Mosaic Life

Any day now

So last week my sister’s doctor told her that the twins are now developed enough to be born healthy. (Right now she is 34 weeks and 1 day along.) The doctor used the term “take-home babies” to describe their state. Which made me think of the drive-thru. Would you like a drink with your babies? Hot, fire, or mild sauce?

This is great news since she’s been having contractions for over a week. So any day now I could get the “it’s time” call. I’m just hoping it doesn’t happen Tuesday, the anniversary of my wreck. That wouldn’t be cool. Although I am excited about finally meeting Rylan and Dawson. Exciting stuff.

Southern Belle, Valley Girl

Most of my life, I’ve strived to keep my accent very neutral. However, I’ve realized that my accent changes with extreme moods.

When I’m upset or sad, I start sounding very southern. I noticed this last April when I had a car accident and had to talk to the police officer. Something about being very scared not only brought back my “yes sirs” but made me sound like a southern belle in distress. And even as I spoke I knew I was doing it, but I thought maybe it’s good to appear this way to earn the sympathy of this very southern policeman who wanted to give me a ticket for not keeping control of my car in heavy, heavy rain while tractor trailers raced by me in my tiny economy car. At any rate, he didn’t give me a ticket. So… That was good.

Two days ago I had just gotten out of my car at the supermarket and was talking on my cell phone to my friend Shanna when I heard someone honk twice at me. I turned around, and this guy pulled up and said “hey, I fix the dent on your car for $500.” Let me give a little backstory. That dent is a sore subject. Someone ran into our parked car at a very traumatic time in our life and didn’t leave a note. And for some strange reason, we have a ton of other things we’d rather do with $500 than fix that dent. Plus, we’d been approached multiple times by the same company (or scam artists, as I suspect) offering to fix the dent every time we went to that parking lot. And they’re persistent. One time they followed us, honking their horn and flashing their headlights. So when that guy approached me two days ago, I immediately switched to a Valley Girl accent. I don’t know why; it just happened. And what followed had my friend Shanna laughing for a good five minutes. “NO I’M NOT INTERESTED. I DON’T WANT TO FIX THAT DENT, YOU GUYS HAVE ASKED ME THAT A BILLION TIMES BEFORE, GO AWAY.” “Oh no, that wasn’t me, I haven’t asked you that before.” “GO AWAY. LEAVE ME ALONE, I’M SERIOUS, GO AWAY.” “I’m just trying to help–” “I SAID GO! GET AWAY FROM ME. GO! LEAVE.” This included emphatic gestures and my very serious angry face. I’m really not a confrontational person, but next time I may give him a dent to fix for $500. And report his license plate number.

So yeah. If I have a heavy accent either way, you can pretty much bet I’m having a bad day. Just thought I’d let you know.

I’ll sue to know you better

I signed up for summer classes last night. I’ll be taking Western Civilization I (I took Western Civ II back in 2003), Global Communications, Shakespeare, and Special Topics in Literature and Culture: Alfred Hitchcock. I think I’ll enjoy my classes, but I am taking a Saturday class. Which means I’ll be getting up before 8 a.m. on a weekend. Unholy, no? I’ll live. Guess I have to make sacrifices to achieve my goals, blah blah blah, lack of sleep.

I realized something after I’d submitted my class schedule. I don’t believe I like reading Shakespeare. I know, weird, right? Everyone loves Shakespeare. And if you don’t, you’re probably stupid or smart enough to be able to reject standard ideas of smart things and not get crap for it. I don’t think I’m really either of those, but here’s my beef with reading Shakespeare. People insist that it’s readable as it is. That it doesn’t need to be translated because it’s already in English, right? Let’s take a random chunk of dialogue out of Shakespeare’s King Lear and see if we can decipher its meaning.

Kent. I must love you, and sue to know you better.

Edm. Sir, I shall study deserving.

See? What the heck? Suing people and studying deserving. Doesn’t make any sense. But yeah, in this class I’ll go ahead and pretend to comprehend it because everyone else will. And they’ll be like, this is such classic work, such beautiful imagery. And sure, I’ll get the basic idea of what’s going on. But as for getting lost in the reading, probably not going to happen.

So yeah, it should be an interesting semester. It’s going to be crazy though, because my work gets insanely busy during the summer and it was hard enough to make it when I wasn’t doing school at the same time. Wish me luck.

The cutest nursery in the wide world

I visited my sister, her husband, and her belly over the weekend. She’s 33 weeks along, and the average for having twins is 35 weeks, so they could be here like any day now. So excited! Anyway, her nursery is ready now. Isn’t it awesome, with the polka dots and the green, blue, and pink? The twins’ closet is full of cute little boy and little girl clothes, there are a ton of diapers, and it’s crazy but it’s even making me think I might want babies in the next 5 years. Me, of all people, with my heart of stone and whatnot.

And now to tell you about my magnum opus that I alluded to in my last blog. Since January I have been putting together stories, pictures, and information for a family tree book to give to my sister. She’d been showing a lot of interest in our heritage, and I thought it’d be the perfect gift for her and the twins. I got a lot of my information from Ancestry.com, though I had a good amount of help from a few family members. We finished it this weekend, and I’m really happy with the product.

So what did I find out in my research? Well, we’re mostly Irish and English. We have two great grandfathers that fought in the Civil War, and one died at Gettysburg. Most of my male ancestors were farmers, and most of my female ancestors were widows. None were famous, but they were hardworking.

There are more colorful characters as well, which involved things like moonshine and shootouts with the police, but that’s for another time. Let’s just say that I’m taking a rest from thinking about my ancestry for at least 6 months. They’ll still be there.

Woo, Spring Break

This week is my Spring Break. My intentions were to get ahead in my German and Broadcast Media classes, but you know how that sort of thing goes. Good intentions, blah blah.

I haven’t been completely lazy, though. I’ve been working to finish up a project that I’ve been working on since January. I can go into more detail about that next week, since it’s sort of a surprise for someone. At any rate, I consider it my magnum opus. I feel like Charlotte from Charlotte’s Web when I say that. You know, how she tells Wilbur that the egg pouch/eggs that she’s been creating are her magnum opus and then she dies? Well I don’t expect to die, but man, I had no idea what I was getting into when I started this here project. I’ll be super glad when I have a finished product.

So yeah, Spring Break. Not going to the beach to party. I never was into that sort of thing, anyhow. But I must say, I would really like to see an ocean soon. It’s been too long. I took it for granted when I was living in California and the ocean was always 30 minutes away. But hey, now I have tornadoes and humidity. Beat that, California.

I’m not old, but I sure can talk about the weather a lot

We had some crazy weather over the weekend, as I’m sure you’ve heard on the news by now. There was a tornado in downtown Atlanta that caused a lot of damage to the CNN building, the Georgia dome, nearby housing, and the surrounding area. It’s amazing that no one was killed, especially when you look at the aftermath.

It’s funny, because even though were were only a few miles away from where the tornado struck, all we experienced was about 10 minutes of strong storms. We were watching a movie with some friends and were completely oblivious to what went down. I mean, we’ve seen far worse thunderstorms than that. There was a really bad thunderstorm on the first night that we moved to Atlanta. You know, where lightning lights up the room so much that it feels like someone is playing with the lightswitch? And thunder sounds so close that you’re pretty sure it had to have taken out the neighbors? Yeah, that kind of storm. And ones like that made what we saw Friday night seem like nothing.

We were planning to go to Chattanooga for the weekend, but storms were in the forecast, and something about being really close to where a tornado struck makes you want to lay low.

Living 100 years

My great grandmother, Sadie Woodall, passed away yesterday. She was 100 years old. I can’t even fathom living that long. She outlived her husband and four of her children. How strange to live in a world where everyone you grew up with died a long time ago. But I know she’s in a better place now, and I hope she’s surrounded by those loved ones that she missed. She led a good life, and she had her wits about her up to the end.

I don’t necessarily intend to live that long, but I hope others will be able to say the same about me. You know, that I had my wits about me. Or maybe that I was a tough old broad. I like to think I will be.

Gonna party like it’s your birthday

Guess who had a birthday today, according to our best calculations? It’s Monster! He’s a whole year old. That means that he’s going to start being very mature now and stop biting and pouncing us. And maybe he’ll let us pet him. Who knows? It’s a whole new cat year.

Happy birthday to Monster!

I feel like I don’t even know him anymore

I’m flipping through radio stations, and I momentarily rest on a station that actually isn’t playing commercials.

Brandon: So what, we listen to Fergie now?

Wendy: (raised eyebrow) How do you know this is Fergie?

B: (shrugs)

W: Besides, this doesn’t sound like the chick whose London-London bridge want to go down.

B: I know, but this song is actually from that same album. All of her songs sound so different.

W: How did you know that the songs are from the same album?

B: They were talking about it on Mtv.

W: Since when do you watch Mtv?

B: I was watching it the other day when I was flipping through channels.

W: Huh. That’s dangerous stuff.

So yeah, my husband knows more about Fergie than I do. Do you know what that means? Both of us need lobotomies.

New classes

So I begin German II and Survey of Broadcast Media tonight. I like taking 8-week classes, because they fly by and professors have no choice but to cut right to the meat of the subject. It’s funny, the other night Brandon was talking about his Aquinas class, and I said, “Wow, you’re still taking that class?” He kind of stared at me and said, “Well, yeah. I just started it in January.” It just feels like regular semesters are so long now.

I reviewed the German vocabulary words that the class has learned in German I, and a lot of it is coming back to me. So I’m not horrified about jumping into German II; just a little uneasy. If I do realize that this is a terrible mistake, I can switch to a Genderlect class and take another language later (they offer French in the summer). So we’ll see how that goes tonight. I really want to get my language class over with, though.