stuff post

I don't even like Kay Hagan that much, but around here there have been a lot of ads against her. The irritating thing is that they're pretty substance-less. I almost wouldn't be surprised if someone got on the radio and called her a poopyhead.

I am astounded at the rate at which Heidi can run with a pair of pants around her ankles.

A few weeks ago I checked out the movie for Northanger Abbey. Today I finally got to watch it (I gave up a nap to do so--yes, it was worth it). Apparently nobody else in this house is remotely interested in watching a period drama. I tried watching it with Heidi, and she moaned and said, "I want to watch a movie about little girls, not big girls." Ryan wanted to watch Non-Stop (which was also really good). I hadn't realized how hard it is for me to get around to watching a movie all by myself.

I am done with red delicious apples. If I wanted baby powder I would buy baby powder, not apples that have the same texture as baby powder. I bought some from Costco because they were cheap and I thought they would work just fine for dehydrating, but they are so bad I can't even cut half of them.

I didn't lose hair after Kevin and Heidi were born, but this time I feel like I'm losing a lot of hair. Washing my hair feels like getting tangled in a spider's web these days.

I finally feel ready to move on to the Week 3 routine for Couch to 5K. I've been on Week 2 for a month. The Couch to 5K program has nine weeks, so I would probably be running a 5K already if I were following the program exactly, but I've had to take it a lot slower. It's okay. The improvements are subtle, but I can tell I'm getting better.

One day several months ago I was just idly looking at my family tree on familysearch.org, and I ended up going all the way back to some ancestor (assuming all the genealogy is right) named John Crow. At the time his page said he was born in Connecticut in 1602 (too early to have settled in Connecticut, let alone been born there), and he had twenty-one brothers who were also named John Crow. Obviously there were issues with his record. I didn't have time to figure out what was going on, but I was sort of curious to see what ended up happening, so I clicked the star to get notifications if there were changes. To my surprise, soon after that someone started doing fairly extensive work on his record. She merged all of those John Crows, added a lot of sources and a life sketch, and some other things. Now here's the sad part: About two weeks after she put a lot of work into deleting about a dozen couple relationships that were all duplicates, Family Search swooped in with their Legacy New Family Search stuff. (They have been gradually adding things from the New Family Search into Family Tree for the people who don't want to lose what they did in New Family Search, but in my experience it's mostly been clutter with not much useful information.) So unfortunately all of those couple relationships were added back again by Family Search. As humorous as it has been for me to see this entire thing unfold, I'm guessing this lady was probably really frustrated when that happened.

On Thursday we had one of those days. Kevin had an earache, so we went to the walk-in clinic early in the morning to see the doctor. Then after going into Harris Teeter to get the antibiotics, we found out they don't open until 9 a.m. So we had to go back home and then come back later, which meant I brought three kids into Harris Teeter by myself. It was sort of okay, though, because they had some really good cookies for samples. Then we came home and I spent half an hour persuading Kevin to finish drinking his nasty medicine. Who knew two teaspoons could be so much? Then we watched movies. Then Heidi decided it was fun to make Kevin mad at her and she accidentally broke his pumpkin while trying to be annoying, so he yelled in her face and I sent him to his room. Two minutes later I checked and he was completely zonked out on the floor. Then the maintenance men came and gave us new burners that actually get hot enough to boil water (everyone in Baity Hill is getting new burners). Once they were gone I took the opportunity while Kevin was sleeping to make dinner. Problem. After I finished making it I realized the kids would not like it, but now my window of opportunity for making dinner was over because the kids were going nuts and wanted to play. I had no idea what to make instead. (Maybe normally I would say tough luck, but they had eaten very little that day as it was and I knew they'd be in bad shape if they didn't eat until the next morning.) While I agonized over what to make for dinner they got even more wired playing in the hallway with friends, until finally it got late enough and I got desperate enough that I just made them some oatmeal. Heidi told me exactly how she wanted it and I meticulously followed her directions, and then she refused to even eat a bite. So after attempting (unsuccessfully, of course) to force-feed her I put her in bed and locked the door. When Ryan finally got home we ate the dinner I had made (which was fine) and then I went on a run. Ryan gave Kevin another dose of antibiotics while I was gone, and apparently there was much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, and there is also a lovely pink spot on the carpet. As I was finishing my cool-down walk (around 8:15) I heard the fire alarms go off because of course somebody in the building forgot that we have normal burners that get hot now and they burned their food making a late dinner. Ryan had to bring all three kids out of the building by himself. Heidi had been really deeply asleep and she freaked out when the fire alarms went off. She was still quivering when we came back in. We didn't get the kids back in bed until 9:00. What a day.