As my husband and I were talking, we heard the sound of legos being dumped out in our son’s bedroom. His dad reminded him that it would be time to pick up toys soon. Boychick asked how many minutes. “Fifteen”, said his father. Boychick’s response?
“I love fifteen minutes!”
The gym I joined, like many such establishments, uses music with a good solid beat to set a pace. Usually it’s nothing but a way to keep rhythm for me, but the other day they had an “oldies” cd on. I have a problem with “oldies”. Usually, when I learned them, they weren’t old. Music ages faster than humans, right?
One of the songs on that cd was Simon and Garfunkel’s version of Wake Up, Little Suzie. I haven’t been able to get it to stop running in my head since, so I started actually thinking about it. I have to wonder if it even makes sense to a kid from the current crop of teenagers. Not the words, they’re really pretty inane, but the assumptions behind them. That you could fall asleep watching a movie and not be found, because it was a drive-in and you and your date were in a car or that staying out until 4:00 a.m. once was nearly as dreadful an act as murder.
I remember going to drive-ins as a kid, but even by the time I hit high school they were fading, and now they’ve all but vanished. What do the kids in high-school now know from drive-in movies? The whole thing is like that. “Reputation” doesn’t mean the same thing now. There’s no hard, bright line, with “nice girls” on one side and “tramps” on the other, and a girl who stays out one night is not forever labelled a tramp. Now it’s fairly common for kids to stay out until dawn on prom night. Then? I think if my date and I had tried it, we’d both have been grounded until we left for college. That was 1975. The song came out in 1957. When S & G recorded it in 1982 the assumptions still made sense. Now it’s a song with a cool beat, but I’ll bet the words don’t make sense at all. And overall, I think that’s a good thing.
I won’t miss you.
My husband being in dire need of a new trench coat, I betook myself off to the nearest outlet mall to obtain the requisite item. I don’t make that drive for little stuff, though I know people who do, but when the price difference is between $300.00 in the department store and $80.00 for last season’s style at the outlet, it becomes worth the time and gas. We are not fashion slaves and I haven’t noticed mens trench-coat styles changing much in the past 20 years anyway. So off I went.
I decided to come home by an alternate route, since I had a little time for it. Interstates are fast but generally lack interesting scenery. And of course, I got lost. That doesn’t faze me much either; the bump of direction is good enough that I always know which way is home, and can zig and zag until I get to something that leads there. None the less, I was not entirely prepared for the visual impact of one farmer’s creative take on making sure the flocks of goats and sheep were not mistaken for deer by local hunters. The farm in question was entirely surrounded by forest; even coming up on it, you don’t see it until you’re right there. There are three fields visible from the road; two contain flocks of goats, and one a flock of sheep. One flock of goats is bright yellow. The next is bright turquoise, and the sheep are bright pink. The only parts of the animals that reflect colors seen in nature are their heads. It looked to me like the animals had been dipped the animals and with the dye added to the dip. It was wonderful to behold, and left me with tremendous admiration for that farmer’s creativity..
Of course, since I was shopping I’d no desire to be burdened with my purse. I put a few necesssary items in assorted pockets in my jacket and headed out. This meant that the camera that lives in the purse was unavailable, and there is no way I could manage to get lost in exactly the same way and find that farm again. So I have no photograph. I don’t think I’ll be forgetting the technicolor flocks any time soon, though.
I guess we aren’t in central Indiana any more. The time changed, and we actually had to reset our clocks instead of just noting that our friends were either now an hour later than we (the Kentucky and Indianapolis contingents), or finally on the same time zone (the Illinois contingent). Whether the entire state shifts to Central time, as has been discussed, remains to be seen. Up in our little corner of the state, we follow Chicago. Given the number of people who live here and work there, that only makes sense.
We didn’t remember that this was the weekend of the bi-annual ritual Resetting of the Clocks last night, so this morning we thought our son had wakend us at 7:00, which for him constitutes sleeping very late indeed. I figured it out in the course of my morning web-surf and told my husband, leading to the comment “I guess he managed to get us up at 6:00 after all.” What can I say? That’s our boy!
“I’m being a good little cat. Now what can I go scratch the eyes out of?”
I do not handle uncertainty well. I’ve known that for years, as have most of the people who have to put up with me when I’m caught by it. To say I get grouchy and restless is an understatement that would do credit to a New Englander. Used to be I stopped eating and started walking under stress. That’s reversed itself the past 5 years or so, with utterly predictable (and visible) consequences. It’s hard to get away to walk when you have a small child, especially if they are marathon nappers or past the stroller stage…or both. It’s worse when the kid reacts badly to such outings. That’s one of the consequences of motherhood I did not foresee. That’s also why things like exercise bikes were invented, or at least so I like to think.
But I’ve wanted for some time to undo what I’ve done unto myself, so I’m putting the tension of waiting to find out if and when I will be employed again to good use, to try to recover old behavior patterns. While it is possible to be too thin – and I was – those patterns were much healthier for both me and better for everyone around me. A tired me is fairly easy to live with; a grouchy me is not. If I can’t walk courtesy of the weather or other obligations, I have an exercise bike. It’s even in the living room, relatively accessible to everyone. And the time I spend on it, I’m neither eating nor sitting on my excess padding. I can’t claim immediate huge benefits to my family from that, though there is the long term benefit of a much healthier mom for Joseph. But I can claim them for myself. That’s quite enough.
It looks like Dorothea must have installed something new and delightful in response to the recent spam-o-rama. The hack struck again, but what I received as notice in my e-mail was that a certain amount of spam had been “digested” and deemed yummy. And lo, there was no spam in my comment log when I checked, either, despite the resetting of my filters. Thanks, Dorothea!
I haven’t tried to hack WordPress yet, but I think it may be time. Every time I check, there’s another infestation. They’re like roaches; they proliferate faster than I can eliminate them. Now I’m finding new spam without the resetting of the internal spam filters. The words tagged to stop spam are intact; the number of links which should trigger the filter is unchanged (and set at 0), and the spam comments still appear. These creatures aren’t sheep molesters. They’re slime molds.
Yesterday Wick and I went out to spend my birthday money. We took the house wireless. Its been less than 24 hours and already Im wishing wed done it long ago. No more arguments with Joseph over playing Yahoo! Games, nor requests that Wick quit whatever hes playing around with to let me do legal work on the computer with the cable modem or that I get off IM with my friend K. so that he can do something in the way of job searching. No more feeling like my room has been invaded if my housemate needs to check her e-mail, only because the computer is in our bedroom. Theres a desktop in the living room, and now it has the same broadband access. Some people have TVs in assorted rooms and one computer. We have one TV, and three computers.
Its also wonderful in that now I can be on the computer while Joseph plays downstairs with his trains. Hes gets lonesome by himself, and I get worried and interrupt myself to check on him. Now its not an issue. Laptop downstairs? No problem. Little wireless card plugs into USB port, and I can be wherever Joseph wants his mommy to be. Computer gets set to hibernate if I go off to play duckling or kitty, but if he wants to play trains by himself and only wants me as a presence, then I can write. I am, in point of fact, downstairs right now, writing cheerfully. I should be baking for Thanksgiving, since its at my house. Instead Im delighting in the freedom to play from wherever I happen to be. Ill settle down in time, but for right now I am indulging in my birthday present with great and childish glee.