Bold the ones you've read, strike-out the ones you hated, and add your number to the tally of ones read for each.  I added some below, as it seemed logical *shrugs*



Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (149)
Anna Kareninna (132)
Crime and Punishment(121)
Catch-22 (118)
One hundred years of solitude (115)
Wuthering Heights (111)
The Silmarillion (105)
Life of Pi: A Novel(94)
The Name of the Rose (92)
Don Quixote (93)
Moby Dick (87)
Ulysses (85)
Madame Bovary (83)
The Odyssey (84)
Pride and Prejudice (84)
Jane Eyre (81)
A Tale of Two Cities (81)
The Brothers Karamazov (80)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (79)
War and Peace (79)
Vanity Fair (74)
The Time Traveler’s Wife (73)
The Iliad (73)
Emma (74)
The Blind Assassin (74)
The Kite Runner (71)
Mrs. Dalloway (70)
Great Expectations (71)
American Gods (68)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (67)
Atlas Shrugged (69)
Reading Lolita in Tehran : A Memoir in Books (68)
Memoirs of a Geisha (66) -
Middlesex (66)
Quicksilver (66)
Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (65)
The Canterbury Tales (65)
The Historian : A Novel (63)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (63)
Love in the Time of Cholera (62)
Brave New World (62)
The Fountainhead (62)
Foucault’s Pendulum (61)
Middlemarch (61)
Frankenstein (60)
The Count of Monte Cristo (59)
Dracula (59)
A Clockwork Orange (60)
Anansi Boys (58)
The Once and Future King (57)
The Grapes of Wrath (58)
The Poisonwood Bible : A Novel (57)
1984 (58)
Angels & Demons (56)
The Inferno (56)
The Satanic Verses (55)
Sense and Sensibility (56)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (56)
Mansfield Park (55)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (55)
To the Lighthouse (54)
Tess of the D’Urbervilles (54)
Oliver Twist (55)
Gulliver’s Travels (54)
Les Misérables (52)
The Corrections (53)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (52)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (52)
Dune (52)
The Prince (51)
The Sound and the Fury (51)
Angela’s Ashes : A Memoir (51)
The God of Small Things (51)
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-Present (52)
Cryptonomicon (50)
Neverwhere (50)
A Confederacy of Dunces (50)
A Short History of Nearly Everything (50)
Dubliners (50)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (49)
Beloved (50)
Slaughterhouse-Five (50)
The Scarlet Letter (49)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (48)
The Mists of Avalon (47)
Oryx and Crake : A Novel (47)
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (47)
Cloud Atlas (47)
The Confusion (46)
Lolita (46)
Persuasion (46)
Northanger Abbey (46)
The Catcher in the Rye (47)
On the Road (47)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (45)
Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (45)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (46)
The Aeneid (45)
Watership Down (45)
Gravity’s Rainbow (44)
The Hobbit (45)
In Cold Blood : A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences (44)
White Teeth (44)
Treasure Island (45)
David Copperfield (45)
The Three Musketeers (44)
Days of War Nights of Love
The Princess Bride
Starship Troopers
The Handmaid's Tale
Huckleberry Finn

Ethics bowl is the oddest gem, really, hard to believe it has been hidden in the midst of this university I attend for five whole years and I never noticed.

We argue what is morally right, based upon a variety of factors, among them the rights of the individuals involved (whether natural rights or state granted rights) and a number of other factors, making a suggestion pertaining to the case based on the moral issue at hand. 

Its like.....cultural deconstruction, or reverse engineering for cultural thought....I am almost giddy with the result of reading through a plethora of cases from the past few years, along with their answers. 

Could I do this for a living please?

The only hard part is deciding which case to pick and take under my wing...the three in my stack are on on fair trade and the balance of indigenous support versus bottom lines, one on the Buddhas of Bamiyan (statues demolished by the Taleban) and cultural preservation, and one on the unpaid cost of women's work in relation to GDP.

*dies*  I like them all.

You're The Guns of August!

by Barbara Tuchman

Though you're interested in war, what you really want to know is what
causes war. You're out to expose imperialism, militarism, and nationalism for what they
really are. Nevertheless, you're always living in the past and have a hard time dealing
with what's going on today. You're also far more focused on Europe than anywhere else in
the world. A fitting motto for you might be "Guns do kill, but so can
diplomats."


Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Pardon me while I distract myself from the subtle aspects of rational expressions for a few moments....

Last night we went out for a rare few hours of freedom after the kids went to bed, to a going away party for a friend of my husband.  We drank a bunch of really nice wines and chattered with people who don't need to be asked if they remembered to put on clean underwear this morning for a bit.  Mr K drank more than me so he was a bit louder and schwilly and all, which always makes me smile.  The house we were in was effing fantastic...it was built in the 1920's, and the owner/builder set the place up on a hill in Dayton, so we could see downtown and all the lights twinkling. 

I was bemused to discover that even at my motherly stage of life, I could still manage to compell a drunk ole punk guy to drape himself over me in the kitchen of the house, making me wonder whether to move away and not stand there worrying about what my husband would say, or stay there and spare the drunk dude's feelings, which were presumably all fragile and drunkenlike, heh. 

In the end I stood there while he made all sorts of exclamations about what I was wearing and WOW I had been to San Francisco (he was from there I think) and OMG why did I not smoke cigarettes so he could give me one?  I eventually manuevered to the side and escaped with the lame excuse of obtaining a tortilla chip.

My (sort of) drunk husband was then greeted with amazement by the punk guy, who exclaimed "You are married to her???!!You fuck this woman every night??"  I nearly died laughing as I choked on the sip of the wine in my class I had just taken, as Mr K replied "Yup."  It made me kinda nostalgic, just the open nature of this old punk guy...it was like people I used to hang out with all the time, where you just say whatever crosses your mind and you aren't an ass unless you really cross serious lines like grabbing the persons genitalia or something. 

We woke up this morning and I felt relatively fine but kinda slow, Mr K was loads worse, headaches and grumpy sluggishness.  I had a brilliant idea...since we rarely take days off of school (ever, not even "normal" holidays....our little secret ingredient to ensure we can take off for fun days or sick days or whatever), why not take today off and find a holiday for the kids to celebrate that they could learn from and have a day to play a bit?  Mondays are short days anyway, so no big teaching time loss.  Heck, even "Mismatching Socks Day" could be fun, eh?

Even better we had "Constitution Day," so I printed off the whole thing, even the Bill of Rights, and Hershaw recited it while his siblings listened with relatively blank looks on their faces before drawing pictures of the forefathers in a huge blank white book.  There were a few extra butterflies and shiny hearts than I remember being in the original depictions that accompany the Constitution, but this was their project, right?  Not like a rainbow or two wouldn't cheer up ole frumpy bored-looking Thomas Jefferson anyway.

We left for classes as usual around lunchtime, feeling all smug and happy....like we were the coolest homeschoolish parents in the world.  Don't worry, I am sure someone will stick a toothbrush down a heating vent or smash banana on the wall as per usual tomorrow.  But today....woot!  Score one for the parents team!  ^__^

And um...heres where I catch up, presumably.

Two weeks down, on the verge of a third.  First week was introducing the kindergardener to school, along with the normative years for the second grader and fifth grader.  This was especially interesting since Dream is the excessively detail-oriented child in our house, who has elaborate rituals (most of them in her head) for mundane things, and the vast majority of her life is spent mitigating her heightened sense of spatial understanding and her rigid expectations of the world.  Catastrophic at first in regards to school, but after a few days of rolling around in a tantrum on the floor over not liking phonics, not being able to write the "D" in her name (heh, there is a d in her non-internet name too, lol), she sorted herself out, and as long as we keep her laughing she is the most enthusiastic student ever to grace the halls of our homeschool.

Hershaw and Muse settled into the school year much easier, and my establishment of both a system of responsibility charts and a rigid school day helped us all transition nicely.  Hershaw is doing almost entirely self led work, which gives me the hope that he won't get to college and wonder why the professors don't write the notes on the board in outline form for him anymore. 

The second week was comprised of a) Mr. K and I heading out to our university studies, introducing a whole new schedule involving the taking of buses and approximately 2.5 less hours of sleep a night, b) the start of the ballet term, and c) the beginning of my mother actually being responsible for the kids for more than a grocery store trip.  A and  B are running relatively smoothly, although Bean dropped ballet once he realized he wasn't going to watch his brother dance (yup, he actually believed we signed him up to watch Hershaw grand jete around the room).

C.....well...C has me stressed out to the point of vomiting and/or throwing myself before a slow moving train.  My mother has a problem with following the basic constructs that hold our house together on a day to day basis, meaning she does whatever project she damn well pleases under the guise of "helping" us. 

This worked fine when it was just the first week...I could fix whatever hair-brained scheme she had undertaken usually by the end of the day, and I still had time to unleash my domestic goddess on the rest of the house at regular intervals, ensuring that we had clean floors, clean countertops, fresh food, and clean laundry.  But ooohh-wah-oh that second week was quite a dropping of the other shoe, no?

Now I have less time to manage it all, and between Mr K and myself, we expect the third adult in the household to, at bare minimun, maintain things to a semblance of order when we leave the household in her care.  The smooth functioning of things here (and my effing sanity, people!) relies on basic standards being met, things being done in the relatively normal fashion, etc.  With one kid, you can change it up I guess, and do whatever.  Two, sure.  Once you get to three, scheduling becomes a bit more of a necessity, at four, you cling to your lists and planners as a lifeline, and at five, total chaos breaks out when you wreck the system.

My mother is the wrench in my gears, apparently.

I won't go into all the grisly details, but suffice it to say I have arrived home to tiny children who have been allowed to nap for half an hour, with no attempts to coax them back to sleep, meaning they are miserable at dinnertime, and in O's case, usually fall asleep around or before then, ensuring they will not go to sleep until 2 AM.  I have found my pajamas and undershirts hung on hangers while my mother complains that we are running out of things to hang clothes up with.  She has handed stacks of laundry to small children to put away unsupervised, meaning that I will find them in the dirty clothes hamper or crammed under a shelf somewhere.  Hershaw capitalizes on her historic inattentiveness, playing Runescape or surfing the internet unobserved (not realizing that his sisters or the history will tattle on him, heh).  And yesterday.....I came back from the grocery store to find our 20 month old playing next to the street while the other kids were playing up the street by their friends house, and she was sitting up the stairs, on the porch, in a chair, and she moves slow, being old and all, so O could have been a hood ornament before she even got past the first concrete step.

We have argued so bad she almost had to go home, which was actually impossible since we are double booked on classes, and her being there for overlap times is vital.  I just....gah.  I am stuck with her here, nailed into this school quarter, and nothing is changing anytime soon.

So when you see me not writing or calling or returning e-mails, it is probably because I am trying to make up for all the stuff that is being screwed all to hell around here, or I have finally snapped and am in a corner somewhere, drooling on myself.

Hershaw's birthday party took over the whole day, leaving little room for breathing or reflection until now, but WOW!  It was so much fun!

Let me give you the recipe, so you can replicate it if you like:

One clean house, including all of the kids' rooms, minus the kitchen
One and a half tables of yummy food and some sparkeling punch
A handful of friends and family in attendance (including some rare ones that have long been missed)
2 cups happy laughter and big grins
1 box of candles that spell "Happy Birthday"
1 cake made to the birthday boy's specifications
1 dash little sisters for spice
1 toddler that is so excited she falls asleep and misses the party but is then up all night (optional)

Mix well and let simmer for hours, and be sure to tuck the leftovers up in your heart for a rainy day.

Hershaw had an amazing time...he spent his much of his time getting to hang out...really hang out with his friends, something we haven't had much time to do lately.  He loved showing his treehouse to everyone and feeling super cool when he and his friends hung out for a bit on Youtube, showing eachother videos of bands they liked and watching funny short video blogs and stuff.  It meant so much to him that two of his friends he hasn't seen in a long time came...it was like a big ole reunion today!

Just...plain....awesomeness.  Thank you to everyone that came, and eveyone that had Hershaw in your thoughts today who couldn't come.  He feels very very loved.  :)

My parents helped so much with everything that I am able to get to work at a decent hour, with no big messes to clean up or the sense of exhaustion that descends over me after parties sometimes.  Sure, I am tired as hell..I cooked and baked for four solid hours earlier without even stopping to eat and then people arrived before I had managed to shower or change, lol.....but it didn't matter.  We had a fantastic time, there were no major injuries (well, Dream scraped her knees and forehead outside, hehe) and they are all happily asleep now. 

Wheeeeeeeee!

Anti-veganism is becoming a veritable disease these days....and now "buddhists" are even clamboring on the hate-wagon:

Read the article too...it is amazing how we don't look at other cases of malnourishment as being "meat-based" diets in the head line.

Just one year ago, we celebrated the near-dismissal of all our credit card debt.  We were careful for so long, waiting for tax returns when we could give the companies and their ostentatious fees the ole heave-ho when we paid them off and cut up their little plastic demons. 

Then my funding at WSU ended.

See, we have been playing a dangerous game for years now, eking out a living on the backs of student loans, borrowing against my future income.  That worked for a long time, but the funding ran out before I graduated, and we still had two years to go.  Sooooo...we opened up the credit cards again to buy groceries, gas, pay ballet bills for the kids, and even float the utilities along.  If I were a finance major, I am sure I would have imploded inside.  Luckily I am an anthropology major.

Then the "living on credit cards" thing worked for awhile too, until the monthly payments rivaled our food bill or our house payment, and all the cards were maxed out.  Sadly we have little by way of concrete goods to show for it, excepting the laptop we had to replace for my schoolwork, to the tune of Best Buy's 21% APR.  The rest went into bellies and kept the lights on.

Now, we are at a point where we cannot even pay our credit card bills at all, so we have been scrambling around to devise a new plan, a better plan, a save-our-asses-before-we-get-sued-plan.  The first thing we did was stop paying the credit card bills, which really mystifies the companies after our 5 or more years of good dealings and timely payments with most of them.  They call, sometimes multiple times in one day, to tell me I have a bill, and then proceed to ask me to pay it.  Most of the time I am nice, simply telling them we will have more money once we figure this all out, so why not let a momma chill and not call her 8 times a day?  Other times they start yelling and being all derogatory and I just hang up on them.  Asshats.

The second part of our plan involved casting our net into the world of private educational loans, where we could borrow up to THIRTY! THOUSAND! DOLLARS! for expenses related to school, in this case, room and board related for us.  This got me really excited...I figured I would get a loan, pay off all the effing credit companies, and rebuild our credit with a good loan we would pay off each month, with no more fees being racked up (close to $100 a month for nearly every card we can't make a payment on including late fees and over the limit fees as they keep tacking it on to the account....and we have close to ten credit cards). 

Then they told us we needed a co-signer.  Slumping, I called my mother in defeat, explaining we were screwed and without a paddle and all that.  She tried her best, both her and my dad, but since they are retired and taking care of my grandfather (and living with him to do this, meaning they gave up their house) the banks all said nope, bringing us back to square one.  We already got our lights turned back on by my husband's mother and her husband, who both gave us a loan to pay the electric bill after it got shut off (and we had to run a cord across two houses to a neighbors to have one light in the living room and cook dinner in our firepit, ha!...but I digress and that is another story), so we can't ask them.  Being only children...well...ya, not brothers and sisters who might actually have a savings or own their own homes and be able to cosign.  Totally screwed.

So we hatch Plan C, which involved registering my husband for classes at WSU, because he can take out student loans!  This will work rather well, and will not only cover the missing chunk my dropped funding left out for my tuition, it will give us some money to live on for a little while longer, so I can get through the last three quarters of my undergrad and graduate, moving me into graduate school and graduate school funding.....more loans!  More debt!  OMG are we effing insane?!  Yes!  But we are alive!  And with food and shelter!

But wait...it gets better.  I received a letter offering me a Home Depot card, which I tossed aside to the back of the desk, laughing because we are already in dept up to our eyeballs so I couldn't imagine why a company would offer me credit at all.  Then the washing machine broke.

We do approximately three loads of laundry a day, more if cloth diapers need to be washed or someone pees the bed.  I have gone to the laundry mat before, and to do enough laundry for three days of our normal washing, I would spend 120$, so by the time the week was done, I would have shelled out as much as it costs to buy a washer.  We looked at each other, then looked at the letter, and nodded solemnly.

Would you believe they extended the credit to us?  I am shocked as much as I am relieved.  I mean...it is plainly obvious that we are drowning in credit cards we have lived on...are they really that kind?  Then I flipped over the letter to read the 24% APR.  Ahhhhhhh, now I get it.  New washing machine arrives hopefully tomorrow, they had to special order the inexpensive energy efficent one I picked out, since all the other po' people had bought the stock while they were on sale.

On the bright side, we will be able to wash clothes.  On the icky, dark, smelly, slimy side...we have plunged one more nail into our credit coffin and I have the sinking feeling it will take upwards of 20 years to recover. 

Good thing I have a sense of humor, eh? 

It helps that we haven't been treated like credit lepers by our friends and family for the most part.  My mom sends me coupons, and she is coming this fall to watch the kids so I can get a job while going to school.  My husband's mom has offered to watch them as well.  AND...someone I know from the online game I was doing research on, all the way in Canada, sent us two huge boxes of food...rice, pasta, sauce, cookies...even toothbrushes and soap!  I was just....flabberghasted.  Marc...wherever you are right now...thank you so much for that. ^__^ 

Our neighbors even banded together and shoved us out for a night on our own to eat dinner, even all chipping in to give us the money for our food and drinks, on top of watching all five of our little monkeys so we could go.  In the process, they helped our marriage to not crumble under the personal and financial strain it was being crushed by.

Mere footnotes in our lives....but all of it, every last bit of it, bolsters my faith in the good we can do as human beings, regardless of the economic leeches we have let credit companies become or how little American society supports working families.  All the little acts of kindness made me realize that all of us down here on the bottom, huddling together while the bigwigs trade bits of our lives away and make money off of people being poor.....we are stronger than them through our ability to have compassion and take care of our own.

Thank you, each and every one of you, for not letting that faith die inside me.  Without it, I am toast, and I know it.

X-posted to my blog on myspace coz I am too damn lazy to write something this long for over there too.

I am a bit surprised at the productivity of this Monday, but it was nice to have a day where things got done.  Laundry is getting through alright, a bit slower now that the washer broke again and it stops in the middle of the spin cycle and thus takes twice as long to do everything.  New washer soon with the last of our credit we are not paying back until September, with any luck

I found myself thinking all nostalgically again today, but I steeled myself, practicing my version of tribal fusion dancing and cleaning up the play room.  It was silly, you would have laughed I swear.  An earwig fell on me and I nearly lost it, but Hershaw got a kick out of me screaming and jumping around.  Of all the bugs in the world, spiders even, earwigs are the worst.  The WORST!  But I survived, heard Rise Against, and made some tea. 

So...sort of skirting right around all the thoughts in my head, not permitting them to exist.  Talked to two good friends today, one directly, one indirectly.  It...made me feel a modicum better.

Parents come in 2 weeks.

I was in Meijers yesterday, trolling through the pet supplies and then the office supplies, picking up random things like pencils and erasers, when I turned my cart and looked up, blinking as I saw children who used to be friends of my daughters.  They were with their father Curt, one of the people who used to be in a community built mainly around the mommas who were friends.

I gasped inwardly, but felt too awkward to say anything so I just pushed my cart on towards the water aisle, hanging my head as I felt in that moment the defeated feeling I always feel when I think back to what it was, what it could have been, and how it all ended.  I didn't look back, and he didn't say anything either.  I didn't stick around to hear if the girls called my daughter by name.

When did the community really fall apart?  Was it when we got the coxsackie virus and unknowingly got everyone sick at Hershaw's 6th birthday, and Tuesday jumped on the chance to declare social anathema on us so I wouldn't challenge her wise woman hegemony anymore? 

Maybe it was when the Sister Circles just started becoming redundant, and people stopped coming as much.  Perhaps it was all the growing tensions that blew small issues out of proportion, making our hip alternative to the suburban mom scene seem so ironic...and so much like all the things we tried not to be.  Maybe it was when backstabbing became a spectator sport, and low self esteems drove gossip like fossil fuels drive our economies.

Perhaps it ended further for me when Linda, the mother of the two girls I mention above got mad over something minor and used it as a means to shove me over the edge of the social precipice, never having liked me to begin with.....or maybe it was when Ali and I had our falling out, and the whole thing went to hell.  Ali was the last piece of the puzzle...the last connection I had to any of those people who attended parties with catty smiles and knitted tongues.  I felt relieved at the time...two years ago next month...when I did not have to see them anymore, to feel out-of-place at a public gathering because I loved Ali and didn't want to ditch the rest of them on account of her.

Or maybe that was none of it...maybe we were just too close to something real and positive and amazingly powerful that we killed it ourselves before we had to commit to it...before we gave over our hearts and built a whole new world with our combined energies.  Maybe I was just incredibly naive to think that we had a chance, that we were able to craft a community to replace all the PTAs and Soccer Mom's organizations where we didn't quite fit in.

Some days lately, I fear my nostalgia might swallow me whole as I look back on what we had done here in Dayton...what had started to grow before we hacked it down like so many choking weeds.  Is it thinking of what has been lost though...or for what we could have been? 

I would like to think that it isn't impossible to have a community like that.....like the one I knew when I was traveling, like the one I knew just over two years ago.  Hope springs eternal, but damn....its hard to keep believing sometimes.

Yes yes, its Linkin Park *shudder* but if I hear this damn song on the radio one more time I am gonna turn it off before the tears spring out of my eyes and into my gas station coffee.  It sums up precisely how I feel, and....that is just...ugh.  Effing Linkin Park.

"In The End"

(It starts with)
One thing / I don’t know why
It doesn’t even matter how hard you try
Keep that in mind / I designed this rhyme
To explain in due time
All I know
time is a valuable thing
Watch it fly by as the pendulum swings
Watch it count down to the end of the day
The clock ticks life away
It’s so unreal
Didn’t look out below
Watch the time go right out the window
Trying to hold on / but didn’t even know
Wasted it all just to
Watch you go
I kept everything inside and even though I tried / it all fell apart
What it meant to me / will eventually / be a memory / of a time when I tried so hard
And got so far
But in the end
It doesn't even matter
I had to fall
To lose it all
But in the end
It doesn't even matter
One thing / I don’t know why
It doesn’t even matter how hard you try
Keep that in mind / I designed this rhyme
To remind myself how
I tried so hard
In spite of the way you were mocking me
Acting like I was part of your property
Remembering all the times you fought with me
I’m surprised it got so (far)
Things aren’t the way they were before
You wouldn’t even recognize me anymore
Not that you knew me back then
But it all comes back to me
In the end
You kept everything inside and even though I tried / it all fell apart
What it meant to me / will eventually / be a memory / of a time when I tried so hard
And got so far
But in the end
It doesn’t even matter
I had to fall
To lose it all
But in the end
It doesn’t even matter
I've put my trust in you
Pushed as far as I can go
For all this
There’s only one thing you should know
I've put my trust in you
Pushed as far as I can go
For all this
There’s only one thing you should know
I tried so hard
And got so far
But in the end
It doesn’t even matter
I had to fall
To lose it all
But in the end
It doesn’t even matter

This time, four, five? years ago, was when Sean died.  But death is not only very permanent, it is well....boring.  I think people's lives should be celebrated by how they lived.

Sean was the second person I met in Dayton, and the first person I really felt understood me back then in town.  One night, I decided to have him and Dave pierce my lip and nose, so we headed out to a record shop in New Carlisle to do it in their back room among the cases of N2O and dusty bins of records and posters.

I watched Sean a moment as he pulled on his rubber gloves and prepared the hollow needle and the lip ring.

"Do you ever miss it....being in SF?"

He looked up, his face breaking into a smile "Of course...but I know something you don't"

"Oh?"

"I am going back...I always do"  He picked up the bottle of Bactine and cleaned my lip. 

I closed my eyes as the needle went in, the familiar electric shock stretching through my nerve endings as my body responded and I breathed deep.  The steel ring followed, and the skin swelled warm around the intrusion as I opened my eyes and looked into his.  "Lucky bastard...we should make bets on who makes it home first"

"Heh...you're on.  I make it home first you owe me a 40 oz, alright?"

I rolled my eyes.  "Fi-ne......and you owe me one if I make it back first"

He laughed and I proceeded to get my nose pierced, then we all went to a pizza place in town where I proceeded to try and eat something with tomato sauce while my nose and lip throbbed in unison.  Hershaw, who was four months old, batted lovingly at my face, unaware that my lip and nose area had become a swollen mass of pain.

Years went by, and I took out my nose ring after many infections.  I was reluctant to take the lip out for many years..it mattered to me to keep it.  Eventually it eroded at my teeth and gum line, and I conceded to remove it, but I still stick my tongue in the small depression it left behind sometimes when I think of him.

He made it home first, and won the bet.  And now...every year I try and pour out a bit of swill in his name, even if I drink wine or rum instead of 'foties....into the earth where he is.

July is going rather well, considering how life had been going and feeling and happening all in a blur.  Our kids were hijacked by our neighbors on Monday, who demanded that we go out to dinner and leave them to play in the water for a bit while we went to dinner.  Dumbfounded, we set out to do just that.....

At a local place that specializes in having vegan options (including vegan pie, yay!) we were able to sit FOR MORE THAN FIVE MINUTES uninterrupted, having a conversation.  Then, we ate all our food, and didn't have to share with anyone.  And (here's the kicker) not one person had to be told not to do anything, at all!  Just me and Mr K and our food, then drinks at the bar where he works so he could prove he really has a wife and didn't make me up.

We came back to find that 1) Bean had already pooped, 2) O hadn't even cried, 3)all the kids were uber exhausted and ready for bed.  OMG, YES!

Movie night was declared, and we opened up Big Fish, made popcorn and remembered (again) why we love each other so damn much.  Mr. K and I stayed up for a while after and talked about why we are so different, and how our perceptions shape how we feel on a day to day basis.  And...well, we had pink eye, but we didn't know it yet.  Our eyes just itched and we chalked it up to being all misty eyed over the night.

I am sure my simple prose isn't enough to impart how important this whole evening was, so I won't fall flat trying.  Suffice it to say it was an evening among evenings....to be remembered and cherished.

Well, I hope you all didn't think I was dead or anything.

Coz I wasn't....I was just hibernating.

I sank to the deep deep deep of a depression sea, came up for air, and now I am breathing easier and playing catch-up for all the stuff that piled up while I was looking out of the fishbowl my life had become.....including this journal.

Soooooo...lets see. Hershaw is almost eleven, I am almost 29 (permanently, heh), Muse is seven, Dream is five, Bean is three and O is a whopping 18 months. Remember...when I was still writing, she was a wiggly little baby? She is still wiggly, but um...well, less so.

The three oldest kids do ballet (in season), and coming up this fall, all three of them will be officially enrolled in our e-school homeschool. They excel at working together when they want to, and being each others worst enemies when they don't.

I am almost done with my degree, and I killed my honors project just to have my advisor revive it by neatly organizing it all and telling me to write a 35 page paper on the cognitive value of breastmilk. This is....amazingly less daunting than involving people and qualitative reports for me on the attachment parenting thing, and the Second Life project was going a bit...um....bad. And that is an understatement.

Anyway....two years are up, we still can't afford to buy the house, and the creditors are coming to collect on all the groceries and utility bills we charged. We are undaunted though, and are hoping that sending Mr. K back to school this fall will at least get us some excess loan funds to consolidate that mess, while getting him a professional degree. The way we figure it...we will just be two working fools with an au pair and two degrees and loan repayments of like....1000$ a month?...so our standard of living won't drastically rise or lower, we will just be able to actually pay all the bills. Which, is damn fine with me.

All in all, life is doing well. Our family is adopting a soldier to send letters and packages to, which I hope will not only be an educational experience for the kids to be able to put energy and effort into, but that it will teach them that while we may not support the politics of the war, we do support the men and women stuck over there doing their job. Compassion is a good thing to cultivate regardless.

But before I eat up your entire friend's page..... ^___^

...but Bean is listening to this on the satellite lullaby station right now.

Sharing is good. :)




Evening Falls

When the evening falls and the daylight is fading,
From within me calls - could it be I am sleeping?
For a moment I stray, then it holds me completely.
Close to home - I cannot say.
Close to home feeling so far away.

As I walk there before me a shadow
From another world, where no other can follow.
Carry me to my own, to where I can cross over...
Close to home - I cannot say.
Close to home feeling so far away.

Forever searching; never right, I am lost
In oceans of night. forever
Hoping I can find memories.
Those memories I left behind.

Even though I leave will I go on believing
That this time is real - am I lost in this feeling?
Like a child passing through, never knowing the reason.
I am home - I know the way.
I am home - feeling oh, so far away.

.....but my husband lets me sleep in, so when my brain rambles at 3AM, I can get up and spill it . July (yes, I KNOW it is now August) has been an odd anniversary for me for a few years now...three?four? I am terrible at remembering the actual passage of time, but great at keeping memories of people and moments clear.

My friend Sean died in July, four or five years ago. I wasn't with him, or even privvy to his death until months after it occured. It is probably best that way.

The last time I saw him, he was visiting our house we had over in old neighborhood, one populated almost entirely by old people who rarely left their houses. He had brought his daughter Zoe over to play with our kids (Hershaw was 4, Muse was 1 or so) while we got to catch up a bit. His HepC was getting worse, and I alternated feeding him food he refused with herbal tinctures that he dutifully took straight down his throat (a feat of bravery that did not gounnoticed by Hershaw, who took his in juice).

Sean was tired, coughing a lot. Every time he coughed I gave him another squirt of garlic and habanero. He laughed and complained that "my herbs tasted like dog balls" but he took them. I watched him do all of the dishes in the sink while I protested, and I saw him look out the window over the sink to where Zoe and Hershaw were playing, running circles around Muse who laughed madly. I could tell he was waxing wistful in the way I was always able to tell he was.

"You have a really nice house here...your life as a house punk is all sparkely and shit, isn't it?" He coughed and turned away. I kicked him in the leg.

"It is a nice life, Sean....you could have a life just like it if you would stop fucking things around, you know."

He looked at me sadly then, and in a moment he seemed decades older.

"I....couldn't ever lie like this."

He never did. HepC and lung cancer got the better of him, untreated and ignored for far too long. A squatter's death, as it were.

I think he realized that living a short time missing the small joys of settled life is far better than living a long time mourning the days when you used to be a nomad. Sean was like a wild animal...unable to ever get the 9-5 and wear the suit and tie, punching a clock and playing a game he knew the rules to all too well.

He preferred to have intermittent heartbreak, rather than the long, aching, drawn-out kind. Sean wasn't meant for domestication, and he knew it better than anyone who met him ever could.

If there is some sort of afterlife, I hope he is somewhere in the wind, wild and free. Thats how I think of him now anyway, every July. Some years I even remember to pour out a bit of beer for him in on the ground.

Let me get this straight....we, as a species with supposed higher intelligence, are expending energy, time, and money to adopt frozen embryos discarded by the processes of in-vitro fertilization.  Note that this is instead of adopting living, breathing, starving, homeless, orphaned, needy, children.

Behold the Snowflake Children.

*sigh*

If this doesn't signal the end of rational thought in regards to science as we once knew it, I don't what else does.

This is x-posted to my LJ, MySpace, and my blog on Blogger, if anyone cares. I don't generally like to be so lazy, but this warrants sharing on a broader scope.

Muse and Dream (our two eldest daughters) have entered into a cleaning strike. It all started innocently enough, with me asking them to "clean up the damn room already" and they were all "no" and I was all "get cracking" and then they did it, it was done, and they were free to go about their lives....

Until I moved a dresser in their room to allow the closet door to open easier, and I found that a gazillion (yes Mr. Bush, that is larger than a Brazillian) pieces of toys and general debris were shoved into the crevice behind it.

"Um.......girls?"
"We didn't do it!"
"It is your room....who else could have done it?" (I rolled my eyes here)
"Our brother did it.."
"Did not!"
"Did too!"
"Did not not not!"

At this point I dissolved into a puddle of tantrum and kicked my legs until they cleaned the room and made me a nice relazing mug of tea.

Ha.

It was really just a small pile, perhaps twenty or so items. I explained that they could probably clean it easily and without much further ado, and then life's fun would continue on uninterrupted. The alternative, if they refused to do this, was to stay in the room until it was cleaned....as long as it took. Thinking this was adequate, I turned on my heel and went downstairs to check if any crack coffee was still in the pot.
There wasn't.

"We aren't doing it!" I heard in a chorus of small voices coming down the stairs. "EVER!"

Four days have passed now, and the room is yet to be cleaned. They have stuck to their guns, refusing not only to clean up the small mess, but have since pulled out more.

Putting away laundry has become a dangerous task, what with the picket lines and mountains of plastic and stuffed animals blocking my way. They are not moved by my claims that there are wonderful things to do outside, computer games to play, museums to visit....for Bob's sake, Riverscape to go to!

Somehow all my discussions about peaceful protests and sticking up for what you believe have sunk in.....TO MY DETRIMENT!!! (it isn't the first time)

*sigh*

Apparently, I am the "Man," the "System," the "Powers That Be."

Fuck.

Muggy day today...not quite hot, just unbelievably moist.

I desperately want a shower, and I think this has been a wish for a few days now...there just never seems to be the time until after the kids go to bed, but I can't stand night time showers...they make my hair dry all wonky.

We picked up our local organic box yesterday from Milan at Olympia Foods.  It was bigger than I expected!  Full of wheat grass, sunflower sprouts, kale, tomatoes, cukes, onions, mustard greens, lettuce, and wee baby squashes and carrots that looked almost too cute to be real and edible.  Yum!

I got seitan (hail seitan!) at Olympia too, so we could make it up with all the new veggies and rice.  And next week....a mere 7 days away....we get more veggies delivered! 

They are having a raw potluck at the farm at the end of this month....I can't wait to go.  Anyone know of any neat raw party foods I can make that are not too expensive?  (other than the requisite veggie tray of course)  I am looking for something that can be a bit complicated, but keep in mind I do not have a dehydrator (although I can set the oven low) or a food processor.  I do have a blender and I improvise well.