Equality House, Westboro Baptist Church, Love, and Hate

After reading an article about the painting of the Equality House across the street from WBC headquarters, curiosity drove me to click the link to WBC's website.  It just ... wow.  I'll keep this as brief as possible and try not to get too sidetracked.

In the FAQs, WBC says they teach hate because the Bible teaches hate.  They teach hate "because God hated Esau" and "God hates workers of iniquity."  They say that when "God loved the world" it doesn't mean "God loves all people in the world".

That all may be true, but I think they're missing a very important point:
Christ said the greatest commandments are 1) to love God and 2) to love your neighbor (Matthew 22:37).  He said that we ought to love one another as Christ loved us (John 13:34-35).  Christ said, "Come Follow Me", not God (Matthew 4:19).  And God said he was well pleased with his son (Mark 1:11, Matthew 3:17, Matthew 17:5).

So, based on the Bible's teachings, I think I'd rather do what God says (listen to Jesus) than try to do what God does (so what if "God hates fags"? Christ told me to love them!)  Christ did not hate the woman taken in adultery - he said he did not condemn her - he also did not condone her actions - and told her to go and sin no more.  Love. Your. Neighbor.

God is God.  I am not God.  I am to follow Jesus' example.

Love your neighbor.  Even if you disagree with them and don't condone their morals.  You can disagree with someone without being hateful.  Conversely, someone can disagree with YOU and still love you!

The end.

White Elephant Gift Exchange

We hosted our first White Elephant gift exchange at our house last night.  I dare say it was a rousing success!

I've had many different experiences with white elephant gift exchanges over the years ... it seems that often times my first experiences end up being bad/traumatic ones, so let's get the first story out of the way.

At my first white elephant gift exchange, I received a bag of pencil shavings.  I still remember the girl who brought the present.  At my first non-school white elephant party, I had to leave early, but instead of keeping the gift I had at the time (some DVD that looked mildly interesting) they kept trading and my husband ended up coming home with the gift he brought to the exchange, and DVD of a truly HORRIBLE 1943 film.  I think I was mostly disappointed my husband came home with his own gift and didn't say anything.


Then it was followed by a few hilarious and awesome White Elephant/Ugly Sweater parties, and it restored my faith in white elephant exchanges.  Yes, Virginia, there CAN be hilarious white elephant gift exchanges that don't end in bitterness and tears!

When Carmen was a baby, some friends hosted a white elephant gift exchange and we brought a HUGE 2 gallon jar of pickled jalapenos.  We brought home a Barbie, and one of the most interesting gifts there was some warming massage lotion from the dollar store.  Hmmm ... highly suspect ... we would all know what happened when, late some night, our neighbor busts out the front door screaming, "IT BURNS, IT BURNS! OH MY ... BACK!!  MY LEGS!"


So we wanted to host a party where, generally, everyone could go home with something they didn't hate.  I'm sure it helped that our friends were more familiar with what kinds of things were appropriate white elephant gifts (ie. NOT pencil shavings) ... and we invited kids, who I think can be excited about ANYTHING if you say it's a gift. ;)

I decided we should pack some extra presents so that either people could go home with a gift if they didn't bring one, or they could take home an un-lame present along with a lame one, or whatever.

So we packed a present I've been wanting to do for YEARS - a goofy autographed self-portrait.  I had an 8x10 photo I printed of Mark earlier this year.  There is a long backstory behind this ... in short, I have a friend whose little brother went on a mission, so they made this huge blanket of his face and had the blanket with them when they took family photos of major events while he was gone.  Imagine something like, there's a wedding, and one of the wedding photos would have his face in it, or he's at a baby blessing, or whatever.  I thought it was hilarious so I copied it.  Mark was unable to come to a family reunion because he had very little vacation time from work.  I ended up never using his photograph in a real picture, but hey!  It was a funny thought!!

~~~AAAAAAANNNNYYYWAAAAAYYYYY.  I had Mark autograph the photo and wrapped it up.  My friend Kirsten opened it and was a very good sport and jealously hugged the photo all night long.  She was even upset when her stepson stole the picture from her, and after they brought it home she told me her husband wanted to display it in the bathroom.  That is probably the BEST place to display Mark's photo.

We figured if whoever took it didn't like it, they could always take out the photo and have a nice black picture frame!!  Mark would never know. ;)


Carmen also has way too many bottles of nail polish.  So I took a handful of the brightest neon-colored nail polishes and put them in a bag.  SOME little girl would LOVE to have bright neon nail polish, right?

Last Christmas, we got TWO copies of the movie "17 Miracles".  So the unopened one got wrapped up in pretty paper.

Several years ago, we went to DI and bought a whole bunch of Living Scriptures movies on VHS.  We still don't have a VHS player, and ordered DVD sets of the Living Scriptures.  As much as Mark makes fun of the movies, I LOOOOOOOOOVED the Living Scriptures movies as a kid!!!  They made me the smartest kid in my Primary class because I knew all the stories!!!

When I was in high school, I had a weird obsession with scented candles.  I have a ton of half-used scented candles stored in Carmen's closet ... so when I was at the dollar store, I saw a Skittles Cherry-scented candle and thought, "I HAVE to get one of these!  Because I always think scented candles are nice, then I take them home and go WHAT WAS I THINKING?!"  And since it was only a few dollars, I decided I had to include some kind of crazy fruity candy with it, so I found one of those fruit-flavored Twizzlers licorice things that is that nasty bright yellow color.


So that was our 5 weird presents we contributed to the gift exchange.  Here are some of the things that got passed around:

~A metal combat helmet that looked like it was from WWII.
~A 4000 piece puzzle.  It measures 98 cm x 138 cm.  It probably weighs 5 pounds.
~A multi-purpose grater (it grates cheese and stuff).  There were 5 or 6 of them all together in the bag. LOL!!!
~A set of 4 pretty sake glasses
~An abacus
~A corkscrew
~A set of pink measuring cups/spoons
~A Winnie-The-Pooh puzzle
~A checkers board




We ended up with a puzzle, the checkers board, and the Skittles candle/Twizzlers.  Carmen wanted the candle and candy SO BADLY that she hid them under a pillow on the couch and sat on them.  When one of the little boys came over and tried to steal it from her, she started crying until he decided to change his mind and take something else. ... Oh, three-year-olds, you are so funny ... At the end of the night, we traded the abacus for a 500-piece Kodak puzzle, because he would probably make better use of the abacus RIGHT NOW than we would.

I figured it would be fun to teach Carmen how to play Checkers.  And the Checkers board is perfect - all of the pieces are plastic and cheap and the board will probably disintegrate in a year or two because it looks like it just laminated card board.  Whoever brought that gift is a genius.  Actually, ALL of the gifts at the exchange were genius!  I'm so thankful for all of my friends who made this party AWESOME!!!!


Another great memory from last night is that we invited our next-door neighbors and they were gracious enough to come.  When it came time for Richard to open his present, he opened the "17 Miracles" DVD and it was kind of hilarious to watch him read the back of the DVD, which proclaimed, "THE BEST FILM YET FROM MORMON CINEMA!"

"Oh, great," our friend Jonathan chimed in, "We are setting the bar pretty low here!!"

Ultimately, some Mormon who didn't own the movie went home with it.  Phew.  Glad it's found a new home!!

And our friend Tyler opened up the nail polish.  He painted one of his nails neon green.  His girlfriend, Gretchen, took home the measuring cups.  Everyone was such good sports.  I AM SO HAPPY.  HAVE I TOLD YOU ENOUGH TIMES THAT I AM SO HAPPY OUR PARTY DIDN'T SUCK?!




But today I have a cold.  I am staying home and hoping to rest and drink enough water that I can get better soon.  Mark's sitting in with my Primary class (the other teacher is teaching today!) and I'm at home with the baby.  Mace always cries during church because he usually takes a long nap after breakfast and wakes up around 10.  (This year, church is from 8:30 to 11:30.  It was good until Mace developed a sleeping schedule that involved a nap from 9ish to 10ish.)  He just woke up from his nap and is happily playing on the floor, so I'm feeling pretty good despite my hot, scratchy throat and general exhausted-feeling-ness.

Making your own baby food

I'm a cheap frugal person.  If I can (easily) do something for way cheaper, I will do it.  Since my whole adult life I've either been a student or a stay-at-home parent, so after studying and chores are done, finding ways to produce stuff for less is a good economic use of my time.  I'm not a couponer or anything, but I generally cook my own food and shop sales.

That's part of the reason why I nurse (it's so much healthier, and formula makes poop smell gross, and formula costs money, and bottles are equipment I'll have to wash, and I'm just lazy like that!) and that's why I don't buy baby food.

I was at the grocery store the other day, and I happened to walk by the baby food aisle.  Now that Mace is eating solids (and boy, is he eating!!) I buy rice cereal to mix in with stuff, but that's it.  I figure a couple dollars for a big box of ... powdered rice/oats (whatever!) ... is an okay thing to spend money on.  I can't make it myself.  But then I look at the baby food, and think, "75 cents for a baby's-fist's-sized jar of ... peas?  I can buy a whole POUND of frozen peas for a buck!!"  How hard is it to boil some peas and stick 'em in a blender?

I guess then the question is, "If you make your own baby food ... do you have to make it in small batches or something so it doesn't go bad before your baby gets around to eating it?  Jars of baby food are preserved."  Simple solution: Freeze it!  When Carmen was a baby, I read that you can put your homemade baby food into ice cube trays and freeze them.  Then when it's time to eat, you just thaw the food cubes in the microwave and feed them to your baby.  Voila!  I fill ice cube trays with pureed food, then when they're frozen I transfer them into a big plastic Ziploc bag so I can make another batch of baby food.  Easy peasy.

This is the website I use as my guide for feeding my baby.  I love it, and it gives me ideas of the new foods I can introduce to my baby and when.

Mace started eating food at the beginning of November (he was about 6.5 months old).  We started with rice cereal mixed with milk, then introduced applesauce and bananas and zucchini and whatnot.  Applesauce is easy because you can buy it in BIG jars.  Just be sure to buy applesauce that's just apples and not sugar.

Sometimes Mace wasn't a big fan of the new food I'd introduce to him.  So I'd put the new food into a bowl of applesauce-rice and feed him mostly applesauce and a little bit of the new food, then increase the amount of the new food in each spoonful until he was eating the new food without complaint.  Other times, I'll take one thawed cube of food (carrots, zucchini, sweet potato, whatever) and mix it into a big bowl of applesauce.  I figure the flavors are mild enough that he won't notice the difference, and most of his nutrition comes from milk anyway.  Supposedly.  That kid eats so much it makes me wonder how he packs it all down (but he refuses to nurse more ... he wants food and squawks for it!). :p

I love how communicative Mace is about food.  When he wakes up in the morning, I nurse him, and about 20 minutes later we all have breakfast together.  Usually Mark makes bacon and eggs (sometimes I do) and I put Mace in his high chair.  He bounces around and kicks his legs and smiles and grunts at us, and when I *finally* have his food ready, he LUNGES at the spoon and gobbles up whatever I'm feeding him.  And when he's still hungry, he grunts at me and cries.  If we're out somewhere and he's hungry and he sees us eating, he cries and reaches towards the food and growls "Rawwwrr, aaarrrgggghhhh!!!  Um-um-um-um!!" until I let him have a little taste of whatever I'm eating that is OK for him to eat (if I'm eating out, I always try to order something that contains something Mace-friendly, or I stick a banana and a spoon in my diaper bag.) and then he lets out this really cute content noise, like, "Aaaahhh, mmmm-nom."

And it kind of makes my heart burst with love for him.

One of my favorite foods to feed him is banana, because we cut the banana in half and scoop the fruit out with a spoon.  It's very self-contained and easy to do.  Some people like giving their babies solid foods in little pieces to play with in their hands and feed themselves ... but I think that's very messy, so I'd rather be a clean control freak and spoon-feed them myself.  When Mace gets teeth, I'll give him little bits of food he can chew on (like red bell peppers) that won't get all mushy and messy and gross.

Our schedule goes something like this:
Morning - nurse, breakfast
Then I try to go to the gym after he takes a brief nap
Noonish - nurse, lunch
Afternoon nurse
He takes a short nap at some point in the afternoon, either before or after the afternoon nursing, depending on when he gets cranky
Evening - nurse, dinner, bed.

Most of the time, the food is some kind of combination of vegetable cube mixed with applesauce, and half a banana.  Mace eats 1-2 bananas a day. O.o  And yet he still poops (bananas and applesauce can constipate.)

Random fact of the day: applesauce constipates (you lose a lot of the fiber when you peel apples) but apple juice helps loosen things up (because of the liquids and sugar).  Both are made of apples, but have different effects.  But if you REALLY need to help your kid empty their bowels, PRUNE JUICE.  You can either give it to them in a bottle, or mix it with baby cereal.  Rice cereal will also contribute to constipation, so you might want to switch to oat cereal.

Okay, enough about poop.

My kid sleeps from 7 to 7.  Sometimes even later.  HOW DID I GET SO LUCKY?!  And he started sleeping through the night in September, after we moved into our house and gave him his own room (instead of, you know, our closet.)

I used to wake Mace up to nurse him around 10 or 11 before I went to bed (you know how cows love to be milked in the morning and feel uncomfortable?  I HAVE SO MUCH EMPATHY FOR COWS.  YOU MEN HAVE NO IDEA.) but then there were a few nights where Mace was not interested in nursing and seemed cranky that I would wake him up in the middle of the night.  Your body adjusts to your nursing times, so now I no longer get SO uncomfortable at night right before I get to bed.

I love having a 7-month-old.  They are so much fun, and expressive, and playful, and AWESOME.  Sometimes I wish he wasn't so clingy, but the nice thing is that since he has an older sister and two cats, there are bunch of other people around to entertain him.  I just can't leave him in the same room as Carmen for a long time, because eventually she leaves and he gets lonely and upset.  He can craw, but he hasn't yet figured out how to switch ROOMS.  He'll just beeline towards a toy and stuff it in his mouth.

Well, it's either a toy or it's cat food.  NOM NOM NOM.

Summing up the year, part 1

Summary of the year:

January - March: Spent most of the time being pregnant.  Funny how that takes over your life - you spend a lot of time just trying to keep everything together and it's exhausting!  I tried to keep myself busy with crafting, play group, book club, going to the Children's Museum with Carmen, etc.

April - Mace was born!  The first few months after having a baby are a blur - you're up feeding every 3 hours and hormones are a wreck.  Also, Mace was tongue-tied: that's where the frenulum, the thing under your tongue that holds it down, is connected all the way to the tip and you can't stick your tongue out.  It makes nursing really hard and painful until the doctor clips it.

May - Carmen's birthday, Mark's birthday, Big Carmen's wedding, Jocelyn and Andrew's wedding.

"Big Carmen" is the girl whom my Carmen is named after.  We became friends in 6th grade, and she ... well, I can't really put into words how special she is and how much she means to me.

Unfortunately, both Carmen and Mace were miserable throughout the whole ceremony so I ended up being the only one to attend while Mark went out in the hall and drove the kids around. O.o;  But it was lovely, the cake was delicious, and I thought it was incredibly sweet Carmen's mom remembers I don't drink and let me drink sparkling white grape juice with the little kids while everyone else toasted with champagne.  LOL.  I LOVE BEING MORMON SO MUCH.

Also, a few weeks ago, she texted me and told me she's pregnant!  She's so excited!!  I'm excited, too!  And I'm sure you're NOT wondering, but I doubt she'll name her kid "Kamis" to reciprocate my naming a child after her.  ;)

A few days after returning from Carmen's wedding in Dallas, my friend Jocelyn married Andrew.  Jocelyn's daughter, Zoe, is friends with Carmen.  We met Jocelyn when we first moved here, and it was about the same time she and Andrew started dating.

The ceremony was lovely, and my favorite part was when Andrew read the vows he wrote for Zoe.

He gave her a necklace with a ring on it.

And since I'm talking about babies ... Jocelyn is expecting a little girl any day now.  (Gosh, now it's going to be embarrassing if I find out she had her baby over Thanksgiving and I never found out about it.  If it's not on Facebook, it didn't happen, right??!)


May was the time when Mark started looking for a new job in earnest, because two things happened: there was a meeting with the higher-ups where he presented his ideas and they said it sounded interesting, then his immediate supervisors came to him after they left and were basically like, "By the way, so you know, it totally ain't happenin'.  Go back to your cubicle and give up your dreams." and then he got his annual review where they essentially said, "We have no idea what he's actually doing, but other people say he's good at it, so we think he's doing okay."  No matter how much you love your office manager and a few of your coworkers, when your job gives you such miserable feedback and makes you so depressed, it is time to look for a new job if you can.

(Carmen with Diane, the office manager, at the work BBQ.  I miss that lady!)
At the end of the summer, Mark's work had a BBQ (this was before he found this other job).  Of course, it was the ONE weekend it rained all summer and the activity was outdoors.  Luckily it stopped raining for a little while and we had a lovely time. :)  Also, we played Bingo and I won the final prize - an iPod nano!  ... if anyone wants an iPod nano, let me know.  We have a bajillion iPods and need to get rid of them.

Story: Once upon a time, I wanted an iPod.  I asked for one for YEARS, and finally after 6 years, my dad gave me one for my birthday!  (By this point, I had given up on the iPod thing.)  So I put music on it and at Thanksgiving, I somehow managed to lose it at the Coast house (where we go almost every summer with Mark's family - Mark's dad's siblings got together and bought a house on the Oregon coast).  Mark got an iPod Touch for Christmas one year, and we thought we lost it driving home so we bought another one.  The day after the new iPod Touch arrived, I found it between the front seats of the car (I swear it was invisible before!!  It had been almost a MONTH since it disappeared!) ... A year or so later, I got a phone call from Mark's aunt, saying they were at the Coast house and found a lump in the recliner and discovered my iPod.  WHAT. SERIOUSLY.  .... So then we had two iPod touches and my old iPod back.  Then I won an iPod nano.  And then this summer I needed to get a new phone (it was about 3 years old and if it shook too hard the battery would disconnect and turn off my phone ... so my phone would be off for hours at a time and I wouldn't notice.) so I upgraded to a free smart phone.  So now I REALLY don't need my iPod touch, much less 3 other iPods. O.o;

Er, anyway.  So yes. iPod. Want one?  Everyone's already got one.  Sigh!

Apparently this is a post about hats

Okay, so now I really ought to start writing again.  Recording the memorable/everyday events of our family.  So I'm starting today.  Here goes!!

Yesterday was my mom's birthday.  I used to always tell people she was turning 21 again, but now that I'm 25, it's getting harder and harder to convince people of that. ;)

The important thing isn't that yesterday was Mom's birthday - it was that she flew to Austin to come visit us!!  She was going to come on Halloween and stay for a week, but at the last minute she decided she'd rather come later in the month.  It actually turned out really well, because Mace started crawling a few weeks ago. :)  I'm pretty sure that makes Mom's trip so much more exciting and fun, to have a crawling grandbaby. <3

We picked up Mom from the airport, then went to Mark's new job downtown, then ate dinner at the taco food truck by Mark's work (SO SO GOOD), then went over to 6th Street to look at hats at The Hat Box.  Mark has been asking me for weeks about getting a new hat from that place.  He has a coworker who, apparently, wears *amazing hats* and he got them all from The Hat Box.  Mark had a famous hat for a few years, but then we last it at Disneyland last year.  Funny coincidence: It was a hat we bought from the Indiana Jones store, and we lost it 3 years later on the Indiana Jones ride. :(

Old hat:

Carmen wearing Mark's hat!

New hat:

Mace wearing Mark's hat!  ... why do I not have any pictures of Mark in his own hats?!

We actually bought two new hats for Mark, but I only have a picture of this one.  The other one looks a bit more like the old hat.  Now I'm going to go on a hat tangent ... hats are big in Mark's family.  Sort of.  His brother, James, tends to wear hats and looks good in them.  We might get him a hat for Christmas (I doubt James will read this. phew.)  Mark's dad tends to wear fisherman hats.  But I don't have a picture of it.  Maybe some day!

I guess Mark looks really good in hats.  I'm just ... not used to them.  I don't wear hats.  Dang.  He's right.  He looks good in hats.  I should stop encouraging him to dress like a bum.  I'm such a boring t-shirt and jeans-type girl.

Jorgen's wedding, February 2011

Okay, maybe he doesn't always look great in hats.  But that doesn't stop him from always trying them on.

From our Mexico cruise in February 2010.  He tried on my cousin Emery's hat.

Taken some time in ... 2007?  One of our poor newlywed dates to DI where we bought a $35 couch.

Hm, somehow this turned into an entry about hats!  Okay!  So anyway, Mark got some nice new expensive hats last night as his Christmas present.

Today, I went to the gym in the morning to let Mom have some quiet time to get ready for the day.  All week long, Mace has been clingy and has cried (loudly!) the whole time I've been gone ... Usually the people in the gym day care try to let me work out for at least an hour if my baby is fussy, but this week has been so bad they've called me back after 20 minutes. Monday. Tuesday. Wednesday.  I had an appointment with a personal trainer last week who gave me a list of things to do, and this week I learned to immediately hit the machines fast and hard, because I'd probably only have 20 minutes to work out.  Hah! But then today, he was pretty cheerful and I got a whole hour in!  I was able to do all of the lifting I wanted to do, and I even got some time on the elliptical to read my Book Club book (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks).  When I came back to the day care to pick my kids up (I wanted to go home and keep my mom company), Mace had just fallen asleep in the swing.  Aww~ <3

Mace took a ridiculously long nap in the afternoon, and when he finally woke up we went shopping with Mom on a Christmas quest to find an elf to do the "elf on a shelf" thing.  I hadn't really heard of this until a few years ago, when a friend of a friend posted pictures on her Livejournal of this weird cute little Christmas elf.  Apparently it's like a little gnome you hide around the house at Christmas time, and the kids get excited trying to figure out where the elf is hiding.  We couldn't find an elf, so Carmen picked out a Christmas puppy.  Close enough. ;)

Then we went to the mall to ride on the carousel and walk around.  There's a little kids' play area by the carousel and Carmen likes to go play with the little kids.  Since Mace is crawling, I set him out on the floor and let him watch the bigger kids play.  He is kind of a road block, and other moms are constantly telling their kids to watch out for the baby and be careful.  I'm not sure if I'm being helpful (now they are more aware of other people when they are playing!) or if I'm being annoying (why the eff is that weirdo mom letting her baby potentially get run over by packs of 3-year-olds?!) but I don't care if a little kid runs over Mace.  It will make up for the fact that he doesn't have a whole bunch of older siblings to maul him!  He only has Carmen!

It was really funny to watch the kids play at the mall.  They ran around in circles screaming, "AAAAUUUGGGHH IT'S THE BABY MONSTER!  HE IS GOING TO GET US!" and they would run away, as Mace smiled at them and got up on his hands and knees and rocked back and forth.  He didn't really want to go anywhere, so he just spun around in circles, watching kids and smiling, then occasionally coming over to Mom or me to gnaw on our shoes.  Oh, baby Mace, how I love you.

So .... that was our day.

And here's a picture of my mom ... she and Mace were matching today!  It was not intentional!

Don't you think she looks 21?

Wow.  Writing this was fun.  I think I'll do this more often.

Facebook as a Pseudo-Journal

I have been such a slacker as far as blogging goes for the past few years.  In high school, I kept a LiveJournal (friends-only) and updated several times a week.  I'd come home from school and write.  My friends would read it and we'd interact online.  Then I went to college and I still wrote, but not as much.  Then I got married and I wrote sometimes.  Then I had kids and basically stopped writing.  I think I need to start writing again, but I don't really know where to start.  Ha ha!  Isn't that life! =p

Also, Facebook has kind of ruined my journal-writing.  I can just post something about Carmen or my life and I feel like, "Oh, that's the recording of my life for the day!" .... So I think I end up updating Facebook too much (some people post a million times a day, some people only check Facebook a few times a year, I generally post something daily and put pictures up for my family ... so I'm sure I drive the less-active Facebook people crazy) and never write in a journal/blog.  It's probably because I feel like it's easier to spend a few seconds updating Facebook than it is to spend several minutes writing up a blog post, constantly being interrupted by small children.  I have a hard time stringing coherent thoughts together these days.  It seemed to get better after Carmen was a year or two old.

ANYWAY, LIFE!

So we moved into a house in September.  It's amazing how much breathing room we have now that we've doubled our living space!  Mace is no longer sleeping in the closet, the piano is no longer behind the dining room table and I actually sit down and randomly play it for fun, etc. ;)

Upstairs, there's a loft.  We've dubbed it "Carmen's playroom" and have put all of our games and the kids' toys up there.  We also set up a bed in the back of the play room.  The mattresses we bought for the bunk bed way back when came with box springs, which we've kept for the last 3 years, so when we moved into the house we bought a third mattress and set it up on top of the box springs.  Sweet!!

The nice thing about Carmen having her own play area is that now we can keep the main living areas clean.  Or at least cleaner ... unless I'm doing laundry.  Then it sits all over the floor.

We also now have a two-car garage and two cars!  But only my car fits in the garage because Mark bought a big weight set and set it up in the garage so he can work out in the mornings and give up his gym membership.  I won't give up my membership because I love going to the gym and being able to drop my kids off at the day care.  I go to this super-fancy-schmancy gym (LifeTime Fitness) and if I'm too tired to work out, I can nap/read books/etc on the couch in the fancy-schmancy locker room.  Most gyms are kind of grimy and sweaty and you just go there for a class or whatever and can't wait to leave.  The day care might be kind of sketchy.  But LifeTime's day care is awesome - they have several different sections for the kids (there's a baby area, a place for toddlers and young kids, a computer lab, a covered outdoor play area, a playland-type area with a slide, tables for coloring and crafts, and a basketball court-type place in back with those multicolored padded walls for playing) and I loooooooove all the people in the day care.  It is so worth paying 2-3x what I would pay for a Gold's Gym membership.  I just feel good every time I go, and I WANT to go.

Another thing that has happened since we've moved is Mark has a new job!  He was kind of unhappy with his old job ... he was kind of isolated from his coworkers with the projects he was working on, and his managers didn't communicate with him often and basically had no idea what he was doing.  Mark discovered his values were different from his company's values ... to me, it sounds like he didn't like updating/debugging/working with super-crappy code that was thrown together just to "work" but was impossible to work with/update/add functionality/etc.  Better coding practices would be good in the long term, and if they *didn't* implement good coding practices, they'd be ahead in the field now but far behind in the future because another company could easily enter the market and catch up to and overtake them. ... but ... you know ... I'm not an expert on the software-aided engineering market. ;)

Anyway.  Mark found a job with a small company called DataStax and ended up on a Quality Assurance team ... which ... well ... basically sounds like Mark to a T. ;)  He'd do a better job describing his job than I would.  He gets to work from home, since most of his associations with his coworkers are done through chat.  He goes in to work on Wednesdays because they get free lunch (apparently) and the office is downtown, near 6th street, so the food options are pretty awesome. ;)  He also adores his coworkers because they are nerdy in all the same ways he is.  While he was interviewing, I believe they talked about Dungeons and Dragons characters/campaigns they've done in the past.  OH YES THEY DID.  And they get together and have game nights every so often at the office.

PS. Austin is awesome.  Great food, great music, great people, great culture ... I love it here!!

We spent Thanksgiving in Austin this year, and we are going to spend Christmas alone here, too.  We are kind of remote from our families (my family's in Seattle; Mark's parents moved to Orem last year) but you know what's great about here?  We don't have to deal with the misery of snow!  We'll go to Utah and Washington in the summer when the weather is nicer there, but I think we are going to spend every year trying to pressure our families into coming down here for the holidays. ;)

Why I'm obsessed with political stuff

Everyone on Facebook has been complaining this year about how everyone else seems to be posting political stuff, and they can't wait for November 6 to pass so everyone will just shut up and go home.  It's not going to happen with me.  I'm political ALL the time.

Why?

A few years ago, one of my best friends came to me in tears because she couldn't get a job.  She was doing okay health-wise on her medication (she has epilepsy and bipolar, which cause her to be disabled when she doesn't have her meds) but here's the kicker - she could only afford her meds if she was on MEDICAID.  If she got a job (she wanted to be a phlebotomist) it would pay her just enough to lose her Medicaid benefits, but she wouldn't get good enough health insurance benefits for her to be able to afford her own medication.

Um, so I pretty much hate the Democratic party for this.  (And don't get me started on why I hate the Republican party, too!)  Keep everyone dependent on the government and spend lots of money so you can keep your power and control over the people?  It seems to me that this follows that the goal of the Democratic party would be to make everyone poor and make everyone slaves to the party/government.  YES, I understand the actual goal is social liberalism and to make sure everyone has equal rights and life is "fair" ... but ... reality?  You tend to make people poor, sick, and dependent on the government.  And you don't treat people equally - you pick and choose favorites.  Your favorites are the poor and disadvantaged and people who make bad decisions and you want everyone else to pay for it.  Great.  Thanks for forcing charity on me because obviously without your mandates I wouldn't be charitable.

It makes me see how vital a role religion and charity play in society, and why although regimes fall, religion carries on.  There is a sense of choice with charity, and you understand why you have the desire to help those who are struggling.  When you start attaching numbers to things, that sense of charity and personal responsibility and intrinsic motivation disappears.

Ugh.