Yesterday, after Hayley got home from school and George was home from work, I had to head out to the drugstore. Of course, as soon as I announce I’m going to the store, I get hit with a virtual cacophony of requests. I walked there, wandered through various aisles, picking up what I was there for, and headed for the cash with my purchases as well as things that George and the girls wanted.

When I spread out my things on the counter at the cash register, I looked down and started to giggle. Giggles soon gave way to full-out laughing. The cashier looked at me curiously, clearly wanting to ask what was so funny. I pointed out why I was laughing and she started snickering too. It was funny because even though not everything was for me, I was still a walking stereotype at first glance.

Because there I stood at the cash, a woman with a bag of salty chips, three chocolate bars, a big bag of Skittles candy… and a pack of pads. Talk about your basic PMS survival kit, right? All I needed was a bottle of Midol (and yesterday I probably could have used it) and the stereotype would have been complete.

To be fair to myself, two of the chocolate bars were for the girls, and the Skittles were for George. As for the chips, I don’t need to wait for a specific time in my cycle to eat something salty. But still, it was a good laugh.

It’s almost embarrassing how much I am loving Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. I mean, I loved the movies (at least the first two), so I guess it’s not much of a surprise, but I am enjoying it in a way that I haven’t enjoyed a new series in a long time. And since it just started, there should be at least a handful of episodes to keep me going when all my other shows flip back to re-run mode because of the strike.

Please tell me I’m not the only one watching!

I remember when I was a young girl in high school I hated so many things about myself. I hated my thick glasses that made me look like I was wearing Coke bottles on my face. I hated my hair because, although hairdressers loved its thickness, for me it just made it hard to do anything nice with it because at that age I possessed an ineptitude with anything that could be called styling; as a result, I had bushy hair. I didn’t hate my entire body but I wondered why I couldn’t have a little more cleavage, dammit. I was self-conscious about my teeth because my incisors were more prominent than the rest of them (actually, I’m still self-conscious about that).

In other words, I was a fairly typical teenage girl. Just about the only problem I didn’t have was an eating disorder because I was always thin. But I had all those other things, plus a horrible sense of fashion, an uncertainty about makeup (though that never stopped me from wearing it, which was probably unfortunate, what with all that blue eyeshadow and metallic pink lipstick that was “in” back then), and a burning need – like so many girls that age – to fit in, to cave to peer pressure, to follow all the trends so I could be as “cool” as everyone else.

I know this is one of the things lying ahead of me as the mother of two girls, having two beautiful girls who should have all the self-confidence in the world and who may not, no matter how much we both try to instill it in them. Look at the world around young girls – they see women on TV and in movies who are the size of a toothpick and they talk to magazines about what diet they follow or how many hours they work with a personal trainer. People call Jennifer Love Hewitt, a girl with a very normal and nice body (and awesome rack) fat after seeing her in an unflattering pose in a bikini when she was in a private moment – fat. FAT. If people think she’s fat just because she isn’t a stick figure with a bobble head, what do you suppose young girls think? Every few years, an article is released mentioning that eating disorders are hitting girls younger and younger. It’s disgusting.

And THEN I read this article called Why 10 is too young for your first Brazilian where it mentions that Nair released a special line of hair removal products which is ranged at girls age 10 to 15. Why? Why are girls as young as ten being encouraged to use a chemical to melt the hair off their legs and bikini lines? But that’s not the worst part.

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I don’t know where my blog interest went. Well, actually I sort of know. Whenever I have free time lately, which is usually in the evening after the kids go to bed, I find myself practically living on Flickr, looking at photos taken by people I admire. I find that I have a lot of people that I’ve added to my contacts listing that I don’t even know, just because I love the pictures they take. I poke around and I get inspired, and if they have exif data, sometimes I’ll click through to find out what settings they used. Lately it seems that all I can think about when I don’t have to be thinking about problogging and kids and what to make for supper is photography. I suddenly remembered last night that my father was really into photography for awhile and I guess maybe it’s a genetic bug because I’ve gone from being happy with just snapshots to wanting to do so much more.

Anyway, between my Flickr/photo obsession and two straight months of self-imposed blogging, I just lost it somewhere. I’m still not sure what I want to do. Part of me wants to make some changes to what currently exists here, and part of me wants to back it up, take it down, and start from scratch. New year, new page? Same domain, but just wipe out all these entries and begin again.

In the meantime, I wasn’t sure I was feeling the other design so I went and poked around, lamenting the fact that 95% of the WordPress templates all look more or less the same, another 4% look original because they’re custom designs, and only 1% of the free themes look somewhat unique. Luckily, after some cursing and despair, I found this one and I think I like it. If you’re reading on a Feed Reader, kindly click through and let me know if it looks okay for you.

Right, enough of my own blog, off to take care of the other ones. Let’s see what I end up doing with this space.

I have totally lost my blogging mojo.

I know that a lot of people generally dislike making resolutions for the new year, but I’ve always loved doing that even if I suck at keeping a lot of them.

Last year I only made two. One was to read more because I was appalled at how little I read. I think I failed miserably on that one. I am quite sure that I didn’t read any more books last year than the year before. I just run out of time and steam. By the time I get done with my day, I’m usually too tired to bother. Also, I went through a period of being unable to find anything much that appealed to me. I did re-read several of the Harry Potter books, and of course I read the last one. I know I read a couple of others but I can’t even remember which ones they were. At least I’m ending the year with a bang because I have less than ten pages left in Memoirs of a Geisha which I loved so much that I’m almost sad to be just about done. I’m going to finish it shortly, definitely before the ball drops in New York City. Then I can start the New Year, fresh with a new book. I have Felicia Sullivan’s memoir, The Sky Isn’t Visible From Here which I’m dying to read, and I also really want to get started on Wicked.

So there’s a resolution I need to keep working on. I desperately want to get back to reading more like I used to do. I know plenty of parents who are still voracious bookworms so that’s not really an excuse, not now that I’m well past the newborn days of fog.

My other resolution for 2007 was an all encompassing “make the effort” which I got from a friend, and I think it’s a good one to keep for 2008 as well. It’s a good catch-all. Make the effort with my family, doing more fun activities indoors and out. Make the effort to be more patient (hoo boy). Make the effort to be a better mother, wife, friend, person. Make the effort to continue making our home nicer.

It’s a good resolution.

Tonight, Breanna is still up, though I know she won’t be up until midnight. I’ll probably put her to bed around 9:30 or so, depending on her mood. She always lets me know when she’s tired and she’s amazing about wanting to go to sleep. Meanwhile, for the second year in a row, I’m letting Hayley stay up until midnight as long as she stays reasonably quiet and doesn’t get too cranky and tired. I’m pretty sure that she’ll make it since she’s always been the night owl child.

We have chips and cheesies, and even a frozen pizza, though I highly doubt I’ll bother with cooking it. I have some 7Up as a treat for Hayley (Breanna has to be happy with juice or water, alas) and a bottle of red wine for myself. We’ve gotten champagne before on occasion but I wasn’t that interested in dealing with the crowds at the liquor store just for that. I’d rather have the wine, thanks.

We’re waiting for 10 pm, and then we’ll tune in to see what’s happening with the various new year shows on television, and if there’s no good music we’ll just supply our own. I still like to always watch the ball come down in Times Square so I’ll be sure to tune in for that. Then Hayley will have to be whisked off to bed and I’m sure I won’t be awake much longer than that.

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope that 2008 brings joy, health, and prosperity to all of us.

See you next year! Har!

If you have three seconds to spare I will love you forever if you could go to this link and “digg” the post for me. It’s my final posting at pittwatch.com for the year (unless some major news happens later today) and I would love to have the year go out with a bang.

Thank you!

Hayley is a huge snow fan. She could happily stay outside in the snow until she turns blue and freezes solid. When we went out today, she was running everywhere, hiding diamonds (chunks of ice) inside snow banks to hide them from the pirates (a game I invented for her because it was one Breanna could keep up with), and building a little winter fort under a tree for the fairies.

I used to love the snow and winter too. Not so much anymore. I’d just as soon hibernate. Breanna and I share this in common. She was keen on the snow for about ten minutes.

Then she got really tired of falling down. I got tired of that too because she can’t get up very easily in her snow suit so I had to constantly trudge through the snow after her to haul her back up, and being a bit heavier than a two-year-old, I kept sinking.

At one point, she started asking, “home? Mommy, home?” which was her version of, “Jesus Christ woman, I’m cold and sick of this snow and I’d like to go inside where it’s warm and dry and I can play with my new toys and perhaps eat a cookie.” I managed to get the pirate game going for a bit which kept her happy for another ten minutes or so. Then she just had enough and I picked her up while bargaining with Hayley that she could have hot chocolate in exchange for going inside in another five minutes. That had just been settled when Breanna passed out on my shoulder, sound asleep, mouth open to the wind.

Luckily for my back, George arrived home five minutes later and took the sleeping snow bunny upstairs. More than once I’ve accidentally woken Breanna up by sneezing down the hall, but somehow he managed to remove her boots, undo her snow suit so she wouldn’t overheat, and put her down on the bed without waking her up. She slept until four, kept dozing off for another 20 minutes even though I poked her in the ribs and called her name while she noodle-necked all over the place, and still managed to fall asleep at a decent hour tonight. I think it’s safe to say that the holiday season has exhausted my little one.

The same can not be said for the five-year-old who played outside for an extra half hour until I pleaded to come in due to cold feet and hands (mine, not hers) and then immediately wanted to know what we could do now, “could I have some hot chocolate now can I paint where is my easy bake oven are my sea monkeys bigger yet where are you going?” Once they start school there’s just no rest for parents when they’re off from school is there?

One of my resolutions is to learn to do more with my camera than just picking it up, pointing it at someone, and snapping a picture. I’ve gotten better at that, but I’ve had an obsession lately with one particular thing – bokeh.

Bokeh is a word I had never even heard until about a couple of weeks ago, though I had seen it many times before. It’s the effect that you get when you set your camera so that the subject is in sharp focus but the background is blurred. It makes your subject stand out more. I could do it in Photoshop, but I wanted to learn how to do it properly with my actual camera.

That meant learning a lot of things that in the past would have come out sounding like the teachers on Charlie Brown episodes – “muh muh muh muh muh muh…” However, after spending a lot of my “free time” (whatever THAT is) on various photography sites and digital photography sites in particular, I am not getting a very basic grasp of things like Depth of Focus, apertures, ISO, and more. Just don’t ask me to explain them yet, I’m not at a level of understanding where I can adequately explain.

But I do know that if I ever want to graduate to a DSLR (and oh, how I want to!), I’d better be able to understand what I’m doing because I really feel it would be an incredible waste to get something like a Nikon D-series camera or a Canon Rebel only to keep it on the Auto setting all the time.

And I think I’m finally getting somewhere. This isn’t as striking a difference as I’d eventually like, but the background is definitely blurred while the mini lava lamp (found in my stocking from my parents, and man I love that more than anyone over age 13 probably should) is in focus.

Anyone with good sites to recommend for learning more about how to really use a camera rather than just pointing and shooting? I’d love to check them out!

I am seriously loving Digicamhelp. I’m trying to learn to take better photos instead of just the basic point and shoot stuff. This site explains really well about ISO, apertures, DOF, and more. Awesome.