Preludes And Nocturnes

It is my grandpa’s birthday - he turns 82.  Two years ago it was his 80th (if I can still do basic math) and that was 2007.  See, I’m working this all out because I can’t believe his 80th was only two years ago.  For my grandpa’s 80th birthday Jim, Leone, and I drove down from PG for his party.  Leone was about to move at the end of the month to Vancouver to start her teacher program; Jim and I were about to move down to Vernon for my one class at the uni.

Two years ago…

The three of us were living in the house in PG. I was working at the uni there. Jim had JUST arrived at the beginning of May. Leone had graduated her undergrad.  Lots of changes - but it seems sooooo far away from right now.

No Malcolm. No *plan* for a Malcolm. We didn’t live here. No thought of buying a house. Nada.  Leone was about to start her teaching program - and now she is about to finish her first year of teaching this month.  As a teacher on call (substitute) she got a very amazing opportunity to teach full time when they needed someone to cover her practicum class short term.  All in all, she ended up getting four… five (?) months of full time teaching.

It makes my brain hurt to try to figure out that two years ago I wasn’t even pregnant.  I wasn’t even thinking about being pregnant!  For the record, we thought about being pregnant about 45 mintues before it seemed to happen

And now sitting in this house with a sweet baby boy sleeping upstairs (at 9am I might add!) and my husband getting ready for work and all these things that are just home to me now, I can’t believe that it has only been two years.  Wow!

Okay, I have the next two months off, and then I’ll be teaching full time for July and August.  So there are some things I really want to get done over the next two months.

First off, I need to get to the gym and out for walks and all that.  Really and truly, I can’t handle my size right now. I don’t need much - twelve pounds would make me very happy and take me back to my prepregnancy weight.  Now, when I got pregnant I was already up 10lbs… but we’ll worry about that later. Right now I’m weighing in at 192lbs and I’m just feeling so blah.  I have a perfectly good gym membership, but I don’t like their childcare. Too many kids when I went last time. Now that we’re officially the first Canadian city to close a school due to swine flu, I’m not really feeling the vibe of malcolm mingling anyway.  So Jim is home a few mornings a week and I need to just get up and get in to the gym for an hour. Three times a week at the gym would do wonders. Add in a few walks each morning with Malcolm and I’d be golden.  So I’m going to update here as I need to get crackin.

Next up, crafts.  I want to pump up my shop and my goal is to list three new items a week.  I want to run a series of sales as well.  In May I want to run a blog sale (possibly Facebook as well as I’m not sure how many of you I have here these days) and I want to run and SPCA sale with all proceeds going to them.  I think I’ll make a line of kitty cards for that sale.

Finally, random stuff including website, yard, and curtains.  I want to revamp my theme and have a few new things added to my site including a spot for pictures. Vicki has sent me a form, I need to fill it out. Stat!  We have a fence in the backyard, now we need the front done. I need some flowers and some plants, and to post some pictures for you all. And I’ve been working on lining all our curtains in preparation for hot hot summer months to come.  Malcolm’s room is half done and the curtain is now at black-out status. It is amazing.  When just the one panel is stretched across, there is almost no light at all (just around the edges). Nothing comes through it. I am using this crazy heavy twill and that means I need to buy and install some new rods as the tension ones are crying under the strain.  So I need some inside mount adjustable rods.

Okay… are you all as excited as I am about this?  Hmmm?? Any spring goals you want to share with the rest of us?

Min was talking about posture and it reminded me of something said to me recently about being organised.  More than a few times over the past number of years I’ve had people comment on how organised I am.  When I teach my students about some research methods, I can see them marvel at (and, for some, scorn) my techniques as I outline some of their options. I have systems with index cards for early research, colour coded post-its for later research, highlighting text in different colours for end stage writing. I have advanced files. I have my crafts in various drawers according to all sorts of sorting criteria. And so on.

I have had a friend at grad school tell me how in awe she was of my organisation skills.

But, see, I don’t have good organisation skills!  I am horribly disorganised!  That is why I need all the systems and colours and markers!  If left to my own devices I’d be drowning under a pile of papers and articles.  I am “performing” organised.  I am acting like I think an organised person would act!

Thus we arrive at the question.  Am I actually organised or am I just acting like an organised person would act to counter my inherent nature?  Where does the organised essence reside - Within the soul, or is it simply a matter of outcome?

Finished marking the last paper at 10:15pm last night.  I have one week until they write their grammar exam- why oh why did I think that was a good idea?  But, until then all I have to do is prep up their grammar review classes.  I’m going to do them on power point and I really like the idea of finally having a comprehensive grammar review that I can use going forward. All my other grammar stuff is on overheads and in bits and pieces in different fonts, etc, as I made them up over the past nine years.

Yep, I’ve been teaching this class for nine years!  Different institutions and with some breaks in the teaching, but my first uni class I taught was Septebmer 2000. I will point out that I had actually typed eight years and as I wrote sept 2000 I did the math again and just went and changed the 8 to 9.  Counting years gets confusing sometimes when it starts with zero.  Or something. And I’m always like, ‘do I count the year to year or do I count once it is done?’  Whatever. You get the gist.

Too busy.  Too crazy. But this weekend I might get some time to craft and paint.  Jim will be writing all weekend as he has a deadline on Monday for some chapters (he’s contributing to a text book), so I’ll be on beeb duty.  Okay, it is after 7am and I have to scarf down my breakfast and get to work!

New hairdo (excuse the bags under my eyes - Malcolm and I had been up that night at 12:30 and then from 3am-6am) I had under three hours sleep. But, my hair looked great:

Oh mom, you are zageratin!

No. No I’m not.

Malcolm came to work with me today. It has ended up that they need me through to next monday, so today Malcolm made the trek into the uni and hung out with the admin while I taught class. It was super cute and there are pictures as well.

I just realised I’m too tired to type out any more of this post right now.  All in all, as a dry run of what it would be like to be working all of a sudden… whooo, I’m thinking this is TOO HARD!  But there were crowds around the beeby boy to admire his cuteness

Here he is with Gail, and then a picture of him in the boss’s office/chair!

I am teaching tomorrow!

The PTB gave me a call yesterday and asked if I could cover a week of classes for a prof who had a sudden death in the family (not the cool part of this story - it is strange being so excited based on something that started out so poorly).

But - I am so excited to go in tomorrow! I’m teaching two classes tomorrow morning!! Whoohoo!

Now, if you’ll excuse me I have prep to do.

I’m having one of *those* days.  I dropped Jim off for work, got to the bank, got to the bulk food store, got home in time for “mommy’s show” (Without A Trace on each weekday morning at 11am) and I felt on top of the world!  I was productive, I had a very cute baby who was awesome while out running errands, I had a nice morning coffee and chat with my amazing husband - whoo!

Then 45 minutes later I look around the piles of laundry I’ve been folding while watching my show and the half unloaded dishwasher (on commercials) and I feel defeated.  I never get all the laundry done, I feel like I’m not getting the house advanced, I’m trying so hard to get the house a bit more “finished” feeling before I go back to work in January and before Malcolm becomes mobile.  We still have boxes, we still have major sections of rooms not making sense, we still have space we can’t use because it is just in a holding pattern.  Yesterday I managed to work with Malcolm in tow and get the summer clothes stored and some final unpacking done in the bedroom. I feel that room looks pretty good - but I’ve felt that way before. We have very little storage room here; every square foot has to be used wisely.  And this means that there isn’t that area to just dump stuff.  So things have to be sorted and found real homes.

And I think part of it is that this is our house - I can try to make some long-term choices.  Yes, this is somewhat related to my clutter/clean house ramble from a few weeks back.  But today it was just my rollercoaster of Yay I love being at HOME all day  - to - BOOO I will never get the daily stuff under control let alone progress on these other projects - to (again) - Yay I’m Playing my Music and Dancing around with Malcolm while finishing the kitchen and making bread.

Really, I’m a spaz.

In other news, Malcolm likes to groove to Lauryn Hill (Everything is Everything), giggle to Liz Phair (Fuck and Run), and doesn’t really like Madonna.   I can see that he has some good taste… but he needs to embrace the dance-fun that is mommy’s Madonna.  And how much do I love that my new stereo (bought it this past winter with my Sony Points - whoo!) has a plug in for my ipood.  We get days of dancing fun from that tiny blue micro.

So this afternoon I hope to finish making my two loaves of 12 Grain bread, make and freeze applesauce for “solid-eating Malcolm”, vacuum (why does that need two u’s?), and finish designing the course-packet for my classes in January, and finish the roll-out drawer for under Malcolm’s crib.  See, and all that makes me feel Yay again…  I enjoy this stuff.

Are you all as rollercoastery as I am on this type of stuff?

I just bought a corner TV stand. I’ve been looking for one FOREVER. It took me a full day plus to put it together.

I’ve spent a whole lot of this afternoon re-staging the living room. This tv stand makes me way too happy. Really. It is bizzaro.

And in other news, Malcolm has been asleep for 6 hours (since just after lunch) and woken twice to eat and fallen asleep as he finished the bottle.  I cleaned the kitchen.  For real.  And marveled at my tv stand.

I got a cell phone.

Yep, I held out and held out. I even didn’t get one when mom said I had to for my last semester (trimester) in the winter. But it has been made clear to me that not having a cell phone seems to not really be an option. Mainly because more and more there is nowhere to access public phones.  Plus so many people just keep asking “what’s your cell number”. When we were in the States for Jim’s dad’s funeral there were people ranging from friends to lawyers who needed to contact us and the expectation now is that there, ultimately, should be a way to do this and leaving a message with friends does not suffice.

And I started to really feel for Jim in all this. He is used to having a cell and has gone without since moving up here to Canadia. So we both got one yesterday. With Jim traveling all about for work and us having to arrange times to meet up all throughout the week, it was just getting silly. It went from me saying once every few months “oh a cell would be handy now” to me saying that each week.

I was going to go prepaid and found a pretty nice deal through one company, but another company had a sweet corporate rate through my job.  I’m getting 250 minutes, voicemail and call display, $0.10/m long distance, unlimited calls after 6pm and all weekend, 30 outgoing and unlimited incoming texts (which I’m thinking of paying an extra $2 to go to 250 outgoing as, well, texting is rather addictive) all for $28 per month.  And our entire area here is ‘local’ so it is fine for me to call from work and all along the drive home without using long distance.

So yeah. I need to get some of your cell numbers so we can do this texting thing.  Julia, my international texting costs me .25 each, so I’ll make them really count.  North America is covered in my package.

We got Jim a plan where he can talk/text to/from me unlimited nationwide. His includes double the minutes, a secret group of “five” special friends of which I am one, and voice mail/ call display. This will be super nice for when he is out of town for work and able to just call me no matter what and with no charge. All for around the $60/m mark.

Welcome me to the future and know there was minimal kicking and screaming.  Just about three weeks of obsessive research into the best deals.

It is 11:25pm on a Tuesday night. Malcolm is sleeping.

Why am I still up and looking at random junk sites online? What is this power you have over me?  Why don’t I just go to bed?

*pook*