Out with the Old, in with the New

We said we wouldn't paint over the dark wood in the farmhouse kitchen, and I like the wallpaper- although I am told it is out of fashion.

Today, TLBP and I both suddenly thought, at the exact same time, that the handles on the cabinets and the drawer pulls were just ugly. Replacing them isn't too expensive, and it's easy as pie, so we went ahead and did it.

Here's before:

And after:

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

And then here's all the old hardware, eleven drawer pulls and eighteen cabinet handles:

Would anyone like to have these? They might look good painted, or even just on something different.

Next weekend, perhaps we will tackle the cottage cheese balls that pose as light fixtures in the mud room.

The Different Parents

Little Z is at an age (2) when she can interact with people on her own, but she needs to have someone with her. I take her out and about a lot and we meet people and it's fun, for the most part. I end up having short conversations with many parents as we watch our children play together or put on our coats after a music class or story time or whatever. It always amazes me all the different types of parents you meet. Parents are as different as people, of course.

This guy I met a week or two ago, for instance. He was a stay-at-home dad with twin boys, Tim and Jacob. I'm pretty down with stay-at-home dads. I think it's awesome if a woman can land a job that pays enough for her husband to stay at home with the kids- and pay for tuition to this lovely music class we do. Wonderful! So, I was talking with this guy after class as we were putting our shoes and coats on. (This is always a comical process, as toddlers never understand that you should not stand in front of the door. No one can ever leave or come in or reach a shoe. The place is set up all wrong, and I find it hilarious to watch, but I digress.) I was trying to steer the conversation away from our kids a bit, and we got on the topic of names... blah blah blah... he was still talking about other people's kids, and Tim and Jacob, and the YMCA and he couldn't stop talking about kids, kids, kids, and I had told him my name and everything and the guy never told me his own name, so I just asked him, and he said,
"Oh, I'm Eric, but most people just call me Tim and Jacob's Dad."
"You're Eric!" I exclaimed. "That's a good name!" (We had been talking about names.)
"Yeah, but you can just call me 'Tim and Jacob's Dad'. Like it says on the shirt."
I looked more closely at his black tee shirt, and sure enough, on the back of his shirt, it said, "Tim and Jacob's Dad."

I'm sure that, somewhere, someone is blogging about what a freakin' weirdo I am. But, man. That's weird! He didn't even want me to call him by his own name. He was just Tim and Jacob's dad. That's it. It made me a little sad inside.

There was one parent that made me really happy, too, one day. She was this real butch lady, talked like a man, with this sweet little one year old girl at the playground at the mall. Pretty much the second I started talking with her, as our kids played next to each other and completely ignored each other (as kids that age do) she was rattling off her daughter's benchmarks,
"She started feeding herself at eight months. Her hand-eye coordination is extraordinary. She was walking at ten months, turning pages of books. She can hang on to a bar and hold her own weight for fifteen seconds..." And on and on. Just statistical data, all of it extraordinary. She talked with just the utmost, complete love and admiration for her child. It was amazing. I was so happy for her. But, also, I was so refreshed by her blatant belief that her child was superior to all others. That's how everyone feels, right? My child is the best! But you never actually say so. You don't just walk up to complete strangers and tell them how great your kid is! (You leave that to the grandparents.) Man, that lady was refreshing. I'll never forget her.

First Snow

Friday Farm Functionals: The Schmoosher from Space

See, here's the problem:

That's our yard. Not the farming part, the "pretty" part. It's clay. Real clay, like you would sculpt with in pottery class. And there is some sort of spring underneath, and the integrity of the drainage has just been completely curplumaged by that geothermal, and the puddles are over a foot deep and I don't want Little Z to drown there and it used to be such pretty grass and-

What we need is a giant, flat object, preferably free and from out space, to come down and schmoosh it all flat for us, so we can plant some pretty things.


Ah. That would be so nice.

Why we write

My friend Jen has this horror blog and we were actually talking on the phone last night, really talking like with our voices and stuff- not just commenting on each others' blogs. It was amazing.

Apparently, her blog has a huge following, even though she gets very few comments. Kudos to Jen! She's always been a living encyclopedia of film, and yet still somehow had a personality. (If her personality was a film, it would be a darkly ironic comedy, I think. Probably it would be in Italian, too. Not that she speaks Italian or is Italian, but it would be in Italian, nevertheless. With subtitles and long silences.) She says that, even though she has like a billion or so readers, she just writes for herself.

That's why I write this one, too. I just write for myself. It makes me happy to let my freak flag fly high.

So, fellow bloggers, why do you blog?

And if your personality were a film, what genre would you be found under?

(I guess I should answer the second question for myself. I would be a low budget musical with a few decorative transvestites- transvestites in non-central roles, I mean. And there would be tubas.)

The two year old view

We let Little Z try using the camera today. Here are a few of her pictures.

Norwegian Wood

Musicals are so unrealistic. When, in real life, do people just spontaneously burst into song and sing harmonies together? It has happened to me only once.

When I was seventeen and I lived in Malung, Sweden for a year, I was part of a vocal ensemble called, very descriptively, "malungs vokalensemble". We were a hodgepodge group of wacky folks, including a weird blind guy who one night grabbed me and gave me a big wet kiss on the mouth. Ew! Most of the group was women, though. There was one woman in particular I remember, a skinny lady with auburn hair who always had some sort of drama going on her life. There were twelve of us, three for each four parts, or maybe it was four for each three parts- I forget. We sang, though, and what we lacked in talent, we didn't really make up for in anything. We sang a lot of folk songs and did small performances every couple of months. We were sort of like the feel good movie of the year, with our eclectic group of people of varied singing ability, but hearts of gold (the blind guy, for instance, seemed to be completely tone deaf, but we were so lacking in men that we kept him on) but they never made a movie out of us, because we never did that great thing that would make you feel good.

I was the only native English speaker in the group. This didn't really matter, except for when we found a nice, three part (or was it four part?) arrangement of "Norwegian Wood" in English. Since everyone else was singing with a Swedish accent, I had to sing like them to blend in, "Eesent eet gud, Norveegian Wud?" This was actually a bit difficult. It's hard to do something wrong on purpose. I secretly thought our performances of that song were absolutely terrible. Because they were.

In the spring of 1992, I took a bus trip to Norway. It was a three hour drive to Oslo. As we were boarding the bus, I noticed someone from Malungs Vokalensemble loading six flower-print suitcases onto the bus. (It was going to be a four day trip.) It was none other than the auburn haired drama queen. Always very enthusiastic, she was ecstatic to see me.

A few days later, we were in Oslo, taking a guided tour of the Norwegian Parliament, Stortinget. The tour guide was pointing out all of the different types of beautiful wood used in the interior. "All of these woods," she explained, "are from Norway."

The Drama Queen and I turned to each other. Our eyes met. We each took in a deep breath, and, in spite of the ten other people on the tour and the very business oriented guide, we broke out spontaneously into two-part harmony,

"Eesent eet gud, Norveegian Wud?"

Friday Farm Functionals: National Seating High Performance Suspension Truck Seat

Now that I'm a commuter, I think I might need to upgrade my car seat. According to the Northern Tool Catalogue, "This National Seating high performance suspension truck seat is an ideal choice for OTR drivers."

Yeah. I don't know exactly what an OTR driver is, but I'm sure I am one. And it's from a catalog, so it must be really great, especially because it costs $749, and weighs 95 lbs. I might have to cut a small hole in the roof of my car for my head to fit through, but that is surely a small price to pay for the ease and comfort that this truck seat will bring me. What more could one ever ask for? I had one when I was a bus driver, and it really bounced going down those dips in the road in Pueblo West. Boingy boingy boingy. Those kids were never happy unless they hit their heads on the roof at least once on the way home.

A link to make you feel better

I had a dream once that had a message, sort of like a fable. The message was: Don't despair. There's always someone worse than you.

A variation on this message might be: Don't despair. There's always someone who's got it worse than you.

The people who received this letter definitely had it worse than I.