The Unfinished Craft

I am great at starting things. I love the excitement of new crafts and projects! It is so fun to sit down with something new and a new idea. The trouble is, I have difficulty seeing them through to the end.

I had to semi-tidy my sewing table when we were having company earlier this week. There, I found the half-done projects I have thrown over there and promptly forgotten about. The felt sea animals based on the library book? I started that three months ago--and 2 seahorses and six jellyfish later, it languishes waiting for me to get a second wind and cut out more critters for embellishment with ribbons and beads. And look, here is the fabric I bought for the Roman blind in the guest bathroom, along with the plastic rings and cord to make it a blind. Hmmm. That one hasn't even been started--just the materials enthusiastically purchased a blue moon ago. And now I have my master bedroom blinds cut out and ready for the simple curtain loop and sewing on of beaded trim and ribbon for tying them up. Maybe that one will actually be DONE sometime soon, since we are going to be painting the bedroom.

I think what I will have to do is to take a whole year for "unfinished projects". This includes the yardwork, and finally finishing our shed...tons of stuff we've been meaning to do, but just haven't motivated ourselves to do. Then, every time we want to start something new, instead we pick something unfinished from our list and do that. I'm willing to bet that if we did that, we would have a much tidier house and yard. Now if I could only DO it and we could stick to it! Hehe. Always the problem of completion... :)

A Tidy House!

Well, our house is pretty much as clean as it gets unless parents are descending. Wahoo! By this I mean that our main living areas are 90% tidy (I admit to two clutter piles on the IKEA bookcase and kitchen counter) and I even mopped the floors in the dining room & kitchen yesterday. *gasp* Yes, I know...I am not a big fan of house cleaning, but the floors were crying out for a little love, so the Swiffer WetJet was employed to rid them of spills and some bird mess. All the bird-generated newspaper confetti is gone, and our bird even has a clean cage.

Yes, yes, your mother/wife does know how to clean. Hard to believe, after living with the detritus of vacation unpacking for a week, but there you are. All of which was prompted, btw, by DH inviting another out-of-town co-worker for dinner. I sent him with the urchins to pick up co-worker from the ferry, and finished up everything while they were gone. I even had time to have a quick shower and a cool drink in hand when they got home. Woohoo! DH created a yummy chicken tikka masala (mmmmmmmmm...) and we had lowfat lemon poundcake and fresh berries for dessert. What a great night!

Now if I could only get the rest of my life as neat and tidy. I have to finish paying hospital bills from DS' arrival, if I could only get the right person at the hospital on the phone to take my flexible spending account card number, #$%^ it! And I have to figure out how large a chunk I am taking off the CC debt this month, and schedule that payment. Wahoo! Love seeing that go back to zero where it belongs...we're getting there. I managed to switch my application at the community college to an application for an adjunct faculty position, which frankly suits me better right now and is more of what I had in mind from the get-go. I have to call and check on that next week...waiting to hear from them drives me nuts. Of course I could be rejected yet again, which would make me sad. Probably more so than before, because this is really only for a couple of classes at most and WOULD be entirely at night, so it would be perfect for us right now, as I said. We will see what comes of that.

I have to finish sorting through mail and come up with a better system than "throw it there and I'll get through it eventually". Hmmm. We will see what ideas perk through the brain over the next week or so.

Somewhat organized is better than totally disorganized...there is progress here, peeps!

Crappy Coffee Convictions

Yet another fun little remnant of our vacation is that we are now back on the caffeine. Sleep deprivation coupled with driving pushed us from caffeinated coffee into Starbucks DoubleShots and (for DH) Red Bull by the last day of our vacation. We were so desperate for coffee one morning that we assembled the beat up perk coffeemaker in the RV to make coffee, because we broke the SpaceMaker carafe while cleaning it (which we replaced, btw).

Anyhow, while on our trip we bought some Starbucks coffee at the "Food Round Up" or something equally cutesy in West Yellowstone, MT. They didn't have pre-ground coffee, though, so I had to use the store machine for grinding. That particular choice was a poor one, in hindsight, because clearly someone else had used the machine and hadn't ground up all their beans. I discovered this halfway through the bag, as the Starbucks house blend slowly gave way to the most vilely artificially raspberry flavored coffee I have ever tasted. It says something that we actually DRANK it while on vacation.

Now that we are back home however, it is squirreled away in the top of the coffee cupboard, to be reserved only for those times when we most desperately NEED COFFEE!! I hope we won't find ourselves needing it, because, dang, we are coffee SNOBS. No cheapy flavored robusta beans for us! Only good quality arabica that's well roasted, TYVM. Good coffee is like good wine--it spoils you for the cheap kind.

Of course, DH & I got into a great philosophical discussion last night sparked by the 100th episode of "Dirty Jobs". That show reminds me how darn blessed we are not to be the people who clean out septic tanks or pick up roadkill or do thousands of other nasty jobs. And of course we moved on to talk about third world countries and how dirty jobs are even more dangerous there because of the lax safety standards. I was reminded of a photoessay I saw in a magazine, about poverty around the world. One picture haunts me to this day, of a woman and her family (her children and her mother) who were living in a one room shack, I think in Bulgaria. And this woman used to be a prostitute until her kids begged her not to do it any more, and so she gave it up even though it meant that shack was all they could afford. They were so poor that they collected plastic bags and tied them up tightly to use as fuel for their fire, and they burned so dirtily that they were all covered (even the baby) in dark black soot. SO sad.

And here I sit, at my expensive laptop, complaining about cheap flavored coffee and putting out tons of cardboard for recycling when that woman and her family would be GRATEFUL to have cardboard to burn. Wow. The disparity is so incredible. I have a greater appreciation for what some friends of ours meant when they were saying they had a hard time supporting their church's multimillion dollar building campaign when a good friend of theirs was running an orphanage in Kenya on less than a thousand dollars a month. Their church has a perfectly good building, but they want to make some aesthetic changes, make it a little bigger, etc...and here their friend was paying a nurse $100 per month to come to the school & orphanage every day to check on the kids who were sick and provide care. Wow. That is a big difference...when literally pennies per day can feed someone, versus being a proverbial drop in the bucket for a comparatively wealthy church's building fund.

It does make me want to give more. I have a bunch of things for the food bank, but I just haven't bothered to put it all in the car and drop it off. Ditto some clothes for Goodwill. Hmmm. Talk about convicting! It's too easy to ignore the widows and orphans and complain about our own good fortune. I hope I can do a better job teaching our kids and reminding myself of our many blessings and sharing them with those in need. I suppose you could say that crappy coffee convicts hearts! Ha!

Hello?

So I am going to do something here, which is add a page counter to the blog. I get next to no comments on posts, so I would like to get some sense of whether anyone is actually, you know, READING this blog. As fun as it is to ramble to myself, it is not really a sanity saver so much as a time drain on some days.

I'm still trying to re-establish normalcy here since our little trip. DD is doing better with tantrums, and has gotten back into the swing of her normal routine. Of course, that means that DS is determined to change it up on me, and I think in addition to teething and starting solids, he is now trying to drop a nap. I was expecting it, he hung onto the 3 naps per day for longer than I thought he would. However, figuring out when his natural naptime is and then adjusting that to DD's schedule will take a few more weeks. Which means, in short order, I am cranky because DS is cranky.

He's a charming little bugger. I'm trying to get him to sleep in his swing now, and he looked over at me and gave me a huge smile and giggled. Cute kid. He's tired though, I am predicting a crash in about ten minutes.

We still have boxes all over the den. I still haven't found my cell phone. DH helpfully suggested checking it online to make sure no one is using it. Hmmmm. If I had known about that particular feature earlier this week I would have done that, TYVM. I'm pretty sure however that the battery is dead and it's hiding in some of the remaining stuff from the RV that I have yet to put away.

I'm also annoyed with myself for the state of the yard. More weeding needed! Veggie garden needs weeding! And fertilizing! Need to weed and feed back lawn! It never ends, people, I'm telling you. And I have a mountain of clean laundry which needs to be folded. It would probably help if, instead of putting folded clothes back on top of the mountain, DH actually took two minutes to put them away when we are getting ready for bed. Just a thought. Of course he is probably annoyed to come home to continual clutter.

Eyes drooping....closed...yep. He's out. DD is playing with PlayDoh and will probably do so for the next hour, so I'd better get to cleaning up our den. Oh joy. Give me a home improvement project any day over housecleaning. Yuck.

Blighted Idaho

We had a clear slate for the 3 day journey home. We could have gone back through Montana and eastern Washington, but we decided it would be more fun to loop south through Idaho and new countryside, then head north home. I wish DH had done then what he did while we were driving through Idaho yesterday, and already committed. He did a Google search for attractions or interesting things to see within a hundred mile radius of our location. His sole hit? An adult entertainment store. Uh-huh.

I am cursing my stupidity for acquiescing in this matter now, as we drive through southern Idaho. As far as I’m concerned, Idaho has mostly been one big black spot in our trip. The only nice thing I think I saw was a two second glimpse of an eaglet and parent bald eagle on a nest near the Snake River, and that was from binoculars as our RV whizzed by. And hey, I can see that at home, so it doesn’t really redeem the rest of Idaho for me. Sorry.

Why am I excoriating Idaho? Well, let me see. First off, when we crossed into Idaho from Wyoming, we spent nearly an hour cruising around a beautiful lake. How is that a bad thing? Well, there was not one single sign telling us the name of the lake! Even our maps had no name on it for the lake. Is it Palisades Lake, after the dam at one end? Calamity Lake, after a campground we passed? I haven’t a clue, and clearly Idaho has no intention of telling me. I’m going to have to look it up on Google Earth when I can get a decent signal just to satisfy our curiosity!

Which brings me to another point. All along the road, we see billboards advertising “CLR TLK”, aka Clear Talk, apparently a cellular service provider here in Idaho. And yet, I get about the worst, crappiest signal for my cell phone and the Sprint card I use to access the internet on the road. Which means, no contact with my peeps, or emailing more photos to the fam—nada. GRR. Yes, maybe it’s an addiction, but I like to let my friends and family know what’s going on and find out how they are doing. For all I know my sister could be in labor or have delivered our niece by now—I probably won’t get any signal until we cross the state line.

Adding to our frustration with the incredibly boring scenery was the fact that most of Idaho is a huge wind tunnel. We spent the better part of the afternoon wrestling the RV between the lane markings while forty mile an hour winds buffeted us. It gets pretty darn frustrating to be constantly fighting the wind, and seeing how it sucked the life out of the RV’s meager gas mileage just added to the irritation. There’s something else those “Go RVing” ads don’t tell you—an RV isn’t exactly windproof, and the door rattled so much I thought it was going to come off. The wind DID blow off one of the rear turn signal covers, so that’s something we are going to have to replace for our neighbors. Great. And I was mega-annoyed by the fact that every highway has about four or five different numbers attached to it, so figuring out if we are still on the right road can be a royal pain in the rear at times.

I mentioned the Snake River. It is very pretty, and we saw several whitewater rafting excursions out there yesterday. We will do that another time when the kids are older. However, what’s the next best thing? Staying next to the river, of course! So we booked into the Twin Falls KOA, right next to the Snake River. For some unfathomable reason (perhaps the lack of sleep referenced in my blog a few days ago), we miscalculated the number of miles between the Grand Tetons and Twin Falls, and so ended up on the road late. This meant that DS was screaming for the last half hour or so because he was just DONE being on the road. (As an aside, I think the road noise gets to him because when we’re on surface streets he’s fine again at the end of the day.) So we didn’t pull into the site until just after 8 pm. It was still light enough to see the pretty river, and we had eaten a fast food dinner to keep DD from going nuts, so we could just relax. I thought, “Ok, this is nice—I can settle for a nice night.” We even had cute little sparrows nesting in the tree next to our site. My birders heart went, “Awwwwwww.”
I’m just going to gloss over DD’s crying fit and time spent in bed with me and DS, and the hour or so it took to get both of them back to sleep at 2 am. It’s a time of my life I’d rather flush down the toilet, thanks. Anyway, we finally got back to sleep, and I was rudely jarred out of sleep in the middle of the night by a loud buzzing noise. A plane!! It kept coming back and buzzing the campsite, and I was getting seriously pissed off and ready to call the FAA with a noise complaint about this d@mn joyrider out at God-only-knew what hour of the night, when my sleep deprived brain figured out it was a crop duster. Sh!t. It finally left and I dozed back off, thanking God for the miracle that neither DS or DD woke up due to this. Then, it came BACK at 6 am. DH told me it came around the first time at 5 am. Of course, DS woke up the second time, and so did DD, and that was that.

So now here I am, at 7:40 am, sitting in the cab of the RV with DH driving as fast as he can to get the hell out of Idaho. I should have known what we were in for when we passed a Wal*Mart Supercenter-sized Army surplus store, whose signs boasted all manner of military supplies and even had old military vehicles for sale. Hmmmmmm. All that did was remind me of the newspaper stories about whacked out loners living in Idaho and separatist militias. Goody. That’s it Idaho—we’ve enjoyed looking at your potato fields (for about fifteen minutes, the rest of the eight hours of viewing were kind of dull) and we enjoy eating your spuds, but we won’t be hurrying back to be tourists in your state again.

Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons

As a note, we spent four days in Yellowstone National Park and one day in the Grand Tetons, so this is a highly condensed travelogue of our time there. Suffice it to say the wide open feel extends to time, which seems to slow down even more while you are there. We were sorry to leave it behind for the real world again!

Yellowstone was undoubtedly everything it was cracked up to be, and then some. I was not really prepared for the complete spaciousness that greets you. I loved the big, open feel of Montana, but this was different again. It was just completely wild. Montana is all ranchland, but Yellowstone is just open wilderness. You drive into the park and hit that first open vista, and feel like taking a big breath and letting it out slowly, along with all the stress of modern life. Seeing bison roaming and grazing adds to the “step back in time” feel, and you can almost picture yourself coming through as a settler in a covered wagon. It just seems so totally untouched, and we loved that.

The fires that raged through the park in 1988 completely changed the landscape. The old lodgepole pine forests are visible, the bare trunks of the burned trees standing as a stark testament to just how much of the park was ravaged by fire. However, there are healthy young trees that naturally reseeded, and a lot of the dead trees have fallen down now. It is fascinating to see the new trees and all the fallen dead trees—almost like someone scattered them with a gigantic bowling ball. The thermal features have their own unique signature on the landscape, too. Unexpectedly you come across pockets of steam coming up from the ground, the orange and white colors indicating geologic activity. The smelly springs and geysers hit you in the nose first, and then you turn a corner and see a massive white and orange outcropping with billowing steam at the top. We bought an audio guide and accompanying book about Yellowstone and it told several gruesome stories about unwise visitors who met untimely ends after walking on the crusts of thermal pools, or diving in to save their dog, or leaving food out for grizzlies (suffice it to say that fellow became food). Yuck. It reinforced our decision to visit only a few thermal geysers/pools with DD, and to always use her monkey backpack (with a convenient tail leash). Still we were not comfortable wandering around the areas with extensive thermal pools and boardwalks, so we only visited a few where she was easy to keep confined and the walks were short enough that she wasn’t likely to become bored and want to stray off. We had no interest in becoming a statistic.

We were fascinated and repelled by the tourists who seemed intent on becoming one, however. It was absolutely unbelievable how many people got out of their cars and were repeatedly violating the 25 yard minimum rule for distance from bison, elk, or deer. It is supposed to be a hundred yards away from a bear, and yet people were intent on violating that, too! HELLO??? The “get closer to get good photos” of the bison phenomenon was really the most common one, and we were just open-mouthed at the stupidity of it. They have horns, they run faster than you, and they have CALVES to protect, people!! Hello! Stay away! Get a better telephoto lens for your camera and please don’t check your brain at the door of your car. Unbelievable.

We saw a lot of wildlife there. It was always obvious when animals were close to the road because there would be a glut of cars stopped to view them and take pictures, and the inevitable stupid ones who were getting out of their cars to get up close and personal. We saw several bald eagles, osprey, and plenty of ravens. Lots of bison, lots of elk, some mule deer. Completely memorable was the herd of bison hoofing it down the road, right past our RV! We got some great video of that. DH was 2 feet away from bison calves as they loped by. SO COOL! And I saw coyote pups playing outside their den, and we saw 2 black bears foraging. On our last day in Yellowstone, as we were passing out of the park, we saw a grizzly sow and her two cubs! We are glad the rangers are aware of bear movements, apparently, as everywhere we saw bears there were two or three rangers directing traffic and keeping bears away from people seemingly intent on suffering the consequences of their own stupidity. Frankly we were happier that the bears and wildlife were being protected from the people than the other way around, which is a pretty miserable way to feel, but you get pretty tired of seeing folks doing exactly what they had been told explicitly not to do. We kept hoping to see a ranger pull up and start ticketing people!

The Grand Tetons were sparser on wildlife, but that was probably because we stayed away from the main drag around the lakes and instead stuck to the sagebrush flats on the east. Beautiful scenery, though, and of course the Tetons themselves are magnificent. No sightings of moose, which was a disappointment for me, nor of the rare trumpeter swan. However, when you are mainly sticking to the road it’s to be expected. The next time we come we will do some hiking and really get out there instead of doing mostly car sightseeing. With kids’ naps and stops, however, come limitations. It made me very happy we had the RV to be “at home” wherever we happened to be, and we certainly loved what we saw. We will be back, that’s for sure.

Decompression Days

Since returning from our little holiday, our DD has been the most disobedient, willfull, stubborn, and naughty child in recent memory. Yes, she was naughty on vacation, too, but the level didn't reach as high as it is now. Frankly it's more exhausting than all the unpacking and cleaning and laundry, and that's saying a lot.

I'm sure it's just the typical 2 and a half stage of temper tantrums and wanting things her way, all the time. The thing is, I am not willing to put up with it. DH was more willing to be accommodating on vacation, but even then there were times that I physically restrained her and took her back to the bedroom, and let her have her tantrum there while I ignored her. She pushed and pushed us, and I knew that limits had to be re-established. She cut out that little routine after three times of having enforced "time-outs" where she could have her tantrums in the bedroom and wasn't allowed back into the main part of the RV until she was calmed down, speaking with words instead of screaming, and behaving herself.

She had a tantrum this morning about having a pacifier. I am keen to re-establish the home routine of "pacifiers are for night-night and naptime only". DD wants to have one whenever she wants to have one, and she got to have one most of the time while we were away due to the road travel time. She got to do lots of things in the RV which we wouldn't allow at home. DH is thinking that gradually restoring the balance is the way to go, whereas I have to deal with her most of the week while he's working, and thus I want to re-establish the normal routine ASAP. I don't know which one of us is "right", probably both and neither. However, it is clear that we are going to have to pick our battles wisely with this little one as we re-adjust to home life.

I am having some moments myself. Confronting the few dirty dishes we had left and finding mold in some plastic glasses did not make my day (they had to be tossed after the dishwasher failed to remove it...ewwwww). Likewise having about a zillion loads of laundry to do, and rushing to get the RV back into immaculate condition, is a bit wearing. I spent time in a laundromat today, spending $7.25 to wash and dry the comforter from the bed in the RV, and doing ours too since I was going to the laundromat. That was fun--I brought no magazines, so I stood with DS in the baby carrier on my chest and just watched the comforters wash, and then dry. About as exciting as watching grass grow, and probably worse since my mind was zipping through all the things I had yet to do in order to make the RV A-OK to return to the neighbors. All while wondering if DH was having trouble with DD at home, since he was actually working from home today and I had forgotten my cell phone.

We have bags all over our den (again) and we also have IKEA furniture we purchased en-route home (since it's over an hour away and was on the way home, it made sense to stop for what we needed). Those boxes are under the coffee table and in our bedroom. DH has suggested we paint our bedroom this weekend, too, since we finally bought a bed for our bedroom (instead of using the rolling frame that has irreparably scarred the new hardwood floors). Hmmmm...I'll go for that if we get the rest of the crap stuff put away first.

*sigh* Remind me again how vacations leave you relaxed?