I was taking a trip down memory lane this evening and I happened across the very first post is the Vomit category. It may well be one of my favorite posts ever, so here it is again, a Life as Lou rerun, “The Vomit Chronicles”.

This is me so excited I can’t sleep. Seriously. I had a migraine that felt like someone was stabbing me repeatedly through the left eyeball, cranky noisy children, and a fairly crappy day- UNTIL my boss called me from CHA (the largest Craft and Hobby show where at this very moment bou coup yummy scrapping supplies are being debuted and quickly purchased to go into my awesome Home Scrap Club kits), and she told me that not only did she love my idea of doing a Limited Edition “Stamp Lover’s” kit, but. . .we get to have a Quickutz rep at our store in February for a big Quickutz day. The highlight of the day, aside from the hundreds of dollars worth of stuff being given away, is the totally awesome mini album Make and Take that she asked ME to design and teach! WOO! So, I whipped up an uber cute little album sketch, and she is going to send me all the awesome wonderful funky dies I’ve been wanting for weeks now to play with and keep, and then I get to go teach and play and meet Quickutz people and just have a jolly good time in general! SAH-Weet!

Also, this week I finally got the Quickutz Revolution, which is rockin’ sweet. I got to go cropping this weekend (oh blessed break from the children!) So I got to play with it and make some stuff that I’m going to use in upcoming features. I also got to reconnect with some good friends.

I am so blessed to crop with the most wonderful group of women. I literally stumbled into them about 9 months ago and they are so kind and fun and real. I absolutely cherish being able to spend time with them and just enjoy their happiness and shared creativity. I totally look forward to seeing them every time we get together.

It is way too late for me to be up. But here I sit- happy, excited, counting my blessings. If Chris were home, I think I’d burst from glee!

Life As Lou has officially been alternately boring and amusing people for two years now. Wow. That list of monthly archives on the side looks intimidating, doesn’t it?

Anyway, here’s to another year!

It’s been one of those days. The kind where all you want to do at the end of the day is curl up in bed, bury your face in your lover’s chest, and hide. That’s today.

It started out alright. Aside from the pressing and overwhelming duties of figuring out how to pay the bills all on my own, balance the finances to perfection, take Jonas to speech and school, do the grocery shopping, fax some important paper work that should have been faxed last week, call about my daughter’s speech issues yet again, have my visiting teacher’s stop by and reach organizational and creative nirvana so I could actually get some work done, I was really ok. Overwhelmed, but ok.

Then I ate gingersnaps. My homemade gingersnaps. The best gingersnaps in the entire solar system. The gingersnaps that probably stock the cookie section of Heaven’s Chow Hall, because, seriously, they are THAT GOOD. I crammed them in one after the other while running out the door to pick Jonas up from speech.

While driving I started to get a tightening in my chest. A nasty, wheezy, hacking, a “perhaps I’ve aspirated something” hacking, followed by an odd tightening of the throat. I ran into the school to get Jonas, picked him up, and right in front of the office came to the very definite understanding that this little annoyance was not going to pass. This irritation was going to require the use of my epi-pen, and all I could think was, “this is going to shoot my day to hell.”

I was right. I ended up in the school nurse’s office, attempting to communicate the situation through a swollen throat, at which point she figured that she should probably just use the epi-pen on me since I was fumbling it through my hands, not really able to think all to clearly what with the lack of oxygen. She jabbed my thigh, which hurt, but not too badly, and within seconds my airways opened and I because nice and jittery. She then asked me who my teacher was and which class I was in. ( Note to self: don’t leave the house without your hair fixed and good coating of make-up- you look like a freaking 6th grader.) I then dialed every number in my cell phone, hoping to find someone who could get my kids and take me to the ER. I had no luck. Finally, I called an off base friend and asked her to call an on base friend to come get me, and she did.

The nice folks at the ER gave me the usual intravenous cocktail, which made me good and loopy. They asked me what I had eaten, and all I could say was, “The world’s best gingersnaps”, which, apparently, I am allergic to. Oh cruel, and unjust world!

I then got a ride home where I sat on the couch, feeling crappy and hung over, until my kids came home, at which point the headache part of the hung over feeling came into sharp focus, and I bailed out and put on a movie, imploring my children to be vegetables. They are good kids and they obliged me. I had a few nice phone calls, a few friends dropped by to make sure I was still breathing and the school nurse even called me at home to make sure I was ok.

So here I am. Kids in bed, tuned in to a movie, me sitting on the computer missing Chris and enjoying a massive, drug induced headache. Just your average day.

I recently got the best job! The Scrapbook Nook, my favorite scrap store, hired me to design their kits for their monthly kit club, The Home Scrap Club. This means I get paid to go shopping and coordinate beautiful scrapbooking goodies into a kit, and then I get to take that kit and design example layouts and projects from it. And, it gets better. I also was hired to manage their very first Design Team, which means I got to select a fabulous group of insanely talented scrapbookers to work with, and we are currently playing over at the store’s message board and gallery. I say playing, because designing art, chatting it up and sharing a passion, baby, this ain’t work!

These are the things I’ve designed from our fully loaded February kit. It includes 10 sheets of the Basic Grey Blush paper and monograms, matching SEI buttons, coordinating grosgrain and velvet ribbons, cardstock, and a totally awesome tin packed with Maya Road chipboard hearts.

Each month I will be packing the kits full of the newest, hottest scrapbooking materials (I’m stalking the CHA new release sneak peeks right now lol!) Each kit will cost around $25- and for a very limited time, if you sign up for 5 months you get the 6th month totally free. You can also buy them on a month to month basis. And, we ship to anywhere in the world you could possibly live or be stationed, so as a military wife, I’m pretty proud of that! I know scrappy stuff can be hard to come by outside of the USA.

Right now, our Design Team has a little contest going on to see who can get the most new subscribers. (The kit club is pretty small, so it’s a matter of job security to me to find more fun people to come and play). If you love my work and my scrapping style, you will adore these kits. It’s like having a box of inspiration land on your doorstep every month. And if that weren’t enough, every single month, there will be an online class with complete instructions on how to complete one or two layouts or projects using the kits, and over twenty examples of things you can make. So you can’t go wrong!

Go sign up for the kit! And when it gets to the referral spot, make sure you let them know Leah sent you Thanks!

Preparing for a deployment is a lot like preparing for a long awaited trip to Disneyland. You run around gathering supplies, excited and nervous, do a few extra loads of laundry and get everything in order that will have to happen while you are gone. The thing is, until it really happens, it just doesn’t seem real, and when it happens, the only thing is continues to have in common with Disneyland is the really long wait until he comes back home and the ride of your life together gets back on track. Instead of cotton candy and roller coaster rides that make you puke, you get all of the household chores and taking care of everybody, even when you have the flu because there’s no one else to step up.

Right now we are preparing. Every day it comes closer and starts presenting itself as a reality in fairly stark ways. The desert camo gear and the gas mask lying around the house, the sudden influx of toiletry doubles all serve as constant reminders that your family’s lives and the life your spouse are about to split dramatically. In spite of all this, life continues in it’s usual monotonous patterns. There are still dishes to wash, Sunday school lessons to prepare, jobs to attend to. Even our usual family outing of going out for burritos and browsing the bookstore happens in its usual rhythm. These rituals are benign, safe things that we hide behind and take comfort in, things that distract us from the fact that there is indeed a war going on, one that Chris will soon be much more involved in.

This war is not one that presses hard on the minds of everyday Americans. There is no real sacrifice for the common man; no gas rationing, no victory gardens being planted. Only the occasional displeasure at the news that yet another service man or woman has reached an untimely death at the hands of an enemy or due to our own military’s occasional incompetence. The event is momentarily glowered over, and then dismissed so we can return to our safe routines, where we try not to think of the people for whom this war is a pressing, every day reality, for which there are consequences. Relationships sour with an ocean between loved ones, stress becomes paramount, and people die.

Living on an air force base, I am continually made aware of these consequences. The young mother with four small children in tow at the commissary isn’t shopping with her brood for fun. She’s struggling through the aisles because she doesn’t have another option. Parents come home to be reunited with children who no longer remember them, or who are bitter over the months of neglect. Spouses engage in infidelity and come home to find their homes are no longer their homes. Of course, there are those who make it through almost unscathed, who’s priorities are a little straighter and who cling fast to the bigger picture that takes them out of the present stress and into the joy of the future.

At a recent briefing we were told that most couples fight a lot prior to a deployment. They love each other so much they choose to emotionally distance themselves because it’s easier to say goodbye to someone you’re ticked off at. Chris and I have not fought or bickered. It’s just not worth it to us. Oh there have been occasions we could have snapped at each other, but when you realize that the socks on the bathroom floor that are irritating you today won’t be there very soon, fighting about it starts to look pretty stupid.

The one thing that remains constant is the worry. We have spent so much time worrying about how the children will take this that it hasn’t been until recently that we’ve really started to ponder on how much we will miss each other. Our routines are so intertwined, I am sure it will come as a shock when those tiny things that we depend on are suddenly gone. Little things like another body heating up the bed, or having a lukewarm bath without Chris coming in with a steaming pot of boiled water to compensate for our tiny water heater plague my thoughts, and make me wonder how many other little things will suddenly come to the forefront of my mind once they stop happening regularity.

Our last long separation brought us closer together, and in the long run, was a credit to our marriage. It was something that we survived together, although apart. I’m hoping this one will do the same. You have to have that hope.

My car, my crappy little Dodge Stratus, officially gave up the ghost a few weeks ago. This means that we are down to one car, which isn’t all that bad (husband is deploying soon, so it’s all mine then anyway). The bad thing is that this car, a 1990 Toyota Celica is a sports car. A sports car that just barely squeezes the kids into the back, and which has a crummy clutch and stick shifter.

As many of you know, driving with small children is a multitasking event. You’ve got to be ready to hurl candies and pacifiers into the back seat, and able to fish around under your small charge’s feet to locate dropped Polly Pocket shoes. You’ve got to be able to balance a whopper and fries on the side console and feed yourself without dripping on the clean shirt you put on for going out. To a seasoned mother, this isn’t so hard- but when driving a manual transmission, you really need a third hand to pull it off.

Now, our car, Cherry Pie, is a sweet little ride. She’s getting old, but she’s always been our favorite car because she runs. Cherry Pie is also the car Chris had when we were dating, so we have lots of fond memories of old country road makeout sessions. That stick shift may have saved our moral integrity, as it is pretty hard to smooch with a big lump in between you, phallus shaped as it may be. Chris taught me to drive her when we were engaged, and I knew then he must really love me, because he would never let anyone near his baby. We even got into an accident in this car while I was in labor and Chris was panicking. Now, she’s slightly dinged and one headlight refuses to go down, so she is perpetually winking, as if she’s put on her come hither look because she remembers the old days before there were two car seats crammed into the back.

We got the Status when Jonas was born because a baby seat wouldn’t fit. For almost five years I had no reason to drive Cherry Pie. Now, very suddenly, I’m supposed to remember.

I asked Chris to accompany me on a quick drive the other day. The plan was to go out the back gate, swing around, and come in the front. This would take me through all 5 gears (and reverse too) and take only about fifteen minutes.

Now, during the time that I was driving an automatic, Chris decided to replace the old shifter with a new fancy shifter with an big spider emblem on it. He thought it was pretty cool, and I didn’t care at the time, because, hey, I wasn’t driving it. The only trouble with this new stick was that it doesn’t have any numbers on it, and I couldn’t remember which direction all the different gears went! Chris mocked me relentlessly for this, but I think deep down he knew that it was highly likely that I would throw myself into reverse while attempting to move into 5th gear, so he came along for the ride to supervise.

Well, you really don’t forget how to drive. It wasn’t that hard (as long as I don’t drive with the emergency brake on, I do quite well). We tooled around very quickly, with only one mishap. I killed the engine as I was showing the gate guard my id. I only mess up when I have an audience. We we’re almost home, driving down the main road of the base when all of the cars in front of me started to drive all jerky and slow. Of course, this ticks me off, because, “How rude to make me downshift and potentially kill the engine! I was perfectly happy staying in 3rd gear all the way home, and now I’m all over the place. . .” I’m halfway through my mental tirade when I see the reason for the funky driving.

There is a cat in the middle of the road. He has been hit, and he is sitting there in obvious pain, while everyone swerves around him. To Chris and I, that is unacceptable. I stopped the car (all by myself, clutch, 3rd gear, 2nd gear, 1st gear, brake- TA-DA) and flip on the hazard lights. I send Chris out of the car to see if he can help the cat. It turns out that the cat’s hindquarters are sliced down to the bone, and the cat is pretty ticked off about it, and unwilling to let Chris near him.

Chris hops back in the car (did I mention it’s raining?) And dials the base police. The MPs say they will be there shortly. While Chris is making the call, the cat disappears from sight. Now, we know the cat headed the direction of our car, and we know it didn’t come out from under the car, but when we look for it- the cat is not on the ground under the car. I said, “It’s crawled into the engine.” Chris doesn’t believe me. I told him to pop the hood and look, and sure enough, there is a cat in our engine block. The poor thing is shaking, hurt, wet, and miserable, but it’s out of the rain and squished up next to a very warm engine in a place that we cannot extract him from. After well over a half an hour of talking to the cat, and smiling at passers by (Can we help you guys? Erm, There’s a cat in our engine. Zooom.) the MPs arrive, and immediately recognize me as the chick who killed her engine at the gate.

The first guy walks over and peeks under the hood and exclaims, “There’s a cat in there!” He was totally shocked. Apparently, all the MPs thought that we had made a prank call, that no cat would ever crawl up into an engine, and that was why they made us block traffic on the busiest road on base for nearly forty-five minutes. These guys have no idea what to do about the cat. Normally, we would just reach in and get it, but he’s hurt and we didn’t want to risk hurting him more, so we opted to call the Humane Society.

Our Humane Society is right off base, so the portly idiot they deployed only took a half an hour to arrive. He assesses the situation, grabs a stick, and gives the cat a hard jab so that it runs out of the engine and high tails it down the street limping on three legs. Chris, the MPs and I stare in shock and horror at this sadist as the cat runs off. All four of us, when considering the HUMANE Society were thinking more along the lines of a tranquilizer dart and a ride to the vet to get cleaned up. Any idiot can poke a cat with a stick. The guy says, “that’s taken care of”, hops into his truck and drives off, leaving us shaking our heads and sputtering.

Because we no longer have a good reason for blocking traffic, we get back in the car. Two hours after we went out for the quick drive, I let Chris take us home.