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Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Stand Up

Support free speech and the right to hold an opinion that may differ from someone else's without being publicly vilified for it by ignorant, intolerant people and country radio stations controlled by conservative corporate interests. Buy the Dixie Chicks' new CD, out today.

UPDATE 5/31: This is exactly what I hoped would happen!

Monday, May 15, 2006

Mother's Day Weekend

The weekend started early, since I took a vacation day for Friday, but it didn't start out very well. On the way home from work Thursday evening, I blew out a tire on the van. Luckily, I was near a little parking lot in a county park, so I could safely park the van. Of course, M. was going to be home late that night; any other night and he would have been home before I even left work. So I called our neighbor, trying to catch her before she picked up her daughter at the same daycare as H. I did get her and she was nice enough to come get me and then stop so we could pick up H, too. And of course, it was also tumbling class night. I would have skipped it except we missed last week when H banged up her knee, so we got home and left right away in the truck. I left M. a message, since he would see that both the truck and van were missing, and we made it to tumbling just in time.

After we got home, we called AAA, thinking they could tow the van, but if you have a spare, they will put the spare on instead of towing it. Since it was raining, we decided to let AAA put the spare on instead of M. doing it himself. I felt so bad though, because as soon as we got back to the parking lot, the rain turned into this giant thunderstorm. We asked the mechanic guy if he just wanted to come back in the morning and change it, but he didn't seem to mind doing it in the rain. Good thing we had him do it, too, because the spare was a monster to get off from underneath the back of the van. We would have been there all night if M. had to do it!

Luckily, the spare is a full-sized spare, so it didn't delay or cancel our trip to Ocean City for the weekend. First, I had the Mother's Day tea at H's preschool, which was absolutely adorable. They sang songs and served us iced tea and snacks and gave us flowers. We left for the ocean just after one and got down there right at 5pm. We had a wonderful dinner at a restaurant on the bay and watched the sunset in to the water.

On Saturday, we went to Assateague in the morning. The weather was absolutely perfect. H was more interested in getting her feet wet than building a sand castle. She loved playing just at the edge of the water, running when the water would come up to meet her. We stayed there for a couple of hours and even though we didn't see any ponies on the beach, we did see quite a few along the road in the wetlands area.

We went up on the boardwalk Saturday night and H got on a bunch of kiddie rides. She really wanted to get on some of the big-kid rides - she has no fear - but she's not nearly tall enough. We just had pizza for dinner after walking around and were back at the condo around 9pm. I crashed around 10:30, not even making it to the end of the NASCAR race.

Sunday morning was cold and overcast, so we had a terrific Mother's Day breakfast at some little hole-in-the-wall restaurant and headed back home. It was a very relaxing Mother's Day weekend, even though the usual laundry and cleaning chores were waiting once we returned home. The best present was getting to watch The West Wing finale Sunday night uninterrupted! (And how about the Grey's Anatomy episode Sunday night? I'm so glad it's on again tonight. I couldn't bear to wait for September!)

Monday, May 08, 2006

Interview

I had my admissions interview at NDM yesterday afternoon. It went very well and I’m in the program, with my official acceptance letter to come in the mail later this week. It was more of an information session than an interview, except for some questions at the end. The interviewer/adviser was very enthusiastic and ready to have me go to the registrar’s office right then and there to register for the summer session. But I need a few days for everything to sink in and to talk over the schedule with Mark, since he will have to take care of Hayley for two nights a week for eight weeks over the summer, beginning just after Memorial Day. So I’m going to enjoy our weekend at the beach and then come back and register and finally get started. Real forward progress at last!

Sunday, May 07, 2006

Rough Week

H had a rough week this week. At school on Tuesday, she cut her finger with the scissors - not with the blades, but she pinched it between the plastic handles and had to have a band-aid for it. On Thursday at school she fell down outside on the asphalt and had a huge scrape on her knee and elbow. She still wanted to go to tumbling that night, even though her knee looked really sore and I didn't think she could participate fully, but we went anyway. Halfway there, she told me she didn't feel good and wanted to go home. I turned around and headed for home when she told me she had to "growl" (her word for throwing up). There was no place to pull over, so I handed her the little trash bag I keep in the car and she growled into it. What a trooper! And then, on Saturday, when the scrape was feeling better and starting to scab over, she managed to get stung by a bee inside the house. She had already had her bath and was in her pajamas and somehow a bee made it inside the house during the day and stung her on the foot. She was exhausted and slept until 8am Sunday morning, which she never does.