For a mom to be sick. It’s just way too inconvenient for everyone, and when she’s finally back to full strength, she’s behind on everything.
Archive for the 'Tidbits' Category
Automatic toilets that flush (and spray you!) before you can possibly get your pants pulled back up.
1. It’s clear that bats were made to eat mosquitoes, but wouldn’t it have been simpler to just not make any mosquitoes in the first place?
2. If there weren’t any boys to fixate on automobile transmitters and cell phones, would such electronic gadgets cease to exist?
3. Why does lovely spring have to be so short when hot and humid summer is so long? Honestly, it just seems unfair for poor spring get the short end of the seasonal stick, year after year after year.
4. And concerning all those female hormones. . . is it really necessary for half the adult population to cry uncontrollably and/or fume viciously for days on end every single month?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Our wonderful family physician of nine years, Dr. Kym R., moved WAY out of state about two years ago. She’s not a major email person, but she did include her new email on a Christmas letter.
Some two months later, I eventually emailed her and she replied. My email was a fairly fun piece of writing, so I am posting it here – along with her sweet response.
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Dear Dr. Kym,
I finally carved out some time to scroll through my overflowing inbox and realized I had never written to you. Sorry. Life got busy. Know what I mean? I have learned a few things lately and since I know you love to learn, too (ha!), I will share them with you now.
1. If your firstborn attends college on the other side of the country, you will spend entirely too much time crying. Punt that obeying God stuff and force your children to attend college within a five-hour drive.
2. Never remodel anything in a house over 90 years old. Especially bathrooms. Just let ‘em leak. You’ll save thousands and your blood pressure will stay down.
3. If you DO get the insane idea to remodel something, do not for any reason hire a friend from church to do the work.
4. If you are foolish enough to hire a friend from church, make sure in advance that he really knows how to do the kind of job you are wanting done.
5. Get all estimates in writing, and if your remodeler works on a cash only basis with no receipts or paperwork retained, double your Bumetanide dose, take 2 Alleve and call me in seven weeks – when the job might be done.
6. When adopting a child, pre-order not only the gender and health status of your precious baby, but also his/her personality and gifts/abilities. Unless you and your husband are both filthy rich (read: physicians – ha!), do not request a child with a strong predisposition toward gymnastics, as it is the most expensive sport imaginable. Baseball would be a much simpler choice.
7. Perimenopausal women should be outlawed. They are way too emotional and irritable to live among the general population, and in particular, no otherwise stable family should have to put up with one. These pathetic creatures should be sent AWAY from humanity for several years and only allowed to return if and when they can carry on a converstaion without biting off any heads and remember why they have entered any given room.
8. God must have been laughing when he set things up so that children would leave for college, parents would get old, arches would fall, stomachs would sag, bladders would leak, TRI-focals would be indicated, and husbands would have “mid-life crises,” ALL AT THE SAME TIME. However, with sufficient hearing loss, one can at least occasionally disappear into one’s own world and ignore it all.
9. Do not space your children more than three years apart. Nuff said.
10. Just because you created backup files of everything under the sun before your computer was reformatted does NOT mean you will be able to recover any of the backed-up information. Always check your backups to make sure they are not corrupted before you have to use them for a restore.
11. If your superlative in every way family doctor has the audacity to move out of state, and if you are fortunate enough to locate a passable (male) replacement for 2/6 of your family, a different but outstanding (male) replacement for 3/6 of your family, and yet another quite trainable (female) replacement for yourself, do not get too excited. All the work of locating these fine physicians, dealing with two different (one bad, one horrid) insurance companies, and arranging and attending five different (can’t be back to back) get-established appointments will go down the (at least it’s not leaking since the remodel) toilet – when the passable male moves out of the area and the outstanding male transfers to an Urgent Care, both in less than nine months after you get established with them. The moral of the story: If your doctor is adamant about moving, consider following him/her or using frequent flyer miles to maintain your preferred patient status. Failing that, you will be forced to pick a doctor out of the phone book and set up five more get-established appointments (over a period of two months) with some guy you’ve never met and don’t even know if you’ll like.
There you have it; the wisdom of the ages!
Love,
Patty
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You really can’t imagine nor will you ever know, how very much I miss you. You know I have office hours every Thursday afternoon and with the new Branson airport going in anything is possible…
love always,
kym
It’s 5:30 PM on March 28 – that’s almost APRIL, you know – and our forecast for this evening calls for a 30-50% chance of SNOW from 8:00 PM till 2:00 AM. I am so excited!
As members of the Branson AIM team, Jessica and Josiah were honored to be a part of Young Christians Weekend at Silver Dollar City today. They had two presentations (in the saloon) at 2:30 PM and 4:00 PM. Scott and Andrew went out for the first one and reported that, in addition to the team doing really well and their (especially Scott’s) being terribly proud, it was SNOWING as they left the city. Now we just need that snow to head a bit north and east, and we’ll be in good shape.
In other news, this afternoon I made a carrot cake (replacing the explosive one from Scott’s birthday a couple weeks ago), but we cannot eat it tonight because it is reserved for tomorrow’s lunch. A family from church called today to invite us to have lunch with them tomorrow (WOW!) – steak fajitas, so they say. This is amazing, because I think I can count on one hand the number of times in six-and-a-half years that someone from church has invited us to lunch. It’s not that church folk are rude; it just doesn’t happen often, maybe becuase there are several of us. In any case, we don’t have to fix lunch tomorrow (hooray, hooray!), and Andrew made me promise to leave the carrot cake on the counter; NOT on the stove. I promise.
It appears that my recent hard drive reformat has resulted in the loss of most things from August 2007 to the present (February 2009). That would be a year and a half of my life. A year and a half of pictures (although thankfully I had managed to get some of those stored online). A year and a half of school records. A year and a half of ministry paperwork. There aren’t a lot of silver linings, but one is that our family financials and our ministry financials were not stored in “My Documents” and were therefore not backed up with the dreaded Windows Backup Utility. They both seem to be fine.
I will be fine, too. I am quite tired of crying and being angry and frustrated. Today Mr. A came to “finish the bathroom.” It’s not done. He’s coming tomorrow. I am pretty sure it will be done before I turn 50. That’s my new deadline. If the bathroom is not done by then, I give myself permission to be angry and frustrated!
Today is Josiah’s birthday. He’s 15, which means I will soon force him to get his learner’s permit and start driving. It looks like he will learn to drive in a 2001 Mazda MPV! It will be our youngest vehicle at only eight years old and sporting only 90-some thousand miles. It is considerably smaller than our previous vans (the back seat offers Asian seating, which means that four average Asian males can fit comfortably on that seat – OR two pre-adolescent Americans can sit there if they first fold themselves in thirds and insert their knees in their ears), but we think it will be workable. It will soon have a trailer hitch, as well.
We are all moving forward!
First, the carpet is in and looks great.
Second, the bathroom is not done yet, but Mr. A will be here tomorrow to continue working. So far, we’ve invested about 175% of the original estimated cost.
Third, the red van recently took to stranding Scott as well as me, so we are now in the process of buying a new van.
Fourth, my computer has been reformatted. This should have been fairly straightforward, because I back up my files religiously. Our whole family shares the external backup drive so it stays pretty full, and I have to keep dropping off my oldest backups. I usually have three or four on there at any given time. I did another backup right before wiping off my hard drive. BUT, when we went to restore my files, it seems that ALL of my backups were corrupt. For a significant fee, we were able to recover some of the files, but the critical (to me) stuff like most of my pictures and everything pertaining to the kids – including almost two years of school records – seem at this point to be lost for good.
Fifth, we rearranged our bedroom, and we think we like it, but we need to get a smaller bed. We’re discussing the possibility of downsizing from a king to a queen. Being in desperate need of a new mattress, we hope to come to an agreement sooner than later.
And just in case anyone missed it, NEVER USE THE WINDOWS BACKUP UTILTY TO BACK UP YOUR FILES – unless, of course you do it only for recreation and will never need to restore them. = )
1. Our new president was sworn in.
2. Katie didn’t get the job with the chancellor.
3. Andrew wouldn’t do his chores or academics.
Tomorrow will be a better day.
I am finding myself quite stressed and impossible to live with today, so I decided to analyze my life and try to figure out if I am just a mean, angry lady, or if there might be legitimate factors contributing to my frustration.
1. My bathroom has been torn up for about ten days and there is no end in sight. It will be at least three more weeks – if everything goes well – before I can flush, wash, and/or bathe within the privacy of the “master suite.” Right now, I’m using the kitchen sink for toothbrushing and makeup removal (1st floor), the boys’ bathroom for necessaries (2nd floor), and the attic bathroom for showers (3rd floor). It works well, but having my personal stuff spread over three levels is disconcerting.
2. Our annual ministry banquet is tomorrow night, and ministry always has a way of bringing out many differences of opinion and last-minute ideas that I don’t handle very gracefully.
3. Andrew’s first gymnastics meet is tomorrow morning, which means an early rising and departure and then helping him through an event about which he is quite apprehensive.
4. I miscalulated (or failed to calculate) when PMS would hit. I heard Joyce Myer say today that PMS is just a pretty mean sister, and I can relate. It seems like I am SURELY wise enough to be done with this phase of life. How long, Lord?
5. Katie went back to college and I miss her. Nuff said.
6. Jessica is going to have her wisdom teeth out the day after tomorrow. I am very sorry to have to put her through that, and I am not sure how best to help her through the first couple days.
7. Our pastor called a church-wide 21-day fast, and this is Day 5. Various family members are doing various modifications thereof, but the long and short of it is that no comfort foods are being consumed, and I am definitely not being comforted!
8. I made my awesome Texas Almond Sheet Cake today to take to the banquet tomorrow. Because I got interrupted and then got flustered because I had forgotten to take Andrew’s playmate home, I forgot to put the almond extract in the frosting. Result: It wouldn’t spread properly, looks really cruddy, and probably won’t taste very good.
8. Katie is about to have her first job interview(s) and I feel like I have not prepared her well for that. The young lady had to go online to figure out how to write a resume, for crying out loud! Where was her high school guidance counselor and why was she never enrolled in “Job Application Skills 101?” In addition, I am trying to advise her on which of her writings to submit with one of the applications, and I really don’t know how to figure that out.
9. I am going to be gone from the house from 8:00 AM to 10:00 PM tomorrow, so I am having to think through everything I need for 14 hours, a gymnastics meet, and a ministry banquet, get it all organized, get it all packed, and get it all loaded. But my brain is dead.
10. When we do return home, we will be bringing an overnight guest who is driving more than three hours to attend the banquet. But I will have been gone all day, so there is no way for me to make sure that we will walk into a decently straightened home. I hate walking into a messy house when it’s just us chickens, but I LOATHE it when we have guests.
11. I won’t be here to do laundry on Sunday afternoon, so I would normally do it Saturday, but being gone all day Saturday, I am trying to get it done today, but it’s 9:19 PM, and there’s still one more load to start, two to finish,and two to fold.
12. Andrew won’t do his supper clean up, and there has been much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. His bedtime is 8:30 PM, but he is just now starting the clean up. So much for getting him to bed early for his big day tomorrow.
So, yes, I think there are some actual reasons why I am having such a tough time. I’m glad to have figured out that I am not just miserable by nature. Surely after the gymnastics meet, the banquet, the extraction, and the interview, I will be able to relax and enjoy life a bit more.
And, I have a lunch date on February 3 with my friend, Dianne. We will comfort ourselves with excellent Mexican food, including many chips and much salsa!
I am trying return from my unintended blogging hiatus, and as usual at times like these, so much has happened that I don’t know where to start. Here – in no particular order – is an incomplete list of some Christmas traditions, memories, and/or events of recent weeks.
Katie coming home! (Had I mentioned that Katie has almost a MONTH off for Christmas break? We are so glad she’s here.)
Boys dipping pretzels in almond bark
Making Bird’s Nest Cookies with Grandma R. She was here for a week over Christmas during her cross country move from CA to NC, and we made LOTS of cookies: Bird’s Nest, Christmas Cookie Balls, PB ones topped with Hershey’s Kisses, Norwegian Spice Cookies, and Fudge. Grandma, Jessica, and I had something of a production line going.
Watching the stockings get larger and the space under the tree get smaller as people shopped and wrapped in the days before Christmas
Caroling to neighbors and friends on Christmas Eve, and delivering cookies to them.
Breakfast casserole, cinnamon rolls, and fresh pineapple on Christmas morning.
Watching a family movie on Christmas day. This year it was Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, compliments of Jessica.
Re-celebrating Christmas with my parents a few days later. We like to verbally share what they mean to us, and it’s was a very special, Kleenex-filled time.
Pool and ping-pong with Grandpa. He’s quite good at both!
