Love At First Sight

I haven't blogged all summer! I can't believe it's been so long! The truth is that I have been so busy, that everytime I sat down to blog, someone or something would interrupt me and by the time I got back to it, it'd be outdated. But here's something that I started writing in July and is still current!

First of all: Woo-hoo!!! As many of you know, I got this BEAUTIFUL new bike. Not sure about any other place on earth, but this is what every kid in America traditionally dreams of owning: A new, shiny red bike (which later turns into a wish for a new, shiny red car)!!

So, let us start at the beginning.

I have been pulling my hair out since early June trying to buy a used bike in reasonable condition. In late June, I came across an ad, in which this woman was selling hers for $45. I went over and took a look. First of all, this bike was a year old, secondly, it had a broken pedal, and third, she couldn’t give it to me until the end of July. I was NOT going to cough up $45. She informed me that the pedal would cost me $5-$6 to replace. I said, ok chickadee, I’ll pay you $30 for it right now, or $25 at the end of July (since I’d only get a month’s worth riding out of it by then). Later I found out that the pedal was much more expensive, and it would end up costing me $20 less than a brand new bike of the same model. See ya!

And then it happened one day… and of course I have a tear jerking story about it. I was strolling along, minding my own business, trying not to let my eyes wander too much. You know how it is, right ladies? You go shopping to pick up a few household items, and you see something, and suddenly realize, you need it. My budget for the month was telling me, you don’t need anything right now and keep your eyes to yourself!

But 'lo and behold… There it was, on the top rack.... I turned the corner and it was like we'd been waiting to just run into each other all our lives. It's beautiful shiny cherry exterior with splashes of white here and there... the classic handlebars that are perfect for my need not to ride bent over... the wonderfully cushioned seat that is not only soft enough not to bruise my a*s, but big enough to accommodate the sheer bulk of it. I could hear "hallelujah" in the background as my mouth dropped open in awe... there was an inexplicable shining light surrounding the bike that blinded me to any other bike on the rack. I knew right there and then, there could be no other for me, this was it. I was ruined for all others...

I looked at the price and was shocked, and rechecked the brand... yup, a Schwinn... hhhmmm... was something wrong with it maybe? Then I noticed the very same one on another rack that retailed at 150 some dollars. But mine was below $100. I called a rep over to confirm the difference between the two, and when he said there was none and went to change it, I knew it was now or never. I wasn't going to let anyone separate me from my future bike!!! I kicked my Indian gene (kind of like vampire teeth, appearing at opportune times but not visible at other times) into action and stepped right in between him and MY BIKE. I was ready to fight, but turned out he was on my side. He smiled at me and asked if there was something the matter. I told him that since I'd found the item under that price, and had already decided to purchase it, they are obligated to sell it to me for that price. It was their mistake, not mine. He pulled it down for me, ripped that tag off and told me to ring it up right away while he was still on shift so he can verify what I'm claiming. Of course it was 15 minutes at the cash register while they tried to find a loophole… I don’t know whether they got sick of trying or they saw the damning gleam in my eyes, but they handed the sucker over.

Of course, by my calculation this meant that some time in August, I’d have to starve for about 1 week… Eh! Que sera sera, right? Anything for the BIKE! (Just kidding)

So in recent days I’ve wondered about this particular desire I was suddenly possessed with to own a bike. If it has been just a whim, I’d have given up early on when I couldn’t find one easily. I haven’t ridden since I was 12-years-old. After much contemplation, I let it be and just enjoyed myself. Riding at a long stretch with nothing but me, the wind and a beautiful day is such a freeing experience (albeit also a sweaty one!).

It was quite comical trying to re-learn riding. I had to force Brother into helping me which he thought was ridiculous considering my age, hahahaha. And then it came to me 2 weeks ago… while I was going down a long sloping sidewalk with the wind rushing at me. Life has been so complicated and un-fun for sssooo long. I even managed to forget some of the things I used to do for fun during and before my teen years. Bike riding was one of those things. Turning 30 has been some kind of life transitioning thing for me or something. *shrugging* I’m not sure what’s happening to me, or if this is some kind of pre-midlife crisis, but whatever it is, it’s been good for me in. Over the past year, I’ve gone back and begun doing the simple things I used to do, and find that they make me happy. :-)

Swollen Eyes, Alien Reactions, and Fatal Jokes

Hello out there (imagine it's echoing)….

Hope all is well with everyone. I am a bit delirious myself this morning due to no sleep for the past two nights! If you don’t know me, then you’ll logically think it was a wild weekend. If you know me, then you’ll know that I have an absolutely zero social life in that way, so of course it wasn’t some crazy night out situation… Kid was sick on Saturday, and I had to wake every 45-60 minutes to keep a check on the temperature. Poor thing was flushed and having a tough time with sinuses on top. I only woke twice last night for this purpose, but there was another reason I didn’t sleep. I had another one of ‘those’ nights when you can’t stop thinking about some things…. and someone… yeah, there’s a someone that as hard as I try, I can’t shake… an inaccessible someone at that. So this morning, I’m all swollen-eyed, pale, and plain old pooped. But that didn’t stop me from taking a walk at 5:30am to clear my head (and freeze my a** off since I ran out without a sweater in my hurry). We all torture ourselves with something once in a while, right? This is my thing, the one that got away… The One.

Well, once in a while, I like a little distraction from The One. Nothing wrong with that, right? I mean, I’m mourning, not dead. :-) And I had such a distraction recently. Here’s the short and sweet of it (whatever that means when it comes to me!).

So, there was I was, being closely examined by him. I was flat on my back for most of it, and to be honest, if I had to have someone towering over me, why not this guy, right? Especially since I estimated that he’s got to be within 2 years of my age either way. Sounds like a hot date, right? Nope, it was my new doctor from the week before, actually. Talk about an alien reaction, it has just been too long! I was like a teenager all over again. Of course I got nervous… and it was like I was missing the opposable thumb or something, because I couldn’t grip anything properly, and nor would my hands stop shaking. This is me, who’s lived on two different continents, grit my teeth through a tough divorce, rode and jumped off deadly trains that kill tons of people every year, punched the quarterback in the face when I was no more than 16, and nun chucked scores of deadly (ok, not really deadly, just felt deadly) mosquitoes vying for my blood…. And now I've been reduced to this... tsk tsk. I think I was bolder when I was a teenager than I am now as an adult. At first I was fine, until he walked in and came really close so that I could get a clear view of him… and that was the end of any intelligent thought or word. I don’t think I’ve been as quiet in a space of 15 minutes (when someone else is present) since the time Ben’s potty-mouth Filipino friend made me say a very very very bad word by accident. We were at TGIFridays and it was all I could do not to jump under the table and hide when the 8 odd people suddenly went silent at my utterance. I tried denying it, but there was no going back--- too many witnesses! Anyways, back to the examination table. Now, understand that I was encouraged early on by this doctor’s nurse. I thought I was going in to see some old fogy, until the nurse asked if I’m married. Sighing I said ‘no’. I didn’t know where she was going with it until she practically beamed at me and informed me with a wriggle of her eyebrows that the good doctor himself is also very much unmarried and “cute as a button”. Hahahahaha… That is a phrase I’d use for a little boy, not the big one I encountered. I was stunned and amused at her blatant suggestion and could only smile at her. Of course now I was curious. It was all going fine until I finally opened my mouth (unrelated to my medical history I mean). And then the whole thing died a horrible death, I should have stuck to just nodding. But I had to go and make a joke. It brought forth a look like I’d just told him that I microwave bunnies for fun. I had to say I was kidding three times before he’d cracked a smile (a handsome one at that). But without a doubt, my joke probably sliced the moment in two and fed it to the dogs.

Oh well, it was fun while it lasted!

My diet was shot to h*ll this last week since I went out and ate with my knitting pals and then went to a carnival on Saturday with Kid where the food selection is geared towards fattening up America. Mmmmm… pizza, baked goods, candy, pop… Anyways, time to take Kid to the doctor.

Until next time…

Those Mothersockers!

Hello! Today is the best day of the year for me. It is Kid’s birthday! Of course, everyone knows that today is also Mother’s Day. What a present! The year Kid was born, Mother’s Day fell the Sunday before I gave birth, and I remember going out to lunch with my friend Ben, and his mom. I wasn’t expecting anything, but was touched when TWO Mother’s Day mugs showed up at the table. I remember tearing up, which of course I thought was so wimpy of me, but soon realized that it was a permanent side effect of pregnancy. Anyways, even though this isn’t my first MD, I still have to remind myself that I now share this day with my mom. :-)

Now that I’ve shared some feel-good stuff, here comes my topic for today. I am planning to moan and b*t*h about something. I am sure many of you have heard about this knitting competition I entered last week, which is why this blog is running a couple days late. Here is how it works… We participants were entering a war in which we kill our target by knitting a pair of socks and snail mailing it to them. Of course, we also have our own killers. Once we’ve been killed, we are out of the running. The objective is to kill as many people as possible, and remain the last man standing. There are more details, but I won’t go into them since I know you aren’t reading this because you’re dying to know more about the contest. So, there were 1800 of us registered from all over the world, and everyone was supposed to get an email with the unique pattern (so no one could cheat by pre-knitting), and the specifics of our target (i.e. shoe size, address). These official emails were supposed to hit the circuit at 7am CST …and they didn’t. In fact, I can’t believe I was so excited that I barely got any sleep, and then I was up at 6:30am to get ready to start, as all my peers were (according to the open forum on the website). There were people who didn’t sleep at all since it would reach them at like 2am their time.

Well, at 10am we all finally noticed a posting on the website with the pattern. It was 3 hours late (growling), and by then I had an awesome headache, which became worse when I realized that it was half-as*ed. Sorry for the bad language, but this is nothing compared to what I was thinking at the time. The only consolation was that we could knit to a certain point before we needed our target’s shoe size, so knitting needles began flying at speeds that defied logic (haha). It was actually a lot of fun, and I managed to relax and knit with my eyes closed (to ease the headache). I was so darned excited, and this was the first time I was knitting a sock (you can’t count the one I knit the day before to kind of familiarize myself with the method of sock-knitting, since it didn’t look like anything that would fit a human foot). I knit for most of the day on and off, and hoped to mail out the socks the next day. Well, the further I got, the more confused I got, and thanks to the open forum, I realized that my confusion was stemmed in the fact that there were numerous errors in the pattern. I could feel the dark clouds rolling in on my sunny horizon now…

Before we could participate in the competition, we had to become a member. And in order to become a member we had to pay money. Albeit, not a lot of money, but still… money is money. And I expected some punctuality and proof-reading, but that was not to be, and little did I know that this was only the tip of the iceberg. The coordinator had managed somehow to get in over her head. This is the third annual war, and it seems she’s never had over 500 people in the competition, so it’s always gone well in the past. On top she had a death in her family some time in the past 2 weeks. I wanted to throttle the people on the forum that were verbally bashing anyone commenting on how ill-organized this whole thing was. It went along the lines of, “she is volunteering to do this, not being paid”; “she is mourning a family member”; “she is doing this alone, no one else is running the show with her”; etc. First of all, she may be doing this for free, but we AREN’T. I don’t care how little money it is, we paid. Secondly, I am very sympathetic to a death in the family, I’ve had my share. I am positive that no one would have faulted her if she’d postponed the start date for the competition. People would have been more than obliging if she’d posted on the website that she’d rather wait, and do this right, than stick to the original date, and do this in such a crappy fashion. Third, I’m pretty sure that most knitters are very enthusiastic and if she’d asked for some FREE help, she would have gotten it. No one placed a gun to her head and insisted that she do this NOW and do it ALONE. At this point, I am still keeping my cool, even though it doesn’t seem like it. I was a bit miffed, but probably not as much as some of the other participants. Now here is the straw that broke my back (me being the camel in this scenario :-)). I kept checking my email every few hours to see if I’d gotten my email, and wondering if I’d have to knit two half socks before getting this information. I was reading something on the forum when I realized there were a couple of threads going on and on about how…. apparently some people had gotten their emails… 2 hours before the official posting of the pattern on the website!!! In case you don’t know, you should react with a sharp intake of breath at this moment. I know that to non-knitters, this may not seem like a big deal, but it is!! These people not only started knitting that darned sock, but they had all their info in front of them and could now feasibly send their socks out the very next morning while the rest of us poor dogs would work our fingers to the bone and still not have a prayer of mailing out until Monday! Hold on, hold on, we haven’t gotten to the breaking back part… then the coordinator, who still hadn’t sent out these emails to the majority of contestants by the 24 hour mark, posted killers and targets and all their info on the website. Of course my target’s shoe size was listed in the UK size, and EU size, but the US size had been cut off the page… *sigh* I’d just look it up according to what I had, but then... We had been told that in this first round, our targets would come from the same vicinity as we are. My target was in Tasmania, Australia… ok, ok…. That’s fine I figured. This must mean that my killer is also from some other country so that the time it takes for the socks to reach in both instances must be somewhat equal, right? Right?? NO. My killer is right here in the US. Do I even have a chance at this point? Of course not. Not unless my killer goes into a coma for about a month, or manages to slam 5 of her/his 10 fingers in a door. Not that I’m wishing any such thing, just giving you examples, *evil grin*.

I was so terribly disappointed, and if that was maybe one of two things that had gone wrong, I might have just sucked it up and continued… but when I added the lack of punctuality, pattern errors, unfair advantage for some participants over others, absence of organization, and now a definite death sentence by location, I got fed up. It was definitely the end of it for me. I wrote my killer an apology for any inconvenience and re-directed her to my target. And then, to my credit, I wrote the coordinator asking her to remove me from the list WITHOUT ripping her to pieces in the email. This whole event got quite a bit of media attention and even a sponsor— so you’d think… but guess not. Anyways, as a final note, I still wanted to go back and slap some people around on the forum that were still busy telling others that they should be thankful for the roof over their head and the food on their table instead of getting mad at the coordinator for the mess she made… really? Can we keep things in perspective and stick to the context of the situation? And they call me a drama queen…. *huff*

Happy Mother's Day!

Swearing, Jumping and a Butt Bruise

I have a 'clothes' story to tell today. Clothes and I have had an interesting history from the beginning. Something like a ‘love-hate’ relationship. I love how they look, just hate how they look on me. I am, like most of the women I’ve ever met, trying to lose weight. This isn’t the first time I’ve ever tried, but I believe it is the first time I am not hating it while trying. I figured out several years ago why I’ve never been fond of clothes-shopping like all my friends. I always walk away realizing that what I thought was made for big-boned-ed people, was actually made for me. :-) Here’s a typical scenario: I pick up what looks like it’ll fit, go into the dressing room, and then try to get it on despite the tearing sounds I imagine are coming from the next stall. And the whole time, I’m chanting ‘it’s gonna fit, I swear, I just need to get it over one shoulder, and then it’s gonna fit… seriously….” You know how this ends, right? Once you’ve managed to get that one shoulder in, you realize it is useless, and now are trying to get the heck out of the top while you’re running into the walls of the stall because you’re blinded by the top which is half on and half off. Once I backed up into the door knob and didn’t know how to explain that bruise on my butt (wondering whom I had to explain it to, aren’t ya?). And then there was the time with the pants… You’d think I’d know better than to go near the pants… I have artificial knees that I am not supposed to run or jump with. And yet, there I was unable to avoid just that. The darn pants were shy and reluctant, unless I jumped in place for about 30 seconds. Once that hurdle had been jumped (no pun intended, haha), I had to run around (a bit hysterically) to get the button on. Back in the “snap button” days, I was like a broken record in there. I knew I shouldn’t have looked in the mirror, but who ever said I was a coward? My hair had lost all semblance of order, my lipstick and eyeliner were skewed across my face, and the pants looked mad angry at my legs/hips. Imagine my one-arm-in shirt look… it was so terribly depressing that it kept me from stepping into a clothing store for the next 4 years. I finally broke my fast when I realized I had nothing to wear for Kid’s birthday party 2 years ago. That little trip was everything I had expected it to be. The anxiety, frustration, disappointment, etc. At one point, Brother thought something had happened to me in there. Apparently, I’d been trying clothes on for 4 whopping hours, and he had searched all over the store for me. Of course by then, I’d run myself ragged with that darned chant about fitting and swearing… I mean not swearing like swearing, but swearing it would fit… well, maybe a little swearing swearing. Brother showed great compassion and patience that day (or it might have been the two beers he had while waiting, dunno). Too bad there isn’t a group for things like this… you know, like to ease us back into the shopping way… or at least prevent an episode of running and screaming from the changing rooms of any miscellanous clothing store…

Anyways, I was reminded of all this because…. *drumroll please*… I very carefully tried on my college jeans… and they fit!!!!! Yeh!!!! Of course I can’t sit in them, eat in them, or breathe in them, but THAT’S OK!! I’m just happy they wanted to fraternize with my hips at all!

Blogs, Quakes, and Mating Habits

I have often wondered how people write a day to day blog. What if there is nothing interesting to say? What if life is boring? I actually scanned a couple of blogs to get some idea of how it’s done, and I’ll be lucky not to bore someone to death also. Oops, was the mean? Not a good first impression, right? Oh well, if you already know me, you must like me, and if you don't, you'll learn. So, in case you’re wondering what you’ve missed during the first 30 years of my life (hence the blog title), let me assure you that some of it was great, and the rest was pure hell. :-)

So, we had an earthquake this morning at 4:37am. And for some reason, no one sees what a big deal that is for us Midwesterners. We’re more about tornados here in IL, so I was confident in the knowledge that I’d have to go to California for a quake. Guess not. And I must say, I’ve been labeled a drama queen twice in the past 2 hours. Is it wrong that I am disappointed at having missed it?? Ok, ‘disappointed’ is a mild adjective, I had a freakin’ fit and felt the need to kick something when I realized that everyone but me had woken up. Apparently, my family feels it was best that I was not woken up, because I would have “screamed, cried, and smothered my kid.” I would NOT!

Anyways, moving on from natural disasters. A little about myself…. I obviously have a kid, who will be referred to as ‘Kid’ from here on out. I am divorced, and living with my wonderful family of ‘Brother’ and ‘Mother’. I like to hike, jump from moving trains, buses, planes, and once a year I observe the mating habits of some of the most dangerous crocs in the world. Don’t believe me? Good, because you should know right away, hiking is a lose-lose situation with me, because bugs make me ‘scream, cry,’ and spring for the nearest human being, which was no joke back when I was nearly 200 lbs. I don’t jump from anywhere (except for the one disastrous jump from the moving Mumbai Central Line train), and I wouldn’t go near a croc even to feed it my worst enemy (and as for the mating habits… ew). I am an avid knitter, and I teach it for fun. I love reading, and I wish I could cite a classical title, but the truth is, I love reading suspense and horror. My latest obsession is Stephenie Meyer’s ‘Twilight Series’. Oh, and in case you haven’t figured it out yet, I also like talking people into near deafness. That’s how I get Kid to sleep every night, and the reason why Mother looks frightened when I say ‘can we talk?’, and why Brother had to get counseling 4 years ago… Haha... I think Homeland Security could use my mouth as a weapon…. Totally kidding… maybe…

Ok, enough for now. More next time...