DH is off for ten days or so to catch lizards in the Chihuahuan desert. I am a bit jealous, not that he’s catching lizards, but that “work” for him is what many people would call “vacation.” I mean, he’s camping in the desert! OK, so kill lizards and pulling their tissues and putting them on dry ice is not what most people do for vacation. But the camping part is pretty cool.
He made a noose out of a telescoping fishing pole and fishing line. He noosed a couple of lizards around here for practice. I wish I had a picture of that lizard he brought in the house, dangling in mid-air with a fishing line around its midsection, and my husband smiling from ear to ear.
We peeled all the crawfish we brought home from the boil yesterday and peeled them today. A friend here (a local) told me that Zatarain’s Etouffee Base makes an excellent, fast crawfish etouffee - just follow the directions and add a pound of peeled crawfish tails.
I bear witness that this is true. It’s such a little box, that I was concerned it wouldn’t make much. But DH and I had enough for dinner, and oh my was it yummy. Yum yum yum. MMMMMMM. Teeny tiny little lobster tails in a spicy tomato cream sauce over rice.
We had fewer crawfish to bring home last year, but this year we peeled them faster. Maybe we’re getting more efficient.
You know you’re from New Orleans when: No matter where else you go in the world, you are always disappointed in the food.
I didn’t get my mom a card this year. I lived nearby for so long, that it was easy to get mom a card. Even if I waited until Sunday, I could go pick one up on the way over. We often went out for dinner with the whole family (all four of us siblings, plus spouses and children). That kind of tapered off as my parents acquired more grandchildren, and the moms stayed home with their own kids. My sisters-in-law probably send a card every year. I’m still not accustomed to not being able to go see Mom on Mother’s Day.
Pretty lame excuse, I guess.
My mom and I were talking the other day about talent. She said she was never able to do anything artistic, and she wishes she had been able to draw, or paint, or make pretty things. I disagree with her on that. My mother never got into music, I think, but she has a lovely voice. Some of my earliest memories are of my mom singing pop music while she did “mom stuff” in the kitchen.
She also is that rarest of things, a really good listener. Mom was infinitely patient with her four little children, and even when we got to be older and more self-reliant, she had available whatever time we were willing to give her. As an adult, I really appreciate that rare talent, which really is a talent…you just can’t hang it on a wall.
One of my favorite bloggers wrote this essay about her mother.
And I ripped this song from a CD (Windows Media Player required, probably) that the children sang in church today. I first noticed this song when an online friend posted the lyrics, but today was the first time in my 17 years as a LdS that I heard it sung. I cried.
Happy Mother’s Day.
I really don’t like doing yard work. I think I would like gardening if I didn’t also have to cut the grass.
I love thinking about gardens, and how they could look in my yard. But because I’m in such poor physical condition, the actual work of yard work is really, really hard for me. I spent an hour cutting the front yard this morning, and by the time I was done it took me fifteen minutes to catch my breath.
The back yard is large and has a lot of potential. I think I would like to put raised plant beds in some strategic places, because it’s a swamp, and to plant some large native plants and shrubs (vs. trees) along the fences. I would like a nice covered patio off the back door, perhaps even screened in (’cause we got bugs here) and a gravelly walkway meandering around the raised beds and native plants. There would be some yard for little boy to play in, and maybe even some neat plant/play areas, where he could crawl around and look for bugs and lizards. It would be nice to have a shallow pond, with some moving water in it, to bring in the frogs. We had frogs in the yard in January in a shallow marshy area (four inches of muck=happy frogs).
Of course, it would take big $$ to pay someone to do this, and is just too physically demanding for me right now. Maybe that’s an incentive to become more physically fit.
We are running out of space on our server. It’s not a very big drive to begin with, and nobody ever deletes or cleans up anything.
I downloaded a utility that shows how much space each folder uses. By moving one ancient application off the server onto a local drive (mine has over 75GB available), and deleting one folder and one additional file, I will be able to free up three times the amount of space we have available now.
On the other hand, there are hundreds and hundreds of folders with hundreds and hundreds of documents that could be cleaned up a little here and a little there and it would probably free even more space. But it would take weeks to sort through them to make sure only truly unneeded stuff was deleted. This way, I’m not cleaning up nearly as much space as I could, but it took just a couple of hours to figure out how to make it happen, instead of a couple of weeks.
I’m sure there’s a metaphor in there somewhere.
A friend sent me an e-mail in which she described feeling “freed” when she had prayed to know if she should stay with her husband, and she finally felt like it was OK to leave. The exact same thing happened to me. I prayed and prayed and prayed to be able to get a divorce. I kept getting the same answer: No. Stay. Eventually after some time in Alanon, the answer changed. And I was free.
I think the reason I needed to stay was because without recovery, in Alanon, I would have just gone into the same relationship with a different guy. Instead, though, I was able to see how my own behavior made the situation much worse, and how I couldn’t control him, but I could control me.
Once I learned that, it was OK to move on.
I was going to make some extra $$ setting up a PC for a colleague. Augh! They have an internal DSL modem, and Bellsouth told me the wrong driver to download. And you can’t get internet access without the driver. I spent most of the day there and accomplished very little.
I don’t like to charge by the hour, because if I was a professional, it would only take two hours or so even under those difficult conditions. I have mentally prepared myself to finish the job in a timely manner; I hope to get that done pretty quickly this week.
A week from tomorrow, DH is going to drive all the way across Texas to catch lizards (various species of the genus aspidoscilis) in New Mexico and Arizona. He’ll probably be gone for about ten days or so. It’ll be just me and Little Boy for most of that time; Older Son finishes school a week from Friday. This will definitely involved “working on my time off,” because I’ll be a single parent. Well, I did it to him twice already this year; I guess it’s my turn.
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