Butter for Beer

I'm laughing at the rambling nonsensicalness of Last Post. (Why did I think blogging was necessary after stuffing stockings till five in the morn?)

I confess that as sin, OK?

My moral inventories (AmZyg's purpose, afterall) have been pretty thin, so, lessee. What else...

...Oh. Arguing with April yesterday about boys & wasted college course tuition. T'ms Eve is not a time to joust
...judging my church leadership
...hating my family's Christmas sensitivities
...throwing away D2's thong (It got into my laundry and, well, that's just passive aggressive to chuck it w/o a second thot when I was tossing my load into the dryer)
...using DH's debit card when my Christmas cash ran out
...not having the umphf to turn around and hazard the crowd at Nordstrom Rack when I knew OS's wished for gift was in there
...not calling the guy in Vista whose wife died two years ago, ending our 23 year holiday get-together tradition
...not making the effort to befriend ladies on our street who choose to avoid the neighborhood ladies' -christmas brunch
...faking that I liked DH's earring gift when I didn't

...AAAnd, finally, trading a lb of butter for D2's last Heineken. I know I'm called by a Saviour who loves us to steer clear of alcohol, but my beloved O'Douls was gone and... no excuses. I am driven to drink when stressed and unhappy.  It will go bad for me if I keep sneaking everyone else's wine and brandy, beer and rum.  Why, this is MY home, and my rules should apply, but, in a fit of self serving "enabling," I've eased up on the alcohol ban.  Hic-up.

I will continue this later; still craving yet another long awaited winter's nap. Christmas fatigue? or depression? May the angels of our merciful God attend this home, these kids and their callings. May the nine books (seriously?) OS rec'd from all and sundry sibs and parentals actually percolate into his spirit, leaving him hungry to wade into those baptismal waters. Sooner than later (that poor soul, taking such a HIT by being the repository of every generational flaw and curse, both maternal and paternal).  And bless the girls whose passive aggressive mom still suffers from powerful immaturities: anger, resentment and feeling rejected by people who shouldn't matter...

And bless this week of new year prep when DH settles matters, makes plans for the next year, and begins praying seriously about career moves.

Merry Zygote Christ Mass

You're well over the half way mark, little Zygote. You're learning not to be afraid when in the company of critics, and you've proved you can defend your differences to the "party bosses" with out being too contrary and upset (we do have to work on that one, tho), esp when the topic is the ornery obscene - ness that is Christmas. That's progress.

You're little five month body is fully in order, a complete package: beating heart, brain waves that began long ago, limbs that dance and pray... On your way.

I wonder how the gene for argumentativeness develops?

Yesterday's brunch featured some flash of brash: I wanted to persuade A. that boys need to take time off from college to learn where their strengths and callings come from. It was a good Christmas Eve conversation, where I used my dear OS as my convincer. (<--- I was type-dreaming as Pandora sings gentle Christmas verses! nodding off and typing nonsense.)  After punching stocking stuffers into four felt Christmas stockings held together by 20 year old glue and a tad of stitching, I feel sick at how purposeless these trinkets are... necklaces, Stand True patches, bumper stickers, ornaments, gas cards, a watch, gum, socks, lint rollers, free employer trinkets... It's gotten more obscene each year, with overflow junk --more than ever!-- placed above each stocking, on the mantle.  I should start... ay soon (<--nodds off again... !)

a'Right. I'm tired. I'm GOing, and as I do, I'll hope my future gift choices will brim with intentionality, and serve some greater purpose than garnering admirers who think my taste is hip.

OMg. I am so sleepy i can't even read this to proof it.  Two brunches. Two parties. Errands. Collections. Donations. Housecleaning. More housecleaning. Rain Rain Rain and more beautiful rain. All accumulated to one end: impress others with gifts. And Jesus gets the Visa bill.

God Bless our family, our street, this city, our state and nation, and may the Church of Our LORD recover from Christmas extremes, pointless family get togethers and way too much gluttony.

Amen. Go baby Zyg.o, GO.

Just Say NO To Christmas

No one loves denial more than I do. But after 25 holiday seasons where a negative cost benefit analysis has been duly noted, not just in financial terms for our family, but in terms of spiritual growth and the particular dysfunctions of our family, it is time to Quit Thee Like Men. Christmas is a nuisance.

We've raised ye olde tannenbaum to idol status, our family centered observances to idol status, getting gifts to idol status, and selfish waste is the end product.

On a related note, in the spirit of these observations, I insisted the twenty-somethings-who-still-live-under-their-parents'-roof must show proof of sound financial stewardship before heading off to bring home a $50-$75 piece of living homage to pointless traditions, a practice they took up after their parents' sizable debt paying for their private CHRISTIAN college educations (idolized that too, I now see) convinced me to get a fake tree until all debt was paid off.  This child-centered home actually saw the children rise up in rebellion and bring the tree home themselves at this suggestion.

In keeping with this yearly coup, yet another one was staged Tuesday night, ignoring a father's stated contingencies. The showdown on the driveway ensued, to my great consternation, offense and spiritual detriment.

So, when it says in Matthew 5 that an offender is to go and reconcile with the offended party, WHERE, I must ask, does it describe said reconciliation to be a mere, happy, jaunty, glib little "hey, Mom. About the other night, uh, sorry."

Whoever said that "saying sorry is the be-all, end-all, definitive answer" to the world's problem with unforgiveness... was an ass.

The only way to fix an offense, really, is to ask the one offended, "Can we talk? I'm interested in hearing how you're feeling about what happened. I'm truly sorry, and want to hear your heart on the matter."

Listening to, dialoguing, and hearing another person's state of mind is the only THE ONLY way to repair emotional harm.

Where Thanksgiving Went

Advent outside, candle poised,
wrecked  by beer and scandalous boys. I was so angry.

As far as Moral Inventories go, when I feel misunderstood, the pegs of sanity wobble, and my whole world comes crashing down.  For years I've confessed my tirades, made my amends, prayed to become this New Creation the Bible talks about, but God, either because He likes my angry self, or because He hasn't chosen/saved me yet - not sure which - has not seen fit to answer my prayer to become a composed, gracious, genteel, positive, "sweet" Christian.

And so I remain: floating inside a soundproof bubble whenever "hardship is not as I would have it" ( thank you, CelebrateRecovery, for this new vocabulary). For safety's sake, I determine to stay isolated from people as much as possible, lest I do or say some unfathomably wrong thing that can never be amended away, especially now that I recognize that pastor abuse has taken place in my church: a staff who measure people by what they can do rather than by who they are in Christ... or, who they might someday become by the grace of God, Amen, PthhPthh (<-- that Jewish thing Barbara Streisand does in Yentl).

It's a dangerously shunning place for those of us who struggle, yet DH has deemed that we must stay, enduring their dysfunction until we somehow, finally "arrive".  

I pass the struggle down,

so, the poor kids have learned to ignore me; and neighbors know --when they see my offspring getting hammered in public (like last night on the driveway, mouths taut & checked out while I chop'd the air and pointed my finger) that it's gonna be good, and so - I imagine - their windows fly open, ears craned.  

The kids were headed to the "Xmas" TreeLot without having first met DH's budget requirements.  (Childish idealism collides with adult realities once a-gain.)

But, this isn't about that.  

What about Advent? What about That Thanksgiving Gaffe?  It had all been piling up in my overheated little psyche. . .


Those TURKEYS!
I thought it was understood by my weird family that Thanksgiving was sacrosanct.  Holy. The most important holiday of the year. Well, next to the fourth of July.  This has and ever will be one of my most cherished convictions, & every year I put a flourish on it when I wish out loud for Christmas to just GO AWAY.

We've included some beautiful hymns to our celebrations down thru the years that take the spotlight off the food for just a minute, and shines it where it belongs: on the LORD of the Feast, the Giver of life, the Comforter of the Pilgrims at Plymouth. JUST for a MIN-UTE block of time, we'd pause.

Add to this sentiment, the fact that my kids can sing. Oh! How they sing.  Their blended voices produce this 'harmonic' that, like David singing to Saul of old, can soothe me out of any ill temper and restore order and sanity to my disordered heart.

So, will they, I asked, offer our most recent Family Gathering of thirty aunts, uncles, cousins and an ailing grandmother, some tiny gesture of harmonic resplendence?

No.

Something about "no one asked them."  I don't count, you see, because I am the mom.

It's not that they're shy, or unused to performing.  They're just infected with the myopic perceptions common to all those raised in dysfunction:  it was false humility. An immaturity.

Poor blokes. So disabled. 

On this count, so abundantly bereft of grace, I must take blame. The acorn falls not far from the tree.

And poor gathered TurkeyDay diners, deprived of a few brief moments of reverie and Spirit filled re-ordering of priorities... a prayer, at best, or a mouthful-plus-two chews of needed entertainment, at worst.  My TV-less children must not know that diners crave entertainment. They do not perceive that people gathered once a year in a Grandmother's three-car-garage at rented tables with space heaters and lit candles, NEED a diversion from stale, predictable, shallow conversation.  ANYTHING BUT the droning hum of space heaters is welcomed. 

WE ARE AN ENTERTAINMENT CULTURE. PEOPLE DEPRIVED OF THEIR TV'S FOR FIVE HOURS ARE HUNGRY FOR ANYTHING, be it a juggling act or a circus clown.  Or three offspring with a Thanksgiving hymn to offer up in the Spirit of the Day.

The disappointment has yet to wear off, tho it's been two weeks.  And to make matters worse, on our second Advent observance, i actually heard the man in charge say these words when I complained that I didn't get the import of his reading: "What do you want? We sang the hymn, we read the passage and we prayed the prayer. What more do you want???"

O h  d e a r  G o d.
Just take me away.

No. Doctors, in general, are a pretty blind sort

Re: the last line of that last entry...

I often practice the speech I'll give the doc someday when some life threatening this or that first comes to light.  "Are you kidding? I have more to fear from a medical profession that looks the other way every g.d. day while thousands of unborn children are torn limb from limb, than I do from this disease. Excuse me while I go prepare to die."  Kind of a Get Thee Behind Me Satan speech, if yu kno what I mean.  No?

Oh, forget it.

Endowment for Human Devolopment: AmZyg @ 3 Months

Her name was Jeanne Hardey. She was a third cousin whose family I have never met. The obituary celebrating her fifty-three year old life which was ended this fall by cancer, was only discovered during a websearch for the order of nun to which her aunt Phyllis Braniff belongs.

The Braniffs are the celebrity family of Mom's extended relations because they once ran a commercial airline.  Only oldsters remember Braniff Airlines. And only people in Louisiana will remember this cousin, Jeanne.  A beautiful, Judy Garland face is pictured with her life story, and there, tucked in with particulars about a lifetime of good will, six children and a grieving husband, is the Braniff connection.  Even failed business ventures live on in the hearts of third generation namesakes.

Most interesting to me is the medical practice she helped her husband build.  There on his clinic website were links to everything good: local family services, natural family planning, mental health and general health links, even a DMV link. And then, there it was: ehd - Endowment for Human Development.  I sat fascinated by ehd videos of a child at 2 month's gestation, captured by some sort of laparoscopic camera, heart beating wildly, hands waving, veins and bones fully visible through paper thin tissue.  Now I need not consult Wikipedia for my Zygote updates anymore.  EHD features panels full of developmental photos and videos for the full nine month term.

Thank you Dr. Hardey. Thank you Jeanne Hardey.  I am impressed, transfixed and so very grateful for discovering www.ehd.org.  Why, I am left wondering, does my "family friendly" physician not have an outspoken web presence like this man?  I have a mind to patronize Dr. Hardey...  how can I swing a visit to Moss Bluff, LA for my next batch of lab work ups?

Better yet, how can I help Dr. Millane here in Long Beach see his need to pony up and stand for something??  Oh, man. I'd rather hitch-hike to Moss Bluff than pursue that matter. CA doctors are so... blind.

D.C. Dice'n It Up

The sales clerk at a downtown Washington D.C. Men's clothing store understood me.  As he was ringing up DH's purchase, he asked why I didn't have an H&M bag to show for my time mucking around over there, right across the street.  When I told him I couldn't patronize a store that was so blatantly selling sex, he nodded knowingly.  We discussed the sick music, the in your face lingerie & skimpy hemlines, but not the fake nipples on the female manekins (but I would've, had DH been anywhere else: "yeah, why DON'T the male manekins have 'em? They must get just as cold standin out in those frosty east coast window displays..."). We bonded instantly.  From there, my poor DH, proud owner of a half-off silk pullover, freshly wrapped in JosA.Banks tissue and nicely bagged, stood by helplessly as his wife and her dapper new soul mate talked politics like we knew our opinions mattered.  Maybe some day, we'd be called in to produce invaluable testimony to some impending congressional investigation re: all that ills mankind.  DH waited; so patient, so obliging.

It was inevitable, though. Mr. Salesman-the-Democrat and I had to disagree at some point, and, as his predilections leaned leftward, I learned he opposed unregulated homeschoolers. I was reduced to defending myself against government encroachment that he insisted we needed because somewhere, some evil mother is abusing the privilege of keeping her kids home from the neighborhood school house.  I chuckled inside! I was tempted to out myself! That woman is me! Lazy, mean spirited, and for heavens sakes, a child abuser because I spanked a kid in anger MORE than once!  Yes, my poor kids were definitely deprived of the Harvard education that was to have been their destiny all because I forged Bible into their heads instead of algebra.  My bad.

Well, to change the subject and get back to a nice dispute about which we might once again agree, we said our goodbyes over the conclusion that ChaseBank does not deserve us, and that boycotting them is the least we can do to protest J.P. Morgan's complicity in the real estate meltdown.  And Fanny/Freddy. And the Feds. And the consumers who thought they could get a Somethin4Nothin mortgage...

Ahhh. Washington D.C!  Guaranteed to supply "Everyman" with a seven minute power trip via debate between shop clerk and shopper.

[Holy LORD... would that I will forsake my argumentative pride and name the Almighty NAME above all names as the only subject worth debating. Would that I might leave a fragrant spirit of healing in my wake, and not a divisive air of factionalism... Upend me, LORD, that I could see my way to hold discussions of IMPORT, and forsake these silly exercises in self importance.  aMeN.]

HaikuOnDemand

Of all the side effects of a long-term home education lifestyle (my least favorite being the load of dysfunction raked up from the murky bottoms of our souls every day), my favorite was the bathroom graffiti wall.  It's finally painted over, but bless their hearts, the leetle geeyls found dry erase panels to stick onto the wall above the toilet paper, and so lives on the tradition. They currently bear an homage to Augustine in the form of a  Psalm 32/Ps 51 Tee Shirt slogan contest...

And before I erase the paen to rain that was scribed ("someone write a rain poem!" I implored) by D#2, or SLB (sweetlittlebird---she who used to sing warbly yet emerged into a steady voice), on yet another bathroom dry erase board above the counter, I will post it here for old times sake, as the 9 days of rain gave way to the usual warmish, no fun cause it's s'posed to be fall, Santa Ana blah.

RAIN HAIKU

WITH EACH DRoP, THE RAIN
PLAYS ITS SYMPHONY UPON
THE LEAVES AND SIDEWALK.

I hear she has a GCC dorm rep for fastest haiku on the floor.  And a journal filled with more. Let me see!

Three Month Old Zygote Pick Up Line

[from Wed last ...Hotel Web connection was scant.]

Election season stole my 3 month Developmental Milestone, overdue now by two weeks. But instead of tracing in words the mysterious knitting together of the 12 week old Psalm 46 life-appointment, I am caffeinated and dumbfounded tonite by what I think I saw on the tour bus tonight.

Heading over to the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum in six+busses for some aeronautic history, DJ spinning, flight simulators, Imax movie and piles of drink and food, hundreds of techie conferies traveled with buddies and workmates.  Heading back to the hotel, I wondered at the different pairings evidenced in the seats ahead, behind & across the way: twenty something couples who'd just met, some drunk, most masking a slight ill at ease. That self conscious pulling-on-the-hair; tense hands on the seat or lap; a silliness to the conversation that the men want nothing to do with, but women just default to; an overly animated male couple holding intimate eye contact;  I was trying to size all this up when I recalled the little gal on the wait staff who blanched when I asked her how long she had to stay for clean up tonite.  She looked askance, cut across the aisle and hurried off.  What did I say?? I was just empathizing!  Sitting on the bus, it hit me. I've never seen Sex In the City, but did she think I was hitting on her? Do these kids think they're supposed to go home with a sex partner just 'cause they're drunk & dolled up for a party? Does a TV show really have so much power that a busload of singles (or not?) feel a compunction to hook up for the night just because Ferris Buhler's wife says it's OK?

The whole conference began to feel surreal.  Maybe these professionals aren't looking to improve work productivity. Maybe they really believe that emulating TV characters will get them a TV show ending. I asked DH, and he thinks it's all in my head. Always paranoid, I am. Well, let's hope so.

I am impressed with him for not giving me the option of sitting out this little junket.  God Bless my man for honoring his vows to a 25 year new marriage; and God help the thousand men who are here without their wives    ...OR MOTHERS!

Emergent B'Smergent

The following is from my Catholic cousin's blog, pinewoodcastle.typepad. 

I've copied it here in order to advocate more contemplation of Scripture and in spite of my criticism of my Catholic brothers and sisters. While I maintain they are in error believing in works-based salvation, they are not to be dismissed simply because their adoration of Christ differs from mine. We worship the same Saviour, and honestly, in some cases, their devotion to the bearing of spiritual fruit make my reeking banana peels look fairly knotty.

Not that YWH's holding a competiton, or anything...


"Carlo Carretto, a leading spiritual writer of the past half-century, was a hermit in the Sahara desert for more than a dozen years. Alone, with only the Blessed Sacrament for company, milking a goat for food, and translating the Bible into the local Bedouin language, he prayed for long hours by himself. Returning to Italy to visit his mother, he came to a startling realization:

His mother, who for more than 30 years had been so busy raising a family that she scarcely ever had a private minute, was more contemplative than he was.

Carretto drew the right lesson. It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with what he’d been doing as a hermit. Rather, there was something wonderfully right about what his mother had been doing as she lived the interrupted life amidst the noise and incessant demands of small children. He had been in a monastery,

but so had she.

A monastery is not so much a place set apart for monks and nuns as it is a place set apart (period). It is a place to learn the value of powerlessness* and to learn that time is not ours, but God’s.

Our home and duties can, like a monastery, teach us that. John of the Cross once described the inner essence of monasticism this way:

'But they, O my God and my life, will see and experience your mild touch, who withdraw from the world and become mild, bringing the mild into harmony with the mild, thus enabling themselves to experience and enjoy you.' 



John suggests that two elements make for a monastery: withdrawal from the world and bringing oneself into harmony with "the mild."

Certain vocations offer the same opportunity for contemplation. For example, the mother who stays home with small children experiences a real withdrawal from the world. Her existence is monastic. Her tasks and preoccupations remove her from the centers of power and social importance. And she feels it. Moreover her sustained contact with young children (the mildest of the mild) gives her a privileged opportunity to be in harmony with the mild: to attune herself to the powerlessness rather than to the powerful.


The demands of young children also provide her with what St. Bernard, one of the great architects of monasticism, called the “monastic bell.” Bernard told his monks that whenever the monastic bell rang, they were to drop whatever they were doing and go immediately to the activity (prayer, meals, work, study, sleep) to which the bell was summoning them. He was adamant that they respond immediately: If they were writing a letter they were to stop in mid-sentence when the bell rang. When the bell called you to the next task, you were to respond immediately, not because you want to, but because it’s time for that task and time isn’t your time, it’s God’s time. For him, the monastic bell was a discipline to stretch the heart by taking you beyond your own agenda to God’s agenda.


Hence, a mother raising children, perhaps in a more privileged way even than a professional contemplative, is forced, almost against her will, to constantly stretch her heart. For years, while raising children, her time is never her own, her own needs have to be kept in second place, and every time she turns around a hand is reaching out and demanding something. She hears the monastic bell many times a day and she has to drop things in mid-sentence and respond, not because she wants to, but because it’s time for that activity and time isn’t her time, but God’s time. The rest of us experience the monastic bell when our alarm clock rings and we get out of bed and ready ourselves for the day, not because we want to, but because it’s time.


The principles of monasticism are time-tested, saint-sanctioned, and altogether – trustworthy.

But there are different kinds of monasteries, different ways of putting ourselves into harmony with the mild, and different kinds of monastic bells. Response to duty can be monastic prayer, a needy hand can be a monastic bell, and working without status and power can constitute a withdrawal into a monastery where God can meet us. The domestic can be the monastic."

- Father Ron Rolheiser

- - - - - - - 

["...However, just be sure, my dear children: there will be no negotiating on abhorrent belief in purgatory, praying to Mary and/or dead saints, the immaculate conception, and transubstantiation..."

Now, two years later, one child is an Eastern Orthodox hipster, more Catholic than the uuberest of Catholics; another is dating Catholics, and the third is... still not baptized and dating a not-very-un-ex-Catholic.

Oh, can a mother's grief be any more complete?]

*I imagine Rolheiser'd been pursuing the amalgamous AA BigBook, wherein is found the Famous First of the TwelveSteps, tho I can't be sure.

Capital Capitol

Praising God for John Michael Talbot and Pandora, and, seven days post election day, for His enduring WORD, Jesus, who can still my heaving breast with promises that He loves California and won't let her fall into the cold, mean seas just yet.  I do not love CA that much, and rather brashly protest her too many Democrats who vote like a robotic union machine, aiming the state straight for annihilation  and heaping more ruin on her rubble while the rest of us wonder how to salvage the mess.

But a few pairs of walking shoes and some magazines thrown into a suitcase later, we are in the nation's capital attending an OpenText conference at a pornicious hotel in National Harbor MD. God bless my man. He requested the Adult fare off our TV, and when we entered room 8-215, he checked this time. (Remember the Alamo at September's Westin? A hurried departure at 11:59PM will not soon be forgot...)  It was still there upon the TV menu, so he grabbed the phone and dialed the "Consider It Done" line. It got done.

No TV has emitted since that moment, the times and seasons calling for more hymns & less HGTV.  The LORD of Hosts and Hearts wants to still my complaining spirit, so with no kitchen and bath remodels to behold, I can train my mind on 'importanter' matters than having my own bathroom: a seven month backlog of unstudied sermon notes and an artsy new journal to chronicle them in --a BD gift from she who still calls me friend.

The monuments were wind whipped yesterday as the Mister & I prayed round the National Mall, chased a squirrel half up a tree when it tried to pinch my sunglasses case, and drank cocoa next to Constitution Pond. It's all to one effect: tears lept out when "Battle of the Bulge" came into view on the WWII Memorial, sure that the supply of valorous, duty bound young men who will stand in the gap for a righteous nation will soon run out.  Victoria's Secret, MTV, cable porn, prayerless schools full of sexting children seem to indicate one thing: righteousness is dead in America.  With respect to Rory and Nick, fine soldiers and valor filled, what's left to fight for? Bigger happy meals? Vomitoriums on every corner? A thong on every female?

We head for Old Town Alexandria now, and while I will not freeze with my man's warm belly fat to snuggle into whilst the water taxi speeds us across the Potomac, I will have to put away my tears, with time only for pondering I Cor 3:22 +/- which speaks to those self possessed, power seeking metro riders living off over-taxed citizens, paying heed to unspoken rules of public decorum: speak only if the one asking is elected to a position of power or makes more money than you. All others deemed invisible.

"Let no man glory in men. For all things are Yours... and ye are Christ's; and Christ is God's."

American ZygVote

Oh, dear God. Change the heart of this people. Change my heart. Why do I imagine that one precinct and sore feet a new nation will make? Only by your grace, Holy LORD. Open our eyes to what we must do to safeguard 230 years of artful, ordered singularity.

Find your people able and willing to just vote already.

Amen.

All Saints Day

 a nice blog about lovely matters... u kno, God's judgment, child abuse, elections and the like... all obliterated by blogspot's lousy text editor,  not allowing UNDO after a text cut axed the whole page.

Thanks alot.

American Hallows

It's dusk. GLAD-RAD plays John Powell & Howard Shore, drowning out dear D's air-balloon organ trill next door.  It's that Vincent Price spook 'em tune that he's graciously postponed playing all month until tonight.  The first year his display went up, it played semi-daily until 10 PM, & the kids muttered a bit about lost sleep; but ever the morose one, I rather decided to like it.  (How is it that they lost sleep? They never go to bed until after 1AM?)

I finally heeded the LORD with the apology I owed neighbor kids J & T --over threatening to pray that God avenge the five year old they were picking on.  It went well.  I hate it when my anger management problem overflows into the lives of poor innocent children!  One claimed to have no idea what I was referring to, the other looked at me with those knowing eyes that told me he'd been wondering when I was going to 'fess up.  It was a good opportunity to remind them how much God loves them and does not plan to harm people, only to bid them Come To HIM when He calls.  These boys grew up mostly avoiding Sunday School, Bible Club, and much of my God talk, but I perceive a deep well of need and a welcome mat for the Gospel.  Holy LORD, capture the boys of our street, pour out your grace and mercy and bid them with powerful visions of all you have in store, not just all you hope to save them from... in the Name of our Saviour, Christ Jesus! aMeN.

It's time to set up our coffee table out front.  Like last year, I'm not sure who will hand out candy at the door, as all three offspring have sprung to attend parties.  After our chili and pizza night two years back, it became clear that our living room is too small for an all-comers neighborhood gathering.  The coffee-out-front idea was suggested at church. Good call.  I want to take credit for their change of heart in canceling ye olde harvest carnival.  I'd always excuse ourselves from it to stay home where the relationships are.  I  mean, who wants to miss out on all the kids, the costumes, the chiming trick-or-treat!'s? Someone must have been listening.

God of heaven, secure the borders of our corner of this patch of planet.  With your angelic heraldry, defend and arrest anything demonic that would dare foment evil in our children and our ways.  Open the eyes of our neighborhood that You would be our first thought every day, and your praises lifted before our first act every morning.

Saints alive! It's Halloween.

RainRainWentToday, NextTimePleaseALongerStay

It's Requiem for a Dream playing on Pandora (Clint Mansell/Kronos Quartet) along with blessed other movie soundtracks on GLADiator RADio, OS outside finally settling on one-color-or-the-other for the front of the house since the sun came out, but not before beating his eldest Sis' at a rainy morning game of chess. I could pretend it was a their idea, but that would be untrue: after listening to Glad-Rad all day yesterday, it became glaringly apparent that when it's gloomy & wet, one's chess board must be put to use, or what's a rainy day for? Pawns & bishops dusted off, table cleared, it wasn't hard to sell the plan. Soggy leaves dot the wood floors, added a woodsy touch.


Middle Chyle. She's out with her church kids, climbing Mount Baldy. (She will not track in a single leaf. That's just who she is.)


Mr. Man. Off driving go-carts with team members from work, but will walk in at any moment (he WILL track in more glorious leaves), hence, I must be brief in the interest of beating him to the kitchen where chicken thighs are thawing.  We're locked in a game of 'cooking wars.' I am not really interested in winning, but I am certain that he iS, so today shall be my turn.


Wait. Yesterday's laundry, still unfolded. The morning was spent penning a letter, talking on the phone, HELL talking (theology, not trash) with eldestD,  and reading an old Will Glasser blog. On THIS very day, eight yrs ago, he wrote the item below.  It exactly declares my usual position on Halloween, but I've 'acclimated to the culture'; moved left of right. You kinda hafta' when the house next door is a The Coney Island of Halloweeness. Would that I could post a picture.  I've come to adore what I once abhorred.


Mr. Glasser's now married and living in SO-CA, yet a little too far away and too clean to give a call to D#1, his fellow classmate who is a slightly bohemianized variation from the PHC ideal.


I salute him anyway:

"WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2002

October 31st: Reformation vs. Halloween by Will Glasser.blogspot.com

On October 31, 1517, a monk stood at the door of a church in Wittenberg, Germany. With several strokes from a hammer in his hand, he nailed a piece of parchment to the wooden door. The parchment bore ninety-five statements condemning the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church. The man was Martin Luther, and the ninety-five theses that he posted on that October day set into action a movement that would change the course of history - the Protestant Reformation.

Sadly, Christians today do not associate October 31st with Luther's brave action. Instead, the day is spent in celebration of a pagan festival of death and darkness. Reformation Day has been overshadowed by Halloween.

The roots of Halloween can be traced back more than fifteen hundred years before Luther's time to the Celtic festival Samhain. This festival was celebrated on October 31st, the eve of the Celt's New Year, to honor their lord of death, Samhain. On this evening, the Celtic pagan priests, called Druids, built huge bonfires, on which they sacrificed crops and animals. The people would array themselves in ghoulish costumes and parade around the neighborhood to frighten off spirits... "

(Funny. I was just perusing the blog of Jim Morrison's wife,  "Mrs. Morrison's Hotel," who celebrates her Wiccan priestessness, wishing her readers a Happy Samhain. [D#1, how do you pronouce that, again?) Good thing for all of us she doesn't take comments. I doubt she wants me asking if she's really a priestess of death. Jim is a little beyond caring, at this point.)

I wrote a near identical Halloween Hellow to give away with the candy some eight years ago, too. [OMG. Did I steal it from him? can't remember back that far...] The hope --beyond redeeming the night-- was that some like minded family would see our info, call, and invite us to a neighborhood Bible Study. I'm starting to figure out that is never going to happen.  All these years, I've considered our house too small, but I hear the LORD lately saying OhPooh. You don't need a big house to worship Me. Just do it.  What a concept. (Does Jesus say Pooh or Pshaw? Such a deep day of Theological Thinking.)  So...

...if I can demand my children PLAY CHESS already, why not hypnotically propose that DH hold a Bible Study already?

It's complicated.

A Passive Aggressive Follow'd my Lead

I am anxious to get to a giant anamorphous/yesmakingupmyownwordsagain pisanous pile of newspapers, news magazines, Life:Beautiful, and CA history, but as the 'walls' of numerous due-dates are closing in, so the walls of my home are also.  And this, just found on someone's iMac desktop, tho three months old, fits my present state of mind; reminds me that my children learned passive aggression AND NOT SO PASSIVE aggression, from none other than their mother.

That would be Me.

I confess.

Holy God,
Friend. 

Heal us all. 
Help. Mend.

"10/2010

 My dear SLB:

I removed the sewing bags from the living room weeks ago when someone was cramming stuff between the wall and the couch, not caring that parcels were spilling out, a file box was gaping (it was never welcome to stay there in the first place), and someone's empty beverage containers were rolling around the vicinity. So I took action as a matter of self defense against apathy.  I hate apathy, and I think you do too.

You never brought the matter up with me, you simply returned your sewing stuffs back to the place from which I had removed them.

I hear they call that being “passive aggressive.”

Worried that my desire to control your stuff is a desire to control you?

Man-Up and ask me! You'll get a question in return: "Is my desire to control this home meant to communicate that it's not yours to control?" Um, yauh! Controlling Females. Somewhere, there's a ballad by that name; a book by that title; a sestina by that theme...

I feel claustrophobic when things touch the walls.  There it is.  I am neurotic.  Besides that, our tolerance for clutter is starting to relax so much that all the purses on barstools, books on tables and magazines on bars are not bothering me like they used to. I find this alarming! (Does nothing matter anymore?  That’s a sign of depression.  I’d rather clean up the clutter than go on anti-depressants.)

So, if you want your small room to feel less small, store your excess in the art room, garage loft, or a rented storage unit.

Thank you for trying harder than the rest of us to make things harmonious and artful, God breathed and holy.  You rock, but notSoMuch when you resort to my old freakish methods of agresion con pasion.

Love you,

Mom."

Two Months? Seeing What Is. And an Unknowing Prophesy.

These first two months of virtual redux have moved slowly. Glancing back at August 1, it's hardly there, lost in a bleary haze...  


Propelled by wiki-inquiry and a backward look at a lifetime of stunted growth, the pensive journey forward into 50-year-old-ness is plight filled. Who wants to be transparent enough to admit that middle age has arrived before people skills? Who wants to live with the certainty that, though Celebrate Recovery lifted the veil of shame from a lifetime of anger and pride, I have only a few remaining years to recover from the losses? Twenty? Thirty? How stark life appears when viewed through that lens.  


Thus, I took an online query on an Asperger site and found I'm only two points away from being autistic.  Clever, huh? To diagnose away my problems is to avoid responsibility for them!


That explains why I'm perseverating over zygoteness.  There's something about wrapping one's identity around being but a morula. 16 cells. The zygote's last stand. Morula: Latin for mulberry --that tree they cut down in front of the girls' kindergarten classroom. That tree from which silk worms will only eat. It is small, useful, cute, unassuming, and, like the silk worm, has no idea what it's about to become, nor the usefulness for which it was created.


At (eight to) ten weeks, however, the morula has expanded to "fetus," that implanted little figure that NARAL and Planned Parenthood preach is a mere blob of tissue, despite the presence of heartbeat (21 DAYS, wiki.heart development) and brain waves. It's settled, then. Into a purpose, every morula must grow; let go its grip on the door frame and allow God's hand usher in the life He's planned.


WikiOde to the precious early stage brain (recall chords of Snow Patrol, Up To Now...): "The ventral half of the neural plate is controlled by the notochord, which acts as the 'organiser'. The dorsal half is controlled by the ectoderm plate which flanks the neural plate on either side.

Ectoderm follows a default pathway to become neural tissue. Evidence for this comes from single, cultured cells of ectoderm which go on to form neural tissue. This is postulated to be because of a lack of BMPs, which are blocked by the organiser. The organiser may produce molecules such as follistatin, noggin and chordin which inhibit BMPs.

The ventral neural tube is patterned by Sonic Hedgehog (Shh) [yes, you read that right. It really is called that]* from the notochord, which acts as the inducing tissue. The Shh inducer causes differentiation of the floor plate. Shh-null tissue fails to generate all cell types in the ventral tube, suggesting Shh is necessary for its induction. The hypothesised mechanism suggests that Shh binds patched, relieving patched inhibition of smoothened, leading to activation of glia transcription factors..."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

BEFORE four-year-old Ellie was found floating face down in Tulloch Lake during one of her family's post-waterski siestas, I am sure her neural plates were differentiated in the most Einsteinian fashion (with hair like mine, she certainly looked the part); but AFTERWARDS, not so much: all that O2 deprivation bundled the synapses in a confused mass of anti-algebraic debility. 

OH the inhumanity! Or, not.

The "retard" the siblings made fun of in subsequent years was every bit as precious in God's sight as Little Albert. The fragile-X children of Brian Doerksen are every bit as precious as the most brillant Oxford don...

And with that thought, I turn to D#2's Dell and play Creation Calls on YouTube for the Nth time.  Thank  you, Mr. Doerksen, for reminding me of God's perfect mind, hand, heart, plan.

Everything He's made is good.

(Another progeny-ward P.S. - OS: Ponder, please, the Sonic Hedgehogness* of your calling. Be a musician. (SHH!) You're a mere !noggin molecule! now, but lodged to become more; much more. Or not. Just let go the proud doorframe. Let's see.)

Epilog 
(That? No, that was not the prophesy. Here's the prophetic element: YOUR LOFTY WORDS DID NOT MEET YOUR ACTIONS, after feeling forced to move away from your neighborhood of 24 years, because a home for the disabled crashed your party by moving in next dorr...doer...Doerkson... DOOR.  Suddenly all the unreconciled angst, bitter self pity and unresolved anger over everybody's failures coalesced into dramatic tears every time you so much as looked out the window at the new "facility" next door, or heard the angst ridden cries of the victims living within, as they were fed, sunned, or diapered on the kettle druuuum of a wood deck they installed between your houses.  I sought counseling. She whom I paid $125 per hour to enlighten me as to WHY I couldn't stop crying, said to move, and then to try and figure it all out. To my great shame, we did. And my entire universe collapsed. . .)

Zygo's R Us

"The zygomatic bone (cheekbone, malar bone) is a paired bone of the human skull. It articulates with the maxilla, the temporal bone, the sphenoid bone and the frontal bone. The zygomatic is homologous to the jugal bone of other tetrapods. It is situated at the upper and lateral part of the face and forms the prominence of the cheek, part of the lateral wall and floor of the orbit, and parts of the temporal and infratemporal fossae [Fig. 1*]. It presents a malar and a temporal surface; four processes, the frontosphenoidal, orbital, maxillary, and temporal; and four borders.

The term zygomatic derives from the Greek Ζυγόμα zygoma meaning "yoke". The zygomatic bone is occasionally referred to as the zygoma, but this term may also refer to the zygomatic arch or the zygomatic process."  -- from OS's Anatomy Class web link

NOTE to three who were birthed by me:
Zygo, zygoma, zygomatic.  Whatever way you slice it, it's all about the face, facebook, the image you want to present to the world, and what kind of stuff you are really made of.  So, while you chilluns backpack away your Columbus Day Weekend, please note how exasperating was your reply to my farewell note.  My "poor choices" comment was not about separation or feeling the pains of some empty nest. OMG--you can SO miss the point when denial is your default.  It's about hamstringing him who is enrolled in college classes that we've paid for. It's about my lawn going un-mowed for 8 weeks.  It's about that mess on the workbench in the garage. It's about my house sporting two different shades of brown with masking tape left around windows, ladders left up in the side yard, and a bathroom that awaits it's weekly cleaning. For the third week.  It's about D#1's (expensive?) detour to OuterBanks, NC last Monday. It's about waiting to plan the whole trip until the NIGHT BEFORE.

While you enjoy those broken budgets, the underage drinking (OS), and the lovely woods of our blessed Sierra Nevada, I recognize that impulsiveness is a family plague, and I cry out to God for His healing forgiveness.  I had a hope while we went through the home-ed motions that you all might adopt some accelerated form of godliness beyond that limited mode we modeled.

Exasperating.  Our zygomas are showing.

(*PS: I must confess those pictures were priceless and your spark for adventure, enviable. Now, would someone show me how to insert visuals in blogs?  The skull image that went with the above definition was perfectly Halloweeny.)

Two months.

Being propelled toward 50-year-old-ness, these first fluctuations of virtual redux are fearful.  

I am now a morula. 16 cells. The zygote's last stand. Morula, Latin for mulberry.

Remember that tree they cut down in front of the girls' kindergarten classroom? That tree from which silk worms will eat? The children are twenty something now, yet their special tree is no more. Some silk moths somewhere are in lament, learning with me that life is one fluctuation after another, one disappointment and frustration after another.  Weather them well, and fruit appears.  What the BioDome failed to appreciate, we know instinctively: [>Bleep<] happens, growth occurs. Composting in a nutshell.

I wish I could say this truth is internalized.  Sadly, my compost is an anerobic mess. Smells bad.  But all is not lost.  In the next seven months, good things may come.

I am waiting.

Longfellow Memory

We had a semblance of continuity in those precious early years:

monthly memory poems, 

verses, and the annual 

 Speech Meet.  

This wee verse entered the scene from a Celestial Seasons tea package (you take what you can get when your education dollars come NOT from the Fed, but from what your bacon-bringing hubby can cobble together each year, once taxes and mismanagement take their toll).

And the following verse sticks in our collective heads, called forth on strange and not-so-strange occasions, and always to my great delight.

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,

  Life is but an empty dream! 

For the soul is dead that slumbers,

  And things are not what they seem. 

Life is real!  Life is earnest!

  And the grave is not its goal;

Dust thou art, to dust returnest,

  Was not spoken of the soul. 

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,

  Is our destined end or way;

But to act, that each to-morrow

  Find us farther than to-day. 

[did not learn next three verses] 

Lives of great men all remind us

  We can make our lives sublime,

And, departing, leave behind us

  Footprints on the sands of time;

[we did not learn the verse that belongs

here, either; tea boxes have not much 

room, after all. 

But this is the one I always chime in with,

complete with my penchant for the over-

dramatic:] 

Let us, then, be up and doing,

  With a heart for any fate;

Still achieving, still pursuing,

  Learn to labor and to wait!

Goodscape

I used "goodscape" in a post tonite. Such a pleasant word and a pleasant thought that one can just decide something is a word and make it so.  The post-comment arose as I pondered a blog's gardening theme, and 'cause I followed D2's nagging exhortation to only think/write/say/stay POSitIve in my remarks, and she is right. Flowers bloom and poetical things emerge if I can just stave off my usual focus on the negative.

It's becoming easier, but you wouldn't know it reading here. The moral inventory aspect of AmZyg's purpose is becoming apparent: my resentment over a twenty year ongoing offense has turned toxic. It crops up, twisting my heart, cutting too close to the bone... & I wonder how anyone can escape the smell of anaerobic waste reeking from the cracks in my composure. I am a walking bad-scape.

So, I avoided Zygoting last week. Avoided my Bible, avoided God & people, and on Sunday, thought up three good excuses to skip out on church & communion after my 3's room fun was over.  Rather than retreat to prayer, I went wandering around blogspot when I got home, posted ill advised comments on blogsOfStrangers.  Zygote is such a simpleton not to post anonymously. Zygote is too lazy to learn the ins & outs of techdom, true, but worse than that, she harbors a madness, a narcissism that believes the laws of the web will be suspended for her alone.  And, while she's too private for Facebook, she was not so humble as to let the big orange button pass her by that day she clicked on

"Start Your Free Blog Here!" 

It was probably that word FREE! that nabbed her, a tractor beam word too powerful for over-budget housewives to resist. [What IS a tractor beam?]

I fancied a blog that would inform my kids, my DH, a blog wanderer or two, & a generation of grandchildren yet unborn: some audience of peccish teen relations in 2030, or 50, or 70, who will want to know who their grandmama/aunt/9th cousin-once-removed was; what generational sins will likely plague them, what blessings and curses may confront their offspring-yet-to-be?  D2 reminded me I could post privately, yet, what lure, what voyeurism, what love of taking risks is it that leads a person to throw their stuff out there hoping it might be seen?  The pure ego of it spawns an imaginary search for a shrink again, my eleventh, or thirteenth. I've lost count.  (Now, wait. If you'll dare to peek beneath those thirteen layers of denial, you'll recall a sinister wish that your Enemy would find these pathetic rantings and decide you are somehow not worth hating... that's like wishing everyone would wake up and suddenly give Hitler the "benefit of the doubt.")

At its best, public blogging forces the heart and mind to meld themselves into something approaching a psychological GoodScape; a horizon line at sunset to look upon, anticipating a new day ahead while simultaneously reflecting on the one about to end. . .


. . . HeaveAsigh. Tonite, I forgot my cares and found myself poking around sites gathered from Friday's HortSymposium. Freeing, blessed, wondrous, beautiful landscaping sites governed by people who live like they were fine pieces of acoustic music. Uncomplicated; honest; hardworking; artful. Once again, the temptation to post on a blogOfStrangers overtook me.  It was bliss, leaving my moral inventory behind and reliving simpler times.

This time I copied it before I left, so I could have it 'for keeps,' the Nursery Blogger's theme, evident:

"My favorite nursery of all time has passed on, as do all good things, including the owner, whose life story and great soul left a permanent wake in our home that has yet to subside.  It was a destination, 30 minutes south in Westminster/Huntington Beach: Heard's Country Gardens, & it lives on in the Salvia that dots my front walkway; in the mounds of Mondo that have endured season after season; in the love I have for the simplicity of dirt--a love cultivated by Mary Lou Heard's singular newsletters which, upon arrival, would bring to a halt whatever we were doing so we could sit & devour every word.  Her heart and her great humor permeated her business, and inspired us to hatch our first landscape plan, & to launch it by composting-in-place:  We drove to nearby Sycamore-lined streets, piled high a load of fallen leaves into the back of our stationwagon, then pulled Old Blue up & onto our dead lawn where the kids unloaded it by the handfull. Over the mound we spread vermipost and grass clippings... & mixed everything with a pitchfork for four or five months. The goodscape remains to this day, ever-blooming in seasonal colory.  

Soon after she died, some nice folk organized a womens' shelter benefit 

around Mary Lou's folksy style, & all her newsletter contacts now further 

one of her worthy charities. 

I miss Heard's."

HEARD'S GARDEN TOUR <3

Only One Fight

It's a record.  The two Polar Opposites, whose wedding anniversaries are noteworthy for either being cancelled by arguments or to some degree marred by them, can report only one sour note brought on by my favorite soapbox issue, public nudity.  Because I have to pay bills and unpack from our wonderful four day getaway, clean up the mess left by three 20-somethings and grocery shop, here's my best pik on the 'fore mentioned issue, just found on D#2's desktop while I was (why were you doing this??) organizing her folders... (i was unloading stuff off of a flashdrive.  Oh yeah.)  P.S... the fight wasn't because we disagreed on the issue of public nudity, just about what to DO about it.  It is ever and always about what to DO about something... God bless my DH. He does what every man who's ever confessed everything has done: puts his head down and goes on with his life.

Me? I write a letter.  This one's from six years ago, & I thot it worth a re-read.

Mr. - - - - - , Principal

Milliken High School

2800 Snowden Ave

Long Beach, CA 90808

November 23, 2004

Dear Mr. - - - - -,

I hope you will receive this letter in the spirit with which it is sent.  I just want to register disappointment at the judgment used in allowing your fall drama presentation, Noises Off,  to feature public undress.

I have long stopped being alarmed at the base elements of our culture.  Ever since I heard some guy on the radio refer to the United States as a Post Christian Culture, my alarm at what I see every day has melted to a sort of sustained grief.  I’ve grown used to looking the other way when Carl’s Junior & Victoria's Secret sell their wares, or when titillating shows like Desperate Housewives and NYPD Blue become award winning hits. [note to blog: we no longer own a TV]

I must object, however, when the values that drive commercial interests in our popular media become the standard adopted by the best of our cultural institutions; and shouldn’t our local schools strive to be that? To be the BEST of what our culture offers, willing to overcome the swill that 'popular' culture swims in?  So, this is the spirit in which I write this letter: kids need the adults in their lives to teach and model the necessary refusal to adopt the base standards they see everyday; to resist mediocrity, compromise and failure; to absorb higher principles -- the ones that even allow those money driven interests to exist in the first place: values of decency, restraint, purity, honesty, discipline.  Consult any primary source document on the founding of our free-enterprise-sustaining nation, and you will see these conservative values embedded within the framework of our founders’ writings and in the fiber of their lives.

So, what is to be gained (bawdy humor and ambitious acting skills aside) by extending to your young high school students the permission to adopt the standards of Madonna and Playtex, MTV and Hanes, when the better part of maturity calls on all of us to forsake their prurient appeals and to resist the normalization of publicly exposed underwear and recreational sex?

I cannot fathom how an institution committed to the welfare of our children and the training of future leaders could have allowed two female students (lead actor and her understudy) to strut and slink about the Milliken High School Auditorium stage in their underwear even for a minute, and certainly not for the majority of the play’s duration…

It saddens me, even sickens me.  And worst of all, one actress attends my church.  How abhorrent to think that her own school would ask her to choose between faculty approval and the better part of judgment.

Sincerely,  


[my utterly disrespected --both then and now-- name]

9/11 in America

What should be an occasion of solemn observance and serious reflection is just another routine Saturday, and it hurts to think about why: while we merry wives of wisdom (cough) are supposed to look to men for leadership, the reality of our pace setting role takes some time to sink in [25 years isn't nearly long enough].  There's a proverb about wise women making wise plans, but overwhelm and under confidence have taken a certain toll.

DH is tending to his usual first Saturday of the month widow ministry.  D#1 tends to her love of theatre and left for her latest stage management gig a few minutes ago. They will attend an Angels game this afternoon, and God willing, think patriotic thoughts as they sing that National Anthem. D#2 sleeps in and will find the Panera danish a bit stale when she finally rouses. OS is likely waking up to smells of bacon in Bishop, compliments of his rather portly [read bacon loving] host whose invitation to a weekend get-away constitutes the second most patriotic observance of us all: inhaling bacon and innertubing down wild rivers only comes in second behind consumption of ball park foods in the annals of All American Culinarity... Lastly, I have an afternoon hair appointment, not because I need a haircut, but because our wedding anniversary's coming up, and that means DH will not wince when he sees my friend Martha's salon bill.  When there's any excuse to $pend, I like to patronize the TheGoodGuys, or, 'Gal' in this case.

As for Patriot Day observances, NPR seems bent over backwards to cater to Muslim sympathies.  Just once I'd like to hear Scott Simon or whutsIzName Seagull mention The Kite Runner, The Stoning of Soraya M. or the women of Ontario, Canada who begged officials to leave off plans to allow Sharia law there because their prized rights as women of the West would evaporate otherwise.  I lament the left leaning people I listen to everyday, yet, I still tune in, amazed at how Christian media falls so short of the NPR/PBS standard.

Why do Christians efforts in news collecting/reporting fail to deliver much excellence??  Maybe the massive monies required to produce fare sufficient to current expectations are all spent overseas on charity and missions. If there's any leftover, it probably goes to people so bent on being Nice T'ians that quality suffers in the interest of not ruffling anyone's feathers.  That's it. Maybe T'ians in media are just too nice.  The folks at my church should go work at the networks. They could whip 'em into shape.

Oh, I dunno...

"Your photo's pretty weird," said DH when I showed him my first few blog posts.  I agreed, but couldn't imagine showing my face given the insecure state wherein I live.  I forgot to mention to him that the missing head shows my hair standing on end and is titled "burn-out personified" or some such caption. On my lap I am holding a lost and found item, Artes Latinae curriculum's answer key, lost for a VERY long time, and finally found after assigning a seat-of-the-pants grade to the wee leetle geeyuls who worked so hard to finish the one year program in two years and then some... they actually remember a few latin phrases ten years later.

So, I worked hard trolling the inner workings of iMac's picture files and iPhoto libraries searching for an improved photo, to no avail.  I do not like my face. Considered posting the shot of my sooty brows and bangs taken by OS moments after the oven blew up in my face.  I could laugh about it then, as now, because I am so used to calamity.  The photo, however, seems lost forever deep within the bowels of Apple's mysterious hierarchy of saved files, preserved moments and fond memories...  I gave up after becoming weary of a message about my hard disk being full.  Our '93 machine is groaning with age, and an entire day is mostly lost.

I think D#2 wants the entire neighborhood to kneel at the cross This Instant! as she belts out hymns and worship tunes with the front door and all the windows wide open.  She's been hard at work in a special-needs classroom this first week of school, at a job she was told she would lose if she dared take that missions trip to Ethiopia in June.  They were bluffing.  So, as she blows off steam, two of the neighborhood rascals (+1 little sparrow girl, B.) have appeared in the front yard, producing [near] thunderous applause.  They burst in seconds later, grabbing OS's four stringed guitar and offering a scratchy rendition of some M&M post-rehab song that D2 knew all the words to and just sang along at the top of her lungs --her usual way.  After explaining how OS's unrepaired guitar resembles our half painted house, I offered to pay them to finish the  job.  They liked that idea, but decided to toilet paper OS's room instead, as he is gone to Bishop for the weekend. It is good to see the ruffians after a long summer of missing each other. These are the fellas who would not come to Bible Club all those years ago -sigh.

Is a day considered well spent when plans to organize 2,000 photos, OR create a garden photo book, OR find 40 year old Joe Cocker lyrics [OHHhh...not Cocker. Cooker!], OR learn the definitions of skiffle and Georgian and neoclassical, OR finally watch Thriller on YouTube, OR discover that Mariah Carey videos are slutty and then decide to play an hour long mix of classic Sesame Street vignettes... suddenly morph into an invitation to Jake and Tyler (+1) to toilet paper our son's room? 

Life in the 'burbs can be quaint, and on the eve of the ninth anniversary of 9/11, we all need a little levity.