There for a while I wasn’t sure we were going to get a summer at all. Too much rain, no opportunity to plant any flowers or veggies, and a lonely-looking pool. The July 4th weekend changed all that, thankfully, and we were able to get a LOT of swimming and grilling done. Dan made the best barbecued ribs I ever put in my MOUTH. And the dog is finally learning to love swimming…well, nearly. He’ll voluntarily get on the first or second step if you tell him “Go swimmin!” but he’ll only get out into the water if Dan or I are already out there.

It’s been weird for everybody, our little “upside down” family with Daddy staying home and Mommy working. The kids are certainly enjoying having more Daddy time, but they often glom onto me when I walk in the door. My own private time has become very rare, which is hard for me. I like to be left alone a good amount of time. But I try to remember that the time will be here all too soon when they will prefer the company of friends to me, and then I’ll miss these days. So I will appreciate it while I can (and sneak in some alone time whenever I can do it without feeling guilty).

Work is going well, although I have to say that some of the “personality” issues I’ve had from the beginning are wearing on me harder every day. My closest coworker and friend is just back to work after being a stay-home mom for years, just like me, but she only works three days a week. Because of being there less often, I think she didn’t see some of the issues that I was describing to her until recently. We work in a very small room with another proofreading team, and let’s just say that not everything is rosy in our little world. Everything from the preferred temperature to the amount of sniping about other coworkers behind their backs gets right up my left nostril despite all my mantras and deep breathing exercises. The thing is, and this is common with me, no one is aware that I’m slowly going insane except my friend. I keep a nice, peaceful face on all day and try not to make waves. When everyone leaves the room, I pretend to commit hari-kiri with my office scissors.

However, for reasons I don’t want to get into too deeply because I don’t want to jinx them, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Please keep your fingers crossed for me for an opportunity that is in my sights. I know there will be issues no matter what I do, but I feel confident that no matter where I end up I’ll be able to re-embrace positivity by saying, “Hey, at least I’m not proofreading anymore!”

So I guess I kind of disappeared there, post-haircut. As usual, there’s not much going on here to tell.

Dan finally received an email back from Albany giving him instructions on how to  complete his “application” to reinstate his status as a NY State certified teacher. I thought they were going to give him a list of courses he needed to take and stuff he had to do, but basically they just gave him a username and password to some website where he had to upload his transcripts, resume, and letters of recommendation. I don’t know if that means he’s good to go or not. I do know that the more I hear about the perks that teachers receive, the happier I am to see him pursue this direction. I guess that’s why we pay such high taxes. Still nothing on the job front, but he’s putting his name out as a consultant in hopes of getting something part time or non-permanent while we wait out this stinking economy. We’re still doing very well pinching pennies and making his severance last, so please don’t worry about us and our financial situation. My paycheck and his unemployment payments are helping too.

I still hate my job. And that’s all I have to say about that. <–in my best Forrest Gump voice

The kids are well. Rebecca took a year off from soccer to try karate and advanced two belts, but has decided she’d rather go back to soccer in the fall. Thursday the local soccer league held tryouts for the A and B travel teams, but she didn’t make the cut for either one. Fortunately they still have an interleague team that does some traveling and plays just for the joy of it, so she’s gung-ho about doing that. Her previous coach is the coach of the interleague team, and he’s just great. So I feel good about that. I also feel good about the fact that interleague is less expensive and has a smaller time (read: weekend) commitment. Ben is flourishing in karate and will continue with it for as long as he wants to. I just love seeing him out on the floor, looking so graceful doing his katas. He’s just one stripe away from an orange belt.

Dan and Rebecca are leaving in a moment to attend her fiddle workshop, where she plays old Irish and country dance music with other kids. If you’ve ever been to a contra dance, that’s the kind of music they play. She pretends she doesn’t like it, but for the first time since she’s four she will just pick up her violin and start playing stuff from the workshop, just for pleasure. That’s a ringing endorsement! I still have some laundry going and want to work a bit more on my vest. Thanks for checking in on me!

I never have the time or inclination to blow out my hair straight, so it’s always a treat to let the stylist do it when I have my hair cut. Tomorrow it’ll be back to curly again.

Please ignore the “weekend” face without makeup.

I’ve decided that knitting sweaters in pieces and sewing them up is a pain. I’ve done seamless sweaters before, and I liked it, but this time I started literally from scratch by taking measurements, swatching, and doing a lot of math. Thanks to the book Custom Knits by Wendy Bernard, I am making a top-down, seamless shrug for Rebecca. Here it is in progress:

Because it’s a shrug, it only comes down to about the bottom of her ribcage. I made super short cap sleeves, and it’s knit from a cotton/acrylic blend that will work through spring/summer/fall. It’s sort of my guinea pig knit, making sure I know what I’m doing with the new sleeve construction before I make a sweater from the book for myself.

Things at work are going okay. We got a new type of document scanner–it’s actually a camera–so the work does go a little quicker now. We were caught up, then we lost two days to the installation and training for the new machine, but now we’re almost caught up again. When I left work on Friday there were only six projects in my inbox. Compare that to over 70 at one point!

Dan had an interview with a local company last week. They do something with green mass transit and bus stops…I’m not sure exactly but I’m sure I’ll find out if it works out. He didn’t get to meet with the COO because they ran out of time on interview day and then the guy left for two weeks in Aruba. Must be nice. He’s supposed to call Dan for a phone interview while he’s away. We’ll see what happens. I’m happy to say that Dan’s severance check finally arrived, and Motorola did the RIGHT thing and paid out all the bonuses from 2008. So we have enough to get by for a while longer, as long as we keep stretching our pennies.

Off to throw the bathroom rugs into the dryer and have a shower so we can go to the Cherry Blossom Festival at Stony Brook later.

Somebody out there seems to want me to update my blog. I’m not kidding, Laura, my life is BO-RING. Seriously. But if you want to know what I’m doing, I’ll try to make it as exciting as possible.

So first off, they fired our proofreading night shift. There were two day shift (Toni and me) and two night shift girls doing the kind of proofreading that I do. Now there are half as many of us. At the same time, the people who generate the work for us have increased productivity somehow and we are getting more than twice as many projects to proofread that we did before. Some nights I go home and there are more than 70 projects in my to-do bin, and when Toni, who is part time, is there we can get about 30 done if we really crack the whip and don’t chat or take our morning break. Without Toni I can maybe get out 23 or 24 if most of them are labels, which go faster. I’ve nearly cried twice. I’ve stayed late every day this week, and I have to go in on Saturday.

And then the zombies nearly broke through our barricade, but the monkey military forces held them back with Pez dispensers and potato guns!

(That was me trying to make it more exciting.)

Oh, there is one exciting thing. My brother and his family came to NY to visit us for the FIRST TIME EVER and we had a great time despite gale force winds and miserable rain. And on Easter Sunday we saw Seal with his son on his shoulders in Central Park, and we saw Heidi Klum from a distance as they got into their SUV in front of Tavern on the Green. (We were at the awesome concrete playground just above the restaurant.)

Other than that? Dan’s still hunting for work and the kids are still doing the normal kid stuff like forgetting their homework and learning karate. Dan and I took the dryer apart, found the parts we needed to make it stop banging every time we dried a load, and put it back together again. We have veggie and flower sprouts, grown from seed, ready to plant outside as soon as we’re relatively sure of no more frost. Dan is being a great house husband but I’d be very happy if he could find a job. And that’s pretty much it.

Except for when the Queen came to visit! And ate my homemade banana bread and played our Pinball Wizard machine from 1973 in our basement!

(Was that exciting?)

Thank you Pam and Laura for the nice compliments! I’m trying to convince myself I don’t need that white sweater in every color. It’s so cute and fits so well, for once.

So Pam asked for updates. Dan is still home and looking for work. It’s like searching for water in the desert. I’m still working at the pharmaceutical company, and it’s a soul-draining experience. Suffice to say that the work isn’t particularly challenging or interesting, and the “environment” leaves much to be desired. But in this economic climate I’m just happy to have work.

The kids are doing pretty well. Ben’s behavior in class has improved dramatically, but he still has a tendency to drift away when he’s supposed to be writing or drawing something. Give him a math sheet or a science experiment and he’s all over it, but he really hates to write. Rebecca has been showing some signs of mild Tourette’s. I know that might sound kind of drastic, but the fact is she just has a few twitches that don’t interfere with her friend-making or school work, so we aren’t making a big deal out of it. We’re keeping an eye on it, and the pediatrician is aware. They’re both enjoying karate and doing well in shule (Jewish school). And they both want to get back on their bikes soon!

There’s really nothing else interesting to tell! Sorry my life is so blah!

A few more completed projects! The beret was about 3/4 done when I hit a counting snag and gave it a time out. I only had to rip back about four rows to find the errors (two missed yarnovers) and fix them, and then zoomzoom to the end. Rebecca loves it.

And a nice cotton sweater for me, to wear over my multitude of solid tees to make them work-friendly.

That’s all from here for now!

Hey all, I’ve joined a group on Ravelry that encourages you to spend one day a week working on UFOs (unfinished objects) in order to have more finished projects and less guilt. For March, though, they’ve issued a challenge to finish as many UFOs as you can before the 15th. I obliged by finally getting the pieces of my Twisted sweater off the top of the knitting cabinet and sewing them up. I knew the sleeves were going to be too big, and you can see in the photos how much I had to cuff them to make them work. It’s a shame too, because the design of the sleeves is so pretty and it gets lost when you roll them up. Anyway, presenting my newest FO:

Yeah. No untimely deaths in our house thank goodness. In fact, Dan and the kids broke in the new oven by making a wonderful chocolate chip Bundt cake. Yum!

Pam, you asked about the job. It’s okay. It’s not very challenging, and while most of the people (including my boss) are incredibly nice, there are some that are just plain wacko. And there are the typical petty backbiting issues…I guess there are some things I didn’t miss about regular interaction with adults. Sometimes, they don’t act like adults. The schedule is working out better, but that is due in major part to Dan being home. And we’re hoping that won’t last too long of course. He’s doing ALL the cooking, but we’ve instituted a regular shared housecleaning routine on Sunday mornings that allow us to have a clean home without one person being the sole cleaner. Thank you for asking. I hope your knee is feeling better.

This past weekend, my very sweet and responsible husband decided to clean the oven. He spent hours with an oven cleaner and lots of elbow grease, then decided to “top it off” by using the self-cleaning function to get the final bits. (Honestly, I didn’t think it was that dirty…I HAVE cleaned it in the not-too-distant past!) Sadly, he decided to open the oven before the oven was really interested in being opened, and I think he sort of tried to force the lock, and the end result was an oven door that was irrevocably stuck. With heavy hearts we went in search of a nice but not too expensive replacement. We found a Hotpoint that fit the bill, and it was delivered today.

Why would that make me afraid to go to bed? Well, it’s a gas stove. And while I feel fairly certain that the gas isn’t leaking, the stove still has this nasty burning-oil smell that we’re trying to burn off by using the (gulp!) self-cleaning function as recommended in the manual. The manual says right there in black and white that a new oven has a coating on the inside that smells to high heaven and all you have to do is burn it off by running the self-cleaning cycle. But I’m so paranoid I can’t bring myself to go to sleep for fear I won’t wake up again.