Talk nerdy to me

Some of you who have been reading me a while or who actually know me know that I'm a bit of a closet nerd. I was avidly involved in Final Fantasy XI (aka Final Fantasy Online) for a while and have been very sad the last few months that my husband and I made the decision to leave it--it has been dying, slowly, for a while, and they've announced a new online FF coming out, so we're just waiting now. The folks over at Square Enix (who are responsible for several anime shows as well as video games) are just brilliant. I loved playing Fable TLC and Fable 2 and I've enjoyed watching the hubster play games like Bioshock 1 and 2 and Dead Rising (almost went into early labor laughing at that one!).

So anyone out there who has a son or husband or other loved one who likes video games might have heard of the Half-Life games, and their little brother Portal.

Portal has got to be one of the most incredible short games I've ever seen. It only took us an evening to get completely through it but I fell in love. The ending song is the best, and I love the open-ended nature of the game. Supposedly there's a sequel coming out, so I'm curious to see how it turns out and how the next Half-Life game ties into Portal.

Anyway, to the point. A while back the hubster found this online for me. It made me SO RIDICULOUSLY HAPPY and I thought that I'd share it since I've been a bit distant lately. Do a little research on the whole Rubens' Tube thing. The fact that I got so excited only serves to prove what a nerd I am deep down inside. So what if I'm a miserable failure at chemistry? Physics is cooler anyway.

Enjoy the video and share it with any gamers or nerds you might know. You just might make someone's day.

Back and Forth

I go through these phases a couple times per year where I just kind of drop off the radar for a couple weeks. I guess I'm in the middle of one right now. Sometimes I feel really sociable, and other times I just keep to myself. A friend mentioned the other day that she hadn't talked to me in a little while, but she just figured I was going through one of my spells and didn't want to push. That kind of made me realize, hey, I haven't really talked to anyone lately. I mean, I've replied to emails and read blogs and posted comments on a couple, but I haven't had a good conversation in a little while.

So I just want to apologize for not keeping up so well with everyone. I appreciate those of you who read and comment and hopefully I'll rejoin your ranks in a week or two.

Love

I wasn't sure what else to call this post.

My heart has felt very raw lately. Nothing has happened to hurt me. No harsh words from the husband or betrayals from friends. I'm not sure what's wrong with me. I've simply felt like I'm teetering on the verge of tears for a week now.

We actually got what seems to be good news this week about NG's work situation. He's going someplace less stressful and where he can get some overtime. We also got some information about his feet. They're just as bad as we thought, and they can't be fixed, really, but they can be helped. And that's good.

I should be happy, right? I guess that's the problem. I am happy. I'm hurting too, though, and I just can't seem to figure out why. Something just doesn't seem right.

It's nothing physical that I can discern. Aside from discouragement about not being able to lose weight before I go back to the endocrinologist (he's going to kill me!), I haven't noticed anything "off" physically. Just emotions.

I'm overwhelmed with love. My Sweet'ums has been a complete butt this week and yet she had sweet moments today that just made up for every bit of it. And yet there's this part of me that's afraid, too. Wanting to hold her and not let go. Like I can't get enough, and I dread putting her to bed at night because I might wake up from the dream and that'll be all I have of her.

So much love. NG hugs me and I want to absorb him and us be one and never have to be apart from him. I want a weekend away with him, far from phones and people and everything, but I don't want to be apart from Sweet'ums either. I long for those silly-sweet moments together, laughing over stupid things. I want his companionship, his voice, his smell. At this moment I miss his warm presence, just that awareness of when someone you love is in the room with you. It's night shift, and I hate it. It compounds this overwhelming-love-sadness. I don't think he realizes how beautiful he is to me.

I love them both so much. I can chalk some of this emotional mess up to hormones, and loneliness, and the stress of dealing with a moody two year old largely on my own.

But why do I get this sense that something is ending?

I sound like a madwoman.

Late Night Ponderings

Nice Guy is playing Dante's Inferno, a relatively new video game which is at once an amazing and yet disturbing amalgamation of ideas drawn from religious texts, mythology, and fictional literature regarding Hell. I never read the play for some reason, so I'm not the person to ask about how well they stuck to the story, but I find it incredible to think that any person could believe any great amount of this stuff. Then again, I was raised Pentecostal, and while different individuals within my faith have their own ideas about what Hell would be like, about the only thing they can all agree on is that it would be complete deprivation of the awesome presence of God. To me, that's the part that matters. The physical details are only just that--details. I believe that great punishment of some kind exists for sinners in Eternity, and only God in His infinite wisdom could possibly know the most effective form of punishment for any individual.

Anyway, all of this got me to thinking about a couple verses in Genesis (4:13-14).

¹³And Cain said unto the LORD, My punishment is greater than I can bear.
¹⁴Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me shall slay me. (KJV)

There's just something about Cain's pleas that get to me. Of course Cain is concerned about not being able to farm food, and being cast out from his family to live on his own, and the possibility of being killed by whomever should find him. The part that catches me, though, is the line about "and from thy face shall I be hid". If you look at it in New International Version, it says,

¹³ Cain said to the LORD, "My punishment is more than I can bear.
¹⁴ Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me."

"...and I will be hidden from your presence." To me it sounds like Cain is being removed from the communion with God that his family had always enjoyed, and to him, that's the primary punishment. It sounds like he's saying all of the rest could be tolerable if he could still walk in God's presence, but since he can't, it's just overkill. Of course God intervenes and gives him a mark to keep folks from killing him, which I've heard preached so many times was a curse but I kind of think of as an act of mercy. Then, there's the part where Cain finally leaves:

¹⁶And Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden. (KGV)

So that's what I'm thinking about right now. Even Cain, who is so villainized in so many stories and traditions, recognized the gravity of being removed from God's presence.

I like to hope that Cain suffered his Hell during his lifetime, so that maybe he found peace after death. After all, I'm not completely convinced in the time frame all of this happened in that he really knew what it meant to kill someone, and that maybe the small mercy God showed him was a sign that He knew Cain didn't fully realize what he had done. After all, why not just smite him and send him on to eternal justice? Perhaps to allow him to live and to experience living and then death as a part of life, and then to live with the knowledge of his action, was the punishment. He certainly wouldn't be the last person in history to have to live with the knowledge of their mistakes. I prefer to think that maybe living the lesson was punishment enough for him.

At any rate, those are my ramblings and thoughts. I'm not sure they're completely coherent, since it's late and it has been a long day (did you SEE that bad weather???), so bear with me with any mistakes or hard-to-understand parts or not-quite-put-together theology.

Ready for a break

We were child-free this past weekend so we hoped to get some work done around the house. Little did we know that this was going to be a chaotic and stressful weekend. In some ways, little got accomplished.

To be fair, we did a ton of work outside. We went through a lot of stuff we hadn't unpacked yet (yes, even after living here three years!) and threw a lot away. Anything that was salvageable was saved and will be either reused by us or sent to Goodwill.

On the other hand... Remember my little plan to have a heart-to-heart with the hubby? It was one of the least productive conversations I've had with anyone in ages. Instead of just being honest and open about how we felt about the situation, he jumped on the impulsive side ("Damn the consequences, let's do it!") because that's what he thought I wanted to hear. Having him jump on the impulsive side made me jump to the cautious side, because that's how I respond when I feel like people aren't considering the potential trouble an action could cause. He kept pushing until I got upset, and when I wanted to be left alone (I don't like to cry in public and we were talking over dinner while we were out) he kept on at me. I still don't feel like the issue has been completely worked out, but I do know this much: I've got a lot of weight to lose before anything else happens, because I learned the first time around how hard a pregnancy can be when you weigh too much.

So hooray! I survived until Saturday. We're getting ourselves up and around and deciding what kind of shopping we needed to do, and *BANG BANG BANG* our neighbor knocks at our door. There was a small flood outside the back of my home. After searching for a bit we figured out what was going on: the cut-off for the water main outside our house was leaking. Keep in mind we live in an old park and if you cut off water at the main line to one home, you pretty much cut off the water to everyone else down the line too. So we called the manager, who was too busy playing at a local spring festival to come take care of the issue. So we waited. And waited. And waited. The water just kept getting deeper and spreading. Saturday night came and went with no response from the manager. Sunday came and went with no word. So finally, Sunday night I went to my neighbor's house (because by this point water had interfered with our internet and cable and phone lines and we had no way of communicating) to call the electric company (they're over the water supply in our town). He called the landlord and demanded something be done. So in the middle of the night they came out FINALLY to turn off the water. The excuse they gave us? "Our boss gave us permission to have the day off." Holy cow! If my husband got a call from work saying that there was an emergency and they needed him, wouldn't you think he'd be expected to show up or be in trouble? So anyway, Monday morning things finally got "fixed". I say "fixed" because they didn't do the job the right way, and it's only a matter of time before it happens again.

So now it's been a few days since the flood waters receded and our internet/phone/cable still wasn't working. I had to have my mom call the cable company to fix everything. Sure enough, water had destroyed the little splitter under our house that directed the cable lines to different rooms. It's fixed now, I think, and hopefully it'll hold.

The one good thing that happened this week: We finally found Nick Jr. On Demand. Which means now, when Sweet'ums is hollering for WonderPets and the one episode for the day has already passed during naptime, I have a way to satisfy her urge to help baby animals and save the day. Hooray!

Meant to be, or not meant to be? That is the question

The other night a strange thing happened.

Nice Guy was on night shift so I went to bed alone. I didn't sleep well, or much, but when I did sleep, I had a dream. In my dream I'd had a baby, and as we went about normal daily life I was attempting to breastfeed this baby, who was successful sometimes, unsuccessful other times, and periodically wouldn't even bother to cooperate with me. It was a beautiful baby, but so horribly tiny, and I wasn't really sure it was getting enough to eat. The baby was a boy, but I don't think there's any significance to that--my dream-babies are always boys (even Sweet'ums, for the duration of my pregnancy with her).

Fast forward to sun-up, and Nice Guy stumbles in and comes to bed. I get up with Sweet'ums when she woke up, and eventually got him up so we could eat lunch. We were talking about being tired and not resting, and he told me that he hadn't wanted to say anything because he didn't want me to think he was pressuring me, but that he'd had the strangest dream. In his dream, he had talked me into trying one more time to get pregnant, and that we'd had unexpected success. He said he saw me in the bathroom, freaking out, with a positive test in each hand.

This was all over the course of one "night", mind you. Both of us.

I don't know what to make of it. I looked up the possible themes in online dream meaning dictionaries, and came up with so many possibilities. Any of them could be possible, from there being a new beginning in our lives that would need a great deal of nurturing, to me being the baby of my dream (one dictionary said that usually, babies in dreams represent ourselves) and my inability to be nurtured. And, of course, I ponder another possibility: maybe in our subconscious minds we just feel like we've still got a lot to give. Maybe the parents in us just aren't ready to give up the baby phase yet, even though Sweet'ums is barrelling towards "big girl" at full speed.

It brought up some uncertainty in both of us, and we really haven't had a chance to talk it all out yet. Sweet'ums goes to my mom's this weekend, so we'll have some alone time to really evaluate how we feel. Even though we basically made a decision about the size of our family, we agreed a long time ago that if we decided we really did want another baby we'd consider the possibility. If Sweet'ums started expressing a desire for a sibling, we'd consider it. We had "decided", but it was nothing either of us was prepared to write in stone. We're both young, after all, and these are big decisions to make.

The hardest part for me is the same as it has always been. My decision to have only one child is based more on practicality and less on what I really want. I adore my family exactly as it is right at this very moment, but then again, I'm also the girl who said in high school that she wanted a dozen kids. Just because I can see that something is most likely the best course of action doesn't necessarily mean I can embrace it with my whole heart.

Maybe if Sweet'ums wasn't so darned flexible the decision would be easier. She's a wonderful only child, and I think she'll continue to be, but I also see the potential for a really great big sister in her.



So I think sometime this weekend I'll pick up a 2-litre of Cherry Dr. Pepper, order a pizza, and have yet another heart-to-heart with my hubby.

BRB

I might not be around much for the next little while. Both of my internet browsers have decided to refuse to work, so I only have about 30 seconds to do what I need to online before they stop working. I'm trying to figure it out. I'll be back... Just not sure when. We're having a lot of internet problems overall.

So anyway, hope everyone's doing ok and not having computer problems like us.