Pregmentia strikes!

It's been well established that I can be a colossal ditz at times. I'm beginning to wonder if I should even be allowed outside the house, though, because of the stupid stuff I consistantly can't remember. Insignificant things like:

-The names of my students
-The names of books we've read in class (the kids totally nailed me on this one today--I was so embarassed!)
-Setting my alarm

Oh, and the teeny, tiny little matter of MY OWN NAME!

Last night at class I was getting ready to leave when one of my friends pulled me aside to ask if everything was okay at home. I was a little surprised that she was asking because I didn't remember mentioning anything about my home life to her recently, so I told her that no, everything was fine, and asked why she thought things might not be okay. Her answer? I had signed my maiden name on the class roster that night.

Whoops.

This wouldn't be so embarassing if I hadn't done exactly the same thing last week. Now, I did use my maiden name professionally while we lived in the DC area, so it's not like I've been using my married name for very long, but still! At least it makes for a somewhat amusing story (Juan got a kick out of it when I told him) so I guess pregmentia is at least good for a laugh. I just hope what little memory power I used to have comes back when this baby is born!

Super What?

I'm not a football fan. To put it more bluntly, I can't think of many things that are more boring than sitting around watching football, even if I'm with friends and there's alcohol involved. Juan is the same way--I'd be surprised if he even knows which teams are playing today. I only know because my students couldn't talk about anything else last week.

Therefore, it shouldn't suprise anyone that I sort of forgot that the Super Bowl is today. I swear, on some level I knew that it was on this weekend, but the fact that the entire city was planning to be at the grocery store this afternoon to pick up party supplies completely escaped me. Until I got there, that is.

Oh. My. God. I've been to the grocery store on the day before Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, and an hour before Game 7 of the NBA finals back when the Jazz made the playoffs and I still lived in Utah. As such, I thought I knew what the word "crowd" meant. I had no idea. I have never, in my LIFE, seen so many people trying to buy soda and potato chips. It was insane.

So, just in case anyone was wondering, I'm not watching the game today. I am, however, trying to recover from my supermarket-induced emotional scars. I may need therapy.

Happy (belated) Blog-iversary

So, the actual 1 year anniversary of this blog was a week ago, but seeing as how I've been drowning in work (and living in a lot of denial about how much I still have left to do every night for the next couple of months) I didn't notice. Oops! So, happy blogiversary to me!

I thought I'd take a look back everything that's happened to me over the last year. Note, this was originally supposed to come with links, but I'm too damn tired and overwhelmed with work to add them. Sorry, but you can navigate by months on my sidebar if you'd like to read posts I mention here

January:
-Began this blog
-Started the spiral into a depression over not being pregnant
-Put our condo on the market

February
-Took a fantastic trip to Boston and Maine
-Had the best Valentine's Day on record
-Got in a car accident
-Finally called my doctor to start the fertility testing process
-Took the infamous photo of a knife I almost stabbed Juan in the foot with

March
-Hit a peak in my depression over not being able to get pregnant
-Had the crappiest 25th birthday on record
-Visited my family in Utah and posted about all the things I dislike about my home state
-Was picked up as an evil liberal blogger on a conservative Utah blog for the aforementioned post
-Still didn't sell our condo

April
-Had my first RE appointment with the most evil Nurse Practitioner known to man
-Took a trip to California with a mysterious "Item X"
-Had my HSG and was officially diagnosed as infertile
-Took a trip to our new town and placed an offer on a house

May
-Lost our contract on the house because our condo still hadn't sold
-Wrote my all-time favorite post on being an infertile 20-something
-Quit my job
-Got an offer on our condo
-Lost our buyer after just a week
-Found out that our dream house in Texas was back on the market and placed a new offer
-Got another offeron the condo from a new buyer
-My dad was hit by a car while riding his bike in North Carolina
-J graduated from medical school
-Left DC for Texas

June
-Took a trip to Vegas
-Entered a new chapter in infertility-related depression
-Closed on our Texas house and moved in
-Did not find a job

July
-Started seeing a new doctor about infertility
-Adopted Jasper
-Got admitted to grad school to become a teacher

August
-Survived our massive flooding
-Still didn't have a job
-Joined Operation Common Thread
-Celebrated my parents' 25th wedding anniversary
-Started school

September
-Had a laparoscopy and FINALLY got a diagnosis for our infertility--scar tissue
-Wrote an angry letter to NBC over a stupid, prejudicial story they did on young, infertile women
-Encountered the centipedes from hell
-Interviewed for a job as a high school English teacher
-Took a road trip to Utah

October
-Didn't hear from the school after my interview, assumed I didn't get the job
-Got another negative pregnancy test
-GOT THE TEACHING POSITION!
-Decided to hold off on calling the RE to start IUIs
-Started my 20th cycle of TTC

November
-Was busy at work
-GOT PREGNANT!!!
-Our cat Codi went into heart failure and spent a week in critical condition

December
-Codi came home!
-Finished my first semester of teaching
-Annouced my pregnancy to my family and the internet at large

My mother will be so proud

Guess whose blog comes up on the first page when you Google "babysitting disaster stories"? Just guess.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. I'm thankful for many things this holiday season, but the ability to laugh at myself really has to top the list.

If You Give a Mouse a Cookie...

I was planning to be productive today, I swear. All I had on my agenda was cleaning and lesson planning. That was it. For its part, the cleaning went great. We scoured the house from top to bottom, and it ended up looking better than it has in weeks. I paid special attention to the kitchen since it's spent most of the last month looking like it's been hit by a tornado.

After we finished, we realized that we were almost completely out of food, so we took a break to go grocery shopping. I happened to make an offhand comment to J about wanting to make some special hot chocolate tonight after dinner. This hot chocolate comes in incredibly hard chocolate wheels, which then have to be broken apart and blended with hot milk in a blender. It's delicious, but a PITA to make.

J half-jokingly commented that if I wanted hot chocolate we should probably buy a new blender since our current one was on its last legs. Seeing as how I'd owned the blender since college (and it had been a hand-me-down from my aunt before that) I didn't argue with him. We took the groceries home then headed back out to Linens N Things for a blender. Just a blender.

Well, if you're anything like me, you can't walk into Linens N Things without seeing at least a dozen household gadgets that you simply must have. I can usually resist the temptation to buy most of these things, but today I saw the ONE gadget that I'd secretly been pining for since I'd first seen it on an infomercial last year.



Bake and Fill cake pans!!!

If you haven't seen the infomercial, the purpose of these pans is to make cakes with more than one filling. For example:



They are possibly the coolest cake pans ever, and I've been sorely tempted to call the 1-800 number and order a set for myself on more than one occasion. Now, here they were right in front of me. Naturally, I grabbed J's arm and proceeded to tell him what a fabulous product this was and that I absolutely MUST have one. J, who knows better than to argue with me when I'm like this, told me to toss it in the cart, and, for good measure, to get the miniature set too. You know, just in case we ever need to make 10,000 filled cakes at the same time.

Well, since we were now buying these amazing cake pans, we obviously needed some cake mix and frosting. Back to the grocery store!


(pay no attention to the Snausages--we decided it wasn't fair for us to get treats if Jasper didn't get to have any)

By this point our whole schedule for the day was shot. It was late afternoon and I hadn't done an iota of lesson planning. Still, I wasn't about to let a little thing like my job get in the way of trying out my new toys. I proceeded to spend the next TWO HOURS in the kitchen, baking. I didn't get to my lesson planning until after 7:00, but I did end up with all of these goodies:


(for those of you wondering just WTF I baked, the ones on the left are miniature Funfetti cakes filled with vanilla pudding, the one in the middle is a Devil's Food cake filled with yellow cake, and the cupcakes on the right are just cupcakes.)

Oh, and my nice, clean kitchen? The kitchen I spent so much time scouring this morning? It once again looked like it had been hit by a tornado. A tornado that likes to bake.



Guess this means that I'll have to spend another morning cleaning it very soon. And then I might need to go to the grocery store to pick up a few things...

More on Bad Things Happening When C Cooks

Clearly everyone loves a good C-sucks-in-the-kitchen story (I know I sure do!) so here's my first, and probably most infamous, cooking disaster story.

It was 1993, and I was on my first babysitting job ever. I'd just taken the big babysitter certification class at St. Mark's hospital and I got a call from the mom of one of my sister's friends, asking if I could sit while she and her husband went out for an evening. Could I? YES!!! I was so stoked. I must have re-read every single Babysitters Club book I owned (and at that point I think I owned them all) in anticipation of my first real babysitting gig. What activities would I do with the kids? How would I spend my first paycheck? What would I WEAR?

You could say that I was very, very prepared for every contingency I could think of by the time the big day rolled around. I got the full tour of the house (even though I'd been there before) a list of emergency contact numbers, and instructions for how to finish up a project the mom had started with the kids earlier that evening. The project was making homemade potato chips, which was something I'd never done before. My dad left, the parents left, and suddenly I was alone. With the kids. The kids who I was now in charge of. For two or more hours.

I tried not to let them know how much I was panicking right then, and instead suggested that we finish making the potato chips so we could eat them while watching a video. Basically, the recipe called for slicing up thin pieces of potato (which the mom had already done), adding some seasonings, and nuking the chips until they were crispy. This should have been a piece of cake.

Emphasis on the should.

We had made maybe 2 or 3 plates of chips before things went wrong. First I noticed a slightly acrid odor in the air. I remember thinking that the chips we were making were probabaly burning, so I turned off the microwave and pulled out the plate. Even though they'd been in there for over 2 minutes, the chips were still cold and soggy. Now, please remember that I was 12 years old and not exactly a master of deductive reasoning. Adult C would have seen that there was something wrong with the microwave since it hadn't done a thing to these chips after 2 minutes. Teenybopper C just thought "Huh, that's weird," and put the plate back in the microwave. Teenybopper C made the wrong decision.

Maybe a minute after I put the chips back in, thick, black smoke started POURING out of the microwave. I flipped, and told the kids to get outside. The girl didn't listen (this would become a chronic problem during later babysitting adventures at their house) and grabbed a dishtowel to fan the smoke away from the smoke alarm, which had activated. I grabbed the little boy and the cordless phone, ran outside, and called my dad to tell him that he needed to get there RIGHT NOW BECAUSE THE HOUSE WAS GOING TO BURN DOWN AND IT WAS ALL MY FAULT! Then I grabbed the girl and made her and her brother sit outside with me while we waited for my dad.

To this day, I don't know why none of the neighbors came out to see what was happening. The smoke alarm was going off right next to the open door, everyone on the street knew everyone else, and people should have been home at that hour. Who knows. Anyway, my parents just lived a block away, so my dad got there in under 3 minutes, and somehow got the smoke to stop coming out. He probably just did something smart like unplugging the microwave.

I don't remember if we got ahold of the parents right away or not. I think not, since this was in the days before cell phones and they were probably at a movie. I do remember being really scared to tell them what happened when they got home. Fortunately they were understanding, and gave me an extra-big tip for handling things so well. I remember the girl got grounded for not listening to me when I told her to get out of the house.

In any case, I thought that I was done with babysitting for good after that. None of the members of the Babysitters Club had ever started a fire in their client's microwave and had to call their dad to come put it out. There wasn't a section of my Babysitter's Handbook (courtesy of my certification class) that dealt with explaining to parents why their house smelled like icky smoke when they came home.

I think my negative feelings about babysitting lasted a week or two. Then the family called again (they had bought a new microwave) and wanted me to sit for a few hours again. I said okay, and that was the time the little boy almost hung himself with the venetian blinds. I'm tired now, though (and craving some potato chips) so that will have to be a story for another day.

Confused by that Newfangled Internet Thingy

Remember when I decided to go back to school to become a teacher? And how excited I was about buying school supplies and paying tuition? Yeah, I'm getting over it.

I got a call from the university this morning to let me know that a class I really wanted to take had an opening in one of the online sections, and did I want to enroll? Of course I did! This was the one class I was really bummed about not getting to take right away, and while I had never taken an online class before I figured that at least this meant I wouldn't have to commute to campus more than once a week. Saving gas is good! The woman at the university gave me some kind of code (note: I didn't bother finding out what the code was for, just wrote it down in my day planner) and told me that she'd e-mail me more details about the online program.

Now, either she was incredibly busy this morning or I'm an idiot, because her e-mail made no sense whatsoever. It was an e-mail that had originally been sent to the course's instructor and said nothing specific about what a student had to do in order to navigate the online course software. One of the links in the e-mail seemed somewhat helpful, though, so I followed it to the massive, scary University of Texas System page.

Disclaimer: as a general rule, I think that I'm a fairly savvy internet-type person. I have a blog, I know a little HTML (watch how I can make my words bold or underlined), and I can order a pizza from the comfort of my laptop. I'm not an IT professional by any stretch of the imagination, but I tend to understand how to do things on a computer. I'm apparently not as knowledgeable as I thought though, because I have no freaking clue what I'm supposed to do in order to access my class online. I can't even figure out what day it starts!

After spending a good 45 minutes battling panic over not being able to figure out the stupid software (or even how to log in) I sent a mea culpa e-mail to the woman at the university who had originally sent me the supposedly "explanatory" e-mail, begging for some guidance. At the very least, I need to know what this stupid code means! I hope (fingers crossed) that the reason I'm having so many problems is that the university hasn't had time to formally register me for the class yet, so my usual logins and passwords aren't working.

In any case, I'm having flashbacks to my one recurrent college nightmare, in which I discover that I signed up for a class without realizing it, haven't been attending all semester, the final is TODAY, and if I fail, I'll ruin my GPA. I feel completely unprepared and clueless, and it's not pleasant.

Confession Time

I'm about to say something that may shock you.

Ready for it?

I'm....a bit of an airhead

(waits for family members to stop laughing their heads off)

(still waiting)

it's true. I, C, am kind of an airhead. I don't mean to be, but somehow I end up saying and doing things that are, well, ditzy. For example, this afternoon I called our realtor and set up a meeting for 7:00 tonight. I called Juan, made a little note in my Outlook calendar, and then promptly forgot all about it. I only remembered the meeting when Juan called my cell at 7:00 to find out why I wasn't home yet.

As Homer Simpson would say, "D'oh!"

Sadly, I do things like this all the time. It's common knowledge that if I don't write something down, I WILL forget about it. Heck, even if I do write it down, there's only a 50% chance that it'll get done. I'm a very frustrating person to talk to because I tend to repeat things over and over again, not remembering that we've already covered them. I also don't remember things like J's schedule (which, in my defense, changes frequently), plans that I've made (see above for a case in point), etc...

So, since only my friends and family read this blog, I'm going to pre-emptively apologize to all of you for anything important that I forget about in the future. I wish I could change, I really do, but shy of hiring a personal assistant to follow me around and make sure I don't forget anything, it's probably not going to happen.

Reason #547 why I shouldn't be allowed in the kitchen

Scene: Our house, Sunday night



That's a kitchen knife. It's impaled on the floor because I dropped it while trying to open a bag of frozen chicken poppers. After dropping it I spent 10 minutes running around the condo trying to find the digital camera just to take a picture of it because really, it's kind of cool.



Here's J, shaking his head because I convinced him to pose his foot next to the knife so it would be easier to see that it is, in fact, sticking up out of the floor. The things we do for love...