Wednesday, July 16, 2014

I love cars

Sometimes I wish we lived back in a time and place when it was uncommon for people to go anywhere except on foot. I mean, dysentery and not being able vote are both less than ideal, but imagine if shopping were situated close enough for walking. No car? No problem! If you've never had gangrene and an amputation.

With the money we have spent fixing our cars in the last six months, we probably could have bought a whole new vehicle (but an old enough vehicle that it would need repairs of its own soon). It's hot enough here lately that our car can't keep up cooling the engine. I ride around with the windows down and the heat on. To complete the picture: we are also missing three hub caps. It's my childhood on repeat. To be fair to me, we have cars with windows that actually roll down, and I don't have to keep a fire extinguisher on the passenger seat to put out the engine when it starts on fire (yes, that is a real thing that happened, and when I was 5 I thought it was TOTALLY NORMAL).

And the alternator on our van just broke. It's like the lottery of awesome. If you are our local mechanic.

On a positive note, we just paid off the last of one of our student loans that was costing us $100/month.

On the other hand, if we hadn't paid that off, fixing both cars would not be a problem at all.

On the other hand, yay for less debt.

If one of my children ever wants to go to college for 8 years, she had better become something where earning lots of money is involved.

Friday, July 11, 2014

Bees will buzz! Kids will blow dandelion fuzz!

I love it when I save something as a draft, and it disappears. I have started at least five entries over the last couple of months, decided to come back to them later, and then realized that I just previewed it instead of saving as a draft. I'm smarter than I look.

What has been happening here? Summer! Summertime! That has been happening. You can tell I'm happy because my house isn't as clean as my anxiety usually forces me to keep it. Sorry about the doll tied up in the corner. It's not what it looks like. I don't know what it actually is, but Emmy was cooing lovingly at it yesterday, so I assume it's nothing sinister.

Summer turns me into Olaf, with the singing and everything. The hotter it gets, the happier I am. I like to walk outside and feel like I'm getting smothered in the face by a pillow made of fusion reaction. I like to play in the pool and not freeze to death when I get out. I like for all the grass to die so I don't have to mow it. I love summer. I literally twirled in the parking lot the other day because it was freezing inside church, and when I walked out, all of my molecules came to life with glee. I had to twirl. It was imperative.

But yes, about the cleaning. I mean, we don't live in squalor. But I couldn't care less if the table is messy, unless we're actually eating dinner. And I don't mind pulling clean clothes out of the dryer for a few days instead of my dresser. And if it's not going to infect anyone, who needs to mop the floor constantly?

The only drawback is that the second we have a cloudy day, I'm back to neurotically scrubbing everything. I guess it gives me something to do when twirling isn't an option.

Speaking of which, I'm back to being interested in working out. Most of the winter, it's just a thing that I do that I don't particularly love, but you do it because that's how I stay mentally healthy. I have good weeks and bad, but a lot of it is just doing what I'm supposed to do. I floss so my gums don't wither. I brush so my teeth don't fall out of my head. I work out so I don't hate myself and you and everything.

But now I'm back at it with zeal, and I feel great, and I'm looking for new fun things to do.

This brings me to my next point:






I blame Pinterest. When I first joined Pinterest, I grabbed a couple of these workouts for myself because they looked like something I could easily do at home with an odd minute here and there. And then they multiplied and infested Pinterest like a colony of smug, muscular rabbits.

I do a lot of these things in my various workouts, and my belly is neither flat nor capable of killing things. It does a lot for me. It digests food. It supports me when I sit or stand. It connects my legs to my heart, which I'm pretty happy about. But if I think it will ever look like these pictures, I am just setting myself up for extreme disappointment.

So I stopped pinning them. Maybe I will start making my own text-superimposed-on-belly workout ideas. Perhaps with a taco in one hand and a beer in the other.