TRICK A TREEEEEAT

I feel slightly ridiculous for dumping photos and a blog post online fifteen minutes after we get back from Soren's preschool Halloween party, but I'm trying to stay on top of things.

Soren, light of my heart, announced some time ago that he wanted to dress as a leaf pile for Halloween, and that made me love him even more than before. Dressing as a leaf pile is creative, pretty funny, and, best of all, requires no particular sewing skill on my part. Maybe it's weird that someone who's as addicted to knitting and other artistic pursuits as I am doesn't like sewing, but I don't. It's tedious. And I suck at precise measurement because I'm impatient. And sewing machines scare me because they make too much noise, so I have to sew everything by hand.

Oh, so how's this for a backhanded compliment? At the preschool today, one of the Pre-K teachers walked by and said to me, "I love his costume! It's just my kind of costume! When my kids were growing up they were always complaining, 'Mom, why do I have to wear this? You're so bad at sewing!'" Uh. Thanks? Is there even a compliment in there? Maybe it was just a big ol' backhand.

Anyway, judge for yourselves, and then keep it to yourselves unless it's an actual compliment. I think he looks pretty cute, myself.

Blast From the Past

Okay, so I've been wasting time looking at files I archived in 1996. To celebrate, I will now share with you a poem I wrote about my work environment in the dining hall at Brown. Enjoy.

Dishroom: a complaint


As we slump in the dishroom in the morning,
We can imagine the most frigid landscape to be idyllic.
There must be birds chirping out there,
There must be cars honking or people walking,
Breezes blowing or laughter or fun or even sleep --
Something better than the monotony of conveyor belts,
The steam rising from the diabolical dishmachine,
The defective beeping of the soap dispensers.
O you mess makers, you half-eaters of food,
You pourers of excessive syrup,
Takers of a thousand juice glasses --
Who scrapes the soggy pancakes from your saccharine plates?
Who pries apart your bowls stuck together with Cheez Whiz?
Who feeds your soup cups into the infinite, rumbling dishmachine
And retrieves them at the other end when they emerge, bone-white and
hotter than suns?
When you send your silverware through with your tray, who screams in
frustration at your trespass?
We, we few, we miserable few,
Denizens of the humming room, the stagnant, humid room,
We who watch the milk curdle as we mix it with orange juice,
We who sweat and scrape at 8:45 when all of you leave at once to make your
9:00 classes,
We struggle to keep the conveyor belt from stopping.
There is no fun, no laughter in the dishroom --
There are only the conveyor belts.
I would like to write on the conveyor belt
An endless message to travel around and around,
An enduring inspiration for future prisoners --
I would like to write this thing, this monument,
But the conveyor belt runs the wrong way.
My hands are covered with syrup
And they won't even give us a radio.

Little Victories

It's not all failed DMV trips, rotten gutters and busted Hondas around here. Good things happen, too. This week has had lots of little bright spots, which I will now list so that I have something to look back on next time all my tomato plants get completely fungified and have to be destroyed.

• Not only has my tiny orchid NOT died, it has even successfully bloomed and is now gracing the kitchen windowsill with a 1" spike of 1/4" white flowers.
  
  
• I tried making Cook's Illustrated's quick puff pastry recipe for homemade apple turnovers, and even though I totally didn't bring my A-game to the dough shaping, they turned out AWESOME. And then I ate three of them, so I am no longer suffering from a saturated fat deficiency!
  
  
• My much-anticipated root saw arrived yesterday, and I used it to finally remove the 11" arborvitae stump from the front yard. My mystical quest to remove all existing bushes from the entire yard is now underway, and my weapon is called Yewbane.
  
  
• I cleaned the bedroom.
  
  
• Sigrid looks really cute in the dark teal hooded sweater I made for her.
  
  
• I scored a big play rug (printed with roads, of course) for Soren for $10 at Job Lot. This was especially amazing because I went to Job Lot looking for that specific item.
  
  
• Soren got to participate in a child-development research project with a Brown student yesterday (at the Children's Museum). It was pretty cute to watch, and yay for science!
  

Soren's Friend Cheerios

Soren's been composing lots of songs lately, and although they seem impromptu, he clearly puts some work into composing (or at least remembering) them, because the lyrics are mostly the same from day to day. Chris managed to transcribe one the other day; it's about one of Soren's matchbox race cars which is apparently sponsored by Cheerios. And now, without further ado:

My Friend Cheerios

My friend Cheerios
He's the best
My friend Cheerios
He's the best
My friend Cheerios
He can split Cheerios into a bowl
My friend Cheerios
He can string Cheerios on a necklace, as cars do
My friend Cheerios
He can make space on the couch for all his friends to sing
My friend Cheerios
He can have a birthday cake -- but only one

A Penny Saved is a Penny Spent on Something Else

I just thought that up, but I like it.

We're just saving money all over the place this year! The gutters did NOT cost $28,000! The car is still under warranty, so we won't be spending $3800 on a new engine, unless Honda goes through some major contortions to avoid paying out, like declaring that the engine is no longer part of the powertrain! I love the word "powertrain"! And the word "harbormaster"! But that's neither here nor there.

On the other hand, who knew that it would cost so much to have a big pile of branches taken to the dump? And who could have guessed that we would end up paying someone to paint the new (wooden) gutters because we didn't feel like doing it ourselves? Actually, I guessed that last part.

In all, though, if you operate under the "a penny saved is a penny earned" philosophy, we made some decent money this summer, and we should totally spend our windfall on a huge TV and a pony.

Cleaning Conundrums

Paradoxes? Perhaps! Dilemmas? Definitely! Cleaning Conundrum Quiz!

1. What do you do when you want to declutter your old house because you want to reduce the number of potential spider lurking spots, but then you're thwarted by spiders perched on the stuff you're trying to put away?

2. When the baby gets hold of a BJ's bottle of liquid soap and dumps a quarter of it on the floor and starts smushing it around with her hands and feet, is it funny that you then have to mop the floor and give the baby a bath? Or is that just annoying?

3. If you really need to vacuum the baby's room, but only get a chance to clean while she's napping in said room, can you find someone to spin dust bunnies into yarn and then knit it into a sweater while the baby's napping?

When the Laptop Breaks, it's the Blog that Suffers

We have, shall we say, a flight of broken laptops right now: one from the 2004 G4 Powerbook vintage, which crashes every time you even slightly nudge it; one 2007 Macbook Pro, which only gets a wireless signal if it's sitting on top of the router; and one month-old Macbook Pro which is no longer on speaking terms with its own keyboard and trackpad. This is not to say that Apple does not offer a high-quality product. Leave Apple out of this. This is merely to say that my desktop (a delightful '06 Mac Mini) is the only functioning computer in the house at the moment, and it's all the way upstairs in my office where it was really really hot for a couple weeks there, and then we went on vacation to Santa Barbara, and then my older sister came to visit, and that's why I haven't been blogging. I am mainly making excuses for the benefit of the various grandparents who follow this blog. The rest of you probably didn't even NOTICE that there was only one post in all of August, and I think I'll go eat worms.

Anyway, it's been a busy month. The gutters done been fixed, which is great, although now they need to be painted, which I frankly don't plan on ever getting around to, so we'll probably hire someone. A bunch of gross overgrown bushes were cut down during the gutter project, and now the carcasses are sitting in the side yard waiting to be 1) chopped up and stuffed into countless yard waste bags; or 2) dragged across the street in the middle of the night and thrown into the woods, hopefully without any cops noticing; neither of which I plan on ever getting around to, so we'll probably hire someone. To chip everything, that is, not drag it across the street.

Meanwhile, we all went to Santa Barbara and enjoyed lounging around with Gramma and Grampa Richie and Kelly Ann. We experimented for the very first time with sharing a room (i.e. Chris, me, and both kids), and it went well until the last couple nights, when both children took turns crying and keeping each other awake. It's a good thing that didn't happen the first night, or we would have spent a lot of money on some enormous hotel suite for the remainder of the trip. When the room-sharing was good, though, it was very good; Soren and Sigrid seemed to enjoy waking up in the same room, and Soren even sang a few songs to his baby sister. The only one I can recall went something like "The dark night is oooooverrrr, and the sun came up! Yes, the sun came up! Oh, the sun came up!" It was very sweet. When we weren't sharing a room, we were doing all kinds of things like walking to Shoreline Park, driving R/C boats in the pool, going to the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, visiting with friends, buying tiny orchids for each other, and waiting for the batteries in Soren's new toy train to wear out. We had a wonderful time, and I'd love to write in more detail, but it would be so much quicker just to post pictures.