For Your Viewing Pleasure

Adoption news: Our insurance letter was not notarized in the right way for the state of California to approve it. Though we don't live in California, our insurance company is based there, so they have to notarize things according to state regulations. And ours wasn't done properly. This letter is becoming as troublesome as my medical form.

Oh well, it shouldn't set us back any though, since our home study is still being proofed, and INS in Oregon won't call us in to be fingerprinted until it's been received. One day, it'll all be done.

In the meantime...

As a follow-up to our favorite non-cuss words post: the writers of this commercial trump us all. It was the funniest thing I encountered yesterday, and let me tell ya, with the minute-by-minute hilarity that is our life, that's saying a lot.

"Who are you calling a cootie-queen, you lint-licker?"
Enjoy.

Summer sighs.

Both of us are sleep-deprived today. This is a regular occurrence in my life but not usually in Ted's. We both got in bed by 11:30--Ted was working the New York Times crossword puzzle while I was reading more of One Year Off by David Elliot Cohen about a couple who sell everything to take their three kids around the world for a year. It's good reading, and I recommend it (if you can get past the author being a bit hoity-toity ...or maybe it just bothers me).

There were fresh, clean sheets on the bed, air-conditioner on full-blast, ear-plugs installed firmly in my ears, and oncoming drowsiness induced by the book and time of day. I drifted off even with Ted's lamp still on. After a few moments, I felt a jabbing in the tenderest part of my side. It was Bang Bang wanting to sleep on me, despite having his pick of any number of cozy spots on our California-king size bed. He has quite a knack at finding the most sensitive part of our sides to jamb his paw into when he's settling in for the night.

I pushed him away and tried to go back to sleep. He was having none of it. When Bang Bang sets his mind on something, there's no deterring him, just like the time he tried to escape from being locked in the attic by ramming the door open with his face. Ted eventually turned his light off, and the battle for my side of the bed continued. I pushed Bang Bang away countless times, and Ted did his best to pull him away from my side as well. This went on for at least an hour. You may ask why we don't just shut the cats out of our room at night: because they, especially Bang Bang, claw, cry, and scratch at the door making it impossible to sleep. At least if they're in the room with us, they'll settle down somewhere on the bed and sleep too. I guess this is our way of trying out "attachment parenting," which some of our friends are big proponents of.

After some time, I heard Ted get up and go downstairs. I thought I'd still be able to go to sleep, so I turned on my left side while Bang Bang promptly nestled himself into the space behind my knees, satisfied at last.

Then I couldn't fall asleep. I got up eventually and found Ted writing emails at the computer. It was 2:20 am. Ted never has this much trouble sleeping. I went to the guest bed downstairs so that he could sleep not having to worry about waking me up, free to move around as much as he needed to.

I know that I slept eventually because I woke up in the morning. I couldn't have fallen asleep before 4:00 am though, which I thought was bad until Ted told me that he was up until 5:00. He'd gone back upstairs and worked more of the crossword puzzle, just not sleepy. Weird. He thinks it may have been the four shots of espresso he had yesterday.

So today is a hazy day. Ted's building railing on the deck, and I'm cooking pots of jambalaya and turnip greens. Ted's dad is coming over to eat dinner, something he sometimes puts up a fuss about, sometimes even saying, "Oh don't want any of your g*d*mn southern cooking!" When I told him two weeks ago that our friends Banyon and Melissa moved up to Oregon from Mississippi, he said, "Who do you people think you are, trying to take over our state with your backwood ways?!"

Ed's pretty good at pretending to be a curmudgeon. It's going to be an interesting two weeks in Ireland with him later this summer. I'm looking forward to observing Irish Ed in the homeland. He's going to so quickly fit in at the local pub, amidst the locals over pints of Guiness.

I did talk to our social worker today about the status of our homestudy. There had been a bit of confusion (on our part) about who actually proofs it, so we'd been thinking that Gladney currently had it. I called Gladney this morning to ask how the proofing is going, and our case worker knew nothing about it. After a very slight panic, I talked to our social worker who explained that, no, our home study agency has been proofing it for the last couple of days and that when they're done, Gladney can proof it.

Whew. That's a heck of a lot of proofing going on. It should be worthy of a Pulitzer by the time everyone's done with the thing.

As I was writing this, our social worker called to get the email for our Gladney caseworker so she could send it there. Yay. So it's officially off to Gladney, as of about a minute and a half ago.

Getting these final things done has really been feeling like it's dragging on. It felt strange to put our final envelope in the mail last week (extra passport photos), knowing this envelope is most likely the last one we have to mail. Now we're just waiting for our homestudy and dossier to be finished, both of which are out of our hands.

In the meantime, we're building our deck, forcing yankee relatives to eat southern cooking, taking our cats for walks at night (yes, it's true--all three go for nightly walks with us around the block--how awesome is that?), sleeping when we're able to, working crossword puzzles, reading good books, being inspired by pictures like this, and watching Oregon berries grow, like this one in our back yard.

Apple-fart!

I'm sure most people reading this blog have already seen this popular clip, but here it is anyway. It's a little girl figuring out why mom is laughing at her use of the word "ask," illustrating perfectly the need to censor our cuss-words in front of kids.

We've had a hard time deciding on a winner for this competition. There are so many good ones. "God bless America" reminds me of how my Granny and her sister, who we all call "Sister" despite her being our aunt, both say "Well, misery" in this long, drawn-out way. They also both say "Land forever!" I have no idea what that means, but they say it all the time.

I had been leaning towards "fart-hole" until Ted pointed out that one might not want their kid saying this. I also really like "son of a chicken liver" and "go blow it out your foot." I've actually already said the latter once this weekend. Ted really liked "farfegnugen" but we both admitted that it's sort of hard to pronounce, especially in a pinch when something else might slip out more easily.

"Piles of arse" is wonderful, reminds me of pirates and could give a nice, satisfactory "aaarrrr" sound.

The winner though, for being a nice combination of wholesome and nasty, and something we wouldn't mind our kids saying is: Apple-fart. Great job on that one, Rusty. It's especially funny if you are able to conjure up a mental picture of an actual pretty red apple letting one rip. How wonderful would it be if each time you pulled the stem out, the apple would let one out? As Ted says, "It's like the stem was holding the fart in and we get to uncork it." (one thing any Rooney kids will never miss out on is indulgence in bathroom humor--at least at home. Don't worry: we plan on teaching them how to behave in public. You can still invite us over for dinner, really. But come on--who of you who has seen Robots didn't laugh at Aunt Fanny?).

This is what Ted was doing with that wig. We have entirely too much time on our hands, people.

Favorite non-cuss words

The adoption process is a test of patience. So many lovely adoptive parents who normally don't cuss are stretched to the limit and often tempted to let out a full-flowing stream of their favorite words. I know I've done it, especially after the incident with the nurse. Here, Ted is recreating my face after getting off the phone with the nurse.


So it got me thinking: what are people's favorite non-cuss words, the words and phrases they use to blow off steam while in the presence of small children?

Ted's is "Jiminy Christmas." Mine is "Dadgumit or "dadgummit all to the pits of hell!" if it's especially bad, but both of these sound pretty boring. A couple of Yankee pals in Slovakia used to make fun of my frequent use of "dadgummit," but I don't remember them offering any better alternatives.

Here, Ted expresses physical pain (this is some high quality acting you're seeing here, people).


So what do you think? Got any alternatives for me? Leave your favorite non-cuss word and/or expression of disgust/anger/pain in a comment. Maybe you'll even get a prize.

Ethiopian cuteness

Our social worker actually thanked me for calling her today. As the mom of eight kids, all of whom are adopted, she said she can understand our eagerness to have the home study finished. I tried telling her that I'm not really as anxious about it as she thought, especially since we still have those two documents hanging out there. She said she's planning on working on our study tomorrow by the light of a small reading lamp during her daughter's dance recital practice, which apparently is in the dark. She hopes to have it done by the end of the week, even told me to call her then to see how it's going.

One of those documents is from our insurance company. Kate (of our dossier service) gave us the exact format the letter should be in, written in third person: "This is to certify that any dependent of Ted and Lori will be covered by their insurance...blah blah blah." The person we talked to at the company said it would be written just like that. Today we got in the notarized letter in the mail, all with the right words, except written in second-person: "This is to certify that any dependent of yours will be...blah blah blah." We're hoping it won't be a problem. Wouldn't that be something: sorry guys, you don't get a child since that insurance letter wasn't written in the right case.

Our friend Jill brought up today how cute all the Ethiopian kids are that she's seen. True dat. I offer proof by clicking here. Just wanted to pass along the link for a few moments of sighing at all the cuteness. Check out Owen Yosef, Amara, and the twins Zamara and Zayna. Oh my. How bad is it to pick favorites?

And yes, Neola, let's go get some tots!

Throw-away day.

Is any day a true cast-off? Today felt like one. We woke up this morning to a river in the basement due to the water heater bursting at some point during the night. Thank goodness we have a drain down there or the whole basement would have flooded. So Ted has spent the day shopping for a new heater, carting it home, and installing it. When he was dropping me off at the gym before another run to Home Depot, I asked him, "So where did you learn to install a water heater?"

"Well, I've installed a washing machine and I've installed a gas stove, so since a heater is a combination of plumbing and gas hook-up...."

"So you've never actually installed one before?"

"No."

But it's going well. I'm continually amazed at the skills Ted has picked up through the years. As I write this, it's all hooked up but there's a snag in getting the pilot light lit, so until then, no hot showers yet. At least we can always go to our 24-hour gym if we get desperate enough for a shower. I am starting to feel a bit funky.

Other than that, random things have been going on. I've been reading All Over But The Shoutin' by Rick Bragg, recommended to me by my friend Angela in Mississippi who called today to let me know that Dave, her husband, just got the job of Honors College Dean at the university there, so as Angela said, "Now I can quit my night shift at the Value-Barn and Dave says I can go get me a second pair of shoes."

I also found another adoption blog that I really really like, really. It's currently the first link under my blogs section.

Nothing to report yet about the homestudy. I haven't called our social worker yet to check up on things, though I may tomorrow. Our agency recommends doing that, just to stay on top of everything. I'm hoping it's all going well.

Lastly, I learned how to post videos to the blog, finally. It really wasn't that complicated...thanks for the blogging lesson Humphrey.

For your enjoyment, and proof of what I learned to do today, here's a video. It's not just another silly kitty video, I promise. It gets more absurd and more funny as it goes. Oh, and he has his own blog too, but he's currently having surgery to have a string that he'd eaten removed from his little kitty gullet. I'm sending good vibes his way. Boy, do we know about pet surgeries...that's a blog for another day.



Update: We have hot water! Ted succeeded. I'm just waiting now for the day when he breaks out his awesome nunchuck, bow-hunting, and computer-hacking skills...a man's gotta have skills.

And the really cool thing about the whole hot-water fiasco today is that we made the switch from an electric heater to a more energy-efficient gas one. And can you guess who managed to pull that one off? You got it, my very own man with skills. The basement wasn't wired for gas, but Ted got all the tubing figured out, at least eight connections, which he checked for leaks and everything. Sigh, my hero. No leaky gas in this house...at least in the basement, hardy har har.

And in celebration of the hot shower I'm now going to take, here is a clip from Flight of the Conchords, my new favorite comedy folk band. "I'm not crying'-- my eyes are just a little sweaty today."

Planet Hollywood

I recently found out through our friend Rusty's online movie "prejudgments" that the film 1408 is being released this summer. This isn't normally the type of movie that I'd go see, since the older I've gotten, the more nightmares I tend to get by watching anything scary, creepy, or dark. I'm fine if I watch a dark movie early enough in the day to block enough of it out by bedtime, but occasionally if I end up watching anything too intense too late in the day, I'll have horrible nightmares.

So while I don't necessarily plan on seeing 1408, I am interested in it because of the role it played in delaying our honeymoon in Ireland by a week. A couple of weeks before we were set to leave, Ted booked the role of "Kevin O'Maley" in a 'test film' for a studio. The deal was that this production company had greenlighted this film, based on a short story by Steven King, but they were undecided on who they should hire to direct it. There was this young director who wanted to do it, but he'd only directed music videos up until that point. The studio wasn't willing to give him full control of the film until he'd proven what he could do as a director.

So, they hired him to direct a 15 minute excerpt from the screenplay in order for him to show them his stuff. What's amazing to me is how much money they threw his way, just for a test. While I'm not an expert on these things, it really seemed like he got the full carte blanch for his fifteen minutes. I know this because Ted got paid his quote and I got to sample the yummy victuals from the craft services. That's some good food let me tell ya, one of the few things I really liked about living in Los Angeles.

Because Ted was getting paid decently for this and because we thought maybe there was a chance he'd get hired for the actual film, we decided that it was worth it to put off our honeymoon by a week. Being new to Los Angeles and especially to "the industry," I was interested in visiting the set too, though I seem to have chosen the wrong day to visit. Earlier in the week, as Ted was leaving the studio, he noticed this woman digging through a garbage bin, pulling out chunks of styrofoam and talking to a little Asian boy about his day at preschool. Yes, it was Angelina herself with Maddox. I guess the stars really are like us, just as People magazine tries to convince us of each week (though I'm not sure I ever have or ever will dig through a dumpster for styrofoam while talking about preschool).

I showed up on the set around lunchtime and walked around the sound-stage looking for Ted. A grip could see I was a bit lost and asked if I needed help. When I told him who I was looking for, he said, "Oh, the monster--sure, he's in his dressing room." It's always nice to hear someone refer to your newlywed husband as "the monster." So I went to his room and was genuinely shocked at what I found. Here's a picture of Ted, taken earlier in the day, getting his make-up touched up before filming:

There's the hottie I'd married a month before. I wish you could see his fingernails better here. It was the grossest thing about the whole make-up job. Apparently the story with Mr. Kevin O'Maley is that he'd killed himself in room 1408 and exists now as a ghost, living mostly in the air vents, which is why he's a tad moldy and covered in so much dust. Here's another photo, this one of Ted enjoying his dessert. The guy in the red shirt is the talented make-up artist.


I was genuinely weirded out eating lunch with Kevin O'Maley. I'd try to look mostly at my plate. These pictures don't accurately show the layers of mold on my husbands face, neck, hands, and even teeth (they had to do a fair amount of touching up after lunch).

I decided to stick around to watch the next and final scene being filmed and got my first taste of how awkward it is as an observer on set. You feel like you're constantly in the way, no matter how friendly everyone is or even if they've given you your own chair to sit in. I also got my first taste of how boring it usually is on set. You just do a lot of sitting around reading or doing crossword puzzles. Lastly, I got my first taste of how long the days can be on set. The idea with me coming to have lunch that day was that there was only one more scene to film in the afternoon, and then the whole thing would be wrapped. Since we were sharing a car at the time, I was also there to pick Ted up at the end of his work day.

That work day stretched until after midnight, the night before we were scheduled to leave for our honeymoon. In that final scene they were filming, the guy in the main role (which ended up going to John Cusack) decides to crawl into the air vent to prove the non-existence of this ghost. As he's crawling through it, he looks down into a room through a vent and then up again to find the ghost face to face with him before disappearing.

Ted was put on a small skateboard-type contraption on his stomach in the even bigger contraption they were using to film the inside of the vent so that when the main character looked up and saw the ghost face to face with him, Ted could be quickly pulled backwards with a rope and thus "disappear." You can see the final version of this scene that ended up being used in the film in the trailer. Even though it was pretty boring most of the time watching the first version of this scene being filmed with Ted, it genuinely looked pretty scary when they played it back on the monitor.

The production team knew that we had put off our honeymoon by a week and that we were leaving the next day, so as a thank-you, they paid the change fee of our plane tickets and gave Ted this really expensive bottle of scotch. It was nice of them.

So why didn't Ted end up being Kevin O'Maley in the final version of the film? Who knows? It was another realization for me about how Hollywood works: you never count on anything "until the check's in the mail," as Ted says. We do know that the young director who worked with Ted didn't end up getting hired by the studio, though I'm sure the studio honchos were really nice about it, letting him down easy. Everyone in Hollywood loves ya babe, with a big smile, so no hard feelings. Hey, the director got paid too, and I hope he's still doing at least music videos. We thought he did an awesome job on the 15 minutes he shot of 1408.

Here's a final picture of Ted on set, getting his nails inspected, my very own Monster.


The trailer to the theatrical release of 1408 can be seen here. If you have young kids at home, just a warning: the trailer is surprisingly frightening, despite it being approved for viewing by "all ages."

And no, Ted's feelings weren't hurt by not getting cast in the final version of the film. I believe that the reason Ted has lasted so long in the job he has is because he refuses to take anything personally. He just goes to work, which he sees as auditioning. If he books a job, then that's extra credit. He doesn't tell anyone at all (sometimes not even me) about his auditions because when an actor does this, he's setting himself up for the inevitable letdown of telling well-meaning friends over and over, "No, I didn't get it." Actors don't book 90+ percent of the jobs they audition for, and it becomes psychologically damaging to think too much about all the work they're not getting.

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On the adoption front: Our friends Jim and Rusty (thanks, guys!) have both mailed in their notarized letters for our dossier, and we're sure the third will go off soon.

On Monday night, I found out that a lady at our small group is a CPA, so she's working on that final financial form for us as we speak. Then that's it people. Job done.

Our social worker should be finishing up her report and sending it in to CIS, at which point they call us in for fingerprinting. Then the whole thing goes off to Kate and we wait and wait and wait.

In the meantime, we're getting ready for our trip to Ireland with our dads by going to see Once tomorrow with my father-in-law. We're also listening to this song, just because it's funny (thanks, Debra, for turning us on to Flight of the Conchords!). I think anyone married for longer than a year can appreciate it (or c'mon, maybe six months...).