the house always has the upper hand

Every year the beach house has a little "surprise" for us. They are never good, these little surprises. Always bad. Bad, bad, bad.

Our first visit of the spring or summer always causes me a lot of stress because I don't cope well with surprises, especially ones dreamed up for me by inanimate, expensive possessions. I dread going to the house, all the while longing to see it again because this house is relaxing and comfortable and fun. Except for that annual first visit.

I forced myself to get down to the house for a weekend before Memorial Day weekend so that our holiday would not be spent without a fridge or a toilet or water, you know, some modern convenience necessary to our comfort and well being. When we got to the house all seemed well. Of course the outside shower had its yearly crack, but we had already dealt with that by paying the township $150 to turn off our water at the street and then $150 to turn our water back on at the street. Everything else was spiffy until I got to my bedroom and found one of the windows on the floor. How long it had been like that is anyone's guess, but the room did not smell of mildew and the house had not been ransacked so K. taped the window into the frame with an appalling amount of duct tape and we went about our business. We felt lucky, and Memorial Day weekend was fabulous for us and the kids.

This weekend the house greeted us with a large-ish puddle by the front door. Puddles do not generally send me screaming into the night, so I fretted not. Then K. looked under the house and realized that the crawl space was filled with water. A quick check with the neighbor suggested that it had been raining quite a bit and many neighbors' crawl spaces were filled with gallons of water and we were probably worrying unnecessarily. There was the fact that the puddle by the front door was bubbling, and that did strike both K. and I as rather ominous. Rain-produced puddles generally do not bubble. Despite the reassurances of our sweet neighbor I put my foot down and insisted that K. call the plumber.

Today we've been without water for hours as a good friend makes a huge muddy mess of the front yard while attempting to find the leak in the pipe that we paid a healthy sum to have replaced just 2 or 3 years ago. There's no laundry, no dish washing, no working on dinner, no showers for our muddy boys, no toilet, no water. Just us in this house that loves and hates us, waiting around for things to be resolved or not, grinning to ourselves to think that we were hopeful that the outside shower would be fixed today, and trying to decide what gift might appease the house this year. I'm guessing landscaping in the front or new shutters. K. thinks siding or new windows are the ticket. The house will be getting none of these things this year of all years of course, but perhaps if we promise something really, really good the house will let us be. At least until Spring 2010.

we're expecting...10-ish

Via email

K+A:
We came home the other day and found a sea turtle in the front yard. She was trying to dig a hole to lay eggs but the groung was too hard. She went across to L.+B.'s and didn't like that spot either. She ended up in your yard and found the ground softer and dug a fairly deep hole. She laid maybe 10 eggs and then covered up the hole and promptly headed back to the lagoon. We put a bucket with rocks on it on the street side of the hole. R. contacted the "sea turtle people" at Stockton who said that it wasn't a good idea to try and move the eggs but that they should be fine unless maybe you should drive directly over the nest, depending on how deep the eggs are. We'll leave the bucket until you come down the next time so you know where the nest is. I'm thinking maybe a few rocks in a small circle surrounding the nest so your can park your cars over it. Or maybe you can come up with a better idea.

W.

BTW- the gestation period in 45 to 75 days depending on weather conditions.

swimming

For 29 years I believed that I was a competent if not downright good swimmer. I based this belief on the following:

1. I have not yet drowned. It's been years since I have flopped on the beach, heart racing and adrenaline pumping, panting and thankful to feel terra firma under my feet.


2. I love to swim in the ocean, paddling around in water which is over my head and crashing around in big waves with abandon.


3. I went to summer camp for 8 years and the people there told me I knew how to swim.


4. I can cruise up and down the lagoon, even if I do need to switch to a new stroke every so often. (I tend to favor back and side.)


5. See #1 above.

As it turns out, even with the incontrovertible evidence I've provided above, I was wrong. So, so wrong.

I am not a good swimmer. I am not an adequate swimmer. In fact I am a very, very bad swimmer. Not only was this realization disturbing to me on many personal levels but it is also a fairly undesirable quality when one thinks that one might want to become a triathlete.

And to top it off, not only am I a very, very bad swimmer but I am also a "sinker". I have never been able to float. At summer camp when called upon to float on my back I would position myself on my back and end up straight up and down, my head bobbing in the water like a little sort-of-blond-if-you-squint buoy, my feet scraping the bottom. Floating is not my strong suit and it never has been, and this has had little to no impact on my life since my final year at summer camp when my mom signed me up without asking first and I endured a week as horrific as a 13-year-old can make it. But floating does pop right back up to the top of the food chain when one is attempting to learn to swim. Buoyancy is your friend with respect to swimming. And I sure hope it's friends with you because it has always snubbed me rather nastily, totally without provocation I might add.

A non-swimming sinker. That's me. And I need to be able to swim in 7 weeks.

That is how I found myself sitting in my bathing suit at the edge of a pool hoping that the water wasn't too cold and keeping a wary eye on the 11 others sitting with me. (It wasn't. It was blissfully warm.) A weekend swimming workshop complete with underwater video of yours truly churning through the water as if her life depended on it.

I'd have to say that it's rather odd to sit around in your bathing suit with absolute strangers having strained conversations about stroke rates and body positioning. I know people sit around in their suits at the beach every day but there are some clear differences: you're outside, you can hide under your towel whenever you want, you don't have to make strained conversation, and there aren't any underwater video cameras. I've thought about this a lot since last weekend and I've decided this would make a good litmus test for potential friends: invite the new couple to your house for an all-day barbeque and let them know that it will be a bathing suit bbq. No fussy towels, no designer cover-ups—just you and your potential new friends in their swimsuits. There is no hidden innuendo in this either. It's just that sitting around for hours and hours in your bathing suit interacting with people you don't know very would might serve to strip away some of the artifice rather quickly because there's nowhere to hide and most everything you've got it all out there in the open. In a good way, of course.

I personally managed to sit around in my swimsuit with my new swim buddies (2 women, 9 men) for 2 consecutive 8-hour sessions without permanent psychological damage. I even learned something. Swimming is hard. There are about 17 things you need to think about with every stroke and you must think about them all simultaneously and you must actually move your body and do the stroke that you are remembering so carefully and you must maneuver your body through the water in some convincing fashion while not ending up on the bottom of the pool and you must remember to breathe whilst remembering your other points. Oh, and only breathe when your nose and mouth are bathed in oxygen, otherwise your stroke gets all messed up while you cough and spit.

I am sad to say that I did not learn to swim last weekend. I learned all of the things I must do to learn to swim and I practiced them each individually so that when I returned home I could begin doing the hours and hours of drilling required to learn to swim. So officially I am not yet a swimmer, even though the 3 instructors (who were very good) stated unequivocally at the end of the session that they were quite sure that I and the other 5 or 6 budding triathletes at the workshop with me could definitely swim the 800M required in our respective sprint triathlons. Why they said it I have no idea. I am still not a swimmer, and I actually do think that it takes a swimmer to swim 800M (approx. 1/2 mile) in an unfamiliar river in a melee of people, some of whom may at any given moment be kicking you in the head.

I am hopeful that I can claw my way to adequate swimmer in the next 7 weeks. I'll let you know right after I track down those summer camp swim teachers.

TMI:
The new-ish swimming method that is popular with many beginning triathletes (and swimmers in general) is called Total Immersion. It's popular because it emphasizes relaxed swimming (I can attest that it is very relaxing) and the relaxing nature allows you, in time, to swim farther than you thought possible without exhausting yourself. So far I am only "swimming" 25M at a time so I cannot attest to the whole distance thing, but I must believe it on some level or I wouldn't have taken the workshop.

Z.: still cute, still not eating

Z. finished her first year of preschool today. It was hard for her and she never really settled in to school in the way I would want for her, but she loved her teachers and made some "friends" and tolerated a lot of it very well. I'm proud of her for sticking with it and doing something that was so scary and difficult for her.

For me it was a school year full of rising hopes and dashed hopes, my own mini amusement park ride throwing me vomit-inducing loops when I least expected them. I have had days where I've thought, "She really is going to do this. In another 5 years or so she will be virtually indistinguishable from the other kids. And maybe she will even go to college." And I've had a marginally lower amount of days where I've thought, "School is going to be painful and sad all the way through, and when we are finished I have no confidence at all that she will ever live apart from us." Z. is still pretty much a mystery, even to me.

Her teachers and therapists were fabulous, giving us reports of increased comfort, participation, and cognition. I would listen to them and feel happy that Z. was doing so well. Then I would peek through the window when I went to pick her up and watch her standing and staring, lost in her own little world, struggling with her backpack and jacket, shut down and unable to function. Each time I would feel a little stab of guilt and sadness. And I would wonder exactly how bad things were those first days if this was worthy of glowing progress reports.

To my amusement and dismay she became and stayed what I like to call the school's mini mascot. Everyone (and I mean everyone) knows who Z. is. At her closing program one of the moms said to me, "My second grader loves Z.! She is thrilled whenever she sees her." I had a moment of wondering why on earth her second grader had the faintest clue who Z. was and then sighed to myself because I knew why. For now I have chosen to accept and even enjoy the minor celebrity that being Z.'s mom brings. Everyone grins at us. They wave. People want to talk to Z. and tell me how sweet she is. It's uncomfortable and it's fine too, as long as they treat her with respect and don't try to pet her.

This is a crazy old weird rambling mishmash of Z. factoids which happens to be fairly representative of my feelings at the end of this school year. It was a good year and a bad year, and long year and a short year, a happy year and a sad year. In other words a year walking hand in hand with my special girl.

triathlon training is all about not wearing underwear

So yes, I'm training for a sprint triathlon. Some of you are thinking one of those insane Ironman things like on tv? and although I wish that were the case, no. Not quite. In the race I registered for you swim a 1/2 mile, bike 14 miles, and then run a 5K (3.1 miles). [In an Ironman you swim 2 miles, bike 112 miles, and then run a full marathon (26.2 miles). I would love to train for and do an Ironman, but that is something you work up to, and I think working up to that will take me at least 7 years. When I'm about to turn 50 we'll talk.] My piddly little sprint race is August 2. Feel free to mark it on your calendars.

Last year when I had my little melanoma scare/wake-up call at the beginning of the summer something fundamentally shifted inside me. The shift was pretty immediate, and I'm still feeling the fallout. One of the things that happened was that I decided that if I was going to fight cancer at some point in my life (which feels likely) I wanted to start from the healthiest place I could. I started exercising. Around the same time I went and watched my good friend PrettyDecoratorGirl (aka T.) race in a sprint triathlon. I was enamored. Immediately.

I wanted to race in a triathlon too (because it looked like fun and it sounded hard) but I've got the three kids and I was in no shape to even contemplate a race like that. (Although those in the know online say that most people could finish a sprint triathlon with little or no training. I tend to disagree, but perhaps they are right. I suppose if you could swim the half mile without drowning the rest would definitely be downhill.) So I told her I would do it with her in 2010 and I just kept my head down and got on the elliptical machine as much as I could.

As I mentioned K. and I had that little horribly stressful earthshaking economic downturn of our own and one of the results was that beginning this past April K. began to work at home most of the time. K. working at home meant that I had the time to train and after a ridiculous amount of whiny indecision on my part I decided to just train for the darn thing this year even though I didn't really have enough time to get myself in the kind of shape I wanted to be in when I raced it. And here I am, 8 weeks out, pretty panicked and working out 6 days per week.

Jumping into a new world is always interesting. There is terminology you don't understand, rules you have no idea even exist, and people who are dedicating their lives to something you didn't have one single clue about just days ago. Life is so fascinating, isn't it? It is not easy for me to feel stupid for months at a time, but then again how do you learn something new if you're not willing to look like an idiotic loser from time to time? In the spirit of the thing I walk more than I run in my tricked out running gear, I've almost fallen off my bike more times than I can count, I haven't even begun swimming yet, and I am such a poser on my expensive bike and wearing the million little exercise gadgets that K. has thoughtfully provided me with. Jumping in also involves reading books, getting on the internets, and of course training.

The training has been interesting. I've learned so much already, and it's just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Much to my surprise I've become one of those people in the goofy bike shorts and funny bike shoes. I'm about to take a swimming class. I already have a bum knee and a sore Achilles tendon. And I'll let you in on a little secret: triathletes hardly ever wear underwear. Of course there isn't underwear when you've got your bathing suit on. Running shorts these days come with a little panel sewn in so that you don't have to wear underwear underneath. And although I never realized it you DO NOT WEAR UNDERWEAR with bike shorts. The sweet woman at our local bike shop ('lbs' to triathletes) told me three times that you DO NOT WEAR UNDERWEAR UNDER THE BIKE SHORTS when she sold me my very first pair. You see it's all about chafing and the minimizing of it. Chafing is bad. Get the right gear, use the zillion varieties of sport-specific anti-chafing lube out there, and skip the underwear but whatever you do don't chafe.

I haven't chafed yet so I must be doing something right, right?

blink...blink...blinkblinkblinkblinkblink

Hi. I'm Amy and I'm a backsliding blogger. I'm a backslider and I'm pretty unrepentant right now, but I do miss you. Oh and I'm busy. But it definitely seems like time to stop writing the blog entries in my head every day and just start up again. I finally deleted 19K junk messages off my site and I'm ready to go. So here. Let's just catch you right up.

I got my hair cut. I mean we may as well start with the important stuff, right? Ok, the hair really isn't that important. But it is a lot shorter. Still needs color though.

K. and I had a rather stressful and just downright bad 4 months. We went from 12 employees to 3, dumped our office space, rid ourselves of clients, and took two big cuts in pay. It was much worse for the employees, but it was no picnic for us either. It was so stressful that I went into survival mode, and survival mode did not include blogging. It did include exercising (so stressed!), downsizing in just about every department, and continuing to parent. Oh, and sleeping, a lot of sleeping. Sleeping is my number 1 preferred method of escape. Things are starting to turn around now in the sense that they are no longer getting worse, and we do not expect things to get much worse. I'm grateful.

If you ask me straight out I will admit to being a hypochondriac. But even for me the number of doctor appointments I have right now seems excessive. I swear it isn't me. I go in and I talk to the doctors but I don't let on to the level of my hypochondria (no way!) and they keep sending me to more doctors anyway. I've been to the scary melanoma clinic (love my new dermatologist! haven't had melanoma! have had two moles graded severe! got one little thing taken off that was "moderate"!), the dermatologist (for a re-excision of a re-excision), had a mammogram (clear) and a breast ultrasound (discovered 3 (T-H-R-E-E) heretofore unknown cysts), an exercise stress test (I asked for it, and I got it), and some random blood tests (my cholesterol levels are surprisingly good). I think that's everything my silly little hypochondriacal mind can handle right now. I go to the gyn next month so we have something to look forward to.

The kids are good. E. got Lyme's Disease (from a tick in our yard!) and I was pretty bummed about it, but he seems fine. He has agreed to train with me in the fall (running) and he's going to learn to ride his bike without the training wheels this summer. We are almost through with Kindergarten which he rocked. Z. is Z., still not eating, still getting used to school, still inhabiting her own little planet. She is sweet and has really blossomed in preschool, talks more now (even to the teachers!), and thinks she knows how to go on the potty even though she doesn't. R. is the rough and tumble one with the bruises to prove it. He's talking pretty much non-stop although you can't really get much of what he's saying and gets excited about everything. Especially ice cream cones.

In other news, I'm regretting starting my 365 project (take one photo a day for a whole year), I've lost almost 20 pounds, I have a serious crush on Rafa Nadal, I'm drinking at least 64 ounces of water a day which means that I am quickly getting over my phobia of public restrooms, I've managed to add a few new recipes to my repertoire, I watch the weather channel like a little old lady, and I'm still trying to stretch myself and do things which scare me. Which is why I'm in training for a sprint triathlon.

Tell me something about yourself that's happened in the past four months!

obsessions that have nothing to do with anything

Today we had our very last ever, ever, ever meeting with a social worker! I'm trying hard not to seem too overly excited. [How am I doing with that?] I mean, I think if we ever meet with another social worker it would mean bad things, including but not limited to the possibility that we decided that three children wasn't really enough to send me completely around the bend so we decided to adopt again.

Kidding. I'm kidding. But I do think we are finished with social workers. This is our ...let me think... ...just give me a moment... I'm going to say our fifth SW for two adoptions. It could be sixth, but I'm going with fifth just to be safe. We had one I really, really liked a LOT (she is now in Kenya or somewhere like that. Uganda? G., we miss you!) and two that I thought were passably good and then the others. Today's was passably good, but she was also just phoning it in (in a good way for us quite honestly).

Perhaps I should have something wise or informative or helpful to say about it all, but all I really want to talk about are bento boxes. Do you know what they are? I am currently obsessed with them. Yes, this non-cooking, lunch-challenged mother-of-three whose children would not even be alive if peanut butter had never been invented is in love with these clever, gorgeous, freaky time consuming little lunches.

Check these out on Flickr.
These are very, very cute too, but have all kinds of unrecognizable Japanese food items in them, so I cannot replicate. [Not that I could replicate anyway, but I really can't.]
Also, I must have THESE. (And I'm allowed to have them, right, because they are only $1.25? And, you know, $10 to ship probably.)
Also this. Just because.

Because I am unhealthily obsessed with bento boxes right now I bought myself two at the local Asian (Korean) grocery the other day. I am on a strict buy-only-necessities budget right now, so I must make the little bento boxes into a necessity soon, or I will suffer painful pangs of guilt and buyers remorse. I must make a bento lunch for someone. And soon.

In the spirit of being bored at the end of January I invite you to share your unhealthy and totally random obsession with me in the hopes that we can commiserate in useless passion together. And then go down two entries and leave a comment so that perhaps you can win a free cookbook, courtesy of me!

GO BENTO BOXES!

(Oh, and does bloglines recognize me as a person again yet? You can tell me the truth. I won't hold it against you.)