Monthly Archives: May 2010

May29

Cheetos

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Cheetos

Joey, Henry and I are checked in to the Gateway Hotel in Ames.  We’ve got a lovely room on the fourth floor, and Henry loves it.  He loves the elevator (which we call the “magical box”) and the hallway.  Earlier he and I were playing fetch in the hallway, and he thought he had gone straight to doggy heaven.  It’s nice to look out the windows and see the trees swaying in the breeze.

Ahhhhh.

Our room has two double beds because the hotel was out of king rooms.  Double beds are just kind of skinny and squishy when you’re used to a Queen, and my first thought when we walked in the door was, ooooooooh, maybe I could have my own bed!!!

But of course I wasn’t about to say anything.  He’d pick on me for weeks for wanting to hog a bed all to myself!

After the rehearsal, which was outside at Reiman Gardens (lovely), I was super zapped and went back to the hotel to lay down.  Henry was tired too, so he slept on the chair while I watched The History Channel.  Joey took his brother to the mall and while he was on the way back to the hotel I decided I really needed Cheetos.

“Will you please bring me some Cheetos?” I called him to ask.

“You want CHEETOS?” He asked.  Then he offered me a bunch of other suggestions that might be more beneficial, but I was stuck on Cheetos.

“Alright, I’ll bring you Cheetos,” he said, and we hung up.

Shortly, he returned with the Cheetos.  He flopped on the other bed and said, “Maybe we can each have one?”

I perked right up.  ”Serious?”

“Yeah,” said Joey.  ”Then I can stretch out.”

WIN.

I get my own bed.  This is going to be so cool.

And it wasn’t even my idea!

May28

Bruce

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Bruce

Since we’re in Iowa for Joey’s brother’s wedding and I haven’t been home in nearly a year, I took the opportunity to head to Cedar Rapids just to go HOME.  Turns out I was a little homesick.

We met most of the clan for lunch at HuHot and ate way too much, then afterwards we just went home and sat on the back porch for awhile. A few hours later Pops said, “Let’s go look at the cows,” so I put on the girl boots (incidentally, those are actually The Kid’s boots?  I thought they were the girl boots) and tromped out in the field with Pops.

“Watch out for that wire, it’s live,” he said.  And he jumped over the fence.

Pregnant lady doesn’t jump over the fence as easily as she used to.  I almost nailed the hot wire.  Twice.

As we were walking around in the field (I slid on a cow pie and almost went down for the count, it was great) Pops got a call from one of his clients and wound up needing to go down to the office.  So Joey and I tagged along.  I sent some emails for Pops and Joey raided the candy stash.  About an hour later we were  heading back up 380 towards home again.

Mom was home making delicious taco salads, and when we pulled in she just about had dinner ready.  So we set the table and sat down at the table on the back porch and started eating.

That’s when we heard the cat.

There was a stray kitty, a gray stripidy one sitting on the steps to the porch sitting there meowing at us.  No one had ever seen it before.  His name was Bruce.

Bruce sat there meowing the entire meal, and every now and then one of the dogs would run over to try to get a good look at it.  Bruce would freak out and run down the stairs, but a few moments later he’d be back again for more.  (More of what…who can say.)

The Kid deposited some taco meat on the steps mostly when Mom wasn’t looking (as if she didn’t know, though, he wasn’t very quiet about it) and Bruce was so stupid and/or stray that he never even tried to eat it.  He just sat there, lower fangs out, panting and meowing at us.

I thought he looked dangerous because of the fangs.

After eating my dinner, I sat down next to the screen door, which was a few feet away from Bruce.  Ernie came over to look at him with me.  Bruce came up pretty close, but every time Ernie would sneeze, it would freak him out and he’d run back down the stairs.  One of the times he did so, he kept his tail in the air.

“Uh, Bruce is a girl,” I said.

“No, it can’t be.  His name is Bruce,” said Joey.

“First of all, I can tell he’s not a boy because I just saw. And how could you even know its name?  We’ve never seen it before,” I said.

“It looks like a Bruce,” Joey and The Kid said.  ”That’s his name.”

Henceforth, Bruce was a boy even though he/she was a girl.

Sometime after dinner he disappeared.  Probably never to be seen again.

May28

Hello.

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Hello.

Internet.

I was going to blog something and I had it all planned out last night.

Then I slept and I forgot it.

In summary, yesterday we drove from Texas to the magical land of Iowa.  Joey was Thinking Ahead and he drove around Dallas on Wednesday and picked up the first three Harry Potter books on Audiobook, so we listed to the Socerer’s Stone all the way up and time went by in a flash.

OH YEAH, and how could I forget, we stopped at the cattle pens in Kansas!!!!  My 3 1/2 year goal was completed.  Somethings I learned about the cattle pens on our visit:

  1. They look much more interesting from the road
  2. They smell better from the road, too
  3. Cows do go there, I could see fresh poos (could smell them too)
  4. Cows are just never there when we are
  5. I liked the cattle pens about 75% more than Joey did

At one point I went running across the prairie because I saw a blue flower and totally left Joey in my dust.  He just stood back by the fence and watched me, I’m sure he was thinking I had lost my ever loving mind.  But the blue flower was pretty so I picked it and brought it back to show him.  He tried to act impressed, which made me feel good.

We stayed long enough for me to ascertain there was no cows, run around on the prairie, and walk around in the pens for awhile (Joey refused to go in there) and then I decided that was enough for me.  So we packed it up and left.

I told Joey thank you about five times for indulging me and stopping.

Then it was back to Harry Potter, and I cried through the end of the book.  I can never handle it when Professor McGonagall gives Neville 10 points for being willing to stand up to his friends.

Sobsobsobsob.

May26

The World’s Most Amazing Roadtrip EVER

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The World’s Most Amazing Roadtrip EVER

Tomorrow morning at some unnatural hour of the morning, Joey and I will begin The World’s Most Amazing Roadtrip Ever.  It’s not so much amazing because of where we’re going necessarily, but it is amazing because of the fact that I think it has to be bad for you to drive so far in so little time.

We are going to rock it off the face of the planet, though.

Watch us.

(And you probably actually will too, because that’s why I have this here blog.)

It looks like the sum total of the miles we will drive is 2,388, based upon Google Maps.  That’s going to double the amount of miles that are currently on our RAV4.  We will either know if we really like that car or if we really hate it by the time we’re back in town.

We will be driving through ten (count em, TEN!) states and I will be on License Plate Patrol the entire time.

You know this game; it’s the one where you look for as many license places from as many states as possible.  I am awesome at it.  I know all the tricks.

Joey was going to run to the library today (I hope) to try to check out some audiobooks.  We wanted to buy the Harry Potter ones but they’re outlandishly expensive so we opted for the good old Dallas Library (which honestly kind of stinks, we won’t miss it) and hopefully it won’t let us down.

I cannot believe this trip is almost here.

Henry is chomping at the bit to get going.  He saw me take out his pack kennel this morning and he just sat there next to it for about five minutes like, OK Mom, I’m ready to go…why are we not leaving?

So now I need to go run around like a crazy person to get some stuff done.

May25

UNCLE!

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UNCLE!

I had my first (maybe only?) prenatal massage last night, and I was so tight and sore that I had been looking forward to it since I scheduled it last Thursday. My head was throbbing and no matter how often I took Tylenol, stretched the muscles, tried to massage them myself, NOTHING was helping.

The masseuse was a woman in her early 20s, and she was supposed to be “the best” at prenatal massage at this particular spa. I had high hopes.

About ten minutes into the massage she put what felt like her entire body weight on this knot behind my shoulder blade, and she pushed.

I gasped. I couldn’t breathe. “That really hurts,” I tried to say, but it’s really hard to say that when you can’t breathe.

“Push against my hand,” she said.

That made the pain worse. “That hurts much worse,” I wheezed. “It really, really hurts.”

“It’ll release soon,” said the masseuse.

She was right, about thirty minutes of pure agony later, I could actually move my shoulders again. And I thought massages were supposed to be relaxing.

After she completely mashed up my shoulders, she moved down to work on my hips. “There are trigger points here,” she told me.

That’s when she found it.

After a few moments of probing, she zeroed in on the exact location where we had injected the progesterone in oil for all those weeks. The knot has substantially gone down (used to be about the size of a golf ball, and just about as rock solid) but it is still EXTREMELY painful deep down in the tissue. And for some reason I can’t run or jog without it making every nerve in the vicinity scream bloody murder, so I have to do this fancy arms-behind-my-back stance that makes me look like a total moron.   However, that is unrelated.

So yeah, she found The Spot. “Oh wow, you really have a knot here,” she said. “That’s very strange.” AND SHE MASHED HER FINGERS INTO IT.

What I thought had been pain before with the shoulder knots? Child’s play. My eyes started watering and I literally could not draw in a breath. “Stop!” I wheezed. “Stop now.”

“It’ll release soon,” she said.

I was like THE HECK IT WILL, so I started gasping “IVF, IVF, IVF” as if that made everything a lot more clear. But I forgot that about 90% of the population has never and will never have to shoot hormones in oil into their muscles to stay pregnant, so unfortunately it did not help my cause.

She continued to mash, and then started doing this rocking thing and somehow managed to get even MORE nerves involved.

“STOP,” I said, as forcefully as I could, face down and gasping in pain. “When I did IVF it required deep tissue Progesterone in oil injections, so what you are pressing on is a mass of olive oil that has not yet distributed from my muscle tissue. STOP NOW. It is not something that can be worked out.”

Finally, she backed off. “Wow, I’ve never heard of that before,” she said.

I was so relieved that she had let up off my knot that I couldn’t say anything. She moved to my other hip and I was bracing for the same conversation again, but fortunately she asked “did you do them on this side too?” before pressing on anything.

“Yes,” I said. And I was kind of short about it, too. I was pretty mad that she hadn’t listened to me earlier because that was some serious pain she had put me through.

An hour later, I did feel better after having all the knots worked out of my muscles. My right hip, however?

Totally bruised.

May23

Let’s just hope he doesn’t have the gift of dreams and prophecy

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Let’s just hope he doesn’t have the gift of dreams and prophecy

About a month ago Joey woke up in a cold sweat and in the process woke me up as well.

“I just had the weirdest dream ever,” he gasped.

Turns out he dreamed that I was in labor and we were in the hospital with things progressing the way they normally do.  And when the doctor whipped out the baby, he had a bit of a look of shock on his face.  Joey soon realized why, because a Shih-Tzu came scampering up the bed towards us that I had apparently just given birth to.

“Oh!  She’s beautiful!” I squealed.  ”We’ll call her ‘Prison’!”

Ahh, such a beautiful name.

Now, granted, there is SOME concern with IVF that they may have transferred the wrong embryos (trust me, I do stress out about this even so often but I really try not to) but I figure if they had blown it that bad they would have let us know by now.  And as far as I know, the Presby ARTS lab doesn’t do Shih-Tzu IVFs.  Only human.

I don’t even know if they do IVF for Shih-Tzus.  It sounds very expensive.

Sometimes I call Henry “Prison” just for fun, though.

May23

stuff, Stuff, STUFF

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stuff, Stuff, STUFF

One thing that Seriously Bothers me about being an twenty-first century American, is the underlying drive we all seem to have to ACQUIRE! MORE! STUFF!

We are trained to believe (from before we are born – trust me, I get ads from Babies R Us) that we NEED this thing, that this item will make our lives easier, and people will respect us more if we have this gadget.  We get a sort of adrenaline rush when we swipe our plastic and somehow we feel, for a few minutes at least, that we are powerful, successful, and people will want to be like US now that we have this new thing.  Whatever it is…toilet plunger, food processor, humidifier, trash can, new outfit.

And once we make a new purchase, we spend a ton of time trying to make our friends feel like they need whatever it is we just plunked down good money for.  ”This is AWESOME, you totally NEED this.”  (Read: be like ME!!!)

I know I do all of that.  I bet you do too.

Anyway, I don’t like stuff just to have stuff.  Seeing American consumerism pile up in my home stresses me out and it makes me feel guilty.  Guilty that I have all this extra plastic and cotton and silk and wool that I don’t even care about or in some cases, remember that I had…and there are people with nothing.

The walk-in closet in our bedroom has been bothering my conscience for weeks.  Especially lately, since I have been spending good money on buying maternity clothes.  I feel bad buying more clothes when I know I have scads that don’t fit, or I don’t wear because I don’t like them, or I have just plain forgotten about them.

So today, on the way home from church, we stopped by Target and picked up at 116 gallon Sterlite container with a snap-on lid.  My goal: go through every item of clothing I owned and think about it.  Would it fit me in a year?  If so, would I be interested in wearing it then?

I filled that container with all of the clothes I am going to save, summer, winter, jackets, formalwear, everything.  And whatever didn’t fit is sacked up in several very large trash bags (nearly folded, of course) and waiting by the front door to be donated to Luke’s Closet down at DTS.

Every time I walk past those bags, I feel ashamed that I have acquired so much stuff that not only do I have enough to save 116 gallons worth, I had so much I am giving away whole trash bags full.  I obviously need to be more careful about what I am buying if I have allowed myself to pile up this much stuff.

While I was at it in our bedroom closet, Joey tore apart the hall closet.  He discovered another four trash bags full of random, and in some cases broken, things we had just shoved back behind the walls and didn’t even remember we had.  I don’t know what it is about keeping a broken item that makes us feel better about it not working anymore.  Ick.

And really, we’re not savers.  We don’t keep stuff just to keep stuff.  That’s what shocked me so badly about all the stuff we have gotten rid of today.  I’m not sure where it came from!

We had been hanging on to four suits of Joey’s from college and his terrible Chorale uniform tuxedo for the last five years, and neither one of us really knew why.  The suits didn’t fit him, when we bought them he and I had our first dating couple argument because he wanted them to be huge and baggy so they’d be comfortable.  Um, let me just say that when he wears them he looks like he’s a little boy playing dress up.  And within the last five years, he’s come to realize that so he won’t touch them with a ten foot pole when it comes to wearing them…but we couldn’t get rid of them.

His brother’s wedding is next weekend and Joey’s officiating.  We did break down and buy him a new suit today, even though he had already four in the closet…that didn’t fit him.  But those other four we are donating to Luke’s and hopefully some seminary student will be just the right size for them. (Along with that terrible looking tux, hopefully someone gets excited when they see it.)

Our closet right now looks amazing.

There is ONE suit hanging in the back of it, and it’s a suit that fits properly.  He will be a very handsome officiant next weekend.

The only clothes of mine that are there fit me and I will wear.  I used to tell Joey I didn’t have anything to wear, but that CLEARLY wasn’t true.  I just had so much stuff hanging there that didn’t fit that I couldn’t see what did.  Noise, he calls it.

No more noise in our closet.  It is ROOMY in there.  And it’s exactly the way I like it.

May23

Don’t Let the Pregnant Lady Go To The Store Alone In the Morning

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Don’t Let the Pregnant Lady Go To The Store Alone In the Morning

For the past few weeks, Joey and I have been playing Sunday School Hookey.  We have been burning the dynamite at both ends for the last…two months?  three?  I can’t remember, it has been a long time.  We’ve run ourselves fairly ragged, so we decided that we’d skip a few weeks of Sunday School, get up about 8:00…make breakfast together, sometimes take Henry on a walk, sit on the couch, and just spend a little bit of extra time together and make it to church by 10:30 feeling rested and rejuvinated instead of rushed.

OH MY WORD it has been the best thing we have done in a long time.

I think my parents are Concerned about the lack of Sunday School attendance going on down here, but in the five years we have been married I think we’d only missed about five Sunday Schools total before we decided to take this little break.  And I assured them that since Joey’s going to be a youth pastor, we will be card-carrying Sunday School attenders for the rest of our lives.

We’re just sneaking in the break while we can get it.

All this to say, we were so tired last night that we set our alarm for 9:00 instead of 8:00.  (I keep thinking one of these days we’ll stop feeling so exhausted, but it hasn’t happened yet.  Maybe next week?)

I slept great until about 8:00 when I started dreaming about fruit juice.  I finished the last of my Cranberry Raspberry juice yesterday afternoon while I was watching a movie, and I must have known subconsciously that we were out.  I woke up abruptly at 8:20 and I knew that I NEEDED FRUIT JUICE RIGHT NOW.

Joey was still sleeping.

I poked his shoulder until he barely woke up and then I whispered, “I need juice.  I have to go to the store right now.  I will be back later.”

He looked at me like I was nuts.  Then he mostly fell back asleep.

I left for the store without even brushing my teeth, and when I reached Central Market I was one of about twenty people who was weird enough to be up and shopping at the time of the day.

I went into the store for juice.

I left the store with juice, four ultra-moist chocolate chip muffins, one peach, one San Pellegrino Limonata soda (that’s for me, not for Joey) and two Bon Bons.

(For my birthday, which unfortunately isn’t until August, I want one 12 pack of San Pellegrino Limonata (Lemon) and one 12 pack of San Pellegrino Aranciata (Orange).  CAN YOU IMAGINE?  Twenty-four days of the most delicious Italian sodas in the whole world all for meeeeeee!!!!!  I have told this to Joey already.  I hope it comes to pass.)

Joey forgave me for buying the extra foods because I got him chocolate chip muffins.  It was my grand scheme.

I have a feeling he will not be allowing me to go to Central Market by myself anymore, though.

May22

Fur

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Fur

This morning, while I was out shopping with Kendall, Joey was at home giving Henry a haircut.  Henry has been on probation for the last few days because his behavior has been Questionable At Best lately.  I think he knows change is in the air or something.  Anyway, he had a thick and bedraggled coat of winter fur that needed to be cut off.

We’re heading up to Iowa later for Joey’s brother’s wedding, and Henry’s coming.  So naturally he needs to look his best.  And after we go to Iowa, it’s off to Indianapolis for a week, at which time he will be staying with us at the Grandparents Laird’s house.  So he REALLY needs to look  his best.

And you say, what’s this business about Indianapolis?  Why on earth would you spend an entire week there when you are from Iowa and you live in Texas?

To this I reply…wait a week or so.  All shall be revealed.

SUSPENSE!  I LOVE SUSPENSE!

Anyway, the point of this all is to say that Joey started Henry’s haircut and probably made a royal mess in doing so, and just 30 minutes ago, I finished it.  We save a truckload of money by grooming Henry ourselves, and we have a two-part system worked out.  Joey buzzes him and I trim Henry’s face, legs and paws with the scissors.  Works like a charm.

Except today I forgot to change into grungies before doing so, and I managed to cover myself entirely in chopped off Henry fur.  My black shirt looked gray and my jeans were dripping fuzz, so I threw them in the dryer…I’m hoping that removes some of the excess.

The worst thing is I only have one pair of maternity jeans, and of course those are the ones now covered in fur.  And I sort of need them for church tomorrow.  I may be up late (or early) running them through the wash.

Bonus: we ate at Desperadoes for dinner tonight with Joey’s pops, and that stupid Eagles song is stuck in my head now and won’t get out.  It’s really bad. Deeeeeeesperaaaaaaadoooooooooooooo…………

I better end this because if Gramps said I made another rambling post like the one the other day, I was fired.  And I can’t risk getting fired at this point because Henry needs a place to stay in Indiana next week.

The end.