Ten Christmas Wishes

1. I wish I could get my dog a Christmas present.

2. I wish the lighting in this picture were better.

3. I wish Christmas cookies had no calories.

4. I wish that transporter beam technology from Star Trek actually worked. It would make Christmas shopping so much quicker.

5. I wish someone else would wrap my presents.

6. I wish my family all lived on one street and we never had to be apart at Christmas.

7. I wish my friends were close by too.

8. I wish I had a recording of Abraham saying, "Ooh!" every time he sees the Christmas tree.

9. I wish I could stop time and keep my beautiful boys little forever.

10. I wish YOU well, safe, happy, blessed, and loved this Christmas.

Road Legal

I have invented a new traffic violation. DUC. Driving Under the influence of Children.

As some of you may know, the transmission in our Suburban has, after weeks of failing health, officially committed Sudoku. Or something like that. The boys and I had gone to Walmart for a day of high class shopping, when it started to make funny noises. I rationalized said noises as being a product of the cold weather and high winds, because I am a mechanic, and went to church that night anyway. I guess that turned out to be a blessed decision, because that meant that when the transmission kicked it, our friend/babysitter/guardian angel Susan K. was right behind us on the road. Long story short (too late), we managed to limp it home with Susan following, and when we got there, she rolled down her car window and said, "I already called Wayne (her husband) and he said it was fine if you borrow this car for a while, so I'll pick you up in the morning and then you can drive it home after work tomorrow." Now you see why I call her my guardian angel.

So, with extreme gratitude, I took her up on her offer and have been driving her car for a little over a week. I've been trying not to drive it any more than necessary, but last Friday night, after work, I decided to make a run to Tractor Supply and Kohls to do some Christmas details. Don't ask. Well, a couple of details turned into ten minutes in Tractor Supply, then one hour at the Gerbil Tubes, then heaven-only-knows how long at Kohls, then, finally, Meijer. It was about 10:30 when we started home, which, in our second-shift life, is not too too late. But I was tired, and my hair was standing up in spikes from my fingers running through it, and Abe was uttering intermittant shrieks and giggles, with Charlie alternately making faces at him and hitting him with things...

Good times.

On top of this, the car was still unfamiliar. It has more quiet power than what I'm used to, as well as slightly squishy steering. So I was snarking at the kids, babysitting the speedometer, driving one-handed to point out pretty Christmas lights, and going cross-eyed about the time we passed Grant's Lick. And,  you probably guessed it, on go the pretty lights in the rearview mirror.

So I pulled over, thankful that at least I did not have the breast pump going... which is something I admit I often do while driving. Wouldn't that cop have been surprised? I was so chagrinned that I didn't notice that Charlie's immediate reaction to being pulled over was to take off his seatbelt. Excellent choice.

Kentucky's Finest leaned down to peer with his flashlight in my driver's side window, and I completely forgot what I had planned to say, because the first words out of his mouth were, "I think I know what the problem is."

Good grief.

He went on to tell me he'd pulled me over because I was "weaving pretty bad on him" and asked if the car was mine, to which I answered that I was borrowing it from a friend. Then he asked for my ID. Igg! "It's here somewhere," I said, then proceeded to excavate it out from the pile of coats, diaper bags, shopping bags, and general chaos in the passenger seat. He gave it a cursory glance, told us to be careful, told Charlie to put on his seatbelt, then let us go. Thank God highway patrolmen don't like to give tickets to chubby, harried-looking women with two small children in the back seat. As we pulled back onto the road, I told Charlie (quite calmly, I might add) that if Mommy ever got pulled over again, he had to keep his seatbelt on because Mommy could get a ticket just because he had it off. To this he replied, "I thought you were going to get arrested!"

My work is done here.

Burma Shave 2010

Not that I (or, in fact, almost anyone who would be reading this) am old enough to remember Burma Shave's roadside sign campaign that began in 1925, but I am going to revive it.

I'm going to campaign for Barbasol: the broke-mom-of-two-small-

children's choice for shaving comfort.

"If I shave

my legs at all

I shave my legs

with Barbasol.

My leg hair is

so blasted thick

I cannot shave it

with a BiC.

When I need to be

nylons-ready,

I shave my legs

with a machete."

It's gonna be big.

The Tale of the 26th Prisoner

I have officially arrived in the paraprofessional world.  "Paraprofessional" means I get paid about ten bucks an hour to do the same work it would take a pair of professionals to do. Just kidding. Actually, I love my job, with all its quirks. And on Tuesday, a co-worker and I went to a quirky workshop and I loved it.

The workshop was at KDLA in Frankfort, which stands for "Kentucky Dept. of Libraries and Archives. Vicki drove, because Frankfort is an hour and a half away, and given the state of my vehicles at the moment, there was every chance we would've ended up living there if I'd been the one to drive. Vicki driving meant I had to navigate, which is never a good thing, especially when I like the person I'm with and start talking too much to pay attention to the directions. We only got lost once, though, and in my defense, the turn we missed wasn't marked. Well, it was marked, just not with a green sign with a foot tall number "62" like I was expecting. At any rate, we didn't get very lost for very long, and Vicki didn't hit me with any blunt objects, and we'd left early-ish anyway, so we got where we were going just under the wire.

I didn't expect KDLA to be in such an idyllic setting. Frankfort isn't the largest city in Kentucky, but it is the capitol, so I expected it to be more... urban. KDLA, however, sits on a hill off to the side of the city, surrounded by wooded hills and parks, with a spectacular view of the capitol building on an adjacent hill. If I hadn't talked myself out of taking my camera with me just before I left in the morning, I'd have a better shot of that view, but here is the best that Vicki's camera phone could provide, and then a little bit better one from the web.

The KDLA building itself is an artistic looking block of concrete with three huge silos down each side that store, as I was told by the front desk attendant, sensitive documents that require climate controlled environments. And you thought librarians never did anything cool. Just inside the lobby, a visitor is presented with the Braille Library for the Blind stacks. To the right lie the Archives, ensconsed behind a guard's desk which I'll tell you about later, and a beautiful sculpture called, Kentucky in Woods, shown  at the top. This is what SLA Kentucky's newsletter says about the sculpture, "Located in the building’s main lobby is a unique sculpture by Bobby Reed Falwell. The monumental wood sculpture is made of 28 Kentucky woods and is an abstract representation of Kentucky, with the sunrise on the east and the sunset in the west. The woods came from the Estill County land of Dr. Thomas Clark, who worked with Falwell to locate each variety of tree needed for the project." That's cool, but mainly I just thought it was pretty.

The first half of the workshop was about the services offered by KDLA, most noteworthy of which is the Talking Book Library. Basically, what this program does is make audiobooks of books that mainstream companies wouldn't; i.e. a cookbook in audio form so that someone who has had a stroke and can cook just fine but can't turn the pages of a book can still try new recipes. The possibilities are endless. I love this program! Since I can't do it justice in this blog without writing a novel, I'll direct you here and here for details.

During a tasty lunch, eaten in Vicki's van to get out of the horrible cave the seminar took place in, we revelled in the wildlife experience of KDLA. No, I'm not talking about wildlife in the library/archives: they only let them in if they have all the proper forms of ID. But while Vicki and I were eating lunch, we saw a herd of five mysterious deer emerge from the woods to crop grass unabashedly by the roadside. They were mysterious because they didn't look like white-tailed deer, but my expert source, a.k.a. my husband, says there aren't any other species in Kentucky. Shortly after the herd made its appearance, it was joined by a flock of wild turkeys who I can only assume were having a last hurrah before the start of turkey season which was coming up the following Sunday. So fascinated were we by the view of distant critters that we took a drive to try to get a better look. Alas, the camera phone didn't have enough oomph to document that. I'm still kicking myself that I decided not to take my camera with me.

After lunch/safari, Vicki and I went back to the dungeon to take part in *booming voice-over* The Tale of the 26th Prisoner! This was a collection building/censorship excercise meant to illustrate the challenges that library "book selectors" face when chosing books for their collections. There were something like 80 of us library book slaves who took part in this training excercise. They split us up into six groups and we were given these instructions: You are a librarian who has committed a terrible crime. (Probably something to do with those five copies of Twilight that the library has been trying to get back since January...) Because your character has been found to be in all other ways irreproachable, you have been given a lightened sentence to serve as the librarian of a new prison island. This island is separated from the mainland by 75 miles of frigid water. You and the other inmates will be expected to be 75% self-sufficient. Two of the inmates will have children with them, because they have been found to be exemplary parents and their crimes were not violent: a nine year old boy and fourteen year old girl who have been tested to reveal genius level IQ, and one seven year old severely autistic boy who excels at art and music. The children must pass the same standardized tests as other children their ages or they will be put into foster care and their parents put in a maximum security prison on the mainland. One woman is pregnant. The other prisoners range from seven to eighty one years of age and represent all major ethnic groups and world religions, both genders, and all sexual orientations. You must select ten books to meet the needs listed above, but... The governor of the island will vet all books being brought in and will not allow any books containing violence, sexual descriptions or images, religious ideas, or any ideas deemed to be of an inflamatory nature. If the governor disallows more than three of your choices, you will be put in solitary confinement for life.

Needless to say, we should've just chosen one title and had done with it: Catch 22. That's obviously what the situation was: it is impossible to meet all the above needs without breaking some of the above rules. No history books: violence. But what about the standarized tests? No medical books: naughty pictures. But what about the pregnant woman? And you can just forget about any novels with the above rules... You get the idea. After the scrutiny of the governor, my group had only three books left, five out of six groups were in solitary confinement forever, and I was chanting, "Revolution! Revolution!" The presenters did tell us that we must be the good kids that our directors allow to leave the library because every other time they had led this workshop, at least one group said, "We want a book on boat building..."

After much hilarity and being shipped off to solitary confinement forever and ever, Vicki and I decided to stop in at the Archive room. Getting into the Archives is much like getting into Canada used to be: it can be done without a passport, but we had to have two forms of ID, sign away our firstborn chilren, and make extra certain to put our middle initials on all blanks asking for our names. Sheesh. All we wanted was to take a look at the portfolio of the Packhorse Libraries, which Vicki had read about in Down Cut Shin Creek.  The Packhorse Libraries were a program of the W.P.A. in Kentucky during the Great Depression. These intrepid librarians would take books in satchels on horseback to the remote settlements and camps of Appalachia where the poor families would receive them with great excitement. Because the culture of the area and time was such that these families didn't feel right about taking something without giving something in return for it, even if it was a loaned library book, these families would often give the librarians something of personal value, like a family recipe or a scrap for a quilt. The librarians then began to make scrapbooks of these items, which eventually became a highly valued part of their cirulated materials, passed on from family to family around the region. What Vicki and I were hoping to see was one of these actual scrapbooks, but either through miscommunication or because the scrapbooks are not actually kept at KDLA, what we ended up seeing was a folder of photographs of the Packhorse Libraries, a couple of which are  shown here. When we left the Archives, we were told that KDLA actually has a signature of Abraham Lincoln's, amongst other valuable articles. And the themesong from Mission Impossible started playing in my head...

Thanksgiving

The week of Thanksgiving dawned foggy at the Holler. Not that fog isn’t picturesque, but it doesn’t make me think Thanksgiving, so I was glad to be going out of town. On Monday before the big day, my mom and brother came to pick up the boys and me for a week’s stay at Midmile Farm-- the old stomping grounds in Indiana. My brother and sister-in-law had flown in from New Mexico a few days before, so it was to be a nuclear family reunion.

Of course, a trip to Grandma’s house is ever an opportunity for Charlie to discover how many different playgrounds the world has to offer. We got in late on Monday night, and after a day in the car, Charlie went to sleep even later than usual. As chance would have it, he also woke up early Tuesday morning with a nose bleed, so Grandma and I formed a plan to flat wear him out that day. The first park we visited was the VFW playground in Columbia City. It is a paradise of wooden wonder that makes me wish I was a few feet shorter, a lot of pounds lighter, and at least twice as energetic. It was a chilly day, but we played as long as we could before going home to Grandma’s to make lasagna. After a day of running in the cold and very little sleep, Charlie still managed to keep himself awake until the end of the movie he was watching: 10:30 p.m. I don’t know what it is about sleep these stubborn Pearson males dislike so, but after the movie was done, he fell asleep faster than I’ve ever seen.

Wednesday morning, Charlie didn’t quite wake up all the way. He zommed his way down to breakfast, but quickly gave up on sitting upright, and went to nap on the couch, sleeping the morning away until 1:30 p.m. This was enough for me to decide he must have strep; it was so out of character for him. So just for a little vacation fun, we visited ReadyMed. No strep. I guess we just wore him out a little better than we intended to.

Thursday was, of course, the big day. What Thanksgiving would be complete without the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, or, as my sister-in-law Susan and I came to call it, “Where Celebrities Go To Die.” My eyebrows hit my hairline first during the performance by Alan Cumming, who closely resembles nothing so much as a strung-out, gay elf. A little while later, I was wowed by Cindy Lauper, looking like she had spray painted hot pink stripes on an albino ferret and Superglued it to her head. About the last thing I saw was what appeared to be duet between Miley Cyrus’s doppelganger and Kermit the Frog. I went to Thanksgiving dinner thinking, Well, that really puts the “Ummm...” in “awesome.” Dinner was, of course, fantastic. Perfectly slow roasted turkey, Mom’s signature cranberry salad, sourdough rolls, au gratin potatoes, stuffing, pies... And a new dish: Mom’s Spontaneous Cajun-style Blackened Green Bean Casserole... which happens when an overworked cook forgets the beans are still in the oven. Seriously, though, if I ate that well every day of the year, they could fill me with helium and float me along with Snoopy and Buzz Lightyear in the Macy’s Parade.

A little while after lunch, Uncle Joel took Charlie for a run/ chase/ mudfest/ exercise in futility which I, sadly, missed while giving Abraham a nap. The futility part came in when Charlie tried to catch Uncle Joel. I think it was good for him. It’s not often Charlie’s will gets bested. The mudfest... well, as you can see here, we didn’t escape the unfestive, non-crisp yet still beautiful fall weather.

The rest of the week blurred by, with a couple more parks thrown in, a trip to see some Christmas lights, and a shopping escapade at Michael’s Crafts. I’ve never been dragged out of a store by my collar before, but I think the experience was good for me. Temporary insanity happens I see a wall of beads marked “50% Off.” What can I say?

On the way back to the Holler on Sunday, Grandma, the boys, and I crammed a five hour trip into seven hours. Grandma jury-rigged the little dvd/tv so that it wouldn’t shut off every 5 seconds. Charlie watched movies, looked at books, played Leapster, and in general complained very little. Abe slept and also complained very little. Grandma drove, and I only complained when I started to get queasy, which was in no way intended to be a comment on Mom’s driving. We stopped at a school playground in Eden, IN for an hour long fifteen minute break. May I just say that playgrounds are way cooler now than when I was a kid? Here is what Mom looks like after a week with my children... We had supper at LaRosa’s, and got in at the tidy time of 5:00 p.m., in time for Grandma and Grandpa to turn right around and drive home again. Super(grand)parents! Any ideas what I’m thankful for this Thanksgiving?