Category: Daily Life

I know I’ve been neglecting my blog lately. I guess after keeping up the 5-posts-per-week schedule fairly consistently for almost three years, I deserve to be a bit of a slacker now and then.

Truth is, I just don’t have much to talk about right now. I’ve already discussed at length all of the primary things that are happening right now:

• the kitten and her post-surgical travails
• raging acid reflux and its effects:
  • inability to sing properly
  • inability to eat normally
  • denial of coffee (nooooooo!)
• revived yoga practice

Those are just the most dramatic ways in which every day is the same, which tells you something right there.

Even when I’m out and about lately, I just don’t seem to have my writer’s brain in the proper gear. Rather than my usual habit of composing little snippets of blog prose every time I see something interesting, it’s as though I’ve stopped noticing anything outside the narrow tunnel of the given task at hand.

I think my post title sums it up: I’m just tired. Mainly I’m tired of having heartburn, a sore throat and difficulty swallowing no matter what I eat or what medication I’m on. That all leads to me not getting enough sleep and then I’m literally tired as well.

I’m sure I’ll get everything sorted out sooner or later. In the meantime, I’ll do my best to keep posting and hope I can get a little spark of creativity going from time to time.

Xena the Coneheaded Cat is loving, friendly, sociable and sweet. She is also single-minded in her determination to reach her post-spay sutures by any possible means. She scrapes at them with the edge of her Elizabethan collar. She reaches for them with her front and back feet, stretching her own belly flesh to pull them closer. It’s driving us crazy.

She visited the vet three times last week. The first time, the vet wrapped her midsection with bandages, turning her into Xena the Wasp-Waisted Conehead, and prescribed a week’s worth of antibiotics. By the time my husband took her back to the vet the next day, Xena had managed to yank her bandages up and reach her sutures anyway. That was it for the wrapping.

By the time I took her back to the vet the third time, she was looking better. She made it through the weekend okay and I hoped that she had finally decided to leave her sutures alone.

This morning as I was getting ready for work, Xena jumped up on the bathroom counter and put her paws on my shoulder for a hug. I sneaked a look at her belly and saw sutures askew around an ugly, unhealed spot. Criminy.

The vet has already said that in the 35 years he’s been in practice, he’s never seen a cat mess with its sutures so relentlessly. Pain pills don’t deter her, nor does the collar. Oddly, she acts as though she feels perfectly fine in every other way.

I’m taking an early lunch today to bring her back to the vet yet again. It’s possible they’ll have to actually replace some of her sutures.

If she could just chill out for another week, she’d be healed and ready to resume her cone-free lifestyle. It’s too bad you can’t reason with a creature with a brain the size of a Brazil nut.

Saturday was my niece’s seventh birthday. My sister is out of town, so my niece, my brother-in-law, his mother, his aunt and her fiance (husband? I may have missed a development), my husband and I met for dinner at a Japanese steakhouse to celebrate. My niece chose the cuisine, evidently for the opportunity to stuff herself with shrimp. She’s a shrimp-eatin’ fool, that girl.

After dinner, my niece came back home with us for a sleepover (and to bake chocolate chip cookies, per her specification).

Taking a leaf from my friend Me’s book, I’d decided to start a tradition with my niece of taking her shopping and letting her choose her own birthday gift. That was the plan for Sunday afternoon. Somehow I had failed to fully convey this to her, as evidenced by the following conversation:

Jane: Okay, let’s bake cookies!

Niece: And then we can open presents.

Jane: What presents?

Niece: The presents you got me for my birthday.

Jane: I didn’t get you any presents. Tomorrow we’re going shopping and you can pick out your own presents.

Niece: You didn’t get me any presents?!?

It took a little more explaining, but before long she had decided that we would visit Target in the morning to expand her already enormous collection of Littlest Pet Shop stuff.

We baked cookies until well after my niece’s bedtime. She brushed her teeth, settled down into her sleeping bag and asked me to read a story. She hadn’t packed any of her own, so I decided it was time I introduced her to the Oz books. I chose one of my many copies of The Wizard of Oz (which you can read in its entirety here) and read her the first chapter and part of the second before she started to nod off. I tucked it into her suitcase so her parents could read her the rest.

The next morning, we made our Target run and my niece chose a Littlest Pet Shop Digital Mouse. We went back home to release it from its plastic shell and I offered my niece the instructions, but she had it figured out in no time on her own.

She brought her toy with her as we drove to Lawrence, Kansas to meet my aunt for lunch at the Free State Brewing Company. After lunch, we shopped up and down Massachusetts Street for a while until we reached an enormous toy store. My niece spotted something in the window that got her very excited, and beelined into middle of the store before we even realized she’d taken off.

I followed her and found out the source of her excitement: a big bin of Ugly Dolls. I had seen Ugly Dolls online, but assumed that they were only ever purchased by graphic designers as cubicle decorations. I’d considered buying them for my niece and nephew, but had decided they were too weird. Boy, was I wrong.

My niece knew all their names and took a good 10 minutes deciding which one she wanted after I told her I’d be happy to get her one as an additional birthday gift. (Up to that point, I’d only bought her one cheap toy anyway.) She looked them over one by one and finally selected Icebat. An excellent choice, I thought.

Once she had Icebat, she was over the whole shopping thing. I almost stopped at Eangee Home Design on my way home to purchase a jellyfish light that had caught my eye, but decided I could always get it later.

I dropped her off so she could go to a 5:00 p.m. soccer game, headed home and took a nice nap with the cats before having dinner with my husband and getting caught up on an entire week’s worth of TiVo’ed entertainment.

I didn’t get any housework done this weekend, nor did I work on songs, catch up on laundry or even cook a meal at home. It was all worth it, though.

Yesterday was my husband’s actual birthday. We had a lovely dinner, made even more lovely by this special balloon.

Xena is back from the vet with a cone over her head.

(You know I couldn’t resist making her a LOLcat.)

What else? Well, I have sore muscles from yoga class on Monday. I hope that today’s class will loosen things up a bit. It’s nice to be reminded that I have abdominal muscles buried somewhere underneath all my winter lard.

I went to the doctor on Monday to find out why I have severe, throat-burning acid reflux every day despite my prescription for Nexium. She switched me to Protonix, so we’ll see if that helps. (So far, not so much.)

Thanks to that doctor visit, I know exactly how much I weigh right now and I was not happy to hear it. I’m already lightening up my diet to try to combat the heartburn, so I’m hoping that a stepped-up exercise plan will take care of the rest.

And that’s all I’ve got. But hey, it’s Wednesday already! My weekend promises to be a whirlwind of activity and fun. Well, activity anyway. I’ll do what I can to work in bits of fun.

I’ve been wanting to link to this ever since I bought it, but I’m never sure if my husband might randomly read my blog and I wanted it to be a surprise.

My hubby is one of those guys who pretty much goes out and buys himself whatever he wants. Thus, it’s really difficult to think of a good gift for him that he wouldn’t have gotten himself. When I ran across a link to Austin artist Kennon James‘ Black Faerie print, I knew I had a winner:

The price was right, so I ordered a print and took it to my favorite shop to be matted and framed. This was back in early March, so I ended up hiding it in my closet for weeks, waiting to present it.

Finally, I gave it to the birthday boy before his party on Saturday. He loved it and wants to hang it on the wall in the studio where he’ll see it when he’s sitting at the mixing console (which is most of the time). He was a little concerned that it might be "too much" for more conservative clients, but I think it’ll be fine.

Since I bought the print, Kennon has become one of my regular blog readers and commenters. How cool is that? I enjoy his blog too (particularly the fish) and I hope to buy more of his artwork in the future.

Today is Tax Day. I filed my taxes yesterday. I know enough people who’ve worked for the IRS to know that
there’s a secret grace period of about a week, but I’m too chicken to take advantage of it. For me, not having to line up at the post office with my forms in my hand is a great triumph.

Unfortunately my triumph was short lived. When I sorted through the mail I received yesterday, there was an envelope from my late grandparents’ bank. In it was a Form 1041, Schedule K-1 from my grandmother’s trust with instructions to include the amount listed on my 2006 federal income tax return. 2006. The one that’s due today.

The letter was dated April 7th and it was postmarked April 12th, so there’s no question that they completely dropped the ball and had no intention of getting it to me in a timely manner.

I suppose I have no choice but to file an amended federal tax return. I don’t know if it’ll affect my state returns (I file two because I work in one state and live in another), but that would be a huge pain. I’ll almost certainly end up having to pay back some of my federal refund, which makes me very unhappy.

My plan is to fax the form to my accountant (she shouldn’t be too busy today, right?) and let her deal with it after her post tax day break.

In the timeless words of Roseanne Roseannadanna, "Well, Jane, it just goes to show you, it’s always something."

You can tell we had a good party on Saturday by the fact that my husband and I slept until noon on Sunday.

As predicted, four o’clock turned out to be too early of a start time. I barely had time to make all the food and take a shower before the first guests arrived. My husband was in the shower then.

We ended up having a total of fourteen guests whose arrival times spanned from four o’clock on the dot to about nine o’clock. The last two couples stayed until well after midnight.

I thought the turnout was good, but my husband later fixated on the three or four people who had said they were coming and never showed up. I told him he’s starting to behave like one of his bitter old aunts and he needs to look at the glass as 3/4 full.

As I shopped for party food, it occurred to me that some of my original ideas were a little too girly. Thus, I chose to make Ro-tel/Velveeta dip with tortilla chips, mini smoky links in barbecue sauce, and dill dip for the potato chips. We ended up getting one giant pizza and some cheesy breadsticks. My "healthy" compromise purchase was a veggie tray with ranch dip.

The guests went through it all like a swarm of locusts. We had a little bit of pineapple upside down cake left, but that was about it. Oddly, we had leftover beer, too, but it’s probably because some of the guests brought their own.

During the party, my husband was being cagey about his age because our guitarist is younger than both of us and we’d been carefully neglecting to say how old we are as long as we’ve known him. At some point when I wasn’t around, someone pinned the big 5-0 on my husband in everyone’s earshot, so the cat was out of the bag.

It later transpired that our guitarist hadn’t been entirely upfront about his own age. I distinctly remember him telling us not long ago that he was 35, but on Saturday he fessed up to being 37. So we’re all big ol’ liars.

The party was a good warm-up for our BIG annual party, which we’ll probably have in early June. That’s the one where we invite pretty much everyone we know, so if you live anywhere near me, expect an invitation late next month.

Well, I’m off to take Xena to the vet to be spayed, pick up my tax forms from my accountant, and visit the doctor to see why I still have constant heartburn despite my daily dose of Nexium.

Have a lovely Monday!

My husband’s 50th birthday party starts in about eight hours. So far I have done almost nothing to prepare. I was going to make a list of tasks on a piece of paper, but what kind of blogger does that? No, I must share all of the boring details with the Internets instead!

Here’s what I need to accomplish between now and 4:00 p.m.:

• I am very glad that our cleaning lady came on Tuesday and that we’ve hardly been home since then. Thus, the only cleaning that needs to be done is a quick sweep of the kitchen floor and a wipe of the bathroom counter. It’s also probably time that I loaded and ran the dishwasher.
• My husband has requested a pineapple upside down cake as his birthday cake. He also mentioned rum cake as another favorite, so I thought I’d split the difference and flavor the upside down cake with some pineapple rum. I’ve never actually made a pineapple upside down cake before, but I’m not going to let that stop me.
• I need to get other party food from somewhere: the grocery store, Costco, perhaps the farmer’s market. I’d like to hit the farmer’s market for pico de gallo ingredients, if nothing else. If it weren’t raining and threatening to snow, I’d feel a lot more enthusiastic about the whole thing.
• Then I’ll need to buy some beer. On my list: Boulevard Lunar Ale (I’ve been wanting to try it), Guinness Stout and Newcastle Brown Ale. We already have some Boulevard Wheat and a few Rolling Rocks in the fridge. If someone finds our selection too exotic, he or she is welcome to run down to the liquor store on the corner for watery, mass-produced swill.
• We’ve decided to get two giant pizzas from our favorite pizzeria for the party. The tricky part is knowing when to order and pick them up. Even though the invitations say that the party starts at four, I think most people won’t come until later than that. What would you do?
• My office and the studio are both horribly messy. The studio is my husband’s problem, but I need to do something with my office. I don’t think I have time to clean it up properly, so I’ll probably scoop all the piles of papers into a huge plastic tub, shut the lid and worry about it later. That would sound like a better idea if I didn’t already have another giant plastic tub that I packed with office crap three or four years ago before a party and never bothered to unpack.
• My dressing room/closet room is years overdue for a spring cleaning. I think it’s best if I just shut the door.
• Our band practice room could probably stand to have heavy comforters hung over the windows for soundproofing in case a jam breaks out. Eh, I’ll deal with that if and when it happens (and then only if it looks as though the music will continue past 10 p.m.).
• Once my husband gets up, I’ll make the bed and do what I can to clear off the dresser and bedside tables. The bed is the logical place for people to put their coats, but I don’t want anyone spending too much time eyeing the awful, peeling wallpaper, so I’ll probably just light a couple of candles and keep the lights off.
• The cats will have to move to the basement for the duration of the party. Xena is crazy enough with just two people around. I don’t need her zipping around and biting twenty people, one by one. At some point, I’ll put their food and water and Velcro’s fleece bed downstairs and block the cat door.
• It makes sense to bring up our big plastic utility table and set it up in the living room. Should I cover it with a bedsheet or buy a festive, disposable tablecloth? Decisions, decisions.
• It would be nice to work in a shower, hair fixing and makeup application before our guests arrive. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

That sounds like a lot, but I think it’s fairly manageable. I guess I’ll get dressed, grab a sturdy bag and get started on my shopping. I think this’ll be fun!

Hope your weekend is fun, too.

I’ve been asked to contribute a post to the Lazy Eye Theater John Carpenter Blog-A-Thon, so here goes.

Even though I’d known about this for a couple of weeks, I didn’t had the leisure time to re-watch any of John Carpenter’s movies, so I had to cheat and visit IMDB to get a nice, solid list of the ones I’ve seen. It turns out that I’m more of a Carpenter connoisseur than I thought!

Here are my top-of-mind impressions of the John Carpenter movies in my viewing past:

• Halloween (1978) – Since I was only eleven when this came out and I had very protective parents, it was a while before I caught up with the rest of the world and got the Michael Myers experience firsthand. However, I have since seen the movie a couple of times and feel that it truly deserves its place in horror movie history. It’s suspenseful and creepy and mercifully free of gore.
• Escape from New York (1981) – Love it! Any movie featuring an eye patch-clad character named Snake Plissken is okay by me! Yes, it contains more Ernest Borgnine than any movie needs, but that’s just nitpicking.
• The Thing (1982) – Compared to the 1951 version with its Giant Carrot Monster, this is the scariest movie ever made. It IS really creepy and does a great job playing off the paranoia of the isolated crew who suddenly can’t trust each other. The inside-out dog is something I’ll never be able to un-see.
• Christine (1983) – Not one of Carpenter’s best, but considering that most of Stephen King’s work is practically unfilmable, a valiant effort.
• Starman (1984) – A young Jeff Bridges naked! I have a soft spot for this movie that it may or may not deserve. I think I saw it two or three times when it came out. I just can’t resist science fiction.
• Big Trouble in Little China (1986) – Another classic! A big, colorful, goofy action movie with a ridiculously over-the-top plot and lots of Kurt Russell with bare, muscular arms. What’s not to like?
• Prince of Darkness (1987) – Crazy street person played by Alice Cooper dissolves into a huge mass of cockroaches. Need I say more?
• They Live (1988) – "Rowdy" Roddy Piper modulates the shouting somewhat to play the hero who finds special sunglasses that reveal which of his fellow citizens are evil aliens and which are human. Source of the best cheesy movie line ever (sorry, Bruce Campbell), "I’ve come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum."
• In the Mouth of Madness (1995) – Eh.

I’m thinking a day-long John Carpenter ’80s-fest is in order to wrap up this blog-a-thon. Who’s with me?

I went out into our back yard to hide the eggs about a half hour before my sister and her family arrived. By the time the egg hunt began less than 45 minutes later, some kind of critter had located one of the hard-boiled eggs and chewed through the shell. I tossed that egg into the woods for the animals to finish at their leisure. When I gathered the real eggs from the kids’ baskets and counted them, I was short one more. I hope our local wildlife enjoyed their little snacks.

One thing I didn’t notice in the yard while intent on hiding eggs: a long-dead mammal of some kind – probably a rabbit, heh – strewn across a corner of the yard, most recently, it seemed, by the lawn mower. We kept the children herded away from it. Fortunately I hadn’t been dense enough to put any eggs in that portion of the yard.

I had noticed that there were a bunch of fairly large tree limbs on the ground in the back of the yard. What I hadn’t realized until I stood in the yard and looked closely is that a dead tree had fallen onto our shed. It must have fallen fairly gradually and gently, because the only visible damage to the shed is some smooshed shingles on the back point of the roof. Today I collected tree service recommendations from my co-workers and ServiceMagic, and chose a company to come out, saw up the tree and take it away.

So anyway, the Easter dinner went pretty well. I ended up serving our food
later than I’d meant to because I didn’t take into account how long it
would take for the ham to heat up all the way. That just meant everyone
was extra hungry by the time we ate – except for the kids, who had that
much more time to eat candy.

Incidentally, I got a huge amount of traffic over the weekend to my recipe for dinner rolls. I hope all of you anonymous Internet people enjoyed them. We certainly did!

For dessert we had lemon chiffon pie that
my sister made from our great-grandmother’s recipe. I’ll post that
recipe here sometime soon.

As soon as our guests left, my husband and I immediately took a nap for several hours. Ahhh!

This coming weekend I’m throwing a birthday party for my husband. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it goes as smoothly as last weekend’s entertaining!