Category: The Adventures Of Cynical Woman

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A couple of weeks ago, I became so evil even I couldn’t stand myself. Yelling, snapping, having meltdowns. I was just foul. I’d had several nights of insomnia, but that by itself wasn’t enough to justify how absolutely miserable I was. I was so furious over the mess in the garage I went and renovated the place.  I, who had never picked up power tools before, painted and put up peg board, and then installed a rack of shelves. By MYSELF!  And I made several trips to the dump, the thrift store, the hardware store. Some days, I’d start on that garage at 8:00 AM and keep going right through the day until about 8:00 PM, when I’d finally collapse, drenched in sweat and absolutely filthy from all the cleaning and scrubbing and painting.  A few days, Pixie was able to convince me to take her to the pool, where she’d swim and I’d float around in my floaty chair and just stew.  I was mad at everyone and everything.  I told the Hubster to not say one word to me about the garage. I was going to do whatever the hell I wanted to do with it.  Fortunately, the man stayed out of my way for most of it.  And then there were these moments when I’d feel the whole world just drop out from beneath my feet.

Yeah, something was wrong with me.

I knew something was wrong, too, and it was affecting the kids. So I made an appointment, went in and told my doctor that if he has seen me the week before, he would have declared me rabid and had me put down. After a bit of discussion, he concluded I might be starting menopause. When I told him about the yelling and snapping and renovating of the garage, he said, “So you’re a bit manic…”

And then he gave me a prescription to take the edge off my mood.

I have to admit, that prescription works. We’re waiting on blood work to see how my hormone levels are doing. In the meantime, I’m on a very mild medication that seems to have nipped all my stress in the bud. I’m not a brain dead zombie, nor am I comfortably numb. I just feel really relaxed and that’s good because now I can finally spend time with the Hubster and kids without worrying about whether or not I’ll end up on the 11PM news.

I’ll let you know how things go. In the meantime, I need to go replace my couch. I chewed a few holes through it before the meds kicked in.

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Meet Magic Mike! He’s the instructor for the 5:30AM TRX class Mich and I have started taking at the Y. That’s right, 5:30AM. The class is very strenuous and I’m not sure Mich will ever truly forgive me. Why she puts up with me, I will never know.

In addition to the TRX classes, Mich and I have also been going to deep water aerobics at 6AM a few times a week. And I’ve been biking 15-25 miles on Sunday. And I manage to sneak in karate classes at least once a week.

All that exercise. And yet somehow my butt is still expanding.

I know it’s a combination of stress, change-of-life hormones (i.e. menopause), and bad habits. And these three factors just feed on each other to make things worse. I’m not sure yet how I’m going to get a handle on it all. The exercise does help, but I need to be very careful about what I eat, and that’s something I just don’t do when I’m stressed. And of course, the hormone surges that come with menopause just jack that stress level right on up, and when that happens I turn straight to comfort food…

The Hubster tells me not to worry about it. He thinks I look fine. And I love him for saying that. But my jeans are saying something else entirely. So I’m going to do something about it, I just don’t know what yet. Perhaps Magic Mike will be able to magic the fat off my butt at the next TRX class.

Assuming I don’t hang myself on my straps first.

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Oh, this week’s webcomic is no joke. Princess went off to Girl Scout camp last week, leaving me with only one child to deal with, so I took advantage of the lightened workload to tackle something that’s been bugging the crud out of me for a while now. Namely, the disaster known as my garage.

You see, for the last few months, we’ve been traveling to my mother-in-law’s house to help clean the place up. We’ve spent entire weekends getting rid of junk, clearing out the basement and attic, and tackling the overgrown yard. It’s been for a good cause, but it’s been exhausting. And every time we do this, we come home with a bunch of stuff from Mom’s house that ends up shoved into whatever free space we can find in our house. Well, after we came home from the last trip, yours truly had a total melt-down over the fact that we were putting so much time and effort into cleaning someone else’s house while our own house was rapidly turning into a dump.

Well, I finally decided to do something about it. Hubster wanted to do it himself, I know, but his long work hours have pretty much left the man with only enough free time on the weekends to tackle the lawn and buy the groceries. Thankfully, after seeing how badly I was frothing at the mouth over this issue, he decided to stay out of my way and let me do whatever the hell I wanted to do. And what I wanted to do was start with the worst disaster area in our house, the garage.

On Monday last week, Pixie and I ventured into the garage and began our work by dismantling an old stationary bike that had been sitting in there for years. I had to hunt for the manual online to figure out how to take the bike apart, and in the end had to ask folks on Twitter for help. But once I had instructions, Pixie and I were able to take that sucker apart and get it loaded into the car and take it away to the local thrift store. Then came the hauling out of stuff – boxes, trash, tools, more boxes, more trash, more tools. We lined the front yard with the entire contents of the garage, just so I could see exactly what we had in there, what could be thrown out, what could be recycled, and what we actually needed to keep. It took me five hours to haul everything out. Then a thunderstorm started and it took me 15 minutes to toss everything back in, leaving the garage looking worse than before. But at least I knew what I was dealing with now.

The next day, I hit the hardware stores and bought pegboard, screws, and paint. I spray-painted the pegboard bright colors and then hauled everything out of the garage again and started sorting. Stuff that was never, not ever supposed to go back in the garage went onto our wrap-around porch, where it stayed until I could haul it away to the dump/thrift store/recycling center. Stuff that needed to stay got cleaned up and organized into its appropriate category – toys, tools, bikes, etc. When the garage was empty, I swept it out. When it was swept clean, I put up the first section of pegboard. By the time that was done, it was dark and I had to haul everything back in again, except for the stuff I left on the porch.

And this process of hauling out, sorting, cleaning, sweeping, and putting up pegboard went on for the rest of the week. At least once every day while Pixie and I cleaned the garage, someone stopped to ask me what time the garage sale started. One person even tried to buy my bike, and nearly had his head ripped off for that (I love my bike; don’t even THINK of buying my bike). In the process of doing this, I learned a lot. I learned that…

• Hardware store clerks do not know how to count. I can’t tell you how many extra trips I had to make back to the hardware store because I got shorted a bracket or a dozen screws or a can of paint.
• My garage is NOT a TARDIS. In spite of the amount of stuff we had crammed in there for years, the garage is not actually bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. In fact, at one point it seemed to shrink when I tried to get stuff back inside at the end of the day.
• Hubster is addicted to cardboard boxes, bubble wrap, and packing peanuts. We get a ton of packages at our house, and he stores all the boxes and packaging materials in our garage. About 50% of what I got rid of last week was cardboard boxes and packaged air (those little balloon things that come in Amazon.com boxes). The man actually had TWO GIANT BOXES of packaged air. I cut him back to one. I also flattened all the boxes so I could store them in one giant box, and made a vow to cut up and recycle any future boxes that come into our house. We have enough to last us a lifetime!
• I am addicted to pegboard hooks. I bought a gazillion of them, and have been using them to get everything off the floor. It wasn’t until I did so that the garage finally started to grow back to its normal proportions again.
• And finally, what I learned is this. I AM COMPETENT. I DON’T HAVE TO WAIT FOR THE HUBSTER TO SOLVE A PROBLEM, ESPECIALLY IF IT INVOLVES HARDWARE, LUMBER, PAINT, TOOLS, ETC. I CAN DO IT MYSELF.

And I think that last item was the biggest thing I’ve taken away from this little home improvement project. I can fix something if it’s broken. I can tackle any project I set my mind to. And that’s a major thing for me. I’ve depended on the Hubster for years to do things around the house. I don’t have to do that anymore. If I want something fixed, I can learn how to do it myself.

Hubster may come to regret me learning this. Or he may not. Either way, now that I’ve started fixing up the garage, I intend to do the same to the rest of the house. So look out world! I’ve got a drill and a hammer and I’m not afraid to use them!

I’m traveling **again** so today’s webcomic and this blog post were all done on the iPad. I’m sure it hasn’t come out quite right, since I can’t get WordPress on the iPad to cooperate with me, but I’ll try to fix it when I get home.

Hopefully, when I get home, my new solder and soldering braid will also be there. I’m trying to complete a simple kit from WayneandLayne.com, but the solder that came with the iron I bought doesn’t melt very welland it’s making life difficult. I’m hoping new, better solder will give me a better shot at learning to solder. I suppose it would have helped if I hadn’t inadvertantly bought the **surface mount** soldering kit instead of the **through hole** kit. Oh well. Learn something new every day!

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Yes, my youngest child actually said these things.

The kids and I come up with a new theme every summer, some sort of activity we do together, some book we read together, or some show we all watch.  The first summer we did this, we spent every evening reading the Bone graphic novels. It was the first time I think I ever really enjoyed summer.  The summer after that, we made pie every week and raised a lot of butterflies. The summer after that, last summer, we watched the anime series Chi’s Sweet Home every night before bed (and raised more butterflies).  For this summer, we’re watching Star Trek, the original series, and doing lots of DIY projects, including some basic electronics projects like crystal radios and LED throwies.

The kids are enamored with Star Trek. Absolutely in love. We’ve been watching an episode a night, and we’re not even through the first season yet. I’m in love with it too. I’m glad to see that a show I watched as a kid has stood up so well to the test of time. STOS isn’t perfect, of course. There are still plenty of episodes where you can spot plot holes big enough to drive a bus through. But when the writing lags, the acting, the sets, the costumes, and the effects still manage to suck me in. I’m enjoying this as much as the kids, and Hubster’s even having a good time watching with us.

One thing that is obvious is that Star Trek is still thought provoking. After every episode, the girls both have questions to ask. Pixie’s philosophy question, (“Are we real, or just someone else’s dream?”) isn’t a fluke. We’ve been getting all kinds of questions like that from her.  Meanwhile, Princess wants to know how the show was made.  “Mom! How do they make the star ship fly around that planet like that?”  “Mom! How do they do they make people disappear when they do the transporter?” “Mom! How did they make Spock’s ears pointy like that?!” It makes my heart go pitter-pat to have these discussions with my kids. What’s even better is that with today’s technology, we can make our own little movies. I spent one evening last week showing the girls how to make a “space ship” (made from an egg-carton Pixie painted up) sail across a scene (our very dark-colored carpet) like it was flying through outer space. All we needed, aside from the egg carton ship and the dark background, was a simple stop-motion animation app on my iPad. And then used iMove to put that together with another stop-motion scene of little toy people rushing out of a castle to greet them.  Add a little music and voila! We had three seconds of a movie.

So that’s our summer fun. And I’m working hard to figure out how to extend that fun into the fall. It gets hard to do stuff like this during the school year. Homework and Girl Scouts and karate classes eat up so much time. I’m trying to work out a schedule that will let me plan our free time better so we can keep doing this. We’ll see if I can make it work. If I can, maybe I can extend that summer joy into the rest of the year.

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That’s my hair all right! And I have been in a mood lately. A nostalgic mood, to be exact. Not sure what started it. It might have been the trip up to Pennsylvania a few weeks ago to see my aunt. My late grandma’s old house is right down the road from my aunt’s place, so I spent a lot of time in that neighborhood as a kid. Being there as an adult with kids of my own was kind of startling. It was nice to see my aunt and uncle again, but sad to realize the house my grandmother lived in had been sold to another family. I had a hard time picking it out because they’d made changes to the place.

I also spent some time this weekend touring an old light ship, which really made me nostalgic. That light ship looked and smelled exactly like the Army tugboats I used to work with. Walking through it, seeing the tiny little kitchen and the tiny little bunk rooms and the tiny little office for the ship’s captain really took me back. There’s nothing quite like small military boats. They are a world unto themselves. I caught myself thinking while we walked around that if the apocalypse were to suddenly hit, I could be quite happy holed up in that little boat, even it if was permanently dry-docked in cement. It would make a neat little house.

I think maybe the final kicker to my nostalgia trip is the book I’m currently reading, “Howl’s Moving Castle.” I had seen the movie years back, but hadn’t realized it was based on a book. I made my find in the kids’ section of our local library and immediately snatched it up. Reading that book reminds me of all the evenings I spent at Virginia Tech watching anime with my friends. I miss those days, especially when summer rolls around.

Oh well. That’s enough of my trip down memory lane. I’m going downstairs now to watch TV with the kids. We’re watching “The Menagerie” from Star Trek, the original series.

I know. I know. Have fun, ya’ll.

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Actually, what with family visits and travel the past month, keeping the kids occupied hasn’t been that big a problem yet this summer. We did do all the above activities, and before anyone asks, we distilled mint leaves to get mint essential oil, and the marshmallow shooters are actually little breath-powered rifles that shoot mini-marshmallows. They are not some sort of alcoholic beverage produced in our still.

But I did have one week at home with the kids where I really needed to come up with something for the little monsters to do. So we made a still, slingshots, and marshmallow shooters. Then later that week, I was talking to a few people about the activities we had done, and what we’d still like to do, including making squishy circuits. One mom told me the squishy circuits looked exactly like plastic explosives, and that she expected I’d be in jail before the week was out. The Hubster thought that comment was pretty funny until I reminded him that he’d have to come up with bail money to get me out.

If anyone is interested in doing any of the activities listed above, I suggest you get a copy of Make Magazine’s Summer Fun issue. It’s got the still, the marshmallow shooter, and lots of other cool projects in it. If we do anything else really interesting, I’ll let you know. And if you hear about a blue-haired mama who was killed in a tragic marshmallow shooting, you’ll know it was me.

We’ve been on the road a lot the last couple weeks, including a trip to see the Hubster’s family in DC. We spent a lot of time working in my mother-in-law’s yard, pulling weeds, trimming trees, and yes, taking out one very nasty rosebush that hit me in the face at one point. It was a fun trip, and we’ll be back in DC again in a few weeks to do even more gardening.

You’ll notice that my brother-in-law has a halo, just like the Hubster. There’s a reason for this, and it’s not because I think he’s an angel (though he is a great guy). The real reason for his and the Hubster’s halos is that my in-laws had these painted plaques done during a visit to Puerto Rico (where my mother-in-law is from). Each plaque depicts a different member of the family as a saint. My father-in-law was the patron saint of good husbands. My mother-in-law is the patron saint of good wives. And then each brother in the family had a particular aspect they were supposed to represent. The Hubster is St. Michael the Magnificent (he’s the oldest of 5 boys). My brother-in-law Chris, whom I drew in this week’s webcomic, is St. Christopher the Cheerful, and he is pretty cheerful every time I see him. Like I said, he’s a good guy. Of course, all my brothers-in-law are good guys, and I’m grateful to have married into such a wonderful family, so I’m always happy to go see them, evil rosebushes or no.

Of course, one of the problems I have with traveling is that it makes it hard to keep up with the website, I can manage to get a week’s worth of blog posts done in advance, but then I have to get the next week’s web comic going while I’m on the road. I still haven’t figured out the best way to handle that. To keep packing simple on this last trip, I decided to draw the webcomic on my iPad. The results aren’t bad, but they’re not as polished as I would like. I could take paper and pen and do it, but I’d have to pack my pens, my drawing pad, a t-square, a drawing board. Plus I worry about how to carry around my paper so it won’t get mangled.

I could just not worry about doing a 4-panel strip and instead do a color sketch on the iPad, and I’m leaning more and more toward that. I can do a nice digital painting on the go. But I still need to find a good way to do webcomics on the go, as I have a new comics project in the offing that I will have to do whilst running around with the kids. I just don’t get that much time at my desk, so everything pretty much has to be done on the go.

I’ll figure it out eventually, I’m sure. I just need to keep experimenting until I find something I like. You’ll see the results here, I’m sure 😉