Chateau Karamakov

I promise there will be cast iron update soon.

I can't stop watching Dance Academy. It's this Australian show that's basically Center Stage, except... a tv show, and Australian? and Better. capital B Better.

I had my sacral/pelvic/lumbar/thoracic dysfunction fixed -- the osteopath got the right side of my pelvis to drop down 3/4" back to level, which untucked my sacrum from where it was pinching my sciatic nerve, and he said he was very impressed with the amount of work it took to get my pelvis screwed up like that -- and my range of motion on my left side is suddenly nearly equal to that of my right side. There's clearly more work to be done; I have to relearn my alignment all over again, and all the muscles in my back are trying to figure out how to be in the proper place, which can be painful. I obviously don't want to overdo it and put myself back into sacral misery, especially since I have no idea how I got there in the first place. But, it's refreshing to know that I'm not just incapable of doing anything to the left in ballet.

Edited to add a kitten picture:

Whatever the Mess You Are

Yesterday I did not get quite as many things done from my list as I would have liked! This is what I accomplished :

+ put shoes away! this only took me three days! wooo

+ check Mint.com, which is still suffering from lack of communication with Bank of America, which is making me very very sad. A week without my Mint.com account is leaving me with frantic energy that is generally targeted toward obsessive budgeting and financial planning, and presently seems to be channeling toward making to-do lists every second possible. Not a bad thing, but it's making the lists seem to never end.

+ make awesome playlists for quiet focus time and energy focus time. This included buying too much/never enough trashy pop music on iTunes yesterday, and also rediscovering how much really awesome classical music I have.

+ look up dance class schedules for LP'oh11. it turns out there is also ballet at my neighborhood studio on Saturday and Sunday!

+ catch up on Teen Mom 2 and 9ine. I am currently obsessed with teen pregnancy and parenting. I could not possibly begin to explain why. TM2 has this trainwreck aspect with some of the moms, but some of the stories are seem so incredibly genuine that I often find myself being really moved by the end of the episode. Also, trashy TV! So great.

+ Buy plane tickets to home for May. This is one of the reasons I wish that Mint would resume communication with Bank of America, so I can figure out how that $877.60 is going to affect my monthly budgets. Booooo. Yay for a trip home!

So now I have to rearrange the to-do list and probably start a new one, because this crazy budgeting energy needs to go somewhere.

Yesterday I stopped at 7Eleven on the way back from the bank and left with three Cadbury creme eggs! SPRING.

Frogducks

There was a sportsball game this week, I wore my Yell-O and green to the bar and took shots when we scored touchdowns, which was sadly/luckily only twice. Sadly because we lost the game, luckily because I had to be at work at 8:30 the next day. Fun fact, it turns out the only yellow t-shirt I have is a camp shirt with a frog on it, but the frog and name of the camp are green, so I had the colors ok. Also, it is from Oregon, so I'm pretty sure it counts, even though it wasn't a UO shirt.
LOOK even Rhett wore the right colors [on his eyeballs].

HE HAS GOTTEN SO FAT. His 2011 resolution is to lose two pounds. We are [read: he is, through my enforcement] in full force of dieting, which I hope will be much easier in the spring when he is allowed to go outside again. Too cold for kitties right now!!

I wore through the butt of another pair of jeans :( I pretty much only have 3 pairs of jeans, and two that I wear on a regular basis. One pair from Target, and they don't really fit, and then there is my pair from GAP, and they now have a hole. So, that's a thing. I go through jeans faster and faster these days, every six months or so. maybe it has something to do with me being way more active in jeans than I ever was before. Running after children, of course.

Today was my first day with the newest batch of kidlets, and I have good news and bad news about that. Good news is that they're real real cute. Bad news is that they're real real cute. The boy is 21 months and big big huge, running around, talking all the time, excellent communication. He's so good that it kind of kills my previous rant about how Stellina is the Most Great Communicator Of All Time, OF ALL TIME! Wow, I can't believe I got a Reagan reference and a Kanye reference in that same phrase. Anyway, he is big. I used to sit him once a week when he was about 5 months old, and he was huge then, too. And super super drooly. The girl is about 10 weeks, so... tiny. Very tiny and very adorable. Henceforth, their names are: Big and Tiny.

Tomorrow is my first full day with Big and Tiny, today was just hanging around, meeting the kids (again), learning the ropes. Tiny is only awake for about an hour at a time, and Big takes a 2 hour nap in the middle of the day, so it shouldn't be a terribly stressful time.

Hopefully this will be the last introduction of kidlets, other than Imminent Space Monkey, of course. I am beginning to have too much going on, which is good because money is good, but I don't want to add any more stuff or it will begin to defeat the purpose of taking time off after school to chill the eff out. I already haven't been to ballet class in about 4 months because of taking extra work and needing time off and oh, seeing Capital R all the time.
And also, I don't know how much more Sesame Street I can handle.

Things To Which I Am Morally Opposed, episode IV

The neighbors having a disgusting pond of water in their front yard, which really is just a massive breeding ground for mosquitoes

Things that make my feminist brain hurt

People who care about Elena Kagan's sexuality, or anyone's for that matter

Busting a hole in my ballet slippers 7 minutes before the end of class, placing me in the inconvenient situation of having to dance on Thursday with a giant hole in my shoe before my new ones arrive in the mail

This, which I absolutely know I signed up for:

Bad Decisions Dinosaur

That fried chicken sandwich after my first ballet class in 3 months may not have been really smart.

Looking at wedding photos while already in a weird alone-mood also may not have been that great an idea, either.

Letting Stellina walk to Eastern Market pushing her bebe strubber! bebe strubber! (baby doll in the toy stroller) in 85 degree weather - maybe should have thought twice about that one.

Choosing to work Saturday night - leaving me with no free nights this weekend! - instead of going to the Nats-White Sox game which will be broadcast nationally on Fox, I might end up wishing I had made a different choice.

Making another blog post that is yet another list, yeah, I really shouldn't have done that.

When I am wondering who

This weekend I went and saw the Washington Ballet's production of The Great Gatsby. Yeah. F. Scott Fitzgerald in all his ... balletic glory? Anyway, it was pretty horrifying. WHY, SEPTIME, WHY.

But! there were some excellent parts. It's been a while since they've been able to afford live music! I'm so glad my $90 ticket (at 16% on my credit card) could contribute to that. /bitter

I've had Irving Berlin's "What'll I Do" stuck in my head since Saturday. So here it is, via Frank.