Seanna (n. shaw-nuh)

First time in a Tennessee grocery store

Hahahaha she already has the look.  It's the look that says, "Oh no, not you again with the camera.  I must smile and pretend I am not annoyed."  Just kidding.  I think I caught her unaware there for just a second.  Last night B took J to a record (really.  a record) store in Nashville and she found three albums she liked enough to buy:  Sex Pistols, Mick Jagger and something else.  She was quite surprised and happy at the prices. 

Want to see Charlie again?

She is one small girl.  She talks all the time.  All the time.  The only things she doesn't like are (a) when you won't give her your food; and (b) the dog.  Everything else, she's up for. Oh, except hot coffee.  She is not a fan of that and is quite disgusted with the whole idea at this point.

I am off for a long day of working, having slacked off all day yesterday other than the trip to the grocery store.  Ahhhhhh it was good, though.  I even watched Gilmore Girls, which I very rarely do. 

The girls are at church or still asleep.  J went to church with one of them.  P, I think.  She wants a bike to ride around on and explore with.  All this driving everywhere is a very foreign concept to her.  We did have a bike but we sold it at the garage sale last fall.  Ah, well. 

I don't generally like Sundays all that well; I find them depressing which is something that stems from my childhood, I think.  Working and moving the laundry around befits the whole Sunday vibe, I think.  We need to start going to church again, though.  I miss it. 

And with that, off I go...

Meet J

This was just after she'd been on a plane traveling for hours and hours and she still looks so pretty!  Photo by P.

 

Here's J and E at the Host Family Orientation meeting, which took place at El Tap to accommodate my weird  work schedule, and I still managed to be about 15 minutes late to it.  NICE. J&E had just met a bit before I took this photo--E had been off at running camp.  She said they ran about 40 miles.  Wow.   Anyway, they just naturally fell into this pose after E rolled her eyes at me.  No sense fighting the inevitable, right?

We made a sign to welcome J (and now you will know her name if you look carefully but oh well)

See that brick wall with the flowers?  Yeah, that's where I left MY CAMERA.  Then we drove off.  Fortunately, I noticed it was not with me about 30 minutes later, before those clouds turned into rain, and Uncle Steve saved the day by coming up and rescuing my poor little Nikon.  I never do stuff like that! 

Anyway, so we got to the airport probably an hour early just to be on the safe side, but B was desperate for food, so we wandered over to this bar/lounge where a quite talented young man named "Michael Lee Hunt" (think about it, and in an airport, no less.  "Ben Dover, paging Ben Dover....") was singing and playing his guitar, and then it took forever for the cute waitress to bring the chicken strips to the girls but we STILL should have had plenty of time to get over to where J was disembarking, but the plane was 10 minutes early and somehow we still managed to screw it up.  We found her a few minutes later downstairs in baggage claim and all was well.

Poor little J was so exhausted that we came home and showed her her new room, and she sort of floated around it exclaiming things, things which seemed positive, in German.  Lots of long compound German words but we sort of gathered from her tone and  face that they were good compound German words.  It was very cute.  She ate a bowl of spaghetti and went to bed. She is still a little jetlagged but is keeping a good schedule, getting up at a decent time and going to bed fairly early.  I think P wanted C to see how the rooms look now, so here are some photos:

See the green blanket on the far bed?  That is the blanket that "goes" in J's room but now it's P's blankie.  I was first like "What to do, what to do?" but then I remembered the comforter, circa 1986, that I have always loved.  I used to look for months and months for linens because I only liked very expensive stuff, like the $200+ plus comforters (which was outrageous back in the mid 80s and kind of still is today).  But I was poor and besides, at some point it becomes the principle of the thing.  So I would wait for it to go on super clearance at the linen outlet stores and then I would snatch it up. Anyway, so the blanket in J's room is a vintage 1980s comforter until I come up with something better.  Which may or may not happen.  Sloth is a powerful thing.  Plus, I still like to buy linens only on super clearance.

OK, so let's see.  This upcoming week is a busy one.  I have to work in the office Wed-Fri next week, covering for the boss.  My fabulous husband is starting the school year next week with a week of inservice, more or less.  I think he has to give a presentation to some of the teachers, too.  P is in band camp, and E wants to get her driver's license.  B is looking for a part-time job, which are kind of hard to come by around here these days but I'm sure something will turn up. 

I still owe lots of emails to people.  I've been in a bit of a funk in that department, I'm afraid.  I'm sure nobody is living or dying waiting for an email from me, though.  That would be too much pressure altogether.

It is 7:15 AM here in middle Tennessee, and I have been up for 2 hours.  I think I am going to go to the grocery store because the girls inform me we are dangerously close to starving to death from lack of options.  I think they are just being dramatic but their point is well taken.  I was sort of hoping to take J with us on the first trip, but she had a busy evening last night, going to the local production of The Music Man with P&E.  She also walked around the neighborhood.  On her first morning here, she looked out the kitchen window and said it looked like Märchen, which means "fairy tale."  That was very sweet and quite a compliment!  I should tell the yard guy.  But I probably won't.   I have to work a bit today or I will regret it tomorrow and I believe laundry is woefully behind.  Little Charlie is here with me in the studio at the moment, just dozing away on one of the throws.  She likes it in here.  I have finally taken to leaving the door open so she can wander around, and she does, but this is apparently her home base because it's where I find her when she is done exploring and wants to take a little kitten break.  She is still SO TINY.  I need to take photos of her because I know it won't last long.  She seems to be starting to get along with Sam and Leo, although I don't think she is at all interested in making friends with Nugget.  Nugget probably feels pretty much the same way.  She talks a lot and purrs a lot and definitely, definitely plays a lot.  But she also sleeps a lot, so it all balances out. 

I guess I'm off before the sloth kicks in and I find myself spending the day, just spending the day.  I have things to do, man!

My camera is outta juice

and I can't remember where the charger is.  That's my excuse.  I have the cutest new photo subject, though.  Her name is Charlie.  I doubt she even weighs two pounds.  She discovered this morning that coffee is very hot and that she probably should be a  bit more cautious before sticking her nose into things.  Oops.   I think I have a photo from the adoption site but it's not a good one. She is much cuter than the photo. 

See, she looks kinda mad and bedraggled here, and normally she just looks maybe a little ruffled.  She is a little purr factory and she wants to be friends with everybody.  We adopted her from a local rescue agency on Saturday.  Even my MOM likes her, and my mom does not like cats.  She patted her and smiled at her, told her she was pretty and said "I like YOU."  That's a ringing endorsement, let me assure you.

I am off to the office this morning to help train the new lady.  We are now officially fully staffed, so that is the last training I will have to worry about for a while, yay!  I will be there today and tomorrow.  Not my favorite thing to do but it works out well because on Wednesday evening we are picking up our new family-member-for-a-year at the airport!  She seems to be very excited, and we are too.

I almost forgot to mention that I can't believe you guys noticed my typo from the last post.  I didn't even notice it.  Now I'm going to prove that I can ignore it, move on, and not fix it.  At least until next time I sign in to this thing....

Oh, it's clearly time to go.  Charlie is stalking my fingers as they fly over the keyboard.  I already have enough tiny little kitten scratches to last me a while!

I know what you're thinking...

....you're thinking, "She's off tooling around in her new little white car with the top down.  That's where she is."  Want to know how many days I have driven it since returning home Saturday night?  Exactly two, and one of those was a quick 10-mile trip back and forth to work.  The other was taking a child to cross-country practice.  That's the extent of it.  And for my friend DANI, did ya know you can ride around with the top down at night, too?  SILLY.  Also, I found a sunblock that actually works.  Well, one of the children found it.  I think it is SPF 70 (SEVENTY?).  I have a huge can of it in one of the little storage bays in the car.  Between that and the SPF 30 that is part of my makeup routine (I think it's actually IN my makeup), I am an SPF 100 kinda girl.  Is that even how that SPF stuff works, can you layer it?  I have no idea.  I also have a can of it in the house.  But really, I have been in the thing a total of maybe 30 minutes since we came home.  It's sad.  I'm sad.  But that's pretty much the way it is around here.  I don't get out much.  I guess it will keep the miles low in case we need to part with it down the road, though. OH and for Tish, to whom I owe an email, yes we still have the green convertible.  I am not that wild about it.  It's just not my cup of tea, I suppose.  I liked it for the first month, though, and it was my husband's dream car apparently.  Hope the same won't happen for this new (to us) vehicle.  If so, I will never admit it.  NEVAH.

I am getting ready to work all day, and then I have to work in the office tomorrow and Friday to cover for my boss.  After that, things should be fairly well back to normal, for the most part.  I always say that and then something else happens.  The new system seems to be working out well so far, with a few glitches here and there.  I like almost everything about it, and the one or two things I am not crazy about, I can live with.  It's nice that we got new computers with it, too.  Much faster.  Zooommmm.

So, we saw a lot of things on our trip last weekend.  I would have liked to have stayed around NYC a little longer, but we spent most of our time there in traffic, so everyone was anxious to get the heck out.  I liked all the different people in the Bronx, and the small view of the little neighborhood we drove through was pretty neat.  It's interesting to see different ways people live.  There was also a gorgeous parkway (on which we were stuck for 45 minutes, creeping along) with pretty boats anchored in the river beside the road.  Very cool   Very northeast coast.  The girls also saw the Manhattan skyline in the daylight and at night.  I saw it in the daylight but at night I was too busy trying not to die a fiery death by collision so I missed it.  Lots of bridges.  Lots of tolls.  Lots of humanity. 

We stayed overnight in a hotel in Pennsylvania.  Did I mention that Pennsylvania, and Allentown specifically, has CASINOS now?  That was a shocker.  I might have mentioned that but I was so amazed, it's worth mentioning again.  We drove through about half or three quarters of length of Pennsylvania, exiting somewhere west of Carlisle and Harrisburg.  That's not far from my birthplace near Penn State.  I would have liked to have checked it out but it was WAY out of the way so we skipped it.  I haven't been up there since 1987, I don't think.  I had forgotten, or maybe never knew, that when you travel along I-81, which we did for a mind-numbing FIVE HUNDRED PLUS miles, you go from PA to MD to WV to VA in the space of maybe an hour.  That's pretty cool.  You are in Maryland literally 10 minutes and then it turns to West Virginia.  One of the children entertained us with  her odd falsetto "sing your sentences" trick. It did draw a few stares in the convenience stares, but that probably would have happened anyway.  We aren't from around there, you know.  Not anymore for me and for the rest of them, pretty much not ever.  I had been off the evil Diet Coke for more than a month until the trip but I have to say I had some again.  Now I'm back off it.  I don't really like it that much anymore.  This is a positive development. 

We have much to do this week in preparation for our new child-for-a-year.  Most of it does not involve me, my favorite kind of much-to-do. It's mostly a bedroom shuffle and cleaning up of her new room/cleaning out clothes and dressers and the closet. I think my involvement will be limited to stocking a few things to make her feel comfortable, although mostly we have everything we need for that, I think.  I should probably make sure we have enough clean towels, that sounds like it should be my job.  And New Child is a vegetarian so I need to probably put some thought into that whole concept. I think I have decided I could be a chickentarian.  Probably not a complete vegetarian and definitely not a vegan, but I could probably be a happy chickentarian or even a mostly vegetarian with a couple chicken sacrifices thrown in there once in a while.  New Child is actually a fishanddairytarian, so I am not that worried.   Plus, I had another New Child, and while she was a great great non-picky eater, it seems to me she lived on bananas, orange juice, cosmic brownies and the occasional Pop Tart until we bought so many we broke her of them. And there is always spaghetti from a jar, right?  And grilled cheese.  And cheese quesadillas.  Not that I've ever made those. 

I owe emails to a bunch of people.  I'm working on it!  Well, I could have been working on it just now but instead, out came this.  Hmm.  Off to work and awakening children.  Not in that order.

Had a couple days off, so

....we went to New York. We were back almost 48 hours after leaving.  We drove.  All of us went.  We left in one car and came back in two:

So, that was fun.  My favorite parts, besides actually getting a "new" car, were the scary Russian with the missing thumb and having Chinese food at some random restaurant in The Bronx.   I even liked the NYC traffic, although I liked it more in the above car than in the one we arrived in. 

That's what we have been up to this week.  It was fun but I'm glad it's done and we are back home.   Driving 1700+ miles round trip in 48 hours is kinda tough.  Now I have to work 12 hours today to make up for it.  Not recommended but hopefully worth it.  And thus ends our new-to-us car acquisition odyssey for this round.

I slept in until 4:30 this morning

Because I fell asleep at about 7:00 last night!!  Who does that?? (I can just see the comments I'm going to get from certain children of mine now.) Now it's 6:45 and I've been awake for hours.  HA!  Tonight should be fun.  I worked at the office all day yesterday and I guess I was just worn out.  Not that I worked hard, mind you.  It was actually a little on the dreadfully dull side.  A conference call, shuffling from computer to computer testing them out for the training session we are having next week, and collating instruction manuals.  Sounds taxing, I know.

So thanks for all of your kind sweet comments about Baby and other things as well.  All bloggers love comments, I think.  I don't say thanks often enough but I love comments!  Thank you!  And a special hello to my friends from New Jersey, Liz and Ken.  Been thinking about you guys.  Hope all is well with you and your family. I miss you guys.  There's also a certain someone from Minnesota I've been thinking about lately. 

I am so turned around.  It feels like Saturday but I think it's only Friday.  This lovely holiday weekend has been set in stone for months as a major overtime weekend for the people in my department.  Bleh. I guess I will get an early start on it.  Usually Friday is one of my days off, but since I'm up so early I suppose I can knock some work out and be ahead of things.  I will be on site most of the week next week.  I've actually been on site kind of a lot lately, mostly going to meetings to get ready to implement this new system we are finally getting next week.  I predict drama and limited chaos, but since I'm not in charge of things, this is not a source of stress but rather fascination for me.  I find my not-Southern ways sometimes cause me to cock my head in confusion when dealing with these sorts of things, and even as recently as yesterday I actually said out loud, "you know, I'm not from around here..."  I think it was because I misunderstood a word someone said and loudly mused that they were clearly  not right in the head.  Not speaking Middle Tennessee is sometimes a bit of a handicap.  But I do have to say that the people around here are generally much nicer than pretty much anywhere else I've ever spent time.  And they are genuinely nice.  It's like it's contagious.  Uh oh. We can't be having that...I'm not from around here, you know.