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Sunday, December 05, 2010

SHE'S ALIVE!!

I kept trying to write a 1,000-character Facebook post and finally gave up. Look! I'm using a blog. How does this thing work again?

I am tempted to do a big catch-up blog post but let's face it, if you know about this blog, you probably know about my Facebook page and my Twitter feed and you've been following my zany antics all along, so there's no point in that.

Why am I doing this again? Oh yeah. Too Many Characters.

All right, so I can't help it. Quick recap of the last oh, say, year of my life will be AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS POST.

Meanwhile:

I took C to the ballet this past weekend. We went to see the Nutcracker, of course. We wanted to go see this big fancy production of it in Fresno, with (I think) a live orchestra and a couple of her 4-H friends in the company, but we couldn't afford that, so we went to this smaller one put on in a smaller city -- actually in a small outlying suburb of a smaller city -- and it was really very nice. Two thumbs up, Merced Civic Ballet. As usual, watching any kind of production made me want to be involved somehow. Not in a ballet -- ha ha oh my gosh NO -- but in something with, you know, a stage, and an audience, and lights and curtains and that rush of happy adrenaline that you get when you're in front of a crowd as part of a group.

Wow, I have no idea where C gets her drama-queen tendencies. Do you?

Apropos of nothing, I am leading a 4-H Theater Arts project this upcoming year. I know you must be shocked. (I'm also leading photography and knitting/crocheting. Pray for my soul.)

This weekend overall has been a flurry of activity, mostly because of the craft fair where C was helping in the 4-H booth and selling some of her own little crafty things that she'd made herself. This afternoon while the boys are off at a Scout event, C and I are having a quiet afternoon at home, after doing something (some things) that, I realized later, would have totally humiliated me at the age of, say, fourteen or so. Are you ready for this SHOCKING STORY?

We 1) walked 2) to a yard sale (A YARD SALE OH MOM NO WAY WHAT IF SOMEONE SEES ME) and then we 3) walked home while I 4) carried a lampshade. I didn't think anything of it until after we were home, and of course it's nothing to me now, but I am relatively certain that there was a time in my life when I would have sported an attitude that would have filled my loving mother's head with filicidal fantasies before I would have carried a lampshade along the shoulder of a public road where someone from school might see me.

Man, being a teenager was lame.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I've been taking chemistry this semester, along with Online PE which is exactly as awesome as it sounds like it would be. I like chemistry, I really do; I love the mathiness and mad-scientistishness of it. I even like my instructor, which I didn't at first because she is one of those instructors who looks at anyone who approaches her with a question with an expression that says, "What the hell? How'd this cockroach get in here? JANITOR!" So that took some getting used to, and still, seventeen weeks into the semester, my lab group will do a round of rock-paper-scissors to decide who has to go up to the desk to face her withering scorn if we have a question we can't figure out among the four of us.

Oh yeah. QUICK recap. I have problems with "quick".

The kids are fine by which I mean that they are growing up far, far too fast and I can't seem to do anything about that so I have to just embrace it. C is eleven -- very, very eleven, with all the drama and joy that the word implies. We have so, so much fun together. She has a new BFF, whom she actually calls her bee-eff-eff. She wrote a 15,000-word novel for the Young People's NaNoWriMo in November and it's actually not half-bad, especially for something written by an eleven-year-old at a rate of a thousand words per day. NSLT is [counts on fingers] fourteen and a half and is now the tallest member of our extended family at 6'1". (My dad used to be taller than that, but then he had back trouble.) He got his first pair of glasses in November. He looks like A MAN. There is an additional MAN LIVING IN MY HOUSE NOW. He needs to SHAVE. He and his dad go out and work on their car projects together and HE ENJOYS IT. He draws pictures on his church bulletins of HIS CAR DOING A BURNOUT. Like I said: a man! I am totally not making this up.

T is forty-one (well, he will be in three days) and is exactly the same as he was when he was thirty. Maybe he's a wee bit more grim in his expression, if that is possible, but he is still zany and funny and very, very much in love with his car. And with me. And with being a dad. We grown-ups are boring.

I am almost thirty-six and I am also very much the same. Still overparticipative in class! Still talkative and loud! Still completely fashion-clueless! Just a little fatter than I used to be. I tell all my female acquaintances who are afraid of turning 30 that the thirties are fabulous, because they are, but I do neglect to mention the way weight just kind of starts to stick on you when you're not looking. I figure why make them fret in advance, right? Or maybe it's denial and it's all my fault and nothing to do with my age. Denial and ice cream. No, it couldn't be that.

The garden did better than we thought it would do after the giant freeze we had in the middle of May. The peppers bounced back admirably. The tomato plants grew nice and big, but didn't put on much fruit. The squash was wonderful and now it's all gone and I'm sad. And nothing else did much of anything. The chickens now have the run of the frost-blasted, weary garden, and they're loving it.

We now have twenty-two hens and two roosters. Claire entered two of her birds in the fair and they actually won prizes and stuff. It was a big deal.

You know what I miss most about blogging is the books posts. I don't read nearly as much as I used to (SAD CLOWN), because of school -- mine and the kids'. (Speaking of which, homeschooling is still going swimmingly. NSLT is studying geometry, C is doing sixth-grade math, and they're both studying world history, geography, physical science, essay-writing and Julius Caesar.) But I have probably read about fifty books this year and I have reviewed none of them. Maybe I'll try to get back into that in the new year. It was a new year's resolution originally, back about five years ago, that got me doing the books posts in the first place.

And there you have it. Think of it as your bulk-mailed Family Christmas Letter (which I'm very much not planning to do this year. Here, I'll even put in a picture.

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