I’ve been reading a series of mystery/detective books lately, and that’s put me in a sleuthing mood. They say you can tell a lot about a woman by looking through her purse. Pursuant to that, I’ve decided to look through my purse at the moment and document what I find. If this seems boring, you can stop reading at any time and go find your smurf name at http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mule/smurfgen.html.

1. The Purse: my purse is probably 3 years old. I got it at Target for $5. It’s my “summer purse”, as it has kind of summery colors of yellow, blue, green, and brown. It’s not trendy, but it’s sturdy and simple with a zipper top and not much else. It’s something I don’t mind putting on the ground or throwing in the trunk with the groceries. From this I guess you can tell that I don’t care that much about being in fashion and that I’m rather laid back when it comes to my things. The purse isn’t dirty and I’ve kept it in good condition by making repairs when it gets damaged. I guess that makes me thrifty (or cheap depending how you look at it).

2. My wallet: a hand-me-down leather wallet from 1992. It has a change area, some pockets for credit cards and a long cash pocket that folds in half when the wallet is snapped closed. My debit card, BYU ID, and license are easily accessible from the outside of the wallet.

Inside is my benefits Visa, my temple recommend, a list of the Articles of Faith, a book of stamps, my CostCo card, my library cards, my insurance cards, my social security card, my old Utah ID, a picture of Dinomight with my brother, and the business card for my Ob/Gyn office. Oh, and $6 cash and my bank account information.

What can we tell from this? Well, I’m prepared with everything I need to easily get through most situations. I can teach about the church, check out library books, have an emergency at the hospital, apply for a job at BYU, do a missing person’s search for Dinomight, attend the temple, mail a letter, and pay for prescriptions. Also you can tell that I don’t rent movies, belong to any grocery store promos, carry a condom, keep a lot of cash on me, or have any credit cards. Also, the BYU ID is deceptive, as I graduated 2 years ago.

3. My cell phone: it’s fully charged and locked. It sits in a case that I made myself out of one that my boss was throwing away. The wallpaper is my Dinomyn smiling up at me. My call list involves mostly the same numbers: my mom, Dinomyn, Duchess, Latro, my voicemail, my sisters. It’s a nice phone, but I’ve dropped it a few times, so it has some scratches. It’s a Sony Ericsson T616 camera phone, the same as Latro’s. So, here’s thrifty again, using a hand-me-down case. I’m a mom (or I at least know a baby) due to the wallpaper. I’m not too social, due to the call list. I can be a bit clumsy, due to the scratches.

4. Two discount movie tickets to Cinemark Movies that expire in August 2005. Either somebody loves me and they were a gift, or I’m thrifty and buy my tickets discount before I go to the box office.

5. My clip-on sunglasses: slightly the worse for the wear, as they’re about 5 years old. They are magnetic, which means that I wear glasses and they came as a set when I bought my glasses. The fact that they’re in my purse could imply that I don’t wear contacts, which is true. I prefer the ease of glasses: they’re easy to take off and put on, they don’t wear out your eyes, they come with sunglasses…

6. A receipt from Tepanyaki the Japanese Steakhouse: I love asian food. Unfortunately, this receipt was for when Dinomight went out with Duchess and Latro without me, as you can see by the amount being about $20—not enough for two people. On the back is written some dimensions: 20.5 x 13.25. They could go to anything, but they happen to be the size of the filter that I thought I needed for my air conditioner which turned out to be a swamp cooler. Still, it shows that I thought ahead and wrote down what I needed before I went to the store.

7. My grocery list from last night: has about 25 items on it. Shows that I’m buying for a household, as no one person in their right mind would buy all of this food just for themselves. Also shows forethought, and perhaps a penchant for making lists.

8. A canister of pain killers: it’s only ½ full, which means that I like to take pain killers. In it is Tylenol: Extra Strength, which could imply that I’m pregnant or nursing mother, since that’s the only thing they’re allowed to take. This happens to be true. Also, I’m a prepared nursing mother.

9. A pen: prepared. At this point my preparedness could be construed as “anal”. Still, it really comes in handy when I’m on the phone and need to write down an address, or sign a check, or something.

10. Pacifier: OK, this is a sure sign that I’m a mommy. Either that or I have an oral fixation. Still, it shows that I’m a prepared mommy. Or maybe just a mommy that doesn’t like to hear her kid crying, and this is the easiest way to quiet him up.

11. Checkbook with ½ the checks missing: From the well-kept register you can see that I write the checks that pay the bills. Also, you can see that it’s a joint account, and that we haven’t bothered to update our address or telephone numbers. The non-fanciness comes in again, as they’re just boring, bank style checks. I haven’t used any of the deposit slips, so I probably have direct deposit on my paycheck.

12. My work access card: it doesn’t say where I work, but it’s got my name and photo on it. The photo is faded, along with the card, showing that I’ve worked here for awhile. It sits in a special pocket in my purse so that I can find it easily.

13. Keys: pretty boring. One house key, one Mazda key, and one hefty looking key that happens to open my boss’s office door at work. I work in a cubicle. It needs no key. There is a lip balm holder on it with Tahitian Noni lip balm in it.

14. Last, but not least, a tube of Pink Starshine Mary Kay lip gloss. It’s half used, but looks old (it’s 2 years old). This shows that, although I occasionally care about make-up, most of the time it’s an afterthought. Also, I probably know somebody who is a Mary Kay Lady, as according to my checkbook register I don’t buy Mary Kay regularly. It was probably given to me or bought on discount. As it so happens, my sister was into MK at one time and gave us all a whole bunch of free product.

I guess what I boil down to is a thrifty, prepared, anal-retentive person with hand-me-down stuff that works just fine. I have no reason to buy Gucci. I have no money to buy Gucci. I have no desire to buy Gucci. Therefore, I buy Target, stuff it with the things I use or may at one point need, and I’m happy with that. You can glean from this what you will, but what I do has worked well for me so far. Good for me. I feel like Nancy Drew now. Quick, Bess, George, go find Ned and bring him back here! I need his massive football shoulders to break down this old grandfather clock. The thief is hiding in a secret room behind it!

It’s amazing how the little things can make your day. Seeing friends that you thought you wouldn’t see for awhile, hitting all of the lights green on the way home from work, a giggle from your kid who is just learning what tickling is. This morning a guy at work opened the first of the double doors for me, and then as I was about to return the favor, he asked me to wait so that he could get the second set of doors, too. I can’t remember the last time I had doors held for me like that. After two years of marriage, Dinomight and I are more or less off of the honeymoon, and usually he’ll get the first and I’ll get the second door for him. The other thing that made my day yesterday was going into a room in my house and finding it still clean. It didn’t matter that I had been the one to clean it, precious little in my house stays clean for very long. One or the other of my roommates usually messes things up and neither of them is very good at cleaning up after themselves.

We were playing poker last night, and I realized something about myself after I went all-in on a nothing hand and ended up the designated dealer. I prefer to observe and maybe participate slightly, rather than be in the middle of things. This isn’t a new characteristic. I’ve had this tendency my entire life, but when I came to college I changed my personality on purpose. My freshman year in ’99 I decided to become more like my sister. She was Red/Orange**. I became outgoing, I made the fun instead of waiting for someone else to do it. I made a great group of friends, and was always in the middle of them. It was exhausting, but it was awesome. My grades might not have been a 4.0 like in high school, but I was learning more about life and about myself than ever before. Relationships were forged that are still strong 6 years later. That’s the longest I’ve ever been friends with anyone in my life. My family moved almost every year since I was 8, and I’m not a very good pen pal, you see.

My Freshman year I felt powerful. I could organize an evening in 5 minutes on IM or the phone. Saying goodnight or goodbye to my friends was never as simple as “goodbye”. We would designate a time and place to meet the following morning for breakfast or class. It was more of a “see you then” type of situation. Being that close to a group of people that I really liked was intoxicating for me. I couldn’t get enough of it. If someone had to study at the library or the Cannon Center, we would all go and study together. Several people within our group were dating and that made it easy to spend all of our time together. It was almost like we were all dating each other (the 6 of us) as no one really paired off that much. Sometimes I spent more one-on-one time with one person, sometimes with another. The group’s friendship was like a moving, living, breathing, constantly changing thing and I was told more than once that I was at the heart of it. It was like ruling a mob. Heady stuff, and it was too much for me.

I pulled myself back a little in January to catch my breath, and in so doing I discovered Dinomight. In spending time with him I had less and less time to spend with my friends. For me, this was a very good thing but my friends saw this as abandonment and were angry with me. I’m not sure Benvolio ever really understood why I did what I did. Duchess finally forgave me, but I know she was hurt by my actions. Neither of them realized that I had to pull back. The friendships were too intense and I never developed the tools to deal with that. Benvolio and Duchess were dating, but Benvolio and I were the best of friends. He would talk with me about his relationship with her, about his feelings about life, about his problems with friends back home and we were getting really close. When I found myself developing romantic feelings for him, I knew it was time to take a step back and stop whatever we had from progressing any further. It would have torn our group apart if I had stayed in the middle of things, and everyone would have been hurt badly. That sounds really cocky, but I’ve seen it happen before and I didn’t want it to happen to us. So, I moved away from this amazing thing that I had discovered. This thing that had given me the energy to work from 4-8am, go to school from 8-3pm, do homework in the afternoon and stay up until 12 or 1am partying. I’m not sure how I did it…lots of naps in the sun, I guess. These people who had been as much a part of me as my own family (which is saying a whole lot), became acquaintances and classmates. We still hung out occasionally, but my co-dependency on them switched to Dinomight. I’m not sure if it was as overwhelming for him as I think it was, but he became everything to me. In my group I had had an on-again, off-again boyfriend, but nothing was serious. We were mostly just flirt-mates. In watching Duchess and Benvolio I got more and more depressed, wondering what was wrong with me and why I couldn’t find someone to love me. Why didn’t I deserve someone great to be with me? My stiff upper lip fooled everyone, though, and no one suspected how lonely I was. After all, I was always with a tight group of friends, right? Only the guy I was falling in love with was dating one of my best friends. Bad news.

With Dinomight, I needed him, and he needed me. He had just gotten out of a bad relationship, and was trying to pull myself away from a situation that could have gone rotten quickly. We discovered a mutual love of knowledge and science. We each had holes in our hearts that the other filled. Soon (rather quickly, according to my friends) we discovered a mutual love of each other and were inseparable. When he left to go on his mission, I was miserable, but I already knew we were going to get married. My heart wasn’t broken, just put on ice for awhile. We wrote to each other, and I tried to muster the energy to be outgoing again, but I was scared that the same thing would happen all over. My one foray into being a Orange had not turned out well for me. I was content with my Purple status, and am to this day. Sometimes a little Redness will come out, but mostly I stay Purple.

When I started out this blog I really didn’t mean to have emotional diarrhea, but there you go. I miss those simpler times, sometimes, but most of the time I’m glad to be where I am. It’s difficult at times (as Duchess witnessed on Saturday), but I chose to be where I am and I wouldn’t be the same person without all of the trials and triumphs I experience on a daily basis. My Dinomyn, the joy of my life, keeps me going when things seem too hard. I wouldn’t give him up for anything. And that’s all I have to say about that.

**For those who don’t know the color triangle, here’s a quick rundown:

Yellow 1 = creative, imaginative, forgetful, curious, likeable, idea/possibility-oriented
Red 2 = combative, athletic, action-oriented, reality-oriented, do-ers
Blue 3 = calm, aware, guiding, background figure, future-oriented, support role
Orange 1-2 = impulsive, natural center of attention, self-centered, charismatic, celebrity, salesperson, spokesperson, oriented in the moment
Green 1-3 = thoughtful, passive, peacemaker, rule-oriented, worrier, manipulative, kind, planner, theory-oriented
Purple 2-3 = rational, unemotional, judge, accidentally offensive, expert, highly respected, truth-oriented, has to be right (but usually is)

See the cute chunky babies? Dinomyn is the one on the left. His cousin, Sammy, is the chunk on the right. So cute! I'm not sure what Dinomyn is doing, probably saying "Take this picture, already, I'm tired of being propped up!"

Well, I’m back at work again, and I have to say that vacation really agrees with me. I should take more vacations. Even with Dinomyn, it was a hootin, hollerin good time. I miss my family so much. It’s been 6 month since I’ve seen them, and that is WAY too long. I’m the middle of four girls and a little boy, and we’re one of the tightest families that I’ve seen. We love getting together and just sitting around talking or playing with the babies or playing our favorite game, Encore.

Encore is a singing board game where you pick a card with a word on it, and then the teams go back and forth trying to think of songs with that word in them. For example, my team won with the word “cold”. We started with “Baby, it’s cold outside…”, they countered with Norah Jones’ ”Cold, cold heart”, and we came back with Vanilla Ice’s “Ice, ice baby, too cold, too cold…”. They couldn’t think of another one in the allotted time of 30 seconds, so we won the game!!! That was after about an hour and a half of playing, of course. My family loves music and lyrics, and we’re really good at this game.

So flying wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be. Dinomyn did great!!! He seemed to understand that the flight would go faster if he slept through it. We had 2.5 hours to Dallas, and 2.5 hours to Raleigh, NC. We had no problems with his ears popping, mostly because I fed him milk and made him suck on his binkie so that he’d swallow and his ears would pop. This seemed to work rather well. I think he’s probably the perfect age to fly with, since he’s still sleeping for a lot of the day. Not to say that he wasn’t cranky some of the time, but for the majority of the 4 flights (there and back) he was asleep. Of course, crammed into that tiny seat and holding a sleeping baby, there wasn’t a lot for me to do, but I’d rather be bored than trying to calm a screaming baby. The one moment of sheer panic came when I was picking up my bags in SLC after coming home yesterday and the car seat wasn’t there. “CRAP!!”, I thought, “We can’t get Dinomyn home, we can’t go buy a new one, what the heck am I going to do????” Then I realized that there was an odd-baggage carousel that I should go look on, and sure enough there was the car seat, just a little wet, but very much there. Thank heavens!!!!

We stayed at my sister’s ex-partner’s house. It’s a great house, but can you say awkward? We went to their promise ceremony year in September 2003, and they’re already broken up. I guess many of those relationships just don’t last. Anyway, we love this lady (even though she’s a year older than my mom, and my sister is 30) and it was so great to see her again. She just loved the babies, and was really gracious to give up her house for 5 days to us. She did have a cat, though, and because my whole family is very allergic, it was a snotty, itchy-eyed kind of weekend. Fun, though. We had beautiful weather, and really enjoyed sitting out on Linda’s deck overlooking her 10 acres of forested NC beauty. If you haven’t seen the trees of the Blue Ridge Mountains, you’re really missing out. They’re absolutely beautiful. Dinomyn got passed around like a hot-potato, but he rather enjoyed all of the kisses, I think. He and his 6-month-old cousin would sit and have conversations that kept us all laughing. Plus, he rolled over for the first time, and I caught it on tape!! Yay, Dinomyn!!!

It was great to actually spend Mother’s Day with my mother, and celebrate her and me and my sister as mothers. We got adjustments from my chiropractor aunt, and massages from my sister’s new girlfriend who happens to be a massage therapist. It was so wonderful. Plus, when I got home, Dinomight had gotten me a clothes dryer for Mother’s Day. Some may say that this is a chauvinistic gift, but I couldn’t have asked for anything better. Now I don’t have to schlep our wet clothes over to the Laundromat to dry. I’ve been waiting for a dryer for 4 months, now, and it’s wonderful to have one!!!

So, that was my trip in a nutshell. Fun times, recharging my family batteries, spending some time in the sun. We missed Dinomight, but he had a poker-filled weekend anyway, and he was glad to see us when we finally came back.

Tomorrow I will be hanging out in a cabin all day. Don't worry, it's not as cushy as it sounds. My company has a cabin at Sundance, and my boss has decided to have our all-day-meeting there as all of the conference rooms here are booked. If I'd have known that was an option, I'd book all the conference rooms all the time so we'd have to have all of our meetings up there. Think it'd work? It would take a miracle…
So, we're going up there at 8am, and having lunch at the Sundance Foundry and Grill, and staying as long as it takes into the evening to finish our project. Just me and a bunch of VP's. I wish Duchess could come with me. I have a feeling that it's going to be a VERY long day.

Too bad I can't bring Dinomyn, either. All day without him(*tears*)…whatever will I do? How about a weekend of intensive Dinomyn-time, with close proximity for 12 hours on a plane and no daddy to hand him off to all weekend long? Sounds about right. Although, there's a cornucopia of aunts, uncles, grans, great-nanas, and a cousin for him to play with. Yay! I doubt I'll get to spend much time with him all weekend now that I think about it. Then the next weekend we fly to Arizona, and do it all over again. Same Seamus, different cast of relatives.

He's getting so big!! You'd never recognize him! Well, most of you couldn't pick him out of a line-up right now anyway, but still. He can actually get himself up on his side, but he hasn't learned to tuck that arm under to roll over. It holds him there like a kickstand. :) Fun mental image. Latro thinks he's "soothing". I'm not so sure about that.

Duchess and I are going jeans shopping this afternoon, and I'm scared. For all who were wondering, Surprise!!, I carry any excess weight in my rear end. That makes it difficult to fit into my pre-prego jeans. My belly is almost gone, but that rear is here to stay. Not really, I just need to get out more and work it off. I guess youcan say that I have a little junk in the trunk, and it's time to vacuum out the car. Stupid car.

I'm also a little nervous about flying with Dinomyn. I'm just picturing a blow-out diaper as soon as we're taxing down the runway, or a screaming baby for 2.5 hours until we finally reach Aunt Sannie in Dallas and let her take over for the second leg of our trip. I guess what doesn't kill us makes us stronger, right? Wrong. Nietzsche was full of crap. What doesn't kill us can make us much, much weaker and can permanently endanger our health. Like pneumonia. It can weaken your heart permanently, but not kill you. Did Nietzsche take into account pneumonia? I don't think so.