I want to write about crack.

I want to write about the crisis I am going through that involves baby gear, Photoshop, and online shopping.

I even want to write about hissy fits, school work battles, and the piles of laundry I am processing because I fed somebody something that refused to stay inside them. (I will leave it to your imagination which end it escped from.)

But I can’t.

Because in a few hours the kids will go to bed, Mr. MG will roll his eyes and vacate the living room, and I will get some snacks and park it for two hours. The moment I have been pining for for eight months is almost here. I’m finding it hard to focus on anything else.

Dim the lights!

Got any spare change?

mere has tagged me!

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages.)
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

And just like her, my closest book was an HTML manual. Also three photography/Photoshop manuals-slash-textbooks. But then! I turned around and, lo, the school bookshelf!

From Bruchko:
“I fell asleep that night feeling terrible. ‘Father,’ I prayed, ‘You brought me here to work with the Motilone Indians. I have medicine that can help them.’ “

A few years ago Bruce Olson spoke at our church’s missions conference. I usually skip that sort of thing, but everyone was making a really huge deal about it, so I went. Wow! He is one incredible person, and his story is fascinating. My excerpt doesn’t do it justice.

I’m tagging
1. L
2. Jodi
3. Kate
4. Lawanda
5. You!

Have fun!

I am not a runner. In fact, I despise running. I have always maintained that the only time I run is if someone is chasing me with something sharp and has intentions to do me harm.

How could anyone like running, even a little teeny bit? What with the side stitches, the sweating, the burning legs, the not being able to breathe. Oh, and the wanting to barf. All of it adds up to a passtime that I will pass on. And as for people who do it for fun… well, they are obviously on crack. (Sorry, Kate.)

It’s true that I have a treadmill, but I have always used it for incline routines and only short bursts of light, barely tolerated, jogging. I liked the little lights telling me what a great job I was doing, going up that big, mean, fake hill. But it sure got boring fast, and it took forever. It was cutting into my valuable cookie-eating time.

Then last fall Jodi (who is also a total crack head) posted about plans to get even more fit than she already was, and part of that meant running one mile three times a week. Oh, I can do that, I thought. One measly mile…How hard could it be?

Obviously, I had blocked out the fact that I have never ever in my entire live long life run a whole mile before. You know those fitness tests in high school gym class, where everyone had to do the mile and the teacher wrote down your time? I sauntered. Then I schlepped. I may have even meandered. By the time I got to the finish line, the rest of the class was napping.

But now, at 35, I was deluded enough to think I could do it, no problemo. Ha!

I could tell that I was not a natural when even the baby looked doubtful and alarmed. I talked/threatened/cajoled myself into running the first half, walking a bit, then running the last bit. And again with the wheezing and sweating and wanting to hurl. But I got the mile in.

The next time I ran the whole thing, if only to get it over with sooner. Walking halfway into it just prolonged the misery.

Now, three weeks into it… ahem… I kind of like it. I feel pretty good. I turn on the BPM channel on XM and it goes by pretty quickly. And the rest of the day somehow goes better on the days I run. I find myself usually trying to get in more than the minimum, and hating to stop.

Hmph. Pass the crack.

When Moo was born, I spent the first week constantly crying. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know – hormones. But besides that, I was so overwhelmingly happy. I was blissed out so far that I couldn’t keep it in and it kept leaking out my eyes.

But another cause was that I knew from having two before her that it was going to go by so fast, and there is no human way I could remember it all. And that ripped me up.

The thing I had forgotten in that first haze of baby-ness is how fun kids are all along the way. (Well, except when they are faced with math corrections. No fun to be had there.) Even though I will never get back her first day which I spent blissfully, tearfully, absorbing first sneezes and hiccups, I get to see every day how she is blooming into this totally new person.

I thought I had seen drama before, but now I know better. She is my first kidlet to fling herself on the floor and flop like a beached tuna and scream when she doesn’t get her way. If she is headed toward danger and you pick her up to move her, she will pump both legs in midair and shout, “NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!” I obviously missed the family meeting in which it was decided that she is queen of the known universe.

But she melts me with the way she imitates and pretends. At a wee thirteen months, she will rattle off entire monologues in what sounds like ancient Babylonian, complete with hand gestures, weighty pauses, and significant glares. Maybe if I rub her head counterclockwise she will mutter, “Paaaul iiiiss deaad…”

Today she wanted to play with a box of Breathe Right strips at the commissary. After a few rounds of handing them back and forth:

She hands them to me. “Thank you, Moo.”

I hand them back. “Tank ooo!”

Back to me. “Thank you.”

And then to her. “Tank ooo!”

she started to pinch the corner of the box. Pinch, pinch, pinch. Then she lifted her pinched fingers to her mouth, popped an imaginary something in there and proceeded to chew. If I hadn’t seen that she was faking, I would have freaked out and tried to dig in there for a chunk of something she might have pried off the cart. She is some actress.

I think I might be okay with her not being a little pink comma snoozing for hours on my lap anymore. I never would have believed it, but this is way more fun.

For the last few days I have been spending my extra time restoring my Photoshop catalog. Deleting a few hundred duplicates here, hunting down several dozen broken links there. And then, under the pile of catalog backup discs, photo cd’s from before I had PS and was limping along on the software that came with my Easyshare camera. I’m not sure why they never made it into the catalog, but finding them now made a very humdrum job fun again.

has also changed more that I knew.

In honor of Black History Month, The Teaching Company has a free lecture on Duke Ellington. Enjoy!

Well. That was the exact, precise opposite of fun.

Guess what I did for the last four days. Nope, not that. Nuh-uh, not that either. That? Oh, I only wish. No, what I have done for the last four days was battle through and recover from a total system failure. At the worst point, I was looking deeply into my shiny new monitor at a black DOS screen telling me that my Raid 0 had failed, there was no boot drive, and by the way I was now the owner of a very pricey paperweight. Boy, did I pick the wrong day to stop sniffing glue.

This means that, instead of working on my blog book, instead of researching templates and servers, instead of teaching history, I spent hours and hours soft-cursing (“Dang! Crap! Rat’s knuckles!”) and pulling out my hair. More hours on the phone with HP – who, by the way, are fantastic and have bolstered my faith in humanity. I kinda want to buy them flowers and a nice dinner someplace cozy. Eventually my lovely beast was brought back from the dead, with the exception of my external hard drive which was irretrievably corrupted and has to be reformatted.

**Let me take this opportunity to beg you to RIGHT NOW stop what you are doing and make a backup of every important program and file you own. Really, you can come back and read the rest later, but for the love of Pete go burn everything on disc immediately while you are thinking about it. Thank you.**

This time I was lucky. I am a backup freak (thus my interest in the hard copy blog book) and so I had all my Photoshop catalog and Itunes backups burned on disc, plus all my old Word documents still alive and well on the old ‘puter. There were a few hours when I wasn’t sure if I had Moo’s first birthday pics burned yet, and I was going to just cry, but it ended up being fine.

Now to the long, boring task of restoring my catalog of over 6,000 photos to a different location and reconnecting it to the catalog. More hours cutting into my busy bon-bon eating schedule. And lots of whining about my sad lot in life. But all of it with a think coat of gratitude that I didn’t lose it all in a pile of flaming, tangled ones and zeros.

Want to know what really eats at me? The possibility that someday the servers of the world will all go *poof* and the last four years of my memories will go with it. I know I should have been making a hard copy backup all this time, but if I had time for that, I probably would have time to brush my hair, too, wouldn’t I?

But this is even better: Blurb makes blog books. Their free software lets you pop your blog into printable, editable format. Then you choose softcover or hardcover and how many copies; one copy if you are like me and want to have a nice coffee table book of your writing… or someone like Ree or Donna could have lots of copies printed to sell.

I can’t wait to try it out.

Ew, as in all this laundry.
Almost to the top of Mount Washmore!
Next time, I shouldn’t wait three weeks.
My, oh my, newly washed jeans feel snug, don’t they?
Now I’m glad I got that mile in this morning. (Thanks, Jodi!)
It felt good to sweat it out again.
It certainly did not feel good to have to keep going.
Where can I sign up to donate cellulite for stem cell research?
Maybe I can get a sponsorship!
Right across the tush of my jeans:
“Curing Parkinson’s Because I Donated My Tukas to Science!”
Naw.
I wonder what to do with this here white space.
It being the New Year and all.
Something has to be done; this look is awful.
Not as awful as my hair.
But that’s what happens when you trim your bangs with nail scissors.
(Hey, the kids were locked out of the bathroom, and it’s all I had with me.)
Wonder if I should keep growing out the grey, or henna again.
Huh!
Starting out the year with bad hair, a fat butt, and a generic blog template.

So glad that those are the worst of my problems.