My So Called Life

The Dangers of Losing Weight, or, How I Lost My Wedding Ring

/ Shane / 8 Comments

So, as you are probably already aware if you had any contact with me in the past week (virtual or otherwise) that I lost my wedding ring.

The funny thing about your wedding ring, is that you never really notice it. And yet, you always *constantly* notice it. I wasn’t really aware of this until I lost my ring, but I unconsciously touch it or rub it a million times a day, like a touch-stone. Now that it’s gone, when I unconsciously touch my finger I have a millisecond of panic, where my mind just registers, “Something is wrong!” before I have time to think, “Oh yeah, my ring is gone.”

So it is hard to say where exactly I lost my ring. I know for sure that I had it the night before. Normally I probably wouldn’t have known that, but I was working in the garden pulling out tomato plants, and my ring flew off. I noticed right away, and I picked it up and thought, “Huh, that’s weird.” The next time I noticed my ring (or should I said didn’t notice my ring) was at work the next day.

Of course, since the last time I had it, I was in the garden, at home, at daycare, at school, and at work (and of course I’ve checked all of those places as thoroughly as I possibly can). It seems to me that it was most likely lost at work, since that is where I noticed I was missing it. Even though I don’t generally notice my ring, I have a feeling that I would have noticed it pretty quickly after I lost it. However, I wanted no stone left unturned, up to and including jumping in the dumpster at home and re-opening a poopy diaper I had changed. Those would have been totally worth it if I had found the ring, but I didn’t, so they really sucked.

As for how I lost it, I’m not really sure. You take your ring off for one second, and some hobbit is trying to throw it into Mount Doom. Just kidding, I never, ever take my ring off. (But I still don’t trust hobbits. Tricksy they are, tricksy.) It has always been a tiny bit on the big side, but if it has ever fallen off before, I noticed it immediately. I have been losing some weight for a while now, so maybe that’s why it slipped off, or maybe it was that in conjunction with the colder weather. As my co-worker pointed out: “You’re supposed to get fatter the longer you’re married. Your wife shouldn’t be feeding you healthy food.” In other words, this is all. Sara’s. Fault.

I’ve been pretty bummed about the whole thing. First off, taking the sentimentality out of it, it’s definitely the most expensive thing I’ve ever misplaced. Second off, I really hate losing anything. It just drives me crazy until I find it. I’ve been walking around staring at the ground everywhere I go, even if the ring couldn’t possibly be there (like if I go somewhere I didn’t go that day). I just can’t stop thinking about it, and thinking of more places to check, even if the places get more and more absurd.

But finally, you can’t take the sentimentality out of it. That’s my wedding ring! That’s the symbol of my marriage. I could get another ring, but it will never be THE ring. It’s not just any old ring. This has come up before, in the discussion of “upgrading” your ring. Some people get a new, better ring on some particular anniversary, such as adding diamonds, etc. The theory, I guess, is that you’re older and you have more money, so you can get a better ring now that you could have back when you got engaged. (Either that, or maybe it’s like, “Well, I guess it’s going to last after all, so I guess you ARE worth spending money on. Either way.) I have always adamantly been against this. I don’t care what kind of ring I would have bought now…it’s the one that I did buy that’s special. That’s the one that reminds me of where we were at at that point in our lives, even if we were young (perhaps BECAUSE we were young).

I don’t know, I’m just depressed about losing it. Now that it has been a week, I’m not holding out much hope of finding it.

My precioussssssss.

We’re off to see the turkey

/ Shane / Leave a comment

This year for Halloween, the entire family went as Wizard of Oz characters (making good use of that birthday present). Evie and Oliver were Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion, respectively:

Sara was the Scarecrow:

And I was the Tin Woodsman (by process of elimination):

Okay, so my costume was a little uninspired.

Oliver was as excited as we’ve ever seen him, running around the house like a crazy man. But I’m not sure why, since he had no idea what Halloween or Trick or Treating was. We had practiced a little bit with him, but he only really liked the part where he said, “Knock knock!”. I guess maybe he just caught the mood from his big sister.

Oliver caught on pretty quickly, wandering from house to house and yelling, “More candy! More candy!” But then again, he didn’t actually *eat* any candy; he preferred to sit in the stroller and eat cheese and apples. We tried to skip some of the houses with him, but he was not having it. If Evie went to a house, he had to go to the house too.

Unlike Evie when she was little, Oliver was not afraid of anything. People in scary costumes, skeletons hanging from trees, moving blow-up cats, spiders dropping on people, nothing. He wasn’t even afraid of the giant turkey.

Yes, I said giant turkey.

You see, the street we go to for trick-or-treating is a little crazy around Halloween time. They usually have some sort of giant, scary structure in the middle of the road, and this year happened to be a giant turkey. This thing flaps it’s wings, moves its feet and mouth, and has some sort of speaker system that plays music and occasionally squawks. When I say giant, I mean giant: there is maybe a haunted house inside or something? We’re talking like 20 feet tall. Oliver thought it was fascinating.

There was one incident that I really regretted. There was a person kneeling by the sidewalk, unmoving, acting like a decoration and waiting to jump out and scare someone. I wasn’t 100% sure it was really a person, but I suspected, so I told Evie to go over and look under the hood. Well, Evie did NOT suspect it was a real person, and it didn’t occur to me to tell her, so you can imagine her surprise. Luckily they knew better than to really jump at her, but all they did was move their hand when Evie got close, and Evie lost her mind. She was so terrified that she couldn’t even run or scream, just sort of convulse in place like she had twenty thousand volts running through her. I grabbed her up immediately, but the damage had been done. She was absolutely terrified, and it took awhile for her to calm down. Why did I ask her to look under the hood? How could I not have foreseen that outcome?? Poor girl. The incident was quickly forgotten in all the excitement and didn’t ruin the night, but I felt pretty bad.

Everyone loved us being dressed up as a set. As we were walking around, so many people would say, “Oh look, there’d Dorothy. Oh, and the Lion. Oh, and here’s the Scarecrow! And the Tin Woodsman!” And yet, a surprising number of people got it wrong (“Is she the little girl from Little House on the Prairie?”). I kind of liked having a family theme though, so maybe we’ll have to remember that for future years.

Evie did not wear her Dorothy outfit to school. She went as a doctor: not a surgeon, but a “a doctor in the emergency room”. We were told that “characters” were not allowed at school, so we decided to play it safe and keep Dorothy out of it. But then, of course, there were two other Dorothy’s at school!

Evie: “I thought you couldn’t be a character?”
Teacher: “Well…we don’t want characters from t.v., but there’s a book for the Wizard of Oz, so that’s okay.”

Thanks a lot, mommy and daddy.

As we walked through our neighborhood on the way home, there were a few houses with their porch lights on. This is very unusual for our neighborhood. We have never seen anybody trick-or-treat (ever!) around there. So we decided to hit up those houses on the way home, to encourage the trend to continue.

At the first house, the porch light was on, but nobody was home. At the second house, someone came to the door, but it was clear that they didn’t expect anybody, and just happened to have some suckers since they had a little kid. The third house was for sale, but they had their porch light on and the gate was open, so it looked pretty inviting. Well, the only person that was there was someone working on the house, so he came to the door in his grubby clothes covered in paint and drywall dust. He insisted on busting out his wallet and giving a dollar to each of the kids, despite our objections.

Evie: “Why did that man give us a dollar, even though you both were saying, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no”?”

After that, we decided not to bother with any more houses on the street. But it wasn’t a total waste, since Evie later said that her favorite part of the evening was, “when I got the dollar.”

It must be October

/ Shane / 2 Comments

The beautiful Ms. Olivia

Slimy!

Another year, another set of pumpkins carved

Grumpy Cat

/ Shane / Leave a comment

In the past month or so, our cat Nala suddenly got old.

She’s eating a lot less. She’s a lot less active, sleeping more during the day and being grumpier about moving (for example, when you want her to get out of the chair you want to sit in or when you want her out of a room so you can shut the door). She’s just grumpier in general: more likely to try to attack your ankles (well, Sara’s ankles…she knows better than to go after *my* ankles), more grumble-y about getting kicked out of a room, more likely to yowl at you, more likely to have a grumpy-looking, scowly face, etc.

Now traditionally, my relationship with Nala can be described as rocky at best. But it’s funny, but all this grumpy old lady behavior actually makes me like Nala more, not less. This may seem a bit counter-intuitive (why would I like bitey-cat more than non-bitey-cat?), but there’s really two reasons:

  1. I kind of feel bad for her, getting old and all. It seems like the least I can do is give her a scratch under the chin now and again. She deserves the same respect any old person gets, just for making it this long if nothing else.
  2. Seeing her like this reminds me of the fact that she’s going to die some day, and that’s going to be hard on the kids. For both of them, their first words all centered around Nala (I think Oliver’s was “Nala” and I think Evie’s was “Meow”, but she said “Nala” pretty quick too). I think, like many kids with pets, Nala’s demise will probably be their first real experience with death.
I think it is easy to forget that pets, like people, keep getting older. But pets, unlike people, have a limited shelf life. They just don’t last as long as you and your kids wish they would.
I think it’s going to be interesting to see if I miss Nala at all, after she’s gone. Lord knows I have contemplated getting rid of her (or actively wished her death) many times. But when it happens for real, I don’t know what my reaction will be. I’m certainly not going to miss being awakened at night, cleaning up vomit, or finding out she made a unilateral decision to move her bathroom.
One thing is for sure: if I don’t miss her, I will be the only one.

Google Searches V

/ Shane / 2 Comments
Since my friend Dan mentioned it on his blog, I decided it was time for another round of strange Google searches. These are things that people searched for that somehow landed them on my blog.
  • “funny things to say at a bachelor party” – That’s pretty lame my friend. Make up your own jokes. And I have to assume this is the same guy who later searched for, “sayings for bachelor paintball” and maybe even “sweet to say on monday quotes”. Dude, you’re trying too hard!
  • “that noise robert downey jr makes in sherlock holmes” – What in god’s name does that mean? Did he make a noise in that movie? If so, what else is there to know about it? This one really baffled me.
  • “zombie wizard of oz” and “wizard of oz zombie art” – Both are topics found on my blog, but not usually in conjunction with each other.
  • “congratulations you are alive” – Thank you?
  • “creeper stare” – ::sigh::, I guess that’s me.
  • “antonym of sleepwalk” – Uh…is the opposite of sleepwalking just sleeping? Or did they mean walking around while not sleeping?
  • “awful face” – Aw, really? And they found me? Geez. Good thing someone else searched for “heaven fantasy picture” to balance it out.
  • “why geeks shouldn’t have children” – Ouch. I guess I’m the poster child for this? That one cuts deep.
  • “flannel sheets dry skin” – Ugh, god! Most horrible search term ever! ::shudders:: Why would you be looking for that? I’m looking to *avoid* that!
  • “zombies and skylights” – I don’t know what this one could be, but it sounds like a bad combination to me, hombre.