Roam responsibly…and a hat!

When I was a kid, we roamed a lot. I roamed my neighborhood like a stray cat. On foot, on a bike, even by bus on occasion – I was out and about from a rather young age, all on my own.

Like, as in, kindergarten. And of course, this being nineteen-sebbenty-{mutter}, The Lady My Mother didn’t give it a second thought. I walked to kindergarten all by myself (in the company of approximately 62,000 other kids, but they don’t count). I was on my own. We all were.

And we learned real quick the do’s and don’ts of being out and about on your own as a child. What things could turn your sweet, dear, honey-voiced little mother into a raging, fire-breathing demon with red eyes, claws and the most unbelievably vile temperament. What situations turned really scary, really quick. We learned from each other what houses to avoid. We heard all the urban legends, about how there was this one time? When this kid? Was walking? Alone? And this guy? Was walking his dog? And he sez, “You wanna pet my dog?” and then…{dun-dun-duuuuuuh!!!!}

Blood, guts, dismemberments, we heard it all. By the time my parents thought to have The Stranger Danger Talk™ with me, I was all, “…and…?” because there was nothing new there.

There were other things I learned early, too. Things like…how to tell time. And what the relationship was between me and said time…most of which had to do with avoiding the red-eyed, fire-breathing, steel-clawed demonic mother-like person mentioned above.

But occasionally, it would be something not involving staying out of trouble. It would be something like…one of my friends inviting me to something. I would carve those dates and times on my soul (if I wanted to go, anyway). The first thing I would ask was, “What time Saturday?” And if I knew I had a conflict, I’d ask anyway. Because time is BIG. Sometimes, just because you have to be one place at 9:30 in the morning doesn’t mean you can’t be in another place by 2:30.

Which brings me to Eldest. After the Great Childcare Debacle of 2010©, she now walks to school with two neighbors in the morning. She has an after school program she is supposed to be going to…but a couple days ago, I was on my way home when she texted (!!) (that still freaks me out a bit) to ask me what time I’d be there because blah blah book report and something about research and I said (texted) (!!!!) why don’t you go ahead and walk home?

I think she ran for home. Heady with the ultimate freedom that is being all on your own. Nobody around to squeal on you if you dawdle. Nobody you have to keep up with, or wait for. Nobody being the boss of you.

Just you, and the open road sidewalk.

Ah, sweet freedom…!

So imagine her surprise when she got an earful from me the minute I got home about stopping to talk to people on her walk home.

“What was up with the dog?!” I fired off as I came through the door. And as I was in the middle of giving her a big long lecture about not talking to people, even “nice looking” people walking their dogs in the park because they might be blood-guts-gore-dismemberment types!!!, I realized that…

…ohmygah…

…I have just officially turned into my mother. Steel claws. Red eyes. Fire. Brimstone. Vile temperament. Furious over “nothing.”

And poor Eldest stood there, looking at me like, Whoa! and slowly realizing that she must have butt-dialed me on her walk home. (Ya, she did. And I listened to almost ten minutes of her walking along singing and then stopping to talk to somebody about their dog, and I almost walked up to the front of the train to slam the accelerator to the floor because GAH! Street smarts! SHE AIN’T GOTS NONE!!!)

The next day, I was working from home thanks to a miserable combination of an oncoming cold and a really bad back pain week. Imagine my surprise when the door slammed open at about 2:45 and Eldest shouted, gleefully, “OH MooooooooOTHER MiiiiiiiiINE, I’M HOOOOOOOOOME!!!”

And imagine hers when the red-eyed, steaming demon erupted from the bowels of Heck to give her what-for about needing to know where she was. I MEAN, YOU KNOW, REALLY! It’s not that walking home is FORBIDDEN, it’s just that when I expect you to be one place and then you just walk away and turn up in another…!!!!!!!!!!!

(The Lady My Mother is so totally laughing right now. I can feel it. She is laughing so hard she is going to fall out of her chair.)

So today, she told me before she even left the house that she wanted to walk home right after school.

Then she reminded me via text message (!!!!!!!) when she went to lunch.

And then she called right before she left the school grounds. “Oh hai, yeah, just wanted to remind you I’m walking home – that’s OK, right?”

And then she entered the Den calling out, “Hi, I’m home, just like I told you! Three times, you may recall!”

Smart aleck.

And then a few minutes later, she got a phone call…and sadness. There were conflicting parties on Saturday. She really-really-really wanted to go to Party 1 and has been looking forward to it just forever...but Party 2 is a BFF+10, and she can only invite one (1) person and naturally she wanted Eldest because who wouldn't choose her first, and BFF+10 was most severely bummed that she couldn't go...and, feeling pained for BFF+10 (I have a big old soft spot for this kid, actually) I said, “Well, but, what time does she need you at her place? Because you’re coming home pretty early Saturday morning from Party 1…”

She looked at me blankly.

I said it again. S-l-o-w-e-r. I’m picking you up at Ludicrous O’Clock Saturday morning. What. Time. Is. The. Other. Party?

Still she’s looking at me as if she’s never heard of time. Time? Time? What’s that?

Sigh.

She had no idea. None. She hadn’t asked for and/or hadn’t retained this information.

This is a kid wandering the streets without a keeper.

But, you know…I can’t keep her a baby forever. At some point, she’s going to be out there on her own. She’s not going to learn how to fly if she never leaves the nest; I can’t imagine how bad it would be to turn her loose in the world for the first time after she’s gotten her driver’s license.

In other and completely unrelated news, thanks to a surprise meeting that was one of those ones where I do a lot of intense listening but almost zero talking, I finally started getting the face finished on the hat!

Oh, you know…the hat?

…from…July…?

Ahem. Anyway. Yay me! I finally got the mouth and the nose and the pupils sewn onto the front of it! The ears are a bit (actually a lot of a bit) bigger than the picture in the pattern, but I think they’re kinda cute that way so I left them alone.



Now all I have to do is the white part around the pupils and it will be ready to plop onto Baby’s head. Eeeeeeeeee! I hope she likes it…or at the very least doesn’t loathe it…

And now three of the Denizens want one too. And I still owe one of Danger Mouse’s BFF’s a dead fish hat. Which she reminded me of when she was over last weekend. Forcefully reminded me. She wants it in pink and white because that would be “pretty.” But definitely she wants it to be a dead fish. Because a live one would be gross, whereas the dead one is funny.

(Just go with it, y’all. The logic of the ten-and-under set is mysterious indeed…)

Crack-BOOM!

I was just packing it in on the old work day when a tremendous BOOOM! rattled the windows and I said to myself, “…wait…was that thunder?”

Friends…this morning, it was a balmy, clear day. Cool, but not cold. Hint of fall, but still summery. And then, just as I was getting ready to head out for Denizen pickup, it started to thunder, and far, far away I could see little flashes of lightning.

I hadn’t gotten two blocks when the water began to come down from the heavens in buckets. It rained cats. It rained dogs. It rained chickens and antelopes. It rained as if it meant it, big fat juicy drops that almost hurt when they hit exposed skin.

The streets filled up fast. Lakes began to form. Driving to get the kids, I could barely see where I was going. Other drivers were apparently unaware of the situation, and were driving like complete nuckin’ idiots they could actually see the road.

Frequently, they would hit roadside lakes at full speed, sending up huge plumes of water from their startled wheel wells.

I got soaked just dashing from the van into the center. And then got double soaked getting back to the van, trying to keep Captain Adventure from rolling in the mud like a happy little pig, trying to keep Boo Bug from dawdling, trying to keep Danger Mouse from pulling out papers from her backpack to show me. Seriously, you are getting SOAKED, in the RAIN…not a good time for paperwork, babe…

I drove home with my senses tingling, white-knuckled and tense, as lightning flashed around us, as the streets got less and less passable, as earth that has forgotten what water even is did its best to deal with the sudden onslaught, as storm drains that had nodded off while waiting through the long, lonely summer awoke to find themselves overrun, trying to remember their training, trying not to panic as the water surged into them…OK! Ya! So, uh, keep it, erm, moving, people! Small molecules first! HEY, NO TREE BRANCHES!!

The lightning began to get closer, and closer, and closer. The crack-boom were nearly instantaneous, the light bright enough to hurt my eyes, the closeness of it setting off the instinct to get out of there.

The lizard in my brain sensed a predator, y’all. A big, invisible monster that was going to nail us if we hung around. {Crack!...Boom!} … {Crack!..Boom!} … {Crack!.Boom!.Crack!BOOM!CRACK!BOOM!!!!}

And behind me, cacophony. Captain Adventure screamed with laughter each time there was a sizzling crack and thunderous boom. Danger Mouse was yelling some complicated story or question or something. Boo Bug laughed with her brother at first, then realized she was missing a prime opportunity for whimpering and switched over to that.

Then we got home, and being the meanest mommy ever I herded them all indoors away from the fun of swimming in their very own front yard…and the lightening, which continued to slash around us from all directions like a demented disco ball.

I watched in amazement as the front planter box filled, and overflowed, and began to crawl up the porch. I watched our court fill, the water puddling and pooling, sending questing fingers all along the curb, looking for a way out of the concrete trap it had fallen into.

I watched a car on the access street hit a new-formed lake at what seemed like about thirty miles an hour, a wall of water shooting up all around it, watched it slip and slide and spin a quarter of the way around, wincing in anticipation of metal on metal, praying it would somehow not crunch sickeningly into the parked cars lining the street…and it didn’t. It collected itself and proceeded onward down the street, perhaps just a little more cautiously now.

And then the rain began to slow. Less than an hour into the storm, the drops lost their rotund shape, the pace began to slacken. The thunder still boomed and the lightning still cracked, but it was moving away, further and further away. The crack and the boom were separating again, one-alligator-two-alligator-three-alligator-four. Four miles now, now five, now six.

Now silent.

The ferocity of the rain tapered down and down and down, until it was barely more than a heavy misting, falling daintily all around.

The water receded, as fast as it had pooled. The pond growing on my doorstep that I’d been eyeballing nervously for ten minutes stopped its attempted conquest of the front door and crept quietly back into the lawn, sank into the thirsty ground…vanished.

The pavement of the court appeared again. The rippling lake was gone, gone as if it had never been there, gone into the drains, into the ground…gone, leaving us staring and blinking and wondering if we just imagined the rising waters, the pelting rain, the drops the size of a quarter…

Mother Nature Says: It’s Fall. And don’t you forget it! {crack-BOOM!}

And the sock yarn is...

Soles & More by Sensations, available at Jo-Ann's craft stores. It's a typical 75% wool / 25% nylon blend on the lower end of the sock yarn scale; I believe I got the two balls of it at a local Jo-Ann's on shocking discount a while back.

I think I paid $4 for both balls. Which is why I bought them (and a couple other balls in other colorways too) when I already have so much sock yarn around the Den that I have drawers I can't close, boxes I can't close, Space Bags I can't close, and plastic storage totes I can't close and I'm sorry, but am I sensing a pattern here...?

...but c'mon, four bucks for a pair's worth...it would be like walking away from FREE GOLD that was just lying there on the curb...!

I'm finding it to be a perfectly decent sock yarn. Nothing wrong with it, but it isn't spun of unicorn mane or anything. (Which isn't fair. I mean, it's competing with stuff from Lisa Souza and Rabbitch, here, people, it's like throwing me on stage at the Miss America contest and expecting me to do well in the bathing suit competition.) ("Herrrrre she is, Miss OHMYGAH MY EYES!!!!!!!")

It is the ever-so-poetically named color # 1812, or TP/GRN/BLU. (TP? What the heck color is TP? Taupe? Nah, that's boring...maybe it's Trefoil Pasley? Turnip Petals? Toilet Porcelain? Trembling Parsley! Which would also be a great name for a punk band, wouldn't it? And now, the Trembling Parsley! {ROAR! sez the crowd...})

And the thin yellow strips are charming the dickens out of me for some reason. They're just so bright, verging on being jarring but somehow pulling back right as they begin to teeter toward "too much."

I started the heel flap on the first sock on the last leg of the homeward trip. Amazing how fast a sock seems to go, when you've been working on lace for the last stretch of forever...

We interrupt the other 47 works in progress...

..with a sock.

The thing about "on the go" knitting is, there frequently comes a point where they become more pain than pleasure, you know? I spent half an hour trying to do one ear on the anime-inspired hat. Each row on the shawl is now taking twenty minutes or more, and setting it down mid-row is perilous in the extreme. Eldest's Lillehammer is getting too big and awkward to carry and work on in cramped, swaying quarters.

Thus...I am making a sock. You know, real quick.

Because it is fast, easy and light.

And also because crawling around under BART seats trying to find the #2 DPN you just hurled wildly across the train is sooooooo much fun! (You meet the most INTERESTING people that way, too..)

(sent from my Treo)

Bright and Beautiful

This, lovely as it is, was NOT a sight I was particularly looking forward to seeing this morning.

I am tired, oh my people. SEE, I was out too late last night, bein' rowdy with mah coworkers at a "team building" event. (It's a burden, having to work with these people...really...don't let the fact that they make me laugh something like every six seconds fool you, working in this team is a ho-hum drag...)

I got home at the stroke of midnight...then had trouble getting to sleep...then the alarm went off at 3:30 because I have a 7:30 meeting "in person" this morning...which makes catching the 4:45 train mandatory.

Needless to say: Feh.

So I made coffee for myself and the husband - who I'm not seeing as much of these days. And I looked at my sleepy-headed mate, in his ratty old robe, yawning hugely, cat already on his lap and glaring at me defiantly, scruffy-bearded and altogether rumpled...and I began missing him before I'd even left.

This is one of those weird "people in love" things, I suppose. I'm pretty sure it wasn't the sort of sight that would make most people want to stick around. (I, on the other hand, am GORGEOUS. All the time. And also elegant. Especially first thing in the morning, in tatty old PJs that are about three years past their expiration. It's my perpetually vampire-red eyes that REALLY make the "look," ya know? Ssssssexy!)

I was settling into a good case of The Melancholy by the time I got on my train. I felt lonely, cut off, tired, pessimistic about my chances for ever feeling content again (because The Melodrama is right next door to The Melancholy).

And I missed my guy.

Really, REALLY badly. (How I would "deal" if either of us traveled a lot is beyond me. But I suspect it would rhyme with "really, REALLY badly.")

Firmly in a funk by now, I jammed my iPod earbuds into my ears and hit 'play' on a random playlist. The Melancholy possessing my body didn't want to talk to anybody about her damned knitting or how freakin' early it is or Measures E, Q or X in the blasted upcoming ballot, or tell you how her garden grows.

..I'll just be over here wallowing in loneliness and sadness, never mind me, just another lost little waif adrift in a sea of nobody-gives-a-damn...

And then, three songs into a new playlist I made at some point then forgot about on my iPod...rich and beautiful and young(er) and happy...my husband singing the lead line of a song about (surprise-surprise) beer.

It was an instant blast of Happy, and Gratitude, too.

How many people get to hear their Beloved's voice on-demand like that? Sure, it's not nearly as good as his actual physical presence, but in my mind...I was watching his show, back in the day. Watching him be in his element, happy, confident...

Remembering how beautiful he was, and still is, and how proud I was, and am, that I get to call him my own...

But it gets better, because his voice is not alone.

And of course, other voices summon other faces. Other dear, sweet, beloved faces. Some on the stage, some making merry with me in the audience, some on other stages, in other places.

They were all right there with me in my mind.

Some live (relatively) close at hand and bless us regularly with their presence (and endure our occasional assault on their own peace and quiet). Some live far away and are a seldom treat. Some have largely vanished from our lives...but still we know, if we had a need, they would come to us by one road or another. In person, in spirit, in thought or prayer.

Just a simple song. Kind of a silly one, come right down to it.

But in that gloomy moment of loneliness, when a cloud was trying to form over me and puke darkness all over me, it was like gathering the best-spent days of my youth, the greatest treasures of my present, and my future hopes together in a song.

Hard to keep feeling lonely with so much love, laughter and light all around me.

..happy sigh...

It's a bright and beautiful new day after all.

(sent from my Treo)

Red umbrellas and food dye

This red umbrella makes me happy: It represents the impending end of the Umbrella Wars of 2010. SEE, sisters got umbrellas at the Bean Festival. The bother...did not.

War ensues.

So, behold the $3 umbrella, Bringer of Peace.

Also, San Francisco Chinatown tip: this same exact umbrella on the Union Square end of Grant was $6. The further "out" you go, the more the prices tend to drop.

This pork bun, however, is NOT red...and in a development that will cause food purists to blanch, I really miss the obnoxious red food dye that used to make the BBQ pork nestled in that sweet steamed dough a most unlikely red.

It came from the same bakery where The Lady My Mother used to take me, from the time I was too young to do more than gaze raptly at her while SHE had one. Ah, nostalgia...

They're still awfully good, and at just a buck a bargain.

..but still...

I kinda miss that bright, undoubtedly toxic red dye...

(sent from my Treo)

Dear Me:

If you are going to do That Thing where you dab a dollop of facial mud on a developing zit, it would be REALLY helpful if you washed it frickin' off BEFORE you left the house.

Because otherwise, people MAY think you've got an enormous smear of poop on your cheek. And as recently discovered, that makes it rather hard to pull of that "cool, competent" thing we were going for today.

Thanks for your attention to the above.

-me
p.s.: Idiot.

(sent from my Treo)

The IEP of doooooooom…

Today was the second time we’ve gone through a “big” IEP meeting. Every three years, they do the “tri annual” thing; I think the main difference is that they are longer. Much, much longer. Epically longer. Longer in a way that can be a bit mind-boggling. First, we review where we were, now we go over where we are and blah blah this test and yadda yadda that test. The amount of time and energy spent observing and testing Captain Adventure was a bit astounding really, as was the fact that he put up with it – and apparently did so with a relative amount of grace, since everyone who had put the screws to him commented on his “cheerful, cooperative” nature. (Um, wait, are we sure we’re talking about the same kid? Because he kicked me in the face last week when I was trying to transition him off the Wii…and ‘cheerful, cooperative’ are not the words that come to mind, people.)

At some points, it seemed like they were just looking for ways to make me cry. Because you know what can kind of set you off? Things like test results that show your six year old is functioning at < 3 years (or in other words, “falls off the bottom of the chart”) in such-and-so categories.

I don’t care that if you turn your head sideways it’s totally an Internet ‘heart.’ It still kind of breaks mine…in some ways, precisely because I can’t argue with the assessment. There are definitely areas where he is not keeping up with his peers, especially in the social / communication arenas.

Autism is mean that way.

On the other hand, he’s also got things like, scoring 120 on a weighted IQ test,that’s right…my boy? SUPER genius. (In certain categories, when tested in a way that leans heavily on his really keen hand-eye coordination and mathematical tendencies. Terms and conditions may apply. See store for details.) (…wait, what?…OK, possibly? I have been watching too much TV lately…)

He’s also got areas one area where he shines like the sun, and that would be math. He’s doing second grade work. Lemme say that again: My “disabled” son? Kickin’ patookis in the math, baby. He’s doing work that seven year olds do not grok. He can do column math. (Without the ‘carrying a one’ part, though…he’ll add together 27 and 14 and come up with 311. But then he KNOWS that ain’t right, which, I mean, you go, boy! He just doesn’t know what to do about it yet, and so far has resisted my attempts to show him because what do I know, I’m just a mommy, it’s not like I’m a teacher or something…)

They didn’t test for it, but, he can also subtract. I’m just sayin’. (Proud momma syndrome: Check.)

These Official Meetings always make me feel fearful. Irrationally so. I fear both sides of the coin. I’m afraid they’re not going to find that he’s made progress, and I’m also afraid they’re going to find “too much” progress – and cut his services. I’m afraid they’re going to challenge his speech therapy, or tell me (gently, I’m sure) that he’s not nearly as high functioning as we’ve been assuming. Uhhhhhh, yeah, he’s not EVER going to be anywhere NEAR a mainstream classroom, I can’t imagine why you’d ever think he WOULD be…

It’s a constant juggle for me, trying to balance reality and hopes, dreams and limitations. To accept what is without leaving off the therefore that follows it.

To be realistic about things, but nevertheless shoot a little higher than reality suggests is prudent.

Which naturally leads to this IEP anxiety, I guess. I don’t really want to know how far off base I am, when I look at him and try to envision him out on his own in the So-Called Real World…working…laughing with friends…falling in love…mortgage, minivan, Denizens of his own…

I don’t want to know that he’s no, really right smack in the center of average for kids with his diagnosis. I want to believe that he’s not, that he’s barely only sort of possibly MAYBE in the bucket.

But I also don’t want to have him yanked away from the excellent help he’s getting right now, either. I don’t want anybody to actually say, “Oh, no, he’s fine, he could totally just go right on into a mainstream second grade classroom next year, la la la, everything’s awesome!” – because that is so not true, either.

So naturally, I’m not going to be happy either way, right? No matter what they say, pretty much, I’m going to find something in there that makes me some combination of anxious, sad, angry or just plain contrary. Nuh-UH! That’s just STUPID…!

But overall, our news today was good. His speech remains garbled enough that speech services are deemed necessary (whoopee). His track record with post-time-off behavior remains bad enough that he continues to receive inter-session classes (um, yay?) (I mean, really: On the one hand, he needs it and I’m glad they give it to him, but on the other hand it’s like, “Oh yeah, whenever he’s just home with us for any length of time, he goes completely feral and it takes, like, two weeks for his teacher to civilize him up again”? What does this say about my parenting, people?!) (actually, it’s kind of cute how hard they try to make it not sound like that…well, by nature, the home environment is more chaotic, and that’s actually GOOD, because blah blah blah…, and of course I’m thinking, …heh…you people have NO IDEA what kind of chaos goes on at my place…! and then my husband usually jumps in and starts blabbing about what-all kind of crazy goes on around here and I’m kicking him soooooo hard under the table and then I’m wondering why the psychologist is yelping like that, and…oh…ummmmm…)

It’s a bit humbling, really. There are so many people gathered there who are all working with him, one way or another. People who put in hour after hour helping him navigate his way toward a more mainstream life. People who, moreover, have helped him blow his nose, or change out of his pants when he had an unexpected accident, brought on by distraction or, more precisely, intense focus on something other than his body and its signals.

People who go over the same things with him, slowly, again and again, trying a hundred different ways to say the same thing, looking for that elusive key that will open the door for him.

Never giving up. Coming at it again and again and again. Putting up with him when he’s in one of his foul moods. Helping him find better ways to deal with those irritating “emotion” thingees, that so often come at him from nowhere and leave him flailing for a way to express himself, or even understand himself.

It still just amazes me, that other people willingly put up with all the crap our special needs kids will dish out. That we live in a time and a place where we aren’t expected to lock them in a room away from the “regular” people and pretend they don’t exist…or ditch them on a snowy hillside to die of exposure for the good of the tribe.

I’m still so grateful for them, each and every one. I’m aiming unreasonably high for my boy, and they’re right in the court with me saying, “Sure, you could totally make that shot! Just follow through more on the throw, but don’t flick your wrist like that, you’re sending it off to the right a bit…”

It’s good to have so many coaches, and cheerleaders, working with us.

Even if the meetings do occasionally go on (and on, and on, and on) a bit…

Do NOT try this

Seriously. I am warning you. Just don’t do it. The results are horrible.

So do not collect together

4 to 5 cups of all-purpose flour
2 packages active dry yeast (4-1/2 teaspoons if using bulk)
1-1/2 cups warm water
3 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon salt
Another 1 tablespoon sugar

And by all means, don’t put the yeast in about 2 cups of the flour. Don’t mix the 3 tablespoons sugar and the salt into the warm water, for heaven’s sake don’t add it to the flour / yeast combo and stir until it’s all mixed up and slurry-ish. Then don’t mix in as much more flour as you can manage with a spoon, then turn it out and knead it on a lightly floured surface and keep adding a little flour at a time as you knead forever, or until you’ve got a smooth, elastic ball.

Then don’t cover it and let it rest for ten minutes.

Then don’t cut it into twelve portions, shape each portion into a nice, smooth ball, poke a hole in the middle of each one and pull it out smoothly (neatness counts!) until you’ve got a roughly 2” hole in the middle of it.

Don’t set those on a greased cookie sheet and let them rest, covered, for another twenty minutes – firing up your broiler at about the fifteen minute mark and starting a gallon of water in your widest pot boiling with that 1 tablespoon of sugar remaining.

After twenty minutes, don’t broil them 5” from the heat for about 3 minutes, turning once. (They shouldn’t brown at this point, they’re just getting an initial crust going.)

Don’t turn the oven down to 350 at this point.

Then don’t drop them into that pot of boiling sugar-laced water for about seven minutes, turning once. (But if you do, don’t crowd them in there – you’ll have to do only four or so at a time.) (Yeah, it gets tedious. It’s like, really? Because I’d rather do all twelve at once and BE DONE NOW, but if you try you’ll end up with a blog of melded togetherness that will never look quite right after you’ve pried them apart from each other.)

Don’t take them out and let them drain for a second on paper towels or a cookie rack. (I prefer the cookie rack because it doesn’t involve throwing away a paper towel, and also because I don’t mind having to mop up the countertop under the rack afterward. Eh, it’s seen worse…)

Then whatever you do, don’t put them back into the oven for 25-30 minutes.

Because this is what happens:

{BIG EMPTY SPOT OF NOTHINGNESS WHERE IT REALLY FEELS LIKE THERE OUGHT TO BE A PICTURE}

See? That blank space right there? That’s where a picture of twelve bagels should be. Only there isn’t one, you know why?

Gone in under sixty seconds.

Mind you, the facts that a) there are six of us loafing around on a Sunday, and b) that they came out of the oven right at lunch time, and that c) oh.my.gahd., they are nothing, NO NOTHING like what comes out of a plastic bag from the supermarket, probably didn’t help their longevity much.

All sarcasm aside – wow, were these good. And, all fiddly “broil then boil then bake” stuff aside, easy. Simple ingredients, simple steps, and the end result was astounding. Crispy-chewy-salty crust, dense, and remarkably flavorful for something made of only five “in every cupboard in the world” ingredients.

But don’t do it.

I suspect they’re highly addictive.

Like meth.

Only without that whole “getting arrested and spending the rest of your life in jail” part.

Pig poop and pearls

We lost our childcare Tuesday morning. Abruptly, and in ugly fashion.

The bridge wasn’t just burned – it was atomized, and the canyon walls blasted another thousand feet apart, and, well.

I think it would be easier to build a car-carrying suspension bridge across the Grand Canyon out of dental floss than it would be to fix this thing.

The husband and I spent the rest of the week working from home so we could deal with the crazy drop off and pick up schedules (four kids, three schools, four different schedules, oy) and start scrambling around for replacement care.

…so…many…phone…calls…

And then of course, since these big chunks came out of the middle of the day for all that, we ended up having to work into the night to make up for them.

It has been a rough, rough week. I feel like I’ve been put through a wringer, twice, and not hung up to dry but hurled into a corner to quietly mildew.

Fortunately, I was already planning some time off today and next week.

Unfortunately, my plans for that time did not include ferrying the Denizens all over the place; and my budget didn’t account for the startup costs of new centers and programs; and my time off is unpaid time off; but, on the bright side, none of my plans were non-refundable.

Sigh.

But just when I was starting to worry that we weren’t going to be able to make this thing work, everything just sort of fell into place.

We found placement for the three younger ones, all at the same center, even Captain Adventure. They didn’t blink, blanch, or bluster about his autism. They just asked for a copy of his IEP and delicately mentioned that they’d need to meet him before enrolling him. Then they showed us the various ways they deal with kids with special needs, and I was all, Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I just need to kiss you right now…

The bus is being rerouted to the new center. Eldest is comfortably settled into the after school tutoring program at her school – which goes until 6:00 and should take some of the heat off us at night. Nothing says “awesome” like getting home at 6:30 at night only to find that your child has spent all her homework time at the sitter’s house doodling unicorns or anime in the margins of her book, but hasn’t actually done line one of her math homework...

And, at the end of the day, we’ll be paying about $140 less a month for all of it. Which I suspect is the Universe’s way of saying, “Ooooooh, did I just totally kick you in the teeth? Wow, sorry about that…here…have a cookie…”

I feel like I fell into a vat of pig poop and came up with a fistful of pearls right now. It was a helluva week. I’m exhausted, strung out, sad when I’m not pissed off, glad that the kids are happy with their new places, wishing The Incident never happened but kind of glad it did...in the same way I guess you’d be happy you got stabbed in a drunken brawl, if the doctor sewing you up happened to notice a cancerous tumor while he was at it and whisked it off your backside for you.

Wow, it was so lucky that that guy slashed my butt with that broken beer bottle…uh, wait…

I can’t wait to put this whole thing into the rearview mirror.

And if I’m really lucky…I’ll actually get one of my three days of personal time off next week, uh, you know…off.

(I know. I’m trying not to get my hopes up. I think it would be just asking for it if I did…)

Mold-Free Monday

I cleaned my office desk this afternoon. This is one of those little "housekeeping" details that frequently…eludes me. I'll go through my day sucking down cups of loose-leaf tea (because bags would leave me in grave peril of tea-cup tidiness, and we couldn't have that), or coffee liberally laced with milk and sugar, or even {shudder} instant hot cocoa (sugar-rush desperation, I occasionally haz it…), and then sort of not get around to the part where I rinse it out, preferably with a little soap being involved at some point.

I make toast with butter and jelly (usually in lieu of actually eating lunch, which is a terrible habit I've noticed is extremely prevalent in our group, especially during deploy weeks – which this week was), and as I'm shoving the plate, cup or bowl aside, I make a mental note to make sure I don't, you know, forget to clean that.

And then I totally forget all about it until I need it again. And there is no way in heck I'm going to remember to take a minute at the end of the day to take care of it, because approximately 99.95% of the time, quitting time jumps on me like a mountain lion pouncing on a mouse. SURPRISE! {squeak!!!!}

I don't know why it is that quitting time always seems to sneak up on me. After all, most days it arrives at precisely the same time. I even have reminders set up, a recurring "meeting" I've put on my Outlook calendar that pops up a little window fifteen minutes before I should be leaving.

And yet I almost never leave the office in anything like an orderly fashion. Oh no. It's always a rout. I'm always trying to finish one last email, or just look at the distinct values of this one field in this one (200-million-record) table real quick (there is nothing 'quick' about a table with 200,000,000 records), or I'm embroiled in an argument a vigorous debate about whether or not this line of code is doing what we think it's doing.

And then suddenly, without warning, I've got 28 seconds to be in the elevator or I will miss that train, which means missing the bus, which means missing the second train, which means cooling my heels for an hour at the bus stop waiting for the next blasted shuttle.

I don't like missing my shuttle. It makes me testy.

Half the time, I don't even notice I've still got dirty dishes on my desk. I just start flinging electronics in the general direction of the zippered pockets all over my backpack, and then I run for it. I'm genuinely surprised (and disgusted) when I get in three days later to find my tea cup has applied for a driving permit and the cream cheese from Thursday's bagel has been sneaking off to Planned Parenthood because it's got a thing going with the little bits of burned meat I picked off my sandwich.

Ew.

Now, much as I'd like to pretend this has only happened once, maybe twice, well.

I'm afraid it's actually all too common an occurrence.

But not today!

Because, before my last meeting of the day, I looked at my desk, noted (and herein is the miracle) that said meeting was going to end precisely at quitting time, and I said to myself, said I, "Self! Deal with that, right-now!"

So I did.

People, you would have thought I had invented penicillin. That is how clever I felt, for having done the impossible, by which I mean knocking the spent tea leaves out of my infuser into the compost (hello, this is San Francisco – of course we separate our refuse into compost, recycling, CRV and {GASP!} landfill…the basket for which is I kid you not the size of a tissue box…), rinsing all the particles off my utensils, and even (in a spasm of cleanliness that defies all tradition) dried them so they won't be all spotty when I get back in Monday morning.

I also cleared off all the (mostly) empty soda cans, used napkins, assortment of wrappers, and other such goo-gahs.

It took me two trips to the kitchen.

And on the second trip, I brought back a damp towel with me and gave the desk itself a quick rub-down, and put all my crap away in my drawer. Tidied up the BRD [business requirements] and FSD [functional specs] and TSD [tech spec] documents sprawled all over every available square centimeter (and quite a few arguably unavailable centimeters). Put away my pens and pencils.

And then I sat through my last meeting of the day feeling so clever that I almost mentioned it when the project manager said, "OK, so, does anybody else have anything they'd like to add?"

Yes, yes I do. I cleaned my desk. Like, FOR REAL.

Fortunately, I managed to rein in my self-congratulations. I wouldn't want to make anybody else on the team feel bad for not being as bad-ass as your faithful correspondent.

Still.

I'm going to have a mold-free Monday morning at work, people.

That's right. Bad assery: I haz it.

And now, we shall conveniently overlook the state of my home office, because I am all about focusing on the POSITIVE, people…(besides, as long as I can shove aside the stuff enough to let my mouse move freely, I'm fine, right…?)

The Magic Time Tunnel

Dudes. I totally have a time machine in my house!

This morning, I got up at 3:35. And I got ready and left my bedroom at 3:52. (Because I am a glamour queen who spends ever-so-much-time getting her "look" together in the morning.) (I call it the "drowned rat" and any day now, it will totally catch on.)

I went downstairs, walked through my hallway and guess what? Even though it only took me, like, ten seconds to walk through the hallway, it was 4:09 in the kitchen!

Then I left my kitchen at 4:28, walked through the hallway again, and guess what?!

It was 4:38 in the car!! And I was LATE LATE LATE!!!! And I just ever-so-barely as in HAD TO RUN FOR IT made my train!!

Dudes. Obviously? My hallway? Is a mystic time portal!

AWESOME!!!!

Tonight when I get home, I'm planning to run backwards from my back door through the hallway, out the front door and around the back to do it again about five thousand times. Give or take. Whatever it takes: My goal is to be thirty-two again.

I think it may just be possible!

Either that, or I'm going to be explaining myself to a psychiatrist because I've thoroughly wigged out my neighbors.

Again.

(Working the too-danged-early shift: A leading cause of insanity since 1902.)

…and so it goes…

Last week I was out sick for three days. I think that is the most sick leave I've taken from a job since Eldest was born. And I was none too happy about it, either. I mean, it's one thing to take a "sick" day, you know? Oh ya,ya, I'm soooo sick, *cough-cough*, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the CSI:Anywhere marathon on Spike, if that's what you're thinking…

It's something else entirely to actually be sick – not for three days, but for six.

And counting. Which I didn't realize before about 11:30 this morning when it suddenly occurred to me that I was still doing the hot-cold-hot-cold-hot-cold thing. And that my head was pounding. And my sinuses were throbbing. And that I was beyond tired. And that really, had I been anywhere near my bed or couch, I totally would have crawled onto it for a little late-morning siesta.

Also, I nodded off in a meeting. Briefly, and I think I woke up before I got really busted, but, well, see, what happened was, I was in this phone meeting? And I was dealing with 74 emails (which was what I had left after an initial pass of sort-file-sort-file-fast.answer-sort-file this morning), so I was kind of, uh, multitasking, and then I realized I had absolutely no idea where we were in the conversation so I tried to stop multitasking but I just couldn't seem to tear my eyes off my whackity-majillion open windows sooooo, I sat back and closed my eyes in an attempt to give my brain nothing to do but listen with my ears and suddenly I realized that I was totally falling asleep because startling awake will bring this realization to one.

Thank Dog for the mute button, friends. Because I think I actually did snort a little when I woke up realized I was falling asleep.

And I still had no idea where we were in terms of the meeting agenda. Wait, what project is this again…?

Fortunately (which may not be the right word here), the meetings today went right over and through the lunch hour(s); by the time I finally said, "OK, thanks everybody!" for the last time, it was 1:30.

And my manager recently laid down da law on me when it comes to overtime and lo the law is thus: Do it not.

Which means that I was sitting there asking myself: Do I want to take a lunch half hour and leave at 2:30 like normal, orrrrrrrr, do I want to skip it and leave at 2:00?

In some ways, it makes no difference. I'm still at the mercy of the train system. Leaving earlier doesn't get me home any earlier – I'm still on the same ACE train, arriving back at my home station at the same old time.

But in others, well. If I just sit there staring blankly into space at the bus stop (possibly snoring) (or worse, talking to myself, which I have a bad habit of doing in the best of times and which becomes downright constant when I'm falling asleep while technically wide awake), nobody writes me up for it, ya know?

So I (and my Starbucks card) busted out of there like we were breaking out of a medium security prison, I filled up my trusty Contigo with an extra-hot triple-grand Ambition-in-a-cup, and caught an earlier train out so I could hurry up and wait at the bus stop.

And listened to a lovely couple discuss their most intimate marital problems AT FULL VOLUME BECAUSE WE ALL NEEDED TO KNOW EVERY LAST GORY DETAIL allllllllllll the way to Dublin while a dude I suspect was tweaking sat across from me staring at me and doing this weird rapid blinking/head jerking thing, picking at his forearm and occasionally drawing in a sharp breath like he was about to say something only to shake his head and let it out in a long, drawn-out hiss. Awesome!

I love BART. Truly. When it's light, the crazy people really come out of the woodwork. When it's crowded, it's like a fascinating glimpse into what life would be like post-apocalypse, when it's every man for himself and people will stubbornly sit glaring at the elderly pregnant woman and her walker with an expression that clearly says I will DIE before I give up this seat.

It probably doesn't help my tired/sick/cranky feeling today that I worked like a dog over the weekend. This is something that will happen if one decides that it would be awesome to go all homestead-y on one's bad self, and throws one's self into this massive gardening project, with all kinds of grandiose ideas around how much can be produced on each square foot of ground.

…and then one promptly and after deciding that there is simply no work for one left in the whole entire Universe gets a job in a city far, far away from said homestead but instead of immediately dropping the whole crazy idea like a sensible person would, one says, "No, no, I'll just tone it down a tad, because after all, it's only a twelve fifteen month contract (with possible if not probable extension to eighteen) – it will be gone before you know it and what will you have left? The homestead…" and then one will spend every spare waking moment of one's exhausted, pathetic LIFE dealing with the stupid homesteading crap, and one will wonder if one needs psychiatric evaluation and possibly medication would be nice because NORMAL PEOPLE DO NOT LIVE LIKE THIS, PEOPLE!

Or so I've heard anyway. Ahem. So! This weekend, I got to deal with the produce that has been building up all over my kitchen counters and stacking up in my fridge and starting to wither on the vine while I was busy doing other things like working, or doing laundry, or being sick.

Over the course of the weekend, I put up an awful lot of stuff. Let's see.

6 pints strawberry jelly.
5 pints zucchini relish.
4 pints 'house' salsa (mild-to-moderate spicy)
5 pints green-tomato salsa (Habaneras Edition – kick, it haz it)
4 pints BBQ sweet-tangy sauce
4 quarts Italian-style spaghetti sauce
6 pints cucumber relish
4 pints zucchini marmalade, which is not as disgusting as it sounds. It actually tastes like plain old orange marmalade, but the bulk of the, um, bulk is actually shredded zucchini
5 quarts tomato puree

It's time to start resetting the little fields, too, as we're entering the transition months, shifting away from the heat-lovers to the cold-tolerating. Taking away the current aphid food and planting new goodies for them to devour. (Honestly, if only I could figure out how to harvest and sell aphids, I'd be set for life, y'all.) (maybe I could skin them for hide and tallow…?)

But I can't think about that right now.

Because I'm almost home, after thirteen hours of being gone. It will be noisy at home. There will be messes, old ones and new ones. There is stuff that needs to be put away. Emails that will need to be answered. Homework and questions and what's for dinner and four of us will think bedtime is too soon and two of us will think bedtime will never come, and many somethings won't be finished yet and will simply have to wait for yet another day.

And so it goes, and so it goes, and so it goes…and goes…and goes…

I swear, it wasn’t what you’re thinking right now…

A little bit ago, I was looking at Regretsy (and laughing myself silly, which was nice because yes, I’m still sick and that pisses me off no end) (three errands today, and I was all like, ohmygah, I’m DYING, no, for REAL this time…).

And then I heard this noise coming from my bathroom and I said to myself, Hmm, what’s that noise? and then I got up to see what it was, and what it was, was, my son getting into my earrings. Spreading them out on the edge of the bathtub and loading up his pockets with the ones he particularly liked.

So I took them away from him and was doing the old, “Blah blah blah mine blah blah blah NOT yours blah blah blah out-out-out!” thing.

And, as I finished putting them back where they actually belong on the counter to be put away, you know, later, and was coming out of the bathroom (shutting the door FIRMLY behind me), still going “…blah blah blah furthermore yap yap yap stay out blah blah blah,” I saw him…staring at my computer screen.

With rapt fascination.

Because naturally, my browser was sitting on a nice if fugly example of someone’s cross-stitched endearments around what a BLESSING children are and how LOVELY it is to be that most sacred of beings, A LOVING MOTHER the enema pin.

Awesome. I can’t wait. “Oh hai, Mrs. Captain’s Mom, this is his very young teacher? Ya, he said something about looking at ‘butts’ on your computer, and I was just wondering, ummmmmmmm…?”

Sigh.

Last week, he told her during a moment of High Drama, that he wanted to killllllll himself. Not because he actually wants to, you know, kill himself, but because he wanted a do-over. His whole world is framed like a video game right now, and to him having a character “die” or “get killed” means they’re going to :ping!: back onto the screen, back at the start of the level. So when things aren’t going his way and he’s pissed off to the point of no return about it, he’ll start saying things like “I want myself to die!” or “I’m going to KILL myself!” in the same way that I might say, “GAH, I wish I could have a do-over on today!!”

Even knowing this, it still creeps me the heck out whenever he says it. And I have to resist grabbing him and delivering an emotional lecture about it – which would, of course, deliver only one message, loud and clear: Heyyyyyy, saying that sure gets a rise out of mom! I should totally do this any time I want to piss her off, which is about forty-seven times an hour!

Fortunately, his teacher being an autism specialist and all, she understood instantly when I explained this to her. (And agreed with me that while he may not mean it in the traditional sense, we do still need to keep an extra vigilant eye on him whenever he starts that, on the off chance that he might throw himself under the bus wheels or something, expecting that he’ll just :ping!: back into his bed and it will be morning again and now he gets to “do the level over” – isn’t special needs parenting awesome?!)

However, I’m not so sure if I can explain an enema pin to her. Especially given my tendency to just really keep going when I get nervous, instead of shutting up like a smart person would do.

“Ya, well, you know how there’s Etsy? You know, Etsy? Etsy? The online art marketplace thing where, ya, well, it’s, you know, art? Ya, well, then there’s this Regretsy blog, ‘where DIY meets WTF’ and, uh, well, there was this…well, a lot of times, it’s like…see, this one time, she found this one where this woman uses her boobs to do paintings? HAHAHAHAHAHA, I mean, heh, yeah, well, ahem. Aaaaaaanyway…it wasn’t what you’re thinking right now, it was just, this…pin…celebrating (I guess, celebrating), uh, enemas, and I mean, heh heh, really, what could be more WTF than that, huh?”

And then she’ll look at me.

And really…I mean…but…

It wasn’t anything like that. It was just, you know…sigh…

…is it way too late to take the fifth right about now…?

Then I wonder why he always wants to come with me

You just never know what might be at the farmer's market.

Sigh.

Time allotted for errand: Twenty minutes.

Time actually spent: Forty-five and counting.

Happy, sweaty Denizens expected: 0

Actual happy, sweaty Denizens: 1.

Well played, Captain. Well played.

(sent from my Treo)

Being sick is boring

Yeah, AGAIN. Although I'm doing it right this time: full triple digit fever, dizziness, lung congestion, nausea, sore throat, headache, misery.

Can't sit up, can't move around...just lying here, me and my Treo and my TV remote...nothing on...soooooo boreeeeeeed...soooooooo unable to doooooooo anything...

I can't imagine how I'd survive an actual, long-term illness / disability. But can imagine it would not be pretty.

Also, now the TERRIBLE EXERTION of emailing my blog from my Treo has me all sweaty again. Gah.

Seriously. When I am Queen of the Universe? Germs are SO outta here. (So vote early, vote often! Me for Supreme High Empress! YAY, ME!!!)

On This Day In History…

…let it be written that I, the Mother of Chaos, did go forth unto mine bathroom with the current-day’s newspaper in hand and actually managed to read one (1) whole entire editorial without being interrupted by even one (1) Denizen wondering what I was doing for all that long while (consisting of roughly five whole minutes), let alone the usual minimum of two (2) (4) (6) (8) children per minute asking the same question five times each.

Aside: It is a sad, sad commentary on your life when it is so exciting that you got to read a whole entire quarter-page article without being interrupted that you immediately rush to blog about it, and then honestly can’t remember what it was about…BUT! Undaunted and thus emboldened!

I shall now…

…attempt…

…the unheard of feat…!

To
Drink
One
Whole!
Entire!
Cider!

(waaaaaait for iiiiiiiiit)

WHILE STILL COLD!

(That’s right, I’m an envelope-pusher, yo…)

(And all kidding aside, that is the first time I have been be, you know, alone in the bathroom in, like, six months…)

Gratitude du jour 8-26

I got an automated call from Costco that the eggs in my fridge were part of the Big Egg Recall.

You know, the ones we've eaten all but six of?

And I was pretty pissed...until I saw a headline just now that J&J is having to recall hip replacement parts.

Now THAT'S a call that could really wreck your day..."HELLO! This is an important message from...(different voice) your surgeon (/different voice)..."

So today, I am grateful that none of my body parts are currently under recall.

Thank you, $DEITY, amen.

(sent from my Treo)

Aw biscuits…

You know how people are always saying, “Be careful what you wish for?”

Yeah. I’m taking a sick day today.

But, in a twist of unfair that really takes the cake, it’s not because I’m sick enough to take one (I’m downgraded to a mild sore throat, headache, and occasional blast of fever), but because Danger Mouse woke up at 2:00 this morning and threw up all over (all over…sheesh, she’s a tiny little kid, where on earth did all that come from?!) the bathroom. Awesome!

In related news, I find it somewhat amusing how fast my “let’s use the environmentally-friendly, cheap, homemade natural cleansers and this washable towel!” thing vanishes when I am confronted by a nasty, whole-bathroom spray of spew.

Dudes. I went through, I kid you not, half a roll of paper towels and probably a quarter cup of Clorox Clean-Up (which is usually only used around here a dribble at a time when I’m dyeing stuff, to get one or two drops of #37 Blue off the white tile – one bottle will last me for years) in that bathroom this morning.

But between the “ew” factor and the germ-phobia, I did not care. If there were any germs in that astonishingly large volume of ick, they were bleached into oblivion, stuffed into a plastic trash bag that I tied shut as if I thought I had Satan Hisself trapped in there, and tossed into the garbage. And then I washed my hands three times with soap and warm water like I thought I was about to go do open-heart surgery without gloves on or something. (My gloves had holes in the fingers. Germ-admitting holes! Gah!!!)

I even thought about changing my clothes, but decided (after a thorough check for spots) that now I was just being silly.

It’s also amusing to me (from the safety of my relatively germ-free kitchen chair) that my germ-phobia has very little to do with the germs, or even the illness they bring on. Personally, philosophically, I’m definitely in the “germs are a part of the human experience, and it is good that we get minor illnesses and get over them because it makes us stronger – save the antibiotics for the life-threatening [or really painful] crap” camp.

But when it comes to the part where all six of us cycle through each illness once or twice in rapid succession, never any two at the same time so the whole cycle takes, like, a month…I turn germ-phobic real fast.

It’s a tremendous motivator, the idea of being woken up every morning at 2:00 for a month at a stretch because one kid or another – or one of us parents – is (hopefully) kneeling by a toilet (because if we’re not, well, that’s going to be even worse) hurling up things from three months ago and possibly a toenail or two, not to mention all the time lost from work and the fact that all the whining starts to grate on my ears like fingernails on a blackboard until I’m seriously considering divorcing my husband and saddling him with all four of the Denizens so I could run off to Taos to “find myself” in a commune where we live off-grid and grow all our own food and collect all our water using fancy funnel-y things like that show I saw on TV once and oh-oh-oh, could I live in one of those wicked kewl little, what-were-they-called, earth ships?…yeah…that’d be awesome…and as soon as I’m done scrubbing this bleach-soaked roll of paper towel over this manufactured tile, I’m totally going to sign myself up, baby…!

(Why do I have a feeling this is going to be one of those “interesting” weeks…?)

...aw, they really know how to cheer me up...

There are nine watermelon growing in my watermelon patch. Nine! From just two "little" plants.

Yeah, uh...they're...not so little anymore.



All that. Two plants.

Astounding.

And nestled here and there...melons.



But not everybody is so perky. This sunflower knows exactly how I'm feeling today...



It's not a sunflower. It's an ugh-flower.

(These mammoths do that - their heads get waaaaaay too heavy for their stalks, and they just sort of...keel over. This weekend we'll have to stake up the two that have started doing this. It's hard enough to keep the ants off them as it is, but letting them rest their beautiful big faces right on the fence [a.k.a., Interyard 23, a favorite commute route for insects between destinations] is like opening up a Denny's on I-5 and then being surprised if people stop in wanting food.)

Still feel rotten physically, but a walk around the garden on a quiet Friday afternoon surely does do wonders for my attitude about it. Too bad every office can't come with a big old sunnny-patch garden where people can go grab a cucumber and a fistful of cherry tomatoes right off the vine for their lunch...

Aw, come ON!

Last night as I was piling into bed I muttered to myself, “I’m calling in sick tomorrow. And this time, I really mean it.”

I say this to myself about every other night. I’m so tired by the time I turn in that I actually do feel like maybe I’m coming down with something. I feel hot, or cold, or I have a pounding headache, or my joints are aching in that “flu-ish” kind of way, and, well, maybe my nose is a little stuffed up and possibly I coughed once or sneezed twice and anyway…I think I’m coming down with something and I’ll have to call in sick tomorrow.

Therefore, naturally, I don’t take myself seriously when I’m going to bed thinking that maybe I’m coming down with something.

So imagine my surprise when I woke up this morning still feeling like I’m coming down with something. A little feverish, pounding headache that scoffs at Excedrin, lethargy, muscle ache all over…I’m pretty sure I’m coming down with a lovely case of The Scrounge.

And now that I’ve crawled my way to lunchtime…yeah. I can state with authority that it isn’t a case of just still being tired, or in need of a(nother) cup of coffee, or perhaps a six pound slab of chocolate or maybe an iron pill (taken with a pound of top sirloin and two pounds of spinach).

I’m definitely coming down with something.

I’m not sick yet, but I’m on my way to sick and will probably be feeling pretty wretched by quitting time today.

And, just a calendar check here, it’s Friday.

Which, you know…well. That’s not fair. I’m starting to come down with something today, which means I don’t feel quite unwell enough to hit the couch. I work from home today anyway, so I’m not buying any net-new time away from commuting.

At best, I might feel ugly enough to log off a couple hours earlier in the afternoon. Or maybe even lousy enough to not even come back from my lunch break here.

But I don’t feel quite bad enough to actually crash right now. Which means that The Scrounge is probably going to hit me like a freight train tomorrow – on my precious, too-brief window of so-called leisure where I try to put Humpty Dumpty back together again restore some order around here.

And then I’ll be feeling marginally better on Sunday, and by Monday I’ll be fine.

Seriously, is that fair?

If I ran the Universe….well. If I ran the Universe, nobody would get sick in the first place. But if for some reason my omnipotent powers didn’t extend to actually eradicating illness altogether, well, by Me they would totally have to take the weekends off.

{grumble grouse complain whine kvetch}

In other news, you know how you know who your friends are? Well. I know one thing for sure: Friends do not send friends links to things like this when they’ve just made all kinds of solemn vows about not spending any money (click on the image to go to KnitPicks for project details) (and this is not the same as me sending it you, which would be un-friendly...all blame lies with my friend Kathy who sent it to me in the first place):



Why don’t you just hand me a six pack of peach cider, a box of The Sinus Medicine That Actually Works and the keys to your Porche while you’re at it?! (I know you don't have one yet, babe, but maybe you could buy one just for the occasion?)

…but they are awfully cute, aren’t they? And Captain Adventure would love! either the googly-eyed alien or the muffin-seeking slug…

If I had a time machine…and peaches grew on trees...

I would make thousands of jars of peach butter and hand them out on street corners all over America.



This was my breakfast this morning: A toasted bagel with cream cheese and peach butter. It tasted like bright sunshine and happiness.

Which was good, because this is what I was working on during the commute in this morning.



And it was more like "well, what the @*&^@...why is this…wait, isn't this supposed to be the…knit four, ssk, yo…no, wait, I've got knit six here…but…no, no that's…huh-uh, that's completely…wait…is that a dropped stitch? OH. YOU. ARE. @*^&@ING. KIDDING. ME…"

Among other things (primary amongst those other things being the fact that I am an idiot who never, ever, EVER learns from experience, no matter how painful it may be), I had taken the excellent advice given, made a copy of my destructions instructions, and was using a highlighter as I went to keep myself 'on track.'

Except that I apparently got excited and highlighted two rows I had not actually done.

Which rather throws a wrench into the whole system.

This is the project I took on our camping trip. (Please see "idiot, can't learn" comment, above.) 99.5% of this progress was made during the van ride there and back again, .45% of it was made in spurts and stops while we were camping (most of that in the wee little sliver of morning between when I hauled myself out of the tent and when Captain Adventure would emerge from his cocoon ready to begin another day of terrorist activities fun and excitement), and -.05% was made this morning as I tinked back, re-knit what I thought I'd done wrong, stared at it, counted and counted and counted again, and only toward the very end of the journey realized that I was trying to do row 107 when, in fact, I was supposed to be on row 103.

But at least I was wrong about the dropped stitch. It wasn't a dropped stitch. It was just a pulled out stitch – where somewhere along the line something (probably my knitting needle) had gotten hooked under the yarn and yanked it out so that it formed a big old loop where no big old loop was supposed to be, and naturally since matter can be neither created nor destroyed, a puckered-up section of stitches resembling a cement block that used to be an airy little bit of lace.

Sigh.

So I engaged in underwater stitch-un-pull-out-ing, laboriously teasing the big old dangling loop back into the shawl and convincing the cement block to return to lace-shawl form and biting my lip the whole time to keep myself from muttering out loud while I did it – because that alarms people on BART.

Although I'm not sure why, now that I stop to think about it. I mean, it's not like there isn't somebody on practically every single train who is talking to themselves, or an invisible friend, or singing, or dancing in their chair, or otherwise behaving oddly…which makes those "security advisory announcements" kind of silly. I mean, really: If I see someone 'behaving oddly,' I'm supposed to report it? What constitutes "odd" when you're on BART, for Pete's sake?!

So why someone who is muttering vulgarities at their lace while wielding two pointy sticks, a crochet hook, clenching a bent-tipped tapestry needle between their teeth and balancing a pattern on their knee and a highlighter behind their ear should alarm anybody on BART is beyond me.

But I guess I'll keep on at least trying not to mutter obscenities at my lace.

If nothing else, it rather spoils that whole "knitting is the new yoga" and "gentle little flower of domesticality" and "oh, my knitting is just so relaxing" image.

...@*&^@ing lace...

Money Monday: August 16, 2010

I know, blast from the past, right?! It is consistently amazing to me just how much this contract has thrown a wrench into my (so-called) normal life. From getting the bathrooms clean to making a budget to writing regular blog posts (ahem), it feels as though there is always something I didn't do because I was doing something else because there are only so many hours in a day, dammit, and furthermore why is everybody always picking on me IT'S NOT FAIR WAAAAAAH!.

Oops. Sorry. Still in the "post-vacation why am I expected to know everything get OFF me and NO, I don't know where Precious McCantSleepWithout'Em Puppy got to…" mode.

Anyway…until relatively late last night (relative to when the alarm was going off this morning, anyway), I was paying bills. Because my life? One big old never-ending rollercoaster of awesome, that's right.

I found myself contemplating just how far out of whack things have gotten since I started this contract. If I had been this disorganized before I started back to work, I'm pretty sure we would have ended up in an even sorrier way than we did – I don't think I'm exaggerating much when I say I think we might actually have found ourselves staring down the foreclosure barrel without so much as a dime for our own cannon.

I've been stuck in "reaction" mode for nine months now; stuck in the dreaded maelstrom of stimulus-response-stimulus-response.

It's hard to find a calm place to think, a moment of time away from "everything" to regroup and plan…and it feels as though it wouldn't matter even if I did, because right now Life is just plain out to get me.

Oh, did I just squeeze 10% of my paycheck aside into savings like I planned? HA HA! Welcome to a leaking water heater, splish-splash all over the garage! Warranty? Suuuuuure, it's under warranty, and you can choose one of the following two free water heaters: Ten gallons smaller with a lesser warranty than the original, or ten gallons bigger with the same warranty…great! Oh, did we forget to mention that you'll need a bunch of work done to install the bigger one, and that the labor for same is not under warranty?

…sorry, our bad...

And of course, when am I trying to sit down and do this stuff? In the evening! When there are children!

It's like trying to work on your Mozart flute solo in a kennel specializing in the rehabilitation of abused terriers.

Seriously. It is.

Life right now is more about surviving than about living. It's about getting through another day, another week, another dinner, another trip to the mall for whatever fool thing somebody forgot to tell me they needed (or I forgot they told me, or I lost the slip of paper informing me of said need, or, well, whatever).

This, of course, is nothing noteworthy. This is not a unique situation that only I get to endure; it's not my personal and exclusive cross to bear, something nobody else in the whole entire world could possibly understand.

This is just how life is, sometimes. Sometimes it's mellow and easy-going and we can take on all kinds of special projects. Sometimes, it's all wild and crazy and we don't have time for a danged potty break, let alone a nice long stretch of "me time" to regroup and reorganize and reprioritize and get our @*^@ together.

As things stand at this precise moment, I have another six months to go on this contract. That's very good, because I haven't made nearly the headway on debts and savings that I would like – the money has evaporated as fast as it has come in.

It has a way of doing that, if you're not staying 110% on top of it.

So I was having this conversation with myself where I was basically calling myself on the carpet for the lack of progress toward clearly established goals.

At first, I was really defensive. Show me what I did that was 'bad', I groused. I defied myself to come up with anything I had bought that wasn't necessary.

But coming on the heels of our camping trip, during which I had spent a considerable amount of time pondering the differences between the way I used to camp and, well, this…well.

Back in the day, I actually didn't camp at all – I was a backpacker. It's a whole different reality. You look at every single thing you might bring and you ask yourself a simple question: How am I going to feel about this wonderful whatnot when I'm five miles into my hike? Ten? Twenty? How about on day 3, when we're still three miles from the summit and oh by the way, it's another four days before we get back to the cars?

You start downgrading things pretty fast. What is "vital" and what is "nice to have" begin to veer sharply away from each other.

I seldom brought a flashlight. I used a rock to hammer in tent spikes, if I brought a tent at all which was not a given. I brought almost no clothes with me, and certainly not anything that was merely for sleeping in.

My jeans were warmer anyway.

But when we were camping ten feet from Homer the Odyssey…well. We brought soooooo much crap with us. Seemed like we had fifteen flashlights. We did have seven sleeping bags. {pauses to count on fingers} Yeah, there's still only six of us.

We brought two tents: One that sleeps nine, and one that sleeps (technically, although they'd better be really good friends) four. We needed them! In case!

And we brought enough food to feed about fifty people for a month. And way too many clothes. And lanterns and flashlights and games and decks of cards and tarps and door mats and sleeping pads.

You would have thought we were going camping for six months in the wilderness, y'all.

I found myself thinking about that as I was shaking my head over where the money went these last nine months, looking for where I shoulda/coulda/woulda done things differently.

Apart from a few (dozen) too many pizza nights, I couldn't really point out anything that wasn't "needed"…until I started asking myself whether I would have taken them on a fifty mile roundtrip peak-bagging backpacking trip.

Oh.

Wants and needs aren't really that complicated. We tend to put a lot of stuff on the "need" list that really doesn't belong there. We say we can't live without our iPhone, or our cable television, or our organic clover-honey mead…and sometimes we know we're wrong about that, but I suspect more and more we don't understand that.

We really do think we will curl up and physically die if we don't have these very specific things that mankind somehow managed to stagger around without for generation upon generation.

How they ever got anywhere without a phone that could guide them via GPS is beyond me…but they did. Even sailed right out to sea and somehow got to whole new continents, while we can't get to the local dry cleaners without that steadying voice telling us, "…in 500 feet, turn LEFT…"

I want to accomplish two things in the coming month.

The first is, I want to get back on top of things. I want to regain control of where our money is going, instead of constantly and passively allowing whatever crisis has arisen to decide where it's going to go. Yeah, I'm tired and I don't have time and I don’t feel like it and wah wah wah…but at the same time, I'm not a danged twig caught up in a river here. I'm a full-grown woman (allegedly), with an oar and a compass and dog-dang it, I know how to row.

The second is, I want to clamp down on the spending, reevaluate these "needs" we seem to think are vital to our survival, and make sure we're not losing sight of where we want to go…which is a long of way of saying, I'm going to institute a spending fast. I don't care what it is or who thinks they will D-I-EEEEEEEEE without it (and Tama, I am looking at you right now, madam if-I-don't-get-a-netbook-I-will-no-really-physically-D-I-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E), the answer is no.

Unless of course you really will curl up and die.

All you have to do is prove it, and whatever it is, I'll get it for you. Go ahead. Prove that without coffee, you will actually, physically die…I'm waiting…go ahead…prove it…

(ohmygah, I'm going to die doing this, aren't I…)

(no-no, think positive…I have tons of coffee in the Den right now, it's ooooookay, we can get through a month of this…)

Headlong

Seriously? It is not actually Sunday evening already, is it?!

…seriously?...

This last week went by in a blur. A blur of noise and heat and smoke and laughter and beaches and campfires and seriously, how many people did we THINK we were feeding?! and having to explain why it was that my son thought it was perfectly OK to just grab your kid’s bike and make off with it (he got confused…after all, it was a family reunion and we had six campsites and he didn’t know these people but it was OK to just walk on into their camper, and he didn’t know these people either but it was OK to grab a juice box out of their cooler, and he didn’t know these other kids at all but they were OK with him playing with their toys…so obviously, this whole entire place was just one big Captain’s Personal and Private Family Affair and it was totally OK to go into any tent, trailer, camper, cooler, box or any other thing he found just help himself, no, no!, don’t bother getting up Auntie Whoever You Are, I can get my own beer and bag of chips, thanks…) (oh yeah… “embarrassing” doesn’t begin to express my feelings, kids…especially since it turned out that just about every single time I thought this cousin or that uncle “had him,” uh, they sorta-kinda only partially MAYBE “had him” and he was actually off on his own terrorizing the whole, 200-some-odd-space campsite…) (in related news, we can never go back there again) (or anywhere else from Malibu to Oxnard) (seriously, I think they printed up posters…)

And then we came home and the next three days vanished into a rush of back to school (the Denizens started back to school Wednesday! Wednesday! Excuse me, but is that not, like, right smack in the middle of what should be summer vacation, School District?!) and unpacking and cleaning-cleaning-cleaning and wait-a-second, if I’ve been cleaning for three days straight…

…um…

…question…?

Why does this place look like it has never seen the business end of a broom, mop or vacuum cleaner?!

Well, I can tell you at least partially why: Four quarts of Italian-style tomato sauce and five pints of zesty zucchini relish were canned this weekend. Because I had fourteen pounds of tomatoes and a zucchini the size of my leg growing out there when I got home, that’s why…plus the former site of Lake Chaos is now Lake O’Weeds (there’s a surprise) and part of the fence fell down and I have deep unrest about one of the butternut vines because I think it may have gotten a squash borer and furthermore the yellow-striped heirloom tomato plant looks a bit…yellowish and scrawny…to me, AND the ooze tank for the sunflowers isn’t oozing enough and the poor things were giving me this look that clearly said, “what kind of mother are you?!”, AND PLUS the sweet potatoes are overtaking the unexpectedly reviving artichokes and the Christmas limas are trying to attack the neighbor’s overhanging tree AND!!!!!!!! we have corn that should have been eaten, like, yesterday, but wasn’t and I didn’t get around to it because I was dealing with the Aforementioned Everything but, guess what? All four of my newly planted pumpkin hills have sprouted, and the back bed I was afraid had an actual leak-leak doesn’t (we capped it off at the surface and it is dry as a bone, woo hoo – no subterranean leaks!), and, there are two little tiny baby yellow squash in the front boxes!

…which will be torso-sized monsters in less than 48 hours, I’ll betcha…

I feel as though I am coming out of this vacation the same way I went into it: Unprepared, and headlong.

…and tired…and a little grouchy…and in need of a vacation…

…um, wait…

This is probably going to be another one of them-thar “interesting” weeks, isn’t it.

…buckle up, racing fans, it’s going to be a wild ride…

The faces of semi-civilized wafflers

We're halfway home, at an IHOP in the middle of nowhere. We cut the camping short by two nights because (in husband-who-disagreed-with-my-other-reasons-convincing part) our innocent-faced little Captain there was running like he was fueled with pure rocket fuel. It was like chasing a lit firework. Or a squirrel that had been pounding back Monster sodas.

I am SERIOUSLY exhausted right now. That boy ran me a merry chase these last five days. Wait'll I tell y'all what-all he managed to get into on this trip. Whooooooo-wee. Wee!

..weeeeeeeeeeeee...

..whew...

......oy......

(sent from my Treo)

The face of wanna-be evil

Don't tell her I said so, but Boo isn't even close to being sort-of evil. She can barely work up to 'mildly irritating.' But she's trying...note the horns...try to look terrified for her...oooooh, SCARY EEEEEVIL...

(camping is going about as expected...Boo and Captain woke up about 6,000 times wanting to go home last night...I am now on permanent "do nothing but chase Captain Adventure" duty, because whenever anybody ELSE tries it, well, let's just say he a) can move remarkably fast and b) has a fuzzy concept around which groups are "family" and which are just innocent by-campers who would really rather not have a random autistic six year old rummaging through their tent/trailer/cooler) (I know...some people are SO fussy...)

(sent from my Treo)

Hard to believe, but...

..this is the face of PURE EVIL.

OK, that may be a *slight* exaggeration.

But boy-oh-boy, is our Captain ever on a tear today! Screaming! Running! Hitting! And other uncivilized behavior!

He is terribly (and I do mean TERRIBLY) excited, because we are going camping! In a tent! WITH MOMMY!!!!!

He's gonna HUG me and SQUEEZE me and SLEEP on me and LOVE me and also tent-tent-tent-tent HE!! LOVES!!!! CAMPING!!!!!!!!!

(He has never actually been camping before. Hence the SUPER-EXTRA excitement!)

(We're all gonna die. He's going to kill us with just the noise. Or he's going to vibrate us all to death with the nuclear-reactor like waves of energy radiating from his little body.)

(...why was this a good idea again...?)

Why some people should not be permitted to mobile blog

The first thing y'all must realize about me is…well. This is probably better expressed in story than mere words.

Today, I wore a pair of very nice little sandals. They might even be considered "kicky" – if you do not have a particularly fashionable definition of the term. (They might also be considered "somewhat juvenile" or "gee whiz, woman, did you let your six year old dress you today?" or possibly even "hahahahaha, I can't believe she actually bought those, ohmygah, and did you see how proud she was of them?!" – especially if one takes into consideration the hot pink toenail polish, which I put on last night when I realized, in rapid succession, that…
a) I hadn't put away the laundry and
b) had nothing to wear tomorrow unless
c) I cared to wear Girl Clothes which naturally meant I needed footwear
d) …other than tennis shoes…and furthermore…
e) I can't find my super-comfy sandals but hey
f) here's those metallic blue things I got from…that place…that time…gosh when was that, and where, and why? Oh well anyway, they're cute and comfy and if I squint they kind of go with the only clean shirt that goes with one of my clean skirts, right? right! but gads, they're
g) open toed and
h) ack, toenails! So…ugly…eyes…burning…! Therefore…!
i) I went digging for nail polish, of which it turned out I had three choices, which were
1) formerly mauve, now "solid hunk of colorant + oily stuff that won't mix back together anymore", or
2) formerly…uh…dunno, please see colorant + oily + won't mix problem, above, or
3) hot pink "minute dry" nail polish I actually bought for Denizen manicures but surely it's better than the whatever-you-would-call-THAT currently adorning my toes, right?

I am not convinced I actually did the right thing. But the world will never know, because the…yellowish-orangish-I-surely-hope-that's-polish-because-toenails-should-NOT-be-that-color thing I had going on before is buried under three layers of goopy "minute dry" in extra hot pink.

Because that is how I roll, people.

So the polish I wasn't sure about, but the sandals, those I liked. Cute little kicky things, all…girl-like…and…stuff…

At least, that's what I thought before I wore them today. Soon, however, I realized that they are actually crappy little sandals. They pinch my feet horribly. And there do this…thing…where they dig into the arch of my foot all funny…seriously, I had blisters by 11:00 and I hadn't even left my desk. (Although granted and in their defense, at 11:00 I had been wearing them for seven straight hours.)

I had by that time downgraded them from "cute" to "rotten, ill-fitting little monsters," and I wondered why on earth I had even bought them, seeing as how they were so obviously a pair of real stinkers.

At 4:15, I was standing next to our team developer's desk waiting for my turn to pester him about Something Very Important Indeed. I was already charging past the ten hour mark on the workday, perilously close to missing the last train to the last shuttle to the last train and I was fidgeting in my stupid, ugly, painful, idiotic torture implements of death and despair.

Angrily, I looked down at my aching feet. Because what the HECK, sandals?!

It was at this point…over twelve hours after putting them on…that I noticed something. Something subtle I'm willing to bet had been noticed by many people and which had probably already been tweeted and blogged and Facebooked and MySpaced and written in forty-foot letters on every communication satellite in Outer Space.

There are Grubdjuroians "bfffirting" it right now, people.

Go ahead. Guess what it was.

Yeah. Got it one, folks: They were on the wrong feet. For. Over. Twelve. Hours. I had even looked at them (where "looked" is pronounced "glared"), several times.

But not noticed they were all left-right, right-left.

This is the person you are dealing with on this blog.

Just so we're clear.

Now, with that out of the way…about those pictures down there in the weird post entitled "sent from my Treo"…

Now, maybe one would be tempted to think, Gee, I wonder if this is some kind of 'performance blogging art'! or possibly some new, avant-garde blogging technique! Yes, yes, I think I'm FEELING the…wordless…pathos…of the…minivan…and…boxes…

Or they might think it's meant to make you think. Or a secret code that only the chosen few understand.

Yes, they might think that…if they didn't know me at all.

I suspect it will surprise nobody here, though, when I say that the Story of Those Pictures is this: They happened to be in my cell phone's memory, for who knows how long. And I was trying to send them to my archive folders on Photobucket, because I needed to clear up the room on my Treo, because since I run my whole entire life on the poor thing, it has a way of getting low in memory.

Instead, I apparently sent them to my blog. And had no idea I had done so until I saw a very confusing comment in my email.

"So-and-so commented on my…post entitled…what-now? I don't remember that one…maybe it's old or something…boxes of shoes, say WHAT?!"

And now, children, I want you to just pause for just one more little moment to consider what might happen if I had a Twitter account as well.

I'll give you another moment to get over the searing visions of global communications breakdowns. Don't worry. I'm pretty sure Twitter has safety mechanisms in place to prevent what you're thinking from actually happening.

ANYWHO. So, what the heck are those pictures?

Well. The first one I took when I arrived home from Fagundes a couple weekends ago with (I kid you not) 911 pounds of beef and pork. That's what those boxes are. One whole steer, and one whole hog. I took the picture and have this whole long rambling story to share about that day, which I'll get around to any second now.

But for the moment…hey look! Pictures of boxes! With meat in them! That all had to go into a freezer! Right that very moment and even though it was over a hundred and fifty pounds more than I had been expecting!

It was awesome. Also, if I may make a recommendation: Don't open any freezers around the Den until further notice. At least not without a "catcher" standing at your elbow, in case of meat avalanche.

The next picture my husband actually took. Note that it says if you buy one summer sandal, you get another summer sandal 100% free.

…let it settle for a second…

If you buy one sandal…you can get another sandal… 100% free…

And then ask yourself: how much is a sandal? I mean, are they, say, half the price of a pair of sandals?

Being blessed with two feet and being rather fond of having matching shoes on them (all [copious] evidence to the contrary aside), I've never bought a sandal. So is this an awesome sale? The Gift of the Century? I am the wrong person to ask…

(I know. The husband and I, we are both just waaaaaaaay too easily amused. We must have giggle-snorted over that one for a good ten minutes.) (We were on a date. Together. Alone. Alone-together. No children. We could have been standing knee-deep in a flooded basement with nothing but forks to bail it out with, it would have been a laugh-a-second.)

That last one is the 4:48 ACE train roaring into the station in a cloud of noise and brake dust. If you stand on the platform and just stare at the tracks as the train comes in, that's what you see: A blur of gray and blue.

It always amazes me that something that big, that forceful, that fast-moving, can somehow manage to actually stop at the end of the station. It also fascinates me that something capable of such violence, such grand and terrible noise (which between the HEY-hey-hey, waaaaaaaaake-UP!! whistle that blows shortly before it arrives at the station and the metallic screaming from the wheels and brakes as it arrives, is impressive), can then turn right around and provide such a gentle and (relatively) quiet ride for its passengers once we embark.

Standing on the outside looking in, it's a bright, barreling, noisy blur in the darkness.

From the inside looking out, it's a merely adequately lit, gently rolling, muted trip…past people sweating and stalled in endless, nose-to-nose cars on the freeway, in the dust and heat and bother, poor lost souls.

And that, in not a bit brief, is what was up with those photos.

Because I am nothing if not not concise.

(sent from my Treo)