Doodle

Friday started out like a normal day. I dropped Caroline off at school, came home and got back in bed with a cup of hot choffee (Half hot chocolate, half coffee. Trademark pending.) and waited for Regis and Kelly to come on. This is what my bout with SAD has done to me. It has led me down a dark road that causes me to turn on bad morning television because how am I supposed to leave the house and accomplish anything when it’s cold and rainy outside?

But right about the time I finished my choffee (trademark pending), I saw a strange light flooding in through my bedroom windows. And in the words of the oath I recited during my sorority pledge presentation in college, LO, THE SUN.

All of a sudden I turned back into a productive member of society assuming that the sign of a productive society member is someone who cleans their bathrooms, vacuums their rugs, sweeps the wood floors, showers, blow dries their hair and gets dressed in something other than velour sweatpants and a sweatshirt that reads “Texas Aggie Football 1993”.

(Sadly, 1993 was about the last time Aggie football was good and that is why I hold on to the shirt.)

And, yes, I realize I could have cleaned the bathrooms during my bout with SAD/becoming a hermit, but I kept thinking my maid was going to show up until I realized I don’t have a maid. Which just caused me to fall further into depression.

But the sun turned it all around for me. I felt like a new person, a person with dreams, goals, and ambitions! Well, maybe I’m getting carried away. It was the sun, not Zig Ziglar.

Speaking of Zig Ziglar, when I began my first job out of college, an ill-advised foray into financial sales, the company paid for me to attend a motivational seminar featuring a variety of speakers who were supposed to get you FIRED UP about life and your career. It totally worked and I left the Alamodome determined to be the best financial salesperson I could be despite my inability to balance my own checkbook. But then the O.J. Simpson trial started and I was powerless to do anything except watch the trial while I ate Ruffles potato chips dipped in ranch dressing. So you can add the death of my financial career to O.J.’s long list of crimes.

Anyway, the sun stayed out all day Friday and, much to my delight, showed up again on Saturday. P had to work all day Saturday because the rain has caused them to fall behind on a lot of jobs, but Caroline and I spent most of the day outside just soaking up the sun. After a winter full of nothing but gray skies, I’m afraid this may be the summer that I officially veer over into George Hamilton territory. But I have to remember that a sunny 70 degree day feels differently than a sunny 105 degree day. I’m sure MaMaw will pull out her sun hat by the time June hits.

Sunday morning decided to be a buzzkill and showed up with clouds and some drizzle. Caroline and I are both suffering from a lot of congestion and a chronic hacking cough so we stayed home from church, but she was invited to a birthday party later in the day. After the party, she came home and was looking through the party favor bag and found a candy necklace. Clearly there is nothing more precious to a six year old girl than an accessory made of processed sugar.

She took a bite of it and got a funny look on her face. I asked, “What’s wrong?” and she said, “I THINK MY TOOTH IS LOOSE.”

I wasn’t sure if I believed her because we’ve had loose tooth false alarms several times that have just turned out to be a wayward piece of Chex Mix, but, sure enough, one of her bottom teeth is officially loose. I’m not sure if it was loose before she bit into the candy necklace or if the candy necklace was the perpetrator, but whatever. She finally has a tooth to wiggle after years of bemoaning her dental misfortune.

And that’s all we heard about the rest of the day.

She wasn’t sure if she could put up her clean clothes because of her loose tooth. She didn’t know if she could carry her plate to the sink because of her loose tooth. She could hardly eat her tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwich because of her loose tooth. A tooth, by the way, that is less than half the size of my pinky nail.

When I tucked her into bed she thought she might need some Tylenol to help with the pain of her loose tooth and definitely needed a lullaby because of THE LOOSE TOOTH.

Honestly, where does she get the drama? Doesn’t she know there are real people, LIKE HER MOTHER, who are suffering from serious things like SAD?

But I sang her the lullaby because I knew it would make her smile. And I don’t know how many days we have left of that little smile that looks like baby Chiclets all lined up in a row.

They’ll be gone like the sun before I know it.

Sometime last week my Macbook kept flashing a little warning on my screen to inform me that my startup disk was almost full and files would have to be deleted. I didn’t even know I had a startup disk, much less that it was almost full.

I’d gotten that same warning about six months ago and took care of the problem by deleting a bunch of old pictures and maybe some important software that shouldn’t have been deleted. (More on that later) But this time I decided that I didn’t want to go through the hassle of burning a bunch of pictures to CD’s and it might be a better idea to buy a flash drive and put everything on it.

(Because it’s not enough that I have hard copies of all my pictures and that they’re all uploaded to Shutterfly, I need to have everything in triplicate because I am neurotic and what if Shutterfly ceases to exist and I lose all the albums I’ve created since Caroline was a baby?)

I bought a flash drive but wasn’t really sure about memory and full startup disks and gigabytes and whether or not the jeans I was wearing made my bottom look big. So I did what I do in most tech emergencies, I called my friend AJ who just happens to be in town this week.

God bless her for not hanging up on me every time I start a conversation with “I was wondering if you could help me with…”

I explained my full startup disk dilemma and told her about my flash drive purchase. She responded by asking me how many gigabytes it would hold and I replied that I had no idea but the flash drive cost me $29.99 at Office Max so I assumed it could hold about $30.00 worth of memory. Which makes total sense because dollars are real whereas gigabytes are just something that people made up about five or twenty years ago.

And then I mentioned that I liked the flash drive I selected because it is the prettiest shade of purple even though I’m not normally a fan of purple. At that point, AJ suggested that I probably wouldn’t want to share the details of our conversation with too many people (so I’m writing about it on the internet) because people might mock me for not understanding gigabytes.

But to those people I say that I don’t think their pocket protectors really work with the shirt they have on.

Fortunately, AJ volunteered to come over last night and help me figure out the issue with my startup disk and why it overfloweth. She also explained a concept to me that involves an external hard drive and suggested I might want to invest in one that holds between 500 and 1,000 gigs. Which kind of makes my four gigs seem a little pitiful even though they came in a festive purple color.

She also explained that all the movies I’ve saved in iMovie take up a lot of space and I should get them off the computer, but I told her I didn’t know what to do with them and asked if there was some way I could automatically burn them on a DVD that would play in my DVD player. AND THERE IS. I have been surrounded by this technology ALL THIS TIME and had no idea. I totally should have read the manual that came with my computer.

We began looking through all my movies so I could figure out what I wanted to keep and what needed to be deleted forever because it may have involve Caroline videotaping my rear end while I paint the backhouse.

While I looked through the iMovie files, I came upon a few video clips I’d totally forgotten about. They were videos of Caroline when she was just two years old. And I realize this is the equivalent of asking someone to please look at the slides from your vacation to Niagara Falls (the scenery is AMAZING!), but I had to share it.

Little Caroline from Big Mama on Vimeo.

OH MY HEART.

I would’ve totally dissolved into a big pile of sloppy tears and sentiment right at that moment, but AJ had moved on and informed me that I needed to get my Mac mail account up and running because Entourage is going to be non-existent in about a year.

The only problem is I deleted my Mac mail software the last time I tried to free up space because my startup disk was full. AJ didn’t even know it was possible to delete Mac mail off your Macbook, so I guess she learned something technical from me for a change.

Granted, it’s not something anyone really wants to know and definitely isn’t something you’re supposed to do, but I’m claiming it as an accomplishment anyway. I’ll take my tech victories where I can get them.

Although they won’t be sent through Mac mail.

I just finished playing ten rounds of Bejeweled Blitz.

I don’t know why I’m telling you that, but I guess I want to make you aware that I am at an all-time high level of procrastination. And, as part of the procrastination process, I decided to go brush my teeth and am now having a hard time focusing on writing anything because I had no idea my eyebrows were in such dire need of grooming and I really, really want to lock myself in the bathroom with my super-magnifying mirror and a pair of tweezers.

But I think we all know that would just lead to several weeks of me becoming best friends with my eyebrow pencil as we banded together to conceal my overzealous eyebrow plucking tendencies.

(If you think this post has started off without any real train of thought, JUST YOU WAIT.)

On Thursday night it started raining and continued to rain without ceasing until early Saturday morning. I am not the least bit ashamed to report that I spent that entire amount of time in my pajamas. At one point it looked like I might have to get dressed to pick Caroline up from school, but P saved the day.

I don’t want to give the wrong impression though. It’s not like I wasn’t very busy completing several different tasks around the house. For example, on Friday morning around 10:00 a.m., our junk drawer in the kitchen (don’t act like you don’t have one) looked like this.

All that clutter was making it so hard to find the glow sticks or the Santa Claus bubble gum or the bright orange polka dot ribbon when we needed it. And I’m so thankful that our spare hide-a-key is safely tucked away in the back of that drawer. That will come in super handy the next time I lock myself out of the house. Which happens more frequently than you might think.

After about thirty minutes of throwing away stuff while P wasn’t paying attention, I had that drawer all cleaned out. I don’t have any photographic evidence of the clean drawer. You’ll just have to take my word for it and believe that if my life is so lacking in excitement that I’m writing about cleaning out a drawer, I certainly wouldn’t be lying about it.

But wait. There’s more.

Last Saturday, P was at the ranch and Caroline and I found ourselves with nothing to do. I’d really been wanting to go into this antique store that I used to LOVE before I had a child and realized you don’t let a toddler loose in a store full of old, fragile things and, also, that we were spending all our disposable income on Pampers and Gerber Yogurt Melts.

So I asked Caroline if she wanted to go with me to the antique store and she said yes. Then, much to my delight, she LOVED the antique store. She declared it the BEST PLACE SHE’S EVER BEEN IN HER WHOLE LIFE (which kind of makes the money we spent on Sea World tickets last summer seem foolish) and I hugged her to me and said, “Mama has never loved you more than I do right now.”

We searched all over the store looking for various treasures and ultimately found a few things that I wanted to use to accessorize the living room, plus an old school desk that I wanted for Caroline’s room. I bargained with the owner and got all three pieces for A STEAL. A STEAL I SAY.

And I loaded up my car (cue the Sanford and Son theme music) and we headed home with our treasures.

All this to say that my other project while in my pajamas on Friday was to try to arrange my new pieces on top of the armoire in the living room and email pictures to Holly for approval.

My first attempt.

It was wrong, by the way.

Which led to my second attempt with Holly’s direction.

P came in to see what I was doing and I asked for his opinion. His opinion was that there was NO WAY we were getting a pet bird and then I had to explain that the bird cage was just for decoration and then he said he hoped I didn’t pay a lot of money for it and I told him it was A STEAL at just $15.00.

(Which is actually just an amount that I use to describe a lot of purchases.)

(But I was glad it was the amount I threw out because the look on his face seemed to indicate that he thought I paid $15.00 too much for it.)

After he picked Caroline up from school, she noticed I’d arranged the bird cage and said, “I wish we could get a real bird.”

“Well, we’re not going to. Maybe we could have an imaginary bird.”

(I didn’t feel like there was any need to launch into my semi-fear of birds.)

She didn’t seem to buy my whole “imaginary bird” suggestion, so I pushed it a little further and said we could name the imaginary bird “Babe” which was the name of the imaginary friend she had for several years but I haven’t heard her mention lately.

She said, “Oh Mama. Babe is gone. She grew up.”

And then I curled up in the fetal position and looked at her baby pictures for the next several hours with a box of Kleenex by my side.

On Saturday, she went to the ranch with P and shot a duck that she thought would look great in the bird cage.

I think I’ll pass.

Oh, and she also brought home some turnips that she found and thought might be DELICIOUS for dinner.

Which worked out so well because I’d just been wondering how to get more turnips into my diet. The turnip really is the cousin-your-mom-forced-you-to-ask-to be-a-bridesmaid vegetable of the vegetable world.

I told Caroline I had no idea how to cook turnips and she told me to “google it”.

And I did. Only to discover that the larger the turnip, the more “woody” the taste.

So, yeah. Since these are bigger than my child’s head, I’m thinking they’re best left uneaten.

Unless we decide to feed them to our imaginary bird.