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Saturday, September 29, 2007

the growing-up continues

We had some shopping to do in the valley today, and while we were in the mall, C did something else she's always wanted to do:

That's not a sticker on her earlobe.

Friday, September 28, 2007

a red-letter day

C has been longing for shorter hair for at least a year. (This is the seven-year-old version of peer pressure. "Daisy has short hair, Mom, please?"). Other than her bangs and one end-trim about a year ago (well, and the two times she took scissors to herself as a toddler), her hair had never been cut. I had originally told her that her hair belonged to me until she was ten years old, by law, at which point she could decide to shorten it if she wanted to, but I relented a couple of months ago and told her that for her eighth birthday we could have a special trip to the salon and get her hair cut short, if she didn't change her mind -- which she didn't. Sunday's her birthday, and salons are closed Sundays, so we went today.

Goodbye, long hair.

C and my favorite Russian hairstylist, Natalya (I say this as if I've been to her more than once, or as if, for that matter, I've been anywhere to have my hair cut more than once in the last decade), discussing options.

Somehow she looks about five years older than she did two pictures ago.

(This is C in her new dress, a birthday present from T's parents.)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, PRINCESS. love love love you.

conversation with T

Tonight on the way home. T is driving; I am mostly-jokingly chiding him for driving too fast:

I: You're being kind of careless with my car. I usually shift down to first and go really slowly when I get to the dirt road. You're rattling my car to bits and raising way too much dust. No wonder your car is always so dirty, if you drive like this.

He: Well, when I'm driving my car onto the dirt road I'm headed to where you are. So you can understand why I would drive fast.

I: Now how can I scold you, when you say something like that?

He:You can't. But you can blog about it.

I: I'll do that.

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

a little help?

On Saturday, we will have our last interaction with the Other House when we go there to attempt to dig up Natalie's rosebush, in order to move it here (where I think we'll probably leave it permanently, not sure though). I may have the blackest thumb in California, but even I know that this is a TERRIBLE time to transplant anything -- what can we do, though? Ask the next tenants to let us come and do it in the winter? Does anyone who knows about gardening have any tips to help with this? For example, can we cut it off really short right now for ease of transport, or will that kill it forever? Should I feed it with anything before I put it in its new hole?

P.S. I'm doing much better, getting pretty well settled in, with only some minor nostalgic twinges now and then. :)

Thursday, September 20, 2007

OK, so now I know.

Yesterday I did the vast bulk of the cleaning at the old house, and then I cried all the way home.

I cried driving through town. I cried while I was putting things in one of our two mini-storage units. I cried on the phone with my dad (which was very embarrassing), and I cried while I listened to a serendipitous series of shuffled songs* on my iPod in the car on the half-hour drive from one house to the other. I had stopped crying by the time I got home, but I know I looked terrible and everyone was very nice to me at dinnertime. (It is taking practice, but I am learning to call this house "home" instead of "Mom and Dad's" and the other house "the other house" instead of "home").

It didn't help that I had been going on five hours of sleep for approximately a week, which does me no good at ALL, or that I had just worked hard, virtually nonstop, from 7:30 AM till 6:30 PM, or that I had had a semi-argument with T when he came to pick up LT from the old house for Boy Scouts, or that my hands were excruciatingly sore, tired, chapped, red, and banged-up from having scrubbed and scoured all day long. But in the main, I cried because I was grieving for a time and place that will never be mine again. Today I felt a little silly about it, but when I went back to pick up some cardboard to make garage sale signs, pulling in and parking in my old spot was a seriously nostalgic moment. Even now I choke up if I think about the sunlight coming through the sliding glass door in the afternoons, or the curtains with pictures of construction equipment that I made to hang in my toddler son's bedroom, or the smell of the first fire in the woodstove in the autumn.** See, there I go again. Some things I took for granted, even disliked in a way -- for example, that the default place to walk was in town, or that the safest place for the kids to run around and play was the nearby school playground -- seem sweet and like something to be missed.

In other words, I have it bad. But it'll pass. And at least now I can stop wondering if it's ever going to hit me, right?

*"What's Up", 4 Non Blondes, which, aside from being just an all around great song for when you're sad, because it's kind of ABOUT being sad/hurt/confused but not letting it ruin you, contains the line "I cry sometimes when I'm lying in bed/just to get it all out, what's in my head"; "Release Me", Wilson Phillips, which was a song that made me cry with regularity when it was current because I was So Dramatic and also I had Boyfriend Issues; "The Story", Brandi Carlile, another girl-power bittersweet kind of song, no explanation needed if you are familiar with it, and if you aren't, go listen to it, especially if you have two X chromosomes; "Sound of Silence", Simon and Garfunkel, which was not as pat to the circumstances as "Bridge Over Troubled Water" would have been, but it worked fine. I forget what came after those, but they got me over halfway home, at least.

**which probably would have been built tomorrow. It has been blessedly cooler this week, and it's supposed to be a brisk, possibly wet weekend. YES. Garage sale and all.

Monday, September 17, 2007

moved out, moved on

Whatever else has been true about the house where my family has lived for the past dozen years, one thing has been certain: It has always looked lived-in. Sometimes, in fact, 'lived-in' would have been far too charitable a term for the chaos that filled every room. This past weekend, the house has achieved a state, for the first time since I've had anything to do with it, wherein it does not look lived-in in the slightest, for the simple reason that it no longer is lived-in. Our belongings have been moved out (although I keep several boxes on hand to catch the last few things that are left lying around: the hair scrunchie on the top shelf of the closet; the crayons that fell into the gap where the hardwood doesn't quite meet the sliding-glass door and we never got around to putting in new trim; the answering machine; the spoon rest; the clock). Even the outdoors is as pristine as any non-landscaped area overseen by a family of people with the world's blackest thumbs can be in September in California. (That is to say... not very pristine. But it's devoid of anything we put there, anyway.)

And yesterday I started the job of going through all the rooms, removing every trace of our lives from the shell of the house that holds so many of our memories. By the end of the week there will be no smudges on the cabinet doors, no ring in the bathtub, no shed-skin-cell dust on the built-in shelves. Our germs will be gone from the doorknobs, and the house won't smell like us anymore. I've already washed away the wildly inaccurate marks made by my children over the years as they "measured" themselves against a doorjamb: Here is LT on his tiptoes. Here is C sitting down. Here is LT squatting. Here is C standing on a chair.

That house, where I've lived my entire adult life, is the only home my children have ever known. In fact, it is the only earthly home one of my children will ever have known, if she could even be said to have known it at all, before leaving it for one filled with glory, where there has never even once been, I presume, a toppling pile of laundry waiting to be folded and put away. All three of them were conceived there; all three came home from the hospital to one of the rooms I'm cleaning this week. The future tenants/owners will probably never stop to think of all the quiet candlelit trysts that have been kept in front of their fireplace, or of all the times we've sat in their bathroom, filled with shower steam, cuddling a croupy child at 3 AM. Nor will they have any way of knowing that my newborn son once lay in his crib in the apartment over their garage and projectile-pooped across his little bedroom until (I swear this is true) he hit the opposite wall four feet away. They won't know about the morning we came home from the hospital without our daughter: how the house filled with people who loved us while we began the task of learning to live without her, how I went to my son's room and lifted him still sleeping from his crib, so that I could comfort myself with his warm, breathing neediness while our family sat in a circle of grief in the living room at dawn.

I keep waiting to feel sad about moving out and moving on -- or even to have more than an occasional sweet-painful twinge of nostalgia. I feel like I'm skirting the edge of a well of sadness. In the space of a week, "home" will become another "place I used to live". There have been a few of those in my life, but it's been so long since I've added one to the list that apparently I don't remember how to feel.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

book meme! book meme!

My friend Kiwiria posted a BOOK MEME. I'm supposed to be either packing (looks ominously like we might get a light rain shower later and there's stuff that needs to get under cover at storage before that happens) or doing my homework for English class, but how could I resist?

Okay . . . picture this (really) worst-case scenario: It’s cold and raining, your boyfriend/girlfriend has just dumped you, you’ve just been fired, the pile of unpaid bills is sky-high, your beloved pet has recently died, and you think you’re coming down with a cold. All you want to do (other than hiding under the covers) is to curl up with a good book, something warm and comforting that will make you feel better.
What do you read?

The first thing that pops into my head for this situation is a Mitford book. Also L.M. Montgomery would be helpful here.

So, this is my question to you – are you a Goldilocks kind of reader?
Do you need the light just right, the background noise just so loud but not too loud, the chair just right, the distractions at a minimum?
Or can you open a book at any time and dip right in, whether it’s for twenty seconds, while waiting for the kettle to boil, or indefinitely, like while waiting interminably at the hospital–as long as the book is open in front of your nose, you’re happy to read?

Oh my gosh, definitely the latter. I can lose myself in a book anywhere, under any circumstances I can think of, much to the chagrin of my husband who, after thirteen years of marriage, still forgets sometimes that there is an established and necessary protocol for speaking to me when I'm reading.
1) Ask yourself: Is this conversation really necessary?
2) Get Rachel's attention and establish eye contact. If it is super, extra important that she pay attention you might want to explicitly ask her to close her book.
3) Speak your piece as efficiently as possible*.

Otherwise, I'm perfectly capable of remaining lost in my book and making 'hmm' sounds at appropriate places without being fully aware that someone is talking to me; this has been getting me in trouble my entire life.

*speaking haltingly in such a moment may result in rolled eyes and/or the use of "move it along" hand gestures. COME ON SPIT IT OUT THE BOOK PEOPLE ARE WAITING.

One book at a time? Or more than one? If more, are they different types/genres? Or similar?

Sometimes I'll be actively engaged in five or six books. Sometimes I feel more like focusing on one at a time.

1. In your opinion, what is the best translation of a book to a movie?
2. The worst?
3. Had you read the book before seeing the movie, and did that make a difference?

1. The best, in my opinion, is A&E's/BBC's Pride and Prejudice, hands down. BBC does a very good job with adaptations; their Wives and Daughters is very well done as well, especially considering that the book is about four inches thick. (OK, not quite four.)
2. First, I must say that I am the pickiest person I know regarding adaptations of books. Every once in a while I can like one that flies off on total tangents and even changes the plot and the characters' motivations, but that is SO SO RARE (Mansfield Park, I am looking at you.) Other than that, I am happiest if the screenwriter essentially just turns the text of the book into a screenplay... and this doesn't happen often. There are SO MANY adaptations that I have disliked that I am going to focus on a special category: adaptations that other people think are great, that make me shudder.

First in line for this non-award are the LOTR movies. Yeah, the timeline of events is basically correct (although there are many details changed, e.g. the beacons of Gondor, and many alterations for the sake of added drama), but the characters are completely altered. Every time my kids are watching this trilogy and get to the part where Frodo (who, yes, was one conflicted hobbit, I'll grant you) tells Sam to GO HOME I very narrowly manage to not do lasting damage to my television. Likewise the completely opposite-to-his-book-self character of Faramir. And the complete fabrication of the whole Arwen thing just so the film would have a woman character on screen for more than thirty seconds. And a jillion other incidents/characters as well. Don't even get me started on Frodo's drugged emo gaze filling the screen until it makes me feel physically nauseated.

OK, Rachel, don't hold back, tell us how you really feel.

Next (I could go on all day but I'll just do two), and I know I'm going to step on some toes here: the new Narnia movie. I know that even long-time Lewis fans really liked this movie. But not one single one of the four kids is anything like Lewis would have had them to be. Physically, the casting was flawless, and the actors were excellent, but let's go down a list from worst to not as bad: Susan, instead of being a mildly annoying older-sister type, is an absolute brat who wants to undermine the entire everything until practically the very last minute. Peter, who in the book is this very staunch, brave in spite of his fears, matter-of-fact doing-what-has-to-be-done boy hero, is a wishy-washy "eww, I don't want to STAB the wolf" whiner. Both Peter AND Susan constantly harp on their desire/need to go home and how they shouldn't be here and it's too dangerous waah. Lucy is not nearly as badly done as the first two, but even she has her moments (she, who "never once said 'I told you so'" as per Peter in the book, implies that concept virtually as soon as they step into the snow). Even Edmund, about whom I have the fewest complaints, instead of merely being a boy led astray who learns his lesson, continues betraying Aslan's people left and right for quite a while on his trip with the Witch. Just as annoying as the mischaracterization of the children was the way the entire movie had an entirely different tone from the one Lewis gave it. The books are these very subtle, subdued, British-feeling adventure stories; the film tries to be a kids' Indiana Jones, with daring escapes on a grand scale and snotty wisecracks from the animals and children (I have to physically leave the room when the scene with the river starts or risk committing mayhem; also, I would rather watch the humorously bad costumed-people-with-terrible-accents beavers in the 80's BBC movie than the cleverly animated smartass "The Honeymooners" beavers in this one).

My goodness. Um. Moving on. Question three.

3. Yes, I think it does. For a very long, detailed book, sometimes watching the movie first makes the book more readable for me (hello, Tom Clancy, I am looking at you). Also, I am more inclined to be fiercely loyal to a book if it's an old friend before I see it desecrated by filmmakers, but that doesn't mean that I have never learned to like a movie less once I realized how it veered away from its original source. However. I watched Forrest Gump and thought it was an OK movie; I tried to read Forrest Gump and couldn't make myself do it. The Black Stallion the film is wildly different from The Black Stallion the book, which I read as a child and really liked, but as an adult I infinitely prefer the film. And I watched The Princess Bride for the first time in junior high and have loved it ever since, in spite of the fact that when I read the book I found that the filmmakers had taken some pretty substantial liberties. In other words, I'm a fickle, inconsistent brat and don't listen to me.

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

verily, I am a prophet

Back when we first started really doing the work of moving out of this house, a couple of months ago, I started prophesying about a very specific thing in a "just you wait" kind of way, and today I found out that I was right. I suppose the fact that I am totally OK (although a titch... annoyed) with the fact that our landlord is not going to sell this house after all when we move out is a sign that I am seeing God work, or something equally spiritual and holy. Seriously, this move has been good for us in a lot of ways, all kidding about boxes aside, even though it has been an utter and complete pain in the derriere for everyone concerned. We may not have decluttered a whole lot (although we are having a moving sale in ten days; y'all come on Thursday evening the 20th for a freebie preview), but at least now everything we own is organized, mentally inventoried, and boxed. Right? I can honestly say that I am very glad that we've gone to all this trouble, even though we're moving home with my parents temporarily which I swore I would never do unless it was them needing us -- even though my back will never ever be the same -- even though it happened in the dead heat of the hottest summer in a decade or so, when just being outside is hellish misery, let alone toting around boxes and furniture all the livelong day.

But I do hereby proclaim that I told you so.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

yeah, baby, you know what I want.

(Legal wrangling continues.)

This move has changed me in ways that I never envisioned. Not only is my body now accustomed to lugging heavy things around and being in near-constant motion, not only do I avoid buying or permitting my children to buy anything that I can't eat or throw away lest I should have to (scary chord) move it, but I have discovered in myself an insatiable lust for... boxes.

My maternal grandmother has a wall in her kitchen that is one big bulletin board, and in the way of ladies who lived through the Depression and collected ev-er-y-thing, it is always covered with interesting objects. Interesting, at least, the first time you look, because the turnover on this wall art is zero. Every now and then something is added, but nothing ever gets taken away; I remember seeing some dooey-buttons from a 1960's presidential election way down in one corner and thinking that it was neat that Grandma had found those and put them there, and it wasn't until years later that I realized that she had probably put them there when they were current.

I digress (no, really?). One of the items on Grandma's bulletin board that, in my hyperlexic restlessness, I read and re-read when my family lived with her for five years, was a column by Erma Bombeck about her mother's fixation with boxes, and how she would never let one go once she had it, and how Erma and the rest of the family "received gifts in boxes from stores that had gone out of business twenty years ago" or some such thing, and how Erma's mother had to know a young man brought home by one of her daughters was worthy of her box before she would give it to him. This was another mere bit of (very funny) quaintness to me, any time I thought about it, until this past month.

But now... now the smell of cardboard in the sunshine makes me get all happy inside. I get a little tingly feeling when I hear the sound of the tape screeching out to make this flat bit of cardboard into a lovely prism-shaped container that will carry my belongings. I have a favorite box (U-Haul "Small Box" size, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways...). I never had a favorite box before. Honestly, I never thought about boxes at all, until every single moment of every day of my life became consumed with the need to put more and more and more things in boxes, moving to and fro and taping and marking like a robot on speed, until my house becomes empty. Yesterday I ran out. It was a terrible moment. I had ONE very large box on the porch, and a whole slew of shoebox-and-smaller sizes, but nothing in which I could pack our clothing, which was the task of the day. I had a leeetle meltdown (I cannot pack! How can I PACK when I don't have BOXES? What am I supposed to DO HERE?) blew up at my husband on the phone (after all, if a man can't provide you with the boxes to which you have been accustomed...), complained to my mother, and before I knew it God was having a good laugh at me and I was very nearly buried in boxes. I went to grocery stores and collected some (at T's urging -- I so thought grocery stores must have stopped getting things in boxes sometime around the Summer of Love, but then what else would they get things in?); my mother brought a pile of them from work; T came home with about a hundred pounds of very large ones from the warehouse at work. Then this morning my dad rescued some for me at the hardware store, and just as I was sitting down to blog about boxes, Debi arrived with another heap of them. I am set.

With God as my witness, I will never go boxless again.

Tuesday, September 04, 2007

aauuughhhhh

no news about The House. There are legal maneuverings underway but I'm not holding my breath.

Meanwhile, T just came home from a Boy Scout meeting with the news that a hike has been scheduled into the weekend during which we were going to be moving the last of our belongings out of this house and transferring ourselves for good and all to my parents'. Well, not for good and all. For until we are convinced that the real estate market is not going to help us magically find a house we can both live in and afford in our county, and we find a place to rent and get out of my parents' hair. Anyway. Did you catch that? I thought I had THREE weeks before we moved, but nooo, I have two. LESS than two, because today is Tuesday. TEN DAYS would be a more accurate way of putting it.

Please excuse me while I panic.

You know what's hardest? Even harder than the complications caused by the fact that the few things on The Spreadsheet that were left in the ASAP group have now been pretty much merged with the early-September group as well as the Last Wave group? Is that I am going to have to figure out which books I want to do without for something on the order of an entire... week. Or close to two. Of course I wouldn't be reading every book on my precious (channeling Smeagol) bookshelves in the next ten days, but I like to have all of my options open at all times just in case. What if eleven PM next Wednesday is the perfect psychological moment in which I will be able to pick up War and Peace and finally, after many many failures, actually get into it and read beyond those interminable soirées at the beginning? The moment will pass and it will be another fifteen or twenty years before the stars realign to favor that event! What if I find myself checking into the hospital for some dire and completely unforeseen problem (meningitis? broken limb?) and all of my Anne books are at my parents', out of my reach, so I actually have to read a magazine while I wait for someone to bring me one? huh? huh?

OK, so the Annes stay until the very last minute and that is final.

Also, I should not be sitting here typing right now; I should be packing something. But not the books.