feel the beat on the tambourine

maura @ 9:37 pm

Jonathan called me a blog slacker (blocker?), so here I am, posting again, EVEN THOUGH I DON’T HAVE TO.

We might get snow tonight, woo hoo! And my skates finally came, so I am going skating before class on Friday in Bryant Park. Because I am a nerd. A skating nerd.

Back to work! I’m simultaneously planning xmas gifts and researching a term paper. Ah, the glory of the interwebs, whatever did we do before Al Gore invented it?

har

maura @ 8:04 pm

So festive! Now maybe I can finally get some Xmas shopping done.

P.S. Did you know that Punk Rock Karl has a blog too? Of course you did!

the moral of the story

maura @ 10:01 pm

Day 30 and I made it, phew! Thanks again are due to M. Kennedy for firing up this vast NaBloPoMo machine.

I will say that I learned that I can blag more often than once a week. But every day is a bit much. I neglected my journal severely this month, which of course is just like this except full of complaints and neuroses of a more private variety. (You wouldn’t like it, honest.)

Also I learned that without my partner, my kid, and my new career, I would have very little to say. Which I guess is true of many folks, and not so bad anyway.

Also I learned that I can write a short post on my visor on the subway without too much annoyance or difficulty if I tap the letters screen with the stylus. I mean, it’s not the best thing in the world, but it works okay.

What I didn’t learn is how long I’d have to continuously click on the NaBloPoMo randomizer to bring up my website. I gave it a valiant effort far too many times without success.

At least I can check the analytics (recently installed by the esteemed tech department of mauraweb!) which report that by gum, a few people did get here from there. So welcome! Come back anytime, especially after the semester is over and I have MUCH MORE TIME FOR THIS NEWFANGLED BLAG THING.

the day i saw you the skies turned blue

maura @ 9:15 am

An early entry today, as I’ve got my internship then a playdate then dinner then (Gus’) bedtime then (my) homework. Phew!

Even though it’s after Thanksgiving, here are some things I am thankful for:

– Club 8, for being so singalongable and making me not mind the drive to pick Gus up from school so much.

– Jonathan’s leftovers soup which he made for dinner last night. Lentils, carrots, potatoes, frozen spinach, tofu, chicken broth and some of my mom’s leftover gravy from Thanksgiving. Yum!

– Having a glass of wine with 5 friends from Gus’ old school who live in our neighborhood last night. I feel like there’s way too little time for grown-up friends these days, we are all so busy. It was so nice to sit and talk without the kids around. I’m so glad, too, that even though Gus is no longer in school with those kids we are keeping up the friendships.

Time to go — Happy Wednesday!

meet me at the jean cocteau

maura @ 7:44 pm

A haiku, for you:

Very ready am I
For NaBloPoMo to end
Almost it is there

Say it with me: two more days!

there are leaves in the trees

maura @ 7:08 pm

We’re in the home stretch now with this crazy NaBloPoMo thing, woo hoo! Looks like I might even make it to the bitter end, despite the poorly-timed fact that I have two (2!) class projects due at the end of the week. Sleep is for the weak!

Taking yet another page from the Book of Anne, here’s what we’re reading right now:

Absolutely, Positively Alexander, by Judith Viorst (Gus)
We’d been talking about the no good horrible very bad day book (Gus had read it at school), then they had this threefer when I went to check it out of the library. Quality stuff for the parents too, like carpooling in an old VW bug with a kid in the front seat! And a very good reason NOT to have gum at bedtime.

Adverbs, by Daniel Handler (Me)
You know him better as Lemony Snicket, but he has a real name and writes for grown-ups too. This is his new novel, though the library stuck a “short stories” sticker on the spine. Each chapter name is an adverb. It’s funny, light, sweet, and a little chewy, just like the delicious coconut meringue cookies my mom makes at Xmas. Mmmmm, I’m hungry.

Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, by James Tiptree Jr. (Me)
I’ve only read the first of these short stories, but man, it was good. James Tiptree is the pen name of Alice Sheldon, and these are some really great scifi stories.

Hold on to Your Kids, Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate (Me)
I keep hearing good things about this parenting book so I finally requested it from the library. Though I guess I didn’t read the subtitle too closely (“Why Parents Matter More than Peers”) because it’s more about today’s tween problems than the tantrum my 5-in-less-than-a-week yr old threw last week on the B71. I may just return this to the library unread.

A Little History of the World, by E. H. Gombrich (Me)
I started this at the beach over the summer and shamefully have left it lying on the shelf since school started. But since it’s a story that I already kind of know, it’s not like I’m losing the thread of it. It’s so nicely written, everyone should read it!

True Names by Vernor Vinge, and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier, edited by James Frenkel (Jonathan)
I don’t know anything about this book, but Jonathan seems to like it. The Publishers Weekly blurb on Amazon says: “This remarkable anthology reprints Hugo winner Vinge’s (The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge) “True Names” (1981), the story that began SF’s cyberpunk revolution, with 11 essays showing its effect on science as well as fiction.”

Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories, by Dr. Seuss (Gus)
Everyone loves these three classic stories of bluster, bragging, and vanity. Gus has been particularly into people getting their comeuppance lately, so he is all over these.

Also Jonathan says he’s reading “A Ruby book and another programming book,” but he didn’t tell me their names. Maybe it’s for a secret project! A secret project to raise my traffic numbers. He installed Google Analytics on our websites recently which revealed that his hearts server is completely kicking my ass.

all the tickets you couldn’t sell

maura @ 9:42 pm

Does everybody collect things? I think so, seems like it is just human nature. Gus has taken to collecting various things since his toddlerhood like a duck to water. And, despite my desire to clean and minimize and get rid of everything we don’t use, I’m a packrat and a collecting suckah, too.

Here are some of the things we collect.

Me:

– Watches: Some are Swatches but I also have a fair number cheesy cereal box and happy meal watches. I stopped wearing a watch when I was pregnant (thought it would help me chill out, which it did) though so now they are all in a big clear plastic tub.

– Bags: I’ve mentioned this one before.

– Pee Wee Herman stuff: I loooooooooooove Pee Wee. I have the talking doll, plush Chairry, a very cool Ice Cream Soup tshirt that I don’t wear anymore for fear of disintegration, colorforms and a plastic, 3-section dinner plate. Plus all the DVDs, of course.

Gus:

– Subway and bus timetables: He loves the subway, and he loves these timetables. We have planned entire days’ outings around riding a new line so we can acquire a new timetable, no lie.

– Corks: For some reason he loves corks. Whenever we open a bottle of wine he asks for the cork. Sometimes, if the neighbors are over for dinner, he and his friend will play with “Corky” as if it were an action figure or doll or something. Crazy kids.

– Anything from Nature: I’ve just cleaned up a whole pile of dead leaves from the coffee table. And then there was that time with the maggot last year (which, it turns out, was an acorn weevil). Right now we have “monkey balls”* (sweetgum pods) dropping seeds all over the house. Aahh, nature.

* Okay, when I was little we always called them monkey balls, but the website I linked to above calls them gumballs. What??? Preposterous!

All of us, separated by generation:

– Smashy pennies: Jonathan and I had collected these in a freewheeling, ironic way before Gus’ birth. We even have one from New Zealand, which we made on the ferry between the North Island and South Island when we were there on our honeymoon. We were sooooooo ironic and freewheeling about it that I even mounted some of the best in frames and hung them on the walls.

And then, Gus was born. And apparently there’s a whole big smashy penny industry out there just waiting to suck in the kids, because every damn zoo, museum and other cultural/natural institution has at least one smashy penny machine. Now we cannot leave the house on a trip to one of those places without being reminded to bring “one penny and two quarters for me please”. He keeps his segregated from his real money in a special, small bank shaped like a purple crayon.

i’d bite you if i had the teeth

maura @ 8:12 pm

What has become abundantly clear over the past 25 days is that I really am a once-a-week kind of blagger. I simply don’t have enough material to rock it everyday-style like those professionals out there.

Plus, I have homework to do.

get off my hill tiny man

maura @ 3:53 pm

Last xmas my mom got Gus a couple of fairy tales on tape for the car. We hadn’t listened to them in ages but pulled them out again recently in a desperate attempt to keep him awake on the ride home from school (which is only 15 min long but they run ’em hard in kindergarten so he is often exhausted).

Gus’ favorite tape is read by Margot Kidder. He especially loves Puss in Boots, The Frog Prince and The Brave Little Tailor. Ms. Kidder actually does a great job reading the stories, even breaking into a few different voices for each character*. We’ve found ourselves spontaneously breaking out in pieces of the stories around the house: e.g. “Youngest princess! Keep your promise to me youngest princess!” in a froggy voice.

* The other tape is read by Ed Begley, Jr., who is somewhat more sleep-inducing and less entertaining.

Hey, it’s Buy Nothing Day — don’t forget to fight the consumerist agenda, you stinky hippie!

i am the boogie man

maura @ 8:24 pm

Ah, Thanksgiving. I’d wager today is the day NoBloPoMo-ers are most likely to forget to post. But not I! No, I’m on top of it. RIGHT there on the tippy top.

Except that there’s nothing much to say. Dinner was tasty, especially the sauteed kale with bacon and onions (and the turkey + stuffing too). Gus is enjoying some quality cousin time and obsessing over “Nightmare Before Christmas”, which they’ve watched twice today. The vibe has been pretty calm all day. Not too bad for a rainy Thanksgiving.

But tomorrow we have GOT to get that kid outside.