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Burning California
We’re covered with smoke here. You probably saw something about it on television. Everybody I know is fine, so don’t worry. We’re all rubbing our eyes and coughing but we are in no danger of having our houses burn down. The fire near us is a whole city away and there are lots of streets and concrete between us. I guess that’s one good thing about living in an urban area. We don’t have that much wild brush to burn up here.
It probably wasn’t very smart of me but I was so in awe of the rose colored light, I packed up Baby Bug and took her down to the tide pools for an impromptu photo-shoot. I hope she doesn’t blame me when she develops asthma later in life. I don’t know how bad it was to be breathing this air. It didn’t hurt to breath and I saw a few other families out enjoying the strangeness of it all.
Maybe I can sell my photos and pay for her doctor bills. Ack. I shouldn’t joke like that. But it was pretty amazing to be out in this strange other-worldly light, taking pictures. I would have stayed longer if the battery in my mom-minivan camera didn’t go dead. Along with everything else that is dumb with this camera it also has a battery that goes dead with very little warning. It lasts the normal amount of time but when it starts blinking that means your photo shoot is pretty much over immediately. Even turning it off and then back on again doesn’t work.
But guess what!!!! I don’t hate my doltish camera anymore! You know why? Because it’s waterproof. WATERPROOF is sooooooooooo cool! It was the weirdest feeling to deliberately dunk a piece of electrical equipment in a tide pool today. I was all ready for it to shock me or at least start changing funny colors on the lcd screen. But nope. It just kept on working and working. I LOVE IT!!! My camera is an amphibian! How cool is that?
You should have seen the look on the girl’s face who was standing near me when I dunked my camera in a tide pool. Her eyeballs popped right out of her head. Priceless, that’s what her shock was. I think I’m going to go around dunking the camera in water just to repeat that over again.
Being amphibious makes all the other stuff that I hate about the silly camera not so bad. I can put up with the slow shutter button response. I can put up with pukey color it adds to all my photos. I can even put up with the stupid lcd screen that goes dim one second after I start to frame my shot. I’m sorry I said all those mean things about it because when it comes to taking a beating and still keeping on ticking, my camera can kick your camera’s butt. (I say that affectionately, of course. As a rule, I’m against cameras fighting.)
But enough about the silly camera. It was really fun showing Baby Bug the tide pools. I can’t believe I haven’t taken her down there more. I used to walk there all the time when she was small enough to fit in the baby carrier but I never let her actually get down and look at the little crabs walking around.
It was like walking around on the moon. Poor Baby Bug, I was so distracted by my picture taking that she got herself in quite a pickle. The ground is very uneven and rough and her little feet just couldn’t find an easy way to go where she wanted to go. Eventually, she fell into a pool and got very upset because she had her shoes on. “Shoes ON!” she cried.
I love her little orange shoes but she has nearly outgrown them so I told her it was okay that she got her feet wet. I couldn’t very well take her shoes off because the rocks are sharp with barnacles and crustaceous skeletons (is that redundant?). So I decided her little orange shoes could take one for the Gipper. Or Gromit or whatever. It was worth it for the experience.
Okay, yes, I admit it. I was selfish and I wanted to play with my amphibious camera. Take one for me, cute little orange shoes. (Actually the shoes are fine. Much like my camera!)
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out and about
Guess what!? The jogger stroller is finally fixed! Yaaaayyyy! Oh, right. I already told you. It’s huge news over here. Every pore in my body is singing happy songs about oxygen and living forever and stuff. It’s great. I didn’t realize how sedentary I had gotten over the last few months until I pushed myself out of the house and took a little jog down to the beach.
If it’s not one excuse it’s the other. There are always a million reasons not to get out and force yourself to sweat a little bit. At first it was because Baby Bug needed breakfast and that took forever and then the sun was too hot by the time we were done. Then it was because I needed a shower afterwards and trying to schedule a shower during day time hours at I-am-the-Mom Corporation was pretty much impossible. Then it was the jogger stroller having a flat and next thing you know our morning routine included watching television all the way up to Dragon Tails. ACK!
Getting the jogger stroller fixed (and the fact that it’s not dog-breath-hot anymore) has greatly improved our morning routine. Less tv. More outside. It’s fantastic! It’s probably a little too early to be bragging and celebrating but I am very very happy with my bad self.
Another good thing about getting out and walking with jogger stroller is that I can take pictures of the beach again. It’s been too long. I’m tired of trying to take pictures of Baby Bug while strategically framing my shot so the stains in my carpet don’t show. It’s time to get outdoors! I know fall and winter are coming but around here, that’s the most beautiful time of year.
In other news, guess who I was lucky to meet last night? Sophia! The famous wife of Neilochka! She was beautiful, of course, and charmed Baby Bug right away with her Russian accent and a very long sparkly necklace. Neil was there too but he doesn’t have a mysterious accent or a long sparkly necklace. He is very funny though. Anyway, I met them so I could sign the back of Neil’s art that he bought at the gallery show. Some how I forgot to sign his particular framed picece before he bought it. What an idiot I am sometimes.
Hanging with Neil and Sophia was great but Baby Bug was a holy terror! It was my fault for scheduling to meet them at the end of the day when Baby Bug’s low battery light starts blinking. There is just no pleasing her when she needs food or sleep. I fed her early but that didn’t improve her mood at all. Maybe she just wanted to watch her “Tubbies”. Who knows.
Baby Bug being in a bad mood was not good because I had to write an ode on the back of Neil’s frame and of course I didn’t work on it until I was driving to meet them. Yes, I was that mother scribbling on a wrinkled piece of paper on my steering wheel at the stoplight yesterday. I know. I’m terrible. But you try being a mom and getting things done. Ha.
Anyway, I managed to get all of my long beautiful somewhat poetic ode written (while stopped at stoplights) except for the very last sentence. I thought I could just wrap it up really quick like at the restaurant and all would be well. I didn’t take into account that Baby Bug would want to run around the restaurant and bonk her head on the edge of a table and then require me and only me to console her. I didn’t take into account that Baby Bug would cry buckets of tears if I paid attention to the back of Neil’s art or a pencil instead of her. Oh the tears.
It was terrible. For some reason the restaurant became very hot and I started sweating and next thing I knew I was scribbling some kind of nonsense and then booking it out of the restaurant with Baby Bug screaming in my arms. Motherhood is sooooo glamorous. Thankfully, it was a good twenty degrees cooler outside and I managed to distract Baby Bug from her bonked head by letting her play in the water fountain outside and all was well.
Neil and Sophia packed up my giant mom purse for me and even brought my cup of coffee outside for me. They were so great. They were so great and we had so much fun talking that I said, “We should do this again sometime!” completely blocking out the crazy toddler experience that just happened in the restaurant minutes earlier. Neil and Sophia nodded and smiled and then went off to their show muttering under their breath, “Not on your life you crazy mom person.”
Well, they probably didn’t mutter but I’m sure they are glad they are the ones going to a show on a Sunday night all dressed up and looking nice and not going home to fight with a toddler about bedtime.
