Green Is Good

RGKS: My Top Five Stories About My Son Puking

2009-03-17T09:16:00.001-07:00

A few days ago I delighted my 10-year-old son by pointing out that the song playing on the radio, "Down Under" by Men At Work, contains a lyric about vomiting ("I come from a land down under/where beer does flow and men chunder"). This got me thinking about the only other song I know of with a line about vomiting, which is "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)" by The Proclaimers - or so I thought. I had always heard the line as "And when I heave up, well you know I'm gonna be/ I'm gonna be the man who heaves up next to you," but when I looked it up for clarification, it turned out that that actual line is "And when I haver, well you know I'm gonna be/I'm gonna be the man who's havering next to you." The definition of haver, according to an online dictionary, is to spout nonsense, which is something that is definitely just as likely to happen when one drinks as puking. In any case, that ruined my idea for making a list of songs that mention vomiting. I'm sure others besides "Down Under" exist, but I can't think of any, so instead, I'm going to share my top five stories about my son, who is talented in this area, losing his lunch, or breakfast, or dinner.

5. New Friends

A few years ago, our family was invited to dinner at the home of some friends we'd recently met. Their house was large, immaculate, and had white carpeting throughout. We had a very nice evening, with the kids happily watching a movie and the adults enjoying a meal in the dining room without interruption, until after dessert, when my son wandered into the study and deposited the entire contents of his stomach, which included pizza, ice cream and several juice boxes, in the middle of the floor. After my husband and I cleaned up the bulk of it, our hostess demonstrated the powers of her excellent spot-cleaning machine from Sharper Image, and generally, she and her husband couldn't have been lovelier about it. Still, the incident pretty much killed the evening for us, and we left with our heads hanging low. Amazingly, we have been invited back several times.

4. Swimming Lessons

The summer he was three, Will took a one-week session of swimming lessons at a local pool. He yakked in the pool 3 of the 5 sessions, causing it to be evacuated each times.

3. Blue

One day the year Will was in kindergarten, I arrived at school to work in his classroom to see that the mouth and lips of every child in his class were stained toilet-bowl blue. Their sheepish teacher, who earlier that week had sent home a notice asking parent to please pack healthier snacks for their students, explained that a little girl in the class had brought cupcakes with bright blue frosting to celebrate her birthday that day. When school was over, I took Will home and fed him lunch. Within an hour, he turned a little pale and, before I could get him to the bathroom, sprayed blue chunks all over the family room rug. He continued to barf blue on and off for the rest of the afternoon.

2. Two in One Day

A few years ago, we stayed overnight in San Francisco, and the next morning, we went to breakfast at a recommended place, Sears Fine Food, near our hotel. Will enjoyed something in the pancake/waffle family of breakfast foods, perhaps a little too quickly, and when his sister got up to use the restroom, he took advantage of the situation by turning his head and hurling his breakfast on the seat she'd just left vacant. A harried waitress helped us clean up the smelly mess and was rewarded with a tip equal to the amount of our bill. We spent a fun day at the Exploratorium and stopped for lunch at a chain restaurant on our drive home. As we were getting ready to go, Will got that look on his face and my husband was able to get him to the restroom before he spewed, thus making this the day he managed to throw up at every restaurant we took him to.

1. Fake Crying

My daughter is a picky eater, and one night I made a new recipe I thought she would love, so I was surprised when she was resistant. "Take a bite of that and tell me you don't like it," I dared her. Well, you can probably guess what happened: the little stinker brought the tiniest morsel to her lips and declared "I don't like it." I burst into fake, dramatic sobs, which failed to impress my daughter. My toddler son, on the other hand, failed to grasp that I was only pretending, and burst into real tears. My husband and I tried to calm him down, but we weren't fast enough, and before we knew what was happening, he became so worked up that he horked all over the dinner table, drowning his dinner plate in its previous contents, only now in liquid form. Three times in quick succession, in fact, did he heave. We spent fifteen minutes cleaning up, after which our daughter returned to the table and ate every bite of the recipe I had earlier been so sure she would enjoy.

Everyone Has Probably Stopped Reading My Blog

2009-03-14T09:50:00.000-07:00

But I'm posting anyway. In spite of the fact that no one is going to read and I actually have nothing to say. I really liked blogging and am sorry I let it fall by the wayside. So I'm going to try to get it started again. Wish me luck!

It's one of my favorite times of the week - I'm sitting on the couch with coffee, my computer, and the dogs next to me on a Saturday morning. We have one commitment for the weekend, but it's a fun one (yay, we get to see Jayla today! Ryan is chortling in the kitchen as I write this), we have a new copy of Rock Band 2 to amuse us, the weather is nice. Ryan and I had a nice evening out last night - dinner and a play, Avenue Q, which was really fun. I got a new haircut this week that I like. The freezer is full of Dream Dinners, so my family will eat well for a few weeks. The puppy's spay incision healed up nicely and she doesn't have to wear those dumb little tee shirts anymore. We get to see Jayla today! So yeah, life is good.

Wouldn't you be in a good mood if you knew you got to hang out with this person today?

Inauguration Day!

2009-01-20T08:45:00.000-08:00

I don't blog nearly often enough anymore, but today I'm sitting here watching the inauguration of President Barack Obama, and I just want to say something to mark the occasion. Progress marches on, regardless of efforts to stop it, because this country is free. I am not always the most patriotic person around, but I acknowledge that this day is here because of the rights granted in our Constitution - freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, the amendments to the Bill of Rights that freed the slaves in the south and that granted women the right to vote.

Gay rights propositions went down this past November, but their day is coming too. There has never been occasion in this country that we looked back at a time when we denied basic rights to a group of our citizens with anything but shame and regret. A generation ago, it was still illegal in some states for mixed-race couples to marry, and today we've elected the child of a mixed-raced couple as our new president. I can't help but notice what a beautiful thing it is to see women and people of color not only among the massive crowd watching this historic event, but involved in the proceedings, mixed in among all the officials, making this day possible.

You can't stop it - progress marches on. Happy Inauguration Day to all!

Funny Coincidence

2008-10-18T09:11:00.000-07:00

This is our dog Buster:

This is our puppy, Posy:

And this is Buster Posey, former Florida State baseball star and 2008 draftee for the San Francisco Giants:

Buster is a pretty common name for dogs, though not for people -- I was happy to see on Buster Posey's Wikipedia entry that it's not his real name (which is Gerald, and I can't blame him for wanting to be rid of that). Posy (or posey), however, is not a common name, for people or dogs, which is part of the reason I chose it. So I find it very entertaining that there's a baseball player named Buster Posey, and he is a player for the team to which I have the most allegiance (I won't go so far as to call myself a fan, since I barely pay any attention most seasons, but I grew up in a Giants family and continue to feel fondly toward them despite being married to a rabid Dodgers fan). Also, like Buster and Posy, Buster Posey is extremely cute. Seriously -- look at that guy.

I have a new favorite baseball player :-)

2008-10-13T16:16:00.000-07:00

I pretty much live my life on Facebook now, but I know everyone isn't there, so I wanted to post some pictures and give a few details here too.

First, Ryan and I attended my high school reunion September 27, and it was a lot of fun! I was really nervous, but ended up having a great time.

I'd barely recovered from that when I spontaneously adopted a puppy two days later! Posy is a toy poodle/terrier mix, about 2 1/2 months old, and just the cutest thing ever! House-training is a challenge, and Buster keeps looking at me as if to say "how could you do this to me?", but we are all enjoying her.

Most importantly, this past Saturday, October 11 at 8:05 am, my niece Jayla Jean was born. Her parents are my brother Chad and his wife Angela. I was lucky enough to be there for her arrival, along with my mom, Angela's mom and sister Lora, and of course, Chad. Watching Jayla's birth was absolutely amazing, and of course we are all in love with her, no one so much as her daddy! It's so much fun to see my little brother as a dad :-)

So that's the big news here! Soon we will head down to the valley for Ryan's high school reunion, we are all looking forward to dressing up for Halloween, and of course there is regular life, with school, activities, PTA, and this marathon election season. I'm a mama for Obama! Just say no to McPain!

Everything I Know I Learned On Our Summer Vacation

2008-08-15T21:53:00.000-07:00

A trip to Newport Beach can be as nice as a trip to Hawaii if you factor in several things, including but not limited to the fact that being able to drive means you don’t have to pay for airfare and a car rental, makes it possible to travel on your own schedule, and allows you to bring along everything you can cram into your car.

Spray sunscreen in a can is convenient when you’re putting it on, but it sure doesn’t seem worth the money when you use up an entire can of it just trying to get your family of four properly screened before your first morning at the beach.

The combination of a functional set of black swim-shorts with a cute, colorful bikini top means that, while my body is not exactly bikini friendly, it is not strictly bikini unfriendly either.

Arcades are pretty much similarly scummy wherever you go.

Sand can get into the most amazing places.

There’s probably such a thing as being too vigilant about sunscreen, but that level of vigilance is not one I have ever managed to reach.

Everyone in my immediate family sunburns easily.

A single-day ticket to Disneyland has become so prohibitively expensive that it can actually seem to make sense to just buy annual passes for the whole family and plan to come back a few times later in the year.

Credit card companies use perverse non-customer-serving logic, such as to simply decline charges that seem too big rather than giving the customers a hassle-free way to authorize them. This can lead to unpleasantness, especially when one is on vacation, and, frankly, seems counter to the desire of credit card companies as well. Don’t they want you to charge a lot of stuff?

It’s actually possible to go to Disneyland in the middle of August and have it be fun and not so ridiculously crowded that you spend all your time waiting in line. We recommend going on a Wednesday when the economy is crappy and Disney has just raised tickets prices a few weeks earlier.

Somehow, the saccharine schmaltz of Disney doesn’t seem that bad when you are actually inside Disneyland.

If you are walking around, say, a theme park, and it’s so hot and humid that the sweat seems to be pouring off you, a margarita is excellent remedy.

Just as the fact that fries are fattening doesn’t keep you from eating them on a frequent basis, the fact that you rented a condo and brought lots of food so you could eat home-cooked meals on your vacation doesn’t keep you from eating out a lot.

A walk of almost any length is too long the day after you spend fourteen hours walking around Disneyland.

The experience of swimming in the ocean teaches many life lessons. For instance, like life, the ocean can be dangerous, but if you don’t get out there, you’re never going to have any fun. Also, the ocean does things on its own terms. You can try to stand at the edge and not get wet above your knees, but if a wave wants to soak you, you’re going to get soaked. It’s better to learn to float along with it than keep fighting against it. And even when you do, you’re still going to get slammed into the beach by a rogue wave you weren’t ready for every once in a while.

However true that last item may be, having a mother who expects you to appreciate nuggets of wisdom like “The ocean isn’t fair” right after a rogue wave has slammed you into the beach is probably kind of a drag.

Even the best, most relaxing vacation can be tiring.

A little 2 bedroom/1 bath condo just a couple of blocks from the beach in great weather is terrific for a week’s vacation, but toward the end, you’re still pretty much ready to get back to having a dishwasher, a DVD player, reliable wi-fi, separate bedrooms for the kids, multiple bathrooms, your dog, and air conditioning. In other words, home.

Car Names

2008-07-12T09:34:00.000-07:00

Here is my list of best, boring and WTF? worst names:

BEST:
Element - Elegant simplicity -- it's elemental. Would have been perfect for a compact hybrid with nice lines.

Escape - we rented one of these and it was a sluggish, rattling piece of crap. It would be a great name for a zippy little car though

Sonata - just sounds nice. I'd drive one. I guess it's not real manly though.

Avalon - See Sonata.

Odyssey - Perfect for a minivan -- it sounds like a non-perilous adventure to me.

Pacifica - I am a West-Coast girl

Caravan - Also perfect for a minivan -- it sounds cozy and familial.

Solara - See Sonata.

Jetta - Sounds zippy and cute, but kind of cool too.

BORING:

Anything that is letters, numbers, or a combination thereof (Example: my car, the Mazda MPV)

Most made-up names (Examples: Camry, Corolla, Lumina, Elantra)

Everything made by Kia (Examples: Spectra, Sorrento, Optima)

Accord - as in, the two factions reached accord. *snore*

Civic - as in doing your civic duty by driving something that gets good gas mileage. Great car, boring name.

Passat - conveys nothing to me

BAD:

Aspire - This could have worked on a really high-end car. But putting it on a boxy little subcompact just makes you think everyone driving one aspires to be driving something better

Buick Lucerne - it just makes me think of the brand of dairy products. Horrible

Chevy Uplander - what?

Avalanche - I don't want to drive anything that sounds like a natural disaster

Aztek - Let's name a car after an ancient civilization and then spell it wrong.

Chevy Equinox - I get that they are going with an astronomical term, but it just doesn't sing

Envoy (Denali)and Yukon (Denali)- I don't know what the Denali means on either of these, but both Enjoy and Yukon sound heavy to me. Some people might think that's good, but I don't.

Mercury Grand Marquis - there is nothing royal about this car. Give it up, Mercury

Nissan Armada - an armada is a fleet of ships. I can only guess Nissan is banking on the general public not knowing the actual definition of the word with this one

Pontiac Vibe - too close for comfort

Saturn Relay - sounds dinky and cheap

Suzuki Grand Vitara - grand what?

Touareg - maybe I'd like this better if I spoke German

Mitsubishi Lancer - this just sounds painful

All-Time Worst Car Names:

Pinto - I don't remember when it came out, but it's hard to imagine this ever sounded good, even in the 70s

Citation - duh. Hopefully whoever green-lit this one got fired

Probe - I think this is the all-time worst car name ever. EVER. It's not even a pleasant euphemism for anything it might bring to mind. And no one wants to see anything called a "Probe" coming up fast behind them

A Tale of Two Songs

2008-06-30T16:02:00.000-07:00

I'm terrible at keeping up with current music. I always know what movies are out and what awesome things are currently on TV, but my knowledge of music is usually hopelessly out of date. For instance, last year I decided I really liked a song I kept hearing at the gym, so I located it online and discovered it had gained popularity after having been featured on "Grey's Anatomy" the year before. Ugh! Two other recent favorite songs of mine were songs I downloaded after hearing them in commercials. It's embarrassing.

There are two songs I've had on almost constant rotation on the old iPod lately, and they could not be more different. One is the Oscar-winning "Falling Slowly" from the film "Once," which I recently watched. It's a pretty decent little indie film that I can recommend to anyone who can grasp the idea that in the movie, two people become friends and make music and that's pretty much all that happens. "Falling Slowly" is a beautiful, heartfelt song, and listening to it always reminds me of when, on Oscar night, Jon Stewart brought the two singer/songwriters back onstage so the female one could give an acceptance speech, apparently feeling it was rude for the orchestra to have rush the two of them off the stage prematurely. Any song that reminds me of how I heart Jon Stewart is a good song.

In sharp contrast to "Falling Slowly," the other song stuck in my head non-stop these days is at least brand new. I read about it in some pop-culture-themed blog where the basic idea was "no, this song will not suck me in," so I ended up watching the video and felt compelled to download the song almost immediately. The song is an incredibly asinine little dance tune sung by Vanessa Hudgens of "High School Musical" (and naked internet pictures) fame. The lyrics detail her desire to put on sneakers and go out dancing with her presumably also sneaker-clad friends, and it features the line "Basically what we're gonna do is dance" 18 times in three minutes (yeah, I counted). It's called "Sneakernight." And I admit I love it. No, I'm not kidding. I dare you to listen to it and not feel like dancing. Basically.

My Grandma

2008-06-17T13:36:00.000-07:00

It's been a bad year for us in terms of grandparents.

My paternal grandfather passed away in September. Ryan's last remaining grandparent, his maternal grandmother Grandma Wanda, passed away in April. And my maternal grandmother Marge passed away last week, having made it two weeks past her 90th birthday. Grandma Wanda was also 90 when she died.

I have been fortunate to have had a tremendous amount of time with my grandparents. I still had all four of them till just before my college graduation. The four of them are all distinct personalities in mind. My maternal grandfather, Don, who passed away in 1992, was the sweetest man I have ever known, and he always made me feel special and adored, even the time I pulled his dentures out of his pocket when I was sitting on his lap after dinner one night. My paternal grandfather, Ed, was more gruff and distant, but I have fond memories of the running joke we had about whether or not he liked peanut butter cookies when I was a little girl, and I came appreciate his terrific sense of humor as I grew up. My paternal grandmother, Shirley, or as we call her, Nanny, who is now the only grandparent I have left, has been a bundle of quilt-making, sweets-offering, bulk-cooking energy for my entire life. Last week she had a stroke and injured herself in a couple of falls, as if another bit of evidence that old age is cruel was needed.

My Grandma Marge is the grandparent I've known probably the best. I've spent the most time with her, and her decline in the last several years of her life is the one I have been closest witness to. She always thanked me for coming to see her when I went to visit her, and my parents usually did too, as though it was a favor I was doing for all of them. I never saw it that way. This was, after all, the woman who never once forgot my birthday, who not only bought me Christmas presents but wanted to make sure I had exactly what I wanted waiting under the tree for me every year, who liked to take care of me when I was a little girl and who was just as happy to see me once I was an adult. She never let me pay for lunch, even in the last year when she could barely sign the credit card slip.

Despite what must sound like a materialistic nature to our relationship, she wasn't just some old lady who bought me stuff. It wasn't the stuff so much as the fact that she wanted to give it to me. Knowing that she wanted the best for me made it even more painful to watch her decline into a state where every day was a struggle.

Rest in peace, Grandma. I love you.

Cooler

2008-06-02T12:46:00.000-07:00

Sorry that last post was weird. It wasn't finished -- I had to leave the computer in the middle of it, and when I came back later, the window wasn't up anymore, so I forgot about it, then remembered and assumed it had gotten lost and was no longer moved to post. Then in an email my mom mentioned that she'd read on my blog that we were sick, and I thought "oh, holy crap, that posted? It probably ended really abruptly and felt unfinished." And I don't even remember if I ever went and looked at it. Perhaps it just seemed like I was still a little addle-braine from the illness.

In any case, at that time it was really hot, and then that misery evolved into what has been an absolutely lovely couple of weeks. Yes, there was wind, but what does that matter when you get to sit here?

I mean seriously. Between that, riding my bike a lot, and doing yard work, I may have spent more time outside in the last couple of weeks than I had in the whole last year combined.

It turns out that nasty, horrible hot spell we had a few weeks ago pretty much stopped our spring allergy season dead in its tracks. I have had a few sneezes here and there, but for the most part, nothing. Compared to a year ago, when our house was on the market and I couldn't be outside for more than 10 minutes without suffering for hours afterward, the second half of this May has been a stroll through a very temperate, pollen-free park.

HOT

2008-05-21T15:48:00.000-07:00

Let me share with you the lovely events of the past week...

On Mother's Day, Ryan said he didn't feel that great and that he thought he'd been drinking too much, so he wasn't going to do any of that that day. I said I was sure I had also been drinking too much, but it was Mother's Day, so screw sobriety for at least another 24 hours. We went to my sister-in-law's parents house and had a great day with their family and ours, culminating with everyone sitting down to watch the finale of Survivor. We stayed for a lot of it, too, though once Cirie got eliminated, I packed up the family and we left -- I didn't care which of those skinny brown-haired bikini girls won. By the time we got home, I had a terrible headache, which I still had the next morning.

Ryan, though, was worse off -- his off-feeling of the day before had now developed into a full-blown gastrointestinal nastiness. He spent most of the day sleeping and I brought him Gatorade. I got rid of my headache but still didn't feel too great, and suspected I had a touch of whatever he had. He never did actually barf, but I figured when it hit me full-force, I would definitely end up with my head over the toilet. Because barfing is what I do.

Finally!

2008-05-05T11:20:00.000-07:00

This is old news now, but I never got around to posting about it when I got the okay to announce to the general public: I am finally going to have a niece or a nephew! My big little brother Chad and his lovely wife Angela are expecting a little one around October 1st. We are very excited, since we have been waiting to be an aunt, an uncle and two cousins for a long time, and that same month will mark ten years since we have had a new baby in the family (of course he will always be my baby!). And I can't wait to see my BLB as a dad :-)

We will have to wait till the delivery to find out if it's a he or a she -- the ultrasound was Friday, and even if Chad and Angela had changed their minds about leaving it to be a surprise, the baby was too wiggly for a determination to be made!

Spring is here...

2008-05-05T10:33:00.000-07:00

so of course I am miserable. It's so hard -- the weather outside is beautiful, so what I want to do is go out and work in the yard, walk the dog, go for a run, or ride my bike. But I know if I do, I will pay for the rest of the day -- sneezing my head off, blowing my nose constantly, and just generally feeling fatigued. I try to keep reminding myself that at least we aren't in the process of buying and selling houses this year, and the sneezing is better than that one year I got exzema all over my legs -- that was brutal...

Of course the activities are ramping up as the school year is coming to an end -- this coming week I will begin collecting books for the used book fair at our end-of-the-year carnival, and we have Will's 3rd grade concert in a few weeks. It's not a great time to be losing energy. But thats life in Davis...

There have been about a zillion fundraising events for the Davis Schools Foundation lately. Friday night we went to a wine-tasting benefit at a local winery, and Saturday was Schoolapalooza in downtown Davis, where local businesses were donating part of their profits and there was entertainment, raffles and giveaways. Ryan worked at the DSF booth for most of the afternoon, and he said so many people stopped by to write checks and get their free bag of Annie's Organics stuff (Annie's donated 200 cases of stuff to give away), and I was there just hanging out and doing some shopping. It was a lot of fun and everyone seemed to be really enjoying themselves. This budget crisis is a terrible thing for our schools, but the efforts to make up the deficit are a great thing for our community, and a great example to our kids. It's pretty cool!

New Feature: RGKS

2008-04-21T11:11:00.000-07:00

As I have tried many times before, I'm going to try to start posting here more, and so, in a burst of optimism, I'm going to start what I hope will be the first of some but not too many Random Gratuitous Kid Stories. The idea is that if I think "oh, I should post on my blog" and can't think of anything to write about, I can pull one of these gems out of my head and churn it out quickly. We'll see how that works.

Also, from here on out, I'm dropping the cutesy pseudonyms for the people I write about. It's just getting old.

Anyway, here's an old favorite about a couple of notes Rachel wrote when she was 7 and 8 years old. As I mention in this space from time to time, life with high functioning autism can be all kinds of awesome, and these notes illustrate that point.

Note #1: Toward the end of the school year when Rachel was in first grade, the full-inclusion (ie special ed) teacher at her school was very pregnant and would be having her baby over the summer. Rachel had never been able to wrap her mind around the idea that you could have a baby in there and not know if it was a girl or a boy. (I think this kind of uncertainty still puzzles, her, actually. Every Tuesday when we are watching "American Idol," she asks me who's going to get eliminated, and I have explain once again that it's not decided until after the show). So on the last day of school, when they made cards for the pregnant teacher, Rachel wrote one that said:

Dear Katie,
Have a happy baby. It's a boy and his name is Tim.
From Rachel

(The baby turned out to be a girl.)

Note #2: We went to Hawaii the spring Rachel was in second grade. Her school aide, Mrs. Sharp, reminded Rachel several times that she wanted Rachel to send her a postcard. The last day we were there, I made her sit down and write the postcard, and this is what she wrote:

Dear Mrs. Sharp,
I'll be back Monday.
From Rachel

I made her write in "PS - I'm having fun" or something like that, but at least I knew Mrs. Sharp would get a kick out of it.

I'm Going To Recommend Some Stuff

2008-04-20T21:27:00.001-07:00

There's a lot of stuff I've been noticeably liking lately, so I'm going to recommend it:

List of the Day is a great website I check first thing (and several times thereafter) each day -- not just lists, but also a Mugshot of the Day, any funny videos or videos he comes across, etc. If you saw the collection of funny Olan Mills portraits with comments that circulated a few months ago -- this is the guy who put that together. If you don't have time to look at lots of sites all the time, you can look at this one every day and keep up with most of the goofy stuff that's getting a lot of attention online.

The Davis Schools Foundation: Yes, I know everyone has budget problems right now, but our school district is facing budget cuts of $4 million next year, which means losing teachers and programs. The DSF is hoping to make up a lot of that with fundraising and the community is really pulling together for it. Please think about making a contribution if you can, for the good of Davis school children, or else find out how you can help ease the budget crisis for your local California school district.

Audible is where I like to buy audio books. Not everyone has time to listen to books rather than read them, but if you spend a lot of time in the car or doing boring things around the house, believe me, it's more interesting with an audio book on your iPod. I have the plan where you pay $14.95 a month and get one credit -- most of the books on the site cost one credit and $14.95 is much less than the price listed on the site, so you are rewarded for your loyalty.

Donna Ricco: I'm not big into fashion, but I've been shopping for a dress for my upcoming 20-year high school reunion and kept coming across Donna Ricco dresses that I loved. I ordered one from Nordstrom and it's perfect -- I can't wait to wear it! I love the colors, the flowy fabrics, and the body-skimming designs.

Tech For Less: People who know me know I am both addicted to technology and extremely accident-prone when it comes to taking care of my technological devices. Fortunately for me, there's Tech For Less, where you can get a bargain on "open box" items. I have bought a laptop, a wireless router, a desktop computer and several iPods from them, all below retail. One item had a problem but they were happy to take it back, and their customer service is excellent. Check them out next time you need some component and can't face Best Buy or Fry's again.

"Mad Men" and "Friday Night Lights" -- I recently watched the first seasons of both these shows, the former on iTunes and the latter on DVD, and they are both excellent as portraits of a particular time and place. "Mad Men" is about an advertising firm on Madison Avenue in 1960, and it's amazing to see all the ways society has changed in 50 years. "Friday Night Lights" is about a high school football-crazy town in Texas, and I can't imagine what it would be like to live there. But I would go to a high school football game every Friday night too if it meant I got to see Kyle Chandler presiding over things. I can actually think of many things these two shows have in common (besides being excellent) and I may write another blog post on the subject, but I definitely give both a thumbs up and you should check them out.

"Lost" -- It's been fantastic this year, and it's back with the remaining 5 episodes of the season this week. If you haven't ever watched it, start from the beginning, don't worry about catching every detail in Season 2 and the first half of Season 3, and enjoy it when things really get going after that. I can't wait to see how they wrap it up over the next two seasons.

And of course: "The Office" Best show on TV, and it's finally back with its last few post-strike episodes -- I think there are three left. Even in this strike-shortened season, it's been top-notch.

I guess that's it for now....

I Am President

2008-04-16T16:07:00.000-07:00

No, seriously.

I'm president of the PTA at our elementary school. Next year. Well, one of two -- I'm co-president.

I could say "oh, I don't know how this happened," and "they asked and I just couldn't say no," but I do, and I could have. The fact is that someone came up with this idea during one of the most stressful weeks of this school year for me, the week of the spring book fair, which followed right on the heels of the school auction, in which I'd played an active role, and even though my first thought was "hell no!," my second thought was "Me? They want me? They think I'd be a good president?" It was like I was transported straight back to high school and had won a big old popularity contest. In fact, no one else wanted the job, and while I was told I had a month to think about it before I committed, as the days ticked by and I didn't say no, never mind, forget it, it pretty much became official. And now I'm stuck.

I don't know if I'm going to like it or not. Like every district in California, we are facing big budget cuts due to the state budget crisis, and starting next week, we have to start hammering out the PTA budget for next year. Probably some people will complain about stuff, but I guess I can handle that. My co-president is someone who knows me well and I think we'll work well together. In any case, I don't see myself going, you know, mad with power or anything. And the flattery part probably won't last very long. I just hope I'm not cursing my decision to do this by the time school starts in the fall...

Random Crap

2008-01-25T06:31:00.000-08:00

- This week we had a meeting with Mr. Seventh Teacher, where he couldn't have been nicer and more helpful. And it wasn't even tense, even though the day after I called the Slap Squad out on him, Mermaid evidently announced right there in his class, "I hate social studies and my mom hates Mr. (Seventh Teacher)!" So I am officially calling off the Slap Squad, but I reserve the right to re-engage their services if things don't actually improve in social studies this coming semester.

- Heath Ledger -- wow. I just looked up his IMDB filmography to confirm what I was already thinking, which was that yes, I've actually only seen one of his movies. But it was a doozy. "Brokeback Mountain" is one of the best dramas I have ever seen, and he was great in in. It's very sad he died so young. RIP, Heath.

- The Academy Award Nominations -- I was glad to see "Juno" get so much love, but sad to see the equally quirky/good "Waitress" be totally ignored. I guess timing is everything when it comes to the Oscars.

- I am inching toward having a draft of my Nano novel ready for my circle of readers. There is one section that needed a major rewrite and I am letting it intimidate the hell out of me -- no idea why. Hopefully I can get over it and finish today.

- I feel a little dirty about this so I'll just admit it here and then try to live with myself: I bought the new Tom Cruise biography in audio form to listen to on my iPod. I was shopping around for something to listen to, and there it was, and I just couldn't help myself. According to Amazon, the thing is selling well, so it's not like I'm the only one.

- It's been a rainy week, which made it hard for me to go down and visit my grandma, but I finally made it down there yesterday while the kids were at school. And it rained on us, which was no fun, but we had a nice time anyway. RM just told me there's supposed to be a big storm today, and I am glad I don't have to go anywhere in it.

- It's Friday -- yay!

The Slap Squad

2008-01-13T17:49:00.000-08:00

Years ago I was part of a listserv for parents of children with conditions similar to my daughter's, and there was one particularly spirited woman on there who came up with the Slap Squad, who could be dispatched to punish whomever was getting on our nerves that day. The intended targets were usually uncooperative teachers, school administrators, insurance companies, or providers of services like speech or occupational therapy, those kinds of people, against whom some special ed parents are continuing battling. Reasonable Man and I have tried hard over the years to not be that perpetually-squeaky-wheel type of special ed parent, but everyone has their limits, and we have fought the occasional battle, and come up against the occasional foe who could use a visit from the Slap Squad.

This is our daughter's first year in junior high, and hence her first year with multiple teachers. In the past seven years, we have been lucky enough to have seven teachers who really wanted the best for our Mermaid, and this, her first year in junior high, we have been lucky enough to have six teachers who want the best for her. This is great, except for the fact that Mermaid has seven classes, and the seventh teacher is such a complete and total tool that he a) he seems to attribute the trouble Mermaid has in his class to her having an attitude problem, b)he manages to get RM and me all aggravated and riled up on almost a weekly basis, b) Mermaid starts crying pretty much anytime the subject of his class comes up. Clearly this is not cool. I could describe his latest offense for you, but why? It's just more of the same we have been suffering for the past several months. I am actually beyond the point of finding comfort in picturing him dealing with the karmic ramifications of picking on an autistic student. And for that, Mr. Seventh Teacher, you have earned yourself a visit from the Slap Squad. Not that I expect it to do you any good, but I will enjoy imagining it happening anyway.

And as long as they're out there doing my bidding, I decided I might as well come up with a list of others who have incurred my wrath and need a good smacking-for-hire:

People who don't drink coffee, or don't watch TV, or don't read Harry Potter books, and are kind of self-righteous about it (not to be confused with people who don't do one or all of those things and manage to say so without making you want to kick their pompous asses about it);

Dr. Phil, for constantly telling people "I always say don't substitute my judgement for your own" when that is basically what he does on every damn show, and what would be the point if he didn't;

The people in Hollywood who are now complaining about the writers' strike, not because the writers have been getting screwed over for years, but because the Oscars might get cancelled;

Sociopaths who appear on reality TV and are arrogant enough to think no one will notice there is something seriously wrong with them;

George W. Bush and everyone in his administration who has not yet resigned in disgust;

Everyone who has made the current presidential election seem like it's already been going on for two years when there are still ten months to go.

So that's it. Let me know if there's anyone I need to add to the list!

Woo Hoo!

2008-01-13T17:32:00.000-08:00

Today, I finished NaNoWriMo.

NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month, which technically was in November. I did not "win" NaNoWriMo this year because I did not write 5,000 words within the month of November. I wrote about 43,000 words in November, minus the ~6,400 words of that document I wrote over the summer. In any case, I feel like I completed the thing, even though it's January, because as of today my novel:
a) is over 50,000 words, and
b) has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

It doesn't matter that it's a wreck, and I might literally die of embarrassment if another human being actually read it in its current condition. In fact, its being in that condition is practically a requirement of a just-completed NaNoWriMo project. I plan to spend the next few weeks whipping it into shape worthy of the readers who eagerly await its arrival into the world.

Just thought I'd mention it!

Another Title Change

2008-01-09T12:27:00.001-08:00

I don't know why I didn't think of it before. It's so simple.

2008-01-05T17:16:00.000-08:00

Being a shut-in isn't working so well for me. I am as much of a homebody as anyone, but yesterday, my third consecutive day of staying home putting away, organizing, watching taped TV shows and pretending to work on my novel, I kind of lost it for a while and fell into a pit of despair. It didn't help that we've been having these storms that made the house dark all day long, nor that I haven't been sleeping well, both because I'm staying up too late and also because I can't get to sleep once I do actually go to bed. Anyway, it all caught up with me yesterday, and I had a few hours of misery. Then RM came home and we ate In'n'Out Burger for dinner and drank some wine and watched "The Big Lebowski," and even though I had a hard time sleeping again last night, I woke up in a much better frame of mnd today.

It was a-stormin' again today so I didn't leave the house until late this afternoon, and then only because we have no internet connection at home right now, but it's still been a much better day today.

I have connected with more people on my MySpace page and so it's proving to have more of a purpose than I thought before. And I actually did get quite a bit of work done on my novel today, in spite of my best efforts to thwart this goal by watching my "Persuasion" DVD for the umpteenth time in the middle of the day and calling my mom for a lengthy chat. Hey, family is important!

Even though I've been staying home unshowered far too much of the time this past week, I'm still not looking forward to having to start up my real life again on Monday when the kids go back to school. Getting up early sucks, and so does 7th grade social studies. Oh well.

I'm the mother of a teenager...

2008-01-04T00:12:00.001-08:00

and here is photographic proof:

This picture could only be more perfect, in my opinion, if there were earphones dangling from her ears and maybe the stereo next to her didn't have the Spongebob theme. Oh, and if she didn't have a smile on her face.

If you must have a teenager of your own, I highly recommend getting one of the mildly autistic variety. Sure, the preschool years were hell, but she's never once told me she hates me, demanded a brand-name anything, or refused to go to school with that zit on her chin because what if someone sees her? How many moms of teens can say that?

New Name

2008-01-03T23:05:00.000-08:00

We haven't lived in a green house in six months now, and nothing pithy was coming to me, so I borrowed from Schoolhouse Rock. It's probably too cute. Oh well.

Family Portrait

2008-01-01T23:16:00.000-08:00

This is our family portrait, taken on Block Island, RI in October. How cute are we?

New Year

2008-01-01T22:34:00.000-08:00

I'm glad it's a new year. My daughter is officially a teenager now, and that's a little scary, but whatever. 2007 was a far more eventful year than I really cared for, and now I'd just like to have a regular old boring 2008. As I told Reasonable Man earlier this evening, in 2008, we get to live in our nice new house without the aggravation of buying it and moving into it, and that is a fine thing indeed. I would also like to have no one in my family require surgery, emergency or otherwise, this year. Elective cosmetic procedures don't count -- not that I have any planned, but I wouldn't rule it out either.

I now have a MySpace page, for no good reason other than that over Christmas, RM and I were drinking copious amounts of wine with his younger brothers, and they all have MySpace page, and so does RM because he needed one in order to join, or "friend" or whatever it is, the page someone in his high school class started in order to organize/gather info for their upcoming 20-year high school reunion. And so now I have this MySpace page with six friends: RM, his three brothers, the aforementioned high school reunion page (and I didn't even go to that high school), and a page that apparently represents the comedy club they sometimes have at a restaurant here in Davis, which sent me a friend request. My brothers-in-law explained to me that now I need to gather lots and lots of of these "friends." I'm not that into this, though, considering that I don't even know why I have the damn MySpace page in the first place. Nevertheless, if you happen to be reading this, and you have a MySpace page to and you want to see mine or friend me or something, the URL is http://www.myspace.com/tkbezerra and, you know, whatever. Anyone who reads something I wrote and says something halfway nice to me is my friend forever, so they can certainly be my "friend" too.

When I started this blog, I swore I would never use the word "blog" as a verb, and now I do it all the time, so I'm not even going to pretend I won't someday use the word "friend" as a verb on a regular basis if I get into this whole MySpace thing.

In other news, I limp toward the 50K mark and, more importantly, completion, on my November novel. I haven't worked on it as much as I would have liked, but I've still made some good progress on it, especially in the past week. Obviously the concept of 50,000 words is arbitrary at this point, since I didn't "win" NaNoWriMo this year, but I do think that the novel needs to be at least that long and probably somewhat longer in order to be viable, marketable, etc. I would very much like to have a draft for my "inner circle" of readers to read pretty soon, and am toying with the idea of a January 30 deadline for that.

This year I think I enjoyed the preparations for Christmas better than the experience of Christmas itself. I got some very nice gifts and always appreciate what people are kind enough to give me, but I guess I really am an adult now because receiving presents just isn't that big a part of the holiday for me anymore. Here were the things I enjoyed most this season:
1) Getting out the decorations and watching all my stress about them eventually result in the house looking great for our first Christmas here
2) Spending time with our friends here (and other places) before and after Christmas and on New Year's Eve
3) Going to Weight Watchers and feeling proud of the fact that I was staying accountable and not gaining a bunch of weight over the holidays
4) Having my family come for our annual early Christmas dinner on the 22nd and especially sitting around the table after dinner, talking and laughing and enjoying each other
5) Hanging out with my brothers-in-law, creating the MySpace page I have no use for and laughing a lot

I just realized none of those things involve my kids. That is definitely something to work on next year!

Tomorrow, RM heads back to work after being off the last week and a half, and for him it's almost a new job, since he has handed off the work that has taken up most of his time for the last two years and can start doing the stuff he much prefers. So that is yet another way this year will be better. And I head back to the gym for only the second time in the last week, for a personal training session. And that's a good thing. I can definitely see the results of my working out regularly this past year. I am also 10 lbs thinner than I was a year ago. I'd like that to be more, but 10 lbs is not bad, and I will keep plugging away at it.

Finally, I've been watching a lot of this show "Clean House" on the Style Network. I guess it's pretty much the same as "Clean Sweep" on TLC, where people who are drowning in clutter have the show come in and help them get rid of stuff in a yard sale and then use the money they make to organize and decorate. I never got that into "Clean Sweep," though. Anyway, it gets me thinking, and in the past several days, I have done a lot of decluttering and organizing of our bedroom closet, which is big enough that when we moved in, we just kind of put all our crap in there in a stupid way and it didn't matter because there was room for it. I've freecycled off lots of stuff that is now making someone else happy, and RM and I got in there and moved some stuff around so it all functions more efficiently. It's a good thing. It's never going to look like one of those professionally tricked out closets, but it doesn't need to. We're happy with it. And all of this has me really thinking about simplification, recycling, reusing and all of that other earth-friendly stuff as I go into the new year.

So that's how things are in the not-green house on this first day of the new year. Here's hoping we all have a great 2008!

Warning: Dangerous Product

2007-12-09T13:20:00.000-08:00

I was in the grocery store a week or two ago and saw this product on the shelf:

My mouth dropped open. The only other time I have ever been so offended by the mere existence of a product was the time I saw a tee shirt that said, in really big letters, "Shut Up, Bitch."

I was by myself but I asked, out loud, "Don't they know how fat we already are in this country?"

I like how they show it being put in a crust in this little ad, and wonder how much of what has been sold has actually ever made contact with a crust. I would probably just open it in the car on the way home from the store and start scooping it into my mouth with my fingers. Which is why I'm not going to buy any.

This stuff is in the deli section of the supermarket and comes in something similar to a Cool Whip container, only larger. If you do not want to also become larger, I highly recommend avoiding it.

Random Blogging

2007-12-08T09:35:00.000-08:00

I've been neglecting this space again -- maybe that's just how it's going to go. I'd like to write more and am hoping to do so. Anyway, here is some stuff that is happening or going through my head recently:

- I did not finish NaNoWriMo this year, but by design. I am still working on my novel and have every intention of finishing it it -- in fact, I am very happy with it. It's the first time since I was in my mid-20s that I have written about a character my age, and the first time ever that my main character is a mother, and it really pleases me to have really enjoyed writing a story about a mom in her 30s where the romantic storyline feels just as magical as anything I've written about teens or college-aged characters.

I am at about 45,000 words, and probably could have hit 50,000 by November 30 if I had wanted to, but here's what I realized about the whole NaNo experience: it's become a crutch for me. I came up with the idea for this novel last June and was excited about it. I wrote some of it and then allowed every other thing in the world to get in the way of getting any of it done till NaNo was in swing and I could work toward the goal of completing 50,000 words along with all the other NaNo participants. Well, I've done NaNo before -- four times, in fact -- and I know I can do that.

What I haven't been able to do so far is maintain any sort of momentum in my writing in any other month of the year, and that is my new goal. I will finish the project and then set it aside and get to work on another project that I started a few years ago and have wanted to return to. When I feel myself reaching the end of that one, I'll start brainstorming and hopefully start coming up with a new idea for the next project. Maybe I can even rescue/rewrite/finish the novel I wrote about half of in November 2006. In any case, the goal for now is to write consistently in any other month of the year but November. Wish me luck.

- I am glad to hear that health care is supposed to be a big issue in the presidential election next year. I feel my family is very fortunate in this particular area, but it’s an issue I’ve been very interested in since I did a project about health coverage for a political science class back in college. And this week, something arrived in the mail that really brought the current state of things into focus for me.

I don’t think I blogged about my daughter’s health crisis this summer. In a nutshell, during the last week of July, Mermaid started having abdominal pains and was nauseated for several days, and eventually she underwent emergency surgery to remove an ovarian cyst the size of a cantaloupe. Both the cyst and the shriveled little ovary attached to it were necrotic and could have caused her to become septic if they’d stayed inside her much longer. It was a very scary couple of days, but fortunately it all went well and she has made a full recovery.

This week we received her hospital bill. Let me first say that we have good insurance through Reasonable Man’s work, and our portion of the bill is just $600 – not a small amount of money, but probably not enough to bankrupt most people either. The bill is not itemized, but I assume it covers the 7-8 hours Mermaid spent in the ER the first day, the CT scan done of her abdomen, the time she spent in the OR and recovery, and the two days she spent in a private room after that. The total is $36,463.50.

Here’s the thing: if this could happen to Mermaid, it could happen to anyone. Unlike many autistic children, Mermaid has been blessed with optimal physical health. She is truly one of the hardiest children I have ever known. She went through all the usual colds and such when she was in preschool, but by the time she hit elementary, her amazing immune system was fully formed. She had perfect attendance in kindergarten and missed one day in first grade, only because I had her take a mental health day. Each winter during cold season, she may have a few stuffy-nosed days, and only if Reasonable Man, Enthusio and I are first felled by some particularly nasty germ does she usually suffer anything that would cause her to actually miss a day of school. Yet she, of all of us, suffered a health crisis resulting in a hospital bill equal to the price of a nice car or a year of study at a private university.

That number -- $36,463.50 – would amount to a financial crisis for the average family in this country. Reasonable Man and I could take out a mortgage on our home to cover it, and I certainly hope that most hospitals know that a person without insurance also doesn’t have $36,000 squirreled away for a rainy day and will arrange some kind of a payment plan. Still, that amount is staggering, and it’s no wonder to me that health crises have the power to bankrupt people without insurance, or with insurance that refuses to pay. Something has to change here.

- As you can see, our Christmas tree is in the kitchen this year, because that's where it fits!

I am surviving the holiday season. I am one of the many who grew up loving Christmas but as an adult developed so many expectations for myself that each December became a slog. Every year I try to work on making preparations a little simpler. This year I was excited about decorating our new house for Christmas, but of course I built it up in my mind to a point where I felt paralyzed once I actually got started. But I was able to pull back a bit and get it done, and then I spent about a week with some things still sitting out, ready to be put up, before I faced the fact that some of them just needed to be put back in the garage. Now the house is all decorated, the cards are printed, much of the shopping and some of the wrapping is done, and with two weeks to go, I think I’m doing just fine.

- School is under control for the kids. Mermaid is plugging along in her classes, and we have come to a place of agreement (I think, I hope!) with her social studies teacher. Enthusio continues to have a great year, and this past week one of his two teachers told me they are giving him some very challenging math. He struggles a bit emotionally, but she said they are pushing him because they know he can do it. I trust these two teachers, who both just adore him, to handle the situation sensitively, and I know he feels confident in math, which makes me very proud. He has also been reading some books – the Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing series and The Mouse and the Motorcycle – that I loved as a kid, and that’s great.

That’s about it here. Happy Holidays!

I'm A Cheater

2007-11-21T09:36:00.000-08:00

I'm doing National Novel Writing Month again this year, for the sixth year running, and hopefully "winning" for the fifth time. But I'm cheating. If you are at all familiar with NaNoWriMo, you know that it entails not only writing 50,000 words in the month of November, starting no earlier than November 1 and ending no later than November 30, but also that you shouldn't have written any part of the novel before, even a part you aren't going to count in your word total. Well, I actually started writing my NaNo novel back in June, and wrote a little more sometime over the summer, and then there it sat: 5,000 or so lonely words. And I often told myself I should keep writing, but did I do so? Noooooooooo.

In the meantime, November approached, and I thought about NaNo and felt quite snotty about it, partly because I flamed out and didn't finish last year, and partly because I didn't have any good ideas for a novel to write and didn't feel like putting the into figuring one out in October, when I had a lot of other crap to do. Of course, being a grown-up, I knew that having not finished NaNo last year was a really crappy reason to not participate this year, but such was my attitude, and so I didn't really give it a whole lot of thought up until the first several days of the month had passed and I realized wait, wait, this is November, and I love NaNoWriMo, and if I don't even try I'm going to be really upset!

And so I picked up the novel I'd already started. I had 5,000 words already written, but on the other hand, five novel-writing days had already passed, and if I'd started a novel on November 1, I'd have had far more than 5K under my belt by November 5. Well, that's always been the case in the past. So I gave myself a pass, on the basis that:
1) I've completed the challenge of starting fresh on November 1 four times before, so yes, I know I can do it following the words, but after all,
2) The point is to get writing, and to get 'er done, as they say (Well somebody says that. I think It might be Larry the Cable Guy, but I'm not sure.)
3) Also that thing I already said above, about how if I started on time I would have had more words than I had when I took up this crazy thing a couple of weeks ago.

And so, sixteen days later, I have added another 27,000 or so words to what I had originally, and am indeed on my way toward getting 'er done. For good or for ill. And I think I am obeying the spirit, if not the the letter, of the law, and that the NaNo gods will, in the end, smile upon me.

And if no, screw 'em.

2007-11-07T10:40:00.000-08:00

I Hate Junior High

2007-11-01T13:04:00.000-07:00

Probably not as much as I hated it when I actually attended myself, but I still hate it.

Mermaid had a B in Social Studies, which has always been her most difficult subject, at progress report time. So I was dismayed to learn on Tuesday she will have a D in Social Studies on her first-quarter report card. Her teacher sent home a sheet with a handy breakdown of the grades she earned on every assignment, test, etc for the quarter. It showed that three in-class assignments had not been turned in, that she had received a zero on a pop quiz, and that she got 2 of 14 possible points in "Class Participation."

1) She's not good at keeping track of her work. It very well may be that this is true of almost all 7th graders. Be that as it may, she has a support person in class with her who should be, at the very least, making sure she does and turns in assignments done right there in class, and this happened not once but three times. Not okay.

2) She didn't just fail the pop quiz -- she got a zero. This tells me it wasn't modified for her in any way. If regular tests need to be modified for her, so do pop quizes -- especially those that amount of 3% of her grade.

3) Class participation? Hello? She is autistic. She can barely participate in dinner-time discussions with her family -- she is not going to be able to contribute to things on the subject of ancient civiliations in a class of 30 kids without serious facilitation.

I don't know for sure what the situation is, but all the issues we've had so far this year have related to her Social Studies class, and my guess is that unless the Inclusion Specialist specifically goes into the classroom and discusses modifications for Mermaid (as has been the case for tests and projects), this teacher simply holds her to the same standard he would with a typical student. I would love it if Mermaid were capable of performing to his expectations, but she's not.

Frustration doesn't fully cover my feelings on this subject.

Wii Tennis

2007-10-30T20:25:00.000-07:00

Enthusio turned 9 and we got him a Wii, because he is spoiled. Yesterday when I was alone in the house, I played Wii tennis every chance I got. It was too much. Here are all the things that were painful today:

Waking up, having slept on my left side
Hooking my bra
Putting on my seatbelt
Putting on my sweatshirt
Carrying a full basket of laundry
Taking out the trash
Thinking about playing more Wii tennis

2007-09-22T11:32:00.001-07:00

Last weekend it worked very well to sit down of a Saturday morning and post in my blog. So I'm going to try to be the opposite of other sites that are only updated during the week and write the blog that's only updated on the weekend.

This month is difficult. Yesterday, my grandfather passed away. He had been having lots of major health problems for the last several months, and it's been quite a roller coaster for the family. He was a very dignified man, and he didn't like needing physical care, not being able to live in their own home as he and my grandmother (Nanny) had done until this summer, or any of the other indignities an elderly and very ill person is forced to endure. Of course it's sad that he's gone, but it was also very sad to hear how unhappy he was about what his life had become. When my mom called to tell me the news yesterday, she said he'd really kind of given up lately. So I can't help but be glad he didn't have to live that way for very long.

I also take comfort in the fact that my family and I visited my grandparents this past December, and it was one of the very few times that I really sat and talked to my grandfather. He was a funny guy, and Reasonable Man and I really enjoyed spending that evening and the next morning sitting and enjoying his sense of humor and the way he and Nanny interacted and helped each other along. At one point Nanny interrupted him and he told her "I'm talking to my granddaughter" and it made me feel special. He had seven children, thirteen grandchildren, and 4 great-grandchildren, and when we all get together, it's a crowd that he would often retreat from. But that night it was just Nanny, Grandpa, and my little family, and it was a treat.

Another time that stands out in my memory is when my parents brought the two of them up to Davis when I was in college. Reasonable Man and I were dating but not yet engaged, and I think it was the first time they met him. We had a picnic on campus, and it seemed like they had barely arrived when it was already time for them to leave. I complained, and my grandfather said, "Remember, Tracie -- short visits make long friends." I doubt he made that up, but it was funny and I will always remember it as something he said.

Rest in peace, Grandpa. We will miss you.

Sunday Morning Sloth

2007-09-16T11:10:00.000-07:00

I just sat here looking at crap on the internet long enough to almost run out the battery on my laptop. The battery on this thing is truly pathetic, but still, that's a lot of time wasted this morning looking at the following sites:
passive aggressive notes.com
Found Magazine
The Office Sign Project
Apostrophe Abuse"
The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks

These things delight me, if only because they prove that there are others out there with senses of humor as cruel and snarky as mine. Here people are, innocently writing notes or making signs to express the deepest feelings in their hearts, to make their homes or offices nicer places to live or work, or to promote the wares they have to sell -- and then smartass elitist internet types post them just to make fun of them, for the amusement of others. On the one hand, there seems something very wrong in that. On the other, it's finding a second use for things, isn't it? And who among us doesn't support recycling?

I love the idea of having a whole blog filled with examples of the grammar or punctuation error one finds most egregious, but mine would never work, because it's the use of "less" instead of "fewer," and the entire contents of such a blog would be endless pictures of signs reading "10 (or 8 or 15 or whatever) items or less" from grocery stores around the country, the example of girls singing about how they "want to be one less" in the commercial for the HPV vaccine Gardasil, and a shout-out to our local supermarket chain Nugget, which, in addition to being one of Fortune Magazine's 100 Best Companies to Work For and a lovely place to shop, features signs for its express lanes reading "8 items or fewer."

It was not my plan to sit here for so long this morning. At one time I probably thought I might go to the gym, and today I really must give the inside of the spa a scrub so it's ready to be filled tomorrow when the electrician comes to hook up the outlet for it, and perhaps even set up the trampoline (!). But I keep not eating any breakfast (brunch? lunch?) or getting dressed, so here I sit. I guess it's probably time to get going.

Out in the World

2007-09-15T10:52:00.000-07:00

You know, this is the stuff I really like to talk about. I guess I always feel like I need to update on what's going on in my own actual life before I turn to all the pop culture items that are the real focus of my brain a good deal of the time. I think the title of my blog lends itself to that, and the fact is that I do like to talk about my kids sometimes. So I guess this blog (when I actually write in it) will continue to be a mish mash of stuff about my life and also what I think about stuff that's going on out there in entertainment-land.

First off, let's get it over with: Britney Spears.

1. Upon reading that MTV had readied a more figure-flattering corset-style outfit for her and she had rejected it, I was reminded of something someone once said about the infamous Tonya Harding back in the mid-90s: "She didn't have any class, and she wouldn't let anybody give her any." Not that a corset-style outfit MTV picked out for Britney would probably be the definition of class, but you know what I mean.

2. Maybe that outfit wasn't the most flattering thing she could have worn, but I'd still trade bodies with her without a second thought.

3. To the industry folks who want this comeback because Britney used to make them buttloads of money and they'd like some more: she's just not that into you.

Here's something I've been thinking about her for a while: she makes a good case for the argument that we all have a destiny that is preordained for us. The tragedy here is not so much that, in a few short years, she's gone from being a very pretty, fresh-faced, seemingly happy girl to a dead-eyed single mother of two -- that all clearly would have happened even without the fame and fortune. The real tragedy is that she has the money to flame out in such a spectacular fashion and the noteriety for it to have occurred with the whole world watching. I feel bad for her, frankly.

The Presidential Race:

I don't have a favorite candidate. I can't believe we're so deep into it with over a year to go, but I already know that I will vote for whoever the Democratic party nominates and I am just hoping with all my heart that it's someone electable. There seems to be a lot of certainty that we will not elect another Republican in 2008, but let's face it: the unthinkable has happened in the last two elections. "Cautiously optimistic" is as confident as I'm ever going to feel until a winner is named. Notice I didn't say "until the votes are counted" -- I don't have a whole lot of confidence in that process either.

Happier things:

Only 12 days till the season premiere of the The Office! I've been gearing up by watching my season 3 DVDs (which took FOREVER to get here from Amazon -- I pre-ordered, of course) and catching up on episodes of The Office Alliance podcast. Yes, I'm a total geek.

Reasonable Man and I will be going to see "Superbad" this afternoon. He's been talking about this movie since he first heard about it, so I hope it lives up to his expectations. BLB and the Bride said they liked it but that parts of it are "so wrong," so I figure I have been warned. It will be nice to go to the movies -- I saw three in one week and that was it for the whole summer.

2007-09-15T10:45:00.000-07:00

I went running and it felt pretty good. It was just a little 10-minute run down to the gym, where I did some weight-lifting and then another 10 minutes home, but since I haven't done it in a year, I thought that was fine. I don't want to overdo it, and in the fall there's always a chance that the weather will turn hot and I won't go again for a while. No matter what happens, I will never be one of those people who runs in hot weather. I don't really like to run in cold weather either. Frankly, it's a wonder that I ever managed to start running in the first place, considering what a wimp I am about the conditions. But now it's fall and I may be able to do it for a while before I start wussing out again.

School is now in session...

2007-09-15T08:58:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, I made the Blogger sign-in page my home page in hopes of guilting myself into writing in my blog when I opened a browser window and there it was. Well, you've seen how well that worked. So I'm going to try dedication to the craft of writing again. That probably won't work either, but it's worth a try.

So the kiddos are back in school, with mixed results thus far. Enthusio is off to a great start in third grade, with teachers who think he's fantastic and a smile on his face every day. He is in the top groups for math, reading, and spelling too. Sorry to brag, but I've never gotten to do that before :-) Mermaid has started 7th grade, and we are surviving. I am still pretty much in panic mode about that, as evidenced by the multitude of emails I have sent to her full-inclusion teacher and other teachers so far. I think the fact that I've been having school dreams about falling hopelessly behind for the last decard are playing into how I'm dealing with this new chapter in our lives. In any case, Mermaid is coping with all of it better than I am. She seems to have made a complete physical recovery from her surgery this summer, other than the fact that she continues to pick at a couple of little spots on her incision. Kids are amazingly adaptable!

I need to go back to Weight Watchers. I've been working out very consistently and that's good, but haven't been controlling my eating at all, and I'm pretty sure I've gained back a good portion of the ten pounds I lost. But the weather is cooling off and I want to start running again, so maybe I can get things back on track.

The new house is great, and is slowly coming together. I did a burst of painting in early August and will probably do more soon. Last weekend I put knobs and handles on the kitchen cabinets. Audio books on the iPod are a great companion to working around the house or yard, as are podcasts. I've gotten a little discouraged in the last few weeks, looking around the house, thinking about all the stuff I want to do around here, and remembering how much of it was already done in the old place. It feels insurmountable. But I just have to keep remembering that we were there more than seven years, that a lot of the stuff I did there I had to learn as I went along, and that virtually everything that needs to be done here is cosmetic. In this new house, I'm not having thing about ways to create more storage all the time. And of course, it doesn't have to get done all at once.

So that's it -- that's what's going on in my life right now. As always, life is pretty good, and after a summer punctuated by some stressful events, I am looking forward to a cool and pleasant fall.

In Loving Memory

2007-09-03T18:14:00.001-07:00

EMMA MINT BEZERRA

1992-2007

Harry Potter 7 (No Spoilers!)

2007-07-22T13:08:00.000-07:00

I just want to say I've finished it already. Reasonable Man, Enthusio and I actually attended the downtown HP7 brouhaha Friday night, where you could reserve (fork over the 38 bucks) your copy at an independent book store and pick it up starting at midnight. A city block was closed off in the early evening for festivities that included booths with wizarding activities like wand-making for kids, a showing of "Goblet of Fire" on a great big screen, and a snitch drop. At 12:01, the first triumphant family received their book to a chorus of screams and cheers, and within five minutes, we had our copy and were heading for the car. Fifteen minutes after that, I was ready for bed and reading the first chapter.

I'd been telling people this past week that I wash hoping to read it slowly and savor it, since it was the last one. I even told Reasonable Man that he could have the book most of the weekend because I would have time to read it this week. Reasonable Man, who earns his pseudonym, recognized these statements for what they were: lies so insidious that I myself actually believed them to be true. He patiently surrendered the book to me yesterday and nodded knowingly when I admitted sometime in the evening that I planned to stay up and read the entire thing overnight. (Why I thought I wouldn't race through this book, I don't know. I've gobbled down every other HP offering, including the first one, which I read in a single afternoon when I was sick with a terrible cold in December 1999, possibly without leaving the couch a single time.) I read non-stop from approximately 7:30 pm to 1:45 am, when I could no longer keep my eyes open and then went to sleep on the couch till a little after 4, when I resumed reading, finishing a little after 6 am.

I don't even want to say whether I liked it or not for fear of spoiling it in some small way for the handful of people who might actually read this post. Here is what I will say: I'm not sad it's over. The Harry Potter phenomenon has been an amazing thing, and Reasonable Man and I have enjoyed it in terms of entertainment value for ourselves and watching Enthusio get into it as well (he's currently attempting to read HP6). It's been interesting to watch as a cultural event as well. On the one hand, I shake my head over those people who have analyzed it all so thoroughly and seem to get so emotional over it all. On the other hand, I admit that I myself have anticipated the release of the both of the last two books with equal parts excitment and anxiety, just because of the turns the story had taken and with the knowledge that Troubled Times Were Ahead, that Harry Faced Evermore Daunting Challenges.

One of the biggest triumphs of the series, in my view, was that the author wrote a protagonist who began as a likeable and engaging child and transformed believably into a brave and complex young adult who had been shaped not just by all the trials he'd faced, but also the full understanding of his responsibility for the future of all wizarding kind. Even when other characters didn't fare as well, Harry was a hero worthy all the adulation the series has received. But as it progressed, it grew harder and harder to watch him face uncertainty, danger, and hopelessness as he carried that burden. And so I'm grateful for resolution, for Harry's sake. I don't know how much more peril I could have watched him go through.

Some quibbles: I don't think Ron and Hermione matured as believably as Harry did, and their romance, for which the stage was set way back in book 1 and which finally came to fruition on book 6, never worked for me. I've also detected a not-so-subtle theme of sexism running through the series, from Fleur Delacour, the only female Tri-Wizard Champion, being such a pathetic competitor; to the portrayals of Rita Skeeter and Dolores Umbridge as playing up their femininity in villainous ways; to Hermione's tendency to constantly burst into tears in the later books. That surprised me, coming from a female author, unconsciously done though it was. But those are small things, and I only mention them because I'm resisting any urge to say much about this newest book. I will probably write more in a few weeks when I'm sure most die-hard fans will have had chance to digest this grand finale.

People are saying that this will never happen again. I'm not so sure. Who would have ever thought it would happen once? What I do know is that no one can make it happen. There are copycats and series mentioned as worthy successors to the throne, but I think if we ever see this kind of thing again, it will come from somewhere unexpected and unlikely. I'm just glad it's not my job to spot it early on, like the people at all those publishers who passed on Harry Potter's world before Scholastic took a gamble.

Our Family - June 2007

2007-06-26T10:59:00.000-07:00

Our New House

2007-05-20T10:36:00.001-07:00

We are in escrow and the green house is on the market, hopefully to sell very soon. This new house is about a mile away from where we currently live -- it's a great location near friends and in a nice neighborhood, and the house is pretty much exactly what we want. The backyard is a bit smaller than what we have now, but the house is one-story with 4 bedrooms, a nice-sized kitchen and great room, dining room, and a beautiful master suite. I've posted a number of pictures below -- just pretend the current owners' stuff (and dogs) isn't there!

Great Room

2007-05-20T10:35:00.001-07:00

Kitchen/Great Room

2007-05-20T10:33:00.000-07:00

Kitchen

2007-05-20T10:32:00.001-07:00

Hall Bathroom

2007-05-20T10:30:00.000-07:00

Backyard

2007-05-20T10:29:00.001-07:00

Backyard

2007-05-20T10:27:00.000-07:00

Master Bedroom

2007-05-20T10:26:00.001-07:00

Tub in Master Bath

2007-05-20T10:23:00.000-07:00

Yoda, I Am

2007-05-02T18:45:00.001-07:00

Don't you wish you could be Yoda too? Take the quiz to find out which Star Wars character you are at http://www.liquidgeneration.com/Media/Default.aspx?MediaId=1415

2007-04-29T16:35:00.000-07:00

SPOILER: If you haven't read the book Middlesex, and I do recommend it, you should know that I talk about some of the plot points extensively in this post. I don't think I give away much that the author doesn't also give away in the first page of the book, but if you expect to read the book at some point, consider yourself warned.

I've just finished reading a very good book, Middlesex, that everyone else read a couple of years ago. I was supposed to read it a couple of years ago too, when my book club read it, but I wasn't able to go to the meeting so I didn't read the book till now. In it, a hermaphrodite, Calliope/Cal, describes the family events that led to his/her birth and being raised to the age of 14 as a girl before discovering that she was actually genetically male. In an interesting coincidence, I also watched a 20/20 special on transgendered children, or children who believe they were born into the wrong body because they feel themselves to be the other gender. The special profiled three children: a teen who is biologically female but is now living life as a boy; the saddest 10-year-old I've ever seen, who was born a boy but has always felt she was a girl, watching jealously as her twin sister was everything she wanted to be (she is now living as a girl); and a 6-year-old who was born male but lives as the girl she's been proclaiming herself to be since she was two. It was riveting TV. And it made me thing more about what happens to the main character in Middlesex.

As Calliope reaches puberty, she begins to sense that her body is different from those of female classmates, and she is uncomfortable with the sexual feelings she has for girls, especially the one she refers to as the Object (of her affection, of course). But until that tender age fails to produce breasts and crushes on boys, Callie is comfortable being a girl -- in fact, up until that time, she thinks of herself as a very pretty girl. But after an examination at the emergency room following an accident reveals that something is amiss between her legs and her parents take her to an expert in gender reassignment and other intersex issues, she is so disturbed at the prospect of hormones and surgery to keep her a woman that she runs away from her family and begins living as a young man, never to return to her former female self.

Based solely on what the special about 20/20 said, it would seem that the novel, while compelling, is just plain... well, wrong. The "sexologist" Callie sees notes in his report how remarkable it is that, although chromosomally she is XY, having been raised as a girl, she feels herself to be female, but she is horrified enough at his conclusiont hat she is a biologically male (and in the knowledge that she is attracted to females) that she leaves everything she knows and transforms herself into a male. What little I learned about transgendered individuals indicates that there is one more, evidently even more important factor in determining gender than biology or socialization, a kind of gender identification we are all born with, something that Calliope would presumably not be able to just turn on its ear in order to transform into Cal.

I do recognize that transgendered (feeling oneself to be the opposite sex of the body one is born into) is different than intersexual (born somehow neither completely male nor female in a biological or genetic sense), and I don't know anything about how gender identity works in intersexuals, but all this sure has got me thinking about how central the concept of gender is in our lives. It seems so basic, so cut and dried: you have one set of plumping and you're a girl, the other and you're a guy. Apparently not. Off to do some research on the subject...

Last Week Wasn't So Hot

2007-04-23T07:15:00.000-07:00

A week ago Saturday, someone broke into our cars and stole our Transpods (thingy to play iPods in the car). Actually, "broke in" is probably over-stating things somewhat, since we had accidentally left our garage door open that night and the cars weren't locked or anything. They also took all our CDs, most of which were homemade mixes. I hate the idea of a couple of punks out there sitting around making fun of my mix CDs! The scariest thing about it was that the owner's manual for Reasonable Man's car was sitting out on the seat when we discovered the theft the next morning, as though they were trying to figue out how to steal the car. We suspect that was what attracted them to our garage in the first place.

On Monday, I received the replacement power cord for my laptop that I'd ordered the week before -- I actually did a little dance when I discovered it on my doorstep -- only to discover that my laptop still would not take power from it. It seems the little accident that broke the power cord also broke the piece the cord attaches to in the computer. When I took the computer to the repair place to see about having it fixed, the guy told me that I was looking at at least 3 hours of labor and probably less than a 50% chance the repair would work, at which point I started crying. There is one day a month on which any kind of bad news will start me bawling, and unfortunately for the guy at the computer repair place, last Monday was that day. And the nicer he was, the worse it got.

Things improved a bit mid-week, just because nothing else bad happened -- I went about my business hauling the kids around, getting the data from my laptop transferred to an external hard drive, keeping the house in order, and actually cooking dinner almost every night. Then Friday, when I was actually doing a good deed and was the only school mom to show up to help put snacks together for the kids to have during STAR testing this week, I turned my ankle and ended up with a nastily bruised foot that I could barely walk on for the first day or so. (Don't ask me why it was my foot that ended up hurt -- that's what always happens when I twist my ankle for some reason.) So I've been limping around the last few days.

None of that is catastrophic -- just pain in the ass. I'm hoping for better luck this week.

What I've Learned About Weight Loss

2007-04-21T16:19:00.000-07:00

I have a lot in common with "One Day At A Time" cutiepie Valerie Bertinelli these days. She and I both would like to lose 30 lbs. We both are kind of surprised that we ended up this fat. We both have tried to do it on our own and have not found success. And so we have both decided to pursue a smaller self by following a commercial diet plan.

That's where our similarities end. I am doing Weight Watchers, which has worked for me in the past. I decided on my own to go back in there, face the scale, and start working on this already. Valerie, on the other hand, got a call from the Jenny Craig people, asking her if she'd like to use their system to lose weight and do commercials showing her progress, a la Kirstie Alley. I think I got the better end of the deal here. Maybe Val is going to make a buttload of money doing Jenny Craig for free, but who wants to get a phone call from some corporate suit to the effect of "We noticed you're fat -- want a job?"

Valerie got to guest-host on "The View," and People magazine did a cover story on her. I don't care about the People cover, but I'd love to be a co-host on "The View." Also, on the People cover, which states right there in bold print that she is a size 14 (aka still a "misses" size and not all that uncommon a number to find on the jeans of America's 40-something women), Val is sporting a top that can best be described as a grecian muumuu, aka NOT FLATTERING. Normal-sized legs in normal-sized jeans peek out below. Who did this to her? I'm sure glad I get to dress myself.

Size 14 is another thing Valerie and I do not have in common. While size 14 is reason enough for her to feel fat enough to go on a diet in front of the entire nation, I will probably be a nice, well-proportioned size 14 after I lose 30 lbs. Also, I'm not sure she realizes that, even right now, 30 pounds overweight, she still looks like Valerie freaking Bertinelli. I, on the other hand, will never look like Valerie Bertinelli no matter how much weight I lose. No one will ask me to do Jenny Craig commercials or guest appearances on sitcoms, much less watch a show about a braless single mom with a creepy building super hanging around all the time just to experience my hotness every week, the way guys did with Valerie did in the 70s.

On the other hand, the fact that I was never a regular on "Touched by an Angel" probably still puts me one up on Ms. Bertinelli.

In any case, I do wish her luck, but I'm not looking forward to the inevitable appearance on Oprah in a bikini six months from now.

Virginia Tech

2007-04-20T10:46:00.000-07:00

Another sad week for our country as we try to make sense of yet another instance of a disturbed man with access to weapons bringing his twisted version of revenge on the world to fruition and taking innocentl lives in the process. Interestingly, the main point of discussion seems to have quickly moved from "why did this happen and how can we prevent it from happening again?" to "how should the media cover these events, and was all of the coverage this time, particularly the taped rantings of the perpetrator appearing on TV, appropriate?"

I do think how these things are covered is important, as is the question of whether those tapes should have been aired, and I see the difficulty faced by networks who want to give the people what they want and know that people will tune in in droves searching for the latest information but find themselves with air to fill and nothing new to report. These kinds of events are the bread and butter of networks like CNN, and we can argue that people should be paying as much attention to the kids dying over in Iraq till we're blue in the face, but we all know that if, during a week like this one, MSNBC or CNN decides to cut away from Virginia Tech coverage, however repetitive, to do a story about our troops in the Middle East, most people are going to change the change the channel. It sucks, but that's the reality.

Much more important in my opinion than how the media covers these stories is the fact that they happen at all. Today is the eighth anniversary of the Columbine shootings in Littleton, Colorado; yesterday was the twelfth anniversary of the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. One thing has clearly not changed in twelve years: our culture has not stopped producing angry, disturbed young men who believe violence and death are the price the world has to pay for their rage.

I don't know if there's any way to weed them out before they do these things. It seems, every time another one of these tragedies occurs, that there were many signs that these situations were brewing, that these young men had told people around them, either explicitly or through writings, drawings or actions, that they were time bombs waiting to go off. Occasionally we do hear a story where things went the other way -- where the friend a potential shooter confided in tells someone in time to stop the shootings from happening. But that clearly isn't happening often enough. So many times, people are too frightened to take the warning signs seriously, or there isn't more they can do than to suggest a student visit the campus counseling center.

So what can we do? Well, to me it seems like a no-brainer to limit the access of guns, but apparently this is something that will never happen here because the NRA is the most powerful lobby in America, more powerful than the reality of the bodies of dead sons and daughters being removed from a high school, an Amish school house, a university building, or a middle school. In Virginia, it was apparently more important for citizens to have the right to buy one gun per month (how many months does it take to assemble an arsenal?) than it was to make sure a college student who had never committed a felony but who had been involuntarily committed wouldn't be allowed to buy two handguns and fifty rounds of ammunition. And in the Oval Office, someone decided the first order of business in responding to this situation was to appease the gun lobby by affirming the president's support of the unlimited right to bear arms, and that he could express his sympathy to the victim's families later. Is this the country you want to live in?

Why Can't I Make Time to Post?

2007-04-20T10:34:00.000-07:00

Here are the other things I make time to do online every day:

Check my email
Read through all the entertainment news that I have listed on my My Yahoo page
Go to Television Without Pity and read recaps of any shows I watched the night before
Go to Pop Culture Junk Mail and see what kind of cool, retro, 80s, funny or crazy stuff Gayle has found lately
Go to the Superficial and read celebrity gossip
Go to That's What She Said and read any new posts about The Office and then the comments, possibly adding my own
Go to Mick LaSalle's blog and read any new posts and then the comments, possibly adding my own

Every day, I have many thoughts about many different things, many of which are worth putting in my blog. Those thoughts are the reason I started my blog in the first place. And yet, although I think about putting those thoughts and ideas down in my blog and I rarely do it, which makes me annoyed with myself and starts a whole snowball effect of "if I didn't blog about This Big Thing, I can't just blog about That Little Thing because" -- why? It'll make me seem like a shallow person? I'm not sure. Sometimes it's true that all I'm really thinking about is American Idol, or something someone did that really pissed me off five years ago. Those things are part of who I am -- so what? If I talk to my friends about those things, why shouldn't I put them in this space, as long as they aren't gossipy things that would be hurtful to someone I know?

Long story short -- I'm going to try to do better. Watch this space...

On My Mind

2007-04-01T10:03:00.000-07:00

American Idol: Addictive. I never watched before this season -- why? Chris Sligh was my early favorite, and I was pretty surprised when he got the boot this past week, but not too disappointed -- he was kind of doing a slow fade in the last few weeks. I think Jordan Sparks is my favorite now...

Jesus Camp: Reasonable Man and I watched this documentary the other night, and it's not an exaggeration to say it scared the crap out of us. I don't have a problem with Christianity at all, but indoctrinating defenseless kids with the idea that their generation has to be an army for the cause, doing all they can to spread their "message" (which is intolerance from what I can tell), that their entire purpose in life is to devote themselves to Christ, and that God has a plan for their lives (so they have no free will, and there is a right choice and a wrong one at every fork in the road of their lives?), seems wrong-headed in cruel. Over and over, they showed kids sobbing during sermons, presumably because they are full of sin and know they have to repent? These are little kids. The few that they focused on seemed lovely and smart and articulate, definitely capable of doing real good in the world, but it was hard to see the path they had been sent on as the right one.

That's What She Said: On, a lighter note, if you are a devotee of The Office like I am (I even have a Dunder-Miffilin baseball cap!), this podcast is for you. I've gorged myself on their approximately 90-minute podcasts covering every episode of this season, in which they explicate the 20-or-so minutes of air-time Office shenanigans plus and deleted scenes they can find at nbc.com. Pure bliss for a Jammer like me.

The five episodes of The Office on NBC this past Thursday didn't hurt either. And finally, after six weeks of reruns, a new episode this coming week!

The Omnivore's Dilemma and The Better World Shopper's Guide: In the former, which I read for my book club, I learned that virtually every processed food we eat is packed with corn, the wrongheaded political and economic reasons our country produces an ocean of corn in the first place, the difference between the organic ideal and the industrialized organic food we're seeing so much of these days, and so much more. I carry the latter title in my purse to help me use the money I spend to support socially responsible companies and avoid the ones that aren't. Going to Safeway is ever so much more complicated, but I've learned a lot and I know I'm feeding my family better than before.

The View: I tape it every day and watch the "hot topics" discussions they start with most days. As someone who has generally avoided reading much about current events since approximately January 2001, I'm learning a lot about the issues of the day, and I have to applaud a show that lets four women get up there and say what they really think (even though I think most of what Elisabeth Hasselbeck thinks is lame).

Drake Bell of Nickelodeon's Drake & Josh: He's Mermaid's obsession, but we were impressed when we saw him sing at Arden Fair Mall last weekend (just him and a guitar, plus he sang Blackbird, one of my favorite Beatles' songs) and he was very sweet to Mermaid when we got his autograph and chatted with him. The girl has good taste :-)

What I've Been Doing Lately

2007-03-25T09:01:00.000-07:00

The house: We have pretty much made up our minds that we want to move. We want a house that's bigger, one that is one-story and has at least four bedrooms, and one with a better master bedroom/closet/bathroom configuration, one that is here in South Davis. Not many of those come on the market, so for now we are waiting, and keeping our eyes and ears open. And because I have serious anxiety about the idea of selling our current house, I've been working, slowly and steadily, on getting it ready to sell. Spring came early this year -- at the end of February, more or less -- so I've been doing lots of work out in the yard, and I've also been doing some painting inside. I've painted the family room a more neutral shade of yellow -- more of a cream -- and I'm still seesawing back and forth about changing the red accent walls to something more neutral as well. On the one hand, our real estate agent advised me to paint them. On the other -- this house is full of color, and anyone who doesn't like color isn't going to buy it with some of the other bright colors I've chosen for other rooms anyway. To me, the red accent wall with our fireplace is the highlight of the entire house, and I imagine that half the people who walk in would love it and the other half would hate it.

I know this isn't hugely important, but it's the kind of thing I've been thinking about lately.

I've also been doing a lot of work at school lately. The first week of this month was the spring Scholastic Book Fair, and I'm one of 5 chairpeople for that. I actually wrote a long post about kids and money last weekend, which Blogger ate, but I think I can summarize it here pretty easily:

Considering how out-of-control materialistic we are as a society, it's touching how most 6-year-olds still think a couple of dollars is a lot of money. They walk into that book fair thinking they're going to be able to buy everything in sight.

Tax is a difficult concept for pretty much everyone under the age of 10.

A lot of kids want to share with their friends, and for every generous kid, there's one who is willing to exploit their friendship in order to get stuff. That's why we made a new rule during this book fair, that if you want to buy something for your friend, a forty-five cent eraser is fine and a five-dollar book is not.

I personally don't let my kids spend money at the book fair unless I'm right there with them (since I'm a co-chair, that's quite a bit of the time).

When promoting the book fair, Scholastic is all about the books. Then you open the doors and the kids flood in, and they are all about the stuff. A huge portion of the profits from Scholastic book fairs comes from third graders buying highlighters they don't need, bendy pencils that don't write well, scented erasers, notebooks, planners (!?), bookmarks, and pens with all manner of junk attached to the ends of them. I have mixed feelings about this stuff. I love to shop, and some of the stuff is awfully cute, so I can understand the attraction to it. But I also hate the fact that we are basically exploiting kids who have a few dollars and want to spend it so much on junk they don't need. I just read a book about the ill effects of advertising to kids, and the bottom line is that it is shameful how much marketing is directed at kids who are too young to know they are being manipulated.

In general, though, I love the book fair. It's fun to work on something that people enjoy so much.

I'm also working on our annual Parents' Night Out auction, which is this coming Saturday on the UCD campus. For the third year, I am collecting reservations, and I'll also be helping to set up on the day of the event. Fun stuff :-)

So that's what I've been doing lately. Not terribly exciting, but it's keeping me busy.

Jumpstart This Blog

2007-03-25T08:43:00.000-07:00

I really let this thing psych me out. I know I didn't write the whole month of December because I didn't finish my Nano novel this year and then felt like, hey, if I couldn't find time to write my novel, I shouldn't be writing in my blog either. That's stupid and doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but I know that's what happened. So anyway: guess what, world? I didn't finish my Nano novel this year. I was struggling with it anyway, and then I went for a week of outdoor ed with my daughter's class in the middle of November and came home sick and was just never able to get back in the rhythm again. It started to feel like torture and that is not why I do Nano each November. So that's that. I will most like try again next November.

The other reason I slack off writing here is that I get lots of ideas about things to write about and then I know I will want to write something long and brilliant about each topic and that scares me away from writing at all. That's something I've been fighting against since I started this blog, and it's probably close to the reason I don't write enough in general, and the reason that Nano has been so great for me every November till this past one. But anyway -- I'm vowing to set that aside and get back on track. I'd like to say I'm going to post here everyday, but I know that's a lofty and unrealistic goal, so instead I'm going to say that I want to post here several times a week and go from there.

To get myself started, I'm going to do a series of posts here today to kind of describe what's been going on in my life and in my brain lately -- kind of like cleaning out the closets -- and hopefully that will get me going toward that elusive goal of posting more regularly.

The Oscars

2007-02-26T10:47:00.000-08:00

I'm going to pretend that people will actually check in here to see what I thought about the Oscars and post my review of it, as though I'm some kind of entertainment journalist or something. Why not?

- General thoughts -- most of the telecast was incredibly boring, but in the end I thoroughly enjoyed it, mostly because a) enough of the people and films I wanted to win awards actually did and b) I spent the second half of the telecast posting comments on the blog of my favorite movie critic, Mick Lasalle, and this morning he actually referred to TWO of the things I said in his blog entry about the Oscars. How cool is that? (Look, most of us are total geeks about something, and I am a geek about movie reviews. Not actual MOVIES, you understand -- although I am quite picky about what I see, since I've had kids I don't get out and see movies nearly often enough. But I do read movie reviews pretty voraciously, and pride myself on knowing critics think about all the movies I'm not seeing. This makes it possible for me to both enjoy the Oscars every year even if I haven't seen any of the movies AND scream like Abigail Breslin when I see a movie critic I respect mention a couple of my comments in his blog. I respect your right to find that obnoxious.)

Anyway, if you are interested, here is where Mick and some other fans and I were making comments during the Oscars last night: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/mlasalle/detail?blogid=38&entry_id=13823#comments
And here, in the first paragraph and in item 8, is where he agrees with two of my comments: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/mlasalle/detail?blogid=38&entry_id=13838

And that's enough about that.

- I really wanted Jennifer Hudson to win for Best Supporting Actress. She was awesome in "Dreamgirls" and I have her singing "And I Am Telling You" on my iPod -- it gives me goosebumps every time. I did NOT want Eddie Murphy to win because every time he started singing, it reminded me of his old "James Brown Hot Tub Party" skit from SNL, and also, I think he's a pig. So it made me pretty happy when she won and he didn't.

- I didn't think Alan Arkin was great in "Little Miss Sunshine" but I enjoyed his performance and was pleased that he won. (I actually would have loved to see Steve Carrell be nominated for his performance. That guy is a GENIUS). I also liked it that "LMS" won a screenplay award (even though, as a writer, it irritates me to no end that the screenplay awards are always kind of the consolation prize. My favorite movies invariably win screenplay awards and not Best Director or Picture.). For whatever reason, Reasonable Man's and my favorite "LMS" moment comes the first time they are all running to get in the moving van, and Alan Arkin yells "Get in here, you dumb bastard!" at Steve Carrell, and both the guy who said the line and the guy who wrote it got Oscars, so that was a good thing.

- I really liked "LMS" but wasn't disappointed it didn't win Best Picture because it wasn't that great. It was a really entertaining and well-done little movie and I think it's cool that it got nominated, but it's not like last year where I thought "Brokeback Mountain" was robbed or anything like that.

- We saw "The Queen" last weekend, and I thought it was a pretty solid and interesting movie that was obviously owned by Helen Mirren's performance, and good for her for winning. There's been quite a long streak of young, thin, glamorous actresses winning Best Actress going back to at least the late 90s, so it was nice to see someone break that mold -- at least the young part. She certainly looked thin and glamorous enough to suit me.

- I don't have any particular feelings about "The Departed" doing well. It's something I can't deal with really violent movies -- it's supposed to be pretty good, and being that Martin Scorsese is a highly respected director, it's very nice for him to get an Oscar. (Just for fun, I looked at his filmography on IMDB and was not surprised to find that I have seen total of about 1.6 of his movies -- I watched "Goodfellas" in its entirety, made it about a third of the way through "Cape Fear" before the tension got to me, and I saw his portion of "New York Stories," although the only thing I can really remember about it was that Rosanna Arquette was bitchy and had awesome hair.) So whatever on that. I didn't have a strong rooting interest for anything nominated for Best Picture anyway.

- The actual telecast -- ugh. Why weren't Best Supporting Actor and Actress the first two awards like usual? Starting off with Best Art Direction is not the way to go. I like Ellen Degeneres and thought she did a good job, but what did she have to work with? There just wasn't much energy to any of the proceedings, and by the time Clint Eastwood came out to give a lifetime achievement award to the Italian composer guy, I was about ready to slit my wrists.

- My vote for most fabulous dress/style goes to Kate Winslett. She always manages to wear some color no one else has on and just completely rock it. Her movie, "Little Children" as well as "Notes on a Scandal" are the only nominated movies I'd still like to see -- I read both books, found them just okay, but want to see what really good actresses can do with the material.

- I lied -- I'd also like to see "West Bank Story," which won for Best Live Short Film -- that looked like a good one.

I guess that's about it...

Getting Scammed

2007-02-25T10:48:00.000-08:00

The other day I got scammed. And the stupid thing is, I had a very strong sense it was happening while it was happening, and I just went along with it.

On Friday afternoon, two girls knocked on my front door. As soon as I saw them, I know I got that "oh, crap" look on my face, because they told me "oh, don't worry, we're your neighbors." That got me to come outside and talk to them. The fact is, a lot of students live on our street, and I have no idea what any of them actually look like. Then they told me their under-17 girls' soccer team had qualified to play in a tournament in Orlando, Florida, and they were raising money to go. Suspicious point number 1: these girls definitely looked older than 16 -- but I wasn't really thinking about that at the time.

They pulled out a dog-eared leaflet and assured me that it wasn't magazine subscriptions -- it was sets of books, their coach had gotten them hooked up with Borders somehow, and the books were really nice and if I didn't want a set for myself, I could send them to the women's shelter, that's what a lot of their customers had been doing, etc. At this point, I was totally ignoring everything that was a little fishy about this (clearly this had no connection to Borders; sets of books are actually worse than magazine subscriptions; the girls are talking fast and keep evading my question of how much the books cost) and hearing what I want to: raising money for the soccer trip to Florida, donating books to a women's shelter. I like to donate to worthy causes, and these girls are so nice and friendly. I want to believe them.

Finally they give me a price, around $34, and I agree to send a set of set of books to the women's shelter. One of them sits down on the bench on my porch (after asking if it's okay; the other keeps telling me their coach says they have to come back and do me some other kind of favor, like washing my car) and I chat with the other girl. I ask her how long she's played soccer. She says 14 years. If she's about 16, that means she's been played soccer since she was 2? But I don't do the math till later. The girl continues spinning some tale about her father being in the military, which doesn't seem to have anything to do with playing soccer. I write out a check to "Kays Naturals" as instructed. My total is $48. I think that's a lot for shipping and handling, but still go along.

The girls thank me profusely as I hand them the check. One of them asks me about my nosering. The other, who has a nosering, comments on how painful getting her nose pierced was. They tell me they only have one more house to go to before they're done and I wonder which of my neighbors they're going to go suck up to next. As they are backing down my front walk, one of them asks if they can send me a postcard from Brazil. Brazil? They realize their mistake immediately. "Oh, sorry, Orlando!" one says! "We went to Brazil last year!" Unfortunately, at the same time, the other blurts out "we're going to Brazil after!" My eyes narrow, they hurry off, and I go inside.

Amazingly, I still think about it for a while. Sure, there were a few lies in there, but maybe a set of nice books is going to arrive from a women's shelter? Don't be stupid, I tell myself. I take the receipt they've given me, and right there in black and white it says that the person from whom I received it won't earn points toward the trip they are working for if I cancel my order. It's the whole "young people earning points/trying to win a contest" BS that I know how to spot a mile away -- I've been turning these people away from my doorstep for years. How could I have fallen for it? I Google "Kays Naturals" and found several items about this particular scam, including this warning:

"IF YOU PURCHASED MAGAZINE SUBSCRIPTIONS OR BOOK ORDERS TWO NIGHTS AGO FROM TWO TEENAGE GIRLS SAYING IT WAS FOR A SOCCER TEAM FUND RAISER THEN YOU ARE A VICTIM OF A SCAM."

I filled out the info on the back to cancel my order and wrote a little note indicating that I knew I'd been lied to. Then I got online with my bank and cancelled the check, just to be on the safe side. I certainly don't trust them to cancel my order. So in the end, no harm done -- these people aren't getting my money. Still, I can't stop thinking about it. I've actually had the desire to drive around and see if I can spot these girls, just to confront them and tell them "hey, I'm not stupid -- do you really think I didn't know you were lying to me?" Somehow, their discovering at some other place and time that I stopped payment on my check isn't nearly satisfying enough.

This whole episode makes me wonder:

Why did I just go along with it? I knew early on that many things weren't right, but apparently I was still made just socially uncomfortable enough in these situations to just smile and go along, despite having developed the assertiveness to say "no thanks" and close the door on people just like them years ago. All I can say at this point is, it won't happen to me again. I'm envisioning the next time one of these kids comes to my door and wondering what I'll say.

The other question is, who are these kids, and why do they want to do this kind of work? It turns out there's plenty of information about them online, and they are being exploited as much as their potential customers. The sleazy "travelling magazine sales crew" industry rounds up young people with promises of travel and easy money, then subjects them to all manner of dangers and abuses. To read more, see http://www.thenyrm.com/000658.html and visit www.magcrew.com.

2007-02-03T19:16:00.000-08:00

Having heard from a reader yesterday in no uncertain terms that I "suck" for not posting recently, I feel the need to rectify the situation. So I shall. I just don't want any complaints about the fact that I don't actually have a whole lot to say at the moment. It's 7:20 on a Saturday evening, and after a day of lying around watching about 20 episodes of "Scrubs" with BLB and the Bride, we are currently watching "The Princess Bride" on Bravo (even though we own the DVD) and basically doing nothing productive. The kids are arguing, which they seem to be doing a lot of lately. Reasonable Man and I will probably have bowls of cereal or something equally gourmet for dinner. And tomorrow we host our first ever Super Bowl party, which should be fun despite the fact that I do not give a rat's ass about football and was hard pressed to come up with Chicago's opponent (Indianappolis, and I did come up with it, all on my own) in tomorrow's game.

In more significant news, it's official: Enthusio is having a good year in school. He likes school, has friends, and is graduating from psychotherapy in a few weeks. He still tells bad jokes, but I fear this is something he won't outgrow, as his father also tells bad jokes on a regular basis. Anyway, that's all good. Mermaid has had some issues come up at school recently, but nothing major. She is still essentially the same happy kid she's been for the last year. Who knew puberty would be such a breeze? Homework is still a drag, and is likely to get worse next year when she starts junior high, but she's not worrying about it, so why should I? (yeah right!)

I'm not sure where January went. I did a few projects around the house (put up cabinets in the laundry room, replaced the light fixtures in a couple of bathrooms) and otherwise went about my regular business of going to the gym, drinking coffee, driving my kids around, avoiding cooking dinner, and watching stupid amounts of reality TV. Oh yeah, now I remember: I spent most of January watching the first 6 seasons of America's Next Top Model. I now have two episodes left of season 6 and then I'm done. I don't know whether to be relieved or devastated. What a twisted, aggravating and totally addictive show. Good thing the new season starts at the end of this month!

I guess I should start looking around and figuring out what needs to be done before our party guests arrive. Can you feel my excitement?

Bumper Stickers

2007-01-07T01:07:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I saw a bumper sticker that made me sick. It had a picture of Ronald Reagan in a cowboy hat on the left side and one of W in a cowboy hat on the right, and in the middle it said "My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys." That is so pathetic! Neither of those assholes were ever cowboys, unless your definition of "cowboy" is "rich poser who buys a ranch so he can ride around on a horse acting like the Marlboro man."

A few weeks ago I saw a really good one: "Be Nice to America or We'll Bring Democracy to Your Country." Hee hee...

Everything I Know I Learned From Watching America's Next Top Model

2007-01-06T20:33:00.000-08:00

Did you know that Vh1 showed every single episode of America's Next Top Model ever this past week? I happened to turn the TV in the first 10 minutes of the first episode from the first season, so I did what any reasonable person who just started watching this past season would do: I set my DVR to tape every single episode for the rest of the week. And after watching many episodes each night since Monday, I am now a little over halfway through Season 3 and still have roughly 40 episodes left to watch -- only a problem if Reasonable Man dumps sattellite TV for cable in the next few weeks (don't ask).

Even though I have plenty of other stuff to do, I can't stop watching this show. And even though I know I'm a little late in coming to the ANTM party, I wanted to share a few things I've learned:

1) Even though I enjoy this show, I still hate the fashion world and what modeling is all about.

2) Even though I didn't watch the first six seasons of this show, I have evidently been paying enough attention to know the names of the the winners of every season, which kind of sucks as I go through and watch them.

3) One of the best parts of each season is when the girls get their hair cut/colored/styled and at least a handful of them lose it. As obsessed as I can be with my hair and as much of a crybaby as I am, I don't think I've ever actually cried about my hair, no matter how short I've gone. Some of the ANTM girls go into hysterics over having their hair cut to below shoulder-length. They need to get over it.

4) That dead-eyed vacant look you see on the face of every model in fashion magazines? Will get you picked on week after week after week on this show even though you better have it down when you actually go out to work as a model.

5) If you are a well-known supermodel who hosts a reality show, it's perfectly acceptable for you to lecture girls who live in a house decorated almost entirely with pictures of you about being more humble.

6) There will always be a token plus-size model. She will never win the competition, no matter how fabulous she is, but she will probably get lots of plus-size work after she leaves the show.

7) As insufferable as Tyra Banks is, every season includes at least one stuck-up ANTM contestant who is even worse.

8) If remaining "Christ-like" by not posing nude is important to you, you should maybe take enough time off teaching Bible Study to to thumb through an issue of Vogue one of these days. I'm not saying you have to like it -- I find a lot of it pretty questionable too -- I'm just saying ANTM, where you might have to do a naked girl-on-girl photo shoot, might not be the place for you.

9) Having ANTM on while I do my hair and make-up causes me to give more attention to those things. Having it on when I get the munchies every night doesn't help me lay off the snacks though.

10) I will never be America's Next Top Model. But if that means I will also never have to hang around with Tyra Banks, I can deal.

You Know How It Is...

2007-01-04T18:57:00.000-08:00

You go awhile without posting (although 6 weeks may be a record for me -- I hope so) and then each time you think about maybe getting back in the saddle, you feel the need to write some huge long thing to explain about why you've been gone or what the hell you've been doing all that time or whatever. And that thought is just exhausting, so you end up posting nothing at all.

Well, I'm doing an end run around that and making my first post since mid-November something brief and completely random:

We saw two movies over Christmas break: Eragon and Charlotte's Web. Eragon was tolerable -- I suspect it was more exciting for a kid who a) has read the book and b) is too young to recognize the fact the story is about 3 parts Star Wars, 3 parts Lord of the Rings, and 1 part Harry Potter.

Charlotte's Web was enjoyable. I'm not a huge fan of the animated version so I thought doing a live-action version was a decent idea, though I didn't expect it to be as good as Babe -- and it wasn't, but it was very sweet. Two questions, though:

1) Dakota Fanning is a perfectly competent actress, but why does every single pre-teenage girl part go to her? What is so special? She's not bad, and I don't have a problem with the fact that she's not particularly pretty either, but I don't see what's so appealing about her that she gets all the parts.

2) Why does all the voice work in Hollywood have to be done by well-known actors these days? Charlotte's Web had 10 "names you know"-level actors voicing farm animals, including Robert Redford and Oprah Winfrey. Of those, the only voices I recognized were Julia Roberts as Charlotte (and I might not have been able to place her voice if I hadn't known she was doing the part), Steve Buscemi as Templeton the rat (actually very good voice casting) and Thomas Haden Church (from Wings and Sideways) as one of two crows. Even Oprah's voice wasn't recognizable, and I was listening for her because I'd read she did one of the voices. So what in the world is the point of hiring all these stars to do voices when you don't recognize them? Aren't there plenty of talented voice actors out there who could do a better job?

I blame Disney, of course. They had to go and hire Robin Williams to be the genie in Aladdin. And it's not always a waste -- most of the Pixar movies have made good use of their big name stars, as have the Shrek movies, and I even came to appreciate Scarlett Johanssen's work as Princess Mindy in the Spongebob movie. But Robert Redford as a horse in Charlotte's Web and Rachel Weisz as the dragon in Eragon is just going too far if you ask me.

Mystery of the Finger Update

2006-11-20T15:58:00.000-08:00

I just realized I totally forgot to post about what the heck was/is wrong with Enthusio's finger. The orthopedist we saw kinda cleared things up for us, based on examination of xrays and the MRI. Yes, he had a finger MRI, and boy was that fun. Anyway, evidently the deal is that when a person is still growing, their bones have an outer layer that is almost like a skin, and that is the part of Enthusio's finger that is inflamed. There is also a layer of extra fluid around it. Apparently you can get some kind of infection in your body and it can travel all through your body in your bloodstream and just suddenly stop and say "okay, this looks good" and irritate some random part of your body. So presumably Enthusio had some kind of little bug back in July that was enough to make his finger skin swell up but not enough to make him sick at all, and now it's long gone, but the fat finger remains.

The next step would be to biopsy the bone, but the orthopedist thought that would be an overreaction, since the finger doesn't hurt and isn't getting worse. We will go back and see him next week, when it's been a month, although I don't think there's been any change. Maybe he will just have the fat finger forever. There are worse deformities, I suppose...

I could go upstairs and get dressed, but...

2006-11-19T12:54:00.000-08:00

... what fun would that be?

Yesterday I got up late (after 10) and took a shower first thing. Then I sat on the couch with the computer for hours, accomplishing nothing, fell asleep for 2 or 3 hours while Reasonable Man took the kids out to play golf, and then woke up and paid the bills and watched a lot of the TV shows that got tivo'd in my absence this past week. Didn't even touch my novel till late in the evening, and then stayed up till nearly 1 am trying to get my 2K in before I went to bed. A stunningly unproductive day, all said.

This morning I got up at a normal time (8 am), and while I've been sitting here on the computer for 5 hours, I've gotten a whole lot accomplished. I wrote a message to my nov98 list, wrote my first blog entry in weeks, wrote a plot summary for most of the second half of my novel, and wrote almost half of my daily 2K. So sure, I'm not dressed, but I'm already feeling better about myself right now than I did this time yesterday, or even 4 hours later.

I've been reading about the TomKat wedding because how can you avoid it. A few observations: she looks like a bobblehead in the wedding photo they released -- did she maybe go a little overboard on the post-baby weight loss thing she did recently? Also, they appear to be the same height for the first time ever, so he is standing on something or maybe wearing lifts in his shoes? That would be a weird thing to do now, after we've all seen her towering over him in every photo for the last year and a half.

Of course, all indications remain that these are some seriously weird people. This morning I read some speculation that perhaps baby Suri has been mostly kept from view for so long because of a large birth mark on her forehead, which did appear to be there on an enlarged photo. I can't imagine keeping a baby cloistered from view for that reason, but then, I also can't imagine getting engaged to someone I've only known for two months and immediately adopting his weird religion and cutting myself off from everyone I knew before and only hanging around with Scientologists and dropping my career and getting knocked up by this guy who is clearly a complete weirdo either, so I obviously don't understand much about what it's like to be Katie Holmes.

In any case, I still think we didn't see the baby for so long because she's about two months older than they say she is.

Also: I don't get it when people are engaged, get pregnant, have a baby, and then have the wedding later. Let me rephrase that: I don't approve of it. I know it's practically the worst thing in the world to come off as judgemental of this sort of thing anymore, but I don't care. I think being married to your babydaddy or babymama when Jr. makes his or her arrival if at all possible is a pretty nice thing to do for your kid. I don't mean we should go back to the bad old days when it was a huge stigma to have a baby outside of marriage so you got married in a hurry even if you weren't at all sure about the other person. I don't think anyone should get married just because they're having a baby, but I do think that, if you're already planning on getting married, and whoops! a baby's on the way, maybe you can set your vanity aside and go ahead with the wedding a few months earlier than planned.

Or maybe that's just me. But I don't think so.

Anyway, the whole TomKat wedding appears to me to be just the big fat cherry on the whole ridiculous overblown spectacle that their relationship has been from day one. I honestly could care less if they are for real or not, but I can't respect the way they complain about what's been said about them in the press but continue to do every on the grandest scale possible, attracting as much attention as they can. Boo hoo, TomKat. Now go away.

I do want to hear more about the Britney-KFed bust-up though. Bring on the gory details!

NaNoWriMo, Take 5

2006-11-19T09:49:00.000-08:00

I'm really struggling to make it to 50K this year. Part of the problem is that I kind of don't really know who my main character is. In the past I've always had that figured out because a) 3 of the 4 times I've previously done this thing, I was writing about characters I dreamed up about 20 years ago, and b) the one year I came up with something totally new, I started brainstorming about the characters and the storyline at the right time, ie in the 3 to 4 weeks before I started writing. This year I came up with the story and the characters and was all hot to get started... at the beginning of September. By the time November 1st hit, I was not the least bit into it. So although I'm still pacing myself and am on track to hit 50K by 11/30, it's all happening in a series of fits and starts, and I find myself just plain avoiding writing in a way I've never done during Nano before.

One very cool thing happened about a week ago, and that was that my main character turned unreliable. (See, I wasn't kidding when I said I didn't really know who she was!) I'd never had that happen before. That might sound kind of crazy, if you don't write -- the idea that your character might do or turn out to be something you didn't intend. I imagine characters in your more plot-driven stories probably don't get away from their writers quite so often, because they are completely in service to the plot. But those of us whose writing is character-driven know that sometimes the people we create have minds of their own. It's kind of like walking a really big dog who outweighs you -- you may be holding the leash, and you may be the one who feeds that dog and hands out the doggie treats, but every once in a while, however awesome that dog might be, it's going to drag you off the path and through the brush every once in a while.

Not only do I expect my characters to lead me off in unexpected directions -- I rely on it. Aside from the aforementioned characters I came up with 20 years ago, my approach to writing novels is like this: I come up with an idea -- not a plot, an idea -- and think up the characters who will bring that idea to life. Then I start writing and I see where the characters will take me. Though I count the characters as slightly more important, the idea, or concept, if you will, is pretty important too. The only time I've started a novel with characters only, it took me 10 1/2 years to finish. The characters did eventually lead me through a pretty decent story, but there was a lot of stalling before we got to the end of the path.

The unexpected detours characters make are one of the things that enrich your story. Last year I created a love interest for my main character, and was frustrated that practically whenever I put them in the same scene together, they'd end up arguing. After a while I got to thinking, how am I ever going to get these two together? But in the end, all the conflict they'd had made their coming together more believable. So even though I sometimes get annoyed when I'm trying to zig left and my characters want to zag right, I do generally trust them to take things in the right direction.

That's why I thought it was an encouraging sign when I discovered my main character was sort of unreliable. I'd written almost a whole chapter of her describing her life, but a few chapters later, she fell apart and the lead male character and I both found out at the same time that she hadn't quite told us everything. No wonder I didn't feel like I knew her. And who knows? She may have more secrets up her sleeve before we reach the end.

She's the only one who knows...

Ahhhhh....

2006-11-08T08:18:00.000-08:00

The Democrats took the House, we voted to get a Target in Davis, and Britney filed to dump KFed's ass. Yesterday was a great day!

I don't know why that third item makes me so happy -- I think she's almost as much of an idiot as he is, but whatever. All the news reports keep mentioning their "iron-clad pre-nup," and that may be true, but I'm sure she has to give him something, and we can all just fervently hope he uses part of it get himself a vasectomy, because four kids is plenty of spawn for that loser.

Evidently Davis is the first place in the nation where Target had to go to the ballot. There are still lots of folks here who want to keep the small town atmosphere. I appreciate that, but I'm sick of having to drive a minimum of ten miles just to buy a pair of underpants. Now if we can only get this Trader Joe's thing figured out, I promise I will never complain about the shopping issues in Davis again.

Nancy Pelosi will be the first female Speaker of the House in history, third in line to the President -- how much does that rule? I wasn't following the election and didn't think too much of all the predictions of a Dem sweep till last night, when Reasonable Man went back to his political junkie ways and spent the entire night pouring over election results on his laptop while watching the coverage on CNN (he did take an hour-long break so I could watch "Veronica Mars"). He called "woo hoo!" many times, just like it was the 90s again. Boy, it's been a long time since we had a good election. But I still want to know why couldn't people have gotten pissed off about Iraq in 2004.

Little Bits of Catching Up

2006-10-14T10:29:00.000-07:00

Today I am writing in this blog, dammit!

Life has gotten so busy since school started. It's amazing how much stuff I end up doing, considering that I have no job and both my kids are in school every day! This past week, for instance, I had a meeting to go to Monday afternoon, a doctor appointment for Enthusio that ended up taking several hours plus taking him to Campfire on Tuesday, a trip to the Scholastic Book Fair warehouse in the morning and then two different hour-long appointment/meetings for the kids in the afternoon on Wednesday, and we had Girl Scouts after school on Friday afternoon. Thursday was mercifully uneventful. Last week, I hosted Bunko here and we had a little get-together for Ryan's birthday on Sunday. Today we have BLB and the Bride arriving for an overnight visit, Tuesday I host my book club here, at some point this month I need to have my little moms dinner club over here, and we'll be having Will's birthday party here the last weekend of this month as well. Then right into running the book fair and starting my Nanowrimo novel plus trick-or-treating the week of Halloween, and on Thursday of that week I leave to go back east for four days for a girls' weekend. The week after that, Carisa and my new nephew Zan will be through to visit, and the week after that, I will be joining Mermaid's sixth grade class for a week of outdoor education. Then it's pretty much the holidays, and we are going to try to squeeze a trip to Disneyland in between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

So if you've been wondering why I haven't posted much lately -- that's why. My usual caveat -- I don't mean to complain, as I know I've got me a pretty sweet life (daily trips to the gym take up some of that time, as does at least one shopping day a week) and a lot of what I've listed there is fun stuff. Still, it does get pretty busy, and it cuts into my time at the computer...

Mystery of the Week: Way back in July, during our East Coast Adventure, Enthusio's left index finger swelled up, and swelled up it remains. Reasonable Man hypothesizes that he jammed it when they were boogie boarding at Bethany Beach, but Enthusio doesn't remember injuring it, and it's never really hurt him. After much nagging, Negligent Mom here finally took him to the pediatrician about it this past week, and she was completely flummoxed by it. She frowned, went and stuck her head out the door of the examining room where we were, and called to her fellow ped, "Hey, Bob, come look at this finger." (Becky has now challenged me to put this line in my Nano novel. I love a challenge!) Bob did, and then he went and got his digital camera to take a photo of the fat finger next to it's much thinner counterpart on Enthusio's other hand.

The xray showed nothing out of the ordinary, so the ped ordered bloodwork to rule out infection (and I'm also supposed to be taking stool samples but I keep conveniently forgetting), and next we're going to have an MRI done and see an orthopedist. The ped seems more curious than concerned, so I'm not feeling worried about it at this point (as far as I know there is no such thing as finger cancer), but I have to admit that they all took it far seriously than I expected them to. Obviously I would have taken him in a lot sooner if I'd realized they would want to do all these tests...

I Forgot: aka, Mom's least favorite words this past week. Here are the things Mermaid forgot:
1) To give me the paper that's been sitting in her music folder for the last 3 or 4 weeks informing me of what new books she needs for saxophone this year and also the fact that morning band has been meeting before school on Tuesdays for the last two weeks, sans Mermaid because I didn't know anything about it
2) To bring home all manner of necessary instructions, notebooks, papers, etc. that explain her homework or which were needed in order to complete her homework this week, necessitating the exchange of notes and such with her aide at school and such to figure out what the heck is going on
3) To not freak out if I am approximately 30 seconds late picking her up from school and either bursting into tears or going into the office to ask to borrow the phone to call me when I'm actually sitting outside waiting to pick her up

I know she has some issues and that when she's a little distressed, logic flies right out the window, but geez. It's a little frustrating. On the other hand, yesterday she successfully rode her bike home from her Girl Scout meeting about a mile away, and I think she will be providing her own transportation to and from those meetings on non-rainy days for the rest of the year.

Beyond the forgetfulness, she continues to have a good year in school. A little defiance here and there with her aide, but I knew the honeymoon wasn't going to last forever, and apparently social studies is more hands-on/interactive this year, so hallelujah for that! Enthusio seems to be doing great too -- I haven't chatted with his teacher in a while, but I do know he has made a couple of little friends and that he's been playing kickball at recess instead of wandering around by his lonesome each day, so that is great news and couldn't make me happier :-)

World Travellers: A few weeks ago, my mom ended her 40-year nursing career with her long-awaited retirement. Way to go, Mom! We went to a lovely dinner in her honor and got to spend a nice evening with some of her very nice, but sad, co-workers who hate to see her go. Right now, she and my dad are on a three-week trip to Spain and Portuegal, and hopefully they are having a great time. Also off to far regions are Ryan's brother Jamie (of YouTube pet cemetary film short fame) and his wife Annette, who are visiting England for a week. I am officially jealous! Reasonable Man would like for us to take a trip to England in 2008 -- I am crossing my fingers...

Finally -- well, I don't know about you all, but I know I'm sleeping better knowing Paris and Nicole are friends again. It gives you hope for world peace, no?

2006-09-27T21:56:00.001-07:00

Since I don't neglect this blog enough, I've decided to start a second one! I've been doing a lot of projects around the house lately, and the reaction I've gotten from a lot of people when I tell them I replaced cabinets in my kitchen, the tile around my fireplace, the vanity top in my bathroom has often been amazement. Happy as I am with the improvements to my house and the development of my skills, I don't really believe I'm doing anything other people -- other women -- couldn't also do. So I'm wondering why, in 2006, when most women do paid work, there's a Home Depot or Lowes on every other street corner, and the internet is rich with detailed instructions on how to do almost any home project out there -- why is it still so unusual for someone like me to pick up a drill or a crow bar and make things happen? I have a theory that a lack of confidence is what stops a lot of us, and I'll be writing about it at It's Not Scary, and sharing some of the projects I've done as well. Please check it out and tell me what you think.

Because I'm all about the innovation, the new blog is on a brand new, invitation-only blog service called Vox. Let me know what you think of that too :-)

Edit: I'm already over the other blog service and am moving It's Not Scary back over her to Blogger -- the correct address is http://itsnotscary.blogspot.com/

2006-09-19T23:19:00.000-07:00

Recently I saw a story on the news about a new vaccine for the human papillomavirus virus (HPV), which is transmitted sexually and can lead to cervical cancer. This virus is extremely prevalent among sexually active adults, so the fact that a vaccine has been developed is great news. There are undoubtedly conservative types out there who are against it (since apparently any kind of medical breakthrough related to female reproductive health must be some kind of threat to home, family, and the sanctity of human life), but somehow the FDA managed to fight off the forces of the neocons long enough to approve it, so that's good, right?

Only the news story I saw was all about how a lot of parents are resisting the recommendation that girls should receive the vaccine sometime between the ages of 9 and 12. Because, you know, that's too young. And there was the obligatory shot of a pre-pubescent girl running around a soccer field and looking cherubic while her mom talked about how she wasn't going to follow the guidelines, basically because the whole idea made her feel kind of icky.

I have a few thoughts on this:

1) Why should my daughter be vaccinated now, when she's so young and isn't having sex yet? Duh. The vaccine can't protect her from potential infection unless she gets it before she has sex. And yeah, I know no one likes to look at their pre-teenaged daughter and imagine that her becoming sexually active is anything but a distant possibility in the far, far future. I've got an 11-year-old daughter myself, and I shudder at the thought. Still, let's be realistic here: even the most organized parent in the world doesn't have the date their child is going lose his or her virginity marked on the calendar. If you want your child to wait, talk to them about the reasons they should do so, but for God's sake, don't deprive them of something that could keep them safer and healthier if they don't follow your advice.

2) I can't get my daughter vaccinated against HPV because, at 9/10/11/12, I feel she's still too young for me to talk to her about HPV. This one really bugs me. I suppose you're going to have a long, in-depth discussion about lockjaw with her before you take her in for her tetanus booster? Now, I'm not saying there aren't maybe a few girls out there who'll have lots of questions about why they have to get this shot, but I feel fairly confident that most of them won't question things any farther than this:

Parent: You're going to have to get a shot at the doctor's.

Daughter: A shot? Oh, man. (whining) Why?

Parent: To protect you from getting cancer.

Daughter: Oh.

Some of them might be savvy enough to ask what kind of cancer, but I'm guessing a vague "You know -- down there" will be enough of an answer to satisfy all but the very most scientifically-minded girls. Most pre-adolescent girls do not want to engage in discussions about "down there" anymore than their parents do.

I'm not saying that parents shouldn't discuss the reason for the shot with their daughters -- I'm just going with the idea that you give kids as much information as they can handle and that they ask for, and therefore, the argument that girls whose parents feel they are too young to learn about sexually transmitted diseases shouldn't still be protected against them just isn't a good one.

3) My daughter is a good girl and won't be having sex till she's married, so she doesn't need to get this shot. To me this ranks right up there with the logic that kids don't need sex education because it will just give them ideas, and if you just don't tell them anything, they won't have sex. I realize withholding information and not having your kid vaccinated against a sexually transmitted disease are not the same thing, but I can't help thinking that the parent who doesn't want their daughter to get this vaccination at 10 is the same parent who doesn't want her to learn about condoms and STDs later on in junior high and high school. And last I heard, the whole "preaching abstinance as sex education" wasn't keeping lots and lots of kids out there from becoming sexually active, only keeping information from them that could keep them safer and healthier when they do.

Getting shots is an unpleasant fact of childhood -- no question about that. But the fact that the reason for this particular immunization just happens to make some parents look ahead to the future and feel a little queasy doesn't excuse those parents from fulfilling their responsibility to make sure their child is protected. No one ever said this parenting thing was easy.

Please Help a Good Cause

2006-09-15T08:44:00.000-07:00

Remember my sister-in-law The Bride? Well she and Big Little Brother celebrated their first wedding anniversary on August 20 -- time flies! Anyway, she's got a new project -- training for a half marathon with the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society's Team in Training program. I've known a number of people, including my other sister-in-law Dana and my good friend Sue, who have participated in TinT in the last several years, and it seems like a terrific program for a great cause. The Bride, who will heretofore be known by her real name, Angela, simply because I haven't thought of a good pseudonym for her, has a fundraising goal of $2700, and here is a link to her fundraising page

http://www.active.com/donate/tntgsf/angelagkluver

Please check it out and consider making a small donation. Every little little bit helps!

2006-09-11T15:02:00.000-07:00

This morning I woke up at my friend's house in Livermore at 4:55 a.m., got in the car by 5:20, dropped my other friend off at the Oakland Airport by 6:20, and was home in Davis by 7:45. Reasonable Man was getting the kids off to school and I chatted with them and helped get their stuff into their backpacks so they could leave and I wished them all a good day and fell soundly asleep on the couch with the dog probably before they were even out of the driveway. My plan was to sleep for 30 minutes and then go to the gym, but I guess I didn't set the alarm on my cell phone right so I ended up not waking up till 90 minutes later -- at which point I did get up and go to the gym. I worked out for an hour, chatting with the mom of one of Mermaid's friends who joined recently, and then took off for Sacramento where I bought a buttload of groceries at Trader Joe's and then came home, unpacked them, ate some lunch and showered.

So really, on the whole, a pretty productive day, no? Still, the early rising and lengthy nap left me feeling off, and I have basically felt like I'm swimming through a fog since I woke up the second time. I really hope Mermaid doesn't have much homework when she gets home this afternoon because I really am pretty much feeling like like that commercial for cold medicine from a few years ago, where the little cartoon guy's head floats up above him like a balloon, only I haven't taken any cold medicine. I wish they still showed that commercial because it was such a good metaphor for the discombobulation I feel every time my sleep schedule gets disrupted in a major way.

2006-09-10T09:21:00.000-07:00

I've been a bad blogger lately. I've actually begun about 6 different posts in the last few weeks, but the usual thing always happens: I get too ambitious, it starts to seem too hard, I have other things to do, and I abandon it halfway through. So today I'm going to write about a number of random things, just to clear the board, and maybe I can start fresh this coming week with the current minutiae of the my life instead of continuing to try to catch up on the old stuff.

Babies Babies Babies!

There was a baby boom in my life this summer. Welcome to the following little ones, and congratulations to their parents:

John Ronald Barnes, born July 10 to Josh and Emilie Barnes. Emilie is one of my best friends from junior high and high school.

Colin Martin Lee, born July 12 to Chris and Ninette Lee. Chris is a high school classmate of mine that I've become friends with over the last couple of years here in Davis.

Miranda Josephine Mains, born August 4 to Chris and Janine Mains. Janine is a close friend of mine from the November98 due date list I joined when I was pregnant with Enthusio.

Ethan Pierre Lund, born to Toneka Webb and Matt Lund. Toneka and Matt are longtime friends of my Big Little Brother-- he introduced the two of them, and Toneka introduced BLB to his wife.

Zanfirico Clark Izarn Kluver -- my nephew!!! -- born August 29 to Carisa and Marc Izarn Kluver. Carisa is my cousin, but we are close so I am claiming Zan as my nephew, and I could not be more excited :-)

I got to meet Colin a few weeks ago when we went to the Lee's for dinner; today I'm going to Livermore to meet Miranda, and next weekend I fly to Seattle to meet Zan. How fun!

Celebrity Stuff

I loved the alleged incident reported a few weeks ago wherein Jessica Simpson allegedly asked if she could kiss Britney Spears' pregnant belly and Britney allegedly replied "Hell, no!" This is, in my opinion, the only reasonable reply to such a stupid question. It almost gave me new respect for Britney.

I also loved the item where Mr. Britney, K-Fed, defended his own intelligence by claiming to have gotten "amazing-ass" scores on his GED. I'm not even going to touch that one.

I have a theory about Suri Cruise. Although her appearance on in Vanity Fair this week doesn't necessarily prove that Katie and Tom are her parents, I never really bought the idea that the whole pregnancy was made up and they don't have a baby. I do, however, believe that she was actually born 2 or 3 months earlier than was reported. Come on -- wasn't that "born down the hall from Brooke Shields' baby on the same day" thing just a little too convenient? Look at the evidence:

1) When Tom and Katie announced her pregnancy in October, not only was she already showing but she looked about 6 months along. I remember reading that she was due sometime in the spring and thinking "spring, my ass -- she'll never make it past the end of January." She continued to look way pregnant for the next 6 months -- except toward the end, when she sometimes looked like she was suddenly a lot smaller, and sometimes she literally looked like she had a basketball under her top. I think it's because at this point she'd actually already had the baby.

2) When people were asking if she was really pregnant, I always immediately thought, "yeah, of course" because in those last few months, there were lots of pictures of her looking, well, terrible. If they were faking the whole thing, wouldn't they have her continue looking fabulous? What I think is that when she was looking exhausted, sometimes enormous, bedraggled, and sporting cold sores at various times, she was actually post-partum and not in the later stages of pregnancy.

3) No pictures of the baby for several months. Duh -- they had to wait till enough time had passed that they could pass off a baby born in January or February as a baby born in April. The baby in the Vanity Fair pictures could be 4 months, 6 months, 8 months old -- that's how babies are during that first year of life.

Now, why would they do this? Well, do the math -- if Suri was born in January or February, Katie would have had to become pregnant almost immediately after she and Tom met. Planned or not, yuck -- one more log on the fire of "is this just a big stunt to prove he's not gay?" So they retreat for the rest of the summer and early fall and put off announcing the pregnancy until she's showing in October and just pretend the baby doesn't arrive till a couple of months after she's born.

Think about it. It makes sense.

School

It's going well. I've talked to Enthusio's teacher a couple of times since they started, and she's really put me at ease -- she says he's fitting in, being accepted by his classmates, and seems happy and comfortable in the classroom. He did ask her if he had to do the math book, since he already did it last year :-) But they do have this computer program the kids can use where they work on things like math at their own speed, so I know he can move ahead if he gets bored with the 2nd grade curriculum.

I had a conversation with him that disturbed me a little bit, where he told me that he is playing by himself at recess and eating by himself at lunch. He said that's what he prefers to do for right now, and that he wants to get to know his classmates before he becomes friends with any of them. If that continues, then I will definitely want to talk to his teacher and such to try to facilitate his forming some friendships, but for now he is comfortable and that is the most important thing. I am feeling very confident that he is in the right classroom this year :-)

Both Mermaid's teacher and her new aide say she is doing beautifully and she seems very happy in her new class. I know this is kind of a honeymoon period for her with the new aide and issues will arise once the novelty of the school year wears off and she is confronted with work she doesn't want to do, but that sort of things has become less frequent over the last couple of years and I think she's going to have another good year.

The House

Since we decided not to move for the the time-being, I've been a busy bee making improvements to our current house. In the last several weeks, I had put tile around the fireplace, sanded and refinished the bannister (no more teeth marks!), and torn the tile countertops out in the downstairs half-bath and the kitchen. In the bathroom I installed a new all-in-one vanity top, and in the kitchen, we are having a new laminate countertop installed this coming week (I can't wait!). In addition to the projects that have allowed me to hone my own home improvement skills, we also have a new fence and gate between the house and the garage that we hired a fence guy to install, and we have beautiful new cornice boxes over the windows in the living room and dining room, courtesy of my father-in-law (thanks, Joe!). Upcoming projects include redecorating Enthusio's room, mounting the flat-screen TV on the wall, and refinishing the dining room table. I would also like to do lots of planting in both yards this fall.

Writing

I am excited about National Novel-Writing Month this year -- I've thought of a basic storyline for my novel, I have names for the main characters, and I think it's going to be good! One thing that especially pleases me is that I will get to write part of it about a gushy teenage romance in the main character's past, but most of it takes place when she's about 30. So I'm getting to do the silly stuff I love, but also branching out into something new, writing about a character much closer to my own age! We'll see how it goes...

Books

Probably in large part due to the reading bender on which I embarked during our vacation, I find myself ironically poised to pass the 50-books-read mark this year. Ironic because last year I actually tried to do that and fell just short, while this year I haven't even been trying.

Important Note: Jodi Picoult's My Sister's Keeper is really 99% a very good book, but if you decide to read it, I highly recommend you close the book at the end of page 412, after the resolution of the lawsuit, because in the last ten pages, the story rides completely infuriatingly off the rails. I don't know what the author was thinking.

Okay, that's it -- that's all the junk that's been floating around in my brain the last few weeks. It feels good to get it all out there :-)

Wish Us Luck

2006-08-28T11:44:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow is the first day of school. Last night was Kick-Off Picnic, where you go and find out who your teacher is. Very exciting stuff...

Enthusio got the teacher he wanted, the same teacher Mermaid had for second grade. She is a very soft-spoken, low-key, easy-going teacher and I think she will be a good match for him. We're a little concerned that the academics will be boring for him, since he's already done second grade once and had no problems with the work, but we also think it could be a real confidence boost for him to maybe be one of the best readers in his clas and that kind of thing too. There was a possibility of him being in a second/third combination class, and we liked that idea from the academic perspective (maybe he could do third-grade work if he got bored in the second grade stuff) but had the downside of possibly including kids from his old grade with whom he's had issues in the past. Overall, his being in a straight second-grade class is probably the better option and I am cautiously optimistic about this being a much, much better year for him.

Mermaid was placed in a fifth/sixth combination class, which surprised us, as they've never put her in a combination class before. We weren't real thrilled with the idea, especially when we heard that the class had just been created (and the teacher hired) this past week -- we had to wonder how much thought had been put into her placement in this class? But then we met the teacher at the Kick-Off Picnic yesterday, and she seems just great -- very on top of things, very pleasant and easy to talk to. She said she'd heard Rachel had the same aide this year, so that's good (hopefully it's true). So we're feeling good about Mermaid's situation too.

Now hopefully the stuff I ordered from Land's End, which includes school shoes for Enthusio, will show up today and I won't have to take him out for an emergency pair tonight!

2006-08-21T21:03:00.000-07:00

Check It Out

You probably don't know that Reasonable Man's brother Jamie manages a pet cemetary in San Diego. At Christmas, we saw an awesome short film a local filmmaker made about Jamie's place of business, featuring Jamie himself, and happily, it can now be enjoyed online, so have at it!

Staying in the Green House (For Now)

2006-08-10T22:06:00.000-07:00

We didn't buy that house.

We put in an offer, but we withdrew it the next day. This market is just not right for us to put our house up for sale right now -- not for a lateral move, anyway. If we find the house of our dreams in the next few months, we will go for it, knowing we are going to be out some money, but to buy something in our same niche of the market, give up our excellent low interest rate, take a hit in property taxes and end up in a smaller how -- nope, it wasn't the right move for us. I'm still thinking about that house and all the things I liked about it from time to time, but I knew when Reasonable Man presented the situation to me what the right decision was, and I think I surprised him with the degree to which I was reasonable about the whole thing.

I surprised myself by not being that disappointed about it. In fact, in the week since we decided not to pursue that other house, I've spent a lot of time working on this one, and not only am I not disappointed, but I'm actually falling in love with this house all over again. All those shows on HGTV are telling the truth: moving your furniture around can make a huge difference. Last week I moved most of the home office stuff from the over-used dining room to the under-used living room, and today I moved around some of the stuff in the kitchen dining area and switched the positions of the love seat and couch in the family room, and in some ways it's like our house it twice as big as it was.

I'm not saying we're staying here forever -- in fact, it's entirely possible that tomorrw we'll we something new in the real estate section that just totally kicks our butts -- but in the meantime, we're looking at probably staying here till at least early next spring, and then who knows? Maybe we'll decide to stay. Either way, this is a great house that we love and whoever gets to live here will be some lucky folks.

2006-07-30T14:16:00.000-07:00

Here are the caricatures we had done of the kids in Central Park when we were in NYC a few weeks ago. Apparently Enthusio got the idea to have this done back in May when Reasonable Man took him to Legoland. RM didn't want to pay fifty bucks to have it done at Legoland, but Central Park is rife with artists willing to capture your likeness in Sharpie, so we didn't have a hard time finding someone to make Enthusio's dream come true for a much more reasonable $15.

He knew exactly what he wanted, and instructed the artist thusly: "I want to be like Batman riding a skateboard, only not with wheels -- with rockets." The artist didn't even seem to think this was a weird request -- he just nodded and went to work. At some point he asked Enthusio to make a face like a superhero. Enthusio complied:

Yeah, I've never seen superhero making that face either. Enthusio's picture didn't have that expression. He seemed a little disappointed when it was done -- RM and I think he was maybe embarrassed at the size of his teeth in the picture. We assured him that that was just the way caricatures are drawn, which is true, but between you and me, the teeth are actually not all that exaggerated. I imagine he'll grown into them some day.

While Enthusio was having his picture done, Mermaid decided that she'd like to have one done too. The guy who did Enthusio's had a portrait to do first, but he said he'd be available in about an hour if we could come back. Mermaid surprised us by agreeing that she wanted to wait -- it was pretty humid out and she'd not been enjoying the weather, so I had figured she'd want to head back to Aunt Dana's apartment sooner rather than later, but once Mermaid makes up her mind about something, that's pretty much that. So we took a little walk past the Central Park Zoo and had a snack, then headed back to wait for the artist guy to finish his portrait, and in the meantime, another caricature artist set up his stuff nearby, so we had him do Mermaid's instead.

I may not have mentioned it before, but this past year, Mermaid has decided she doesn't want to smile with her teeth showing. The first reason she gave was that her friend Allyn doesn't smile with her teeth showing, and later on, she told me that when she smiles with her teeth showing in a picture, it makes her "look like a ghost." Yeah, I don't know either. Anyway, no way no how was she going to show her teeth to the caricature artist. No big loss, since as you can see from the finished picture above, he captured her Mona Lisa smile perfectly. He also did a very good job of following her instructions that she wanted to be singing with the Beatles -- I'm not sure how well you can see it in the picture, but it's pretty clear that he's drawn, from left to right, Paul, John and George. (George has enormous ears in the picture. Did George have enormous ears? I have no recollection of that.) Of course, Mermaid did have to point out to me the other night that Paul is holding his guitar the wrong way (right-handed instead of left), but otherwise we all think the artist did a pretty awesome job.

2006-07-30T07:59:00.000-07:00

First we went on vacation for nearly three weeks. Within two days of arriving home, I was sick with a nasty cold. So what do you think happened when I was finally getting over that? If you guessed that I pulled a muscle in my back, keeping me away from the gym for even longer, you're absolutely right! So now it's been a solid month since I've been to the gym with any regularity. No wonder I'm feeling so fat.

Of course the book I'm reading right now isn't helping. Fat Land by Greg Critser is a very thorough explanation of "how Americans became the fattest people in the world," and it's not a pretty picture. Contrast the amount of bickering and naval-gazing that goes on just for the powers-that-be to make a decision what they should tell the general population about how much exercise we should all be getting with the free-for-all that goes on with advertising sugar- and fat-drenched foods to kids and the terrible ingredients that make up so much of the food on the market and it's no wonder so many of us are fighting -- and generally losing -- the battle of the bulge.

In other words, my kids picked the wrong week to try to get out of swim practice. I may not be exercising much lately, but they are for damn sure going to if I have anything to do with it.

2006-07-30T07:02:00.000-07:00

This house-buying thing has gotten complicated.

First, a caveat. I know there are bigger problems in the world. This town is an expensive place to live, and we've gone from contemplating a major kitchen remodel, which we can afford, to moving to a new house, which we can also afford, while many people around us aren't able to make a move or buy a house in the first place. We live in a nice house in a nice neighborhood and none of us would suffer if we had to stay here for a good long while, even if we didn't remodel the kitchen. In other words, I know this doesn't exactly rank in the top 947 great tragedies of the 21st century. Nonetheless, it is currently a dilemma for us, so please bear with me.

From day one of our decision to start looking for a new house, I have maintained that size is not the issue. Our house is small by the standards of some people, but I've always felt like we had more than enough living space here, and one of my biggest beefs with this house is that a lot of the living space we have -- our living room to be specific -- doesn't get used (we don't really need a second sitting room most of the time) or is unusable (the western exposure of our house makes that room too hot to sit in after 1 pm during the summer). The fourth bedroom we added a few years ago suffers from similar problems. And so we spend a great deal of our time in the family room, which is somewhat cramped. In addition, the upstairs of the house is difficult to heat in the winter and even more difficult to keep cool in the summer. Add the fact that the kitchen needs a major overhaul and we don't have nearly enough outside/garage space for bikes and such, and you have more than enough reasons for us to be shopping for another house.

Yesterday I saw a house that I really liked. I sent Reasonable Man over to look at it and he liked it too. The price is right. It has one story and four bedrooms, one of which is at the front of the house and could function as exactly what we would need it for: a place to put the computer, a place where the kids could keep their school stuff and do their homework, and where we could put the futon and have guests stay. It would be an extension of our living space when we didn't have guests and a guest room when we did. The layout of the house is big and open, there is a ton of built-in storage, and the backyard is big enough for us to put in a pool and still have plenty of room for patio furniture and our trampoline. The kitchen would need some work, but it's attractive and it has a pantry. And on the "location, location, location" front, it's basically in the same neighborhood where we live now, where we are very comfortable and where many of our friends live.

So what's the problem? It's smaller than the house we have now, by about 200 square feet. The space it has is everything I think we need when I envision the most efficient house possible for us, but probably not one inch more than that. The family room is not smaller than what we have now, but it's certainly not much bigger. There's no place to put anything bigger than a small dining table, so hosting things like Christmas dinner would be a problem. The family room furniture we have now would fit just fine, but there would never really be any options for moving things around too much.

I've looked at a number of houses since we decided to move, many out of our price range, and although I maintain that size is not that big an issue, the times I've walked into houses with a big, wide-open living space, I've swooned just a bit. The idea of having a family room where you could have one of those great big ginormous sectionals and not have it completely fill the room is awfully appealing. One house in particular stands out in my mind. It's on a busy street, and the backyard is pretty tiny, but when you walk in -- well, the word "cavernous" comes to mind. There is a huge living room, a huge kitchen/family room, and then there's also a huge loft. After Reasonable Man saw it and thought it was pretty cool, I said to him, "but don't you think that's way more space than we need?" He didn't, but I did.

I still think so, but I've definitely come around to the idea that I would like that much space. And therein lies the dilemma, because I can still walk into a house like the one we found yesterday and just feel so sure it could work for us. But five years from now, after doing the work on the kitchen and putting in a pool, will our family of two adults and two teenagers feel crowded, and will we wonder why we bought this house when we could have gone bigger?

This is similar to the the questions I have about my car. I drive a minivan, but I chose the smallest one available, with the best possible gas mileage. Even so, I often wonder: do I really need to drive a minivan? I only have two kids, and we only drive extra people around every once in a while. I could drive a sedan that gets much better gas mileage -- a hybrid even. Then again, it's nice to be able to haul extra kids around when we need to, or drive another family on outings. We have friends who have traded cars with us for an evening or overnight so they could transport more people all in one car than their sedan can hold. Long car trips are more comfortable in our minivan than they used to be in our old Toyota Camry, and storage is never a problem. We can even haul the occasional piece of furniture without any trouble.

In other words, we don't need the extra space every day -- but sometimes we really do need it. Does that occasional need justify the fuel we consume by driving it every day? Similarly -- do the occasional times we feel crowded or want to host a big holiday dinner justify buying a house that's bigger than we need, with the added costs of heating and cooling, not to mention furnishing it? A small house, one that has only the space we need to live on a day-to-day basis and no more, equals smaller energy bills and no reason buy new furniture. That means a smaller ecological footprint we're leaving, and I really do like that idea. It's very Davis. And it's not like we'd be depriving ourselves of nice things, like a pool and a new kitchen. In the end our quality of life still goes up.

Just as long as life with teenagers doesn't feel more crowded than life two grade-school-age kids does, I guess.

2006-07-23T09:23:00.000-07:00

I am SO sick, and last night ranks among the most miserable nights of my life. The area around my nostrils is positively rubbed raw, my throat is the sorest it has been in my life, and one of my nostrils is either completely plugged or a veritable faucet at all times. I've gotten way past being glad to be home, being grateful that I didn't get sick until after we got home, or being able to appreciate the merits of our dry Davis heat over the humidity of the east coast we experienced a week ago, because guess what, people? It was 111 freaking degrees here yesterday. Please pray, cross your fingers, get out your worry dolls or do whatever else you like to do to wish our air conditioning unit health in the next couple of days, 'cause I am petrified that thing is going to die and then we will have no choice but to go live at the Holiday Inn Express for a few days.

One of the Few Musical Entries You Are Every Likely to See In This Space

2006-07-23T09:15:00.000-07:00

Buuuuut the cat came back (I didn't see her, but Reasonable Man did)
She couldn't stay away
She was sittin' on the porch (under the bushes by the garage, actually)
The very next day (last night)
O the cat came back
She didn't want to roam (anymore, since we're back now and there aren't strangers living in her house anymore and we've been leaving her treats outside the garage)
The very next day (well, last night)
She was home sweet home (actually we haven't seen her since that one sighting, but at least now we know she's not dead and the butt-kissing we'll need to do to get to come back and live in the garage again can commence in earnest)

The Mystery of Emma

2006-07-22T12:14:00.000-07:00

We were gone on our trip 19 days, during which time some friends stayed at our house, which was actually very nice. Yes, I had to do more cleaning in the days before we left than I would otherwise have done, but when we got back, the house was spotless, and even though I know it's unlikely that our house will burn to the ground, fall down, explode, implode or otherwise suffer major damage when we're away, I still always breathe a little sigh of relief when we come around the corner and see that minty green edifice we call home still standing there, and so on this, our longest trip ever (so far), it was good to know someone who had our cell phone numbers was staying here and it was likely she would call us if any of those imagined disasters were to befall the Green House in our absence.

We returned Monday evening to find everything as it was when we left -- everything, that is except for our garage, which was missing one cranky 14-year-old female cat. Further examination revealed that her litter box had been used at some point, as had the garage floor. Hey, she's old. All specimins, which were NOT examined closely, appeared to have been left a while back, but it's been hot, so, you know, things dry up pretty fast. In other words: Emma was not in the garage, and there was no indication that she had been in the garage for quite some time.

This obviously made Reasonable Man and me kinda sad. Emma was our first baby. We adopted her on December 27, 1992 -- our six-month wedding anniversary, and for the two years between then and Mermaid's birth on December 31, 1994, Emma was the princess of our household. She spent long evenings luxuriating on our laps on the couch in front of the TV. We squeezed the water out of tuna cans and gave it for her for a snack. We played string with her, took pictures of her, and delighted in her antics.

After Mermaid was born, Emma accepted her demotion in status gracefully. Right around the time Mermaid started to crawl, Emma waged a wily (and ultimately successful) campaign to be let out into the yard (until then she'd been an indoor cat) by yowling loudly by the back door whenever I was trying to get Mermaid down for a nap. She was in her element there in San Luis Obispo -- less so after we moved back to Davis and she was banished to the garage due to her unfortunate habit of peeing on the living room carpet in our new house. Since then, she's been cozy in the winter on her heated pet bed, not so happy in the summer. Sometimes Reasonable Man gets an earful when he's leaving for work in the morning, because her dish is empty or maybe there have raccoons or other varmints invading her space sometime during the night, and other times she will clamor for a little attention. Mermaid rediscovered her out there a year or two ago, after completely ignoring her for about 7 years, and she would go and spend time with her, but otherwise our contact with Emma has been pretty limited in the last 6 1/2 years.

Nevertheless, we're unhappy that she's disappeared. I liked to think that she had maybe felt unwell and crawled off someplace dark to die peacefully -- it seemed unlikely that something more violent would have happened to her after she'd lived in the garage without incident for so long. I asked my neighbor Kim, who is the only person I could imagine would have noticed her around, if she'd seen her. Kim said she hadn't but told me about a time one of her cats got cheesed off about something at her house and disappeared for six days, only to come back after she'd given him up for dead. That made me feel better -- maybe it's not like Emma to leave her shelf in the garage for any length of time, but then, this was also the first time we've ever left for almost 3 weeks and let other people live in our house while we were gone. Who knows what was going through her little cat brain? Kim recommended that I leave food and water for her somewhere outside the garage. I figured I had nothing to lose by following her advice.

Yesterday morning, there was a hopeful sign in the garage -- fresh cat poops under my car! (No, I didn't examine them closely -- I just kind of poked at them with my shoe to see if they'd squish. Sorry to get graphic on you there.) After I swept the garage out, I called Emma's name a few times, and I'm pretty sure I heard her meow back at me. I left some tuna juice out near the bushes next to the garage in case she wanted a treat. It was gone later on, and of course some other cat might have consumed it, but I'm choosing to remain hopeful that our first baby is still out there and might come back to live in our garage again soon.

Books, Books, Books

2006-07-21T09:27:00.000-07:00

I eventually brought my total books read on our trip to 7, which officially makes it my best vacation ever! Far and away the best book I read was Alive, the story of Urugayan plane crash survivors in the Andes mountains who had to resort to eating the bodies of their co-passengers in order to survive. Icky, yes, but absolutely riveting. It is absolutely amazing what they went through and how hard they fought to live through ten weeks up on a freezing mountain top together. The events actually happened way back in 1972, but if it sounds familiar, it may be because they made a movie of it about 10 years ago, which by the way I will never watch, and not just because it stars Ethan Hawke. While I understand why they did what they did and commend them for having the will to live, I don't care to see any kind of re-enactment of it...

A couple of fun books I enjoyed: Autobiography of a Fat Bride by Laurie Notaro, who seems to have gotten a little funnier with each book she's written, and Jane Austen in Boca by Paula Marantz Cohen, a retelling of Pride and Prejudice with Jewish senior citizens in a retirement community. Hilarious. I saw online that the author has written another one in Scarsdale -- I will have to check that out!

Dirty Secret

2006-07-21T09:21:00.000-07:00

We packed pretty light for our almost-3-weeks-long vacation, figuring that we would be able to do laundry easily everywhere we went except possibly Manhatten, where we stayed at my sister-in-law Dana's upper east side apartment. Little did I know -- Manhatten would the be easiest place to do laundry of all! Did you know people who live there don't do their own laundry? They take it to the laundry down the street, where they pay someone sixty cents a pound to do it for them! We took ours in on a Sunday morning and got it backed -- washed, dried and folded -- that afternoon. I couldn't believe it. Why don't they have this everywhere? I have been informed since I got back to Davis that you can have this done at a laundrymat here in town, but I am betting it costs more than sixty cents a pound, or else everyone would be doing it.

Under the Weather

2006-07-21T09:17:00.000-07:00

We picked up a bug during our travels and now we are all feeling a bit sluggish. My throat is sore, Mermaid has been all stuffed up, and Enthusio got pink eye -- gross! When I went to the Rite-Aid pharmacy the other day to pick up his prescription eye drops, the girl at the counter said "hi, Tracie!" Yes, apparently I frequent the Rite-Aid pharmacy often enough that they know me by name there. The girl behind the counter said that she sees my name a lot and that "you're always really nice." Hopefully she would still think that if she knew I have no freaking idea what her name is, even though I'm pretty sure she wears a name tag.

Yeah, But It's a Dry Heat

2006-07-19T14:36:00.000-07:00

I want to post more about our trip, but right now my thoughts and feelings about it are unfairly clouded by my blissful relief at being home. My friend Jane, who along with her family graciously provided us with shelter and sustenance during the final days of our trip, says that it doesn't matter how long or short your trip is -- the last day or two, you just want to get home. I don't know what percentage of the time that's true, but I can certainly agree that I always feel that way on any trip of a week or longer. In this case, the time we were away actually passed really quickly and it didn't feel like we were gone nearly three weeks, but those last couple of days were tough, even though we spent them doing fun things with people we enjoy.

It didn't help that the east coast humidity that I had dreaded on this trip really cranked up the last 5 or 6 days we were out there. I'm sorry to all you east coasters (and midwesterners -- it's bad there too, right?) but I don't know how you live with that. California may be brown and ugly for a lot of the year, but at least your clothes and hair have a fighting chance when you step out the front door even on the hottest day.

That said, it's supposed to be 108 here tomorrow! I just hope our air conditioner can make it through. If not, make no mistake -- we will be checking into a motel.

Random Vacation Notes

2006-07-10T06:12:00.000-07:00

I'm reading my ass off on vacation. First, I finished the piece-of-crap true crime book I was reading when we left Davis during our layover in Dallas and just left it sitting there on the seat when our flight started boarding. Maybe someone picked it up and started reading it, but I'm hoping security got nervous about something being abandoned in the airport and decided to blow it up right there where it was abandoned, like I saw done at the Paris airport many years ago. It was that bad. Then I started reading my book club book, which is okay, but then I was handed a stack of more appropriate beachy-type reads, so I've been plowing through them. Note: the first Ya Ya book, Little Altars Everywhere, is far superior to its celebrated sequel, Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood, which was a mediocre book made into a seriously lousy movie. The Glass Castle is a pretty riveting memoir in the "my crazy and/or substance-abusing parents never should have had kids" genre, and guess what? I am finally reading The Da Vinci Code. I've been resisting for three years, but the time has come, and guess what? I'm enjoying it.

We've had our share of disasters this trip, including getting on a commuter train to Grand Central Station instead of our Amtrak train, and having to high-tail it on the subway from GCS to Penn Station, with all our luggage, to catch up with that Amtrak train. We did it, though. And the kids were troopers all the way. I love travelling with school-age kids. Everywhere we go, I see toddlers and pre-schoolers, and just think damn, I'm glad they don't stay that little forever! It is, in many ways, great while it lasts, but there are definite advantages to having that phase be over.

Can't seem to add photos to my blog right now, so I can't show you the cute caricatures we had done of the kids in Central Park right now, but suffice it to say, they are fabulous.

Also, I am pleased to say that, 28 years after my first visit, I still adore the Statue of Liberty. How anyone ever got up the energy to build something that big and that cool, I will never understand, but I salute them!

2006-06-24T11:00:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I know it's been a while. You all know I feel massive guilt whenever I've been lame about updating, right? Not that that really helps anything, but I do want you to know I at least think about it.

Anyway, I do have a few little items to report here. First -- the kids are out of school. Hallelujah -- Enthusio is done with his school year from hell and hopefully he will never have to endure another one like that again. I am cautiously optimistic that next year will be better. Unfortunately, our principal is leaving, which means that if we have any issues next year, we will be starting from scratch with someone who doesn't know the history and that could really suck -- but you know, this is not our first time at the rodeo and I think we have a pretty good track record re: dealing with the school and advocating for our child, so we will deal with whatever comes up. I think Enthusio is in a better place this coming year too -- he still has his moments, but he's definitely made progress and I still think having him stay back a year will really help.

Both he and Mermaid brought home good report cards. Mermaid got all B's except for her A in spelling, which is no surprise since she has taken to studying the dictionary in the last few weeks. Maybe we will be seeing her at the national spelling bee one of these years!

So far we are having a pretty lazy summer experience. Both kids started their only activity thus far, swim practice, this past week, and they both like it a lot. With Mermaid that is no surprise, since she loved it last year, but this is Enthusio's first time and it's great to see him feeling good in a group of kids at his same skill level.

In other news, I turned 36 this past Monday. The number just bothers me. Maybe because it's a downhill slide toward 40 now? I can definitely tell you that I don't feel 36 years old. In my mind, I'm still about 17...

CONSUMER ALERT! Costco has changed their ridiculously liberal returns policy, with regard to computers only. Now you can only bring them back for a refund for 6 months. I found this out on my birthday, after fighting with my laptop all weekend. It developed some kind of driver meltdown after I installed the software that came with our video camera about a month ago. This the laptop I just bought this past October, so you can imagine how thrilled I was about this turn of events. Anyway, let me just recap the situation for you:
1. The only reason I bought this particular video camera was so we could upload video to our computer and create our own DVDs. We've now had the camera over a year and have yet to do this a single time.
2. The only reason I finally installed the video camera software was to upload Mermaid's performance of "When I'm 64" at the school talent show to the computer. It turned out that her performance was got taped over about 3 days after it happened, which is a subject dead and buried between Reasonable Man and myself, but nonetheless -- I wasn't able to perform the operation that was my sole reason for installing the software in the first place. This installation proceeded to cause problems with my computer that made it impossible to shut down properly and also caused it to spontaneously restart whenever I left it sitting there for any length of time, on or off.
3. The only reason I bought this particular computer was that it was the cheapest one at Costco, where I believed I would be able to return it for a full refund if anything went wrong with it. Their new six-month policy evidently went into effect over a year ago, and if I'd looked into it at all, I would have known that. Also, I can't blame them for changing it -- the old policy was just an invitation for abuse, after all. Nevertheless, it totally sucks for me, because if I had known I couldn't return the computer like I thought I could, I never would have bought this computer. I don't know what brand I would have gone with, but I can assure you that a Compaq/HP would not have been it.
4. Not only did I buy a computer I wouldn't have bought, but because of how much I spent on it, the Costco people talked me into upgrading my membership so I can get cash back at the end of the year or something like that. I'm still not clear on what the benefits of that are.
In short -- I tried to work the system but didn't do my homework, and ended up getting kind of screwed. Don't let this happen to you.

My final item is that, on the brink of remodelling the crap out of the Green House, we have decided to move instead. It started with me going to look at a house a couple of neighborhoods over from here on a whim several weekends ago and just snowballed from there. So now I am studying the real estate section every week and going to open houses, as well as doing work on the Green House with a mind to selling the place at some point in the near future, and hopefully some time in the next year, we will be living in a one-story house that is bigger, has at least 4 bedrooms, and has a pool. Pretty exciting stuff!

I'm sure there is more detritus to report, but that's all that is coming to mind at the moment, and I need to start doing some stuff around here, so that's all for now!

The Essential Self

2006-06-10T09:06:00.000-07:00

This awesome post beautifully sums up an unexpected benefit of having a developmentally delayed child. As Mermaid heads into that great battlefield we call adolescence, she does so with her sense of self fully intact, not caring how she looks or what anyone else thinks of her. It's a quality we could all use.

Enthusio's therapist talks a lot about helping him get in touch with his "essential self" -- those qualities of goodness and wholeness we all have that are the real us, not the constructs of our personalities that keep us protected from the outside world. I admit kind of thought she was full of crap for a while -- you know, "come on, lady -- we just want him to be able to go to school without crying everyday" -- but the more I heard about it, the more I realized that getting in touch with the essential self is a real and positive thing, and we are fortunate enough to have a living, breathing example of it right here in our family.

We focus on all the downsides of autism, and there are many. I wouldn't wish it on any family. But the other side of the coin is what autism doesn't do -- it doesn't allow the child to separate from that essential self that will serve her well when puberty comes knocking on the door in a few years.

Enough Already!

2006-05-20T10:27:00.000-07:00

I never thought I'd be in this position, but I'm going to defend Britney Spears. I have to. This is getting ridiculous.

Yes, all the evidence points to her being an idiot. Her taste in men is obviously crappy. Her music has always been pretty sorry, and the bits of her horrible reality show that I saw convinced me that there is some essential character development that doesn't happen when you spend your late teens and early twenties surrounded by sychophants instead of working at low-paying jobs, living in crappy apartments and maybe struggling through school or something.
But I also think she's getting a raw deal in the current media obsession with her parenting skills. Okay -- driving with the baby in her lap? Terrible idea. I'm definitely not giving her a pass on that one, and I'm not buying that crap about her having race away from the vicious paparazzi.
But then -- okay, poor Sean apparently hit his head when something went wrong with high chair and he fell. He was with the nanny at the time. Well, guess what? Stuff like that happens. One time when Reasonable Man and I were right there, we were getting Mermaid out of her high chair and I still don't know what happened, but the tray was off and she fell forward and hit her forehead on the kitchen table. It was awful, and of course we felt terrible.

Last week, Britney and Sean were photographed riding down the road in a convertible. Britney was driving, and the baby was slumped over asleep in his carseat in the backseat of the car. Andhis carseat was facing forward. One article said it appeared he didn't have straps over his shoulders, and another said that he obviously wasn't fastened in properly. Well, maybe so, but unfortunately, babies slump over in their carseats like that sometimes. And yeah, they recommend that you keep the kid facing backward till they're a year old, but I'll go ahead an admit right now that I turned both my kids forward before that myself. Neither of them liked being in the backseat facing backward and not being able to see me, and often that lead to a lot of crying that I decided was not worth it. Sometimes you make that kind of a decision as a parent, you know?

And the latest is -- *gasp!* -- Britney was holding the baby in one arm and had a glass in her other hand, and she tripped. She freaking tripped, people. Yeah, clearly that makes her an unfit mother. I mean, I don't know about you, but I've never tripped since I became a mother...
Oh, except that one time when I did. And I actually did drop my baby. I was carrying her up to our third-floor apartment and caught my toe a few steps from the top. I had to make a quick decision -- drop Mermaid on her back on the landing in front of me so I could catch myself, or fall on top of her. I chose dropping her -- it was only a few inches, and fortunately there was some of that nubby industrial carpet that they have in store and restaurants and stuff to soften her fall a little bit. She started howling and I felt horrible, but she was fine.

Mermaid also fell off the couch when she was a baby. And one time I accidently dropped the cordless phone and it hit her in the head. We all want to protect our kids from those kinds of things, but there's only so much you can do. We all get a bad bonk once in a while.

Maybe Britney gets all the media attention she does because her behavior has been questionable in the past, but I was a young first-time mom too, and I'm just grateful I didn't have the paparazzi following me around and watching me screw up back then. If this keeps up, what's next? Is there going to be an article every time Britney takes her baby out in the sun without a hat? A few years down the road, are we going to hear about every time he fights with his little sister, goes out to play without a jacket, or gets less than 100% on a spelling test?

Maybe I'm a hypocrite that it doesn't bother me if the press beats up on Britney about KFed or her dubious fashion choices, but all this bashing of her parenting skills just doesn't sit well with me. Raise your hand if your parenting could stand up to the constant media scrutiny hers gets?

Yeah, I know:

2006-05-20T09:13:00.000-07:00

It's been a while.

Life has been pretty eventful lately. In the good news column, last night was our school carnival, featuring (for me anyway) the used book sale. That means there is no longer an ocean of brown paper grocery bags full of books in my living room. It also means I no longer have to look at the pile of papers sitting on my coffee table (aka my desk) and guiltily think about what I should be doing to prepare for the used book sale. It all came together in the end. The bad news was, it poured rain on the carnival. The good news was, the used book sale was under shelter. The bad news was, the books kept getting wet anyway. We had to keep running around wiping them off with paper towels. The good news is, people bought them anyway. Only maybe a third of the books I unloaded from my minivan at the beginning of the afternoon went back into it at the end of the evening. Also, my lack of volunteers turned out to not be a problem. One lady who showed up to work her shift from 5:45-6:30, and both she and her husband hung around till closing. Her husband wasn't even signed up to work, and he both went around yelling that all books were ten cents a piece during the last half hour we were open AND helped up pack up at the end. I love that guy.

After the carnival was the talent show. A whole crowd of people was huddled in the sheltered spot outside the MPR where the show was going to be just to get out of the rain for quite a while before they unlocked the doors and went in. It was a pretty soggy crowd in there, and we nevered did get a seat, but we watched the whole thing. Mermaid's performance of "When I'm 64" went off without a hitch. She kinda stood there looking away from the audience without smiling the whole time, but she sang it nice and loud, and the lyrics only got away from her once. She was really pleased with herself and we were proud of her. And when the talent show was done, we were able to grab both kids and make a quick break for it, due to the fact that our minivan was still parked right outside the MPR, right by the sheltered lunch tables where the used book fair had taken place.

Priorities when I got home were: change into sweats, pour a glass of wine, and count the money from the book sale. We made $181 -- woo hoo! I feel it was pretty successful, which is good since I've already been informed I'll be running it again next year by the person who volunteered me to do it this year without my permission. That's what I get for being good friends with the PTA VP of Events.

In other news, it's been a rough week for my grandma. Come to think of it, it's been a rough month for her. A rough year, even. She's been in a nursing home since early April, and I've been going to see her every week, which has been kind of nice. I've enjoyed spending time with her, and bringing her stuff to eat (she doesn't love the food at the nursing home), and having me visit seems to give her a boost.

Unfortunately, after my parents went on vacation for two weeks, Grandma ran into some health problems and got sent to the hospital twice -- once with a blood clot in her leg a week ago Wednesday, and then again this past Tuesday night with congestive heart failure, which has been a problem she's had pretty regularly over the last few years. The first time she went in, the nursing home called my parents' home number, left a message, and didn't bother to call any of the zillion other numbers on the list. So none of us even knew she was at the hospital having surgery until two days later, when my aunt and uncle came down from where they live in the mountains to visit her and found her bed at the nursing home empty.

Grandma came through that okay, but started having problems breathing almost as soon as they sent her back to the nursing home Monday night, and she was back in the ER 24 hours later. By this time, my aunt and uncle had had to return to the mountains. The hospital assured my aunt that Grandma was comfortable, but because the hospital was crowded, she was in the hallway of the ER. Big Little Brother, who lives just a couple of miles away from the hospital, went over to see her, and called and told me I should come down, so I did. It was awful to see poor Grandma, lying there in the hospital. She wasn't hardly moving at all, and when I went to talk to her, she told me "I just want this to be over." I stayed there with her in the ER, and fortunately they had a room ready for her about an hour after I got there. On the way up, she said they weren't supposed to be taking her upstairs because "I didn't want to go." Even though she did seem to understand that they couldn't just leave her in the ER hallway indefinitely, she continued to insist that she'd been told she wouldn't be moved once she got to the hospital.

I stayed with her for the rest of the afternoon, went to BLB's for a few hours for dinner and such, and then returned to the hospital to spend a couple of hours with her. The next morning I was back again, and I stayed all day. My aunt and uncle were on their way back down from the mountains, and my parents were flying back from Hawaii a few days early. In the meantime, Grandma was actually getting a little better, much to her dismay. She wasn't eating or taking her medication, and I think she thought that would just finish her off. I was supposed to leave around one, but once the doctor came in and told her she was actually improving, I decided to hang around. Poor Grandma just didn't know what to do, and it was pretty hard to know what to tell her, but I'm glad I was there with her. Once my aunt, uncle, parents and BLB arrived, it was decided Grandma would go back to the nursing home the next day and stay there -- no more going to the hospital. In the meantime, she felt like eating, and went ahead took her meds again. She was pretty tired by then, so we left to let her get some rest and went out to dinner.

I'm really proud of my family. Everyone appreciates what everyone else is doing, and there's no complaining that this person should be doing more or anything like that. Everyone was glad my parents were able to go on their long-planned trip to Hawaii, and they didn't mind coming home a few days early. Reasonable Man didn't mind holding down the fort up here in Davis while I was there with Grandma for almost two days. BLB didn't mind running around, getting Grandma settled in nursing home on Monday night and everything else that followed. And I'm so glad I was able to go down and be with her on Wednesday and Thursday, even though she kept encouraging me to go home. I know she was glad I was there, and I was glad I could be a comfort to her and that she didn't have to be alone. I don't know what the next few weeks will bring, but I'm awfully glad to have my school stuff over with so I can concentrate on more important things and be available for my family as needed.

Spring Has Sprung...

2006-05-06T12:10:00.000-07:00

... and it's kicking my butt. If I spend more than a few minutes outside this past week, I sneeze for an hour. Running is out. So is yardwork. I actually don't really like going out to the mailbox all that much, truth be told.

Just one more reason to be looking forward to summer...

Jump Around!

2006-05-06T10:44:00.000-07:00

Rewind several weeks back to spring break, when we were spending a morning at the home of my friend Crazy Karin. Moms and kids had finished dyeing Easter eggs and were scattered in various places around the house, and I asked Crazy Karin if she knew where Mermaid was (I knew where Enthusio was: at the computer. He is obsessed with video games and will choose playing them above all else most of the time, even if he's in a girl house where most of the games available involve kitties or ponies or something). CK said "she's out there having a merry old time on the trampoline." And indeed she was. I had witnessed Mermaid on that trampoline many times with other kids, but it was the first time I'd ever seen her on it alone, and "bliss" does not adequately decide the expression on her face.

"I don't know why you guys don't have a trampoline," CK said.

"Neither do I," I replied.

And so, less than a week later, this suddenly glaring lack of a trampoline in our lives was rectified. I did some research online, chose a safe model, ordered it, and returned from a busy morning one Wednesday to find three enormous boxes'o'trampoline (and safety net) waiting for me on the front porch. Being me, I almost immediately set to work assembling the contraption, and about 7 hours later, I had this to show for my efforts:

Also, this:

And so our bouncy adventure began.

Pluses:

The kids are getting lots of exercise. That first evening, when they came in for dinner all red-faced and sweaty, I knew this was going to be a good development. It would be fair to say that our whole family struggles a bit with our weight, and what with all the media hoopla about how we are raising a generation of fat kids, etc., I am happy to add another activity that is actually, you know, active to their life.

Tons kids have passed through our backyard since the trampoline came into our lives. I really like having a yard full of happy kids. A week or two ago, I was coming back from a run and because of the open space next to our house, as I came up the street was was treated to the sight of 5 kids bouncing into view above our back fence -- how fun is that? Jumping on the trampoline is an activity that keeps Mermaid engaged with other kids a lot longer than a lot of other things, so that's great.

Several times we've had dinner with friends and then brought everyone back to the house so the kids could jump and the parents could just sit and hang out for a while. So the tramp has added a new dimension to our social life, and that's always a good thing.

Minuses:

This isn't completely a minus, because it only bothers me a bit and the kids not at all, but 2 or 3 kids on our street who previously had zero interest in playing with Mermaid and Enthusio are now knocking on the door to play with them just about every day. One of them is at least diplomatic enough to ask Mermaid to come out and do things other than jump on the trampoline once in a while, but generally they end up in our backyard. It's really not a huge deal, just a little irritating.

Enthusio seems to end having a lot of meltdowns when the tramp is full of kids, depending on his mental state, how tired he is, etc. When a group of kids gets together out there, they always seem to want to come up with games where if you do this or that or whatever, you're "out," and that situation is always rife with peril for Enthusio -- at this point in time, he absolutely cannot handle finding himself on the losing end of anything, and between his lack of confidence in his physical abilities and his current belief that EVERYTHING is unfair, it just turns into a mess over and over. Reasonable Man and I disagree on how to handle this: he says we should just ban those kinds of games for right now, and I can see the wisdom of that (it's our trampoline and Enthusio should be able to feel safe and happy when he plays on it), but I'm also wary of removing every obstacle from his path and communicating to him that a) we don't believe he can learn to handle things better and/or b) all he has to do is cry a few times and we will make sure he gets his way. I am constantly torn between wanting to let him have his emotions without making him feel he is wrong to feel the way he does, and wanting him to learn to control them already. As always, it's a tough one.

Celebrity New Items

2006-04-30T18:07:00.000-07:00

I don't care if Katie Holmes had a silent birth or not. I don't care who dropped Britney Spears' son on his head (the child would obviously have a better shot at living a normal life if he was being raised by chimps regardless of whether Brit or K-Fed was there when it happened, so whatever). I don't care what continent Brangelina's baby is born on or what he or she looks like. And I don't really care about that whole Charlie Sheen/Denise Richards/Richie Sambora/Heather
Locklear mess going on. I really don't.

But I am DYING to know why Keith Richards was in a palm tree, out of which he fell and got a concussion. Seriously. They can't keep that kind of info from us indefinitely, can they? I mean it -- the public has a right to know. Color me waiting with bated breath (baited breath? Whatever.) Inquiring minds want to know!

Life Gets In The Way

2006-04-29T10:30:00.000-07:00

I am constantly writing blog posts in my head as I exercise, drive places, dry my hair or do any of the 487 other things that take up my time besides being at the computer. You know when I don't think much about writing in my blog? When I'm actually sitting at my computer, reading email or checking my list of sites I look at every day, which gets a little longer all the time, and I let myself believe that I must go through the whole thing before I do anything actually productive online. Answering email usually comes first, though that's always piling up as well, and then it's usually time to go to the gym, pick up the kids, help with homework, take a shower, something -- and then I don't write in my blog, or do any of the other things I need to do, which lately include:

- Querying the two agents out of my first list of ten who don't accept email queries
- Looking at the email I got a year ago from the woman who ran the used book sale at our upcoming school event, which is now my responsibility, and making sure I'm doing everything I need to do to get the word out that we are collecting used books, not to mention contacting the list of volunteers I'm going to need to help me actually run the thing, which is now less than 3 weeks away
- Working on the novel I started almost two years ago, which is good and which I think about and which I really really really want to work on but somehow never make the time to actually
do so

But let's face it: life has gotten complicated. Just this past week, for instance -- Enthusio is back in school, but he's been home every morning till 10:15 or so because I excused him from STAR testing because one of the practice tests freaked him out, and his teacher and the principal and I all agreed that it wasn't worth jeopardizing an already fragile situation to have him take it. It doesn't seem like that big a deal to just have him with me for that long -- we get Mermaid off to school, go to the gym, get some coffee, and then I drop him at school either before or after I go home to shower -- but you know, somehow taking a 7-year-old places makes it take just a little longer to get everywhere. So there's that. There are only two more days of testing, thankfully, and then that will be over.

Also, my grandmother has moved to a nursing home for the time being, and so going to see her one day a week is now top priority. I have really enjoyed both my visits to her so far, and I'm really happy to be able to go spend time with her. Also top priority is having lunch with Reasonable Man once a week, coffee with Sue, and anything else social. So between obligations (school stuff, getting kids from one place to another and getting their homework done) and spending time with the important people in my life, time gets to a premium. Here's how my week looked:

Monday - gym, quick coffee, quick shower, drop Enthusio off at school, lunch and shopping with Sue and her sister, pick up kids from school, homework
Tuesday - gym, quick coffee, quick shower, drop Enthusio off at school, Target, lunch with Reasonable Man, Trader Joe's, go home to put away groceries, pick up kids, drop Enthusio at Campfire meeting, get Mermaid a haircut, drop her at home, go hang out for the remainder of Campfire meeting, go home and help Mermaid with homework
Wednesday: appointment with personal trainer, drop Enthusio off at school, run errands, come back to school to work in classroom only to discover they don't need me, go home, shower, clean up kitchen/house, kids get home at 1:30, homework, take Enthusio to social skills group and do homework with Mermaid while he's there, go home
Thursday: gym, coffee, take Enthusio to school, drive to Walnut Creek, stop at store to pick up lunch, spend an hour having lunch and chatting with Grandma, drive back to Davis, pick up Enthusio from school and take him to therapy, read therapist's parenting book while I'm waiting for him, go home, do homework with Mermaid, Reasonable Man gets home and we go out for dinner where we have terrible service so we're there over and hour, go to my friend's office opening for an hour and get home after 8 pm
Friday: skip going to the gym, do homework w/ Enthusio, drop him off at school, go grocery shopping, make pasta dish for gathering I'm going to that night and cookies for girl scout meeting after school, clean house, shower, run errands, pick up Enthusio from school, get snack ready for girl scout meeting, host girl scout meeting from 3:15-5:30, take 5 minutes for minor grooming, greet sitter, and go to friend's house for dinner

I'm not complaining. There was lots of fun stuff packed into the schedule this week, and even my "stressful" stuff is not exactly the stuff of which nightmares are made. And not all my weeks look like this, but the school-related activities sort of naturally ratchet up this time of year, so at this point I'm just looking forward to getting it all done and surviving till the end of the school year. Maybe I'll blog more then!

Enthusio Update

2006-04-18T14:05:00.000-07:00

He went back to school yesterday, and had great day, according to both he himself and his teacher. I'm having her call me to let me know how it goes each day this week. He did melt down a couple of times yesterday afternoon, and I didn't have high hopes of him having another great day at school today, just because of how things started out. First, he argued with me and then cried because I made him turn off the TV and take a shower before school this morning. Then he acted really put out about a couple of other things before I took them to school. It's never a good thing when we have tears 3 times before he even goes to school!

On the other hand -- I'm beginning to think things are not as bad as we thought with him. Reasonable Man, Enthusio's therapist and I have all talked about his extreme sense of injustice, and his therapist hypothesized that this is because he has developed an expectation that things will never go his way due to low self esteem. But this past week, after hearing from a good friend that her 7-year-old daughter is also going through a major "life is so unfair" phase and that she read in a book about 7-year-olds that this is a common thing for them to go through, I've been asking around a bit, and guess what? Sounds like a lot of them go through this. I know that the constant falling apart and the complete inability to deal with any frustration whatsoever is still not a normal or healthy thing for him, but it's awfully good to hear his belief that everyone else in the world gets to do things he doesn't get to do, etc, etc, is probably a phase and not a sign that his sense of self worth is a lost cause.

Rain, Rain, Rain

2006-04-15T09:34:00.000-07:00

I'd love to know the number of Californians who have written whiny posts about the rain in their blogs over the past few weeks. In case you haven't heard -- we've had an absolutely unreal amount of rain over the past two months or so, and now here it is mid-April, and we're still waiting for spring. Poor us, huh? Those of you who live in parts of the country where rain is a regular part of the summer, sub-zero temperatures are regular part of the winter, and wearing shorts and sandals for most of October every year must be really dripping with sympathy for us, huh?

I don't usually mind the rain too much, but I would have appreciated this particular patch of wet weather not coinciding with my first (and hopefully only) experience of "homeschooling" immediately followed by spring break. It was very inconvenient to have to try to remember which days it was raining and therefore Enthusio couldn't have ridden his bike for at least 20 minutes in order to count it as PE as I fudge on his Independent Study Log, which I have to turn in next week. There was also that whole issue of being trapped in the house a lot. Not great. I could have been better about things, God knows -- there are plenty of museums and such around here I could have taken him to. Unfortunately, rainy weather just makes me want to hold up in the house and lie on the couch. It does not inspire me to take my son out and enlighten him in a cultural way.

All the rain reminded me of this story I read in my 5th or 6th grade reader. It was about a human colony on Venus, where it rained all the time except for one hour every 7 years, and there was this girl at school who everyone hated because she'd lived on earth and was probably moving back to earth eventually, so they were jealous that she could remember what the sun was like. On the day the rain was supposed to stop, there's some kind of altercation and her classmates lock her in a closet, and they end up forgetting about her while the sun comes out and she misses the whole thing. I remembered the basic plot points of the story and also the poem that the girl wrote: "I think the sun is a flower/ that blooms for just one hour" -- so I Googled it and found the story online. It turns out that it's called All Summer In a Day
and it was written by Ray Bradbury. I was kind of surprised at how much of it I remembered and that it would stick with me for so long -- I had also remembered that the girl's name was Margot, and I guess that I identified with her -- she was sensitive, and poem indicated that she was a good writer. Reading it again after all these years, I was particularly struck by the bullying aspect of it, since that's a topic that's been on my mind a lot lately.

Thursday was such a fake-out, because not only did it not rain -- it was 75 or 80 degrees out, and the sun was shining and it was just the kind of gorgeous spring day we should be having regularly. And we all knew that it was supposed to turn around and rain again the next day, so it felt particularly cruel, but we took advantage of it and spent the afternoon at the park. Yesterday actually was fairly dry -- the skies were gray, and the rain came down a few times, but for the most part it was pretty nice out. We spent the morning in our friends' backyard, and when it started sprinkling, the kids just kept jumping on the trampoline and the moms just kept sitting there on the porch chatting. Today is a little colder, a little grayer, but it's still not actually raining, and I am just hoping it stays fairly dry out so we can enjoy the Easter egg hunt at the park our friends are having at noon. Maybe we're adapting to this rain thing -- I guess that's what you do. The good news is, starting Monday, the forecast is for sun. Hopefully it's the beginning of something and not just another sample of what we've been missing so far this April.

Moving Right Along

2006-04-05T13:05:00.000-07:00

Well, I did it. I just sent out my first agent query! You know, in the past, this process must have been SUCH a pain in the ass. If I was only using the book of agent listings I've had sitting on my shelf for a while, I would have much less idea about each of the agents I'm querying, but compliments of the internet, I've been able to find out more info about most of them. A few of them actually have blogs :-) and a lot of them accept queries via email, so that's pretty cool. Anyway, I have a list of 10 agents who sound good, and I've written my query letter and fiddled with it and I'm hoping it's good. I guess we'll find out when these agents start replying, either saying no thank you or asking to see sample chapters of my work.

In addition, I've put my work a little more out there for feedback this past week. I sent all three novels to my mom, asked a girl who babysits for us to read them (I thought it might be nice to get some feedback from an actual young adult) and I've now heard some positive things about the third, most recently-written novel The Princess of Whatever from two of the people I gave it to. Sure, I'm married to one of them, but he is usually willing to be fairly honest in his assessment of my work, and I don't think he would have led with "I think this is best thing you've ever written" if he iffy about it. He reads a lot and knows all my work, and so this is high praise in my book. Good feedback on this particular novel feels really good since it was, in some ways, SO difficult to write. Reasonable Man says that I got the tone right, which is good to hear.

Getting back to passing the manuscripts on to my mom. She had to ask me for them, and I've been thinking about why that would be. I am tremendously proud of them, and she always wants to read my stuff, so why wouldn't I be passing them along to her as I've written them? Well, there is the fact that she's my mom, and my novels are full of teenagers doing things that parents don't want their teenagers doing, and maybe there is still a little of that whole "she's my mom and I don't want her thinking I do that stuff," which is obviously pretty silly, considering I'm 35 years old and in less than two years, I will be the mother of a teenager myself.

But there's a more general issue as well, and here it is: if a grown-up asks me if they can read some of my writing, I usually want to give them this other novel I wrote called Claim to Fame. It's about people in their early 20s, but at least the target audience is adults. That's great, but the fact is, what I want to do long-term is write for teens. I'm not embarrassed to tell people that, but it would seem I'm a bit squeamish about showing people my work in that area, and if the dream I'm currently (and finally actively) pursuing comes true, these things are going to be out in the world where anyone, not just the people I pick and choose, can read them. So I'm thinking it may be time to try and develop -- hm, a thicker skin is not the right term -- let's say a little more confidence about what I do. I write books for young adults -- they aren't genre romances, but they do focus on romantic relationships, and my target audience is teen-age girls. And not that I've gone around apologizing for them, but I do think I've found myself trying to explain what the heck I'm doing writing for and about teenagers, and I am hereby officially done with that. So there.

2006-04-01T11:50:00.000-08:00

I haven't read many YA novels in a while, so I had forgotten about how the tone in them is different than the tone in a novel written for adults. It's hard to put your finger on what it is exactly, but the closest I can come to explaining it is to say, remember that thing you used to hear from your English teachers about how you should show, don't tell? Well, there's a lot of that kind of telling that goes on in YA novels, particularly if they are written in the first person. YA protagonists are always telling you how they feel and explaining crap to you. The funny thing is, this is something I was really trying to cut down on in my work because it seemed like a weakness to me, and I still don't want tons of it there, but I think what's there can still work because of the audience for whom I'm writing (I almost said "market" instead of "audience" there -- perhaps I am beginning to think of this in business terms after all!) I don't ever want to talk down to my readers, but then again, teens are not going to be analyzing the subtext...

From My Imaginary Mailbag

2006-04-01T10:01:00.000-08:00

Tracie, I noticed some interesting titles on your list of the books you've read this year: Topping From Below, and All's Fair in Love, War & High School. The first one sounds dirty, and the second one sounds like something girls in 6th grade would love. Weren't you an English major in college? What gives?
- Curious

Curious - I'm glad you asked this question. Yes, I do have a degree in English, and you're right, these titles are kind of outside the norm for even my eclectic reading habits. But I have good reasons for having read these titles, and here they are.

Topping From Below sounds dirty because it is -- the novel is about kinky sex. I'm not a prude but I don't usually read kinky sex books. I read this one because a friend of mine gave it to me -- she knew the author and actually appears as a very minor character in the book (the main character runs into her at the grocery store), which is set in the part of Davis where we live. It wasn't a very good book, but I enjoyed all the references to streets and businesses in Davis that I know. I could have done without all the stuff about without all the stuff about dripping candle wax and nipple clamps though.

In case you're curious, the term "topping from below" is part of the domination/submissive lexicon, and refers to the sub trying to control what's going on. It is not considered a good thing in terms of dom/sub relations, as in "oh, you don't want to get involved with that guy -- he tries to top from below." And before you ask, I didn't know that before I read the book.

All's Fair in Love, War and High School is one of the books I'm reading in the name of market research. I'm looking at different young adult books that deal with relationships to see what's out there and how my own work compares. So far I haven't been overly impressed with what I've read, which makes me think I have a pretty good shot at this whole thing. All's Fair actually was kind of a cute book -- it didn't strive to be anything more than it is -- Chicklet-Lit? -- and it had some pretty funny parts, so I enjoyed reading it. The other one I've read so far, Hard Love, tried for more serious issues, and didn't fair so well in my eyes.

Next up: another YA title (RX, about a high school brain/drug dealer), and a reread of an old favorite (Tim, by Colleen McCullough, my choice for book club this month).