S.A.D.

i think i have seasonal affective disorder. except in reverse.

most commonly when you read about it, it's in reference to people who just can't stand the winter. they get withdrawn and depressed from the lack of daylight, the cold weather, the dreary gloomy season. they get light therapy and vitamin supplements.

my mom loves the warm sunlight, gardening, fishing, and will find any excuse to be outside every possible moment of the summer. she loathes cold weather and high school ski trips found her sitting in the lodge all week long sipping hot cocoa and reading a book. i'll call her on a ninety-five degree evening and she's mowing the lawn. and she's happy about it. my sister and her husband own a boat. on a random weeknight you might find them picnicking on the lake. my sister has skin that warm, sleek golden color that mine hasn't looked since i was twelve years old.

freaks.

i am albino-like compared to my late-august counterparts. the heat is beats down incessantly, trying to suffocate me (and apparently only me), and i avoid it at all costs. i hesitate and groan before walking out the door. it's like walking into an invisible wall of vaporized tar. i feel sluggish. i break a sweat buckling aislinn into her carseat. it feels gross. i get sunburned. i reach a point where there are no more clothes i can remove without being reported by the neighbors that i'm committing indecent exposure while carrying in my groceries. there are bugs. my plants give up all hope and scorch to death and i can't help them because it's too hot to go turn on the sprinkler. most of the water never reaches the ground, anyway, before it's sucked up into a sunset atmosphere the approximate temperature of a crematorium.

the last few days, then, have been a GODSEND. i feel lighter! sleeker! faster! of course it's all in my head, but isn't that the point? soon it will be fall, and the air will be crisp and cool and accommodating to life on the planet once more. i am watering my plants again. they're like gee, thanks, i'm dead but i don't care. i feel productive. the windows are open. in two short months it will be time for apple cider and vegetable stew and baked goods and cinnamon-scented candles and the skies will get dark early and blankets will become useful again and the fireplace! and everything will be right in the world.

i'm moving to alaska.

epic fail

my post below, that is. i can't tell you how many times i've thought about blogging, and how many pictures i've wanted to post. but i'm lazy, and my flickr account expired, and i've used that as an excuse for way too long. i'm faced with a decision: to renew or not to renew? on one hand, all my pictures are already there. on the other hand, i don't love the interface.

do any of you bloggers have any suggestions for a blogger-friendly photo hosting site? i'm happy to pay a reasonable annual subscription. bonus points if it's easy to share albums with friends and family. more bonus points if they have an in-house high-quality digital printing service (flickr doesn't - when you order prints it links you to snapfish and you have to wait while your files are exported yet again).

something old, something new

i'm really jonesing for a new car. i want a car with better mileage. i want new car smell that doesn't come in a plastic package.

the problem is, my car runs just fine. and buying even the most fuel-efficient hybrid car does not offset the environmental impact from the production process. at the end of the day, the best thing for the environment and your wallet is to just keep driving the car you have, no matter what the price at the pump is.

when i'm really feeling sorry for myself, i detail my car. something about having a sparkling clean smelling car makes you feel a lot better about what you're driving. especially when there are so often goldfish crackers smashed into the floor mats these days, and dried up wet wipes in the cupholders.

yesterday i gave my blog a facelift, and i'm hoping it will have the same effect. my blog posts have been scarce this year, and i want to regain some of the enjoyment that i used to get from posting. so i cleaned up the old blog and gave it a new paint job.

we'll see if it has the desired effect.

skoy cloths

i hate kitchen sponges. they're bacteria amusement parks, and they start smelling bad after two days and never recover no matter how many times you run them through the dishwasher.

a few years ago i swore off sponges and started using plain washcloths in the kitchen. they're thinner so they dry faster, and i could run them through the washer.

even so, after using them for a few months, the mildewy smell started to linger, which required bleaching. and the bleaching broke down the fabric and led to their quick demise.

i contemplated a solution for a few months until i saw my friend maria mention skoy cloths on her blog. or maybe she mentioned it here. or here. maria is a busy woman.

i checked for them at whole foods to no avail, so i opted to go the online route and bought two packages (four cloths per package) for $6.99 each on amazon.com. they're made of mixed cotton and cellulose (wood) pulp. when dry, they're stiff, like extremely thinly sliced sponges. based upon the amazon.com reviews, i wasn't really clear whether i would get 2 or 20 or 200 uses out of them.

when you wet them under the faucet, they become like a super-thick paper towel. i love them! they dry out lightening fast and it takes several days for them to get smelly. then i just throw them into the washer and run them through with the rest of the laundry - including the dryer cycle as well. admittedly, they would probably last longer if i let them air dry, but who has time to sort their wet laundry for dishrags?

i have been circulating four of them for the last month or so and they are holding strong. they're fading a little, but they have plenty of life left in them. and they don't stink. i'm sold.

Bug!

here's a video of aislinn yesterday. she's recovering from a virus so please ignore her runny nose.

the weekend update

oh, golly gee, what a week. i had to get three beers in me before i could even get up the motivashuns to start this post.

tuesday morning aislinn had a tiny cough when she woke up. i'd been sick the week before so i just thought, "oh, she's coming down with what i had." then tuesday evening she came home from daycare with a stiff neck. she still didn't have a fever and was acting chipper so i thought i'd just keep an eye on it, even when she was fussy at bedtime which is uncharacteristic of her.

then she woke up around 9:30 p.m. running a fever. crap! stiff neck+fever+cough=meningitis scare in my book. i'm probably uber jumpy because i was in college at the time that there were meningitis outbreaks nationwide in college dorms so it's kind of on my radar, and also because she's my BAY-BEE and i've got a Ph.D. in self-schooled pediatrics courtesy of WebMD and babycenter.com and Dr. Sears.

so i called our pediatrician's after hours line to talk to a nurse. the answering service says that our ped is still taking after-hours calls and she will page him. okay, that's fine, whatev.

now my ped has kind of been on my shit list for a while for a couple of different reasons that i've mentioned on here previously. long story short he's a little too young and a little too cocky and takes me a little not seriously enough and always acts like i'm overreacting even though aislinn only sees him MAYBE twice a year for actual sickness. i'm no dumb young thing, right, so don't treat me that way, it won't fly.

anyways the pediatrician called me back and was acting all annoyed at my call, like i scoured the internet to find his home number or something. then he told me that he "doesn't know how [I could] really tell that a child that young has a stiff neck anyway, soooo..." okay, thanks for more or less just calling me an idiot. goodbye. in fact, goodbye forevah.

so i wait until the morning and i text my pediatrician/stepsister and ask her whether i should make an appointment with the doctor or take her to the emergency room. she tells me to go ahead and bring her to the ER (where she's a resident) because with the stiff neck that's probably where the ped will send her anyway to have blood tests done.

SO i take her to the ER and they give her an IV to take blood and give her a strep test and have to give her a catheter to get a urine sample since she isn't potty trained and it's an all-around six-hour nightmare, despite the doctors and nurses on staff at the St. Francis Pediatric ER who were very kind and gentle and accommodating and all-around great. ultimately she's discharged with a diagnosis of an general infection (probably whatever i had) that's caused her lymph nodes to swell which is causing the stiff neck. follow up with general practitioner in 1-2 days.

so we took her home and i inhaled some pei-wei and by this time she and i were just flat-out exhausted so we slept.

cut to friday. she was still running a fever, so i took her to a new pediatrician for her follow-up on the recommendation of a friend. my initial impression is that this guy and i will jive a whole lot better, so i'm hopeful.

today aislinn has continued to run a fever (the 5th day), but today her fever was a lot lower and i had to give her very little medicine. i don't ALWAYS medicate a fever, but i do medicate symptoms when she's appearing very uncomfortable. we were even able to venture OUT OF THE HOUSE with daddy to go to whole foods for lunch and to a used bookstore.

being out of the office unexpectedly for three days in a row has been nothing short of a logistical NIGHTMARE in terms of client appointments and things i need to get done, so i am very ready to be back at work tomorrow, even though i'm only working a half-day so i can pick her up early. but at least i didn't have to take a bunch of attitude from a superior about it. it's my practice and i can stay-home-with-my-sick-kid if i want to. that was the whole point, right?

having a sick child is so exhausting, more emotionally than physically because you'd give anything to make them better. the whole thing was underscored for me by the death of an eighteen year old boy from my hometown on friday. steven wilson had engaged in a courageous battle with cancer for the last year, and thousands of strangers and friends followed his every setback and improvement on his facebook page and the blog written by his mother. so i hold my beer up high this evening to parents everywhere who have children who are gravely ill. a twelve-hour scare nearly brought me to my knees, and i can't imagine what horrors they must go through every day as they watch your children suffer. bless you.

anyway. now i'm going to go sleep for a dozen hours.

i has a jacket!

a life jacket, to be exact.

last night after my extended immediate family's (is that redundant?) sometimes-weekly Thursday Night Dinner, erin accompanied me to Academy to purchase a life jacket for kitten. we're going to the lake for our annual extended immediate family lake trip in a couple of weeks. i'd looked at wal-mart and target but found nothing satisfactory. when i mentioned this to erin, she mentioned academy. i was hoping to find something without cartoon characters. unfortunately i wasn't able (EVERY SINGLE LIFE JACKET had a cartoon character), but i did find something with a relatively benign Dora The Explorer patch - and it seemed the safest design.

en route aislinn was at the End Of Her Rope, it being after her bedtime. but once we walked into Academy she brightened right up and was so proud to try on her new "jacket."

jacket?! jacket?! jackejackejacket?!

she was SO proud of it, in fact, that she wore it all the way out of the store. we set her up onto the cash register and had her scanned.

and then we got to the car and she had to take off her "jacket" and promptly melted down in the parking lot, and then fell asleep on the 7 minute ride home.

do you like my jacket? jacket?

in fact, the only thing she said more often that evening than, jacket? was ewi? ewi? ("erin? erin?"). erin is her FA-VOR-ITE person. she likes aw ewi ("aunt erin") more than she likes mama. she has picked up on the times and places where aw ewi is likely to appear. after daycare, if we go anywhere other than home, when i open the car door at the restaurant or store or mall she's asking, aw ewi? ewi?? if we go home and someone comes in the front door before jake is expected home, she chirps, ewii!!! ewii!!!! it's adorable.