Being Deposed

Depose: 2. Testify to or give evidence under oath.

A new experience. Answering questions under oath is a lot more stressful than you'd think. And it's not because I was trying to lie or hide anything, either. It's just really weird knowing that you've just sworn to speak only the truth. Sometimes, it's hard to remember what the exact truth is, and separate it from overall impressions you made from a conversation.

My good friend E had breast reduction surgery in 2007. (And yes, the doctor's lawyer is just now getting around to depositions!) The plastic surgeon botched the surgery so badly that the first time her boyfriend saw them, he said it looked like her breasts had been attacked by a bear. They are truly awful, and one other surgeon she's seen has said that they will probably have to be completely removed and then reconstructed to be fixed. Can you imagine going in for a breast reduction and the end result is that you need implants and nipples tattooed on? 

My appointment was for 11 a.m., and E's ex-husband was being deposed before me, at 9 a.m. I arrived about 10:45 a.m, because I'm habitually early for everything. And then I proceeded to wait until 12:20 for my deposition to begin. Right next to the waiting area was the glass-walled room where her ex was being deposed, and I could hear some of the lawyers questions, although not her ex's answers. The poor guy was in there from 9 to noon. I could understand how the lawyer would have lots of questions for him, since they were still married at the time of the surgery, so he was with her as she went through the healing process.

So, I began at 12:20, and I finally got out at 2:20. Two hours! The lawyer kept wanting to pin me down to dates and time --when did you have this conversation? When did you have that conversation? How many weeks after surgery? When did you first see the scars? When did you see her breasts? 

That was in 2007 & 2008! Maybe some people can remember things more specifically, but I felt like I was really floundering in time. And then somehow I felt like I was being tied down to my less-than-specific recollections.  And really, everything I said is kind of "hearsay" anyway, right? Other than what her breasts actually look like (and the pictures tell the tale much better than I can), all I can tell them is about things E said to me. Two hours for that seems kind of excessive.

I think a lot of this is intimidation --trying to wear E's resistance down so she'll drop the suit. There really isn't any question that the doctor will eventually settle (he's being sued by three other women for botched breast reductions), but they've dragged the lawsuit out for 4 years now. An expert witness who normally testifies for doctors has agreed to testify against this doctor, saying that he's never seen such a horrible result. And the only reason these depositions were finally scheduled is because the judge threatened to set deadlines if he didn't see progress being made.

I'm grateful that this experience is now behind me.

Christmas Babies

Rob's birthday is December 28. It's a sucky time for a birthday. I always get him a birthday gift for my birthday, in August, but I still feel like I should do more for his actual birthday, since it just seems totally absorbed by Christmas celebrations. This year I did manage to get him a birthday gift, although it was rather last minute.  He keeps a list of all the single malts he's sampled on his computer, so when he was out yesterday I used the list to find a few that the liquor store had that he hadn't. Glenmorangie Quinta Rubin 12-yr was the lucky winner. The three of us also went out to a nice brew pub for dinner this evening.

However, Rob didn't waste any time in sinking back into the grumpy mood he's in most of the semester from feeling overwhelmed by his to-do list. Ah, life.

Also, I'm ready to clean up Christmas, but so far I'm in the minority here. Emma wants everything to stay up, and Rob just doesn't want to add another job to his to-do list.

And lastly I get to be deposed tomorrow.  A new experience, that I'm a tiny bit nervous about.

Christmas Decorations

I didn't join in Jen's Holiday Tour this year --I thought I'd sit and enjoy it for a year before participating. However, I have taken some photos of our decorations, so here they are.

The tree is in the living room. Our living room is different, in that it has two doors side by side. So, while the tree is in front of one door, we still have a door that goes out to the front porch. We've often wondered if the house was owned by Shakers at some point (it was built in 1845, so it's old for the area).

We use an untrimmed blue spruce each year, because in addition to lights, we put real candles on the tree. We light them in the evenings when we sing Christmas carols in the days leading up to Christmas. This is a tradition I've carried on from my mother's youth in Germany. The blue spruce is fresh, with strong branches, so the candles are perfectly safe. In fact, with a fresh tree, you'd have to work pretty hard to set it on fire. :-)

A picture of the few presents that are currently under the tree. We put most of them out on Christmas Eve, after Emma has gone to bed.

Emma and Rob have created masterpieces of cut-paper snowflakes, and I've been sewing gift bags to try to keep our wrapping paper to a minimum. Each year we increase our stash of bags.

This is the hutch, in the dining area of the kitchen, with a strand of wooden stars purchased at our local fair trade store, Just Goods. I love this decoration, and I'm really tempted to leave it up year round.

And here is the mantel, with our stockings and some Christmas decorations. We're not Christian, but Rob and I were both brought up in Christian denominations. Our spirituality is firmly grounded in nature, and we celebrate Christmas as the time of the winter solstice, and include many of the traditions of our childhoods.

This is one of my favorite mantel decorations, a decorated spice ball. I've had it for years now, and it still smells absolutely wonderful each year when I take it out.

Lockout, or Strike?

So, after a nice day today, I found out that the college Board of Trustees has declared an impasse. We've been in mediation for a few weeks, and the BoT just yesterday sent out a general message to students that they would continue negotiating. Tonight they held a special Board meeting and declared an impasse.

This means that we have to either accept their last offer or strike. Or, alternatively, they can lock us out.

I am so angry, and I have no place to express it. Emma already feels anxious about talk of a strike. Wonderful holiday news.

Enough With The Woe, Let's Talk Phones!

It's not the season for woe --it's the season for gingerbread houses! Emma makes one every year, and here she is working on this year's entry:

And the finished product:

The first photo was taken with my new iPhone. We've been using an internet phone (Vonage) for many years, but it recently died (not the actual phone, but some mysterious black box that lived it's life between our modem and wireless router) and we decided it was time to join the 20th century. When we ordered them, the guy helping us at the Verizon store said we must be the last people on Earth to get cell phones, and he expected that balloons would fall from the ceiling once he completed the order. That would have been fun, but strangely enough it didn't happen.

I got an iPhone 4, which was available right then. Rob, on the other hand, always wants the best of the new toys, so he has to wait a few days for his 64 Meg, iPhone 4S, diamond-encrusted, gold-trimmed . . . . okay, the diamonds and gold I just made up. But instead of searching for a restaurant location, he can just say "I'm hungry" to his phone. Although I did warn him that I'd laugh if he started talking to his phone.

Since neither of us like to talk on the phone, we got the least amount of minutes (700/month). Then I promptly started worrying about how many minutes I was using when I called my mom the next day to give her the new phone number. I hurried her off the phone, only to find out later we'd only talked for 30 minutes --that's a pretty brief conversation for my mom.  The next night Rob used my phone to talk to his dad, and I had to tell him that although the conversation might have seemed like it was 2 hours long, it really only lasted 20 minutes. Since those are the only two people we talk to on the phone, I think we'll be okay in our 700 minute limit.

Other than text-messaging, which we haven't tried yet (who am I going to message until Rob gets his phone?), this isn't very different than having an iPod Touch, which we've both had for years. This morning, while I was at my office and wanted to remind him of something, I sent him an email. Still, now I have a phone, instead of our house having a phone. It feels different somehow.

Women's Woe

My best friend, an English professor at a UW school, recently posted this link on Facebook: Hello, I Am Fat by Lindy West. If you read the column, you can tell that it was prompted by something someone had said to Lindy. Along with this link, my friend V also posted that she'd recently made a list of the things in her life that would not change for the better if she were suddenly thin (it turned out to be a long list). What she found was that the only things that would change were those things linked to how others perceived her. 

Why is this worth writing about? Because V has kidney disease. The disease is primary (not caused by something like cancer), and she's been dealing with it for a few years now. First she had three months on systemic steroids, where her chubby body got all puffy. Then six months off treatment with doctor visits to check if her numbers were staying down or going up. They went up. Then she had six months of the same treatment; numbers went back up. Finally, a few weeks before our annual Thanksgiving get-together, she emailed me to let me know she was going to be trying a new treatment that was sort of like chemo-therapy. Once a week, for four weeks, she would spend all day in the hospital, getting something infused into her. We postponed our trip to see them at Thanksgiving, since she wasn't going to feel much like eating and even less like cooking during this time. Her numbers went down during the treatment, but we'll have to wait and see if they stay down. 

The fact that your body doesn't fit the social norm should seem less important when you find out you have a progressive disease that will impact your quality of life and maybe even kill you. And yet, V is still thinking about how her life might be better if she were thin.

Of course, V isn't obsessive about it. She's got a lot going on in her life, so I think that her concern about being fat is mostly associated with mornings and deciding what to wear that day. I have another very good friend, though, who is obsessive about it. 

E went through a rough divorce (she was the one who wanted the divorce but it was still very rough), and then met up with a former male friend. This friend had always been infatuated with E, and they began a relationship. This would have been ideal, except that E has self-esteem problems (the reason she ended up in her first marriage), and her boyfriend was commitment-shy, the result of events in his past. During a particularly tumultuous period, E lost some weight. She was never fat, unless you're going by air-brushed, anorexic, model standards, and she's the most beautiful woman I've ever known. But she sees "unattractive" every time she looks in the mirror. She and her boyfriend are back together, and he has made a firm commitment, which is great. But since she lost the weight it seems like her only topic of conversation revolves around what she's eating, how she's going to keep the weight off, whether she's kept the weight off, and what other health problems might be causing the weight problem in the first place.

Personally, I don't care about any of that. The value I place on her friendship has never had anything to do with what she looks like or how much she weighs: she's a fascinating, intelligent, and witty woman. But when I run into her now, dieting and weight are the two topics that come up first. And I especially don't want this conversation to be happening in front of Emma --that kind of message gets easily internalized and I made (and kept) a promise to myself when she was born that I would never talk about dieting. Health, exercise, loving my body for what it can do: yes. Dieting and disliking the way my body looks: never. 

I've spent WAY too many years yo-yo dieting. Take off 20, put on 30. Take off 30, put on 40, etc. It's gone that way my whole life --and while I've consciously exercised for health, severe calorie restriction was the only thing that ever decreased my weight. Two tablespoons of cereal in the morning, a dry bagel for lunch, a half cup of rice with spaghetti sauce for dinner. The problem is, severe calorie restriction was not sustainable for me, and each time, enjoying life eventually became more important than being thin. We also now know that this kind of dieting is extremely unhealthy, and I don't want to do anything that would influence Emma into that pattern of unhealthy eating.

One of the great things about getting older is that I care less and less about what I (or anyone else) looks like. I'm not trying to impress anyone, nor am I looking to hook up with anyone, so both my own appearance and that of other people is simply less important in my life. For health reasons, I should weigh less, but my weight hasn't actually changed up or down in five or six years, which I think might be a record for me.

So, this is how I feel about women and weight. And yet, when I see strangers out and about, the first thing I "see" with women is their weight. This thought process does not happen when I see men. I do not spontaneously think about their weight. We are absolutely our own worst enemies, and I wonder, is it possible to bring kids up without all this emphasis on how a certain appearance is "good" and another appearance is "bad"?

Advent Decorations

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas . . . . or the solstice, or something :-)

Rob found this wooden Advent calendar on sale last year, because it needed a little repair work. Emma also has a chalkboard to count down the days till Christmas, and another wall hanging Advent calendar not in the picture. Also, she uses her white-board/chalkboard easel to count down as well. Regardless of which room she's in, she'll know how many days till Christmas!

This basket is where we collect Christmas cards, and the little gnome is hand-knitted, from paperdiva knits.

This is a fair-trade, hand-made, twig basket Rob got me a couple of years ago, and I asked Emma to arrange some pine branches and cones, along with a few gold balls. She did a really excellent job.

We have always celebrated St. Nicholas Day because it was one of the holidays from my mother's childhood in Germany. You put your shoe on a windowsill the evening of December 5th, and St. Nicholas fills it with goodies that you joyfully find in the morning. Emma's friends heard about this holiday and suddenly I had parents telling me their child wondered why St. Nick wasn't filling their shoes?  :-)  I was going to end that celebration this year, since our new Advent calendar has window space for small gifts, in addition to a piece of chocolate. Rob and I had decided that one small gift per week, maybe in Friday's window, would be nice.

Have you ever tried to un-institute a holiday celebration? These kids, they don't give up easy!  We'll still be filling a child's size-5 shoe on the evening of the 5th. At least this year I don't have to fill the parental shoes, though. I think I can modify the holiday that much.

Do you celebrate any holidays that people in your area don't? Or tried to phase out something from your kids younger days?

Little Things

I woke up at 4:30 this morning. I couldn't make myself stay in bed any longer by 5:30. Before taking a shower I cleaned the bathroom, which put my shower time at a more normal hour. Now that's making good use of time, yeah?

Yesterday evening we had another homework emergency. In Emma's new class, they're stressing independent research done at school rather than at home, which I'm all for, but this is still a transition for her. They're working on an energy unit, and she ended up having to research "by products". That's kind of vague, and from our conversation last night she didn't get a lot of direction from the teachers. First of all, she spelled "by" incorrectly in her first searches and ended up with links to "buy our exclusive whatever". Then the teachers typed it in as "bi-products"!!  Because of these problems she got special permission to work on it at home. Amid the tears, we had settle on something a little more specific than "by products" and then find some kid-readable sites. Luckily, she has a savvy parent :-) 

But formatting and printing still had to be done this morning before school, and in our future is the creation of an interactive model of a nuclear power plant, with its by-products. We're going to use dry-ice in a cup as a cooling tower --the interactive part is that the other kids will get to pour water on the dry ice to make it steam away quickly. And we'll get some of those yellow and black radiation stickers. No, I don't really think it's going to be fun during the creation process, but she sure learned a lot about nuclear power last night!

This morning I managed to get chocolates in all the Advent Calendar windows, pick up Christmas stamps, find a few Christmas trinkets for certain days in the Advent Calendar (including St. Nick's Day, on the 6th). Oh, and I also managed to get some grading done.

As I was out and about this morning, everyone I interacted with was so pleasant. The people who work the morning shift at Panera know me and are always so nice. This morning as Brandon was making my latte, we talked about They Might Be Giants. And I love going to our post office because I know all the people who work there (just from going to the post office over the last 13 years), and everyone is so nice. Mark, the guy at the counter this morning, keeps firewood on our property.  Heck, the guy who drives up our long driveway to deliver our mail will say "Hi, Emma! How are you?" when she answers the door. One of the benefits of living in a small town, and being there for many years. It was such a pleasant morning.

I hope everyone else is having a pleasant day too.