In 12 hours I will be arriving at the home of the lovely Ms. Laura to pick her up and drive up to SFO. Our flight leaves at 2pm.
I am SO EXCITED!!! I’m also kind of tired. We are pre-jet lagging hoping to make it a bit easier to adjust.
I’M GOING TO NEW ZEALAND!
😀
I’m totally taking the backpack in the icon. And one suitcase. And a diaper bag. That’s not too bad.
We are planning to be offline for most of the trip so I will probably not respond to anything internet-ish. A break will be loverly.
We leave for New Zealand in 11 days. !!!! Holy Shit that’s soon!!!!
Uhm, would anyone be willing to come spend some time with Puff while we are gone? Two weeks is an awfully long time for her to not have company. Ideally if anyone is willing I would like it if someone stayed here for at least a night or two here and there in the two week period because she gets terribly lonely.
Anyone?
We leave for New Zealand in five weeks and three days. I’m just starting to delve into guide books and it’s really neat. I found a neat one that gives the history of the country and it’s neat. Someone in New Zealand invented jogging: random, and neat. The place where we are staying is the area of the most geothermal activity as well as being the center of Maori culture. Yay!
I’m already starting to think about packing lists. 🙂
So I’m looking up information about international travel with babes. I found a really neat site so I thought I would share: http://flyingwithchildren.blogspot.com/2008/11/as-flight-attendant-for-thirteen-years.html
If my big, huge bitch of the day is, “It’s taken me two hours to finish booking our two week trip to New Zealand” I really need to shut the fuck up.
Ok, maybe my life isn’t so bad.
The fact that making a flight reservation has taken me over an hour. I am getting really pissed off. Now I am on hold being shuffled between various Indian customer service reps who cannot understand me reading off my reservation number as I try to add a lap infant. I am really really frustrated. And after 20 minutes Travelocity told me that I have to call Air New Zealand. Now Air New Zealand is telling me they can’t do anything, Travelocity has to do it.
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
And Shanna just woke up from her nap and is yelling. This took her whole goddamn nap.
Edited: I am up to 55 minutes of phone time after 40 minutes of fucking with websites. But I’m done
Is anyone going up to Manda and Tristan’s wedding this weekend? Uhm, obviously I mean is anyone from my friends list. I’m sure they have friends, I just don’t know how well we will overlap. I’m curious cause I’ve never been to Camp & Sons before and it would be awesome to have someone show me around without having to be you know, gregarious or outgoing or something ridiculous like that.
And they have outlets, right? I won’t have to try and blow up the air mattress with my lungs? 🙂
I’m home! Did anyone miss me? 🙂 I had a good time in the PNW seeing people. I got in a good many quality visits this time which I often don’t manage to do. w00t!
Shanna was awesome. Her fuss was limited to times when she was exhausted or really hungry and even in those times her fuss was very minimal. I declare her a good traveler.
It was exciting trying to figure out how to sleep on a queen sized bed since we are used to a king. Then we got put on a double bed for a night. Maybe we shouldn’t have bitched about the queen… 🙂
My packing list was pretty much perfect. My timing on laundry and what-have-you worked out exactly as I planned. The only extraneous thing was about ten baby wipes and I’m ok with that.
My kid weighs 14.5 pounds. whoa. She’s big. (that’s at 3.5 months)I
Shanna loved playing outside in the grass nekkid. She was walking around and seemed to like the grass under her feet.
I missed the swing.
I didn’t do anything in Portland or Seattle other than seeing people and eating food. I didn’t even go to Powell’s. Seeing people was enough taxing of the kidlet’s patience.
I got to see quite a few little ones on the trip and that was very fun. I’m trying not to compare Shanna in any sort of competitive way but instead just be thrilled at seeing how humans vary.
I’m glad we aren’t traveling again for a few months. That was an awful lot of work for all of us, but mainly for me. I had ridiculous anxiety around packing and getting to places on time and making travel connections. My stomach needs a break from that much acid.
Ok, so I can see how those baby buckets are somewhat convenient. I’m still very happy that I don’t own one because I would be somewhat tempted to let her sit in it and then I would have one more thing to feel guilty about. Oy.
I have a ton of laundry and cleaning to do. This morning I have already cleaned mold out of my cat’s water bowl and cleaned her box. She already hates me less.
I semi-skimmed lj a couple of times when I was gone but not consistently. I may or may not actually catch up. I will do the meme Peter tagged me for though because, DUDE! I got tagged! (I hardly ever get tagged and it’s instant love…)
Because this baffles me, here is my packing list so far. I’m sure I’m forgetting things.
Goodness gracious we have been seeing a lot of people lately. It’s very cool. paulaandandrew came over last night, my lovely flyinamazon has come over a couple of times, we’ve had visits from blate and yanijc and jkuroda and bk2w and tshuma and angelkatharine and noirem and joedecker. I might be forgetting some of my blessings recently as I’m a total space cadet. I’ve gone out and seen a bunch of other people. I’ve spent time with my sister and cousins and no one fought. (Well, we had a small argument because my sister asserted that she won’t be voting for Obama because he is a Muslim. Uhm, whatever.) Ooh! And Debbie is going to come see me next week! It’s been too long. And have I mentioned that it is really neat that I’m hanging out with Britt so much? I haven’t seen dangerpudding in a bit, but that’ll be remedied next week. 😀
And we have a lot of upcoming travel! Portland weekend after next and we will be staying for over a week. bldrnrpdx I still need to talk to Dad about your event. I’m going to try. The lovely and wonderous Ms. blacksheep_lj will be picking us up from the airport and lending us a carseat. w00t! I get to spend a lot of time with my adored shadowsintime oh, and there will be the wedding for ihotpockets. 😀 There will be a trip up to Seattle to see Jefe and Jen and Rachel and hopefully I hope I’ll get to see malixe and imp-of-satan and meet Henry!
Next month is another wedding, this time with a camping trip involved. We’ll see how camping with a baby goes. woof.
We are going to go see my mommy for Thanksgiving. She’s terribly excited.
And New Zealand in February. I think I need to stop complaining about my life. (Ok, I don’t complain much… but any at all seems like a stretch.)
{disclaimer: if I’ve left your name out, feel free to poke me. My memory is not what it once was and it was never amazing.}
{Edited to add: satyrlovesong and ribbin both came over too!} (See, I want to keep track because I get in these moods where “nobody loves me, everybody hates me” and it’s just bolgona. So now I have a list of who loves me. :D)
So the neighbors two doors down have a son who is six weeks older than the munchkin. I went with the mama to Gymboree today. It was silly, but I’m going to give it a shot for a little while because it will be something concrete in my week to do and a reason to socialize with other parents who have kids the same age and who are actually near me physically. Dude. Concept.
This means I ended up talking to my neighbor a lot. She’s very insecure. She’s very nice–don’t get me wrong, but insecure. I feel like I am going to spend a lot of time validating her. Today the biggest theme was “Am I bad because I want to work” and I kept telling her that it’s ok that she wants to work. Hanging out with a baby all the time is bloody boring. It’s ok that you don’t find babbling intellectually stimulating; no, you are not a bad parent. She asked how I can handle it then. I had to laugh. It’s not as if my job was about adult interaction anyway. 🙂 I told her that it takes all kinds. I like to be able to control my days and do projects in my house and do things like cleaning during the day so that when Noah is home we don’t have to deal with much of the ‘work’ of life we can just play.
It is fascinating to me how people have trouble believing that their choices are ok. I’m in the same boat a lot of the time so I’m really not criticizing. 🙂
And speaking of choices, I choose to go to New Zealand. This trip is made possibly largely through the largesse of a really awesome lady. I’m so excited.
I am coming up to Portland at the end of this month. We will be arriving on Friday the 29th of August and coming home on the 7th of September. The first weekend is fully booked (we are coming up for a wedding and then I gotta see a special girl) but after Labor Day we have lots of open time. I want to go up to Seattle for at least a day because I’m going to see my friend Jefe’s new restaurant. (Ok, not that new… but I’ve never seen it.) It’s Austin Cantina if you live in Seattle, go check it out. Tell him Krissy sent you. 🙂 Jefe and his wives have done a lot of work and seem very happy.
So uhm, yeah… anyone want to see us? 🙂
Today I have done a bunch of reading. For the record: Northrop Frye may have one or two points that are interesting, but in the main he is a twat. The other critics I read today bothered me far less. I have also folded the laundry, made the bed (Arbus–I don’t know why you like making the bed, I hate it), cleaned up the kitchen after a weekend of use, and did a bunch of random picking up to allow the house to once again look “staged”–aka, boring. I’m all proud of me.
I have also been thinking about how I want to do more actual cleaning this week, partially in preparation for the open houses next weekend and partially because we will have a fabulous house guest. Very excited about hosting Brehen. 🙂
Which brings me to my point about house guests. I have had a number of people (it’s got to be close to 20 at this point) mention coming to visit us in Pittsburgh. This is awesome, wonderful, thrilling news for me to hear–but it also freaks me out and terrifies me. I’ll explain why. I am massively territorial about my space. I want things to be set exactly so, cleaned exactly so, and I want to feel like *I* have more history in my space than anyone else. This leads to all kinds of weird things about guests in my house in general. It’s part of the reason that I freak out about hosting events. I have slowly been coming to understand the depth and breadth of my neurosis on this topic as time goes by and more people want me to host parties/weekend stays/etc. I am not complaining about people wanting to visit me or stay with me or what have you. Really, I’m not. What I am saying is that in order for me to feel fully comfortable with that I need to be respectful of my own needs for boundaries.
Which brings me to the blunt part. I don’t want to host anyone for an entire weekend for the first six months we live in Pittsburgh. I may make an exception if there is some kind of emergency situation–but it would take something pretty damn extreme. I know that sounds like a long time, but it probably won’t feel that way to me. I want to settle in to my house slowly and feel like there is no pressure around needing to entertain anyone. I will also be settling into seeing how things work with the Lizard because if things go according to plan, the end of the six month period will mean the Lizard is only about eight months old. After that six month period I will probably be missing people like mad and I will be begging people to come stay with me. It’s just very important to me that I have it. I’ve told a number of people this individually, but I think that a couple of people felt like it was a personal rejection and it really isn’t. If I don’t want *you* to come stay with me ever I’ll bloody well tell you that. 🙂
So if you tell me “I want to come visit you” anytime soon I may cringe and say “Not until spring.”
Oh… unless you mean coming to stay at the Disaster House. Feel free to ask for that. I have all kinds of feelings about this house that mean I am not real attached to who stays here. 🙂
I will be flying to Portland tomorrow evening. I will be staying with a friend. I’m willing to bet I will not be terribly easy to get a hold of. All sorts of things (I’m looking at you Jon) will just have to wait.
Let’s look at the next few weeks, shall we? Tomorrow I need to continue to frantically get my classroom closer to being ready for a sub on Friday and get the kids through another day of finals prep. In the evening I get on a plane and go rent a car by myself for the first time in my life. Kind of spooky. I will most likely go straight to Dad’s house and goodness knows how much sleep I will end up getting. I also need to arrange getting a key for the place where I am crashing somehow. Friday and Saturday will be spent with Dad in some capacity. Sunday morning will likely be spent either with Dad or with the friend I am staying with.
While I am gone Noah needs to finish packing up all of the stuff in the house that is over carpet. Most of it is packed already, at this point we mostly need to get boxes to storage and get furniture out of here. Looks like it is he and I trying to move it with most of it falling on him. 🙁 Whatever I don’t help him with tonight and tomorrow he has to do on his own. The carpet is being replaced on Saturday. I get back on Sunday to help put things back and finish up the last baby steps of touching up paint (there are about a dozen specific spots that need to be touched up). I should also continue packing stuff in the kitchen/bathroom because we want most things out of sight for the showing. The house is being “staged” on Tuesday which means that some pushy-ass woman is coming over and insulting the hell out of my/our taste and telling us how we can make our house look less crappy. I’m looking forward to it.
I need to completely clean out my classroom and get all of my stuff packed and off the walls within nine days, preferably sooner so the next teacher can start moving in. I also need to finish grading all the late work that is still pouring in. I need to continue typing up the questions the kids are submitting for the finals. I need to create the finals. I need to grade the finals. This probably represents about 40 hours of work I need to do sometime in the next nine days while out of town for several of them. I have a mandatory IEP meeting next week where I get to go deal with a horrible parent and her horrible child. Luckily her case manager is pretty cool and is backing me up. Thank goodness for small favors. I have a hysterical family who keeps breathing down my neck about how I am persecuting their child by giving him a bad grade despite the fact that his grade in my class is higher than his grade in any other class. Cheers.
And after getting the house on the market next week we get to go to Pittsburgh from the 25-28th so I can see how I feel about the cold. I think this is the most traveling I have done in this short of a time period in my life. (I will be out of town for like 15 days out of a five week period. And this is on three separate trips.)
And I have an ever increasing flow of email traffic from con stuff, most of it extremely demanding and resulting in someone getting pissy if they aren’t responded to RIGHT NOW.
So, if I don’t get back to you or if I have a fairly short temper or I’m not cheerful, by all means feel free to take it personally.
Been home for not quite 12 hours so far. Laundry is going. I dumped the contents of the two (enormously overstuffed) suitcases on the floor and now I need to deal with actually putting stuff away.
Disney World was… interesting. Loved Epcot and Animal Kingdom seemed neat (we didn’t actually do much there because of sleep needs). I wasn’t that impressed with MGM Studios and Magic Kingdom was noticeably inferior to Disney Land. It was pretty neat being in this All Disney All The Time world for a little while. I started to have a little bit of a hard time with the eternally plucky staff at times. Amusingly, I didn’t like the waiter who acted like we were impositions much more so I guess there is just no pleasing me. Luckily I had more good-body days than bad-body days. I think I need to invest in serious black out curtains because both of the rooms we had on the trip could be completely pitch black during the day and we slept 9-12 hours each day. I suspect that we might both be more-sleep-is-good people.
Andrew–we went to the slavery museum in Nassau and it was just as interesting as you said it would be. Thanks for the recommendation. 🙂 The visit to the warm was nice, but I’m really glad I don’t live there. If it is this warm in the winter I would die in the summer. I got my hair braided on Nassau–just shy of 100 braids and it looks neat. I was probably overcharged, but I think that given how much money I make and how much money the braiders need to live on… I’m ok with that.
Noah had maybe two hours of cumulative grump on the whole trip and I probably clocked in four or five hours of cumulative grump on the whole trip. All things considered that is bloody amazing. Spending time with him continues to be the most wonderful way to spend time I have ever experienced. He is freakin awesome to travel with. I love my easy-going baby. I scored big time on my Christmas presents to him. I got jammies this year. 🙂 And a trip to Disney World and a cruise. So I can’t really complain. Dude we shopped. Went more than a little nuts. I’m surprised we got it all home… The funny part is: a lot of it is just getting put directly into boxes for storage for the next 8-9 months. I’ll get to feel like Christmas is coming early next year when I unpack. 🙂
Speaking of which: I need to get off the computer and start packing. The folks are coming to measure for carpeting in a bit. We need to get a bunch more stuff packed before the kids come over to finish up the painting touch-ups later this week. (I love my aides. I love them. I love them. The kids who painted this summer are coming back because they love me so much. 🙂 We have about two weeks to finish emptying the house out for the staging. I’m trying to get a bunch of the stuff packed and in storage so I won’t have to worry about it for moving. I also need to respond to a bunch of TNG emails today. I am going to wait until after the carpet people come because I need to get stuff off the floor…
I doubt we will make it out to any of the NYE festivities tonight. Love you all, but my body is terribly confused right now as to what time it is. We are going to have apple cider around 9 and call it a Disney World New Years. 🙂
Maybe more later. Maybe not. 🙂
Looks like I am running off for a week. Disney World, here I come!!!
*squee*
We got the paper work today for the Disney World/Cruise trip. I’m bouncing. SO EXCITED!!!!!
I took the advice of my therapist and a good friend. I did what I wanted for my birthday. It happened yesterday. It was fucking fabulous. No, ya’ll don’t get to know what it was. 😛 Ok, James and Chris know, but they have to keep their mouths shut.
I will tell you that Noah is the best husband ever for making me hand drawn “I will do ….” coupons. They are sweet and adorable and show a lot of work and consideration about what *I* actually want. Have I mentioned I married the right boy?
And! As a sorta birthday/really Christmas present to both of us–we booked a Disney cruise for Christmas vacation. We’re going to Disney World!!!!!!!!! SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.
So. Fucking. Excited.
And tired. And hung over. Today I will smile wanly and not be my normal fireball self. That’s fine. 3/5 periods are doing research in the library. It’s almost like I planned for this…
Because I realize that a long explanation isn’t going to happen. I had (mostly) an exceptionally good time. I loved getting to see people I haven’t seen in a long while. I had some really intense personal conversations with some of the most inspirational and fabulous women I have ever met. I enjoyed most of the drive through pretty country, eventually I did get bored though. I got to show Noah around Portland and Seattle a little which was really neat because I have always thought of them as Tom-places and now I realize that they are me-places too. That was a nice feeling. That was partially nice because it helped me step back a bit from a bit of my baggage around Noah sharing things with me he has shared with other people and that is persepctive I really need.
It was a good trip north. The only thing that was consistently a little hard was that from when Noah arrived we never had a good night’s sleep. Various things were a problem every night and that was totally suckful. Which means that by the time we got to the camping/backpacking part of the trip we were already very sore and sleep deprived. I need good, consistent, quality sleep or I am just not really a good person to be around. I know this about myself and I try very hard to ensure this need is met. I’m quite sad that it became a problem on this trip. So we hiked out about two miles (a very solid uphill the first mile then down hill the second mile) in the heat when we were already sore and uncomfortable in general. We were actually having fun talking about how each of us is the other’s favorite person to hate backpacking with ever. We camped next to a very pretty lake that night and had fun playing at camping stuff before the sun went down. But the next morning he noticed that my attitude had taken a turn for the worse mainly because my entire body hurt. We decided to just go home so we could sleep in our comfortable bed. Oh my god is this bed awesome.
And so, we came home and have been doing house work and spending lots of good quality mellow time together. Last night we went out for a ridiculously decadent evening with some of our very favorite people. It’s been a lovely little vacation.
Maybe someday I will get around to telling ya’ll about the white trash Mondavi commercial, but then again… maybe not. 🙂
I think that: http://www.nps.gov/lavo/index.htm looks like a lovely place to go spend our honeymoon. 🙂
*bounce*