Summer Fridays

Have I mentioned that I love my job? Here are three reasons why:

1.  This morning I woke up knowing that it was a summer Friday,  and even though I'm on the kind of contract that makes me want to punch people in the throat when they say "Oh, you work at the college? I bet you're ready to be off for the summer!," I knew that this afternoon offices will close at 4 p.m. and I would be skedaddling out an hour earlier than I do than most days.

2.  If you look closely at today's photo, you can see that I am streaming World Cup games on my auxiliary monitor. We in the MomQueenBee household are huge fans of World Cup soccer. Huge. According to Boy#2 World Cup soccer is better than the Olympics because it actually means something in the rest of the world. I'm not sure I'd go that far (Better than the Olympics? What blasphemy is this?) but I see his point. Because I work at a college and not at, say, a mortuary, I can choose a task that doesn't require full attention at every moment and also keep an eye on the ball.

3. At 11:15 a.m., the darling woman from the registrar's office cranked up the popcorn machine then brought bags of popcorn to everyone on the floor. Popcorn IN THE MORNING.

I love my job.


  

They're Teenagers

Husband and I don't sit out on the deck much, even though this particular deck took almost exactly the same amount of time to construct as one of the great cathedrals of Europe, which is to say several hundred years. (I jest. It was really only four years or so that the first step out of the sunroom into the backyard was eight feet off the ground. It just seemed like several hundred years.)

Anyway, the reason we don't sit out there isn't because we don't love the deck. Who wouldn't love it, with its rain-dappled cedar rails and shade trees?

We don't sit out there because Our Dog Pepper is no longer with us. And while we miss Our Dog Pepper in general, the thing we miss the most is that she is no longer there to make friends with the neighborhood's stray cats. She was so anxious to play with those critters that they almost never ventured past the back gate, much less up onto the deck.

Now, though, every time we look out the back door there are cats sitting in our deck chairs. I wouldn't mind this except that if one sits in a deck chair that has been recently inhabited by the cats, one gets back up with one's fanny covered in a veritable cat-skin rug of shed hair. (Also, you will not regret clicking on the link in the previous sentence. At least I didn't.)

I don't know how old the cats are but I'm pretty sure they're in that one year between childhood and teenage years in which the tween is intolerable, the year in which you would like to give your child away because he could not possibly be the result of any nature or nurture you approved but who would take him?

You know the stage, right? When your previously loving babykins, the one who could be brought to contrition with only  a sorrowful look and the words, "Oh, Boy!," suddenly stares back at you and said "Yeah? What?" And that stage only lasted a year but holy cow, you were ready for him to GET OVER IT ALREADY?

The cats that were in the deck chairs nanoseconds before I took the shot above turned camera-shy and shot off the deck when I opened the door but they gave me this look from the landing at the bottom of the deck steps.

Yeah. Definitely almost-teenagers. No wonder their parents don't claim them.

Books Everywhere

I love to read. I have loved to read since I was a wee thing, when Sammy the Seal and Emmett's Pig were the literature of choice. In fact, I can still recite Sammy's opening pages--"It was feeding time at the zoo. All the animals must be fed." Aaaahhh, such a great plot. And the characters are so finely drawn.

As you may be able to tell by my continued love for Sammy and Emmett, I am not particularly choosy about what I read. I tend to have three or four books going at the same time: There's the young adult best-seller open on my old e-reader (the one that I don't mind sweating on) which is propped on the book stand of my elliptical. Another, this one an actual book with pages and everything so that if I drop it there's no damage, is on my bedside table to lull me to asleep. A third is pulled up on the iPad for evening reading and still another (this one also a paper-paged version) is in my travel bag so that if my e-readers run out of steam during a trip I don't have to go cold turkey.

If you think this seems like a wee bit of hop-toad attention span, you are absolutely correct. Every time I dive back into one of the books I have to remind myself where I was and what the characters are doing. This is especially a problem when one of the books reaches a critical plot point, one that has me thinking of the book when I'm not actually reading it. Then I'm all "What? Where did Hannah go? And why is the heroine named Taylor now?" When I get to this crucial part of the book, all bets are off. The book, or the iPad, or the Nook, suddenly is carried with me everywhere as I race through pages to find out WHODUNIT? AND WHY? OH MY GOSH!

Today I made a wonderful/terrible discovery: It's possible to pull up the latest book I'm reading on my office computer. That means that whatever I'm reading is only a click away, so much more enticing than the budget I'm perusing or the brochure I'm proofreading.

But because I'm a grown-up, and I really do like my job, I will resist the urge to sign in to find out why Mark is being such an utter jerk. As soon as I had taken today's photo I signed off of my account and I won't get onto it again. I'll console myself with memories of days gone by:

It's feeding time at the zoo. All the animals must be fed.

Best Roommate Ever

Okay, a disclaimer before I write today's post: Husband is a really, really terrific roommate. We've been roomies for more than 30 years now, and he's a good guy who is considerate about lights and fans and that kind of thing. He is my favorite roommate in many, many categories of the Best Roommate competition.

However, as I remembered again over the weekend, he may be only the runner-up in this competition. Once again I was Pumpkin for Much Older Sister at the annual convention of the women's organization we both attend. As she was organizing and directing and basically working her fingers to bony stubs, I lounged around enjoying the hotel suite comped to the bony-fingered who do all the work of the convention.

While she was pinning down the logistics of registration and housing for more than 300 women (who could, on occasion, be cranky. It's true! Who knew?), she found time to leave a gift bag of goodies on the table beside my bed. And because she knows me particularly well, when she left for her 6:30 a.m. meeting she also left the nectar of the gods to ensure there would be only 299 cranky women because I would be deliriously caffeinated:

And then, because we are only 17 months apart in age and she knows the way to my heart, she also left this less tangible but no less appreciated gift which caused me to sigh happily, pull the high-thread-count duvet up around my ears and go back to sleep:

Ahhhhh! 

Sorry, Husband. You're a really, really terrific roommate, but at this stage of my life setting the thermostat to 68 during a Kansas summer may just trump lights and fans.

 Although you could try a gift bag...

Still Hopeful

I'm so sorry to leave you for two days looking at the photo of the tearful moppet who has just struck out for the most recent time. Awwww...so cute. So sad. 

But wash your emotions out with this picture--behold, my garden! 

I know! Remember just a few weeks ago when I was lamenting the certain death of anything I planted? And pre-memorializing the four tomato plants and two basil plants now inhabiting the old fishpond in the back yard? (Yes, the archaeological remains of a fishpond were in our back yard when we moved in. We find this spot charming. Also, we are too lazy to dig the bricks out.)

You don't remember? Let me refresh your memory:

Woochy-woochy! Such adorable little things. Of the six bedding plants I jammed into the potting soil all but one are still alive. One of the basil plants succumbed to non-watering during the Memorial Day weekend when no one was home, but pfffft, it's only a plant and if it doesn't even want to try, well, then I just have no time for it. The replacement is doing just fine, and I harvested enough basil this week to transform our Bacon and Tomato Pasta into Bacon Tomato and Basil Pasta.

Maybe, just maybe, in another month we'll have tomatoes worthy of the foliage that looks so amazing today.

At least there is still hope.

I Do Not Miss This

This picture seems to be everywhere. I borrowed it from here.

One of my friend has two kids who are in the thick of kid sports. One of those kids is a gung-ho athlete who is always scrapping and diving, making the team and making an impact. The other--well, she wrote this about that child on her Facebook page this morning:

I guess if I have to choose between my son being a winner at baseball or being a winner at life, I'd choose life. That's what I'm gonna keep telling myself.

Sometimes I forget which parts of having young kids were not so much fun for the mother of the Boys. The asthma attacks. The class parties. And more than anything else, youth sports.

You have to sign your kid up for sports, of course, especially when your kid is a boy. In Small Town all girls do dance, all boys do sports. Much of the time, this is a good thing.

The early years of soccer when the sport is mostly herd-ball were just fine. It was lots of running and the otherwise-forbidden Little Debbie snacks after the game were the highlight of the day. When he was five it didn't matter that Boy#1 couldn't be distracted from counting the train cars that were passing by the soccer pitch, not even when the ball actually hit him in the leg and bounced away to another more aggressive player. I loved the flowers he picked and ran over (during play) to present to me in the stands. Boy#2 was a head taller than all of his teammates and highly competitive and in his first years of competition he was always picked early in the draft. He also was genetically doomed to be the opposite of fast, though, and more and more often got stuck in the goal where his height was an advantage but his quickness.... Boys#3 and #4 had similar athletic career trajectories.

As they get older, though, the stakes get higher. Teammates (and especially the parents of teammates) care about wins and loses. They care when a kid strikes out every time, or misses the easy chip-in. Sometimes they audibly groan, or say with asperity "Just watch it onto the bat." Their exasperation hangs heavy over the stands.

They don't get that this kid is watching, and keeping his eye on the ball, and relaxing, and choking up, and doing every. single. thing. he's been asked to do, and that he knows as well as the audibly groaning jerk in the stand that he's probably going to strike out again. That he's going to whiff the sure goal the star set him up to score. (That's partly because the star had never once passed to him before and seeing the ball right there was paralyzing, but that's a story for another day.)

Certain things were required in the House on the Corner. Piano lessons, until eighth grade. Church youth group. A job (or paper route) as soon as legally old enough. What Husband and I didn't require was that the Boys play sports. We would pay fees and chauffeur them to practices and games and we would be in the stands cheering for them at every single game, but the only requirement was that they finish any season in which they enrolled. They couldn't decide after three practices that (soccer/baseball/basketball/tennis) was too hard but they always had the option of not participating in the next season.

And even though they weren't good at these sports, they signed up over and over and over again. There was always the hope of a new season. This year! This is going to be the year that everything fell into place, except that it never really did. Each one of them got marginally better at soccer or baseball or basketball, but in spite of the hours invested (one summer we literally spent every single weeknight at the ballpark, with multiple games most nights) they never really became athletes.

In hindsight, this probably was a good thing. They were really, really good at other things--playing the piano, writing stories, showing up for work every single day. They turned out to be kind and hard-working, and empathetic in a way that kids who always win everything often are not. They were consistent winners in geography and spelling bees, and if they had been good athletes, too, they might have thought I was a liar when I told them that everyone is good at something but almost no one is good at everything so yay for you! but don't go thinking you're all that when you win the math contest.

They were good at the things that our society doesn't value so much in kids. A kid who can throw a perfect spiral will have his name in the headlines every week but the hoopla is much more subdued for National Merit Scholars.

This week a friend's kid won a state championship in an athletic event, and I am so, so happy for him. He's not only a great runner, he's good at life--smart, funny, humble. Not all kid athletes are. These are the audibly groaning kids and their parents, the first-chosen and the highly coordinated who don't understand or respect the bench-sitters and the clumsy.

So for those of us whose kids are good at life but not at sports? Keep telling yourself to choose life, A. And remember that someday, like the asthma attacks and school parties, this stage will be behind you.

You will not miss it.

Perpetually Lost

You all know that my own self-image is not nearly as incompetent as the image I paint in this space, right? That I tell you my two-right-shoe stories and my I'm-not-a-very-good-cook stories because  I usually have on a complete pair of matching shoes, and that I rock a chocolate sheetcake? This is true in every area of my life except one:

I am a terrible navigator.

Husband, Boys, friends, can I get an 'amen' here? (Not so loudly, please.)

The best moment of my young motherhood was not when the toilet-training was finished, or even when the vomiters learned to hit the bucket. No, the best moment was the day when Boy#1 took my place in the shotgun seat and opened an atlas on his lap. WOOOOOOOOOO!

No more nervously tracing lines to a destination, and watching for the exit sign--"Turn here! I meant turn back there! Turn around!" Now my sons were taking their rightful spots in the map-loving lineage of their father, and happily plotting courses that got us from Point A to Point B effortlessly and efficiently. It was navigational nirvana.

I must stress here that Husband has been the perfect pilot for a nervous navigator--never once has he said "Really? You really thought a gravel road would take us to the interstate?" or "Really? You really think I can get four lanes over to an exit in less than 100 yards?" No, he's been the swell peach of a guy that I married and his response to my ineptitude, over and over and over again, has been "Well, this isn't the end of the world. Let me get pulled over and I'll take a look."

I know! What did I do to deserve him?

But the Boys grew up and left home, darn it anyway, and while my grocery budget and tolerance for clutter have benefited from this transition, I have lost my navigators. As we were on our way to pick up Boy#1 from an unfamiliar airport a few weeks ago I got us so thoroughly and completely lost that we almost missed his flight. And that was with the help of my phone's GPS system. I may or may not have cried, and said "You don't even know how much I hate navigating."

Yesterday morning the sermon was about the 40 years the Israelis spent wandering around in the wilderness before they reached the Promised Land. Our preacher pointed out that if they had only gone northeast instead of southwest, they'd have gotten to their destination in a matter of weeks.

Husband leaned over and lovingly church-whispered, "Hey! Why didn't you tell me you had been Moses's navigator?"

Sigh. Some reputations are just too well-earned.