The Awful End

It is said that when the King of England first visited Christopher Wren's Cathedral of St. Paul, he said it was "Amusing, awful and artificial"--an exercise in the changing nature of English, as the words then meant "amazing, awe-inspiring and artistic."

Does that apply to Lemony Snicket's "The End?" Well, that depends on how you look at it. I started the series back in the day, when it was offered an something fun to read while waiting for the next Harry Potter. And it was amusing--in the current meaning--a clever twist on the earnest Victorian books that showed Our Hero, who was Honest and True, overcoming adversity and earning riches and rewards. I have actually read at least one book by Horatio Alger, where Our Hero was oppressed by a nasty stepfather (even his wife called him "Mr. Tarbox"), but escaped to the gold fields of California to strike it rich.

Of course, the exact opposite happens to the Baudelaires, which was clever. As the books progressed, I enjoyed the silliness--Count Olaf posing as "Detective Dupin," a reference to Edgar Allen Poe's detective of the Murder on the Rue Morgue. I failed to make the connection myself, but someone pointed out that J(erome).D. Salinger had written something called "To Esme, With Love and Squalor." Hence Jerome and Esme Squalor in The Esatz Elevator.

Sunny's speech was also cleverly allusive. As she learned to cook--in The Slippery Slope, I believe--she offered an appetizer with the phrase "amuse bouche"--literally something to amuse one's mouth. (A dedicated fan created a Sunny dictionary here.)

The books were rife with anagrams--the first I spotted was "Al Funcoot," the "author" of the play in which Olaf was going to marry Violet for the Baudelaire fortune. "Al Funcoot" of course rearranges to "Count Olaf."

But then I found some boards--and the dedicated and even obsessive fans who were looking to find hidden messages and deeper secrets that would reveal more about the story. Did you know that one of the patients in The Hostile Hospital was "Laura V. Bleediotie" which is an anagram for "Violet Baudelaire?" They discussed who "Beatrice" was--and I had thought it was just a nod to Dante, so I had skimmed it, smiled briefly, and moved on.

Was there more that I had just missed? Was there deep structure and a tightly cohesive story that ran beneath the books like a secret passageway--and that could be found only by serieous deciphering of various codes? Did I need to carefully parse The Unauthorized Autobiography and The Beatrice Letters to get ready for all the hidden meanings in the last book?

Then I read "The End." And while it ties up some threads, it leaves very very many unaddressed--even unacknowledged. There are more clever allusions--everyone who lives on the island is named after a famous literary island dweller: Robinson and Friday: Miranda, Alonso, Ferdinand, Caliban and Ariel; Omeros and Calypso. The "facilitator" of the island is named Ismael, and keeps repeating "Call me Ish."

The book also cleverly inverts the story of Eden: here, as all are dying, a serpent offers an apple that saves everyone's lives. There is plenty of clever wordplay, such as "read the end of The End from the end of The End and not from the beginning of The End." All are hallmarks of the entire series, and this one is certainly a match for all that came before.

As a finale, however, it asks more questions than it answers. What happened to the Quigley triplets? Is Fiona really evil, or is there hope for Klaus' broken heart? Will the Baudelaires ever come into their fortune? Is VFD really just "Volunteer Fire Department?" Then why all the secret passages and codes and costumes and child-snatching? Why is the sugar bowl so important?

But, in the end, the story got away from him. "Lemony Snicket" seeded his books liberally with false leads, possible story lines, red herrings--far too many to be resolved in a single book. Which he acknowledges with long discussions of how stories have no real beginning and no real end, that they cannot be fully encompassed, that they are like the infinite layers of an onion, with new stories being revealed.

Which I find very reassuring. Sure, I had missed some clever allusions, some neat puzzles, but there was not an entire story that I had completely missed. Jasper Fforde (another of my favorite funny authors) has said that as he writes, he puts things into the books so that he can pick them up later--even though he has no idea what they are going to be when he first writes them. Perhaps that is what happened with The Series of Unfortunate Events. Perhaps Lemony Snicket will write further series--the Quigley triplets would be a natural. And, of course, I will read them.

I do still want to know what "a wet viper perm" is supposed to be an anagram of.

Nietzsche Family Circus.

You may have already seen the Marmaduke blog, which explains the barely funny daily cartoon in five hundred words or less. But this! This is totally awesome! It randomly pairs a (ceritiably non-humorous) Family Circus cartoon drawing with a random quote from the famous philosopher.


"The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends."

This is clearly filling a need in MY life. Why not other pairings, like a Shakespearean Insult Generator with pictures of Paris Hilton? Or whoever (or whatever) gets your hate on.


"[Thou] foul defacer of God's handiwork.
Thou elvish-mark'd, abortive, rooting hog! We leak in your chimney."

(That last one sounds like the French Taunter from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.)
Speaking of which...why not random Monty Python quotes matched to--oh I don't know, maybe E! Online's Fashion Police.

Listen, strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.



So, brave knights, if you do doubt your courage or your strength, come no further, for death awaits you all with nasty, big, pointy teeth.

The possibilities are endless.

More Hard Work

So, I got some wonderful responses to this post. It's nice to know I'm not alone, and that even I am loved.

I've done some more thinking about this issue--it IS homework after all.

The problem is that it feels like I've signed a social contract that no one else in the world has--that you only ask when you are truly desperate. Thus, it's not okay to ask unless the situation is extreme, PLUS when someone else asks you to do something, you are required to move heaven and earth to accommodate them, because it's an emergency--because they asked.

Which leaves me in a pissed off place when I find out that the request wasn't important. And whose fault is that?

I don't want to pass this on to the kidlets, but I don't have very good models to behave otherwise. Although I have this one friend who is very good at saying "I'm sorry. That doesn't work for me." And then she just shuts up--she doesn't apologize, or try to make something happen, or negotiate, or anything. Just "That doesn't work for me."

It's my new catchphrase.

Confidential to Mr. Sweetie

For those of you reading between the lines: this will explain that.

Fetchez la Vache!

Blogger has upgraded, and now has new colors and templates and all kinds of shiny newness! I love the smell of fresh paint on a blog!

It has even arranged for some new fonts. What I want it know is--does Trebuchet also launch large rocks? Or cows?

Trolling the Internet

I went online looking for this:
Mr. Pumpkin Head pirate kit. What a steal! You don't have to perform a yukky crainiotomy with all that slimy orange pulpy stuff--plus seeds! It's non-flamable and even a kid can do it. So, I went to the website here.

But wait! There's more! More stuff from this seller? I'm there!

Maybe (I thought to myself) there are more options! Fairy princess pumpkin push ins! Or Vampires! Frankensteins! Mummies! Edvard Munch screams! The possibilities are literally endless. Surely someone has taken injectable plastics to the next level for Halloween.

But, I was distracted by this. Look! Shiny!

But if I got them, could I wear them after Halloween? Maybe the patent leather ones would be a better choice?

P.S. Thanks for the link, sweetney!

Living Like Trading Spaces

Well, my last year of decorating the cafeteria for Book Festival is now finished. The event happened tonight, and I got everything done. It did feel a bit like Trading Spaces, in that there was a definite count-down...as well as using flimsy materials, from what I hear. Although I don't think TS has stooped to crepe paper like I did.

Anyway, I had three kids and one other adult to assist, and we finished with 10 minutes to spare. The crepe paper operated as the spreading leaves of trees (which were the center posts of the room, covered in brown artist's paper): the metallic skirting made a charming waterfall over the doors, and in a bold move to make the whole thing about the kids, I made large paper leaves with all their names on.

This was especially smart for relieving any pressure on me--it was about the KID'S ART, not about what I could do. I just put up the background for what the KIDS did, and the KIDS' art was the focus. And really, isn't that appropriate for a school function?

The kidlet's requests were really reasonable, and I bought a couple other books that looked interesting. So now I'm done, and I've set the bar reasonably low so that if no one volunteers to decorate the cafeteria, kids could do it. Or, they could give it a rest for a bit, and then a new volunteer could suggest it. "I know, let's decorate the cafeteria for Family Night!" And then everyone else will say "You are such a genius!"

Either that or there will be a professional set decorator from the Guthrie who has a kid at the school.

New Math

Tomorrow night is the big Family Night for Book Festival, and so all my work on transforming the cafeteria must be finished by tomorrow at 5. I have lots and lots of ideas that are not going to happen, and I've got bits and pieces of projects around the house that I've been working on. My mind is full of rainforest crafts, and I have little mental energy (or even time) for much else.

PLUS

We spent every spare minute last weekend enjoying the boat, so I woke up on Monday realizing that kidlets needed clean laundry for school that was still residing inside laundry hampers.

PLUS

Mr. Sweetie is travelling this week--he left Tuesday morning at 6:30, and will be back Friday night about 9:30.

EQUALS

Six loads of unsorted laundry dumped on my bed. I'm just going to move it over to Mr. Sweetie's side of the bed and pretend it's him.

Noticing

I was at a memorial service two weekends ago, and there is so much I want to say about it, but I am still processing some of it.

Nevertheless, I did notice one thing particularly. One of the men speaking at the service was asked to step up on a raised platform and participate in a Buddhist ceremony, which involved lighting incense. He was a tall man, thin and European looking, (as I found out later) an advertising executive and the boss of the man being memorialized. As he walked across the platform, one of the legs of his elegant suit was caught on teh heel of his shoe.

It was that detail that made his sorrow apparent.

Noble Bermondsey

Not only is our dog fluffy, and fuzzy, and soft, and cuddly, et cetera ad nauseam, he also has a coat of arms. Awesome, dude!

Doing Some Hard Work

I saw my therapist today, and it's time for me to do some more hard work. I'm seeing her to get ahead of the depression a bit more--the worst of the pain is finally over, and I even have some small margins of emotional resiliance, so if one thing goes wrong, I'm not overwhelmed and non-functional.

What I am discovering about myself, though, is that it is hard for me to advocate for myself. Somewhere, I got the idea that doing things for myself--because I want to--is not acceptable. Which really makes no sense at all.

I mean, when Mr. Sweetie and I started building our gardens, I knew I loved roses, but they were the one plant I couldn't bring myself to buy and plant. Why, you ask? I don't know. They were what I loved the best, but absent a "logical" reason to get them, I just didn't.

I'm finding that I have the same problem with other aspects of my life. Right now, I have a small handful of health issues that I really ought to have checked: I think I may be going slightly deaf; I have a plantar's wart that will not go away; I should get a mammogram; I have reason to think that I might have issues with sleep apnea. But do I call a doctor and get an appointment for any of these things? No! Why? I am afraid to bother a doctor--after all, they aren't really serious.

Okay, that's just stupid. As my therapist pointed out, I could be living very dangerously--who knows what health issues I might have. As I can figure from my own (former) professional life--you don't get paid if you don't have clients who give you work.

The problem is that I am afraid to take up space. I am simply, constitutionally, genetically incapable of asserting myself--hence, near pathological conflict avoidance. My brand new garage had a problem with some sort of shorting out--push the button to raise the door, and all the power went out. I was actually shy about calling the construction company to send someone out to fix that. As if, what? I was supposed to keep parking in the street because I couldn't get the door open? Or I was supposed to run to the basement everytime I used the garage and flip the breaker?

So, I spent some time with my therapist this week, and really--this is incredibly unhealthy behavior. I'm not happy, I'm passive-aggressive to Mr. Sweetie, I'm teaching my kidlets that they can't speak up for themselves. So I have to start taking myself as seriously as I take the rest of the world. This is my therapeutic homework until my next appointment.

So, rather than just hobbling along with things that are "good enough," or "at least not actively bad," or even "not life threatening yet" I am setting myself the task of treating myself to what I need to be the person I am capable of being. The person Mr. Sweetie married. A person that I like and admire. Like that.

Bumper Stickers to Show and Share

One of about 15 bumper stickers on the car in front of me at the stop light:

"In case of Rapture, can I have your car?"

The Scientific Method

Pony was filling Bunny in on 7th grade math.

Pony: And then we had to spend two minutes observing dirt. With water in it.

Bunny: Just a bucket o' mud, eh?

Pony: No. Wet dirt.

I guess those are fundamentally different things. This is what a good education provides.

The Persistance Of Schlock; or Earworms to Regret

I was listening to the "Adult Contemporary" (pronounced "Boomer fogey") radio station yesterday, and they were playing a selection of acoustic music--for those of us who refuse to be old, but don't really want to hear The Offspring on a Sunday morning. When I tuned in, Lyle Lovett was just winding up a tune that I didn't recognize, but was unmistakeably his.

But, going from the sublime to the ridiculous, it was immediately followed by the old Harry Chapin warhorse "Cat's in the Cradle." You remember that piece of crap, don't you? About the guy who is always too busy to spend time with his boy, until his boy grows up and becomes too busy to spend time with his dad. Pretentious. Obvious. Like sticking your head into a garbage can and having somebody come by and hit it with a baseball bat: There Is A Message!

I couldn't believe that someone actually found that piece of regrettable "music" and actually broadcast it--now. In 2006! I thought there was a statute of limitations on something that trite.

Apparently not. The Pony came home the other day, complaining about a couple of her friends singing "One Tin Solder." Oh. My. God. If there is not a statute of limitations on that, there should at least be a freshness date on crap that old. Anyone old enough to have heard that before SHOULD NOT have to be reminded of it again.

As a public service, I will refresh your memory:

Listen children to a story/ That was written long ago /'Bout a kingdom on a mountain/ And the valley far below. On the mountain was a treasure/ Buried deep beneath the stone/ And the valley people swore/ They'd have it for their very own.

[Chorus] Go ahead and hate your neighbor/ Go ahead and cheat a friend. Do it in the name of Heaven/ You can justify it in the end. There won't be any trumpets blowing/ Come the Judgement Day/ On the bloody morning afterrrr-er-er/ One tin soldier rides away.

Okay, that was painful. Worse than that, it stuck in my head after Pony told me about it. That's what makes it an earworm--it gets into your ear and you can't get rid of it. Hard to say which is worse--the Tin Solder or the Cat's Cradle.

What is the matter with musicians today--can't they write their own crap, so we don't have to listen to the old crap? I want fresh, new crap--the freshest crap you can find! That stuff, I can ignore!

Fighting the Good Fight

I have struggled with depression through most of my kidlets' lifetimes. Sometimes the depression wins. However, since the tweaking of my medications, I have felt more like a human being and less like a puddle of anxious goo. But I lost a LOT of years to depression, and I feel like I should get them back.

But I don't want them to be tacked onto the end of my life--however old I get to be, there is a limit to how long I want to hang on, and the extra seven years might not actually be anything I want at that point. I know at least two women who lived far longer than they cared to, and every day was just a disappointment that they were still here.

I want my seven years back NOW. So, I decided that I would just advance my birthdate by seven years. This gives me the advantage of being back in my mid-30s, plus now I'm the youngest of my siblings instead of the oldest.

However, it appears that you can't cheat the calendar. I was sitting at the dinner table a while ago, and Mr. Sweetie became concerned about the expression on my face. I looked unhappy, or dour, or depressed--none of which I felt.

That is when I realized that, despite my entitlement to being younger, despite my lack of wrinkles, despite the fact that once every month I get a mother of a zit to announce my period--I am not, in fact, younger. Actually, it appears that in the battle against aging, gravity is now winning.

This would be really depressing, except that the alternative is not any better. Damn gravity.

Life Improvement Projects

I am discovering that I like boating. We finished 3 bottles of wine and one jug over the weekend. Yes, I like my wine.

But now we need a signature drink for on-board. We tried one that Mr. Sweetie's sister had recommended: a white Lillet with ginger ale. Maybe it's better on a hot day, but of 4 of us drinking it, only one really liked it. As a hot weather drink, though, it's not better than a mojito--just easier to make.

One couple I knew had a boat drink called "Strip and Go Naked" which was really drinkable on a sunny summer day, and consisted of an unholy mix of beer, vodka, lemonade, and probably floor sweepings for all I know. Yes, I had a lot of that--and that was over 10 years ago.

The aperatif of choice is currently Bailey's. At least that part is settled.

And We Have Lift-Off!

Yes, it actually happened. The Lady Cliff hit the water on Friday and is, in fact, now a river tested boat. I had blind faith that it would actually happen, all objective evidence to the contrary, although Mr. Sweetie kept saying that it wouldn't happen until spring--probably to keep himself from being disappointed if it DID take until spring.

The gas lines got replaced and the seacocks got maintained, and she was lifted off her blocks and put in the water late afternoon Friday. I, of course, had about ten thousand things to do on Friday afternoon, and couldn't get to the marina until about 8 p.m.--having spent hours and hours ferrying the kidlets to their various music lessons and overnights. By then, it was fully dark, and we decided we didn't really need to move the boat to her slip until the next morning. Sure, we may have been over-cautious, but since I hadn't brought a blindfold, it wouldn't have been COMPLETELY DARK YET.

OF COURSE WE DIDN'T MOVE HER IN THE DARK! But, as it was our anniversary, we bought champagne and exotic cheeses and elegant crackers and gooey chocolate desserts and had dinner in the best restaurant in town. Lady Cliff was moored at the dock where she was put into the water, and so as we listened to jazz and ate, she rocked gently on the currents. The lights in the salon are warmly yellow, and make the African mahogany brightwork glow.

Poor Mr. Sweetie was like a kid on Christmas Eve, he was so excited about getting to go cruising in His Own Boat. Literally. He basically woke up at 3:30 in the morning and could not go back to sleep. At least he didn't come stare at me, willing me to wake up--a technique that has been attempted on Christmases past.

And she drives beautifully. Cap'n Sweetie piloted her out onto the river with just the two of us onboard, and we sauntered upstream a bit. The fall colors were at their peak this weekend, and Saturday was a gorgeous sunny day. After retrieving and kidlets and inviting the Evil Grandparents (JoMama and Poppa), we went out again. And again that evening. And with some other friends on Sunday. Which was gray and cold, but still wonderful and exciting and definitely NOT ENOUGH BOATING.

A Cultural Interlude

Last night, Mr. Sweetie and I got to take a curator lead tour of the Chinese collection of the Institute of Art. Boy was he a wealth of information, and what a fabulous event!

When I heard we were going to have a "curator," I just assumed a sort of stuffy old guy who spends his time in libraries and the warehouse, obsessing over things like humidity levels. What we got was a facinating man who travels the world and cares deeply about the deep cultural clues imbedded in old artifacts, and who communicates that passion in a clear and absorbing manner. We were there for 2 1/2 hours and I totally could have been there longer.

The newly expanded Chinese galleries are organized around the three main philosophies of Chinese thought: Buddhism, Daoism, and Confusianism. As our curator, Bob Jacobson, summarized them, Buddhism focuses on the self in relation to mind/self; Daoism is self in relation to the natural world, Confusianism is self in relation to community/family. Which, of course, I'd never have realized by myself.

He showed us the layout of the Ming dynasty reception hall, with the furniture placed as it would have been on a formal occasion, with the matriarch and patriarch on the large bench/throne, and the chairs reflecting the relative status of the attendants. (The chairs are also the first in the world to be designed to the shape of the spine--rare, foreign, and ergonomic!) The furniture was all made of a special dense wood that is itself no longer available, and is all constructed along the same principles of architectual building. Plus, furniture came rather late to China--compared to everything else China invented, furniture came with Buddhism from India, starting with an altar, and subsequently raising everything off the floor to become chairs and tables and benches, etc. Who knew?

Even the wall hangings reflect the Confusian ideals--a male and female swan with cygnets, standing as the matriarch and patriarch surrounded by their family. Whereas I had looked at them and thought "oooo! pretty!" they actually had meaning and wouldn't have been merely pretty and wouldn't have ever hung anywhere else in the house.

I don't know about you, but as much as I like the ink paintings, they do start to look alike to me. But Bob showed us a series by a Chinese artist who fingerpainted--actually never used a brush, but his fingers, nails and hands to create art--even the water buffalo are basically just a decorated thumb-print.

What was hammer home, however, is just how OLD China is--they've been casting ornamental bronzes for better than 4000 years! They invented practically every kind of ceramics you could name--and then went on and invented porcelain. Hundreds of years ago they manufactured lacquerware that is as light and thin as what we now make out of petroleum polymers. All under a continuous society--the Chinese have been Chinese since before the classical Greeks or Romans, before anything that remains in Europe, back to the time of the earliest Egyptians. And they're still here!

Now they are revving their economic engine--now is the time to learn Chinese!

I Knew Sleep Was Good!

Heard a conversation on NPR with a memory expert. Apparently, memories are made in one part of the brain, but stored elsewhere. This is why some forms of brain trauma have different effects--like the movie Momento, where the new memories had no lasting power, and the hero kept waking up into new times and having to deduce what was going on. The storage facility was damaged.

This also explains why Alzheimer's patients can remember their more distant past, but not their more recent lives--the memories are literally* stored in different places.

*N.B.: I am using the word "literally" literally, and not figuratively or as an intensifier. This is one of my pet grammatical peeves. That and repetition of "self," as in "I self-analyzed myself." As opposed to, say, self-analyzing someone else?

According to this expert, one of the reasons sleep is so important to humans is that the brain uses sleep time to sort memories and store them their different locations. Sleep deprivation also impinges on the ability to remember.

Of course, the image that popped into my head was the brain as a "memory librarian," using the hours the library is closed to reshelve the books. Can't you just see it pushing around a metal cart of jumbled images and filing them according to the Dewey Decimal System?

In Which I Realize I Am Insane

Once again, this afternoon, I spent 45 minutes of a gorgeous autumn day runing an art class for 11 3rd through 5th graders. The Bunny's school has an annual book festival as a fund-raiser, and I am involved. "Incarcerated" may be the better word. "Semi-voluntarily committed" also works.

See, this school is a private school started for all those premier Saint Paul families who were not Catholic, and thus were stuck with either the public schoools, or raising their children to go to daily mass and to get their information from cloistered nuns. Robber barons of the early 20th century didn't apparently like those options, so they started their own school.

And overachievement has reigned ever since.

Don't get me wrong, it's a fine, fine school, and I am thrilled with the academic opportunities my kids are getting. It's just that there is something...I don't know, maybe "off"...about having volunteer meetings with women rifling through DayTimers (TM) and FiloFaxes (TM). Once something happens at that school, it just keeps growing and growing.

Many schools have book fairs for fundraisers, and they put up tables in the cafeteria, call Scholastic to bring some books, and then are done. Not us. Oh no--that wouldn't require the tactical and strategic effort of all our Type A stay-at-home parents. So ours lasts a week. We have daily readings by parents in all the classrooms. We have class trips to fill out wish lists. We have appearances by authors and illustrators and professionals who embody the year's theme. We have Family Night, in which families are invited to shop for books, AND have dinner, AND have story-time, AND see a presentation by an entomologist, AND another presentation by the Minnesota Zoo...

And we decorate the cafeteria. And not just decorate--the goal is to transform it. This is my job.

I got into it because a friend of mine was doing it all by herself. She came in with rafts of pictures she had been painting in her basement for weeks, and I told her that she should let me help, because I enjoy painting. So, one year, we did it together. And she suggested that we should co-teach a mini-course: 45 minutes twice a week for six weeks and get the kids involved. I agreed, and then her kids left the school, leaving me to run it. This is now my third year. Like I said--semi-voluntarily committed.

Now the event is next week, and it's time the rubber hits the road. Or the craft paper hits the walls. I have a ton of ideas, and no way to make them reality--having two kids playing sports and having to drive to away games totally takes away the time I can use the school to paint and plan.

Well, this is the last time I need to do this, and I'm totally going to have to have my head examined before I take on this big of a project again.

Progress On The March

So, since I lost my iPods, I had to go online and see what the latest versions look like. It's just being a good consumer.

And my goodness, they have changed in the last six months. When I got my mini, all the screens were black and white only.The Nano came out about six months later with a color screen, but were only available in black and white. Now they come in colors too.

The shuffle is less than half its previous size, which is dangerous because I would totally lose that in less than a month. Maybe a week.

The video iPods look awesome--if I got a white one, I could have different colored skins for it, which would be fun, as I am all about accessories. But wait--there is a U2 edition. I am (still) addicted to U2--and it has their signatures reproduced on the back and some exclusive content included. But I don't want black and red...

Plus, I heard a rumor that the next generation is going to come out in time for Christmas. And they couldn't print it on the internet if it wasn't true, right?

A Tax On Stupidity

Things are settling down around here. The road destruction is nearly complete on both sides of Chez Evil,and the signs that said "No Parking this block 7/1/06-12/28/06" are gone. Which is good, as that is a long time to have no access to your own street.

The garage is finished, just awaiting the final electrical hook-up to be fully operational. The front stairs that Mr. Sweetie is building for us have all the structural pieces attached and level and now need only treads and risers to also be fully operational. Just like Darth Vader and the Death Star "This base is now fully operational. wheeze wheeze"

But. I am not, apparently, fully operational. In fact, I am being stupid. Mr. Sweetie's mother, Gramma Sweetie, came to visit, and I left her in my Van of Evil, talking to Mr. Sweetie on the Evil Cel Phone, parked in the new garage with the overhead door still up. She came into the house, and I failed both to close the door and to lock the car.

The next morning, Mr. Sweetie found a folder with the registration and insurance information on our front porch. It hadn't been there earlier when he'd brought in the newspaper.

Yup. Someone rifled the car. And in my colossal stupidity, I had both my iPods in the car. Which this Someone took. Plus the AirPlay that allowed me to listen through the radio. Plus the power charger. And a cel phone that had been mine until I got the shiny shiny pink one with a different carrier.

Yes, it could have been worse. No windows were broken, no i.d. taken. Nothing was damaged and no one was hurt. But I'll never get those back--who is going to pawn them rather than use them? They'll just erase my stuff and put their own stuff on and that's that.

I'm sure whoever has them now has laughed himself sick over the Old Lady music that's on there. Perhaps it's like liberating the iPod from bad music or something--A Cause. Whatever. It leaves me having to listen to the radio, now, which is sooo bad it's why I had an iPod to start with.

More Fun With Latin!

Alert Reader JoMama has studied some Latin, and passes on the following information:

The proper way to render "I love Emo" into Latin would be "Ego amo Emo."

That is just so darn fun to say! Try it at home!

What Dreams May Come

Sometimes, I get to have the greatest dreams. It's a sign to me that I'm actually finishing the job of rest if I get to have really elaborate and interesting dreams. Recently, I've been staying up late and getting up early, and cutting out my REM sleep. So, today, I took a really good nap, and had the greatest dream in ages.

I was driving around a version of my neighborhood on a night much like the ones we've been having recently--wet and rainy. I live in an old area that is just stuffed full of old Victorian behemoth houses, built for families with 10 children and 20 live in servants. For many years, most of these houses were no longer fashionable, and were donated to charitable organizations or were carved up into rooming houses and tiny apartments. Over the last 20-30 years, however, many many of them have been reclaimed into single family homes (more or less--how do you classify live-in nanny quarters?)

In my dream, many of them were even bigger than in real life, and were being equipped with showy awnings and extremely dramatic lighting. And three of these dream houses were open as historic re-enactment sites, and I was touring them as they presented "Victorian New Year's Day Open Houses."

So, I walked in the front doorway and marvelled over the beautifully carved oak panelling and trim. To the right were the family's rooms, decorated with carved furniture, velvet upholstery, fine china table settings, elegant stained glass windows, the whole Victorian mise-en-scene. (Yes, I looked at each one of these things in my dream--these are very detailed dreams I have.)

To the left were the "working rooms," the butler's office, the kitchens, the servant's quarters, etc., all of which had much more plain furnishings and architectural detail. Since this was the site of re-enactment, there were also actual modern restrooms, as well as dressing rooms for the actors playing "The Family" and "The Servants." Some of the actors were changing shifts as I toured the house, so I found myself keeping track of where I had seen some of the people before--wasn't that the Cook from the kitchen that I was seeing up on the third floor?

Interestingly enough, not only was I dreaming about sights and sounds and actors and furnishing and all the other tourists going through the house with me, but I also was dreaming in textures. Up in the women servant's dormitory, there were a couple of single beds, and one large mattress on the floor for the youngest servants. When I lay down on it, I discovered that it was filled with dried corn kernels. I even picked up the corner of the mattress to feel the individual kernels, and I even could smell the slight popcorn scent of the kernels that had been warmed for the night.

Where did this all come from? There was an actor playing the "Father" who interacted with me as if I was one of his daughter's friends, and we talked about a party she and I were going to be attending later. There was a invalid "Grandmother" who had an enormous four-poster bed with a velvet quilt on it. I looked out one of the windows, to see another large house which had a long line of people in the front waiting to get in for the "open house." The houses backed up on something vaguely "municipal"--a large chain link fence and really bright lights, as if it were a water treatment facility or city pool or something that would never have been there when the area was fashionable, but could well have been placed their when the houses were run down and the property values had tanked.

There is just so damn much detail, and I don't know why I dream so extravagantly. On line dream analysis doesn't help much--some things represent "intellect" or "how you present yourself"--but when there is just so much stuff in my dreams, it's really hard to work out anything about what going on inside my head.

The one thing I am certain of--dreams about being in a bathroom usually mean I have to wake up and go pee. I have yet to find a "dream analysis" work that gets that literal.

Separated At Birth--the Johnny Depp Version

So, I've finally watched "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," and it's far better than I expected. I've never liked "The Candy Man" song from the Gene Wilder version, that movie was just sort of like saccarine Tab--sort of artificially sweet with a bad after-taste, and an inescapable '70s sort of cheesiness. I didn't really see the need for a new one, as the old one was still available for those who wanted it. Not that I thought anyone really did want it.

The kidlets were also soured on it--the Bunny loved the older version, and was staunchly against any tampering with it. (So, she's not got infallible taste--we still love her.) Pony had been punished with the "Willie Wonka Welcome Song" earworm--friends and acquaintances sang it, repeatedly, and it was soon inescapable. No one at Chez Evil wanted to see it.

But the times, they are a-changing. Pony is now in 7th grade orchestra, and they are playing selections from the soundtrack and was watching the movie in school. Bunny has mostly forgotten the Gene Wilder movie and has been playing the PS2 game version. I have seen several Johnny Depp films and find him an extremely interesting actor to watch. (Yeah, sure, he's also often veritably dreamy, which never hurts, but as Willie Wonka...not so much). So, I rented the DVD.

It was better than I expected, and much less "off" than I remembered the older one. Depp was about as far from Captain Jack Sparrow as he could be, I loved Deep Roy as the ubiquitous Oompa-Loompas, and the fantastic sets were so purely executed with joy and verve that I immediately understood why Tim Burton was drawn to the story--it was the kind of world by which Tim Burton movies often seem inspired.

So, being the geek that I am, I went to IMDB and read trivia and connections and comments and reviews---and came across Roger Ebert's review in which he compares Depp's Wonka to Michael Jackson. Which, I remembered, I had read when the movie first came out, and which added to my impression of creepiness and my desire to stay away in droves from the film.

But, actually watching the movie, it seems to me that Ebert missed the boat. Johnny Depp might have some superficial resemblance to Michael Jackson, but not so much that when I watched the movie I thought of the "King of Pop." Depp's Wonka has no interest in children, and would avoid them entirely if he could. He does not keep pets--unlike Michael Jackson's pet rat and monkey and other zoo animal pets, Wonka keeps squirrels only because they can remove walnuts whole from the shells. Wonka's animals have jobs and responsibilities and probably even hourly quotas and union breaks.

It's the voice, though, that I really couldn't place. Michael Jackson has a distinctive breathy voice, best captured in the line from the "Thriller" video: "I'm not like other guys." (No shit, Sherlock!) There is just such a little-boy-lost/Marilyn Monroe quality to his voice that is so inseparable from the creepiness that is Michael Jackson that to remove the voice is to remove the likeness.

And Johnny Depp does not speak in a breathless voice in "Wonka." He has a fairly flat affect, actually, and a little chirpiness, accentuated by the slightly higher pitch he adopts. It's got the immaturity of a boy's voice before it changes, which suggests the perpetual pre-adolescence Willy Wonka has built for himself.

But there was something else that I just couldn't place. Something about the cadence of his line reading, the way he refused to speak any of the children's names. He called them "little boy" and "little girl" as if those were, in fact, the children's names. He spoke in the royal third person with that odd nearly cheerful inflection that recalled....recalled...

Church Lady.




I would have gotten it much faster if one of the winners of the Golden Ticket had been ...


SATAN!!!!

Good News, Bad News

Well, we got the survey results on our boat, and the insurance response.

The good news is that the insurance company will cover us--which is not a small thing, given the large number of insurance companies that will not cover a boat as old as ours, or first time boat owners.

The bad news is that there are a number of things that have to be addressed before we can go boating, and it's just hard to wait until next spring! Sure, a lot of them are easy, like replace the 20 year old flares, and put stickers that say "Fuel" and "Oil" on the proper fillers and tanks.

Some of them are bigger deals, and a few are very big deals and not to be done except by professionals. On the other hand, I do have some questions. One of the directives is that we are to "service stiff seacocks."

Can you hire a professional to do that, and is it even legal?

The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name

So, the dog remains a really good dog--he's really a nice little boy. But, he remains a boy.

I've only had one other male dog in my lifetime, and he never had this--once he was neutered, he was neutered, if you know what I mean. The old boy never had an erection in his entire life. Not so for Bermondsey.

I came out of the laundry room tonight to see the dog standing guiltily in the hallway outside the Bunny's room. His head was hanging down and he was looking at me from under his bangs in a way that said "okay, so I pottied where I wasn't supposed to, and I'm really sorry, but I'm just a dog and so, if I'm really cute will you not be angry at me?" At least, that's what I thought, but there was no telltale puddle on the floor, or pile anywhere.

And on second glance, he was standing with his back hunched over, so I thought maybe he tried to poop and it got caught in the long hair on his backside. His tail was hanging down, not jauntily curled over his back as usual. But that wasn't it either.

But, oh my god, he had an erection nearly the length of his entire body! And he looked really embarassed about it!

Now, we've long suspected he was having intimate relationships with various stuffed animals that belong to the girlies. Barney is often discovered lying abandoned in the dining room, a fair distance from the upstairs bedrooms. And Mr. Bun-bun has tan fur very similar to Bermondsey's, and is roughly the same size. I have frequently mistaken him for the dog, especially as he is frequently found under the parlor chairs.

Tonight, these "companions" were still downstairs. There was, however, a suspicious wet patch on the quilt on one of the beds.

It's like the coda to the Gene Wilder sequence in "Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex*"--after ruining his life and career after being found having unnatural relations with sheep, Gene Wilder ends the movie lying on streetcorners, swilling Woolite.

Bermondsey spend part of the rest of the evening hiding in the closet. Who knew dogs were capable of Freudian acts?

Now With More Pirate-y Goodness!

Yesterday was International Talk Like A Pirate Day, and in it's honor, as well as in honor of our new status as boater, we have a nearly full compliment of piratical names.

First Mate Keel-Haul Kate Bonny--that's me.

Second Mate Half-Tooth McBeady--that's the Pony

Boatswain Monkey Smythe--the Bunny

Cabin Boy Brody Swiftknife--that's the dog

Only Mr. Sweetie has not yet had a sufficiently terror-inspiring name bestowed upon him. Suggestions are welcome.

No, "Michael Eisner" will not be accepted. Even if he is still very scary.

Fun With Latin!

Another in our occasional series of "Fun With..."

I tried to take Latin in high school (yes, and I am STILL a geek), but not enough students signed up so it got cancelled. Thus, my only Latin is the Stuff One Picks Up. A legal education is probably a small help in that, but even so, my law school diploma is written in Latin, and I can't read it.

So.

We've all heard "Veni, Vidi, Visa:" the riff on Caesar's declaration "veni, vidi, vici." "I came, I saw, I conquered" becomes "I came, I saw, I shopped."

The Pony came home the other day with "Veni, Vidi, Velcro:" "I came, I saw, I stuck around."

Incidentally, a friend of mine took some elementary Latin, and discovered to her horror that the "v" sound in Latin is pronounced as "w." She insisted, and I agree, that a macho dude like Julius Caesar would never have said "weenie, weedy." Just not good form, eh what? Not at all swank OR topping good form.

So, The Bunny's nickname at school is "Emo", pronounced like the police abbreviation "M.O." which has it's own irony. ANYWAY. Something about the Bunny encourages playing with her name, so occasionally we call her "Emo, Emat, Emas" which if I recall my crossword puzzle Latin accurately, would loosely translate as "I love Emo, you love Emo, s/he loves Emo."

Right?

More Bumper Sticker Favorites

From actual bumpers!


You can't have my rights.
I'm still using them.


George W. Bush: You give him an inch
and he thinks he's a ruler.

Why We Wait

So, you are asking (I know you are! You're thoughtful like that!)--why wait for insurance? Why not just put her in the water, maybe take her for a little spin?

I know, you say, that there was all that legal training you had for all those years, litigating for insurance companies--don't you think maybe that view of the world is a little skewed? After all, you saw what went wrong, but how often did you see what went right?

See--you are nice like that. You want us to enjoy our new toy right away, don't you? I bet you always buy fresh batteries for Christmas Day, so no one has to wait to play with those cool toys that always come "Batteries Not Included."

I was thinking that myself--can you believe it! I was actually thinking--well, what could happen?

Then I drove into the marina to meet the truck. This is what greeted me by the entrance.

This is not so good, is it? I think we'll wait.

Here She Is!

Well, contrary to all expectations, the Lady Cliff arrived on Friday.

I know! I don't believe it either! But it's true.

It was actually surreal--she arrived on the truck, looking just exactly as I remembered her.

Apparently, customs was no trouble at all--all my worrying was unnecessary. Our hauler, David, had a couple of worrisome moments, neither of which was customs. We'll hear those stories later.

Anyway, so Lady Cliff was sitting on the truck, and there were papers inside that I wanted to get--some records of restoration work for the survey that should happen on Monday, so I asked. Can I get those papers now or would it be better to wait until she's up on blocks.

Bless his heart, David didn't exactly laugh at me. Exactly. He did sort of smother a smirk and gave a little kind of snort. Yes, she just traveled a thousand miles on a truck, OF COURSE it's safe to get up on her. It's not like she's going to tip or anything.

So, with the aid of a ladder, I climbed up into her. Wow. We had a boat.

The travel lift wasn't available right away, so it wasn't until about 2:30 that she came off the truck. David moved the truck and the travel lift came over. Straps were run under her hull, and with a gentle lift, she came off the truck.


Hey Mom ! Look--no truck!


So, now she's up on blocks, waiting for a survey and then insurance coverage before we put her in the water. It's kind of hard to wait, but we did get to all go have dinner on her last night. It was wonderful. Mr. Sweetie found Frank Sinatra on the radio, and with the warm lights in the saloon, we had sandwiches and drinks and chips and...a lovely time was had by all.

Das Boot

The boat was successfully loaded onto a trailer in Toronto on Tuesday, and the driver pulled out on Wednesday. His goal was to hit Sault Ste. Marie last night, which means he'd have crossed the border into the US by now.

I am, of course, worried that the Customs documents I did were not up to snuff, and everybody is locked up in a Customs detention cell in upper Michigan.

Assuming everything is all right, however, the boat is scheduled to get here Friday around noon. At which point it is going up onto blocks so it can be surveyed for insurance. Maybe MAYBE we can get that done by next Monday and get coverage locked in by the weekend.

Let's take another look at this bonny lady, so we can remember why we're putting ourselves through all this?

Time for a little redecoration

Don't you just love the smell of fresh paint? Freshly sawn wood? Take a deep breath--can you smell it around here? How about up there, to the right? New photo! Aren't I gorgeous?

Fashion Forward

Went with the kidlets to the Science Museum yesterday, and got to do some people watching.

Do you know what is truly delightful? Little girls, allowed to wear whatever they want. There was one girl, probably about nine or ten, wearing jeans and a shirt--pretty non-descript. But she had all her pretty long blonde hair piled up on the back of her head, with a pair of decorative chopsticks perched on top. She also had someone's (probably her mother's) pale green pashmina shawl which she wrapped around herself like a cocoon, and then opened wide like wings.

Another littler girl, probably about six, walked by wearing a red velvet dress, with red tights and black velvet shoes. The shoes had flowers appliqued on them. She looked like she'd just come from Christmas church service--not at all like she had come to do science.

Then I saw her sister. Another probably ten year old. She was tall and thin, and the first thing I noticed were her shoes. They were strappy sandals--silver. Sparkling silver too. Which she wore with black and silver sparkling tights, and a leopard-skin sheath.

What was especially endearing is that the family members these girls were with didn't seem to have come from any special event at all. Mom and Dad had on non-descript blue jean-type parent clothes. It looked like these girls had been allowed to pick out what they most wanted to wear, which was (obviously!) the prettiest and fanciest things in their closet.

And why not? The way kids that age grow, there is every likelihood that the red velvet dress won't even fit by Christmas. If they don't wear them now, they might never be able to.

Fall Colors

It has turned cloudy and cold these last few days, and it truly feels like autumn. The kids are back in school, the nights are cool. Last week was warm and sunny, but a couple of days of this weather, and I've gotten the velvet comforter back onto the bed. My closet is full of bright colors that look garish and inappropriate, and I am longing for good thick socks and warm sweatshirts.

Last night, I took a book into the parlor, and turned on lights and started up the fireplace. It was perfect.

Organizational Dynamics

I was standing at Kinko's the other day, waiting for the fax machine to spit out my invoice, and I passed the time perusing the books they had for sale. I wasn't conveniently close enough to the fiction, or this post might have been very different.

Instead, I was by the "self-help/business-help" rack. Did you know that Highly Efficient People now have eight habits? I guess they weren't efficient enough to include that one in the earlier book. You can learn how to work for a jerk, give one thousand great answers to tough interview questions, and find new clients. Up in the top corner, however, was a title I thought I'd look at: "One Thing at a Time: 100 Simple Ways to Live Clutter-Free Every Day." Not a clutter free title at all, but still. The fax machine was taking its time, so I looked at it.

You may be more disciplined, but I never look at the first pages of a book that I pick up. Not for me, reading instructions on how to apply the wisdom of the book! Why would I even want to find out if the author has any qualifications to write this book? No, I leap in, and open at random.

And I got "Go to bed half an hour earlier." Which is totally my thing, right! I am a True Believer in the Power of Sleep, so I read on. Basically, she says, most organizing books tell you to get up half an hour earlier and accomplish a bunch of stuff before the rest of the day crowds in. Which is fine, the author says, but you need your sleep! If you are going to get up half an hour earlier, then go to bed half an hour earlier too, or you'll just deplete your own resources.

Now, that I liked. Starting with self care, and then tackling the world! So, I bought it, with the intention of reading it, highlighter in hand, to get some ideas about how to live with four busy people in a tiny house.

And, I've started reading it, but as I got a few chapters in, I realized that my mother, JoMama, had given me a book called "Organizing for the Creative Person" which I still hadn't finished. Already, this wasn't going well--I was cluttering up my space with books on reducing clutter. So, Good Intention #2--reading BOTH organization books.

Because I have taken an interesting tack on clearing clutter in our lives. Basically, I have removed all storage from the house. This works in an interesting way. First, if you eliminate all your horizontal surfaces, there is no place to put stuff, thus less clutter. Sort of. Plus, with no shelves for tchotkes and trinkets, you eliminate items that collect dust. Not bad.

But--what happens to the stuff that used to be in the shelves and on the flat surfaces, you ask? Well you might inquire! It all ends up in the basement. All of it. Not organized at all. So, when you need something, you can go spelunking through your accumulated possessions, or you can just buy another one so you have it when you need it, which is NOW.

I'm thinking that this wasn't such a good strategy. So--I've got to rethink this organization thing. Good thing I've got some books to help me--if I can find them...

What Letter Comes After Q In The Alphabet?

Aaaarrrrr! Of course.

We are going nautical. Mr. Sweetie has realized a lifelong dream, and bought a boat. Not just any boat, but a 1948 wooden cabin cruiser. She is a beauty--even I've fallen in love and I've never had any form of boat lust whatsoever.

This was what the one day trip to Toronto was about, and it was VERY satisfactory. Now it's just about trying to get the thing into the country. Who knew it would be so tricky?

But, the important part here is...now we need pirate names. At least, The Pony thinks so. So, because you can in fact find anything on the internet, I have found at least a half dozen Pirate Name Generators.

From now on, ye landlubbers, I be Keel-Haul Kate Bonny. That's FIRST MATE Keel-Haul Kate to you!

More Ways To While Away The Hours

God, I love the internet. You can truly find anything. Check out this official seal generator!

Mine rocks.

Jerusalem--With All Due Respect

Being trendy and hip urbanites, Mr. Sweetie and I live inside the city. Actually within the city limits of Our Capital City. Because we are sooooo hip.

Actually, because this is Saint Paul, where nothing changes, we live in the suburbs of 1895--still well within current city limits, but having all the gritty urban vibe of your basic two story brick elementary school, with the swing sets and yellow school buses of your youth--which also happens to be right out our back yard.

Being urbanites, and thus the type of people who park in the street--we have parked in the street for the fifteen years* we have owned this place. And also because we haven't had a decent garage to park in. Sure, the house came with a two car garage, but we took care of that, and promptly filled it with re-useable renovation debris. "Re-useable" as in "I'll bet I could do something with that someday, if I ever got [insert unrealistic estimate of time, interest and equipment here]."

*Clearly, this must be an error. Fifteen years! I'm not old enough to have done ANYTHING for fifteen years, am I?

Then, the Nice People From The City noticed our garage. It really wasn't so bad--not much to look at, but we were just waiting for a huge branch from the towering maple trees beside it to crush it to the ground. Sadly, as attractive of a reconstruction plan as that was, it failed to execute on a timely basis. Then, the Nice Guys down the block who had a worse looking garage replaced theirs. And ours got scheduled for demolition.

Mr. Sweetie, Our Super Nice Next Door Neighbor, and I spent a weekend with crowbars, sledge hammers and intermittent assistance from the kidlets, and at the end of it all we had an impressive collection of debris packed scientifically into a dumpster and a naked view into the street behind us.

Thus, all last winter, as I scraped with snow, the sleet, the frost, the frozen rain off my car, I kept thinking "I won't have to do this next year...in Jerusalem."

Really, I am sorry my brain works like this. I can't help it. Every time I thought about next year, the words "in Jerusalem" would float unbidden into my brain. Of course, I think it's a respectful homage to my friends who liked to teach me Hebrew words, and then laughed their asses off at hearing a blonde shiksa trying to pronounce words like "L'chaim." But, just in case they feel differently, I offer a blanket apology, and swear that I mean it with all due respect.

ANYWAY--so now, we have a garage!

Most of a garage anyway. I got up one morning, and suddenly there were about a dozen men in my back yard with a cement truck, and at the end of a hour and a half, they were gone, leaving behind a beautiful cement pad and one last guy to lay the stone edging for the framing to rest on. It was amazing! They came, they poured, they levelled and then left! I have watched Mr. Sweetie do cement work around our house, and when you don't have a big mixer truck, it takes a LOT of WORK. Maybe we should get one for Mr. Sweetie's next birthday.

Then, I got a call from the garage guys, who said "We'll deliver some lumber to your house on Monday, and we will probably even get a carpenter out there sometime on Monday as well." I saw the first load of lumber--pre-built triangles for the roof. About two hours later, there were three walls standing, all framed in. Before the end of the week, we had the garage built, sheathed in plywood, the acess door and windows all installed--and all evidence of construction materials cleared away.

Then the roofers came. I have no idea how many of them there were, but they were like ants--climbing up onto the roof, roped together: one man on each end of a rope, which was laid across the peak of the roof. Men were carrying shingles in from a truck, men were hoisting shingles to the roof, men were laying shingles, and still other men were running across the shingles power hammering nails into place. Then, they were gone.

So now, we have a ginormous garage in our back yard. The garage itself isn't so big, really, but given the size of our Hip Urban Lot, it looks like a second house backed up to ours. We are still awaiting siding, wiring, and the overhead door, which will doubtless arrive and all be installed while I'm not looking. It's got several windows, so the side that faces the house looks more charming than its predecessor, storage above the parking space, and extra storage next to the cars. The neighbors already want to move in.

It's A Coincidence I Tell You!

It is only a coincidence that--not having blogged for nearly a month now, there is a tiny spider building a swing bridge across my monitor screen at this EXACT moment!

I'm a Pistol Packin' Mama!

Mr. Sweetie and I took a one-day trip to Canada last week. The plane left at the ungodly hour of 6 A.M. (!) so we had to be at the airport an hour ahead to check in for an international flight.

For those of you keeping score, the distance from St. Paul to Canada is just Not! That! Far! Physically, culturally, Canada is like the third Twin City. Anyway, we pulled into the airport at 4:45 and were inside three minutes later. Piece of cake, right? Except.

Minnesota is Northwest Airline territory. 99 and 44/100% of all flights out of Minneapolis are Northwest. Which is in bankruptcy. With its mechanics on strike. And its flight attendants about to go. So, even though there are A LOT of people in NWA uniforms at the airport at 5 a.m., none of them are working.

Which means that even though we got to the airport check-in line at 4:50 A.M. (!), we still had to wait in line for HALF AN HOUR!!! to get checked in. And we didn't even have any luggage.

You know what? Airline travel is really like riding a bus these days. We got upgraded to first class (Thank you, frequent flier miles!), all that meant was slightly more room, and two bags of peanuts for what should have been a breakfast flight. And since those British terrorists have ruined it for all of us, we couldn't even buy breakfast and bring it on the plane ourselves.

But--lest I sound grumpy and dissatisfied--it was a great trip. We went to Canada for a reason (that's for another time) and it was a glorious day, our business was completed in a VERY satisfactory way, and we returned to the airport with plenty of time to eat, buy souvenirs for the kidlets, and be together.

Most excitingly, however, my purse got pulled out of the x-ray machine, and handed over to a TSA guy for personal inspection. I was pretty certain there was nothing of any interest in there, so I was interested in what they were looking for. My wallet came out--it's a big thing, with a compartment in the back where I stored my iPod. My glasses case came out--it's a solid clamshell sort of thing, and the inspector opened it outward, with his face turned away--I almost expected fake snakes to come popping out. I had a digital camera, some assorted papers, and I was cleared to go.

Very nicely, the TSA inspector offered to show us what had prompted the search, and he turned the monitor around. Inside my backpack style purse, my digital camera had tipped up against my wallet, which was made opaque by the shitload of change I had in the change compartment. It really looked like a handgun.

I'm more dangerous than I ever knew!

The Lessons Of The Sleeves

I never imagined how hard it would be to be a mother. The way these kidlets are central to my heart was something I had expected--what I am constantly surprised by is the way that I am so fiercely protective. It causes me a literal physical pain when I see my darling, my wonderful, my so painfully fragile little ones confront the hard things in life.

When the Pony was a tiny little baby--about four months old--there was nothing she hated more than sleeves. She'd lie on the changing table, smiling and happy, until it was time to put her arms into sleeves, and then she would cry and cry and CRY.

I was rather proud of myself for persisting. I was even able to say to her "Honey, if sleeves are the worst thing that happens to you, you are one lucky girl." I'm sure she understood me, right?

But still! Every hard lesson comes at a price--paid by me! I want to keep them safe, even more than I want it for myself. But you can't.

I mean that. Literally. You can't.

The other day, the Bunny was taking a shower. I was in the very! next! room! when I heard a blood curdling scream. The shrieking! The decibles! It was unbelievable! It was the kind of sound you'd expect to hear when a knife wielding hocky mask wearing psycho rips aside the shower curtain. The sound when a face pushes its way out of the wall and intones the warnings of an oncoming hell.

It was, in fact, the sound of shampoo in the eye.

I guess, if life is safe, the little things feel as invasive as the truly horrible things feel to the average person. This, my chickadees, is the lesson of the sleeves.

Now Improved!

The Sheraton Hotel is coming down this week. It was an odd little hotel, perched on the edge of I-94, surrounded by a Target, grocery stores, car lots, and dollar stores. Coincidentally, it was not close to anything you'd want to get to from a hotel. It was only about three stories high and never seemed particularly elegant.

I drove by this morning, and the demolition had begun. A few walls had been knocked down, exposing the interior.

I had thought it might look like a dollhouse--all the little roms with the outside wall removed. But it didn't. It looked so desolate: the wall that still stood had curtains still in the windows, as if there were still people staying there. There couldn't be, of course, so the curtains in the window were just like a sign of gross abandonment. The piles of rubble added to the moonscape.

There was a machine doing something, and casting water mist into the air. The morning sun was throwing rainbows over it all.

The old hotel never looked so good.

Bumper Stickers In The Neighborhood

There are a number of rental units on my block, and sometimes all I know of the people in them is based on what they have used to decorate their cars. Sometimes it seems that the bumper stickers are all that are holding the car together, but being in an educated state, no one puts just anything on their car. They all express their owners' personality. Here are two of my favorites:

Darwin Loves You

This one makes me smile. Minnesota's not likely to become a state that teaches Creationism, or Intelligent Design, so I can just smile, secure in my sense that that is one battle I won't have to face.

I (Heart) Scrawny Pale Guys

And who doesn't?

All The Small Things

Life has been chaotic recently. Lots of stuff combining to make daily living more difficult than usual. And, of course, that means more for me to whine about. You lucky readers!

The shower.

For starters, the shower is about 14 years old, and the fixtures weren't highest quality at the time. They were good quality, and a good value, and apparently had a life span of exactly! 14 years! The initial symptoms were a lowering of water pressure, and a tendency for the spray to angle off in different directions. The terminal symptoms were a failure of most of the jets, and a spiritless drooling of water from the edges. It was like trying to shower under a teething baby, with an occasional loogie hawk for variety.

So--time for a new shower head.

But! It couldn't be easy! Because! In the intervening fourteen years, brass bathroom fixtures have become passe. Dated even. Restoration Hardware doesn't even carry ANYTHING in polished brass anymore. The local home stores had only a couple of chintzy pieces--nothing that was a well made or acceptable as what was failing back at home.

Time for a special order.

So--Mr. Sweetie and I went to Home Depot (TM) too look for a showerhead. Preferably one with a modicum of antique charm for our 115 year old house. We found one--with holes like a watering can and not nipples like a power washer--and ordered it. "It should be there by Monday" I was told by the nice lady who took my order on Thursday.

Nope.

By Wednesday--with no showerhead--I called. "Yes, the one warehouse was out, so they had to ship it from another warehouse. What can I say?" It arrived on Thursday--so not the 3 days later I had been expecting. Mr. Sweetie and his plumbing buddy the Bunny went up to install it. At 9 p.m.

Yup--you guessed it. The parts didn't fit each other, plus the design was so bad that the water actually backed up out of the showerhead itself and ran back out the arm and down the wall. You couldn't actually get anymore water out of it than we were getting from the one we were replacing.

So--return badly designed showerhead and back to special order. Wait a week. Again. In the interim, the old showerhead was so useless that we took showers in the bathtub. Huzzah for bathtub faucet with telephone style hand shower!

Meanwhile.

Meanwhile, construction continues on all the street in our neighborhood. Old lead water supply lines are being removed, and new curbs and sidewalk being installed. Then streets being paved. No street parking allowed, and a ginormous trench built at the end of the driveway so off-street parking is not an option either. We found ourselves parking farther and farther away, climbing over piles of dirt and holes in the sidewalk to get to and from the car. Complicated by the fact that you never knew from one day to the next what street would be totally blocked by enormous excavations--heavy construction equipment, seven foot high dirt piles, with correspondingly deep holes.

Into all this disruption, it becomes obvious that it is time to replace our disintegrating concrete front steps. They have always been an eyesore--too large for the scale of the house, and resolutely charmless. Many many, MANY years of temporary patches and repairs (going back easily 40 years or more) have finally failed, and so Mr. Sweetie got himself a rental jackhammer and took them down.

So, to recap: no shower*. No street. No sidewalk. No stairs. Construction everywhere. Fine film of dirt settling on all horizontal surfaces.

What would you do in these circumstances? That's right--re-decorate a bedroom! Remove all the furniture, take apart the window to repair and paint, remove all light sources and ceiling fans! Paint the room--and halfway through find out that the Bunny (whose room it is) has buyer's remorse and doesn't want to change after all!

So--half the stuff in her bedroom is now in her sister's room, where Bunny is also sleeping. The rest of the stuff is in the hallway. The walls are edged, but only half painted. The room is a hangover-inducing mix of blue, pink and green.

So! How is your summer?


*Okay--I must give credit where credit is due. Mr. Sweetie installed the (second) new showerhead the day it arrived--one week later--and it is wonderful. It pays to buy known brand names. Thank you Kohler! And Mr. Sweetie!

Requiem for a Goldfish

The goldfish died.

This is the sort of trauma that afflicts almost every child who is given a "starter pet" like a goldfish. When I was a kid, the school had a fundraising "fair" and one of the dependable games was a ping pong ball toss into a square filled with small fishbowls, each with its own Real Live Goldfish. A goldfish was the most prestigious of prizes to bring home, and I remember the year we came home with two of them.

Unusually, one of the two was not gold, but black. Predictibly, we named the gold one "Golde," but in a nod to our Broadway ambitions, the black one became "Tevye."

They lived in a little bowl, and I remember some nonsense about dissolving "oxygen tablets" into the water to make it habitable. They did not last very long, probably, but as every parent knows, once something has a name, it's as real a pet as the old dog that's been around for years.

As a parent now, I marvel at the brilliance of ping pong ball toss as a revenue raiser. Even today, those little goldfish cost about twelve cents each. Ping pong balls can't be too expensive, right? (I looked them up, and they aren't--$1.59 the dozen) and after the capital expenditure of a bunch of little fish bowls (which can be bought from Michaels for about $3 each, and that's retail!). You never won the bowl, just the fish, which you carried home in a plastic sandwich bag. Sell tickets for a quarter a try, and you're in clover!

So--the Bunny wanted a fish, back when she was about 4, and we got a goldfish. Based on our joint nostalgic memories, we also bought a large glass fishbowl, and took it home.

Mistake. Surprise, surprise.

Goldfish, I learned, are not really very nice fish. They are very dirty--they poop long orange strings of poop. They seem to shed scales or something, and a fine black crud soon lines the bottom of the bowl and the water clouds up.

To properly keep a goldfish, you need a tank. With a filtration system. Which means a pump and some sort of filter, which you change. You need to change 20% of the water weekly, vacuum the gravel to keep the silt down, and you should really augment the tank with an aerator. Failing to do these things--EVERY WEEK!--results in a foul smell eminating from the water and polluting a surprisingly large area.

So, we got a tank. And the goldfish--which was silver and thus named "Luna"--was happy. Too happy. She grew. She rapidly outgrew the little tank we had gotten her. We had to upsize. But a six gallon tank only holds six inches of fish, and Luna soon outgrew that. Over the next five years, we upgraded until we had a twenty gallon tank and a filtration system with both a mechanical filter (meaning the water ran through what looked like a pot scrubber) and a bio-filter, which used some sort of organic matter (don't think about it--it's bacterial) to neutralize the ick generated by the fish. We ended up with a filter that was designed for a 30-40 gallon tank, because the fish was just that dirty.

Luna got huge. And the larger she got, the more apparent it was that goldfish are carp. Shiny carp, with glittery scales, but still carp.

But the Bunny loved Luna, and took excellent care to make sure that she was properly fed. I got to do all the cleaning--no surprise there. And Luna thrived. For five years. Sure, I got casual about cleaning the tank, and there were emergency rescue events where the water was so bad that Luna was gasping for air at the surface, and I had to do massive make-up cleanings. But she still thrived. And grew. And grew.

Then, one evening, the Bunny went into her room to get her pajamas, and there was Luna, lying peacefully dead at the bottom of the tank. The Bunny cried, and refused to go back into her room. It was time for the inevitable, if long postponed, pet funeral.

But--oh my God--can you really flush a five pound fish? This fish was so big that if you had pulled her from the lake you could have kept her. Many a lake cabin meal was made from fish smaller than Luna. She had outgrown all the aquarium nets we had ever gotten, and was nearly big enough to need her own casket.

And suddenly, I couldn't do it. I--who had stayed with both my elderly dogs as they ended their lives. I--who had dealt with the three parakeets who died within weeks of their acquisition. I--who had respectfully buried bettas and guppies and mollies in the garden. I--who had dealt with the wild rabbit that decided to die underneath my roses.

I--got creeped out.

I mean, she was huge! An enormous fish! A fish outside the parameters of pet sized, and well into sport trophy size. I just couldn't do it! There is a reason I don't fish! Or even eat fish! Especially not fish that lie there and look at me with their damned lidless eyes!

Bless his heart, Mr. Sweetie--the lad who spent all his summer childhoods fishing in the lake with his brother--he took care of it. I think I owe him one.

Adventures in Linguistics

Acdording to an exhibit at the Duluth Zoo, there is actually a thing called the "House Mouse." They are noticeably smaller than the fancy mice sold as pets at PetCo and PetSmart. The ones in the exhibit were actually tiny, only about an inch long.

So, if there is, in fact, a subspecies called the "House Mouse," what do you call them when they are in your house and you have many of them?

"Hice Mice?"

GnomeMania

Mr. Sweetie had a Boys Golf Outing weekend last weekend, where they played 90! holes! of! golf! On sort of spur of the moment, I took the kidlets up to Duluth.

We had a lovely room in a functional hotel--nothing special, but the view was lovely!

So, what do you do in Duluth? with kidlets who are 12 and 9?

You go to the aquarium, of course! Since we don't technically have an aquarium here in the Twin Cities, Bunny wanted to see the one in Duluth. It did not match up to her experience at the Shedd in Chicago. Are we surprised? No.

It was a very nice facility. You enter and are greeted by a two story wall of water, which really says it all, doesn't it? The Great Lakes Aquarium is dedicated to the ecosystems around Duluth. Which makes sense, of course, because then it is unique and educational.

But.

The ecosystems around Duluth are all freshwater. Freshwater fish, they are not so much to look at. Can you say carp? Walleye? Sure, there are trout, but they look mostly the same dull green as all the other fish do. Remember those days when you were about 5, and your parents took you up to a rental cabin on a lake in Wisconsin, and your dad would defy all the basic assumptions about a vacation and would get up at about 4:30 in the morning to go fish? And when he came back--just as you were waking up--he'd invite you down to the fish house where he would hack off the fishes' heads and gut them, and the smell was just soooooo bad? Guess what he was catching?

That's right. Carp. Walleye. Trout. The Great Lakes Aquarium is dedicated not so much to fish as to dinner.

We were more impressed with the Duluth Zoo. In the great tradition of the great zoos of the world, this one was started by a guy who acquired a tame deer, and decided to reach for greater things. Which it does surprisingly well, after setting your expectations incredibly low. The entrance is shabby, with a ticket sales booth that looks like it travels with the carnie and is otherwise used for selling cotton candy. The main building is a bit dark, and the exhibits are not immediately on display. In fact, you walk down some stairs that remind me of my old elementary school, and into a room that--if it weren't a zoo, you'd think was a pet store. There are rabbits, and geckos, and fancy rats, and gerbils and guinea pigs. Except there are fewer of them than there would be at PetSmart.

It's after you get outside that the zoo surprises. There aren't a great number of animals and exhibits, but the ones that are there are well done and interesting. The peafowl wander the zoo freely, and were ganging up on the prairie dogs while we were there. One male decided to show off for the lone female peahen, and opened his fan tail and rattled it at us all. The grounds are quite expansive, and there is room a lot of future development there. It beats the heck out of the Como Zoo.

However, the most successful part of our trip was the aquisition of a miniature gnome. He is about three inches tall, with a red cap and a suitcase under his arm, and he became the focus of many many photographs.

Which I shall not post here. Yet. For some reason the computer is not recognizing the memory card. But when it does...

PREPARE FOR THY GNOMISH OVERLOAD!

So...Chicago!

So--the trip to Chicago was a two-fer: we went to see the King Tut exhibit for Father's Day. We took the train down all day Saturday, went to the Shedd Aquarium Sunday morning and King Tut in the afternoon.

Because the Bunny is all about trains, we took the El the 10 blocks from our hotel to the Museum Campus, then walked over to the Aquarium. The El is amazingly quiet, but hardly posh. The stations in particular are subject to peeling paint and rusted metal. Of course, the low point of the day was on our return to the hotel, when the train we planned on riding to our stop unexpectedly! turned! left! It wasn't supposed to do that!

We made it back to the hotel, however, and had dinner at The Big Downtown, a restaurant that has trolleys and minature trains running in the bar. The food was amazing and excellent, and we ate ourselves very full, and went back to the hotel.

The next morning, we had about 4 hours to fill before we had to catch our train back, so we went to the planetarium. Of which we used to have one here, but no longer. This time, we took a cab, to save time. The cab drove us down Michigan Avenue, along the beautifully landscaped parkland that lines the lake shore. I was just about to say "this is a much more attractive route than the El" when a jogger crossed in front of us. He was tall, rangy, rather older than I am, with stringy muscles like beef jerky. He had on tiny nylon shorts and no shirt--but a heart rate monitor strapped below his nipples.

He looked like he was wearing a bikini top but had forgotten the top part. Remember Wendy O. Williams of the Plasmatics? She used to appear on stage wearing electrician's tape to stay "decent." This guy kind of looked like that, without any of the bodaciousness.

Maybe it wasn't such an attractive route after all.

All We Need Really Is Love!

I'm still marinating in U2 music, and it still surprises me on a frequent basis. Just now, I'm listening to a live performance with B.B.King of a song my U2--"When Love Comes to Town."

It's a terrific song, so beautifully suited to B.B.'s voice and his band plays horns in the back, giving the entire thing a decidedly non-U2 sound. And B.B. King's guitar sound is so distinctive, and SO iconic, I assume it takes a real degree of chutzpah on U2's part to play with him.

And then, I saw the video of the rehearsal. Bono is showing B.B. King around the set up on stage and sketching out what they will be doing. And, bless his heart, B.B.King is nervous! Who'd have thought? Bono is talking about what key they will be in, or something, and B.B.King (the man is a GIANT! and not just figuratively!) says:

"I'm not so good with the chord thing."

He's practically scufffing his toe in the dirt, he looks so abashed. Bono hastily says:

"Oh, don't worry. Edge will do THAT."

How revealing! Even B.B. King needs love too!

Casey Jones: Our Hero

We are back from a long weekend in Chicago. We went by train, because the Bunny loves trains. Turns out, we all love them. What a great way to travel! It took eight hours from Saint Paul to downtown Chicago, which is what it takes to drive there--with none of the hassle, tiredness, or bad food that comes with a car trip. Restrooms are always available, and they're so tiny and cute! We ate in the dining car, and had lovely meals. Dinner was excellent, far better than the HoJos on the tollways. Naps were had, kids could walk up to the loounge car for snacks, or just to stretch their legs.

We are dreaming of a longer trip, now. One that requires a sleeper car. Glacier Park is potentially do-able: board at 10:30 at night, arrive the next day at dinner time. And no one is pissed of because SOMEONE can't read a map...

AMTRAK--thousands of marriages saved! Why not yours?

Roll Over Nietzche, Tell Kierkegaard the News!

I've been reading my favorite theologian/philosopher recently: Anne Lamott. You've got to love a writer who says about a particularly bitter break-up that "we said words that perhaps Jesus would not have said."

Her most recent book is "Plan B; Further Thoughts on Faith" which follows the same vein of overtly religious essays I loved in "Traveling Mercies." As I read "Plan B," much of it was familiar, because I had read many of them when they first appeared in Salon. This left me free to read for the subtleties, the nuances I had missed when I read them the first time.

Some of those nuances are new, because she did revise those essays before they were collected in the book. Some of them I missed as I was reading for plot and for her humor. Some nuances are simply invisible when read online. I firmly believe that reading online is a manifestly different act that reading a book, even if the content was identical. Online there is the (rarely resisted) temptation to open new windows, to run audio and maybe even a game of solitare or something. There is something that makes me hurry when I read online, a sense that there is so much content out there, just a click away, and that time is short. It's like gulping down a cold drink on a hot day--you're already taking the next mouthful before you've swallowed the first.

Anyway, this time around, I'm seeing how important it is to her to be tender with herself. The message comes through in essay after essay, especially in her colege graduation address. This is the only life we have, and we need to appreciate the things that matter. Society tells us that we should be productive, rich, we should strive for prestige, or power over others. Anne reminds us that those things are never as fulfilling as we think they will be.

I struggle with this regularly. I always thought of myself as ambitious: someone who wasn't going to settle for anything less than success. I thought I would work my entire life, and would push into the highest levels of whatever I decided to do.

The plan was put into motion when I was accepted into Yale Law School. I chose Yale over Harvard so that I wouldn't tie myself into knots over my grade point average. Yale Law School doesn't calculate grade points or class rank. We graduated in alphabetical order, which meant I graduated second in my class.

Then, I got pregnant. I thought I was just getting ready for a change in my legal focus, that I was bored with doing the same old things. No, it was hormonal, and THAT was a permanent change. Despite all my vows that I would not let motherhood change me--I was changed. Profoundly and permanently I was changed. By the time I was pregnant with my second child, I was seriously struggling wih depression; depression that I believe was triggered by hormonal changes from pregnancy. It was not post-partum depression: it did not pass on its own. It took several years, multiple therapists and more than a single antidepressant to get me back to feeling like someone I could recognize again.

Now, as long as I take my meds, I feel pretty good almost all the time. Once I got the right combination of medications, I suddenly experienced what it was like to be happy. Happy! I had forgotten what that was like! It was such a precious gift, to actually find that i could enjoy my own life. My children were a source of joy, not just an enormous obligation that I feared I couldn't meet. It's still amazing to me: that I have such a wonderful and kind husband, that I have such bright and delightful daughters, that I don't live with fear.

I'm still amazed, daily, that life can be so good. It seems that, after such pain--and it was deep and unremitting pain--such a gift that I've been given; a second chance at life. Isn't that enough? Isn't it enough that I'm no longer half dead, that I'm able to live?

But I don't--at least, not when asked. For me, alone, I am so amazed that I am still here that there is nothing to do but just be grateful. Anne understands that. It is important to be present in your own life, and present to those you love.

Depression makes it hard to be present for those I love, even well managed depression. I still have some seriously bumpy days, and what my family needs from me is not easy for me to give. Emotional support is not something of which I have vast reserves, and I fiercely believe that I am needed to provide stability and support for my family.

I shudder to think what would happen to my fragile state if I tried to add employment to my mix, and I do feel significant cultural pressure to become an economic engine. What I keep asking myself is...why? Why is it not acceptable to simply be grateful for what I have and to tend to my patch of the world? I don't have those answers, but when I read Anne Lamott, I realize that someone else is also asking those questions, and I am not alone.

Is This Seasonal Affective Disorder?

Weather around here. Is. Nuts.

Truly.

Couple of weekends ago, it was pushing 100 degrees. Not long after, we had a weekend where it was struggling to get out of the 50s.

There's a diagnostic code for this, and it's called "bi-polar disorder."

No, it does not have anything to do with the North Pole. Santa Claus is just fine.

It's The End Of The World As We Know It!

From Salon:

Following a hip replacement, doctors have told John Cleese he can no longer do his Monty Python "silly walk." (ContactMusic)

Oh, the horror...

Guess that getting old isn't for sissies.