Unrest

I had, actually, a really fantastic weekend.

Saturday, as I'd mentioned, I volunteered a few hours for the JDRF "Hope Floats" fundraiser at the Fresh Market. I had expected it to be somewhat hectic, which it was. I hadn't expected it to be fun, though.

One of my fellow volunteers worked for the Fresh Market; the other was the father of a diabetic. Both of them had brought their kids and friends, so there were six or so preteens hanging around the whole time I was there. They had far more energy than anyone else, but they were great kids. They begged for drinks and hot dogs, but didn't whine about being bored or having to put in this time as volunteers. They squabbled with each other over whose turn it was to get to make the floats, were more or less polite to adults, and they helped out with a will when things got busy. They were also unfailingly funny, even if sometimes unintentionally.

The dad had a sharp, sarcastic sense of humor that I enjoyed, and when Matt brought the kids up for a visit, he tried to talk Penny into some interest in an insulin pump. (No success, but I appreciate his trying.)


Though I have to say that my favorite donor was the man who walked up, dropped a check for $25 into our donations jar, then harassed the kids to make sure they put extra ice cream and plenty of root beer in his float. He was a hoot.

I was scheduled for two hours, and actually stayed for three. Surprisingly, my feet didn't give me any trouble -- they ached when I was done, but not horribly, and they were fine after I was able to sit for a while. My hips and back are still a little sore today from all the standing, though.

That night was our monthly D&D game with Jen and Brian and Braz, and that was lots of fun, too. We had tacos for dinner beforehand, and snacked on chips and salsa while we gamed. (Okay, my weigh-in this Wednesday might not be all that much fun...)

Sunday, mostly, we just sat around and relaxed. I did run a box of books out to the storage unit, and a couple of boxes of my old, too-big clothes up to the thrift store. (And learned that the thrift store is accepting childrens' things again -- they have to send them up to HQ to be tested for lead, but at least they have testing in place now! So now I can clean out the several boxes of outgrown kids' clothes from the storage unit, whoo!)

But other than that? Sat around the house on my behind and tried to imagine getting caught up on sleep.

This week will be slightly hectic -- lots of weird stuff going on at work, including an assortment of "this is going to go out soon but we won't be able to tell you exactly when until the day before" deliveries. And Matt's taking the week off from work, so I'm trying to fit in a day and a half to take off with him and help him organize the kids' junk a little. (That's not all he's doing with his vacation, but that's my top priority for the time I'm taking off.) Depending on how those last-minute deliveries fall, it currently looks like I'm taking tomorrow morning, and all day Wednesday. We'll see if it actually happens that way, but if it does, there may not be entries from me for a couple of days.

Wish me luck!

Kids Are Weird.

"Mommy, look!"

"Yes, I see."

"No, on your windshield!"

"Yes, I see it."

"No, there, on your windshield!"

"Yes, a bug, I see it."

"What kind of bug is it?"

"A dead one."

"But what kind?"

"I don't know."

"Maybe it's a fly."

"It's not a fly."

"Maybe a fly squished it."

"Unlikely, but sure, whatever."

"Maybe it's a mosquito."

"Um, maybe."

(Time passes...)

"Say bye-bye, bug!"

"Mom, no!"

"...Hon, it was raining. I had to turn on the wipers."

"But you wiped off the bug!"

"I had to see the road, Penny."

"But I liked that bug! It was cute!"

"...Life is like that sometimes, hon."

"You made me want to cry."

(Time passes...)

"Why did you have to wipe off the bug?"

"Because it was raining and I need to be able to see the road when I'm driving. I'm sorry it wiped off the bug, too, but that happens when things are outside the car -- they get wiped away, or blown away, or washed away. If you want to keep things, you need to keep them inside."

"Look! It's still there, on the wipers!"

"Huh. So it is."

"Quick! Put it in my pocket so I can keep it safe!"

Sign Me Up!

For what are probably obvious reasons, I've gotten on the local JDRF chapter's mailing list. I'm still rather waffling about whether to do the walk again this fall -- there's not a lot of enthusiasm in the house for either the fundraising or the walking portions of it.

But they're holding another fundraiser this weekend, selling hot dogs and cookies and root beer floats outside the Fresh Markets (in Williamsburg and on the Southside!) and they emailed my yesterday to see if I would volunteer to take a shift. They're only two-hour shifts, so I signed up for one on Saturday afternoon. I'm actually quite looking forward to it. I might take Penny with me, if she wants to go, and when my shift is done, I'm right there at the Fresh Market and can pick up the stuff I need for the tacos we're having for dinner that night. Good planning, me!

Anyway, if you're local to Williamsburg, come on by the Fresh Market between 1 and 3 on Saturday, have a float or a 'dog, and say hi!

I'm sort of hoping the chapter organizer will be there. I'd love to talk to her about not just organizing fundraisers, but also support activities, on our side of the Peninsula. A play-date at Newport News Park for families with diabetic kids. A database of potential babysitters who are trained in the nuances of diabetic care. That kind of thing. The chapter has some of this stuff on the Southside (which is a denser citypack, and also where the children's hospital is) but it's almost impossible to get to from -- say -- Williamsburg.

I'm also thinking of signing up for their mentoring program, or at least finding out what's involved in being a mentor. The first couple of weeks were a nightmare, and I would have loved to have been able to just talk to someone else who'd been through it, who could talk me through some of the panic and answer some of my zillions of questions and show me that life would ever attain some semblance of normality. And I think being able to help someone else who's struggling with that adjustment might feel more "worthy", to me, than simply raising money.

Just a few thoughts for my morning.

Short and Sweet

Okay, I have no idea what the hell is chewing up so much of my network's bandwidth, but it's taking me like fifteen minutes just to load up blogger. (At a guess, it's the mandatory "upgrade" to Internet Explorer 7 that everyone has put off until the last possible minute, which means my connection will be all but worthless until the day after tomorrow.) So I'm going to email this entry in, and I apologize if it gets formatted weird or something, until I can actually get in to fix it.

And work just jumped up in my face and waved a bunch of red flags around, so even this is going to be short and sweet.

Penny had a great first day in first grade.  She came home with a bunch of forms for us to fill out (of course) and told Matt, "You have homework! And I won't do the special cheer until you finish it!" Matt saved a few lines of the "homework" for me to do so we could both witness the "special cheer", which took her a few minutes to remember and went, "Rock! Paper! Scissors! Youuuuuu. ROCK!" (With appropriate hand motions, of course.) It was very cute.

She did insist on my walking her to class today, but didn't try to cling once we got there. I figure I'll probably walk her back for the first week, then start making my farewells at the front lobby. We'll see how that goes.

Labored

Saturday, we went to John and Sam's house to celebrate John's birthday, and Mom's, and a friend of John's whose birthday is also in September. Sam's parents and her sister Kim and Kim's husband were there, too, since Sam's parents had come to town last weekend for John's art exhibition. It was crowded, but it worked out pretty well, and we had a great time. There was cake, and lots of noise, and playing outside with the neighbor's dog, and lots of good food.


And then came my Weekend Of Fun. (That was sarcasm.)

It started, as these things often do, with the internet.

"Huhn," Matt said Sunday morning, scrolling through his usual slurry of newsfeeds. "The Snow Leopard upgrade disc is actually the whole thing. It says in this article that it'll work to upgrade any prior OS, or even on a completely blank disk."

"Huhn," I said. "So, can I borrow your Snow Leopard disk, please?"

One reboot later, I was looking at the install screen and clicking on choices. English, yes. American English, yes. The hard drive, yes. Yes, yes, yes... Go! It started installing, and I walked away to fix Penny's lunch.

A bit later, Matt came into the kitchen. "It says there's some problems and needs to run the repair," he said.

Eh, bad sectors happen. "Go ahead and tell it to go," I said.

A few minutes later, Matt came back into the kitchen. "It, um, didn't work," he said.

Well, dang. No Snow Leopard for me, I guess. I went out to look at the computer. There was an awful lot of text detailing the problems, and some of it was in red. "Irreparable. Please back up your hard drive as soon as possible, then reformat and re-install."

Well, crap.

"I've got a copy of DiskWarrior," Matt said. I let him run it while I finished my lunch and gave Penny her shot.

It didn't work, either, though it generated even more text. Words like "disk malfunction" and "will most likely worsen" jumped out at me. I started cussing and whining at my twitter followers.

Just out of curiosity, I attempted a reboot without a CD in the drive anyway. The computer churned for four or five minutes, then turned itself off. I ran DiskWarrior again, and got the same result. Interestingly, though the text suggested a hardware malfunction, when I ran the hardware diagnostics, I got an all-clear.

Okay. First step: backup my stuff. Luckily, all the stuff that would kill me to lose (like my writing and my very favorite pictures) is all in online repositories like Google Sites and Flickr, but I still have a buncha gigs of music and a buncha gigs of movies and a buncha gigs of less-beloved pictures that I would be pretty pissed to lose. Matt had a spare hard drive I could use (he's going to upgrade his main hard drive with it eventually) but not an enclosure to fit it to let it function as an external drive.

Braz has a whole bunch of empty enclosures, though, so he volunteered to loan me one. We packed up the kids and went over to Braz's, and spent a couple of hours hanging out and playing Rock Band, which was fun and helped de-stress me a bit. I took a cute picture with my iPhone of Alex playing drums.


Then we went home, and I hooked up the hard drive to my computer, and after some wiggling (the USB cable didn't want to stay plugged in) started backing up my stuff, starting with the essentials.

USB is slow. I didn't finish backing everything up until Monday morning. My plan had been to wait until the backup was complete, then wait until Alex was down for a nap, and call Apple to make sure I'm still covered with the warranty plan and if they'd set me up to ship the computer back to them for repairs. In the meantime, I got set up to do my computing on our guest computer, figuring that I'd be without the laptop for at least four or five days.

But once the backup had finished, I figured I wasn't losing anything if I played around with it myself. After all, everything was backed up. Why not reformat and reinstall?

So I did, and -- somewhat to my surprise -- it worked. Then I remembered that I still have a firewire cable left over from when I had a firewire iPod, and putting my backed-up files back on the hard drive went much faster. And I spent the rest of Monday fiddling around with it and getting all my applications and settings back where I wanted them. (Including one frustrating problem with iPhoto that finally resolved into not having copied all the actual pictures over that I thought I had, even though the thumbnails were still there. You'd think there would be a cue in the program to tell you when a picture is missing! It would have saved me a few hours of hair-pulling.)

Anyway, it might turn out to be a blessing in disguise -- it cleared my hard drive of a lot of cruft programs that I haven't used in years and years, and got me a nice chunk of hard drive space back.

Now, whether I still have a mechanical failure that's going to cause my hard drive to continue to degrade over the next however long, I'm not sure, so I'll probably be investing in a nice big external hard drive in the near future to use to back everything up.

So that was my Labor Day, pretty much. Whee.

But this morning was Penny's first day of first grade, and that was much happier. Yay! She didn't seem nervous at all, mostly just excited. She found her way to the classroom without any trouble, and after she'd gotten settled at her desk and I'd taken a couple of pictures, gave me hugs and kisses (but didn't try to drag it out, like she sometimes does) and set to work on her first first-grade assignment.


That's my girl.

Beach Day

Whoops; I never did get around to posting anything yesterday.

But my day off was really very good. Penny and I took Alex to school, then went home to eat breakfast and get ready for our day. It was a little chilly to go swimming, but when I offered to take her somewhere else instead, Penny insisted that she wanted to go to the beach.

So we did. Yorktown Beach is situated right at the point where the York River opens up into the Chesapeake Bay -- by no means is it an ocean beach, but the water is salty and it's a really pretty spot. And there was enough wind yesterday for there to be some small waves (which as far as Penny was concerned were big waves). She absolutely loved it.

We walked along the beach and let the water swirl around our ankles. Penny got hypnotized by the water and nearly lost her balance a couple of times, but eventually she got the hang of it. She picked up bits of seashell, and poked dubiously at the seaweed. She made footprints and gasped with awe when the waves washed them away, and then did it again. She dug her toes into the sand and giggled when the water pushed more sand on them. She spotted my footsteps and tried to walk in them. She threw bits of rock and shell and handfuls of sand into the waves.


As if the cool air and strong breeze hadn't been enough to dissuade me from swimming, we found three jellyfish bodies washed up on the shore in the space of about ten minutes. And I saw several in the water, though at least they were individuals and not a swarm.

Did you know that dead jellyfish can't sting you? I talked Penny into touching one of the washed-up bodies so she could see exactly why they're called jellyfish. (Though more than jelly, they feel like those gel window-clings.) Once she got over the initial ick-factor, she because entranced by them. One of the ones we found was huge -- easily eight or ten inches in diameter, and too heavy for the little waves to wash away. Penny kept coming back to it, and after about an hour was referring to it as "my jellyfish friend". When the waves began to get too close (the tide was coming in) she actually dragged it a little further away from them to "rescue" it. She picked up a smaller jellyfish and put it in a bucket to take home "so Daddy can see a jellyfish!" and found a few little broken-off pieces that she had enormous fun playing with. (They stick to stuff like those window gels, too.)


She waded in up to her knees (clinging tightly to my hand -- we both got splashed nearly up to our waists) and retreated to dryer sand for other fun. She made a sand angel (which is just like a snow angel, but not as cold) and buried her arm in the sand and marveled at how hard it was to lift it straight back out. She buried her feet and ankles, and then various of my limbs, as well.


We ate a picnic lunch and watched the boats on the river, including a trio of Coast Guard vessels (and one helicopter), and a gorgeous 3-mast ship -- the Yorktown Alliance -- practicing maneuvers for some show or other.

We were there for two, maybe two and a half hours, and if we'd been able to swim, it probably would have gone longer. Though it's possible that two hours was just long enough, since I came home with a faint burn on my chest and neck and one arm. (I spent most of the morning facing north, I guess -- the other arm doesn't even have a tan line. And my legs are still as white as paper. Stupid legs.)

After we left the beach, we dropped by my folks' place to visit with my mom (Dad wasn't home) for a while, and then we went back home. Penny watched some TV and worked on an art project while I sorted the gajillion pictures I'd taken.

All in all, it was a fantastic, relaxing day, and I'm glad I finally did it. Next summer, I'll try to remember to do it earlier, when we might actually be able to get in the water.

And then yesterday morning, her school had its Open House so students could meet their teachers and find their classrooms (which is why I didn't get to work in time to post all this yesterday). And before that, we had the annual meeting to review and renew her medical plan and to fill her teacher in on what she needs to know.

Penny was surprisingly excited about everything. She took to her new teacher right away, and was excited about all the stuff she saw in the classroom, and thrilled to recognize a few names of other students. For a kid who's been clingy in the extreme and terrified of even tiny changes to her surroundings, it's nice to see her finally showing some enthusiasm. So hopefully our first-day-of-school dropoff will go well, next week.

Our plans for the long weekend are pretty simple. Saturday we're going over to John and Sam's to celebrate birthdays (John's and Mom's and a friend of John and Sam's). And that's pretty much it for plans. I'm sure we'll get out of the house each day (Alex, like Penny before him, does better if he get a Trip every day, though he's a little calmer about it than Penny was) but probably just running errands and such.

And then Tuesday is back to school!

Mother of the Year

The highlight of my morning? Cussing in front of half-a-dozen toddlers. Not the F-bomb, at least, but a nice shrapnel spray of dammit.

I won't say it was entirely without cause. On top of the sore throat I'm nursing for the second day in a row and the late start we got (which I admit was entirely my fault), I'm wearing heels today, and I had Alex in one arm, and was precariously clinging to a double-pack of diapers, and Penny -- who'd been helping me carry the extra-large package of wipes -- frantically said they were slipping out of her grasp just as we reached the daycare door, so I took them from her and now I'm trying to balance 25 pounds of boy plus probably ten pounds of slippery plastic packages that are bigger than the boy and punch the door code into the lock and Alex is leaning and wiggling because he wants to put , and everything is collapsing just as I get the door open and my foot wedged in it, and that's the moment that Penny decided to turn around and start a conversation with a friend of hers in the parking lot.

So I burst out with, "Penny, get in here, dammit!" just as the daycare director was coming out of the two-year-old room, which is right by the front door.

Nice one, Liz.

And I get to wrap this up quickly, because I've just been informed that one of my people spent all yesterday twiddling her thumbs and is bidding fair to spend the rest of the week at it, too.

Are we sure today isn't Monday?