Children Talking to Children In the Dark

Peeve the First

I mentioned back on May 13th that in lieu of going out to dinner on that night in May to celebrate our anniversary, Beloved Husband and I were holding out for September 13th, when we could say that we had been married for 33 1/3 years and 1/3 day, a full third of a century. Back in May, we talked to a restauranteur in our community, and made sure he could make modifications to handle my dietary needs (very low cholesterol, plenty of veggies, no pecans or walnuts, carbs better if whole grain, and served in portions amounting to 30 to 40 g carbohydrate max). He looked up for me whether the date was actually one when they were going to be open, and said he was sure he could do something lovely. So far so good.

A week ago Tuesday, we called and officially got our reservation, and I sent the restauranteur my dietary needs and prohibitions as an email, so he could have them to consult when and as needed. I began to search around our small town for babysitters. This is complicated by the fact that when your town is small enough that 21 is the Biggest Elementary School Class EVAR, and this year we will graduate 3 - yes, 3! In some years the pool of available sitters is small. I teach swimming and taught French as a volunteer in the school. I know these kids, and out of the limited pool there are some I would nevereverever trust to watch the high-spirited Whirlwind. By that Saturday I had someone lined up. Whew!

On Tuesday of this week she canceled. Okay. Back to the list. No luck that day. The next day, I succeeded in getting a "I'd love to do it if I don't have to work that night. I can let you know tomorrow afternoon." Never did hear back from her, so I hit the phones Thursday night, and managed to get a classmate of Middle Daughter's who was willing to do it. Whew again!

On the day, I was busy much of the day, getting some cleaning done, getting a meal ready for The Whirlwind, and getting showered and ready in a nice outfit. We only go out every two to three years, so this was an Occasion. Once I was ready, with 10 minutes to go before the babysitter was due, and 40 minutes until our reservation, I sat down to check my email. Maybe one of my kids had written. There was a notification of a Facebook message sent two hours previously. Our sitter had canceled.

Grumps. Despair. A futile attempt to find a substitute close enough to fill in at the last second (as if I hadn't already called almost everyone already).

Finally Beloved Husband called up to the Inn, explained our problem, and asked to have them pack up our meal as takeout.

The ambiance left a little to be desired, ("If it's just you two, why can't I come down? Can I come down and get my light-up stuffie? How is your dinner? Is it sooo good? Daddy, can you save me some of your cheesecake?") but there we were, elegantly dressed, and the company was the best there is. The food was pretty good too.

So - Pet Peeve Number One - Baby Sitters Who Cancel Without Warning Or Consideration

Middle Daughter says it was a case of she decided that she didn't want to do it, and bailed. She told us that she was feeling indisposed. She's all about all the fun of the Fair today. Hmmm... I thought I knew her better than that.

Pet Peeve the Second

Our landline (the only phone that works where we are) has a HORRIBLE BUZZ. Yeah, I was shouting just then. So does it. I called the phone company to troubleshoot it. They had me unplug all the phones and the modem for at least 5 minutes, and then go to the outside box, disconnect the house, and plug an old-fashioned totally wired phone in. Yeah, being middle aged, we have one of those. The disconnecting fixed nothing, the buzz was still there, so the agent said they would send someone out the next day, and that the problem was definitely in their lines, and not within our house. So we expected it to be fixed the next day (Friday). Nope.

Apparently, they decided that since I had a soprano voice, I'd done something wrong. They decided to wait to see if we continued to complain, or if the name on the account (a masculine name) was able to fix what some poor woman could not. Their line test had shown a zero (no problem) so I must be lying.

Beloved Husband called back after our dinner, and got immediate, prompt, courteous agreement that there was indeed a problem, that it indeed needed to be fixed, and that they would send someone as soon as possible (Monday), and oh, by the way, Mr. Posessed-of-a-Bass-Voice, we re-did the line test, and there is indeed a short, and the problem is clearly not in your home.

So - Pet Peeve the Second - Sexism from My Fellow Females, Because Both Agents Were Female

This is not the first time. One of Eldest Daughter's teachers gave her a B for her quarter grade when she had received no grade below an A. He admitted to her that he had erred and told her he would fix it (three separate times!, no action), he told me the same thing (twice!, no action), and when Beloved Husband called, it was fixed the very next day. With a single phone call. The funny thing is that Beloved Husband sounds gentle and polite on the phone, even with people he doesn't care for, because he was raised to be polite. He is not out there Teal'c-ifying them into submission at all!

The Upshot: BAD PEEVES! GO LIE DOWN! NO TREATS FOR YOU!

For you out there who are not Peeves, but f-list instead, thank you for listening. I feel so much better now.

I do not live in California. I live in Vermont. We have a little (for those of you who are Californian, read "barely perceptible") tremblor once every few years. On the tenth there was a 3.9 quake in Quebec, which we could have felt if we were up at 4:19 that morning. We slept through that. now there was a 4.5 (possible 4.6) earthquake centered around Lake Arrowhead, Maine, which we definitely did feel, and it rumbled like the dryer having a rough start up (although that might have been part of the house moving around to cause the noise).

Now when I lived in Greece this would have been a big nothing. Ho-hum. *yawn* But this is New England.

[Eyes overfull and not tied or strapped bookcases speculatively]

I'll say it again, Mother Earth, slowly in case you didn't get it the first time. N--e--w E--n--g--l--a--n--d.

Oh, and for those of you with geology backgrounds. Yes. I know that earthquakes can happen here too. But I'm spoiled, I tell you, spoiled, and I expect this to stop right now!!!


ETA: The U.S.G.S. has, since I posted, revised their rating of the quake in Maine from 4.5 (where they had initially pegged it although they soon moved that up to 4.6) down to 4.0. I didn't want to leave that overinflated number out there, because on the Richter scale, that difference matters.

I just wanted to post to let folks know why I have been rudely ignoring them.

I haven't really.

On June 8th we had a couple of sizeable thunderstorms come through here, and this caused us to lose both power and phone. When the phone came back on a few hours later, it was at best unreliable. On our end, sound kept dropping out. The folks we were talking to heard plenty of crackling and static.

This made connecting to our dial-up internet an impossibility. I got about an hour in while sitting with our laptop at one of my kids' weekly appointments, because the building has free wi-fi, and I mostly used that to answer my personal e-mails. We finally got connectivity back here a few hours ago, and then I had some business transactions I needed to take care of before I could get down to socializing.

So if you asked me a question or sent me a response, and you got no reply [*How rude!*] it wasn't because I was lazy or ignoring you. I just was "away".

Back now. Hopelessly behind. I'll be working hard to catch up about in time to go out of town for a week for the last week of June. At least then I'll be able to take the laptop with me, and I'll be heading into the land of wi-fi and fast internet!

So anyway, I'll be getting back to you all as soon as I can, provided I don't have to take too much time out building an empty padded room for the Whirlwind of Destruction to bounce from wall to wall in without wrecking anything. School ended today, and she's been in rare form lately.

( Exciting Adventures of the Whirlwind, and Floral Enthusiasm behind the cut )

After coming down with a influenza-like illness (my husband the doctor simply calls them I.L.I.'s, and I insist that it could not possibly be proper flu because I got my flu shot, damnit!, and I simply refuse to consider the possibility) and being under the weather since Monday, I have finally crawled out from under my rock and started facing life again. Thank goodness that hockey and figure skating ended on Saturday and we are in the pre-lacrosse and field hockey lull! Minimal chauffeuring duties and simple dinners were the order of the day(s).

Two things I noticed while I was lying blearily in the comfy chair, but still (apparently) wearing my fannish goggles:

Norfolk Southern says they provide "Shippers with a path to prosperity", or words to that effect. Sounds good to me. I am awaiting their check with some eagerness. ;)

A new catalogue came this week from Hearthsong, a rather upscale toy concern. They are offering Flying Space Monkeys in spring toy collection. I giggled especially hard because although there are unisex ones in the background of their picture in blue, tan, and red, the one in the foreground is pink, with long curved lashes and very eye-catching red lips. Perhaps a Space Monkey for the BadFic! Jack/Daniel stories which make Jack horrifyingly OTT macho, and Daniel a total queen?

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I have glanced over the goings on while I was "away", but if you have anything in particular you want my input on, lemme know, and I'll go back and comment.

Happy New Year to all. May 2011 be a year of wonder and delight, and may it lay the foundation for still brighter and better things to come in the years that follow!

I found and snurched a year end summing up meme from mayogate and filled it out. It was kind of an odd fit for me, but it was kind of intriguing to fill out. ( There be answers here. Some at length. Oh, stop rolling your eyes. I know I can be verbose. )

Well, I finally finished the Christmas shopping today. I still have a to-do list that is too long for the time remaining to do it in, and nothing that can really be left out. Par for the course.

All the same, I can toddle off to bed after a very loooooong day of shopping secure in the knowledge that at the very least I won't be disappointing anyone by not getting them anything, and that the gifts that had to be sent are all on their way soon enough to make it there in time.

Since Christmas in our family is a matriarchal tradition, almost all of my Christmasses have taken place at my maternal grandmother's house. She lived in southern Vermont, all very Norman Rockwell snowy and set in picturesque rural New England scenery, in a house built up in the hills in the late 1700's and old enough to have age-blackened massive hand-hewn beams, wide pine flooring, and a fireplace with a bread-baking to one side and a swinging iron hook to hold cooking pots over the fire. She died at the age of 97, and this means that Christmas is now in northern New Jersey. Not nearly as picturesque and stereotypical, alas!

It will be a big crowd gathering, at least 17 of us at last count (not including my sister's baby in utero), with all the hustle and bustle and chaos that that entails.

We will all be competing to produce the most succulent and elaborate dinner when it is our turn to cook, and the cousins will be weaving in and out of the adults' feet, desperately trying not to burst with anticipation, while everyone tries (it sometimes seems) to dredge up those moments when we were each most embarrassingly and undeniably ourselves, and the missing are remembered with fond pangs. None of the things served will be American traditional. No Turkey with all the trimmings. No Roast Beef and oven-roasted potatoes. There will be stuffed vine leaves, there will be leg of lamb. There may well be Asian dishes, Mediterranean dishes, and most of them will be the original recipes of the cook for the night. For many years my Grandmother took us out for Chinese for Christmas dinner, and my kids are still a little indignant that Christmas dinner no longer has Peking Duck and hoisin sauce!

There will be breakage, and frayed patience, and tears of joy. There will be the inevitable broken toy tragedy, a gift that everybody marvels at because it's just so right that really we all should have thought of it, and far too much candy.

There will be no room to move by Christmas afternoon, between the people, the stuff, and the bags of ripped and discarded wrapping. The best wrapping will be carefully and reverently folded, and put upstairs by my mother for re-use.

There will be stockings for every blessed one of us, and some of them, thanks to a competition some years back that got a little out of hand, will be simply ENORMOUS.

There will be singing of carols acapella, since my mother doesn't have a piano, with harmony. My husband was in the choir for years and knows the base parts to so many carols! Two of my daughters between them know many of the alto parts, although they are both more comfortable as sopranos.

We'll eat Christmas Eve and Christmas dinner on the Royal Copenhagen china and with the silver service that we have always used, because my mother has my grandmother's dishes and silver now.

Some of the gifts will be labeled with tiny writing well camouflaged in the pattern of the paper, so that the children sorting and delivering will have to hunt, and the orgy of greed cannot begin too soon. This will be a good thing, because we always have to wait for a sleepy night-owl of an uncle to drag himself into the day, bleary-eyed and feeling blindly about for the strong cup of coffee someone will thrust at him.

Some of the packages will have to be carried off to the people in the family who read Arabic to have their labels read aloud so we know who gets them.

Every few years there will be a gift so fascinatingly and horrifyingly hideous that it will echo around the family for a few years, finding its way into a stocking of the unwary. For some fifteen years it was a can of haggis. We are a gastronomically adventurous family, but we just couldn't imagine that that could possibly be improved by canning.

Just about every year someone gets a gift that becomes a family obsession for a while, because it is so silly, or so fun, or so difficult, that everyone wants a turn with it.

Some will go to Midnight Mass. Not all of them will be Christian. Some will simply be the curious and the gregarious.

Jokes and allusions will be made in at least five languages, sometimes in order to speak of stocking matters without testing the faith of the true believers. Somehow we always seem to have a supply of them, because just as my mother's got old enough to outgrow that, I had some of my own. Now my sister is enlisting us for at least the next eight years, and after that my kids may well be starting to provide!

In short, we'll have the rollicking bustling Christmas that is common in large families.

I'll be a little busy, so if I don't see you before New Years, I wish you the joy of the season. As the sign outside the hardware store down town says (rather dryly - this is a small town, overwhelmingly Christian, and inclined to think that the world has always been and will always be as Norman Rockwell painted it from the life) "May your personal choice of a seasonal celebration be empowering!" I say it with irony too, but mine is warm, inclusive, friendly irony, because really, inside, where we are all just people, I mean it.

Please don't be offended by any silence. Know I'm just to busy in real life for a while. I'll be back and being verbose again before long. I promise!

For those of you who may have noticed some radio silence in this corner of the 'webz, my dearly beloved [Gritted teeth? What makes you think they're gritted? Flying spittle? Noooo! Silly! This is just...ummm...extra whipped cream. Yeah. Whipped cream. *Gives the Jack-O'Neill-tm-wide-eyed-look-of-Unconvincing-Innocence*] middle daughter managed to infect my computer with Antivirus System PRO, a virus that pretty much defines DO-NOT-WANT. She was *grrrrrrr* inclined to deny responsibility until history logs made our case for us irrefutably, and is now off-line, pending retraining. Not everything is up and running yet, but life here is slowly returning to normal.

Point is, I've been exiled for a while by this, so if you have anything you particularly want me to notice really soon, gimme a heads-up. Otherwise, I'll get there...um...Christmas is coming, isn't it?...eventually.