June 27, 2008

I will be wearing my I SURVIVED ALCATRAZ t-shirt

Chris and I have started planning our trip to San Francisco, you know, now that it’s three weeks away. Oh sure we have our plane tickets (we both leave at the crack of dawn on Sunday to come home, which should be fun fun fun) and a hotel room (with ONE DOUBLE BED — thank god Chris is a wee little sparrow) but we have no real plans for our time in SF.

Oh sure there’s that conference, but since we’re going to be there for two extra days we thought we might want to see the city a little.

Also, shh don’t tell our husbands — they think we are working the WHOLE TIME. Suckers.

The only thing we have planned so far is a trip to Alcatraz, because who doesn’t want to see a prison? We’re hoping it will give us some ideas for things to do with the kids on those days when everyone is on our last nerve.

Anyway, this morning the very lovely Amy Hatch emailed me to let me know that a piece she interviewed me for lo these many months ago was finally up at Travel|Muse. Amy asked me for tips for shopping on vacation, and honest to god I had no memory of what I had said. Fortunately, she’s a great writer and very very funny, and she makes me look really good (thanks Amy!). She also made me laugh, with this paraphrase of my Very Wise Advice: “Choose your ’souvenirs’ wisely to maximize your budget, she adds, and avoid the dreaded ‘I Went to Alcatraz and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt’ syndrome.”

I may have to buy one of those t-shirts now. Or at least send one to Amy.

You can read the full interview here.

June 26, 2008

priceless (and alarmed)

We had a security system installed yesterday, with fancy motion detectors and smoke detectors and various other bells and whistles that we are still uncertain how to operate. So far we have not set the damn thing off but it’s only a matter of time.

Our neighborhood has had somewhere between 30 and 40 break ins since the beginning of March (and of course we had our own brush with the criminal element, although there was no breaking involved in that incident, just spitting and STEALING MY STEREO AMP). We joke that we bought this house because the neighborhood was so nice, but apparently we have moved to the hood.

You know, the hood with all the big SUVs and the country club in the middle. THAT hood.

The MO for the burglaries is this: the perps (can I use that word? I can think of an alternative but this is a family-friendly blog) ring the doorbell and then when no one answers they kick the door in and rob the house. Since I’m here all day and the kids are here more of the day than I would really like, that’s a wee bit scary, or at least it was to my mother and mother-in-law, both of whom suggested that we GET AN ALARM ALREADY. So we did.

We’re good kids.

The man came yesterday and spent four hours drilling holes in various parts of my house and running wires and doing I don’t know what all to get this all hooked up. And then he tested the system and HOLY MOTHER OF GOD IS THAT THING LOUD. My apologies in advance to my neighbors because when we set the alarm off — AND WE WILL — you will ALL hear it.

This morning after Wade left for work I emailed him to remind him that I had written a substantial check to the man yesterday to pay for the alarm — he likes to check our account balances on line and see how we’re doing, which is fine except that this one particular check was for a fairly big part of the current balance which meant that there’s not as much money actually available as there might appear to be. I don’t know what I thought Wade might do today that would require him to have access to the FULL balance of our checking account (buy me a diamond studded whisk, perhaps, or some mink flip flops), but I thought he ought to know.

I got this response, which is of course a paraphrase of dialog from The Simpsons (duh):

Alarm Guy: That’ll be $450.00.

Wade: WHAT?!? Are you KIDDING?!?

Alarm Guy: Sir, surely you can’t put a price on your family’s safety?

Wade: You’d like to think not … but here we are.

June 25, 2008

dreaming

We’re at the pool, but it’s not our regular pool, it’s more like a lake with rocks and big trees but not a lake, a pool, and it’s a bright sunny day and there are parents and kids playing everywhere and people with fancy drinks and it feels like a very chic hotel until the men come to round us up. They are wearing black helmets and black clothes and they have some sort of weapons and they don’t really threaten us but they make it clear that we have to go with them, right now.

The part of me that knows that this is a dream thinks that this is PRECISELY WHY I should always have a change of clothes in the pool bag. And then thinks what a stupid thing that is to worry about now.

They take us to some kind of detention center and we wind up in the infirmary, Wade and the boys and I, because apparently something is wrong with me although I feel fine, but Henry is coughing and coughing and Wade starts to worry because it can’t be good for him to be coughing, and I misunderstand why he is so worried and decide that I will ask the nurse for help because she seems kind or at least neutral and less frightening than the men at the pool and so I explain that my son has a cough and he was taking medicine for it but we don’t have it with us and she asks what kind of medicine and I say oh just an antibiotic and she stares at me with a completely blank face while Wade is hurrying the kids down the corridor because I have not understood that if Henry is sick they will take him away from us and we will never see him again and I watch them running down the hall and I see Charlie looking back at me while Wade pulls him along and I hear Henry coughing and coughing and coughing and I know that they will be looking for him now.

I wake up with a sick feeling in my stomach and hear Henry really coughing (he has terrible allergies or a little cold or something). I get up because I am afraid that if I go back to sleep the dream will start again and I don’t want to know what happens. I get water for Henry and he drinks it and then I lay down with him in his bed and he curls up next to me and closes his eyes and leans against me and goes to sleep, without coughing any more.

June 23, 2008

Twitter + Flickr = the New Blog

“She was so busy Twittering the LAST funny thing that she missed the NEXT funny thing.”

Sometimes, the last funny thing really IS the LAST funny thing.  Read more at Flickr.

June 22, 2008

Saturday, 5:00 pm

Madras on the sunporch.  Life is good.

June 18, 2008

which is better?

Charlie has a new favorite game; he will ask us, “Which is better?” and then offer two choices, with no context at all. Like this:

“Which is better, Mama, 15 or 75?”

“Okay, which is better, a grappling hook or a light saber?”

“Mama, which is better, green or orange?”

I love that.

No matter how many times I explain that really, it depends — if we’re talking about how many minutes until snack time, then 15 is better, but if we’re talking about how many dollars he might earn doing chores, then 75 is better — he always says, “No, Mama, which is BETTER? Just answer.”

And no matter how I answer, he says, “That’s RIGHT!”

I’m trying to apply a little of his philosophy to our summer, to remember that each choice really is the better choice, in its own context. And I’m trying not to see every choice as a failure of some sort, but instead to see that orange and green are both good and both right.

Some of you asked about other camp options for the kids; there are other options here in the city, but we’re not feeling like the other options are an option for us. We chose this particular camp because it is familiar to the boys, and because starting over, again, with a new place and new friends was just more than we wanted to deal with this summer. I know we were right about that, even if the camp has turned out to be less than perfect.

I think that Charlie is right: there aren’t clear-cut choices sometimes, there are just options. Sometimes context helps — a grappling hook is more useful than a light saber if we’re climbing a mountain, for example, but not if we’re fighting the Sith — but sometimes the context is so complicated that you just have to make a choice.

“Green or orange, Mama? Which is better?”

“Hmm.  Green.”

“That’s RIGHT!”