a person’s a person no matter how small

maura @ 9:02 pm

It’s 9pm, do you know where your children are? In our house he is being read to by Grandpa, after having played a rousing match of Wii Tennis with Grandma. This mama is enjoying the slacking, yo.

so so so tired

maura @ 9:27 pm

Man, it is a lot of work to shift the contents of an apartment around. For some reason it is my thighs that are most unhappy and pain-ed, why is that? I guess all of the crouching to pick up heavy stacks of books and move them from one room to another has something to do with it.

I wish we just had one more day, that’s how much we need. One day, preferably with Gus in school or someplace else entertaining. But we don’t. Thankfully things are fine in all the places where it matters most for the visitors that arrive tomorrow. But it’ll be a busy week, that’s fer sure.

home improvement, take 2

maura @ 9:21 pm

We decided not to paint this weekend, after all. Jonathan’s mom + stepdad are coming to visit next week, and it seemed like making them sleep in a room suffused with the delicate scent of latex paint would be impolite.

So we moved all of the stuff around to move Gus into his new room, instead. Or should I say half of the stuff. Man, do we have books! So many many many books. And the knicknacks, I have had it with them! The paddywacks can stay, though.

Pray tell me HOW do those of you out there in blagland with kids get through home improvement tasks? (Yes, I’m looking at you, Anne.) Gus still doesn’t love playing by himself, though we did get an hour or so when he was playing with his lego pirates and his dollhouse. The pirate captain slept in a huge bed balanced on a stack of furniture. Good for him!

Hopefully tomorrow will be better, when we will actually start moving things INTO his room. Then at least he can help with the arranging. And we will maybe begin to dig out from under the piles of books everywhere. If you haven’t heard from me by tomorrow night, send help!

he keeps her nose warm with his hand

maura @ 7:36 pm

I went to the gym today for the first time in over a week. And I feel GREAT! At least I did, until the crushing late afternoon tiredness hit me. But that’s why we have coffee, right?

Sigh, the gym: it’s been the subject of much recent brain activity for me. I’m kind of having crazy mood swings about it, actually.

I reupped my membership over the summer and nearly instantly regretted it. Mainly because of the cost: MAN, gyms are expensive. In the best of all possible worlds I can get there 3 days/week (more realistically it’s twice weekly). Aren’t there better things we should be spending that money on?

But then I relented. Over the past few years it’s become apparent that I feel much much MUCH better both physically and mentally when I get some real exercise on a regular basis, even with all the city walking. Going to the gym is an efficient way to exercise: 30 minutes of cardiovascular work + a few weight machines + stretching + getting there and home = about an hour.

BUT, besides the ca$h cost there’s the environmental costs of using a gym for exercise, and those have been weighing (har) on me lately. I could switch to swimming, but in the cold weather my skin already has a difficult time remaining on my body without adding chlorine to the mix, thank you very much. I could use a rowing machine, which I think only has a small battery for the display, much less energy hogging than the elliptical machine that I prefer.

Of course, I could just switch to an outdoor and free form of exercise, like running. And in fact I live right near a giant park! But I’m a wimp — it’s cold out, and I’d feel weird running with my iPod on because what if a car comes out of nowhere and I can’t hear it to get out of the way? Ditto biking: practically free (well, I’d have to get a bike, but that’s still much cheaper than the gym), but I’m a wimp: I certainly couldn’t iPod while biking, and cars are even more of an issue.

(As an aside, I do plan to get a bike at some point and use it for some very local transportation. At least until I get brave enough to ride someplace far and trafficy.)

Then there’s the time issue: when I get a job, will I ever have time to exercise? In a perfect world I’ll be working at a college with a gym near the library, and could nip over to the gym for a workout during lunch a couple times a week. But there’s no guarantees that will happen.

So I guess, for now, I’ll just stick with my current plan. And maybe the next time I go to the gym I’ll unplug my favorite machine and see how it handles all crunchy + green-like.

my one and only friend statistics

maura @ 6:36 pm

It’s been blast from the past time for me in the car lately. I’ve been listening to a copy of a mix I made for a friend’s birthday in early 1992 (!) that I excavated from the box of car cassette tapes.

So many of these songs are still so very excellent: Close Lobsters’ “Just too Bloody Stupid,” Ultra Vivid Scene’s “Special One,” and Pale Saints’ “True Coming Dream” to name just a few. The extended dreamy guitar outro on Field Mice’s “Of the Perfect Kind” STILL slays me to this day.

Some of these records I just bought because of label lust, say, anything on 4AD or Creation. And the songs were okay, but now I find myself using our car tape deck’s handy skip feature to fast forward over them. More than one of these songs is on the new Rhino Records Brit Box (e.g. Wonderstuff’s “Unbearable” and the Primitives’ “Crash”).

Some of these songs haven’t quite held up to the test of time, to my ears at least. I remember LOVING Voice of the Beehive, but now they sound corny and overproduced. They probably were always corny and overproduced, and maybe it’s just my preference, as I age, for corny and underproduced? Who’s to say.

And some of these songs make me a little sad, because this tape is the only copy I have of them. Like Felt’s “The Day the Rain Came Down” and Momus’ “Hairstyle of the Devil,” both of which I borrowed from a friend to make this mix. Are the consequences of thrifty living coming back to haunt me?

who has time for music?

maura @ 8:44 pm

More notes from the Department of Frivolous Things that I Should Not Be Worrying About:

I am nervous about my gray hairs. Not their color, about which I really could not care less.* No, it’s the texture. It is just different: not as curly, more crazy angles.

* Though the last time I got my hair professionally cut the stylist could not refrain from offering to color it for me. I was irked + mildly offended at the time, but later I realized that he could just as easily have been going for the upsell rather than telling me that I looked old. Which is what I choose to believe, at any rate.

Right now there is still enough brown old curly hair to keep the wild new gray hairs in check and force them to curl up with the rest of the group. But what will I look like when that brown hair is all gone? Will my longstanding the Roseanna Roseannadanna nightmares finally become a reality? And how old AM I, anyway, to have just used that reference? Prehistoric!

first: don’t panic, second: don’t panic

maura @ 5:32 pm

Yesterday as I was writing my blag entry Gus climbed up to sit on my lap. Suddenly he asked, “why are you writing a letter about what we did today?” Oops. Since he never wants to read to us when we ask him to, I never quite know where his reading stands. Guess I will have to stop perusing Bitch PhD when he’s in need of a snuggle.

Yesterday was full of human-computer interaction hilarity, actually. At the Audubon Center they have a few iMacs set up with animal-n-nature-related websites bookmarked (and live interwebs, which my friend and I couldn’t resist using to check our emails). Gus sat down and started clicking around with the mouse, then said to his friend: “I need to get my mom to put the dot com on this PVC. Mommy, get me the internet!”

I was rereading last year’s NaBloPoMo posts the other day and was saddened to see that they are much more interesting than this years. I’m sorry, interwebs! It has seemed harder to post every day this year, which is kind of odd since last year I was taking 3 classes and going to an internship 2 days/week. But I guess looking for a job is time-consuming, too, especially with all the relentless knee-hi shopping it requires.

it is of the perfect kind

maura @ 6:19 pm

I should have gone to the gym this morning, but I was still tired + sore from all the painting. And also the being kicked by wee feet early this morning. We are still suffering from post-daylight-savings-itis here, and I cannot wait to get over it.

Today Gus had no school (Happy Veteran’s Day!) so we went to the park and the Audubon Center with some pals from his old preschool. It was a lovely fall day, a little cloudy, a little chilly. The kids had fun pretending to be bats and making bat pizzas with cloth bugs + animals at the Audubon Center. Then we all roamed the park looking for colorful fall leaves.

When we got home Gus made a leaf picture of the Emperor Bulblax. He used stems for the eye stalks, clever kid.

And that was today! Now it’s dinnertime, and we’re having spanish fried rice, except for Gus who is having a quesadilla. Yum!

someone was waiting for me

maura @ 8:46 pm

Jonathan was grumpy about yesterday’s post, which made it sound like he was sitting around on the couch all day eating bonbons and watching Kiki’s Delivery Service with Gus. But he wasn’t! We were both working the whole day, though Jonathan’s chores were less painty and more plumby.

See, in the morning, just before Jonathan was about to head out to the food coop to do the grocery shopping, I asked for his help with the drain on our bathroom sink. It’s been slow for ages and I had the evil chemicals* in hand, ready to fry whatever clog was down there.

* Oooh, how unhippie of me! We have those chemicals from before I got all crunchy, and I figure it’s better to use them up and not buy any more than to just throw them away, right?

So we pried up the sink drain and boy howdy, the gunk, it was intense. Dr. Seussian, even. Inspired by the degunking (no chemicals required!) we moved on to the other bathroom. Where we promptly broke the pipes.

Now, it wasn’t really our fault, more the fault of the crappy plumbing they put in 20 yrs ago when our building went coop. But still, a broken sink is a broken sink.

Jonathan went to the coop as planned, then took a trip to Lowe’s for plumbing supplies. But he couldn’t find the right thing, so he and Gus had to go back to Lowe’s today.

And then when he was installing all of the new pipes a different part of the sink broke. Guess it’s back to Lowe’s tomorrow.

So, to recap the weekend’s activities:

Bedroom: ceiling painted (white), walls painted (pale butter [har, of course!])
Bathroom: sink broken (twice)

things were strange when i was far away

maura @ 5:59 pm

Home Improvement Day #1 is drawing to a close and things are going okay. I painted the bedroom ceiling, which was no fun at all BUT at least it is done! Except for the little spot that I only realized I missed when it got dark enough to turn on the lights. Them’s the perils of painting over one shade of white with an only slightly different shade of white. But I can fix that tomorrow, right?

Then I did a little spackling + sanding in preparation for painting the walls tomorrow. Afterwards I wanted to vacuum up the little bits of flaky paint + stuff, and I accidentally sucked up a paper towel into the vacuum hose. Apparently I am still not used to the massive sucking strength of our new vacuum! I had to use the ceiling painting pole to push the paper towel out of the tube. Never a dull moment.

I’ve been ignoring Gus all day and now he’s climbing all over me — gotta go!