@ Home in the World

A "Friendly" Rant.

I'm taking advantage of one of those rare mornings when I am up before the kids. The #)*%&$&(!! crows woke me up at 5:30, and despite being up very late last night, I haven't been able to get back to sleep. So, I am up, writing.

The boys are still sleeping because they were up late last night. We went to the beach with our neighbors, late yesterday afternoon, for the first time all summer. My neighbors' kids are 13 and 11. Having them keeping on top of my 7 and 8 years olds, made for the first time I was able to sit down at the beach in years. Usually, I'm too busy trying to keep Pumpkin out of deeper water, but this time I was actually able to have a conversation.

After the beach we took the kids to Friendly's. Had I been a bit more cognizant of the hour, we probably wouldn't have gone at all. Friendly's has the slowest service on the planet. Really, for 25 years it has been this way. I can remember being in high school, wondering where my food was and that has been a pretty consistent experience ever since. The design of the Guilford Friendly's at the time allowed us to see most of the kitchen, and  I still couldn't figure out what was taking so long. Friends of mine who have worked there say that Friendly's doesn't want to be thought of as a fast food place. Well, okay, but half your clientele is composed of families with squirmy, whiny, fussy, hungry, messy children, and their parents are more likely to tip better than the other half - seniors on a fixed income and teenagers with little to no income.

As far as I can tell, it's usually not the waitstaff, it's the way the kitchen is organized. I often feel bad for the waitstaff who are so often left with a completely trashed table, and a couple of sticky dollar bills for a tip. Friendly's recently removed the napkin dispensers from the tables, a move that may save them money, but does not work for families with small children. I had to ask for extra napkins twice last night because we ran through them.

Fortunately, one of the good things about summer is that no matter how late the kids were out, they can sleep in the next morning.

23

It has rained for 23 days. Not 23 straight days, but 23 out of the last 30. We may get a reprieve on Sunday.

I'm not usually that bothered by the weather, but it's July 2, and I haven't yet been to the beach!

Although I every much dislike how dark my house gets when it is cloudy or rainy out, the sound of the rain on leaves makes me feel like I'm living in a cabin in some exotic location.

I've heard that Seattle is like this -- in the winter.

This rain is seriously sapping my energy.

I hope my vegetable garden survives.

Sticky Notes 8 - The Off the Wall version

Foul Ball!

Baseball is over for the year here, although Tigger would probably play until October if the opportunity presented itself. We have finally (FINALLY!) found something that Tigger is actually interested in obsessed with. He walks around with his mitt at all times, tossing a ball up and down until someone realizes that he's playing with a ball in the house and chases him out of doors. He badgers Piper to play catch with him, and Piper has found it a useful bribe: "Let's get this done and then we can play."

Tigger knows when the Red Sox games start and what channel they are usually on. He is starting to ask intelligent questions about the action on the field. He still comes up with some really off the wall questions, but that's just a part of being Tigger.

He is obsessed enough with baseball to wake up in the middle of the night and yell "Foul ball" before going back to sleep.

Off the Wall

I was a senior in high school when Thriller was released. Some of the people I was becoming friends with around that time are still my best friends today.  I am a little weirded out by Michael Jackson's death, but probably no more so than I am by what he became in the intervening years. If I gave it much thought, I would have said he had one more spectacular comeback in him - different moves, different music, different appearance, for sure. Something that allowed us to remember his talent more than his weirdness. In news articles that have shown the progression of his physical transformation, I'm always stuck on the photos from either the Billy Jean or the Beat it videos, wishing that he had stopped there. I've managed to avoid most of the commercial radio stations' Jackson blasts, because the whole thing is oddly like losing a Beatle. What keeps getting me is the State Farm commercial released several weeks before his death that uses "I'll be there."  Ironic, I think.

"Sometimes you just have to bow to the absurd."*

I have never, ever watched a single episode of American Idol, and probably never will, but every summer America's Got Talent gets us rushing to the couch. This is, of course, the U.S. counterpart to the show that gave us the collective introspection exercise known as Susan Boyle.

Year after year, I find that my favorite acts are not the straight out singers, but the ones with a great story and something unusal to offer, most often the acrobatic/street dancers or people who make music out of something different. Last year, I was rooting for a pair of guys calling themselves Nuttin but Stringz who came in with a unique mix of violins and rap. They lost in favor of a forgettable opera singer, but I was pleased to see an advertisement for a performance of theirs at Mohegan Sun earlier this year. Sometimes I wish the show would do a "where are they now" segment for those who were good enough to become finalists, but didn't get the grand prize. No doubt many of them went on to pursue their crafts lucratively in spite of the loss.

And can I just say that I LOVE Sharon Osbourne, in spite of her strange taste in men.

But most of the fun of this show is the utterly ridiculous, like this act (embed disabled), who kept making it back last season in spite of Piers Morgan's obvious distate for them.

*Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek: The Next Generation

Do I need a road trip? Oh, yes!

I don't post much in response to contests, but this one caught my attention, and at the last minute, too.

Blogher is running a contest for tickets to Blogher and I'd like to go to Chicago as much as I'd like to go somewhere, nearly anywhere I haven't been yet. Plus, as I get more serious about my writing, I'd certainly love to go to Blogher to meet other writers whose work I have read.

The contest asks for us to choose among three FORD vehicles that we'd like to take on a road trip this summer; the Fusion Hybrid, the Ford Flex, or the Escape Hybrid.

After looking at all the specs, I'd have to choose the Ford Flex, because as much as I'd love to be driving a hybrid these days, a vacation with my family requires a bit more space. Typically we use a third row seat to split the boys up when we are on long trips. It keeps the peace. We also have a dog who is so much a part of the family that we take him on vacation unless we are flying.

I once drove a Ford Explorer. It lasted for 10 years, and I loved it. It did not have much in the way of gadgets, nor does the car I currently drive, so when I looked at the list of available technology on the Flex, I was impressed.  I particularly like the idea of a built-in refrigeration compartment, that would save us the room a cooler would take up.

So, send me to Blogher, I'm sure there's plenty for my husband and kids to do in Chicago, and we need an excuse for a road trip!

Mist-ical

The foghorn is so evocative.

It's a sound I have lived with all my life and one that conjures up a host little scenes in my mind.

There's the woman strolling the beach, maybe looking for shells or sea glass, maybe lost in her own thoughts. She is wearing  a heavy woolen sweater against the chill, but her feet are either bare or sandaled. Does she find what she is looking for?

There's the clammer, knee-deep in the muck, gathering the beginnings of a pot of chowder with a large, curved, rake.

There's a couple, clad in shorts, building a fire in their damp cottage and planning to stay out of the foul weather for the day. A good day for reading and board games.

It's the lobsterman, not far from shore, whose puttering boat can be heard but not seen in the enveloping mist.

There's a woman on a bicycle in a bright yellow slicker, bringing back provisions from the market up the road.

It's the bustle of harbor activity in the early morning hours, before the fog burns off and the sun comes out. It's those moments that belong to the locals, long before the tourists have risen.

It's the train, speeding me off the island and into the city, where there is no fog. I think about those friends and neighbors whose work is where they live, and I can't wait to get home.

Back in the pool again

Over a year ago we took the Pumpkin out of swimming lessons because the overstimulation was causing him to be disruptive to the rest of the class. It wasn't the ideal situation to begin with. We were in a Saturday class and with the bazillion children of the other working parents in the area. The classes were pretty big and there were several classes going on at once. Add to that the noise bouncing and echoing of the pool room walls and we have a pretty much guaranteed silliness and safety issue.

And so we reluctantly pulled him out despairing of yet another thing he wasn't able to do like other kids.

This morning we returned to the pool after over a year away. We've talked to him endlessly about following the rules but it helps that it's summer and everyone else is at the beach.

We're paying for group lessons but he's the only one here. He's got the pool and the instructor all to himself.

He's thrilled!

And the difference is...?

Pumpkin's first therapy appointment has been pushed back into July because the insurance company (Arrgh, Magellan again) says the therapist is not a registered provider with them and that it will take 30 to 45 days to get him registered. The kicker is that the provider is registered with another practice, just not the one that is close to us. Apparently, that doesn't count.

On the night I heard about this, I found myself listening to Newt Gingrich going off about how no one wants government bureaucrats making decisions about people's health care. As if we didn't realize that the only difference between a government bureaucrat and a corporate insurance bureaucrat is that the guy working for the private insurance company is getting paid more than the guy working for the government.

Why do the Republicans treat us like we are stupid?

Oh, wait....

A girl's place is at home (plate)

I'm at the last of Tigger's baseball games for the season. The girl playing catcher has the best baseball instincts of any member of this coed team or any team they've played all season.

A couple of days ago she told me that last year she was the only girl at the baseball camp that Tigger will be attending the week after school ends.

She'll have maybe a year or two more of this before they make her switch to softball. It will be everyone's loss. Except maybe for the softball team.

Computerless

I have a new laptop on order. It arrived with a problem. Yesterday, our house desktop developed a problem that may or may not be virus-related.

Posts will, of necessity, be short as I will have only my phone for the next few days.

What did we do before computers again?

You can keep my things, they've come to take me home!

You probably recgonize it, but if you don't, it's the last line from Peter Gabriel's Solisbury Hill; a song he supposedly wrote about his decision to leave Genesis.

My take on it is that it's a fairly positive tune about knowing something isn't a good fit for a long time and then finally making a change that's expected to work out better than what you had been doing. In Gabriel's case, he went on to have a very successful solo career, and the band he left also changed direction and had quite a bit of success as well. A good outcome all around!

The song was released when I was a child, but it was still very widely played in the mid 80s, when I was in high school and college. It grew to have real meaning for me when I was about to return to Boston after taking a semester off and living back in Guilford for six months. I learned a lot about myself, but Boston was, at least at the time, where I really belonged.

I've had that song in my head for a while now, and not just because it remains one of my favorite. I've always hated it when bloggers got all cryptic and mysterious about changes that were happening behind the scenes, and now I have to do that as well. At least for now.

Let's put it this way: I'm 42 years old, the older I get, the more I find myself in these "now or never" situations. Increasingly, I'm learning to say "now."