Toddler-induced Insanity (AKA Homemade Watercolors)

I’ve been called “brave” by a fellow mom for the activities I allow my toddler, Lady O, to engage in, but I’m pretty sure that “brave” means “crazy.” The “brave” reputation comes from my willingness to play what we call “messy games.” For instance, Lady O asks to “play with the flours” several times per week.

She doesn’t get to play in the flour that often, but she asks. Sometimes she asks for the messy game with the colors:

 

Baking soda and colored vinegar=many minutes of fun, which is basically hours in toddler land.

Today, she asked to do bubble painting, one of the tamest of our messy games. I can’t claim credit for the invention of any of these (except the flour, I guess. That started out as moon sand but I got lazy); I found them all on Pinterest. As the stay-at-home mom of a toddler, I’m always looking for new activities to keep her mind busy and her feet off her five month old brother.

I am, admittedly, also trying to keep her out of my activities, which can’t all be relegated to nap time. Since becoming a SAHM, I’ve become more interested in decorating my house. I think this is a natural consequence of spending so much time within the same three rooms with two children two years and under. Having pretty surroundings makes it easier to be home, and when I get frustrated, I can look at the beautiful things I’ve made and feel a sense of accomplishment. And also, I get bored sometimes. Dr. Seuss has a relatively short shelf life in terms of adult interest. Currently I’m working on my kitchen. It’s laid out in the worst possible way for a mom of little kids: the kitchen is parallel to the living room, but across a full wall from it, so I can’t see my kids if I’m in there. (And no sane-ish parent is about to encourage their two year old to hang out in the kitchen with them. Chemicals and knives and counters to climb—oh, my!)

What was I saying? Oh, yes. The makeover. There’s a whole half wall above my sink that is completely blank: no cabinets, no window, nothing. Dishes are hard enough to get through, and without something pretty to look at, there are days where I just want to toss them out the window rather than stare at the white, white wall and scrub. So I’m trying to remedy that by creating some décor for my kitchen. But I can’t paint without Lady O wanting some of that action, and unfortunately, the only paint I have is acrylic. (Okay, and fabric paint.) So I set her up with several layers of newspaper, some cheap brushes, paper, and the tiniest bit of paint I could manage to drip out of the bottle. And then I made homemade watercolors for her.

Here’s the problem: I didn’t read the directions first. I just skimmed them to make sure I had what I needed. And as I got all the ingredients mixed, I finally read that they would take twenty-four hours to dry out and be ready to use. That’s like 2 millennia to a toddler. And to the mother of the toddler screaming for the promised paint. It also took what felt like 2 millennia to mix and color the paints, so we’re really looking at 4 millennia. It was probably an hour and a half total, but either length is too long in toddler time. It took so long that I got the hiccups from my building tension.

Nevertheless, we now have watercolors drying above the fridge and Lady O is napping. And I thought I would share with you the lessons I learned about making watercolors at home.

I used this recipe.

First, don’t get all conservationist and try to fit all of the paint base in the ice cube tray. I don’t like to waste, and it seemed like I could fit more, so I did. But when I started mixing the colors, I discovered my error. Anyone who thinks ahead (not me, obviously) would have realized that if cubes were too full, they would run over when mixing the colors in. My husband, for instance, would have told me as I poured the first cube that I would have that problem. I remained unaware until I started mixing the red. I sort of solved this by doing the colors in rainbow order. I figured that a little bleeding here and there wouldn’t hurt, since I was mixing my own shades anyway. That was true until I attempted purple.

Let me interrupt for a second and say this: Dear purple, I hate you. You are impossible to make and you always turn out ugly. Because of you, Lady O won’t be able to make a “raingow,” though I’m sure she’ll ask several times and cry and get frustrated when we can’t finish it because of your stubbornness. I hope you can live with yourself.

The purple, besides being more in the range of charcoal-brown, had more completed colors to spill into, and so took the opportunity to taint all of them. I almost ended up with a half tray of different shades of brown because of that purple. This wouldn’t have been a problem if I’d been content to fill each cube only half or three-quarters full.

Oh, and apparently the popsicle sticks I was using are starting a mutiny. I know because I found a few of the shivs they’re making in preparation.

I can pretty much promise that when these watercolors run out (never, I hope), we will go to the dollar store and buy more, like sane people.

(I want you to know that most of my “crazy” activities pay off. The flour, for instance, keeps her occupied for at least half an hour. Do you know what you can get done in half an hour? A lot more with your toddler out of the way! Also, they generally provide hilarity. One of the first times we did the flour activity, before I learned to only dress my toddler when absolutely necessary, I looked over at her and thought, “Hmm, I don’t remember buying her white socks.” And then I remembered: I didn’t. Her socks were pink with silver polka dots when I put them on her. Those socks left the cutest white footprints across my carpet.)

A Two Year Old's Guide to Eating PB&J

Step One: Make sure Mommy has separated your sandwich into halves, even if your sandwich is only a half to begin with.

Step Two: Open each half to inspect the contents. Determine whether Mommy used creamy or crunchy peanut butter.

Step Three: If she used crunchy, pick each peanut chunk out of the sandwich and eat it. If she used creamy, pick each imaginary peanut out of the sandwich and eat it. Make sure to leave behind holes where the "peanuts" were.

Step Four: Complain about your sticky hands in your "pre-meltdown" voice until Mommy wipes them clean.

Step Five: Hold each open-faced sandwich in both hands and eat right down the middle, biting like a half-starved T-rex into the fleshy center of your sandwich, but only on three of your four portions. Stay well away from any crust portion. Cry crocodile tears if the bread rips even a little.

Step Six: Using your fingers, pull small bits of the sandwich, including bread this time, away from the area of the crust, saving them from potential crustiness by quickly devouring them. Do this down to the crust on only one portion of your sandwich, and halfway on a second portion.

Step Seven: When you have consumed all the peanuts, three of middles, and one and a half of the sides of your now open-faced sandwich, call out "Done! Down!" and "Wash hands sticky hands!" until Mommy gives up on her "one more bite" pleas, wipes you down, and frees you from your high chair.

Step Eight: Immediately request a snack.

A Few of My Favorite Things (Read: Books)

I often get asked for reading suggestions, and I try to tailor them to the asker as much as I can. But there are some books (and "book" here can mean novel, essay, play, or poetry) that I recommend to everyone, that I liked so much that no matter a person's preferences, they end up hearing about. That list includes:

• The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak
• The Bromeliad Trilogy by Terry Pratchett
• The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
• The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• Cry the Beloved Country by Alan Paton
• The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
• The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
• King Lear, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, and Macbeth by Shakespeare
• Born to Run by Christopher McDougall 
• The Poisoner's Handbook by Deborah Blum

Obviously, this isn't a full list of the books that I love. Some literature I can't recommend to just anyone.  "A Modest Proposal," for instance, is not for those who cannot joke about fiscally motivated cannibalism. And all of the above recommendations are more serious in nature, even those by Oscar Wilde (because it's earnest, you see). So if you're looking for something lighter in nature, maybe something what one might call "beach reading," I'll tell you what I took to the lake the other day: Emma and Anne of Green Gables. (No, really, I did, but I didn't open either, so you can lower those eyebrows.)

But if you really must know what I read when I'm not pretending to be intellectual, here's what made it into the one box (for weight and space reasons, we couldn't bring my books or bookshelves, and yes, I do actively miss the books that got left behind) of books that made it onto the moving van to Idaho two years ago:

Editing references, History of the Church (my mom's set that I borrowed and have--ahem--never finished), Jesus the Christ, various Shakespeare, Austen, poetry, and cookbooks. Fire hid during the real packing and so became a stowaway to Idaho. I like it, but it didn't make the original list.

Didn't I say I love Harry Potter? I'm still waiting for the sequel to Pegasus. You hear that, Robin McKinley? My toes are still tapping impatiently.

Not pictured: Ender's Game, Ella Enchanted, Summers at Castle Auburn, and The Ugly Princess and the Wise Fool

On Starting Over

It's been four years--FOUR YEARS--since I've written seriously, and almost exactly that since I posted anything at all here. So much has changed: two kids, a new state, two new jobs, several new hobbies. Let's start with a constant: running.

I started running about the time of my last post. The previous February, I was promoted. It was my first post-college full-time job, and I hated it. The complete truth is that I loved what I did, but I really disliked who I did it with. My bosses had made it quite clear that I wasn't their first choice, and each time they came in, they spent a couple of hours telling me and my coworker of the week (it was the worst revolving door position I've ever seen) what a terrible job we were doing of running the place. And I, I who had never cared all that much for anyone else's opinion of me, had started believing the story of my own worthlessness. I didn't have friends near to buoy me up because I worked long hours, so I mostly spent my time away from work sitting on the couch eating ice cream and escaping into fiction. Soon I gained twenty new friends on my hips. And each pound made me believe what I was being told just a little bit more.

I remember one night I was lying in bed crying and thinking, "Why am I so sad? I've never felt so sad in my life." Jason didn't know what to do, and I can only imagine how helpless he felt with a wife who was paralyzed by her own sadness. I couldn't tell him how to help me because I didn't know what was wrong. But that night, I realized that the problem went beyond my unhappiness at work: it wasn't that I hated my job, but that I'd started hating myself. I'd bought into the rhetoric I was hearing at work that I was boring, stupid, and completely unproductive. And I wasn't doing anything to get a second opinion: I was completely neglecting not only my relationships with people who loved me, but also my relationship with God. And that was the killer. As long as I'd been secure in His love, it didn't matter what other opinions were expressed.

So the next morning, I ran a quarter mile and began to love myself again. It started as a way to lose those 20 pounds (and let's be honest, get hopped up on endorphins) but I found that what I really needed was the sense of accomplishment I felt when I ran. Endurance is something humans are built for (have you read Born to Run? You really, really should) but that doesn't make running easy, especially when your adult life has been primarily composed of sitting and reading. So every run was an accomplishment for me, and it still is. Running helped me climb out of the hole I'd willingly climbed into when I started believing what other people thought of me. I've only stopped running for pregnancy and injury.

That first quarter-mile run was one of the best decisions I've made as an adult. The verdict is out on other decisions I've made (letting the two year old play in a bucket of flour, for instance), but I'm hoping a return to writing will be one of the better ones.

Book Review: Little Stinker

Little Stinker is about Percy the fish, who is small and plain, and likes to blow butt bubbles.

I love children's books, especially when the moral is "You may be small and ugly, but that doesn't mean that you don't also stink."

Thank You, Or My Birthday in Pictures

This is not my baby! It's my nephew. He wasn't actually born on my birthday; he missed it by that much. But he sure is cute!

Thank you to everyone who made turning twenty-five good!

Dear Snow,

I know you've received a lot of letters lately imploring you to continue your recent good work in the Pacific Northwest. But Snow, I think you deserve a few days off. No, seriously, take a few days. I'm not suggesting this just because I've been sledding in both a real sled and my car and found the first mildly more fun than the second. I'm not saying it just because you and I have had our disagreements in the past, some of them widely publicized by me via Facebook. I'm not even recommending this only because I'd really like to see my parents for Thanksgiving. I'm encouraging a break because you deserve one.You've worked hard to make freeways into parking lots and overturn septic tankers on nearby roads. (I can't imagine how much work that last one alone must have taken.0

And maybe you're not tired yet. I get it. But I hear there are other parts of the country that consider you a miracle and would be just delighted with a visit. Southern California, for instance, or Texas. You could even be daring and head to another country! All I'm saying is keep your options open. Don't feel obliged to stick to just one area because you've received such acclaim there. The only way to make a real name for yourself is to head off and see the world. We'll all be waiting for you when you come back--next year.

I just want what's best for you, Snow. And if that means we have to be parted for another 365 days, or maybe even longer, I'm willing to make that sacrifice.

Best wishes,

Tina

What I'm Reading: Interesting Scientific Articles

Such as Is the Sun Emitting a Mystery Particle? and Was Darwin Wrong?

Read and discuss. Go!

Teddy Roosevelt is a Ninja

This is a little partial story I wrote for a kid at work. The prompt was "Write a biography." What my student should have said was, "Write an accurate biography." Enjoy.

Theodore Roosevelt was a president of the United States of America. What most people don't know about him is that he was also President of the International Association of Ninjas. Teddy, as he was known in the dojo, was an expert in hand to hand combat. In fact, most of the "animals" he killed while hunting were actually other ninjas. His public relations manager later disguised each fallen ninja as a bear or mountain lion so that no one would know about Teddy's ninja secret.

On a Spring day in May, Teddy Roosevelt rode his horse, Samurai, into the woods. He was thinking about the latest IAN meeting, and how his friend, Robert Hope, had talked about possibly learning to use swords.

"The future is in armed combat!" Robert had yelled at the group of ninjas. "The enemy will be armed, and we need to be ready."

"The enemy" Robert spoke of was a secret group of assassins called The Death Machine. The Death Machine wasn't really as secret as its members liked to think. Teddy knew The Death Machine met inside the Baltimore Community Center on the first Friday of every month.

Before Robert had ranted about swords, the IAN had debated about the best time to attack The Death Machine's headquarters. Andy Rockefeller thought they should attack on July 4th, Independence Day. He thought ridding the world of The Death Machine on that day would be appropriate. But most of the IAN thought The Death Machine would expect that, so they'd picked a random date, August 23rd, for the attack.

Teddy was pondering whether swords would be a good idea for the attack on The Death Machine when a heavy something hit him from the side and knocked him off of Samurai.

Teddy sprung up from the ground and yelled, "Haai-yah!" at his assailant.

No one was there. Teddy spun around, expecting to see a member of The Death machine holding throwing knives.

No one was there...

(To possibly be continued)

As you can see, adjectives (like accurate) are important.

Seven-four-two thousand ten

Unfortunately, I forgot my real camera, so all my pictures from the Emerald Downs fireworks show on the third were taken on my phone, thus the terrible resolution. On the bright side, my phone has some functions my real camera does not, enabling me to do this:

On the fourth, we didn't have any fireworks, so Jason, Eric, and Dean shot shotgun shells at glow sticks. The theory was that when the glow stick was hit, it would explode. The reality was a little different.

As you can see, Eric is holding an intact glow stick (Yes, one. You might want to get that double vision checked out) and some glow stick pee and looks a little disappointed (and blurry) rather than excited. Lesson: Despite what the movies tell us, bullets rarely make things explode. Curse your lies, Hollywood!

But do you want to know what does explode? The guts of many pop-its while held in Eric's hands! So you see, we did have some fireworks after all.
 

I hope you all had a happy Independence Day!

I am an Orangutan, or What I'm Reading: Party of One, The Loners' Manifesto

What this book really sets out to do, though it takes a lot of detours on the way, is to redefine the word "loner." The author, Anneli Rufus, says we only use "loner" in bad ways. I agree with her. Almost every criminal--serial killer, school shooter, or otherwise--is labeled a loner, Rufus points out. When someone is weird, we call him or her a loner. We would never put Michelangelo in the same category, but he, too, was a loner. Maybe there's something wrong with the way we think.

One of the topics Rufus explores is why we think this way. To put it simply, it's the us vs. them paradigm. For the most part, primates--that's the us--are social creatures. In the past, we had to be this way in order to survive. Communities, and the people in them, relied on each other for success, love--everything. Anyone who didn't contribute to the community in the same way--there's the them--was looked down on. We still think this way, for the most part. But the question Rufus asks is, is that necessary? Her answer: not in this age of independence. And then she posits that we should make a distinction between true loners, those who want to be alone, and pseudo loners, those who are alone because they've been rejected by others.

Party of One is a very interesting book. Rufus takes the time to look at the fields that have built our culture--technology, art, music, literature, etc.--and shows how many of the people we revere as innovators and geniuses were also true loners. To name a few: Isaac Newton, Edgar Degas, Georgia O'Keeffe, Alexander Pope, Barry Bonds, Emily Dickinson, and J.K. Rowling. If these are the people who change the world for the better, Rufus asks, shouldn't we be treating them better? She also takes the time to look at those who make "loner" a bad word, and she comes to the conclusion that they were not true loners. What drove the acts of murder and terrorism was their longing for acceptance and the pain of rejection, two things true loners don't ache for or care much about.

I never would have labeled myself a loner. I've always had friends, always hung out or gone to lunch. But my friend (Hi, Kirsten!) (See, I have friends!) lent me this book after a discussion one day about how I only enjoy people for a limited amount of time. And as I read, I started a checklist:

A loner...
*Prefers her own company                                                            Check
*Rarely gets bored or lonely on her own                                       Check
*Doesn't feel a need to conform to other people's standards        Check
*Is very stubborn about not conforming                                       Check
*Gets tired after being with others for long                                  Check


And etc. Hm, I thought to myself while reading, I guess I am a loner. And it's really not a bad thing. Even in the world of apes--notoriously social creatures--there are orangutans, who prefer to be alone.

Do I sound curmudgeonly? I almost feel like I should be hanging out a window yelling, "Shut up and got off of my lawn! And turn down that rock 'n' roll while you're at it!" Maybe the real problem isn't that I'm a loner; perhaps I was just born with a 70 year old soul and I've only gotten older since.

But being a loner, like Rufus points out, doesn't mean that you don't love or enjoy associating with others. It means you're picky, picky about when, with whom, and for how long you spend time. You're choosy. As one of my friends pointed out to me, I don't have that many friends, compared to most people, but I have more really close friends than most people do.

What I'm trying to say was that I enjoyed the book, even though I think Rufus spends too much time talking about how she thinks loners are better than everyone else and not enough time giving examples of how loners have changed the world. I admire her stand. I don't recall ever being harassed for being a loner, so the term really doesn't bother me personally. But I do think that there should be awareness on all our parts: you like to spend their free time with lots of people, and I prefer to spend their free time alone, but that doesn't mean either of us is a psychopath.

What I'm Reading: The Eyre Affair

Or rather, What I Read, because I'm done with it now.


Finding this book was one of those rare instances where I broke my own rules and bought a book before I knew that I would love it. I was at Half Price Books the other day, buying Dracula, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Cry, the Beloved Country for a dollar each (I love clearance) when I ran across The Eyre Affair, also on clearance. The summary on the back seemed familiar and intriguing, and it was only two dollars, so I bought it.


And what was so intriguing, you ask? Well, the setting for the book is in a bizarre alternate-reality 1985 in which cloning is so common that people own dodo birds as pets and there's a branch of the government totally devoted to time and space travel. The main character, Thursday Next, is an operative of the LiteraTech branch of government, investigating literary crimes like forgeries and the defacing of Will-speaks (machines that, for ten pence, will quote monologues from a Shakespeare play) by Baconians (those who support Sir Francis Bacon as the writer behind the front of "William Shakespeare"). When the original manuscript of a Dickens novel goes missing and the main suspect is an old professor of hers, Thursday gets involved. Throw her uncle's invention that allows anyone to transport him or herself into a work of literature and even bring a character back, and you've got intriguing. At least to me.


Was the book funny? Yes. Was it original? Yes. Did I want more? In the sense that I could tell there was more imagination where this came from, yes. Mostly, I enjoyed it. There were times when I wished for more explanation--How could her dad travel through time? Was it a genetic ability, or something he was trained for?--but the story was good enough to mostly distract me from my lingering questions.


Um, I feel like I meant to write more, but you'll have to forgive me if I don't remember what it was. If my forehead burning my hand is any indication, I'm less than well this weekend. If you remember what else I meant to say, let me know. Enjoy your Memorial Day weekend!

What I'm Reading: Lucy

In an effort to be true to myself and also to write more and about things that I like, I'm going to try some new things. Right now I'm going to try a What I'm Reading post, which I may continue to write. Let's see how it works, shall we?


Some of you may know that before I was ready to formally declare my nerd status with an English major, I studied anthropology (the social science, not the clothing line, which is spelled Anthropologie). I'm still interested in anthropology, so much so that occasionally I have a hard time watching Bones on Fox because I want to be Kathy Reichs. Right now I'm feeding this interest (read: obsession) by reading a book called Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind by Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey.


The great thing about this book is that it matches the hard science explanations with closer looks at famous anthropologists and their great discoveries, meaning that it reads less like a scientific paper than like a novel. There have been a few places where my eyes have crossed during an explanation of the science (potassium-argon dating, I'm looking at you), but for the most part, it's been really fascinating. The book itself is almost an introduction to physical anthropology. Though the book is about Lucy (the famous bones of one 3+ million year old hominid discovered in Ethiopia--the oldest and most complete set of human-like bones anthropology has discovered), it winds its way through the history of physical anthropology and paleoanthropology to explain the significance of finding Lucy. It's history, science, and good old fashioned storytelling, all in one book.


My favorite part of the book, however, is how Don Johanson, an anthropologist, acknowledges the faults of anthropology and acknowledges the biases of anthropologists. Frequently, anthropologists pretend to themselves and others that they are completely objective, that nothing clouds their interpretations of the evidence. But the reality is that every human brings biases to everything they do; we can't leave them behind. In looking at the goals and dreams of the anthropologists in the book, including himself, he highlights the lack of objectivity that they all have, but also tells how many anthropologists have understood that enough to try to work around it.


I'm not done with the book yet, but I already love it. I think one question I can anticipate from some is what I believe about human evolution, since I am a very religious person. My opinion is this: science and religion are two different types of knowledge that don't have to invalidate each other. As humans, we don't know everything about science, and we don't know everything about God. I don't know how the science of physical anthropology and evolution fit with what I know from religion. But that doesn't mean that they can't fit. And maybe someday we'll figure it out, if we don't stop trying.

Oh, Canada

In keeping with trend--the anytime-I-make-an-effort-something-goes-terribly-wrong trend--when I tried to go to see my parents in Bellingham at the beginning of the month, I was delayed by a lady jumping in front of a train. She didn't jump in front of my train--they don't usually let passengers on freight trains-- but my train was delayed by the incident, and for a while, my mom and I were afraid we wouldn't make it to Canada on time. As a result, I almost called this blog "Oh, the Places You'll Go--Right After We Get the Body off the Tracks," but I thought that might be a little insensitive. Funny, but insensitive. (Discussion Question: What other Dr. Seuss book titles can we ruin? Seriously, post your ideas in the comments. The one that makes me laugh hardest gets a certificate or something.) The best part was how they announced the delay to my train. I was sitting in my seat, reading my book, when across the loudspeaker came the words, "We've just received confirmation of pedestrian interference with a train." Pedestrian interference with a train? What kind of euphemism is that? That's like saying "hostage interference with a bullet."  Luckily--or unluckily, depending on how you feel about Canada--the train was only delayed by one hour, and I got to gawk like a yokel at the cops searching the poor woman's car as we passed through Edmonds.

But the good times didn't stop there! We got on our way with plenty of time to cross the border, until the Canadian border patrol decided my mom and I were suspicious characters and ushered us quickly--glares included at no extra charge!--into the border guard offices. We waited in line for about 20 minutes, wondering if it was the banana peel under my seat that got us such attention from Canada. The whole wait I kept opening my mouth to say things like, "So, Mom. How long have you been smuggling weed?" and "Since when does Canada care what it lets in?" and shutting it only just barely in time. When we talked about it later, my mom told me she was doing the same thing. (This post could also be entitled "How the Rains Family Deals with Stress," but that's not nearly as funny.) We also had the privilege--lucky us--of watching an old man get searched for marijuana. The guard had him lift his pants and push down his socks, take off his shoes, turn out his pockets, and lift his shirt. Oh, why did they make him lift his shirt?! I didn't look away in time to avoid seeing his pasty white used-to-be-fat skin hanging over his pants, which is possibly the biggest regret of my life.


After asking us a long list of questions and searching our car, they determined that I wasn't the missing person they were watching for, and my mom must not have kidnapped me after all. We were released into Canada, which I'm not sure is sufficient compensation for all of that.


Fast forward through the cultural celebration for the Vancouver, B.C. temple (which was awesome, by the way. I may post some pictures and one amazing video from it later.). We were headed home, but I had to stop somewhere and get Cadbury Wunderbars--the real prize for venturing into the north lands. On our way, we made a pit stop at A&W for root beer floats.


Can I ask you something? When you get a root beer float, it's made either with soft-serve ice cream (typical of A&W) or scooped hard ice cream, right? That's been my experience. In Canada, A&W made our floats with the shaped middle part of a round ice cream sandwich. I thought they were putting astronaut ice cream in my root beer at first, and I was prepared to be disgusted and irate. Instead, I was just frustrated because it was impossible to get even a sliver of ice cream without splashing root beer all over the place. Looking at it, I almost felt like I was looking at part of the set of ABC's Wipe Out. I sort of expected to see a tiny person jump from my mom's scary round ice cream to mine, possibly falling into my root beer in the effort. I really hope I didn't look away at the wrong time and end up accidentally swallowing someone.

 What was really entertaining was that when I went to catch the train home, it was delayed at the border for about 15 minutes, but we weren't told why. In the five minutes before the train pulled into the station, at least three police cars pulled in near the tracks, and as the train rounded a corner into our line of sight, the cops started moving slowly toward it. (Picture lionesses hunting.) More passenger interference? Or was yet another mother kidnapping her adult child and fleeing the country? Or perhaps the Canadians just couldn't stand the bizarre cylindrical ice cream any more, and one had tossed the lot into the ocean and fled to the United States for sanctuary. Whatever the cause, the moral of the story is this: If you want a bit of excitement, all you have to do is put me on a train.

Three Generations

An Update, a Mystery, and an Outrage

This weekend we went to Bellingham to surprise my dad for his birthday. He was asleep when we got there--it was closing in on 11:30 pm--but my mom made me wake him up so he would know what I came for. What followed was this conversation:

Mom: Wake up, honey. Someone's here to see you.

Dad: What?

Me: Surprise! Happy birthday!

A minute of chatter including "thank you"s, etc.

Dad: How long have you been planning this?

Me: A few weeks.

Dad (to Mom): Did you know about this?

Mom: Yep. I actually kept a secret!

We mostly ran errands on Saturday, but we did make it to Lynden (a Dutch settled town near Bellingham) in an effort to go mini-golfing. My dad loves mini golfing. Sadly, the mini-golfing place was no longer open. But as a consolation prize, we got to take these:

 

  

Last night for Jason's dad's birthday, I made creme brulee. For the first time. I'm always a little worried about my first attempts in cooking; they frequently turn out like this. What I've come to realize, however, is that the only cooking I can manage to truly mess up is simple cooking: cakes from a box, chocolate chip cookies, etc. Which means that for a first effort, my creme brulee turned out quite well. Next time, I would torch it from the start (we tried using he broiler to caramelize the sugar originally), which would keep the creme part from cooking with the brulee part. I didn't get a picture of the finished product to share because I was too busy licking my ramekin clean, and I mean that literally. But if you're curious, the recipe came from Epicurean.com and can be found here.

As for the mystery, this ought to be a shocker. Remember those strange aquatic beasties Jason and I found while hunting for tadpoles? Yeah, they disappeared. Which makes for another batch of aquatic pets we've somehow managed to lose. Here's the evidence:

See? No strange beasties swimming in there! (It is kind of hard to tell because of the swamp murk.) In this case, we suspect that the transfer from swamp to tank shocked them into changing into some kind of flying beast instead of a swimming one. So if you see a strange orange mohawked flying creature, wave goodbye to it for us.

And finally, the outrage. Before I go on, take a moment to look at the date stamp at the top of this post. What does it say? Hmmmm? Oh, yes. March 8th. And I'm writing this from just outside Seattle, where the weather is fairly temperate all year round. Except for on March 8th, 2010, when it randomly snowed.

 

It didn't stick, but it's the principle that matters! Also, I hate snow, so when I hear of it snowing anywhere, I get angry. That's why I never watch the weather; I just look it up online. 

Anyway, now I have to go to work and I'm probably going to be late if I don't let this post get on its way. I have a few projects planned, so we'll see if I can actually blog about real things instead of just making fun of people. Should prove to be an interesting experiment.

Can I see Your ID?

We went tadpole hunting yesterday. I've been wanting to since I told Jason about how my brothers used to go catch tadpoles and snakes in the swamp behind a park near our house. (The swamp was conveniently located behind a fence with "No Trespassing" signs on it.) I think they even took me with them once. So now that we live back in Washington, on a piece of land that comes complete with a swamp minus the "No Trespassing" sign, I've been itching to hunt for baby frogs.

The thing is, the frogs haven't laid their eggs yet. (We did get some frog eggs, though. Don't ask me how; it was sad and gross.) So we ended up catching other crazy pond life. And I do mean cah-razy. One of the weird things we caught is a worm (hopefully not the kind that wiggles its way into your foot and up to your intestine), but we're still unsure what the other strange beastie we caught is. So we've been searching the internet, asking various known pond life pictures, "Are you his mama?" But all has been in vain. So now I ask, can you ID this little lost creature?



It's not the best picture (you can't see it's freaky head, for instance), but it does show some of our little pet's more defining features, like its weird double mohawk fins and the weird butt-stomach sitting on its back. I'll try to get a better picture of the swamp thing. In the meantime, please help us solve the mystery of the SWAMP THING!

Why is it that all our mysteries involve aquatic life?

(For your entertainment: The list of events this blog title reminds me of includes the time last summer when a Costco sample lady asked me if I was old enough to get samples without my parent or guardian.)

Caution: Work Zone

You may have noticed some interesting happenings here at Tina Reigns. The layout experimentation, for instance. Or the infrequent postings. These are all outward manifestations of recent changes in my circumstances and my knowledge. Let me explain.

You may know that for the last almost three-ish months, I've been teaching, which is not what I intended to do when I said goodbye to BYU. I wanted to write. I had some ideas about the what and the how and the who for aspects of my dream, but those were dependent on an unreliable job market. But regardless of the who, what, and where, all my online contributions and activities were meant to help create the reality of that dream, including this blog. It's been mostly a sort of online, informal portfolio to showcase my internet savvy. Now that I'm teaching, my perceptions about what my blog should be have changed. Not that I don't want to write any more; I will always want to write, but it will be something I do on the side until it becomes a viable option for lifestyle supporting work. Instead, I'm going to teach and enjoy teaching. But that change in attitude leaves meunsure about what to do with this blog. If I no longer feel my blog should be only a portfolio (and, to be honest, a lame one; I haven't really written on it in months), what should it be?

I feel like the answer to this question is dependent on the answer to another question: What would I write about on a semi-frequent basis? I still have concerns with being a waste of internet space; I don't want to end up being one of those bloggers who spend countless hours and words saying nothing at all. So I've been thinking about the sites I spend time on on the internet. I certainly spend time on family sites. I could turn this into a personal blog, the kind that keeps my family and friends informed about what's going on in my life. After all, it serves a little of that purpose as it stands. I feel like that would be a valid use of time and space, but I don't feel comfortable in that role. I've never been able to just open up to anyone about my life, even regarding trivial matters. If I focused my blog on that, I would never write on it; it would be better to just take it down.

I spend a lot of time (as I've discussed before) on food blogs. How I love 'em! There are a few in particular that I would love to emulate: Smitten Kitchen, Sophistimom, Picky Palate. But my problems with going all food all the time are many. First, there are so many food sites, I would feel redundant. I'm a good cook--depending on what I'm making, even great--but I'm not an original cook. I can definitely copy and adapt, but I rarely create. Thus the rebirth of this blog into a food blog would be it's rebirth into mediocrity, which is something I'm not willing to accept.

I also enjoy craft and home decorating/improvement sites (probably a shocker for some of you, but don't worry: I rarely finish my projects), but again, there are problems. The mediocrity that would come with rarely finishing craft projects I start. That could be a positive; perhaps I would only do simple projects that people like me can finish. But then, I also don't have my own home to decorate or improve, which puts a damper on that idea.

I also can't quite leave behind the original snarky side of my blog. What can I say? It comes natural. So maybe this blog will become a meld of all of all of the above ideas, like a strange and slightly hideous crayon sculpture a child makes that you can never quite seem to look away from. I'll let you know.

I'm also messing with the layout as an experiment with the knowledge of website and blog creation I'm trying to gain. It's slow in coming (the knowledge, I mean), so be patient. It will probably also change many times as I decide and re-decide what I want to do with my internet persona.

So hang tight while I experiment. If you have any suggestions or ideas about any of this, I'd love to hear them. You know where to find me.

I tripped over frozen horse poo

Winter: 1
Tina: 0

I Dreamed a Dream or Two

I have really vivid dreams. It used to be that I slept so deeply that if I dreamed, I didn't know it. But since I've been married, I remember my dreams every night. I didn't realize this until I started telling my husband about my weird dreams--they are always weird--and he commented about how often I dream. I didn't believe him, so I started keeping track and found out that he was right. I dream every single night.

A few weeks ago I dreamed about going back to school, but instead of going back to college for a graduate degree or another bachelors, I went back to junior high and then high school. And all the people I went to school with--all the people I thought I never really wanted to see again--were in my dream. It was almost a nightmare. And that's just one example.

A few months ago, I dreamed about my sister-in-law Catherine. In my dream she'd written me a note, and since I apparently have a junior high mentality, I had to write one back. But when I gave her the note, she took one look at it and said, "You spelled my name wrong. See?" And actually, I had. I'd spelled it "Cathirine," which is a ridiculous way to misspell her name. You'd think that I would have spelled it with a K or left out the first E instead of changing it to an I. But she actually wasn't concerned about the I. She was concerned that I'd left the accents off of both of the Es. I gave her the weirdest look while she showed me because all I could think was, "Wouldn't the accents make your name sound like Cath-ay-rin-ay?" But she didn't notice my confusion; she just said, "Usually I don't worry about the accents because it just confuses everyone. But I thought you should know." Since we're family, you know.

I think I'll address their Christmas card to John and Cathériné Rains.

But the point is, last night I had another very strange dream, this time about my little brother, who is serving a mission for our church in Ohio.

At first Paul (my little brother) and I were out wandering around a park with some other people at night. I'm not sure why, but we were. But while we were out there, this little tiny lamb comes frollicking along from behind a bush. It was like a pygmy lamb--I'm not sure if those exist--because it was so tiny and cute. It was all alone at first, but soon a whole lamb family followed. The lambs were grazing, and most of us were just watching the lambs, but a few were playing with and cuddling the small sheep. All was happy, until we realized that there were wolves nearby, and we had to protect the lambs. (By the way, what were pygmy lambs doing in an urban park, wandering free and wild? And also, if you had a pet pygmy lamb, and you took it for a walk in the park, would you need to obey leash laws?) So we gathered in a circle around the wolves (Why? To my awake self, this seems stupid. Apparently my subconscious is extremely unintelligent, or has a death wish) with torches, to scare them back into their cave. Which actually worked, after some snarling and barking from both sides.

But then the scene changed--dreams are so bad at transitioning smoothly--and I dreamed that we were at college, and Paul was a sophomore who somehow got assigned to senior dorms. So I went to check on him, 'cause, you know, that's what older sisters do. And of course Paul and his roommates were playing video games. (Do college boys do anything else? Okay, they chase girls and play video games. In my experience, those are almost the entire extent of their extracurriculars.) So my friends and I (oh, yeah, I had friends--crazy dream) started to check out their place (Again, why? College boys have never been known for their tidiness or concern with sanitation. Again, evidence that my subconscious has a death wish), which had three floors, by the way, but the tiniest living room known to man. When we made it to the basement, what did we find but a rack of old bridesmaids' dresses (which, of course, were the ugliest I have ever seen) and formals and one wedding dress. What were they doing there, you ask? I never got to hear the reason--I'm sure Paul had one--because Jason's uncle woke us up by pounding on our bedroom door before 9 am. This, I told Jason, is why we will never actually live with his grandpa like his aunts want us to so much: we will never have privacy. Someone will always come pounding on our bedroom door early in the morning, and I will always want to poke their eyes out with a rusty fork. It wouldn't be good for familial love.

Anyway, when I wrote to tell Paul about the dream, I made sure to point out the silver lining in the dream: obviously, I've been thinking about him. The bad news is that I've apparently been wanting him to fight wolves and cross dress. Maybe simultaneously.

I told you I have weird dreams.