once again, I wock

Got this from my teacher today:

Really nice job on the Final Exam. Your grade is a 4.0. Your answers were very thorough and clear. You did an excellent job in the course, and will obviously receive a passing grade.

Wow. I did well on the exam. I'm a little...surprised. But very, very pleased.

Gentle Guidance for Husbands

The Sniglet finally has his very own room, what was formerly Dr.Bob's sanctum sanctorum. Which means He Who Must Be Taken Seriously has moved in with me, and now it seems my bedroom/office could use a bit of spiffing. The piles in the corners, for instance, have got to go, and the whole mattress-on-the-floor thing is also a little too college for a pair of suburban parents beginning the slide into middle age. Today I needed to change the sheets and I noticed we don't really have enough bedding. And I could use a desk. So yes. Housy things must be purchased, and we all know what that means. Come on, sing it with me...

IKEA

That's right. The single greatest threat to marital stability in the Western World, Houseware Hell, Particle Board Unlimited itself. And he did say we need to go and get some stuff. Some time. In the future. Not now. That's okay, I can wait. And while I wait, the Bob the Builder sheets are on his side of the bed.

Muuahahaha...

Oh, yes. Winter.

Yet another annual tradition that I'd managed to forget about. The heater's broken. Again, yes. Mm-hm, every year since we moved in! Fortunately we rent, so we don't have to pay to get it fixed, but if I were the landlord I'd be pretty annoyed by now. Anyway, the fixit guy came yesterday (at weekend rate$, oy vey) and fixed it, but this morning it was down again and Dr.Bob decided to wait and call tomorrow. On weekdays they charge slightly less, and the problem is apparently a part that needs replacing, and you'd never get that done on a Sunday, so even if we called the fixit guy back in, basically it would cost the landlord a bundle and achieve nothing for us. We would still be without heat for an entire day. In the winter. When it's like 15° out.

Annoyed? Of course not! You all know how much I loooooooove being cold.

It's a very big, very international company, and apparently I could get in legal trouble for making some general statement about them involving words like "useless" or "garbage" or even "duh". So let's put it this way. Our heater was made by Viessmann, and it has broken down every winter, four years in a row. Draw your own conclusions.

a somewhat-sick child

Nothing worth complaining about, of course, especially since the Next Doors had some vile stomach virus last weekend, and with a newborn in the house too, eyuurgh. No, the Sniglet just has a little cold, not a big deal at all. But I still kept him home for two days. Tuesday was a no-brainer - it was their "Wandertag". This is a German thing: every so often, the school or kindergarten takes the kids on a long walk, through a forest or to a sunflower field or something, for the whole school day. A nice tradition, when it's not colder than a welldigger's ass (thank you Mr. Waits), but can we get real for a minute? Lately, you go outside and you can feel the blood vessels in your face freeze and snap. And call me an overprotective helicopter-mama if you will, but even a slightly-sick child should not be marching around the woods in subzero temperatures for three hours. So I kept him home on Tuesday.

Keeping him home on Wednesday was more in the nature of a public-service decision. He refuses to blow his nose, and forgets to cover his face when he sneezes, so I can just see him blatting snerkies all over the kindergarten train-set. Way to make friends.

And that really is about all we've had going on. The Peanut had his appointment with his shrink today. She does some kind of play-therapy, so all he ever reports is "We played Monopoly" or some such. I try not to press him for details, it seems like I should try to make this whole process as stressless as I can for him. Besides, she'll tell me whatever she thinks I need to know at my appointments.

oops, clarification

Yeah, that was ambiguous, wasn't it? Okay, not ambiguous, it very strongly implied something that is not even slightly true. Very sorry. The Seattle Seahawks are going to the Super Bowl, not me and someone else. I meant we in the sense of our guys and not someone else's guys. I will be watching it in a pub in Munich, though, so I'll still be missing the commercials.

But even so. DETROIT, BABY!

onward

So I staggered to bed at 4 a.m. after the NFC game, and set my alarm for 11:30 to be sure I'd get up in time to pick up the Sniglet from kindergarten - Dr.Bob got up with the little vipers at 7, so I didn't have to. Yes, I am well aware that I have the Best Husband in the Universe, thank you. Anyway, I slept through all that. He did wake me at some point to tell me he was leaving for work, at which I opened one eye, croaked "We won!" and flomped back to sleep. Since then I occasionally break into a little happy-dance, or feel compelled to shout "Detroit, baby!" but mostly I've got it under control.

I finished the Final Exam for the database course, which was mind-bogglingly worse than the Final Project which I had thought could not be topped. Life is full of surprises. If he doesn't send it back for revisions, I am done with the course, which would call for a "yay", but I'm so wrecked by the whole experience that a feeble "whew" is all I can manage. The course was fine, materials good, teacher great - zero complaints on that score, but I was just so wildly out of my depth. Not to mention overwhelmed by outside events that bore no relation to the course but still affected my work some.

Which makes it all the more important that I get a job in database administration right away, quick before I forget everything. Except that oops, the very husband who was all keen for me to have a career and get out from underfoot and all that is now...not so much. Because around here, jobs are mostly in Munich, and if I have to commute every day, I'll be gone a lot, and more childcare and housework duties will fall to him. This is not bad per se, see Best Husband comment above. But he has to finish this third book by July or some unspecified form of Career Death will result, so for the next six months he really does need to be writing every minute. Getting up with the kids is a superb thing, because it enables me to sleep more, and gets him up early so he can start working. But it really is the most he can do right now.

In my snarkier moments I used to say that he desperately wanted me to have a career until he found out that it would require me to leave the house occasionally. But I'm not so snarky these days, probably because I'm getting enough sleep.

So there's the conundrum. By July I will have forgotten everything I learned in this class, I promise. By the time I got to the Final Etceteras I'd already forgotten everything before lesson 4 (of 8), to my chagrin. But I'm still webmastering. Still taking the ambiguously-named Web Techy-Thingy course. Still working for the AHF on fridays. Still helping my husband be a translator. Kinda, maybe, still a bit on the busy side, to be looking for another job. Sigh. I guess timing is everything. Anyway, techie-types don't actually remember ALL that stuff, they just keep their reference books handy. I'll just be using my reference books a bit a lot more.

WE'RE GOING TO THE SUPERBOWL!

First! Time! EVER!

Woooot! And I can't even jump and down and scream, because it's 3:30 a.m. here and I don't wanna wake the guys.

hooray for Austrians!

Because they're showing the NFC final on TV. It's times like this I wish I lived in Munich itself, and could go down to the Arc and watch the Hawks kick some Carolina butt on a big ol' Satellite sports-bar TV. But it's a school night, and the trains don't run between midnight and 6 a.m. and I really can't be gone all night under the circumstances. But at least I can see it, thanks to the Austrians. Woohoo!

I'm getting tired, though. It's been a really long time since I stayed up this late.

one piece of progress

I talked to He Who Must Be Humored, er, tuesday maybe, and pinned him down on the Ritalin thing: we're going to try it for two weeks in April. Because the kid's just about to start up with the therapist again, and we want her to be fairly well-acquainted with him so that she can help us assess its effects. We'll also be conferring with his German and English teachers, both before and after.

And then we'll know.

ten things you didn't know about me

I didn't know them either until just a few minutes ago! Annotated by yours truly.

Ten Top Trivia Tips about Alala!

1. Alalaology is the study of alala. (Try saying that three times fast.)
2. Neil Armstrong first stepped on alala with his left foot. (She was asleep at the time, and didn't notice.)
3. About one tenth of alala is permanently covered in ice. (Yeah, my toes.)
4. Humans share about fifty percent of their DNA with alala. (Wow. I would think it would be much less.)
5. The first American zoo was built in 1794, and contained only alala. (That, actually, is not altogether impossible.)
6. Every day in the UK, four people die putting alala on! (That's right - you try that with me, I'll open up a can o' Whupass!)
7. The military salute is a motion that evolved from medieval times, when knights in armor raised their visors to reveal alala.
8. Alala is the smallest of Jupiter's many moons!
9. Some people in Malaysia bathe their babies in beer to protect them from alala. (Hah. That would SO not work.)
10. Wearing headphones for an hour will increase the amount of alala in your ear 700 times. (Eeeeuw!)

I am interested in - do tell me aboutherhimitthem

Ganked from Amber. I just couldn't help myself.

how to study

Aaargh. He got a C on his German test. *Sigh.* This sucks on many levels. He could do so much better if he would just put some effort into it. But he does have a problem with apathy, and I can sorta see why it might seem hopeless so why even try. Plus which, I'm not altogether sure he knows how to put some effort into it. Did you know how to study for a test when you were 11? I didn't. Even now, with all the studying I have to do, sometimes the information just doesn't sink in. I have a few strategies for getting around that, and I could probably teach them to him, but then we run into the apathy problem. I've tried showing him little tricks for focusing his attention or remembering things, and he's all, yeahwhatevermama. And, canIgonow?

The other level on which this sucks is it gets the Lord and Master all hair-up-his-ass, and he lectures the boy, who - face it - tunes out after the first four words. And he rants to me about the whole thing, which, Hel-lo? That is MY son you are gritching about, shut your face before I hit it with a brick. The fact that it's his son too? Does not make it anything like okay. It makes it worse.

So now there's an impending math test. The LnM will be in Munich the night before and morning of, so I am instructed to "remind him to at least look at the stuff". Hey kid? Go look at your math stuff.

?

?

*sputter, sputter* What? That wouldn't even work on someone who doesn't have ADD! Not for the first time, I feel the urge to ask my husband if he's even met this child.

my new favorite word

wingnutterance

Brilliant.

Meme again

Tagged again! Hoohoo! Okay, here's the meme:
Ground Rules: Write a blog entry about your Five Guilty Pleasures, state the rules clearly, and tag five people to carry it on.

You cannot imagine, and it would kill me to tell you, how hard it was to limit this list to just five. That's right, I'm a freakshow.

1. Okay, since I was tagged by a fellow knitter, number one will be Knitting. It's so tactile, so rewarding, so fun. The rhythm is lulling, and it keeps my fidgety hands busy. I especially love knitting plain ol' jersey in the round while I read - in fact, it really helps me focus when I have to study. I love cabling. Unfortunately, I buy a lot of yarn that I don't wind up using. I have a real problem throwing anything away. None of my relatives are really into hand-knit stuff, and I don't knit quite well enough to sell it. Hence the guilt. I really do it only for myself, because there is no one else to benefit from it.
2. Genre Fiction! Novels! The fun kind, not the weighty Block o' Literary Merit kind. What lit-snobs call "trash" and I call a cracking good story. Jennifer Crusie, Lois McMaster Bujold, Elizabeth Peters, Jasper Fforde, Christopher Moore! Hahahahaha! I'm not sure why I feel like I should be Improving My Mind every time I pick up a book. I'm not sure why these books are less Improving than some big depressing tome where everybody dies. But still.
3. Movies. Same as above, the fluffo stuff. I don't go to be scared, or to provoke thought, or to jerk tears. Poignant, my ass. Make me laugh or gimme my seven bucks back. Nyah.
4. Chocolate milk. Yeah, me and the nine-year-olds. What can I say? It's yummy.
5. Blogging! I spend way too much time on it. I read other people's blogs and am so impressed, and then I come to mine and think, meh. But still, it's a compulsion. I wish I were a better writer, and I guess that's where the guilt comes in. People make me laugh, and I do my best to return the favor.
   

Tag five people! In a wholly optional and non-binding way, of course. Um, Kris, Kel, Amber, and Linda. Sound good? Oh, and Gene, because dude! Write something! It's been like a month already.

Thanks, E! That was fun.

Other things you should know, if you don't already

Kilian's been diagnosed with ADD, and the principle that Parents Must Present a United Front is being severely tested. El Husband and I have very different ideas about what's going on, and we've had a lot of fights about it. For the record, he's won every damn one.

In a nutshell, there is strong evidence for a physical component to ADD's etiology, and I think it might be worthwhile to try Ritalin. It has helped in some cases, and might make a difference in his ability to concentrate and remember things. There is all kinds of conflict Out There about this, and I don't want to get into it here. Yes, I've read both sides. Yes, if there's a chance Ritalin can help, I think it's worth a try. If it doesn't work, at least we'd have tried it and we'd know for sure. Even if it did work, I don't think it would be a total solution because of the attendant psychological problems.

The psychological problems. Hm, yes. Chicken-or-egg debate, that one. Are they the cause of his behavior, or are they a result of his condition? I say the latter: his inability to function at the level of his peers is wrecking his self-esteem and making him act out. Da Husband says the former: some buried inner conflict his making him have ADD. I advocate trying ritalin or some such to see if it can help him focus, and then working out some coping strategies to help him get around this limitation. I hope that if he can function better, he will feel better about himself, and some of the depression will lift. Husband advocates sending him to psychotherapy to locate the source of this inner conflict that is making him depressed and apathetic and forgetful. Frankly, I expect that after two years of therapy, the therapist will tell us that his ADD makes him unable to function at the level of his peers, which is wrecking his self-esteem, and she recommends ritalin and coping strategies. And we will then be where we could be now if a certain spousal unit would listen to me.

The other thing is that he is "Gifted", a term which I hate. It is not just a gift: a 130+ IQ is also a curse for a kid in an ordinary elementary school. Especially when that kid has behavior problems. (No, the behavior problems are not just a result of the giftedness: we checked.)

So that's the background to our problems re his relationships with everyone in the family, his steadily slipping grades, why he dropped out of hockey and broke his mother's heart, and why he keeps getting in trouble at school. He was diagnosed shortly before his tenth birthday, it took us a year to get an appointment with a therapist, we are trying to figure out what all our options are, and that's about where we stand now. Just so you know, because this is sure to come up from time to time.

long, depressing post

Well, it's open-book, and I suppose technically I have until february fourth to finish it, so that's why I'm blogging right in the middle of my database exam. I should get it done, just to be finished and able to move on to other things, but I can't concentrate.

Ugh. Son1 keeps hitting Son2. Son1 is 11; Son2 is 5. And no matter how many times we explain it, S1 just can't seem to understand why it's wrong to hit somebody smaller than he is. So he keeps doing it. This morning Two coughed as One was passing, and One hit Two, hard, in the middle of his back, because "he coughed on me on purpose". I snapped. I screamed at him until my throat hurt (gee, how dignified, and we wonder why he doesn't respect his mom...) and I slapped him a few times too. Not hard enough to hurt him, but still, not very nice of me. Not nice, she says...sheesh.

Firstly, it is not legal or ethical anymore to beat, starve or shun children, and outside of those options, I can't think of anything that hasn't already been tried, to no avail.

• Time outs? Tried that. It does help to defuse a situation, but it does not lead to any change in behavior. Besides, I can't levy a 10-minute time-out five minutes before he has to leave for school, and we already know that delaying consequences doesn't work.
• 1-2-3-Magic? On 3, you have to impose a Consequence, and finding workable, effective consequences is where the problem is.
• Lecturing? We do that. He hates it, but he doesn't change his behavior.
• Natural consequences: I like this one, let the results be the punishment - you break a toy, now you don't have it to play with, what have we learned today? But there are no natural consequences to beating on people smaller than you. That's why so many people do it.
• Logical consequences also sounds good. Consequences imposed from outside that bear a logical connection: if you break curfew, then you can't go out tomorrow night. If you fight over the TV, we turn it off for the day. Etc. Well, the logical consequence of hitting a little person would be to be hit by a bigger person, wouldn't it? But of course, it also demonstrates that under some circumstances hitting a smaller person is okay, and we don't want to teach that.
• Sticker charts and rewards? I can't keep track. I've tried this one so many times, and it always falls apart after a few days. I run out of stickers. I don't have any change. I promise I'll get to it later and then I forget. This is one of the reasons I suspect I may have adult ADD, because I simply cannot behave consistently from day to day. I've been trying, and failing, for years. And I'd be willing to blow along like a tumbleweed for the rest of my life, accepting my chaotic nature as part of my unique charm, except that it makes me a Not Very Good Mom, and I'm messing up my children. That's a consequence I can't accept, but Just Try Harder isn't working. And getting help is impossible. I can't even get anybody to believe me.

One friend helpfully told me, "I just wouldn't put up with that behavior." When I pressed for details, i.e. what exactly does that mean, what do you do that constitutes not-putting-up-with something, she simply reiterated that she would Not Put Up With It. Umm, thanks for some completely useless advice.

Secondly, and secondarily, of course it is morally wrong to beat, starve or shun a child, and of course I know that. But to be brutally honest, I'm beyond caring about that at this point, and the real reason I don't try it is because I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work.

I always said my first job is to protect my kids from anything that might hurt them, and when I feel they're threatened, Mama Bear comes right out. But how do you protect one of your children from your other child? When you want what's best for both kids, and those goals conflict, what do you do?

weather

John McCrae said it long before me:

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.

Admittedly, he was talking about the Kaiser's armies, but I face a more implacable foe - the weather. And now that Mom is gone, the task of bitching about the weather falls to me. It's grueling, gut-wrenching work, but someone has to do it. Besides the English, I mean.

All righty, let's jump right in, shall we? It was COLD! Hideously cold, for days and days, I swear I could feel the blood vessels in my face bursting every time I went outside. Ack! Clear, though, the sky and the frost-covered maples across the street were very pretty. Then yesterday it snowed a bit so I sent the Demon Spawn out to shovel sidewalk and driveway and while they were at it, the sleet started and undid all their lovely work. Then overnight it warmed up and rained and turned all that sleet into slush, which then froze solid. We had a giant pile of heavy, slushy snow fall off our garage roof, that had to be cleared so we could get the car in and out of the garage. And now it's all killer-slippy, frozen slush, and worst of all, it's COLD again! Aaagh!

And the worst thing? It's still. Only. January.

I've changed my mind. There is no more ambivalence: I want that job in Lubbock.

random

Um, backstory: one of my Christmas gifts, from Firstborn I think, was a computer accessory kit that included, blessedly, a number keypad - the only thing I miss about having a laptop. El husband thinks I'm crazy, but there you go.

Anyway, Secondborn is fascinated with it and wants to sit on my lap and press numbers, so I opened a .txt file for him to play in and he typed all the numbers. Then he said he wanted to type another number and I said go for it kid, and he said, "It's a number that's not here on this paddington!"

Which I will concede is only mildly cute, but I typed it in the .txt file so I wouldn't forget it, and now I want to close that file (there is no reason to save a bunch of random child-generated numbers), but that quote is in there, and I have to put it somewhere. So here you go. The depth of my commitment to you, my readers, is... no, let's not finish that thought.

Brunch, he said.

That brunchy-thing He Who Must Be Humored went to, for a friend's 40th birthday? Yeah. He got there a bit late, around 4 p.m., and just called me now (10 p.m.) to say he's leaving. A brunch. From 4 to 10. PM.

Hello, Germans? I think maybe we should clarify the meaning of the word Brunch? As in, even this far north, even in the dead of winter, a meal eaten after nightfall is not brunch. No, not even in Spain. Okay?

and of course I forgot...

to mention my brother-in-law's birthday today. Have a good one, bro.

since wednesday...

Thursday: I scrabbled together my last assignment and the dreaded Final Project, made them look reasonably nice, edited out all the swear words and turned them in. This doesn't mean I'm done - if either thing doesn't get at least a 3.0 I'll have to redo it, and there's still the exam to survive. But even so, it means there is light at the end of the tunnel, and if it is the headlamp of an oncoming train, well, at least the situation will change soon, one way or another.

Also went to a concert, Art Brut - great show, and I highly recommend them to... um, well, gee, do I know anybody who likes that sort of thing? Aside from my illustrious husband and his über-cool friends. Talking of whom, we were supposed to meet them at the concert hall. So we step in the door and I say however will we find them in this poorly-lit, crowded room, and he says "Easy. Head toward the beer." Sure enough, we walk five steps toward the bar and bump right into Sam. And Carsten and Tobi find us two minutes later. Wasn't that convenient? A benefit of keeping your friends for thirty years, I guess.

Friday: work.

Saturday: a Clean House! All by myself, because Himself is off to some brunchy-thing for a friend's 40th birthday.

Sunday's forecast: another tricky assignment for the webmaster gig, and whatever Assignment 2 is for the WebTech course - I haven't even looked at it, how bad am I? I wanted to go to Stitch-n-Bitch in Munich, but it's far too cold to leave the house. Ever again.

So I guess the best part of my weekend was Thursday night. It'll do.

Howbout you?

Garden Ghosts

This is being such a weird winter, and our garden has been wretchedly neglected. Ooo, "garden" - false cognate, sort of. In German, "garten" also means "yard". And I guess if you mow it once a week and weed and prune once a year, it's a yard. Anyway, last October while I was in Port Townsend with Mom, and el Husband was here on his own with the kids, of course the annual fall pruning didn't get done. Apparently, Annoying Neighbor asked Mrs. Next Door if she would bug Robert about the pruning, and Mrs. Next Door was all, "Um, I'm sure that when Anna gets back from burying her MOTHER, who just, you know, DIED, they will attend to the shrubberies which so annoy you."

But we didn't, because not long after that, FLOOMP! A winter's worth of snow descended on us and it hasn't really gone away, ever. So all these plants that we usually trim down to about six inches (except the traffic-hazard lilacs) are still huge and looming and ratty and oh-so attractive. Especially the ones with all the dead leaves still attached. Suburban Living Magazine, here we come!

And then yesterday and today have been clear-as-a-bell and sunny and blue and even warmish, in a wintery way. And then around dusk the fog rises, the temperature drops sharply and all that fog goes gnkkkkk- onto every surface. And the giant looming spindly ratty shrubberies are frost-limned and ghostly and almost-beautiful. Except for the ones with the dead leaves. They're still kind of yucky.

hopeful news

There's a job opening for a medievalist at the FUBerlin. Keep your fingers crossed for us, yeah?

Thanks.

side note

Oh by the way, I know I do a lot of grousing about how disorganized I am, so I thought you might like one little bit of happy news in that area: I actually have figured out The Food Thing. I mean, I have a sort of plan for getting food on the table/in the lunchboxes on a regular basis that hardly ever falls through. Unlike the old wait-for-inspiration method, this works, and I've actually been using it for more than a couple days. So I have managed to Get Organized in one tiny little facet of my life.

This is progress. This is good.

and there was much rejoicing...

Oh. My. Gawd, I finished it. Not the whole course, just the Final Project - I still have assignment 8 to go back and do. And the exam, which is open-book so how bad can it be? But the hair-raising, terrifying Final that I was all freakin' about is done. Not perfect, okay, maybe not even good enough, but that doesn't matter because if I turn it in early enough I can get feedback and fix what's wrong. For the first time I feel like I actually might be able to finish on time and BE DONE with the course.

Oh great. You know what this means, don't you? A big, fat I Told You So from el Husband. Argh. Oh well, I'll get over it.

Oh! And Mrs. Next Door is home with her baby, whom I will go and see just as soon as my cold is all the way gone. Yay!

Take this job and...uh, hang on a sec...

I was just thinking today about how I could take the JOB site off my bookmarks toolbar, but I didn't actually do it, which turns out to be a good thing. They haven't found a replacement webmaster. I guess there was a bit of he-said, she-said, some crossed signals and miscommunication, such as can happen around the Christmas vacations. Anyway, Da Husband asked me if I'd consider stepping in temporarily, and I said oo, er, ah, um, oh all right. So there I am. Maybe. If they can agree on my salary. Glad to be bringing in some money, a bit bummed about the free time and brain space I was looking forward to having. BUT it's only a 3-month contract. By March they should have someone else.

And actually, this is probably a good thing. Because my reason for quitting at the end of last year was that I was going to be done with the database thing early in November, and so January would be a good time to look for a job or internship. But Mom's death and the surrounding events set the course back a bit, so I'm still not done. And Da Husband has to finish his book by July, so will have to spend more and more time away from home, so I kinda have to be here. All in all, I probably shouldn't look for a new job until summer anyway.

So okay. Deep breath. Change of plans. Okay.

We don't need no steenking resolutions

The problem I see with New Year's resolutions is that you are supposed to put them into action in January. January sucks. Post-holiday letdown is no time to get all virtuous. Consider:

• It's still dark and cold and wretched out. There are very few reasons to leave the house that justify the half hour of extra socks-boots-sweater(s)-coat-hat-scarf-gloves application. Incipient starvation, maybe. Nothing else leaps to mind.
  
• Icy sidewalks. You could break an ankle walking to the gym.
  
• Diet? Want some fresh vegetables with that? Too bad, there won't be any until March! Hah!
  
• Housework? Cleaning in artificial light always results in streaks, missed spots, and dust bunnies bison that somehow escaped the vacuum, and I'm not going to waste my three hours of daylight cleaning.
  
• Get organized, declutter, unload all your excess stuff? Sure! Perfect weather for a garage sale! Not.
  

Plus I don't know about you, but this is when I usually get sick, and this year I'm bang on target with that. It's just a cold, but still. I am so not in the mood to become a Better Person™ right now. Check back with me in April.

Ho(ly) Ho(ly) Ho(ly)

Whew! Despite the nap, I have managed to finish the middle third of the Final Project From Hell today, so I've decided that I deserve a break. A very small one. No, my lovelies, I haven't been gone, I've been right here at my desk, slaving away at my homework, not even reading your blogs, let alone updating mine. Even though you were never more than a few clicks away from me. That makes it just that much more poignant, doesn't it?

Anyway. Friday was a holiday here, Epiphany in the Catholic calendar. They call it Heilige Drei Könige (Holy Three Kings) in Bavaria, and these fellows go house to house. Yes, there are four of them. No, I do not know why. Ours looked much nicer than the guys in this photo, much spiffier duds. And they sing a song in 4-part harmony and swing a...censer? with burning frankincense (yes, it turns out that is a real substance, though I am still skeptical about myrrh) and play recorders and collect donations for 3rd-world poverty-type causes. And then they write their initials and the year at the top of your front door, like this: 20 C+M+B 06. I think it's a charming tradition, but Mr. Cool (da husband) is of course much too cynical and worldly for such things.

So our house is blessed for the year. We missed them last year because we were in the U.S. on the 6th, and so got no blessing for 2005. Hey, maybe that's why it was such a bummer of a year.

Oh, I also got the first assignment for my webtech course done and submitted. This looks to be a lot easier than the database course. Um, yeah, a grain of salt with those words, please, because I'll probably have to eat them later on.

this is for all of you who freak out when your children say darn

So Mrs. Next Door had her baby, and I needed to find a newborn chew-toy, which is the only reason I even took my kids into the toy store at all. On the way out, I spotted a bag of giant dice and said "Hey look!"

Son2 (the 5-year-old) said "Cool! Arschwürfel (Ass-cubes)!"

Yes. He. Did. The lesson, I guess, is never go out in public with your sons without duct tape.

I know!

I can't believe I was gone so long...my blog.txt file is all huge, because I start all these ideas and don't finish them. Because I want to write well for you, my dearests. I want to be both coherent and concise, and - dare I whisper it? - interesting! I want well-crafted, mindful, thinky-head posts that uplift and inspire you. I might be willing to settle for posts that don't make you scream that you want the last five minutes of your life back.

But I don't have time for that. I only have time to blat out whatever's galloping through my head at the moment, which, after four days, is always "Gah! I haven't written in so long!"

So in a nutshell: My webmaster contract has ended with nary a bang nor whimper. How do I feel? Well, with everything else going on, I guess I'm glad not to have to worry about it, though the site is kind of my baby. Grew it from a pixel, I did. Ah well, onward and upward. It's probably not my last-ever webmastering gig.

I have less than a month to finish more than a month's worth of the database course. The anxiety of this is a sort of whining chartreuse blob on the edge of my vision, which may also be a factor in why I don't blog for days at a time. I'm sitting. I'm typing. It should be homework. Oh right, last night I met a database administrator. Friendly guy, said if I had any questions I could ask him. All I could think of is "Duh, what the hell is all this?"

I've started another course, it began without me noticing and the first assignment is due Monday. First assignments, as you probably know, are always reallyreally simple, but require about 50,000 pages of reading. Hm. An interesting puzzle. I wonder how I'll solve it.

Curry night! Yay! I used to work at the AHF on Wednesdays, but I had to switch to Fridays for about 40 different reasons, and what I missed most was Curry Night - dinner at an Indian restaurant with 30 or so of Munich's anglophone community. Fortunately, about 15 of the 30 are diehards who never miss a Curry Night, so I got to see some familiar faces. That was nice. Almost like having... friends... (cue pathetic wistful music).

All right, I've been up for an hour and a half already, and the kids are coming home soon. Homework. Now. (aaaaggghh! Noooooo!)

Happy New Year, y'all!

Please don't let me drink anymore.

homesick

Tony's been up to the Pacific Northwest lately, taking pictures and writing about the quirky little stores and ocean views and the rain and all the nothing for miles - no people, just trees and sky and road. I shoulda told him to go up and check out those little buildings that guy made out of rocks, the world (not to scale) in miniature. Eaglemount Rockeries, that's it. Maybe a bit out of his way, though.

I was there on my birthday, the day before Mom died. Baby Evan and Heather and her mom Shanghaied me and we went to a pumpkin patch and had ice cream at the little ice cream shop in a defunct train - the only time I've ever seen that place open. And then we stopped at Eaglemount and took some pictures, and then they dropped me at Mom's house. A few hours later, she was delirious, and ten hours after that, she was dead.

This wasn't supposed to be another post about my Mom. It was supposed to be about how, reading the busblog, looking at Tony's pictures, I can smell the rain in the evergreens and feel the damp air on my skin and the hum of the car wheels on the wet road. Tony'll be back home in southern California soon, and I'll be glad, because it's wonderful to read his words and see the pictures and know he's as enchanted by it as I am, but it also makes me homesick.

It's been beautiful here, too. The snow is pretty and it hasn't been too cold and the sky was even blue yesterday. But the weatherdudes say some bad stuff is coming tonight. Also coming tonight is Nigel - his flight gets in at 7:30 and I hope the storm doesn't delay his flight or muck up the roads so it takes forever to get him back to the house.

This is the last day of 2005, isn't it? I sure had some hopes for this year. I sure hope next year is better.

whatever that means...

Well, looks like I've made it through my first Christmas since Mom died. I'm not sure what Making It Through something actually entails, now that you mention it, but. Here I am on the other side of it, more or less intact. As alive, as sane, as whatever-I-am, as I was before.

I haven't wanted to write about her, about what happened, about how I feel now, because I can't seem to articulate it. I haven't talked about it either. But even though I haven't put it into words, I'm still thinking about her.

Every day.

Every minute.

surfacing

Haven't written in seems-like-forever, and it's not because blogging is like work and I'm on vacation, oh, no. It's because blogging is like fun and I'm at work. The kids can: entertain himself with his new swag (Firstborn) or hang out at the Oompas' for three days because he has to be home this weekend when Nigel comes (Secondborn) and Da Husband has to write Da Book so I have a quiet house to work in and my whole brain has been poured into works like this:
CREATE TRIGGER DelAuthor ON authors
FOR DELETE
AS
IF EXISTS
(SELECT 'true'
FROM Deleted d
JOIN titleauthor ta
ON d.au_id = ta.au_id
)
BEGIN
RAISERROR('Author still has titles in the database. Delete failed.',16,1)
ROLLBACK TRAN
END
So much talent. Tragically wasted. After all this struggle, someone dang well better give me a job.

And now, more homework. Gah.

hackety-hack

I don't know, I keep feeling there should be an easier way to hack this template. Meh. I'm probably just lazy.

Oh, and Merry Christmas all.

I just don't know how she does it!

How does the busy housework-addled, supportive wife-type WAHM, StAHM, (slahm, bahm, thankya mahm) get everything done? Let's listen in:

Adorable Moppet: Mama, will you read me a story?
Highly Efficient Mother: Certainly, dearest. Shall we read Managing and Using MySQL, or JavaScript for the World Wide Web?
AM: No, I want I Was So Mad.
HEM: Perhaps I should book your therapist now.

But seriously, I've been reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to Firstborn, one chapter a day, and today we reached the delightful chapter 8, which is almost a whole page long! I was pleased, but he felt a bit cheated. I told him he had to go to bed now anyway because I still have presents to wrap, and he made a grouchy face, grasped the door handle, said "Slam!" and then closed it carefully and quietly.

This is a new thing. I like this new thing.

Yuletide crabbitude

My lungs hurt when I breathe in. That's a good sign, right?

I got all the Christmas shopping done today. The boys are giving their grandmother one hell-ass ugly candle, but hey, that's what she gets for already owning everything in the universe, isn't it? They got their grandpa a ham, for pretty much the same reason. In fact, I bought both items by myself and wrapped them, so the kids will see them for the very first time on Saturday when they're opened. They have been instructed to try not to look too surprised. Shortcuts at Christmas? Yes, I am overworked and overwhelmed, and not getting enough sympathy for the fact that my mother died, so I am Queen Badass.

Incidentally, one of the many tragic side-effects of that is that I no longer have my favorite emotional blackmail line - for the past year I've been telling my husband, "My mother has cancer, so you have to be nice to me!" No, I am not sorry I said it, it was funny. There are a lot of things I regret about the last year of her life, but being able to find a joke somewhere in all that mess is certainly not one of them. Cass'll back me up on that, though he'd probably say as jokes go, that one is pretty pathetic.

However. I am still only 2/3 through my database administration certificate thing, and I went and signed up for another course (yes I know what you're thinking, but there is an explanation. Perhaps one day I will supply it.) and my book (yet another JavaScript book - can't you people just pick one text for all your classes? The CSS people do.) came today but I haven't enrolled yet and I have one or two more things to do for the webmaster job and of course the other job isn't going anywhere so there goes my Friday. Oh poop, and I haven't even made the lemon cookies yet! Clearly, I already have enough going on, so this year Christmas can pretty much bite me.

Oh, and Firstborn? Had an English test today and forgot to turn it in. Automatic F. A native English-speaker in a German high school, in a class full of kids taking only their third year of English instruction. The Husband and I were assuming that here was at least one class where he couldn't tank.

Apparently we underestimated him.

I've been tagged! This is so cool!

My existence as a blogger, validated by the Goober Queen!

Seven things to do before I die:
1. Live in a city again.
2. Exercise regularly.
3. Work for a nonprofit outfit.
4. Make the pilgrimage to Santiago.
5. Work for a publisher or bookstore.
6. Get organized.
7. Get (and stay) on top of the housework.

Seven things I can (or will) not do:
1. Take up jogging.
2. Learn to play a musical instrument.
3. Skydive.
4. Give up coffee.
5. Stop fidgeting.
6. Get over myself.
7. Be consistent.

Seven things that attract me to my spouse:
1. His smell.
2. His shoulders.
3. His muscles.
4. His faith in me.
5. His sense of humor.
6. His hands.
7. His...um, no, sorry, that would be TMI.

Seven things I say most often:
1. You should be nicer to me.
2. Bummer.
3. This is my skeptical face.
4. You're so cute.
5. I dunno, you decide.
6. *SIGH*, Boys! (or Germans!)
7. Because I'm a bad mother, that's why.

Seven books (or series) I love:
1. The Narnia books
2. Pride and Prejudice
3. The Amelia Peabody series
4. Lost Horizon
5. Jasper Fforde's Tuesday Next series
6. Lamb: the Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal
7. The Miles Vorkosigan series

Seven movies I watch over and over again:
1. The Princess Bride
2. Muppet Treasure Island
3. The Fifth Element
4. Casablanca
5. Beauty and the Beast
6. Galaxy Quest
7. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers

Seven people I want to make suffer would love to see play along (yike, do I even know seven people who haven't already done this meme? Probably not...):
1. Kel, who is way overdue for a blog entry anyway.
2. Camellia, who is too.
3. Linda
4. Kimberly Di
5. Firstborn, see #7 on the Things I Say Most Often list.
6. Vicki
7. Jeneane

a cringe to the inevitable

We all go through the same milestones, right? First tooth, first steps, first self-inflicted haircut. Today it was Secondborn's turn. Firstborn, now, he just cut a chunk out of his bangs and scotch-taped it to his upper lip to make a mustache. Nothing too...er, comprehensive, and fairly easy to repair. But Secondborn dreams bigger, I guess.

God, it looks like he used a lawnmower.

He's making that face, by the way, because we were cackling like hyenas and he couldn't decide whether to laugh with us or be offended.

UPDATE: I got out the clippers to "even it out" (i.e., cut it all down to 1/8") after dinner. Unfortunately, the Husband gave him a mirror at the mullet stage and 2b was distraught. He slid off the chair, buried his face in my lap, and howled, "I'll never be cool again." Oh dear.

i know, i know...

I haven't blogged in what, four days, which is like a decade in internet-time. I can't remember what I did during those days, but I was probably busy, since I'm rarely not. And today I have That Headache. You know, the one that feels like my right eye is digging a tunnel through to my left ear? Yeah, that one.

I think it was spawned by my job. Again. This outfit, um, publishes books, sort of, sometimes (this is me being circumspect because I blogged something about half the texts being "crap anyway" some time ago and got in trouble for it, though I did not get dooced, for which I cannot decide whether to be grateful or not. But I digress). Where was I? Oh right, books get published and subsequently reviewed, and if the reviewers are proud residents of the 21st century, the reviews are online somewhere and all I have to do is post a link to them. But come on, this is the Humanities we are talking about, so most of them haven't even caught up with the previous century - boy are they gonna be ticked if they ever find out it's been and gone. Don't worry, they won't find out.

So sometimes I get a ditto-copy of a review, three pages in two columns this last time, and I have to scan it and put it up as a readable image, which is not exactly difficult, but it's tedious, time-consuming, and so bizarrely, counter-intuitively wrong-on-so-many-levels that it gives me That Headache. I mean, I expect a certain amount of tedium from webmastering, there are some things you just have to slog through. But the cognitive dissonance created by scanning and posting three pages of text as an image makes my brain hurt.

And then I write only to complain, so see, you should probably be glad you haven't heard from me in four days!

Oh, but here's a very small story about my neighbor: I bumped into her Saturday, both of us having recently had spats with our husbands and still seething, and I made a joking reference to Strangers on a Train. She didn't get it, so I sketched out the basic plot for her, and she said "Oh, okay. Well then, please don't actually kill my husband, all right? Because I really do want to do it myself."

hahahahaha(um, you're scaring me?)hahahahaha...

And a good time was had by all

Today was the day of dread, Ignatz's birthday party. Wherein we invite seven of his closest little hoodlum friends to hang out with us for an entire day (we would have invited more, but we only had two cars and two drivers, so there was only room for 8 kids altogether), with great trepidation. The weather turned grim last night, so it was all slushy roads and bad visibility and of course I hate driving in the best of circumstances, so I concentrated fiercely, and now I'm so tired I feel like I kept the car on the road through sheer psychic force. Gah.

We took them all to the Burger King at the airport, and they behaved themselves, mostly, and then we hustled them all to the movie theater to see The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the German title of which translates to "The King of Narnia," further proof, as if we needed it, that Germans Just Don't Get It (you know what the German title of Little Women is? Do you? It translates to "Betty and her Sisters." Seriously. Somebody needs slapping for that.). And there were no crises, no fights, no disappearances, and no car accidents, and everyone seems to have had a good time, miracle of miracles. So that's that survived.

I actually did enjoy the movie, even though I saw it not in its original English, but dubbed into German by actors who talk like typewriters. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was THE book that really hooked me on reading at the age of 9 - it was the first chapter-book I ever read all in one sitting, and my dad let me stay up til 4:30 a.m. on a school night to finish it. So it's very important that I get to enjoy the movie, and that means seeing it in its original language.

The rhinoceros was a nice touch.

Boys rock

In response to the "I have an 11-year-old" post, Kimberlydi says,

Wait until he's 16 going on 17, wearing size 14 shoes, and towers a head taller than you... It just gets better. :)

I am so looking forward to that! I think it's really cool that my boys will be bigger than I am someday. Potentially a lot bigger: my brother-in-law is 6'4". Okay, I'm not looking forward to how smelly boys get, but I can deal with that. My friends who have daughters have fabulous wonderful daughters, but still, I'm really really glad I have sons. Can't wait till they wear the same shoe size as me and I can buy them really nice shoes which then become my shoes three months later. Heh.

Happy Birthday Ignatz!

That's right. As of today, I have an 11-year-old son. Does it ever go away, that sense of astonishment over the fact that you have (more or less) successfully reproduced? My friend Dan, whose kids are 18 and 20, says no, it will be perpetually amazing. But some days you feel it more than others.

Eleven. Wow. Happy birthday, kid.

just to clarify...

In response to my last post, about ambivalence and Texas, my brother emailed: "There are good people in good quantities just about everywhere." Which is absolutely true, and I'm not ambivalent about the people there. Mainly I was thinking about how West Texas is sort of in the desert-y bit of the USA, and I come from the more rain-foresty bit, and I can get a whopper of a sunburn in about ten minutes. Also, I read in "The Bean Trees" about how you need to drink a lot of water in the desert or you'll die or something, and I've posted before about how much I hate water.

On the other hand, I would have regular access to Mexican food. Okay, that settles it. I'll start packing.

an entry from my personal dictionary

ambivalent, adj.

1. Robert had a job interview today with a school in Lubbock, TX
2. It didn't go well. They probably won't offer him the job.
   

Lemon Stars-n-Moons

(makes oh, 2 dozen I guess)

1/2c. room-temperature butter
1/3c. + 2T. sugar
1 egg
1/2t. light corn syrup
1t. lemon extract
1t. grated lemon rind
1 3/4c. all-purpose flour
1/8t. salt
-----
for the glaze:
powdered sugar
lemon juice
yellow sugar crystals

Beat butter and sugar together until fluffy. Beat in egg, corn syrup, lemon extract and lemon rind. Gradually beat in flour and salt. Divide dough into two parts and refrigerate at least an hour. Set out at room temperature to soften before rolling it out to 1/4-inch thick between two sheets of waxed paper. Cut out moons and stars. Bake oh, 12 minutes, or until very lightly browned just on the edges. Cool 5 minutes on baking sheet, then transfer to wire racks and let them cool thoroughly, or the glaze will be too slimy. Oh right, the glaze: Mix the powdered sugar and lemon juice, ice the cookies and dip the edges in the yellow sugar crystals.

Christmas Crinkles

(makes about 3 dozen)
1c. sugar
1/4c. vegetable oil
1t. vanilla
2oz. unsweetened baking chocolate, melted and cooled
2 eggs
1c. all-purpose flour
1t. baking powder
1/4t. salt
(1/2t. peppermint extract)
1/2c. powdered sugar

Mix sugar, oil, vanilla and chocolate (and mint extract, if you're using it) in large bowl. Mix in eggs, one at a time. Stir in flour, baking powder, and salt. Cover and chill at least 3 hours. Grease cookie sheet and heat oven to 175C/350F. Drop balls of dough (those little trigger-action scoopers are great for this, if you can find the 1-inch size) into the powdered sugar and roll 'em around a bit. Place 2 inches apart on cookie sheet. Bake 10 or 12 minutes for 1-inch cookies, probably more if they're bigger. Cool on wire rack.

Mmmm, cookies...

Speaking of holiday traditions for the catastrophically disorganized...

What that means is that even though I have lots and lots of holiday traditions, I observe them extreeeeemely patchily, and this year so far I've only managed the Advent calendars and the "wreath" with candles (this year's wreath is a bowl of water with floaty-candles in it: for the last three years it was a real (well, fake, but very wreathy) wreath with silver candles, which we hung from the ceiling to keep it away from Son2, but I think he's finally old enough that we can stop that). If you judge by the "annual" ornament tradition, Son1 is about 6, and Son2 is probably 3 or so (IRL, they are about-to-turn-11 and just-turned-5, respectively). Candy canes for the tree? Uh, not yet. A tree? Er, still arguing about that one. The Nativity scene is Playmobil, and I think it got mixed in with the other stuff. I'm fairly sure I saw a pot of frankincense in the luggage compartment of Son2's airplane.

But I'll be doing cookies this year, by cracky! Two years ago I did Total Cookie Warfare, I must have made 10 or 12 different kinds. Gave them to everyone we know, and still had lots leftover. Last year I was about halfway through the Whole Thing (you prep them in advance, and then freeze them, it's the only way a person with a job can make 12 different kinds of cookies and still have at least a few of each kind around when Christmas arrives) when that pediatrician told us we should try to cut sugar completely out of Firstborn's diet. And there's me with a freezer full of cookie dough. Gack.

So anyway! Cookies this year! Because we decided the pediatrician was a crazy man! But I don't want to make myself crazy (okay, okay, crazier) this time, so this year there will only be four kinds, two of which are recipe-ed here. If you try 'em, let me know what you think.

Diva, thwarted

So as I was saying, in three weeks my contract expires and I won't be renewing at the JOB. That's right, I'm quitting, though in a no-hard-feelings kind of way. Even so, I must admit that in the darkest corner of my evil little soul, I want them to miss me. I want them to tear their hair out and cry "Why, oh why did we ever let her go!" Unfortunately, their publications maven is also leaving, at the same time I do, and an urgent email has already gone around, to the tune of "OMG K is leaving, does anybody know anyone who might be persuaded to take her job, OMG we are so screwed." That's right, my thunder has been thoroughly stolen. Dang.

Of course, a large part of the story is that they all understand what she does, and they don't understand what I actually do there (okay, two of them do, but one of them is my husband, so he doesn't count). So they have no idea how easy or difficult it will be to replace me. My dread secret? I have restructured the whole site so that a reasonably intelligent chimpanzee could run it. So it actually wouldn't be that hard. Hm. May have shot myself in the foot there.

Which means that if I were to go bounding into the office, say, next June, and say "Didja miss me?" (which I won't), they'll be like, "Um, why, did you go somewhere?"

That's okay (grr, is not, grumble grumble). My inner diva probably shouldn't be fed anyway.

bit late to be asking this question, but...

Your Career Type: Social

You are helpful, friendly, and trustworthy. (harf, harf, harf) Your talents lie in teaching, nursing, giving information, and solving social problems. You would make an excellent: Counselor - Dental Hygienist - Librarian Nurse - Parole Officer - Personal Trainer Physical Therapist - Social Worker - Teacher The worst career options for your are realistic careers, like truck driver or farmer. (That's right. No realism for me, thanks.)

What's Your Ideal Career?

circadian hell

Is there any logical explanation for this? I spent nearly the whole day studying (database backup and recovery) and worrying (der Husband is pushing himself perilously close to mental breakdown just in time for the holidays, and frankly, I don't have enough reserves to cope with that right now), and by 5:30 I was so tired I thought my eyes would fall out. But I'm a mother, and I have to stay up long enough to get the kids (well, kid, since Son2 is with the grandparents tonight) fed and watered and put to bed, so I stare miserably at the clock and cling desperately to consciousness - just survive till 8:00 and then I can collapse. And what happens? It's 7:30 now, and foink! I'm wide awake.

This makes no sense.

The Boxes arrived yesterday.

For those of you who are joining us late, the division of labor regarding Mom's estate is as follows: my brother is the executor of her will and therefore handles all accounts and pensions and insurances and whatever else - the money end. Which is good, because I am so absolutely clueless in such matters that I can't even come up with an example of how dumb I am. My job is (well, was) the stuff. I had two weeks, which turned into nearly a month, to clear out her closet and dresser and go through knick-knacks and books and paintings and letters and... just... stuff. Which I did, and it was a very strange and awkward business, done in too little time.

Maybe other families do it differently, but it seems natural to me that the daughter would absorb the stuff into her own life, as much as possible. Especially the kitchen things should find a new home with someone who grew up with them and knows their stories. The pot that Mom used for making stew, which is still comfort food for me, or the griddle we used for pancakes, the muffin pan that makes flower-shaped muffins, or the baking dish that must have held at least a thousand tuna casseroles. The stories are lost if you pass these things to outsiders.

But these things are heavy, too. A lot of them are breakable. Shipping is expensive, and if I ship more than $50 worth of stuff to Germany I have to pay import taxes. So I had to leave a lot of things behind. I got the pie pan. A few wooden spoons. Some photographs of great-grand-relatives. The Muppet DVDs she was sending us one at a time, for birthdays and Christmases. A file of my childhood art and schoolwork. Two coffee cups, one of which broke in transit. Some cookie cutters. The light-bulb spice jars, which crack me up every time I look at them. Only a little bit of history. And I shipped them over, and worried for five weeks that the Customs guys would mess with them, because they have done before - they ripped all the wrapping paper off the Christmas presents Red sent us a few years ago. But these, they didn't even open, and everything came through okay except the one coffee cup.

And I'm relieved, I am. I'm happy that the stuff arrived safely. I can surround myself with little bits and pieces of her life, use them myself and add my own history to them, and that way she won't be forgotten. Wish I'd been able to find a way to bring over the stew pot, though.

Sorry this went on for so long.

They all liked the jambalaya, which can only mean one thing.

The aliens must have gotten them all at the same time.

dialog

He: What's dinner?

Me: Jambalaya! Hah! Son2 will hate it!

He: Is this a new policy? Are you out to get him or something?

Me: No, I've just figured out that I can cook a lot more stuff if I don't have to care whether he likes it or not. He hates everything I make anyway.

He: That's not true, there are some things he likes.

Me: Yeah, like two things. He's like your dad. And I respect your mom, but I don't want her life.

He: You could occasionally make something he likes.

Me: He could occasionally eat something I make!

He: Well, I guess you're even then.

ooop, there goes another one

I do believe it's "warming up", in the sense that the snow is melting and another giant wodge of it just slid off the roof past my window, and...nope, didn't get the mailman. This time. It is not warming up in the sense of feeling any warmer, and you still risk your life if you venture outside with any exposed skin, unfortunately. Excuse me, I need to go work on my list of excuses not to leave the house.

ode to the Body Shop

Partly because I like the nice bright colors, and the no-animal-testing and the fair trade aspect - I'm sure there is a German company that does same, but I don't wanna stand around reading labels in German. I'm lazy like that. But has anyone else noticed that the Body Shop is gradually shucking all their floral stuff? I mean, with the body scrubs and shower creams and lotion and shampoo and conditioner, you have a lot of competing smells anyway, but howcome over the last few years it's gone from some-flowers to all-fruit? I used to could smell like this:
And now, I smell like this:

Not that that's necessarily a Bad Thing, I just, as a matter of personal taste, don't really like to smell like food. Just a thing I have. The blueberry lotion is way OTT, but the foodless alternative is "shea butter", and the "unscented" stuff is never without-smell, it just smells like soybeans or something. I miss the roses and gardenias, a bit. Okay, maybe more than a bit. Maybe I should start reading labels in German. Weleda has flowers, I think.

girl, put some clothes on!

I think my WeatherPixie's been smoking crack. 32°F out there, and she's wearing this little belly-baring t-shirt. She never puts a coat on unless it gets below 0. Fahrenheit! I'd chose a more sensible Pixie, but none of the others have such cool hair.

Yeah, Baby!

Hah. Five loads of laundry, sorted, folded, and waiting to be put away (the sixth load is still in the dryer - betcha it's still there next Friday), two grumpy sons because I made them help me fold stuff, two shiny bathrooms, one house full of clean floors, and one metric buttload of peeled cooked potatoes for use in whatever culinary adventure I stumble into next. In the words of Son1's kindergarten pal Richard, ca. 1999, I Wock!

Overcompensate much?

Um, no, why?

Oh okay, I admit it. For the last two three (four?) weeks I haven't been very good at keeping up with the laundry, and you know, starting to have trouble finding warm socks for Secondborn, or any underpants I don't hate. So this weekend I addressed that problem, and there are now five loads of laundry (in baskets and crates, not just piled up any-old-how) on the couch waiting to be folded. And another load in the drier. Which is enough to make me wonder why a family of four has six loads of laundry? More than that, because there are no sheets in there, and not all of the towels, and none of us are running around naked - we're not even wearing our grubbies or our fat clothes. Clearly, we consume too much, and it's time to donate some of it to the needy.

Yay, another project.

Lame Duck Job Syndrome

It's not really that bad a job. Okay, the people who tell me what to do don't have any idea about HTML, so no - I mean literally, zero - clue about what is easy or difficult, possible or im. But come on, how many people work in a similar situation? Most, I would bet. It's not uncommon, and not really unbearable. And I'm not quitting because I hate it hate it hate it. My contract expires at the end of the year, is all, and I've decided not to renew because I have to look for a job that goes with my shiny new database management certificate. I'm movin' on up. Admittedly, I have the distinct impression that they will be happy to see the back of me, because I'm a lot more uppity than they expect from women around here, but for my part, I have no real hostility toward them.

Okay, now that I've gotten that out of the way, AAAAAAARRGH! Not at the job itself, but at the lame duckness of it. The simple fact that I will not have this job in four weeks makes it unutterably cringeworthily horritudinous now. A few simple page updates, that's all she wants, she asked for it Thursday and I am now, Saturday night, banging my head on my desk (ow!) trying to convince myself to do it.

I was going to blog, but I couldn't think of anything to say. So I open up HTML-Kit and download the .doc with the changes on it, and babing! I'm inspired! To blog! Not to work!

(Babing! Babing! We took Thing1 to a birthday party in A Nearby Town, and on the way we passed a sign to a place called Babing. Heh.)

Dinner tonight: garlic lemon salmon, broccoli, and rice. No children present, so we were able to have an adult conversation. For the uninitiated, "adult conversation" doesn't mean it contains swear words, violence, and/or sexual situations, it just means no interruptions of the "Mama! Look how many rice grains I can fit up my nose!" variety. We should do this more often.

Okay, now I really really have to do those page updates.

winter fog

It freezes into crystals, and lines every little thing, every branch, leaf, defunct spiderweb, chain-link fence with tiny white spikes, and it's so breathtakingly beautiful, everything ghostly-pale against the gray sky.

But it's also FUCKING cold out, so I think I'll keep my blue funk for a bit longer, thanks.

I did go to amazon.de and order some Christmas CDs. Umm, Bach cantatas, a Brian Setzer Orchestra thing, and...oh, right, tinkly instrumental celtic stuff. I also bought wrapping paper today AND...went to the gym! Yay me.

Oh yeah, I also made spaghetti and meatballs for dinner today, homemade sauce and from-scratch meatballs, I'm so June Cleaver. Except I forgot the salt. Other than that, though, they were fine.

Oh, right. Christmas.

On the afternoon of the last day of November, we zipped out to the store to buy Advent calendars for the kids. We brought them along to choose their own - I don't think I'll be up for engineering surprises this year - and the stores were nearly sold out, which is what I get for waiting till the last minute. No, I haven't even started thinking about shopping yet.

This is going to be a rough season. Over and above the fact that Thing1's birthday is on the 15th, which complicates things every year, I just don't feel like I can pull it all together this time. The cookies and the parties and the cards and the fact that nobody in the family knows what to get the kids or my husband so they all ask me - it's always overwhelming, but this year I still haven't caught up on the month of everything I missed while I was Home in October, and I'm still waiting for the grief of Mom's death to catch up with me. While I wait, I stare into space a lot. Oh no, I think we're out of wrapping paper too.

Christmas music might help me get into the spirit of thing, and maybe even remember that Christmas is looming long enough to get some stuff done. But finding and ordering a CD that doesn't suck sounds like too much work right now.

silly/fun

Okay, ganked this list from Kelly, and the word gank from her friend Mario, whom I do not actually know. But he taught me a new word, so he can be my friend.

A: Area Code You Are In Right Now: 8081
B: Birthday: October 21st
C: Current Crush: John Cusack
D: Favorite Drink: Coffee
E: Eating Currently: gummi bears, stolen confiscated from my sons
F: Favorite Food: mashed potatoes with lots of butter and gravy
G: Who Do You Go To For Advice: My next-door neighbor
H: Happy or Sad: yes
I: I think: too slowly
J: Job: several
K: Any Kids: two sons
L: I Love: my family
M: Favorite Movie: Princess Bride. Yes, I am a dweeb.
N: Your Phone Number: not tellin'.
P: Favorite Perfume or Cologne: something lilac-y would be nice.
Q: A Little Quirk About Yourself: I tell the truth when people ask me how I am.
R: Last Road Trip: Andalucía, about three weeks ago. El woohoo!
S: Tell Us One Secret: I don't have any secrets
T: Favorite TV Show: haven't seen anything other than kiddie shows for four years. I hate them all.
U: Color of your Underwear: usually black
V: Last Time You Were in Vegas: umm, New Year's, 1992. 1993?
W: Wishful Thinking: the only kind I do
X: X-Rays Taken This Year: None
Y: Your Favorite Year of your Life: almost always the one I'm in, except for this year. This one was not so great.
Z: Zodiac Sign: Libra

Thing1 and therapy

So this morning I went to see Fr. W, the only psychotherapist-for-kids here in OurTown. This was the last of the 8 um, Probestunde...like trial sessions. She had four with Thing1, and two each with me and Robert, and will now write to the insurance company, describe the problem as she sees it and say that she thinks Thing1 will benefit from therapy. If they approve it (i.e. agree to pay for it), we can start seeing her regularly - Thing1 once a week, the parents probably once a month or so.

Have I ranted yet about how inappropriate I think psychotherapy is for a kid with ADD? Probably. There's really no point in objecting, though, because there is nothing else here. To have any kind of choice in what to do for Thing1 we'd have to move to Munich... which we may yet do, but moving to another city is a huge process here, usually takes half a year at least, and if Robert finds a job in the next year or so and we have to move anyway that will have been a lot of trouble and expense for nothing. Anyway, she's really nice, and may yet be helpful. I should and will give her a chance. But I'm frustrated at how little input I have in these decisions about Thing1's welfare, and it makes me wish we could go back to the States, where at least I know how to navigate the bureaucracy and how to find out what the options are.

about Niklas's sweater...

Thing2 cut a hole in it. With scissors. At kindergarten, last Wednesday. He says it was unintentional, and his teacher confirms that there did not appear to be any hostility behind it. Apparently, he just...did it. Which is why, she says, she recommends that he not start school next September, but wait a year. Apparently he has some, uh, maturing to do. Which is a bit confusing because he was so cheerful and friendly and socially... uh, ept (opposite of inept? Okay, okay, I know it's "apt", I was just playing) when he started kindergarten two years ago. He seems to be going backward.

So now we have to call Niklas's mom and figure out how to replace the sweater. I never realized how mortifying parenting is. Oh, especially since remember the Thanksgiving thing? Where Thing2 was not very nice to the hosts' little boy? Well, the little boy's mom is a database administrator, and therefore a potential asset in my imminent job search. Or was a potential asset, until she met my son and I left my purse at her house.

By the way, if you can stand waiting for it to load, this is pretty funny. Unless you hate cats, of course.

but I digress...

So I've been thinking that photo up there deserves an explanation - I mean, are those birth-control glasses, or what? What happened to the rest of my face? Why am I even wearing glasses, since those of you who know me know that I've had 20/20 vision all my life. And it's a funny story, or maybe it isn't - the whole situation struck us as deeply and hilariously weird at the time, but it's probably one of those "Ya had to be there" things. And of course it was long enough ago (a whole month, wow!) that I've forgotten some of the details. I did take notes, in that little notebook I mentioned in a previous entry, but I don't have that notebook to hand, because of another thing that happened. Which is that I left my purse at someone's house. We, except for Thing1 who went to see his godfather instead, went to a sort of Americans Gathering For Thanksgiving thing in Munich, on Saturday. Which was fun, yadda yadda yadda, oh except that Thing2 was a surly-butt - the hosts have a 4-year-old son, a charming little boy who was very happy to have someone his age to play with, except that Thing2 wouldn't play. Which not only embarrassed me, because he should be nice to other people (even though he has nobody to model this behavior for him, since his parents are surly-butts as well - oh no, remind me to tell you about Niklas's sweater sometime), but also annoyed me because he wanted to crawl all over me while I was trying to talk to grown-ups. Gad, is it time for a new paragraph yet?

Sure, what the hell. Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, reasonably fun and not terribly eventful, except that, as the punch line of a comedy of errors, I left my purse there. With the notebook in it. And my cel phone, and my PDA which has little alarms to help me remember to do stuff, and I devoutly hope no alarms are set on it right now, because Robert won't be able to pick up my purse until Tuesday. Also hope nobody calls me. Because the family who hosted the Thanksgiving Thing were very nice, and my son has already been rude to their son, and I have already demonstrated my complete scatterbrainedness, and on top of everything else, I would really hate to annoy them in absentia with random beepy gadget noises.

So that's why the story of the glasses will have to wait. Because this entry is already long enough. Maybe I'll remember when I've got my purse back, Tuesday evening, or maybe the story will be supplanted by whatever happens tomorrow morning, at my appointment with Thing1's shrink. Which I sincerely hope I remember to go to, because it's at 8.30 am, and I don't have my PDA to remind me.

been remiss

You know, given that I am Tom Waits, it's actually kind of embarrassing that I haven't bought any of my albums since Black Rider. Okay, the label should be sending them to me free of charge, and I shall send them a very stern email, but in the meantime I should pick up a few, and this requires some thought. Because there's a sort of Tom Waits continuum, with, say, the mellow bluesy Semi-Suite at one, and the clanky, shrieky, Earth-Died-Screaming at ten. And if I recall correctly, Black Rider was about a twelve, a little bit past my level of dissonance-tolerance. And every time I look into buying another Tom Waits CD, I wonder where it is on the scale. Somebody should set up a Listmania! list. Oh look, somebody already has. Welcome to Stream-of-consciousness blogging, folks. Anyway. The point was: asking the general public for input! Yes! Because I take advice from strangers! Okay, not really. But still, here's a chance to put some pictures up, and we all love pictures.

So there's my collection so far, in order from bluesy to clanky. Those of you familiar with the canon, please tell me where you think the others fall in that spectrum. And I'll go buy the two or three that suit my mood the next time I visit amazon.com.

Thanks.

hola

Turns out, it's not just me. Ask pretty much anyone from the Left Coast what they miss most, living in Munich, and they all say the same thing: Mexican Food!

So that's good, I'm not alone. Misery loves company. Of course, I'd swap all my companions in culinary deprivation for a shredded beef and bean burrito, but that's okay. I'm fairly sure they'd do the same for me.

another crisis, been and gone

And then I didn't post for a coupla days after I found out that I'm Tom Waits, which is reprehensible*, but here's why: I have lots of time, but it's all in 10-minute chunks, which doesn't seem like enough time to cover the latest crisis, which is now basically over. That is one of the cool things about parenting, actually, that the world collapses on a regular basis, the problems get solved before you even have time to tell anyone about them, and if you're me, and you don't document them, then they're forgotten two days later. Not that I have forgotten that Robert's parents bought Thing1 an Xbox even though we have clearly, specifically, and repeatedly said no, but it doesn't seem like as big a deal as it did a few days ago. Because at least we agree 100% on what to do about it, so all we have to do is tell the Oompas that we said no, and we meant no, and please get rid of the damn thing, then wait a few weeks to see if they actually do it.

*(I mean that not posting is reprehensible. That I am Tom Waits is self-evident.)

I do feel the need to qualify this a bit, as we do have one dear friend (that we know of) who bought a Nintendo (or something) for her kid, and I don't want her to think that I'm judging her. NintendoXboxPlaystation is not inherently evil. It is a fine thing for some kids, but not for Thing1. Because he acts like a crack addict, I swear. He plays online games on his computer, maze-things, or shooty-things, or whatever, and he gets really, really, really tense about them. Tense? How about wigged-out? It's scary. He screams at you if you interrupt him while he's playing. He hits the keys so hard he's actually damaged them, and now some of them don't work - which is particularly sucky because when Thing1 gets Robert's laptop next year because R is upgrading, the Dell which Thing1 now uses was supposed to go to Thing2. But the Dell is pretty useless without a working A-key (among others), and it's Thing1's fault, not Thing2's, so it's hardly fair that Thing1 gets a shiny nearly-new computer and Thing2 gets a POS. Hm. I digress. The upshot is that Thing1 lacks the interpersonal skills, manners, concentration, etc. that are appropriate to his age, and computer games will not help him develop them. Plus there is the fact that when they bought the Xbox, he picked out a game that is so violent it's not supposed to be played by kids under 16. Sixteen!

Happy Thanksgiving, y'all

Tom Waits... charismatic story-teller with a
penchant for freaky people and unusual
settings. You thrive on the concept of the
underdog coming out on top.


Which fucked-up genius composer are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

via Slacktivist.

The sun came out today.

Happy Birthday, Mom.

100 Things

I realize that this is a hoary old meme, an ancient meme, probably a cavememe, but I like reading other people's 100 Thingses, so I might as well put up mine.

1. I was born in California. Bay Area, woo.


2. We left when I was 4 months old, so I remember absolutely nothing about it.


3. I lived mostly in Columbus Ohio until I was 13.


4. I also remember very little about Columbus. Just the house.


5. And the park.


6. And some people.


7. I'm never bored.


8. I like number games.


9. And crossword puzzles.


10. My feet look just like my dad's (except I don't think he wore red nail polish on his toes).


11. My B.A is in Social Science: psychology, anthropology, history...


12. But I'm moving into IT, which I am not at all cut out for.


13. Because I want to have a job someday.


14. We'll see how that goes.


15. I am utterly, absolutely inept at making small talk.


16. I am a coffee snob. Starbucks can bite me.


17. I am not a good cook.


18. I have two sons.


19. I live in a suburb of Munich (Germany), which has me in a sort of permanent identity crisis.


20. I have one friend in this town. She's English.


21. I love happy movies. Don't care much for the other kind.


22. If I could read all the time, I would.


23. Fiction.


24. I like science-fiction, but there sure is a lot of crap getting published lately.


25. Ditto sword-and-sorcery stories.


26. I've been proofreading off and on for over 17 years, and I have no patience with bad writing.


27. I would love to have one of those zippy, informed, aware, interesting blogs about What's Going On, but I just don't have the attention span.


28. I tell people I'm from Seattle, unless they're from Seattle.


29. Then I say I'm from Port Townsend.


30. Well, nobody else knows where Port Townsend is.


31. It's beautiful, though. I miss it every day.


32. Even though living there drove me crazy.


33. I like to knit, but I'm not all that good at it.


34. I have one brother.


35. My dad was married three times. I still keep in touch with both my step-moms.


36. I've been with my husband for eleven years.


37. I hated every single minute of high school.


38. College was better, but I still dropped out 6 times.


39. I finally got my B.A. when I was 31.


40. I am a cat person.


41. I have three tattoos.


42. I really like graph paper. I have a lot of it.


43. I am very difficult to wake up.


44. I think trains are cool.


45. My birthday is October 21.


46. I am geekily fond of Star Trek.


47. And the Muppets.


48. I should be studying right now.


49. When I'm not a student, I feel restless and bored, like I'm just treading water.


50. So I sign up for a course (currently, Database Management) and then I feel stressed and overwhelmed.


51. The thing I miss most about the U.S. is public libraries.


52. And used bookstores.


53. I don't like really hot weather. I hate really cold weather.


54. Big cities intimidate the hell out of me.


55. I wear jeans almost every day.


56. I am almost never on time.


57. I have a bad temper.


58. My favorite color is green.


59. I wanted to be a dancer.


60. I should have tried harder.


61. Silver. Not gold.


62. Sometimes little kids ask me if I'm a witch. Not in a nasty way, they're just curious.


63. I had waist-length hair when I was 20 or so.


64. Then I had green hair.


65. Then blue.


66. I shaved my head after my dad died.


67. I dance in the kitchen, while I'm cooking or cleaning.


68. I can't sing at all, but I do it anyway.


69. When my older son was little he used to cover his ears and cry when I sang to him.


70. I really should take better care of my teeth.


71. I got my first driver's license when I was 26.


72. I don't like to shop.


73. I really like being a webmaster, but I doubt I could make a living at it.


74. I'd like to, though.


75. I can write, but I don't. It's too much like work.


76. I fall over a lot.


77. I smoked for five years, but then I quit. It was hard, and I'm proud that I did it.


78. I like palindromes.


79. And big words.


80. I don't like housework. Okay, nobody does. But other people seem to bear it better than I do.


81. I don't care for sausage. But I live in Germany, so I have to eat it anyway.


82. I am always trying (and failing) to get myself organized.


83. I love my PDA, but I mostly use it to play games.


84. I want to like spiders, because they kill the bad bugs, but the fact is, they give me the heebie-jeebies.


85. When I get stressed out, I lose weight because I forget to eat.


86. I don't like vacations much. I like my normal life.


87. Weekend jaunts to Rome, however, or a few days in Spain, are a different story.


88. Yes, I do realize how fantastically fortunate I am, thanks.


89. I could theoretically count to 1,023 on the fingers of one hand. I say theoretically because I've never actually done it. But I could.


90. I think I'd like to have another baby, but my husband says it's not a good time. By the time he thinks it's a good time, I probably won't want to anymore.


91. Some people think I have a talent for languages, but all I can really do is mimic accents.


92. My dad died at 45. I think about that a lot.


93. My mother died recently. Now I don't have any parents. I do have the stepmoms, and that's almost the same, but not quite.


94. My favorite thing to look at when traveling is cathedrals.


95. I also really like castles. Not chateaux, big-fancy houses for people with too much money, but the real, feudal, defensive structures. Buildings as weapons.


96. I really need to live near water. Ocean, lake, river...something big and obvious.


97. Mountains would be good too, but water is more important.


98. I've mostly stopped biting my nails.


99. My older son calls me the Queen of Sarcasm. He's probably right.


100. I thought of all 100 things in one day. Another useless skill to add to my arsenal.

cookies, continued

Update: they showed up after all. They ate most of the cookies. So no harm done.

Oh, yeah: and it's snowing. Again.

ya like cookies? we got cookies!

darn, darn, dang it, drat...poop.

SO the Sniglet has been wanting to play with Jakob, from kindergarten, and Jakob's mom and I have been trying to plan a playdate (incidentally, does a playdate between two pre-schoolers require more planning than the Normandy invasion, or does it just seem that way?) and finally settled on today. Jakob's mom talks a bit faster than I hear, but the gist of the conversation was that his big sister was going to be at a friend's house from 2 to 5, so JakobsMom would bring him over and then she'd be free to stay and hang out if Jakob decided to get all shy, since this is his first visit, and if he didn't get all shy she could take off and have some she-time. Whoa. I may have a grown-up visitor. Or, not!

Okay, race home and make lunch for the kids and turn the kitchen inside out looking for something to offer her, because you have to serve coffee and cake, or something equivalent, if an adult German comes into your house. I'm not sure what happens if you don't, but it's probably something like when you feed a gremlin after midnight.

Anyway, I whip out some Christmas cookies that I mixed up last year and then froze for later use - let sit at room temp for ten minutes, put in 150°C oven for 10 more minutes, voila - and I'm hurling melted chocolate on the vanilla stars and mint bells, and an icing-sugar glaze on the lemon moons, and JakobsMom calls to say he's a bit unwell, so she's taking him to the doctor.

So no visitors today. That's part I. Here's part II: We don't have dessert every night. We don't think a sugar bomb is a daily need, and we feel the kids get quite enough sugar already. So last night I said no, no dessert, unless you want a tangerine or something. In which case, have at it. Well, while I was upstairs, Ignatz helped himself and his brother to some gummi bears that were left over from the Sniglet's birthday party. Even though I'd said no dessert. So the punishment for this instance of direct disobedience is, logically enough, no dessert for the rest of the week.

So now I have about two dozen cookies sitting around, and no people to fling them into. What the hell am I going to do with all these cookies?

A is for Adrenaline

The reason I got such good grades in school, even though I am catastrophically disorganized, is that I can hyperfocus on schoolwork - but only under the influence of a deadline-induced panic. I've actually done reasonably well at this database course so far, because I gave myself a week to do each assignment. I told the teacher at the beginning of each quarter that I would turn in one assignment every Tuesday. I'd sort of start poking at each one on Thursday, achieving nothing, fritter away my whole kid-free Sunday on trivial things like housework and web-surfing and "oh I really must answer this email". Then on Monday I'd realize it was due tomorrow, freak out completely, and devote two solid days to the material (toast for dinner, yum! Sure you can make it yourself, you're four years old already!), and usually manage to claw my way through the assignment in time. Of course, occasionally the material would baffle me to the point of needing to ask the teacher a question, and it would take a couple-three days to get the answer, and then I was essentially screwed, but the system worked, more or less.

Until now. Now I'm baffled nearly every week, but that's not the worst thing. The worst thing is that I have an extension until February 4th, and I really can't convince myself of the need to get it done before then. I had set myself the informal deadline of the end of the year, but I'm on assignment 5 (of 8, plus a final project and open-book test), and Christmas is looming, and I know there's no earthly way I will get this done by December 31st. Since that is the case, I can't seem to convince myself that it should or could be done any earlier than February 4th. Especially because of the other worst thing: once I pass the course, I will have no choice but to look for a job, a process that ranks right up there with emergency dental work on the list of Things I Hate.

By the way, I bet you think I wrote this entry in order to avoid having to study. Not so, though that is the case for the last week or so of entries. No, this time I did it on a genuine study break, and made actual progress on the assignment as well. Yay me.

I was wrong about the snow

It did stick, boy howdy did it. And more fell, and it's all over the place now. Of course, it's a tiny bit warmer today, so it's starting to melt - great lolloping wads of it are falling off the roof, making our front path a fairly thrilling place. I'm sure the mailman is excited, since all the houses in our neighborhood are the same. Every mailbox an adventure.

I saw the Harry Potter movie yesterday, and it was pretty good, in spite of Kilian's constant remarks about how this or that scene was different from the book. Oh well, at least he wasn't totally wigged out by the scary scenes. Yay, autism. I also saw the new Pride and Prejudice last friday (without Kilian), and liked it better this time around. Some bits still bother me, but on balance, I think it's a fairly good movie.

I have to call Jerry and see how he's doing. I should have done it last week, or the week before. I did try the other day, and left a message on his voicemail. Tomorrow it will be a month since she died. And the day after will be her 60th birthday. I really should give Jerry a call.

missing Mom. sort of.

Not as much as I should be missing her, because it really doesn't feel like she's all the way gone yet. I mean, intellectually I know she is, but I don't feel sad yet, I just feel kind of empty.

To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.
Oscar Wilde

I still have the step-moms, though. So I shouldn't feel so weightless and lost. But I do. I keep waiting for the realization to hit me, but I can really only grasp the edges of it, the lack of Saturday phone calls and the fact that I probably won't ever be inside that house again. And somebody else will get the phone number, I really liked that phone number. The garden will never be the same again, nobody would be able to keep it like she did. The kitchen stuff I left behind, and my sewing machine, and the dresser she got for her 16th birthday, I hope the people who get them love them as much as we did.

You see? Only the really trivial stuff penetrates, and I feel like I'm being petty, letting all these trivial things bother me. There's a wall, and only the tiny things can get through. I'm not ready for the big one yet. I don't know if I ever will be.

I'm sorry I was so exasperated with her sometimes. I'm glad I never told her how exasperated I was. I hope she didn't know anyway.

Hoss's wife died yesterday. I hope he's holding up okay.

first snow!

Of course it won't stick, November snows never do, but it looks very promising right now. And even though it will also cause lots of problems, re traffic and dirt in the house and cold, I've decided to be all excited about it because the kids are. Gotta get out and build snow-stuff with them this year.