The Average Blogger

Autumn

So, I did manage to get the Young Prince to decorate the yard in time for Halloween, and he had a nice day of the Actual 'Een—starting with his friend's bar mitzvah in the morning, progressing through his music lessons, spending the early evening trick-or-treating with some neighborhood kids, and wrapping up the night with some horror movie viewing par excellence.  

(His assessment: "I enjoyed going and wasn't bored or anything—but I think I'd learn more at services where most of the talking is done in English,"  "I am now learning my third Christmas song on piano, and I don't know why because it's not like anybody will come over to hear me play them," and, "Look, I got Reese's cups!") 

I spent most of that weekend working, wrapping up with a 32-hour stint from Sunday morning until Monday evening. I then took two days later in the week to clean house, do laundry, and take the YP to the allergist. Turns out he is allergic to virtually everything all year round, and in two weeks he begins a weekly regimen of shots that will last three to five years, but theoretically render him invulnerable in the long run.  Or so they say. 

We are also taking him for another assessment this week for sensory issues to see if something else is at play in his brain and whether someone can figure out how to make him less twitchy and grumpy. I have no idea what will come of that. Can't hurt, might help, probably won't do much of anything. And then next week, we find out what the school system has in mind as far as accommodating his assorted issues. I'm sure you can imagine how excited we all are about that bit of business. 

Meanwhile, Not Your Average Blogger is proceeding apace on his book and job and things seem to be going well on that score.

I had a possible nibble on my own writing effort, but it fell through, so I'm on round 2 of researching publishers.  I know I only need to find one match, but jeezopete.  You know, I hated dating, and this is an even worse variety of the "you're really nice, but..." song and dance. I suppose being told that my book is well written and interesting is preferable to being called illiterate and tasteless, but it's sort of like hearing "you look nice and smell good" as the lead-in to "but I'm just not that into you." It's complimentary, but ultimately not terribly helpful or much salve to the ego.  

So all of this agita has conspired to make me fairly preoccupied, alternating with ridiculously sleepy. As a result, not much else is happening. Barring some sort of massive upheaval, I expect the holding pattern will continue through Thanksgiving, if not the end of the year. 

Anyone want to come visit for the holidays and give me a reason to decorate and cook (and the kid an external reason to keep practicing his piano lessons)? 

Best Intentions

So, that resolution to work a 40-hour week kind of went out the window this week. But I did make some progress. I didn't pull any all-nighters, and I Was Not Available for weekend work requested of me. So that's something.  It's like the overtime equivalent of "the earliest I've ever been late." 

The funny thing is, I worked from home two days—once to make sure all went well with the contractor and once for a snow day (on which, once again, we saw nary so much as a single flake of snow. Making up for last week, I guess.)  Plus, the contractor came in again today to make up for the lost time from our iced-over driveway, and all three of us were watching a movie.  Since I work on my laptop in bed when I telecommute and the best TV in the house is in our bedroom, I pretty much haven't left the bedroom the entire time the contractor has been here, except for the days I went to the office. I can't imagine what he must think of my lifestyle, like I'm the character Swoosie Kurtz's played in True Stories. Except not as rich.

 As for the bathroom, it is torn down to studs. Even the plywood below the flooring is going to come out, beause it is too thin, creaking and bending in an alarming manner when you stand on it. So next week will be plumbing and tiling. Maybe when all is finished, I'll post photos. 

In other news, the Young Prince had his first band concert. It is so odd, comparing my life to his. I played flute for two years before I was in a concert, and then we played actual, recognizable songs in a dimly lit cafeteria, which I assume was to make it feel more concert-like.  The YP, on the other hand, is in with kids who first laid hands on their instruments in September and are not even playing full eight-note scales yet, (as near as I can tell; the YP plays drums so it's hard to say,)  but working through the fundamentals book, and their concert was held in a brightly lit gym. It was nice to have a concert to see what the kids are up to, and it's nice they get to perform in front of a crowd to get a feel for it. But I think my parents might have gotten the better end of that deal.

Other than that, it has been a cold, work-centric week.  I am still reading more than watching TV; the YP is finally working on a script as the first phase of making a short film this year, and Not Your Average Blogger is working, stepping up and filling in for my neglectful parenting, and counting the days til he escapes us for warmer climes in his next book tour. Anyone planning to be in Tucson in March should arrange to be at the book festival! 

Meanwhile, I'll make an effort to do something exciting this week to report in my next post. 

Nothing New Under the Sun

The Young Prince has been nagging me to write a blog post, but I have nothing to say.

His schooling is going quite well. He finished The Yearling this week, and next week embarks on writing what could be the most depressing essay ever: comparing that to Old Yeller.  Fortunately, the weather seems to be thinking about starting to warm up, so perhaps we won't all feel like slitting our wrists at the end of the endeavour. 

That resolution I made for the new year to work less? Not working out.  I fell off the wagon, had it back up over me and then roll forward a few times. I'm hoping to leverage my just-completed 80-hour week into some time off next week, especially now that the time change has happened and there are a few more hours of daylight on the tail end.

 Other than that, I'm counting down to April 4 (opening day) and our spring vacation six days after that—we are going to put a bazillion miles on my car driving to Mesquite and then driving around out west. 

Don't ask me about my book. 80-hour work weeks tend to stall out other efforts.  Not Your Average Blogger, on the other hand, is knee-deep into the next one. La la la. Maybe I should send the boys on  vacation without me and stay home and write. 

Mmmm, nah. 

I'm Getting Too Old for This Nonsense

Last week marked my second-ever business trip. It was to the same place as my first business trip, for largely the same reason, but it played out rather differently. 

For the second September in a row, my boss sent me to Santa Monica to learn how to create more effective presentations.  I was excited about this, because I'm actually helping to build presentations, and I don't feel I'm particularly good at them. So every little tutorial helps. 

Last year, I arrived on the weekend, rented a car and stayed with family. I spent my days in the office and my evenings with a motley assortment of friends and relatives from various past lives. It was fun, but I felt rather as if I were shortchanging the office because I was off doing my own thing pretty much every day as soon as my 8 hours were clocked. 

So this year, I arrived on a Tuesday and took a cab from the airport to my hotel, which was three blocks from the office. I washed my face and hied myself to the office, where I made a colossal effort to wander around saying hello to people I ordinarily only commune with via email, and then I settled in to get some work done. 

I was pretty wiped out that night, so I wandered up to Pico and Main and opted for a gourmet meal from Jack in the Box wherein I sampled all my favorites and after which I was unhappily full. I miss Jack in the Box, y'all.

Next morning, I woke up at 5:30 and wished I could fall back asleep, but then the Young Prince's doctor called my cellphone to tell me his appointment was canceled.  Unfortunately, Not Your Average Blogger was already halfway to their office and I think he was probably 3/4 of the way there before he noticed my text. So at that point I gave up, got up, and went into work, where I breakfasted in the office cafeteria and did a little bit of "real work" before going to my training seminar. 

The seminar was interesting. It was half new material and half retread. It also netted me another copy of a book I already had. If anyone wants a copy of Slide:ology, I know a guy who knows a guy... 

After that, I went out with some colleagues and discovered the following: 

• Bar Pintxo in Santa Monica has excellent sangria. 
• I do not like tapas. 
• I especially do not like tapas involving mussels. 
• I do like beer. 

We wound up across the street at Kings Head pub, where we met up with my college friend Cynthia. We had a great time catching up, she got on great with my co-workers, and I learned the following: 

• The more Boddingtons you drink, the better it tastes.
• Trivia nights are fun.
• I suck at trivia nights and spend half the time going, "Frack! NYAB would know that!"
• I have not entirely forgotten the lesson that when "one more drink" sounds like a good idea, it's probably not.

After coming in second and getting a gift certificate we couldn't use that night, my compatriots decided it would be a good idea to traipse down to the beach. I was not enthused as I had my laptop and 500 lbs of work papers with me, but I went along anyway because I figured the walk would do me good. It certainly didn't hurt me any, although I maintain that the Pacific is too damn cold to go jumping around in, particularly in my work clothes. Eventually we all meandered back up the hill and parted ways for the night. 

After about five hours of sleep, I woke up next morning feeling strange — not sick, no headache, just sort of spaced out and slow. I spent a half-hour wondering if this is what hangovers feel like as an old person, and was halfway to the office before I realized that no, I was just really, really tired. I loaded up on caffeine and plowed through the day, going back to my room a wee bit early in hopes of a nap, but instead talking to NYAB and the YP before going out for the night with another college friend, Sharidan, who works in The Industry.  She regaled me with awesome swag and tales of drama from the editing rooms of Breaking Bad and Witches of East End, and after an hour and a half in the car, we had made it the 18 miles to Los Feliz, where we went to The Rockwell Theater and saw the Baz Luhrman show, which was very impressive, as was the food.

After another six hours of sleep, it was Friday and my last day on the Left Coast. I made another round of face-to-face meetings with people, including lunch with a project editor I work with on a fairly regular basis, and then I made my way to the airport with 15 minutes before my plane boarded — only to learn my flight was delayed an hour. This put me into Dulles at 1:40 a.m., at which time there were no cabs and 30 people looking for one, with one poor cab-stand guy shrieking into a walkie talkie that HE NEEDED RIDES NOW, and the dispatcher snotting at him that they'd be there when they got there.  All in all, this put me home at 3, where for some dumb reason all the menfolk were still awake. I think we all finally crashed around 4, and slept until noon, glorious noon. 

To wrap up this week of excitement, we had tickets to Saturday night's Nats game. As it turned out, the kid got sick, so we left him with NeighborGirl (who isn't really our neighbor anymore, but that's OK), and then the game was rained out anyway, so we came home and watched Almost Famous. 

It is now almost Tuesday and I feel mostly recovered, although I now need a week to catch up on all the things I skipped doing over the weekend in favor of sleep. Here's hoping for a week of humdrum. 

Moody

We were watching an episode of Quantum Leap yesterday where the guy wanders around the disco era for a while, and some woman gives him a mood ring.  I had one of those once. I wish I knew what happened to it. It would have pretty much run the color spectrum this week, from irritation to depression to despair to lethargy to relative optimism. 

At work, I'm dealing with an extremely high-maintenance author who doesn't seem to understand the concept of deadlines. On Wednesday, someone sent her a note that said, "This is it, if you want us to print it by the date of your conference, you have to stop making changes now and let us print it." Well, I guess she doesn't care about her conference, because at 6 p.m. Friday she told us a new round of changes was coming. I'm still having a hard time adjusting to this non-news-format mentality. I kind of miss the days where you wrote it once, then if something changed, you wrote an update. (I think part of my grumpiness about this is that I'm also missing the days when I didn't work days. It's getting harder and harder to get up in the mornings -- which is funny, given it wasn't all that long ago I was getting up at 4 a.m. for work. Now it's a struggle to be up by 7. I suppose I should go to bed earlier.)

At home, I'm facing a weird combination of lethargy and setback. I should mow the lawn, but Oh, God, I'd have to get out the mower. Then I set a time and rev myself up to get the mower, and it's raining. We spent much of yesterday out shopping, but then last night our washing machine flooded the basement, which means more shopping that would have been easier to do yesterday.

Not Your Average Blogger started his new job, but I don't have much to say about that because he hasn't. He posts a lot of stuff on Twitter, though. 

The  Young Prince made it through a week of drama camp relatively unscathed. I was a little disappointed to go to his recital thingie on Friday and watch him wander through his paces without smiling once and forgetting one of his lines, and yet when I pressed him afterward he swore he was having fun and was eager to go back. I suppose it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if he wound up being some kind of geek other than Drama Geek -- I find that sort rather tiresome, myself. 

And then there's the writing. I think about it constantly, but I feel like all my ideas are horrible. I write stuff I think might be good, but then I run out of time or energy and it's very hard to get back into the frame of mind for (fill in the blank of whichever thing I think I should be working on). I sent several queries out for one book over a month ago and received one rejection and dead silence from the rest, all of whom are supposed to have a "we will contact you with rejections" policy. I'm not sure if it's worth my time to follow up, as I am told by an agent who would know that books about 14-year-olds fall through the cracks as being too old for middle grade but too young for YA, and I should make the characters sophomores. This is a huge paradigm shift; essentially it would be an entirely different book. It exhausts me to think about. 

On the plus side, I began a new diet and I've lost four pounds since Wednesday.  I suppose this may account for my moodiness to some extent. But it's nice in that first week to step on the scale and see it heading the right direction each time. Wonder how long that will last.

We have seen two movies of late. The first was RIPD, which I liked quite a bit. It was sort of Men in Black with dead guys instead of aliens. Some nice writing and nice ideas. I sort of wish Jeff Bridges had been a wee bit less Rooster Cogburn-y, but that's a pretty small nit to pick.  Yesterday we saw Pacific Rim.  It was ... big. Lots of big things fighting other big things with big noise. Brain candy, decently executed. (Although I will admit that when the big boss gave his Crispin's Day speech and ended with "Today we will cancel the apocalypse" all I could see in my head was a Monty Python skit. "Sorry, no, they've called off the apocalypse today. Go on home. Come back tomorrow, maybe we'll have one then." "What do you mean, canceled?! I sold off all my belongings and waited in line for days!" I mean, really, the skit almost writes itself.)

Anyway, the upcoming week is going to bring more of the same -- work, camp, commuting. And maybe a new washing machine. Life in the fast lane. 

Another Month Gone By

And no blogging to show for it. I guess it's good I never thought this would turn into any sort of money-making venture, as clearly I would be in the poorhouse.

So, let's see.  The roundup:

Not Your Average Blogger is in a new position at the same old place.  He seems to enjoy it so far -- a lot of things he likes to do, and people seem to leave him alone to get it done, which also pleases him.

My job is humming along. I'm constantly busy, but I think I'm getting to a point where I'm not so completely baffled and demoralized all the time, so that makes me happy.

The house is still over our heads. I still have a thousand projects.  I finished a scarf for the Young Prince, and he declared it too short, so now I'm making a longer one in TARDIS blue.

He turns 10 this week. I'm sort of amazed by this. It doesn't feel like it's been that long. And, as I told him, it's amazing he's still alive, as there were many days early on that I was sure I'd kill him accidentally, plus many others later on where I struggled not to kill him on purpose.  He sighed, rolled his eyes, and assured me the feeling had been mutual. Snort.

We had a good week last week.  The school district pulled an absolutely ridiculous stunt where they flipped the teacher planning schedule three times because of weather. That is to say:
-- The previous Wednesday, the school had it set that Monday was a day off and Tuesday was a half-day. NYAB and I made arrangements to be around for kid care.
-- Then they had another of their ridiculous, pointless, streets-are-barely-even-wet snow days, and for whatever reason (I think it had something to do with exams at the high school level), we got a call saying the schedule was switched so that Monday was a school day, Tuesday would be the day off, and Wednesday a half-day.  This was a little harder to deal with, but NYAB and I again re-arranged our work lives.
-- Then Monday morning it was ... I don't know, raining? ... and school was delayed two hours.  We got a message that afternoon informing us that the schedule was changed again, so that Wednesday was the day off and Thursday was the half-day.

Well, by the third flip, NYAB was out of options to be off work and I was so fed up that I refused to work from home simply to accommodate their half-day nonsense (wherein, let's face it, NOTHING gets learned anyway), and simply kept the boy with me.  We spent the day in DC, where we learned about aerodynamics at the Air and Space museum, then about dinosaurs and gemstones and forensics (with actual human bones!) at the Natural History museum. It was an excellent day.

I'm equally happy to report that I am the only one having major problems with school these days. The Young Prince is motoring along and doing quite well from all reports. Grades seem to be fine, he comes home excited to talk about what he learned, and he's got a good circle of friends. He is now to the point where his only real drama seems to stem from PE.  This is not a surprise, in many ways. PE is less structured than the rest of his school day, with more chances for disruption. He is not as interested in it and thus doesn't understand many of the finer points of the games they play, so he gets frustrated. He isn't as physically adept as he is mentally, and would rather put in time playing piano than running or jumping or getting stronger/faster/whatever. I suspect the other kids aren't particularly interested in involving him, given these conditions. This all sounds terribly familiar to me, as I had much the same experience.

The difference is, I didn't care. He seems to take it to heart, a bit. And I know for an outright fact that the teacher is absolutely no help whatsoever, as we have had problems with him singling the kid out for extra discipline in the past -- and we stupid old folks made the mistake of getting involved to find out why, which I guess means the YP now has an enemy for life, or at least for another year and a half. In any case, since we started a new system where the YP gets graded for each portion of his day, the PE teacher constantly marks him a grade lower than any of his other teachers, and every time I ask why, the kid doesn't seem to understand what he's doing wrong. I suggested to the YP that he ask the teacher for some help with how to do better in class, and the boy reported back that the teacher's response was, "I don't know, what do YOU think the problem is?" 

Bless his heart, the child simply glared and walked away, which I have to say shows a lot more restraint than I would have had, at his age or my own, so perhaps I need a hit off the kid's meds.I don't really understand why the school has a designated PE teacher who then can't be bothered to help kids who struggle in PE.  I mean, a kid fails math, he gets all kinds of support and special help and the other kids aren't allowed to tell him he's stupid. But PE, well, that's a whole different story, much as it was when I was a child. They don't have Remedial PE for Physical Retards, and it's still perfectly all right to ostracize and tease the less capable, who apparently are supposed to suck it up, learn to take a joke, control their temper, whatever. I'm looking forward to the last day of fifth grade, when I can tell this man off and congratulate him for sucking every last bit of joy out of Organized Sports for yet another generation of my family.  Honestly, I am thisclose to telling the kid that it is perfectly OK to lie and say he has a headache every Monday afternoon for the next four months.

But really, if PE is the worst of our problems, I'm a happy woman, and life is brilliant.

 

 

Not Really a Post, Not Really a Blow-Off.

I owe more to this blog than it's getting, I know that. And I have lots of excuses for not keeping up. 

One problem is that my biggest life absorptions at the moment are, well, deeply absorbing and take up LOTS of time.

Another problem is that those absorptions are extremely frustrating and not entirely my story to tell, and I'm still not sure what crosses a line and what doesn't. Here's the short version: Homeschooling is probably a wonderful and fulfilling endeavour when you sign on for it willingly and are well-prepared going in, and aren't obligated to try to keep pace to some degree with an existing classroom full of students that -- at least theoretically -- will eventually re-enter the picture.  But as a stopgap because of a fucked up school bureaucracy that seems to put everyone but the students first, it pretty much sucks. So, yeah. More on that later, maybe, after it's all sorted out and so am I. 

Work is work.  My boss has been incredibly gracious about dealing with the Aforementioned Academic Fucked-Up-edness.

NYAB's work is work.  To an outsider it all appears to be coming apart at the seams, but at this point I reckon he might as well ride it into the ground and see what he can get out of it, and then we'll move to an island that start with a B.

House, yard, money, all those grownup woes -- not so woe-like, but mildly distracting.

Election! Well, the debates have been fun.  And because of the AAFU-edness, the kid has been allowed to stay up and watch them all and learn a thing or two.  I'm not sure he's learned very much, and he tends to get distracted and bored, but then he circles around to listen some more, so that's been interesting.  If nothing else, he learned that it's Simpson-Bowles, not Bowles-Simpson, which is more than I can say for the candidates.

In my copious free time, I've decided to become a sweepstakes junkie.  I figure if I'm gonna spend all that time dorking around online, I might as well be dorking around with something that has 0.00002 percent chance of getting me something, as opposed to 0 percent.  And the kid likes to push buttons on some of the little interactive games, so it's a bonding thing! At least, that's my story.

Oh, and we finally watched Season Seven of Weeds. A big accomplishment.

And that's all I've got for now. 

Look Who It Is!

Hahahaha.  OK, that was a slightly longer hiatus than I intended.

Work kicked my butt, y'all. That learning curve was steep, and I had a hard time adjusting my own expectations that I'd be done, not half-done, at the end of any given day.

I thought about ditching the blog altogether, frankly. I didn't write here, and I didn't really miss it much. I had lots of other writing to do (rewrite on my novel is officially with the editor again), and not nearly enough time to do any of it. I had games to play with the kid, and a to-do list that threatened to bury me.

But the thing is, then I went back and read some stuff I've posted over the years, and I realized how much I like having it. I wrote about stuff that I'd forgotten even happened. I don't know how much of a dodderer I'm going to be in my old age, so having it all recorded might help preserve the warm memories for those cold winters.

Here, then, are some highlights of what I didn't write about in real time:

The Young Prince attended tennis camp, basketball camp, two drama camps, and a math camp. He won a talent contest by singing Loser Like Me, which was hella cool and made him a BMOC for that week. He was wroth about spending the last two weeks of summer doing multiplication, and yet I do believe it is the camp he's enjoyed the most. He asked to go to the next level next summer.  I'm so thrilled with what they've done, I can't begin to sing their praises loudly enough.  The kid learned all his times tables in eight days -- after fighting with his teachers, his parents, and his babysitter for more than eight months. Amazeballs.

The Young Prince also got himself into a heap of trouble during one of his drama camps, which precluded his participation in the B-52s concert at Wolf Trap last month. Instead, he and Not Your Average Blogger stayed home that night, and I went to the show with a friend of ours. We made it through Squeeze, the opening act, and then it absolutely dumped rain.  We toughed it out through two songs, but then the lightning started and I didn't really love the idea of standing in a big field with a bunch of electrical equipment nearby, so we left.  We were so drenched that my car seat was still damp the next day (this, despite sitting on a towel!) and the cash in my wallet never did dry out while in my possession.  Still, it was gobs of fun -- at least, I thought it was.

We went to a water park and commented, "We should do this more often."  Then we didn't go back, becuse things got crazy busy.

We went to Chincoteague and loved it as much as ever. Then we didn't go back, because things got crazy busy.

I spent a weekend making jelly, and was rewarded with another blue ribbon from the fair, this year for my blueberry offering. For the second time in a row, they misspelled my name on the ribbon.  This time, I was Arwen Brickwell. OK, then.

While we were in Chincoteague, we visited the Goddard Space Center.  The YP got a bunch of lunar landing model kits and action figure things.  Then he and his dad built a movie set for them and re-enacted the 1969 trip to the moon.  It was inspired.

Then we went on our official vacation, to Orlando.  Many anecdotes.

1: Being a parent has shortened my patience for standing in line with teenagers. On the last ride of our first day, NeighborGirl and I were waiting with a bunch of squealers behind us, and some guy ahead of us was yapping with them. The girl behind me tried to push ahead to him, and without even thinking about it, I barked at her, "Absolutely not!"  as if she were my 9-year-old.  Then she pushed again, and I said, "I'm pretty sure I said no..."  at which point her friend who spoke English interceded and said, "She just wants to go talk to him."  I said, "I don't care. If he wants to talk to her, he can give up his place in line and come back here. I haven't stood here for 40 minutes to let all six of you cut in front of me." NeighborGirl was cracking up by this time, and the guy in front of me just looked astonished that I stood my ground.  Ah, the joys of being a Cranky Old Lady.

2: Karma bit me for it, though. As we were getting off that ride, I tripped going over a bridge thing, and rather than splatter my face into the pavement, I caught myself -- and chucked my phone into the lake 30 feet blow us. So I spent the next several hours trotting around to the Apple Store, Verizon and Best Buy, and shelling out an embarrassing amount of money to replace it RFN in case the dogsitter called.

3: A good friend of mine from high school came to visit us at our kamping kondo, which was absolutely wonderful. She's not as sweet as I'd painted her in my memory, and I was delighted with her wickedness. We had all kinds of fun and wine and I'm very excited that she's coming up here next summer so we can do it again. 

4: Universal Orlando is a lot of fun.  Three-day passes were nice, because I didn't feel all stressed out with all the time spent standing in line. We still got to see everything, and hit the highlights twice.

5: Harry Potter's Field is impressive. Butterbeer is good, but not worth the souvenir mug. The YP felt his wand pick him, and then, weirdly, some woman who worked there (who hadn't been around when the kid was going through this flight of fancy) recommended the same one he said had chosen him. Spooky.

6: LegoLand is impressive too, in a different way.  The stuff they've made out of Legos is mind-boggling. I wonder how you get the job of creating a scale model of the Capitol out of Legos.

7: We also visited my old neighborhood. It's a suburb now.  So weird. And all the trees in my old front yard are gone, which makes the house look much shabbier and not as secluded as it used to seem. Or maybe I'm just old and jaded now. There are also a slew of McMansions that went up -- across the street from the Boys and Girls Club.  For the view, I suppose. 

Then, last weekend, NYAB and I ditched the kid with NeighborGirl and went away for our anniversary. I was basically along for the ride, NYAB did all the planning and he did a brilliant job.  We went to Valley Forge and saw everything and completely amused ourselves with jokes about all the signage and railroads. Then we went to the Nats-Phillies game and had a great time, even if the Nats lost.  Next morning, we visited the Liberty Bell before heading home. (It's still cracked. But now it lives in a lovely air-conditioned museum-y type building.)

The boy lost his two top teeth this summer, and he's grown about an inch since we marked his height on Opening Day.  I reckon he'll have a beard in his next school photo. Sheesh.  He met his teacher for fourth grade today. Word on the street is that she is smart and fit, and will keep the kid on his toes. Both the YP and NYAB had favorable reports on her, so that's promising.

Next week, I hie myself to California for business. Don't I sound all impressive? I'll be staying with my aunt and uncle, and I think I have dinner with a few friends lined up, unless I wuss out and decide I need bed more than food.  Not sure when I'll have time to post next, but I'm optimistic it won't be as long a break as the last one!

OK, Break's Over!

And there's so much you've missed!

Not really.  A lot has happened, but as I've said before, while I am almost never bored, I find it hard to believe anyone else would find my life anything other than dead boring.

So, let's see.  What's changed?

The kid escaped third grade with all A's and B's, although it seems like he cut it awfully close.  This summer he's dedicating his time to behaving himself, relearning his states and capitals (same as every summer) and mastering the fricking multiplication tables he opted not to lean while his teacher was going over them in school.  Actions, as they say, have consequences.  I'm hoping the consequence of repeatedly reminding him that if he'd learned them when he was supposed to, he'd be free to watch more movies this summer will be that he does his classwork in class next year. 

As for the summer, he's been to a day camp where they made rockets out of soda bottles. He's been to a camp where they play a lot of games and run around most of the day.  He slammed his thumb in a car door and got a brace for it even though it wasn't broken.  He was absolutely stellar on the Fourth of July, and he's got all kinds of excitement in store for him in the next couple of months.  But I'll need blog fodder in the future, so I won't share what that stuff is just yet.

The house is still the house.  Lots of dog hair, lots of grass, lots of lethargy as far as doing anything about either. We survived the "derecho"  with the power going out for a whopping 20 seconds, and the cable/internet/phone mysteriously going out 4 hours after the storm and staying out for about 36 hours.

Not Your Average Blogger is still trucking along.  He's working on a new book.  Because I "shamed" him into it.  What I actually did was suggest he resurrect a book he wrote several years back, retool it and start shopping it around again.  Apparently he'd rather REsearch than REwrite, because he took on a new idea instead.  I have already told him that I'm going to take on his old book and turn it into gold, but I'm not entirely sure when that will be, because......

1: I have a new job! and,

2: An editor liked my YA superhero book!

So the new job is as an editor with a wonky think tank and I absolutely love it and I'm reading all kinds of very cool stuff that I'm not going to tell you anything about unless or until I get explicit permission to do so because, HELLO I GOT FIRED BEFORE I WAS HIRED last time I talked about work. I will say that I really do believe that the first six months of this year were serendipitous: The fact I got jilted by That Other Place simply meant I was free to take this job, which is a monumentally better fit for me and infinitely more interesting -- and, not for nothing, seems to have much nicer and much saner people on the payroll. (And someday, yes, someday I will tell you exactly what I think of That Other Place and the assorted nonsense that transpired and how Your Tax Dollars factored into the whole sordid mess, but today is not that day.)

The book news is very exciting.  Now I just need to figure out how to carve out 16 uninterrupted hours to go through the thing and retool, rewrite, reshape and reform. I'm hoping next weekend will provide the time.  I may have to check into a motel to get the distraction-free environment, I'm not sure. But I'm hella excited that someone is hella excited and wants me to put the work in. 

The problem with a new job and a book rewrite is they aren't exactly compatible.  In my new life, I can actually sleep until a reasonable hour, and given the option, I choose to take advantage of it.  So where I used to get up at 4 a.m., be at work between 5 and 5:20, then usually home by 3 or 4 and able to watch the kid and write and do assorted other things until I dropped dead at 10:30 or 11,  what now happens is I get up at 6, run the dog, leave for work by 6:45 and arrive between 7:30 and 8, workworkwork until I leave at 4, and get home around 6, which really only gives me four hours to Do Stuff, Including Dinner.  Four hours is barely enough time for me to figure out where I left off on a manuscript, certainly not enough for me to get back into the mood and voice and make any headway. I was all set to work on it last weekend, but we had no cable/internet/TV -- which meant no GoogleDocs. (Because that's where I started storing the thing after my hard drive crashed. I'm constantly outsmarting myself.) This weekend we have a concert tonight, and dinner with friends tomorrow, and I really really do need to do some more yardwork ... or housework ... or napping. Probably napping. So, maybe next weekend. 

The only other thing worth reporting on is that the Fourth happened, and it was probably one of the nicest days we've had in years, despite the fact it was literally 100 degrees out.  We started the day with NYAB and myself taking the dog for a walk, then everyone packing into the car and going to a ballgame, which was a great, great show. And sitting in the Red Porch seats means the wait staff don't want you to keel over in the 100-degree heat, so they brought out ice water along with ice-water drenched towels for all the delicate flowers.  It was great.  The kid pulled his usual trick of playing his videogames instead of watching the game, but he was generally well-behaved and as a reward we took him to see Spiderman -- a much better outing than the Toby Maguire version, I must say, although a bit alarming to me in its liberal use of recombinant DNA gene-splicing stuff (upon which my book also hinges, le sigh.)  After the movie we headed back to NYAB's office and watched all the fireworks shows in a 50-mile radius.  It was as lovely as last year, but it also made me a little sad to think of how much has changed in the intervening time.  On the other hand, the 2 hours it took us to get home hadn't changed a bit, and reminded me I don't miss commuting from the Capitol at all.  

And now you're all caught up.  See you back here in a week? Maybe? Maybe not. Time will tell

Business As Usual

Well, it has been quite the exciting little week here at ye olde AvBlog site.  Lots of traffic, lots of agita. I'm grateful for all the support from folks who know me, I'm delighted that so far nobody has called me a moron, at least while I was in earshot.

I feel like I should use this opportunity to be profound, to be useful and worthy of the attention, to comment on matters of consequence. But I am not a little prince and I don't really have any observations on the warfare between the sheep and the flowers other than to think I really ought to follow through on my plans to acquire an agriculture textbook and try to understand some of it before my mom tries to tell me anything more about the family farm.

So I'll trundle back to more mundane matters, as if nothing ever happened. Let's start with Russian Jews.

Fiddler on the Roof opened last weekend and did fairly well, pulling in more than a hundred folks. After last week's crazy pell-mell pace of rehearsals every night and strife every day, this week has felt like a picnic. That all ends tomorrow, however.  Tomorrow there is work, then a performance that will get us home at midnight. Friday I am up for work at 4 a.m., a doctor's appointment at 2:30,  another performance that gets us out at midnight, after which we will drive to Newport News for NeighborGirl's college graduation at 10 a.m. Saturday -- and after that we will theoretically come back north, do another performance Saturday night, get home at midnight, and be back at the theater on Sunday for a Mother's Day matinee.  Gahhh. No rest for the wicked.

But the kid is loving it, and Not Your Average Blogger reports that he's doing well on stage.  (I haven't seen much from the audience; I'm mostly running around backstage looking for buckets and bottles and battery-operated candles.)

This has not left much time for me to admire my house at my favorite time of year.  Creating mulch paths in the flowerbed last year was exactly what I should have done years ago -- the weeding has been cut to almost nothing and the spaces I've finally filled with new flowers look absolutely gorgeous. Inside the house is not as gratifying -- having a dog means lots more hair and I'm astonished at how I can sweep a pound of dog hair off the floor, then come back and sweep again a half hour later and have another pound. You'd think the dog would be bald by now. She's not. She's still a cutie. 

We are also into the time of year where summer camp looms its head.  It's going to be quite the eclectic summer for the boy.  While my main goal was to set it up so we could avoid spending any time whatsoever in Woodbridge for the next couple of months, the kid's desires were also considered. So he's got a kiddie class on physics and bottle rockets, basketball, a couple drama camps, golf, and two weeks of multiplication-intensive math camp at the end of August as he heads into fourth grade.

Fourth grade! Too soon! Good lord. This time next year his age will be a double digit and he'll probably be taller than I am.  Perhaps that basketball camp was a good idea after all...