Me=Stalker

So years ago, I had this friend in grad school. We hung out here and there, she worked with me on my website. She got married, and it didn't work out for her. I remember talking to her about the marriage and how sad it was. She moved away and went to try her PhD in DC. We stayed in touch for a while after, and eventually she moved back to Texas. Somewhere along that move to Texas, something happened and we were no longer friends. I don't know what it was, but I think I said or did something that offended her, and she just decided it wasn't worth it to explain. I am not someone who habitually offends someone, so I felt bad about it, but didn't really know how else to deal with it than just get over it.

I watch frequently this video for the babies that has in it a little girl with this friend's name. Today, I saw it and thought "Gee, I wonder what ever happened to her." I googled her, found a couple of articles about her-- enough to be able to track down her current website. You're never completely anonymous if you publish on the web, and google is quite the tracker.

So on a whim I wrote to her. She looks happy on her website; her life seems to be going well, for which I am happy. I wrote that I hoped whatever it was that offended/hurt her was long past and we could be friends again.

In short, I felt a bit like an email stalker. I hope she doesn't feel that way, and I really hope she decides to write back. I valued our friendship at the time, and am not looking to be her best buddy or anything. But growing up the way I did, I lost a lot of friends to moves and distance. I have always regretted losing friends, and hated it that I didn't know what happened. So we'll see.

Right now I feel a bit anxious about it though. Normally I probably wouldn't have bothered, but Andrew is leaving town for two weeks (yes, a nightmare time... we'll survive, but it'll be tough!) and I'm feeling at a loss for things to do to keep me from falling into crazy mommyland. :) So.

We'll see. She might write back and she might not. I hope she does. This way, I can feel like a good story & not a stalker.

Commando: The Sequel

When I typed in the title, my "autofill" told me I had already written a post titled Commando. It was pretty funny, actually, so if you don't remember it either, check it out. :)

But I wanted to write about why I don't ever like to go Commando. Aside from comfort issues, I think it has to do with something that happened when I was about five years old.

I had stolen my mom's big circle style skirt. The navy blue one with cute little white polka dots. And it twirled in a big spinny circle when I would turn around, a little dervish with a red stringy haircut. I liked the way it felt for skirt to go flying; it was pretty, and I felt all grown up.

I don't remember exactly why I took my white cottony panties off* that day but I suspect it had something to do with a five year old's incomplete bladder control. I do remember stepping out of them and leaving them on the floor.

But my panty-less state did not stop me from spinning in mom's fancy skirt.

Apparently, I did it once too often while playing with the girls from down the street. (Even then, I usually played with boys... my best friend Robbie wasn't home for some reason so I had to hang out with the mean girls who had a big white dollhouse and played tea party too often for my taste.)

The girls must have spotted my panty less unmentionables during one of my spins. I didn't realize that the skirt went up that high on my little whirligigs. So they told me to show them my skirt again, and I happily complied. I didn't notice till afterwards the vicious, little-girls-about-to-be-mean smiles on their faces. (A look I came to know very well.) In retrospect, I even remembered seeing them whispering to each other, planning their coup-de-skirt.

Halfway mid-spin, one little girl grabbed the edges of the twirlying skirt and flipped it up so that it definitely went up over my head, purposely flashing everyone there. I knew then that everyone had seen my naked bottom, so I was mortified. They laughed with that special little girl laugh that has been patented for centuries by the minions of lower regions of Hell as a torture device .

I ran home, never wore mom's skirt again.

And I still hate going commando, being pretty sure that someone will know, and judge me for it.

*I can only imagine the freaks who will now be drawn into my blog googling these phrases. Hey there sexual deviants!! Please leave now, and go get some therapy. It's not normal to google that particular combo of words, looking for anything other than a coming-of-age story.

Why computers are evil.

So I have all of my dissertation chapters in separate files. Multiple versions of them, because I am paranoid about losing them.

Last week, as I crowed on the website, I combined all the chapters into one long master document, with the intent of working on that one for the edits I'm on now. I added all the relevant graphics & tweaked them to get them aligned properly, with captions and stuff.

Yesterday, working on the printout of the dissertation, I realized that chapter two's printout was from an earlier version of the chapter. No big, right? I went in, copied the correct version and pasted it to the master document. As I was saving it, the program crashed on me.

The file is still there, all 19K of it. But I can't open it. It's dead as far as I'm concerned. And since I just did the work last week, the last day I worked on stuff before yesterday, I hadn't yet made multiple copies of the complete file.

It's not a big loss... I still have all the chapters that went into the master. It's really only a full day's lost work.

But damn if it doesn't suck.

I know these things happen. In my Master's Thesis I had three small graphics (compared to the dozens I have in this work.) It crashed a few times on me then. So I know to have multiple copies. I need, in fact, to have a couple of copies of the master document without graphics in it. Which I will do. But the way it works, see, is the documents you back up never crash. It's always that one that you didn't quite get to that screws up.

Computers, which really do make our lives better in so many ways, are evil incarnate. They sucker us into needing them and then they screw us over.

Not a bit setback, but a huge, curse word yelling, screen whacking, I hate computers kind of moment.

198

Today, I put all my chapters together into my dissertation "master" file. This is minus the several page-filling graphics I will add later to the Buffy chapter. It also doesn't include the works cited, which will add at least 20 pages probably by the time I am done with it.

My dissertation is currently 198 pages long.

SWEEEEEEEET!

It's really really close to being ready to send to the entire committee as the draft for comments/revision. It's not really the first draft, as each chapter has already been revised several times & submitted to the committee. But this is the first draft of the entire thing.

I am well in line with my self-imposed deadline of having it ready at the end of April, and being done with the whole thing, revision and all, by the end of the summer. As long as my committee cooperates, I should be a very happy camper by the time Halloween rolls around this year.

Anyway. My babysitter is about to be off work now, so I have to go back to mommyland. But I'm a little giddy.

Only The Good

If you've blogged as long as I have, you sometimes get an idea for a blog that you think you might have written about before. But I'm too lazy to search to see if this is out there already. So I'm writing it anyway.

We're riding in G's car on a summer day. He has a sunroof and the windows are open so all of us have hair blowing wild and salty-smelling in the sea air. Down the long road between the island and Destin, that smallest "fishing village of tourists galore." G drives fast but skillfully, so you don't feel scared he's going to wreck. J. is in the front seat and I'm hanging on in the middle of the back.

I don't remember where we were going or what we were doing. I think it was just a week or so before I went away to join the Navy and this was (we thought) my last day before boot camp. (Another day another story).

I know I'm going to lose the more crumudgeonly of you with this but here goes. The radio is belting out Billy Joel's "Only the Good Die Young" and we are all singing along, happy, young, but trying very hard not to be good. Secure that we'll sing this song again someday when we're all grandparents.

The sand is very white, like snow it blinds you if you stare; the air smells of seaweed drying on the beaches to either side of us.

The lyric goes "I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints; the sinners are much more fun." I remember a girl I once knew who said "He's going to be sorry he said that someday" and me thinking "I don't think he will, actually."

We're all laughing. And we're not at all sorry about it.

Punks

On the way up to the lake the other day, Andrew & I spied a trio of teens rebelliously decked out in punk paraphanelia. I think one of them even had a hot pink mohawk. They were soooo cute. (Yes, you can tell you're a parent when you think teenagers are cute.) I was in the back of the minivan feeding babies, and pretty much unseen because of the window tinting. Andrew, kooky booky he is, flashed a happy thumbs up to the teens. He actually was approving of how hard they were working to be disaffected. It was a good effort.

But the rebellious teens didn't really know how to react. They just didn't have it in their mind that he could be approving of them. At first, they waved confusedly, acknowledging Andrew's thumbs up happily. But then they realized that wasn't very punk rock and the wave turned into a flip-off.

It was very funny. What more insulting thing could a 40something guy in a minivan do to a bunch of teens who wanted to be rebellious and countercultural than approve of their whole look? He didn't mean to be insulting, really, but he's such a crazy thing that all in all, he just ruined their poor rebellious little day.

Leaky

So it turned out the plumbing leak was two slab leaks & one wall leak. We had a plumber at our house the other day for an insane amount of time rerouting the pipes. Now, with the damage, we had a "repair" company out yesterday and the stuff they sprayed to kill mold was hideously smelly. It made me nauseous after a while. So we're staying at our family's lakehouse temporarily...

Anyway. That's a quick update. It's time now to feed babies. :)

Home Again Jiggety Jig

Home last night to find a plumbing leak ruining the floors in our hallway just in front of the baby's room. Fun & games! Yay! And since the leak has affected the lining under the wood floors, there's an icky musty smell too. Luckily, when we bought the now-discontinued floor planks from Formica, we accidentally bought an entire package too many, so we have some replacement planks. I hope we can fix it that way and not need to re-do the whole house! That would make Andrew seriously cranky.

I woke with a "Welcome home to Texas allergens" headache too. Maybe since I grew to adulthood in FL I don't get those over there. The allergens there don't kill me. Since we may be moving there in about 3 years (Andrew's military contractor job is changing bases, thanks to the base re-alignment committees) that might end up being a good thing!!!

Anyway. I have loads to do. Friend Nissa is going to have her baby girl this week and I must make "breastfeeding in the wee hours" snack packs for her. And clean my messy house filled with the debris of a long road trip. And go grocery shopping cause the fridge is empty. I will need a vacation tomorrow to make up for my post-vacation needs today!!

I do have cute vacation pix, including the "first Easter bunny" photo shoot. Maia was not thrilled. Sean, as usual, flashed his "game show host" smile. I'll post something soonish.

But it is GOOD to be home. I missed the craziness here.

Oh yeah, and Maia is walking! She's only taken about ten steps alone so far but it's a matter of days till she's out getting her driver's license now. :)