Sunday, July 6, 2014

Questions, Outfits and the night I heard the words: "Run, run so I can shoot you like a dog..."

Happy Sunday!  I just had to join in the link up fun!

1. Have you ever walked out of a movie? 

Nope.

We almost had to walk out of Brave because a certain four year old was terrified of the bear (the fact that I'd agreed to sit in the front row of the theater probably didn't help)... but we made it through and it became one of her favorite movies!

It probably helps that I usually get a chance to go to a movie roughly once every 2-3 years... and so they tend to be carefully chosen because they are so, so rare!


2. What do you most often use for blogs and blogging: desktop, laptop, tablet, or phone?

 The only device I have that works for blogging is a laptop and so that's where all of my posts come from...  but I really can't imagine trying to type a post on something that didn't have a keyboard.

The laptop in question...

3. Have you ever had anything stolen from you? 

I could chose so many different instances for this one.  There was the time when I was working for a non-profit in Berkeley and someone smashed my car window and stole my rugby bag which had socks and a sports bra in it, waiting to be washed.  There was the time when I forgot my purse in the car (right outside work during the middle of the day) after flying back from the polygraph/psych exam right after I'd been hired by the CIA and someone smashed my car window and stole my purse and the six hundred dollars cash for travel expenses that I'd been given at the end of that particular exhausting trip, that very, very unfortunately was in it... The person then used my credit cards to go to Jack in the Box in the minutes before I managed to have them cancelled.  There was Paul's bike which was stolen out of our garage a little over a week ago.

A trip to Cape Agulhas during my semester abroad.
The time that stands out though had less to do with what was stolen and more to do with what came after and comes from the semester I spent at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.  One night my roommates and I saw flashing lights outside and walked out onto the deck to find out that someone had broken into my boyfriend at the times car.  They'd stolen his rugby cleats, some other shoes and a pair of my sandals that were super old and rather gross since I wore them after I took my cleats off at rugby practice.

At first I hung back out of sight.  I was already in my pajamas and there was a huge group of security people and police officers who had responded when a neighbor heard the breaking glass and hit the panic button on their security system.  But there was so much yelling that I could't understand (because they were yelling in Afrikaans and my Afrikaans was mostly limited to our coach yelling at us when we weren't playing well... I can still say "you played like @#$#" in Afrikaans...and know a handful of other colorful phrases that I won't repeat here for the sake of my readers... which is especially funny to me now since we only had one loss the entire season.) that I went down the stairs (as everyone told me to "Get back inside!") and stopped at the landing in my flannel embarassingly floral PJs and asked loudly over the shouts: "What's going on?!?!?"

I just had a feeling in the pit of my stomach that couldn't quite be ignored.  Something was off.  Something just didn't feel right.  They'd caught the man and had him there, first pinned up against the fence and then at the center of a group, although the picture in my head is blurry now, eleven year later and I don't think I could really see through the crowd of people from various security companies and police who'd arrived, although I thought that he was begging them for something.  Still maybe I only remember that because of what I found out later.

When I came outside and asked my question, they quickly loaded the man into the police car and all the cars with their flashing lights drove away, leaving our street in darkness again.

The next day I pestered my boyfriend until he told me what they'd been saying. He didn't want to tell me.  Finally I found out that they'd roughed the man up, slammed him against the bars of our driveway gate, and then they'd let him go and were yelling "run, run so I can shoot you like a dog!" when I'd come down the stairs and asked what was going on... all over a few pairs of worthless old shoes.

4. Do you identify as a member of a particular ethnic group? 

Not really.  I'm a little bit of this and a little bit of that, with parts of my Dad's family being here since the revolutionary war, with stories of an Indian princess that I was raised on (and a faded name on a very old family tree) thrown in.

Since I have blue yes and I can get very, very tan (even with sunscreen) and was a lifeguard through high school and college I got lots of "what exactly are you?" questions in college (which to me always seemed like such a weird question to ask a complete stranger).  I could say "Irish, Scottish, English, German" which would sum up most of my background, with most of the other countries in Europe thrown in if I go back in the giant geneology binder with information my great grandmother passed on to us and that my Dad put together for a family union over a decade ago.

But usually I just think of myself as American.  Since I'm a little of this and a little of that it seems kind of silly to try to claim to "be" anything else!

5. Do you abstain from meat on Fridays? 

Usually.  In other words, when I wake up and manage to remember it's Friday before we preparing something that involves meat (or eating something that has meat in it... usually involving leftovers) than yes.

However on days when I end up stumbling around the house not remembering it's Friday and eat meat before remembering I do something else instead (usually involving a rosary).

6. Seen anything weird lately?

Pin pointing one weird thing around here is kind of... difficult.  In fact a week without some sort of weirdness is... weird... so I may not be the best judge of these things.

The most interesting and not quite normal part of my day today came when I had Patrick strapped to my back and was rocking Mae forward and backward in the stroller (which by the way is the best solution we've found so far to keep her happy during Mass) in the narthex and she got very excited and started pointing to the light above us while saying "No rainbow!  No rainbow!  No rainbow!" and making a circle with her finger around the light.  I crouched down next to her and assured her that I understood she didn't see a rainbow and she smiled happily, occasionally repeating the phrase and pointing to the light over the next hour.

I think I'm going to talk to her OT again about getting her vision tested with a specialist after this latest conversation.  We've had some other moments that had us questioning if her vision had some abnormalities.  She likes to stand on books and look down at them and sometimes finds it easier to answer questions about things she's looking at after looking at pictures or objects from across the room... and she refused to watch anything on TV until about a month ago or would only watch Dora out of the corner of her eye (Dora used to be her favorite and could at least buy me half an hour to make dinner) for over a year.

She's really not a fan of screens at all these days, and one of her therapists recently suggested that screens might bother her because she might be seeing the individual pixels.  That added to her comment about rainbows today makes me wonder exactly what her view of the world looks like!

I'm not sure if that qualifies as weird, but it's what's on my mind at the moment.

Speaking of being at Mass it's time for What I Wore Sunday.  Today actually went pretty well.  I had Paul take Sadie in to Mass and stayed out in the narthex with our two youngest and that actually worked out this morning.  Patch fell asleep on my back and Mae didn't have any screaming fits... and that makes today a success!

I wore a very stretchy non-maternity dress that I got years ago at Target to Mass today, with a snood and Patch strapped to my back:


Patch wore a pair of overalls from Thred Up with a Mickey Mouse t-shirt under it:



And what did Mae wear?

If you guessed "the Dora dress that you wash almost every night" you'd be correct.

And this was the best picture I got of her today since she was always headed somewhere to do something:


Sadie wore a hand me down dress that I absolutely love and had a blast playing with one of the little girls she's been playing with after Mass each week at the park:



For more WIWS head over to FLAP!  For more Answer me this check out Catholic All Year!

8 comments:

  1. Your Dad's side came over about 170 earlier than the Revolutionary War babe. And that is if there is no native blood in you.

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  2. You're totally right! And Sadie would probably die if I didn't mention the native blood part! She gets dreamy eyed every time we see anything with Pocohontas on it!

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  3. Are you using an Ergo Baby carrier? That's my go to when out with my kids on my own, but I wasn't sure if I could still use it now that I'm pregnant again.

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  4. You worked for the CIA???!!!! Was it a good experience? I always wondered if I should look into employment with them or the FBI, but then, I always somehow find something else and forget all about it.
    If you can talk about it, I'd love to see a post about what your work was.
    And that last picture of Sadie: Oh WOW, what a beauty!!!! Precious girl. Glad you got such a lovely shot of her at this age.
    God bless. ~ Bonnie

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  5. Hi Lynn-

    It is an Ergo! And it just barely fit under my bump! Today was the first time I tried it on my back!

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  6. Hi Bonnie-

    I never actually went to work for them. I was hired by the Clandestine Service and went through 13 months of interviews with a couple of trips back to D.C. for interviews and polygraphs (I do have a few stories from that!). The month Paul and I got engaged my conditional offer of employment was revoked, so I never went to work! It sort of worked out perfectly!

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  7. And I just googled because I thought I remembered writing about it at one point and I found the post! It's right here! http://awomansplaceis.blogspot.com/2013/07/how-we-met-part-1.html

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  8. You go girl! I was able to ERGO one of my kids during late pregnancy (he wasn't walking at the time, so it was a necessity), but boy, that about did me in. (It did help speed labor along when the time came, however!)

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