| Local Politics |
[May. 10th, 2008|03:12 pm] |
Today we went to a picnic for Aiken County Council member Scott Singer, who is running for the State House of Representatives. I didn't really know one thing about him, but the picnic was held in the Gem Lakes pavilion in our neighborhood, so I figured this would be a good opportunity to a) meet some neighbors, b) learn a little about the local political scene, and c) get a free lunch.
The food was good and I did meet a few new people. I made a point of sitting at a table with a woman who had a little boy about David's age. Of course, she doesn't live in our neighborhood - she was visiting her mother, who does. (The Gem Lakes demographic skews old.)
Scott Singer seems like a nice guy, and he also seems fairly smart and practical. While there were a couple of his positions I disagreed with (school choice and illegal immigration), most of what he had to say was what I wanted to hear. He favors a stronger executive branch in our state (having state agencies report to the governor instead of the legislature) and also favors keeping the state legislature out of local affairs. Those were the two issues I was most concerned about. He is also a "smart growth" person, favoring impact fees for developers and land-use plans that preserve open space, and he's big on alternative energy - he was instrumental in getting the hydrogen research center established here in Aiken.
I had thought that he and Brad Boni were the two people running for this office, but it turns out there are four guys just running for the Republican nomination. I'm not voting in that contest, but if he wins this I will at least consider him for the position in November, depending on who he's running against. Wait, what am I saying? This is Aiken: whoever wins the Republican nomination *will* be the one who gets elected in November. |
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| Reconnecting |
[May. 4th, 2008|10:38 pm] |
Yesterday George and I went to a funeral for the infant son of one of his co-workers. The baby was stillborn at 8 months. I can't even imagine how hard that would be. The service was at St. Paul's in Augusta, which is an absolutely beautiful church. Even with the altar draped in white and the congregation singing hopeful, positive hymns, it was still a very solemn occasion.
People often say how small South Carolina is, and I find it's true again and again. At the funeral I saw two people from our old church in Columbia, two people from our current church in Aiken, and one friend from Sewanee whom I haven't seen in seven years. I was especially surprised to see our friend from college, since last I heard she was in New York. Now she's in Augusta and married to another Sewanee alum.
While it was great to see these people again, I couldn't help wishing we had reconnected at the baby's baptism instead. |
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| Travel, Bikes and a Busy Day |
[Apr. 20th, 2008|10:43 pm] |
I'm getting ready to go to California next week for my cousin's wedding. It's just D-Mac and I going, George is staying home. He's looking forward to getting a lot accomplished around the house while we're gone. We'll see how much on his list gets done, and how much beer drinking and book reading gets done. ;)
Yesterday we bought bikes. George's is more mountain-bike style and mine is more of a retro road bike. We plan to ride them around the neighborhood and get a trailer so we can take D-Mac to the swimming lake. It's a bit of a hike with all the gear if you're walking, but it's too close by to justify driving. Plus, we need the exercise, and this is just generally a good neighborhood to ride a bike in, as long as you stay on our side of busy Town Creek road.
Today was really busy. After church, we went to a cookout with friends from church. We could only stay an hour because George's aunt and uncle were making a detour on their way back to McClellanville to pick up our old china cabinet (and also to see D-Mac and our new house). The china cabinet used to belong to George's grandmother, and since we bought a new one a few months ago we don't need it anymore. George thought it ought to stay in the family, so he offered it to his cousin Edmund, who just recently bought his first house somewhere down near the coast. It was nice to see them, and I wish I could've been a better hostess but I had the worst allergies of the year so far today.
I think it must be the oak pollen. All day I've walked around sneezing and snorting with my eyes half-open. I went through an entire mini pack of kleenex during church, then finished off the boxes in the kitchen and living room later. I am taking Claritin, but there's always about one week during the spring when it doesn't work and I feel miserable. It seems that this is that week, and I am glad I will be spending it on the other side of the country. I hope it rains a lot while I'm gone.
In the TMI/PSA category, at the picnic today I let D-Mac drink some orange-colored juice in a little barrel-shaped plastic jug. I saw other kids his age drinking it and figured it must be OK. Clearly, the allergies were addling my brain. George tasted a little bit of it and said it was sickeningly sweet, probably pure corn syrup with a little food coloring thrown in. Fortunately, D-Mac only drank about a third before spilling most of the rest of it. I hate to think what the rest of the day would have been like if he'd had any more. After George's aunt and uncle left, I took him potty about once an hour, and most of the time we were too late (he's still wearing pull-ups, though). The whole upstairs smelled vile. So, people, in case you didn't know: do not give large quantities of corn syrup to your toddler. Again, I know this; what was I thinking?
Anyway, I hope we're both feeling better tomorrow as we prepare for our long cross-country journey. I'll post some pictures when we get back, and in the meantime I'll be microblogging from my phone over at twitter.com/superflippy. |
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| Yet another DITL |
[Apr. 15th, 2008|10:17 pm] |
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Last Saturday was the annual frou-frou tea party on the lawn at the FCC and it was also a DITL day, so I decided to participate. Pictures posted here. Please view and comment. |
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| DITL for Friday, April 4 |
[Apr. 8th, 2008|10:48 am] |
Here's my Day in the Life entry for last Friday. Please go comment and vote if you like it. I was asked to play music for the St. John's women's retreat, so I got to go spend the weekend at Gravatt with a bunch of my friends from Columbia whom I haven't seen in a while.
I made the pictures kind of small because so many of them turned out blurry. Also, most are overexposed because I tend to worry about things turning out too dark and overcompensate. I am still a beginner at learning how to use the manual settings on my camera. |
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| Margaritas and Friendship |
[Mar. 30th, 2008|09:18 pm] |
On Friday George and I got together with some friends for a margarita night. One friend, A, made her recipe and I made mine, the GTU Alabama margarita as introduced to me by Zana. It's simple: put a can of lime concentrate in the blender, fill the can up with tequila and add that, then fill the rest of the blender with ice and mix. It makes a surprisingly good margarita.
A's recipe was at the other end of the complexity spectrum. It involved juicing fresh limes and mixing them with powdered sugar, tequila, triple sec, and ice in a cocktail shaker, then straining. But I have to admit, hers were better than mine, probably due to the fresh lime juice.
( musings on friendship and social climbers ) |
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| Happy Easter! |
[Mar. 23rd, 2008|08:39 pm] |
Our annual Ham and Gin & Tonic party was today, and a good time was had by all. The kids ran around the yard in a sugar-fueled frenzy while the adults ate, drank, and chatted. We overestimated the amount of ham we would need, though, and are going to be eating a lot of leftover ham for a while. We also have a ton of leftover beer and gin. The rate of alcohol consumption seems to be a lot lower in Aiken than it was in Columbia.
( a couple of pictures )
The church was packed this morning. George figured that St. T's can hold about 320 people and almost 400 came to the 10:30 service. There was an Easter Egg hunt for the kids before the service started. The younger kids hunted eggs in a side garden and the older kids looked for eggs in the cemetery, which seemed a little weird to me. A friend told me that's the tradition, so I guess all the families buried there are OK with it. |
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| Dentist, Chocolate, Garden |
[Mar. 21st, 2008|03:09 pm] |
Instead of going to my usual Friday morning kaffeeklatsch, I made an emergency trip to the dentist.
( cut for the squeamish )
D-Mac had an Easter/St. Patrick's Day party at daycare yesterday. They had an Easter Egg hunt and he came home with more chocolate than he ought to eat in a month. After D-Mac went to bed, George removed all but one piece from each egg.
George has the day off today so he's working in the garden. Last weekend he completed the beds for the herb garden, and now he's marking off a flower bed and planting flowers in pots. I'll post some pictures when he's done. |
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| No more high chair |
[Mar. 12th, 2008|05:20 pm] |
This weekend, we decided it was finally time to get rid of the high chair and make D-Mac sit in the booster seat we bought months ago. His high chair converts to a toddler-size table and chair, so it's still being used. On Saturday we bought him some Play-doh. He sat at that table and played with it for an hour and a half straight, and again for half an hour on Sunday. I can't remember the last time something held his attention for that long.
D-Mac also got a haircut on Saturday, which I think always makes him look older. George got a haircut last Friday, so now I'm the only one left with a shaggy, disreputable mane. Fortunately, I have an appointment at the salon tomorrow. This will be my first haircut since November, so I plan to have a lot taken off. |
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| I will remind him of this story when he's a teenager |
[Mar. 3rd, 2008|04:32 pm] |
On Saturday we went to our friends' wedding (not my photo set, I forgot to take the camera out of my purse). It was a lot of fun and we were treated to some great music courtesy of 88 Rewind (warning: site has sound), our friend Patrick's 80's-themed band.
All the kids present enjoyed dancing to the music, and D-Mac was no exception. He and I were out in front dancing together and he kept looking over at L, my friends' 4-year-old daughter. I leaned over and asked D-Mac, "Do you want to dance with L?" He nodded. I led him over to L and told her, "D-Mac wants to dance with you." They put their arms around each other and she swung him around in a circle until he fell on the floor. They were both grinning ear to ear. |
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| Day in the Life for Feb. 24, 2008 |
[Feb. 28th, 2008|02:59 pm] |
Here's my latest DITL. Check it out and please vote if you like the pictures - you don't have to be part of the ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) ditl community to do so.
I submitted this exactly at the midnight deadline last night. Starting around 10, D-Mac refused to sleep for longer than 10 minutes at a stretch. So I ended up toting him downstairs at 11:30 and holding him on my lap while I resized and uploaded the last few photos. He kept asking me to scroll back to the picture of him eating ice cream, so I finally just printed out those pictures for him.
I had a bunch of witty captions planned, but ran out of time to type them. The mural is from the St. T's nursery, the cemetery is next to the church, and the paintings in the church are the Stations of the Cross. D-Mac is dipping a lemon in bean dip during lunch at the Mexican restaurant, George is building a workbench in the garage, and those are lamb chops we had for dinner. I think the rest of the pictures are self-explanatory. |
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| Kittehs! |
[Feb. 26th, 2008|02:02 pm] |
I don't think there are many of you who follow this journal and don't read ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) sanba38's, but just in case you haven't seen her latest pictures, check out the two mama cats and nine kittens. (There is no regular vet on Molokai and a waiting list for spaying, hence the plethora of kittens.) |
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| The Splurge |
[Feb. 18th, 2008|09:53 pm] |
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The Apple TV arrived today. George had the day off, so he set it up and oh, it is nice. It plays music and the video quality is really good. And the videos won't skip or jump because there are no disks for grubby little hands to smear goo all over. |
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| Love, stinkiness, shoes, redecorating |
[Feb. 14th, 2008|04:09 pm] |
Happy Valentine's Day, y'all.
I'm taking a short break from work to write this while the office airs out. It's been cold and rainy recently so Gwen has spent too much time living in this room, and it has acquired a rather distracting funk.
So, what's new? D-Mac got new shoes last weekend with Thomas the Tank Engine on them. I wanted to get him the brown plaid Van knock-offs, but once Daddy pointed out the "train shoes" there was no going back. I halfheartedly tried to get him to wear his "church shoes" for picture day today, but after a long, sleepless night I just didn't have the energy for that battle. Besides, we have absolutely adorable school pictures of D-Mac from just 6 months ago so I doubt I'll be buying these. I can memorialize the train shoes and the bad home haircut for free with my own camera, thanks.
We've also planted bulbs alongside the driveway. Slowly but surely, we are making this house ours. I pulled down some of the ugly wallpaper in D-Mac's bathroom last night while he took his bath. It pulled down the top paper layer of the drywall with it. Oops. This particular wallpaper bugs me because the blue stripes in it are a dusty, purplish blue and the tile in the bathroom is aqua. I don't know if the person who chose it just didn't care that the color was so off, or didn't like aqua and was hoping that the clashing blue and pink stripes would overpower the tile.
The next thing I need to do is figure out how to remove the little yellowed pieces of plastic that are holding the wallpaper up in our shower so I can just remove it all. The things holding them in are like tiny nails without heads and I'm not really sure how to pull them out. |
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| DITL for January 31, 2008 |
[Feb. 4th, 2008|11:18 am] |
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My latest day in the life entry is here. Check out the pretty pictures and vote if you like 'em. |
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| The Playlist of Knowledge |
[Feb. 1st, 2008|03:02 pm] |
I just came across a playlist in iTunes labeled "Knowledge." Curious, I clicked on it and discovered it's an automated list of songs with "know" in the title. It makes for an interesting compilation, and I'm listening to it right now.
Don't Want to Know if You Are Lonely - Hüsker Dü
Everybody Knows - Concrete Blonde
How Do You Know - Songs From The Loft
I Don't Know How To Love Him - Jesus Christ Superstar
I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me) - Aretha Franklin, Featuring George Michael
I Know Things Now - Into The Woods
I Want To Know You (In The Secret) - Sonicflood
Know You In The Now - Michael Card
Know Your Onion! - The Shins
Known By The Scars - Michael Card
No One Knows My Name - Gillian Welch
Old Enough To Know - Michael W. Smith
She Knows - Four Star Mary
Still Know How To Groove - Everybodyduck
We Know Too Much - Strong Hand Of Love - A Tribute To Mark Heard
You Know How Women Are - Buddy Jewell
You Oughta Know - Alanis Morissette
Like To Get To Know You Well - Howard Jones
I like how some of the song title juxtapositions sound like a conversation. "Everybody knows." "How do you know?" |
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| Only Losers Can't Do Paperwork |
[Jan. 28th, 2008|04:10 pm] |
That's what I told George on Saturday, when I discovered that I couldn't vote in the SC Democratic primary. I had picked up the form to change my voter registration to Aiken County back in November so I could vote in the local elections. Well, I didn't get my form filled out in time, so I couldn't vote then.
Of course, the smart thing to do would have been to immediately sit down and fill out the form right then. But instead I put it in my "to do" pile of paperwork. The pile of forms to fill out, letters to write, rebates to send in, papers to file, etc. etc. So of course it never got done.
Then, George found out that you had to change your registration at least 30 days before the primaries if you wanted to vote. So did that motivate me to fill out the form last December? Of course not.
See, I still had my old voter registration card and I just figured that if I missed the deadline I could always drive to Columbia and vote in my old precinct. Unfortunately, the morning of Jan. 26 I discovered that I no longer had my old voter registration card. I suspect I may have pitched it in a rare fit of wallet-cleaning. I needed the card to vote in my old precinct because I actually did update my driver's license right after I moved. (Only because I learned my lesson after an earlier paperwork fiasco involving my driver's license that cost me thousands of dollars, but I digress.)
I was really, really, really upset about not being able to vote in the primary. I went outside and kicked the fence until my foot was sore and said some words that I probably shouldn't say in front of D-Mac. But did this motivate me to just sit down and fill out the damn form? Of course not! If there's one thing I'm good at, it's avoiding paperwork.
Fortunately, George pulled out the form, set it on the table, handed me a pen, and told me I'd better fill it out right then or else I would forget again and regret it even more later. Realizing he was right, I filled out the stupid form and put it in the mail.
So I couldn't vote this weekend, but at least I'll be able to vote in November. How much do you want to bet that, come election day, my "to do" pile of paperwork still remains untouched? |
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| DITL for January 15, 2008 |
[Jan. 21st, 2008|11:19 am] |
Here are some pictures I took last Tuesday.
I did the whole cameraphone/spy thing in an attempt to make an ordinary day more interesting. Please feel free to vote for it if you like it - you don't even have to be a member of the ditl community. |
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| What we did this weekend |
[Jan. 14th, 2008|11:52 am] |
We had a pretty productive and fun weekend. I ate out every single night, which was a plus because it means that the kitchen is not a total wreck anymore.
Friday, D-Mac and I had dinner with a few friends from church. George had a cold and didn't go. It was nice getting to go out and socialize, but D-Mac was a little difficult because he was at a house he'd never been at before and he's also at a stage where he wants to cling to Mama but isn't really interested in playing with other kids. So I had a lot of brief conversations interrupted by consoling the boy when the dog licked him, helping him find things to play with, helping him wipe pizza off himself.
Saturday, George drove a co-worker to the airport to pick up his car in exchange for a free night of babysitting from his teenage daughter. So we got to go out and have a nice, grown-up dinner at an Italian restaurant I've been wanting to try called Olive Oil. The service was a little spotty, but the food was really good.
Then yesterday George managed to build one of the raised beds for his herb garden.
He'd originally planned to make 4, but we both agreed 3 will be enough and will fit better in the space anyway. Then his parents came over and took us out to dinner for his dad's birthday at Ruby Tuesday, since that's about the nicest restaurant we can bring D-Mac to right now. At least their food is actually pretty good, and D-Mac loves the mini turkey burgers.
Only 2 more weeks until the boy turns 2, but he already seems like a full-fledged 2-year-old. |
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| Busy days, sleepless nights |
[Jan. 7th, 2008|12:00 pm] |
Just thought I ought to write here so folks know I'm still alive. Though only because it's not possible for a person to actually die from sleep deprivation.
D-Mac has been clingy and restless lately. I think that's a 2-year-old thing. He still wakes up a couple times every night and has trouble getting back to sleep.
He's started talking a lot more, though, and sometimes it's very cute. His new thing is "Where X go?" And even when you answer the question he will keep asking it over and over. The other day an airplane flew overhead and he didn't stop asking "Where airplane go?" for about half an hour.
He still doesn't pronounce sibilants, so shoes are "yoos" and french fries are "wen wies." I can see how sign language would be helpful at this stage since so many of the words he says sound alike. Unfortunately, he's learning words faster than I can learn and teach him signs right now, so I'm just doing my best to interpret his toddler patois.
We did get our house clean for the new year. We hired a maid service. George hardly noticed the difference, but it was huge for me. We also took care of a lot of the unpacked boxes by simply stuffing them in the attic, so the house looks fairly nice right now. We have too much stuff and I would like to get rid of a lot of it but that means sorting through it, which takes time. Also, a lot of it falls into the category of "random piece of plastic that could be trash or could be an important part of something George needs" so we really need to find time to sort through the junk *together*. The way things are going now, this may never happen. I wonder how much I could get for our random boxes of junk on eBay? |
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