Her breasts were like pomegranates or what you will, but like nothing so much as a young woman’s breasts.

- Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Read that his morning and thought of the play last night. Julie and I saw “A Thought in Three Parts”. We were accompanied on this trek with another mother,

Fantastic quotes from this CNN article:

Schwartz called that “outrageous” and said even he can’t fill up his SUV at that price.

“If it keeps going like this, my kids will never be able to afford to drive,” said Schwartz, who has an 18-year-old son and 15-year-old daughter.

- Schwartz: owner of title insurance company and gas station.

Oh, the humanity!

Yesterday Stella woke me up at her normal time. About 7:15am. She’s been having stomach trouble lately and so my first order of business was to clean a particularly nasty diaper. As I did so, she danced at her music and sound table. Pulling the frog’s guitar frantically to fast forward to the songs that were most danceable. She was not about to sit down.

I got home about 7. Stella has been spending the days with her BaBa (paternal grandmother) and so Julie and I were both in a mood to just hang out with her. We haven’t seen that much of her lately, and she’s been letting us know with lots of hugs. Which is not to say she doesn’t love spending time with her Baba. Just that she makes a point of reminding us that we’re her parents.

We were hanging out in Stella’s room and she started just standing up in the middle of the room. Or pulling up and standing without holding onto anything. And each time she did she’d have this look on her face. Pride, like she’d just narrowly won a race, mixed with a look of intense mischief. I swear there were little lights dancing in her eyes. You could see the wheels turning.

Shortly after that she took a step. It was more of a shuffle, and we asked each other, “Was that a step?”. “I dunno. I think so.” At which point she took a shuffle and a real step. At this point we were goading her on. Julie was convinced that if she got the camera Stella would stop, but decided to get it anyway. When she got back. Stella stood up with the assistance of her table, and then took 4 wobbly steps towards me. We were cheering and yelling. And Stella looked like a thief raiding the Pharaoh’s tomb. After that she stopped performing for us. Cheeky monkey. We feed her and cloth her! We tell her when to dance! She was looking pretty tired though. Which I guess makes sense when you realize that in essence she’s doing what people do in physical therapy. So we took her downstairs. Gave her some food and put her to bed. I read her “Goodnight Gorilla”. And I decided that Gorilla is a girl gorilla just like Stella. And all too soon our little girl gorilla will start letting all the animals out to try to come sleep in our bed.

Julie brought up something else funny. Apparently, when my mom comes over she immediately finds a barrette for Stella.

Sidetrack Barrette, btw is one of the words I pronounce with a Jersey accent. Like pajamas. Don’t know why. It just happens.

I find this funny. Stella has very unruly hair for those of you who don’t see her regularly. I realize that my mom brushed her daughters hair every day, ironed ribbons, and then put them in their hair, but I just can’t seem to get the energy to carry on the tradition. And I’m cool with that. Here’s to hoping that Stella continues to pick out her own clothes (sometimes t-shirts and jean shorts, sometimes dresses) and pull out her barrettes, and becomes whatever sort of girl she wants to be.

I mean seriously. You report this “story”? The president is justifying his attacking Iraq in oh… 2001 with the fact that Al Qaida

“What personal - professional attributes do you think qualify you for this position.”

The fact I don’t reply to spam.

So I have a headache today, and I’m wondering if it’s related to barometric pressure. So I’m going to record today’s pressure for future reference. This shall be of no interest to any of you. Thank you for your time.

1013.0 hPa

UPDATE: Today is 1012 hPa and I feel fine, so I guess that’s not it. Or it’s more complex than that.

How long must I itch. What in the heck kind of bug was it that has me itching a week after I was bit? I’ve never had anything even remotely like this. And it doesn’t seem to be going away. This is horrible.

So I’m thinking about doing this:

http://www.scriptfrenzy.org/

I challenge you to do so also. Let’s get some scripts! I mean we’ve got two film crews, one theater company. Let’s get some original material!

I walk to the bus every morning. This morning as I turned the corner

Arghh… I itch right now. And I want to scratch but I shouldn’t. I got almost no sleep last night because I itched so badly. I knew I had some bad bug bites last night, but it wasn’t until I took off my clothes to go to bed that I realized the extent. Julie was nice enough to put some sort of soothing lotion on my bites, and as I pointed them out I realized they were everywhere. Including one on the side of my leg that has developed into a rash of sorts.

And the big problem with me a scratching is that I tend to rip open my skin. Because it itches that badly. I generally scratch until I bleed. Then I can sometimes have enough self-control to wait until I scab over, and then I scratch until I bleed again. I have horrible scars. Generally the itching is so insistent that I don’t really feel that I’m scraping off skin. Arghh… I can feel it now. I need to stop blogging about it.

I just reread the above and I think I used itch and scratch properly. This is one of Julie’s pet peeves with me. It wasn’t until I met her that I learned that itch and scratch are not synonyms. It’s amazing the way we learn language. I, however, know how to use lay and lie properly. She doesn’t seem to think this matters, but I do. Now I know itch/scratch and lay/lie! My grammer skills amaze and confound!

Anyway… so on Sunday we went to church. We had to be greeters. There was no one there though, so Julie did most of the greeting while I walked Stella around. She’s been all about walking and standing this weekend.

We left church and went to Sears to try to find a new food processor. I had decided to make my steak with chimichurri sauce for movie night. Unfortunately, chimichurri requires a lot of blending and chopping of green things (specifically parsley and cilantro), and my old processor had bitten the dust a few weeks ago. Well actually it’s a “hand blender”. Basically, it’s a small food processor that works on the amount of food I normally want to process. I generally do not need to chop up 8 cups of tomatoes so I really have no need for a full blown Cuisinart. Sears had nothing. Williams-Sonoma had a hand chopper that cost the same as a electric chopper and seemed pre-broken. Julie had a blister. Penny’s had nothing. But Macy’s had one. It’s a Braun, and it seems somewhat flimsy, but it did the trick last night.

After our trip to the mall we decided to brave Kerby Lane. We waited for about thirty minutes for a table and Stella was a trooper. She attempted to eat dirt again, and a few cigarette butts, but being good parents we gave her crayons to chew on instead. Once inside Julie and I ordered food. Good food. We ordered Stella a kids cheese omelet and pancake. Which came back being enough food for an adult. It was a full two-egg omelet. I cut it up for Stella. Not fast enough. Never fast enough for that kid. I need to take a class on knife technique just so I can keep up with cutting her food. Although I don’t know if they teach you to techniques for cutting with dull dinner knives. Stella loved her food. Julie loved her blackberry pancakes, and I was happy with my fresh-fried potato chips.

We called my parents on the way home and let them know they could come over. They got into town at about 10pm on Saturday, and they’re officially here now. We hung out for a while before everyone came over. They went home to sleep and our friends arrived at 6pm for movie night. The kids really are old enough now to just be part of the scene rather than a constant distraction that grinds all conversation to a halt. Tara ate next to Stella, and Stella relayed her appreciation by putting some nice greasy hand prints all over Tara’s shirt. Then she and Daniel spent the next hour driving Stella’s push cart around the house and generally being extremely active.

We put Stella down at about 8:20pm and Anna, Sean and Daniel left at about the same time. We watched Solyent Green. Which would probably have been pretty suspenseful if you hadn’t known the secret the whole time. It also was really nihilistic. It completely focused on one character and his inability to save the world. He didn’t try to start a mass movement, there was no big over the top saving the world speech. It was pretty much one character who could have saved the world, but failed. Ahh well, the food was really good. We had a green thai curry from Jeff and Tara, and great pasta salad from Laurie and Justin, and a fruit salad from Anna and Sean. All in all, a good night. I went to bed and tried not to scratch.

I was talking about this picture with Julie over the weekend. Isn’t it disgusting? People in china drink that stuff. Talk about living in the industrial revolution.

This story is interesting. Julie and I went to Wal_Mart this weekend. And it was as horrible and as ugly as I remember. They’re currently in the process of converting it to a Super Walmart, but it was pretty much the same ugly it always was. If anything the construction was the most effecient, attractive thing going on.

The “greeter” stopped us coming in and asked if we had returns. We answered yes, and he had to rummage around and affix stickers to our items. Even though we were literally 10 feet away from the returns desk. Do they have that much graft in 10 feet?

We were there buying towels and we found what we needed. And ogled all the crap we couldn’t possibly ever need. The one bright spot was that we did have an awesome employee check us out. They have little bells like the kind a school teacher would have at each check out. If you get great service you can ring the bell. I don’t know if there’s someone tallying the bell rings, but it is kind of interesting. You could probably choose which line you wanted to get in by the amount of bell ringing going on ahead of you. The women who checked us out was getting enthusiastic ringing from every person who went through her line.

But that article brings up an interesting point. I say all the time that I want to support companies that do these sorts of things. And yet I keep going to Target. Target has announced nothing green to my knowledge. They’re just selling slightly more attractive Chinese crap, at slightly fewer stores and taking no responsibility for what they’re doing. Wal_Mart’s definitely on the right track. I guess I should just suck up my love of aesthetics and buy my household staples there.