Way-Overdue Post

Lots to catch up on. Feel free to skip sections of this as needed because I'm going to be rambling for a while. As far as I can tell, I have 9 different things to tell you about. So I'll begin with last Thursday.

1 - My Sequoia. I have a big honkin' SUV. It's a Toyota Sequoia and we've had it since December, 2001. I love this vehicle. It has almost 108K miles on it. It's the Mom-mobile. Anyway, last Wednesday, I loaded up a ton of stuff from our garage into the Sequoia to schlep up to Gwen's house for the garage sale Saturday. Stuff schlepped and unloaded, Sequoia is fine. Except the back window isn't rolling down. Not such a big deal. I've had trouble with it before - but it always resolved itself and the window always ended up working. But not last week.

So Thursday morning before I take Caleb to school and go uptown to Community Bible Study, I took all of our bags and a big box of stuff for CBS out to the Sequoia and loaded it into the back. No problem. Then I loaded the kids and noticed that Julie's face was messy. I went to the back to open the back door and get her diaper bag and...nothing. The door handle broke as I was trying to get in. Great. The window doesn't work either, so I have stuff back there I'm going to have to climb over seats to get out. Not so much of a big deal except for the big box of stuff. Lovely.

Our local handy-dandy shop (owned by church friends) can't fix it, so I made an appointment to take it to the dealership next Friday. Hopefully they will fix both handle and window and it won't cost me our entire tax rebate check.

2 - Garage Sale. I am disillusioned by garage sales. Let me just say that donating items and taking a tax write off is more profitable. Also, there's a certain segment of the population that thinks that they have the right to be able to buy my stuff for way cheaper than I'm willing to sell it and they get pushy and even angry when trying to negotiate. Makes me mad. But Steve had a very nice response for me when I called him after the garage sale to vent. He said, "But you got all this stuff out of our house. That's great!" Good man.

3 - A few nights ago I awoke at about 1 a.m. to crunching and other weird eating-type sounds. Turned on the light and discovered the cat having a midnight snack on the floor at the end of the bed. A mouse. Nearly decapitated because she decided to start with the neck. Nasty cat. But I'd rather have a half-eaten dead mouse in my house than a live mouse. Still, it was disgusting. My #1 preference is NO mouse, but I don't know that this is an option with Gray Cat in residence.

4 - I was sick on Monday. I got up at 5:30 a.m. to go running, as usual, and decided to go ahead and run. It was one of those mornings where I wasn't sure if I was really sick or not. I knew that if I went for a run, I'd find out soon enough how I felt. Sure enough, about 15 minutes into my 45 minute run, I felt yucky and walked along a shortcut to get home. Good thing, too, since I started feeling really sick about 4 houses away. I stayed home all day.

5 - After I got home Monday morning from my abbreviated run, I showered. Steve told me after I got out that Gray Cat brought in a live bird while I was cleaning up. He got it from her, it escaped, she caught it and killed it, then Steve took it away and put it in the trash. He was even nice enough to vacuum up the feathers before I got out. Stupid cat.

6 - Steve was at a meeting Monday night, and I was home with the kids. I put them all to bed, then heard a disturbing noise. The aforementioned Stupid Cat was throwing up on my living room carpet. She did this 4 times. So I'm not feeling well and I'm cleaning up cat vomit. Lovely. Stupid Cat. I told her, "That's why you're not allowed to eat these things you kill," but I don't think she was listening to me. I think she was watching some birds outside on the porch.

7 - I took a story I wrote for my writing course to the Los Alamos Writers' Group on Thursday night and read it for them. They liked it and gave me some suggestions for submission ideas. I'll keep you posted.

8 - Yesterday, I decided to walk the girls to the grocery store before picking up Caleb from his after school activities. Audrey wanted to ride her bike. She's rather good on it, but we got her some new training wheels since the ones she had were basically garbage. I'm pushing Julie in the stroller and keeping an eye on Audrey. All of a sudden I see that one training wheel is doing something weird because it's loose. I end up stopping every minute for the next 30 minutes and hand-tightening the loose training wheel. What a hassle! I finally got home and Steve fixed it in 30 seconds. But that was the most frustrating walk I've taken in quite a while.

9 - I learned today that I am 2 pounds from my weight before I got pregnant with Caleb. This is funny since I'm 2 pounds away from losing 50 pounds. Cool, huh?