House Dreams

When my dad was visiting a couple of weeks ago, he asked: "All things being equal, Amy, would you like to live in a house someday?"

Sure, I said. If I had 3 million dollars to spend on it. Given our constraints, no. We like urban life. I wish I had space for a huge vegetable garden, and a small orchard, and a little corner of wild, and I wish I had a window in my kitchen, and that I didn't have to climb 3 flights of stairs to reach my apartment, and be condo association treasurer, and justify my compost bin to the neighbors. But we are very happy in the neighborhood we're in, and to buy a house in this neighborhood, we'd have to be much richer. Hell, to buy our apartment, we'd have to be much richer. We got lucky in the real estate market, and live in a condo that is now, five years after we bought it, above our means.

So, here we are.

But if, say, we had a sudden windfall, I might like to live in a house like this. (via Treehugger)

If you give a blogger a broadband connection...

She'll want to post a new entry on her blog, and:

I started to log in to Blogger to write a new post. Blogger wanted me to start logging in to the new, improved, google blogger instead. So I had to do that. Once I'd logged into google, I noticed google talk, and remembered that some people who don't show up on AIM do seem to use google talk. So I found a how-to for setting up my iChat to use google talk as well. Then I thought maybe I should use gmail more than I do, because it's got some cool features, so I fiddled around in that. There was an email from flylady in my inbox, and I remembered that I wanted to update our 'babysitter information', so I started working on that. Halfway through the babysitter information, Aya woke up, and I remembered that I'd meant to write a blog entry about nothing in particular.

test post

with new Google Accounts-brokered Blogger. Hi there, NSA! XOXOXO.

My Hard Drive is Mortally Wounded, and other news

So says my disk utility. My hard drive is so mortally wounded that the disk utility itself crashes while trying to figure out what's wrong with my hard drive. In any case, it can't be fixed. It's hard to know how long it'll hang on for; like Art Buchwald, maybe it'll live a year past when it started refusing dialysis, but maybe it will die tomorrow. I am proud of myself for not ignoring the signs of impending doom (weird crashing, the sudden loss of most of my email inbox for no apparent reason...) and bothering to back up stuff. Which is a pain. And no, I don't manage to back up routinely. Just like I don't manage to floss my kid's teeth every night. (Hah, I said to the chick from the dentist's office when she asked about that. I do not have an extra hour every day for fighting with my child. Did you know you're supposed to brush and floss your kid's teeth yourself until the kid is 10 or 12? Because they can't do a good job themselves until then. You are also supposed to take your kid to the dentist every six months starting when he is 6 months old. Hah. And Hah. If we manage to get a toothbrush into Ari's mouth once a day for a couple of minutes, we count ourselves grateful and move on with our lives.

Other things the experts tell me to do that I ignore include: not letting Aya sleep in bed with me. Not having honey anywhere near her, because she might look at it and somehow get infant botulism and die. Putting her face down on the floor when she's awake so she'll cry and struggle and freak out in what they rather cheerily call "tummy time" because otherwise she'll never, ever develop her neck muscles. Remember which side her head was turned when I've put her to sleep, on her back (in a crib, of course, see above) and turn her head the other direction next time I put her to sleep, so that she doesn't get a funny-looking head. Give her vitamin drops because she otherwise might not get enough vitamin D.

Hah. Hah. and Hah.

I have spent the entire morning so far figuring out what I need to back up from my computer and moving it to a drive somewhere on the network. God, I have a lot of crap on my computer. The 10 episodes of Battlestar Galactica that I broke down and bought from iTunes took the most time. When is the next episode coming?? I must know what happens to Starbuck! When I get my new hard drive and my computer all set up again, I will start in on Veronica Mars too. Oh, iTunes, you are a bad influence on me.

Life with 2 kids: More laundry. Even less blogging.

Now, I know there are bloggers out there who have seven kids that they homeschool. That's lovely for them. I like sleeping, though.

Aya is an easy baby, but she does poop all over her clothes, so we do maybe twice as much laundry as we did before having her. Maybe we should consider going diaper-free. Skeptics complain that it seems time-consuming and gross, but I fail to see how this is different from the normal baby situation.

On plus side, my hematocrit is back to normal, so I have energy. My iron levels are not normal, however, as I gave all my iron to Aya, and continue to do so. Therefore, I'm still downing that buffalo meat. I've just signed up for a meat farm share to support my new animal protein habit in the socially, ethically, and environmentally responsible way.

If we were going to move to New Zealand, which we almost certainly are not, given the encouraging results of the last election, this is the house I'd want to live in. Not that I could afford it.

Yesterday I spaced on a doctor's appointment for Aya. I have a teeny little paper calendar that works great, except that I tend not to, you know, look at it. So I have installed a nifty little add-on to Firefox that reminds me of my appointments through my browser, the one thing I do not forget to check every day.

Vomitola was coveting a baby carrier called the Eden Mei Tai. I caught the covet from her and ordered one, which I love. I also love that it sounds like something that will make you very, very drunk. It reminds me of an ID-lax chinese restaurant I used to frequent in my first couple years at college.


Oh, and my computer is ailing. I need Max to diagnose it. I have that "about to lose all my data" feeling, so I cleverly backed up my documents folder.

That's all, internets. See's ya later.

The Future of the Blog

Lately, between giving birth, getting mastitis (AGAIN!) on Christmas, nursing an insatiable pink-dressed baby, and reading a book about road repair to Ari, I've been pondering the future of the blog. It has, in case you hadn't noticed, Internets, fallen into some disrepair. So I wonder if it is time to demolish it and build a playground instead, renovate it into expensive condominiums, or leave it be, allowing it to continue gathering cobwebs. Shall I let the community newspapers pile up at the door, or try to get a grant for building affordable housing? Will a historical commission argue that the blog should not be demolished, but preserved for posterity? Isn't there something a bit embarrassing about an abandoned blog? Perhaps our personal blog should be resurrected, and we could just post photos of our kids and complain about our hair, and not have the burden of all those posts about Jose Padilla we meant to write and didn't.

Ari cried last night because he realized that the real Barosaurus, the real real one, that was actually alive at one time, was killed by that asteroid that caused the dinosaurs to go extinct. He has a friend Barosaurus in his head, next to his enormous rhino. My son cried for the death of a dinosaur a bazillion years ago. This is the kind of thing that I feel any urge to write about at all, these days, despite the pain that all that torture causes me. But should I write such things on a blog that originated to complain about politics? (It turns out, by the way, that the Barosaurus was actually extinct long before that asteroid hit.)

If I admit that I don't, right now, feel like writing about politics, does this make me a bad citizen? If writing about politics was my main means of participating, then am I giving up participation? Can I have a political blog that takes huge hiatuses into purely personal territory? Should I have a personal blog that sometimes talks about politics? How personal? We have tried to maintain a thin anonymity on this blog, mostly to stymie employer google searches. (And mortifying blog moments like the one involving the rabbi. Don't ask.)

What is this blog for, anyway? Who is reading it? Shouldn't I just email my damn friends instead of using the blog to tell them what is happening in my life? It's 2007. How should I spend my diminished free time? Is the blog guilt worth it, when I have child guilt, medical bill mixup guilt, garden guilt, and laundry guilt in ample amounts already?

And finally, I do have a husband who does sometimes post here. What does he think of all this? What do you, my few but faithful readers, think of it?