4.29.2005

This and that

My junior year of High School we focused on great American authors. Among the list of books to cover that year was The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner. I honestly remember very little of the book other than at least one section is told in a stream of consciousness narrative. Its that same style of writing that my blog sometimes start to resemble. In celebration of that, I give you tonight's entry.

Crawling to and fro
Meg is well on her way to mobility. She doesn't lift her lower half off the floor when she moves and she doesn't move forward per se - at least not far. She is totally capable of turning herself to face whatever direction she finds comfort whether she's on her belly or back. And, well, she sort of inch-worm crawls herself backwards. Yes. She's doing a dead-leg crawl in reverse. Its hysterical to watch and utterly frustrating for her. She's trying to move straight ahead and yet she gets going in the opposite direction. When I'm not giggling cruelly at her sheer pissed-offness, I'm sweetly saying "Oh honey, you'll get it. Come here baby girl. Come to me!"

Raisins in music.
I took violin 8+ years. I haven't picked up the instrument in 13 years. The Wiggles however, have. A recent aired episode on Disney included a violin playing Wiggle during "Music with Murray." (Maybe it was Anthony?)Logan was fascinated by the segment and, well, Mommy got a brilliant idea.

Brilliance speaking: "Hey, Lo! Wait here, I have a surprise for you." And the bright idea shuffled down the hall to retrieve the dusty old black case.

Ok, so it was a good idea at the time and he was rightfully thrilled. But he wanted to play it. Folks, to play a violin with a bow you need rosin on the bow. A non-rosin covered bow won't slide across the strings with grace and ease. What you get instead of sweet melodies is a sound worse that a tortured cat. Thirteen years of dust collecting means that no rosin existed. In fact, the reason I stopped playing was I ran out of rosin. I kept forgetting to replace it until one day I forgot all about trying to.

So after using the bow no more than a photo-op or two, we instead plucked the old strings. I took the aforementioned photos. I took video. It was great fun. But Logan, well he was not satisfied. So today I took the kids to the 'music store' and I bought the rosin. This afternoon we sat on the floor with great ceremony and slid the hard amber cube up and down the horsehair bow. We tuned the instrument with the help of the old outdated casio. And we took our turns playing with it.

So what does Logan say about the experience?

"Daddy, today we went to the store and got raisins so now we can play the violin."

Something to pontificate on another day
The only real hard-and-fast rule of parenting is that there are no rules. Think about it and we'll toss it around another day when I have more time to wax poetic.

Dreams were made to be deciphered
I recently had a dream that three of my co-horts in crime and I were a pit crew at some Nascar event. (We're going to ignore the fact that I've never, in my entire life, seen a Nascar event, let alone understand the exact nature of the pit crew enough to pull off being part of one.) We stood around waiting and waiting for our car to come in....and then it finally came meandering over to us. My boss was driving doing maybe 25mph around his laps.

He lept out of the car and started to bellow angrily at us. He wanted us to move faster. Our haste wasn't hasty enough and it was costing him time. . .time that could loose him the race.

I sort of figured I knew what that dream meant, but today's "fun with bossman" really cemented the whole thing in my head. How frustrated am I to get the "Ok, well you'll need to do these edits within the next 10 minutes and get it back to me 'cause I have meetings and we have a deadline of 3pm today to get this done."

Yes sir. Of course sir....and I won't mention out loud that you've had this stuff to review for 3 weeks.

2 comments:

Melessa Gregg said...

I know it's not as stressful as a real job, but that last part struck a nerve with me too. I am the PTA treasurer, BUT I have no access to the bank, no authorization to sign checks, I'm was never given a starting amount for the sub-categories in the PTA budget, and it wouldn't if I did because I'm only given the deposit amounts and expense sheets a month or two after they happen. BUT, I'm constantly asked about how much money we have, if I can give someone a check, or how much money is left in, say, the 'Teacher Appreciation Fund,' by people who want to know NOW. It's kind of hard to do my job efficiently when I'm not given the tools to work with-and I've give up asking.

Just wanted you to know I could (kind of) commisserate.

By the way, I fell in love with stream-of-consciouness writing in high school too. I learned about it reading James Joyce, still a favorite for me.

Cath said...

Before you know it you'll not be able to stop her, she'll be into everything!