I have nothing good to say, so I'm saying it*

*From a song-in-progress by Brother-in-law (songwriter/guitar player)

The house is quiet just now.  After a chaotic weekend involving hot dogs, water balloons, watermelon and a wading pool filled with children under 9, only Sonar X3 and I remain.  Partner is at work.  The other two Sonars  abandoned us to spend a week being spoiled by Grandma and Granddad.  Sonar X3 could have gone too, but was daunted by the idea of getting in a car with his sibs and driving away to leave us here alone for a week.  Perhaps he thought I wouldn’t know what to do without him?  

With only one child in the house, I find that there is a lot more time in my day.  It is unnecessary to do a load of wash every day.  And there are half as many dishes.  Ditto half as much crap strewn on the floor.

So I’m working on Ravenclaw-ish socks for Sonar X5, and also started a lace scarf just for the heck of it.  I finished reading The Girl With No Shadow by Joanne Harris (her sequel to Chocolat).  Seriously, if you haven’t read any of her books, go find one.  Her development of character is great, and she is a master at pacing a book so that I am slowly pulled along, with the tension and the emotion increasing incrementally until she just blows me away in the last quarter of each book.  I find myself dabbling with her books for the first half, just reading a bit here and there, savoring her attention to the details of smell and taste.  But by the time I get to that last quarter, I can hardly put them down wanting to know how this complicated tangle of humanity works itself out.  Good stuff.  Really good stuff.  

Next on the stack is The Good, the Bad, and the Undead by Kim Harrison, and then Lavinia by Ursula K. LeGuin.  

This weekend we will retrieve the Sonars.  Partner has one more week of work before his six week vacation.  Just today we contrived a plot to visit family in New Mexico the last week of June.  Gas prices, hash smices.  If we can drive the whole fourteen hours in one day, we won’t have to dish out for hotels.  That’s right.  I said fourteen hours of driving with the three Sonars in a car that is equipped with neither personal DVD players nor video gaming of any kind.  

I’ll try to remember to pack the sedatives.  For me.  

Teeth, and the Last Day of School

I really love to brush my teeth.  It feels good.  Leaves my mouth fresh.  Satisfies that obsessive part of my brain that is into patterns and repetition and order.  That’s not to say that I brush my teeth as often as I should.  I’m pretty good about brushing in the morning, unless it’s a weekend and my day starts off in a slower, more lazy way.  

I’m very hit-or-miss about nighttime brushing.  And it seems to me that nighttime brushing is even more important than morning brushing in terms of overall mouth health.  I mean, at night there’s no saliva flowing, no movement of the inside-the-mouth parts, and whether we sleep with our mouths open or closed, if there is food residue in there while we’re sleeping, we’re just setting up a wonderland playground for the little germs that live in there and eat our teeth when we’re not looking.   But skipping the nighttime brushing is so much easier perhaps because there is no social stigma.  I mean, skipping the morning brushing leaves you breathing horror into the faces of anyone you talk to, while skipping the nighttime brushing offends only you, or perhaps the person that shares your bed and suffers your open-mouthed breathing in his or her face.  

Still, I do a fairly good job of both morning and nighttime brushing when I’m on a set schedule.  When I am regularly required to do certain things at a certain time and/or place.  

I am about to be cut loose from most such constraints for eleven weeks because today is the last day of the school year.  After today, our only regularly scheduled stop will be Thursday storytime at the library, that and the need to generally get the children food and sleep at approximately the same times each day.  

Before you assume that I’ll be sleeping in and eating bon-bons all day, let me reassure you that laundry and dishes and cooking and entertainment and vetting of media and discipline and mediation and education and legos and the carving out of time to have adult conversation with Partner and squeeze in some personal intellectual development and the enaction of my own dreams and goals and aspirations—not to mention a birthday party for an eight-year-old— will all still occur.  I’ll just be able to do it without having to get up at the crack of dawn or go to bed before midnight.  

I’m just not sure I’ll remember to brush my teeth.  

Runner?

Recently queried about when I’d start running again, first I stammered, “Uh—.”  Then I whined about how hot it is here right now.  Not hot, so much as humid.  Ok, hot and humid.  

Check out the Wiki article on humidity.  As they point out in the article, we’re usually referring to “relative humidity” when we use that term.  The relative part refers to the different moisture capacity of the air at different temperatures.  The higher the temperatures, the higher the moisture capacity.  So 90% humidity at 75 degrees is much less water than 90% humidity at 80.6F/26C (our current conditions, down from 90F earlier—no, no rain).  Through some magical voodoo one can arrive at a heat index of 87F/30C for that data.  In other words, because there is 90% relative humidity right now, it *feels* like 87, even though it’s only 80.  Go figure.  

This is the kind of weather where I can walk very slowly out the door and begin dripping sweat before the door shuts behind me.  The kind of weather where I “dry off” after a shower, but I’m never really dry, just sort of less damp at some point several hours later.  

So, you can probably understand why the thought of physical exertion out there leads me to whine.  I find it hard to continue to whine, however, after my previous post, in which I extolled the bravery and fortitude of my middle child.  

I haven’t actually done any kind of running for a long time.  I generally refer to April—the Month of Endless Demon Virus—as my excuse for slacking off in the running.  But I haven’t actually run regularly since just after my race back at the beginning of March.  Since I only ran for a smidge over two months, and have NOT run for almost three months, I’m not sure it’s honest or fair to call myself a runner over there in the left-hand margin.  

I can honestly call myself most of those other things, knitter especially.  There has been a decent amount of knitting and knit-planning.  A fair amount of legoing.  Not so much writing.  That one I can blame on the running, but that is for another post.  

I’m disappointed in the lack of running.  I really liked the running.  My brain felt good.  My body felt good.  Ok, you know, not in the moments immediately after the running, but in the times in between the running, when I was sleeping better, feeling stronger, and generally having more energy and enthusiasm for things in general.  

So, what I should be doing right now is promising to me that I will start running again.

Tomorrow.  

When I think that though, at least a dozen excuses pop into my brain, most having to do with wet air and knitting.  

Digital Tedium

I’ve been having “issues” with the computer. This has made anything remotely to do with this rickety old machine tedious at best, and like banging my head against a brick wall.

(No, dear, I wasn’t talking about you when I said “this rickety old machine.” You’re a good computer and I would never call you rickety. There there.)

Don’t tell the creaky one but there will soon be a sleek and sexy new machine in my life. I am counting the days (five). Flush with the giddiness of making our last car payment, we decided to throw caution to the wind and buy a new computer. High speed internet follows. I can’t wait. But I will have to.

(No, dear, you’re not creaky either. I was talking about my, um—chair. Yes. My chair.)

I will try to get caught up on all of the fascinating blogs I’ve been planning to write. While you wait, with what I’m sure is baited breath, I’ll tell you what’s been bouncing around in my brain.

—Harry Poppins
—Minor League Baseball
—Doing Things the Hard Way
—Reading Magic
—My new attitude toward my children’s germs
—My charmingly ironic partner
—The cultural significance of Oscar the Grouch
—Squirrel Fest
—Wind, wind, windy, wind, wind

Let’s start with Oscar, shall we?

Satan is Winning

Look, honey, Mummy’s brought you some presents! I got you a new book. And a Nip/Tuck Barbie, complete with lipo-pump and four sizes of removable silicon implants! And next week, I’ve scheduled us for a Mommy-and-me Medi-spa day for a little botox and chemical peel.

Just you wait until you’re 13 baby, and Mummy will share her plastic surgeon with you too!!

Keep that wheel turning, baby! Only two more pounds to go!