St. Valentine

"There is no surprise more magical than the surprise of being loved. It is God's finger on man's shoulder."
- Charles Morgan"You don't marry someone you can live with - you marry the person who you cannot live without. The ultimate test of a relationship is to disagree but to hold hands."
- Alexandra Penney

Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction."
- Saint-Exupery

"A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous."
- Ingrid Bergman"To love another person is to see the face of God."
- Les Miserables

"Sympathy constitutes friendship; but in love there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole."
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time."
- Lawrence Durrell"If you love someone, let them go. If they return to you, it was meant to be. If they don't, hunt them down and kill them slowly."
- Chief

"True love never dies for it is lust that fades away. Love bonds for a lifetime but lust just pushes away."
-Alicia Barnhart

Horseshit, Alicia. Lust and love are fire and fuel, fuel and fire, that joyous bonfire made when Love's strong Arts (of such noble individual parts) makes one fire of four flaming eyes and of two loving hearts. You couldn't be wronger.

It will be ten years ago this October, but I still yearn for you, my love, like I did when we first married; to talk with you, to work beside you, to make love to you, to make a life with you.I love you. Happy Feast of Valentine.

New Year's Resolution

Mojo has wanted a new workplace for her laptop for some time.

The front room (a.k.a. living-room-dining-room-family-room-place-for-all-people-almost-all-the-time) has one particularly wasted space in the bay window in the northeast corner. We removed the other wasted bay when we added the porch, but the remaining one is a constant, nagging, reminder of the poor design of the little 1920s spec house we live in.

We've been limping along trying to shove various desks in the space. They have been functional at best, but what my bride really wanted was something custom-made to take advantage of the space. So being the loving spouse I am I finally got down to crafting a fitted desk to the space over the New Year weekend after mere months of promises and prevarication.And here is the grateful helpmeet at her new desk. The supports are a pair of kitchen cabinets salvaged from the Rebuilding Center, total $20, while the tabletop is a pair of clear pine 1/2" boards, total $24. The IKEA desk this contraption replaced cost, I recall, something like $45, so an actual saving of one dollar was realized!I'm glad my sweetie is happy. But if only doing something about the single bathroom in the house was this easy...

Tradition!

Big Boy came home this week with something called "Thanksgiving Homework" from his second grade class.

This consisted of a two-page (double-sided) sheet with some fairly incursive questions about what he had done for T-giving and things like his personal favorite sights, smells, sounds, and tastes of the holiday. Oh, and he had to draw a family tree.The question that stumped us, though, was regarding "family traditions".

Because, you see, we're the very worst sort of rootless, mongrel Americans. Homogenized, pasteurized, bland...our families got to this continent and dropped their old customs and mores like a live grenade.

And we have so far successfully resisted the late trend for "re-traditionalizing" families and holidays. We gesture towards the occasion, but, really, I am an utter pagan and Mojo, who does randomly lurch towards some sort of holiday spirit now and then, is really too slothful to complete the effort.

So we sat there, the three of us; the Boy poised with his pencil and his shining evening face looking for parental guidance, and my bride and I, utterly clueless. Bereft. Vacant of inspiration. Utterly gobsmacked.We could not think of a single, solitary family "tradition" - for Thanksgiving, or for any other holiday, for that matter. We were adrift in a sea of postmodern American anomie; we had no traditions.

Finally, in the way my mind always works, it drifted from trying to think of a family tradition to the notion of tradition in general and from there to historic quotes regarding tradition, and from there to Winston Churchill. And that's where I came upon a suggestion for the Peep.

"Rum, buggery, and the lash?"

Mojo and I were forcibly struck by the likely reaction of Peep's very dignified second-grade teacher confronted by this as a family tradition, and spent the next four minutes or so snorting and giggling.

The Peep was NOT amused. He had no idea what the three things were, but he knew that his parents were being irresponsible, and refused to write it down. I think he settled for "Eating Thanksgiving dinner with family".Smart boy.

I suspect that if one of our children turns out to be a serial murderer or a Wikileaker no one at the elementary school will be surprised. We're such bad parents.

Again with the cooties

Poor little Miss.

She just can't seem to repel the Louse Invasion.

So this Sunday we huddled inside against the nasty wet cold, I got in a steamy tub full of soapy water - the Girl likes her bathwater on the scalding side of hot - and scrubbed her little head thoroughly. After enough mermaid play I lifted her out, towelled her dry, and raised the shears above her head.Before you could say "Rapunzel" little Miss had lost half her shiny black hair.

Luckily for us we'd been preparing her for the moment for several days, reassuring her that it would grow back, explaining how we needed to trim her crop so that the Good Medicine could whack the Bad Bugs and stop them from making her head itch.So she was a very Good Little Girl and ended up with the appallingly cliche' Adorable Chinese Moppet Bowl Cut; she looks like she stepped off the package of some awful La Choy industrial-grade dinner. Sweet-and-sour pork, probably.

But that wasn't the idea. The idea was the civilized version of the Shaved Head And Purple Nit Paint of my youth; the idea was Death to Lice, and the Little Miss' defoliated dome worked like Agent Orange on a second-growth forest in the Ia Drang Valley. The little boogers got napalmed, and then Mojo went in behind the airstrikes with the tooth-comb ground assault and combed out the stay-behind ambushes and louse-egg booby traps.Mind you, everything has its cost. For us it was two anxious hours hovering over the Girl ensuring that the vile louse-shampoo stayed out of her "nose, eyes, mouth, and vagina" (according to the directions on the package. Who the hell goes around sticking louse shampoo in their lovely lady bits? Unless you're stupid enough to use this stuff on CRAB lice, which it very clearly tells you not to. Honestly, just when you think you've plumbed the depth of human inanity...). The pink headband was a means to keep the stuff off her face.Anyway, the entire effort seems to have been worth it. So far, Little Miss appears louse-free. And her mother does, too, since after several hours of furtive scratching (entirely sympathetic, IMO) Mojo dosed herself, too.

So here she is with her mom, both of them squeaky clean American Girls without a scintilla of nit between them.