A Post to Give You Nightmares July 29, 2008

Last night as I was getting ready to go to bed I noticed a spiderweb under the counter.  It was a really sticky web.

The kind of web that black widows spin.  (I’ve had reason to do some research on this in the past as I mentioned here.)

I destroyed the web, something that if done repeatedly is supposed to get the widow to move on, but then I figured that she’d just move on to another spot in my house.  And I can’t have that.  It took a few minutes before I spotted the spider.  The light wasn’t great and at first I was sure it was a black widow, the shape was dead on (if you’ll pardon the pun).

Because it’s necessary to have witnesses to our most harrowing episodes I didn’t kill it.  I caught it.  In the light however I noticed that the spider isn’t black.  It’s brown.

Sean looked at it today and said, “it’s a daddy long legs.”

“No way!  The body’s too big and the legs are too thick.”

Sean says the legs are too thin and too long to be a widow.

I disagree.  I’m willing to concede that it’s not a black widow.  I mean, it’s not black.

It’s a brown widow.

What do you think?Oh, and I didn’t have nightmares last night, but I did this afternoon.

Revisited July 28, 2008

For those of you who are new to the Wonderland please read this post before you read this post.

School started today.  The Princess went off to begin third grade and the Pea headed out to first grade.  His first full day of school, morning and afternoon.  And that means one thing: lunch.

His lunch was packed with care by his older sister (she beat me to it, it was made before I got up) he had a juice box and a sandwich (peanut butter and jelly on a hot dog bun), he had a nectarine.  I even added a little baggie of carrots.

So he went off to school and guess what.

HE DIDN’T EAT HIS LUNCH!!!  HE “BOUGHT” LUNCH AT SCHOOL!!!!!

He was told at the beginning of the day to put his backpack in his locker.  He did.  Apparently not many kids bring their lunches to school or possibly he wasn’t paying attention (I’m sure that wasn’t it) but whatever happened he didn’t end up going back to his locker to get his lunch.  “They made me get the school’s lunch,”  he said when he got home.

*Deep Breath*

Since it was the first day of school many forms and permission slips were sent home.  Amongst them I found one for free and reduced price lunches.  We don’t qualify for either but I’m sending it back anyway.  See:And when they send me the bill for the lunch that the Pea ate today I’m taking a page out of Lisa M’s book (I linked to her blog but she gave me the idea on the last post of this nature.  Somehow I’ve failed to follow the link to her blog and read it before now.  I plan to rectify that oversight.) and declaring it an unautorized expendeture.  I will not pay it! You think they’ll get the message?

PS Bonus points to the first person who figures out what the phone number on the form is.

Stuff July 27, 2008

I took the Princess to the store for a little school shopping today.  She needed shoes.

Can we please just get a pair of shoes!!!!  We don’t need Hannah Montana shoes, we don’t need Disney Princess shoes, or Tinkerbell, or High School Musical (don’t get in the way of the Disney marketing machine.  It will run you down.)  And then I went to the boys section to look for shoes for the Pea and Irish1.  Hulk, Batman, Speedracer, Hellboy.

Seriously?  Hellboy?

Ok, No.

But it is nigh unto impossible to find a pair of shoes that don’t have a face on them.

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Apparently I bought apple juice because I didn’t feel like I was mopping the floor often enough.

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I have ants on my counters which is weird because I’ve made a point of leaving plenty of food on the floor for them.

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The Princess and the Pea go back to school Monday!!!!

And for You Who Won’t Be Converted July 24, 2008

to the Tour that is.

I watched “Notting Hill” for the millionth time tonight and I realized that roughly half of the phrases I use regularly come from that movie.  Here’s a sampling:

“Classic”

“Tempting but, no.”

“It’s a diesase, I’m having injections…” (he goes on to say “and taking pills, I’m told it’s only a matter of…” and I think I may start using the whole thing.)

“It’s not a classic anecdote.”

Ok that’s all I can remember but I’ve been up all night, I know there were more.

How about you?  What movie do you constantly unconsciously quote?

Viva Le Tour!! July 23, 2008

I know what you’re thinking: great, a sports post. *sigh*  And I don’t really blame you, I’m not much of a sports kind of gal myself.  I understand the rules but I just have trouble getting very excited about most sports.  I do like swimming (a holdover from highschool when I dated most of the swim team.  Ok, just the captains) but I LOVE the Tour.  I don’t follow cycling any other time of year but there’s just something about the Tour that just really gets me.

Take today’s stage #17, for example. It was right around 125 miles, 40 miles of which ascends three (four) different mountains one of which is so brutal that Versus (our go to station for tour coverage in the US) gave it its own commercial. (That means something to anyone who’s ever watched anything on Versus, this station tries to out man SpikeTV.)

For the past three days the race has been going through the Alps.  The Alps people! These are serious mountains.  Yesterday, on stage 16, a German named Stefan Schumacher in a group and alone led for almost the entire stage.  Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, he did not win the stage (the guys in the early breaks nearly never do) and finished 8th overall (for the stage). But today he was out there doing it again, pushing up these mountains all by himself just because he could.  He had no hope of winning the Tour and realistically very little hope of winning the stage.  And yet he rode.

And it’s not just what they do, it’s the way they do it.  Cycling is a team sport but only one man gets to stand on top of the podium at the end of the race.  For the last three stages the man leading out the main bunch for the majority of the stage has been Andy Schleck from Luxemburg.  He has yet to win a stage, he isn’t even trying.  He certainly isn’t going to win the whole shabang.  You see Andy has a brother named Frank.  And Frank just might do it.  For the last three days Frank’s been the maillot jaune, or yellow jersey so his brother has been, literally, beating himself up, expending his last ounce of energy to take that extra bit of wind resistance off his brother.  If you need me to point out the life lesson here, you’ve got bigger problems.

These guys, the domestiques, ride for the purpose of helping other guys on their teams win.  Ever heard of George Hincapie?  Maybe about half of you have.  How about Lance Armstrong?  Is there anyone who hasn’t heard of Lance?  But Lance would not, no question WOULD NOT have won all his Tours without George.  George rode into the wind to block it for Lance, he led Lance up and down mountains.  On at least one occasion that I know of he gave Lance his bike.  And now that Lance has retired he does it for someone else. (Kim Kirchen currently placed 11th.)

A lot of people don’t like cycling because it’s “too slow.”  I’m not going to say they’re crazy (although they are) but to me the pace is the beauty of it.   They’re just ride along for hours but then all the sudden someone attacks and the whole face of the race changes.

Remember the Schleck brothers?  There’s another man on the Schleck’s team, team CSC, who has a chance of winning the Tour and when he attacked out of a group that had been riding relatively quietly together for more than four hours, at the base of the last climb the Schleck brothers, both of them, did what they could to hold off the others riders in their group so that Carlos Sastre, of Spain, could take the lead, both for the stage and for le Tour.  Again, there’s a life lesson in there.

And how about this year?  Who do we Americans root for?  Well, I hate to tell you but America’s great white hope, Christian VandeVelde, at more than 4 and a half minutes back, is out of contention for the Tour, for this year.  Which is another thing that fascinates me about cycling.  We spend three weeks watching these guys racing.  They’ll be on their bikes for more than 100 hours, and four minutes puts him out of the running? Crazy!

Follow Through July 21, 2008

I was supposed to go finish my visiting teaching yesterday (yeah, I know, it’s only the 21st.  What can I say?  I’m amazing.  And I will not mention that this will be my first month of VT this year.) but I didn’t end up going because Irish1 was acting something like this   Actually he wasn’t anywhere near that bad but I found that video on youtube and I thought it was really funny.  I also realized that there’s a lot of crap on youtube.  Not necessarily crap as in immoral, unholy stuff (although if the titles people are giving their videos are at all indicative of what they show then there’s a lot of that too.)  but crap as in why would you post a video of your child crying?  I can see a video of a really epic fit.  You know the one I’m talking about.  The fit that is so unbelievable, so out of proportion to the offense, real or imagined, that you get to the point that you just laugh at your child as he (or she) literally expends all his (or her) energy railing at the universe.  And then falls asleep where ever he (or she) landed.  But that’s not what I found as I searched for tantrums.  I found boring, run of the mill, the kids stopped crying as soon as they were handed their cup/doll/car stuff.  My kids do this on a daily if not hourly basis, this isn’t entertaining.  That would be like me blogging about what I had for breakfast on a daily basis.  Trust me you can only hear about so many bowls of Cheerios.

But back to my point.  I felt really badly about having to cancel but Irish1 really really needed a nap and even if he wasn’t going to do that (he did by the way) I wasn’t going to even try to take him into someone else’s home acting the way he was, and now I have guilt.

I was raised to do something I said that I would do.  I’m not good at excuses. I feel guilty calling in sick for work even when I literally can’t walk.  So to beg off of VT, especially when the appointments, the hard part, had been made, that was bad.

And the fact that I was composing a blog post about it in my head even as I was calling my companion… very bad.

Seriously, Go. July 20, 2008

I stumbled across this today and this guy’s blog won’t let me comment for some reason but I thought it was so fantastic that I wanted to share it with all of you.  Click here.

As I said I did just stumble across his blog today so I can’t unconditionally recommend it there may be a lot in there that is vile and awful but this post at least was really really good.

Edit-  I’ve had more time to check his blog out and if there’s anything in there that’s vile and awful I can’t find it.  I now feel ok about giving a full fledged thumbs up.

Motivated Slacking July 17, 2008

I work a lot of night shifts.

Often my coworkers, especially the new ones, ask me if I like working nights.

I do.  The pace a night is drastically different.  The smaller crew lends a more team like atmosphere.  I’ve had surgeons mop the floor for me at night, something that would never EVER happen during the day.  But if I’m honest, if I truly get down to the real reason that I like night shifts- it’s because there’s a chance, every so often if I’m really really lucky I won’t have to do anything at all.

Well, that’s not entirely accurate.  I’ll still have to do about an hour and a half worth of stuff but that’s not too bad for a twelve hour shift.   (Unless I work a weekend, weekend’s have the potential to be truly perfect.)

So having a twelve hour shift in which to do an hour and a half’s work you might think I would take it slow, pace myself.  You might think that I’d do some of my paper work in the first couple hours, maybe about midnight I’d head into the core and pull a little suture but then maybe I’d wait until three or four o’clock to do the instrumentation (I know you have no idea what I’m talking about but just go with me here.)

You’d be wrong.

I start a shift at seven o’clock and if all goes according to my own personal plan I’m done with everything I have to do by eight thirty.  I get to work, put my head down, and power through what I have to do as fast as I can.  On nights when we have cases to do it’s not unusual to find me doing bits of my paperwork in between them when most of my coworkers would be chatting. I’ll pull suture while I’m waiting for the anesthesiologist to talk to the parents instead of getting a little something to eat.  If I could make the cases themselves go faster I would, but I don’t have any control over that.  So I do what I can to get my stuff done at the same time.

Why the working like a maniac when it’s not necessary?  So that I can maximize my slacking time of course.  I want to get all my stuff done and I want to get it down as fast as I can so that I don’t have that hanging over my head while I surf the internet.  If my work is done I have no guilt if at two o’clock I’m a little tired and I take a small nap rest.  I’d never sleep as that’s not allowed.

If there’s work to be done, I’ll be honest I probably won’t volunteer.  But if tapped I’ll do it and do it without complaint, but I’m not going to take my time.  I’ll do it as efficiently as I possibly can.

I used to work as a checker at a big box super store (no, not that one) I was the fastest checker there (seriously, they kept track) I wasn’t the friendliest, if you wanted to chat about the barbeque you’re buying for you were in the wrong line, but if you want to get out of there, step right up.  And I had customers who noticed.  More than once I had people tell me that I was their favorite checker because I was fast.  I just hated seeing that big long line, it looked like work.  I wanted it gone.  So I did what I could to get it gone.

I do the same thing at home.  I get up in the morning and get as much done as I can as rapidly as I can so that I can read all afternoon.  My kids see me working so hard, and without complaint, and assume that I like doing it. (Sadly, I remember saying that to my mom.)  Oh, how wrong they are.  It’s just that I’ve learned that it doesn’t pay to put it off.  I’m the mom, if I don’t do it, no one’s going to.  But I’m not wasting my time, yet, I’ve got blogging to do.

The Night the Lights Went Out July 15, 2008

I’ve been listening to a different radio station in the car lately.  I think it’s more listener driven, at least that’s the line they’re selling, it may or may not be true.  What is true is that the mix of music is different from other stations of the same genre and I noticed that they play “The Night the Lights Went out In Georgia” a lot.

Naturally I had heard that song before, maybe I just hadn’t paid attention.  Let’s see if I got this right.

This girl takes it upon herself to shoot her cheating sister in law and the cheating SIL’s lover.  When the brother goes to confront his wife and her lover he finds his wife gone, because his sister somehow hid her body, and the lover dead.  He’s arrested and his sister who actually did the killing doesn’t step up in time to save her brother from being hanged.  And it’s the judge in the town who’s “got blood stains on his hands”?

I know it’s a classic and all that but does this seem wrong to anyone else?

Why I’m a Lame Mom July 14, 2008

Neither of the Irish twins have ever had their pictures professionally taken.  Oh, I just remembered that’s not true, Irish1 had his taken at the hospital when he was born.  We didn’t buy any.

I do not serve hotdogs, on their own, as a meal.  A stick of meat is not a meal.

My children know what amputation is by the age of 3.  “If that really hurts so badly that you have to keep crying about it I’ll bet I can take you to my hospital and have someone cut it off for you.”  It usually starts feeling better really soon thereafter.

I don’t give out band-aids unless I see blood.

We’ve never taken our kids on a real vacation.  We’ve visited the in-laws for a long weekend, that kind of thing, but we’ve never packed up and headed… anywhere.

I don’t even take them to get ice cream.  I just can’t bring myself to pay for three scoops what would buy a half gallon at the grocery store.

I make my kids, even the princess who’s 8, sit in carseats or boosters.  All. The. Time.

I don’t play video games.

I don’t allow sleepovers except with cousins.

I don’t change my mind, no matter how hard they whine.

I don’t read to them nearly as often as I should (read: Ever).

The “playroom” is now a playroom but the TV’s still unplugged.