moon

how cool is this picture Josh took of the moon tonight?

fatty dog

88 pounds!
the vet wants him to lose 8-10 pounds or put him on a prescription diet. I figure cutting out table scraps will do the trick, plus more walks. And Josh fenced off a section of the backyard where we can throw scraps for the chickens that Buddy can't get to. I'm sure at least 5 pounds of his weight is from the chicken bones incident! Honestly though, I was surprised he doesn't weigh more.

thankful for them

thankful for them
Originally uploaded by mosaic me

let's play...

How much does my dog weigh?

yesterday and today

I didn't post yesterday.
We're having a hard time getting over this stomach bug. Kaylie is on round two of it and stayed home today due to being up all night long, poor girl. My stomach perpetually hurts and Claire just...stinks.
Josh got home Sunday night and started a new job being filmed on the Disney lot the very next morning. And...we had to cross the picket line. I say "we" because I dropped him off and picked him up the first day. He's not in any union (yet) and he's not doing the writers' job, so he's not technically a scab, is he?

irony

so ironic that I found this yesterday at hipster cards. (cause I'm so hip, you know ;)
I know there are plenty of you choking on your beverages at this one.
And no, I didn't make it myself. ;)

SOMEBODY CUT ME A F-ING BREAK PLEASE!

1:00AM. Again, someone is awake and from the sound of it, in the bathroom. Damn, I've got another sickie sitting on the toilet. I shove her a trashcan and in 10 minutes it's full of puke. As soon as I get her up off the pot and the puke wiped away so I can move her into the shower, guess what happened? The other one greeted me at the bathroom door with, "MOM? BLAJDFKASDFAHISDFHAOWIEHFOAIWHFAWEFDH." All over the carpet right next to my bed.

My bedroom smells gorgeous, I have two loads of laundry to do now and a bathroom floor and toilet to clean. Best part of it, besides being alone with no help, is that poor Joshie will probably get it next just in time to come home. :(

home

it's been a tough day

Confession time, kids: I went off of vitamin Z.
Cold turkey, unsupervised.
Sometimes I do that for a day or two between refills and it usually isn't a big deal. The main side effect I suffer from are surges, which I've learned to get used to. But this time I was off for two days...three days, four, five...and both Josh and I noticed lots of little differences. I was laughing and smiling spontaneously and we both were surprised by it. There are lots of other little things that were a big deal so I decided to make a go of it and never refilled my prescription.

My friends, that lasted about three weeks. With the yin comes the yang and I hit a low this morning that I hadn't felt in years. As if being depressed and anxious about what I would usually consider normal things spiraled out of control and I couldn't make my brain stop cycling from isolating a thought, carrying it from what if it worst case scenario in about 10 minutes. Each negative thought or item of stress took this same cycle until I thought I was going to throw up. I always bump the wackiness factor up a notch or two at this time of the month courtesy of PMS but I usually can control my thoughts enough to know what I'm freaking out about and what is a valid concern. There was none of that these past two or three weeks. Normal situations would cause me to freeze like a deer in the headlights because I couldn't think rationally of what to do next.

Like I said, I hit new lows today so I sucked up my pride and filled my prescription and added a dash of Xanax (my last 1/2 emergency pill) and feel like I'm on my way to feeling better. Of course, this means that I will stop crying at dead hummingbirds and human fetuses in museums, songs and commercials. Screw laughter and libido, plain old sanity is what I need.

Thanks for bearing with me.

field trip

Yesterday I went on a field trip with Kaylie's fifth grade class (as a chaperone, ooooo!) to the California Science Center. We all trudged to South Central LA on big, yellow, exhaust-spewing school buses. I had a group of seven 10-year olds to supervise. We waited in the hot sun (it was 90 degrees today, the kind of weather you've heard me say I pay good money for to live in CA) for the IMAX movie, Prehistoric Sea Creatures or something. The movie was pretty neat; they sure don't make 3D like Captain Eo anymore, do they? The movie followed the life of this little penguin-dolphin type of animal called a dolly-something-saurus. (I'll look it up. (Better yet, you look it up by following the science center link above, deal?) It was so cool to feel like you were swimming in the middle of a school of fish, or to see the glassy layer of dimension on the aerial shot of the ocean. The kids couldn't help but reach out to try to touch the images; I caught myself wanting to do the same. HOWEVER! I was not in the mood for the whole circle of life spiel today. The cute little dolly-saurus saw her mom and her brother eaten over her lifetime and had a chunk of her fin bitten off by a shark-o-saurus, where the shark's tooth was embedded in her scarred flipper foreverandeveramen, until her bones were found somewhere in Colorado thousands of years later.

I cried at the fucking movie, okay? Is that what you wanted to hear? Is everyone happy now?

Cheerfully continuing on the day's theme of life and death, we (my group and I) noticed the teacher awkwardly standing over something near the side of the spiral staircase. It was a teeny little hummingbird that she said was dead, or at least in the throes of death. It was the saddest thing I've seen in a long time! I scooped it up with my museum papers and carried it over to the science center workers. They informed me that it was against their policy to pick up sick or injured animals. I looked around over the three flights of spiral stairs leading up and all the layers of bird crap under their favorite perches. Pigeons grow fat in the city, you know. (All I could think as we walked up was bird-flu-bird-flu with every step. Right-left-right-left. Bird-flu-bird-flu. Dear Lord, please let the kids have enough sense to step over it.) I said "Really? With all this crap around and things hanging from the ceiling, you don't have injured and dead birds all the time?" Nope. They pretended to call their "animal care department" to get me off their back, crazy lady in high heels at a freaking museum with a twitching bird (nearly) in her hand.

I couldn't stay until the fictional animal care team arrived, damned kids, so I tucked the bird, still on the paper, near the entrance and under a bench, then let the worker-people know where I'd put it. As I was doing this it made one last attempt at spreading its wings - literally. It didn't look fully grown to me, so maybe it was a fallen fledgling. I spent the rest of the day trying to convince myself that all it needed was some warmth and a quiet, safe place to recover and it would be fine, but I just don't know. I do know it was saved from death by stomping fifth grader, though.

Back home,we get Claire, have Big Sticks courtesy of Teresa and Jordan, change, get back on the road to go meet Nana. Sneeze and sniffle (them, not me) the entire way there. Shit. Meet Nana at Panda Express, eat dinner, kids pass out cold on the 90 minute drive home. Still sniffling and sneezing like faucets and whatever else sneezes a lot. Drag kids into Vons for fresh supply of Dimetapp and tissues, since they each went through two Puffs travel packs in the car. (those are my favorite travel tissues, just so you know) Get 'em home, shower 'em up, dose 'em up, herd 'em into bed. Hallelujah. There is hope for the to go to school tomorrow yet!

1:20AM. Someone is awake. Kaylie. She yells for me that she's nauseous and needs a bucket. I fly across the floors in my socks just in time to get a half-full trash can (for junk mail) under her face and she starts to hurl. Ahhh, partially digested Panda Express. Isn't it enough that I couldn't eat Chinese food when I was pregnant with her? I manage to not puke myself, clean Kaylie up, clean out the trash can and line the rest of them with plastic liners and placed at each kid's bedside. I'm ready.

(thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you Joshie for my flickr pro account! wheeeee!!!)

tagged by R

1- Link to the person that tagged you and post the rules on your blog.
2- Share 7 random and or weird things about yourself.
3- Tag 7 random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.
4- Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

7 Random things about me:

1. I was one of the first three people waiting for OJ's famous slow-speed chase on the street at his Rockingham home. I have a whole roll of film from that day.

2. I don't like movies.

3. The entire left side of my body is a half-size bigger than my right.

4. I have a crush on Dirty Jobs Mike Rowe.

5. I went to Joe Blasco makeup school and graduated at the top of my class (of five) but never did a thing with it. (hi mom!)

6. Richard Moll is the only person ever able to correctly guess my ethnicity

7. Brussels sprouts are the only vegetable I won't eat

*I'm still working on who I am going to tag

I had a shitty day. I'll elaborate later.

britney spears is a spoiled brat

Breaking news,I know, but I've developed a fresh new sense of hatred for the skank in the last 24 hours, since I saw the dancer's rehearsal of "Gimme More" at the VMAs. As if it wasn't obvious that she was "marking" the performance (what one usually does in rehearsal), seeing what the performance was intended to look like was...sad. Just sad. I could get up there and do better than that tired, drug-addled thing.

7,000 views

Not blog views - Flickr views.
Seven thousand views since June 2007
kinda makes me smile :) which is kind of difficult this week.

please excuse Laura...

from blogging anything meaningful today, as she has some sort of wicked flu. Vomiting, headache, dizziness and skin that feels like it's been sliced off with razor blades as I speak. Fever of 1o1. She can barely sit up for more than 10 minutes, that's how much everything hurts.

One's personal misery is all relative, isn't it?

On the bright side:

"I'm one stomach flu away from reaching my goal weight." by Emily Blunt as Emily in The Devil Wears Prada.

(That one was for you, Mom ;)

I lost our children today

I've never done that before. I've known where they were every second of their 10 and 6 years together. I couldn't find them after school. I raced laps around the school; across the playground, past the kinder building, into one hallway, checking classrooms and bathrooms, swing around the other hallway, still checking everywhere, trying to control my rising panic. They were supposed to meet in front of room 16 for the jewelry sale but the sale was called off. Claire was freaking because she'd been told what to do, damn it, and she didn't want to get busted. Kaylie finally met up with Claire and out of the goodness of her heart because she didn't want her baby sister to cry (which means she wanted to buy some jewelry, of course!), asked the teacher who was doing the jewelry sale if she'd bring in the stuff anyway so they could buy something. Lovely teacher that she is, she did. I was actually talking to that teacher when I was walking in to school and she was carrying a box of jewelry. Hey, I had to cut her some slack, we've never had her as a teacher. She didn't know those were my kids. I started alerting teachers and other parents while I ran laps and called anyone I knew who might have seen my girls. For about 90 seconds I stood on the steps in front of the school with my heart heavy as a rock in my gut, told myself that it was time to call Josh. I couldn't find our children. Our daughters, our babies, the golden children we'd be nothing without. I was sure someone saw them alone and took them for themselves and I was going to have to kill myself. And then they appeared like two blue-eyed, brown-haired angels and I wanted to throttle the little jewelry-saturated grins off their faces. They faded quickly enough once they realized what had been going on. They'd been in the classroom - a bungalow - during my frenzy. I took the drive home to cool off (by telling them I couldn't talk to them yet, they were already sobbing at that point) and then got their stories. We cried, hugged, called Daddy and talked about all the different reasons for waiting in the allotted area near the office and how they'd given me a headache I'd never be able to get rid of.

A few hours later we were off to Family Movie Night at school which was a whole new fresh sort of hell. Post-dinner parents burping and farting up a storm in a small-ish auditorium watching Shrek 2 while the kids run around screaming, screaming, screaming , screaming. So much screaming! Without them though, the silence would be deafening.

disregard

...that last post, the one about playlists. It's long been deleted, along with my memory. My brain is swiss cheese.
Coherent posts will follow.

Instead, treat yourself to:

El Campo Santo

I'd love it if you would check out the pictures I took yesterday at El Campo Santo, the old graveyard at the Workman Temple Homestead. I've been doing some reading about local history, probably because Kaylie is doing another explorer unit this year. We visited the homestead museum in fourth grade and again in sixth I think. I've always loved the area and been fascinated about the lives of the people who built their homes here "first".

However, I have been highly annoyed to find out that one of the settlers killed himself when he lost all this land at the beginning of the Depression. Kind of an important piece of the story, isn't it? We don't need to go into details, but kids deserve to be told the truth, especially when learning about history at school. Sheesh.

You can also check out more pictures of the cemetery by yours truly here.
If you like, you can read an interesting "article" about Turnbull Canyon, the legends surrounding it and how they tie in to the Workman/Temple/Rowland families. It's a long one though. I've chosen not to believe most of the legends of Turnbull Canyon. Growing up here, I had my fair share of party nights at the locations mentioned above. Still, when a Christian evangalist chick gets mysteriously killed and dragged around the city (beginning on Turnbull Canyon) it does make you pause...

the implosion of the scrapbooking industry

I gave up on competitive scrapbooking about two years ago. I just couldn't compete with new product lines every three months; I was just collecting supplies. I said goodbye to the fifteen-dollar special issues and stopped obsessing over anything scrapbooking...until I found The Blog.

I knew that there was somewhere like this out there. Back in 2002-2003 I met and scrapped with a couple of women who are considered scrapbook "celebrities" and remember the kind of shit that gets talked at crops. You'd have to have your head firmly planted in the sand to think that they don't talk! It was always about whose nanny takes pictures of their charges so their famous scrap-mother can scrap them, who sucks, etc. Not so much who doesn't suck 'cause women are catty.

Back to the implosion: as our disposable incomes dwindled over the past year or two, more and more women got sick of the constant blizzard of new scrapbooking products (some of which really just sucked but we'd buy them anyway) and the new trend of being a "life artist" (that term is a diatribe in itself) and the mutiny began.

First was the saga of "So There Stacy". I always suspected something like this would happen but was shocked that it was the happiest woman alive that fucked up first. STS was followed by the drama of a shitty scrapbooking class by Red Heidi and her sudden exodus to China. I know who these women are and I used to be a fan...not so much anymore.

The next drama that came up had to do with Creating Keepsakes Hall of Fame contest, which actually made Newsweek. No shit.

If scrapbooking conjures up images of kindly suburban women passing pictures around the kitchen table, then you don't know the modern hobby. Outraged scrapbookers recently forced the industry's top magazine, Creating Keepsakes, to strip a New York woman of its coveted Hall of Fame title after readers noticed a photo credit on one of her layouts. The rules require all entries to be the "sole work" of contestants. But while Kristina Contes admits that she made a mistake, she blames "petty, jealous women" for bullying contest officials into disqualifying her work. "I mean, it's not like I stole someone's boyfriend," says the 28-year-old restaurateur. "This isn't high school."

But it is a cutthroat business. Scrappers spent $2.6 billion on supplies last year, according to the Craft & Hobby Association, and one in four households contains a scrapbooker, making it more popular than golf. The Hall of Fame award can bring celebrity status, TV appearances and teaching jobs. After Contes declined to return her title voluntarily, irate hobbyists smeared her on blogs and threatened to flood her restaurant with fake reservations. "The b–––h doesn't have a moral bone in her body," wrote a commenter on the Scrap Smack blog. Over on the Creating Keepsakes Web site, angry readers cried cover-up and threatened boycotts when editors deleted unkind comments about the company from the site's discussion boards. "I wanted an explanation," says Noell Hyman, who was among the first to question Contes's work. She got more than that: Contes and another woman whose work was questioned have been replaced in the 25-member Hall of Fame class for 2007. "Women prove time and again that they are ridiculous, vile creatures," says Contes. She plans to retreat from the scissors-and-glue game—but she'll always have the memories.

P.S. The Blog is worth a read just to find out the nicknames that have been thought up for some of these women. Well, if you like that sort of catty shit. ;)

birds on wires

birds on wires

Somewhere off the 101 in the San Fernando Valley this morning. I've been chasing one of these pictures for a while and finally just *did* it.

NaBloPoMo

So yeah, I'm gonna try to do this again. I think I tried last year, I forget. Or thought about trying, at least. And on this blog, pictures count as posts. Never fear, I'll even the pictures out with a good dose of whatever dog I rescue and get bitten by this week.