Artsy Fartsy

This is so funny, and so straight out of my head only better, I had to share it.  One of my favorite recent additions to my blogroll is The Park Bench, she’s too funny, and today’s 20 Questions for Women Who Aren’t Us is the perfect introduction if you’ve never read her site.   Go, read, laugh.

Looks peaceful, doesn’t it?  I painted this last weekend to hang in the now happy, bright, and art-filled guest bedroom.  Let’s just take a moment to bask in the peacefulness… aahhh.

OK, back to reality.  This week has been nonstop nuts with multiple appointments and jury duty, and one awesome yoga class that kicked my butt, and tonight I pack my jammies and my puppy and go to my sister’s house to watch her two boys as she and her husband take off for a tropical weekend of sunshine in Canada.  Wait, I got that wrong.  They wish it was tropical, and maybe it will be sunny, but it’s definitely Canada and it’s sure to be freezing cold.  Anyhow, I will be at home with the boys, and with the help of my mom who is tag-teaming the boy wrangling duties, hopefully neither of us will go crazy and we’ll have good weekends all around.  Tomorrow I get to pretend to be a mommy and take Cameron to kindergarten.  I’m nervous - I hope I do it right.  Cameron will surely tell me if I don’t.  I did find a magic weapon to help me through the weekend, thanks to my mom who told me that Cameron wants to come over her house every weekend to watch Star Wars on her digital cable.  I talked to Cameron on the phone on Tuesday and told him that I had all the Star Wars movies on DVD and I was going to bring them this weekend so we could watch them. He was so excited, he’s probably been asking my sister about that all week.  Sorry Andrea.  So wish me luck this weekend, and may the force be with me.

I showed up for jury duty today and no one cared.  There were no paparazzi, just metal detectors and a roomful of bored, twitchy people who didn’t want to be there.  Those who had served in the past shared their war stories of what was going to happen to us, and a man behind me fell asleep during the riveting videos about the judicial system and the “honor” of being selected as a juror.  We were told that we were being selected for a civil trial that was expected to last two weeks, and although I was curious to hear the details of the trial, being away from my job for two weeks in March would spell disaster, so I was excused with eight other people clever enough to come up with good reasons not to serve.  Because I was excused for a “hardship” and not dismissed for being a democrat, or a gun-owner, or left handed or whatever crazy reason one might not be chosen for, this was not considered time served and I could be called back to serve again in as little as two weeks.  In the days leading up to today, I was so nervous and anxious, and I dreaded showing up today, for fear of being chosen.  Now that I’ve gone through it, I’m not as scared.  I’m actually looking forward to begin called again, I think I’d be the perfect juror, actually.  If you’ve ever tried to debate me or declare your concrete opinion on a subject in my general vicinity, you’ve probably witnessed my irritating ability to look at every situation from every possible point of view.  I’m open-minded and I love philosophical debates, my favorite topic being “if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it…” You know that one.  Yes, I could debate you all night on that one.  So anyhow, back to jury duty, if it was any other time than those weeks in March, it wouldn’t have been such a big deal.  Maybe they’ll call me back in the summer and I’ll get a chance to irritate the crap out of eleven other “angry men“.  Wouldn’t that be fun?

One year ago today I brought home my new Yaris.  It’s been a fun year, a less expensive, fuel-efficient, cute car-driving fun year.  And today when I checked my odometer I see that it’s also been a year of driving a lot.  Holy crap, 17,000 miles!  The Yaris had 70 miles on the odometer when I brought it home.  Today when I get home from work it will have just over 17,070.  That’s crazy!

Don’t tell my insurance company.  According to my policy, they think I drive 7,500 miles per year.  Who only drives 7,500 miles in one year?  (Well, with the exception of my friend Paula who almost never drives her new Saab and probably hasn’t even had the oil changed yet in the year she’s had it, that’s a different story.)   It’s 25 miles one way to work for me, that alone would add up to more than 7,500 and I drive to other places than work.  Like to the grocery store.  And Jo-Ann Fabric.  But where else have I gone?

The farthest we went in the Yaris was the one day we went to New Hampshire to buy Luke’s truck.  We also took a trip to Vermont when we were truck shopping, but other than that, I have nothing to say for my 17,000 miles.  Well, nothing regarding where I went, but I can say plenty about my car.

I love my Yaris.  I’m still in love with it.  If they made “I Heart My Yaris” t-shirts, I’d wear one.  Happy Yarisaversary!

I heard that it was going to be in the 40s today which does cheer me up slightly, but still, I’m really tired of this snow.  Friday we took a long walk by the river in the midst of the storm and I tried really hard to find something good about the snow.  Something pretty, something that made me happy.  The only thing I found was this:

My tiny snow-loving pup.  If she had the ability to shout “woo-hoo!” she would have the moment I let her out the back door on Friday.  She almost jumped with joy.  She runs and darts and slides and chases flakes and jams her head into the snow to sniff.  She’s hilarious.

I wish I could share her excitement.  She even broke through the ice at the bank of the river at one point and plooped her backside in the frigid water, then scrambled back out and continued to run around for half an hour.

I need to learn a bit about snow appreciation from her.  Right now I’m thick in snow loathing while she stares out the window and begs to go out again.   Twenty-five more days till Spring.

I’m sitting here watching the Oscars right now and the two actors from Once are singing that song from the movie when they first play together in the music shop. Have you seen Once? My friend Megan overwhelmingly recommended it to me last month so I borrowed it from Netflix. And… I really didn’t like it. Or did I? I tried three times to watch it and the last time I got pretty far in, but then fell asleep and just didn’t really care enough to try to finish it. But now I’m sitting here while they sing and I realized that I’ve been staring at the television with like a zombie, hands frozen over the keypad, emails forgotten because I can’t believe how much I love that song. It gives me the chills and I wish I knew the words so I could sing my heart out along with them. Maybe I should give it one more chance. Try to actually finish the movie and I guess, if nothing else, I can watch that scene in the music shop again.

P.S. I hope they win the Oscar.

Oh, and P.P.S., Jack Nicholson looks AWFUL. Remember in Men In Black when the bug was “wearing an Edgar suit“? That’s about how good he’s looking these days.

Update: They won! And they won while I was downloading “Falling Slowly” off iTunes. Yay!

I got home from work early enough last night to go for a walk by the river with Molly and still catch the 5:00 rerun of Gilmore Girls. I really miss Gilmore Girls. It’s like my friends have moved away and haven’t written. Does that make me pathetic? TV people are like friends to me? Maybe so, but I sill miss Lorelai and Luke. And especially Logan. Oddly enough I’ve seen Luke and Kirk as characters on different WB shows, and Sookie is on Samantha Who? but that’s all wrong. They all should just go back to Stars Hollow and make me happy. OK, enough about that. Time to make some real-life friends.

Did you see the eclipse last night? It was very cool. Luke’s telescope was in the basement and I’m far too clumsy to be trusted with moving it outside so I looked at the moon with binoculars. It was beautiful. I know you could see it with the naked eye, but with binoculars you could see more detail, and color, and plus I’m nearsighted so any help I can get is appreciated.

I finished our taxes last night and I have to say, Turbo Tax is very cool. It’s written so well and calmly, like they hired phone operators from the suicide line at the crisis center to help write it. It’s all very much filled with the “don’t worry, we’ll get through it, let me walk you through it step-by-step” kind of reassurances that I need. Doing taxes scares the crap out of me, not because I think I’ll do it wrong, I have wise Turbo Tax on my side after all, what scares me is the thought of owing the IRS. One year right after we got married we did owe, BIG time. I can’t handle that again. All of the personal financial analysis unnerves me, too. Did I donate enough to charity this year? Probably not. Did I contribute to my IRA? No. Should I have more taken out of my pay to go into my 401K? Most definitely. This year, too, I officially downgraded my business from a Schedule C-requiring business to a hobby. I hate that word. Hobby. Ick. But I’ve been making more things for fun and less for profit over the past couple of years and making a $200 annual profit after deducting expenses doesn’t exactly make it a business. Oh well, I’m a “hobbyist” with big ideas.

I dropped off a giant bag of clothes and things to the salvation Army the other day and took home this little goblet. Chalice? Candy dish? Whatever it is is fell into my recent obsession with white glass and only cost $1.49. I think that’s a good ration to keep: bring giant bag in, take small cup out.  I also bought a small white hobnail glass footed bowl (could there be more words to describe that?) on Saturday at the antique store when I bought the Drink Spikes.  That one was a whole $4.  Big spender, huh?

I saw Across the Universe last night.  I’m not sure what I think about it other than everyone in the movie reminded me of someone else, and not the Beatles, just someone else.  Lucy looked like Jenny from Forest Gump, Max looked like the blond hobbit who’s on Lost, it was all very distracting.  I loved that it was very much like Moulin Rouge with the different musical arrangements (the slow version of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” sung by Prudence was absolutely gorgeous, and that reminds me I wanted to look for it in iTunes), but then it started to resemble The Wall and that just bored me.  It followed the late-60’s style of movie-making where the story is going along well and then the scene jumps to a dim and smoky jazz club for a 20-minute musical interlude with trippy animation.  But then again, perhaps they made it that way on purpose.  Watch it yourself and tell me what you think.

It’s going to snow again tomorrow.  This snow thing has lost its charm.  I’m ready for spring.  My friend Dan from Florida sent out pictures yesterday of a recent trip to Disney with his wife and daughter and they were all wearing shorts and sandals.  That made me painfully sad.  Let’s all look at last night’s sunset and think happy thoughts of warm weather.

Saturday afternoon Luke and I took some friends to my favorite antique store. It does have a name, Memory Lane Antiques, I just prefer to call it the antique store.

Our friends were sufficiently overwhelmed by the massiveness of the place, and even found a map of Hebron from the early 1800’s that had their house on it. I was enjoying looking at everything but hadn’t fallen in love with anything yet, and then Luke turned around and handed me a box of Drink Spikes.

They’re clear plastic spikes (or big nails) with sayings on them, like “Spiked with Lethal Likker.” How could I not buy them? They also work well as drink markers. I knew that my drink that evening was “Spiked with Happy Hooch” so if I happened to pick up the drink that was “Spiked with Devils Dew,” I knew I had the wrong glass. Luke thought I was a little crazy for buying them but I love them! It’s the little things that make me happy.

That’s right, Black Friday shopper that I am, I was a bit scared to enter the mall on President’s Day, but my mom and my sister persuaded me and so I went. It actually wasn’t as bad as I had expected, but we were there with the boys which meant spending time at the play area, and play area = the center of the crazy. I’m not exactly a germophobe but with all the kids and all the runny noses and sneezing, that place makes me want to go home and shower in bleach. The boys played for a while, the grownups chatted, and we ran into my cousin who was there with her two kids, so it wasn’t really bad at all.

After plague central the play area, we grabbed a bite at the food court and then rode the carousel, to which I said, “there’s a carousel in the mall?” From the time it opened until the time I actually got a job in the mall, I practically lived there. Now it seems like years since I was last there. And being there makes me feel old. Not only do I look like a mom walking around holding hands with cute little Alex (who complimented me on my shoes, what a gentleman), but most of the punks hanging around the mall are probably young enough the BE my kids! It’s painful to realize that not only do you refer to yourself as a grownup (and in the third person for some reason) but you actually ARE a grownup.  Sigh…

Early Sunday afternoon, Luke and I went for a walk down by the river to see how much the recent rains had changed things. It was beautiful and stark and everything was bright and icy, it was a nice time for a walk. Today, I’m sure it’s all different.

We got pounded last night with another big rain storm and another several inches of the wet stuff. Around 1:30am I woke up because I thought I heard something. Usually I just ignore what I thought I heard and go back to bed, but this time I just felt uneasy and I couldn’t fall back to sleep. I rolled over and looked at the clock, then realized that the house was really dark. You don’t realize how much light all of your various electronic things put out until you lose power. The alarm clock face wasn’t lit, the glowing power button on the computer in the office wasn’t casting a glow into the hallway. The light from the answering machine and the clock on the stove weren’t lit. The power was out AGAIN and the house was pitch dark.

I looked out toward the closest neighbor’s house and it looked like his power was out, too. Up on the street, I can usually see a streetlight or two through the trees - nothing. Even the lights on route 6, which you can usually make out in the dark during the winter with no leaves on the trees, they were out, too.  I grabbed my cell phone, threw a log on the fire, found a flashlight and climbed back into bed.  Then I started thinking.  What are the chances that anyone else is up at 1:30am to notice that the power is out and call the power company?  If I wait until the neighbors call, it could be morning before it’s fixed.  So I called.  Connecticut Light & Power has an automated hotline where you can call and report an outage or check the status of one.  I entered my information, they told me I was the first one to report the outage, thank you for calling, I hung up and went back to sleep.

An hour later I woke up to Molly barking her head off at the gigantic CL&P truck coming up our driveway.  I grabbed her and we watched to see what in the world this guy was doing.  He put his ridiculous strobe lights on (because, you know there’s a lot of traffic to watch for when you’re parked a quarter mile down a private dirt driveway) and he came to the side of the house to look at our meter.  He looked up in the woods with his flashlight (our power lines are underground, by the way) then came to the door and - at 2:30am - knocked.  I opened the door and appeared in all the glory you’d expect for someone who should have been asleep at this time, I said hello, he looked at me and said, I kid you not, “you’ve got no power here.”  Ya think??  He asked for help locating our transformer, then asked if he could drive over our flooded, muddy lawn.  I was too tired to complain and I really wanted to get the power back on so I said fine.

I went back and laid in bed and started to think… why is he looking at my transformer?  Was it not obvious that the entire western side of Andover is dark.  Now I understand that it’s 2:30 in the morning, but there are streetlights and glowing doorbell buttons, and no house is truly ever dark.  So why is he checking MY transformer?  Shouldn’t he be looking at the lines on the street?  Whatever, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.  Another while later the big truck comes backing toward the house and attempts to back up next to my little car and I get to see strobe lights in my bedroom, hear Molly barking like an idiot, and listen to reverse beepers for the next five minutes of the 27-point turn it took him to turn around.   Then he left, it was 3am, the power was still off, but at least it was quiet and I could fall back to sleep.

A short while later I heard the delightful beep of the answering machine and the microwave as the power miraculously came back on.  I was happy, I set my alarm clock from the time on my cell phone and fell back to sleep smiling.  And then the strobe lights were back.   What the??  Mr. CL&P was back in the driveway, but was nice enough not to drive over the lawn again, instead he walked back to the transformer, for what reason I do not know, then got in his truck and left once again.  It’s now 4am.

I fell back to sleep and woke up at 6am.  I turned the TV on and figured I’d relax for another hour before my alarm went off at 7.  Not really paying much attention to the TV, the weather came on just before my alarm was set to go off and the weather guy said it was 7:56am.  WHAT?  It’s supposed to be 6:56, not 7:56.  I’m an hour late!

So needless to say, I’m not in the best shape today.  It’s taken a while just to type this because I can’t seem to spell or focus for more than a few minutes in a row.  I left the house without my glasses on, but luckily remembered before I got too far from home (no wonder everything looked blurry).  I seriously need some more sleep.  How do you new moms do it?  One night of getting up every couple of hours and I can barely manage to breathe and blink at the same time.  I have big hopes of getting more than two consecutive hours of sleep tonight, I might just get them here at my desk today the way things are going.