Under the Same Sky

Evelyn is at my parents house tonight. Since my in-laws are arriving on Wednesday, it completely messes up our normal visiting schedule. I was missing them, so we met them for dinner halfway between here and there (About 45 minutes for each of us.) My dad suggested that E bring her clothes if she wanted to come home with them, and of course she did. Staying with Granny and Grandpa is one of her favorite things. Anyway, as we got in the car to head home, we were talking about how it's not like it was, say three, four years ago. We'd get in the car and breathe a little sigh of freedom. Of course you love them dearly but a chance to pee alone for a day or two is pretty fabulous, you know. Now it was just sort of.. meh. Seven-year-old kids are not a lot of trouble and grief. I will hopefully be able to get a little more done while she's gone, though. I am so way behind on job stuff.

I am typing this while standing up. Yesterday, it hit me that I could move the printer on my desk to a little side table, and then stick my monitor and keyboard up there. I have an overturned plastic storage tub with a mousemat on top for the mouse. Unfortunately, my feet started off the standing desk experiment kind of hurting.. we've been busy with housework this weekend. It's actually a great height for it, even. I can't believe I never thought of doing this earlier.



We did have a little bit of excitement yesterday, when M went to open the windows to remove the outside panes and shattered one of the smaller inside panes in Evie's room. But, he went to Lowe's and bought glass and came home and replaced it, pronto. I think it may have been our fastest home repair ever. He also replaced brake parts on his car this weekend. I like being married to a handy person.

I am not sure I am going to be able to get over the weirdness of standing up. It has made me spend less time with my computer, though. I suspect that will be valuable on its own--I do tend to get sucked into reading stupid stuff that I don't even care about when I am just sitting at my desk. It is fairly easy to put it back, but I'm going to try to spend a majority of my time standing for a few days, at least. My tailbone is still sore.

I have started watching Orange is the New Black this weekend on Netflix and I am kind of fascinated by it. I have never had HBO or any of the other un-rated type of cable channel so I am totally not used to naked people walking around. Or people peeing on-screen. Or..other things. I have always been boring and law-abiding, so the idea of carrying drug money for my girlfriend just out of college and then going to prison for it ten years later is completely out of my realm of imagination. Am not very far into it yet but I like it so far.

I got dressed before we left for dinner and was feeling oddly constricted and uncomfortable. That is when I realized that I have not had on a bra since Monday. That is awesome.

I'm going to try something new and actually follow through with a picture of a finished project! We bought a new flat-screen TV to hang over the fireplace and we have had a LOT of setbacks in getting it put up, but it's finished now!



M thought this picture needed annotation but I'm too lazy to write captions directly on the photo like he envisioned. I shall just direct your attention to the highlights. First, we were not actually watching South Park, just flipping through channels with the mute on (as we were listening to Nat King Cole singing about Christmas.) Just getting the important stuff out of the way. ;) The TV looks smaller than it actually is. The big electronic things in the right bookcases are the receiver, dvd player, xbox and wii, and the important thing here is that... note that you don't see any cables from those items. We're going to do a little more prettification of that area but for now--not seeing cables running in front of the bookcase is enough. :) Also, those big black things on either side are speakers. Amazingly enough, those speakers were dragged all the way from Sweden with M--so purchased long before we moved in here--and they just happened to fit the spaces in the bookcase like that. Absolutely incredible...though they've been there so long now that I barely see them anymore.

And.. just a quick note on the presents on top of the bookcase. We put presents up there last year to keep them away from prying toddler fingers and then realized that it was really, really cute that way. So, there's my home decorating tip of the day--when possibly, use your wrapped presents as decoration, as it looks festive and happy and Christmasy, and it also keeps people from looking too closely at the interesting things under the tree. I do have some presents under both of the trees as well, just to keep it pretty. So far, Evelyn's been pretty good about not bothering them.. hope she keeps to that.

Now, the second thing I wanted to write about is Christmas cards. If I don't have your address and you think I should, send me an email at kisha at mosaicminds dot net. If you want to know my address, I have a contact info post here (friends only).

Update: the keys were found, but not until after my parents drove all the way to the next town (25 minutes from here, maybe 15 from where they were) and picked up M's keys and drove them all the way out to my house. Then, they walked in and announced they were going to look for my keys. I cheerfully told them to go for it. My niece walked directly across the room and said, "Found them!" within ten seconds. Seriously. I was stilll opening the gate* to the kitchen to go check on E's lunch. They were in Evelyn's toy oven. The really annoying thing is that I looked there three times. and both M and my mom suggested it as the place to look. AND I DID. They were near the back and I guess I didn't bend over far enough to see them. Argh. Oh, well. At least we found them. That makes life easier.

(M tried to give me the "you have to keep up with your keys from now on" speech, but I may have pointed out that HE was the one watching her when she took them and hid them, as I was carrying stuff in from the car, so we were able to avoid that particular discussion at the last minute. haha. :) )

So, on to the camping. The weather is abysmal. They have a camper so we can be indoors, but... still, not what you want when you go camping. This campground is much smaller than the other ones they've had, and more cramped. I am a bit concerned about what we're going to be doing, but I suppose it'll work out. I was planning on going over first thing this morning--originally, the was even leaving here with M at seven--but on second thought, I'm letting E sleep in as long as she will. It's actually quite lovely to have a little time to myself first thing in the morning. I guess I have that to look forward to when she stops napping, huh? Maybe? She's like her parents and has never been a habitually early riser.. thank goodness. I normally wake her up at 7:30 if she's not awake already, but compared to my dear, suffering friends with 5:00 babies, we're doing pretty good.

Anyway. That's about all I've got. Would someone volunteer to take our nasty weather for the rest of the week? No?

*Speaking of our kitchen gate, I do not understand why people have such a hard time with it. It swings open, and the latch is both tricky and requires a little strength, so I DO understand why no one knows how to open it until they're shown. Most people still have a hard time with it even after they're shown how to do it. I mean, I don't have a problem with people having issues with it, I just don't get it. I mean, nine times out of ten, I just step over it anyway. It's about as tall as I could comfortably step over myself, but I am shorter than all of my adult visitors. I really love it because it's metal, and thus sturdier than any other gate that I have ever seen, much more attractive than the plastic varieties, it's taller than most (good when one has an extremely tall child) and the swinging open thing is great too. Maybe it's considered rude to step over someone else's gate? I don't know. Anyway, the one thing I don't love about it is that I have spent a year talking about how well-designed it is to prevent little fingers from getting hurt, and Evelyn found the one place where it's possible to smash a finger this weekend. Hopefully she won't lose a nail from it like we thought at first.

My parents are pretty nifty. My dad works for the university and they're on spring break this week, so they came down yesterday to spend the night with their grandbaby. And us, I guess, but who really cares about us when there is THE BABY? You know, I always thought that would bother me, that people really just care about your kid and not you after you start having babies, but really.. eh. Not so much. Anyway, they came down and my dad, who has a hard time not making himself useful, got started on burning stuff in the back yard. Our yard is a disaster area because of all the ice storms and trees falling. As soon as we start getting things burnt, we have another storm. We've lost two trees this year and countless branches. M has been wanting to burn stuff for months now, but the weather hasn't been cooperative. He doesn't get much time to work on it. Anyway, we had a burn pile back there that was the size of a small house. It is now gone, as well as most of the brush from the surrounding areas. That sentence is just so inadequate to describe the amount of stuff that is gone now. The sad thing is that we still have half as much left to go on the other side of the yard, but the good news is that M can work on that on Saturday instead of the first pile. Maybe we'll even get it done sometime in the near future!

Which will be extra good because Miss Baby loves being outside and she's now big enough to realistically be outside with her while getting some stuff done on the yard. We have a to-do list a mile long. I have started raking the leaves out of the flower beds, and we saw our first Easter lily blooming yesterday. I love spring. I really really do. I remember learning about the seasons when I was little and I had a hard time imagining that anyone could ever like any season but summer the best, but spring is pretty magical now that I'm an adult.

After a busy evening spent picking up sticks for the burn pile (she did well staying out of the way, or we would have had to bring her back in), Evelyn flat-out refused to come to Mommy for bedtime. She said, "Granny rock," and that was what happened. She wouldn't even come to me for nummy nummy. I was afraid she'd wake up hungry without it so I tried to convince her to come to Mommy for just a minute and eat before going back to Granny, but the mere thought of that made her cry. So... for the first time ever, Evelyn went to bed more or less without nursing (she did eat a tiny bit when she conned her way into a trip to the potty, but very little) and in the arms of someone besides me or M. It felt weird. And I was happy that my mom got to rock her to sleep, for E is not the most affectionate child ever, and is too busy to sit still for too many hugs and kisses usually, and that she is making progress on the whole sleeping/weaning thing, but also maybe I was a little sad that she didn't want Mommy at all. She really does not care for me when my mom is around, which is a little funny, and generally I don't mind, but then again... sometimes it irritates the crap out of me. She won't let me carry her, she won't let me push the buggy in a store, she just wants my mom. Oh, well.

We spent today just sort of hanging around. We went out for lunch and to do a little shopping, but we were all too exhausted from the night before to do much good at that. I gave away a piece of furniture to my parents, which was a sudden decision but a relief because we didn't have anywhere to put it. It's a kitchen hutch type of thing that we bought for the last place we lived, and it doesn't fit in our new kitchen, so it's been floating around our house for the last three years, trying to find a sensible place to stay. Then I made dinner and they left and Evie cried.. all very much as usual. She was wore out so bedtime was pretty easy at least.

And now I am going to go think about bed for myself. Happy that tomorrow is Friday!

M was watching HGTV this morning, and he left it on while I was putting E down for her nap. Suddenly, we worked up the inspiration to actually paint something in our house! Woohoo! When we moved in, we said that the absolute first thing to go would be the pink walls in the living room, dining room and hallway. We have now lived here three years and haven't touched any of those rooms, but have redone all three bedrooms and gutted the little bathroom and redid it, but have not done a single significant home renovation project since... well. Since Evelyn was born. (When we had this conversation earlier, M paused for dramatic effect and said, "we haven't done anything to the house since... oh, how long? Evie, how old are you?" And she said, "TWO!!" And M said, "ahh, right. In two years."

Two notes. One, we've been teaching her to say that she's two so we don't have to re-teach her how old she is in May. Second, our little bathroom is so darned nice and not a single person has ever commented on it. We did more work in there than anywhere else... ripping out the vanity, refinishing the hardwood floors, putting in new cabinets and lights and mirrors and painting it all a coordinating cream color to the bedroom itself. (We. HA! I was pregnant and M did it all.) I still walk in there and think, "wow, this room looks good." When we show people around our house, hardly anyone even really looks at that bathroom. It's nice, dammit, but no one cares. Maybe we should hand out little fliers when they enter the house. "Hi and welcome to our home, please rave over our little bathroom, we're needy." I guess the after means more when you know what it looked like before. (Bad pictures but you get the idea.)

Anyway, the dining room is now drying from its first coat. There was a metric assload of masking tape to do, but we got most of it done with a tiny assistant running around with us. Then she completely refused to fall asleep. It took me an hour longer than normal, and it ain't speedy most of the time. We didn't get to start painting until ten, but it went by pretty fast. I'm pretty excited about it. I really hate the pink. This will hopefully motivate us to do the living room and hallway, too. I sure hope so. It's difficult to do these things with a kid but other people seem to get stuff done occasionally so surely we can too.

For the first time in weeks, she has started waking up in the middle of the night again, so I guess I should get myself to bed while I still have the chance.

I have had two pen cups on my desk since I brought my stuff home from work, September 2007, because I have been too lazy to consolidate them. It took me until today to do something about it. Better late than never?

I just did something sneaky with my Walgreens receipt that earned me $4.20. I makes me feel giddy and a tiny touch guilty, but it is not worth the trouble of explaining. I didn't break any laws or anything but I did do something that was Not Intended by Walgreens.

On a similar note, M and I taught E to do the evil laughter thing this morning. Muahahahahaha. It was so funny.

We have spent the weekend working on a computer room cleanup project. I started it a while back but this room was piled high with stuff that I couldn't decide what to do with on my own so it didn't get anywhere near done. Plus, M's desk is always the worst part of the room, so I definitely needed his help there. (That post is still one of my favorites.) Inconceivably, my desk is now the worst looking part of the room. Good thing I got started on the pencil consolidation project this afternoon!

Even though I make homemade pizza from the same simple recipe at least twice a month, I always have to have the recipe out, hanging on the fridge. I always check the measurements, too, even though I know them. I don't know why I do this but it's very important to me, apparently. I don't like to cook things without access to the recipe if it's a dish that I first made from a recipe... even though I completely know them and have made so many changes to them that the original recipe barely applies. If I make something up or learned it from someone else without a recipe, it doesn't bug me at all. I just realized that. Yay for self-awareness!

I looked back at all of my old journal entries from May 12, 2006 and before (2007 being Evelyn's birthday) and tried to imagine myself writing those entries with absolutely no clue that two, three, four, five, years from then, I would be having a wee little baby yanked from my abdomen. It feels so strange that a day that is so emblazoned on my mind now meant nothing special then. It makes me wonder if today will be something amazing (or awful but let's so not go there) in future years.

We are teaching E to play in the computer room while we do other things. It is F A N T A S T I C. Occasionally stressful but fun. The cleanup project is helping a lot, too. Also, sometimes I turn M's computer on and let her watch YouTube videos in Swedish. She likes that for up to four minutes at a time! ;)

There is pretty much nothing better than strawberries and ice cream. *nod* I just told M that since I fixed them last night, I thought he should fix them tonight. He decided that he didn't think we should eat any tonight, in that case. He is such a guy sometimes. He did actually follow through and bring me ice cream. I used to have something to the nature of "True love arrives with Ben & Jerry's" as my 'title' on the muds... also M-inspired. I do believe I will keep him.

I just informed him of my plans to buy another twenty bags of frozen vegetables. He informed me that the basement freezer is getting really full by now. I think I shall have to plan some vegetable-type meals again. I just bought twenty .50 coupons that will double and make them free this week at Kroger. Spending three bucks for the coupons equals fifteen cents per bag. I love my new coupon hobby, really I do.

This weekend did not go as expected.

First, we had two things planned. One: mow lawn. Two: take pictures of baby. Then my parents called on Saturday morning and wanted us to come meet them for lunch in Lexington, which is about foty minutes from here. It was their anniversary and we thought, hey, might as well because after all, who cares about the gas prices*! M went out and mowed the lawn before we left, but we thought we'd save the pictures for Sunday. The lawn would be freshly mowed and it was supposed to be cooler. We thought that would work out well! We've been meaning to take "serious" pictures of Evie for weeks and months now but it somehow always gets put off because of weather or other plans or laziness or whatever. It was totally Going To Happen this time though!

(And, not a one of you are expecting to see 16-month pictures of my kid at the end of this post, are you? Ha!)

So, yes. We had a nice time, but there were no pictures taken Saturday. We did, however, finally get around to getting our eyes checked at McVisionsRUs. It's been way too long for both of us. I have been holding out because I wanted to go to my real eye doctor in my hometown but it is a bit much to schedule an appointment with a baby and make two separate trips up there just to pay more for the service, wait longer and also, factor in the cost of gas for the trips. When I was about eight, I got glasses for the first time, and I saw a different doctor for the first couple of visits. He made me cry. I am still leery of eye doctors and I barely even remember the first guy. M has been trying to convince me that I am an adult now and I can probably deal with someone else examining my eyes and so I finally decided to go with it. (Having said that, I was so anxious about it in the waiting room that I was sitting there seriously thinking that I'd probably rather be having a pap smear than see this new doctor and that is seriously messed up. Of course, I have also never been to any doctor where half of the exam is conducted in the waiting room in front of the other patients being herded like cattle through the office but still. WTF, btw?) But yay for new glasses! And they were to be ready on Sunday at four! Wow! But wait, that means we need to drive to Lexington again. Crap. Ahh, well, we'll still have plenty of time for pictures in the morning at least.

Except, I rarely take my toddler outside to play during the remnants of hurricanes. It didn't rain, though it was cloudy, but the wind was fierce. We puttered around the house, put the baby down for her nap and then decided to tackle our little storage room/closet. It gets super messy sometimes and just now it was stacked with my free stuff. We're organizing, getting stuff done. The little room is off the sunroom, so we are noting the windy conditions often. I am walking through the sunroom while M is in a different room when I hear a loud creaking sound and see something moving from the corner of my eye. TIMBER!

My husband, as is so often the case, is much more succinct than I am: clicky clicky linky linky with pictures.

So, that was special. We are SO LUCKY. It could have hit the house. It could have hit US, or our sweet little baby. It is mere feet from our computer room, where we would have been lounging had we not been taken by a fit of productivity. That tree is (well, WAS) freaking huge. There's a somewhat smaller chunk that fell towards the back of our property, which took out another tree. We also lost a huge branch in the front and there are gigantic limbs laying around in the branches like ticking bombs. As it is, the only damage other than to the trees themselves? Two sections of that lovely horse fence on our neighbor's property. (We walked over this evening to talk to him about it, which was much appreciated. He's a sweet older man who brings us organic vegetables in the summer and hangs them on our door handle so as not to 'bother' us. We met his daughter and granddaughter, who were just leaving, and she told us that her dad had said something about how he knew we'd be over to talk to them about it. I laughed later and said that it was really sweet because we have never once been over in the past, though he has walked over to talk to us, so it was sweet that he had such faith in us. M pointed out that we had never broken his fence before. Point taken.)

Anyway. So the wind died down and we decided to go on to Lexington to pick up our glasses. We walk in and they say, "oh, we tried to call you..." and that is when we knew that it wasn't going to end well. [Also, it helps, when you 'try to call someone' if you call the right number...] Apparently a computer system went down because the other store lost its power, and they were not able to finish the glasses. Haha, we were actually working on this pair but it's only half done! Too bad! But here, we did finish this first pair! So M, my darling sweet husband who I love beyond reason, received his glasses while I merely got a glimpse of my sadly gigantic lenses pre-framing (which just depressed me). M has terrible vision, yo. He has been complaining about needing new glasses for two years. Turns out that with his old glasses, he could only see with 20/20 vision! OMG, how awful! Spoiled brat. I sadly do not have any sympathy for his vision needs because some of us cannot even see that there are actually letters up on the screen without glasses. ;)

Oh well. Disappointing but no big deal, really, because they'll mail them to me (hopefully to receive tomorrow) and it's not like I can't see from the glasses I have. We have a nice little excursion, stopping in for Mexican in a newish restaurant which Evelyn LOVED for some reason. All was well and good until we got home and realized that our electricity was out. Sorta. The A/C had gone off just before we left and we assumed that we needed to go trip the breaker, but we forgot about it. When we returned, we realized that it was not just the air conditioning but half of the electricity in our house. We had power on one wall of the living room (so, the TV worked, but not the cable), in the bathroom, a light in our bedroom but not in the wall outlets... it was seriously messed up. I don't know who did our wiring but they had an interesting way of doing things. So suddenly we were in need of an electrician! Yay! Several long hours and some troubleshooting by my boyo, with assistance from my dad and grandfather, and we figure out that it was actually a problem with the electric company, so luckily we didn't end up with an expensive repair job on top of the tree expenses. The whole evening was really weird with these power issues, but we had full electricity back by eleven last night. Whee! It's a good thing, too, because otherwise, today would have been very boring. No TV, no cooking, no internet. I can't even bear to think about it.

This post has gotten much too long, but I should add one more thing. We had a storm-chasing tree service "company" come by last night and offer to give us a free estimate. They will happily do all the work for the wonderful price of $1800. We contacted other places today, including one that was recommended by a co-worker of M's, and they're going to take care of the big tree, and the dangerous limbs, for $600. So, while the whole thing sucks, it is not going to be a financial disaster like we feared at first, and since the tree turned out to be rotted in the middle... well, really, it was the best thing that could have happened that it fell down just the way it did. I did like that old tree, though. Luckily, I have six or twenty more trees to take its place in my heart...

The end. Finally.

*Some people care greatly about the gas prices. In fact, there were several incidents of fisticuffs breaking out at the gas stations in the town M works in on Friday. The cost of gas, it stinks, but you know what? As it turns out, gas prices didn't actually go through the roof like they were expecting. These shmucks got themselves arrested and assaulted over the equivalent of two dollars. The price of gas is terrible but WHY IS THERE SO MUCH HYSTERIA ABOUT TINY DIFFERENCES? Like the people who will stand in line for four hours to save ten cents per gallon and then run in and grab a carton of cigarettes or a Little Debbie. If that two dollars is so important to you, then maybe there are other areas you could consider cutting back on? Hmm?

Over a year ago, our bathtub faucet broke. It wouldn't let water come out of the tub spout, just the shower head. We have been running bath water via the shower head all this time. There are many problems with this approach, mainly relating to the speed of water delivery. It gets cold as it travels to the tub, so it's difficult to do water temperature correctly. It's slow slow slow, darn those water saving features! And it's just plain weird. But it's just one of those things we've lived with for so long that we just stopped thinking about trying to fix it, if you know what I mean. Finally, it occurs to us (and by us, I mean M) that you could like, fix it by replacing the spout doohickey. Turns out those are just like seven dollars at Lowe's, so he buys one. After it sits on the bathroom counter for a few weeks, he finally attempts to put it on yesterday to find that it didn't fit the pipe and he didn't have the correct tools. But the good news is that the old one might be fixable because it appears to be related to gunky build-up! So he soaks it in vinegar and after the proper application of a little elbow grease, all is well, and we finally had a working tub last night! We were both watching the thing dispense water from the appropriate spot this evening with glee and fascination. I might have gone so far as to call it sexy. We usually take a bath with Evelyn in the evening and then hand her off to the other parent and stand up for a quickie shower (just in case she has peed in the water, you know.) Tonight was Mommy bath, and as I stood up and flipped the doodad that switches between tub and shower.... the gasket broke.

Now we don't have a working shower at all.

Easy come, easy go.

I hope she didn't pee.

(p.s. We do have a second shower in the house, though I have never actually even used it. I guess it's a good thing that M wouldn't let me turn that tiny little shower into additional closet space last year via the installation of a clothes rod in the shower itself...)

We were up pretty early on Sunday morning because Evelyn decided that she had really had enough sleep, thank you. Instead of lazing the day away, I pestered M into getting up immediately and heading off to home improvement stores to get materials for one of our most recent obsession project plans. We make a lot of plans, the two of us, but usually we neglect to carry through with them until we lose the motivation to get started. Admittedly, we have a lot of other stuff going on (yard sale prep!) this week so it really wasn't the best time for it, but we are sort of fickle and cannot stay committed to only one crazy project.
( This is VERY image heavy. )

M and I did not quite get as much done this weekend and we wanted because we spent most of the time undoing what we had done already. We decided to babyproof the dining room, block it off and give it over to Evelyn to play in as she liked. As a trial run, we blocked the large entrance to the living room (nine feet) with the couch and a plastic tub, and we left three bookcases in there. We put her in there, and she was happy for five minutes playing with the vent in the floor, which was the only other thing in the room she wasn't supposed to play with. Then she stood up at the blocked entrance to the kitchen and yelled at us. We sat with her and she ran off to pull all the books off the bottom shelves. No other toy in the room tempted her for the rest of the trial period, so we spent today moving everything back the way it was and moving the bookcases out of that room. We're still in the middle of that project because for once, I refused to just pull all the books off the shelf willynilly. I am the keeper of the books and it takes ages to get them all put back together properly. No, wait, that's not why we're still in the middle of that project. We need to anchor them to the wall since the sproglet might start climbing things in the near future. Whatever, it's still not done, and I will have a fun time tomorrow keeping her out of mischief until it's all put away properly.

I haven't posted much of substance this week and that is because my baby has decided to be unhappy. You know how they say when mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy? That is a total lie because the truth is, it's when baby ain't happy that nobody is happy. She slept badly, she shrieked at me for hours, her belly hurt, her teeth hurt... maybe. The truth is we have no idea what's been wrong with her. Friday she seemed to do better, and she's been in mostly better spirits this weekend so I am hoping that this week will be better than last week. We usually have a nice little routine in our days, and she plays a lot in the floor, but when she isn't feeling great, she is much worse to crawl off and get into things she's not supposed to get into. She really doesn't prefer that I sit and play with her directly--she'd really rather I be sitting there watching her play alone, and participate occasionally, but she always knows when I'm not paying attention to her. This week it was necessary to do a whole lot of paying attention to her and only her and nothing but her, or she would crawl away. Of course, she would crawl away anyway and I would have to get up off the floor to go drag her back and then she'd get mad, but she crawled away slightly less than if I was trying to do something else. I have felt like a crummy parent, a little bit, because I am TIRED of sitting there playing with her all day long. I don't like sitting in the floor for hours. The clock, it moves slowly when you are handing her toys one at a time. I do enjoy it, really. I would just enjoy a little less of it and so I am hoping she is over her funk and is willing to let Mama relax a little this week.