Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Mom is headed out of town

Well, my Mom just rolled out of the driveway after a whirlwind week of renovation and decoration. Mom was sweet enough to bring us several needed items all the way from Albuquerque. We gained an 8 foot bookshelf, a lawn mower, a weed whacker, and an edger. Now Tony can attack our forest-like lawn with suburban gusto.

Mom didn't stop at furniture. She MADE our living room curtains! Ya'll, she even bought a sewing machine to accomplish the task. They look great, though Mom was annoyed by an apparently uneven stitch (I can't see it) that she wants to drive back to Texas and fix before the baby arrives!

She also did mundane chores that are tricky for my 8 months pregnant self. Like vacuuming the stairs. We have the original yellow Dyson. A big drawback of this machine is the incredible force of the hose. A person with could easily be yanked down the stairs while the vacuum tries desperately to suck it's hose back to the base. Falling down the stairs would be bad at this juncture. Wouldn't be great for my Mom either, but she assured me that she could stay upright.

I can't say enough about how wonderful it was to have my Mommy here. In fact I got a little greedy. When Mom said,
"Maybe I should stay another day..." I didn't try terribly hard to dissuade her even though she has a lot going on at home.

Today however we had gotten to the silly point. She has a meeting in 48 hours in another state. So it was time to say goodbye until next time. I haven't lived with my Mom since I was 17 (I went to college a little early) and I see her pretty often. I am not usually such a sad-sack about living in a different state from my Mom. But at this very moment I miss her like crazy.

It's gonna be funny when the kid is old enough to have attachment issues and is wailing, "But WHY can't we stay at Grandma's house for another day?!" and I will have to think of a good reason while Tony rolls his eyes and starts the car.

For the record, Tony didn't want her to go either since his house repairs started moving at a very rapid clip once my Mom showed up!

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Dark and Stormy Night

Last night I was jolted full awake at 4am. The house was surrounded by a lightning storm, but that wasn't what woke me. I was sure I heard a soft thump from upstairs.

We have only been living in this house for a month so my first though when I woke up was, "Am I allowed to go upstairs and check on that?" After a few sleepy blinks I realized that nobody else was going to go upstairs. Tony was getting some much needed sleep and I didn't want to wake him.

So picture me wandering around our dark house, during a storm, with only my big ole' pregnancy t-shirt to protect me from the thing that bumped in the night.

I made my way to our pitch black staircase which is opposite our curtain-less sliding glass door. I was simultaneously freaked out by the possibility of psyco-killers watching me from the backyard and zombies waiting for me in the shadows upstairs.
Against my wishes my brain recalled that staircase scene in the Haunting. You know the one, where the ghost hunters go upstairs looking for one of their missing companions and suddenly her screaming body drops down on them from the attic?

Suddenly I feel something warm and soft rub against my leg.
I spring into a useless pseudo kung-fu stance and look down. It's just our kitty Byron. He looks up at me and yawns.

So I think to myself, "If there were really something upstairs the cat would be hiding under something and trembling...So I don't need to check it out."

When I got back to bed poor Tony was wide awake. He offered to go check the mystery thump but I was adamant that he stay in bed as my Tony-shaped security blanket. Just in case.

Kevin sez: What about eye color?

Well, the easy answer to your question Kevin is: "It would depend on varying ratios of eumelanin produced by melanocytes in the iris." (Pssst...thanks Wikipedia)

However, if we're talkin' genetics I'm gonna have to rely on a vague recollection of my 7th grd. Biology class (psst...thanks Coach Brock).

First we must determine our actual eye colors.
When Tony and I were first seriously dating he came over at my apartment for a New Year's Eve dinner party. In the middle of dinner I got a long distance phone call from my cousin Kevin who was drunk dialing me from Times Square. It went some thing like this:

Me: "Yello?"
Kevin: (background roar of 10,000 drunken happy people) "Guess where I am right freaking NOW?!!"
Me: "Hell?"
Kevin: "New FREAKING York!! WOOOOO!!"
Crowd: "WOOOOOOOOOO!!!!"

Somehow we were able to carry on a conversation of sorts and he asked what I was doing. I said I was hanging out with my new boyfriend. Kevin wanted to know what he looked like and I said Tony was tall, with brown hair, and green eyes.

Kevin: "Alright Holt! Sounds NICE!"
Me: "Thank you!"
Tony: "Pardon me? I have WHAT color eyes now?"

See, apparently Tony has Brown (maybe Amber) eyes. In my defense his brown eyes are very light and my eyes are green, and I had been drinking lots of Champagne. But to. this. day. Tony randomly makes me tell him what color his eyes are just to make sure I haven't forgotten.

So here are our two parental eyes:

I seem to recall (7th grd. Bio) that Green eyes are somewhat rare and brown trumps green. Am I correct in my fuzzy recollection? Anybody remember how to do this? Anybody?

Wednesday, April 9, 2008

From my Babyhood days



The closer I get to my due date the more I wonder what the kid will look like. Genetics indicate that she will look something like me. I would presume that Tony's baby-looks will also be a factor, but I don't have any Tony baby pictures.

So here is another baby picture of me:

And the only picture of Tony I could find on short notice:


Tony and I look remarkably alike for an infant and a grown man. Almost... disturbingly alike. I happen to know all my second cousins though, so no worries on that front.

Monday, April 7, 2008

A Freaking SNAKE.

Oh the joys of homeownership. Chief among them is washing clothes (sans quarters) in your very own garage. Ah, the freedom of sorting your household recycling and gathering masses of moving debris for Monday's trash pickup. If you are anything like me you will assert your landed gentry status in unflattering shorts and a stained t-shirt. Perhaps even bare-foot and pregnant if you want to get really specific.

On Friday afternoon I was reveling in my be-shorted, non-shod, mortgage-owning status while tossing a big bag of trash into our garage dumpster.

SQUISH goes the trash
SMACK goes the dumpster lid
HISS goes the big. freaking. snake.

Yup, directly behind the dumpster was a foot and a half of brown snake tail (not a garden snake!) thrashing around in a panic. Now I know that this is post shedding season when snakes are blind, and the only thing that will ease this snake's distress is biting my fuzzy ass.

So I run like my junior high track coach always wanted me to. Knees up, eyes front, record time! I also added some arm flapping and mindless screaming. Just in case I could increase the distance between me and the snake by clawing at the air or using sonic propulsion.

Anybody else been introduced to a snake in a memorable way?
Blog Widget by LinkWithin