Update on the DOGS

First a quick update on the dogs (from yesterday's Glass Incarnate): The landlady for Alvin and Belinda called Belinda yesterday and Belinda insisted Alvin was coming over daily and feeding and watering the dogs. Bullshit. When they had no water at 9:30 am for the rest of the day and it was in the high 80's yesterday... Sadly she gave them the heads up there was a problem and they came late last night and cleared out a bunch more stuff (looks like cabinets torn out and on the curb this morning) and took the dogs. I was really hoping they would get adopted and go to a better home.

The female pit bull was still chained up as of early this morning, but she is not out in the yard now. I am going to keep an eye out and if they try to chain her up again I will call again. I lucked out and the complaint from yesterday was not filed in my name so I do not have to worry about repercussions. When we were walking into A & B's backyard I pointed out the pit over the fence to the animal control person and since she was able to see it from there, she filed the complaint herself. Of course when they think it's safe and chain the dog up again I will have to call in my name... but one bridge at a time.

In the middle of yesterday's dog excitement the neighbor on the other side told me that he saw a rat ran under the fence into his yard from the neighbor on his other side. This is another yard with four dogs chained/caged 24/7. The people who live there own the house and have lived there for about 40 years. I talked to them about the barking when we first moved in, and they were receptive but really didn't do anything. Other long-time neighbors told me that many people have complained over time about the yard (it is full of trash, junk cars, rickety sheds... you get the picture) and dogs (chained and caged) but nothing ever comes of it. That might be about to change as my neighbor was quite distressed about the rat and is also bothered by the garbage smell, the barking and the flies emanating from the yard. This being Georgia in the middle of a lush early summer, the verdure obscures the trash. But you can still see a bit of junk truck, trash, shed and one of the many kennels in the yard through the trees.

The times they are a changing. Next (after the vacation news): pics of the new screened-in porch (just in time for West Nile season!).

Life

I really should be waking my child and getting her to school, but we are both suffering little sniffly colds so I am going to let her sleep just a little while more. She has plenty of time ahead of her where she will have to wake for someone else's schedule. (I can't stop thinking of Jodi setting five alarms to get her up every work morning Yeee!)

So, today's topic is Real Life... Somehow not what I expected. No matter what you do, you do it the same as you do everything else. There is no magic state of differentness--eventually it's all the same. Wherever you go, there you are. How odd. No wonder the existentialists were such a grumpy bunch.

I have spent my entire life waiting to get There and do... Something. Well I am Here, I am doing what I want--cubicles, mandated traveling for my job, and somebody else's rules are a thing of the past--and it is the same, I am the same, as before. With few exceptions, I am just as happy/unhappy as I have been my entire life. There has been no magical transformation or noticeable ascension to a higher state. And I expected one. I think a lot of people do.

We think "I would be happy if I could have/be X". What a crock. (For me the last one is "thin") We get X and nothing changes. The young girls who yearn to be married and have babies as the solution to their dissatisfaction with life are not going to be happier if they get what they wish for. They carry their unhappiness along with them and wonder what went wrong. Intellectually I know that, and yet I have still been waiting for a major life change of my own for the past 30 years. I have been waiting to do something, get something, and suddenly be a different person, a happier person, a less stressed person. Hah. That's not to say I am not a different person, I am. There were just no chutes and ladders in the process of getting here: It's taken 30 years of incremental change, change so slow it can only be seen by looking back at my attitudes, beliefs and actions in times before.

So what's the point? The point is that, unless we are in the middle of a really shitty life patch dealing with divorce, death, a really crappy job or relationship, etc., right now it's as good as it gets: We are no less happy than we will ever be. When we achieve our goals there will be a momentary spike of euphoria and then we will go right on being fundamentally the same us we are right now.

Is that a bummer? No, it's actually liberating. It's permission to stop waiting for something better and to live in and be happy in the now.

Would it be better not to have goals? After all, if we are going to feel the same, what's the point? I think the solution is not make shortcuts to our goals a goal. There really is something to be said for being comfortable with the passage of time and enjoying the journey.

As I write this I wonder how many cliches I will eventually cram into it, and right behind that thought comes this one: They are cliches because people repeat them to death. People repeat them to death because they believe them. Maybe they knew something all along that I am just now coming around to. Here's one more to savor:

Life is what you make it.

Baxter

Better late than never, I announce the addition of a new family member: Baxter!

He is an approximately four year-old cocker spaniel rescue who joined the family officially last Thursday. Bad habits include sock and toy chewing, but they are well compensated for by his quiet affection, ferocious protection, and tidy 23 lb package (he weighs less than Jessie does, Huzzah!)

Baxter came to us via our new deerhound groomer. We were considering adopting him when we lost Splinter and that put all plans on hold for grief. But Baxter needed a good home, and adopting him just felt right. The only one not thrilled is the cat--sorry Loiosh. I know you are the first and eldest, but you really need to be a bit more flexible. So welcome Baxter!

The Joys of Technology!

I come back to Stranded in the South, and not to rant! I meant to write a lot more about the social ills which plague me, but evidently I purged the plague with Caitlyn and have no more bile right now for The Compact. Instead, today I celebrate!

First news, there is a new iMac in our house. Dave found the Delicious Library last week and that was the straw that tipped over the camel. He took the bluetooth scanner to work today to scan in all of his computer books. When we have the book, cd and dvd collections all scanned, we can sync them to our iPods and never leave home without a complete list of everything we have (no more standing in Best Buy going "Do we have this on dvd?"). More importantly, if we ever need the list for insurance purposes it will be up to date. And it has a built-in lending function!

The iMac makes me feel like I've hopped into the century of the fruitbat in a big way. The first clue that Kansas had gone bye-bye was at the Apple store when the salesman said "Here is the 17" and here is the 20"." And when I said "Nice monitors, where are the computers?", he replied, "These *are* the computers" and proceeded to show me the USB and firewire ports on the back and the cd/dvd drives in the sides of the sleek, flat monitors. Everything came in one little box.

Other tech which makes the headlines this morning is our friend Jonathan's Guitar Hero for the PS2. The pics are of Jessie learning to play, but we all took turns at it and I can see where it would become addictive. On the way home Dave told me about a similar game called Dance, Dance Revolution (I know, where have I been?) and it may be the ultimate answer to the, hrm, weight issue... We'll see.

Tomorrow's news: Baxter!

Part 1 of the Tirade: Caitlin

Yesterday I spent a not-quite-committed-to afternoon off catching up on current happenings in my little North American corner of the world. Most of the current socio-political cultural news I get is from my friend Lize who is very well-educated, passionate, literate and liberal, and who writes Prematurely Grey. The hot topics there which I followed off into other corners of the Internet included the latest in the Mommy Wars (enter Caitlin Flanagan) and and introduction to the Compact.

I was also sucked in by the mainstream media reportage of the "silent birth" of the Holmes-Cruise baby and it drove me to read more about Scientology to find out (better late than never) what all the fuss is about. I could go off on a rant and a tangent here about Tom Cruise and the really stupid, damaging things he has said, but this post is about Caitlin Flanagan and her damaging stupidity. Tom will get his turn later. I will just say now that I am glad I am not Katie Holmes' mother as I do not think I could have smiled and kept silent as I watched my daughter skip off blithely down the path of self destruction with him.

It is not surprising that Caitlin , the justly reviled author of "To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife", would show up multiple times on Prematurely Grey, nor that her opinions would send Lize into an outraged spin. I admit to being bothered more by her success peddling her shtick than in the outrageousness of the shtick itself. There will always exist people who spout seductive and destructive philosophy which is grabbed as a life-line by those casting about for validation and well-defined answers. And certain adaptations of said philosophy could actually improve some people's lives. That's what religion is all about, after all. And I completely respect another person's right to his own beliefs. What I absolutely, positively cannot abide is a hypocrite. And a rich, smug, self-righteous hypocrite with every purchased support system in the world is the worst of all.

As I write this entry, I find myself getting all riled up by the same things that outrage every other thinking, educated, liberal woman who is exposed to Caitlin's views. I start to write about how her ideas are just wrong... but that's not the point. The focus must be on why she should be dismissed out of hand--and it's not about her views and whether or not I agree with them, it's about the money and the mouth. She has plenty of both, but they are not co-located. It's also about the scalabilty of her "solution" and its lack of personal relevance to most women in this country--let alone the world. Finally, to think that being a better mother--or anything else--can be determined by one factor and works the same for everyone is insanely naive.

How can one even think of giving the time of day to a woman who--while ardently preaching that women should stay at home and take care of their children, their men and their hearths--by her own admission does not cook, does not clean, was not the primary caregiver for her children before they went to pre-school, and who has a very active professional career that she runs "from home" with the help of a personal organizer? She doesn't even have the honesty to confess "Do as I say, not as I do". Instead she holds herself up to be a better mother and wife because she is home at roughly the same time her children are and sees it as her duty to give her husband regular blow jobs.

And just who is her target audience? In this country where personal wealth is measured by the ability to buy things and hired staff is a luxury of only the truly rich, her lifestyle is so alien to most of us that I can't even begin to see how it could possibly scale to the real world. When she writes about mothers staying home or not and she refers to women of her acquaintence, she is referencing the top 1% or the top .5% of the economic tier in this country. While some of us get someone in to clean the house every couple of weeks (and consider ourselves fortunate) they have housekeepers, cooks, personal assistants, personal organizers, personal trainers, nannies, gardeners, etc. The experiences, deprivations and benefits of growing up in that kind of environment cannot be boiled down to does Mommy work outside the home or not. Mommy may very well stay at home with the children--while serving on several charitable boards and participating in other philanthropic activities. Don't let's kid ourselves; it's no less work and she's no more available.

Finally, I have to say what bothers me most about people taking Caitlin seriously (and they must as she wrote/writes for the Atlantic monthly and the New Yorker) is that her views show a fundamental lack of understanding of the complexity of human life and human relationships. There is no one solution that works for everyone. To sniff and call a woman a worker bee because the woman says "she has to work" when she might very well mean she wants to work shows a clear lack of understanding of the differences between individuals. Just because Caitlin has no drive does not mean that no one else does either. How obvious does it have to be that we are more able to enrich the lives of those around us--including our children--if we are happy? If someone is not happy because she is doing what she is 'supposed to do' rather than what she wants/is driven to do, how pleasant is she to be around and how good a caregiver is she?

One last question, where is Caitlin's husband in all of this besides providing her a meal ticket and getting regularly serviced? If I were a man reading her columns/book, I would be outraged at the diminished place I was given in today's family. My husband is a supreme caregiver and we equally share the roles and responsibilities of life management, householding and childraising. And we don't have sex because it's my duty--we do it because it's fun.

Caitlin, the Compact, Censorship and Shaping Things

Coming Soon. This one takes more than stream of consciousness.

Night Terrors

What is it about the middle of the night that makes everything you think and feel more intense? Writing this entry is the last thing I do now before getting ready for bed. And I hope with every exhausted cell in my body that tonight--for the first night in four--I do not wake at three, four or five a.m. victim of an attack of anxiety, remorse, guilt or depression.

When I wake in the night, whatever I think of is so much more intense than it is in the daylight. It seems that anything I fear is bound to come true. And I tell myself that it really isn't so--I am overreacting. I rationalize. I focus on releasing my muscles one at a time. I breathe. I think Happy Thoughts. I try so hard to relax... and I can't let go of whatever woke me.

I wake, more often than not, heart pounding. And lately I immediately panic because I am awake at the dreaded hour and I fulfill my own prophecy that I will not get back to sleep before the birds begin their sleepy song and light tinges the sky around six-something a.m.

Last night I lay and listened to Dave breathing and to his little night rustlings for over an hour. I felt so alone and disconnected. I fretted about everything, and cried about not getting Splinter to the vet in time. Finally I slid over across the great expanse which is our kingsize bed, I put my arm across Dave's chest and my nose against his shoulder. And I felt everything let go. I eased back to sleep. Maybe if I can hold tight to how I felt right then, I can keep whatever might come to hound me tonight at bay, and I won't wake till it's time to get up and get the Sprout to school.

In Memorium

Splinter

March, 2001-April 14, 2006

He was The Perfect Ferret:
Inexaustibly Playful, Inately Gentle, Infinitely Tolerant, Insatiably Curious
Taken too quickly and too young.
We will miss him,
and lay him to sleep
under the weeping willow
in the backyard.

Sleepless in Atlanta

In order to post here I need to launch a browser. My homepage for Firefox is CNN.com. Some days I wonder what I am doing writing little bits about a little life in the midst of uranium enrichment by Iran, the playing of the tape of the last moments of flight 93, the loss of the glaciers in Glacier National Park and the virtual extinction of the polar bear in my lifetime. Of course these headlines share space with reports that Madonna and Guy Ritchie's marriage is on the mend so I can console myself that I am not the only one to write inanities. At least we appear to be done with Jessica Simpson and Nick Whatsits--and Brittany and (is it?) Kevin.

After the second night in a row of almost no sleep I am in a definitely pensive mood this morning. Last night Seraph (deerhound #2) decided she had to go out at 2:30 am. I had already let her out at 10:30 so I was a bit cranky at being woken up. The neighbor's dogs also had a sleepless night and barked on and off for several hours. I couldn't let Seraph out into the yard for the night as the contractors were due at 6:30 this morning and I did not want to have to get up again to let her in. So I ignored her as long as I could and then I put her on the back deck. That worked for about an hour and then she decided she just had to go down into the yard. So I got up, got decent, went out into the front yard and wrangled the gates closed so I could put her out there.

Then Jessie woke up from a nightmare about dinosaurs eating other animals eggs and I spent some time listening first to her nightmare and then to her preferences of dinosaurs. At first she liked the tyrannosaurus rex best--large meat-eater, but when I told her about the speed and cunning of the little meat-eater--the veloceraptor--she decided those were her favorites. She went back to sleep to dream of hunting prey in the verdant jungle.

Other parents look down their noses at us for letting her watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But The March the Penguins caused a week of nightmares from the leopard seal eating the mother penguin. XXX, Blade, Buffy, Alien vs. Predator, Sean of the Dead (her current favorite movie--it's about zombies in London) elicit no such response; she sleeps like a baby after them. "Kid appropriate" movies. Huh.

I just got back from PetCo where I bought a doggie door for the new shed. The builders are going to put it in for free for me as they had to give me a 3" smaller door than was specified due to the window placement. I am thrilled. Seraph had better watch it or she may find herself relocated to the back yard permanently.

Driving to Austin, or 1000 Miles with a Four Year-Old

I meant to get an early start Tuesday morning (I hear chuckling)—to the point that at one time I thought we might leave at 6:00 am (I hear outright guffaws). Dave helped with the major loading Monday night, but it still took me a lot more time than I would have liked to figure out how to pack the van for a retail show again (got to get the tent in) after almost a year's hiatus. We got on the road by 1:30 pm. The late start negated the possibility of dinner with friends in Dallas, but there is always another meal--in this case breakfast Wednesday.

When we did finally get moving we did so in technological style: Dave bought us a Garmin Street Pilot gps, I brought my iPod with the cable that plays it through the fm radio and your car speakers, and Jessie had her portable dvd player. We are fortunate that the car has two cigarette lighter power adapter outlets and I was also able to get an adapter that transforms one power adapter outlet to three and another adapter that allows regular electrical devices to plug-in through it. I could navigate, listen to music and charge my cell phone while Jessie watched movies in the back. Sweet.

There are no rest stops between Atlanta and Birmingham on I-20W. Just be prepared.

After driving awhile Jessie's natural curiosity asserted itself and she asked me where my osstrills are. What? You know, your osstrills--like an elephant has at the end of his trunk. Oh. I showed her. I don't even want to know what the sequitur for that one was.

A little while later after I finished talking to my friend Mike in Dallas about eating together Jessie asked me if my friend Mike was brown or white. I said white and she asked who my friends are who are brown. I named some names for her and she replied sagely that "Cross men are bad." When quizzed about what/who cross men are she replied "Men who wear crosses around their necks... and dress all in white." Oookay. Then she said, "There was a man in the fellowship hall (in the church where her pre-school is located) who said that everybody should get to go where they want, even little kids. They killed him. He was brown. He is in heaven now. Where is heaven?" The lessons the teachers did for Martin Luther King Day must have been really intense as she is still processing them.

Down the road a ways we had to stop for gas. Side note: Cars would be great things if there was a way that they could run with no need to stop for fuel. The whole need for gas thing is going to make it really difficult to flee to Montana if there is a national catastrophe and I feel the need to flee it. The gas station I picked took marketing a bit far and after I paid (at the pump, of course) the pump started talking to me about all the cool things I could buy inside the store. It was creepy. My first thought was that they didn't really sell anything inside the store, they just lured you in and rendered you for parts. I got back in the car and closed my door until the gas was finished pumping so I wouldn't have to hear the creepy talking pump.

We finally stopped for the night after leaving Shreveport and crossing into Texas. It was 11:00 pm and we were about an hour shy of Dallas (making it easy to get there for breakfast with Mike the next morning before doing a gallery delivery). Hotels off the interstate are always a crap shoot. No, that's wrong. They are always either way over priced or crappy. There is no variability. Tuesday night's room (ostensibly at a Hampton Inn) smelled of cat urine, had cigarette burns on the 1970's synthetic fuzz fiber blanket, and was stingy on towels and water pressure. But we slept well, and by accident at 6:30 am when I had to get J up, dressed and brush her hair, I found the Wiggles on the Disney Channel which kept her docilely mesmerized through the getting ready process. That was a relief.

You know you're in Texas when: The Tanger Outlets billboard advertises the Bible Outlet Store. The Dallas police also have their own billboard: Join the Dallas Police Force, 4 yrs active military service OR 45 hours of college. Huh? Either we want people who have had the ability to think for themselves drummed right out of them OR we want people who have been trained to think for themselves...

And then we got to Austin. Lovely, warm Austin (brutally hot comes a bit later in the year). I am very happy to have a couple of days of downtime/recharge time with friends here. And shopping. And a pedicure. Whoo hoo.

Blogging (Again)

I sip a Dr. Brown's root beer, munch on a handful of cheddar cheese goldfish, wait for my chicken and herb dumpling Progesso soup to heat in the microwave, and ponder the impact of blogging and Google on life. In the past two days I have received unexpected communication from famous and infamous people because of what I put on Glass Incarnate. I write a couple of names out there on one of the pages in the billions and billions of stars in the anonymous ether(net), and lo and behold, the owners of the names know! (Do you think if I write 'Mel Gibson' he will know? Not that it matters. He has gone downhill since Lethal Weapon when he sauntered to the fridge in his altogethers.)

(Side Note: I was in graduate school at the University of Chicago when that movie came out on vhs--there was no stinkin' dvd then--and Karen Deaton and I were watching it as we prepared mounds of little Greek appetizers for the annual linguistic society conference. When the Mel-to-the-fridge scene came on we scrambled for the remote and made him walk up and back and up and back and up and back. Mel does his own buttwork you know. He doesn't use a stunt butt.)

Back to Important Things. I work alone. I do not commute or go to an office of any kind. The only times I make it out of the house/studio are to take Jessie to school in the morning, to drop off work at a gallery (once a month or so) and to drop pieces off at Dixie Glass Hoppers to be drilled (again about once a month). So while other people interact around the 21st century water cooler, my sole window to other people and the world until Dave gets home is the internet.

Before blogging, I obsessively read news and human interest stories on CNN.com. (Another side note: if there is something weird that happens in the country, e.g., a story with the headline "Girl Found Running Naked in the Street: Victim of a Failed Exorcism"-- the location will be Atlanta or France. Really.) I cheered when the whale was safely carried out of the Thames and cried when it died anyway. I think one of Dave's biggest concerns on arriving home everyday was what I had read during the day which would affect my mood (and thus our evening).

Women of previous times (and still now I suppose) in similar situations to mine (often they were called housewives, now they are family managers or some such) watched tv. In both the CNN.com and soap opera (pardon me, 'daytime drama') scenarios the relationship is one-sided--everything flows in one direction with complete disregard for and disinterest in the participants on one side by the other (I am sure the whale-rescuers never even had a hint of my existence).

I also IM, but that activity is more analogous to talking on the phone (see women of previous times above). When I was a teenager and there was one phone in the house (same style as at left) I would lay in the hallway outside my bedroom door, which was as far as the cord would reach, and talk for hours to my best friend or the boyfriend du jour. Now I hate to talk on the phone. When the phone rings I regard it as an interruption, a nuisance and I usually can't wait to get off it. My mother might disagree with this as I still call her every couple of days. I have set her up with IM but it's not much use as she still has a dial-up modem and so is not often on-line. And we email, but there are times (many of them) that I just want to talk to my Mom. Dave and I do not talk well on the phone together.

I like IM'ing because it is the perfect multi-tasking communication medium: I can IM as many people at a time as I could wish and I rarely type the wrong thing on the wrong screen. And I can type something or someone can type something to me, an if the recipient doesn't type back right away, it's ok. The phone does not work like that, you have to keep the conversation flowing.

But, really, IM'ing is still just an alternative form of an existing communication technology. Blogging is a whole 'nother animal of a different color. When I blog I do so with the knowledge/hope/expectation that someone else will read what I wrote. When it is someone I know--my husband, family, old friends, etc.--the experience exists within the parameters that I expect from communication. But when someone else comes in and reads and comments, the standard dynamic no longer works. Then the experience becomes more like talking at a party, having a random stranger overhear you and chime into the conversation. I like it when that happens.

I have not been blogging for that long. But I have already made cyber-connections that have become as real to me as the friend and acquaintanceships I maintain in the real world. Yeah I know, this from a woman who got all excited about the kidnapped penguin in Britain and followed the story for days (do you know the parents just had another chick?). I read their blogs (the cyber-connections, not the penguins), they read mine. I comment on theirs, they comment on mine. We interact in this dystemporal way, and as time passes, I begin to count them as friends. I value their feedback and opinions, and I look forward to sharing with them.

Where am I going with this? I have no clue. I can see the edges of a Bigger Idea, but I haven't fleshed it out yet. I feel a bit like Rip Van Winkle: There have been other cyber activities which encourage the forging of relationships and/or exchanging of ideas which essentially passed me by--e.g., chat rooms, online dating, online gaming, sim worlds, and most discussion groups. I occasionally post on WarmGlass.com, but I do not read the posts daily or even monthly. I usually only go there when I need to find or share technical information because otherwise it is too much and too big. It would take all my time to keep up with what everyone was writing and it would be, well, boring. Unlike blogging (which I am defining for my purposes as the activity of writing, reading and posting comments on blogs) which can be as intimate or as social as the blogger wishes, as big or as small.

So I dwindle the post to its end and I mull over my thoughts. I have no conclusions other than blogging is a cyber activity that is different than other cyber activities and interesting to me. It is a new form of communication rather than an updated version of an old form. You are never too old to learn how, and it is never too late to start. Now I just need to get my Mom to post her comments on the blog entries on the blog itself rather than sending them to me in email...

I am a Sheep

Thank you Bridget and Bill for the quiz.

Which country should you REALLY be living in? Australia G'day Mate! You're a yokker. A true Aussie. You love the beach and barbies, as well as sport and sex. Life couldn't get any simpler, and thats the way it should be. C'mon Aussie, C'mon!

Click Here to Take This Quiz Brought to you by YouThink.com quizzes and personality tests.

I Win! I am the Biggest Geek!

Sadly I get to be the biggest geek not through any efforts of my own, but because Mr. Bruce Sterling posted on Glass Incarnate today. Some people have cherished Kleenex which wiped the sweat from Mick Jagger's... at a Rolling Stones concert. Me, I may never let anyone else post a comment on that blog ever again.

I wrote Dave about it and his response was, "Um, you do know that people aren’t always who they seem on this Internet-thingy..." He's so cute. Doesn't he know I Have the Tools? I looked up the information on the visitor who posted that comment and got the domain name, referring page, location (including latitude and longitude), OS, Javascript version, monitor resolution, color depth, length of visit, page views, browser version, and out click. I am pretty sure it was he.

Brenda "Geek Groupie" Griffith

I Recycled

Well, I did it. It was hard--not finding the place, or getting them to take everything, or even loading the minivan up. No, what was hard was letting go. I just got back form the electronics recyclers: I filled the back of the minivan with old cables, modems, routers, vcr, computers, phones, computer batteries--all the detritus of the Diamond Age. They took everything. And I had several less-than-brief pangs on the way home. Recycling is all well and good, but reusing is better. I should have sorted everything, neatly wrapped it all up and put it on eBay free but for shipping. The linksys routers still work (except for the wireless part), the cables are a real treasure trove...

If I were a better person I would have done this. It is all well and good to talk the environmental talk, but one needs to walk the walk too. Yes, we donate to the Nature Conservancy, Defenders of Wildlife and the National Resource Defense Council. I compost everything in the yard. We recycle (against Dave's better judgement). Dave takes the train to work. And I still feel like I come up way short. I don't walk or bike anywhere, I drive. I don't compost house scraps. And I don't find good homes for things I no longer use. I do, however, self-flagellate really, really well. Yesterday, the first day of spring and the vernal equinox was also International Earth Day. My Earth Day resolution for 2006 is to make more of an effort to repurpose and reuse and to rely less on recycling.

Happy Earth Day everyone.

A Scorpion King Crab

Last night in a fit of good parenting, J and I watched the Scorpion King over macaroni and cheese accompanied by a Super Tuscan 2001 (well, for me--she had milk). We did this in the living room. Then after dinner and a movie we went upstairs and watched the better part of the Return of the Mummy in bed. It is now 10:17 am. We slept until 9:30 and then watched the rest of the Return of the Mummy. I love Sundays!

Right about now Dave should be on a plane winging his way home to us. Before he gets here, J and I are going to try to tackle the closet in the cat's bathroom... When we moved here this was a walk-in closet which was designated to hold everything not immediately useful but impossible to get rid of: all of the old electronic equipment, cables, modems, flotsam and jetsam, 8 mm projector... you know. We finally took the plunge and decided to get rid of it all (well, all except the 8 mm projector) and use the space for an emergency supplies closet: water, lanterns, bandages, candles, analgesics--everything we might need in case of a hurricane or bird flu. (Put your head between your knees and kiss your... no, wait--wrong attitude).

It was my task to clean out the closet and Dave's task to gather the supplies. The result, as you might guess, is that everything that was neatly stored in the closet is now half in the closet and half in the cat's bath and completely messed up. And all the emergency supplies are in boxes and bags in the dining room. Things have been like this since last fall and The Time Has Come to Do Something About It! J and I thought it would be a nice surprise for Dave today. We'll see how far we can get (i.e., how ruthless I can be: "But wait! I might someday need that Mac SCUSI cable from 1990! No, two coaxial cables is NOT enough! I am not sure what it is, but if I throw it out I might find out that it was important and THEN where will I be?").

Wish us luck...

A Drive with Jessie

After I picked Jessie up from school yesterday we went to the grocery store. They must feed the kids lots and lots of sugar for their afternoon snack as, boy was she wired! As we were driving (keep in mind this is only a few blocks) she saw a young woman with a dog. This sparked two threads. The first was on having a dog:

J: Mommy, can we have three dogs?
Me: No honey, Daddy doesn't want three dogs.
J: Can we have two dogs?
Me: We have two dogs.
J: No, two little dogs.
Me: no, honey.
J: Please can I have a little dog? I promise I'll take care of it? Please, please, please?

Isn't four too young for this kind of concerted begging? I thought I had until at least, uh, seven for this to kick in.

And then we got into 'how old is old?'.

Me: Is 20 old?
J: No.
Me: 40?
J: No.
Me: 60?
J: 58 is old.
Me: Is 60 old?
J: No, yes, no.
Me: What is old?
J: 70?
Me: Is 70 old?
J: Daffodils are old.
Me: Really?
J: Yes.

Where do you go from a wind shear like that?

Then...

J: Mommy, who's this? "I want me gold!"
Me: A pirate?
J: No.
Me: (remembering it was St. Patrick's day) A leprechaun?
J: No, (carefully enunciated for my benefit) a leper-corn.

And as we pulled into the grocery store parking lot (referencing the two pecans she picked up on the playground at school and brought into the car--yes we are in Georgia, they grow here and are *everywhere*) :

J: Did you take care of my coconuts?
Me: You mean your pecans?
J: All the things I have at school are 'coupons' that I found.

Oooookay.

And finally, getting ready to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer the movie:

J: I love Buffy. She kills all the vampires.
I warn: This is a different Buffy. (She has seen the entire series more than once but this is the first time for the movie.)
J: Is she going to save the day?

Yup. Plot synopsis in a nutshell. The most disturbing part of watching the movie with her was her fascination with cheerleading--the uniforms and the pom-poms. I will have to be vigilant. A good nerd friend (really, really, really nerd--but not at all dork) from high school's daughter (yes, I am that old) became a cheerleader. I can still remember his "Where did I go wrong?"

I am a Badger

Got this (as I get so many good things!) from Bridget's blog. She is a horse, a noble (herd) animal. Me, like 24% of the people who took the test, am the badger:


The badger is... common. I guess most of us are grumpy but have hearts of gold. The other animals I could have been are the horse, bear, wolf, puma, otter and crow. I would like to have been an otter and see myself as more of a crow. Dave (not that he will ever take the quiz) is definitely a wolf. And Bridget--herd animal joke aside--really is the horse (you have to see the qualities to understand).

Music, Parenthood, and Death

Yesterday was a day of ups and downs. Dave is in Austin for the SXSW Music Festival. While he is gone I get a taste of single parenthood. Wow. Honestly some of it is easier and some of it is tougher. Yesterday morning on the way to school (after a terrific meltdown about panties, pants, socks and shoes... whatever), a squirrel ran across the road in front of us. Here is the ensuing conversation:

Jessie: "Did we hit it?"
Me: "No, we missed him."
Jessie: "It's a girl."
Me: "I didn't see that close." (Thinking of something I was not going to say to my four year-old)
She didn't miss a beat: "I did, but I didn't see her eyelashes."

That's how you tell the boy squirrels from the girl squirrels doncha know.

The rest of the day was normal... until I went to get her from school at 6:00 and found that the minivan had been egged. After we got home from school I checked Dave's car on the street and it had been hit twice too. What the hell. The only neighbors I have ticked off are the ones with the dogs and I haven't done anything to them recently. This morning I checked with a neighbor down the street (her name is Java, she was on her way back from Jupiter Coffee... some low-lying fruit are just too good to pass up) and though she hadn't been hit she saw lots of eggshells on the street. So I felt less violated.

Why are many acts of random scattered violence easier to accept and feel like less of a violation than a single one is/does? Because we are, in fact cattle, and it's nice to be in the herd? Well, if I have to be in the herd I will picture myself as a gazelle. I could go down the whole path of being from Montana where Men are Men, Women are Scarce and Sheep are Nervous again but... oh wait, I just did. Anyway, that's a flock, not a herd.

Dave being gone always makes me think of all kinds of weird things. This morning's topic (unsurprisingly) was what I would do if Something Bad Happened To Dave. Skip past all the suicidal depression part because that Would Not Be An Option because of the Sprout. Dating for about 15 years does not feel like an option either, but that is a separate and much less important topic. No, today I obsessed about where I would live and VERY surprisingly I thought that I would not move. Even though we have only lived here for three years, we have very good (old and new) friends and a good support system. I would both have to and be able to get a real job again. Jessie has friends and we could put our lives back together more easily here than we could elsewhere (e.g., in Montana by my parents, in Chicago by Dave's and old friends, in Austin by old friends, or somewhere new with no one). How odd. Here I am thinking I am struggling daily to leave here, and when I really focus on it, it doesn't seem like such a desirable idea.

Politically Incorrect

Ok, I probably should not be posting all of this. But it is my life and my rant and the chips are just going to have to fall as they may.

At the end of last year Jessie came home from school with head lice. Eeuw. But we dealt with it. As some of you know, she is 4-1/2 and has never had her hair cut. I have not had my hair cut since she was born and it is between my waist and my butt. She passed them to me. Eeeuw. We dealt. I nitpicked until my fingers bled. Literally. But we got over it. It took through January, but we got.over.it. (Though my head is itching again just thinking about it.)

I just came from the school and, oh joy, now they have pinworms going around! What the hell is it with the south?!? When it was announced that there were pinworms in one of the classes many parents piped up with really grotendous stories of how their parents had to deal with them... I never had lice, I never had pinworms, I never had cooties of *any* kind! Is it because I grew up in Montana and life there is just too harsh to pass around all this s*it?

Now I have the joy of looking at my child's butt in the middle of the night with a flashlight... and that is just the beginning. I am opening a bottle of lovely California red right now and drowning my sorrows in AJB Super Tuscan 2002 and 'The Princess Bride' on dvd (J's pick for a treat as D is out of town and she misses her Daddy) .

Show and Tell

This week at Jessie's preschool they are doing a unit on pets and this morning the ferrets got to take to the road to meet all the kids. I am proud to report that both Saltimbocca (on the left) and Splinter (on the right) were perfect gentlemen. They let themselves be squeezed by Jessie and petted by all classmates with perfect aplomb. I have to say, if it weren't for the smell, ferrets would be the most perfect of pets--to the extent that there would be no reason to have anything else.

We are on #4 and #5 (the first three having died of old age in the past couple of years) and none of them have been biters... well, except for Squirm who was fond of ankles and would take a nice nip out of one given the opportunity. Smudge was the first ferret and he was a sable, as is Splinter. Then came Sisyphus who was a black-eyed white. Then Squrim the silver mitt joined us. Saltimbocca was a free-to-a-good-home adult ferret at the pet store. He is a silver and has been a wonderful companion to Splinter since the demise of the other three.