If you check Misheru regularly, you’ll have noticed the site has been broken or down for a couple months.

Clearly, this is my mother’s fault.

Did she touch it? No. Does she have any idea how to touch it? No. However, she expressed a desire to leave comments, whereupon I decided that I needed to upgrade WordPress. This upgrade resulted in a complete crash of the site, and I had to involve Marti in trying to get it back up. Then I wanted to change the architecture of the backend while we were at it, which resulted in other problems. Then I tried to restore it, accidentally deleted the whole thing, and had to restore from a June backup (luckily I didn’t lose any data).

See? Completely my mother’s fault.

Anyway, after spectacularly burning my site to the ground, last night we (okay, Marti) accidentally fixed it — he saw a message about the theme and ventured to delete it, and suddenly my site lived again. Apparently the cool cluttered desktop theme that I loved so dearly was incompatible with the new version of WordPress, which was why the site crashed in the first place. Oh, and those comments? Turns out I had a weird setting on them AND that the database where my comments lived had been corrupted.

That may have sounded like Greek, or possibly Roman, but the end result is that the site is up with a new look. I found this cool desktop theme, similar to my last one, and I love it. I even have a Cruzer thumb drive that looks like the one on the right used for the search window. This theme was created by Roam2Rome (see? there is a Roman!) and whoever that person is, she or he did a fantastic job. Thanks.

Since the site has been down all summer, I have a lot of catching up to do, so watch this space.

25. I have a terrible soft spot for fluffy things, and particularly love “flat” things because they remind me of how my favorite dog in childhood used to lay with his legs backward. I was a slave to Tare Panda in Japan.

24. I’ve been secretly obsessed with art ever since a Picasso (blue period) I saw in a museum in London moved me to tears.

23. I also have a very bad sense of humor, and my first web page had a link to a website of farting dogs. You had to mouse-over the dogs to make them fart. I loved it and it always made me laugh.

22. When I was in junior high, I wanted to have four kids and to be a writer some day.

21. The idea to live overseas came to me the first time I learned to meditate in prayer when I was 9.

20. I feel terribly guilty about having more money or more things than other people. This does not stop me from trying to accumulate both.

19. I have an obsession with popping zits. I cannot explain this.

18. If I were a little less balanced and a little more militant, I would be an eco-soldier, because natural beauty moves me so deeply I cannot even explain it. If I am too far removed from nature, I always fall into a deep depression. Conversely, working with dirt, hiking or getting outside almost always makes me feel better.

17. I secretly believe in life on other planets (well, not so secretly now, I suppose). I simply believe the logic is there; space is too big to be totally empty. However, I accept that “life” might consist entirely of members of the roach family, whereupon I would spray that extraterrestrial life with the best bug-killer money could buy.

16. When I got lonely overseas, I actually cared for the spiders and geckos living in my house. I had multiple spiders missing a leg or two that I cultivated. When I left, however, I forgot about them until the next teacher moved in. She spent one terrified night in the middle of the house, huddled with her 5-year-old and a babysitter, with spiders in every corner. She did her best to exterminate them. When she told me, I acted sympathetic, but in truth I was extremely sad about the loss of my arachnid pets, and I did not tell her I had let them live inside on purpose.

15. I hate bicycling. I cannot explain why, but I do; however, I still go biking for “fun” with others.

14. I don’t really like candy. If it isn’t chocolate or doesn’t have frosting, it really doesn’t interest me.

13. By the time I met my husband, I had decided I never wanted to get married. Perversely, the man I was dating wanted to marry me, and I was still dating him when my husband decided he wanted to marry me too. This just goes to show the absolute perversity of men.

12. I love quilts, but I absolutely abhor quilting. I don’t mind sewing, but quilting makes me want to stab myself with something sharp.

11. I am not afraid of tarantulas, and don’t mind most creepy-crawlies so long as they don’t surprise me. I loathe cockroaches.

10. I once ate a fish while it was still alive, pretty much on a dare. As an added bonus, it had poisonous spines, which I had to rip out with my teeth.

9. I felt like I had bad karma for many weeks after this incident.

8. I am also somewhat superstitious.

7. When Marti met me, I had been doing yoga for two years and could wrap my legs around my head.

6. I think this might be why I was getting multiple marriage proposals.

5. No matter how many things I learn, I never feel “smart” enough. This often makes me obnoxious, as I try to show people I am not dumb.

4. I am, at heart, painfully shy, and being in a crowd can sometimes actually cause me physical pain.

3. For some reason, I often feel ashamed if I do not understand some nuance about another person’s culture or customs. See #5.

2. I love people very deeply, which is why I tend to have a few, very close friends rather than a wide circle.

1. If I could be other than who I am, I would be a very fluffy people-person who could talk to anyone. I also make fun of these kinds of people, while I secretly envy them.

..these posts are making babies!

One, two three…

It’s a crazy world in the Martinez household, with four dogs and two cats now holding court in a borrowed house. A few days ago Saffron and Henna, one of the dogs we’re housesitting, jumped out the window we keep cracked for the cats. (The cats, I might add, are very unhappy that we’ve taken up residence here; they responded by urinating on everything in the closet in Ben’s room. Subtle, cats are.) Have I mentioned the poop?  It appears that six animals create a lot of, shall we say, animal waste?  Or, in other words, there’s a lot of sh** going down around here.

Yes, it’s Saturday, and by 6:30 a.m. this morning we were in full crisis mode.  Two dogs got out of the yard this morning but only one came back (Saffron, my dog, the one I can AFFORD to lose of course); I called and called, and finally a neighbor stopped me and said she had found Henna and had her in her yard. We went to her house, only to find that Henna had escaped — again. I organized a small neighborhood search team to find her, only to find she had finally gone home  – Ben very graciously let her in and closed the door silently behind her. I’m not sure how many years I lost off my life over that.

However, as anyone who is a pet owner knows, there are moments when the owner gets to remember why s/he decided to adopt or buy or accept a pet and today it was Ewok’s turn to remind us why the escaping/pooping/barking/shedding is worth it.

Behold, Maya, asleep on the floor after throwing a fit because she decided she wanted peanut butter toast instead of peanut butter bread:

Yep, she fell asleep in the middle of a tantrum.

Yes, she is asleep in the middle of the kitchen, in her white princess dress, in the middle of a trantrum. I think she might have been a teensy bit tired — after all, she got up at 6 a.m. to play with the dogs.

I kept walking past her, getting snacks, making tea, etc., when I looked down and saw this:

I think the girl and dog MIGHT have bonded a little.

Ewok, as I’ve mentioned, is ridiculously cute, and curled up next to the naughty little princess…well, it’s going to be a bit tough to find him a new home, now, isn’t it?

HMMMMMmmmmmmm.

Tuesday, if all goes well, we will sign off on the sale of our home here in central Tucson. It’s hard to put down into words how I feel about this, but let’s just say that I am very much looking forward to Tuesday.

I’ve chronicled in this blog some of the reverse culture shock that I felt when I moved back to the US from Japan — my inability to look at people in the eye during a job interview (considered rude in Japan); my struggle to “re-learn” English; my frustration at certain cultural challenges (diet, cars) that makes it hard to lead a healthy lifestyle. But, there was and is a part of me that wants to buy into being a citizen of my own country and acting like everyone else.  So, after Ben was born, we bought a new car and then a house — otherwise known as fulfilling the American “dream.”

The American Nightmare

It entertains me to see the number of articles about how “homeownership isn’t all that great” now that the housing market has crashed, but just five years ago someone writing an article about that would have been lost in the shuffle to buy, buy, buy. The idea that homeownership somehow changed standard of living rippled through government at all levels, and we saw janitors and hamburger flippers signing on the dotted line to buy a place of their very own.  We bought a few years before the general frenzy, in 2002, but were greatly encouraged by our friends and family to “buy as much house as we could afford.”
continue reading "Letting Go"

So, the “baby doggie” we picked up last week has been christened Ewok, as in the Ewoks from Return of the Jedi, and yes, he really does look like that. Behold:

Looks cute, doesn't he?

He’s small, and he doesn’t chew up things as ferociously as Saffron, but to date he has:

• Peed on the corner my couch
• Peed on the corner of my comforter
• Peed on the corner of my backpack
• Peed on the corner, any corner
• Pooped in front of the kids’ room
• Pooped in front of the fireplace
• Humped Saffron
• Humped both a massive lab/pitbull mix and a lab/sharpei mix (he could run under their bellies with clearance)
• Humped my leg
• Humped Marti’s leg
• Peed in Marti’s shoes…3 times

Needless to say, Ewok is a very special doggie.  Very, very special.  He’s super cute, except for the whole peeing/pooping/humping problem.  Also, he collects dirt like a mop.  We just let him run around the house and then wring him out at the end of the day.

A close second to the name “Ewok” was “Roomba.”  ’Nuff said.

My mother is coming to adopt him in a few weeks, but shhhhh.  Don’t tell her how naughty he is.  It’s a secret.

The original Ewok

Today I saw this little dog wandering around the wash near Ben’s school, and before Marti could blink I had jumped out of the car, picked up the dog and placed him between Ben and Maya.  Maya, of course, “loved him” all the way back to the house to drop him off with Saffron while we went to a meeting with our tax guy. An hour later we came back, humbled after getting yelled at by the tax guy for not having all our documents from 2007 (I barely can keep track of documents from YESTERDAY) when I realized that the little dog had slipped out of our yard.  We’re used to our 50-pound hound, who couldn’t get through the bars without a crowbar and a diet, but of course this little 10-pound ball of fluff probably just walked right through them after we drove away.  Duh.  So I put the leash on Saffron and proceeded to walk the arroyos all the way back to where we found the little guy the first time.  Forty-five minutes and many scary underground graffiti-filled tunnels later, we hadn’t found the dog, so I headed home on top of the ground rather than under it.  Saffron and I finally get back to the house when I decide to peek the OTHER direction down the arroyo and we walk half a block down, where I see a little bit of fluff moving behind the house NEXT DOOR.  Yes, the DOG WAS NEXT DOOR THE ENTIRE TIME.

Oh well.  At least Saffron and I got our exercise.  Also, there were some fantastically beautiful places in those tunnels, like one with a mirrored vent up to the road that sparkled like crystals and made even the graffiti beautiful.  One of these days I’m going to dredge up my courage and take my new camera down those washes and film some of those places.  Hopefully with a weapon in the other hand.  It’s hard to believe there are such deserted places weaving through and under the center of the city.

Regardless, fluff ball was duly re-captured and brought back to the house.  I washed him, and washed him, and washed him, and then I cut a million burrs out of his coat, including some very painful and gross ones around his rear end (if God is a dog lover, I definitely upped the size of my mansion with that one).  He was pretty good-natured about the whole thing, just crying a bit when it hurt, and frantically licking me as a kind of peace gesture.  I’ve filed a lost dog report with the humane society and posted a photo on craigslist, so we’ll see if this little guy has an owner somewhere.  It’s hard to say; he is clearly a sweet dog, but it looks like he’s been lost for a while, as he is a little sick with diarrhea and was full of burrs, and I combed out a tick and a lot of dirt from his coat.  He’s been duly sprayed with flea/tick spray, and gotten a little disinfectant on the sore bits.  If you recognize him, leave a comment and I’ll be in touch.

And yes, I’m a big sucker, but look at that face:

Okay, I have to admit that I am writing this because I am procrastinating at work.  YES, I AM WRITING THIS AT WORK, BUT IT’S MY LUNCH HOUR.  That being said, I’m probably going to eat some of the yummy hummus and pita + salad I bought while hunched over my desk trying to fix this DARN BUG!!! OOOh, I hate computers sometimes!  Particularly when my code is buggy.  But I fixed three bugs this morning, so I’m feeling a little entitled right now.

Anyway!  Back to the car.

Anyone who knows me knows the saga of me and my Ford Focus. Here’s the short long story: in college, my parents bought me a Ford Festiva (thank you mom and dad!) which I dearly loved.  It was small.  It was red.  Its name was Ho-Ho.  It got 42 mpg and almost never broke down, and it cost $100 to replace all 4 tires.  In short, it was car nirvana.

However, after we had Ben, it became car hell. We took back a carseat because it literally could not fit into the tiny backseat.  The next carseat, the smallest we could find for a newborn, only just fit, and then only if Marti drove with his knees around his ears.  Also, Ho-Ho didn’t have a/c, which was only miserable for a few months in Washington, DC — but we were moving to Tucson.  So one day I declared that I would NOT move to Tucson with an infant unless I had a car with air conditioning, which in hindsight was REALLY FREAKING SMART of me.  I can’t tell you the number of times I had to pull over in 110-degree weather to nurse Ben when he was little (Ben, if you’re reading this, YOU NEVER PUT MY NIPPLE IN YOUR MOUTH.  REALLY.) and I would leave that a/c going full blast, bringing the temperature of the car down to a comfortable 95+.  (Marti: mmmm, nipples). But I digress…

So, since I had loved my little Ford so very much, and it had been such a great car (I’d had a very, very crappy Subaru in highschool, whose tailpipe had broken in the middle of a church scavenger hunt leaving sparks and terrifying old ladies all over Ontario, Oregon.  Did I stop?  OF COURSE NOT) that I decided to buy another Ford. At first I wanted a Ford Fiesta, one jump up from the Festiva, only to find Ford had stopped making them in lieu of their new model, the Focus.  Some friends of ours had just bought a Focus (they had a new baby too) and just raved about it, so despite the fact that we had really been considering a Honda Civic, we went ahead and bought the Ford.  Oh, yes, we bough the farm Ford.

Our 2002 Focus worked well for about 6 months, whereupon it started making strange clicking noises that could be heard whenever we had the windows down. It was under warranty, so I happily took it to the dealership, where they kept it for 3 weeks (we only had bicycles to ride the entire time) and then declared nothing was wrong, it was perfectly fine, and I was clearly paranoid/insane.  Hmmmmmm.

We got the car back, only to hear the clicking noises some more, so I diligently took it back to the dealership.  They kept it another 2 weeks, but this time we hit paydirt — the transmission was bad.  What?  We had about 17K miles on the car (we had driven it to Tucson from DC) but I was very surprised to have lost the transmission already, and I blamed Marti’s driving.  It took another week to get a transmission in it, but after that there wasn’t any clicking, so we were happy.

Fast forward to 20,000 miles: stock tires are bald and have to be replaced. $400.

28,000 miles: during the very first brake change we found that the stock rotors were tiny and would have to be replaced.  Cost: $800.

37,000 miles: just out of warrranty, the car starts clicking again.

47,000 miles: Marti runs the car into an arroyo during a flash flood and the car has to be rebuilt from the bottom up.  We heave a sigh of relief as we get a 3rd transmission as part of the deal. We are without a car for 6 weeks.

55,000 miles: Back tires are bald again. Replacement cost: $300.

75,000 miles: Despite rotating tires, back tires are bald again. Replacement: $300 (yes, we should have used our warranty, but we hadn’t rotated every 5K miles and thus it was worthless — a good lesson).

85,000 miles: Car starts clicking again.

90,000 miles: Back tires are bald again.  My dad takes a look and says its the alignment.  We take it to a shop, who says it will cost $300 to align the tires because Fords have to have a special kit.  We also find out that the tires have never been aligned, and we probably bought the car that way because of how the dealers ship them on trucks, which is why our 75K tires only last 20K.  Cost: $600 with new tires (warranties don’t count if there is an alignment issue).

100,000 miles: Fuel pump dies. Replacement: $750.

105,000 miles: Car starts popping out of 5th gear and hydraulic fluid is running down the clutch pedal.  I suspect the transmission and clutch master cylinder, and take it to a shop.  They agree.  Cost: $3000.  Since the car is only worth $3200 in perfect condition, we consider it totaled.

Here’s the funny thing: I am totally and completely relieved. We’ve been fighting with that car for 8 years, so much so that I actually took a 1984 Toyota pickup on a 5,000 mile road-trip rather than drive our 3-year-old car.  We never knew when it was going to break down, blow a (new) tire, or just do something strange.  After about 15K miles, EVERYTHING rattled on it, to the point of driving us totally insane.  In fact, Marti would often speed in rental cars, because in our car the rattles got to be unbearable at about 70 mph, so it was easy to hear if you were speeding or not.  Since my parents were here, we took my dad and started looking around.  I thought I wanted to buy a Honda Accord or something similar (the Prius is still out of our price range) but I really wanted leather seats, so we looked at a lot of Volvos and Saabs and BMWs.  I had fun test-driving an older BMW 3-series, but it seemed small and the seats didn’t fold down in the back, which is problematic for us with our single car.  Finally, at a wholesale dealership I had gone to to check out a Saab, I saw it: a beautiful, 11-year-old Acura with leather seats, sunroof, power everything and Bose sound system for just $6K.  We took it for a test drive and I found it hard to give it back; we drove it for 45 minutes, checking out such novel features as the motorized, telescoping steering wheel (I had to sit on a pillow during long trips in our Ford), heated seats, lumbar support and cruise control.  I think the dealer thought we’d done a runner on him, but we did come back and offered him $5200.  We finally decided on $5400 plus taxes, which was a great deal and came to just over $6K out-the-door (taxes are high in Tucson).  The car doesn’t rattle.  It doesn’t grind.  It’s comfortable to drive and doesn’t hurt my back.  The kids love the back seat, which is big enough for them to actually stretch their legs, and I love the sunroof and the little niche where I can put my sunglasses.

I know that cars aren’t perfect — the Acura does occasionally make a buzzing noise when you first turn the a/c or heater on — but minor defects are different from new transmissions every 25K miles. More than the money, it’s the time in the shop that I dislike; we’ve had a second car from time to time (the Toyota pickup and a Volvo station wagon) but we are primarily a 1-car family, and I don’t think it’s reasonable to have a car in reserve just because the main car breaks down all the time.  I’m sure we’ll have to fix things on the Acura — after all, it’s an 11-year-old car! — but there’s a huge difference in quality here.  I’m not sure I would ever buy a new car again, and I don’t plan to ever buy another Ford (turns out Kia made my beloved Festiva, and sold it to Ford who slapped their tag on it).

As for the Ford, it’s scrap metal now.  We’ll probably donate it the end of the year, although I will try my hand at fixing the master cylinder if I can find some cheap parts, primarily just for the learning experience.  Some friends of ours just bought a new Ford Focus, despite our history with ours, and all I have to say is — good luck.  I’ll wave while driving by in my Acura.

The last few years Marti and I have had a terrible time keeping track of our cameras, and to date I believe we’ve lost 2 so far. I’m not sure exactly how it is possible for us to “lose” a camera, but the last time we saw our Olympus (which I liked very much) was at the annual mud puddle at Reid Park here in Tucson two years ago. We got all these great shots of Ben and Maya with 2,000 of their closest friends playing in giant, fire-hose created puddles of mud…only to get home and be totally unable to find our camera. Probably I set it on a table, or on top of the car, or Maya “took” some pictures and left it on the grass, who knows?  Sadly, all those photos of my children completely covered in mud are all gone.

So, I told Marti I wanted a cheap camera this time, thinking that our camera, which was $300 when we bought it, could be re-purchased for a song.

Wrong.

Cheap is still cheap, and the little digital camera ($75) we bought to replace ours, well, sucked. I could only get decent shots if it was on manual and I set each and every setting myself, the flash washed everything out and photos were grainy or blurry all the time.  We stopped taking it with us, it became such a chore to actually shoot a single photo, and the video option only worked outside. I mean, come on, I’m only going to take videos outside?  In perfect lighting?  Because too much light would overexpose the video (read: digital, still overexposing) and too little would make it look like twilight, with vaguely moving blurry shapes.  Also, unless I set the white color on it manually, everything turned out blue-ish.

This sad excuse of a camera was MIA as of a few weeks ago, and I can’t say I miss it.

While my parents were visiting, I borrowed the Sony Cyber-Shot my siblings and I bought them a couple years ago.  Yes, I bought my parents a decent camera, but didn’t buy one for myself. I was really impressed with their camera, and have a few hundred photos to sift through and post on this blog.

Because that’s the point of this endless ramble: until I get a new camera, just expect my crappy writing, no pictures.  The end.