10 Confessions

I am reading a book called The Encyclopedia of Ordinary Life, a unique memoir by Amy Krouse Rosenthal. As one of her "B" entries she writes her thoughts on "Busy". She points out that when we are asked what we are doing as a child we always say "nothing" and then (I would say when we discover the false emotion of guilt) when asked, we suddenly switch to saying how busy we are. We are all so busy. yep. we truly are. But always? So. And why is it not ok to say that we are not?

It made me realize that I had done that here, on my blog, where I am usually so transparent. I implied in my last post that I was so busy that I didn't have the time to write in depth about all that happened on our two week road trip. Not so true. I was busy getting over a sore throat. I did a bunch of laundry (not exactly time-consuming now that we have machines). I was busy watching a movie, a really sad one - Incendiary- in the middle of the day, by myself (not something I ever do) one day this week when I was feeling blue.

I have also been busy making lists of things I want to be busy doing - buying a canner and canning, freezing, painting more walls, building a studio in our back yard and then dancing in it, adding more light to my kitchen, revisiting the book I wrote. I will do all of these things(probably not the studio). But not right now.

I am doing those things that are asked and needed of me by my children - taking them to baseball games and practice, playing all kinds of games with them, researching the Geo-Bee and Hindi (Jesse's newest interests). But, really, I'm not so busy.

SO, when I read about this confessional tag on Julie's blog - I was primed for it.

I am afraid that those long paragraphs you just read were not my ten confessions, just the intro. I haven't blogged in a while and am not feeling brief.

1. I think my children hung the moon and stars. This doesn't mean I don't think yours did too.
2. I bought myself a very cool shirt in NY, silky and off the shoulders and with skulls on it. A few days later, I left it in the hotel room in Virginia Beach. My confession is that I have rationalized this bozo move on my part by imagining that the cleaning lady who found my perfect shirt will wear it to a party and, because of its allure, will then meet the man of her dreams - a good man. That's the only way I can live with having done this. sigh.
3. When the hair dresser asked the kids yesterday if they may want short hair, I wished upon all that is holy to me that they would say yes. (They did. They love it.)
4. In my mind's eye, when I dance in my kitchen (or bathroom or hallway) I still have it. I have the legs and brilliance of Natalia Makarova (my favorite Russian dancer back in the day).
5. Some days, I ache that I can't find the perfect words to express a feeling. Other days, I'm happy if I can remember the name of everyone and everything I see.
6. I am not a great home maker. I cook. I clean. But I am not overly impressive in these areas. I admire those that are.
7. There is a certain mildewy smell that makes me happy. It brings me back to Camp Merrie-Wood overnight camp. I smelled it last night while leaning against a fence and I look forward to being there again.
8. I have a mail thing. I buy the gift and wrap the gift and make the card (and sometimes even make the gift) but I have a block about getting it into a mailer or box and then a bigger block about getting it the post office. It's ridiculous. I'm giving this up, right now! My niece Zoe turn two today and her gift is sitting on my dining room table. She lives in Australia. She'll be 2 1/2 by the time it gets there.
9. I have a phone thing. I won't pick up the phone to call you unless your house is burning down and I know that no one else sees this. But that won't be you as those neighbors whom I can see would not be reading my blog. They may be sitting on their porches staring our way (shudder) but not reading here - I hope. I do love talking to you when you call me. But I am better with e-mail.
10. I hate when I am long-winded. If you choose to do this tag, and I hope you do and tell me so, I hope that you are long-winded as well.

The Kelly(ie)s/ or, true confessions of an eighth grader

I have "Kelly" on the brain this week. It started with the Park School (fourth through ninth grades) reunion I'm going to in a few weeks. Several days ago I dug through an old trunk in search of two green spiral notebooks. I remembered writing in them back then, thirty to thirty five years ago. I found the green spiral notebooks, but the blue locked diary was better. It covered almost every day of 1977 and some of '78. Every entry begins with "Dear Kelly", as that was my diary's name (which is also true of all of the green notebooks and of most of the baby dolls I cherished when younger). There are even worse embarrassing revelations, like the list of my favorite songs at age 14. Don't Give Up on us Baby by David Soul led the list. And then there was the mad crush I had on Sylvester Stallone. This dark, rugged man had overcome the challenges of living in Hell's Kitchen and had gone on to write and star in "Rocky". I was in awe. I sketched a picture of the beaten-up underdog with vulnerable girlfriend Adrian in my diary. Gonna Fly Now was number two on my favorite song list.

The second Kelly of the week is a more recent friend, the unschooling Live and Learn conference creator, Kelly Lovejoy. She came last week to get tomato plants from Nicolas and in return listened to me babble on hung out with me until 1:30 in the morning and much of the next day. One of the highlights was watching she and Helen talk chicken. Kelly is all about their color while Helen only notices how many eggs they lay. Kelly has put my dog on a diet. Others have tried, but they weren't Kelly. The next two Kellys are from previous chapters in my life, one visiting us from Boston where she is married to my friend who helped start Barking Dog Theater and the other was a college roommate. College-rommate-Kelly visited me here in GA when I first moved here and proceeded to fall in love with and marry my ex-boyfriend (the one I'd been complaining about to her in letters for a year). These two Kellys both ended up at the same party with us this weekend and were both monopolized by me much of the day.

Did you really need to waste your time on any of this? Probably not. But what was revealed at this party, where we rehashed various shared experiences, while our poor children tried to get us to quiet down, was how very wrong I am about that long-term memory talent I have often bragged of having. Turns out it's not just my short-term memory, but even the dramatic events of my past that have been seeping out my ears to make room for the present. Periodically, I have to record things here so that I can put names with faces as it gets worse (wish I'd remembered to take pictures of the last two Kellys). And then, the Kellys fit so nicely together in a set. I just need to see this one now to complete the theme.

Thanks to all of these women, it's still one of my favorite names.

Transplanting

These represent just a few of the trays of "China Choi" (similar to Bok Choi) that were transplanted out of the green house and into a high tunnel today. It was beautifully overcast. I took lots of pictures of farming and of boys. They were trans-planting too, in their own way:

I have more tutorials and recipes coming soon to the farm blog. The tutorial will be created with pictures, not video, as my video camera battery charger has been transplanted into another realm. There is some kind of black-market in camera/video chargers going on in this house. More likely, there's a really bored ghost who likes to see me running from outlet to outlet, screaming and pulling my hair out over having lost yet another one! Just a few weeks ago I had to buy a new charger for my camera, and both my sister and Danielle may have lost their chargers here.

My friend Beth has a ferret that has been known to hide her husband's cell phone (as well as Jesse's yu gi oh card case last week) deep within the stuffing of a mattress . We don't have a ferret. We do have a cat that has been moved outside, so could have grounds for revenge. But how could she have unplugged the chargers from the outlets without electrocuting herself in the process - especially with all that spraying she was so fond of doing everywhere - when she lived inside. Besides, I think she likes her new post, from which she gets to scare away the birds and pounce on the frogs in our pond.She swallows them whole (when I don't get there first) and then spits them back out.

Yeah. Gross, and mean. I am a big lover of frogs.

Maybe it is her...

For less rambling and some good, practical, illuminating farm talk - see my other blog. It is far more respectable.

Tenderized

I am not sleeping much lately. There's excitement about my family coming. I'm panicking about the many things I forgot to do that day. I'm listening to the new sounds of our newly-inside-dwelling cat, crashing into the wall near my bed as she races back and forth with her invisible friend in the dark. Mostly, I'm worrying - about friends' troubles, or the homeless, or whether Nicolas is happy. I wish that I could be like sometime insomniacs Barbara Kingsolver and Rue Kream and get out of bed each night to write a great book. Maybe tonight.

Lack of sleep has softened me. The professional production of A Christmas Carol that we saw last night (our friends in it included two acclaimed young unschooled brothers) had me in tears over Scrooge's redemption. That was unexpected. I even acted in this play, years ago in Boston and was cynically burned out on Christmas carols for years. This year, just a few notes of Johnny Mathis and I well up. And, this particular production is great. If you are local, and can get there, I believe that even those less tender would love it.

This morning, I saw a branch out of a window and was touched by the way the wind moves its leaves, that there are just a few less of the red flutters every day.
I deleted the earlier published rambling about having lost my checkbook at the theater, and my "excuses of an insomniac" for having done so, because I found said checkbook between the seats of our car. Life is bittersweet but the emphasis today has gotten sweeter. I'm going to be a presenter at the Northeast Unschooling Conference, which means I'm bringing my family for a visit home to Boston at the end of August! I hope that some of you will be there, to pump me full of tylenol pm or mundane thoughts late at night and share a wicked good time. Do Bostonians still say wicked?

Cleaning Up

For a year now, Nicolas has had it with our couch. It has well-loved throws and wool blankets strategically covering its gaping seams and stains. But the real problem is that for many months now, it has no longer provided comfort at the end of a hard day. It is the sanctuary to which Nicolas retreats when he wants to fall asleep hang out with us around the wood stove.

So I researched couches, for a very long time, really wanting to just get one from Freecycle or Craig's list but also knowing how little chance there would be of accomplishing that in a timely manner when Nicolas can't drop everything to go pick it up and I can't drive the truck (I'm not a real woman -I don't shift, yet) to get it myself.

We went to a local furniture chain (blech)- the one place we could go to get a couch delivered quickly - meaning before six weeks from now. We have lots of valuable friends and family due to start arriving in a week.

It was late. We arrived an hour before the store closed. We sat on every couch. And then, with only minutes before closing, we decided upon the one I'd found online.

"I can only get you that one in the pearl color if you want it before January," announced our salesman.

Pearl? We looked at one another, visions of our red clay filled farm life running through our heads.

"Leather is very easy to clean. You can get it sealed at the factory and I'll be giving you leather cleaner in these bottles that you can come and get refilled, for life."

I thought about how dark our living room is and how difficult it has been to add more light with the old wiring. A white couch would really lighten up the room and would provide the highlights needed to see our guests' faces. I thought of a new bright, clean future that supported life with a pearl couch. I found myself agreeing to this purchase. Not only that, we bought the pearl colored chair to go with it. They will arrive on Wednesday.

I have been waking up in the middle of the night from bad dreams that include strange color combinations and dirt.

On a positive note, we have been even more inspired to de-clutter and deep clean our home, so that it will go with our couch:
Above are our newly repainted kitchen shelves, to hold the beautiful glasses and china that were being lost in the dirt streaked white.
My mothers' crystal, the Brenna mug I bought at the Live and Learn conference, the mug from our recent trip to Belgium, the dark blue glazed goblet from Ann Ohman, the mug from a Joffrey Ballet concert years ago called Billboards, the hearts mug from Nicolas last Valentine's day, the big pink tumbler that is Mindy's, the yen store cups from Japan, my mother's small Mexican mugs that I treasure so much that I painted a bathroom with the same colors, the egg cups from our wedding...

I'm pairing it all down to the essentials.
And I'm thinking of knitting a very washable blanket that will completely cover the new furniture. Because really, what were we thinking.

The Vienna Boys Choir

As a Christmas present, last month we bought tickets to go see the Vienna Boys Choir with my mother in law, Helen, who is Austrian. Those who were the boys' choir at the time had sung at her wedding in Vienna, years ago.

We saw them last night, in a nearby small Georgia city that has a good arts council. They performed in an old high school auditorium. This must have been the most humble theater on their tour. But even standing on faded,scratched black platforms and accompanied by a less than stellar piano, they were young boys with angelic voices and had our hearts beating more strongly. Gillen's jaw was dropped for much of the concert. He was blown away. Jesse too.

Being in a high school, after the concert Gillen and Jesse asked if they could dance down the halls, like in the High School Musical movies. After their dance, on the way home, Jesse stated that he may want to go to high school as he could imagine being able to sing and dance with friends there. He earnestly tried to convince me that this really could happen.

If only life were like a musical. Everything would change. The dingy grey walls of a high school or office building would stand in stark contrast to the brilliant, alive sounds it encased and new paint, in bright warm colors, would be applied on a regular basis. Any personal conflicts would soon be remedied by the bonding wrought through having to 'shuffle, ball, step', turn, breakdance or leap, in unison. Men on the front lines of war, hearing the enemy singing would find themselves moving their hips to the music, their throats tightening as they related to the pathos coming through in the foreign battle lyrics.

I'm just saying we need more music and dance, and less self-consciousness. O.K. - And more talent. There you have it - my justification for breaking out into musical numbers as I go through my day. I'm not only insane. I'm inspiring myself to finally repaint the kitchen. If only I had the talent of the Vienna Boys' Choir, or Patty Lupone, or someone my kids idolize, like Hannah Montana.

Buzzing in paradise

Since putting it out to the universe that I want to move here, a conspiracy has formed to damper my enthusiasm. I don't know who the ring leader is but they have some talented mercenaries working for them. Last night, the heat, a mosquito and a Kukaburra kept me awake until it was light out. Seriously. Buzzing in my ear is the way to torture me to death (I hope no one reading ever has reason to use this knowledge). I tried sleeping under a pillow, under a sheet, turning on the light and hunting it down...the most talented mosquito I have ever come across. How do I know it was a conspiracy? Nicolas - not bothered at all, until the Kukaburra started laughing at dawn.

By the way, this was venting, not whingeing. I'm good now.

Hopefully time for zoo pictures later.

Frik is actually Frac

A few posts back, I mentioned a cat that has been showing up at our house and whom we have decided to start feeding and caring for and calling "Frickle" because "he" looked like my mom's male Calico cat whom I loved so much years ago. In the comments, Tamar pointed out that Calicos are female, to which I retorted, "not this one!"

But Tamar's comment got me thinking and Nicolas and I decided to look for ourselves. It turns out that just because you can hunt and raise chickens, two things that our 9 yo friend Aaron does very well, doesn't mean you are equipped to designate the sex of a cat. The equipment that Aaron saw back there must have been the calico patterning playing tricks on his eyes. Frickle has been renamed "Fracas", for the female sibling.

In that same post, I called my mom's two cats Calicos. I cat-sat these two, loved them from the time they were kittens and inherited them from my mother when she died. I would know! Well, apparently not. I looked in an old album today and it appears that my memory has become an issue. Here they are, Frickle on the left: What is up with my brain! What else have I rewritten? Good thing I have this blog to keep as evidence when I start rewriting my kids' childhoods!

Here is our new Calico, Fracas the second.
She is outside looking in while the first Frik and Frac were doomed to always be inside looking out, at the many many birds that came to my mom's seven bird feeders.

Bzzzzz....

I just got up from the computer, shut off the lights in this room, left the room, turned on lights in the next room, and waited for a few minutes before returning here and slamming the door - all in the pursuit of getting a fly to follow the light to the next room and leave me alone!

I used to turn into "fly lady" with the kids - and I wasn't that benevolent cleaning lady who goes by that name either. I would turn in circles and allow for a few Incredible Hulk transformation twitches before the take-over would be complete. And then "Fly Lady" would wield her fly swatter(s) with a vengeance. She was not patient or compassionate like Mommy. She was homicidal, cranky and loud - in some kind of Spanish accent (so kind of funny). For a while the kids truly believed in this super woman, since she could kill flies a whole lot better than mommy.

I hadn't thought about her in a while.

I just heard the buzzing again while writing this. There. I slapped and successfully killed a mosquito! yes!

I hope to remember fly lady the next time I am bugged by anything. I won't necessarily pick up a fly swatter but maybe I will transform into a super hero who can kill the frustrations with a whacky accent. Or I will start singing songs from old musicals with my own lyrics thrown in, while dancing. I haven't done that in a while either. I know now why my mother used to suddenly talk in tongues. That sounds like "baaa ba baaaaa, be be ba ba " spoken musically, and with the intensity of a torch singer (think Edith Piaf) . I loved it. I think she was just saving herself from the boring, counterproductive glare, lecture or whine. Or, she was just a loon. If so, I have the same gene.

connecting

With encouragement from the Australian part of the family (though those in Holland will be glad as well) I finally downloaded the free skype software, enabling us to talk to family in far away lands for free. A few hours after I started the account, my computer started ringing! I "answered" the light blue ringing bubble on the screen and suddenly I was whisked into an episode of "The Jetsons". My computer was talking to me, in a familiar Australian accent. My mac laptop had come alive and had taken on Naomi's persona! It was surreal and freaky and I was hysterical.

When I finally stopped laughing and Naomi hooked up her camera so that I could see her (soo wonderful) I saw how cool this could be. We got to see her growing-with-child belly. sigh. That was something! We got to see Kenneth's new rock star haircut. Nicolas and the kids saw K. & N.'s Sydney apartment for the first time, including their beautiful view of the Bay from their terrace. We caught up on their new business venture, they got to hear the kids' voices (though mostly I was heading off Jesse from his attempts to have his stuffed dog Rufus kiss Naomi so much, in case Rufus inadvertently disconnected the skype). We shared Red Sox updates and reconnected with the pandas (Louisafini and Pandolfini who need an entire blog entry to themselves some time soon). It was all good. But that was because I could see them and they couldn't yet see me. I have to get a cord to connect our video camera to the computer.

I think that connecting in person is what it's really all about. We connected with some friends here today on their way to Vidalia. Sharing good food and laughs and the outdoors is so fine. If you can't have that, then connecting by voice is good; though I sometimes prefer writing. But this video phone phenomenon...I feel like the first phone generation must have felt. I think of Pa Ingalls saying "these times we're living in are going too fast, we have trains where we used to just have wagons, and telegrams, and kerosene lamps.... it's too much too quick." (I'm seriously paraphrasing Laura Ingalls Wilder) Am I afraid of even more technology? Been reading too many "Little House" books lately?

I want to see the new nephews (one niece?) when they are born. I loved seeing my brother after not having seen him for a year. It was so good to see Naomi looking so pregnant. But I don't want the computer to ring at any old time and have to literally FACE someone while talking. You feel like you're sitting in front of the person, but you're not! What is my problem? I'll stop wondering until I actually have a camera on me for the first time...if anyone even calls me again after this babbling.

OK, I am not stopping. My mac ibook is the way I connect to the world outside of my little town. I love being able to connect to such a fabulously diverse bunch of people, to reach out instantly to so many friends, family and yet-to-be-made friends, so easily. Skype just makes that possibility even bigger. It's a little wierd. But I can face it. Bring it on.

"squirrel", part three

This was a lesson to never blog before having coffee.

Above,apparently trying to eat the boogie board, is the "squirrel". I finally had the guts to go close enough to look at it and realized that it was our crocodile, that usually lives on the rim of the bathtub. Yes! No dead squirrel to fish out of the pool, and my son doesn't have evil powers.

I have a vivid imagination (or am just certifiable).