Stolen quiz, stupidly double-spaced (why can't I figure this out?)

TECHNOLOGY
Q. What is your wallpaper on your computer? I had to look - my husband just changed it to some weird Matrix-y city scene.

Q. How many televisions you have in your house? 1 in the living room, 1 in our room, 1 in mom's room. That's all that function, although we also have a warehouse of broken electronic crap that surely includes several obsolete televisions.

BIOLOGY
Q. Are you right-handed or left-handed? right

Q. Have you ever had anything removed from your body? Just children and teeth.

Q. What is the last heavy item you lifted? Um, groceries? I don't know, I'm not much with the heavy lifting. The twins, I guess.

Q. Have you ever been knocked out? Not yet!

BULLSHITOLOGY
Q. If it were possible, would you want to know the day you were going to die? No, I'm neurotic enough.

Q. If you could change your name, what would you change it to? Kate? That's a tough one. I hate my name, I guess I should have alternatives planned. Laura? Um, Corrine? I'll have to think about it.

Q. What colour do you think looks best on you? blue, maybe

Q. Have you ever swallowed a non-food item? yep

DAREOLOGY
Q. Would you kiss a member of the same sex for $100? Sure

Q. Would you allow one of your little fingers to be cut off for $200,000? Probably.

Q. Would you never blog again for $50,000? Sure, I hardly blog now!

Q. Would you pose naked in a magazine for $250,000? Probably

Q. Would you drink an entire bottle of hot sauce for $1,000? I don't think so

Q. Would you, without fear of punishment, take a human life for $1,000,000? If I got to pick the person. :)

DUMBOLOGY
Q: What is in your left pocket? nothing

Q: Is Napoleon Dynamite actually a good film? I actually do like it. I like anything that I watched with my husband that put him into hysterics - his reflected amusement is hilarious

Q: Do you have hardwood or carpet in your house? hardwood

Q: Do you sit or stand in the shower? stand. That's a weird question.

Q: How many pairs of flip flops do you own? 1

LASTOLOGY
Q: Last person who texted you? Friend's husband, wanting to go to the gay bar with us

Q: Last person who called you? Heidi

Q: Person you hugged? Husband

FAVOURITOLOGY
Q: Number? 14

Q: Season? Spring because of flowers

Q: Colour? yellow

CURRENTOLOGY
Q: Missing someone? Yvette

Q: Mood? Lazy, happy

Q: Listening to? Backyardigans

Q: Watching? Also Backyardigans

Q: Worrying about? Sewage and dead mice in my basement. You'd worry too.

Q: Wearing? New tank top and capris. I always swore I'd never wear capris, but that was before cellulite made shorts inadvisable.

RANDOMOLOGY
Q: First place you went this morning? Running, can you believe it?

Q: What can you not wait to do? Finish the semester

Q: Do you smile often? all the time

Q: Are you a friendly person? usually

Mmm, sewage

You know what I don't like? My house. There are things about it that I do like, of course, but in general, it is a pain in my ass. There are holes in ceilings, broken windows, rampant weeds, hideous ancient paneling, weensy closets, and now the latest - some drain thing in the basement is full of, well, worse than crap apparently, and worse than crap is now backing up all over the basement floor. The good news is that the plumber was here really really fast. The bad news is that he is nowhere near free. Also, there is sewage IN MY HOUSE. That is definitely also bad news. Yuck.

I'm vomiting truth

That's a Tivoli quote from this evening. I'm too drunk to do justice to the evening, but too many funny things have happened not to post. First of all, the drive to the bar involved me, sadly sober, listening to no fewer than 5 backseat drivers yelling RIGHT! LEFT! even though I knew where I was going. And my mother went too. Yes, to the gay dance club. It's been a strange evening. I made Sarah cry and now Tivoli is in the fetal position and nachos are the only option. Surely this will make no sense in the morning, but such is 2:30am revelation. And now Sarah is life-coaching Tiv, and I'm trying to listen and transcribe while eating and drunk-spinning, and I love my friends and life seems good despite itself.

Happy birthday, baby

Happy birthday to my sweetheart. You're the best husband and father I can imagine and I'm lucky every day to be with you. I love you!

No twins were drowned in the writing of this post

My mother is back doing her clinical trial, and her 36-hour absence is palpable. My daughter is wearing the pjs she wore to bed Saturday night (it's Monday evening), a raincoat (her choice), and purple sparkly shoes (again, her choice). My four year old is in the same clothes he wore Saturday as well. Only because he continuously shits through his clothes is boy twin in clothes not old enough to walk by themselves. The laundry pile is starting to groan ominously. We're eating take out and leftovers whenever hunger occurs to someone, and there's no apple juice. The living room looks like Legoland in California meets Jackson Pollack, but with more dirt. My car has such unspeakably foul and ancient crusted takeout containers on the passenger side floor that I'm afraid to even tackle it.

Okay, I got the twins in the tub and relocated the laundry heap down a floor. I am sitting outside the bathroom, where my rotten daughter is deliberately and with malice aforethought throwing water onto the floor and yelling NO when I tell her to stop. Defiant pig. I have a classmate babysitting in the morning, and more classmates coming for a study group in the afternoon, so I have to put a veneer of clean on this pit of disorderliness. But first, I have to listen to the 6 year old read his homework, which always feels like doing penance for some unremembered but obviously very serious sin.

What a glorious day

I should give up the doctor idea and become a meteorologist. At least here in Baltimore, they get to wear hilariously ridiculous clothes and just make shit up for a living. Today, for example, was supposed to be rainy and wretched, and it is just beautiful. Not that I'm complaining. It just seems like a good gig, where no one cares that you're wrong all the time.

I spent most of my afternoon at the library at my college. Anyone who knows me well knows that libraries and I do not, as a rule, get along, but I needed a book on integrals (god help me) and the library is part of the college and not a larger library system, so I'm not yet banned from it. The library itself seemed to be on to me and my poor borrowing habits, though, and it took me a ludicrously long time to:

a) find the building itself
b) find the front door (really, how hard is that?)
c) goggle at the warehouse-sized room full of 4000 computers and about 17 books
d) use one of said 4000 computers to find a suitable-looking book
e) go up and down the elevator, hitting several floors more than once, in search of "Stacks," which is where the computer directed me but which is not, anywhere near an elevator, labeled
f) find a book that looked both useful and not hideously painful to read (like this post! ha!)
g) stand in a line longer than the one at Target this morning (who are these dorky undergrads, clogging the college library on a gorgeous Saturday afternoon?).
h) actually study, a little. Anyone have any questions about friction? No?

Wow, that was boring. Boring to live, boring to write, boring to read. But I'm committed to the blog entry now, despite my crazy 4 year old yelling "SIMON FOOTBALL" in the background on a permanent loop, so I'll keep plodding on.

Despite my battle with the library, it's been a good day - I got to go to Target (whee, I love Target) and get a curling iron, among other things (although I think I should have gotten a smaller one, now that I've played with this one), and the guys did yard work while I studied (it's really for the best that I not be around while the boy uses the riding mower, it makes my heart stop). I finished my friend's vampire book, which was hilarious, and I think we're going to the movies tonight, like real live popular culture consumers. My poor girly just fell and bit through her top lip, complete with way too much blood and no small degree of hyperventilation by me, but she seems okay and my own blood pressure should return to normal any time now. I can handle strangers' blood (and even my own, actually), but not my kids'.

Oh, and I had a caramel macchiato and cookie dough for dinner. Life is lovely.

Drunken ramble

Depending on who you talk to and your frame of mind, alcohol is supposed to either relax you or depress/enrage you. I think it takes a special kind of moodiness to have both reactions in one evening. I was trying to be tidy and clean up leftover beer from this weekend's birthday celebration for my husband (FORTY, can you believe it!), so I had a couple (3?) Coronas and was feeling jus' fahn, until the boy. Always the goddamned boy. Lost his fucking backpack. How do you lose a BACKPACK. He used it 25 minutes ago, it's large, the house isn't that big a mess. And it's not just the losing it, it's the atrocious magnified mosquito whine he emits when feeling guilty/angry/frustrated. Of course someone else took it, we all covet the backpack. It couldn't possibly be his complete inability to follow through with one goddamned task or find his ass with both hands and a map.

Whew, I feel better now. As I'm sure you all do. Now is bedtime, that most wonderful time of the day, and my mother is coming back tomorrow from her leisurely retreat being a lab rat for a clinical trial. I already appreciated her, honestly, but now I REALLY do. And now it is spring, almost in earnest, and the green grass always reminds me of when I was pregnant to bursting with this same wretched child, and the season seemed to move so much faster than my own arrested progress toward motherhood. Every time I left the house, I would gape childlike at the tree buds and burgeoning flora, much to my now-husband's amusement. Thinking back to that time and right after, when I held that bewildering new person in my arms, I resolve again to be more patient. I think it would help to lose my hearing.

E is for Easter. And Early. And Ear infection.

The plague continues apace and respects no holidays. The four year old is still wheezing, even after steroids, and is now complaining of ear pain. My husband is terribly congested and being quite stoic about it, which makes me feel both sympathetic and guilty, since I have NOT been all that stoic the past few days. I am feeling much better myself after the removal of the giant tumor-like nastiness from my tonsil, but we are all suffering from one degree or another of sleep deprivation. Last night, my husband had to go to work to fix something at 11:30. I went with him to keep him company, thinking it would be a quick trip. We got home at 3:30am. I fell asleep right at 4 and was awakened by excited Easter children at 4:22. In the course of trying to convince the children to go the fuck back to bed for a bare minimum of three hours, I rendered one shrill and shrieky with the injustice of not being allowed to sleep in my bed if he could. not. be. quiet. and the other began grabbing his ear and writhing in pain, requiring that I go downstairs, navigate the 30 pieces of poo the dogs left in the kitchen, and get him medicine and drink. I got back to sleep at 6:15 and we restarted the day as a family at the much more reasonable hour of 7:45. The big kids searched for Easter candy, the twins shook Easter eggs and ate candy off the floor like dogs, and I resembled the cryptkeeper with my sunken orbits. Happy Easter!

Want to see something really nasty?

I'm gaining new medical knowledge already, and I haven't even applied for med school yet! This beautiful picture is of a tonsil stone, also called a tonsillolith. Sadly, this is just an internet image and not a picture of the actual stone I removed from my tonsil today, but it gives you an idea of the nastiness (mine was much more impressive but shriveled a bit after extraction and is no longer all that photogenic). For those of you who, like me, had never heard of tonsilloliths, they are calcified ick (I believe that's the technical term) that grows in the "crypts" of your tonsil (no part of a body should be called a crypt, in my opinion, seems sort of morbid) and forms a pearl-like stone. Like an ice berg, mine was more subterranean than terranean and left a sizable hole in my tonsil after I extracted it with a QTip. I can't overstate the relief I feel now that it's not rubbing against the inside of my mouth and throat every time I swallow or breathe or eat. Don't say I never taught you anything!

The Easter Pig

We're not religious folk, but I like Easter. I like that it is a high holy Christian day but follows the most pagan and bizarre of calendars (how does the crucifixion have anything at all to do with the lunar cycle or the equinox)? Besides, what's not to like about unlimited candy, fancy dresses, and messy coloring of eggs? We've all been ill and it's starting to look a bit like The Shining around here, so today we dyed Easter eggs, in part to compensate for missing yet another outing due to wheezing and aching and general pestilence. Boy twin was mostly interested in picking up completed egg artworks and talking to them in his own sibilant crazy language, but girly got very involved in the dyeing process. I love this picture - besides showing her joy at the strange thing I was letting her do, her personality just shows through here:
























Of course, her personality is also pretty plain here, where her pouty little pissy face clearly objects to having had her picture taken the first time:

























Lastly, for your viewing picture, I present my piglet's imitation of an egg. I can only guess that this is based on the dragon egg in the critically acclaimed Backyardigans film Tale of the Mighty Knights, which quacks throughout the movie:

Spring Break

Wow, has it been almost 2 weeks? I sure do slack. Let's see, what's been doin'.

I had midterms in both classes last Wednesday (still no grades back, but I think I did well). Today, I gave the midterm in the hideous atrociousness that is the class I'm teaching - enough said about that. I have off from taking classes this week, off from teaching next week, and the kids are off next week too. A friend is in town for 2 months (or longer! she could stay longer!) and we have grand ambitions for projects while she's here. Today would be a good time to start on those ambitions, probably, but I don't see getting out from under this blanket on the couch any time soon. The 3 little kids are all varying degrees of ill, with the 4 year old in the lead with what he calls "group" but really seems to be regular but asthma-inducing virus. He hasn't wheezed in so long, I'd hoped he'd given it up. That boy, always has surprises up his sleeve.

In other news, I'm older now, and had a lovely birthday weekend with friends and the zoo and parties and cake. Lots and lots of cake. I am straining to put on pants that were loose not long ago. I am sadly having to contemplate cutting back to 1 or 2 desserts a day and maybe even exercising. How wretched.

This is dull, but life is pretty routine right now - a good routine, but nothing too noteworthy or exciting. Aren't you all glad I wrote?

He really IS an alien

I took the 4 year old with me to pick up the big boy from school today. Big boy read his reading homework on the drive home, while 4 year old quietly listened from the back. All of a sudden, and apropos of nothing at all (not what big boy was reading, not any previous discussion, not a TV show, nothing), the 4 year old yelled out in evident frustration:

"When am I ever going to get my tail????"

Opportunity Cost

All this high-falutin' book-learning is going to my head. Although I am studying physics and not economics, all the random never-used trivia I picked up somehow during my first try at college (how, I'm not sure, as I rarely went to class or read a textbook) is coming back to me at odd moments. Just now, for example, I was weighing (get it, weighing?) my desire for potato chips against my desire not to be fat to the point of resembling a marine mammal, and I realized that the opportunity cost of NOT eating the chips is just too high. I want the chips more than I want to fit through doorways, apparently. Surely self-knowledge is a good thing.

So little to say, so little time

My thoughts are fleeting at best, and mostly interrupted with fragments of physics equations that I can never quite follow to the answer. I often marvel at the fact that I managed a bachelor's degree at all the first time around, with the atrocious study skills and lazy ass class avoidance habits I had - I haven't missed a class this semester and I do my homework days in advance and STILL I find physics to be as close to incomprehensible as I'd imagine arabic or hungarian or russian to be.

My lovely husband tivo'd Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves for me, and we're watching it now. It's a bit of a disillusionment to see how god-awful it is - I was 15 when it came out and thought it the height of romance and good story-telling. I remember riding around with my friends and listening to my cassette single of the awful theme song by Bryan Adams, and just hoping one day I'd find love as true as Robin and Marion's. I suppose my husband will have to do.

What else is happening? February has flown and March always feels like the real start of the new year to me. The zoo is reopened, and the four year old is looking forward to seeing real tortoises in action ("I'm a little nervous," he confessed, but he still can't wait). We have birthdays and spring breaks and Easter upcoming, longer days and shorter nights (the nights seem plenty short already, I'm beginning to look forward to the twins' departure for college as the next sure time I can sleep through the night).

I also have a new theory about why women live longer, on average, than men. If the last years of a full lifespan are spent gradually losing your context, then men have at least a decade's head start. My husband (and sons, too, actually) couldn't find the couch he's sitting on without a map, for example. My mother, who is not old but aspires to be, is getting to be almost as bad. She opened the freezer yesterday to check our stockpile of butter and grumbled as she closed the door that she can't find anything in there - I opened the door myself and was immediately confronted with a bright yellow box reading "BUTTER" in big letters on the side. Crazy old bat (I say that with love).

Things are all so comfortable and pleasant, I half-fear that the other shoe will somehow drop, but it's hard to sustain paranoia when life feels so good. It does leave less to complain about, though - I'll try to find more to write about despite the absence of grievances.

Little boys are weird

I always knew I wanted kids, but somehow I imagined myself with a large family of mostly girls. I am still sometimes surprised by the reality of life with four boys, and the huge differences between the boys and girls. I can't believe there was a whole generation back in the 70s and 80s that asserted that there are no innate differences between the sexes. And people say the drugs now are strong.

The kids had two days off from school this week - Monday for that trumped-up commercial joke of a holiday, Presidents' Day, and yesterday for...rain. Cold rain. Whatever. It's meant a lot of togetherness with public enemy number one, aka my 6 year old. Monday was possibly my worst day ever with him, which is certainly saying something. Yesterday was surprisingly not awful, leading me to hope that things were improving in the me-envying-mother-cats-who-can-eat-their-young area. Today, he has reverted to type, being mean as a snake to his brother, having extremely selective hearing, and throwing shit all over the house how hard is this goddamned rule DO NOT THROW SHIT IN THE HOUSE. We still have a broken window from 2 years ago - when home repairs are undertaken at this glacial speed, it's just good sense not to encourage projectiles in the house, right?

Against all logic, I let the 6 year old have two friends over for a sleepover tonight. Also against all logic, so far it's going really well. Sometimes adding kids really does make things easier (something I often tell people who seem surprised by our herd, but sometimes I wonder if it's true). Favorite moments so far include three half naked heathens streaking through the kitchen and into the bathroom, led by 6 year old yelling "follow me! into the shower!" A few minutes later, I heard the 4 year old tell his little brother, "push my nipple and see what happens." As of this typing, there is screaming and thumping coming from upstairs, but it seems to be of the happy variety. So far, anyway.

My life in bullets

I've had good intentions and poor follow-through on my blog this month. Topics I've meant to write about and haven't (and almost certainly won't get around to at this point):

• Taking classes (I'm awesome! All 100%s so far!)
• Teaching a class (big suck, hate it this semester, not doing it again)
• The primary election (I just voted, after changing my mind about who to vote for at least 37 times in the past week)
• Tae Kwon Do (enrolled 2 of the boys, and it seems to be making them lovely, who knew, crazy 4 year old even wore clothes with a face on them, unprecedented)
• Bingo ("Balls!" I went on Saturday and am totally hooked, must go again soon, totally worth the money just to see the bizarre subculture even when you don't win)
• Volunteering (still awesome, excellent motivation not to do drugs/go insane/drive into things/walk drunk down dark streets in front of traffic)
• The twins (trying to wean, still not sleeping, cute but speechless, girl peed on the potty twice but then lost interest)

See how much I talk to you all in my head? Isn't it faster to just get the Clif's Notes like this?

Me and Percy

I finally named the cat. We got him in September, and never settled on a name. My friend and her kids call him Cookie, because of the way I obtained him (from a stranger in a car at the park, just as we warn children not to take things). A couple of my children call him Panther, which is actually a pretty good name for him, as he is large and black and half-wild. Most of us just call him Kitty, but as he seems to double in size each week, that's starting to seem silly. This week, as the stupid cat tried over and over to get into my water glass, it occurred to me that his most distinctive character trait is persistence - maddening, insane persistence. Thus he has become Percy, at least to me. Percy, the cat of a thousand names.

It dawned on me this morning that I have a narrow but distinctive persistent streak myself (persistent sounds so much nicer than stubborn). I've always thought of myself as fairly wishy-washy, but on the few occasions that I actually commit myself to a goal, I don't let much deter me. Including common sense. I seem to have set myself just such a goal with this medical school madness. This morning, after being up almost literally all night with a stomach virus that left everyone else after 24 hours but really really likes me and does not want to leave, I drove to school at 7am in ice and rain, only to discover that the college had a one hour delay. I made good use of the delay in the bathroom in the student union (I'd better be thinner after this), and then proceeded to my 2 hour physics class, where I had to engage way more actively than my tired, dehydrated, ill body wanted me to in an experiment involving a bowling ball. I made it through without any horrifying incontinence-related emergencies, then returned to my car, only to discover that I had forgotten to hang my parking pass and had therefore received a ticket. And despite this, I fully intend to go back for more on Monday. Although hopefully without being a host for 8 zillion nasty stomach viruses.

My summary of the State of the Union farce

"Lean to the right, Lean to the...right, stand up, robots, FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT!"

Scene: the US Capitol building
Bush: blah blah blah
Republicans: leap to their feet and clap
(Repeat, ad nauseum)

Who's still thinking it's a good idea to hitch their cart to this jackass in an election year?

--------------------------------------------------
This just in: Dumbhole Dubya just said "our foreign policy is based on a clear premise"

I stopped listening to type this, so I don't know what his actual premise summary was, but I think the truth lies somewhere between the guesses in our living room:

My guess: "We're the boss of you"
My husband's guess: "We don't like brown people."

I'm officially old

I'm officially starting in-class pre-requisites next week (my organic chemistry class was online), so I went to the college today to pay tuition, buy books, get my ID, etc. My first indicator that I wasn't in Kansas (aka, the real live gwown-up world) anymore was the mile long line of prepubescent-looking fellow students at the bursar's office. To add insult to the injury of the long, young line, I appeared to be the only person actually giving money to the college. Everyone else was getting some kind of rebate. Lame. Do kids still say lame?

While I was in the only-old-people-pay line, I talked briefly with a life-sized Barbie doll, done up in full makeup and very fancy clothes to get her mystery rebate. The conversation went like this:

Barbie: Are you a transfer student?
Me: (incredulously) No, I'm old.
Barbie: Yeah, I know, but you could still be a transfer.

Yeah, I know? Biyotch.

And then, the final blow. After paying my tuition, I walked the 6 miles uphill in the snow (it was literally snowing, and uphill, but probably only felt like 6 miles) to the building where one gets one's student ID (because why put all adminstrative functions in one building?). I filled out my application form and stood in yet another line, then gave my form to the clerk. Her first question? "Have you been to HR yet?" It took me a minute, but then I realized what she meant and answered, "no, I'm not faculty, I'm a student."

Next week should be interesting.

My husband thinks I'm insane

In my ongoing quest for ways to make myself a more appealing med school candidate, despite my sub-par undergrad GPA (what I'd really like to do is a Jedi-mind-trick-style wave of the hand and say, these are the grades you're looking for), I have been researching international volunteer opportunities. Not only would it be supercool to travel to unlikely places (Mongolia! Moldova! other random places starting with the letter M!), but I could learn interesting things, possibly actually help people, look good on my med school applications, and join the movement toward volunteer tourism (the Today Show said there is such a movement, so it must be true).

My favorite international volunteerism website so far is Projects Abroad - in addition to volunteer opportunities in healthcare, teaching, etc, you can choose to do immersion language in a foreign country. Now THAT would be awesome. I really want to actually speak Spanish, especially because I'm always called upon at the hospital to talk to the Spanish-speaking patients, even though my Spanish is so poor that the patients and staff alike mock my efforts (and yet I'm the best speaker we have, scary). So, now the idea has evolved into me and my husband taking a two week vacation to some lovely remote location to learn a valuable skill together. Romantic, right? Sadly, my husband isn't feeling the love. A few of his choicer comments, made after I mentioned Senegal as a possible destination (I'm afraid these may reveal some unfortunate cultural biases on the part of my husband, which is a little funny considering I had to tell him where Senegal is):

• "Just what i wanted - a starving vacation where I don't understand anyone and I fear for my life."
• "Where is your internet connection? 'Here, put your letter in this camel's hump.'"
• "Hello, I am Keith. 'Hi, I'm Al, Al Queda.'"

He also tried to talk me out of my plan by asking if this was all in reaction to my aborted attempt, earlier in the day, to purchase some pretty clothes for my daughter on sale from Gymboree, home of strangely addicting and yet ridiculously priced children's clothing. He interrupted my discussion of the appeal of India to say, "would buying some red patent-leather shoes make this better?" I'm afraid we've passed the point where small red shoes can deter me. Although they are really cute, and I may have to get them also.

Other highlights of my day included a nap, a change from old pajamas to new pajamas (the hallmark of a truly decadent day), an abysmal failure in culinary adventure (don't ever try this recipe, it was putrescent), and a moment of agony in which I brilliantly poured boiling water not into the sink but rather onto my feet. Quite painful.

Off to peruse more volunteer websites. Can you hear my husband groaning?