Songs my mother taught me

Overlooking the cheesy graphics, the obvious improper use of government, and the irritating "health messages," this website Juliana found is really cool. Not only does it have the words and tune to "Do Your Ears Hang Low?", it has quite a selection of other classics.

My mother had an enormous repertoire of songs--or song fragments--on every topic under the sun. We used to make a game of it, trying to come up with a topic and see if she could sing a song about it. She always could. Thus it has always been one of my maternal ambitions to know a large array of songs. But, alas, I actually learned very few of my mother's songs--or if I did, only a small portion of the song.

Now I can begin to remedy that problem. I can toss in songs my grandparents sang to me as well. So from now on D1 can expect to be regaled with "Be Kind to Your Webfooted Friends," "Deep in the Heart of Texas," "Frog Went A-Courtin'," "Shortnin' Bread," "Six Little Ducks," and much more. And I'm sure my whole family will be thrilled to see the complete lyrics to "I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas."

More home adventures

I've figured out the solution to my refrigerator-cleaning problem. I've divided up the kitchen chores that need to be done about once a month into four parts (under sink, fridge, cabinets, and surfaces). Then I'll spend half an hour each Wednesday doing one of the four. If a month has five Wednesdays, I'll do more cabinets. You can all cancel your calls to the health department now.

I think I've killed all my plants again. Well, the peace lily was probably dead anyway. But the lucky bamboo may have finally gone this time, and the philodendron looks frighteningly pale. I'm not good with plants. I can tend to things that need it at frequent intervals (husbands, babies) or make noise when neglected (babies, husbands). Plants don't make noise and don't need to be remembered very often. So in my house they don't get remembered at all--especially since these were out in the garage until I found a place to put them in the house, which I never did. I'm going to try to revive the remaining plants (especially Philo, with whom I have a long history) and put them back on the refrigerator if they pull through. Maybe I will remember them there.

Taking the blame

I get annoyed at Dear Abby (not D1, the one in the newspaper) fairly often. (Why do I continue to read it? There's not much in our local newspaper. It's that and how Dorothy decorated the table when the Modern Homemakers met last Tuesday.) She generally serves as the prophet of Conventional Wisdom, mingled with a touch of Political Correctness.

This week a girl wrote in confessing that she had been sexually assaulted by her high-school boyfriend of 18 months but had never told anyone; now that she was in college, she found herself unwilling to date for fear of what might happen. DA advised her to go get counselling, and reassured her, "It's not your fault. The victim is NEVER to blame."

I don't want to take one iota of blame off the boyfriend. Indeed, I'd hold him primarily responsible even if she was a willing participant; it is a gentleman's duty to protect the honor even of ladies who do not wish to be so protected. And there are certainly victims (e.g. young children) who should be told they couldn't possibly be blamed.

But isn't there a pretty high likelihood that somewhere in the course of the 18-month relationship this girl did something that contributed to the situation and for which she quite properly feels guilty? Maybe she sneaked out behind her parents' backs to see him; or said "Yes" once and found he wouldn't take "No" thereafter; or tried to draw a line in a place where a line won't hold. It's not doing her any favors to gloss over that possibility and just insist, "It's all the guy's fault." In order for her to resolve this situation and have healthy relationships in the future, she's going to have to deal with her own guilt (if she does in fact have any) as well as her anger at him. She'll need to figure out what she could do differently in the future as well as identify the characteristics of men who might mistreat her.

Obviously DA couldn't have helped her through all that in a newspaper column. But she shouldn't have closed off one of the essential parts of the healing process with a blanket statement.

Contagions

I have a cold. Rose had a cold. DJ had a cold. Amy has a cold. Can colds spread through the blogosphere? Maybe I should disinfect my keyboard.

Marching On

I had a thawing-hamburger related problem this morning that required me to clean out the entire refrigerator. Which on the whole was a good thing, considering how long it has been. (If I keep blogging about my housecleaning problems, I wonder if people will no longer dare to come over.) I had it 2/3 done in the time it took DOB to shower and dress, making me wonder why I had waited so long. Actually, I know why I waited so long. I didn't have a plan where it came up as The Next Thing To Do, and so it waited for an emergency.

But I have developed a new plan that, while not addressing the refrigerator problem, should help me in organizing the rest of the house. That is to take one room per month and have that room be my focus: deep cleaning, organizing, decorating, whatever. Then when the month ends, I give up on that room and move on. This prevents me from either getting bogged down for too long or getting sidetracked too soon. So my plan is now: September, nursery; October, office (dread, dread); November, master bedroom; December, take a break; January, kitchen; February, bathrooms; March, living and dining rooms; April, garage. In May I'll either work outside or start over again.

I have also figured out a simple scheme that will allow me to fit three and maybe four children in the house without giving up the home office or feeling too crammed. That should do us for six years or so, which is enough for me to feel reasonably prepared. (So I like to plan ahead. Way ahead. It's next week I have trouble thinking about.)

Whine, Worry and Song

Whine: I have a cold. I've been debating for a couple of days whether it is a cold, paint fumes, or newly-developed seasonal allergies, but I've come down in favor of a cold. It's not right to have a cold at the time of year when it's too hot for chicken soup. I should fix some seasonal cold-defying menu, like spicy enchiladas, but tonight is YR board meeting night so we're having pizza, the second-worst cold menu.

Worry: Rumor has it that pertussis is going around, and possibly even in the family DOB's sister babysits. That puts a hard new edge on vaccination decisions. (Although I've read even in pro-vaccination accounts that the pertussis immunity doesn't kick in until 5 months, so it wouldn't matter yet.)

Even more immediate, DOB was exposed to hand-foot-and-mouth disease yesterday. (Tip for job applicants: Exposing your interviewer to painful, highly contagious diseases may indeed cause them to remember you, but will not impress them with your professionalism.) He took all reasonable precautions of washing or throwing away everything he might have touched, but we will wait anxiously for the next week to see if that was enough.

Song: D1 is very fond of singing "Do Your Ears Hang Low?", which I looked up all the words to before she was born just for that purpose. DOB has never heard anyone but me sing the song, and somehow he always twists the tune a little bit when he sings it. Once I've heard his twisted version, I can't remember how to sing it correctly for quite some time. So I have been unable to correct him and his version drives me crazy.

We decided we would settle this question once and for all by checking the book out of the library again. So I reserved the book, DOB brought it home, and I sat down at the piano to demonstrate to DOB once and for all what the right tune is. And then I realized in horror that the book had the wrong tune. It was not the one I grew up singing. (Taught to me, no doubt, by my elder siblings, but they usually deny having anything to do with it.)

So we're still stuck. I'm going to have to see if I can pick it out on the piano. Unfortunately tunes of which I only have ancient childhood recollections tend to elude precise rendering.

No whited sepulchres here

Last night DOB recoiled in horror when he noticed that the outside of the salad bowl was distinctly greasy feeling. (I'm definitely not the world's most skilled dishwasher, and plastic bowls tell all.) I apologized and tried to reassure him.

"I know the inside is clean, I just sometimes forget to get the outside clean, too."

"If you don't clean the outside, it's going to get the inside of another bowl dirty."

"I know. I guess it just goes to show that I'm not a Pharisee." (Referencing Matthew 23:25.)

On further examination of the passage, it even could be construed to offer divine endorsement of the idea that cleaning the inside is sufficient. But DOB assures me that it is not.

Galahad and the grace of God

I have been pondering DJ's comments on Galahad. Come to think of it, Galahad's situation does result from a lot of unmerited divine favor. My difficulty in accepting him parallels my difficulty in swallowing the inequalities that come from God's grace in real life. That's why I tend to feel envious when it seems like God has given someone else a free ride, and guilty when others don't seem to have it as well as I do. (Not just monetarily, but in all sorts of areas.)

As DOB points out, deep down, I'm a liberal. I want things to be fair. Shouldn't we all get the same? Or, at least, shouldn't we all get only exactly what we deserve? (Don't answer that.) Or if God is handing out undeserved things, shouldn't we all get the same size of ice cream cone?

But we don't. What keeps me from going around redistributing the ice cream is two realizations: one, that human efforts cannot even things out, and will create even greater inequalities from trying; two, that even if I don't understand God's purposes in his unequal distribution of his blessings, He does have them.

Though God's purposes are higher than my comprehension, perhaps I can guess at some of them. If we all received equal blessings at the hand of God, there would be no occasion for compassion or generosity. No one would get the character that comes when you start out behind and have to catch up. There would be no stories worth telling.

So the next time Sir Galahad rides through town with his shield blazing in the sunlight, I promise to swallow my pride and cheer with the best of them.

If you want something done right

DOB's next younger brother has vehicles that are, if possible, even more troublesome than ours. (Of course, he takes cars for free, so it is to be expected.) Right now he has his truck parked in our garage and comes over in the wee hours of the morning (he works graveyard) to tinker with it until DOB leaves for work. He also is thus available for various tasks like taking doors off their hinges to be painted.

This morning he and DOB were conferring in the garage. DOB came back in and said, "You got paint all over the doorknob."

"Yeah, I know. It's really hard to get around it. I'm going to clean it off."

"Why didn't you just take the doorknob off?"

I don't know, I guess I always thought paint on doorknobs was an inevitable part of life. Removing the doorknob had not occurred to me.

DOB pointed out that one of the key distinctions between us, when we are faced with a task, is that if he sees a problem with accomplishing the task the way he desires, he will stop and analyze it until he figures out how to fix it. Whereas I will just soldier on in spite of everything. The end result is, if I do it, it may not be done right, but it will be done. If he does it, it may not be done, but if it is, it will be done right.

Anyway, his brother took the doorknob and hinges off, so I will be cleaning those today in addition to painting the inside of the door.

Wardrobe Malfunctions

The door-painting project got postponed until this week, due to a combination of scheduling and weather factors. (Apparently hurricanes affect weather even this far inland. I don't think hurricanes should be allowed to impact weather anywhere you can't get good fish for a decent price.)

With painting on the agenda for today, I dug in my closet and located my painting skirt, a garment that was once an acid-washed denim, late bleached, painted, and adorned with dark blue patches where the bleaching got carried away. I put it on and realized in the couple of years since I last had occasion to paint the elastic had disintegrated and it no longer had any power to hold itself up. I am contemplating whether it is worth saving for the second trimester of future pregnancies, but I'm not sure I would be engaging in any projects sufficiently toxic to justify it. I don't think anyone else would want it, and it is rather past the point of being used for rags, so I may have to just plain throw it away.

Regardless, it was not suitable for wear today. So I pulled out another skirt, nearly as old but not yet so colorfully adorned, and tried it on. The elastic had likewise disintegrated, but it had a smaller circumference to begin with, so it seemed to be staying up. Over the course of the day, however, especially when I put my cell phone in my pocket, it began to sag threateningly. Before heading out with D1 for a walk, I decided it needed the added precaution of a safety pin reducing the waist band. So far, so good.

I'm not sure how well the door painting is going. I've had little experience with home improvement projects, as up until now I have lived with people who were much more competent in the area and were content to do it and leave me to fix dinner. But since the front door was never even painted by our predecessors, and was industrial gray accessorized by tape fragments and rust spots, I don't think I can make it look worse than it was.

Time for another coat.

Getting Away With It

Eats, Shoots and Leaves was, as expected, a delicious read. (It was the sort of book I can always imagine myself slowly savoring homemade chocolates while I'm reading it. Not that I have any homemade chocolates; I just have to imagine them.) Plenty of ghastly examples and very witty renderings of grammatical rules and history. If I get very inspired, I may post some favorite quotes.

It did recognize that famous writers can get away with flouting the rules of punctuation, rather as people who could draw at some point can pile up garbage and get museums to buy it; thin, beautiful people can wear ugly clothes and call them fashionable; rich people can decorate their homes with trash pickings and call it chic; and, as Rose pointed out, Ogden Nash can utterly disregard the meter when he wants. Contrary to the apparent beliefs of some, however, the corollary is not true and disregarding punctuation is not the path to literary fame and fortune any more than wearing ugly clothes turns you beautiful.

The Wild West, or something like it

This week was "Roundup Sunday" at our church, where we were to dress up in western attire. (You don't have costume days at your church? Actually at a lot of churches it would seem rather cheesy, but at a small, close-knit country church it doesn't seem out of place.)

Anyway, DOB and I had been plotting our attire for several weeks. With his mid-1800s suitcoat and vest from our wedding, gray dress pants, a black grosgrain bow tie and a top hat, he was a very dignified figure. My outfit consisted of a long brown wool skirt, embroidered white blouse, brown scarf, brown hat, and boots. Although this was no doubt not what anyone else thought of when they dressed western, we determined that we were George and Eliza Richmond, George being a railway official sent out West to supervise railway expansion, circa the 1870s. (I'm sure we were the only people there who felt compelled to create a backstory.)

I dressed D1 in a long, smocked gown that had been made for one of her uncles (one of those generic garments that babies of both genders used to wear) and a frilly white bonnet.

We won the prize for best-dressed cowboy and cowgirl--I'm guessing they put the emphasis on best-dressed, not on cow handling, because we didn't remotely resemble cowpokes.

I hope to get pictures back from someone soon. The deacon has a digital camera.

Milestones the Baby Books Miss: Imaginary Words
That is, the first sounds the doting parents can pretend sound like real words. Yesterday morning, while D1 was supposed to be having breakfast, DOB came in. D1 looked him straight in the eye, grinned, and said, "Hi."

She's convinced she can talk as it is. (And Grandpa is convinced he can understand her.) She likes it best when she is supposed to be eating. I foresee a childhood of plates growing cold.

This does sort of remind me of the dueling baby boasting in the movie Bachelor Mother:
"Can he talk?"
"No."
"Well, this one can, can't he dear?"
"Indeed. Why last night, he said the first two lines from 'Gunga Din' quite distinctly."

How NOT to write a love letter
Reader's Digest has a short feature this time on "How to Write a Love Letter." Here is one of the examples, verbatim:

Use Simple Prose Leave flowery talk like "How do I love thee, let me count the ways" to the Brownings. Write in a natural voice, such as, "I've never been as happy since the day I met you."

Yeah, a heartfelt message like that should really endear your sweetie to you. I may not be sappy, but even I wouldn't claim DOB has made my life less happy.

Narrow Passages
Tomorrow we are planning on picking up some free furniture from DOB's partner. We don't have room for it in this house, so DOB's parents are going to store it for us. DOB's mother wants to put the china hutch in their living room, but she first wants to repaint the living room. So until that happens, we will keep it in the hallway here. Thus we are storing the furniture for ourselves, which reminds me of that quintessentially Wodehousian situation in Picadilly Jim where Jimmy Crocker, due to a sequence of events I could not possibly explain here, winds up deceitfully posing as himself. (I really must read that book with DOB. Maybe we can get it next--it will be quite a relief after we mourn the end of Camelot.)

The only place we have to put it is in the front hallway, which it will probably mostly fill. Meanwhile as fall comes on I've discovered that I can put up my drying rack in the back hallway/laundry room and still have room to (just barely) get by. It's fortunate we are all skinny these days. Of course, when one of us (naming no names) was not, there was as yet no cause to dry diapers.

The Quest for the Holy Grail
Earlier this week we finished the second King Arthur book, on the quest for the Holy Grail. I discovered I was much mistaken in my understanding of it. (No doubt betraying despicable ignorance here.) I thought they were off trying to find the Holy Grail and then perhaps restore it to its rightful place or something. Instead, it turns out they all knew exactly where the Holy Grail was. The quest was rather to have the Holy Grail reveal itself to you and enter into the mysteries thereof. This involved proving one's self worthy of receiving those mysteries, by defending some fair maidens and resisting the temptations of others, for the most part. There are a lot of very weird episodes that are evidently demonic ruses to tempt the pure in heart.

I didn't care much for Galahad. He just has it all too easy. He's the best knight in all the world (so dubbed before he even goes out and does anything). So of course he gets the magic swords and the powerful shield that's been waiting around for hundreds of years and he just rides around, not even tempted by evil, and carries all before him until he alone is permitted to enter fully into the mysteries of the Holy Grail. Of course, then he dies, but he doesn't seem to mind.

I guess he's supposed to be more a symbol than a character. He's not a christ figure, because the innocent sacrificing is done by someone else (Percival's sister). Probably he's supposed to be the embodiment of chivalric ideals. Hence he becomes yet another example of why an ideal would be very unpleasant to live with.

I like Percival and Bors better. They have to struggle to get where they are.

More Firsts
D1 got to attend her first official government proceeding last night, as DOB took us down to introduce us to the Marion Township Trustees. (Townships are an aspect of government I had never encountered in pre-Ohio days. Why people need yet another governing body I'm still not quite clear on, but I think the theory is it keeps power from accumulating so much in the counties.) She made no disturbances--although since the meeting was conducted with rather less formality than a Rotary meeting, and most of the members were proud grandparents, I don't think it would have mattered if she did. She was duly entered into the minutes.

"Our Story" (No Sap Added)
The Unrepentant Bachelor Blogger has been complaining about the inevitable sappiness that ensues when couples share "our story." Now I have some sympathy with him, because I abhor sappiness, too. But I don't think it's an inevitable part of getting married. I think DOB and I survived the premarital process without inflicting any sappiness on our friends and relations. (Not to say that we didn't inflict other things, like permanently tied-up phone lines, on them.)

I can even tell "our story" without a drip of sappiness:

Once upon a time, DOB was looking for people to argue with. Since QOC was also looking for people to argue with, they encountered each other and argued. DOB, by foul treachery (or so QOC alleged) won that debate. So QOC was very annoyed, and kept arguing with him.

After a couple of years of arguing, they spent so much time at it that His Majesty became concerned that all this arguing might jeopardize QOC's job. So he told DOB he should either begin subsidizing QOC's existence himself or stop taking up so much of her time. DOB duly considered the matter and decided that the former course would be more expedient, as it is very difficult to find people who like to argue that much, and QOC was also a good cook.

So DOB and QOC got married and lived together ever after, but they were too busy paying the mortgage and populating the world to argue any more.

See? That's not so bad, is it?

The Grammar Commando rides again
I finally got Eats, Shoots & Leaves from the library. Now I can nourish my inner grammarian.

Working Out for Bush
D1 received a Bush/Cheney onesie as a gift from some YR friends. Clearly, the perfect attire for her to wear when we staff the county GOP headquarters on Friday nights. But I am concerned about her legs getting cold, especially as fall comes on. Her wardrobe is very predominately pink. The only thing that even remotely coordinates is a pair of red tights (which as it happens don't go with anything else). I hope that works, although I fear she'll look like she escaped from an aerobics class.

Thomas Sowell and Diaper Changing
Now that D1 sleeps all night long, I always double-diaper her before bed. The two diapers are quite adequate to the task--indeed, they're not even that wet in the morning. I generally feed her around 6:30, put a fresh diaper on, and put her back to bed as she's generally quite sleepy until after 9.

The problem was, after that diaper changing, she would always soak through everything before she woke up from her nap. (She never does this later in the day.) I was complaining of this to my sister yesterday and she said, "Well, why don't you double-diaper her first thing in the morning?"

Duh.

But I realized I wasn't doing this because it seemed more logical to me that she would wet more overnight than she would in three hours. She ought to wet more at night. It wasn't my fault if she didn't!

This reminded me of Thomas Sowell's distinction between the constrained (conservative, roughly) and unconstrained (liberal, roughly) vision. The unconstrained believe more in what Sowell called "articulated rationality"--i.e., if an intellectual can explain it and it sounds logical, then it must be true. The constrained believe more in experience; who cares what reality ought to be, it's what reality is that we must deal with. I was allowing my articulated rationality of diapering theory to trump what I had observed to be true.

So to avoid becoming a liberal intellectual, I double-diapered her this morning.

Rain and what follows
Yesterday afternoon, after a highly productive morning (14 qts. of applesauce and all the bulk goods rearranged), D1 and I were taking a well-earned nap. Through the fog of sleepiness and the usual household appliance sounds, I slowly became aware of yet another noise. It finally convinced my sleep-impaired reasoning that it might be rain. I dashed to the window to check and discovered we were having an unforecasted torrential downpour. (Rain in Ohio is a whole different animal from rain in Washington.)

My immediate thought was for the clothes I had out on the drying rack. I dashed to the patio door and realized that, alas, it was too late. The clothes were already far wetter than when I removed them from the washing machine. Since DOB had to have dry socks by this morning, I had to take the load in and dry it in the dryer anyway.

The rain and extra work also distracted me from taking out the garbage. I awoke this morning and realized that it was garbage morning, but thought I still had time. But, alas, we were running late and before I could take the garbage out I had to get dressed and before I could get dressed I had to take a shower and before I could take a shower I had to get DOB's clothes ironed and by the time I had done all that and went out front, I realized the garbage truck had already come.

Now I was in despair because I had been cleaning out the garage and finally decided that I really was not going to use the giant bag of wadded up paper that was left from moving, and so the garbage can was overflowing already even without the most recent garbage added. Having it sit around for another week was not a cheering prospect. And I was sure that the garbage truck came first to the street behind us (we front on two streets) and to the street out front (where we set out our garbage). But just as I was about to give up, DOB called out, "Quick, take it out back!" I dashed out and sure enough, there was the truck almost to our house. I handed the can to the garbage men personally. They insisted I was wrong about their street order, and they were just running early today. I did not really care anymore.

In the Mood
I'm enjoying the thrill of a highly-successful weekend. For the first time since well before D1's birth, the only mess left from the weekend was the Sunday night dishes. It's nine o'clock on Monday morning and the house is tidy (mostly), the laundry is running, and D1 is still napping. Ah, the possibilities.

Also this weekend, I scored a touchdown in the Sunday-afternoon scrimmage. DOB and I went to a (free) swing concert at the local high school in the evening. We had to leave early on account of it being D1's bedtime and also needing to get up for work in the morning (clearly no longer a concern of most of the other attendees). But it was great fun and we got a cd to continue the concert. Query: How big does a band have to be to be a big band? This one only had about 16 members, but they did a great job.

So, with all that, I should be primed for this week's activities: freezing applesauce and painting the front door. DOB's sister is coming over today and we are going to attempt a bushel of apples. I'm not sure how much that is, as my family had an orchard and picked the apples into whatever old boxes we could find. My mother and siblings and I made applesauce until the freezer was full, our arms were falling off, and the floor was so sticky small children got entrapped trying to walk across it. Then we quit and all went swimming. So I'm not sure how much is reasonable for two people to attempt, but we shall see.

The front door is another project that cannot be put off. Apparently the previous owner never even got around to painting it, and it shows. And it had best be done before the weather changes and the storm door is an inadequate barrier. I will see if I can paint more neatly than my last major attempt, when my repainting of my bedroom resulted in me also needing new carpet.

Le Restaurant Richmonde
Anniversary Weekend Specials

Dinner
Chicken Tetrazinni (cooks in the crockpot, so chef is free for pre-dinner activities)
Toasted Baguette with Garlic Butter, Homegrown Tomatoes and Fresh Basil (Worth all the work of growing tomatoes and basil. So far D1 is showing no reaction to the garlic butter, hurrah!)
Peas (What are french peas, anyway?)
Stale Cake (At least a designated couple of bites of the one saved from the Ohio reception. Who invented the saving the cake for a year tradition, anyway?)
Strawberry Crême Glacée (Much better than the cake.)

Breakfast
Fresh Currant Scones (Actually raisins--I can't find currants at any of the stores around here. And I left out the sugar. Fortunately that was easy to remedy by serving them with honey. The time I made three orange cheesecakes for a four-course meal for thirty people and left the sugar out was a little harder to fix.)
Scrambled Eggs with Tomatoes and Cheese (An omelette would be better, but my pans are incorrigible.)
Sliced Peaches (that should have ripened longer)

I think I'll stop there as the menus have now descended to leftovers, beans and rice.

To be (or not to be) a snob
I have been troubled lately by the suspicion that I may be a snob towards a certain class of people. DOB and I were discussing this at 4:30 this morning. (Why were we awake at 4:30 on Saturday when we can scarcely hear the alarm on weekdays? We wish we knew.) Anyway, this is the distillation of the discussion.

It is not lack of money that we are tempted to look down upon. For one thing, there are few people who have less than we do at the moment. (Although there are certainly those with much more debt.) Nor is it a particular kind of employment--we have many good friends and relations who work with their hands, whom we respect and admire.

Rather it is a particular outlook on life: an attitude of entitlement and resentment, one that puts in only the required amount of time and effort and then complains about the pay. A perspective that only sees and spends for the present, indulging in pleasures that are gone in a moment while long-term needs go unprovided for. I also think it tends to accompany poor taste in clothes and decor--but that makes sense, because it is a mindset that does not strive to learn or grow.

These people do tend to work blue-collar jobs and be poor. But that is a consequence, not a cause, of their mindset. People who work blue-collar jobs who take pride in their work, poor people who spend what they have wisely, people of any class who are always trying to learn and grow, who appreciate beautiful things and try to further them--they are all worthy of respect and a pleasure to be around.

It's not necessarily snobbish to note characteristics that are undesirable and criticize them--or even to minimize contact with people whose bad attitude is catching. It could be snobbish, though, to assume a person has certain characteristics before getting to know him, or to condemn the person rather than his behavior. Since that's always easy to slide into, I shall have to be careful.

Interview Answers
In addition to DOB's answers below, you can read answers from Rose and Marsha on their blogs. Juliana, Jeremy, and Jaclyn all answered in the comments. (There wasn't a rule about people whose names start with J, it just happened that way.) All quite intriguing, though I found DOB's most fascinating--of course, I find DOB most fascinating, anyway.

I have now completed answering my interview.

Doesn't D(uckling)1 need her very own set of royal rubber ducks?

The Downward Slope
I was just reading back through a month of the archive. My writing six months ago seems so much more witty and profound than the current batch. I always feel this way when I read my old writing. I hope it's just that I can better appreciate my own writing once I've achieved some distance from it, and not because my writing has been in a constant state of decline since I was seventeen.

Milestones the Baby Books Miss: Bibbing
Bibs serve multiple functions throughout infancy. At first, they help catch spit-up. They are quite inadequate to this task, since spit-up goes all sorts of places besides immediately below the chin. But one puts them on in a show of good faith. (I still recall with some bitterness when my eldest nephew, now five, celebrated his first Christmas by nailing my brand-new Pendleton wool skirt--even though someone else was holding him! Fortunately the skirt seems to have survived.)

Later on, bibs will become necessary for catching stray food particles when the solid food process begins. (My nephew got his due back and more when I tried to feed him later in life.)

In between these two times, one reaches the Unending Drool point. At this point, bibs are a sort of diaper on the top end to absorb an unending stream of dampness before it soaks through everything in sight.

Last night DOB inspected D1 and decreed we had reached this point.

While on the topic of my niephlings, that reminds me that my sister-in-law would always laugh at my inadequate diapering skills. She would have had convulsions had she seen that, despite two months of practise, I somehow diapered D1 without even bothering to attach the tab on one side. Fortunately no calamities ensued. I really do much better with cloth diapers.

Retirement Planning
Both of our fathers believe that having several children should be one's primary form of retirement planning. We're rather inclined to the same view, although people shouldn't get too carried away with the idea, or DOB will be out of a job. But consider the differences:

• A brand-new IRA isn't at all cuddly.
• You can only put $3,000 a year into an IRA--you can put way more than that into your kids (especially when they turn 16).
• Sure, some kids are undutiful, but an IRA never calls.
• No matter what Congress does, mooching off your kids will remain tax-free.
• Mooching off your children makes a more interesting literary topic:

A man was meant to help support his children,
Which is the right and proper thing t' do.
A man was meant to help support his children, BUT
Wiv a little bit o' luck, wiv a little bit o' luck,
Wiv a little bit o' luck, they'll work for you!

Cheap is Good, Free is Better
Despite still feeling a bit draggy (still no definitive flu symptoms, but napping like Garfield), I decided I couldn't bear to miss the Labor Day Weekend sales. So I went to a couple mid-day on Saturday, though I feared all the good stuff would be gone.

I don't know what was gone at the first one, but what was remaining the proprietress was so sick of that she was giving it away for free. So we got some baby toys, a game of Pictionary, Valentine's day decorations (kids love that kind of stuff), lace curtains (if they don't work in the living room D1 can have them in her dress-up box), a couple of shirts, and a whole bunch of interesting-looking books, which I am checking out during feeding times. Right now I'm reading one on Eli Whitney, both his mechanical ingenuity and his less brilliant attempt to engage in monopoly and price-gouging. (Which the cotton farmers of the South found ways to combat without bringing anti-trust suits--amazing, isn't it!)

The second sale wasn't quite so desparate, but I got quite a few baby clothes for half-garage-sale price, which is decent.

Then Monday DOB, rather than expending not-yet-existent money taking me out, called a farmer friend of his and arranged for us to go boating on his pond. The farmer then loaned us his Gator and we went riding through the woods together--a rare treat since DOB's feet limit his ability to walk in the woods. Finally, the farmer took us down to his garden. It was one of those gardens that gets planted with great ambition every spring, and by September has gone entirely to weeds and more produce than anyone can keep up with. He helped us pick as much as we could carry.

Now I just have to get up the energy to deal with all this stuff.

Do Re Mi
We spent part of Labor Day at a singing school, learning to sing from shape notes. Actually it was only the last day of the school, so we missed all the learning and practice and just got in on the singing, but even so it was fun and educational. DOB's family went to the other four days and took notes, so we will no doubt have the chance to learn what we missed.

I love that style of singing. We have the hymnal they use now (though there are definitely some songs we'll skip due to doctrinal differences). But we'll be working on four-part a capella harmony much more now. And Abbey's going to know her do re mi before she knows her A B C.

In other exciting events of Labor Day, a man hunt went through DOB's family's neighborhood. The helicopter spotted one of his brothers out tending to the chickens and sent a patrol car down to tell him to get inside. This delayed any outdoor sports but the excitement and speculation seemed to make it a worthwhile tradeoff.

One year ago today . . .
I was in the Pacific Time Zone, so I was just waking up. I called DOB to wake him up, so he could pass the morning playing foos ball.

Let's see, since then we've had one car wreck and endless car repairs, one major injury and countless minor ones, months of illness, a job change, rapid bank account-emptying, two moves and a baby.

It's been the best year of my life.

Happy anniversary, DOB. Here's to many more.

The Flu Descends . . . perhaps
DOB and I think--think--we may have come down at last with the dread disease that plagued his family for most of last month. It is difficult to tell, though, because our only symptoms is a general feeling of fatigue and achiness that descends after any minor exertion. According to report, the disease can take that minor form and never worsen if one takes it easy. If one does not take it easy, various extreme forms of congestion and even rashes may ensue. Therefore, it behooves everyone suspecting the disease to let the chores pile up, go into work late and come home early, and generally kick back.

Can you imagine a better illness?

The only downside is that we had to miss the YR party to watch the President's acceptance speech last night, on the grounds that we couldn't have stayed awake that long even if we had tried. This is the problem with living in the eastern time zone. On the west coast, all events of national significance happen before bedtime.

But we finished the first book of King Arthur. My favorite knight is Gawain; DOB's is Percival. Now I must reserve the remaining two in the series from the library.

We can't tell if D1 is sick or not. Since she's likely to sleep as much as she feels like, she will probably stay with the more mild form of the illness, too.

In which my weird aunt interviews me
1. What is the fiction book that you have read that you were most surprised to have liked? Why?
It would probably be War and Peace. Prior to reading it, my only strong association with it was Charlie Brown struggling through it in "Happy New Year, Charlie Brown." I was expecting something I would have to slog through for the sake of having read it, as I did with Moby Dick. Instead I found Tolstoy's insights into the human psyche to be fascinating. Of course, it may have made a difference that I was 20 when I first read War and Peace and twelve when I tackled Moby Dick. I should probably try Moby Dick again.

2. Where would you most like to visit that you have not been?
Scotland.

3. What talent that you don't have would you most like to have? Why?
I'd like to be able to sing well. I love singing but I know full well I'm much better in the chorus with someone strong to follow than I am trying to sing on my own. Most other things that I would like to be better at I think I could improve to where I would like to be if I just had the patience to work at it, but I don't think I could with singing.

4. Assume that you are going to spend 300 years as a tree. Describe your ideal tree-life.
I first read this as spending 300 years in a tree and spent a couple hours designing a fancy tree house. . . . OK, as a tree. I'd be a California Redwood in a remote valley within sight of the ocean on one hand and the mountains on the other. The redwoods forest is the treeiest place I've ever been, and if I were a tree I wouldn't mind living in California.

5. What are your three favorite fairy tales (folk tales, fables, myths)?
King Thrushbeard, Sir Gawain and the Loathely Lady, and the homecoming of Ulysses. I realized once I compiled this list that all three hinge on disguise, and disguise of a particular type: the friend disguised as a foe, the beautiful disguised as the ugly, the master disguised as a stranger.

All right, now according to these chain-letter like rules, I must offer others the option of requesting interviews from me. I wonder if I broke the chain I would have seven years of bad luck?

1 -- Leave a comment, saying you want to be interviewed.
2 -- I will respond; I'll ask you five questions.
3 -- You'll update your blog with my five questions, and your five answers.
4 -- You'll include this explanation.
5 -- You'll ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed.

Things People Say

"She's so tiny!"

She seems pretty big to me. You try carrying a thirteen-pound weight everywhere you go. More than that, though, I think the difference of perspective arises from our standard of comparison. Other people are subconsciously comparing her to the individual who will be guiding thousands of pounds of metal at high rates of speed in just sixteen years. I am subconsciously comparing her to the individual who three months ago fit in my abdomen.

"Having kids sure changes your life, doesn't it?"

DOB does identify with this one, because we don't get to spend time alone together like we used to. (Though not even ten months passed between when we stopped having a younger sibling in the back seat and started having a baby there. But then babies don't make deliberate rude noises or snicker.) Maybe it's just that my life has had a few more changes than his in the past few years, but as far as I'm concerned the changes from a baby have been no more of a fluctuation than all the other changes that have rolled on through.

"What a precious little girl."

OK, I can't really argue with that one.

Making Money
You may have noticed that ads no longer appear at the top of the blog. But we bloggers do have the option of getting those ads back. The incentive is that we could get a share of the revenue from visitors who click on the ads. Blogger has a whole instruction sheet on how to do it, including tips on how to have strategic product placement to make the ads more effective.

It all reminds me of that episode in Anne of Avonlea where Diana takes a story of Anne's, puts in some strategic references to a particular baking powder, and wins a story contest for Anne. Anne is horrified, feeling that she has been sold out to commercialism when she should write for fame alone.

Personally, although I'd prefer fame (or at least wide readership) to fortune, I wouldn't turn down a fortune if it showed up on my doorstep. (After reasonable efforts to ascertain if it was anyone else's.) Nonetheless, I'm squeamish about putting ads back on, for some reason. They're ugly, I guess. Besides, I'm not sure people would want products placed the way I would place them:

"Our Ford Taurus just broke down again."
"I cannot get the stains out of D1's Carter outfit with my Arm & Hammer Detergent."
"The E-Machine computer had its hard disk freeze."

The Great Imposition
Imagine that you take a total stranger and, without so much as a by-your-leave, set him down in a strange place, attach him for life to a host of people he knows nothing about, and proceed to control every aspect of his life. For a month or more thereafter he spends his time (when not sleeping) either staring glumly at you or weeping in despair.

With that picture in mind, you can understand why a baby's beginning to smile is greeted with such eagerness. At last his parents have some hope that they are not creating unabated misery in the child's life.

Chesterton Quote Time
Somehow I've missed reading this one in context (which is apparently about attempts to replace the family):

“You are like a lunatic who should carefully water his garden with a watering-can, while holding up an umbrella to keep off the rain.”

Auto-ignorance
I can't tell cars apart. I can tell a car from a truck or even an SUV. I can identify colors and age (within a decade). Once I get close enough, I can read the vehicle name. But apart from that, a car is a car.

DOB sees things differently. He can identify a car going 75 on the opposite side of a six-lane freeway. If we are driving through his hometown, where he used to work in car insurance, he can also tell you who owns the car. I have trouble identifying our car in a parking lot.

Recently, DOB has decided that he would like to purchase a Pontiac (I think) Bonneville someday. In furtherance of this goal, he has instituted a game of "Spot the Bonneville." I still have trouble remembering he's not talking about a public utility, and pleaded for a game of "Slug Bug" instead (I can identify them), but to no avail. He did establish the rule that there would be no detriment to points from an incorrect identification.

So one day he had just spotted a Bonneville and was trying to point out to me the virtues of the Bonneville in styling so that I could better identify it. I tried to notice the shape and features of the car. Then, emboldened by the knowledge that it wouldn't hurt me to be wrong, I pointed at the next likely candidate and shouted, "Bonneville!"

Then I realized I was pointing at the lot of a Saturn dealership.

The bag of clothes finds a home
After some pondering on the specific characteristics of our nearest neighbors, I came to the conclusion that the only likely target was the house next door to the left. So when I saw the lady next door out tending to her flowers, I showed her the bag and asked her if she had any idea where it came from. She did not, but volunteered the information that they took clothes downtown to a mission working with Mexican immigrants. I figured the clothes could not serve a better purpose, and gave her the bag. The end.

On a related topic, I have enough frilly dresses for D1--between hand-me-downs and things other people found at garage sales, etc.--that she could go to a party every day for a couple of weeks. She's not even going to have opportunities to wear them all before she outgrows them. I guess I shall just have to pick out a few favorites and save the rest for a garage sale, a hand-me-down bag, or in case I ever have twin girls and need more dresses at once. Or perhaps D1 will like to put them on her dolls.

Monday Morning
The station wagon broke down again. Won't start. Fortunately it did it close to DOB's work (at his partner's house, in fact) instead of in Hicksville this time. And his partner was kind enough to loan us his car to get home in. So we drove out in a 95 Taurus and home in a 01 Saturn. But we have to return it, so it doesn't count.

We've been gone all weekend again and the house looks it. Why don't the fairies ever come and do the dishes while I'm gone?

Marsha has become a regular blogger at last and has good comments on her political philosophy. (Which resembles mine except I'm less of an ideological purist.)

Time for me to start work. My first task is inputting various financial data from the Wall Street Journal. After that I shall try to clean off the desk so that when I have more work to do I have room to do it in.

Low-Budget Operations
One of the local radio stations plays a variety of music--swing, classic country, polka--according to the tastes of whomever the host happens to be. We appreciate the diversity, but apparently not enough other people do to make it particularly lucrative. The other evening we were listening to it on the drive home and the DJ came on saying, "Could the person who called a couple of minutes ago please call back? I was on the air at the time and couldn't answer the phone." Now I'm not surprised they can't afford a second person around the station--but not even an answering machine?

Real Life Mysteries
Last night, while we were out running errands, someone left a bag of clothes on our front doorstep. Had these been a bag of baby clothes, I would not be particularly surprised. But these were a bag of women's clothes.

In the Sunday School stories, someone receives such a bag of clothes after praying for clothes they desparately need. But I don't need clothes. And if I did have to pray for clothes I do hope--with all due respect--that God would have better taste. These garments are not my color, not my style, and not really my size. (The term "my size" has a different amount of flex to it after pregnancy.) They would be better suited to someone three times my age.

Now that is a fair description of most of our neighbors. It may be possible that, in this neighborhood of somewhat similar houses, someone mistook the doorstep and I am holding the clothes that some lady down the street is wondering why her friend never dropped off. But if this is true, how do I find it out? It seems awkward to go door-to-door, holding up a bag and asking, "Excuse me, are these your clothes?" On the other hand, it would be just as awkward for them to go door-to-door asking if anyone has taken in a mysterious bag of clothes. Maybe I should just take them out and set them in the yard for all comers.

Football Season
The fall football season has begun. I refer not to the NFL season, about which I know nothing unless I happen to notice DOB has football articles up on ESPN.com instead of baseball articles, but to the season of plotting and training for the annual family football game on Thanksgiving.

Somehow I didn't fully comprehend, before marrying DOB, how important this would be. They should put this in premarital counseling: "Will your family traditions require your wife to learn to play contact sports?" Fortunately DOB did not make prior ability a qualification, since I didn't even know how to throw a football until he taught me. (This was not because I was prissy--my brothers don't play football, either. We prefer individual sports without rule books. We're not team players and we'd rather argue than look things up.)

But willingness to play was a necessary feature. His brothers also expect their wives, whenever they may appear, to play football as well. I mentioned the possibility that these theoretical young ladies might not want to play football. They countered that all girls worthy of consideration would be willing to play football; since they define a worthy girl as "one who is willing to play football," I couldn't really argue with them.

Last year I escaped on the grounds of being pregnant. That not being a good idea this year, I shall have to play. The teams have been designated, the players ranked in their various skills, and our team has a significant point deficit. DOB nonetheless thinks we can win, due to his superior strategic and leadership abilities. But I had better get in training. I ranked high on catching ability--or at least colliding with the ball ability--but low on throwing and stamina. So I will make my daily walks more vigorous and begin playing catch in the evenings. Can't let those Bengals win.

Sunrise, Sunset
D1 has outgrown her first clothes. Amazing. A month ago we had such a tiny, helpless baby and now we have . . . a slightly larger and more wiggly tiny, helpless baby. But it feels significant to us!

She has enough clothes in this size that I'm wondering if I'll ever have to do laundry. (Hint to people giving gifts to new babies: they'll need clothes after they're six months old, too.)

Here's hoping for a cool, early fall because at the current growth rate she'll have outgrown this next set by late October and if the weather stays warm all the fuzzy fall outfits she has won't be any good.

Small Miracles Gratefully Received
Yesterday I tried to get on the deceased computer long enough to copy off the files I had neglected to back up. It allowed me to get on (good), open the CD burning program (better), line up the documents I needed to copy (yes!) . . . and then I could not find my emails! Every combination of versions of Outlook and Windows hides them in a different place, and while I was searching for the current hiding place, it crashed again. (arrrrrghhhh!) And wouldn't come on again, no matter how hard I tried. Add to this that I was trying to feed a fussy baby, we had people coming over in two hours and the house wasn't ready, and I knew I was in trouble because I hadn't taken the nap I should have taken, and things were getting a bit hairy.

But today, after the meeting was over and the house had recovered, after I'd had a good night's sleep and a nap, while D1 was taking her nap, I tried again. And it booted up. And let me open the CD burning program. And grab the documents. And I found my .pst file. And they all got written onto the CD. And then the computer crashed.

Now I can ponder what to do with the computer at my leisure. Meanwhile, as the Oracle constantly points out, I had better back up more often. I haven't had a backup since he did it last summer before I got married. And if I only do a backup once per name change, my data is going to be in constant danger.

Alternative Lifestyles
D1 has spent an unusual amount of time either playing by herself or being held by someone else the past several days. Also I am planning on starting working from home for DOB tomorrow. These factors have caused me to realize that if I worked a normal job, I would be putting D1 in daycare about now, and thus caused us to ponder how our lives would be different:

We'd have a much bigger house, because my income would qualify us for a bigger loan and we'd need it because that's the kind of house financial professionals and lawyers live in.

And nicer cars. And we would just go out and buy an infant car seat instead of making the all-four-years one from the hospital work until one of the people who've promised to give us their old one finally remembers to do it.

In another month, when D1 started putting things in her mouth, she'd get sick all the time because she'd be putting toys in her mouth that twenty other kids had put in their mouths. So she'd be on antibiotics all winter, and I'd be stressed out because I'd have to keep taking time off work to take her to the doctor or stay home with her if the daycare wouldn't let her come.

With all that going on, we'd never get enough sleep. We'd drink a lot of coke and coffee to stay awake at work. We'd be grouchy.

I would be too tired to cook. We'd rely on frozen dinners and take out. Our food budget would probably be double or triple what it is now. And with the processed foods and D1's constant sickness, we'd be catching things all the time, too.

When we both got home, we'd be too tired to talk or read together. We'd watch TV for a little while and then go to bed.

Then again, we probably would have realized this would be a problem, and what with all our house and car and credit card (gotta furnish the big house) debts to pay off, we would put off having kids for another five years or so. No D1, D2 or D3. And by the time we did decide to have kids, I'd be older, we'd still have eaten a poor diet because I'd still be too tired to cook, and several years on the Pill might have messed up my hormones, so we might need fertility drugs. Maybe we'd get triplets to make up for lost time. :-P Even one kid would seem like a huge interruption, though, after we'd forced ourselves to get comfortable with life without them. My career would be that much farther along, and I'd probably want to get back to it ASAP. I'd take a few years off to get the (two) kids off to a good school, and then return to my more important work. We'd never have the time to know them--or each other.

Writing Our Own Job Descriptions
Judges deciding they could legislate was only the first step; now executive branch officials are deciding they can judge. Michigan election officials voted to deny ballot access to an initiative with plenty of signatures because they don't think it's constitutional. Note to election officials: That's not your business to decide. From the language given in the article, which is unusually broad, I suspect it could be construed in an unconstitutional manner--to prohibit, say, a private employer from granting benefits to same sex partners, or even preventing a private wedding chapel from conducting a same-sex ceremony. But a judge could also construe it to refer only to government actions, in which case it would likely be constitutional. Regardless, it's the judge's job, not theirs.

And in Louisiana, it seems they're up their old "one subject" trick. As if legislative bills are ever held to this standard. For some reason an initiative that addresses same-sex marriage and civil unions violates the one issue rule, but the Consolidated Multiplied Omnibus Bill passed at midnight just before adjournment never does.

Cheap Thrills

• Making a casserole using leftover rice, leftover turkey, leftover cheese, and leftover broccoli, that turned out delicious.
• Sewing a birthday card using scrap fabric and tissue paper on a blank card that turned out really cute and took about five minutes, less time than looking for one that wasn't obscene or too mushy. (Just stack a couple different scraps of paper and fabric artistically and sew them on with a regular sewing machine.)
• Saving $35 over the previous month's electric bill by hanging four loads of clothes a week and turning off the A/C during a week of cooler weather. (I've discovered I really like hanging laundry. It is an excuse to get outside that doesn't get dirt under my fingernails.)

Milestones the Baby Books Miss: Burping
True, burping has been part of D1's life since day one. But in the early days, coaxing her to burp was a huge problem, requiring the united efforts of all adults in the vicinity, involving a dozen variations of position and patting techniques, and generally taking as long or longer than the meal itself. She would inform us of her misery intermittently until the burps were gone. If we misjudged the absence of further burps and set her down too soon, we would be punished with wails of anguish.

Due to improving skills at nursing, increased torso and neck strength, and perhaps DOB's fine coaching and example in the activity, matters have improved greatly. Now all I have to do is sit her up on my lap for a few seconds and we both wait calmly until she emits a noise that would attract admiration in a junior high cafeteria. After that, all is well.

Such a noise is, of course, loud enough to attract attention in other venues as well. Like last night in church.

Very Briefly, Before D1 Wakes Up:

• DOB's mother's 50th birthday party on Saturday came off as a complete surprise. A good time was had by all. We have plenty of leftovers, which are essential after a party because you don't feel like cooking.
• Cardamon is the cayenne pepper of baking spices. Do not attempt to include it in equal quantities to things like nutmeg and allspice.
• My computer has, reputedly, died. I was not present when the death occurred. I am using the home office computer, which I hope does not jeopardize its tax-deductible status any more than DOB using it to check ESPN does. E-mail will not be functioning until I find a workaround with the laptop (which was broken when we moved in, so we've never bothered to set it up with an Internet connection). I hope the data can be recovered.
• We were essentially gone all weekend, yet the house is a disaster. I've never understood that phenomenon. And we have guests coming tomorrow.

Interesting Thoughts Afoot

Some people refuse to understand the natural law concept. (I wanted to reply but it required an email address. I need to get me a throwaway address for online use.)

Our school email group is having a rousing (and so far quite civil) debate on whether minor, non-dangerous, traffic infractions are unimportant and should not be enforced (or observed) or whether the Law is the Law. It's a difficult matter because on the one hand a) you can't pull over every speeder, so some enforcement will be selective, yet b) any acknowledgment that enforcement will be selective opens one to charges of prejudice and profiling. And I don't think anyone is arguing that we can abandon the vehicular code altogether. We could perhaps make the code entirely a question of prudence, but that wouldn't really solve the problem in b).

I'm thinking about writing a defense of why women should vote, in response to this. In very brief form, I think that while household voting is not necessarily a bad idea (a sort of mini-federalism), it is certainly not the way things are now and there is nothing illegitimate about individual voting, as the civil government must deal with us as individuals in other aspects.

But all these thoughts must await further pondering. Great things afoot today, on which more later.

A day that will live in . . .
I don't usually post birthday greetings here (so nobody else get offended that you weren't mentioned, ok?) But today is unique for being both DOB's mother's 50th birthday, and my big brother's 33rd birthday. (I think. I need to get together with my nephew on this question. He was once reciting the family's ages and he came to Papa and said, "Papa is two and . . . I can't remember what other number he is." Well, I can remember the first number, Judah, so you just tell me the last one.)

Today is also the second anniversary of a significant telephone call from DOB to His Majesty, one of a very, very few occasions when DOB found himself tongue-tied.

Ownership
After seven months and a call to the title company, we now have a deed to our house. Woo-hoo! We are officially home owners!

The deed itself is boring. I've seen more impressive certificates from VBS. Couldn't they at least put on a fancy border?

Nomenclature
DOB and I have few areas on which we just do not understand each other. Less than most couples, I think. But we still have a few.

One of the primary ones is tie descriptions.

Every morning, DOB puts on the shirt and pants I have ironed and then calls out, "Which tie should I wear?" (Even if he always wears the same tie with that shirt.)

I call back from the kitchen, "The dark blue one with light gray spots."

"Which one is that?" he asks. He only has one tie currently in use that remotely resembles this description. I don't think he even looks.

"The one I bought in February when I went shopping with Kitra for maternity clothes," I elaborate.

"Oh, OK," he says. A few moments later, he emerges wearing the right tie.

What is so hard about matching a clear description to the tie in question? And what is so much easier about recalling the precise circumstances of its purchase?

It might be easier to just go with the description that he understands. But I refuse to concede my ground that visual descriptions are more logical than recounting the life history of the tie.

Thus, we are working on yet another tie descriptor that we can both agree on. Following Deontologist's example, we are starting to name the ties.

Today's tie, the dark one with the light gray spots, is called "Nuclear Fallout."

Alas, DOB's ties are much more conservative than Deontologist's ties. It's going to be tricky coming up with memorable names.

Or I could just lay his tie out with his shirt. But why make things boring?

The Good Divorce
This month's Reader's Digest had an article on the broader acceptance of the reality that there is no "good divorce" and all parental divorces traumatize children.

So what should be done about it, according to the article? Get the kids counseling to help them deal with the trauma.

I'm not sure this perspective is an improvement. Is it better to be irrationally optimistic or pragmatically calloused?

King Arthur and His Syncretistic Knights
Setting aside mysteries for the time being, DOB and I started reading Rosemary Sutcliff's retelling of the Arthurian Legends, The Sword and the Circle. So far I'm impressed with the version (but I have always enjoyed Sutcliff): it has the right tone for an ancient legend while remaining entirely readable, and it handles the immorality and occultism at the heart of the legend well, neither glamourizing it, camouflaging it, nor going into excessive detail. Alas, unlike the gorgeous illustrations for her retelling of the Iliad and Odyssey, there is only a cover illustration and it looks like three modern teenagers in Halloween costumes.

When you look at the whole story, the mix of beliefs is indeed strange. People go to the church feasts, yet they still look for omens from the stars. Children are raised in convents, but also study black magic. Incest is taboo, but adultery is acceptable--and so is revenge killing, or even killing for the fun of it, as long as it's a fair fight. It is not yet a Christian world, but a syncretism of Christianity and the old practices. There is a God, but He seems too far away for practical purposes. It reminds me of what I've read of some areas in West Africa today, where people may profess Christianity or Islam, but still do voodoo on the side.

Because the pagan beliefs are still strong, there are a lot of random or unknown quantities in the stories. Sitting at the end of centuries in which the universe has been accepted as orderly, first as created by God and then by the laws of science, it is harder for modern inhabitants of Western civilization to appreciate the world of Merlin, where things just happen, and don't have to make sense. But it has been a common outlook on the world, and is likely to become more so, as a society that no longer has an intellectual faith in God begins to lose its faith in science.

This is not the world of the Middle Ages, whose romantic lens we usually see it through, but the Dark Ages, in which semi-barbaric peoples struggle to survive after civilization has disintegrated. People commonly muddle the two, and then blame the resulting mess in their minds on the ascendancy of the church. But the Dark Ages were so dark precisely because the church had so little influence. It was in the Middle Ages, when the church became the final arbiter of morals and manners, that civilization was able to stabilize enough to move forward after the wreck of Rome.

Hints from Heloise

• Don't try to take stains out of white shirt collars immediately after washing the windows using old newspapers.
• Poached eggs make a great quick meal on toast or fried potatoes, but they're really not all that hot on popcorn.
• It's not a good idea to open shampoo bottles with your mouth, but if you keep forgetting to open it before putting the baby in the bathtub, that's what you'll be stuck doing.

I have found them at last
There is an Apostrophe Protection Society in the world. They even have pages of photos of actual apostrophe abuse. (Note: The images are graphic and may be disturbing to some readers, at least those who care about grammar.)

The particular abuse that annoys me the most right now is the one on the box of hair clippers I picked up at a church rummage sale a few months ago. The cover shows a young boy in a bowl-cut with the chirrupy title in large letters of "Getta' Haircut!!" (The quotation and exclamation marks are on the box.)

Every time I look at it, I am filled with questions. Who are they quoting? Why do they have an apostrophe when no letters are missing? What are they exclaiming over? Why did they need to come up with a name--what was wrong with plainly labeling it "Hair Clippers?" How does one use hair clippers to do a bowl cut, and why would anyone want to?

It's almost enough to make me regret buying the clippers. Maybe I should glue something over the cover. (I have to look at it fairly often, as DOB gets it out every week to trim his goatee. And he claims he can't figure out how to get the cord back in the box, so it doesn't get put away until I do it.)

For those of you who care

New baby pictures are online. They're from Saturday the 7th.

It was a dark and stormy night.
Two girls, camping on a beach, seek shelter. By mistake, they stumble into a rickety old house. In one derelict room they find an elderly couple bundled up in a decaying bed. With hollow eyes and sepulchral tones, the old man cackles fiendishly at them and says,

"You might as well die now. There's no hope for you now that you've been exposed to it."

And what is the loathsome disease the girls have unwittingly been exposed to? The man continues.

"You can litter one box, and you'll escape. But as soon as you litter the second box . . . you . . . will . . . DIE!!!!"

No, that's not supposed to make any sense. But it's what I dreamed last night. Why littering? Why boxes? Why the one free toss? I have no idea.

Mysteries of the Modern World
What's the point of a baby outfit with a matching bib? If I don't care if she spits up on the outfit, I'm not going to bother to put a bib on her. If I do care if she spits up on the outfit, the matching bib is not going to be an acceptable target either. The end result is I use the matching bibs from the former outfits when she's wearing the latter outfits and use the matching bibs from the latter for--I don't know, display pieces?

Too Much Thyme On My Hands
Last night I was making dinner. I grabbed the marjoram, noticed it had a cover for shaking, and gave it a few shakes over the dish. I grabbed the thyme, gave it a few shakes over the dish, and noticed it did not have a cover for shaking. Sometimes I think my spice cupboard is deliberately set up to entrap me. I retrieved what I could and scraped the rest off and threw it away. It was a terrible waste of thyme.

Sherlock Holmes and the Drug War
A combination conspicuous for its absence. The crimes Sherlock Holmes unravels pertain to theft and murder, motivated by the usual assortment of human passions. Drugs are present neither as a crime themselves, nor as motives for other crimes.

(At least to my recollection, but it's been awhile since I read through all the stories. DOB and I are reading through them at the rate of about one a month, so it will take me awhile before I have a more definitive thought on this.)

To be sure, literature is not criminal statistics, but nothing conveys the mores and social realities of a time better than its literature. Sherlock Holmes is meant to be sensational--to tell the tales of the dregs of society. So it ought to be an excellent place to look to see how drugs influenced Victorian England.

Drugs were readily and legally available at the time. Opium dens operated; Holmes himself shoots cocaine from time to time when the casework gets slow. It's not evident from Sherlock Holmes, but opium and cocaine were commonly used in patent medicines.

And the dangers of drugs were known. Watson lectures Holmes from time to time on his cocaine use, rather as a doctor might today lecture a patient on smoking. In one story, Watson must go to an opium den to retrieve a friend who is tragically addicted, much to the grief of his friends and family.

But drugs still are not perceived as a societal problem per se. Certainly they sometimes cause problems for individuals, but even there the drug of choice for home-destruction is alcohol. (As it has been since Noah planted a vineyard and will be until the cup is passed in the New Jerusalem.) Because drugs are legal, they do not attract the attention of organized crime. Imagine what Professor Moriaty could do if he also headed up a drug cartel.

In short, the record of Victorian England gives us historical precedent that the legalization of drugs not only means no need to prosecute people for having drugs, but also gets rid of crimes committed over drugs--and without an increase in drug abusers. Then today's police, like Sherlock Holmes, could focus on thieves and murderers and let the mere addicts alone.

New Income Source
The Wall Street Journal had a consumer review of various plain white T-shirts, which apparently are the latest rage. The one that received the poorest quality rating was also one of the most expensive, at over $40. But this was not that odd, considering that the fashion company's stated goal is to create a T-shirt that feels like it's been worn for 12 or 13 years.

Instead of cutting up DOB's remaining premarital T-shirts for rags, I clearly should be selling them. I wonder if armpit holes are now a hot fashion item?

DOB has some interesting calculations on the economic impact of a gas price jump.

First Lessons
Last night we were sitting down for family devotions. DOB, noticing he had D1's rapt attention (or seemed to), pointed to the book in his hand and said, "This is a Bible."

I waited, wondering what lesson he would choose for our daughter's first spiritual instruction.

"Don't spit up on it," he continued.

Well, I guess that's a good place to start.

Very Disturbing Thought
In a conversation at church this Sunday, the question of diapering before the invention of plastic came up. A friend related that she had known a very elderly woman who could remember her mother walking around, a baby on one hip, and her skirt constantly stiff and smelly with you-kn0w-what.

Ewwww. Did everybody really do that?

On a more pleasant note, D1 is developing the theory that the small objects that periodically strike her face are subject to volitional control. Firm proof has not yet been established, but experiments are ongoing.

And on a less pleasant note, polyester covers or no, it's time for a change.

Gender Conflicts
D1 has a few distinctly boyish outfits, picked up at garage sales before she was born or inherited from her uncles. (They're mostly in the size I expect her to outgrow any second now.) Today she was wearing one of them, a blue onesie with a little bear and fish on the front, when we headed out for a walk. Wanting to keep the sun out of her eyes, I decided to get her hat. It's shocking pink with a bow and lace trim. I think the pink won out.

Of course, that was just to make up for last Saturday, when she was wearing a pink onesie and a Milwaukee Brewers hat. (The kind that nachos come in. DOB discovered it was a perfect fit.)

Let's face it, we need a boy, too, to straighten this out.

Core Functions of Government
Apparently a WA state legislator wants the state secretary of health to publish pamphlets promoting small families. I'm not sure what her definition of "population sustainability" is since families of two or fewer children result in a declining population because they don't fill in for those unable to have children at all. Government moralizing is generally despicable, but this is one case where the moniker "Nanny State" doesn't quite fit.

The Inevitable Baby Post
Anytime you see a timestamp this late you can bet I'm up with D1. Tonight we were going to Get On Schedule and all go to bed on time. We did. D1 decided she didn't want to go to bed yet. So I'm out with her in exile, trying to get her to settle down while letting DOB get his sleep. Last night D1 went 5 hours straight--giving me the longest chunk of sleep I've had since she was born. But two good nights in a row is probably too much to ask for at this stage.

This afternoon we were over with DOB's family and one of the uncles was holding D1. She was defying all his attempts to get her to look him in the face. Finally as a last defiant gesture she flung her bib up over her face so that she couldn't see him.

First Amendment Watch
In other news, the First Amendment is threatened, once again, by the people who ought to be most concerned about protecting it. The ABA is considering making part of its ethics rules for judges one that forbids them from joining a group that discriminates against homosexuals. This would mean judges would have to leave groups like the Boy Scouts and, presumably, conservative churches as well.

Now, judges do need--more than any other member of society--to both be and appear impartial. But this can only go so far. Would we ban judges from joining the Sierra Club on the presumption that they then could not judge fairly when large chemical-producing corporations came before them? For that matter, why shouldn't a judge belong to, say, an all-female or ethnic club? (Which apparently would be prohibited even under the current rules.) As long as a group does not call for violence or oppression of another group, simply belonging to a group that has restrictions on membership does not intrinsically call into question one's ability to judge fairly.

Fourth Amendment Watch
After taking His Majesty (aka my dad) to the airport on Saturday, DOB and I sat in a McDonald's parking lot while I fed D1. At the motel next door the police had pulled over a car, arrested the driver, and proceeded to search and impound the car. We initially parked on the far side of McDonald's, but then a few cars obstructed our view, plus it looked like the situation was well under control, so we drove over to the near side of the parking lot. (Shameless gawkers that we are. We tried to gaze only intermittently, though.) The female passenger was standing against the motel wall, watching with a passive-resistant demeanor, and finally made some calls on her cell phone, presumably for other arrangements. Meanwhile the police took a dog and rubber gloves and dug everything out of the car--pillows, clothes, etc.--and strewed it around the ground.

Studying criminal procedure tends to take the blood out of it. (Law can make any subject boring. One could read the Supreme Court case Jones v. Clinton cover to cover without finding anything to appeal to the prurient interest.) Watching the thing live and imagining the same thing happening to me on my next vacation makes the Fourth Amendment a vividly important string of words. Even just a search is a huge infringement on personal freedom. The Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments aren't just about protecting the rights of criminals (as an occasional law-and-order conservative seems to think)--they're about protecting all of us from the dangers of an overzealous state.

Keyes to Illinois
So it appears that Keyes is going to run for Senate in Illinois. I initially thought this was a bad idea--Keyes isn't even from Illinois (don't want to go pulling a Hillary) and doesn't exactly have a spectacular record of vote-getting.

But after reading some discussion on it, I'm starting to think maybe it's a good idea. The Republican party needs somebody to run in Illinois, but after all that's happened it's too late for a Republican to seriously expect to beat Obama. The GOP's real goal would be to go down fighting, without wasting the prospects of up-and-coming Illinois politicians. Keyes will run a good race, conduct interesting debates with Obama, and generally keep things moving without hurting his career if he loses.

If DOB had time to post on this his thoughts would no doubt be much more profound, but he's supposed to be finishing up work and coming home. ;-)

Money to Burn
I am cheap. OK, you all knew that already. Cheapness is neither virtuous nor sinful; it is just a habit of not spending money that may be good (as when it causes me to forgo unnecessary expenditures and remain solvent) or bad (as when it tempts me to avoid paying my own fair share).

Thriftiness, on the other hand, is a virtue. In essence, it is the practice of getting maximum value and enjoyment out of your money. Because bankruptcy is no fun, it requires ensuring that money first goes to paying bills and meeting the necessities of life. Next, it would require some level of preparation for the future, appropriate to one's means and future plans. (DOB runs into people making six figures who can't find money to plan for the future. There's something warped there.) After that, thriftiness just means spending less money on things that aren't important to you, so that you can spend more money on things that are.

Part of this whole equation is realizing that time is money, too. Thus, thriftiness may involve spending less money so that you need to spend less time earning money and can spend more time on things that are more important or more fun. Or it might involve spending less money so that you can have a job you enjoy more that pays less.

Thus, there are few particular behaviors or lifestyles that are necessarily thrifty or not. A thrifty person might live on a farm in the middle of nowhere, accessorized with things scrounged from dumpsters and collapsing barns, or they might live in a downtown apartment and spend a thousand dollars on shoes a month. The issue is whether they are living within their means and spending their money on the things that matter to them.

The trouble is, most people don't stop to think about what's important to them and make sure their money is maximized in that direction. Suppose you spend $5 more on lunch and/or coffee every day than you would spend by making these items yourself. (Ha, Marsha, you knew I'd bring it up, didn't you?) Over the course of a year, that's going to be about $1500. Is the taste and convenience of the purchased lunch or coffee worth that much more to you than the house payments/vacation days/donation to your favorite cause that the money could instead be used for? If so, go eat your lunch in peace. (On the other hand, it takes DOB and me less than 5 minutes to pack up leftovers for his lunch. That makes lunch packing an activity worth about $60 an hour--tax free.)

Everybody has to spend at least some money on food, shelter, and clothing. After that, their priorities are going to differ wildly. There will be things that they'd have to be flat broke to give up (for me, internet service would be one); things they'll spend money on as soon as they have any extra (a bigger house on acreage); things they'd spend money on if they had plenty of extra (attending live performances); and things they wouldn't spend money on if you paid them to (convenience food--beans and rice from scratch are healthier for millionaires, too). The important thing is not what order your secondary priorities are in, but whether you spend in that order.

The only action that defies thriftiness across the board is waste, which is simply putting something that still has some use out of reach of any use. No matter how rich I was, I would turn out lights in empty rooms (or maybe set up a snazzy system of automatic sensors ;-) ). If a wealthy person can afford to buy a new outfit for every day they're alive, that's not necessarily wasteful--as long as they dispose of the old ones in a way that lets someone else make good use of them. Even blatant overspending--buying for $150 something that could easily be purchased for $20, say--is not in itself wasteful. At least the money is going to someone engaged in some sort of productive activity.

Other "thrifty" activities may be thrifty or not, depending on your circumstances. Right now, garage saling is a thrifty activity for me because I live in a neighborhood with lots of garage sales, and I can get a lot of the things I need right now (children's clothes and toys, household furnishings) at them. Before this year I didn't have those factors and I had never shopped at a garage sale. On the other hand, in the past I have driven very decrepit cars because I had my dad and brother to do a fair amount of the work on them. Now I live on the other side of the country, and DOB and I don't have the space or skills to do the work ourselves, so that's no longer a thrifty strategy.

I'm cheap, and I can't help it. I work on being thrifty--which for me usually means being willing to spend money on the things that really do matter to me, and when necessary accepting the tradeoff of spending more money to save time and energy.

Some people carry the "fairy-tale wedding" concept a bit too far.

OK, I can picture the bride in wings attended by fairies, but where on earth did they find groomsmen willing to be "frolicking elves"? It's hard enough to get a guy into a tux. Now if they were playing Tolkien elves, armed for an Orc attack, I could imagine it better.

I would thank Deontologist, but I bet he just gakked it from Dave Barry.

How brightly shines the moon
I was finally able to show The Taming of the Shrew to DOB last night. And he enjoyed it as much as I hoped he would. It's such a great story about real love: not namby-pamby niceness, but the desire to see someone become the person they were meant to be, whatever it costs to help them get there. On what it means to be a leader. On the difference between a marriage that's a true team and one where each person maintains their own separate objectives and tries to manipulate the other.

And it's hilarious.

Mental Notes
It's much easier to remove the seal from a bottle of baby shampoo when NOT holding a wet baby.
It's also much easier to transport a freshly bathed baby if you don't leave the towel in the other room.

Something We Can All Cheer . . .
It's rare that a bill comes out in Congress that deserves unmixed support, and when it does it's usually repealing something. Surely this is one we can all get behind: repealing the unconstitutional (still is, no matter what the Supreme Court says) restrictions on talking about politicians shortly before an election. It's good for Michael Moore. It's good for the NRA. It's good for candidates who happen to own car dealerships. It's good for America.

College Expenses
We have received a comment that, cheaply as we may think we can get by with babies, vast expenditures are lurking eighteen years down the road. Now, we may only have a baby so far, but remember we were just in college ourselves and are still pursuing additional credentials. Also DOB is a financial planner and helps people save for their children's education, so we are not blind to the costs.

First of all, let me make a shocking pronouncement: Parents have no moral obligation to put their children through college. None. If you feed and clothe your child until he is able to work for himself, and give him enough education to read fluently, write coherently, and do enough math to not get cheated, you have fulfilled your financial obligation towards the child.

Further, parents aren't required to fund a college education for all their children, even if they do it for some. My parents funded some of their children's post-high school training and not others, depending on a wide variety of factors, including their own inscrutable reasons. We don't hate each other.

And not every child needs to go to college. None of my grown brothers has a college degree. One works in construction, and one is in the navy. One is a manager at a large software firm, and has never been held back by his lack of a degree. There are still a lot of fields where what you can do is more important than how many extra letters you have.

But there are many fields where credentials are necessary, and it's likely enough some of our children will want to pursue some of them. If we have the money to help them out, we might want to do so. And if we do so, I will repeat the lecture my mother gave to all teenagers: "Getting the credentials is just a game. Find the quickest and cheapest way to jump through the hoops that you can, and get it over with."

There are scholarships. There are work/study programs. There are much cheaper schools than Harvard. There are equivalence tests. If they really want an education, they can work and study for it. If they don't want it enough to help reduce the costs in one of the above ways, why should we pay for it?

This mindset leaves out two important aspects of a college education. One is the social aspect. About this, I am heartlessly indifferent. Any advantage of meeting different people and ideas they miss out on they can have while engaged in productive activity; any advantage of hanging out with other juveniles they can fund on their own. The other is the possibility of pursuing a great liberal arts education, broadening the mind and joining in the Great Conversation. Most colleges don't do this anymore, and those that do are by no means necessarily the most expensive. Besides, it is my hope that we'll raise them so that they will be broadening their minds and thinking about great ideas for their whole lives.

Laundry Room Meditations
DOB was horrified to discover that I have a racist, segregationist, laundry scheme: Whites on Monday, Darks on Tuesday, Coloreds on Wednesday. He dreams of the day when our clothes will be judged, not by the color of their skein, but by the content of their fiber.

And I've long wondered why, when I get detergent or stain remover on my hands, I feel compelled to wash it off with soap. Isn't what I am washing off essentially soap?

Another developmental landmark: D1 has learned to make spit bubbles. (This will no doubt soon have consequences in the laundry department.)

Shameless Self-Promotion
Another article published here. (It's on my mother's lectures. Those of you who knew her can probably add a few of your own.)

Minor Developments
Everybody knows the big Baby Book Milestones: first tooth, walking, first word. But the fun of being a parent is watching the gradual development of a full-fledged human being, in steps so tiny anybody else would miss them.

The other evening, DOB set D1 on her back on the bed, with a couple of stuffed carrots on her arms to keep her company. We expected her to pretty much flail her arms and ignore them. Instead, she grasped one of the carrots with both hands and patiently manipulated it until she had its nose (so some stuffed carrots have noses) in her mouth, and tried sucking on it. Whereupon she screamed in annoyance to find no milk forthcoming.

Now, this seems small. But consider all the development that goes into it. Not only is she aware that there is a world around her, she has come to the realization that she can manipulate and control objects in the world. She can form theories about what will happen and then test them to see if they will work. It's the beginning of all work and play, of hand-eye coordination, and of interacting with the world rationally, as a human being, rather than by instinct alone. She's made giant strides from the passive newborn of six weeks ago.

Of course, this deepens our speculation on whether she has figured out that parents are manipulatable, too.