Elf Calamities

Invariably, if you are going to do the Elf on the Shelf thing, you are going to have mishaps.

Like forgetting to move the Elf and the kids discovering her first. "That silly Elf tried to trick you guys (again?) and came back to the same spot!"

Or the day the housecleaner knocked her off her perch and left her sprawled on the floor. Horror! "Well I hope she forgives the housecleaner for touching her and doesn't give a bad report to Santa."

Or the day that daddy stepped on her.

Our elf was sound asleep on the dolly bed in Skadi's room on the floor next to Skadi's bed. She had survived the whole day there, I THOUGHT we were out of the woods.

AB was putting Skadi to sleep that night and at some point, got up, and stepped right on Mina!!

The world screeched to a halt as Skadi's eyes welled with tears, "DADDY! You hurt Mina. You touched her and will get a bad report and now she can't fly back to the North Pole and so Santa won't get our good reports. WAH!"

It didn't stop there. I heard about it for the next two days. Not only from the kids but AB as well.

"I don't care that it is cute she was in a little bed, she should NOT be on the floor or SOMETHING is bound to happen," and he was probably right.

But as it turned out Mina was none worse for the wear and flew to Santa that night and issued her good reports.

(Thank goodness AB didn't step on her face and smush it in or something catastrophic like that...)

Soul Sister

Ok yes, one of my favorite songs… Hey, Soul Sister… can I admit that here?

In the past few weeks in discussions with friends and actually online as well, we have hit on that “right person”. Who is it and how do you know?

I know my right person… my husband. We have this super marriage. A marriage that when others are in groups and venting about their significant other about all I can find to say is, “I got nothing.” (Now if they wanted to switch the topic over to work? I could so bend some ears there.)

I am lucky. Very, very lucky.

My husband supports me in everything I do. He gives me his opinion, even though I may not want it, and then he shuts up when I ask him if I asked for his opinion. We talk all the time. He has heard my stories 6832 times and I have heard his 6833 times. But we still learn from each other. We are a team and ever proud of being a family together. And I pray to God that he never finds a reason or desire to leave me.

We started dating when we were in our senior year in college, just before we each turned 22. Those first two years were rocky. We broke up a number of times. I always swore (before him) that I wouldn’t go back to a failed relationship. But something kept pulling me back each time. Then I decided to go to grad school. He followed me a few states over and by that action, I knew we were in it for the long haul, though we didn't marry for 3 years after that.

I dated a lot (read too much) in high school. I look back now and realize that I wanted someone so badly that I dated anyone who took a second glance at me. I hope I can infuse in my daughter a stronger sense of worth in herself and less of my early dependence on feeling like I was someone because I was with someone. With only a few exceptions I went from dating one person a prior weekend to having a new boyfriend the next. It wasn’t until a particularly stifling year and a half in early college that I decided I needed to be brave. I needed to be by myself for one full year. I needed to figure out who I was.

And I did it. When AB came along that senior year, I was ready.

Is he my soul mate? See I am not sure I believe in a soul mate. The whole one person for each person out there and if brought together, sparks will fly and all will be good in the world, doesn't really jive with me. And AB agrees with me.

I, in no way, believe that if the stars hadn’t aligned bringing AB to Colorado for college (because his dad decided to get his graduate degree at the same university) and then bringing me to the same university because I was dating Mr. Stifler who wanted to switch universities… or say I hadn’t put off PChem Lab that one year, maybe I decided to take it on a whim the semester prior… or say I hadn’t looked over in PChem Lab on that first day and said to myself, “OMG I so cannot be lab partners with Wayne again, I have to pounce on someone else” and AB was standing there… that we wouldn’t have been perfectly happy with someone else.

Who that someone else would have been, I have no idea.

Would I have gone on to grad school by myself and dated one of my fellow grad students? Or would I have moved along single into a job and married one of the many single (probably for a reason) nuclear physicists or engineers I worked with?

There have been other people who have come into my life that I believe, if circumstances were different, that we could have successfully made a go at it and been happy. Does that make me want to jump ship and test it out. No freaking way. I have my small list of guys in the back of my head that on a rare occasion I think back on, “if things would have been different… where would we be now?” And I think it would have been good, but I am in no way kidding myself that that list of guys is also guys that I never actually dated either.

So maybe, just maybe, I did luck out and find my soul mate. I don't know. But I look forward to spending the rest of my life with that fabulous man that is driving our children up the street right now as I sit here typing.

Fishergirl

I was born in Central Wyoming to a father who enjoyed fishing and a grandfather who lived fishing. From a young age I had a pole in my hand.

Through the years I continued to fish even into high school. I went fishing on occasion with one of my best friends, Brian, from high school. I remember one night camping out at a lake around a bunch of old people (who were all quite nice) and fishing. The wind blew so hard that night I feared the tent was going to blow away with us in it.

Given that my husband's moniker is "Alaska Boy", you can probably guess that I have fished in Alaska. One of our most recent trips I even outfished AB for sockeye!

One of my favorite Alaska fishing memories is fishing with my mother in law at 1am with wine glasses in our hands. We have fished in a number of different places in Alaska - the Kenai peninsula, Talkeetna area, and King Salmon.

AB hasn't fished much in this area though we keep talking about changing that. Leif has a desire to fish and he caught his first fish, a nice rainbow trout, in Alaska two years ago. AB needs to get out there with Leif.

AB has his list of fish to catch - salmon shark tops the list, but includes sturgeon and tuna.

For Father's Day this year I decided to get AB a sturgeon fishing charter. I conspired one morning (while in a meeting) with a coworker who is an avid fisherman. When I told him what I wanted to do he rattled off a phone number. One of his good buddies is a guide and would be happy to take AB out.

I called and organized the trip after giving in and divulging to AB my plans. See putting anything on AB's schedule is hard. AB was thrilled.

Unfortunately the first trip was cancelled. There is an issue with trying to get a single guy, one guy I mean, on a charter. No guide is going to take a single person out. The guide worked with me trying to fit AB on with other groups, but it wasn't looking good.

Finally one evening I said to AB, "I could probably go with".

I hadn't really thought about it to that point. It isn't an inexpensive venture, but I love fishing too. AB smiled. The big issue with doing this lies with the kids. Being out of touch of the school, the kids in daycare, is a tough thing. Thankfully we have great friends who can back us up!

I called and asked him to fit us in and offered a few days. Thursday night he called and asked if we wanted to go out the next day. Even though my gut said no way, too short notice, what about the kids, this is less than 12 hours notice, I agreed to go.

AB caught the first sturgeon.

I got the second... when our guide saw him jump he had me sit down in the chair and brace myself...

Then he jumped again and I completely freaked out!

Once I got the fish all worn out - after about 20 minutes - I passed it off to AB to pull in. (Which only took about 40 minutes or so!

Hello big boy!

8-9 feet long, 200-300 lbs, and about 60-70 years old.

AB holding on to his mouth. I got to do that too! Then we let him go.

This is me bringing sturgeon number three!

Me and my fish! This one was only 25 years old or so. (Then we tossed him back in.)

Then I caught a catfish... that was a surprise. It was our guide's first catfish on the river after 14 years of guiding!

Difference

In one way, AB and I are very different.

I have a vault of a memory when it comes to faces. Not always names, but I recognize faces very easily. I remember kids from kindergarten to college and I can usually place them too.

This has been very interesting with regards to sites like Classmates and more aptly, Facebook. Truly I look through my list of people from high school on Facebook and I know most all of them. And I didn't go to a small high school. Search my work place and I can pinpoint most of the people who list my company as their place of employment work. I know faces. And if we went to the same high school, I remember you.

I knew this was unusual probably about high school. I remember being in some get together study group after school one day. I was sitting in the classroom with many of the crowd I didn't hang around with, but knew because we had classes together - or so *I* thought. Somehow we got on topic of knowing people and I was surprised that even though I had classes with most of these people, they didn't know who I was or that we had other classes together. I was a quiet teenager and I tended to stick to myself, not participate a lot and hang out across the street from the school in "the park" and not on campus. I never saw it as my fault people didn't remember me, but instead their oblivion.

At my 10 year class reunion I got a lot of blank looks as people were greeting me. It was as though they were trying to be nice as I called them by name, but truly had no idea who I was. I remember one girl who hung out in the park with us actually admitted - "I have no idea at all who you are". The first honest person all night.

Sure, I look a lot different from high school. But my ability to recognize faces is sometimes annoying. Take the other morning for example. I had friended a guy from high school on Facebook who was in my crowd our junior year - he was a year older than us. I can tell you what his parents house was like (gorgeous and white), what kind of dog he had (bull terrier that looked like Spuds Mackenzie), that he drove a red Honda CR-X, who he dated (Cinnamon) and that after he dumped her he dated Lynette for awhile (and this appalled me), that he cut his hair after he made a deal with his dad that if he cut it, dad would buy him the Honda CR-X. I even remember intimate details of a relationship of his and the details he shared with my guy friends about this girl in my gym class in a not so favorable light.

Surely he would remember me, we hung out together, went camping as a group together...

Nope.

He accepted my friendship request and honestly (which really does make me happy to know these things) sent me a note telling me he had no idea who I was.

I have come to accept for some time now that I will remember people and they don't remember me. I don't always friend people that I know right away on Facebook because I carry a little paranoia in my head that they won't have any idea who I am and will just think I am a stalker freak. It is only people I know HAVE to know me, that I jump on friending. And when they remember me it makes me happy and feel a little normal!

Now the flip side.

My husband.

He remembers NO ONE. He remembers his crowd. He accepts friends on Facebook and then spends weeks trying to figure out why he should know this person. He even carried on a long conversation with one guy on Facebook and still claims he has absolutely no idea who he is! I keep telling him to tell people this up front. It doesn't mean you aren't open to a friendship, but maybe they can help you jog your brain.

Another aspect - EVERYONE and their dog remembers my husband. (Seriously dogs remember AB.) He actually gets a little annoyed by this probably in the same way I get a little annoyed at never being remembered. We go to the grocery store and invariably someone will come up and greet him and chat. We walk off as I chastise him for not introducing me and he admits, "I didnt introduce you because I had no idea who they were, I probably work with them".

Totally foreign to me. I can't cover myself as well as AB does. He is good at going with the flow when someone recognizes him and he doesn't them. Me? IF this ever happened to me I would stand there blankly.

AB often wonders why people remember him.

LOL.

I remind him that his port wine stain is pretty much a dead giveaway as well as his somewhat unique name.

AB and the chickens

We both have our "things" that we refuse to cook. I have overcome a few of my fears in the kitchen... namely rice (amazing what moving to sea level has done for my rice cooking abilities) and pie crusts (I am now the queen pie crust maker). What I don't do is cook steak and I don't buy fish. Those fall in AB's realm.

Before dinner on Sunday AB declared once and for all that he is never cooking a whole chicken ever again. Ever. And I assured him that he would never have to cook a whole chicken again! Because I won't let him!

Roasting a chicken really is an art - cooking the entire chicken through without burning the skin, drying out the breast or undercooking the thigh. AB's fear lies in the last part - uncooked chicken seriously freaks my poor husband out.

Ok, he has a point. I certainly don't want to ingest the stuff.

I think I understand my husband's neuroses here. He cooks fabulous meat. Really he does. Roasts, tri-tip, filet mignon, every type of fish imaginable, pork loin and tenderloin and oh... ribs... the ribs...

Given this there should really be one meat out there that confounds him. You can't master everything can you?

In AB's case it is the roasted whole chicken.

(Insert chicken joke of choice.)

The leaves

Our trees are finally mature enough to warrant actually raking the leaves instead of feigning ignorance and just letting them drift away in the "breezes".



Here is some fun from the weekend:

And one of Winny-dog. Poor abused dog, I so rarely get pictures of her anymore. I really like this one.