Hands up all who'd rather save sleep than daylight.

I do not appreciate Daylight Saving Time, and not only because of everyone calling it Daylight "Savings" time all over the place, as if I need another thing to correct.  The semi-annual sleep adjustment is a little burr under the saddle I'd rather have removed, is all.  I just want to leave time the hell alone. 

Even the Bean needed waking up this morning. She's usually up before anyone, and on her most helpful days, she makes breakfast, puts the water on for my tea, and lays out all the ingredients for me to make lunch for her and her sister. That Bean is awesome. You tell her she's awesome, and she says, "I know," but you can tell she's trying not to grin.

I think maybe this will be my new candidate litmus test. Promise me you'll do away with time changes... I don't care whether we stick with daylight saving or standard time, just pick one and don't change it... and you have my vote.

That, and don't appoint any more wacky originalists to the Supreme Court, ok?  OK.

I don't think they're sugarplums.

Cripes, I hate it when the Peanut wigs out in her sleep.

We still keep a baby monitor in the basement for when we're watching a movie and wouldn't be able to hear the girls if they called us from two floors up. One night we were watching something... a thriller, I wish I could remember which... and I heard the Peanut call "Mommy! MOMMY!" So up I dashed, and when I reached her, she was standing in the middle of the room, completely still, eyes wide open but unfocused. She turned her head to me, unblinking, and whispered, "something's coming... closer... closer..." 

Yikes. I have read enough Stephen King and watched enough creepy psychodrama to be thoroughly freaked out by this. "What's coming, Peanut? What is it?" No response, just those huge open eyes. I put her back to bed. She had no memory of it the next morning, but of course I will never be able to forget it. She's talked in her sleep since she could talk at all, and her sudden utterances can be jarring, but that's one for the record books.

As a toddler she used to wake up in the middle of the night in tears, unable to explain why she was awake or upset. Other times she'd wake furious and insist something was wrong with her toe, or her foot. Probably it had pins and needles from how she'd been lying on it. This kept happening from time to time, always her foot hurt, and there was no making it better. You just had to wait till she drifted off again.

A few weeks after "something's coming..." we heard "Mommy! MOMMY!" then silence. Again, "MOMMY!" and I went upstairs, sort of dreading it. This time she was still in bed, but propped up on her elbows, eyes open. I checked for all the obvious things... fever, wet bed... nothing. Phew. But she wouldn't respond to me. She'd recoil when I touched her, thrash around like crazy, and yell "MOMMY!" really loudly even right after I said "What?! I'M RIGHT HERE!" After several minutes of this she sat up and said "Mommy! Some people just STAND THERE, when you need them to MOVE!" then lay back down and fell quietly asleep.

It's true you know. Some people just stand there, when you need them to move. 

Last night, I heard her yelling the Bean's name. "Bean! BEAN! BEAN!!!" I got upstairs to find her jerking around in bed, completely agitated, not responding to my voice, though she stopped yelling for her sister and started yelling for me. She'd be still for two seconds and then jerk around and yell again.

I never know whether to wake her up, or wait it out. But the more this happens, the more inclined I am to wake her up as much as I can. She can't seem to shake herself out of whatever has her upset, and it's clearly not fun.

This time I sat her up and talked to her gently but firmly, in a serious voice, saying her name, and to wake up enough to answer. "Mommy! I don't know why I can't keep still!" she said. "I keep having... visions?" (Oh lord.) "It's hard to explain... everything is going really slowly, and I don't know why!" "Are you awake, or asleep, Peanut?" "Mostly asleep..." and she lay back down and was out cold.

Visions.  Something coming closer... closer. I think I liked it better when it was just her foot.

I am the Lorax. I speak for... well, Universal Studios, I guess.

I'm going to be a wet blanket on this one. I don't think a movie should have been made of Dr. Seuss's book, The Lorax. Remember the Lorax? Who "speaks for the trees, which you seem to be chopping as fast as you please"?  The folks responsible for Despicable Me made a movie of it.

That is, they churned out an uninspired, bland, predictable story to justify charging people to see a movie-length CGI production featuring some elements of the original. They call it "Dr. Seuss's" The Lorax, but it isn't really. It's hard to imagine that Dr. Seuss would've been down with the idea of Lorax-based merchandising. 

the original

I was planning to refuse to see it out of principle; then the Peanut was invited to a Lorax birthday party, so as long as she was going to see it, the Bean wanted to, and I was kind of stuck. 

So here's what it is. Thneedville is a walled community without trees, where fresh air is supplied by a corporation run by an evil little man and his thugs. Nobody minds. Our hero is a kid who loves a girl who paints pictures of trees on her house and dreams of seeing a real one. To win her affection, he goes off to find her a tree, and locates the Once-ler, who in intermittent flashbacks tells the story of what happened to them.

It's boring. They made The Lorax boring. There's very little of the original text in the script, and a lot of nothing added to fill time. Betty White (voicing the hero kid's Grandma) and Danny DeVito (voicing the title role), Zac Efron and Taylor Swift, cool as they are, didn't wow me. 

Adding to the wretchedness:  it has songs. The young Once-ler carries around an electric guitar, and now this is a musical.

They took The Lorax, stripped it of its simplicity, wisdom, and wit, added flat, stock characters and music not worthy of a good advertisement, threw in some obligatory cute animal bits, and spat it back out at a public ready to open their wallets. Universal Studios hasn't missed a trick - the movie contains several sequences that will make great rides in their theme parks.

Remember the villain played by Ken Jeong in Furry Vengeance? Basically the same villain here. Remember Alvin and the Chipmunks? Add fins, and you got yourself some Humming-Fish. Thneedville with its bottled air is not unlike the spaceship carrying everyone around in Wall-E. I don't think there's an original angle in this whole film.

If you see it, you won't have a horrible time. It's not actively unpleasant (except for the singing, gah!). You might even like it. My problem comes from setting the bar too high -- from believing that anyone who really read and understood this story, with its message about conservation and corporate greed, would never turn it into something as vapid and forgettable as this, let alone stamp Loraxes on stuff and go "biggering and biggering and biggering and biggering." In an arrangement that busts the irony meter into tiny outraged splinters, this Lorax is now being used to sell cars. I am the Lorax! I speak for the Mazdas!

It's the height of cynicism to have done this, and I hope it's a colossal failure.

That said... what an unusually mild winter we're having!

Yesterday wrapped up February school vacation. We're not skiiers or island hoppers (skiing looks fun, but it's the island hopping I could really envy), so we generally stick around. This week's been warm enough to go on a couple of really great walks. Watching my lovely girls "discover" a shallow pool along a trail through the woods of our town's little nature center took me back about four decades.

For a couple years when I was really little, our family lived in a college town just outside Boston. The college campus had a little pond. One fall day my mother packed a picnic and we sat on the grass by the pond and had lunch, then played around for a while. I couldn't have been more than 6. I distinctly remember the sensations of that day; the "ploop" sound of little stones tossed into the water, the endless circles of ripples they made, rough twigs in my hand and the sounds they made flicking mud and water around, cool damp moss at the pond's edge, brightly colored leaves floating about.  I remember it as a Huge Adventure.

I want my girls to have so many memories like this that they don't seem unique. I hope each of my daughters will walk in the woods as an adult and feel that it's a familiar thing, a thing she grew up doing with her mother and her sister who love her beyond measure, so that whenever she does it it's a comfort on some very basic level.  Assuming we can continue to avoid both poison ivy and Lyme Disease, we appear to be on track for these happy woodsy memories to be so plentiful they blur together.

Yesterday afternoon they came across this mushy puddly place in the woods and pretended it was Degoba and they were Yoda and Luke Skywalker. That's a memory I might single out, even if they don't.

So, how are you enjoying public office?

I always said I wouldn't write here about the particulars of serving on the local School Committee (= School Board, in most states), and these days that's probably a better idea than ever. Still, because many people ask me this in passing... let's just say "enjoy" is the wrong verb. "Regret" is the wrong verb as well, for the record. "Endure" is a strong candidate. Oh, I jest! But it can be frustrating.

It's wrecked my blog, for one thing. I don't give time to blogging any more, and I don't feel free to write publicly about a lot of the things that occupy my (admittedly limited) mental real estate these days. What's left? Who wants to read a post about what an unusually mild winter we're having? Nobody, that's who. If Daniel Craig himself called me up and wanted to talk about what an unusually mild winter we're having, I might hang up the damn phone.

Still, I can't bring myself to take Noted and Blogged down. I love some of the pieces I've posted here, I did enjoy (sometimes it is the right verb!) my intermittent writing hobby, and someday I hope to again.

It ain't all bitching and whining.

This is the Bean's Thanksgiving art project. It's a turkey, and its feathers name things she's thankful for. She ran out of room so decided to go in a complete circle.

The Peanut's is harder to photograph - it's a paper chain with something she's thankful for written on each link. She included a lot of the same stuff her sister did (they worked on these "secretly" together in the Peanut's room the day before Thanksgiving), but with the chain format's limitless space she was able to add "hospitals, books, water, a bed to sleep in, trees, a nice teacher, [eye]glasses, a nice contrey, animals, love, a nice school, hollidays, a house, my stuft animals."

Why can't people leave people alone, part the nth

I guess this is as good a place as any for my rant about how Black Friday is emblematic of everything wrong with American culture these days. It isn't enough now that stores have to open at 5:00 AM... now they start at midnight, or even the night of Thanksgiving. So people who work retail have to cut their family holiday short to accommodate our collective lust for competition to buy cheap crap. Yeah yeah, we're grateful, we gorged ourselves to prove it, now get the fuck out of our way or suffer the consequences. Pepper spray is the new elbow to the ribs.

I know that everyone who shops the day after Thanksgiving doesn't behave this way, and I guess I should be thankful that unlike last year, nobody was trampled to death. Still, the whole concept disgusts me. Pffft.

I have some shopping to do today myself, hopefully while Black Friday lovers are still sleeping it off. Not Christmas shopping, which I plan to do only very locally or online this year -- just for groceries. Yet, even with Thanksgiving still visible in the rearview mirror, I can expect to encounter the bells, the bells, the relentless bells.

So I printed out my little notes for the red kettles, politely explaining that my donations go elsewhere while the Salvation Army maintains its position that homosexual people should not only not be allowed to marry, but should be celibate. 

Hopefully I won't forget which pocket holds which paper.  Both my purposes will be amusingly defeated if the red kettle gets my shopping list, leaving me with a scrap of cheerfully expressed social activism to guide me through the grocery store.

a non-update

Yes, I am still here, and no, I never did figure out what that ticking was.

November has been... intense. Memorial services for two terrific, accomplished, vibrant and beautiful women. My mother's stay in the hospital for hip replacement surgery and rehab, and my father's stay with us during some of that. A four-day conference of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees. Continued construction on the house. Meetings, playdates, parent/teacher conferences, basketball practices, Tuesdays in the school art room, Thursdays in the school library.

Thanksgiving.

All worth writing about, but there is no uninterrupted time for that any more, unless I get up at 5:00 AM, which is how it happened today, but as great as it is to sit at my desk unobserved and undistracted, I could probably have made better use of staying asleep, which I would have if I could have.

Now I hear little feet on their way downstairs, so that's the end of unobserved and undistracted.

I hope your Thanksgivings were all lovely, or, outside the USA, that your November 24ths were just super.

I sense a nap in my near future.

The telltale... what, what, WHAT?

I was just emptying the dishwasher, while waiting for the teapot to boil. Mounted on the wall to the right of my cooktop is a spice rack Mr. Sandyshoes made for me. On hooks at the bottom of it, I hang spatulas, etc. So I'm hanging up some of these utensils. The kettle whistles, I make my tea, and continue unloading clean dishes while it steeps. At some point I notice a faint ticking sound in the vicinity of the spice rack.

Tick.

What could it be? Who would care? It's barely perceptible.

Tick.

But it bothers me because I don't know what is doing it. I assume it is the spoon I see rocking back and forth on its hook a bit after I hung it up, and I go to steady the spoon.

Tick.

Not the spoon. The tick is coming from higher up, within the spice rack, somewhere between parsley and tarragon (yes, they're alphabetized. Yours aren't?).

Tick.

Maybe the change in humidity from opening the dishwasher just after it finished running is causing the wood of the spice rack to expand against the kitchen wall?

Tick.

I press on the spice rack and hold.

Tick.

Hm. That did seem like kind of a stretch. I've emptied that dishwasher hundreds of times and never noticed this before.

Tick.

The ticking is regular. I'm going to time it.

Tick. One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand,

tick.

Every four seconds. But what? From where?

Tick.

The pepper mill? I take out the pepper mill, hold it to my ear, feeling foolish now, but something is ticking. This is a question with an answer, and I want the answer, even if it's going to make me feel like a dope.

Tick.

Not the pepper mill. In the wall. I go around to the other side of the wall, which is my laundry room.

Tick.

It's even less perceptible here. Definitely on the spice rack side of the wall.

Tick.

Folks, I wish I had an end to this story. Something in my wall is still ticking. Every four seconds. Quietly, but distinctly, ticking.

I predict it will continue through tomorrow, and stop just as Mr. Sandyshoes gets home from his trip. There won't be any point in telling him about it, but I probably will. Uh-huh, he'll say. The spice rack is ticking. Sure thing. Don't worry baby, I'll get right on that.

4th grade homework is impossible

The Bean's favorite subject is "science." Under that umbrella, her class spends time on various topics in turn. The current unit is about weather, the atmosphere, etc. So she brought home a study guide that has terms she wanted me to quiz her on (humidity, greenhouse effect, front, anemometer...) and questions she should be prepared to answer (what properties can be used to describe air masses? In which layer of the atmosphere does most weather occur?).

I scanned through the guide, making sure I knew everything she was supposed to learn, plus a little extra for discussions. It's cool -- I had forgotten all about the troposphere being called that. So far, so good.

The last bit of her assignment read "Please review the symbols of a weather map and [emphasis mine] be able to predict the weather." And I thought, whoa.

She didn't understand when I told her if she really mastered that last bit she could quit school. I guess some stuff's only funny to parents.

OK, maybe only to me.

This one goes to '11

In amateur rock bands where individual egos trump balanced sound, often one musician will nudge up the volume on his amp, and in a few minutes another one will do it too, and not to be outdone a third pushes his over the volume of the others, leading the first one to realize he's not loudest any more and crank it up, etc., until everyone is at max volume and nobody can even stand to be in the same room anymore. You expect kids in garage bands to behave this way.

Same thing in Presidential primary elections. Florida moved up its primary more than a month, to January 31st (why?). South Carolina and Nevada had to follow suit (why?) and moved theirs to January 14. Iowa is having its caucus on January 3 (why?). New Hampshire's Secretary of State is now saying he'll move their primary into December 2011 if necessary to maintain first-in-the-nation status and comply with a NH state law that says theirs has to happen a full week before anyone else's (WHY?).

This is so flippin' stupid, and I haven't even gotten into the candidates, about whom humorist Andy Borowitz quips "there are people running for President I would not trust to park my car." Hm. Probably best I don't get into the candidates, except to say that Mitt Romney's inevitability train now appears to be leaving the station before the calendar year is even over.

This is so depressing I may forget to complain about the Christmas decorations already up in department stores.

That's gonna leave a mark

Help! Police!

Our town has a weekly newspaper. Like many local weeklies, ours includes selections from the week's police reports. These are always worth reading. Yes, there is sometimes news of real crime (thefts from unlocked cars, mostly) and traffic accidents, but more importantly, we have gems such as these:

A resident from North Shore Boulevard called police at 9:27 PM to report a squirrel in the house.  Police contacted the animal control officer. The resident called police back an hour later to say that the squirrel was still in her home and had scratched her. Police suggested that she contact a private company specializing in ridding homes of wildlife.

 and

A resident called police at 10:33 PM to report seeing four coyotes wearing dog tags walking in the area of Quaker Meetinghouse Road and Route 130. Police checked the area but did not see any animals. Police determined that the report was unfounded since coyotes do not wear dog tags.

Naturally, friends and family visiting from more cosmopolitan settings grab the local paper as soon as politely possible after arrival. You just never know if a "suspicious person" will turn out to be a Comcast employee, or if maybe a goose will be observed walking down Main Street at dawn, with or without dog tags.

in which kickball isn't just kickball

The Peanut's 2nd grade teacher is the same terrific person the Bean had that year. We love this teacher. One of the wonderful things she does is to have the children keep a composition notebook in which they write a letter to their parents, and the parents write back on the next page, back and forth throughout the year. I loved my letters from the Bean. They captured her personality and school day moods differently than any other way we communicated, and gave me an avenue to be playful with her, when so much school day life is sucked up by just telling kids to do things/having grown-ups tell you to do things. I've tried to continue her notebook through 3rd grade (she refused) and 4th (I get an occasional note). Maybe we'll do it in pulses, but it's a line of communication I want to keep open. Sometimes a letter does what conversation cannot.

Anyway, this is today's letter from the Peanut, for those who know her and/or would be amused:

Dear Mommy,

I dissected my paere today and it had 5 seeds inside.

We are going to the book fair next Tusday at nine therty. Thank you! Finaly! Choclit cupcakes! I love you Mommy! OK. Bad news. I got another blister on the monkey bars.

I love you!

Peanut

They have been spending the week studying "seeds and how they travel"... hence the pear dissection. Walking to school, the Peanut has held a plastic bag at the ready, gathering whatever seed-related items she could find. Garden string bean, pine cone, seed pod from the iris, all went in the bag. She was so focused on seed hunting that she almost stepped in dog shit. I wish the dog owner had been carrying a plastic bag.

Y'know... occasionally, there will be some discussion on the town level about where/when dogs are allowed to be on various town-owned properties. I always feel for the many responsible dog owners who take care that nobody will likely step in their dog's poop. But all it takes is one pile of dog shit on the freakin' sidewalk to harden my heart and ensure my vote against allowing dogs anywhere. Too bad really. If we could trust people not to be assholes, what a better world this would be.

But I digress. Monkey bars! That Peanut has been a monkey bar fiend for a couple of years now. She spends every possible recess period practicing swinging from end to end and back, and frequently comes home with serious blisters on her palms. The kid won't stop until she bleeds. Then she cries, not just because it hurts, but because she has to take some days off. She has got it in her head that recess is boring, and that the only part of the playground that's any good is the monkey bars, and other than that there's just the dumb ol' field, where some kids play kickball. Why don't you play kickball, too? I asked her. She said that no girls play kickball, but she wants to, and on Monday she is going to do it!

This is brave, because earlier this week a boy asked her why she was playing a baseball-like game with the boys in gym instead of hula hooping with the girls, and she came home pretty upset. It had never even occurred to her that she was the only girl in the game, let alone that there was anything peculiar about it. I couldn't help but remember my first day of middle school, when I sat with the boys at lunchtime because that's who my friends were, and I didn't realize until it was too late what a social gaffe I'd made. Painful, painful stuff. I'm trying to remember that she is not me, now is not then, etc., etc., but I can see how she feels different, and hurts, and I understand completely. It is how I know, too, that no matter how awkward it feels not to, she will never pick up a hula hoop and join the girls just because they are girls and she is one too. She'll pick up a hula hoop when and if she feels like freakin' hula hooping and not before, and if what the boys are doing looks more fun then that's where she'll want to be.

Today, while her sister was at soccer, we took a ball of our own and practiced kickball so she will feel ready. She made me pretend all the other players were on the field with us, and shouted out what they were doing and where we had to run, and whose turn it was to kick, and whether we were tagged out or not. Needless to say I was exhausted before the first inning was up, and when older boys in baseball uniforms showed up to use the field for their practice, I was secretly relieved. (One boy threw a ball to another, overshot him by a fair bit, and my Peanut ran and got the ball. She fired it back to the nearer boy, and her throw was perfect. I couldn't believe it. Made a nice smack into the kid's glove when he caught it, too.)

I really hope her entrance onto the 2nd grade kickball scene goes well. In the meantime, I know what to write about in our letter journal this weekend.

September, ur doin it wrong.

Yeah right. Being "present in your present" is all well and good when there's crisp, dry air, and sunshine warm enough to comfort but not so hot you're sweating before you burn your first calorie of the day. Not so easy from beneath a damp sticky air mass that hangs like a mouldering blanket over everything for days on end. Late September, and I am running air conditioners just to prevent me from pulling my remaining hair out. Who wants to buy pumpkins in this weather? I ask you.

Actually, it's getting better. I should quit my whining and focus on the fact that in a mere few months, a run of days like this will be an impossible dream. All too soon, there will be cold and damp to complain about.

So, remember Mr. Sandyshoes and I got to spend a few days in Maine at the beginning of the summer? And remember I'd said I was going to plug our hotel, etc.? Of course you don't. But we did that, and I said that. Accordingly:

We stayed at the lovely Blue Nose Inn, a pleasant stroll from central Bar Harbor, with great views of Frenchman Bay. The hotel is attractive and comfortable. There's a hot tub, steam room, and pool, which we used, and exercise equipment, which we didn't. There's a bar and a pianist playing nightly in the "Great Room," which made for an enjoyable nightcap (and when did I become someone who enjoys a "nightcap"? Is this not something one's parents used to do? Sigh.) One evening there was a wine-and-cheese reception hosted by the manager. It was interesting talking with him about the similarities and differences between the tourist-dependent, seasonal economies of Bar Harbor and Cape Cod. Don't ask me why it was interesting, because I can't remember a thing we said; I was on vacation. But I know I enjoyed the conversation, which I could not have had it been dull.

What else? We loved dinner at Cafe This Way. It's a cool setting... tables set up in a converted-garage (though it isn't, I asked) feeling space, full of books and original artwork. Hard to describe. Check their website for pictures (caution:  the font is damn near unreadable. Why do people do that?). The food was so good that we went back the next morning for an equally terrific breakfast, and will make a point to revisit it if we're ever in Bar Harbor again.  

The day before, we'd had an (eventually) delightful breakfast on the porch at the Two Cats Cafe, though it took a while to get seated, and after that a bizarrely long while before anyone took our order. We waited and waited. I was this close to leaving, but it turned out fine. I guess they were having a tough morning. A lady at the table next to us sent back her coffee because it was too hot, and her pancakes because she thought they were mushy (maybe they were, who knows. Ours were fine). Sent back coffee because it was too hot, though! Can you imagine? Steven Wright had a joke: "This pizza's too hot. I think we should send it back." Restaurant people must just shake their heads sometimes.

Something that amused us in Acadia National Park: We were parked at one of its famous natural features... Thunder Hole, I think, though the tide wasn't right for making the thundering sound it's named for... and, after climbing around on the rocks a bit, came back to the car, ready to move on.  A small group of people were gathered behind the car next to ours, pointing at something, and saying things like "ooh! Look! Right in the parking lot!" and we looked in the direction they were pointing, and there was nothing there. Unless... wait, they couldn't mean... that seagull? Ayuh, they did. A whole family of tourists was beside themselves at this incredible wildlife sighting. They all looked sane, but what the? I took a peek at their license plate: Indiana. So I assume this was the morning of the very first day of their very first Maine vacation, and that they'd arrived in darkness the night before... and that they don't have landfills where they come from.

Naturally we had way too much fun pointing out those wily, elusive seagulls to one another on the rest of the trip.  I'm told we have them here at home, too. If it's not too humid tomorrow I might try to find one.

Well shoot -- happy equinox!

I appear to have taken the summer off from blogging.  Go figure. Blogging's hard to get to with the family around all. the. time.  But now that we have settled into something of a regular schedule again (also, frankly, now that Facebook sort of sucks), I hope to be writing here a bit more.  We shall see.

So, what's been happening?  Summer happened, and I can hardly remember it already. The girls are back at school... 4th and 2nd grade are proceeding apace, and they both seem to be enjoying it.  Classmates are good, teachers are terrific, all is well. 

The Peanut did have a moment of shock and dismay this morning. She froze in the middle of clearing her breakfast dishes, and turned to me in sudden horror. "Mommy? Is childhood... is being a child just to get you to be a grownup? Because I don't want to be a grownup, ever!" Her wide blue eyes filled with tears, and she couldn't speak further. When she'd swallowed the lump in her throat she managed to get out that she never wants to have a job and have to get up in the morning and leave her home every day! So I tried to come up with a thousand cool jobs she could have. Peanut! You could have a job designing and building playgrounds! You could work at a toy company, testing toys with groups of kids! You could have a career designing dress-up costumes! You could be a singer, have concerts at night and get up late every day! You could have a job traveling to different places and writing about them! You could collect rocks and dinosaur bones! You could be an actress and pretend all the time! Jobs don't all suck. Lots of people love their jobs (humor her. Heck, humor me. I hope to love paid work someday myself. I'd say "again," but I never loved the kind I did. I really, really hope the Peanut has better luck.).

In the meantime, the Bean was rattling off a thousand reasons why she thinks being a grown-up is going to be the best thing ever.  You can drive! You can eat all the treats you want and nobody can tell you you can't! You can go wherever you want! You can read anything! You can decide everything for yourself!  And I had to agree... being a grown-up is pretty damn cool, and like her, I was eager for it even as a little girl. Maybe it's a first child thing.

One daughter can't wait for adulthood, eager for everything she'll gain; one cries at the thought of it, sad for everything she'll lose.

So, as the balance on this half of our ceaselessly spinning planet tips once again toward shorter days and longer nights, I wish for my children not to urge it on too fast, nor to mourn its progress too bitterly.  I wish it for myself as well, and for you. Be present in your present.

Happy, peaceful Autumn, everyone.

Our Independence Day came early this year... or 9 years late, maybe.

Mr. Sandyshoes and I just took a trip... on our own. Just us. No offspring. This is something we said we'd do annually, on or around our anniversary each June.  Maybe a few days, maybe just an overnight, but certainly, we said, we should get away on our own once a year, even when we have children.  We will be the kind of parents who believe our children will need time without us, as we will need time without them, we said.

(Go ahead and laugh.  It's OK.)

Well. I couldn't have left the girls with anyone, as babies. They each nursed until 16 months, for one thing, and I'd have been bereft without them, for another. It just didn't feel right until this year. Yes, our oldest is almost 9. Yes, that is a long time not to have had a few days alone with my husband. 

Over the years I'd see Facebook posts of friends with more and/or younger children than we have, heading up to Boston overnight or grabbing date time with their spouses here and there. I'd envy these friends a little. You hear all the time that it's important to do things as a couple, to jealously guard that time and MAKE IT HAPPEN or it's likely your marriage will suffer. Yeah yeah, and yeah right. How do they do it, these parents of toddlers who go away alone together?  My children were school aged before I'd ever even hired a babysitter for an evening. When the Bean was a babe and I still had a paid job, my parents filled in the child care time between Mr. Sandyshoes leaving for work late and me coming home early. It worked for a while, but when the Peanut was born, there was no way I couldn't be home with them. It was good to be at work, but it was better to be with my girls. 

Of course, one income means less money for babysitters, dates, and weekend trips... so it's sort of a reinforcing cycle.  And so here we are, with the girls 7 and 8, taking our first time together without them. I don't regret the home time one bit, but now we really should be able to do this every year. The girls are ready, we're ready, and, after all, we're the kind of parents who believe our children need time without us, just as we need time without them... right?  Right.

So, this year, Mr. Sandyshoes made the plans secretly, and on our 10th anniversary he emailed me (he was at sea) that -- surprise! -- we would be spending a few days in Maine while the girls stayed with his sister and her family, who live near Boston. Yay! This gave me some time to prepare them for Our Big Trip and Their Big Trip as separate events. They were super-excited and felt All Grown Up.

The Peanut made a brief mention of possibly missing us, then reminded herself she knew our phone numbers, so she'd be OK.

The Bean started making a packing list.  I told her I'd made one for them that she was welcome to, and she said no, thanks, she'd do it.  Ten minutes later she came to ask for it.  Ten minutes after that she said she was going to use my list, because "it looks like you spent a lot of time thinking about it" and it didn't seem to her that I'd forgotten anything. Hee! Oh Bean, after a few hundred trips, you'll get packing lists down to a science as well. I'm actually pleased to have her approval though, she's tough.

Last week we dropped them off and hit the road. Our lucky girls have the best aunt and grown-up cousins ever, and they had the time of their lives playing games and watching movies and doing the swan boats and the Museum of Science and Quincy Market and scootering through Boston Common, and they can blog about that their own selves whenever they want to, but this is MY blog, damnit and WE went to Mount Desert Island, Maine, which was just perfect.  In my next post I will plug our hotel and some of the restaurants we went to and share a couple of pictures from Acadia National Park.

In the meantime, happy Independence Day!

Happy Fathers' Day

For making sure I saw all the Marx Brothers movies; for introducing the concept of taxation while sorting through our Halloween candy; for giving me first crack at the New York Times crossword puzzle all those Sundays; for a bone dry sense of humor that can still stand to be silly; for not letting blindness, illness or infirmity get the best of you; for the gold spray painted coat hanger halo on my angel costume that one year; for all the bad puns (is that redundant?); for the custard-colored 1980 Chrysler LeBaron I drove to California and back; for "giving me away" twice, but never acting like you owned me in the first place; for being my biggest fan, thank you, Dad.  Happy Father's Day, and here's to many more.

How's 2012 -- is 2012 good for you?

We're building an addition on our little Cape Cod house. Contractors will do the things that licenses are required to do, but Mr. Sandyshoes is doing most of the rest himself. You may remember he has a full time job as an oceanographer at a university. Yes, he's on sabbatical this year; but that relieves him of teaching and faculty meetings, not of his research, which continues at a greater pace, if anything. He's actually at sea for a month-ish, as I type.

Getting a building permit was a long, complicated, expensive process, riddled with really, really boring conversations, even though it's my house and I'm supposed to be fascinated (support beams! rebar! sub-slab plumbing! Honestly, all I can manage is a Beavis-like snicker whenever anyone says "double hung.")  Eventually the permit was granted and work began.  Astute readers may remember my account of the Bean's 8th birthday festivities amid the chaos of a new septic system installation and destruction of our deck and alcove, just days before I left for our short-term move across the country. Good times.

Since then, various, usually pleasant representatives of the Board of Assessors like to come visit. "Hello," I tell them. "It's not done yet." "Oh, OK," they say, "can you give me some idea of your timetable?" I explain about Mr. Sandyshoes and the full time job, and they say gotcha, and everything seems cool. Lather, rinse, repeat.

By the way, there is nothing against the rules about taking a long time to do a permitted project, as long as work is ongoing, which, as the pit o'dirt in front of my soon-to-be-demolished garage makes manifest, it is.

When the most recent emissary came up the driveway this week, clipboard in hand, I came out to greet him as usual. "Hello," I said, cheerfully. "It's not done yet." For some reason, this one seemed kind of annoyed. "Well," he said, gesturing at our foundation, then back at his clipboard, "this doesn't look like an 'addition.' It says here, 'addition.' This just looks like a garage."

Actually, what it looks like is a garage foundation around a pit o'dirt in front of an existing garage, but let's not quibble.  What you see there, is what we've got so far. The plans for what it will become are at the Building Department. It's an addition.

I explained about the parts that, looking only at the foundation, you can't deduce will be built. I confirmed his information about our existing house.

After a short, inconclusive silence, he said, "you know, when this is all done, we're going to have to come in and look at your whole house." At which my inner Beavis struck again, but I managed to keep it at "yes, I know."

It's still not done yet. 

And, y'know, I'm sorry about that. We are not on a mission to dupe or inconvenience the Board of Assessors. It's just not finished. Believe me, nobody would be happier than I if it were. Summer's going to bring banging of hammers, screeching of power saws, and a spike in ibuprofen consumption. Also, that pit o'dirt isn't nearly as charming as it sounds.

So, you're now reading the blog of an elected official!

(Whaddya mean, "whose"?  Why I oughtta...)

And... that and $2 will get you a medium coffee. But yes! I did win a seat on my local School Committee, and am now getting into the work of being on the local School Committee, about which, as promised, I will not write in specific terms here.

Campaigning, though. That was something.  Longtime readers, you know me; you know that ordinarily, I am a bit of a loner, with a self-deprecating sense of humor and quiet, non-confrontational hobbies.  I'm just not used to talking so damn much, not to mention being interviewed and photographed and quoted and being in the newspaper and on television (just local cable, but still). For a few weeks, among the other candidates' signs, there were white-on-purple signs with my name on them all over town. People gave up their Saturday mornings to hold these signs and wave to voters. Amazing.

I spoke to everyone: Town Republicans, Town Democrats, the local fish and game club (at which "where's the rest of this moose?" went over like a lead balloon... sigh), gatherings of retirees, gatherings of parents, gatherings of first graders, gatherings of puppies. Everyone. I walked around town knocking on people's doors to talk to them. I talked in coffee shops and grocery stores, playgrounds and parking lots. Wherever a registered voter, or anyone, really, would listen to me, I talked.  More importantly, wherever anyone would talk to me, I listened. 

I got very tired sometimes, and quite sick of my own voice, and my mouth felt dry a lot. I'm sort of a worrier about health-related things; Mr. Sandyshoes and I joke about that, because it is silly. One night during all this madness I said to him, "what kind of cancer does it mean you have if your mouth is dry all the time?" and he said, basically, "the kind that comes from talking constantly for weeks on end. Now shut up."

If only.

I became necessarily, utterly, reluctantly self-absorbed. At some point during the campaign I was pulling into the grocery store parking lot, and a white-on purple sign caught my eye, and for a split second I thought, "COOL! Who got one of my signs in such an awesome location?!" Then I read the sign, which said "Please return shopping carts here," and I thought, now I have lost my mind.

It became important to get out of town for a couple hours every few days just to clear my head.

At one point Mr. Sandyshoes and the girls decided to take me out to dinner to give me a break from campaigning and talking about the election. We went to a local restaurant and were seated in a booth near the door... and proceeded to campaign and talk about the election with a steady stream of well-wishers who paused to say hello on their way out.  It was really lovely. But it was not a break.

How do you feel, people would say -- how do you think it's going? And I felt good, I really did. I was a bit concerned about being in an echo chamber of sorts; the people I spoke to almost always responded positively, but surely somewhere people were responding just as positively to a candidate with a different message, and I had no idea how many. Voters really did seem to want a change on our school board, though, and that's what panned out.

It's now time to get to the real work ahead, which feels just fine to me... and also to get back to writing here, which feels pretty good as well.  Thanks for waiting out the hiatus!