Computers

Pat fixed up 3 new computers for Railroad Junction school, which Alex will quit attending on Friday.  He gave the newest one to Alex's kindergarten teacher, and 2 to the preschool area.  I'm taking the old preschool computer to the e-waste facility today.  There was no way it could be saved and Alex's school is better off with the new ones.I'm looking forward to getting it out of the living room.  I held onto it until Pat was able to get the refurbished ones in place.  Now that they're there, I can move on with my life and regain the ability to open the entry closet door again.

Alone

Tomorrow I get to host a play date for Alex, with his good friend Nathan, and, for the first time, I won't have another mom present.  Part of me is looking forward to this, that way there's no struggle to keep conversation going while watching the kids, or needing to justify Daniel's odd behavior.  Still, I miss being able to talk to other mommies. 

And this also reminds me of how alone I feel lately.  Pat will be coming home early tomorrow and spending his time with Rick.  I have to force him to spend time with Alex and Daniel and I hate it.  He never volunteers to spend time with them.  Of course, he'll be with Rick tomorrow out of necessity.  Rick needs to go to Concord to get a form signed, but I offered him a ride there today and he declined.  Tomorrow Rick will tell Pat that I didn't offer him the ride, and that I'm interfering with him becoming an Eagle Scout.  Then, as Pat's greatest hope in life is for Rick to become an Eagle Scout, it will turn into Pat and Rick against me.  I'll be asked, "Why don't you want Rick to be an Eagle Scout.  Why do you hate him so much?  Why don't you ever do anything for him?"  I offered to drive him today.  Tomorrow I'll be busy with a playdate I scheduled Sunday night which is WHY I offered to drive him today, since I would be busy tomorrow.  But, nope, it'll be me trying to make trouble, not me holding to a commitment I already made.  It'll be me hating Rick and favoring Alex again.  oh well.

Busy Days

Let's see, we started off today with a trip to the Walmart for diapers.  Then we went to the Home Depot to build picket fence planters at their kid clinics.  Finishing this, we headed to Lowes for their Build and Grow clinics, but, unbeknownst to me, we had left a leg of Daniel's planter in the Home Depot parking lot.  Daniel soon discovered this and got upset so I told him we'd go back and get a new one after the Lowes clinic.  At Lowes we build school house boxes.  Then we went back to Home Depot and found the leg in the parking lot.  We headed for the farmer's market in downtown Pittsburg.  Parking in front of Steel town coffee, we proceeded to the market to make head bands, get balloons, eat samples, and to buy two cauliflower.  I took the kids to the coffee place to get a pick me up for me, but then Alex's talking Alien balloon popped so we went back to the market for a new one.  We headed home by way of Jack in the Box.  Once home Pat said he wanted to go fishing tomorrow and needed some new castmasters.  Back we went to Wal Mart.  Then we came home to find my books had come into the library, hence a library trip.  Then Rick needed a ride back to jhis friend Jesse's house.  Then home again.  Thank goodness for my crock pot.  Dinner was mostly cooked.  In the evening, we took the kids to How To Train a Dragon at the Drive In, where Daniel fell asleep in the car and the rest of us, Pat, Alex, and Me watched the movie.  Then to home and soon, some sleep.

Doctor's Visit Today

I had an appointment with Dr. Jaffin in Antioch today for my shoulder.  Apparently, I am doing just fine.  Shoulder surgery apparently just hurts like bloody hell no matter what.  I still tend to panic.  While I can stay reasonably calm for the first hour or so after an appointment, I rapidly manage to get back to my state of controlled panic which is the norm for me when all is NOT well in my world.  So, the second I have a question, or something scares me about the recovery process, I will panic again.

As usual, I took the kids to school today.  Alex first to Railroad Junction, then Daniel to MLK.  Mr. U's car followed me in the gate.  When I took Daniel to the bus, he told me, "get out of the cold mom" for which I was grateful.  The cold causes me to stiffen up and makes my shoulder hurt more.  I hung out at Pat's house, cleaning up and so forth, until 10 when I went to help out at Alex's school.  There I filed, took down a bulletin board, and cut out stuff for the craft project of the day.

In the afternoon, I took the kids to the library to pick up book six of the Ranger's Apprentice series on CD for Pat.  I imported it into I-Tunes, then returned it to the library in the evening when some other stuff I had requested came in.  Pat came with me this time and picked out some books from the stacks.  Then we came home so I could put the kids to bed and Pat could take Rick to the gym.

It's Monday

which means that Pat has the day off.  We took the kids to school, then went to Starbucks.  Pat told me he didn't want to do anything today, joy.  He doesn't understand how difficult it is for me to go out and do stuff with my shoulder hurting so badly but I agreed.  We're both getting over pneumonia right now, and he probably needed a break so he spent the morning playing hearts and spades.  We got Daniel, and then he went back to his card game.  I picked up Alex so he wouldn't have to interrupt his card game.  He said he edited some pictures.  We went to ACE after Rick came back to get some tomato cages, and Pat cleaned up my Dad's old table saw.  Then I cooked dinner while Pat took Rick to the gym.  In the evening we went back to ACE to pick up some mushroom yard art we saw there earlier to add to Pat's backyard phallic temple then to Walgreens to get Rick some deodorant.  We went to Starbucks and then came home to find that Butch had called.  Pat talked with Butch a while, apparently he really liked the Orson Scott Card Empire novel I had gotten for him.  I asked Pat about basically getting every thing he ever wrote and he agreed so I started hunting down more of Card's work while I put the kids to bed.  Pat has returned to his card games.  I hate those games.

Today

Let's see, today the kids got up at 6:10 am.  I'm still sleeping in the living room so naturally they woke us up when they turned on the computer.  I got up and turned the volume down, but naturally I was up for the day, though I dozed in the chair for about an hour more.  I got up and gor some pain med from Pat.  We wanted to take the kids out somewhere to get their energy out, but neither of us felt like it since we're both still recovering from pneumonia. Finally, we marshalled ourselves to go to the grocery store.  When we came back I cleaned for a while while Pat played cards.  Then he worked for a while on the tent to go over Alex's top bunk.  Rick called to tell us to pick him up from Boy Scouts around 12:00 then we came home again.  I cleaned, Pat worked on the tent.  He finished it, then tried to call my mother so we could go out tonight.  When she didn;t call back, we left Rick with the kids so we could go out, then we checked on her.  She was fine, but her home phone was not receiing calls from Pittsburg.  We went over to Todos Santos plaza for the evening,  Pat and I had hot dogs at the Hot Dog Palace.  Then we went to Half Price Books, my favorite store in the world.  We bought some DVD's and I got a new book, George Takei's To The Stars.  At this point I was in a LOT of pain so we went to Starbucks and came home.

Notes on Today

Today was a Lowes day for the kids so we went there at about 9:30 to build planters.  The planters were okay, but Daniel spilled his dirt twice, and Alex once before we even left the parking lot.  We also had to make a stop at the library to pick up some new audio books for Pat.  They were having their book sale today and I bought a couple of computer games for the kids, one of which didn't work, and a few books - The Magic School Bus and Electricity, Ernies Neighborhood, and Sonic the Hedgehog.  We got french fries, then headed home for the afternoon.  We had tuna steaks for dinner as Pat loves his fish.

Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol Pre-Released

So I was at WalMart in Pittsburg California today and they had Dan Brown's new book, The Lost Symbol on the shelf! I was shaking as I picked it up and raced to the cash register. Naturally I knew that I couldn't buy it until Tuesday, but it doesn't hurt to try, right? Well, naturally it rang up "Sell Not Allowed". The cashier called a manager, I think her name was Debbie, who told me that the item had been put on hold and couldn't be sold but she didn't know why. So I told her why. Yes, I probably shouldn't have done it, but if I can't have that book, nobody can. LOL Well, she told someone else and they promptly cleared the shelf of the 10 or so copies that were out. Wow, some stock person sure fucked up last night.

Book Review - Curious George

I wish we could return to a simpler time in children literature. It seems that every book nowadays has to be screened over and over to make sure we don't expose our young ones to something that might influence them and the result, to me, is a bland pablum of happy books with nothing to really laugh at. If we look at the older books we get the menage of mischievous characters dealing with exotic situations that are funny and interesting to children because they are not perfect and politically correct.

One of their favorites is Curious George, a perennial classic. But Curious George is not the innocent storybook character that he would appear to be. Some may think that George is simply a curious little monkey, but did you realize that George is a pawn of Philip Morris? GASP. Yes, in the original classic, George displays his loyalties on his first day in the Man with the Yellow Hat's home. He has dinner and then he smokes a pipe, complete with illustrations to show my impressionable children exactly what transpired, just in case they weren't listening closely enough. But, George, in spite of your foibles, I still love you. I will still read your many adventures to my children who manage to overlook your follies. But maybe we should consider a new book, Curious George and the nicorette patch.

Then we have the Man with the Yellow Hat. Dear Man, you're not exactly being an environmentally friendly partner with the Earth. After all, you removed a little monkey from his home with no thought of the consequence. Perhaps George was an endangered species, or maybe he had a family he left behind. Surely he would have been better off in his home territory. For all we know, he never would have gotten into so much trouble had he stayed at home. In the jungle he would have had normal monkey diversions. Hanging from tree limbs, and swinging from vines would have occupied his time as opposed to eating puzzle pieces, and soaring over the city on the tail of a kite, although then we would never have had his adventures to entertain our children.

Plastic

I love my crock pot. Pat got it for me for Christmas 1 1/2 years ago, and yes I did ask for it. But the handle on top broke with in a month, and Rival was not exactly willing to work with me to replace it. Well, I broke down and got a knob at the hardware store to give me an easily usable lid. For my 3 dollars I got a plastic bag with a plastic bag in it holding the knob, and a plastic bag holding a screw. Don't you think that's a lot of plastic for what I bought?

Plastic is one of man's curses to Earth. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a "green meanie" as I refer to the diehard environmentalists such as ELF and the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. Plastic is different, it never goes away. Every microgram of plastic that was ever created is still with us today. It gets smaller and smaller, but it's still here. I try to do my part and recycle, but like in the packaging for my crockpot handle, I wish the companies would try to do their part too.

Speech Therapy

Since Mini-Me was 2 years, 7 months old we have been making a weekly pilgrimage to Children's Hospital Oakland in Pleasanton for Speech Therapy. Alex has many speech issues, mostly related to the fact that he was nearly deaf his first year due to ear infections, and also because he was tongue tied. He had ear tubes at 15 months of age, but the damage had been done.



Mini-Me's first speech therapist, Monica, had a hard time working with him. Her idea of therapy was to have him run through picture cards, having him repeat a sound over and over with different pictures illustrating the sound. His reward was, at the end of the session, to play with her toys but it was hard for him waiting for a big payoff at the end of the session. During this time, he also had a frenulectomy, freeing up his tongue to enable more normal sounds.



Ten months later Monica left and we switched to Joyce. Joyce was a Godsend. She knew how to work with Alex by giving him little play times between short bouts of work. His speech started to take off. Now in September Alex will be stopping speech with Joyce, I will be glad to see him graduate, but I will truly miss Joyce.

Shoemaker's Children

"A shoemaker's children go barefoot", the old proverb goes, "and doctor's wives die young." I would like to ammend this. LAN administrators wives go computerless. Our computer has been on the fritz for well over a year. It started when Norton did an update on our anti-virus program. We were running a firewall and the new Norton was incompatible with the firewall program. To fix the program Pat had to uninstall the firewall, uninstall the anti-virus, go through the registry to manually remove all instances of the Norton program, then reinstall the anti-virus. Understandably, he didn't want to have ANYTHING to do with fixing the computer after this and it's now suffering from a terminal illness. The blue screen of death comes up hourly, and most of the children's games wont load because it says they aren't compatible with windows, even though they were a year ago. I would like to kill the computer, to take the 22 rifle and put a slug though its mother board. Perhaps then Pat would get a new one.

My Library

The Pittsburg library is a location where I have spent a good percentage of my life. I can easily claim to have been going there for 30 years, but it may be more, but not that much more. From the story book section as a child to teen romance and Anne of Green Gables as an adolescent, to the research section as an undergrad, I know my library in and out.

Right now, I can thank my library for saving me a small fortune in audio books. Pat has a long commute, two hours a day. He has an I-Pod that I keep filled with audiobooks to ease his time. Considering that the average cost of an audiobook on I-Tunes is $20 and Pat goes through two to three a week, I save about $60 a week, just on audiobooks.

I also save on my books. How many times have you bought a book, brought it home, and by the time you get around to reading it you find that you really don't like the book at all. Now I check any new books that I might want to buy out of the library first, a test drive so to speak. Then, after I return it, if I want to read it again I will add it to my library

Also, I save a lot on movie rentals. Not only do I try to get new releases, but also the classics that we feel we should see. This allows us to take chances without financial risk. We don't have to question if we really want to spend our money on said book / movie, we just get it free.

Now I find myself going full circle back to the children's room. I love watching Mini-Me and Bun listening to story time and checking out books just as I used to do. The city wanted to move the library a while back, but the funding for a new building fell through. I'm glad because I live my old library.

Reading

I read to Mini-Me and Bun by the hour. We cover armfuls of material from the Berenstain Bears, to Froggy, Dr. Seuss and High-5 Magazine. I usually don't mind reading to the kids, except for the times when Bun starts turning pages in mid read, or when he wants me to read one page then skip 5 then read another. I know this is what's best for their language development. It also gives me a secret sense of pride that my kids listen to the teacher in story time and can answer the questions about what's being read. My only rule is to not get any books that I would hate to read. After all, if I'm not going to read it, why should I frustrate the kids by having those books around to begin with.

A Guilty Pleasure

I have had a Neopets account for 8 1/2 years. I started this at work when I would have four hours of work in an 8 hour day. Naturally I wanted to do the work when my boss was around so I'd look useful and he'd feel good that he was bringing in enough sales to keep me busy. But what to do the other 4 hours while waiting for the phone to ring. Free Cell and Minesweeper get old quickly. I had to keep the phone lines open so I looked into online gaming and found Neopets. I have played with this account, off and on, for many moons and it still keeps me happy. It keeps me from being depressed by keeping me from dwelling on being alone. It has provided friends through a guild I joined and a way to escape to a colourful, happy world where I don't have to hear Mama being called out constantly, if only for a few minutes a day.

Veganism

I have always flirted with vegetarianism. Off and on through college I would embark on this life style, then go back to my omnivorous ways when the going got too rough and the siren call of chicken and hamburgers would lure me back. However, I can't argue that I do feel healthier on a vegetarian diet. And oddly enough I love reading vegan food blogs. I just wish I had the energy to try one more attempt at a herbivorous life