Busybusy

It's been a busy past few days. I made a bunch of Ebay sales, so I had that work. Then to make life more fun, I had jury duty today. I really lucked out - I got called for a panel, we marched over to the courtroom, waited a while and then were told to go back to the jury room.

At that point, my main hope was that since I had been called once, I could skate through the rest of the day without my name coming up again. Instead, an hour later, the same panel was called, which made me nervous. We were marched down to the lobby, where we were told we weren't going to be coming back to that building, which made me really nervous. Then we were taken outside...

and told we were dismissed for the day. Hooray! I went and hopped on the train and was home by 11:30. It was great! I had all the time in the world to be productive, or we could take advantage of the fact that B had taken the entire day off and the fantastic weather and go to the zoo!

Instead, about 10 minutes after I got home, the vague ickiness I had been feeling on the train and bus that I had chalked up to not enough sleep and being in motion escalated into rushing to the bathroom to puke. Soooo, not so much for the zoo. Instead, I spent the afternoon on the couch and K got to enjoy her wading pool instead. Still taking advantage of the fantastic weather, but not quite as exotic as the zoo.

Whatever caused my mid-day puke-tacular seems to be pretty mild, fortunately. I'm tired and headachy, but I successfully ate a very bland dinner. Hopefully a good night's sleep will take me back to normal. Then I can frantically work to make up for what I've felt too lousy to do tonight.

Why I'm wearing my husband's deodorant

(Disclaimer: not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach)

It's not because I didn't like mine (although I wasn't too sure about it - it was a scentless natural kinda thing from Trader Joe's and I wasn't convinced it was doing a great job).

It's not because I've decided to throw off the shackles of conventional societal mores on scent and hygiene and let my stink flag fly.

It does have quite a bit to do with the ticklish operation we had to perform tonight. You see, K has a new habit: taking off her diaper after we put her to bed. I wouldn't mind so much if this new compulsion were accompanied by an interest in potty training, but no such luck. Just a sudden desire for exhibitionism.

So tonight, we went into her room and found her asleep, without pants or a diaper. In her laundry basket. Incredibly cute, but not exactly an ideal sleeping situation. The ticklish operation was getting her into her bed and a diaper on her without waking her up, since the risk in waking her up is that she often can't go back to sleep for two hours. So we had to move her veeerrrrry carefully, but ultimately successfully, as she's now peacefully sawing logs in her bed, safely rediapered.

But back to the deodorant. A few days ago, I went upstairs and discovered K, holding out her poop-covered hands saying "Ewwww." I completely agree with you, kid.

She had woken up early from her nap, pooped and then taken her diaper off. This actually has happened more than once in the past (giving rise to a phrase you never want to have to say, "Where did you put the poop?"), but she's usually pretty neat about leaving everything in the diaper and putting it in a fairly logical place. This time, however, I found the offending diaper in my bedroom. And next to it, smeared with poop, was my deodorant.

I could understand why there was poop on the outside - she had poop on her hands, ergo, there was poop where she picked it up. But there was also some poop on the actual deodorant part as well. Did she try to rub deodorant on her butt?

So I threw that sucker right out, after putting the kid in the tub. I haven't had time to go to the store since to replace it, which is why I'm smelling rather manly these days (because I'm using men's deodorant, that is, not that I'm building up a sweatymanly odor by the end of the day).

*****

We've been downloading Dr Who, so I saw tonight's episode a couple weeks ago. But I had to watch it again (actually, we've been rewatching all of them when they show on American tv, because we're just that geeky) because it was such a delightful episode. And what a joy to see Felicity Kendal, who starred in one of my favorite Britcoms of all time, Good Neighbors, the hilarious series about a couple who decide to quit the rat race and take up farming in their yard in suburbia.

Bad attitude

Unlike many infertiles, Mother's Day never bothered me much when we were trying to conceive. I wanted a baby, but the concept of actually having one and being a mother was so abstract to me that things that trigger many infertiles didn't affect me that much.

But now I know exactly how they feel. Because if I see one more article today on how to honor your father on Father's Day, or great Father's Day gifts for Dad, or creative gifts to make for your completely alive, non-dead father, I think I might hurl. Or maybe just hurl my computer at the wall.

I had been doing better when Spring came. But then we went home and cleaned out my parents' house, and now we're coming up on one year since my father died. I keep finding myself looking at the pictures of him holding K, and thinking about how much he would appreciate that her developing sense of humor is so much like his. So yeah, Father's Day? Not the kick in the stomach I needed right now.

I hate Veriz0n

On the plus side, a cold front is coming through, breaking the back of the horrible, brain-melting heat wave we've had since Friday. The downside is that every time we have a thunderstorm lately, our DSL goes on the blink. So probably no commenting tonight, and no substantial posts.

And now we get to see how many tries it takes to get this to post in between DSL yo-yoing up and down...

The darker side of the information age; or, high rent problems

One of my co-workers gave me a present for K today: a set of assemble-yourself balsa wood dollhouse furniture. I had been telling her earlier about a problem I've been trying to figure out lately. I brought my dollhouse back from my mother's house last month for K, but I don't have anything to put in it. The furniture I had used that was worth keeping was really nice Victorian-style furniture that's way too nice for a toddler to play with (and there's also only three rooms' worth, when the dollhouse has eight rooms - it's a gorgeous large dollhouse that my grandfather made for me). What I need to do is find some durable plastic furniture for her to use until she's old enough not to destroy what she plays with. The problem with this is that while there's plenty of dollhouse furniture, both durable wood and plastic, available for sale at the click of a mouse button, none of it is cheap, especially when you have to fill eight rooms. In one of life's more hair-pulling ironies, it would actually be considerably cheaper for me to buy an entire dollhouse that has furniture included than to buy the same furniture off the shelf. The only economically feasible solution I can see is to get some kits from a craft store and make some furniture myself, but I'm certainly not going to go to that sort of effort just to have it mauled by a three-year-old who wants to try and sit on a dollhouse-sized chair.

The furniture R gave me is unbelievably cheap and badly made, to the point that I accidentally snapped a piece in half trying to assemble it. But that's the point; she figured it wouldn't matter if K destroyed it because it was so cheap. Heck, it comes half-broken down already - the decrepitude is a built-in feature. The picture here unfortunately doesn't give a proper perspective on how drunkenly skewed the bed is, although you can see how I had to leave the tray off of the high chair because it wouldn't attach properly. But it's also clear that K doesn't care. Unfortunately, the only kit she could find was for nursery furniture, so this isn't a whole-house solution.

My current plan is that we found a Melissa and Doug wooden castle a while ago at an unbelievably fantastic, if we ever want to buy this we need to buy it now because we'll never see a price this low again sort of price. I think the current plan is to make it a Christmas present, and I think we'll get some figures and some rudimentary furniture (maybe some tables and chair, a bed and some nursery furniture) so it can fill the same play function as a dollhouse. Then when she's five or six, she can have the proper dollhouse with nicer furniture.

Of course, this is one of those occasions when the Internet contains things I would rather never have known. Because apparently a couple years ago, Ikea had a dollhouse and several rooms of dollhouse furniture, as well as dollhouse dolls. Exactly what I want. But now they're discontinued. I could look for them on Ebay, of course (and in fact I'm watching a few auctions right now), but the point of getting stuff from Ikea is that it's cheap. Paying $20 for five pieces of dollhouse furniture kind of misses the raison d'etre of going Ikea.

But it gets better. While I was surfing around, I found yet more discontinued Ikea toys that were either things I've been looking for, or things we have but were more expensive. A nice wooden garage with wood cars, a play kitchen, a toy barn that's so much better than their current toy barn that they're barely in the same phylum. Sigh. We've certainly bought more than our share of Ikea toys, so it's not like they don't still have plenty of good toys available. But the fact that if we had only had access to an Ikea a year earlier, I would have been able to get several of the toys I've spent a huge amount of time searching for the right cross-section of price and construction on, is something I would been just as happy not knowing.*


*Reading this over, I have to admit this is certainly a rather high-rent problem. But only in a sense, since part of the reason I have to search so hard for certain things is that we don't have much money, and therefore we need to find a bargain, or better yet, a dirt-cheap used version. The whole lead-paint, evil-plastic panic hasn't helped this either - handmade, non-toxic wood toys are wonderful, but expensive, which is one of the reasons I value Ikea so much. I spent a lot of time last Christmas reading blog entries on this that started out with "Goodness knows our children already have too many toys..." Except that if you subtract out the stuffed animals, K doesn't fall into that category. She's a first child, we don't have much disposable income and she lives far away from her grandparents, who aren't the type of grandparents to shower her with toys (which is fine by us, but it contributes to the not-having-too-many-toys factor). And right after we moved to Philadelphia, I realized that all of the toys she had were baby and young toddler toys, when what she really needed was preschool toys for her to grow into. So I started to make a concerted effort to start collecting them, with an eye towards toys that will have long-term appeal and be useable by multiple children. At this point, I can say that after her birthday, we'll be just about at "enough, " where "enough" is defined as "everything gets played with over the course of a month."

Things I found at work today:

1. That one of my childhood favorites, Ben and Me by Robert Lawson (of Ferdinand the Bull and Rabbit Hill fame), has a sequel called Mr Revere and I, told from the perspective of Paul Revere's horse. And in fact, the process of looking these books up on Amazon has revealed that they are but the first of an entire line of stories of famous people told by their pets, including Christopher Columbus's parrot and Captain Kidd's cat.

I remember Ben and Me was made into an animated short by Disney, which bore only a passing resemblance to the book. I liked it a lot as a kid anyway. I'm a little curious now how well it would hold up. I'm a little sorry now that I didn't know when I was younger that Robert Lawson had an entire line of pet-authored biographies, because I'm sure I would have liked them then. I may have to pick up Mr Revere and I sometime at work and see how good an author an 18th century horse can possibly be.


2. That we have quite a few origami books in the children's section. Some are good, some are so-so, but none are quite so mindblowingly frightening as this:



Yes, that is Shari Lewis of Lambchop fame, in her younger and if it's possible, even scarier days, when she apparently liked to put eye makeup on with a trowel. It's actually a pretty straightforward, basic origami book with good instructions, punctuated with moments of horror like this:

You WILL enjoy your paper airplane


Shari prepares to release her breath of fire upon the unsuspecting paper boat and its doomed inhabitants


A discerning reader expresses their editorial opinion

I know I complain a lot about the age and general decrepitude of the books in my library, but occasionally finding gems like this make it all worthwhile.

June Books

The Sharing Knife : Beguilement
The Sharing Knife : Legacy by Lois McMaster Bujold
Beguilement is a re-read, but while we've owned Legacy for months, I'm just now getting around to reading it because the next book has just come out. The delay in reading shouldn't be taken as a sign of not liking the series though. My love for Bujold is pure and true and I'm enjoying this new world a lot.

Death Masks
Blood Rites by Jim Butcher
Books five and six of the Dresden Files books. They continue to be a fun series, combining the best of contemporary urban fantasy and noir detective mysteries. Not great literature, but fun.

Heaven to Betsy by Maud Hart Lovelace
For a complete change of pace, the next book in the Betsy-Tacy series. Although it's clear that as Betsy gets older, she's moving away from Tacy and becoming the center of the story.

The Moon by Night by Madeleine L'Engle
The sequel to Meet the Austins, which I didn't like as much. I think it was a combination of L'Engle being entirely too good at describing the hard aspects of being 14 and the fact that I couldn't stand one of Vicky's romantic foils. It was hard to have any sympathy for her attraction to him when I wanted her to push him off a cliff.

Pho-licious

We all have sore throats, so we've been eating a lot of soup lately (to the point that one of the counter people at Panera knows me by name). Dinner tonight was Pho, a Vietnamese beef soup and it was a definite hit.

I used the recipe here (I highly recommend this blog, btw - it has tons of great crockpot recipes), with a few modifications. The biggest one is that I omitted the fish sauce because the beef I got at Trader Joe's was marinating in a sauce for Korean bulgogi. I looked at the ingredients and none of them conflicted with the flavor profile of pho, so I decided to give it a try. I omitted the anise because I don't like it and used ginger powder instead of fresh ginger because that's what I had. I added approximately two cups of fresh bean sprouts at the very end of cooking, so they would be warm and somewhat cooked, but not stewed and gross.

As it turned out, the bulgogi marinade was a fantastic gamble. The long slow cooking in the crockpot made the beef tender and delicious and the entire meal was just divine.

I threw up my hands in despair a while ago and decided that I just wasn't meant for Southeast Asian cooking, Thai in particular. I can never get ingredients as good as they have in restaurants, and they're often not quite right, like having to use Italian basil instead of Thai. I have to buy a bunch of large bottles of stuff that I don't use often enough to use them up before they go bad, which means it doesn't wind up being cheaper to cook that sort of thing at home, so I might as well just go to a restaurant where it's cooked by an expert. But pho is going to become part of my regular repertoire, so maybe I can conquer some of the cuisine of Southeast Asia after all.

(Ack! Internet service is extremely bipolar tonight, so I doubt I'm going to get all of my comments in.)

Random blather

When I got up this morning, my eyes were the paaaalest shade of pink. What you would call "Maiden's blush" if you saw it on a paint chip. I stared at myself in the mirror for a long time, then decided to go to work and resolved to wash my hands a lot.

It was more or less the right decision. I'm still pretty tired and not feeling great, but I still managed to get some stuff done and they really needed me since all of the museum staff was in a workshop all morning. One good thing I discovered is that our Uberboss is preparing the budget for the next fiscal year, which will have money for the children's collection in it. Yippee! Soon we may have science books written within the past decade, if you'll allow me to let my dreams get big for a moment.

So did I mention we managed to see Iron Man while we were in Michigan? We really liked it, although it seemed like without Robert Downey Jr's charisma, it would have been a somewhat boring superhero movie with really great computer graphics. The measure of how good the computer graphics were is that I didn't even think about them until after someone else mentioned them later. There was never a moment during the action when I caught something unnatural looking and thought, "Hmm, computery." They were so good that they blended seamlessly with the rest of the action, which is really a huge accomplishment. The best success in cgi is when it goes completely unnoticed.

Fortunately, RD Jr was just delicious, and refreshingly had chemistry with his romantic foil (although I suspect he could have chemistry with a ceramic plate), so it wasn't boring, and good enough that I'm looking forward to the sequel they were so clearly building up to.

House of plague

Quoth the doctor: "Sounds like pinkeye to me."

She didn't want to see us, which I find a bit... iffy (although I'm already documented on not being well-pleased with the doctor, so par for the course, I guess). But we have eye drops now, which is about as much as she can do for us unless it gets worse. B already looks a bit better, so hopefully we're on the right track.

I have to say, there are a lot worse illnesses to have than a mild to moderate case of pinkeye. B feels pretty good, but he's off work for the rest of the week, without argument. Apparently if you call up work and say you have pinkeye, they don't want you or your incredibly contagious germs within a 50 yard radius. So! He was on vacation for two weeks, came back for one day and is now out sick for the rest of the week. Employee of the year, here we come!

In any case, while my eyes aren't really bothering me, I still feel pretty flattened by this cold, so I'm grateful to know that he's going to be home tomorrow again. Our alternating work schedules don't give us many days to just lazily hang out together at home, so it was kind of nice.

So! Are you tired of my whining about being sick yet?

We've been trying to figure out what to do with the rest of our summer in terms of more travel. K and I are flying out to Colorado in July for a cousin's wedding. My mother and brother are going as well, although they're driving. In what I can only imagine was a moment of COMPLETE INSANITY, my mother had been planning to have K and me fly to Michigan and drive to Colorado with them. But I was able to convince her that it might be a tad more pleasant for everyone involved for us to just fly straight to Denver instead of shoehorning me and my restless, potty-training three-year-old into the incredibly uncomfortable backseat of her van next to my brother. I suppose it could have been a nostalgic recreation of all of those childhood trips to Colorado in the backseat together, in the non-airconditioned car with only a radio, sibling antagonism and all the wheat in Nebraska passing by for entertainment. It's memories like that which make me bless the day we bought our portable dvd player.

We had been thinking about another trip to Michigan in August, but hadn't decided anything until we discovered today that a good college friend had the good sense to plan his wedding for exactly when we were thinking of going. Yay! So that settles that. I've actually been investigating if the train might be a viable option for that trip. It would be a long poke, but it would still be shorter than driving and we wouldn't have to do the work of driving or sit still the entire time. And with gas prices, it might not be any more expensive.