2009 has been rather dramatically unpleasant for us. I even kept a list of reasons why:

high-risk and expensive pregnancy
extended and expensive miscarriage
weird and expensive horseback-riding situation
moved
moved really quickly
got rid of most possessions
left friends
left good teaching job
Husband traveling all the damn time to Europe
Husband commuting five hours every week
Husband work stress
my work stress
realtor problems
lost lots of money selling house
cat Tang died
Husband car accident
moving to Sweden stress and worry
roofing scam
lemon dishwasher
driveway problems
lost my glasses
constant construction/yardwork etc. noise in neighborhood
beach house living weirdness with mom
chronic arthritis pain
grandmother’s Alzheimer’s decline
granddaddy’s strokes and decline
money continually going away
two speeding tickets
broken washing machine, useless dryer

Nothing on here about Little Girl, though. So that’s good. On to 2010! It has its own massive set of risk factors, but I guess it might be okay.

It’s the end of the year and it seems like a good time to clean out my Drafts folder again and try to figure out, from cryptic notes and sometimes absent titles, what I meant to post about but did not. Usually very sensibly:

Ersatz
It starts like this, “A friend of mine, way overeducated for it, is a nanny. Her current employer has gotten all whack-jobby so she wants something new but, due to the above-mentioned whack-jobbiness, she’s nervous about” and there I stopped, below it posting a redacted version of all the back story my friend wanted to me to use while I was being her fake job reference. I had no problem with the lie: the details were what made me nervous. I’ve actually been a fake reference before, for a friend who was applying to the police force in NYC! Neither time was I called. It’s been a bit of a let-down, really. I remember once when I was doing hiring for my social work job, I called a reference and it turned out, I could tell from the answering machine, that the applicant was using her roommate as her “former boss.” The best part of this story is the social work agency was so hard-up for employees they hired the unsavvy fake-reference lady anyway.

Sick
“Omigod, I have some horrible illness that just causes high fever (102!) but no obvious symptoms (no coughing, sniffling) so no one is sympathetic. Not that it matters, since Husband had to go out of town for work again anyway. I’ve got my fever down to 100 so at least I no longer feel like I am near death.” That was a really brief illness because I think I was better within six hours of starting that draft. But I really did feel bad!

Correct
“I correct other people’s children.” Yep, it’s true. I was probably going to to on to describe specific incidences of this behavior. Hm, maybe that’s why we haven’t made any friends here.

Really good gossip about people you don’t know
Wow, I really wish I knew what this was supposed to be about! I love gossip!

Evolution
Aha, I’m not going to reprint it here, but you can imagine what follows: I’m trying, but not too hard, to be sympathetic to evolution doubters, and to explain why they are wrong. But that was way too overambitious for a post.

Passport
Oh, this was supposed to refer to this excellent post about infertility and expound on the comment I left there: “I’m a mother after infertility (2.5 years) and loss (one) and am more bemused by all the effortless fertility around me. However, the more I talk to people (and I am really open about the infertility–I always mention it in the kinds of conversations you mention above) the more I see many other people have had those problems, and if not those, then others. And I don’t feel like I am less a member of the motherhood community. Honestly it makes me feel MORE like one–like for crying out loud I WORKED to be here, I deserve it. Now when I was going through infertility, I was totally miserable and uncomfortable with fertility, but now I’m like, eh. And I’ll be honest about something else: I am a little happy that I am not so fertile and don’t have two under two accidentally now or whatever. There are some benefits!”

Religion: I just don’t get it
Again, obvious. This is how I started: “As Steven Weinberg said, ‘With or without religion you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.’ “

Awesome and Swedish all at the same time
Let them sing it for you!

What’s on her mind
A transcription of one of Little Girl’s monologues

(no title)
“At just barely three years old, Little Girl has caught on to irregular past tense verbs. “You bought that at the store, mommy!” When talking about our late cat Tang,” and that’s as far as I got. I guess writing about irregular past tense verbs is boring.

Help
Oh yes, I remember this. I wrote this whole long post about something from my past and then realized I’d already basically written that post before.

Seattle trip 2009
This is a bunch of pictures that I worked on uploading and ordering forever, before realizing I wasn’t uploading them to the private blog I keep for family.

Public work
Here we have a comparison of my two jobs and an inevitable complaint. I bet you are super-disappointed I never posted it!

Defending Sweden
Well, that certainly doesn’t sound like me.

Scary
Again something positive about Sweden. When did I write all these posts? “You know, none of this emigrating-to-Sweden business was intended to be analogous to the I’m-gonna-move-to-Canada musings many people professed during the Bush years, but it’s starting to be very troubling, even frightening, to me that right-wing domestic terrorism is, like, normal now. I feel compelled to point out that you don’t see liberals killing people who work perfectly legal jobs that they nonetheless don’t approve of. These hate-filled murderers are, to my mind, unable to cope with modernity, so act out in primitive ways.” But that’s a little mean, so I didn’t post it.

Mice on bikes*
?????????

Good things
You know me, so surely you aren’t surprised I didn’t have any actual text to go with that optimistic of a title.

The Handyman
I was writing about the handyman at the beach house, and how, in Husband’s absence Little Girl was getting attached to him and how sweet that was, but then I got all pissed of at how slowly he works and didn’t want to say anything nice.

You can’t bring it with you
Things the internet says you can’t buy in Sweden:
Adult-size broom
Large trash cans and garbage bags
Underwear if you wear over a size 10
Baby powder
Chocolate chips
Ziplock baggies
Baking soda

Posting to other blogs
Before my camera broke, I was getting really into taking pictures of things and sending them into snarky blogs. Like this one about apostrophes.

Okay, I am getting bored with this activity. There are 51 drafts left! If I posted as often as I began a post I would break the internet!

PS: Bloglines seems to be pretending my blog doesn’t exist again, but it really, really does!

After living with my grandparents for ten years my mother bought her own home. I was fifteen and strongly disapproved of her selection–a boring brick ranch house in the neighborhood across from my grandparents’. I had my heart set on some little cottage near the university where my mom was a professor, the one that she had not bought because of the termites, an issue which did not bother me nearly as much as the pink color of the walls in what was to be my room in the house she did buy. Which my mother painted for me while I was off at one of my academic camps, choosing a wonderful blue color that I subsequently replicated in our house in Atlanta, and a sample of which I have saved so I can put it in the Swedish house, too.

We got to know our new neighbors. I thought this was totally dumb. Why did we have to socialize with these people? I mean, GOD. Our closest neighbors were an elderly couple; the husband had been a General, and the wife raised four girls as they moved all around the world. I had nothing nice to say about the woman’s not having worked for pay, and I was also unimpressed that she had only learned Spanish when she’d lived in a variety of countries. Teenagers are big assholes. It’s a mystery how anybody put up with me.

But over the years I softened, and I invited Mrs. S to my 18th birthday party, a small, formal, sit-down affair at my mother’s, as her husband had died the year before. She was so charmed to be included. And over time I’ve gotten to know her family; her daughters lived all over the world, doing very interesting things–in recent years, though, two have died–and one raised a family in France, and I got to know her daughter. These far-flung relatives visit Mrs. S, almost 102, rather often and for great lengths of time–the one with the French husband stays for six months at a stretch–and so the granddaughter I know, who lives now in Italy, and I have gotten to catch up regularly every few years. We got together over Christmas. I’d love to visit her in Florence, and her parents in their home outside Paris.

It’s a bit of a thrill to know such globe-trotters, to know I have sincere invitations waiting for me to such exciting locales. And of course I’m such a person, too, with an international life, where crossing the ocean is a regular occurrence and different languages abound. I invite people to my European home, too. It’s a personal trait I come by honestly, having made my first international move, to China, before my first birthday. Soon I’ll have a new address abroad, far from my mother’s ranch house. But I’ll come back to visit, too.

So I haven’t been posting under the “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all” guide to human communication. Just a lot of stress and illness here. Money worries. Work issues. Nothing major. It could be worse, but when did knowing that ever make anyone feel better? So my gift to you is not to moan biliously all over your holiday spirit, should you be possessed of any.

+++

Little Girl is doing well. She now likes to assign rotating names, like “Steeny, Ganina, Sito, and Loli” to her toys. Lately she’s been talking a lot about “Fweeden” and our various relatives there, with whom we’ve been talking on the webcam more often. She and her four-year-old cousin A have managed, characteristically of children, to play together despite physical and linguistic boundaries, and that’s neat to watch. Little Girl really has quite the imagination; she can be entertained merely by her own two hands for twenty-minute stretches at a time, in which they talk to each other (did you know her hands were boys?) and gambol about.

Originally, she has wanted a a remote-control helicopter from Santa. When we saw such an item in action at a family party, though, it was clear this would not be the right toy for her, and since she was kind of scared of the thing in close quarters, she agreed. Instead, she wanted a cow. Uh. So I suggested what I, as her mother, know would be a big hit with her–a baby doll you can wash in the tub–and, possessed of a high order of self-awareness, Little Girl wholeheartedly agreed. We “called Santa” to change her order. After quite a lot of research, I settled on one and ordered it and it came and I am SUPER, SUPER EXCITED about this dolly. She’ll love it.

She’s taken after my grandmother, who is constantly calling out “yoo hoo!” when she’s looking for my grandfather (which is her primary occupation, never remembering where he is if he’s not right in front of her). Now when Little Girl wants attention, it’s “hoo hoo! hoo hoo!” until you pay it. It always works since I find it so endearing.

Oh, and I discovered a solution to her tangly bedhead hair and the complaints I get when I comb it out: a braid at all times. My little girl has a hairdo! So grown up!

I guess it’s Sweden Week because here’s another post on the topic. Maybe that’s because it’s about to be MY LAST AMERICAN CHRISTMAS. Did you know they open their presents on Christmas Eve in Sweden? No running down the stairs in the morning to see what Santa left, no stockings and cinnamon buns, no spending the whole afternoon trying out your new things. And what about Santa? It’s barbaric! Of course we could still visit the US for Christmas (I confess to having been surprised to learn that planes can still fly when it’s snowing; of course I’m from Georgia, where any snow completely halts society) but my mother has been talking about how “neat” it will be that we can get together in various spots–like Italy–for future holidays. That sounds pretty stressful, I have to say.

Anyway, as I’ve mentioned before, I speak Spanish, and my brain has a nice niche for it under “foreign languages.” For many years now I’ve been sporadically exposed to Swedish, and can usually understand whatever the topic is and often more than that, but in terms of production I’m quite limited. And when I am expressing myself in Swedish and I meet a hole in my lexicon, my head helpfully supplies the Spanish word. A few times the opposite has happened if I’ve been hearing a particular Swedish word a lot in my studies or whatever. This phenomenon does not increase my fluency.

There are a few differences that really trip me up. In Spanish, verb infinitives (like “to go”) end in the letter R. In Swedish, it’s the conjugated verbs that end in R. And the pronoun “he” is “han” and “she” is “hon“–so the A goes with the masculine, and the O with the feminine. Since it’s the opposite in Spanish, I had to create a mnemonic: “hon” is what waitresses, who are female, say in diners to customers.

I keep trying to get out of doing Spanish translation at work so I can focus on Swedish but they really don’t have anyone else. There’s a good chance I, in fact, will keep this job after the move (I work remotely as it is) but I just can’t operate effectively in three languages, one of which I am struggling to acquire. It’s confusing!

We’ve had a roof leak much of the time we’ve been here. (It took me a while to figure it out; I just kept thinking Little Girl had had an accident, since the leak is in her bathroom). We’ve had it fixed. It still leaked. We had the roofers out again. It’s still leaking. Apparently the roofers suck. And I can’t get them back out here to work on our roof–they keep lying to me and blowing me off. (I feel like the person who complains that the food is bad, and the portions small. But I really want the same company to fix it because, you know, I already paid them to do so. Surely they know how and are just being lazy).

My keyboard has started randomly, intermittently, of its own volition, typing series of Ts. I have to reboot to get it to stop. It’s so frustrating. And kind of freaky.

Next week I have to go take care of my grandparents while my mother has a little vacation. I’m happy to help, but I’m not actually able to do so. I can’t get them to take their meds. I can’t get my grandmother to use her walker. She won’t let me change her (I know, change!) or dress her. My grandfather won’t let me cook for them. And Little Girl always gets into trouble for doing regular little-kid stuff. But if it makes my mom feel better, I’ll go. But it’ll suck. Mostly I don’t think my grandmother knows me anymore, and when she does, she just gets pissed I’m living at the beach house, and keeps asking me when we’re leaving. That or she, in her forgetting-how-to-walk Alzheimer’s way, will keep fleeing whatever room Little Girl and I are in, confused by us, I guess. And they’re both so complainy and sad. But we’ll go.

I have too much work and I can’t get it done and it’s performance review time so I can’t say no to tasks and I keep volunteering to do shit I don’t have the time or interest to do and it’s really stressing me out.

As per my mother’s request, we are getting a new driveway here. After much prep, the concrete should be poured tomorrow. I am not altogether thrilled with how it is turning out, though I think it’ll be fine. The problem is that it’s all on me since I’m the only one here. I had to get bids, I had to pick one, I had to get approval from the architectural review board, I had to work on the plans, I had to answer all the questions (“Where do you want the 4-inch sleeve?” Uhhhh…), I have to live through the work. Sometimes I really wish Husband were around more. For the roof situation, too. Partners are useful.

As a sub-topic to that, I am super-excited about the landscaping opportunities the new driveway (which is in a different place from the old one) will provide, but then we only have a few months more here and they’re mostly in winter so it’s sort of like the gardening version of blue balls–all anticipation and work and no payoff. And that’s no fun.

Our one friend here is about to have a baby and so we’ll be down to no friends at all, since obviously she’ll be in the newborn hole for at least six months.

I’ve been trying to eat really, really well, and tonight I was compelled to purchase donuts. I ate two. (Little Girl had one and a half). They weren’t even good. Now I’m irritated with myself.

Let’s see. There’s more, but they’re in the vein of “I have to move to a beautiful country with a high standard of living and omigod peanut butter is expensive there!” and “My toe hurts” so I’ll just stop.

We’ve been here over half a year and only made one mother/daughter friend combo. Our social life is a far cry from what we had before, and sometimes, like right now, that makes me sad. I’m pretty sociable, and Little Girl is, too. I’ve said it before: I miss our old friends, and I miss having friends in general. I can get by okay by talking to my friends on the phone, but it’s just not the same as getting together with another parent and his/her kids for playdates, park trips, picnics–the assorted pleasant activities you do to entertain small children and oneself.

It’s not that we haven’t met people. It’s not that I haven’t made an effort. Mostly I think it’s that we’re here temporarily, and when people find that out, they don’t want to make an effort to get to know us.

Which I get. Which is why I only just last week told our one friend that we’re moving to Sweden. We’ve been getting together frequently for months (they had just moved here, too, so she was just as eager to swap phone numbers as I was when we met at storytime at the library), but I just never brought it up, and since the move is one of the big things going on with me, that means we talked a lot about her instead, which made her like us even more. You know how everybody likes to talk about themselves.

When I finally did inform her we were “thinking” about moving to Sweden, it was calculated. We’re firmly friends now. She’s heard about the difficulties we’ve had living in a family house. She knows Husband’s unhappy with commuting five hours each way every few days and wanted a new job. She knows he has a big family. It sort of made sense in the narrative of our lives I’ve disclosed to her, even if the idea of the move as a new theory is false. She wasn’t surprised to hear it. They’re even thinking of not staying here permanently themselves. Maybe she was hedging the same way I was.

All this time I was uncomfortable with keeping our plans from her, for not being authentic, but I wanted Little Girl and I to have some buddies even more. We needed them. As it happens, we just met a new mother/daughter pair that could potentially work out great, too, but I’m not sure I even have the energy to try to strike something up, though we did exchange numbers. I really liked the mom, which makes me even more discouraged: why make friends if you just have to leave them, anyway? We don’t have much longer here. Maybe I’ll should save up my friend-making efforts for Sweden, where it will be even more difficult to connect, for so many different reasons. But is that any way to live? Putting off happiness for convenience’s sake?

We had a great trip to Tennessee and North Carolina and a pleasant Thanksgiving. But on the road I realized I’m starting to have “lasts” in the US, and they’re unnerving. Elderly relatives I’ll probably not see again, mountains I may never pass through once more, accents I might ever hear again, foods that won’t be easy to find in the future–I’m beginning to take note.

It was bittersweet to explore parts of an old hometown, Asheville, and know it’s not too likely and certainly not too easy to visit them again (may I note I impressively remembered, mostly, how to find my old house that I lived in when I was five; sadly, Husband wouldn’t let me knock on the door and try to visit, though I told him this isn’t a strange thing to do–is it?). I couldn’t even buy souvenir reminders–I really wanted to take home some kind of Blue Ridge Mountain-y handicraft–since it’ll be too difficult to get stuff to Sweden. I settled for buying gifts for people who are staying put.

There are other places I’d like to see again (DC area to see family, San Francisco, Alaska, NYC) and since they’ll still be there even after I emigrate, there’s technically no rush. But it feels, rightly so, like time is running out on America. Just over four months left. And I so like it here.

We’re about to begin several days of driving around various southern states, none of which is adjacent to our state of residence, seeing family (specifically the sparse family of my stepfather), visiting old haunts in Asheville, NC, fretting about how the pets are doing (the cat will be guarding the house and the dogs will be in a kennel about which I have mixed feelings), and testing Little Girl’s tolerance for road trips, as well as the batteries of her portable DVD player. Traveling for Thanksgiving is a first for me; before it’s always come to me. Guess for my last Thanksgiving in the US it’s time to have the full holiday experience. I hope there’s green bean casserole.

We just don’t know what to do about this bathroom in the Swedish house. We are planning on gutting it but we don’t know how to put it back together.

It will be the only full bath in the (six bedroom!) house and so we want it to have the following elements: toilet, sink, storage, mirror, towel rack, tub, shower. It’s about 5×8 feet (160×257 cm). We had hoped to have a separate tub and shower but it seems the room is just too narrow for that I think.

The other problem is the window–if we have a shower/tub combo over there where the tub is now, how do we keep the window from being damaged by the water? And with that slanted ceiling a shower curtain won’t work, not that I like those anyway, and so I guess we’ll have to get some custom-cut glass panel. Or what?

And it looks like the typical thing there is to have floors and walls and the slanted ceiling all covered with the same linoleum-type material (but you can use different colors; we don’t want tile, except maybe for an accent somewhere).

So what should be put where? How do we solve our problems? What color(s) should it be? What kind of vanity? I need new thoughts on this!

I was pretty depressed the years I kept not conceiving a child. The usual fixes were sought: the services of a reproductive endicronologist, a therapist, an anti-depressant medication, a new life direction (grad school), and everybody’s favorite suggestion for combating being mopey, volunteer work. (It must be said, though, that with all this, the only thing that really made me feel better about not being able to get pregnant was getting pregnant).

I decided to teach English as a Second Language to refugees and got hooked up with a family of Afghanis who lived in the run-down apartment complex not too far. Twice a week for a year I tutored them in their home. Despite spending so much time with them I never did get to know everyone very well in terms of demographic details–names, ages, familial structure–due to linguistic and cultural constraints as well as what I suspect was a sort of purposeful lack of forthcomingness and clarity on their part that I decided to respect and let go, being aware their previous and current life circumstances were not altogether happy and might not be enjoyable or simple to recount. I know at least one child of the oldest couple present had been murdered, and that mention of the Taliban made everybody drop their eyes.

What became very clear, at any rate, was the kindness of the family, and the exotic tastiness of their food (I remember a lot of almonds) and their tea (I recall a beautiful tea service). What never became clear, to them at least, was much of what I tried to teach them. The kids all got up to speed in their schools, but the adults, particularly the women, seemed so baffled by not only the language but the process of participating in educational efforts, that it felt like every week we just repeated the lessons of the week before. I had taught ESL to illiterate adults before, or at least tried to (it’s by far the most challenging instructional environment imaginable, bar wartime, disability, and total apathy), and had some tricks up my sleeve, but I’m not really sure I left them much better, English-wise, than I found them.

But I know I helped them when I went grocery shopping with them. I know I helped them when I navigated the school system with them on behalf of a child who was having trouble. I know I clarified some impenetrable INS paperwork (to the best any human was able). I know I got one lady to stop applying her nasal spray to her ears, having totally not understood the purpose of the medicine her doctor had prescribed her. I know I made them feel more at home in a new country, a friendly, American face who kept showing up, smiling, carrying confusing worksheets and insisting cheerfully upon their memorizing their phone number and address (not that anybody ever did).

My dad asks after them a lot; once I took him to meet them and he had some sort of wordless bonding with the patriarch. I wish I had kept seeing them, but I gave them up when I was sickly pregnant, working two jobs, and in grad school full-time. I don’t know if they fully understood why I stopped coming. I wonder where they are, how they are doing. I know they would have loved to see Little Girl. They would have been so happy for me; they had always seemed so concerned that I didn’t have children and my family was not close by. To them, I think, nothing (possessions, comfort) could be an adequate replacement for family ties.

My grandfather was a surgeon and another close relative is a pediatrician. I never strongly considered medical school myself, mostly knowing I was not up for the gargantuan effort, and besides, I was jonesing for a baby as early as late college, but I appreciate medical arts and sciences and have had good experience with its practitioners and, yes, pretty much believe most of what my doctors tell me.

Sure, I wish medicine were more evidence-based and scientific and I recognize the unfortunate influence of drug company lobbyists (while being grateful for medications themselves, one of which, metformin, I take daily and which has hugely improved my health), and I know that my c-section wouldn’t have been considered necessary in many other countries, and that sometimes doctors make mistakes or don’t keep up with current research and have biases and strong attachment to preconceived notions just like anybody else.

Yet on the whole I am very cognizant of my good fortune in having access to experienced, educated, and kind medical practitioners, and I believe they mean my family well (insurance companies not so much). Medicine is one of the big perks of being human, and I see it as one of the super-neato ways that human intelligence and capabilities have developed in such a way as to guide our further evolution. No longer does shitty eyesight mean starvation! No longer can a small cut you weren’t able to keep clean potentially spell death! Now you can (sometimes) reproduce even against your body’s own inclination! Now, conceivably, we could be selecting for more subtle traits (in practice, though, the typically more scaled-back fertility of the more successful population–by some definitions–is the antithesis of how natural selection usually works. Now it’s survival of the least-apt to use contraception).

My appreciation of medical advances extends to topics like immunizations, so when the pediatrician finally got some H1N1 vaccine in, I immediately made an appointment. Little Girl’s not in school or around society at large much usually, but we’re about to go on a multi-state, multi-hotel, multi-tourist trap Thanksgiving trip, so I’m glad to offer her some additional protection. And to participate in the larger societal effort to reduce disease.

Uhhh, I am so sore. Lately I’ve had a mania for yard work. Some patches of the property have gone wild–or were never tamed, I’m not sure–so I feel like a pioneer homesteader, clearing the land for my log cabin. Creating order when before there was chaos is fulfilling, and there’s an artistic element that I enjoy: Which palm fronds to lop off? How to shape that azalea? Do I want to allow that incipient bay tree to grow further or ought that spot to be bare?

I think I’ve got a patch of poison ivy on my wrist, and my stomach muscles today are enormously sore, I guess from the huge project of slaying that climbing wisteria vine yesterday (God, that quite the epic battle), but I’m already planning on patrolling the ligustrum border tomorrow, conquering the ilex. It’s nice to have a hobby.

I don’t know, I guess I developed some sort of allergy or something, but a few years ago I started being insanely irritated by wearing earrings, and I eventually gave up. But I’d like to wear them, you know? For one thing, people keep giving me earrings, so I have tons. And some I actually like.

But then I had a new problem: I couldn’t get an earring in my right ear even when I tried. And the left ear was no picnic. The holes had filled back in.

So I decided to get them pierced again. I’d had this plan in the back of my mind a bit–not like it was urgent–but last week, the day after my birthday, while running some errands, Little Girl and I passed a store that advertised body piercings. Hey, a real piercer! That sounded good! We went in and a hot Israeli guy said he could probably stretch the holes for me for 15 bucks. Sold!

So Little Girl and I followed him back to a the piercing room, which was wallpapered with photos of young ladies of dubious reputations showing off their belly-button piercings. I wanted to show Little Girl what I meant by pierced ears, so I took her over to the little display of fake body parts with piercings in them, when I realized that there were no regular ear piercings in evidence. Sure, there are noses and eyebrows and lips and other kinds of lips, but no ears, so I quickly redirected her attention.

Explaining that the piercer was “like a doctor” (she likes doctors, and plus he had on latex gloves; they were black, but still) and he was going to fix my ears so I could wear earrings, she held my hand while he stretched one hole (OUCH) and had to pierce anew the other.

Little Girl was cool with it. She asked a few times if she could have her ears pierced, too, but was satisfied with my answer that she’d have to wait until she’s 10, or maybe even 13. (She is familiar with this sort of answer as she gets it when she requests to drive the car. Also, I have no real reasoning for those ages she has to await, except that I myself had to wait until 13 and that seems…sensible).

From a mommy standpoint, I felt a little uncomfortable with the slightly sexual ambiance of the piercing parlor, though Little Girl didn’t seem to notice. The piercer’s attitude towards Little Girl was one I like, though: he neither fawned over her nor ignored her, was just matter-of-fact that she was a small person who was accompanying me. Anyway, it was hardly that transgressive a place to take her, nestled as it was between a Bed Bath & Beyond and an Old Navy.

And my ears are healing nicely, thank you.

1 vague geocaching intent
0 geocaching experience
0 geocaching plan
1 fussy three-year-old
2 lazy dogs
0 strollers
0 containers of water
0 snacks
0 maps
and…
1 faulty motherfucking GPS device

This post writes itself, right? You can probably even infer the huge fight in the middle of nowhere after wandering around for two hours and arriving absolutely nowhere.

There’s a happy ending: Husband can run really fast, so he finally went and got the car so we didn’t have to drag ourselves all the way back, and then later we used his cell phone, which has GPS that actually functions, to, uh, drive to the spot, two miles away.