Unmitigated

My First Grandbaby

Meet Hurley.

My Son, the Worrier

My almost-19-year-old son is not much of a communicator. It's something that I bug him about occasionally. It's a little ironic that I bother him about it, because I'm certain this stoic attitude came from me. I stil work on communicating with people I love. I am a little better at it now than I was at his age, but if I am speaking truthfully (and I'm trying), then the degree of improvement has been small-ish.

I added the "ish" there, because I'm also trying to cut myself some slack, but that's another topic, and this post was supposed to be about my son. SO...

My friend's pediatrician told her something very wise. There are three things you can't make kids do, as a parent: eat, sleep, and use a toilet. I never wanted to battle over food, because I didn't want food to have that kind of emotional baggage. I was very lucky to have two good, cooperative sleepers. The toilet?

After months of battling with my daughter about toilet training, I decided that I was not going to battle the next kid, and I let him decide when he wanted to do the whole 'potty like a big boy' thing. Which meant that he, like his sister before him, left diapers behind at nearly the age of four, when it was time for Pre-K. My sanity was saved, but not my budget. Diapers that fit a three-year-old kid are expensive!

As part of getting ready for Pre-K, he had a physical, like his sister had. He was very excited to get to pee in a cup! It turned out that there was just the merest hint of blood in his urine, and the doc wasn't alarmed, but wanted to do an ultrasound, just to err on the side of caution.

It was scheduled for the following week, and I spent some time telling him about how it wouldn't hurt, and that the doctor would be able to use a special machine to take a look inside of him.

Whatever I said, I somehow managed to increase his fear, rather than allay it, and on the way to the doctor's office for the ultrasound, he said, with tears in his little blue eyes, "Are they gonna take off my brown?"

Your what?

He grabbed the skin on his arm, and said, "My brown. Are they gonna take it off to see inside me?" We are a pretty pale family, but the boy has always gotten a bit of a suntan, despite the sunscreen.

He thought they were going to remove his skin to look inside.

Let me tell you how much my heart broke for him, right there. Poor baby, had been worried for days but didn't say a thing, until he could no longer hold it in.

Ready for more?

The summer of 1999, I was getting ready to return to college to get my teaching degree. We had been talking to the kids about it for months, as it meant a few changes in schedules, etc, for all of us. The boy, now seven years old, asked again, with those damn blue eyes, "Mom, when are you moving into the dorm?"

Gah! How long he had been carrying that one around, I don't know, but he managed to break my heart again. He knew that college students lived in dormitories. The idea of a commuter campus was beyond his imagining. Older sister didn't seem worried about anything, so maybe he thought she wasn't concerned because she was nine years old, and maybe when you are nine, you don't need mom so much.

Lately, when he asks us about things like the Instructor-in-Training program he is joining at the martial arts school, I can see him framing questions carefully. I know there is some kind of fear in there somewhere, and now, if there were tears in his blue eyes, I'd have to look way up to the top of his six-foot-three frame to see them.

Damn kid. Better not break my heart again.

*sigh*

Dig That Knife in a Little Further, Please...

Okay, obviously I am too old for my own damn audience. The "Oscar-winning rabbit" part was facetious. That's how Bugs Bunny was introduced after 1958, when Knightly Knight, Bugs! won an Oscar for animated short.

The actor, who was invisible to us because we were several rows of people back in the crowd, DID rhyme with Lawn Men, however, and won an Oscar for his last major performance as a San Francisco city supervisor that was shot and killed by a giant Twinkie.

The concert? Was the same song, performed six complete, and two incomplete, times, and was incredible.

RTT: A Different Kind of Tuesday

Just to add a little spice to the Random Tuesday Thoughts, I am messing with the format. That's just the kind of wild and crazy woman I am.

Or, my life is sufficiently un-exciting that I can "shake things up" by not centering Keely's button. Hold on people, it's gonna be a bumpy ride

You may be wondering why I am not at work today. You were, weren't you? You could tell by my typing, and this devil-may-care attitude that I am still in my jammies at 10:37 a.m., couldn't you? That's just how perceptive you are. It's why I love YOU best (keep that on the DL, I don't want to hurt my other readers' feelings--they're very sensitive). Any way, I am not at my regular job today, because an amazing opportunity presented itself, that I couldn't pass up.

What was that opportunity, you ask?

Well, here's where things get sticky. I can only say so much...you may recall that the film industry has tremendous tax breaks here in Michigan, and that I have previously had the chance to work as "background," or as a film 'extra.' On set they call us background, as in..."Roll film...background...and action!"

That's how important we are. We enter the scene before the actors. Except the actors are usually called "talent," to distinguish from us, the untalented, I suppose. And we aren't allowed to mingle with the talent. 

So there's a film being shot here currently, and it stars that Oscar-Winning Rabbit that rhymes with Lawn Men. The movie's name comes from the title of the Talking Heads song that Buddy and I picked for our first dance at our wedding, 25 years ago.

So, when the chance came to be an extra in the filming of a concert scene with the original performer of the song? I jumped at the chance. Even better, they told us we could bring a guest between the ages of 18 and 50, so we just squeaked under that line there.

So that's this afternoon.

So far this post doesn't seem too random, so let's jump into the WABAC machine and head to...yesterday. Short trip. I saw my pain guy yesterday, Dr. R, and we tweaked the meds a bit, and decided it was time for a refresher of last year's ablation procedure. Not my favorite thing to do, but I went from January to August of this year with little or no pain at all. 

The latest version of the Educator Guide from The Henry Ford, EDventures (get it?) is all published and pretty, and not only am I quoted in it, my picture is in it! I think I need to talk to those film people about moving me out of the 'background" category, and into the "middle-but-kind-of-out-of-focus-ground."

Yeah.

Go see Keely.

Stealing the BBC Book List

...from LoJo

The BBC apparently believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here (My count is 38, I think):

BOLD THE ONES YOU’VE READ!

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma - Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (Hey BBC, this is one of the Chronicles of Narnia)

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy.

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth.

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt.

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo