Awake and alert

This morning I've been awake since roughly 4:30a. I'm guessing at that time since it was 4:45a when I actually decided to check my alarm clock. At 6:20a I gave up trying to fall asleep again and decided to take a shower and start the day. Sure, I went to bed at 1a and it makes no sense that I should be awake now. I suppose I've got a lot on my mind.

My husband planned on trying to sleep in until 8a, but, duh, he was aroused earlier by my moving about. He just asked if I was stressed. I said I was probably anxious and had a lot on my mind. I told him I'd blog about it to solve the problem. And then I told him his commentary would surely not be omitted from my blogging ;-)

One day more before baby girl/slug is born. The funny thing is, the new baby is not what's keeping me up. It's the rest of the players in my immediate and extended family.

Just a random question...

Did you like George Peppard better as Hannibal in the A-Team...


...or as "dah-ling" Fred/Paul in Breakfast at Tiffany's?

Talk about two sides of the same man.

Some blogging house cleaning

I feel it is that time that I need to start keeping stock of my blogstock, so to speak, in that I've just been going at this blogging thing without much foresight. Some people shut down shop in order to do this, but I haven't got that kind of time. I'm blogging on my lunch hour and late at night anyway; I don't have time for a major overhaul right now.

HOWEVER...

There are some things I haven't been about keeping track of very well. For instance, I've been following a lot of blogs and leaving comments, and having email correspondences with other bloggers and so on and so forth. I like to link them over there on the left sidebar. But I'm realizing looking at the list of "Other Blogs I Read" (catchy title, huh?) that many of these blogs are missing. So, I hope there are not hurt feelings. More importantly, if you want your blog included in the list, I would be more than happy to include it. In fact, I would grateful if you would tell me so that I am not so patchy in my linkwork. Please leave me a comment or shoot me an email (heather@comparativechildhood.com -- again, catchy, huh?) giving me your blog and the URL and I'll include it in the list!

OK, other than that, I'm trying to make sure this blog doesn't get too heavy. Sometimes I spend days on a topic that really drags, and though I am more than appreciative for all the feedback I get from you guys, I feel sometimes like I dig myself into a deep, deep hole. Maybe I'm giving you guys the wrong impression, like life should be all serious introversion and self-evaluation, and that you should never do anything frivolous. Quite the contrary! Actually, many people I know would laugh hysterically if they heard me characterize myself like that. So I'm going to try to be a little less edited, and a little more genuine here. Got it?

On that note, Little Miss Sunshine State posted a word association game yesterday that I thought was hysterical. It's easy: I say____, and you think ______. And?.....here we go!

1. Spit it out:: I know you're hiding something from me

2. Shadow:: Dancing

3. Database:: meltdown

4. Expression:: Chomsky

5. Boss:: Springsteen

6. Baby:: baby, where did our love go?

7. Mystic:: Pizza

8. Kate:: Hudson

9. Boobies:: should be called breasts

10. Raid:: Ants and Spiders and Cockroaches, oh my!

I'll tag Margo and Melissa and Amira and Natalie for this one, because I can't wait to hear their responses. And Margo gave me an award last week and I haven't had the time to write about it yet. So until then, you guys can go check out Margo's blog and see what her responses are to the word association game.

One last thing: I browse the web using Firefox on Mac OSX. Has anyone else had the problem of all italics turning into squares? I know it's not a font installation problem, because I can get italicized text in other browsers and other applications. Ugh. I hate that. Because all I can see in the word 'hate' now is square-square-square-square. Damn-damn-damn-damn.

Cheers to you all today!

Christmas already?

I just realized, it's already Christmas Day in some parts of the world. That's not fair! I mean, the holiday does start until the actual day, but it goes on as long as you like. It's not like because I am 15 or 16 hours behind some time zones and have to wait almost a whole day longer for the day to arrive that it lasts that much longer for me.

I feel really sorry for the people in Hawaii. What's that like?




Oh, wait. I think I just realized I've lost my perspective. I'm suddenly feeling a need to feel sorry for people in Hawaii? My brain is clearly gone.

Christmas lights

When checking to see if the lights for the Christmas tree still work, make sure you plug them into a socket you know is working. Or at least, do so before you test every single one of the 200 bulbs and then decide in an irritated huff to throw the whole string in the garbage.

The End.

I've got nothing to say. Nothing.

I said before I started this blog, I won't post unless I've got something to say. And then on a whim, in a moment of carefree ambition a month ago, I thought, I should try this whole "a post a day for a month" thing. It never occurred to me that this would be a problem if I had nothing to say.

To my surprise, the ideas just kept coming. I found myself sometimes writing two posts a day. About a week ago I thought, I can really do this! I can post something every day for a month and the "something" I post will be worthwhile!

I won't become one of the bloggers that blogs about blogging!

Four days ago I called it quits. There was just nothing left, and no time to post it. To my surprise, I eked two more meaningful posts out. Who would've thunk it?

But today, nothing. So I'm posting for no reason except to say, I really did post every day for a month. That's it. That's all I have to say. Apparently I am one of those bloggers who blogs about blogging.



And so ends NaBloPoMo.

in just under the wire.

Alright, I couldn't just let go; I had to post something. I think this is the first time I've posted on my blog just because I felt like I needed to post, and yet had nothing to say. I suppose this is a crossroads. Nonetheless, I apparently am not above posting for the sake of posting.

84

Go ahead, try it. I dare you.

An observation

I think people don't like to end sentences with periods anymore. At least not at the end of a paragraph or comment or something else. I've been watching this on blog comments and facebook comments and status. You can end with a question mark or exclamation mark, but not a period.

You can be more creative and end with an emoticon :-) or an ellipsis...

But to just end it with a period, that seems to be a very rare occurrence indeed.

There's one woman I am friends with on facebook who ends every single comment and status update with an exclamation point! Or many!!!!!!!

There's another facebook friend who always ends her status updates with ellipsis...

What does that mean?

So my challenge for us in the blogosphere today is to leave comments that end in periods. Like this:

"Wow, I never thought about that before. What will they think of next? Your post encourages me to write about this next week."

Even as I wrote that, I could feel myself tending towards wanting to end it with ...

But no, there's no reason to do that. Full stop is ok. I hereby encourage us all to stop underusing the period at the end of comments and paragraphs.

Trying out a meme

I've never done a meme before. I hear you're supposed to be tagged to do these things, right? Or is that a culture of the blogosphere I'm just not connected with? It hardly seems fair during NaBloPoMo to do things like memes, but it seemed like fun. Since I already wrote another entry today, this is fair. If I slip up later in the month though, just remember that I didn't use this meme as my only post of the day!

So here goes. This is the One Word Meme, and it's been all over the blogosphere. I'll just credit its existence to Mother Nature.


Instructions: Use one word to describe or answer the following list. (In the comments is fine - or on your blog if you like.)

1.Your house?
Undiscovered

2.Your significant other?
Tall

3. Your hair?
Thin

4. Your family?
Traditional

5. Favorite place to eat?
Diner

6. Your favorite thing you can see right now?
Grace

7. Where is your cell phone?
Charging

8. Your favorite drink?
Coke

9.Your dream/goal?
Freelancing

10. What room you are in?
Bedroom

11. Your hobby?
Writing

12. Your fear?
Illness

13. Where do you want to be in 6 years?
Michigan

14. Where were you last night?
Home

15. Something that you aren’t?
Funny

16. Pie?
Cherry

17. Wish list item?
Piano

18. TV show?
M*A*S*H

19. Last thing you did?
Lectured

20. What are you wearing?
Turtleneck

21. Vacation spot?
Beach

22. Your pets?
Peaceful

23. A best friend?
Irreplaceable

24. Your life?
Potent

25. Your mood?
Melancholy

26. Missing someone?
Gone

27. Your car?
Civic

28. Something you’re not wearing.
Make-up

29. Your favorite store?
CVS

30.Best memory?
Riveting

NaBloPoMo

Yeah, I'm in. Why the hell not.

Another two of a kind

This comparison has probably been made before. But nonetheless, here is another entry in my ongoing Separated-At-Birth saga.

Senator Harry Reid

Actor James Cromwell

I'm wondering if there's someone out there who looks just like me.

Back in the Saddle

Well, I'm confined to four weeks of bed rest. This is to 'optimize healing' and 'reduce potential scarring.' I've never done this before. I am a rather kinetic person, so they say. It will be an adjustment to sit in the same place. I've only been out of the apartment once since I came home from the hospital, and that was to go to my doctor's office. So, since my laptop often is my only source of amusement while I am in the predicament, the blog may be getting some good attention in the next month.

So I don't keep you in the lurch, the surgery was successful for its purposes, but revealed a new pathology not previously detected nor suspected. The prognosis is not fun. Expect pain in the future, expect that any future pregnancies will end in c-section, and expect a hysterectomy as soon as you're done making any babies. That's assuming that the babies can be made. Ah, well. I'm giving you the glossy, sugar-coated version. I wish I could upload the pictures my doctor showed me! They were quite a sight.

In the meantime, here are some realizations I've had during the last few days. Warning: Much of this new-found wisdom may be the by-product of fuzzy thinking laced with narcotics.

1. When assessing one's financial stability, a cat is a liability on the balance sheet. Though the cat provides much happiness, love, and yes, care, she does not hold value, she does not appreciate, nor does she have any wage-earning potential. That's something I wouldn't have expected to see on the balance sheet.
2. There's lots of drug use in the world today. I was reminded of this when filling prescriptions for controlled substances. Actually, my husband filled the prescriptions, and I has the experience of 'being reminded' by actually obtaining the drugs. I couldn't have possibly filled the prescriptions because I was in bed in a loopy state of mind! Anyways. I've formulated a hypothesis that I bet checks out. The large majority of people who get addicted to pain medications are rich white people. Who can afford surgery. And pain medications. Someone get on checkout that fact on some website somewhere.
3. Most of the celebrities I have fallen for during my lifetime are dead or dying. Examples: Michael Hutchence, Jim Morrison, John Lennon, Michael J. Fox. Someone needs to tell Val Kilmer this. Unfortunately, I'm so sorry to tell you, I never thought Tom Cruise was much to look at.

Here's something random just for your amusement.

Really. Going to see Star Wars was one of the best childhood memories I have. I'll have to write about that here sometime.

I've been writing offline a lot lately. Short stories, essays, perspectives of life. I haven't done this in almost two decades. It feels really good. I had forgotten I had a creative side to me altogether.

My kid is great. Let me explain. About this time every year, a wave of euphoria crashes over me like a big wave and carries me all the way to the shore. I get super-optimistic about the coming school year, with ideas and hopes and dreams and excitement. It lasts until I get the first report from school, usually about 2-3 weeks in. The report is always something negative. (Don't believe me? Anyone out there with a genius child who is well-behaved and an over-achiever? Do you ever get a phone call in the middle of the school day, about week three of the school year, with a teacher saying, 'I just wanted to tell you that Junior is a blessing to have in class!' I didn't think so.) This year I'm telling Grace all about my optimistic euphoria. 'Won't this be a great year?' and 'Aren't you excited about school?' and 'Swim team's gonna be awesome!' and 'I can't wait to see what you're studying in science.' Blah blah blah. I'm sure she's really invigorated by this. But I really don't care. I'm gonna have fun with the euphoria this year.

Grace's dad is avoiding communicating with me. He actually wrote this in an email last week. He wrote that he's doing this because I have sent negative email messages to him. I'm assuming he's referring to episodes like this. The problem is, all communication about arrangements for visitation have fallen to the wayside and been relegated to the status of 'Assumption.' Still, he told me he's avoiding communicating with me because I'm confronting him when I see something he's doing that's affecting Grace negatively. But even though he's avoiding me, he's still a proponent of 'all the parents and stepparents should sit down together with Grace and confront her on all her faults' pow wow. Weird.

Moving on. I had a great conversation with my dad a few days ago about politics. He's always liked McCain, and I assume he's planning to vote for him. My dad knows I like Barack Obama and that I will not vote for McCain. He asked me if I had seen the forum with Rick Warren. (Of course I did -- what else was I gonna do while I was laying flat on my back at the hospital?) My dad likes Rick Warren. Here's the great conversation part. We just talked about the strengths and weaknesses of each candidate reflected in that forum. We shared ideas, our disappointments, or disagreements with their ideas and logic, and more. It was refreshing to just talk about these ideas without it being a debate or threatening or emotionally charged. I was happy to have such a nice visit with him over the phone while recuperating. So I made a decision -- I'm not going to worry about this election anymore. No matter what happens, there will be problems and mistakes. Wrongs. And the people of America are the ones who are gonna have to solve these things. I know who I'm going to vote for, and I'll vote. But I am not going to put myself through the strife of asking anyone why they'll vote a certain way, getting my hopes up, watch them be dashed, insulting people by saying they have no brains because of how they're voting, etc. My effort is better put into making change that talking about it.

More for your amusement: 'My Biggest Financial Liability'

And, let's see, what else could I put up? Here. One picture of the flowers Grace and my husband picked out for me.

Very nice, eh? Photography by my husband too. And the vase. I love that vase. It was a wedding gift. When I picked it out for our registry my husband asked, 'are you sure we'll ever use that?' I assured him we would, that people would bring long stemmed flowers to our home and if we didn't have this vase, what would we put those flowers in? The truth is, I love simple arrangements of flowers like this one, and I longed for a classic vase to make it possible. I have always imagined that when I grew up, I would live in a home that had a place for a beautiful vase. The same vase would sit there and each day fresh flowers would be displayed. Hopefully I'd have a flower garden that I could grow the flowers in. Like most of America, we're suffering from the housing crisis right now, so the home with the flower garden and the designated place for the vase is lacking. So when I came home from the hospital and found this in my room, my heart just melted. I love my family and I love my home. Could all you readers remind me of that when I get on a cranky rant?

That's all. This has been one big, huge, unconnected, poorly edited, stream-of-consciousness-style rambling. I am not the rambling type on my blog. I'm gonna look back on this and think, 'I cannot believe I allowed myself to publish that.' But, I'm all into honesty and discovering myself these days, being more uninhibited when looking inward. So it seems like I should just go for it while this is what I'm experiencing.

coffee, coffee everywhere

I can't help but make a comment here about the imminent closing of 600 Starbucks venues. Afterall, this affects my life. Because my daughter thinks that a Vanilla Bean Frappuccino® Blended Crème, despite it being a glorified vanilla milkshake that I can make at home, is worth the fortune Starbucks charges for it. 

It seems to me that 600 store closings is not that many in light of how many they have, right? How many Starbucks are there anyway? A LOT of them, it turns out. When I checked wikipedia today, the info there reports that there are over 15,000 Starbucks worldwide. As of November 2007, there are 6,793 company-owned stores and an additional 3,891 joint-venture and licensed outlets in the United States alone. That's 10,684. If you close 600, there are still over 10,000 left.

This makes sense to me because in the 'historic town' where we lived in Maryland, the local shopping strip had two Starbucks, one in the strip and one in the Safeway grocery store. This gave Grace TWO opportunities to ask me to purchase a Vanilla Bean Frappuccino® Blended Crème when I dragged her along to help me buy groceries.

Whew. For a second there, I was beginning to believe Grace might have to settle for coffee with her parents in the afternoon! Oh, No, The HORROR!

OK, now that we've gotten over the panic of a world without Starbucks coffee, two comments. I didn't start drinking coffee until I took my first waitstaff job during the breakfast shift when I was 20. It worries me when I go to Starbucks during finals week and I see undergrads walk in and say, "I'll have a double shot of espresso, no cream." That must be affecting their ability to reason soundly. Now for something more humorous - my mother-in-law. When my mother-in-law visited the United States from Brazil the first time, she went to Starbucks at a rest stop on the Ohio turnpike. She had been in the car for hours and just wanted a sip of coffee. After taking her first sip, she looked at my husband and quietly said to him in Portuguese, 'this is awful coffee.'

Starbucks opened a store in São Paulo and it succeeded. So well did it succeed, they opened 9 more. I guess my mother-in-law's taste doesn't represent that of typical Brazilians. Starbucks hasn't yet spread to Rio or Brasília, though. There's still hope.

Another two of a kind

Again, in scanning the news, I noticed an uncanny resemblance:

Bono*

Robin Williams*

Weird.

*Bono's photo found at abcnews.com here, William's photo found at yahoo movies here.

Webby Awards - vote!

I've been a fan of NPR's "Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me!" for a long time. And now (evidently) I am a blogger. So that qualifies me to tell people that the website for the news quiz show has been nominated for a Webby Award! So if you are a fan, and if you're hip to the web, go to the Webby Awards site and vote for "Wait, Wait!" They are nominated in the category of Humor. Now I know that I Can Has Cheezburger is also nominated in this category, so I'm guessing that The Smirking Cat's vote will most likely go to them instead. But for the rest of you out there, vote for "Wait, Wait!"

Separated at birth?

Is it just my imagination, or has anyone else noticed the uncanny similarity between famed videoblogger Amanda Congdon and CNN reporter Brooke Anderson? It's not just in looks -- today I could swear that while I was watching the Showbiz Tonight segment that Anderson was Congdon, and I just hadn't heard news of the change yet.