#64 Own an Evening Gown

The day after Thanksgiving, Wade surprised me by saying he wanted to go shopping. "Shopping on the busiest shopping day during the year? Are you serious?" But he was relentless. Our first stop was Best Buy. He insisted that we get to the store by 8:00. Since the store opened at 5:00ish, I figured it would be pretty picked over by 8, but who am I to complain? I was, as usual, dillydallying and Wade was rushing me out to the car. I was none the wiser.

We got to the store and ran into some friends we hadn't seen in a long time. We talked for a minute and then Wade turned to me and said "this isn't a coincidence that Wes and Jamie are here." I must've looked a little confused because he continued. "We've been planning this since September. Wes and I are going to take the kids and you and Jamie need to find new outfits for tonight's date." I was stunned. Every once in a while, he can really pull one over on me. His parting words were "we don't care what you get, just remember that you need a formal dress for the cruise." It's been so long since I've gone formal dress shopping.

Jamie and I drove to the mall and started our quest. It'd been a long time for both of us, and neither of us had occassion to buy a formal dress since being through the temple. So, it was a challenge nonetheless.

I finally found a really nice dress that was a halter-dress. I then had to spend the next hour searching for something to wear over it. I finally found it at Dillards. My first purchase ever at Dillards.

We went to lunch and then met back up with our husbands. They brought us a dozen roses and whisked us home to get ready. We dropped Josh off with Wade's parents and then picked up Wes and Jamie. The guys took us to Biacci's for dinner and then to Mannheim Steamroller. It was all very cool and unexpected. And that's how I came to own an evening gown.

Follow-Up Fish Tank Confessions

**I still think big fish are creepy. I involuntary shudder when I see fish that look like this:

I don't want something like this in my kitchen staring at me while I eat, contemplating consuming me himself. I also don't deal well with any kind of death. Pets or people alike, I internalize the emotions and I'm a basketcase. One of the many good reasons I didn't pursue my dream of being an oncologist. Another, slightly more pressing reason being the lack of good grades to get into medical school. A friend gave me a hermit crab for my birthday a few years ago. I was so nervous it was dead that I finally had to just throw it away because I wasn't functioning as a normal adult. I'm not entirely sure that it was dead when I threw it away. It looked dead, but they're called hermit crabs for a reason. In any case, I certainly don't want to scoop this sucker out of the water and try to dispose of it in the trash can...or flush it down the toilet.

**An update on the London blog I follow. Turns out she just changed blogger dillibobs and it didn't update to my feeder. Whew. Good thing, as I was feeling kind of bad for her early demise (See above).

**In the last two days, my patience level has not miraculously increased ten fold, but I do realize my limitations. I'm grateful to be living in an age where television can watch my child so I can close the door and ponder why I had him in the first place. I often wonder how people did it before the advent of technology.

**A friend gave me a good recipe to kick Josh's spitting habit. Pepper. It's mean, but it works. He's not nearly as rude. All I have to say is "do you want some pepper" and the kid is gold. Before I get a backlash of "bad parent" comments, I only put a dash on my finger. I'm not trying to kill the kid, but it's akin to soap in the mouth. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

**Yesterday, as though it were a sign from God that he indeed reads our blogs, the sun came out. It was a gorgeous day.

**Do you ever have those days that you feel are going to be great days? I have a friend down the street that we take turns on Wednesdays watching each other's 2 year old for a few hours so the other one can do whatever. In my original Fish Tank Confession, I was lamenting playdates and babysitting. This is different. This is a set up that works for both parties. I only babysit every other week for a few hours. There are no last minute calls. And I know that for every time I babysit, she babysits my kid and I get to play for a few hours. In any case, today is her turn and I'm going to read in peace and quiet for my few hours. After I got back from swimming this morning, I was showing Wade David Archuletta's performance on American Idol and it made me happy that a local kid was showing that not all Utahns are weird and backwards. His rendition of "Imagine" was incredible. When I checked my email, there was an email stating that a jacket I had ordered a few weeks back and was on backorder actually shipped this morning. I wasn't expecting it until nearly April, but I was sooooooo excited to get that email. Now I can still wear it this season. YAY! It's going to be a good day. I can feel it.

**I'm reading an incredible book about World War II that makes me believe in the human spirit again. I hope to get it done by Friday so I can review it for the week. It's heavy, so it's taking longer to get through. But not nearly as heavy as Anton Chekhov. At least it's interesting. ;)

**I caught a ride from a friend in the neighborhood almost every day one semester. I never offered to pay gas money. To this day, I still feel bad about it. I didn't purposely try to cheat her out of gas money. I just didn't think about it. In fact, I feel so bad about it, and it's been weighing on my mind so much that I'mgoing to go pay her some gas money and tell her what an idiot I am. Then I can let it rest. Mind you, it's been over a year. She's still talking to me, so she must not feel that bad about it. But I do.

**I am a word nerd. Like the contestant on American Idol, I am addicted to crosswords. I was a bit offended that Simon would think it was dumb, but unless you do crosswords, you don't understand. I'm proud to be a word nerd. I'm not ashamed at all to own an electronic crossword puzzle handheld device. In college, I had a 25,000 clue crossword that hung on one entire word. When I get my very own home office, I'm going to make one wall a crossword.

Fish Tank Confessions

** I think really big fish are creepy. Anything with bulgy eyes and funny mouths. I'm terrified of getting a fish that will grow to be the size of my cat.

**Say you write a witty blog and lots of strangers start to follow it and then something happens to you and you're in the hospital for a long time or you die. How will those followers ever know what happened? I think that's what happened to a blog I follow from London. She was always really good about writing every day and now, it's been almost two weeks and nothing. Weird.

**I hate that I'm so impatient. I lose my temper with little provocation that is directly proportional to how much sleep/food I've had. Today, I ripped the head off of a three year old not related to me. Granted, he was annoying the snot out of me, but still, he's only three.

**I thought it was really cute when Josh would blow raspberries when I asked him to do something he didn't want to. Now, I'm trying to unteach him this nasty habit because many parents find it offensive. I didn't mean to instill in my child that this was an acceptable way to address a problem.

**I hate babysitting, "play-dates", whatever you want to call it. I don't mind watching a kid for 15 minutes or so, but I dread watching them for hours. Even if it's a "friend" of Josh's. I don't really understand the purpose of "playdates" because I shouldn't have to feel obligated to make my child play. With that being said, I will watch a child or two if I'm given proper time to prepare myself for it. I would just prefer to get a root canal or visit the proctologist instead.

**Turns out this blog is not entirely anonymous to those I don't want reading it. Last night, Wade googled my full name and got a hit on the first page for my blog. Not good considering those not nice things I wrote. So I've deleted them. I would feel bad if someone mentioned in the blog were to google my name and read what I wrote in the passion of the moment after a bad day that is long forgotten. I feel like a fake for a number of reasons. First, I really wanted a forum where I could freely write about my daily encounters and now I feel they need to be somewhat censored. Secondly, I thought some of those entries portrayed my best writing. I weighed the chances that someone I didn't want reading the blog actually googling my name and the ratio was not promising. But I don't want to take any chances. So they're deleted into obscurity.

**There use to be this yellow ball of heat in the sky that would shine happily on my flowers and front porch swing, making me happy. I could visit the park, walk to the gas station for an ice cream cone or sit in the driveway watching the kids play when this yellow ball of heat was out. Has anyone seen it? I think it's lost.

**I was outside in the rain this afternoon and saw the first blooms of spring sprouting from the flowerbed.

**I miss running outside. A lot. I miss being outside. A lot.

**Josh fell asleep tonight at 6:00. I thought he wouldn't make it through the evening, but it's 11:30 and he's still sound asleep. This means that I've had an entire evening to do whatever I've wanted to. Wade and I played two games of chess. He won the first one and I won the second one. I was quite proud of myself and refused a third game so I could go out a winner.

**I love watching 48 Hours Mystery. I especially like all reports by Keith Morrison. His voice is velvet. I could listen to him read the phone book. Sometimes, I'll watch 48 Hours while folding laundry during the day and I'm all alone. I get creeped out and have to watch cartoons with Josh to calm myself down.

**I have a very active imagination. I like to imagine certain scenarios and then strategize how I would react. I also hold pretend conversations with real people in my head. Better than real conversations with pretend people in my head.

Imagine This

Imagine sitting at church, quietly listening to the prayer and hearing a 3 year old running down the aisle laughing. Of course, you open your eyes to see what the commotion is all about and you glimpse a harried mother chasing the 3 year old but failing to catch the runaway child because of limitations set by her choice of footwear. You watch as the three year old breeches the stairs leading to the stand and you laugh inside at the predictament this mother is in. Luckily for all involved, the father of the 3 year old is sitting up in the corner on the stand and the miniature monster makes a beeline for his lap. The father, in a moment of pure geniusness, picks up the child and leaves out the side door as the mother sits down on the second row in the only empty spot in the entire chapel to avoid any further embarassment by having to walk up the entire length of the room to the back doors. When the father doesn't return by the time the sacrament is being passed, the mother has to endure the stares of those fortunate enough to have well-behaved children to see if father and/or child is still alive. She hears them in the bathroom, so at least one is still alive. She is informed that the child head butted the dad on the way out the door, causing a major nose bleed. Fortunately, the nose didn't bleed unto the brand new white dress shirt of the father, so the kid is allowed to live one more day.

Welcome to my reality. Remind me, why do people have more kids?

In other news, after a long day, Josh was banished to his room for dinnertime. This was after repeated attempts at sitting in the "Naughty Chair" which resulted in a bite on Wade's forearm and pee on the couch. The straw that caused this breakdown? Wade wouldn't share his chocolate with Josh. After dinner, Wade went to release our prisoner from his dungeon and here's what he found:

I think he was preparing to run away. Josh turned to Wade and said: "Share the chocolate Daddy!" Good words we should all strive to live by.

Our Very Own Swimming Pool in the Kitchen

It's finally up and going...well, almost. We still have to get fish. And some plants. And something to put on the back to hide the tubing and have contrast against the white wall. But other than those few minute details, the 100 gallon fishtank we bought from the neighbors nearly two years ago is finally filled and ready to breathe life.

Why has it taken two years to put water in a glass bowl? Well, for starters, we wanted to refinish the stand. So when we bought it in June of '06, we left it in the garage, parking one car out in the driveway. In September, when it started to get colder in the mornings, we resigned ourselves to the fact that we are going to have move the thing, so we spent a Saturday sanding and refinishing the stain. Then we moved it into the kitchen where it has sat empty ever since. We both thought that setting up the aquarium would be a huge endeavor encasing many hours over many days. And we didn't know where to start. Since we did get the thing two years ago, we're embarassed to go ask the neighbor who sold it to us for help. It was his pride and joy until he couldn't keep up with the maintenance of the saltwater fish (we're doing freshwater for the time being).

Josh made friends with a little boy his age named Aidan. Aidan has been driving me insane over about the fish tank. Every time I see him, he asks if I have fishies yet. No. Not yet. Why? I don't know Aidan. We just don't. So the first Saturday in February, I dragged Wade to the nearest PetSmart and we started asking questions. Turns out that getting an aquarium set up is a costly endeavor. Especially a 100 gallon aquarium. We went home and finally dug out all the paraphernalia and lo and behold we got an awesome deal. Fast forward to President's Day where we took some pictures of a funny looking apparatus and drove to a speciality fish shop. He was able to tell us what it was and how to set up the blasted thing. We bought 100 pounds of rocks ($85!!!) and came home. We've spent the last week getting everything clean and ready to go. This evening we hooked it all up, ferrying buckets of water (lots and lots of buckets) from the bathtub. Josh is so excited about getting fish. It's all worth it just to see him jump around. We made the concensus that in the event that we move, the fish tank is staying. Good thing we don't ever have to empty out the entire thing.

Book Review Friday 2/22/08

Book: Ward No. 6 and Other Stories
Author: Anton Chekhov
Pages: 358

I'm so happy I'm finally finished with my January classic read. It's taken SOOOOOOO long to get through.

I've never even heard of Anton Chekhov before, so I thought it would be a great start to goal number 55, read the classics. I'm not sure what I was expecting, the title does say "Other Stories", but I was a little perplexed as to why this was considered a "classic". The stories, were at best, mediocre examples of Russian life in the late 1800's. Perhaps if I was a Russian scholar, a little more would've made sense, but for the most part, they were poorly developed and boring. The upside to the short story format is that there's a end looming in the near, near future and you don't have to endure too much of one boring story. You just get to start a brand new boring short story.

With that being said, all the stories weren't that bad. Once I got over my initial knee jerk reaction to classic reading, instilled in me at an early age, I started to almost enjoy the book. "The Witch", the second story in this compilation, was interesting, as was "The Kiss". It was kind of hohum until the middle of the book, "Ward No. 6", a story about a doctor and a ward of mental patients at a local hospital. This was my favorite story of the collection. It was a bit longer than the rest thus far in the book and Chekhov gave the characters a little depth, something not seen a lot in the previous stories.

There were some poignant statements stemming from the stories. For example, in "On the Road", a story about two travellers meeting at an inn, a conversation on faith arises, and one traveller says to the other "faith is a faculty of the spirit. It is just the same as a talent, one must be born with it." In another story "The Pipe", the overseer of a farm, Meliton, wanders into the woods and meets up with a shepherd playing a pipe. There they talk about life and happiness. The pipe player is lamenting his lot in life and Meliton turns to him to say "Things happen so queerly in this world that it is simply laughable and nothing else." How true it is, even 100 plus years later. Towards the end of the book, in "Gooseberries", a story about a man obsessed with gooseberry bushes, he says "the happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burdens in silence, and without that silence happiness would be impossible." While I don't necessarily agree with all these statements--I believe faith can be taught later in life and your happiness is not dependent on other people--it did give me something to ponder. By far, my favorite statement came from Ward No. 6. "A man's peace and contentment do not lie outside a man, but in himself." A motto I would like to adopt for myself. Make big signs. Display it on a t-shirt.

Do I think that Anton Chekhov should be added to summer reading lists throughout the country? Probably not. Would my classic list be complete without Ward No. 6 and Other Stories? Probably. Still, I'm glad I left my reading comfort level and tackled Old Russia. I'm a better person for it.

Book Review Friday 2/15/08

Dear Readers,

It's your lucky day! I couldn't decide which book to review, so for your reading pleasure, I'm going to review both books I finished this week. One was captivatingly horrendous while the other one was surprisingly endearing. Enjoy.

Book: Das Kapital: A Novel of Love + Money Markets
Author: Viken Berberian
Pages: 175

Like Juliana I too wish there was a rating system for books so I knew at the onset what I was getting myself into. Surprisingly, on Juliana's review of another fictional geeky math book (when I say geeky math book, I mean to say books using the disguise of math titles to bring in readers, not necessarily books about math), she paralleled my thoughts on my fictional geeky math book. I just don't think geeky math (or math titled) books are meant to be good fiction material.

Das Kapital: A Novel of Love + Money Markets (so as not to be confused with Das Kapital by Karl Marx) is a story about a Wall Street trader, Wayne, who relishes in the demise of companies, cultures, economies. Intertwined in his story are also the stories of a Corsican, who remains nameless, and Alix, an Architecture student living in Marseille.

The Corsican and Alix meet in a hotel lobby, become lovers, and somehow become entrenched in Wayne's life, separately and secretly. How it comes to be is a little vague and unrealistic. It just sort of happens.

When I was completing my math degree, I took a mathematical finance class. I liked it so much--more so the teacher than the material--that when it was offered again another semester under the disguise of a different course number, I was first in line to sign up. It was basically just a repeat of the same course, but I got credit for both classes. I use to think that I would never be able to use this information in my daily life. I now see where I can put that information to use. Reading this book. It's the only way I knew what was going on. I don't believe that the average reader will have an inkling of what's going on in Wayne's working world and I can't imagine that the people who do read this kind of smut for recreation.

In short, I thought it was a trainwreck. It wasn't well written, jumped all over and was covered with unnecessary smut. But I couldn't seem to put it down for good. What the draw was, I don't know. Maybe the geekiness of it. I certainly don't recommend reading it. It's much too heavy and weird for most tastes.

Book: Rules of the Road
Author: Joan Bauer
Pages: 201

This book was on recommendation from my mom and her book club. I was sold the minute she told me it was about shoes. I am a shoe fanatic. I own four pairs of high heels, two pairs of "hooker" boots, 10 pairs of sandals, 3 pairs of athletic shoes and about a pair of everything in between.

Chicago teenager Jenna is a shoe saleswoman for Gladstones, a national chain of shoe stores. School is out for the summer and Jenna's alcoholic dad has just shown back up in town. Trying desperately to please everyone around her, she finds herself sinking fast. Madeline Gladstone, the elderly president of Gladstone's, calls one night, looking to make Jenna her chauffeur for the summer. Jenna can't get out of the house fast enough, and soon they're off to a Texas board meeting, where Madeline will officially resign as president, stopping at Gladstone stores along the way.

What ensues is a lesson for life. Jenna is facing down the very demons that we all faced as adolescents. She's just doing it from the drivers seat of a Cadillac. Along the way, they meet some colorful characters who enrich the story with their bits of wisdom. Jenna's grandma, who resides in a nursing home while battling alzheimers, imprints the book with the teachings she instilled in Jenna before she became sick.

As Jenna and Madeline cross into Texas, they meet up with Harry Bender, Gladstone's best shoe seller. His Texan wisdom trumps all: Don't hit a man chewing tobacco and don't drink downstream from the herd.

This feel good story was the perfect book to cap off the week with. I really enjoyed the writing style of Bauer. While billed as a Young Adult read, it can also be enjoyed by the likes of adults. It served to remind me of my awkward teenage years--red, frizzy haired and amazonian tall. But, just as I survived, so will Jenna.