January 29, 2009 @ 17:36

Today we had a Superbowl potluck at work.  For two hours we ate hot wings and played Rock Band.  I love this place.  We had some awesome Taco Soup, too.  Here’s the recipe, note, it is not what I’d call good-good for you, but not too bad, either.  It was turkey.  And I suppose it’s really okay until you get to all the Frito and shredded cheddar garnishing goodness.  I was behavin’ and just had a small bowl.  I skipped the coconut pecan cake that Jenn made.  *sigh* 

Taco Soup

2 pounds of meat – Turkey, Beef or Chicken (I used turkey today)
4 cans of beans like pinto (I used southern style beans)
3-4 cans of whole corn
2 cans of Rotel (you can use one less can of Rotel and add another tomato sauce)
2 cans of tomato sauce (I used Meatloaf seasoned tomato sauce)
2 packages of McCormick’s regular taco seasoning
2 packages of ranch dressing

Cook meat, add all the can goods, rinse out can to add about two to three cans of water, add the seasoning packages. Let cook until hot. Eat over rice, Fritos, crackers, or cooked tortilla strips.  Can garnish with cheese. 

Sitting at a table with my running buddy from summer before last, I said it out loud.  Half marathon in October.  I’m in.  I’ve been skittering away from the details of last year.  I’ve given you a few, but not the whole ugly truth.  I’m not angry at myself.  It just is what it is.  I gained weight.  My kids are happy.  Better than even trade.  But it’s time to go back. 

So I pile on weight easily.  You might have guessed from last couple of weeks stats that I kinda lose it easily, too.  I know, Trixie, it isn’t fair.  But I promise, living on the pendulum is not fun.  If you relaxed for a month, you probably wouldn’t see much on the scale.  I can pack on twenty pounds in less than twenty days.  So what I didn’t tell anybody, is that I got all the way up to the 3 again.  As in hundred.  There.  I said it.  Ouch.  But since November I’m down over thirty pounds.  I am back on track.  This is my plan.  I’m sticking with the bike until the weather turns warmer.  Both for comfort and to have a little more ease back into it for my foot.  I’ve been pain free for about three weeks now and I like it.  Wanna keep it that way.  And it’s a great way to work the cardio back up.  I’m already 40 miles in for this week with three more days to go in it.  But as soon as spring gets here, the feet are coming off the pedals and are hitting the trail.  As of today, I’ve got 105 miles in for 2009.  What’s our goal this year, Trixie?  1,000?  Just tell me.  I’m in. 

 January 26, 2009 @ 17:20

This afternoon when I picked Puppy up from school he had buttoned his shirt up all the way to the neck.  Sweet little Monk-boy.  But he had a wonderful day.  Perfect was the word his teacher used.  So we are happy.  Whatever keeps you together baby.  On the drive home he asked if we could go get a donut at k-frog. 

Me:  K-frog? 

Puppy:  Yes, k-frog!  With the donuts with sprinkles! 

It took me a few minutes.  Not until we actually passed the sign, did I get it. 

Last week we were sitting at a stoplight at Museum Road.  I thought, hey, bet he he could read that word.  And so I asked him to look at the green and white sign and tell me what it said.  I was all prepared for the little moment of pride when he sounded out the word museum.  He leaned forward in his seat and looked out the windshield and quickly rattled off . . . 

“Left turn yield on green.” 

Puppy, you see the world in a different light, but have got some awesome skills . . . 

Recognize . . . 

January 25, 2009 @ 11:33

Miles:  34

Hours of other fitness pursuits:  3, does supervising yardwork count?  Then it’d be like 8. 

Pounds lost:  3, guess it was a week three curse for me. 

I’ve got the best friends ever in the whole of the universe.  Yesterday, as my birthday gift, they all came to my house and cleared out the sadly neglected back yard and set fence posts for me.  It was a huge undertaking.  I’m not a yard person.  I do not have a green thumb.  Plants, like elephant’s to their mythical graveyards, come to my house to die.  When I bought this house six years ago the yard was beautiful.  A little crazy, climbing roses trained onto the power line, clematis left to trail along the ground, but beautiful in a haphazard way.  This suited me.  But my general gardening ignorance, less than enthusiastic desire to dig in the dirt on a daily basis and having a new born baby boy quickly led the yard further into looking like the Secret Garden.  A couple of summers ago some friends came to visit and gave the back tree line a working over, along with working over the front yard.  Last summer I planted containers of flowers and veggies and herbs and it was lovely, but the other side of the yard was still languishing.  Privet hedge and trumpet vine and morning glory and a half dozen other vines I have no names for and dozens and dozens of little scrub trees had created a blanket of foliage that nearly obscured the view of our neighbor, not a completely bad thing, there.  This morning, though, it is all gone.  The peach tree stump that still stood where it had died four years ago, gone.  The curtain of vines that rolled over the edge of the carport’s roof, gone.  The little scrubby trees that were crowding the beds, gone.  Perdiodically throughout the day, someone would call out my name and I’d look up to find them standing, looking very lumberjack cool, with a hand on a smaller tree trunk with that look in their eyes.  Can I take this one down?  I would always nod my head yes, bemused expression on my face, and maybe repeat what I’d said to them all day.  Do whatever you want.  I am in awe of the offer, I will not argue a single point of the execution.  It was just surreal to watch these people work their butts off for me and act like they liked it.  Janet swears she could spend all day every day in the garden.  All I can say is wow.  They left my roses and a dozen small trees and my mimosa tree, which I know some people call trash trees but that I love.  I could not be happier.  Thank you. 

January 21, 2009 @ 20:57

A year ago, Janet bought me a book.  I’m a terrible person to give books to.  Because I ask for them.  And I mean it.  But then I have so little time to read on most days that they linger on my bookshelves.  Neglected.  Unappreciated.  Well, I picked up the book, Janet.  And you are right.  It’s brilliant.  I’m halfway through.  Thank you . . .  Again . . .  I snort laughed at the lunch table at work today.  Yah. 

Take the Cannoli : Stories From the New World by Sarah Vowell

January 20, 2009 @ 18:05

I walked Puppy into class a few minutes early today.  We had a quiet talk before class started.  When I picked him up this afternoon he was all smiles.  When I arrived home from work, he was running around the house in his Batman mask and cape.  I watched the inauguration in my boss’s office with a couple of co-workers this morning.  It was perfect.  It could not have been better day. 

January 19, 2009 @ 09:10

Last night, the somewhat cute Monkish traits and the recently dormant tortured soul tendencies within Puppy collided.  Sprung up like a volcano.  Punched through his shiny new layer of maturity and broke him down.  This school year has been going so well.  I knew of course that we still had struggles waiting along our path.  His breezing into the kindergarten class was not the same as sliding into home plate.  This was not a finish line that we had just crossed.  I just wasn’t prepared for the pain within his wailing. 

Perhaps it’s genetic in some ways.  I’m nothing if not melodramatic.  I’m sure that once in a blue moon it makes for a good read here.  But trust me, living with the live show?  Harder.  When I was a child I had several strange obsessive tendencies.  When chewing gum I would always have to chew evenly.  Twenty times on the left side, twenty times on the right side, twenty times on the left side, twenty times on the right side, twenty times on the left side, twenty times on the right side.  To this day I hate chewing gum.  When walking down a sidewalk, if I stepped on a crack with my left foot, I’d immediately begin searching for one to step on with my right.  If I caught myself drumming my fingers on the desk at school, I’d begin counting the taps.  Every finger’s tap count must be even.  It began to affect my schoolwork.  I began losing sleep.  Five minutes with my left cheek pressed to the pillow.  Five minutes with the right.  I was exhausted.  But so desperately tuned in to the count, the need for everything to be even.  I had to to something.  I had to break myself of the habit.  My mother is a very straightforward person.  As full of sweetness as she is, she is also very practical.  As a result so am I.  Focused oddly, but practical.  She sat me down and told me about her fears when my father went to Vietnam.  She told me of sleepless night and staring at the clock endlessly thinking of the things that might go wrong.  Thinking of all of her fears.  She finally grew so exhausted that she gave in.  She decided that no matter what happened, it would be made worse by her not being able to sleep.  She said to the world outside, “Let it come.  I will sleep anyway.”  And she did.  She just . . .  did.  I was inspired.  I learned how to turn off the pendulum of obsession. 

Even sweetly balanced and ever sympathetic Bear has had his quirks over the years.  When he was a toddler, he would not take a broken cookie.  Even if it was the last one.  Oh but, he’d mourn that broken cookie.  Cry like you’d taken away his favorite toy.  It was an injustice.  Thank god his strangely over-developed sense of right and wrong fleshed out so much more . . .  tolerably.  Perhaps some children become a dilution of us.  Some a distillation.  Puppy clearly is 100 proof. 

Last night, just a few minutes before bedtime, he began to wail.  A loud heartbroken sob.  Before I could get to him, Bear was scooping him up and bringing him to me.  The wailing stopped, he began to shriek at his brother to put him down, he couldn’t see his eyes.  He needed to see his eyes, they wouldn’t work.  He had been settling into bed and looking at himself in the mirror.  He was staring at himself when he noticed that when he turned his head, his eyes stayed still.  He stared more intently, I’m sure.  Looking to catch the movement.  But we all know, they did not move.  He swiveled his head around and around.  His eyes did not move.  He was freaked the hell out. No other way to put it.  Bear rolled him into my lap.  He was a tight ball.  Knees drawn in to his chest and hands over his eyes.  They were splayed out wide, fingers spread, extended till the the palms were arcing forward.  They flew in front of his eyes, forward and back.  Never touching.  Like he was afraid to touch them, but couldn’t stop trying.  His eyes were puffy, cheeks streaked with tears and patches of red.  He’d obviously been crying quietly for quite a while before he began to spill over and out.  He began telling me what he had seen and what was so terrifying to him.  It seems like a silly simple thing.  But he was hysterical.  I remember those kinds of crippling fears when I was small.  And I’ve never been the kind of person who thinks fears are funny.  Even if they are irrational.  As he spoke in broken spurts, I thought about all the building tension that he’d been storing up over the past months.  How this past week had been so hard.  And how it had clearly been a signal.  And I had missed it.  I had let my joy at the ease of our first transition gloss over the work that still lay ahead. 

I held him in my lap and spoke to him about not being afraid.  About how our eyes work.  About how much I loved him and how everything was going to be okay.  Because I promised.  That’s okay, isn’t it?  To make promises that you cannot possibly know that you can keep?  On that scale at least.  More than an hour later he fell asleep.  Still hiccuping occasionally and drawing in those stuttering breaths after.  He muttered and whimpered in his sleep even more than usual.  This morning when he woke, the first thing he did was pop up and out of the bed to stand in front of the full length mirror in my room.  He began swiveling his head to the left and right.  He breath began to quicken.  I squatted down behind him and tucked my chin on his shoulder so that our eyes were seeing the same things.  I tried again to explain how our eyes work.  How our brains tell them where to look.  How everyone has a different job.  My job is to work in my office.  His job is to work at school.  Bob the Builder’s job is to build bridges and roads and buildings.  Then I explained how our bodies’ parts all have different jobs.  And then I tried to explain the way our eyes track.  In four year old’s language.  I’m not sure if I managed to make my point.  But a half hour later, he laughed out loud at something I said and asked for breakfast.  So, right now he is sitting behind me with a bowl of cereal watching a Bob the Builder DVD and laughing out loud.  That’s enough to ease his fears today, I hope.  And tomorrow I will be paying closer attention, watching for early signs. 

January 17, 2009 @ 15:59

Miles:  27

Hours of other fitness pursuits:  3

Pounds lost:  9, take that week two. 

This morning my mom and I loaded up two truck loads of stuff and took it to the city dump.  I cannot tell you how great that felt.  It’s one of those things that had just been killing me.  But when you drive a little Honda, hauling off crap is a problem.  I off loaded the dreaded love seat and chair that I had been hanging onto for far too long.  In the course of the last 12 years I’d recovered them twice.  They were beyond saggy and sad.  It was way past time.  Backing that truck up to the edge of a big concrete overhang and then flinging them off the tailgate down into that giant container was actually pretty cool.  And it was really good to drive away from them.  I then went and picked out new paint for my bedroom, living room, hall, bathroom and Puppy’s room.  Puppy wanted Thomas blue.  I compromised and got him a deep sky blue.  The same blue will go in the bathroom.  Pumpkin orange for my room.  And a pale emerald for the hall way, a darker shade of the same emerald for the living room.  I’m going to start painting tomorrow.  I might actually get a lot of it done with the three day weekend.  The house will be like a bright jewel box when I’m through.  Like the happiest little girl in the world lives here.  Then I just have to go find a new sofa and it’ll all be perfect. 

January 16, 2009 @ 19:03

So I had to go pick up Puppy early from school today.  The little ball of stress that’s been building up inside him finally burst today.  I knew that we had been doing better than I had any right to even wish for this first year.  This week the boat rocked a bit.  He’s developing some very Monkish traits.  Not wool robe and rosary monk.  Tony Shaloub Monk.  Yah.  Fun, right?  He’s becoming increasingly distressed by public restrooms.  Pretty normal actually.  And probably smart.  But very problematic when you spend all day long in a public school.  He’s got very specific preferences for noise.  Music must be loud.  All other noise must be soft.  Public restroom toilets are loud enough that when it’s time to flush he becomes this I Love Lucy level comedic scene of trying to flush while covering his ears with his hands.  He covers his ears with his little elbows out akimbo.  Then he leans over and tries to flush with one of his elbows.  Skittering away from the coming noise.  Half the time he misses and has to go back in for the bend and flush.  Sometimes, he’ll try to use his foot.  It’s funny and sad all at the same time.  It has built and built until now he begins worrying about it before he can even get his pants up and buttoned.  Instead of just an awkward foot or elbow to flush it’s bob down to pick up pants, cover ears and lean over to flush, drop pants again, cover ears again, drop pants again, cover ears again, drop pants . . .  well . . .  you get the picture.  And as he’s immature for his peer group, when the stress factor overrides his modesty, he bails from the restroom.  Nakey or not.  It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so distressing for him.  We’ve got to find a solution to this one before he gets a nickname he can’t shake off.  On top of all that, this week was so cold that he didn’t get much outside time.  So he’s got cabin fever and OCD.  Poor baby.  I’ll have to break out the Lincoln Logs this weekend and let him spend some really good quality time sorting and stacking and building.  Maybe he’ll get some of the Monk out.  Here’s hoping, anyway. Anybody else got any good ideas? 

January 15, 2009 @ 21:41

Today I took a half day off and went to Little Rock to have lunch with one of my sisters and one of my brothers.  Our sweet baby brother.  He’s twenty two and adorable.  He humors us mostly.  His twin and our baby sister is quickly becoming more of our peer now that she’s a mommy, too.  But for baby brother, I’m pretty sure we’re still a bit of a mystery.  At one point we were talking about a mutual friend and their divorce.  I was telling my sister that I was sure of one particular point because women are so easy to read.  Baby brother nearly dropped his fork. 

Baby brother:  Easy?  Yeah, right.  Any time you wanna share that secret I’m listening. 

Me:  Well that’s half the battle right there, sugar.   

He’s right of course, people are only easy to read if you really know them well.  New friends?  Co-workers?  And worse, new crushes?  Painfully opaque. 

Besides the perfectness of getting some family time in general, my sister found something of mine buried in an old file drawer at the family business.  My year book.  From 19 freakin’ 84.  Our Freshman year.  Yah.  Some of the pictures were especially priceless for the clothes that are right back on the racks today.  Those ruffled little house on the prairie shirts?  Have you seen those out again?  Really.  There’s even a picture of a bunch of people’s feet wearing crazy socks that’s captioned “Get Footloose with the class of 1987.”  Oh, yeah it did.  The mandatory mug shot of me was horrible, I will not be sharing it.  Sorreeeeee!  I had cut off my hair that year.  It was not pretty.  I can say, though, that a mullet it was not.  They had spelled my name wrong, too.  First and last.  I had to laugh.  I imagine that it upset me back then.  I just imagine me with all my Sweet Valley High drama filled indignation.  I read all of the inscriptions from friends.  There was even more drama there.  Not at all subtle references to the situations that had apparently ruled us all for that school year.  Some social stuff.  And apparently I really sucked at Algebra.  I mean I know this.  But at least six signers mentioned it!  I couldn’t remember more than a handful of the people that had written those things.  I even flipped through cross referencing pictures with signatures.  Nope, still nothing.  I certainly didn’t remember any of the dramas.  I’ve spent a large portion of this afternoon and evening trying to remember back to those days and still . . .  nothing.  All I really remember are three particular girls.  There are a few other people who circled around in my memory, but there are just those three that I remember best.  Two are still in my life.  I’m blessed with that.  The third I say a prayer for frequently.  What I have now are two friends from that long ago that I’d bleed for.  Guess there’s still drama left there, but it’s the good kind now. 

Love you Janet.  Love you Heather.