thank you, Canadian healthcare!) I looked like an extra from a horror film, because I had blood all down my shoulder and back from holding Nolan when he was screming.

But, he's okay. On the whole, it wasn't such a MAJOR tragedy. It was very scary and upsetting and I felt like a lousy mother for not protecting my kid, but overall, everything's fine. KB says the crooked tooth will give him character, maybe it will make him look like a kid other kids won't want to mess with. I think it makes him look like Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel, but at least it will only be until he's six. Or seven.

And we did get in one non-horrific trip to the beach the next day where we re-visited what we dubbed The Rock Of Doom, complete with Nolan-contributed bloodstain on it. We had some swimming lessons with Kathleen and some boating with Alan and some kayaking around their little bay, disturbing the turtles, and then it was time to come home.

So that was our trip to Canada.

Note the lack of segues.

Maternity Clothes 2: Electric Boogaloo

In other news, I have had to drag my giant Rubbermaid bin of maternity clothes out of storage, as none of my regular clothes are fitting properly anymore. I've been using the rubber band around the buttonhole trick for a couple weeks now, but I guess it's time to give in. I don't even really have a belly yet, it's just that my waist seems to have decided not to exist any longer. It also feels as though this is happening a LOT sooner than it did last time around, but at least I'm able to resurrect some clothes from storage rather than being completely unprepared. Some of the leftovers are going to be completely useless, of course, since this baby will be in a totally different season than Nolan was - I'm gonna need a lot more big-belly warm clothes for December and January. But I was generously given a huge stash of leftover maternity clothes from my friend Sonya, who had her new baby Paul in July. She's worn them through two pregnancies and is like, "Get them outta here! I'm never wearing them again!" so I was the lucky recipient there.

Sadly, Sonya and Ben and Spencer and Paul have moved to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. (Sadly for us, not for them.) They are starting their new life there where Ben is a professor at Gettysburg College and Sonya will be starting in a private medical practice. Nolan will miss Spencer, I know, and I will miss their company big-time. The last time we saw Spencer Nolan was having a fit of pique and refused to give him a hug goodbye, which just served to remind me how in-the-moment kids are compared to adults. Ben and I are like, "Nolan, give him a hug! You're not going to see Spencer again for a long time!" and Nolan's like, "Whatever." To him, it was just another day playing with Spencer, and if he didn't feel like giving him a hug, he wasn't going to give him a hug, god dammit. Future be damned.

All right, I gotta stop now. I started this post over a week ago but Blogger kept crashing and refusing to save and I had to keep starting over until I quit in a fit of frustration (gee, I wonder where Nolan gets it) and now it's SEPTEMBER and I need to write about pre-school and Kathy our Chinese babysitter and "Hair" and that's just too much for one entry. More later.

Thanks for reading.

(Also, can I just say that in the Clash song from which this post takes its title, I love how, even though they are all punk and anti-establishment and revolutionary, et cetera, they still manage to use correct grammar in the line "Exactly whom I'm supposed to be..." That's just so British and awesome.

Okay then. Carry on.)

Long and dark, shiny and black

2008-08-05T11:07:00.003-04:00

So believe it or not, KB and my mom and aunt and I went to see Bruce Springsteen play at Giants Stadium on Thursday night last week.

I've never really considered myself a Springsteen "fan," although I can certainly sing along to plenty of his songs, and I've never had any special antipathy towards him, either (like I do towards, say, Rod Stewart). I've never owned any of his albums myself, but both KB and my mom have a lot of them, so I've listened to plenty of his music and become, if not exactly a fan, then an appreciative listener. He has a sort of workman-like quality to his music - no frills, no fancy effects or over-produced noise, just basic, instrument-based rock and roll. His earlier albums are especially classic, and there's a quality of street poetry to his lyrics that reminds me of Tom Waits in a way.

So last December, my mom mentioned that she'd like to see him play and if she got us tickets would we be interested in going? And I was like, "Oh, okay. Sure. I know KB will want to go." So we got our $80 nosebleed tickets and I forgot all about it for six months. And when Thursday night rolled around, I can't really say I was all that jazzed about going - I'm still feeling pretty tired from the placentasmithing and I was coming down with a cold (which I'm just now getting over, thankfully, but of course KB has it now), so the prospect of driving up the Turnpike, standing up and screaming for three hours and getting home at one in the morning wasn't exactly floating my boat.

But boy, am I glad we went. The man knows how to put on a show, even when you're so high up he appears to be 1/8 inch tall and you have to look at the Jumbotron to see what the heck is going on. He's gotta be pushing 60, right? I mean, he and most of his band (for it was the full-on E Street Band Experience) have been making music for like, 40 years or something crazy like that. And he (and all of them) just so genuinely seemed to be enjoying himself, just playing music and having a good time. And they just powered through them! He didn't stop for a lot of stage patter, there were no "We're gonna take a short break" announcements - they played nonstop pretty much the entire three and a half hour show. It was pretty impressive.

He did kind of milk the New Jersey thing a bit - apparently this was the last time he'll ever play at Giants Stadium (they're tearing it down and building a new stadium 50 feet away. Ah, progress.) and he did a lot of "It's great to be home in New Jersey!" kind of stuff, but the crowd ate it up. It's funny, there seems to be a certain level of irony inherent in many of his songs, and I think it's fair to say a large part of the crowd was kind of oblivious to that darker layer of his stuff. Kind of like when Ronald Reagan wanted to use "Born in the USA" as his campaign song, and Bruce turned him down - Reagan didn't get the whole bleak, disaffected thing that song has going on. Ronnie heard the fist-pumping "Booooooooorn in the USAAAAA!" chorus and thought he could ride that wave, never mind that the lyrics are about a man who's been used and abused by his country. So there were a lot of T-shirt and Crocs-wearing, pot-smoking good old boys in the audience who didn't quite get the, how shall I say, deeper aspects of the music.

(It took me a while to realize that people in the stands were not, in fact, booing him throughout the show. They were yelling "Bruuuuuuuuuuuce!" I would hear all this booing and be like, "What's the problem, people? Let him play "Brilliant Disguise" if he wants to!" until I realized what was happening. Duh.)

Apparently, the band have a repertoire of 250 songs that they can choose from at any given show, and they take requests from the audience - you have to hold up a sign with the song you want on it, and he walks around and takes the signs from people and brings them back to the band and they all go through them and pick out which ones they want to play. So it was a nice mix of what they wanted to do and what the audience wanted to hear.

And he did play the one song I wanted to hear, which was "Rosalita." I love that song. We were talking about it before the show, what songs would we really want to hear, and when I said "Rosalita" my mom was like, "Oh, don't count on it. It's rare for them to play that one, apparently." (She watched the 60 minutes special with Bruce on Sunday, so she was the authority.) But it was the final song of the show! It was awesome.

And we didn't get home at one in the morning. We got home at three in the morning. There was a propane tractor-trailer overturned at exit 16W on the Turnpike (which is where the Meadowlands is) so everyone was late getting to the concert. It was supposed to start at 7:30, started instead at 9:30, and he played, including encores, until one in the morning. And I stupidly wore brand-new (cheap) sneakers and got blisters from walking from BFE (where we parked) to the stadium and back.

And I'm STILL glad we went. The man is a class act, all the way.

Thanks for reading.

Have you come to raise the dead?

2008-07-28T10:53:00.002-04:00

I blame Rose.

She invited me to join Facebook, the pervasive social-networking whathaveyou that seems to be all the rage with the young'uns these days, with the tempting phrase (and I quote) "Dru and I are on this, Joy. Come to the dark side."

So I joined, figuring it would be just like Friendster or one of those other faddy things that I would be interested in for a few days and then give up on.

But no! It has been...actually, quite good. Time-consuming, but good. I hate filling out all those personal information questionnaires that these sites always seem to have, where you have to concisely sum up your entire being, personality, life, interests, beliefs, pants size, astrological sign, height, weight, sexual preference, et cetera. Who can do that in a few paragraphs?

Initially I figured it would be a way to keep in touch with my legions of cousins, since they are members of the aforementioned "young'uns" demographic, and while it has served that purpose admirably well, it has also gotten me back in touch with tons of other people, from as long ago as high school and college all the way through LA and NYC and up to Boston. It's pretty nice to see those familiar faces and find out about what's going on in their lives. Some friends you don't mean to lose track of and are immensely happy to hear from when you do get back in touch...

Number one among them...Janet! YAY, Janet!

I know the four of you who read this thing know which Janet I am talking about and need no further information, but should you like to be nosy and find out about her life (does it even count as being nosy anymore when we all put our lives up on the internet for everyone to see?) she can be found at mrs-swank.livejournal.com.

We caught up on the phone this past Saturday, and I can't tell you how comforting it is to know that out there in Wisconsin is someone who understands why leaving an answering machine message consisting only of Homer Simpson's thought process ("Dental plan!" "Lisa needs braces..." "Dental plan!" "Lisa needs braces...") is an act of purest hilarity.

Yay.

Thanks for reading.

Inside you the time moves and she don't fade

2008-07-20T14:07:00.002-04:00

Well, we had the first ultrasound on Friday (after much wrangling with our crappy insurance company over whether or not they would cover a first-trimester ultrasound) to pinpoint the size and age of the embryo, because my OB wasn't sure after the oh-so-fun manual exam and my periods were irregular before we conceived, which means it's hard to narrow down the due date. TMI, you say? Sorry. So, the ultrasound:

The day we had it done (Friday the 18th) the embryo measured a size consistent with it's being 7 weeks 5 days old, which means I'm a little farther along than we initially thought. Which is good, because it means this wretched period of all-encompassing fatigue and pervasive nausea will come to an end earlier! Woo-hoo!

For those of you who, like me, are having trouble visualing just what the heck is in those pictures, here is a photo of an embryo of the same age:

It's mostly head at this point, as you can see.

That little round ball to the right side of the ultrasound photos is the yolk sac (not pictured in the photo), which will soon become detached as it ceases to serve its purpose (which was to generate new blood cells - that function is being taken over by the liver and the bone marrow).

Kind of freakish, isn't it? Did you even know human beings had yolk sacs?

It was nice to get the ultrasound, though. I've got the symptoms and the positive pregnancy test and all that, but it's still great to see the little sprout on the screen to confirm that all is well. (And that there's only one in there. Which there is. Whew.) We got to see the little heart going wubbity wubbity wubbity, which brought an involuntary tear to my eye.

It's pretty damn strange to have another living creature incubating inside you, even one that you made yourself and greatly desire - I think that's why there are so many horror and sci-fi films that directly or indirectly reference that fear of the alien creature inside of us.

For (an obvious) example, the movie Alien. What could be more explicit than the worm-like chest burster literally tearing someone apart as it makes its way into the world? How many women have had that nightmare in the days before they give birth? And in the third installment, when Ripley realizes she's been implanted and throws herself into the big steaming vat of molten metal, the chest-burster tries to escape and she clutches it to herself in an overtly maternal gesture. Perhaps the aliens (or the pursuit and attempted elimination of them) are Ripley's substitute for children - I think she has a daughter back on Earth (it's been awhile since I've seen the films) but she's in hypersleep so long that her daughter has already grown old and died.

In any case, the H.R. Giger designs for the first Alien (or "xenomorph" as they seem to be referred to in much of the online fan sites I've been browsing through) are strikingly similar to some early embryonic photos I've found. Although Giger always said he didn't get any inspiration from naturally occuring animals, the similarity is still there, and is enough to make you think, "Just what exactly is this thing growing inside me?"

(For those of you who can't tell, the TOP photo is the Xenomorph...)

Or take The Fly, for another example (the 1986 version, that is, starring Ebony's favorite jazz musician boyfriend). The scene where Geena Davis is having a nightmare about her pregnancy with Jeff Goldblum's increasingly bizarre-acting Brundle(fly). She has a horrific labor and basically gives birth to a giant maggot, whereupon Brundlefly crashes in through the window and steals the little grub away. Although the scene doesn't actually occur in the reality of the film (she's dreaming), it is potent imagery nonetheless. What exactly happens when you combine two creatures' DNA to make a third creature? And how do you know there won't be some mistakes along the way?

I could go on and on, I suppose. Rosemary's Baby. The Omen. (The 1976 one with Gregory Peck, that is.) It seems to be a common theme in horror/sci-fi, perhaps because pregnancy is such a common occurrence in the world, and there are millions of parents and soon-to-be parents out there going, "What the hell is going to happen to us now? What are we bringing into the world?"

Or maybe it's just me, watching too many movies, as usual.

Thanks for reading.

There never seems to be enough time to do the things you want to do (once you find them)

2008-07-14T10:23:00.002-04:00

No, no, I didn't fall in a ditch. I am perfectly fine, other than the simmering nausea and bone-withering tiredness.

I've just been taking every opportunity I can to nap, and that has seriously cut into my blogging time. And my fiddle-practicing time. And my reading time. I think I'd rather nap than do just about anything else these days.

But, thankfully, this only lasts another month or so (or it did last time) and then we'll be on to the second trimester when I'll hopefully feel much better.

Thanks for reading.

Brass monkey junkie, that funky monkey

2008-06-30T16:33:00.004-04:00

Did I forget to mention that I purchased some monkey puzzle tree seeds off Ebay and planted them? I did? Typical.

Well, they've sprouted. Or rather, four out of five have sprouted. It took about six weeks for them to do so, during which they just sat there, inert (or so it seemed) while I wondered if I had just blown 12 dollars on duds. But now they are actually showing signs of growth, which makes me happy.

I have no idea if they will grow successfully here, but I think they're just the coolest-looking trees, so I'm willing to give it a try. Of course, I'll be leaving them in their little pots for the time being, as I have no idea yet if we're going to be staying in Princeton or moving on. Apparently, they've very slow-growing trees, so hopefully I'll be able to cart them around for a while without having to commit to a planting spot.

We first saw a monkey puzzle tree at the Barnes Foundation, an art museum with extensive gardens in Philadelphia. While we (KB, my brother Kevin and I) were walking around the arboretum we saw this tree that looked like an escapee from a Dr. Seuss book, and when we read the little identification card it said, "Monkey Puzzle Tree." I had this faint recollection of reading an Agatha Christie novel as a teenager - something about Hercule Poirot approving of monkey puzzles because they didn't shed their leaves - and wondering what the heck a monkey puzzle tree was. And then there one was in front of me. They had trimmed it to emphasize its Seussian qualities, and it was really quite striking (I wish they had a picture of that specific tree on their web site, but of course they don't and I didn't have my camera with me when we went.)

So now I am the proud owner of four monkey puzzle seedlings and one inert seed (although it may yet sprout - apparently they can take up to two months). We'll see what happens!

Thanks for reading.

I said Ouch! This really hurts!

2008-06-28T21:43:00.003-04:00

Well, the freaking out has commenced, of course.

I found out about the pregnancy much earlier this time than I did with Nolan (I think - I really can't remember exactly.) I just knew something was up and took the test much earlier, whereas before it was a definite surprise situation. And now since I'm feeling pretty okay and normal, other than some tiredness, I'm starting to worry that something is wrong with this pregnany. People always tell you that if you feel bad (nauseous, exhausted, irritable) when you're in the first trimester it's actually a GOOD thing, because it means the hormones are flowing and your body is doing all the things it's supposed to be doing - building a placenta, storing up energy, et cetera. So of course my emotional brain is ignoring the known fact that it's really early yet and is instead freaking out about the lack of sickness.

In other words, I'm feeling bad because I don't feel bad. Brilliant!

Some couples wait to tell other people that they're pregnant just in case something does go wrong and there's a miscarriage. We tell everybody we know on the theory that, should something go wrong, we'll probably need the support and good wishes of those very same people, so why not blab now? I'm not a very competent secret keeper anyway, and I'm certainly not very good at hiding it when I'm feeling bad (as KB can testify), so why even try?

That's one of the big ironies (or perhaps, to be grammatically correct and not fall into the Alanis trap, one of the paradoxes) of early pregnancy - you feel tremendously crappy, you're constantly exhausted, cranky and nauseous, but you don't LOOK pregnant at all. There is no way for anyone who doesn't already know to tell that you're pregnant, so no one treats you any differently. All you want to do is lie down on the floor and take a nap, but everyone else around you expects you to be acting normally - handling your workload, talking intelligently in meetings, not appearing to fall into a coma periodically.

This drove me crazy early in my pregnancy with Nolan - every workday morning I would walk the mile to the T station and if I failed to get a seat on the train, it was all I could do not to crumple to the sticky floor and weep piteously. But no chivalrous man would give up his seat for me because I didn't look at all pregnant (of course, truth be told, not many men gave up their seats even when I was hugely pregnant - it was mostly sympathetic older women who had obviously been there, done that) and I didn't have the self-possesion to say "I'm pregnant. Please can I sit down?" The time when you really need the break, no one will give it to you.

So that's the reasoning behind my tell-everyone-now strategy: Maybe I'll get some sympathy. It's all about me. (Actually, it might get KB some sympathy, too. Maybe I'll start marketing T-shirts: "I'm in my first trimester. Pity my husband.")

Of course, since I haven't started having any morning sickness yet and am torturing myself with the possibility that I've already miscarried and just haven't realized it, I can now also feel guilty (in this purely hypothetical future situation) for putting everyone on red alert, garnering sympathy and then failing to actually, you know, have a baby.

I can't win.

(Also, in case you didn't know, the reason you get so friggin' tired [besides the fact that you're growing a brand-new entire human being in your body] when you're busy placentasmithing: By the end of pregnancy, the placenta, on average, weighs between 2 and 3 pounds. That might not sound too impressive, but just you try spontaneously generating 3 pounds worth of blood vessels and connective tissue, and see how you fare.)

Thanks for reading.

Nausea, oh, nausea, and we're gone

2008-06-24T09:32:00.002-04:00

Oh my.

(As KB said when I told him, "That didn't take long.")

I'm glad we had our Saturday night of sushi and beer before I found out.

Thanks for reading.

Sleep a lot, eat a lot, brush 'em like crazy

2008-06-20T07:41:00.007-04:00

Hey hey! We got vegetables!

I noticed the first peas tentatively showing their faces a few days ago:

On Tuesday I coerced Nolan into going out into the garden to check out the peas, and we picked the first one!
(I love that picture - I love how solemn he looks, like he senses the gravity of the occasion: The First Pea From Our Garden.) Then, of course, we ate it:

Nolan does what he likes to do when he eats pea pods, which is open it up and eat all the peas inside one by one, then crunch the whole pod into his mouth and eat that. (Isn't that required when you're a kid? Some sort of kiddie by-law? "Article 9, Section b: Any child coming into possession of that vegetable commonly known as a pea pod shall hereby be compelled to split open said pea pod by insertion of the thumb along the seam and consume, one by one, all the individual peas contained in said pod. Consumption of the pod itself is optional and left to the gustatory inclination of the individual.")

So we should have lots more peas coming soon:
And the green beans and tomatoes have also started to get flowers, finally, so I'm expecting those to start fruiting (vegetabling?) soon.

Now I just have to figure out what exactly I'm going to do with all these vegetables. I really have no big plans, food-wise, so I guess I'd better bone up on my tomato/pea/green bean recipes. I'm going to make some Dilly Beans from the green beans (according, of course, to my mother-in-law's great recipe) which are basically like pickles, only with beans instead of cucumbers. They are excellent and addictive. But I only have twelve canning jars, which I have a feeling is going to account for about 1/3 of my bean harvest, so I'd better do some research.

Thanks for reading.

Party time! Excellent!

2008-06-17T10:56:00.008-04:00

So Nolan's party was last weekend, and it all went swimmingly. Literally. It was ungodly hot, unfortunately, and the humidity was about 99.999%, but the family and friends rallied quite well, much food was consumed and we had a good time.

I was running around like a crazy person most of the time (as opposed to my usual sanguine self) so I didn't get a whole lot of photos. Alas. But here's what I got:

Nolan asked for cupcakes instead of a regular birthday cake this year, so I made him two kinds: Vanilla cupcakes with chocolate frosting and chocolate cupcakes with cream cheese frosting. My mom found this cupcake display thingee at one of those humungous discount party supply stores, so I set them up on that and got some candles that spell out "Happy Birthday" to stick in the cupcakes. Of course, I have no photo of us singing and Nolan blowing out the candles, because I was holding him at the time. Alas.

Here Nolan is playing with some of his party guests, including cousin Nathan, whose 1st birthday party we went to last month. I only have this photo because my stepmother, who owns the exact same model camera that I do, accidentally picked up mine instead of hers and took a few shots with it. Which was fine with me, as now I have some pictures of actual party action. Note the highly realistic lobster bath toy my mom is holding. We plan to take that sucker to the community pool this summer.

Cut to: opening the gifts.

As you can see, he really scored, loot-wise. I think I'm going to sneakily spirit away a percentage of the toys and hide them in a closet, then see if he notices. If he doesn't then I can sort of portion them out later in the year, like for long car trips or plane trips for the novelty effect. I really need to go through all of his toys anyway and cull the ones that are no longer age-appropriate.

Opening a luau-themed book and a hawaiian shirt from Cool Aunt Jen. (Nolan's reaction to all clothes-related presents was pretty much the same: complete indifference. He also got a pair of socks from Grandma and Pappy that were tossed aside like so much discarded wrapping paper.)

Opening a kid's play tent from Auntie Erica and Uncle Jeffery. This was a big hit - because what you really want on a 100-plus degree day is a small structure you can crawl into to really concentrate the heat and humidity. Your own personal sweat lodge, really.

Thankfully, Pappy and Uncle Kevin set it up right away so Nolan and Nathan could commence sweating in earnest!

And that's about all I got.

Thanks for reading.

We'll eat a lot of broccoli and drink a lot of beer

2008-06-07T22:56:00.001-04:00

Happy 3rd birthday, Pooter Man! I love you more each day.

Love,
Mommy

The yard is nothing but a fence; the sun just hurts our eyes

2008-06-04T09:15:00.021-04:00

On this rainy Wednesday I thought I'd share some garden pix with y'all, as promised, since I can't be outside working in said garden at the moment. (I took these a week ago.)

This is the kitchen garden, looking out from the barn-style doors on the back end of the garage. The house is on the left (duh) and the windows you see are the guest bedroom and the master bedroom and master bath. The open gate at the end goes out into the back yard. As you can see, the near end is a patio with paver stones, and then there are more pavers that make a path through the center of the garden (with a little island right in the center). The whole thing is fenced in, which is nice for keeping the deer out (we do see them, even in the middle of Princeton as we are).

This is the 180 degree opposite view, looking from the gate back towards the garage and the house. To the right are all the tomatoes - some in containers and some right in the ground. We (meaning KB's mom and I) weren't sure about the soil quality so we fudged by putting some in containers. This way we'll be sure to get some good tomatoes even if the ones that went in the ground don't make it. Also on the right you can see the potting bench - that was left here by the previous owners, along with lots of tools and empty pots, which is nice.

Here you can see what's behind the open garage door. Below the light on the left side of the frame is a clematis vine that was also left here by the previous owners (I wouldn't have known what the heck it was if Ann hadn't identified it for me). The window you see is the kitchen window right above the sink - I put the daisies in the window boxes. On the ground underneath are some containers with maple tree seedlings that I brought with us from Quincy - I wanted to put them in the ground wherever we settled, so we'd have a little piece of our first house with us. Guess I may have to wait and see before I do anything with them now! There are also a couple containers of herbs - sage and mint, which I understand (again, from Ann) you shouldn't put in the ground because they are aggressive and will take over your garden.

Speaking of herbs, this is the little island in the middle of the garden that I've christened Herb Island, seeing as how it consists solely of herbs. (I'm clever like that.) I've got rosemary right in the center, and then basil, parsley, lemon thyme, plain thyme, and cilantro all around it. Since I took this picture one of the cilantro plants bit the dust, leaving one survivor (but that one seems pretty healthy - although it's flowering - is that a good thing? If I want to use the leaves? Should I pinch the flowers off? I dunno.)

This is the right side of the patio - you can't really see it very well, but at the bottom of the frame there's a table there which, once I clean off all the accumulated gardening crap, we can use to have coffee or whatever out here in the mornings. The big container on the left has three jalapeno pepper plants in it, which seem to be doing well. The big plant is another leftover, which we believe (i.e., we have no real idea) is another variety of clematis - the woody portion of the plant is intertwined with the lattice of the fence, so it can't really be moved without hurting the plant.

These are a couple close-ups of that mystery plant showing the crazy flowers and an enterprising spider who decided to build his home there. Which is fine. We like spiders. They eat the bad bugs.

This is the left side of the garden under the windows - in front are a row of marigolds, which supposedly are good for repelling squirrels and bunnies and other critters (both of which we have in abundance in our yard) and in the back are green beans and peas that I grew from seeds in that little garden kit.

And speaking of spiders, here's a big daddy long-legs on one of the green beans. I have no idea if daddy long-legs count as spiders in the gardening sense (meaning they're good because they eat other bugs) but I'm going to leave this guy be, I think. The beans and peas seem to be doing well so far, so what the hey.

On the right, the lettuce seedlings awaiting transfer (which, a week later now, are HUGE and need to be planted!) and on the left, the tomato seedlings which I'm letting gather their strength (two of these have also bit the big one since the pictures were taken). Both of these I grew from seeds - the other tomatoes we cheated and bought as plants from the garden store. So we'll see how they do compared to each other.

And here's the above-mentioned tomatoes. The one in the back on the right is a volunteer, meaning he just showed up with all the other weeds that were in the ground already this spring. I decided to give him a chance, and didn't yank him out. As long as he doesn't give the other tomatoes any gross bugs, he can stay.

Alrighty, that's all for now. Lots more garden stuff to discuss, but this is enough pix for one post.

Thanks for reading.

I get up again, over and over

2008-06-02T19:10:00.002-04:00

So here we go again; the interviews, the real estate tours, the lists of pros and cons about each city, the endless debates, blah blah blah. All the stuff I thought (or hoped) we were done with, all the things I felt such relief last year that we'd NEVER HAVE TO DO AGAIN...yes. We're doing them again.

Tomorrow we drive up to Valhalla for KB to interview (all I can think is, "Valhalla? Isn't that where Thor and Freja and Wotan and all those crazy Norse gods hang out?" and so that Led Zeppelin song that has the lyric, "Hammer of the gods" is stuck in my head. I don't even know which song it is; it's the one that goes "We come from the land of the ice and snow..." et cetera.) at the hospital there; Nolan and I will be heading down to Manhattan to Fort Tryon park to hang out.

Then Wednesday KB has another interview at another place right near where my grandparents used to live, and then Thursday he has ANOTHER one at a hospital in New Brunswick. He has a week of vacation this week, thankfully, so we have time to do all these interviews.

I know if I were a more optimistic person I might be excited about the possibility of seeing new places, meeting new people, blah blah blah, but I'm just not. I'm terrified at the thought of having to move again and start all over again.

I think I thought that if I just wanted this (this being Princeton) to work out badly enough, it would. Or rather, it didn't even occur to me that it might now work out - that's how much I wanted it to. My brain refused to even entertain the possibility that things might not work out here. And we see how well that turned out. Wanting something to be true does not make it true.

It's weird how I vacillate. Some days I'm like, "Ah, what's the big deal? We still have each other, we're all healthy, we're (relatively) young, KB's a friggin doctor, it's not like we're going to starve. What am I whining about? We'll land on our feet." and other days I just freak myself out hyperventilating about moving and selling the house and finding new doctors, dentists, dry cleaners, grocery stores, preschools, violin teachers, FRIENDS, et cetera. I guess I need to get better at this process, because who knows? It could happen again.

So anyway. Whine, moan, complain.

What else? Nolan is potty learning (that's right, kids, they don't call it potty "training" anymore) and doing surprisingly well. We started trying to motivate him with a calendar on the wall that he got to put stars on. One star for peeing in the potty, two stars for pooping. That lasted about four days, until he realized that he wasn't really GETTING anything. So now he gets candy. We just cut straight to the bribery. If he produces anything in the potty, he gets to pick either six M&Ms or one Hershey's kiss. He wears either Lightning McQueen or Elmo big-boy underpants (Ha! I initially typed "big-goy" underpants - I guess they're that, too!) and those seem to be an additional motivation for him. We have to bring the potty with us EVERYWHERE, and for long car trips and quiet time we wear pull-ups.

So that's exciting. For us. And pretty much no one else in the known universe.

And his birthday is coming up fast! Three years old, believe it or not. (By the way, if any of y'all sent us a gift for Nolan off his Amazon wish list, could you let me know? We got a couple things in the mail with no sender listed (other than Amazon) and no invoice included in the box, so we have no idea who they're from.) We're having a par-tay on Sunday, so I will be sure to put up some new photos from that shindig next week.

All right, that's all I got. Further bulletins as events warrant.

Thanks for reading.

There ain't too much sadder than the tears of a clown (when there's no one around)

2008-05-20T13:40:00.002-04:00

KB's mom left this morning. Nolan and I drove her to the Newark airport and dropped her off, and she is even as I type winging her way across the country back to the Bay.

I am bereft. I suppose I should feel lucky that I get along so well with my mother-in-law, and I do, but right now I'm feeling sorry for myself at losing my wing man. She's like a combination mom/friend/sage/mentor/protector figure in my life, and it's been a great two weeks having her here. She has endless patience for Nolan and all his foibles, and is always willing to get him when he wakes up, or play with him when he wants to play, or just generally take the pressure off of me being the only adult at home all day.

She loves to cook, and we always eat well while she says with us. Plus she's so considerate - pretty much every morning during her visit she's unload the clean dishes from the dishwasher, and just this morning when she was making herself a turkey sandwich for the flight home, she made an extra one, wrapped it in Saran and stuck in the fridge for me to eat later.

She just knitted another sweater/hat combo for Nolan, this time in a pretty teal blue and gray pattern that he looks adorable in, so he's all set for this winter. Nolan got so used to having her here - the first thing he said when we got home from dropping her off was "Where's Grandmama?" as if he expected her to be waiting for us even after we just watched her walk into the airport an hour before. Sigh.

Plus, she's like the greatest gardening guru of all time. She's been instrumental in planning where to put things and deciding what plants to buy, so any success we have with our beans, peas, tomatos and herbs will be mostly to her credit. I wish I had taken a "before" photo of the garden (although the camera was dead) so you could see how much it has improved. I'm going to take some extensive photos of the house (one day, when it stops raining every day) and I'll get the garden in there so you can see how much we've done.

So I am sad.

Thanks for reading.

I can see for miles and miles

2008-05-12T09:36:00.004-04:00

Well, this has been a shitty weekend, both literally and figuratively.

On Thursday night, KB was told that the practice won't be offering him a partnership. In other words, he needs to find another job. The reasons are complicated, but a lot of it boils down to the practice putting their business interests before their employee (KB)'s interests. In some ways, it's a relief, as this possibility has been hanging over us since about mid-March, and now that the proverbial sword of Damocles has dropped, we at least know what the hell's going on. Hell being the key word there.

All of the things I though we had going for us here in Princeton - stability, permanence, a feeling of finally being "home," have turned out to be mere chimeras, like desert mirages that disappear as you get close. We stupidly, and mostly at my urging, just bought a house three months ago, because I was sure things would work out here, and now we may be in the position of having to sell the place six months after buying it. Not a smart idea even in a robust real estate market, much less in the kind of market the U.S. is in right now.

We don't know where we'll be going next - we have until December to find something else - and we don't necessarily have to pull up stakes and move across the country. The non-compete clause in KB's contract only specifies that he not work within a 10-mile radius of any of the current group's sites, so that means we could conceivably still live here while KB commutes to another position.

I'm trying to take the long view - some day we'll look back at this and go "Whew." KB was actually starting to get quite unhappy with his workload with this group - he was doing a lot of the modalities and specialties he's not as well trained in and doesn't like as much (mammo, nucs, ultrasound) and didn't get to do much of the ones he really likes and is well-trained in (musculoskeletal, body-imaging, cross-sectional), so I think he actually is a bit relieved. I can't really blame the group, either (although I'm plenty angry with them) since they have to, as a business entity, put their business interests first. But it's still shitty.

AND speaking of shitty (nice blend, Fozzie, thank you, Fozzie!) I spent the entire weekend either in bed moaning or on the toilet moaning with some intestinal virus I mysteriously contracted while no one else in the family has (thank god for small favors). I'm not sure if it was a psychosomatic reaction to the news (not really likely, but the timing seemed more than coincidental) or what, but suffice to say, it was ugly. I just started feeling better yesterday (Mother's Day) and am almost back to normal today. Yecccch. Too much sharing, I know, but I just had to convey the complete well of blackness that we'd fallen into this last few days, and that was certainly a big part of it for me.

Sigh.

Thankfully, KB's mom is here staying with us for another week - she's been a godsend. She took Nolan all day Friday while I lay in bed sobbing and writhing. I can't imagine what it would have been like had she not been here. That's one of the good things about being married - you get to co-opt your spouse's family members as your own, and when you're sick, nothing helps like having a mom around.

And then, to complete the trifecta of crappiness (not literally) we had a wind-and-rain storm last night and one of the mostly dead trees ("I'm not dead yet!") in the back fell over on the house. At 3:12 a.m. Scared the crap out of me and KB, but nobody else woke up and no damage was done (except to the tree), so it could have been worse.

And so could all of this, really. This isn't the worst thing that could happen in our lives, not by a long shot, (I know one person in particular out there who knows about the worst thing happening, but that's her story, not mine, and I know she'll tell it, and tell it well, when she's good and goddamn ready) and we'll get through it and figure things out. And then there's that whole thing about being stronger at the broken places.* But it sure hurts while you're healing.

Thanks for reading.

*"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are stronger at the broken places." - Ernest Hemingway.

With a knick-knack paddywhack

2008-04-28T09:59:00.003-04:00

Well, we've been to Washington and back, and it was a great vacation, but it's always so hard to come back to real life once you've had a vacation. Erica and El Jefe were awesome hosts, cooking dinner almost every night and providing tons of distraction (bath toys! art projects! books!) for Nolan. Plus we had the whole upstairs of the house to ourselves - it was like our own little apartment in their house. We didn't do a whole heck of a lot, really. We went to the wedding of KB's friend Weissy (the ostensible purpose for the trip), and we made one other trip into Seattle to go to the Frye museum and of course Pike's Place market, but other than that we mostly hung out in Olympia. Erica and I got to have a girls' night out (which meant Nolan, KB and Jefe had a boys' night in, complete with steaks and bourbon) and it was soooooo nice to just hang out for a little while. We've been friends for over 20 years now (yipe!) and it's incredibly easy to fall back into our same rhythm of talking and laughing together. (The sparkling wine and gourmet food didn't hurt, either.) We almost didn't go out because we had all gotten sick (thank you, airplane travel) and we were kind of sniffly and sore throat-y, but again, the sparkling wine was a lifesaver. The girl-time binge made the return to Princeton a little hard for me - I'm once again reminded of my dearth of close friends here, and while I know things will get better with time and there's no rushing it, I still miss it.

So what else is going on, you ask?

Well. Our camera died, for one. The day of Weissy's wedding, right at the beginning of the ceremony. KB picked up the camera, pushed the shutter button, and it just froze, dead. So I am looking for any and all input into digital SLRs the four of you who read this blog might have for me - considering the Canon digital Rebel XTi, but willing to listen to other opinions. And that also means we have zero pictures of our trip.

And zero pictures of my seedlings, which I just planted yesterday. We had one of these indoor plant-starting kits that we, well, started before we left for WA, and while we were gone the green bean seedlings went berserk and pushed the lid off, they grew so fast. So I got the peas and the green beans in the ground yesterday, and I'm giving the tomatoes a few more days to get their strength up (and to hope the weather warms up a little) before I subject them to the same treatment. I put down chicken wire to keep the squirrels from digging up the plants (because I was told that squirrels aren't really interested in the plants themselves, they just like digging in freshly turned earth - who knew?) and think I probably killed more seedlings trying to get them through the holes in the chicken wire than the squirrels would have. Sigh. So we'll see.

Aaaaaaaand...what else?

Fiddle lessons are continuing. My teacher said something last week that really struck me, which was "Musicians are athletes of the small muscles." We were talking about the importance of practice and how there's really no shortcut or substitute for it. You have to tell your muscles the correct way to do things ("No, ring finger, for C sharp you're right next to the pinky, not the middle finger.") over and over and over again until they can do it from memory. Even if your brain can think it correctly, that doesn't mean your fingers and arms can play it correctly. So you have to commit yourself to practicing scales over and over just like a tennis player practices serves over and over. There's no other way to do it, to the chagrin of slackers like me who have a dream scenario in mind of playing in an Irish bar pick-up band but don't necessarily want to, you know, work to get to that point.

(And please, can someone explain to me why the names of the scales never have anything to do with the notes that are sharped or flatted in said scales? G major has one sharp, F#. A major has three sharps, F#, G#, and C#. Why? Why isn't a scale with only an F# called F#? I think I need to take a music theory class.)

I guess that's it for now. Nolan is good, KB is good, the weather sucks, the cats are annoying. You know, the usual.

Oh, and we still have no working washer-dryer set up. The new washing machine is installed, but the old dryer won't stack on top of it without a special stacking kit and new legs, so I've ordered those and when they come in I get to find out if KB and I can do it (stack the dryer on top of the washer and hook it up, that is) ourselves. So I'm washing clothes and hanging them on a clothesline I rigged last week. We're so eco-friendly, if not strictly by choice.

Thanks for reading.

The way I like it is the way it is

2008-04-09T14:29:00.004-04:00

I know I bitch and moan a lot about how hard it is to stay at home with Nolan, but there are certain perks to having a small child around the house.

I have now conditioned him, my own little private science experiment, to yell out, "Phone's ringing, Dude!" whenever the phone rings, which is harmless and makes me chuckle.

And I know I have mentioned previously my history of replacing song lyrics with ones suitable to my immediate situation, and that hasn't changed (I've just stopped writing about it):

The other day I was getting Nolan down from the dinner table, which involves much squirming and thrashing and whining when I'm wiping his face (for some reason wiping the hands doesn't bother him, just the face) and to distract him, I started to sing. He was slumping down in his seat, trying to maneuver his face as far away from the washcloth as possible, and I kept repeating "Sit up. C'mon, sit up. Sit up!" so of course the song that came to me was James Brown's "Sex Machine," with its call-and-response "Get up! Get on up...Get up!" structure. So I started to sing it. And lo and behold, Nolan was interested. "What's that song, Mommy?" he said. (As a side note, we have now entered that phase of toddlerhood where he's constantly asking, "What's this? What's that?" and it's not so much driving me crazy as it is wearing me down slowly, question by tedious question.)

So I put it on the stereo for his edification, and we boogied around the living room for awhile, with Nolan doing his trademark arhythmic toddler seizure/dance. We let it play while we were cleaning up after dinner and getting PJs on, then put Nolan to bed and thought nothing more of it.

Well. Our little funkmaster has now made James Brown's "70's Funk Classics" (not even a real album, as far as I know, just a re-issued collection for those of us who want the Godfather's go-to hits only*) his favorite CD. We listen to it at home, we listen to it in the car...he can't get enough. The first time he asked for it, he said, "Mommy, can we play that Brown James song?" and after I got over my giggle fit I obligingly put it on. He listened intently, and each time a song faded out, he would say, "Is there going to be more, Mommy?" and when a new song came on, he would ask, "What's this song called, Mommy?" like he's expecting a quiz at the end.

We listened to it in the car on the way over to my mom's last week to do laundry (for yea, I say unto thee: the washer, it is still kerflooey) and after shoving a load in, I came out into the living room to see Nolan boogie-ing around by himself, mumbling/singing, "Shake your money maker! Shake your money maker!" It did my heart good, I tell you.

And he hasn't gotten tired of it yet. The other night when Nolan and I were snuggling in the rocking chair in preparation for bed, he said, "Where's the bridge, Mommy?" and I was like, "Huh? What bridge?" And he said, "You know, when he says he wants to go to the bridge." (Nolan often comes up with non-sequitors where he seems to assume I can read his mind, and he'll sometimes get mad when I genuinely don't know what the hell he's talking about.) So I said, "You mean James Brown? When he says 'Take 'em to the bridge?'" (and I do my pathetic James Brown impression) and he says, "Yeah! Where's the bridge?" So then we had a whole discussion about actual, structural bridges versus musical bridges. I relayed the whole thing to KB after Nolan was tucked in, and we just shook our heads in wonder.

You got to be careful what you expose your kid to, because you never know what they'll soak up. They're like sponges, they are.

Thanks for reading.

*Although, now that I think about it, it doesn't have "I Feel Good," which I would guess is the number one most well-known James Brown song. Alas.

Say no go

2008-04-01T10:55:00.002-04:00

Whew.

I got a whopping 23 out of 50 on this song lyrics quiz by Defective Yeti's Matthew Baldwin. And now my head hurts.

See, the catch is, he lists the lyrics in alphabetical order (eliminating any repeated words, like the chorus), so even though the song might be quite easy to guess if the lyrics were in the order they're sung in, when they're alphabetical...not so much.

Some of them are actually pretty easy if you can pick out the key words - how many rock songs do you know that have the word "Scaramouche" or "mulatto" in them? - but with the order all f-ed up, songs you really should know get harder to guess. The paradoxical thing is that the shorter the list of lyrics, the harder it is to guess, because there's fewer clues to distinguish one song from another.

And the (perhaps not so) shocking thing is how similar the lyrics are from one song to another. "Baby" and its variants show up about 75% of the time, and when you throw in all the "at"s, "the"s, "be"s and "you"s, it gets damn difficult to distinguish Aerosmith from Simon and Garfunkel. Which you would think would be not too tough.

Okay. Gotta go read a book with the words in an order that MAKES SENSE.

Enjoy. Tell me your score if you do it.

Thanks for reading.

Bow down before the one you serve

2008-03-25T14:25:00.003-04:00

Fucking Sears.

Fucking "American Home Shield" home warranty.

Why is it so difficult to get anything done simply these days? Why do I have to spend so many of my precious Nolan-free minutes on the goddamn phone with a goddamn robot trying to get someone to come fix my goddamn washing machine? It's not just: "Oh, the washing machine's broken, let me call the repairman." And the repairman shows up and fixes the stupid thing.

Instead, it's: "Oh, the washing machine's broken." Let me call the home warranty place (on a Friday) and get a robot and push button after button on their voice menu before getting a live human, who then proceeds to tell me to wait for a call back. So I wait for a call back and speak to a human for 30 seconds before being transferred to Sears to talk to their robot (who at least has voice-recognition software so I can talk instead of pushing buttons). I finally speak with a Sears human and am given an appointment time five days in the future (a Tuesday), which means five days of toddler living with no laundry getting done. Then when the repairman comes he tells me he needs to order a part, and when the part arrives THEN I can call to make another appointment to effect the actual repair. Under no circumstances am I to call BEFORE the part arrives (even though there seems to be a five-day lag in appointment-getting). The part finally arrives on the following Monday (after one Thursday trip to the laundromat sans car, trying to get Nolan to walk at a pace slightly faster than a handicapped caterpillar as I push my little-old-lady grocery cart full of dirty laundry and hold his hand at the same time. That was three hours round trip, only an hour and a half of which was actual laundry-doing.) and I call to make a new appointment. I am told Tuesday afternoon from 1pm to 5pm. I am stupidly happy to get an appointment for the next day. I foolishly assume that the information given to me on the phone by a Sears rep will be accurate and go to the gym in the morning, only to miss 3 phone calls from Sears wondering where I am when my appointment was for 8-12 that morning. I call back upon returning home from the gym (going through all the robot brou-ha-ha yet again) and am told that I'll have to reschedule. I say, "I don't want to reschedule, I want my washer fixed when you told me you were going to fix it." I am transferred to a "tech repair" specialist who takes my phone number and tells me she will call the local repair routing office and have them call me. Two hours go by. No one calls. I call the main Sears number again and am forced, through gritted teeth, to once more recite my phone number and address for the robot. The customer service rep based in Manila, Phillippines tells me she cannot transfer me to anyone in the "tech repair" department because she doesn't have that capability. I tell her the previous rep did exactly that, but she persists in wanting me to reschedule instead. I am unfailingly polite - I say, "That is unacceptable. I would like my washing machine repaired today, as I was told it would be." She clearly does not know what the hell to do and ends up giving me the phone number for what she says is my local repair department. I thank her, hang up, and call the number (which does have a local area code) and, like something from a Sartre play, am connected to the same fucking robot who wants me to tell her my phone number and address. I hang up and jump up and down furiously while hissing "fucking fuckity fuckity fuck fucking fuckers" under my breath, startling the cats, but thankfully not waking up Nolan. I decide it's really not worth getting that mad and surrender to the robot. I call back one more time and get an appointment for tomorrow afternoon. From 1 to 5.

I will keep my fingers crossed. And shove one more day's laundry into the hamper.

I hate that this has me so upset, and I hate that this is the kind of thing that's making me upset these days - it's so lame. It's so 1950s housewife. I'm in pearls and a full skirt vacuuming and telling KB "Darling, the washer repair got a bit botched, I'm afraid, and so you shall have no clean hankies for work this week." Blargghg! There are more important things I could be doing with my time!

Thanks for reading. Sigh.

You mighta heard I run with a dangerous crowd

2008-03-24T11:22:00.002-04:00

How is this even possible?

This man, this smart, witty, kind, caring, gentle man...is dead.

But how does someone who's only 34 just...die? Of natural causes? He contributed to the world - he was a teacher and a writer, he inspired his students, family and friends, he gave unselfishly of himself...and now he's dead. Cancer. I can't think of any other thing to say than "It's not fair." A four-year-old's response, to be sure, but the truest one I've had.

I didn't know him well. He was a year ahead of me in high school. We were loose friends in college - we were in the same chemistry class one semester, so since we knew each other from high school we sat together and made snarky comments about the other students, the teacher, everything. And we formed a little study group. And once that semester was over, we would wave when we passed by on campus or out and about in Laramie...but that was about it.

He was one of those people that I would idly wonder about periodically through the years. I always knew he'd be successful in the traditional sense of the word - he knew what he wanted to do with his life and he had a plan for how he was going to get there (unlike me and 90% of college students, I think.) So I didn't really wonder about him like I wonder about some of my other Wyoming compatriots (E-Mul and Dru and Rose and Broc, you know I'm not talking about you here), whom I suspected might end up dead from unnatural causes, or in jail, or divorced with four kids by age 30.

No such worries with Chet. I never did get in touch with him again, never did try to find out what was going on in his life. I only know he died because the Rawlins, Wyoming grapevine is short and news travels fast along it. His life, as short as it was, had meaning and purpose. You should read his blog. And his "This I Believe" statement. And think about what you'd want to do if your life were going to end soon. Because it could, even though it's not fair.

Thanks for reading.

We will get by

2008-03-18T10:04:00.003-04:00

Introducing Nolan and Spencer as The Two Goofy Guys in..."World's Shortest Jam Session"!

(Clearly, the presence of the paparazzi made them uncomfortable.)

And here you see Nolan and Spencer discovering the harmonica. What talent! What natural musical genius! (Yes, that's the favorite Pink Shirt Nolan is wearing.)

Thanks for reading.

I got something that'll sho nuff set yo' stuff on fire

2008-03-10T09:28:00.007-04:00

We were on vacation last week. KB had taken a week off because we thought there was going to be an opportunity to see Alan and Kathleen, but that didn't work out. So instead, we stayed close to home and just did a couple little day trips.

We went to the aquarium in Camden on Tuesday afternoon, which turned out to be the perfect time to go - it was practically deserted, so Nolan had lots of running around room, plus the animals seemed very active; when Nolan and my mom and I went last summer, the hippos in the African River exhibit just sat there (not that I blame them, considering the weight they have to heft around) doing nothing, but this time they got out of the water, walked around, splashed back in, swam past the glass, etc. It was great! Alas, we forgot our actual camera, so instead we have several grainy cameraphone pictures.

We got to touch sharks (Spotted Bamboo sharks), jelly fish, sting rays (little baby ones, with the stingers removed), lobsters and shrimp. I refrained from touching the jellyfish, lobsters, and shrimp. Tempting, but no. Nolan was waaaaay into the touch tanks. Literally. We tried to roll his sleeves up, but that doesn't do much good when he's got his arm in the water up to his shoulder. KB swears Nolan had his face in the shrimp tank. (Of course, we took off his wet shirt and stuck it in a plastic bag in the diaper bag, where I forgot it until Sunday when we did laundry. Mmmmmm, stinky fermented shrimp water shirt.) The other good thing about the place being deserted was that when Nolan had his standard No Nap Today Late Afternoon Freakout, there weren't that many witnesses around. We like to have some privacy when we beat the boy.

Then I got to have some Me Time! I took the car, all by myself, and went up to Windham Mountain to snowboard for a day! Huzzah!

The Windham Mountain experience was a wee bit on the lame side, I have to say. I mean, the jones to snowboard was satisfied, so just on that alone I would say it was a good trip, but the place itself was kind of "eh." I drove up Wednesday afternoon (I got to fulfill my desire to play Vampire Weekend on a road trip! Woo-hoo!) and got to the mountain around 5, only to be told there was no night skiing on Wednesdays (something not mentioned on the web site). Waaahh! I wanted to maximize my ski-time to drive-time ratio! So I drove to my hotel thinking I would check in, get dinner, read my book and chill out. I checked in and was told that the hotel restaurant was closed on Wednesdays (also not mentioned on the website, or by the person who took my reservation over the phone). Argh. So I drove up and down the "main street" of the town of Windham looking for a restaurant that was open, and ended up in a (read "the only") diner. Which in and of itself isn't a bad thing, it was just...not what I was imagining. Then I went back to the hotel, took a bath and watched two episodes of "Ghost Hunters." (I love that show.)

I woke up at 6:30, thinking the mountain opened at 8, went down to the lobby to get my free Continental breakfast and check the conditions, only to be informed by the sign that the mountain didn't open until 9. 9 a.m.! What kind of mountain doesn't open until 9?!?! Sigh. But eventually, I got there, and then things were better.

[I don't have any pictures of myself from that day, because while I am a competent snowboarder, I am not skilled enough to take a self-portrait whilst riding, especially with my crappy cell phone camera (see above photos) or our chunky little Kodak EasyShare, which I did not bring since it would have gotten crushed the first time I fell. So instead please take this random screengrab of a dude (or possibly dudette) catching some air, and pretend it's me even though I have never gone that big in my life. Thanks.]

The conditions weren't great - mostly crunchy corduroy with occasional icy patches in the morning followed by tracked-out slush in the afternoon as the day got warmer - but I didn't really care. I was riding agin! Yay! There was hardly anybody there, so there were no lift lines to speak of. I rode the whole morning (about 9 - 12:30) with wrist guards (for falls) and without my iPod (to hear other people), just to be on the safe side. Had lunch (seven dollars for a tuna salad sandwich, eep) and mused over the lift operator (identified by his name tag as Javier from Santiago, Chile - why anyone from Chile would be working a tiny, crappy Eastern US mountain is beyond me) who asked me out of the blue, "Are you Alec's mum?" To which I said, "Uhhhh...no?" He said, "Oh, sorry sorry." And I was like, "No problem." but internally I was going, "Damn. I guess I still look like someone's mom (or mum), even while shredding."

After lunch I got my iPod out of the locker, and prepared to mellow out. One of the main reasons I love snowboarding is that it really forces you to focus on your body and what it's doing. You look down the mountain, you see the hills and the curves of the terrain and you have to simultaneously plan ahead - where to turn, what to avoid, how fast to go - but also to react quickly as things change and don't go exactly according to your plan. It's a very "in the moment" activity, and if I can hit my stride, really start carving and flying and I've got some good music playing...it's beautiful. That nagging voice in my head that's constantly got some yammering commentary finally shuts up for a while. There's no time for it, really, you're just focussing on your legs, your feet, the board, the snow...it's so peaceful. Or it can be.

But then, speaking of plans going awry, my iPod betrayed me. Big time. I hit "Shuffle Songs," which is pretty much my SOP - just give me something random, because everything that's on the iPod I put on there, so it should be good, right? Right. I forget sometimes that the iPod takes EVERYTHING that's on my iTunes when I sync it, no matter if I actually want to listen to the song or it was some random thing I downloaded (like...oh...say...giraffe sounds. Lots of them. Each one or two seconds long. To show Nolan that giraffes actually DO make noises*) eight months ago for some obscure reason. And damn if Binkley (that's my iPod) didn't keep throwing out the WORST possible songs at the worst possible times.

For instance: I'm getting on the lift when the lift operator decides he wants to talk to me about something concerning my lift ticket. I have to take off my headphones to converse with him. What does Binkley serve up? Amy Grant's "Baby Baby." Oh yes. Because, see, I was in charge of games at my stepsister's baby shower, and I made up a game that was basically just "Name That Song" that had 'baby' in the title. So I had to download a bunch of 'baby' songs to burn the CD for the shower. That's the only reason that was on there! I swear! I never once thought nostalgically about my high school boyfriend and his prediliction for singing that to me! Never! But there's no way to explain that to random lift operator boy. Nor would I want to - I'd come off like I have Tourette's, I'm sure.

And then, of course, as soon as I'm on the lift and swinging up over the trees and into my 7-minute ride up the mountain, what comes on? Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life," which is still cool despite being used for Carnival Cruise Line commercials**. I want to point the headphones back at the lift operator and crank the volume.

Next ride down the mountain, Binkley goes on a Muppet Show jag, and I get three Muppet-related tracks in a row, the final one being Kermit's nephew Robin singing "I'm Five." Now, I love the Muppet Show, but that's just not one of the better songs - what about "Mahna Mahna," Binkley?

Now, I hear you saying, "What the fuck, Athena? Just change the stupid song if you don't like it!" and I agree with you...except. Except there are bad songs that are just lame and can't even be enjoyed in an ironic this-is-so-horrible-it's-kind-of-good way, and then there are songs that are sort of mediocre and can be tolerated for a brief while. And you have to decide - Is this really that terrible a song that I need to 1) take my glove off, making sure not to drop it off the lift 2) unzip my jacket 3) open my interior pocket and 4) fumble with cold-benumbed fingers to press the scrollwheel and change the song? And then re-fasten all those unfastened items? Or do I just suffer though it and hope that something better comes up next? And I, being a "let's just stick with the status quo unless things get drastic" kind of girl, usually just suffer.

But it was like Binkley was onto me, and kept fucking with me on purpose. Going up by myself on the lift, where I can't actually ride or move or do anything? "Grey Cell Green," by Ned's Atomic Dustbin. Woo-hoo! Righteous! Righteouuuuuus!

Going down the last part of the run to the lift where other people may hear what's leaking out of the headphones? "Bananaphone," by Raffi. Sigh.

But, in the end, Binkley redeemed himself. The lifts closed at 4 (4pm! What kind of a mountain, etc.) and as I got on the lift at 3:50, I knew this would be my last run. So as I skated off at the top and made sure my step-in binding clicked, I asked Binkley to be kind and give me something good for my last run. I start carving, and what comes on? Chaka Khan. "Tell Me Something Good." Sweet. Peace at last.

Oof. I've got more Nolan pictures and more events to relate, but it is 11pm and I started this post at 9:30 this morning. I'm spent.

Thanks for reading.

*It's kind of a snorty/hiccupy kind of noise, in case you're wondering

**Which makes it #2 on my list of "Best (Presumably) Unintentional Heroin References" in commercial product marketing, #1 being UPS's "What can 'Brown' do for you?" campaign.

My friends say she's a dumb blonde, but they don't know she dyes her hair

2008-03-03T14:51:00.002-05:00

So here's a stupid quesiton:

(Or, at least, I'm assuming it's stupid. It may, in fact, be a wicked smart question, but I'm defaulting to my life-long habit of just presuming everyone else in the entire world to be smarter, cooler, and more competent than me. It saves time.)

What do I have to do to be "safe" with my computer when I go to a public wi-fi spot? Now that we have a babysitter coming on a regular basis (3 days a week, woo-hoo! For a couple hours, anyway.*) I would like to take my laptop to...say...a coffee shop (gasp!) and actually, you know, do stuff on the computer for a while. By myself. In public. With a latte.

What should I be doing so that I don't have some crazy Princeton student/hacker/mad genius stealing all my private info? I have FileVault. Is that enough? Am I safe-ish (from viruses, anyway) because I have a Mac and not a PC? I'm not going to be going crazy with the online shoe-shopping or anything (not in public, that is), but if I wanted to buy a book from Amazon, would it be a very very bad idea to do it on a public wi-fi hookup? Is there some way you can encrypt your transmissions?

I never use my computer in public because I'm so freaked out about not having performed the correct prophylactic procedure on it. I would like to take it out and about more (it is a friggin' laptop, after all), but I don't want to risk getting our identity stolen. Am I just being paranoid? Do all those people typing away in Panera know something I don't? Or are they taking foolish risks?

I need someone to just walk me through it, step by step.

I've tried searching on a couple different online forums for help with this, but most of the discussions are either waaaay over my head (mostly on the Mac users forums), or directed specifically at PC users.

As Nolan would say, "Need help!"

*I have to say, despite her absolute wonderfulness, I have mixed feelings about having Kathy (that's the babysitter's name) here three days a week. Even though it's only 9-12, I somehow feel like I'm cheating by having someone else take care of my child during regular working hours. Nolan is my job right now, right? So how many people have a pinch-hitter at their regular nine-to-five job? (Of course, to be fair to myself, I have to say Nolan is more than a nine-to-five job. I don't get a lunch break. Or vacation. I'm on call 24-7. So I do need some time to do other things, like mail packages and buy groceries.) There. I've just justified myself to myself.

Thanks for reading.

At last, my love has come along

2008-02-25T23:09:00.005-05:00

Nolan was finally able to consummate his relationship with Jake...

I think Jake probably just got tired of running, poor kitty. Nolan's jazzed, though. All he wants to do is follow Jake around and wait for him to stop so he can pet him. I told Nolan he wasn't allowed to bother Jake when he's eating or using the litter box, but considering how much "privacy" he gives me when I poop, I'm gonna have to keep a close eye.

Yay! Now we gotta work on Lola...

Thanks for reading.

You think you're tired now, well wait until 3

2008-02-25T11:00:00.002-05:00

Hey, how about them Oscars, huh? Were they long, or what?

But seriously, folks. Did anybody watch the whole thing? Really? I told myself I was going to watch everything, just because I could (KB had no interest and I managed to get Nolan in bed by 8, so I was free to sit there and tube out for four hours) but in the end, I had to skip some of it, it was just so tedious. I found myself flipping back and forth between the Oscars and something on the BBC America with Michael Palin and a flimsy excuse to show all his favorite Python skits. Even when I wanted to want to care (like when the 98-year-old Production Designer/Art Director dude was giving his speech) I just couldn't.

Although I did find some serendipitous moments of switching back and forth between the two, such as clicking to the BBC and the architect/abbatoir/block of flats sketch with John Cleese screaming, "You sit there on your loathsome spotty behinds, squeezing blackheads, not caring a tinker's cuss about the struggling artist..." and then back to the Oscars to see Cameron Diaz trying not to yawn while listening to Robert Boyle (the above-mentioned Honorary Oscar recipient).

I was surprised by a number of the winners: I had thought Julie Christie would win Best Actress and Ruby Dee Best Supporting Actress, simply because the Academy likes to give Oscars to the older long-haul actors who've never won (or, in Christie's case, who won so long ago it was like a different career). Funnily enough, I thought Marion Cotillard's and Tilda Swinton's acceptance speeches were two of the best of the night - perhaps because they weren't really expecting to win and were able to be more spontaneous in their remarks.

I was dismayed to see Diablo Cody win for Juno - it was a cute and funny film, but there's no way in hell that was a better-written screenplay than Michael Clayton. (Plus I find her tremendously annoying personality-wise. Note to "Diablo" [I know that's not her real name]: You are not Bettie Page. Nor are you Louise Brooks. If we all just agree that you're a bad ass, will you please stop showing us your tattoos?) I was betting on Paul Thomas Anderson for director, too, mostly because There Will Be Blood seemed to me to be more the quintessential American picture (Corporate Greed versus Religious Fervor - hey! It IS America!) than No Country For Old Men. I thought the Messers Coen would get the Adapted Screenplay nod (as they did) but that Blood would win for Picture and Director. Shows how much I know.

And now I have two more movies to add to my Netflix list - The Bourne Ultimatum (which won in both Sound categories), because I didn't realize it was directed by Paul Greengrass and had dismissed it as another money-sucking sequel (even though the first two kicked ass, I have to say), and Enchanted, which looked to me from the previews I saw to be another sappy Disney princess-in-peril schlockfest, but which after hearing the three nominated songs I might have to reconsider, as they seemed just snarky enough to make for a fun movie (particularly for those of us who had a seriously Little Mermaid-influenced adolescence).

And Jon Stewart was great. I like that he's not really a Hollywood guy - he does his thing and then gets out of the way of the awards and winners and lets them do their thing. If he comes up with a funny quip spontaneously, he'll throw it in there, but he doesn't force it (a la Billy Crystal). Plus he gave that Czech singer a chance to give her speech, which I thought was very sweet. (That movie, Once, is on the list for my Movies with Geriatrics course, so I don't have to Netflix it.)

But why wasn't Roy Schieder in the "We're Sad They're Dead" montage with Heath Ledger? Did he not make the deadline?

So anyway. What'd you guys think?

Thanks for reading.

P.S. I'll announce the poll winner once I finish tabulating all three of the responses I got!

Is your bed made? Is your sweater on?

2008-02-22T14:24:00.003-05:00

So my new favorite album is Vampire Weekend, by Vampire Weekend. I'm not linking to anything of theirs (videos, websites, etc.), because I haven't seen anything. I'm trying to keep myself uncorrupted by hype to see if I really like them as much as I think I do. Does that make any sense? I feel like I came to their music legitimately (whatever that means) because I heard them on the radio first, and responded to their music and nothing else.

I was in the car with Nolan coming back from our music class, and I heard this song that was a crazy schizoid mish-mash of genres - it sounded like some sort of Afro-beat funk combo, but then the singer came in like your traditional semi-whiney alternative white dude, and I was all, "Eh?" Nolan said, "What's this song called, Mommy?" And I was like, "I have no idea, but I like it." And of course the DJ never tells you the name of the song when you want them to, so I made a mental note of the time (Saturday, 11am) so I could look on the XPN website's playlists and find out who it was. It takes a few days for them to get their lists up on their site, so I had to keep checking back. Then when they finally had Saturday posted, I couldn't tell which order the songs were played in, so I didn't know if the top of the list was the end of the hour, or vice-versa. So I ended up going through the list looking for all the names of bands I'd never heard of (which is 90% of them, since I'm such a clueless dork), finding that band/album on Amazon and listening to the sample to see if it matched up with what I remembered of the song in my head.

It took me a while, but I finally found them. Part of the reason it took me so long was the name "Vampire Weekend" sounds to me like a Jesus and Mary Chain knock-off - some sort of Goth wannabe band - so I didn't even try them until the end of the list.

So. The album. Vampire Weekend sound like Paul Simon and David Byrne had a musical love child, and then hired the Shins to be their nanny. Paul Simon and David Byrne happen to be two of my favorite musicians EVAH, and then VW also name-drop Peter Gabriel in one of the songs, thus completing the triumvirate of Angsty White Guys Who Incorporate (Some Might Say Co-opt, Or Even Steal) World Music Into Their Sound And Also Have Excellent Lyrics. The guitar sound is quite reminiscent of Simon's Graceland album, while the beats and riffs are not what you typically get on an "alternative" album. The only place I find the album to be kind of so-so is in the lyrics. They're fluffy and light and silly in places. Some of the songs are better than others (Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa, Oxford Comma), but they're all short and inventive, and the album as a whole is fun and energetic and fresh - makes me want to find an excuse to go on a road trip, if only so I could zoom along and blast it from the stereo. (I know, I'll never be a music critic.)

I immediately downloaded the entire album, and then did that embarrassing thing where when you like something so much you pretty much force it on your friends/lovers/roommates just to gauge their reaction and see if they love it as much as you do. Poor KB. Ten o'clock on a Wednesday night, he's trying to go to bed, and I'm shoving my iPod at him going, "You have to listen to this!" (He was very diplomatic in his response - he listened to one song, said, "I can see why you would be into this," turned over, and went to sleep.)

I understand they're quite the media darlings at the moment, or that's what I gathered from reading some of the reviews on Amazon. I wouldn't really know - I haven't watched MTV in years, and I stopped subscribing to Rolling Stone when I left L.A. I guess that's why I feel that my experience of them is somehow more authentic, because I only know them from their music - I have no idea what they look like, how old they are, what country they're from, any of that. I know I could find out quickly enough with a search on YouTube, and probably will eventually, but for right now I just want to keep my infatuation pure.

Now I must go listen again.

Thanks for reading.

I used to love her, but I had to kill her

2008-02-21T23:47:00.004-05:00

Argh. Can't sleep (clown'll eat me!) so I'm writing.

Why does my brain wait until I'm all ready for bed - teeth brushed, face washed, prayers prayed (Ha! just seeing if you're paying attention) - and I've gotten snuggled into my warm bed before going into Hyper Creative Drive? Is it just that my sense of what is actually worthy of being written down is skewed by my tiredness and everything seems like a brilliant idea? (kind of like when you're stoned and everything you think seems REVOLUTIONARY!) Or does my brain just like to torture me by waiting until I'm all snuzzy drowsy cuddly with KB before it goes, "Psst. You know what would be a great way to introduce the FBI agent in that horror script? Here listen, I'll tell you..." and I find myself laying there arguing with myself:

Me: "I'll write it down in the morning."
My Brain: "You'll have forgotten it. I promise you."
Me: "No, this is too good. I'll remember it. I know I will."
My Brain: "You won't get all the detail. You won't get the feeling of it. You'll get some vague outline and most of the facts, but it won't be as meaningful and good as it is now."
Me: "God dammit."

And I get out of bed and go into the office and turn on the blinding light and write it down. And it's true, My Brain is right, because it's happened before - I tell myself I'll remember it in the morning, turn over and go to sleep, and then when it's the next morning (or afternoon when Nolan's napping, as is usually the case) and I do try to get it down on paper, I find myself going, "Now what was that great line? Shit."

I have, since the great The Wind That Shakes The Barley tragedy of Ought Eight, been given a virtual kick in the butt, writing-wise. I am simultaneously trying to work harder at writing at least something every day, and also giving myself a break for not being able to be Superwoman and do it all plus be a great writer. KB has said to me many times that this is just one phase in our lives, the stay-at-home-and-raise-your-kids phase, and there will be other phases (hopefully the write and sell and make movies phase) in the future, and I know that's true. It's just so hard sometimes to cut myself slack.

Which leads me to my next thought.

Nolan and I were at the library today, because we've been staying home entirely too much lately, being all homebound and cocoony with no appointments or playdates and I really felt we just needed to get out. It's hard to convince Nolan to change the status quo most of the time - if he's happy playing Constructables, he doesn't want to get a coat and hat and shoes on and go out in the cold and get in the car. So I usually defer to him and we stay home and play on the floor until I'm drooling with ennui.

But not today! Today, I forced him into the coat, etc. and we went to the Library for some interaction with other human beings.

And in the lobby, we ran into this woman, let's call her, um...Heidi. Nolan and I have run into Heidi and her kids numerous times in the past at various playgrounds in Princeton, mostly last fall, just after she had had her third child. She's a pediatrician who works part time, and did I mention she has three kids? When we first met her last fall, the baby had just been born and she was on her six-week maternity leave from work. (And she was completely free of any leftover baby weight that I could see.) We met for a couple playdates (her middle child, a girl, is Nolan's age) and lunch and whatnot, and I wish I could think of a bad thing to say about her, because...there isn't one. The woman's perfect. She has three kids under the age of 5, she works part time as a friggin' doctor, and she's totally cool. About everything. She makes homemade cookies. She knits. She wears Chuck Taylors in a completely un-ironic way, and she gets away with it! And she's not that annoying kind of holier-than-thou mom who let you KNOW that she knits and makes homemade cookies and doen't give her kids any food with high fructose corn syrup. She just does those things. And is totally self-deprecating and slightly goofy and doesn't wear makeup and I hate her.

I have one kid and am home full time with him, I don't knit or bake or do anything crafty, and all I do when KB comes home from work is bitch about what a tough day I had and how difficult Nolan was to deal with. Sometimes I think I just need to turn in my Parenting License to the Parenting Agency and say, "Sorry, I really thought I could handle this, but as it turns out, I cannot. I am a complete wimp and am totally incapable of dealing with adversity in any form, especially as it pertains to my child. Sorry about that. Better luck next time!"

Aigh.

So anyway, we met this woman in the lobby of the library, and we chatted and I invited her and her husband over for dinner. Because I'm an idiot, and apparently a masochistic one at that. I'll get to know her even better over dinner, I'm sure, and it will turn out that she volunteers for Save the Children in her spare time, knits afghans for elderly Katrina survivors, and that she once rescued a litter of puppies from a burning building. While wearing her Chucks. Sigh.

So I'm looking forward to that dinner.

But, and I have no smooth segue here (alas), the real thing I wanted to write about when I sat down was...Paul Haggis. KB and I just watched "In The Valley Of Elah," and I have to say, that's the first Paul Haggis film I've seen that didn't make me want to retch. Or hoot. Or both. Repeatedly. It was actually quite good - some clunky dialogue and some rather obvious foreshadowing of plot points, but on the whole very balanced and subtle and...mature.

I guess it's surprising to me, because when "Crash" won Best Picture in 2006, it really just hurt my brain. I couldn't fathom that anyone could think that trite, preachy, poorly written, hammily acted, obvious, treacly, ponderous, mish-mash of cliches could be on anyone's list of Not Too Awful movies, much less the Best Friggin' Movie of the Year. I laughed when it was nominated, it seemed like such a joke, and when it won I was just flabbergasted.

Not to mention "Million Dollar Baby," which was slightly less painful due to the mollifying presence of Morgan Freeman (he can make reading the phone book seem like Fine Art), but in which I was still able to predict the "big" moments, right down to almost getting the dialogue word for word in some scenes. (My mom hates watching movies with me now - she says I've gotten too snobby - and this was a particularly bad one. We were watching it at her house, since she has the pay cable and the big flat screen TV, and when I started guessing what the lines were going to be, out loud, to KB, she got up and left the room she was so annoyed. Sorry, Mom!)

So with those two movies (plus the screenplay for "The Last Kiss!" Yecch! Now there's a winner!) comprising the entirety of my knowledge of Paul Haggis's, how do you say, oov-rah, I did not have high hopes for Elah. I guess when you go into something with low expectations, it's not too hard to pleasantly surprised. I don't want to be damning the movie with faint praise, because it actually really was quite good. My theory (espoused to KB, my current sounding-board/victim for theories) was that Haggis had written and directed Crash, but only written Elah, and thus had another person (the theoretical director) to reign in his worst impulses and sort of balance him out.

Buzz! Wrong! Thank you for playing, Caroline! Take your year's supply of Rice-A-Roni, the San Franscisco treat, and leave quietly, won't you? He wrote and directed both of them. Huh. What do you know. Maybe he's growing and learning as a director and writer? That was the thing about Crash, it was so...juvenile. All the ideas were on the surface, nothing was left for the audience to understand. He might as well have just bought one of those giant billboards on Sunset and wrote "Racism and stereotypes...BAD. Caring about people as individuals...GOOD." and saved us all two hours.

But then, he's the one with the shelf full of shiny gold statues, now, isn't he?

Thanks for reading.

Oh I wish I were an Oscar Meyer weiner

2008-02-18T21:57:00.002-05:00

C'mon, y'all! The Oscars are six days away and I have exactly ONE returned ballot! Get on the stick, people!

The Rocky Road to Dublin

2008-02-11T22:39:00.000-05:00

Well, shit.

I have just had one of the strangest, most frustrating experiences I think I've had in my whole life.

I signed up for a course called "Second Chance Cinema" with the Princeton Adult School, which basically means me and 68 senior citizens in an auditorium on the Princeton campus getting a chance to watch films we didn't get to see in theatrical release. Eighty bucks for 13 films, only two of which I'd already seen. A good idea, yes? Monday night = Caroline's night to go see a flick and have some Caroline time. Yay!

Except today, the first film, "The Wind That Shakes The Barley." I don't even know how to describe it, what happened.

The curator/emcee got up and described the movie, did his intro, gave the proles and droolers a little background on Ken Loach and his style of filmmaking. All very standard.

The lights went out, the movie started, and the first scene was like Paul Laverty broke into my house two years ago and cherry-picked scenes from one of my scripts, inserted them into his screenplay, and made the fucking thing with Ken Loach.

I thought, "This is my movie. Fuck! Fucking Ken Loach made my movie!"

But he didn't, really. It's a very different movie. It just happens to have some of the exact same scenes I wrote in my script The Long Black Veil eight years ago at USC. This has never happened to me before - it was the strangest thing, sitting there, watching scenes unfold almost exactly as I'd imagined them in my head (and wrote them in my script). It was partly exhilarating - like, "YES! That's exactly how it should look!" and "Oh, perfect! That's it! That's perfect!"

It wasn't until I really thought about it a little bit that I was overcome with the "Oh, fuck!" feeling. I can never make my movie now. Or if I do, I'm going to have to drastically change several key scenes.

It's not plagiarism, obviously. It's just a case of two people having very similar ideas. And, the Big Fucking Difference, of course, is that Ken Loach actually went out and got the funds and the actors and the equipment and Made The Goddamn Movie, whereas, what have I been doing for the last eight years? Oh, sitting around with my thumb up my butt, thank you very much. And they're not really the same story, at all. TWTSTB is more of a political polemic (a Ken Loach film, in other words) while TLBV is a romance. A period Irish historical romance. Gah!

I guess I should be glad that it was a Ken Loach movie and not a fucking Ron Howard movie or something like that. Jerry Bruckheimer, worse. At least I like Ken Loach's movies. Mostly.

I'm so angry with myself. I worked so hard on that script, and it's been sitting in a fucking Staples filing box for six years, being carted around from LA to New York to Boston to Princeton. And now it's toast. It's dead. I might as well burn the fucking thing.

But you should see these scenes! See the movie! Go see it! Rent it! The hurling scene at the very opening - the whole idea of sport as a metaphor for war, for the stupid games men play. The scene at the ceilidh dance, with the fiddlers! The couples whirling around, and the camera picking out the couple we're really interested in, seeing their shining faces as they spin because they think they've really got something to celebrate, when in fact it's all going to crumble soon, and only we know how fragile their elation is, because we know what's coming. Those scenes. Those scenes are right out of my head.

Arrrrrrrrrghhhhhhhh. I'm going to go kill myself now.

Thanks for reading.

Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids

2008-02-04T11:15:00.000-05:00

Inspired by this thread on Fark. (WARNING: Don't read the thread unless you are prepared to spend about an hour giving yourself lots of new things to be afraid of and a massive case of the heebie-jeebies.)

Things I am irrationally afraid of:

-Spiders and roaches and silverfish, oh my! Anything with lots of wiggly legs and a tendency toward fast, jerky, unpredictable movement. Mice, fine. Lizards, great. Snakes, cool. I have no problem with any of them. Flying 3-inch roach skittering up the wall in my bathroom? Kill me now. *shudder*

-Those cans of biscuits/pizza dough that you peel the paper off of and they POP open. I hate those! The suspense! The weird, doughy, sploot noise! The worst is when they don't pop even when you've peeled off all the paper and then you have to go find a spoon to "press at seam" to MAKE it pop. *shiver* I usually make someone else do it for me, and even then I have to leave the room or cower in fear with my hands over my ears.

-Injury to my eyes, specifically having a paper cut on my eyeball or having someone (who? who would do this? I don't know, that's why it's irrational) pull out my eyelid and use a hole punch on it. I distinctly remember the first time I thought of this - it was in Mr. Smith's literature class in high school and we were reading 1984. There was the whole thing with Winston's worst fear being having his head stuck into a cage full of rats, and that made me ponder what it would take for me to confess to the government torturer things I hadn't done, and the dark recesses of my brain came up with Hole Punch In The Eyelid. *flaps hands around and whimpers*

-I also, since seeing 28 Days Later, have a horrible fear of being unable to protect my defenseless son from zombies or any other huge natural-disaster type occurrence where humanity's dark side is revealed, people go feral and run amok, and you can't trust anybody. I am seriously thinking about training to use a gun and taking a wilderness survival kind of course in an attempt to allay those fears. This one doesn't strike me as irrational (well, maybe the zombies part) so much as Highly Unlikely But Still Definitely Possible And You Should Cover Your Ass Just To Be On The Safe Side.

Brrrrrrrr. I have to go hug Nolan now.

Thanks for reading.

Got no flowers for your gun

2008-01-31T21:26:00.000-05:00

Also, who knows if there will be a ceremony, but in any case, here's the Official 2008 Thptpth Oscar Pool. Vote early! Vote often! Just do your patriotic duty and vote!

Winner gets ... ummm ... winner gets ... I dunno. I'll think of something.

Thanks for reading.

And I'm right on time, and the girl keeps singing

2008-01-31T15:44:00.000-05:00

I am finally back online, after weeks, weeks! without internet. So painful, the internet-less-ness. Nolan would go down for quiet time, and I would think, "A-ha! Now I can...hm. Now I can unpack another box, I guess."

For yea, verily, it is true! We have moved. Again. Finally. For what I now decree shall be the last time in a very, very, very long time. So sayeth I.

And the moving, it was a saga. Perhaps not quite a biblical-length saga, but a saga nonetheless. There were tears, and sickness; there was freezing cold and carbon monoxide; broken possessions and non-working telephones; ugly hotel rooms, pilfering moving men, cranky landlords, you name it. Someday (soon) I will post the unedited version of those events. When I've had a chance to recover.

But in the mean time, I just wanted to say we're back!

Thanks for reading.

She blinded me with science

2008-01-14T13:54:00.001-05:00

I usually don't give too much credence to those random little factoids you get on some multi-pack foodstuffs these days (e.g., Nolan's instant breakfast oatmeal packets have "Dino-Info" on them, my Splenda packets have stupid little Splenda-focused phrases on them) but at lunch today, on my Snapple lid, I got one that was interesting. (You would think these kinds of things would be manna from heaven for me, Useless Trivia Girl, but I find most of them redundant and boring - "Oh really, Snapple? A panda bear's diet is 99% bamboo? I never would have guessed that, thanks!")

My lid today said, "The motto on the first U.S. penny was 'Mind Your Own Business.'" This seemed just bizarre enough to be true, and I deemed it worthy of investigation. Of course, "investigation" in today's modern world (speaking of redundant, Caroline - "today's modern world?" Jeesh.) mostly consists of Google and Wikipedia, and sure enough, there it is.

Of course, Snapple got a couple little facets of their trivia wrong - namely, the United States Mint has never produced a "penny." The official name for the one-cent coin is "cent." And the actual motto on the coin was "Mind Your Business," which is a little more open for interpretation than "Mind Your Own Business."

But still. How often do you pick up a Jeopardy-worthy tidbit from a Snapple lid?

I also like noting the fact that "In God We Trust" was not made the official national motto until 1956 - take that, fundamentalist Christian blowhards!

Thanks for reading.

There must be something wrong with the machinery

2008-01-12T14:35:00.000-05:00

I is a computer geenyus! I done fixed me my CD drive all by my lonesome!

It wasn't that hard, really, and I'm not sure why I was so intimidated (and why the hell the goofballs at my local computer joint couldn't get their acts together to take care of the job). I realize that most computer repairs aren't quite so simple, and I probably won't attempt any other self-repairs soon, but it was quite satisfying to do. I could see where all the bits went, which cables plugged into which sockets, and although there were a couple of hairy moments (I had to remove a mounting bracket dealie from the old drive and attach it to the new drive, no mention of which was made in the instructions) I was able to figure it out on my own. It only took me about an hour (during Nolan's "quiet time" of course) and there's something of the Quaker in me that feels inordinately proud of being able to take matters into my own hands, rather than rely on the help of professionals.

Don't worry, I won't quit my day job.

Thanks for reading.

Saved by zero

2008-01-08T15:37:00.000-05:00

Happy New Year and all that crap.

I have, as usual, several semi-literate mostly unpublishable half-posts sitting here in my dashboard, and I have run out of motivation and inclination to finish and/or delete them.

My computer was held hostage by a highly incompetent computer "repair" shop here in Princeton for three weeks with no actual repairs ever effected, so I was using KB's computer for a while, which I really don't like doing. Not because it's not a perfectly fine (if PC) computer, because it is, but because it's not MINE. It doesn't have the passwords pre-typed like my computer, it doesn't have the same shortcuts as my computer, it doesn't have my address book and my contacts, my photos, my notes, et cetera. It just makes for very difficult computer time.

The reason my computer was being "repaired" was that the CD drive has crapped out on me - it will accept a disk and whirr industriously for awhile, igniting false hopes in my breast and fooling me into thinking that it will actually work, but then nothing happens. No icon on desktop, no music on iTunes, no DVD playing, et cetera. So I figured I needed a new drive. I took it to this local place, thinking I'd do my part to support the local economy (plus I hate Apple stores - love the products, but really truly hate the stores. Genius bar, my fanny.) but they had it for, as I said, three weeks and didn't do anything with it. Whenever I called in to see what the heck was going on, no one seemed to know anything, or I was told that the person who DID know something was on vacation. One time I called and got no answer at all (this was at 10:30 am) and when the voice mail picked up, the sultry anonymous computer female told me that the box could not accept messages and that there had been an error. These kinds of things, in a supposedly tech-savvy place, do not engender much confidence in me.

So now that I have rescued my computer from their evil clutches (and warded off the $150 "diagnostic fee" they tried to hit me with) I am bravely (and perhaps foolhardily) going to attempt to repair it myself. My awesome brother-in-law knows his stuff, Mac-wise - he helped me find a site to buy a new drive from and promised to talk me through the surgery on the phone if need be. So wish me luck with that.

AND. Yes, we're closing on the new house next week. We are currently booking movers and changing our address with all 8 million businesses/publishers/utilities/banks that need to know. Sigh. I hope we don't have to do this again for a looong time.

NOW that I've forced you to listen to my whiny bitching, here's what I know you're really after. Nolan pics:

Nolan petting a random cat on the street while we were out for a walk. I feel bad for him that Joe Street Cat is friendlier with him than our kitties are. I wish they would get over their fear of him (Jake's actually getting better and more tolerant, but Lola still flees in terror) because it would work out so well - the cats are constantly looking for attention and Nolan is constantly trying to pet them. I want to shake their little kitty shoulders and say, "Wake up! This is a win-win situation! He wants to pet you! You want to be petted! What exactly is the problem?" Maybe it's just that he will pet them gently and contentedly suck his thumb for a little while, and then grab an empty wrapping-paper tube and try to clonk them on the head with it. That could have something to do with their antipathy, perhaps.

Nolan experimentally tasting one of Erica's homemade peppermint marshmallows. She sent a whole bag of them, along with homemade pumpkin truffles and a present for Nolan. When I first gave him the hot cocoa and said I had a special treat for him, he got all excited. Then when I dramatically brought out the marshmallows, he looked at me like, "What the hell is that supposed to be?" I encouraged him to taste it, and this is the moment his expression changed from "What the hell?" to "You've been keeping this delicious sugar treat from me my whole life, evil wench!"

I think it's fair to say he enjoyed it.

He now treats the hot cocoa as more of a marshmallow delivery device than a beverage in its own right. Each one is the perfect size pillowy little square to fit in his cup, and he lets them get a little soggy, scoops them out, and sucks the hot cocoa out of them before re-immersing in the cocoa. We'll be in trouble when they run out. (Nolan did not get any of the pumpkin truffles. KB and I reserved [hid] those delectably smooth little nuggets for ourselves.)

Nolan on Christmas morning. You'll notice there is a dearth of ornaments on the lower half of the tree. This is because from the moment we set up the tree to the moment Nolan broke his first little shiny glass ball type ornament was approximately 2.3 minutes. The second one wasn't for another couple hours, but we quickly discerned that if we wanted to preserve any of our $3.99 per dozen Target ornaments, we'd best take action. So all the glass balls were shifted to the top of the tree and we moved as many soft or wooden ornaments as we could to the bottom of the tree, but we just don't have that many. Thus, the bare-bottomed tree.

Nolan at the Museum of Natural History (after a New Year's Eve haircut of which no pictures exist because KB took him, not me. You know if I'd been there, you would have gotten a three-part photo essay entitled "My Baby's Fourth Haircut. Sob.") in New York. He was more enthralled (and exhausted) by the train and subway rides that got us there than the museum itself. He had a huge freak-out about an hour into our visit, when we had to take him into the Astor Turret and just let him sob and scream, but it seemed okay because there were about 30 other toddlers and their various nannies/parents/minders also there. (The Astor Turret re-purposed as The Toddler Freak-Out Room.) I think we'll skip going again until he can read - it's much more interesting if you know WHY all those bones and stones are there, and his attention span is just too short right now. Did I mention he's not taking a nap anymore? Yes. We now have "quiet time" every afternoon, where he is free to sleep or not sleep, on his own, in his room. Most times he doesn't sleep, and that makes for very cranky evenings, let me tell you.

So anyway. Them's the haps round these parts.

Thanks for reading.

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end

2007-12-04T11:01:00.000-05:00

People!

Sorry it's been awhile since I rapped at ya, as my man Jim Anchower often says, but we have had some serious shit going down.

We are buying a new house! It's true. It's all happening. There was much back-and-forthing with the offer and the lawyers and the blah blah blah, so things were up in the air for quite a while, but now it appears that all is well and we will be closing some time in mid-to-late January (it's set for the 18th right now). Woo-hoo! Now that it seems it will actually happen, I feel comfortable showing you some pix.

There are lots of pictures of the snazzy kitchen, because when they remodeled it in 1997 it was featured in a kitchen-design magazine. It is the most well-appointed kitchen I have ever been in (prep sink! pot-filler! indoor grill!), and it is certainly the nicest room in the house. What they don't show you, of course, are the original 50's-era bathrooms with the buzzing fluorescent lights and peeling caulk, but hey. All the better opportunity to remodel them and make the house our own, right?

We had the inspection yesterday and things look good. Nolan came with me for the inspection and saw the house for the first time, and he approves. Sample conversation (from the ride home in the car after the inspection):

Me: Did you like that house, Nolan?

Nolan: There was a night light! That was my favorite.

Me: Yes, there was a night light in the hallway. Would you like to live in that house?

Nolan: There were no cars in the rooms.

Me: Well, that will just mean more room for your cars!

Nolan: I want some snack.

And...scene! Nolan seems to have the expectation of lots of toy cars in the bedrooms of every house we've looked at. Not sure if he thinks every home has small boys living there and thus large amounts of toy cars, or if he just assumes that everyone is interested in cars and therefore has a room full of them in their homes.

So that's what we've been up to. Lots of phone calls and e-mails and scheduling and huge check-writing. I am excited and eager to get into the house and get situated, but not real thrilled about the prospect of moving in mid-January amidst the cold and the wind with the muddy boots on the wall-to-wall carpeting and the glaven. (It's been fucking COLD and windy here lately - I swear I saw a tumbleweed the other day whilst walking home from the grocery store. Made me think I was back in Wyoming.)

Plus we're already in the thick of applying to pre-schools for Nolan for NEXT FALL. Next fall! I was worried that KB had lost his mind when he mentioned pre-school applications, and that we were falling into the cliche of the snooty parents trying to get their dumpling enrolled into simply the BEST pre-school to ensure the little darling's entry into the Ivy-league college he is so obviously destined for, but it turns out that you have to apply a year ahead for EVERY pre-school, snooty or not. So we've also been consumed with decisions like: 3 days a week? Or 5? Co-op? Or Montessori? And all the fevered worrying about what is best for our child that that entails.

Thus endeth my long-winded list of reasons for Why I Am Not Posting More Frequently.

Thanks for reading.

Why does my queckery biffle you so?

2007-11-14T15:13:00.000-05:00

I is a published author!

Check it out:

IM IN UR PAPER, RAGGING ON UR CITIZENS

Meanwhile, the hunt for a new house intensifies. We have a house of interest (like people the police don't have enough evidence to call "suspects," they call a "person of interest") that we're hopefully going to be making an offer on soon, depending on how the sellers answer a few of our questions.

If things move forward according to plan, I will show y'all some pictures. We're trying not to get too excited so we can walk away if need be, but it's so hard! Especially for me. I'm a big fantasizer. I'm already planning dinner parties (with what friends?) and bathroom renovations (with what money?) and kitchen-garden layouts. In November. So, yeah - reality? Not so high on my list at the moment, clearly.

I finally got off my ass and sent out a shitload of pictures of the little man, so if you haven't checked your e-mail lately, and you feel like watching a 150-picture slideshow and pausing it every three seconds because my subtitles are so damn verbose, please check here.

In response to your inquiries, Nolan was a monkey again this year for Halloween.

The costume from last year still fit (barely), and since this was our first official "trick-or-treat" year, Nolan didn't even have any idea what the holiday was, much less an opinion on what costume he wanted to wear. (Now he's Halloween savvy - just yesterday he told me "Want to wear monkey costume and get more candy!") I'm sure next year we'll be shelling out big bucks for some pre-fab tractor-trailer/car transporter/truck kind of costume (you know I'm not that mom who's going to be able to make my kid's costume) so we recycled the monkey costume while it was still possible.

We walked up our street and back again with another little boy from the neighborhood, Spencer, and his mom Sonya. Spencer was a duck who refused to pull his duck-hood up, and since people were often mistaking Nolan's monkey for a mouse (or occasionally a bear) we called them The Mouse-Monkey and The Angry Duck.

We were the first wave of trick-or-treaters at most houses, which was good, because we moved sooooooo slowly. Any activity undertaken with one toddler is, by its very nature, excruciatingly slow, so when you factor in the combined delay exponent of TWO toddlers and add the confusion of a holiday based on walking around in disguise to people's houses demanding candy, you get a trick-or-treat excursion that starts at 5:15 and ends well after dark.

After each new house's candy acquisition, Nolan would say, "Wanna open it!" and I would tell him to wait until we got home, at which point he could open one piece of candy, and he would reply, "Wanna go home." We managed to convince him to keep going long enough to get a respectable score of candy in his bucket. The biggest hit of the night was a mechanical bat on a string that flew around and around in the air on a neighbor's porch. We spent a good ten minutes at that house, two hypnotized toddlers staring into the dark.

So now we're rationing out the candy one piece at a time for dessert after meals. It will easily last until Christmas, I'm sure, when Nolan can replenish his candy supply, and we'll have to attempt to explain the special weirdness of the traditions surrounding Christmas.

Thanks for reading.

What kind of man would take a job like that?

2007-10-29T09:59:00.001-04:00

We had the 1st Annual Jane Rauth Memorial Broadway Show trip yesterday. My mom, my aunt, two of my cousins and their half-sister and I all went into NYC to see "Curtains" with David Hyde-Pierce and Debra Monk.

Can you tell we're related?

It was great for several reasons, not the least of which was just getting out of the house with some other "girls" for a day and talking about girly things. We had dinner at an Indonesian restaurant just up the street from the theater, which was that perfect NY combo of delicious, cheap and exotic. Yay, New York! This is one of the reasons we moved to Princeton, so we 'd have easy access to this kind of stuff.
The show itself was quite good, kind of a classic old-school show-within-a-show musical murder mystery comedy type deal. The cast was excellent - really the only snag was that David Hyde-Pierce has a shockingly bad "Boston" accent. He sounded like he was doing a Sean Connery impression with a mouthful of marbles. But other than that, he was impressive and quite funny - he had a chance to do some of the more Buster Keaton-esque physical comedy that I always thought he excelled at (and was underrated for). (See also: Niles Crane attempting to iron his pants.)

(In case you were wondering, Jane Rauth is my late grandmother, and was always the impetus behind all of our various trips to Broadway - she took me and my mom to see "Les Miserables" when I was 13, and when you've grown up in the barren cultural prairie of Wyoming, a Broadway production on the massive scale of "Les Mis" can really blow your mind. So I've always been grateful that she thought having some fun/entertaining/cultural events in your life was important. [My mom of course felt compelled yesterday to tell everyone else the story of my Broadway de-virginizing, when, as the orchestra struck up the overture at the start of the show, I turned to her excitedly and said, "Mom! It's a live orchestra!" Such is the thrill of the Great White Way when you grow up in a town where Cowboy Poetry passes for culture.])

All in all, an excellent way to spend a lovely autumn afternoon. I will save my rant on the exorbitant prices of Broadway tickets for another time.

Thanks for reading.

Quick! Someone call the girl police, and file a report

2007-10-22T16:48:00.000-04:00

It is currently 77 degrees here in Princeton, at five o'clock in the afternoon in late October - does anyone else feel that there's something wrong with that? Pumpkins on the porch, leaves on the ground...and shorts and flip-flops on every passerby. Although occasionally I do see someone engaging in what I call "wishful dressing" wearing jeans and a turtleneck, pretending it's autumn and sweating like crazy.

Whew. I'm glad I wrote that last back-to-reality post before I checked everyone else's blogs...Doc Broc's post would have made me a wee bit self-conscious, I think. I don't post those lists to sound cooler than I am*, honestly...it's more like, since I consider this blog (and all y'alls blogs) the way that we keep in touch with each other, I like to tell you what I'm up to. And read what you're up to. And then if we've read the same thing or seen the same movie we can talk about it. You know. Connect. Promote interaction. As much as is possible on the web, anyway.

I kind of went on total non-computer status there for a while - didn't read anyone else's blogs, didn't check e-mail, didn't surf the web at all. I'm not exactly sure why...I just needed to disconnect for a while, I guess. These past few months have felt like a sort of time out of time, an extended summer vacation, and the ridiculously warm weather hasn't done anything to disabuse me of that notion. I keep feeling like this life we're living in Princeton is just for now, and that sooner or later we'll have to go back to "real" life, whatever that is. Maybe it's because we lived like that for so long that I expect it to continue, or maybe it's because we're only renting this house so I don't think of it as our "real" house. I don't know. But there's been a feeling of impermanence hanging around me, and I need to take steps to remedy that - start getting involved in life in Princeton in a real way.

*Precisely 19% cool, if you want to know.

And now, a cute Nolan story, apropos of nothing:

Jake (the bigger, male, slightly-less-astonishingly-dumb one of our pair of cats) was having a spazz attack, running around the house in that sudden urgent way that cats have. Nolan was eating breakfast at the table. Nolan says, "Why are you running around, Jake?" and then answers himself as Jake and says, "I'm chasing my tail!"

And another bizarre message has arrived from the outlands of my brain regarding my choice of reading material and inter-arts confusion: I'm reading a book called "The Shadow of the Wind," a sort of gothic, multi-layered book-within-a-book set in Spain around the time of the revolution. It was recommended to me by my mother-in-law, who read it for her book club, and although I normally steer clear of "book club" books and anything that comes with a so-called "reader's guide" in the back, Ann (my mother-in-law) has pretty good taste in books and has recommended some past winners to me, so I'm checking it out. Of course, every time I go to pick the book up and see "The Shadow of the Wind" on the cover, I get the song from Pocahontas stuck in my head, the one that goes, "Can you paint with all the colors of the wind..." but since I never really got into Pocahontas the way I did some of the earlier "new" Disney movies (see also: Little Mermaid, Aladdin, etc.) I don't know the rest of the words to that song, just a vague scrap of the melody, and then that runs over and over through my head and becomes distorted until it further resembles Ronnie Dobbs' plaintive show-stopper "Y'all Are Brutalizing Me" from Mr. Show's second season. And then I start thinking about that episode and how the movie they made from it, "Run, Ronnie Run" (with a guest appearance by Ebony's mayun) never really lived up to the brilliance of that episode, and how some comedy skits should just be left in their short incandescent wonderfulness and not be stretched and tortured into full-length films. Not that anyone from Saturday Night Live would listen to my puny little opinion, and not that I'm not grateful for the sight of Mandy Patinkin, stark naked, singing "Can't a man not control his bitch with violence?," but still. You see where I'm going with this? Neither do I, but it's far, far away from General Franco and the plight of everyday people in war-torn Spain, which is where I started.

Sigh.

Sometimes I worry about me.

Thanks for reading.

P.S. Yes, some new Nolan pictures are coming soon. Soon, I tell you!

Everyone goes south every now and then

2007-10-20T11:15:00.000-04:00

Howdy, y'all.

No, I'm not dead, everything's fine. I just took a little blog break, that's all. I went through a month or so of thinking, "I really should post soon, it's been awhile" and then another month or so of thinking, "I'd better come up with something really good to post about to break this long silence, to somehow justify my continued absence from the web," and then the pressure (admittedly self-imposed) was too much and I didn't think about it at all.

So now I just thought, "Fuck it, Caroline, just write whatever, jeez. It's only a blog."

So here I am. We are all fine, Nolan's good, KB's good (Happy Birthday tomorrow, Sweetie!), I'm good, Princeton's good.

Things I have discovered in the past two months:

The ocean is a force to be respected.

Skinny jeans are not a trend I want to have anything to do with.

I'm much happier when I don't have to drive, but if we do go somewhere in a car, I wanna be the one driving. I have control issues.

You don't have to be a good gardener to grow good tomatoes.

Watching birds is really quite peaceful and relaxing.

Every home should have a musical instrument or two.

Sometimes it is better to want something but not to get it (a material item, that is, not something like world peace or a cure for cancer.) It keeps you craving and alive. Ditto for being hungry. It's okay to let yourself get hungry every once in a while. You appreciate your food more.

Books I have read in the last two months:

"What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng" by Dave Eggers - Powerful, grueling, humbling and inspirational.

"Eat, Pray, Love" by Elizabeth Gilbert - Fun and funny, but quite possibly the worst possible book to read after "What is the What" - they are so different; even though both are ostensibly non-fiction, they take place in totally different universes.

"The Book of the Dead" and "The Wheel of Darkness" by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child - I used to love these guys; I read "Relic" in one sitting, but lately it seems like they just have a formula and they plug in the old reliable characters, add a dash of supernatural intrigue, and then half-bake the results. Don't know if they're worth my time anymore.

"The Big Girls" by Susanna Moore - I felt the same way I did about "In The Cut" - bleak and thrilling and like nothing else I've ever read.

"The Echo Maker" by Richard Powers - Picked this one up totally at random at the library and got lucky - an interesting amalgam of medical procedural and meditation on the meaning of identity.

"Bad Monkeys" by Matt Ruff - Fun and silly thriller, right up until the final one-twist-beyond ending, when I lost my patience.

"Midwives" and "The Double Bind" by Chris Bohjalian - Eh. Maybe I read them too fast, but I saw the ending coming a mile away in "Bind" and didn't care much one way or the other with "Midwives."

"On Chesil Beach" by Ian McEwan - Engaging and typical of McEwan, in that he allows his exploration of the innermost thoughts of the characters to comprise the entire story ("novel" is too generous a word for this one), but c'mon: a Booker-prize nominated book about premature ejaculation? Thank goodness it didn't win.

"The Yiddish Policeman's Union" by Michael Chabon - Very good, but not as good as Kavalier and Clay. Again, I suspect I may have read this one too fast.

Movies I have seen in the last two months:

"Michael Clayton" by Tony Gilroy - Amazing and well-written, going to have to see it again. And find the screenplay. So nice not to be condescended to at the movies.

"Elizabeth: The Golden Age" by Shekhar Kapur - Fun costume drama/soap opera. A real "movie" movie. Plus, Clive Owen in a puffy pirate shirt! Alalghalghaglaglllll...

"The Descent" by Neil Marshall - Started out sooo promising, then descended (pardon the pun) into typical schlock horror-gore. Disappointing.

"Raging Bull" by Martin Scorsese (yes, this was the first time I'd seen it) - Not really sure why this is considered such an awesome movie. Awesome acting, yes, but fairly pedestrian as bio-dramas go.

"Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" by Shane Black - Pure pulp. Very funny and arch - made me love Robert Downey, Jr. again.

"Hot Fuzz" by Edgar Wright - Not as good as "Shaun of the Dead," but still better than 90% of the straight buddy-cop movies out there. KB laughed his ass off.

"Miller's Crossing" by Joel and Ethan Coen - Excellent, excellent, excellent.

"Richard III" by Richard Loncraine - Interesting adaptation. Ian McKellen kicks ass, of course, but not as revolutionary as I would have thought.

"Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" by Tom Stoppard (had to make KB watch it) - One of my all-time favorites. Every time I watch it I see new things to love.

"Coffee and Cigarettes" by Jim Jarmusch - Uneven but ambitious. Some of the scenes/skits made me think, "Why am I wasting precious free time watching this?" and I almost shut it off, something I rarely do, but I stuck with it and there were some worthwhile and funny bits, too.

So. Yeah. That's what I've been up to.

That and looking at real estate porn. Never in a million years would we be able to afford that house, not even when (if) KB makes partner and is making the "big bucks," but I love looking at it. I (heart) that house.

How are you?

Thanks for reading.

Why can't I stay in one place for more than two days?

2007-08-14T14:06:00.000-04:00

So I'm reading that Cormac McCarthy book The Road. Or rather, I'm trying to read it. I'm having a slight difficulty. Every time I pick it up to read it, I get the Tenacious D song "The Road" stuck in my head. If you're not familiar with the D's ouevre, well, let's just say it's not exactly a solemn song, as would befit a book reviewed by the Chicago Tribune thusly: "Why read this? . . . Because in its lapidary* transcription of the deepest despair short of total annihilation we may ever know, this book announces the triumph of language over nothingness." Yeah. Not your typical summer beach read. So this glaring incompatibility between a goofy pseudo hard-rock satire ditty and a grim post-apocalyptic mediation on humanity keeps clonking me in the brain and I haven't gotten very far into the book. Perhaps I should shelve it for now and find something a little more...fun.

*"Short, precise and elegant, like the inscription on a tombstone," according to Webster's New World Dictionary. I had to look it up.

This has happened to me only once before, this contest of wills between different art forms in my brain, and that was with the Wally Lamb book "I Know This Much is True." I kept getting that Spandau Ballet song "True" stuck in my head, which of course lead to that P.M. Dawn song "Set Adrift on Memory Bliss," which sampled the Spandau Ballet song, and then I'd be sitting there going, "Whatever happened to P.M. Dawn? They were pretty decent. Huh. I gotta dig that CD out and listen to it again." and totally not reading the book at all. Of course, I could just blame my complete lack of involvement with the book on Wally Lamb, as I didn't think it was nearly as good as "She's Come Undone," which had me a sobbing mess by the end. (Yes, that is what I would call a good book.) I made the mistake of finishing that book on my lunch break at work and coming back to the office with red eyes and mascara smudges. So professional looking.

Yikes. In looking up the links for these books I see that they are all on the Oprah's Book Club list, apparently. That's sort of frightening.

Aaaaand that's all I've got.

Thanks for reading.

Let's call the whole thing off

2007-08-07T14:37:00.000-04:00

So guess what these plants are?

This little area between the front porch and the side porch used to be where we kept our garbage and recycling cans. There were four of them, two trash and two recycling, lined up front to back, and they sat on top of a whole bunch of what I assumed to be weeds.

Now, what you have to understand (and I really should have taken a "before" photo to illustrate this) is that these plants were NOT staked up , as they are shown in the photo. I did that after I discovered what they were. Before, they were all laying down and matted into the ground by the trash cans. Which the previous tenants had put there, by the way. So I don't feel I should be ridiculed too much for not recognizing initially that, amongst the clover and other assorted weeds, we have two very much alive and very actively fruiting tomato plants!

My mom was over two weekends ago, and why were we outside? I guess we were playing with Nolan and his tricycle, or she was getting in her car to leave, I don't really remember, and my mom knelt down and said, "Carrie, these are tomato plants!" I was all Scooby-Doo with my "Hurh?" I knelt down next to her, and sure enough, there were little green globes hanging from some of the branches.

The plants were practically on the verge of being run over by the car, so far out into the driveway had they protruded, and since I thought they were weeds, I hadn't really thought to do much about it.

But yes, they are tomatoes, and so I went inside and found some cheapie old brass curtain rods, pulled off the little finials, shoved them into the ground and tied the plants up to them. Then I dug all the weeds out with a cultivator and threw out some of the assorted trash and debris that had collected there because of the trash cans.

God know how these things got there, since I'm given to understand that tomatoes generally aren't perennials, and I certainly wasn't doing anything to take care of them in any way. Until now. Maybe the previous tenants planted them long ago, and the trash ooze leaking from the cans helped to fertilize them? I don't know.

So I went to the Home Despot and got a couple tomato cages and some vegetable fertilizer. Trying to shove the quite-mature plants into the tomato cages did not work very well, however, and in the end I gave up after only getting one of them into a cage, with much accidental breaking of stems and crushing of flowers and the glaven.

So who knows? Maybe in a few weeks we'll have tons of tomaters and a crushing need for my mother-in-law's fabulous Cream of Tomato Soup recipe. Or mabye we'll get a few stunted runty tomatoes and the rest will be killed by some bug that I don't know enough about gardening to prevent.

But in the meantime, yay! Tomatoes!

Thanks for reading.

You make the rockin' world go round

2007-08-03T14:47:00.000-04:00

Oy.

So I joined a gym here in Dirty Jers, and a fine gym it is. I really haven't gotten around to much of the settling-in type tasks of moving to a new place (New dentist, new vet, new doctors, etc.) but I have, in fact, joined a gym, because I figures: New Town, New Life, New Me! Trying to be all the-glass-is-half-full about the relocation process.

The gym I joined is associated with the Princeton University Healthcare System, which is also what KB is affiliated with, so we got a nice whopping discount. Other than that, the main incentive for joining this gym is that THEY HAVE CHILD CARE, something that is essential to me, yet seems to be of negligible concern to most places. No child care equals no gym time for Caroline. (And how ghetto is it that the YMCA here has no child care? Was the Y back in Boston so terribly forward-thinking and awesome for having FREE child care for every family membership? Or is the Princeton Y so lame and recherche for not having it?) This new gym, this lovely place, has a fabulous child care center that Nolan loves (our first day there he didn't want to leave and cried when I took him out) and is content in, and really, that' s my only criteria, so I find it pretty lame that only one gym in the greater Princeton area fulfilled that criteria.

Anyway.

One of the perks of this health-care-center-affiliated gym is that every three months, you are given a free nurse assessment, a very thorough one, whereby they tell you your height, weight, blood pressure, heart rate, flexibility, body measurements and approximate body fat percentage.

You are also given a free personal trainer appointment once every two months so that you can get a little guidance as to how to improve your "numbers." This is excellent for people like me, who always go to the gym full of "This time I'm really going to work hard!" intent and end up on the elliptical trainer listening to Tenacious D on my iPod for half an hour, looking around for a while at all the complicated weight-lifting machines, and then stretching on a mat and packing it in. This does not really spell long-term motivation or success in improving my health, so I'll take the personal training where I can get it. These people should know how to help me out, right?

Lord, I sure hope so, because the numbers I scored today at my nurse's appointment were sobering.

Look, I know I'm not going to be auditioning for "America's Next Top Model" tomorrow, and I can certainly stand to work harder at taking care of myself as well as taking care of Nolan. I was prepared to be a little disappointed with the nurse's report, but I didn't think it was going to be THIS BAD.

I have 33% body fat, people! THIRTY-FUCKING-THREE PERCENT FAT! I am one-third gelatinous, jiggly, wobbly goo!

Look at this printout:

Not only do I have 33% body fat, I have 33 POINT EIGHT percent, which means I am borderline OBESE! OBESE! Aigh! Is there a more frightening word in the English language? Because somewhere between college (where I distinctly remember being equally appalled at being 25% fat) and now I went from "Moderate" to "Overweight" and now I'm bordering on "O-FUCKING-BESE!" How did this happen?

Sigh.

(I love how they try to personalize the information by inserting your name into the text with their little fake-friendliness macro. Like, not, "Lose some weight, you nameless shlub." "Go to hell, soulless machine!" But "Lose some weight, Caroline." "Oh, thank you for the advice, you caring printout, you!")

Even worse is the flexibility rating:

When I was in high school and we had those National Fitness Test Days instituted by Reagan or whatever neo-Fascist thought it up, flexibility was always the ONE area I did well in. All the jocks and cheerleaders were racking up the points on the Flexed Arm Hang and the Vertical Jump and the Sit-ups, but boy howdy when we got around to the Sit and Reach, I would bend down with my head at my knees like, "Bang! Reach that, motherfucker!" Off the charts flexible! Well, not anymore. Apparently, despite my months of yoga and my genetic predisposition to flexibility, I am now only on the borderline between "Fair" and "Average." That, in my middle-child good-girl straight-A Lisa Simpson mind, means somewhere between a D and a C. Sob.

I'm trying not to get too upset about this, despite my all-caps and my profanity. My weight is just one aspect of my life, after all. I think overall I have a pretty healthy lifestyle. I eat well. (And before you say, "Well, maybe that's your problem right there, genius!" let me just interpose that I mean I eat a balanced diet with lots of whole grains and not too much red meat and plenty of fruits and vegetables and blah blah blah.) I have the occasional alcoholic beverage but rarely overindulge. I don't smoke. I don't do recreational drugs. Anymore. Sob.

So why am I so jiggly?

And again, let me just reiterate, I am not really too concerned with my health overall. My blood pressure has always been and remains low (90 over 56), and so has my resting heart rate (62 bpm, thank you very much). This nurse's evaluation didn't include a cholesterol check, but I've had it checked before and there's no reason to worry there.

I'm just talking about fat, I guess. One more American woman obsessed with body image. But here's the thing: I don't want to look like Nicole Richie or Lindsey Lohan, poor souls. I couldn't give less of a shit about being "thin." I'd rather look like Mia Hamm or Serena Williams. I wanna be strong. I wanna be cut. I wanna be able to kick some ass. Shit, I just want to be able to pick up my two-year-old without wincing and worrying about putting my back out.

So, to the gym I go.

Thanks for reading.

More human than human

2007-07-24T08:12:00.000-04:00

Ugh. Sorry for the laxitude in updates. I have several half-finished posts that were interrupted and which, when I came back to them, didn't seem as publish-worthy (or even finish-worthy) as they initially did. I hate that.

All is well here, we are just settling into the Princeton vibe. Joined a gym, got our trash situation settled (finally), made use of the library (yay!). I am slowly getting back into a screenwriting groove, setting up some organization systems in the office and doing some brainstorming and note-taking.

More to come.

Thanks for reading.

Have to admit it's getting better

2007-07-03T08:00:00.000-04:00

Hey party people! What's happening?

We are just chillin' like villians here in our new Princeton home. (Note: We are not, repeat NOT, gellin' like Magellans.)

Awesome things about Princeton:

-Walkability - KB walks to work every morning now. It takes him 10 minutes, 12 minutes max, which is what it used to take him just to get to the T stop in Boston, after which he still had a thirty minute train ride. Here it's just 10 minutes, door to door. This equals more time at home in the morning which equals more sleep for KB. Yay!

Also, Nolan and I can walk pretty much everywhere in town, which means on the odd days when KB needs to take the car to go to one of the other imaging centers, we are not left high and dry. We can walk to the library (which is incredibly fabulously awesome and great), downtown, the grocery store, a large selection of parks and playgrounds...it's pretty damn nice. Walkability equals no need for a second car which equals big savings for us. Double yay!

-Diversity/Friendliness - Lots of people in Princeton are here for the school, as you might imagine, which means a fairly high population of people who are not permanent permanent residents, but more like short-term permanent residents (kind of like we were in Boston - we knew we had to be there at least four years, but after that we just weren't sure.) This translates into A) lots of different kinds of people, which is awesome, and B) people who are ready to break the ice fairly quickly. (In contrast to my M.O., which would be something like, "Shit, we're only going to be here four years, it's going to take me three years just to get to know someone well, and then we're just going to leave...why bother?" Ludicrous, I know.)

We met a woman in the sandbox at the local playground (she had her 18-month old son with her, she wasn't just sitting in the sandbox) who turned out to be the Chief Resident at the hospital and who, within 20 minutes of meeting us, offered to cat-sit while we were in Berkeley. We took her up on that offer. Nice!

-Proximity to family:

We haven't taken full advantage of this aspect yet, but Nolan's Nana has already been here many a time to get her Noney fix and to help us out by hanging with him whilst we unpack. We've also been invited to my uncle's wedding and my cousin's Eagle Scout award ceremony, both of which we'll be able to attend, because now we live close enough! Huzzah!

Some Weird things about Princeton (lest you think I am all starry-eyed and blinded by the newness of this love affair):

-Trash/recycling: Princeton does not pick up your trash. You have to hire a private contractor to do it for you, and we have had a hell of a time getting one. The two bigger companies we've called have both said they "can't find us" on their maps, which means they don't serve our street. Which is ridiculous, because we've seen their trucks driving down our street picking up other people's garbage, which is how we got their phone numbers in the first fucking place! It's now been two weeks since we started producing garbage here, and lemme tell ya, it's starting to smell not-so-nice sitting out in the 90 degree heat.

Princeton will deign to pick up your recyclables, but they have a VERY specific list of what is acceptable and what will be rejected. Like, a two-page list. Detailing every acceptable item and haranguing you to be very sure to NOT include anything not on the acceptable list, or they will leave your bucket at the curb and all your neighbors will know what a bad Princetonian you are. Yikes.

And, uhhhhh...that's all I can think of for right now. Seriously. I'm sure I will discover some other things I don't like about the place, but lemme tell ya, at the moment, it's lots of checks on the "Pro" side and not too damn many on the "Con" side.

YAAAAYYYYY!!!

Thanks for reading.

We finally got a piece of the pie

2007-06-18T16:48:00.000-04:00

Well, we made it. We're in the new place at last.

With most of our belongings intact. There were a few moving-related casualties (some glass jars, a wardrobe shelf), but nothing too major.

We've unpacked Nolan's room, the kitchen, the bathroom and the living room thoroughly and completely. Our bedroom, the office, the playroom and the guest room are kind of half-assedly done. The rest of the basement (besides the office and the playroom) is in a state of complete and utter chaos, with little islands of order carved out for the cats' area and the laundry area. Pictures will come when we're a little more organized.

The Verizon dude finally showed up today to hook up the Internet (Yeeeeeee-ha!) and the TV (whatever). And the land line phone. Thank God for cell phones - how did we manage these major moves before cell phones? Did we just lose contact for five days or however long it took to get the phone hooked up? I guess we did. I really don't remember, and I certainly moved a number of times before the year 2000, which is when I first got a cell phone. Huh.

So anyway. We're here, we're not dead, we made it. It wasn't as bad as it could have been.

Now we're going to Cali for a week to chill the fuck out, before we come back and close on the Boston house and KB has his orientation for his new job.

Whew.

Thanks for reading.

Like Harrison Ford I'm getting frantic

2007-06-08T20:46:00.000-04:00

So we leave in one week. Next Friday, between 8 and 10 am, the movers will drop all our stuff off at our new place in Princeton. They're coming to pack us up (they're coming to take us awaaaayyyy, ha ha hee hee ho ho!) on Thursday, and we're actually driving down that night, but we won't really be there be there until Friday. So one week from today we start our new life.

And this week has been nuts.

Monday, we signed the purchase and sale agreement on the house (yay!) and Nolan had his two year check-up*, Tuesday KB left for Kentucky to take The Test, Wednesday he flew back and we went out for a nice dinner in the North End, Thursday we had a Thank God The Test Is Over barbecue with KB's classmates and today I had a good-bye and good luck kind of playgroup/party with my mom's group. Oh, and did I mention Tuesday was our wedding anniversary? And Thursday was Nolan's birthday? Yes.

So tomorrow we have our own "So Long and Thanks For All the Fish" shebang, and then we just (just!) have to pack up our entire lives and move to a completely different state and start all over. That's all.

So I guess what I'm saying is I'm capitalizing on this excuse to slack off on the blogification for a while. A week or so. Just long enough to start a new life and all.

Thanks for reading.

*37 inches tall, which is the 97th percentile, 30 pounds, which is the 75th percentile, and 51 cm head circumference, which is the 95th percentile. My boy's above average! Woo-hoo! He also had to have blood drawn for an anemia test, and the damn phlebotomist couldn't find the vein in his right arm, so she poked and prodded for a while and then switched to the left arm while my poor Noney was shrieking and writhing in my arms. I don't think I've ever had quite such a visceral reaction to Nolan's pain before - I wanted to grab the woman and shake her and scream "Stop! Hurting! My! Son!" until she dropped the big scary needle and apologized unreservedly. Luckily I managed to restrain myself long enough for her to get the friggin' blood.

Haaaallelujah! Haaaallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Halleeeeelujaaahhhh!

2007-05-31T13:06:00.000-04:00

We have accepted an offer on the house.

I repeat, we have accepted an offer on the house. It is less than our (reduced) asking price, but we really liked the lady and I think she loves the house almost as much as we do, so we've accepted.

We had the inspection a week ago, we're signing the Purchase and Sale on Monday, and we close on June 28th.

Thank god, thank god, thank god.

I don't even care that we're losing money - it's not that much money, and after all, it's only money. It's worth it to me to have everything wrapped up before we leave for Princeton.

One more (giant) check on the "Things to do Before We Leave Massachusetts" checklist.

Yay!

Thanks for reading.

All we are is dust in the wind

2007-05-24T12:25:00.000-04:00

Oh man, if this were my kid......

Thank god (so to speak) they were Buddhists and not, oh, say, Neo-Nazis making a Lego sculpture of Hitler, or that kid would have been toast.

Thanks for reading.

If all of the raindrops were lemon drops and gum drops

2007-05-23T07:25:00.001-04:00

So here's a weird thing I've discovered:

You know how when you're feeding somebody a bite of food with your utensil, you tend to open your mouth along with them? I've noticed this when feeding Nolan, or watching KB feed Nolan - KB'll hold the spoon out to him, and when Nolan opens his mouth to take the bite of food, KB will open his mouth, too. (It doesn't happen much anymore now that Nolan mostly feeds himself.)

I used to think that this was some sort of biological adaptation evolved to encourage your offspring to eat - to visually show them that it was safe, healthy food that you're giving them. "Open wide, Junior! See? Like me!" Or something.

It seems pretty unconscious when we do it, which is what makes it sort of funny - you don't realize you're opening your mouth along with Nolan until someone watching you points it out.

Then yesterday, I popped a bowl of popcorn for Nolan and I to share, and he was feeding me some pieces of popcorn (we're "working" on sharing as a concept right now - can't say that it's going too swimmingly, but then, he's not even two) and HE was opening his mouth right along with me as he shoved popcorn in my mouth. It looked exactly the same as when KB does it - a sort of distracted, unconscious opening of the mouth as he focuses on getting the food into my mouth.

So what does that mean? Are we genetically inclined to open our mouths when giving someone else our food to show them that it's okay to eat? Or did Nolan learn to do it by watching KB and I open our mouths while feeding him?

Investigate, and report back to me.

Thanks for reading.

If there's something inside that you wanna say, say it out loud it'll be okay

2007-05-21T07:16:00.000-04:00

Enough with the rain already! I am going crazy with all this stupid weather.

Not only is it just plain depressing, with the gray clouds and the darkness and the endless drizzle (and the glaven), it's a major pain in the ass when you're trying to sell your house. Every time someone wants to come for a showing, I run around in a panic cleaning up various detritus and vacuuming the rugs, and every time we come home, the "buyers" have tracked muddy leaves and assorted debris all over the place as they walked around. Which means I just have to clean up AGAIN the next day when someone else wants to come see it.

Not to mention that when it's pouring rain outside, the possibilities for where Nolan and I can go for an hour or so are limited. No playground, no walk to the store, no chance for him to run around and burn off some energy. We end up driving around aimlessly (oh so good for the environment and the pocketbook, what with the $3 a gallon gas) or going to the mall to walk around (also not so hot for the wallet - or for the self-esteem - I end up berating myself - "I've become one of those moms! Those moms who go to the mall! And just walk around! I have no imagination! Aigh!")

I guess I should be grateful that we're even getting people in to see the house. It's such a disruption, though - no wonder selling your house is such a stressful process. Random strangers coming into your home, different people every time, walking around and evaluating how you live, while you are sent out into the rain with your child like an unwelcome guest. It's even worse when the "buyers" show up earlier than their appointed time, something that has happened a couple of times.

On Friday the person was supposed to show up at 3, and of course I had to wake Nolan up from his nap so we could leave, so I waited until the last possible minute so he could sleep as much as possible. Then, when I finally did wake him up, he had a poopy diaper, which is a whole new emergency when you're showing your house - you have to not only change the diaper (trying not to get any poop on the changing pad cover so you don't have to change that before you go), you have to open the windows (in the fucking rain!) to make sure the smell dissipates, and take the dirty diaper out of the house with you in a plastic grocery bag so you can make sure the house doesn't reek of poopy diaper. So of course as we're walking out the front door, plastic poopy diaper bag in hand, the "buyer" and her real estate agent are walking up the driveway. Fifteen minutes early. And she's all "Ohhhhhh, we're so sorry, it looks like we woke you up!" to Nolan. And I want to go, "You did, you fucking wench! You made me wake up my sleeping child and run around like a madwoman to please you! You'd better fucking buy this house!" But of course I don't.

Because it's not her fault, really. When I am the "buyer," like in Princeton when we've gone to look at houses, I want the people to accommodate me and my wishes, and if they don't, well god help them. We were down there in April looking at places, and at one place we showed up (with our agent) in this exact situation - the woman answered the door and was like, "Oh. You're early." and our agent asked if we could look around anyway since we were there, and the woman said no. And I totally mentally crossed that house off our list - I was like, "Well I guess you don't really want to sell your house, lady!"

So I know we have to do everything we can. But it's still a giant pain in the ass.

And we've lowered the price by 20 grand! Cough, cough, choke. And we continue to put money into the place - we had a handyman come to paint the deck and power-wash the siding last week, and the house looks great, but it's like, "How much more do we have to do?" Why won't someone buy this house? Forget about being choosy - when we first started this process I was envisioning competing offers (as I'm sure many delusional sellers do) and how we would be able to pick the people we thought would love the house as much as we do. Ha!

Now I think I would be happy if Donald Trump wanted to buy it and knock the whole block down to build the Boston Trump Taj Mahal. No. Not really.

Which reminds me, did I ever tell y'all what happened with the Development Next Door? I didn't? Typical.

We won. We totally, completely won. Even though we didn't get the street rezoned (yet - I don't know what will happen after we leave) we were able to scare off the developers completely. Both the house right next door to us and the one all the way at the top of the street are being rehabbed instead of knocked down to build condos. Because we were able to get a city-wide moratorium on building in Residence B (our current zoning) so the city can re-evaluate how it applies the zoning laws, both sets of developers realized that they were just losing money sitting on these houses/pieces of land, so they're rehabbing and trying to sell.

Woo-hoo!

When KB's mom and I were outside working on the garden a couple of weeks ago, the people who live across the street from the place up at the top of the hill walked by and stopped to talk. They ended up thanking me for working so hard on fighting the developers - talk about gratifying. Now at least I know, even though we're leaving, we'll have had a positive impact on the neighborhood. Those houses will be in much better shape, and I think the street will benefit.

Yay!

Now if someone would just buy our place so they can enjoy the great neighborhood.

Oy.

Thanks for reading.

This was a Pizza Hut, now it's all covered with daisies

2007-05-14T06:46:00.000-04:00

More garden porn!

All the daffodils have come and gone (am I supposed to be doing anything with the dead ones? Does anyone know? Like cutting off something? Or something?) as well as most of the regular hyacinths. The grape hyacinths bloomed a little later and so are still hanging around:

Lots more tulips have come up. I think that's normal; they're later-blooming than the crocuses and daffodils.

The tulip bulbs I planted were called "Queen of Night" and were supposed to be tall, with a very dark maroon/purple/black color. While I did get a few of those,

most of the flowers that have come up are completely different colors.

Very pretty, but not what I thought I was buying & planting. I guess that's what I get for buying bulbs at the Home Despot.

Then there are the tulips in the back - the ones I didn't plant, that the previous owner planted oh so many years ago and that just keep coming back like the perennials they are, in the vain hope that I will know what to do with them or how to take care of them.

Pretty nice, huh?

We've got some flowering bushes in front, too, that were here when we got here. Once again, I'm not exactly sure what they are, but I think they might be azaleas.

Then, of course, to counterbalance the beauty and symmetry of the flowers, we have to have a little evil weed*:
For there is no beauty without chaos, no light without dark, no Han Solo without Darth Vader.

Yup, it's Poison Ivy. It grows rampant in New England, apparently, and we've got it bad in our backyard. As you can see, it's all over The Rock, which is no good. Even if we're only here for another four weeks, there's no way I can keep Nolan from brushing up against it on one of our trips out into the backyard. I'm going to go get some Brush-B-Gone today and eradicate the sucker.

*No, not THAT evil weed. You think I'd have that growing in my back yard? Ha. Ha, ha. It is to laugh.

So I'm trying to view this all as practice for our REAL garden that will come later.

Thanks for reading.

I feel so good if I just say the word

2007-05-10T07:07:00.000-04:00

Some words Nolan can say with the utmost clarity. The really important ones he's got down cold. "Mama," for example, or "milk." (And, strangely enough, "daffodil.") Others, sometimes he can say the vowel sounds but not the consonants, or he substitutes consonants he can say for the ones he can't manage yet.

Because I spend so much time with him, I am (usually) able to consult the Nolan-English/English-Nolan dictionary in my head and come up with a translation. There are times, however, when even I cannot figure out what the heck he's saying. (Even when I use context, like they taught us in 3rd grade!)

So I thought I'd give y'all a chance to play Nolan Interpreter:

A NOLAN VOCABULARY QUIZ:

For each word given in "Nolan," pick the correct English translation.

1. "Brulella"

A. Vanilla
B. Umbrella
C. Brunhilda
D. Banana

2. "Elfadent"

A. Elephant
B. Alphabet
C. Accident
D. Element

3. "Dit-dee"

A. Ditty
B. Itty-Bitty
C. Kitty
D. Pretty

4. "Hininder"

A. Highlander
B. Cylinder
C. Calendar
D. Hindenburg

5. "Lai-bop"

A. Lamb chop
B. Mmmmmmm-bop
C. Light bulb
D. Lollipop

6. "Wahmen"

A. Watermelon
B. Ramen
C. Women
D. Whoa, man

7. "Dental"

A. Dental
B. Central
C. Gentle
D. Gentile

8. "Epup"

A. Step up
B. Get up
C. Ketchup
D. Hiccup

9. "Pee"

A. Pee
B. Pretty
C. Please
D. Peek

10. Wow-uh

A. Wow, huh?
B. Flower
C. Water
D. Shower

Scroll down for answers.

And while you're scrolling down, an anecdote:

Last night, while I was putting Nolan to bed, he asked for his giant giraffe stuffed animal. (He says it "Gee-raf" ["G" like in "gulp," not "g" like in George] in case you're wondering.) It's almost as big as he is, and it's wearing a skirt, rain boots, and, inexplicably, a blue ribbon that says "1st" on its neck. We didn't buy it, it was a (very very nice, don't get me wrong) gift.

And it occurred to me that we've never given the giraffe a name. Some of his animals have names - Grover (obviously), Sigfried the German lion (Siggy for short), Wolfgang the wolf (Wolfy for short), and Comfy Cozy Cow. But many of them (and there are MANY) have no names and are referred to by their generic animal designator. "Bear," for instance, or "Froggy." So I thought maybe, since he seemed to be growing rather fond of the giraffe, it was time to give it a name.

"We've never named your giraffe, Nolan." I said. "Should we give her a name?"

"Wanda." Nolan said.

Just like that. "Wanda." Clear as a bell.

So the giraffe's name is Wanda, apparently.

ANSWER KEY:

1. - B
2. - A
3. - C
4. - B
5. - D
6. - A
7. - C
8. - C
9. - C
10. - Trick question. It could be B or C OR D, since he says the same thing for all of them.

SCORING:

1-3 Correct: Well, what can you do? You don't have kids.
4-6 Correct: Not bad for someone who doesn't spend every day with Nolan.
7-9 Correct: You are a parent. And a linguist. And you spent way too much time on this.
All 10 Correct: You are me. Or Nolan. Nolan, you're not on the computer, are you?

Thanks for reading.

You've been gone too long

2007-05-03T14:26:00.000-04:00

Kelly (my stepsister) had her baby boy on Monday.

Nathan Dean was born on April 30th at 1:30 in the afternoon after - get this - 32 HOURS OF LABOR.

Witness the conehead:

I really can't think of anything I LIKE to do for 32 hours, much less to have to go through something as excruitating as childbirth for 32 hours. She did end up getting an epidural, which is only sensible. He weighed seven pounds 12 ounces at birth. (Which is remarkable, considering I think my stepsister weighs about 97 pounds soaking wet.)

Now they are back home, and the real fun begins!

I wish we lived closer so I could cook her a bunch of freezer meals like I do for the women in my mom's group who have had new babies.

Well, soon enough, I suppose.

Good luck to you, Kelly and Lewis and Nathan (and yes, Frank and Riley, too) and yay! Nolan has another cousin!

Thanks for reading.

UPDATE: Argh. Thought I had the whole sideways-picture thang fixed. I guess not. Sorry, you'll just have to turn your head.

Miss Otis regrets she's unable to lunch today

2007-04-30T07:33:00.000-04:00

I wonder why it is that I seem to be unable to enjoy things in the here and now. Whenever I'm having a good moment, or relishing a victory or the like, my brain immediately jumps to how sucky it's going to be when the moment is over.

To wit:

Yesterday I was able to go shopping* and go for a run at the YMCA by myself because my awesome mom-in-law is still here with us, and she can hang out with the Nolanmeister while I go do my thang. Almost the entire time I was browsing and then sweating and panting I was thinking "Enjoy it now, because she's leaving in three days and then your life will go back to the hellish mess that it normally is." Yeah! Thanks, brain!

*A pause here to sing the praises of the glory that is T.J. Maxx. Sometimes you gotta elbow the other bargain-seekers out of the way, but man, can you get some great deals. I bought a pair of capris, six tops (including one by BCBG Max Azria) and a pair of Aerosoles shoes for - wait for it - $142. How kick-ass is that?

Last night when I took Nolan out of the bath, he ran away before I could get the towel on him, which he thought was hilarious and thrilling until his wet feet slipped on the hardwood floor and he went down hard. He cried and I picked him up, wrapped him in the towel, and snuggled him. When we got upstairs he just wanted to keep snuggling for a little while, and while I inhaled the scent of his freshly-washed hair and the clean towel, all I could think about was how when he gets older he's not going to let me comfort him that way. He'll get all distant and independent and grown-up, and I won't get to snuggle with him any more. (This is making me weepy just writing about it.)

Sometimes I find myself trying to imprint that happy moment on my brain. I tell myself, "Remember this. This is the last time this will happen." Whatever it happens to be at the time. We went for a drive down to Hull yesterday while our real estate agent had another open house here, and walked out on a little peninsula where you can see straight across the bay to Boston. It was foggy and rainy yesterday, but you could see the city outline, and I thought to myself "Remember this. This is probably the last time you'll see this view in your life. What are the chances you'll ever come back to this exact spot once you move to Princeton? Engrave this in your brain, becuase you won't experience it again."

Why can't I just be in the moment? Why can't I just enjoy myself and smell my kid's hair and be happy? There are so many occasions when I wish I could click a switch to tell my brain "Thank you, that will be all for now," and shut the constant yammering commentary off.

I'm thinking back to when I was in labor and how when the pain got so intense my brain went all "Elvis has now left the building" and wishing I could do that on command. There must be some other way than blinding cervix-stretching pain, though.

And speaking of labor and cervix-stretching (nice blend Fozzie, thank you Fozzie!), my stepsister is in labor at this very moment. My dad called last night at 8 to say that her water had broken and she was 3 centimeters dilated. I hope things are moving along well for her - she was, last I heard, trying to go drug-free - and that her little baby boy will be here safely soon.

Sigh.

Thanks for reading.

Keep on with the force, don't stop, don't stop til you get enough

2007-04-23T20:27:00.000-04:00

We're not dead!

Sorry if we worried everybody!

Nolan's fine. He's no longer sick and listless. He's having some teething issues and not sleeping very well, but otherwise he is his usual fabulous self.

We've just been busy. (The distinctive cry of the half-assed blogger: "But I've been really busy lately!")

We went down to Princeton the weekend of the 14th and 15th to look at places to live (and found one - more on that in a second) and then had to drive back up to Boston in the Great Nor'Easter of Ought Seven on Sunday. That, as they say, sucked big donkey dick. Seven hours of white-knuckle, rain-soaked, wind-blown driving interrupted only by a (rather pleasant, actually) lunch at Pizzeria Uno somewhere in Connecticut. We brought the portable DVD player in the car (Thanks, Kenton and Andrea!) and Nolan was fairly happy with Happy Feet (thanks, Grandma and Pappy!) but soon discovered he could kick the DVD player from his car seat and that put an end to that. Maybe he was just trying to keep his own feet happy. Robin Williams doing half the voices in one film is enough to drive anyone over the edge.

But we did make it home alive, and Nolan had a great time hanging out in Dirty Jers with Nana (and Nana had a great time hanging out with Nolan, but then, what else is new?) KB and I went around Princeton with our real estate agent and looked at rental houses. It was pretty slim pickins, but we found something that will work for us in the short term whilst we get settled and look for something to buy. (And try to sell this house, for the love of pete, which has NOT HAPPENED YET.) It's nothing fantabulous, but it's big enough for now and it's in a really great location - walking distance to the hospital for KB, walking distance to downtown/library/YMCA for Nolan and myself, and a playground at the end of the street. Yay! Plus, how sweet will it be the first time the faucet springs a leak or the dryer goes kerfloey, instead of trying to fix it myself (or make KB do it) I can just say, "Call the landlord!" I'll be trying to console myself with that while we hemorrhage money paying rent and a mortgage simultaneously. Damned housing market.

So anyway.

All is (mostly) well. KB's wonderful mom is here staying with us for a spell, and let me tell you, has my mood improved since she's been here (I am particularly blessed in the mother-in-law department, I must say); she never tires of reading "Mother Goose" to Nolan 38 times in a row, she helps with the cooking and the laundry, and she's fun to talk to besides. We (meaning she and I, not KB - he had to work the next day) had a few too many glasses of wine with dinner one night last week and were up until all hours telling embarrassing stories to each other. And she's knitting (another) sweater for Nolan! (The gauntlet has been thrown down, Dru.)

And now, Nolan with a giant bear:

Thanks for reading.

It's tough to walk in dignity with throw-up on your shoes

2007-04-09T19:36:00.000-04:00

Poor Noney is sick.

I was supposed to have playgroup at my house this morning at nine-thirty, and as I was dashing around cleaning up the kitchen, making more coffee, picking up stray toys and wiping off the dining room table, I couldn't help but notice that it was almost eight o'clock and Nolan was still asleep. He normally gets up around 6:45 or 7, 7:15 if I'm really lucky.

So I kept my fingers crossed and hopped in the shower, and when I got out, he still wasn't up. So I stuck to my old adage "Never wake a sleeping baby" and threw in a load of laundry, got dressed and put out some muffins.

Nine-twenty rolls around and he's STILL asleep. Then I start to have those old fears from when he was a newborn that he's died in the night and oh, if only I'd gone and checked on him sooner, I could have saved him, what a terrible mother I am.

So I go up to his room. He's laying there in his crib, surrounded by stuffed animals, thumb firmly corked in mouth. Awake. But listless. He sees me and croaks, "Mommy," very heart-breakingly and puts his arms out for me to pick him up. I pick him up and immediately get a whiff of The Stench, that awful aroma that means he has probably had diarrhea in the night and been laying in it for hours. I feel awful. I quickly change him out of his soiled pj's and diaper and put on a clean dry diaper and comfy sweats. He protests and cries, but in that same listless manner that tells me he's really not feeling like himself. I check his temperature - low fever, nothing serious.

I take him downstairs and call the other playgroup moms to call them off - no point in their kids getting the plague, too. Nolan drinks the milk I offer him, but just wants to lay in my arms and snuggle.

It's weird, probably about 75% of me feels bad for him that he's not feeling well, and bummed for myself that I will be denied the adult company of the other moms - my little sanity break for the day; but the other 25% is like, "Woo-hoo! He's gonna be a piece of cake today!"

And it's true. No tantrums, no defiance. He just wants to sit and have me read him books. We watch an Elmo video and he eats some graham crackers and a banana; drinks some water.

Then I try to put him back to bed and he cries pitifully. Usually when I put him down for a nap if he cries a little I just leave him to it; he always settles down and goes to sleep after a short interval. But when he's sick like this I just don't have the heart for it. I pick him back up and sit in the rocking chair with him for a while.

That's pretty much how the rest of the day goes. More diarrhea; more half-hearted protests as I change his diaper. More water. More graham crackers. More Elmo. More laundry. I give him chicken soup for dinner at 4:30, a bath at 5:15, and have him back in bed by ten to six. I never even leave the house.

My poor baby guy. I hope he's better tomorrow.

Where they lie so long, beneath the seasons

2007-04-03T14:59:00.000-04:00

Well, you wouldn't really know it from the freezing cold rain we're having, but spring is officially here.

Last fall, KB's mom was out here for a visit and she showed me how to plant bulbs (me being the non-gardenically inclined sort) and now the flowers are coming up!

I feel kind of bad for the crocuses - they're popping up all cheerful and perky and then getting smashed and trampled by the sleet/slush/hail crap we've been getting all week.

I love that they're even blooming at all, though. I feel all proud and boastful, like, "Look what I did!" even though all I did was dig the holes and put the food and bulbs in. It's fun, though, seeing my handiwork coming to fruition. Pretty magical, too, thinking that all those bulbs have just lain there dormant all winter and now somehow know to come sprouting up. I should be getting some tulips and daffodils and some other flower whose name I have forgotten, too. (Hyacinth? Can that be right?)

Ah, nature. All organic and biological and green and good.

Yay, flowers!

Can you see them, see right through them

2007-03-27T20:55:00.000-04:00

It's the end of an era.

Sadly, I am down to my last beloved Pure Tints. Back when I was last bitching about the tendency of products I like to be discontinued, I bought ten of them from drugstore.com, but now I am (almost) bereft. There's like a centimeter left in the tube of this one, and then that's the end.

*sob*

For a while I tried rationing the Pure Tints out and not using them so much, hoping in vain to stretch them out, but I love them so; it was impossible.

I got all excited because I saw at the drugstore that Almay has a new line of lipcolors that look somewhat like the Pure Tints. But then I read the fine print - they're technically lipsticks and they cost friggin' $8.99 a piece. Tempting, but no. I can rationalize blowing four bucks on trying out a shade that I may or may not like, but nine dollars is above my waste of money threshold, methinks. Plus the whole point with the Pure Tints was that they were sheer and light and not too much of the "Hello! I'm wearing lipstick!" and more of the "My lips are naturally this smashing color, you silly!"

Alas.

Then I got my hopes up because I saw that Burt's Bees has come out with these , and I love their stuff. They even have a shade called "cocoa," which is what my old Pure Tints favorite was. And only four bucks! Huzzah! So I bought one post-haste and rushed home to try it out.

But I was deceived. The supposed "cocoa" looked more like PUCE. Ugh. Nothing like the color of the cap. Shiny, silvery lavender-y grossness. That went right in the trash. Now I don't know if I should even bother trying another shade of those. You know, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, I'm a fucking idiot.

So I ordered a couple of these from drugstore.com. (I swear I'm not plugging drugstore.com on purpose, they're just the only place I buy this kind of stuff from online, mostly becuase I'm too lazy to even look for or research another one.) I use a lot of other Neutrogena products for my face, and I generally like their stuff, so we'll see. Seven bucks each, though, oof. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

(Can I just say*, also, I hate when cosmetics companies [and clothing companies, and shoe companies, et cetera] make up stupid names for their colors that have absolutely no relationship to what the color actually looks like. I mean, "Clean?" What the fuck color is "Clean?" Wouldn't that be NO color at all? I understand that each company wants to distinguish its particular dark brown thing from every other dark brown product that's out there in the world vying for consumers' attention, but Jesus. Try to have your color name have some bearing on reality, please, product-makers of the world. Orange is a color. Forest green is a color. "Jazzy" is not a color. Even color names like "chestnut" and "daffodil" I can tolerate, because those are universally [pretty much] well-known objects that are all generally the same color, so we have a point of reference. Chestnut is probably a dark brown, daffodil probably a cheerful yellow, right? But then you get into things like "sky." Well, what kind of sky, exactly? I mean, I know it's most likely a pale blue, but who's to say it's not raining that day? And from there they just go spinning into a fairy land of "perky" and "stucco" and "fang." Just tell me what the hell colors those are supposed to be, please.)

(I also hate, while we're on the subject, when catalog titles don't just say something straightforward like "Spring 2007" or whatever. I got one the other day that said "Anticipating Summer 2007." I refuse to buy anything from a catalog that stupidly named, sheerly for the principle.)

*Of course I can say. It's my blog, for pete's sake. Why must I ask my own permission?

Where was I? Oh yes. No more Pure Tints. Boo.

Thanks for reading.