My So Called Life

Someone said I’m lovely!

/ Shane / Leave a comment

First time for everything I suppose!

Sam from A Few Fine Things nominated me for the “One Lovely Blog” award!

I don’t believe I’ve ever received any sort of blogging recognition or award before. And though Sam is not exactly a *stranger* per say, since she comments on Glipho frequently, it’s nice to be recognized by someone I don’t exactly know! So thanks Sam, much appreciated (and also for cluing me into some new blogs to read!)

Rules of the award:

– Add the “One Lovely Blog Award” image to your post
– Share 7 things about you
– Pass the award to seven nominees
– Thank the person who nominated you
– Inform the nominees by posting on their blogs

It’s been awhile since I’ve done one of these “things about me” lists (since Feb. 2009 apparently), but nonetheless I can’t think of a SINGLE THING about me that I have not already plastered all over the Internet. Not one. Really struggling here.

Okay, here goes….

1. I am afraid of busses. Well, afraid of them is not really the right word, but they make me anxious to the point that I would never choose to use them if I could help it. Trains are okay. Trains are on a rail and they can only go where they can go. A bus can just close the door and drive to Abu Dabi.

2. I used to be blond. Like, really blond, all through my childhood, long after you would have assumed my hair wasn’t going to change color. For that matter, I USED to be cute:

3. Speaking of things I used to be, I used to be a mallrat, like you read about. I would spend hours there, bumming around stores, buying things, getting pizza at Sbarro (or free samples from Chik-fil-a), meeting up with people, etc. I could still probably draw you a pretty good map from memory, with all the key stores marked out. But it was so much more than that! There were like rival gangs. For example, for arcades I was a Tilt guy. I wouldn’t have been caught dead in the Golden Nugget. Likewise, I would only buy music in NRM. Sara finds all of this absolutely hilarious, and can’t fathom how this could be a part of my past.

4. I come from an *extremely* big extended family. My dad was one of 7 kids, and my mom was one of 17 kids. No multiple births (twins, etc.). Just lots and lots of babies.

5. I am ranked as one of the top 3 pillow jugglers in the world.

6. One time when I was driving my car caught on fire. There was the smell of burning wires and smoke started pouring out of the steering column. It turns out that with that particular model, it was not exactly unheard of. The weirdest part about the whole thing was that the car ended up being totally fine without any sort of repair required.

7. I am a terrible cook, but I like baking. It’s not crazy to go through 5 pounds of flour in a weekend, although not as much lately perhaps. A lot of that is bread for the week, and most of the rest is pancakes. Lots and lots and lots of pancakes. We usually go through 30+ pancakes on a Sunday.

On the matter of my own nominees, here are some of my favorite Gliphers at the moment:

1.  Tess Wynn – I’ve been kicking myself for missing her on my Meet A Glipher list of favorite Gliphers!! So glad I got a second chance. Love her sense of humor, plus we’re both originally from Wisconsin, so there you go.

2. Kami McArthur – Kami is a super sweet, just starting out writer (like me!), and I feel like her sincerity and ernestness really come through in her posts.

3. Woelf Dietrich – Another writer, but sort of the photo-negative of Kami. 🙂 Dude’s got HP Lovecraft and a giant man-eating squid on his homepage right now. Not only is that awesome, but I want to see how he’s going to fit a “Lovely Blog” award on there with the rest. 🙂

4. Laura Locket – Laura writes every day, and no one knows better than me what a challenge that is, not only to do it, but to keep it interesting!

5. Garden Geekery – Bees! I am currently fascinated by bee keeping, as we’d like to keep bees one day, and therefore this blog.

Alright, I hate to go outside of Glipho for this, but…

6. Alexis Abell – An old friend, with some hilarious kid adventures. If you’re a fan of Quote Monday, you should check out her blog.

7. Rodan – A VERY old friend! It’s kind of hard to explain his blog, but I lurves it. Each post is like a surreal dip into the inner workings of his strange brain, where everything starts out normal, but nothing is as it seems.

To my nominated (Glipho) bloggers – if you could click the version button at the bottom of this blog post when you wish to do your own nomination post then it will link all our blog posts together in harmonious loveliness.

Someone please chop off my head

/ Shane / 2 Comments

(I just sneezed 5 times in between writing that title and writing this sentence, no joke.)

Allergies. Allllllleeerrrrggiiiiis! 😦 Quite frankly, I don’t even know why the scientists make them.

I really can’t tell if this is the worst allergy season ever, if my allergies are gradually getting worse, or if I just forget from year to year how bad allergies are. All I know is that, right now? I want to crawl in a hole and die. My head hurts. I can’t stop sneezing. I’ve gone through half a box of kleenexes. My eyes are red and raw. It is impossible to escape the very air you breathe.

And I’m on allergy meds!

During the day I’m experiencing these things on a low grade and thinking I feel miserable. Then I go outside. All of a sudden it hits me like a ton of bricks, and I experience true misery. Sometimes I have to drive without my glasses so the tears can stream freely down my face. Sometimes I have to pull over because my allergies are too much for me to handle while driving. No joke, my allergies hit me so bad just from the parking lot into work, my coworkers actually asked me if it would be better for someone to drop me close to the door, to save me the few extra feet of walking outside.

I’m starting to develop a pavlovian fear response to sunlight, hearing birds chirping, or the smell of freshly cut grass. Instead of being good things, they make me think of pain and suffering.

The worst part is, when you have a terrible cold, you can at least go to bed and hope you will feel better in the morning. In this case, there is no hope. You can go to sleep, but you’re not going to feel better. For weeks.

This all makes me think of the worlds most famous allergy sufferer:

Think about it. Why do you think he has that air-filtration apparatus on his face 24/7? Why do you think he’s ready to choke a dude at a moment’s notice? Alderaan looked pretty green, no wonder he wanted to blow it up. I’m really starting to be on Mr. Vader’s side in all of this; allergies make me want to turn to the dark side too. And when did he really turn to the dark side in the first place? Apparently in the middle of a hellacious allergy attack, because this is exactly how my eyes look right now:

The No-Sleep House

/ Shane / Leave a comment

If there’s one thing that has defined our child-rearing experience, it’s sleep troubles. However, it has been so good for maybe 6 months, so I kind of thought we had it solved (by “we had it solved” I mean the kids grew up and grew out of it, not that we did anything in particular). Basically, we had a routine: the kids go to bed at about 7, and mostly fall asleep by 7:15, the kids get up at about 6 which is 30 minutes earlier than we allow them to actually get up, but manageable. Even when Ollie started skipping naps here and again, or if Evie was particularly tired from school, we would just try to get them in bed by 6:30 or so, so they could catch a little extra sleep.

However!

It turns out that perhaps we were not so out of the woods as we would like to imagine. It turns out that the only reason the kids have been sleeping in to the glorious late hour of 6 a.m. is because it’s been *dark* until then for the last 6 months. It’s not dark at that time anymore, nor is it dark when they go to bed at 7 p.m. And it’s only going to get worse as we get into summer.

This is so, so obvious in retrospect that I’m cursing myself for a fool for even forgetting for a second that our 6 a.m. “late” mornings would end as soon as it was light earlier. Evie in particular has *never* been able to sleep when it’s light out. And, of course, this is further complicated by the fact that the two of them are sharing a room; this means there are now TWO chances that the sun will wake somebody up, who will wake the other immediately on pure principle. It also doesn’t help that one or the other is perpetually sick, which means hacking, sneezing, and most importantly, waking up. Loudly.

Of course, our room shares a wall with their room, which means when they’re up, we’re up. I lay and listen to them talking, or singing, or fighting, or coughing and just wish they’d be quiet for 15 more minutes. If they can’t sleep, couldn’t they at least just lie there, or play quietly, or look at books or something? But on the other hand, isn’t that why we put the two of them in the same room? It’s not like we can say, “Play together, but do not exceed this decibel level until the specified time.”

There’s nothing we can do about the sun. We have a blackout shade, and a good thing too, since that’s what allows us to get to 5:30 or so. They’re simply not getting enough sleep, and neither are we, which means everybody has raw nerves and zero patience.

Will this never be over?

No More Pop

/ Shane / 1 Comment

For several years now, Sara has not had any pop to drink. This drastically cut down on the amount of pop I was drinking, since it mostly wasn’t in the house. She also convinced me to stop ordering pop at restaurants when the kids were around, to set a good example. Although sometimes this kind of killed me, I am definitely on board with trying to give the kids some good, soda-free role models. We see plenty of role models sucking down soda like there’s no tomorrow, trust me.

None of this ended up being all that hard, because I found a lot of other things to drink, such as coffee, a million different kinds of tea, milk, wine, Sara’s homemade cocoa, smoothies, the occasional white Russian, etc. (to say nothing of water). I’m much happier with this variety of things, I actually feel kind of foolish for being stuck on pop for so long.

Nonetheless, I steadfastly held on to my 4 cans of diet, caffeine-free Dr. Pepper for my lunch at work (one could argue that I was already hardly drinking pop at all). It’s a vast understatement to say that I enjoyed those cans of pop. I would look forward to them for hours, and often, it would be the only thing about my lunch that I enjoyed. I didn’t just love that can of pop per day, I was IN love with that can of pop. Sure, it was chalk full of the most god-awful chemicals on the planet, but it’s only 4 cans a week, and it was basically my last big vice.

And thus it continued for many years.

Suddenly, one day I took a few drinks and I just thought, “Ugh, this tastes like corn syrup and weird disgusting chemicals.” Seriously, it was just that abrupt. One day I loved it, the next day it was, “it’s not you, it’s me”. I soldiered on for a few more days just to make sure, but no, I just didn’t have the taste for it anymore. It was just too sickeningly sweet all of a sudden. At last I realized, if I was no longer enjoying this cloying cocktail of chemicals, what in the world was I drinking it for?

I could see having a pop now and again in the evening or if I went out to eat. On the other hand, I don’t see any reason to invite that particular demon back into my life. If I’ve gotten it out, what would the draw be? I enjoy so many other drinks more.

Now, it’s not totally all fuzzy unicorn rainbows. There is some downside.

Years ago, I had mostly eliminated caffeine from my diet. Now, it has come back with a vengeance, mostly due to drinking caffeinated coffee when decaf is unavailable. It’s even wormed its way back in at home, where I usually make “half-caf” coffee. Additionally, I put cream and sugar in my coffee or tea, which means I’ve picked up an extra calorie or two that the diet pop wasn’t giving me (say what you will about super-unnatural chemicals, but our bodies refuse to process them on principle, so there’s that). Also, I wonder if I’m teaching my kids a different lesson by always having a steaming cup of joe in my hand, rather than a pop.

Well, one problem at a time. For now, it’s sayonara soda.

On the Spectrum

/ Shane / 4 Comments

A while ago, Sara and I were listening to a story on NPR about a guy who discovered he had asperger syndrome. What was interesting was that Sara and I were having totally different reactions to the same story. The whole time I was listening, I was thinking, “Ugh, this is so annoying. I can’t stand it when regular, normal, everyday people claim to have some affliction that makes them different from everybody else. This is clearly an average person who wants to feel special.” Meanwhile, listening to the same story, Sara was thinking, “Oh my god I can’t believe what a weirdo this person is.”

This all came to light during a particular segment of the story. The man’s wife was describing how she was giving him a test to see if he had aspergers, and she came to a question that said, “Do you think about making traps?” She was absolutely convinced it was a typo, because the question didn’t make any sense, but her husband immediately answered, “Yes!” Everyone on the program had a good laugh over that one.

“This is so stupid!” I exploded. “Who doesn’t think about making traps?”

Sara looked at me in bafflement. “You think about making traps?”

“Of course I do.” Now it was my turned to be puzzled. “You don’t?”

“What kind of traps? Like for trapping…people?”

“No. I don’t know, any kind of traps,” I said. “Like how they work and if you could make them, or like if you were out in the wilderness if you could actually outsmart an animal and catch it. I mean, I don’t think about this all the time, but it crosses my mind.”

“I…do not think about making traps.”

“Not ever?”

“Not ever.”

This got me thinking that perhaps I was a weirdo after all. Obviously, however my brain worked would seem normal to me, so maybe I was a little asperger-y too. Maybe I identified with this guy a little too much.

A couple of days later, I was working with my brother in the garden.

“Do you ever think about snares?” he asked. “Like, how they work? I can’t really figure out how you could build one that would actually catch an animal.”

“Just a minute,” I said. “Hey Sara, could you come over here for a minute?”

Sara came over to stand with us in the garden.

“Nathan, do you ever think about making traps?”

“Yeaaaah…” he said suspiciously. “That’s what I was just asking you about.”

“You guys are unbelievable,” said Sara.

At this point, we started to speculate that maybe this was just a difference between men and women. Maybe some hidden hunter-instinct, long buried in men’s psyche, caused us to think about traps.

“No way,” said Nathan. “Rachael definitely thinks about traps.”

I decided to follow up on his hunch. It did seem highly likely that our sister had spent some time thinking about traps. I don’t know if this makes sense, but it somehow seemed like it would be in character. If so, maybe it’s familial rather than gender-based. I called her up.

“Hey, I’ve got a question for you. Do you ever think about making traps?”

“Traps?”

“Yeah, you know. Do you ever think about them?”

“What kind of traps? Like for trapping…people?”

“No, I don’t know. Any kind of traps. Just for trapping things.”

Rachael was decidedly suspicious about this line of questioning. “Why would I think about making traps?”

“This definitely counts as a no!” shouted Sara in the background.

“No reason, I was just curious,” I said, and hung up.

So what’s the deal? Are Nathan and I on the spectrum? Is it a male/female thing? Do you think about making traps?