Beth's Contradictory Brain

Life The Universe and Everything

I'm now in the year of the answer to life, the universe and everything!

We had a pretty good birthday this year. My brother's birthday is four days after mine, and now Nerdstar's is two days after mine. So, I've always liked sharing. With Nerdstar it helps to make it more of an event. It gives us an excuse to go out of town or do something fun. I also realized that I like sharing because I don't really want all the attention myself.

Last night we got together with a bunch of friends and had dinner at a Chinese duck place, Peking Gourmet Inn. Back in Houston, for special occasions her and her family used to go have duck at this certain place. Now that her grandparents have passed, that won't happen anymore. So, we're glad we found this place around here that's similar.

Other than that life is just rolling along. We had Pinhead's monthly checkup the other day. He's right on target. Wednesday starts week 24. We/I spend a lot of time with my hand on her belly feeling him wiggle around. We think he's in tune with her eating schedule because he tends to start kicking when it's time to eat! Then we keep joking that she always puts him into food comas. At least he's gotten a taste of almost every type of food out there.

Next month we're going to start getting his room and stuff ready.

Mostly we just can't wait to see him.

I'm still working about one day a week or so at the doctor's office. It's going to be weird when I give notice because at that point there's no telling when or where I'll work again. I'm sure I will work again in the future, but the rest is completely unknown.

I'm also doing the work from home scoring standardized test essays. There are three or four projects a year I work on, and they last a couple of weeks. It's not a lot, but it's good money for the time spent.

3 Strange Days

I'm not sure I could accurately tell you the day or time or maybe even where exactly I am right now.

The alarm went off at 3 a.m. Saturday morning for our 6 a.m. flight to Houston. It takes us about 50 minutes to get out the door, about an hour to drive to the airport and park, then the adventure through security and to the gate. I don't think that's so bad.

We landed in Houston about 8:30 a.m. and Nerdstar's sister picked us up from the airport. They wanted an "asian" breakfast; I was holding out for Whataburger at 11. So we headed to some little asian place and they got something - Nerdstar will have to tell you about that.

Around 10:30 her sister's boyfriend met up with us and we headed out for Whataburger. Yummy.

Then it was off to the Houston Rodeo and Livestock show. There was a pretty big carnival and lots and lots and lots of cowboy stuff for sale. We were still too full to eat all the bad for us stuff, so that's probably good.

The rodeo was really cool. It was all of the events instead of just bull riding like the PBR, although those PBR dudes are crazy good at riding bulls. The only downside was that the volume of the speakers in that place was deafening. It gave me a horrible headache. Nerdstar's sister had never been to the rodeo, so it was all really cool.

We decided to leave around 7 to go get a yummy dinner. That's when the fun started. Her sister's car had been hit in the parking lot sometime while we were in there. Wow. As we were walking up all I thought was that someone had better had left some info on the windshield. Yep, the park police had talked to the man and gotten all his info - except of course he doesn't have insurance.

So, she called her insurance and arranged a tow truck. The car wasn't horribly damaged, but half of the front bumper was knocked totally off and was on the pavement. We couldn't get the rest of the bumper off so we could just drive it home. It didn't take the tow truck too long to show up, about an hour. Then another 45 minutes or so later her friend gave us a ride back to the house.

Sad part was no yummy dinner. We went to a Taiwanese place that was too cool for it's own good and the food was just so-so.

Sunday we got up and headed to Rudy's for lunch. Man did that hit the spot. I even got a little blue bell vanilla ice cream sandwich afterward!

Then we headed to a Chinese grocery store for Nerdstar to pick up some stuff to bring home AND a better Taiwanese restaurant, also for things to bring home. We bought a couple of glass containers with good lids for the soup dish and noodle dish. The TSA agent in Houston just smiled as Nerdstar explained it was just a duffel bag full of Chinese food, and thankfully let it all through!

Unfortunately, the bad luck continued for us.

We had a 5:30 flight out of Houston to Chicago then on to DC, getting us home about 2 a.m. It was going to be a long day. We got to the airport about 3:30 and at 4:30 were told the flight would be delayed until 7:30. That meant missing our connection. Over to the customer service desk. Apparently it's harder to travel during spring break than it is Christmas. There were 0 seats available from Houston to DC all day Monday. We didn't think standby would happen. So we were told there was a 4:30 flight Monday afternoon from Chicago to DC they could book us on. Great.

We made it into Chicago at 10:15. Our connecting flight left at 10:19. Nope, no hope of them holding the flight for us.

Finally, at almost midnight we left the terminal with a voucher for a hotel room and a post-it with the 4:30 flight #. That's it. No boarding passes, nothing absolutely stating we were on the flight.

Things got a little better once we wandered around and finally found where to catch the shuttle to the hotel - it was the Crown Plaza in Chicago. The room was super nice and had the best hotel bed I've slept on. I like 'em soft!

We got a good night's sleep and our food vouchers covered a great breakfast buffet at the hotel.

We hit the airport again at 10:30 this morning. An hour later we had boarding passes for the 4:30 flight. I got to looking at them and saw the word "business" - but no actual seat numbers. We went ahead and went through security and asked at the gate. Someone had put us in business class, so she assigned us seats and printed new boarding passes. We were so very happy!

That was the bestest flight ever. Except it was only about an hour and a half. When we do international flights in the future we'll have to sell our kidneys or something to make sure we get business class seats!!

We finally pulled into the driveway at 8:30 tonight. Poor Ramen has to spend another night at the kennel. But that cats are ok with that!!

Done?

I was talking with Nerdstar about this last night. I'm feeling like I'm pretty done with this blog. Just typing that makes me a little sad.

I've been working on cleaning up an exported version I put into Word so I can eventually print it. I'm just over halfway done and it looks like it's going to be about 1300 pages. I mostly enjoy going back and reading about the past eight or so years of our lives. There were a lot of hard times, but a lot of fun, too. And I'm so glad I have this blog where it's all documented.

For some reason I've never been great at keeping a personal journal. I have horrible handwriting, so paper is usually out. It never recovered from all the note taking in college. (I'm always sad there weren't laptops back then I could have taken notes on instead!) I also tend to write more dark and sad in a journal. I guess I find it harder to write the "what's happening" stuff just for me because, well, I know what's happening. Except, that's the thing, I won't know years from now. There are so many little things I would have completely forgotten if not for this blog.

Another thing is that in some ways I feel like facebook has replaced this blog. I like that I can get more comments and interaction there than I have here for a while now. When I started this blog, I wanted it to be a place I could put my crazy thoughts and ideas about the world out there and have conversations about them with anybody, anywhere. That never happened as much as I hoped. Although, I was also telling Nerdstar how great it is that there are still a handful of people who I've been reading from day one and still at least keep up with one way or another online.

That said, reading back on the time Nerdstar was in Iraq, this blog and the people who read and commented really helped me a lot. That still means a lot to me.

I also know that with all the changes and moves and such Nerdstar and I have been through, we're in the biggest transition of our lives right now - pregnancy. And I have no idea how much I'm going to want to keep blogging after the baby is born. And if I do, I think it would be over on 2 Bad Moms and not here. But does the world really need any more "mommy bloggers?"

Maybe I'll get better at a personal journal if I'm writing it for the baby.

Anyway. I'm not shutting the blog down. I just don't know when I'll be updating it again.