I spent yesterday and today at our new favorite pool, an outdoors number that has been in operation for a hundred years or so but is news to us. So I am pink, pink, pink, and my kid is toasty brown, despite our spf45-in' it up. my two most fervent wishes for the baby came true: that she would inherit her dad's skin tone, and that she not have down's syndrome. only one of those is directly related to this story, I guess.

In the park after swimming, I overheard a dad trying to be clever with some hot mom by making a joke involving the phrase "constant vigilance!" - she did not look impressed - then he turned back to his copy of deathly hallows. that was pretty awesome.

i ate some key lime pie tonight, oh yummy yum.

tonight, after reading the george and martha where george has a french lesson and asks martha how to say "please give me a kiss" and martha says "voulez-vous m'embrasser" and then george gives her a kiss and martha says "tee hee, i knew you were going to do that", there was a great deal of back and forth smooching in this household. the kid said "gracias for giving me a kiss" and i said "gracias for being my daughter" and she said "why would i be anything else?"... a fine night.

tonight we went for glamorous ice creams with a chum. i mean, more glamorous than you are even imagining. there were flakes of gold on the kid's dessert. too much, really. now i'm making granola but goddamnit, i put the raisins in before baking - now they're gonna be all burny-petrified. grumble grumble.

my baby is home from her trip to chicago with her papa. she arrived in a cheerleader's uniform. her grandmother bought her a curling iron. WHAT??? she is five years old. and her hair is already curly. i'm at a loss for words here. the curler is going out with the garbage. my deprogramming regimen involves farmer's markets, salads from the garden, bob dylan (for her brain development), a trip to the beach. it's good to see her, though. she's all boob-squeezy, having missed the twins for a week and a half, i guess. this morning, feeling my sideburns: "mama, i hate to say this, but you're growing a beard."

this morning we made french toast sandwiches with blueberries and slivered almonds. sheer breakfast elegance.

i finally got buffy comics 4&5, but have not read them yet. oh, goody.

i read that book.

now i'm making a HUGE amount of pasta with spicy red sauce.

and that is that for now.

omg HI and HAPPY BIRTHDAY Sarra!!!

It is raining here, thrill!

i am back in the sunshine after three weeks of alaska, which was a sunny at first and then quite rainy. a perfect vacation which went on just long enough for me to get totally grumpy and miss home. i did a lot of hanging out in the rainforest, hanging out on the beach, hanging out with my sister. becoming a s'mores scientist. everything about the town feels like it fits me so much more than portland. it was a great visit, i might have pictures soon.

now i'm sweating and realizing i have a week to re-organize my life while my kid jaunts off to her next trip, chicago with her papa.



saw the harry potter movie and am vaguely dissatisfied. meh. i thought i'd get all fired-up and back into the potterverse, but it may have had the opposite effect. oh dear.

livejournal! hello!

There is some serious drama in the cave that is my tech services department. It stresses me out all day when I'm there. Upon leaving, I cleanse myself by making some tabouli, and drinking a tall boy of Oly with a little pickle juice in it. Also, I just got a haircut. Not a great one, but passable.

Also, I am listening to my favorite Clash song. Stay Free. Does that make me a pop-loving cheezeball? Who here likes the Clash? Me. Meeee.

I am currently fabricating a journal for the last three months of my internship - it would have been easier to actually write notes every day, but that's not the way I roll. You know.

My time could be spent much more productively right now: Ruby Oliver is calling to me, and I started listening to Parable of the Sower today - want more!

a dude picked a fight with me in line at the library today. i have been hopping mad ever since. though afterwards we had a lovely walk by a swampy lake, and saw bunnies and dragonflies and banana slugs.

just, just, grrrrrrr, if a lady has one arm full of books and an irritating 5yo by the other arm, and you have nothing in either of yours, really, do you need to be looking for trouble? stab stab stab.

itunes on shuffle just segued sweetly from erykah badu to gollum squealing "one of the goblinses will put it on!" that just made my middle-of-the-night.


the party was totally fun. i played my first wii!!!!! i had seen it being played, but that doesn't compare to holding that thing in your hand. that little pulse. want one. my best friend's gaybrother was there, and my kid absolutely fell in love with him. she whispered, "he looks like thriller!" he was honored, of course. how could you not be?

i am doing homework - went to bed with the kid, who was having a freaky bad night (is it because she was Full of Cake?), now am up and being mildly productive. this may be my new strategy.

i went to see knocked up again last night. it has stood the test of very little time, lots of internet research, and rewatching. ( little spoilery maybe? )

before that, attended the preschool end-of-year ceremony, which involved the craziest play i've ever seen, about dragon taming and unicorns and bla bla bla. the kids sang some scottish songs, "oh you cannae push your granny off a bus" and something about a guy walking down the street and all the girls yelling "oh billy where are your troooosers?" that is a fine preschool teacher.

this afternoon, a 2yo birthday party. beers beers beers is the name of that game. beers and a vegan cake. i want to give the birthday boy on my way to buy eggs, a lovely taiwanese kids' book, but i just remembered that baby is allergic to eggs! a moral conundrum indeed.

it's raining! yaye!

Oh dears, I just finished The Book Thief. I read and cried in a cafe, then read and cried on the bus, then read and cried in an absurdly comfortable chair in my library. Sweet, sweet tears, shuddering gasps, noisy napkin noseblowing. I just dropped it in the RETURNS slot.

I loved that book. You should read it!

it actually rained, and was cold, and i made granola for the upcoming week. bought the kid some KEENs, which felt rich and luxurious. they are fat, ducky shoes for hobbits, if hobbits were high-tech shoe-wearers. two more days of preschool, ever. i'm sad but shoving it down. we're giving the kid's teacher apples to apples, everyone likes that, right? tonight i wrote a terrible paper on julius caesar. i just don't care anymore. i now hate shakespeare, thanks. i am having a hard time concentrating on anything that does not involve me rubbing seth rogen's vampire fangs when they get sore or achy. ummmm. here, have a little post-apocalyptic rogen.

today we watched some spiderman cartoons that feature neil patrick harris as spidey and ian zierring (90210 duh!) as harry osborn. also, lady rapper eve. not that good, but i was screaming inside, you know. nph!

i'm getting into bed with the book thief right now, so don't come a-knockin'.

( eeeeeeeeee knocked up!!!! )



this morning i went to get my mother's day check from the flower shop, and when i walked in, my married produce boyfriend said "OH DAMN, if i'da known you were coming i wouldn't've shaved my dirty sanchez!" that's a good boy, right there. he's the one who told me once, "i've asked a lot of girls out for drinks, and i've been turned down by a lot of girls, but you're the first one who turned me down because she had to go home to watch battlestar galactica." i win? then my ex-boss bought me an enormous frozen coffee concoction. whee.

now, i clean and homework-ize until i get my baby from her papa's. i love my baby. sweet times.

sweetness: i just called my mom to check in, and mentioned that i was going to see "knocked up" tonight, and she yelled "oh my GOD i'm going to see that tonight too! it's got people from freaks and geeks AND firefly!!!!" my mom is pretty awesome to me right now. also awesome is the fact that knocked up is opening in juneau today - we used to get movies at least three weeks behind the rest of the universe.

eating polenta and braised kale. reading the book thief, which my children's librarian friend told me was the best book she's ever read, and i'm starting to feel like it might be in my top three as well.

omg seth rogen! come closer! CLOSER!

the baby's ear was all womb-squished, and that is so cute. he also did that little gaspy yawn that babies do. the farmer's market was uncomfortably packed and i felt like a salmon swimming upstream, and i ran into a girl i have some drama with so i've been feeling punched in the gut all day. but we had some good hours in the park just south of the market, and there was a ridiculous amount of basil to be had. i got a call from my sister saying "I'm on 5th avenue glasses shopping and I need some advice. Can I pull off purple frames with teal streaks? They're Dolce and Gabbana!" my sister is a different kind of beast. i said "dude, you totally can, i gotta get off the phone cause the kid's balloon animal just popped."

tonight we made cheaters' pesto - basil, garlic, almonds? reasonably edible.

i'm filling my ipod with tolkien at the moment. now that heroes is gone, i need a new show to get into. it's gotta be good but not great, i don't want anything to eat my brain. house?

usually on friday nights my kid is at her dad's, but tonight she is with me, and the very finest part of the situation is that we can wake up and go to the farmers' market tomorrow morning - i don't know why i feel like i can't go without a kid, but there it is. one of her preschool chums became a big sister yesterday, and we are taking her with us in order to give the new parents a break. that means i get to see a newborn baby! i'm all manner of stoked for tomorrow.

the last new new baby i saw was my best friend's little one, who turns two next week. he was born to the sweet sounds of the clash, and his mom, high on epidural, urgently described her favorite scene from shaun of the dead to her midwives. i got to hold him two hours out of the womb. i was just snuzzling him up with kisses a few days ago, and he said in a high strangled voice, "help, please!" and it made me love him even more. my kid keeps asking me to have another baby, and i keep telling her that this kid counts as her little brother. that's better than saying "OH HELL NO", right?

books:
looking for alaska by john green was great - boarding school, band of misfit chums, pranks, evil swan, super sad. i am in love with the colonel.

the boyfriend list by e. lockhart - girl drama, high school lepers, therapy sessions, seattle houseboats. i listened to this and the voice was perfect and every time she said "boobs" i laughed. i need more ruby oliver.

( i'm late, i'm late, but i'm here to talk about heroes )

Today we went on a hike and as we were puffing our way up the mountain, someone told us they'd just run into a cougar a little further up. Thrill! The kid got scared, which is a perfectly rational reaction, so we headed back down. I believe cougar procedure is the same as bear procedure: be loud and slowly back away. File that one away with this tidbit I also learned in school: You can always outrun a drunk.