March, 2003

We’re in the house! Hooray! Unfortunately I still haven’t unpacked everything and we’re still moving the last of our junk from the old house. Yes, we have far too much crap. I have been able to weed some of it out, however. I went through our clothes and came up with a huge box to donate to a local shelter. Wonder what they’ll think of all the old comic book tees? And, once we get the house cleared out I need to tidy it up and we still haven’t tackled the garage. Arrrghhh!

Calvin is now a big six months old. He’s this close to crawling and would be there already if he could connect the swimming motion he makes when he’s on his belly to moving forward when he’s on his hands and knees.

He’s still not sleeping through the night. Kind of a bummer since I was hoping I’d be getting semi-decent sleep by now. Mike has just got to watch that I don’t go too many nights with really interrupted sleep or I tend to get depressed. Being tired and sleep-deprived does that to me. Strange.

Not only is my day full with taking care of Cal and trying to unpack our junk, I’ve taken on the job of watching another baby who lives two houses down. Her mother is the counselor at Duncan’s school and went back to work in February. Her four-month old daughter is really a cute and sweet baby and I only get a little frazzled when they both start crying at the same time. Okay, there was last Friday when I was heard uttering the immortal line “I’m sick of babies!” but that was just for the last hour of the day and everyone’s entitled to lose it once in a while, right?

Duncan is doing great in first grade. He’s reading at a second to third grade level and does well on his schoolwork overall.

The first grade play is coming up this month and Duncan has the role of Old MacDonald. He has a whole seven lines. Woo! The little ham will get to be in every scene and wear a white beard. It should be cute.

Mike, as always, is employed by Integris Health. The crap he was going through at work the last time I wrote has settled down. The ad agency was smacked a little bit and has backed off for now on their bid to take over the Integris web site. I’m sure they’ll rear their ugly heads sometime in the future, however.

I rejoined STAR OKC since I was officially finished with my pregnancy and we got into the new house. I can’t claim we just don’t have the time any more and besides I volunteered to do their web site for them. I figured if I was going to be the STAR OKC webmistress I probably should be a paid member. Besides if you’re not a member you can’t be a pain-in-the-butt with your opinions and votes at meetings. Check out the site at www.starokc.org. It’s nothing spectacular. More of a way to advertise the club than anything. I have some ideas about ways to punch it up a bit but will worry about that once the summer hits and I’m not taking care of two babies five days a week. I’m not left with too much time each day to do more than take care of them and maybe get a few household chores done. Sometimes I actually get to unpack some things too.

I haven’t been watching too much TV this season mainly because they’ve canceled the new shows I liked. Right now I’m faithfully watching Buffy, Angel, NYPD Blue, Judging Amy, The Bonnie Hunt Show, Survivor, Farscape and ER.

I catch Charmed every now and then or read while it’s on. I’d like to watch Futurama more but it seems like we’re always doing something at that time on a Sunday or it’s pre-empted by football. Birds of Prey and Firefly were canceled so there went those hours of viewing. Right now there’s not a whole helluva lot on the tube that I care to watch beyond those shows and certain shows on the Food Network (Iron Chef, anyone?).

On the movie front we’ve seen LOTR: The Two Towers (loved it and yes, Calvin made it through the whole movie), Daredevil (pretty good but I missed Elektra’s death because I had to go potty. Ack!), Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (great flick!), Adaptation (good but strange flick) and I can’t think of any other movies. For a while there it was tough to go unless we went in the middle of the day when I could put Cal to sleep in the movie. Then when he got to the point where he could stay with a sitter there were no movies that I wanted to see.

Mike’s a whore and would go see more movies but I hate the thought of wasting an hour and a half to two hours of my life on something that’s probably going to be crap. I didn’t mind doing that when I was in high school and college and had nothing but time but now I can always think of something else I’d rather be doing than sitting through the latest piece of drek from Hollywood.

Only one review this quarter because, well, you know the reason. I’m a lazy slug.

Tamara J. Hodge,
March, 2003