Being that Cody and I have been out of town visiting our grandparents and Uncle Bill (more on that later), I haven't had much time for blogging. Actually, that has more to do with the lack of an internet connection- no, scratch that, lack of a COMPUTER- than lack of time. (Grandparents are chill.)
For today, I want to take a moment to share with the Internet the baby toads we found hopping around outside this morning. They are smaller than a nickel, and cute as a button. Apparently we need to watch our step around monsoon season because we saw a few that met their demise due to their ironic ability to look like a piece of stray gravel. Sad.
These little guys bring back some great childhood memories of going to my friend Emily's house and making an afternoon of catching baby toads in her family's garden. Every summer they would go to the Verde River and bring home buckets of these little guys to put in their garden to eat bugs. We would promptly comb the garden to capture them, scare the piss out of them (literally), and watch them hop around wherever we decided to take them- usually the back patio or, if we were sneaky enough, into the living room. The ones who survived the neighborhood cats (or us) grew up to be large and quite slimy. Needless to say, they lost their appeal when it came to catching one, but we still thought they were cute.
Look how tiny he is!
You know you have your priorities messed up when your to-do list is 29-items deep, you haven't bothered to unpack even though you have been home for three days, the house has been turned upside down by a recent sewing project, and you are online, writing.
My super talented and smoking hot husband took it upon himself to make a full-fledged video montage of our time in Kauai in November. Besides the roosters, the best part of our honeymoon was that we actually got there- our flight was scheduled to leave at 8:15 a.m. And when did we wake up? 6:58. I believe the morning went something like this:
(My thought process waking up.) "Gee... THOR sure is rattling around in his cage early. And there are sure a LOT of cars on the road for 5:15 in the morning. Actually, what the crap am I doing awake this early with no alarm?"
(I sit straight up, wide awake, and look at the clock, which is staring defiantly back at me saying, "Nah nah, nah nah NAH, it's SIX FIFTY-EEEEIGHT! MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA!")
Me: "HOLY %&$*%@$#@$#@$#%&*%$!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
Cody (startled and ready to kill an intruder): "Whaa??? Who- where? What's going on?" (Looks at the clock) "HOLY %&$*%@$#@$#@$#%&*%$!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
At which point I immediately burst into tears.
My poor mom called two minutes later: "Where are you, dear? You were supposed to be here at 6:30."
"WE JUST WOKE UUUUUUPPPP! WE'RE GOING TO MISS OUR HONEYMOON!!! WHY DIDN'T YOU CALL ME AT 6:30?!?!?!?" Because, clearly, when things like this go wrong, it is automatically Mom's fault. Oh, the joys of motherhood that I will have to look forward to one day- being yelled at by my kids when they are freaking out about something I had nothing to do with. (I love you Mom!)
We grabbed our suitcases and the dog and tossed them in the car, and I commenced to drive like a banshee to my parents house and made it there in a record 12.346 minutes. I was a basket case the whole way there, and Cody was on the phone with Hawaiian Airlines trying to let them know our situation. Apparently they weren't having it, which is such crap because what kind of customer service is that anyway? "You're not gonna make it" seemed to be their catch-phrase of the day.
At 7:30 we pulled up, and I was completely defeated and ready to throw in the towel when my mom opens the door, grabs the dog, throws him in the house- like, literally THROWS him- and shoves us back out the door and into the car. She was like, "We are getting you two on that plane if it's the last thing I do. Now let's go." Holy crap Mom, way to not take no for an answer!
7:45- we pulled up to the terminal and ran, luggage in tow, to the check-in counter. Apparently the same bitch- I mean, airline worker that Cody talked to on the phone was working the counter, because when her trusty sidekick walked up she was like, "These are the ones I was telling you about." (Um... RUDE! We're standing RIGHT HERE!) That was promptly followed by, "You're not gonna make it." Excuse me, but when did that become Hawaiian Airlines new ad campaign? And what the crap did she think we were doing anyway, lounging around at home reading the newspaper and drinking our morning coffee when we happened to notice that, oh, hey, maybe we should get to the airport soon, it's already SIX FIFTY-EIGHT?
Honestly.
"I can't guarantee that your bags will make it onto the plane, nor can I promise that they will make the transfer flight to Kauai once you land in Honolulu..." Just shut your mouth and give us our boarding passes, we still have to wait through security.
Well, I sobbed our way through security, thoroughly convinced that we were never going to make it (I shouldn't have let Hawaiian's merciless negativity get to me!), when we reached the front of the line and the security guy was so kind and encouraging, saying that we were just fine and had plenty of time to make it (ten minutes to take-off, I believe). By nothing less than an act of God, we made it onto that plane with better seats than we originally had reserved, and sat in shock the whole six hours there because HOW ARE WE ON THIS PLANE RIGHT NOW?
Call us paranoid, but we had no doubt that the entire plane knew that we were "those people" who they tried to tell "weren't gonna make it" because we had the crappiest service of all time and got a few dirty looks. But whatever. After a morning like that, we didn't care what anyone thought; after all, they didn't live through the EMOTIONAL TURMOIL OF WAKING UP AT SIX FIFTY-EIGHT or the ironclad determination of my mother to get us on that damn plane. And if our luggage wasn't there to greet us at the Kauai airport, we always had our cute matching Life is Good "Just Married" t-shirts that we hoped would score us lots of free stuff.
But, amazingly, in the five minutes it took to walk from our plane to the baggage area, our luggage had magically appeared, sitting in a nice, neat row, unscathed by the chaotic and traumatizing seven-hour trek from our apartment in Scottsdale to the baggage claim in Kauai. I defy anyone who dares challenge us with, "You're not gonna make it"! Screw you, Hawaiian Airlines nay-sayers! Next time we're flying Aloha!
The Codeman and I took THOR on a little trip to San Clemente to stay with our dear friends, Nate and Adria, and their one-year-old, Jude, i.e. THE-CUTEST-BABY-ON-THE-PLANET. We left on Friday afternoon and made the drive complete with a terrified dog curled up in my lap, eyes darting around, wild and alert, every time we passed a big rig. He is inexplicably terrified of those things.
Anyway, the weekend in pictures:
Taken at the Montage at Laguna Beach.
Family portrait.
Amber and me and our Asian dog.
THOR's first time seeing the ocean!
Apparently it was a little bright out for him. Someone needs some Doggles!
We were at a poverty party. I wish there were pictures of this apartment, because it was amazingly cute.
This is THE-CUTEST-BABY-ON-THE-PLANET... and THOR. They're tight like that.
"If you're nice I might give you this bone."
The gang.
I wish I had this view out of my house! They're so blessed.
Baby THOR wasn't feeling so hot on the long drive home.
Pretty sure that poor Little Man had a fever- he was like a fireball when I held him in my lap!
...Of course, the second we got home, he started running around in typical dog-on-crack style. Back to his old self in no time.
Recently my dad and brother found a new weekend pastime: shooting. I'm not entirely sure what could have brought this on, but if I were to guess, it would be an exercise in defending their constitutional right to wield firearms whenever and wherever they like. While my dad claims that it is for protection from home invaders (because those run rampant in their neighborhood), I tend to think it is less an act of familial preservation than it is a big F-you to gun control advocates trying to take away his right to shoot them if he was ever physically attacked by one. While I know that guns in-and-of themselves are harmless, I have a tendency to want to lock myself up in a thoroughly insulated titanium box for my own self-protection whenever I am around one (and rightfully so, considering that under my brother's instruction, my sister blasted a hole through her closet wall and into the next bedroom... at least the "bullet" was a "blank"... hahaha!).
Anyway, this blog isn't really about gun politics as much as it is what I think my dad and brother should do to put this new hobby to its most practical use. As long as they don't mind shooting in the dark, in the middle of the week, in some God-forsaken area near our apartment, at 11:00 at night, and either pissing off a lot of residents in the process or emerging as full-fledged heroes. Here's why:
Spring is in full force in Arizona, mixing cool nights with warm, sunny days. THOR likes to run around in the grass and stick his little nose out the window when we drive around. The orange trees and wild desert flora are blossoming and everything smells heavenly. Sounds like a fairy tale, right? There is a window of about three weeks, maybe a month that this lasts. In anticipation of the inevitable inferno that is the Arizona summer, Cody and I want to put off using the A/C as long as possible because APS IS THE DEVIL AND WILL ROT IN THE LAKE OF FLAMING SULFUR FOREVER (see the book of Revelation for proof), so we are leaving our windows open at night to let in the fresh air, and closing them during the day to hold it in.
Two nights ago, as I settled into bed with my husband, our dog, and my book, joyously reading and looking forward to a restful night, my peace was broken by a shrill, earsplitting, incessant, and ever-changing… bird call.
As is the case with most noises that keep me awake at night, be it a neighbor pounding his bass through the walls or one of those annoying car alarms where the horn honks erratically and stops IF AND ONLY IF its owner comes to shut it the &%#! up, my first instinct was to blow up the culprit with a bazooka. But since I didn’t have one of those handy at the time, all we could do was close the bedroom window- much to Cody’s chagrin, who describes sleeping between THOR and me akin to being trapped inside a car in the middle of the summer in Phoenix with no A/C and the windows rolled up. When that did absolutely nothing to muffle the annoying song of what I think is a mate-less, sex-deprived, attention-starved male Northern Mockingbird, I started to go crazy. I even tried earplugs to drown out this crap, but I could only get an earplug in my left ear, because apparently my ear hole in the other ear is too small to accommodate a foam earplug. Now there’s a problem I never thought I’d have.
On that note, I’m not sure which will be more annoying for my neighbors: the constant bird noise, or me taking up a shotgun at every tree within a half-mile radius in an irrational, ruthless, apocalyptic, sleep-deprived rage until the bird noise stops.
This view is precisely why we couldn't pass up the opportunity to live in this exact apartment. My last lease wasn't up yet so I paid double rent for a month and a half so we could secure it. That and I couldn't get out of the craphole otherwise known as Arcadia del Sol fast enough. (If you're reading this, don't EVER, under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, rent from there. EVER.)
...And this picture shows why it was worth every penny.
Although I must say that some strange things have happened involving the street running along the front of the complex, like the time when we had just gone to bed and we hear this thing go by that sounded like it couldn't have been anything other than an actual Lear jet on a rather odd emergency landing runway, or perhaps a heat-seeking missle run amok. We still sit around trying to come up with ideas on what it could have been, ranging from a rocket drag racer to Godzilla ripping ass to the Starship Enterprise. Take your pick, it could have been any of the above. It was so loud that it woke Cody up from a dead sleep for the third time in his entire life, and was gone before we could reach two feet over to open the blinds to gawk confusedly at "What-The-Crap-Was-THAT."
And, lest we forget, the Scottsdale Senior Center across the street adds a PLETHORA of excitement to the neighborhood as well.
