Eleven things.

NEO-blogger Alicia from Poise in Parma tagged "whoever wants to" in her Eleven Things blog post today, so I'm picking up the baton.

11 Random Things

1. Low-carb ice cream frustrates me. The only "real" low-carb option seems to be Breyer's Carb Smart, which I can only find in vanilla. It tastes slightly of cardboard and sadness.

2. I'm kind of sick of people (mostly my family) telling me that I don't eat enough or that having some more food isn't going to hurt me. Um, yes, it will! Excuse me, I am trying not to get diabetes over here, thanks. I'm 25, I don't want diabetes until... well, preferably never. They're probably just jealous that I'm getting thin again.

3. Paxton is also frustrating me, a great deal more than low-carb ice cream is. He's currently having a growth spurt and teething molars and he's obsessed with trying to walk. This all adds up to his sleep schedule being thrown out the window and a lot of angry/frustrated tantrums. I had to get up at 5:20 this morning to calm him down before the alarm went off at 6:00. There is not enough coffee in the world.

4. This semester is actually a lot more difficult than last semester. I thought commuting 3 days a week instead of 5 was going to be helpful, but instead it has completely thrown off my schedule. Since Pax is growing up and starting to eschew naps in favor of activity (and he's easily bored), I get nothing of adult value done two days a week--I'm too busy re-reading board books, fetching puffs and rearranging baby gates. Cramming a 5-day week into 3 days on campus is proving more difficult than I'd first imagined.

5. I've recently discovered the wonders of TJ Maxx, Marshall's and Nordstrom Rack. I could waste hours shopping for clothes, but for now it's mostly window-shopping.

6. I've got to get costuming again--this coming May we're doing a Regency ball somewhere in NEO (details forthcoming) with the Rifles, which has me hoarding photos of gorgeous Regency ballgowns on Pinterest. A week later, we'll be packing up for World Steam Expo in Dearborn, MI. I need ideas for a steampunk baby costume!

7. Speaking of Pinterest, I am completely obsessed. Follow me here. There's a Nerdmama board!

8. Coming up with eleven things is really, really difficult. Damn.

9. Life with the iPad is sweet. It keeps proving itself surprisingly useful, to the point where I am beginning to resent having to use my cell phone or a computer. It even comes with me to the store--I feel a little pretentious using it for my grocery lists, but it's easier to keep track of then a piece of paper and a pen!

10. I bought new makeup last Avon campaign. My makeup was beginning to get crummy and the stuff I ordered is really nice (and cheaper than the drugstore brands I was using, if you can believe that). I am currently in a love-love relationship with Shine Attract Lipstick, which is a brand-new product... lip color wrapped in a clear medium that goes on like lipstick but shines like gloss. I have the "wrapped raisin" color. Loooooooooove. Go buy it, it's on sale for $4.99 and I can pretty much guarantee you won't be disappointed. I usually don't wear lipstick at all but getting to sample this stuff completely changed my mind.

11. My husband got a raise at work. We might be able to have iPhones again. This is kind of a big deal, because the prepaid phones we've been using have got to be the crappiest phones in the history of mankind. They freeze constantly, crash constantly, have next to no dedicated memory, and sometimes they turn themselves off for an hour or two at a time. No, the battery doesn't die--they just turn off and stay that way. Real winners, these phones.

(Not) The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

I've been in college for the past seven years. It is hard for me to get too excited about Christmas until about a week before the holiday, because I have to deal with these things called "final exams". Since I'm an art history major, I also have to deal with these other things called "final papers", which are due maybe a week before I have to take the final exam. Am I the only one who thinks revising a 10+ page paper a week before I have to memorize 75+ slides for an exam is a little unfair? Maybe we could do the paper thing mid-way through the semester? Maybe the paper could be the exam? Something?

On top of that, Paxton is (finally) getting baptized this Sunday and stupid me decided that it would be no problem to throw a party afterward.

And on top of that... my guinea pig died last night. The guinea pig that I'd had since early 2005.

Said pig was elderly and had been sick for awhile (almost a year) with things that would, normally, kill a younger guinea pig with a certain amount of speed. We were beginning to think he was immortal. Sadly, that didn't turn out to be the case. He had a seizure last night, and I took him into the bathroom and held him until it was over. It was one of the saddest things I have ever experienced, honestly.

So now I have a dead guinea pig in an amazon.com box, chilling out in my house because I really have no idea what to do with him. The box won't fit in my freezer--I'm considering putting it in the garage since it is fairly cold outside. Sometime today I will have to call the vet and see about getting him cremated (he was not the sort of animal who would go for being in a box in the ground).

...excuse me, I have to go cry uncontrollably and flunk my math final now.

Salvador Dali

b. 2004 S. Portland, ME

d. 2011 Cleveland area, OH

School Daze.

Reports of my death are, as always, entirely false.

School started again two weeks ago. I have this problem where I keep not graduating from college for one reason or another (and I swear that 75% of the time it is not my fault, either), so I am on year seven of a nine-year Bachelor's degree.

This is how my day plays out:

6:30 AM - Fall out of bed, stagger directly to the kitchen. Stare at coffee maker until I remember how to make it work.

6:40 AM - Having completed vital task #1, turn attention to vital task #2: pee.

6:45 AM - 7:15 AM Make myself lunch--usually pepperoni and cheese on some sort of bread item, a side of celery or carrots, crackers and a piece of soft cheese. Drink coffee. Check the weather, get myself dressed, make sure everything I need for the day is in my bag. Let the dog outside, let the dog inside, feed the dog.

7:15 AM - My husband is now done with his shower and out of the bathroom, so I can do something with my hair and put on some makeup to make it look like I got a full night of sleep.

7:25 AM - One of us gets Paxton, changes his diaper and puts him in the carseat. Then we leave.

7:27 AM - Paxton gets dropped off at grandma's house to be smothered with Chanel-scented, Spanish-speaking, diabetic Methodist* love for the day.

7:45 AM - I get dropped off at the Brookpark Rapid Transit station.

8:10 AM - I board the eastbound train to downtown Cleveland and attempt to attract as little attention as possible in order to avoid ATCs (Awkward Train Conversations) with CTP (Creepy Train People).

8:35 AM - I get off the train and walk through Tower City to get to Public Square, where I wait for the eastbound HealthLine bus.

I get to Cleveland State University sometime around 8:45. Riding the bus is an adventure. It is usually full of... interesting people.

Whenever I get to CSU - 9:30 AM - I sit in the library, making sure that everything is okay on the internet and sometimes talking to my friend Bieler.

9:45 AM - I book it out of the library and across Chester Avenue to the art building, where I sit in a very cold room learning about art since 1968.

10:50 AM - I run from the art building, across Chester, up the stairs and through the main classroom building into the student center and sprint through the campus innerlink to the other side of campus/the business college, where I fall down the stairs and drag my battered body into classroom 127 for German 101.

11:00-12:05 I learn elementary German from a woman with a French name and kick all sorts of ass with the six other female students in the male-dominated subject.

12:15 I make it back to the library, where I either start studying (if I want to stay later) or gather my things and run to catch the HealthLine back to Tower City (if I want my husband to pick me up on his lunch break).

The good news about going home before 4 PM is that the CPT tend not to be there if it isn't rush hour. The bad news is that I have just given you my schedule for three days out of the week. For the other two, this morning routine does not happen, but this afternoon routine does...

1:00 PM - I sit in the back of a lecture hall and pretend to give two shits about math. Actually, I do give at least one shit, because I need to pass the class and math is hard, even if this is the math class for idiots.

2:50 PM - Bieler and I have lunch and try to keep away from other people as much as possible. We are vaguely hermit-like and live in the library.

4:00 PM - I go to the art building, climb the stairs and settle in for two hours of discussion on the Virgin Mary and her place in medieval art and culture. This is more interesting than it sounds, although the sheer amount of reading and writing required for this class is enough to make me cry and want to kill myself.

6:00 PM - Bieler and I gather our things from the library and take the HealthLine to Tower City. She goes east, I go west.

6:45 PM - My husband picks me up from the Rapid station and we go to my parents' house for dinner. My mom offered to cook for us twice a week since my getting home at 7 PM is not really conducive to making healthy food.

********************************************

So... that is my routine lately. It's tiring... and it explains why I haven't been blogging so much. Rest assured, Paxton and I are doing just fine! He just turned four months, and he gets his shots on Tuesday--wish us luck!

*These four things pretty much sum up everything you need to know about my mom.

Nerdmama vs. The Tornado

It is good to know that my husband and I work well together in an emergency.

In my last entry, from this morning, I mentioned that it was supposed to storm all day today. What ended up happening was that it was bright and sunny all day, and warm enough to hang my laundry outside, make sun tea, and drive around with my car windows open. Until tonight.

Shortly after 7 pm, I got a phone call from my mother, alerting me to the fact that a tornado warning had been issued for our suburb. The storm was expected to arrive at 7:18. I got off the phone and informed my husband just as the sky darkened and the lights started to flicker.

"Get the pigs into the hallway," he said matter-of-factly. This is the guy who laughe

d at me for taking my guinea pigs into the basement of our old house the last time there was a tornado warning for this area (two years ago, and it didn't even rain).

I took the guinea pigs into the hallway and stuffed the cats into the linen closet as my husband strapped Paxton into his carseat. I stuffed a handful of diapers into our diaper bag and quickly made up a couple bottles of formula, then grabbed the prescription bottles from the kitchen shelf. My husband had dragged the comforter off the bed into the hallway, the pillows soon followed. I grabbed my camera and car keys and started to close and block off the hall doors as my husband leashed the dog, and we all went to hunker down in the hallway. We accomplished all of this in ten minutes.

It sounded like the world was ending outside. We peeked around the corner of the hallway to see the picture window and you couldn't see for all the rain and hail. When it was over, we found large, quarter-size hail all over the yard, piled up on the windowsills and against the doorways. The outside of the house and my car were plastered with leaves, and our street was completely flooded.

The flooding in the street went down almost right away, and neither the house nor my car appears to be damaged. Paxton slept through the entire thing, and my husband has already gone to bed. Adrenaline and the rumbles of distant thunder are keeping me up tonight. We don't have renter's insurance yet--it's one of those things that fell through the cracks these the past couple months--and I can't help thinking that if the storm had managed to damage our house enough to destroy some of our possessions, we'd be completely out of luck. Not being able to claim a loss on our nursery furniture, my iMac, our TV--any number of things--that's a scary thought, one that struck me as we were doing Paxton's bedtime diaper change. I'll have to pay a visit to the insurance company tomorrow.

Anyway, it appears that the actual tornado happened a few miles away from us. Still too close for my comfort, as it took down a wall at our local mall and uprooted trees at the college across town. I really, really, really hate bad weather. :(

OT: British Men That I Find Very Attractive

Pregnancy hormones do weird things to your brain. For starters, the pregnant brain can shrink in size by up to 8% (luckily, it bounces back afterwards). It also makes you have some really crazy dreams.

The guy to the left is David Tennant, a Scottish actor whom I think is one of the most attractive men in the world. I'll admit that he's a little crazy-looking (I like that in a man), but what really gets me is his voice. Scottish burrs are undoubtedly the sexiest accents in the entire world and Tennant's got a voice that could move mountains.

David Tennant could move my mountain any day.

So, I had this dream last night and it was totally about David Tennant. WWIII had started, the Nazis were back because apparently Germany just figured that using the same tactics over might work this time, and apparently they had because Germany had taken over all of Europe. The Germans were somehow rounding up Americans and forcing them to go overseas as servants to reward certain Europeans... these people didn't even have to be Nazi supporters, they were just celebrities that the Nazis happened to like.

I somehow got wrapped up in this and ended up being given to David Tennant, which I could not bring myself to complain about. Sure, I'm a libertarian... but, y'know, give me freedom or give me death or just give me to David Tennant. I am totally cool with that last option.

It was all going so well. I cooked meals and did laundry and got to sleep on David Tennant's couch. Awesome! Hooray! He even got to keep the TARDIS from his run on Doctor Who in the basement and I got to see it. I was kind of hoping the dream would've progressed into some sort of sexy-time...

The Germans came back, took me away and told me they were very sorry for the misunderstanding and that I was free to go. They'd found out that I was actually a citizen of the U.K. so I couldn't actually be forced to serve celebrities. I tried telling them that I was totally cool with it... no luck.

Then I woke up.

To celebrate my crazy-ass dream, here's a list of my top five most attractive British men, all of whom are old enough to be my father but I don't care:

1. David Tennant (he can talk to me and make goofy faces all he wants... among other things)

2. Jason Statham (as long as takes me for rides in his BMW and promises not to shoot anyone)

3. Hugh Laurie (he can keep his accent, but he must act like Gregory House, M.D.)

4. Daniel Craig (in a tux, please)

5. Sean Connery (but only when he was younger since he's now old enough to be my father like three times over, and that's weird and/or creepy)