{"id":50,"date":"2009-11-12T20:22:39","date_gmt":"2009-11-13T03:22:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog2.queenoframbles.com\/?p=50"},"modified":"2009-11-12T20:22:39","modified_gmt":"2009-11-13T03:22:39","slug":"looking-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog2.queenoframbles.com\/?p=50","title":{"rendered":"Looking Up"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Now that I&#8217;m feeling a little better, I am able to be truly positive, instead of grasping for positive straws.  <\/p>\n<p>I still have a bit of a cough, but I have re-entered the land of the living and am ready for food!  Except I didn&#8217;t have a car today, so we are still out of food. Bah.  I made a nasty frozen dinner that made me sick.  Now I am eating frosting.  It&#8217;s all for the baby, right?  Ha.  I need to go back on those prenatals so I don&#8217;t gain 100 pounds with this pregnancy.<\/p>\n<p>I decided that today we were going to make a dent in the pig-sty of our house.  I don&#8217;t let Erik bring many toys up here, mainly because the living room is a very small space and he doesn&#8217;t play with them anyway.  He has two beach buckets of toys in the living room and the only play he does is simple:  dump them all on the floor and walk away.<\/p>\n<p>Usually I can get him to pick everything up really easily.  I just have to tell him he is having a race and bet him that he can&#8217;t beat me and he&#8217;ll get it done in less than three minutes.  Today?  Of course not.  Today he said it was boring and he wasn&#8217;t going to do it.<\/p>\n<p>I brought out the big guns and said he couldn&#8217;t watch any of his shows until he picked things up, but he wasn&#8217;t biting.  <\/p>\n<p>I decided it was not worth a big, showy power struggled but I <i>was<\/i> going to win.  I walked away, and went down to do laundry.<\/p>\n<p>He spent a long time watching the laundry spin.  Then he spent a long time watching me scrub the bathrooms and &#8220;helping&#8221; me. Ugh.  I wasn&#8217;t going to tell him no because I think it&#8217;s good for kids to get a sense of family chores even if they are less than helpful.<\/p>\n<p>I think I may have solved my powder-room-smelling-like-a-men&#8217;s-urinal problem.  I hope.  I pray.  I hope.  <\/p>\n<p>I often spray down the toilet and the floor and wipe it all down on my hands and knees, but it never seems to help.  Today I sprayed down the walls.  When I wiped them down, the rag turned yellow so I&#8217;m hoping that was the source of the nastiness. It never occurred to me to clean the walls, but maybe his aim really is that bad.<\/p>\n<p>I was finally really bored and decided that if he wasn&#8217;t going to get to watch his shows, I could turn on the country music station.<\/p>\n<p>The second I turned that on, he started howling &#8220;noooooooo!&#8221; and had his toys cleaned up within two minutes.<\/p>\n<p>Poor kid has no taste in music.<\/p>\n<p>The other topic:  Our Lemon Saturn<\/p>\n<p>I called the mechanic and he said not to drive it under any circumstances.  You don&#8217;t want to mess with bad brakes.  I have AAA, so I called them and the tow truck driver was here in less than 10 minutes.  <\/p>\n<p>He took the car down to the mechanic and I sat around waiting to hear the bad news.  <\/p>\n<p>It wasn&#8217;t <i>that<\/i> bad, but it will still set us back almost $1000.  I don&#8217;t know what bad would have meant.  In addition to the brake problem, they said that something with the steering would not pass inspection so we&#8217;re having that taken care of as well.  I tend to believe them because I&#8217;ve noticed steering problems lately.  <\/p>\n<p>I should get the car back tomorrow afternoon.  I am ready to drive it straight to Honda and trade it in for a mini-van.  I think we are going to wait until February since that is supposed to be the best time to buy a new car.  Can we really afford to wait? What other bombshells will the car drop?  As Mike pointed out, it should be a damned good car now.  We&#8217;ve replaced just about everything on it except the engine.<\/p>\n<p>At least all my bathrooms have been scrubbed down and my living room has been vacuumed.  I don&#8217;t feel like I am living in a hovel anymore.<\/p>\n<p>I also decided to do a couple of things to make myself happy.  I&#8217;m getting my haircut Saturday and I just ordered a pair of titanium earrings.  I hope my sensitive skin can handle them.  Everyone says there&#8217;s no way my ears will have a problem, but knowing my skin I am proceeding with caution.  It would be fantastic if I could finally start wearing earrings again, though the selection doesn&#8217;t seem particularly great.  I <i>love<\/i> earrings, a little known fact since I haven&#8217;t worn them in years.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/grain_damaged.livejournal.com\">Grain Damaged<\/a> has challenged me to do one Dear Jane block this week and my week is running out.  Now we know what I&#8217;ll be doing tomorrow during preschool.<\/p>\n<p>Last Friday I went up to my quilting room, determined to do some quilting.  I looked at the table and turned right around again.  It all seems so overwhelming.  But I&#8217;m going to do it.  I&#8217;m going to pick a simple block and knock it out of the park.  And then I&#8217;m going to organize the sewing table a bit so it doesn&#8217;t drive me out of the room.<\/p>\n<p>I think I am going to pull out my square top<br \/>\n<center><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/ramblequeen\/500176997\/\" title=\"Square Top by Ramble Queen, on Flickr\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm1.static.flickr.com\/220\/500176997_05f28519de_o.jpg\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" alt=\"Square Top\" \/><\/a><\/center><\/p>\n<p>put a border on it and get it quilted even if it kills me.  I love the top and want to use it on the guest bed, but have no idea how to quilt it.  I think it would be cool to incorporate squares into the quilting, but I just have my little home sewing machine and that is not going to work well for me.  I am a piecer, quilter.  I guess I&#8217;m going to bite the bullet and do some kind of diagonal grid quilting. It will be fine.  Right?  Surely it will be fine.  Just not perfect.  I need to accept the fact that I will never have a really fancy QUILTED quilt. I have to be content with having the colors and fabrics being designs that I love.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Now that I&#8217;m feeling a little better, I am able to be truly positive, instead of grasping for positive straws. I still have a bit of a cough, but I have re-entered the land of the living and am ready for food! Except I didn&#8217;t have a car today, so we are still out of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog2.queenoframbles.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog2.queenoframbles.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog2.queenoframbles.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog2.queenoframbles.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog2.queenoframbles.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blog2.queenoframbles.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog2.queenoframbles.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog2.queenoframbles.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog2.queenoframbles.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}