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Feb. 16th, 2014 06:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
altarflameThis weekend is wall to wall gloriosity. I'm makin' up words over here.
Grant and I woke up early yesterday morning and took all the kids to breakfast at a local diner we know well and love. There were several people we knew there, everyone pigged out, and it was a good way to "charge up" the children, with conversation and affection, before we left them with a sitter and spent the rest of the day up in Miami together.
First, we went to the Coconut Grove Art Festival. There's so much to see, tons of varieties of handmade jewelry, ranging from string and wire to loaded-with gems. There were sculptures made of horseshoes, robots made of found objects, bizarre watercolor layering techniques I don't even know how to describe - every variety of photography you can imagine was represented in enormous prints, from surrealist mash-ups to back-lit flowers and the guy who makes landscapes out of food. And the guy who makes landscapes out of bodies. Journalistic, traditional, infrared, everything. There was a woman there with hand embroidery that looked like photography, and a dark room for us to go in and stand among lit up wire-work bodies twirling from the ceiling. There was wood working for days, and mind-bendy furniture.
There were SO many times that I wanted to take pictures, but I swore to myself going in that I was not going to spend the whole time with my phone in my hand, looking at everything through a screen.
I got a plate of coconut shrimp and fried clams with a pretty swell strawberry daiquiri, while Grant tore up a gyro, and then we walked around splitting some sugar-cinnamon roasted cashews. The weather was great, just barely too hot out of the shade. Sometimes some live music was cool, and there was zip lining. We sat under beautiful mossy trees talking to a shirtless guy and generally people-watching.
After we left we hung out at a pretty cool bookstore for awhile, working on our budget and planning for things like when to replace our falling-apart-van and our hasn't-worked-in-years dishwasher. Sat in a window display above the street, read a collectors' Rolling Stone together, called the kids for a few.
We went to an indoor-outdoor mall with the WEIRDEST parking set up either of us had ever seen, and got him shoes he's been needing for too long, and sat in some of those pay massage chairs.
Coffee at Pasion Del Cielo, which is always yummy. Then we got gas and headed up to the beach.
We laughed so much just parking and waiting for a table at Burger and Beer Joint. Walking over from the car, this guy with a canoe on his SUV asked if we had change for a dollar. We gave him our last two quarters for the meter, and he was all frantic like, "Thanks guys, I just gotta get over there and catch me a tarpon real quick before they tow me!" Motherfucker actually thought he was gonna race over to the bay two blocks away on foot, I don't know, maybe carrying that boat on his head, grab a fish and be back in his car in 18 minutes? Also, some warehouse space had been opened up and had a motorcycle in the middle, surrounded by couches, with skateboards mounted on the walls all around. There was some pulsing music and a few people with the silliest "We are SO cool" faces you might be able to imagine.
Outside B&BJ was a lot of gross stinky water, basically up to the curb wrapping around their corner lot. While we waited for a table, we saw a dozen women in spiked heels trying to jump over it and heard at least 5 people say something like, "wtf man this water stinks."
Food there was AMAZING, as it always is, but we both also got stupid-drunk throughout the meal and then had about two hours of hysterical laughter, with a couple of intermissions to either almost fall asleep in the nice warm bathrooms (since it was getting chilly as the sun set) or grab more quarters and go load our meter back up. We put more in the tarpon guy's meter every time, too. The whatever-the-hell-that-was in the warehouse space got more crowded as time passed. The stank water blessedly drained away.
I slept like a rock, until NOON. NOON, do you hear me?! I get up at either 6:45 or 7:30 on weekdays these past months, and usually have to be out of the house by 8:30 with Ananda and her cello on Sundays, too. Nooooooon. Grant popped in like, "hey, look at this amish butter and these edible flowers Jake and I got you from the farmer's market?" THEN, I putzed around for awhile, took a sweet ass LUSH bath with brunch and Pandora blaring (did I mention I haven't actually been in my bathtub since, like, last summer?) and have basically been talking to my little kids (who've been jumping on the trampoline and eating fruit and cereal all day to their hearts' content) and writing this ever since.
*sigh of ultimate contentment*
I found a doctor willing to give me B-12 shots every week. Thank you, to everybody who weighed in with that. She's even giving me twice the dose my old MD was giving me per shot! And a month's supply of those shots are only costing me $17 out of pocket. So, that is all pretty sweet. She does want me to see another rheumatologist, one she recommends. She said the word, "lupus," which is kinda terrifying, but... I mean wtf can I do but wait and see?
The last time I fell was on the treadmill. I got some vicious treadmill burns that are still healing two weeks later, but that is my only fall in the last month or so, and I was being kinda stupid (my phone, which I use for c25k, started alerting me about something and I couldn't see it while I was running, and went to step up onto the sides of the treadmill instead of just turning it off...one foot went up on a side, other one slipped). I've ALMOST fallen two other weird tripping times, but I caught myself both times, and one of the biggest hallmarks of the falls I was having throughout December and early January is that I could tell I was gonna fall, but couldn't stop it. So, big improvements in that arena.
I had a dramatic ego blow taking some online IQ tests a few weeks ago. I know IQ is controversial anyway, and that online tests are not very reliable, either, and I have even made tons of sincere speeches to people about why scores don't even matter...yet here I am, having a hard time with my own results. My three scores were all 115-123. Previously, I've always scored between 137-142 (as an adult). I had to finally just tell myself I'm still recovering, and vow that I would wait at least a couple of months and a bunch more B-12 shots before I tried again. Gah. I shudder to think what I would have gotten a couple of months ago.
I have a dark bruise that spontaneously appeared on my left calf before I got the treadmill burns, and is still there. It's finally started to change and fade a little, this week. It's never hurt. It's about twice the size of a quarter? One thing it's taught me is, for God's sake, no matter what happens, NEVER EVER google "unexplained bruising" if you want to sleep at night!
Ananda threw me for a loop, telling me her birthday is less than 4 months away. She will be FOURTEEN. I was getting it on, at 14. I had lots of friends who smoked pot. I knew someone who killed himself. I had a work permit and earned paychecks all summer. It's completely baffling. She's obviously leading a very different life than I was, her days pretty much revolve around catching up in math, writing papers, practicing her cello, roller derby, watching YouTube, trying to talk me into cooking her rich french crap, and planning get togethers with (other homeschooled) friends. She comes out of the bathroom with her hair a different manic panic color almost daily, lately. She's psyched that she can be a Counselor in Training (CIT) at Girl Scout camp this summer - last year she did leadership training and was a Program Aide (PA). You have to be a PA for a year and get more training before you can be a CIT, though, and have to be at least going into high school. She wants to earn some other Cadette badges for volunteering with Elise's troop, which is all Daisies and Brownies.
Ananda, Elise, and I have sold SO MANY GIRL SCOUT COOKIES these past months. I mean. They've had a wall of cases, in their room. But they just sell, and sell. If we walk around the neighborhood for an hour, we get $100. If we take them with us to GMYS, we sell 4-5 boxes just sitting there with them out, every time. Elisey's little troop is doing a zoo sleepover, and she'll get some free camp weeks :)
Aaron is taller than me. He has the shadow of a mustache, and a few chin hairs, all of which mortifies him. He's still so innocent and just totally blindsided by puberty. His best friend is in Vermont for months and he's had some bullying problems at dance, so he's pretty lonely lately.
Isaac will be 10 in 4 days. ISAAC WILL BE TEN IN FOUR DAYS! My little Isaac? o_O So far I've gotten him the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books he didn't already have, and a rainbow loom kit because he's been making the bracelets with just the bands for months but there are designs you can only do with the loom. He just had this big dramatic situation with the girl he likes asking his best friend to go to the Valentine's Dance at school. The two of us have are so much closer than we used to be, I feel really close to him for the first time, these past couple of years, and I love it.
We cut Jake's afro off again. He cut his own bangs down to the skin, and left the rest, and it looked SO HORRIBLE. I tried, I really fucking tried to be a supportive mom who lets her kids express themselves, but about 36 hours of twitching into that I broke and started trying to nudge him towards cutting it all. He spends almost all of his time lately drawing and writing loooong elaborate comics and other stories. Also drawing, cutting out and taping things up, on the walls above his bed.
Aaaaaaanyway. I s'pose I have to figure out what's for dinner.
Grant and I woke up early yesterday morning and took all the kids to breakfast at a local diner we know well and love. There were several people we knew there, everyone pigged out, and it was a good way to "charge up" the children, with conversation and affection, before we left them with a sitter and spent the rest of the day up in Miami together.
First, we went to the Coconut Grove Art Festival. There's so much to see, tons of varieties of handmade jewelry, ranging from string and wire to loaded-with gems. There were sculptures made of horseshoes, robots made of found objects, bizarre watercolor layering techniques I don't even know how to describe - every variety of photography you can imagine was represented in enormous prints, from surrealist mash-ups to back-lit flowers and the guy who makes landscapes out of food. And the guy who makes landscapes out of bodies. Journalistic, traditional, infrared, everything. There was a woman there with hand embroidery that looked like photography, and a dark room for us to go in and stand among lit up wire-work bodies twirling from the ceiling. There was wood working for days, and mind-bendy furniture.
There were SO many times that I wanted to take pictures, but I swore to myself going in that I was not going to spend the whole time with my phone in my hand, looking at everything through a screen.
I got a plate of coconut shrimp and fried clams with a pretty swell strawberry daiquiri, while Grant tore up a gyro, and then we walked around splitting some sugar-cinnamon roasted cashews. The weather was great, just barely too hot out of the shade. Sometimes some live music was cool, and there was zip lining. We sat under beautiful mossy trees talking to a shirtless guy and generally people-watching.
After we left we hung out at a pretty cool bookstore for awhile, working on our budget and planning for things like when to replace our falling-apart-van and our hasn't-worked-in-years dishwasher. Sat in a window display above the street, read a collectors' Rolling Stone together, called the kids for a few.
We went to an indoor-outdoor mall with the WEIRDEST parking set up either of us had ever seen, and got him shoes he's been needing for too long, and sat in some of those pay massage chairs.
Coffee at Pasion Del Cielo, which is always yummy. Then we got gas and headed up to the beach.
We laughed so much just parking and waiting for a table at Burger and Beer Joint. Walking over from the car, this guy with a canoe on his SUV asked if we had change for a dollar. We gave him our last two quarters for the meter, and he was all frantic like, "Thanks guys, I just gotta get over there and catch me a tarpon real quick before they tow me!" Motherfucker actually thought he was gonna race over to the bay two blocks away on foot, I don't know, maybe carrying that boat on his head, grab a fish and be back in his car in 18 minutes? Also, some warehouse space had been opened up and had a motorcycle in the middle, surrounded by couches, with skateboards mounted on the walls all around. There was some pulsing music and a few people with the silliest "We are SO cool" faces you might be able to imagine.
Outside B&BJ was a lot of gross stinky water, basically up to the curb wrapping around their corner lot. While we waited for a table, we saw a dozen women in spiked heels trying to jump over it and heard at least 5 people say something like, "wtf man this water stinks."
Food there was AMAZING, as it always is, but we both also got stupid-drunk throughout the meal and then had about two hours of hysterical laughter, with a couple of intermissions to either almost fall asleep in the nice warm bathrooms (since it was getting chilly as the sun set) or grab more quarters and go load our meter back up. We put more in the tarpon guy's meter every time, too. The whatever-the-hell-that-was in the warehouse space got more crowded as time passed. The stank water blessedly drained away.
I slept like a rock, until NOON. NOON, do you hear me?! I get up at either 6:45 or 7:30 on weekdays these past months, and usually have to be out of the house by 8:30 with Ananda and her cello on Sundays, too. Nooooooon. Grant popped in like, "hey, look at this amish butter and these edible flowers Jake and I got you from the farmer's market?" THEN, I putzed around for awhile, took a sweet ass LUSH bath with brunch and Pandora blaring (did I mention I haven't actually been in my bathtub since, like, last summer?) and have basically been talking to my little kids (who've been jumping on the trampoline and eating fruit and cereal all day to their hearts' content) and writing this ever since.
*sigh of ultimate contentment*
I found a doctor willing to give me B-12 shots every week. Thank you, to everybody who weighed in with that. She's even giving me twice the dose my old MD was giving me per shot! And a month's supply of those shots are only costing me $17 out of pocket. So, that is all pretty sweet. She does want me to see another rheumatologist, one she recommends. She said the word, "lupus," which is kinda terrifying, but... I mean wtf can I do but wait and see?
The last time I fell was on the treadmill. I got some vicious treadmill burns that are still healing two weeks later, but that is my only fall in the last month or so, and I was being kinda stupid (my phone, which I use for c25k, started alerting me about something and I couldn't see it while I was running, and went to step up onto the sides of the treadmill instead of just turning it off...one foot went up on a side, other one slipped). I've ALMOST fallen two other weird tripping times, but I caught myself both times, and one of the biggest hallmarks of the falls I was having throughout December and early January is that I could tell I was gonna fall, but couldn't stop it. So, big improvements in that arena.
I had a dramatic ego blow taking some online IQ tests a few weeks ago. I know IQ is controversial anyway, and that online tests are not very reliable, either, and I have even made tons of sincere speeches to people about why scores don't even matter...yet here I am, having a hard time with my own results. My three scores were all 115-123. Previously, I've always scored between 137-142 (as an adult). I had to finally just tell myself I'm still recovering, and vow that I would wait at least a couple of months and a bunch more B-12 shots before I tried again. Gah. I shudder to think what I would have gotten a couple of months ago.
I have a dark bruise that spontaneously appeared on my left calf before I got the treadmill burns, and is still there. It's finally started to change and fade a little, this week. It's never hurt. It's about twice the size of a quarter? One thing it's taught me is, for God's sake, no matter what happens, NEVER EVER google "unexplained bruising" if you want to sleep at night!
Ananda threw me for a loop, telling me her birthday is less than 4 months away. She will be FOURTEEN. I was getting it on, at 14. I had lots of friends who smoked pot. I knew someone who killed himself. I had a work permit and earned paychecks all summer. It's completely baffling. She's obviously leading a very different life than I was, her days pretty much revolve around catching up in math, writing papers, practicing her cello, roller derby, watching YouTube, trying to talk me into cooking her rich french crap, and planning get togethers with (other homeschooled) friends. She comes out of the bathroom with her hair a different manic panic color almost daily, lately. She's psyched that she can be a Counselor in Training (CIT) at Girl Scout camp this summer - last year she did leadership training and was a Program Aide (PA). You have to be a PA for a year and get more training before you can be a CIT, though, and have to be at least going into high school. She wants to earn some other Cadette badges for volunteering with Elise's troop, which is all Daisies and Brownies.
Ananda, Elise, and I have sold SO MANY GIRL SCOUT COOKIES these past months. I mean. They've had a wall of cases, in their room. But they just sell, and sell. If we walk around the neighborhood for an hour, we get $100. If we take them with us to GMYS, we sell 4-5 boxes just sitting there with them out, every time. Elisey's little troop is doing a zoo sleepover, and she'll get some free camp weeks :)
Aaron is taller than me. He has the shadow of a mustache, and a few chin hairs, all of which mortifies him. He's still so innocent and just totally blindsided by puberty. His best friend is in Vermont for months and he's had some bullying problems at dance, so he's pretty lonely lately.
Isaac will be 10 in 4 days. ISAAC WILL BE TEN IN FOUR DAYS! My little Isaac? o_O So far I've gotten him the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books he didn't already have, and a rainbow loom kit because he's been making the bracelets with just the bands for months but there are designs you can only do with the loom. He just had this big dramatic situation with the girl he likes asking his best friend to go to the Valentine's Dance at school. The two of us have are so much closer than we used to be, I feel really close to him for the first time, these past couple of years, and I love it.
We cut Jake's afro off again. He cut his own bangs down to the skin, and left the rest, and it looked SO HORRIBLE. I tried, I really fucking tried to be a supportive mom who lets her kids express themselves, but about 36 hours of twitching into that I broke and started trying to nudge him towards cutting it all. He spends almost all of his time lately drawing and writing loooong elaborate comics and other stories. Also drawing, cutting out and taping things up, on the walls above his bed.
Aaaaaaanyway. I s'pose I have to figure out what's for dinner.
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no subject
Date: 2014-02-17 03:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-17 04:41 pm (UTC)"But I chose university-hosted, census material gathering, more official online tests! With very comprehensive breakdowns of types of intelligence! I specifically looked for things based off of Weschler or the Stanford Binet! And I'm comparing my scores on those kinds of tests now, vs my scores on those kinds of tests then!"
*shrug* I'll get over it. I'm less upset about it than I was already :p
Thank you, for your sweet attempt to comfort an irrational person with facts ;) I really do appreciate it.
no subject
Date: 2014-02-17 05:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-23 03:44 pm (UTC)get latest updates, so where can i do it please assist.
no subject
Date: 2014-03-10 12:32 am (UTC)I truly appreciate people like you! Take care!!
no subject
Date: 2014-03-11 06:43 pm (UTC)Does one offer guest writers to write content for you?
I wouldn't mind producing a post or elaborating on a lot of the subjects you write
related to here. Again, awesome website!
no subject
Date: 2014-03-17 05:57 pm (UTC)kind of info written in such a perfect means? I
have a mission that I am just now running on, and I've been at the look out
for such info.
no subject
Date: 2014-03-19 09:18 am (UTC)It seems like some of the text in your polsts are runniոg ߋff the screеn.
Can someone else please provіide feedback andd let me know if thiѕ iss Һappening
to them too? Ҭhhis may be a problem with my internet browser
because I've hhad this happen previously. Ϲheеrs
no subject
Date: 2014-03-19 10:37 pm (UTC)how many months old your toddler is, I am regularly purchasing clothing for
friends babies, our nieces and our nephews and I often manage to get the wrong size