Sunday Projects, No Pirates

The rain continues to fall.  As someone said so colorfully this morning, it’s clear and still.  Clear up to our asses and still raining.  I’m doing a little work around the website here, working on some ideas for NPR’s Three-Minute Fiction contest, and doing a little therapeutic knitting.  That’s the first half of a heart from MochimochiLand.  I’m looking for the pencil sharpener.  What do you do when the light is dim and the rain comes down? 

Notes about the blog and a short story, plus a bit of love knitting

Books, music, who could ask for more?

This is what I want to do all day long. Anyone with me?

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.  

Potpourri

In no meaningful order, I’m throwing a little grab bag at you for today.

~The smaller Sonars and I recently watched Mary Poppins. The movie was so much more dreadfully boring and weird than I remembered, but we all loved the songs. Sonar X5, in particular, has reveled in deploying the tunes with his own new and delightful body (bawdy) lyrics. No, not gonna share those. But I will share that Sonar X3 can’t seem to call the movie by it’s right name. He calls it Harry Poppins every time. No matter what we tell him. Cracks me up every time. It might help to know that we’ve been reading all of the Harry Potter books out loud. Anywhere from a few pages to a chapter each day for the last YEAR. We have six chapters left of book 7. Harry Poppins. Just a spoonful of magic makes the dark lord go doooown, dark lord go down.

~We went to a minor league baseball game last weekend. The Corpus Christi Hooks are part of the Houston Astros farm system. We had a great time, got a little sunburned and ate burgers after. I loved it. The Sonars were less enthusiastic this time, not sure why. But a baseball stadium always makes me a bit nostalgic for high school. I spent four summers during my teens working as an usher and ticket seller for the Albuquerque Dukes. Great, though often peculiar fun was had. My old team is no longer the Dukes, by the way. They’re now the Isotopes. Because of the national lab-space-military industrial complex in New Mexico? Because of the Trinity site out in the eastern part of the state? Because someone in power is a big fan of The Simpsons? Anyway, minor league baseball games are good fun. Free tickets and special deals often abound if you hunt for them. And you get to experience a lot of the pomp and fanfare of the big leagues for a lot less money. We got Craig Biggio commemorative figurines on our visit. No, I don’t really know who he is either.

~It’s new underwear weekend around here. I handle a lot of laundry and decided finally that the state of everyone’s underwear was just really rather sad. So it was comfort waist boxer-briefs for two Sonars (the third Sonar has really lovely underwear, mainly because he never wears any). Soft, stretchy cotton bikinis for me. Partner’s were also ok, because he replenished the underwear stock a few weeks ago—grey and blue boxer-briefs. I also plan to get a couple of bras. I put on one yesterday and the underwire sprung out and punctured my armpit. Ok, not punctured, but you know what I mean. That leaves me with two industrial sports bras, one bra with a poking out underwire, one with a bent underwire, and way way back in the back of my drawer, three nursing bras that, though I’ve not been nursing any babies for some time, still hang out back there. So let’s just say that it’s time for me to do a little drawer-cleaning and that a couple of pretty bras that don’t necessarily have nipple-flaps might be nice. ;)

~Three more days to sexy new computer. Though apologies are in order for this lovely old gal. It wasn’t her fault at all that the computer wasn’t connecting to the internet properly. It was the evil old phone company. Gr.

~We’re in the throes of deciding on our new internet service provider. We can choose between pricey local company with wireless network and cheaper evil cable empire. You might think that the evil epithet means I will choose the local company, but the decision is not that easy. The cost and the contract and the slightly slower connection add up against them, especially the long contract. Against the cable company: we don’t currently have cable service, and if we opt to keep it that way, we pay a $10 surcharge for having only broadband service. Jerks. Pluses for big cable: speed, no service charge, no gigantic equipment to install. Pluses for the two lovable geeks down the street: personal service by actual human beings, supporting the local economy, and not taking the fast food option and joining the evil empire. Tough call.

~The squirrels around our place are going crazy. Our house, yard, trees, and fences are like this gigantic racetrack right now. They chase each other everywhere, up down around over across. Zoom zoom zoom. Spring fever? Mating time? Nut wars?

~I love the end of a bag of tortilla chips, the crunchy bits down in the bottom. I pour them into a bowl and dollop some salsa on top and eat them with a spoon. The very best part are the bits that get just a teensy bit soggy by the time I get to them. Good stuff.

~So, I knew I was sick. Really sick for a while. At least I thought I knew. And then I got better. And was completely shocked to find out just how sick I had been. It didn’t hit me until I really felt better that I had been so horribly, deeply, miserably sick. Breathing in particular is good. Nice, deep, cough-free, wheeze-free breaths. Breathing makes everything else so much easier to do.

~Partner picked a gallon of ripe cherry tomatoes out of the back yard this morning. No exaggeration. A gallon. He thinks that there are at least three or four more gallons of tomatoes out there on the verge of being ripe. Want some tomatoes?

~Sonar X7 has three more weeks of school. And a birthday coming up. This computer is older than he is.

~We’re having a gorgeous, sweaty Saturday. It’s 83.1F/28.4C with 83% humidity right now, according to Weather Underground. We should get another handful of degrees yet. I’ll try not to melt into the pavement on my way to a shady spot under the tree where I plan to knit (Gryffindor socks for Sonar X7) or read (Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris) while the Sonars build a fort under the yard table and throw things out of the tree at each other.

What are you up to?