Jeez Louise

Baby stuff (no I don’t have any babies)

A friend of mine recently had a baby and bought a Bugaboo stroller. She loves it. She says it is well worth the upwards of $700 she spent on it and the accessories that go with it. She says it’s versatile and she can pretty much go anywhere with it - she’s a runner and she has been jogging with her 3-week-old for the past week or so.

This led me to thinking of all the things people buy when they have a baby. How many are necessary? How many are just… convenient?

I mean… diapers, a blanket, clothes for the baby are essential (unless you want your naked baby just peeing everywhere). They won’t let you leave the hospital with your kid if you don’t have the proper car seat so that’s pretty much essential, too. If you can’t/don’t want to breastfeed then bottles would be a necessity as well.

Other than that, though, you could probably get by with a baby and the stuff I named above. Not that I have any babies or anything, so there are probably moms out there reading this and thinking “Wow, Louise, you’re pretty uppity there, decreeing what we should and shouldn’t have”.

Secret? I was just thinking of my What If Zombies Took Over The Earth plan (I do have one) and I thought “if I had to run away from zombies and save some non-zombie babies while I did, what kind of stuff would I have to snatch up and bring with me?”. So that’s my list.

Addendum: Yeah, if I was running from zombies, I’d probably want something to carry the babies in (if I wasn’t in the car with the baby in the carseat). Unless I just wanted a huge sack full of babies which wouldn’t be convenient. So maybe a stroller or more than likely a baby sling of some sort.

I think this might be the most boring post ever.

Yesterday was a pretty fancy day. It was an inservice day, first of all, so there were no kids to teach. Instead we teachers learned some stuff. Secondly, my inservice was in the Big City so … I don’t know, we got to go to the Big City. I brought Rob with me and he explored while I sat in the classroom. Got to see some people I taught with a few years ago and caught up with them. Pretty nice. Plus it was a beautiful day. The class I was taking let out early so Rob and I took the opportunity to just walk around and have some enjoy the sunshine.
The weather was great, too, until a bit later in the afternoon when the wind started picking up. It was still beautiful and sunny but I was afraid my wig was gonna blow away (my favourite baldness joke: “There I was standing at the top of a hill, the wind blowing my hair, and Rob chasing after it”). I did manage to take a few pictures at the waterfront before we toddled off home.
Last night though! Last night, in addition to the wind, there was a bunch of thunder, lightning, and hail. Hail! I haven’t seen hail in years. I didn’t enjoy it. It was enough to make me consider Barbados villa rentals.
I am going out soon to check my garden- the turnips and beets I’m not worried about, but I fear for the tomatoes.

the root of all evil

I have never been good with money. I mean, I’m notoriously cheap, and always want to be saving money, but add to that my horrible attention span (hello adult ADD) and I just constantly forget which bills I’ve paid, which ones I haven’t. One thing that’s helped with this is automatically pre-setting the bank to pay bills. Another thing we did this year though is make it so that our auto insurance was through my work, so the amount just comes directly out before the money hits my bank account. It really does help.

Still though. Budgeting is a pain in the ass. I want to be one of those people who just lets someone else take care of all the finances. Except, 1) I imagine that being able to hire a financial planner would mean actually having plenty ‘o’ money and 2) We’d end up getting hosed by whoever we hired, I can pretty much guarantee that.

HDTV

Do you have HDTV? Or are you going to get one of those boxes to add to your regular tv when HDTV becomes the norm for every station? I’m asking because I saw a commercial saying “If you don’t have HDTV before (a date I forget) you are NEVER GOING TO BE ABLE TO WATCH TELEVISION AGAIN!” and that is kind of scary. Well not really, I mean people have lived without television before. Wait. Is it even HDTV (hahaha now I feel like I’m HDTV saying HDTV every HDTV second HDTV word) or is it something else that will be happening to cause everyone’s television to explode? Oh man. I JUST saw this commercial. Like, not 20 minutes ago. I think I need to watch less TV and start working on memory exercises.

Oh joy oh bliss

First of all you must know that I thoroughly enjoy office supplies. New pens? Thrilling. Highlighters? Captivating. Post-it notes in all shapes and colours? The highlight of my life. So it shouldn’t surprise you that the whiteboards they put up in my room yesterday are like new toys for me. I don’t have to contend with hives or wheezing anymore from the chalk (or the chalk breaking and me accidentally scraping my fingernails against the board). The markers are low-odour so I don’t get all high off the fumes or anything, either.

I hadn’t used my chalkboard that much at all this year - I’ve been using my overhead projector for pretty much everything, even though my projector kind of sucks and is always the tiniest bit out of focus (or, maybe I need new glasses). Today though? Today was like “I’m going to … write something on the board!” five seconds later “Oh! We really need a diagram to show where Louis-Joseph Papineau was hiding out as compared to where Wolfred Nelson was assembling his troops!” And when I did use my projector, instead of having to contend with the 30-year-old screen in my classroom (it takes so much effort just to get it unrolled and then half the time takes me 10 minutes to get it rolled up gain), I could just project directly onto the whiteboard.

Yep. I’m a nerd. But I’m a chalk-dust-free nerd, and that counts for something.

I realize that fully 9/10ths of people reading this aren’t going to even understand or care about this post. I’m okay with that.

I have been watching Heroes since the first season, and for themost part, I have loved it. This season though, it’s just getting too confusing for me. No one is who they seem. peoples’ parents aren’t really their parents, but they’re other peoples’ kids, and siblings of other people, and they’re al rnning around in Africa and shooting each other (hopefully they have family health insurance) and partnering up with bad guys and some of them are dead but their twins are showing up and it’s making me crazy (although honestly? it could all just be because of my short attention span).

But! One thing I have been really enjoying this season is the little Veronica Mars reunion. First Kristin Bell joined up last season and is some kind of lightning-throwing lady. And this season? Francis Capra! He can yell really loud! I’m inexplicably happy about seeing Weevil again.

Now we just need Logan and Wallace to join the cast, and I might become 100% invested in Heroes again.

Who knows where thoughts come from, Joe? They just appear!

I have a weird headache, so this won’t be long.

1- Just paid $90 to have the brakelines on our van fixed. Considering most mechanics charge at least $35/hour plus parts, and it took him three hours to do it, I think we got a good deal.

2- Y’all are going to laugh and call me antiquated, but just this afternoon, a dude showed up and installed whiteboards in my classroom (no, he’s not just some random guy who showed up; obviously he was hired by the school board, but I had no warning). No more chalk! No more sneezing every ten seconds! No more constantly searching for my chalk! Although I will probably constantly be searching for my dry-erase markers but whatever.

3- Four-day week! Inservice on Friday.

4- Very much enjoying True Blood. Sure there are tons of boobs in it but that’s maybe part of the charm?

5- I’m extremely tired. So that is all.

KYLE!

Years ago, when I was teaching 3rd grade, there was a little boy in my class who was… interesting. Every day he would be running around the classroom, screaming “Shabbideee, shabbidoooo” while we were working on our multiplication tables. He would hide under his desk when it came to Reading Circle time. He stole the other kids’ lunches. He broke another boy’s arm at recess one day. Dealing with him was a challenge, to say the least. I would get home from work each day, exhausted, and flop down on the sofa, mumbling incoherently. Rob would ask me what was wrong, and I would say one word. The boy’s name. “Kyle!” This sounds terrible, but it became sort of an all-purpose cry of frustration around our house. No milk left in the fridge? “kyle!” Lose an eBay auction? “Kyle!” Flat tire on the car? “KYYYYLE!” Imagine it being said in a combination of the way that Seinfeld would say “Neuman!” and the way Captain Kirk would say “Kahn!” and you’ve got it.

So it’s no surprise that today, we have a hurricane warning.

For Hurricane Kyle.

Fitting.

An update would be in order

I hate when writers of blogs that I read post something dramatic and scary and then leave for a week, because then I worry about the blogger and whatever situation they’re in. I totally understand that blogging is usually the last thing on your mind in times of crisis, I do. But I still worry.

Anyway. My dad. His lungs collapsed. After they inserted (installed?) the chest tubes, they just had him laying around in the Emergency Room on a stretcher for like, forever. Anyway he couldn’t sleep and it didn’t look like they were going to be finding a bed for him anytime soon so they sent him home, with instructions to come in twice a day for x-rays.

He’s very weak, which anyone who’s ever had pneumothorax knows, is normal. The doctors here are sending him to a specialist (although specialists are few and far between around here so it might be six months before he does) to see about performing another surgery to repair weak spots on his lungs.

This all sounds very complicated to me. So for now, I’m clinging to this: He’s home, and he’s alive, and he told me the stupidest joke on the phone yesterday so it’s all good.