This is a good day for catching up on laundry, doing the weekly grocery shop, and filling the cars up with gas. Just a nice productive Monday, no different than any other.

You know how there are things that you learn when you’re a kid, but REALLY LEARN as an adult? Like, I learned to wash my hands when I was a child, but I didn’t REALLY LEARN to wash them until I was an adult and it mattered to me to get the germs off. I learned to brush and floss my teeth when I was a child, but I didn’t REALLY LEARN to brush/floss them until I was 22 years old and making $5.80/hour and had four giant cavities I had to pay to fill. I learned to do just-in-case shopping before a storm when I DIDN’T do so and then was snowed in with the resulting toddler.

There is also a batch of things I learned when I had to teach them to the kids, and one of those things is the embarrassingly dorky concept of good sportsmanship. I didn’t play sports much as a child (other than a brief bench-sitting time on the Little Christian School soccer team, for which I had to wear below-the-knee culottes so I wouldn’t be too provocative in my soccer uniform), and I don’t remember the concept coming up much otherwise. Teaching it to the kids, combined with seeing vivid negative examples from adults who haven’t yet learned/incorporated it, has been very instructive.

Now possibly you played a lot of sports as a child or figured this all out long ago and so this is like Being a Human Being 101 for you, but for me it was kind of mind-blowing to realize that good sportsmanship is for the WINNER as well as for the LOSER. And in fact, in some sense it is MORE for the winner. The loser must be polite and must accept the outcome graciously: no public tantrums, no “IT’S NOT FAIR!!,” no violently overturning the game board all over the floor. But the winner has an even greater burden, because the winner is the HAPPY one in this situation. The winner must be polite too, and must accept the outcome graciously: no public gloating, no mocking, no butt-waggling. AND ALSO the winner must be especially gracious in the face of any slippage in sportsmanship from the loser, because the loser is the one who is suffering and the winner is the one who is feeling GREAT. Overcoming the feelings that go along with defeat is hard, it’s really HARD, and overcoming the feelings that go along with victory is…not all that hard, because the winner is happy instead of miserable. The winners know this down to their elemental beings because the winners have all been losers at one time or another, and so have had a chance to compare attitudes.

It’s so common and human to attempt to be a good sport and to FAIL, or to forget to try, or to be too upset and unhappy to try immediately, or to stumble a bit before finding solid footing. Even someone who is trying hard to be a gracious loser may need a little time to adjust. Even someone who is trying to accept defeat may need to go through a few other stages first in order to get to that acceptance. And during that time, it is not helpful to have the winners waggling their butts and saying “WE are the WINners and YOU are the LOSErs, WE are the WINners and YOU are the LOSErs, how does it feel to LOSE, LOSERS??? YOU DESERVED IT!! LOSERS!!”

The winners of COURSE may celebrate their win, but it would be considerate of them to keep in mind the people who are feeling super sucky at that moment. It isn’t as if the winners must shut themselves in their bedrooms and scream “YAYYYYYY!!!” into their pillows to muffle their joy, but it is good sportsmanship to avoid crossing the line between rejoicing and gloating. Are you waggling your butt, either physically or symbolically? Then you are gloating.

In the case of a political election, it’s useful for both winners and losers to think to themselves, “How would I be feeling right now if my candidate had lost/won instead of won/lost, and how would I want the other side to be behaving about it?” Winners may feel as if they’re just rejoicing, until they imagine their uncles who belong to the other party behaving the same way and realize it would seem like grossly unsportsmanlike nyah-nyah-the-best-candidate-won gloating. Losers may not realize their expressions of disappointment have crossed over into unsportsmanlike behavior, until they imagine the other political party making similar remarks in the face of a loss.

Again: it is the winners, I think, who have the greater responsibility to keep the situation civil and pleasant. Both sides will stumble in their quest for good sportsmanship following an event, but the stumbles of the losers should elicit more feelings of mercy, and be more politely overlooked as temporary and understandable lapses in the face of great disappointment. The winners and losers will BOTH have to bite their tongues hard to deal with the stumbles of the other side, but the winners can distract themselves with a reverie about the happiness of the recent win, while the losers have no such comfort.

I finished the FAFSA! I finished the FAFSA! Dinner was an hour late because I made Rob sit down with me as soon as he got home and get the parts we had to do together done RIGHT THAT MINUTE, but now it is DONE! I’m glad that the school warned us repeatedly ahead of time that the Expected Family Contribution number would be More Than You Can Possibly Imagine Paying Without Selling Everything You Own. One counselor made little fluttery motions with her hands and referred to it as The Magical Fairyland Number. Another called it a “fake number.”

I read a book recently that I want to recommend:

(image from Amazon.com)

Crosstalk, by Connie Willis. I wish I had made a note of how many pages I suffered through at the beginning, persevering only because Paul had recommended the book to me and I wanted to give it a fair shot. The first section is just a woman being CONSTANTLY PESTERED AND INTERRUPTED, by people and by texts and by phone calls, and it made me feel squirmy and as if I couldn’t breathe. Then there was a plot shift and I was suddenly ALL IN, and STAYED all in even though that interruptive style persists to some extent throughout the book. It was the sort of book I kept being very eager to get back to reading, and I find those are fairly rare. I suggest reading it without reading the flap or finding out anything about it first, to increase the fun of it.

Oh, do you remember the exciting story of our stolen credit card number, the packages arriving at my house but with someone else’s name on them, and then The Mysterious Car Suddenly Parked Across the Street? And how our theory was that the person who took our credit card number might be LOCAL (the name on the package is unusual, and is listed in the phone book with an address just 25 minutes away) (though it would be pretty dim to use one’s own actual name), like maybe a local clerk or someone who put a skimmer on a local gas station pump or whatever? And that although the packages had to be shipped to the address on the credit card, he’d been able to use his own email address, and so had access to tracking info from UPS, and so knew when to sit outside our house to snag the packages? And so then we were KICKING ourselves for not taking down the license plate number?

WELL! Yesterday, THE CAR WAS BACK. I sprang into the action I’d planned while lying awake kicking myself: I sneaked out the side door (not visible from where the car was parked), stealthily crept around the back of my house and up the OTHER side of the house, so that I had a good view of the back of the car but they would not necessarily see ME, depending on how intensive a stake-out they were doing (but I suspected they were keeping an eye out only for the UPS truck). I used the zoom lens and took several clear pictures of the license plate as well as of the entire car. Like a SECRET AGENT! And then I skittered back around the house and safely inside, locking the door immediately and then trembling mightily for like an hour while wondering if I’d be more of a FEDORA-wearing agent or more of a WIG-wearing agent.

Meanwhile I commenced A STAKE-OUT OF MY OWN. Here was my plan. STEP ONE! I would keep an eye out for UPS. STEP TWO! When UPS delivered the packages, I would NOT go out and get them! STEP THREE! When the perp crept snakelike from his car and walked snakelike up the driveway to collect the packages, I would PHOTOGRAPH HIM through the window! STEP FOUR! I would take, like, three powerful tranquilizers and drive to the police station and report the whole thing! It was scary, but I was ON THE CASE!

So then I waited for hours. Every time I had to pee, I was worried I would miss the whole thing. Then Paul came home, and he walked like an ACTUAL secret agent right up to the car and looked inside, and there was no one in there. “A car seat, and a bunch of crumbs,” he reported, agent-style.

Shortly after that, a woman came walking up the street, walked to the car, got in and drove away. So. Er. Evidently I spent all afternoon spying on and photographing a car that had absolutely nothing to do with our credit card. And UPS never came. We don’t know why she was parked there for five hours. Perhaps SHE HERSELF is a secret agent!

This last week before the election is really hard. I’m going with my Temporary High Stress Coping Plan, which is basically this:

1. Eating lots of things that just SMACK of holy nutrition, such as broccoli and carrots and eggs and bananas and smoothies and yogurt and blueberries and salmon. Making sure I get plenty of protein, because that seems to help. Making sure I eat nice big quantities, because a full stomach is comforting: I think it triggers a biological “everything is okay” feeling. Hunger causes stress, as it ought to for survival purposes.

2. Having on hand any edibles/drinkables that are happy and supportive. Cookies. Vodka. Chocolate bars. Cheese popcorn. Bailey’s Irish Cream. Good dips. Potato chips. Drambuie. Smoked almonds. Get it, gurl.

3. Exercising. It’s good for reducing stress. But it’s hard to do while stress-nauseated and existentially discouraged. So I don’t beat myself up if I can’t make myself do it; I do remind myself that it has been helpful in the past. Sometimes I say to myself, “Listen, just set the treadmill to, like, 1.3 mph and let your feet drag resentfully for five minutes.” Then once I’m ON the treadmill, I start to feel a little better and that makes me crank up the speed. I tell myself I can stop anytime, so that I don’t feel as inclined to rebel.

4. “Everything is going to be all right” music sometimes helps, but I’m not finding it very helpful right now. It feels like a promise no one has the ability to make at this point. I’m leaving it on the list because maybe you are reading this list much later, and applying it to a different sort of stress. In which case I recommend Odds Are by The Barenaked Ladies. Trudee mentioned it in the comments section awhile back, and I’ve been using it as therapy ever since. Also Tonight, Tonight by Hot Chelle Rae: La la la, whatever; la la la, it doesn’t matter; la la la, oh well; it’s all right.

5. Thinking of this as a literal physical illness that will pass. I’ve used this in the past when there’s been a confrontation or stressful situation I can’t stop thinking about, and I’m queasy with adrenaline: I think of it as being sick, and I remember how on other occasions I have felt this way and then recovered. I have to suffer through it for awhile, but it’s not permanent. This is not helping as much right now, when I don’t know on which approximate date to pin my hopes of relief. Election Day? Inauguration Day? A few months after that? Eight years after that? NEVER EVER???? I do think there will be some level of relief when the election is over, even though I am also concerned about the potential aftermath. Just having that day over with may help. If nothing else, it should bring a halt to the RELENTLESS CAMPAIGN ADS.

6. Finding distractions, when possible. Exciting books. Riveting TV series. Good phone games. I downloaded AlphaBetty Saga, which is sort of like Candy Crush and sort of like Scrabble. I’m watching Love, which I’m finding mesmerizing and uncomfortable in a very distracting way. I don’t know yet if I’d recommend it. There’s a lot of crude/naked/awkward.

7. Finding happy evidence of Good Humans, when possible. Museums. Trick-or-treating. Playgrounds. Animal shelters.

8. Finding things to look forward to. I like to think about Thanksgiving recipes, and I’ve deliberately decided not to think about them until November 9th, so that I have something to look forward to. I ordered See’s Candies, which are coming November 8th-11th. If you have the budget room, I suggest ordering/buying a few fun things (a book you’re on the waiting list for at the library; new pjs; sequined shoes) and not letting yourself open/have them until November 9th. Post-election presents, as a reward for surviving.

9. Doing practical things, if any. Sometimes there aren’t any. This time I found it comforting and helpful to do some emergency preparation, which we’re supposed to do anyway. We have a lot of water and canned goods and peanut butter and toilet paper and cat food now. I’ve been trying to keep up on laundry and groceries, as if preparing for a storm that might knock out the power. I also donated money to PlanUSA.org, the local library, and my preferred political candidate. And we can vote. It’s a drop in the bucket, but it IS a drop, and it’s IN THE BUCKET.

I can’t think of a better time for See’s Candies to do their flat-rate-or-free shipping deal than right before next week’s election. It’s not quiiiiiite what I’d call “flat-rate” since it does in fact vary—but it’s $6.95 for orders $30 and under, $5 for orders between $30 and $65, and free over $65. It used to be you could pick your exact delivery date, but now you can pick a range—and when I placed my order this morning, the earliest range is November 8th-11th. Wouldn’t it be PERFECT for it to arrive ON Election Day??? But arriving for the aftermath is good, too.

We have had our credit card number stolen AGAIN. I get so frustrated with this. This time we found out because packages addressed to someone else started arriving to our house, four packages so far. At first we thought it was just a shipping error, but then Paul remembered that some places will only ship to the address connected to the credit card, so we checked and sure enough: $600 to a MILITARY TACTICAL SUPPLIES site. OH GOOD. Then Paul was like, “But how did he think he could GET these packages?”—and then we both remembered the car that’s been parked across the street from our house several days this week, in a place there is never a car parked, so that we’d both noticed and commented on it. So thaaaaaaat’s great. I have a feeling we will be dealing with this mess for awhile. Today I keep hoping to see that car out there again; we’re both kicking ourselves for not jotting down the plate number. And now we’re waiting 5 days for the new cards to arrive. I hope they will actually arrive in more like 2 days; usually it’s more like 2 days. I hate that this has happened often enough for there to be a usually.

I am ALMOST DONE filling out the FAFSA (college financial aid form). There was a big pause in there because the FAFSA asked for our checking/savings account balances, but I knew we had an orthodontist evaluation and a window-replacement appointment in the near future, so I didn’t want to put in the numbers for financial aid and THEN take out thousands. But now I am back on track. I just have to wait for Rob to get home so we can sign it and submit it.

I took the two littler boys trick-or-treating last night (older three kids were either at home or with friends) and really enjoyed it. I used to haaaaaate it: I felt so sure we were going to lose a little kid in the dark, and I was nervous about traffic, and I was trying to keep everyone from stepping in dog poop, and I was frazzled from having to get everyone fed and into a costume before 6:00, and the whole thing was an ordeal. But now everyone can for the most part get into their own costumes, and everyone can walk independently with just a periodic reminder to “Are you kidding me?? Get out of the ROAD,” and everyone remembers to say thank you, and I’ve found that sturdy little apple/cranberry juice bottles (like these or these) make PERFECT pocket flasks, so I would now say it isn’t even slightly an ordeal and I find it fairly fun.

Furthermore, I’m sure I’ve written about this before, but I get so sentimental and weepy at the whole Halloween THING. Look at all the expense and trouble people in a community go to, just to make a fun event for other people’s little children. And many of them are so FRIENDLY and CHEERY about it: “Oh, look at you! What a great costume! Here, you can take THREE things! Happy Halloween! Have fun, be safe!” *SOB* There were tears leaking out of my eyes pretty much the whole time, so good thing it was dark.

Today was not a great day, parenting-wise. I did the “I REALLY don’t want to take you to something you want to go to, so I will take you to it, but I will be so grumpy and sullen and martyrish about it, and so unable to break out of that mood even as I OBSERVE the mood and know I MUST break out of it, that I threaten to suck the joy out of everything; and also I will say regrettable things indicating my lack of enthusiasm, as if you couldn’t already FULLY COMPREHEND my lack of enthusiasm from THE LOOMING DARK CLOUD OF MY WHOLE BEING.” Then I did the “Pointing out that I TOLD YOU it would not be fun, but you WOULD NOT BELIEVE ME, and now I have set it up so that it is IMPOSSIBLE FOR YOU TO ADMIT IT, and in this way I CONTINUE TO SUCK OUT ANY POTENTIAL HAPPINESS, now or in the future when you might want to do something else you think might be fun.”

It wasn’t good. Why did I even BECOME a parent? What a terrible idea. My poor children. Etc.

Oh! Do you need an infusion of “humankind is generally-speaking okay after all,” as I do after repeatedly accidentally looking at comments on political posts, and also after repeatedly accidentally deliberately looking at the Facebook profiles of family members I’ve had to hide for their nauseating-to-me political views? I suggest a trip to a museum. Paul and I went to an art museum today, and I kept getting teary-eyed at all the WORK and EFFORT it takes for some people to make art, and for other people to carefully preserve and protect and display it, and to create special exhibitions around a theme, and to take time to choose what to write on the little plaques, and to CARE that people come visit. There were items from, like, 1263. That’s a YEAR: 1263 doesn’t even LOOK LIKE a year, but it WAS. And those items were in a museum because not just one somebody but a whole LINE of somebodies care so much about keeping it. People spend THEIR WHOLE LIVES preserving ART for people to see long after they themselves have died. Something is beautiful and/or meaningful and/or important and so they carefully protect it and…*SOB* PEOPLE CAN BE SO LOVELY

I ordered Elizabeth some new shirts from The Children’s Place, and also bought her some at Target. Here is a picture of one of the shirts she outgrew in TCP large (green, top), one of her new TCP extra-large shirts (pale blue, middle), and one of her Cat & Jack (Target) shirts in extra-large (white with pattern, bottom):

I can see how a parent might go either way, feelings-wise. If the child in question was jussssst out of the TCP L, or had gotten wider without getting much taller, the jump to Cat & Jack XL might give a parent the feeling that there was NO SIZE THAT FIT. But in Elizabeth’s case, where she suddenly grew a whole bunch taller and not much wider, the new TCP XL shirts already look short and boxy and as if she’s about to outgrow them: they’re only an inch longer than the old size. The Cat & Jack XL shirts are perfect for what I’m looking for: they have room to grow, so I don’t feel like I already have to start shopping for the next size up, but they don’t look enormous on her.

Speaking of Elizabeth, she would like to be Holtzmann for Halloween, and that is a request I’d like to honor because Holtzmann is awesome.

(image from third-bit.com)

But I am very, very, very low-end of the spectrum as to what I want to spend on a Halloween costume. I looked up “homemade Holtzmann costume” and found instructions that included purchasing a $40 jumpsuit and $15 goggles to be worn one single time, and I am not on board with that plan.

Our tentative plan right now is to go with this inspiration from Paul Feig, producer of Ghostbusters: “You imagine her room is just this enormous pile of clothes she’s found in dumpsters and Goodwill and bought at garage sales.” We’ll color a pair of cheap safety goggles yellow, figure out how to do crazy hair, and layer on the rest of her look from assorted household clothing and disabled electrical tools. We’ll do Holtzmann’s everyday look, rather than her professional ghost-hunting uniform.

My main earlobe piercings got a little irritated, so this morning I dipped the earring studs in antibiotic ointment before putting them into my ears. This is a tip my Aunt Barb mentioned to me when I was a pre-teen. My mom didn’t have pierced ears, and so neither of us knew this idea. (I have heard about NOT doing it for cartilage piercings, in case you are suddenly feeling anxious.)

I was thinking about all the other beauty/care tips that get handed down and around. My mom’s friend Carol is the one who mentioned you have to use some sort of shaving cream or lotion or soap when you shave your legs with a disposable razor: my mom used my dad’s electric razor, so I’d thought disposable razors worked on the same “dry legs, no added substances” principle and gave myself a nasty razor burn.

Carol is also the one who told me you could water down an overly-intense lipstick by putting on lip balm/gloss first, then dabbing on the lipstick lightly, then rubbing your lips together to mix.

My friend Melanie’s mom is the one who taught us to wash our faces: first, run the washcloth under hot water and hold it against your face for a little while to open the pores; then put soap on the washcloth and wash and rinse your face; then, run the washcloth under cold water and hold it against your face for a little while to close the pores. I don’t even do it this way, yet I think of it as The Way To Wash Your Face.

My brother’s friend Robin had a much older sister who taught us to put a little bit of conditioner in our hair after towel-drying it but before blow-drying it. This was in the era of perming, blow-drying, and using a curling iron, so we were all looking for ways to turn straw back into hair.

I wish I could remember and thank whoever was so persuasive about face lotion that I started using it every day from age 12 onward. It might have been one of the teen magazines I read, or maybe Cosmo. Well worth the price of the subscription, if so. I bought Oil of Olay with my $1.25/hour babysitting money.

Amy, a girl in my youth group who was 16 when I was 12, is the one who mentioned that sometimes you need to shave armpits in more than one direction. She’s also the one who taught me how to feather my hair. And to match all my eye make-up to my eye-color, which I no longer do, but it was fun at the time.

My grandmother demonstrated how to spray perfume on a wrist, then touch the wrists together lightly, then touch the wrists lightly to the sides of the neck.

My mom taught me how to put wet hair into a towel turban. I think often of something I saw a long time ago (surely one of you will know what this was) where Elaine from Seinfeld tosses a pile of towels to a line of towel-clad women (could one of the women have been Elliot from Scrubs? but if so, WHY?), and we look away, and there’s a fwip-fwip-fwip sound, and when we look back all of them have towel-turbaned heads, and Elaine says “I love how we all know how to do that.” What IS this from? It’s in my memory like it’s a commercial.

I’m trying to remember other tips and who told them to me. In the meantime, who taught what to you?

I keep trying to get people with tattoos to tell me how much it hurt and what the pain was like, I think because I am worried I would get started on a tattoo and then not be able to finish. But pain is too hard to describe, and anyway it varies so much based on where and who. Three things that have set my mind at ease recently:

1. LOTS of people get tattoos. And though I am sure it has happened, I have not yet heard someone say that they got one and will never get another because of the pain; and I have not yet heard someone say they have only a partial tattoo because the pain was too intense to complete it. …Though saying this one out loud is certainly a mistake. How at this point can anyone who HAS heard such a story keep themselves from telling it to me now, for SCIENCE? But in this case I would like to knit a little non-scientific comfort blanket to hold, so shhhhhhhh. Tell me later, AFTER I write a post about what it was like to get a tattoo. I will try to remember to specifically invite such stories at that time. For now, I am leaning on the huge number of people who go back again and again for MORE tattoos. (Go ahead and tell THOSE stories now, if you like.)

2. I can get a VERY VERY SMALL tattoo to start. I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me before. But if I wanted to I could get like ONE FRECKLE tattooed on my shoulder, just to see. I don’t think I’ll go THAT small, but I could do a teensy little flower or something. I don’t have to impress the tattoo artist with my originality, I can just pick something out of a book.

3. The cartilage piercing. I don’t want to seem to be comparing several seconds of sharp pain to the long-haul burn of tattoo pain, but that experience built a little structure in my brain, where “scared of pain” got paired up with “pleased and strutting after doing it anyway.”

I was thinking it would be fun and motivating if all of us who had been putting off tattoos could all plan to go on the same day, but the logistics of that are not workable. Plus, there’s a Right Mood, I think. Like, some days I just THINK of doing some task and my stomach lurches teeteringly into my poor throat, and other days I’m like, “Sure, let’s do it!” I feel fidgety even trying to say “Let’s aim for October!” The big hurdle for me right now isn’t even the pain, it’s the fear of going somewhere new and doing something new. That is going to take a very particular kind of mood.

Let’s say a person were bracing for, at best, a period of civil unrest, and at worst something more like worldwide unrest. What might a person stock up on, to prepare in a calm, reasonable way that doesn’t include building a bomb shelter or converting all our cash to gold and burying it in the yard? My usual favorite kind of emergency preparedness is to buy things we’d use ANYWAY, but get significantly ahead of the supply we’d usually have on hand. I also like to buy things that meet a variety of emergency needs: things we could use in a power outage, a serious snowstorm, a presidential candidate calling followers to riot, sudden flooding, etc.

I’ve read enough books set in the second World War to know that coffee, tea, and sugar got scarce pretty quick. Those are easy to acquire in reasonable quantities, and easy to donate or use up if they don’t turn out to be needed. Canned things are handy, of course: soups, vegetables, fruits, legumes, tuna. Peanut butter is good dense low-perishable nutrition. Dried fruits, nuts. Crackers and dry cereals last a long time. Granola bars, meal-replacement bars. Rice, dried beans. Powdered milk. Water.

Good to have flashlights, batteries, candles, matches, oil lanterns; we have those things anyway for storms. We have nightlights similar to these; they come on automatically if the power fails, and they can then be unplugged and used as already-fully-charged flashlights. Extra can-opener. We have a crank-operated radio similar to this one, that can also kind of charge a cell phone (i.e., a few minutes’ worth, for making a quick phone call).

In a situation where a person might fear the general public, a weapon would be nice; if a person were not comfortable with a gun, a person could purchase a few pepper spray canisters (I have two black and one pink; now that I know it exists, I’m also getting one in turquoise). It’s not going to hold off an army, but it’ll help with someone who’s gotten a bit out of hand.

I’d rather not even have to worry about toilet paper, and it’s not like we’d need to worry about using up a surplus of it if it turned out the surplus were unneeded. Plastic bags: garbage bags but also I’m going to let the little Target-sized ones build up. A jug of bleach. Baking soda, vinegar, paper towels. Wet wipes. We have a couple of boxes of disposable plastic gloves on hand anyway (Paul uses them when cutting hot peppers), and a couple pairs of reusable cleaning-type plastic gloves. Duct tape.

I’m not planning to buy extra, but I’ll be making sure we’re nowhere near about to run out of our basic medicines: ibuprofen, antihistamines, prescriptions, antibiotic ointment. Maybe I’ll get a little ahead on bottles of multivitamins, just for the comforting aspect of it. We’ve got tons of band-aids already, and some bandages.

I’ll get a little ahead on cat food and cat litter, too.

I’ll plan to keep the cars fairly full of gas, rather than letting them run low. If there are things we WILL need pretty soon (socks, undies, printer paper), I’ll buy them sooner rather than later.

A clothesline is a nice multipurpose item; I got this one. Two hundred feet is enough to use it as a clothesline and still have extra to use as rope.

I already have a little survival-manual collection:

Department of Defense U.S. Army Survival Manual
The Forager’s Harvest
50 Most Common Medicinal Herbs

I have no idea if they’re any good. I’ve never opened them, let alone read them. It’s OWNING them that makes me feel better.

We have a pretty good supply of blankets and quilts already, and a sleeping bag per person I think. Actually, I think we only have enough sleeping bags for the kids. *adds “two sleeping bags” to list*

More ideas for the list?

Paul brought home nearly an entire large veggie-lovers pizza from a work event because no one else wanted it. I’d never had a veggie-lovers pizza before, so I tried a slice—and found that unfortunately the crust had gotten kind of icky and soggy. Paul wondered if it would work to scrape the toppings off into some scrambled eggs, since he knows I like vegetables in scrambled eggs. I tried that for lunch today and it was the sort of thing that made me put another tick mark on the “pro” side of the Marrying Paul pros-and-cons list.

I have applied for a passport, and if you’ve never done that before, perhaps you find the thought as intimidating as I did. I was worried too because I know it’s the sort of government-paperwork thing where you can get to the front of the line and find out you forgot something or did a form wrong and have to go all the way home and come back another day. It’s going to vary from person to person and from place to place, but I can give you the gist of how it went for me.

I started by thinking, “I don’t even know where to go for information on this. DMV or City Hall or something?” In the U.S., you go here: Department of State: Passports and International Travel. There is a Passport Wizard thingie to help you figure out (1) what you need to have and (2) what form you need to fill out. I’d thought this would be a waste of time, but actually it was very useful in two ways: first, because it gave me the information it said it would give me; and second, because it helped organize my mind and made the task seem manageable. Here is the list I made of things I would need for my own adult, first-timer passport:

1. certified copy of birth certificate
2. driver’s license
3. photocopy of front AND back of driver’s license
4. two copies of passport photo
5. Form DS-11, completed but NOT SIGNED
6. check for passport, made out to U.S. Department of State (name and birthdate on check)
7. check for execution fee, made out to application place
8. appointment for passport application

I found this a little overwhelming, but on the other hand was able to say, “Okay, well, I can at least go get the passport pictures taken,” or “Okay, well, I can just dig out the certified copy of my birth certificate.” I had a manilla envelope to collect the various things in.

You can do your own passport photo, but after looking at the list of requirements about backgrounds and inches and sizes and angles, I opted to spend $12.99 to have it done by someone who already knew the drill. I searched online for “passport photo” and it pulled up a bunch of places near me; I had it done at a drugstore that also has a photo-processing department. You are not allowed to smile (the site said a “natural smile” was okay, but the drugstore and postmaster agreed that the rule was NO smiles), so practice ahead of time looking alert and pleasant without smiling. I did not practice (or rather, I’d practiced a natural smile), and my photo looks like I’m exhausted and probably coming down with something. You’re allowed to wear glasses, but there was a note that as of November 1st glasses would no longer be allowed in passport photos, so I didn’t wear mine.

I gathered all my stuff together and drove half an hour to the nearest post office that does passport applications. I don’t know if I’ve gotten more nervous with age or what, but my face was hot and my hands were icy. And then everything went perfectly fine: I got a really nice clerk, and I had all the right paperwork with me, and everything was fine, and the whole thing was over in about ten minutes. They take the certified copy of your birth certificate to send in with the application, but he says they’ll send that back.

Entire cost: $140 for passport book/card, $25 for post office’s application fee, and $13 for the passport photos = $178.

Now to get six more. I started on Paul’s, but the envelope his mother labeled “birth certificate” was actually a decorative thing from the hospital where he was born, so this morning I sent off $32 to get an actual certified copy of his actual birth certificate.