Thankful Itinerants

You know who has really spectacular weather of a Thanksgiving week? The Arizonans, those lucky lucksters. I enjoyed seeing everyone bundled up in sweaters and fleeces during the shivery 70 degree days. Brr!

I'm lazily relying on pictures, as is my habit of late. There are a few bits I don't have any good pictures of, though, like the night my parents and I drove the girls out of town in an attempt to get a better look at the stars. It was moderately successful- we saw Mars and Saturn in addition to the Pleiades, though neither my parents nor I could pin down the Big Dipper. During the singalong on the way back, my dad indulged in one of his endless novelty songs, "Found a Peanut." About six verses in, Naomi whispered to me, "Mommy, is he just making this up?" Hee.

In addition, I had a fun night with some high school chums at a local sports bar, dinner out with my sisters, and a trip to the zoo with my brother's family and my parents. Thanksgiving dinner was remarkably early, it seemed to me (12:01 p.m., approximately), but the turkey was delicious and we had a good time. I was toying with making the weird cranberry relish they are forever flogging on NPR, but I didn't. Anyone ever made that?

And now, the pictures...

I have already mentioned that my mom buys the best toys. Good job, Gramma!








On Tuesday morning, I took the girls to Hole in the Rock at Papago Park. They loved climbing around on the rocks, especially Naomi, who pretended to be a bear the entire time.




The Zoo! Remember when Muriel was all terrified of the livestock? No longer! She loved this goat with her whole heart.


I made up a name for the goat, Buttercup, before I realized that the nice Zoo people had put the name of each goat on their collar. (Its real name was CJ.) Muriel really believed Buttercup was hers, and kept objecting if any other child attempted to make contact with the creature.


Meanwhile, I was mildly obsessed with this giant bird, the Kori Bustard, an animal I had never heard of before. 42 pounds! Heaviest flight-capable bird!

Thanksgiving!


I got this idea from my friend, A.- the kids had a good time assembling assemblies from mini-marshmallows and uncooked spaghetti. Muriel just ate a couple of marshmallows.

Beautiful Thanksgiving afternoon- sunny, warm, and so delightful. Except that about ten minutes after this photo was taken, as I was sitting on the floor of the porch playing with the kids, Muriel decided to throw up down my back. Whee!

Muriel had been a sick little insomniac for the first three nights, had about two decent nights' sleep, and then in honor of Thanksgiving, picked up a nice stomach virus, probably from Buttercup. She was already in a lightweight phase, but three days of being sick and not eating followed by two days of throwing up and not eating has resulted in our little skinny thing being an even littler, skinnier thing. I'm trying not to worry. More vitamins and jello for her, maybe.

Here are the pictures I didn't post, because I can't get Lightroom to work in a recognizable way right now- one of Jim and Naomi in the plane on the way home- hooray for having another parent along! And one of our friends' new baby, D., who joined us (along with her parents! yea!) for a terrific former band nerd brunch the day after Thanksgiving. So wonderful to see old friends, and new little ones.

That's the trip roundup. The holiday open house is this weekend- Will I distribute the invitations to the neighbors on time? Will the power go out? Will anyone show up? Stay tuned...

Thankful

Yesterday Muriel and her classmates made big paper turkeys, decorating the big fan feathers in the back, which their teachers then assembled. On the right-most feather, the teacher wrote the child's name and what they are thankful for, as dictated by the child. Charlie is thankful for strawberries. Ella is thankful for her Mommy. Muriel is thankful for... Vitamins and Jello.

Aren't we all? Tomorrow morning is the kickoff of a crazy travel season- we're off to Arizona to blink in the sunshine for a week, and try to remember how to play outdoors. And then of course there is the thankful feasting. Have I told you lately, friends, how thankful I am for you? You and vitamins and Jello.

Girls' Weekend Mashup. Or Sample.

Imagine if you will that your girlfriend won a weekend stay at a geodesic dome on Washington's Pacific shore, and that she was kind enough to invite you along, buy you some cocktail makings, snack box, red-velvet petit fours, and for heaven's sake, a camel colored Snuggie to wear while you kick off the holiday season a little early by watching White Christmas on DVD and listening to the November beach wind howling outside.


Of course, I don't have to imagine it, only acknowledge my good fortune at hitting the weekend jackpot yet again. After the snack, cocktail, and Bing Crosby combo and a luxurious night's sleep in the geodesic loft, I had a long walk on the windy gray beach and time to catch up on back issues of the New Yorker. Liver, down, erudition, up slightly. In the afternoon we explored the nearest tourist/beach town, a place almost entirely devoid of village-type charm, with weird little strip malls bunched up along a rigorously divided highway-type road. We hit a souvenir shop enticingly named "Eye Candy," which was positively chockablock with seashell-themed merchandise. The homemade ice cream and fudge shop next door was also kind enough to stay open in the off season, and while we enjoyed a cone apiece, Ice Cream Shop Radio played a current song that uses the refrain from a vintage Hall and Oates hit. You know the one. Thus began the debate on what constitutes a mashup vs. a sample. I read (OK, skimmed) the Wikipedia articles on both mashups and sampling, and I still don't think I can answer the question with any authority.

Anyway, back to the dome for more snacking and magazines, and in the evening, back to the town to visit the Irish pub, which had advertised live music and implied fish and chips.


The live music was a guy at once loathesome and lovable, playing a truly random assortment of songs (Danny Boy? Yes. Take the Skinheads Bowling? Yes.) on the guitar and sometimes the piano. At one point he started "Blister in the Sun," and somehow the lyrics to "Might Like You Better if We Slept Together" crept in. OK, so, mashup? Sampling? At the last minute it switched to "The End of the World as We Know It," so ultimately we had to conclude it was...a medley? The highlight for me was a singalong to the Pogues' "Fairytale of New York," the lowlights I will refrain from cataloguing.

So, already a Saturday night to remember, right? But while the music played, two couples came in, pointedly dressed in their pajamas. My friend gave them a friendly interrogation on the way back from the Ladies', and that is how we ended up leaving "Galway Bay" and heading to the IGA (the town's grocery store) for Moonlight Madness. The IGA was hopping, the place to be in your pajamas and bathrobes, buying three pounds of Cornish game hen for $4.99, or, like the elderly man we bumped into on the way in the door, a half-priced case of Monster energy drink.


We spun the wheel of cheese (though we did not win the Emmenthaler), we bowled with a frozen turkey and eight two-liters of 7-Up (though I didn't even make contact with the soda, weakling that I am), and we jumped onto orange numbers taped to the floor whenever the lucky number announcement came across the PA.

Thus did I resurrect my streak, winning a ten dollar gift card on lucky number 9. What a weekend!

Back on the Eastside, every weekend is a Girls' Weekend. Muriel got her witch on, and Naomi, who already has considerable practice, was her cat.


Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble. Jim also got to take the girls to a princess party for one of Naomi's school friends. Apparently Snow White, the REAL Snow White, according to Naomi, was there, inexplicably doing magic tricks and painting kids' forearms instead of their cheeks.


Times are hard, even for the princesses.

Continuing Education

This past Saturday was the second and final installment of a brief but interesting continuing education class I enrolled in through the local college. (It's not a community college anymore, yo- they've got bachelor's degrees now!) The class was about online writing, specifically blogging. I know what you are thinking- what more could the creator of this entrancing, engrossing web log possibly need to learn about blogging? Yeah, yeah, very funny.

The class was geared toward people who have a business or some other interest for which social networking (via blogging, tweeting, Facebook and the like) is an as-yet untapped opportunity. The instructor provided lots of ideas for how to make your blog more engaging, including such obvious yet oft-ignored advice as "update often." Apparently I should also be reviewing products, or books, or movies, staging contests with prizes, and conducting polls. (For the first contest, I am thinking about a wagering pool on how long we let our jack-o-lanterns moulder before we transfer their squishy persons into the yardwaste bin...)

The real reason I signed up for the class is that I have been fomenting an online writing project on a topic that interests me. I thought getting a little formal blog training (such as it is) would give me a confidence boost to get going already, since like many projects in my brain, this one has taken out a mortgage and moved into a solid little house in the idea phase. But what I learned, of course, made me not more confident, but markedly less so. Because social networking on the web, and knowledge networking, I guess, provides a staggering array of tools and sites and doodads you can use to make sure that your thoughts or your message or brand or whatever get OUT THERE! in a hundred different places and ways. So you can set up and write your blog, but no one is going to find it if you don't give it the right "Google juice," and get it stumbled upon or dugg or kirtsied or whatever.

OK, maybe these are just ways to encourage visits, not determine the life or death of your ideas. But still, there is a gravitas implied in the level of effort and technology to promote an idea (which ironically I would be perfectly willing to exert if I were helping my classmate get his building supply company's blog off the ground) that feels misplaced on some fun writing project I'm idly mulling over. Crap. Now I have to go back and read the Artist's Way all over again.

Speaking of education, we let the television educate our children a bit over the weekend, and we were all treated to an episode of "Dinosaur Train" that featured great green boulders of Brachiosaurus dung, feces, poop, and one other poop-phemism that escapes me. We were expecting more of a (snickering) reaction from Naomi, who is not immune to the refined toilet humor of the preschool set, but because she is a TV hothouse flower, I am never sure what she is even understanding when the shows are on.

Speaking of jokes, the knock-knock jokes are attempting to gain traction. The joke is a fascinating little neuroscience mini-project- little kids love to laugh, they love jokes, but they don't understand them, and they really don't understand how to tell them. (Of course, neither do I, I am terrible at joke telling.) It's amazing what mental abilities go into this genre of socializing. So Naomi can repeat jokes, but the ones she invents are more Dada than Catskills.

And speaking of more laughs to come, I am happy to discover lately that Muriel possesses the personality trait (which she didn't get from me) of being able to laugh heartily at herself. At dinner the other night she was holding her fork weirdly, upright by the tines on one hand, while doing some other engrossing thing with her other hand. She looked at her food, then said, hey, where's my fork?! When I told her it was in her hand, she looked at it, and back at me, and laughed and laughed.

Above Average Wednesday Evening

Tonight Muriel saw on the foyer table a little box of restaurant crayons I found in the pocket of a coat I haven't worn since last winter, and decided she wanted to color. I found her some paper in the art drawer, and she drew a little shape she referred to as a love, by which she meant a heart, and in fact it was pretty close. Then Naomi got in on the act, and helped Muriel trace her hands. Naomi traced her own hands on a different piece of paper, and decorated them elaborately, as she does. She made two circles which she said were cheeks, and she decorated those too. Then she taped the paper up on the wall over the cardboard box they have been living in, got some chopsticks and the rice server paddle thing, and set up her henna and face painting shop. The chopsticks were the henna, the rice paddle was the hand mirror so you could see your painted face.

They also were playing with this flashlight/radio we have, that you can wind up to charge the battery. Jim did his usual science explanation of how a dynamo works. Do they listen to this stuff? Hard to say. He had to coach Naomi a bit on how to turn the knob just a tiny bit to tune in a station. She wound it and wound it, and found one of those song that starts slow and melodic, but that you know is going to pick up. When the beat started, she stood there holding this flashlight radio, bouncing to the rhythm, with this serious, un-self-conscious look on her face that was indescribably awesome.

Naomi climbed into the chair behind Muriel and played that her arms were Muriel's. Then Muriel decided that meant she was Naomi, so she climbed onto Naomi's chair and ate up her leftover salad. There was some play yoga (Muriel's idea), and a pileup on Jim (in which I took no part), and then off to the bunk bed.