Category: Daily Life

Rather than continue with my usual self-absorption today, I thought I’d give over my blog space to try to help someone else.

A gentleman I know named Frank Esteban is afflicted with multiple sclerosis. His constant companion is his assistance dog, a collie named Surf. Sadly, Surf has been diagnosed with lymphoma and needs some expensive medical treatments that Frank cannot afford unaided. Enter IMOM, a not-for-profit organization whose motto is, “Companion animals shouldn’t have to die or suffer in pain simply because their caretakers are financially challenged.”

IMOM is featuring Surf as one of their pets in need, and is set up to take donations to help pay his vet bills. They accept credit cards, PayPal and will even set up payment plans.

If you’re inclined toward charitable giving and you feel you can spare a little, please consider making this one of your donations. It’s a worthy effort and I know it will make a big difference for this family.

I packed an impressive number and variety of activities into the weekend, which in turn inflicted upon my musculoskeletal structure an impressive number and variety of aches and pains. Considering that I’ve been an inert, deskbound mass lately, I’m lucky I feel as well as I do.

Saturday began with about an hour of leaf raking and bagging, followed by flower planting. I haven’t even touched my own yard and garden yet this year, so even that little bit of labor awakened some dormant muscles.

Next came horseback riding, which ended up lasting about three hours, rather than the hour I was expecting. Saturday was a gorgeous day to spend on horseback. We saw about eight deer and a wild turkey during the ride, not to mention lots of hawks and other predatory birds. I was riding a small, spunky horse named Josie who was not allowed to lead because of her penchant for leaping over streams and perpetrating other horsey goofiness. Her short stature saved me from a lot of tree branch scrapes, although I found a scratch on one temple the next morning as I applied moisturizer. (Downside of riding Josie: I had the song, “Josie” by Steely Dan stuck in my head throughout the ride – and now I have it stuck in my head again!)

By the time the ride ended, I was already getting some sore muscles in the area my four-year-old niece would refer to as the “booty.” By the next day, most of the muscle pain was centered on my upper back muscles and inner thighs, although I certainly have no wish to sit on any non-cushioned surfaces right now.

After we left the farm, my sister and I headed to her house so I could pick up my niece for our evening of fun. We saw “Home on the Range,” which my niece seemed to enjoy (she enjoyed the Skittles and popcorn anyway). After that, we stopped for pizza. By then it was so far past her bedtime that as soon as we got to my house, I got her into her pajamas, helped her brush her teeth, read her one story and then it was lights-out.

I went to bed within the next few minutes myself, and it was a good thing, too, because my niece woke me up at 6:30 a.m. (okay, it was really 7:30, but we’d forgotten to set our clocks ahead). I was moving pretty slowly, but managed to spend the morning watching cartoons and our DVD of “Shrek,” painting with watercolors, playing three rounds of a hiding-and-finding game my niece made up, and coloring on the back patio with chalk. My sister and brother-in-law came to collect their daughter and we all went out for a lovely brunch.

The activities continued apace, but you get the idea. Tonight’s plan: Christmas light removal (I know, I know!), roto-tilling and grass seed planting.

Yesterday was a day of tying up loose ends. I received an official offer to go full time at my job, which I eagerly accepted. I got the final word from my accountant on last year’s tax bill and, while it’s a lot of money, it’s not as earthshatteringly high as last year. We also discussed figuring my first quarter 2004 taxes now – what a concept! – so that’ll be under control as well. Heck, I’m even one laundry load away from having a full complement of clean clothes and linens. It’s been a great week!

Tonight: pedicures after work with a friend, after which we’ll meet up with our husbands and go to dinner. Then my activty-o-rama weekend begins and it’ll be a rollercoaster through Sunday evening. Please secure all loose articles…

If I may quote the immortal words of George Peppard, “I love it when a plan comes together.”

After I thoroughly screwed up and double-booked this Saturday evening while underbooking the afternoon, yesterday everything magically worked itself out. My sister e-mailed to invite me to go horseback riding right after I’m finished gardening. Then, the evening birthday party had to be rescheduled, so I no longer look like the mean, selfish wife who can’t help her own husband celebrate his birthday. Life is good!

I’m very much looking forward to the horseback riding, even though I’m told it’ll be a short excursion. My sister and I grew up riding ponies and then horses, so we’re both very comfortable in the saddle. We make a point of seeking out riding opportunities as often as we can.

The last time we went riding together was on a trip to Mexico about five or six years ago. We stayed at the Rio Caliente spa. The spa offered quite a variety of activities, so we managed to schedule in some horseback riding around our massages, yoga classes, pedicures, hikes, etc.

Wow, was it fun! Clearly the concept of “liability” did not have the same resonance for our innkeepers as it so often does for their litigation-shy neighbors to the north. The horses were relatively young and frisky – definitely not the shambling plodders you so often find on trail rides in the U.S. Toward the end of the ride, my horse decided that a little cantering was in order, which quickly developed into a gallop. My sister’s horse followed suit, and we were having a lovely time until we realized that the less comfortable riders in our group were right behind us, clinging to their saddle-horns in white-knuckled terror. We reined our horses in and resumed a more gentle pace.

That was a great vacation in general, except for one thing: the spa serves only vegetarian food. When we booked the trip, it sounded like a fantastic way to get rested and healthy, blah, blah, blah. Maybe it was just their chef, but the sameness of the meals became apparent after two days, and we quickly got to the point where we were skipping some of them rather than face yet another salad with fresh sage leaves lurking amongst the lettuce. Breakfast was the high point, mainly because they had good granola and fresh fruit, but after nearly a week of no caffeine, sugar or meat, we both started craving all that is evil about American cuisine.

The instant we made it through customs in Houston on our way home, we made a beeline for the Wendy’s at the airport and stuffed ourselves with hamburgers, fries and Diet Cokes. I’m pretty sure we followed it up with something containing alcohol once we’d caught our connecting flight home. The spa is very close to the town of Tequila, but we had made the unwise decision to forego outside trips and remain at the resort throughout our stay. Sigh.

So with that tangent fully explored, and my weekend plans secured, I’ll move on and start getting ready for work. (And yes, I believe I have seen every episode of the A-Team. But then again, if you’ve seen one…)

After all that happy talk about my dazzlingly well-planned weekend schedule, it seems one vital portion was based on incomplete information. My husband’s co-birthday party with his cousin turns out to be in the evening, not the afternoon. Part of the problem is that nobody ever came out and said what time it was going to be, although I distinctly remember discussing whether I’d have time to clean up after my planting project that morning. Something made me think it was in the afternoon, although my husband claims he never implied any such thing.

So, in short, I can’t go to the party. My niece and I will have to do a gals’ night out by ourselves. It’ll be just like going out with one of my girlfriends, but without the martinis. Oh, and I don’t ordinarily hold my friends’ hands when we cross the parking lot.

Speaking of martinis, tonight I’m going to happy hour to help a friend celebrate her birthday and enjoy her first post-partum martini. That’ll be my second drink of the week after a mojito with dinner on Monday. I’m such a social butterfly all of a sudden!

So that’s it for now. I need to make a breakfast shake, take a shower and hit the road. I’ll try to think of a topic that will return me to my regular essay form tomorrow.

I know I’ve already set a bad posting precedent this week. I’m actually quite busy (what a surprise!) and I haven’t been spending a lot of time online (gasp!). The problem with doing a lot of work is that it’s boring and nobody wants to hear about it. [Clarification: My job isn’t boring to me, but I’m willing to bet you wouldn’t be interested in hearing about the details.]

I’m looking forward to this weekend, though. On Saturday morning I’m going with my community service club to a women’s shelter to plant flowers. Before then I need to drag out my small roto-tiller and make sure I can get it to start. I also need to shake out all my work gloves to make sure spiders haven’t nested in the fingers over the winter – that would be an unpleasant surprise.

On Saturday afternoon I’m going to a party to celebrate the birthdays of my husband and his cousin. I suppose I’ll have to start thinking of gift ideas between now and then.

After that, my four-year-old niece is coming to spend the night at our house. We’re taking her to see Home on the Range, although we’d probably see it sooner or later even without the accompaniment of a child.

My niece is the ultimate Disney consumer. Almost every time I see her, she’s wearing her Cinderella costume, or at least a tiara. Her upcoming birthday (she’s not officially going to be four for a few more weeks) will feature a Disney Princesses bouncy-castle and an elaborate castle-shaped cake. Even this time last year, she was reported to have said at daycare after tripping over something, “The Princess fell.” Three years old and already referring to herself in the third person! That girl’s going to be a candidate for a new “Who Wants To Marry A European Prince” reality show in fewer than two decades.

So that’s my life: working hard all day and looking forward to an event-packed weekend. Just like every week!

The highlight of my weekend was that my husband set up my new desktop computer. Yay! It’s a Pentium 4 (replacing my Pentium 3 laptop), has a huge hard drive and a ton of RAM (no, I don’t remember the specifics right offhand), and came complete with a CD burner and my husband’s old scanner (which actually works, unlike my old one that – d’oh! – I forgot to put out with the trash this morning).

My husband originally built the CPU to use onstage with his band, and it’s fantastically loaded with features. Perhaps a bit TOO fantastically loaded with features. For lack of a better term, it’s completely pimped out. It has multi-colored, lighted exhaust fans. The side of the case is clear lucite, and through it you can see glowing blue cables. The on/off button is shaped like a jewel and cycles through a rainbow of colors every few minutes. There are even glowing blue LEDs framing the front panel. In short, it is the extended disco remix of a computer. I actually kind of like it, except that the cheapo lighted fans are noisy. It cries out to have a lava lamp installed next to it.

From a performance standpoint the computer is HEAVENLY! My old computer had been turning into such a dog that I could hardly get any work done. I haven’t tried the scanner yet, but everything else seems to work wonderfully.

Best of all, unplugging and moving everything forced me to finish cleaning off my desk (I even vacuumed the shag carpeting underneath). I have perhaps one more hour of filing before my entire work area is clean and tidy. I’ll fix the room’s feng shui yet!

I’ve been having a devil of a time getting as much sleep as I want lately. There are few things I enjoy more than a solid night’s sleep, although my schedule does not permit many “sleep in” days. Right now there are three factors working against me when it comes to sleeping until the alarm rings. Two of them occur all the time and the other is, fortunately, temporary.

First there’s the temporary factor: the antibiotics I’m taking for my latest bout with bronchitis. They’re giant yellow horse pills that leave a lingering bitter taste in my mouth and include in their list of side-effect warnings, nightmares and hallucinations. Luckily I’m not experiencing any hallucinations, but I’ve been awakened by vivid and strange dreams almost every morning since I began taking them last week. Last night, for example, I dreamed that I’d moved into a new house with lots of windows. People kept pressing themselves against the windows to look in, so I had to race around closing all the blinds. I wouldn’t go so far as to call that a “nightmare” because it wasn’t particularly terrifying, but it was definitely freaky enough to wake me up. That’s where the two permanent sleep-denying factors come into play.

Once I’m awake, my chances of going back to sleep are incredibly slim. One reason is my husband’s snoring. I can ignore it through my deepest sleep thanks to a noisy bedside air cleaner that I run solely for white noise (in fact, it doesn’t even have a filter in it anymore). I’ll admit right now that his snoring is not even all that loud – it’s just random and startling enough to shatter any chance of my regaining sleep. Just as I’m drifting off, he’ll emit a snort or grunt that thoroughly reawakens me. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t fleetingly considered smothering him with a pillow from time to time. I usually settle for growling, “Roll over!” Sometimes this is accompanied by a sharp elbowing.

The second sleep destroyer is the presence of our cats. Our male cat takes turns sleeping next to us and on us all night long. If it’s my turn when I wake up, his shifting weight on my side or chest makes it very hard to fall back asleep. He’s a big klutz, too, so if he’s moving around he can cause a great deal of discomfort with a misplaced paw. Another of our cats has decided that her morning mission is to scan me for any trace of consciousness so she can immediately greet me with glad cries. Never mind that it may be a false alarm – she leaps onto the bed and races across our sleeping bodies to make peeping noises at me as soon as I stir even once. Not relaxing!

The good news is that after today, I only have two days left of this course of antibiotics. I’m hoping that ridding myself of the strange dreams will help me stay asleep at least a bit longer. As for the snoring and the cats, well, they’re just a small price to pay for companionship.

These days I no longer sport the curly hairdo worn by my doodled younger self that you see to the left. I abandoned perms after a trip to San Francisco where a combination of weather and water quality left me looking as though I were wearing a giant Brillo pad on my head. That was also the trip where one of my eyes got so irritated that I had to wear my Coke-bottle-bottom glasses for a week. Not pretty.

I was born with blonde hair that gradually darkened as I got older until it became a mousy brown around the time I was in junior high school (the height of my geekdom, judging by photos of the era). Since then I’ve had just about every hair color you can imagine, including a shade of purply-burgundy that can only be explained as a severe lapse in judgment. Eventually, though, I realized that no matter what color my hair actually was, I always saw myself as blonde in my mind’s eye. Thus, I’ve been blonde again for the past few years.

Of course, as any bottle-blonde can tell you, maintaining your roots is a big issue. It was bad enough having brown roots, but these days my brown roots are shot through with an ever-increasing number of silvery-grey strands. With all that grey hiding beneath the blonde, my hair has changed texture quite a bit, which makes it more and more difficult to keep it looking well-conditioned. However, I discovered a new Tigi deep conditioner called “Chocolate Head” that does a pretty good job on my hair and, as an added bonus, makes the shower smell like downtown Hershey, Pennsylvania.

I called yesterday to make an appointment to get my 2+ months’ worth of roots taken care of. As soon as the receptionist answered the phone, I completely blanked on the name of the hair stylist I’ve been using for years. I finally managed to stammer my way into an appointment for this Saturday, so at least I’ll be presentable for the client meetings I have next week. I’m very much looking forward to hair that’s roots-to-tips blonde again. It’ll also be nice to get my overgrown bangs out of my eyes – I’m starting to look like an anime character.

Ahhh, how wonderful it is to have my tax stuff dropped off at the accountant’s office. I can’t say that my home office is completely cleaned up yet, but I filled three giant trash bags full of the shredded remains of unnecessary paperwork that had been accumulating for the past year. The shredder is now a permanent fixture next to the kitchen trash can, in the hope that we’ll shred unwanted mail daily, rather than let it pile up on the countertops.

I’m pretty good about doing spring cleaning and clear-outs. I am so merciless about getting rid of the clothes I haven’t worn in the past year that I’ve been known to get rid of garments and later wonder where they went. I certainly wish I hadn’t been so thorough about ridding my closet of my “thin clothes,” because they would really come in handy right now, even if they’re not exactly in style anymore.

Our big project for the house this spring is going to be a rearranging of our office/studio space. In 1978, the then-owners of our house decided to tack a two-car garage onto our small, 50s ranch house. Their stroke of genius was in putting a giant rec room above the garage. Unfortunately, nobody ever redecorated it after the inital go-round, so it’s a masterpiece of hideous 70s decor. Here’s a little rundown of the more impressive features:

• Dark brown, faux wood-grain ceiling tiles that give the impression that one is in the hold of a pirate ship.
• Dark brown, splintery-pine center beams and trim, including some bat-winged molding accenting the top of the mirror-backed, built-in glass shelving unit.
• A bar made of inlaid woods, with appliqued leaf-shaped wood designs on the front. There are no actual, useful bar accoutrements such as shelves or a sink, though.
• A dynamic flooring pattern that alternates sections of orange and brown shag carpeting with brown and black patterned linoleum.
• An open-grill wood stove that hogs space in the middle of the room and caused me to have to steam-clean the carpet three or four times to remove all the residual soot. Obviously, we don’t use the stove.

We haven’t put in a lot of effort trying to make any of this decor go away, but it’s definitely time to rearrange things to suit our lifestyle. My husband has his digital music studio along one wall. My desk is tucked into the bay window in the front of the room. The rest of the room is given over to far-too-visible storage, drum sets, and an entertainment center across from a loveseat that’s always piled with junk.

The room is so huge that we have more or less decided to just run with the 70s theme. A friend gave me a crudely-carved M*A*S*H symbol (hand making a peace sign, with women’s high-heeled legs). I have a lovely macrame wall hanging of a tree with dangling roots. The loveseat is bright red velvet to pick up the red in the wood stove. I bought a huge, tacky plastic plant to set next to the couch. The kitsch potential is there, as long as we tidy things up.

That’s definitely not going to take place this weekend, though. Chronic overscheduler that I am, I have every moment of the weekend booked already, and I need to read “Wuthering Heights” between now and 2 p.m. tomorrow for a “Classics Rewound” book club meeting. I guess that’s a sign that it’s time to head home. Until Monday…