Our baby is getting his first teeth!

His two bottom front teeth broke through in the past week. We have had several extra-fussy days and he has been waking up a lot in the night, all of which is fairly normal for him, but right now it’s surely related to teething. Their sudden appearance kind of took us by surprise, to be honest.

The first tooth came in last Thursday morning. Doc and I were discussing Jamie’s recent crabby behavior, and he said, “I suppose it could be that he’s got teeth coming in now.” I reached a finger into Jamie’s mouth to feel along his gums, as I often do, and lo and behold! A tooth had barely broken the surface! The second one came in on Monday morning. I discovered it as Jamie and I were taking our customary morning walk.

He’s had a rash on his cheeks and a bit of diarrhea, which I suspect are also related.

I would post a picture but I doubt I could actually get one. Every time I try to open his mouth he sticks his tongue out!

He is also eating vegetables now! We have had him on Happy Times organic brown rice cereal (soy-free) for several weeks, which he tolerated well, and about two weeks ago we began giving him avocado. Avocado is so easy — you just get a nice soft ripe one, cut it in half, remove the pit, and feed the baby directly from the avocado! Just scoop out the flesh with a rubber-coated baby spoon. He has also had sweet potat0, yellow squash, and, just today, carrots. I’m not sure he was crazy about the sweet potato, but he seemed to love the yellow squash. We mixed that with a bit of rice cereal to thicken it, since it gets kind of watery when pureed.

The jury is still out on carrots. He threw up his first try all over me this morning — I am talking from neck to toes here. Carrots mixed with Nutramigen AA formula, cooked for a while inside in a baby’s stomach — you can just imagine how that smelled. I had to take another shower, rinse out the inside of my leather shoe, and completely change my outfit before heading to work. And I just now realized that I forgot to use the scrub brush and carpet cleaner on the rug in his room. Hopefully it won’t stain too badly.

On Sunday he’ll get to try his first green veggie, probably green beans or peas. I considered broccoli, but I’m not sure you’re supposed to give broccoli to a baby. It can be tough on adults’ digestion, so I imagine it might not be the best thing for Jamie at this point either.

The crawling is also progressing slowly but surely. He has gone from rocking back and forth in place to reaching his arms out and lurching himself forward, scrabbling his knees a little, lurching again, and eventually getting where he wants to go. It’s not so much crawling as it is a full-body dry heave (sweet fancy Moses!). But he’ll get there. And as such, we are beginning to babyproof the house in earnest. We have plug covers, power strip covers, furniture wall straps, and storage boxes for our tiny display items (if it fits through a toilet paper tube, it gets put into storage). Next will come cabinet locks.

My dad is in town for a few days, stopping over on his way back from Ireland. (Nice, right?) I don’t think my mom is coming down for a while, but we are making plans to go visit them this fall. We will also visit Doc’s mom and the rest of the Kansas family next month.

We had dinner with Debbie and her boyfriend, Sandra and her family, and Kathryn and Rachel a couple of weeks ago. It was really great to see everyone again! I miss living close to all the girls and getting together all the time.

Lake Highlands North sprayground

Last weekend we visited the Lake Highlands North sprayground. If you are unfamiliar with a “sprayground,” as I was, it is a really genius invention — a playground of fountains for kids. It’s a large squishy surface with all kinds of water jets and fountains and things for kids to climb on, swing on, and run through. They get thoroughly soaked and thoroughly tired out. The parents can stay dry on benches around the sprayground. There’s very little danger involved; drowning is a fairly remote possibility, and the surface isn’t slippery. It was packed with little kids on Sunday afternoon. I became the best friend of a 4-year-old named Lilian, who latched on to me and told me her life story (in the way that only 4 year olds can). Her dad was sitting on a bench, facing away from her, with his iPod earbuds in, totally ignoring her. I felt kind of bad for her so I listened to her babble at me for a good 10 minutes before I left and took Jamie back to our blanket spread under a tree. I think Lilian’s just a talker. I guess the dad figured he could get some peace and quiet for a while and let her talk to someone else for a change.

Jamie is really still too little to fully enjoy the sprayground, but he did like sitting on the ground in front of a water jet and playing with it. I think as he gets older it will be some place we really enjoy going as a family.

Kathryn sings it!

Kathryn recently joined a band called The Vintage Vibes, a 40s/50s rock/swing band. She’s amazing! You can listen to a few of her songs on the band’s MySpace page.

Tuesday night we watched her perform at a blues bar in Arlington (that’s a nice loooong drive). It was really more of a rehearsal than a bona fide performance, but we really wanted to see her nonetheless. We brought Jamie, since we’re really not at a point where we are prepared to leave him with a babysitter for more than an hour or two (and besides Grandma and Auntie Rachel, we don’t really have anyone to sit for him yet anyway). It was too loud and smoky to take him inside, so we switched off staying in the car with him. I’m still counting it as his first trip to a bar, though. :)

Kathryn was absolutely fantastic! She looked gorgeous in that blue dress and man oh man, can she ever sing. I really think that this style of music suits her voice better than anything I’ve ever heard her sing before. She sings it like she means it! 

Definitely go to see her if you get a chance — I imagine there might even be dancing! When she has a schedule of shows available, I’ll post it here.

In case you hadn’t heard, this week is Leslie Lee Appreciation Week 2008!

Friends, 

It has finally come again, the time each 486 years that we take one week to fully honor Leslie for no reason other than that she is awesome.

The aztec had a name for Leslie, it was Quaxiquatiataltaxabelgle. Unfortunately the modern attempts at translation have only come up with something close to “Have you seen my red feathers? I need them for my ass fan.” But I am sure it has lost something over the millennia and once meant something far more grand… I mean they had a friggin NAME for her! They just don’t do that for anyone… do they?

So come join in the supergoodness! Check out the photos, leave some comments for Leslie, and post some photos of your own! Come on, she’s so photogenic, you KNOW you have some pictures lying around somewhere you want to contribute! (To post your own, you gotta make a Flickr account if you don’t already have one…but it’s EASY and FREE!! Or, if you are resistant to moving into the 21st century, send your photos to me and I will post them for you.)

Show Leslie some love!!!

I have been on VACATION!

Yay, vacation!!

Doc and I flew to San Jose, where we stayed with Arushi and Shyamal for a few days at their place in Mountain View. The fires in Big Sur were still burning and there was a lot of smoke in the air. It hung like a pink-brown cloud over everything, and made our eyes sting. We visited the redwood forest in Big Basin State Park in the Santa Cruz Mountains, went into San Francisco one afternoon, swam in her pool, did a little shopping, and went out to Napa County and ate at a fantastic place called Greystone Restaurant, run by the Culinary Institute of America, where i had the best piece of fish I have ever eaten in my entire life. It was halibut, pan-fried in olive oil with just a bit of salt and pepper, and probably caught mere hours prior. It was the most amazingly perfect texture all the way through, and served on a bed of morel mushrooms and tiny baby squash, sauteed in butter.

The weather in northern California is fantastic in the summer. I’m afraid that I underpacked for this trip, bringing along mostly tank tops and capri pants, when what I apparently really needed was long pants and sweatshirts!

We hopped aboard an Amtrak train, the “Coast Starlight,” to head up north to Seattle. Train travel is quite enjoyable. It takes longer to get to your destination, but is cheaper and much more scenic, relaxed, roomy, and social than flying. Doc and I rented a small sleeper cabin instead of coach seats, and it was a huge improvement over our last train trip ten years ago, when Doc had a severe case of the flu in coach. The room was tiny, barely wider than the width of a seat, but we could shut the doors and fold down two beds and the privacy was worth every penny. Plus, all meals are included in the price of the room, and although the food was not awful (certainly better than you might expect on a train), the a la carte meal prices were quite inflated. We would have easily spent more than the cost of the room upgrade on meals alone, had we traveled in coach!

The route along the coast is very scenic and beautiful, especially through Oregon. The train huffs and puffs its way along the side of mountains through all this gorgeous countryside. You really can’t beat morning sunlight sparkling down on a glittering mountain stream hundreds of yards below, and rocky rapids surrounded by tall fir trees.

The train was three hours late getting into the station in Seattle (11:30 at night!) because, sadly, someone had a heart attack on board the night before and the train had to stop in the middle of nowhere in California to wait for the Careflight helicopters to arrive. We also had numerous electrical problems onboard that resulted in the lights going out every now and again — this is especially inconvenient when you are using the tiny airplane-style bathroom, which has no windows.

A late train wouldn’t normally be that big of a problem, except that my mom and dad had arranged to pick us up at the station and drive us back to their house… two and a half hours away. By the time we got to their place it was nearly 2 a.m. I was so tired from having barely slept on the train the night before, I just fell right into bed and don’t even remember my head hitting the pillow.

I’m really tired now, in fact… I’m going to post some photos and then write more about the vacation later!

Kathryn and I graduated college in 1994. I found a “remember when” list online for the Class of ‘97 Reunion last year, and while they don’t ALL apply to me and Kat, most of them are close enough. It was interesting spending four of the most important years of our lives in a tiny town. Sherman has grown exponentially since we left.

YOU KNOW YOU GRADUATED FROM AUSTIN COLLEGE IN 1997 IF:

• You lived in Caruth and couldn’t move your furniture (Nope, we lived in Clyce and could rearrange at will)

 

• You vividly remember the damp and dingy smell in Luckett Hall because there was a Luckett Hall (Oh god yes! Coincidentally, I walked into the bathroom at work one day early this week and immediately thought, “Jesus, it smells like the basement of Luckett in here!” That damp moldy smell is permanently burned into my brain and nose.)

 

• You knew the real SUB and PUB (Sadly, they are only a memory now. Their unique character has been replaced by a big bright shiny new building. I guess it had to happen some day.)

 

• You attended at least one party at Old Settler’s (I’m sure I did!)

 

• You remember getting drunk on $0.37 at Calhoun’s on “Coin Night” (I am proud to say I never once set foot inside Calhoun’s during my entire four-year college career.)

 

• You typed your papers on a Word Processor (sure did! I got one for high school graduation. It was a typewriter with a tiny little readout screen. Practically useless, unfortunately. I typed most of my papers on my friend Peter’s Mac Classic or the Mac Lab in the basement of the science building.)

 

• You know where the Loggia was and snuck food out of the cafeteria and ate it there at least once (Many, times, actually. Apparently the cool kids hung out in the Loggia, a little glass-walled hallway between the PUB and Slater’s.)

 

• You remember the only places to eat in Sherman were City Limits, MGs, Vittina’s, Garcia’s, La Mesa, South Austin Grill and Slater’(What’s MG’s and Vittina’s? La Mesa? Besides a handful of fast food places, we only had City Limits, Denny’s, Garcia’s, Slater’s, the PUB, CiCi’s pizza, which we were THRILLED to get our junior year, and Tracks, that tiny little cheap hamburger place on the other side of 75, across from Dude’s Music and Pawn. We were poor, so South Austin Grill was only for very fancy occasions; see photo and caption below.)

 

• You had to drive past the cemetery to get alcohol in Denison (or Denison was just a liquor store) (Yep. If you were going to “the store,” that meant Kroger. If you were going to “the STO!” that meant the liquor store on the edge of town.)

 

• You were excited when Super K-Mart, Chili’s and El Chico came to town (All these came to town after we’d left)

 

• You saw the Steak Country Cow in at least one parade and remember all the stories associated with it (Oh yes! Loved that cow. Rumor had it that once, many years ago, it somehow ended up on the roof of Abell Library!)

 

• Hickory, Crockett, Purgatory, Luckett, Coffin and Old Settler’s were still standing (Yes to all.)

 

• You had at least one class with either Hugh Garnett, Ken Street, Jane Ellington, Roy Melugin, Jim Ware or Shelley Williams (Jane was one of my favorite professors. So were Peter Lucchesi and Mark Monroe. I think Mark’s still there but Peter retired years ago.)

 

• You remember Harry Smith as President and David Jordan as Dean (Yes and yes. And Tim Millerick was Dean of Student Life. Super cool guy.)

 

• You had to go off campus to Nautilus to go to a decent gym (We weren’t really into working out the way kids are today. That was for athletes. We’d walk the track sometimes or play tennis or racquetball, but we never really missed not having a “decent gym.”)

 

• You remember the 1st season of The Real World (No, I do not. We did not have a TV until our senior year when we moved into an apartment, anyway, and we didn’t really miss not having one.)

 

• You risked your life living in a campus-owned house (Three years in the dorm, and one year in a campus apartment)

 

• You thought Ice Milk was a real treat when they added it to Slater’s (Slater’s got ice milk?! Damn.)

 

• You remember a fraternity named Rho Lambda Theta(Sure do.)

 

• You watched at least one demonstration in the SUB by John White, the pool shark (Hahaha. As VP of the Campus Activities Board, I probably booked the guy at least once.)

 

• You remember the Trust Games at the Lake Campus (We didn’t do trust games as freshman, but Kat and I and our boyfriends and other friends camped at the lake a few times. The cafeteria would prepare a meal for you to grill over your campfire if you told them in advance you were going camping at Texoma… really nice food too, better than you’d get in the cafeteria. Once it was potatoes to bury in the sand and bake, and steak and veggie shish-ka-bobs. And it was part of our meal plan! No extra cost!)

 

• You got injured at some point sliding down the levee (What levee? At the Red River Dam?)

 

• You went to a party at The Hill or Pumpjack (Yes, and yes! Fallout and Tequilafest were other parties I always enjoyed going to. I think the Phi Betas and/or Tri Gams hosted Fallout in the old VA building, complete with cargo nets and nuclear radiation signage everywhere. I don’t think fraternities at AC were like fraternities at many other colleges. They were mostly all nice, sweet guys. No Animal House antics.)

 

• You were allowed to smoke in the PUB (True enough, although I didn’t smoke. I tried to go at times when there weren’t a lot of people there, to avoid it.)

After Kat and I graduated, our families took us and our friends to the South Austin Grill, which was pretty much the only “fancy” restaurant in town at that time. Sadly, this is the only decent photograph I have of that.

Here’s what Kat and I did in the classes we had together! Really, we were both very good students, but sometimes the lectures bored us out of our minds.

When I bought my first computer, in 1996, I believe, I was pretty sure I was going to get a Mac since I’d typed all my papers on Mac Classics in college and been able to use a Color LCII in my office on campus for doing flyers and other layouts for publicity-related items for the Campus Activities Board, of which I was a vice president. Actually, learning Pagemaker on that computer was what got me my foot in the door at my current job! Anyway, I asked my new boyfriend Doc to help me do a comparison of a few Mac models that I thought I could afford. I bought the Performa 6205CD and an extra 8MB of RAM, and I think that I paid a total of something like $2700 for the whole shebang. Check out those sexy specs!

Shortly after college graduation, I went to the Stonewall 25 Anniversary celebration in New York, marching in support of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender rights. It’s a very long and complicated story, but I mostly had a fantastic time. I saw Laura Branigan in a street concert, visited the Statue of Liberty, participated in a parade, visited Fallingwater and the Hershey’s Chocolate Factory, and saw more of the Midwest and East Cost than I had ever seen before or since.

I visited Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Finland, and a few other Eastern European countries as part of a month-abroad course I was lucky enough to be able to take in 1993. On paper, we were supposed to be studying these countries’ new economies after the fall of the Soviet Union, but in reality it was just a fun cultural experience (I’ll post my journal here later, I think). We had to turn in a ten page paper at the end of the class, which wasn’t a whole lot of work for one month. A few nights ago I found a small stack of currency from some of these countries. Being a poor college student, I think if it had been worth more than about $10 I would have exchanged it on my way back into the States, but I decided to keep it as a souvenir. So when I found it the other night, I wondered how much it was worth these days. A quick calculation on exchange-rate sites told me that my 11,650 Polish zlotys were worth more than $5,000.00 US. WHAT?!! That can’t be right. Can it?? Has the value really gone absolutely nuts like that in the past 15 years??! Maybe it has!! Where can I take this money to be exchanged?! Is this too good to be true? It has to be too good to be true. Right? Hmm, maybe I should do a little more digging… and… DAMN. Turns out in 1995 Poland revaluated their currency, to where 10,000 old zlotys were worth one new one. And one new zloty is worth… drum roll please…. 44 cents US. Oh well. I guess I’ll keep the bills. They are really beautiful, although I think that’s Copernicus on the 1,000 bill, and did he get hit with the ugly stick, or what? Talk about your baaaaaaaaad haircuts.

Trivia at the Trinity again last night. Doc and Brittney and Chris and I had our own team. We didn’t do too badly, all told… 52 out of 73 points. Rich’s team ended with 59, and I was imagining they’d sweep the floor with us.

I didn’t realize that there were modest cash prizes for first through fourth places! I’m hoping that my brother Bob, when he’s in town over Thanksgiving, will join us. He can be our secret weapon. They even asked a math question last night! (None of us got it… something about reflex angles. I’m pretty sure I’ve never even heard of that.)

Here’s something that will show you just how completely late to the party I am (and always have been): I was being hit on, fairly aggressively, by a drunk loud co-worker of Rich’s, and I was completely oblivious to it. I’m sure that everyone else at the table was watching this train wreck happening and wondering why I didn’t shut this guy down. Doc, especially, was mighty uncomfortable, but I honestly had no idea that he was focusing on me. I thought he was just being kind of a loud jerk in general, and trying to include me in the general conversation (which included the line that I’ve heard a million times before, and that always pisses me off… “Why aren’t you talking? You should talk more! You’re too quiet!” or, conversely, the sarcastically delivered “Katy, shut up! Quit hogging the conversation!” Kiss. My. Ass.)

And for my part, I was making a conscious attempt to NOT stay in my shell around people I don’t know, like I usually do, and was trying to make friendly conversation with everyone, including Mr. Hit Man. I guess Mr. Hit Man saw this as an open invitation to increase the level of obnoxiousness/hitting-on-ness. It didn’t occur to me that he wouldn’t realize that Doc and I were together. Eventually it dawned on me what was going on, and I informed him that I was happily married for eight years, thank you very much, and Doc finally was able to elbow his way past this dickhole, put his arm around me, and said “SHE’S MARRIED TO ME.”

So, I’m a total idiot. I felt really embarrassed. But then again, I’ve never EVER clued in as to when people were interested in me. I wish I’d been a little quicker on the uptake and had time to figure out a great way to verbally crush this jerk like he deserved.

My friend Stacey lives in Minneapolis and luckily was not on the bridge over the river at the time of its collapse.

Which reminded me of the footage I’ve seen of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge (also known, ominously, considering its fate, as “Galloping Gertie”) tearing itself to pieces in a high wind in 1940.

I just wanted to take a minute to thank all of our wonderful friends — especially Kathryn, Arushi, Britt, Bob, Joel, everyone who has left comments here, listened to us bitch, let me cry on the phone, drove me places. Knowing you care is a huge comfort.

I don’t take y’all for granted, even if I’m not always that good at expressing myself.

I love you guys.

Yvonne didn’t come to work this morning because she is IN LABOR! Way to go, Yvonne!! We’ll be thinking about you today!

(Also, we are eating iced sugar cookies this afternoon as a pre-baby celebration :)

Tres Smith, a photographer that sometimes worked freelance for my office, died on April 19 after a years-long fight against cancer. He was 41. While I didn’t know him as well as some, he never failed to be friendly, sweet, kind, and generous to me whenever we met. He had a fantastic sense of humor and piercing blue eyes.

The last time I saw him he was taking pictures of me and Brittney eating chocolate cake at the Dairyette, laughing it up.

We will all miss you, Tres. Rest in peace.

Yes, I know, Thursday came and went without an update. I have an excuse though: I was too tired. Wednesday night Brittney came over and we went walking for an hour around the neighborhood (I missed my yoga class because I was in a job interview). I realized how much I miss walking with Britt. We have good conversations.

I did manage to pry myself out of bed at 5:15 a.m. on Thursday morning, and I met Yvonne at the Bath House at 5:45. Thinking I might need a little something in my stomach for energy, I made half a peanut butter sandwich and tried to eat it when I got to the park while waiting for Yvonne to arrive. I only managed two bites. My tummy doesn’t like to eat that early in the morning.

The mileage markers around the lake leave a lot to be desired, so we’re not sure how far we went, but we ran for 37 minutes total, so we think that was about 3.5 miles. It was just undarkening outside when we started to run, and still rather cool out — low 70s. We were both pretty out of it and I don’t remember too much of the specifics of our conversation, but thinking back later that afternoon, it seemed like it was so far away and like maybe it was this long strange dream that I had.

We saw downtown all lit up and reflecting off the lake in the gray-blue dawn light. The sun came up and I have to begrudgingly say that it was very pretty, which is a tough thing for me to admit — I’ll tell the story of why below. I was home by 7, which gave me ample time to shower and wash my hair and dress and I even had time to stop for breakfast before work. Most weekdays I’m not even out of bed until 7:30.

I am not necessarily opposed to doing an early morning run again. Not every day and maybe not every week even, but it wasn’t as godawful as I was imagining it might be. I was pretty tired all day and took a nap when I got home, but it was really nice to get the run out of the way early in the day.

I may have mentioned this before, but I’ve always hated seeing the sun rise. I’m definitely a night person by nature, and seeing the sun come up somehow breaks whatever magic the night holds, cheesy as that may sound. Like, “it’s over, the day’s started, time to do normal everyday things now along with the rest of the world.”

I remember very clearly when this thought first crystallized and clarified in my head — January 21, 1990. I was at a party at Bonnie’s house and we had stayed up all night. She and Ginger and Ian and I were laying on her front lawn in a square, each of our heads on someone else’s stomach, and we’d been laying there for hours in the cold talking and laughing and singing and saying crazy things because we were 17 year olds flying high on sugar and caffeine and we were all so in love with ourselves and each other. It was probably one of the highlights of my life up to that point, largely because super-hot, massively charming (but invariably fickle) red-haired Ian was lying on top of me. And then the sky started to lighten, and everything changed. It was like reality suddenly whacked us in the face with a cold wet dishtowel. The crazy intense lovefriendship we had going on (typical teens!) changed. It was time to get up, go home, and face whatever normal mundane things the next day would hold.

Maybe now it’s more that sunrise equates to only a little bit of time left to sleep; soon it will be time to peel myself out of bed and go to work or do chores or pay bills or whatever other soul-deadening adult tasks need to be done. I don’t want to see that from the back side.

Saturday I ran about 3 miles at the lake. I’m never quite sure how far I’m going because the mileage markers leave something to be desired. So I just run it by time, which isn’t of course as accurate. But then again, accuracy is not really my goal. It was very humid Saturday morning so I heated up really fast and had a tough time cooling down, and I had to walk some. Tonight I ran a very easy 3 miles (or so — we lost track and I think we probably went a few extra laps) at the gym. Man, I tell you, air conditioning makes all the difference.

Saturday night we went to Yvonne’s birthday party at her house. She and Nate cooked dinner (grilled stuff and salads — she makes a mean peanut noodle salad) and made the most massive vat of sangria I’ve ever seen in my life. Seriously, there was probably 10 gallons of the stuff in a huge octagonal glass jar that sat on ice in their sink. It was Yvonne’s Magical Mystery Sangria. It sneaks up on you! I even ate sangria-soaked watermelon. It wasn’t bad! Walker was freaked out at the sight of me again, but I bribed him with a milk-bone and then we were best friends. I think he must have had a bad experience with a tall or curly-haired woman in his former life as a street puppy.

Mom and Dad were in town Saturday night but left early Sunday morning, so we didn’t get to see much of them this time. We’re going to Lubbock in August to see Bob graduate and we might go to Houston for a couple of days afterwards just to spend some time with them. This is (knock on wood) their last summer in Houston.

I feel really bloated and piggy lately. My eating habits have gotten shitty again. Let me rephrase that to take proper personal responsibility: I’ve been shoving lots of bad-for-me food into my cakehole, and I need to do something about it. All this running isn’t going to do me a bit of good if I don’t trim down so I’m not lugging around 30 extra pounds on the marathon.

Yesterday I went through my desks and threw away a bunch of stuff that I didn’t need anymore. I’m trying to change my packrat tendencies (“but I might need that some day!”) and I tossed out/recycled stuff that I hadn’t used in a few years. I am having severe minimalistic urges lately that directly conflict with my need to save stuff. I’m not sure where this is going to take me.

Last night was the season premiere of the Venture Brothers (season two). I was dreading that it wouldn’t hold up to the quality of the first season, but it’s looking good so far. Holy shit, it’s Dean Fucking Venture!