Blast my pituitary gland!

...at least I think that's the one that controls when you're sleepy or not.

Let the record show that I have actually tried just going to bed to see if I'd fall asleep. It didn't work. Unfortunately, I just laid there like a slug thinking of every single unpleasant thing my brain could dredge up (i.e, house fires, paralysis, leprosy, being buried alive). I've made an executive decision, though... I'm going to get up early in the morning regardless of the time I do actually end up asleep tonight. I'm going to force my body out of the bed and I'm going to deny myself a nap at any point tomorrow, thereby making sure that I'm sleepy tomorrow night.

Anyway, I figured I could do something ANYTHING other than just laying there making myself crazy, so I decided to come back to the office and this is what I ended up doing. Sitting here jabbering on to a text box and listening to random music.

I followed this same pattern last night, didn't set an alarm, and ended up not waking up until 11. How this happened with a 6 month old in bed with me, I'll never know, but I wasn't happy about it. My alarm is already set for 8 AM. Not really early, I realize, but it will be an accomplishment for me.

I went and picked buttercups on my grandparents' farm this afternoon. I was going to just make a short trip of it and get them from "the bottom" (the low parts of the fields surrounding the branch), but I thought, "Now am I really going to do this without walking over to the old home place?" (the area where the old home place of my grandmother's people used to be, that is... it burned down in the 30s). I had borrowed my grandmother's old shoes, but I still didn't want to get them wet, so, I took 'em off, rolled up my jeans and waded across the branch. My great-grandmother probably rolled over in her grave. It was against everything she believed in to get your feet wet in March, no matter how warm it was. The water was chilly, but it felt good. I walked barefoot through the pasture the rest of the way back to the house... and that felt good, too.

It had been too darn long.

You know how in movies, people have these flashbacks of sorts where they look at something and see something or someone who's not there or someone who used to be there maybe. Think, Cold Case at the end of every show where the main blonde chick pictures whoever she's allowed to R.I.P. Anyhow, I had that sort of sensation looking out across the field where the old home place used to be. Not as in I saw the house and people who occupied it or anything, but I could imagine it... as well as my great-grandmother and her sister as children standing next to the porch with their dog like in that picture I love so much. It was just a perfect day. The light was just right...

Why don't people sing like this guy anymore? It makes me sad...

A recent back-and-forth on Facebook made me stop and ponder something... what makes a person "country?" Or so it was termed in the back-and-forth. I have to say there isn't a good answer to the question, unfortunately. I remember when I was in grade school going to a rodeo with a few friends. Some of the older girls in the group went totally out of their way to dress for the occasion... I mean, they actually borrowed people's Wranglers, Ropers, and belt buckles... and cowboy hats, too, it seems now that I think about it. So many people that I can think of even still seem to think that their country-ness (or really any other label) is determined by what they wear, or what they drive, or what they do...

That just seems silly to me since clothes can tear or burn or rot, trucks and tractors can go kaput, and a person could (for whatever reason) not be able to do the things they've always done and defined themselves by.

For me, I'm satisfied just being who I am with no labels and without trying to fit under someone else's heading or subheading. I do what I do and am what I am based on nothing more than the fact that I like what I like (with the obvious exception of some things that I do being required of me by my Lord, which I try to do whether I like them or not).

Ahh... it's 1:33 in the AM. My crazy body...

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OUT OF THE CLOSET!

Made ya look... haha.

No really, my maternity clothes are OUT OF THE CLOSET! Completely. Well, ok... there's one pair of fat pants still in there because I forgot about them until I had totally taped up the box and I didn't want to re-do it, so I just put them waaaaay back in the catacombs so I'll never see them (and probably won't remember them the next time I need them, but oh well).

So, yeah... I also cleaned out all the stuff I never wear anymore and am sick of looking at. Aaaannnnd... you should see my sock drawer. I also finally went through my terrifying underwear drawer and threw away all the hooker-looking things I wore in high school (had I any idea of the trashiness of which I was capable back then? Not the first clue, unfortunately...).

My little man was a complete and total angel the whole time I was doing this, but I kept him well entertained...

That pretty much sums up my productivity for the day... I'm so behind on laundry it's not even funny.

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Finished

So I finished reading my book...














...and I have to say that I liked it overall. There was quite a bit of it that I disagreed with (as you might have noticed by my earlier post), but there was quite a bit of it that really spoke to me, to coin a stupid, cliche little phrase. Besides that, I love LOVE the way this woman writes. I went and checked out another book that she wrote called The Last American Man, which is the biography of a man named Eustace Conway. Never heard of him. But I brought it home anyway hoping that it would at least be written in the same manner. We'll see.

Anyway, in the end, I guess you could say I liked Eat, Pray, Love in the same way that I like a field of flowers. The whole thing is beautiful and definitely fun to look at. Some of the flowers are nice to look at up close, but there are only a handful I'd pick and bring home with me. Was that maybe a little too oblique? Probably...

Anyway, so I brought that one book home with me from the library and a few others... an Anne Lamott book, as well as a couple of sewing books (since some schlepp checked out every last crochet book before I could get to them). The book I got that I'm reading now, though, is Into the Wild (by Jon Krakauer, whose name reminds me of the word sauerkraut), which I'd been interested in reading for a while.

Meanwhile, it's my hubby's b-day today! Happy birthday, Dave-o!










(that is a from-scratch pound cake, thank you very much, made by yours truly)

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Latest Creation

You guessed it... another scarf. Shocker, right?































I wasn't thrilled with the finished product, but it's an accomplishment regardless, right? It's basically 3 rows of double crochet rounded once with shell stitches. If anybody's interested in the pattern, I can post it, but it's in a book that I bought so I don't know if it's technically legal to include it...

The book is...













...and it's pretty much amazing! (p.s. I have no idea why my font insists on changing, but I'm just gonna go with it). But yes, as far as I'm concerned, Debbie Stoller is a genius. My husband insists that I put the book away when his parents come over and really, I guess I could remove the cover, but that would take all the fun out of it now wouldn't it?

I also just bought its sister (and the original Stitch 'n' Bitch) book...












Which also seems to be a great book with all the charms of the crochet guide... it's just that, sadly, I am a retarded knitter (so far). I keep trying and am beginning to feel like that cock-eyed bird who repeatedly flies into the kitchen window regardless of curtains, tin foil, and even the occasional doily. Ugh. I really want to like to knit... really. But every time I try to hold needles in BOTH hands, I just want to use them to gouge out my eyes or something equally violent. I'm hoping that Miss Debbie will help me love it eventually... I SHANT GIVE UP!

That's all folks :-)

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Spain!

So my friend April went to Spain over the past weekend (jet setter that she is) and brought me back this cool stuff!


A beautiful pitcher to add to my collection, so that when people are admiring all of them (which happens really often, as you can imagine) I can say, "Hey! That one's from Spain!"










And this amazing print of some Gaudi catherdral... which I plan to mat and frame and hang in our bedroom.

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On a completely different and unrelated topic (and forgive the font switch... I'm tired of messing with the HTML formatter which rudely changes all your settings every time you blink)... I am currently reading _Eat Pray Love_, by Elizabeth Gilbert and find it maddening and fascinating all at the same time. In a nutshell, it's a chronicle of this woman's search for the ability to be constantly "in tune" with God, but without ever denying herself any wordly pleasure. Yeah... I find it really hard to read anything without writing all over it and making notes in the margins, so when she implored a Balinese medicine man to help her learn "how to live in this world and enjoy its delights, but also devote myself to God," my marginal response was, "NOT POSSIBLE, lady..."

Anyway, here are more of my thoughts on why I simultaneously love and hate this book.

The "eat" part of her journey is spent in (where else?) Italy, where her main goal is to learn the art of pursuing pleasure.

I LOVE how she describes the food:
(speaking of a place in Naples, the Pizzeria de Michele, which supposedly has the best pizza in the world) "They have only two varieties of pizza here -- regular and extra cheese."

And as if that right there wasn't enough to make me want to move there indefinitely...:

"[The crust is] soft and chewy and yielding, but incredibly thin. I always thought we only had two choices in our lives when it came to pizza crust--thin and crispy, or thick and doughy. How was I to have known there could be a crust in this world that was thin and doughy? Holy of holies! Thin, doughy, strong, gummy, yummy, chewy, salty pizza paradise. On top, there is a sweet tomato sauce that foams up all bubbly and creamy when it melts the fresh buffalo mozzeralla, and the one sprig of basil in the middle of the whole deal somehow infuses the entire pizza with herbal radiance, much the same way one shimmering movie star in the middle of a party brings a contact high of glamour to everyone around her. It's technically impossible to eat this thing, of course. You try to take a bite off your slice and the gummy crust folks, and the hot cheese runs away like topsoil in a landslide, makes a mess of you and your surroundings, but just deal with it."

Now I'm hungry.

On the flip side, though...

I don't go for all the religion/spiritualism = hocus pocus crap. I don't like the whole "I pray to the Divinity and I am the prayer and I am the Divinity" hoo-hocky. It just doesn't work for me. I like the thought of dwelling in God and God dwelling in me, but it doesn't make much sense to me to think that God and I are one being as in "the drop dwells in the ocean but the ocean also dwells in the drop" sort of thing. The way she puts it all just makes it seem sort of like, I couldn't exist without God, but God couldn't exist without me either.... and that just... ugh... sends chills up and down my spine. I guess I kind of see God as, of course, my creator and kind of like my boss (an ultimately loving boss, thankfully) who blesses me to let me do some things for Him and in His name, but Who I also know could accomplish it all without me or anybody else's help, ya know? I dunno... this got a whole lot deeper than I had intended.

I did find this interesting concept, though, which is still sort of in the spiritual line of thought, but more pertaining to temporal relationships:

She had been talking to a friend she met at the Ashram in India about how she believed that an ex-boyfriend of hers had been her soulmate and she's lost him and was now totally at a loss... and here's what her friend said (he calls her Groceries and her ex-guy's name is David):

"He probably was. Your problem is you don't understand what that word means. People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that's holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave. And thank God for it. Your problem is, you just can't let this one go. It's over Groceries. "

His whole point was that the point of a "soulmate" (er... somebody you want to call a soulmate but didn't manage to end up with) is to break down some of your personal walls and show you how capable you are of loving and being loved.

I could expound more, but this is already long and ridiculous and I've gotta get ready to go to a proofreading party, so that's all for now...

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