Called out.

I keep getting called out by Jenny, and it's starting to be embarrassing. How long since I posted anything? Ummmm..... What can I say? I have nothing to write about! Okay, not exactly true, but most things get shared on Facebook or by email or in hours-long phone calls or via Twitter (gasp!) or the couch for Fancy Lady Writing Group (whenever any pieces actually get finished, which for me, I am loathe to admit, is rare). I feel as though I have nothing to report. Apparently, nobody from the old bloggin' crowd has much of anything to report. We have ceased amusing each other in the interworlds. Updates about children and angst and developments and whatnots have slowed to a crawl. I suppose everyone is busy living their lives instead of chronicling them. It's fine. I mean, it is what it is, right?

Except, of course there is a lot going on! People are building businesses and moving to Hawaii and starting school and putting themselves out there and traveling and producing sweet babies and raising adorable and brilliant children and buying houses and having 50th wedding anniversaries, recovering from trauma, mourning their fathers and trying to figure out what they want to do when they grow up (or turn 60, whichever comes first), seeing estranged family members, ignoring estranged family members and I don't know, all kinds of stuff, good and bad. All that blessed good and terrible messiness of life. It's a weird time we live in and so much hopeful positive delicate weird change is swirling around mixed up with the terrifying and the fear and threats of destruction across the planet and the cosmos. "May you live in interesting times" says the proverb, and boy howdy do we ever. Arab spring, climate change, Palestine, space program, elections, economies, China, food systems, ocean of plastic, peak oil... I have to stop the list, it's making me palpitate.

With a nod to the dangers of ignoring the bad to our own detriment, I must say that these days I try to focus on the goodness, the possibility, the promise, rather than the worrisome fearful terrifying and uncontrollable things. Do your best. Work with what you have. Make good choices. Don't stress to the infinitesimal details of each decision. So much is outside our reaches anyway. What am I trying to say, here? I really don't know anymore, but I feel like a beer might help me figure it out.

Hi, I love you.

Okay, hi. Hi there. How're ya? Ya good?

See, I know it's been a very long time. And I actually have a lot to say to you, my sweet Interwebs, but things have been so so so so so busy lately, that I haven't been able to sit and organize any thoughts (let alone the photos, oy the photos!) to send your direction. I will try, I will. Very soon.

When? After I'm done packing for our move to the giant house this weekend, and have finished the 2500 word article I have to write for one class, and written and practiced the 10 minute story I will be presenting orally (snicker) for another class, and have trained the new girl at the Wellness center, and read three loooooong books for school, and workshopped 7 articles for the first class and read some Flannery O'Connor for the second, and previewed tons of good/bad/heinous submissions for the Portland literary magazine I've committed my eyeballs and exceptional discernment (ha) services to each week, and organized the next meeting for my writing group (that I've COMPLETELY dropped the ball on, you guys, I'm sorry - I'll make it up to you with fancy drinks and an extra large deck on which to smoke your wicked writerly cigarettes), and cleaned my old small pretty apartment, and cleaned my new giant weird house, and phone banked at least once more and hosted my awesome Obamania brother for a post-election decompression, and hopefully having thrown the celebration of the century after the Election in a few weeks. THEN I will sit and put it all down here for posterity. For myself. Because I'm old and I have started to forget things. And for the five of you who might be curious as to what's been happening all up in these here Northwest parts.

So I will tell you about the new house, and my Facebook addiction, and Josh's birthday, and the weird coincidences that have been happening lately, and the dream I had about Jojo giving birth to twins (actually a very fun dream, all things and strange subject matter considered), and perhaps I will have more interesting stories to tell you. For the moment, all my words have been reserved for the classes I impetuously signed up for a few weeks ago.

In the meantime, lacking anything of substance, please watch the following, compliments of Z The Wonder Volunteer, who keeps me well liquored in the lubricating grease of campaign and peripheral greatness:



I know you won't judge me when I confess to thinking these two too skinny Ruskies are hot. Especially not after you hear the "I love you" at the end. I love Al Gore, or whoever invented the internet. I don't know how I lived a life before it came to be.

How to Amuse a 3-Month-Old.

Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, I've been hanging out with the sweetest little gal you'll ever meet. You are probably familiar with her from the Watson family site linked at right. Her name is Sarah and she is a doll baby, utterly and completely. Already at 3.5 months, she's got a total personality and basically cracks me up all day long (except when she's tired/cranky/desperate for the Momboob I cannot provide and/or having pooplosions out the top and sides of her diapers... during such times she more threatens to crack me than to crack me up.).

We have good times, me and the babe. She generally sleeps at least three of the eight hours we spend together, sometimes even four (during which times I try to sleep also, with the help of a magic spit-up covered sweatshit that blocks out all light and allows me to stay slumbering and motionless on the couch so as to not wake the wee Sleeping Beauty with unnecessary activities like walking, talking, going to the bathroom, what have you). Our days start early (not as early as poor Mom and Pop, I know) and usually breaks down to an hour or hour and a half of fun and food in the morning, followed by two hours of nap, then about 2 hours of food/diaper changing/play time and another hour or two of naps, then more food, more diaper changing and intensive efforts on my part to amuse, bemuse and delight, finally falling into desperate attempts to distract and pacify in the final half hour until Mama and the Twins come home to make all Sarah's dreams come true with the afternoon nursing sesh.

We've developed several fun and amusing games to fill the non-food/non-diaper related hours between naps. One game involves a mild version of peek-a-boo with her swaddling blanket floating down through the air toward her while she's lying on her back. This usually gets me some smiles, a few excited leg kicks, and sometimes that adorably weird sucking-in-air thing that babies do when they feel wind on their face (which usually means I'm getting a little too zesty with my blankie-waving, actually - "Take it easy" as Bex would say).

Another game consists of my laying on the floor, knees bent toward the ceiling, with Sarah sitting on my tum, back against my legs, while I sing ridiculous songs about her smile, her fingernails, her drool, whatever. Last week I somehow got a Sunday School song in my head (at least I think it's a Sunday School song, having never been to Sunday School myself...), the one about Noah and it goes something like "Who built the Ark? Noah! Noah! Who built the Ark? Brother Noah built the Ark!" An absurdly folk-songy version can be viewed here*. It is to this tune (approximately) that I sing things like "Who's got the drool? Who's got the drool? Sarah! Sarah! Who's got the drool??!? Baby Sarah's got the drool!!!" while moving my legs to the left and my torso to the right, snuggling Sarah one way or the other and giving her a little tickle to emphasize "Baby Sarah's got the drool!" I am proud to say that this little shaker produces hilarious giggles, the sounds of which melts my frozen heart like sunshine and kittens and unicorns and rainbows all wrapped up in a box of World Peace. Gah. She kills me.

I won't bore you with the other so-called games as they mostly consist of my pointing out completely non-interesting things as if they were unequivocally fascinating, or making insane faces worthy of an asylum escapee, with appropriately deranged sound effects, etc. We also do a fair amount of "reading" books, which she's actually quite content with at this stage of the game, taking in each page with interest and curiosity... look out: beauty AND brains, double whammy, right Pops? (And Daddy just jingled the keys to the chastity belt he's planning to strap on her in a decade or so.)

The tough times do come, about 30 minutes before Mom comes home. We've had to get a little creative in that time as most distractions can be a little overstimulating, and there's nothing a working mom needs less than a screaming hot mess of a baby melting down under overzealous babysitter tricks. Periodically we end up pacing the house, or sitting on the porch, watching the electronic picture frame change images, or cars drive by, or the dog pee - simple things, watchful things, observational rather than participatory activities. I'm quite proud of one recent discovery, however, though I fear I may be creating a wee bit of a narcissist. My latest success, documented below, involves the use of my camera phone, with the shrunken image of herself shining back at her as she looks into the display of the phone console. Brilliant. Utterly captivating. It was a 25-minute staring contest. Check it:



In related news: How freaking cute is that face? J'adore.

But: you can tell that she's pushing the limits of happytime in this photo by the little swatches of pink above each eyebrow. When those start to turn scarlet, you better look the hell out, man, no joke. Also, the slash of pink on my chest? Angry baby nails, Yo, angry, angry baby nails. So yeah, look out, for serious. (Of course I'd let this one scratch my eyeballs from my head, she's just. that. perfect).


*Updated to say that it's not a Sunday School song after all... It's RAFFI!!! After half a dozen or more solid years of Raffi from '86 to probably '94, how could I forget? And now it begins anew. Already the strains rise in my head: "Bay-Bee, Buh-Loooooo-Guh". Oy. Luckily I've not yet been forced to consume The Wiggles or Dan Zanes yet, but I've heard rumor on the MommyBlogs that they are out there. Waiting. Watching. Biding their time. Ready to pounce. (More on all that - the explosion of motherhood, the insanity of mommby blogs, the ubiquity and the conversion of the interwebs - very soon).

Happy Hanukkah, Goyim.

Happiest of Hanukkahs, folks.

For you, a gift, the gift of the miracle of light:

It's the little menorah that could. The very one purchased with Bex at Noah's Bagels on Solano, in Berkeley, like a million years ago (um, more precisely: eleven years ago).

Don't you like my fetching pastiche here, arranged around the fire in demonstration of the conflicted struggle between Boho Artiste and would-be Business Woman, the oppositional forces of which I am obviously grappling with on a daily basis? To wit: Oh wait, this is the wrong photo. Dang. This is the one I took with my camera phone, because I could send it to myself by email because I can't find the thingy (you know, the thingy) that lets me pull photos off my camera and put them on my computer. I do know the name for it, but it escapes me just now. I'm very tired. Be quiet, I do too know the name.

Anyway, okay, well in this photo you can see only a tiny piece of my Boho/Business identity crisis, namely that there are two phones and two business credit card settlement notices on the table (long story there, not important or interesting, except that there will be cash back, oh yes there will be cash back); as well as my expensive and pillar-shaped "Deluxe Hanukah (sic) Candles" from New Seasons; a chestnut that I found on the street and thought would be a cool thing to do something cool with (like what? Your guess is as good as mine at this point); and my little silver piggy bank Christmas tree ornament that I think I may have accidentally stolen from Target because it was not on my bill post checkout, and was more in my purse than in my shopping bag when I unpacked the goods at home. Hmmm.

(Not shown and/or just beyond the frame of the cameraphone version of my desk: camera; watercolors; post-its; biz credit card; biz receipts; web site how-to book; artsy "To Do" pad from Powell's; knitting needles - I suck, in case you were wondering-- bead project; pretty paper for folding interesting paper boxes with which I had reasonable success for Jess's shower; ten printouts about how to market using Facebook - gag, not for my own business, fyi -- and of course my giant 22" LCD monitor. Please hold all judgments until the results of the duke-it-out match have been tallied in full and new business cards - or artist cards! - have been printed).

So anyway, the focus of the photo, the menorah. It's moved with me 8 times so far, and been lit probably 9 out of the 11 Festival of Lights'n'Latkes since then. Not bad for a $6.99 little bitty from the bagel shop.

Two years running I couldn't find candles that fit the wee holes, and both years Joosh whittled the ends of the candles to the right size. Once they were giant thick 'oh no the electricity is out' candles, and he fully slivered them down to practically matchsticks. Every night. That's like, 2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9, so what 42 candles total? How cute is that (especially for an anti-semite, right Ma?)?

Unfortunately, bad jew that I am, I ALWAYS forget the third and fourth to the last words of the candle-lighting prayer - l'had'lik neir - and have to go look it up on something like Jew Faq (dot org). Thank g-d, once again, for the interwebs. I would be a shiksa without it.

And speaking of (the interwebs, not shiksas!)... In addition to the Hanukkah wishes I want to say a mighty Congratu-effing-lations to Bex on completion of her first semester of the brutality that is law school. Dude, you are 1 down and only 5 to go. And you are a rockstar.

I feel like I had very deep thoughts to share with you all about my acupuncture treatment today, but unfortunately anything remotely deep and/or sensical has fallen straight out ma heed.

So I will instead share with you my new haircut and wish you good leftover latkes tomorrow morning.

You like? I went to a salon that specializes in curly hair. The camerphoney quality of the photo, on top of the low lighting (of the menorah flame in an otherwise dark room, thank you very much) doesn't show all the magic that is the separate little spiral curls out from the top of my head, but trust me, they are luscious. And of course they are nothing that I will be able to recreate tomorrow, but that's okay. Just for tonight I will love them like they deserve to be loved, and tomorrow I will lament their loss and see if any of my ridiculous hair product (that I never use because hello, I work at home and who cares?) can reassemble anything even remotely similar without the shudder-inducing crunch of mousse, as is the standard when trying to coax out the ringlets.

And yes, I'm wearing a pajama top. And yes I wore it all day. Whatever. At least I wore a skirt, and not PJ bottoms, as I've been known to wear in places like Andronicos and Baker's Square and Spat's. The only bad thing about the PJ top wearage today, actually, is that there's this ridiculous little bow at the bust, under a line of lace, and I wonder if my new haircutter lady (tats, pin-up girl style, etc) thought I was some sort of Holly Homemaker. My hair was a teensy bit Baby from Dirty Dancing when I first walked out, which was not what I had in mind when I said I was "looking for a bit of a change". We'll see what tomorrow brings.

Cutting your bytes into smaller, easily chewed pieces. You are welcome.

So I tried to break up last night's mega brain-barf-on-blog post into smaller, attention deficit-worthy, bite sized pieces (I don't have the stamina or attention span for posts like that one, why should you???). I also hoped to correct my ridiculous photo positions and formatting, but I'm sorry to report that I have grown tired of such things and it will all have to wait.

Also, apparently I just risked outing TeabaggerT as a workday slacker (which is not to stay he doesn't stay up all night working, it's just that he claimed to be playfully working in the middle of the day and I thought maybe that statement needed some air quotes around it " ") and now I feel terrible because I posted my zinger in a place where his co-workers can spy my facetious handiwork. Crap.

On the plus side, I was able to instigate a multi-threaded conversation about bezoars, which I think takes not a little bit of talent.

Sucktastic.

I am a truly sucky blogger. It's true. So true that I've had to use 'truly' and 'true' in adjoining sentences, right out of the gate. That is some truthy truth. See, I thought it had been maybe two or two-and-a-half weeks since logging in some mindless sharing here, but no no. When I clicked over today, I realized: it's been over a month. Shiza.

This is pretty typical of me and projects. Fun or otherwise. Big ideas. Lots of thought/discussion. TONS of intent. A decent start, full of commitment and maybe a dash of ingenuity (I'm thinking of the millions of bead-store-necklaces that are sitting around half finished, not necessarily the bloggy blog here). But delivery? Um. Yeah.

I don't have any great excuses. It's only stupid Working On Work Projects stuff. And since I sit at my computer 10 hours a day some days (14 on more than few, I'm sorry to admit), it's not like I couldn't click over and login and dash off a post. Except I can't. Because I'd have to log out of my work Gmail and all associated Google docs (people, Google docs are amazing - a bit slow on occasion, but cheap and convenient... like my men). In logging out of work Gmail, I risk not only missing something time sensitive and critical (it's been one emergency after another, I'm telling you) but also having to log back into 25 spreadsheets and templates -that would be pure craziness- anytime I want to say something. Plus with the constant sitting and writing and stressing and staring at the (lovely and large but glaring) screen, I'm completely boring and have nothing interesting to say, can't even pretend to have anything noteworthy to note (hilarious conversations & periodic chat with Bex notwithstanding, but totally inappropriate for bloggage, I'm afraid).

But you know, popping in this evening, I realized something: I've lost time. Not X-Files lost, but like, blink of an eye/where is my-life-flying-off-to-now lost. I don't know what happened to our beautiful summer, or how the cold crept in and bit the leaves red and yellow and called in the Big Storm guns to battle the sunshine and shower us heavily in bursts throughout the day (super beautiful, I must say, but best of all: washes away all the damn crazy HUGE spiders that have invaded the building and the greenery around here). So suddenly there are only a few fragrant peaches and crapload of pears, apples, pomegranates, and other fall-ish fruits where the plums and plucots and berries spilled forth just a few days ago (or possibly a few weeks ago since I am obviously completely dissociated from real time right now). If I didn't have a calendar and had to guess the date, I'd think it was maybe Labor Day at most. So wrong.

But as far as blogging goes, it's not that I haven't made some attempt. In the past few weeks I've written and somehow not saved for editing the following posts:
Why Iowa is Great (a beginners guide)
Why Jakob is Great (an ode to the pre-three's)
Sneaky Subversive Movies and the Studios that Hide Them (until two minutes before the Oscars, forcing me to suffer "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry" when I need some movie time but the screens are utterly bare.)
The Coming Recession.

I will likely not try to recreate these, with exception of Why Iowa is Great, but it will be sadly lacking in photos as my phone was an unworthy tool for capturing more than a few up-close details, and the fellow traveling with me through it's cornish hills and prairies can't be relied upon to send me any of his promised photos (from his dumb i-phone that totally didn't work anywhere in the entire state except Des Moines, by the way).

Oh yeah, that was another entry: Why iphones Are Dumb. I will likely skip that one too, so as to avoid the wrath of the growing Applafia.

Though it has kept me from participating in the blogosphere lately (writing or reading), the one good thing about current work is this: the utter ridiculousness that will make an excellent story one day, maybe even mildly amusing enough of a sitcom scenario to get a pilot made (but not shown, of course). The bad side of this absurdity is that some of the circumstantial hoopla is so totally implausible outside of something like an (admittedly poorly written) sitcom that you will think me totally trite and/or a lier if I try to explain it to you here in a factual rendering.

Bach'ing It

Last month I went up to Seattle for a few days with my grandparents. Joosh (tm Rypinski) was not able to go due to work obligations and the substantiated rumor that we might be renting a tiny little hotel suite or 1-bedroom flat for all of us (I actually have an entire post about this, half finished, as so many things are around here, but it will have to wait). But mostly it was the whole work obligation thing.

As we were getting ready to hit the road, Grandma asked if Joosh would be okay by himself. I wasn't sure what she meant exactly, so she went on to ask if he could, you know, cook for himself, or would he (what, starve? eat cold cereal and uncooked ramen noodles for four days?) have to eat out every day. I laughed and said that no, he's very good in the kitchen, can make lots of good stuff, and even does the dishes. Don't worry, I said, he definitely knows how to fend for himself.

That's very good, she said. It's great that he can batch it.

Quoi? I was confused. Is that some sort of old-timey word for "cut it" or "make it" or slang for survival or something?

No no, she said, "bach" it, like bachelor.

Oh. Duh.

It was so cute how she said it, how matter of fact and proud she sounded: "It's great that he can bach it". The stories she then told about different husbands of various friends of hers, men who couldn't boil water for themselves, who would be utterly lost whenever their women went away, were totally hilarious. One gal received a phone call from her fella asking why the macaroni wasn't getting soft in the bowl when he microwaved it. Without water.

Grandma guffawed at the ineptitude of these many sorry saps and their poor beleaguered wives, and talked about Grandpa's cooking and that it's so important to know how to take care of yourself, etc etc. It was a surprisingly lengthy sermon on the independence mountain, I must say. But very cute.

Well as proud of J as she was (and me, by virtue of having chosen such an apparent rarity), let me tell you, she would be absolutely appalled at me this week. J is in the VTA and I am, ahem, Bach'ing It Up here in Bridgetown. And I am disgusting. First of all this whole working at home thing is awesome, but the utter busyness of late and the lack of anyone to make fun of me for wearing my pj's all day means that I am doing just that. Second, I'm never so much into doing dishes on the slowest of days, so those are piling up rather nastily (especially since my "dishwashing" usually consists of filling the basin with hot water and soap to pre-soak the intended washees, but then totally forgetting about it until the next day when what is left is a chilly, unsoapy, crud-filled, scum-surfaced pond of yuck in the sink that I usually can't bear to attack for at least another day). Also, I put a fan in the window of the living room that at some point blew hard enough (apparently of its own accord) to scatter a bunch of receipts and loose mail from the coffee table (also known as My Office) all over the living room. That was Wednesday. The fan is still on. The scattered items are still that, but perhaps more widely spread around the room.

I ate rice pudding for breakfast. I haven't had coffee in days. My main meal today was chips, black beans with garlic (god, do I admit this? that were still on the stove from the night before.... don't judge) and mango salsa. People, it's bad.

I've decided that it's really not me, it's work - I'm stressing about a project that is going to go live two weeks from today (and will involve my flying to Iowa for two days after Labor Day to train call-center answerers, how random is that?) and not only are there a million little pieces to take care of/keep track of, I just can't seem to let go of all the loose threads and dangly bits hanging out here and there not getting done by others or Indians (ah, outsourcing), and all over which I have absolutely no control. It really could be work. But in my heart of hearts, I know that really it's because I'm just not very good at bach'ing it anymore.

Don't tell Grandma.

Am and Gram at the (gorgeous) Japanese Garden in Seattle.