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frustration

frustration

you know, all i want to do is donate my baby's cord blood so that someone, somewhere, might benefit. it seems such a colossal waste to just chuck it when experimental therapies help people out there (like the little boy whose father i met weeks ago at Giant) live longer.

yet it seems like no one is collecting it except in certain hospitals in the local area. so far, the nat'l marrow network says i can call cryobank and get a kit – no charge for the kit if it is for donation purposes. that may be the only way i can go, although i am wondering whether i will be charged by my doctor for collecting the stuff (although big deal if they do, i suppose.) damn! fairfax hospital only does it for fairfax, and holy cross it appears only does it for holy cross.

apparently, everyone does it a bit differently, and so it is an administrative nightmare to try and collect from different hospitals. hello? i thought medicine was a more precise science?

you say it's your birthday?

you say it's your birthday?

well, mine was sunday. and i got to have it in the happiest place on earth, walt disney world. lemme tell you, it is tough returning to 20 degree cold when you have spent several days in the 80s. but here i am.

anyway, my birthday started out with me throwing up my dinner from the night before. (i know, too much sharing, right?) see, when you are pregnant, you have a large appetite, but at this stage, there is not much room for food since the baby is mashing up against everything, including your stomach. so at 1:30am, the deluge.

in the a.m. i felt a bit better. i got a wonderful Tigger watch and a T-shirt with Belle on it saying “i'm with the beast” (hee hee hee) from BS and BS, not to mention birthday hugs and kisses from them and my pals jacks and anya, who joined us on this trip. BC shared the fact that it was my birthday at the Port Orleans food court, and next thing you know it, the OMG-sized chef came out and made the whole place sing happy birthday to me. but i was definitely sleep deprived from the night before. so we went to the magic kingdom. i got a button that announced that today was my birthday. complete strangers began wishing me a happy birthday. and promptly, when we stopped at a bench to sit, a bird shit on my head. yes, you read that correctly. he hit my hair and my one and only dry clean only outfit. i know, i know, it is supposed to be good luck. but you know – when you are not feeling well, and you have two little girls who have to go to the bathroom, and a bird shits on your head… you just feel like a cloud waiting to rain.

fortunately, i bucked up after a trip to the Tiki Room. i really liked the Buzz Lightyear ride – it wasn't there 10 years ago when i last visited The Mouse. and i got hugged by Pooh and Tigger, which, for those of you who know me is a big deal 🙂 jacks and anya got me a wonderfully cute pooh mug, too. so the day picked up considerably once i had my little cry.

after a nap and a shower (and a good pipe – oh, wait, that's not my story, that's Curious George), i felt 1000 times better. sure, it monsooned and there was a tornado warning, but we dropped BC off at the Neverland Club (no, NOT michael jackson's house but a little daycare party for little ones with a peter pan theme) and went to have a birthday dinner at narcoosee's, a Grand Floridian restaurant where we dined when we were on our honeymoon. the place is on the water, and we timed it so that we could see the Magic Kingdom fireworks while we ate. it was lovely.

and, jersey girl that i am, i was really happy because BS then took me to the game room, where i promptly whupped his ass in pinball (a tradition – ever since we dated, we have been going out to play pinball, although we haven't done it in a very long while.) we picked up BC and anya from the Neverland Club, along with jack's dad (who came to visit), and all crashed.

like i said. it picked up considerably after the bird shit. i am one lucky chick.

life during wartime

life during wartime

there are days when i wonder whether my psyche has ever been the same and will ever be the same since 9/11. there is this wacky rush of adrenaline i still feel when i encounter things that aren't quite normal; and yet i feel like i am supposed to learn to accept these things as normal when they simply are not.

today, i drove downtown for a meeting. as i went south on the GW Parkway, i noticed a ton of traffic sitting, waiting to get on to the Roosevelt Bridge. so i cut around and went further south and crossed over the Memorial Bridge. i followed independence to 15th street. seemed like a good enough place to cross over to constitution ave., i thought. a few blocks later, everyone on constitution was diverted by police off towards pennsylvania ave. the entire area around the Dept of Justice was completely blocked off by tons, and i do mean tons, of police cars. now, pre-9/11, i would probably have not thought anything of it. but, as i turned onto penn, i noticed many more cop cars around the building, some with racks of weapons on top of the trunk area.

all those guns.

there are days when i feel like this whole area is under siege and things will never be the same ever. and i feign normalcy with every fiber of my being because i believe so strongly that my kids deserve nothing less than a calm world. it wears me out. but when they are old enough to notice guns all over the place, when they are old enough to realize that the water and food supplies we have downstairs are not simply “in case we lose power,” well, that will be a sad day, indeed. i even freaked out today because i missed my turn off 395 and ended up in the pentagon parking lot. all i kept thinking was, OMG, i am not meaning to trespass. i really, really am not an intruder. i just want to go home and made a wrong turn, like a zillion other tourists who end up here. only now, there are people with guns all over the place. and i am really lost.

my psyche needs a rest.

greater love hath no daddy

greater love hath no daddy

BS has had a tough schedule over the past 2 months. besides a challenging full-time job, he has been taking a class that meets 2xweek and requires homework virtually every night as part of his program. less time with BC and me, less time for himself. it has been a cranky time.

yesterday, he took his final for that class, so today, he wanted to make a concerted effort to spend time with BC and me. bully for him, i say. after we finished running a.m. errands, he wanted to surprise BC with a visit to a local outdoor ice rink. understand that neither BC nor BS can ice skate. i am probably the only one out of the three who can; but as i am 7 months pregnant, ice skating is not exactly a recommended activity for me. we arrived at the rink. its fairly expensive to do this – BC and BS together cost $17 for the experience. but we figured, ah, BC will skate and hold onto BS's hand, who will not skate but merely walk on the ice.

to quote John McLaughlin: “WRONG.”

they would not allow BS to walk on the ice. he would need skates. BS, as i mentioned above, can't skate. the odds of him pulling BC down were tremendous. and i thought, oh shit, i will have the joy of taking them BOTH to the ER. but BS is a determined kind of fellow, for those of you who don't know him. he saw that his little girl really wanted to skate. he knew he had started something he couldn't really pull away from. “i'll skate!” he said.

and they did. well, sort of. he held on to the rail, and BC held onto his hand. they literally dragged themselves once all the way around the rink. it was a slow trek, but BC was so thrilled to be on real ice skates, holding her daddy's hand, and trudging along. after once around, tho, the thrill was gone and she decided that she had had enough for her first intro to skating. “i want to learn to skate. i want to practice every day,” she said. (first i will have to find a local rink that isn't thousands of miles away 😉

but i was proud of both of them: her for trying something new, him for just doing what he had to do. which is so very like him, anyway 🙂 $17 is a lot to pay for a short experience like that, of course, and it rankled me slightly, cheapskate that i am; but when we brought the skates back in, the guy who i think runs the place saw us not complaining about the price or anything and he gave us $8 back. “because you are nice people and aren't complaining,” he said.

hey. didja hear that? finally getting rewarded for being a nice person.

grammys is not your grandma; its the grammys.

grammys is not your grandma; its the grammys.

i am still watching the grammys, which i have taped on my VCR. thus, i do not have full comments to it. my best pal murph wrote a wonderful e-mail on the topic, and if she allows me, i will post it here. in the meantime, tho, here is my response to her e-mail, for your reading pleasure.

my husband taped the proceedings, and i am slowly, but surely, plowing through. sadly, i missed simon and garfunkel reunited thanks to the fact that BS forgot to start the tape at the beginning of the ceremony; i would have liked the drama of wondering whether artie would poke paul's eyes out. i haven't gotten to the one thing i am looking forward to, the bruce/elvis/dave grohl tribute to joe strummer – i am saving that until my beloved spouse can break away from class to watch it with me.

i imagine it is difficult to manage the sound at an event where you have to go through a billion different set-ups on stage. nevertheless, i am quite appalled at the crappy sound, the terrible mixes, that i witnessed thus far. what i marvel at even more is the fact that some of the PRESENTERS are even miked poorly. granted, robin williams just started his extemporaneous rant sans mike, but still – when handed a mike, he sounded EVEN WORSE. how is that possible? i used to work shows like this, albeit slightly smaller venues, but even so: presenters are not difficult to mike.

i admit i cried during the bee gees' speech. i wasn't merely crying, however, because of the fact that maurice gibb is gone (although that is sad and i will not make fun of it.) i cried because they had NSYNC cover Bee Gees works. now, laugh if you will – and we probably have disagreed over this one for years, you and i, murph – but i just adore old Bee Gees material. “to love somebody” is one of the best pining-away-for-the-fjords song i know. and finally, almost 30 years after the fact, i am willing to admit publicly that the guitar riff in “staying alive” is absolutely incredible. to have NSYNC even go NEAR any of these songs was too much for me to bear. fast forward, please.

faith hill. sadly, i heard that. she was actually terribly, horribly off (i think my baby went berserk when he heard it, as he started kicking my insides as if to say, “mommy, please, PLEASE make that noise stop!!” poor thing, he is now at a stage of development where he can hear things outside the womb. i imagine he is compiling a list of the terrible injuries i provided to him while in utero, and listening to faith hill AND those @#$%#$% opportunistic and annoying dixie chicks will be near the top of the list, i fear.) and if her gold dress had been any shorter, i could be making a very, very off-color joke about her starring in a new james bond flick, a cross between Goldfinger and Octopussy. and, as a nice MOT girl, i will leave that at that.

some random thoughts.
1) if avril lavigne is considered punk, then what would that make black flag? (and who would you rather have on your side in a dark alley?)
2) does erikah badu realize that, in the scheme of musical history, she is less than the speck on the hemmorhoid of the amoeba compared to BB King, who is the friggin horse upon which said amoeba rides? bless his gracious heart. if i had been BB, i think i would have taken lucille and el kabonged ms badu's ass.
3) WARNING: Girly moment ahead. gosh, dave grohl is cuuuute. why the HELL does he have to have that chick, i think her name was jordan, on his arm? and why did he have to tell the world that he wrote the entire album about her? eek. jordan is simply not muse material. meow. Okay: Girly moment over.
4) why, oh WHY do i suspend my belief, year after year, wondering whether the grammys will actually be awarded to those who earned them that year? kinda sorta like charlie brown, running up to that damn football again, only to have lucy pull it.

ahh, bruce. even he sounded off to me. and you know i worship at the altar to bruce, jersey shore girl that i am. i would listen to him, off or on, so i guess you cannot really go by me on that one. i would probably extend that courtesy to very few others, namely sir paul, elvis the c, and pete townshend. hopefully, the tribute to strummer will make it all right. but you know, i looked out at the sea of talent (!) in the audience. i kept thinking, ok, when will peter gabriel play? when will my man elvis the c get a solo shot? why oh WHY do i have to even consider eminem an artist? and why does that one song by vanessa carlton that sounds like the bridge in a bad (is this redundant?) Lifetime movie keep getting nominated?

so many questions. so little pepcid-AC.

omg

omg

i am looking at an Ebay auction where the seller, clearly a grandmother, mentions the name of her granddaughter, the original owner of the clothes being sold.

the child's name? valkyrie grace. what the HELL were her parents thinking?

wagner much? kill da wabbit, kill da wabbit…

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