Gene and Bette are moving and are going through a million old photos and dispersing them to interested parties. Saw photos of Bob as a 7 year old. Lots of photos of baby Jane and George. I think we are going to try to send them to a service to scan them.
Did a three mile old-house run today. Ran to the house I consider my “real” childhood home. Look! A Z4 parked in the driveway – certainly an upgrade from the Duster and Gremlin we had. I remember sock fights with my parents in this house. I remember climbing the trees in the front yard. I remember playing with all the neighborhood kids – hide and seek in the dark. And I remember the woods in the backyard.
I ducked into the woods in the middle and looks for our old trails – places where Donald (who apparently can now run 400m in 1:04. Not bad!) and I fished for minnows and crayfish with our kitchen strainers. I had to schooch over a log to cross a stream (and convince Maxi to come with me).
Finally emerged and ran past the house that we lived at when Donald was born. This house I have fewer memories – I remember playing on the swingset in the backyard and the neighbors two houses down. They’ve built an addition – I wish I could go inside and see it.
It’s hard to get out as a family these days on the weekends – often Vince has plans and Jeremy, Edda and I drift to our respective computers and work or watch TV or putter around the house. So it was with great effort that we all headed out this weekend in the pouring rain to the movies. We saw Frozen – recommended by friends – and Edda loved every minute of it. Laughed at all the jokes – had the best time ever.
Ate at a Korean chicken place right before the movie. Rainy days have the best light.
Our friend, Vidya, came from Philly to spend Sat. night with us. When he walked in the front door – he couldn’t recognize Jeremy without his goatee. Vidya was a few years ahead of me in grad school – helped me out on my slightly disastrous research project. We stayed up late, late, late talking about Indian politics. Diplomats, conspiracy theories and LGBT rights. Reminded me that I should read Son of the Circus again. Seems like just yesterday we were all sitting around grad student housing watching Friends and Seinfeld.
Went to Vince’s orchestra concert last night. Three groups – orchestra, band and chorus. I was preparing myself for a long, drawn out concert in a hot stuffy room because that’s what they were like in elementary school. But the teachers in middle school had the good sense to make the whole thing 45 minutes long and everyone played/sang popular songs. Katy Perry, Star Wars, Beethoven all made appearances.
Vince and his fellow orchestra pals.
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Vince is going to my junior high alma mater. It does give me a strange and happy feeling to watch Vince play violin in the same gym where I played violin concerts as well. Actually, I think he is using my old violin. I did manage to find my photo on the wall in the 1986 class photo.
The arctic blast is headed our way tonight. We’ll see how cold it gets here. It’ll get cold, but not as cold as a lot of the country.
Vince had to write an adventure story for school tomorrow. He is so handicapped by his slow handwriting, poor spelling/punctuation ability and slow typing speed. The rough draft which he worked on at school was maybe eight sentences long – a lot of them unreadable as many of the words are misspelled and everything is more poorly punctuated than this blog. As soon as I volunteered to be his typist, a whole, fully formed wonderful story with metaphors and plots twists and details spills from his mouth. I handled all the spelling and punctuation. Since he didn’t have to worry about punctuation, all this funny and complicated dialog between the characters appeared (dialog is the worst thing for Vince to punctuate correctly or anyone for that matter). Is writing the direct act of putting pencil to paper or finger to keyboard? Or is it the actual story buried beneath the mechanics? I’m hoping that the story is the most important part and that the mechanics will catch up sooner or later – either by Vince getting better at typing or computers better at editing.
Edda’s counselors, Izzy and Sarah, from Camp JCC came by to visit yesterday. We had a rollicking good time – lots of good talks about music (Izzy is a french horn player) and speech therapy (Sarah is working on a speech therapy degree). This was the first time we really had a chance to talk to them, Nat usually did the drop off and pick up at camp so we never had a chance to chat before. They even got to put Edda down for a nap. They are holding Edda’s Peter Rabbit, the last toy that she could really hold on to – up until she was about 18 or 20 months old before she lost her hand use.
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Sliding into the new year now – I feel with the snow day on Friday, we never really got going. Now school for me starts in less than 20 days, so I have my own work that I have to get into some order before school starts. Last term, I didn’t really realize how much work it was going to be. This term, I’m a little scared to balance everything I want to do because I pretty much know exactly how much work it’s going to be. But the term is only three months (OK maybe really like 4…, but three sounds so much better). Jeremy has deadlines at work (we’ve turned into people who work on weekends now, when did that happen?) and Nat is going on vacation for 10 days at the end of January. Going to be fun times.