Category Archives: adult-only

Published in the adult-only category

Good enough

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One of my wonderful friends told me that I inspire her because I have accomplished so much and I started out with so little. If I stop and think about that even semi-objectively she is right. But there is always that voice in the back of my head saying, “But you didn’t do ‘x’ and you failed at ‘y'” and those things seem to cancel out my accomplishments. But why? How do I lose credit for the things I have done? I got a high school diploma. I was the first one in my family to do so. I managed to avoid pregnancy/abortion when most folks in my life circumstances didn’t. I am not an addict and I seriously doubt I ever will be–given my familial background that is huge. I have a bachelors degree and a teaching credential. I have been to five foreign countries. I have been to 30 states including an amazing backpacking trip in Alaska (have I said thank you lately, DA?). I am a fairly technically skilled top. I am a very good teacher. I have a good eye for putting together colors in interior decorating (if I do say so myself. :P). I’m a good mom. I’m a good wife.

I am sane. I own my shit. I am good about boundaries. I give and receive respect. I am an honorable person.

If I fail the masters exam what have I lost? I lose out on the chance to have a piece of paper to hang on my wall. I lose out on the ability to feel snotty and superior because of my formally recognized education. In reality I won’t be more educated if I get the piece of paper. I will still be in the top pay bracket if I go back to teaching because no one can take away the units I have earned.

I’ve been having a serious identity crises lately because I feel like who I am has somehow become less since I became a mother. It’s rather bullshit though. I’m not actively doing a lot outside of being a mother right now, but that’s ok. That is the season of life I am in. I wanted it and doing this does not devalue me.

I am good enough.

Experimental cooking

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I’m going to boil some spaghetti noodles and chard. Then I’m going to stir fry them with garlic, oil, apple cider vinegar, balsamic vinegar, maybe a splash of soy sauce.

Hm. I wonder if this will work out.

ETA: I added harisa which is a blend of hot red peppers, olive oil, spices, and garlic.

This is hella spicy but really good.

book talk

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Many thoughts and feelings all jumbled up. I wonder how much of it is connected to the really complex and unsettled book I am reading. Midnight’s Children is utterly fascinating. I often have trouble getting into magical realism books at first and then I feel changed by the experience of reading them. I see more complexity in life and relationships. It’s really interesting.

To do

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This is getting overwhelming to think about so I’m going to type it up.

Clean out garage. Most stuff has to go into the storage shed. (We are having our roof replaced.)
Study for comp exam.
Continue weeding in the yards.
Water plants.
Borrow/steal/buy a rototiller for the yards.
Buy a bench for the front yard.
Figure out how I am going to hang the baby swing.
Return baby swing. (different one from above item)
Touch up paint around house.
Take empty paint cans and batteries and light bulbs to recycling center.
Vacuum.
Harass people to hurry up and fill in the google doc with what meat they want.
Take comp exam on Saturday.
Try not to angst about SFSI interview.
Pump milk.
Cook food.
Figure out how to use up food in the garage.
Invite people over to drink bad wine with us. (I’m weird about just throwing it away. Anyone want to come drink bad wine with us? The more the merrier. 🙂
Get some exercise.
Buy new door for coat closet.
Wash windows.
Try not to obsess about amount of money being spent on new roof and solar panels.
Don’t eat out. (See above cooking reference.)
Wash car-inside and out.
Juice oranges from tree.
Fill hot tub.

Some of that has to be done this week. Some of that doesn’t have a definite finish date on it. I’m feeling very very busy right now.

I hear it is poetry month

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In the course of studying for the comp exam (6 days and counting) I came across this lovely poem by William Wordsworth:

WE ARE SEVEN

——–A SIMPLE Child,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death?

I met a little cottage Girl:
She was eight years old, she said;
Her hair was thick with many a curl
That clustered round her head.

She had a rustic, woodland air,
And she was wildly clad: 10
Her eyes were fair, and very fair;
–Her beauty made me glad.

“Sisters and brothers, little Maid,
How many may you be?”
“How many? Seven in all,” she said
And wondering looked at me.

“And where are they? I pray you tell.”
She answered, “Seven are we;
And two of us at Conway dwell,
And two are gone to sea. 20

“Two of us in the church-yard lie,
My sister and my brother;
And, in the church-yard cottage, I
Dwell near them with my mother.”

“You say that two at Conway dwell,
And two are gone to sea,
Yet ye are seven!–I pray you tell,
Sweet Maid, how this may be.”

Then did the little Maid reply,
“Seven boys and girls are we; 30
Two of us in the church-yard lie,
Beneath the church-yard tree.”

“You run about, my little Maid,
Your limbs they are alive;
If two are in the church-yard laid,
Then ye are only five.”

“Their graves are green, they may be seen,”
The little Maid replied,
“Twelve steps or more from my mother’s door,
And they are side by side. 40

“My stockings there I often knit,
My kerchief there I hem;
And there upon the ground I sit,
And sing a song to them.

“And often after sunset, Sir,
When it is light and fair,
I take my little porringer,
And eat my supper there.

“The first that died was sister Jane;
In bed she moaning lay, 50
Till God released her of her pain;
And then she went away.

“So in the church-yard she was laid;
And, when the grass was dry,
Together round her grave we played,
My brother John and I.

“And when the ground was white with snow,
And I could run and slide,
My brother John was forced to go,
And he lies by her side.” 60

“How many are you, then,” said I,
“If they two are in heaven?”
Quick was the little Maid’s reply,
“O Master! we are seven.”

“But they are dead; those two are dead!
Their spirits are in heaven!”
‘Twas throwing words away; for still
The little Maid would have her will,
And said, “Nay, we are seven!”
1798.

You’re kidding, right?

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So I went to www.findyourspot.com and answered questions. Here are the top 24 places that site thinks I should live:

Little Rock, Arkansas
Fayetteville, Arkansas
Salem, Oregon
Eugene, Oregon
Charleston, West Virginia
Shreveport-Bossier City, Louisiana
Corvallis, Oregon
Alexandria, Louisiana
Portland, Oregon
Santa Cruz, California
Monroe, Louisiana
Santa Barbara, California
Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Ventura, California
Frederick, Maryland
Medford, Oregon
Baltimore, Maryland
Hartford, Connecticut
Valencia, California (Ironically–this is right around where I was born.)
Providence, Rhode Island
Cape Cod, Massachusetts
Palo Alto, California
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Champaign-Urbana, Illinois

They didn’t have a question for, “Please sweet Jesus keep me away from the bible belt.”

Meat

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I’m looking into ordering some grass fed beef. It looks like ordering half a cow costs $6.15/lb while a whole cow costs $6.00/lb. Half a cow represents ~170 lbs of meat and a whole cow is ~340 lbs of meat (makes sense now doesn’t it). There would be additional delivery fees as well. I’m putting this up here because I am open to sharing this order with a bunch of people (all co-op style) if there is interest. I would cheerfully deal with picking up the meat (I would need to rent/borrow a truck for a whole cow) and arranging for it to be divvied up. The meat would be a mixture of steaks, roasts, ground beef and stew. Usually a breakdown for a split (half) of a cow looks like this:
15 lbs pounds steaks (one – two pound packages)
17 lbs roasts (2.5 – 4 lbs)
35 lbs pounds ground beef (1 lb. packages)
11 lbs chuck and round steaks (1.5 – 2 lb. packages)
7 lbs stew meat (1 lb packages)

I don’t have the storage for a whole cow by myself but I could potentially help with storing some meat for other people on a limited basis. This would need to be negotiated case by case because I will run out of room. The company I am looking at is: www.morrisgrassfed.com

Pickup would be in early June, this gives us all time to eat out of our freezers and make some room. 🙂

So! Who is interested? We could have a meat pick-up party. 🙂 I would like to put in an order by the end of April.

Dancing

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I haven’t mentioned it, but Noah signed us up for tango lessons. 🙂 We’ve been to one so far and it’s fun.

And in other news we might just go to PEERS this weekend. Noah is more than a little into Girl Genius so the theme is too perfect. Now we have the problem of finding stuff to wear. I have Victorian garb, but I may or may not be able to get my expanded body into it. And I’ll certainly need to get my corset back from Yani before I can even try. If anyone is going or not going and they have Victorian garb for a body that is more like a size 14 could I maybe borrow it if you aren’t using it? And I have no idea what Noah is going to wear. Hmmmmm…..

Amusingly, in order to study costume stuff I had to admit that I bought him Girl Genius comics for his birthday. 🙂

{milestones} First sign

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I missed a little bit of poop, I could hear it, and I took her in to the diaper changing table. It was only a tiny bit so I asked her if she needed to go more or if she was all done using signs. She signed more! So I took her in to the bathroom, put her on her potty, and she peed and pooped lots!

It wasn’t a picture perfect, text-book ASL sign but it was really close. I would accept that as her sign for more. When she finished peeing/pooping she started clapping. I think that clapping is her ‘all done’. 😀

up

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It’s to the point where I get really excited about waking up in the middle of the night if Shanna stays asleep. This is the most consistent ‘alone time’ I get.

I haven’t written about the Oklahoma trip. It was… interesting. I think I had forgotten or been unaware of just how closed minded the family is. I almost turned to my mom’s friend and said, “Have I mentioned that I’m queer. I’ve probably fucked more girls than both of your sons combined.” I wanted to do this because they had multiple books on their coffee table about the homosexual agenda and how homosexuals are ruining this great country. Great. I was asked if I was going back to work when Shanna goes to school and the response when I said I would be homeschooling was, “Well, that’s a choice.” Yup. It is. And fuck you very much as well Mr. Sunshine.

Oh, and when Shanna fell out of the bathtub and hit her head I talked to her about why I was asking her to sit down. My mom listened in and then said, “I told you too but you see how that turned out.” ?? In general as a mom you told me to do stuff and I didn’t listen? “I told you not to do things as a teenager but you didn’t listen to me and you got raped. See what happens when you don’t listen to me?” ?!?!?!?! WHAT?! Oh my fucking god. She said she didn’t understand why her comment was different than me telling a ten month old, “See honey, that is why I asked you to sit down. I’m sorry you hurt your head.” Though she did apologize the next morning–I guess that is progress.

I hate doing that quantity of driving sans cruise control. It’s crummy.

I realized recently that most of the people I’ve been spending time with are female and close to my age. This is such a bizarre change compared to the rest of my life. But you know what? I can’t complain. I really appreciate the friendships that have deepened in the past year and some. It’s really good to learn more about the people who think I’m worth going out of their way for.

Just life

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I made steal cut oats for breakfast. We had strawberries, walnuts, whole milk, and a little bit of brown sugar mixed in. It was fabulous.

Today was a cooking day. We have tri-tip prepared as well as chicken cooked with orange and pineapple and a little bit of rum. I boiled the rutabagas and potatoes and smashed them up together with a lot of butter and milk. I haven’t figured out what I am doing with the chard yet this week. hm. We still have asparagus and artichoke to cook but I figure those can wait a day or so.

Between cooking and cleaning house I don’t seem to find/make time to sew. This is very annoying. It doesn’t help that I feel like I really ought to be studying for the comp exam. Twelve more days.

Have I mentioned that I feel growing anxiety about this test? This is my last shot. If I fuck this up I’m just done. That’s kind of stressful.

I want to have an affair with my husband. I miss having that sort of intense interaction with him.

My daughter is getting more and more kid-like every day. I find her endlessly fascinating. And exasperating. Definitely exasperating. 🙂 She is sleeping for shit these days and that’s feeling really hard.

I need to get off my ass and plan the birthday party. *sigh*

I managed to get off the acceptance letter to the roofer and the information for the estate lawyer. I met with someone (ironically–he’s my sister’s ex-boyfriend. the only boyfriend of hers that I have ever liked) today about putting solar panels on our roof. It’s looking very likely. That’s productivity. We are still waiting to hear back from the accountant. By this time next month we may well be many tens of thousands of dollars poorer.

My back hurts and I’m not getting enough exercise. There is simply not enough time in the day.

Any feminist who questions the worth of what I do with my time can kiss my lily-white-ass. Those of you who are working moms–how do you manage to sleep?! I don’t have enough time for all of my stuff and you all have to do what I do and work. Y’all must be crazy.

Want to eat!

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I have recently heard about a few new-to-me restaurants that I want to go to.

http://essanaycafe.com is in Fremont and it sounds like a pretty interesting restaurant. The Prix Fixe menu in particular sounds really interesting.
http://www.pampaspaloalto.com/ is in Palo Alto and I really really really want to go here. I mean, meat. And more meat. And more meat. And the sides sound good too. 🙂
http://tymefortea.com is also in Fremont. I think that a girly sort of outing is in order. *cough*JennyhasWednesdayoff*cough**cough*MarkletLauraborrowthecar*cough*

It would be awesome if people read this post as: “Hey! Do any of these restaurants sound good to you? I would love to find people to go with!”

EWWWWWWWWWW

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I just looked over and Shanna was leaning down trying to pick something up off the carpet with her mouth. It looked vaguely Cheerio shaped so I went to investigate. Nope, it was cat food. Cause my cat threw it up on the carpet. My daughter was trying to eat vomited up cat food.

EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

(needless to say I pulled her away and cleaned it up.)

More erf

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I woke up at six and can’t get back to sleep. Too much going on in my brain. Physically I’m kind of off and I can’t figure out exactly what is wrong. I’m obsessing about all the deaths that have happened in the last year and some. I feel very anxious about life. The comp exam is in 18 days. I should probably review poetry. *sigh*

I can’t get driving directions online to the place we are going in Oklahoma. All the mapping software basically knows that the road exists but that’s it. Awesome. I have to wait until a more sane hour then call them. I’m sure there are tiny little motels in the town we are going to, but there is zero online presence for any hotel there. I lived in this town for a little while as a kid. I remember feeling very superior because I was from the big city. Now I find it almost charming in a severely inconvenient sort of way.

I still haven’t decided if I am going to deal with dragging the carseat around in the airports and gate checking it or if I am ok with actually checking it. I’ve heard some horror stories about baggage handlers destroying carseats. They are somewhat delicate and if you throw them too hard they are no longer useful in a crash. And they are so fucking expensive. But I’m not going to have much in the way of help. *sigh*

They don’t sell good travel potties that fit over elongated toilet bowls. Fuckers. You’d think that this would be a reasonable thing to have given that almost all public toilets are elongated. Shanna does not appreciate sitting precariously on a grown up toilet while being held up. It makes the whole pottying experience much more stressful. I think I’m going to bring her potty and disposable anti-bacterial wipes for cleaning it out. Not my first choice, but better than not being able to potty her. At this point I’m only having a couple of misses a day and I don’t really want to back slide a lot. I think it is funny that by volume more than half of what I am bringing on this trip is diapers. People still ask me when I am going to switch to disposables (not for traveling–just in general) because “Aren’t you sick of washing diapers?” The washing really doesn’t phase me in the slightest. However I was really really really tempted to not deal with lugging the volume on this trip.

You people don’t post on lj enough. I tell you all about my life, where is the reciprocal reading material? 😛 (Essaying–you do well. 😀 And I have no complaints about Rbus.)

My house isn’t clean and I’m trying very hard not to care. It’s a struggle though. I will never again buy black furniture. Being able to see dust 15 minutes after dusting makes me feel like I am the worst, most terrible housekeeper ever in the history of the world. I really don’t need that guilt.

I had a good time at the museum on Sunday. It was nice to see people and play with kidlets. 🙂 Shanna is still not quite to the interacting large scale stage. It’s all about her. 🙂 It’s very cute.

It’s hard balancing things with Noah right now. His job is sucking the life out of him. I am trying as much as I can to be supportive and not demand much of him. I was doing ok for a while. Then I hit an emotional wall and started feeling really upset and crummmy and needing a lot more from him. I’m largely still not pestering him with those needs. He doesn’t have much extra right now. So I’m spending a lot of time crying. It’s interesting how I know this isn’t depression–it doesn’t feel that way. I’m grieving. I’m sad. It feels pretty lonely to feel like this and spend so much time alone. Shanna doesn’t count as a person in this way because she is pretty much a bottomless pit of need with not much to give. I’m ok with that–that is what she is supposed to be. But I’m having a hard time. I’m pretty sure my grieving isn’t impacting her negatively. She seems to be still very healthy and happy and delighted by life.

Oh, and she’s teething again. The diaper rash appeared instantly and is fierce. I don’t entirely understand how she can get diaper rash like that when she is barely wetting diapers at all and she never sits in pee. Babies are a mystery. Good thing they are a cute mystery. She has been asleep for more than 11 hours. This is very very good because it is going to be a long day of traveling and her naps are going to be disrupted. I’m nervous about traveling with her by myself but I’ll manage.

Wow that’s a lot of whining. And she slept through me writing it. w00t.