It’s currently 8:00 by the clock on the wall, but our bodies think it’s 9:00. T this morning, while we (she, Q and I) sat snuggled up on the recliner, watching “The Aristocats” (they watched – I snoozed), suddenly announced, from where she lay, extended out on the footrest atop my shins, chin in hands: “Es diferente hoy. Yo no se que es, pero es diferente.” We had said nothing to them about the change of time, but she could feel it.
And sure enough, around 7:00, her body, knowing full well that it was really 8:00, gave out. She finished her dessert and crawled into Mami’s lap, where she lasted hardly any time at all. We changed her into he pajamas and dumped her into her bed half an hour later.
It was a pretty lazy Sunday, all in all – though Janneke, who flies about doing laundry and cooking on Sundays, would probably clobber me if she heard me say that. We awoke and set about walking the dog, reading the paper, eating breakfast, etc. With all her busywork interspersed in there. She sneaked off to our bedroom during “The Aristocats” and, later on, during the Packer game (miraculously broadcast in the Land of the Clam-Eaters), to read and otherwise prepare for her precious Job. The only work I did was to rake the front lawn, which went from 10:30 to noon or so, and then to do some odd laundry-folding as I shrieked at the screen, and then walked away grumpy at 4:15 or so, having watched the Packers give away the game. It was really not a very positive experience, and all in all I’m pretty glad that circumstances prevent me from watching them more often. I get very little positive out of it, even if they win. And if they lose, my day’s just shot.
But less so nowadays, because T and Q are such great distractions. T wanted to go to the “eyeball park” in town – that’s where the great steel eyes with glowering blue lights inside them inhabit the strange moguls in front of several of the College’s dorms. I had promised her we’d go there and play, and so we trooped over and spent probably twenty minutes climbing and otherwise possessing them. Then she got tired of it, and we trooped home.
Janneke was downstairs on the treadmill, watching TV with Q in tow, so I sent T down there and in the gloaming loaded all the neighbors’ leaves, which they had raked into piles, onto my tarp and trooped them back to my leaf pile. Come spring, those leaves will all compost down into the best fertilizer a lawn could ask for. Who’ll be the sucker THEN!?! And then I came in and we all sat down to supper.
That was today. The story of yesterday was soccer.
Q’s last game, against Pittsfield. A friend of his who moved to Pittsfield a couple of years ago was on the team, and her mother, who used to be a daycare teacher to both our kids, was there to watch, so that was nice. But the game itself was all business. Q and the boys had their work cut out for them – this was the team they had beaten 3-2 in Pittsfield, and they had been doing some growing in the interim by the look of things.
The Pittsfield boys were fast, skilled, and tenacious. Williamstown had two platoons working again – one group of five would leave the field entirely and be replaced by the other. And neither team really did better than the other – Q and his friend Alex, along with Crow, with whom Q had hooked up productively in Great Barrington last week, were the main offensive players on the second squad, and got some good penetration, but just couldn’t turn anything into goals. And Pittsfield kept getting behind our defenders. It was a surprise – usually these guys stay with whoever they’re up against and don’t let them get past, but these little curly-headed jukers were giving our boys fits. And before you knew it, it was 1-0. And then it was 2-0…and then it was 3-0. Williamstown got some good things going, but just couldn’t close the deal. If I recall correctly, the half ended and Williamstown still hadn’t gotten on the board. It could have been a lot worse, but Jay, Williamstown’s goalie, plays with the instincts and timing of a thirty-year-old and single-handedly anticipated, charged, and thwarted probably four other scoring chances. We had a bad feeling over on the parents’ sideline.
The second half, Alex took over. He scrambled and squabbled and fought his way through the defense, followed by Q, for one of the most tenacious and gritty goals of the year to get Williamstown out of shut-out territory, and then his shift ended. Brady and Sammy D came on with the other squad, and Brady’s persistent attacking down the right-hand side, which had always ended up in him being forced into the corner or losing the ball, finally paid off in a lovely goal – 3-2. And then Sammy D, who can almost never be shut out in a game, came through on the same shift, fighting his way through traffic on the left side and putting one past the keeper. 3-3.
Q’s squad took the field again to end the game, and before too long those gnat-like Pittsfield attackers had gotten just past Q, and then just past Jacob, and then just past Jay for another score. 4-3 now, and time was winding down – this had already felt like a really long half, and it looked to end the year on a downer for the boys. I had been exhorting Q to hustle throughout – even Janneke had gotten into the act. Maybe because this was the last game, maybe because she didn’t want him to end on one of his stand-and-look performances. He’d had some good runs at different points, but overall it was not much of a hustle day. He’d nearly put two crosses over for goals, but they were both the sort of play where he seems like he’s half-paying attention until the ball is right at his feet and then lamely pokes at it. Same situation, week 3, he’d have been firing it through the back of the net. But in this back half of the season, you were lucky if he managed to stop fiddling with his shirt long enough to notice the ball. It looked bad.
But others were seeing something I wasn’t. His sheer speed had a lot of people seeing him as our only hope, as the one kid Pittsfield couldn’t stop in this, what hadе to be the last minute. 'Give it to Q!', screamed Crow's mom. 'It's up to you, Q!' screamed somebody else. 'Man,' I thought to myself. 'That's not who I think should be taking over right now.'
Pittsfield mounted an attack that got all the way to Jay, and Jay boomed a punt down the right-hand side, where Q was playing. He came under the punt and looked straight up at it. I was reminded of situations last week where the same thing would happen, and Q, afraid of being hit in the head, would get to the right spot but then duck out of the way and laugh, even as the other team charged toward the goal with the ball he could / should have controlled. I was fully expecting the same thing here.
No. Q let it strike the ground and then settled beneath it, and headed it down to himself on the bounce. Two Pittsfield defenders were right on him, and he sprinted past them down the right side, gaining maybe a few inches, half a step. And these guys were good – forget about angling toward the goal. They were charging to put themselves between him and the center – he was not going to turn the corner. He was rapidly sprinting himself out of having an angle on the goal at all – it was now or never.
Two defenders draped on him and moving to cut him off, Q launched himself forward, laying out feet-first as the ball skittered ahead, left leg curling beneath him, right leg arcing as far ahead as he could send it. He slid to the ground and connected with the ball right in the sweet spot in one unbelievably graceful and powerful stroke.
Past the stabbing cleats of the foremost defender. Past the fingertips of the diving goalie. Across the face of the goal. Just inside the far post.
It was, from start to finish, a thing of absolute beauty, which I did not film. I would love to be able to share it with you, but I had completely forgotten the camera in my pocket, and am kind of glad I did. Because I watched it with such intensity that I remember it vividly. It was just gorgeous.
He jumped to his feet and raced back toward midfield, fists curled upward, elbows locked to his sides, high-stepping and screaming primally as his teammates chased after him and the sideline went wild. Williamstown was smelling blood – in the next few seconds, they mounted another charge, and had the game gone on, I think they probably would have gotten a couple more across. But as soon as Pittsfield managed to clear the ball to midfield, the whistle blew. And all the parents, from both towns, looked up at each other and laughed and shook our heads and said 'Thank goodness.' Because those are a couple of good, good teams, and neither deserved to lose. It was a privelege to watch and I am still not completely recovered. I was wrong about Q's heart and about his drive, at least at the end. And I am glad to have been so.
I don't know whose idea it was, but the jubilant Williamstown Strikers, next I looked up, were all shirtless, waving their jerseys around their heads in whirling circles of purple as they ran in and around and among each other, howling. I know in my bones that never in my life did I experience a sporting day like that one. It warms me up just to think about it.
Today I was saying to Q that Alex, for example, is like a wolverine. Aggressive always, scrappy, fighting through the tackles, always charging everyone else's shot hoping for a rebound, scrambling and never giving up. And Q is like a deer – seemingly effortless, graceful, but suddenly and shockingly powerful and fast, with one move flowing seamlessly into another. They compliment each other beautifully. It was so fitting that the 4 goals scored were by Brady, Sammy, Q and Alex – those were the four top scorers on the year. What a fantastic season they had, and what a fabulous job their coaches did.
«Estoy contenta de que la temporada de Q se termino,» said T this morning. «Porque cuando la gente grita, me hace doler las orejas.» ('I'm glad Q's soccer season is over. Because when people scream, it hurts my ears.')
Same for my blood pressure.
Going bird hunting for the first time in my life next week - let's see if I get hooked on it the way Alex's Dad, who's taking me, has been. His father has a German shorthaired pointer that they use, and boy, it might be a lot of fun. Still...if I had my druthers, I'd go shoot some more squirrels. Them's good eatin' - and weren't released into the woods from a pheasant farm twelve hours before I shot them. Not sure how to think about this...Matt (Alex's Dad) brought three shotguns over to the house for me to try out Saturday night (they came for dinner), and man, they are some beautiful guns. And he's an enormously generous guy to be bringing me along on this - sounds like a bunch of very serious bird hunters we'll be going with. I'm excited - a little afraid to be laughed at, should I miss my first flying target ever, but pretty confident. I am not a bad shot.
Just ask the squirrels.
Sunday, November 2, 2008
Saturday, November 1, 2008
October 25: The Movie
So last week, when Q played his game, I got a lot of footage, and without really knowing how good it was, I decided to also film the kids carving pumpkins. And when I had all that filmed, I thought, "I should just make a movie about the whole damn day." So I kept filming, and here it is. Probably only diehard fans of Q and T will stick it out through the whole thing. But maybe not - the music is interesting. It's all from the CD that we listened to in the car to and from Great Barrington - an hour ride in each direction, so we got to know it pretty well. The whole video is too long to fit as just one, so I've broken it into two. Here's part one:
And here's part two:
And here's part two:
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Quick Sketch
Q and T were watching "The Santa Claus 2" this past Sunday morning. (Sundays, T picks a DVD to watch, and despite the presence in the house of the only-recently-screened "Free Willy", she went with this old standby.) There came a part where Tim Allen begins to woo the (female) principal of his son's school, and T called out, "Oh, I love this part!"
Q's voice was filled with righteous indignation. "I HATE this part!"
"But, Q! This is the part where they fall in love!"
"I KNOW!", he cried, even louder. "That's why I hate it!"
"But, Q: Some day, you will have a wife!"
A pause of a couple of seconds, and a low rumble from Q:
"Maybe."
Q's voice was filled with righteous indignation. "I HATE this part!"
"But, Q! This is the part where they fall in love!"
"I KNOW!", he cried, even louder. "That's why I hate it!"
"But, Q: Some day, you will have a wife!"
A pause of a couple of seconds, and a low rumble from Q:
"Maybe."
Sunday, October 19, 2008
The Threadless Narrative
Can't find a unifying principle for the weekend's news tonight, somehow. So here it goes anyway - a disjointed list of Things That Happened. Hopefully you'll find your own way through it, because as a guide, I'm pretty useless at the moment...
Friday night, we had pizza, as we usually do, but not at home in front of a family classic movie. No, we went down the street to the Cozy Corner, our local watering hole, and sat in a booth in the bar (roughly the size of our living room) and had one large and one small pizza between the four of us. ("Among", Ronadh. I know.) It felt like being at Cheers - Ronadh stopped in to pick up a pizza and stood at the half-door that leads out to the parking lot, where people who have called in their orders come to pick up - Janneke saw her over my shoulder, and then I trooped over with T, who insisted on getting a hug. And then Rafi the Gorgeous, our neighbor across the street, came in with his Mom Paige and her sister, and they stopped at our booth and chatted a bit with us. And then we ate the pizza. It was a great, affordable little adventure in a gloriously smokeless bar - same place where we had drinks before we were seated when my Dad and my sister came out for Christmas a couple of years ago. Anyway, upon completing our pizza, we split up - Janneke took T to go see The Cat's Pajamas, a kiddie-music group that had played here last year, and Q and I went to Paresky to play pool. Q wasn't into seeing the music, and he's gotten more and more into playing pool at the Youth Center. So he chose that over going out to see a movie or to bowl.
He beat me three times. I scratched on the 8-ball once, accidentally sank it another time, and the third time...well, he just won. BUT: I had agreed on a rule that I get one shot per turn, whether I make it or not, and was also allowing Q, if he made a particularly good slow, careful, accurate shot, and then scratched, to keep his turn going with the cue ball placed at the pocked where it had fallen. So there were some handicaps at work. But he did improve a lot over the course of the evening, sinking three in a row at one point. A techno band whose shows are accompanied by projections of avant-garde animation was setting up shop in the auditorium next to the pool table as we played, and we bailed just as their show was beginning. Probably best for us and them. Observation: Of the 60 or so students we saw troop down to see the show, it seemed that probably a majority were Chinese. As in, from China (or Taiwan or Singapore), speaking to each other in Chinese as they played ping-pong and waited for the show to start. Techno and animation in combination must be big in China.
After pool started to get old, we went home and watched Sports Center until the girls came home. And when they did, we got the whole story:
The band had been performing a story about "Don Gato", who had leapt to the top of a building to eat a snack, but had then fallen and hurt himself. The puppet they were using to illustrate the story had fallen to the stage with a whack, and T had fallen into a blubbering panic, thinking the pupped had "got dead". She locked eyes with one of the performers, who, after the song, interrupted the show for, Janneke says, probably five minutes so she could come down and show T the puppet and make sure she understood that Don Gato had survived his fall and come out wiser on the other side of it. They signed a poster for her at the end, and it's up now in T' room. I'd take a picture of the inscription, but T is in there sleeping. Bother.
Q had a game on Saturday in Lenox, and he was very timid again. He managed to get two shots in, but neither went in - because in both cases, he seemed to remember that he was allowed to kick it a couple of seconds after he probably could have, and the resulting kick was weak, and he didn't follow up his miss. It's amazing to watch this transformation from an eager go-getting playmaker, one of the team's few most effective and aggressive players, to a kid who's reluctant even to break into a jog and seems most concerned about avoiding getting hurt. He did fall the other day, and then caught a hard shot in the same part of his back where he'd been hurt, and toughed it out and didn't come off the field ("I didn't let my team down," he said in the car afterward, to which I responded with a grim nod and a high-five), but over all he was just this somnolent shadow of his former self, which is what he's been for three or four weeks now. Strange. Thats where he is now, I guess - no sense fighting it. But it's just so curious. I could believe a timid player gradually growing into aggressiveness and enjoying the success, and then continuing the upward spiral, but this is an aggressive and successful player who seems to be shrinking more and more into his shell. Not sure what to make of it. Hopefully next year his confidence will have grown to match his talents. Anyway, they lost, 5-2. I think I made less of an ass of myself on the sidelines than at previous games, but who knows. Am I the problem? Should I stop going...? Though I don't think so - when I saw him at practice the other day, he didn't know I was there, and the coach took him aside specifically because of this problem. Weird. And occcupying much more of my mind than it ought to.
Saturday night we had dinner at the house of Denise and Peter, parents of one of T' best friends, and it was lovely. Lots of good food and chatting. And then Sunday we tried to get all the housework done that we hadn't been able to do on Saturday before I had to drive to Lenox to be interviewed by the committee that's re-certifying our school, and Janneke went to the harvest contra dance to celebrate the end of the growing season at Caretaker Farm. T danced like a madwoman, independent of us, going from partner to partner, remembering each of the steps in the dance, grinning like mad the whole time. She had selected a special dance dress (no photos, sorry), and was the belle of the ball, followed everywhere by a troop of adoring pals.
After having hiked to the top of Pine Cobble this afternoon with her friend Hazel and Hazel's parents. During which time Q had his friend Colton over for some football, bike riding, ping pong, Yugi-Oh and video games.
Man, there's just too much to keep up with. I gotta get myself to bed - Monday morning has come around again. I'm going to start agitating for a four-day work week...
Friday night, we had pizza, as we usually do, but not at home in front of a family classic movie. No, we went down the street to the Cozy Corner, our local watering hole, and sat in a booth in the bar (roughly the size of our living room) and had one large and one small pizza between the four of us. ("Among", Ronadh. I know.) It felt like being at Cheers - Ronadh stopped in to pick up a pizza and stood at the half-door that leads out to the parking lot, where people who have called in their orders come to pick up - Janneke saw her over my shoulder, and then I trooped over with T, who insisted on getting a hug. And then Rafi the Gorgeous, our neighbor across the street, came in with his Mom Paige and her sister, and they stopped at our booth and chatted a bit with us. And then we ate the pizza. It was a great, affordable little adventure in a gloriously smokeless bar - same place where we had drinks before we were seated when my Dad and my sister came out for Christmas a couple of years ago. Anyway, upon completing our pizza, we split up - Janneke took T to go see The Cat's Pajamas, a kiddie-music group that had played here last year, and Q and I went to Paresky to play pool. Q wasn't into seeing the music, and he's gotten more and more into playing pool at the Youth Center. So he chose that over going out to see a movie or to bowl.
He beat me three times. I scratched on the 8-ball once, accidentally sank it another time, and the third time...well, he just won. BUT: I had agreed on a rule that I get one shot per turn, whether I make it or not, and was also allowing Q, if he made a particularly good slow, careful, accurate shot, and then scratched, to keep his turn going with the cue ball placed at the pocked where it had fallen. So there were some handicaps at work. But he did improve a lot over the course of the evening, sinking three in a row at one point. A techno band whose shows are accompanied by projections of avant-garde animation was setting up shop in the auditorium next to the pool table as we played, and we bailed just as their show was beginning. Probably best for us and them. Observation: Of the 60 or so students we saw troop down to see the show, it seemed that probably a majority were Chinese. As in, from China (or Taiwan or Singapore), speaking to each other in Chinese as they played ping-pong and waited for the show to start. Techno and animation in combination must be big in China.
After pool started to get old, we went home and watched Sports Center until the girls came home. And when they did, we got the whole story:
The band had been performing a story about "Don Gato", who had leapt to the top of a building to eat a snack, but had then fallen and hurt himself. The puppet they were using to illustrate the story had fallen to the stage with a whack, and T had fallen into a blubbering panic, thinking the pupped had "got dead". She locked eyes with one of the performers, who, after the song, interrupted the show for, Janneke says, probably five minutes so she could come down and show T the puppet and make sure she understood that Don Gato had survived his fall and come out wiser on the other side of it. They signed a poster for her at the end, and it's up now in T' room. I'd take a picture of the inscription, but T is in there sleeping. Bother.
Q had a game on Saturday in Lenox, and he was very timid again. He managed to get two shots in, but neither went in - because in both cases, he seemed to remember that he was allowed to kick it a couple of seconds after he probably could have, and the resulting kick was weak, and he didn't follow up his miss. It's amazing to watch this transformation from an eager go-getting playmaker, one of the team's few most effective and aggressive players, to a kid who's reluctant even to break into a jog and seems most concerned about avoiding getting hurt. He did fall the other day, and then caught a hard shot in the same part of his back where he'd been hurt, and toughed it out and didn't come off the field ("I didn't let my team down," he said in the car afterward, to which I responded with a grim nod and a high-five), but over all he was just this somnolent shadow of his former self, which is what he's been for three or four weeks now. Strange. Thats where he is now, I guess - no sense fighting it. But it's just so curious. I could believe a timid player gradually growing into aggressiveness and enjoying the success, and then continuing the upward spiral, but this is an aggressive and successful player who seems to be shrinking more and more into his shell. Not sure what to make of it. Hopefully next year his confidence will have grown to match his talents. Anyway, they lost, 5-2. I think I made less of an ass of myself on the sidelines than at previous games, but who knows. Am I the problem? Should I stop going...? Though I don't think so - when I saw him at practice the other day, he didn't know I was there, and the coach took him aside specifically because of this problem. Weird. And occcupying much more of my mind than it ought to.
Saturday night we had dinner at the house of Denise and Peter, parents of one of T' best friends, and it was lovely. Lots of good food and chatting. And then Sunday we tried to get all the housework done that we hadn't been able to do on Saturday before I had to drive to Lenox to be interviewed by the committee that's re-certifying our school, and Janneke went to the harvest contra dance to celebrate the end of the growing season at Caretaker Farm. T danced like a madwoman, independent of us, going from partner to partner, remembering each of the steps in the dance, grinning like mad the whole time. She had selected a special dance dress (no photos, sorry), and was the belle of the ball, followed everywhere by a troop of adoring pals.
After having hiked to the top of Pine Cobble this afternoon with her friend Hazel and Hazel's parents. During which time Q had his friend Colton over for some football, bike riding, ping pong, Yugi-Oh and video games.
Man, there's just too much to keep up with. I gotta get myself to bed - Monday morning has come around again. I'm going to start agitating for a four-day work week...
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Landslide
Is what we'd see if Q or T were ever to run for President. As evidence I submit Q's essay, with which he returned home from school today:
"Me for President
"I am thoughtful. I'd stop Hummers and give poor people money. I am adventurous because I like to find countries and stop wars that are happening. I'm creative. I'm creative because I will build a tree making machine. I'm very fair. Very very fair because if I were president, I would give half of my money to the poor. I'd think that I propably be ELECTED!"
Not sure what the actual assignment was, and I don't think I want to know. I'll just imagine him sitting at the computer on his own during his free time and banging that out because the spirit moved him.
T, meanwhile, is a little diplomat herself. As I was perched on the edge of the stairs behind our couch, stretching my calves (those of you who have been to our house will be able to picture this - those who haven't: What are you waiting for, exactly?), T and I had a chat, she standing just in front of the couch, waiting for story time to begin. As she looked at me, she said, "Papi, vos me haces pensar en Brad. Tu cara." (Dad, you remind me of Brad. Your face.)
I said, "Quien es mas guapo?" (Who's more handsome?)
T smiled and immediately said, "Vos!", nodding as if it were obvious.
I pushed it a little farther, not quite knowing why. "Y quien es mas feo, entonces?" (So, who's uglier, then?)
She messed up her face in an utterly inimitable Tie squirm, pulling her chin in and sending the midpoint of her eyebrows up to her hairline. "Yo no quiero decir eso!" (I don't want to say that!)
So there's your ticket. Q for President, T the running mate. She has more experience than Sara Palin, anyway.
"Me for President
"I am thoughtful. I'd stop Hummers and give poor people money. I am adventurous because I like to find countries and stop wars that are happening. I'm creative. I'm creative because I will build a tree making machine. I'm very fair. Very very fair because if I were president, I would give half of my money to the poor. I'd think that I propably be ELECTED!"
Not sure what the actual assignment was, and I don't think I want to know. I'll just imagine him sitting at the computer on his own during his free time and banging that out because the spirit moved him.
T, meanwhile, is a little diplomat herself. As I was perched on the edge of the stairs behind our couch, stretching my calves (those of you who have been to our house will be able to picture this - those who haven't: What are you waiting for, exactly?), T and I had a chat, she standing just in front of the couch, waiting for story time to begin. As she looked at me, she said, "Papi, vos me haces pensar en Brad. Tu cara." (Dad, you remind me of Brad. Your face.)
I said, "Quien es mas guapo?" (Who's more handsome?)
T smiled and immediately said, "Vos!", nodding as if it were obvious.
I pushed it a little farther, not quite knowing why. "Y quien es mas feo, entonces?" (So, who's uglier, then?)
She messed up her face in an utterly inimitable Tie squirm, pulling her chin in and sending the midpoint of her eyebrows up to her hairline. "Yo no quiero decir eso!" (I don't want to say that!)
So there's your ticket. Q for President, T the running mate. She has more experience than Sara Palin, anyway.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
3-Day Weekend Hijinks
Whoah - OK: T put on her "firebird princess" get-up that she wants to use as a costume for Halloween. It's some fall-colored chicken feathers arranged in festoons around the edges of a prancy-girl dance outfit that she got from Flavia, and it is soooome kinda cute. Pictures will have to wait until the big day. But, I mean, wow. Kee-yoo-uhtt. (Those of you not from Wisconsin may need to go find a Packer fan to translate that for you.)
Q was ratted out by Ronadh the other day. Ronadh had sorted out that Owen and Q, and a couple of co-conspirators, had been exploiting a loophole in the transfer system between school and their after-school commitment to spend some unsupervised time. So I had a talk with him yesterday, in a very calm and quiet way - I decided I actually kind of liked the grit shown by trying to put one over on us. A fairly harmless one, at that. So while I made it clear that we weren't pleased, I didn't exactly browbeat him.
We had Monday to spend together yesterday, by the way. T had daycare and Janneke went to work, so Q and I did a whole bunch of stuff. (Though my first activity of the day was to go running with Magnus. We ran 13 frickin' miles. he then went on to run 3 more, but I went home. Sixteen miles? That's just crazy. After I had some breakfast, I went to pick Q up from where he'd just had a sleepvoer birthday party at his friend Sean's house, and our day of daddy-son funhouse craziness began.) We then went apple picking (Macouns are absolutely the best apples ever conceived), watched Sports Center, threw the football, explored the woodsy area between our street and Sean's back yard (turns out you can walk there in five minutes without ever crossing a street), drove to North Adams and bought me some running shoes, and had lunch at McDonald's, before going to Paresky hall to play pool. It was just an absolute hoot.
We're on the very edge of possibilities with this computer. I've got too many movies on here, and I can't get them off - well, the main problem is that I have a half-hour-long movie project, which is an ungodly amount of gigabytes long, and leaves me without enough free space to turn it into a much-smaller movie so I can delete the project. So we're thinking about getting some more memory space, wondering what our options are. And long-term, I need to be able to burn DVDs so I can send these movies off to people. (Like my Dad, who would watch them on the tee-vee but won't on the computer.) So we have to lay out some more money. Which we love to do. I'm thinking I'd like to get a Mac Mini and set it up in the basement with the monitor we have from the old Dell desktop that melted down years ago.
Y'know how sick I am of hitting the mute button every damn time a Cyalis commercial comes on? I just don't need to think about an erection that lasts more than four hours. And neither do T or Q.
Almost as sick as I am of John McCain's flagrant racism. I'm having fun imagining Barack Obama meeting McCain post-election and saying, "I will never forget that, John. Never." And when Palin reaches out to shake his hand, Obama turns his back on her and walks away.
And then Palin and McCain notice a Barbie makeup kit, left behind by one of the Obama daughters on the floor. Palin reaches down and picks it up. "Aww," she says, "I used to have one of these!" She winks at McCain and opens it up.
Blinding light gushes out of it, and she and McCain melt like the Nazis at the end of "Raiders of the Lost Ark."
Q was ratted out by Ronadh the other day. Ronadh had sorted out that Owen and Q, and a couple of co-conspirators, had been exploiting a loophole in the transfer system between school and their after-school commitment to spend some unsupervised time. So I had a talk with him yesterday, in a very calm and quiet way - I decided I actually kind of liked the grit shown by trying to put one over on us. A fairly harmless one, at that. So while I made it clear that we weren't pleased, I didn't exactly browbeat him.
We had Monday to spend together yesterday, by the way. T had daycare and Janneke went to work, so Q and I did a whole bunch of stuff. (Though my first activity of the day was to go running with Magnus. We ran 13 frickin' miles. he then went on to run 3 more, but I went home. Sixteen miles? That's just crazy. After I had some breakfast, I went to pick Q up from where he'd just had a sleepvoer birthday party at his friend Sean's house, and our day of daddy-son funhouse craziness began.) We then went apple picking (Macouns are absolutely the best apples ever conceived), watched Sports Center, threw the football, explored the woodsy area between our street and Sean's back yard (turns out you can walk there in five minutes without ever crossing a street), drove to North Adams and bought me some running shoes, and had lunch at McDonald's, before going to Paresky hall to play pool. It was just an absolute hoot.
We're on the very edge of possibilities with this computer. I've got too many movies on here, and I can't get them off - well, the main problem is that I have a half-hour-long movie project, which is an ungodly amount of gigabytes long, and leaves me without enough free space to turn it into a much-smaller movie so I can delete the project. So we're thinking about getting some more memory space, wondering what our options are. And long-term, I need to be able to burn DVDs so I can send these movies off to people. (Like my Dad, who would watch them on the tee-vee but won't on the computer.) So we have to lay out some more money. Which we love to do. I'm thinking I'd like to get a Mac Mini and set it up in the basement with the monitor we have from the old Dell desktop that melted down years ago.
Y'know how sick I am of hitting the mute button every damn time a Cyalis commercial comes on? I just don't need to think about an erection that lasts more than four hours. And neither do T or Q.
Almost as sick as I am of John McCain's flagrant racism. I'm having fun imagining Barack Obama meeting McCain post-election and saying, "I will never forget that, John. Never." And when Palin reaches out to shake his hand, Obama turns his back on her and walks away.
And then Palin and McCain notice a Barbie makeup kit, left behind by one of the Obama daughters on the floor. Palin reaches down and picks it up. "Aww," she says, "I used to have one of these!" She winks at McCain and opens it up.
Blinding light gushes out of it, and she and McCain melt like the Nazis at the end of "Raiders of the Lost Ark."
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Lamest Post Ever
Or close to it, anyway. But I wanted you to know: I still care. Just not that much.
T is in the living room, doing some post-ballet-practice coloring. They give her a new letter and calendar for every month, and she has a binder where she keeps it all. She goes every Tuesday at 3:15 - too early for me to make it back, unfortunately. So Mami takes her, and I hear about it afterwards. I took her once, to the very first time, and wound up sitting on the sidelines with her on my lap, claiming shyness, for 98% of the lesson. She finally felt sufficiently confident to join them when they were saying goodbye. It was only a 30-minute lesson, but I have to say, that's longer than I prefer to be sitting in dirty socks on a folding chair at the edge of a dance floor.
The lessons are held at Pine Cobble School, a local private K-9 school where our friend Danny teaches. From what I understand, it's pretty pricey, but I'm not sure where the money goes. The facilities are a little bit run-down. But the teacher is enthusiastic, and the little helper girls are nice. T hasn't quite gotten the same rapport with them as she used to have with Carly, the girl who helped out at tumbling, but she enjoys the whole concept of dance more, I think. Always comes home chipper, anyway.
I am waiting out the few minutes I have before I go to drive Q from the Youth Center to soccer practice. Q had his debut as a pianist last night - they had "A Little Night Music" at the elementary school. It was a pretty informal soup-and-crackers get-together with students who play instruments performing for everyone in a somewhat free-flowing format. Q played "Bugle Boys" - Here's a link to video that Ronadh shot of it:
http://madmonster.williams.edu/misc/Q.MPEG
We were not exactly on the ball, multi-media wise. Probably at least partially due to the fact that I was sick all day yesterday. I bugged out on a faculty meeeting and came home to sleep before going to pick up T and go to Q's recital, then hit the hay minutes after putting them to bed. And had fevered dreams about those weird domesticated foxes. Anyone who's run into me in the last three days has been regaled with that whole business - so I'd just like to take this opportunity to say: I'm sorry. I swear, I do have other things to talk about.
Like how cute my kids are. Nobody ever gets sick of that! Here's a picture I took tonight - Q and I were on the couch at bedtime, and I was massaging his calf, which was sore for some reason:
Or how nice our family is. I accidentally uploaded this one while trying to upload the one above, and thought to myself: "The world must know...!"
So there you have it. Lamest blog post ever. Hey, like I always say about this rag: It's worth every penny.
T is in the living room, doing some post-ballet-practice coloring. They give her a new letter and calendar for every month, and she has a binder where she keeps it all. She goes every Tuesday at 3:15 - too early for me to make it back, unfortunately. So Mami takes her, and I hear about it afterwards. I took her once, to the very first time, and wound up sitting on the sidelines with her on my lap, claiming shyness, for 98% of the lesson. She finally felt sufficiently confident to join them when they were saying goodbye. It was only a 30-minute lesson, but I have to say, that's longer than I prefer to be sitting in dirty socks on a folding chair at the edge of a dance floor.
The lessons are held at Pine Cobble School, a local private K-9 school where our friend Danny teaches. From what I understand, it's pretty pricey, but I'm not sure where the money goes. The facilities are a little bit run-down. But the teacher is enthusiastic, and the little helper girls are nice. T hasn't quite gotten the same rapport with them as she used to have with Carly, the girl who helped out at tumbling, but she enjoys the whole concept of dance more, I think. Always comes home chipper, anyway.
I am waiting out the few minutes I have before I go to drive Q from the Youth Center to soccer practice. Q had his debut as a pianist last night - they had "A Little Night Music" at the elementary school. It was a pretty informal soup-and-crackers get-together with students who play instruments performing for everyone in a somewhat free-flowing format. Q played "Bugle Boys" - Here's a link to video that Ronadh shot of it:
http://madmonster.williams.edu/misc/Q.MPEG
We were not exactly on the ball, multi-media wise. Probably at least partially due to the fact that I was sick all day yesterday. I bugged out on a faculty meeeting and came home to sleep before going to pick up T and go to Q's recital, then hit the hay minutes after putting them to bed. And had fevered dreams about those weird domesticated foxes. Anyone who's run into me in the last three days has been regaled with that whole business - so I'd just like to take this opportunity to say: I'm sorry. I swear, I do have other things to talk about.
Like how cute my kids are. Nobody ever gets sick of that! Here's a picture I took tonight - Q and I were on the couch at bedtime, and I was massaging his calf, which was sore for some reason:
Or how nice our family is. I accidentally uploaded this one while trying to upload the one above, and thought to myself: "The world must know...!"
So there you have it. Lamest blog post ever. Hey, like I always say about this rag: It's worth every penny.
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