mom

Mom leaves today. I'm sad about this fact, but thrilled she doesn't leave until this evening.

Mom asked if we could still head out for frozen yogurt, which I had promised her a couple days ago, and to which I happily agreed. On our way back, I suggested, since we're unable to stick to the four hour work day, that we set monthly goals for ourselves. I was struck by Erica Douglass' tweet question last month:

Biz tip: 1st day of the month! Have you plotted out your goals for this month? What will be awesome to achieve by 6/30?

and wanted to try out a list for this month.

Mom was enchanted by the idea also, so out came the cards and down went the list. My list is:

1. A working demo of themegeni.us
2. Theme support for open source themes working on the site
3. Weigh 125#
4. Balance lengthwise for 5 seconds on the foam roller with both arms and legs straight up in the air
5. Blog daily
6. Call Mom and Dad every week
7. 30 pushups without stopping
8. Donate clothing
9. Doctor appointments for neck, knee, lyme and tentatus
10. Have the kitchen clean before going to bed each night
11. Redesign my blog

The first one is the hardest, but I've already started on it.

The theme support is an idea I've had for a long time.

I didn't think weighing 125 pounds was going to be hard, until I realized my scale is off by 5 pounds. In the wrong direction.

If I can balance length-wise on the foam roller for five seconds, our pilates instructor said she'd buy us all a frozen yogurt. Given that this seems to be the only way to get her to come out with us, I'm up for the challenge.

I've been blogging daily, just haven't been pointing much, since my blogging server ran out of disk space a month or so back.

Calling Mom and Dad weekly I don't think will be difficult. I was humoured, however, that Mom wrote down the goal as "Call Mother/Dad weekly," since "Mother" is how she addresses her mom.

Thirty pushups will be a challenge, since I can do only about 15 in a row at the moment. I'd like to do these from my feet, not my knees, also.

Donating clothes is going to be more tedious that difficult, as I'm more able to part with ill-fitting (think: men's large shirts) clothes than I used to be. I'm not, however, able to part with them without taking pictures of them so that I know where they went.

Doctors appointments are ones that I've been meaning to get to or in the process of doing for a long time. My neck I've been complaining about for a year or so, with the doctor pooh-poohing me each time. My knee is in the process of getting magnetized to see what's up. I need to be checked for Lyme's disease, based on various symptoms I've been having and the multiple tick bites I've had in the last four years. And, since I work in the soil a lot, a tetanus booster would be a good idea.

With the heat these last few days, ants have been coming in and seeking the relatively coolness of the house. The compostable items in a bowl on the counter hasn't been exactly a deterent either. So, keeping the kitchen clean has been a complete necessity. That, and I'm in the process of cleaning out the kitchen window anyway, so it works for me.

And, I've been meaning to redo this site, removing the focus from the ME ME MY-LIFE ME personal aspect, and more into the ME ME ME THIS-IS-INTERESTING-TO-ME personal plus not-so-personal aspect.

So, lets see how this goes. I'm doing okay so far.

Mom and I celebrated my birthday today. She told me about the surprise party she had planned, how both my brothers were going to be there, and how Kris was going to fly in, and Sam and Jackson were going to be there, and how everyone was going to meet up at a sports bar where we were "waiting for Eric to come over after work." My nose flushed and I, once again, started crying at just what I had messed up by not flying out. Stupid stomach flu / food poisoning / sympathetic pains!

This evening, to celebrate, I made Mom (and Andy who came over - yay!) chocolate souffle, as I had, to my surprise, never made a souffle for her, and she was craving chocolate cake. I have to say that tonight's souffles were probably the best I'd ever made.

While various parts of dinner and dessert were cooking, Mom asked me if I wanted to celebrate my birthday exactly now, and open up the various gifts she brought with her. Gifties? Sure!

She handed me the first one from Eric, which was, I have to say, a little rumpled from the travel.

Before:

After:

To Kris' completely honest statement about his wife being a shaker, I shook the box. I noticed it looked smaller than its before picture from earlier this week. Wondering if I mis-remembered the picture she had sent earlier, I felt the box's shape, tested its indentations, sniffed it, and, just to make sure it was really mine, licked it. I then started to open it.

As soon as the box was exposed, I started laughing. Mom started to say something, but I was completely incapable of answering, as I was laughing so hard at the box. Yes, it was smaller than the before picture, because it was cut in half:

When I pulled out the gift, I noticed I had one of a pair of earrings. "It's a pearl earring," I said looking up at Mom, who was sitting there smiling ear to pearl-earring'd ear. She tilted her head and my new pearl earring's twin flashed on her ear. "Yes," she answered.

Eric had given Mom and me matching earrings. Mom often wears singleton earrings of matching styles, a single pearl possibly being a singleton. The earrings were different than any other set she has. I pulled out the alcohol to clean my ear lobe and the earring stem, received a lesson in pearl care, and popped the earring in.

I have to say, we are quite the matched set.

Mom and I may have to work out a timeshare on the full pair, but for the moment, when I wear my earring, I'm going to think of both the wonderful woman wearing its match, and Eric for the reminder of how amazing she is.

Thanks, Eric!

Yeah, somehow I think Mom isn't going to let me pay her to do my taxes again. Something about "complicated" and "insane" and "What? You have that deduction, too?" and "Forms! Where is this form!"

I think I'm lucky I have her doing this much already.

When I was growing up, one of my aunts joined the Cult of the Triangle (not really, but it sounds good). She had heard about the power of the triangle from somewhere and shared it with the rest of us.

Essentially, if you had a pain or something that needed fixing, you could make a triangle by holding your palms out flat, pointing your thumbs toward each other and angling your hands so that your pointer fingers formed the top of a triangle (at nominally 120° inwards). I don't know if your thumbs and pointer fingers were supposed to touch.

After forming the triangle, you now had the power to eliminate pain, cure cancer, and increase the length of your penis. All you have to do is hold the center of the triangle over the area to affect and concentrate on the outcome you desire. Trying to remove a pain in yourself or someone else? Feel the pain draw out of its original location and into the triangle.

But wait! I lied. That's not all you have to do. Once you draw this bad mojo into the triangle of your hands, you also need to be rid of it. If you don't, your hands would hold the pain, cancer, short penis, whatever the original issue was. So, you need to shake out that bad mojo. That's right - flick it away, get rid of it, shake it off.

Be careful where you flick that bad mojo, though. Depending on its original state, you can confer it to the object you flick it on to. Why, a friend of a friend of my aunt flicked some bad pain mojo onto a rock, figuring the rock could take it. It split with a large crack some days later. So, don't go flinging that bad mojo indiscriminately.

About three weeks ago, my monitor died. Since Mom is out and helping me with my personal tasks, I asked her to find a new power supply for my monitor. After surfing the various Apple forums for a bit, I came to the conclusion that the power supply was the most likely problem, as others had "fiddled" with their power supplies and had their monitors start working again, an event that had happened to me months earlier. I had spent a long while trying the fiddling trick again, without succuess, so I wanted a new one to see if my current power supply was indeed the problem.

After explaining all of this to Mom, she looked at me and said, "Just use the triangle on it."

"Mom!" I exclaimed, exasperated. I had tried who knows how long trying to fiddle with the power supply, what could would a triangle have? Argh!

I humoured her, hoping where I flung the bad mojo wouldn't come back to haunt me.

The monitor fired right up.