Total Space Cadet

Yum yum

2010-11-30T17:55:00.000-08:00

The official readiness signs for solid food:
- sits mostly unsupported
- 5-6 months old at least
- leans towards spoon with open mouth

The Alice readiness signs for solid food:
- grabs spoon as it approaches
- crams spoon into mouth
- squeals and waves arms, getting cereal on back of head
- crams spoon into mouth again
- gives spoon up begrudgingly
- hollers when spoon is not being refilled fast enough
- refuses to let anyone else control the entry of spoon into mouth

After six months of only breastmilk, I can't believe her enthusiasm for food. My little baby is growing up!

Time is just flying on by...

2010-11-02T21:54:00.001-07:00

February 7, 2010:

October 31, 2010:

Yes, life is still moving at a difference pace nowadays! Reduced speed it is.

Bad parking is apparently a criminal offense.

2010-10-01T12:41:00.000-07:00

This morning I dropped my baby off at daycare so I could go to my therapy appointment at 11. (Don't worry, just getting some help working through some normal new-mom transition stuff.) The last time I parked in that building it cost me something stupid like $12 for the 1.5 hours I was there, so I was determined this time to find a spot on the street.

Once I reached the neighborhood I saw an open spot on the other side of the street, but I figured I might be able to get something a little closer. Not being successful at that, I drove around the block and back to the open spot.

The people right in front of that spot were parked at a terrible angle with their head in and the tail of the SUV pointing out a bit into the middle of the road. As you know, this presents a challenge when you're trying to parallel park. The truck had a local food and hunger charity's bumper sticker on it and there was a guy streetside unloading some food into a milk crate. I pondered if this was the charity's location as I pulled forward and back, forward and back, trying to get my station wagon closer to the curb.

I thought to myself, this guy must think I'm an idiot. After all, when I see someone totally botching a parallel park job, I roll my eyes. No one in Seattle can park properly, as far as I'm concerned... and now I'm turning into one of them.

I figured I pretty much got a handle on it and was about to put the car in park when I heard "PUT YOUR HANDS UP! PUT YOUR HANDS UP! GET ON THE GROUND!"

Running towards the SUV on all side were about a dozen of Seattle's Finest, guns drawn. And when I say guns, I include extremely large weapons, not just handguns. About four black police undercover SUVs with their lights blinking pulled up to surround my car and his.

So of course... my hands are up! I know they aren't after me, but I'm still sitting there, with my foot on the brake and my hands in the air, the Top 40 station blaring away on my radio, watching cops and what I can now see are SWAT team members put this guy in cuffs. This guy who's probably in his early 20's and who I had assumed was doing food bank work.

Once the young guy is in custody, a couple of the cops approach the driver's side door of the SUV and take a woman out of there. Of course, with whatever garbage I had going on the radio going I couldn't hear what they were saying, but I could see she was upset. She cries, "what's going on? That's my grandson!" and then she briefly stumbles, as if losing consciousness from the shock of it all, into the arms of the police officer standing next to her. They take her over to the sidewalk and sit her down, and some investigator starts to question her.

"Do we have transport for him?" I hear from somewhere around me. The guns are put away at this point.

You should know that the entire time this is going on, I am debating whether to put the car in park. I keep thinking that it can't be safe to have a car with an automatic transmission in drive while a take-down is occurring and I'm surrounded by weaponry, but I know that I shouldn't put my hands down... because I'm surrounded by weaponry.

Finally some cop approaches my door and says, "it's OK, you can come out now" and one tries to open my door... which is locked, because of the auto-lock feature. I unlock it for him and just sit there in a daze as he opens the door. "Put the car in park," he instructs, and I do, and then he takes me and walks several steps back from my car, which is still running.

"Do you know this guy?" he asks. "Uh, no," I answer. "So you're just parking here randomly?" "Uh huh," I say, and then I laugh, because it's so ridiculous. Then he looks into my backseat and sees my carseat. "You don't have a baby in there, do you?!?" "No, are you kidding? I'd be crying if my baby were with me."

He told me I was OK to go. Of course, I had to go back to my car, turn it off, get my purse, and then go purchase parking and come back and stick it up on my car. I wondered if I should have moved my car but I didn't see the point.

I wasn't really scared by the whole thing so much as I was shocked. Seeing all the guns were pretty scary. I wonder now if any of them were trained on me, just in case I was an accomplice or something.

The other thing I realized as I headed back up the block to my appointment is that all of those police officers were sitting around waiting to do their sting, and they had to WAIT because I was spending several minutes trying to fix my terrible parking job. It's not clear to my why they came at the exact moment they did... I assume they didn't want me to get out of my car first... but I'm just imagining the chatter on the radio about this. "Uh oh, some lady is trying to park there... this is taking forever!"

Once in the waiting room of the therapist's office I happened upon a newspaper story of a homeless guy who just got four rounds in the chest and died when some cop saw him "standing on a corner with a knife." Apparently the guy was deaf in one ear and was well known enough in the neighborhood as a kind of harmless drunk. The knife he was holding was a three-inch whittling instrument. Of course the story is all very vague about how it could have happened, but at that point I really felt spooked.

Naturally I related all of this to my therapist. He was appropriately empathetic and then told me that there is a wet house in that neighborhood, meaning a shelter for addicts who aren't sober. He agrees with that concept but thinks that it attracts a bad element. I then went on to tell him that I hoped it wasn't just a drug crime they were taking this guy down for. Surely it doesn't take a SWAT team to take down a nonviolent criminal.

Then I started wondering what exactly this kid had done, the one out with his grandma unloading food. Though I'm sure it was something detestable, I couldn't help but feel bad for him, wondering how it had come to pass that he was a suspect being stalked by a dozen police officers, guns drawn, just waiting for him to make the wrong move.

Nothing is ever free.

2010-09-20T11:52:00.001-07:00

It just so happens that my employer is located in the South Lake Union neighborhood in Seattle, an area that is exploding right now with the new location of Amazon headquarters, a Tesla dealership, a bunch of biomed companies, a Microsoft outpost, and some other stuff.

With new office space comes new local businesses. Which is great. I am 100% pro local business.

Last Thursday there was a "trade show" in the neighborhood. I put this in quotes because it wasn't really a trade show, it was more like an open house. A coworker convinced me to go because they were serving a large assortment of free food, and handing out bags of swag. Of course, most of that stuff is just garbage anyways (for example, the flyswatter-- guys, there are basically no flies in Seattle!) but sometimes you get something good like a reusable grocery bag.

You trade this free swag for your name and email address, which is fine with me.

I stopped by one booth for our local "wellness center," which is a combination pilates studio, chiropractice, naturopathy clinic, and massage therapy location. They had a Plinko game and with my first disc I won a "free chiropractic assessment and adjustment."

I was kind of excited about this. My daughter is nearly 4 months old and I've been nursing her somewhere on the order of 10-12 times a day (although less now, since I'm back at work). Though nursing in public is legal in basically every state, it's pretty common and embraced in the Seattle area, so I wasn't always at home propped up with boppy pillows and in an upright posture like I was supposed to be. For example, yesterday I nursed in the front seat of my (parked) car before we went into Ikea, on Friday I nursed on the ground at a park after my walk, and just about every day I prop her up and nurse while I'm hunched over on my laptop. 2-3 times a night I also sit with one leg up on an easy chair and fall asleep.

(The dangers of falling asleep in a chair while nursing in the middle of the night is a post for another day. Perhaps some parents will understand the strange phenomenon of "losing" hours in the middle of the night from passing out in a chair.)

The grand result of this is that my lower and upper back are sore and stiff and for the first time ever last week I got a tension headache that started in my neck, which also is becoming stiff.

This morning I had my appointment. I dropped my daughter off at daycare on my day off (yay, best mom ever) and drove over.

In the waiting room I filled out 6 pages of paperwork with my medical history and watched other patients come in and drape themselves across what appeared to be pilates machines and lie there before their appointment times with various body parts hanging in slings. It was all a little strange. With some hesitation I hand them my health insurance card as well, knowing that I would refuse any service that would bill to them. After all, this is a free appointment, and because my insurer is an HMO and my employer, I'm not in the practice of pretending like billing them for services is actually "free."

I go in and speak with the chiropractor, he re-asks all the questions about my pain, makes me attempt to touch my toes (which I unfortunately cannot), bend backwards, bend sideways, twist, etc. All in front of a full length mirror, which is great for the ol' postpartum self esteem. Then he makes me lie down and presses here and there, asking me where I feel pain.

After all this he has his assessment: my lower back, upper back, and neck probably all have problems.

So, right. That was why I was there, after all.

Then he hits me with the kicker: in order to continue, he has to X-ray these three locations. Because they have already (conveniently) checked up on my insurance coverage for me (did I give them permission to do that? I guess I did), they know that my insurance doesn't cover it. X-rays are $60 a pop.

I'm standing there looking at the guy. A bit confused, I clarify, "so you want me to get $180 worth of X-rays before you can do any adjustments?"

"Well, yes," he says.

I tell him I'm going to have to refuse at this time and then I make a hasty exit while he announces to the receptionist, not quietly, that I'm going to "look at my other options and let them know." Glad to know that the people lying around slung up world's oddest waiting room are privy to that information.

In the car on the way to the grocery store I get a bit angry about this. I'm a skeptic and I don't go in for this woo stuff, and chiropractice really is part of that movement. There's evidence to show that it helps with some low back pain, but there is not evidence to show that it helps with, among other things it claims to, sinus problems, kidney trouble, cancer, headaches, joint pain, vision problems, dizziness... or basically anything else. This all was passing through my mind as I was looking over a diagram in the waiting room that was connecting the vertebrae to all the other body parts and body systems. It's all unsubstantiated woo, and there I was supporting it. It made me feel uneasy.

In addition, I gave them an opportunity to find out if they can bill my insurance for the privilege of irradiating me three times. As it is I already have to fight with my dentist's office over whether they REALLY need to take X-rays every.single.year. Frankly there are too many people close to me with cancer right now for me to want to jump at the opportunity to subject myself to more radiation. Especially in my lower back, which is the area that contains all my reproductive organs.

In summary, I'm going to have to trust my gut about things. The thing about chiropractice that I knew going in was that no matter what they were going to do to me that day, it would be recommended that I keep coming back over and over. After all, it's not in their benefit to actually fix anything, because they need to be able to squeeze me and my insurance for that next dollar. I had just hoped that they would maybe doing something today that would make me feel a little better, but they didn't feel any obligation to go that far. Which perhaps they shouldn't, because after all, I wasn't paying them anything.

Furthermore, I don't need to get myself in a situation where someone's trying to convince me of a bunch of hooey that's not evidence-based, just like I wouldn't go somewhere and have someone tell me the color of my aura, the balance of my chakra, the direction of my body's energy flow, or the type of scented oil I have to keep at my front door to bring money into my life.

For now, I'm going to have to help my back by not hunching over all the time, and exercising again. If that doesn't work, I'm going to have to pursue what the research says will actually help me, and then go and spend money to get that treatment fair and square.

Big day of fail.

2010-02-01T20:39:00.000-08:00

Woke up at 5:30am after a fitful sleep. Husband took me to the airport for a big exciting business trip to... wait for it... the other side of the state.

Got myself into the world's slowest security line. I left the corporate laptop at security, a move that could have lost me my job had I been unable to retrieve it. Luckily they still had it when I went waddling back there... naturally I had traveled through half the airport at that point. By the time I made it back to the gate I had round ligament pain (maybe?) and no time to eat my breakfast.

Sat next to a guy on our comically tiny commuter plane who also had wide hips and we spent the flight trying to squirm away from each other. He pretended he wasn't too annoyed that I wanted to read the paper, I pretended I didn't notice he was annoyed.

I went to Spokane because I am interviewing people for a temporary position. One interview canceled while I was in the air, saying she was only interested in permanent positions. (Naturally this didn't occur to her until I had already spoken to her twice and it was the day of her interview). The other interview didn't bother to show up and didn't answer the phone or email. Kind of embarrassed myself with the gal at the security desk by coming out to tell her that in fact no one was coming.

I had one other phone interview scheduled which, mercifully, went fine, so I think I at least have a hire for the position. However, I flew across the state to do a phone interview. Hey, good stewardship of company resources, that's me!

Bored myself at Wal-Mart until I realized I was going to be too late to take an earlier flight.

I drove a PT Cruiser that has a turning radius that's so bad it's noticeable when you're trying to make a simple right turn. (Apparently a well-known downside of this car that even the true believers complain about.) There are no gas stations convenient to the airport. I think that's due to some sort of collusion with the rental companies to pay their $14 fee so you don't have to refill the tank if you drive less than 75 miles.

Took another tiny plane home-- at least I got a row to myself. Couldn't accept the proferred free beer from probably the world's last airline that offers free booze-- at that point I could have used one.

Tom picked me up at the airport. Together we sat for 15 minutes at a bridge waiting for a boat to come through.

If my fish gets burned for dinner I'm asking for a refund of my entire day.

Update!

2010-01-22T16:46:00.000-08:00

I had forgotten that the point of a blog is to, you know, actually write something every once in a while.

When I last posted I had a secret that I wasn't yet sharing with general society: I was pregnant. And in fact, I still am! Nearly 24 weeks now. This is the biggest thing that has happened to me this year, single-handedly destoying my (already pathetic) wardrobe, my social life, and my ability to play soccer.

Now, I'm a long-torsoed person (a.k.a. my legs are short), 5'7", so just a bit taller than the average gal, and started out a bit big to begin with. This means that the journey to look pregnant-not-fat has been a long one that I'm not entirely convinced I'm over the hump yet. Over the bump, maybe? For example, I took a ride on the always-pleasant King County Metro 28 bus to Fremont the other day and despite looming my belly over the sitting passengers in the Old/Gimp section and giving the worst stink-eye I could muster, I was not offered a seat. In fact, someone vacated a seat about 2 stops after I got on and it was quickly snatched up by a guy I had waited at the bus stop with. Granted, he spent his time there holding a full-volume conversation into his Bluetooth and I was wearing a large T-shirt, but still.

What I've found is that when most people reach 24 weeks of pregnancy they already have a lot of things figured out, for example, they know what crib to buy and their nursery already has a theme. I don't know any of this yet because I'm horribly indecisive, my husband is worse, and the baby simply isn't cooperating.

I went and got my Big Ultrasound two days before Christmas with the goal of creating the Best Christmas Present for Grandparents Ever: the Big Reveal about the baby's gender. I dragged my husband along to the ultrasound and we had a comprehensive look at baby's parts for over an hour, none of which elucidated the appropriate genitalia. Word on the street is that if you can't tell it's probably a girl, which is the assumption I have now. Unfortunately I can't yet bring myself to go to one of those private places and pay for an ultrasound (my Cadillac Health Care Plan spoiled me, you see). I get to find out next month, maybe, because I talked my doc into doing one at her office. If that fails, forget it, I will be one of Those People and just go to one of those for-profit ultrasound clinics that represent a vast misuse of medical resources. So sue me.

I've been trying and failing not to be jealous about people who are weeks behind me, gestationally, and already know whether they're having a boy or girl. I should really be tempering myself because I realize full well that some people have a hard time conceiving and everything appears healthy and gosh, compared to Haiti, life is really good, but still.

I'm going to have to work on posting at least once a week. In the meantime I have to share what I did to one of my creepier-looking ultrasound pics. All ultrasound pics are creepy, but this one was right up there.

And because I have no reverence for the Miracle of Life at all, I did this to it. Space Cadet in training, due to arrive in May.

This is why some people aren't cat people.

2009-09-29T22:26:00.000-07:00

When people find out that I have a cat, and ask me about the cat, I come right out and tell them that she is a mean, evil little thing who hates most everyone and will probably hate them too. But it's not personal or anything.

There are two things that happen at this point. People who hate cats will nod and accept this as proof of what they've been saying all along about cats. They might even put in a plug for their dog preference. People who like cats or even a few souls who adore living creatures in general will consider my cat a challenge they can overcome with their charms.

I love these people. They are so sweet, but so misguided.

An average misanthropic feline, which is a not inconsiderable number of them, will simply avoid people altogether. These are the famous cats that their owners "never see" but who seem to consume their food after everyone goes to bed. They hide in upstairs bedrooms when people come over. They get on top of tall cabinets and stare down, ignoring all the "here kitty kitty." The braver among this set might come out long enough to grab the treat you bribed them with before disappearing again. This is not abnormal cat behavior. It's annoying though, which is why there are people who don't like cats.

However, even a cat that doesn't like most people usually still likes some people, and there is a set of standard behaviors that cats may respond to. You sit (preferably in the living area where their owner normally is), you reach out your hand to them, you talk softly, you're patient, and if you're one of the few people around, even a shy cat will come out to investigate and might come by to deposit his scent on your hand or your purse. Cat people treat this as a victory, a reflection that they "know cats." Fair enough.

My cat is not like this. It's not just that she doesn't like people. She actively, aggressively, and vengefully hates people. Basically everyone in the world but me.

My cat has appeared out of nowhere in the middle of a social event we're holding to hiss at people. Just to hiss! No other apparent reason. And heaven help the poor person who tries to stick out a hand towards her. She scratches. Two parties ago she scratched me while I was trying to calm her down, and I was her third victim that night. I will never make that mistake again. I still have the scars.

If I'm petting her and she's tired of it, she'll bite me. Same for my husband, who is about the only other person in the world she tolerates. Doesn't just walk away, bites. Believe me I have tried to look for the signs that she'll do this. I've even tried stopping the petting before she gets tired of it. But inevitably she will nudge me for more attention until the exact moment she hates it and can bite me.

She likes to get my husband out of bed in the morning under the guise of needing breakfast. However, he will not be able to feed her and go back to bed, like one could even with dogs. She will harass the hell out my husband by poking him in the armpits. She developed this skill since my husband and I have lived together, since I'm a heavy sleeper and never used to wake up for her. She learned, late in life, the fine art of morning harassment.

If you have cats you might have seen them grabbing things with their front legs and kicking them with their back legs. If you replace that object in your mind with a bunny rabbit you realize that this is the act of eviscerating-- yes, literally tearing the guts out of the animal the cat has hunted down. Besides toys, my cat like to eviscerate pillows, our box spring, our couch, the chairs around our dining tables, boxes of tissues, and our feet when they are under the covers.

I could go on.

In light of all this you'd hope that a cat this, well, unpleasant, would at least have the decency to do the job cats were domesticated to do: kill pests. My husband and I love everything about our townhouse except the spiders, which I've decided are unavoidable considering all the trees around our house (and it's easier to say this than realize that our house might actually be infested with spiders, yay.) Periodically a spider will find its way on to the floor, at which point the cat will make it her best friend.

Yes, really. There is nothing in the world that our cat will treat with more gentleness and respect than a spider. She will sit and watch spiders all day. Occasionally she will reach out and give them a tender poke, as much encouragement as anything else. This floors my husband and I every time. We beg and plead for her to step on it, pounce on it, kill it deader than dead! At least to prove she has some shred of moxie that isn't simply for hating people. Alas, it's not to be. All spiders in our house die at the hands of people or of natural causes like old age or heart disease.

We've decided she does it out of spite, which would be just like her, so we've made a pact to act like it's OK that she buddies up to the local arachnids just to see if it will make her kill one just to rebel against us. We'll let you know how it goes.

It's no-filter night at the cell phone store.

2009-09-18T23:40:00.000-07:00

We headed to the cell phone outlet store at the mall because the phone I've hated for the year I've had it finally decided to do me a favor and die. This corresponded conveniently with an unplanned overnight layover in beautiful Cincinnati and/or northern Kentucky, who knows.

And then I couldn't find it. I may have subconsciously thrown it off a bridge or something.

There's no way to resolve a lost phone except to pay out the nose for a new one. Kind of like there's nothing to be done about your 2-year cell phone contract except curse the world and wonder how ALL cell phone companies manage to force you into long contracts. Not even gyms do that anymore. I might consider pay-as-I-go but of course, I'm in a contract right now.

Breathe, breathe.

We're in the cell phone store. I'm trying to figure out what phone to get based on the 2"x2" card next to the phone that does not bother to mention its memory, battery life, included features, or warranty. But the salesgirl sure can look that up on the computer for me and write it on a stickie note because, why not? It's only 2009 and we don't have the sort of technology that might allow us to generate a piece of paper from something on a computer screen.

As you might imagine this is all going terrifically quickly, especially the part where she tells me the battery life in minutes (quick kids, how many hours is 846 minutes?) and, like a fool, I ask her to translate that for me. She was going to have to check on that.

We haven't even gotten to the best part of this story yet, which is my new friends Chunk and Biff. I know you're dying to hear about these guys, because I sure as hell was. Chunk is a tall, fat red-headed guy with the ruddy face of a seasoned alcoholic and the voice of someone who's smoked for 40 years, despite probably not being older than 35. His sidekick Biff's job was to sit or stand 8 feet away from him so they could conduct their conversations at maximum volume.

Chunk and Biff were kicking off their exciting night of substance abuse by getting Chunk a new phone and transferring the sim card over. He really liked the old phone and replaced it with the exact same type of phone, even though the first one just died. Instead of entering his own information into the computer terminal, Biff's doing it for him, helpfully yelling for all the pertinent information like how he spells his last name and what his zip code is. Ah, friends.

Meanwhile they're trying to meet up with their other friend who is somewhere in Shoreline looking for a ride. Their stellar advice is that he get on "a bus" and they will "call him when it's time to get off." This dude was not entirely convinced but eventually bought into this plan anyway. He covered his bases by asking three times that they actually remember to call him. Did I mention Chunk put him on speakerphone for this? I guess he figured that he could double his chances at remembering to make that key call when it was time to get off the bus by having Biff hear this scintillating exchange, too.

Chunk and Biff may have done too much coke last night (which was Thursday, by the way) but they can't agree on that point. In fact, Biff doesn't believe it's even possible to do too much coke. HA HA! What a comedian, this guy! HA HA! Hack, cough, hack, Chunk wants to hurry this part up so he can get a smoke.

Did you know that Chunk and Biff's friend Ryan is going into rehab? You would have never thought Ryan was headed to rehab, man! Not that guy!

Chunk and Biff are basically our new best friends now because my husband and I know more about them from 15 minutes of conversation than we know about our own siblings. Whom we owe calls, on speakerphone, coming to a retail establishment near you soon.

What brings us together.

2009-09-14T22:13:00.000-07:00

Tom and I traveled to Florida this weekend to attend the wedding of a very good friend of mine, R. I've actually known this guy since my first year of college, which is 12 years ago. I still don't feel that old.

I've known R through a lot of ups and downs for us both. We've both been in not-great relationships. He had personal stuff to sort through, I did too. He knows some deep, dark, ugly secrets of mine, and I know his. We've shared real joy and real sorrow. We've exchanged a lot of advice. He knows to call me out on my crap, and likewise me for him.

I'm a pretty big introvert, which means that I'm perfectly content to call almost never. For my friends who are long-distance, and they are numerous, this makes me a pretty poor friend in general. I keep meaning to rectify this, but then on some days, like today, I find I spend an hour after work walking home (up and over Queen Anne hill, with a view of the lake) instead of trying to take the quickest bus home to make phone calls. Maybe I'll figure it out.

The nice thing about R, though, is that he and I have history. When you share old stories with someone it means you can pick up right where you left off. Only for us, I get to see him now as the great man he's become. A little kinder, a little softer. Calm. He's always been knowing, but he puts a little more weight behind that now. Years, and knowledge, and peace about things.

And when I talked to his wife for the first time, I just knew she was the one. First of all, we weren't even 3 minutes into the phone conversation and she was "busting his balls," as he puts it. Which is appropriate, and funny. And she's smart and insightful, yet patient and loving. R is a strong personality. He needs someone who is firm, gentle, and loving.

Every once in a while I'll read something about marriage being an archaic institution, or how it's inherently sexist (and certainly in today's society, inherently heterosexist). But I think for some people, when they find someone, and they're wonderful together, and they start thinking about how they're going to build their life together, it's a wonderful thing to get married.

When I get an opportunity to give marriage advice, which is rightfully infrequent because I've only been married a year, I always say that you have to marry someone who has your values. Unfortunately this term has been co-opted for negative reasons, politically. The fact of the matter is that the person you intend to marry needs to share your views about children, finances, fidelity, careers, travel, family relationships, friends, free time, and the like. Whatever those views are. After all, we're not just talking about someone to canoodle with. You're going to share your LIFE. These things needs to be sorted out before the jewelry and the cake and the dress and what color it's all going to be. And these values need to be discussed in detail, and seriously.

We're hanging out in the hotel room the night before his wedding and his fiancée mentions that she doesn't think their daughters will ever do gymnastics, and he agrees, and they discuss why, and we all laugh in the context of the conversation and move on to the next topic. But there was none of what you sometimes see with people, either ignoring the comment, or "oh gosh, I couldn't have kids in a million years," or the discomfort because perhaps kids had never come up before. It was just another topic, something they'd discussed before, something they already knew about each other and their future. Which is good.

A few weeks before R's wedding he was talking about stressors in his and his fiancée's life and he was lamenting about how difficult it all was at the time, and how it would be nice if he could go into his wedding with it all being easy instead of hard. I took the opportunity to remind him that marriage is about having someone who's your rock and your comfort when times are hard. That anyone can be a good-times girl, and this is what marks most dating before people decide to get serious. And that hard times are strengthening.

If anyone knows about growing strength through difficult times, it's R, who's had more of his share of tough stuff. And as you'd expect, he's a wonderful person. He found someone wonderful for him, which makes me so happy.

Cheers to you, R, and your lovely wife. Thank you for inviting me to the first day of the rest of your lives together. May you find a little more love, strength, hope, peace, and happiness with each other every day for the rest of your lives.

Sands through the hourglass...

2009-09-08T22:37:00.000-07:00

I was perusing a magazine the other day while my husband was finishing taping the ceiling during our little painting debacle.

I was studiously reading an article about face cream. It was one of the ones that recommended different types of cream for people of different ages.

I'm always on the lookout for that perfect skin cream. My skin magically flips over from chin zits to scaly dryness at around this time of year. It's charming, really.

I got three-quarters of the way through the page on appropriate face cream for people in their 20's. You know, keep that youthful glow! Protect your skin now while it's still perfect and wonderful!

Then I realized... I'm not in my 20's anymore.

I mean, I've been 30 for 7 months now. I thought I was OK with it.

I just don't think I was ready to be in a category of people who have to use wrinkle-fighting cream. I'm 30, but I don't feel like I'm "in my 30's."

The only problem is... I am in my 30's. I have over 6 years of career experience. I'm married. We're talking about starting a family. We own a home. The parties I throw tend towards sedate affairs with wine, and the guests admire my furniture. We spend our weekends at the farmer's market.

I don't know. I like my life. I just didn't think that the footloose and fancy free part of it would so quickly pass me by. There's a last hurrah of sorts at the end of this month in Vegas for a friend's bachelorette party. It's not actually my party, but I'll still be doing some celebrating. Being 30 is actually pretty great.

How to paint your master bedroom in just a few easy steps.

2009-09-06T18:57:00.000-07:00

Move into your new house and decide immediately that the ugly orange wall in your bedroom left behind by the previous owners must go.
Get distracted for the next year by work, your wedding, your honeymoon, holidays, your birthday, your husband's birthday, Google Reader, other people's babies, The Great Healthcare Debate, and Farm Town.
Decide you want to paint the room yellow. Pick up paint chips everywhere. Stick them to the wall. Ask friends that come over for their opinion. Decide almost certainly on a color.
More distractions for several months, while you realize you want to paint your room green instead of yellow.
Pick up more paint chips, decide on another color, do nothing for several more weeks.
Finally decide that you will go and pick up paint that day. Use an internet calculator to determine that to paint your 17'x10' bedroom, you will need 4 gallons of paint.
Read an online review that says that a certain brand of paint is the best paint for the money. Realize you don't have any chips from that brand. Decide to go to the home superstore and pick a comparable color.
Be marginally unsatisfied with the paint choices at the store compared to the chips you already chose. Your husband will become fixated on a color (and will later deny this ever happened). You will have a niggling feeling it's a little too bright. Suppress this feeling and buy the paint and supplies.
Your husband will relate a story of how he painted his entire bedroom in 1994 using just paint pads. Therefore you will pick out a roller and several pads, but no brushes.
Go home in victory. Announce on the internet that you bought paint. Let the paint sit around for a week.
Your Product Owner will approach your desk with today's version of Why You Are Not Doing Particularly Well as Her ScrumMaster. She will spy the paint chip on your desk and stop mid-sentence to yell, "is that the color? You will hate that!" When you relate that you already bought it, she will tell you to take it back to the store. Tell her that stores don't take back mixed paint. She will argue with you, and then try to point out that you probably didn't spend that much money on it anyway, so it's OK to go and buy a different color. When she finally gets that you're going to paint with this color, she tells you half-heartedly that it will be OK and wanders back to her desk. Spend the balance of the afternoon in a funk, then decide you're going to use it anyway.
Holiday weekend! Wake up unusually early on a Saturday to prep for painting.
Move all your furniture to the middle of the room. Cover about 80% of it with a tarp, some ugly sheets that were on your husband's old bed before you got rid of it, and a few old towels. Determine that's good enough.
Once you close the bedroom door to start work, the cat will want to go nowhere and do nothing but get inside the bedroom. She will scratch on the door to get in for the next 48 hours.
Roll out plastic sheeting. Tape it to the trim along the floor. Tape the trim on the doors and windows. This step will take the entire morning.
Wash the walls with large sponges and diluted cleaning solution. Wipe down with plain wet sponges. Realize too late that tape and water don't mix. Retape large portions of the trim along the floor while grumbling.
Lunch break.
Open the can of paint, and start painting. Complete the entire room except for the 5 inches closest to the ceiling. Realize you have no idea how to paint that area without also painting the ceiling.
Go to the store and buy a thing to paint along edges that's kind of like a wide Venetian blind. Also, milk, tomatoes, and pretzels.
Go home and attempt to use the edger thingie. Realize it's too difficult. Proceed the tape the edge of the entire ceiling. This step will take the entire afternoon.
Paint along the ceiling.
Your husband will knock a container of paint off the ladder. It will fall directly on to your bedskirt, part of the 20% of your furniture you didn't cover. Figure it's a blessing in disguise, since you haven't liked that bedskirt since the day you put it on the bed. Unfortunately, it will probably take you six months to replace.
Declare the day over with.
Post a bunch of pictures to the internet. Despite the fact that you waver between love and alarm at the brightness of your room, dare anyone to say anything about it, proclaiming you "love it." Your friends are very diplomatic, noting "any color green looks good," "it's light and airy," "bold choice," "if you love it, that's all that's important," and finally, "that looks like green slime-- are you making a Nickelodeon room?" Laugh it off. Go in and out of the room 25 times over the course of the evening to stare at your bright green walls.
Go to Blue Moon Burgers and eat 8000 calories worth of greasy hamburgers, onion rings, and special sauce made from mayo and peanut butter.
At the end of the night, set up your camping pad, your inflatable mattress, and your sleeping bags in the second bedroom. The cat will decide this is the most exciting thing ever and will harass the shit out of your husband all night. (She would harass you, but wild horses couldn't wake you up). At 5AM your husband will kick the cat out of the room. Because the door doesn't latch, she will make her way back in. He will kick her out again and prop the door closed.
At 5:45AM your next-door neighbor will wake everyone in a 3-block radius up by dumping coolers full of ice on to your paving stone driveway. Your husband will go downstairs to see what the hell is going on, but the neighbor has already taken off. The reason for dumping ice on the driveway at the crack of dawn is never clarified.
Wake up at 9:00AM sore from your awesome sleeping arrangements. Take a good look at the room in daylight. Repaint the orange wall of doom. Notice you missed about 25 spots elsewhere in the room.
Realize that you do actually need to buy brushes. Head back to the store again.
Head home, paint over the missed spots. Declare victory. Much rejoicing, etc. Post more pictures to the internet.
Head out to the store to buy a new duvet cover you picked out last night on the internet, leaving your husband to clean up the mess.
Buy a new duvet cover and then go and look at shoes and Ann Taylor Loft. Realize you still have paint all over your arms and are unsuitable to be seen in public. Touch a bunch of merchandise anyway, just to see if anyone does anything. They don't.
Come home with a new blue and white duvet cover. Your husband, while barely taking his eyes off the television, says "well, the part near the ceiling doesn't look perfect. Some of the paint leached under the tape."
Run upstairs and survey the room. Realize the top of the wall looks like hell. Panic while you try to figure out what to do.
Your husband joins you and suggests that either you leave it alone or go and buy trim to go along the ceiling.
More panicking and brow furrowing.
Consult the internet. Had we bothered to do this beforehand we would have learned that the tape is supposed to come off immediately after you paint. To avoid the leaching problem. Awesome.
Your husband comes to the rescue. He re-tapes the entire ceiling, pressing as hard as he can, and leaving just a few millimeters of space so that you can paint over the uneven parts.
Get on a ladder and repaint the half centimeter in the wall-ceiling area. Rip the tape off as soon as possible after your finish painting a section. Discover a small amount has leached anyway due to the texture of your walls and ceiling, even though overall it looks 100% better. Don't feel so bad anymore.
Look around. Realize you're actually done this time. Thank your husband for being so hardworking, patient, and wonderful. More rejoicing.
You've used only 1.75 of your 4 cans of paint. The good news is that Habitat for Humanity takes donations.
Clean all the brushes and bins in your master bathroom sink. Wonder what you're doing to your pipes after two days of dumping latex paint down them. Realize that you own your home and if you FUBAR your pipes, you have to fix them. Hope this doesn't come back to haunt you.
Remove the rest of the tape and the plastic sheeting. Realize that you got paint on the trim in more than a few areas and that some of the orange still shows by the floor trim. Decide you don't care since the bed and bedside tables will obscure that area. Discover you got just a little paint on the carpet since you didn't cover all of that, either. Sigh.
Let the room air out for a few more hours, but know that no way are you going to sleep on the floor for two nights in a row, even if you die from paint fume inhalation.
Enjoy your new room for 15 minutes before you start shopping online for new accessories and a new dresser to go with your brand-new color.
Eat hamburgers at home with asparagus instead of onion rings on the side. Start talking about going out for ice cream.

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2009-08-16T22:24:00.000-07:00

Blastoff!