I stabbed myself in the eye with a mascara wand today.
This is not the first time this has happened.
No, I’m not a closet alcoholic, and I don’t have coordination problems, at least not with my fine motor-skills. (I can thread a needle in seconds, but do tend to walk into walls.)
I am near-sighted. The above image is an approximation of what I see when I look in the mirror each morning.
Story time
When I was 5, my parents discovered I was near-sighted on a trip to the zoo. It went something like this:
“Look at the squirrel, Leanne!”
Clearly we were not at a zoo with much of a budget.
“What squirrel?”
“The squirrel! It’s right there on the fence? Don’t you see it sitting there on the fence?”
“Uh….Fence?”
The Fun Perks to Near-Sightedness
The good thing is, when you’ve been wearing glasses for most of your life, you don’t really mind them. Sure, it would be nice to be able to read text farther than an inch away from my face. Also, roller coasters are a lot more entertaining when you can see the drops, not just feel them.
And let’s not get into how fun swim team was. (Okay, my team is on the LEFT side when I get out of the pool. The LEFT side. The people on the right are the OTHER team. Stupid teams with the same color bathing suits.)
But for the most part, I don’t mind being nearsighted. The only time it really sucks is at times like this morning, when I went to lean in to apply my mascara and misjudged the distance.
Free Life Lesson
Be grateful for your eyesight, folks. Whatever other troubles you have, at least you can see the #$*#)*@ squirrel.
Step Two: Use most of the onions, but leave a couple in their orange mesh bag.
Step Three: Store these onions on top of your dryer, in the back of your washer/dryer closet.
Step Four: Forget about their existence for months.
Step Five: Clear off the dryer and discover your onions. Surprise!
Step Six: Fruitlessly look up planting onions only to find you can’t plant them fully grown, even if they’re rooted.
Step Seven: Post pictures on your blog, in the hopes that your folly will bring entertainment to the lives of others.
Step Eight: Warn people to clean out their closets more than once a year. Another month or two and these onions might have morphed into sentient beings, used their roots as appendages, and held our clean laundry hostage until we did their bidding. And who knows what an onion might want?
Actually, that would be kind of interesting to find out. Maybe I’ll put one of them back…
As a perk to apartment complex living, we only have to deal with snow when we need to drive somewhere. Then, we just have to go clean off our cars. As you can see below, sometimes this takes a while.
Jon was busy helping his family out with computer troubleshooting and was therefore distracted from keeping his pregnant wife from going outside to stand in snowbanks, so I sneaked out.
Ostensibly this was to wipe off the cars, but for real I was just going to play in the snow.
Funnily enough, Jon noticed his car was missing from its original spot about halfway through, and thought it had been towed. (When it snows, we get stickers on our cars threatening to tow them if we don’t move them soon, so the plow guys can clear up the space.)
Anyway, I successfully achieved my goals of the day. Before you get impressed, read them below, and realize that the bar’s not set too high here.
Throw lots of snow around.
Clear off the cars so Jon can get groceries for the Beast.
Don’t run anyone (important) over in the parking lot while trying to move the cars.
Now I’ve just got to:
do about 5 loads of laundry
weed out my clothes (going to pack the ones that don’t fit away until June)
clean the bathroom sink (it has this weird mold thing that I am looking forward to killing with Comet)
bake chocolate chip banana bread
…and I will have had a frighteningly domestically productive Sunday. As a reward, I will allow myself to eat 1/2 of the banana bread loaf in one sitting. (1 slice for me, 5 for the baby.)
Update: I was able to get most of these things accomplished, but unfortunately, failed at posting in time. I will go console myself for this failure with more banana bread.
At 12:00 today, some of my coworkers and I gathered in the conference room and tuned in to the inauguration video broadcast live on nytimes.com.
We watched Obama’s inauguration speech in silence, and, despite the numerous challenges facing our country and this administration, for the first time in 8 years, I felt hope. I thought to the baby, “You’ve picked a good time to come into the world.”
I hope we are entering a time of positive change for our country and our world. I hope that I will be part of it.
Jon’s been saying that more websites are using flash these days. Not for archaic site intros, but for interactive interfaces like YouTube or Seeqpod.
It’s been awhile since I’ve used Flash, so I thought I’d brush up my skills (or lack thereof). So, I started working on a movie, with the help of an online tutorial.
You’ll be glad to know that after several hours, I finally got my skill level to be about equal to 1989 graphics.
For all of you old school gamers out there who remember the 1989 NES game A Boy and His Blob, this one’s for you:
And if you want to get real nostalgic and listen to the theme song, check out Press the Button’s article – I decided to spare you from embedding it in the flash file after hearing it for the 5th time while editing. Some things are better off not remembered.
Normal people clothes don’t fit me anymore. After trying on clothes for about an hour in a store, I realized this, called Jon (who was spending this time in the Apple store), and gave up.
Happily, they have whole stores for pregnant people.
I went to the Motherhood Maternity store, and everything fit. Even more exciting was the fact that they keep a fake preggo belly in their dressing rooms. The belly is a big cushy oval with Velcro straps. I imagine it is there so people can try clothes on and get an idea of how they’ll look in a month or two.
Since I’ve read I’ll be gaining a pound a week or so for the next 4 months, I decided to try the belly on.
It was clearly awesome. Not only did it make me realize that in a couple of months I will be lucky if I can get out of my car (let alone get in behind the wheel) but now I really appreciate the size I currently am, as opposed to the size I am plus a fake preggo belly.
On a related note, since I can already feel a steady stream of kicks and punches, this also makes me wonder how they’ll feel in another month or two when he’s twice the size. Possibly, my stomach will just fall off and he’ll climb out of it like a chicken out of an egg. That’s actually kind of what I’m hoping for.
Now, if you, too, would like to try on the preggo belly, just take a trip to your local Motherhood Maternity store, snag some clothes off the rack, and sneak a camera into the dressing room. Then, post a link to the image in the comments. I dare you.
