Light and Momentary

Too good to pass up

I just got a call from a pod person. He pretended to be my husband, but he didn't fool me. I know he was a pod person because he said, "Could you make me a list of things to do tonight?"

I covered my astonishment well. I said, "Sure, honey, I can do that!" And then I reached quietly for my cell phone while I kept him chatting on the landline. I dialed the FBI. And NASA. And the zoo. Who handles pod people invasions, anyway?

Really now: "Could you make me a list of things to do tonight?" What kind of stupid aliens are these? They can fly through light-years of empty space (boy, are their tentacles tired!). They can invade my husband's workplace, where the security people always scrutinize my license v-e-r-y carefully to make sure I am not going to steal any secret info on, I don't know, outlier weighting strategies. They can take over his body while making sure enough of his consciousness remains to dial our home number -- and then they say a crazy thing like "Could you make me a list of things to do tonight?"

NOTE TO THE POD PEOPLE: Try again.

It might be that my husband will wrest back control of his body before he gets home tonight, but I doubt it. If the guy is uttering sentences like "Could you make me a list of things to do tonight?" he's bound to be pretty far gone in the alien's grip. I need to have a list prepared to keep the pod person busy while I prepare to go all Sigourney Weaver on his cloaca. I've got it started:

• Construct long-handled chimney broom using toilet brush, duct tape, and all those detachable thingies for angling the blind slats.
• Construct catapult from snow shovel and scrap wood.
• Hurl self to roof.
• Bandage resulting lacerations using duct tape and superglue from construction projects.
• Sweep chimney [unswept for at least five years].
• Catalog the arachnid life therein.
• Alphabetize the socks [my husband loves alphabetizing things so maybe this task will speak to him, submerged though he might be beneath the pod person's will].

What do you think? Will that buy me enough time for the FBI to get here? Help me out, ladies -- what's a person supposed to do when an alien calls?

The Power of Facebook

The summer I turned ten, my family moved to a small town in southern West Virginia. A girl named Sheri lived around the corner and we became good friends quickly. We were pretty different. I was uber-geeky and drama-prone, short and scrawny with fuzzy red hair. She was tall and blond, even-tempered and good at volleyball. Sometimes, though, you just click.

We were best friends during sixth and seventh grade, mostly. When we got into an argument about something mysterious (even at the time I wasn't sure what the problem was), we didn't talk to each other for a few weeks. I was fiercely, horribly lonely until we patched things up. Life is better with a best friend in your corner.

Her parents' marriage foundered when we were in eighth grade; she moved out of the neighborhood and into an apartment in a different school district. We saw each other occasionally until the next year, when her mother moved back to Iowa. We exchanged a couple of letters, but that was all.

I looked for her last year on Facebook -- no dice. A few months ago she friended me and we exchanged a string of messages, catching up. She said they'd be traveling through the Midwest in July, and I invited her to stop by for a visit. At 4:00 yesterday afternoon she emailed me: Are you free for dinner? I called her right back and started throwing a meal together.

(One of my favorite things about my husband is that I can call him at 4 in the afternoon and say, "Hey, Elwood, my childhood friend is having dinner at our house with her husband and three children. How do you feel about backing out of your ultimate Frisbee game?" -- and I can be reasonably certain that he will say, "No problem.")

She looks just the same. Her three kids are the same ages as my middle three, and they all got along. Her husband and my husband have similar backgrounds (hey, Rob, he works at Oak Ridge). It was a completely unexpected way to spend the evening, but OH I am glad she sent that email.

Sometimes Facebook is a ridiculous time suck and font of drama. But you know, sometimes it's a really good thing.

One more week...

...in which to get those things crossed off my list. Do you know, I'm getting there. I did a hundred push-ups on Saturday night. I did them in sets, not Marine-style all in a row. But still: I did a hundred push-ups! No more abalone-esque upper bodies here. I can do the Teaser, more or less. I was wishing I could do it better and then I asked my husband to try it. I'm feeling all right about my Teaser now. ;-) And! earlier this evening! I ran 5km in 29:52! It is a little embarrassing that I had to work hard to sustain a 9:40ish pace for 3.1 miles, but there it is.

My diploma came in the mail today, so I'm a for-real-for-true PhD now. There was a hitch with getting the degree conferred, because I found out almost too late that I had to submit a petition to have my master's level coursework declared relevant for the PhD. I said, Excuse me? I said, We're not talking about a master's degree in musical theater here. I said, You must be joking if you think I need to submit an official petition to say that a master's degree from my department is relevant to the pursuit of a doctoral degree from my department.

The automaton at the other end of the line said, Rules are rules. Again and again she said it, until I said, You have been EXTREMELY unhelpful and hung up the phone with a certain...emphasis. A certain dismayed emphasis, accompanied by a strong inclination to swear. Would it be a big deal to have the degree conferred in August? In the long run, of course not. But I busted my butt -- I don't know how clearly it came through here, but I was teetering on the very brink of crazy in January and February -- to get that dissertation defended and deposited by the spring deadlines. I was incensed. So was my advisor; so was the departmental secretary.

In the end, the departmental secretary marched herself over to the dean's office. She said, Jamie Gladly has worked SO hard. She has young children and she lives all the way over in Gladlyville, but she got her defense done well before the deadline and she has always taken pains to get her paperwork taken care of. The dean's office said, All right, we can push the petition through. The secretary wasn't done. She said, AND before I go you have to call that Suzanne woman who only knows how to say "Rules are rules" until we all want to punch her, and you tell her that Jamie Gladly is getting her degree conferred in May, not August. The dean's office said, Will do.

And they did. Hurray!

Now to declutter the rest of my house and get ~250 pictures into an album!

The Horrible Office Gets Its Own Post

When we moved into this house we stashed homeless items in the office. It's a little room at the back of our house with an ugly ceiling (badly repaired after an upstairs plumbing leak) and an ugly floor (water damage + old hardwood) as well as ugly woodwork (the former owners' dog did a number on the door and its frame). Also: ugly paneling on the walls, ugly wallpaper in the closet, ugly peeling paint on the windowsills.

This is the northeast corner. The file cabinet is broken, but it is holding up a stack of homeless framed pictures. Also note the cardboard box of scarves and mittens in the middle of the floor. UGH. And the books! Aaagh, the books. (My husband will never stop buying books. I wouldn't really want him to stop altogether, of course, but I do pitch the notices about the library book sales because he is a wild man at a library book sale. He comes home with bags and bags of rare and precious finds, and I smile and say wearily, "Oh! More books. Wonder where they are going to go." It doesn't really work, though, when I intercept the notices in the mail. He has some crazy kind of homing thing in his brain that draws him inexorably to library book sales. Or it could just be that he reads the notices in the paper.)

There was a paper shredder in the middle of the floor. There was stuff, piles of homeless stuff, on the other file cabinet and the desk and the ugly wheeled thing that used to be a microwave cart. The closet was reminiscent of Fibber McGee.

I hated that room and yet I couldn't really imagine getting it into shape.

Pictures

Look, it's a little girl in pigtails! A budding Cubs fan in pigtails even. How cute is that? 

Here are my oldest and youngest, talking about Sandra Boynton's ABC book. Here is a reminder to me not to leave the vegetables sitting in their bag after they've been delivered. This is my 10yo as Wilbur Wright, telling us his life story.

These are the fun socks I cast on after I defended my dissertation (OH, the relief -- so glad that's behind me) and before I lost interest in knitting.  This was my son's first knitting project. (It folds up into an innocuous little hat.)

Tomorrow I am going to post some before-and-after pictures of the Horrible Office. (Posting this on the web will motivate me to get the Horrible Office out of during and into after. It's been during for a while now.)

Life is like a water slide

On the Fourth of July we went to the water slide pool for the first time this summer. They'd been rebuilding the slides last summer, and so we'd never been down them before. My oldest son raced up to the top; I stayed in the tamer parts of the pool with the baby. Fifteen minutes later we crossed paths briefly. "You have to try them, Mom," he yelled. So I did.

"It is ridiculous to feel nervous," I told myself sternly. "You know perfectly well that these slides are safe. They let five-year-old children go down them."

It's a big drop, though.

The first time I went down the twisty slide I couldn't enjoy it because I was worried about what would come next. What if I went too fast? What if I dropped my glasses? What if [insert unnameable bad things here]? That's me all over: I let fun experiences pass me by because I'm worried they won't be fun experiences.

On my fourth trip down the slide it hit me: in the big picture, we only get one trip down the water slide. I can fret about the unknown and try unavailingly to brace myself against the sides. Or I can trust the Builder and the lifeguards, and just enjoy the ride.

Drive-by

We were in Milwaukee yesterday with my in-laws, and I was sent out in search of Malt-O-Meal. We were going to Summerfest, see, and yesterday you could get a free ticket with a grocery store receipt showing you'd purchased two packages of Malt-O-Meal products. We decided to buy enough cereal to get six adult tickets.

I drove to the grocery store with Stella and we headed to the cereal aisle. I was dithering by the bags of Malt-O-Meal cereal, none of which really filled me with enthusiasm. I have relaxed a lot about feeding my kids processed food, but Froot Loops and knockoffs thereof are not something I'm willing to have in my pantry. So I was piling the cart with bags of frosted mini-wheat clones and trying to read labels on some of the non-fluorescent alternatives. (And thinking, "Maybe it's better just to buy the stupid tickets.")

An elderly lady came down the aisle accompanied by a woman who appeared to be her daughter. "Look how darling!" the older lady exclaimed about Stella. "She pushed the cart right out of our way! And look, she wants the healthy cereal." Stella had indeed pushed the cart over to the side so the pair of them could get past. She had pulled a $5 box Amaranth-Quinoa Puffs With Acai Berries And Added Trendiness off the shelf and was trying to heave it into the cart.

I smiled and said thank you, as Stella snagged a box of Umpteen Grain Goodness With Toasted Hemp Seeds Plus Extra Earnestness. The daughter said, "I'll have to tell my own daughter about your little girl! My daughter [significant look at my cart, heaped with frosted mini-wheats] only ever buys healthy cereal."

Ten years ago I might have felt the need to explain that my own pantry was full of millet and lentils. Yesterday I just smiled and said, "You do that." If you need any frosted mini-wheats, I can set you up.