Deconstructionist

m-o-m-m-y

2012-01-17T18:18:00.000-08:00

I'm sick. Around here, we don't even need other people to catch colds from anymore. We're generating our own strains, we are a totally self-contained viral eco-system. I'm as sick as I'm not sick, easily, and that means whatever marginal advantage that might be had by precautionary measures can suddenly add up to a sizable percentage of my life.

Pre-Thea, my approach to the cold virus was to ignore all the advice and do not a thing because really, all the hand-washing, zinc-popping, medicine-buying added up to a lot of time and/or money for what? A small statistical advantage, perhaps an extra 24 hours of reduced viral misery quotient over the 730 days on average in which I suffered one cold. What? Does that make sense? I can't do any proof-reading because I can't see through the mucus tears filming over my eyeballs.

Now that we're raising Patient Zero, I do it all. I pay a premium for lotion-infused tissue instead reaching for a sandpapery roll of toilet paper. I have humidifiers, a neti pot, and at least three other brands of saline sinus spray, homeopathic tablets, vapo-rubs, and all the medications in my cabinet are well within their expiration date.

Last night I didn't get any sleep, having a toddler in the bed head-butting me with all the outrage her grief and exhaustion could muster. OH PLEASE, GRANT ME GRACE. She finally fell asleep at 4:45.

When I left for work an hour and a half later it was only raining delicately, but on the drive up the hill to campus the snow began to fall and became increasingly flurried and treacherous. Finally, having slid uselessly against the curb a block away, I consider defeat (freezing to death I've heard is like falling asleep (deeply appealing option)) and yet, look there, a huge red CAMPUS CLOSED sign like a fucking love note to me. At home, snow fell but did not accumulate the rest of the day.

Later, I stopped by the pharmacy for MORE medications. Congestion being the main sleep disruptor, I asked the pharmacist what was safe for a toddler. I almost began to tremble with relief when she said a half a teaspoon of benedryl was safe, but might induce sleepiness.

The snow they say, is to begin accumulating. With any luck we'll all be sleeping well past when the alarm would go off and I'll spend the day under the dining room table, driving around in the passenger seat of Thea's car.

Head thumping, eyes not working together, nose in revolt. This song actually brought tears to my eyes. Real, misty tears.

When you know the rules, you can break them

2012-01-12T12:54:00.000-08:00

There isn't a lot of time for writing and when I have it, I sit in front of the computer squirming until the time is almost run out. There is rarely an exception to this, except for the times when I have been prolific, when writing becomes a natural extension of sitting. Thinking on that note, there was one very prolific year on this blog and, at the risk of drawing your attention to the horribly embarrassing archives, it was a long long time ago. Turns out I've been here, in my very quiet corner, for over 8 years. I know some people don't consider this real writing, but I like to be here, when I can be here. When I can sit still and extend myself.

2011-11-18T08:26:00.001-08:00

There are no windows in this room, except for the transom over the double doors, and the two panes in the doors themselves. The building is on a hill, and outside these windows, the land falls away steeply so that all I can see from where I sit is pine tops lifting from the mist. It's always misty here, except on the mornings when it's foggy.

Go, baby, go!

2011-11-08T22:03:00.000-08:00

Tonight, this happened! Thea pushed aside a grilled cheese sandwich and reached for the plate of raw veggies we serve with dinner every night. All is right with the world. Anything is possible.

I can relax now, bounce clear-eyed grandbabies on my knee under the Bodhi tree.

Fuck yeah!

Eye on the prize

2011-11-07T21:59:00.000-08:00

I've got two colds dueling in my head, if that's even possible. They feel distinctly different, yet conjointly miserable. In fact, I still detect last week's mere single cold yet lingering, if merely a ghost. Get one, or all three of them from me. Go ahead, guess how much I care. I don't.

I'm back on the road. If still somewhat a diminished runner, my plans are grander then ever. I applied to get a team into Hood to Coast 2012, and was denied. It was a brutal stomach-ache of a week, repeated texts for my account balance, page refresh requests, internet stalking, tight-lipped lottery -- my iphone swiping finger is unbelievably sore. I'm in the grief stage, the bargaining, raging, denying stage over and over. It's done now. I'm setting my sights higher. Marathons again, ultra-marathons even. Maybe someday ultra-ultra-marathons, someday when no body needs me anymore.

In the meantime, my head is a plague hole.

achoo

Trick-or-treat

2011-11-02T21:45:00.000-07:00

Last year, my high hopes for Halloween were dashed by teething pain and over-tired crankiness. This year, celebrations went a little more smoothly. By that I mean, we took a bunch of feral cats, tied their tails together and took them trick-or-treating. In the end, we had candy... and not a few wounds.

Thea was a little more obliging this year. We prepped her for a few days, anticipating the reluctance we'd face trying to suit her up, and it worked. I try to script everything with her anymore because her toddler sense of control and independence is so easily corrupted by unexpected events. She does not at all like being yanked out of her busy busy world without warning. For candy included. We've been a mini-mob here, call-and-responding not for peace, nor for economic equality for the 99% (though we do want that, very much) but for the ritualized menace that is Halloween!

WHAT DO WE WANT? Candy

WHEN DO WE WANT IT? NOW

Just before dark, John and Anita came down with Leo in the stroller for the evening's event. We decided, fuck it! Let's bring two riotous dogs with us as well! Add to that the task of chasing Willie back in the house, posing toddlers for pictures at dusk thereby forcing the first waves of trick-or-treaters to march across our Brand-newly Seeded Lawn to get around our camera tripod -- and oops! there goes Willie again! PETA will not approve if she is sacrificed! DON'T LET THE KIDS CHEW THROUGH THE GLOW STICKS. WHO THREW THEIR BEER CAP IN THE CANDY BOWL?

We finally left to do our own trick-or-treating, dragging the kids, the dogs leaping, leashes twisted around each others necks. Predictably, it didn't take long for Thea to figure out exactly the perks and limitations (as in, how badly I wanted to be out trick-or-treating with her and therefor how infirm my stand would be, if I even dared to risk the taking of one) and when she did, she informed me with a pert NO that she was NOT going to say "thank you" for candy. She looked so sweet and shy at the door that invariably each adult indulged her, charmed into replying "oh that's okay, you don't have to say thank you" to my milquetoast prompts. Thanks for the back-up adults! Come on! Let's stand here uncomfortably in the cold with this stranger until her darling little mouse can find her manners! Whaaat! Why not??

My sweet sweet revenge is that whatever I don't eat of this candy myself, that you spent your hard-earned money on, is going straight into the garbage. In fact, most of it will. THANK YOU!

After just about an hour of trick-or-treating I gave Thea a half of a mini kit-kat bar as we were headed home. I've read that science has debunked the cocaine effect of sugar on children, but what then would explain the next few hours of my life?? The excitement alone? Perhaps. Once we got home it was a full-on fracas. Our bedtime routine proceeded as it usually does, at vastly exaggerated volumes. It wasn't a fight exactly, just a exuberant howling child whose willingness to go through the motions of brushing her teeth, potty, jammies, and good-night kisses was secondary to her otherwise completely consuming, rapturous commotions.

Clark and I retired to the front room to drink beer and pass out candy to whoever was left still knocking on doors. The storm raged from her crib. The trick-or-treaters stopped coming. The howling did not. I fell into bed, exhausted. The child waged her war against all things peaceful. Just before 11pm the chattering yammer stopped, mid-sentence. A booming vacuum of Silence! I waited a few minutes and snuck downstairs to see her tucked in proper. She'd been sitting upright in her bed when, apparently having stopped to take a breath, fell forward into her own lap, dead asleep.

Whew.

Ticking girl-shaped bomb

2011-07-20T06:56:00.000-07:00

Aquarius Horoscope for week of July 21, 2011

You really need to tell your stories. It's not just a good idea; it's downright urgent. There's a backlog of unexpressed narratives clogging up your depths. It's like you have become too big of a secret to the world. The unvented pressure is building up, threatening to implode. So please find a graceful way to share the narratives that are smoldering inside you -- with the emphasis on the word "graceful." I don't want your tales to suddenly erupt like a volcano all over everything at the wrong time and place. You need a receptive audience and the proper setting.

art haus

2011-07-19T22:21:00.001-07:00

This hotel makes an impression. It's very futuristic -- hive-like with silent elevator pods zooming up and down the 47 floors of the atrium.

I'm lonely and awkward in a crowd. I left the reception party to take arty pictures of the skyline from the 24th floor.

Thea's first documented, confirmed dream. I was not there and she held a chicken and it bit her. She talked about it all morning.

----------

Ahem: This above, it was not intended for posting. What I do? I save everything and publish nothing - but I hit publish instead and it seems disingenuous to unpublish, especially after having been commented upon. Here, have some pictures.

Convention

2011-07-16T22:43:00.000-07:00

The flight deplaning at the gate behind me is clearly from Hawaii. Everybody is tan, nobody alone, traveling in family groups wearing straw hats and tropical print shirt. They are carrying DOLE gift boxes, and wearing island mu-mus. Just my luck, this tropical breeze over my shoulder while the smell of decay wafts from my own gate, just a little ways down where there are no outlets available. Me and my dying battery.

It's not exactly despair I'm staring down, but it's something not unlike it, here... laid over... alone... for hours... traveling for reasons I hope to be convinced of. Right now, I expect the best I can make of this trip is to be alone in my hotel as often as possible.

Expect to hear from me.

surgical situations

2011-04-07T19:00:00.000-07:00

In case you were wondering, the surgery I am referring to (in my last post) is the plate-removal surgery Owen had about three weeks ago. Normally, after a TPLO surgery the plate would stay in unless there was some sort of complication, such as an infection. We had planned to have the plate removed because he retrieves in ice cold water during the winter duck hunting...blahblah... I know I said it all before...

I am glad we did because he never seemed quite right after the first surgery and still limped a bit now and then -- most days actually -- even though he was still eager and able to give it the pepper chasing tennis balls.

After the second, less complicated, less invasive surgery, Owen was immediately and obviously improved. He was walking tentatively on the leg that same day and running within a two or three days.

We don't know why the plate was causing problems (there was some obvious inflammation in the connective tissue on the x-ray), but for whatever reason, removing the plate seems to have recovered him completely. Unfortunately, as relatively easy as the surgery was, he was still defrocked of his fine feathering.

Bad mothering

2011-04-06T14:04:00.001-07:00

Thea has been caught drinking out of Owee's water bowl. I am certainly to regret this, but after judging her determination, I gave her a bowl of her own water set on the floor, just like a dog. She has never drank so much water, nor so happily!

Clark has reservations, of course, as any decent parent would. He isn't sure we should be encouraging this behavior, to which I say CHILL, SHE WON'T BE GRADUATING FROM HIGH SCHOOL DRINKING FROM A DOG BOWL. This is my standard assessment tool. Will she be sleeping in our bed when she graduates from high school? Peeing on the floor, less that three feet away from the potty when she graduates from high school? Chewing up food and intentionally letting it dribble down her chin when she graduates from high school? Writing incomplete sentences when she graduates from high school? (probably) If the answers is "no," or at least "probably not," I am going to pass on causing myself undue stress.

With regards to this current problem/solution, I wonder if I am lazy, callous, reckless, lacking imagination -- or all those things. I don't want to fight with this very determined little dog-bowl drinker, and besides, with her own (clean) water bowl how bad can it be? At least she won't be drinking cat poop backwash. As a matter of previous instruction, we have not been able stop her from drinking her bathwater even when she repeatedly gets an uncomfortable soapy snort up her nose.... and kids, they all get bonked now and again and certainly ingest disgusting things. Right? Besides, I am a little ashamed to say, it may be that I am slightly amused by this behavior.

This is going to come back on me, right? All over the internet infants expire in a teaspoon of water and discussion boards are alive with the virtue of boiling water for anything that might touch a mother's child. Meanwhile, I'm teaching mine to drink like a dog. Will she get worms, assuming all dog bowls are drinking vessels? Is she going to do this at the family reunion? Probably. I'm steeling myself for the humiliation.

----------------

Speaking of dogs -- Owee ran his first post-surgery 5k the other day. I should knit a leg warmer for his drumstick, something to keep him warm through this frigid spring, till the hair grows back.

Springlike

2011-04-04T08:49:00.000-07:00

We had a day of temperate spring. It was enough to mow down the lawn, throw up the windows, shake out the rug. It was enough for some playground business. Today, despite crack of dawn birdsong and unbound joy yawning in my chest, it is nothing like spring.

I do believe it is spring, despite strong empirical evidence to the contrary. I thought I heard "winter storm warning" on the radio, in the background, but I am not sure. 90% chance of rain for the next few days and a cold April, that is all I can find on the internet.

The bad weather stays in the background. That's the secret to living in this climate, on the days when you don't find slate gray churning skies thrilling. It's a brilliant bright day above the clouds. My mom will see that when her plane breaks through. She flew away early this morning.

For Roy

2011-03-17T09:25:00.000-07:00

Let see...

Instapaper has a free and paid version of their app. I think instapaper is brilliant and I love it and won't live long enough to read all the articles I have archived.

HomeRoutine is a really great, highly customizable app that helped keep me sane when I was home during the day with Thea and working nights and weekends. Keeping up with her and trying to remember everything I needed to get done was too crazy. I added things like "Owen's medications" and "brush hair" and then just did what the list told me. When I use the built-in timer, I want to cry I am so proud of my self. Love, love love it.

Big Picture - Of course, their pictures should be viewed on a big screen, but I still like having them to look at on an iPhone when I have down time at work.

Pandora, This American Life (for $2.99 you get their entire archive), NPR News - Get yourself a speaker dock/charger.

Kindle - You don't have to have an Kindle to download and read books on your phone. I just got a Kindle for my birthday, and they sync well. I don't really like reading books on my phone, but it is a nice to have access to them anywhere I might be, anytime. Plus, I can read in the dark which you can't do with the Kindle.

ToyCamera, OldCamera, 8mm -- <3<3<3

MacGourmet - I am in love with cooking. I have the app for my MacBook and use it alllll the time for clipping, saving and organizing recipes, and for creating menu plans and shopping lists. The iPhone app gets some mixed reviews for it's syncing issues, but I haven't had any problems. It is really useful to have when I am at the grocery store and can't remember what I was planning to make, or what I have to buy to make it. There are lots of great recipe apps. A couple more that I have, and like a lot, but use less often: Whole Foods, and How to Cook Everything

mSecure, Units, PageOnce, Mint.com, Groupon, Evernote, Tomorrow, Gift List, Alarmed, RunKeeper, Dragondiction, WorkLog, Meditator, AroundMe, CheapGas, SleepMachine, RedLaser, and Zappos are all other apps that I have, and like.

There are many ingenious apps that often end up having limited real practical use. And tons of apps that have a ridiculous clutter of features. I searched for an app that would send me reminders to drink water. I found tons of hydration apps that have enable the user to geo-tag each drink of water they take, catalog all their drinking vessles, take pictures of each incident of water consumption and post it to various social media sites, etc.etc. useless clutter. Less is more. The best apps do one simple thing well.

Good luck Roy.

PS - Plants Versus Zombies. Don't tell anybody I told you.

This modern life

2011-03-08T21:38:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I wake up at night thinking about bees, about colony collapse, enmeshed with exponential glacial melt and chemically dispersed oil spills, about my graying hair, and my very young child, thinking -- something has got to give -- but it actually doesn't, does it? I'm not owed anything giving. When I run, when I am running and fighting inward against it, curling my toes, my mantra is "one has no reasonable expectation to comfort" which is to say, no there is no actual basis for thinking I deserve to be or ever will be comfortable. Usually, I get preoccupied by parsing the sentence, over and over I try to make sense of it for even if it is grammatically correct, of which I am not certain, it does not immediately, intuitively make sense. I can't remember where I adapted it from, a Buddhist idea at least I know. What I find every time is, exactly as it is means exactly what I want it to mean.

Does it seem harsh to remind myself that life is harsh? It feels kind too. There is a cloying, and deeply flawed, lulling sense of entitlement about this modern life. I was recently listening to a radio story about dish-washing machine soap, how some states have banned phosphates in detergents because of their adverse effects on streams, fish, eco-systems, etc. The company of course, found it not feasible to manufacture two kinds of detergent, and began selling the same phosphate-free detergent in other states where there was no such ban in place.

The reporter was interviewing a woman who was outraged, OUTRAGED that her dishes were spotty when they came out of the dishwasher. She bought trisodium phosphate from the hardware store and mixed her own detergent. The reporter says "so you just can't do with out them phosphates?" and after she (baselessly) dismisses the science (whatever!) she answers "the dishes weren't coming clean." Ipso-facto, the world can burn! I felt a very un-Buddhist, compassion-less desire to throttle her. That sense of entitlement reminds me why I have to force myself into discomfort, why I want to be the one who inflicts it. The truth is, if I don't run I see a future of decrepitude, of aches, atrophy, and regret -- a pain far worse than the discomfort of getting out of a warm bed on a cold, dark morning. Life is going to take it's pound of flesh. I find some dignity is standing up, accepting that it will, and choosing how I give it.

My dishes come out clean so maybe I don't know much about the heartbreak of dirty dishes. I haven't checked the ingredients on my box of detergent to determine its phosphate status, so who am I to talk about sacrifice? I am not qualified, its true. It could be argued that I run for vanity as much as health. It might be true, but the truth is, what keeps me going is the fact that I have pain due me and the only thing I can do about it is decide how I take it.

This is a good example of muddy thinking. I'm still not clear, even to myself what the hell phosphate-laden streams have to do with running in the morning, but for some reason, these analogies submerge from my subconscious, conflated, to argue against doing the easy, dishonest thing. Life isn't easy. You aren't owed clean dishes. Your dishes are not more important than fish in streams. Fucking get over it. Get out of bed. Go. Run.

a vexation brought on by overlooked mushrooms

2011-02-22T22:55:00.001-08:00

I wanted to make soup tonight. I set out the wheat berries to soak in water last night, counted my garlic bulbs, checked that there was enough vegetable stock -- but came home and realized I was without the shiitake mushrooms. The other ingredients languish, the kale is wilted in the fridge. There is no way I am going back out.

The most artistic thing I can do anymore is cook. I don't remember my dreams, I fidget when I sit to write, I can't sneak-read more than a paragraph at a time, I run in short bursts -- it seems reasonable to conflate my need to create things, however imperfectly, with the need to feed ourselves, having thishere family.

Left-overs are fine then I guess. Clark could care less for the artistry of food. He will eat whatever someone is so kind to put in front him. Thea is his diametric opposite in that regard...being that: things are not eaten specifically because I put them in front of her. I foil this plan by packing her off with a lunch bag of lovingly tended-to foods that other people put in front of her who, later, more often than not, report back that she ate everything with relish. I figure if I can manage to foist her off on the babysitter, on a friend or on the grandparents at least four days a week at which time she will eat, my parental duties regarding corporeal nourishment are being met. That does not prevent me from beating my breast and wailing... fistfuls of hair at a time. I should spare myself the drama -- she isn't going to starve to death willfully skipping the small percentage of meals we share. Still, I was disappointed tonight that I'd forgotten the mushrooms, for the soup... follow me?

Speaking of that small percentage --- Last week I thought I was clever, teaching her to count to three by throwing her, swinging hammock-like in my arms to the count of three first, onto the bed to land - POOF - in a swallow of down comforter: once (ONE) twice (TWO) three times (THREE!) WHEE! And within a few minutes she could count to three.

A few days later I started counting to her really slowly, enunciatingly -- the way you would to someone you didn't think was getting it (I say in hindsight) -- ONE, TWO and she said TREE FOW FIII

I was a little shocked and very very proud because of course part of me just automatically assumed she had "inherited it" from me in the same unexamined way that, when I was pregnant, I used to jump to, and draw myself up short from, wondering if the music in my earbuds was too loud or abrasive for a developing fetus.

oh! duh!

NO SHE DIDN'T LEARN IT FROM ME! I work all the fucking time these days (sometimes not even for pay (see me seething over unpaid $1600 invoice 75 days late?) grr) -- there is WORK in a way I can't seem to escape.

She didn't learn it from me.

So what. She didn't learn it from me. I soldiered on. I'd count to five, matter-of-fact and then say SIIIIX, SEVEN and she says AYYT NIIIY TEYYN

motherfucker. ELEEEVEN I say -- less game, more caution... FOWTEE, FIFTEEE, AYETEE, NYTEEE, TWAY.

So, yeah, I am a little dismayed because I don't dream and I don't write, and I don't read and I don't run (as I'd like) and I don't socialize and on top of all that, I can't make my soup and my daughter is counting to twenty(!) without me (excepting a few omitted numbers). I am going to sing to her those tough numbers 6, 7, 11, 12, 13, 16, 17 till she knows them well and that's all I need... these six numbers, and the chair, and my soup, for sure.

curated

2011-01-31T22:38:00.001-08:00

I'm surprised to see all the things I haven't posted here, that most of the accounting of my life is tucked away, unfinished in the drafts folder -- isn't that a woeful metaphor? This is what strikes me most about having such an irregular presence, is that when I load up my page I read fossilized moments. I suppose the animate intimacy of this blog died a long time ago.

There is still a lot of me here, if you see that or not. I have been posting for more than 7 years, which is longer than any other thing I have ever done. Is there any sense of time passing?

-My neighbor died and was buried between a holly and a rhododendron on a wet, wet gray day. The mud soaked through the leather soles of my husbands shoes. She was 99 years old, my age when WW2 ended, retirement age when Clark's parents brought him down to meet her as a new-born baby.

-Sometimes I have these awful days that just go on and on, punctuated by arduous cross-valley car steerings and driver-seat picnics. Today was that day. When I got home, Thea was all grown up, sang me songs and said "love you" for the first time as I squeezed her door shut at bedtime. Okay! Yes! It was me! She said it to me first!

I've been doing this since forever. This blog is a touchstone, one steady thing that time swirls around.

Status

2011-01-16T20:58:00.000-08:00

I do believe the daycare question has been answered to satisfaction, but only very very recently.

Just before New Years I found a woman who was farther away, and more expensive than I was prepared for, and after an interview and second home visit I agreed to sign a contract for care. It all came together with no time to spare before the start of the new term.

Almost immediately I regretted it and for the next two weeks was a tortured, remorseful buyer. I really tried to separate my anxiety from what might be real issues -- but honest-to-god my Best Intentions are a wildly insufficient parsing apparatus. Surprise.

Finally after I'd become more and more contorted in our interactions, even having Clark brush me down daily, the daycare lady sat me down with a cup of coffee and said MY FEELINGS DON'T GET HURT EASILY, LET ME HAVE IT -- TELL ME HOW YOU ARE FEELING ABOUT THINGS.

In that case, a lot of my concerns seemed sort of incoherent and shadowy, easily disinfected with just a little daylight. I'm a total nutjob, getting all worked up over here. Oh god, please somebody tell me which parts I was making up, which parts I was over-reacting to, which parts were completely non-existent, and if anything was real. At times like this, I am fervently glad I am not a single parent. Not because of all the things I would have to do alone, but because there is a rock solid human-being who keeps me from blowing away.

Anyway! Thea seems fine getting dropped off and picked up, expected toddler coping stresses notwithstanding. I'm working a LOT, up running early in the mornings, and for the first time in my life, nodding off on the couch at 9pm.

I'm full of this feeling that I'm getting better at life all the time. I mean, at least this time I knew I was being crazy.

Singing "up above the world"

2011!

2011-01-01T22:55:00.000-08:00

Don't forget the black eyed peas for luck in the new year please.

Sticker shock

2010-12-28T13:29:00.000-08:00

Good thing I am not the depressive type because, wow, this post-holiday week is an unfun, mess-cleaning, downpouring rain-fest. I'm a little puffy about the eyes probably ya, because I've mounted what seems to be a more fruitless and heartbreaking search for daycare than I thought possible.

Local AND quality AND affordable? God, I'm so naive!

Yes, I want my childcare provider to make a living wage, and yes I probably will get what I pay for -- thank you lady for filling in my stunned silence with that chastising byte of wisdom -- but after a couple days of touring blue collar homes and immigrant family basements and weathering the culture shock of other peoples intimate lives, I'm worn out and incredulous. My brain hurts from the math ...

< thoughtbubble >At X dollars per month, add 30% to how much I'll have to make above X before taxes, divide it into worked hours -- I'll have to work full-time just to afford part-time childcare, or work-full time to afford full-time childcare with a cut in take-home pay, and standard of living and less time with my child< /thoughtbubble >

I'm ducking through water sheeting down off the corrugated fiberglass porch roof, dead summer plants, dirty tipped-over molded-plastic yard chairs... still optimistic. Obese lady here, bra-less and be-slippered, reclines on K-mart furniture, tells me she'll let my child cry it out at nap-time. Do I get a discount if I pretend to not notice that your husband snuck out just as I was pulling up? Did he pass a background check too?

A dedicated childcare facility, the kind with a designated hand-washing station, and no visible personal belongings (stacks of mail, coupons and receipts, laundry, litter boxes), a place like that costs almost as much per month as housing and bills, combined.

How is this possible? America, you have truly said FUCK YOU to working mothers. I know, because I used to not give a shit about these matters, as a representative non-mothering American. Now I am mothering, and I'm totally alone in this mess. Even when I try to talk it over with Clark he says to me WELL, IF YOU THINK YOU CAN WORK ENOUGH TO COVER THE COST -- GO FOR IT.

Because I'M THE MOM, RIGHT? IF I WANT TO GET ALL UPPITY ABOUT HAVING A "CAREER" I'D BETTER FIGURE IT OUT MYSELF?* His right to work is unassailable. Agh, these stupid old cliches, this stupid mess, these hopeless times!

It'll all be different in 2011, right?

*That isn't exactly fair because Clark has never said that and he has been unfailingly supportive if a little lop-sided, but I still think the point is salient...

Sunday Baking

2010-12-05T14:12:00.000-08:00

I'm making gingerbread in the shape of butterflies because certain economic forces seem to be manipulating the cost of cookie cutters in the shape of little men... at least, at the only one store I went to, where they were four times more expensive than any of the other cookie cutting shapes. I don't appreciate feeling like a beguiled holiday sheep and in fact and at the same time, have never met a butterfly that made me mad or hurt my feelings. On the other hand, there are plenty of people whose heads should be bitten off for doing exactly that, so clearly this line of reasoning has it's limitations. This is where it lead: I bought the butterfly shaped cookie cutter.

There was some nice unexpected floofery when I threw a measure of baking soda into the hot mixture of molasses and brown sugar, but other than that, the recipe wasn't unimpressive.* I baked up a tiny swarm of 20 or so butterflies and threw the rest of the dough in the garbage.

Cleaning up just now I somehow managed to slice -- emphasize: saaa-lice! my finger right the fuck open washing the sauce pan. Help me figure out how I did it. My niece Ashley, who is living with us this school year, is constantly complaining that our knives are too sharp but the last three (3!) times I have cut myself (and badly) it happened not with any of our razor sharp knives but, in this particular order: on the lid of cottage cheese container, the foil from the neck of a wine bottle, and now the lip of a cooking pot.** I clearly have thin skin, haha, but I'm working through that.

Anyhow... here's some videos of daily nonsense

The sign for mouse as it might commonly be expressed, can be seen here. In this dialect, the finger goes all the way up ones nose.

*But not so offensive that I didn't eat three (4) cookies.

**UPDATE: I whittled the tip off my finger with our super-sharp paring knife a couple hours after posting. I'm now triple bandaged and annoyed! Witness:

So, today I was up bright and early because...

2010-11-21T21:04:00.000-08:00

Last night I was talking to my mother-in-law and she was suddenly all flashing light haloed and starry. I blinked a few times and wondered if I had recently stared into a very bright, tracer inducing light, which, no, I didn't think I had. And a few minutes later, driving home I started to notice peripheral zig-zags in my vision field -- and I knew it was all over for me. I could feel the aneurysm pulsing in my brain.

OMG I'M TOTALLY DYING, THEA PLEASE... LAUGH FOR MOMMY, JUST ONE... MORE... TIME...

It was a tough evening. I kept trying to sneak off to the couch to lay down, to fend off a physical discomfort what was crawling over me but Thea took the rejection hard and decided firmly that I was the only person allowed to handle her. So I drug myself again and again from the couch from a worsening state to ask her to sit in the tub, back to the couch... to convince her to submit to the washing of hair, back to the couch... to the zipping of jammies, back to the couch... and finally I just stayed and did it myself: the holding, the reading of books, the rocking of the chair, singing of songs and tucking of blankets.

When she at last went to sleep I crept upstairs with my laptop to Google the symptoms -- phantom lights, headache, nausea and willingness to go to sleep before midnight -- and holy fuck! Peripheral zig-zags, word-for-word? A migraine! What? That's so commonplace... no way! Then I ran downstairs to puke.

Anyhoo, the exciting part of my story is that I had a real life Migraine (ouch!) and went to bed with an icepack at 830pm which I have never, ever, ever done before under my own volition. Ever. Even when Thea was a brand-new baby and I hadn't slept for years. Ever.

I got up today earrrrly and it felt so right! Can I call myself a morning person now?

Killed

2010-11-20T13:26:00.001-08:00

I'm out last night after dark, running up a busy street that borders my neighborhood. There's this raccoon running too, across my path. Turning to look over my shoulder, yes damnit there is a car coming and I'm yelling NONONONONOOOONOOOOO but the raccoon doesn't understand me and the car doesn't hear me and yeah.

There now, is the raccoon in the middle of the street. The street is wet, and not particularly well lit, on a hill, on a curve, cars still coming. God, at least the driver pulled over and I'm not alone with this. The raccoon actually rolls over now, she's still alive. Whew! ...wait, Agh! This is worse, isn't it? Fuck.

She's just laying there on her stomach, her head up, composed. Cars are swerving around her. I can't tell if there is blood or guts on the wet black. She's got her front paws stretched daintily out in front, just looking around. This is the exact same pose Willie strikes on the back of the couch at her most content, falling asleep with her head high.

This is really sucking because I don't know what to do and this guy is pacing around going WHAT DO I DO? SHOULD I DRIVE OVER IT AGAIN? I CAN'T DO THAT! WHAT DO I DO? And she's out there in the street nonchalantly not dead, cars swerving around her. She's a wild animal, I can't go out there and pick her up. Besides, I'm wearing all black fullpantslongsleevesblack... I'm gonna be killed with her if I walk out into the street.

Calling Clark, no answer. Calling non-emergency punching through their prohibitive phone tree. And dude, I'm shaking and trying not to cry. Does anybody think, it's just a fucking raccoon? Because I'm feeling like I should think that. I don't know why. At the same time, if you said "it's just a raccoon, geez" I'd hate you.

Cars are swerving around her and this guy is running up and down knocking on doors that nobody is answering. I'm wringing my hands. Police non-emergency has office hours. They're closed. Can't type on this stupid iphone keyboard with hands shaking. Dove Lewis? Animal Control? Cuddle hotline?

After 10 forever minutes of this the raccoon, oh horror she tries to get up. Then, umm... she walks right off past me up into the dark street of houses. No blood dripping, guts dragging -- she's wholly intact.

She doesn't seem to even be limping but this still can't be good right? I saw her, heard her get hit, hard. Maybe she just got brushed by the bumper and rolled under the car? She's probably going to find a place to die? I'm totally confused though. Can I cry yet? I don't have any reason now. She's not dead! She looks fine! Except that my chest is pent the fuck up with anxiety. I'm a riot in a dispersing crowd.

Life is going on. Someone blares their horn at the car parked there with hazard lights. Clark is still not answering his phone. I'm cold now, and wet with sweat. The raccoon is gone. She doesn't want our help. It's just me and this kid and he's like, UM, BETTER GET GOING. SORRY YOU HAD TO SEE THAT.

Now it's just me, staring into traffic. I'm two miles from home, looking and feeling like a shadow. I've lost the heart of my run but it's cold out here so I jog stiffly home.

Uphill bothways

2010-11-18T13:16:00.000-08:00

It's probably doesn't need to be said that running is a lot more of a challenge these days. This week already there have been a couple of down days, days where I just had to keep bumping my run down the to-do list until oops, it was too late...

Take yesterday, when getting out to the street required a force of mysterious strength and origin. Thea, with four more teeth coming in, is in complete revolt from meaningful sleep... tired, pained, sweaty, willful... prodding her up and down the stairs, changing clothes tying shoes with one hand, the other retrieving her from the precipice of the stairwell.

Stuffing her into a sweater, jacket, two pairs of socks, boots, gloves and packing her tight into the stroller with a warm fluffy blanket over howling protestation. The draping of the stroller rain-bonnet brought on physical arched-body bucking...

This is absurd, this is totally absurd

...wrestling the stroller out the door, scraping past the awful, resistant glass screendoor into heavy, twilit downpouring rain and screaming outrage. See? There are a plenitude of reasons to say FUCKTHISFOREVER... but I know that we, she even more than me, need a change of scenery and some fresh gotdamned air.

There is nobody out here now, in this downpour, on this deeply puddled path. I only see one other person running and his clothes are plastered by rain to his body. It is almost full dark when I slow running to a walk, back where we started. I'll get home just before the wolves and the gusts I bring with me mean the inside won't be so stale anymore.

Fresher air

2010-11-12T18:27:00.000-08:00

The impossible 8 weeks is up and we got the approval from the veterinary orthopedic surgeon to begin taking Oweeeee for short 15 minute walks, twice daily.

The assessment at this point is that the healing progress is "less than ideal, but within the range of normal." Being less than ideal means you can still see the cut lines in the bone on the X-ray and a slight occasional hesitation to use the leg, all which should have no effect on his long term prognosis = %100 full recovery.

why do you torture me so? just let me die!

I wanted to tell the doctor that, you see, Oweeee is a thinking man and a extra-sensitive submissive dog who is probably depressed in his current state of inactivity. THAT is why his healing has been a little slow, THAT is why he sometimes still rests that leg on its toe when standing instead of putting his full weight down. I know my Oweeeee, he is a leg-cocker if even looked at with disconcertion. I have no doubts that now being allowed outdoors, he will rebound much more quickly.

So, anyway, less than ideal means another round of X-ray$ in six weeks. Blerg.

in my clutches! -- aaagh

Costume wars

2010-10-31T11:14:00.000-07:00

This blog post is sponsored by today's cancellation with less than 24 hours notice. It is circumstantial compensation, sure, but I'm amused by the idea of being a paid writer. Anyone who can craft a noun phrase like that should be remunerated, don't you think?

It's Halloween. My pumpkins survived the night.

Thea is a chagrined ladybug who violently rejects the antenna doctrine. I really want to force them onto her head though, and I'm fighting with my better nature. Believe me, I have no illusions about this... the costume is for my benefit... and it's really just too bad she is too young for coercion and/or bribery and/or threats because maybe we could come to some kind of truce in which I win.

I've been chasing her around the house with a camera begging her to hold still long enough to have her picture taken at the very least. Begging doesn't work either. I think her costume will probably be in tatters before long and I'm just going to have to pick up the pieces and, you know...

...keep trying to shove them onto her.

Wish me luck!

On Pumpkin Smashing

2010-10-30T23:50:00.000-07:00

I don't want anybody to come and smash my pumpkins. There was smashed pumpkin on the street outside today and I almost, briefly, thought about bringing my jack-o-lanterns in for the night but that is a fundamental contradiction to the spirit of carved-pumpkinry, isn't it?

These ones this year matter to me a lot. Just like everything, Halloween has been recast in light of Thea. So yes, I do not want them to become ex-pumpkin street slime at the hands of our local ~~turdface~~ teenagers. However, these pumkins are also being crawled over and through by both slugs and perhaps a couple of ants, and THAT is just gruesome enough to say: leave them outside of the house, no matter the peril. Slugs! are crawling in! and out! of my pumpkin mouths! and pumpkin eyeballs! Agh!

2010-10-29T14:03:00.000-07:00

I have some free time built into my schedule today, but not enough time to do anything or go anywhere off the trail between campuses. So I'm here, brushing crumbs off the cushions in the hallways and looking at enthusiastic student art of dubious quality.

The weather got me wrong again. Last night was so cold and wet when I wore a thin sweatshirt to the concrete campus on the windy hill. I swore today I would dress smarter but it turns out today isn't parka weather. Last night was. I historically have bad winter coating habits, often look out the window into a horizontal torrent and accordingly select comfy light-weight sleeves that served me well all summer long. This is my tendency my friend Sascha often points out, poking me maliciously, with her actual finger. She called me yesterday is perhaps the only reason I tried to dress appropriately today. And it backfired.

It was very nice to talk to her. Most of my friendships are mostly theoretical these days. This probably sounds sad. It is, I guess.

Anyway, pumpkins.

For the birds

2010-10-19T10:30:00.000-07:00

Our backyard is fenced in by chain-link and grown over with a laurel hedge. The hedge hides about 90% of the chain-link fence (which I hate), but the hedge is also ugly and prone to looking mildewy and diseased. I'd like to eventually replace the fence, removing the hedge entirely, however, the hedge is perfect habitat for the small song birds that eat out of our feeders. They sit singing in the bushes all day long. Does anybody have any suggestions on what we can do to keep these birds around? Are there other plants in which they are likely to settle? Honestly, I'd rather keep the hedge if taking it out means we lose the birds. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

----

Anyway, it wasn't any one molar coming in that caused all that anxious to-doing around here, it was three. Now all three teeth are in and, YAY! happiness EVER AFTER ever since. It's been so lovely in fact, that the day after that last grievous post, rose petals tumbled out of Thea's diaper and angels sang.

This is true too. She'd been out in the backyard with Ashley defrocking the roses. There were trails of petals around the half an apple tree, leading to the dog's water bowl, filling the water bowl, escaping through the fence, and, it seems like she saved a fistful of those petal down the front of her onesie. When I went to change her, oh pleasant day, there they were.

But yes, I didn't know until a few days ago that there were actually three teeth breaking through. I had Thea on my lap, head thrown back, laughing and I was like HOLY CRAP, LOOOKIT! TEETH! I do my best to anticipate her need for pain medication but it's not easy. I can only imagine that mouth hurt like a motherfucker.

Anyway, breathing easy.

It's just a phase, right?

2010-10-05T00:39:00.000-07:00

Things have gotten very exciting here. Owen is gated up in the kitchen with a shaved-naked and visibly withered drumstick haunch. He ranges emotionally between visibly depressed and thickly morose, depending on how tranquilized he is at the moment -- though he can rally a good swooping howl and nerve-wracking broken-legged leap, even from the depths of a drug stupor, when any of us come home. These moments are, you know, his only high points during this ~~trial~~ long convalescence... homecomings aaaand the radio... oh, and going outside long enough to pee! Three weeks down, five more to go.

Immediately after surgery, pre-atrophy

Also, we have more teeth: big fat molars = punchypunchy baby! It's a curious fact that toddlers haven't gone extinct. They seem to have an uncanny ability to know exactly when to come around hugging and kissing. Seriously, she is really fucking cute and cute works on me. And so does the feeling of insane, terminal-velocity mamalove. But, fuck!, it ain't easy. I actually banged my head on the wall today, about five or six thumps. At times, always lately, I feel like the most clueless, under-prepared, incompetent person to ever try mothering which is a double blow because I had gotten smug, I was going to be a better! mother! than all the mothers I've known. But hold that phone! The contest has hardly begun, and there is still plenty of wine.

This face?

I really don't know what I am doing! Today I just stopped trying to negotiate what I thought was a pretty fair compromise which went like this: okay! you got to brush your teeth, now it's mama's turn (to brush your teeth) (so cheery) and finally, because it was received with back-arching howls anyway, I just executed some street justice and wrenched the toothbrush out of her hands with my superior strength and we suffered the consequences together - on the floor, snotty, and streaming hot tears. Bonus, she still comes to me for consolation, even when the disconsolating event is of my doing.

So that, with scene reruns re: lotion, nail clippers, food, clothing (and other things I wasn't even given enough time to deny her of), was our day, week, month? year? How long does this phase last? So yes, I'm making a list of resources: The library is a discrete way of getting information. Parenting websites too, though maybe other parents aren't quite willing to use the same language I use to describe my toddler's behavior (badger in a dress) which makes the search results either dishonest, or upsetting, or both. Other parents? I need specific advice instead of platitudes. I want someone to tell me this: When A happens, then B should be your course of action, in which B is nothing abusive, or non-life affirming.

I think, as times have noticeably darkened in this struggle for independence, about that smug anti-parenting article citing non-parents self-reported higher levels of happiness, and I remember the quote "my family are like millstones around my neck" and, with a nod, I still wouldn't un-wish. This is not to say That. I just want to make it easier on us, me maybe mostly her.

this face?

holymother! so I had a dreams last night that was such metaphorical overkill! It was me at the funnest, swanky party but I could not, WOULD NOT stay because, no! this isn't like me!, and plus I had to get home to sleeping Thea. So instead I spent the entire party into the early morning hours searching the grounds for a to-go box, or even a dirty plate so I could bring home some of the amazing food from the banquet tables. But I could not find a container, or, then I could not hold onto a container, or find another... and all around me were people in various states of rapturous life-affirmation fun-having. And the food slowly disappeared, then the desserts disappeared, and the people started to disappear and I was still thinking I had to find this container because maybe the food had just been put in the fridge, and I could still make it home. And yet, my niece, who was supposed to be babysitting Thea, drifted into and out of the crowd, mentioning that she had told the neighbors that I would be right back and they weren't really keeping Thea safe, but had an ear out for her, so there was THIS too, this urgency to send my niece back to watch Thea, or to get back myself, but I just had to get this container! Why didn't I just eat the fucking food?

you guys! what is the food? did I have this dream because one of the classes I interpreted on Thoreau and his LIVE FOR NO-OTHER credo? is this just because I feel so weighed down and dispersed by the piles of things in my head I mean to get around to, but refuse to sacrifice NARY A ONE, EVEN IF IT MEANS I'VE THEN SACRIFICED THEM ALL?

Just... damn! I wish I had time for all the library books I have checked out. At least I can keep renewing them, over and over again. Eventually, I'll read up all the answers.

TPLO

2010-09-15T14:38:00.000-07:00

Tibial Plateau Leveling Osteotomy. It's kinda fun to say. Owen is having one done today after wiping out on some wet logs at the creek on Friday. He slipped and fell while running full speed chasing a stick. He's been limping but stoic since the initial fall and didn't even cry when we prodded him for clues, but it was clear that he was not using the leg and from the way it wobbled side-to-side, it was also pretty clear that whatever was wrong wasn't going to heal on it's own.

THESE VERY LOGS

We took him to the vet Saturday, stayed home Sunday, went in for x-rays Monday, consultation with an orthopedic surgeon Tuesday and then back again today for the surgery. His cruciate ligament and meniscus were torn when he fell. There is nothing to be done for the meniscus, but, because the cruciate can no longer prevent slippage where bone meets bone, the plateau of his tibia is being leveled (if you couldn't tell from the name of the procedure) so there won't be a slippery slope...plateau... and then everything will be great. The surgeon will make a circular cut, adjust the angle of the top of the bone, nail everthing together, sew it up and that's that, as well as I understand it.

Because Owen is a working dog and spends winters standing chest-deep in icy water we've decided that the implant, which would normally just stay on the bone, will need to be removed to prevent painful expansion and contraction, which will be another surgery a few weeks after the 2-3 month convalescence following this one.

Of course, we are grateful to have the emergency resources to cover the cost, which is mind-numbing, but I couldn't help cringing when I handed over my credit card this morning for half-down on the estimate. I mean, we have spent the last three years aggressively paying down our debt and this pretty much puts us right back where we started.

But the hardest part of this is the regret. I just fucking hate myself for letting him run over those logs, which, right now seems sooo fucking stupid as to border on criminally negligent. I mean, I didn't just let him. He ran over the logs the first time and it was so amazing to watch him airborne at full sprint I intentionally threw the stick in the same spot the second time. By then, the logs were wet and he suffered his fall. Owen is an incredibly athletic dog, strong and agile with an exquisite musculature. He is the most physically capable dog I have ever had. It really didn't occur to me (fucking DUH) that he could fall. The surgeon says he expects a full recovery, but I still feel like I took something that was magnificently perfect* and destroyed it, and for that, I can never pay enough. DRAMATIC, NON?

*and sweetly undeserving.

Gifford-Pinchot

2010-08-21T21:37:00.000-07:00

Clark is gone for the weekend camping with his extended family. I wouldn't be missing it except for the recent Great Falls Exhibition of Horrors. There is no way I'm dragging that kid out of her snug little bedtime routine again until she is old enough to negotiate, old enough to sit still and listen to an explanation and maybe old enough for regret. Until then, thanks, I'll stay home. At the rate she is mastering worldly skills it should only be a few more weeks.

What I missed most being gone was our walks in the mornings and evenings. Thea and I go around the block in footie pajamas and bid prolonged farewell to anyone passing in the other direction, especially with a dog, or to anyone getting into a car. About halfway home we stand on the sidewalk while she signs CHICKEN to me and points to the house where they indeed have chickens in the yard. It takes several minutes before I can convince her that I know there are chickens in that there yard, and that it is OUR JOB to say goodbye to those chickens.

BYE CHICKENS, GOODBYE LIKE YOU'VE NEVER BEEN GOODBYED BEFORE! GOODBYE TILL YOU ARE MISSING FEATHERS! TILL TOMORROW MORNING CHICKENS!! GOODBYE CHICKENS!

BYEBYE!

BYE!

BYE!

BYE CHICKENS!

BYE!

It's the cutest fucking thing that ever happened to those chickens and tonight they came to the fence and we had a little chicken party. It was a going away party. BYE CHICKENS!

Speaking of babies! There still ISN'T one over in Montana. Anita went in for another doctor visit, another stress test, and for the laying out of options. They will try to induce on Monday. In the meantime, all the old wives tales are being vigorously researched online and ringers are being left on all through the night. So far, the only wake-up calls I've gotten have been notification that it's my turn at WORDS WITH FRIENDS. (username: theachance (if you like that kind of thing)).

While we were gone

2010-08-18T10:20:00.000-07:00

The apple tree in the back yard fell the fuck over. The house smells like paint and the backyard is strewn with tree limbs and paintbrushes, drop clothes, rollers, lengths of quarter-round molding...

Clark did a lot of work while we were in Montana. He replaced the molding through the whole house, something that we have not made the time for since the floors were redone back in January, and finished painting every floorboard, wall and ceiling on the ground floor except the kitchen (remember that project from last fall?). Whew! I'm tired sitting here comfortably on the couch just looking at the walls! I better make some noise about how hard it was to be in Montana with that baby so we all know the score is even.

Packing for Home

2010-08-16T11:16:00.000-07:00

This has been a long exhausting trip. I am packing to leave tomorrow morning and there is still no signs of real labor. The expectant parents are at the midwife right now for another stress test, another ultrasound, a little bit more poking and prodding. It is seeming pretty likely that I won't be getting my hands on a baby this visit. Boo.

I don't necessarily have to leave tomorrow. I don't have any pressing concerns to get home to, but I miss my husband, I miss my dog, I miss my child transitioning easily and comfortably into sleep. As I write this Thea is screaming from the other room after napping for a mere 20 minutes. I am wondering if the pack-n-play is close enough to the shelves that she can pull the whole thing down on her head, or maybe get a foothold to climb up and stick her finger in a light socket. This child is killing me. The future should invent hover cams for monitorning kids. Aren't we living in the Space Ages! I wouldn't be wondering if she was ingesting a tube of zinc oxide I swear might be within arms reach of the crib. Damnit why is she so quiet right now?

Missouri River

Anyway, half of the family left yesterday. It was hushed and a little sad around here. I packed up from my seedy motel and moved into the baby room, cooked up a couple more casseroles for the deep-freeze, walked to the park, drank a couple beers with John. In the evening we walked the river side trail past some falls. I wouldn't call them Great... there must be something better because these look like they are only exposed because of the dam immediately up river, which was not here when Lewis and Clark trekked by taking note of the greatness of the falls ... anyway, they were Nice Falls behind which the sun set prettily and still, neither baby was lulled, theirs to labor, mine to sleep.

Mediocre Falls

Great Falls, Montana

2010-08-12T22:22:00.001-07:00

I'm in Montana this week for a baby but there is no baby yet. Today is the third day after the due date, DD+3 and it feels like there will never be a baby, like there is no such thing but a basketball under a shirt. In good faith we wait, and eat occasional meals together.

I thought it better to entertain an interrupted toddler in a setting more private than a full house with a newborn, so I'm staying in a ~~post-prison halfway-house~~ motel my brother recommended, near one of the less glamorous freeway exits. I spend the evenings wrastling with my small, but willful daughter. It's rough for a bebeh, you know, not being in her own bed living her own known life. She has true mastery of the concept DOG (word and sign, living and representational) but almost no mastery at all for the whimsy or caprice of her own emotions.

Every night I pace, and sing, and cuddle and mostly restrain her until she gets sooo tired (and screamy) she falls asleep by accident, twoplus hours after her bedtime! And when she wakes up at 5am she is already ready for a nap, but, being away, wont take one except by accident.

I would be betraying her to tell you how hard the last five evenings here have been for me, because it's my job to want to do anyanything at all for her. I'd jump in front of a train, I would... but feverish hyper-exhaustion just seems, I dunno... unnecessary, like something that can just be knocked-off. These nights, oh, I suffer all the rage and sorrow she can muster. I practice my Zen calm and try to let it go through me but it's hard to not fall down when it does.

I don't like it here and I don't even know where the fuck I am. I had to Google "Great Falls" just now to see my location, and it's relationship to places I do know. To be honest, I'm just looking to pick a fight with this town. For example, I've put over 25 foot miles into this place and only seen three other runners. But I was mad when the second, then third runner went past me today because it destroyed the case I was building against this town. I still don't have to like it, even if people here do occasionally run.

So anyway, we're a whole bunch of family gathered together, several from as far as Norway, waiting on a baby. I hope it's a SHE, I hope SHE comes tonight, though that will be a Friday the 13th birthday, but eh... there are worse things.

Play group

2010-07-28T13:58:00.000-07:00

Thea and I went to the Portland Children's Museum today for Dance Together, a chaotic scarf-waving toddler class, the last of four sessions which we paid for months ago and were never able to attend until today... haha they have a cancellation/refund policy that I didn't bother to look at until just now... um, anyway, Thea peed her pants and I didn't check the diaper bag before we left so I didn't notice that there was not a change of clothes in there like there has been everysingleday for her whole freakin life. I have been hauling around a hulkinghuge bag packed for every possible contingency none of which were ever realized until today. That is probably not exactly true. Still.

Instructing toddlers is the height of futility so really, the parents (the moms actually because really, in the infant massage classes, and new moms groups and Tiny Tots at the library and MOPS (mothers of preschoolers) at the park, and Science Tots... all these baby group attenders are moms at a ratio of 10:1, with the one in ten dad being a sorta oversensitive stay-at-home sissy type HAHAHA JUST KIDDING!) anyway, the moms are dancing around trying to demonstrate nose-touching and hand clapping and the babies are like YOUAREFREAKINGMEOUT JUST PICK ME UP PLZ.

Sometimes they hit each other, sometimes they scream and run in circles, they put whatever they can in their mouths and often they spend some time just staring at the overly enthusiastic group leader. Once and awhile they try to bite her talking puppet hand. ANYWAY, Thea gawked and gamely held onto a FOAM DANCING NOODLE, but by the middle of it was overstimulated and refused to be put down. I can oblige a little baby pee so I just held her on my hip as we hopped on rubber squares and choo-choo followed-the-leader.

Then, because we skipped nap time to attend she was in a foul little mood and chased Owen around beating him with the green and sliver pinwheel that I bought her as we were leaving, which I swear is the exactly same toy it was when I was a kid. Poor Owen. I usually make him sit and take her attentions because she gets such a kick out of him scampering away, and dude, I can't think of anything more dangerous then a kid determined to chase down and torture a dog that towers over her. So Owen takes the petting, terribly put-out about it, but without his histrionics the fun is ruined for Thea, which is my job I guess and she wanders off to stuff the mail slot with tupperware lids. Except when she actually hits then hotdamn she gets scooped up by her armpits and deposited into a minute long timeout purgatory. Even for a fairly painless pinwheel beating.

That is what I did today. Plus laundry, a sassy lentil-barley soup and six miles in the afternoon heat.

2010-07-27T09:02:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I wrote a fairly annoyed few paragraphs about general misconceptions regarding sign language which I then decided not to publish. Yes, the assumptions and ignorant comments are ugh, fucking irritating, but they are not really offensive unless you work at getting offended, and they're almost never malicious. Besides, I think everybody feels exasperated about the things they KNOW that others DON'T KNOW. What's interesting about that? In fact, few things annoy me more someone yelling OHMYGOD THE GENERAL PUBLIC IS SOOO IGNORANT ABOUT MY SPECIALIZED NICHE AREA OF EXPERTISE AND/OR MY VERY UNIQUE EXPERIENCE OF LIFE. I think maybe my peevishness about my job runs neck and neck with my intolerance for knowledge narcissism. IT'S A VERY CROWDED RACETRACK.

Anyway, all matters being settled, now I think I'll round us up and go for a hike. I have all kinds of very important other matters, like drawing up and sending out invoices but getting paid sounds so very boring.

Off to shirk then.

Runaway Artist

2010-07-15T13:47:00.000-07:00

There is an unbelievable lull in the day just now, without work, baby or other distractions. She is napping, I think. Sometimes she wakes up and chatters quietly to herself and then I might not immediately know that she is awake. More often she wakes up at full speed. But for the rightnow everything is quiet and I have a moment to myself.

Lately I'm casting about for a little bit of independence, just enough to tend to living. Still, sometimes when I stand up and walk around the house to oh, eat food, brush hair, have a chore - whatever - she becomes insanely needy. Anytime I am not enraptured with her, really. That's funny, because my drive to do most things seemingly not Thea-centric are mostly still Thea-centric most often motivated out of deep and compulsive need to tend to her, to provide her with things like clean floors and clean clothes. For Thea, that is unacceptably not Thea nibbling rapture and she really wont have it.

Unlike that is the same child who runs away as best she can, which isn't yet a worrisome labor. I mean, our pace ratio is significantly in my favor for at least now. Her running gait is a sort of swaying goose-step panting-huffle and she breaks into it when clothing is attempted, doors are left ajar, or anytime she is unleashed in the wide open. Also in the direction of pets.

Today I took her and Owen to the church yard a block away to throw the ball and she kept walking determinedly down the alley walk, away. She never once looked back. I am pretty certain, and am likely to perform experiments of stealth to confirm, that she would have just kept going if I hadn't run and collared her. I'm pretty sure she would just keep walking away.

Just me and my ball chucker

DO YOU THINK SHE COULD WALK FIVE MILES my husband joked when I told him. He doesn't think this is something with roots. He takes things for what they seem. For me, GOD it represents everything. Like everything does.
.
.

2010-05-25T00:13:00.002-07:00

Well, Thea is one year old just now. Despite both Clark and I each having taken a trip to the ER during this last year, we made it without any trips to the emergency room for her, though just barely. She walks now, zombie-like, and as she made her way across the living room tonight she fell on her butt and chomped down hard on her tongue. I was on my way to a job and when Clark called me. I called the team I was working with that evening, apologized to her and turned the car back towards home. By the time I got there she was composed. The volumes, gallons, of gushing blood had ceased to gush and had been cleaned, clothes set to soak, medication administered, tears dried. Per the doctor there is no need to go to the hospital. We'll be feeding bland foods and giving her kisses. Otherwise, there isn't much to be done. The mouth heals quickly.

My mom is here visiting this week. She's standing in while I catch up on a years worth of sleep and Clark studies behind closed doors. He has been studying about 6 hours everyday after work, and 12-16 hours on the weekends. This has been our routine since the floors were done. I'm not happy about it. I'd like some help with the dishes and a conversation with my husband. I'll bet he would rather be doing the dishes too. By Saturday, if we did it right, he'll be a Certified Industrial Hygienist. It is the unsexiest job title in the world, the unlikely co-mingled impressions of impersonal-intimate and boring-icky come to mind. Still, any slight lead/volatile organic compound/radiation/asbestos irrational panic I have is usually handled with nerdy science talk, after which, the next day he'll bring home a 40 thousand dollar molecule-o-meter and zap readings all over the house, send in dirt samples and pat me on my irrational head. I appreciate it.

So, in the meantime, mom is here. I've taken three epic naps since she's been here.

More later. More on birthdays, this last year, this next year, life ahead. But later.

Mothers Day

2010-05-09T09:53:00.000-07:00

Mama

Mama

Sleeping is the most highly prized commodity here. I got a lot of it today. Then breakfast, flowers and coffee under the apple tree. We bought plants, planted them, hung bird feeders and filled them with seed. Did you hear that mom? SEED.

In the afternoon after the clouds rolled in and the temperature dropped I went running through the neighborhood with my posse. It was the best mothers day I have ever had.

Hope yours was too.

Unstoppable Object

2010-04-21T10:25:00.000-07:00

Jump forward to now. Everything is different. Thea sleeps through the night, all night, in her own bed after minimal fuss and drama...at least, compared to what I was expecting... and now sleep deprivation can only be the fault of my own self who won't put herself to bed.

And now that she sleeps through the night, she wakes up at exactly 5am. It wouldn't be hyperbolic to say at the very second 5:00:00am. She is accurate like an atomic clock. I've found the easiest way around this problem is straight through, so on those days when I want to do things the easy way I just get up with her and get on with my day. Other days I try to bring her to bed with us and then suffer a miserable half-sleep that is a worse fate than death: being gouged, kicked at with shrieks of joy, hair pulled, head-butted and sometimes bit. Also, wrastling to keep her from leaping out the second story window.

Other things are different too. Everything, that is. She has taken some steps but still mostly holds on while making her way around. When you try to put her down on her feet, the lower half of her body arches and bucks and her feet take off, forcefully pushing off the surface to get somewhere before you can release her top half, and making it impossible to do so. Great care must be taken when setting her loose. It's a good thing our sizes are what they are to each other or we'd both be badly injured.

She also says (said twice) MAMA, but is most inspired by the kitty -DITTYDITTYDITTY. She signs MILK, DOG and sometimes MORE... pathetically few for the child of a sign language interpreter. She leans into my face with her drooly open mouth when I make kissing sounds. On Easter Sunday for the last time I spent the whole day making baby food. She has six teeth, and uses them to eat finger foods now... no more, that lovingly prepared organic veggie gruel I used to schlep in my kitchen.

Also, the mimicry has begun. She is doing things I didn't remotely think had caught her attention. She brushes her hair and puts my sunglasses on her face. It's friggn amazing and on top of that, unbelievably cute.

........................
..................
...........

But now, having prepared this to be posted on the internet, I have to address the nagging voice of dissent in my head. If you have read this far, Thea probably doesn't offend you. And if she does offend you but you read all this anyway, let me just say that if you met her at a party, you would like her. She would like you too, in a really satisfying way. So go easy, eh?

The other day I was working with another interpreter. Our client asked me about Thea and I made a short comment about how sweet and happy she was and whatever. My team started to say that she didn't want children, absolutely noteverwhatsoevernever because she doesn't like children and they are bad for the planet. She went on to say that people should adopt and not have their own kids and when I pointed out that adoption costs are prohibitive and the process time consuming she only shrugged and said so is having a baby.

Plus, I know everyone hates mommybloggers except they, their-selfcongratulatory-selves, and plenty of sniggering and derision happens on these internets in the general direction of people like myself.

I've actually given these opinions a lot of thought and fair consideration. The truth is, that two people having one child actually equals negative population growth. Of course, for the time being there are three where there were two but in the big picture the returns are diminishing, even accounting for my step-daughter, counting three people for a total of two offspring, or my step-daughter's other sister, three offspring for four people. Anyway, I don't think we'll be having another kid, no matter how much fun it's been (more even than two is absolutely out of the question), and even if we did [have two], we'd still only be replacing our own selves (stagnant growth). You can bet Thea will be raised with a similar conscientious ethic.

But that is sorta missing the point anyway. I don't have to justify for my colleague or for random internet cranks why I had a kid, or the fact that I love her like crazy. It's easy to make arguments against the having of offspring, from crass and hateful to complex and socially acceptable, and every time I say anything publicly about being a mom I hear all those harsh criticisms in my head. Maybe, in part, that's because I once made them myself, and I guess that's why I am mentioning it at all.

Still, it's my blog and I'll post whatever I damnwellplease.

Anyway, I'd be interested to hear other people's opinions about this matter. I wonder if I have lost any readers since having had a baby. I once had a stat counter but when I changed my format it dropped the code and I wouldn't even know where to go find it if I even had the time or interest to do so, so I have no idea the limits of the influence I wield. Minimal to be sure.

Moderator

2010-04-01T21:41:00.000-07:00

Hi, sorry to the few people who like to comment here but I'm going to moderate comments from now on because some jerkwad in China keeps spamming me. WHOEVER YOU ARE I HATE YOU.

When I recently changed my blog after years and years with that The Most Lackluster of Presentations format to the second most lacking of luster formats of all times that I have now, I lost the haloscan code so all my old comments disappeared. They were still housed somewheres until Haloscan got rid of all freeloaders' comments FOREVER and, well, this is an awfully lonely blog now.

I just can't have the populating majority be spammers.

Anyway, it's pouring rain and all my houseplants are waiting outside under the fantastic impression that I am going to have the time to transplant them into nice clean pots with nutrient rich dirt. HAHA.

I am terrified now that they'll all become trojan-horses for the invading slug army and my sanctuary in this hostile slime-land will be invaded. I do love it here, rain and petulant skies the most, but there is always that lurking horrible menace. Over time, the instinct to fear has not lessened at all.

I took my niece to get her lip pierced last weekend for her 18th birthday, then sent her back to college on the greyhound.

I waited standing at the counter commiserating with the tattoo artist about the nighttime habits of babies. It relieves me to know I'm not the only irredeemable failure, derelict in the administration of my boundaries and lacking the vigor to hear a baby cry out... to hear it told. I was so judgmental on this matter once! Ask my friend Kate!!

I really am embarrassed about it.

Anyway, comment moderation. It's a lonely job.

.

2010-03-14T22:32:00.000-07:00

Has it really been a more than a month since I posted? We're a little busy around here with our million-watt baby and the attending storm of tiny disasters. Thea is practically a toddler which means head bonkage and danger lust. This freaks me out a little bit, sentimentally and too because of the vigilance required overseeing these negotiations. If you met her I wouldn't have to tell you that she is a very intense person. Add that she has been trapped in a neurological prison and you might get an idea of the kind thriving will I am talking about.

I haven't had much experience with babies for the last couple decades, not since my brother John was one. In my memory, he was such a sweet, rosy-cheeked baby with blond nap-hair fluffed up on the back of his head. I can't hardly picture him without a halo. Sweet, sweet John. He and Anita are expecting their first baby this August.

Anyway, we've been sick here. Real sick. Everyone has a prescription, if not two. Inhalers, antibiotics, cough syrup and pain medications. I was the last to fall but a few days ago I got the chills and a wet cough. Then I woke up yesterday morning, Sunday, with a riotous ear infection hours before the Immediate Care clinic opened. I sat in their parking lot with one eye squeezed shut listening to the whoosh of blood in my ear not thinking at all.

Segue to nowhere: Thea's third tooth came in yesterday and she's feeling bitey. Right now, I have the cat and dog to protect.

Construction

2010-01-31T23:35:00.000-08:00

I'm in Seattle, falling asleep in a chair. I came yesterday to my uncle's house where my mom is pet-sitting, and tomorrow will take her with me back to Portland. The whole point of the trip is to have her take care of my little Thea monkey while Clark and I put our life back together. I am giddy with the hope of extra sleep.

There was a problem with the floors though... of course there was a problem with the floors... and the house is full of fumes and sticky varnish. We are living out of suitcases at my in-laws house, have been for two weeks and probably will for an indeterminate short while more.

Who knows what this means yet, if we'll end up having to do all the work of moving back in without the help or if, pleaseplease, we can have it done before my mom flies back home.

chicken encounter

We never did finish the painting, by the way, so once we do move back into our house, after we retrieve our implements of householding from the basement and crawlspaces, we'll have to re-drape them with drop clothes and don again our scrubby clothes.

Clark and I both agree, after the floors, walls and ceilings are done, we won't aspire to accomplish anything for the remainder of the year.

I'm living with an 8 month old teenager.

.

2009-12-17T23:38:00.000-08:00

Compared to last year, during my three-year pregnancy, time this year is moving along frighteningly apace. The image that keeps popping into my head is these kayaking videos my ex-boyfriend used to watch of an itty-bitty boat on what looked like a miles-wide river of brown churning flood water and he'd get all excited and pound his one fisted hand into his other open palm and be like YEAH! and I'd just get queasy and dashed on the rocks. I kinda feel like, since Thea's birth, I am a tiny action figure in those raging waters and of course, the water would cliche-ingly represent time rushing along and yes, this is what I imagine when I think about how time is rushing me along. IT'S FUCKING HAULING ASS.

We're in the middle of painting the entire interior of our house and the house is upside-down right now. Dislocated plants spilling dirt, baby toys and jumping machines, dining room chairs stacked in the living room, the couch is across the archway in-between to contain the dog's tail from swiping wet paint, a drop cloth there and over here two strollers bucking each other against the closet door. It's not very convenient for day-to-day living. I do a lot of day-to-day living, you can imagine.

The other day I was completely buffeted between how monumentous was the task in my kitchen, and the one in the living room, and the hall and every way I turned. I got sorta airborne between the areas where I live because all of it, everywhere, was sooo much and there wasn't anywhere to start and I was QUITE SERIOUSLY frozen with anxiety when Clark came home and did some 1-2 KungFu and put the whole house reasonable back together in just over an hour.

WHAT THE HELL IS THAT MAGIC? What does he have that he is able to do that? Why am I always frantically inventing systems of life management: to-do lists and dry-erase, paper notes, synced calendars and MobileMe, alarms, alerts, strings on my finger? My neural pathways are long and circuitous while his are short and meaningfully direct. I may be more nuanced, but I'm sure as hell ineffective.

So anyway! We're painting on a tight schedule because mid-January his parents are leaving for two weeks, and we're going to occupy their house while our wood floors finally get redone. We have to have the painting done before that. HAHAHA. I am feeling remorseful of my color choices with every stroke of the brush, cringecringe, but WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO? Clark went with me to the paint store and wouldn't say a goddamned opinionated word and was like WHATEVER THE LADY WANTS, THE LADY GETS but I was like, shit. Okay, HI! WALL OF PAINT CHIPS...maybe, that one?????

I have to admit, another thing I am not very good and and also very much wish I was, is decorating, or imagining the outcome I want when I do... also: making a decision, ordering with precision in a restaurant, not hoarding sentimental scraps, doing my hair, putting on makeup, being at all predictable, blogging, sleeping, eating, breathing, and... well, lets see, I am good making lists, making a cute baby and then pushing her on a swing.

2009-10-17T00:36:00.000-07:00

Wow, cobwebby! I'd bet even my mom's stopped reading by now. I've been indisposed, working furiously for giggles. Also, photographing and recording as many moments of Thea's life as is possible. At this rate, when I'm old I'll be able to relive approximately 20 percent of her total childhood = four straight years of footage if I continue at this rate until she is 20 years old. I can't stop myself. After she goes to bed I sit here and look at pictures of the old days, her early babyhood and get misty, be ridiculous... and do a little pick-up about the house in a manner that borders on desperate. It drains me that I'm always wrestling with priorities. Everything else is lucky times.

Fuddled

2009-09-11T23:29:00.000-07:00

I went to work today and found myself not at all on the schedule but stayed to work nevertheless. I'd made the mistake because I set my event calendar to start it's week on Monday and not on the traditional Sunday of printed puppydog calendars like the one I leave lying around with my work schedule written onto it so my husband will make sure the be here and care for our child. That same column on the computer which represents Friday, represents Saturday on the old fashioned glossy paper calendar. On the misconsultation of the two of them, I packed my kid off to the grandparents and went into work when I shouldn't have.

Brilliant x1.

Once there I realized that I still have to work tomorrow, as per both calendars, the same times I came for today, so quick-like fired off an email to my huzzband about how I wont be home until after 4 tomorrow and queried would it be worth it to go camping as we'd planned because the drive was 4.5 hours according to Google maps, not including boob/poop factor (which is what I wrote).

And the response I got was IT IS TOTALLY WORTH IT! WHERE ARE WE GOING?? LOVE, CLARK (clark's cousin clark).

Brilliant x2.

So I emailed my huzzzband Clark and he wrote me back WTF? and started calling me in a nervous fashion and when I finally was able to call him back he was like DOOD, WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? WE ARE GOING CAMPING NEXT WEEKEND, NOT THIS WEEKEND.

Brilliant x3.

So today I was in the wrong place, sending the wrong information to the wrong person about the wrong time. It's like I totally walked around the world and tapped myself on the shoulder. I'm so wrong but I feel right, right, right.

In other news, this is a damn cute baby. Don't even pretend otherwise.

My mom took this picture, which I think might be the greatest baby picture of all times.

2009-08-20T00:20:00.000-07:00

My friend Beer, who maybe you remember if you were reading this blog five years ago, called me from Thailand last night while I was working, and after the phone sat there for 25 minutes buzzing again and again I handed it over to my friend Rebecca to answer for me, to find out why/for was I such a hotly sought property. She answered and was like WHAT? WHO? BEAR FROM CHINA? I DON'T THINK SO and was about to hang up when I got that "Beer from Thailand" might sounds awfully like "Bear from China" over a bad connection with a strong accent after four years and enough of a lag to start talking over half of every sentence. OMG I'd totally given her up. A few months ago, in a freak fit of pre-baby cleaning, I even threw away the 723-digit phone numbers for her grandmother's house where nobody even speaks English because it just seemed too impossible... and because it was taking up too much space?? Rebecca told her I couldn't talk so she said she'd call back in an hour then never did.

So I sat around in an overheated and foul mood today, in part because WTF? Priorities? and because I feel like a lousy mom when I'm always over-tired because I can't go to bed on time. Ahem. And, and, and... am I stimulating my baby's brain enough? Is she bored of me singing the same stupid songs? Did she just fart because I selfishly nibbled a broccoli stem? I put her in the exersaucer today because I feel so guilty about my messy house then I was ravaged by guilt for not holding her. DO MOMS EVER WIN? Can someone tell me what it looks like when you are doing everything, or even most things right?

Anyhoo... Tonight Beer called me again and I was here to answer. She'd been back briefly to Portland and couldn't find me, lost my number, went to the house where I no longer lived and the job I no longer held, looked up me up by the last name that I no longer use and finally, after she was already back in Thailand someone gave her my old number which is apparently, luckily, the only thing I have held onto for the last four years. Well, that's about the greatest thing that has happened to me after, you know, the baby and stuff.

Speaking of... here she is!

knuckle sammich

chubs

oh toe!!

ka-zonks

She is 12 weeks old now and prefers to be held standing, otherwise she slumps. She is rolling over, swiping at toys, drooling, teething, and growing more hair. She recently discovered and is fascinated by her feet which have been doing stuff all along apparently without her knowledge, and she stamps them like a Lipizzaner when we ask her 2+2, which we do when we know she is going to stamp her feet. She sleeps most of the night, most nights, as she always has... except tonight bause now i hear her fussing and haveto go bye

10 weeks old

2009-08-03T01:16:00.000-07:00

Beset by octopi

Aplague with musical ducks

Giraffe-wrastling phalanges

Full-body baby camo

2009-07-07T14:53:00.000-07:00

One month old

2009-06-22T23:48:00.000-07:00

I spend a lot of time nursing this little girl, nursing and reconstructing my notions of motherhood. I don't hardly remember what they were, but this they aren't. I couldn't have imagined.

Baby, finally

2009-05-29T18:51:00.000-07:00

Thea Chance Nelson
Born on her due date, May 25th 2009 at 11pm after 24 hours of blood-splattered labor, gruesome and painful beyond words. She weighed in at 7 pounds, 6 ounces and measured 19 inches long. We are back home now and the memory of her birth has already become something else, something that feels euphoric and poignant. What a trick of biology.

At 11:15pm Clark sent out a text message to our parents announcing THERE IS A BABY. Yes, there is and she is the coolest thing I have ever seen.

39 Weeks

2009-05-18T13:08:00.000-07:00

I am one week from my due date. It seemed so far away and suddenly we are in the single digit days and I am sort of frantically packing a bag for the hospital which involves tearing the house apart which in turn is making me feel frantic. Every few minutes I stop and pant and flop face down over the arm of the couch in the basement where it is nice and cool, wherefrom I almost feel like I am laying on my stomach, my belly nestling in the negative space of the right angle and my feet up in the air so the exhaustion can drain out of my legs long enough for me to run around for five or ten minutes more. Repeat.

My hands and feet are suddenly puffy and my belly occasionally becomes noticeably lopsided. The baby prefers to nestle herself on my right side, never to the left, and sometimes as far up under my ribs as she can get.

I am tired of being pregnant. I stopped running about a week and a half ago because I can't find the enthusiasm to get trussed up just to go plodding cautiously along: a heartrate monitor, two sports bras, trying to find a shirt that will fit over my increasingly outrageous belly and the indignity of lacing up and tying not one, but TWO SHOES!

So now I am tired, and bored. Owen is napping at my feet, never straying more than a few feet away. The kitchen clock is ticking, flies are buzzing against the window screens above the sink. This pregnancy has been going on for years now.

Victory Dance

2009-05-09T23:54:00.001-07:00

I got the news a couple days ago that I passed my certification test. Early in the morning I'd rolled over in bed to check the time on my phone and noticed that I had an email subjected "TEST RESULTS." My heart started chugging along painfully in my chest. After all, I have been waiting almost five weeks, hoping with that desperate certainty that if I don't pass now I'll never have the time or money or freedom to prepare for the test again. I opened the email and there was nothing about my result in the body, just expository text about the attached PDF file (agh). The PDF file took an entire 5 or 10 seconds to download (agh!) and at least 3 more seconds to open (AGH!) and then presented itself it tiny doll-sized font. AAGH!

CONGRATULATIONS!

Still, I am taking the precaution of not answering unidentified calls just in case they realize their mistake.

34 weeks

2009-04-16T14:27:00.000-07:00

She is big enough now that I can usually find her bum and give it a little spank. Her knees and elbows are easy to identify, but she moves away the minute I start poking back, trying to feel her, trying to get my hands on her. It is so thrilling when her toes tickle my ribs, and I have no qualms about annoying the crap out of her by poke poke poking back. Oh hi baby!

The house is still a wreck, in a frantic uprooted way. Yesterday I tore the couches apart, scrubbed them with soapy water and shop-vacced them dry. The seat covers and cushions are drying in the basement. This must be nesting: furniture in various stages of rearrangement, cleaning wands and squeegees and mop heads... with the cute little robot vacuum beeping Roomba I can clean floors on both levels of the house at the same time with laundry cycling full time in the basement. It's the closest I can get to drunk. With joy.

I dream about well arranged closets; I can see them in my head. I can inventory the boxes I haven't unpacked since we moved, identify the things I don't need and schedule their disposal without even waking up! Nesting is the best thing that ever happened to me.

Seriously, I am totally at peace scrubbing my fridge.

32 weeks

2009-04-03T00:14:00.000-07:00

People who tell me their labor horror stories or try to touch my belleh don't bother me at all, because the former fascinate me, in my information gathering stage like I am, and the latter, well, that doesn't really happen. I think belleh-touchin' is a myth that women like to get indignant about... either that or the expression on my face would make anyone think twice about copping an unsolicited feel.

(I think, honestly, most people aren't that interested in your gestation, and often times their inquiries are made out of politeness. Fair enough, I don't expect the world to revolve around me because I am pregnant. Anyway, nobody likes that woman. That woman is universally despised, though I have never met her.)

Anyhoo, I did recently have to listen to someone else's birth story and wanted to throw my shoe at her mouth, but it was because of her glowing fertile earth-mother positivity. She'd overheard me talking to a friend about feeling anxious and rushed over to assure me that she had felt nothing but joyjoyjoy at the birth of her son, and nothing but euphoric, blissful joy since... even still, 14 rapturous years later. I know what she was trying to do because she went on and on, countermanding the modern day OUT-OF-TOUCH fear and negativity associated with giving birth because ITS ALL NATURAL, RIGHT? SOMETHING WE WERE DESIGNED TO DO, yeah mother nature and all that crap. But what pissed me off is that I AM ANXIOUS AS HELL, and yes, I HAVE AN OVER ACTIVE AMYGDALA and I LIVE IN FEAR ALL THE FREAKIN TIME and for that I AM A FAILUREFAILUREFAILURE. Thanks a lot for making me anxious about being anxious.

Fucking hippy.

She is probably right, at least about implying that I shouldn't be fear-mongering myself into hysteria like I did this very week. I totally had a panic attack: a frame-shaking, hiccuping snotty mess of a panic attack. The whole tizzy.

I just do that sometimes. Like, I was at work reading some article about maternity ward-issue mesh panties when, just at that very moment I've got to turn and interpret something I know nothing about, rocketshippery or cacti propagation or some such twaddle, and it's like a electrical current collision in my brain and my chin starts quivering so I say YOU JUST PUT THAT AWAY, WE'RE ON THE TOPIC OF MANATEE HUNTING HERE so I stuff it and guess what. Boo.

It's not that I am reading the horror stories, rumors and wild inaccuracies that make up 99% of the body of information out there on the internet. That isn't what does me in anyway. I'm reading blog posts about must-haves for your hospital bag, and I AM TOTALLY POWERLESS TO UNPLUG MYSELF, BECAUSE AGH, THE FUTURE IS BEARING DOWN ON ME.

I am better now. It's out of my system for the time being. At least, I've got my National Interpreter Certification test coming up in a few days and that has given me the freedom to ignore everything but the fact that I BETTER GOTTAMN PASS IF I EVER WANT TO BE LOVED AGAIN.

Yay! I can direct my hypervigilence elsewhere, at least for the next 4,951 minutes!

11ish weeks to go

2009-03-12T18:25:00.000-07:00

I am a week and a half into the third trimester and am starting to see how the novelty of pregnancy can wear off. I hated pregnancy during the first trimester sooo badly I figured it was a mistake of cosmic proportions that I ever got pregnant in the first place.

Then the second trimester came along full of energy and evidence of life and I was like, HEY THIS AIN'T SO BAD, IT'S PRETTY COOL ACTUALLY... but now, after an alarming growth spurt, I am seeing the event horizon for gestational enthusiasm.

These days I'm feeling like I've been punched in the solar plexus every time I look at my feet or try to do something acrobatic like get out if the car. I predict that there will be a nice symbiosis between the impatience to be not pregnant and the acceptance of impending motherhood. If I am not forced into things I have a tendency to get comfortable in a state of suspended animation. I am that sort.

All that said, this doesn't yet suck. I am more inclined to want to sleep maybe. Yesterday afternoon I slept when I had a couple of free hours in my schedule instead of going running which was a shocking deviation from my plan, but IT FELT SOOOO GOOD. I let it happen because this week is the last week of the winter term and the last week of my insanely stupid schedule. From here on out I can run more, and more regularly. The last couple of weeks getting on the road has been sporadic and I find that reaaaallly irr-it-tat-ing. The end of the winter term also dovetails nicely with my plans to cultivate my nesting instinct, to sleep more and to lay around and stare at my belleh more.

I am afraid I don't have much of a nesting instinct at all, and never have. I spent all my formative years skipping town... after living in 38 different places in 8 different states, going to 6 different schools in 4 different states before even finishing the 5th grade... well, I could never see the the profit margin in unpacking all the boxes.* My house will always feel half-coming, half-going as a result. But I've got a viable fetus with unpainted rooms and no crib, no changing table and no matching rocking chair to go with the crib I don't have... the electrical outlets are just sitting around exposed with an allure fatale, what with those knives just laying around begging to be poked into things...

Did I mention we are viable? That means something to me, but I can't really explain what. I feel like I am walking around with a sleeping baby instead of a belly full of mysterious ectoplasm. She isn't usually sleeping (KICK KICK) but, because I can't hear her scream (yet) and I don't have to change any crappy diapers (yet) I tend to imagine her as a sleeping infant. If this little girl were born today she would have a 95% chance of survival. I can already see that this is the beginning of a lifelong trend, from here and onward she'll need me less and less and I'll have to accept that she is and will continue to become her own person and OMG I AM NOT READY TO CUT THE UMBILICAL CORD! GO TO YOUR ROOM, YOU ARE STILL MY BABY!!

i'm taking it out on Owen...

at least he will never grow up and leave me

*By contrast my husband lived in two homes four miles apart for the first 18 years of his life, attended one elementary school, one jr high and one high school and is back living in the very same house to which his parents brought him home from the hospital when he was born. He attended the same elementary school his father attended, which is the same school our daughter will attend if I don't decide to blow town by then.

Still, it happened inside my head

2009-02-23T23:19:00.000-08:00

We hiked Neah-kah-nie mountain this weekend and took pictures there, looming large over the town of Manzanita where I lived for three heart-achy years. It was a steep hike, and I even thought I might pitch off the windy summit being top-heavy like I am making my way across the toothy vertical rock ridge. I stopped to tightened my shoelaces to not slide and roll inside my shoes and risk that fatal descent.

We had hiked to the same place where I took this photo of Cairo more than 9 years ago. What is that property of time that make the years accordian this way, far and near?

Then

and

Now

Someday I will do everything right

2009-02-11T13:28:00.000-08:00

I sent myself a text message in the middle of the night last night, 4:01am, something illegible about grammar. I have grammar stuck in my head like a song. There is a thought bubble above my head parsing language, adding parenthetical commentary to everything I say. ANNOYING (adjective). It's annoying because I am not very good at grammar. Gerunds and infinitives, predicate adjectives, prepositional phrases... it can be explained to me a thousand million times but in my brain they just won't be pinned down.

Maybe by grammar I am trying to avoid baby preparations because I am reacting in the worst possible way, which is to do nothing at all. I am totally immobilized. I work a million hours and can't convince myself to take any time off. I don't have the emotional apparatus to face down a daunting task, certainly not by putting aside my anxiety and doing what I know needs to be done.

I work four 12-hr days, then two 5-hr days, then a 4-hr day which I don't work every other week equaling two whole, non-consecutive days off each month. I manage to get myself dressed and fed everyday (even if I eat too much sugar, processed white flour and simple carbs. Argh. I even feel guilt when I eat fruit because I eat it with so much voracity that I think that headlight bearing down on me might be gestational diabetes).

But I do get myself out the door. Everyday I quote Aristotle, say to myself that "we are what we repeatedly do..." while flossing my teeth, while shining my shoes for the fat lady. (Today my gums hurt too badly to be flossed which, Internet says, is because my teeth are in rapid pregnancy decay. Oh panic!)

My problem in part is that I don't want to do anything that does not solve the root problem. If my bathroom mirror is dirty just cleaning it isn't good enough because I need to figure out why I keep putting off the cleaning of the mirror to the point of disgrace. IF I CLEAN THE MIRROR THIS SUNDAY BUT FAIL TO ENSURE THAT IT WILL BE CLEANED EVERY SUNDAY HENCEFORTH THEN MY EFFORTS ARE FOR NAUGHT.

So I went to the office supply store and bought a huge dry erase calendar and spent hours making a list of every single task around the house, every.single.one, and now I have to sit down and schedule out the entire next prototype month of cleanliness... floorboards, water filter, cobwebs, chimney sweep... Every single task a household might require be done in a days, weeks, month, or years time. ONLY WHEN MY ENTIRE HYGENIC FUTURE IS ASSURED, ONLY THEN CAN I GO AHEAD AND CLEAN MY BATHROOM MIRROR.

The problem is that every day I barely have time to squeeze in a few miles and a conversation with my husband. The dry erase solution is on a to-do pile along with paint samples, the kitchen remodeling catalog, tax forms, warranties and receipts, baby books, our five year plan, interpreter certification materials, medical bills, and an entirely blank paper with the words BABY NAMES scrawled on the top. And everyday more toothpaste gets flecked onto my bathroom mirror.

Toothpaste that is apparently NOT DOING ANYTHING FOR ME ANYWAY! OMG I DON'T WANT TO BE A TOOTHLESS DIABETIC LADY ON A RASCAL SCOOTER SMOKING AND BALANCING A 92OZ COKE ON THE HANDLEBARS. OH PANIC! (interjection)

Life is so sysyphian. All I do, and do and (don't) do... the universe continues its spiral into disorder. Sigh.

2009-02-09T17:05:00.000-08:00

I think today is one of the top tiredest days of my life. I slept for eight full hours last night, then went back home at noon to sleep for an hour and a half between jobs and even briefly weighed the value of my career over that of an hour more on my pillow. Still unrelenting, my exhaustion can only be characterized as painful. Excruciating. I want to dig out my eyeballs and fill my head with dirt. I want to sleep forever.

Dying doesn't hold the same fascination anymore

2009-02-06T00:27:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I started thinking if my axle broke after years of driving this same old car around corners like a race car, everything all weak and loose and then suddenly it can't take the strain and the drive train breaks apart and the car can't be steered and I have to open the door and jump out just as the car careens off a cliff... ...and I am all, WHEW THAT WAS CLOSE but suddenly I think BUT WAIT, WHAT IF... and an infant appears in the scene strapped to a car seat in the back and there isn't enough time to save my baby but I already jumped out of the car and I am alone watching the car go over and I feel horrible because what am I going to do when this happens? And then I realize that my heart rate is way up and I am gripping the wheel in real traffic all stressed out because my suspension sounds creaky and it means that I am going to live out the rest of my life in a long black veil haunting the cliffs beyond death, wailing like the wind.

It's a girl

2009-02-01T21:56:00.000-08:00

I don't have many cravings; fruit, mineral water and maybe the desire to melt cheese all over my food. But today I was just starving to hear Solitary Man, and was drawn to eat the rest of the banana creme pie in the fridge. The pie made me feel like I was coated with grime on the inside, so I lay on the couch for an hour and a half and wondered why. I still haven't been able to listen to Solitary Man but sang what I could recall of the lyrics to my baby in the shower.

I have been listening to bearded long-hairs of the 1970s while Pandora explores the Neil Diamond musical genome for me. I do have the song on my PC, about a 30 second walk from where I am sitting with my laptop in the front room but that would be anti-climactic, and besides, I like to feel the longing. Oh Bob Seger! Yes, I am still the same!

Is that all I have to say? Yes.

I Can Be A Real Jerk Sometimes, Part 38

2009-01-05T00:19:00.000-08:00

Generally, I despise categorical oversimplifications, but when it comes to talking about sex with mothers there are women who confide everything, and women who would rather die. I fall in the latter category. It is not that I am prudish about the topic of sex, sex is a fabulous topic, but that is the tenor of my relationship with my mother as it was irrevocably set many years ago. So when my mother sent me a link about orgasms during birth a few weeks ago I decided that because it was an unprecedented breech of contract I would just do us both a favor and ignore it.

But this morning there was a new email, subject "Birth orgasms / basic science" and in the body of the email, a link to this video.

I drafted a legal notice of reprimand, deleted it and instead just sent her this simple note:

quite honestly, i prefer to go the rest of my life without you ever
talking, or typing anything to me about orgasms, or anything related
to orgasms or orgasming - mechanical, emotional or scientific -ever
again.

i'm gonna go bathe in lye now, then call my therapist.

Surprisingly, this letter was not well received. Like just about half of the things that come out of my mouth when I am talking to her, it scorched the earth. We have a very, um, pandemonious relationship full of both admiration and tumult. But when I think about this kind of exchange with a different cast I have to wonder What the hell is wrong with me? Who sends emails like that to their mother?

Seriously.

I emailed her to say that, No, I really really didn't want to "clear the air" by calling on the phone because "active listening" makes me feel hopeless and tangled, and from now on I would start using emoticons in my emails.

Naturally the whole episode made me feel like I deserve a boot print on the middle of my forehead, and put me in a considerably irritable mood. I went to a coffee shop and ordered a large hot tea. The barista placed a lone chamomile flower in a 20 ounce ocean of hot water. I stared at a tiny, ineffectual swirl of tea color and tried to tell myself to shut up but I already knew that was impossible.

IF YOU CANNOT BE GRACEFUL YOU ARE NOT GOING TO GET ANY SATISFACTION FROM THIS SITUATION SO JUST LET IT GO.

But instead, fatalistically annoyed, I pointed out that there were three prices for three sizes of tea and apparently the only difference is that the more you pay, the more watered down your tea seems to be. That I got another teabag doesn't matter a whit; the moment was uncomfortable, defeated and prickly and anyway, a field of chamomile wont sedate me when I am in a fit of mother-induced pique. What I wanted to do was throw my tea on the floor and get all Twisted Sister about it but instead I wedged into a deep chair and refused to take off my ten layers of winter clothing until I was pink in the face.

I decided I was a jerk and that humans were a hopelessly complicated endeavor. I made it three and a half days into the new year and I want to take it all back. People are innavigable landscapes.

I need big trash bins, a claw hammer and bolt-cutters. I need hypnosis and meditation. I need to hear a predator in the brush. I need to laugh hysterically and I need way more grace then I ever thought.

Resolved

2009-01-01T22:41:00.001-08:00

Actually, two frogs died in my care in 2008, the second discovered supine and clearly expired just a few short hours before midnight New Years Eve. I am convinced that I killed them both because they withered away one at a time while bloodworms bled out on the rocks uneaten. It just didnt seem like old age to me. Would a frog rather starve then eat freezer-burned worms? This will be one of my life's mysteries, and one of my crosses to bear.

Last night was one of the more sedate New Years Eve celebrations of my life. Between the two of us and our vast multitude of friends not one person called with a social invitation. ITS BECAUSE YOU HAVE THE PLAGUE... PREGNANT LADIES ARE THE ANTI-PARTY my husband says. We toast each other, Perrier and Heineken. We eat pizza and watch The X-Files. Mulder and Scully are older but still, she spends the whole movie in solemn crisis, running around in the snow doubting his every instinct. Some things never change.

On the other hand, I watched that show for years waiting for the two of them to give in to each others sultry sexiness. At times, during the boggier years of the show, it was my sole motivator for tuning in but they never caved to my prurient desires. After the X-files I lost interest in TV altogether. But this movie *spoiler alert* jumped right over the good stuff and put them in bed like an old married couple, comforting-goodnight-cheek-kiss and all.

Clark was asleep by 9:47 so I watched a red headed cougar paw Anderson Cooper on CNN waiting for the ball to drop. A correspondent on the ground testified to the frigid cold in Times Square by brandishing his frozen soda while people shreiked and pressed against the barricade. Oh holiday, your party spirit eludes me!

Anyway, just to be on the safe side I think I'll make Pascals Wager and resolve to be a better friend.

add one more burrito

2008-12-31T12:13:00.000-08:00

We went in to the maternity clinic today thinking we'd find out the sex of the baby but it turns out that the ultrasound is not actually done at the clinic. They are scheduled by referral to an ultrasound lab place, which someone forgot to do. Arg, are you kidding me? I already didn't sleep last night; the added delay is almost unbearable. With my best urgent voice I managed to get an appointment for Friday morning. I was hoping to roll into 2009 with a pronoun for It, the little unit kicking me in the bladder who burps like a sailor.

Anyhoo...

It is New Years Eve! How crazy is that? At midnight tonight I will open the front door for 2009 and rush to the back door to let 2008 go out. 2008 was not a bad year, but it was a hard working, no-frills year.

I had no speeding or parking tickets, and only one bicycle flat on a downward trend for two years now.

Got a pup and cleaned up poop from all over the house.

Dreamed about bears. A lot.

Rode the Worst Day, ran the Shamrock, the Pear Blossom, rode Reach The Beach, and ran the Marathon, all together covering 1026 foot miles and pathetically few bike miles.

I went camping only 4 nights, canoed 43 miles, did not fly by plane, and stayed in a hotel room only once. My candidate won, I killed only one frog, attended one wedding and no funerals, rode not one roller coaster, and not one Ferris wheel, lost zero hubcaps, coffee consumption, as well as burrito consumption was low.

We painted the trim on the house and paid down thousands of dollars in debt.

Like I said, 2008 was a working stiff of a year but 2008 got me knocked up and I spent the last five months of the year pregnant drowning myself in lemonade. Grow lemons, grow!

Happy New Year! Much love and appreciation to everyone who reads and comments here. I hope 2009 is full of tall tales and heart swells and much needed improvements.

Snow!

2008-12-29T22:46:00.001-08:00

17 bazillion inches of snow fell over Portland for 12 straight days before Christmas, the most snow since ever. Honestly, snow has never fallen on earth like it did here, in my yard.

My car broke through one chain, then the other and after several days of grinding the motor over icy ridges and ooofing through snowdrifts, I parked and left the car at home. I still have about 40,000 more miles to the moon, depending, of course, where she is in her elliptical orbit when I touch down, and I can't burn up all the ju-ju left in that car during one plucky commute.

The day after Christmas I tromped through the filthy slush and rode the filthy bus downtown in the company of all mankind for my first appointment with a therapist. On the 9th floor overlooking downtown and east, she asked my why I'd come. WELL, I WAS STARTING TO FEEL REALLY ANXIOUS AND IT WORRIES ME THAT I AM A HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT FOR MY BABY. I THINK I'VE GOT A PAYLOAD OF STRESS.

I have been through a cluster of major life events in the last two years. Generally, my response to astronomical levels of stress is to sort of evaporate and drift into the ether. But this time, before the eupepsia and renascent fettle of the second trimester, I felt dreadfully rooted, and dull like my brain had swollen in my skull. Being speechless and short of breath are two things that absolutely will kill me.

But that was then and I am here now, even though I am quite not unhappy. I came still because life cannot be trusted, because I am a god damned Ouroboros, because what threads one day to the next is an eternal recurrence. Wherever I think I am going, I will never fucking get there. It trips me up, again and again and again.

She asked me a million questions:
Do you hear or see things that are not there?
-no

Do you have thoughts of suicide?
-no

Do you ever experience periods of days or weeks where you can function with little or no sleep, build rocket ships and cure cancer?
-no

----------------

Two days later. I totally forgot where I was going with this, something about how she is really short and wants me to come back to talk about my mother. Who doesn't? It is a very entertaining story.

Now the snow is gone, there were no long filthy goodbyes. Tonight I ran down the Springwater Trail with Owen, in the dark and rain alongside Johnson Creek. The water is high, and light malty, rushing with the melted snow.

Can I just feel bad enough to feel good?

2008-12-19T21:06:00.000-08:00

I couldn't sleep for a gap last night because I kept floating to the surface with a love poem about lasagna. This is how I live, breaking the surface. I have emerged from the first trimester, fully human. I feel so damn good in fact that I spent the last week fearing for my pregnancy - after all, for three months I wanted little more then a parapet from which to fling myself.

During that fog, in the darkest night, what I concluded about pregnancy was that pregnant women fall down stairs and are frequently menaced by bears. Stairs, my stairs, the ones I follow down and up in the dead of night again and again (and again) to the bathroom are almost magnetic in their head-long pull. It is all I can do with hand-rails and foresight to steady my descent. And the bears! They lumber magnificently toward me with an air of inevitability. What is inevitable? How is one to know. If they reach me, will I not wake up?

Feeling so unaccountably normal leads me to suspect that perhaps something is terribly wrong. How can I walk around glowing if I am only NOT a graveyard because I JUST DON'T KNOW IT YET. I lay around on the couch with my hands on my belly feeling for a kick. Quicken baby, quicken!

We spoke to a genetic counselor two days ago about the results of a quad screen blood test, which were overwhelmingly in our favor. The odds, as I average them (inaccurately) for convenience, are about 1 in 7646 for any one of the four chromosome abnormalities that the test screens for.

BUT, I cry, A MERE FOUR? WHY, THERE ARE AN UNTOLD INFINITY OF THINGS THAT COULD GO WRONG...

And if something goes wrong it wont be a mere one/seven-thousandth wrong, it will be 100 percent wrong and it will be me upon whom the probabilities have collapsed. Being that I suddenly feel so fully human in a condition that all my four months of experience have unerringly proven, thus far, to be inhumane... under those circumstances, symptomatically feeling well, I might think there was more to be known then that there is an (average) .007646 percent chance that one of four over infinity things could go wrong. Is there any test, an equation or a drop of my blood that can be divined for more gestalt results?

Is there any promise that could be made to me that would not be spurious, or illusive? I mean, after all whatever is wrong is already wrong, right? Wont this baby someday lie to my face? Will this baby never, even for a moment, consider suicide? Will this baby crash on a bicycle, get food poisoning, then someday die? I imagine PROBABILITY swirling, gossamer, around me like the individual strains of the instruments in a symphony. Infinite!

There is no security! I KNOW! RIGHT! How many times has this been said since people started saying things? I should have started cultivating an OKAYNESS about it a long time ago... I mean, with mixed results, I have. But this is the first time I have been personally responsible for inflicting a literal world full of hurt on someone else and I just want, more then anything, for them to stick around for it. In the best of health.

It is a simple wish, really.

Cowlick!

2008-12-13T11:21:00.000-08:00

All my cowlicks are acting up. I have so many cowlicks on my head it is supernatural. You can divine fortunes by the vagaries of my scalp. When I was a kid, and unselfconscious, it was no big deal that I ran around with a lock of hair jutting vertically from my forehead. In sixth grade I made an ill-advised hair management decision and chopped one particularly offending sproing of hair right off my head, at the base. THAT WILL TEACH YOU TO DEFY ME.

The result was a patch of hair about an inch square, just above my left eyebrow that grew in like a crew cut, surrounded by longer flowing locks. Awesome. The follicles seemed invigorated by the weightlessness and as the hair grew back it grew more resiliently vertical. I battled this particular cowlick with scissors, a comb-over and hairspray for over a year before I finally let it grow in. I am not sure it ever occurred to me, till now, that punishing a cowlick was so futile it bordered on retardation.

These days my cowlicks are acting up all over again. For most of my life my hair has been long enough to weight them down, but lately the crown of my head looks like a bed knot ALL THE TIME. No matter that I know how to use a comb, that I try to look professional, that I bother to put on clean clothes because my hair leaves the impression that I woke up in the yard after an all-night, keg-stand and beer-bong bacchanalia. At least I take the time to pull the leaves and twigs out of my fancy do, right?

You can understand why I was so taken the first time I saw Owen, when Clark handed me this writhing, squiggly puppy with a huge cowlick right between his eyes. Like me, it isn't just the obvious deviance of one major cowlick. Like mine on the crown of my head, he has zig-zags running up one side of his body where the hair grows as it wants. On first sight we were kindred and were obviously meant to become family.

Almost every superstition I can find about cowlicks concurs that one cowlick is fine but two cowlicks mean you will be a headstrong rascal, a stubborn, mischievous, but comely troublemaker who is variably lucky and unlucky and is prone to early death.... not a terribly divergent fate then that of left-handedness, from which I also suffer.

Oh baby!

2008-12-07T18:14:00.000-08:00

We heard the baby's heartbeat this week! It sounded like koosha-koohsa-koosha-koosha at 160 beats per minute and I have it stuck in my head like my favorite song.

The sonogram is from our first prenatal visit about a month ago. As twins are a not-isolated occurrence on Clark's side of the family (I have twin mother-in-laws), my first question was if there might be another one somewhere in there, but the midwife assured me there is nowhere to hide.

I am feeling much better lately, but still, by 4pm most days you can knock me over with a feather. The exhaustion is stultifying. I try to take care to not over use myself but whatever that means, it is a moving target. Some days picking up my socks is enough... or maybe the exhaustion is from acting the part so Clark will pick them up for me.

Oof.

Shopping list

2008-11-19T21:57:00.000-08:00

I never was able to recover from the smell of cat pee in my car. It did fade, and blend into the foam and fabric of the back seat but it did not go away. Like an olfactory PTSD, I found it impossible to undetect the smell. My car was haunted by that smell, and the ghost of the smell, and its poltergeist offspring as molecules of urine and the effluvia of the living blended, entwined and gave rise to new, more complex and foul aromas. That is an unholy marriage and I cry ASSULT!

My car has driven over 207,000 miles, and if we assume those miles were driven at a generous average of 50mph, that means I've been just sitting there, breathing and sweating and shedding cells for over 5000 hours (adjusted randomly for idling time at red lights and traffic jams) or about 208.3333 days. AGH! It's pungent from here!

But see, now that I am starting to rebound from the first trimester I found I was able to muster the strength to negotiate a business transaction with a local car detailing shop and, several gazillion bucks and one business day later, my car interior has been atomized and reconstructed more to my liking.

VERDICT: Smells like turpentine, should fade, but driving with all the window down in the meantime is, um, bracing. WORTH EVERY PENNY.

Owen chewed a hole in the floor. Nothing a few thousand hundred thousand million dollars cant fix. Thank god I work 34 hours a day and can obviously afford the lavish indulgence of a house-sized chew toy. I thought about prying up one of the boards and smacking him with it but only because I am human. It was obviously enough punishment to force him to pose next to his new and creative disaster. He couldn't bring himself to sit upright, and instead slunk over on his belly. Being a sadist I made him stay there while taking his picture from unflattering angles. ASSULT!

And finally, I bought myself some belly pants for pregnant ladies. I have run out of patience with ingenuity and make-do pluck. I have never felt sooo happy to put on a new pair of pants. WORTH EVERY PENNY.

Rather pleased with myself

2008-11-13T23:56:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I ran my 1000th mile of 2008. It has been my goal to pass that mile mark for several years, but so far, I have never gotten there. One thousand miles is, unimpressively, only about 20 miles a week over the span of one calendar year. The real difficulty lies in making those distances consistently, through heat waves and downpours, injury, broken bones, sickness, weddings, travel, school, work, and occasionally, extreme and prolonged discomfort.

Lately I have found running quite impossible as the last few months have been perhaps the most profoundly uncomfortable months of my life.

Sick, sick, very sick

They call it 'morning sickness' but I think 'unceasing wretched agony' is more accurate. I have hardly run since the marathon, but I think about it every single day. I just CANNOT(period) barely do it. I cannot, almost not overcome the lethargy. I am etiolated and panting from exhaustion, spring tears at the sight of an unfold pair of pants or the audacious smell of someone breathing across the room....

(seriously, do they have to do that?)

...and quite frankly, I will never do this 'knocked up' thing again. I think I should just have the baby now and then Clark and I can take turns sitting on it, avian style. In fact, I am ready for my epidural, please.

But I got my 1000th mile and my whole family ran with me (Clark and Owen and I (running for two!)*), and through all that, all 800,000 foot falls over the last year, I haven't learned at all how to be stoic about a touch of (air quotes) "morning sickness." I am such a wimp.

*Of course Willie didn't run. Duh. I count her there in spirit.

Disordered sleep

2008-11-09T17:39:00.000-08:00

Maybe it only happens about once a year, but I have these dreams sometimes that just completely undo me and I surface gasping and cry myself awake. For a half an hour last night I was inconsolable and cried until I was undone; shuddering, hiccuping and dehydrated in the dark next to my bewildered, sleepy husband.

DO YOU WANT TO TELL ME ABOUT IT? No, I don't know how. I can put my finger on and trace it as far as my arm can reach but it goes even farther. This goes back before I was born. There must be an infinity of sadness in me.

Sometimes things are best explained with graphs. I drew this today based on a few calculations I made as I fell back asleep.

Do I = f(x)? ...but I didn't draw anything on the Y axis? Does the X axis represent capacity for sorrow? I am aware that this demonstrates an absurd and wildly inaccurate grasp of mathematics but it was dark and my head was swollen. Still, there is truth here.

Tonight, with bare feet, I made hot spicy hot Pad Thai from scratch and it was restorative.

Veterinary adventures

2008-10-02T22:06:00.000-07:00

The pets in this house have cost me a million dollars this month. Owen, with a weepy eye, was discovered to be harboring not only a barbed grass seed under his inside eyelid but a mild infection in both ears.

(poke)

I thought we might be going in for a couple eye drops and a condescending pat on the back and instead, walked out hours later with a grocery bag full of medications.

It was a good thing I had my whole vacation to sacrifice because this required the administration of eye drops every single hour of the first day, and every two hours for the next four days, as well as two pills in the morning and two in the evening, ointment twice a day, ear wash every other day and ear drops every single day.

Still, I managed to fuck it up because one bottle of pills said "1-2 every 8-12 hours" and the other bottle said "1/2 every 8-12 hours" and being a total insensitive jerk was unable to distinguish between the two and for the first three days overdosed the poor dog on ramadyl until we were back in the vet office for an $96,000 follow-up appointment and I was like UM, DID YOU JUST SAY HALF?

I wore my hair shirt all weekend, and even though he suffered no ill effect I let him pick what we watch on the rare occasion I wander into the basement to watch TV.

(tigers, tigers, tigers)

Willie cost me a few hundred thousand dollars more with her feline leukemia vaccine shot and to show her displeasure with the whole experience, including a conversation she overheard about her weight, peed in her carrier on the way home.

Of course I rushed her into the house wrapped in an old towel and bathed her, forgetting about the car. Just enough urine soaked into the seat and baked in the sun to make me feel queasy every time I start looking for my keys. Since my daily commute makes me want to hurl my lunch, her and I will be loosing weight together.

(raawr)

Yes, she is on a diet again and this time I am not going to back down. I already spent $18,000 for a fist-sized bag of Science Diet diet food and feed her with a portion cup. I think that makes us even.

(tigers, tigers, tigers)

Inflation is killing me.

Interlobal communication

2008-08-28T15:15:00.000-07:00

The part of my brain that reflects intellectually on the state of my affairs seems to have its own emotional reality. For example, today I was sat down and forced to watch a power point training presentation about software upgrades at work (boooring!) and every time the word INTERPRETER came up, as in, YOU, THE INTERPRETER, WILL NOTICE... my heart skipped a beat and I started scanning the room. WHO? WHAT? WHERE ARE THE EXITS? Because while interpreting is something I do, and do well (I am an interpreting goddess), it has never registered in the mental database that formally recognizes proper noun statements-of-fact.

THE DOING IS SO VASTLY DIFFERENT FROM THE BEING!

(and you will notice my tomatoes are coming right along)

If I say to myself I AM A WOMAN, natch! There is generally no change in blood pressure unless of course I am feeling righteous and then I might fist-pump and get up in your grill. But if I say to myself I AM AN INTERPRETER my throat would constrict just a bit, and my palms would get clammy and all those bio-chemical changes kick in that mean I would most definitely not pass a lie-detector test.

But! Being that I am voice-activated, start talking and watch me go. No problem-o!

And I don't mean it in a universal I'll-be-exposed-as-a-fraud kind of fear. Actually I do. But I also mean it like, it was so profoundly difficult to become an interpreter, so scarring and with such a dismal prospect for success that I can't seem to get beyond having convinced myself that the odds were vanishingly small so there must be a mistake. Of course, the chance wasn't so remote and while it was miserable, misery and recall tend to create positive feedback loop so that, in hindsight the whole enterprise was a nausea-inducing brush with death.

Memory is famously unreliable. In fact, I am pretty sure there is evidence to suggest that the experiences we think we recall with the most clarity, the formative moments of our lives, are the least reliable because we re-synthesize the proteins every time we remember and every time we remember we have an agenda, and a mood and a bias. Plucking those years out of the vault becomes more shudder-inducing with each de novo reminiscence. And of course, more infinitesimal and the more infinitesimal the more likely Occam's Razor cut will suggest that this was all a mistake.

Of course, this line of thinking leads me to the conclusion that dwelling on the past is a Sisyphean endeavor, like I have always said. The past sucks. Onward goddamnit.

This week in pictures

2008-08-13T19:29:00.000-07:00

The summer so far has been busy. Not really surprising because it is summer and summer is always busy. Anita left a week ago but not before my orchid bloomed a bacchanalia of tiny fireworks to celebrate her awesomeness.

My brother John, who drove from Missoula to pick her up, stayed long enough to eat breakfast at my kitchen table.

How was that breakfast John?

Good bye John and Anita! *sniff*

The next day my dad arrived and we all drove off to my husbands family's annual camping trip in the Gifford-Pinchot National Forest.

All together we were twenty-eight people and eight dogs, including my old friend Ruben to whom I fed the crunchy spines of lettuce leaves (which he considers a delicacy) and with whom I shared half my scrambled eggs.

The day my Dad left (Bye Dad *sniff*) we began tearing out all the carpeting. There are only two rooms left, then the refinishing begins.

Last night I decided to not run for one more day and instead laid out starward to watch the meteor shower. Between the two of us we did not see a single one and as a result, I discovered I was not able to run farther then a block tonight before I was forced to turn home. That damned pie moon lit up every wisp of cloud in the sky and, nolens volens, my wishes were not made.

Back to the ice pack.

Gruffaluffagus

2008-08-12T17:39:00.000-07:00

Two days? That was optimistic! The second day of rest I trotted across a four lane street to catch a bus and was nearly crippled from the calf up. Walking was without consequence, though running clearly was not, so I forsook any leggy activity for the remainder of the week. Why cant someone just invent a protein patch to slap on injured muscles? Like, a meat-ointment or something.

That forsaking business is a bit of a lie. I did go on a vertical calf-flexing hike over the weekend wearing very fashionable but not exactly comfortable shoes and the pain of my blistering heels drown out the symphony of straining leg muscle pain. The views however were well worth the effort. And I looked good, did I mention that? The shoes really were cute.

Finally yesterday I went running a short four miles in a few long minutes, a big toe in the waters. I felt some discomfort but enough to just stay home and eat juice pops instead? The sooner I get back on the road the better for everyone. It is no secret I have to run my personality into submission.

Anyway I have just enough time for a quick Owen update. This is a little video of our morning routine. Sometimes all you have to do is leave the room and come back speaking in a high pitched voice and it starts all over again. It is a good way to start the day.

legs legs damn legs

2008-08-03T12:24:00.000-07:00

I was a little queasy and uneasy about this weekends 20 mile run; queasy because I don't like to eat breakfast at certain hours of the day, and the unease I've been feeling about this run for the last two weeks is because, among other things, some of the muscles in my legs are exhausted by the training schedule.

My right hamstring recovered fully (WHEW) during our river trip so, of course, the first day back I ran ill-advised intervals between every fifth telephone pole: 12345FAST... 12345SLOW... The next day the mutiny began.

Or course, I have my secret weapons: ice, massage, and icemassage and using them, with occasional heat, I somehow managed to turn the corner and begin healing while still on the road, running everyday. But 20 miles while recovering is not the same as being ready to run 20 miles. One is stupid, the other is just senseless in a meaningful way.

Anyway, I was so focused on this 20 miler I went into the 15 miles I ran last Saturday feeling rather cavalier, sandwiched between the more daunting 18 and 20 as it was. I did become exhausted, and chastened to remember that 15 miles is still a rather far distance and should be undertaken with a bit more respect. Just when my spirits were sagging still two mile from home my angel-faced sister-in-law came running down the road toward me, having found my route on the computer and back-tracked to find me kicking rocks and scuffing soles. She ran back home all the way with me... oh my what a darling, restorative girl! I will miss her terribly when she leaves next week.

This week I left to run my 20 miles queasy, a feeling that stuck with me through at least the first hour on the road. I felt my strongest at mile 10, well-heeled and determined but the weakness in my calf crept in just a few miles later. More then weakness, the muscle began to tear. At 18 and a half miles I felt a fiber pop like in the movies when your hero is hanging over a cliff by a rope and one coil of the rope snaps and but he is kept barely there by the remaining twines... THAT WAS TOTALLY ME! It happened in my left calf muscle just above my achilles tendon and when it actually popped (at least that is what it reallyreally felt like) I stopped and broke down in tears which is hard to do when you are panting and you heart is beating 146 beats a minute and suddenly this silly function hijacks all the action.

I limpwalked for half a block, to almost exactly where Anita met me the week before, then decided that more then a calf muscle, I wanted my 20 miles so I limpran the rest of the way which involved keeping the lower left leg precisely taut with neither a flex nor a stretch and I rolled home alone. Dry tear tracks on my face.

I crossed my finish line exhausted and trying to hold off, yet sustain my emotional breakdown to share with Clark. I was limping along my cooldown when I heard him yell HERE SHE COMES and as I looked up, he dash away. A moment later he came out the door, across the yard and halfway down the block sprinting toward me with a towel and a tall glass of cold water. He ushered me into the house, pointing out that it had been cleaned toptobottom, pulled me a chair, untied my shoes, peeled off my socks, fed me grapes and protien shakes, plied me with icepacks and kisses. I have more secret weapons then I ever let on.

So now I am going to take two days off. Two full days off because even though the guilt and recriminations will haunt me, my legs will thank me. I've got nothing else to stand on.

/insert reputation joke here

aentropic

2008-07-28T17:49:00.000-07:00

My marriage as I write this is exactly one year and one week old... almost to the minute, but I would have to check the time signature on the pictures to be sure... and I have finally, if only for a minute, found myself floating on the tranquil and serene waters of life. Life is so good, so sweet, and so gentle that my dreams have stilled and become boring. Take this vignette; back home after three days on the river, which I will tell you about (maybe) and asleep before the next work day I dreamed nonstop about interpreters floating in canoes interpreting into the air.

I understand, on the surface it might seem interesting, it was even a little ghostly, but the dream was merely an intersection of my two days, a day after canoeing to be followed by a day back at work, and nothing more. ...not even (excuse the pun) an interpretation of events. Each interpreter sat in their own canoe indifferent to the current drifting their craft about. It was a traitorous overlap, two transparent days spinning like an eddy in my brain. It was eerie, I mean, who the fuck were they interpreting to? but it was not eerie enough to keep from tossing awake with boredom. All night.

Last night I dreamt I was looking at a list. That's all. I was looking at a list, and I was supposed to pack the things on the list because out the door behind me were dragons and lollipop trees but I kept reading the list, reading the list, insomnolent with impatience. Where are my dreams? If my life is milk and honey will my dreams wither away into mediocrity?

Of course, you can bet you can't count on being content. Eventually someone, perhaps even me, somehow, will start up with their suffering and I will be miffed that I'd been lulled into a false sense of security in a dangerously tentative world. The existential abyss will yawn open and I will swoon on its precipice.

Meanwhile, life, since it is not busy unraveling, is good. Yesterday Clark and I went to a friends wedding out in Hood River and since there doesn't seem to be and danger on the horizon I was convinced by both Clark and Anita to wear an scandalous dress. YOU WON'T LOOK LIKE THAT WHEN YOU ARE 80, BUT YOU WILL BE WISHING YOU HAD WORN THE DRESS IF YOU DON'T, AND IF YOU DO, YOU WONT BE SITTING AROUND REGRETTING THAT YOU DID.

So I did.

Hooray the family

2008-07-16T19:56:00.000-07:00

We were in Seattle and that was fun. My favorite part was sleeping and my other favorite part was throwing sticks for Owen in Lake Washington just a few steep blocks from my uncle's house, and my other favorite part was making pesto from the basil growing in my yard. Oh, and of course, the family.

We came home to a rushed week, a hugely active week and I feel guilty for sitting down if I do nothing more while sitting then breathe. Sunday night my sister-in-law Anita moved in for a few weeks. My mom and Lee stayed the night over. Monday Owen went to the vet and came home neutered. He was so so drugged up on pain medication ...which is a $24 option, wtf? it should be illegal to perform surgery on an animal and opt to not give them pain medication...(what was I saying?) oh! so drugged that even propped on his feet his forehead dragged on the ground. The next morning he was his normal springy self, no less a man I told him.

Now it is mid-week and after two days off from my running schedule to massage a pulling, tearing, wretched hamstring I was on my feet at 4am to run 18 miles, that hamstring willing I was home to kiss my husband as he left for work, and tomorrow we'll both be up at 3am to be on the road at 4am to make our way to the John Day river to spend our first anniversary in the river canyon for four days.

The best part is always the sleep.

Know-it-all

2008-07-06T22:41:00.000-07:00

My neighborhood is dark and well-treed. There are almost no lights through these streets and the sidewalks are, in places, buckled with old roots. I don't know these out-croppings, though I run these streets my knowledge is not anatomical. But I can't NOT think these dreamy thoughts: how I am asleep and dreaming upright on my legs because I know the ground is jutting, warped and yawning under me in the dark and I have no expectations of where then my feet will find me...

...not like when you slam down on the landing because you thought there was an extra stair left... the opposite of that like you float along without needing to know where the ground will be and therefor the ground is where it always was and then you too are where you are meant to be and, AHA it is like that running dream, you know?

Out of the neighborhood now I am running along better lit streets with sidewalks as flat and smooth as glass. I have left the dark streets behind confident that I KNOW EVERYTHING THERE IS TO KNOW ABOUT RUNNING BLINDLY. The very moment I tuck the thought away my foot catches on the opened umbrella of a dandelion seed JUST LAYING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SIDEWALK and suddenly, after years and years and years of running down dark rutted streets, I trip. I fall and I die.

No, just kidding. I fall, like really fall, hard skittering and roll like a burrito (that is to say, efficiently) so that I am surprised to sit upright and disappointed that there is only a few small droplets of blood on my elbow... and then I run. I run because everytime I think I know everything or anything even, I realize on the skid that I don't know anything at all. In all my years of running, leaping boulders and curbs I've never ever fallen till I thought I thought I knew. I'll say imprecisely, I don't know a damn thing. And this is a hard lesson for a girl whose first words were I KNOW! (a defiant scream)

So I get up and I run like blood is flowing like the Rubicon and I run as if anger would be irrelevant and I run and I run while in my mind the blood gushing down my arm and down my leg washes away every moment that passes in its torrents.

And it works for me while really the tiny droplet of blood on my elbow is already coagulated, scabbed and healed by the time I get home.

1000 dollar water bill

2008-07-05T23:44:00.000-07:00

I ran my requisite miles for today, which was fifteen but just to get home I rounded up a quarter mile or so. It was cool out compared to last week when I ran 13.38 with the sun shining down 167 degrees. Lucky for me, that day Clark rode his bicycle along side carrying a riding crop, several bottles of water and concentrated electrolytes tasting like pure sweat. Eventually the water got so hot in its bottle, worsening, if possible, the taste of the electrolyte concentrate that I just stopped drinking and started talking about the West Virginian path I found myself now on, 1977 mid-fall. It was clearly autumn because I was not sweating any longer, my skin chill. It occurred to me I should ask Clark if I was still making sense and he thrust the hot icky bottle of yucky water at me. Last week I survived, recovered panting in Owen's tiny 4' kiddy-pool. This week I survived in much, much better condition, even without an escort.

I am closing in on one whole year of matrimony. I still have not posted except briefly about my wedding and honeymoon, and I guess now I never will. The -1 year calendar has been on my mind a lot lately, passing as it does day by day, a year ago. Memory, I want to pocket those memories but they are most poignant where they are, where I find them. I just stare and stare at this years volunteer sunflowers. I once heard a stand-up comedian say he kept his extensive collection of seashells on beaches around the world and I was like YEAH! Some days when I flip through my checkbook, or drive across the river north I feel electrocuted and seven-dimensional. Time is wild and ravenous. The tunnel west still kills me. A scrub brush hollow under the arch of its branches, the color of brick, ozone, tin, queen anne's lace. I love my scars so much. Next time someone cooks me the best meal I have ever eaten I am going to thrust my hand into the fire so it will be written on my body.

This year (through today) I have run 645.48 miles and I plan to run at least another 600 miles between now and October before the marathon. I should be running with both photo ID, because I am proven neither wise or safe about running in the heat, and a pocket full of seashells and sunflower seeds to scatter as I go.

Guess what?

2008-05-21T16:31:00.000-07:00

I passed my certification test and am now a "candidate for (moremoremore) certification"!

Yay!

Reach the Beach 2008

2008-05-18T21:14:00.000-07:00

I have to study for my certification test which is why I figured out how to download songs saved on my computer to my phone as ring tones. This is so LIBERATING! If you call me and I don't answer till the tenth ring it is because I am enjoying a Finnish Polka.

So I have to study which is why for the blog post too. Kara over at Between The Miles tagged me with 8 Things You Might Want To Know and I can't think of a better time to tell you.

1. I hatehatehate having hot water on my face.
2. I have elegant toes.
3. When I was a teenager I thought my friend John and I had the same dream, like we'd astral-projected into the ethers and hung out together there, but now I think he was just fucking with me.

4. Sometimes I suspect that I could just slip between molecules, but get too excited to do it because I can't quite fathom, but do sense, the quantum possibilities. Other time I am, like, WHATEVER! CRAZY YOU.
5. My Dad is downstairs watching the news with my husband. They like each other a lot.
6. My Dad is here now, and has been here (in a more general sense) for 12 years, before which he was gone for more than 17 years, but before that we hung up pretty much ever day for like, 6 years. Then later I sued about the whole explosive fiasco for 400 million but only won a few million and only got a thousand bucks, to be paid twice yearly for four years. The checks are always late.
7. No, I didn't sue my dad, and no, it wasn't about the money.

8. I don't really burn, I tan slowly. I rode a hundred and two miles to the beach yesterday with my brother, my sister-in-law, my dad, my aunt and my uncle. It was hot but I didn't die at all like I have been known to almost do and that was pretty lucky.

I have a blueprint for my family that won't be realized for, like, fifty years in which I am a Grand Dame and benevolent matriarch of a well loved clan and all the extended loved ones. I am taking lessons in part from Clark's twin auntmother, and in part from my desire to have a running team. Me and my team, we will run 1000 mile relay races living in vans. I will be 90 and wear shortshort running shorts and tell everyone how loved they are. AND YES THERE IS ROOM FOR EVERYONE

This weekend is evidence that my plans are well underway. However, if I don't pass my certification test this Wednesday, all is lost. I best go study.

Mothers Day run

2008-05-11T14:31:00.000-07:00

There isn't much I do with my time lately but work, run and study for my certification test. If I am not actually doing one of those things then I am thinking about, getting ready to, or taking a break between doing one of those things before I do another one of those things. For everything else I do my best to be accommodating. So, my run today is my Mothers Day salutation to you, Mom, writ large on the earth where I live doing what I love best.

I love you and promise I will do my best to not ever step on a crack again.

Call me Sam

2008-05-04T21:53:00.000-07:00

I got a new job quantum leaping round the United States opening and closing windows into peoples lives in a manner that is totally out of my control. Do you remember that show? I go to work and it is like, 1989 again and I am a nerd again fantasizing about amazing inventions of the future like a hair product that will finally make people like me and phones where you can see each other and because that isn't cool enough the phone would have a button you can push and out pops both ice cream and pizza or a pony. And there is a guy with a remote control that doesn't quite work but he uses it as best he can to tell you about what it might be that you are supposed to do... remember that??? That is totally my new job.

That is all I can tell you about my new job, other then the fact that I don't have the experience or the certification for this job and should save everybody the trouble and just go home ....but for that I have been daydreaming about this day since fourth grade.

Maybe this is what I deserve

2008-04-27T22:20:00.000-07:00

My husband's parents are in Turkey for three and a half weeks so we are taking care of their dog, Sunny, who is a bit of a bumpkin lacking the cosmopolitan sophistication Owen displays when we are dragging around on leashes and when we are meeting new dogs and when we are deciding which delicious things on the floor to chew on.

Saturday last week he came over and by Monday he started with the diarrhea so, again, we were cleaning the floor on our hands and knees; Monday after work, up in the middle of the night, 6 in the morning, after work again, and again and again.

By Thursday we are back at the vet and nothing is wrong. Again. MAYBE IT IS JUST STRESS, AFTER ALL HIS MOMMY AND DADDY ARE GONE. TRY THIS REALLY EXPENSIVE BAG OF Low-Intestinal-Residue PupFood AND SOME HERE ARE SOME PILLS JUST TO BE SURE.

Maybe its because when I took a second to roll my eyes heavenward he cleaned out the kitty litter box, chewed the siding off the house, ate a foam mattress, swallowed his weight in mud and ravaged my seedlings starts.

By now maybe you have the impression that I am not a very good pack leader and am a lousy tender of puppies, and I can't blame you. But you would be wrong and you dont have to believe me till you are here, on your hands and knees pulling barbed wire and live possum out of these pup gullets. Then you'd get it, by gum.

Pear Blossom 2008

2008-04-18T22:36:00.000-07:00

Last weekend was hot and sunshiny, more like summer really then anything springlike. I spent seventy-two of those forty-eight hours in the car driving to Medford and back. Between south/northagain I spent one hour, twenty-two minutes and nine seconds running ten miles after only five hours and fourteen and a half minutes sleeping. I don't sleep well before races. In fact sleeping well only happens on the back end, that is, if I finally get there and am allowed to stay there, sleeping. Which I rarely am.

ANYWAY, We drove down to Medford for the Pear Blossom run which is something of a tradition (2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004); the ritual part being me bitching about Medford, the drive and the fact that the race is on Saturday, then leaving later then planned after not enough time stayed. Oh, and I usually wander around the RR tracks in Ashland with John for awhile somewhere in the time between.

There were improvements over last year... I didn't have to make the drive alone, the libraries are open again, no one stole my parking spot and I didn't drown in the rain. We arrived at the start line late for my Dad's 5k and despite starting at the very back of the pack he still shaved a couple minutes off his time.

A half an hour before my race started, Clark and his daughter and I ran the Mayor One Mile in a swarm of impressively enthusiastic, if somewhat untrained, children. It was like The Tortoise And The Hare every few seconds. CHARGE! pant pant CHARGE! pant pant CHARGE! We ran an eleven minute mile and got red ribbons. It was awesome.

My race started just a few minutes later. I edged closer to the front of the pack then I normally do and started slow, at least mentally. This race, this year was the most perfectly executed race I have ever run, and not at all because I set a PR for the course. What that means isn't worth explaining because research shows that nobody has even read this far because there are a lot of words and they are all about me.

I have a sort of distorted and you might say EXTREMELY NEGATIVE view of the past and think even the ME of a month ago an unsophisticated boob so I was a little disappointed to compare my times from this year to my race times from last year and find that not only were they close, I would have been my own fierce competitor if I had been there to race me. Surely, after a full year of evolving I would leave that little twit in the dust! NO! I would have been panting down my neck. Rude! Yet... formidable!

Anyway, I forget what I was saying. It was hot, it was lots of driving, I ate noodles and tried to knit my first-ever scarf on the thus-far hottest day of the year. Brilliant! Tomorrow it is supposed to snow so if I hurry up, knitknitknit, I might be on the cutting edge of fashion for just the tiniest fraction of my lifetime.

Taxes and budgets and bills and boxes-in-piles and dirty clothes and hunger and pestilence and software and the future and

2008-04-14T21:17:00.001-07:00

If I could invent a new word for how overwhelmed I feel right now I would say it OUTLOUD and the air would smell like a car accident and the sky would arch away. Gazing that far upward you would wobble and cease to be at all comforted.

My head starts hurting every time my phone rings and when I pull in front of my house I sit there hanging onto every word of radio news because I can't yet go inside where all those things need doing, maybe better to take my foot off the brake and roll quietly away before engaging the clutch.

But I didn't again today. I came back into the house and shuffled through the rooms in a stupor muttering my new word, doing none of those things at all but wishing it was time to go to bed in the way where sleep is a metaphor for death.

Boy is my head sore FROM BANGING IT AGAINST THE WALL ALL WEEK LONG

2008-04-07T16:36:00.000-07:00

Owen got sick again and while we were away one afternoon broke through the baby gate so he could poop extra stinky diarrhea all over the carpet instead of on that pesky slick old linoleum floor we keep in the kitchen. So we went off to the vet again, and paid $50 to have them look at his poop again, and it came back negative for parasites, again. In the meantime he puked a few times here and there just to make a point.

My poor baby!

That didn't solve the diarrhea problem but the vet did refuse to give him his shots that day and instead rescheduled him for another appointment two expensive days later. His eyes started gooping up with yellow snot and he refused to eat more then a few bites of food. We took turns waking up and running him outside every couple hours through the night and I fretted loud and often about possible dehydration. I left messages with the doctor and she never called back.

Meanwhile, Owen otherwise didn't act terribly sick. Being in quarantine from other dogs he took to harassing the cat as if she were also a frustrated, desperate-to-play 4 month old puppy... that is, hopping up and landing with both paws pinning her down then thrashing her about. Willie doesn't seem to be terribly concerned and does little more than slap clawlessly at his face and hiss once and awhile (she certainly isn't bothered enough to get up on her feet and walk away because that would be exercise and Willie does not do exercise). But I am concerned because I keep ASKING HIM TO BE GENTLE, AND OH BY THE WAY NEXT TIME POOP/BARF OVER HERE but nothing in my power seems to have any impact on anything, ever, at all, whatso-uselessly-ever. ARGH!

For a whole week I simply failed to exist.

Finally, after some research I decided maybemaybe it was his food that was too cheap and dirty and was the source of his health problems. We took him off IAMS which is an ex-good brand now total crap and switched him to Orijen and overnight, literally the next morning he was pooping normally and his eyes cleared up.

Finally fully vaccinated and restored, yesterday we took him to the dog park for the first time. After two blissful hours of being charged and mowed down by packs of full grown dogs running at top speed, rolled in mud and grit and covered in slobber we brought him home and he slept the entire night through.

Home Sweet Home

2008-03-25T13:23:00.000-07:00

Owen is nearly four months old and is now bigger then Willie, but nothing phases her. Here in this short movie, made at 7 o'clock this morning, they recreate a scene from our marriage on the days I am forced to get our of bed before noon.

Thank god that I am so friggin lovable.

Easter Sunday afternoon

2008-03-23T22:04:00.000-07:00

I couldn't stay awake this afternoon and in futility lay where I fell near the heater dreaming of zombies. In a world where it just comes down to you and a few hold outs against an army of zombies there are no happy endings. Even if you set a boobie-trap and explode every single zombie there is nothing left to do but sit around playing cards on a pile of stinking zombie corpses. Even if you win you lose. There is nobody to run the coffee shops, ride city buses, or mow lawns. You can be a zombie or dance a lonely lonely victory dance surrounded forever by death and stink and lonliness and disease. And even when it starts snowing in the kitchen, in the kitchen!, even if the snow is so beautiful school wont be canceled because there is nobody to teach. I tried so hard to see where the snow was coming from and in the end all my looking efforts to see just woke me up, and I was still laying where I fell staring instead at the carpet, depressed.

So I went back to sleep.

Shamrockin'

2008-03-17T20:42:00.000-07:00

Today is St. Patrick's Day and I didn't wear a stitch of green because I am grouchy and obstreperous, gearing up nicely for old age. JUST YOU COME AND TRY AND PINCH ME YOU CHEEKY BASTARDS. I am going to bed in a minute here, no green beers or kissing Irishmen even if one were here saying I have nice looking potatoes with his seductive Irish accent. I'm into Swedes these days.

The race yesterday went nicely because first of all it didn't rain but stayed awesomely overcast for the duration.

Second because even though I had to abandon the potty line when I was within a quarter-mile, not going to the bathroom never bothered me. Still, every single race I run until I die you will find me in a panic waiting to pee while the seconds tick down to the starting gun. If I happen to make it to the restroom in time I run back to the end of the line and start waiting in a new panic because I am sure I have to pee, again.

Third, my lungs were mostly clear and even when I did cough up some pearly junk it did not choke me, was discreet and did not land on the leg of any other runner, thick as we were.

Fourth, fifth and sixth: the freeken hills!, the finish line kick, and my chip time. I finished 15k (9.3 miles) in 1:18:48 = 8:27/mile (7.22 mph) which is faster then I need to run for my marathon goal this year. Theoretically I would need to pick up my skirts and keep running 16.9 more miles at the same pace after the finish line to hit my hopeful 3:45 marathon mark so it isn't time to take it easy just because yesterday went alright, but its a nice pat on the back.

Seventh and eighth: I finished 54/264 in my division, and 258/1218 in my gender. Generally finishing in the triple digits isn't really that impressive but being in the top 20-25 percentile isn't so bad. It is all how you math it.

I could do, if I wanted to, high kicks today with no muscular complaints except a faint sassy twang in my left hamstring but old bitches don't to high kicks. They go to bed early.

Ready, set, go...

2008-03-12T22:24:00.000-07:00

I started running again on Sunday after I took a week off for being sick. My right lung feels clear, if a little tender, but I swear I have grown a membrane across the entire opening into my left lung as if to seal it up for the safe cultivation of tiny mucus pearls at each bronchial juncture. I can feel them and I can not dislodge them. I promise I would not even notice if it were not for the near perfect gas exchange transpiring in the right lung. It is the asymmetry thats killing me.

My heart rate seems higher then usual this week and I feel slower then normal except for those first joyful blocks of dreamy gazelle-like bounding before I settle myself into a pace. The Shamrock Run is on Sunday and I am not entirely sure I'll be ready. Underpreparedness is unlikely to stop me.

Underpreparedness is how I live my life actually, in a constant state of near panic at my inability to become prepared. I dont even know what it means to be prepared and only once or twice in the last year did I actually catch a breeze in which it sublimely occurred to me there really was nothing I needed to be doing but exactly what I was doing. And I love this rare moment so much till it occurs to me that am still lousy at cultivating my Buddha seed because I planted it into the weed-infested garden bed that is my soul and maybe I should just chug round-up or light this stack of papers on fire and the moment is no longer being lived in and I am off and running again. Unprepared.

So will I let that stop me from running 15K in just a few days from now? Hell no.

Spring fever

2008-03-08T23:54:00.000-08:00

-.2 (point two) pounds

Last night, without any forethought, I walked into the bathroom, pulled my hair back into a ponytail then cut it off. I felt so totally uncorked I danced a little.

-7 inches

It was a devastating moment for Clark this morning and he sulked so I wore somber black for him and tried to not twirl my hair or flip it from side to side.

I might go shorter still but don't say anything.

Circle of life

2008-03-05T21:11:00.000-08:00

I went through the car wash today! I love going through the car wash because it makes me feel like I am being swallowed and pooped out by a monster. I love going through the car wash for the same reason I love driving off the Sellwood Bridge and getting hit by trains and traveling with grizzly bears (ask me about Monday's feverish nap)... because besides sometimes thinking traffic might make me late, my life is relatively danger-free and it lulls me into forgetting that I AM GOING TO DIE and who wants to live in a traffic jam forever?

Because life is like traveling with a grizzly bear who is all sentient and fun and cuddles with your dog and then if that bear goes and tears open your chest cavity it would do so still without ever betraying its nature. There is nothing you can not love.

Anyway, my point is I might have written my first guest post! Yes, almost a year late (because threat of death doesn't seem to work) and yes, out of order. And no, I have not forgotten WHO BUTTERS MY BREAD and I think about WHO BUTTERS MY BREAD everyday and even menace myself with a hair-shirt but HOLY CRAP I SWEAR I AM DANCING AS FAST AS I CAN.

The post might, or might not be up in a day or two. Check and see.

Occams razor

2008-03-03T16:29:00.001-08:00

I am so sick it is disgusting. I am so sick I started crying with my head in Clark's lap on Saturday night and all weekend shuffled around the house wheezing, sweating and covered with goosebumps. THERE WERE TEARS OF MISERY GLISTENING ON MY CHEEKS.

Even though I can actually see a germy residue on everything I touch today I went back to work mostly because I rarely even have to talk and am able to impose physical distance between me and my clients. My head is otherworldly and tracking has proven to be somewhat difficult (I shouldn't even be driving!) but luckily two of three of my jobs so far today have been no-shows.

I am sitting at the Fresh Pot on Mississippi Ave waiting out the next hour and half before I work again. I have a teapot, cough drops and wadded up tissue everywhere. It is gross, I know. I am in the window and it is actually raining inside. Yes. There is a pipe that runs along the inside of the twelve foot window frame and it is dripping water and the water drips are splashing onto the nine foot window frame and then sprinkling down on me like mist. At first when it happened I thought I my arm had fallen asleep because it felt like tiny prickles, then it started on my other arm too and I was like OMG I am having a stroke/germ-induced tactile hallucination!

Outside the window it hasn't rained for over an hour so it can't be a leak IT CAN ONLY MEAN MY EMINENT DEMISE till I noticed tiny droplets of water on my keyboard and on the counter around me and finally the dripping pipe in the corner.

Ugh, I need to go track down more tissue.

Owen: week three

2008-02-19T22:13:00.000-08:00

OH MAMA PLEASEPLEASE DON'T LEAVE ME IN THIS WARM SAFE KITCHEN FULL OF CLEAN COZY BEDDING AND DOG TOYS AND FRESH WATER AND NUTRITIOUS KIBBLETS OH PLEEEEEASE MAMA, PLEEEEASE DON'T LEAVE MEEEEEE!

Owen is not happy about the baby gate. He is very very not happy and he breaks hearts all up and down the block every time I swing even one leg across as if to leave. The secret, I have found, is to tire him out with tireless affection which I do, then I sneak away and do selfish stuff like brush my hair while he naps.

To our great good fortune my work schedule this term generally permits me to come home every few hours most days of the week, and when I am unable Clark usually is able to come home for lunch so that Owen is rarely alone for very long. And even still, it is only a few more days until vaccinations and dewormifications and all that permit he and Sunny to spend all their days together in puppytumbling bliss.

I have been trying to get him to walk on a leash but he belly flops down and lays there with both his front and back legs dragging behind him. Thats fine because I am married, and married to a man at that, but even my HUGE GLITTERY RING and my WIFELY BUN aren't enough to ward off the hordes of women who use OWEN as an excuse to try to get into my pants every time we go out in public. Ladies, Please!

So we'll leave the walking for later. In the meantime I've taught him to sit with both verbal and hand cues, given together and separately. (You should see how well he sits! Who would have thought a sit could be executed so cutely! The women at the video store swooned and fainted from affectation when his tininess sat down crisply for a cookie.) This afternoon we began with the 'down' command. He is a eager and willing learner but with the attention span of, well, a ten week old infant. I keep the sessions short but even five minutes at his age is pushing the limits. I am in no rush.

If Owen has lot to learn I clearly have more. There are no less ten (10) puppy books around here... three on the floor next to me, one on a stack of papers I need to file away, one opened up spine down on the breakfast table, two in my bag, one in the car, one on the couch and two next to the bed... how many is that? Doesn't matter. Two were birthday gifts and the rest are dog-eared library books, one which has clearly been gnawed on by needle sharp puppy teeth and one of which will turn me into a dog psychic thereby solving issues like separation anxiety by teaching me, among other things, how to create a psychic golden thread connecting our hearts across the baby gate and through the remote work day.

Anyway, My birthday was EHH, ANOTHER YEAR. My run alone was exceptional. I asked Clark to drop me off at the top of Mt Tabor and I ran all around south east Portland. Next year I expect Owen will be running along side me, if I can ever get him to agree to the leash.

Owen: week one

2008-02-13T23:20:00.000-08:00

The first week with Owen has been life on fast forward: infancy to the terrible twos in seven short days. Today, on the seventh day he mastered going down the stairs which means no part of the house is off limits if the baby gate is down.

The kitchen, paved as it is, served as an e-z-wipe nursery during the three days of his infancy, a place he had little need or interest in exploring beyond. Now when the gate falls all breathing becomes a pant, a frantic search for electric cords, preferably plugged in, cat food (or even better, the cat herself) and poisonous house plants. He has metamorphized from a 10lb doe-eyed crying baby to a hysterically wild-eyed intoxicated 13lb pre-adolescent who needs CONSTANT supervision. The sole consolation of this phase is that his play/sleep ratio is still 30/70. The vet says within a month it should be closer to a 99/1.

Today for the first time I found myself thinking WHAT HAVE I GOT MYSELF INTO? I mean, the idea of communication, of consistancy while communicating with this dog is TOTALLY IMPOSSIBLE. Like, how do you isolate an incident of good behavior in a hurricane slipstream of constant activity, because by the time the second 'O' in the phrase 'GOOD DOG' is out of my mouth Owen has already done three bad things.

And this is when I am giving him my undivided attention. Today I actually tried to balance my checkbook with one eye and one hand while the other warded certain death and destruction away from that tiny little unit of puppy will.

One week! Three pounds! Twice the dexterity! He has the ability to tear through the yard in a tight donut formation, navigate both stairwells in both directions, and he actually hasn't even quite begun to think mischievously.

What have I got myself into?

Owen

2008-02-09T14:00:00.001-08:00

Whew!

More pictures here.

Feeble-minded

2008-02-03T23:33:00.000-08:00

We went to a superbowl party for a couple hours this afternoon, then left just a few minutes into the game. This day, for me, is about eating chips and cheese dip, and all these red faced old dudes analyzing football on the telly kills the deal. Anyway, I was standing there talking with my husband and his friend Doug when, right in the middle of a sentence, I had the oddest sensation in my brain. It was almost like standing up too quickly but instead of rushing vertically the blood moved horizontally sounding internally like Doppler effected shoosh. It was not induced by any actual movement, I had merely stood there talking and my thoughts were just washed away confused in a rush of blood draining or flooding, ebbing or flowing. I am not sure which. I struggled to think and muttered something universal to the faces I found myself talking to. A moment later equilibrium returned and I felt perfectly normal.

2008-02-03T00:38:00.000-08:00

It rained all day today. The neighborhood was full of cars, including people parked in our alley way where my side-yard growing out into the gravel road causes me to mistakenly feel entitled and proprietary about what is actually a public right-of-way. Three houses up the street the neighbors, really the next-of-kin to my recently deceased neighbor, were holding an estate sale. The woman who lived there died quietly in her old age a few months ago without a ripple. Until today when, ripplingly, people are haphazardly parked on my lawn to make off with her washer/drier set.

I couldn't bring myself to go simply because I couldn't bring myself to do anything at all but eat oatmeal in a significantly esoteric manner in front of the heater, imagining how on Earth I'll get out running. Ritual is the last refuge of rootless vine like myself. I laid out my running clothes. Some of them, a neck gator I adapted from my snowboarding gear into a hat, gloves and jacket, are still damp-ish but can be worn again. Shirts and sports bras I never wear twice, reeking like they do of ammonia. Yes, after I run I smell like a locker room full of felonious, untrustworthy men for at least a layer or two. In the summer I have been rejected outright by my husband. BABY WOAH! SHOWER AND COME BACK NAKED, BUT RIGHT NOW, DO NOT GET ANY CLOSER.

Everything else, socks included are usually dry and clean after I run. I may be an emotional tornado but at least I am not at all hairy, don't sweat much and have feet that have never smelled bad. Being me, there are so few consolations but occasionally, yes, I get to wear my socks twice. Anyway, I sniff tested myself dressing to run. And then.

There is no reason to not run just because it is raining. It makes more sense to go run 7.5 miles in the rain for your own ghost then it does to walk 75 feet for someone else who died. I have my own life to run for. Besides, once you are moving the raindrops can't hardly find a place to land.

Around four and a half miles I see a family down the street leaving their house to get into their car. The son, 6/7ish, starts charging around when he sees me coming. His mother laughs, partially apologetic. YOU WANT TO RACE? thats me asking, not slowing down and his mother is like YEAH, RACE HER, SEE IF YOU CAN and he charges after me, surprisingly fast. I have more then enough gears that I can keep ratcheting up my speed and he is still coming after me, churning and red in the face. Finally, nearing the end of the long block, not willing to let him win but not wanting him to lose, I hold out my hand behind me and he slaps me five and the race is over. He runs home and I run home, circuitously, between rain drops.