A Mug Full of Goldfish

What a bummer.  I dropped and cracked my favorite tea cup. I got it from my sister and nieces I don't know how many years ago.  It's one of those fun hand-painted things with my name on it and on the inside it says Auntie Sister Friend.  This was before I added "Mom" to the resume.  I used it almost exclusively for work, drinking tea out of it every morning.  But now that it's cracked, I'm afraid the tea would leak.

So instead of a tea cup, it is now a goldfish cup.

Throwback Thursday February 25th 2016

 

 

 

This is a picture my Dad took of me and my sisters at my graduation from Humboldt State University in 1999.  I graduated literally a month after our mom died.  Even though my sisters and I were more or less estranged at that time (our teen years were VERY tumultuous), they came to see me graduate from college, my greatest accomplishment at that point.  From that time onward, we were a bit closer and kinder to each other.     

 

 

Side notes about this picture: My hair was growing out the black dye I'd been using all through college (oh so goth).  Sister on the right is severely asthmatic and was taking buckets of prednisone which made her puffy and not super-willing to pose for photos in general, so this one is special. Sister on the left's shirt was how I was able to find my family in the audience.  I told her it was like playing Where's Waldo.  The shirt was not premeditated, but coincidental.

My Kingdom For A Stylist

My kid has a lot of hair.  He had a lot of hair when he was born.  He wasn't the hairiest kid ever, but I'd say in the 90th percentile for hair growth for a kid his age.  And this should surprise no one, given the fact that my husband and I have more hair than the average couple.  How much?  I have to snip the hairballs out of the beater bar of our vacuum cleaner every month.  In spite of a hair catch in our shower, we have to snake the drain every six months.  Gross?  A little.  But it's our lot in life until we go bald.

I didn't actually start writing this with the intention of mentioning my hairy drains. I was thinking of my little boy's mop and how I'm completely unqualified to cut his hair.  I started cutting it when it looked like this.

He is about 10 months old in this picture.  I loved his long hair and resisted cutting it as long as I could. I tried barrettes (they wouldn't stay in).  I tried sweeping it to the side, but it wouldn't stay. I finally cut his bangs because they were hanging in his face and he would use his little fists to scrub it out of his eyes.  It seemed to really bother him.

I started with his bangs. After I cut the first few locks, I cried and gave up. Not that he noticed.

Short in front, long on the sides, party in the back.  *sigh* But I didn't give him.  Sometimes he'd sit still for a few minutes and I'd trim a few more locks.  I'd get the sides, the back, it was ALWAYS uneven, but I maintained it over the course of a year.  If I could keep it looking more like this, I'd be happy.

But I can't.  It's starting to get long and shaggy again.  As his toddlery motor skills increase, he becomes more agile and likely to duck my scissors.  Not that I have actual hair-cutting scissors. That's my other problem. I'm using cheap, dull scissors for this.  Shame on me.  At this point I have two choices: keep going and continue to subject my son to terrible haircuts until I improve, or bite the bullet and take him to a real stylist at the risk of him not liking it at all and having a public melt-down (introvert-mommy's worst nightmare).  In the meantime, I still think he looks like a gorgeous baby-model, no matter what his hair looks like.  Check out his Blue Steel look.

Yup. Really, really, ridiculously good-looking.

That Happened. For Real.

I took a couple days off work to be a volunteer for Mythbusters. Best use of PTO ever. I'm not sure the numbering sequence is right. Wikipedia lists the episode as 242, but we can call it 2016 episode six, The Volunteer Special.

Recognize me?  I'm the one in the black shirt with the long hair.

I really can't spot myself anywhere else in the episode.  To be fair, there were about a hundred of us. You can see my friend Amber all over the place. She's highly visible.  Here she is.

Clearly, she knows what she's doing when it comes to make-up.

Anyway.  I had a great time not going to work, dressing up as grossly as I could, and making the growliest noises I could summon from my larynx.

Oh, I was also a non-zombie shopper. Again, I couldn't find myself in the episode, so I'll post a selfie during one of our many hurry-up-and-wait breaks in the store itself.

It's a SHELFIE. Get it?  Yeah. Sorry.

Yelp. An Exquisite Torture.

Like many consumers, when I have a bad customer service experience, often my only real solace lies in knowing I can Yelp them back to the stone age. 

This opportunity does not arise much anymore since I had my son. It isn't that I'm afraid to take the boy into public places. He's generally easy-going and I usually have all the tools to prevent him from getting too dirty, hungry, tired, or bored, in short, everything I need to ward off a tantrum. 

No, I am unable to eat at restaurants because I am broke.  That's it. I have no money. I don't even remember the last time we went to a restaurant. Wait, I do. It was the IHOP on Thanksgiving Day. We went to Sacramento to visit the relatives, and had to eat on the road. We spent somewhere around $30 including tip.  In general, we simply don't have that kind of discretionary income to spend on pancakes.

Now, I read Yelp reviews like it's food porn. My god, if I just had $100.00 to spare, I could eat like a king at Mobo Sushi.  While I cry into my fried rice.  By the way, I fried it myself.   The tears made it extra salty.

So Long, Showboaters.

I'm going on a much-needed Facebook break.  I'm not going to do anything to my account, I'm simply not going to check it or use it for a while. 

Here is my list of reasons:

1. I'm so sick of the show-boaters posting pictures of their lives with things like, "My hubby is so wonderful!" and "Our vacation to Italy!" I know it's a jealously thing. My life is crumbling in so many ways, and I watch all these other people with all this money and free time.  It isn't as though I'm incapable of being happy for others, but I'm going through a really hard time, and watching other people's dreams come true is not necessarily inspiring to me. I have the right and the ability to point the proverbial remote control, and turn them off.

2. Simply, I waste entirely too much time clicking around, looking at pictures, memes, and articles. I've really got to stop procrastinating, and get to work.  I have so many other things I have to do in addition to my job. For example: Take my car in for maintenance, schedule speech therapy for my kid, pay more attention to the cats, clean the kitchen, plan meals, do the laundry, get my teeth cleaned, buy valentine's cards for my kid's daycare, bake scones, learn Portuguese, file my taxes, organize paperwork, shred old documents, update this blog...so many things.

3. I've actually limited the number of people who can see my FB posts to about 30 people. That's 30 out of the 200 "friends" I've accumulated over the last 10 years. I've filtered out co-workers, and filtered out relatives, and filtered out friends who have political views that make my skin crawl. I haven't unfriended anyone because I'm tragically passive-aggressive. I hunker down and hope they just unfriend me eventually.

4. When I think about it, I don't have to use FB to contact my friends.  One of my favorite things on FB is a page run by my cousin and her cohorts called Frock Flicks. I managed to get through my post-partum ugly-crying milk-pumping sessions at work by listening to their podcasts.  It's one of the main reasons I log in in the morning. Well, you know, they have their OWN SITE (http://www.frockflicks.com/).  I don't actually have to use FB if I don't want to. 

5. Hey, I still have Twitter. There's something comforting about the fact that most of my followers on Twitter don't know who I am. We've never met. We will never meet. That's okay. The majority of my friends and relatives don't even know I have a Twitter account, and the ones that do? I don't think they really even see it. Twitter is a fun release for me. I can send my aggression and disappointment out into the ether 143 characters at a time. 

So, goodbye for now, FB. I don't know for how long. I'm sure there will be withdrawals for the first week, but I'll have Twitter and Instagram as patches. 

This Guy

Of course, I'm completely biased because he's my kid. But I can't help thinking he's the most photogenic person I've ever met.

Here we are in line at Trader Joe's in Santa Cruz.

He is so great about going to grocery stores. He sits in the cart, hums to himself, and watches the endless supply of weird, loud, Santa Cruz citizens. 

That's my laid-back, go-with-the-flow boy.

4 a.m. Party At My House!

At some point during the night, my one-year-old wakes up and begins to cry. I make my way down the ladder of our loft bed to his crib. I retrieve him, soothe him, maybe change a diaper, and try to get him back to sleep and into his crib.  That last part only happens if I'm not totally dead-to-the-world tired. More often than not, after the diaper-change, I cuddle up with him on the couch, and we spend the remainder of the night there.

Last night was just such a night.  2 a.m. wake-up call, cuddling on the couch, and back to sleep.  4 a.m. I feel his little toddler hands banging against my back.  Wham wham wham. He's sitting up and pushing me. I roll over and see his happy little face, eyes wide and smiling. What. The. Hell.  He starts wriggling around on the couch, looking out the window. Of course the neighbors have their back porch light on, and he's staring at it.

I do the only thing I can think of (as my brain is not especially active at this point), gather him into my arms and start rocking him and humming the alphabet (song lyrics are beyond my ability at 4 a.m.). He's not fighting me, but he's not gong back to sleep either. Crap. More rocking. More humming. Eventually 5 a.m. rolls around and he drops off again. I've got one more hour before I need to get up and get ready for work. 

At least he can stay crashed out on the couch while I shower and get everything ready for the day. I've become a pro at changing his clothes while he sleeps and he can sleep in the car on the 45 minute drive to daycare.  It's like lugging a cute sack of potatoes around.

I, however, am a zombie.

I'm not ignoring you. I'm ignoring life.

I stopped posting because some things in my life went all sideways.  I really didn't want to talk about them in an open forum (I still don't), and I couldn't think about anything ELSE, so I simply abandoned the blog. 

I don't mean to be cryptic. I just believe that I have the right to keep some things to myself until a time when I'm ready to discuss them.

That said, I guess I feel an obligation not to shut down completely, and to try to take joy in the aspects in my life that I can still rely on. 

One thing that makes me smile twice a day is when I drop off and pick up my boy from daycare.  He is currently in the care of a wonderful lady, "Maria," who runs a small licensed daycare out of her home. She and her husband are from Portugal. She plays with the kids, feeds them her own home-cooked food, and is playful, but at the same time, doesn't suffer fools.  She's the boss.  I adore her.  Occasionally, I hear her speaking in Portuguese to her husband or one of her sons.  I thought it sounded pretty, so I went out and bought:

Have you ever listened to these?  They're kind of hilarious.  Side note: When I first tried to buy this from Amazon, they sent me the wrong discs. I didn't know it because the packaging was correct, the discs were even labeled correctly, but when I popped them into the player in my car?  RUSSIAN.  They were clearly speaking Russian.  It took me a full five minutes of doubting my own ears to realize it.  Anyway, returned them, got the right ones a few days later.  No foul.

So, on my long commute to and from work, the boy and I have been listening to conversational, touristy Portuguese. My pronunciation is atrocious. Maria LOVES that I'm learning it and quizzes me every time I come over.  I think she favors me because S is one of her only full-time charges.  Also, I bring her avocados.  Hey, I'll take any favoritism I can get, and build goodwill whenever I can.