So Corey and I went to California a couple of weeks ago with a few other couples, Brian and Jenn and Jerry and Mindi, (later to be joined by Mark and Jen)  to see our friend Dave Kilzer finally wed.  We decided to go ahead and make a big deal out of it and stay a week in San Francisco.  It was fantastic.



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More later!

Oh my Livejournal darlings, how I have missed you!  My laptop was dying a slow death and had no idea where the internet was, despite repeated reminders, and so I just avoided any major online usage altogether.  No more, I say!  My sweetie bought a new lappy for me! 

Goodbye ancient Toshiba; hello Dell Vostro 1520!  You are sleek and strong and have lots of storage space!  How I love your matte black finish and wide screen!  Your slight 6.75 pounds sits lightly on my lap and your slender frame fits into my bag with ease!  Together you and I shall make lots of wonderful picture posts and funny essays to make up for my complete lack of communication with my LJ beloveds.  We shall replace all the posts the Toshiba ate.  We will Hide-button all the people we don't actually know that well on Facebook so we don't have to hang out on that den of stupidity any longer than we have to.  This shall be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.  And with your complete accident coverage and extended warranty, I hope it shall be a long one!

Things have been kind of quiet around here this spring.  We've done a few home improvement-type projects and I'm in the process of ripping all my vinyl albums to mp3 so we can put the records in storage and move Anna's room into the den as Mia no longer wishes to keep the same hours as the Sister Collective and needs her own room.  Also, school is finally out and Anna is currently en-route to Tennessee to spend the first bit of the summer with my parents.  She'll be 12 in July so we're hoping she'll get one last wonderful summer with all the grown-ups who love her best before we, you know, turn all slow, stupid, and uncool on her.

We also broke down and got an XBOX 360 for CDL's and my birthdays and our anniversary.  I always put the kibosh on buying one in the past as they are expensive, prone to breakage, and didn't have any game titles I wanted to play, but that was before Resident Evil 5 came out for everything but the Wii.  Killing zombies together is a part of what makes the Gina/CDL alliance work as well as it does--I knew It would be folly for us to neglect this framework of our relationship--and we caved like of cards.  We bought the red RE5 console bundle and sent the kids off to the farm while we had a lovely zombie-killing little honeymoon.  Since then we've also played Left 4 Dead (anybody up for a live game?), Prince of Persia (it's a renter unless you are a complete masochist) and I've just now finished Bioshock, which was atmospheric, creepy fun.  Now I'm on the look-out for a copy of Beautiful Katamari and waiting patiently for Brutal Legend, the new one by DoubleFine that put out my favorite odd-ball title: Psychonauts.  Apparently in Brutal Legend (I think there's supposed to be umlauts in there somewhere but I have no idea how to execute those with the new lappy) you're a roadie, voiced by Jack Black, who has died and ended up in Hell, which you must fight your way through to Rock Heaven.  I'm so there! 

About the only major change I can think of to report is that we're getting a puppy in a couple of weeks! Yes, yes, I know.  I always said I didn't have room in my life to tend one more digestive system but at this point, with the kids and the minivan and living in Iowa, who am I to quibble about a minor detail of the idyllic suburban life when CDL and the girls would so very much like a dog?  And since they let me pick the breed, Pembroke Welsh Corgi (I blame Cowboy Bebop and cardigirl  for the attraction) I'm pretty excited about the prospect of a little furball running around, myself.  I know other women have baby dreams when their shortees grow up but I never had until we paid the holding fee for a puppy and *boom*, I'm having crazy dreams where I have to protect this baby bundled up in a blanket, a baby that I'm feeling kind of ambivalent about having.  Then when I lift the corner of the blanket and see it's just a puppy and not a real baby swaddled in all that fabric, I am so incredibly relieved I practically thank it for not being a human and am quite willing, then, to protect it from the zombies and the long drop out the open window.  The kids are too excited for words, as well.  Poor Socks is going to be *so* annoyed.  That puppy is going to love my girls so much that they're going to realize Socks never really loved them at all except for their body heat and thumbs for opening food containers. 

Okay here's what happened:

The plague has hit my house and I'm up to  my armpits in sick people.  And then the washing machine broke again.  And it's January.  Despite the fact that I'm wrapped in the pillowy cushion of Wellbutrin, watching the alcohol intake and getting regular exercise, the Winter Depression Vulture is no longer idly circling but perched on my shoulders and licking its chops, the presumptuous bastard.

Yesterday I'd finished tearing apart the washing machine (broken motor coupler, this time: parts on order) and realized it was getting late.  I asked Anna, who has been home from school with a cold but who was obviously feeling better, to unload and reload the dishwasher as I needed room to make dinner.  Well, she put it off until I asked her twice more and then left a bunch of odd-sized dishes--serving bowl, platter, etc.--she didn't quite know what to do with on the table.  Meanwhile, Mia was getting sicker by the hour and there was no cold medicine left in the entire house because for their bout with the cold, Anna and Gabby had already cleaned out the entire stash.  I threw dinner in the oven (home-made chicken pot pies:  the ultimate in comfort food, even though I cheated and used store-bought crusts) in the oven,  grabbed my outdoor gear, told Anna where to put the odd-sized clean dishes she'd left out and asked her to get out plates for her sisters to set table while I ran to the store. 

I was out in the garage with Claire, feeling for the car in the dark (for some reason the lights in there don't work despite having changed out the light switch--I'm guessing the mice chewed the wiring, which would explain the horrible smell in the coat closet: electrocuted mouse) when I heard an ungodly crash.  I ran into the house to find broken crockery everywhere. 

Anna, probably feeling put upon for being asked to do her normal everyday chore that I pay her 6 bucks a week for, wasn't very careful about picking up my Wedding-Gift-Cobalt-Fiesta-Ware-Covered-Serving-Bowl to put the serving platter away.  The lid fell off and hit the counter and shattered my favorite mug, a souvenir from Marie Laveau's House of Voodoo with ranks of  pinned voodoo dolls on it.  My best friend Barb sent it to me long ago, which is sentimental value enough, but it happened to arrive at a perfect moment when I was ready to run away and become a crazy bag lady.  I'm pretty sure that was the only reason why I didn't just start walking to Florida with the contents of my liquor cabinet in a shopping cart and entire wardobe on my back that day. 

I'm not too attatched to most of my stuff, really.  The few things I do care about, I usually keep out of harm's way, for the children are nightmare roommates.  Because I was in a hurry, though, this one time, Anna wiped out a couple of my favorites in one thoughtless second. 

It's all my fault, really.  But still. 

So a good crying jag and a big glass of Templeton Rye (thank you Joe and Danelle!) last night and I'm mostly over it today. 

I'm still plotting revenge, though.  Oh it won't be mean and only just a little spiteful: remember how you always hated your parents for waking you up before 10:00 on the weekends when you were a teenager?  How you thought they were being completely unreasonable for not letting you sleep until 2?  I always said I would never do that to my teenage kids because I remember the unfairness of it all.  Well, their asses are up and at 'em now. 

This having kids thing is bullshit.

Now that was different.  CDL and I loaded the kids and the presents up in the van and drove12 hours to my parents' house to spend the holiday with them.  We'd never traveled as a family for Christmas before and now I know why there's all those movies about Christmas travel hijinks.  It was fun to spend the time with my folks and the kids had a ball.  It was also my youngest sister's 30th birthday, so much celebrating was in order.  I drank an appalling amount of alcohol all week but felt fine.  Go figure. 

The drive home was harrowing.  An ice storm hit just as we were crossing over into Iowa, and the interstate was a sheet of glass before we hit Iowa City.  We just pulled off and got a hotel room, which was much nicer than ending up in the ditch like countless other cars and semi trucks we saw the next morning on the drive home.  Some of them were flipped over or had gone a long way down into a ravine.  I know CDL really wanted to drive straight through and get home--he can't help it, he's male--but he put up with me freaking out quite patiently, even when the first hotels we tried were full. 

I made a great haul this year, as far as presents go: most notably the Wii fit board, which has been giving me grief about all those extra holiday pounds. I didn't think it would actually do much to help get rid of said extra pounds but as I'm sitting here, my whole body aches from the Wii Fit  yoga routine.  I have to say that I'm quite impressed with the little guy.  Socks the cat gave me a space heater which is keeping me nice and toasty.  My mom and Dad gave me some two-tone, double tongue lavender and rust low-top Converse All-Stars, which I am totally in love with.  Corey's mom got me both Alton Brown cookbooks and a cast-iron grill pan.  My sister Megan got me some wonderful chocolates.

 The kids got some awesome toys this year: Santa brought the whole family lazer tag guns and Megan gave them a rock tumbler and a drill so they can make jewelry!  I have always secretly wanted a rock tumbler.  It's down in the basement churning away right now.  By Sunday it ought to be ready for the next grade of polishing grit.  I'm so excited to see what comes out!  They got some great loot I'm going to have all kinds of fun playing with, really. 

Oh and for those of you with Wii's, The World of Goo is awesome.  Tim sent it to us for Christmas and it owns me.  Am having a little trouble with stage 3 but I'll get there eventually.   

Weird. The two prosecuting lawyers from the trial called me yesterday for a post-game review. They wanted to know if I had any questions and how I thought they handled the case. Does that usually happen? It was nice that they thought to contact me. I really was dying to know about little things that the defense Crazy let slip. Yes, he had a prior conviction. The lawyer he'd fired called the owner of the gun to tell him where it was hidden: the house was already sold and people with kids were moving in. They didn't take the gun itself for evidence because they were sure Teh Crazy would appeal and the friend would never see the gun again: it was a gift from a brother or something. That was kind of them, though the majority really had to work hard to prove to the hold-outs that just because there's not a gun physically in evidence doesn't mean it didn't exist.

I teased the one guy about our weird eye-contact game. He laughed and said that I was a pretty good indicator of how things were going. Apparently my face is about as good as closed-captioning.

When I told them about reviewing self-defense strategies in my head in case I had to take the Teh Crazy down. They laughed really hard. Apparently they didn't think the deputy was standing close enough, either. After the jury left, Teh Crazy approached them for hand-shakes or something and scared them half to death. I guess I wasn't the only one who didn't want him out running around free. They are going to push for the maximum sentence: 12 years.

Gosh. For such an unpleasant circumstance, I really liked most of the people involved and I miss them. I know we could have all worked together in an office or something and been good friends. It sort of seemed inappropriate for me to invite them out for a congratulatory drink, though. Oh well: all things that rise must converge, right? Maybe I'll see them around town.

It's over.  I didn't think we'd ever get through all the witnesses waiting out in the hall every day and the giant pile of evidence.  The state's prosecutors were young but pretty professional-seeming compared to the defense, who was representing himself.  It came out in the trial that his original lawyer said, "it's not a matter of if you're going to jail, but how long."  Apparently he felt like he was so obviously a victim of a vast conspiracy of county sheriffs, farmers,and stupid bitches that there was no way his good-natured attempts to get back with his wife would look bad.  Except there were all the non-stop phone calls and him spending long times alone with her family members after she got the no-contact order.  And him being found on or near her dad's farm where she was staying, too afraid to go back to her house even though she had sole rights to it.  And the strange car that turned up not too far from the property containing a bunch of her stuff including her wedding dress and high school memorabilia and binoculars.  And the GPS tracker hidden in her car.  And his friend's missing gun, pieces of which turned up in the defense's truck, the truck he'd driven through the dad's neighbor's field toward the back of the house and gotten it stuck in the mud in the middle of the night.  Then the gun itself turning up loaded in a heater grate back in the friend's house.   All that stuff adds up pretty big in the guilty column. 

The evidence-presenting part took five days and then we were in for five hours deliberating.  All the jury members were good and careful: we took good notes during the trial, we read through all the photos, statements, and phone records, and we deliberated carefully.  The majority were of the opinion that he was guilty but nobody was an asshole to the people who didn't think there was enough hard evidence.  In fact, there were plenty of thoughtful arguments on both sides.  I was impressed and decided that as much as Iowa annoys me, Iowans are good people, by and large.   In the end, we found him guilty on all three counts, Stalking, 3rd Degree Burglary of a Vehicle (to place the tracker), and Going Armed with Intent.  It was a difficult experience all together, and more than once, I was a little concerned that things were going to get ugly.

As bad as I felt sending a young guy to jail, I would have felt worse knowing he was out running around to wreak vengeance on his wife and her family.  When our foreman read our conclusion, the guy asked for an individual poll of the jury's decision.  The judge had to ask us each to say whether we agreed by first and last name.  I was actually concerned for my safety enough to think through what I would do if he launched himself at us (me and the little Indian dude were closest) before the cop could get to him.  I was running through self-defense scenarios, my heart thudding in my ears, sparks firing in my peripheral vision, but all the while thinking, "okay.  If I'm afraid of the guy on such a basic animal level, I must have made the right decision."  Then on the way home, I was about out of gas so I had to stop at the nearest station, hoping all the while not to hear the sirens of the jail go off down the road, or to have a strange car follow me home.  I had nightmares all night long.  I can't imagine how relieved his wife will be when she hears the news. 

Okay, so while I was writing this, one of the jurors just called me.  Apparently she got some information from the newspaper reporter this morning that the reason why they found the missing gun in the heater grate was because the defense's fired lawyer told police where it was.  That makes me feel even better.

So all the time I've been sitting in court, my life has fallen apart.  Digging out of the stack of homework, housework, holiday plans, and the two pounds I've put on eating out every day and not exercising, is going to su-uck.  I may as well brew another pot of coffee, get dressed, and get to it.  Sitting around here thinking about the trial will drive me crazy. 

Okay, this jury duty horseshit is getting on my nerves.  I was in 4 days last week and it looks like we're in for Monday and maybe Tuesday next week if things go smoothly.  I'm starting to lose my patience in a big way.  I'll probably take a whole grade-point hit in both classes even if I'm prepared for the finals because I've missed so much lecture time.  Worse, though, is the entropy starting to set in at my house: the Kipple is starting multiply exponentially and the kids are reverting to their feral ways. 

I'm one of the twelve angry.  I didn't try too hard to weasel out after all.  Most of the other people who did sounded like such cry-asses that it would have been embarrassing to even try.  Looks like the trial will go for the rest of the week but I hope it doesn't go over.  I like fellow my jurors--we all got along like peas and carrots--but I don't really want to include them in my holiday plans.  Too bad I'm not supposed to talk about the trial because it's kind of fascinating to armchair psychologist me. 

In other news:  my KORG DS-10 arrived!  I was surprised at how detailed the controls were.  You can do some crazy stuff with each individual tone of the drum track, plus two keyboard/synth tracks.  I should probably sit down and read the rest of the big booklet that came with so I can do whole songs that develop and evolve along the way.  Once I get the hang of it, I'll post some video.  Oh, I also learned that it's multiplayer downloadable so you can hook up a bunch of DS's together!  Here's a clip of a guy with 4 DS's linked together!  How awesome is this? It's the best mixture of gaming and music since DDR, I tell you.  

Still other news:  you can take the girl out of the goth clothes but...
Okay so I read all those really horrible teen vampire novels.  Yes, I know.   They were bad like Cool Ranch Doritos are bad.  You know they'll repeat on you for the next 24 hours, and you know there's no brushing that taste out of your mouth.  But they're there and you think: they can't be that bad.  SO you eat one.  And now if you quit eating them, you'll have to live with that taste in your mouth anyway so you might as well 
enjoy it.  Yeah.  The books were awful but I couldn't put them down.  I must need a new imaginary boyfriend or something.  So the movie opens this weekend.  My buddies, several of whom were at the Halloween party, and I are going to make a party of it and go together, dinner before, hotel after, much booze in between.  Am very excited!  I'm not sure what to wear, though.  I've been listening to The Cure all week to gear up.  I'm tempted to get the new album but I have mixed feelings about the way Bob has been laying down his vocal tracks.  I don't know what he did to himself, took voice lessons or what, but I miss the old frail throaty voice buried deep in the mix.  It was more personable somehow.

Jury Duty.  Tomorrow 8:45 am, Story County Courthouse, Nevada (pronounced ne-VAY-da here in Ioway).

What to wear that says "unfit juror"? 

Running a low-grade fever for 48 hours was kind of interesting.  It was just bad enough to make me sit still and let the world pass me by.  With the alternating shivers and sweats, joint pain and headache, plus mild hallucinations and things generally not making sense, it felt a lot like I'd taken a quarter tab of acid.  My sweetie brought me the usual illness provisions: ginger ale, soup, and saltines with the added bonus of movies and fashion magazines.  The idea of him standing there in front of the magazine rack guessing which ones might appeal to me makes my heart swell up and fall in love with him all over again.  He chose well: Glamour and O!.  My mom used to be a regular subscriber to Glamour when I was a kid and though I don't read many magazines it's good to go home sometimes.  And it's always nice to catch up with Oprah: she and I go way back, too.  He also brought back a couple of movies: Sex in the City and The Happening (the new M. Night Shyamalan stinker), appealing both to my secret inner chick and not-so-secret inner sci-fi nerd.  As if he hadn't already won the Best Husband Evar award for the day, he also packed up the children and took them to the early L. family Thanksgiving weekend get-together up in Rochester, MN all by himself.   After I finished watching those two movies, I finally got around to watching What the Bleep do We Know?! that I'd checked out from the library last week (I'm pretty sure it's overdue now). 

I gotta tell you, the three of those movies back-to-back on top of a low-grade fever were kind of a mind-fuck.  I spent the whole time watching Sex in the City thinking: "god I'm fat", "my wardrobe sucks", and eventually "why am I judging myself by the standards of this empty, bubble-headed bullshit?"  I mean, really.  The value set of that movie has nothing to do with my life whatsoever except maybe acknowledging Corey is my Mr. Big.  So then I watched The Happening: in which People Commit Grisly Suicides for a Mysterious Reason About Which Much Conjecture is Unconvincingly Made.  There were some vague notion about people becoming a threat to the environment, ridiculous references being made to the unknown in the natural world while the main charcters worked out relationship issues. In short: the mixture of mysticism and nervous scanning-the-sky Chicken-Little-ism representing humanity as having less free will as you'd think.   Then came What the Bleep do We Know?!   which philosophically and quantum physically kicked my spiritual ass.

Yes, I know it reeks of faddish new age twaddle but it kicked my ass anyway.  It's basically a continuation of Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson with more complicated science and a gentler approach.  All along I've suspected that people are more powerful than they realize.  Seems like people get what they expect to get out of life, only seeing what confirms their suspicion about themselves. Context is everything.  I know this in my head but it's awfully hard to keep this in my heart and use it to shape my world.  When I tell myself I'm fat, all of a sudden I have this ridiculous relationship to food: good/bad, reward/punishment, medicine/opiate.  If I tell myself I'm exactly how I should be, food goes back to being itself. When I tell myself my house is a mess, all I see is work: spots on the carpet, clutter everywhere, dings in the paint, cobwebs on the ceiling.  It's exhausting just to look at.  When I tell myself that my house is a sanctuary, full of love and life, then the clutter turns to artifacts of wonderful, intelligent, happy peple and I'm perfectly happy wandering around my house, taking care of it.  I know I create my own reality.  I am annoyed with myself that I often choose to create a poor one. 

Another aspect of the movie agrees with my major beefs with religion: we all have it within us to imagine a God better than ourselves, not just more powerful, but so many people don't.  They're still on this narrow little scale like playing sex police trying to dictate (yes, I said it) what consenting adults may or may not do in private, and practice reproductive rights discrimination.  How is it a moral issue that rich bitches can have however many babies they want, when they want, but poor bitches have to have babies whenever they happen to get pregnant?  This drives me nuts!  It seems so clear that the ham-fisted behaviorist model of afterlife reward or punishment isn't the level of thought that human spirit human spirit should be but we keep going back to church.  It's an obsolete machine and to subscribe to that mentality, people have to fool themselves beyond reason, to cross their eyes and fingers to keep the insular logic of their faith intact.  That's insane.  There is no way I can get on board with all of that.  I guess what the movie made me think about the most besides the jars-of-water experiment* was that I think I'm on the right track, searching for the next level of thought beyond Gimme That Old Time Religion.

*sounds like psuedoscience to me too, but just in case: "I love you, body.  You are awesome and beautiful and strong and generous.  You deserve a nice hot bath with the expensive bath products, followed by a snack and a nap."

It finally caught up to me, the disease that's incapacitated half my household for the past two weeks.   I'm weak and dizzy and I'm pretty sure my guts have decided to secede from the union.  I've made my peace with the knowledge that whatever presentation my educational psychology partner and I can come up with will be lame and humiliating so school can fuck off for all I care.  I'm going back to bed.

I think I've finally got my topic for that American Government paper nailed down: "The War on Terror: the Frothy Shitpile of Propaganda, Jingoism, and Warmongering or Why the Rest of the World Hates Us".  I've been digging through the online school library for citable research materials and coming up with very little so I decided to wing it doing my research on Google out in the wild, wild web.  Is that a scholarly no-no even if I stick with reputable sources like New York Times and CNN?  I hate the search engine they've got on EBSCOhost and my Google-fu is pretty deadly.  I should prolly ask Mohammed, my cantankerous Pakistani prof.  before I get in too deep, huh?

The fam and I went to see City of Ember at the dollar movies.  It was actually quite charming.  I don't know why it flew under the radar.  Oh, right.  Between Wall-E and Kung Fu Panda, we were all sick to the teeth of rated-G films, which is too bad, really.  Bill Murray and Tim Robbins were excellent and the premise  tied into CDL's whole Fallout 3 gaming obsession-of-the-season quite nicely: post apocalypse, people taking shelter deep underground in a carefully laid-out shining city planned by the 50's era's best and brightest.  The builders schedule everyone to stay in the bunker 200 yearst.  Unfortunately, the box containing the key and instructions for a way out is lost to the ages and it's up to some plucky, amazingly not-annoying kids find the box and figure everything out.  I liked how the movie let us draw our own conclusions and didn't bludgeon us over the head with the obvious.  It never insulted kids' intelligence yet had enough pith to keep the adults thinking.  I highly recommend it.  Littlies beware, It has one little scary bit involving a star-nosed mole the size of a draft horse, but its short-lived and if you see a pic beforehand of what they look like (or better yet get the PBS documentary about the weird little critters) it's not that bad.  

Lastly, I just ordered the new KORG DS 10, which  is an amazing bit of tech.  It's music-creation software for the Nintendo DS that combines the superior interface of the Nintendo DS and the design concept of the famous MS-10 synthesizer.  In fact, it looks easier to manipulate than a full-fledged Korg synthesizer.  Doesn't it look like fun?  It'll be lightswitch raves galore around here in 5-7 working days. 

Here's a demo video. 

I'll report back if it's as raw ninja rock power as it looks.

Three days later and I'm still recovering.  It's mostly mental hangover, though.  Cleaning everything up and getting back to reality has been way too difficult.  In fact, when I arrived at school this morning, it felt like this was the first time I'd ever been on campus.   I'd better get my act together soon, though.  Two papers and a 20 minute presentation due by the end of the month, plus finals are starting to look a little daunting.  It's a good thing I have so many good memories to fuel me through the long dark winter.  This picture alone ought to float me clear to Thanksgiving. 




And Corey wearing Barb's Triana wig will keep me giggling at least until winter break.

Oh darlings, what a fabulous evening.  In fact, perhaps too fabulous, for I spent most of the next day paralyzed in hangover agony. 

Corey and I went as The Monarch and Dr. Girlfriend, a couple of villains from The Venture Bros.  It's a on the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim lineup.  For those of you unfamiliar, it's a twisted send-up of 70's cartoons like Johnny Quest.  I highly recommend it if you like South Park/Family Guy-type humor.  



I made the costumes myself.  Pretty good likeness, no?



( click for more Halloween hijinks )

Feeling better.  When the girls came home and asked what I was doing at school, I said I was out running errands and wanted to stop by to see them in their costumes.  Gabby and Claire both expressed annoyance that I made it for Mia's dance but not theirs, but when I shrugged and said I'd neglect Mia next time, they took it pretty well.  I'm going to look at this as an object lesson in time management, i.e. reading all their school papers daily instead of letting them pile up, rather than see it as further  evidence that I'm unqualified to be a parent.  

Onward to more important things: It's Halloween!  Yay!  Our costumes are done, the pumpkins are carved, there's food and bev a-plenty, the decorations are up, and the candy bowl overfloweth; bring on the trick-or-treaters, I say.  I intend to have a lovely evening haning out with my some of my favorite people and familiarizing myself with the contents of a box (Yes, am well aware of implications of boxed wine.  Suck it.) of Pinot Evil.   Will post pics ASAP!

Okay.  I'm really hating life right about now.  Gabby, Claire, and Mia's classes are all doing pioneer day today.  I managed to round up a pioneer dress for all three triplets and sent them off to school this morning.  Go  me, right?  I should have left it at that.  I was sitting there after the kids left and saw a little flyer saying that the children were going to be dancing a Virginia Reel at 9:30, so I threw some clothes on and ran off to school to see it.  

Well, it turns out the flyer was only for Mia's class.  Gabby's and Claire's class had already danced and I caught Gabby's class on the way outside.  So I stopped to watch Mia's class, feeling like a complete heel.  I wish I'd been an equal opportunity neglecter and skipped the whole thing.  Now Gabby and Claire are going to sit and feel bad the rest of the day that I missed their little dance.  For no good reason, really. All I was doing at 9 was cleaning the kitchen.  There's no excuse.  I was worried about Halloween party prep and the two papers I have to write for my lame-ass classes. 

It's times like these that I resent my whole stupid life.  I hate being so far from my family.  I hate this town for being so bereft of industry and culture that my friends keep leaving.  I hate school for being so expensive and time-consuming for so little pay-off.  I hate my house for being so overcrowded and rundown.  What am I doing wrong?

Just out of high school, I was a Kelly Girl.  One of my first long-term assignments was in the billing department of University of Omaha Med center.  I'd had jobs before but this was my first real nylons-and-blouse office job.  My mom worked there as well.  The manager there was a pre-menopausal pre-feminist named Beth, a manipulating bully of a control freak who often made her underlings cry.  She even yelled at me a few times over wardrobe choices and un-professionalism, but I was young enough to have already put her in the "authority, feel free to ignore" category along with previous gym and Sunday School teachers, and so more or less escaped soul intact.  The older women, the ones close to retirement and desperate to keep their jobs, weren't so lucky.  One day Beth tore into Barb, a sweet old grandma type, who was lighting-fast on the 10-key adding machine but was having trouble with the new office computer system, already obsolete with its green screen monitors and unwieldy data entry program.  Beth harangued that poor woman for an hour, had Barb weeping not as if she were angry and humiliated like she should have been, but utterly broken and defeated.  I wanted to help, make it stop, but I couldn't.  Instead,  I just sat there, heart thudding in my ears, paralyzed by how ugly a human being could be to another without lifting a finger.

Later my mom told me that the woman she was sitting next to, a formidable black woman named Gaynelle, turned and said, not so much as menacingly but with cold assurance, "She [Beth] might make me cry, but then I'll be meeting her in the parking lot later on."  Picturing 5'2 Gaynelle taking twiggy old Beth down off her Coach pumps and rubbing her face in the gravel made me feel much better like it was possible to look at all that misery being handed down from on high and still feel in control.  I suddenly understood the idea of attitude: the idea that people who are willing to go there, get all Council Bluffs on they ass, wouldn't have to take nearly the abuse someone who couldn't go there would.  In the past I'd taken a cerebral "We Have Always Lived in the Castle" approach to other peoples' rudeness.  Unfortunately, taking refuge in one's education and upbringing, i.e. the "egads, the peasants are revolting" stratagem, doesn't really work when confronted with belligerent assholery.  It was an object lesson: the neanderthal with the club trumps the Ph.D if the rules of polite society no longer applies so if the Ph.D decides to break the rules and be a complete asshole, then the neanderthal shouldn't have to hold back either.  Sure, it's not a decision tree that has many sound branches, but just the idea that I could go ahead and be a neanderthal if I had to was really liberating. 

I just had a long winding conversation on the phone with my mom and I mentioned how I never forgot what Gaynelle said.  We agreed that Gaynelle sort of protected half of the office that way, an implied threat that kept Beth from savaging everyone but the most vulnerable.  We should have sent her a thank you card. 

This leads me to next week when there's parent-teacher conferences.  Mia's teacher has been scaring and humiliating her over trivial shit like spelling, math timed-tests and reading logs. We're having nightly tears and freak-outs about too much homework and too much failure.   I can't decide if the teacher is unaware of her effect on her students or if she's a bitch.  I'm taking Corey with me for this one and we'll see how it goes, good cop and bad cop.  I hope the woman sees the error of her ways and lays off.  If she can't, then god help her because I'm starting to get angry and I'm from Council Bluffs.

Welcome to the world, Isabella Julia!   She's a healthy 7 lbs 12 oz. born Born at 12:02 pm Berlin time, as they're stationed in Germany, courtesy of the US Army.  Apparently she looks a lot like elder brother Xander except sporting a luxurious head of hair, lashes, and brows.  I can't wait to see pics of her but I imagine it's rude to demand OMG PICTARS NAO!!1! from my poor tired sis.    

Corey and I are now official home improvement badasses.  Together we ripped apart the washing machine and replaced the water intake valve, replaced wet-rotted siding and insulation on the eastern side of the house, and plugged up all the suspected mouse entrance holes on the western side with a whole can of expand-0-foam.  All in one day.  Okay so Corey's dad helped some, too.  Compared with the estimates we'd gotten from professionals, I'd say we probably saved ourselves about $700 on Sunday.  Go team L!  Now we can pay off the credit cards!  (Almost, anyway.)