Category: Daily Life

The Monkey Mountain Wilderness Hike was wonderful! There were seven of us on the walk and we ended up hiking about five miles through woods, up hills and across meadows, all through the park.

I have a big set of photos on Flickr, but here are a few of my favorites.

I had intended to wear my sturdy Bass hiking boots, but I wore them around for a while in the morning to make sure they’d be comfortable enough – and they weren’t. Thus, I ended up wearing other boots which were more comfortable but not completely suitable for the terrain.

For the last two miles or so, my right big toe felt sore and blistered. There was nothing to do but press on, but as I walked I was dreading the moment when I’d change shoes and get a look at my feet.

As it turned out, I didn’t have blisters at all. Hooray! The only real injury I sustained was a scratch from a knee-high sapling that got me through my jeans.

There’s some doubt as to whether I’ll ever wear the boots again. I think it’s time I invested in some real hiking boots.

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Thanks again to ScooterJ for organizing and leading the hike. I think I’ve actually managed to psych myself into the half-marathon on May 18th. Who’s with me?

It rained quite a bit yesterday and I came home to find this:

The drain across our driveway usually does a great job…if I clear it out a couple times a year. Obviously, I have not yet done so this year.

That means I’ll be spending one morning this weekend with a crowbar (to pry up the grate), a trowel and a bucket, scooping dirt and leaves out of the gutter. It’s too bad I don’t fish, because I’m sure to find a lot of juicy earthworms in the process. Perhaps I can get a compost pile started and use them there.

I also couldn’t help noticing that the dandelions have taken over my flower beds already. If it ever stops raining long enough, I’ll get out my roto-tiller, get the beds back to neutral and plant flowers. I have a $100 gift certificate for a plant nursery, so I should be able to do something pretty with a little advance planning.

My back hurts just thinking about all of this.

Today is my niece’s eighth birthday. One of these days I need to post a photo of us together because she is my mini-me, except that she has pink and purple streaks in her hair as opposed to the blue streaks in mine.

Starting last Christmas, I decided that my job as a cool aunt was to get her interested in something unusual that her friends probably wouldn’t know about. My choice: children’s anime movies.

I started her out with a DVD of My Neighbor Totoro (dubbed, of course), which I’m pretty sure I liked as much as she did. We’ve watched it together three times now and she’s watched it on her own, too.

One of her birthday presents is a stuffed Totoro similar to the one pictured, except that the one I got her is more greenish and has a leaf on its head (as well it should).

The last time we watched the movie together, we ended up seeing a long preview reel of other Studio Ghibli movies that didn’t come up on my DVD player for some reason. I could tell that my niece was intrigued by the other films, so I ordered a copy of Kiki’s Delivery Service as her second birthday gift.

We’re going out to dinner tonight at a Japanese steakhouse (her choice because she loves shrimp). I have to admit, I’m kinda hoping we have time to watch the movie afterward…

Last night was the Kansas City stop on Bossy’s Excellent Road Trip. Cagey met up with me at my house and drove us to Manny’s Restaurant to meet up with Bossy, Dorothy, Cha Cha, Cady, Dawn and Criquette.

After several hours of great conversations, margaritas, Mexican food and beer, and chips and salsa, the restaurant staff were fidgeting in anticipation of our getting the hell out of there, as they’d closed down the rest of the top floor more than an hour earlier.

I did get some documentation:

After Cagey dropped me off and headed home, I drove out to Dorothy’s house and hung out with her, Beloved, and Bossy. We talked about music, travel and awkward social situations, and watched part of a truly awful local karaoke contest on basic cable.

After 1:00 a.m., we finally said our good-nights and I drove my tired self home. As ready for bed as I was, I still stopped at the grocery store to get some ingredients to get this started before I went to sleep.

It was a lot of fun and I hope to get to hang out with the local gals again soon. Bossy, thanks for including us on your road trip! Perhaps I’ll see you again at BlogHer.

I figured that a Friday would be a good time for an odds-and-ends post. Here are a couple of things that I’ve been meaning to mention, followed by an example of something nobody ever really wants to read in a blog post, but I’m going to impose on you anyway.

First there’s BlogHers Act. They’re soliciting contributions for a variety of programs that will improve maternal health and save women’s lives.
Your donation to one or more of these projects can save women’s lives
by supplying health care, birthing kits, education, trained birthing
attendants, meals, and much, much more. If you were wondering what to do with some of your tax refund, here you go!

On to a completely unrelated subject: hand lotion. A while back I received a sample bottle of a lotion called Gloves in a Bottle. Despite the fact that I’m always complaining about my dry hands, I didn’t get around to trying it right away. Well, that was dumb. It turns out to be a really wonderful lotion that makes my hands feel soft and moisturized. Supposedly, it doesn’t even come off when you wash your hands. Best of all, it’s completely non-greasy, so I can put it on immediately before yoga class and not have to worry about my hands slipping on the mat.

Finally, I have to break the "never tell people your dreams" rule and talk about a freaky dream I had right before I woke up today.

I was in a band getting ready to play at an outdoor venue. My friend, me, was our drummer, despite the fact that in real life she doesn’t play drums. As we were getting ready to take the stage, me was hanging back from apparent stage fright, but I gave her a shove and got her up there. The bass player was my current bass player, only not – you know how dreams are.

The band started playing, but the songs weren’t on my list so I didn’t really know the words very well. Worse yet, some strange guy came up onstage and started singing and looking at me as if daring me to kick him off. Also, my mic cable kept coming unplugged.

The stage was exceedingly deep, so I had to walk and drag my mic cable back a good 20 feet to ask the drummer why she was playing the wrong songs.

When I woke up, I was all stressed out. I have no idea why my subconscious put me through all of that, but it probably has something to do with all of the band personnel changes we’ve been having. I think it’s safe to say that when we do finally start gigging, it’ll go a lot better than that.

So that’s all I have today. Tomorrow I’ll report on my husband’s birthday party before I go meet up with Bossy and a bunch of other cool bloggers. If you want to get in on the Bossy gathering but haven’t been on the correspondence list so far, let me know.

Have a lovely weekend!

My husband (happy birthday, honey!) and I get along exceedingly well for the most part, but there are a few things about which I cannot get him to agree with me. Worse yet, whenever he thinks I’m bossing him around, he digs in and gets extra stubborn.

One sticking point is the temperature in the house. I’m comfortable in a very narrow range and also cheap about the utility bills. Therefore, I always think he has the thermostat set too high, no matter what time of year it is.

On top of that, he doesn’t seem to understand that there’s no point in having a fan on unless you’re in the same room with it. Moving air doesn’t cool the room, it just cools the person around whom the air is moving. Did I mention that I can hear the ceiling fan in the (empty) next room rotating vigorously?

I do concede now and then. I have always made it a policy never to buy white bread. I’ll make it from scratch now and then, but I never buy it at the grocery store because I like high-fiber, whole grain breads. The other day my husband plaintively expressed how much he hates the multi-grain bread I buy (and often end up feeding to the birds). I compromised and got some sliced Italian bread. I’m not going to eat any, but at least he won’t let it go to waste.

That’s a pretty short list of disagreements, which is probably why we’ve been married for almost 14 years and it’s seemed like five. For the most part, each person’s foibles balance out the other’s. That’s why he didn’t make a peep about my tax idiocy this year and I didn’t say a word about how late he was renewing his car tags.

Now if I could only get him to turn off the light above his desk when he goes to bed…

So I settled down to run my taxes through an online tax preparation program last night, thinking I might be able to just go ahead and get them finished and filed.

Uh, not so much. There was a form from the settlement of my grandparents’ estate that threw a wrench in the whole process. It wasn’t even the form that was the problem, it was two specific boxes on the form. Grrr.

With that dream shattered, it seemed best to just file for an extension and gather up my paperwork to mail to my accountant. I had a pretty good idea of my tax liability up to the point where the online program gave up on me, so I filled out the extension form and sealed it in an envelope. Some quick research showed that I didn’t need to file state extensions, so that was good.

Then I started looking through my giant bag o’ junk mail to make sure there weren’t any important forms or charity receipts there. I ran across a large manila envelope from my accountant that had never been opened. Uh oh.

It was chock-full of amended tax returns from 2006. I was supposed to send them to the Feds and two states along with checks, oh, about 51 weeks ago. I also owed my accountant $50 for preparing them.  The whole envelope had gotten lost and its existence had slipped my mind until then.

I glumly wrote out the checks and signed all the forms, knowing that sending them in now was going to trigger the countdown to getting bills from each government office for penalties and interest.

Then it was time to go to the post office and mail everything. I drove to the large, main post office for my area and went inside. Every postage vending machine they had was shut down. The do-it-yourself mail station was apparently out of supplies because it would only offer me $16 First Class shipping. Sigh.

I went to the other post office in my town. Same deal. Next I stopped at a 24-hour grocery store. They had stamps, but they didn’t sell them after 10 p.m. By this time, my inner longshoreman was fighting to take over my vocabulary. It was time to give up.

There was nothing else to do but to go Sonic and drown my sorrows in a giant vanilla cone.

Never again! I swear, never again…

Holy schnikes, people! I have absolutely no choice but to spend my entire evening trying to do my taxes or at least file an extension. What is wrong with me?

Yesterday’s burst of house cleaning energy was apparently a weird form of diversionary procrastination, as though my brain was trying to keep me as busy as possible so it didn’t have to face the tax paperwork.

I’m happy that I did almost all of my laundry, my house smells pretty good, and I managed to locate my husband’s car insurance card so he can renew his license tag. Unfortunately, that doesn’t get me any closer to satisfying my annual legal requirements as a wage earner in the U.S. and two states.

On a more positive note, yesterday’s lead guitarist audition went well. If the guy decides to join the band, that’ll mean that everyone in the group who plays a stringed instrument is named John. As if it weren’t confusing enough to have two Johns already. On the other hand, I’ll be able to get everyone’s attention at once by simply shouting "John!" over my mic.

So you know what I’ll be doing after work tonight. No Twitter. No Bloglines. No TV. Just sorting through piles of dusty correspondence and entering figures into the computer. I’d ask you to wish me luck, but I don’t deserve it at this point.

I woke up at the crack of dawn today and immediately had the impulse to get the Shop-Vac and vacuum the studio. Before I got going, I started a load of laundry.

After I was through sweeping, I went down to the basement and swept up a hideous amount of cat hair and kitty litter. I cleaned out each cat box thoroughly (when I hosed them out outside, there were snow flurries coming down) and mopped the basement floor when I was done.

I kept doing laundry, but lost a bit of steam after that (I blame the siren call of Twitter and Bloglines). However, I rallied and did one more cupboard cleanout for the Kitchn Cure.

Before:

After:

Man, I had a lot of ancient and/or duplicate spices! And two boxes of toothpicks for some unknown reason. I think I’m making a lot better use of the space now. Perhaps that will save me from letting it get so bad again, but I doubt it.

I probably have time to do all of the other cupboards in my kitchen before I have to shower and eat before band practice. The question is, do I want to do that?

My husband’s birthday is this Thursday, but we didn’t really start discussing what he might want to do to celebrate until late last week. He decided he’d like to have some friends over, so I pried a list of e-mail addresses out of him on Saturday morning and sent an Evite.

It’s been almost 24 hours and so far the guest list looks like this:

• Him
• Me

I believe I’ll wait a few more days before I make a run to Costco for hors d’oeuvres and beverages.

When he and I first got together, I threw him a birthday party at our tiny apartment. I didn’t know his friends and e-mail really wasn’t in the picture back then, so he must have given me their addresses so I could send invitations.

I remember that I made a rum cake and bean dip, among other delightful snacks. One guest arrived on time and hung out for an hour or so. Then he had to leave, and this guy came by for another couple of hours. Yes, everyone we knew had big hair back then.

They turned out to be the only guests who showed up out of probably 10-15 invitees. Awkward!

Needless to say, I’m hoping we don’t have a repeat of that situation on Friday. At the very least, I know that the guitarist for our original project will be there after he gets off work at 10. Maybe I should rent a couple of DVDs to keep us occupied until then.