All I'm Saying there's a joke in here somewhere

We are developing a mouse problem. Our back yard is adjacent to a big field (remember the poo trucks?), and mice are getting in to our garage. We've seen them on occasion, mainly when one gets into the traps Matt sets.

We thought they were limited to the garage, but Matt cleaned a bunch of stuff out of our garage storage, which is located along the wall that is between the house and the garage, and discovered a hole in the drywall where the little varmints have chewed their way in. We haven't heard them in the walls...yet.

I'm about to shit a brick over the whole thing. I think I will seriously wig the hell out if I find one in the house--the house where my baby is crawling, walking, and putting whatever is on the floor into her mouth.

I believe it is time to borrow the neighbor's cat.

Poor Freya started running a fever at about 10:30 last night. I woke up to find that I had a child warm enough to bake bread on sleeping beside me. I hoped that, like other fevers she's had, it would pass in an hour or two, but we got out of bed at 12:30 and dosed her with Tylenol. Then she just laid in my arms for the next hour as I rocked her. She didn't even fall back asleep--just laid there and gazed at me. You could tell by her stillness alone that she wasn't feeling well.

The fever continued on and off today. She still seems very worn down and is intermittently really cranky. Poor baby girl. Some friends have suggested it is teething, but her teething fevers in the past have been of very short duration. That, and we can't see signs of any teeth and the baby books indicate that we may have a break from teething for a little while yet. Send get well vibes, please.

We're entering into that time of year where I end up hearing about people's vacations to tropical climates. Being in Idaho, there are lots of folks that head out to Hawaii, Mexico, the Caribbean, etc. The weeks leading up to their trips are always full of envy for me. I think how nice it would be to be going somewhere warm and laying on the beach, enjoying the ocean and sipping a boat drink. (And cleaning sand out of the crack of Freya's ass, but I try not to let too much reality seep in to my envious reveries.)

You know what always makes me feel so much better, though? Knowing that they feel like crap once they step off that airplane in Boise at the end of their vacation. I'm not saying I feel better because they feel bad, but because I know that at least I didn't go from sun, sea and relaxation into cold, dirty air and several newspapers frozen onto my driveway. I'll always have that...

You know that joke about why sharks don't eat lawyers? (Professional courtesy.) Well, we live next door to a garbage man and today is garbage day. Because Freya likes to watch the garbage truck, we were standing at the window as the garbage men came, emptied our trash, and moved on to the neighbor's house.

You know what they did? They emptied his trash, then carried his cans up to his garage door.

Sheesh...professional courtesy.

Freya has slept much better the last couple of nights; thank you to those of you who sent advice and well wishes. It must have just been a phase. Now she's back to an hour to two hours between wakings. I know that sounds awful for some of you, but I'll take it.

It is no secret to most that my husband likes to talk. He's the kind of talker that is, well, more like a woman talker than a man talker. There is no reticence in him at all. Tonight as I was asking him to handle the baby for a few minutes while I came upstairs to blog, he agreed and then immediately launched into a story about his day. I hate to say it, but I have noticed that I am developing some mechanisms to show that I am not engaged in his stories: my eyes wander, I say "Uh-huh," a lot, I pick up the baby and start walking in another direction. I'm not sure where he gets that. Maybe it's because he is the youngest of seven kids. It's funny to me, though, because when I was in grade school a lot of my teacher's notes would come back with something like, "Casey always has something to say!" written on them, which was a nice way of saying there was no way to shut me up. Looks like I've met my match with Matt.

Finally, we're going to buy a share in my dad's RV, which is a big honking 5th wheel trailer with a slide-out living room in it. It is pretty sweet. We've been wanting to get a camper or something, but I hated the thought of getting into a credit/payment situation. However, I really want something self-contained and that has water in it now that we have a small child to take on our journeys with us. I can just imagine how filthy Freya could get after a day in camp. My dad needed the money to make some plumbing repairs to the trailer, and it just looked like a good deal all around to us. Now if I can just figure out wireless internet access, you could all have almost-real-time information on our camping trips, and wouldn't that just thrill you to tears?!

I am so rendered-down-tired right now that you could pour me out of a bucket. Freya has spent the last 3 nights waking up every 20-40 minutes. Her first sleep of the night, which she has been doing in her pack-and-play lasts for about 2 hours. That's great, but for the fact it starts around 8:30 and it takes me until a little later than that to get myself to sleep. Then she wakes, I bring her to bed with us, and she's off on the great voyage of fitful sleep.

I've tried rocking her back to sleep and putting her down in the pack-and-play again, and she'll have none of that. The only thing she really wants is to nurse in bed next to me for a few minutes, then she falls back to sleep again.

The thing is, I think she's waking up in part because I move or shift positions. It would compute that she'd sleep better in the pack-and-play, but she really, really doesn't want to do that. At about 2:00 last night, I made Matt get up with her and take her out of the room so I could try to get some sleep. That was a mistake on several levels, because I laid there feeling like a bad mom and couldn't just go to sleep, and because it woke Freya the rest of the way up so she felt like it was play time. Minimal disturbance is the key, I now see.

So I don't know what to do. Like I said, it's been the last 3 nights hard-core, but she's been following this pattern off and on for a week. I don't think she's teething. She shows no signs of being gassy or otherwise uncomfortable. She's just sleeping so shallowly that any little bump wakes her right up.

Any suggestions for me?

Signed,
Pooped in Potato-Land

We stopped this afternoon at Powell's Candy, which just opened today in Boise. A quick search of the internet didn't turn up a whole lot about the place, but it is evidently a small chain of candy stores selling pretty much anything you could think of. One of their bragging points, as reported to me by my husband, is that they can get pretty much any kind of candy you want, provided it is still being produced.

Going in to the place, you can see that they really rely on nostalgia to carry you away. The part they don't mention is that penny candy sure don't cost a penny anymore! Matt has been jonesing for something horrible called Snaps, which are licorice bits wrapped in toxic-colored candy coating. Nay-us-ty! But he found his Snaps (for $3/box). I was sorely tempted by the Abba Zabba bars, but decided to go with my old favorite, the Big Hunk, which is vanilla taffy with peanuts. I used to test the strength of my fillings with them often when I was growing up and buying my candy at the Crouch Merc (in scenic downtown Crouch, Idaho!) with quarters scrounged from my dad's change dish.

So if you were going to be able to get ahold of some candy from your youth, what would you pick? If it's obscure, try to put a link to it in your post.

Via Am.

I got this e-mail the other day that really pissed me off. Here's a snippet:

WEATHER BULLETIN --Denver

Up here, in the "Mile-Hi City", we just recovered from a Historic event--- may I even say a "Weather Event" of "Biblical Proportions" --- with a historic blizzard of up to 44" inches of snow and winds to 90 MPH that broke trees in half, knocked down utility poles, stranded hundreds of motorists in lethal snow banks, closed ALL roads, isolated scores of communities and cut power to 10's of thousands.

FYI:

George Bush did not come.

FEMA did nothing.

No one howled for the government.

No one blamed the government.

No one even uttered an expletive on TV.

Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton did not visit.

Our Mayor did not blame Bush or anyone else.

Our Governor did not blame Bush or anyone else, either.

CNN, ABC, CBS, FOX or NBC did not visit - or report on this category 5 snowstorm. Nobody demanded $2,000 debit cards.

No one asked for a FEMA Trailer House.

No one looted.

Nobody - I mean Nobody demanded the government do something.

Nobody expected the government to do anything, either.

We did not wait for some affirmative action government to get us out of a mess created by being immobilized by a welfare program that trades votes for 'sittin at home' checks.

Even though a Category "5" blizzard of this scale has never fallen this early, we know it can happen and how to deal with it ourselves.

"In my many travels, I have noticed that once one gets north of about 48 degrees North Latitude, 90% of the world's social problems evaporate."

It does seem that way, at least to me.

I hope this gets passed on.

Maybe SOME people (Like NO and Wash. DC freeloaders) will get the message. The world does Not owe you a living. The Government and Tax $ are not your insurance company.

I'm here to say...BULLSHIT!!!

This piece of trash hasn't been picked up by Snopes yet, so I thought I'd point out a few material points to refute the whole.

One, there's more than a couple Colorado Republicans out looking for aid. An all-risk incident management team, funded and made up of government employees has been working on evacuations, road opening and livestock feeding since shortly after the first blizzard hit.

I hardly think that means "no one is asking for the government to help."

The inherent racism in this message really pisses me off. And it sounds like something Rush Limbaugh would have written.

Just a heads-up, folks. If you get that e-mail in your inbox, it was written by a right-wing nut job who doesn't bother to find out the facts.

Do you ever sit somewhere--meetings, on a plane, the mall--and mentally give people make-overs? You know, trim about 4 inches of split ends on her, get rid of that godawful too-blonde dye job, trade those pleated khakis for a pair of flat fronts?

Or is that just me?

You know when you go to a meeting or training and you're given an agenda? I kind of look at that as a contract between me, the attendee, and the hosts of the function. They're saying, "Look, you come to this deal we're putting on, this is what we're going to talk about, and here's how long it is going to take." That works for me.

What doesn't work for me is when meetings go off-agenda. Whether that is adding a new element, or worse, exceeding the time allotted for a particular subject, it drives me up a rope. My brain is watching that clock and saying, "Hey, you said we were done with this at 11:30. It's 11:35. You're on my time now, buddy." And my brain more or less just shuts off at that point.

I have decided (because every meeting and every training I ever go to goes wildly off-agenda) that this is my problem, as opposed to that of the hosts. I think societally we have broken the covenant, and there is a new, unspoken covenant that the agenda is, as they say regarding the Pirate's Code in Pirates of the Caribbean, "Really more like guidelines."

GAH!

Not much content tonight: I'm too exhausted. Freya woke up about every half-hour last night, all night long. I'd just get to sleep and she'd be up and fussing again.

Not sure what that was about, but I sure hope that she's through with it. Nighty-night.

Holy crow, peanut--you're nearly a year old! Here's what you looked like (from the outside) a year ago:

And here's what you look like now:

You've come a long way, baby! This has been a great month for you: you cut your sixth tooth, which makes four across the top and two on the bottom, you're crawling like a world champion, you've taken your first steps, and your vocabulary consists of Daddy, dog, hi, fish and bye. You rock! You're also now napping in your crib, which is a pretty big thing for me. You somehow seemed ready to go into it without a big fuss. (There was, of course, the thankfully-brief period of time where you didn't want to lie down in the crib, but I think we're past that now.) And while I still love having you asleep next to me at night, I have hopes that you'll be sleeping at least part of the night in your portacrib in our room sometime before too much longer.

You're still nursing, and people are starting to ask me how long we'll go. I'm planning on leaving that up to you. I really wouldn't mind going for at least another six months or a year. I hear Rosie O'Donnell people say that if a kid is old enough to ask for it, they're old enough to be weaned. I think Rosie O'Donnell people need to mind their own business. The World Health Organization thinks it's best for two year-olds to still be drinking breast milk, so I think I'll listen to them. But the bottom line is that it is up to you. A lot of kids start getting too busy to nurse at this age. We'll see if you're one of them. You're certainly busy, that's for sure. It's all I can do to keep up with you.

You're the best, baby.
All my love,
Mama

(Taken from "Blogging for the Initiative-Handicapped")

If all else fails and you lack content for your blog, take a picture of your kid in a funny hat. That always brings the readers back!

Freya has learned to stand up in the crib. For a while we were able to get her in a nice, sleepy mode, lay her down in the crib, and she'd fall asleep after a few minutes. It was wonderful! (And it lasted all of about four days, which makes the situation all that much more poignant, at least to us.)

Now we lay her down and she fusses, then remembers she can roll over and stand up. And she does. It totally is wrecking her naps because (a) she doesn't know how to lay back down again--or even that she should, (b) she gets too awake by the physical activity, and (c) because we have NO FREAKING IDEA whether we should pick her up and try again later, if we should leave her as-is, or what.

We really don't want her to have to cry it out, but I don't want her to learn bad sleep patterns. Please help!!!

Because my employer grants us all a paid day off for the occasion of Presidential funerals, I had a four day weekend. I've made a vow to try and do something notable with the day off: when Nixon died I bought my first pickup, I can't remember what I did when Regan died because I was laid off anyway, and when Ford died, I dragged my husband and daughter to Baker City, Oregon.

Ring-a-ding-ding, right?

We stayed at the Geiser Grand Hotel (pronounced GUY-ser), which is a really cool old place that we've often looked at from afar and said, "We should stay there someday." It was pretty interesting, particularly how they spent $7 million to restore it to the Gold Rush glory. Beautiful place, and the rates really weren't that awful. I just wish we could have enjoyed the restaurant, but I have an unholy sinus infection going on and didn't want to waste any money eating good food I couldn't taste.

Once we got to town yesterday, we went looking for a place to snowshoe and drove into the mountains to Sumpter, OR where we followed a sign to a State Park featuring the Sumpter Dredge. It looked interesting, it looked like a good place to snowshoe, and because THERE WERE NO DAMN SIGNS, it looked like we were driving on a road and not a snowmobile trail. Well, our mistake there, eh? Everything went quite well for a quarter mile or so, except that Matt and I both kept agreeing that "Boy, this road sure looks like a snowmobile trail!" Assholes that we are... When we finally decided that we should turn around, I got a little off the packed trail and sank the Matrix in the snow. Thank God there was only about a foot of snow on the ground and we were clearly visible from the main road. Some locals came and pushed us back onto the trail, giving us the skunk eye the whole time for being the stupid flatlanders who drove on their snowmobile trail. (Signage, people! Signage!) Anyway. We didn't bother to enlighten them about how we were resource professionals and I certainly didn't tell them that I used to manage snowmobile trails. Then they really would have thought we were stupid.

So I mentioned the sinus issue, right? I was totally, totally blocked up last night. Couldn't breathe through my nose. At halftime during the Fiesta Bowl (which Boise State totally rocked) Matt offered to go get me something from the bar to try and unstuff my nose. I asked for a shot of brandy. Well, I couldn't even taste it. Slugged half of it down...nothing. No burn, nothing. The other half created just a little wisp of heat, but not much otherwise. So I breathed through my mouth all night long. Lovely!

And it is finally back to work for me tomorrow. I hope I remember how. And now I start keeping an eye out for the next likely President to require burial. How's Carter looking these days?