Random Calculations and Scraps of News

1) We rebooked our tickets for Hawaii (see post four or so back.) After losing our first tickets to ATA's bankruptcy, I was concerned our only option would be to fly out of Reno on crappy, expensive, red-eye flights, but I was totally wrong. We are flying out of SAN FRANCISCO on crappy, expensive, red-eye flights. That's eight hours in the car, which will probably become twelve, with the Screaming Bean screaming. Moreover, we will be taking these crappy flights IF and ONLY IF my parents can rebook their tickets too. They found out today that Southwest--who heroically promised they would rebook their customers in the wake of ATA's bankruptcy but have since realized the dangers of overcommitting oneself--is leaving them high and dry. Or low and nowhere near the ocean, if you will. If they don't go, we can't--they were going to let us crash with them in their condo, and there is no way we can afford our own. Is this trip beginning to seem cursed?

2) Squidge Bean is really beginning to get her hand-eye(-bowel) coordination down. She is starting to reach out and feel our faces, which is the cutest thing. This morning we were playing and she had one hand on either side of my chin so deliberately and was looking in my eyes and it was so endearing and then...she let one rip, long and loud.

3) For some reason, in the last hour or so of my functional grammar seminar (sounds mind-numbingly boring but is actually only mind-numbingly hard and rather fun--eg we often examine data sets that allow us to conclude that Bill O'Reilly is completely incoherent, while Sarah Vowell is brilliant. Rah rah liberal education!) I often get spacey and find myself strangely drawn to mathematical calculations. I usually play with our budget, but that gets depressing, so today I changed it up. My little number doodles revealed that Squidge is 85 days old today. This means I have fed her somewhere around 765 times, using a lowball estimate of 9 feedings a day (I am still waiting for the glorious time when she will habitually go more than two hours between feedings). Because I feed her for approximately 30 minutes a time, that means I have spent approximately 22,950 minutes feeding her in the last twelve weeks. That's 382 hours. That's almost 16 days. That's over 2 weeks, out of the last 12, that I have spent with a cute little parasite attached to my boobs...

4) ...Which apparently are creatures of the night. After twelve weeks they still get ridiculously full and sore when I'm sleeping, even if it's only been a couple of hours since the Bean last ate. In contrast, during the day I'm often fighting to get them to produce. It is odd finding out that your boobs are decidedly noctural while you are a day owl. Oh, and that you can smell like milk All. The. Time, even when you've just showered.

5) Apparently iPhones are amphibious: my mom dropped hers in the toilet today and it survived. Technology never ceases to amaze me.

The White of the Orange: Confessions of a Weird Eater

I had another one of those stress days, where the weight of everything I have to do started pressing down on me, where the semester's end and THREE 25-page, publication-quality-or-very-near-to-it papers loom...But. I don't want to talk about that. I want to talk instead about what I will nickname, affectionately, WFT's...Weird Food Things.

I am inspired to talk about WTFs because I took the Squidge Bean over to my parents' house today so I could have my arms free to do some homework for awhile, and also so I could give my mom a break from trekking up here. When I walked in, there was a gigantic bag (I'm talking 20 pounds) of birdseed sitting open by my dad's armchair. Now, the presence of this bag was nothing unusual--he and my mom enjoy watching the birds in their yard, and my dad makes these birdseed cake things to hang from the trees. What was unusual was the location. In a flash, I turned to my mom and asked, "Has Dad been EATING that?" She burst out laughing and said yes, he likes raw seeds, and how on earth did I suspect?

Well, I suspected because my Dad is prone to WTFs. He is famous for eating the tails from tail-on shrimp--no, not the meaty part, the silicate shell part that normal people tug free and abandon on the rim of their plates. When we go to Thai food, he will swipe those suckers off your plate and pop them into his mouth like peanuts. Nothing really deters him in the way of normal food cleanliness or appropriateness (my husband shares this flaw. He claims old food is still edible even when it has practically started its own hair band in the cheese drawer. When we were traveling in Thailand, he once ate a grub). My dad is an avid red meat eater and recently, to make a point (to me of course, because I got aggravated that he was dripping raw meat juice on the cutting board where I was chopping veggies for a salad) he carved off a chunk of raw tri-tip and chowed it down. Raw. Fresh from the plastic.

Now, I have no WFT's with meat. I'm a white-meat-and-fish-only girl since 1997, when the revolting quality of college dorm cafeteria meat finally iced the cake of years and years where rare meat from animals whose dead heads hung on the wall was my only dinner option. But I do have my share of other oddities. I am a rather nutty eater of fruit. I scrape the white of the orange out with my teeth, and even stranger, I like to eat the skin off of orange seeds. Indeed, I enjoy rinds in general. And the skin of seeds in general. Yes, it's weird. That's why I call them WTFs.

I also confess a fetish for spoon foods. Particularly custard-y varieties of spoon foods like, well, custard, and tapioca, and flan, and rice pudding. In fact I get aggravated when people serve a spoon-friendly dish (like hot brownies topped with ice cream) with a fork. People, come on. It is just unfair to let all of that goodness escape through the tines. Forks are SO not pleasurable to eat with.

And, at the risk of sounding eating-disorder-esque, I can put away a whole bag of candy like there's no tomorrow. Lately I have a particular adoration for Twizzlers. Did anyone get that forward that's going around about how margarine is only one molecule away from plastic? Well, my husband says Twizzlers are probably ZERO molecules away. Honestly, they taste totally synthetic. When I consider them objectively, I don't even actually like them. But for some reason they call me and I buy them all the time and hide them in the pocket behind the driver's seat of the Rav and eat them unmercifully.

There are more...many more...but I can't think of them right now. So...anyone else want to confess a WFT?

The Video Camera is not a Toy

Okay, don't look at this if you have anything against baby doody. But I had to post it just because I crack myself up in this video. (Cracking oneself up is a genetic trait from my mom's side of the family!)


green eggs and... from Mario Colombini on Vimeo.

Apparently, I'm totally going to be one of those parents that embarrass their children. I acknowledge that posting this video way worse than showing Scarlett's first boyfriend a picture of her naked in the bathtub with chicken pox, which is about the worst my parents ever did to me! Maybe I'll "forget" to tell her about this when she's older.

How to Get Smiled at by Strangers, for Dummies

When I was pregnant, I got my fair share of attention from strangers, like most pregnant women (even if at the end, because I never got that big, I kind of felt like I was getting less attention than I deserved!) When I would go to the grocery store or the bank or what have you, strangers would often smile at me and ask me when I was due, what I was having, if it was my first, etc. The one place this rarely happened was a place I mildly hate to shop but do anyway because, well, it's cheap: WalMart. Fat, cranky, trundling pregnant women are no rarity there--in fact they seem to be a large percentage of the shopping population (the shopulation?)--and when I was one of them, I joined the other preggies in fatly, crankily, trundling around, ignoring each other.

Now, though, I've apparently I've found the formula for getting smiled at by EVERY person shopping at WalMart: wearing Miss Scarlett, facing forward, in her Baby Bjorn. I did this yesterday because she's generally just intolerable in her carseat these days, a total pill who sticks out her bottom lip petulantly and squalls at the sheer injustice of being safely strapped into anything. She likes the Bjorn much better because she can observe everything and get noticed by everyone. And man, did she. All of a sudden, I noticed that almost everyone I passed smiled at us. Old ladies squeezed her toes and called her a dear (and one very old man called her a boy, but we won't worry about that.) People stopped me in the vegetable aisle to ask how old she was. Other new moms gave me conspiratorial smiles and how-cuted her, obliging me to how-cute their offspring reciprocally. I started to feel like I was in a Mentos commercial, or one for deodorant, or something.

At the risk of sounding like a misanthrope or cynic, I'm not actually sure I liked this experience. Unless I'm in a gregarious mood, I usually enjoy doing my shopping in my own world. And as great as it is to hear Squidge complimented, I'm not used to having to exercise my cheeks so much with all those conspiratorial little smiles when I'd rather be silently pondering dog biscuit brands. Plus, it's rather taxing to answer "thank you so much" when people say how cute she is, as opposed to "I know, isn't she?" which is the answer that comes to mind. (This is not 100% vain/proud mother. This is only 75% vain/proud mother and 25% thinking it's nothing I did to make her cute, she's just cute on her own, and she's a real little person, so feels more natural to agree with compliments than to accept them.)

Anyway, I'm guessing my days of antisocial shopping are over, at least until Miss Scarlett's old enough to join in the "Mommy I want THAT" chorus that is sure to turn all those what a cute baby grins into what a spoiled little BRAT! glares. Won't that be heaven?

Mayday: Flight To Good Times, Going Down

I woke up to the lovely news this morning that ATA airlines was throwing in the (little lemon-scented wipie) towel, filing for bankruptcy, and canceling all future flights with no regard or recourse for the many poor consumers who, innocently, began their day believing the good money they paid for tickets to Maui guaranteed that they would actually get to go to Maui. Now, normally the financial foibles of airlines concern me not a whit (okay, with the exception of the time that Reno Air went down. Reno Air had great prices, was hubbed in my own sweet hometown, didn't skimp on the snacks, and had stand-up comedians for pilots. Flying them was fun, cheap, convenient so of course they went out of business) but I happen to have vested interest in ATA. $1365 dollars of vested interest, to be specific.

Yes, I was one of those innocent consumers; I've been rudely awakened from dreams of papayas, pina coladas, and (pictures of) six-month Squidge in an adorable baby bikini, and dammit, I'm cranky now. Okay, make that downright pissed. Mario and I were looking forward to mid-July and my cousin's wedding in Maui, even though it was a difficult decision to go in the first place. On one hand, it was a great opportunity for a family vacation, Squidge's first...on the other, we are financially struggling, and common sense would dictate that extravagant vacations wait until that's no longer the case. But it meant a lot to my cousin, so we finally said good-bye to some precious savings and made the reservations. Apparently it was just our luck to have the Expedia roulette wheel land on the airline with the financial management skills of a plate of mahi mahi.

At least I paid with my credit card (ha ha, the pay-later mentality validated!) and Wells Fargo can refund me (hopefully) by pulling the money back from Expedia, who would have to have a valid reason to protest this retraction--and ATA's Chapter 7 should keep them quiet. But a preliminary glance at what's available now is pretty depressing. Tickets are hundreds more for crappy, too-early and red-eye flights (with a six-month-old? Don't think so.)

As sorry as I'm feeling for myself, I'm feeling more sorry for my cousin, dealing with all these de-flighted relatives. We aren't the only wedding guests who are going to have to consider stowing away on a pineapple freighter if we want to see her say "I do."

Poop.

Load Gun, Shoot Foot

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/2008/03/04/81-graduate-school/

Oh god.

Falling into Disrepair

Last night in my Writing Across the Curriculum seminar (very exciting, yes) I truly realized the state of neglect I have let my body fall into. I was, as usual, in heated discussion about something or other (the ethnography of thought, anyone?) when I realized I had an itch on my right elbow. I unthinkingly reached my hand up my sleeve to give it a good scratchy-scratchy, when I suddenly realized how my skin felt.

Desert. Cracked earth. I'm talking dragon scales, people. I took a peak at it when no one was looing, and shuddered in horror! I'm not just talking dry. I'm talking snake about to shed! And I suddenly realized how long it's been...ummm, since about the morning of January 15th (the day I went into labor, of course) since I actually took the time to rub lotion on my own body. Oh, I've rubbed it on Baby Squidge...but not on myself.

I have never actually done most of the things women do to keep themselves up. Think of all the possible maitenance--hair, eyebrows, fingernails, toenails, tanning, other skin treatments, waxing, shaving, plucking, working out, on and on...it makes me exhausted just pondering it. That kind of maitenance is a full-time job, and I usually have at least two of those already. I keep up with my hair these days--trim every six weeks and color every twelve weeks, because it gives me true please to have redder hair than nature gave me-- and that's about it. I miss exercise and am trying to do it when I can. But this is ridiculous. I hardly even look at myself these days, and most of the time I am in such a rush to get ready and STOP THE CRYING that I (here come confessions) rarely shave my legs, brush my teeth for too short a time, skip the floss WAY more often than I should, skimp on scrubbing in the shower...

In short, it's happening.

I'm letting myself go.

AUGGHHHHHHHHHHH!

But what can I really do about it? Last night when I came home I stole some of Squidge's Eucerin ointment and greased up the old elbows (yes, the left side was just as bad as the right.) My new-month resolution: to maintain human-looking skin, if nothing else!