Heeeeeere's Linda

Okay hi Ya'll.
Yeah, so I've been AWOL for awhile. Things have been a little crazy here lately.

So, News.
We're selling the house.
What? You say. You just moved into the house!

Yes, but we've decided to sell. There's more space than we need and not all of it usable space, so we met with our realtor today and the house will be listed by the first Monday in October. So, if you know anyone who needs a great old historic home, send them our way.

I've been cleaning and packing up the unnecessaries. A week from Friday we get a POD. One of those boxes they deliver for you to fill up with your stuff and then they take it away and store it for you. We're going to strip a bunch of stuff out of the house to "stage" it to sell. Fortunately, we haven't been here long enough to really get engrained. I remember moving out of the rental house I had lived in for six or seven years when Gray and I bought our first house. Oh My God how much Crap I had stashed in that house! It had the benefit/curse of lots of storage space. So all of that storage was full of crap. My advice: always get a house with nice size closets, but not too many of them, and NO extra "storage space." Storage space is another word for "oubliette where you dump all your useless shit you don't know how to get rid of otherwise."

We had a garage at the last house. That was the endless pit of doom when we moved here. Seemed like crap came out of that garage waaaaayyy out of proportion to the amount of physical space that was actually there.

So that's news.

Lets see... other news....

Grayson has had the Mystery Illness. He's been out of school for FOUR days now. Just a low grade malaise. No actual symptoms, just droopy and tired and complains of "feeling bad all over." I was convinced he had either an ear infection or another case of asymptomatic strep. He had that a couple of years ago. But no. Gray took him to the doctor today and they found NOTHING WRONG WITH THE KID. What it amounts to is that I think I've been flummoxed out of four days of school.

They drew blood (payback of a sort, I guess, if it's all theatre) just to be sure it wasn't mono. But I highly doubt it. I think it's inactivity, boredom, and a profound desire to stay home, play computer games and watch television. Okay, so this is what we call a Parents' Teachable Moment.

Tomorrow, the boy goes to school.

Another SIck Day

Another day of being home sick. Gray is home, too, and we're spending the day in separate rooms like the old married couple we are, sniffling and coughing and largely ignoring one another except for the occasional "bless you!" when one of us sneezes.

At least it's a good day to be home sick. Gray and drizzly, with more gray and drizzle in the forecast. I heated up the last of last fall's frozen stew for lunch and it was perfect. This weekend, if I'm feeling better, I'll begin my annual fall mass cooking and whip up another big batch.

I don't actually hate cooking, by the way. I'm not even really bad at it. But I hate thinking of things to cook. I hate meal planning, that's all. It's virtually impossible to cook something that all three of us like. Grayson is limited pretty much to fish sticks and macaroni and cheese. Gray doesn't seem to like anything made all in one pan or with rice or pasta, which I live for. I just can't get my mind around the idea of meat and a vegetable. What kind of meat? How do you cook it? It's just so boring.

Soups and stews are another thing. You make an enormous batch and split it up and freeze it and voila, you have desperation dinners for a year. Fall is always my time for busy, hopeful cooking and baking. Like spring is my time for busy, hopeful gardening. By October I'll be so carried away by fall that I'll be optimistic enough to take on baking bread again. Maybe even pie crust. Hope springs eternal, after all.

My bread always tastes okay, it just never rises properly. My pie crust, on the other hand, is a sadly different story. It's pitiful because these are two things I would really like to be able to do well.

I've spent a lot of my day online putting out minor fires at work. Fortunately, my fabulous assistant Krysten is there to run the ball for me. I haven't been able to send email to my mass press release lists, so I send them to her with the list and she sends them out. I swear I've done nearly as much from bed this morning as I would have done from my desk at work. It's amazing what we can accomplish from a computer keyboard. And how completely dependent I am on it now.

Mainly I've spent the last two days reading. I read two books by Susan Beth Pfeffer. They're young adult novels about apocalyptic events on Earth. I read both of them over the past two days. I've just started The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, which is excellent, so far. I have a whole stack of other books to work on when I'm done with that.

The one book I can't seem to get my teeth into is the one I was supposed to read for Book Club. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. It's just dry. And perhaps a little strident. I'm way too lazy to get into organic and local food, or to get het up about how many gallons of petroleum go into getting me my blueberries or mushrooms. I'm doing pretty good to get to the store and home with them without troubling over their itineraries prior to my meeting them. Yes, I know, I'm going to recyclo-vegetarian hell for that. I do recycle my plastics and junk mail, and grow my own peppers and tomatoes in the summer, so I feel redeemed somewhat for the sin of getting my apples from Washington in the winter.

I had a brief reprieve with the book because Book Club was scheduled for this past Friday and Brooke got sick, so it was bumped to the 19th. So I still have a week and a half to read the book. But honestly, I can't seem to do it. And at the moment, I don't even know where it is.

It's boring being home sick. Gray's jacked in to World of Warcraft. It's not like he's going to play checkers with me or anything. Even the dogs are asleep.

The Sick Family Reunion

Ug. The whole family is down with a cold. Not "down with" as in "get down with your bad self," but "down with" as in, "ug, I'm so miserable, I just want to lie down."

Actually, Grayson is feeling better and will go to school tomorrow. But Gray and I are both feeling like seven different kinds of shit.

So I've been lying around all day reading. Not a bad thing.

Birthday party

Grayson's party was a great success. Good slides and bouncers, good company, good cake. All the kids seemed to have a really good time.

Only fly in the ointment was that Grayson started feeling sick by the time we headed home. And by bedtime, he had a really stuffy noise and bad cough. So, we're home together today, on his birthday. And we had to cancel the family dinner we had scheduled for tonight with my folks and my grandmother Sybil. I'm feeling a bit sinusy myself, and when I talked with Gray earlier, he said he was feeling a bit the same. Sigh. Ah well, at least Grayson didn't get sick until AFTER his birthday party. We can reschedule the dinner for another evening this week when we're all feeling better.

In the meantime, here are a couple of pictures. Grayson had lots of help from friends in opening his presents. In the top photo, the boy on the right is Sam Powell, he lives down the street from us. John Tolbert is Grayson's best friend, there on the left. Sam Alley is half out of the picture on the far left.

There were a couple of really good inflatable slides. The best was a big ship that had a long dark tunnel you had to go through to get up to the top. And it was a really fast slide, too. Some of us grown-ups enjoyed it, as well as the kids.

There was no place in the party room to hang a pinata, so Gray just cut open the bottom and shook all the candy out over the kids heads. It was hilarious. Four pounds of candy was scooped up in under a minute.

Today Grayson's hanging out in his pajamas playing his new Spore game. He seems content, if a little wheezy and sniffly.

Let them eat cake

Here they are... the birthday cakes. We went with two this time, just because we couldn't decide whether to do the beetle or the caterpillar. So we did both.

An Old Friend

I ran into an old friend yesterday. I had stopped at Byron's on the way home from work to pick up some wine and I was crossing the parking lot, minding my own business. A guy with a mustache was leaving the store and crossing the parking lot towards me. He had on dark glasses and seemed to be sort of checking me out, so I lowered my head and prepared to go by him acting oblivious. But just as we passed each other he said "Hey Linda."

I stopped and turned around and looked at him, but he wasn't anyone I knew. I looked and he said something like "How you doing?" and finally I just said "who ARE you??" And he lowered his glasses a bit and looked over them and said "I'm Jeff."

Jeff Nichols. My old friend from the Arts Institute days, who had been the site foreman during many long hours at the Fall institutes. Jeff and I had worked together for several years, 15 hours a day, 5 days a week at Quartz Mountain, setting up and tearing down each week's workshops. We had hung gallery art, moved pianos, bought supplies, covered floors, hauled heavy easels out of second-floor storage areas down steep narrow staircases. Working like that with someone, you get to know them pretty well. And until he had moved his glasses, I hadn't had any clue who he was.

In my defense, he has cut off his hair AND beard. And once he lifted his shades it fell into place immediately. I gave him a big hug and we stood there in the Byron's parking lot for over an hour, catching up. It has been nearly ten years since I saw him. TEN YEARS. It didn't feel like anything like that long, though, as we stood there, shooting the shit. He's just the same as he was before, only with more grey in his mustache. This is the thing about being well and truly grown up: the passage of time is relative. I recognize the passage of time not in how much I've changed, but in how other people's kids have changed. Jeff told me it was his son's 30th birthday. When I first met Jeff, that son was a gangly teenager. Jeff turns 50 this year. Amazing.

It's true that in your mind you achieve a certain age and that's where you stay. I've stuck at around 32 or 34. I never really think of myself as any older than that. Gray said he's clocked in at around his mid-twenties. I guess we will someday be old geezers, still feeling like we're twenty or thirty-something. I can't decide if that's a good thing or not. Do I want to feel older? Physically, I certainly feel my age. My hips are creaky, my eyes are weaker, my back aches. What would I expect to feel if I felt my mental age? Smarter? I wish. Mainly I'm just more forgetful.

Like, I've been wracking my brain the past few days trying to remember if I got Gray a birthday present. One night a week or so ago, I woke up at 3 a.m. worried that I hadn't given him anything for his birthday and trying to figure out why. Then I realized I couldn't even remember if I had given him anything or not, much less what it was, if I did. Surely that can't be normal? So I lay awake worrying over my early onset Altzheimers. Well, you gotta have something to worry about at 3 a.m.

Anyway, it was great to see Jeff. We exchanged phone numbers and promised not to wait another ten years. I bought my wine and drove home with a smile on my face. That's another thing about knowing someone so well... even after ten years, you're still friends.

O My God It's Early

"The time is 0600. What's the O for? O My God it's Early."

The immortal words of Robin Williams in Good Morning Vietnam

My morning actually started at 3:30 when the helicopter with a search light arrived over our house and circled around for a few minutes. Fortunately, whoever they were seeking must have decamped or been apprehended, because it flew away and did not return. But things were loud and bright for a while there.

Then at 5, Grayson tapped me on the shoulder to let me know that "I didn't go to the bathroom before I went to bed and, sadly..."
He had wet the bed. Our bed.

So what do you do then but get up? I packed Grayson off back to his own warm dry bed, left Gray sleeping peacefully on his nice warm dry side of our bed, and got up to surf Audible.com and futz around until it's time to be functional.

This weekend is the Big Party for Grayson's birthday. Tomorrow my mom and I will create our annual birthday cake sculptural extravaganza. This year calls for Bugs. So we're making a beetle cake and a caterpillar cake. The caterpillar cake will be green inside : )
Today I go shopping for appropriate candies with which to decorate: licorice legs, Spree eyes, etc. And tonight Grayson and I will make more bug decorations out of pom poms and pipe cleaners. They're very cute. I need to pick up some party favors, too. I love Grayson's birthday. It's the best day of the year.

The Flight of the Monarchs

The Monarchs have arrived.

I saw the first of them yesterday as I was leaving work. Monarch butterflies fluttering along on their random way to Mexico. It is always one of the true harbingers of Fall for me.

At Quartz Mountain, lo these many years ago, they would come through in herds... droves?... gaggles? ... in October. In the evening they would light on the trees en masse for the night. Some years there were so many that some of the trees seemed to pulse eerily as all their many wings opened and closed. Some years there were more than others.

I always feel sorry for them when they have to fly in rotten weather, and it's been rotten flying weather the past couple of days. Rain and wind, courtesy Gustav. As if it wasn't hard enough to fly a couple thousand miles on rice-paper wings. Especially since half the time they're just looping around. They must fly three times the distance they need to, for all the random loops and dives.

Still, I love seeing them. And sometimes, if we're lucky, we'll find a caterpillar around this time of year. It has happened for us twice. Always in September. So I'll keep my eyes on the morning glory and milk weed to see if I can find one this year, as well.

When Gray and I were first married, we discovered a Monarch caterpillar on the morning glory vines in front of our house. We spent an entire early October afternoon parked on chairs in the front lawn with beers, watching it curl up and turn into a crysalis, which is a truly bizarre process.

Two years ago, we found another one and kept it inside through its metamorphosis. Grayson named it "Antenna," and we got to watch as it morphed. We kept the crysalis tied inside a collander on top of the bureau, but unfortunately the butterfly emerged without our notice, and the cats, or something, pushed the collander backward, and the newly hatched butterfly fell between the bureau and the wall, crimping a wing. It never unfolded properly, and though we fed it fruit and kept it alive for several days, it was never able to hold itself upright, and finally Gray took it outside and killed it. Grayson cried. And he still talks about Antenna sometimes.

Just one of the many small creatures we have killed over the years. Antenna can be counted among the ranks including fish, tadpoles, red-eared sliders, triops, a mouse, ducks and the kitten that Izzy killed. I'm like Dr. Death.

A bit gloomy today. Guess the weather has something to do with it. But that's part of the appeal of Fall, isn't it? The wonderful melancholy of it. It feels good to feel bad sometimes. So I feel sort of bittersweet seeing the Monarchs laboring their way south through Oklahoma in September. I always wish them well.

Our neice, Jordy, lives with her father in central Mexico, very near the area where the Monarchs go to overwinter every year. Seeing them has always been on my Life List. Hopefully someday we'll take Grayson for a visit and get to see the forest draped in millions of Monarchs. What a sight that must be.

Another arachnid pest and some labor day shenanigans

Lets talk about chiggers.
It's been years since I was actually bitten by a chigger, but recently I have had the opportunity to re-experience this unique north american summer thrill.

A week ago, I received five chigger bites at an evening party in the backyard of the friends of a friend. They are still driving me mad with itching. I try very hard not to scratch them bloody, but it is a constant struggle.

I looked them up on the web to see what I could do about it. The short answer is "nothing." They do not really burrow into your skin, but inject an enzyme that liquifies your flesh. As if that is somehow better. The enzyme also causes a sort of drinking straw to materialize around the injection site which allows the little bugger to drink you like a slurpy. It's the enzyme and the tube that cause the prolonged itching, not the little critter itself, which is, by the way not an insect, but an arachnid (a mite) in its larval form. The adults hang out in the dirt and eat plant stuff.

Anyway, there's no silver bullet to stop the itching except time. So I wait, and my left leg looks like I have chicken pox or something.

Happy Labor Day. I plan to spend the day doing no labor whatsoever. I have been a good mom the past two days: Took Grayson to Norman to"register" at this great toystore there on Saturday. He is sort of a tough kid to buy gifts for because he does not really go for any of the typical 8-year-old boy stuff. Cars? Nope. Action heroes? Nope. Lego building kits? Nope. He's not into Star Wars or wrestling or army men or plastic weaponry or rockets or models or electronics or sports. So what do you get him? The things he plays with most are usually pieces of something else. Lately he's discovered how to jump rope, so he does that quite a bit. I bought him a really good jump rope.

So I took him to Copelin's and he picked out a few things. A bunch of UglyDolls, which kind of amused me. A bouncy ball, and a sort of foam rubber pogo stick. Some arts and crafts stuff. That's it. But at least it gives us a starting point.

His party is next Sunday, at the Jump Zone - one of those places with a bunch of big inflatable toys. It's a Bug party, so my mom and I will be working all day Saturday to create a spectacular blue beetle cake with a chocolate body and a red velvet head. We've invited 20 of his dearest friends. Then on Monday, his actual birthday, we'll have the family celebration with something that he likes to eat, like pizza (no doubt), leftover cake and his grandparents and great-grandmothers and whichever aunties would like to join us. So, you see, it pays to have a birthday on Monday, because then you get to celebrate TWICE.

He will be 8. He's tall and lanky and getting long-haired. He's still so skinny he can wear the underwear I bought him when he was four. He's bright and funny and happy and remarkably well-adjusted. I'm grateful every day for him. We're lucky lucky lucky.

Yesterday I took G and two friends to the Science Museum Oklahoma (formerly known as the Omniplex, which I thought was a perfectly serviceable name), where we spent some three hours. So I have definitely done my motherly service and can feel justified in lazing about indolently today.

This morning we were going through the ritual Jumping-On-Dad that must be done every morning before we can properly start the day. This usually culminates in Gray pulling off Grayson's socks and throwing them down the stairs. But this morning a new opportunity presented itself. The bedroom window was open, so Gray attempted to throw the socks out onto the roof. This failing, he yanked off Grayson's PJ bottoms and threw them out onto the roof.

This is fun.

Grayson asked us to open the window so he could climb out onto the roof ( in his underwear) to retrieve his pants. But he decided a better idea would be to go get his pointer (a stick with a pointing finger on the end of it... just one of the peculiar toys I mentioned that he likes best), and use it to snag his drawers back in through the window.

So he leans out with the pointer, forehead pressed against the glass, reaches out annnnnd....
drops the pointer onto the roof.

I completely cracked up. Now his pants and his pointer on on the roof. Finally, Gray took pity on him and opened the window wide enough for him to climb out and retrieve them both, plus a pair of plastic dracula teeth that I guess the cats carried out. But as soon as Grayson was out on the roof, Gray closed the window.

This is really fun.

Now my son, my only child, is standing out on the roof on 20th street and Classen Boulevard, in his underwear, giggling wildly, and pounding on the window to be let back in. Where's my camera when I need it?

Yes, we did let the child back into the house. It was an exceptionally satisfying morning. A good way to begin a holiday.