Things, Life, What-not.

The Boy is in 7th grade. He’s growing tall and strong, and he’s practically electric with his shining good health and energy. Sometimes when I look at him I can’t believe he’s mine, and then I realize that . . . he isn’t mine. He’s his own person, one I can just watch, admire, guide for as long as he’ll let me, and love, love, love.

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I am nearly finished with my sister’s hot water bottle cover, and after a brief episode of panic surrounding a stitch dropped in the middle of the cable (I tried to fix it and felt like I was making things worse, so I wisely put it down until I could take it to Natural Stitches and have one of the fine people there straighten me out), it looks like it’s going to be very cute. I’m finishing the portion that will cover the neck of the water bottle, so right now the thing looks like a sweater for a little dog with no legs, but I swear that’s a good thing. I’ll post a picture once it’s finished and actually covering a water bottle.

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I have had a summer of series-reading, and it’s coming to and end. I read all of the Sookie Stackhouse books, including the most reason one, which I broke down and bought in hardcover because I really couldn’t wait. I’m pleased that after eight books Charlaine Harris still has things for these characters to do, but I sense that things are going to be wrapping up soon. Maybe another book or two, and then Sookie can be retired. In the meantime, though, I can’t wait to find out what happens next—especially with a certain little boy she’s become acquainted with.

I’m picking up the last of Harris’s Lily Bard series from the library today, and I’m looking forward to gobbling it up quickly. There are some similarities between Lily and Sookie that make me wonder about things Harris herself might have gone through—or at least things that are foremost on her mind. She’s an interesting person and a fun writer, and I have her first Aurora Teegarden book requested. I am a glutton.

I’ve also just finished the nine-book Little House series. I’d only read the first two when I was a girl, because that’s all my dinky school library had, but I sort of knew what happened even though I wasn’t a big devotee of the show. I mean, I saw enough of the show that all the characters in the book look like their TV counterparts in my head despite the illustrations, and every time Carrie was mentioned I pictured a little girl falling down in high grass. I knew Mary went blind, and I knew Laura married Almanzo, and I knew life on the prairie wasn’t easy. That’s pretty much all there was to it, right?

But somehow, there was more to it. They worked so hard, and were so resourceful. They loved each other so much, but their emotions were so repressed. They dealt with so many uncertainties so bravely. I used to think I’d have made it as a contemporary of Laura and Mary (I would’ve given Mary a run for her money at being the priggish little well-behaved rule-follower), but I don’t know if I’d have had the strength and grace necessary to make it as a contemporary of Ma and Pa Ingalls, what with the unceasing work, the continual threat of mortal danger to your kids’ lives, and the utter lack of book or time to read them.

Anyway, I really enjoyed reading these. I have to admit, though, that I skipped over the lyrics to most of the songs they sang (and they sang a lot of songs—Pa and his damned fiddle). I also skipped the detailed descriptions of their outfits, as buttons and hoops and corsets and hoops and layers upon layers of underwear just bore me. But I loved reading about the housework and the farming. Awesome.

Thinking of Little House naturally (ahem) leads me to Sci-Fi, namely Joss Whedon’s Firefly. I’d tried the pilot of this much-beloved show twice, and just couldn't settle into it. It opens with a battle scene featuring characters that you can't care about because you don't know, and . . . it just didn't work. I decided to give it another go last night, and it finally worked. GOD, it's good! It's so riveting! It's an odd combination of Little House and Star Wars and Gunsmoke and . . . I don’t know—was there ever a TV show about pirates?

Odd as it may seem, Firefly is like Little House--although it's set far in the future (and in space), the universe is crawling with PIONEERS. Mal, the captain of the ship, has a distinct whiff of Pa Ingalls about him (although Mal's a lot more menacing). The far-flung planets have been somehow given atmospheres, so humans can live on them, but from what I've seen so far they look like the Old West. They have horses and wear cowboy clothes and worry about supplies. They're settlers. Homesteaders, even. Their currency seems to be food, specifically nutritionally dense blocks of some kind of protein supplement. I don't have the back story yet, but I think Earth may be uninhabitable. And I don't think anyone I met in the pilot was an alien . . . this might be a show set in space but populated entirely by humans. That's rare, isn't it?

Anyway, I am totally thrilled to have this new television obsession, and I'm oddly pleased that there are only 14 episodes plus the movie. It feels so much more manageable than seven years of Buffy, and I’ll definitely be able to get through it before it’s time to go back to Dollhouse.

Oh, Joss Whedon, how do I love thee?

The Hilarious, the Crappy, and the Awesome

Hilarious (to me, at least) excerpt from a text exchange between The Boy and me:

Me: We play the vikings on oct 13--favre has to come here!
The Boy: Right after they play the scary ravens.
Me: Maybe playing us and the scary ravens will make him retire for good.
TB: Or it will kill him . . .
Me: We have to admit he's pretty brave.
TB: No, he's pretty bavre.

Get it? Favre = bavre? Maybe you had to be there.

Crappy accidents after work yesterday:

That's not my car. I took this pic this morning, and my car was parked in that spot yesterday.

I have worked in the same building for seven years, exiting through the same door nearly every day. Yesterday, I walked straight into this fire escape and bashed my head. Hard. Hard enough to make one of those unintelligible grunting noises people make when they're hurt and surprised. My first thought (being a hypochondriac and all) was of Natasha Richardson. Of course.

Once I settled in the car and concluded that I wasn't seeing stars, bleeding, or bursting into tears, I headed to the library to pick up the Charlaine Harris book that was waiting there for me (the third book in the Lily Bard series). The Boy wasn't going to be home for dinner, so I decided to splurge on a sub from the sandwich shop across the street from the library. Thoughts of eating delicious take-out on the couch, reading my book, in my nicely air-conditioned house went a long way toward making me feel less pitiful for having bashed my head.

I ordered my sandwich and sat and the counter with my book while I waited for it. Then I left the shop with my sandwich, books, bag, drink, and keys in my hands . . . and tripped over something (my feet? my shoes? the doorstep?) and was only prevented from falling into the sidewalk by flinging my bent arm (remember, I was loaded down with stuff) into the corner of the doorjamb. I didn't fall, and I didn't even drop anything, but OH how my forearm aches.

I'm very hopeful that I've reached the end of my yearly injury quotient. And I won't go into detail about how I left a message on my friend P's answering machine, telling her I'd hit my head. I asked her to call me when she got the message, and told her that if I didn't answer, I was probably dead. I did this, because I AM A PARANOID HYPOCHONDRIAC, and so is she. She called, was relieved to find I wasn't dead, and totally felt my pain. She even called again, a few hours later, and was able to talk me down from my Natasha Richardson fears, thus allowing me to take a chance on going to sleep. (I had planned on staying awake all night, to assure that I wouldn't die in my sleep, thus depriving my son of his mother. Because, as I mentioned, I am a paranoid hypochondriac. With anxiety issues. Thank GOD for P.)

And now, have a look at my awesome knitting:

Cables! This is going to turn into a hot water bottle cover for my sister. It'll look like a very small turtleneck sweater--only without arms--and I'm really pleased with the progress. I got the yarn from a sale bin, and I couldn't be happier with its texture, color, and the way it knits up.

So, there. I started with a joke and ended with something pretty. So even though I am revealing what a clumsy, paranoid freak I am . . . maybe you won't be too afraid of me.

A Beautiful Weekend in Photos

Finished dish cloths for my friend S. Ribbed, for her pleasure. (I've been dying to say that since I started knitting them.)

This pic is from my parents' local paper, which did an article about their church's annual parish festival and the ladies who make the pizzas. That adorable cutie is my grandma, who was mortified by what she thinks is a terrible picture. Come on, though--she's awesome!

This is my dad and The Boy, bonding over The Best Thing Ever -- the BB gun my dad gave The Boy. (With my permission and full blessing--I had one when I was 12, and I loved it.)

This is the target The Boy made to accompany the hanging cans my dad put up to shoot at. Note the evil cow, the Simpsons-like robot, and the clown--those were to be shot, but the butterfly and angelic bunny were to be avoided. Sport, you know. He also shot a pepper from my mom's garden and an apple from a tree in the yard. Good times.

And this is the pie I made for my mom and dad's anniversary. Look at those hearts! Because they LOVE each other. :-) I made them the pie and gave them a blown up and framed copy of the photo from my last post. People got choked up, which means it was a hit.

It was truly a beautiful weekend.

They Look Like They're Playing Dress Up

My parents’ 40th wedding anniversary is this coming Sunday. She was nineteen and he was twenty, and while so many kids were off to Woodstock or college or Vietnam (the army wouldn’t take my dad because he has stupid feet like mine—thank God), my parents were getting married and going to work. He was a Journeyman in a machine shop, perfecting his skills as a tool and dye maker, and she was working in a sewing factory. She sewed the bridesmaid’s hideous yellow dresses herself, the reception was in my dad’s parents’ yard and garage, and they spent their honeymoon night in a motel about twenty minutes out of town.

They started dating when she was sixteen, and she’s never been with another guy. She doesn’t romanticize it—she’s told me more than once that she was desperate to escape her (mean, drunk, controlling) father’s house, and that she knew my dad was a nice, solid, steady man. She was certainly right about that. Her father didn’t attend the wedding (in fact, she didn’t see him after that until I was born about a year and a half later, on his birthday), but her brother came home from Vietnam to give her away.

So they pretty much got married as kids, lived with my dad’s parents for a while (tiny house, my Slovak immigrant grandparents and my dad’s three younger siblings, terrible cooking, non-stop polkas on the kitchen radio, and lots and lots of church), and then bought their own little two bedroom house—the house we all lived in until my little sister was two—for $8,000. Judging from some old photos and their sheepish reminiscences, there were lots of parties in that tiny house. Lots of motorcycles, lots of pot smoke and beer, lots of music, and a lot of happiness. My mom’s sisters and cousins and their boyfriends and eventual husbands all hung out there all the time, as did my dad’s friends and brothers. I had no end of attention from all of these young hippie types, and I loved being the star of the show until my wretched pest of a sister came along when I was about three and a half. (She had the nerve to be born on a night we were supposed to be going to the drive-in—I can clearly remember my mom’s water breaking as she came down the front porch stairs, which caused me to dance around singing, “Mommy peed her pa-ants! Mommy peed her pa-ants!”)

So my parents had two kids, a dog, a house, and an ever-changing stream of cars, trucks and motorcycles by the time they were 24 and 25. Money was tight and my mom was lonely and bored, so she fought my dad tooth and nail to convince him that it would be a good thing for her to go to school to get her nursing degree. He hated the idea. Hated it! Mothers were supposed to stay home, as his did—my paternal grandmother never even had a driver’s license! But she did it. She worked as a nurse’s aid while taking classes at the community college to become an RN, and then took classes at a branch campus of the state university to eventually earn her BSN while I was in college myself.

Their marriage had some tough times. He hated that she worked and went to school, and that her schedule actually kept her from church on Sundays AND saw her doing laundry and housework on Sundays—a double whammy, and very serious affronts to his Super Catholicism. He did little to help her, because he didn’t know or care how to do much in the way of housework—he had been raised with certain expectations, and was reluctant to change.

She met lots of new and interesting people, and I am almost positive there was a doctor who cared for her a great deal and wanted her to be more than friends. I was pretty sure when I was eleven or twelve that they were going to get divorced, and I found that I was okay with the idea for the most part, because I really wanted my mom to be happy, but I was sad for my dad, who I knew would never eat anything other than hot dogs and scrambled eggs, and who wouldn’t think to decorate for Christmas.

They got through it, though. And through a few more rough patches. Forty years, two kids, many pets and friends, two grandsons, one daughter’s divorce (hi!), the deaths of all of their parents but my mom’s mom, and they’re still going strong. They’re too used to each other to not be together forever. And if you prodded them, they’d probably even admit that they love each other a whole lot.

So . . . Happy Anniversary to them! Let’s hope we can throw them a huge-ass fancy party for their 50th!

Can Fun be Ruined by Something That Happens After?

The Boy and I took his one of his friends to join my mom, sister, brother-in-law, and nephew for a weekend of water park fun at Kalahari Resort in northern Ohio. We had a wonderful time in the water and on the slides, and the kids loved the huge Dave-and-Buster’s-style game room. The whole place was very clean and well-kept, there were life guards positioned all over the place—like every twenty feet or so—and all of the staff members were very friendly and helpful. Everyone had a very good time, and I planned to come home (after a stop at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton) and write a rave review of the resort as a great family destination for people within a three or four hour drive of the place.

And then I heard this morning that a three-year-old drowned there after we left yesterday. I can’t tell you how grateful I am that we were gone when it happened—I know I’m cowardly, but I hope I never have to have contact with that kind of grief. The poor, poor family!

The mom said she lost sight of the little boy, who was playing with an older brother, and I can see how that could happen, because the pool areas got really, really crowded as the days heated up, because you don’t have to be staying at the resort to use the pools and slides. At one point the wave pool looked like a can of sardines. So I’m wondering if this kind of tragedy could be prevented if Kalahari would change its admissions policies to only allow a certain number of people to use the place at any given time.

Sigh. I had been planning on taking The Boy and another kid for a weekend over the winter, as they are well beyond the age where they need to be followed around, so I could just park myself in a hotel room, order up some room service, and read and knit to my heart’s content, but now I may rethink it. Not because I think they’d be in too much danger, but because . . . it seems weird to me to think of heading for a weekend of fun to a place where a child died. Is that stupid? I don’t know.