About Me:

1. I have relatively fair skin
2. My hair is just above shoulder length, and dark brown.
3. Eyes dark brown. I wear glasses.
4. “Nearly-B”-cup breasts.
5. Size 10-12 jeans/skirts.
6. Size 10-12 dresses, depends on the cut.
7. Thunder thighs.
8. Tummy pudge from two babies and too many Snickers bars.
9. Tan easily, but fair skin mostly. White white legs.
10. Five feet, four inches.

The Options:

My husband is joining me this year, too!  In other news, we are incredibly dorky. Also, this year I got a sponsorship from Headway Themes – more about that later – another post!

I’m driving to NYC with DaddyGeek and Bibliosaurus, who, BTW, is getting a super awesome fucking web design featuring DINOSAURS before the conference. YAY.

Both of them are rooming with me, plus Ewokmama, ALSO YAY, because DUH. She has “EWOK” in her name, which basically makes her automatically accepted into any and all geek/dork clubs. These things are very elite.

I am probably going to pee myself a little when I meet everyone again.  Jumping up and down after a long car ride has a tendency do to that to a girl who has had two kids and hasn’t done enough kegels. Please to be ignoring the piss stains on my pants.

I have new business cards. See?

If you need business cards, I can do that shit. Like, quick if you really need it. There’s still time!

I’m not a party girl. I’m RSVPd for a lot of parties, and there is NO WAY that I am going to miss the Mouthy Housewives party and the BlogHer Gala – other than that though I’m flexible.

We’ll be arriving on Wednesday, leaving early Sunday.

I am excited. Are you going? Pls comment and tell me. Pls? I want to meet you. Like, for realz.

I should post a vlog. I will try to do that next.

Yesterday was a lazy day filled with rain and thunderstorms, tv and lazing about. Today we made some memories. I took a lot of pictures, we splashed in the water, we made a great sand castle with a moat.

Sure, we were an hour behind schedule getting there. We dawdled a little in Target. We all have sand in unmentionable places, and we didn’t manage to take naps. That stuff doesn’t matter; it’s not what we’ll remember. We’ll remember laughing. We’ll remember playing on the playground. We’ll remember trying to make a moat around our sand castle. We’ll remember the sprinkler. We’ll remember swimming with Daddy and splashing with Mommy.

Good times.

This is choppy. It’s apt; my memories seem choppy.  Certain things stand out – feelings, smells, sights, sounds – not always a whole memory, just a flash, just a part of the big picture. I have to think hard about the date, the year, the season.

My memories are like wisps of mist trailing away as a fog clears. They’re what gets left behind when the sun is shining brightly and it’s hard to imagine anything other than this moment, right now.

Strong Opinions

• If you are living and working in the USA, you need to learn to speak English. I am not going to learn to speak your native language unless I visit your native land.  The fact that our citizenship test (!!!), driver license tests (!!!), signs and even automated phone systems are available in Spanish makes me want to kick someone in the teeth. English is our national language. Fucking learn it. This should would NOT be acceptable in Germany or France, people. I love that we are a country of immigrants, melting pot the whole shebang – it makes the world interesting – but it would be nice if I didn’t have to press 1 on a phone system just to listen to it in English.
• Justin Bieber sucks, and it looks like he sticks his face into a vacuum every morning to do his hair.
• Glee is probably going to make waves across music departments next school year. There are over 90 songs by Glee Cast online; seriously, go take a listen. If you’re a choir teacher and you aren’t capitalizing on that, you’re probably an idiot, or boring. No, their timeline to come up with those numbers isn’t realistic, but the point is that choir can be a lot more than just standing in a white shirt and black pants and singing Handel’s Messiah. Get on the boat; music is cool.

Whining and Complaining: Short Story

• I am busy and my brain is going to explode.
• It’s very hot and humid out and my brain is going to explode.
• If my brain explodes you know that no one else is going to clean it up, which means I will have to clean it, and that just sucks.

Whining and Complaining: Longer Story

• I love the whole Rent a Geek Mom gig, but I am not doing a good job at managing the number of clients I have at one time. It’s all fine and good, then a few projects take longer than anticipated for any number of reasons and WHAMMO I have 18 clients and my brain is going to explode. Anyone out there good with the Headway Theme want to help a sista out?
• It is over 90 degrees here today and the humidity is not quite at oppressive yet, but will be by the afternoon. The kids are at my mom’s house, which doesn’t have AC, and even putting in a window unit is iffy – regularly will blow a fuse if someone also plugs in a hair dryer or something – though she has partitioned off part of the house & is risking it in order to keep the kids cool today, which I really appreciate.

Family News (a.k.a. the “mommy” part of this “Mommy Geekology” thing)

• Geeklet is a year and a half, and is saying maybe 20 words? She talks a lot. Most of it we cannot understand, and Cupcake tell us that she is speaking Martian, but that she can understand it. Then she narrates. It’s fucking adorable. Sometimes she narrates in falsetto, which is even more hilarious.  She dances whenever she hears Jump! by the Glee Cast and she loves to collect rocks. She has a new fascination with her sister’s princess Polly Pockets and if you don’t watch her carefully, she will climb up and lay down on the kitchen table to play with her cars. She makes vroom vroom noises and she gets down on all fours and barks like a dog sometimes, just for fun.
• Cupcake is 4 years old. She is sweet and beautiful and smart and loving and compassionate and gorgeous, so gorgeous. She is still using binkies at night, but we’re slowly, very slowly, working on getting her off. (She uses binkies as a lovie- there isn’t anything else she’s really truly bonded with, so it’s tricky). She’s drinking milk in a big girl cup at night and she’s going potty 60% of the time. She’s talking and making up pretend friends, she sings along to all the songs on her kid shows and she plays SuperWhy! games on Daddy’s iTouch. She doesn’t love spraying water but she loves to swim in a pool/lake/pond. Her favorite snacks are cheese and crackers, or Cheez Doodles, or anything with cheese on it. She’s growing a garden with her Nana and we have a tomato that’s ready to be eaten! She’s an amazing big sister, truly a big helper around the house. She’s 4, and she’s trying our patience at every turn but I’m learning to find joy in it, at least some of the time, because it means she’s getting bigger, she’s learning, she’s strong and independent and opinionated.
• DaddyGeek has fallen off the “going to the gym boat” — and I never got on the boat in the first place. We need to start taking better care of ourselves and losing some weight; the additional bulk and unhealthy eating has started to have side effects for me, and has continued to have side effects for him. If you have diet/workout regime/healthy lifestyle suggestions, I want – need – to hear them.

Miscellaneous

• A while ago, we got a new living room set (Bob’s Discount Furniture FTW!) and our apartment is starting to finally feel like a home and not a mish-mash of college apartments and whatever was on sale at Target or IKEA.
• Our carpets desperately need to be cleaned but I keep forgetting to call Stanley Steamer. If I don’t do it soon, they will just be brown, and not cream, and why the HELL do apartment complexes put cream carpets in, ANYWAY!?
• Thank god for central air, and 24/7 maintenance when it freezes over or your dishwasher won’t work properly.
• Yesterday Amazon.com suggested that I purchase Monistat because I had been viewing a fan. I can only assume that Amazon thinks I was going to use a fan to cool the itching and burning sensation? Because I don’t know how else these are connected. Also, I don’t have any itching or burning, so perhaps Amazon.com is also psychic? Or is that a threat? I don’t know whether to be in awe or terrified.
• I got a new camera on Sunday, after a year of looking and comparing and reading and asking and trying to figure out what features I wanted, what featured I would actually use and what the features even were, and finally settled on a Canon PowerShot S90. It’s pretty fucking awesome, and I may try to find time to do a review of it sometime soon. The best way to describe it is like partway between a point & shoot and a DSLR; lots of control over manual features if/when I want them, only one lens, fits in my pocket, will even shoot RAW. Obviously I’ve only just started with it, but I read a bunch of tutorials and the user manual, so I think I’m on my way to half-way decent photos. At the very least, this time in the kids lives will be well documented.  Some images below – no post-production work on these.  You can see the rest in my Flickr feed.

Learning about image composition: angles make for interesting shots?

This didn't come out quite right, but I was playing around in full manual mode, setting apeture, focus, ISO, shutter speed - the whole shebang.

I figured out how to get the fuzzy background effect on small objects... it's harder with moving objects.

There's a cool color isolation option on this camera.

The background isn't as fuzzy as I was going for (OMG THE CLUTTER HALP ME HIDE IT) but I was getting there.

I am proud of myself.  I am proud of her.  I am proud of our family.  I think we’re doing OK.

But today I am feeling glum and dejected for no reason.  I am getting my period.  So I am reminding myself.  We are a pretty happy family.  We are a lucky family.  We love each other.  We are trying.

We are not perfect.

We don’t need to be.

We’re OK just as we are, and it doesn’t matter if others do not agree.  I am happy to listen to anyone’s criticism to see if there is a way that I may improve.  But that doesn’t mean I will change anything.

And that’s OK too.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember.

I think it’s pretty obvious that I’m a huge Geek.  And I think it’s been made clear a few times that I started designing websites, and I freaking love it. You know what I also love? The Headway Theme. Like, for realz. Super a lot. I cannot explain to you how much I love this goddamn theme!!

I’m a forum moderator for the official Headway forum, and I also design on  Headway almost exclusively at this point. I realized quickly that the ease with which you can create designs was attracting a lot of web design and WordPress newbies – and so we had a lot of questions at a very basic, general level.

I wanted a place for these users to go – a place where they could get the most basic questions answered without someone spouting off instructions that went right over their heads. So I started Headway Beginner.

I’ll be posting tutorials and such there. I may touch on basic WordPress functionality as well, since it seems a lot of Headway newbies are also WordPress newbies, too!

Anyway if you use the theme, or are thinking about it, check it out.

… The feeling of pure triumph when I solve a technical problem

… The serenity of my sleeping children.

… The helplessness I feel when confronted by someone else’s pain.

… The friendships I have made, and lost.

… Puppy love and how it felt to be a teenager.

I had a very painful experience with my mother this week. Years of anger and resentment, hurt over slights real or perceived, built up into one angry crescendo of ultimatums, screaming, lecturing, swearing, and threatening. I reached my breaking point. On Tuesday, my husband and I realized that we could never meet her demands. She was being unreasonable, she wanted explanations, apologies, begging – she wanted a lot of things we couldn’t give her. The details don’t matter much – the bottom line for all of this was communication. We didn’t communicate with her. She didn’t communicate with us. When we did “communicate” we just talked at each other, no one really heard anyone else. We had misunderstandings. My husband and I failed to fulfill part of our bargain and it doesn’t matter that she made it impossible – I mean, it does matter, that’s the why of our failure, but to her it doesn’t matter because she didn’t see herself as being impossible, and the bottom line was that we didn’t manage to keep up our end of the childcare deal.

It’s funny how our emotions can cloud our perceptions of ourselves.

On Tuesday my husband and I decided we needed to take the kids out of her care during the day. Cupcake was picking up on the tension, the anger, the resentment. When my mother and I fight in the morning, she acts up the rest of the day, in the evening when I bring her home. She hits and yells and won’t listen. She says “Grandma doesn’t love you” and “Grandma doesn’t want you” to me.

I can’t quite explain how that statement broke my heart. Not because of what she said – I already knew these things. I’ve known them for a long time. It broke my heart that she recognized it in the hateful words, the angry tone, the shouting. I don’t want her to know that a mother could feel that way about a child. I don’t want her to believe that is what a healthy mother-daughter relationship looks like.  The worst part is that I can see myself in her. Not as she is with my kids; it’s amazing how much patience she has with them. No, I see a reflection, however faint, of our current relationship in th way that I sometimes handle my children.  I sometimes yell when I should whisper. I let my irritation at the world spill through into my interactions with them. Yes, some of this is human. I think some of it is influenced by daily reinforcement, in my life, of my own unique and unhealthy, daughter/mother relationship.

When my mother confronted me at the end of the day on Tuesday, demanding and threatening, I tried to let it wash over me. I tried to forget the last 8 hours I’d spend agonizing over our decision, alternately crying at my desk at work and going to the bathroom to see if I could throw up. I summoned my nerve and said it: We’re putting the kids in daycare.

It’s funny how just a few words can change everything.

Her entire expression changed. She went from yelling You cunt! to a stunned, shocked, hurt expression. Panic crossed her face, then came back to stay as she realized I was serious, so serious. Suddenly, she became reasonable. Suddenly, she was apologizing. Suddenly, she admitted that she was being impossible on purpose – in everything – because she felt slighted, used, hurt, taken advantage of.

Suddenly, we were communicating, calmly, like adults. Expressing our frustrations and fears.

We spent another hour or so talking that evening, after I discussed the turn of events with DaddyGeek. We talked Pros and Cons, we made lists. We knew that if we could eliminate the stress of our own personal interactions with my mother, and keep them from affecting the kids when they did arise, that in my mother’s care was the best place for Cupcake and Geeklet until school. They are learning so much, She loves them so much. With them, she is patient and kind and understanding, she is creative and she teaches them. She puts a smile on her face for them.

I think it’s safe to say that I am quite often jealous of my children and the relationship that they have with my mother. It used to be that I wanted to have the bond with my own children that she seemed to have. She helped me realize what I was doing wrong – I fixed it, and I don’t feel that’s lacking anymore. No, now I am jealous of their relationship with her because I want to be in their shoes. I want her unconditional patience and love again.

We are trying again with a clean(er) slate (No one ever gets a really clean slate again, no matter what they say). We are setting some ground rules for communication, and I am cautiously optimistic that this will solve our biggest problems. I am cautiously optimistic that once we solve those problems, my mother and I will have a chance at a relationship again. I am cautiously optimistic that if she is willing to admit her own part in the destruction of our relationship, which up until the other day she vehemently refused to admit (and she hasn’t admitted much, but it’s a start) that we can repair, renew, rejuvenate.

OH HAI, that was depressing. GRATUITOUS BABY PICTURES!