For Donna

over at Quiet Life

(2003) You win some...



Taken out on our beach at sunset.

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(2004) You lose some...



The idea was to create a pyramid, resembling a Christmas tree, of grandchildren, with the star, Grandchild #7, THE BOY, on top. Then the pile became too unstable and THE BOY would not keep his star hat on and Granddaughter #6 would not stop sobbing... Not even Photoshop could save this shoot. So much for the clever set up.

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Time to get moving on the Christmas 2005 photo, eh?

I don't have a pot to...

...cook in.

During our packing madness, we opted to give every bit of our oddball camp cooking equipment, all we had been using since Hurricane Charley struck last year, to a local homeless shelter. Both of us were certain that after settling in here, the box with all our regular pots and pans would ultimately turn up and we would have a nice matched set again.

Whoops.

I am thankful for, as well as disgusted by, Walmart, where I can find something 24 hours a day to boil potatoes in.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Tra la, tra la...

Whoa, sorry to go all melodramatic on you down there in that post! As rough as my brother has it, and in spite of a depressing family history, I have realized that I am a complete optimist. No, truly, I mean, you've seen some of those properties we've involved ourselves in, right? And how about homeschooling? You've definitely got to be pretty darn optimistic to take that one on, eh? What do you know, I might even be confident too, or smug, but whatever! Excelsior!

It also occurred to me that, really, if our house burned down, there's not a whole lot I'd miss. Clothes, furniture, toys, even photographs, all of it but for a very few items of historical importance, which I am now determined to donate to a museum for safekeeping, could be gone forever and I'd be okay with that. We've been dragging the same old furnishings around for years -- one comfy couch is as good as another. Toys make great collector's items down the road, especially those Beanie Babies collectibles (but only if you've kept your original Ty tags attached and safely sheathed in plastic sleeves so your kids can't ruin them), but consider this: My streamlining makes yours more valuable. You can thank me later. Like maybe the year 2305. As long as I'm not a Swiss cheese brain, images are more safely and permanently stored in my head. And just in case I do become a Swiss cheese brain, my mother always has duplicates. Sure it's fun to find a picture of Grandma or Great Grandma as a little girl, but vintage photographs are special because they are rare; years ago people didn't shoot three rolls of film for Junior's Kindergarten graduation or watch such momentous occasions through the eyepiece of their video camera. Maybe people these days have shorter attention spans and require constant review of their activities lest they forget. Have you ever been to a birthday party where the candles have been blown out and then relit because the event was not adequately captured on film the first time? My mother has cards and school papers and photo albums galore and she has decided it's time to pass all those treasures on to me. I'm already overburdened by the amount of papers I've kept for my own kids. Losing some of our books would be tough, though. Fantasy lists of what five or ten books/items/etc. you'd take to a desert island have always intrigued me, mostly because having already done the (partially) deserted island thing, I must make plans in case, you never know, we end up in some other remote locale. See! More optimism!

Phew

My other brother, the insurance expert, is on his way to NJ to help our less fortunate brother. My parents have signed power of attorney over to him and he has been able to decipher that there is some existing contents coverage. Insurance brother already has plans in place for temporary accommodations and a storage unit in case anything might be salvageable, and has contacted AAA for a locksmith to replace car keys. He is bringing extra clothing and will be there to assist through Wednesday.

Artist brother had plans to spend Wednesday, Thanksgiving, and the long weekend with his girls, visiting our Boston cousins. Those are still on. After that, who knows?

Shattered

[I had planned a much deeper post on this topic, but I'm just letting it fly off the top of my head tonight before it gets away from me again.]

I've been thinking a lot about depression lately. I've noticed many other of the bloggers I read have dealt with serious, clinical depression, not the blues, but the black hole. I've thought they were very brave to out themselves in such a way.

Do artistic people think and feel more deeply? Does expressing themselves help alleviate the pain? Are they creative because they're depressed, or depressed because they're creative?

I've been dealing with the dark side since I was around seven or eight years old when I believe I lived through a parent's nervous breakdown. That was the first time I considered suicide a realistic option. I prayed for God to let me die in my sleep.

For years my cousins and I blamed the faulty genes on one particular branch of our family. Damned moody Irish. Now we recognize mental illness is rife through all the various bloodlines.

Is it escapable? Is it nature or nurture or a little of both?

From my own personal experience, sometimes God does give you more than you can handle. Only someone who's been there knows. My poor brother-in-law was haunted by voices in his head for years before he finally made them stop. I for one am glad he finally found peace. My own tortured artist brother has suffered his wife's affair, a hellish divorce, surprise bankruptcy after discovering his former spouse stole and squandered their lives' savings, continuing cruel treatment from the ex and her new husband, a heartbreaking year-long separation from his daughters, and when he started taking his troubles to work, the loss of his job before he took matters into his own hands. He survived.

But for how long?

A friend whose father killed himself after an attempt many years earlier said it was like waiting for the other shoe to drop. We both agreed it was difficult to discuss these situations with anybody who hasn't personally experienced them, not because they were too painful, but because of the inevitable walking-on-eggshells treatment you were sure to receive from your audience. We can handle it, people. We live with a different reality. We walk with the Shadow of Death and fear no evil. We have hearts of glass.

This afternoon God or Fate or whatever you want to call it took a hammer to the fragile remains of my brother's heart. His home, his sanctuary, one of seven condos created from an historic hilltop mansion, purchased by my parents for him to live in as he tried to put his life back together, was destroyed when the entire building burned to the ground. All his pictures of his girls, their childhood toys and treasures he saved from happier days, all his lifetime's artwork, his manuscript about the annus horribilis, all gone. Neither he nor my parents had insurance on contents.

Yeah, he was the one who first discovered the fire in the unit above his and he did break the door down and save the owner's badly burned dogs and then ran up through the rest of the building alerting all the neighbors and everyone made it out alive, but that's not going to make him feel any better.

We started today out with Jorge taking all the leftover food from the Give Thanks Feast to a homeless shelter. I never imagined that by the end of the day one of us would be homeless.

Kind of exciting news...

Last night the school had its Give Thanks Feast. The kids had a ball eating with their friends and then tearing out of the place to run it all off at the playground, while the adults socialized and cleaned up. The housekeeping was well underway when I finally had a chance to say hello and introduce Jorge to the mom who hosted the legendary Halloween party. I had loaned her my copy of The Well Trained Mind some time back after a post parent-teacher night discussion about middle school options. Her son has been officially tested "Gifted," so his options are the "Alpha" track at the local middle school (nope), or the school especially for gifted children a heck of a long drive away (maybe.) We talked briefly about homeschooling, but she was uncertain about how it could be done. Since then, she's asked if I didn't mind her keeping the book a bit longer. No way, have at it! At that point I decided her next recommended reads would be A Thomas Jefferson Education and The Paideia Proposal, two short treatises to give her a break after digesting the extremely comprehensive WTM and present a less complicated plan, ultimately working her up to my dog-eared, highly notated copy of Climbing Parnassus. The other day, Gracie came home and mentioned that her schoolmate might be homeschooled next year. Speaking with his mom last night, this is something he wants to try -- Gracie, the poster child for homeschooling, has been out there selling it apparently. The mom is still nervous, but said that with support, she would be willing give it a go. I then pseudo-jokingly mentioned the other option would be to start our own private school. She has been one of the key people in establishing the charter school, so she has had plenty of experience getting an educational facility up and running. I briefly outlined the "600", or non-traditional private school (the new preferred FPEA terminology) option, something I considered in the past, which is home educating under the guise of a private school designation. She said other parents on the island would be interested too, and suggested we discuss it over lunch.

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Continuing in the homeschool vein, there was a post to our local support group's board asking about the appropriateness of bringing nine and eleven year olds to see the Bodies exhibit at MOSI. The poster was concerned about exposing her children, not to the sights of plasticized corpses with their flesh peeled back, but to nudity. She wanted to know if there was much included in the exhibit. I couldn't even begin to compose a reply, it would have been thoroughly sarcastic. Now I have visions of the displays wearing little red gym shorts.

Nearly Normal

We are 98.7% moved in. One giant Clyde Butcher and one heavy wood-framed mirror to go until we are completely out of the Punta Gorda house. Then we have to patch and paint and clean -- but that's it!

Here on the other side of town, I have decided we will just live out of boxes. It's so much easier, really. You always know where everything is -- it's out in the garage, in that great mountain of cartons -- and it forces you to be more creative with the few necessities you have on hand. Dressing requires no thought, you wear the same outfit every other day, unless you're my children, then you wear the same outfit every single day because somebody, and I won't say who, but somebody under four feet tall, somebody with a knack for misdeeds, left red and green contraband crayons in the pocket of her pants. I have been avoiding the laundry room all afternoon because the sight of an entire load of whites and khakis, including all but one set of school uniforms, streaked with Christmas colors, soaking in the tub, is just not putting me in any sort of festive mood.

Moving Tip: Leave the iron on and go for a long drive.

Friday night was the big office street party. The weather was perfect, cool and cloudless, the food was scrumptious, especially the sushi bar, there was never a wait at the open bar, where I became reacquainted with a taste for tequila, and the band was lively. Rich snowbirds, local shopkeepers, blue and white collars from over the bridge, fisherman, everybody had a grand time mixing it up. One of the local ministers mentioned in his sermon Sunday how great it was to see people come together as a true community. He announced that he would like to host a similar event to celebrate the reopening of the church after major renovations are completed, but with a lot less alcohol. I sensibly skipped the red wine, which I love but never fails to give me a raging, instant migraine, and decided to have one margarita. What harm could just one do? Well, one led to two and then a third after finding that they were not disgustingly icky sweet. I knew it was time to quit when one of the other parents from the school came up to introduce himself to my husband, after first putting his arm around my shoulder, and telling Jorge, "Your daughter is the sweetest thing ever..." and I nearly blurted out, "I'm not his daughter, I'm his wife!" before realizing he was indeed referring to my ten year old. Instead, I cracked myself up, leaving him wondering what was so funny about his sincere compliment. Discovering today that he was an English major, I'm going to consider his actions a misplaced social modifier.

The best part of the evening actually occurred the following morning when I woke up and rediscovered tequila does not leave me with a blinding headache.

Slowly but surely, we are getting moved in; not settled, never settled, but all of our stuff is nearly in one place now, or at least all the stuff that's necessary. At this point all renovation plans have been put on hold for the expediency of being done with this drag called, "moving." Not like over at Dy's place where miraculous things are happening. "Let's just be done already!" has become my new battle cry. Paint has been picked, well, paint samples and test quarts mixed anyway, but hey, that's progress, and today I shall splash some colors on the walls for my husband to judge the results. Honestly, it doesn't even matter what he prefers, because one color is as good as the next and I doubt he will remember which one he liked better, there are such minor shade variations. Let's just be done already! The floor guys came over Friday to figure out how best to clean off the waxy build-up on our we-all-might-fall-down-and-break-a-hip-slick terrazzo floors. Boy were we surprised when it turned out there wasn't anything on them but a little surface dirt. The previous owners were just cleaning maniacs and honed the floor down to a glass-like sheen with the industrial floor polisher that came with the house. I can't wait to crank that baby up. I want to ride it. So we'll have them clean the floors with their magic, professional juice, and we'll throw down our rugs -- with lots of rubber padding underneath. I don't want anyone pulling an Aladdin.

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My plan to drop out, er, I mean Jorge's plan, seems to still be top-of-mind. I was overjoyed to discover last year's Lehman's Non-Electric catalog mysteriously appear from whatever banana box it had been packed in and left on the tank of our toilet.

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The plan to get back into some sort of read-aloud, possibly holiday themed, bombed out due to time restraints and our present ships-passing-in-the-night schedules. A workable, though hopefully only temporary replacement during our brief shared family time has been brought to us by the kind people at Netflix. For Halloween we watched Soylent Green, chosen after the kids were intrigued by the snippet from AFI's 100 Movie Quotes (#77: "Soylent Green is people!") and their father's fond remembrances. I also dug out our copy of Freaks, but haven't yet had an opportunity to review that classic -- you most definitely have to be in a special mood for that one. In an effort to share some of our old favorites with the kids, we recently viewed Life of Brian (the girls' self-censorship was hilarious: hands clapped over eyes and scandalized gasps emitted when Brian steps out nude in front of the masses below) -- which reminds me in an "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" kind of way, that the Sprint man unexpectedly showed up at our house today and fixed our DSL -- and Raising Arizona. Next up: This Is Spinal Tap
. After much begging and pleading, I bought the Phantom DVD, the movie adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical, for the girls and their newest obsession. A rash of loud operatic singing has broken out. I dredged up some pretty impressive (to them) Phantom stories from the old days: the thank you note I received from Cameron Mackintosh for my creative and oh, so clever cast and crew gifts; my friend and co-worker who has been the paramour and professional associate of Michael Crawford, the first and best Phantom, for nearly fifteen or so years; seeing the trap doors and proscenium being built; and getting to sit in the perfect seats, fourth row, center orchestra, right smack under the chandelier, anytime I wanted. Yeah, their old mom had a fairly interesting life once upon a time.

I have to say, I think Andrew Lloyd Webber deserves a ton of credit and think he may be considered one of the great composers one day. His compositions are mostly lauded, but usually tempered with the dreaded "pop" label. Too bad. Well, there was that one horrible Cats thing...

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The girls, because their school is located in another county, are eligible for membership in that county's library system. At first I didn't think it was necessary, we have our county's crummy library for interlibrary loans and the Fust library for quality literature. Why would we need another? Then I discovered that the Reading Room, which shares the building with their school, is not considered a full-service library. You can reserve and renew books online, it has several computers for internet access, and because it is attached to a county that actually has a large city within its boundaries offers a full menu of specialty items just like a big library, but because it is so remote from the rest of the county they don't have any facilities for managing money. They don't want the librarian to be responsible for transporting cash on their behalf, liability for them, so they do not charge late fees. The due date is more or less a suggestion. Sign me up! It has taken me so long to get through Post Captain -- Miss B has kindly waived my overdue charges on each of my numerous return visits, and allowed me to keep the book for another extended stay -- that I am thinking I will finally return that copy and borrow the book from the Reading Room so as not to impose on Miss B.'s generosity.

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On the school front, the kids received their report cards, and, no big surprise here, did very well. Gracie's teacher recommended she be tested for the gifted program. That's about the only way she'll be able to attend our area middle school next year, even though Gracie insists she doesn't want to be a Krelboyne kid. Her teacher confided that while her other fifth grade student is already officially labeled "gifted," Gracie beats him in almost everything. He is planning to attend a public charter school exclusively for Krelboyners about an hour's drive north of here. Maybe they could carpool.

Homeschooling is still a viable option.

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On the work front, I am no longer intimidated working with Mount Vesuvius. He clapped me on the back the other day and asked if I was getting the hang of his crazy business. With a big smile I told him I've been married to a micromanaging technophobe for fifteen years now, working for one is no different.

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You Passed the US Citizenship Test

Congratulations - you got 10 out of 10 correct!

Could You Pass the US Citizenship Test?

Brings to mind Groucho's, "I would never belong to a club that would have me as a member."