I took Friday off school to go to an eye doctor's appointment. (The only appointment I could get was at noon, and it's an hour's drive back from work to the eye doctor's. So I could essentially have taught two classes, for which I would have been docked a whole sick day anyway. So screw it, I stayed home.) And for the heck of it, I kept T home, too.
Well, not so much for the heck of it. T, along with two other kids in her class, had been sent home on Wednesday with some uninvited guests of the parasitical sort. (No big mystery where they came from - one of T's little buddies who went home has an older brother who recently had a bout, and whose hair looks a lot like mine these days as a result.) And upon checking Q, he turned out to have been infected as well. So we did the whole wash-everything cycle, got the DDT shampoo from the drugstore, the whole bit. Lots and lots of laundry and vacuuming, lots of scrubbing and rinsing...Such fun.
Thursday morning, T still had a couple moribund ones, which Janneke eliminated with another early-morning shampoo, followed by another in the early afternoon, just to be sure. And Q never showed another sign of them. What a trial - luckily, nobody else ever had them, and we appear to be over the hump. But what an ordeal.
So that contributed to my keeping T at home with me. I was able to monitor her well (nothing ever showed up), and there was no danger of re-infestation from the children at school; meantime, the daycare would be kid-free for 2 days over the weekend, and the books tell you that that's the longest they can survive out in the world. So I kept her to myself. We waved goodbye to Q as he walked out to the bus (I filmed him standing there kicking at the snowbank as he waited, and thought it would be cool to have footage of him getting on the bus during a normal, not-first-time-ever kind of way; so I resolved to stand there and film him all the way to pick-up. But it got to be long, and I thought, I should just get a box and set the camera on it and come back for it when he's gone. So I walked three steps to look for a box and heard the bus come. Razza-frazza-furga-sumba-frizza...)
Then it was just me and T. I puttered around the house in the morning, then drove to my appointment, during which T waited out in the little play area they have, with the typical 1959 jigsaw puzzles, half-clothed action figure dolls and three-wheeled plastic cars in a dingy tin bin. She ignored all that and drew and colored while I was inside, getting checked for further decrepitude. None happening, as it turns out - my prescription will remain unchanged. And when I came out, T was happy as a clam, except that she couldn't locate the bag of Ritz Bitz I had bought for her earlier. This upset her mightily, because there was one left in the bottom of the bag that she had been saving for Mami. I located it on the floor (the bag, neatly folded - not the actual Ritz Bit), and all was well.
She has been so into that lately - making sure everybody gets some, sharing things when no one asks her to...She'll walk across the living room with a carefully dipped carrot stick five or six times whenever we have a pre-dinner snack dish, or collect Skittles into a bundle and bring her to you on the off-chance you might be itching to hold a cat. Q will be bouncing on the furniture and land wrong and sit there crying, holding his knee - and T will spring into action, run out of the room and return less than a minute later with a cool glass of water for her brother, who thanks her and drinks it down while T strokes his hair. If I saw it in a movie about a family, I wouldn't believe it. I'd say, "No way that ever happens. Siblings hate each other! I know this! Um...That is to say...I've read that it is often so in some families that are not mine!"
Moving on, T and I went straight from the eye doctor to Mcdonald's, beacuse I am (1) disorganized, and thus did not have a pre-fabricated lunch ready for when we finally left the optometrist's at 1:00 and (2) a pushover. I had a fish sandwich and T had a happy meal, devoured with much gusto. And one of my former students at BArT was working there, and said hello to me. There are things to be said about that, but I think that I won't say them.
Off to another optometrist's, on Main Street in North Adams, whose service I find superior, but who is not covered by my insurance for the actual appointment. And there T gave her opinions on a number of frames before I settled on the one she liked the least and ordered me up a pair. T was upset that I didn't want the black mountaineering goggles she had so coveted. And I couldn't actually give her a non-lame reason why I wasn't buying those. Years from now, I'm sure I'll regret not having listened to her...
Q never came home Friday night, because he had a sleepover at his friend Owen's house. And we had organized another little event where one of T's friends would come watch a movie with us, but because of the whole lousy situation (you know what I mean), we decided not to have him over, and it was just the 3 of us, watching the hastily-checked-out "HUnchback of Notre Dame" because instead of the children's movie we had expected to find in the mail from Netflix, "Yentl" had shown up. And we quickly surmised that it would be less of a hit with out nearly five-year-old.
Boy, the sexual not-quite-completely-"under" undertone to that particular Disney film is pretty uncomfortable to watch. They had to make Esmeralda more sexual than most of the Disney princesses you see, but man, some of the poses they put her in - particularly the sequence where she's a vision dancing seductively in the fireplace of the lust-crazed constable who's pursuing her - belong on certain Internet sites that are pay-only. (I've read.) And I have a problem with the way Quasimodo smilingly puts Esmeralda's hand in the hand of Phoebus at the end, accepting his lot as a freak who deserves no love. But what should I expect? I recall seeing the trailer for the movie and thinking it was an "Onion"-like false trailer, that Disney couldn't possibly touch that story. It'd be like giving Moby Dick a happy ending, wouldn't it? Although I confess I have never read the actual novel. Probably should.
Soon as I finish "Williamstown 1753 - 2003: The First 250 Years". Team Trivia is less than a week away, after all.
This morning, Q came home and then the two of them played outside pretty much all the late morning and the early afternoon, climbing in our decorative shrub trees and making bows and arrows (bows, anyway) out of sticks and twine. T got stuck in a tree at one point, falling so that she was hanging from one bent knee, unable to extract herself; Q came running in to fetch us, and janneke went limping toward her shoes, saying "I can't get out there fast enough!" I had thought Q's tone seemed pretty jovial, but suddenly I imagined her hanging in a way that had her strangling, and I ran outside and around the corner in my socks. I found her, airway clear, scared and stuck, and pretty easily extracted her, but man!, crossing snow, then wet mud, then snow again is about the coldest thing you can subject your tootsies to. Took me a while to recover.
After lunch, we played a "Doctor Who" boardgame based on chocolates that Ronadh had brought back for us from Ireland, and then we were off to the Clark, where we perused the Tholouse Latrec (which I have spelled wrong on purpose to be post-modern and ultra-hip) show, and where Janneke provided the kids with paper for sketching on. And here are some of the results - Looking at this:
...T did this:
And looking at this:
...she did this:
Sorry about the quality of the in-house images, but it's getting pretty late, and quality control has gone straight in the crapper. Pardon my French.
From there, off to the park at the elementary school, where the kids did a little bit of swinging and scampering while I charged off to the library to pick up the aforementioned "Williamstown" book. They got cold quickly, so we came back home, and soon thereafter it was close to 6:00, so I had Q change his clothes and drove him off for Sunday evening pickup soccer in the elementary school gym. I went home again and came back to pick him up around 7:10, arriving with enough time to watch him play for a little bit. They were doing "score and keep playing", where squads of different colors would take the floor and play a sudden-death game. Losers leave, winners stay out. Q was on the white team, and he saw me after losing and trotted over to sit beside me.
Great black horned demons swelled up inside me and forced me to say a few things like, "You can't be afraid of them. You're playing off them too much. Go get 'em! You need to be more aggressive."
He took it well, and then went back out, and absolutely tore the opposing team up. He shot twice on goal, scored a number of take-aways, ran any number of players down - and this with almost everyone on the court a fourth, fifth, or sixth-grader.
I know I shouldn't tell him these things. But then, when I do, he goes out and kicks ass!...Idunno. I'm going to hell. That's about all there is to it.
Home to supper and to bed, T crashed out and asleep before even getting to say goodnight to anyone, Q showered and sweet after a sweaty early evening. And Janneke, literally, in a wheelchair. She appears to have been favoring her foot as she walked on the treadmill today and it is now so sore that I jokingly offered to bring up the wheelchair that I'd grabbed out of the neighbor's "Free" pile for use in future filmmaking. And Janneke took me up on it. So she's got one foot up and is reading for tomorrow, and I sit here on the couch beside her, doing this. Ah, the lives we lead. Maybe tomorrow, if we play our cards right, we can work in some knitting. Perhaps guitar practice - but only if I'm very good between now and then.
Which we all know I will be.
Fast forward forty years, and hopefully we'll be in the same house, with the same wheelchair, doing the same thing. That would be a pretty darned lucky thing.
Man, I have had it. Daylight savings should be abolished - I have no earthly idea what the hell time it is, or should be. Or at least, I should be allowed to spend the three days after we switch the clocks ahead in a drug-induced coma. Those are the choices: Abolition, or accommodation. Either way. You choose, Society. I'm a reasonable man.
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