Hope as an anchor for the soul

It's a charming notion, and has such a grand ring to it, along the lines of 'I will hold beauty as a shield against despair.' But then, Hebrews is a very grand book.

Michael is so very helpful with my personal grooming, ever ready to pluck a stray hair that escapes from my ponytail and trails down my back. Sometimes he's a bit zealous about this, grasping at a hair that's not yet lost its grip. Me: 'Ow!' Michael: 'Oh, are you still using this?' Last night ~ Michael: 'Whup! There's an 'air!' (pause) 'Not in the progeny sense.'

Halcyon summer days

Except I never could remember how to pronounce that. But halcyon summer has hit in the busiest of ways.

This is going to be a quiet evening, as I only have to bake chocolate chip cookies (we are woefully out - I had to pack date bars [which is really breakfast food and hardly qualifies as dessert] in Michael's lunch this morning), pack Michael's lunch, fix supper, whip up a big pot of soup for supper tomorrow night (ensuring enough leftovers for lunches the rest of the week), call Verizon to straighten out a cell phone issue, and put away the laundry while Michael mows the lawn. Then after we eat supper we can change the sheets, run more laundry, make the bed, wash the dishes, and read more Narnia together before getting to sleep by nine sharp (since we still haven't caught up on our sleep from getting back from our Virginia weekend at TWO AM yesterday morning). This is going to be a breeze. Except that I forgot to take the butter out to soften, so I am absolutely stymied on the cookie front (experience has taught us that the texture turns out totally wrong if you dare to melt the butter instead of creaming it in), and I thought out my to-do list in such precision that to put it out of order would throw off my groove, so while I'm waiting for the butter to soften I might as well come in here and write about it.

Monica is such a riot. The compensations for having to work and wake up early every morning are (besides the money) getting to work with such great people. Today she came up to Crissy, sent her some secret signal, and ran off giggling fiendishly. Crissy then showed it to me, which I can't wait to teach my brothers: point to your eyes, point to the side of your head, point to the other person, hold your nose. Get it? Get it? It even rhymes! Running low on sleep and high on sugar (two cups of coffee this morning which were probably more than half sugar and cream to keep me awake), I couldn't stop laughing.

Well, actually, I have stopped by now, apparently. But it was very funny.

To continue the saga of the gum incident

Because Lunch Breaks are too short.

So anyway there we were sitting in the pew during the ceremony, and I decided upon a stick of gum. Operating upon the possibly fallacious premise that what's good for me is good for everyone, and that Michael will necessarily share my opinions and thoughts, I offered him a stick too. (Michael has to correct this mistaken impression whenever I seem in danger of forgetting that we are in fact two separate people. When he was printing out our boarding passes and I misunderstood at what step he was in the process - thought he was printing two apiece instead of printing out his after having printed off mine - Me: 'Why are you printing out two copies?' Michael: 'Love, I know this is hard for you to remember - us being married and all - but we really are two different people. We each need our own pass to board.') I proffered the stick of gum to him. He took it in his hand with a quizzical expression, held it up to the light, examined it curiously...finally I had to help him direct it to his mouth. After that he seemed to know what to do with it. Ron, watching from down the pew (why wasn't he paying attention to the ceremony?), started shaking with silent laughter. He obviously thought it every bit as funny as I did, although we decided that it was the sort of thing you have to see to believe - completely lost in translation when he tried to explain it to a present but unobservant bystander later on.

Michael's unerring ability to make me laugh inevitably reminds me of Sir Percy from The Scarlet Pimpernel: 'A bowl of punch, honest Jelly! The wits that have made a clever woman laugh must be wetted!'

In which it is discovered that the rigours of a full-time job and the pleasures of maintaining a random blog are not entirely incompatible.

It's called Lunch Break.

So we were sitting in the pew at Carrie's wedding paying earnest attention to, of course, the bride and groom, the stars of the show, after all. (During the gathering music and prelude I kept looking around the room and beaming as I recongnised dear familiar face after dear familiar face, and nudging Michael and whispering 'Look there! It's so-and-so!' and pining anxiously for the reception so I could rush over to talk to them, and I had to keep reminding myself that this was Carrie's Wedding Day, not Rose's Big Chance to See Everyone Again and Show Off Michael To the Ones Who Haven't Met Him Yet.)

Lent...sort of

Michael asked me last week, 'So, should we give up sugar for seminar week?'

Those fortunate enough to have read the book Cheaper By The Dozen will recall with fondness the chapter wherein a very civic-minded lady pays a visit to Mother, hoping to enlist a volunteer in the cause. The clincher is the very quotable line 'How revolting! And within eighteen miles of national headquarters, too!' Well, it's been rather like that this week. Every one of my actions is called into scrutiny, pondered over, and tsk-tsked by Michael in the most pious manner. 'Wearing pants today? And during a basic seminar week, too! What's this? Running the dishwasher? Rose! What are you thinking!' Really, now, aside from the late nights and uncomfortable chairs (unavoidable in any seminar), it's been very good for us. It's nice to have a refresher course in all this auld lang syne, and as Michael said last night, 'I didn't remember how funny he is!'

Back to the basics

The Basic Seminar is coming to town this week, and Michael and I are attending. Hence very busy lives for the next few days. We cooked up a huge pot of stew on Saturday, and roasted a huge pot of pork roast for BBQ sandwiches yesterday, the idea being that we could eat quick meals of leftovers before we dashed off to the seminar each night. (Except that we had Todd and Marcela over for dinner on Saturday, and somehow when Todd's around there's never as much leftover as you think there should be =>) It's been a long time for us both - over ten years for me, and at least fifteen for Michael in his estimation, meaning, as I have been pointing out to him repeatedly, that that means it's been about half our lives for both of us! It will be interesting to see how our views and perspectives have changed in the intervening years. We shall see.

End Construction

Road work on 85 at odd hours continues. I suppose the powers that be consider themselves to be doing us a favour to limit their activities to non-rush hour times, but it's still a bit of an aggravation. When I see the signs announcing the merciful conclusion of the work zone, I am always reminded of Jonathan's stock wry remark whenever he spotted one of those orange 'End Road Work' or 'End Construction' signs: 'Those protestors!' accompanied by an exaggerated shake of the head. The funny thing is that he's been doing this for well over ten years. That's a pretty clever joke for a four-year-old to crack!

It's the time of your life, so live it well

Friday night we watched A Bug's Life. And at long last I realised why practically the only line that stuck with me from the whole movie was the line 'It's the time...of your life....so live it well!' Aside from the fact that that line comes from the only song in the whole movie, that line is practically the only line of the whole song. Not only that, but the song is played only during the credits! How did I pick it up and remember it after all these years? Because it played during the outtakes, of course, and there is nothing like animated outtakes! I must have watched them and the song lodged in my head without my noticing. No wonder, as it repeats again and again, which is not a problem as it has a very catchy tune. But it all makes sense now, like when I watched The Princess Bride again after not having seen it for maybe ten years after it came out in, when was it, 1987? For many, many years later, before the whole movie slipped from my memory into foggy oblivion, the only line I could remember was the classic 'Hello...' (If you need me to finish that sentence for you, my friend, there are serious holes in your life. Gaping chasms in your heart that need to be filled.) And I could never understand why that was the only line I could remember. 'Boy,' thought my mature fifteen-year-old-self, 'I must have been really morbid back then, to remember a line about killing and dying!' And then - gladsome day! - I watched it again at long last (but not for the last time!) and it finally dawned on my why it had made such an impression on my impressionable seven-year-old-self: because he says it like twelve times in once scene alone!

I wonder how many more of these 'Aha!' experiences are lurking around corners just waiting to be discovered. There is an excellent line in one of the Father Brown stories, which I wish I could find and copy down exactly, but I'm not due to go on another Father Brown kick for awhile yet and I'd have to read through the complete omnibus to track it down, but it goes something like this: 'All at once a window in his mind opened and shed light on something which he realised, quite suddenly, that he had known all along.'