This post's for you!

This post goes out to Samantha "ready for a fight at any moment" PM:

Sam, this made me think of you.

There are craft fairs and there are aquatic creatures, and they should remain separate...apparently.

How could I forget?

Yesterday morning, before we drove back, we walked into a Denny's and this was on the TV. What trip to L.A. would be complete without a high speed police chase? Cracked me up.

I didn't take this photo, but I could have taken one like it. This is the kind of atmostphere outside the studio.  

thanks for watching and be sure to spay and neuter your pets!

Yeah, we did it, we were in the audience of the Price is Right. As you can probably already guess, neither Kevin or cute little me were picked to be contestants, but it was so fun, it didn't matter. I had to keep reminding myself to close my mouth because I was so agape with awe of the whole event taking place all around me. It's an uninteresting series of facts of why we didn't catch the first taping like I had planned, but it was no problem at all to catch the second taping of the day. (It goes like this)
I was really surprised how nice everyone was who worked at CBS. I mean, no one I came into contact with was rude or pompous. Amazing! I get way more attitude from people at the supermarket than I did that whole day. Plus, most of these people not only had to wear silly outdated red CBS blazers, but they had to deal with some crazy people (you know who I mean) and they still were friendly. Go CBS!
Here's another list of things I learned that day:
-It takes hours to get from arriving at the studio to getting to your seat. Gotta get your name right, show ID's, SS#'s, etc. All x 300 silly people.
-Everyone gets a mini interview by the director, your name and where you're from. That's when they choose whose name gets called. Pressure!
-The studio is so tiny! It looks huge on TV, but it's little, like smaller than a high school gym. We decided that they use tricky lenses to make it look bigger.
-Bob chats with the audience during the breaks. This freaked me out a little bit, like when they pass the microphone to anyone who raises their hand at church, but it is from these breaks that the best stories come from...
One lady wearing a custom T-shirt with a photo of a housecat that read "My cat and I watch Bob Barker everyday" raised her hand and asked the question, "My cat wants to know why you still use a microphone with a long string instead of one without."
Good heavens.
Another woman raised her hand and said "I want to show you something," and started up the stairs towards the visibly alarmed Bob. Thankfully all she wanted to show him was her own custom shirt. As she turned around, Bob read the back which was something like his own chronology, born here, raised here, did this, did that at that time, etc. A bit creepy, and I think we all sighed with relief when she sat herself back down.
My favorite was a girl, roughly my age, who yelled out, "Bob, you gotta sign my T-shirt! I made it, it's you!" He said "what is it...oh it's my head!" Indeed it was his head, made completely out of sequins-- very impressive and tacky. If there was a contest, her shirt won in my book, it was awesome. He agreed to sign it, but wanted to sign the back, y'know to avoid the boobs. But everyone in the audience and the girl herself begged for the front, because it just made sense. He cracked a little joke,"Is there an attorney in the house?," and then he enlisted two stage people to help him sign the front side of her shoulder.
It airs on June 10th. If by chance you do watch, Kevin and I are in the very back row, almost perfect center. I'll go ahead and tell you that both contestants went OVER on the showcase showdown, so tragic. But one lady's got a fine outfit on, well worth watching for.

Viva la Bob, 33 seasons and still truckin.

Progress! The builders have started to build, and soon(ish) this will be a second bathroom.  

Harnesses! Ready for the road trip! Mojito acted like I was hurting him when I put it on. 

H-ha! I'm totally going out and getting these for our roadtrip tomorrow for Franklin and Mojito. And they'll hate me for it. 

Like a McGruff safety pamphet

Last night Kevin's mom said that when Kevin was a baby he had "one of the first car seats," and I found this hard to believe. He was born in 1977, surely people didnt just carry their babies like Big Gulps bewteen their knees while they drove before 1977.
So I looked it up, and apparently his seat was one of the first mandated ones. I guess people just tossed babies in the back floorboard on the way to the supermarket before the government made laws against it. But car seats had been around before then, thank you Swedes once again.
Aurora, did you have a car seat?
My rabbit trail search continued and I found this disturbing fact:
An independent nationwide poll on child passenger safety reveals that 21 percent of grandparents - one in five - say they "never" use a child safety seat when they have their grandchildren as passengers.
Grandparents--, they let your kids get away with murder, and then they try and murder your kids.

this is not helping

So as I've mentioned before, I plan on using cloth diapers. Don't flip out, this is why:
-It Takes 20 Trees to Diaper One Baby in Disposables for 2 Years
25,000,000 trees are cut annually for this one product in the United States.
-Single-use diapers represent the 3rd largest consumer item (after newspapers and beverage and food containers) in the municipal solid waste stream. These diapers will require over 500 years to decompose.
-Not since the Middle Ages has there been so much human waste in our garbage. There is NO safe way to dispose of single-use diapers. Flushing them down the toilet causes 95% of clogged sewer lines in the US, and creates 43,000 tons of extra sludge per year. Most people simply toss these soiled single-use diaper into household, hospital, or roadside garbage. This adds 84 million pounds of raw fecal matter to our environment per year.

Knowing this, and also knowing that "Mom" will be my full time job, I knew that I should "go cloth." I'm not doing it to be earthy or make my life harder. I'm doing it out of sheer guilt. Incidentally, that's the same reason I recycle.

And so, I've been researching how this whole business works, cloth diapering that is. Depending on who you talk to, and what you read on the web, difficulty levels vary.
It's all very confusing at this point, and it's not from a lack of information. The world is super saturated with cloth diapering products and advice.
Here's a maddening example:
"How To Wash Diapers

Unstuff any Fuzzibunz and unfold diapers as you put them in. Close any velcro tabs. Spray any poop with Zout. DO NOT put any wool covers in the washer, ever.

First Step: SOAK
put in detergent halfway up to the first line on the cup. (NEVER use fabric softener)
put in the diapers (including fuzzibunz), but not the covers or pail liner.
set the washer to:
- cold wash
- cold rinse
- second rinse
- high water level
- regular agitation
- SOAK on the dial

The washer will agitate and then stop.

LET IT SOAK for at least one hour. Longer if there is a lot of poopy diapers. As long as you want to if you are going out or busy.

SECOND STEP: PREWASH
Turn the dial to prewash and let it run through. (this agitates for 4 minutes and spins out the water but does not rinse)

THIRD STEP: HOT WASH
Turn the dial to regular wash. Add just a touch more detergent, just enough to cover the bottom of the cup. Put in the covers and the pail liner turned inside out. Let it run all the way through spinning.

Take out the pail liner and hang it up to dry.

FOURTH STEP: extra rinses
Turn the dial back to rinse so that it goes through two more rinses. Every other wash time, or if the Joeybunz are feeling crispy, run through two more rinses. You can also check the water of the last rinse and if there are still suds in it, run more rinses.

FIFTH STEP: extra spin
turn the dial back to spin and spin it again. This helps them to dry faster

SIXTH STEP: drying
Hang up the Fuzzibunz and the covers (including the fleece covers), put the rest in the dryer on medium heat. Once in awhile, put the plain white (Green Earth and ProRaps) covers in the dryer, especially if they have been leaking. After the dryer stops, take out what is dry and start it up again."

Um, that can't all be necessary. Anyone getting visions of the "Anal Retentive Chef" from SNL?
None of this is shaking my confidence that I'll follow through, I just want to get my game plan down. But I am sure that I'm not going to follow that woman's wash routine, she's crazy.
We might even use the local diaper service. Still tryin to figure out what's cheaper.

Ok enough information. Entertainment time!

Fig. 1.
Toyota Corolla, public enemy #1. Be afraid! 

Explaination upon request.

I think it was Kevin who asked me to blog about the concept of the "tan sedan."
I developed this theory shortly after I moved to the [Silicon] Valley. It is as follows:
tan se·dan n.
1. Any beige, tan, biscuit, brownish, buff, coffee, drab, ecru, gold, khaki, sand, or tawny colored foreign 4-door vehicle, often driven by a non-caucasian person, that is exteremely dangerous and should be avoided on roads and parking lots at all times.
Note: Not all non-caucasians are dangerous drivers. Only when behind the wheel of a tan sedan are they hazardous to public safety.
See Fig. 1 and Fig 2 If you find your self with a view like Fig 2 in real life, get away as fast as you can. They show no mercy.

If you think I'm just making this up, just watch and you'll see I'm on to something. Especially if you live around here. When someone rides your butt-- tan sedan. When someone swerves into your lane-- tan sedan. No blinker?-- tan sedan!
I'm also not saying that there aren't other sterotypes that are bad drivers. Any of the manhood-compensator trucks, as I like to call them, are also bad. But I think they're bad on purpose. They usually seem like they have unresolved anger issues that manifest in tailgating and peeling out around little girls in honda civics like me. "Yes, I see. You're the bad-ass. Good for you."
And anyone who drives a Volvo is also to be feared. Volvos are famously safe, so I believe that people who buy them know that they are horrible drivers. Kevin reminded me of this when I wanted to get one. And I'll be honest, I fit in that category. I drive like a granma and my reflexes suck.
But I verily I say to you: beware of the tan sedan!

"Let's hear it for the boy!"

Kevin's such a pumpkin for painting the baby's room today (and last night for that matter). I could only do paint prep, like taping, because I'm not supposed to breathe the fumes.
As you can see we have a nice "Marmalade" color on 3 walls, and "Electric Pink" on the fourth/feature wall. In the foreground, please note the $50 crib and the free twin bed. Okay the yellow bed was mine for about a year before we got married, I bought it of of craigslist. But, the cool thing about it, other than being free, is that the girl said her grandfather made it. It's like-- almost sentimental. 

Yay for Kevin! 

I haven't had much luck with bums.

Having lived in Santa Cruz for 3 years, I got alot of bum exposure, and I don't mean the full monty kind either. I mean the c-c-c-crazy kind, or the decided to reject modern society kind. Anyway, in Santa Cruz they're everywhere. I learned from someone on the "inside," that is, someone who worked with the homeless and shelters, that in S.C. at least, that there is always somewhere they can sleep at night, and get a meal, the programs are very generous. So he said, to not ever give them money.
I did a few times, and they usually ended badly. In particular, it seems I paid for some guy's sexual favor (aaaa!!) because right after I gave him the cash I had on me, he and another guy followed each other into a downtown port-a-potty. Another time, I gave this crazy woman all the cash I had, that was supposed to pay for my food for the rest of the week and then she proceded to ask for more and then get hostile.
Like I said, it never goes well for me.
So I don't know why I thought today would be any different. I guess because it's San Jose, not Santa Cruz, and I don't know how good the shelters are here, I dunno. I drive up to a stoplight where there is usually a guy with a cardboard sign (not always the same guy, I guess they rotate, or rock paper scissors for the spot). I keep little Jack in Box bucks in my glove box so I can give those instead of money. I handed the guy some of those and two dollars. He was very nice and apreciative, he even made polite conversation with me-- right before his cell phone rang! That's right, cell phone, the cardboard sign guy on the highway offramp, had to take a call.
C'mon, at least put in on vibrate to make the whole thing more convincing.
Oh well. It doesn't really matter to me how bad he needed what I gave him. But I did think, "gosh, I guess even homeless people are better about answering their phones than I am."

ok now it's real

Summer arrived today for me. I had to drive my car just now, which I had forgotten to move into the garage so it wouldn't sit in the sun all day. So yes, it sat in the sun all day and it was absolutely equitorial inside it by 5pm.
I had the T-shirt on the steering wheel like an oven mit as I drove, and it even burned my hands through that. My make-up bag was like the dressing section at a salad bar. I worried for my CD's. I try to take the little binder of them out of the car the night before if I think they might get a cookin', but like I said I forgot alot of things. I've warped many a CD that way. It wasn't hot enough to melt the LCD clock in my dash like it was with my Honda in Dallas in high school. I kept socks on hand for steering wheel mits then. (The sunroof didn't have a cover, that didn't help.)
Now I'm at home with a headache from the heat and glare of of the other cars, (does that bother anyone else?) eating pickles out of the jar.
And for those of you who haven't spent time in the summer in someone's *house* in California, I must let you in on a little insanity: Almost no one has A/C. Like, they're in denial that it ever gets hot here. Nevermind that the businesses all have A/C. School and homes, nope. News flash- it gets hot. And also in breaking news, it also gets cold, and most houses only have wall heaters. Um, how is a giant toaster supposed to warm the whole house. It doesn't. People are surprised when I complain about being hot saying "I thought you're from Texas." And I reply "yeah, we have a thing called air conditioning and it's everywhere, even outside sometimes."
Point of all that: I'm hot.

Two totally unrelated things

#1. I finally got a DVD of my Easter performance and we're working on getting into the right format to put it online for everyone to see.
#2. If you don't watch Extreme Home Makeover, you need to! I bawl like a baby everytime it's on TV. It combines my favorite things: philatropy and design. It's on right now and they're bulding a new home for the family of the first woman to die in combat in Iraq. Wait, it gets more poignant, her parents live on a poor Navajo reservation and take care of her kids in a trailer. Hello! Frickin' awesome!

Element

Kevin and I have semi-decided that when we buy a new car, we would like it to be a Honda Element.
We don't know when this would be, probably when one of our cars dies.
But it's cheap and has good safety ratings (and that's mostly what I look for in a car), plus you can hose down the inside and it's muy handy. (and it's not a mini van! and it's got good gas milage).

Ow!

I just got stung by a wasp! At least I think it was a wasp, it looked something like this.
I've never been stung by a wasp or a bee (I didn't get out much as a kid, Aurora can back me up on that), so I stared at my foot to see it would puff up. It didn't, I guess I'm not allergic.
I have it elevated, in the most un-lady-like pose, right now as I type this.
Stupid wasp, why did you have to get all mad when I stepped on you?

It had been far too long without a photo! (corbis? what corbis?) 

Registry Time!

I do feel a little guilty because it was only last summer that I was making my wedding registry, and now I'm making a baby registry. Sorry folks.
My New Baby Registry
I'm still tweaking the details, like the font and the colors and layout.
But it works! Feel free to browse.