Lace, dimnity, and Unbounded Domesticity

If cats' accidents are TMI for you, then read no more.

You've been warned.

Got home late Sunday night, after a grand and glorious tour of the mid-Atlantic and Pennsylvania heartlands. Good times, nice visits, etc etc etc. Here at home, I've been struggling (and suceeding) to stay off the computer and accomplish things. So far so good, with the downstairs of the house almost completely conquered and the attic well on its way. As a matter of fact, I was so enegerized that I decided to open up the baby's closet and clear out all my stuff that doesn't belong in there.

Working, progressing, working, progressing, until the little cat jumps on the desk and knocks over the little Christmas candle decoration that I'd set up there. *Crash* [say the cymbal] and there's little bits of glass on my desk and in the floor 'round about. So, I think, "Hey, let's go ahead and strip the bed/shake out the comforter and just vacuum the whole room. It needs it." So I get my shoes, the vacuum, and come back to tackle this worthwhile project. Unfortunately, while stripping the bed down I came upon a progressively more distinct odor of kitty, um, well, "pee pee." Yuk. When I got through the brown/green sheets to the white matress pad, the distinct color of kitty, um, well, "pee pee" was also unmistakable.

Yuk.

My memory wafted back to Monday morning, when my catsitter told me about "finding the little cat locked in the baby's room! Wonder how long she'd been in there? Silly thing." [Be it known: I am not angry at the cat. I knew before I left that she has the ability/habit of locking herself in rooms by accident, and I didn't make sure that the door was propped open. It's my fault. She was considerate, too, in not going in the crib or on the carpet, both of which would have been much more permanent problems to have to deal with. And more expensive.]

So, into the washer with bleach goes the [stinky] mattress pad. Into the garbage goes the unsalvageable [stinky] foam mattress-make-feel-nicer thingy. Out comes the adjustable wrench, and into the garage goes the ruined-but-already-falling-apart box [stinky] spring/mattress itself, and into the shed go the rails, headboard, and footboard. I've been wanting to rid myself of the wretched bed anyhow (didn't go together properly due to long use and mis-sized bolts) and this was my chance.

Out came the vacuum, into it went the glass, the dust, the fur, the paper shreddings, and the dirt. Onto the computer goes I, to take a break. Now the sheets and comforter are calling my name, but I don't have any color safe bleach yet. Curtain.

Choreographed Mayhem

So, day three at Family North headquarters. Lots of people in the house, lots of noise being made by the people in the house. Dog, three babies, brothers, silly string, dinner. It's been intense, so intense that the baby had to be taken out of the house for a ride in the car in order for him to get to sleep. Waaaay too overstimulated otherwise.

File Under "Other"

Found this great video linked on Meredith's blog. The next generation of filmmaking at Christendom (no offense to the Handycams and Cybershots of my class and before) is just, well, amazing. And funny. :) Too bad the billions aren't in hand to make full-length features.

Also, we've reached new lows in the world of sports. As a cranky mommy who doesn't even want her kid to play football until he's fifteen or sixteen, this is just silly.

Bought a book from The Strand today, in honor of big brother. Hope it comes on time.

Finally, don't get creeped out by all this. Only 16 hours (give or take a day, darn embark schedule) before my spouse is supposed to be free to come home. So I'm killing time. Really killing it. It's infuriating for him to be that close and yet still not close enough.

Brave Chicas Club: The Rules

So, another insane young woman who has decided to tether her horse to the military wagon called me yesterday. Not only does she love and cherish her spouse, she's willing to move cross-country with him while eight months pregnant. She wants to know "did I like the doctor that delivered my baby?" I did. The photo is not related to that fact. (Partially because the doctor pictured is, in fact, a dentist. A dentist did not deliver my baby.)

The photo goes with the insane young woman who emailed me last week. She wants to know "if I have any advice for getting married right after graduation and going straight into the Marines?"

So, this is for her. I present: The Rules

#1: Always have a sense of humor. See photo.

#2: Never fall in love with the plan.

#3: When you have fallen in love with the plan after all, retain a sense of humor when it screws you over.

#4: Assume your husband forgot it, didn't know about it, or failed to make a copy of it.

#5: Don't buy any furniture that you can't move alone (even while pregnant).

#6: Oh heck, don't buy any furniture at all.

#7: Make many accquaintances within the unit--if they don't become your BFsF, that's fine.

#8: Thank God for the random person with whom you did happen to become good friends.

#9: Learn everything you can about your husband's job (even if this is very little because he's doing Secret Squirrel Stuff).

#10: Learn how the military system works on your own (i.e. without spousal aid), including the acronyms, the bureacracy, the benefits, the drawbacks, the free stuff, the complementary programs, and how to correctly spell bureaucracy.

Stay tuned for details on each rule. And more dentist photos, if I can find them.

Apropos, perhaps.

The final paragraph of my Christmas present and new favorite book:

"Americans are proficient at war the same way they are proficient at work. It is a task, sometimes a duty. Americans have worked at war since the seventeenth centuery, to protect themselves from the Indians, to win their independence from George III, to make themselves one country, to win the whole of their continent, to extinguish autocracy and dictatorship in the world outside. It is not their favoured form of work. Left to themselves, Americans build, cultivate, bridge, dam, canalise, invent, teach, manufacture, think, write, lock themselves in struggle with the eternal challenges that man has chosen to control, and with an intensity not known elsewhere on the globe. Bidden to make war their work, Americans shoulder the burden with intimidating purpose. There is, I have said, an American mystery, the nature of which I only begin to perceive. If I were obliged to define it, I would say it is the ethos--masculine, pervasive, unrelenting--of work as an end in itself. War is a form of work, and American makes war, however reluctantly, however unwillingly, in a particularly workmanlike way. I do not love war; but I love America."

--John Keegan, Fields of Battle

Deeply Saddened

Perhaps it's no excuse, but "real life" got in my way this past month (that is, husbands coming and going, babies growing and changing, moving, traveling, cancer in the family, etc etc etc) and I freely admit that I didn't really vet Scott Brown for my own personal information. I knew he was campaigning against a woman Democrat, a woman Democrat who has readily and easily behaved as instructed by the political powers-that-be in her party, and that Scott Brown was campaigning strongly against the health industry takeover being orchestrated by the Democrat-controlled Congress.

I did not know, point blank, that he was not pro-life.

I did not know until after the election was over, and I now feel like I was cheated by the man. At the very least, the mainstream coverage of him was not so complete as to mention his stance on abortion. The wiser among you would rightly respond, "He's a Massachussets Republican. What do you expect?" One does not make headway in the bluest of blue states by touting conservative social opinions. I should have known. Still, I feel cheated. Here was a "good man" who was setting an example of clean living and honest campaigning--he defeated the bad guys and stood in the way of millions of babies being killed on the American taxpayers' dime.

He just doesn't stand enough in the way. He's standing alongside the train tracks, throwing rocks at the train wreck that is our social amorality run amok. He ought to be standing on the tracks, letting the machine know that more innocent children will be slaughtered in this country over his dead body. That's where we all ought to be. Last week, several hundred thousand of you were out there on the tracks, marching down the National Mall. Kudos, but you can't write laws, and you can't change the ones that are written. Bigger men must collaborate to change the status quo in the country. Why do all of our big men have small hearts?

But back to Brown. Was a vistory won? Or are we teaching American politicians that "good enough" is, well, good enough? It isn't. Thinking abortion shouldn't be paid for with tax dollars is NOT good enough. (They already are paid for, by all kinds of back-alley government social projects, but let's not go there right now.) My own baby means everything to me--I made Joseph promise when we went to the hospital that if it came down to me or baby, well, the answer was "baby." When I look at my baby, when I see his face twist in fear at a bad dream or hear his anguished cry at finding himself alone, I cannot feel in my heart that any politician in office who supports abortion is a politician who shouldn't be there. No pro-abortion "victory" is ever a victory. Babies are dying. Abortion is frightening to them--they are terrified, aware of what is happening, and they are terrified. Such a horrible thought...my little baby's cry at a bad dream (a cry which usually dissolves into hysterical laughter, thank goodness--I have a versatile little dreamer) breaks my heart. How can knowing that hundreds of thousands of babies' cries go not only unheeded, but are actively caused by the decisions of their mothers and the behavior of their doctors, not break my heart as well?

It does break my heart. But it doesn't help me answer in my own soul what to do in cases like that in Massachussets last month. Was stopping healthcare takeover worth it? I understand fully the prinicple of double effect, and the discussions like Judie's at ALL are not opaque to me. But I'm still uneasy. I probably would have voted for him, because I truly feel that the prevention of large-scale evil is a good thing. And I certainly did not will the evil of his pro-abortion opinion. But would it have been right?

Sigh. What a sick world. I want to enjoy my life, my child, and my country in peace. No such luck.

Hame agin.

Only one cat had a bathroom episode on this trip--appropriately enough, just as we got in the door of the house. So we cleaned the cat, the carrier, and the kitchen floor.

More later. Sigh.