Tales from the Steppes

2005-04-15

11:09 p.m.
Maybe we could sleep in, I'll make you banana pancakes

Just finished filing my taxes. I know it probably seems pretty tardy to most people. I am just happy not to file an extension this year. I was proud of the SU. He did not freak out when I told him how much we owed. Nor did he want to go over them and check my work. Major progress. Of course, he has not done the taxes in more than 10 years. For some reason, this is my job. I would personally think that the half of us that is anal retentive would do a better job at it.

Of course part of the reason for the non-freaking has to do with the fact that the SU has a new job. I have grave reservations about this particular decision but it is not my career so there is a limit to my input. And we don't have to move, so that is a happy thing.

The SU is going back to work for the same crappy little company that he was working at when I met him. It has new owners that are trying to grow the business and they need him and his technical expertise. He will have a lot more control over the company as he will be the COO and run most of it. There are a lot of positives to this position. He will own a decent chunk of the company. His hours will be more flexible, allowing him to help with the childcare thing a bit more. He will get to do a lot of different things.

Then I remember how long it took him to find a job to get away from that company. Years. And we had to move to godforsaken Buffalo to do so. Ok, Buffalo doesn't suck as bad as all that but my career was a big fat zero for the entirety of our stay. He is also used to supervising 50 people and managing meellions and meellions of dollars. Much more than the new company is in totality.

But whatever. If he is happy, then it is ok with me.

We celebrated by getting a new chainsaw. Really. I made him get a little girly chainsaw instead of the big honking one he would have chosen on his own. If it came in pink, it would have been perfect. But I will settle for one with a bar under 20" long with less kickback. Ummmmmm. Power tools.

Let's see, other news. Umm, I dislocated my jaw earlier this week and it has sort of gone back into place. Sort of. A little disturbing because a dislocating jaw is a frequent thing for many people with Ehlers-Danlos and I had avoided it until now. It is not that I necessarily fear having my body become disjointed. More that it is not preferred.

Next Friday I am taking the day off and going hiking for the entire day. The SU will have to handle the kids in both the morning and evening, before he goes back to work. I have already picked the circuit hike that I am going to do and I am looking forward to it mroe than I can say. I am not taking my cell phone into the woods with me - no responsibilities for the day at all. I will move at the speed I want to, stop whenever I want, do whatever I want. Bliss.

This is assuming I get to a certain point in my writing. So far, I have about 40 pages written, many of it in bullet form. It is a little scary to think how many pages I might end up with. So I think I will have to be less informative. Probably a good thing.

I finally managed to get the MM off of his dissection fixation. The science fair is coming up and he wanted to do a project about frog's lungs. So I spent some time looking for frogs to dissect and found that most companies restrict their sale to schools. The MM practiced with an on-line tutorial in preparation for the real thing. And then I found some frogs available to the public. So we talked about it more but as soon as he realized that they killed the frogs so that people could dissect them, his whole attitude changed. It turns out that he thought scientists found them dead of old age and then dissected them. Not quite. So then he wanted to know if we could anesthesize the frog before cutting it open. We talked about the ramifications of that a bit. And then he concluded that he was not willing to kill a frog just to look inside it. Good decision. I was almost as proud of him for this as I was for him NOT suggesting that he dissect Squooshy, the EM's dead hamster. He may be a little on the oocky side (from the girl perspective) occasionally but the MM is sometimes quite mature for an 8 year old boy.