word of the day: splitter (and variations thereof)

Yesterday morning started off early at 9 a.m. (what are people thinking?!) with a tv/phone/internet technician coming over to install some equipment. All he needed us to do was find a cord splitter buried in one of the walls of our house. Rrrright. My dad had wired the house himself when we built nearly two decades ago, and sorry kid, but that particular neuron channel in the brain must've split off from the other house-building memories and become grown over with more useful data - like, well, anything. Nevertheless, we searched low and high, moved boxes and beds, and Dad undid any wall plates that were not electric. Never did find the splitter, so the guy drilled a new hole in the house. Just a giant drill, all the way from the inside to the out, within 20 seconds. Snaps you right out of the sense of security and castle-ness you have about your home, know what I mean?
*
Then the folks, Zoralee and I went to check out a Winnebago at an auction, just for kicks and giggles. Turned out to not be ideal for our extended family, with some of the work it'd need, but it's hard to keep this bunch of people from viewing, googling, carfacts.com-ing, bluebooking, NADA-ing, talking and dreaming about vehicles in general, but especially road trip vehicles. We want to know what options you've got for pottying on the go, cooking on the go, sleeping on the go, making good gas mileage, listening to music or books on cd, and storing all our stuff. If we can look like the Clampetts while we're doing it, bonus.

Zoralee and I then split off and headed to town, where I split from Zoralee, leaving her with Aunt Heather for fun and games while I visited my friend in an extended care place. K requested to have her nails cut, which I was thrilled to do; I figured cutting nails on anybody less wiggly than Zoralee would be easy. But my lands, I've never seen more heartier nails on a human being! However she's getting her calcium, it's working. She'd offered to soak her nails first, but knowing nothing about nail care, I just started in with what she provided me - toenail clippers. Bits of keratin flew all over the room like shrapnel. An innocent nurse got "nailed" in the eye. That's not true, but yuckity yuck anyway. It was good, clean fun. If I didn't take itsy bitsy bites at a time, K ended up with splitters down the nail. Ouchers!!, plus they would no doubt snag on clothing later. We got the splitters filed down to a reasonable smoothness with a file K had won at Bingo.

Then it was back to Luke and Heather's, where Luke and I worked on several split tracks for one of his songs. That was really great, and it got me jazzed up to record some of my songs, as well as sew, and organize, and finish photo projects, and make astounding meals, and, and, and. It's funny how breaking out of your routine to do something creative makes you feel like Superwoman for about an hour. Superwoman with glasses, of course. And speaking of glasses and splitting, I went the whole day without a splitting headache - good because I'm wearing old glasses whilst my current ones are in for repair.

And now I close with the only pics of the day, Z and Heather in the studio listening to Luke lay down a vocal track. By the way, Zoralee now calls Uncle Luke, "Unk." It is presch and a half.

classic listening faces. . .expressing creative ideas

bye bye, love

at the train station in the early morning last week,

letting loose of J for awhile(he's carrying a duffel bag, just turning toward the train door)

zoralee - teeth, hollers, and all

zoralee's month back in montana

- getting reacquainted with the chickens -

just after this photo, Z broke into a high squeal of fear;

enclosed spaces aren't very good for reintroductions

but she loves the eggs!

a cool speckled one

This red rocking chair belonged to my Grandpa Gene when he was a baby.

Z is the fourth generation to play with it. How special is that?!

Zoralee LOVES Grandma Rena. She's saying "Gah-ma" with ever-increasing clarity,

and she'll nearly always choose her over me (HER OWN MOTHER). It's a bit ridiculous.

Here, despite Grandma's protests, Z knows she's got milk-making goods somewhere in there.

Zoralee is a phone talker. Boy, howdy. A phone yeller is more like it, just like Grandpa Larry. Some imaginary conversation partner somewhere in the cosmos is getting an earful. Z talks on whatever cell or cordless phones she runs across, as well as remote controls and calculators. Perfectly reasonable. Smallish, plastic squares with buttons. But she also talks on toys, balls, dishes. Recently she held a pair of pants to her ear and said "Ah-lah," her hello. Is she imaginative or confused? How can I blame her for not knowing which household items are embedded with electronics when she found her birthday card from Nana the other day and opened it up to hear Nana's voice? It's one of those recordable cards. I tell you what - kids these days are going to grow up thinking absolutely anything is possible, anything is believable. Let's hope they put that no boundaries mindset to good use solving world puzzlers like poverty, disease, and convincing people to drive in the right lane unless they're passing. I mean it.

double-fisting

trying to figure out who is this clean shaven guy in a suitstory time with Crazy Uncle LukePeek-a-bowlI'm not sure how frogs end up in our bath pics - it's not planned that way.fingers

cardamom (this does not refer to IDing your ma for alkeehol)

I had an English instructor in college who talked a lot about cardamom. I mean, a lot. If you're like I was back then, not knowing what cardamom is, let me save you the google step: it's an Indian spice used in everything from curried dishes to baked goods to coffee. So anyway, this instructor was in love with cardamom. Her grandmother had used it all the time in family recipes, and she planned to write an entire cookbook featuring it. By now, maybe she already has. Any of you fellow Warner Pacific-ites remember her? I hated to print her whole name online, but at the moment I can't remember any of it anyway.
*
But speaking of spice, she got engaged to another professor, a guy from out of town who wrote a human sexuality textbook, in use at Warner. It was all the scuttlebutt when he came to campus to visit after their engagement. A scandalous development for a Christian college, even a liberal arts one, because what could a single man possibly know about sex ed?!
*
So for the past decade plus, cardamom has caught my eye. It appears in the darndest recipes, and I usually have some on hand, though I've just read that it's better to keep the whole seeds available to grind as needed. Not sure whether or not I'll Martha Stewart up for that one (kind of like cowboying up).
*
All of that is my intro for the photo you're about to see. You can bet your bippy I bought this gum.

One Sock Z, Fastest Cowgirl in the West

(too fast to even get a good picture)

sneeze, freeze, threes, my main squeeze, & tease

SNEEZE
I saw one of our hens sneeze. It startled me just how classic a chicken sneeze looks. Its neck was stretched out, its head nearly frozen, and all the world paused for those few seconds before the release. It sneezed four or five times in a row. Sounded about like you'd expect. I wonder which critters don't sneeze. Bugs? Do bugs have noses?

FREEZE
Our big freezer in the garage quit working sometime over the last few days. We were fortunate enough to find out before everything had thawed completely. An entire 1/2 cow is in there, hundreds of dollars of meat. Ughhh. The internet says this model was last made in 1976. That could have something to do with it. Dad joked that surely we could squeeze a little more use from it, and we actually tried the old electronic trickery of unplugging the device, plugging it back in, and waiting for a day. But, nope. So we loaded all the meat into the regular refrigerator freezers, one upstairs and one down, and took a load into town for my grandparents to freeze.

THREES
Last week I dumped a load of dirty diapers into the washer and heard some unnatural thudding. I looked in to see three eggs nestled about the diapers. I instinctively blamed Jason. Why would he do something like this? What a waste of good eggs. I asked him about it, and he instinctively thought I was crazy for assuming he would put eggs in the hamper. He did remember something though - seeing three eggs on the bottom stair a few days back. Ohhh, right! I'd set them there temporarily as I came in from outside, because I'd needed hands free to take off my coat. Then I'd forgotten about them. It seriously took us that entire line of reasoning to recall that we have a mobile toddler who loves to find and move objects. It made me so excited to introduce Easter egg hunts to Zoralee. Oh man. I am getting short of breath thinking about how fun that will be! Note to self: you wouldn't have to wait until Easter.

MY MAIN SQUEEZE
Jason has been working out two times a day, strength training and cardio stuff, for the start of his upcoming job. We have another week and a half with him before he leaves for several months of training. Boooooo for that. I'm trying to pre-adjust mentally. Like, if I go to bed before Jason, I envision him just not coming in after me. Then I get a real big knot in my stomach and change the mental subject. Every moment of time together is now extra precious. I guess each season is always precious, but you don't necessarily value it as such until you see it ending. We bought a computer camera to get set up for Skype. It was cheap. I already have a grudge against it, for one because it'll be my best link to Jason for days and nights and days and nights, and for another because it feels like cheating. I see the round ball of a camera - haven't even had the inspiration to take it from its box yet - and I know how lucky we are to live in a time when we can communicate that way. But it's not fair to the people who haven't been able to do that for ages and ages. Does anybody know the name of the psychological malady whereby you constantly feel horrid for living such a privileged life? I think I've got it.

TEASE
Pics of Zoralee are next on my agenda for blogging. Ooh, I may be able to get one on now, real quick.

you know another season of 24 is playing when...

• ...your dad offers this tag-on after the supper prayer and Amen have been said: "And please help Jack Bauer to kill about a million bad guys."

• ...you're no longer a simple stay at home mom walking down the stairs with a laundry basket in arm; you're a disheveled, jaded, under cover spy between gigs, wondering who might be watching you through the windows.

a few sweet memories of the pregnancy

Back when I was pregnant with Zoralee, I'd sometimes see another mom leaving the midwife's house as I was arriving for an appointment. She'd be really pregnant and have a toddler or two in tow, and I'd think she was so beautiful and amazing. During this recent pregnancy, I got to feel that way too! Whenever Cousin Autumn was checking for a heartbeat, I'd think, "I'm that lady. I'm the one having babies and raising babies at the same time, and the baby I'm raising gets to be part of my baby-having process."

Autumn and Zoralee playing on a birthing ball at the birthing center where A works

Here's Zoralee being weighed on a real scale (other than a bathroom scale).

Just shy of her first birthday, she was 17 pounds.

This could seem like a sad post at first glance, but I swear, I am having the best time thinking back. Being pregnant again was warm and life-ful, even though it didn't end in the birth of a baby. I day-dreampt of having children, plural. And of being a "young family," by virtue of the fact we'd have two very young kids. Ha ha ha. And of having one for me to carry and one for Jason to carry as we hiked. And of seeing in another child variations on the Zoralee theme and, of course, new themes altogether. I couldn't wait to try EC again with my hard-earned wisdom!

Even though those hopes won't be fulfilled yet, the feelings and memories don't disappear. They rattle around inside my heart from time to time. They have added to who I am. My friend Tamie sent me the Chinese proverb, "She who returns from a journey is not the same as she who left." True as can be.

being pregnant with my sister - I feel so lucky that we had this time together. So lucky!

our lost pregnancy - part III

Okay, wonderful you-people. Here is the final long post about the pregnancy I lost before Christmas. It has drug on only because I haven't had the desired time to blog. But I am not continually sad about this, as you might think by me writing on and on! There have just been too many thoughts. Sure, there are reminders that make a small, sad lurching in my stomach - today I met a woman whose baby is due 10 days after mine would've been - but I am very well.

And hey, I so appreciate your comments and emails. This ongoing conversation has been a source of mutual healing. Here are some after-thoughts, and then I'll post another email with a few happy memories of that pregnancy.

greatest comforts
Having Zoralee has been, in soooo many ways, my main comfort. I know that my body can make a baby! She is living proof of it. She also brings me/us so much impossible-to-ignore joy. Caring for her daily needs and being fascinated by her growth certainly balance out the time I'd otherwise be able to spend grieving. (I must say though, if I miscarry again before birthing another child, my grief and anxiety will probably grow exponentially.)

Getting pregnant a second time was as miraculous to me as the first. It was amazing.

saddest thoughts
Remember how in mid-November, when I would've been considered eleven or twelve weeks along, we posted the picture of Zoralee with the kumquat sign? By then, the heart of our little womb-dweller had already ceased its beating. It never reached kumquat size at all. Thinking of this specific sibling and Zoralee not getting to know each other is probably my saddest thought. I love my siblings. During childhood, I thought a lot about the other siblings I'd never know, the five my mom lost before, between, and after the four of us kids. Oddly, I remember the miscarriages, the later ones anyway, more than her successful pregnancies.

When I was 13 or 14 weeks pregnant with Zoralee, we had our first meeting with Marcy the Midwife. I told her that I would probably miscarry this baby, but that I was just so glad I could get pregnant and was glad to be in baby realm and midwife-meeting mode. I still remember her stare of confusion. She said, "WHY ON EARTH are you assuming you'll miscarry this baby?" Her look, and her explanation that it would be rare to miscarry as far along as I was, together jolted me toward reality, although I wasn't buying it 100%. Actually, until I had a baby in my arms, I assumed something would go wrong. Call me a loony toon or a pessimist; more realistically, call me somebody who has a hard time believing I could have something as cool as a baby human.

Last sad thought: wow, there were myriad mental adjustments to make, one by one, day by day. No early summer baby for us. I won't be carrying my naked little one in a sling as I do summer chores. No tandem nursing of this little one and Zoralee together. No baby cousin to match Rachel and Cam's Poppy. Booo!

Most unexpected thoughts
Several times I have started to lift something heavy and then paused out of habit. My thought process is 1. Careful, don't endanger the baby! 2. Oh....there is no baby. 3. Well, then who cares if I hurt myself? When I'm walking on ice, I'll rightly reason that slipping and hitting my bum isn't such a worry anymore. But then I go further to wonder who cares if I even survive the fall. I will occasionally even feel like my family might disown me because my productivity is slipping. Isn't this strange? I mean, being pregnant was fulfilling, but for Pete's sake, I've never considered Pregnant Lady to be a noticeable slice of my identity! I've only been pregnant for 13 months over 34 years of time. So where are these thoughts coming from about my self-worth being tied to pregnancy? Jimminies.

THE END!
(I reckon)
(Other than the next post, which'll tell my happy memories)