Today has been a decently productive day. So far I have a) showered and eaten, 2) purchased 8 of the participating Kraft items so as to use the $7.00 off coupon at Fred Meyer, iii) affirmed my husband’s wonderful attitude and communication skills in dealing with our Krabby Patties webhost (sorry for the down time), IV) read “Grumpy Gloria” and sang the alphabet (minus F & Q, a.k.a. the Unspeakables) a number of times, 2*2+1) and successfully avoided preparing my Bible study lessons by moving cumbersome things in the garage.

In the midst of my “This Must Be Cleaned We Have Too Much Crap How Did We Become Suburban Americans?!!?” anxiety attack (it’s been an ongoing thing this week) I decided not only to reorganize, but to actually open boxes (gasp: novel idea) and throw things away (yes, my husband knows; no, I’m not throwing his things away, but they may get piled in places he can’t avoid them, a.k.a. his computer chair).

One of the boxes I decided neeeeeded to be tackled today was an ordinary paper box: but inside contained all the papers, cards, pictures, candles, paraphernalia from our blissful nuptials of June 2003. After we got married, moved, both changed jobs, dealt with paper work, newly acquired relatives, and that minor whole “two becoming one, but don’t touch my stuff” thing, I didn’t really feel a whole lot like dealing with anything white or flowery or ceremonial. Meaning, anything having to do with our wedding stuff got thrown into the paper box to be dealt with “sometime down the road.”

That day was today.

When I opened the lid, I fairly expected either dust and nasty fumes from some decomposing corsage to assault my nose, or else to look at the pile and say, “What’s this?”

I found some fun things, and a few things that caused me to wonder, “How did I manage to live without this?!!?”

• a great mechanical pencil
• a self-portrait of my brother and dad
• cute cards and pictures of friends and their little ones who aren’t so little

Other things I had an inkling that I don’t need:

• receipts from the caterer/flower people/church/office max for a flower hanger
• a pile of “Hubby & Dren’s Wedding CDs” - although I plan to google what kinds of art projects you can do with cds you don’t want: you know they’re out there
• returned invitations due to incorrect addresses
• a self-portrait of my brother’s nostrils

Then I found some really random stuff:

• a wallet-sized version of my diploma - laminated (thank you, Alumni Association)
• my Idaho library card
• my bank card with my maiden name
• two 37 cent stamps

But there was one item that topped them all. When going through all the stuff that came out of my wallet when I shed my last name for a new one, I found a social security card. Right before I put it in the “to be shredded” pile, I felt a need to glance at it closer. It had my maiden name on it. But it also had my married name on it. It was, indeed, the social security card I misplaced after Hubby and I opened a joint bank account. Yeah, that wasn’t too long after we got married (but long enough that people began asking us if we ever planned on cashing their wedding gift checks or if we were so affluent that we were using them to wallpaper our townhouse). Oops.

I can feel both my father and father-in-law shuddering as they read this.

It has now been safely filed in my personal file by the Hubby. But to give me some credit (I’m not a total non non): the other night I pulled together all of our paperwork to do our taxes. True, I misfiled two pieces, but yay that I remembered we should have those two pieces of paper, and that I’m familiar enough with the crazies of my mind to figure out whereabouts they probably were.

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It was pretty, at least at our house.

I was very happy to stay home, having coffee and tea with friends across the street, playing with the fam at the park.

Some people were not so smart and did not stay home.  Instead, they played live action bumper cars.  It makes me hurt inside.

I love my four wheel drive vehicle parked safely in my garage on a non-hill street.

Via Dooce.

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• JJ slept through the night.  Or at least he didn’t get out of bed.  And if he cried, my inner mama preferred to sleep than respond:  she rarely does that (it’s hard having a Type A alter ego).

• I found a hole in my jeans:  I’ve NEVER had a hole in a pair of jeans.  My favorite pair of  jeans.  My American Eagle jeans.  My American Eagle boot cut short jeans.  The last pair I bought in Boise when all I had to spend money on was rent, clothes, dinners out, and Victoria’s Secret lotion.

• JJ did not want to go into the nursery at church today.  Not that he cried; he just pretended that he was wired to be shy.  Um, the child who blows kisses to scary old men at the store?  Yeah, that kid.

• I did not want to drink coffee at Bible Study this morning.  I drank tea.  And not from my own mug which I bring *every* *week*.  The mug I bought in college so that I would have something to drink out of.  And I drank *green* tea:  it was healthy (argh, Jim Marr:  you had to mention your gallons of hilar-tea).

• My child got to go outside and enjoy the non-rain (not that it’s sunny, but it wasn’t rainy).  He went out in rainboots that the Gran knew he needed.  He put them on himself!  When he came back inside, he was missing boots and pants, clothed only in a shirt and socks.  Wet socks.  White-now-brown socks.

• The top button on my favorite pair of aforementioned jeans popped off.  Please:  add insult to injury.

• I’m allergic to walnuts.  How do I know?  When I eat them, like I’m supposed to for mental health reasons, my throat hurts and swells up.  I’m not allergic to anything!  Other than dog dander and dust and voting.

Just in case y’all wanted to know.

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Yeah.

Ah, the beauty of a hot day, long hair, and toddler sweat.  My friend Joetta used to make a face like that:  she called it her “courting” face, one to make the boys “run hither.”

Doncha wanna run hither?  Doncha?

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No wonder I never get housework done.

But at least I’m really nice when I’m not getting housework done.

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For Allison

Which John Cusack Are You?

But unlike Martin Q. Blank, I will *not* be attending my high school reunion in two months, partly because I don’t really know who those people are, and partly because I can think of a lot more productive uses for $160 (that would be the amount for Hubby and I to attend: there’s NO way I’d go to something like that without backup). Anyway, I was unanimously voted to be the least likely person to go to a high school reunion when playing a game with my friends: I wouldn’t want to disappoint.

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Many many moons ago, I worked as an instructor at a high ropes course.  Many of you are currently saying, “Huh?”  It means I worked at a retreat place where I would string middle and high school students willingly up in the trees to perform amazing feats like trying to grab a trapeze bar by jumping from a platform . . . forty feet in the air.  Or climbing the tallest climbing tree west of the Mississippi (120 ft. I think).  Yeah:  crazy.  And it was crazy when I did it.

Oh, I’m not a climbing girl.  While I was little, I did climb fences and kitchen counters (our cabinets were *really* high).  And I did go backpacking with my dad and best friend and her dad, which consisted of packing a really small pack with a few clothes, some packs of kool-aid, one book, and one doll, and maybe some tp while the dads did the majority of the grunt work.  We’d follow trails until getting to the campsite, or until they faded away while the dads said we “just weren’t looking hard enough for the trail:  it’s right here!”

See, my dad likes to get into situations like that.  He and a friend almost floated away in their tent one time:  it rained so hard that it flooded, and they woke up to unexpected waterbeds.  Another time he tried to climb Mt. Hood, but that was stopped by a whiteout and instead he spent 16 hours in a tent freezing his tookus off with his buddies:  fun!  Mom and I agree it was God smiting Dad:  see, he did that last adventure on Mom’s birthday.  Foolish, foolish mortal.

It’s good to have fun stories like that:  outdoor adventures almost gone horribly wrong but saved at the last minute.  I just found out today that some of my friends experienced the former but without the later.  Please send out happy, comforting, healing thoughts to my friends along with their wives and extended families and friends.  My heart grieves to think of the pain they’re going through, and I hope their boos can soon be turned to happies as they heal and rest and create some new, better outdoor memories.

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Your results:
You are Supergirl

Click here to take the “Which Superhero are you?” quiz…
I think it was the push-up bra question that clinched it. That, and Firestar wasn’t an option.

So, who are you going to be joining me as in the Justice League of America?

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Last night I attended book group. . . or an informal meeting of book group.  Typical of spring behavior, folks had too many things going and couldn’t come together to talk about the PAIN AND SUFFERING we’ve been slugging through.  And in fact, most of the folks who came hadn’t made it through the book.  Yay me:  I want a cookie.  Except that most of the people who came had only recently started the book (as opposed to me, who started a month ago and finished on Saturday), and they *loved* what they had read so far (as opposed to me, who’s only verbalizations consisted of sighing and moaning when we’d actually talk about the book rather than how we came to be a part of book group or why one of the girls liked to torture another one because she had the gaul to say that she liked “The Age of Innocence” to which I added another disgusted noise or how the high ceilinged apartments across the street were great except for the cobweb factor).

Then we got on the subject of weblogs.  To which I was the only blogger in the group.  And yes, I have two:  one where the words “poop” and “yarf” are freely shouted from the mountaintops and one where they’re more casually used.  Someone asked what the point of blogging was:  journaling so all can read?  Diana, in her attempt to help, said she’s paint a picture for us:  “Imagine I’m wearing a raincoat.  Imagine I’m not wearing anything else under the raincoat.  Imagine I just ran in front of you and “wham” flashed you.  That’s blogging.”

I’m a flasher, and I never even knew it.  Excuse me while I run away giggling and try to warm up my tooshie (flashing this time of year is still pretty cold).

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Well, I should be writing about how the fruit of my loins is nineteen months . . . and one day, or I should be noting that the fruit of my loins is missing because his beloved and sainted grandparents took him in the Underground Railroad Ford Explorer to freedom up north because after a six month process his mother was supposed to have a canal rooted through her tooth today only to hear 1.5 hours (and a bit of discomfort) into the procedure that she has to go to the dentist’s “special friend” (a.k.a. endodonist a.k.a. really really expensive dentist for people with stupid potentially-joined roots), and then she came home and experienced a whirlwind of temper tantrums, and the Gran wisely recognized that to retain grandparent status would mean the extraction of aforementioned tantrum thrower to neutral territory.

But instead I’m going to answer the meme from the absolutely fabulous, hot Latina Mama Y, my newest Internet friend.  Why?  Because she tagged me, and I’m not one to slack on a tag.

Meme:  list 6 weird habits/things/facts about yourself.  Which answering in itself seems weird:  why would one willingly share such items outloud, much less on the internet?  Because that’s what the WorldWideWeb was created for:  public self-humiliation and then rabid self-defense when someone calls you on it.

Fact 1:  I love John Denver.  I abhor James Taylor.  Why is that weird?  Because they’re THE SAME PERSON.  But John makes me think of warm fuzzies, and James makes me of trying to exfoliate with an S.O.S. pad.  I also like Neil Diamond though I am not a Vegas-frequenter/lounge-singer-follower/wearer of garish clothing.
Fact II:  If you were to turn on a soap opera and point out a character, I could tell you what relationships that character has been in on the show, what other shows they’ve been on, what relationships their character had been in on the other shows, what other shows those other partners have been/are in, and who they’ve been connected to in real life (both the actor and the actor’s character’s partners).  Confusing, eh?  And yet somehow I can keep it staight *AND* I barely ever watch daytime tv.  It’s a gift, really.  I can’t tell you who the first five Presidents of the U.S. were (and I’m a history major:  oy), but I can tell you that Nikolas on General Hospital is Nikolas number one but was replaced by Nikolas number two but then Nikolas number one replaced his replacee so he’s Nikolas number one and three and his character was married to Emily who is Emily number two because Emily number one left the show to become Joan of Arcadia  and Nikolas number one/three was going to be married to Courtney who was married to Jax who was married to Brenda who is on Vegas with Leo from All My Children who was married to Greenlee who in real life is married to Bob the Bachelor but in real life Nikolas number two is divorced from Eva Longoria who is on Desperate Housewives but was also on The Young and the Restless where her character . . . okay:  must get back to meme.

Fact C:  When my mom had Uncle Bubba, she gave me a baby doll so that way “mama has a baby, and Aj has a baby” (always with the distraction techniques - smart lady — which is why she currently has my child).  The baby’s name was Georger.   I don’t know what exactly how it came about.  I know that he was named after George Jefferson - seeing as how this floppy, white boy doll had so many similarities to the spunky, comedic curmudgeon.  But I didn’t want to “steal” George Jefferson’s name, so I made up a name in honor of him:  Georger.  Maybe he was George — and that much more.

Fact 5-1:  I can tell you all of the names of the United States in alphabetical order.  AND I can tell you all of the counties of Idaho in alphabetical order.  AND I can tell you what Idaho county a car is from.  Freaky deaky.

Fact Cinqo:  In second grade I was sick during the days that we learned “7+4″, “7+5″, and “8+5″, and to this day I do a quick count in my head or on my fingers instead of instictively knowing like I do with the other additions.  To get by when the teacher was watching and we weren’t supposed to use our fingers, I would count using the tips of the numbers (for the four - top and bottom of vertical line, right and  left of horizontal line; for the five - right and left of top line, top of backwards “c”, middle of backwards “c”, end of backwards  “c”).  I did this until some time in high school when I finally made myself realize how much they added up to:  it was a self-imposed learning block - loony loon.

Fact Number of members in Bono’s family:  If I could (i.e. had time and did not house a whirling dervish), I would organize my movies/music/books like they do at the library - i.e., I would have genre sections and then alphabetizing from there.  I don’t do this because time is lacking and Destructo Boy so loves throwing things off of shelves, but it doesn’t mean that in my head they aren’t organized . . . and put away . . . and not ripped or chewed on or gummy.

To Tag:

Aimless (c’mon:  you can work the dog poop story in there *somehow*)

Hubby (it’ll be a stretch, but nonetheless)

Gregg (tag back at ya)

Sarcastic Journalist (I’m sure you have tons of free time and energy to do this)

Oh, That’s Cute (with the bebe hormones goin’, you’ve gotta be having some sort of weird cravings)

Fashionable Chaos (you could write one for your brother and make it very bland, showing that he’s Class 1 dating material - gotta work it when you can!)

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