mellymell: (Default)
I'm finally chipping away at the stuff I wanted to get done over the weekend. Jonah and I got through his toy box downstairs and quite a bit of his room yesterday. Jonah was somewhat resistant and was onto me as soon as I pulled out two boxes and started throwing stuff in them. He walks up and says, "are those toys to take to Goodwill?" Then starts saying, "no! I want to keep that one." He protested even after I presented the prospect of having new toys by the end of the weekend to replace them or if I said something was broken (and broken might mean has dead batteries). I never should have let him watch Toy Story. Eventually he got sidetracked enough with playing fireman that he left the fate of his toys in my hands.

I still need to go through his closet and all of the non-clothing drawers. We're about to get him a new bed and the changing table where we stored toys isn't going to be there anymore. I'm trying to prepare for not only the new toys he's about to get, but also the rearranging of his room once we get the bed.

I'd love to set up stations in his room like they do at school (i.e. all his Lego in one spot, all his Hot Wheels in one spot, all his dress up/pretend stuff in one spot, etc.). The idea is you play with and store the stuff in one area so theoretically things don't get strewn everywhere. Theoretically. He seemed interested yesterday in wanting a place to hang up his fireman hat and jacket "just like a real fire station" and I know he helps put things away at school. So as long as I have labels and he knows where things go, he might participate in cleaning up with a little prodding.

Anyway, It felt good to get a huge chunk of that done, even if I didn't get some of the other cleaning and errands done I wanted to yesterday. Now I want to do it to the rest of the house! This might just be the beginning of me getting pulled out of my funk. Organizing usually helps. I love to organize! I'm a freak like that. I've designated a journal sized spiral notebook to decluttering/organizing. Jonah and I sat down and made a list of containers and storage he would require for his various categories of toys. His Hot Wheels and Lego have outgrown their containers and his Star Wars figures appear to require their own small box now as well.



Of the happy, apart from feeling really accomplished in Jonah's part of the house:

Jonah and I made dark chocolate peppermint bark yesterday morning. That was a lot of fun and very tasty! Jonah loved smashing the candy canes the best, I think.

I found Giraffie! Jonah's cuddle toy that he sleeps with every night has been missing for a couple of weeks, but I discovered him stuffed under a chair cushion in the living room. He's handled it pretty well, except for one day on the way to school he had a little bit of a breakdown. There weren't big tears, but I could tell he wasn't just whining and was really missing his little friend. I diverted him with the notion that he was only going for a half day and wouldn't have rest time and therefore wouldn't have been taking Giraffie to school anyway. If you could have seen the way this little boy was literally bouncing around when I pulled that little blanket/stuffed animal hybrid out of the chair. He was the very picture of giddiness. I think he hugged him as tightly as he possibly could. It was very sweet.

I installed Swype on my phone and it is FREAKIN' AWESOME! If you have an Android phone and don't already have it, I highly, HIGHLY recommend installing the beta that's available right now! I'm sure it will be even better as I get more comfortable with the keyboard layout (it's slightly different than the one I was used to, in terms of where numbers and punctuation keys are).

In the past two nights, we've seen Robot Chicken Star Wars III and It's A Trap! (Family Guy Return of the Jedi). Both are fantastic! But I think Robot Chicken was a better effort, no matter how much Seth MacFarlane likes to dog on Seth Green in his episodes (which is a funny gag, don't get me wrong, and even better was when all the other voice actors turned it around on him). I could have done without about 2 minutes worth of the nodding scene. I totally realize that going beyond the time limit of the joke was part of the gag. I just find those sort of annoying and lazy, like the 5 minutes of Conway Twitty in the middle of a 20 minute episode or Peter skinning his knee. Thankfully, after sitting through 5 minutes of nodding, the Darth Twitty gag was blessedly short.

And of ultimate happy, I read the new Hyperbole and a Half.
mellymell: (Default)
So, yesterday sucked even worse than Saturday and I've tried and tried to come up with something that made me happy that wasn't just completely trivial, but I can't. So, here it is: Chris made gnocchi and scallops for dinner with a yummy sun-dried alfredo sauce. Mmmm, butter and cream.

Oh wait, also, the neighbor kids brought over a little bag of Christmas cookies. That was really sweet and the shining star on an otherwise shit day.



Today was definitely an improvement over the past three days.

I'm happy that I'm mobile again, though somewhat stiff and still sore. I have to take it easy and not do too much at once (that goes for anything, sitting, standing, typical house stuff, laying down) I have to stick to a regular cycle of work and rest. Rest has to be alternated between sitting and laying down. I can't sit for too long at all. But, I'm not in crippling pain, so YAY! Haven't even taken an ibuprofen today. I feel like I can work the rest of the kinks out with some diligent yoga (which I've been really needing to do anyway).

I'm happy that I got some of Chris' gifts wrapped so he'll stop snooping in the closets trying to find them.

I'm happy that I finally finished putting together [livejournal.com profile] amaz0n_princess's CD! It was so hard not to cheat and send two CDs or to bend the rules and burn it as a data disc so I could fit more mp3s on there. But I was good and stuck to the rules and managed to squeeze 21 songs on there. See my halo? ;) Hope you like it! It was really hard to get the songs to flow from one to another since I wanted to cover such diverse musical territory. The cover song was easy to choose and I think she'll get why. The foreign song narrowed itself down fairly easily as well, though I wish I could have included the other two runners up (some other year, perhaps). But I got it down to 24 songs, 15 minutes over the max runtime, and then froze because I didn't want to cut any more. I really deliberated over this thing! Hope there's lots of stuff you don't already have. It'll be on its way to you tomorrow. :)

I also started working on the one commission I have this year for my brother-in-law's girlfriend. I'm finally doing the pieces of butterfly wings under glass cabochon pendants. I had found a second completely intact Monarch butterfly on my run on the beach in Florida last month (the first one was somewhat less intact). I held it in a loosely cupped hand for probably a mile or more. It's been fun to work on jewelry again and I started pulling out all sorts of other materials I could possibly put in these bezels. I've got silver, copper and bronze to work with. Lots of possibilities! I'm thinking brocade swatches. It's like everything I look at I think, "hmm, wonder what a piece of that would look like under glass".

I got my Christmas dinner menu planned. Not a single dish I've made before! Also, we are free from the shackles of obligatory turkey this year! FREEEEEEEEDOOOOOOMMM!! Chris always got a free one at Vandy for Christmas and since all our extra freezer space is full of beer and kept at refrigerator temps, we had to cook it soon after receiving it. I suppose we could have donated it to someone if we really wanted to, but honestly that thought hadn't occurred to me until just now. Anyhoo, we're doing Alton Brown's grilled leg of lamb with pomegranate molasses as well as his green bean casserole, a root gratin, zucchini mushroom crumble, roasted butternut squash with Moroccan spices, and roasted asparagus with balsamic browned butter. Oh, and I lied, I am making something I've made before: cranberry pumpkin yeast rolls.

Tomorrow is the last day for this meme, but life has been beating me down and I know it's only going to get worse after the holidays. So, I might keep it up. We'll see. Even if I could make it a weekly thing, I think I really need to focus on the positive in order to deal with the stuff that makes me want to simultaneously scream and cry.
mellymell: (Default)
mellymell: (Default)
Holy zombie Jesus, it's been a busy past 6 weeks or so! Quick recap:

  • Thanksgiving - Nov. 26th

  • An admittedly relaxing child-free weekend for me (Chris however built two workbenches and thoroughly cleaned out the garage) - Nov. 27th-29th

  • Jonah's 3rd birthday - Dec. 4th (party Dec. 5th)

  • Antioch Sud Suckers (ASS) Big Brew (aka, 12 homebrewers in our driveway resulting in 60 gallons of beer fermenting in our garage) - Dec. 6th

  • Trip to San Francisco - Dec. 10th-14th

  • One weekend with limited obligations (Doug came over and brewed and I think that was about all we really did) - Dec. 19th & 20th

  • Christmas Eve with Brandy in Huntsville - Dec. 24th

  • Christmas Day at home with Chris' family - Dec. 25th-26th

  • A very white Christmas in Indiana with my mom's side of the family (with side trip through Bourbon country in Kentucky [aka The Shire] to get a used barrel for the aforementioned 60 gallons of beer in our garage) - Dec. 28th-29th
  • New Year's Eve party at home with extended visit from Steff and Lilly - Dec. 31st-Jan. 2nd.


*breathes*

Just in case you've been wondering where I am and what I've been up to, there you go.
mellymell: (Default)
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"There's got to be a morning aaaf-ter. . . "

Usually a combination of the two. I have a lull where it's hard to get the decorations packed up and put away and hard to get all the normal stuff back out. It's also hard to get back into regular routines and I don't know if it's kind of a mini depression or just that I've been in a weird sporadic routine for a week or two (or a month or two, whatever) when it's all over. Then, the seasonal depression usually hits after the holidays and gardening planning are over in about mid-January because I still have at least 6-8 more weeks of cold, grey, yucky days to get through before spring. I hate winter and Christmas gives me a good distraction, even though I don't really get excited about it.

But then, there's the relief that everyone is out of my house and I can sort of curl up on my own time and do the things I love instead of perpetually preparing for some gathering. I mean, I absolutely love to see everyone and in many cases it's the only time of year we get to see many of the people at the many gatherings we host or attend. But after about 6 weeks of that (pretty much non-stop from Thanksgiving to New Year's), I'm ready for some "on my terms" time and a little routine.
mellymell: (he told me to burn things)
I must have read Jonah his Frosty the Snowman book a hundred times since this summer when we got it. But we've of course been reading it a lot more lately and there's this one part that bugs the crap out of me.

The children bring Frosty to life and all is great and wonderful. There are a few pages that describe the activities they enjoy with their snow-brained friend. One page says something to the effect of:

"The magical part was that while the children played with Frosty, they never got shivery cold."


Really? That's the magical part? They're playing with a walking talking snowman and the magical part is they're not cold. Seriously? Alright. Whatever.



In other WTF and FTW news, I spent a $5 promotional credit for mp3 downloads at Amazon and they sent me another code for $3 in On Demand TV. *scratches head*

I bought Coldplay's Viva La Vida and I'm loving it. Makes me want to write, especially Cemeteries of London, 42 and Death and His Friends (go figure).
mellymell: (me at arches 2005)
Jonah and I had our first theological discussion last night. It came a lot earlier than I thought it would. But I guess I shouldn't be surprised how it came about since he goes to preschool at a Baptist church.

We were driving to the post office when we passed a yard that had a nearly life sized nativity in it. He was chowing down on a piece of granola bar that I had shared with him and I thought he was saying "that's good". As it turns out, he was saying, "God, that's God." When I asked him to clarify, he said, "in the manger, that's God." I asked him if he learned that in school and he said, "yes."

Most of you know I don't identify myself as Christian, but I wouldn't be upset if Jonah winds up doing so for himself. I really don't care what religion or belief system he adopts and I'll be happy to objectively help him in his search for something that makes sense to him. So, I took the most objective and informative stance as possible and it was probably more than a three-year-old needed to hear.

I told him, "yes, Jonah, Christians believe that Jesus was the son of God and they celebrate his birth on Christmas Eve. But there are lots of religions and each one has their own god or sets of gods." Then I poorly attempted to explain pagan Yule to him since yesterday was indeed the solstice. I don't think he understood it all, but my main point was to make sure he knew there were other beliefs out there and not to limit his scope to what they teach in school. It's not so much that I want to drive him into the same search I've been in since I decided to turn away from Christianity. More so, I want to teach him that other religions are just as valid and I want him to respect all beliefs, no matter what one(s) he chooses for himself.

I kind of hope this is the first of many open discussions he and I can have on the subject.
mellymell: (Default)
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They go up today! We're going to get our tree and I'll probably be decorating for the rest of the week taking breaks here and there for birthday preparations for Jonah's party next Saturday. I like to have all the Christmas stuff up for his birthday but not before Thanksgiving. I like to wait until the weekend after New Year's to take it down. Chris always gets the urge to take it down like New Year's day. But it's a lot of work to do so I think it deserves a solid four weeks up (and it's always a little sad to pack it away). Maybe this year I'll get around to redecorating the shelves with my "rest of the year" decor (I didn't last year, it's still in a box).
mellymell: (Default)
Today, you're supposed to answer the phone, "Buddy the Elf speaking, What's your favorite color?"

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