Mandajuice

Re: the camera

I kind of thought it was obvious, since most of you have seen the pictures I take, but I'm a total photography novice.  I have ZERO clue what I'm doing.  The stupid Sony Cybershot that I've been wanting to throw against a wall for the past three years probably still has 100 fancy features that I've never once thought to use.  I lost the instruction manual about a month after we bought it and I haven't felt the need to look for it even once.

The only reason we're buying the SLR is because when I click a picture, I WANT THE CAMERA TO TAKE THE FRIGGIN' PICTURE NOW, not three seconds later or ten seconds later or three mintues later (if I want to use the flash), or whenever the cranky SOB decides it feels like taking a picture, but NOW.  The D50 is the cheapest and most simple digital camera I could find that will do that for me.  In the process, I feel like I'm also buying a camera that will just happen to take WAY better pictures than what I have now, even in automatic mode, which is where the setting will probably remain for the next three years.

So that explains it.  I have no idea what I'm doing, but at least I'll be doing it with fancy new equipment!

BOOYAH

We close escrow on the condo tomorrow.  My reward for all that back breaking work (and for accomplishing the unenviable feat of turning thirty, which I will do in 26 days) is this:
It should be here in about a week.  It will be hard to keep myself from licking it.

Alex goes BOOM

This weekend posed a real change for us.  For the past twenty or so weekends, I've had to get Alex out of the house or entertain him myself so Dave could study.  And apparently I didn't realize how much I missed having Dave around until we had him back.  It never occurred to me that we could, you know, DO STUFF all together like a family again.  It was awesome. 

Saturday we all joined up at Carol's house for lunch with Dave's cousin Charlene and her mother, Auntie Lala, who is something close to ninety years old at this point and in the kind of health I hope to still have at seventy.  I adore Auntie Lala because she's such a riot - just conjure up a stereotype of a tiny old Italian lady in a cardigan and you've pegged her to a T.  She's this feisty little meatball of mirth.  And swear words.  And I was SO looking forward to watching her interact with Alex because they're both so ornery and I just thought he'd eat her up whole.  But it was not to be.

On the way in from the car Dave and Alex had a race to the front door, like they always do, and Alex landed a perfect face plant on the concrete and was just gushing blood from his mouth.  We were worried about lost teeth and stitches and really, that was it for the boy that day.  He was fine, but he kept asking to go home (which is normally what we threaten as a punishment).  He wouldn't even LOOK at Auntie Lala, much less talk to her and after an hour or so, he fell asleep on my lap while we were eating lunch.  I didn't even manage to get any pictures, which was just the height of stupidity.

I did get some pictures of the aftermath, however. These were taken the next morning and they are LOVELY:

My boy, the prize fighter.  Anyway, we had Dave's best friend Jim and his family over for Coors and Take 'n Bake and Alex was already back to his old self again.  By the end of the night their six year old daughter Katie had her fill of two year olds and I'm sure she went home with a renewed conviction in her parents wise decision not to give her a little brother.

It's time to move the computer back to the bedroom

For two reasons:

1) Alex spilled a giant cup of water and broke my mouse.  It won't scroll.  I feel totally handicapped.

2) You guys get multiple posts!  I get this:

More american idoling

I'm putting my redux under the cut this time because my dear husband thinks it's a waste of blog space (not to mention effort) and that admitting I watch the show makes me a big Lame-o.  (Of course he watches it with me practically the whole time).  And for the same reason I can't stop watching Gilmore Girls, I can't stop watching American Idol.  I just don't know what that reason IS.  Although if you caught my Junior High School crush, Sebastian Bach singing Hollaback Girl on this week's episode of GG, you know EXACTLY why I can't resist this crap.

Of course I'll miss my family and friends the most, but...

Some things I really missed while I was gone:

My coffeemaker.  Of all the things you'd think they'd have perfected in the state of Washington, coffee seemed obvious.  But it wasn't.  Three times I found myself seeking out a Starbucks because the restaurant coffee at breakfast had been so horrid - even at the fancy shmancy Hilton restaurant.  The coffee at Shari's was undrinkable.  And I'm not even a coffee snob!

DVR.  Alex completely DID. NOT. UNDERSTAND. why I couldn't make Caillou or Backyardigans magically appear on the hotel TV at his whim.  And don't even get me started on what it was like to watch Grey's Anatomy with BOTH of my boys sitting in the hotel room with me when I couldn't even push PAUSE to shut them up.

My airbed. Seriously.  Even the twin one we bought for the hotel was inadequate.  Rolling over was an olympic event since I had to scoot my whole body back over to the middle every time.  I think we've pretty much decided that we have no recourse but to buy a Sleep Number Bed.  And soon.  Every single hotel we stayed at had a bed that was WAY too soft for Dave and WAY too hard for me.  Getting up and down off the air mattress on the floor is getting more and more difficult.  And as much as I would love to SAVE every red cent of the proceeds from selling our condo, I think this will be my one exception.  Well.  That and a digital SLR.  We'll see.

The sky.  Well, specifically the blue one.  We got nice weather on Friday, then the sun didn't come out for more than a few minutes the rest of our entire stay in Washington, which, in and of itself, didn't bother me.  It was that the sky was so different.  From now on when I mention that it's "overcast" in California, just picture me saying it with air quotes.  When it's "overcast" here, it's basically like the clouds just went in front of the sun for a few hours and you can still almost feel the happy little sun up there taking a nap.  In Washington, overcast is like twilight.  It's almost dark.  It's the thickest sky I've ever seen.  It's going to take me some getting used to.  And some frequent trips back home to California to see the sun.  Living here I have been so horribly, rottenly spoiled.

Some things I'm going to love about Washington:

The rain.  Or more specifically, the sound of it pouring and the fact that people don't get a fleck of wet on their windshield and suddenly start driving ten miles an hour under the speed limit.  Californians are SUCH wussies. 

Fred Meyers.  I LUUUURVE that place.  Dave practically had to drag me out of there kicking and screaming.  And he wouldn't even let me look at the baby clothes!

The strangers.  Neither of us could put our finger on it, but it seemed like Washingtonians are just less complicated and much more likely to smile at you - and not just because they want to steal your purse.  Everyone seems more down to earth.  It's not like we were having in depth conversations with anyone, so this is more of a gut feeling than anything else.  But I'm actually far more concerned about people not liking me than I am about not liking the people.

The prices. I know this one goes without saying and that I've already mentioned it a thousand times, but it's just WAY cheaper to live there.  A regular-priced box of Golden Grahams, and not even a big one, costs $4.99 here and so does a 12 pack of Coke.  I always expected the housing to be much less of course, but everything else?  I had no idea how much we get ripped off just living here.  NO. IDEA.

Washington

So, we're home, but we romped all over Washington from Vancouver to Tacoma getting a lay of the land (that looks REALLY weird when you write it).  Of course we included a trip to Target to buy an air mattress and then a second trip BACK to Target because the first night I woke up at 3:00AM sleeping on the floor after the air had all leaked out.  That was fun!  That morning Dave and I got into our first of three fights about how to handle it when one of us can't sleep past, say, 7:30AM because her hips have gone numb from the pain and the rest of us want to (and deserve to) sleep in and OH JOY we're all crammed into a single hotel room where I can't even put my pants on without waking everyone else up.  We never did resolve that one.

Even though everything else went wrong, Dave and I both noticed that we somehow managed to consistently get the best customer service of our lives.  Which is totally awesome but also ridiculously expensive since we tend to believe that exceptional service should not go unrewarded.  With cash.  It didn't hurt that we stayed at nicer hotels than we usually do and as far as I'm concerned luxury travel is one of those things that you never downgrade from.  Once you've been at the Hilton, it's physically painful to go back to staying at Best Western.  I'll just have to budget our vacations accordingly (you know, the ONE week off that a lawyer gets to take about every five years).

Alex continued to amaze us with his angel ways.  I can only remember him having about three meltdowns during the trip, which is about how many he has on a normal day before lunch.  Part of the reason, maybe even all of it, is that Dave was with us.  And by with us, I don't mean the kind of "with us" he's been for the past several months when "with us" has meant "studying in the bedroom so please be quiet".  I mean "with us" as in I didn't take Alex to the bathroom or fasten his carseat straps for almost five days.  Dave was constantly tending to and entertaining and most importantly disciplining the boy, which was awesome.  It was like I hired the supernanny to come tell me I was being too much of a lazy wuss and it TOTALLY worked.  The most amazing thing of all is that he didn't have even one. single. accident. the entire trip.  He didn't even wet the bed! 

Of course the trip wasn't ALL shits and giggles.  Sure, it was nice to see Dave again after he had been gone, but the newness wore off after about ten minutes of smelling his bad breath and watching him scratch himself.  Not that you could accuse me of being easily annoyed or overly sensitive, because we all know that pregnant women are ALWAYS completely pleasant and totally rational, right?

Dave also didn't love Washington, which isn't to say that he hated it or that we've changed our minds about moving there, but it's a compromise, which by definition implies imperfection.  It's extremely difficult to be objective when you're planning to give up your whole life and everyone and everything you know and move far away where you don't know what to expect.  But we want to buy a house, a decent house in a good school district and to do that and stay close to everyone and everything we know now, we'd have to spend a million dollars.  Which?  Yeah, we don't have and never will.

So our choices are to either move back to center of the state (aka the armpit), where you spend half the year going from your air conditioned house to your air conditioned car to your air conditioned office and back home again or move out of state.  Washington is the best state we could find and stay west-coastal.  The cost of living in most areas is just a fraction of the cost of living here.  I NEVER KNEW the rest of you people could go around buying milk for $2.50 a gallon NOT ON SALE or because it's going to expire tomorrow.  Or that a Yoplait could cost anything less than a buck.  Or that gas could be TWO FRICKING DOLLARS A GALLON.  (an aside: how I've managed to survive this long as a human being without ever shopping at a Fred Meyer store is beyond me!)  The strange thing about our situation is that the very things we complain about - the necessity of wealth to even exist here - are the very things we think we'll miss in Washington.  Affluence makes everything pretty, even if you're just on the outside looking in at it.

And we just have to try harder to keep our perspective.  The thousand square foot condo we just sold was three blocks off a six lane auto mall, two blocks from a crack house and in one of the worst school districts imaginable.  And if we tried to buy it back at the price we just sold it for, we could NEVER afford it on one income.  The same money in just about ANY city in the state of Washington could buy us a gorgeous five bedroom house on actual land and in a school district where Alex would never have to walk through a metal detector.  As much as we enjoy living here, we just can't look at that evidence and not make the obvious choice, no matter how imperfect it is.

Pictures of our trip are up at Flickr.

He's a stinker

It just got eerily quiet as I was putting away the groceries, which is NEVER a good sign with a toddler in the house.  I found Alex under the table in our bedroom holding a piece of cardboard he found inside a shoebox.  He had decorated it with a pen and offered it up to me as soon as I walked in the room.

ME:  Uh, where's the pen?
BOY: I hid it because I know you don't want to be mad at me.

I swear, if he's this sneaky and he's not even two and a half yet, I am SO totally in for it when he becomes a teenager.  I should be saving all my serenity mantras for then.