2000-08-07 - 986025685

On the internal soundtrack: "Late Night Double Feature" from Rocky Horror. Over the weekend I had the "Holly Hobbie General Store" commercial jingle in my head, which was absolutely horrible. Anybody else remember that?

Well, the shower went off without a hitch. On my part, anyway. Didn't forget anything major and things went smoothly, thanks to my helpful aunties.

S wasn't terribly surprised, for two reasons: First, the dog was in the back yard after S had been particularly careful to remember to lock the back door; and second, because she went upstairs to change clothes as soon as she got in the house, and while she was up there, her daughter went up and said, "Mommy, there's a party in the basement." Ah well.

I think she liked her stuff. She pretended to be all mad about the surprise but I think she liked it anyway. At my request, everyone at the party had written pieces of advice for a happy marriage on little paper hearts that I gave to her in a little gold box. I had given her one that said, "As Gram wrote in my memory book, 'Love each other. That's what makes a happy life together'". She got a little choked up when she was reading that one and "yelled" at me later for almost making her cry. I didn't mean to do that; I just wanted to be able to share the advice Grammom gave me, because she wasn't here to do the same for S. I wished I had planned the shower earlier so that I could have gotten a special note from her for S.

I got to see A&M and the twins on Saturday night. Baby B was still awake, and he is just amazing (I hadn't seen him for a month). He smiles CONSTANTLY and he even does it when he's crying. He cries because he's tired, but he can't help smiling through the tears if you smile at him.

Despite having been up every two hours the night before, A was in a great mood and we were laughing a lot talking about the babies and dogs and goofy things. It came up that their dog likes to sort of "spoon" them when she sneaks into their bed while they sleep. This led to a discussion of sleeping with a spouse in general, and I mentioned that I hate being breathed on while I'm trying to sleep. The rhythm of the breathing keeps me awake (a weird sort of anticipation of the next breath), plus it's all clammy-like, yick. Poindexter doesn't care, so I breathe all over him, but he has to arrange the sheets to cover my neck when he spoons me.

Was that TMI? Oh well.

I had a nice time visiting with Mom & Dad. The weather was gorgeous on Saturday so we sat out in the backyard in our robes, eating breakfast. Mr. O next door dropped by for a while too, and invited Dad to do water aerobics with him the next morning, which he does in the pool of the house A&M are buying. Dad got a kick out of this, especially since he got to use A&M's pool before they did. I don't know if he'll start doing it regularly or not.

Mom and Dad ran alongside the train and waved as it pulled out of the station. It's quite the family tradition now.

Poindexter kept himself quite busy this weekend. He told me he had a few "surprises" for me. Taking the tour of the house when I got home invoked a lot of "WOW! WOW!" on my part. He bought a water filter and installed it under the kitchen sink, and now our chlorine-riddled city water actually tastes GOOD! So we'll save a ton on bottled water and I don't have to deal with those @*?^$ plastic jugs anymore. He also cleaned all the dirt out of the garage that we tracked in last winter (yes, we waited THAT LONG to clear it out). He's currently in the middle of moving the thermostat through the walls from the 3rd floor to the 4th. And he even emptied the dishwasher and put a few of his dirty plates in, which is Not His Job. I'm constantly amazed at what an incredible man I married.

I'm making you sick, aren't I? Well, if it makes you feel better, he rarely takes out the kitchen garbage unless I specifically request it, and ... um, well, yeah, so, he's not technically perfect, I guess.

People make fun of me for gushing so much about Poindexter. My feeling is, better to do that than focus on the bad stuff. If the other long-term good marriages around me are any indication, we're going to annoy the hell out of each other soon enough, so why hasten the process?

MORE INSIGHTS TO EVIE'S PERSONALITY

I used to be very shy. I don't think I was the non-smiling type, but I had a godawful time striking up conversations with strangers. I was like this all the way up through high school, rarely talking to people beyond my own group of friends.

I made a decision the summer before I left for college: I was not going to be shy anymore. In fact, I was going to make a point to get to know, by name at least, every single person in my first-year dorm. College is a good place to make a resolution like that, since there are no already-established cliques to tread upon. Just a bunch of people who also don't know anyone else.

So I did that. I would go around introducing myself to people everywhere I went. "Hi, I'm Evie, what's your name? What suite do you live in? Where you from?" It was hard at first, just getting myself to jump over that hurdle of "What if they don't want to talk to me? What if I can't think of anything to talk about? What if they think I'm a dork?" But once I'd done it a few times, it got easier and easier until I did it without thinking.

Eventually it got to the point that I would walk up to people and ask them questions without even thinking about it. A friend of mine was amazed when we were having a conversation and couldn't remember the name of something or someone, and I walked up to some guy and asked him if he knew it. Apparently this is Just Not Done.

It's nice, though. You meet a lot of nice people that way, people who ordinarily would just breeze through your life without you even noticing them.

BTW, I did get to know all but four people in my 100-person dorm. And the four I didn't know were Neanderthal football players (not that all football players or Neanderthals or anything) who spelled out "EAT ME" with their Christmas lights in the suite windows. It's probably just as well I didn't go meet them.

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