alphasarah

Mothers' Day. Went out last night with 8 other gals while M took TRex out to dinner. Kiddo had religious school this morning, then we went out to lunch and then to the nursery to get our plants. And then... many hours in the garden.

In the veggie patch: sugar snaps, brussels spouts, cherry tomatoes, butternut squash, zucchini, cucumbers, dill, rosemary, sage, oregano, and thyme (all the herbs but the dill are holdovers from last year). (ETA: And the garlic. I forget about the garlic.)
In TRex's garden: petunias, marigolds, lobelia. She has sandwort and a dianthus in there, too.
In "my" garden: petunias, marigolds, lobelia, and a purple blooming perennial that I can't remember the name of.
In the rest of the backyard: a bleeding heart, some flowering groundcover that I can't remember the name of. (ETA: and some basil near the mint; trying to prove my theory that the problem I have with basil is just that it gets scorched in the really-extra-full-sun of the veggie patch,)
In the weed patch garden behind the garage: some periwinkle.
In the front yard we took out the sad-looking holly bush and put in morning glories.

And now we're all tired. The kiddo was a BIG help - there's no way we could have gotten all of that planting done this afternoon without three sets of hands working on it.

Other things. Softball is back! They've had 3 practices and the league parade was yesterday.

It looks like we're going to get really lucky and they're not going to have any games until after dance recital is over (next weekend is crazy... Canisius graduation and tap recital at the same time; Religious School service day Sunday morning and then ballet recital Sunday afternoon).

Oh, and I'm not an aunt again. Yet. We are bordering on full-on babywatch mode (J is due in a week; Miss C was 3 days early.)

For the very few of you who either didn't get my email yesterday or who aren't friends with me on Facebook... it's March for Babies time again!

Remember this little chicken creature?


Well now she's an obnoxious, swim-team-joining, electrical engineering second grader.


You can donate here.

Have I posted about the ongoing saga of do I actually have allergies/asthma? Last year my PCP (the one I loved... who has moved... SIGH) referred me to an allergist. He has concluded that I don't have asthma and that the random airway constrictions that I experience are reflux-related (though I have no other signs of reflux unless I eat like crap/too much, and the constrictions have no discernible correlation to my diet) and that I'm not allergic to a damn thing. HOWEVER. He has been seeing a lot of patients and reading about people who present with clear allergy symptoms (like I do) who still test negative on skin tests, and he treats those people as if they do have environmental allergies.

So he gave me Nasonex. And I used it, and it definitely made a difference in the waking-up-and-spending-five-minutes-blowing-my-nose-then-coughing-a-lot department. But the headaches. Like no other headaches in the world. I could set my clock by them - 20 minutes after taking the stuff, huge throbbing frontal headache. Way worse than the stuffy and coughing in the morning. I tried to remember to take it right before bed but that didn't happen, naturally, so I just gave up and returned to the status quo.

When I saw him last week, I mentioned this. He seemed skeptical of the headache thing at first but I said that there was a clear, strong correlation and that the headaches were qualitatively different than any other headache I ever get. He was like, "Well don't DO that!" (have I mentioned that I quite like my allergist, in all his weird socially awkward ways?) and he handed me a sample bottle of Omnaris as well as a card for $11 copays. AND IT WORKS! I don't love the taste/nosefeel of the stuff but I'm soooo much clearer in the morning (no giant coughing fits to clear postnasal drip! Minimal nose-blowing!) and M claims that I'm snoring less, too.

Thus, purple army guys defeat accented bumble bee.

So, signs are pointing to body-chemistry change in the hair thing. Because the following things happened at the same time:
1) I have lost a lot of my curl. Like, a LOT. 20 years ago I would have KILLED for this to happen, not I'm not happy about it.
2) The greys are multiplying at an alarming rate. I don't mind this, actually. They seem to be a pretty good shade of grey. Oddly, though, they are asymmetrical (many more on the left than on the right).

Getting old is weird, yo.

Longtime readers may remember that I stopped using shampoo on my hair, after reading this book, about the time that I started this blog. My regime of lots of conditioner and the occasional lemon juice wash or baking soda/conditioner paste scalp scrub worked for eight year. Lately, though, things started going downhill. I was having to scrub more and more often, and my hair was dull and clumpy within a couple of days. And then on Thursday, even after a scrub, it was just gross. That was when I did something I hadn't done in eight years.

I reached for a bottle of shampoo. 

Yes, you heard me right. I shampooed my hair. As I told M afterwards, I felt kinda dirty.

I don't know if it's that my body chemistry has changed, or something changed in our water, or what, but it was definitely a necessary step.

I don't love the way my hair has looked the past couple of days - frizzy and flyaway. I will definitely be going back to conditioner-only as much as possible. But I can't be opposed to the odd encounter with the sudsy stuff, either. 

A couple of weeks ago our living room ceiling began to look a little bit like this, only less dramatically so. There's no plumbing in that part of the house (it's right by the front door) so I knew it had to be coming from outside. A quick look in the bedroom crawlspace revealed that yes, in fact, the floor there was wet, as was the insulation. So I called the folks who replaced our roof 4 1/2 years ago. After a couple more phone calls, a major scheduling screw-up, and me using the "magic words"*, the owner of the company was at my house at 7:40 Friday morning. When I went to turn on the living room lamp so he could see the stain, it didn't come on. I checked the plug, then went to pull the lamp towards me to check the bulb, when the (plastic) shade literally crumbled in my hands. When I went to clean it up, I had to just bring the trash can to it because every piece disintegrated as soon as I touched it. So I changed out the bulb and figured we would get a new shade for the lamp this weekend.

This morning when I went to look closely at the lamp to see if we would be able to get another fitted-in shade or if we were going to have to find something that would fit onto the bulb, I tilted the lamp to look at it and at the bottom of it there appeared a strange pile of grey powder. I moved it some more, and more grey stuff appeared. Picked it up and the whole concrete base fell out. It, too, was crumbling. Cue another trip of the kitchen trash can into the living room, this time with its friend the dustbuster. And cue us buying a whole new lamp.

The roofers, by the way, spent the afternoon re-tarring all of the seams of our roof (under warranty coverage), and to make up for the miscommunication, also cleaned and tightened up our gutters.

*You know, "Better Business Bureau" and "Attorney General's Office".

Pay for the house & car.
Do all the pipe-dream stuff to the house that I want to do (new kitchen, skylights in the sewing room, living roof on the garage, solar panels on the south-facing slope of the roof) as well as all the repairs that need to be done or will need to be done sometime in the next couple of years (new driveway, new sewer line, etc.).
Dump lots into TRex's college savings.
Give lots to various charities.

A recipe from earlier in the week: Turkey Tenderloin with Herb Pesto*. It's not revolutionary or anything but it was tasty. And it keeps well. We had it with roast veggies and stuffing.

( Read more... )
*But I didn't call it pesto because after I made Roasted Salmon with Caramelized Apple Pesto - which was AMAZING, btw - the kiddo has declared that she doesn't like pesto. I don't understand.

Stay tuned... assuming I can locate the necessary tools, the kiddo and I are going to can applesauce on Sunday. Wish me luck.

Today we:

• Purchased a replacement pumpkin (the one we got a month ago melted.... ewww)
• Made apple butter
• Winterized the garden
• Carved the replacement pumpkin (easiest scooping & carving pumpkin EVER)
• Roasted the (many) pumpkin seeds - half with cinnamon sugar, half with Old Bay

Now I'm chilly for no good reason and am contemplating hot chocolate. Because I can.

Hope those in the MidAtlantic and New England are hanging in there!