Back at last

Our impressions of Holland are much the same as they were last time - impractical plumbing, small spaces, friendly people, wonderful food - so we needn't go into all that again. Possibly the most memorable part of the whole trip for me was coming down with a horrific cold the day after we arrived and fighting with said cold the whole blighted trip, thus rendering all my memories overshadowed by a fog of sneezing and sniffling which left me wondering why on earth people ever took snuff so as to do this to themselves on purpose.

We're getting back on track now. Jane and Ella are still waking up rather early in the mornings, which is probably good for us all. Oh, but it's good to be back!

JAMBOG, Phase II

(See here for rules.) (See here for Phase I.)

Scenario #3: You're imprisoned in an old castle dungeon. Guards stand outside your cell. A moat surrounds the castle. How do you escape?

Katy shivered in the cold darkness of the old castle dungeon. Dressed only in her pyjamas, she rued the day that she had come begging to the gates of Castle Bruster. 'Only a little scoop of ice cream,' she had implored, but the merciless Baron had thrown her into the dungeon rather than part with one scrap of his lavish medieval feast.

Presently Katy took heart. Surely she might contrive a way of escape. She scanned her cell for inspiration, and noticed, to her surprise, a cup of coke sitting on the bars in the window. An idea struck her with blinding force, but she quickly recovered, and called for the guard:

'Oh! Guard!' Katy called out, trying to think of a plausible excuse. The guard unlocked the cell door and came in to see what was the matter, and Katy quickly threw the cup of very flat coke into his eyes. He staggered and tripped, and in a trice Katy seized the keys, swung the great door to, and locked it behind the guard.

Quickly she ran down the flagstone hallway, looking for a way out. Just as she reached a larger passage, she heard a clamour of loud shouts and footsteps. Katy looked about her for a hiding place, but there was none. At the last minute, she seized the large, silver globe of a light from the hall lampstand. When the patrol of guards came around the corner, they saw what appeared to be a gypsy sitting on the floor, waving her hands mysteriously over a magic ball.

'Come! Look ye into my crystal ball and see what your futures shall hold!' Katy intoned.

'That ain't crystal - that be silver,' protested one of the guards, licking his ice-cream cone, for they had just come from the medieval feast.

'Well, come look into its silver depths, and see how crystal clear your future shall become!' Katy replied. Interested, the guards all peered downward. Katy set the ball spinning at the guards, who dropped their ice cream cones, slipped, and went down like ninepins. Katy darted around them and rushed up a stone passage.

She found herself in the castle kitchen, where the roaring fire sent out a cheerful glow. There were cod sizzling on a pan over the fire, sending out deliciously tempting smells. But Katy had other fish to fry. She spotted a huge colander of alfalfa sprouts which the cook had left out, and an idea flashed into her head. Gathering up bundles in her arms, she ran up to the highest turret and arranged the sprouts into a rough semblance of a bird's nest, which she curled up in the middle of.

Within a very few minutes, the giant rocs circling the castle caught sight of her and came swooping down. One of them clutched her in its talons, whisked her across the moat, and set her down gently in safety. And thereupon was she at liberty to continue her quest for free ice cream.

Fashion Tirade

Of course there's no such thing as objective fashion, because what we inherently find attractive is inevitably going to be coloured by the pervading fads and trends that have shaped our cultural awareness. But it is slightly frustrating to me to be so completely unable to find a decisive answer on what specific looks actually look the nicest, without regard to what sleight-of-hand they're trying to accomplish.

The driving force behind most fashion 'looks' seems to be mainly concerned with creating the illusion of tallness and thinness. Vertical lines (not stripes! Because that would be too obvious!) are supposed to lengthen and slim the figure. Skirts that stop just above the knee are supposed to make the legs look longer, as opposed to the drab, mid-calf length, which makes the legs look dumpy. Boot-cut jeans balance the legs, making the thighs look narrower in context. Skinny jeans give a slimming line and make the legs look longer.

I have yet to read a useful piece of advice on which look actually looks the nicest for its own sake. Since I am pretty happy with my shape, I really don't feel compelled to resort to optical illusions in my wardrobe; I'd much rather not waste time agonising over whether a particular style causes me to look - even if ever so slightly - like something I am not.

This annoyance of mine carries over to the perpetual articles in magazines and what-have-you, where we're regaled with Tips For Disguising Figure Flaws and Ten Easy Ways To Look Up To Five Pounds Slimmer. My thought is, rather than waste all that time and energy and effort studying these principles, buying new clothes, tanning, etc., why not just go ahead and lose the five pounds? I mean, if it's a legitimate figure flaw that needs to be fixed, then fix it. Otherwise, stop worrying about it.

Redbox rocks!

A few weeks ago I gave Redbox a try for the first time. I'd read about it online and heard great things about it, but when I finally got around to trying it out, I was less than impressed. The 'free' code I'd been proffered didn't work, and the customer service rep with whom I spoke seemed ambivalent about solving the problem for me and even suggested that the code malfunction might be a common problem. I wrote a very thorough email to customer support, listing my perturbations and suspecting them of pulling a bait-and-switch by deliberately offering free goods/services which were merely designed to lure new customers in.

Customer service responded in fine style. I received a very courteous and apologetic response, explaining that the glitch with the code was a temporary issue, that Redbox really is in the habit of offering absolutely free rentals, and giving me two free codes on the spot as a goodwill gesture. Their reputation properly restored, I gave them another chance, and now commence to sing their praises. Both codes worked like a charm, and I became hooked.

Redbox, in case you haven't heard of it, is like a vending machine of new release DVDs located in various popular locations such as Wal-marts and McDonalds. Check their website to find one near you. The cost is usually $1 a day, but there are so many free codes emerging that you can pretty much get one for free any time you want.

It works for Redbox, because if you are late returning your DVD, you get charged $1. Still, that's not much for a movie rental (and hey, last I checked, Blockbuster was charging $4.29 for new releases!) So far we have always been prompt about returning our movies on time, and the location is very convenient. We are definitely fans.

Reflections

Ten years ago this year I left Oregon.

My oldest younger brother, now twenty, was ten when we left. That means that he's spent half his life in Oregon and half in Virginia. The others, still younger, have spent most of their lives in Virginia. For some of them, Oregon - my childhood home and all my growing-up memories - is but a distant memory.

The children I used to babysit are now old enough to babysit my children.

And here's the real kicker: as of next month, I will have lived as long in Georgia as I ever lived in Virginia!!

Oh, and while we're at it...

Since we're going back to Holland next month, I thought it high time to post these neat pictures of European-style lights (that, and the winter games are on):

JAMBOG time!

(See here for a list of rules.)

A Drink
From Days To Come
"We checked in with the hostess and sat at the bar to drink a Coke and enjoy the cigarette smoke while we waited. Scott was talking about something at work and I was sitting in the bar stool leaning on the bar and sipping my Coke ..."

A Light
From Focht Tales

A Food
From The Real Food Revolution
"I tell my kids that we're going to have bird's nests for lunch."

Something Cold
Need I say more?

Free ice cream is here again!

I will not miss this again, quotha. (Somehow I have missed it every single year I've lived where there are Brusters.) Michael was aghast when I told him, all gushing and bubbly, about my discovery and my plan to dress the girls up in their pyjamas, and wear my bathrobe over my sweats, because that's the closest thing I have to actual pyjamas, at least that could be worn in public.

Gold and dross

I'm sure you all have seen (or heard of) that little demonstration of time and priorities using a box of sand and some bricks. Someone performed it in our Sunday school class a few years ago, but I'd read of it elsewhere, and I think it's a terrific visual presentation.

Basically, you have a box full of sand, and a stack of bricks, and you're told to make them both fit into one box. If you try to cram the bricks into the box full of sand, you will discover that they will not fit: they simply will not occupy the same space. But if you put the bricks into an empty box (Ha! I caught you, a la Sherlock Holmes! I never told you that you had an empty box! [but then, as I told someone recently, who was complaining about S. H.'s habit of making himself look clever by withholding important information so that the reader could not out-guess him, Come on! This isn't Encyclopedia Brown we're reading! You're not supposed to figure it out on your own!]) , and then pour the sand in around it, then it will fit (at least more so). The idea is that you have to start off with the really important things in life, and fit the less important things in around them, or else the unimportant things will crowd out the important things.

Such is the way I feel about this season of my life. The more bricks I try to cram in, the more swiftly the sand flows out of the hourglass of my life...oh, well, never mind the metaphors. This is not, by the way, a roundabout (and that word always makes me think of England) announcement of the end of my blog, merely a meandering mulling over the sparseness of posts recently.

Sometimes blogging is sand. Fun sand...sandcastle-building-worthy sand...lie-lazily-in- the-sun-and-ignore-my-cares sand...but sand nonetheless.

All right, now I shall go off and do the dishes. Again.

I couldn't have said it better myself...

...especially about the imposting and the sorcering.

Fetch and carry

One of the most mind-numbing aspects of keeping up with little people, whose energy and creativity seem limitless, most especially in comparison with my own, is the setting things to rights by insisting on believing that everything has its proper place, and should, ideally, stay there.

Far more minute - and thus more irritating and camel-back-straw-breaking than the endless repertoire of dishes, dusters, and laundry - is the unending courier duty of patrolling the hallways, counters, couches, tables, and tupperware drawers to ensure that used tissues, clean laundry, dirty laundry, foodstuffs, hairbrushes, papers, utensils, and the like didn't get misplaced by little hands. Jane and Ella are fond of picking things up and just following me around the house, distributing random items in their wake, quite apart from their intentional foraging expeditions, where they hide the magnets under the bathroom sink, because they are making popcorn. As if in space, objects drift casually through the house, coming to rest peacefully in the odd nook or cranny.

There seem to be two possible destinations for these unfixed objects: in full view, which is annoying to me because it gives the appearance of clutter and makes me feel, no matter how much time I spend running around putting things away, that my house is falling apart and I just put that away three times already this morning and what's the use of it all, or out of sight, which is only slightly more dire, because it may turn out to be something that we may require before we happen to discover its resting place. Asking Jane where she put the nasal aspirator is decidedly unproductive.

Legs and letters

I am constantly amazed at the little bits of profundity Jane pops out with. I should be writing this all down in her baby book. But at the rate I am going, I am doing well to remember to share it with Michael that night, let alone blog about it. Two clevernesses come to mind, however:

This morning she was admiring herself in the mirror and reading off the letters on her shirt. Now, she knows all her letters and the main sounds they make, but we've kept it simple thus far and only introduced her to the short vowel sounds. In absence of formal school time, I've taken to spelling out short words whenever I can and walking her through the sounds. Her shirt read, 'Dept. of Cute,' and she was happily reciting the letters.

So I decided to make a giant leap forward and introduce her to the concept of long and short vowel sounds. Leading her to the garish letter magnets on the fridge, I spelled out CUT and explained how, without an E, the U made an uh sound, but when you add the E, it makes the YEW sound! Never missing a trick, she said, 'Let's add the Z!' And then proceeded to line up all the rest of the letters, in order of colour.

Then this evening, she was running around sans-culottes. As I washed the dishes, I overheard this ensuing conversation:

Jane: Jane's legs are naked!
Michael: Yes, they are.
Jane: Jane is wearing no pants!
Michael: No, you're not wearing pants.
Jane: Just legs!

Silver linings (or not)

Sara's recent post about grey hair, and our response to it, reflects a lot of similar thoughts I've had on the topic. On the one hand, of course I want to accept my age. (But of course, I don't want to look too old while doing so.) Of course I want to age gracefully. (But just not too soon.)

I've wondered what I'll do when the time comes to deal with it. Aside from all the problematic health concerns linking cancer risks to darker hair dyes, and the problematic costs associated with the natural (e.g. henna) dyes (well, for that matter, surely even the most dastardly carcinogenic hair dyes must get expensive after a while), there's the old Institute baggage of the notion that we must accept ungrudging our ten unchangeables, such as aging and death.

(I don't actually believe this anymore, by the way. Death is inevitable, but that doesn't mean we don't strive to fight it every chance we get. It's a product of the curse, and therefore not something that we should just accept glibly without protest.)

Of course there seems something inherently dishonest about dyeing one's hair, just to pretend that one looks different from how one really appears. But that hurdle can be quickly resolved by pointing out that it's just as dishonest to wear makeup and coloured contacts, or to shave one's legs, or to get braces, or wear high heels.

No, my biggest problem with the notion of dyeing one's hair is the societal concession to an inflated standard of beauty. Just as the popular advent of make-up ('Painting like an Indian,' as Dad Gilbreth jeeringly called it in Cheaper By The Dozen) last century leveled the playing field for the masses and undermined the relative natural beauty of the genuinely good-looking, so the widespread and almost universal dyeing of hair gives us an inflated notion of youth. Most women who would otherwise go grey do dye their hair, because everyone else does, so we have come to associate grey hair with an exaggerated sense of oldness.

For that reason alone, I'd be eager to see society re-establish a rational, sensible acceptance of grey hair as compatible with vibrance and youth. But am I going to participate in countering the current trend? Probably not until the backlash grows to be a widespread phenomenon. No blazing of fashion trails for me.

I read recently (maybe in a review of this book?) that various tests and studies had proven that grey hair only advances the perception of one's age to the average viewer by three years. Whatever. I don't need to look three years older than I am. When I am thirty, fair and square, I will be perfectly happy to look thirty, thank you very much. Meanwhile, I will try very hard not to stress about it, since stress is supposed to bring on ye old hoary head.

Snow!

We had a winter storm warning on Wednesday, which was shortly followed up by the winter storm itself. Atlanta promptly shut down; as the first flurries of white flakes came down, every activity was canceled and the stores ran out of bread, milk, and toilet paper. I thought it was an urban legend when I moved here, but it's true: whenever it snows here (not too often, granted) people flock to the stores to stock up on supplies.

Meanwhile, Jane and Ella enjoyed their first brush with snow:

I know things have been slow with the recent writers' strike...

But honestly, is this the best they could do?

I won't tell you what movie I just finished watching, because that might give it away, but in the fit of scoffing that resulted I came up with the following obvious plot devices employed by low-budget and apparently desperate writers:

- In the dramatic confrontation scene, where the Hero confronts and fights with the Villain, sufficiently immobilise the Heroine so that her role is reduced to helpless screaming. For best effects, rig it so that her screams coincide with the most tense moments of the struggle, to further distract the Hero and highten the suspense. Give her enough of a free hand that we can waste precious screen moments by cutting back and forth between the epic conflict and her frantic struggles, but not so much that she breaks free and does something actually productive, such as clobber the Villain.

- When the relationship threatens to drag, bring in an additional potential love interest. Make her blonde. Trot her out and let her run her paces for a few scenes, then dust her off and return her to the wings from whence you plucked her so that the main characters can get on with their spectacular misunderstandings.

- Throw in a few sunset scenes. Zoom in on close-ups of the Hero's and Heroine's fake sobbing (didn't any of these people read Encyclopedia Brown?? Come on, we all know that when tears run from the outside corners of the eyes, they're not real!) in an attempt to distract from the obvious paintedness of the sunset.

- For good resolution, simply pair off characters with the likeliest candidates. Kill off all the leftovers so that nobody ends up alone.

$100 sapphire...check. Now what?

When we went on our Alaska jaunt last summer, I think I mentioned that the high point of the trip, aside from the abundant food and the midnight chocolate, was dashing about from shop to shop at every port of call, collecting free trinkets. My plan was to work some of these into nice little Christmas presents, which didn't pan out so well, as a recent cleaning frenzy unearthed the crumpled bag of treasures buried under some obscure pile of Deal-Withs. Ah, memories!

One of them is a blue sapphire. It was billed as genuine, and touted as being worth $100. Is Alaska really so short on tourists, and long on sapphires, that they've taken to giving these little gems away as a thank-you gift for visiting their humble shores, you wonder? Not quite - rest assured that they have a plan. When I entered the store, flourishing my stateroom coupon, I was offered the incredible chance to have the free stone mounted in a ring or pendant for only $50. Never one to throw good money after...um...well, no money, I declined the offer and walked out of there with my head held high, clutching my $100 sapphire, with no notion of what to do with it but with a very strong fondness for it, as, after all, it was Genuine, not to mention worth $100.

(This is not an isolated incident, by the way. Another store promised free freshwater pearl pendants, and then spent several minutes explaining to me why I needed to buy their $10 sterling silver chain to wear the pendant on. Finally they just gave up and let me have the pendant. I still haven't figured out what to wear it with.)

Now we're being followed by rocks

Just finished watching Pirates III and all I can say is, What? That's it???

No, seriously, now what? Is there going to be yet another movie to tie up all the rest of the loose ends satisfactorily? Hate to wreak havoc on this nice trilogy motif we had going, but there has to be a better resolution than once every ten years.

This is the woman scorned like which Hell hath no fury.

A minor diatribe

Internet shorthand will always be with us (at least as long as we have the internet), but that won't stop me from gnashing my teeth at all the little expressions I find particularly irksome. And the one which at this moment has aroused my derision is the phrase dh, shorthand for, I can only suppose, Dear Husband.

A small part of me (a very, very small part) wants to like the convention, because it sounds so charming and refined to refer to someone as Dear. It also sounds almost British (as in, 'Dear Charlotte,' or 'Dear Mamma'), and anything British is sure to score high points with my passing fancy.

Another part of me wants to stop being annoyed by it, because some people whose writings I otherwise like tend to employ it, and I don't want to catch them in the crossfire of my snide and possibly quite irrational dislike.

Another part of me wants to encourage any instance of niceness and civility in our language that I find, because of course it is laudable to consider one's husband dear, isn't it?

But mainly I just find it annoying. It's a very tiresome cheapening of the language, like a case of chronic italics in an impressionable teenager or the overuse of the word 'love' to mean all things from mildly be interested in to passionately adore.

And why the need to perpetually tack on the chirpy adjective? It almost suggests some kind of insecurity, that one needs so flamboyantly to wear one's heart on one's sleeve and insist how dear one's husband is. It seems to imply a kind of superiority, in stark contrast to those of us poor saps who are so blase as not to publicly call our husbands dear at every opportunity. If you're content to let your husband off with the mere title of husband, which is nothing if not prosaically descriptive, without any reference to the state of your relationship with him, well then! We can see just how loving a wife you are!

In fact, why stop at dh? Why not go gung-ho for this Positive Speech thing and make up all kinds of cute little acronyms to demonstrate vociferously just how wonderful and healthy and enthusiastic we really are? How about my brat (beautiful righteous adorable tot) or my lunk (loving unselfish nice kid) or my gross (gorgeous reliable opinionated svelte spouse)? Yes, why don't we start scattering these little tidbits throughout our conversation and see if the wonderful trend will catch on?

Or is the point to be deliberately unintelligible? Is that why the lazy but somewhat onomatopoetic LOL was abandoned for the more obscure, erudite, and hence now wildly popular ROTFLOL? Because if it makes too much sense, then it wouldn't be clever and original enough to use it, now would it?

Goldilocks

Jane is quickly getting the world all figured out and, per her perfectionist nature, methodically and systematically putting everything in its place.

It happened a few weeks ago that she noted a difference in heights by commenting, 'Jane is little; Mama is big.' Mama did not like this depiction, and promptly informed Jane that while Papa may be big, Mama is medium. So Jane dutifully took in this tidbit of information and proceeded to run with it (in a very methodical and systematic way, of course).

Many days later Michael coughed, and Jane commented, 'Papa's big cough!' She then turned to me and observed, 'Mama has a medium cough.'

Jane is not satisfied with one-sided conversations, so I must not only acknowledge what she says, but agree with her whole-heartedly:

Jane: Papa has a big cough!
Mama: Yes, Papa has a big cough.
Jane: Mama has a medium cough!
Mama: Yes, Mama's cough is medium.
Jane: Jane has a little cough! (cough, cough)
Mama: Yes, Jane has a little cough.
Jane: Ella has a smaller cough!
Mama: Yes.
Jane: Ella has a smaller cough!
Mama: Yes, yes, Jane, Ella does have a smaller cough, doesn't she??

These conversations happen fairly frequently now, and they tend to be rather predictable.

Jane: Papa has a big sneeze!
Mama: Yes, Papa's sneeze is big
Jane: Mama has a medium sneeze!
Mama: Yes, Mama's sneeze is medium
Jane: Jane has a little sneeze!
Mama: Yes, Jane has a little sneeze.
Jane: Ella has a smaller sneeze!
Mama: Yes, she does.

And the possibilities are endless. Jane will never run out of gambits.

These boots were made for walkin'

There is a little sketch somewhere by a famous artist of a man with multiple limbs doing cartwheels inside a big circle, the point of which is to prove that the length of the arms, fully extended, should exactly match the height of the body, or thereabouts. There are also optical illusions out there involving top hats and brims, which have something to do with ratios of height to width and all that.

Apparently footwear manufacturers draw their inspiration from these tidbits and decide that the circumference of a woman's calf must exactly match the length of her lower leg, from knee to heel, even including, say, a four-inch stacked heel for good measure (stop and admire my self-restraint for not ending that sentence with 'to boot.' Ha, ha!) From which you are to conclude that my long quest for a good-fitting black boot (or any colour boot, for that matter) continues unfulfilled.

I don't have particularly skinny legs. I am not plump, and I think my calves are about right for my height, and so it bothers me no end that absolutely no boot out there exists which will fit properly. All I want is a nice pair of basic leather (preferably zip-up) boots. I am past caring about price and will gladly pay any amount (and I already checked, and they don't sell boots at CVS) of ready money just to buy a good pair of boots that could last me a few seasons. Seriously, this search has been on for most of my married life, and you would think that at least one season they might come out with a normal boot for a normal-sized leg.