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Tuesday, May 31, 2005
Very Beautiful Day
Some days are so wonderful that they surprise me from sun-up to bed time. That's because only good things CAN surprise me. I have seen so much awful stuff that I kind of expect BAD, and then a good thing happens and I'm just speechless, spitless and amazed. All day today was too good, just fabulous.
When I woke up, Lydia called and asked what I had in mind. I truthfully responded that nothing whatsoever was on my mind because I only just opened my eyes. I asked, "What's on YOUR mind?"
She said, "I planned today to take the kids to swim at the YMCA because both of them love that. At breakfast I told them we were going swimming. Benny worried, 'Can't we spend the day with Ahno instead? I want to go see Ahno.' "
Lydia, "But Benny, SWIMMING!!! You love that."
He reiterated, "Let's go to Ahno's house today."
Hearing this, I naturally yelled, "Take those kids to the pool and leave me alone!!!!" NOT!
Shortly thereafter Lydia and the kids showed up. Unfortunately I did not have the entire house vacuumed and disinfected. When I know in advance that the children are going to be with me at a certain time, I get the place sparkling clean. Not having had advance warning, they came into a house tht had not been especially cleaned and disinfected for them. Oh, well...
Immediately Benny wanted to play Playstation games. I said yes. Then I remembered that his mother was on hand and changed my tune, "Ask your mother. It's up to her."
Lydia OK'ed the video games.
As Benny played video games, Lydia worked on her blog. Baby played with this and that.
Finally lunch rolled around. I offered Stauffer's French bread pizzas. Lydia accepted on behalf of the children.
As the children played, Lydia worked on her website,and as the pizza baked, I cleaned fresh strawberries. I called to Benny, "Come here and try this berry. I want to see how many bites it takes to eat it."
Benny showed up to do kitchen research and we found that a really large strawberry requires nine bites for a little boy to eat it.
Sadie required almost forty-five minutes on the job as a pizza eater. Eventually she gave up, and when Lydia asked, "Would you like to take a nap?" Sadie nodded, "Yes."
Then Lydia went up to the work room with an armload of fabric. She said that Benny's violin teacher needs new cushions in her studio and asked Lydia to create them.
As Lydia sewed and Sadie slept, Benny and I created a concoction called Triple Chocolate Decadence. It required a great deal of discussion. Benny ended up doing all of the work. When our lovely project came out of the oven, Benny sniffed the chocolate smell hard enough to almost dredge up the entire beautiful treat as a scent.
About then Sadie woke up. Lydia and Sadie came downstairs and we all set out for a walk around the Yacht Basin. benny rode his bicycle. I pushed the stroller. Lydia took charge of the effervescent Pork Chop.
Past all of my favorite houses. Down by the Yacht Basin. On and on we went and it was all scenic.
After a long time, Benny asked, "Are we going back to Ahno's house?" and we turned around. On the homebound way, we used the water-side route.
On our side of the water was a sidewalk and grass and homes. Across the inlet were marinas and restaurants with outdoor, water-facing tables and live misic. Between us and the marinas were sailing boats small, big, huge, and ridiculous, coming and going to their berths. The sun shone. A cool breeze refreshed us. The baby gabbled happily. Benny obeyed all of Lydia's traffic strictures. One house had two free-range big dogs which threatened Pork Chop, but the owner was outside and made the dogs stop in time.
Finally we reached my house again. Benny and Sadie watched "The Incredibles" with me downstairs as Lydia tried to finish her project upstairs. I put supper for Lydia and her family into the oven...cleaned more strawberries for their dessert.
Then it was over. Lydia, the kids, all their stuff, the hot food, Benny's bicycle...it all went into the van. Pork Chop and I settled back for a rest. A lovely day.
Lydia said, "Really, Ahno. You live in a beautiful neighborhood." Right...except that as we came home from our walk, I noticed that a recent round of evictions at the yellow apartments has magicked a pile of matresses, a line of old, broken-down dressers/tables/chairs/etc at the curb across the street.
The Monkey Wants Me To Be Great
More about games...
When Benny plays Donkey Conga, I can not sit beside him and watch...which hurts his feelings because he likes to have an admiring audience. With other games, I'm right there. I can watch him fly through the rings in Spyro: A Hero's Tale for any amount of time. I can watch the races in Mario Cart almost indefinitely. Donkey Conga, though, is too painful to watch. Here's why. Benny choses a song and begins. Then the first beat in the song where he achieves less that a GREAT, he starts over. Once I believe he began "Bingo" more then a hundred times.
When I noticed this tendency developing, I argued, "The whole point is to enjoy the tunes, Benny. So play the whole song. Sure, you'll make little mistakes, but over-all you make a very high score and it's nice to hear the music."
He ignored me. After a while, I notched up the rhetoric, "Benny, if you start that song again, we're turning off the game."
Of course it made him very sad to turn off the game. So I retried persuasion, "You know, Benny, I love to sit with you while you play, and it's nice for me to watch you. I can't take it, though, when you do this start over thing again and again. It makes me miserable. Next time it happens, I need to go into another room and do something else."
At that point, he always promised me that he would not ever again start over. Then immediately he started over. The first time this happened, he looked wretchedly around for an ameliorative, "I have to start over, Ahno. You want me to play the whole song, but the monkey wants me to be great."
"The monkey?" I question.
"Conga, the gorilla," he points to the screen.
"How do you know he wants you to only get GREATS? Maybe he'd like to have you play the whole song,"
"No. When we play two tracks, HE only gets greats. He wants me to do that, too."
Well, hey. Far be it from me to force a child to disappoint a monkey. Who am I in comparison? I'm just the Ahno who gets BADS, MISSES, and the occasional OK when I play. Clearly, I am an unworthy role model and no one who wants to succeed should listen to me.
Now when Benny senses that I'm about to go into my, "No more starting over," he raises a cautionary hand, keeping his eyes on the screen, of course, and with his other hand doing the beats, says, sternly, "No, Ahno. I have to listen to the monkey."
Monday, May 30, 2005
All Played Out
Computer games. So stressful. How I let myself get sucked out in the undertow of online games this weekend, I have no idea. Ordinarily I avoid games, but this weekend I played for hours. Shocking. I sat down to play, looked up at the clock a few minutes later and WHAT???? How could I have lost three hours? Which games had this sedative effect?
1) Chuzzle Deluxe. This is a shockwave game and the soundtrack alone is enough to permanently warp my mind. Little tweepie bleeps and blurps and clicks over and over and over. I sat matching chuzzles in a sort of coma. An hour passed and I thought it was just a couple of minutes. Really. It feels like sinking into an altered state. A whole screen full of brightly colored cute little creatures make noises and roll their eyes on and on and on. I don't know whether I love this game or if I am now a demented senior citizen who should be in a home. How could a normal person want to sit there for a whole hour clicking on chuzzle faces?
2) Rocket Mania...a Yahoo puzzle game. I love this game. I adore it. Maybe it's the cute little dragon who sits there rolling his eyes and making encouraging remarks. Maybe it's that each success yields a fireworks display. Maybe it's the lure of that impossible 7-rocket launch. (I really did that...once.) This was the first online game to reach out and hogtie me to my computer chair for endless hours of play. Maybe it's that no matter how hard I concentrate, I can't seem to get past Assistant To The Master.
3) Magic Vines...another Yahoo game. This game throws me into such a condition of desperation...I become obsessed. I must, I totally, absolutely must beat all the vine grids before time is up. No matter what. No matter how many times I have to practice. Oh, the misery to see the clock run out of time and to know that one little vine remains in an inaccessible position...or to have cleared the board with a split second left and ...OOOOH, NOOOOO! Here comes an evil lady bug. The whole time I play that game I say out loud to myself, " This is ridiculous. I'm quitting right now." And then right after saying it, I start again.
4) Gem Drop...it's a Wild Tangent game. This game subtly makes me more and more frantic. It begins soothingly. The gems drop and I line then up and it's kind of pretty. I'm racking up a huge score and then the gems drop faster. And faster and faster and my heart begins to pound, I hit wrong keys. And I begin again only to have the same thing repeat.
I suppose this is how it feels to be a compulsive gambler. Thank God that these little games don't cost money like gambling. Well, Chuzzle does, a little bit. You can play for a little while; then you have to buy the game for about $20.00. They do cost time, though. I go for weeks without thinking about computer games. Then I'll sit down and begin with Rocket Mania and I'm lost...hours later I come up out of the fog, exhausted, wondering where the time went.
At my house Benny's favorite video game is Donkey Conga for Play Station 2. He loves the game, but it's so much work. He won't allow himself any misses, bads, or OK's. Every beat has to be a GREAT. He literally works himself into the ground over the game. Sometimes I have to make him turn it off. It's horrible to see the little boy furiously determined and sweating away to get a perfect score. I say to him, "BENNY!!!! Stop. That is only a game. Don't take it so hard. I can't stand it." Which is an example of pure hypocrisy because I no sooner begin to play a game than I, too, obsess and go directly into high stress mode.
The only good thing about computer games that I can see is this; if I fall victim to serious anxiety, a computer game serves the same function as drawing. It focuses my whole attention on one simple thing and keeps me there. For people like me, the type that would never even consider going to the doctor for anti-anxiety pills, maybe computers games are an example of self-medication when once in a while I go over the top with uncontrollable land-mine explosions of nervousness. After an orgy of computer gaming, it's true that I'm tired, but the jumpiness is gone. Come to think of it, that may be the reason why a couple of times/month I come home with a sack of grocery store books and bury my nose in stories until the books are all read. Books, drawing, and computer games as the alternative to Zoloft. Hm...an instance of the overhead lightbulb blinking on, here. You've heard the expression, "Better living through chemistry?" I suppose the Joanna version of that would read, "Better living through drawing, books, and computer games." I like to think that what I do is better than frying my neurons with drugs, but perhaps I award myself unearned props.
House For Sale
Each day Pork Chop and I pass interesting old houses here in Colonial Place. Some of them are empty. None of them are exactly delapidated because the city fines property owners who let things go too far. However, the empty houses look like what they are. Some of them more so than others. One of the bigger old places, I have thought would be a nice house if someone fixed it up. On Saturday as we passed this house, I saw that it is now for sale, a sign in the yard. People came out as we passed and Porkee barked at them. One person sat down on the steps. I asked if she was the owner or a realtor, she said, "Realtor, listing agent." So I asked the price of the house. She named a price which got my eyebrows up, and she added, "Well, it does need work." She invited me to come in and tour the house. So that's what Pork Chop and I did. Finished basement. Big downstairs living room, family room, half bath, dining room, small kitchen, large foyer. Four large bedrooms upstairs and a full bath on the second floor. A fully finished third floor. All with new paint, carpet, and appliances. That house won't be on the market for long. During the time it took me to totter around looking in all the corners, three families saw the sign, stopped and took their own tour. I'm betting it will be sold by the end of this Memorial Day Weekend. One thing I do not understand is why the place was so hideously dirty. If I were trying to sell a house, the least I'd do would be to get out the vacuum cleaner. It's amazing what some people will tolerate. If I had paid the workers who left those cigarette butts all over new carpet upstairs and down, first I would have said a few unflattering things. At the very least, dropping cigarettes onto carpet might have caused a fire!!!
A Visit From Sadie
This morning I woke up to a call from Lydia reminding me that I agreed to accompany Team Netzer on its weekly mission to help Dan tool up for a bike race. He rides his bike every day, but once/week they go somewhere that he can flatout race with no traffic lights to slow him down. So after a while I was on my way to an area mall. Behind the mall, numerous businesses share a huge parking lot which was quite empty since today was Sunday. We all got out of the van. Lydia provided me with a chair. Benny had his new bike and helmet and the whole parking lot as a riding area. Lydia had Sadie and the stroller and a stop watch. Dan took his racing bike out of the back of the van. Lydia handed me a tablet and pen and told me that my share of the effort was to write down Dan's times on each of his 16 laps around the entire mall complex....which would add up to over twenty miles. Dan did his stretches, hopped on his bike, and disappeared. About every three and a third minutes, he came by again, and I wrote down his time. Benny rode his new bike all over the parking lot pretending that the lines were roads. After half an hour, Benny said that he needed a rest and a drink of chocolate milk. Lydia found and set up for him his own little collapseable chair. He refueled on chocolate milk, ate a couple of pretzels, and said to me, "Now it's time for me to sit here and talk to you, Ahno, so talk." Soon he was back on the bike. The sun was bright in a cloudless sky. We all enjoyed the our morning out. Later we stopped at McDonalds.
On the way home Lydia asked if I would watch Sadie while the rest of the family took Lydia's friend and her child who homeschools with Benny out in the boat. Lydia had prepared a treasure hunt of things for the children to "discover" around Chesapeake Bay. So Sadie and I got out at my house on 38th Street and waved goodbye to the treasure hunters.
That was at about 11:30 A.M. The treasure hunters got back at 6:15 P.M. It was a quiet afternoon. Sadie did a two hour nap. Then I was busy making supper for the rest of the Netzers to find when they got home, so I gave Sadie a cup of chocolate pudding and a spoon. She entertained herself by eating some of it and buttering the rest over her lovely new summer dress. Oops. I cleaned her up and changed her clothes and found Sadie's favorite TV program, Dora, The Explorer, on the Noggin Channel. We watched that. Then Sadie had a good time carrying her toys around here and there. Finally, she located her old push toy and drove it around the downstairs for a good 45 minutes, working hard. In all, I must say that Sadie is very easy to entertain. She's a happy little girl full of little baby ideas about things she'd like to do. She just goes ahead and does her thing. Once in a while she comes for a hug and then she's on her way again.
When Lydia finally appeared, Benny wanted to come in and play for a while. This gave Lydia a chance to have a training session with Pork Chop who is learning to tolerate being carried around in her new purse dog carrier. Finally the Netzers were on their way home complete with dinner. I made grape and beef salad...this time I included strawberries, too. For me, it was an unusually busy day, but it was all good.
Friday, May 27, 2005
Berries
Recently I began to notice tiny bits of red down in the grass of my back yard. Since I only visit the back yard as a potty trip for Pork Chop, I didn't bother going eyeball to eyeball with the tiny red stuff, just thought in passing, "That looks like itty bitty strawberries." Today I finally knelt and looked closely. Yes, those are strawberries, the smallest ones I've ever seen. By now they cover the ground. It's red every place I put my foot.
This had me thinking about strawberries when the newspaper arrived. Well, what do you know? An insert promoting a Strawberry Festival
in Virginia Beach; games, art, rides, crafts, and, of course, strawberries for sale. Several places advertise berries at $1.09/pound.
A short while later I found myself at the produce section of the ghetto grocery store. Piles and piles of strawberry boxes. Such huge berries, too. Seriously. In one box, I counted nine berries. A little sign announced that each box weighs a pound. Wow. I bought a box. What a treat! Berries big enough that it takes three bites to eat one.
When my mother was still alive, it was her custom each year at this time to make several shelves full of little jars of homemade strawberry jam. Then during the remainder of the year, every time someone did something nice for her, she'd present them with one of those jars.
A couple of months before she died, we were at the farm. It was that annual jam-making time. Mother was in no shape to do the job. I volunteered. She offered to sit on a rocking chair in the kitchen and supervise if I would do the work. We began the process but she was in too much pain and gave up. Clueless, I gave up, too. However, it seemed a shame since I had on hand ten pounds of berries. Finally I went upstairs, sat on her bed, and wrote down Mother's jam-making instructions. Then I did it all myself. The jam was just like her own product. Seemed easy.
Mother died that August. At the end of the following winter I decided to retire and move to Norfolk. What followed was a miserable experience; retiring and moving. Absent the kindness of friends, I would not have survived, and it seemed that every few days I gave a little jar of jam to another nice person who helped me do something I couldn't do by myself. Then, at last, there were no more little jars. Subsequent helpers merely received a thank-you. Felt wrong. A couple of friends, used to the jam thing, laughed and asked, "Hey! Where's my strawberry jam?" I apologized and they assured me that they were just kidding. I still felt impolite. After years and years where the thank-you came with a jar of jam, mere thanks did not seem enough.
Now another year has gone by, strawberry time again. Lydia just called and asked if there was anything I'd like to do tomorrow. I asked if she'd take me to Virginia Beach. Among the attractions is a pig race... which the kids would enjoy. I plan to buy strawberries, some little jars, boxes of lids, containers of Sure Jell, a big sack of sugar, a couple of short-necked funnels. While I have no memory of how to make strawberry jam Mother's way, it's not rocket science. Surely I can do it. At least I'm going to try.
Thursday, May 26, 2005
Crazy Old Lady
This morning those nest-robbing crows came back. I was sitting right here where I can see the front porch out of the corner of my eye while I use the computer. Flap, flap, flap. Oh, NO!!! In my nightgown, hair all crazy, feet bare, chihuahua yapping at my heels, I rushed out onto the front porch yelling, screaming and waving my arms over my head. This happened at the height of rush hour, the time when cross-town business traffic takes advantage of the fact that you can get from Old Dominion University at one end of 38th Street, straight across to the Virginia Zoo at the river, you can buzz across town with only a couple of traffic lights to slow you down. This street is always busy but during A.M. and P.M. rush hours, the pavement facing my porch is full of cars. There I was making a fool of myself. A street packed with drivers waiting at the Colley light looked at me in horror, concern, surprise, amusement, disgust, outrage; expressions as varied as the assumptions supporting them. Someone's insane relative, slipped her leash, a goofy old weirdo, pathetic senior citizen in need of supervision... you see, they couldn't see what I saw...a small nest resting on top of the ugly dead hanging plant, a nest with one tiny baby bird threatened by big bully crows. I did indeed make a fool of myself, but it was another win for baby bird. The crows stayed very briefly. Smart birds. Maybe they remember me from the other day, the person determined to wait them out no matter what. I can't be embarrassed out of something I intend to do. If in defense of a baby bird my house becomes the place to watch for crazy lady sightings, so what? That might be fun; create an urban legend and feed it.
Wednesday, May 25, 2005
AAAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHH!
You have to try it. If no one has ever before offered you a chance to do Petals Around The Rose, now is your lucky moment. Someone sent me this link and I tried the game. Having no tolerance for frustration, not any at all, I gave up after five minutes and called Lydia and Dan who both "got it" immediately. Then, when I knew the answer, I felt like a dodo. See how you do.
Getting Mad
I prefer not to know about bad things I can't fix. Sometimes, though, unwelcome information sneaks by my defenses. The other day I read that in all of Hampton Roads... that is this urban southeast corner of Virginia... only 16 black male public high school seniors have a GPA of 3.0 or better. Further, less than 50% of all black children graduate from high school. These problems were attributed to teacher prejudice against blacks. This was so ridiculous that I chose not to believe it. Since then I have learned that these statements are true.
Where are the parents? They should be up on their hind legs, demanding a public purge of purtainant personnel.
Gang Warfare On 38th Street
A while ago pansy baskets hanging on my front porch met a cruel fate when a pair of mocking birds built their nest on top of the flowers in one basket. Since I couldn't water the flowers, they kaboomed. Yes, I could have maintained the non-nest basket, but, oh, well. It's hot weather now, anyway and pansy time is over.
So there's been this one ugly basket hanging out there, draggly brown plant stems hanging down. My first thought was to throw away the nest, but when I saw a tiny egg, I decided to respect the effort of those little birds. They have faithfully kept their egg warm. I wondered if the egg hatched but feared to look in case that might drive the parents away.
Yesterday I was shocked to see big black crows flapping around on my porch. What in the world? Aha! One of them tried to effect a landing on the nest basket. I surprised myself with the speed at which I tore out onto the porch, shaking my fist and screaming. The crows were surprised, too and flew off the porch but not by much. They sat on a nearby bush, assessed my committment the nest. One crow tried to get back on the porch with me standing right there. The nerve!! I didn't dare to leave.
Lydia came out, too, and asked, "Did the egg hatch yet?" So, I took down the basket and looked. Yep. There was one small baby bird with it's mouth open, soliciting regurgitated insects. Could the crows have intended to eat a baby bird? I didn't know that crows were like that. Whatever they had in mind, they weren't going anywhere. I yelled and clapped my hands, pounded on the porch railing. From the bush they stared insolently back at me. Lydia volunteered to run over to church and get one of the life sized puppets she made and set it on a porch rocker as a scare crow. I told her to forget it. Crows not frightened of a live person jumping, clapping, screaming and yelling at them, would not be impressed with a puppet. Eventually the crows gave up and moved on. I went back into the house.
No, they had not moved on. They had faked me out. I no sooner sat down in my living room, than the crows returned to the porch, flapping around the nest basket. BAM!! I was right back out there jumping and yelling and waving my arms. Again they stayed. So did I. Finally they gave up. I went indoors. They came back. So did I. I wished that I could have just taken the basket into the house with me, but the little parent birds would not have understood. AT LAST the crows flew away and stayed gone.
I got busy and forgot about them until Benny was out showing me how he rides his new bike. Standing on the porch to watch him, I heard a bird fuss come down the street. There were the crows flying toward me again, this time chased by a mob of little birds; mocking birds, robins, starlings, several pigeons, and a blue jay. The small birds co-operated to chase away nest robbers. It was quite an aerial ballet. Little birds attacked when they could, pecked at the crows and then wheeled away out of range. It all went by my house at about second story level, turned and came back. Took them a while, and required a great effort but the little birds won and the crows gave up. Later on I saw a parent bird feeding the baby.
So far, Little Bird Gang---1/ Crow Gang---0. I hope the crows don't return at a time when I'm not around to run them off or when the little bird gang isn't up to strength.
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