Lessons from Green Meadows

What I Have Learned So Far From Our New House:
* DO let your husband surprise you with a Johnny Depp poster hung behind all of your clothes in the closet so that, whenever you pull a shirt from the hanger, a gorgeous pirate smiles back at you.
* DO clean your tiny master bathroom mirrors with Barbisol shaving cream so that they don’t fog up in the morning when you can’t open the bathroom door to let the steam out because your sleeping husband’s face will catch the brunt of the light.
* DON’T decide to clip the irises around your mailbox after you get home from the bar at 1 in the morning, only to wake up the next day and see a plant massacre on the front lawn.
* DO get a label maker and label everything you own so that there is no question as to where the king sheets go in the linen closet any longer.
* DO get a Swiffer to magically attract all of the dog hair on the wood floors.
* DON’T wait to use the Swiffer until there is so much amassed dog hair on the baseboards that you burn through 6 duster sheets and still don’t get it all.
* DO buy a lawn mower so that your husband dances around the yard while he mows the grass because he’s so excited to mow his own grass for the very first time. (Added bonus=the song and jig that he made up while we were at Lowe's buying the mower and he got to get a cart because we had so much big stuff!).
* DON’T buy your first lawn mower 1 hour before you have to be somewhere, because your husband will not be able to stop himself from immediately cutting the grass, front yard AND back, appointments or not.
* DO throw things away that you hate, regardless of the emotional attachment. It's much better to apologize to the person that gave you that antique lunchpail than to look at it every day with disgust in your heart and a not-often-enough-used duster in your hand.
* DON’T assume that the kitchen faucet isn’t leaking just because your home inspector told you it wasn’t.
* DO force your husband to give you one of his dresser drawers even if he needs it because you are so over your stupid collegey plastic closet drawers and need a place for your underthings.
* DON’T make fun of your husband for all of the ridiculous mementos he keeps in his top dresser drawer…(OK, you should absolutely make fun of the “keepsake socks” from Boy Scouts and the blinking LED belt buckle and the beer bottle caps from Colorado that he has every intention of making into refrigerator magnets…).

More lessons to come…

Tennessee's Hold

For the last 7 years, I've had dreams of getting out of Tennessee. My Tennessee life has always come in spurts...2 years here, another 3 years there. It started with 1.5 years of grad school in Chattanooga, then moved to a 2-year job there, then unexpectedly transitioned into 3.5 years of grad school in Nashville. And now, just when we finally thought we were free, Tennessee has exerted its pull on us, yet again. It looks like our family will stay in Nashville for another length-to-be-determined section of our lives that we will never get back! I realize I'm making it sound a little bleak...those who know me well know of my feelings about this odd, yet beautiful, state. But I should point out the many upsides to staying here for a while...my job is perfect for me; Mark can keep his job that he likes; we have plans of buying our first house (which, Cami, does NOT mean we will be here forever) which we can furnish with great furniture at a great price, thanks to Mark's job; and best of all, it's closer to Georgia than most of the other positions I looked at. After all, we could've ended up in Dubai, seriously. So, for another several years, we will continue to proudly sport our Alabama car stickers all over this horribly orange-stained town. We will continue to cheer Vandy on whenever the Big Orange (no fruit sucks like it) comes to town. We will continue to avoid the downtown honkey tonks at all costs until out-of-town guests visit. We will continue to be amazed at how everyone in Tennessee thinks that the lack of a state income tax is a great idea while important things like roads, air quality, and a little thing called education continue to go down the tubes. But, we will continue to frequent our most favorite of biker bars sans bike, we will continue to attend the most awesome church we've ever been to, I will continue to look for Willie Nelson around every corner, I will continue to find new favorite roads every day that wind through incredible farms and valleys, and we will continue to enjoy traffic that, although Nashvillians complain about, true Atlantians know is pretty close to rush hour heaven. We will continue to root for any team BUT the Titans (thanks to people like you, Albert Haynesworth), we will continue to look forward to Trader Joe's arrival, and we will enjoy finally having some money to spend at the great restaurants Nashville has to offer. So even though sometimes I want to cry when I think about not being in the city that I love, a city that houses both of my brothers, most of my best friends, and my in-laws, and is oh so much closer to my parents, I think Mark and I will try to look at this time as yet another boost to our future...I just can't help but wonder occasionally when this "future" we keep talking about will start!

It's a Twista!

i should never go to walmart. i just should never go. something crazy always happens. but i had to buy diapers!! i had a diaper cake to make!! first, i didn't know where the diapers were and had to ask. i felt like such a dumbass. but i've never had to buy them before! and by the way, for those who don't know, diapers are expensive!! i told mark we need to come up with a way to potty train our kids before they turn 1. and, for those of you who don't know, diapers are not (as i thought) in the toiletries area where the adult diapers are. no, they are in the baby clothes section. diapers look a whole lot cuter when they're next to onesies and baby socks than they would if they were next to some Depends (i think it's a marketing ploy). so i spend a zillion hours trying to decide which diapers to buy...i decided to just go with one of the 3 names i've heard of (huggies, luvs, pampers) and ignore the fact that no diapers exist without baby pooh on them...huggies, it is. just as i was finishing up, the walmart head honcho came over the loudspeaker and said "attention walmart customers and shoppers (and here i thought those were the same thing) and walmart attendants (are these like mixes of stewardesses and grocery store clerks?), we need everyone to move to the center of the store. there is a tornado headed this way"...so we kind of all just start moving toward the center. when we're relatively close to the "center of the store", we can see old women who apparently can't hear the announcements wandering back and forth in front of the cash registers, not able to figure out why there are no cashiers. several old women try to leave and one employee says "look, i can't stop you from leaving, but i can't check you out." old women who want to go home are not very open to the idea of standing around like a bunch of cows with 200 other idiots in the middle of walmart while witches fly by the windows singing "dun-da-dun-da-dun-da, dun-da-dun-da-dun-da, dun-da-dun-da-dun-da DAAAAA". i happened to be standing in the pet aisle. one of the employees was next to me and resolutely informed me that when the tornado came, she was going to get some of the dog beds and put them over her head. the boss woman comes back on the speaker like 10 minutes later and tells us that we ALL need to move near the ladies' dressing area. if you've ever been in the ladies' dressing area at walmart, you'd know that it only has like 3 dressing rooms in a closet-like, no-roof area in the middle of the store. needless to say, all 200 or so people that were in walmart at that time were in no way going to fit anywhere near the ladies' dressing area. she then comes back on the speaker and tells us that the warning isn't over until 11:30 (it's now 11:05), so we just better stay put until then. then, 5 minutes later, she comes back on the speaker and tells us we can go home. then i went to publix and laughed with the cashiers at all the idiots at walmart who are afraid of a little rain :)

PHinisheD!

i'm done! i'm done! dissertation has been written and successfully defended!
here are the stats without appendices:
175 pages
46,080 words
1,235 paragraphs
1,000,000,000 pounds of stress relieved

if anyone would like to read about measuring the quality of prekindergarten classrooms and assessing the early childhood environment rating scale, you are welcome to it. and, thanks to the $60 fee that i am required to pay, it will also be available on microfilm which, as we all know, is the wave of the future...or at least it probably was 50 years ago.
i, on the other hand, will be searching for employment.
yippee!

Where's my rainbow?

When God flooded the earth, He sent a rainbow to remind His people of His covenant. When God flooded my bathroom, I got nothing! Last night at 4 a.m., I woke up to my dog barking her fool head off. Mark is out in Colorado having the time of his life snowboarding while I try to get my dissertation finished and simultaneously attempt to mop up what can only be described as 20 toilets worth of water spilled all over my guest bathroom that is about the size of 1 toilet. Trinity's bark wasn't the "I need to go pee" bark or the "I hear a noise outside" bark, but it was more like the "There is something seriously wrong going in this house and my goal is to make my mom as scared as I am" bark. I was really out of it, being woken from a deep sleep, and I'm pretty sure I thought there was someone in the house and I put the covers over my head in the hopes that the intruder wouldn't see me. Then I realized that I was hearing a weird hissing noise coming from the bathroom in the hallway. I considered getting Mark's hatchet from beside the bed before venturing out of the bedroom, but I decided against it (probably a smart move, because I may have tried to hack the toilet to pieces). The bathroom looked like a volcano, the toilet spewing great spouts of water from two spots. The floor was already covered with a layer of water. Apparently I really don't think well at 4 in the morning and my first thought was to open the top of the commode and see what I could do. After moving random things around inside the toilet, I remembered (duh) that I could shut the water off at the wall. So with the water gushing right in my face like a scene from Tom & Jerry, I pushed my way to the wall to turn the water off. With Trinity hiding in her bed, I called the apartment emergency number and left a message. The guy called me back a minute later and I told him what had happened. His advice? "Do you have towels?" Well yeah, I have towels. Apparently he lives 40 minutes away and wouldn't be getting to my flooded bathroom until the next morning. So I used every towel in the house trying to sop up gallons upon gallons of toilet water from my floor. In the process, I discovered how dirty my floors are because dog hair was floating by me from spots that the mop hadn't reached, ever. After moving everything out of the bathroom and laundry room (where the water had flowed underneath the washing machine...which is a much dirtier place than the bathroom floor), I sopped up enough water to be confident that the apartment below me wouldn't be flooded, as well. Trin and I got back in bed around 4:45. All I was thinking as I sopped and soaked and squeeged was how Mark would probably have a much better solution to this mess if he were here. So where's my rainbow? I guess the rainbow is hidden in the fact that if it had happened 12 hours earlier, I would've been in South Carolina and I'm fairly sure that much more than a few magazines, a couple rolls of toilet paper, and part of our wedding guest book/wall hanging would've been ruined! Plus, I get to go pick up my hubby in about an hour and a half...what better rainbow is there?

Dissertation Deadline

This is exactly how I feel right now. I just set my defense date for March 19, which seems so far away, but then when I remember that I have to send my paper to my committee 2 weeks before that and give it to my advisor for revisions like 2 weeks before that, I'm pretty sure that means I have to be finished with it sometime last year. Couple that with the fact that I'm still waiting for some data to come in from people who promised it to me last month, and you get a recipe for a time bomb. Tick...tick...tick...