I have 18% battery life, which means this will be short. I\u2019ve never tried to write an entry at karate before. Usually I am chasing a toddler around, which is not conducive to happy little journal writing. Actually, lately I\u2019ve been running home, sitting there for 20 minutes and running back to karate. When the weather is nicer I spend the time walking around the shopping complex.
\nMike is on vacation for two weeks, but so far he is probably wishing he could be back at work. Elsa is a mess. Last night she had a gigantic fart, then was happy and free. Except? She started coughing. And when she would cough a lot, she would projectile vomit all over us. At least we figured out the sound she was making right before the vomit came, so we were mainly able to contain it in the bathroom instead of our bed. Still, sleep? Who got any? Erik, I suppose.
\nWho is the grouchiest person alive when they don\u2019t get sleep? That would be me. I was going to try really, really, really hard to be a nice, happy, chipper wife and mother this afternoon. Then Mike snuck up behind me and smacked his lips in my ear. I had a little meltdown, complete with crying. Mommy needs a nap.
\nWe\u2019re going to Vancouver later this week, which means we figured out we better be smart and check the weather. Sunscreen and bathing suits won\u2019t be necessary. I need to get fall clothes and raincoats for the kids. Yikes!
\nI was upset when I was in Kohl\u2019s this weekend and they were almost out of summer stuff, but I was happy today when I needed fall stuff.
\nExcept? The colors for girls this fall?
\nOh. My. God.
\nSo ugly and garish, I couldn\u2019t bring myself to buy much of anything. Who loves poison green and orange? Ugh. Not me. I did find her a few things, but it was disappointing.
\nOf course they didn\u2019t\u2019 have rain coats at this time of year so I had to stop in the consignment shop and see if they had anything. I found a weird little hoodless poncho for Erik and an extremely cute lavender raincoat for Elsa. I looked around at their other clothes and will never understand how they price their clothes. There were a couple of things that still had the tags from the original store. The consignment store prices were higher. Ugh. I only ever buy toys there, generally. It\u2019s worth the price to buy something that\u2019s already assembled.
\nSo summer camp! I am so far off, but I want to write about my college days.
\nCollege was a good time for me, even though I would never want to go back and do it again. I went to a very small, conservative Christian college in Oklahoma. I was really scared of the whole college admissions process and set my sights very, very low when I was in high school. I was one of the few really smart people at this college so I got a pretty good deal on tuition. It also turned out to be an excellent teacher school, not that I knew I wanted to be a teacher. When I took masters classes in Oregon later I was really irked because the classes I took as part of undergrad were exactly the same, if not more difficult.
\nAnyway, there were only 500 students enrolled with about 250 on campus so everyone knew everyone. I was part of yearbook, including editor for 2 years, so I really had an excuse to be up in everyone\u2019s business. I was also part of the spiritual life committee and secretary of our church\u2019s college ministry club. I even went out to the nursing home most Sundays and led singing. If you\u2019ve heard me sing, you\u2019d know just how desperate they were.
\nI was a student leader and always helped with freshman orientation. I was not popular or pretty, but I had friends and I had my niche. I enjoyed it.<\/p>\n
My only problem was my freshman roommate. She was a nightmare. Bossy, pushy, mean, devious. You name it. She would wear my clothes without permission. She tried to control me at every opportunity\u2014a big mistake on her part since I have always been fiercely independent. When I was done with her I was d-o-n-e. After our sophomore year I literally never spoke another word to her. I\u2019m not proud of it, but I was a master at ignoring people.
\nAs a Christian college, we had lots of rules that most colleges don\u2019t have. We were pretty liberal because we were allowed to wear shorts and males and females did not have to have chaperones when they were together. We were not allowed to dance at all, or drink and smoke. We had a curfew. All those rules were just fine with me and I never had a reason to break any of them.
\nThis was the first time I had experience with really fundamentalist Christians. My church in Oregon was very West Coast. Oklahoma was a whole different story. Most of the students were from the Bible belt and had some notions that I considered crazy. They weren\u2019t allowed to go to the movies (but they could rent movies) and they weren\u2019t allowed to talk about aliens (I loved telling them that if God was all powerful he could easily create aliens, which sent them in a tizzy about my heathen ways). There was a lot of hypocrisy which really started to bother me when I realized what was happening.<\/p>\n
Pregnant couples who had the right last name or right connections were quickly married off in a nice little ceremony. Pregnant couples who weren\u2019t \u201cChristian enough\u201d were immediately kicked out of school. There was a lot of judgment on any one who didn\u2019t go to the \u201cright\u201d church or who acted a little different. There was tons of hatred towards gays and lesbians, of course. Two girls were basically run out of school because someone decided they were lesbians. The hatred toward Democrats, Catholics, Mormons, Baptists, girls with short hair, girls who didn\u2019t wear make-up and basically any group that believed \u201cOther\u201d was sickening. At the time I didn\u2019t realize just how sickening, but I surely did realize that these people were extremists. They made the transition to atheist later in life very easy.
\nAnd now I have to wrap this up, because there\u2019s a screaming baby (I ran out of battery juice at karate) and I am going to go see HP7p2 in about an hour. I have been ordered to have fun. I\u2019m just worried about staying awake.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have 18% battery life, which means this will be short. I\u2019ve never tried to write an entry at karate before. Usually I am chasing a toddler around, which is not conducive to happy little journal writing. Actually, lately I\u2019ve been running home, sitting there for 20 minutes and running back to karate. When the […]<\/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-563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog2.queenoframbles.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563","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=563"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog2.queenoframbles.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":573,"href":"http:\/\/blog2.queenoframbles.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563\/revisions\/573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog2.queenoframbles.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog2.queenoframbles.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog2.queenoframbles.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}