Be Gentle, February

Phew. January was the month of meetings. I’ve been a frantic little hummingbird going to all the meetings in relation to the pipeline they want to put right through our town. The big concern is the ground water because it tends to suffer in operations like this. Then there’s the 300 foot swath they want to cut through the state and I’ll be here all day if I list all the things we’re concerned about. Money has been a problem this month. It just keeps disappearing! It had me seriously considering salary vs lifestyle, if I have to give up my house or get a new job or just an extra job. I also don’t know if I’ll have my current job for much longer. If they don’t have the numbers by the end of March, I probably won’t be kept on. Stressful! I also have sheep now. Technically, they aren’t mine, but I’m keeping them until their new field is ready. Two of them are probably preggers. I just hope they don’t have any lambs until they’re safe in their new digs. I hope February brings me good news.

Here there be moon madness.

I could not figure out why the kids at work were so off the map into Crazyland today. Just nonstop bonkers from the time they fell through the door at 730 to when I had to pry my thumbs out of one's grip so I could fall out the door at 330. There's usually a reason everyone is squirrely, either a change in the routine or drop in barometer, or something to have everyone just a little off-kilter. There wasn't a clear indicator this time, until I walked out of the rotary meeting just a little while ago.

Wow.

One of these days, I have to figure out how to take pictures of the moon, because nothing I own can do it justice, but outside is the biggest, shiniest, turning the surrounding clouds into silver shapes like rabbits and pirate ship-iest full moon I've seen in a long time.

It explains everything.

It has happened again: A horse is being named after me! This time a real live horse.

I just finished Chuck Amuck by Chuck Jones. It tells of his life before and during and a little after his career as the genius behind Looney Tunes and so many other animated pieces of our childhood. I especially loved the stories of his family and his pets. The story of his cats alone is so funny I laughed out loud over and over again. It has good sense in it as well, and practical advice, such as this:

Father taught us to swim early- even before he taught us to read. So I learned to swim before I learned to read. The reason for mastering swimming, Father said, was because of his distaste for drowned children. "I never knew a drowned child that was worth much," he said. "Horrid, bloated things, fish-belly white, which, I suppose, is natural enough, since fish, like drowned children, spend a lot of time underwater."

Father's distaste for dead moppets was not shared by Huckleberry's friend Jim: "I alwuz liked dead people, en done all I could for 'em"- one of the sweetest and most mysterious statements in English literature.

Father had another simple straightforward statement about the ocean, the only valid one I have ever heard. "The ocean," he said, "doesn't care."

This is all you know about the ocean, and all you need to know. Over the seventy-odd years of my life I have seen the wisdom of this statement many times. I have seen powerful swimmers washed ashore dead in an apparently pacific ocean; I have seen infants carried out to sea by a frothing riptide only to be cast back by a succeeding breaker. I have seen a whale crushed by its own weight on a receding tide, and I have seen a strange and wonderful white mare ride a breaker from straight out to sea- we watched her from among other whitecaps on a wind-tossed autumn day, a mile or so offshore, until she breasted the last wave and galloped off down the beach. I knew then and I know now that she came from Tahiti; I've seen her in Gauguin's paintings.

"The sea," Father repeated, "doesn't care, but you do. Heed well." Father often talked like one of the wolves in The Jungle Book: "Heed well, Louis Pasteur: 'Chance favors the prepared mind.' A cat," he went on, "can adjudge the speed of everything of possible danger to him except an automobile; that's why cats get shot down so often by cars- their mind are not prepared. If you want to be smarter than a cat- which is unlikely- prepare your mind and your body for any contingency you can anticipate. It's the lazy person's way- and I do hope you are wise enough to be lazy- so learning to swim is not a sport. Being faster than someone else in the water is silly and ridiculous: a six-year-old child can trot faster than the best swimmer in the world can swim. The only thing you need to know about swimming is how to breathe when you're in the water; if you can breathe, you can swim, and the important thing about swimming is to get where you want or need to go. It may be six feet if you fall into a swimming pool (most children who drown in swimming pools do so within six feet of the deck edge). It may be a mile or so if your boat founders. But one thing is certain: water is an alien element- you can't breathe underwater. It's that simple. So, if you want to spare my feelings, learn to swim.

"Swimming," my father went on to say, "is a form of transportation. Like walking, it can be done for pleasure. But when you stop walking, you don't ordinarily sink, so never confuse the two."

See? Hilarious and a very good point.

Princessing is not for the weak

We were talking princesses in class the other day, as happens with four year olds sometimes. We were at the art center. I was doing the daily observations and the kids were drawing or cutting out or pasting or whatever they felt like. I said that if I was going to be a princess, I wanted a big cute animal to be my friend, like a gigantic boar to ride on or something. Then, I had to explain what a boar was, how they had big teeth and tough skins and nobody could stop me with my big pig. One of the girls made this for me: When I asked what animal she wanted, she smiled and showed me this. "Spiders," she whispered. "Lots of spiders." Forget princess. I think this one's going to be queen. (also posted on LJ)

Colors!

The new curriculum has this book. Beautiful watercolors for each color. The preschoolers had fun finding the antelope on every page.

Trailer 1

I had an idea for some connected short stories that I was thinking I could try to hammer out for Nanowrimo. As usual though, as soon as I had some background characters for the main one to bounce off of, I fixated on them instead. It happened with the Besnicks. Marco and Yvette are the son of the trailer park landlady and the local tattoo artist, respectively. I got a friend who does research help me see what sort of imagery would be appropriate for them. Marco's grandparents came from Rimavska Sobota and Yvette' s great-great grandparents are from Haiti, but she's closer to her heritage than he is.

I tried to base their faces on Jennifer Hudson and John Leguizamo, but I don't think they look much like them. Marco was smitten at first sight with Yvette. He courted her with Victorian flower language, going to the tattoo parlor with symbolic flowers. He would tell her what they meant while she tattooed them on him. It didn't seem like he was getting anywhere until he realized she had tattooed on a rose leaf that he hadn't asked for . He had to look it up, but a rose leaf turned out to mean 'you may hope' and that was it. Marco had always been a mama's boy and pursuing a girl she didn't approve was the first time he had ever gone against her. Yvette got the blame for that, of course, but she let Marco name the twins after mom-in-law's parents and that soothed a lot of it. First draft of tattoo ideas for Marco before I got the idea to group the flowers into the skull image.