Light and Momentary

Quickly

Things I am doing this afternoon:

1. Reading chapter 9 in my multilevel modeling book.
2. Reading chapter 10 in same.
3. Revising two sections of the dissertation.
4. Tapping with a teeny mallet on the mostly impervious shoulders of Mt. Laundry. (Which is to say, I'm going to fold clothes for 15 minutes.)

Things I am not doing this afternoon:

1. Checking my email. At all.
2. Ditto Google Reader.
3. And Facebook.

Pinky swear, internet. Summer's racing by here.

They make me laugh.

From my husband, as I attempted to wheedle him into coming over and dispatching the beetle (a nasty black creepy-crawly beetle) I had trapped under my book: "You've been through childbirth five times and you can't handle a bug?"

From my 7yo: "I'm heading outside. Hold all my calls."

It cracks me up when my children drop Calvin & Hobbes quotes into conversation like that. The funniest one ever was when my oldest son (come to think of it, he was 7 at the time) asked me casually if he could have plastic surgery. "What kind of plastic surgery?" I asked him.

Deadpan, he said, "I'd like to have a third eye implanted in the middle of my forehead."

Equally deadpan, I handed him the yellow pages and said, "Why don't you look and see if there are any listings for doctors who specialize in that?" Then I stepped into the next room and laughed so hard I had to lean on the wall to keep from falling over.

I have noticed that people tend to have one of two reactions to this story. Either they think it's hilarious, or they think it's ghastly. You won't hurt my feelings if you belong to the latter group. If it makes you laugh, I'll have to see if I can dig up the picture of Alex at Christmas that year, wearing his gift from my aunt (who found it hilarious and wanted to help).

Seven Quick Takes: Dead Grass Edition

1. I thought I might call this the coneflower edition, or the Queen Anne's lace edition. But wherever the neighbor tried (mostly unsuccessfully, I might add) to smite the (harmless) cicada killers with his mighty can of insecticide, he killed the grass. Argh.

2. Baby has figured out forward motion in the three days since I last posted. On Tuesday she was frustrated, saying to herself, "I know there's a way to get there but I can't figure it out." Today she is like a little Marine commando-crawling through the jungle -- Dig! Push! Dig! Push! Mission accomplished! -- only her mission is to eat the blow-in cards from Muse magazine and not to suppress terrorist activity or destabilize foreign governments.

3. When I started work on my dissertation transcripts at two weeks postpartum, one of the first things I did was to add a code to all of the abandoned and interrupted utterances so I could exclude them from most of my analyses. It should have been a pretty simple operation, but I made a mistake: I omitted a space from the code, so the program didn't recognize it. I have known for a while now that I would have to go back and fix it, but uuuugggghhhh I didn't want to.

This week I figured out my strategy and fixed the values for the first measure. It's not horrible, just tedious. And I have to get it done before I can move on, so I'll do it as cheerfully as I can. I am tempted to be irritated with my January self, but hey -- I made the choice to go back to work at two weeks postpartum knowing perfectly well what postpartumness does to my brain. Maybe I should just be glad I didn't blow anything up.

4. My other school-related goals for the summer, besides cleaning up the data, are to read a little book about cluster analysis, to make good headway in a big book about multilevel modeling, and to rewrite my method chapter to reflect what I did. (For the preliminary exam, you write your method chapter in future tense.) Summer is flying by here, but I'm making progress. Elwood is off on Friday afternoons and I have high hopes for a productive day.

5. In addition to those school goals, I had a bunch of personal goals for the summer. I think I need more summer. Or maybe fewer Aubrey-Maturin novels. I am enjoying them immensely and perhaps intemperately. (I am on #17 at the moment. The characters make me laugh and laugh, which is not what I expected when I started the series.)

6. Earlier this summer we were going out for a celebratory lunch. It was a special day for one of the boys (like a name day, only not exactly) and we always go to a favorite restaurant to observe it. The boy being honored, though, was having a terrible awful no good very bad day in which he just could not get along with his family. He is still angry about my response. Motherhood is like juggling eggs sometimes -- you can do your best to keep kind and patient going at the same time as firm and protective of siblings, but all you get is a big mess splatted all over.

I am tempted to post the story, but it would be my version of a contested story. The part that is bothering me is that he is also still angry with the friend who was going to lunch with us. I do not know how to encourage forgiveness in this child whose inclination is to hold a grudge.

7. Today is our 16th anniversary. Especially today, when I am thinking about the importance and the difficulty of forgiveness, I look back at the two of us and think about all the things we had to learn. I didn't know, sixteen years ago, how much closer we would be today than we were then. Building a marriage is like learning a secret language -- sometimes we can exchange a single look that speaks volumes. (Lest you think I am going all lofty on you, the most common look exchanged means "Can you believe the organist is playing this hymn so slowly AGAIN?" --"I know! It makes me crazy!") Here's to many more years.

More quick takes here.

Having a Crunchy Moment

We share a driveway with the guys next door, two college kids whose parents bought the house last summer. Mostly these guys have been fine neighbors, much easier to get along with than the previous owner. But I just went outside and the guys' dad is there with a big can of insecticide. The problem is the cicada killer wasps.

Cicada killer wasps look imposing but don't hurt people in the normal run of things. You might get stung if a female flies up your sleeve accidentally, but they're not aggressive like yellowjackets. I had adopted a live-and-let-live approach to the ones that live between our two garages, but the neighbor is having none of it. He had hired some guys to fix his garage door, and they refused to do the work because of the insects.

He was unmoved by my amateur entomologist exploits, so I showed him the nest site and he sprayed it. My logic was that if he was determined to spray, he could hit the right spot instead of spewing chemicals around my kids' toys. But he is not content. He is spraying every hole in the ground he can find, and any live insect that flies near him.

Since it's hard to hear someone's tone in a blog post, let me be clear that I am not freaking out (toxins! cancer! disaster!), only rueful. Like this guy says, I liked watching them.

Oh, well, I think he's done spraying. I am off to recycle some old paint. In my Birkenstocks, of course.

P.S. Now his son is now walking around the garden with a giant -- like, 5-gallon -- sprayer unit filled with weed killer. The previous owner was a gardener and these college kids are not, and the weeds have spread. If I were really crunchy I would go out there with my guitar and serenade him in my Birkenstocks: "All we are saying, is give weeds a chance." Perhaps one of the boys would accompany me on a compost bin drum.

The Ribbon-Chaser

When Stella was tiny I would lay her on my legs while I prayed the Office of Readings.

I am observing a moment of silence for those days.

Gladder and wiser, or at least I hope so

I'm poking my head out to say hello -- sometimes a long blog silence makes a person feel like she needs to post something really worthwhile in compensation, but I am refusing to succumb to the feeling. We're having a pleasant quiet day here; we just got back from a picnic and a ramble through the woods during which the sun shone but not too fiercely and all the kids got along. (Not a rumble of unhappiness. Can you believe it?) I am 39 today, celebrating with lemon-almond cake and a tub of the new Ben & Jerry's marzipan flavor that has been calling out to me from the ice cream aisle for the past month.

There are all kinds of things I've been thinking about blogging, but Pete is waiting patiently for this post to end so I can go play with him. More soon.

Underwater

Yesterday afternoon I took the kids to the pool.

In Which I Accentuate the Positive

The trouble with vacations is always re-entry. I was going to take time off from school between the end of that seminar and the Fourth, and now all week I've been thinking, "Get back to it you have to get back to it you'll never graduate if you don't get back to it." Also, last weekend's reorganizing project was not as successful as the one before. The boys' room looks great, but I am still dealing with the stored kids' clothing that was displaced when we moved the Legos into the secret room -- "dealing with" in the sense of "sighing heavily at the bags stacked all over my bedroom while thinking 'gee, I'm not sure how to organize those sensibly.'"

I've been spinning my wheels and feeling frustrated about spinning my wheels, and so I'm going to do a small successes post.

1. Yesterday I took six children to cover a friend's hour in the Adoration chapel, and it went well. The boys' friend Jack had lunch with us and I invited him to come along, thinking he'd say, "Gotta run home now!" But instead he said, "What's it like?" Joe said, "Great!" Jack said, "Sure, I'll come." And he liked it. How about that?

A small success within a small success is that I have been reading Joe the book of Esther this week. He thinks my favorite part is just as funny as I do -- he laughed and laughed when I read it to him, and asked me to read it aloud to everyone in the chapel. I'm feeling good about sharing it with him and getting such an enthusiastic response.

2. Today I read the first chapter in my book on multilevel modeling. This is the approach I'll need to use to analyze my dissertation data, and I have to understand it before I can crunch my numbers. Chapter one = one small step forward.

3. I lost the first five of those irksome ten pounds.

More small successes here.

Opportunity Knocks (With Grimy Little Knuckles)

Remember last week when I was grumping about my invitation from God to clean the basement? Well, it worked out astonishingly well. The basement is only partly cleaned, but the garage is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Or at least a joy until we pile too much junk in there again. I am optimistic, though, that it will be a joy for a good long time.

The best part was that we all worked on it together. The kids hauled boxes of record albums in the basement and wheeled out all the bicycles from the garage. It was filthy in there, from the roofing last fall and the painting in '06, but they worked together to scrub down the table and chairs and shelves. One of them had some sulky moments, but mostly they worked hard and they got along and they didn't whine. My husband got out the shop vac to suck up all the debris, and we put back a modest fraction of the stuff we took out.

I keep going out to stand at the door and admire it. It makes me very happy.

We have just been handed a similar invitation to straighten out the boys' room. Three of them share a room with approximately a quattuorvigintillion Legos. As you might imagine, this is not conducive to tidiness. (<- understatement alert)

Today an electrician came to install boxes for overhead fixtures in our living room and in the boys' room, something we've talked about doing since we moved in more than four years ago. He had to move the bunkbed to get to the wall, and OH MY GOODNESS the wall is appalling. Four years' worth of grimy prints along both top and bottom bunks -- it is crying out for a bucket of soapy water.

I think we're going to move the Legos into the secret room, the low-ceilinged space over our porch. It's a poorly insulated space and so it's an imperfect solution (too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter), but we'll give it a whirl. For now I am going to wash the plaster dust off the bedding and the prints off the wall. I'm going to do it cheerfully, even, remembering how good it felt to finish up the garage. Here's hoping round two of Gladlys Get Organized goes as well as round one.