Takin' · Names

It's been a while.

just thought I'd drop a line.

Things are looking up a little. Rocky's mom is out of the hospital again, we had friends come and visit from Great Britain, Home improvement projects are wrapping up.

Equilibrium is staring to look like it will be restored after some loose ends get wrapped up.

On the upside, a close friend was reunited with his estranged parents.

A long-term close friend was reunited with a son that he has been estranged from for a couple of years.

I'm one teeny-tiny step away from finishing my second degree black belt.

I am so tired of having repetative, multi-hour depressing conversations with people who need money, favors, support, hand-holding, etc.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sympathetic, and we've always tried to be there for people, but I'm tapped. I'm just fucking tapped. It never ends and I can't take it any more.

Same people, same problems, over and over and over and for some reason I always have to do something for their solution to work. There's usually $$ invovled, and every single freaking time the $$$ gets bigger. And the $$ only come back about 25% of the time.

And I could handle that, except then I get guff when I suggest that maybe they could do something different and maybe they would get different result, and then I get the "How could you ever understand what I'm going through? Everything is so easy for you."

Little hint for you bunny-head: It get a whole lot easier when you keep trying to get stuff done, and you try different things until you find the way that works for you. It's only this hard if you keep trying to do it the wrong way.

And the best part? Tonights little gem came from someone who says: "I Just wish I could get him (her husband) to go on Dr. Phil. Dr. Phil would straighten him out."

Yeah. That's what your husband needs - to be verbally abused on national television by a tin-plated dictator with delusions of Godhood.

Bzzzzzzt!

Find. Another. Answer.

I've tried giving advice, money, time, help and sympathy. There's nothing left. All I can do is hang on the phone and say "uh huh. uh huh" while the long-distance phone line between here and the Canadian border siphons away both my money and my will to live.

Probably just as well. I would have to be crazy to want to live in a world where anyone thinks that Dr. Phil is the answer to anything.

Today I:

1)stained three peices of trim for the new door to the downstairs bathroom.
2)made a full breakfast for four people
3)delivered a kid to a co-curricular before-school activity
4)took the puppy on a two-mile walk
5)practiced for a cello recording that is going to happen next Friday
6)put in some practice for my second degree black belt test that happens next Sat. (still not ready)
7)met the bus with the other child.
8)picked up the puppy poop in the yard
9) answered my e-mail
10)wrote this blog post.

It is 10:30 AM, and I'm not even half-way through a normal day. Still to do:

1) clean kitchen
2) clean bathroom
3) buy hostss gift for a friend whose holiday party I am attending tomorrow
4)buy a gift for a friend whose birthday party i am attending next week
5)send my nephew a birthday card
6) more cello practice
7)more Kung Fu practice
8) get ready to attend a play tonight
9) make lunch
10) make dinner
11) make some plans for entertaining our friends from Britian over the next week
12) varnish the new door frame and door for the downstairs bathroom
13 proof-read a rough draft of the prologue for my oldest son's new writing project.

But first, coffee and an episod of Stargat SG-1 and a shower.

To all my friends,

I wanted to let you all know that I deleted the Livejournal links from my blog, anomalousdata. I'm trying to de-personalize my site somewhat, and figured that if you were still friended in LJ, you would know your still my friends! :-)

Just a heads up in case any of you go to my blog and wonder where you went.

The new windows are in.

They are a little bigger than the ones we had before, and they have less in the way of "wood", and more in the way of "glass". They are beautiful. I almost have all the staining done, and I still have to prime and paint the headers on the outside, and then varnish them.

But I took today off to baby sit a friend's pre-schooler. He's adorable. We had a great time. He played with Legos for a while, and then he helped me sort the recycling (for some reason he likes to do this), and then we went out into the yard and he helped me find and pick up sticks fromt he big storm we had on Tues.

Then, I raked a HUGE pile of leaves up in front of the slide on our swing set. He would slide down the slide, and into the leaf pile. That was good for probably twenty minutes.

Then he helped me make the leaft pile bigger. He got a kid-sized scoop shovle from the shed, and he pretended to be a front-end loader operator. I would rake leaves into a pile, and he would "scoop" them up and put them into the main pile. Making vroooming noices and "beep beep beep" noises.

Another twenty minutes down.

Then he went into to play house and found a nail that had worked it's way loose. He wanted to pound it back in, so we went and got a hammer. He pounded it for a while, and I finished it off. By then he had found more. We got all the loose nails taken care of, put the tools back in the garage, and went back into the house.

His parents arrived minutes later.

I miss my kids being that age.

Waiting for potential clients to call me back for a meeting (waiting...waiting...waiting...)

Helped a friend lay a block foundation for a shed. We were almost done when I had to rush home to meet Grasshopper's bus and make him cookies (chocolate chip).

Then, make dinner, run him to orchestra, attend yoga class with Rocky, run and pick him up from orchestra and then...

stain the extention jams for the new windows while either studying my arabic language tapes or watching an MIT bilology lecture.

Who says stay-at-home moms are useless, no-good idiots?

Oh yeah, and two days before my teaching job starts up again!

Yoga was good tonight.

My mid-back got a serious stretching out and aligning. I think that right at this moment, my mid-bakc is the happiest place on earth.

I've got a chronic problem with my mid-back. In part, I think this is because of a car accident I had a few years ago, and in part, it is due to an old weightlifting injury...

...but mostly it is due to years and years of having big boobs.

It is tempting for girls with big boobs to hunch and roll their shoulders forward, to make their chest looks smaller.

This is mostly so that rude boys with diarreah of the mouth and dirty old men don't notice you and give you unwanted attention.

Since I am only a couple weeks away from starting my 40th year on the planet, I'll offer you younger women some advice: and pull those shoulders back and walk straight. If anyone is rude and disrespectful of you because they think you not slouching and hiding your chest is an invitation to them, kick their asses right away and they will learn.

You will save your spine a lot of heartache and make the world a better place all at once.

How can I possibly hate someone I've never met so much?

There's this lady on LJ who seems to have infected the "friends" pages of most of my friends. They all seem to like, respect, and admire her despite the fact that she's obnoxious, overbearing, vicious, and back-stabbing.

And for some reason, she has made a personal crusade of bad-mouthing my best friend at every opportunity, and acting as though my best friend is evil incarnate.

I don't like that someone I have never met can have such a powerful effect on me. Guess I need to work on that.

grump.

If only I could wave my hands and magically become a better person.

Good class tonight. I've got two kids in the class who are super motivated. Another one joined today who is really good at following directions, and the little five-year-old showed up wearing a tiny kimono tonight. Yes, I know wrong culture...like I'M gonna be the big meanie and tell her. She was so cute in it.

One thing I've noticed is that the parents of special needs kids have been forced to learn something that all parents would benefit from knowing: Which is that learning happens in it's own time. A lot of times a parent will come to me and want to set expectations..."How long will it take him to get a Black Belt?", "When is he going to have his first test?", "How high should he be getting his front kicks now?"

I just want to give them my best Mr. Miagi look and say "Will happen when it happen. No sooner."

Or maybe quote that "Cake" lyric: "The more you try to shave the cat, the more the thing will bite and scratch." Is that inscrutable enough for a martial arts teacher?

Trying to force anyone into a mold of your vision for them is wrong and damaging...and most people can see that when it is another adult...but for some reason it's OK when it's your kid.

I guess because we ARE expected to do that for them, and we have to to some extent for them to get along in the world. We have to teach them to use the toilet, and wear pants, and say "Thank You."

But sometimes we need to learn when to back off and accept that some things just will be when they will be. The hardest part of the job is finding that line.

The parents of the special needs kids have learned to take what comes when it comes, and celebrate the victories, and be their (and the other parent's kids) best cheerleaders.

The neighbor has hired a couple of gardeners. Im guessing they're in their mid twenties.

One of them is working with a post-holer.

You know, a tool for digging holes for posts.

It's gonna be a hot day. They already have their shirts off. I'm expecting that it's fairly likely that one of them is going to have to chug a large container of Gatoraid very soon.

Oh yeah, I'm going to the SPECIAL hell.

Is uncomfortable and painful and difficult no matter what position you do it in.

They SAY "find a comfortable position"...but after half an hour, any position you choose is painful. Terribly, terribly painful.

Except for the parts that are numb, of course.

I love my job.

Eight children this term, six on the autism spectrum, one five-year-old sibling to a student with autism, and one kid with Downs Syndrome.

They are lovely, sweet, hard-working, good-natured kids. I instantly loved every one of them...but it's like hearding cats while being nibbled to death by ducks.

Also, I have an assistant provided through the program. She's a life-saver.

Willfully ignorant, judgemental, mean-spirited bigots with big flappy mouths should be stabbed in the head with ninja swords.

Just in case my position on bigots somehow managed to come across as ambiguous.

One can't be too careful, you know.

My kids gave me the best Mother's Day present ever!

Being reliable enough that I could go and have fun at Kung Fu without needing to worry about them. :-) Also hugs and Mother's Day kisses.

Sparring class was first. It was just me and Arsinia. SiFu started us out with running. Four times around the track. I passed Arsinia once, and almost passed her again (would have in one more turn around the track. SiFu ran today, and passed me once...but then had to stop and rest before going around again. (HA!) I was done with the stairs (four times up and down two flights of stairs)before either of them were done with the track.

I wondered why SiFu gave us such a light cardio assignment. I realized why when he started running.

Then there was the jump-roping. Two minutes.

Normally there are two minutes each of sit-ups, v-ups push-ups, pull-ups...lots of "ups". SiFu is a very up person.

We didn't do that, though....just suited up and started sparring. Arsinia is a really fierce fighter. She isn't afraid to hit or be hit, and what she lacks in finesse she makes up for in tenacity and ferocity. She's short and has a lot of uper-body stregth, so she likes to do san shou (traps, throws and take-downs) I let her take me down a couple of times, but then I decided I was tired of it, and started taking her down with me.

She has added reverse hook kicks to her sparring repetoir and when she stops telegraphing those, she is going to be much more dangerous than she is already.

I like having another girl in sparring class that isn't afraid to mix it up.

The other day Grasshopper lied to me. It wasn't a big lie. I asked him if he'd practiced his cello. I was at class, and he was supposed to practice while I was gone. He said he did. I could tell he hadn't, because I had been playing my cello earlier, and my music was still up on the stand, and Grasshoppers was nowhere to be seen. Also, his bow was loose. He almost always forgets to loosen his bow after practice. His cello was sitting in it's stand exactly where it had been when I left the house earlier.

"What did you practice?" I asked.

He listed off all the pieces he was supposed to work on.

"Did you do the repeats too?"

"Yep." He answered with all the false glibness he could muster.

"Did you practice that hard passage in 'Fancy Fiddles" extra?"

"Yep. ", he soldiered on, clearly wondering when the torture was going to end.

If I told my mom something that she didn't believe, she would have me put my hands up on the counter, and she would hit me ten times with something…most often a metal-handled fly-swatter or a wooden spoon (if you took your hands off the counter, she started over from the beginning). Then, she would ask me again. The process would be repeated until I confessed to lying…which I of course always did whether I had lied or not. Then, she would hit me ten times for lying. If, I confessed to lying about doing something wrong, she'd also hit me ten times for whatever that was. Eventually, of course, I didn't care if she hit me or not. I hardly felt the blows. Eventually, I grew amused by her inability to hurt me, and made a stubborn endurance game out of it where she would literally get tired of hitting me before I got tired of being hit.

Amateur.

"Good job." I said, "now you can go to bed knowing that you did everything that you were supposed to do today. I think that's the best feeling in the world, don't you?"

I got a disheartened nod for an answer.

"I'm so proud of you. Goodnight, and I'll see you in the morning."

"Goodnight", he said, and shuffled off to bed, not even bothering with the customary goodnight hug and kiss.

Ten minutes later, he was back, pulling his cello out of his stand. He put in twenty minutes of the most diligent practice I've heard in a while, gave me a hug, kissed me on the cheek, and went back to bed.

Score.

I loosened his bow for him, put the cello away in the stand, and went back to my book.

Beatings dull and lose their effectiveness the more they are used. The conscience - only gets stronger.

My dear, sweet, darling husband comes home from Norway today! Happy me. I'm going to roast a chicken. It is maranating in buttermilk right now.

He is going to be happy when he sees the new carpeting in his office, and when I am done helping him put it back in order.

But first, the greeting with the kisses, and the eating of good food, and the massaging away of the tension and the sleeping off of jet-lag. Also, the telling of tales, the looking at of pictures, and the catching up of daily life.