synchronicity

jotting down how seemingly unrelated, minor moments can happen in a short span that make you think things are connected.

during my dinner out with friends this weekend, i mentioned how a beer i like always reminds me of an ex-girlfriend.

then tonight i heard on the police scanner at work what i thought was her name. upon replay, yup, there it was. nothing major; just calling about nuisance parking.

then just a few minutes ago, was scrolling through the facebooks and happened upon a post with a link to a movie i watched with her when we first started dating almost 20 years ago. (20 years?!)

i really did care for her. and i still do. she was my first serious, meet-the-family girlfriend. and the music by elliott smith in this video clip seems to stir up whatever wistful, regretful, mixed-up memories that surround my recollection of her and us.

can't imagine where these connected dots could possibly be leading, if they go anywhere at all. on the other hand, maybe they're all signs pointing me to tell her one last time "i'm sorry."

no bull advertisement

this was a hard winter on the little bull.

and here i put in a good word for the durability of toro lawnmowers.

our poor guy suffered the first five years of its life living on our back porch, exposed to the elements without any walls.

but last fall, after the porch grew crowded with the children's sand box and other play equipment, it lost out on a roof altogether.

changes of season being what they are, once the leaves were raked, i didn't think about mowing. and i didn't think about our lawn mower.

we were well into our second or third snow of the fall/winter before i realized our little bull had gone through icy freezes and snowy dumps without benefit of any cover at all.

straight from the dealer, 1 may 2008.

i meant to place a tarp atop it, but given the pace of life with small children, the notion kept getting pushed to a backburner until it was forgotten.

by the time the last bit of accumulation was layered this month, i figured, well, we'll see how well these toros are built.

the right weather and opportunity presented itself today, and i donned my yardwork gear for the trip out back, figuring i deserved whatever i got for my negligence.

i walked up, pulled it back from its spot next to the picnic table and filled its dried-out gas tank. 

i depressed the safety lever and pulled the cord. it started up with no hesitation. i took it around the house and began mowing the front yard.

i felt like i'd been granted a reprieve and promised to myself and the little bull that i'd take better care of it.

but after the winter we experienced, i'm going to have to say these toros are built to take a whole lot of punishment.

spring fling

view from the roof.

a mild ache in my muscles serves as reminder that i actually went outside and did something today -- in this case, a cursory mowing of the lawn and a way-overdue cleaning of the gutters.

(as per the gutters, i can recall giving them at least one good blowout before the winter set in -- and after most of the leaves had fallen; looking at the clog from atop the house this afternoon, you'd have thought they hadn't been cleaned in a year.)

anyway, the weather was lovely -- low 70s, sunny, gently breezy -- and, short of a picnic lunch or an open air concert, couldn't have picked a better day for a little yardwork.

it was a nice couple of hours out, after getting some 2-cycle oil, weed-and-feed lawn fertilizer and a new pair of garden gloves over at pile hardware.

cleared more branches off a rogue oak sapling that refuses to die, cleared out the gutters and blew out the detritus off the front porch. still a lot of leaf cleaning to do.

followed up by sitting with the baby after her afternoon nap while mama went shopping for "busy bag" items for an evening out for supper.

becky, me, the baby. los agaves, south charleston.

dinner at "mexican shoney's" -- aka los agaves -- over in south charleston was delightful. the "busy bag" worked like the proverbial charm, leaving kris and me time to actually hold conversations with our friends becky and ben. my shrimp fajita platter was excellent, btw; made me forget what a pain in the ass it was to assemble my own entree.

other supper notes:

• again, the boy and the girl were exemplary. while the baby was shy, the boy was just talkative, animated and imaginative enough to be funny without being obtrusive or obnoxious. they were both most content to draw and play with their silly putty and mini hand puppets.
• it had been a good four years since i'd been able to just sit and talk with becky, whom i still consider to be a good friend and confidante. it's odd and confounding to think it's taken so long to finally get together. when she left the paper, i would've guessed we'd have regular get-togethers at least once every couple of months. funny how life gets in the way.
• becky picked a nice corner spot out on the patio, allowing us to enjoy a bit of crowd-watching and the lovely weather. while it proved not to be necessary to drown out noisy kids, the outdoors still provided a great buffer for sound for my barking laugh. plus, as it was prom night in the area, it gave the babies a chance to see lovely young ladies in their evening regalia, which led the boy and girl to assume they were princesses.

vanilla. ellen's ice cream, charleston.

kris and i were so pleased at the kids' behavior that we rewarded them with a trip out for ice cream. with the local dairy barn -- unfranchised dairy queen -- closed for the evening, we took a chance and made the trek to ellen's downtown. a parking spot that opened just as we approached seemed to validate our choice to swing by. (turns out they didn't close until 10 on saturdays; wise move, as capitol street was hopping with people out to enjoy the pretty weather.)

once home, the boy got two story books; the girl, one. as of 11:40, no one has gotten up, save for a potty break from the boy not long after he'd been tucked in.

tomorrow may bring us abhorrent behavior from the children and other troubles -- as usually happens when i document the boy's good days -- but i'll have to say, as spring days go, i couldn't have asked for one better than this.

letting go

i first watched this video back in november, not long after the debut of disney's "frozen." i won't lie; i was moved, both by the visuals and the words and music.

even without the context of the movie around it, i could see the transformation and sense of empowerment it conveyed and was inspired and taken with it.

a couple of months later, there was the wet blanket of the concerned mother bemoaning the sexualization of the character in her metamorphosis.

frankly, i hadn't thought about it, but watching it through the lens of post-feminist concern, yeah, there it was: strong character achieves self-actualization by becoming a pageant queen in the evening gown competition.

as if body and self-image issues weren't enough for the tweens targeted by the movie, prevailing concepts of beauty are reinforced even as the message of "no right, no wrong, no rules for me" soar through the soundtrack. ok. yes, i get it. thanks for ruining it for me.

(but also thanks for making me think twice.)

anyway, i'd gone months without thinking about the song until last week, kris brought up how "let it go" was such an annoying song. (apparently, it's been a big, big hit on pop radio.)

what kris objected to was its climax, where the singer sounds to her like she's screeching/shouting as she belts out the high notes.

not having heard it in a while, i pulled up the video on my phone as the boy and his sister watched. oddly enough, they were mesmerized.

he at first called it "snow white," before ultimately calling the video "the snow movie." if we have the television on, he'll ask to watch it.

knowing how it annoyed his mom, i at first made it a point to encourage both him and his sister to emulate the dramatic gestures in the scene. i mean, if they were going to get on mommy's nerves, might as well go all in. (the baby even likes putting on her leather shoes so she can get a good stomp on the hardwood floors at the same time as the princess.)

subsequent viewings soon were followed by entreaties to play the video "again! again!" (luckily, the youtube cluster for the search featured consecutive variations on the same performance, so i could do something else for about 10 minutes or so while they watched.)

one of my favorite versions wasn't even a disney production; it was a lounge act parodying and paying homage to not only the song, but famous female singers. you really need to watch it.

this take, though, was a compilation of 25 different singers for the foreign language versions of the movie. the boy still sits still for it and seems taken with what he calls the "panish" vocalists. (afterward, though, he invariably asks for either the "one panish singer" -- the version minus the multiple in-studio cuts -- or the one "not in panish" -- the original.)


(i will note here also the pervasiveness of american pop, not only as a genre, but as a performing style. seriously, how did european and asian singers take to the stage before the u.s. started saturating the airwaves with its theatrical delivery?)

even as a toddler, the boy was pretty good at picking up the choruses of songs in his movies, as well as the last words or lines of verses. hearing his small, sweet voice sing "let it go, let it go" makes me wish it would never change. i also have to suppress the urge to record him as he sings along.

what i am recognizing, though, is that he, and to some extent, his baby sister, has latched on to his first pop song. this will be the song that reminds him of his childhood and, even as his musical choices grow more sophisticated, he will probably still hold a soft spot in his heart for it when he grows up.

we never really had "baby music" for either of our kids; i remember calming the boy down to the strains of little eva's "the loco motion." but even now, as i hear kris humming the lines to "let it go," i think we could probably be hitting upon a song that the whole family will bond over.

big saturday

his day was about four hours old by around 9.

maybe not big, but busy.

day for the boy started before sunrise -- 5:30 a.m., to be exact -- and kind of veered off-kilter until he took a mid-afternoon nap.

mama had to send off a freelance assignment once we had our internet back up. (damn thing keeps crapping out from about 1 p.m. for about seven hours. i wondered if it had to do with the position of the sun or temperature change relative to how the wire enters our house. kris noticed today that we had service as late as 2 p.m. -- i can vouch for around 3 -- which coincided with a rise in temperature above 50 degrees. can only imagine what it's doing to our connections outside the house.)

ramp macaroni and cheese rocks so hard.

this was also the day mama drew a line in the sand and decided she was not going to prepare separate meals for the kids; they were going to eat whatever we were having. bold. she expects a rough couple of weeks ahead.

she was counting on a macaroni and cheese cookoff to provide lunch and nourishment to our children, except neither one wanted to eat. (the boy is big on professing love for foods that cartoon characters try/like, but backs out when actually presented with them. but he loves mac and cheese, so i can only imagine that if it's not from mama, then nothing. that, and he was likely crazed from lack of sleep.)

we hadn't been there very long when he busted his lip big-time while running to me as i spoke with a couple of the many i ran into there. lots of blood and tears. it took ice cream to get him on the track to feeling better.

baby's first mountaineer football experience.

as a result, he wound up missing out on watching my west virginia mountaineers hold a practice here in town. i took a chance with taking the baby over; finding a parking space nearby was sign enough that we should attend for even a few minutes. not sure she got a lot out of it, but seemed to enjoy crawling around the bleachers while daddy watched for almost an hour.

(she really is a chatty thing, btw. since kris and i took two cars in anticipation of her going home with mama while the boy and i attended the practice. so i had the amused pleasure of conversing with her on the road and in the stands. a lot of her conversation began with "daddy! look at that!")

but the boy took a good nap, i got to take a nap after mama took the baby with her shopping after we got back from laidley field, and we got to enjoy a pleasant evening as a family. even supper. after much prodding and the bribe of a cupcake, the boy ate.

after a couple of episodes of harold and purple crayon -- still a favorite -- on dvd since the internet was still out, a few story books and a few false starts -- more milk, potty break, messed-up blanket -- he seems to be resting comfortably. or at least resting.

i hope to God he sleeps in tomorrow; but thanks to God for an understated day full of simple pleasures.

i can't stop looking at this picture

yarrh -- it be little baby stink-eye.

baby was heading out with mama on sunday and she looked so pretty i wanted a pic to send to her lolo and lola. but then she made this expression and wouldn't smile and the phone wouldn't focus and that was that. still love this pic, though.