i love toronto.
i hate dial-up.

(candy cigarette box by clint’s foot. ben was getting the melted fudgecicle cleaned off of his arms.)

my childhood best friend stopped speaking to me almost ten years ago. his then-girlfriend would not let him have female friends. he married her. then divorced her. today he sent me a myspace message to congratulate me on mommyhood & see what was up.

be good to hear from ya sometime, i know it’s been awhile.

this will make my mom happier than anyone. she loves to tell people how i gave him a deer skull out of the creek as an engagement present when we were two.

my mind is a little bit blown. but happy.

yesterday while cleaning something out i found a full box of candy cigarettes & ate the whole thing, watching hazel play & wondering if she will have friends like this. i wonder if they will eat candy cigarettes. or if it will be something else, and if that something else will be given as college graduation gifts, with mixtapes of their version of the traveling wilburys. i wonder if she and her friends will give copies of their collective favorite book to each others firstborn babies. i wonder, of her friends, which ones will be lawyers and which ones will end up stuck in a hole that they dug for themselves, trying to get out.

the year before last i found these packages of little metal flowers at the dollar store – one package of red and one of blue. i made them into vintage-looking earrings that i have listed very very sparingly on etsy because they usually get snatched up fast, and have been looking for more ever since. my reward for stopping in the dollarama this morning half an hour after they opened:

i also found a scrap of paper that i forgot i saved from home a few weeks ago when i threw away all of my lesson plans and paperwork from two summers with americorps. apparently this was a journal entry that i had to write about the best and worst days i could imagine trying to keep eight 6-8 year olds entertained and educated. i think it applies to pretty much every day. or it should. i think i should pass it out to people who are in charge of morale-improvement at their companies.

perfect day:
- no injuries
- no major fights
- no boredom
- no big spills
- good food
- parachute games
- fun art
- lots of laughing

horrible day:
- nosebleeds & broken bones
- constant squabbles
- running out of activities
- paint messes
- no one likes the food
- no recreation / going outside
- crayons & paper only for making art
- lots of crying

i pilfered these glass beads from my mom’s stash (she’s drowning in jewelry – i did her a favor!). they were my great grandma’s – she was a farmer’s wife who always did her farm chores in dresses and a strand of beads and an apron if necessary. if she can pull these off hoeing a row, then i can wear them to do dishes & scrub the toilet & get barfed on. plus i thought it would be nice for hazel to have something to do whilst nursing other than rub off her hair, so erin babyproofed them for me – 49 strands of interwoven steel wire coated in nylon & triple-crimped with sterling crimps :) hazel is a fan.

i posted two other photos that show our twin noses and that we are starting to have the same hair, which i never noticed. people love her nose. “it’s pretty much… to die for”. can i take that as a compliment? :)

listening: chris c.
reading: musicophilia; and too many other things to finish that one quickly

jenn got us on a usa today blog, hehehe.

#3.

ever since leroi moore died i’ve had that dmb song floating lazily around in my head, even if other things are there too. pretty much just that line. i don’t know why that song, except maybe that he co-wrote it if i still have that factoid right (i still know dave’s birthday for sure). we used to write it in each other’s yearbooks and sing it at the tops of our lungs and i would worry about when things were going to end.

but… nothing has ever really ended. high school ended (and so there is a god), but i still see the ones that matter every so often so who cares. college ended, but life now is not that much different than college except that i’m knocked up now. and i NEVER go to class instead of just almost never going to class.

even canada is not going to END. it will never all roll by. we will still see our canada people. we will take our kidlet to his or her homeland on a regular basis so they can get to know all of our favorite canadian things – bluegrass, beer, maple syrup, the smell of the subway (ok that’s just  mine). 

i think the only thing that’s every really, truly felt like it was ending is wva, which is stupid. but there were definitely moments where it felt like it was over, gone, nothing would be the same when we moved back, everyone would have moved away (on the contrary, it seems like everyone is moving back), we’d have to make all new friends, there would be no more music, hugely unacceptable patches of land would be timbered, we wouldn’t recognize anything. so i was doing some mindless task today and brooding (you know i do this well) over the handful of moments where it really felt OVER. and only one of them still makes me cry.

it was at the last priesthood show. mikey and sean did a couple of songs by themselves, sitting on chairs on the stage, cheap beers at their feet, i have photos of them looking at each other and laughing. they had decided that mikey would play one last song by himself. i was surrounded by jenn, rosie, and kelly, who were all crying buckets & no help whatsoever (ryan & emmalee did a much better job of holding up my sobbing self at the last cobra show!). i was still pretty composed thanks to a hefty amount of gin streaming through my system, but then sean stood up, holding his guitar by the neck, and said (in a slightly strangled voice) good luck in toronto, mike, and then stood for a moment longer doing that jaw thing that he does… then walked the few steps off the stage and mikey played the song he played that once made me whisper to ryan, “i want to marry that boy”, before i’d ever said two words to him.

i seriously thought someone was going to have to do some kind of emergency procedure to bring me back to life.

i will probably do the same thing the last time i get to see the foggies play. *sigh*

i’m thinking about using flickr more as a promotional tool for my etsy shop – posting my photos in etsy groups and such – and if that’s the case i’m thinking i should make pictures of the canadian only viewable to people that i am friends with. i don’t FEEL paranoid, and i’m not interesting enough to internet-stalk, but it just seems like it might be kind of smart and responsible to not post my child’s entire life (because you know i will) where any batshit crazy person can keep tabs.

so why blog? i don’t know. you can only find my blog randomly or through my etsy profile, and i’m not too afraid of people who go shopping for handmade fabulousness.

or linked from mikey’s blog, and he does attract quite a lot of nutjobs.

i don’t know. let’s take a vote. IF all baby photos were to be made private (except the few i’d post here, because i don’t think i can link a private photo off-site, but that might be wrong) it’s easy and free to sign up and become my friend so it’s not like you’d miss out on anything.

a day at work has successfully wrecked my back after a whole weekend of spinal-bliss. time to lay on the couch & read.

 

listening: the fan, dave in my head
reading: a few more nights of duma key – i was up until 2 last night, eek

it has just come to my attention that my webpage looks messed up in firefox. i don’t know why this is or how to fix it. sorry.

today after church mikey and i were walking home with a couple of bags of groceries, and he was fantasizing out loud – for the hundred millionth time since moving to the city – about living in the country. specifically in cameron, wv. specifically with clint and kelly as neighbors. in today’s fantasy, kelly and pj have also moved to cameron… we’re all neighbors. two kellys. three if you count me – i go by kelly to my friend’s toddler, josh. he can’t get it right, so we have just accepted that i’m kelly. anyway, we’re all neighbors. we have gardens, and lots of land, and of course there’s gavin – mikey’s horse (destined to lose the triple crown to a pig or anteater).

anyway, i pointed out to him that when we live in the country, 40 minutes from civilization, we won’t be able to just get a couple of bags of groceries for half of the week because the store is too busy and he’s getting cranky and we don’t want to bother, so we leave with what we’ve got and know we can go across the street when we need more food, 24 hours a day. or to go to the bank. or to buy a single can of beer, or paper towels when we realize we’re out. i can’t buy two bananas on my way to work every single morning so they are perfectly ripe – none of that letting an entire bunch of bananas sit in your fruit bowl for a whole week before you get to the end business. you have to plan our your errands and get everything all in one shot, and if you forget something, tough. and usually you have to do this on the weekend, which is the worst time to shop.

practially every saturday of my childhood was spent running errands, and this was of course before huge walmarts and targets, when you actually had to go to different stores for different things. it seemed like it took my mom an hour and a half to formulate our battle plan every saturday morning, making lists on little slips of paper divided into columns for each store. ben and i then fought for half an hour over who got to sit up front. many arguments could have been spared if someone had just taught us how to call shotgun, but then we probably would have been doing so three days in advance. we always had to go to the bank (no debit cards, no atms), get gas at some point, lunch at another point, and groceries. those were the four givens. already four different stops in at least two towns. if we needed a birthday card for someone, that was another stop. the hallmark was right by the little professor bookstore, so i would beg to go buy a book, which was a fifth stop. if we needed socks or underwear or pingpong balls or school supplies or fishing tackle some box department store was a sixth. if we needed a hardware item – which it seemed like we ALWAYS needed for years after they built a house when i was in third grade, ace hardware or 84 lumber were additional stops. if ben had money for baseball cards the card shop was another. we almost always had to go to the feed store for pet stuff, and later this evolved into the local feed store for grain and a box tractor store for other pet supplies like medicine and barn things. if it was summer, we had to cross the river into the dreaded ohio (i hated it even then) go to to my mom’s favorite nursery in hannibal for plants. ben and i would cross the road to a one-room church and examine the really old gravestones of dead children (and they were all children).

we loved cemeterires when we were kids, and my mom loved photographing things in them. she is a very slow photographer. we had lots of time to play when we visited old country cemeteries. we would take rubbings of the really old headstones with crayons and run around, excitedly looking for families who had all died on the same day. we’d call the other over, shake our heads knowingly, and say “it must’ve been a house fire.” we’d scour the weeds for decrepit, forgotten little headstones that were starting to fall over the hill. one time mom wondered aloud if the bodies slide to the ends of the caskets when they are buried on a hillside, and i still wonder this. or we’d go digging through the weeds around the bases of trees looking for really old ones that were being overtaken by tree trunk. weeds meant poison ivy two days later.

also walking home from church today, i stopped dead in my tracks, aghast at what was right beside me: a lightpole entirely covered with poison oak. do they know what it is? does anyone care? are city people immune to these things? i didn’t know poison oak could grow out of nowhere and up a light pole in the middle of the city. i got itchy just looking at it. if i got poison oak in the city i wonder if the doctor would know what to do with me. my fourth grade math teacher used to tell danielle and i to scratch our poison ivy open in the shower and pour bleach in the blisters. neither of us ever had the nerve to do this.

i do love that i have never seen a single spider or centipede or moth or fly or wasp in my current 17th floor dwelling. our balcony door is open 24 hours a day when it’s warm. i guess city insects do not come in the house, unless you are a cockroach. i’ve never even seen my husband use a flyswatter. i don’t think we’ve ever owned a flyswatter. i wonder if he’s as good at fly killing as my dad – that man is stealthy when it comes to killing bees and flies. it’s impressive.

one time dougie found a scorpion in their yard when we lived across the road from each other. i don’t know what this was about, but he brought it up the hill in one of those little baskets that you use to attempt to organize your pens and scissors and batteries and kitchenshit into drawers. another time he found a baby flying squirrel. we would also catch salamanders and little turtles safe snakes. clint and i used to catch crawdads by the bucketful. one time we had the idea to catch enough to cook for dinner and when we got back to the campground with our bucket of crawdads everyone laughed at us and said you can’t eat crawdads. someone kindly pointed out that we could use them for bait. that same camping trip someone caught a huge snapping turtle (real food, apparently), and we had to tie it to a staked-down rope to keep its headless body from wandering away before it was time to cook it.

i seriously don’t know what i’d do trying to raise a kid past toddler age in the city. i’m ready to move home. anytime after the canadian is born and i line up my therapist would be fine.

 

listening: the carolina chocolate drops

ben & i both got talkboys for christmas, and of course took them to school – somewhere at my parents’ house there exists a tape of these sessions: ms. harwood singing aretha franklin’s “you make me feel like a natural woman” at the top of her lungs, danielle and i singing every garth brooks and alan jackson song that we knew, and jess goff (the tire-pee-er) singing some country song that we can no longer decipher; danielle bringing a popsicle in her lunch, convinced that it would stay frozen against an icepack in her insulated lunchbox – it got all over everything our lockers, because she had the top (much like freshman year of college, when she had the top bunk and…); meggan’s first-day-of-school outfit was red and white; hating most everything about crystal kelly; the day that all of the girls had to go to the library and learn about getting our period, and being forced to walk back to the classrooms full of male counterparts toting armloads of pads, literature, etc. – humiliating; forgetting my glasses the day we went to cosi; confusion at rachel’s early fascination with seventeen magazine, which she read in the bus line and on the bus, prompting marisa to one day exclaim “i’d kill for the shirt off his back” as she swooned over a photo of jonathan brandis (didn’t he die kind of recently?); EVERYONE had windsuits; while most of my friends wore the cheerleader shoes with the colored chips that you could insert behind the swoosh (or whatever logo) to match your outfit, my shoes were mini hiking boots that matched my dad’s; a laborador retriever shirt that i had from american eagle (when it was an outdoor store and not… what it is now), and mrs. zevnik getting overly excited about it because it was her favorite store; the beginning of amber’s crush on josh rocchio, which lasted for approximately the next seven years; mrs. templeton teaching us about the word “constipation” and using cheese as an example of something that might cause this problem – worrying about this; my superior halloween costume in the pageant that year – a perfectly replicated bag of m&m’s suit (thanks, mama)… i seriously have to photograph that thing next time i go home; not-brother-ben’s halloween costume that year which was almost as awesome – a taco; mrs. harwood’s handwritten/xeroxed/really difficult history tests, and the creepy feeling i got years later when she wrote me a cheque for babysitting her kids in that same handwriting; puffy-painted “meatball” and “omelette” tshirts; mrs. templeton confusing the shit out of me when learning the greater than & less than signs, with some crocodile mouth method of remembering that NEVER made sense to me; mr. delauder making fun of overweight kids who couldn’t get over that wooden climbing wall in gym class during an obstacle course (do we see a pattern here?); still-boyfriend greg getting hit in the head with a swing and bleeding a TON… mr. brown yanking his tshirt off of him and using it to soak up the blood as he hauled him up the hill and back into the school; rachel was “dating” greg’s little brother, jason, and we got identical christmas gifts – hairbows made out of shoelaces, and pens and notepads with our names on them; billy fox sticking a paperclip in an outlet in mrs. zevnik’s room and feeling the shock for about four classrooms around, running in to see mr. brown screaming at him and his thin, shaggy, blonde hair sticking straight out in all directions; dissecting things in TASK (gifted glass – i don’t remember what it stood for) and playing on computers for the duration of whatever class we were fortunate enough to miss; making videotaped commercials for something – marisa, danielle and i made a commerical for “stink-away pet perfume”, wrote a jingle, and belted it out whilst pressed up against either side of danielle’s 34DD stuffed bra (she was dressed up as dolly parton for unknown reasons)… at some point in college, the teacher assured me that she still had the tape… i’d pay good money for it right now; joey seckman and travis kinney’s commerical involved ninja turtles; cara botkins & i being the only ones who every played football with the boys; danielle swinging upside-down from the climbing bars and mooing until we were all unable to breathe from laughter (this usually included teachers – she was their nonstop entertainment); how she would put her glasses on upside down, pull her pans up high, stoop like an old woman with her lips pulled over her teeth and call everyone “sonny” - always eliciting the same reaction; going to the new school on move-up-day – being terrified of having to mingle with the sistersville kids in just a few months; mrs. zevnik reading where the red fern grows aloud to entire fifth grade, and, as she had to do every year, have someone finish the last few chapters because she was crying so hard; watching the movie in mr. brown’s room after the book-reading, being unimpressed; having to help jess goff make a stained-glass window out of tissue and construction paper – getting insanely frusturated with him, feeling mean later; being allowed to use pens on spelling tests; and the single memory of my entire life that can make me laugh out loud anytime, anywhere, even though it’s not even among the top 50 funniest things that have ever happened to me – walking to the bottom of the playground one day, i heard a monster belch several feet behind me, and turned around to see billy fox flat on his back, head pointed downhill. you’d think it’s the most hysterical thing that has ever happened to me, because i’m laughing right now. go billy.

crying over long division homework in the little orange workbook; mr. brown washing the baseboards in the classroom every time he washed his chalkboards, which was all the time; sharing my first locker with meggan and exchanging notes signed “hagar” with vikings drawn at the bottom – i have no idea why we did this; victor casinelli’s exclusive use of mechanical pencils, his backwards-slanting handwriting, amber’s incessant crush on him, and his black sweatshirt with purple and teal lightning on it; my first soft lunchbox which happened to match my backpack that had tons of pockets that i loved to organize; mr. brown christening danielle and i “meatball” and “omelette” respectively; his poison-ivy advice to both of us – scratch it open and pour bleach on it in the shower; being in awe of a photograph for the first time ever – in our science textbook, a shot of a water balloon being burst by a needle, in the moment when the balloon was pulled into a bunch of shreds of rubber ready to fly through the air and the water was still in a perfect ball; playing geosafari with greg glover all the time and him telling me that when his grandma says when he was born his fingers were the size of matchsticks and he could fit in his dad’s hand (true); eventually that “evolved” and he became my “boyfriend”, at meggan’s prodding, because they are cousins; mr. brown flying off the handle when someone wrote “clean me” in the dust on his vcr - thinking he was having some kind of crisis because there was dust on his vcr, period; feeling claustrophobic during ctbs testing when we had to put carboard dividers on our desks to keep us from cheating off of each other (as if we could see those miscroscopic bubbles), and how the only thing i could see in my peripheral vision was the side of john paul’s head (of the really wide blue glasses strap in kindergarten, which had gradutated to a smaller black one); always overhearing ms. harwood yelling “have a great weekend!!!” while running around during bus-boarding time on friday afternoons and thinking she was going to be hard to handle in grade five; meggan’s excitement when i got my ears pierced; jess goff peeing in the big tire on the playground (there remain two massive tractor tires half buried in the ground – those were playground equipment; a few summers ago my kids begged me to play in the big tire with them, and i still couldn’t bear the thought of crawling inside); getting squashed by a rather obese fifth grader who had no spider-web-climbing skills on the playground… she was wearing teal biking shorts.

being really intimidated by mrs. legrande in the beginning; being terrified of surprise multiplication tables quizzes, which you always knew were coming immediately after lunch if she said “get out a blank piece of paper and number from 1-20″; the burden of toting an embroidery floss case to and from school so we could all make friendship bracelets when we finished our work and at recess; rachel teaching me how to weave with my fingers on the bus; meggan’s recess-time gymnastics club, attandance/achievement notebook, and other hyper-organized such things; “quitting” the recess gymnastics club during some rift between my group of friends – no idea who was on what side, except that malinda was NOT on mine and marisa was; feeling sick one day and mrs. legrande popping a thermomemeter under my tongue during reading circle – fifteen minutes later she remembered me, checked my temp, ordered everyone back to their desks and yelled for mrs. kucharski to watch her class and ran to the office to call my dad – i thought i was going to die; falling on the gym floor and hitting my front teeth, which bled and hurt like hell, and mr. delauder laughing and telling me to quit being a baby (hence the brownish front tooth that will probably eventually be totally dead which i don’t even want to think about and prompted a “do you brush your teeth?” from my little cousin last weekend); toni falling in gym class and breaking her arm and mr. delauder laughing and telling her to quit being a baby (insensitive husband of grade 1 teacher who always yelled at joey, yes); playing 7-up and eraser chase at recess on rainy days; michael fletcher crying because he was hungry, mrs. legrande yelling for mrs. kucharski to watch her class and taking him to the kitchen for some food; learning what “smog” meant from mrs. crumrine – uber-frightening subsitute teacher; becoming a member of the “i can manage myself” club because i never got in trouble – this meant that we all got a tiny laminated card that we could redeem for one day of no homework, which i never used and still have because the thought of skipping homework, even with permission, worried me greatly; getting our mule, sammy, from travis tuttle and how travis would ask me how sammy was doing in class for weeks and weeks and weeks afterward; justin britton punching the wall and bloodying his knuckles because malinda broke up with him; doing the bloody mary in the mirror thing in the girls’ bathroom after lunch; a huge heap of wrapped christmas presents on our desks from mrs. legrande on the day before christmas break began – then i thought it was awesome, now i know she just knew what it meant to teach really poor kids - including the tiny crocheted stocking that’s always on my tree; some of the kids getting to have their own christmas party in the music room before christmas break and going home with huge bags of (probably the only) toys (they got for christmas that year) – beginning to understand poverty meant those kids and the kids who got showers and fresh clothes as soon as they got to school every morning – feeling really guilty that some of those kids lived on my road; a newly-pubescent high school boy on my bus starting to have really bad body odor, some faceless kid muttering “wear deodorant” when he walked by one day, and gabe (then grade… 6?) getting in the older kid’s face and growling “not everyone can afford deodorant, asshole”; general schoolbus harrassment from the henderson boys (not gabe); really terrible schoolbus food fight one day when we had a sub who sat red-faced, scared, and saying nothing – it only ended when the second oldest henderson bellowed for everyone to cease fire because a kindergartener had gotten hit in the eye with a skittle and was crying; the same kindergartener (mitchell) hiding under the seat to use his inhaler when someone with tons of perfume boarded the bus; mrs. legrande being the only teacher who ever ACTUALLY followed through with the reading-intercepted-notes-aloud threat…

i feel like i had way more than this for grade 3. there maybe additional edits, but now is time for bath & book.

 

listening: oh susanna
reading: a widow for one year