balance, car issues, endurance, feelings

Sometimes you get exactly what you ask for… and then some

standard jessica October 21, 2010 3 responses

This morning I ran around like I usually do, getting the girls fed, dressed, hair brushed, nebulized, and everything else that we have to do before leaving the house. The routine was no different than any other day except for the fact that we were also kissing M goodbye for a few days.

He’s in the middle of a trial and is opting to stay in the city for the week so he doesn’t have to deal with the heinous Bay Area traffic.

We kissed him goodbye and went back to the harried routine. I do this every day. I’m good at the morning routine – from the jumping out of bed to the waking up the kids all the way through to the buckling of everyone (and everything – dolls get buckled too) into the car. It’s harried, but it doesn’t throw me off my game.

This morning I was off my game.

I just felt frazzled, off, and overwhelmed. And as I drove the girls to school and daycare I just kept thinking that I needed five minutes of peace and quiet so I could find my calm center again.

With the girls safely dropped off I realized I had a spare hour before I needed to be at Starbucks (to be introduced to the new in house Starbucks Digital Network – totally cool by the way.), so I decided to stop by Office Depot for a moment.

Fine. It might not be the most normal thing, but all that organization at Office Depot makes me feel all zen and calm. It’s just so neat and orderly. The polar opposite of my life and home.

I pulled up, grabbed my phone and my wallet, and for some inexplicable reason, chucked my keys into my purse… which I then left in the car. You know. The car that I locked as I was stepping out of it.

Today Office Depot did not work its zen magic on me. Instead I walked around trying to find my insurance roadside assistance number. Once I had them on the line I had to convince them that I actually had an account with them. Then I had to wait for the repair truck to come jimmy my door open.

I didn’t get the five minutes of peace and quiet I was craving. I got 45 minutes of peace and quiet… sitting on the curb next to my car. Oddly enough I didn’t find my center of calm until hours later when I made the conscious decision to put the morning behind me and give the afternoon a chance.

And no, it wasn’t during a 5 minute lull in the day. It was while I was at work, surrounded by the usual hubbub that surrounds me the moment I walk in.

car issues, car shopping

Gangsta car in da house driveway

standard jessica January 5, 2009 3 responses

On Monday (Seriously? Have we only been home one week? This has been the longest week in the history of weeks.) I called a sitter and M ditched work early so we could go car shopping. We are not car people. Well, we both covet fast shiny sports cars, but when it comes to functional family cars we draw blanks. So, basically, we had absolutely zero idea about what car we wanted. We needed something with four doors, big enough to hold two car seats and a stroller in the trunk, that preferably wouldn’t guzzle $60 of gas a week. (Oh, dear Jeep Cherokee, how we don’t miss your gas guzzling ways.)

You’d think that having just vague needs would make our job easy. You’d be wrong. See, what we ended up doing was going from lot to lot checking out family friendly cars and wishing we were buying Corvettes, Nissan Zs, or Audi TTs. And you’d be surprised how unlike sexy sport cars family friendly sedans tend to be. No, really!

After a painful couple of hours we decided that our best bet was the Honda Civic sedan. Small, fuel efficient, just barely big enough for us, and definitely in our price range. Not sexy, not fast, but good enough. We took it for a test drive and we were pretty much sold. Then, walking around the lot looking for a stick shift model, we happened across the Honda Civic’s sexy sporty version, the Civic Si. I think I heard M’s heart thump in response to my mild “want to take it for a spin?”

The instant M slipped himself into the bucket seat and put his hands on the wheel I knew there was no longer any other car for him. He squealed like a kid in a candy store and almost giggled as he careened around corners and accelerated on the highway. He spent the next three days hunting down the best possible deal on the Internet.

Only issue? The rest of the world also wanted the best deal on that car too. Every time one would pop up on a listing, by the time we called the dealer the car would be sold. All except for one car that was only listed on Craigslist for a couple of hours. We kept trying to convince ourselves that there was something wrong with it, but we also kept coming back to it. Mainly because it was the only one still available. Oh, and because it had the right mileage, color, and price. Details.

As of yesterday that car is now ours. In all it’s black tinted windows glory. That’s right. Our family car is a sedan, a sporty, sexy, gangster sedan. And I bet the gangster who tinted the windows black would not be amused to see two cow print car seats in the back seat of his sports car, but it works for us and that’s all that matters.

Original It’s my life… post.

accident, car issues, Holiday season

Sometimes the holidays start with a crash

standard jessica December 21, 2008 13 responses

The car slammed into us so hard that C’s lovey flew out of her hands and landed at my feet.
“Fuuuuuck!” I howled, shocked by the attack.
“It’s OK. Are you OK?” M asked me. “Are you guys OK?” He asked the stunned girls in the back seat. I glanced back at the two sets of wide eyes staring at us.
“My heaaaad! It huuuuurts!” C started wailing, hands clutching at her head. A quick assessment showed that she wasn’t so much hurt as shook up. Little L just stared at us, unsure of what to think. Clearly she was OK as well.

We glanced around us to see where we had stopped and to see if anyone was hurt. The car that had hit us was mangled, bumper on the road, front of the car completely crumpled. For a moment it seemed as though a third car was also involved, but they drove off so quickly it was unclear if they had actually been in the fray or not.

A passing ambulance saw the carnage and stopped to make sure that everyone was alright. The driver lent his phone to the guy who hit us, who promptly drove off, with the phone, in a flurry of sparks and broken car bits. We all stared after him completely flabbergasted. Where did he think he was going in his destroyed Honda?

After a million hours California Highway Patrol finally arrived on the scene. And after a long while we convinced them that a) we needed a police report and b) we couldn’t drive off and needed a tow, because there was something drastically wrong with the back of the car, and the exhaust pipe seemed to be emptying itself into the car. Whoops.

To make a ridiculously long story short, CHP agreed to write up a report, the perpetrator of the hit and run was caught, the tow truck came to collect our poor car, and a heroic friend came to our rescue.

But the best news of all, aside from the fact that none of us seem to be hurt, was that we miraculously did not miss our flight to New Jersey, scheduled to take off three hours after the
accident. A ton of snow and some thrilled cousins awaited us and it didn’t take all of us much time to shake off the post accident jitters and dig into some serious snow play!

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This week, in a effort to spend as much time with my family as possible, instead of lengthy wordy posts like this one, I’m going to attempt to sum up each day with just one picture. Wish me luck, with five kids running around and delighting in each other’s presence I have a lot of pictures to chose from!