This Joy’s Life

Well, I haven’t posted anything on my blog since Election Day, but please don’t think it’s because I was overly distraught at it’s outcome. Nope, it’s just that life has gotten in the way and on November 5th our house was robbed and I’ve been dealing with that ever since. Talking politics became a luxury I couldn’t afford for the time being. Putting together the list of stolen property and serial numbers and proof of what we owned and what we paid for the insurance is “kind of a big deal around here.” Blah. Plus, it is a big old pain to start fresh on a new computer and takes more time than one might think. I’m ready to move on now. We’ve got a new door and it’s beautiful. And we have a new front porch that I never got the chance to post pictures of on the blog here, so I’m going to do that today.

I heart October, but November and I don’t get along so well. It starts raining every day and is windy and cold. As Clara would say, “I don like it.” Which is what she says whenever I put a vegetable in front of her. So, in my own little protest, I’ve still got my pumpkins out on the front porch and intend to keep them there until Thanksgiving if at all possible. Plus, the one that Vonnie made for Clara this year looks so great that I couldn’t bear to part with it any time soon.

That’s wuz up, folks.

This guy*:

Looks like this guy**:

I’m sorry, but he does. Do not attempt to disagree with me because this is my blog and I will not have it.

They look alike. The end.

*Actor Anthony Heald. You might remember him as the tight-wad VP on Boston Pulic or as Dr. Wilbert Rodeheaver, the pshycologist for the State, in A Time To Kill.

**Actor Nick Nolte. You’ll, of course, remember him from Cape Fear, Lorenzo’s Oil and I Love Trouble. Ok, you probably won’t remember that last one.

Okay, A LOT has happened the last few days and I’ve got lots of new pictures for the blog.

We are so lucky to be surrounded by so many wonderful friends and family that Clara is pretty well set to enter the world with everything she could possibly want thanks to a baby shower that was given to me on Sunday and a surprise shower thrown for me at school today.

I’ll be posting pictures of all that soon and telling you more about it, plus posting pictures of the nursery so you can finally see how that has come along. However, I need more time to get myself organized with all that so for now I’ll leave you with 2 things:

1) A few pictures of my kitties, Harry & Cinder, breaking in Clara’s infant seat, crib and changing table:

and . . .

2) This crazy “World’s Funniest Videos” clip of quadruplets laughing in unison.

In closing, I leave you with this thought:

I work at a high school (the same one as my good friend Carrie, actually. You should remember her from my France trip, ya?). Today at school, we had our first all day assembly celebration. One of the guest speakers was Chuck Norris (no, not really). He had a lot to say, including:
(FYI, there are a lot of facts out there about Chuck Norris. I don’t really know where they come from or why they’ve appeared, but knowing them is very popular with the younger generation lately.)

Anywho, Chuck Norris knows about school spirit and he knows that Carrie and I have it:

He also thought this posters was quite clever. Very Far Side-esk:
See how you’ve got the rock telling the ruler, “You Rule!” and the ruler telling the rock, “You Rock!” Tee hee.

Compared with the South, you can almost truthfully say that there are no bugs in the Northwest. In fact, some friends and I were commenting as much last weekend while we were enjoying the sun and water in Key Center, Washington. At the time, I couldn’t think of one reason to lament those missing pests.

However, being home, I remember now two reasons why I lamented the lack of bugs in the Northwest when I first moved there: the almost deafening sound of crickets lulling you to sleep at night and lightening bugs.

Oh, the sound of crickets at night is really beautiful music! When you live here, you stop noticing it after a while. At least you think you do. But as soon as you are without it, you start to wonder why you don’t sleep as peacefully at night. When I arrived home late Wednesday night, I was amazed at how loud it was. So loud, I couldn’t believe it. It felt like a welcome home chorus just for me!

And lightening bugs – don’t EVEN get me started! The light – seeing it – thousands of blinking lights going off in the yard! My parents have two huge sliding glass doors in their living room and it’s beautiful to sit and watch nature’s light show right outside the glass.

I remember as a child being amazed at how approachable – to a fault – lightening bugs are. Being out at dusk, my brother and I catching them in a big glass jar, letting the survivors go the next morning. It didn’t take me long to learn that I’d rather they all come back the next night and so we just let them be, catching them only in the puffed out pockets of our hands, peeking in to see them light up once or twice and then throwing them back out to their mates in the yard.

Yes, Virginia, there is an upside to bugs. :>

I’m aware that one word can have multiple meanings, but I think the word “mobile” might have the most pronunciations for the same meaning. If you are in the States, you generally refer to your mobile phone as a “cell phone” but when you say mobile phone you say it like mo-bull. This, of course, is unless you are in the southern United States, in which case you probably pronounce it like the city in Alabama – mo-beel. Now, if you in Ireland or the UK you would refer to your cell phone as a “mobile” and you would pronounce it mo-bile (as in the stomach fluid).

And mo-biles are HUGE over here, as they are in the States, but over here I am constantly seeing commercials for ringtones that you text message to acquire. When I say constantly, I mean literally every other commercial is an advert for these ringtones and there are only about 3 commercials in rotation.

These tones have little animated animals, like baby chicks and crazy frogs, and other creatures that sing bizarre little songs. Some of them – a monkey and gorilla – even do a fart rap (look at the middle of the page where it says “Mobile Top Lists” in the red box and click on “1. Fart Rap”, once it loads, you’ll get an earful). Now, imagine hearing them at every commercial break on every channel and you’ll know why I’ve devoted an entire blog post to them. They just wear you down until you are singing crazy frog in your head as you walk down the street.

Yet, I fear I really don’t get it (am I old??). Why would you want these ringtones in the first place? They are much too silly. I guess that’s why the brainwashing via constantly playing them on TV. It ensures you’ll have these tones in your head and think, “I have to have that as my ringtone!” It is for a generation younger than me, I’m afraid. And, I’m not altogether comforted in knowing that in the future, if ever I should hear the fart rap as someone is answering their mo-bile, it will make me nostalgic for my time in Dublin.

Crazy Frog! 

What is it about office supplies that get my blood pumping? I do become the proverbial “kid in a candy store” as soon as I walk through the doors of my favorite office supply venues. You’d better believe it is one of the first questions I was asking the locals when I arrived in Dublin “Excuse me, where do you go to get office supplies around here?” There is something about a new version of a product – a pen, a notebook – that makes my eyes light up at the possibilities of what I might organize and create with them.

At home, I’m tired of the Staples and Office Depots. Same old stuff. There is nothing there to inspire me to reorganize my life, to finally create and maintain a budget, to manage my recipe collection in an organized fashion. But here in Ireland the dream is alive again! I’ve been spending a disproportionate amount of time in Reads, Dublin’s local office supply store, to the amount of sightseeing I should be doing. (I may be like my father that way. I remember one time bringing some friends to the house and he gave everyone a pen. Just some he’d picked up on his last visit to Office Max. I was sure happy to get it, but my friends may have thought it a bit odd. I’m not sure why. . .)

It’s sad, I know, but as soon as I hit the pen aisle my heart skips a beat. New barrels, new colors – which one will go home with me? I came to Ireland with two pens and a pencil and now there must be about a dozen lying around the apartment at any given time. It’s all the little differences that make Reads such a treat for me. First off, the standard printer paper size here is “A4” which is 8.27” by 11.67” so the paper is slightly longer and skinnier than our standard 8.5 x11. Notebooks and hole punchers have two rings/holes, not three. Index cards come in 3×5, 4×6 and 4.14 x 11.67. They’re like panoramic index cards. How crazy is that?!

And the paper aisle – don’t even get me started! They have notebook paper pre-designed for every activity you can imagine from “manuscripts” to “business studies” (which is like a checkbook register), “music composition”, primary school writing with big spacing, “math studies” with graph paper and “science studies” to name just a few. There are even rental log books to help you manage your rental properties, I kid you not! The list really does go on and on.

So, you see, I’ve found heaven in Ireland and it’s at Reads on Nassau St in Dublin.

Help me! I’m living in Dublin, Ireland and I can’t get off the couch because I’ve been watching the Simpsons all day. Not Homer and Marge (although the are on a lot here in the evenings). No, I’m talking about Nick & Jessica.

“Newlyweds” has been playing all day on MTV UK. I just can’t risk missing an episode of Nick & Jessica’s antics to go out and sightsee. You see, I’m totally behind on this season, possibly its last, and it just started here in the UK & Ireland (it premiered in January in the States).

Interesting thing about Ireland TV is that it is mostly run out of the UK and mostly it is American shows and movies (all a little behind in their premiering). There is a Gaelic channel and there are some Irish soap operas but it’s like they’ve been filmed for a college class project and someone thought everyone would be interested. Not so. Irish Soaps are nothing at all like the soap operas in the States in terms of production quality. Same cheesy storylines though.