I clicked on 0% for “How well did this answer your question?” and hit submit.

Here was the question.

I got a popup box asking for my email address and my feedback on how this question could be better.

my response:

I bought this drive expecting to get 500 gigs. And I did not get 500 gigs.

angrily,
Amy

because i missed you.

remember when i said that since my husband james was going to take our web stuff off our borg collective in our basement and open up a hosting account somewhere and put it all there, and this was terrific because it meant that our stuff would be up all the time, every time, even when our own home internet goes out, and isn’t the inkernet a magical, magical series of tunnels that al gore invented?

well, that all is dependant on everything being set correctly in the hosting account.

something wasn’t.

and unbeknownst to me, my main email address, the one i’ve used for years and years was bouncing all over the place.

and then, beknownst to me, my blog email address stopped working too.

and then, very very beknownst to me, my website (this thing here) stopped being available through the series of tubes.

and then i banged my head against lots of hard surfaces and cried.

you know, it’s funny how i sit and look at my site each morning, and i think, gee.. not sure what i could possibly write about.. i saw a weird license plate on my way to work. i even broke out my trusty camera phone and tried to take a picture of it. i don’t know why i keep trying to do this because it comes out looking like a big fuzzy blur. i’ve deleted a whole folder of big fuzzy blurry cars all grainy and pixelated. maybe the internet wants to see interesting/weird/indecipherable license plates. at least it would be something to post. CAN you post license plates on the internet? I don’t see why not, since folks see them when you’re driving down the road. Just imagine their driving along the internet. through the series of tubes.

so yeah. not a whole lot of inspiration on what to write.

BUT THEN THE INTERNET STOPS SERVING UP MY WEBSITE AND ALL OF A SUDDEN THERE ARE A MILLION THINGS THAT I MUST. BLOG. ABOUT. RIGHT. AT. THAT. MOMENT. AND. YET. I. CANT.

oh the harrowingness of it all.

of course, now that it’s back, i can’t think of a damn thing to write again.

except i missed you too. i could take you home and kiss you all over. DON’T EVER LEAVE ME AGAIN! I JUST CAN’T HANDLE IT!

I DON’T LIKE THE SHAKES! SHAKES NOT GOOD!

SINGITY SINGITY SING SING

So I joined a community choir. I went to my first rehearsal and everything this evening. It was great fun. I’m going to help their (I guess i should say ‘our’ now) website to stop being shitty. Yay me!

It was an adventure, to say the least. It is a very small group (maybe 12-15 folks total), and they were missing a handful of members, so it ended up that there were no sopranos. so i said sure, i’d take soprano. so we have me, SIGHTREADING as the lone soprano. the director arrived a bit late, which was good for me, becuase we ran through all the music a few times, so it wasn’t completely new by the time she went through it with us. still. i was just trying to get notes and rhythms right, and maybe, if you’re lucky, words, and the director was aiming for ACTUAL MUSICALITY. you know, like dynamics and different tonality and diction. and then there were those high Fs and Gs (for those of you that don’t know, THOSE ARE REALLY FREAKING HIGH NOTES) that I, alto at heart, and mezzo soprano AT BEST managed to squeak out (by myself! no other voices to blend in with cover it up!) fairly decently, and well, damn. I must say. I am proud of myself 🙂

After rehearsal was over, I asked the director if she wanted me to audition* or anything, even though I had just sung with the group the entire rehearsal. She laughed and said no, I was doing fine.

“You are trained..?”

she didn’t really pose this as a question, but she looked at me like she expected an answer, so I kind of stammered something out.

“Um, yeah. Sort of. I mean, I was a voice major. I dropped out.”

“I see. I could tell**. Where did you study?”

“Brigham Young University.”

“Really! Wonderful.”

She said more stuff too, thanking me for giving what she was asking for, which was nice of her, as mostly, I was just trying not to sound too screechy on the high parts, get the music right, and tried to pay attention to her as much as I could while I was at it. I’m definitely going to get my parts down this week so next week I can forget about the music, and pay attention to the music.

Seriously.. it’s been … 10 years? and it feels great to be singing in a group again. I feel GREAT.

*i brought my books and everything, i was SO PREPARED. I had “Amarilli Mio Bella”, from 26 Italian Songs and Arias ready (super fancy and all classical and operatic), On My Own, from Les Miserables, and either Night and Day, Summertime, or Since I Fell For You from my jazz fake book I could do too. so, classical, broadway, jazz.. I was covered. I’m actually kind of disappointed she didn’t need to hear me 🙂

** I’m going to take this as, she could tell I studied voice, NOT she could tell I dropped out 🙂

PROJECT PHOTO ALBUM

…is still ongoing. I have selected all the photos i want to print, and while I was going to go the costco/snapfish route ($.17/4×6), it costs a lot less to just go the straight snapfish route ($.10/4×6 if you prepay) and when you have FIVE HUNDRED PHOTOS that you decide you want to print (i know. i know. i managed to whittle it down to 450. good lord.) well, that extra 7 cents a photos makes ALL THE DIFFERENCE.

I am going to check these out too. Very cool.

OK. Enough blogginess for now.

Except to say, did you know it’s national delurking week?

So DELURK I say! I COMMAND THEE! COMMENT HERE, ON THE MOKES DE CRAZY! ALL… 7 OF YOU*!

I’m going to try to make a point of commenting on the many, many, MANY bajillion blogs in my blogroll too, so come on folks, let’s go out there and dirty up the internet with our muddy feet stomping our comments all over the place.

And you can START HERE 🙂

-amy sings, “Cheezus was sacrifiiiiiiceduh!”

*ok. i’m being a bit optimistic 🙂 it’s probably more like…. 4. just comment already!

i’m a sucker for these things.

Here is another swap, one with geography and postcards involved, done by Zhinka Dinka Doo (who’s so incredibly talented in the crafty department that come kid birthday-time, I’m totally stealing all her birthday party ideas)! Click for more information:

and unlike the one i posted earlier, this one isn’t closed yet. It won’t be closed until Friday, so run go sign up! It’s just postcards! Fun and EASY!

-amy

UPDATE: And now I have it properly linked!

I’m participating in the mini-swap! How fun! I heard about it last year, but this year, we’re joining in.

SECRETS SECRETS

We love to have something to whisper in our household. Ethan is always deciding to tell us a secret, and usually when that little mouth gets up to my ear, he blanks out and whispers, “I love you mommy.” Not a bad secret 🙂 Jocelyn’s secret usually consists of silence, or “I have a SECRET!” whispered way too loud, so that when she approaches your ear, the parent is half listening and half trying to stay ready to pull back so as to protect the eardrums.

This morning (or maybe it was last night?) however, I heard her shout over to daddy, “I need to tell you a SECRET about how I SLEPT IN MY BED!”

So. Some concepts of “secret” still being worked out 🙂

BEDTIME

After jammies and stories and tucking in and everything is done and I’m standing at the door and say to Ethan, “Have a good sleep,” he is sooooo tickled pink to reply, “SLEEP TIGHT! DON’T LET THE BED BUGS BITE!” *(cackle cackle cackle)*

Another game we play is he lays in bed with all the covers down at his feet. He puts his arms up over his head, and his pookie bear is carefully laid down right next to him. I proceed to pull up the sheet and blankies one by one, up to the headboard and over his face and arms. After each one, he says, “Now??” and I say, “Not yet!!” until all the blankies are cover him up and only little fingers at the very top are showing. Then I say, “NOW!” and he puts his arms down, which then tucks all the blankies around him nice and snug under his armpits, and usually his pookie bear is poking out just right as well. Then we say, “Now you’re ALL SNUGGLED IN!”

I’ve done it a few times for Jocelyn, but she’s not that into it. However, after the story has been read, which takes place in the rocking glider chair in her room, I usually say, “Shall I toss/throw you into bed?” she says, “NO! THROW/TOSS me into bed!” (whichever one I DIDN’T say, is however she corrects me.) The I snuggle her up in my arms, and as I rock, I say, “1…” (chair goes back,) “2…” (chair goes back..) “THREE!” (stand up with the girl). Then I walk her over to the light switch and turn off the light with her foot which is sticking out of my bundled up girl-in-the-arms. If I miss this step, she usually corrects me, “TURN OFF THE LIGHT! WITH MY FOOT!” And then as I approach the bed, she says, “Do, ‘a-one! a-two! a-three!” and then I swing her in an exagerated baby-rocking motion and count, and then on three, and faux-toss her into the bed while she giggles with glee. Then a series of questions and answers goes on about which dolly/bear she would like to accompany her, whether or not sheets and covers are required, or which one, “Sheets?” “NOOOO!” “Blankey?” “The PINK one!” and then after she is all tucked in, kisses are administered (to girl and dolly/bear) and I can take my departure.

THE THINGS YOU LEARN

I decided that while digital photos are wonderful, I do miss the actual PHOTOS lying around the house in an organized fashion, say, a photo album. In the worst case scenario, if hard drives crash irreparably in the house and flickr HQ is hit by photo-backup-targetting missiles, we would have no record of .. well, a lot of shit. So, my project for the last few days have been to go through the photos for 2006 to pick which ones I like a ton, and get them ready for printing.

Doing this on flickr is pretty much futile, because often, I do a massive convert from RAW, shove up to flickr with no type of processing. So I would tag the ones I liked there, only to have to find them on my computer and fiddle with them, so might as well ignore flickr. I have a program called Breezebrowser that I quite like for simple browsing and conversion, but it doesn’t do any photo fiddling or any advanced type of tagging/album type stuff, so that was out. I’ve been meaning to try out Google’s picasa software, which now, I have done, and I must say, I quite like it. I can look through the photos easily from thumbnails, then I can look at each one specifically and it has a good bit of fiddling tools, such as crop, STRAIGHTEN (omg i love this one), fill light, and a very handy “i’m feeling lucky!” which does an auto correction of a lot of stuff (contrast, saturation, etc.) I can do these changes, and then undo them later if I want, as it doesn’t actually change the original files. Since I work in the RAW format, it is also very handy in that it does it all in raw also. I can add photos to my “2006 photoalbum” album, and it doesn’t move any files or try to reorganize my photos, which I like. When I have all the pictures selected in the album and properly fiddled with for the best looking results, I can go to that folder and tell it to export, and it will export all the RAW photos (which are physically located all over the place on my hard drive, mind you and would take me FOREVER to track them down manually) to JPG to a folder I specify. Then they’ll all be right there for me to upload to costco.com/snapfish’s website to print, and I’ll be able to go pick them up at costco on my way home the next day. Along with a couple of photo albums. 🙂

So, while now the software is all handled, the hard drive space is NOT… I had to grab the photos from 3 different locations in our collective computer consciousness in our household.. some were on my laptop (my primary machine) some were on our file server, where I stashed them because my machine was running out of space, and some were on my husband’s 2nd drive in his desktop, again, where i stashed because i was running out of space. BTW.. I had to delete a bunch of stuff in order to HAVE the space to move back to my laptop to work on… hope none of it was important!

Space is a big issue in our house. Grrr. So I have my eye on this 500 gig Western Digital “my book” which will solve ALL my problems for only $240 (at costco. the warehouse, not the website). Drool. I covet your bytes. And your bits.

The only problem is now James has this fancy mac laptop and he’s digging the Aperture photo software and wants to use THAT, and what the hell? how are we supposed to do this? AHHHHH?!!

So I think that separate flickr accounts will be in our future, with us just handling our own photos separately.

So, finally, I’m getting to the part where the title of this section actually stems from (it’s been so long, let me remind you, it’s “the things you learn”…) If only I had learned this lesson EARLIER… like in february of last year…

Perhaps you can take heed from my observations. I’ve now spent a good 6-8 hours going through old photos, and at the time, I must have thought it was CUTE to take pictures of dirty kids faces, now I just wish I could read through time with a wet warm soapy washcloth and WIPE OFF ALL THE SNOTTY SPAGHETTI-Y CAKE-Y DIRT-Y GROSSNESS BECAUSE IT’S SO NOT CUTE. IT’S JUST GROSS.

Practically all the photos of the kids look like this:

Do yourself a favor.

Wipe those kids’ faces. THEN break out the camera.

OK i’m done now. Happy monday.

-amy

more ZERO:

“Which story do you want to read?”
“Um. RICHARD SCARRY!”
“OK. That’s a very long one, so we can do 5 pages.”
“How about.. FOUR?!”
“Sure, we can do four. That’s less though.”
“Does four come after five?”
“No, four is before five.”
“That’s ok, we can still do four. Or, ZERO!” *holds up his hand in the shape of an O*
“I don’t think you want ZERO.. then we wouldn’t have a story time before bed!”
“Oh, ok, I changed my mind!”

‘nother cuteness. Someone at school has told him that he can “keep things in his heart.”

“Shall we have frosted mini wheats for breakfast?”
“YEAH!”
…
“Mommy, I keep these mini wheats in my heart, ALL DAY LONG.”
“Yeah? What else do you keep in your heart?”
….
“My SLIPPERS!”
*laugh*
“How about me and daddy and jocelyn?”
“Um, Yeah! You too! And all my kids. Except TJ.”
“Not TJ?”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
“I’ll put him in my heart after this day.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Yeah. He can be in my heart tomorrow.”

Ethan 2007:

Ethan 2002
Jocelyn 2006	Jocelyn 2005

Jocelyn all dressed up with her “WISHER!” (wand):

Daddy being dressed up:

Ethan with his marble run:

and geotrax trains:

general christmas merriment:

full set here!

hi there 2007! buh-bye 2006.

i look back on the old year as a good one. personally, i took a lot of really good healthy steps.

i definitely have some demons that i battle from time to time. it’s hard to even explain what gets me down. when i’m in an ok place, i don’t mind james disapearing downstairs to play World of Warcraft. Not even a whit. However, when I’m not, I want to throw his computer and that game into a big long pit with big firey spikes sticking up all menacing at the bottom. I want to gouge out his eyes with shrimp forks for leaving my side, but then when he does stay with me, i glower and pout and make life miserable.

When I’m in a funk, it is because I don’t like who I am, or how I am perceived (or rather, how I imagine others are perceiving me) or that these titles that are tagged on to me don’t feel at all like who i am.. (mother.. wife.. woman, working mom, responsible adult..). The things that I love and hold most dear are the very things that turn into shackles that bite into my skin as I rail against them. Somehow these things are the things, the “reasons” that I am unhappy. Somehow in my head things like having children living in surburbia equates to me being a boring surbuban house frau, or it equates to me being weird and strange and different from my neighborhood friends who seem to have it together, more together than I, which in turn makes me feel like a cat wearing a dog costume in a world with no cats.

I realize I’m rambling. I realize I’m making no sense. And it really makes no sense when I get all in a funk, and try to explain to my husband who just wants to do something, ANYTHING, to help me feel better. And I just can’t put it into words, that feeling of inadequacy, the sinking pit of dhoom that won’t give me up.

I’m rambling because I just have such a hard time expressing the dark places my brain sometimes puts me in, especially when I haven’t been there for a while, which I’m glad to say, I haven’t.

Why haven’t I? This is what I’m reflecting on. I think it’s because of something that I always knew I was supposed to do. Everyone knows that you have to take time for yourself. We’ve all read it and been preached at about it, but do you actually DO it? New parents especially are always told that you have to take some time for yourself, PLAN OUT time to spend together as a couple, blah blah blah. New moms, be sure to treat yourself to a nice luxorious bubble bath, take care of yourself, blah blah blah. I think the big steps I’ve taken in the latter half of this year have been taking care of myself. My inner self.

I love reading crafty blogs and seeing the creative awesomeness that comes out of these bloggers heads. I’ve recently disregarded any self deprecation and have started doing it myself to the extent that I have even decided to cater to this hobby a bit and set up my own table where my sewing machine and supplies live. I didn’t worry about the cost (which was dumb, because ikea is cheap) and the weirdness of making my front room into a craft room (it didn’t have anything in there anyway, so hello! good use of space!) and just went with it so that I could have some space to work when the mood struck and not have to be constantly moving my shit on and off the kitchen table. It feels good to “own” this. I may still be a sucky beginner, but I LIKE to sew and make things. I think I never really liked the thought of what this hobby would do to other people’s perceptions of me. Which is pretty stupid, because I LOVE and ADMIRE the crafty people I come across. It was just some part of me denying that I could/should do it.

I wanted to become a better photographer and kind of strong-armed james into getting a new camera. I have tried to carry it with me as much as possible and taken a photo safari class specific to my camera and while I wouldn’t say i’m fantastic, I am happy exploring this side of my artistic self as well.

This one is kind of dumb, but I’ve given up any weird notions I had about my hair and am back to using it as an ever-changing palette that I can alter as I want and use to show the world that I may be a suburban mom, but I’m not afraid to mix things up a bit (more on my further attempts at blonde-ness later). I’m no longer wondering or caring what others will think. It’s hair for heaven’s sake. it grows back.

I really didn’t care and just up and WENT to an indigo girls concert by myself.

I’ve had so much fun planting and growing things in my garden, despite my lack of knowledge or experience.

It’s like I’ve been lost. It’s like I had forgotten things that I loved, or the old things I loved didn’t have any appeal for me and nothing had taken it’s place and it left me all empty and hollow inside. I had some online addictions for many many years (ahem. met james online, so it was good for something, thanks) but after i left them behind, i never replaced them with anything else.

Honestly, now that you’ve read this, it makes me sound like the pre-Amy was a martyr mom who catered to everyone else’s whims and wants, and this just IS NOT true. Anyone who knows me can say that I am a fairly outspoken gal who does what she wants and has no qualms with taking time for herself. What I am trying to point out is that I didn’t really know want I wanted, I didn’t really feel as if I had a real purpose, just FOR ME. I was always looking at the things other people loved to do and thought, “how cool for them,” but really had nothing for myself. I think I really did lose a part of myself in becoming a mom, just being home with other small people who need your constant care and supervision can do that to a person, and in the last 4-6 months, I think I’ve found myself again.

And so for 2007, I resolve to carry on. Now that I’ve found her (ahem. I found myself, that’s who the “her” is, stay with me!), I’m not letting her go. More creativity in 2007, and hopefully in more ways that I wish I had the time and nerve to do, like:

finding a choir or chorale to sing with/in (a vocal jazz ensemble would be soooooooooo awesome)
jazz piano lessons (this might fall under “too much effort required” as i’d have to practice and shit)
sewing classes
knitting classes and groups
more crocheting
painting would be fun. i used to paint quite a bit
learning more about my camera/photography
more crafty stuff with my kids
more READING READING READING
maybe finally do the Artists’ Way for real (shut up linda! I KNOW I KNOW!)

I used to read all the time. I used to carry a book with me everywhere and read while I was walking. when I was little, i would read from my bed by the light of the hall (hello ruined eyesight) until my mom turned it off, and then i’d read by a flashlight under the covers. i definitely need to get reading back into my life. how in the crap it ever left my life (oh yeah, babies. that’s not true though. i got a lot of reading done during nursing time) i’m not sure, but it’s time to bring it back.

so there you go. i’ve been mulling all of this over for the past month or so, and it’s good to get it out there. What about you? Any new years resolutions? What do you do that is just for YOU?

happy new year to you, and may you take good care of your inner self 🙂

-amy

… is now up.

I am trying not to be wishy washy. i am NOT pondering about taking it down. i spent a lot of time on this sucker (back in november) and dammit, it’s staying up.

SO THERE.

Plus, it’s such a relief to get that december banner down. I don’t know about you, but it’s way too depressing to see christmasy stuff/decorations after the holiday is over. Last year the tree came down the day after. This year, Christmas was on monday, and my mom and I waited until wednesday to take down the tree. Which was TOO LONG.

Buh-bye december banner! hello new year!