February, 2003

Lunch break. I’m actually starving today, and I’m not sure why. Also, it’s cold again. Does the weather not realize that it’s practically March? What happened to springtime and sun and warmth? Ugh. Been rainy and dreary for days. And cold. I just overnuked my lunch, which was pizza. Yuck. It’s too hard to eat. Woe is me. Actually, I’d just as soon eat poptarts anyways. I didn’t really want the pizza, it was just the oldest leftover in the fridge this morning and I felt obligated to eat it. Our fridge is as full of leftovers as our house is empty of people. I don’t know if it’s all those years in Nepal or what but my brother’s family, though they can eat quite a lot of food, suffer from “their eyes are bigger than their stomachs” syndrome. They’re gone, after much wailing and gnashing of teeth. No one likes to get their flight delayed, I can totally sympathize with that, but they really acted like it was the end of the world. Like they were never going to get back to Argentina and if they had to spend one more second in this horrible place (the U.S.) with these horrible people (us) they would lose all hope of ever seeing the light again. None of this is hyperbole, by the way, or even mild exaggeration. “I hope we never have to come back here again,” was a phrase uttered by everyone in my brother’s family at some point in the last 48 hours except the youngest child, Abby. She may have said it too, and I just didn’t hear it. However, they should be safely home by now, and this is great news for all of us. I’ve been extra super plus busy this week with my parents leaving and my brother and his family staying here and going back and forth to the airport and various and sundry things so I haven’t done any writing either on cualcotel or my blog or Sophia’s webpage. Heck, I haven’t even played Animal Crossing, so you know I’ve been busy. We’re also all still somewhat sickly with that congestion thing, which we haven’t had time to fully recover from.

I have a list of things to write about Sophia as long as arm. The filename for this entry (not that you can see any of the filenames, but I know what they are) is phrases3.txt. Why is that? Because the last two entries I meant to write something about phrases and failed to. Maybe today I’ll finally get to it. If not, without a doubt, the filename for the next entry will be phrases4.txt

I had another dream that I remember, and while the thought of posting it didn’t really embarrass me, it was rather sexually graphic and I could easily see it being potentially embarrassing to a reader. So I’m again trying to figure out what I should do about that. I’m considering posting it behind a username/password, so that no one stumbles on them by accident. Or maybe a standard paper journal is the best place for my dreams. I thought it might be easier to organize them if I had them online. I even had thoughts of a database, with keywords and subject categories and a date field. That was probably overly ambitious thinking on my part, though. I have grand schemes, I just lack on the execution of them sometimes. At any rate, if you have any ideas or suggestions about my dream journal and what form it should take, write me and tell me what you think.

Pause while I peruse the Nanoedmo page wondering if I should begin surgery on Cualcotel.

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We’ve fallen off the internet at work and I feel like a blind person. I keep thinking “Oh well, since I can’t do that I’ll just look up this thing on the net. No wait. Ok, well, since I can’t do that, I’ll just check my email. No wait. Oh, well, I’ll be able to know when my co-worker that can call the people who can fix this gets in because I’ll see him on AIM. No wait. Oh well then I can just ftp these files home….” and so on, and so forth. It’s very strange indeed.

Well, it’s funny what your mind does to you. Maybe you remember last week how I talked a big game about posting my dreams to the blog yadda yadda and how fun this would be etc., etc. and I posted the dream about the house falling apart. Well, three nights in a row I’ve had dreams that were too terrible for me to post here. I wrote them down, of course (though I have to admit I was hesitant to do even that), but I can’t bring myself to post them publicly. The first night’s dream was just weird and embarrassing and made me think, ugh, rather not go into that. My reluctance was then rewarded by two nights of truly violent and horrific dreams, each worse than the last which I am even more reluctant to post, but which I dutifully wrote down in one of my notebooks. Last night was the final revenge, I suppose, because I can’t remember my dreams at all, so it’s like back to square one. Not sure what I’m going to do about that. I suppose part of the blame can be laid at the feet of Nyquil, since for a couple of those nights (not sure which ones, to be honest) I was under the influence. Still trying to get rid of this darned persistent congestion, you see. Still, I suppose I’m going to have to commit to either posting the dreams or not. Undecided.

Today is the day my parents are going back to Argentina. We are all going to miss them, I know, but my concern is mostly for Sophia, who I’m not sure understands what is going on. I’ve explained to her that nono and nona are going away, and we did lots more hugs this morning than we normally do, but I know she’ll ask for them frequently in the next few days. Her developing mind is such that she remembers people even when they are not present. “Where ducky?” she might ask me or “Where daddy?”. I know I’ll be hearing “Where nono? Where nona?” and see her little shape toddling over to the closed door where they stay with her hand extended towards the knob, looking for them. She’ll get used to it, of course, but even that is bittersweet. So she stops asking for them, is that any better? They’ll be gone for a year, that’s an infinitely long time for a small toddler mind, and by the time they get back she will have to meet them all over again. She’s been very fortunate to have this time of closeness and sharing with them. She has relished them, though not because she understood this time together would be brief. Children are wonderful creatures.

I’m doing other things while composing this entry, including mp3 management. No net access means no Shasradio, so that I’m on my own musically as well as everything else. Fortunately, I’m armed with a good many mp3s. Listening to them makes me cringe when I see them labeled “Track 08″ and so forth. So I don’t think I’ve talked much about Shasradio here before. Shasradio is an internet streaming radio run by a friend of mine. He has around 60 gigs of mp3s, mostly in the areas of techno, rock and alternative. What makes his radio different from any of the zillions of internet radios out there? I’ll tell you what : the ratings. If you’re logged in to the radio when you listen, you have the ability to rate songs according to love, like, dislike and hate. Each of these ratings has a weight, which means that when the code my friend wrote to pick the songs adds up the ratings, songs that are negatively rated aren’t picked. In other words, you control what’s played by your ratings. Is that cool or what? Of course you can be outvoted, which means I have to listen to the dreadful, dreadful Smiths all the time, since the majority of listeners have rated that whining drama queen Morrisey’s songs positively, but it’s still a neat concept. The radio also allows you to have one request queued at a time, so you can actually hear exactly what you want every once in a while. There’s also a chatroom, where you can discuss the songs playing as well as countless other topics. Not only that, listeners can actually upload music they like to the radio. You get one upload per day. Anyways, most of the handful of readers I have are probably already Shasradio listeners, but if you’ve never tried it, you definitely ought to check it out. Consider this my go check this out link for the day.

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I’m writing this to make lunchtime get here faster. I’m starving, despite the fact that I just ate most of a candy bar (it wasn’t a very good candy bar, much to my disappointment). My head still feels oogy. I’m just not recovering from this as quickly as I’d like to. Last night was our ninth anniversary, and we did nothing just as planned. Nothing at all. On Friday we might go out to Bruno’s for dinner. We’re exchanging very, very small presents (CD size and COST, we both promised). Next year, on year 10, we’ll have to have a big bash. My friend, Dave and his wife are married 10 years this year and they are going to England to celebrate. I can’t decide whether to ask for a trip to England or a big honking diamond. Or both. Hopefully next year we won’t be in the financial dire straits that we are this year and we can reward each other with money to equal our love and gratitude. I don’t know whether I’ve ever stated this in my journal, but my husband is the best man ever. I wouldn’t trade him for another human being, living or dead. Time goes on, and maybe I start to take him for granted some, but I rely on him so much and I need him so much and I love him so much and he never fails to make me smile. He’s the shoreline to my tide. I sway and come in and go out and change every day, but he ever remains steadfast, holding me up and anchoring me to the world. I am truly blessed to be able to share even a year of life together with him, much less nine. As usual when I stop to contemplate how fortunate I am, I cannot help but also feel undeserving. I did nothing to get the greatest guy ever.

Lucky again! It’s lunchtime! More later.

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I’m lying in bed. I’m no sicker than I was yesterday, but I’m no better either. I feel all stuffed up and disconnected, the kind of stuffed up and disconnected that makes you have weird dreams. When I was in high school (a long, long time ago) I used to keep a very faithful dream journal. It was interesting, and my dreams rewarded me by becoming more vivid and easier to remember the more I wrote about them. On and off, I have thought about this and missed it. Someone I know from Shasradio was putting her dreams into her LiveJournal and when I told her that I found those entries the most interesting, she started a separate dream livejournal, which you can read here. I check it fairly regularly, I’m going to try and do the same, I think. If I succeed, I might branch the dream journal away from the blog, but atm, since I’m so tentative, I’m just going to jot my dreams down here when I remember them.

I remember two things from last night. One is a strange thing that happens to me regularly, although I can’t remember having had it happen to me in several years now. I wake to the sound of someone calling my name, usually insistently. I think I can hear their voice even as I am waking. Last night, the voice was my mother’s. When I woke, I waited, to see if the call would come again, but of course, it didn’t. Strangely enough, last night was the first night in months that my parents have spent away from the house. When I was a child, this phenomenon would happen to me in waking too, I would hear voices, calling my name. I would often look for my mother and ask her, “Did you just call me?” She’d assure me that she had not. After a while, she developed an answer to my common question: “Well, if you hear it again, say ‘Speak, Lord, thy servant listens.’” This is a reference to Samuel, for those of you not biblically inclined. He is alone in the temple and God keeps calling out to him. Who is calling me? What is it they want?

Both cats are in the bed with me. The dog just sighed deeply. He’s curled up near the window. It’s good to have company when you are sick.

In the other dream, we were renting a house (which we weren’t living in for some reason, or had just moved out of) from the Cain’s. The Cain’s are the people whom we bought our new house from. Something was wrong though, and repairs were needed. I walked down this long, narrow hallways (like the hallway in the apartment we lived in in Argentina) to the back room and showed my mom the plaster on the wall that was peeling. As I touched it, the whole wall fell away to reveal the brick beneath. Now we can see that the damage is not just superficial but structural, for there in the brick wall are missing and torn out bricks.

That’s all I remember. I took a bath earlier, and it felt great and my nostrils opened up and I could breathe. Now, though, I’m all stopped up again, which is bothersome. I was planning to nap here with the kitties after I wrote down my dreams, but now I don’t know if I’ll be able to sleep with all this congestion. Ugh.

Oh! Well, either my cache on Galeon is playing mad tricks on me, or Neil Gaiman went back in time to post on his journal. He’s been posting all week! I swear I hard refreshed the thing! Lots to catch up on. Yay. Oh. OK. His website was acting up. I am not insane, the posts weren’t there when I tried to read them. That’s reassuring.

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I’m feeling a little oogy today. My head is all stuffed up. Blech. I’m at work, but I’m not really sure how long that will last. No writing last night either, felt oogy then, too. My boss said I sounded like someone who needs “to be prone”. He’s funny.

I wish Neil Gaiman would update his blog already. It’s been over a week! I wonder whether anyone gets impatient with me when I don’t update in weeks.

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Well, this past weekend was rough. Sophia has moved into full on tantrum mode now, and I kind of thought that wouldn’t happen for a few months. Sometimes things just get her out of sorts and once there nothing will bring her back from screaming and wailing. No distraction, no consoling, no comforting works. It’s almost like a question of waiting her out. But that’s really, really hard. I thought it was just happening to me, because she seems to prefer Kurt so much and behave so well for him. This weekend though he said it happens to him too. So what do you do? I ask him. I just leave her, he says. Oh, I say. Me too. Only I keep coming back to check on her. Not me, he says. I wait until she comes to find me. Well. She has legs. They work. Maybe that’s what I should be doing as well. Plus we should be consistent. And should have probably talked about it earlier. Communication. Very important. So that was the lesson. Learn to tell each other what is going on with Sophia.

Also, tell Sophia what’s going on. The fact that she understands everything we say means that if we discuss things when she’s not paying attention or in her absence and are then suddenly suiting up and getting in the car without having told her where we are going flips her out. As does reaching over to wipe her nose without having told her in advance this is about to happen.

She is too big for the high chair. She could probably still sit in it, but her feet get stuck putting her into it and taking her out of it, resulting in lots of complaints about “Stuuuuucky!”. Now she sits at the dinner table with us in a regular chair with a phone book. I think she likes this better, because it’s more like what we do. She’s really interested in imitating everything we do. She loves to put my shoes on anytime I take them off. I always thought that walking in someone else’s shoes thing was kind of metaphorical, but apparently, if you’re a toddler, it’s pretty literal. I wonder if she thinks walking in my shoes makes her think like me, or be like me, or look like me.

Last night I blew up a balloon for her. There were left over balloons from her birthday last year that had been sitting in a drawer in the kitchen at the old house. In a sweep and dump of several drawers and cabinets from the kitchen of the old house last week the balloons found their way here. She had a complete blast with this. She kept kicking it and throwing it and laughing uproariously. She was especially delighted by the fact that Sergei seemed a little scared by it. He’d dodge around it and try to always stay facing it. He was mostly playing, in that way he does with the vacuum cleaner. When I had her show Kurt later in the evening how she played with the balloon he said, “This is great! We should tape this!” I agree, we should. Despite the fact that according to a friend of mine I “take documenting your kid to new levels of tediousness” I often feel like too much is going without being recorded. It will all be washed away and forgotten if I don’t write it down, photograph it, hook up microphones and tape it, or get the video camera and make a movie out of it. And it’s worth recording, because it’s all so wonderful and life-affirming. Not because it’s Sophia, particularly, though that makes it extra good for us, but because it’s a child growing up in the world, learning new things every day and fascinated by it all. Anyways, there’s no movie except in our minds of Sophia chasing that balloon, kicking it away from herself, chasing it further and laughing continuously, but there ought to be.

The time when my parents are supposed to leave is almost here, and it’s like it sneaked up on me. I don’t want them to go. It’s going to be really rough on Sophia too, I think. She’s grown accustomed to seeing them every day, to going back in their section of the house for visits. Sometimes she takes my father by the hand and just leads him around the house, showing him her toys and things, pointing to her beloved atlas (another rescue from the old house) or her bears or random things. He always drops whatever he’s doing to go with her, and it’s so sweet.

OK, so I don’t know how much more time I have to write on this today, so to make sure I don’t forget what I was going to say I’m making yet another list of things to write about. Think of it as stuff to look forward to reading about!

• song enjoyment (deep and wide, old McDonald)
• bear going to daycare daily
• cualcotel progress
• hop on pop chase game
• stinky socks game
• politics and war (maybe, if i feel like ranting)
• links? that would be novel, i don’t do that much (maybe bookcrossing and swappingtons)

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Blah. Even with new improved everything in one place I just found a lost Diary entry. I had written one on January 23, only I had apparently started Vim from a different directory than I normally do, so it was saved not where I would normally look for such things and so I just found it now when I was organizing my directories a little. and I inserted it in the appropriate place, so if you are reading this thinking you have read everything before this entry you might want to go back to January 23. Then again, you might not. Anyways, I think I’ve got a system, and if I can just remember to start Vim in the Documents directory, maybe this won’t happen again. I’m pretty pleased though that I seem to be getting at least one entry in a week, despite a pretty busy schedule.

Last weekend Kurt’s parents came to visit. They had a great time with Sophia on Saturday, but by Sunday she’d gotten overtired and clingy and had started to be sick with a raging flu that’s spreading around like wildfire. According the papers roughly 10 percent of kids have been out of school in the last week with this thing. One of my co-workers took his child to the doctor, and the office was so busy that at first they told him they wouldn’t be able to see her. At any rate, the grandparents brought Sophia a great toy. It’s one of those cubes with the wires and the beads with the holes in them all over like you see at Doctor’s offices all the time. Sophia loves it. She also got a “bier! bier!” (bear, bear) from her Aunt Kelly, as well as a couple of books for her ever increasing library. It was quite a delightful visit, except perhaps too short. It would have been nice if they could have stayed another couple of days and gotten to spend a little more time with Sophia.

So Sophia went to Toddler B classes this week. Well, the days she went to daycare, anyways. She didn’t go Wednesday or Thursday. She seems to be thriving there, and she gets to do so many different kinds of activities. When I took her in on Friday, the teachers expressed concern that she hadn’t been there and said they had been so worried that they tried to call and check on her! This is so sweet to me.

For a long time most of Sophia’s vocabulary concerned either animals or food. She had some interest in objects (ball, heart, coat, hat, house) and in body parts, but by far she knew more food names and animal names than anything else. Now, she is learning about emotions and states of being. These new words are so exciting, because they demonstrate an awareness of changes that occur to herself and her environment. So I’ll take her into her room and she’ll say to me, in a whisper, “it’s daaaaaaaaahk. Scary.” She doesn’t actually seem to be scared, by the way. “Yes,” I tell her,”It is dark. Let me turn on a light.” So I’ll flip on the light and she’ll say “Light! Light!” and grin. She’s also conscious of her body, not just that parts of it have names, but that it changes as time goes on. “Sticky,” she tells me after eating, holding her hands out to be wiped. “Messy,” she tells me when she spills something on her clothes. “Stuuuuuuuuucky!” she cries in dismay when she can’t get her feet out of the high chair as I’m pulling her out, or when her arm gets tangled in the car seat belt. “Wet!” she cries with delight after splashing her hand repeatedly into Sergei’s water bowl. The other day she kept getting dismayed because her sweat pants, which have elastic ankles would ride up to around her knees and then stay there. “Stucky!” she would say, tugging at her pant legs. Once I’d fixed them, she’d get up and be on her way, perfectly satisfied.

I’m at work today. It’s my Saturday to work the reference desk. We’re in a bit of a weird situation at work, where they admonish us against getting too much comp time, but schedule us in such a way that we can’t help but accrue it. They don’t want us to have too much comp time because when it comes time to move into the new building they don’t want us to take time off. On the other hand they have so many things they want completed before the move (in some cases complete reorganizations of collections) that they can’t be completed within normal work hours. Not that this is either here nor there. I just come to work do my thing and leave and don’t worry about it too much. The reason I mention it though, is because the search room is freezing and my hands are cold and I’m having trouble typing. Also, there are hardly any people here because of the rodeo. The rodeo is down the street and all the roads are blocked off and it’s really hard to get to the building or the parking lot. There’s four people in the search room, total. I’ve had to pull five items for one person, and my co-worker has pulled a similar amount for someone else. And that’s pretty much it. Dead. quiet. Hence why I’m writing right now. Kind of pleasant, actually, to be able to write basically uninterrupted. The rodeo is on my list by the way, for being a nuisance that makes it hard for me to get to work and making our local hockey team have two solid months of away games. But that’s another story for another day.

Sophia is completely weaned of morning feedings now. With only the nightly feeding left, I no longer have to pump at work and this is a great joy. I put all the parts away in a box and sealed it up and it’s going in the attic. Hurray! In fact, the last Saturday that I worked back in November or whenever, I was still having to pump, and it was quite awkward to explain why I might be longer than 15 minutes on my break. Still, all done with that now. Yay!

Sophia is beginning to throw some of those terrible two tantrums, now. She’ll get angry or upset and just wail and holler and flail about and there’s NOTHING you can do but let her get her waaah-waaahs out. Yesterday she asked Kurt for milk coming out of daycare and when he said no she started to scream like a banshee. She wailed the whole drive home and my dear husband said he was more than a little concerned that child services was going to pull up along beside him and cart her away. The day before that, she threw a full-on tantrum at me when I refused to let her watch television. I guess it’s a test of whether she can get her way by screaming like an air raid siren. We do try to placate her a lot, but I don’t think either one of us is the type to give in on tantrums, so maybe she’ll learn the lesson quickly and spare us all a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth. We’re really putting a lot of effort into rewarding her when she makes herself clear to us. “uhhhhhhhuuuuuuuuuhuuuuuuuh” with outstretched arms gets nothing from us but one solitary “up” makes us pick her up. If she says “help” or signs it we rush over there to help her. Sometimes when she starts to get frustrated with a toy, I prompt her,”Do you need help?” and she lights up and signs help which is very satisfying. We want her to know that if she makes herself clear to us and we can provide it, that we will. Well, except she can’t watch television 24/7. Not even if she asks for it as clear as a bell. As we often say to her, half-jokingly and half-sympathetically, “Life’s hard when you’re a baby.”

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