I am sad to say that we no longer have pinky & the brain. just brain :( I went to give the guinea pigs hay this morning and they all rushed out to get it except for pinky, who was sleeping in his house, and never woke up. It's very sad.

Pinky had some real attitude problems but we loved him anyway. He instigated some pig drama but maybe he just really wanted to assert his place in the herd. his death was quite unexpected, he was our youngest and one of our healthiest pigs. He came to us from the humane society in March 2009 as a baby. So that would put him around 3-4 years old into his 4-8 year "allotted" guinea pig lifespan. I guess it was just his time.

we will all miss you pinky :(

( more photos )

Since getting current again and passing my biannual, I've been trying to keep up and fly every 2-3 weeks, even if it's just to get some practice on my own. I feel like, working for an airplane company, it's sort of a career-cost. They want me to fly and pay me enough to do so every once in a while, sort of like they want me to wear presentable clothes, you know? That's my justification.

I tried opening up a flight plan through flight service on a cross country flight a while back, it was weird. It takes time, the radios are bad, the flight service people just seem to be kinda confused by my existence.

And is it just me, or is the whole flight service station flight plan thing just not really good insurance? The idea is that you type in where you're going, then call them up and say "Okay, that plan I filed? I'm going there now!" and then if they don't hear from you again in like four hours, they start looking.

I hate to think what'd happen if something really went wrong!

The other option you have on a cross country is to talk to Kansas City center the whole time you're flying, it's called flight following. they seem much nicer, and I had a guy here tell me that he's never been turned down for flight following, even though legally they are allowed to say "sorry little airplane, we're too busy to keep track of you, good luck". Maybe it happens in busier parts of the country?

I have a list of places I want to go but this week was just a calm after work flight to Ponca City Oklahoma, famous among Wichita private pilots because it's home to Enrique's mexican restaurant right there on the field. We LOVE restaurants we can just taxi right up to, especially when the flight is only 30 minutes or so.

Coming home to Wichita (Marc obviously took this one)


Josie would not hold still for a picture:


But she was happy about the food:


I had the catfish tacos. Who knew you could make fish tacos from catfish? You learn something new every day in Oklahoma.

We had Josie's carseat with us this time, it elevated her a bit so she could look out the windows in the back, I think that's why she actually stayed awake on this flight. She spent a lot of the flight back screaming, not out of fear or anger or anything, it was just fun to scream. She's at that "I can make noise!" age. She took her headset off after takeoff and said "Loud!" to her dad, and put it back on, but then kept taking it off and having fun just yelling and loving the fact that she couldn't really outdo the airplane engine, and we didn't care if she was yelling... probably a rare treat for adults to let you make all the noise you want. So that's the highlight of flying for her these days.

boring book entry, but wanted to get some titles down of stuff I've been reading.

Famous Last Words by Annie Sanders - chic lit about a clothing designer and independent business owner who's told by a psychic that she's going to die in four days. The guy is so right about other things she really believes him, and tries to set a few things right with the short time she's got left. I liked it, it was smarter than average chic lit. Last winter I read "Can you keep a secret?" by sophie kinsella and felt like I'd lost IQ points and would never get them back, the story was so contrived and the main character was such a ditz. The gal in Famous Last Words is smarter, more mature, and a lot more relatable. It just came out last October, that's how I came to grab it out of the "new releases" section in the library.

Pemba's Song: A Ghost Story by Marilyn Nelson - Whenever I feel stuck and want to just read a good book quickly, I head to the YA fiction section. I picked this up randomly at the library. It's about a girl who moves from brooklyn out to connecticut suburbs with her mother, and their house is haunted by a former slave with a secret who never had a voice or means to let anyone know she even existed. It's a cool story and filled with these wonderful poems.

The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Patterson - I was at mom's house last month and picked this book up because I remembered it being a childhood favorite. As a kid I loved Gilly's spunk and fearlessness, she was TOUGH. As with most YA fiction books though the story reads so much differently as an adult, and I guess that's just a thing with books. Books make you understand a character so much more effectively than movies, they really take a part of you, and when you grow up, the books grow up too. Reading it again made me sad. Maybe there's something that's changed about me as a mom, but reading about little kids needing plain old love and not getting it is tough.

I disagree with the sentiment that "you don't know what love is until you're a mom", I think you can live a perfectly full-of-love life with sisters and parents and BFFs and not miss out on anything. But I have a close familiarity now of what a little kid needs. Gilly Hopkins is about a 10 or 12 year old who's been in foster care since the age of three, and she talks about being mad at herself for "going soft" and crawling up on the lap of a foster mother for comfort when she needed to cry at the age of five, and it just killed me. She's a "child of the flower children", left on her own way too young, I realize that now as an adult and a parent and I feel bad for her and all those kids I know who are just like her.

I keep going to people's houses and seeing huge vinyl letters stuck to the wall, apparently that's the way to really make a house a home these days. People get their last names, or a bible verse, or just a favorite bit of a poem they like. They're practically everywhere. So I decided we needed some!

I did a google search on popular wall phrases and here's what came up first:

Your love is my light, sun of all my mornings, fire of all my nights

Always kiss me goodnight

Let your heart guide you today

and my favorite!

Dance like no one is watching

that is exactly the kind of uninhibited freedom I want people to think of in my house. er, check that, HOME! So I tweaked it a bit, because I wanted the letters in my bathroom, and now we have this:



(that is honestly 100% I promise in my shower! femcon attendees will be able to provide confirmation in a month or so here!)

Sadly I never did come out with my picture frames with phrases based on "All because two people fell in love" but letters, they can be custom ordered from a ton of places, they'll send anything you want! I'm pretty happy about this.

pps... I saw a giant wood block on etsy with the phrase "always kiss me goodnight" scripted on it, I think it was supposed to be a bookend for the room of a happy couple. But I don't think affectionate reminders should be printed on things that are heavy and potentially damaging, am I right? Can't you just see that happy cheesy-ass couple in five years screaming at each other, and one of them looks over at the hallmark-card bookend, hits the breaking point, and throws it through the wall? YOU CAN ALWAYS KISS MY ASS GOODNIGHT YOU PIECE OF SHIT!

that's what makes a house a home :)

I was proud of myself and my family this morning. We finally broke down and got Josie a haircut yesterday, it looks adorable. We got up and got ready for church. I had on a nice skirt, and Josie was wearing this perfect dress with butterflies. She skinned her face up pretty bad yesterday on our walkway, throwing a tantrum because I'd locked the gate and wouldn't let her run out into the street, so I was happy to have her in a dress that was more noticeable than her barfight-looking face. "I am happy to be a mother," I thought.

Then at church there were the prayer requests from the congregation and I swear, this is the summary of what I heard they were about:

5% celebrating mothers
25% supporting those with missing or lost mothers
30% celebrating mother-figures of people whose original mothers didn't cut it
60% healing for those whose mothers just totally damaged them beyond all earthly help

I stopped to think what sort of prayer my kid would be asking the congregation for, 30 years from now.

I realized, statistically speaking, that my odds are not good.

I've never been a huge fan of mothers day anyhow, but it seems like fathers day is more about laughing at the shortcomings of our dads, there are all the cards about how they like sports or fishing or sleeping in, and mothers day is more like "mothers sacrifice SO MUCH we have to thank them unless they fell short of that perfection so we don't". We're all either IN or OUT. It reminded me of the commonly referred to "deuce bigalow" media trope, where a tragic male is funny, but a tragic female is just tragic.

I'm not blaming the people who stood up. They're telling it like it is. Not all mothers are good mothers. Not all mothers can be there. It's unfortunate, just like it's unfortunate that not all fathers are good fathers. What I don't like is this sugary-sweet holiday drawing attention to it, forcing everyone to walk by the pink store displays and put every mother under a microscope.

I think we should lighten up a bit, that's all. Loving your mother, or considering your mother, should be just a normal part of everyday life. It gets too weird when we take something from the everyday and FOCUS on it. It's like getting a bouquet of 2-dozen roses on valentine's day... what does that couple do the other 364 days a year?

I just want to lay low, be what I'm going to be, and hope that's good enough for my child. No holidays. No analysis. No conformity. Less pressure.

I heard a report on Evelyn Johnson passing away and looked her up and saw that she'd been flying for seven years. Well heck, what's the big deal about that? Then I realized they meant her flight time added up to seven years... as in, logged over 57000 hours of flight time, starting in 1944!

She flew for the civil air patrol, trained 5,000 pilots, signed off on 9000, was a Cessna dealer and airport manager, she was one of the first inductees to the National Flight Instructors Hall of Fame, safely landed two airplanes with total engine failure and one on fire, saved a helicopter pilot... who knows what else. In that many hours and a long life in aviation, there have to be a thousand untold stories.

The NPR interview played a quote from her in 2003 about what it'd be like to turn 100:

"Here's what I'd like: Willard Scott will be telling about me being 100 years old," she said. "But I wouldn't hear him — because I'd be up flying."

amazing. One of her students called her mama bird, because she looked after all her students "like they were baby birds" and the name stuck, and it makes you think of all those airline pilots and hobbyists and everyone else up there in the air with their wings. Enjoying what they love, because she loved it so much.

I don't know exactly what I did... just that I was in the far left lane, and merged into the center lane. I think she was in the far right, wanting to merge into the center lane too... which she's no more deserving of than I am. Of course she got so mad I found myself wondering if she could have possibly been in the center lane and I somehow missed her and merged into her, but she could have freaking HONKED, right?

Oh, and we're driving down kellogg at rush hour, both going like 65.

So after I did whatever I did to offend her she's in the lane to my right, she hits her brakes to slow down to my speed so she can drive along next to me, then speed up because the brakes slowed her down too much, then she stares at my car until I make eye contact so she can gesture and make "what are you doing" motions and mouth things that I had no chance of understanding. but I barely gave her a glance because I was trying to LOOK FORWARD at the speeding traffic ahead of me, as she's going 65 mph staring at my car, putting all her focus and efforts into making sure I felt bad.

we were BOTH lucky there was no one in front of her.

I mean, if I could have caused an accident because I didn't see a driver behind me, that's bad. But if you cause an accident because you're just plain not even looking at the traffic in front of you, that's way worse. waaaaay. right?

I was going to do this once a year, then missed 2011 and, apparently, nearly half of 2012. my how the time flies! So tell me who you are and I'll use this to update my friends list groups and all that, sometimes I even try to hit a bit more on the topics people are actually caring more about.

Also whenever I do this poll I like to get an update from anyone reading on what I've missed from you. Did I miss any major events in the last 12 months or so? You know... babies, weddings, educational milestones, out-of-town moves, surgeries, job changes, deportation, book deals... that sort of thing?

Poll #1838998
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 97

How old are you?

gender?

Where do you live?

Pick up to 3 favorite interests that we have in common:

Have we met in real life?

Man I have been lazy about the lj-ing lately.

This weekend I took a couple days off and went to Topeka for a few days with Josie. We went to the SB142 protest rally and saw some old hippie gay rights activists friends, that was nice. We spent a night with my mom and dad, then the next day I got some alone time shoe-shopping done. There was the annual benefit art auction that my sister helps out with. Kansas Discovery Center the next day, tasty lunch at the mexican buffet at Casa's.

Josie's running dialog of everything that happens is now probably 25% real words, 80% josie gibberish, 5% DRAMA sprinkled in for funzies. Mom came running in the other night because Josie and I had been getting ready and she hears Josie screaming at the top of her lungs and figured she'd fallen off something terrible, it was the "I'm in awful pain" cry, you know? But she wasn't in any pain, I'd just told her that she could not wear her dora pajamas to the art auction.

When we did get to the auction she had a pretty good time, she was clingy at first but then she found out where the toddler-reachable snack tables were, gorged herself on grapes and cherry tomatoes, and the people at the bar were even letting her take cups from the stack by the water cooler then stand on her tiptoes to fill them with ice water herself, she LOVED that. She was happy until like 10 pm, we went home and she curled up by me in the full size bed in my sister's guest room and we were both asleep in seconds. At least sleeping is easy, if she can just run 500 laps around a warehouse.

So I almost added this to my last entry about parenting but decided it could be its own story... I was reading that book about how parents should explain things to kids, don't just say "do this because I said so". Anyway, thinking back to my parents they did a good job with this, they always tried to explain things to me. Here's an example.

I was getting better at riding my bike and was about to be allowed to ride around our block, which was exciting. But first Dad explained that it was very important to follow traffic laws on your bike, especially pay attention to stop signs, because those apply to bikes too.

We lived in St. Louis... AWFUL traffic! Terrible! Everyone drove around on these curvy side streets, there was never any plan about where a street should be built. Where I live now in Kansas most cities have a grid plan, but not St. Louis. Last time I went there I joked that if a street was named "4th street" it wasn't because it was between 3rd and 5th street, it was because someone just liked the way the name "4th" sounded.

So in lieu of planned streets to move traffic people just drove around everywhere, through the suburbs or behind stores, and that meant we needed four way stops everywhere. People got used to four-way stops, and during rush hour they became four-way merges, everything kept moving at a pretty good clip despite the traffic coming together. To contrast that, in Wichita people can't even merge onto highways where there are on-ramps, if there's another car on the highway within four miles the merging car will freak out and stop... it's scary.

Back to Dad. He explained to me that bikes had to follow the same rules as cars. Stay on the right side of the road and pay attention to signs. Then we biked to the end of the block where the four-way stop was and he said, "See, watch how this car slows down and stops at the stop sign."

The car screamed through the intersection without so much as a brake light.

He laughed a little and said okay, bad example, watch the next car.

Same thing. In fact we stood there for several minutes, and not a single car bothered to stop at that stop sign. One of them saw me on my bike and slowed down, then sped back up through the intersection. Dad just sighed and said, "Well, don't be like those cars. In fact now it's even more important to stop, since apparently no one else will."

Well, it was a good lesson, even if it didn't play out quite the way he'd hoped.