The Average Blogger

Bright, Sunshiny Day

It was a gorgeous weekend here.  The sun was out, we were out, the neighbors were out -- we even opened the windows.

The Young Prince was booted outdoors Sunday morning -- and he found the neighbor kids out in their yard and we didn't hear from him again for four hours.  Given that this is the TV-addicted cave dweller with nigh-translucent skin, this is an event of some magnitude. 

I raked out all my small flower beds and I'm ready to just throw stuff in them and see what sticks.  I'm about to take on the big flowerbed out front and plant a bunch of low-maintenance day lilies and daisies and whatever else I can find that will be bushy and colorful and cut down on the grass that grew up through the whole bed last year.  I'm ready to dedicate some of the back of that bed to watermelons and pumpkins and other vines.

In other words, I'm ready for spring. 

I love spring, because it means I have a chance to do it right again.  To not let the grass and weeds take over the flowers. To rake all the leaves and not leave them to rot.  To get all the brush piles turned into mulch. 

There's a better chance of some of that happening this year because I'm better prepared and paying a little more attention.  And because we lost so many trees we'll be up to our ears in mulch as soon as we hire someone to come out and do all that work.

Of course, there's also a very good chance I will get busy, or tired, or lazy. Maybe I will post here about the stuff I'm doing, and like the skin care experiments, that will help to keep me on track with the work.

Fortunately, it is supposed to start storming on Thursday and persist through the weekend.  I'm sure that will cure me of this wretched optimism and good humor.

Meanwhile, a number of other projects are getting wrapped up around here. Crown molding around the built-in bookshelves. Automatic outdoor lights -- that match -- on the front, back and side of the house. New lamps for the bedroom, which means good reading lamps for the guest room. It's a small-scale renovation bonanza!

And now I'm heading off to work to pay for it all. Tralala.

Things I Like, Things I Don't.

So, the great experiment is over.  Not Your Average Blogger has packed it in and gone back to his day job.

Well, not back, exactly.  He's back at the same company -- our company -- but he's got a new position. One with no daily deadlines and less stress and less money and hopefully more flexibility and more fun.

I'm glad, I guess. Maybe? I'm glad he is doing what he wants. I'm glad he isn't stressing out about every second of his day, like he was at home. (Let this be a lesson kiddies: Success does not breed confidence in the gambling profession.) I'm glad the income is steady and predictable and I can plan ahead somewhat with it.

So far, the only stress I've heard anything about has been mine, what with his wanting to share a parking space and my being back on the "fight traffic to be home before day care closes" bus, and losing my chance to spend more hours in the office so that the people who work for me recognize me on sight, rather than by my email address. 

He's been very nice about putting up with me, and he hasn't said a word about what is up in his world. 

In other news, I charted my soda intake last week.  I am apparently not bad if I am at home, and atrocious if I get sloppy and find my lunch en route to the office.  My worst day was 44 ounces. My best day was 12 ounces.  So the first step is to find something else to drink when I am lazy about my habits. The second step is to just straight-up stop being lazy and start eating at home before I leave or taking stuff I can eat when I get to work.  Finally, dwindling from 12 ounces to 0 at home.  I expect that last bit will take a week.

It isn't a glamorous addiction.  There are no rehab centers. (Unless you count fat farms. Which I am intrigued by. How do those work? And do the habits persist when you're back in your own house and your husband is snarfing down Cheetos while your son is single-mouthedly keeping peanut butter farmers in business?) On the plus side, there aren't any serious hangovers or withdrawal effects after that first blood sugar headache from hell. So, here goes nothing.

In other other news, my skin care stuff is ... going. I think some of the sun damage is going away, but I can't swear whether that's just twice-a-day scrubbing or actual ointment and unguent effect. Things I know:

This doesn't work. Like, AT ALL.
This doesn't seem to do very much, though it smells nice.
This hurts your eyes when you sweat.
I am on day 8 of this. I will keep you posted.

The only other thing I have to report is that while Netflix online has many, many fine qualities, the lack of subtitles seriously annoys me. And while I hear the 10-second interval fast-forward/rewind button is an innovation, it never stops where I want and is also completely farking annoying.  Take a memo, Netflix.  Fix these.

Plan ahea....d.

Things I want before the next snowstorm (which will be Tuesday, apparently):

-- a snowblower

-- a drying rack for sopping wet snowy clothes.

-- snow boots

-- a snowblower

-- a generator

-- a snowblower

-- Waterproof pants, jackets, gloves, etc.

-- an extra snowshovel. Or a snowblower. 

Full coverage tomorrow.

Gratitude

Things I love:

I love that my dad e-mails me several times a week just to gab, and tell me what he's working on, and share a virtual eye-roll at all the world's goings-on.

I love that I can call my mom at 10 at night and freak the hell out that our sump pump is busted and holy crap our house is going to float away and it will be $10,000 to fix it -- and that she can laugh, talk me off the ledge, troubleshoot and tell me how to keep the house on its foundation til the repair guy shows up, all inside of 10 minutes. 

(I also love that I can call my works-for-a-plumber neighbor at 7:45 a.m., sick as a dog, explain the situation to her and have her tell me, "Go to bed. The guys will let themselves in.")

I love that my husband is doing exactly what he wants to, and he's doing it better than anyone could have predicted. I love that he is happy. I love that he's letting me slack off and play hooky and go to the gym, and we are all more relaxed and taking deeper breaths.

I love that my kid is doing well in school. After weeks and months of frustration and aggravation and far less than optimal performance, we seem to have hit on a system that motivates the kid without offending us and without eating up all the teacher's time. 

I love that I've got time and inclination now to look around at some of those "someday" projects and start them today. 

I even discovered that being sick is nice when it's all three of us together flaked out in the big bed stoned on cold meds.

We're a blessed and lucky bunch, y'all. 

Now It Can Be Told

So, NYAB is quitting his job.

Yes, in this economy.

Yes, with no new job, per se, lined up.

Instead, he is going to stay home, be a part-time house-husband and spend his daylight hours trying his hand in the financial markets.  He's made several test runs and done quite well -- I'll admit, better than I was anticipating.  I'm not sure what he was anticipating, but it looks really, really good.

And so does he.  He hasn't even left the old job yet -- he gave a month's notice, so he's out the Friday before MLK Day -- but he already looks and sounds better than he has in a while.  

He is looking forward to being home more, ditching 4 hours of commuting, being his own boss and not having to Deal With the Goddamn Customers.

I am looking forward to having someone around to let in plumbers and exterminators without me having to stay home, to weekends freed up from chores and errands, to family dinners and to slightly more relaxing 2-hour commutes where I don't have self-imposed stress to show up sort of close to on time on one end and Social Services-imposed stress to show up ABSOLUTELY on time on the other.

The Young Prince is looking forward to seeing more of us and ditching the after-school care. Unlike me, I think he is not looking forward to more home-cooked meals and dinner-table debates and interrogations.

It will be interesting to see what comes of this.  I asked NYAB if he will start every day reciting Alan Shepard's prayer, but he just laughed at me.  

Wish us luck!

Chomp

The Young Prince has his first loose tooth.  At least, he says it is loose. I can't really tell by watching him wiggle it or trying to move it myself, but I will take his word for it.

I don't remember when I lost my first tooth -- whether it was kindergarten or first grade. It seems like I've been waiting a long time for his teeth to start falling out, but maybe that's because I'm more used to dogs, who get that noise over with early?

Meanwhile, the old folks have been enjoying their own dental sagas.  Not Your Average Blogger has, to my mind, a horrible mouthful of bones. Just in the last round of visits he's had two crowns, plus a filling replaced.

Me? Never had so much as a cavity.  I've had dentists call me boring, tell me to go 2 years between checkups, etc. I had a horrible run-in with the administration at our last dentist -- four years ago -- when they wouldn't schedule me for a checkup and a cleaning on the same day, then lost my appointment when I went back TWO MONTHS LATER for the scheduled cleaning.

(WTF is it with dentists and cleanings? I can get in for X-rays with a day's notice, but I called for a cleaning the day before Halloween and they scheduled me after MLK Day. And I'm not even slightly exaggerating; I'm dead serious. Can't they invest in a few more hoses and scrubbers? It's absurd. And they never, EVER let me schedule a cleaning and a checkup the same day, which I find incredibly annoying. The last time I tried, the woman explained it is because they don't know "What kind of cleaning" patients might need -- if it's a 10-minute job or an hour. I say, schedule the hour and if it takes 10 minutes, call in some other poor sucker who's currently scheduled for next July 4. But ... whatever.)

Anyway, with all this tooth awareness in the air, I gradually become aware that something might be wrong with one of mine.  It kind of hurts when I bite down on the right side. Not a lot -- not even enough for me to pinpoint which tooth. Huh.  I look, but don't see anything.  And I figure, OK, my card is up, I suppose it's time for me to join the ranks of the drilled and filled.

So in I go. The assistant spends what seems like hours taking a jillion tiny little X-rays of chunks of my mouth. The dentist comes in and pokes around, and even manages to isolate which tooth hurts. "You probably have a cracked tooth and need a crown," he says. Hey, that's a term I recognize from NYAB's exploits. Then he looks some more and says, "But I don't see anything, so I'm not going to do any work." Um, OK? I guess I'll wait til it REALLY hurts?

Then he looks at my X-rays and jams some more fingers in my mouth and starts poking at things on the other side. "Does this hurt? This?" No, no, no. Nothing hurts on that side, are you trying to make that not be the case? Then he takes this flash-frozen Q-Tip and is all, "Can you feel that? That? That?" No, no, yes! No. Dude looks at me and says, without a trace of alarm or anything else, "Well, I have some concerns about this X-ray. All your teeth on that side might be dead."

!?!?!!?

He touches that damn Q-Tip to practically every tooth in my mouth, including the one that stung the first time, and I don't feel anything on any of them. Soooo ... ALL my teeth are dead?? 

He tells me to see an oral surgeon because he sees a weird dark mass on one of the 600 teeny X-rays the first woman took. And his parting salutation is, "And, you know, it's only one in a million that it's cancer."

I'm one foot out the door and that's the first time he tosses the C-word at me. Jayzez!

Fast forward to a week later, when the oral surgeon takes a panoramic X-ray, says, "It's an artifact. The bone is a bit denser on this side, so it looks darker. If people would stop taking these dinky little X-rays no one ever would have ...." and he trails off, so I finish with, "Scared the living hell out of me?"  He laughs and says, "Well, I was going to go with 'would have made that mistake,' but that sounded bad so I was amending to 'made that assumption'. But yeah, yours works."

Maybe it is good I won't get the cleaning until January. It may take me that long to work up my faith in the system.

Maybe I Should Sing Musetta's Waltz While I'm At It

I'm counting on my exceptionally healthy genes to see me through -- again.

Saturday the kid seemed to be running a fever, but insisted he felt fine and wasn't sick.  He was coughing a bit but off he and NYAB went to run errands.  They got home and he looked a bit more peaked, so we dosed him with fever-reducer/pain reliever and though he spent the evening looking stoned he never did act Outright Sick.  By Sunday he was fine.

So today, NYAB is sick again. He was sick for two days two weeks back and then took another couple days to mend, and he seemed all back to health. But today he started looking dreadful around lunchtime and then he got home tonight right as the kid and I were leaving for Cub Scouts and shuffled right upstairs to bed.

An hour and a half later we got home, watched an episode of Dr. Who ((the kid is a fan now of the New Series, go figure, and he watched 5 or 6 without me this weekend in the obscenely early pre-noon hours. But I made him wait til I could watch the first Dalek episode with him, and man you should have seen his face!) and I sent him upstairs too and got him all snugged down in bed. I come back downstairs and I'm just settling in for a nice night under the laptop when I hear odd noises.  I go back to the stairs and realize what I'm hearing are resonant echoes of the TB ward upstairs.  NYAB coughs, the YP coughs, the echo bounces down the stairs, they start all over again. 

I dosed them both with cough medicine, washed my hands in borax and am hiding downstairs wearing a gas mask and a veil.  I do hope I'm not contagious. The dentist will be most displeased at my appointment tomorrow!

All of Life's Riddles

Before I start, Not Your Average Blogger's travel photos are up over at Flickr.  Go take a look.

The YP has shown a couple of particular talents from an early age.  He is a total media junkie, and he has a fantastic ear for music. Since he was 2, I think he's been able to hear a song once and then sing it on key with all the correct lyrics for hours.  He sings TV theme songs. We can't walk through Borders these days without him singing the theme from Mad Men. He has a great memory for dialog and will quote movies and commercial slogans ad nauseam.

I think I've written in the past about how these proclivities color his paradigm. The toys he loves best are action figures from movies. All his Halloween costumes since he's been able to pick them out have been movie or cartoon characters. (This year? He's a Ghostbuster. I think he has determined he is Bill Murray and NYAB will be Harold Ramis. Possibly something to do with the glasses.) 

One of the tasks his first-grade teacher assigns each day is for the kids to "draw and write about something that really happened to you."  When we saw his booklet, I cracked up, because the entries were basically, "This is me watching Star Wars." "This is me watching Back to the Future." "This is me at the theater watching Toy Story 1 and 2 in 3-D."  "This is me playing with my Dark Knight toys."  "This is me playing Indiana Jones on my DS."  Occasionally interspersed are things like him playing golf with his dad or going to a concert, but the entries are at least 3-1 in favor of video.

Of course, he gets egged on by his daddy.  Last night I came home from helping clean up the grade-school's bingo party, and the lads were sacked out on the couches watching Star Trek.  I walk in and NYAB is not only reciting the lines along with the show, he also treats me to a tutorial on the old vs. new phasers (fazers? You'll have to ask him,) and tricorders and blah de fricking blah and I just sat and pointed and laughed and marveled he'd ever made it out of his parents' basement.  He pointed out they didn't have a basement and threw a pillow at me.  The Young Gene Roddenberry shushed us both. 

While this occasionally depresses me insomuch as his creativity seems pathetically stunted and most of his play has to do with being Batman's sidekick rather than slaying dragons, for the most part I'm OK with it. He does still play, he is still reasonably competitive and now that he's in school and he still reads books, though he's not as keen on it as I might like. 

What's interesting now, though, is how he is synthesizing all this exposure and knowledge.  He's keen on making sequels to movies he likes. He makes up stories that are in keeping with his favorite characters. He has gotten to the point where he recognizes movie references out of context and in other movies.

But the kicker came the other day when we were in the car. He was uncharacteristically quiet and I asked what he was thinking about. He pops out with, "Well, I was just thinking that if I ever work on a Who Framed Roger Rabbit movie, mine should really include the Pixar guys."

Oy.  I live with a pint-sized Dawson Leery, y'all. Except mine has a better forehead.

My Epitaph:

Any Forward Gear Will Do

Gracious. The aftermath at work has been epic, and the drama just keeps on coming. I'm looking forward to when everyone can just come in, do the work, and get it done without having to deal with emotional fallout, angry accusations of betrayal, disorganization, a general heightened level of angst, blah, blah, blah. I'm looking forward to being able to just do my job and make it possible for my people to just do their jobs without getting caught in the middle of turf battles or he-said-she-said games about who's supposed to do what and how it's supposed to be done.

I'm looking forward to Saturday, when I intend to climb up on the roof with my mother and clean gutters and where the only opinions voiced are likely to be swearing at the gutter guards and shrieking about bugs. I'm looking even more forward to climbing back down off the roof and drinking myself into what will either be unconsciousness or a heightened state of hilarity at being home with people who make me laugh. 

I'm looking forward to seeing the room my god-blessed and easily bored parents are willing to rip up for me while I'm spending most of my waking hours at work, and I'm looking forward to getting new bookshelves installed and the floor refinished.

I'm looking forward to two weeks from now, when NYAB will have left on a trip with his siblings and returned to tell us all about it.

I'm really looking forward to two weeks from now when I'll once again be home in time to put my kid to bed on a regular basis. 

And, you know, I'm looking forward to Halloween. And Thanksgiving. And Christmas. And all that good stuff.