Of course

I have an inner ear infection, it is in both ears. Me, the adult; ear infection.

Ahem.

Bryan is in Los Angeles, again.

I am of course still working which means taking Evie to daycare/preschool at 6:45 in the morning. Then I leave work earlier than usual to pick her up in time to go home and do all the things a mother does in the evening until bedtime. Then I get to grade papers, plan for the next day, eat my dinner (cereal tonight, in case you were curious) and clean the house until finally collapsing for a few hours until she cries out, or the alarm rattles me awake.

I tell you again, single parents have the most difficult job in the entire world. They don't get to count on a spouse's eventual return; this is their daily life.

Being nice

I'm being nice today. I don't feel nice, I'm actually quite annoyed, but nonetheless, I'm being nice. I'm being nice because it's the nice thing to do. But like I said, deep down inside, I'm completely and utterly perturbed. Why? Because I'm without a husband. Again.

He was gone most of the month of August. He has been gone this past week and as a result, there was the unfortunate fence incident.

This weekend, he went on a "Men's retreat," which I thought was an event sponsored by our church, but later discovered was in fact a group of around eight guys in their early 30s from our church, hanging out at a cabin and doing whatever men do when their wives aren't around to disapprove.

Because work has been horrible for Bryan, and because he was recently diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, and because life has, in the last few months basically sucked for him, I told him it was probably a good thing that he was going on a trip to the wilderness with other men to do man things.

However, the idea was that he would return today around 1pm so that we could have a few hours of daylight together as a family and so that I could have some time by myself to prepare for the upcoming school week. You see, he leaves at 5am tomorrow to return to Los Angeles. Again.

For those playing the home game, this means he will have been gone five of the last eight weeks, leaving me a single parent transitioning in my new job; a new job as a teacher; a first-year teacher, at a new school, at the beginning of the school year.

You could say things have been a touch tense. But I have been nice, because it is necessary to maintain.

This morning at around 10:45 am, after yet another sad night of no sleep as I was up and down with our child (who has yet another ear infection,) I texted my husband to confirm his mid-day ETA. He texted me back that he should be home around 4 or 5pm. I immediately questioned how 1pm turned into 4 or 5 and he informed me that there had been a scheduling/communication snafu with the other menfolk.

About an hour later, he called me to inform me that the men had again mis-calculated their time and had missed the ferry. They would now be on the 4:45pm ferry, meaning he should be home after 8pm.

He leaves for Los Angeles tomorrow around 5am.

I am rising above, and I being nice; it is taking all the power in my being, but I am being nice.

From Billy Ray Cyrus to Dennis the Menace in five minutes

Evie's hair had become pretty unruly. I wasn't really sure what to do with it; it still hadn't grown in on the sides, but the back and top had become long and well, truth be told, the child was getting a mullet. Never was the mullet more apparent than last night when she awoke from a late, antibiotic-induced nap:


Today I took matters into my own hands and gave her a trim. It was pretty traumatic for all parties involved, my friend Marti tried to distract her, but to no avail, she cried, and cringed and wriggled around. The result, a fairly choppy Dennis the Menace style:

At least the mullet is gone.

She'll be in nothing but pink for the next two weeks. I now understand why people pay money for their children to get a professional haircut, specifically their female children who cannot just have the hair cut shorter if the cut is botched by a cheap parent's DIY attempt.

How I injured myself...again OR My husband is paranoid

A word to all would-be home invaders, don't even try our house; my husband has watched way too many episodes of "It takes a thief" on the Discovery channel and has now fortified our house with such vigor that we have crossed over into the ridiculous.So ridiculous in fact that not only can burglars or other intruders not get in, but even we, the home-owners can't enter if we need to.

We have the kind of exterior door knobs that can be opened from the inside of the house without disengaging the locks. This means in the case of a fire or other catastrophe, we can run out of the house without having to stop and first unlock the door. Great idea, right? Well sure, except that every time you open the door, say to go out into the garage, you should make sure you unlock the door first, otherwise, you may find yourself in a very precarious situation; the kind of situation I found myself in last evening.

Last night, after putting Evie to bed, I went out into the garage to check on the dogs as Bryan is out of town and thus I have to tend to his animals. It was around 8:30/8:45 pm, it had just started pouring rain outside. I fumbled with the door knob to unlock it and walked through, the door shut behind me. I called the dogs into the garage, poured food into their bowls, gave them their evening treat, locked the exterior garage door to the backyard and bid them a good evening. I walked back to the door to the house and found myself locked out.

Instead of unlocking the door, I had apparently locked it.

"No big deal," I thought. "I'll just grab the spare." Except we don't have a spare in the garage, I soon discovered.

"Okay," I thought, "I'll just open the garage door." Yeah, it has a mechanism on it that won't allow it to open, some kind of security bar that my paranoid husband had apparently installed recently. As I stood there I remember him saying something about installing a new security bar on the garage door "just pull the lever and it will pop open, no problem," he told me. It was all coming back.

I examined the shiny silver apparatus, there was a large lever on it, so I pulled. Nothing happened. I pushed, nothing happened. "It's probably spring loaded," I told myself, "you have to do something just right to get it to open," so I tugged on it some more, I tugged on every piece of shiny metal I found, I pushed, I pulled, I kicked, I punched. I screamed at it. Nothing happened. I cursed at my husband. I may have called him a paranoid idiot, I cannot really be sure.

I then dug around through the boxes and found my ski jacket and an old pair of gardening shoes, opened up the back door and made my way out into the rain, to walk through the gate and around to the front, where I would get the spare key from the locked box we have bolted in the house. I tromped through the mud, arrived at the 6' high wood gate only to find it locked, with a padlock; a padlock that requires a key. "Freaking excellent," I said.

Around to the other side of the house, to the giant car-sized gate I went, surely this would not have a padlock on it.

I was right, it didn't have a padlock on it, it had two.

The rain had really picked up at this point, and my pants were sticking to me, my hair was dripping into my eyes.

As I was trudging back and forth through the yard, the dogs were next to me, jumping around with glee, oblivious to the rain, excited at my being with them. Puck jumped and pranced back and forth at my feet through the entire ordeal, unable to contain his happiness at a person climbing around his yard in the dark. "Oh my gosh I can't believe you're out here this is so exciting why are you here this is so exciting woo hoo!!!!!"

I snarled at the dog, saying something about his need to get a life and get out of my way.

I then looked back at the fence, I realized I was going to have to go over it if I wanted to get back into the house; I was going to have to go over a 6'-high wood fence, in the dark, in the rain. This is when I started cussing.

I am 5'3" if I'm being generous. Our fence was here when we bought the house; it's a really nice fence and aside from being 6' high, it's smooth on both sides, there are no parts on which you can stand. No cross beams, no lattice or holes to wedge a foot. We do have chain link fencing on the sides, but it goes to a ravine, no place for me to walk. And remember, it was dark and pouring rain, the ground was slippery, and soaking wet.

My neighbors both have keys to our house, but I had no way of getting their attention. So I plodded back through the mud, grabbed the iron and tile bistro table, dragged it across the yard, and pulled it next to the fence.

Then I grabbed a chair and stuck it next to the table.

I climbed up on the chair and then up on the wobbly table, the legs started sinking into the mud, as I put my foot on the top, the already fragile tiles began to slip away. With a deep exhale (and an expletive for good measure), I used my weak ankle and my numb right hand and hoisted my chubby self up on to the wood fence, catapulted myself over the top, and came crashing down on the top beam, right on my crotch.

I sat there perched like some kind of idiot in a bloopers video for a moment, stunned. Catching my breath, I cussed, then flopped over the other side, where I dangled for a moment, feeling my arm and stomach muscles tearing until I just dropped and fell down into a giant puddle of mud.

I stood back up, stomped up to the front of the house, found the lock box with the spare key and let myself back in the house, where I took off my mud-laden clothes, walked through the house to the garage in my underwear, propped the door open (just to be safe) walked through the garage, closed the outside garage door, walked back through the house, picked up the phone, while standing in my kitchen, still dripping wet, and called my husband, who is in Los Angeles on a business trip.

Calmly, in a smooth and tense tone of icy anger, I relayed the story to him, claiming responsibility for locking myself in the garage while informing him gently as to how I pulled and possibly tore the many muscles in my body after having to scale our fence due to his extreme fortification measures. There was much sarcasm and seething in the telling.

His response to me was, "you didn't pull the right lever" (on the garage door)..."it's really easy to open, I do it all the time."

I believe my exact words at that point were "bite me." I may or may not have also informed him that he is lucky I SCALED THE FENCE instead of taking his chainsaw to the gate, something I seriously considered in my need to
1) get out of the rain and 2) get inside the house to our sleeping child.

Suffice it to say, he is lucky he is in Los Angeles tonight, he would be sleeping in the garage otherwise.

The end.

That is NOT a hat

What I heard was uncontrolled giggling. What I saw (upon exiting the shower) was this:

Just a question...

I admit, I tuned in to the premier of "Dancing with the Stars" this evening. I have somehow been sucked in to the silliness.

I do have one question, however. Why is an athletic woman labeled "masculine?" Why is being "fit" masculine? Why can't being fit be a feminine quality? Why can't we just describe her as "athletic?"

Olympian volleyball player Misty May Treanor is one of the "celebrity" contestants on the show this year. She is an Olympic athlete and she thus has a well-toned, trim, muscular build. Instead of describing her as fit, or toned, or athletic, she was described in her introductory video clip as being very "masculine," simply because she has muscles. Apparently women can't have muscles. In 2008, even Gold medal-winning athletes, beautiful women who have husbands and children and complete lives outside their sport are still "masculine" because they play sports.

I don't know, but it just annoyed me. I guess it is just another of the many examples of unnecessary labeling and gender stereotyping that continue to permeate our culture.

Time Lapse

I tried to capture a time delay shot of our clock today for a photography assignment; I'm a member of a photography forum where we shoot a photo each week from a different topic.

This week the topic was time. I took the obvious approach and decided to shoot our vintage-looking clock, but I was going to shoot the clock on a time delay, so you'd get to see the hands swirling around as time passed.

Something went awry in the processing and I over-exposed the shot. However, I decided to mess with it for a few minutes to see if I could at all salvage it; this is what I came up with.

In the end, I decided I liked this shot far better than my original idea.

The hands are disappearing into the abyss...as is time.

Gives new meaning to "Big Bird"

(Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry)

Has anyone watched Sesame Street lately? It seems to me the writers might be a little "frustrated' what with lyrics in a song about brushing your teeth that go like this:

(Sung in a sultry Marilyn Monroe voice, to a stripper tune) "Ooh, I'm the yucky little back tooth. Come and brush me, Mr. brush! Brush me like you should, side to side, up and down!
Mr. Brush, you've got to brush us all around....oooh!"

Even Bryan looked at me and said, "what are you ladies watching!?!"

"Oh nothing honey, just some dental porn for toddlers."

Don't be alarmed

This is still my blog...I just "remodeled..." a bit.

Stepped right into that one

Each week we have a new "grammar of the week" topic in my class for our 5-minute opening routine. The kids work on a few quick questions/problems on the board after they enter the class while I take attendance, etc. It gets them right down to business and gives me a minute or so to take care of any clerical/management issues before I start teaching.

This week, we were working on nouns.

Scene: (Remember, I teach 7th grade)

Each student has a piece of paper with two columns. On the left side is a list of "common nouns," (restaurant, movie, city, etc.) On the right side are two blank lines for each common noun, they are to write down two "proper nouns."

For example:

Common Noun: Restaurant Proper Nouns: Olive Garden, Taco Bell

This list is from the teacher's workbook, I did not create it.

On the list for common nouns is the word "ballplayer."

The students ask, "Mrs. Scott, what is a ballplayer?" Many are asking, so I decide to answer them all as a collective class. I announce,

"Folks, if you are raising your hand because you are unsure what a ballplayer is, a ballplayer is an athlete."

A student then raises his hand, "can it be any athlete?"

"No," I say, "only one who plays with balls."

Yeah. Stepped right into that one.