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Jillian went to the eye doctor today. She will need glasses, and in the words of the doctor she needs them “like, yesterday.” This is not a surprise at all. The only time we had a problem was when he put the drops in to dilate her pupils and she looks like the world’s tiniest rave kid now:

Day One

One year

Two years

Three years

Four years

I’ll be the first to admit that I have odd hobbies. I like to peel the dead skin from my feet, for example.

I’m also approximately 8 years old in my head, so I have a thing about scratch-off lottery tickets. I love them. LOVE THEM. So I have a thing that I do - whenever I find money on the ground (this happens a lot, actually), if it’s less than $20, I buy instant lottery tickets with it. Whatever I win, I buy more tickets. Sometimes I only win a couple of dollars, but no matter how much I win, I only buy the $1 and $2 tickets because MORE FUN!!!

So the other day, I was down to my last $4 of winnings (got a whole batch with no winners, what a bummer). I bought 2 tickets for $2 each and won $8. Put those back in and got the same kind of tickets and won $39. OF COURSE it all went back in. $19 that time.

Today out of the $19 worth of tickets, I have already won $21. Woo!

I’m weird. This should not be news. Plus, Jillian LOVES to help.

I resisted having a cell phone for years and years. I had one way back in 1999 or so, because I was travelling a lot with Phish and Freddie required me to have one. Nine times out of ten, though, I couldn’t find the damn thing and when I did manage to locate it, it wasn’t charged.

At some point, I realized I was paying for something I was never, ever using, so I got rid of it. I’m not a ‘phone person,’ largely due to the fact that I spent my teenage years in a house that didn’t HAVE one. That would be a totally foreign concept to a teenager today, but 20 years ago, there was just the one phone in the house, usually. And we didn’t have one.

I blame my parents’ hippie lifestyle for my social awkwardness. It doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that I’m um, socially awkward to begin with, no siree! It’s the hippies.

Anyway, fast-forward a few years after I dumped the last phone and when I got all knocked up, Freddie required me to have a phone again. My protests were pretty much the same as everything else I protested while pregnant, namely the fact that women had been getting knocked up and having babies for millenia without cell phones, and I could probably pull it off as well. He wasn’t swayed.

That phone served me pretty well for a few years. It could make and receive calls and texts, which was fun. I only lost it a few times, and only had to get it replaced once. It was small and I even managed to keep it charged most of the time. It got me through pregnancy and having a newborn/toddler/mental case kid, and then Phish came back and it helped me navigate that, too!

Then. Oh, then. Freddie got this idea that we could get me a fancy cell phone (I still say cell phone - am v. old) and get rid of our house phone, which was almost never used. He managed to score a deal on a fancy new Droid X and decided that would be *my* phone (as well as the house phone). Hmmm.

The lure of a fancy phone is almost too much. Freddie has a BlackBerry, which is fine when we need to get directions or something but it’s v. slow and the little keys on the keyboard are sooooo teensy! It’s laughable. Having a fancy phone that *does stuff* would be nice, I thought.

Friday night he brought home the Droid.

I have yet to put it down.

I am also now a slave to the blinky thing. The blinky thing? Well, the Droid syncs up with Facebook and Google/gmail and pretty much any other thing you want to sync it up to. So whenever I get a new email (I get a lot of email) the Droid goes “BLLOICK!” and the little green light starts blinking.

*blink*

*blink*

*blink*

*HELLO I ARE BLINKING*

*blink*

Now, I have given Freddie no small amount of shit over the fact that when his BlackBerry dings he lunges for it to check his messages or whatever. I hate this. Mostly because he does it while driving. Or during dinner. Or in the middle of a conversation with me. He said “you don’t understand!”

I do now.

*blink*

*blink*

*O HAI, ARE BLINKING HERE*

*blink*

*blink*

*blink*

*lunge.*

Jillian has been practicing making letters for the past couple of days. She likes to make P for Piper, and will happily draw the letter P for hours and hours. I asked her to make a J for Jillian and was informed “no, Mama. I will learn that at school.”

Okay, then.

Apparently, school is too far off in the future so she decided to draw a J for me today. In fact, she made five of them. I said “Jilly, those are really good! You’re getting good at making letters!”

She said “I know. I’m amazing at this.”

I don’t even know if anyone even reads this stupid thing anymore. I don’t really care.

I have nothing to say. That’s sort of a good thing, since I tend to do my best writing when I’m agitated about something. Lately, though… life has been pretty fucking good. My family is fantastic, especially my amazing kid. I don’t have in-laws to bother me anymore, so that deep, deep well of angry material has dried up. My house is close to being done. Though there may be some angsty things to write about as I argue with Freddie about decorating and furniture placement and whatnot. High-class problems, man.

But… yeah. Things are going pretty well for me. Everyone’s happy and healthy, and I couldn’t ask for anything more.

Makes for a shitty blog, though.

For me personally, I am focused on losing weight. I have a goal in mind and a strategy and all that fun shit. I’ve been going to the gym 4 times a week or more for the last month. At first it was really the only place we could go to get out of the house while they did noisy, dusty things to it, but then it became a habit and well, yay for that. I have lost 14 pounds already and I only have EIGHTY to go before I reach my ultmate goal.

Sounds crazy, right?

Well, things got a little out of control, you see. Winter happened, which is never a good thing. Then I got injured, which sucked. THEN I had to move out of the house for seven weeks, which meant a lot of crap food/restaurants and then some unexpected stress happened, and blah dee blah, and here we are. Our kitchen was out of commission for almost three months, but we’ve had it back for two weeks now and things are improving, eating-wise.

I was running a bit at first, but I think my legs are upset about that. I had a stress fracture in my left leg that bothered me for awhile, so I let it heal and then started up again. Still have some pain there so I had to switch to the elliptical trainer. I think my legs are just not equipped to deal with the size of the body I have on them. When I get this next 20 pounds off, I’ll try the running thing again.

In the meantime, I am taking a strength-training class and thinking really hard about getting a new bike. We’re getting Jillian a bike for her birthday, so maybe I’ll get one too and we can all ride together.

Already seeing some progress, which is encouraging. Still have a long way to go, though.

HOME! Staying!

The inconvenience factor is still rather high, and we are compounding that by having the dog home with us, but there is MUCH to be said for sleeping in one’s own bed, however dusty and smelly it might be.

The floor is done and it looks great. I’m sure that over time the color variations between the sections will even out, but compared to what it was, it’s amazing now. That was the last really big messy thing to get done. Outside of the entryway tile and the upstairs carpet, it’s all relatively small projects from here on out.

Today’s plans include a trip to the gym, then a detour to Babies R Us for a baby gate. We gave ours away last year but we’ll need one for a little while so Piper doesn’t try to eat the builders and/or escape. We also need a series of plastic storage bins which will help me wrest some kind of temporary order from this chaotic mess I’m facing. I’m not even close to being what one would call a conscientious housekeeper, but we are dealing with a level of filth that makes that first bathroom scene in Trainspotting look like surgery prep.

Hi blog! Where have I been? Why do all my posts start like this?

1. We returned to New Jersey just before Memorial Day. Spent that weekend down the shore with friends, then Jillian and I decamped to Baltimore for a couple of days. THEN we came back to NJ to house-sit, but now we are home. It’s not quite livable yet, but it’s getting there.

2. The drywall in the house is mostly done. They hope to have it done by the end of this week, at which time they will start installing the floor where the laminate used to be AND THEN they’ll sand/stain/polyurethane the whole of the front room.

3. Phish @ Blossom this weekend!

4. That’s all for now - I didn’t really have anything to say, I just needed to check that my site was back up and running after I neglected to pay my hosting bill.

1. It’s past midnight. I have been awake past midnight almost every night for the past month.

2. The reason for this is because I am back in my parents’ house and have been arguing with my father. Just like old times. Which equals stress, and stress equals insomnia. This explains the first 20 years of my life. I thought I’d gotten it all figured out, what with the relaxation techniques and the rage-displacement techniques and blahdeeblah, but ohhhhhhhh no. I never could sleep in this house, and perhaps I never will.

3. Rage-displacement = painting the house. I scrubbed the walls in the living room and painted them. FOUR TIMES. 2 coats of primer, 2 coats of color. Then I did the foyer. THEN I got down on my hands and my bony knees and scrubbed the everloving fuck out of the floor in there. NOW I am painting the kitchen. This involves stripping the paint off of the door (twice, because I fucked it up the first time), stripping the windowsills and doorway trim, moving the [new!!] fridge so I could bust up the last bit of the carpet (in the kitchen, yeah) where the fridge goes. The kitchen is almost done. I even painted INSIDE THE CABINETS.

4. I really really do not want to do the stairwell, but I have a feeling that’s next. If I’m here much longer, I’m going to need another project, and that stairwell got painted in 1942 when this house was built and I think that’s the last time it was done. Lead paint for everyone!

5. If I end up painting the stairwell, I’m going to do it in a very very deep shade of blood-red. The living room is done in lovely southwestern pinky-oranges and the kitchen is YELLOW! and GREEN! (seriously, we are talking about very bright colors here). So… red. Yeah.

6. If I didn’t have music, I would probably die. I don’t know how I would survive this place without my iPod.

7. Books, too. I’ve read about 14 books in the four weeks I’ve been here.

8. The upside to all this painting is that I’ve lost some weight. The last time I checked, it was 15 pounds, which is astounding to me, because I’ve been eating like shit and drinking a lot of beer. So… yeah. Wondering about that, because painting is hard work, sure, but it’s not THAT strenuous.

9. Did I mention I haven’t been sleeping?

10. I really really want to go home.