No word on the health.

I did the MRI; it was relaxing. I had the blood drawn; it gave me a bruise.

My head is killing me.

I’m in Dallas right now, for work. I am pretty much over my job.

You know what made me happy today? A text from Brad with this photo.

Shortly after this photo was taken, I hear he laughed so hard, he gagged and threw up.

I finally uploaded the pictures that had been accumulating on my phone to flickr. Every time I do that, I remember all these ideas I had for blog posts along the way, posts that never happened because I never uploaded the photos I wanted to use.

Today, in no discernible order, I give you a quick taste of things I’d planned on doing better if I’d done them when I’d planned.

And TOMORROW, I will give you a contest update. (TLDR: Contest coming next week.)

1. School started for UT Austin. I hate it when school starts because it means 50,000 people (predominantly rash, immature, shortsighted, 18- to 22-year-old people) invade the city. They clog the streets, create parking space competitions, talk on their phones, tan their bodies, and just generally annoy me. This video was taken on the first day of classes (notice the Tower bells playing “Let it Snow”). I was walking to get lunch at the Union, and was just generally horrified at the number of humans I had to wade through. (Note to self: Leave for lunch 15 to 30 minutes early the first week or two of the semester, before all the kids have stopped attending classes. The normal five-minute salad line takes 35, and you’re forced to listen to conversations that make you want to barf.)

2. I want to have friends like this.

3. As a result of a complete last-minute fluke, I drove with a friend to Dallas for the first show of the Guided by Voices reunion tour. They’ve always kinda annoyed me, but it was pretty damn awesome anyway.

4. This guy walks. It is a tiny bit cute. Just slightly.

5. School skating event… Look at the awesome PVC contraptions they have for novices these days!

6. Archer was sick. This is what he did all day when I stayed home with him.

7. Kieran has been obsessed for years with learning the dances on the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory DVD. He’s finally passing on the love.

End of post = end of days

Wait! Are you sure you don’t need any spicy hot chubbies with that?

That title is mostly an inside joke for Brad. We were at a high school football game once watching my cousin(s) do something (band, I guess). We were both out of college and, besides not caring ANYTHING about football, ever, at all, EVER, we shared a deeply sincere and abiding lack of care for HIGH SCHOOL football.

I mean, seriously. High school football?

Anyway. We were being, it seems, BLASPHEMOUS to some people in the stands because we were, um, talking to each other rather than staring at the game, wearing the right color(s), yelling, ringing cow bells (no joke), etc. There was one guy who was particularly offended by our NOT DOING ANYTHING who started giving us the stinkeye and, at one point, looked directly at us and said, “We can still win this ballgame.”

Only, if you can imagine that sentence with a serious Texas drawl, that’d be great. Something like, “Way cayan stayul wayan this bowelgayam!”

So, yes. We can still win this ballgame.

Whimsy has extended the final day of Minionlympics. Supporters can leave comments until Saturday, February 13th, 5 p.m. PST.

I will love you forever (if you):

• Leave a comment at The Creamery, mentioning that you’re cheering for Alicia.
• Leave a comment here letting me know that you cheered for me in the Minionlympics.
• Leave a comment on the incomparable Jayme’s Minionlympics post, letting her know you cheered for me in the Minionlympics.

I’ll say more next week about the BOX OF FANTASTIC WONDERS I’ll be giving out as a result of this here ballgame, won or unwon.

And, of course, check back in for the closing ceremonies on Monday. I am certain there will be tears.

December 31, 1999

• I fell asleep watching The Last Emperor with Brad. We watched the ball drop in Times Square on tv later that evening, but I still felt reallllly ruuuun downnn.
• Two days later, I had my second kidney stone. A day after that, I was hospitalized for ten days with a case of bacterial pneumonia in both lungs that almost killed me (the first of two brushes with death this decade).
• I had just completed my first semester of graduate school in Austin. Brad was looking for work here but still had a job in Dallas. We had been married a little over a year.
• We had no kids. (We decided to try for a baby five and a half months later, and I found out I was pregnant with Kieran a month and a half after that.)

This Decade

• I finished my M.A. and Ph.D.
• Brad went back to school and got a second bachelor’s degree (because THAT’s always smart, heh) and teaching certification.
• We accumulated close to $150,000 in school loan debts (see bullet immediately above :))
• We became parents, four times over. I gained 50 pounds.
• I tried out “staying home” with two small children (and about lost my damn mind).
• We moved back to Dallas, considered moving to Vermont, then moved back to Austin.
• We bought two houses and sold one.
• Brad’s dad passed away.

Decade the Next

• I watch my children grow to ages 18, 15, 12, and 10 (omg, I just threw up in my mouth a little).
• I employ babysitters more frequently to preserve my sanity.
• I remain gainfully employed. In Austin.
• We buy a bigger house.
• I lose 60 pounds. :)

I have every intention of doing some kind of Day Zero thing to start the new year, but it hasn’t materialized AS OF YET. You, my imaginary friends, will be the first to hear about it, though, as I will surely need to be held publicly accountable.

And you? What’s your #1 goal for the coming decade?

Taken from Swistle, who took from Girl in a Boy House.

*****

Eggnog or hot chocolate? Eggnog equals sick. Hot chocolate equals scrumptious delight.

Does Santa wrap the presents or leave them open under the tree? Like Swistle, we don’t believe, but unlike Swistle, we do receive. Each of the kids gets one present with good curb appeal under the tree each year on Christmas morning. In my family, growing up, all the grandkids got a Santa present each year until the youngest was too old to believe. I was the oldest, so I got Santa presents until I was in college.

Colored lights on a tree or white? Both, but I like colored best.

Do you hang mistletoe? No.

When do you put your decorations up? When we get around to it, moderated by how spirited I’m feeling that year.

What is your favorite holiday dish? Leslie’s toffee.

Do you open a gift on Christmas Eve? We have before, but not traditionally.

How do you decorate your Christmas tree? Lots of ornaments, none matching; the more homemade, the better. I love love love the ones the kids bring home each year. I think most trees are pretty, but I much prefer a cozy, colorful tree with homemade ornaments to the sterile ones people put up now with decorations in one color, all white lights, etc. I also prefer real trees, but I can’t justify cutting down 75 or something over the course of my lifetime, so we do fake. This year, for the first time, we let the kids start decorating the tree by themselves. They did the garlands – red and green beads and gold plastic beads – and I handed out ornaments for them to put on. Kieran can reach pretty high now, but most of our ornaments are still on the bottom two-thirds of the tree. We’ve done candy canes before, but not this year.

Snow: love it or hate it? We never get snow in Texas (except today, apparently, after it was 75 degrees yesterday, WTF), so I can appreciate it. Snow is beautiful, in theory, but then it gets muddy and sloshy, and your boots start getting bleached by salt, and all the kittens die.

Can you ice skate? I can walk around on ice wearing ice skates, if that counts.

What is your favorite holiday dessert? Oh wait. I’m realizing now that the “dish” question above was probably asking for something savory. Well, suck it, suckers, because I like what I like.

What is your favorite holiday tradition? Spending the night at my grandparents’ house on Christmas Eve. I especially love looking at all the holiday cards they got that year, but only if it doesn’t spiral into snarky, self-righteous gossiping (practically impossible).

Candy canes: yum or yuck? Meh. I definitely enjoy candy canes over most other peppermint-flavored stuff. Except those soft pepperminty mints… You know what I’m talking about? They’re like butter mints, but red and white striped boxes of pepperminty goodness.

Favorite Christmas show? Movies? Recently, “Bad Santa” and “The Family Stone.” Traditionally, that Rudolph Claymation special and “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

*****

Happy holidays, mah peeps!! New decade coming soon!! (And for a fantastic defense of this phrase, see this over at The Mom Slant. Julie said it better than I ever could.)

My dear, sweet Archer,

Today, you are five months old.

You’re becoming less and less the yummy, fatty blob you once were.

You love to bat the pacifier out of your mouth and then try to grab it with your fist. You’re still working out the details, though, so you do it really slowly and deliberately, like a turtle.

This month, I had to go to Dallas for work for five days; you went with me. Traveling alone with a baby – and especially one that can’t sit on the nasty airport floor while I put my boots back on – is not especially easy. I packed a small suitcase for us, but a few of your things didn’t make it in. I bought you some outfits and a tiny lovey blanket when we got to Omi’s. You love the super soft blankie, but on the occasion that you pull it up over your nose, you get frantic and cry.

You wake up happy most mornings, but your happy period is still less than an hour at this point. By the time you and Daddy drop me off at work, you’re either asleep or screaming. Just in the past two days, though, it seems like you’ve fallen asleep a tiny bit easier at night. You still fight sleep, but it seems like you might (might) be sleeping more soundly in your hammock these days.

Or maybe not.

You’re still nursing, and I’m still pumping, but the pumping is getting less and less frequent because of my work schedule this fall. We haven’t given you any solid foods yet, but we will in the next few weeks. You’re such a tiny peanut. You remind me a lot of Kieran when he was your age. Minus all the screaming. :)

You really like TV. That’s an obvious difference between you and your siblings. They didn’t really care about TV at your age. Your attention span for an animated show on Nick Jr. is really pretty astounding. This is a really good thing for Momma and Daddy when we need to meet the needs of your brothers or sister. Thanks for that, fourth child.

And final child.

I wasn’t sure immediately after you were born that you were my last child. I’m sure now. I love you so much, and I am absolutely, positively certain that I cannot spread myself any thinner than I happily spread myself for you and your siblings.

You are the sweet ending. I am happy to finally know you.

I love you, my littlest boy.

Momma

There’s been entirely too much death talk the last few days.

So, a little more can’t hurt.

We adopted Quincy from the pound on April 2, 2005. He was six months old and had the most energy I’d ever seen any dog have, ever. In my life. Ever. We brought our two (at the time) children with us to choose a dog that we hoped would be a good guard dog for us in our new house (because God knows we needed one).

Brad wanted Quincy. I didn’t.

I wanted a different breed. I remember there were a lot of blue heeler and husky mixes at the pound when we went, and I wanted one of them. Quincy’s breed was listed as dalmatian on his card, but it was obvious by the shape of his head that he was part pit bull. The pound had an automatic kill policy for pit bulls; Quincy was saved by his spots. And, of course, his eyes. He had one blue and one brown. How could anyone not love that?

In the end, it was his energy that won me over. We took him outside on a leash to a big, fenced yard where you could play with the dogs, try them out. He ran. So fast. He was so happy to be out of that kennel. He played keep-away forever. To the point that when we had decided that, yes, this was the dog for us, and we were ready to take him home, we couldn’t catch him. (Little did we know this was Quincy’s WAY. If he ever got away from you, sorry, but you were screwed.)

Right away, we thought he would be good with the kids. He was aware that they were there and that they were smaller and fragile (Kieran was almost four, and Anneke not quite 10 months), but he wasn’t afraid of them. He never knocked them down, and even when we had babies in the house, he understood. He was always gentle and protective.

We all started calling him Quince pretty immediately after we got him. When Anneke started talking shortly thereafter, the closest she could come was “Toonce.” (Not THE Toonces, of course. Pronounced instead with an /oo/ phoneme like in the word book, not loop.)

He could also jump our six-foot fence like it was nothing. We started having to keep him on a leash just to take him out to pee. He got away a couple times, and he was GONE. Once, he stayed away for about three days. He showed up in our backyard with cuts and what looked like puncture wounds all over his back. We have no idea where he went or what he did, but he was exhausted when he got home.

Quincy started seeming sick, just moving slowly and not really eating, last week. The vet knew immediately that he was in critical condition; he was already in kidney failure by the time he got there. He died Sunday, probably from leptospirosis, a fluke bacterial infection. (He had been vaccinated against it, but apparently, the vaccine protects against just four of the seven strains.)

This is our sweet Toonce. He would have been five this month. We will miss him.

When we lived in Dallas, Brad and I both got tickets for running the same red light. (You’d think Brad could have avoided running it a couple weeks after the City of Dallas hit me up for $50, but you’d be wrong.) Along with a bill for $50, I received a photo of my face through the windshield as I ran the light. Really, don’t you think that’s overkill? They could just as well have included a little handwritten post-it with the words, “Take that, bitches.” Anyhoo.

After the ticket, I found that I sat up straighter when I got to that light. I looked at the cars around me and wondered who was going to run it this time (it was one of those lights that a gazillion people sit through every weekday morning on their way to work, the light that immediately precedes an on-ramp, and one that doesn’t allow enough time before yielding to a way less busy street that doesn’t deserve its green light). If I approached the light when it had been green for awhile, I prepared myself to look in the rearview mirror to see which cars would pass through the intersection with the bright flash that meant they’d been gotten by The Man.

I never ever ever again entered that intersection when the light was yellow (much to the dismay of the masochists behind me).

Well. Since that experience, I’ve complained and complained that those damn cameras cause traffic accidents and other mayhem (which, according to research, appears to be the case). But! I’ve also been careful with the red lights. I look for cameras, and I actually yield on yellow.

I never noticed this until a couple weeks ago when Austin announced it would stop issuing tickets as a result of these cameras (the city apparently read those same studies about traffic accidents). “Yay,” I said, “Common sense prevails. It’s so nice to live in a city that recognizes that these things cause accidents” (and war, famine, and baby stealing).

And then I started driving in a world free from the worry of being sent a bill for $50 with a photograph of my happy ass driving through a red light.

I’ve noticed over these last few weeks that the rules that govern this new (old) world involve my hitting the gas instead of the brake on yellow. Umm, oops.

Bad. (Not bad like one of those people who sleep through the light change and then run through the light into oncoming traffic and decapitate someone, but still, bad.)

*****

On another note. I just saw PJ Harvey on David Letterman. She looks phenomenal. She’s been around awhile, so I thought she’d be all haggard, but no way. She looks and sounds great.

(In case you’re wondering, I’ll save you the wiki google: She’s 39. :))

In honor of Flashback Friday (all the cool girls are doing it), I give you June 13, 2006, a mere three years ago tomorrow. A simpler time when I had just two children. A time when I blogged at a different address and failed to use capital letters. What a half-cocked youngster I was. :)

*****

“this city fucks me in the face”

but not last thursday. or maybe it did. i don’t know. is getting fucked in the face a good thing or a bad thing?

brad and i went to see blackalicious, miri ben-ari, and the roots at the gypsy tea room. it was my last day of school with students, so i was a little sad. i will miss my sweet vv and my small friend, d, very much.

anyway, blackalicious kicked ass. the gift of gab was off’n ma hook (for those of you in the know, this is ten times as good as off da hook). and yay for whiskey sours! when i went to the bathroom – they have a chick in there who turns the water on and off for you and gives you towels!!!! – there was this bit of graffiti inside the stall that had been covered not well by a coat of paint: “this city fucks me in the face.” so true.

when we knew we were moving back to dallas from austin, i kept noticing all these things that make austin such a nicer place to live. in austin, stop sign graffiti includes STOP… “patriarchy”, “war”, “bush”, … in dallas, the only stop sign graffiti i’ve noticed (besides the small-caliber holes in the signs in our neighborhood) has been STOP… “sign.” what a farce. i think it is the perfect illustration of the difference between the two cities. this city fucks me in the face.

so… this is my first entry in quite a while. i have been working, so i suppose i was too engrossed or too busy or whatever to write. i would say that i will try to post more frequently over the summer, but i don’t want to make that kind of commitment, vague as it may be.

okay, so what has happened recently? in descending order by age… brad’s school year ended. he quickly became obsessed with downloading music, categorizing it, perfecting it for our ipods and phatbox. i turned 30. i watched my favorite student, vv, get arrested at school. my school year ended. i started gaining back the weight i recently lost. kieran turned 5. he’s officially a kindergartener now. near the end of the year, he got really good at writing his name (and anything, really, if you spell it for him). he told me yesterday he wishes he were a girl. when i asked why, he said, “because i want to pick beautiful sunflowers.” i told him that boys can do that too, but i don’t think he was convinced. anneke turned 2. she’s gotten insanely beautiful. really. really, really beautiful. she’s *such* a girlie-girl, too, which is weird to me. she has *very* definite opinions about what she wants to wear, how she wants her hair fixed, when she does and doesn’t want to do these things, … brad’s mom got her a plastic vanity table and set of pretend brushes, makeup crap, etc. for her birthday. oh my *gawd* — as if this will help matters. also, she’s potty training, which is parentcode for “pissing all over everything as frequently as possible.” oh, and “shitting in inappropriate places and not telling anyone until wiping ass all over the house.”

Currently watching a documentary on Westboro Baptist Church (yes, the scary one). I can’t devote my full attention, or else my blood pressure will rise, and the fetus may levitate out of my abdomen. So… I’m here to post some pics of my sweeties.

Anneke at school (luckily, Anneke’s school takes lots of pictures of the kids :):















Kieran and Anneke on Spring Break in Dallas:







We made Anneke take a nap when she absolutely, positively was NOT tired. This is how we found her:





Griffon had rotavirus 10 days or so ago. We had to give him an emergent kitchen sink bath when he had one of those completely liquid, rotaviral-yellow poos that tends to slop out the diaper and down the thighs before you can even reach them. Made for super cute pictures, but I’m not posting here, since he’s a little nudie bootie. If I know you, and I’m relatively sure you’re not a child molester, email me, and I’ll give you access to them. :)