Monthly Archives: October 2008

To do

12 Replies

List making for the sake of list making. 🙂

I want to:
make a Christmas list so I can use it as evidence that Noah has to make one.
talk to mitrian/tshuma/bk2w about gardening. (hey… maybe winter break?)
clean my whole house top to bottom, including getting the cobwebs off of the outside.
have more sex. [hey! I can do that now!!….] [ok, done]
clean and fill the hot tub.
go wine tasting.
figure out a steady time for the gym.
schedule a massage or three.
go on a hike with friends.
finish the write up for the Freak Breeders outing and put it out.
research for the New Zealand trip!
make Shanna’s Halloween costume.

Not in any particular order or time frame. 🙂

Being more green

3 Replies

Are you tired of getting credit card offers? Go here: www.optoutprescreen.com and you can stop them! It took about 3 minutes.

Unfortunately, that’s the easy one. It’s a bit more complicated to get rid of the rest of your junk mail but this site: http://www.obviously.com/junkmail/ tells you how to do it. I’m starting the process.

It’s pretty disgusting how much paper is wasted through junk mail. Don’t you wish that you could help reduce it? 🙂

Mmmm politics

125 Replies

I’m not posting much about politics, but I want to let ya’ll know that I am enjoying the stuff you are posting. I’m reading it all. I’m also reading various other sources, my personal favorite is realclearpolitics.com which reveals my bias I’m sure.

I/we have donated to Obama more than once. I/we have donated to No on 8 more than once. (Oh by the way honey… I donated again today. 🙂 I think these are both pretty big deals.

My politics have slid in the past year or so from where they used to be. I used to be a rather staunch Libertarian. At this point…I’m less of one. I’m hyper-aware of the fact that I am a very privileged person and I didn’t exactly get here through my own hard work. *cough* Sure, I have done some hard work in my lifetime… but I have not earned my present level of comfort. I kind of wonder if I ever really earned all that I felt I earned. How much of it was given to me? I’m still not real gung-ho on welfare programs, but I do feel that as someone with wealth it is my responsibility to help support the things I want in existence. I want marriage equality for all because why in the hell should I be treated special? I just happened to find a guy I wanted to marry. It didn’t have to be a guy. I want a president I feel some respect for.

I want to encourage my friends who can to put their money where their mouth is. I feel like this election may well be one of the most important ones of our lifetime. I want to know that I did something to help.

God damn technology.

4 Replies

I’m not an early adapter. I don’t trust all these “advancements” until other people suffer through the bugs. That said, I am lazy. I looked around for a better cash back rate on a credit card and was lead to the wonders of American Express. This card is some serious shit. Right now I am suffering through the hassle of setting it up to automatically pay all of my monthly bills for me. How cool is that? I won’t have to do it anymore! w00t! And they will give me 1.5% of that money back. Seems pretty neato to me given that I have to pay the bills anyway. (No, there is not an annual fee–I checked.) This is a serious pain in the ass.

And my phone is dying. It was fully charged yesterday afternoon. I haven’t used it and it is aready dead. Stupid phone. I’m not sure what I want to replace it with.

bitch.moan.complain. 🙂

Oooooh An Idea!

4 Replies

I’m thinking that what I should do is start up a freak breeders play group that meets up every so often. That’s what I should do! I can advertise on the local freak lists and groups and such. It’ll be awesome! Well, if anyone decides to come. 🙂 I’ll hopefully get to hang with some of the freaky sorts I know already and meet new ones! Yay!

I’m thinking a trip to the zoo. That could be a neat fairly neutral first trip. I don’t know much about local zoos. Is the San Francisco Zoo or the Oakland Zoo noticeably better? I propose November 15th because that is far enough out to make it on to calendars and before the holidays. (And uhm, it’s after my Comp Exam. 🙂 Given the schedules of young’uns I think 10am is probably a reasonable starting time but I’m open to feedback. This isn’t the official announcement, I’m giving my friends a chance to suggest a different date, time, or activity before I solicit the larger freak community.

For ya’lls general information I am defining freak as: kinky, poly, pagan, burner, goth, punk, trans, queer, bisexual, industrial, hippy, or if you just feel like you don’t quite fit in at the local mommy group. You can be any of the above or none of the above. If you think you qualify as a freak, come on down.

Any feedback before I do a larger scale announcement?

Hard night

4 Replies

Last night was the kind of night that prompts me to tell people, “If you aren’t 150% sure you want children–don’t have them.” Really it was all my fault. I was out of the house from 10 am till 6:30 pm and Shanna was only able to steal a couple of 20 minute cat naps. Whoops. As a result she had a terrible time sleeping all night. Major booby-monsterage. She woke up freaked out and needed to nurse every hour or two. At about 2:30 she woke up and just couldn’t seem to go to sleep again. We were up until 4:30. She was fussing and whining and crying and kicking me and generally expressing massive displeasure in my direction. Fair enough. All told she probably got ~9 hours of sleep last night but it was seriously broken sleep. She’s already napping on my lap.

At about 4am we ended up crying together for a while out of frustration. It was rather cathartic.

And it’s worth pointing out that after last night, by far our hardest night to date, that I’m still so happy to be a mom that I ache with joy. I love her so much.

Progress and Balance

1 Reply

I have six untouched books left. I am in progress on four three books. Of the four three I am reading, one Noah is reading to me, two are one is more than half gone (and they are short), and one I am slowly savoring because it’s neat. The two one that are is almost done I can easily finish in a few hours of reading. Of the six remaining, three are plays and the remaining three novels are fairly short. I could probably finish the entirety of my reading in about eight solid days of reading. It will only take me that long due to Shanna interruptions. I have four weeks and three days.

I am trying to maintain a reasonable awareness of politics seeing as I will be voting before the Comp Exam. It feels irritating and distracting though.

Spanish is plugging along. I would feel worse about my grasp of things only some of the people in the higher numbered course aren’t doing much better. I have a test in seven days. I have an oral presentation of some kind (it’s not announced yet) in three weeks.

The house has gone to crap and that’s just how it’s going to be for a month or so. I don’t have the bandwidth.

I’m trying to continue being a good friend. It’s kind of hard. I don’t have much extra energy.

I’m probably not doing enough for Noah. I’m trying though.

Shanna is still my primary focus. I’m telling you, being a stay at home parent is a full time job. This is pretty hard. Especially given all the other things pulling at me. Things will let up tremendously after the Comp Exam and the election. I’m looking forward to being able to coast for a while.

Although… after the Comp Exam comes the holidays. I’m still not entirely sure what all is happening there.

Edited to reflect today’s reading.

some of them don’t suck.

2 Replies

So far I liked The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The English Patient; Midnight’s Children and Kim are both really interesting so far. Pretty much everything else has been obnoxious. I’m happy about four good ones. 🙂

I have eight books left that are not in progress. I have four weeks and four days left. Oof. Best get to hurrying!

Associations

5 Replies

I was thinking about how things become associated with another person. I won’t be able to get all of mine in this list, but here are a few:
English muffin with blueberry jelly = James
Long clingy rayon nightgowns = Brittney (I used to borrow one from her when I went to visit. It was the coolest thing ever.)
Brussels sprouts = Ali
Really sweet late harvest Rieslings = Anna
Driving slow in the fast lane = Debbie
“Where I come from” by Alan Jackson = Bailey
Fast cars = Tom
Ice cream, hedonism, speech ticks = Noah
Naked slacking = Sarah
Macaroni and cheese with tomato soup = Miss Jenny
Spice cake = Miss Sara
Chocolate = Anthony
“No one can make you feel anything” & “Generous”= Deborah (Yeah, but they can make me a sandwich!)

There are many more, but Shanna woke up and is wiggling. I like how many reminders of my friends I have in my life.

Debates

3 Replies

So I watched the Palin/Biden debate. Wow. Could she have tried any harder to seem stupid? In my oh-so-humble opinion if you are going to say “gosh” and “darn” and “heck” so often you might as well say god, and damn, and hell. What you are saying is equally as unintelligent and low class. This is why I don’t really care if people swear.

And I was rather disappointed that neither of them could ANSWER A FUCKING QUESTION.

Although Biden was a little more self-deprecating in a funny way. And I liked his small jabs. He should have used bigger ones imo. But dude. She was so not playing to me.

Meeting mommys

10 Replies

So this meeting moms thing isn’t going that well. The neighbor I’ve been trying to hang out with has a lot of irons in the fire. She’s happy to see us at Gymboree, but we don’t talk at all past, “Look–Shanna can sit up! “J has his third tooth!” and that’s not really that interesting to me. I’ve extended offers of dinner and board games and they aren’t interested. I’ve offered to pinch hit on baby-sitting so she can get stuff done and her husband vetoed that (no one who isn’t family is allowed to baby-sit). So… I can spend $75/month for our babies to do lame stuff and be near her for 45 minutes a week. Yeah, I’m thinking that’s a waste of money.

Mommy & Baby yoga is about the same. It’s 10-15 minutes of yoga then an hour of playing with the baby while other moms play with their babies right near us. Uhm… yeah, no. I don’t want to pay for the privilege.

I would love to find other freak moms. The ones I know are pretty busy or they live in FREAKIN PORTLAND. (And there’s Laura in Pittsburgh. I’m kind of pissed I don’t get to go meet her yet.) So, do any of my friends want to set me up on a blind date with another freak mommy? I could make you cupcakes!

Busy morning

4 Replies

We woke up for the 2:30 feeding/diaper change and uhh haven’t really gone back to sleep since. (Shanna has been sleeping though. That’s more important.) This is one of the downsides to how early we go to bed. If that first sleep cycle was a good one it’s hard to fall back asleep sometimes. Later there will be napping.

But! Since we were both up… we had rather nice sex. I’m really enjoying all the possessiveness that is more permissible in monogamy. 🙂 He’s mine, Mine, MINE!!!! *cough* It wasn’t rock my world sex, but it was nice anyhow. 🙂 Then we talked schmoopily for a while. Then we started talking finance for a while. We decided during this conversation that it was just time to get up.

We are trying to figure out the balance between investing in a regular 529 account and a 529 independent account. For those of my friends with kids, check it out. A 529 independent account allows you to pay into an account as if you were paying for a kid to go to an expensive private school right now and that money basically turns into credit hours for the institution and you can use the credit hours later regardless of what the actual tuition is at the time. Very neat. The problem is that it is a gamble that your kid will want to go to a private school. There are a few hundred schools that are registered with this program and you can go to any of the schools on the list. It’s worth thinking about. Cause we are thinking about more than one kid it’s kind of interesting to wonder about whether one kid will want private or two or none or… ah! Where is my crystal ball?!

Then after doing a bit more research and talking about this I got off my heiny and looked into credit cards that will give us a higher rate of cash back (American Express has a fairly good card–5% back on groceries/gas/drug stores and 1.5% back on everything else once you’ve spent $6500 in a year). I couldn’t find a better card so I opened an account. Card is on its way.

Then I got around to opening the E-trade checking/savings accounts we have been talking about. They offer 3.3% interest on savings and 2.9% for checking. That’s way better than Washington Mutual Chase. Because they don’t have branches to visit they refund ATM fees so we no longer have to think in any way about finding branches. 🙂 Given that I do 90%+ of my banking online it doesn’t matter that much anyway.

I have folded laundry and I’m about to go put it away. After that I will put the diapers out on the line (I did that load overnight) cause the sun is coming up now and I can see.

Then I will come back in here and start researching renewable energy companies. We have a little bit of money we want to put into the market while it’s down and I think renewable energy is a pretty smart place to go right now. I may end up eating those words, but that’s my first guess. I need to figure out a)what companies exist b)which of them are publicly traded c) what are the actual specific technologies they are producing d)what sorts of dividends do they pay e)look at their previous history and how they are performing f)maybe look into their funding sources? Is there anything big I should look into other than what I am thinking of right now? I may start another entry later and edit it as I find more information if anyone is interested in seeing what I turn up. 🙂

And now! I go work on laundry. Not bad for 7:15.