Bloop.

Since my last post I have:

Decided to get glasses.
The doctor says I don't really NEED them, but I wanted them so he wrote me a prescription for reading glasses. I have to say...I'm a little disappointed. I'm legally blind in my right eye, which normally doesn't bother me at all, but it's a bitch to deal with when putting on eyeliner. So I had this fantasy that if I got glasses, I could just maneuver my eyeliner brush around the frames and put my eyeliner on that way, which would be a lot easier than what I do now, which is basically like, put a little on, open my eye to check the work, put a little on, open my eye to check the work, repeat repeat repeat. But my optometrist said that glasses like that wouldn't be practical. The correction for my right eye would apparently be crazy huge, and he said that since I don't use that eye normally anyway, ACTUALLY seeing out of it would probably 1) be something I could only do by "manually switching" to that eye (which is hard to explain to people who use both eyes all the time, but I totally knew what he meant, and it makes my left eye cross), and 2) it would probably give me headaches and make me nauseated, because I'm just NOT accustomed to using that eye. So, bah. I guess it's still going to take me fo-eva to put on eyeliner.

By the time my doc gave me the bad news about my eyeliner situation though, I'd already picked out frames I liked. And I WANTED them. So, because I'm a freak who actually wants glasses, I was like, "what CAN you give me a prescription for?"

He said he could give me reading glasses, since sometimes my poor little left eye gets tired from reading/beading/etc, because it has to work doubly hard. So I got reading glasses. Brett got his normal prescription, but with entirely new and different frames. Our optics shop was having a sale, so before the sale price and insurance, his frames and lenses totaled about $350 (his lenses are expensive). After the sale - $215. After insurance - $15. After the HSA card - $0. Mine were about $260 before the sale price, but then went down to $205, then $5, and obviously we paid that with the same HSA card mentioned above, so we walked away paying $0. Except for what B put into the HSA card initially, which was pre-tax income with matching funds from his employer.

If your employer offers an HSA with matching funds and you plan on using your body for things, ACCEPT THEIR GENEROUS OFFER, PEOPLE!!! Little bits of money (the amount is up to you) are taken from your paycheck each month, your employer automatically matches those funds (so the amount doubles, duh), and then if you, say, hypothetically, go to the dentist for the first time in seven years and need two cleanings, a fluoride treatment, eight fillings, a root canal, and a crown (I am SO glad that's over), not only is it NO STRAIN WHATSOEVER on your daily budget, but you might even have extra money left over for things like fancy reading glasses and expensive prenatal vitamins. (I'm not pregnant yet. STOP ASKING.) Three cheers for good financial planning!!!

Been told that I'm going to San Francisco as an early birthday present. Woo!
Apparently, despite the "early birthday present" label I insisted that my iMac be bought with, my mom and dad have also been in cahoots with Brett planning a long-weekend getaway for the two of us down in SF. We'll be staying at a cool boutique hotel downtown, hanging out with my little brother (Sam) who lives in the area, eating lots of good (DF) food, and possibly, if I can talk Brett and my brother into it, going to Maker Faire. I want to go sooo bad. But we won't have a car, so Sam will have to drive us. But Sam would love Maker Faire. I bet. So he should totally go with us. And we should go. Pleeease?

Been feeling a bit under the weather, and have consequently let the house go to shit.
All last week I had a headache, congestion, and a feeling of like...blah. Just not good. I thought it was allergies, and when the achiness set in I thought it was allergies + pms. But then Brett got sick too. REALLY sick. He spent most of Saturday with a fever over 100, and I took my own temperature as well, and it was 99.5. So we were sick. :P We were SUPPOSED to spend Easter with his family at his parents' house, and I was supposed to bring dairy-and-soy-free biscuits and gravy, but since we were sick and Ali is seven months pregnant, the consensus was that Brett and I spend Easter quarantined in our own filthy sicky house, so that nobody, fetus included, would get our cooties.

So I went to the store and bought a dozen eggs, determined that, come hell or high water, I WOULD have deviled eggs on Easter Sunday. Then Sunday came around, and I was too exhausted to actually cook them. And since I'd been feeling sick all week, the kitchen was so disgusting that I couldn't really cook much of anything. I actually don't even remember what we ate that day. I think we made a sort of half-assed chicken soup. It was Brett's idea and really it tasted pretty good: just chicken broth, carrots, rice, onion, and garlic. No actual chicken. if there had been chicken in it, I would've considered it whole-assed. But sans chicken I give it only half an ass.

Brett stayed home sick until today. He was MUCH sicker than I was, so he had every right to lay on the couch all weekend creating a massive pile of dirty dishes, snotty tissues, sweaty blankets, food crumbs, dvd boxes, etc. But I just didn't have the energy to feel yucky, take care of him, AND keep up with the mess. By the time he went back to work today the house was like, COPS messy. You know, like on COPS, when they go into someone's house and it's totally disgusting, and the person is all like, "yeah, I've been meaning to throw out that dead cat for awhile now." But like, there's so much shit all over the floor that the camera can't even FIND the dead cat, but the cops just keep commenting on the smell?!?

We had no dead cats (thank God), but it did take me all day just to clean up the living room and bar. And I barely made a dent in the kitchen. I swear, never in the history of our marriage do I remember our kitchen ever being this messy. This morning I went in to make breakfast, and since I only had about 5" of counter space, a couple of spoons, and no cookware, I ended up microwaving canned soup in a mixing bowl and THAT'S what I had for breakies. And lunchies. I managed to clean it up enough to make beef stroganoff in the crock for dinner, but it still has a looong way to go. Man I hate getting sick.

Incidentally, I worked on that dairy-and-soy-free biscuits and gravy recipe for THREE DAYS, and it was really good. Not a perfect milk-and-flour sausage gravy base exactly, but an excellent sausage gravy, never the less. Made with a bacon fat roux, crumbled breakfast sausage, sauteed onion, and a combo of almond milk, beef broth, and water as the "milk" part. It looked more like something that should be coming up rather than going down, but it was delicious.

Been totally obsessed with LHotP.
LHotP, aka Little House on the Prairie, is a book by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Aka LIW. I'm actually obsessed more with the whole "Laura Years" series, but I refer to it as LHotP. I have them as audio books performed by Cherry Jones, with Pa's Fiddle performed by Paul Woodiel. I normally prefer audio books to actual books, but the extra treat of Cherry Jones' soft accent and soothing voice, and the singing and fiddling of songs that, in the books, would've just been written out as lyrics has been awesome. I read the whole series of books over and over again as a kid, and for some reason I got the urge to listen to them as audio recently, so...I have been. I like to listen to them on le ipod while I'm cooking, cleaning, madly clicking through (fluff)Friends, etc. It's been quite nice, and it's put me in a very nesty sort of mood. Which, since I'm a homemaker anyway, is a very nice way to feel. :)

Been more okay with the idea of moving.
Brett's wanted to move closer-in for awhile now, but I LOVE our house, neighborhood, and town. And I don't want to leave them. But as the population of this area has grown, the traffic has rapidly gone from bad to worse. Brett's average commute is about 45 min each way, and we're spending about $200/month on gas, so living here just doesn't make sense any more. Moving closer-in will most likely mean moving into a smaller house, which seems like a bad idea since we're also planning on having kids in the near future (and we want to have three), but lots of people have children in small living spaces, and it's just fine. It's funny - when we moved into our current 1800 sq ft house I thought it was TINY, but now that I've lived here awhile I feel like I really don't even need all this space.

There are some things I'm having a hard time letting go of; I still want more than one bathroom, I want a dining room, two separate living areas, a master suite with plenty of closet space, etc, but I've let go of my previous demands that our next house HAS to have a music room and it HAS to have a bar, a hot tub, etc. Because really. WTF. It sooo doesn't have to have those things. All it HAS to have are places to sleep, eat, play, and relax. And places to go to the bathroom. Preferably multiple places to go to the bathroom.

Because this one time, when I was little, I was staying in someone's house in OKC with my aunt and uncle and cousin for a wedding, and there were so many people staying in the house that all four of us were in one suite together, with my aunt and uncle in the bed and my cousin and I on the floor. Then my cousin got sick and barfed in my hair, and we only had ONE bathroom for the four of us, so my aunt cleaned the barf out of my hair with a washcloth while my cousin was sick in the bathroom, and then my aunt got sick too (food poisoning, it turned out), and she and my cousin had to SHARE THE SAME BATHROOM for their barfs and rhea. And they stayed in there together, doing those things, all night. I had to pee, but chose to hold it until morning and use someone else's bathroom. Hell if I was going to pee in that toilet.

The lesson I learned on that disastrous trip: multiple people need multiple bathrooms. Even with just Brett and I living together it's been helpful, because if one of us is sick to our stomach, the other one can continue going about their normally scheduled bathroom business in the other bathroom, completely unhindered. And there have been quite a few times after road trips or long days out on the town where we both enter the house and immediately want to head for the bathroom, and why, isn't that lovely! We can both go at the same time. No queue!

On that note, I think it's time for me to pee, listen to some LHotP, and then hit the hay. Good night! :)