2012 Flashback: Birthday girl

Faith turns 10 this Saturday.  Last year, she had a dental appointment the day before her birthday.  All the hygienists know how to make balloon animals at our pediatric dentist, and for birthdays, they make a hat:

Eric was very jealous; the six-month gap between check-ups means he'll likely never be there on his birthday.  When I was a kid, all I got from the dentist was a plastic toy and a lecture on brushing.

Blast from the Past

Man, I love this goat.  Doesn't take nothing from nobody.  I'm fairly certain he's too edgy for Sesame Street today.  It's a kinder, gentler Street.  Heck, even Oscar has friends over for playdates these days.

"French playwrights and the Bible" for 200, Alex

During Eric's basketball practice tonight, I was reading a review (from summer 2012) of a book on the history of the Conservative Party in Britain, and I came across this gem of a sentence:

"But if, like Naaman in the House of Rimmon, Churchill conformed without believing, it is not evident that Chamberlain and Baldwin -- or even David Cameron -- can be similarly absolved on grounds of political Tartuffery." -- Michael Knox Beran

What a delight of obscure references!  The Second Book of Kings and Moliere both in the same sentence and  pressed into service to discuss the prime ministers of Great Britain!  And not a frisson of context or whiff of a footnote!  I think what I miss most about academia is the sheer intellectual elitism in which one is permitted -- nay, encouraged! -- to engage.

Young ladies' man

The children at our church are dismissed to go to "junior church" after the song service and just before the sermon.  We generally sit in what they call the "stadium seating," wings on either side with graduated rows of pews and stairs on each side.  There was a little girl about Eric's age sitting in the row behind us, and as she got up to walk down the stairs, he waited at the bottom and kept reaching out to take her hand; I could tell he was trying to help her down the stairs, but she had no idea what he wanted.

After the service, her mom leaned forward and said, "Your little boy is so sweet!"  She proceeded to tell us the conversation she had with her daughter afterwards: The mom had explained that Eric had been trying to take her hand to help her down the stairs, and she replied, "I didn't know, mom!  He told me I had pretty hair, and I said thank you."

Dereliction of duty

So I missed two days of blog this week.  Thursday night, I forgot about trying to think of something clever until I was already in bed.  Friday night I knew I should have posted but was just too tired to care.

Get Fuzzy page-a-day calendar?  Still on January 11th.

Yesterday I took the kids to McDonald's where I generally do some reading while they play and tried to get caught up on the daily newspapers dating back to last Friday.

I'm obviously struggling against a rising tide here.

One man's trash

Eric likes to pick things up.  Off the street, I mean.  He collects rocks, sticks, small pieces of plastic and metal, empty eyedrop bottles, Christmas light hangers, and all kinds of trash.  Every time we walk across a parking lot, he has to stop to pick something up.  A while back I asked him, "Eric, why do you pick up so much trash?"

He looked at me, a little hurt, and explained, "Sometimes it's treasure."

2012 Flashback: Dreaming of a White Christmas

We had one this year.  It started snowing just after noon, big fat flakes, and snowed most of the day.  Here's Eric and Faith shortly after the snow started falling.

What I'm reading now

I haven't read a physical book in quite a while.  I'm still working on catching up on the magazines I fell behind on two and a half years ago; several times I've gotten well into the seasonals stack only to bog down in a review of a philosophical or political book for a few weeks, during which time the biweeklies and monthlies start to arrive again.  Right now, I'm in a Claremont Review of Books from Summer 2012 and had less than 8 (admittedly thick and small-fonted) magazines left in my stack, but I'm wading through a multi-page opinion piece on issues that were germane before the election and now are fairly moot.  (You want to know what was all the rage in Winter 2011/12?  Occupy and Rick Perry.  Seriously.  How long ago does that seem now?)  And about 5 new magazines came in this week.  :P

I have, however, read a few books on my Kindle, thanks to the Kindle Lending Library and the ease of carrying a Kindle Keyboard places where a 8-½ x 11 folio wouldn't stuff in my purse.  I just finished reading  The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert, and ran across this quote from the homeschooling author with which I immediately identified:

"In Knox's Cub Scout troop last week, a boy asked how homeschool is different from public school.  Another boy answered: 'At public school, your Mom isn't yelling at you.'  True.  Good Point.  Mea Culpa."

...and in away jerseys

Anyone who has ever watched a sporting event with Tommy knows that he watches sports LOUD.  He's no different watching the kids' basketball games.  One of the boys on Eric's team was on the same team with him last year too and is used to hearing Tommy cheer at the games.  Before the game this morning, Gage's mother came up to tell Tommy that her mother was visiting from Lubbock this weekend, so she told Gage that both his grandmothers would be watching his game Saturday.  Gage looked up at her and asked, "And Eric's dad?"

Basketball and other time sinks

My page-a-day calendar?  Still on January 11th.  I've missed three days of blog this week.  Resolution not going so well.  :P

Part of the issue is that it's basketball season again.  We have practice two nights a week and games Saturday mornings.  The kids are having a great time and, apart from time pressures, we are, too.

Life imitates old joke

I went in Braum's today to buy a gallon of milk, and the woman who was ringing me up was simultaneously on the earpiece for the drivethrough.  The man in the car had her listing off all the kinds of ice cream they had available -- somewhere just south of 30 varieties -- and after she was done, she paused a moment and then replied to him, "Double dip of vanilla, yes, sir."

"Seriously?" I asked her.  "After making you list off all that, he ordered vanilla?"

She grinned at me.  "Happens more often than you'd think."

Just saying....

There is no one I have more respect for after reading their Twitter feed.

Seriously.  If there's any pop cultural figure out there you have some residual affection for, just don't go looking.

Christmas cards

When I was a child, my parents used to display the Christmas cards they received on strings around the doorways of the living room and den and across the beams of the ceiling.  Our house doesn't have exposed ceiling beams or molding around the doorways so I spent a few years trying to figure out something to do with the Christmas cards we receive, other than just put them in a stack where no one can see them.

Several years ago, I saw one of these on Amazon and thought it might be just what I was looking for.  They're made for photos, but they work even better for cards.  I filled two of them this year, using one as a centerpiece for the table and the other (just barely visible in the background above) on a side table.  All the pretty cards and family photos are visible and accessible, easy to flip through and spin around, and it's much more decorative than a stack of cards on a table somewhere.  They've even got a big floor-standing version that you could use as a Christmas tree to put presents under if you live in a loft and are all chic and avant-garde.

Why we read

A case can be made that people who read a preposterous number of books are not playing with a full deck.  I prefer to think of us as dissatisfied customers.  If you have read 6,000 books in your lifetime, or even 600, it's probably because at some level you find "reality" a bit of a disappointment.  People in the 19th century fell in love with "Ivanhoe" and "The Count of Monte Cristo" because they loathed the age they were living through.  Women in our own era read "Pride and Prejudice" and "Jane Eyre" and even "The Bridges of Madison County" -- a dimwit, hayseed reworking of "Madame Bovary" -- because they imagine how much happier they would be if their husbands did not spend quite so much time with their drunken, illiterate golf buddies down at Myrtle Beach.  A blind bigamist nobleman with a ruined castle and an insane, incinerated first wife beats those losers any day of the week.  Blind, two-timing noblemen never wear belted shorts.

....  No matter what they tell themselves, book lovers do not read primarily to obtain information or to while away the time.  They read to escape to a more exciting, more rewarding world.  A world where they do not hate their jobs, their spouses, their governments, their lives. A world where women do not constantly say things like, "Have a good one!" and "Sounds like a plan!"  A world where men do not wear belted shorts.  Certainly not the Knights Templar.

-- Joe Queenan, "One for the Books" 

What we're reading now

It's been a while that I've been trying to find books that Faith is interested enough in to read through for fun of her own volition, like she did The Boxcar Children.  (Still does, actually, as she's reread it a time or two.)  We had some success with Ramona Quimby, as she read most of Beezus and Ramona in one day, but she was disappointed that Ramona grows up from book to book; Ramona really is more entertaining as a preschool force of chaos totally alien to the viewpoint of her big-sister protagonist than the after-school special about how to deal with school/ parents working or being out of work/ dads quitting smoking she morphed into.

It was my mom that hit upon Hank the Cowdog.  She's in her second year of mentoring a boy at a local grade school, and the school librarian suggested the series as a popular choice.  My mom's been getting the books from the library, and Faith's been tearing through them.  She can easily read one a day.  (Fortunately, there's sixty books in the series right now, but she's still going to run out eventually.)  There are audio books too, and Eric's gotten into the characters listening to the CDs.  He's reading the first book now, a chapter a day, for his daily reading/ spelling/ vocabulary lesson, and the kids have been building a replica of the ranch Hank lives on in the spare room at my parents' house, using my old Fisher Price farm set, cardboard, craft sticks, and markers.  They have a chicken house, a machine shed, a gas tank, a pond, and a corral, in addition to the barn and main house.

Important instructional video that could SAVE YOUR LIFE!

...or not. :)

De-Christmasing

It didn't take long for me to miss a weekday this year -- although the weekends are made for make-up days.  And my new 2013 Get Fuzzy page-a-day calendar?  Still on January 1st.

We spent yesterday afternoon taking down all the Christmas decorations and packing them back up in the attic.  The nice thing about living in Texas is that there's virtually always at least one sunny, sixty-degree day Thanksgiving weekend to put the outside lights on and another one about a week after Christmas to take them all down again.  This year, we had to wait longer than usual: constant highs in the forties with clouds, cold wind, and occasional rain.  We finally got a very pleasant sunny day near 60 yesterday and took advantage of it.  Good thing, too, as today wasn't as warm and boasted a cold breeze as well.

When I was young, it used to depress me greatly when all the Christmas decorations went away; my parents would take it all down while I was in school to avoid my protests.  Now, it's nice to have it all put away for another eleven months.  And I always feel like we've added a room to the house when we get back all the space in the front window that the tree takes up.

Reason to be glad you're not a citizen of Iceland

Iceland apparently only allows babies to be named from a government-approved list of less than 2000 names per gender.

Does it strike anyone else as ridiculous that Blaer, the phonetics of which I'm assuming approximate those of Blair Warner, distinguished alumna of Eastland School, is disallowed but Bjork is considered a stolid, sober, unmockworthy name for a girl?

Zoo Year's Eve

Faith and Eric spent New Year's Eve sleeping overnight at the zoo with 43 other children between the ages of 6 and 12.  They called it Zoo Year's Eve.  We dropped them off at 5 o'clock on New Year's Eve and picked them up at 9 AM New Year's Day (a little early, considering the suggestion was for parents to leave their kids at the zoo and go out for their own festivities).  They got to eat pizza for dinner and go into the zoo in the dark after hours and stay up until midnight with hot chocolate and sparkling cider.  I took this picture in the parking lot before dropping them off.  When I picked them up, the first thing Faith asked was if they could do it again next year.

Return of Blog: The Bloggening!

To give you the idea of what kind of year I had, I had a 2012 page-a-day Get Fuzzy calendar so I could read a strip 6 times a week.  (A few years ago, it was seven days a week, but they've since got cheap and put Saturday and Sunday together on one page without lowering the price.)  Last night, for New Year's Eve, Tommy and I sat down and read through the pages one by one going back to mid-July, which was the last time I actually took the time to pull the page off.  It's not that I never had free time, obviously; just that whenever I did, there were other things that took priority over getting caught up on my calendar.

2012 is proof I haven't the discipline to keep up with a blog without a binding commitment to crack the metaphorical whip, so I've made it my New Year's resolution again to update every weekday (with weekends providing make-up days if ... no, when -- when necessary).  I've all last year's worth of photographs to share and stories to tell when life just isn't interesting enough in the coming months; hopefully, I can make 2012 stretch to cover what 2013 doesn't.

So stay tuned and watch this space five times a week!