The new dumpster's here! The new dumpster's here!

And I'm in it! (name that movie reference)

It's not as big as I'd remembered, but I also remember it not being that easy to fill up. It is very, very exciting.

I have had an assignment from my therapist to go around the house and simply bag up papers and put them downstairs, to start getting rid of that clutter. It isn't hard, but she did say to just bag 'em up, period, and I am doing some sorting (garbage, recycling, not paper but I know where to put it). I am thrilled that this is getting done. Yeah!

I recently realized that I don't need to keep bags of donations upstairs, either. I had done this so that I could catalog them and have a list to just staple to the donation receipt. Well, I have a digital voice recorder, so I could just dictate into it and transcribe it upstairs at my leisure.

I had better truck these to Goodwill tomorrow so I have room for more donations from Saturday. Phew.

But--the new dumpster's here! I am so happy. (Also that they delivered it in the middle of the day, when no one was parked at the curb in front of my house, so it's right. there.)

Well that BITES.

A while ago, I bought a canopy at Fred Meyer on one of my trips to southern Oregon. I think it was about $20. Since it had not been that long since our hot hot hot camping trip to Lake Siskiyou, where my sister had brought my dad's pop-up canopy, I thought it would be handy, and the price was right.

Well, a month or so later, I tried to put it together. By myself, as I often do. The top is like a flattened pyramid. As I tried to pop the last piece in place of the top, a part opposite it popped out of place. After many repetitions of this, I started taping the pieces in place. Then they started separating in the middle rather than at the corners. Taped the middles, and a corner popped free of its tape. I just could not get it to go together.

I called the number on the instructions, wondering if there was something I just didn't know about, and the gal was very quick to say that they'd be happy to ship me a new one. Huh? Oh, OK. She also implied that it was no big deal to ship me one with netting, so I agreed, thinking that sounded handy. This would still be the 19-piece put-it-together version.

Well, in April, we had a very small outdoor party for Graham's birthday. It being April, inclement weather threatened. I noticed that our local sporting goods store was selling pop-up shelters for $70 (or was it $80?). That seemed pretty darned good to me, especially since I hadn't ended up spending much at all on the party. I bought it and set it up almost entirely by myself. (Needed a little help opening the top all the way, and then raising it up.) Wow, what a difference. So much easier than the multipart ones. And it came in a handy rolling case!

(I'll get to the biting part in just a sec. Hang with me.)

Thus it was time to sell the screened shelter. It was still in its box, sealed. Presumably fits together just fine and so forth. I listed it on Craig's List as a gazebo with screens for $20 and instantly got 6 replies, all slavering over it. I hadn't been able to find a good photo of what it should look like, so I looked some more--and was shocked to find "gazebo screened" brought up photos of wrought-iron fancy backyard permanent fixtures.

I sent out an email to all 6 interested parties, explaining that this was different (and including a link to something somewhat like it), and 5 responded quickly that they were still interested.

I selected one and we set up a time for her to come. No show. (I should have cut my losses and gone to the next one.) Being a forgiving and sometimes forgetful type, I contacted her again and asked if she was still interested. She was, and gave her cell number. Who cares? I thought. It's sitting in front of my garage; she can just come get it whenever, and leave the cash in the mailbox, as I'd told her. Well, a little while went by and I started to get anxious, and said she needed to pick it up by noon today, Tuesday.

"No problem!" she responded. Where was I, again? (it was included in my last email to her.) I sent the info yet again. Went home for lunch at 1PM and was dismayed to see it still there. Came out at 2PM and saw it was gone. Hooray! Checked the mailbox. Two grimy $5s in there. Not $20--$10. WTF?

I still had her cell phone # handy, and called her. She says she put 4 $5s in there, no explanation for why there are 2 there now. This is the kind of mailbox you drop stuff into, not reach forward into. No way they could blow away, and she agreed. I told her I felt a bit ripped off, and she said she didn't feel too great, either. And that's it.

I think it bites. Oh, well, at least I don't have that huge thing in my garage still. But fuck! I wanted the $20 back that I had paid. That's all. I should have chosen someone else.

Moral: Listen to your gut. Choose the least flaky sounding person. And give up earlier.

Do you ever...

...check your blog to see what's happening in your own life? And feel disappointed that there's no update?

Graham's room is coming along but not finished yet. My latest obsession is finding all the damned pieces to his puzzles so we can give them away complete. Two puzzles left, missing one piece each. The upside: I convinced him to give away 4 peg puzzles (shapes don't interlock but are lifted out of their places by a little peglike handle) to a little girl who had a borrowed one that needed returning. Yay!

And I delivered 10 bags of donations to Salvation Army today. There are 3 more that need cataloguing and then they can be on their way, too. Yippee! I'm getting my garage back. Maybe I can set up my fake hockey net on the back of the garage door soon, so I can practice my shots. Ree!

And... I get my car back today! How long has it been? Wait, don't tell me.

Organizing is such a lot of work.

Don't get me wrong; I know it's worthwhile. But damn, it's a lot of work to get things organized, especially when your tendency is to stack things on flat surfaces.

I got a set of shelving set up last night, to hold Graham's toys in the basement. I put it in the space where there was a simple desk. (I had planned to sew down there. Since it hasn't happened in 8 years, I'm thinking it's not going to.)

I cleaned off the desk and cleared out its drawer and this will be Graham's desk for now. I'll get a set of rolling files for his papers and teach him how to file his own stuff. I'll move it upstairs when I have room for it.

Graham's room is slowly emerging. I can't believe how long it takes! After I sort out clothes and obvious trash (thousands of tissues), there is a set of random stuff that needs sorting through. I've labeled two drawers "small toys" and one "small stuffed toys" to store them downstairs. He is choosing to donate a bunch of stuff and decided he didn't want his Brio-type trains nor the Lincoln Logs. I sold them for $15 and decided to give him the money, as they were his (I said I'd take $5 for my trouble but either he didn't want to or was too busy bugging his eyes out at $15 cash).

Pretty soon now, he'll have a whole new room and I'll have a cleaner, lighter house. Nice.

A dumpster! A beautiful, wonderful dumpster!

My local garbage/recycling company is delivering a 2-cu-yard dumpster to my street next Thursday for a week. Oh, joy! I am so happy!

Who ever thought a dumpster could make anyone so happy? Well... it's going to haul away garbage and recycling from cleaning out my house, and it's free.

Yes, free. ACI will do this once per 12-mo period for no charge. I have no idea why. I used it once before when I pulled the carpeting out of the two bedrooms.

Yippee!

Anyone need a hairshirt?

While looking for a solution to my prickly wool problem (a shawl I just made), I came across this. Too funny.

Red is FUN.

As I started undressing after our (crappy) Green game last night, Doris from Red popped her head into our dressing room and asked if anyone could stay and play in Red, as they had a Maybe who wasn't coming after all. I said, "Uh, I could" and she was so grateful (how sweet! without even seeing me play).

I ended up playing opposite Jena and Andrea! Yikes. They were in their usual form, Andrea slapping hard goal shots from the blue line and Jena whipping past me with the puck as if I were a ghost. But it was damned fun to play. I ended up in a forward line of Steph and Sue C, and skipped a rotation when we had a penalty, for which the offensive coach apologized. Heck, it was fine to get a break, as I'd played 7 minutes continuously at the end of our game after one of our D rotation hurt her back!

I had been afraid that Red would be thousands of times faster and way cleaner. At least last night, it wasn't. It was definitely faster (in a mostly fun way) and nicer play, but there were still some mistakes made that made me feel at home. :) And I learned a lot! I am really feeling good about trying out for Red this fall. And will need many soft shoulders if I don't make it, after having a taste of it now. Yippee!

ToffeeCrack Junkie

I have tasted the Toffee Crack, and it is good. Oh my.

If only Fantasia would open a closer site! Or perhaps it's for the best. At least I now know I can stop for one on the way home from hockey periodically (never saw the good side of Milpitas before)...

-clunk-

Three times I've been ready and willing to take G to see Over The Hedge. Three times he's had behavior that prompted canceling it, including yesterday.

And today? It is no longer playing. And Cars is still too new to see with passes (which is what I have).

For Pete's sake! I actually wanted to see it!

Update: I found it playing at the Metreon SF which amazingly, these passes are good for. Road trip!

More parenting notes

(may be quite dull for y'all, but I just wanted to note this down so I can refer to it again)

From today:

"He can hold out longer than you and you just give up."

She had me make a list of behaviors that I want changed, and a list of consequences. Here are my lists:

Behaviors That Must Change
Hitting
Kicking
Talking back
Yelling
Leaving toys out
Saying "No"
Not doing what you're told

Consequences
Timout--6 minutes on a chair, Mom does not talk to you
Favorite toy goes away for a week
Lose ALL stories for that night
No art at home that night
No videos or movies that night

(consequences are everything he loves to do)

She is emphatic that I not talk to G, at all, when he's in timeout. G will try to engage with me and my not engaging is crucial (and one of the hardest things for me). If he gets up, I wordlessly lead him back and gently put him back there. If he gets up again, I keep doing it and not start the timer till he's clearly submitted. "You'll know when he's submitted."

I'm to go over both lists with him. When he's in a timeout and the timer dings, I go to him and ask him what he did that he's in a timeout. He must remember it *by himself* and apologize. We just did this (just now) and it was excruciating for him.

The chair for timeouts is to be in the middle of the room with nothing in reach (he leaned over and grabbed something from the table last week).

The timer is to be out of eyeshot for him. (I'd been leaving it in front of him so he can see how long he has left, and can bloody well stay in the chair if it's only a minute!)

"Boundaries make him fight back, but then he'll feel safe." He hasn't had enough boundaries.

No raising my voice at him. (another hard one!) Don't wait till I'm angry. He gets a consequence right away, before it completely irritates me, on the first behavior.

I'm also removing every toy from his room but a chosen 10 and moving them downstairs. He is living in chaos and it "makes him feel unsafe." (and it makes me crazy)

He gets 10 toys for the week. He can exchange up to 10 of them each week for new toys. This includes puzzles and dress-up toys but not books.

The toys he doesn't tend to choose after a while, I can get rid of guiltlessly.

All he will have in his room is a dresser, bed, shelves, and a desk. We need to get him a desk, as he doesn't have one. I'll be teaching him to keep his desk clean as well as his room.

One of the behaviors is moving slowly. This is one the list because I tell him to move faster and he doesn't--"Not doing what you're told." If it makes him late to school because he chooses not to move faster, then he has to tell the attendance office why he's late. (This will also be hard for me, as I have a lot of guilt wrapped up in bringing him late.)

If he is slow getting ready for bed, he loses his stories. If he already lost his stories that night, he loses them for the next night.

And there is no negotiating. I am telling him the rules. Period.

Phew. And this comes with no salary?!?

Sometimes it's hard to speak up.

One thing I've noticed lately is that folks who work in food services are not very well versed in the health rules. Or if they are, they ignore them all the time. I was at a fast food restaurant and the guy kept touching his hair (ecch) and not washing his hands. I also never see anyone even wiping their hands after they take money and before they touch the food.

But yesterday I finally spoke up. We were in line at Trader Joe's and the cashier kept sneezing. Granted, she pulled her t-shirt up over her nose each time, but the final straw was when I saw her blowing her nose into her t-shirt collar. When it was our turn, as she reached for our food, I said, "Could you change your gloves first, please?" She did it, but she acted like I was a germphobe for asking.

Uh, you really should be WASHING your hands. My request is not out of line.

Fortunately, this experience is not the norm at our Trader Joe's.

Why is it so hard, though? It seems like the rules are pretty damned clear. Hell, they're plastered in each fast-food restaurant's bathroom, just about.

sigh.

SHUDDER

I'm a pretty calm person around bugs and so forth. I routinely pick up spiders in a tissue and dump them outside (once. if they come back inside, they go for a swim in the porcelain throne. ya gets one chance, one.) and am fine with swatting flies and so forth.

But this? This had me shuddering. Ugh.

Earned my geek badge last weekend

A friend has passed on a Mac G4 to me, from a friend of hers who just wants someone to figure out its booting problems and get her email off of it. I let it sit in my living room for months and finally got it together last weekend to hook up my monitor and a borrowed keyboard and the piece of crap puck mouse that came with my G3 to check it out.

It would start to boot (OS 8.something!), then stop. I managed to get the CD drive drawer to come out (not easily!) and got my OS 9 CD in there. It started to boot under OS 9, and then stopped, about the same place. Hm. The disk that was in the drive was marked "DW 9," which I assumed was DiskWarrior. Interesting clue. I opened it up (love that side-opening thing in these machines!), used my compressed air to blow out lots of dust, and then my sights settled on the memory.

Hey, my mind said. Sometimes memory can be bad and cause all sorts of problems. So I popped out the leftmost chip, closed it up, and... Voila! It booted up just fine.

So, now to get the data off. There was a copy of Roxio Toast on it, but to my disappointment, the CD drive was not a CD-R. I hooked up my firewire CD-R drive, pushed the button to turn it on, and it went in and stayed in, not feeling right at all. Ugh.

Since this was a drive I'd assembled (Other World Computing sold them as CD drives and enclosures and DIY directions for putting them together), I was pretty comfortable taking it apart again. 5 screws later, I found that one of the plastic tabs holding the on button in place had broken.

Would you believe I couldn't find a drop of Super Glue in my entire house? I still don't know how that's possible. So here I am in my pjs, wanting to just finish this thing, and no Super Glue.

Finally, ping! I remember that we have a bottle of New Skin. This is a band-aid-less bandage thing that I used on a cut of Graham's a while back. I had confirmed when I bought it that it was just Super Glue, really (cyanoacrylate glue)--perhaps a sterile version of it.

I painted it onto the part, put it all back together, and yeah! It worked just fine. Hah!

More updates

I realize I've been updating less and less lately. I'm going to try to have an update every other day at least. And will also try not to be boring. :)

I have no idea what we did on Saturday. I think it was one of those Nothing Scheduled But Completely Busy days. Oh, we I did set up the tent and we slept there Saturday and Sunday nights. It was pretty fun!

Anyway, on Sunday, G had one of his last Soccer class/games. He did really well. I mean, not well for what I expect from him, but better than that. He has a really good instinct about facing the ball and a damned good foot (really booted it away from someone and toward the goal at one point). And he really likes it. Last time, he said he didn't like it because he got so sweaty. (snort) So this time, I made sure he got plenty of cool water for his breaks.

Then we packed up and set off for hockey. Without the portable DVD player (damn those freaking thieves! I think they got our 2nd-hand Gameboy too!), I had to be creative. Packed a bunch of Color Wonder pads and pens (thanks, Liz & Andrea!), his tape player with music tapes and books on tape, and lots of snacks. It worked--he really stayed busy the whole game. In fact, he didn't want to go back to the locker room with me afterward.

The game was really good. Our Evite had said 10 players, but 1 got stuck in the same godawful traffic we got somewhat stuck in (I got to the game about 1 min after it started), so we had to free-sub for a bit. Then she arrived and we could switch full lines, which was nice.

We dominated almost the entire game--and lost. Just didn't get it into the net. We really didn't shoot as often as the other team, I think. I'd know if one of us had managed to get a scoresheet to the game! New resolution: allow even more time to get to games on time, and make damned sure I have a score sheet for Fremont games.

That night, G started scratching his arm while falling asleep. I reached out and felt it, and it was covered with bumps. Thus began The Week Of Itching.

Note that The Week Of Itching does not belong in the month of wonderfulness. At all.

There's a new sheriff in town.

I have been talking to a therapist and today felt totally jittery. I talked about what's been going on for me, and she pointed out

Graham's not 3 any more. Time for him to act like a big boy, and for me to expect it.

Kind of a revelation. He is going to

. dress himself totally every morning
. brush his own teeth, twice a day (me only doing checks)
. set the table
. clear the table
. feed the dog twice a day
. clean the guinea pigs' cage twice a week.

I've been hassling him to get dressed, dressing him (if only his shoes & socks), brushing his teeth about once a day (when he asked), doing all the table setting/clearing, feeding the dog, and (mostly) cleaning the cage.

Times, they are a'changing.

He is also getting a timer set to get dressed in the morning and if he doesn't get dressed in time, he gets a timeout. *wow* It never occurred to me to have consequences for dawdling/distractions etc.

I feel better already! (but that could be due to the chocolate too)

June will be a month of wonderfulness.

I have decided that June will heretofore be known by all around as the month of Lovely Things Happening. In order to declare this, I have decided that yesterday was May 32 and that June 2006 starts on the 2nd this year.

Have a wonderful June, full of terrific surprises and void of disappointments!

The theft

About 2 weeks ago, I got in the car with G to take him to school, and noticed the dash showing the passenger-side door open. It was. Then I looked around and noticed several things looking odd--both openings in the dash completely empty, and the between-seats thingy open and much emptier than before.

I frantically checked the rest of the car, all the while talking wildly, with G asking age-appropriate but still maddening questions ("Who took them, Mommy?" "Are they in jail now?"). My hockey gear was all there, including my skates, which are worth more than the rest of the gear combined. G's soccer ball was there. The manual and registration for the car was there.

But many things were not. My cell phone with its brand-new, handwoven bag for the ear thingy. The electronic key for the pool, with the pool-entry card attached. Several friends' housekeys, which were only identifiable by pets' names, if at all. Also, keys to our church (only stamped with "outside door" and "office"). My East Bay Regional Parks District pass and hangtag (and the out-of-date pass and hangtag that I'd never pitched, as well as the hangtag for Laney College, Spring 2005, ditto).

It wasn't till I was packing for last weekend's trip that I found I couldn't find the portable DVD player I'd just bought in March. It worked out to maybe $30 per use. Crap! Oh, and that was when I realized they'd stolen my cassette adapter that I had been using with my iPod, as well as the iPod car charger and my car charger for the cell phone--and, ironically, the iTrip Andrea had tried SO hard to get to me and had finally managed to give me. I'd tried it twice. Buttwipes.

Then on Tuesday, I learned that my neighbor had had a theft, too. The previous night, thieves had come onto their driveway and unscrewed and stolen the lens covering the right-hand turn signal light. WTF?

The police at today's accident confirmed that there has been an increase in burglaries all over our town. Yuck.

(again, counting my blessings that

• My iPod wasn't in the car
  
• The car wasn't broken into--either I left it unlocked, or they managed to flip the lock through the 1" gap in the window (that day was hot)
  
• My fanny pack wasn't in the car (which, like leaving it unlocked, is rare but not impossible)
  
• They didn't look in the ashtray, which contained some inexpensive pearl jewelry but also a not-valuable diamond ring that has profound sentimental value)
  

Counting my blessings... again

I was driving G to school (barely on time, again), had just made the turn onto the 2-lanes-each-way street near ours, and a woman pulled out from the curb to make a U-turn across the street (HUH?). I had time to hit the horn and then brake like crazy. We still hit. Argh.

No injuries, of course, but how freaking annoying. She admitted it was her fault the second she jumped out of the car (it was).

Like our theft 2 weeks ago, it could have been plenty worse. She or I could have been going faster, have a worse angle, God forbid ptui ptui ptui she could have hit G's side and injured him, etc. Oh, and she could have claimed it was my fault. Or a car behind us could have hit us.

But, like the theft 2 weeks ago, which also could have been plenty worse, it is just freaking annoying.

Dammit. I'd like to stop counting my blessings.