March 31, 2009 @ 09:42

I called E yesterday to update him on Puppy’s bout of strep.  And to share some good news.  Puppy is outgrowing Thomas.  Now, don’t get me wrong, we’ve had a lot of fun with Thomas over the past few years.  Even drove all the way to Grape Vine, TX one summer and took a ride on the real train.  Look how tiny he was that day.  Just a little bean. 

Alas, along with all the fun has come the inevitable pain of repetition.  But the light is showing in the end of the tunnel.  And it isn’t a train.  In the past month, a new fixation has taken hold.  And I’m super excited.  ‘Cause I love these stories, have read all the books.  I love these movies.  I will occasionally be met with a brief glimpse of the boy who shall not be named, because I’m too damned old to be obsessed with that kid.  Yep, Puppy has fallen into the Harry Potter series.  He’s running around with a wand casting spells.  He knows almost all of them from the movies.  He’ll run around the corner from his bedroom into the living room and drop into a low stance, wand waving and yell, “Expecto Patronum!”  Or, hilariously, he’s misinterpreted one of the spells and it comes out “TROUSSEAU!”  At least I hope he’s not trying to conjure up any lingerie.  He corrects you when you say Harry with your American accent.  “It’s not Harry, Mom!  It’s haaah-rry”  And slightly confusing is which is his favorite.  It’s The Order of the Phoenix.  I’d have thought it would have been the first movie.  The one he has always called Harry Potter Birthday Cake.  But nope, he replays the final scenes in Order of the Phoenix and outright cackles with glee when they win.  He also seems drawn to Luna.  Perhaps he identifies with her apart-ness?  I don’t know.  I have also been informed that he needs a set of robes.  Seeing as how we already have a set of Quidditch gear from the year when Puppy was a baby and Bear dressed for Halloween as Quidditch Harry with Puppy being the golden snitch, I think a simple set of robes can totally be arranged.  Yee haw, ladies.  That’s all I’m saying. 

March 30, 2009 @ 14:13

So Puppy has strep.  I should have know something was wrong.  We went to my nephew’s birthday party yesterday and he was an angel.  All day.  I realized as we were headed home that I had forgotten to give him his medicine that morning.  He should have been a tornado all day.  But he was serene.  Calm.  I’m tellin’ ya, angelic.  We got home about 5:00.  He went straight to my room and climbed into my bed and put in a DVD and stayed there.  Asleep at 8:00.  Then at 10:00 he woke up with a vengance.  Something hurt, which he could not articulate.  This morning we went to the pediatrician and sure enough, strep.  Highly contagious they said.  Great.  Hope it doesn’t go too far through the kids at the party.  I really am sorry . . . 

So today Puppy has watched Two Story 2, twice, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone twice, and is now quietly building something in the living room floor.  I have to admit I love the peacefulness of days like this.  Does that make me horrible?  If he were in pain today I’d think differently.  But it has been nice having him be all snuggly.  He curled up in my lap in the waiting room at the doctor’s office.   I sat through one round of Toy Story 2 with his head on my shoulder.  For all my wishing that he felt better, I have loved this snuggly day. 

March 26, 2009 @ 20:56

Better late than never?  Last week’s stats: 

Miles:  About 30 is my guess, all around the campsite. 

Hours of other:  About 30 more?  Does walking between camps for hurricanes and jello shots count as cardio? 

Pounds lost:  3, I’ll take it. 

So my house is a wreck.  The day after I return home from my little vacation we began working on repairs.  Seems I’ve got three failed beams  and fifteen failed pillars to replace.  Oh, the joys of home ownership.  Thank god for baby brothers with skills.  Turning a five thousand dollar job into an under two thousand dollar job . . . I am grateful.  This past winter I noticed a weak spot in the living room floor.  A sagging space about five feet across.  This could not wait.  So the first two weeks of March I was working overtime, then the third week I allowed myself those three days off to go camping.  And Monday night my brother arrived with a friend and the work began.  Now I was already behind on laundry and housework because of the work schedule and vacation, so I was bit out of sorts.  Wednesday morning I was supposed to arrive at work with a baby shower cake.  Worse, a baby shower cake for somebody that I really like. 

I remembered this at 7:15 a.m. 

Wednesday morning. 

Oh, crap . . . 

So I fly into the kitchen, mix up the batter, get it in the oven.  I run Puppy out to his daycare (he’s back at his preschool for Spring break) and then come back.  The cake is done, I wrap it up and get it into the fridge to cool.  I rush to work, only 15 mintues late.  Wow.  I run home at lunch and decorate it and arrive back at the office at 1:00 p.m.  Shower is at 1:30 p.m.  Again.  Wow.  I’ve never been so grateful for a plain vanilla with pink roses request in all my life . . . 

March 10, 2009 @ 20:54

Trixie got me presents in Hawaii . . . 

One perfectly turquoise pottery bowl. 

Several yards of dreamy deep blue retro Hawaiian print fabric, coming soon to a backyard piece of furniture near me. Time to go outdoor furniture shopping! 

And two . . .  giant . . .  WHISKS!!!  Bwa ha ha ha!  Do you see that can in the picture for scale?  Dude, I know!  You want them, I know that, too.  How awesome are they?  And totally weird, too.  Just like me and Trixie. I seriously appreciate a friend who would brave the airport with these for me. 

Me:  Hey, Trixie!  You’re a freak! 

Trixie:  Yeah!  And you’re a freak with me! 

Me:  You are so lucky you didn’t get cavity searched at the airport over those. 

Trixie:  glares balefully . . . (balefully is a really good word, and hardly anybody but romance novelists ever use it anymore, I say we bring it back)

March 09, 2009 @ 19:47

Ten things at random, as I’m entirely too busy/tired/keyed up to write anything coherently: 

1)  I love beer.  I’m attending a beer club meeting (read drink beer in large casual crowd of friends) next Friday and I’m totally happy about this. 

2)  I am finally taking a small vacation, thanks to the lovely persons that are E and his girl (read, Puppy’s daddy and stepmommy).  Four days, three of which are scheduled with Mimosa Thursday, Beer Club Friday and Recovery Saturday.  *sigh* 

3)  I have a tan.  I haven’t had a tan this good in years.  It’s become my twenty minutes of zen every chance I get.  It’s really been a godsend.  And I like how I can tell where my socks start now.  Ah lahk it . . . 

4)  I am going to hang a pot rack over my kitchen island this weekend.  I was gonna ask for help (read call Heather and whine) but I decided to cowgirl up and try it.  How bad could it be?  Feel free to warn me . . .  

5)  Trixie is flying back from Hawaii tonight, and lemme just say, upgrading to unlimited text/pix was such the good plan. 

6)  I cannot stand passive aggressive behavior in the workplace.  But have to ask, is it the whole two wrongs don’t make a right to fight that fire with fire? 

7)  Puppy has stopped calling me mommy.  I am now just plain mom.  This is painful and makes me want to buy anti-aging cream. 

8)  At this very moment, however, he is in the kitchen building a zipline between the baker’s rack and the pantry with bunge cords, so that’s comforting. 

9) I had a bad hair day today.  I tried to fix it with spray gel.  This was a very very bad idea.  But at 7:55 a.m., there’s nothing you can do about it. 

10)  I was sitting in traffic beside a guy on a motorcycle today and was seriously thinking what a good idea that would be.  For me to have a motorcycle.  Is this the first red flag of my midlife crisis? 

March 07, 2009 @ 10:24

Miles:  40

Hours of other fitness pursuits:  6, including yoga, weights, and crunches (600), plus add to those six hours, I spring cleaned my kitchen and painted the living room. 

Pounds lost:  ZERO

Dammit. 

Oh, well, the living room is pretty . . .  And it only took a gallon and a half of paint and two bottles of wine. 

March 05, 2009 @ 08:23

Trixie is gone to Hawaii.  Look, I didn’t even have to stomp my foot this time when I said it.  I feel like I’ve grown.  So far she’s text/pixed me pictures of a surf lessons hut, our friends that she’s with, and a dozen messages about Pearl Harbor and seeing whales and lots of other stuff.  This is why yesterday, while she was still on her connecting flight to Dallas, I upgraded my plan to unlimited text.  I know my girl.  And no, she did not book any surf lessons.  I know.  I’m disappointed, too. 

March 01, 2009 @ 21:30

This past weekend I cooked for an SCA event. Saturday was Bear’s birthday, he turned fourteen, and he wanted to attend the event.  So I volunteered to cook.  Easy peasey, right?  I do this all the time.  No problem.  It started out well enough, but by the end of the feast, I was very ready to get out of that kitchen. Bear, little did we know, had in his ever easy going fashion made things easier on me.  Usually his way of never wanting anything special or complicated is tough.  It’s very hard to buy him gifts and know if you got it right because he’s so serene and never asks for anything.  So when he decided that for his cake he wanted cookies and cream but nothing special for the decoration, well, I was disappointed.  Little did I know at the moment that was a huge blessing. That and a staff of Nonnie, Trixie, Gabby and Cassie and a little help from a new friend named Neil.  They saved the day. 

We got off to a slightly late start on Friday night.  This is not my fault, it was karaoke night at a little bar just a few blocks from the house and well, when you’ve got out of town guests staying, you’ve got to be entertaining.  It’s your moral imperative as a hostess.  No, really.  You can look it up.  The plan was to do some cooking on Friday night.  So when we delivered all the food and supplies for the event’s food afterward . . .  around midnight, we didn’t stay any later.  But it was no big deal.  I am a very careful planner.  And when things go off target, I recover well.  In fact I had already scrapped plans for a very elaborate cake of St. George slaying a dragon because of last week being so turned upside down by Puppy’s med changes.  I was not going to spend every night last week sculpting a sugar George when I was needed elsewhere.  So the plan was scrapped and it became a simple simple cake of the Gleann Abhann arms.  And down and dirty quickie cake.  So with all the extra time I’d already built in and gained from easy cake plans, I had more than enough time to do everything.  Until . . .  oven failure.  By 1:00 Saturday afternoon I’d figured out that there was no way we were going to get the food done.  The bread was barely baking.  Each loaf spread out from nice fat rounds into almost focaccia flat disks.  And took an hour to bake when it should have taken 20 minutes.  The texture suffered.  It was more like an english muffin than soft dense yeast bread that we wanted.  My best guess is the the oven was baking at maybe 275.  With strange random bursts of full temperature.  One pan of carmelized onion tarts perfect, second pan charred crusts.  Worse?  I had eighteen whole chickens to roast.  There was no way.  There was just no way that we were going to pull it off as originally planned.  I immediately remembered a feast I had attended years ago where the ovens failed.  It is hands down the worst feast I’ve ever experienced.  Scary pink centered chicken.  Raw center dumpling things.  It was horrific.  It was unsafe.  In my opinion, it was a mistake of not recognizing the disaster in time.  Of thinking that it would somehow be okay.  Nuh uh.  Food safety just doesn’t have any room for maybes.  So I didn’t waste any time making my own decision.  In the end I had to scrap two dishes that were supposed to be oven roasted and rearrange the ingredients I had brought into an adjusted menu.  What we did?  Called Walmart.  By some miracle, they were able to get us rotisserie chickens from the deli in two hours.  We wiped out their stock for the day.  We sent the fresh chickens I had bought to be frozen for use at the next event.  And I suspect very few people were the wiser.  I even had someone send one of our group staff members in to the kitchen to request my chicken recipe.  Yah.  I told him the story and let him decide whether or not to tell it.  We got all the food out.  And then it started to snow.  So with the added fact that I had to work Sunday, we got out of Dodge as quickly as possible. 

The bright spot was between the last two courses, getting to make a fuss over Bear.  He was sung Happy Birthday by about 100 of our closest friends.  He deserved that and more.  Then after going home and cleaning up, I spent a perfect night drinking wine with my friends.  Listened to some seriously hilarious drunken ramblings.  And ended my day feeling better than I expected.  All disappointments considered, I slept like a stone and would do it all again next weekend. 

There was, however, one little moment on Saturday that made me so mad that I’m just gonna say it.  If you are a staff member of a local group who is hosting an event, and have come into the kitchen to ask for more tea to be made, take a minute to look around before you bark your order at the kitchen staff.  You might notice that they are working their butts off to make the meal happen in disasterous circumstances and that they haven’t had more than one person come in to help all damn day and that if you’ve had time to walk in and complain about something three times, you had time to do it yourself.  K?  I’m just saying . . . 

Here are the cakes. 

March 01, 2009 @ 20:18

Miles:  26, bad bad bad

Hours of other fitness pursuits:  2

Pounds lost:  1

How many times can you say I’ll do better this next week before it’s just crying wolf?