Sweet Home Chordata

I'm back!  Oh oh oh I'm back!  I just spent a week -- let me say it a little louder: A WEEK! -- at my parents' house for Thanksgiving.  But I am home now and happy to be here.

When I am at my parents' house I always seem to have the self-discipline of an abalone.  I haven't been a paragon of self-discipline lately anyway, but I can at least claim a place in the chordate phylum.  Let's say I have the self-discipline of a salamander in my own home.  But at my parents' house I find myself saying, "Jamie, it's 12:45am and you haven't finished the rosary yet.  Why are you sitting here playing Lemmings?"  "Jamie, if you don't do laundry tonight the boys will have nothing to wear tomorrow." [The key to manageable air travel with three small boys is packing light -- may I tell you that I packed for four people in a medium-sized duffel bag plus a backpack each for the two bigger boys and me?]  "Jamie, if you keep eating pecan pie you're going to be The Abalone That Ate Phoenix."  And I try to muster the backbone to do the responsible adult thing -- turn off the computer, start the laundry, close the fridge -- but backbone is in short supply over in phylum Mollusca. 

These are things I did at my parents' house:

• drove and drove and drove through endless faceless exurbia with my children in the back seat saying, "You're in my space!" "No, you're in my space!" until I thought I would have to get out of the car and run away if I saw another Home Depot (then I remembered that I was in The Land of No Sidewalks and would likely get creamed by one of the ubiquitous SUVs (Solipsistically Übersized Vehicles) if I attempted to run anywhere)
  
  
• started a conversation with my father about homeschooling (stupid!  stupid stupid I astound myself with my own stupidity!) in which I heard -- again -- that I am consigning my children to lives of maladjustment because all the education higher-ups he knows say that homeschooled children can't hack conventional schools, only they say it off the record because otherwise they might lose their jobs (and because we might be able to have a real conversation about published data instead of an overwrought lecture based on hearsay and speculation), and of course they have no biases because they're the best in their field.  I was polite.  I am a model of restraint.

-- hold on a minute while I break out my imaginary flyswatter to vanquish the snarky bug that bit my salamander tail.  I will now attempt to be more pleasant --

• I also played guitar with my brother and drank coffee with my sister and went to a fun songwriters' circle with my husband (and brother and SIL).
  
  
• And I found something (on sale) to wear to my husband's office party on Saturday.  (I still have glitter in my eyebrows from the clingy black dress that didn't make the cut.  I was hemming and hawing until I took off the dress and a cloud of glitter settled around me.  I cannot abide glitter.)
  
  
• I took Christmas gifts for most of my side of the family in my medium-sized duffel bag, meaning one less post office trip in the busy season.
  
  
• I watched my family enjoying my children.  That's what it's all about, right?

So now I am home and mostly unpacked and reveling in a broadband connection (my parents' internet connection is approximately as effective as a tin can on a string).  Morning school is mostly finished and the floors are clean, and this afternoon we're going to go to the library (on foot! through the park that we can walk to! maybe I will do a little happy dance on the sidewalk because I'm so glad it's there) and get ready for our St. Andrew's Day celebration.  I have to find the saltire and whip up a vegetarian haggis (I was going to post the link but I can't find my recipe online today.  LMK if you'd like it and I'll type it in.  I don't make real haggis because I find instructions like "boil a sheep's lungs, using the windpipe as a steam vent" too off-putting) and a batch of shortbread.  I just happen to have a rutabaga on hand so we can have our neeps and tatties too.  Care to join  us?

All right, my quest for the right vegetarian haggis recipe has kept me sitting here long enough.  I'm off to put in an Old Blind Dogs CD and figure out what happened to Joe's pants.  Life is full of mysteries, I'm telling you.