snippets

I’m going to tell you one little fact that speaks volumes about my life right now; I just *now* (as in this morning) took the Christmas lights down off of my front porch.

~ahem~

Of course, the 5 strings of lights are now wadded up in a ball on my kitchen table and I hope to do something about that before the week day is over. That something will probably be be to stuff the whole thing in a Target bag and throw it in the garage to deal with next November! (At which time I will curse at myself, and go buy new ones.)

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I’m sitting at my desk surrounded by paperwork, books, and Legos. I can’t move from my chair for the amount of work hanging over my head. And when I have a moment to stand up and stretch I step on Bionicles and bruise the poor soles of my feet. Sheesh. I’m on a tight deadline with one rush project, and have two more looming. Work is good to have, but well, yeah. Their vacation was not my vacation. I cannot tell you how glad I am that our so-called vacation is over!

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On Tuesdays I volunteer at the school library. Mostly I put away books, hundreds of pounds of books. I’m also the checkout girl, making sure they’ve brought back their overdue books before they get another, that sort of thing. Sometimes they ask me to help them find just the perfect book. And once I got to read to a first grade class. (They even listened!)

Some of the fourth graders laugh at me because I’m terrible with names. They try to make me guess who they are. I see the same kids over and over, every Tuesday, bright, smiling faces of kids who want to be in the library, who clearly love to read, who get as many books as they can every week. I love it there, even if their names escape me, their happiness doesn’t.

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Today is Tuesday! I get to ignore the pings of emails, silence the ringer on my cell, and forget about the Christmas lights on my kitchen table. I get to go to the library.

March 2, 2010 | 5 Comments 
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I’m not gone, I just have blogger block

My brain is mush. I just can’t think of anything interesting to write about.

I had wonderful company (my friend Teresa while her husband Bill is in Ethiopia!) last weekend but that would be a very long story. I have more company (one of my sisters - yay!) coming this weekend but that story hasn’t happened yet. I have an aunt who is very sick but that’s not my story to tell.

I held a day-old baby on Monday but I had to give her back. ;) I have weigh-in coming this Sunday but I don’t think I’ve lost a pound this month. Josh is going to start t-ball tomorrow so the time suck begins again. I tried to go without wheat for a week, and I keep forgetting.

The rain is keeping me from gardening. Work is slow this week, although I’m sure it will get busy just as soon as my sister arrives. I’m not entertained by anything on tv. Twitter is irritating me - too many retweets, celebrities, and promotions, blech. Whatever happened to original thought and conversation?

I’m more than a little cranky. And worried. Very tired. Not to mention restless, boring, and repetitive. And perhaps whiny? Geez, I really need to get over myself. And I need to find my funny. It seems to have run away from home.

Yeah. I’m all over the freaking place. Give me something to write about would you? An idea, a question, anything you want to know about me? Help. I need to blog through the block.

April 22, 2009 | 5 Comments 
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life’s little irritations #10

Insomnia. And all the wonderful things that go along with it. Including but not limited to:

Then there are the actual causes of the insomnia:

So then there are the actual things that are in my head that won’t stop spinning. These are each tiny irritations in of themselves, but all balled up together create one big aneurysm of an irritation. The kind of stuff you know you can do nothing about, that there are no solutions for, especially at 4 am and yet you can’t stopping thinking about them but if you don’t your brain is going to explode.

It’s occurred to me more than once that if I could just stop needing to pee in the middle of the night I could avoid the majority of my sleepless nights. Other than actual dehydration, I have yet to find a solution for that though.

Anyway, here I am, wondering if it’s possible that writing all this down will now allow my mind to vacate all thoughts so I can lay down and go back to sleep…except…now I have to be up in one hour 45 minutes 30 minutes. Crud. I have to pee again.

November 13, 2008 | 6 Comments 
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crazy crazy day

Edited to add

May 14, 2008 | 6 Comments 
Filed Under life, the boy, the cat, the husband Tagged

irony? don’tcha think?

So I had to drop off the boy at t-ball this evening and then I had to go to a meeting. I didn’t have time to go home and get dinner, nor did I even have time to buy a decent meal. But there was no way I was going to a freaking town council meeting with an empty stomach. (Don’t even ask why I was there, but I’m pretty sure me and my cohort were prominently displayed on the local cable access channel. Yikes.)

Anyway, my solution was to stop at a convenience store, grab a bag of chips and a soda, (and a powerball ticket, but shhh, don’t tell dh!) and eat it in the parking lot. Now, if I ate said chips and drank said soda WHILE reading Bon Appetit magazine, is that true irony, or is it Alanis Morissette not really irony kind of irony?

I just realized, I really hate that song. Why did I write a post with that in it? Now that’s ironic. Right?

[edited to add: HELP ME. NOW THAT FRIGGING SONG IS STUCK IN MY HEAD. and I'm very sorry if it's stuck in yours now too.]

May 8, 2008 | 3 Comments 
Filed Under friends Tagged

faux pas x2

I promised myself I wouldn’t blog today until I was showered, the boy was fed and dressed, and the kitchen was actually clean. Done. (Well, really I promised that to myself yesterday. Did you notice I didn’t post yesterday??)

I’ve been working this thing over in my mind last few days, and now I think it’s time to spew it up before it festers. You know how that is, right? I know you do, some of you have admitted it before!

So I went to a bridal shower for a cousin on Sunday. I sat at a table with a few other cousins and one of my sisters. These are cousins I only see at weddings and showers and anniversary parties, but when we do get together we always have lots of laughs. This occasion was no different.

However. I committed two of the worst sins of mommyhood.

Do you know what those are? Don’t we all?

First, I asked a married, childless woman when she’s gonna have a baby. <<hides in shame>> Oh, yes I did.

Second, I regaled a poor pregnant woman with horrors of childbirth. <<blushing furiously>> Yes, I did that too.

Well, okay, to defend myself about the first. I’ve had the baby conversation with that particular cousin before, and not always of my doing. (I think?) I just shouldn’t have said anything in front of the rest of the table. No wait. I shouldn’t have said it at all! I did take my opportunity to apologize later, in the car, and we had a long discussion about that sort of thing. (We went to the event together.) She was genuinely sweet about it, and we had a great time otherwise, and discovered a mutual love of gardening. But dang, it’s still just hanging over my head.

The thing is, I was married for seven years before we had a baby. People asked me the “when” question quite often for all those years. I was never really offended, but my reason for at least the first 5 years - we will when we have a house - was always countered with “if you wait until your financially ready, you’ll never do it.” That’s what always annoyed me, because I didn’t believe it was true. I felt like it was irresponsible of me to have a baby when I was young and in debt. If we had had an accidental baby, that would have been one thing, we would have dealt with it and we would have been okay. But to plan on a child, when I knew I could not afford it, just didn’t seem right. Not only that, but since I’ve had one child, there have been multitudes of queries about when I’ll have another. Um. Never. Someday I’ll tell you about that.

I’m digressing, as usual. My point is, everyone has their own reasons for not having a baby, and I am well aware of that - yet I asked anyway! It was one of those time when my mouth worked before my brain had a chance to stop it. Foot in mouth disease. Today I resolve to never try to never do that again.

In defense of faux pas #2, <sigh> all I can say is, I wasn’t the only one, and I didn’t start it. Hmm, not a great excuse huh? This dumbass totally jumped on the bandwagon! That poor thing. She was a little pale at one point, so I did try to stop it, but she kept saying “It’s okay, I need to know these things!”

Actually, we didn’t say anything horrific, really, I swear. I kept back the really bad stuff! Heh. I only tried to impart my only good advice to any new mom to-be, however she becomes a mom: nothing ever goes as planned, so better not to plan too much and you won’t be disappointed. I learned that the hard way myself. Read my birth story and you’ll know what I mean.

In any case, I did apologize to her later as well, knowing we had gone too far. I now resolve to find a chance, before September, to have another conversation with her about all the good things about being a mom!

Phew. I feel better. Thanks for letting me get that out. So, you do have any etiquette blunder regrets you need to get out? Sing it sisters!

May 1, 2008 | 6 Comments 
Filed Under family Tagged ,

wherein I momentarily reveal myself

I am honored to be tagged by Schmutzie for the “7 random weird things about me meme” that’s been going around the blogosphere in a few different forms. Most everyone did it looong before I even had a blog and in my stalking surfing I’ve giggled at many of them, but frankly Schmutzie’s post really was the weirdest! I’m not sure I can live up to that but I’ll give it a try…

7 Random/Weird Things About Me

1. Whenever I let my kid watch Power Rangers, I always watch it with him, under the pretense that, you know, you should monitor your kid’s view habits. But secretly, I love those shows. I actually get into the story lines, and if an episode doesn’t record for some reason, I search it out on you tube so we can catch up. For the record, Dinothunder is the best season.

2. I am completely addicted to salmon cream cheese. No, not like good lox and bagels kind of thing. But the salmon flavored philly brand stuff. The fake stuff. I’ll eat it on bagels, crackers, as a dip for chips, you name it. Lucky for my arteries there is only one store within decent driving distance that sells it, and I only let myself go there once a month or so or I would want it every. single. day. I know, ewww.

3. I read trashy romance novels, a lot. I just can’t help it. I go through phases with other genres, but I keep going back to romance. Once in awhile I read an O book club book, just so if someone asks me what I’ve been reading I have something decent to say. It’s not like I’m gonna tell anyone I own almost every Nora Roberts book ever written. Except I just did didn’t I?

4. I hate hate hate the Birthday Song. I hate singing it, and I hate having it sung to me. I always have. I’ve very rarely ever told anyone that, and I’ve never done so in front of my son. For the last three out of his only five little years he’s begged me me not to let anyone sing it to him. I now hate that I’ve somehow passed this on to my kid.

5. I have a terrible blog crush on Wil Wheaton. Yes, that Wil Wheaton. Which leads me to admit my love for scifi. I grew up on all things Star Trek, Star Wars, Tolkien, etc. My book scifi love is and always will be Raymond Feist, (long live Pug!) My tv scifi love is forever reserved for Stargate SG1, (and Daniel Jackson baby!) and I am embarrassingly sad at it’s demise.

6. I am hopelessly in love with the internet. You couldn’t tell could you? It’s my down time after the boy goes to bed, and where I go for my break in the middle of the day. You already know I blog surf, but you don’t really know the extent of it - can we say about 50 rss feeds? You also don’t know I am obsessed with keeping up with Twitter, though I rarely post cause I don’t know what to say. I constantly refresh my Facebook scrabulous page to see if it’s my turn on any of my games. I feel completely inadequate on Linkedin cause apparently only a few of my friends actually know what that is. I go to Rachel Ray’s website regularly to sign up for giveaways - cause I just know I’m gonna win something one of these days! I haven’t read a real newspaper in ages cause I get all my news online. Every little thing I do for work is done on the www, so there I have no choice, but frankly, I have more fun doing my job than anyone really should. The list could go one, but I’m sure you already stopped reading…

7. I swore to myself if I ever started a blog I would never do a meme. But it was actually more flattering to be tagged than you might think. So here I am. And having more fun than I expected!

So reading back through these, it occurs to me that I’m not so much weird, as I am a dork. I’ve actually known that ever since I was on the math team in high school (#8?) but seeing all this in writing - it’s a little painful!

I’m supposed to tag like 5 people or something, but I don’t really know 5 bloggers well enough to do that, (I’m a little shy that way) so I tag SouthernGirlinNH because I adore her, and I would tag the awesome Kristen but I know she’s done this one before, (but you can do it again if you want to!) and I tag any of my real life friends who want to get on board and start a blog (so I can read as much about you as you read about me!)

Hey, at least get on Facebook, would you? So I can beat you at scrabble!

April 21, 2008 | 5 Comments 
Filed Under meme Tagged ,

yes, I am crazy

Did you ever go away for an overnight or two and suddenly, halfway there, you think: did I turn off the coffeepot?? Yeah, me too. More times than I’d care to admit. Now I make a point to unplug the coffeepot just so I remember doing it.

Well, I didn’t sleep very well last night because of that damn proverbial coffeepot. In this case, coffeepot = feline. See, while we were loading up our vehicle, getting ready for an overnight at my parent’s house for Easter, the cat was getting a bit underfoot, trying to get outside, trying to trip us, etc. So I put him out in the locked, enclosed porch. He was happy, I was happy. Two minutes later the boy let him in. Dude. So I let him back out. That’s where it got blurry.

Around 10pm last night, that fact flashed in my brain. Was the cat still on the porch? He couldn’t be. Right? I definitely remember seeing that the door was locked. But that didn’t necessarily mean the cat was let back in before the locking occurred. The boy was, of course, already asleep so I couldn’t ask him if he had the opened the door for dear kitty a second time. DH said he thought the cat was hanging around before he left, but was that before or after the second letting out? Was the poor cat huddled in the damp drafty porch trying to keep warm? Were his cute little toes and ears freezing?? Yes, I’m rambling - just to give you a taste of the circular momentum of my brain between 10pm and midnight. and 2am to 3am. Not to mention the nightmares along more horrific lines when I did sleep. Yikes.

There are plenty of nights when my mind won’t stop rolling like that, thoughts about work, paying the bills, oops I forgot…whatever. But at home, I can deal with it. Yes, 2am online bill paying has happened here in the past. Or at least writing down my worries instead of fretting over them helps. Even if I can’t read my handwriting in the morning. (I can’t be the only one who does this? Right?)

So what can you do, what kind of note can you write yourself, when you’re three hours away from home, worrying about how you’re going to tell your kid you killed the cat? Um, yeah, no idea. So I just didn’t sleep.

In the morning, the boy confirmed that he had indeed let the cat in the second time. Later, as we pulled into the driveway, the kitty happily watched us from his top o’ the couch perch in the picture window. <sigh>

Some people would say, it’s just a cat, what’s the big deal? But he’s my cat, and my boy’s cat and he’s laying on my legs right now where he’s supposed to be, and dang, he’s heavy, and he’s family.

All is right in my world again and sure do hope to get a good night’s sleep! Except, boy, I sure do have a lot of work to do tomorrow, and that guy never responded to my email last week, and oops, I forgot….crap.

March 23, 2008 | 8 Comments 
Filed Under the cat Tagged