The Seversons

So, back in the day, me and some roommates had up on our quote board (the quote board is one of those things you can have in college because you’re allowed to delight in your own wit and people humor you because, well, you’re in college) this little gem courtesy of yours truly: “I’d rather get married than take a bath.”  (The context of this was rather complicated.  We were in the habit of making bets where the wager was $5 and you had to do something ludicrous to do it.  One main example was to get married in two months.  None of us was even dating anyone, so of course that was a long shot.  This particular day, we’d just watched What Lies Beneath, which is scary and involves a bath.  After the movie, I was offered $5 to go take a bath, and that is the origin of the quote.)

Now I am worried that somewhere, water heard me and is now exacting its revenge.  You may recall that within the last few months, I have lost all water to our apartment on multiple occasions.  It even went out on me when I was mid-shampoo.  Now water has a new trick up its sleeve.  It’s here.  It’s available.  It’s just no good.

We are in the middle of what now claims to be a 24-48 hour boil-water advisory.  We found out this morning about 12 hours after it went into effect.  After we’d both showered.  We are not supposed to bathe in it, drink it, or use it to brush our teeth.  So, that means I can’t cook my planned dinner, since I can’t wash the vegetables.  We’re getting ready to leave in a couple of days, so we can’t do dishes or laundry so the house will be tidy.

Worse, Eric just went on a run.  He is sweaty.  And when he is sweaty, he’s pretty fragrant.  And he just said he wasn’t going to take a shower.  I told him he is taking one anyway.

So.  Hopefully someday we’ll get our laundry done.  In the mean time, we’ll be chewing mint gum, buying bottled water, going out for dinner (in another county), etc.  I am not sure what I need to do to make it up to water, but I’m definitely ready to do it.

We are not a pet couple, nor are we quite at the stage where we’re looking to reproduce.  Therefore we add to our little family unit in mainly one way: electronics.  These purchases are rather few and far-between, they are also much discussed and mutually agreed upon.  Eric may pretend when he’s around the boys that being married means no more toys, but it’s just pretending, I promise.  (Although in a bit of pre-marriage jitters, he did buy a flat screen television when he was convinced that I would never let him buy anything again.)

Our newest addition is a Wii Fit which Eric managed to hunt down.  He may act like he did this for my benefit, but I suspect it’s only because I made a deal with him that he couldn’t get Guitar Hero III until he found me a Wii Fit.  I somewhat naively assumed it would take him a while.  It didn’t.  But so far you’d think things had been the other way around as the Wii Fit is Eric’s new best friend.

I am a good wife.  You know this because I am not posting pictures of Eric doing yoga poses.  But I am a good blogger, so I must tell you that he does yoga poses.  Every day.  He is pretty bad at the balance stuff, and let’s just say hula hooping is not his forte, but he does well at the yoga poses and strength training.  We are both pretty competitive and the Wii Fit brings this out even more.  I am in the number 1 spot for most of the yoga, but Eric has me beat on one of them and I am determined to oust him.  Eric also likes to regularly compare our graphs and insists, if mine is steeper, that the graph is off because of some adjustment for something.

My favorite thing about the Wii Fit is the company.  Last Christmas, we took the Wii to my parents’ house and so most of my family members ended up making their own Mii’s, little people that represent you in a game.  We don’t use them anymore, but they still exist.  And it’s obvious which one goes with who, in fact the one of my Mom looks an awful lot like her.  When you do Wii Fit exercises, sometimes you’re not alone.  You do step on a stage with a bunch of other Mii’s.  The Soccer Heading exercise involves a bunch of Mii’s kicking balls at you.  They run by you in the running exercise, and they throw hula hoops at you in the hula hooping.  But the Step is by far the best.  Every time one of us does Step, they are joined by my entire family, all of whom have ecstatic looks on their little Mii faces.  My dad, in particular, really seems to rock out when he does Step.  The two Mii’s on either side of you will look at you in between steps and give you this smile like, “Isn’t this the coolest thing ever?”  It isn’t, but it’s amusing.

However, I do have one caveat.  If there has ever been a machine that seems to have designs to take over the world, it’s the Wii Fit.  It wants to know an awful lot of things about you.  If you are doing well it congratulates you, but if you’re not it gets on your case.  If you fall over during a yoga pose, your trainer says, “You fell over, didn’t you?”  It tells you how you favor your right leg over your left.  It lectures you about how you need to do this every day.  If you lose weight too fast, expect a talking to.  It even spies on you when you’re not around.  On Eric’s second day, when he got on the board, instead of letting him get into his workout, it asked him about me and how I was looking.  (Ever since then Eric wants me to get on the Wii Fit all the time to see when it asks about him.  It hasn’t yet.  I think he is secretly heartbroken.)

The Wii Fit is so opinionated about everything that I can’t help but think it is trying to secretly brainwash me and millions of others into a toned, well-balanced, yoga-posing army to take over the world.  In a way, it kind of reminds me of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey.  There is something kind of stalker-ish about how curious it always seems to be about every aspect of your life.  I’m just waiting for it to say, “I’m sorry, but you cannot quit this exercise,” after I hit the Quit button.

Eric doesn’t seem to see quite as malevolent a presence.  But he was rather surprised the other day when his trainer wasn’t available and had to be replaced by the second trainer.  We still haven’t figured out why a computer-generated image would need to take a little break.

We probably won’t be posting much for the next week.  On Friday we are taking a short trip to the gulf coast, but pictures should follow.

I’m sitting here drinking my green sludge.  It is that most lovely time of the day, the time right after my workout where I get to have my post-workout shake.  (The green sludge is actually very tasty.  It’s made of a banana, some plain yogurt, and Superfood.  Superfood is a juice by Odwalla, but it has spirulina and wheat grass and such giving it a green color.  Thus the green sludge.)  I still hate doing the workout, but it’s become a part of my routine.  And despite the fact that I am still not bikini-ready and our beach trip is less than two weeks away, I am still feeling very positive.

Yesterday I decided to mix it up a bit by doing a Pilates video instead.  I’ve done this video before, when I was first making my workout attempts a few months ago.  Pilates is one of those things that is much more difficult than it looks.  The last time I did it, I really struggled, and I was so sore the next day I had trouble moving.  This time it was cake.  Not only was it cake, but I did a second short workout afterwards just to make sure I got my daily dose of lunges and crunches.  I don’t know why I missed my lunges, I hate my lunges, there is no way in which I enjoy them.  At least with crunches I can feel buff because I’m getting good at them, but I always hate lunges.  But I did them anyway.  Given my previous exercise experience, this is about as hardcore as I get.

Also making me feel good about myself are my current reads.  For those of you who don’t read the other page, I’m now in the middle of The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence and Brideshead, Revisited by Evelyn Waugh.  I am reading two impressive books by impressive authors, making my reading list more impressive.  But the big news is that I am thoroughly enjoying them.  Lately I’ve been feeling underwhelmed by my reading choices.  What happened to the days where I read big, difficult classics for fun?  So I added some more serious stuff to my list and so far it’s going well.  I still haven’t gotten to Melville or Proust, but let’s take some baby steps.  I actually think having Waugh on there as a serious author is kind of cheating.  There are far too many jokes.  But it’s my first Waugh so it has to count for something.  And D.H. Lawrence is kind of cheating, too, because I’ve enjoyed him so very much in the past.  I’m going to have to step it up a notch at some point.  Right now, though, these are good for the ego.  If I am feeling particularly daring, I may take one of my mammoth unread paperbacks to the beach with me.  (Great Expectations, Swann’s Way, or Don Quixote… actually maybe I won’t.  My intended beach reads are Sacred Games and Tipping the Velvet. I am very much looking forward to the latter which I expect to be quite scandalous, it’s my last Sarah Waters book, now that I’ve gone through them all in reverse chronological order.)

This morning I made a reservation for Eric and my first anniversary.  We are going back to the Ritz for just a night.  This time we’d actually like to spend the night there instead of the Emergency Room.  Wish us luck.  (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, click here.)

You may recall that we’ve been trying to take a hike for about a month or so.  Eric wants to take me up Blood Mountain and I think I’m in good enough shape.  I haven’t actually been on the Appalachian Trail yet, though we made a previous attempt where the trail taking us there disappeared so we had to turn back.  The only day we can plan for this hike is Sunday, since Eric works weekdays and I work Saturday mornings.  It’s a couple hours to drive up and a moderately long hike.  So we get ready to go for every single Sunday so far.  Except that every Sunday there have been thunderstorms.  I don’t particularly want to get soaked to the skin while I hike.  Plus, I remember in Utah reading stories in the paper about young newlywed couples going on hikes together and then getting struck by lightning and killed.  (It’s completely possible I only read one such article, but it’s compounded in my mind.)  Cross your fingers for us and let’s hope for better this coming Sunday.

And the last thing that is making me feel particularly good today?  My work-in-progress is up to nearly 34,000 words.  While it looks puny as currently formatted, when I do it in the publishing format with different font, spacing, and margins, I’m actually at 143 pages.  Should I ever finish this beast, I will be looking for readers.  (If I am very lucky, perhaps by the end of the year?)  However, first I should probably figure out who the killer is.

Right now we’re having a stereotypical summer shower.  It’s the middle of the afternoon.  It was pleasant out five seconds ago.  And then suddenly rain comes hammering down with no warning, only to clear up a few minutes later.  We’ve been having lots of big thunderstorms, too.  I love them, except when I am at the library and one hits just as I get out of my car.  That happened a couple weeks ago.  I tried to wait it out, but it wasn’t one of the little ones, so I ended up pretty drenched.  We didn’t have any of these last summer.  I remember because Eric and I were engaged and it rained exactly one day our whole engagement.  The next time it rained was, of course, our wedding day.  At least it means the drought has let up a bit.

I neglected to share a particularly terrifying experience last week.  I was hesitant to share it because I thought some of you (particularly members of my own family) would get all freaked out and paranoid about it.  I can’t blame you.  But misery loves company, and so does paranoia, I guess.  I was up early a couple Saturdays ago for work.  I got in the shower and was going about my showerly business when I felt something on my back.  Not unusual, my back was under the water, my hair is long, these things happen.  But I reached back and felt that there was something there.  It was a very quick chain of events from there.  I could tell it was a bug, so I flicked it.  It just had to land anywhere, since everywhere was wet, and it would be out of commission.  It fell on the floor of the tub, except I lost my balance and my foot went right on top of it.  I didn’t exactly smush it because feeling it under my foot sent me reeling in the other direction.  Finally when I steadied myself I saw a little black thing–possibly with wings–being whisked down the drain.  But I wasn’t really paying much attention.  Because it bit me.  Or stung me.  Or something.  On my back and my foot.  And it HURT.  I jumped out of the shower for a minute, inspected for any other bugs that may be lurking, and then took a look at my back in the mirror.  There was a nasty little welt there on my back.  I finished my showering business, got a towel on, and jumped into bed where a half-awake Eric did his best to make me feel better.

Because it’s me and I’m paranoid I was worried maybe my welts would swell up and then I’d fall over from anaphylactic shock or something.  But I didn’t.  While Eric inspected my welt, I told him about when I was a freshman in college and a bee landed on my face as I was crossing the street heading for class.  I’d never been stung by a bee before, and being the crazy paranoiac I am, I always harbored a fear that I was allergic to bees.  I didn’t realize it was a bee on my face, sitting right on my cheekbone just below my eye, so I swatted it away, and it stung me.  So there I was, only about 100 feet away from the building I was heading for and my Humanities 101 class and I didn’t know if I would make it.  The sting hurt a lot and I felt my face swelling, so I went into the bathroom to check on it.  I got a pretty nasty looking welt on my cheek, but I put cold water on it and it went down.  After a few minutes, satisfied I wasn’t dead or in a coma, I went to class.

My bee sting experience was a good relief, since I learned a bee won’t kill me.  But the shower experience was the opposite.  I still have no clue what kind of bug it was and now I’m hyper vigilant when I inspect the shower.  I still don’t know how that thing got on my back in the first place.  I’m leaning towards a winged creature… but I can’t be sure.

It’s saying something that my shower-stinging experience (which in my mind is accompanied by the music in the Psycho shower scene) is the only real event of note the last week or two.  We aren’t up to much.  I had this past Saturday off, meaning a whole week without any work.  We had friends over on Friday.  I figured out that we could watch tennis on the computer instead of having to drive somewhere (thanks, ESPN360.com!) and we decided to sit on the couch in our jammies to watch the women’s and men’s Wimbledon finals on Saturday and Sunday mornings.  By the time Eric got it set up to run on our television (the picture was decent, but the frame speed made it hard to keep up with those quick shots) it was nearly halfway through the Williams-sisters match.  I rooted for Serena, who lost, though I think she was playing better tennis for most of the match.  I commented to Eric that I like Serena because she’s pretty much the only athlete with boobs that I can think of.  I mean, it’s hard enough having to run all over the court like that, but I feel like Venus, who’s all arms and legs, probably has an easier time.  I like that Serena doesn’t have a traditional athlete’s build, but that she’s incredibly tough.

Sunday was a much longer haul.  Two rain delays and a five-setter meant we watched tennis basically all day.  It was traumatic, since I’m a hard-core Nadal fan and I really wanted him to beat Federer and he blew a 2-0 set lead and from there I was convinced he’d lose.  When I watch sports where I actually care about the outcome, I get very stressed.  Whenever there was an important point, which came every five seconds or so, I got worried and didn’t want to watch.  Still, it was a great game to watch.  Especially since recently too many matches are all short points.  It had tons of long rallies, lots of great shots, and had either of them been playing anyone else it would’ve been over in an hour.  But Nadal pulled it out, I was very pumped, though I still resented the fact that I’d been miserable for a few hours anticipating his defeat.  I watch a lot of tennis, though not enough to be any kind of expert, and I thought it one of the best matches I’ve seen.  Though I remember one from several years ago when I was a big Sampras fan where Sampras seemed so sick he wouldn’t be able to finish the game, but then managed to win.  (An internet search makes me suspect this was a US Open match from 1996 against Corretja, though Sampras had a reputation for faking illness on the court and puked in at least one other match on the court.)

I’m still working out about 5 days a week.  I do just one workout now, pretty much every time.  It’s the hardest and so I figure it’s the best.  It’s still, as always, me and Cindy out there getting our sweat on.  But I have to admit, it’s not as fun as it used to be.  When I started working out at home a few months ago, it was something new and different, I would get a bunch of different videos from netflix to try.  But once I started this final workout and did it for a good three or four weeks now, it’s not so fun.  I have it all memorized, which means that when I’m doing the second set of forward-and-back-lunges, I know that coming up next are dips and I hate both of those.  I know the jumps come in the first cardio set, even though I always hope it’s the second.  It was much better when I didn’t know what was coming.  The problem about this is that working out is hard.  It’s hot, I’m sweaty and out of breath, and it’s just not fun.  My only reward is seeing improvement.  My cheeks are thinner.  My waist is more defined.  But I still have plenty of undesirable pudge that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.  I’m now able to do all the various sit-ups and crunches (over 100), which makes me feel awesome.  But I still can’t do all the squats or push-ups and my improvement is slow-going.

Today, to mix things up a little, and since I know the routines so well, I decided to turn on the news while I worked out.  So I downloaded a podcast of a morning news show I like for today, put it on, and learned about research on whether octopuses (apparently the term octopi is frowned upon) are right or left armed.  It made my workout much more pleasant.  And this is good, since I should probably keep it up for a while to see if I can get a bit more buff.

We have an upcoming trip to Florida for a little vacation in a couple weeks.  But we aren’t expecting to have quite the travel season we usually do for the rest of the year.  We’ll head up to Salt Lake City with my family for Thanksgiving, but it’s looking like we’ll stay in Atlanta for Christmas.  Eric will be just starting his clinical rotations in med school, plane fares are obscenely high, and it just seems like the best option.  Eric has, as usual, very specific requests.  There must be a tree, it must have lights and decorations.  I would be perfectly happy to go tree-less, and have decided that the tree will be tiny, since that’s the size of our apartment.  He has, though, kindly offered to let me do whatever traditions I wish.  While I hope to carry on my family’s tradition of having a goose dinner, there is no way I’m cooking a goose in our crappy oven for only the two of us.  Geese are huge.  And a pain to carve.  I will save it for another year.  So, I’m thinking something like a turkey from the honey baked ham store.  Not too expensive, very little work.  That way I can go crazy on side dishes and pie.  I understand that it is July, but if you aren’t familiar with my ever-expanding tendency to plan, well, consider yourself lucky.

However, what I was actually going to say was that since we are going low-key for traveling this year, any and all of you are welcome to come visit us.  (We look forward to my in-laws in October!)  Or we can work out something else.  Eric may not be able to make it once December rolls around, but I will be just plain bored in February and March when I won’t be teaching.  Anyone who wants to come to Disney World with me is welcome to drop a line.

Today I was actually listening to music on my iPod.  This isn’t something I do often, even though that’s technically the purpose of the iPod.  Mostly I listen to audiobooks and podcasts on it.  (Mostly.  That was for you, baby.)  But I decided I needed to listen to more music, mostly so I could sing.  I quite like singing and I do it so little these days.  I was motivated after I listened to an interview with Kelli O’Hara.  I have had plenty of women I’ve envied over the years, where I would gladly have given an arm to get their voice.  But I think the search must stop because Kelli O’Hara is perfect.  (There is a sad lack of Kelli O’Hara material on youtube.  But you can hear the interview which has plenty of musical clips here.  If you haven’t heard of her, she’s got the main role in the current revival of South Pacific, was in last year’s The Pajama Game, and the previous year’s Light in the Piazza.)

Anyway, listening to Kelli O’Hara sing songs I love to sing made me want to sing them.  And that made me sad about the state of my iPod.  They say you get stuck in your musical tastes around 25 or so, and my iPod would seem to support that idea.  I’ve heard all my music so many times that I just put it on Shuffle most of the time.  My greatest joy is being surprised by a song I haven’t heard in a while and Shuffle is the only way to get that to happen.  But the problem with shuffling is that I just feel like my iPod is depressed.  Depressed enough that it could use some therapy or a Xanax or something.  Where is all my peppy music?  I actually pulled off all my musicals from the playlists because it was too long.  I now see that this was a mistake.  Because instead I’m left with a whole bunch of perfectly respectable but depressing music that I never want to listen to.  Depressing music was great back when I used to get regularly dumped.  But now that I’m past that I want peppy.  (This may explain why the last addition to my iPod was ABBA.  Yes, I’m admitting it.)

Today I had a bit of a drive out to an outlet to get myself a new pair of cross-training shoes.  The in-town selection has been pitiful.  So I pulled out the old iPod and put it on shuffle and prepared to sing my lungs out.  Except I kept having to hit next because everything was so gloomy.

One thing I did notice was that so much of my music reminds me very specifically of particular times and places.  Wilco makes me think of driving down University Avenue in Provo.  Ryan Adams reminds me of driving around downtown Austin.  Liz Phair puts me back the year I lived in Conroe, Texas.  Elvis Costello and David Bowie go with Orlando, on I-4 between Disney World and Sea World.  Atlanta doesn’t really have its own music, probably because I rarely acquire any.  I got the new Rufus Wainwright last year, but that just reminds me of playing it over and over again while I drove to Tennessee.  One of my favorite memories, though comes from listening to The Who.

I must preface this story by saying that a car is good for two things.  First, getting around.  Second, singing.  Your car is your own soundproof booth to belt as loud as you can.  Good stereo systems are always helpful.  No one’s in the next room when you’re in the car.  You don’t have to worry about who will overhear you.  This is probably why all my music memories relate to driving down particular roads.  Once during law school, I was driving through Provo and had The Who playing pretty loud.  Specifically, I was playing Baba O’Riley, a.k.a. the awesomest song ever.  (Among the sins committed by the television shows in the CSI oeuvre, the greatest–even greater than putting on lame television–is the way they’ve ruined The Who.)  There is only one possible way to listen to Baba O’Riley.  You must play it loud.  And you must rock out.  I was doing so, at least I was doing so whenever I was stopped at a light and it was safe to do so.  (There may still have been some subdued rocking out while I was driving.)  I happened to notice in front of me was a woman driving a sedan with a couple kids in the backseat.  She looked at me in the rearview mirror, then pointed back at me, made some comment to her kids, and then started mocking my rocking out.  I had no recourse.  I could not get out and let her know that I was completely justified in rocking out, that I was listening to Baba O’Riley, and that I had no other choice.  Instead, her kids laughed and they drove away.  Obviously this woman had never sat in the car with her kids rocking out.  (It was Provo, so I shouldn’t really be surpriesd.)  I chose not to be upset at her, since she only mocked what she clearly did not understand.

As kids, we all sang in the car regularly.  It was simply what you did.  And it went beyond the years we listened to kids tapes.  (When I was a kid we listened to these things called tapes, and we walked uphill in the snow both ways…)  It was the Beatles and everything on the Oldies station.  I still know the words to pretty much everything they play on the Oldies station.  Our musical tastes as kids were limited by our parents.  So we got musicals, oldies, and my Mom’s spanish disco cd.  (Ask any member of my family to sing some for you, and they probably can.  Even though none of us know spanish.  Luckily she only had one cd. No one has yet owned up to listening to it on Amazon.com.  Lucky for you, Amazon does have some track samples to listen to from other albums.  Like track one on this disc.  Sadly, it cuts out before the chorus.  It’s about a cat.  Don’t ask me anything else.  Is it weird that listening to it now, I have to admit it’s kind of awesome?)  But we definitely all got into it.  And this is as it should be.

When we have kids, the iPod will get changed up for a special kids-singing-in-the-car playlist.  It will include pretty much everything that is both peppy and kid-appropriate.  Which means there will be at least a couple of Liz Phair songs on there, which rocks.  With these requirements, it will probably be musical and oldies-heavy.  To me, it sounds like heaven.  However, I think the idea of having me and our kids singing at the tops of our lungs from something like Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat frightens Eric.  Luckily he’s got time to come to grips with it.

It could be worse.  In high school I never really broke out of my oldies listening.  I never got into the popular bands.  (It was the mid-90’s, it’s not like there was much out there.)  The first CD I ever owned was Man of La Mancha, so you can imagine just how much of a nerd I was.  All I knew of modern music I learned from riding the bus to and from school.  I wasn’t impressed.  And once I started hitching a ride to school with Erika every day, we would occasionally listen to the radio.  But we were in choir and musicals and so there was a stretch of several months where we listened to the D’Oyly Carte Opera’s version of Pirates of Penzance.  Every.  Single.  Day.  Both ways.  If I am ever in some kind of vegetative state, I am still confident that I could sing the entire thing, from start to finish, even the orchestra bits.  Just turn it on and see what I do.  I swear it’ll happen.  Pirates is pretty fun to sing, as is most Gilbert and Sullivan, if you know it.  But it doesn’t really do well for group-car singing.  So Eric can thank his lucky stars it won’t be on the list.  Probably.

Eventually on my drive home today my iPod perked up.  I got my Baba O’Riley, which I thoroughly enjoyed.  It was followed by Hiro’s Song by Ben Folds.  This is quite a reliable peppy song, and it also fit with my train of thought, which you’ve just seen in the preceding paragraphs.  It’s a song about a guy who can’t really deal with getting older.  The chorus is, “I don’t wanna grow old.  Won’t you let me, won’t you let me explode?  In a karaoke supernova.”  I am okay with getting older.  But if I could explode in a karaoke supernova, I can’t imagine that would be such a terrible thing.

I have seen over 50 movies this year.  Just now, we went to see Wall-E.  It was the best one I’ve seen so far.  That is a pretty heavy statement.  I am in robot love.  It’s a very cute kind of love.  If anyone wants to buy me a slightly belated half-birthday present, just go here.

Even better, Wall-E loves Hello, Dolly!, the musical I was in senior year of high school.  So now Eric is stuck listening to me sing “Put on your Sunday clothes…” for the rest of the summer.  I may have done some singing in the theater.  I may also have been a smidge misty-eyed.

When we were kids, my Dad would take us to the annual Disney offering.  We never went to movies.  Except that one time or so a year.  And every time we went, Dad would have to sit through the entire credits.  Have you ever sat through the entire credits of a Disney film?  They’re as long as the movie.  The ushers would stand in the doors staring at us, wondering what we were doing.  Dad used to work for Disney when I was little.  Specifically at Disneyland.  I’ve heard many stories about when I was a baby and Dad worked long hours, so Mom would take me to Disneyland all the time.  Apparently I preferred Pirates of the Caribbean and Dumbo as a toddler.  My Dad also likes to reminisce of when I sat on the lap of Clarence Nash, who did the voice of Donald Duck; little me didn’t quite know what to make of Donald’s voice coming out of an old man’s mouth.  Here I am (apparently doing a striptease) for my favorite, Mr. Smee:

When we moved back to California when I was a bit older (long enough to go from being an only child to the oldest of 4) we continued to make visits.

There were many eventful trips along the way.  The time Sarah was in a stroller, got sick and puked, and we had to go behind the secret gate the characters come out of.  She may still be traumatized from seeing Winnie the Pooh pull off his head.  Until I was a teenager, one of the great achievements of my life was the time I got to ride Thunder Mountain twice in a row without having to get off.  There was the time Minnie Mouse recognized my Dad when we came back after several years, and all the kids gathered around in awe as my Dad introduced us to her personally.  (I’m pretty sure she spoke, something they are totally not allowed to do.)

There was Employee Night, when they opened up Tomorrowland just for us, and according to my Dad I rode Star Tours about 10 times in a row.  (Again, without getting off.)  I do remember it, there was hardly anyone there, we ran through the long line queues and rode with hardly anyone else on with us.  I still get a weird feeling of deja vu whenever I ride Star Tours.  I know in advance when we’re about to lean forward, backward, or to the side.  It’s kind of weird.  That night was the first time we were brave enough to go on Space Mountain.  Before that, the long lines always gave me too much time to be anxious.

I got to go to Disneyland with Children’s Chorale in 8th grade.  (I don’t have pictures of that either.  Being camera-impaired is not a new thing with me.)  I remember we passed the time in lines by sucking on massive gobstoppers and playing hand-clap games.  There were a handful of chaperones, but they mostly let us loose to do as we wished.  That was truly awesome.

Years later, when I was in high school, my family went to Disney World for the first time.  (Strangely, I haven’t ever found pictures of that trip.)  Philip sang the Meow Mix song from the commercials obsessively the whole trip.  You know, the one where all it does is go “meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow.”  Needless to say people gave us strange looks.  (Philip as a kid had strange habits on rollercoasters.  Once he and I rode a ride where the whole time he screamed out, “Woody the Woodpecker!” over and over again.)

I am secretly hoping Eric will start marathoning again… but only so we can go to the Disney World Marathon again.  He only needs to do that one.  With all my Disney trips, I’m something of a Disney obsessive.  My family went all together most recently when we took a trip back to Disneyland a couple Christmases ago.  There is so much to do and so very little time.  I probably had a big stick up my butt because we weren’t. going. fast. enough.  Since then I have learned to lighten up.  At least a little.  I need at least yearly trips to keep the process going.  You may want to keep your distance.  If you mess up my fast-pass strategy, I may have to kill you.

There’s been quite a lot going on chez Severson this last week.  I have started my next round of classes.  Well, class singular.  The second one may not start for several more weeks.  I’m back in the land of too much free time and I’m still figuring out what to do with it.

The biggest news is that Eric has been given the green light to prepare his thesis.  Basically this means all he has to do to graduate with his PhD is write up his thesis and defend it.  Writing up your thesis in the sciences isn’t quite the arduous task it is elsewhere.  Most of it is putting together things you’ve already worked on in papers you’ve already written.  So this means he doesn’t have to do any more actual science-y work, just finish his thesis.  It’s a big step and we’re very excited.  The plans are for Eric to go back for third year of med school in December.  He’s working on about 50 projects besides his thesis (if this surprises you, you don’t know Eric well) so he’ll keep plenty busy until then.

With this recent decision comes a change in our plans.  We’d been planning to take a little vacation in September when we figured Eric would be done with his defense.  Now Eric’s decided to do his defense in September and the vacation has been moved up.  So it looks like we’ll be going in about a month.  This isn’t quite as easy as the previous plan.  We’re moving from off-peak to exactly peak season, but that’s okay.  Eric has decreed that there shall be beaches involved and I have decreed that we will not set foot on an airplane.  So it looks like we’re heading down to Panama City Beach in Florida.  Plans should be solidified by the end of the week.

We have been relatively busy for us.  Last weekend we decided we needed to get out and do something.  So we went to a Braves game on Saturday.  There is actual photographic evidence of this, but I can’t find the little card thing that I use to put the pictures in the computer.  I’ll add the pic later today, hopefully.  The decision was very last minute, we bought our tickets only a few hours before the game.  We were very high up in the stands, but right behind home plate and had a great view.  We decided to keep it simple and take public transit, then make a little hike over to the field.  And I found out that they allow you to bring food and drinks into Turner Field, which was shocking.  I thought no one let you bring anything in anymore.  So we didn’t have to turn over our life savings to get a single hot dog.  We brought Chipotle and sodas and were very pleased with ourselves.  The game was very boring for a very long time.  The only runs were scored in the first inning before we got to our seats.  Our team was down by two.  And then all of a sudden things got very intense in the bottom of the 8th, right before we were planning to leave.  We ended up winning and the last couple innings were very exciting so we felt we got our money’s worth.   Then, of course, was the epic trip home, which kind of deserves its own blog post for all the insanity involved.  But we did learn that there is a much easier and completely deserted route for us to take home that we will use in the future.  So, if any of you feel like flying in for a Braves game, we are experts now.  I hope you like Chipotle.

We had thought we’d go on a hike Sunday morning.  And not a little beginner hike, but a moderate long one.  But… we got home pretty late from the Braves game, we’d been doing a lot of walking around in the heat, and we just slept in instead.  It would have been an all-day excursion.  But we are going to go this coming Sunday, though we’re taking it easy on Saturday this week.

We are very very excited about Wimbledon.  When Eric and I first started dating, that summer we watched the French Open, Wimbledon, and the US Open together.  Last year we were at my parents’ house during the US Open and pretty much camped out on the couch to watch a bunch of matches.  Watching a whole lot of matches in one tournament is great because you get very invested in players you didn’t know before.  We no longer have cable so we can’t get Wimbledon, but there’s not much else on these days, so we’re planning to take some trips to the sports bars to watch it.  I will be rooting for Nadal to beat Federer, finally.

I have been working out like a fiend.  (That’s why we have graduated to the more difficult hike.)  I am taking today off because I’m a little sore, but I’ll be right back in tomorrow.  I am now doing another one of Cindy’s videos, this one her post-natal workout.  I know I have not had children recently, but I heard it was the best one.  And it is.  It kicks my butt very very hard.  When I do it I am literally dripping sweat.  This does not really happen to me very often.  Eric has learned I’m prone to heat stroke because I don’t sweat.  I am still building up to full capacity (those women can do way too many lunges and squats) but I feel very good.  Even better, I noticed the other day that I am skinnier.  I haven’t actually weighed myself, but I don’t need to.  Whenever I gain or lose weight, there is evidence of it in my cheeks.  They are relatively big cheeks for anyone to have.  They’re from my dad’s side of the family, and whenever a large group of us get together, the amount of cheek present is unbelievable.  One of my cousins and I easily passed for sisters as kids simply because of the similarity of our massive cheeks.

When I recently felt myself getting fatter, my cheeks were right there to confirm.  They got bigger and rounder and made my face almost moon-shaped.  The other day I noticed that my face has gone back to its normal oval shape.  I know Eric knows me well because he agreed that my face looked thinner.  This is excellent news.  It also keeps me very motivated.  The other day Eric gave me an opportunity to eat Steak ‘n Shake and I said no.  And I didn’t even want to, which means my body actually likes what I’m doing to it.  Shocking.  Next stop, skinny pants.  Though I wouldn’t expect that overnight.

Finally, I am thinking of taking sewing classes.  There’s a place in town that offers a few of them on Saturdays in August.  But I’m not sure about the cost involved.  I have to buy supplies, pay for the classes, and I don’t actually have a sewing machine so I’m not sure what the point of all of it would be.  But I don’t really see the point of getting a sewing machine if I have no idea how to use it.  I’m thinking maybe I should wait a year or so before I get started and save some money up in the mean time.  I’ll think about it.

Okay, time to finish up this incredibly long entry.  We are off for a steak dinner tonight to celebrate.

There are many things peculiar to the blog world.  Tagging is one of them.  Someone somewhere decided to make people tell you stuff about themselves, and then they’d tell other people to do the same thing.  I have somehow avoided tagging for most of my internet career, but I have finally been tagged.  (I should have known it would strike once it got in the family.)  I am not a strict believer in the rules of tagging.  I will not tag any of you, my dear readers, just like I never passed along chain letters back when they came through the actual mail.   I will also feel free to alter the tag as I see fit for my own nefarious purposes.  (Or non-nefarious purposes.  Those are okay, too.)

I was tagged by my sister (you can go to her blog and see the widget of her floating baby, which has happily changed from creepy alien form to something resembling a human, I’m greatly relieved that she’s not giving birth to something from The X-Files).

5 things on my “to do” list: (I have the most boring to-do list in the history of time)

1. Go to the library to pick up a book that I put on hold.  I’m actually waiting to see if any others come in, as I’ve always got a few I’m waiting for.
2. Fill out my expense form from my last classes so I can get a sweet check.
3. Clean, etc.  (This is always on the to-do list.  So much so that it has its own to-do list which barely ever changes because I always get caught up in something.)
4. Call the State Bar to see if it’s cool for me to still be “active” even though I’m not actually practicing and shouldn’t technically practice as I possess no malpractice insurance.  If yes, then I can eventually transfer anywhere once I hit reciprocity requirements.  If no, then I save money for bar dues and CLE’s, plus no more of CLE’s which are lame and boring.
5. Watch the last episode of The Sopranos.  (This isn’t really on my to-do list, but it’s turned into a chore in my mind so it might as well be.  I hate all of them, which I have realized may actually be the point.  I wouldn’t really know, I kind of missed the boat on this one, but I always got the impression that everyone got a real kick out of it.  Oh well.  But I feel obligated to see it through for just one more hour.)

5 Snacks I Love:  (Go figure, this comes up while I’m trying to get in shape and not think about snacks.)

1. Popcorn.  I love popcorn.  Yesterday we got a free one at the movies, which I ate even though I am trying to be healthy as noted above.
2. Gummi Coke Bottles.  Maybe not on my top5 really, but I saw them the other day and thought that I would like to have some.
3. Peanut Butter & Jelly Bars.  I made some of these for Eric, thinking he’d like them.  He ate zero.  Didn’t even try them.  I ate them ALL.  I haven’t made them since.
4. Banana Cream Pie.  Okay, officially not a snack.  But I love pie.  And I’m not much for snacks.
5. Upper Echelon Oatmeal Raisin Cookies.  If Eric ran for president and I had to send a recipe to  magazines, I would be happy to pass this one down from my Mom.  (The “upper echelon” part is my own touch, as some of you know.)  Eric has never actually had these.  I have never made them because our oven is not an oven but a furnace that makes our apartment 20 degrees hotter.  They will soon make an appearance when we finally get our little convection oven.

5 Things I’d do if I suddenly became a millionaire:

1. Get a personal trainer who makes home visits.
2. Buy cute clothes after said trainer got me back to my regular size.
3. Go on vacation!  This is my favorite thing to do.
4. Start planning our next vacation.
5. Tell Eric to figure out what to do with the rest of the money.  (Yes, I’m really serious.  I doubt I’d do anything different than these 5 things.)

5 Jobs I’ve had:

1. Girl at Domino’s Pizza.  This was my high school job.  Our place was the one that served the Air Force Academy, where most cadets aren’t allowed to leave.  It was a heavy business.  Many boys much older than I was flirted with me to try to get me to deliver their pizzas even though I didn’t have a driver’s license.  I would always warn the drivers taking the pizzas which one were the tools.
2. Girl in Stockroom.  I had this job for two years in college.  I sat in a little room that was probably full of hazardous fumes, dispensing chemicals and supplies to snotty pre-meds.  (This was when I decided I would never marry a doctor.  So much for that.)  Mostly, though, we just acted superior, did crosswords, and laughed at the letters to the editor in the school paper.  (To be fair, this is a tradition among most students at the Y.)
3. Girl Who Watches Your Kids.  This must be included since I was a babysitter longer than I’ve been a lawyer.  It got me a few thousand dollars in the bank that I saved for college.  Babysitting didn’t pay terribly well where I was.  If I made more than $20 in a night, it was a coup.  So making a few thousand dollars required countless hours of watching kids movies while my fellow teenagers were partying.
4. Girl Who Types.  My law school cohorts wondered where my speedy typing skills came from.  (Note, fellow alums, my certificate for Fastest Typist in the West is still in my possession.)  A summer of data entry right before law school certainly helped.  In my heyday I was clocked at above 120 wpm.
5. Girl Who Goes to Prison.  Always my best story job, even better than being a PD.  My first day I sat with the girls who opened prisoner mail every day, and I got the single best story I ever had in my life.  Which means it’s time for a tangent!  So, most letters we received were from prisoners seeking legal assistance, which is what we did.  But we couldn’t provide help with many different things so we had to sort and tried to respond to whatever we could.  Most letters were about appeals and we had to sort through these to see if we thought there was anything to it.  I started a letter that went the way most did, that the person was innocent of the crime.  For a while I followed along and thought, “Hey, this guy may have a point.”  He’d been convicted of murder.  I’ll paraphrase his story.  His story began, as most do, with a fight over the phone with his girlfriend.  He decided he needed to get over there right away.  So he got in the car to go.  As he was driving away, the owner of the car came out after him.  (Yeah, it took me a couple readings to be like, wait, what do you mean the owner of the car?)  You can probably guess how it went from there.  Sadly for my correspondent, felony-murder is definitely on the table when you’re stealing someone’s car.  But mostly I was impressed with how easily he glossed over the whole car stealing bit.  I wondered how long he’d taken to phrase that particular gem.

5 things people don’t know about me:

1. One of the other reasons I’m so good at typing is that it’s a nervous habit.  I type on my hands.  My palms are the key pad and my fingers will just go at it.  I can also tell you some of the words that take up all 8 (and only those 8 ) fingers.  Captions, pontiacs, spalding, etc.  Apparently I’m not the only one who does this.
2. I also have a similar habit of turning letters into numbers (a=1, z=26) and adding and subtracting a word until I can reach a multiple of 5.  This habit is very complicated, but I still do it pretty at least a few times a day.  For example, my name, Jessica, becomes 10, 5, 19, 19, 9, 3, 1.  Add the 3 and 1 to get 4, subtract that from one of the 19’s to get 15.  Subtract the 9 from the other 19 to get 10.  Now with a 10, 5, 15 and 10, you can wind up with a 5 or 10, aka a J or T.  Extra bonus for adding up to Z, or 26.  I know I’m crazy.  You can lock me up.  Worse, I do it all in my head within a couple of seconds.  I also do it so quickly now that the letters have basically become numbers and I can quickly tell you that R plus H equals Z.
3. For months I tried to get a nickname for Eric but never got one.  However, we do constantly call one another “baby.”  So much so that we never call each other by our names.  This is genetic.  My parents call one another “dear” and that’s it.  Even when they fight.  They have no variations.  Eric and I do, but the variations are probably worse than the “baby” part and you’re probably already squeamish from the mush quotient.
4. I am something of a nicknamer.  I cannot help this.  It’s also genetic.  I ended up with one of the more embarrassing nicknames in my family which I had to reveal to all my college roommates since my Mom would blurt it out whenever anyone picked up the phone.  Fine, I’ll tell you, it’s “gander.”  As in a male goose.  No, I’m not a boy.  Don’t ask me.  It has multiple diminuitives and I respond to all of them.  My Mom still calls me by them regularly.  I have always liked Russian because nicknames are built into the language.  I have already come up with an abundance of nicknames for my children.  In many ways these are more important than their actual names since they will come out of my mouth more often.  Nicknames will be given as appropriate and are subject to change.  This also applies to pets.  My last cat started grandly as Lord Byron and ended up through a long string of changes as “The Burrito.”  But I think it fit him well.
5. Don’t mess with my pens.  Eric is one of those who bites and mutilates pens.  I am very picky and love my pens dearly.  He just got chewed out.  Again.  He isn’t even writing anything!  I think he’s just trying to sabotage my pens.  And mutilate their poor little bodies.

And that is the end of the tag, which a slight change.  And hey, at least it’s another blog entry so I don’t have to figure out what to write for a few more days.

You know how sometimes it seems like the universe just hates you?  Lately I am getting this vibe.  It’s a variety of factors, really.  The heat itself feels pretty oppressive.  And the heat is driving the bugs inside.  In two days we saw 4 rather large roaches making themselves at home in our apartment.  Last night it was a rather bizarre looking centipede-type thing that had taken residence on a wall.  I’m not the type who does well with bugs.  But they’re really secondary.

The biggest problem I’m having these days is my utilities.  Just the basics.  Last week we had a power outage that we never found out the cause for.  It was at least an hour long and came right at the hottest part of the day.  So there we were, no air conditioning, no fans,  no lights, and dinner still going on our gas stove.  This wouldn’t have been so bad except apartments usually don’t excel at the lighting concept and so the kitchen was totally dark.  Eric set up a bunch of tea lights around the room so I could continue my work, making our kitchen look kind of like one of those romantic scenes in a teen drama.  (Why candles are supposed to equal romance, I’ve never quite figured.  Don’t they really just equal a fire hazard?)  I used our single small flashlight to check the color of the meat to make sure it was done.  All the while, we had our handy dandy battery-powered temperature thingy by the door telling us just how hot it was.  It has been bad enough lately that the Outdoor reading is –.-, which I finally figured out means that we’ve crossed the triple-digit threshold.

But I would gladly take regular power outages over the other problem.  Twice this month our water has gone out without warning for several hours while they work on pipes.  And it doesn’t go out on days where I’m out and about and don’t even notice.  No.  It happens on days where my entire plan consists of sitting at home and using water-powered appliances to get cleaning and chores done.  The first time was bad.  I hadn’t showered and so I couldn’t go anywhere.  I couldn’t do anything around the house.  And having your own bathroom off limits is just inherently wrong.

It happened again yesterday.  This time it happened at the worst time possible.  I was in the shower and had just put shampoo in my hair.  Seriously.  I am not even kidding.  The water pressure suddenly dropped and I assumed maybe it was because the dishwasher had gone into a rinse cycle or something.  This was my fatal mistake.  At my parents’ house, the shower will often lose water pressure momentarily when someone turns on something else, and I generally wait it out since it’s usually 10-15 seconds.  This time, I turned around, looked at the water and kept looking.  I looked far too long.  I looked for so long because I was thinking, “Wait, is it getting worse?” because I thought it seemed like it was gradually getting less and less pressure but it was difficult to tell without staring.  And then, too late, I realized what was happening.  And by the time I tried to stick my head back under the now tiny stream of water, there wasn’t near enough of it to get the shampoo out of my hair.  Reader, it was tragic.

I was told it would be less than an hour once I called up to my complex.  So I squeezed out as much soap as I could from my hair, put it in a towel, and waited.  And since I assumed the best I waited by watching short tv shows that could be nice little 40-minute markers of time.  This was great in theory, but since the outage lasted over 3 hours, I ended up watching far too much.  But giving in and turning on a movie was like admitting that I would never get to shower.  And yet again I had laundry to do, dishes to wash, errands to run, and couldn’t do any of it.

I never did get to shower.  The water turned on 15 minutes before I had to leave for work.  At this point, I just needed to make sure I could brush my teeth.  And even with the water on, it was scary looking for a good 5 minutes and the hot water was still not working right when I left.  It was not a pleasant day.  If the water goes out again, you can bet I will spend my time plotting my revenge against anyone in the office of my complex.

For now, I must get back to all the stuff I was going to do yesterday.

So you may remember back in March when I started trying to work out again.  I tried going to the gym before the wedding, which didn’t work at all.  And these days, with the crazy summer heat already in full swing, I don’t want to have to leave my apartment if at all possible.  So I’ve been continuing with the workout videos, trying to find ones that don’t drive me crazy.  Except, of course, for the month of May where I pretty much went without and just got fatter.

So June is upon us and I am actually going to get it together.  Classes are winding down, it’ll be a while before I get a busy schedule again.  I had a few new workout videos waiting for me once Eric took care of the electronics and I tried them out.  It seems we finally have a winner.

Cindy Crawford was never a likely candidate for me.  I chose her video only after seeing positive feedback about it.  I thought I would just ignore the pretty model part of it and see if the exercises were any good.  There are lots of caveats to throw in, so I can’t give my full endorsement.  Mostly I like that it’s a very reps-and-sets oriented workout.  Actually targeting specific muscle groups and such.  Granted, Cindy isn’t exactly the paragon of form.  But the moves are difficult enough that they take my full attention and I don’t watch her or the crazy camera work. Of course, if it means I can get out of my fat jeans, I will be even more in Cindy’s debt.

The most noticeable problem is that Cindy cannot just sit in a gym and do the workout.  She does that, in a sports bra and shorts, but she does the same workout in a one-piece on a beach, and then also on a rooftop.  We must cut back and forth.  Cameras circle, lame 90’s music plays, we change to black and white to color.  It’s really obnoxious.

But Cindy in the gym is very charming.  She is exactly what I asked for in my previous post.  I believe my direct quote in what I wanted to hear from someone in a workout video was:

She’ll say, “This one is really hard. Your arms are going to be killing you when it’s over. But that’s why we’re here.” She and her little minions will not make the moves look effortless, instead they will be visibly exhausted. “We’re supposed to do 8 more. I’m not sure I can handle 8 more. But let’s at least give it a shot.”

And that is exactly what Cindy is like.  She stops!  She drinks water!  She gets sweaty!  She can’t do boy push-ups!  She does not like having to do another set!  She hates it that the last exercise in the set is always the hardest!  Cindy and I are really in it together.  And Cindy tells me not to worry if I can’t do all the sets at first.  And that I don’t have to go very fast.  For these things, I love Cindy dearly.

But she is still a model.  And when she’s doing her workout on the beach or the rooftop her hair is loose and she throws it around and I swear she’s on the cover of a magazine.  This could bother me, but I’ve decided to accept it.  Normally when I work out I wouldn’t want anyone anywhere to see me.  I look like a fool, an ugly and sweaty fool at that.  But if Cindy looks so sexy during a workout, then I can imagine that I do, too.  There’s no mirror to tell me otherwise, after all.  And a little delusion goes a long way.  I could use the boost since I am getting my picture taken this afternoon for work.  (Meaning it will probably go on a website and be visible to far too many people.  Frightening.)

More on our comings and goings in the next day or two.