First 100 Days of School

Posted on by February 25, 2020

I hate all this bullshit about the first 100 days of school. What a totally artificial measure. Maybe it’s used to teach math concepts. Perhaps teachers can work it into their lesson plans and do something pertinent with it. But seriously? It’s just a crock of shit designed to give kids another arts and crafts project and force parents to shell out the big bucks.

Case in point? Sam’s class is all dressing up like their 100 year old selves. HUH? Sam does not get it. He has been told to wear a beard. More on that in a moment. Also, the kids are supposed to walk with a cane. Fuck no. Where would I get a cane to fit my 4 year old without making an inappropriate statement about some very real problems that cause kids to need physical assistance? This isn’t a sensitivity training situation. It’s the exact opposite. He can also wear glasses.  Helllooooo? Scott and I both had glasses in grade school. By the end of the year Caroline is going to have them as well. Why not just suggest a hearing aid? Coz clearly that’s another thing only old people need, right?

About the only thing that he’s supposed to have that mostly old people have is gray hair, and he emphatically rejects that, with the logic that he doesn’t want to look like his grandmother. Yes, that was how he put it. (His grandmothers are both good looking. He meant he didn’t want to look old.)

The beard is the only thing he’s willing to do. Because few of the men in his life have facial hair, it doesn’t occur to him that young men grow these, too. Shh. Let’s not tell him, K? So. To keep him from feeling the outcast, and because I’m doing a lot to humor this school that has taken him on, I went out to buy him a beard. But the only beard I could find came with a gray wig that I know he’ll reject.

Not to mention, the only size available was “adult”. Scott thinks he has a workaround to make the beard fit. But the package makes this young guy look very Moses, and when Sam sees that, he’s liable to reject thew whole thing. And even if he gets over the gray wig color, it’s so scratchy, long, and heavy that he’s going to go into sensory overload as soon as it touches him. SO it’s going to be the beard alone. If that.

Sam is unlikely to wear them and I wasted twenty bucks at Party City. But I am a diligent researcher, and I felt it would be best to illustrate the point. So I sacrificed my dignity (what little remained) and put on the beard and wig for my blogging community.

On me, it’s less Moses, more Jerry Garcia with big boobs.  Who knew?

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Edit: I had to give Jerry a ponytail, but Sam wore the complete ensemble. This morning, he was ALLL about rocking the age thing.

Sam’s World

Posted on by July 12, 2023

Sam had an epic meltdown last night and another one this morning. Two for one special down at Scream Mart or something I guess. I don’t know.

There’s an art to finessing these things so we don’t feed into them while still trying to force the little monster to gain some control. I don’t honestly remember what set him off either time, and once he’s in the heat of one, it doesn’t really matter.

If he were older, just a little older, I could comfortably put him in his room and, barring his own ability to confine himself to its four walls, lock the door and leave. Sometimes, I have to do this anyway, because I’m not willing to sit there and have him throw things at me. Physical restraint just gives him something to fight against, so I only use it when I have to keep him from hurting himself or others.

If it’s a very bad day, I have to leave the whole thing to Scott, because Sam’s rage can inflame mine like nothing else I know. Then, it’s all I can do to contain my own violence, and I’m completely incapable of mothering my own little demon. Thank God Scott is a good Daddy.

Mostly, though, because Sam is such a Mama’s boy, I’m the one who can bring him down. I put him in his room, and, if the meltdown has nothing to do with audience, I sit in there with him, barring the door with my body, and wait him out. It’s always a long wait.

Yesterday, he’d been going ten minutes before it was safe enough for me to enter the room. He’s a thrower. He screeches and bellows and throws things. But he’s learning. He doesn’t throw hard things anymore, when I’m on hand, because I throw the things away that he throws at me.  I’m trying to teach him to punch a pillow or throw a stuffed bear. But frankly, when I hear the bear bashing against the inside of the door while Sam caterwaulers, there’s nothing I can do.

I waited for the pounding to slow and let myself in with him. At which point I realized he wasn’t throwing the bear, he was throwing himself. He was hurling himself at the door, then, at the last second before he hit, throwing his arms up. He would grab the handle, use the energy from his legs in motion to position those just under the hands so that he was dangling there monkeylike, still howling at the top of his lungs. On and on he went, jump catch, scramble, dangle, scream, scream, scream, scream, scream.

Usually, there is a point in these horrible wars where I can see him starting to weary. That’s the moment when I can insert a hug. Or a soft word. But yesterday, he wasn’t tiring even a little. He just kept amping himself up further, and I was about ready to leave again and try in a few minutes or let Scott take a shot.

But that meant detaching him from the door.

So I slid a hand up against his chest.  Though Sam is a tall four and a half, he’s so thin that my hand almost spans that chest. And even when he’s furious, I’m a thousand times stronger than he is. So flung him backwards into my lap.

He kept yelling, but suddenly, he was smiling. Not the demonic smile that means he’s completely out of control, gone-baby-gone, possessed, and out for the kill, but a shocked smile. A smile of amusement. He threw himself back against the door, watching me the whole time. He never stopped the noise, but the smile never went away.

I threw him in the air, and things suddenly went from battle to game.

So I threw him again, back across my legs.

He started laughing, gleeful cackles that were frankly as scary as the screams. My sister used to do this, flip a switch and suddenly go from screeching to laughing. For me, when the anger comes, it lingers. For her, there was a corner at the end of the anger, and she would sometimes round that corner and be experiencing the same emotion on the other side. Still out of control, but laughing. You have no idea how badly it frightens me that Sam does the same thing.

Still, he wasn’t yelling anymore. I threw him three more times and then, in fear for the doorknob’s heath, started tickling him. He loved it. From there, it was at least possible to bring him back down to earth with the rest of us and go on with our evening.

So when he started in with the screaming today, I listened for that point when he was at the cracking edge. It wouldn’t have worked at first. He was too focused on whatever had made him mad in the first place. But as he forgot about that, started remembering only that he was angry, not why, I had a chance, and I took it.

I braced myself on hands and knees, put my face right against his, and shouted, “TICKLE WAR.”

He yelled “NO,” and head butted me in the clavicle.

Good thing he ducked first, or he’d have broken my damned nose. Maybe he was going for the boobs, which push my shirt out to drag the floor without a bra. Anyway, he knocked us both over.I flipped off him, turned him over,blew a great big zerbert on his belly, and said, “Tickle or trampoline. You pick.”

He went for the tickle.

I don’t kid myself that this will last. It didn’t work this afternoon in the car, when all we could do was pull off at a gas station and restrain him. The only certain thing with Sam’s meltdowns is that they’ll keep coming. But I’ll take it while I have it. Another tool in the battle to keep my child from hurting himself. From hurting another.

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Hooking up with the folks over at The Lightning and The Lightning Bug for this one. Prompt #34 asks us to change the tone midway through the piece.

 

 

 

I’m also connecting for the first time with the folks over at Just Be Enough. Because this is definitely a situation where Scott and I have to remember all the time that we’re doing the best we can. For those unfamiliar with Sam’s situation, you might want to start here or here

Friday Fluff: Jan 20th 2012

Posted on by February 25, 2020

Friday Fluff, January 20, 2012

Fill out this fun Total Randomness Survey and then share it with your friends on facebook, myspace or anywhere else. LIKE MY BLOG!

Hola como estas?

Estoy en necesidad de una margarita

What are you obsessed with?

World peace, as long as it can achieve itself without any help from me

What do you dip your chicken nuggets in?

I don’t.

What was the last road trip you went on?

Cincinnati last December But the link is to a post about a road trip while ON that road trip.

When’s the last time you dance with someone?

Hmmm… Grammar fail. The last time I danced with someone was at Zumba at the YMCA.

What’s your favorite show?

Well, I think right now, My Fair Lady. But Scott and I go to see Spamalot next Tuesday night, so that may trump. We’ll see.

If you could visit anywhere, where would you visit?

Well, anywhere, obviously. It’s kind of stupid when you put the answer in the question.

What’s your ringtone?

For whom? I have a Scottish one for Scott, a light and airy one for my mother, the Russian Dance from the Nutcracker for regular, and for poor Linda an accidentally annoying one that chants “Pick up de phone” to the tune of Beethoven’s 5th. I swear to God it was cute until the first time it actually rang.

What’s the wallpaper on your cell phone?

Red with gold busts of Caesar

Who is the 6th text message in yur inbox from?

“yur”. Shouldn’t that be capitalized and possessive? Like “Who is the 6th text message in Yur’s inbox from?” And how the hell should I know? Who is Yur? Does he live in a Yurt?

Go to your pictures…what is the 33rd pic of?

Which pictures? Phone pictures? I don’t have 33 on there right now. Regular pictures? 33rd in which folder? You know what? Just forget it.

Whose your 78th contact in your phone?

Fuck you. What’s with the damned numbers? Oh and thank you SO much for reminding me I lost half my contacts when my PHONE GOT STOLEN. Now? Shit, I’m lucky if I have 45 contacts, let alone seventy fucking eight. Christ.

Whose your favorite character from The Office?

My time working in an office was extremely traumatic, and I prefer not to discuss it with you.

Have you seen every episode starting from Season 1?

Every episode of everything ever? No. I don’t watch TV.

What color is your hair?

Brown.

Favorite quote?

“Fuck you”

What kind of car do you have?

Hyundai Sonata

What makes you laugh?

See my blogroll.

Whats the last movie you saw in theatres?

“What” should not be pluralized. That “Whats” wants for an apostrophe. And Sherlock Game of Shadows.

If you could co-star in a movie with any actor/actress you would it be?

“Who” would it be, not “you”. But I shouldn’t be so flip. God, I feel bad about this one. I mean, I consider myself an advocate. So I apologize, but the only actor/actress I know about is Jaye Davidson, and I guess I’d have to go with Stargate in that case. And I promise to learn more about trans actor/actresses, because this is an issue that’s important to me.

 Whats your favorite article of clothing?

Um, I hate to nag, but if I’m going to take the time to correct your grammar, you ought to take the time to pay attention to the lesson. W-H-A-T-Apostrophe-S. Right now, I don’t even have a favorite pair of jeans, and howsabout I promise to come back and answer this in twenty pounds or so?

What were you doing on New Years?

How many new years are we talking about here? It’s a good thing we do the same thing every year, or I’d be writing a really long time. We were at my sister-in-law’s.

GASP! LOOK! WHAT’S BEHIND YOU?!

When I gasped, my husband asked if I was choking and offered to to help. So when I looked, he was behind me.

What are you looking forward too?

I just looked backwards, now I’m going forward? Make up your mind. I’m looking forward to the computer screen of course. DUH.

Are you the life of the party?

Better that than its death, wouldn’t you agree?

Finish this sentence…You are______

my sunshine, my only sunshine.

If you could meet Barack Obama, what would you ask him?

How the hell did I get past security?

 Pop Tarts or Toaster Struddles?

Ick. Neither.

Dark Chocolate or Milk Chocolate?

Dark. Please.

Truth or Dare?

Truth. Always.

Do you kiss your mom with that mouth?

Only on the cheek, I swear.

Your getting chased by the Easter Bunny! What do you do?!

In days of yore, the Easter Bunny was like a God or something, right? Oh my GOD! I don’t see Your anywhere. He’s gone! You’re really scaring me. I think the Easter Bunny may have eaten Your. I don’t know what to do! What do you and yours suggest?

Whats in your junk drawer?

Get him out!! Isn’t that a little personal?

Whats something about you that no one knows?

I don’t know. Ask no one.

What kinda phone do you have?

Eh. I kinda have a flip phone, except it was stolen. So now, I totally have an Android.

Whats the wallpaper on your computer?

It’s impossible to tell for all the game icons. Addict needs an intervention.

Do you dance when nobody’s watching?

Jesus! Nobody is stalking me again. PEEPING TOM PEEPING TOM!

What’s your race?

Well, since I don’t watch TV, I don’t see The Amazing Race, but my sister-in-law and family got my mother-in-law hooked on it, so it must be OK. Running races makes me really gaspy and stuff, so I guess Queen’s “Bicycle Race”. Since the fat bottomed girls will be riding today.

Whose your loudest friend?

Oh. OK. Well, um, TELL WHOSE THAT’S GREAT, OK!?

When your having a party, who definitely has to be there?

Damn it, I thought Your got eaten by the Easter Bunny! Now, you tell me he’s really planning a party, and the whole thing was a scam to keep from inviting me so he could invite Who instead? I bet he has What and I-Don’t-Know-Who on that list as well. Thanks a-fuckin’-lot, Your. See what happens to you. Just you see if I worry about you the next time the Easter Bunny comes after you with a goddamned butcher knife.

Whats the best food combo?

Steak and margaritas.

When you need someone to talk to, who do you go to?

Pick up de phone.

Whats your favorite band(s)?

What’s the day of the week? Oh. It’s Friday. OK. Friday, it’s The Cure(s).

What song do you want played at your funeral?

“The Bitch Is Back”

Your mom goes to college!

Great! I’m so happy for her! I’m all about continuing education.

Would you like other people to see your survey answers?

Shit yes. Why the hell else would I post them on my blog?

Enter your nickname to let people know who you are or leave blank to take the survey anonymously
(do not put in your full name)

Jester Queen

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Oh! Almost forgot. Attribution sooo important. http://www.quizopolis.com/survey/6891/Total-Randomness-Survey/

Next week is

http://www.quizopolis.com/survey/3643/30-Tell-The-Truth-Questions-Survey/

Ooo – Truth questions. Fun.

And I’m linking up at http://www.seekingelevation.com/2012/01/friday-fluff_20.html

Fiction: Waterlogged

Posted on by February 25, 2020

Sharon waited in her car until the last possible second, then hugged her jacket tightly and stepped into the deluge. Water sluiced over her hood, cascaded past her shoulders and rolled down her unprotected lower body. Within moments, she was soaked below the hips.

The wind jerked her first one way, then another. Every step forward was a fight, and the slick pavement made her movements pinched. Halfway to the courthouse stairs, she met a pair of wingtips exiting a dark car. Without looking at each other, Sharon and the man fell in step.

He brought up his umbrella, but a blast from behind snapped the bumbershoot’s fabric outward, breaking it cleanly in less time than it had taken the man to raise it.  He threw down its remains.

“Hold on to me,” said Sharon. She was unsure whether she meant to support him or the other way around. It didn’t matter. They hooked arms against the storm, and in so doing gained the stability to run. Pulling each other, they reached the stairs and then the door. The man handed Sharon his briefcase. As she took it, she realized this was Richard, whom she would divorce within the hour. How little he resembled himself as he braced one hand on the wall and pulled with the other against the monsoon.

A sliver of light as the old wood yielded, and Sharon jammed in her foot to force the door outward. Then, as with the umbrella, the wind changed, walloping Richard back. Sharon grabbed his arm again to keep him from falling.

He seized her, and for a moment they teetered on the threshold. Then he gained his balance and propelled them both inside, where the fickle wind slammed the door behind them. They staggered forward together, still connected in that instant, as they moved out of the world where water held sway and into another dominion entirely.

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This week’s word over at Trifecta:

The Lightning Bug.

And Write on Edge

Frozen

Posted on by February 25, 2020

I was born in December of 1976 in Cincinnati, a bare month before the Ohio River froze over.  My parents took me home to rural Ohio, and my Dad went back out on the road. That left Mom home alone with a newborn. In a blizzard.

The front part of our home was built in the mid 1860s. It’s just a very old brick farmhouse.That front area is just one big room with another room above it. (And the upstairs totally unheated.) The middle of the house was added in the 1920s and the back in the 1940s. All sturdy, yes, but poorly insulated.

It got very cold that year. First, Mom closed the upstairs door. Then, she shut off the front room by hanging blankets in the doorway, because the fire she could keep burning couldn’t compete with the drafts that blew down the chimney. Then, the oil line froze, and she hung more blankets between the middle room and the kitchen. The water  froze, even though she ran the pipes religiously. Finally, she was living with me on a little bit of gas heat run through an antique oven.

Besides the new baby, she had pets to take care of, and Mom’s dogs were her other children. She was low on everything, but she couldn’t get out for supplies. The car was frozen shut, and everything in the gas tank was probably iced solid anyway. She couldn’t call out, because the storm had taken out her phone lines. So she got by day to day melting snow on the stove and trying to figure out if she was going to have to walk to town in a blizzard with a new baby.

Then one day, while she was sitting at the kitchen table, a man came banging on the back door shouting “Anybody home?”

It was the mailman.

He hadn’t just stopped in randomly or due to the letter carrier’s creed taken to the nth  degree. My grandparents in Loiusville had sent in the rescue brigade. Frantic when they lost phone contact with Mom, they called down to Dave’s Grocery five miles away in Marathon. They asked if anybody had seen Mom. When nobody had, the grocers got the mailman involved.

I’m not sure what he was driving, and I know Mom didn’t have much to take with her, but he fit  my mother, newborn me, and both dogs into his vehicle. We stayed with him and his wife until my grandparents arrived in the camper to take us all home to Louisville for the remainder of the winter.They had already gathered in their relatively small home my great grandmother and her sister and another distant aunt of some variety before we arrived.

Whenever my grandmother told the story, she showed me the scratch marks on the door, where Mom’s golden retriever, Sissy, jumped up and demanded to be let out every morning. She shrilled her fears of what could have happened. She conveyed a sense of portentous fear.

When Mom told the story, it became an adventure. Not exactly thrilling or starring Errol Flynn, but not at all gloomy or frightening. Just one of those things we had to deal with to live in the country, with a cozy family gathering at the end. I liked Mom’s version better. I’m certain she made sure it felt safer. Because seriously, I grew up in that farmhouse. She didn’t want me worried about meeting my own ghost some January night. She didn’t want me frightened of the next blizzard.

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I’m hooking this up with Story Dam’s weekly Dam Burst prompt which asked us to present a story about somebody stuck in the worst part of winter. I wouldn’t have had room for any fictionalized version, though I’m sure I have some details wrong.

Censorship (it’s ugly)

Posted on by July 12, 2023

Update: WE WON

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Take a look at the Google homepage today. Or don’t. Who knows if ‘today’ is even when I have posted this anyway. Here’s what I’m wanting you to see:

Here’s the ‘please don’t censor the web!’ link from above.

Take Action

If you happened to visit Wikipedia on Tuesday, you found this:

Powerful stuff. Some of the most influential websites are protesting censorship. (And here’s another petition, by the by: Fight SOPA)

Here’s what got people all up in arms. There are two bills making the rounds of the House and Senate. SOPA  (Stop Online Piracy Act) is the house version. PIPA (Protect IP Act – presumably IP is Internet Privacy, but it could be just IP, like an IP address) is the one making the rounds of the senate.

The actual bill texts are linked above, but the overall gist of both is very bad for anybody who actually puts content on the net. I’ll stop here to address something key to understanding the problem. These fuckers are marketing tools. Both bills have deceptive names. Stop Online Piracy? Woah! That sounds like a GOOD thing, right? Who the hell wants to encourage idea and content theft? Protect IP where “IP” has something to do with the Internet? That sounds seriously necessary. Doesn’t it? Yah. Bullshit.

Both bills are worded so vaguely that an unidentified government agency could step in and call just about anything piracy. So sites like Wikipedia, where people reproduce pictures from other sites, would be affected. Sites like Regretsy, where April Winchell makes a merry mockery of Etsy crap by posting the original pictures, would also be threatened. Because even though Winchell religiously attributes things, anybody who didn’t want her to use their images could prevent her from doing so, simply to silence her ‘negative’ reviews. (For the record? People featured on Regretsy usually make tons of money, because half the time, somebody sees the garbage and WANTS it.)

Oh. To make this point, Winchell has also blacked her site out for a day, complete with a message satirizing what a seizure might look like if either of these bills make it into law. (She’s scarily accurate, though.)

Let me be clear here. Original content creators deserve to be compensated for their work, where such is appropriate. (If you posted it without the expectation of payment in the first place, you still deserve attribution.) Identity theft is criminal. It is a bad thing.

And SOPA and PIPA do not represent adequate efforts to end the real problems. Rather, they are poorly worded attempts to censor the net. They are knee-jerk reaction bills designed by groups who don’t care if they quash free speech in the name of protecting privacy and copyright/trademark.

The implications are far reaching, and anybody could potentially be affected. It’s worth your time to take a minute and sign the petitions above. I took the time to actually contact my congress persons several weeks ago. (They sent back bland letters suggesting they barely knew what an internet was, let alone what to do about one. But then, it isn’t surprising given where I live that these guys aren’t really aligned with my viewpoints on most issues.)

If you have a blog, do a post. If not, circulate those petitions on Facebook and Twitter. Let’s take collective action against censorship before 1984 shows up in our inboxes.

At the Museum Center

Posted on by February 25, 2020

OK, back in December, I posted briefly about our family’s visit to the Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal. I teased you with a picture I took with my cell phone, because I can’t hook the big camera up to the netbook. (Canon is morally convinced I’ll blow the camera’s mind if I don’t load the driver discs first, and I don’t have a disc drive in the netbook.) Also, the upload speed on my aircard is slower than dialup.

I took lots of pictures with the big camera. Here are some down at the holiday train display

That’s my awesome mother-in-law standing with Scott and the kids. I think about ten minutes into the tour all four of them were totally ready for me to put down the camera, but I was only getting started.

Because after the trains came this whole other holiday section. It included these stunning historical examples:

Those. Are. Not. Reindeer. They are JACKELOPES. White-haired demon-horned JACKELOPES. That’s the stuff Christmas nightmares are made of right there, kiddies. Thank God they don’t talk anymore.

Other than those guys, the holiday section was nice, and it ended in a giant mural.

I used my ‘small’ lens to photograph this, but since it was at eye level, the detail is really easy to see.

Here’s another eye level mural

And I also took a close-up of the tiles, still with the small lens.

This is one of the large murals way up in the arch ceiling of the … I guess it’s called rotunda area

I zoomed in some with my little lens, and that was pretty cool, but it was NOTHING compared to what I got when I pulled out the big lens. Check THESE out.

Those things are forty feet up in the air, but the zoom on the big lens is so complete that I might as well be standing on top of the picture. The number of hours it must have taken to create that image, tile by tile boggles my mind.

OK, that’s the end of my picto-geek tour. Thanks for reading along. And if you’re ever in Cincinnati, take the time to see Union Terminal. It’s not a place that will quickly leave your mind.

Challenger

Posted on by February 25, 2020

I was 9 years old on January 28th, 1986, in Mrs. McMullen’s third grade class. We had one of those awful pods where five classes had been crammed into a giant room, separated by dividers. But there weren’t any dividers that day. The teachers had pushed them all over to the wall so we could turn in our seats to view the tiny television set up over in Mrs. Davis’s room. We were all excited, because we were going to watch the space shuttle Challenger take off.

Now, some of you reading this knew where I was going as soon as you read the date. Because you, too were somewhere on January 28th 1986. You, too, remember exactly what you were doing. Because your lives were marked by that moment. Even if you were personally unaffected by the deaths of the six astronauts and one courageous school teacher, you knew its significance. Your life was thereafter identified by ‘before’ and ‘after’ the explosion. And in recalling that moment, you doubtless recalled other such moments of demarcation, some personal, some very public. JFK’s death. Elvis’s. Nixon’s resignation. The assassination attempt on Reagan. September 11th 2011.

Without prompting, I can tell you that I sat in the middle pod, that even though the teachers closed the curtains, I could barely see the TV because the sun glared through the window right behind it, and that I knew exactly what had happened when the shuttle broke apart, even though they turned down the sound right away. We only watched for a few minutes after that. The principal said something unmemorable over the loudspeaker, the dividers went back up, and we tried to have a normal rest of the day. Except that normal had shifted in a way all of us could feel.

My kids were both born to a post 9/11 world. And so far no disaster has shaken either of their roots to the point of memory. Although Caroline was alive during hurricane Katrina, she was two, and we lived in Lexington, Kentucky. Her preschool class gave all their tzedakah money to the survivors, and she understood what happened at the time, but she doesn’t remember it. And several events in both of my kids’ childhoods have changed them, but they are all personal events, rather than public ones. So they do not yet share with their friends, or even each other, a point of before and after when normal became something else. But it will come. And when it does it will mark us as a family. It will mark us again as a nation.

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*Caroline attended Gan Shalom Preschool at the Ohavay Zion synagogue in Lexington, Kentucky. I can’t say enough wonderful things about the program. Among other things, the kids collected tzedakah money, money for charity, and used it to send help those in need.

That’s nice, Jessie, but now I’m distracted. Take me back to where I was.
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This post is for the Write On Edge Surprise Prompt featuring a desolately beautiful shuttle launch photo. That pictures is actually from 1999, but I thought immediately of 1986. I have not yet read the other submissions, but I fully expect to see a lot of Challenger memories, because it is January, and because most of us are old enough to remember.

Fiction: Weep

Posted on by February 25, 2020

Weep

No clouds at all. The soft waves masked a riptide, and there were no swimmers. Even the morning’s shell seekers had retreated from the midday heat,  and white sand ran into green ocean ran into blue sky in uninterrupted succession.

On the balcony, James sipped his iced tea. The ceiling fan whipped in circles without stirring the air down by the table.  “I haven’t seen it this tranquil in a long time.”

Melinda nodded, but she didn’t speak. She watched the condensation weep down the side of her glass.

“There will be others,” James said.

Again, she nodded without saying anything, still watching the droplets zigzag down to eventually collect in a puddle  around the base. In the distance, a white speck pierced the horizon, grew into the shape of a fishing boat, then drifted out of view, heading in the direction of the docks.

Melinda picked up her glass, but not to drink. She wiped the water off the table and put the tea back down untouched. She looked at the place where the ship had vanished, but nothing else emerged from the cove.

James looked there too, for a little while, but then returned his eyes to the tea. He used one finger to stir the ice around, and the clinking cubes cut into the balcony’s silence. He stopped stirring.

“I suppose everything ends, doesn’t it?” he said.

“I suppose so,” Melinda answered, and at last she took a drink from her glass.

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This is the first time I’ve put fiction on my blog, and I’m linking up with the folks over at Trifecta who use the rule of 3. Stories must be between 33 and 333 words and must be based on Merriam Webster’s third definition of a chosen word. Sound pretty obscure? That’s just exactly why I like it.

Anyway, when commenting on my fiction, please know that I welcome constructive criticism. I’ve got a thick skin. I like the chance to resolve things that aren’t working.

Train train

Posted on by February 25, 2020

The weekend after I got back from my solo Ohio trip, I had scheduled a surprise for our family. (This was a bad idea; I’m even worse at planning surprises than I am at keeping them.) I wrote the melodramatic message “Make no plans. Board the dog” across the calendar weekend of December 10th and waited for Scott to notice.

I actually did a very good job of waiting, since I bought the tickets towards the end of November, and he didn’t notice until the day before I left for Cincinnati. He was adding a kid therapy to the calendar and asked “What plans aren’t we making next weekend? Why are we boarding the dog?” And, the kicker, “Doesn’t Caroline have Nutcracker practice?”

And that, my friends, is why I know better than to go off and plan something without consulting my better half. Of course Caroline had Nutcracker practice. It wasn’t a dress rehearsal, but the show was only a week away, so it was a full cast run-through, and she really wasn’t supposed to miss.

I had to delay coping with this until I got back from my trip. Then, the following Monday, I asked Caroline, “next weekend, would you rather have a sleepover with a friend if I can arrange it or…”

“SLEEPOVER WITH A FRIEND!”

“Don’t you want to know what you’ll be missing?”

“I want a sleepover!”

“OK, but only if I can figure one out for you!” So I scrambled around and located a saint of a grandparent who was willing (nay, enthusiastic!) to have Caroline come spend the night with her granddaughter (who is one of Caroline’s best friends) AND take her back and forth to Nutcracker practice. And Caroline wasn’t even moderately disappointed when she found out what she would be missing.

By then, Scott and Caroline knew what was coming, and I knew I wasn’t going to get Sam on a four hour long car ride without some serious bait, so let him in on the fun as well.  I asked him, “Do you want to come on a Santa train ride?”

“Oh YES!”

And so, on December 10th, we dropped Caroline with her friend at the mall and drove four hours to north Georgia to ride the Blue Ridge Scenic Railway. We were in an open air car, it was around 30 degrees, and Sam did not want to wear his coat.

We didn’t fight it. We were running late by the time we got to the station, we almost missed getting onboard, and we were still better prepared than one mother, whose children didn’t even bring coats. To her credit, she had been told the same thing I had. The website clearly states that the cars are open air. But when we called the ticketing booth to reserve, the lady on the other end of the phone said, “Oh no, they have roofs and everything. It’s the middle of winter!”

If ever a more literal minded person I meet, I will be astounded. Yes, the cars DID have roofs. And walls. But there were no windows meaning they were absolutely as ‘open air’ as they had been advertised to be. We had dragged our coats from the car, even if Sam was refusing to wear his, because this particular railway actually goes somewhere. It takes a scenic tour from one town to another, lets passengers disembark in a little town for an hour and then takes them back.

I had already been looking forward to taking train pictures. But then, when I got my awesome camera while up in Cincinnati, my very first thought, before even the baptism and wedding I was attending up there, was “Oh my GOD the train pictures just got incredible”. And that was before I snapped photo one.

The open air car only increased the picture quality. I captured shots that I had been dreaming of since our Amtrak honeymoon. If I could have gotten just ONE photo like these ten years ago, I could have saved myself rolls and ROLLS of film.

I’m pretty sure that when we went over a narrow bridge and the conductor announced on the loudspeaker “everyone please remain completely in the car until we have completely passed over the bridge” it was entirely for the benefit of myself and a couple of restless kids who kept sticking various body parts out the window.

And then, the world’s coolest Santa Claus came down the aisle. It takes a LOT to cool me out over Santa, and this guy totally did the trick:

I love the victorian vest and ruffled shirt. And that thing in his hand is a silver sleigh bell. (Yes, we got one for Caroline, too.) Of course, those things made it that much harder to watch the bastardized version of the Polar Express that Disney puts on. (And yes, it was that night after we got back to the hotel from the train that it showed up on our room TV.)

Anyway, once we reached our destination and got off the train, Sam FINALLY realized it was cold and let himself be stuffed in his jacket. We wandered around the little town, got a hideous meal at a local pizza place (So what if it sucked! We were in love!), and bought me a hat, because the temperature was rapidly dropping and my coat lacked a hood.

The next time we go, Caroline has made us promise to take her, too. I don’t think she’s going to have to wait for next Christmas, either, because all of us were completely enchanted, and I don’t think we got to see even half of what was available.