Susan’s Journal

Today’s Song: dire straits – so far away
(check the radio.blog)

Yes, the weekend was nice. It all came down to today, though.

We got up, we showered, we packed our things. We hugged Rainlin and Dylan, and we told them to be good. We hugged Mom and Dad, and told them we’d see them in two weeks. My stomach was turning over, and my throat was tight, but I held it all together. We pulled out of the driveway and out of the town.

Two hours from home we stopped at one of my favorite restaurants that we don’t get to go to often. We sat there and ate, and looked at each other, for it was so quiet that we almost didn’t know what to do. After we finished eating, we got up and left and finished the drive home.

At home, Luke was very excited to see us, as was Jabba. MEOW! MEOW! I cuddled him for a few moments and came into the bedroom, greeted by the clean basket of laundry on our bed that I had left behind. I set to picking some of it out and folding it, and there was Dylan’s and Rainlin’s clothes. I sat down on the bed and began to cry. I cried quite a bit.

Our children are six hours away from us and are perfectly safe. They are with Scott’s parents for two weeks–one week with the rest of their cousins and one week just with Grammy and Papaw. This will save us over $700 in childcare, not to mention that it will be an absolute blast for them.

For me, though, it will be tough. The thing that struck me as I sat next to that basket of laundry was that I wanted to hold them. I wanted to go into the other room and give them a hug, and I couldn’t. This will be the longest I have been away from them since they moved to Texas ahead of me, over three years ago. Though they will be having fun, and I’m sure I will have time to do things, I’m not looking forward to it right now.

As I sat there foolishly with tears in my eyes, I thought of some of my good friends, both online and in real life, who have lost their children permanently. I thought about how they would never be able to hug their babies again, and that for me that time was just a short fourteen days away. How selfish you are, I thought to myself. It didn’t make that little pain go away right then, though. So I cried a couple more minutes, then got up and folded a little more laundry.

My husband, my wonderful husband, came into the bedroom and saw I was upset, and knew why I was upset. He hugged me and told me it was going to be okay. Then he went out of the room and looked at movie times on his computer and suggested we go see a movie. I just kind of sat there, and he dragged me out of the house. Now his intention was to see The Longest Yard, but it was sold out, so I bought tickets to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy instead. I’ll say it was a very bizarre movie, but then again obviously it should be, and the imagery was incredible. Very cool stuff.

So now we’re home, and I’m avoiding school work a bit, poking through some of the pictures that I took over the weekend. Here’s one–my beautiful babies. We went to Sea World on Saturday. It was really friggin hot. That seems so long ago now.

I fell into the trap tonight; I watched most of the season finale of American Idol. I just had to hear what all this hype about “Bo Bice” was about. He is pretty cool, I have to admit. When they announced that girl the winner, then had her sing, and she was a wreck, and crying, and smiling, and glitter was falling from the ceiling, and everyone, everyone was screaming… that is every little girl’s dream come true. It was absolutely incredible, and I have to say that I think American Idol did a wonderful job.

After the show was over, I went into Rain’s room, and she was asleep in her bed with the TV on. I turned the TV off and went into Dylan’s room to tuck him in. A few minutes later she was standing in Dylan’s doorway holding her squishy (I’ll have to talk about that another time). I asked her something, and she started talking funny; she was sleepwalking. Scott joined me, and we brought her back in her room, which is when “the terrors” started. Some people call them night terrors; but I have to tell you, they freak me the shit out. It’s like she’s possessed. Her bottom jaw starts trembling like it’s on a hinge, and she starts talking nonsense in this voice I can only describe as a monster voice. She said she hated Dylan. She said she just wanted “him” to leave (apparently someone else). She said she wanted to go home–though she was sitting right there in her own princess bed. Scott finally got her calmed down a bit as I watched on, helpless, and we left the room with her lights on.

Speaking of nightmares, isn’t this the trippiest picture you’ve ever seen? I have been playing with my tripod lately (man, that sounds dirty), trying to get some good pictures of Jabba. Actually, when I fixed up this picture (just brightened it up a bit), I was laughing so hard that poor Scott had to leave the room–he was talking to someone at work. I had tears coming out of my eyes. Behold–Susan’s headless pussy.

On a more serious note, I did the online check-in for my Breast Cancer 3-Day walk tonight. Could you possibly spare the ten dollars it would cost you to go to lunch tomorrow, and sponsor me on my walk? I’m still short of the donations I need and could really use your support… click here to follow the simple process to help a wonderful cause. I’ll be walking 60 miles, and you know I’ll be taking pictures too.

I’ve been meaning to do this forever, and here it finally is: [::link removed, email me if you want the file::] I took a bunch of five-second movie clips all day long and combined them down into a six-minute movie. The zip file is about 356MB; download it, unzip it, and watch it. (I zipped it not only to make it a few meg smaller but also to deter bandwidth hogs who would watch it over and over.)

Enjoy, and leave your comments here!

How did my day start, you ask? It started with an email from the security team: “Your computer has two viruses, blah blah blah.” In my five plus years with the company, this has only happened once or twice; so I promptly shit my pants. I did exactly what the email said, went into safe mode on my laptop (then found out I didn’t know the Administrator password), deleted the viruses and ran a full scan, updated some stuff in my system registry, and I even deleted a bunch of shit and did a defrag of my hard drive (which, by the way, was over 30% fragmented). That was half of my friggin day.

For lunch, Scott and I went to On The Border (or OTB, as we affectionately call it). Today I didn’t have my clockwork beef burrito though; I tried something new, which is unheard of for me. I had quesadillas, and they turned my stomach. I think I ate one and a half of the six. I dunno–too greasy, just too friggin yucky. Anyways, while we’re eating Scott said he got an envelope for me at the house, and he started to open it when he realized it was addressed to me.

Now I’ve been telling him not to open any of my mail, that I had a big surprise for him for father’s day, and today at lunch I finally spilled the beans. I know, father’s day is a month away, but I’ve been keeping the secret for about three weeks now, and it’s impossible for me to keep secrets from my husband. So since I told him, I can tell all of you now (he reads my journal). I used most of my airline miles to buy him a ticket to San Francisco. He’s never been there before. He’s staying at a bed and breakfast in the vineyards the first night, then going to a tour of Alcatraz the next day, then flying home the next day. The main part of the trip? A Jewel concert the first night. Scott loves Jewel like I love Sting, and he’s never seen her live. He’ll be 18 rows back, in a tiny venue. I hope he has an awesome time. I thought it would be nice for him to take a little trip away by himself for a few days.

Today’s Song: jewel – down so long
(look at the radio blog, dummy.)

He stared at me. I could see him shitting his pants. (There was a lot of shitting going on today.) He was as excited as a kid at Christmas–I’ve only been able to get that look out of him a couple times, and this was one of them, and I cherished it. He’s really excited about it, and he has been thanking me all day long. It’s kind of good, I found out, that I told him ahead of time; now he can be sure he can have this project he’s working on done by then, so he can go and enjoy himself and not worry about it. So he gets three days to go frolic in San Fran; I hope he takes some beautiful pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge for me; it’s one of my favorite places in the world.

Tonight I had class at work. They have been teaching us some shell scripting skills. At seven, I told the teacher I had to leave, and the rest of the class was like, “well… I need to…” and he said screw it, everyone go home. I felt kind of bad, but it was kind of cool at the same time that everyone got to leave.

Tomorrow is Rain’s last day of school. It’s my baby girl’s last day of kindergarten. In this town they don’t do kindergarten graduation, which I think kind of stinks. I remember the construction paper blue cap that we made, with the white yarn tassle… yes, I’m not ancient, I remember that. Oh well. Times change, I guess.

All right, so I couldn’t resist. I made myself a South Park person. What, you thought it might look different?

In June, I’ll be walking 60 miles over 3 days to help in the fight against breast cancer. Please make the decision to be a sponsor!
[ :: click here :: ]

You can now get Amber alerts sent to your cell phone. Quite an important advancement, I’d say,
[ :: click here :: ]

It’s a funny thing about our household. We started with a Golden Retriever named Sebastian. He moved down here with us from Massachusetts, and he was about four years old. I told Scott one day, “He seems like he’s bored. Let’s get him a friend.” Scott approved, and through a friend at work I started poking through the local Humane Society’s web page.

I stumbled upon a picture of Luke, and I stopped. Have you ever had that feeling? This is the one I want, I thought, and I didn’t have a moment’s hesitation. I just knew. I called and talked to the Humane Society lady, and we arranged for a “sleepover,” where Luke would come and visit for the night, to see how it would go. We had the sleepover, and it was like Luke and Sebastian were old friends–wagging, licking, frolicking and chasing around the house. It was great to see Sebastian so happy. We decided to make Luke the newest member of our family.

Just a few months later, something terrible happened. Sebastian started having trouble with his eye. It was all droopy looking, and sunken into his head, and honestly looked really gross. Scott took him to the vet, and the vet gave him antibiotics, thinking he had some kind of ear infection that was messing up his eye. He didn’t have an ear infection, though–he had cancer. Within two weeks he lost close to twenty pounds, and an ultrasound (which was about $400, by the way) confirmed the worst–it was all over the entire inside of his tummy. (Pancreatic cancer, I think it was?) We were given the choice, and we decided to put him down. Scott called me on the cell phone to tell me, and it was the only time in seven years of marriage that I’ve ever heard him cry (I’ve still never seen him cry). I sat with Sebastian on the floor and told him that I had some friends waiting for him up there in Heaven, and I cried too. It was terrible.

When we first got Luke, we thought we had done something wonderful in rescuing him–he was our three-legged wonder, hit by a car when he was less than a year old. After losing Sebastian, though, we can’t help but wonder if God sent Luke to rescue us. He is so wonderful with the kids, and so much fun to play with, and so easy to take for walks. Just one little tug on the leash, and he “huh?” turns around and looks at you and slows down.

As you can see in this picture, he’s started taking to sleeping on Dylan’s bed, which surprises me. When we first got Luke, Dylan was pretty scared of him–not because he was mean, but because he moves so fast. (Yes, our little tripod wonder is like a lightning bolt.) However, as of late, Dylan has been loving on Luke a lot more, and he’s really started to become “Dylan’s dog.”

I’m watching ever so slowly as Dylan comes out of his shell and starts to become more adventurous. Yesterday afternoon, Scott took Dylan to the park for his first real no-training-wheels lesson. He wasn’t thrilled about it at first, but by the end of the afternoon he was peddling around in the grass while Scott held the back of his bicycle seat. No hands-free tries yet, but that’s a big improvement, and we’re off to a pushing-start.

We’ve also told Dylan, “No video games until you learn how to ride your bike without training wheels,” and that seems to have been a big incentive as well.

Sometimes I have spurts of creativity; I just whipped out some new code for the little page that I use to update my journal, but none of you care because you can’t see it. It plants a little icon-sized version of the picture that goes along with my post, so I can write about it and look at it at the same time. Sometimes that gives me inspiration.

Tonight, as you can see, this post is about Rain. She is my beautiful angel little girl that I love so, so much. In this picture, you see her determined side, sitting on the short patiently, waiting for that fish to bite, gently reeling in a tiny bit at a time to make the worm move like I taught her. She was the only one who didn’t catch a fish (little fishies that we just threw back), but she was determined to do so. In fact, while Scott was packing up all the gear and I was cooling off the van, there she sat on the shore, determined to catch that fish.

In cheerleading, it’s a different story. She does good at it, and I know she loves it, but she just doesn’t pay attention. She’s making oogly faces at someone, or pushing someone else playfully, or just goofing off while the cheer instructor is trying to teach them something. I have been harping and harping on her for weeks and weeks about how important it is to pay attention, and to leave her silliness at the door, and she just won’t do it.

Even in kindergarten, her teacher says she has been doing better. She sits quietly and pays attention, and follows directions a lot better than she did at the beginning of the year.

But the one thing I spend a hundred bucks a month for her to do? She doesn’t pay attention. Is this sounding like the kid who sat on the kitchen floor, banging the pots and pans, with their expensive toys just sitting in the living room?

I don’t want to take her out of cheerleading. I really know she enjoys it, she tells me how much she likes it, but I just… I don’t know.

When I take her there, there’s an older brother of a little girl on the cheerleading team. He sits and plays video games on the TV with Dylan while the girls practice cheer, or they run around and bounce in the other gymnasium room. He’s a great kid, and in general the afternoons at cheerleading are a good workout for everyone (well, except me I guess). It’s nice to see Dylan have a male friend, since it seems like most of our friends have girl kids to play with. I’m hoping that will change when he starts kindergarten and starts making little guy friends who live nearby us. It’s hard with his school across town–it’s not like we can have afternoon playdates, because it’s a half hour each way. Just not worth it.

Enough rambling for tonight? See, I told you that little picture there would be inspiration. Work is work, I’ve got a lot to do to get ready for this weekend. I worked out at lunch time, so that was a yay for me. Guess that’s all. I’m tired.