::fat pants::

Today is one of those delightfully cool-ish days when it juuuust starts to feel like Fall. Which made me oddly excited to put on some pants for the first time in many months. See, all summer long, every single day, I wear skirts or dresses. Loose, comfy and cool. And so I went to the dresser and pulled out my favorite skinny-legged orange cords, which I planned to wear with some cute sandals and flowy top.

But.

I could not zip up said orange cords. Not. Even. Close. So I put them back and pulled out some lightweight chinos. Couldn't zip them either. So then I pulled out my "baggy" Levis. Yeah, guess what? I couldn't get those suckers buttoned if my life depended on it. See, at this time last year (when I bought all the above mentioned pants) I was training for a marathon, running 25-35 miles a week. Even then I didn't weigh that much less than I do right now, but apparently I was considerably leaner. And having NOT run since, oh, February or so, the muscle has been replaced by flab. Specifically flab around the middle. I've really noticed it lately, catching a glimpse of my reflection when I am not holding my stomach in. I might look a little bit pregnant.

I will admit that I secretly hoped that I might have one of those perfectly harmless but gigantic cysts on my uterus that you read about while standing in line at the grocery store: "Woman who thought she was 6 months pregnant actually had a cyst the size of a Rhode Island!!" And then the doctor would cut it out, hand it to me, and I'd get my picture in the paper, smiling and holding a Butterball turkey-sized cyst while wearing my cute size 8 orange cords.

But, well, I went to the doctor this morning to follow up on my pneumonia and go over my blood work and he failed to mention any unusual 40 pound growth. Which means that I really am just fat.

Which leaves me with a decision to make before it really is pants-wearing-season. As I see it, my options are:

1) Purchase an entire new wardrobe of big-girl pants. Spandex must be really, really comfy; that's why you see so many really big women wearing it while shopping at Walmart, buying their cookies and Diet Pepsi in bulk.

2) Sew elastic panels into all the pants I have, like maternity pants. What?? I have some really cute pants, damnit, and I want to wear them.

3) Move to Southern California or Arizona so that I can wear dresses and skirts year around. Ppphhfffttt. Who needs pants? Of course, I will have to convince my husband, my daughter and my ex-husband to move with me.

Oh! I just thought of one more option:
4) I could join one of those religions where the women aren't allowed to wear pants. So they wear, you know, calico dresses all winter, with their snow boots on underneath. Do Mennonites have to believe in God? I might be screwed.

Seriously....what am I going to do???

PS. If you suggest anything with the word "diet" in it, I will hunt you down and EAT you.

summer time

World's worst blogger.

I suck. Luckily no one reads this blog but my mother and sisters, unless I've lost them too. But hey, here are some pretty pictures I just downloaded!

One thing you may not know about me (or you do, if you know me at all) is that keeping plants alive? Not my specialty. The joke in our house is that the only reason my child is alive is because she can tell me when she's hungry. How she survived the early years before language, I do not know.

Anyway, last year I started a rock garden in the back yard, because rock garden plants are very low maintenance, which is definitely the main criteria if you want to survive under my care. My thing with plants (and children) is that I forget to water them for months at a time, and then I drown them with several gallons of water at once, figuring I'm making up for my incompetence. My friend Christina literally weeps for the plants in my care: "They're talking to you! They are begging for water! Can't you hear them??"

Luckily, I love succulents. And the beauty of succulents is that they hardly ever need water! Woohoo!!

Last night while lovingly WATERING my rock garden and gloating over my success, I noticed this plant that I don't recall putting in the ground. Is it a weed? Meh. It's green and it's alive. Good enough for me.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAA
This was just some little succulent, minding its own business, and then one day it sprouted this weird, leggy growth, about a foot tall, with these sweet teeny flowers on the ends. I like it.


AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Hen and chicks: gotta love 'em. Totally my kind of plants: you plant one, water it once every six months or so, and it is so grateful that it rewards you by propagating all over the place. If only children were this easy. Oh. Wait...

AAAAAAAAAAAAA

My favorites: Moss Roses. They add so much lovely color.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Snap dragons remind me of when I was little. In fact, sometimes when no one is looking, I can't resist the urge to snap one off and make it talk: "Aaarrggh!! Ahoy matey! That sun sure feels great today, doesn't it?!" Why do snap dragons talk like pirates? Or is that just me? Has anyone else noticed that the neighbors won't make eye-contact anymore?

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Last Friday was meeting some friends/co-workers for lunch in the little town of Tekoa. To get there, I drove through the Palouse on roads I'd never driven. I really, really love the Palouse. The scenery is just gorgeous and the little farming communities are so charming. People sitting on their porches, old guys driving their tractors down the road, kids riding horses in the fields....There's something really appealing about that simple way of life, isn't there?

I was afraid of being late for our lunch date, so I didn't take as many pictures as I wanted. But I couldn't resist capturing this beautiful little scene, near the tiny town of Waverly.

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I've also been doing some sewing. This is a custom-order Hooter Hider (also known as a nursing cover), made for someone who knows she is having a boy.

And i couldn't resist whipping up a matching onsie.

And last but certainly not least: Beatrice, aka: Bea, BB and, most often, Beast. She loves nothing more than laying on the back deck, watching the world go by.

She's got a terribly rough life. I think she's plotting her escape.

Hope you're enjoying your summer. I can not believe how quickly it's gone by; school starts three weeks from today. Which reminds me, does anyone know how often I have to water a 4th grader?