My husband is really smart

Okay, so you know how you're in church on Sunday morning and somebody stands up and says "Please pray for Edna - she's having surgery Thursday and she's a bit nervous about it." and you think "Totally. I will totally pray for Edna." and then maybe you even go find Edna after the service and give her a hug and listen to her story and promise to pray for her?

And then you know how you go home and the dog needs to go out and there's laundry and dishes and driving kids places and what are we having for supper and suddenly there it is Thursday night and you think "Ack! Edna!"

So maybe you and your friends and your church decide to start e-mailing prayer requests to each other, and that's a little better, and sometimes you send up a prayer just as soon as you get the e-mail, but there are still so many of those times that you move on from e-mail to going to look at pictures of things your friends are knitting and again, Thursday comes and goes and you've forgotten?

Wouldn't it be just so awesome if someone would write a utility that would put a little window up on your computer desktop that had prayer requests in it, one at a time, and cycled through them all day? And this program (or Windows Gadget) would be something subscribable, so maybe even your whole church could create a prayer request list, and then potentially we would be all reminded of each other just when we needed it most? And then wouldn't it be GREAT if that were secure, so that only the people it mattered to could see it?

Well it would and it is.



Go check it out - www.remindergadget.com

(TechnoBoy made that all up, out of his own head.)

Snapshot

A is practicing piano, but has moved on from her assigned songs to something she's trying just to see if she can learn it ...

B is chopping tomatoes for the taco supper he's planned, and largely executed (I fried the hamburger).

The dog is staring at B with unwavering devotion, because he is Near Cheese, and sometimes good things happen when the humans are near cheese.

TechnoGuy comes out of his office and smiles at the whole bunch of us, and I think - yep. This is it, this is what I longed for, all those years that no babies came. Moments like this, warm and friendly, the house full of music and the smell of supper cooking.

May I never forget to be grateful.

The great big post of nearly everything

1. When Curves is fun? Is when my friends M and C are there, or one of them, for at least part of it.

when Curves is not fun? Is when I go at a different time and the place has been taken over by midget Valkyries who are Serious About Working Out and nobody weighs an ounce over Ideal.

I closed my eyes and thought of England. Or Aruba, Jamaica, Bermuda, Bahamas, the desk in my bedroom with my computer opened on it, waiting for me to ...

2. Write a book in a month. NaNoWriMo. Yeeeesh. Lots of people I know are doing it and there's a certain "abandon everything else and focus like a bulldog" aspect of it that appeals to me. In years past I saved that for Christmas Knitting and then I did not want to knit for months afterwards. I'm not sure I want to risk that with my writing, and yet ...

an idea niggles. What to do, what to do.

3. Okay this one needs a picture. I've been working out with Valkyries, so instead of "taking things at my own pace" I've been flailing like a beached seal, and I am sore, so bear with me as I totter downstairs for the camera.



Yes, that is a child of mine DRIVING A VEHICLE. Legally.

4. I have ingested far too much Hallowe'en candy. I don't even like sugar and my insulin-resistant processing system likes it even less. I am here to tell you that I am all done with the Tootsie Rolls.

5. There's SO much more but I have to meet my brother at my Mom's in half an hour and I have been sweating. How's my Mom, you ask?

Here's a pic from her 72nd birthday.

The great big post of nearly everything

now why didn't I think of that?

Trimming B's fingernails ...and he yanks his hand away.

"Not that one!!" he says. "I need that one long!!"

"Whatever for?" I asked him.

"For getting Lego bricks apart."

When is playing computer games writing?

Well it's like this.

If I stay sitting here, at my computer, after I write "She needed to think. Long and hard." then I am, even while I am blowing up multi-coloured bubbles, still thinking about what on earth it is that K is thinking about and how it will be that she can come to realize that she has lost the "luxury of disdain" ...

but if I go fold laundry and cook and grocery shop, K and her struggles have been drop-kicked right out of my mind.

In which my daughter quotes a movie at me, to my utter delight

"And do you know how you overcome writer's block?" I asked my daughter.

She made her best guess. "By sitting in the rain watching cars go off bridges, standing on a table and practicing jumping off buildings, watching apples roll down streets?"

Say what?

So I'm sitting here trying to write a pantoum and humming along to Randy Stonehill and I turn to glance through the slats in the blinds to see if it's still raining ...

and the "rain" has turned my lawn white.

*SIGH*

Letter to the Offspring

Dear children.

Although can I call you children? Both of you have feet that are bigger than mine, and one of you is taller than I am. However, I am still your mother, and that makes you my children.

I just wanted to say: it's not like there's a manual. It's not like I can go look up, say, whether or not I should ask someone if they can quickly play through their songs on the piano while they're home for lunch, and find out before I ask that I'll be starting a big fight that will result in your being back to school late, so please don't tell me I "should have known." Seriously. There was no way to predict that. Do you know how many years you've been practicing piano? There was no precedent, and no place to look it up.

And you know how Dad and I seem fairly stubborn? I know Dad has "consistent" listed as a super-power, so let's talk about me instead. Do you know how many times I am saying "Well the deal was that A would lead to B, unless C, and then, and only then, would there be D, and therefore you have chosen X by default." and I'm thinking "Wait what? What were the choices? I am being too stubborn? Am I failing to honour their struggles? Am I being unreasonable? What page is this on in the manual? Oh right. Dang."? On second thought, it's probably best if you don't read this until you're older, or the arguments will ramp up. If you do read this, I absolutely meant what I said and I have no doubt at all that I am handling this properly, this thing right here, whatever it is.

Just - Dudes. I'm doing my (admittedly flawed) best here.

May it take you less time to recover from your childhood than it took me to recover from mine.

Love,

Mom

*******

okay the rest of you can start reading now.

I called my Mom the other day to say WOW you were consistent, and way to go! Growing up, of course, I thought she was intractable and unreasonable and just so blasted hard-headed! That woman would never back down! Which, umm, wow. Way to go, Mom.

So she told me that she'd heard a preacher one day say "What are you going to say when you get to heaven and the Lord asks you where your children are?" and she took that to heart.

!!!!!!!!!! That is a TERRIBLE question! FIRST of all it implies that every choice your child makes is within your power - which stops being true right about the time you leave the hospital and your baby screams all the way home because he or she wants a soother or doesn't want a soother or is maybe wet or maybe scared of the car seat or maybe that street light right there is kind of spooky and wasn't the noise more *muffled* before, and wow there's a lot of room out here and I'm not so sure I like that. Maybe also hungry. Or too hot or too cold.

Maybe that's just MY baby. Maybe you told your baby to choose to be content all the way home.

SECOND - never mind second.

I spluttered and gasped and spluttered some more and then said "You should have stood up and said "I'm going to say: I don't know, Lord, I thought You had them?" "

Dudes! That was amazing.

That title right there? That's the kind of thing how you can tell I'm a poet what sells poetry.

But here's what I'm talking about.

Walking the dog, just at dusk, because we've decided that if a coyote is going to crouch on the other side of the fence and watch her do her Thang, even though I am shrieking at the top of my (rather considerable) lungs from the deck, it's time for the All Leash, All the Time phase of dog toiletry. Unless we no longer want a dog, and until someone else in this house starts snorting for joy just because I've walked through the door, I still want a dog.

What was I talking about? right. Walking the dog. We're up the hill from the lake but I can hear geese, overhead, and then I realize I can hear them landing on the lake, and so I head down the hill to the lake, and ...wow.

Geese, geese, geese, honking overhead, and wheeling and sinking below the trees so that I could no longer make out any more than brief flashes of white on their bellies, and landing on the lake with a great communal whooshing splash - and honking and gabbling and looking for each other ...and it went on and on and on. It was dusk, my favourite time of day, because all the lines between things blend, and it is so easy to be gentle with my own flesh and bone, and the air was a cool caress and the long symphony of migration went on and on and on and I was in the middle of it, open-mouthed in awe.

A marvelous gift of a moment.

Quick critique

I just got an e-mail from Judith, entitled Hey. As I know and love a Judith, I opened this e-mail and read

pithy detank
armed coiner check small.
gantry small spun otto.
deer held scar billet!
melt precis armed melt.
self ulna pithy nobble?
labile cyder endue unbare!
billet under as doubt?
coiner detank.
detank bemuse lake spawn!


As my dear friend Judith is also a poet, and a good one, I read the whole thing. (the original is much longer, but frankly, after the bemused lake spawn, the narrative lost its flow). We often critique each other's work via e-mail but this time I thought she could just look it up on my blog.

Judith: this lacks your regular clarity and capacity for deep emotional connection. And let us never forget that an exclamation mark in a poem is like telling the reader "You are too stupid to realize this is important." ("!") While I would normally suggest removing the offending punctuation, in this case perhaps it is necessary, as I am, apparently, far too stupid to understand much of your poem until the lake spawn is bemused by the dual detanking of the coiner and the pithy. Or perhaps the detanking of the coiner was a pithy phrase. Seriously, J, this is not a step in the right direction for you, in my humble opinion.

HTH*

S**

(*Hope This Helps. That's the way I sign stuff, sometimes. It often means "I have been a heavy handed critiquing jerk, but I'm putting this obscure acronym here at the end as a pretend stab at self-deprecation so you'll forgive me for it. Love ya! Tootles!")

(**the first letter of my first name. Why I can't be bothered to type out my entire name is a mystery to me. It's five letters, it rolls off my fingertips without thinking (although I do an astonishing ability to consistently spell it wrong even though it's been my name my ENTIRE LIFE) Sometimes I even have to back space and erase most of it to sign my e-mail in this clever code. Don't ask me.)