Adina's Acres

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http://adinasacres.wordpress.com/


**another one that should have been posted in January.

Bliss

Tonight was dancing to a mariachi record in the Moose's bedroom.  The lights in her room are a strand of pink Christmas lights strung along her ceiling, attached to a white set in her closet.  My dance partners tonight included: Yobo, the Moose, Minnie Mouse, and a plush baby giraffe rattle. 


***I have been SO behind on things!  This should've been posted in January.

The Explanation

So my last post was pulled because... I got skeered.  I submitted it to a place looking for writers, which is something I've wanted to do for a LONG time, and didn't get any response back.  I thought maybe they were offended by what I wrote.  I thought maybe someone I didn't know would read it, not understand, be offended, and have bad words to say.  I thought maybe some I *did* know would read it, not understand, be offended, and have bad words to say.  There was a lot of fear.  Fear I am trying to learn to overcome!  Well, maybe not "overcome," but embrace and run into, rather than away from.  Otherwise, how will I ever know if there was anything, really, of which to be scared?

I am a runner.  And not in the athletic sense, though I occasionally do that sometimes, too.  I am a runner from emotion & responsibility.  I am a runner from everything of which I am scared, which is kind of everything.  I will stop running.  Maybe I'll just walk slowly.

Moving on up...

This was originally posted on March 29.  I took it down because I got skeered, but am now reposting unabashedly!

Well, making progress in my recently declared war on anxiety & lack of inner peace anyway.  I tried some meditating and it worked.  A lot.  And now I don't like meditating - brought a virtual emotional tsunami to my brain.  For a moment, I thought I might drown!  It was brought up that maybe I should try GUIDED meditation as I apparently have no problem with "getting there", but more a problem of defining where "there" should be...

Next Monday, I will attempt my first guided meditation session and see how it fares.  B has been going to this session for a while now & is quite pleased with it.  From what I gather, there is someone leading the group & he gives you a (meditation) path to follow and walks you down it so, hopefully, I shouldn't get lost in the flood of abandoned childhood memories. 

Also, at massage last night, my masseuse gifted me a set of meditation CDs - something called the Silva method.  I'd never heard of it, but she assured me it was fantastic.  When I got home, Yobo took a look, rolled his eyes, said something about Silva being a Jung-ian, then announced that he wouldn't poo-poo on this train and was shutting his mouth. 

At school, I am working on an exercise to get to know me better.  I was given a stack of cards with words printed on them & was instructed to not think about it, just tape each card under a column, headers being: Korean, Korean-American, and American.  The exercise, I was assured, would help me evaluate my values and help me to understand from where my values stemmed.  I went through about 20 cards, supposed to do some more tonight.  In the little bit we've worked out so far, it appears that my image of Korean values may be slightly negative... which maybe I already knew & wanted to work on, which is probably why I agreed to this exercise to begin with.  

Many of my "Korean experiences" left a bad taste in my mouth, but I was also fairly isolated in what Koreans I had access to - only the ones at mema's behest and most of them were at her church (which is also a major source of my discontent with organized religion).  I never got a clear picture of what it meant to be Korean as a little person and have found over time that, yes, just like anything else, I need to open myself to knowledge beyond my experience.  Mema's church taught me that Koreans are racist (I'm only half, which makes me not whole, which makes me not a real person), women are scary (especially to maturing girls), men are drunks (sometimes mean ones) beaten into submission (by their women), and I will never be good enough.  For anything.  And nothing means anything unless a Korean told you.  And money trumps everything.  Everything.  Except maybe saving face.  But really, everything, because enough money can buy your face a bit of saving.  I wouldn't say I was ashamed to be Korean, but more that I wasn't exactly proud of it and felt no desire to explore it.  And that is so sad and the first time I have ever actually written/typed that out.

But the birth of the Moose had me cracking open a door I'd locked a long time. While she's only a quarter Korean, it's important for her to know & understand her heritage.  I had a very fragmented, misinterpreted interpretation of what it is to be Korean.  She should know that there is much more to Korea that what her Nana can explain with any clarity.  I cracked open the door almost 2 years ago, so hopefully things have aired out.  It's pretty dusty in here, time to get to work! 

FALAFEL!!!!!!

Haven't posted in forever, but we're still around!  I'm so excited - my work boss is going to pick up falafel sammies for lunch!!!  Now I've got a major rumbly in my tumbly!

Also, just found out YESTERDAY that Easter not only sometimes happens in March, but it's on the Moose's birthday this year!  We'll spend Saturday in Stills' Valley (with Yobo's family) and Sunday with mema & my sissies.  Sunday we're celebrating the Moose's 2nd birthday, Easter, AND a bon voyage party for my sissy & nephew, who are heading to Latvia on the 1st. 

My nephew is on out (locally) famous kid's hockey team (is that squirts?) was invited to an international hockey tournament.  When I asked him if he read up on the local cuisine, he looked at me funny and said "no, why?"  OMG.  I hope he has a wonderful trip.  The Big C (his mama), on the other hand, already has a tour planned with a local abandoned prison & is getting ready for Latvian yummies.

AND THE MOOSE WILL BE TWO YEARS OLD ON SUNDAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

How the frak did that happen?  Oh man.  She told me yesterday that moose like to play in the snow (which she pronounces "noose") and that she wanted to go play in the noose like a moose  :D

School pretty much sucks up all of my non-work / non-baby attending life, so that's really all that's been going.  Oh!  And Yobo milled his first ever logs the other weekend (we bought a chainsaw & a portable saw mill) - hello structural beams for our future home! 

the (lack of) Technology

Dear Moose,

Do you remember this picture?

Well, it's from your first birthday - we were playing a game where we laid these objects out in front of you, you were to pick one, and it would give us a clue as to what your calling in life would be.  You picked the computer mouse; we were all a little surprised, but that was what met your fancy.  We started thinking of what kind of things you might be interested in; where would future technologies take you?

Your dad & I knew not too many months later that you truly did have a technology-based... thing.  You tried, effortlessly, multiple times to wipe & reload my laptop; you attempted to take apart dad's laptop; later, after you were allowed to watch TV, you LOVED being allowed to turn the TV on.  I got a Kindle for Christmas from Auntie Mimi & you promptly destroyed it exactly one month later... how, we still don't know, but whatever you did (or didn't do) worked (or didn't work) really well.  Then yesterday happened.

Apparently you have been using the Wii & the Blu-ray player as piggy banks.  We don't know for how long, but we first noticed strange things last week when the Blu-ray player began to randomly shut itself down (we didn't think much of this at the time).  Then yesterday happened.

While I was at work, dad was playing on his computer in the office.  He noticed you'd been a little too quiet, so he went to the living room to check on you... just in time to watch you flip the switch on the power strip that everything on the entertainment stand was plugged into; just in time to watch the arc that jumped out from said power strip, knocking you back onto the floor (don't worry, you were OK - shocked for sure, but physically OK).   When he checked everything out, he found pennies everywhere - stuffed in the Blu-ray player & Wii mostly.  And there were a LOT of pennies.  Too many pennies for you to have stuffed them all in there in the short time you were alone in the living room.  Too many pennies for either device to sustain.  Too many pennies! 

What APPEARS to have happened is that you had been stuffing every penny you came across into one device or another.  Whatever was stuffed in there yesterday must have overloaded it with metals because once you flipped everything on... ZAP!  We no longer have a TV or a Wii or Blu-ray disc player.  Suffice to say, you are definitely interested in electronic technology.  And, really, truly, to understand the way something works, you've got to understand how it DOESN'T work.

STAY AWAY FROM MY LAPTOP. 

Love,

Mama

2013

Oh my gosh – no posts yet this year!  Well, Happy New Year!  We didn’t do anything exciting… the whole house was asleep by 11pm LOL

We are officially business owners in the state of Alaska!  Adina’s Acres is live & in prime time  J  Yobo has started a website for it… we’ll see how it progresses.  If you want to watch the progression, head on over to the official Adina's Acres website.  We’ve already received our first seed order & germination has begun  :D  We’ve got some tomatoes & potatoes started inside, as well as an accidental pepper we’re now testing – sometimes, when little ones (like the Moose) are trying to be helpful by making a mess, they actually start something they didn’t even realized they started LOL 

A couple of months ago, the Moose was eating some sweet peppers and spat out the seeds in such a way that they sprayed the kitchen.  Yobo had planted some new hot pepper seeds to try out.  When it was time to harvest the peppers, they were, much to our surprise, not hot peppers at all!  We had been amazed that the “hot pepper” was doing so well because we didn’t think the conditions were ideal, but this thing just blew up.  Hahaha it makes a heck of a lot more sense now knowing that they were sweet peppers (which, incidentally, the conditions were perfect for).  It appears that the Moose’s seed-spraying action actually ended planting some sweet peppers that propagated  J  No experience necessary!

Winter is starting to wear on me – mostly because it’s been so kooky!  The last couple of weeks have given us 50 ºF and rain!  UG.  Then it dropped to the 10s – 20s & we got at least 6 inches of snow in the last 2 days.  We’re supposed to be back up to 35 ºF by the end of the week L  I know some of you may think warmer is better, but NOOOO!!!!  Warm = rain = ice = no snow = no thermal mass = voles galore = major agri damage.  This is what we had last year – higher temps & loads of wind, which yielded one of our coolest summers on record. 

Spring semester just started & almost all of the schools in the Anchorage & Mat-Su were closed on the first day due to warm weather.  Yes, due to WARM weather.  It was so icy & nasty on the side roads & parking lots that it was too unsafe to buses picking up kids from neighborhood streets turned ice rinks.  There was literally a picture of a girl ice skating on the street in front of her house on the front page of our local paper earlier this week – it’s even become an internet meme!  I posted it on my Facebook!  The tagline read: Alaska, the only place where school is cancelled for warm weather (or something like that anyway).  This sucks.  It’s hard to take the Moose outside right now, too, cause it’s so icy out, she just continually busts her butt.

I’ve been glued to my Kindle since Christmas & have been utterly neglectful of blogging.  Oi vei.  It’s been so busy.  I did bust my sewing machine back out though!  It’s been almost a year.  Oh man is it angry at me.  It was feeling very lonely & unloved.  I think we’re finally starting to get along again though J  I made the Moose her first ever pillow case.  Pictures will have to follow later.  I didn’t take pictures of the whole process, but there are some really cute pics of the Moose checking her new pillow out.

On the Kindle, I’ve been plowing through the The Secrets ofthe Immortal Nicholas Flamel by Michael Scott.  I’ve just started Book 5 of the 6 part series.  The Kindle that Mimi (my biggest little sister) gave me for Christmas was her old one – she left all of the books on it for me!  I was playing around with it the day after Christmas, just to check it out, and started on Book 1… now my TV schedule’s all out of whack because I’m glued to this thing!

Mimi gave some really great presents for Christmas – she gave the Moose a stuffed Pooh bear (he’s in at least one of the Christmas pictures I posted).  Almost 2 weeks ago, for the first time ever, the Moose asked for a friend to go to night night with her.  I was a little hesitant at first; this would be the first non-blanket item in her crib!  But I figured, if she was able to ask for it, she should be good & she has been!  He’s now part of her night routine – final snack, change diaper & clothes, brush teeth, wash face & hands, find the blankie (& now Pooh, too!), time for night night.  Awesome.