Eh, it’s not that bad.  While I was initially frantic about losing so much square footage, it looks like it’s going to work just fine.  The kitchen is tiny, but in some ways it’s set up better than the one in Rhode Island.  For one thing, the sink isn’t right next to the stove, so one of us can be washing up while the other is cooking.  That would never work in Rhode Island.  Yes, the bedrooms are smaller, but we still have plenty of room to have the girls share again, and the room we lost in the office closet is more than made up for in the master bedroom’s walk-in closet.

Folks, I have a walk-in closet again!  Hurrah!  And there are two shelves above the rod, so I have plenty of space for long-term storage on the upper shelf.  Right now I only have the closet about half full, which isn’t so great in a way.  I have a feeling I might try to fill it.  I need to not to do that; I have plenty of clothes as it is.

We have a kind of a weird layout in the downstairs, though.  The front door opens right into the living/dining room, but this room isn’t really large enough for both functions.  I suppose if we didn’t have both a couch and a loveseat, plus two end tables, it would be fine.  But we’ve created a bit of an intimate living room with our tv in one corner and the couch and loveseat making an L in front of it.  The so-called dining area holds my largest bookcase and our storage bench/coat tree.  I’m glad we still have room for that; we have wayyyy too many coats and a tiny coat closet now.  I seriously need to weed them out.  I mean, how many coats does one family need?!  Sheesh.

We have an eat-in kitchen, of sorts.  Technically the area off the kitchen is the “breakfast nook.”  Somehow we’ve managed to shoehorn my china closet and our dining room table (minus a leaf) into the breakfast nook.  We still have yet to eat a meal there; I haven’t managed to clear off that table yet.

But my favorite place in the whole house might be my reading nook.  Yes, folks, I have carved out a nook for myself in my master bedroom once again.  And most of my books are right there in my room with me!  I couldn’t figure out where to put my smaller bookcase, so into the master it went, along with a hanging shelf that used to live in my kitchen and held most of my spices and teas.  Basically anywhere you look in the master, you see books.  How can this be a bad thing?!  I’ve got my reclining armchair right up against the huge window in the master, and today I had a lovely breeze coming in and cooling me down after a long day of unpacking.  And I can see most of the way down my street too.

It’s a very relaxing place to be, and I look forward to spending lots of time there.

I admit it’s pretty weird to be back here.  You know, a lot of people, when they move back to a place they’ve been before, will say, “Wow, I can’t believe how much has changed!”  I didn’t know the area well enough to say that, I guess.  Instead I’ve been telling Kurt, “I can’t believe how much has stayed the same!”  The bank we used to visit a couple of times a week to do a night deposit when I was a kid is still there, though it’s changed names a million times.  The bar where my sister used to waitress right after high school is still there.  Doumar’s, the drive-in diner (and where the ice cream cone was invented) that Norfolk is famous for, is still there — though in that case I would be more shocked if it wasn’t.  We’ll drive by someplace, and I’ll point it out to Kurt as something I remember from 2003, when we lived here before.  I suppose seven years isn’t long enough for things to change drastically.  I’ll let you know when we finally made it down to my old ‘hood.  It’s gone from completely scary ghetto into gorgeously desirable beach front property.  Who would have thought?!  I admit I am surprised.

I just wish the unpacking was over with already. Ugh.  At least I’m more than halfway through it.  I hope.

I admit I am pretty much stressed out of my mind.  I really shouldn’t be; I’m not the one who’s doing the packing.  I’m so worried about how much stuff we have, but then I look around and realize I’ve done a very good job of purging over the last three years.  Just today I got rid of three full garbage bags of kids’ clothes that my girls have outgrown, not to mention the changing table that was given us when Grace was born.  Their new room in Virginia is a bit smaller, so it was necessary to scale down the amount of furniture there.  Besides, the more furniture you have, the more stuff you will accumulate.  And stuff is my enemy at the moment.

We’re scheduled for two days of pack-out and a day to put everything on the truck.  I’m guessing it won’t take that long.  It took a while when we moved from Washington, mainly because we had the garage packed full of… junk, I guess you could call it.  I’ve done so much purging and getting rid of that Kurt is insistent that we have only a fraction of what we had before.  Most of it’s in boxes anyhow, so theoretically the movers could simply mark it “owner packed” and call it good.  Nothing’s breakable in there anyhow.

I’m hoping that they won’t unpack most of my bins.  Some companies insist on putting everything in a box and carrying the bins empty, while other companies will allow you to keep your bins packed.  Clearly I’m hoping for the latter since it’ll be less work for me on the other side.  But I am not sure yet.  We still haven’t met with the movers, though they usually do a pre-move inspection of our stuff.  I guess it’s kind of clear we don’t have much, and nothing terribly valuable unless you count our Obnoxiously Large TV.  Fortunately they already know about that.

I suppose I should just quit worrying.  I’m at the point where there is very little for me to do anyhow.  I’ve got most of the stuff we’re going to need for the next couple of weeks packed up already.  I just wish I had more information.  It’s still not clear when we’ll be getting our stuff.  It could be as early as Friday of this week, but it has to be delivered no later than Monday of the following week.  I’m hoping for Friday because I really do want to watch the Super Bowl in my own house.  My parents would be fine with me hogging their TV for several hours on Sunday, but I’d rather not have to do that.

I don’t handle transitions well, is the problem.  Once I’m there, I’ll be fine.  And being here, I’m fine.  It’s the getting there that’s the issue.  But I’ll be as positive as I can manage and will everything to go as smoothly as possible.

Hey, at least I don’t have to sell my house or look for a new one once I’m in Virginia.  That’s all taken care of, so I really don’t have much to worry about.

Let’s just keep our fingers crossed that the moving truck doesn’t go up in flames on the way down.  It happened to one of my friends.  She lost everything.  Can you imagine the conflagration all my books would cause if a fire broke out??  Yeeesh.

And now, it’s time to relax, chill out, sip my Scotch ale, and maybe read a little.  Just… breathe.  Breathe I can do, one breath at a time. Starting now.

At least the office is right around the corner.  And I have nothing much to do today, aside from straightening the house in preparation for having guests over tonight.

I do have some good news.  I’m getting a new cell phone!  I am ridiculously excited about this, mainly because I am so tired of my current phone. It’s a smartphone, one running Android, which I love.  But the battery life has always been downright awful.  I know smartphones suck battery life, what with their huge screens and all, but my phone is ridiculous.  I pretty much cannot do anything online while I’m away from a charger because my battery drains so quickly.  At that point, what’s the use of having a smartphone?  I could just go back to having a texting phone. Sheesh.

This summer I finally got tired of my phone and called Sprint because I’d sent two text messages and uploaded a photo, which caused my battery to drop to 60%.  Sprint sent me a new battery, but that didn’t solve the problem.  So then I took it in to a Sprint store and they ordered me a replacement phone.  The battery issue seemed to be a bit better on the “new” (i.e., refurbished) phone, but my phone has gone completely non-responsive three times in 24 hours, to the point where I had to pop out the battery to be able to restart the phone.  I’m pretty sure two of those times were a battery issue, but there’s no reason that my battery should die when it was reading 60% before I talked to my mom for 30 minutes.

Last night I called Sprint (and immediately got a human to speak to, and one residing here in the States to boot), and was given several options.  I could: a) take the phone to a Sprint store, where they would probably issue me a “new” (refurbished) phone by the same maker of my current phone, or b) use my upgrade and buy a whole new phone.  I chose option b, even though I shouldn’t really be spending money on a cell phone right now.  During my conversation with the Sprint guy, he told me that phones by the maker of my current phone tend to have a lot of issues, and he confidentially told me that he wouldn’t recommend them to me.  He also told me if I bought my new phone online, I could avoid shipping charges and an activation fee, so it’s not like he was just recommending the expensive phone to get a better commission.

I was hugely impressed by the Sprint guy.  I plan on contacting Sprint and letting them know how awesome he was.

So now I’m getting an HTC Evo.  I admit I have been lusting after this phone since I first saw the commercials for it.  A friend of mine has that phone and adores it.  I have to say, I much prefer Android over iOS4.  I have an iPod, and while it’s not quite the same as having an iPhone, I don’t particularly care for iOS4.  Android gives me a lot more flexibility and control over how I want to arrange my home screen, and I love having widgets available for when I don’t want to open up the full app.  I can even check the current temperature without waking my phone up completely.

I think my old phone knows I’m getting a new phone because now it’s behaving.  It’s still reading a full charge even though I downloaded five updates to my apps this morning, plus sent several texts, plus spoke to K for a short time.  Usually I’d be down to 70% already.  It’s too little too late, though.  I’m definitely eager to get my Evo!

Off to the leasing office now.  Wish me luck.

I admit it’s been a difficult winter.  Kurt left just before Halloween to join his new ship in the Mediterranean.  He was worried about leaving me with the girls all winter long, but he’s had some awesome experiences out there.  He was able to visit Israel, Greece, and Turkey — places I couldn’t dream of seeing.  Yes, yes, I know.  I need a passport.  Maybe I’ll do that once I get back to Virginia so that my mom can keep the kids while I go swanning about Europe with my husband.

I like this plan!

Fortunately, I’ve had the support of a few amazing friends here in Rhode Island.  There’s one in particular I could not have done without.  We met almost a year ago, but never exchanged information until I happened to run into her at a store this fall.  We went out to lunch, and have been very close ever since.  Not a day goes by that we don’t at least text each other to check in.  And what’s nice is that my kids love her as much as I do.  In fact, one night last week, ME started fussing, and when I asked her what she wanted, she started crying for my friend.  Good thing she loves kids!  One night a few weeks ago, I had had a rough night with the girls.  Grace wasn’t listening, she was racing around the house after I told her to settle down, and all of a sudden, I hear a huge crash from the playroom.  She came running back into the living room, scared and crying, because she’d broken the lamp.

Come to find out, she hadn’t just broken the lamp.  She had shattered both of the lightbulbs (it was a floor lamp with a reading lamp attached to it), one of which was a CFL bulb.  And the lamp itself was broken beyond repair.  That didn’t really bother me; it was on its last legs anyhow.  It was just how it had happened after such a difficult night with the kids.  I called up my friend and asked if she could possibly come sit with them so I could go to Walmart by myself to replace the lamp and get a breather.  She was there within minutes, and I was able to get out of the house and cool down for a bit.

Unfortunately, I will be saying goodbye to these folks soon.  In about two weeks, I will be headed back to southern Virginia, not far from where this blog started in the first place, almost eleven years ago.  Kurt’s ship is homeported out of Norfolk, you see, and where he goes, I go too.  I admit I am a little disappointed to return to my roots.  I was born there, you see, and spent most of my childhood shuttling between wherever my father was stationed and Norfolk, where my biological mother was living.  It’s very familiar to me, and I figure I’d rather go someplace new if the Navy’s going to pay for it.  I mean, how else did I end up here in Rhode Island, of all places?!

I have really enjoyed my time here.  Rhode Island is a very distinctive state, moreso than anywhere else I’ve lived.  Rhodies have their own accent, their own slang, their own food, their own stores.  Where else can you get coffee milk at any locally own cafe?  I am pretty sure it’s the state drink, and it was even offered for a time at Grace’s school in the cafeteria.  Rhodies even have their own clam chowder, a delicious version that’s based around a clear broth.  I’m a fan of the New England style myself (tomatoes do not belong in clam chowder, sorry), but the Rhode Island version is quite tasty.  I also love that I can traverse the entire state in just an hour or so.  Nowhere is far away when you live in the tiniest state in the Union.

Also my kids are getting the services they need here.  Mary Ellen is receiving three hours of speech therapy a week, and Grace is in a kindergarten/first grade mixed class.  Once we move, ME will most likely lose all her speech therapy services, and the elementary school in Norfolk only offers half-day kindergarten, which would be a huge step back for Grace.  I’m sure it will all work out for the best, but it’s nice to have all of these options here.

But there are also benefits to moving to Norfolk.  For one thing, there are MANY commissaries scattered around the area, and they’re open seven days a week, instead of being closed every Monday like the one here.  Plus I bet I could buy chicken any time I want to, instead of being forced to shop on a Tuesday just to be guaranteed the products I want.  There are Trader Joe’s all over the area, and I’ll finally be in the same state as a World Market.  I’ll also be much closer to my parents, so I’ll be able to head up there on the weekends if I wish.  And I already have friends there, folks we’ve been stationed with before, and people from this area are moving south too.

Maybe one day we’ll find ourselves in Rhode Island again!  I can only hope.

Since then we’ve moved twice, both times clear across this enormous country, and I’ve given birth to two amazing children.  Kurt and I have gotten older and wiser, and I like to think we’ve aged like fine wine.  We’ve seen the internet grow from an interesting way to find information to this enormous time-sucker against which I have to fight so I can enjoy my books too.  There was no such thing as Facebook ten years ago, for which I am eternally grateful.  My grades were bad enough without it.

But the rules of blogging have changed and moved on without me.  I see a lot of people posting their blogs on their Facebook page, something I refuse to do, as I have always used this space as a way to vent my spleen.  I’d rather complete strangers know the weird crap that goes on in my head, instead of my nearest and dearest.  Technically, no one needs to know that stuff, but I still put it up here.

And that’s fine if people want to be public about their blogs.  It’s just something that wasn’t done when I first started blogging, back before the word “blog” had even to be coined.  There was only one real cardinal rule about blogs among me and my real-life friends, those of whom had jumped on the Diaryland bandwagon: “You don’t talk about your blog.”  Then again, we didn’t have celebrity bloggers, or those who made their living from blogging.  It was just something that internet nerds like to do in their spare time.

But now I can feel myself pulling back from this whole blogging thing.  For one thing, the interaction isn’t what it used to be.  And I’m not one to troll the net to find new blogs.  Every once in a while, someone will point out a blog they particularly like, but it’s been quite a while since I added a new blog to my Google Reader.  The blogs I do have listed, I can’t find the time to read.  Books are pulling me away, Flickr is pulling me away, Facebook is pulling me away.

The second issue is that I’m just not happy with what I have been seeing lately on the blogosphere.  I’ve always tried to stay out of the various flame wars that have arisen.  I hate taking sides, and I know that what is presented is only one person’s version of events.  But recently I was dragged into something not of my choosing, and not of my making.  Not only that, it didn’t even involve me directly.  And honestly, it made me very sad because it showed me that someone whom I thought was a person who tried very hard to put goodness and light into the universe was instead spewing vitriol behind the scenes.  I’m one of those people who think that we have enough hate in the world that what we should try our best to counterbalance it as much as we can by spreading love instead.  Which is not to say that I am perfect.  I know I have engaged in gossip sessions in which I really shouldn’t, but every time I have said something mean or unflattering, I assure you it’s come back on me ten-fold when someone says something terrible to or about me.  It makes me feel awful enough that I don’t want to cause that pain on someone else.

And so I feel all confused, those whom I thought were my friends maybe aren’t so much, and my world has been tipped on its side.  Everything is just all catty-wampus right now.  I don’t know what to do about it.

All I know right now is that I don’t feel all that comfortable here anymore, and that there is 161 items in my Google Reader that I don’t have the heart to wade through.  I’m not saying I’m finished with this blog, but if I’m scarce for a little while, at least you know the reason.

All my best, and all my sunshine and light and love to you all.

ME does, however, have a new skill.  After falling out of her crib one day last month, she’s figured out how to exit it without hurting herself.  We have the crib mattress set as low as it could possibly go, but her legs are long enough to swing up and over.  Then she straddles the top of the crib rail, swings her other leg over, hangs by her hands, and drops the last few inches to the floor.

*sigh*

Yesterday I had to put her back into her crib twice after putting her down for a nap because she absolutely had to have her MagnaDoodle in the crib with her.  I gave up and let her have the MagnaDoodle, but she was so angry that she was being forced to take a nap that she flung it with all her might out of the crib.  She finally fell asleep, though.  Today I put her in her crib to nap, and after five minutes of fussing, I hear an eerie silence.  I gave her a few minutes, and when I finally cracked open the door to check on her, she was peacefully asleep — in Grace’s bed!  Hey, at least she was sleeping, though.  Clearly I need to switch Grace to a big-girl bed, and put ME in the toddler bed.

It’s just funny because Grace was perfectly content in her crib until she was three years old, and the only reason we moved her into the toddler bed was because she was potty-trained, and I didn’t want to prevent her ability to visit the bathroom in the middle of the night.  Every day I marvel at how different my two girls are, even though they’re quite alike in other ways.

(Goodness!  Not even 7pm and evening colors has sounded.  The days are getting shorter and shorter…)

Grace seems to adore kindergarten, although we’ve already (!!!) had a few episodes of “But Mom, I need to do my homework!” right before bedtime.  Is that something every kid does, something they know inherently?!  I didn’t think it would happen in kindergarten, for crying out loud!

Homework is really no big deal, not for kindergarten.  Thus far she’s had to come up with something that could hurt someone’s feelings if it were said to them (part of a discussion on how mean things “wrinkle” people’s hearts, and why we should try our best not to wrinkle someone’s heart), color a few worksheets, and put together an “all about me” bag.  One activity per day.  It takes her probably ten minutes, tops, to do her homework.  I just need to be better about checking her homework folder.

There’s a lot for parents to learn about going to school, not just the kids!

In non-child related news, I had my eyes checked last week.  I’m on my last pair of contacts, and I needed a new prescription to buy more.  It’s been three years since I had my eyes checked, mainly because I wear my contacts for longer than I should, so a one-year prescription tends to last me more like three.  Oops.  But I never ever ever sleep in them.  Yikes.  I did that a couple of times in college, and I felt like my eyes were glued together.  It was nice to wake up being able to see without trying to find my glasses, though.

Amazingly enough, the naval clinic could examine my eyes for me.  I’d always been told they wouldn’t, since they won’t write a contact lens prescription for dependents.  I guess things have changed in the last few years, which is awesome because now I don’t have to pay for a contact lens exam!  So last week I show up at my appointment with contacts in, but with my case and solution in case I need to remove them, plus I’d brought my glasses in as well.  Good thing, too, because I had to take my contacts out to have my eye puffed (ugh, I hate that machine), and it was time for me to have my eyes dilated.

Grr.  If there’s one thing I really hate, it’s having my eyes dilated — and it’s been a super long time since it was done.  Oh well.  I lived.  But it was zero fun.

What confused the crap out of me was I had to return for my contact lens exam.  I understood why I had to take out my contacts to have my eyes examined, but I don’t get why they wouldn’t do the contact lens exam first, and then the glasses exam.  Fortunately, though, they had an appointment just two days later, so I was able to knock out both appointments quickly (complete with yet another eye puff at the second appointment), and with my brand spankin’ new prescriptions in my hot little hands, off I headed to BJ’s Wholesale Club, where they were having an amazing deal going on for glasses, and where I could get the best deal on contacts.

I approached the woman behind the eyeglasses counter, and when she asked what I needed, I said, “At minimum, I need contacts!”  That’s when I ran smack dab up against another of Rhode Island’s stupid little rules:

Third-party providers (like Walmart, Target, BJ’s, whomever) cannot dispense contact lenses.

I KNOW, RIGHT?!  You have to get them from your ophthalmologist or your optometrist.  An optician cannot fill lens prescriptions, only ones for glasses. This was not an option for me, as the naval clinic won’t dispense them to civilians like me.

Yay, Rhode Island, you have failed me once again.

Fortunately I live almost to the border of Massachusetts, so it was rather trivial of me to hop across the border and place my order with the BJ’s up there.  And I got a new pair of glasses to boot ($90 for lenses and frame — wahoo!), though I’m not sure how they look.  I went by myself, you see, and I never can tell if something looks good on me.  I found the perfect set of frames, but of course my ginormous head made them pinch my temples in a very painful way.  So I went with the second best.  I only hope they look all right.

What’s funny is I gave BJ’s $300 of Kurt’s hard-earned cash, yet I left with nothing.  The contacts will be sent to my home (they didn’t have a full-year supply in stock), and the glasses take two to three weeks to be made.  I prefer my glasses to be sent out to a lab, actually, because any time they’ve been done at an “express” place, they’ve not been ground properly.  It’s worth it to me to wait so they can be done right.

The other funny thing is I now have a prescription which is the same for both eyes.  That’s never happened to be in all the twenty-one years I’ve been wearing corrective lenses.  My right eye has always been worse, and so it’s had a higher prescription.  This optometrist (or he could have been an ophthalmologist, or one of each, since I saw two different doctors) told me that my right eye had too much correction on it, and sure enough, I saw better when he dialed my prescription back to match my left eye.  It’ll be interesting when I get my new lenses to see if I see as clearly.

I sure hope so!

My baby is all growed up!  Can you believe it?  She has started kindergarten today.  ME wanted to get in on this first-day-of-school photo, so of course I had to oblige.  I have to admit, ME’s expression is cracking me up, like she’s so distrustful of this whole “school” thing Grace is now involved in.  I assure you she wasn’t actually cranky.  It’s just her patented look of disdain.

I was a little worried for Gracie, going to school for a full day for the first time in her short life, but she seemed to handle it quite well.  She was a bit nervous when she first got there, but she must have warmed up quickly because when I retrieved her off the bus this afternoon she could not stop talking about all the fun things they did.  The first thing she said was, “Mom!  We had music today!”  Yes, folks, she is definitely my child.

She was so excited about everything.  They went outside two times!  (And that’s how she put it too, “two times.”)  They had music class!  She had hot lunch!  She got to ride the bus home!  She even met a new friend that she had to tell me all about.

I’m really excited for her, especially after I figured out that Grace is part of a multi-age class.  I was told that wasn’t an option for her since we wouldn’t be here long enough, so I was pleasantly surprised to find out this morning that she did make it into that class.  I think it’s because she can already read and write that they felt it was the best placement for her.  I’m quite glad about this.  I had been really concerned that she would be bored out of her skull (as I was throughout most of my public school education) in a regular kindergarten class with kids who were still learning their letters.  Now she’s in a class that’s a two-to-one mix of kindergarteners to first graders, and they do a lot of activities with the other multi-age class, which is a two-to-one ratio of second graders to first graders.  She won’t need to be bored; if she’s more advanced than one group of classmates, she’ll be put with another group.  Plus I’ve heard really great things about her teacher from other parents whose kids were in her class, and I guess the whole school is really great.  I’m almost sorry to be leaving halfway through this school year.

It was so weird here alone with just one kid all afternoon.  I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself all day.  And now I’ll have to figure out how to entertain ME, since Grace was doing such a great job of it for me.

ME had quite a break-through herself today as well.  While Grace was at school, ME’s speech therapist came for the first time in two weeks.  We only get four sessions a month, you see, and somehow we got all our August sessions out of the way early.  So finally the therapist came today, and ME couldn’t stop talking!  It was so great to hear all the sounds that were coming out of her mouth, especially since the therapist was there to hear it.  Usually if ME gets talkative, it’s only around Kurt and me.  But this time she “performed” on demand!  Yay!  She was even attempting words she’d never said before, like “girl” and “fly” and “choo-choo” for the scenic train’s whistle that we can hear from the house.  What’s funny is that the speech therapist and I would be discussing something else, letting ME play on her own, and that’s when her speech would start really coming out.  The more we paid attention to her, the quieter she got.

Fickle kid.

So in a way, we intentionally discussed other issues, to make ME think we weren’t paying attention to her, and maybe that’s why she was talking so much.  Whatever works!  It made me so proud to hear all the sounds that she was making, and how hard she was trying to communicate.

We’re also attempting to wean ME off the binky.  Taking the bottle away from her was super easy.  We just switched her over to sippy cups once she was 1.  She never seemed to miss the bottle at all.  The binky has proven so much more difficult.  I wanted to take it away now, before it got even harder, and I was reminded yesterday of what happens when a parent gets distracted by other issues — I saw a four-year-old little girl with a binky planted firmly in her mouth at the naval clinic yesterday.  Yikes.

I talked to the speech therapist about what we could do about ME and taking the binky away.  It’s been a good week since she’s had one, but it’s been a very hard week.  Everything, and I mean everything, has angered ME in some way, shape or form.  And when she gets angry, she starts screaming.  She wants nothing but her binky at that point.  She doesn’t want to be held; she squirms to get down.  She doesn’t want her water bottle; she flings that away.  Anything you try to give her to distract her, she’ll throw as hard as she can.  She’s been screaming so much her voice has gone hoarse.  Fortunately it’s seemed to calm down a bit between yesterday and today.  Kurt put her down for a nap today, telling her that he’d be right back, and she laid down and resigned herself to her fate.  No yelling.  Today she threw a fit because she wanted a snack right before dinner was ready, so I ended up putting her in the corner to calm down.  A few moments later, there was silence — and she came walking back into the kitchen.  I asked her if she was done, and she nodded yes.  She wasn’t quite, but at least she was trying.

But I’m not giving her back that damned binky.  She’ll be two tomorrow, and it’s time to give it up.

Both my girlies are growing up so fast.  Man alive, I can’t believe it.  They’ll be in college the next thing I know!

Go, us!

Our day started before 7am this morning.  If you’ve been reading me for any length of time, you know that I am not a morning person.  Amazingly enough, I was able to fall asleep last night not long after I went to bed.  Usually when there’s something I have to do the next morning that involves me getting up at an insanely early hour, I can’t sleep.  My mind just races round and round and round, and I can’t shut it off.

The early hour was dictated by Kurt’s re-enlistment ceremony.  Yes, folks, he has signed up for another four years of defending our nation against all enemies, foreign and domestic.  I couldn’t be prouder, of course, and my heart grew three or four sizes to see him stand up in front of all his buddies and coworkers (a veritable sea of varying shades of blue) and swear allegiance to our great nation.  I wish I could have taken photos of the sea of blue, but I was part of the ceremony.  The girls were amazingly good, so well behaved and beautiful and sweet.  I can’t wait to get the photos back from the official command photographer.

Besides, I had on my new outfit (thrift store — $5 each for blouse and adorable skirt), so I looked awesome.  Haha.

After the ceremony, every guy Kurt works with came up to me and assured me that they’d help me with anything I needed while Kurt was out to sea come October.  I joked with Kurt later and told him he ought to make up a watch bill for when it snows, so someone would always be available to shovel my driveway.  Brilliant!  And that’s really all I need.  Everything else is taken care of by the housing company.

Kurt hadn’t been able to re-enlist till today because of his schedule and that of his command, which sort of left it till the last minute.  Our ID cards expire tomorrow, see, and without IDs we can’t get on base or be covered under our medical insurance.  We showed up at the ID office at 2:30 this afternoon and noticed a sign on the door that said they wouldn’t take walk-ins after 3pm.

They still wouldn’t take us, though they didn’t close till 3pm.  They won’t start the process of issuing the ID cards that they can’t complete before 3pm, you see.  Gotta love government efficiency, and the fact that customer service ends at 3, not 5pm.

*rolls eyes*

So now I have to get up first thing tomorrow to renew my ID card.  I am not relishing the idea of dragging my two kids with me to sit for a few hours while the system prints a new card, but it has to be done.  You know how people moan about the DMV?  Those are people who haven’t had to deal with the DEERS system in getting a new ID.  The last card I got before I was married (I was a Navy brat, so I’ve had an ID since I was two), it took a good eight hours, waiting at the DEERS office, to renew my ID.  Granted, the DEERS system was going down after every card that was made, requiring a reboot of the entire system, which took a good twenty minutes or so for every reboot.  It was insane.  But I had to get it; I was going back to college the very next day, so I had no option to come back.

I’m under a time crunch tomorrow too.  I just hope nothing goes wrong, but I’m not terribly confident it’ll go smoothly. I have a history of breaking the DEERS system every time I need a new ID.  Let’s hope I set a new record tomorrow.

The one thing we did manage to get done today was purchasing new tires.  Oh man, how we needed them.  I’ve been doing quite a bit of highway driving since we’ve moved here, what with having friends that live hither, thither, and yon.  One time I took my friend E up to Massachusetts to visit the Target there, and as I hit 70mph (speed limit on the highway here is 65mph), she freaked out a bit and said, “What is wrong with your van?!”  See, it would shake horribly as we’d go over 65 or so, though it would depend on the surface we were driving on.  On Sunday I had to take another friend back home to Boston, and I had about an inch of seltzer water left in my can that I hadn’t gotten to yet.  Within about five miles or so, it was completely flat from being shaken up so badly.

We had a $70 off coupon for tires at the wholesale club, so off we went.  The awesome part about getting new tires on a Wednesday afternoon??  No one is there!  We walked right in and were immediately slotted in to have the tires installed.  Five hundred dollars later (!!!!), and we were on our way with tires with an actual tread to them.  In fact, I can sink the entire tip of my finger into the tread.  It’s so lovely.  And as we drove down the highway on our way home, Kurt took it up to 75mph for just a moment — and there was no shaking.

YAY!

I can only imagine the horror of the tire installation guys who saw the state of our tires.  They were that bad.

As Kurt said, that’s one more check in the box on the Must-Do List before he leaves on deployment.  Next up is getting new inspection stickers for both cars, and renewing our base stickers.  Of course, we need to get our ID cards first.

Happy September, everyone!

Yesterday I had a hair appointment, and it was while I was sitting with the color on my hair that I got a text from Kurt telling me the internet had gone down.  Not only that, but we had no cable either.

Initially I wasn’t that concerned.  No internet or cable meant more time for reading.  How could this be a bad thing?!  However, ME also chose that day to scream her bloody head off instead of taking a nap.  I’m not exactly sure what’s going on with her, but she’s getting fussier and fussier as the days go by.  She is turning two in a couple of weeks, so I suppose we’re just heading into the Terrible Twos already.

The screaming was rather distracting, I must admit.  I tried several times to soothe her, but not much was working.  I just ended up having to let her scream it out.  I’d put her down for a nap because she’d been so cranky that everything was making her scream, so it wasn’t like I could just cancel the nap.  That just would have compounded the problem.  Ultimately she did fall asleep for a little bit, giving us a bit of respite.

But the internet was still out!  And the recipe that I’d planned on using for dinner was online!  Kurt took pity on me and decided we needed to go out instead, and since I’d had such a rough day with a screaming toddler, he took me to the brewery.  Mmm beer!  I only had the one, but I have to say, it totally hit the spot.

Once the kids were in bed, I decided it was really time for me to sit and read.  Except then I remembered I needed to call my mom to thank her for the package she’d sent.  Somehow that ended up into a 45-minute conversation, especially since I’d talked to my dad for a while at the outset.

My parents and I are weird.  We’re not terribly close, though there’s a lot of love between us.  They live their lives and I live mine, is what it boils down to.  They understand the military lifestyle, since they lived it themselves, and they know I can’t come home for every holiday.  We talk at least once a month, sometimes more often, but sometimes less often.  Occasionally when they call, the conversation dries up within about ten minutes, and other times we’re on the phone for an hour.  It all depends.

I rounded out my internet- and cable-less evening by attempting to kick Kurt’s ass at Wii bowling.  I’d earned PRO status last week and was so excited to have a star-studded bowling ball.  But then over the weekend, I didn’t bowl well enough and lost that PRO status!  I wanted to cry.  I don’t know what it is.  I have to stand in just a certain spot and move my arm in just a certain way to get strikes, while Kurt can simply power the ball down the lane as hard as he can and he ends up with a strike.  Then again that’s what he does in real life, anyhow.

Needless to say, I did not kick Kurt’s ass in Wii bowling.  But I did reinstate my PRO status.  Yay!

At 1:30am I noticed a weird flickering coming in my bedroom window, and realized that there was a cable utility truck on my street.  So I wasn’t surprised when the cable was back on when I got up.

Problem.  We still had no internet.  And of the two, I would much rather have internet.

*sigh*

Kurt called the cable company and was told someone would be out between 1 and 3pm.  My friend down the street who also had experienced an outage had had her cable, internet, and phone restored at 1:30am last night, so I had no idea why I didn’t have internet if I had cable.  Finally I got tired of waiting for the tech to show up, so I started doing my own troubleshooting.

Our cable and our internet came out of the same socket in the wall in the living room.  Kurt had installed a splitter so that we could have the cable box and the modem on the same plug.  So I switched the co-ax for the modem with the co-ax for the cable box on the splitter.  I could get cable, but I still had no internet.  I began to wonder if it was the modem.  It was pretty old, probably from our time in Washington, which would make it anywhere between three and seven years old.  I unplugged the splitter from the wall and plugged the co-ax for the modem straight into the wall.

Voila!  Internet.

Hmm.  Maybe the splitter was bad?  I unplugged the modem and the router, moved all that to the office where we have another cable connection, and set it all back up again.  Still had internet, and now had cable in the living room since it was plugged straight into the wall.  Since everything was now working, I figured we didn’t need a tech to come out and canceled the appointment.

Ten minutes later, a tech showed up at my door.  He was skeptical of my having “fixed” the issue since there were other techs in the neighborhood working on the lines.  See, the whole issue came about when the construction workers that are working in the neighborhood cut the cable lines.  The cable techs had been able to put a band-aid on the situation last night at 1:30am, but it was far from being fully fixed.  The tech that showed up at my door tested my signal strength and sure enough, it wasn’t that my splitter was bad — the problem was the signal strength was far too low to support the splitter in the first place.

Finally around 3pm this afternoon a tech came to the door and let me know it was fully fixed, and that I should have no more problems.  Until the groundskeepers come around tomorrow.  If they aren’t paying attention, they could end up mowing over the line that’s laying on top of the grass and cut service to all the houses that lost service yesterday.  Keep your fingers crossed that it doesn’t happen; I’d rather not be without the internet again any time soon.

But I have to say, I am proud of myself for doing all that I did to fix the problem on my own.  I think I like the new set-up better anyhow, with the modem and the router in the office.  The signal’s stronger, since it no longer has to go through a splitter, and my iPod keeps the WiFi connection so much better now.  So I guess it was a good thing that this all happened, even though it was a humongous headache.

Hopefully this doesn’t happen again any time soon.

After two and a half years of my daughter attending a local preschool twice a week, all year round, she is finished.  Tomorrow is the last day of the summer camp, but since Grace doesn’t attend on Wednesday, she was done today.  It was so strange to go in there , knowing it was my last morning to drop her off.

But things are changing in there.  I found out one teacher decided not to come back after the summer, so she won’t be around.  Another teacher needed a switch from the room she’d been in for years.  One of the baby room teachers always takes the summer off, which meant she wasn’t around to say goodbye to anyhow.  And the girl who’d been Grace’s assistant teacher, and was her main summer camp teacher, has decided to go back to school to get her teaching degree.  The turnover in a preschool is pretty high anyhow; Grace outlasted much of the staff in her two and a half years there.  But there were always those few stalwart ladies, the ones who were always there.  Yet even those are changing.  It’s… strange.

I suppose nothing stays the same, however.

Today felt like such a wasted day.  I managed to do more today than I did yesterday, however.  Yesterday was a total lost cause.  What with the chill and the rain, it was all I could do to snuggle down under a blanket and read till my eyes hurt.  ME decided she only wanted one nap, which works out better for me because then she’s napping all afternoon long, instead of waiting till 3pm to snooze.  I did put a good meal on the table for dinner, a delicious eggplant parmesan lasagna that was quite a bit of work but totally worth it.  But that was all I managed to do yesterday.

Today I caught up with some laundry and ironed my capris.  See, all of my capris (or short pants, or whatever you call them — the ones that go to just past one’s knees) have cuffs, and when I wash them, the cuffs get all messed up and wrinkly.  I can’t stand how that looks, so every time I wash my capris, I have to iron the cuffs so that they’re flat.  For some people, that is entirely too much work, but it really doesn’t bother me.  It takes all of a minute per cuff.  It’s almost not worth dragging the ironing board out, but I usually find something else that needs ironing.  Funnily enough, ironing doesn’t really bother me.  There’s something so satisfying about eradicating wrinkles.  You can see your results immediately, and then when you put on the ironed clothes, you look so sharp and fresh.

I probably don’t mind ironing because I do so little of it.  Kurt’s camouflage uniform doesn’t need ironing at all.  When he wore khakis, I’d iron his uniforms (two pairs) on one Sunday, and he’d wear one set per week.  That meant I only had to iron twice a month.  I didn’t really have to be the one ironing; I just felt it was my duty as a Navy wife.

I always felt badly for my mother.  After dinner on Sunday was her time to iron.  And she ironed probably one set of uniforms per day for my father — and another set of uniforms per day for herself.  Ten uniforms to iron, every Sunday night.  Ugh.  Fortunately, they mostly wore khakis, which are pretty much permanent press, but they still can get a bit wrinkled in the dryer.  Every so often, though, one of them would need a dress uniform.  That meant ironing and starching a white cotton shirt, never a fun job.  She did it well, though.  Lots of practice, I suppose.

Now the only things I iron are my few blouses that seem to require it, plus my capris in the summertime.  Not much.

Before you ask, yes, I have tried the wrinkle release stuff that comes in the bottle.  I don’t find it to work very well.  And I hate starting up the dryer just to get rid of a few wrinkles.  It’s the environmentalist in me, I guess.

So the iron it is for me!  Besides, I had to put a patch on a pair of Grace’s jeans.  That girl can rip through the knees of jeans like you wouldn’t believe.  Sometimes I wonder if she’s half boy.  She’s nearly destructive enough!

And in just a couple of weeks, she’ll be off to kindergarten.  I can’t believe how quickly the last six years have flown by.  It feels like I’ll blink, and she’ll be graduating high school.  All I can do is just hang on for dear life, and enjoy the short time we’ve got.