jump to navigation

Thanks V! July 29, 2008

Posted by spacemom in : Weblogs , 7 comments

Thanks to Vanessa at More Than You Ever Wanted to Know,

I am officially addicted to Cake Wrecks… 

Hungry Soul July 3, 2008

Posted by spacemom in : Weblogs, Depression , 2 comments

Julie Pippert of  "Using my Words" has asked "what do you do to feed your soul? What renews you? How does that fit in with the cultural protocol?"

I would step into my trusty 1990 Ford Escort. Sticking with my need to have alliteration, I named her Emma. She and I went everywhere. Even though it was dark and almost 12:30am, I knew where I was going. With the radio blasting, I would turn out of the SUNY Stony Brook parking and ease onto Nichols Road. Sure, it had a route number, but I called it Nichols Road. Making my way to 25A, I would stumble through the rocky coastline of Eastern Long Island. Little towns with bungalows and illegal in-laws and student apartments dotted the way. Eventually, I would live in one of these summer cottages, surviving the spiders that loved the moist sea air.

I drove with the turns of the road. By Wading River, past the William Floyd Parkway (AKA the Pink Floyd parkway) 25A merged with 25,  Along the fences for Grumman, "no photos allowed". The landscape flattened out a bit, eventually leading towards  the city of Riverhead.  Then I turned towards the North Fork of Long Island.

The radio, or a tape would be blaring. I would sing along, pretending to be someone I was not. On the road there was no one to hear me sing. In the night, few people were out here to be bothered with. I continued on through small towns. Mattituck, Cutchogue, Southhold, Greenport. I was nearing my destination. A small land bridge told me  I was almost there. When I reached Orient Point, I would park the car and smell the sea air. On the other side of the land was Long Island Sound, but in front of me was Pecconic Bay. I loved to listen to Billy Joel on these trips. He was Long Island. A different part of Long Island than the hair and cars….

After enjoying the end of the world, I would drive back to my sheltered College life. But for a few hours, I could feed my hungry soul

 

Welcome Chloe! June 12, 2008

Posted by spacemom in : Weblogs , add a comment

Just wanted to give a welcome and a big congrats to Mommy Karen, Daddy Random and BIG SISTER MP from the Naked Ovary!

Go on! Give some congrats to this family of 4!

Stuffing the mailbox February 12, 2008

Posted by spacemom in : Weblogs , 4 comments

Today I’ve been working on setting up my gmail account. I am moving my email to gmail.

Why? well, for one, Jay keeps threatening to move us over to verizon. And I am getting tired of constantly changing my email addresses.

So I am going to work on this, cleaning up the email and moving over there…. Wish me luck…. 

Great news and tagged January 29, 2008

Posted by spacemom in : Weblogs, TeamWhyMommy , 2 comments

First, Stop over at WhyMommy’s! She got clean margins on her breast cancer! But, (of course there is a but), they found cancer in the other breast as well. Keep her in your thoughts that they caught that nice and early so that she is now cancer free!

 
Second, I’ve been tagged by Penelope Anne of the Cafe at the End of the Universe!! Eek!

 First, the rules, which are important, because they also tag — randomly — six more people to join in the fun:

1. Link to the person that tagged you
2. Post the rules on your blog
3. Share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself
4. Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs
5. Let each random person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their website.

 Hmmm

Random quirks about me:

  1. I dispise spiders. Hate hate hate them! Really!
  2. I like to eat Honey Comb cereal with kool-aid instead of milk (I know!)
  3. A dorito and peanut butter sandwich is supreme
  4. I love the feeling of snot freezing in my nose when it is really cold out
  5. I watch TV shows on ghosts and UFOs and then scare myself silly with shadows
  6. Sunday afternoons in the late winter are depressing because there are no good sports on.

 

I suck at tagging, so if you wish to do this meme, go ahead and leave me a comment so I can hunt you down! BRAHAHAHAHAHA

 

* BTW- I may be AWOL this week. We have a NSR to prepare for (NASA Senior Review) and we are all really busy 

What is needed? January 14, 2008

Posted by spacemom in : Weblogs, Life...otherwise , 3 comments

My Canadian buddy,, Midlife Traveler, is trying to save money. Her family wants to buy a house in a rural area and of course, houses mean mortgages, and mortgages mean you need money as a down payment.

Her blog often leaves me thinking, and now is no different. Please go over and read, but a quick summary is this: the original plan was to learn how to save money. This lead to her discovering the live simply theory. Now she is very excited about this concept and the practical implications.

She has asked a very important question "What is needed?"

I think that is a great question and I have been thinking about that the past few days

Things I think I could easily cut back on

Things that are not so easy:

 To be honest, Jay and I do live pretty simply. We try to eat healthy at home and don’t buy a ton of junk at the store. Impulse buys are low and we rarely buy food that we don’t need. We don’t "shop" often. Soleil and I both have a touch of SID and we both flip after being at the mall for a while. We’ve switched our main lighting to CFLs, and have discovered that our electric bill dropped $40 a month (I kid you not). We’ve added a gas fireplace enclosure on each floor. We are burning less gas to keep the house as warm as before, plus we have sealed out the drafts from outside.

Every year we draft up a budget of what we want to do for the house, what expenses we expect to have that year from an annual grocery bill to travel costs (personal travel, not work travel), furniture purchases, electronic expenses and that oh so important savings. We actually put our savings into the budget and insist on a certain level of savings. 

So I guess we have already simplified our lives. This holiday season was a perfect example. The girls got 1 present a day. Some presents were simple, a game that I purchased at a rummage sale. Or Leapster cartridges that I was able to pick up on a buy one get one free sale. The 8 gifts were not all from us. Parents and aunts/uncles were giving gifts too. That helped. In September/October, I had the girls do a toy purge with me. We discussed how we need to get rid of what we don’t use and that we should help those who could use it instead of throwing it out.

What do you find is needed in your life? What can you simplify? 

 

 

Red, red wine… January 8, 2008

Posted by spacemom in : Weblogs , 3 comments

Yesterday was a crazy day. After spending the morning with the girls, running to the gym and then following up with an afternoon with friends, I hopped a nice flight to the state of Texas. There’s an astronomical meeting here and I decided to luxuriate in a bed by myself.

Since I was in Texas, I let Johnny know I was coming. Today we met up at my hotel, went for a tour of the area and then checked out the renovations at his house. I got to meet the dogs (I love them!) and the wifey (who is much nicer than Johnny paints her. She is so sweet.) and the Girl and the Boy. The Girl warmed right up to me. I love playing with kids, something I never thought I would like when I was younger!

We got most of the afternoon to sit back and chat. That was really nice. You can learn a great deal about someone via email, but it is much nicer to sit back and talk in person.

Johnny took some, um, photos. Including the One with the Pimp hat…Oh yeah.. the p1mp hat…(sorry, I tried to find the blog entry about that, but I couldn’t find it… sigh…) You’ll just have to wait until he posts them! 

 

Right now I am contemplating sleep after 3 glasses of wonderful red wine!

Thanks Johnny! 

 

Ediited to add: I found the P1MP POST! 

Happy New Year December 31, 2007

Posted by spacemom in : Weblogs , 3 comments

Trackback Hell November 20, 2007

Posted by spacemom in : Weblogs , 6 comments

UGH! I am getting so frustrated! I am getting bots that come through my blog and put up trackbacks on old posts. These are for P*rN or for drug or damn Viagr@ UGH! I had 22 trackbacks today!

 

It is hard for me to go back and remove all of the trackbacks from my old posts….sigh….

Anyone else have trouble with this? Suggestions? 

A quick post before the day hits. November 9, 2007

Posted by spacemom in : Weblogs, Religion , 2 comments

Yes, I was hoping to get a quick post in before the day really hit me hard. But, oy! Start with the bus being EARLY and you get the picture of today. I make the girls leave the house at 8:25 (so we really leave around 8:28). We need to walk about 1/6 mile to the bus stop. It’s not far, but it is around the corner. We got to the bus stop at 8:33 and BOOM at 8:35 the bus was there. The boy at the corner house almost missed it. His mom ran him across the street and got him on the bus. Whew!

We had two meltdowns in the car; one because Soleil got the pretty pony tail holder and one because we’re three and who needs a reason to meltdown when you’re three? G-d, I hate three. There are so many great parts of this age, just to be blown out of the water by Toddler Insanity. Really, I think it’s been declared by the APA that children who are three are affected by Toddler Insanity.  If I were Dave Barry, I would say that Toddler Insanity is a great name for a band.

Finally, we made it to daycare, when another meltdown occurred because Daddy was going to make it to the door first.(Note to self. Find copy of Alfie Kohn’s No Contest. Use this as a bedtime story.)

I’ve been avoiding the "post once a day in November" stuff because, well, I post every work day and occasionally on weekends. It is fun reading everyone else’s blogs, but really, I can’t keep up. I have a life somewhere in here.

But yesterday, one of my favorite bloggers*** who shall remain nameless, titled a post   "Arbeit macht frei".

I couldn’t remember the translation, but the title was enough to unnerve me. In truth, the blogger was not trying to offend. She was upset over a topic. She later changed the title to the English and later changed it again.

It is amazing how little words can hurt. To me, this phrase brings hurt to my children. They don’t even know it. This weekend, our town is holding a memorial for Kristallnacht.  Please take a moment to read that link. I’ll wait.

You back? Good. Think about this. I think about our temple. The beauty of the sanctuary. The handcarved ark that holds three Torot (Torah scrolls). I am not terribly religious, but I shudder at these thoughts… Imagine, people bursting in and destroying this all. Imagine being forced to a camp or beating to death just for being Jewish.  My children would be accepted as Jews by the haters and probably not as Jews by the faithful (blood line goes through the mother). Could something like this happen today?

You think it can’t. You know it can’t, right? I mean it’s not like the United States would ever round up people based on their religion and torture them and force them to live in a camp? We’re tolerant now. Right? We respect all religions (unless you are atheist. Then you are scum of the earth(that’s SARCASM– I support atheists 100%))

Imagine this, one small title on a blog post. Having nothing to do with religion at all, brought on these strong feelings… Words hurt. Use them carefully.

 

***If you know this blogger, understand that I am NOT upset at her in any way. She is a wonderful person. I am not mad at her. She changed the title when people questioned her on it. And NO, I will not respond to questions of who it was. She does not deserve any bad press. This is a post about how words brought on such strong feelings….