Visit to the Houston Zoo

I took Paula, her friend Ashley, and Isabel to the Houston Zoo yesterday. We had good time. Here are some pictures from our day among animals.

Music Time Warp

Two songs from 1996 got stuck in my head this morning. Funny, I don't remember much from that year. It is one of those that my memory has fast-forwarded. I love the songs, though.

Three Word Wednesday #78

Everyone keeps asking, what’s it all about?
I used to be so certain and I can’t figure out

Barely Breathing- Duncan Sheik


I have not done Three Word Wednesday in such a long time. Let's see how it goes. This week's words are Money, Tangled and Understood.

Isabel's whimpers and cries for her bobo (pacifier) woke me up at 5:30 this morning. After looking for her bobo all over the bed, I found it all tangled up in the knitted blanket from Nana. I gave it to her, and in an instant she was back to sleep. Meanwhile, I was up and alert. Way too alert, almost jumpy. Gabe got up and went to the bathroom. He saw me sitting up in bed, asked if I was OK. I was not. An unexplained sadness was oozing from me. It wasn't due to a dream, since the last I remember before waking up was this SNL skit playing in my head. Was it hormones affecting my mood, perhaps? The feminist in me hates that explanation as it reeks of determinism and can be used to dismiss valid concerns. The woman in me knows there is a lot of truth to the statement that hormone fluctuations can wreak havoc in your psyche.

Gabe came back to bed. He touched my hand and said he hoped I could get back to sleep. By then I was looking for the TV remote control, and crawling out of my skin. How can you go from a funny dream to extreme anxiety in a matter of minutes? All I could think of was money. Have I already spent too much this Spring Break week? Will we have enough money to last us through the end of the month? In this economic climate, what will happen if I were to lose my job? Will I be able to find another job that would pay enough to cover our household expenses?

Gabriel complained of nasal congestion and asked me if we had any medicines to help with that. I mentioned he could either take an allergy pill or a non-drowsy decongestant. But then I thought about the fact that non-drowsy meds can accelerate the heart, and my mind went off on another tangent. What will happen to us if Gabriel dies? Will I be able to carry on and support my kids on my own? Will I lose my house? What will happen to my family?

A wave of anxiety hit me and I started to cry. I felt so lost, so helpless and alone. I begged Gabe to take care of himself and not die, as I did not have anybody else here to help me carry on. My family is all back home. My father has been dead for 18 years. My mom is nearing 70; she's had cancer and she suffers from high blood pressure. When she dies, I surely will lose my moorings.

Normally I am confident, strong, self-reliant. Insecure, clingy people annoy me, yet that was exactly what I had been reduced to at that moment. Gabe got up and came over to my side of the bed. He gave me a hug and told me he understood how I felt. He said if his mother died he would have a hard time coping too, as she is the only inmediate family he has left. He then went back to bed and asked me to try and get some rest, that it was still early. But I was wide awake by then, so I got up and went outside the room. I listened to some music and decided to tackle the Three Word Wednesday challenge.

Prompts

Meleah tagged me for a meme called Look at this stuff. The rules are:

A- Find five things around your house that say something about the person you are and take a picture of them.

B- Post the pictures and tell us about them.

I took more than five pictures, but I will try to group them in five areas in a way that makes sense.

1- My bookcase shelves.



Not only do I love the little flower vase, which I painted myself in one of my rare forays into crafting, but some of my favorite books are on the shelves pictured here. Among others, there are Shirley Jackson and Roald Dahl short story collections, plus Cat's Eye and Alias Grace by Marget Atwood; there's In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez and Separate Checks by Marianne Wiggins; last, there's Wide Sargasso Sea, Quartet and Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys.



The shelves also have pictures of my two biggest loves, Paula (right, at 8 months old) and Isabel (at 1.5 years old), and a little memento from Puerto Rico (a ceramic replica of a colonial-style building from Old San Juan). Looking at this particular shelf makes me happy.



Other shelves contain pictures and the photo albums of my wedding to Gabe. I treasure these, as they remind me of what a great day that was, and how happy we were when we took our vows. Sometimes, when the stresses of daily life get to be too much, I look at them and remember how cool it is to have someone on your corner.

2- My pets

I am not the kind of person that fawns over pets much. This is why I have cats and not dogs. I adopted them from the Houston SPCA a year after moving to Houston from Puerto Rico. I did it because I felt Paula, who was 3 at the time, was lonely and needed someone other than me to love on a daily basis. We had no family living nearby.

My cats are a pain in the ass, but I love them.



Mister was 2.5 years old when I adopted him in July 2001. That means he is around 9 years old now. Mister eats too much and can't be bothered to play with cat toys much. He is also a love junkie, and will sit on your lap when you are watching TV.



Lola was an 8 week-old kitten when I adopted her. That makes her 7 years old now. She has no clue she is considered a "senior" cat. And you would not think it either from looking at her. Lola is the dynamo, the whirlwind, the one who runs like crazy, chews cables, sneaks into my bedroom if we so much as crack the door open, and jumps on top of the highest shelves. She is the reason why I have a quilt covering the new living room couch, so she doesn't shred it to pieces with her claws.

Speaking of declawing, when we bought the couch last December we talked about declawing the cats so they would not destroy the new furniture. Then I did some research online, and we decided not to subject them to that procedure.

3- My bedroom



In January I used my bonus from work to buy some furniture for the master bedroom. This is my vanity table. I love it, but I don't use it nearly as much as I would like, at least during the week. I am always running late, putting my hair in ponytails and applying make up (if any) on the drive to work.

If you look closely, you will see dust bunnies on the floor. I suck at housekeeping (more to come on that).



I love this picture. It's a peaceful corner of the bedroom. I love the chest of drawers; I think it encompasses very well the style of furniture I like. The bathroom door is open, and so you get a peek of the bathtub, very inviting.

4- Art on the walls



My favorite piece of artwork on the walls is not even an original. It's my reproduction of Paul Klee's Senecio, pictured above. My favorite art movements are from the early 20th century, specifically the Modern Art movements that arose between the first and second world wars.

I also love art from Puerto Rico. This is an original lithograph I bought from an artisan back home. It depicts the Three Kings (or Wise Men) riding horses on the Puerto Rican countryside. The Three Kings and all sorts of Catholic Saints play a huge part in our artisan traditions. The practice of making wooden carvings of the saints goes as far back as the 1500's. You can see some examples or Puerto Rican arts and crafts here. I tried to find a non-commercial site to share with you, but could find none. Hopefully someday that will change.

5- The ever-present mess.

As I said before, I am not a good housekeeper. I work full-time and when I get home at 6:30 PM every day, I need to cook dinner and take care of the kids. Often, I don't have time to do housework or I am too tired. Plus, I do have issues with organization. And we have way too much crap. So I get overwhelmed quite easily. Oh, how I wish I had a simpler, sparser life.



Piles of laundry.



Boxes of crap that were in storage until recently and have yet to be put back where they belong.

And more, much more.

Out of words

Every day I get these reports that show how many visitors and page views my blog gets. For a while now I have been watching my stats dwindle due to lack of posting and not participating in the weekly writing projects I frequently partook of in the past. I have never had much readers, but there was a time when I got between 30 and 45 readers daily. Nowadays I am lucky if I get 7 or 8. I am still not sure how I feel about it.

Yesterday I saw a goodbye post from somebody whose blog I used to love. She had not been active since December, and yesterday she wrote to say goodbye.

Ebb and flow. Peaks and valleys. Is that it? Am I stuck in the valley with nowhere to go? Is this a phase as I suspected before from looking at the previous year's trending? Or has blogging lost its appeal to me?

For years I have had an uneasy relationship with writing. When I was in college I was an avid writer. Then I lost the drive, the fire inside, and I have never been able to recover it. For years I chastised myself. I used to think I should be writing. I would ask myself, why am I not doing it? Am I lazy? Do I not have anything to say?

I don't consider myself a writer anymore, not in the literary sense. But I used to love blogging. And now I feel like the well is dry. Is this just a phase or have I run out of words? I really don't know. All I know is that my heart is not in it right now.

Gender Guesser

This is interesting. I saw on Jezebel a link to a tool called Gender Guesser. You copy and paste a piece of text, and the tool analyzes it and returns a guess on what is the gender of the writer.

Just for fun I ran some of my blog posts through the Gender Guesser. Below are the results:

Post: Celibacy
Total words: 896
Genre: Informal
Female = 1327
Male = 1251
Difference = -76; 48.52%
Verdict: Weak FEMALE
Weak emphasis could indicate European.

Post: Oh to be a work of art
Total words: 1073
Genre: Informal
Female = 1529
Male = 1365
Difference = -164; 47.16%
Verdict: Weak FEMALE
Weak emphasis could indicate European.

Post: End of an era
Total words: 383
Genre: Informal
Female = 671
Male = 726
Difference = 55; 51.96%
Verdict: Weak MALE
Weak emphasis could indicate European.

I wonder if this "weak emphasis" thing may have anything to do with the fact that I learned English as a foreign language.

I would love to find out what the Gender Guesser says about my fellow bloggers. Care to share?

A case of the Mondays

Ugh. Since my diminished mental capacity has already been depleted by the ten thousand number crunching scenarios I had to do this morning, here are someecards that encapsulate my mood and great love/loyalty for my job:

Middle of the day shout out

The last few days I have noticed that I don't always get an e-mail notice when a comment has been posted on my blog. For that reason, I had missed reading a few comments. I want to especially send a hug and a word of thanks to Maria and to Enid for your kind words on Tuesday's post.

It has been hard accepting that I am upset. The threat of depression puts me on edge because it can screw up everything I have been working so hard for lately. It scares me that my anger will somehow cause my determination to falter. I dread falling off the wagon and going back to eating excessively and indiscriminately. To put it bluntly, I am scared of giving up. I am no stranger to giving up. In the past I have made half-hearted promises to change my lifestyle in favor of a healthier one. I have made vows I never intended to keep, and was not surprised when those were broken. But I have also made vows I firmly believed in, established routines that worked for a few months, only to see them come to an end at some point.

Let me give you an example, so you can understand what is going through my mind. I have quit smoking three times in my life: in early 1996 (after my then mother-in-law was diagnosed with lung cancer); in 2004 (right before I got pregnant with Isabel) and in late 2005 (after a three-month relapse). Each time I told myself that I would never smoke again, and I meant it. Each time I was sincere in my intentions, and successful at keeping smoke-free for an extended period of time. But two of those times, the decision to quit smoking ultimately did not stick. And even though it has been over two years since I quit smoking the last time, I would be a fool if I categorically claimed that I will never smoke again.

Like alcoholism, nicotine addiction is pervasive, so to keep from falling again takes vigilance. By now it is second nature for me. I just avoid situations that might tempt me. No bars, for example. But how do you do that with food? Sure, I can control what I buy at the supermarket, banish toxic foods from the house. But it is so much harder.

Get well cards

I do not subscribe to the school of fate

No, everything does not happen for a reason. I refuse to believe that it was somebody's plan to strike me with diabetes so that I learn to live life more fully.

I do believe, however, that everything that happens to me can be turned into a learning experience, an opportunity to grow.