August 30 Day Photo Challenge: Day 5

Someone I love.

This man. <3

I could write 1000 words and it wouldn't do him justice.

Moments like that.

Today was one of those days where I sat down at one point and the house was completely quiet. Cassidy had left to spend the night at her OMGBFF’s house, Ben was still at work, the dogs were sleeping blissfully at my feet, bellies full and properly rubbed and Samus was curled up on my lap, a warm little ball of cute and it was just… perfect.

10 minutes before that I was on the phone yelling and fighting for something I believe in so strongly it causes PHYSICAL pain. Actual. Physical. Pain.

Right then, in the middle of my zen calm, the phone rang and after the conversion I’d just had, I dreaded even looking to see who it was but that Mommy Sense kicks in when your kid is away from home and you HAVE to check the phone because no matter how old they get, when they are away and the phone rings there’s always that 1/4 of a second that you say a silent prayer they are okay. So I do, and it’s Ben and I silently thank the Universe that my daughter is still okay and answer the phone:

Ben: So you want to go see Green Lantern tonight? There’s an 8:15 show and we can do dinner first as long as we leave when I get home.
Me: I was actually going to ask if you wanted to see that tonight but I didn’t want to push too much with your back hurting.
Ben: Let’s go! I’m good!
Me: Okay! I’ll change!
Ben: OKAY!

And you guys, I got off the phone and for a few minutes the world was perfect. Cassidy was off doing whatever it is tween girls do on sleepovers. She’s spending the night with my Dream Friend for her. Her friend Alexis is exactly what I’d pick if I could have picked her friend FOR HER. She’s sweet, polite and quite mostly but every once in awhile she will crack up with this hearty belly laugh that is infectious. She is a good secret keeper. And her parents are nice and smile a lot and participate!

And Ben. Ben’s back is hurt so sitting for a long time hurts him and I know that he WANTED to see Green Lantern but he also knew that I needed to not sit on the couch and Be Sad and Be Worried tonight and he suggest this movie as much to help me as he did for himself and… I just love him so much. I know that I’ve said this before but, you guys, this man. This man is amazing. And selfless. And patient. And I’m so lucky to have him.

And then Kumo farted so loud he woke himself up. And Danica was like WHAT WAS THAT FULL ATTENTION IMMINENT INVASION. And Samus was like WHY ARE WE RUNNING IS THERE TOYS, WHERE ARE THE TOYS LETS FIND THE TOYS YOU GUYS YEAH!.

And the moment was over. But it’s moments like that, those moments, they’ve kept me sane the last week or so.

I have a really long, probably ugly, war in front of me but as long as I can grab onto these moments between battles, remember what I’m fighting for, I will succeed.

I’m not asleep… but that doesn’t mean I’m awake.

So I really love my iPhone. I’m an early adopter! I had an original iPhone! Then didn’t get the 3G because we had to go and buy a HOUSE and Ben was all PRIORITIES!! HOUSE BEFORE TOYS! But I got the 3Gs pretty much as soon as they were available. Then it was stolen while eating at Jerome Bettis Grille 36 in Pittsburgh and I was SO SAD. Then I got another one. Then my amazing and awesome husband made up for all that nazi house buying before toys business by sitting outside an AT&T store at the crack of dawn in the cold to get me the iPhone 4 the day they came out.

Anyway, I have always loved them. Really, really loved them.

Then the damn time went and changed on me.

So. I know that there were a lot of people that had problems with iPhones around time changes, or for some reason on New Years they went all wonky temporarily, but they seemed to get all the bugs worked out pretty quickly.

And then mine had to go and turn into a raging, hormonal, demonic asshat.

When I got up last Sunday I checked my phone and was happy to see that it had changed time perfectly. I hugged it and pet it and told it I loved it and we spent a beautiful Sunday frolicking around town and shopping and eating like BFFs do.

And then Monday morning for some unexplained reason she turned on me and our relationship at this point is barely hanging on by a thread.

(Back story: Cassidy’s alarm clock died late last week so I had to gave her mine and had been using my iPhone to get up every day.)

Monday: My alarms didn’t go off. Not a HUGE deal because I still woke up in time to get to work. Knowing that in the past you just had to delete your old alarms and create new ones, I did that and knew that the next day we’d be back on track. I even set one to go off at 3:30AM because I was all motivated to GET UP EARLY and work out! WOOHOO! THIS IS GOING TO BE AWESOME!

Tuesday: My alarms didn’t go off. I had the one set for 3:30AM and another set for 4:15AM. Neither went off. I woke up at 5:27AM. I have to be out the door by about 5:10AM to get to work on time. We had a very serious conversation on the way to work about where our relationship was headed and how trust is something easily broken and not soon forgotten or fixed once it’s lost. I thought she listened. I thought we had synced. (HA! See what I did there!?)

I was wrong.

I also deleted all my alarms and set only one up to go off at 4:15AM. And BOUGHT AN ALARM CLOCK. I figured that eventually it would start working correctly again, but in the mean time I was going to start relying on the awesome multi color glowing alarm clock I got at Target.

Aside: I got a Timex Color Changing Alarm Clock and when I plugged it in it was LATE and admittedly I had a bit of an issue getting it set up. IT WAS LATE. Ben had to help me once or twice (or seven times) and I set it down and he was like, “So, it glows? Can you turn that off now?”

TURN IT OFF!? It CHANGES COLORS! Why in the hell would you want to turn it off!? Well, the good news is that according to the reviews on Target’s website, the glowey awesomeness is only going to last a week or two. Sadness, I’ll HAZ it.

ANYWAY!

Wednesday: Apparently buying an awesome glowey alarm clock kind of upset her because not only did she go off at 4:30AM, the same time as my alarm clock, she first went off at 3:30AM! EVEN THOUGH THERE WAS NO ALARM SET FOR 3:30AM!

3:30AM is REALLY DAMN EARLY! You know, in case you didn’t know that. And not only that but since it was 3:30AM(!!) I kept hitting the SNOOZE button instead of the SHUT THE HELL UP button and it might have gone off three times. And I couldn’t just TURN THE DAMN THING OFF because… it wasn’t actually THERE in the menu to turn off!

Ben said something at that point that involved my phone and an outlet on the southern region of my body that was not nice and I can not mention here.

That was a really long day.

Then, at one point that day I started my Netflix app to show something to Cassidy and she was all HA! YEAH, RIGHT! CHEAT ON ME WITH THAT GLOWEY PIECE OF CRAP ALARM CLOCK! NO NETFLIX FOR YOU!

Thursday: THERE IT IS! 3:30AM ALARM.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

I was seriously about .184 seconds away from throwing it against the wall. Instead I just took a deep breath and turned the phone completely off so it wouldn’t go off again. And so Ben would not perform the act I talked about earlier involving my southern region.

I synced her for the first time in a week today. You’d think that after, like, Monday I’d have done that but that’s what a person WHO HAD GOTTEN SOME SLEEP would do and I was not that person. Since then, Netflix is like OKAY FINE I guess we’ll work.

If for some reason though you see a mushroom cloud over the Bay Area at around 3:30AM tomorrow? It will be safe to assume that it’s Ben’s head exploding.

Also, I will admit freely, the reason I didn’t actually throw it against the wall is because if I did it would make it somewhat difficult to feed my Tiny Wings addiction.

<3

Oh you silly tiny winged bird, how I love you. Love you enough to forget about the fact that I haven’t gotten more than four hours of sleep in FOUR DAYS.

Four. Days.

Goodnight!

Reekend Weecap.

I have a REALLY REALLY REALLY long post mostly written that I can’t post publicly. I’ll probably finish it up in the next few days, set my twitter to private for a day or two and tweet the password, then delete the tweet and make twitter public again.

Drama.

Not mine. Well, kind of mine in that it involves Cassidy but not mine to share publicly. But man, writing is cathartic and I needed to get it all out that way because my head was about 30 seconds away from BLOWING THE FUCK UP for two days.

SO. Life has been, you know, life. Friday Cassidy spent the night at a friend’s house and then the night was… long. Saturday was running errands, a nice long walk down on the levy with Ben and the dogs, lunch with Bob, Judy and John and a movie that Ben’s been wanting to see for awhile¹.

Today was breakfast with Melanie and Kim, laundry, a NICE LONG NAP then dinner at Fresh Choice because Cassidy got to choose dinner and it’s her FAVORITE. We just finished up watching Big Trouble in Little China with Cassidy and now that she’s in bed, we are catching up on TV we missed throughout the week. Like Spartacus which you can’t really watch with a 12 year old. heh

It’s a really good thing I don’t blog every day, you’d be like DO YOU EVERY DO ANYTHING INTERESTING!? And the answer is yes. ALL THE DAMN TIME. Eventually Cassidy won’t be a sensitive tween anymore and embarrassing her on my blog will be common place again.

In the meantime, here she is being cute in one of those rare moments she doesn’t have that ever present look of “OMG WHY ARE YOU TAKING MY PICTURE WE ARE IN PUBLIC YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO ACT LIKE YOU DON’T KNOW ME” on her face.

1096 days later.

Yesterday was three years since this happened:

We kind of eloped. We have a cermony with just Cassidy and us and then surprised my mom and little brother at dinner in all our wedding garb. We’d tricked her into going to our favorite super fancy restaurant “just to have a good dinner.”

Man, Ben has lost a LOT of weight since then! 70 pounds!

I made our little bouquets myself. This one was Cassidy’s at the dinner table.

I loved every second of it. I’m so glad that we decided to not spend a lot of money on a wedding and spent that money instead on a trip to Maui. I highly recommend having a selfish wedding like we did!

Here is a picture of us in December at our good friend Julie’s wedding.

Look how much thinner Ben is! It’s like I married a man and now I’m cheating on him with his much skinner doppelganger. Which is actually kinda hot when you think about it.

ANYWAY! Three years! It took us 5 years to get to that day and looking back now I still think it was the most perfect wedding day ever. I still love him more every day and he’s still the first person I run to with good news and the first person I turn to for advise and comfort.

And STILL, he makes me laugh, at myself, every single day.

I think I’ll keep him around a bit longer.

Like forever.

<3

This is why I don’t post every day.

I wish I had cute stories and funny anticdotes to share with you every single day but lately life has just been… being lived! Work has been INSANE busy, Ben is still recovering from his latest knee surgery, Cassidy is, well, 12. That’s a whole post in itself that I’m not sure I’m in the frame of mind to write right now.

So here’s how my posts would look if I posted every day (No, I didn’t forget about Cassidy, she is at her dad’s for the week since she has the week off school):

Got up at 5:00AM for the SECOND DAY IN A ROW to the sounds of Danica throwing up on our bedroom floor. Three times. I finally had the presence of mind the THIRD time to find a towel and throw it under her face so I didn’t have to scrub puke out of the carpet.

Went back to bed.

Woke up at 8:30AM to the sound of Danica whining to go out. Ben and I tried to argue who would have to get up. I lose.

Get up, let dogs out. Start cinnamon rolls on the oven (didn’t they used to be a LOT bigger? I swear they have shrunk by half in the last few years), clean the kitchen a bit, feed the dogs, get cinnamon rolls out, hike upstairs to tell Ben I made them, come downstairs and eat three, clean the downstairs bathroom a bit, eat two more, give Danica stomach medicine, start a load of laundry.

Then sat down and watch TV for a bit. Ben asks if we are still going to Los Gatos Cafe today. When I mentioned it yesterday he mentioned wanting to eat healthy and I pointed out that you CAN eat healthy there (I didn’t. HA!) so I thought he didn’t want to go. Really glad I was wrong!

Shower, get out. Am doing makeup when I realize that I think I have some gray hair! I can’t really tell because it’s hard to see the top of your own head and I thought about plucking one I thought was gray but realize if I don’t pluck I can still live in denial and convince myself that it’s just the way the sunlight was hitting my hair.

Head to Los Gatos Cafe. It’s a beautiful day outside. BEAUTIFUL! There are perfect fluffy clouds in the sky and the air is clean and we can see snow on the top of the mountains around San Jose. We get to the restaurant and wait, there is ALWAYS a wait there but they have fresh coffee while you wait and it’s fun to people watch there. Los Gatos is full of pretty rich people and I realize that out of the 15 girls waiting, 14 of them are wearing black leggings and uggs. I am #15 in jeans, sparkly Chucks and a gray hoodie. I giggle to myeslf.

During lunch Ben says that my eyes look beautiful today. I swoon.

Come home. Empty the dishwasher, finish cleaning the bathroom.

We decided to take the dogs for a trip to PetSmart. We are trying to get Kumo to stop being so spazzy in public. He’s not mean or vicious, just SO EXCITED TO BE AROUND PEOPLE AND DOGS AND WOOHOO!! Danica is like, whatever. Lets just walk around and smell stuff and buy me a toy.

Take the dogs home.

Go to Home Depot to buy some boring house stuff. Go to Kohls to see if we can find some new hoodies. Can’t. They are getting rid of all the winter stuff and it’s slim pickings. I do, however, find a most excellent Dunder Mifflin tshirt for $9.00. SCORE!

Come home, change out laundry. Sit down and start watching the Daytona 500. I already know who wins and about the big wreck on lap 29 so after that I pick up my laptop and start to try and fix my iPhone. I accidentally deleted the iPod shortcut the other day and I can’t just sync because that will erase all my data. And okay, I REALLY love my iPhone but sometimes Apple does some really stupid shit and this is one of them. I should have the option to sync what is on my phone NOW into iTunes then readd the one app I want but no, because I’ve had to reinstall Windows since the last app sync, I’m screwed.

And now I’m posting this and I have to hurry because Ben is hungry and is starting to look at me like FEED. ME. NOW!

This is what old boring peopled do. NOTHING.

OH! I’m starting a round of P90X tomorrow. Julie and I are going to BRING IT. If you want to join us let me know!! It’s all about keeping each other motivated and encouraging one another to keep going.

The End.