Month:
March, 2003
Finally back. Finally holding my iBook again. Finally slept in my own bed again last night. Many things to do today, all related to attempting to close on our old house. If everything gets done and everything goes well, we should have a nice wad of cash in hand at the end of today (it will dissipate pretty quickly when applied to the debts we’ve accrued in the last six months but paying down debts will be nice, too). We should also be free of our second mortgage (not to mention our second house) and be able to stop living quite so hand to mouth and month to month. I’m not going to work since I am going to be so busy getting the last minute things (which we could have done this past weekend had we not been out of town) done.
When we got back our yard was just gorgeously in bloom. There’s azaleas everywhere in all these different colors, and the wisteria that practically sold me the house is hanging directly above my bedroom window with its million little grape cluster flowers. I can’t wait to go out there and breathe in the delicious scent of my childhood. Even the front yard has these jonquils or something all flowering like nobody’s business. A bunch of tulip looking things in red and yellow popped up where I didn’t think anything had been planted. Hurray for buying a house from gardeners and hurray for perrenials.
The trip was good. The wedding was nice. The best thing of all was that Sophia was just stellar. Instead of her standard 90 percent of the time good behavior rate she outdid herself with somewhere in the 95-97 percentile. She had very few and very minor meltdowns, mostly when we were late getting her to her naps or getting her to bed. Once in the airport on the way home. However, in none of the airplanes were we the parents with that baby. We did rely pretty heavily on the pacifier, too, but we’re still quite pleased and quite proud of our not quite two-year-old girl. Many, many kind people commented to us about how well behaved our baby was. An inordinate number told us how beautiful she was. So much so that Kurt asked me at one point, “Is Sophia just prettier than other babies?” I told him that I didn’t think so, that people a – are being nice and b – like babies. I mean, yeah, she’s cute, but very few babies her age aren’t. She was shy some of the time, but she’d also flirt and smile coyly at people, so I think she really enjoyed the attention. She looked magnificent in her little dress too. The photographer got a GREAT picture of her sitting in Kurt’s lap at the reception. And, the photographer had a sweet setup, too. She had a standard SLR and a slick, slick digital camera. The kind that takes standard SLR lenses that I always drool over but costs a zillion dollars. Of course, that’s her livelihood too, so naturally she has good quality instruments. Anyways, she’d also brought her Mac, and it was the lamp looking one. So about halfway through the reception she downloaded a bunch of the pictures so that people could come by and check them out. It was really cool. She had a real keen eye for both the posed and the candid pictures. I was commenting about how nicely the pictures came out and she was saying that she had a really cute one of Sophia and I told her I had seen it and she looked at me and said “But I don’t have one of you and your daughter.” Believe me, I had noticed that too, with some relief, actually. I was all yeah, that’s alright, I’m not the one getting married, etc. But to no avail. She followed me around and took a picture of me and Sophia dancing to “Love Shack” by the B-52s. I’m probably going to have my mouth open singing, “….where we can GET TOGETHER!” Still, if there’s only one picture of me in the entire batch of 300 or so, I can still be relatively anonymous, right?
We discovered that Sophia has almost outgrown the playpen and that we’ll need some other place for her to sleep when we go to Switzerland.
The site of the wedding was really beautiful. Sophia had a blast walking around in the small garden. She learned two new words “fountain” and “statue” and was delighted when I picked her up and she could see that the bowl of the fountain had water in it. “Wa-wa! Wa-wa!”she exclaimed. She kept dragging me out there to look at it over and over again.
Of the weddings I have been to, this one was probably the most formal. It’s the only night time wedding I have been to in this country. Kurt looked soooooo good in his tux. He always does, he has the perfect frame for it. I was probably underdressed, but I don’t think anyone noticed or cared, and I did the best I could considering I had to keep up with Sophia. There was this cute teenage girl who was standing off by herself that I talked to quite a bit. She was wearing a long purple and black velvety goth looking dress and I thought it quite suited her.
Of the weddings I have been to, this one was also the most disorganized. They desperately, desperately needed one of those wedding planner people. Not having been in the wedding party, when I mentioned that this wedding seemed disorganized to people more directly involved I got a lot of “you don’t know the half of it”. For example, I was told like a thousand times that I would be seated near the wedding party, so that Kurt and I would sort of be nearby. Everytime we were told this I assured the groom and bride that it didn’t matter, that it would be ok and that I would sit wherever. Still, they insisted that I was going to be sitting near Kurt and that it had all been very carefully arranged. Of course, you will know before I even get it typed that I was seated at the furthest possible table from Kurt. You will also know that it didn’t really matter and I didn’t really care, but that gives you an idea of what a zoo things were. Ultimately though, like all weddings, well-planned or not, they were married and people had a good time. Which is, I suppose, all that counts, right?
I did take my paper journal, but I didn’t write a single word in it.
In a moment I will be jumping into the shower. There’s a long, long day ahead of us. We’re going out to Virginia for our friend Jerm’s wedding. Sophia will be taking her second plane ride ever, and her first with all the new security measures. Last time she was so small that the vibrations of the engine put her to sleep for most of the ride. Now she’s a rambunctious toddler, and I’m not sure containing her will be easy. At any rate, the flurry of new speedy updates is going to be at an end until I return, I’m afraid, unless I can manage to get to an internet cafe or a library (don’t count on it). My beloved iBook would normally be right there with me but since I busted the charger (enabling my first encounter with exorbitant Mac hardware prices, I’ve been quoted everything from 120 to 180 dollars to replace it) and I have a loaner from UserFriendly (my local apple oriented store), I’m afraid to go gallivanting about the country with it. To be accurate, Sophia busted the charger when I carelessly left the laptop in a place which enabled her to knock it over and get the charger pin hopelessly bent. I have quite a number of things to do before we leave the house in about 90 minutes, so even though I have a number of things I’d like to write about Sophia just now, it’s going to have to wait. I hope everyone finishes out the week well and has a good weekend.
Maybe I’ll take my paper journal!
I’m listening to war coverage on NPR. I have felt ambivalent about listening to the news. I’m really not interested in a blow by blow take on the war. It’s particularly annoying to hear news only about the war. I want to know all the same things I heard about before the war : business, health, science and politics. Furthermore, I don’t want to know the harsh and gritty details of the war. On the other hand, I am concerned about people, about our troops, and I don’t want to be completely ignorant of what is happening. As is usual for me, I am getting all my news on the web and through NPR, so I’m sure I have a disjointed view of what is going on. I have not seen maps, I have not seen any footage, I have seen only one or two stills. It struck me as odd the other day when, as I was listening to journalists asking whether Bush had watched bombings on TV and were told that Bush didn’t really watch much TV but that he had been briefed, they acted shocked and dismayed. As if the war can’t be understood unless seen on video. As if the war can’t be understood if not seen through the journalistic filter.
I’m encouraged by the dedication and determination of our forces. I know that our military are just regular folk and that some of them are dying. I know there have been and will be civilian casualties. It’s clear, however, that they are trying very, very hard to be precise, to minimize damage, and I’m sure that these efforts make operations more difficult and probably more dangerous for them.
One last observation on the war. I find it interesting that, even though it’s rather clear that there’s no connection between the Iraqi regime and the September 11th terrorist attacks and direct connection between Al-Qaeda and Hussein seem fuzzy at best, the Iraqi military are using a number of tactics that might be favorably called “guerrila” and unfavorably called “terrorist”. Surrendering and then ambushing our troops, hiding gear in hospitals, pushing a line of civilians out ahead of their advancing troops and so on and so forth. It makes me wonder how many mental what-if games Hussein has been playing since the last Gulf War and how much that has made him switch from standard battle tactics to these more desperate maneuvers.
Congratulations to my friend Michael Dunlap who welcomed a new child (a girl named Isabella Beata) to his life yesterday! Blessings on you and your family.
Well, I’ve done some work on the calendar. I’m not sure whether it’s too small to be useful or not. We’ll see. I also changed the number of entries showing on one page to 6. The default was 15, but the standard length of my entries made that way too many. I’m not convinced that 6 is not too few, but again, I suppose we’ll see. Entries since I got the blogging software have been consistently shorter.
I decided not to eliminate the title, but to only post an entry with a title if I feel moved to do so. Most entries will undoubtedly lack titles.
Yesterday was mad hectic, and shortly after I posted that everything about the house sale was going well it started, predictably, to go horribly awry. Just thinking about it makes me all tense and stressed and angry, so I’m not going to go into details at the moment, but suffice it to say that I find it almost preferable to not sell the house at this point and just walk away from the whole thing.
I added the calendar plugin at some point last week and forgot to mention it. I’m happy with it and want it, but I’m having difficulty situating it in a way that pleases me. I suppose that ideally it would hang out on the left with the other navigational items, but it’s far larger than those and I’m not sure I can get it down to a manageable size. Expect much fiddling and moving around of the calendar in the near future. Also expect some fiddling around with the comments, to better set them apart, perhaps add the date on which they were posted and limit the number that are displayed on the front page. Still to do : fixes for some of the displays (most notably the item display) that still seem to break the css and shove the right panel with the pics to the bottom.
Wow! It’s been a busy day, and doesn’t show any signs of letting up. It’s starting to look like our house is really going to get sold after all. We’re having the termite inspection and stuff like that done, so it seems like the last leg of this long journey. Closing is set for March 31.
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This blog, Among Mad People, and its contents by Anna Schwind are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.