Tips of questionable reliability.

So a little while back I talked about how I lost enough weight to fit into some old pants.  If you want to know how I did it, know that I did not do any of the following things (from here):

5 Weird Old Tips To Lose Belly Fat

1. Eat only kale and chickpeas harvested by Incan women.
2. Carry a mosquito encased in amber between your cheek and your gums for a week before each solstice.
3. Betray a child at moonset.
4. Forge an ankh from the wood of a house destroyed by fire. Keep it under your pillow until you dream of a clipper ship consumed by a giant squid. Then throw the ankh into a disturbed Indian burial ground and renew an old friendship.
5. Sit-ups

I did do a lot of eating of foods full of holes (because the hole means less food).  You know, things like cheese and cheerios...and donuts.  Er...I also considered lunging everywhere instead of walking, but that didn't work out.  Because it's hard.

Two for the price of one!

Easter's coming up soon and I'm excited.  I'm always excited for holidays that involve candy, but Easter's got the added bonus of eggs.  Eggs for Jesus!

Easter's one of those pagan holidays that got all Christianized in a weird sort of way.  As far as I'm concerned it's two separate holidays that just happen to have the same name and fall on the same day (the first Sunday following the full moon that occurs on or following the spring equinox except after "c" and when sounding as "a" like in "neighbor" or "weigh"...wait...). 

I celebrate them both heartily.  Do I believe that Jesus Christ was resurrected after three days and that this is a reason to have a feast including but not limited to ham and deviled eggs? I DO!  Do I believe that rabbits are extremely fertile and that eggs, when properly fertilized and incubated, will hatch into probably chickens but also possibly alligators and the uncertainty of which is a good reason to hide them while eating candy?  I ALSO BELIEVE THIS!

It is wonderful to have so many beliefs.

In which you find out two things I love.

This week I discovered that I once again fit into pants from high school.  Yes, they are Wranglers, made for a man, and dark blue polyester, but they fit.  I was never particularly thin in high school either, so that's against me as well.  Still, fitting into old pants that I haven't worn in years is like having an entirely new pair of pants for FREE!  And I love free.  And I love pants!  Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful free pants...

Surprisingly dangerous!

I put lotion on my hands this morning and then for some reason tried to snap my fingers.  I'm pretty sure I almost broke one of those fingers.  Lotion just makes 'em so darn slippery that the snappage gets them going dangerously fast.

Who needs a map when you've got the internet!

Matt and I had a little friendly competition tonight, seeing who could name the most states.  He ended up getting all fifty, although the last one took him a bit longer than the rest (obviously, or it wouldn't have been the last one).  Unlike me, he had a map in his head the whole time and went through it fairly methodically.

I actually surprised myself by getting forty-eight states remembered.  I started out with a map system, too, but after the west coast (you know, all three states) things kind of got blurry for me.  I just wrote down whatever I could think of whenever it came to me.  There were southern states mixed in with the thirteen colonies and those square midwestern states just popped up anywhere, if they popped up at all.  I am pleased with my second place finish.  First loser, woo!

Next time we'll see who can name them in alphabetical order, and then we'll both lose.

Edit:  Here's the map I drew post-competition, trying to find the two missing states.  By all appearances, I am lucky to have gotten ANY states right.

Shiny, tasty things!

When I was on the verge of motherhood, I read a lot of preparatory things on the interwebs.  I remember one article saying how for a new baby, its wants and needs were basically the same thing.  Food, love, sleep, etc.---all wanty-needs.  So what I wanted to know is when does that stop being true?  When do the wants become specific and differentiated from the needs?  And I think I've figured it out: it's when the baby starts grabbing for shiny things.  (At first I thought it might be when they first discovered good-tasting things like cookies, but then I realized that comes much after the shiny-want begins.)

See, babies don't need shiny things, but they always go for them.  That's because someday they'll grow up into big people, and big people also want shiny things.  It's practice.  They get all the grabbing urges out while they're cute and sweet and folks just say "No no no-o!" in a high, singsongy voice so that later they aren't still snatching pretty things wherever they happen to be because then it's just plain stealing and not cute or sweet at all. (phew!)  I have quite a few shiny things (that I legitimately own) and Izzy is all up in the wanting of them.  I haven't quite got the heart to tell her to lay off, though, so she's probably going to grow up to be a thief.  I'm guessing that's how it works.

Staying healthy means staying home

None of us got sick this winter.  Not Matt, not me, and especially not the baby.  If you want to know the secret, it's this: don't go anywhere or do anything or have friends outside your immediate family.  Woo!  Sounds like good times!

Seriously, though, with Izzy being so new, me hating to drive, and Matt having no coworkers, we don't see a whole lot of other people.  We're doing something about that now by being proactive and having folks over to dinner a few times a month.  So if any of us catch some sort of nasty infectious disease in the next little while, we'll know who to blame.  And then we probably just won't invite them back for a while.

On an unrelated note, look at this picture I took:

It makes me feel like I live in Africa...like in the song by Toto.

Ooga chocka!

Izzy is a fairly easy-going baby, as long as I maintain eye contact.  She likes to be the literal center of attention. Sometimes I dance around her like she's a campfire, and that's something we both enjoy.  If you've never tried that, I highly recommend it.  At the least, you should imagine me doing it while singing circus calliope music.


Ya ta dadadada bum bum ba da!

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

I didn't pinch anybody today, but that's probably because I only saw three other people and two of them were wearing green and the other one was my baby.

We celebrated by boiling a pot of meat and cabbage, and I dyed the milk green (he he!).  Also I made cupcakes, but that was for personal reasons.

Cookies? More like lumpies.

Yesterday I made some cookies, only I made them wrong.  So instead of delicious treats, I got hard, walnut-filled lumps.  I put them out on the deck for the birds to eat, but so far have only attracted a single fly.  And the fly left.

I got sniped!

I recently decided I wanted and/or needed an attractive brooch.  (Probably 60 percent want and 40 percent need...okay, maybe 70/30.)  So I was checking out the E-Bay to see what the goods were and I found one I really liked.  It was antique silver with a plethora of filigreed petals, one slightly bent (to add character, no doubt).  Best of all, there were no bids on it yet.  Nobody else had noticed my precious, precious brooch.

The day the auction was set to end, I entered a modest maximum bid, and a few hours later I was still the high bidder.  There were only maybe four hours left, so I began to think of it as mine. ...Obviously I am an E-Bay fool.

Confident in my purchase, I got distracted by a movie with Matt (because Zorro is so cool).  All of a sudden I remembered the auction, and that it had less than two minutes to go.  I was shocked to see that I had been outbid by like seven other people!  They all knew about the BEST brooch on the internet!  I was flustered and upped my price, but in the last five seconds it was taken from me.  Yeah, and by somebody who entered a dollar amount with 99 cents attached.  I keep asking myself why they would do that, it makes it so easy to lose by a penny what strategy am I missing why couldn't they lose to ME?

So today I'm a little bitter, bewildered, and brooch-less.

Race day!

Today was the Rex Lee Run, and it is established tradition that we go.  We went when we got engaged, we went when I was pregnant and sickly, and we went this year with the baby in tow.  I'm not much of a runner, though, so pretty much it's an expensive walk.  Regardless, I put on my race shoes (which, surprisingly, do not glow in the dark), put my baby in a bear suit, and away we went. 

Izzy slept for the first part of the "race," but woke up after awhile since I'm quite terrible at steering and went over quite a few bumpy bits.  She mostly seemed delighted to be out and about with all the strangers, though, so there was no crying.  We even found Grandpa, which despite the large crush of people was not very difficult.  (He's 6'4" and was wearing a bright yellow hat....)

The run was fun, but it turns out that despite being shapely I am quite out of shape.  Maybe when it gets warmer Izzy and I will do purposeful exercisey things more often.

Matt can come too.

I would probably wear this T-shirt.

Oh, Mormon graffiti artists.  Graffitists.  Graffiti-ists? 

by Matsby.

Shining example or horrible warning?

I like movies, it's true.  I might even be a movie buff.  I also happen to like quite a few TV shows, which are similar to movies but have a somewhat different time scale.  The longest movie is maybe four hours, five tops.  But TV shows seem to go on forever.  Take "Friends," for example.  It's like a movie that lasted ten years.  People DIED before they got to see the end.  There's no way to fix the big time suck except for to not get involved in the first place.  It's already too late for me in some respects---I could spend the next five years of my life watching "Psych."  But save yourselves.  Don't start something you may not be around to finish.

facebook and random folks

"Facebook friend" is an odd term. I'm "friends" with a lot of people that I only casually know, or folks that I knew in high school but probably won't ever see again. So it's a loose term at best.

The funny thing about Facebook, though, is that it lets you get to know someone without ever really having to talk to them via what I like to call Facebook stalking. People post information about themselves on their profile page, pictures of their families, and status updates that let you know in real time how they're doing. As their "friend," I have access to all this and can look at it whenever I want and they don't even know I'm there.

All the time I see updates from people that in real life I hardly know but of whom I have intimate Facebook knowledge. And the knowing leads to caring so I have thoughts like, "I'm so happy that So And So is engaged!" and "Man, I'm sad that What's Her Face is having a rough day," and even "Wow! The Ugly One has some really cute kids!" (Okay, I don't really call anyone "The Ugly One." That's just a Teen Girl Squad reference.) But I don't actually let them know I'm thinking about them, because stalking implies stealth and besides, I don't really know these people. It would be weird....

Trololololo!

Apparently this is the Russian version of the rick roll. I highly recommend that you watch the whole thing.



He's just so happy!

Hoorah!

Thanks for the shouts out, everybody! It's nice to know that there are folks out there who are interested in the goings on here. The internet is a pretty big place and comments are a nice way to know that I'm not spouting off in the South Pole part of it where there are no people, just penguins. Four comments means I'm more likely in the Nebraska part or something.

And for those of you who didn't participate, I guess you called my bluff because I'm still here.

Anyway, good news for the Swingy Chair! Matt took it apart and worked some engineering mojo with a soldering iron and whatnot and now it works again. I'm so happy.

For kicks, here is a pretty good song with two separate but equally awesome music videos.
Watch the first one here.
Then watch this one:


Tell me which one you like better, if you had to choose. Also you HAVE to.

It's been like two days, man

Okay, so this is sort of my own obsession, but I still haven't found the answer to that anagram puzzle thing (aka qwantzle) that I was working on the other day, and the author hasn't yet given the solution.  I did, however, find a solution.  I'm pretty sure it's not the right answer (although the start was promising), but it does use all the letters and form real words even if it doesn't entirely make sense.  And because I have no other place to share my accomplishment, I'm putting it here.  Because it was really hard.

So this is what I got:

"I was born too late: everyone understands what I say all the time, guys! I had no doubt until you told it off to the lucky hi fi!"

If you can do better, with "12t10o8e7a6l6n6u5i5s5d5h5y3I3r3fbbwwkcmvg:,!!" as the clue, be my guest.  If this were in one of those puzzle books I would have flipped to the back and cheated a long time ago.

Did I mention that I even had Matt try to write a computer program to help me solve it?  It turns out it would have taken over a thousand hours for the program to finish doing whatever it was that it was going to do, so instead he made me word lists.  And I used them like nobody's business!

Just Super!

Izzy's arch nemesis is the Booger Sucker.  For some reason, she protects her boogers with a ferocity normally associated with a mother bear.  Sadly, despite her attachment (emotional and physical, I suppose) they have to go.  It will be a wonderful day when she can blow her nose all by herself.

Continuing the motif of Izzy as superhero, her sidekick the Swingy Chair no longer performs its designed function.  From now on it's just a chair.  We are all saddened by the loss of its powers.

Also, I'm pretty sure this is my 100th blog post.  If you would like me to continue, give me a hoorah in the comments and I'll think about it.  

Hark! A slayer!

I've been watching a lot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer recently, and every time I do I think to myself, "This is ridiculous."  And it is!  I mean, there are these ugly vampires and demons in every episode and anywhere between one and a dozen people are sure to die.  How many people does a town like Sunnydale even have?  I especially like it when the demons disguise themselves as human teenagers...in order to attend high school, I'm guessing.  Seventeen-year-olds be living the sweet life!

That being said, the show is really addictive.  It's ridiculous, but I like it.  I've got some major suspension of disbelief going on because otherwise I would pick at all the holes and  nonsensical bits even more than I already do. 

I like to pretend that the show takes place in an alternate reality that just closely resembles the 90s.  Obviously I don't know much about this alternate reality or everything would make perfect sense.  That's what I keep telling myself, anyway.

For all you relative-type folks and whatnot...

...if you're just here looking for pictures of the baby, I'm going to start posting those on the Izzy Blog.  A picture a day, if I can, so you can get your fix.

Find it here.

Books are not for eating.

I'm pretty sure she's just looking at the pictures, but it's a start.

It's impossible!

I have spent the better part of the day trying to solve the anagram in this comic:

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1663

I can't do it without more hints, and I'm usually so good at word puzzles.  There had better be an answer tomorrow or something, because I have to know: WHAT DOES T-REX SAY?  IT'S PROBABLY NOT IMPORTANT BUT I AM CURIOUS NONETHELESS!

(The all-caps are meant to both channel T-Rex and denote intense curiosity.  It's not shouting, promise.)