Drinks, Diapers & Deities

Apparently a State Penitentiary is a great back drop for a playground. No wonder we had such a hard time finding it. Hurray for craziness. 🙂

I like food. A new Mexican place opened in town, and it’s one of those little cafes I mentioned earlier. Small, local, has a grocery attached, not the type of place most people would stop at. It serves the normal stuff, but it also serves real Mexican food, and if you ask nicely they’ll tell you what the real stuff is. It is fabulous. I had tacos today. Fresh grilled pork on homemade tortillas with cilantro and a little spice. The waitress brought out two bottles of sauce to top it with. I have no idea what they were, one was red and one was green, but both were yummy. Ducky had something else, I can’t remember what it was called. Beans, chicken, lettuce and tomatoes with a hint of cheese on a hard fried tortilla. She loved that. It was so tasty, and I didn’t feel nauseously full afterward, and nothing was greasy or cheese covered. My friends had fajitas, which were mostly veggies with a bit of meat, no cheese and lots of lettuce and guacamole. MMMMMM yummy.

I realized I hadn’t posted about my giant baby yet. I think everyone has seen her stats, but for those who hadn’t, at 2 months she was 15lbs and just shy of 25 inches. She’s already in the 6 month clothes, and still growing. I’m afraid to see what she’s going to do now that she’s on formula. Developmentally she’s doing great, playing with toys, laughing and “chattering” with us. Compared with Miriam (I know, bad mommy) she’s very normal. I’m not saying Miriam was (or is) odd (though she is), but Miriam was the type to watch, observe and then do stuff when she had it all figured out, which explains her engineery mindset. She only tried once to crawl, once to grasp objects, etc. Katie seems to be the experimental, try until you get it right, type. So she spent days working on the bouncy seat, actually tries to make noises rather than just doing it, and is so darn happy it’s comical. Even when her stomach is bothering her she’s happy.
Miriam is building tractors. (engineery mindset) Legge took her out to Jerry’s and he said she was trying to put the tractor back together. She got a screw in the hole, tried to put the bolt on and when that didn’t work decided to poke at it with a wrench. She just seems to know how stuff works, which baffles us. We haven’t taught her much of it, but she watches while Legge is working on stuff, and then puts two and two together in her head. I’m not sure I’m going to be able to keep up with this one.

It is soggy here. We’ve had 6 inches of rain here in town in the last day or two, and elsewhere has had up to 12. Poor Palo is sandbagging again, (90% of the city flooded last year) as is part of Marion. Central City’s school flooded, and we’ve got about 12 feet of water in our ravine. It is a mess. Luckily it isn’t going to be anything like last year, but I’m guessing a lot of people are on edge right now. I’m curious to see what the little lake down the road from me looks like. I drove past one of its inlets yesterday, and it was about a quarter again the size it usually is.

I’m waiting for my next tattoo session. I have most of my designs picked out, but I’m waiting for Jen to decide if she’s going to get another. If she is we’ll just go in together, and if she isn’t then I’ll go alone. Legge has actually been helping me pick stuff out, and only seems slightly irritated at the venture. Mostly he’s irritated because I’m getting one on my inner wrist, so it isn’t hidden. 😀 We’re still debating over what I’ll be getting for the girls, but he’s been far more accepting this time.

I’ve started walking with Jen, and her dogs, in the evenings. She swears I’ll come to love the dogs. I don’t dislike them, but they love me a little too much. They keep trying to sit on my lap. I’m still trying to get my videos in, but since the two don’t usually nap at the same time it’s hard to do very much. Miriam will do level one of 30 Day Shred with me, and sometimes level two but anything else and she tends to either wander off, or lay down in the middle of the floor to “help” me. I nearly stepped on her head the other day because she snuck up behind me and plopped down on the floor to do push ups. Hopefully with the walking I can get back into my normal clothes before winter, though the way this year has been going, that might be next week.

I think life is about to get very difficult. The ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church of America) had their gay clergy vote last week, and voted to include non-celibate gay ministers into the church. Legge and several of the other counsel members are very upset and plan to bring it up at the next meeting, while our pastor is planning on going with the church. I know it’s going to be loud and messy. I had expected that the vote would cause a lot of problems, and I knew how Legge was going to react to it, but I hadn’t thought a lot of the potential repercussions through. What he’s concerned about is the potential for this to interfere with our relationship, and people trying to pit us against each other. It isn’t a secret that Legge and I are on opposing sides of the argumen, and he’s afraid that people are going to try to talk to me and try to get me to change his mind or have him back down. I can also see that happening, as it has happened already involving some minor stuff, but as I pointed out, I have no power in the church. I’m not on council, and I have no intention of being on council right now. I’m hoping our friends (many of whom are either on council, or have spouses who are) respect us enough to not do anything like that, but I know there are other people who will pull me aside, and I’m not looking forward to it. Hopefully people can keep calm. I’ll be doing my part to keep Legge in line, and prevent him from doing something stupid, but it’s such a touchy subject that I’m not sure what’s going to happen. Some days, I think it would have been better to marry someone who either agreed with me, or just wasn’t quite so vocal. (Ah well, at least life isn’t dull and I know he’ll stand up for the things he sees as important, which will come in handy when he has to defend his crazy, tattooed wife)

I went to see My Sister’s Keeper last week. I didn’t cry…much. I let a couple tears slip, but I may have been the only one there who didn’t go through a box of tissues. It’s a pretty good show. I’m still hoping to get to Julia and Julia. A couple of people want a girls’ night, so maybe I’ll suggest we see it, and then go out for food and drinks.
I’m reading The End of Overeating, which is interesting, but similar to all the other books on why food is bad and addicting. I just picked up a Dali Lama book that I’ll be starting soon, and book group starts next week. We’re doing the bible book Acts this year.

Swimming in Katie’s bath. (I was drying Kate off when Miriam jumped in)

I’m still alive, I just can’t get the two to nap at the same time and thereby find time to post.

What is it about growing older that makes horror movies less enjoyable and more (depending on the movie) stressfully suspenseful or boring? I realize that most of them are pretty awful and therefore boring, but the others are just stressful to watch. I don’t know if it’s the increase in gore, which just reminds me of the unpleasant real life gore I’ve seen, or the knowledge that sometimes the things in the movies can happen and I live on an isolated street that is frequented by not-so-nice people in the middle of the night. This coupled with the knowledge that someday, someone is going to decide that my house looks like a good place to vandalize/break into makes things like The Strangers a bit unnerving. Legge was wondering this too as he quit watching a movie with me last night and went into the bedroom to read. I know some of my friends have made the same comments, and so I was wondering why, when we get old enough to know better, do we react so poorly to things jumping out from dark corners on an oversized screen? Hopefully this doesn’t extend to roller coasters, climbing trees, and riding three wheelers and motorcycles at insane speeds down country roads, or I shall have nothing to look forward to in a couple years.

A group of us were supposed to go shooting yesterday. Very redneck sounding, but I was looking forward to it since no one has ever let me have a gun to play with. After looking at the weather report, and a couple other factors we decided to have dinner at Kathleen’s house instead, which turned out to be the wiser choice as the heat produced “popcorn” thunderstorms all afternoon and evening. There was even a bow echo which caused the tornado sirens to go off because of the wind speeds. We were happily playing Rockband by that point and didn’t really notice the wind too much, though the lightening produced some fun background effects to our jamming. (it was dark so we couldn’t see outside) By the time we started paying attention to the weather again everything had passed and we all commented on how “it wasn’t that bad”, “I didn’t even hear the wind”, etc. So it was with great surprise that as we were leaving I saw what looked like a tree down across the street from Kathleen’s place. I had Legge back the car up to get a better look and sure enough the wind had toppled a tree across the neighbor’s driveway and almost across his garage. It’s been a hard year on trees. I’m beginning to think the state is going to be naked before the year is out. Poor Iowa will start to look like North Dakota, and all the trees with be growing in little groups of straight lines, spaced every 100 miles or so.

I read one of Martha Grimes’ books, Hotel Paradise. It wasn’t bad, but I think that having it told from the perspective of a twelve year old girl was what gave me difficulty getting into it. The writing was beautiful, but I couldn’t lose myself in the story. I’m going to try one of the Jury books to see if that works better. For now I’m reading Water for Elephants. A friend suggested it on her blog, so I decided to try it out. So far it’s proving to be quite enjoyable.
Legge says G I Joe is worth seeing if you’re looking for mindless action. He also said red heads are still hot, so I’m guessing there is a red head in the movie, which may or may not have counted more than the action scenes. 🙂

Katie spent about 10 minutes swatting at one of her hanging toys last night, and before that she had a hold of its foot and was happily shaking it. And she’s only 7 weeks. 🙂 That’s all.