Holy Stressful Mornings Batman!

I'm still in the DC Universe in my mind, apparently.

When I oversleep, all the mistakes of the past week come crashing down at once. I'm sure I make mistakes other weeks of course, but they don't seem to come back to bite me unless I am extra-rushed in a given morning. I slept less than two hours night before last. No particular reason for it; I just couldn't sleep. So with more physical things than usual to do yesterday - I'm cleaning out our storage unit - and lack of sleep and benadryl-due-to-cottonwood, I was dead tired. I went to bed at ten last night.

I woke up at eight this morning. Abby has to be at school - last full day - at 8:35. And oh, by the way, "Mom, I need twelve dollars for a yearbook. Today. Oh, and here's the thing from the lunch lady (ed. note: she's rummaging through her backpack) and it says my balance is zero dollars and zero cents and you said I could buy lunch on the last day of school that we have lunch. We don't have lunch tomorrow because it's a half day, you know." Sigh... all right... we'll buy you a smoothie for breakfast and honey? Please tell me ahead of time when you need things? I check my bank account. Hey, where's the unemployment auto-deposit? It always comes on Tuesday unless Monday is a holiday, assuming I submit my claim on Sunday. I'll call them from the car and find out.

I can't find my Bluetooth earpiece.

So I'm on speakerphone in the car - it's illegal in Washington State to drive and use a phone without some sort of hands-free - hissing at the kids to please be quiet. I get hold of the UI folks and it turns out that if you submit a claim after noon on Sunday it does not go through. Well... gosh dang it to heck. I have enough cash to buy each of the kids a smoothie and pay for the school lunch and the yearbook. I don't have enough in my account to pay for the safeway.com order I placed. I call Safeway and get transferred all over, from the store to Customer Service and back. They say they will get a message to the store picking the order so it does not go through. Great; I'll place the order again for tomorrow. I call my other bank to let them know I will make my payment tomorrow. Good enough.

I drop Abby (and her $15.50) off at school. I drop Lizzy off at the Nest. I come home via the storage unit (you would be amazed at how many boxes of books fit in my little car, especially since Lizzy's car seat takes up some space) and bring a box of books upstairs with me. The Safeway store calls to tell me the charge did not go through on my order. No kidding? Sorry; I called and told you guys the issue. It looks like you didn't get the message form your customer service people. My apologies. She looks through the pile of stuff on her desk; here's the message, sorry to bother you, thank you for shopping with us.

So I came upstairs and wrote all this out. Hopefully this act has purged enough of the stress of this morning to allow me to do well on my phone interview at 11-something.

Still can't find my Bluetooth. For crying out loud.

Comic Conventions

No, not these conventions. The writers' conventions and tropes used in comics and associated media.

***SPOILERS for Green Lantern BELOW*** 

As you know, I took my dad and my husband to see Green Lantern today, as a Fathers' Day treat. I enjoyed the movie a lot; it was beautiful to look at, has a good story (much invocation of Clarke's Third Law), and it was really well-written, but overall a couple things that bothered me. So Dad and I discussed it on our way back to the ferry dock.

1) This is Earth, in the DC Universe. Where the hell was Superman when the entire planet was in danger of annihilation? I decided this was a case of Hero of Another Story, combined with The Chosen One. Hal Jordan was more or less preordained (by the Green Lantern Corps and/or the Guardians, or possibly the entire Universe) to Handle This One On on His Own. And as Superman (and Batman and the Teen Titans and Wonder Woman and the Flash (AH-ah) and any other Earth-centric hero in the DC pantheon) have their own stories, they were at their respective Fortresses of Solitude or in Tokyo or what-have-you). Problem One resolved.

2) So Yellow = Fear = Evil, right? And Green = Courage/Will = Good, right? So how (here's the real spoiler) did Hal manage to defeat the Big Bad Parallax by shoving it into a yellow sun? Yellow should feed on yellow in my mind, not defeat yellow. Green defeats yellow. Dad's argument was that pushing anything into a sun is going to destroy it, just by the sheer bigness and hotness of the sun. Okay, but...

...and then I realized. My tropes differ from my dad's tropes. We have a large overlap, as we share similar tastes in literature (I came by it honestly, from both sides). But there are some we don't share, by virtue of being 32 years apart in age (he has more of the Golden Age ones than I do) and because I play console RPGs and watch anime (so I have more specifically Eastern tropes in my repertoire than he does). To me, Yellow should absorb Yellow, and Green should defeat it. But Green Lantern was written in 1940, in the USA, when such console-RPG tropes were largely unknown here. Problem Two resolved.

The moral of the story? TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life. Or at least make you more aware of it.

Happy Fathers' Day!

Fathers' Day is interesting. My dad and my husband are both in it more for experiences than for gifts, which is nice. So I'm taking them both to see Green Lantern - Hubby is a comic book all-around geek and Dad likes the Golden Age comic book and/or radio show characters - Green Lantern, Batman, The Shadow. And Hubby took me to see Thor for Mothers' Day earlier this year too. I hear Green Lantern bombed at the box office but really, I don't care; my taste in movies is about 50/50 with that of the rest of movie-going America.

I'd also like to give a shout-out to all the other dads I know besides the two I'm taking out today. My ex-husband, who is not only okay with our daughter treating her stepdad as another parent, but actually encouraged her to make a card for hubby. A couple of the Friday Night Gamers, who are some of my favorite people in the world. Assorted facebook friends, some of whom I know from Real Life and some of whom I don't. The host of Ruthless Diastema Game Blog, who is a dad and a teacher. Former and current co-workers, neighbors, and friends. These men parent "In brightest day... in blackest night, (no evil shall escape my sight!)"

Good job dadding, guys.

I Heart Netflix

Specifically Netflix Instant Play. We run it through our Nintendo Wii, and it mitigates (somewhat) the tendency of small children to watch the same damn thing ad nauseum. We still have to watch some of the same stuff over and over again - kids and repetition, you know - but at least we have over 100 episodes of Dora the Explorer from which to choose, and we don't have to watch the same handful of episodes a gazillion times. It's more reliable a source (as concerns availability) than my other favorite media source - the public library. We've also used it to introduce Abby (and to some extent Lizzy) to shows that are otherwise expensive to procure, especially if one does not know ahead of time whether the child will enjoy it. Lizzy (at three years nine months) can navigate the Wii Instant Play interface by herself. The child cannot read yet, but she knows which buttons indicate Resume Play, Start Over, Choose Episode, etc. The only time she runs into trouble is when she tries to use the Search function, because the only words she can spell are Lizzy, Yes, and No.

About twenty dollars a month for unlimited instant play (plus three discs out at a time for things not available on Instant Play - this is why I have Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One in my hot little hands).  Their customer service is terrific, and goes above and beyond to answer strange questions (like "may I use your logo in my blog post?" The answer was "yes, that constitutes Fair Use, as your blog post - at least for today - is a fan site.")

Also, it allows me to indulge in what my mom calls "TV as comfort food". Job hunting when living close to the budgetary wire is a tense and somewhat depressing process, and in an effort to neither scream at my kids nor eat us out of house and home - both things I tend to do when stressed - I've been watching all sorts of old favorite TV shows and movies. Stargate SG-1, Farscape, Trigun, The Twilight Zone,  - you name it, I'm enjoying watching it. Generally during the kids' rest time or after everyone goes to bed, or while folding laundry or job-hunting online while the kids are elsewhere. As I also have a cold and am constantly exposed to Cottonwood of Doom - it looks like there's been a snowstorm out there - I could really use a little comfort food - TV or otherwise.

Friday Randomocity

Three of our Friday Night Gamers (besides me) are sick. That makes tonight Board Game Night.

Abby revealed that her half-vampire side is on the left "because the blood-pressure machine at the drugstore does not work on that side". She refuses to believe that it's because the machine is designed for adults, not for 8yo girls with skinny arms. Of course, this is the same child it took me three years and corroborating evidence from Joe-from-Blues-Clues to convince that twelve and a dozen were the same thing.

Also, she is now on the cusp between Sea Turtle and Seal in her swim school (it goes Starfish-Goldfish-Sea Turtle-Seal from beginner to advanced). Go Abby! Go Safe-n-Sound Swimming! She was a little disappointed because Sea Turtles are "cute". I showed her several pictures of cute seals and she is now happy. Eight-year-olds are strange.

Lizzy is alternating between dancing and jumping on her trampoline, and lying like a lump on the floor.

I am unthrilled by the concept of gaming tonight - I have a cold and don't want to expend the mental energy - so it's just as well we're on board games.

This whole week has been one of those days where it looks like I got nothing done, but in reality I did a ton of stuff. I fixed an insurance snafu that's months old, did several rounds of dishes and laundry, cleaned out the coat closet, cleaned out the shoe box (which doesn't sound like much until one realizes that the shoe box is three feet by 18" and holds everyone's shoes), spent a morning with a friend, spent an afternoon at a farmers' market, and applied for a gazillion jobs. With a summer cold. Go me!

And I didn't blog yesterday. That was weird.

Market Day!

We attend a farmers' market most Wednesday afternoons in the summer. This market is hosted by a local church, along with a bunch of other things they do for the community; they run a latte stand, a fireworks stand, and of course the usual church things; food and clothing drives, Sunday School, youth groups, day camps and so forth. We are not members of this church, but we are members of the community they serve, and as such, we appreciate them.

Leanna has attended day camp there; they had a week of soccer camp she went to. She had a blast. We used to be regulars at their latte stand - Jacob's Well, and how cool is that name for a church-run espresso business? - when we lived closer to it. They named a drink for Abby - "Abby's Minty Cocoa" - and I introduced them to the concept of Italian Spritzer (Italian Soda without the cream). We buy our fireworks there for Independence Day. And then there's the market.

Lizzy Drives

Abby Drives

They have all the usual things one finds at a farmers' market... kettle corn, sno-cones, handicrafts, fresh fruit and vegetables, flowers, baked goods, home-party stuff. I tried to sell insurance there for a few weeks but insurance sales was... not my forte. All the vendors are wonderful about looking up ingredients for nut-allergic Abby. There's usually live music. And they have the Bouncy Castle and a go-kart rink they set up, both of which the girls love (and hopefully we can knock Lizzy out playing in them!). The prices are reasonable and a waiver is required so if your kid jumps off the top of the bouncy castle, you can't hold the church/market responsible. Which is totally reasonable. 

It's been a cool and wet spring, so the fruit-and-vegetable choices were not as plentiful as usual. But I got some nice apples (pink ladies!) and pears and peas and onions. I picked up some orange-flavored cupcakes for dessert. Laston got some pulled pork he really enjoyed. The kids had a snack of kettle corn and sno-cones and played in the bouncy house and on the go-kart track. All in all, an hour or two well spent.