Quick Takes Friday

So, here we are, another week, another Friday.  Another deadline, another miracle.  :)

1. Finished the paper, like I said I would, and have spent the last 24 hours doing things on my to-do list like it’s going out of style.  I’m proud of myself, doing some of the less-fun things like outside work, even though fall has re-arrived and it’s chilly.

2. Went to the library to get some movies to watch while my family is here next week.  This is the perfect time to go to the library!!  7:30pm on a week night…no one is there, it’s quiet, there are no other children to fight with in the play area.  It’s awesome.  We had a great time.  I love the library.

3. I need Christmas to come very soon so that I can give people their gifts and get this stuff out of my house.  Is that terrible?  Is that, like, completely lacking in charity and Christian thoughtfulness, that I’m most interested in giving the darn gifts already because I have them, they’re wrapped, and I’m tired of moving them from one place to another in my search for order and sanity in this house?

4.  Blew another 2 hours this morning going through the music on this computer and trying to sort it again.  Copying from iPods and other computers’ hard drives and CDs has mixed results.  Lots of what copied didn’t copy properly, and lots of other things copied with no file information, so I’m having to listen to each thing and label it, name it, categorize it….bah.

5.  Ultrasound yesterday!  That was actually really fun.  Joe got to come with, for the first time ever, and the tech spent a really long time with us.  I’ve never had an ultrasound last more than 10 minutes before, and this was a little less than an hour.  Baby was chillin’ somewhere amidst my liver and the woman couldn’t get a clear picture of the face…so she was trying all kinds of things to get some movement.  When he finally did roll into view, he covered his face with his hands.  Ha!  But overall, a pretty chill little thing in there…not at all like the frenetic guppy I had a couple years ago.

6. Did I mention that I’m ready for Christmas?

7.  I love the fact that I use Google Earth for school.  “What is this bluff they’re talking about?  Where on the river?  Why didn’t they cross lower?”  And I look on Google Earth, and I understand.

To sleep, perchance to have a drug trip

Seriously, these dreams are not even remotely normal any more.  For one thing, they’re continuous…all night, and then the early morning after I’ve just woken up.  I can control the dream then, for about ten minutes or so if I stay still and the house is quiet.  The “action” or plot of the dream freezes a little, but I can explore details or go look at things that I want to…like being in a museum exhibit of the dream I was having. And the dream content itself is…trippy.

But all that’s in the past.  It’s daytime!  And the paper is done…just finished it.  My resident Nitpick gets home at noon and he’s going to take a look, then I’m turning that sucker in and working on NO SCHOOL AT ALL for three weeks.  Then I start those two new classes.  I hope they’ll be fun.  I want to talk Nitpick into auditing one of them, because I think it would be fun to have him in discussion.  Something tells me they won’t let spouses take classes together.  Conflict of interest or something.

Other than that, not much going on.  I decided that, after like a year of staring at the unfinished project on my counter (how bad is that, is sits on the counter and I still don’t get it done) I was going to finish the Montessori binders last night.  So I did!  They are printed, copied, punched, bound, labeled, and on the shelf!!  I have two more to do, but they are both small and the instructor for the course hasn’t given us those materials so I’m not technically “done,” but I finished what was laying around my kitchen.  It’s a race to check off an item from the to-do list before I add another item.  (I lost.)

Somefink Wonderful

They’re quick takes, but the theme of my day is just so colored by #1, that it leaked over into the title.  Sorry.  You’ll recover.

1.  So, as of yesterday, our little family is officially school-debt FREE!    Yay!!  Not quite regular-debt free, there’s still some of that hanging around, but all of the dough shelled out for Christendom and its contribution to our lives is repaid in full to the grubby financial institutions to whom it was owed.  (Thanks, of course, to the Marine Corps’ hefty contribution, plus selling my car and teaching piano lessons.  Lol.  Totally worth every second.)

2.  When they say “Indian Summer” around here, they mean the industrial strength kind from the real India, in south Asia.  We’re talking about highs in the 80s several days in a row, despite continuous rain, and a yard full of plants that are utterly consufed by their surroundings.  Consufed.  Irises, pear trees, azaleas, and lilacs all going “Hey, spring!  Check out these flowers we made!”

3. Not wonderful, but slightly funny.  This morning I was putting out glue traps in the upstairs,just in case that brown stuff Joe found was mouse poop, and the noise I heard in the attic really was mice and not the Biggest Roach On Earth. 

I do. Really I do.

4. Making cookie dough to freeze today, as part of my plan to “use all the stuff in the cabinets” by secretly just re-purposing it into something fattening that either has to be kept frozen or eaten right away.  The bonus is cookies, but the downside is a freezer that seems to stay full no matter how seldom I go to the grocery store.

5. Speaking of grocery store, one of the [embarrassingly] cheap thrills I get out of Joe being deployed, or in the field, or on duty, or anyplace else he tends to be, is the fun of seeing how long I can go between trips to the grocery story.  My deployment record (not counting bananas and milk, which don’t exactly have a shelf life) was nine weeks.  I’m almost to three weeks now (again, not counting milk which I bought yesterday).  I love it.

6. My son said “Thank You” to me this morning, quite clearly and without any solicitation.  There is hope.

7. Four pages and counting into this final paper, and I’m just typing out quotes so far.  I haven’t gotten to nerve to go back and find out what the assigned length is for this thing…I almost don’t want to know.  If it’s short, I have to pare down the amount of [stuff] I’ve got by A LOT.  If it’s long, I have to say something intelligent in between all these quotes.  What’s a girl to do?  Like any self-respecting student, the first thing I did this morning when I hit a snag was to register for two more classes.  Never do today what you can register for next semester.

Wordpress says Howdy

When I’m logged in on Virtuouspla.net, wordpress tells me “Howdy.”  That’s funny.

So yes, I’m up again over on the site if you want to hear me whine about how people with families (not just large ones!) get raked over the poo just for, uh, having a family.

Last night, it was an irate friend.  “Does your husband ever hug you in uniform???”  Yes.  “Well, I just got told that I was headed down a seriously short career path if I wanted to be so gravely unprofessional in front of my Marines as to hug my wife.”  Meh.  Welcome to the club.

A couple weeks ago, we had a conversation about all the good reasons why we deserved to know when and where we were moving.  Unfortunately, all our good reasons revolve around being pregnant, difficulty of traveling with a child in winter, how switching from base housing to BAH means eating an entire month’s worth of rent and it’d be great to move at the beginning or end of the month and not the middle, or about scheduling a move before (or after) flu season when staying in hotels and being in restaurants doesn’t end up automatically mean spending a week with Cousin Vicks and the Kleenex Band.

But those are dumb reasons.  Unprofessional.  Silly.  So bad, we don’t even bring them up to our [ostensibly rational] chain of command.  We’d get laughed out of the room.  Dumb world.

Foto Friday

Why not?  I’m just sitting here otherwise…putting off working on the quilt.  And the dishes.  Besides, it isn’t lunchtime yet but I’m getting hungry, so it’s either sit here or go forage and be sorry for it later.

A momentous day for our “new” car. Where does the time go?  Where do the miles come from?

 

At the horse stables…where cats are more interesting than horses.

 

Daddy’s first time on a horse (he did great!).

 

Baby playing with car, courtesy of V.  (No, he doesn’t really get the concept.  When Joe asks “Where is the baby?” his hip, stomach, behind, or whatever other portion of Joe’s body looks likely will get pointed at.  When I ask, he usually points to my stomach, but sometimes…other places.  Lol.)

The Sad Truth

Sometimes, I’m sorry to say it, I just don’t get anything done when my husband is around.  We spend so much time….I don’t know, living?  That nothing else gets done. 

High school band competition?  Check.

Fully awesome Jewish acapella group?  Total check.  (Go watch the video, then come back.)

Christmas books out for practicing?  Check.

Dishes done?  Ha.

Schoolwork finished?  Please.

Blog updated?  Don’t make me laugh.

Soooo, here we are this morning doing all those things that don’t get done when Daddy is around.  The school is caught up (and ahead!), the laundry is done, the dishes are…getting there.  And here I am, bloggy blogging about nothing at all.  Really, the whole aim this morning was to link to that video, which is (again) fully awesome.  You have to watch to the end, too, because the last 5 seconds are really funny, if you know philosophy.

Tonight my man child and I are heading to the local homecoming football game.  Because I am not the only one out there that really loves high school football, right?  Of course right.  After all, I spent 7 hours on Saturday sitting in the bleachers watching a high school band competition, so why wouldn’t I drag the toddler to a football game tonight?  He likes balls, he likes the music, and there is seriously nothing else to do around here.  Peace.