30DMC: Day 30

My Favorite Film of All Time

I should have written these in reverse order, because Smoke belongs here. Or Totoro. Silverado, Clue, Great Escape. Those would probably be my top 5.

Except for this last film. This, this is my favorite film of all.
Like Clue, it invades my family's dialect, little quotes from it show up where you least expect it. My friend Rachel often refers to someone or another as a bit of an R.O.U.S., for instance, or, "have fun storming the castle" which comes up more often than you might think.

The Princess Bride, set as a story within a story on film, is wonderfully done. My kids love this film. I love this film. Mike loves this film. Mike and I danced to "Storybook Love" as our first dance at our wedding reception. Nevermind that I was marrying Inigo Montoya instead of the Dread Pirate Wesley. It's a lovely little film, and I guess if I had to pick one for the top of the list, really, that's where this one belongs.

Flood things I'm not going to say

I'm not going to bore you with details about a 1928 law allowing the Corps of Engineers to blow the Birds Point Levee. I'm not going to point out that saying that you've been to Cairo and yeah, a bunch of farmland is well worth saving to let the city drown, is really quite astounding when you're the Missouri Speaker of the House. I'm also not going to point out that the folks who decided to farm down in Mississippi County did so at their own risk and should have taken this phrase to heart: "It's called a floodplain because it's a plain. That floods."

And I won't point out that saying, as many folks in my state are saying, flippant things about residents of Cairo and how they should have seen this coming is the pot calling the kettle black--and actually, there's more truth in that than many would like to admit, since Cairo is 2/3 African-American and most of the children live below the poverty line and many folks have nowhere to go, or little means of getting there. It is true that flooding Birds Point will destroy acres--hundreds of thousands of acres--of "prime Missouri farmland" but I don't think I need to point out that WHO THE HELL CARES ABOUT FARMLAND IF ONE OF THOSE CHILDREN DIE? And I suppose many Missourians still look across and over into Cairo and think, "They're poor, they're black, let them drown." Because these days, I don't put that past any of the God-fearin' tea-partyin' gun-totin' history-revisionist dipshits overrunning my state. And I don't have to say that it completely nauseates me.

On the other hand, a much smaller, weaker hand, I won't bring up the fact that Cairo is built on alluvial soil and if it were being founded today, it wouldn't have been (it would probably be some kind of hideous national park you wouldn't want to visit due to the swamp and mosquitoes).

I won't point out that flooding on the Ohio is especially scary when you consider the uranium enrichment plant upstream from Cairo.

I won't promise that blowing the levee at Birds Point will save any of that. Because who knows? The Corps of Engineers doesn't have the best reputation along the rivers. And we have screwed with Mother Nature long enough that she's ready to take back the levees and the floodplains and all of it.

What I will say is that sand boils have started to appear along the earthen levee around Cairo and my husband calling me from work sounds more and more urgent, although what I'm supposed to do about sand boils I'm not sure, so he called his mom after our last urgent conversation because, now, she could do something, although not about the sand boils, but she could pack up the last stuff she wanted to save and get out of town as the mayor is calling for in his last urgent fax that isn't a mandatory evacuation yet but I'm really not sure why he's waiting. Sand boils. Indigo Bunting asked me just now if that's a noun or a verb. A noun, but a verb there--sand is boiling--is probably appropriate.

Cairo is below the water right now. Sand boils, if they succeed in their intent (the boils, that is) to compromise the levee, will cause the city to fill with flood water. Like 18 feet of flood water.

Maybe it will all be fine. But I'm not going to say that, either.

30DMC: Day 29

Favorite Film From Childhood

Ok, you must keep in mind that I was a child before DVDs and VCRs. I know, most of my readers fall into the same category. Now, my family got a VCR when I was in about 8th grade, so we did have movies available to us to watch and watch again after that point. But by 8th grade, well, it sounds cynical maybe, but childhood was over. At least as far as "favorite film from childhood" goes.

Wow.

I have to think back to Disney films seen on Sunday nights, or, once we had cable, maybe caught here or there? And I'm kind of at a loss. Books are easy, and music, actually, and TV shows, even.

So I hate to do this, but I'm going to have to really show my true colors here and go back to Star Wars. My favorite film from childhood? Return of the Jedi.

I saw Jedi and Empire in the theater and, like I said earlier this month, Empire rocked my world. But Jedi came out when I was in 3rd or 4th grade and I was a little older and wiser. I loved that movie. I was still young enough that we--Patti, her brother Matt, my brother Ian, and I--re-enacted scenes in our backyard and basement. It was our setting of fantasy pretend play until I finally met someone else (Misdy) who had read Tolkien. Seriously.

Of course Patti refused to play any role that wasn't Princess Leia and Ian, also of course, was going to be Han Solo, always, leaving Matt and me to duke it out over Chewbacca and Luke.
I always won that fight and he played the Wookie. Or C3PO. Whatever. I wanted the lightsabre and black clothes (Goth or Benedictine, it was going to be one or the other for me--gee, he even has a hood on in this picture).I loved this movie. I still do--although as kids movies go, I'm glad my girls have Miyazaki and Pixar...

Dialect Thoughts

[Note: this is a continuing conversation with several blog friends, if you're lost].

Most of my dialect is hard to tease out because I've lived in too many places. I've picked up might could, and I use the object in the subject. Those both came from Texas. A few others are south St. Louis-isms that I didn't even realize were there until a professor from California, a linguist I adored and would have taken any class he taught, pointed them out to me. So here's a few things I say, and one that my husband says, for those not from here.

Might could: I mentioned this last week. It means maybe. I might could mow the grass this week, if I had enough incentive to do so. I could substitute "I could possibly cut the grass...." Sometimes I do. Might could seems more positive to me, like I'm almost eager to do it. I also use it to gauge the response. "I might could do that..." to see if Mike is willing to, say, wash the dishes while I cut the grass.

Object in the subject: this isn't that rare, but I did not use it as a young child. I inherited it from my high school boyfriend. As in: Matt and me, we're going down to the store for a slurpee. It makes the antecedent clear. "We" does not include Megan or Tom or Michelle. It only refers to Matt and me. The reason it is Matt and ME instead of Matt and I, well, I would guess it has roots in dialectical laziness. Or possibly Louisiana French. But he was Czech. Eh.

Come with: This was one of the surprises. I thought everyone said come with but my professor found it so fascinating that we say that here. As in: I'm going to the store. Would you like to come with? We don't add the "me" at the end. That's the key missing part. He claimed it showed our German heritage in St. Louis, which surprised him, because come with tends to be more northern (Minnesota, for instance). I also say "bring with" and "go with" although not as often.

Boulevard Stop: a corner with a stop sign, as opposed to a traffic light/stop light.

Off of: I catch myself saying this all the time. Get off of the couch. Why do I add the "of"? I have a feeling it is incorrect. It doesn't add anything to the meaning.

Anymore: this is Mike's addition to my dialect. I do not use it but my head no longer explodes when he does. This is how I use that word: "We don't listen to that station anymore." That is the ONLY way I use that word. Mike, however, can use it this way: "Anymore we always use seatbelts." Or, "I used to read on the back porch but I like the front porch anymore." Or, "Church takes so long anymore it isn't worth taking Leo." Kaboom. This used to make me crazy. But not anymore.

A few other words I use that I've found aren't standard:

Stri-ped with two syllables, but only when describing something with stripes (pajamas, shirt, bass).

Sundae pronounced Sun-duh.

They are green beans, not string beans. Unless they are snap beans which I'll also use. And eat.

The laundromat is catty-cornered from their house, not kitty-cornered.

The little gray bug that rolls up in a ball when you touch it is a pill bug, not a roly-poly (but my kids call it that).

Crawdads, not crayfish. Bags from the grocery store, not sacks. And you push a cart there, too.

If the sun is shining while it rains, the devil is beating his wife (that one I know is from Georgia).

I get goose bumps when you tell me a creepy story.

I stand IN line and I get sick TO my stomach and it is a QUARTER TO 11 or a QUARTER PAST 11. But never half past: then it would be 11:30.

I might do something on purpose, and then again, it might be on accident.

And I drink coke. I don't drink Coca-cola, but if I do have something carbonated, which actually I don't really very much anymore, completely switched over to coffee, but if I did, it would be coke. Not soda and not pop. Never pop. And while I had friends who said sody, that made me crazy even as a kid. Coke: it's all just coke.

Lightning bugs, not fireflies. Drinking fountain, maybe water fountain, never bubbler. I get Chinese food carry-out, not take-out or take-away. Spigots are outside, faucets and taps are inside. My street trees grow in a tree lawn between my sidewalk and street.

I have no preference for route or caramel pronunciations. Syrup, however, is sur-up. Aunt and ant rhyme. So do dawn and on. I pronounce can as ken when it's a verb (I have a CAN of tomatoes, but I KEN go to your house). Sometimes the word wash gets said /warsh/ but not as often as when I was a child.

And my last name, while spelled such that you'd think it would rhyme with Henry Kissinger's last name, is pronounced WESS-singer, with a hard /g/. Say it fast.

That's all I can think of, thanks to a couple of websites that helped jog my memory...I'll need to write about knit vs. knitted some other time!

30DMC: Day 28

Favorite Film from my Favorite Director

Hmm. That's a hard one. I'm going to have to pick a director here, and then my favorite movie by that director, instead of thinking about my favorite movies and then linking back to their directors.

Hitchcock is an easy answer, I mean, it was all about the director in those films. But Rob Reiner's list, or John Hughes...there are movies there that I really love. Gus Van Sant--but that's a love/hate relationship there. The Coen Brothers, of course, but I've talked them to death in this series already, it feels like. Woody Allen? Mel Brooks? Tim Burton?

Sigh.

I'm going to go with Ang Lee. I think it's because he shares my birthday, 20 years apart. No, that's not why.

I've seen 6 of the 11 feature-length films he's directed. All of them in the theater, too. The six I've seen, in order leading up to my very favorite:

6. The Ice Storm
5. The Wedding Banquet
4. Eat Drink Man Woman
3. Sense and Sensibility
2. Brokeback Mountain
And 1. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

I think what I like most about Lee's films is that really? The same guy directed Brokeback Mountain as did Sense and Sensibility as did Crouching Tiger? Seriously? And throw The Ice Storm in there, what, for good measure?

I have to pick him because so many other directors, I think about them and I can see the camera angles or hear the score or roll my eyes at the giant explosions. So much of what certain directors do is all the same. The same actors, the same genres, the same basic storylines. Nothing new under the sun. What I like about Lee is that so much of it is different, but it is all so good. I can't even tell you what his films would have in common with each other--although ennui, the boundless ennui, might be the theme that ties many of them together. But as opposed to directors who stick with what they do best (Hitchcock, Burton, Hughes, Allen, Brooks), I feel like Lee does things he likes. His movies are good. They pull you in even if you don't want to (I left The Ice Storm feeling like I needed to take a shower, ugh). I didn't think I would like Brokeback and I went to Crouching Tiger quite reluctantly. And I loved them both, even though Brokeback is seriously depressing and Crouching Tiger, well, just isn't my usual cup of tea.

Because they're that good, and he is, too.

But Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon is my favorite. I couldn't even tell you how the movies goes (as opposed to Brokeback or Ice Storm or the others). I can't remember...it is Chinese and there's an assassin (I like assassins in film) and a young woman and...I like this movie because my friends Mary and Mal decided they'd seen it often enough together that they could maybe be together. I'm simplifying it; it was a long time ago now. But I do know that they kept going to watch it, and then suddenly they had an announcement to make. Mike and I came together with Much Ado About Nothing, and they did with Crouching Tiger. Gotta love films that get people closer.

I cannot believe how exhausted I am

Computer fast. Not that it is fast (but with our new ISP, it IS fast). But I need to go on a computer fast. It's starting to make me crazy, checking NOAA's water website every hour and, oh, while I'm here, looking for news articles (and, I know I've talked to Ann and Miguel about this, but WHY DO I READ THE COMMENTS ONLINE? Why do I read what a bunch of yahoos think about the Birds Point Spillway? So stupid. Me, I mean, for continuing to hit that button).

I am really exhausted. We had a school meeting tonight that went really well and made me like everything at school again (waxes and wanes). I wish I could say more but that would require mental energy to form the thoughts and words.

Read the girls' stories and by the time we were all done, Mike was tired, Leo was asleep, and Sophia had started to drift lying next to me on my bed. She dragged herself upstairs.

I have a very strong suspicion that my (and Mike's) anxiety about Cairo is leaking into my children's psyches. And while I need to know what's going on, I need to let it go enough to get things done and focus on what's going on here.

Mike is tied up at work and can't go down to Cairo right now, and this is producing more anxiety because, you know, it's his hometown and his parents' house and all that and here he is working on computers. So this prompted a quickly completed argument about my going down, but Leo makes so many things like that still impossible. My mom or Ann could pick the girls up from school, we could swing schedules around, but Leo doesn't do well for others for that length of time. Yet. If this were next year, we could. I even said, "well, I could take him down with me and help your mom pack things and move them" and he snapped back faster than fast: "but you can't put him on your back and swim to a boat."

He's right. And we're all on the edge. I'm not totally recovered from Triduum and Easter schedules and DID I MENTION IT'S RAINED ALL DAY? The puddle in the backyard is growing faster than the potatoes now. I need to bury more of the potatoes and it isn't going to happen in the rain. Maybe tomorrow: high of 68, breezy and clear. I'll put on my boots and go fix the garden. Do some labor with my back and my hands and let my head clear out all this junk that has started to rattle around. Do you ever get that? In a crisis or a semi-crisis, a red-alert stage in your head and you just can't shake all the words?

So now everyone in my house is asleep. And I'm going to join them because I cannot believe how physically exhausted I am. More tomorrow. And all week. Jan sent me a message that it's character building, and I'll misquote her: but I'm already a character.

Palpable

KCFS

It sounds like a radio station. But no. It's now something else I know. You know my tagline over there ---> I like to learn? I like to know people who can do things I don't know how to do? Bah. Over the past day and a half I've learned as much as a lay person should ever know (no, more than that) about a place called Bird's Point Levee. New Madrid Floodway. Laws written in 1928.

And I was reading flood stages and predictions a few hours ago and noted kcfs often listed with a number. And I assumed, correctly, that this had to do with how much water was going by. For instance, at the assumed crest at Cairo, there will be 1750 kcfs.

I already know micrograms/deciliter. Lots of things having to do with shortwave radio frequencies. Tornado and hurricane and earthquake scales. And now this: kcfs is how many thousands of cubic feet per second go past a given point. Volume flow velocity. A quick google search tells me that a cubic foot is 7.48 gallons (which for some reason seems astounding to me). That means a thousand cubic feet is 7480 gallons. 1750 thousands of them is 13,090,000 gallons of water. Every second. Going past Cairo. Am I right? Is that right? Do I have that?

Again with the head exploding.

Easter Eggs

The blue is dyed overnight soaked in vinegar and red cabbage. The yellow took just an hour or so in tumeric and vinegar. Both substances were boiled first before the soaking. And there is one brown egg there for good measure (the others were white eggs pre-dye). The cracks, which I like, are (I believe) due to the fact that so long in the vinegar weakens the shells. And Mike took them out of the dye with tongs instead of a spoon. Which led to a conversation. After Easter Vigil Mass. That did not go well. And led to his doing the dishes and my pouting upstairs.

Then of course I realized I was NOT SUCCEEDING AT ALL and let it go. I got some sleep and Sunday went reasonably well.

Next year? Must dye eggs Thursday. Everything falls apart starting Thursday night. As well it should.

30DMC: Day 27

A movie I wish I'd seen in the theater: I saw The Wizard of Oz as a child, back when it came on the networks once a year on a Sunday night. It didn't make much sense to me, the color change, the characters being played by the same actors. I grew up with that film in the background, paying little attention to it as I got older. In 4th or 5th grade--before I moved to Columbia, Missouri, I know--I read ALL the L. Frank Baum books. Devoured them (note: reading them since, as an adult thinking about reading them to my kids at bedtime, I was shocked by how little they engaged me).

What I wish I could do is go back in time to a point where I'd never seen the movie. And press pause on all those TV releases so that I never see it. Then wait until I'm at least in my early 20s. And then see it in the theater for the first time. I know it's a children's movie (sort of: kind of terrifying, actually), but I think I would have really gotten it if I'd seen it later. And bigger. And with no commercial breaks. And with the understanding that everyone else in the room was going to be quiet, not playing with legos or talking on the phone or playing pinochle at the table.

When the levee breaks

For those of you sitting high and dry in Vermont or parts beyond, it's wet here.

Wet, wet, wet.

It was a wet winter, one of the snowiest, and so we have spring melt coming down. On top of that, we have had ridiculous amounts of rainfall this spring already. It's really quite wet. NOAA predicted record flooding in the whole Mississippi-Ohio river valleys and it's coming true.

My basement floor is damp--and we've lived here 13 years and it's never been damp (except the spring when the gutter was broken but that was an engineering problem, not a groundwater problem). The walls are dry. The floor is damp. There is so much water underneath that it is starting to seep through the concrete.

I have standing water in my backyard, also for the first time. And here are the rivers closest to me: the Des Peres, which is usually just a drainage ditch with ducks walking along the trash-strewn bed, is in the first two photos, and then the Mississippi from Bellerive Park. It's not as high as I've seen it, but the power of it rushing by is still, always, stunning.



More importantly, my in-laws live in Cairo, Illinois, which is essentially a bowl, not unlike New Orleans that way. But usually this is no problem--it is surrounded by huge levees and I've only had to take the levee road once in 18 years. Pete and Kaylen had to take it into town for Easter this weekend (we stay in St. Louis for Easter due to my intense involvement at church). My inlaws' basement has water in it--not surprising, but it indicates saturation. The city is protected by the levees but also by pumps that keep the town from filling up from the bottom. Last I heard, they're not quite doing the job. And it would take one bad storm and the electric out and the pumps go off and then. The crest is predicted still a yard below the top of the levee wall, but remember these levees were decertified last autumn. So you have to hope it'll make it. As I often say, if all goes well and the river don't rise.

The crest will blow away the record set in 1937--but the levee is higher now.So now I'm watching the news reports about the Birds Point Floodway--just south of the confluence, its levee was blown in 1937 to take the pressure off Cairo's levees. Of course, there were 15,000 people living in Cairo then, and now it's just over 2,000. I don't know, as much as I would hate the devastation and horror of a levee breach or pump failure in Cairo, if it's the best plan. Our attorney general has filed a suit to prevent the intentional breach by the Corps of Engineers. I don't know enough to really comment--from what I've read, it's not even certain how much it would help.

My sister-in-law, who lives further east along the Ohio, took work off today to go home and sandbag. Needless to say, I'm not going down there this weekend for my niece's first communion. My mother-in-law is starting to pack up to leave. There's a voluntary evacuation going on now, to become mandatory as the weekend gets here.

My father-in-law, of course, is one of those folks who will not leave. The place could fill up like a cereal bowl and he'd sit on the roof of the shop with a boat tied on and a shotgun in his lap.

So we watch. As opposed to an earthquake or tornado, a flood usually moves slowly. You have time to think and plan. And watch and hope. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Ten on Tuesday: 10 ways to save at the grocery store

I've been talking about this on facebook lately. There's some woman out there (somewhere: not in St. Louis) who saved $14,000 on her grocery bill last year clipping coupons. This made me and several other people scratch our heads because HOW MUCH DOES SHE SPEND ON GROCERIES?

I tend to be frugal, but I do eat certain things organic and I have my milk delivered to my house because I am a total milk snob. So I'm no coupon $14K savin maven over here. But I think we do ok. Some ideas...

1. Buy in season. If you want strawberries in October or asparagus in December, you're going to pay for the privilege (and they often will not be so good anyway). We eat strawberries in May and June. Blueberries in July. And so forth. Apples in the fall and citrus in the winter. Yes, some things are relatively year-round, like greens and potatoes. Other things store well like onions and carrots. But plums from Chile are, well, if they aren't expensive, they should be. I just don't go there.

2. Buy produce but only if you're going to use it. I remember a friend back in college, a young mom with a new baby and a husband she detested (lovely combo, wonder why we aren't friends anymore), who said that she couldn't afford the luxury of fresh fruit. I thought about my grandmother and her 8 kids and everybody had fresh fruit. Yeah, a lot of non-perishables, but fruit (in season) and greens and unprocessed food is cheap. Unless, of course, you let it rot in your fridge.

3. Dry beans. Dry beans are so danged cheap. I have some canned beans too, for power outages, mostly, but dry beans are my cheap easy meal. I've gotten pretty good at making them, too.

4. Buy in bulk if the math works, you have the space to store it, and you know you will use it before it goes bad. I buy certain things on sale in larger quantities--things like tomatoes in cans or peanut butter. If I know I'll use it and it's a steal, I don't buy just one.

5. Try to avoid one-recipe items, especially if it is perishable. It is fun to experiment with recipes. But I have to know what I'm going to do with the leftover leek or capers or jar or pomegranate glaze before I put it in my cart. I actually have uses for all those things. But other things I walk past.

6. Make a list of what you need, and get those things, but also pick up other things on sale (although not to a hoarding extreme). If you don't have a list, you'll wind up buying random crap and wandering around aimlessly wondering what you should cook. But if you're too rigid that you can't deviate to pick up some extra frozen vegetables or whatever--you'll miss out and buy them next week at regular price, most likely.

7. When you make your list, have some flexibility in recipe choices. I know that each week my CSA is going to give me some things I need to use up. I have a general idea of what's coming based on how they produce their rotating lists. And I know how seasons work. For instance, right now we are chock full of greens. I'm going to make sure I pick up an onion, for instance, to go with them, and maybe other things I use in different salads. But I'm not going to be derailed if I either don't get as many greens as I thought, or if the store is out of radishes and I'm stymied in my attempts to make the copperfield salad. I can swing things pretty well.

8. Know your store. If you wander too much, suddenly you have weird things in your cart. I think they jump in. There are aisles I don't go down because I don't need anything there. Even if it were on sale.

9. Avoid processed foods, but when processed foods happen, try the store brand and see what you think. I am often surprised. In a good way, I mean.

10. The standard advice: don't go hungry; don't take kids. Don't go after school when everyone is tired.

30DMC: Day 26

The category I was given was "A movie I like that everyone else hates" but I can't see that going well so I'm going to change it to....

My favorite Western

Because THAT I can do: Silverado.



Kevin Kline, Danny Glover, Scott Glenn, Kevin Costner, Linda Hunt, Brian Dennehy, John Cleese, Jeff Goldblum, Rosanna Arquette. How can you go wrong? After the golden age of John Wayne, in between the Spaghetti Westerns and the Western Renaissance starting with Unforgiven and Tombstone and all those, in between was Silverado.

So good. And funny. It is really funny.

30DMC: Day 25

The most hilarious movie I've ever seen.

Here are the 9 runners-up because they are worth mentioning:

Elf: You sit on a throne of lies
Raising Arizona: the chase scene
Ghostbusters: the stay-puft marhsmallow man
Airplane: Oh, stewardess, I speak jive.
Parenthood: Keanu Reeves should have stuck with this character.
Bananas: Woody Allen parking scene
A Fish Called Wanda: Don't call me stupid.
Hot Fuzz: One thing you haven't got
Clue: What, another door?

Galaxy Quest. Imagine actors, famous mostly, if not only, for their tenure on a sci-fi show, and who now make a living opening big box stores dressed in costume and attending conventions, try hard now, can you think of people like this? Well, then, imagine aliens coming down to earth and kidnapping them to take them to space--where the aliens have, based on the TV show they intercepted and thought was a "historical document", built a replica of the ship from the show. Thinking the actors are their characters, well, hilarity ensues. I especially love this movie because I was a hanger-on with a whole college crowd of sci-fi geeks. So some of this may be lost in translation. But this is my very favorite comedy. Ever.

Easter

I slept in. I got up at 9:30 but lay in bed, alone, listening to NPR. I thought about the past week. I thought about everything.

A long time ago I wrote a post called "Triduum is designed to make you crazy" and I hold that as a truth, one of the constants in the world along with "The MSD bill will always be late" and "drinking bubbly alcohol between white russians is a bad, bad plan."

Triduum is designed to make at least me crazy.

Triduum, Latin for the 3 days, is the three days leading up to Easter. It begins with Holy Thursday after sundown, continues through Good Friday and Holy Saturday, ending with Easter.

But this year, the crazy-making part started before Holy Thursday evening. I was on the news for reasons I still don't quite understand; lots of sturm und drang regarding girl scouts; too much coffee. I went on a field trip with the kindergarten class and snapped at the woman presenting it. What the hell is my problem?

Mike was out of town, and then came home Tuesday just to get up Wednesday and work from 8 a.m. to 1 a.m. Thursday morning. So I went to Triduum practice with three kids and luckily Clark was there to keep my son from walking out the door onto Grand.

Severe weather--during Good Friday service, a tornado touched down at our airport and also the block where the woman sitting next to me at Good Friday service lives--her house was relatively ok but 5 houses down, I hear, was not. Not. As in "no longer." She didn't know that while we were there listening to the sirens go off 3 times in the two hours. Sirens have power, the deacon began his homily. And so do words.

Holy Thursday mass was similarly wrapped up in heavy emotional content and moments. I spent 10 minutes of it in the basement with one of our choir members as she cried on my shoulder about the murder that had happened earlier in the week, a man who attended our church whom she did not know. But she saw the faces of her students in the young man who killed him. I've been there. So we talked. A man came downstairs and I told him we weren't waiting for the bathroom, that we were just being bad, but he could see the tears on Rose's face and said, "I think that's allowed."

And then Saturday, I know this is all out of order...I half-heartedly helped out in the kitchen with meals for the homebound, but I wasn't meshing with the crowd this year (again, what the hell is my problem) and kept texting Ann wishing she was here. I had a 15 minute conversation with Sal the janitor--he is a 60-something developmentally disabled man who has been in our parish his entire life--about sweatshirts. Sal is big into reminiscing. I didn't want to reminisce about what parish and school sweatshirts came out what year, but I did. We both have navy blue ones with the white school logo in the corner, but our pastor doesn't. That was mentioned several times with emphasis. And then we talked about people who were no longer there.

The flowers arrived and I had Sal lock the door behind the delivery man. I went home to switch cars and write a prayer, which I think I did a pretty good job at frankly. Came back to learn Lynn had already arrived and was upstairs. I told Dottie I wasn't having the right kind of week to handle that right now and we commiserated. I read the prayer before we distributed 130 meals for the homebound: We come to the kitchen for nourishment and ease. A kitchen is the heart of a home and the heart of a community. In the kitchen we are linked by hunger, physical and spiritual. We go to the kitchen to nourish others and to be nourished. It is a holy place. O God of the Resurrection and God of the kitchen, bless this food that has been prepared and those who have prepared it in your kitchen. May it bring joy and solace to those who receive it this day. We ask this through Christ ever human, ever divine, Amen.

And then like a traveling preacher with events to attend, I high-fived Mary and Sr. Vanda and made my way back upstairs. There was Sal and Lynn waiting for me. Not really for me, but it felt that way, like they were hiding behind a rock ready to jump out. I spent the next 3 hours hauling plants and going up and down from the choir loft 4 times hanging banners while thanking God that Fr. Miguel and Jack were there to bring in all those ridiculously heavy pieces of stone we use around the baptismal font we build each Easter.

We decorated. I argued with Lynn. I walked away. I simmered and got angry after she was gone. I read the bulletin. I lived up to my Cherokee name: Stands Around And Chats. We lit a practice fire. We arranged plants and rearranged plants. We hung wreaths and I broached the topic of Ordinary Time banners. Still not sure.

It was fine. I was under-caffeinated and hungry by the time I left (the tremor in my right hand gave that away) and all I wanted was lunch and a nap. Mike had made lunch. And had chocolate covered strawberries in the fridge. O Frabjous Day, Calloo Callay.

I slept. Waking two hours later, I was better. We went to church and wrestled Leo and it was over 3 hours long and the music was lovely and the church was lovely and I kept thinking about how much this all wears me out and takes everything I have.

Miguel's homily hearkened back to the deacon's homily on Friday night: Words, what words strike you? And he spoke about what word struck him, not surprisingly: earthquake. Natural disasters. And he talked about Easter among the ruins, essentially. I found myself leaning forward thinking about different kinds of ruination. But that wasn't the word that had struck me.

You know what struck me? Two things.

1. Mt 27:61 But Mary Magdalene and the other Mary remained sitting there, facing the tomb. Who knows what else they needed to get done. Their ordinary lives--certainly they had ordinary lives outside of being Christ's disciples, right? And they're not sitting there waiting for the resurrection. They're marking the place in their minds so they can come back after the Sabbath and take care of the rest of the job of preparing the body. I heard this and wondered what they must have said, if anything. Two women sitting there, facing the tomb. I thought about me and Rose standing outside the basement bathroom Thursday night saying "yeah, me too" to each other. I thought about me and Ann hashing through the week together on the gloomy Good Friday morning, ignoring our obligations of all sorts to talk about how lucky we are to be in our parish. And I thought about my sister Bevin and me, talking about an upcoming trial, wondering if she'd be a witness again, and all the things unsaid. Debbie and I in her car on the way home after her roommate's attempted suicide. Do you think it hurts? Hell yeah it hurts. Zelda and I. Gretchen and I. Pairs of women in moments of deep reflection or pain or emotional connection and focusing only on that, for now.

2. Mt 27:24 When Pilate saw that he was not succeeding at all...not the rest of this sentence, not the rest of the passage involving the decision, or lack of decision, to crucify Jesus. Just that phrase. When Pilate saw that he was not succeeding at all. THAT was my week. Yes, I got things done. But I kept stepping back from myself and realizing I was not succeeding at all. Why in the world would I snap at the naturalist that was leading our field trip? Because I know what she's talking about? Because I don't want to be talked down to? IT WAS A KINDERGARTEN FIELD TRIP. And I realized I wasn't succeeding at all. And I backed down. Later we chatted about birds at the bird feeder. She identified a key sparrow. I was grateful and happy. I had a conversation about my girl scout troop and realized I was not succeeding at all. So I took it. I braced my back foot against the curb and let that woman tear into me. And it was a catalyst to get me to switch my troop around. I argued with Lynn. I wasn't succeeding at all. I walked away. I tried to shake Sal the janitor. NOT SUCCEEDING AT ALL. I had a 15 minute conversation in the rain on Fr. Miguel's front porch about logos and people we both used to know. Just gave in. Keeping myself in check. Keeping the house clean during Triduum. Not. Succeeding. At. All. I know Pilate's frustration. I know the feeling. The only thing I can hope for is that, in seeing my lack of success, I do the right thing.

30DMC: Day 24

Favorite Animation

Well, you know it's got to be Miyazaki. I've already posted about Totoro so I'm going to talk about Miyazaki in general, the ones that we like the most. And, to be fair, one of them is not him specifically but his studio, Studio Ghibli.

The movies we watch the most are, in order of age of the main characters: Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service, Spirited Away, and Whisper of the Heart. I know there are others--Princess Mononoke, for instance, but that is far from a child's film. Ponyo and Howl's Moving Castle are favorites in my house, too, but they don't fit in this little series I've artificially created here...and Castle in the Sky deserves a second look. Sophia liked it; I couldn't engage. So I'm going to focus on these four.

Totoro begins this series with a very limited view told through the eyes of a pair of sisters whose father has moved them to the country to be close to their mother, who is hospitalized (never said in the movie, but implied by Miyazaki's autobiography and various commentaries on the movie, she has tuberculosis). It is set in the pre-TV era, but there are telephones and vehicles. The world Mei and Setsuki inhabit is filled with fairy creatures and safety nets. Nanny, for instance, is a matriarch of the neighbors' family, and lends more than a casual hand to Mei and Setsuki's father, helping them clean the house up and taking care of chores and children. And the fairy creatures--the totoros and the catbus and soot sprites are all part of their growing up in this new old house.It is a lovely little story that I see as mostly the tale of Setsuki (about 9 or 10?), on the edge of awareness about the big things of life, about the things that really matter, and starting to lose her attachment to fantasy. But not quite yet. The scene where Totoro shows up to go flying with them on the wind just exemplifies this. Mei hops right on, but Setsuki struggles. She wants to, but she hesitates. On the edge.

Kiki is the next character in my series. This movie is set, I believe, in a San Francisco-meets-western-European-city-if-WWII-hadn't-happened kind of place. Kiki is about 13, and comes from a long line of witches. These are more like herbalist kitchen-witches than something spooky. Her mother is a witch, making potions and cures for the neighbors. It is her livelihood. And now that Kiki is 13, it is time for her to go spend a year in another city really honing her craft. Instant coming-of-age film. She and her cat Gigi, who can talk to her (and is voiced in the American dub by Phil Hartman), head out on her broom. Landing in a new town, she comes to the realization that she doesn't really have any witch skills, except flying. And thus, she starts a delivery service.The story is much more than that, though, and it truly becomes a coming-of-age story. She finds good role models and her place in the world.

Chihiro is younger than Kiki, probably about 10. The main character in Spirited Away, she lives in a more modern era, though, and therefore seems more sullen and jaded than Setsuki or Kiki. She is older, even if the number is smaller. This is another child-on-the-edge-of-adult kind of film, but it is darker than Kiki and definitely for an older audience. It is actually my least favorite of this set of movies, and definitely not where you should start your Miyazaki viewing, in my opinion. Chihiro's coming of age is more of a Flannery O'Connor kind of tale than the others--or maybe that's the wrong analogy. It's more of a smack across her face and a shout, "GROW UP" than the others. Suddenly and without warning, Chihiro is forced into an impossible unimaginable situation--her parents have been taken prisoner (and turned into pigs) by the spirits that run a spirit bath house. Her task is to rescue them. And it is overwhelming. But she goes from being a completely coddled spoiled child to being competent. And good. So I suppose more of a redemption story than a coming of age. Although that happens too.

From Studio Ghibli, there is Whispers of the Heart, the story of Shizuku, set in modern times. She is about to graduate from middle school, so I would say she's about 14. It's a story of a first love and also about finding your purpose, like Kiki, actually, but without the fantasy. Shizuku lives with her older, quite annoying, sister, her librarian father and over-worked masters student mother. They live in a jam-packed tiny apartment and Shizuku is, I think, overcome with the ennui of modern life.She starts to realize that all the books she checks out from the library are also checked out by a boy named Seiji, and she starts to seek him out, discovering that he is a particularly annoying boy from school. Her opinion, of course, softens, and she is awed by his single-minded aspiration to study violin making in Italy. She wishes she had a goal like that...and sets out to find one. There's a fat cat named Moon and Seiji's grandfather's sad story intertwined in this. Shizuku comes into her own by the end and turns the corner to becoming a young woman.

In a world of kids' animation dominated by perfect Disney princesses for girls and almost exclusively male main characters in the Pixar series, I love that Miyazaki's main characters are usually girls. And they are not fake girls. They are real people who live real lives. Mei, Setsuki, Chihiro, Kiki, and Shizuku (along with Sophie from Howl's Moving Castle and even Ponyo from her movie) are such good protagonists--not practically perfect in every way and not evil villains. Truly good characters, likable and true to life.

Last Holy Week

89/365 Holy Thursday Set Up

Everyone else got there at 7:00. I breezed in at 7:30--Mike had just arrived home from Indianapolis and we'd put a quick dinner on the table first. Most everything was done, frankly. The altar of repose was set up in the Utah Vestibule. The place was clean. The red was down from Palm Sunday.

And my head was so fuzzy from whatever--a long weekend, single parenting, too much wine, whatever--that I was nearly useless. So it was good that we were almost finished.

I polished brass and wished I had a thought in my head.

I watched as other people busied themselves washing up the bowls and pitchers for the mandatum (the foot washing) and thought about how much better I am on paper than in person.

I took wreaths off the doors and disassembled the Palm Sunday adornments, to ready them for Easter (red and palms off, to be replaced later with....something...) and found myself yearning for ordinary time.

It hasn't been a good week.

Man. The story of my holy week. Again and again. Too much to do, no time to do it, somehow always surprised by how much work there is to do, the kids, the house, the eggs, the everything. I have the same thoughts this week that I did last year. Is that what holy week is supposed to be? Is it designed that way? I am indeed yearning for ordinary time and spent most of the set up time at church today without a thought in my head. Again. The earth goes around the sun, the year passes, and it is the same.

We're OK here

The tornado that struck down and destroyed 200 or more homes was nowhere near where I live. It did close the airport when it hit one of the terminals. And I know folks who had some damage to their houses but lucked out in the long run.

Very tired from Easter work. Tired and crabby. But all is well here.

30DMC: Day 23

Favorite Documentary

I have three things to say here. The first is about my favorite wide-release documentary. No, it isn't earth-shattering or thought provoking or something to make you angry about the state of the world (many documentaries do these things, and I like them fine, really, but I don't want to see them again, really. This one I've seen a couple of times).

Spellbound. It's the story of the national spelling bee. The filmmakers follow several students from the classroom/schoolwide bees all the way up to the finals. My favorite scene was when Harry stands there in front of the microphone and repeats his word again and again: banns banns banns banns...his face in all these contorted looks, total ADHD spazz. It's so much fun (and reading the wikipedia article, he's done well for himself).
The second thing I wanted to say here was to mention that a new documentary that come out this month about Pruitt Igoe. For those readers sitting in New Zealand and Vermont (although you may know of Pruitt Igoe, actually), it was one of the very worst housing projects in the US. It is now a fallow field in North St. Louis. I think this will be a worthwhile documentary. It's traveling the country right now at film festivals, but I'll probably wait until the DVD release to see it (unless it shows its face at the St. Louis Film Festival in November).



Lastly, I wanted to mention my favorite documentary on more of a minor scale. It is called St. Benedict's Rule and it is set in Conception Abbey, the men's monastery that is connected to the women's monastery (by lineage, I mean, and geography, but not the same campus--they're about a mile apart or so) where I am an oblate. It's a lovely film that wraps itself around two themes: monastic life, and an apparently random shooting spree that happened at the Abbey in 2002.

You can actually watch the whole thing online at cultureunplugged.com or at Gloria.tv, depending on which links remain active. It's just over an hour long and it makes me sigh. For those who wonder about me, it is a sideways glimpse of the place. My place is just down the road. And, earlier than that, my first really good theology, my first real experiences of what Catholicism could be, were in Br. Stephen's classroom--a Benedictine who lived in the abbey on the school property, an abbey that was a daughter monastery of Conception.

Now I'm going to go watch the danged thing again.

Caught up in Triduum

I'm caught up in Triduum.

Yesterday I thought to myself that I've been here, done this, for 5 years now and I felt like I was kind of phoning it in.

But I don't feel that way now. God continues to methodically surprise me. Yes. Methodically surprise.

And now I have a hypergraphia-style anxiety need to create something and I have to throw this cat off my lap and go do something.

More later. Like Monday. (Except for movie posts, which of course I finished weeks ago and put on auto-publish).

30DMC: Day 22

My Favorite Action Movie! Go! Go! Go!

Die Hard. Yup. The Bruce Willis movie in the building with the German terrorists.

It's actually, in my mind, more of a guilty pleasure than Clue. Maybe because, for the most part, action movies bore me. Duh. Boring. But I liked this one from the first time I saw it. I think it was probably Alan Rickman.I mean, he was SO GOOD as the villain in this movie.

30DMC: Day 21

Favorite movie from my favorite actress.

Emma Thompson probably would fit that category. There are others--Sandra Bullock, Judi Dench, Linda Hunt, Helena Bonham Carter, Angela Bassett, Meryl Streep--but I think Emma is a good choice.

And my favorite of her films is obvious because it was my first date with Mike. It was a date with Mike before we were dating. Just before, in fact. Still technically dating the boy. We went to, AGAIN, the Hi-Pointe theater with another RA from our building and his sometimes-girlfriend.

I paid my own way. Otherwise it would have certainly been our first date in my mind.

Mike had already seen it 4 times over the summer and early autumn. But now we were seeing it together. Much Ado About Nothing. So fluffy and full of Kenneth Branagh, but Emma Thompson's character Beatrice was quite formidable (Maeve, of course, has the middle name Beatrix, which stems mostly from Beatrix Potter but has some roots here too).

Our next date was really a date, although one of the two Toms was there with us. It was the balloon glow in Forest Park. We were never good at being exclusive that way. We liked to share things with other people. We are extroverts and do better together when we're not alone.

The Knock Out Kings Return

An elderly Vietnamese man who attended mass at my church has been beaten to death, on Saturday morning, walking home from the market with his wife.

The police have a suspect. He's 18, which is good, since the courts in St. Louis are terrible about prosecuting juveniles.

He was participating in an activity he referred to as "the knock out game."

We've been here before.

In 2006, during National Night Out (the full title, National Night Out Against Crime), a few neighbors were still out chatting long after the official party had broken up. Mike, me, and 4 other adults. Sophia woke up in the house and found I wasn't there--came outside when she heard our voices.

She was sitting on my lap when the gang of young men headed up our street from Grand, splitting into two groups and zeroing in on us. I remember Mike saying "Evening," to them, as if it were nothing that they passed between us on the sidewalk.

And then one grabbed Joe by the neck and started beating him in the face.

Mike and two other men intervened. Joe, turns out, was a retired (disabled) police officer. "Officer down" is a powerful 911 call. The place was flooded with police. Two of the boys were caught.

They were juveniles. Since Mike had gotten hit as well as Joe, the prosecuting attorney called us to let us know that the one who did the hitting had a restraining order now--he couldn't come within however many feet of Joe or Mike. Whatever. I reamed her on the phone and then Zelda did the same. I think she was shocked by our response. There was a lot of stuttering on the phone. I think she thought we'd be relieved or happy.

The kid who did the attack is not the kid who has been arrested in the death of Hoang Nguyen. It's likely Elex Murphy doesn't even know the kid who hit Joe and Mike.

But I remember when the attack in 2006 happened. And when we tried harder with the police, when we tried harder with the prosecutor, when we mentioned "knock out kings" to them, they all just shook their heads. "Nah, they're not active anymore."

Turns out they are. And now someone is dead.

Girl Scouts: I should start a new blog (long semi-rant entry, be forewarned)

Seriously. I should start a blog dedicated to my girl scout experiences and entitle it "Bridgett Doesn't Care What You Think, This is her Girl Scout Troop".

I have frustrations with the mother ship that are well known. But I stay because GS provides such good cheap ways for girls to do things they wouldn't be able to do or learn in school, at home, or on the playground. Archery, different scout-centric field trips, camping, canoeing, and so forth. I have a high tolerance for paperwork and adult education and my co-leader and I complement each other well.

And over the years we have grown, to the largest number this year at 20 girls. We must be doing something right.

Cookies can be irritating and I have had my fair share--no, more than my fair share--of parents who are just nutty. But I stick with it because of posts like this.

And as Ann often says, where the tires hit the pavement, things seem to be going ok. I'm the buffer between council and my troop, but on my troop level, sure, there's drama, but it's ok.

Part of my drama is with the cookie family. You remember: Grandma bought 1000 boxes of cookies and then spent probably a year sitting outside a shoe store hawking them. Bizarre. The girl in my troop I've called by many names but here I'll call her Violet because I haven't used that pseudonym yet. Violet goes to the parish school, which I'll call St. Catherine of Siena, along with my co-leader's daughter, the two sisters who have dropped out of my troop, Ursula who has dropped out of my troop, and Jackie, who is still in my troop. I have lost other girls from the parish school along the way. It wasn't until yesterday that I started to realize maybe there was a pattern.

I know a mom, Carol, who is involved with the new brownie troop at Siena. Her daughter was in my troop very briefly, but was really too young and it just didn't seem to fit her very well. Her leaving was actually one of the catalysts that got this daisy/brownie troop organized, and I was all for that. I like to see a sustainable set of troops at a school so it becomes one of the things they do, a normal thing, not out of the ordinary. Siena hadn't really had a troop in years until I came along.

Once upon a time, I started my troop at my parish. I was homeschooling Sophia and so we didn't have a school. Yes, 4 of the 7 girls were from Siena, but I listed us as a church-based group. Over time, the ratio changed. Now, out of the 17 active scouts in my troop, only 3 of them attend Siena. Ten of them go to Sophia's school, and the other 4 live on my street.

But this was a gradual shift.

Sometime between our first year listed as my church's troop, to this year, the neighborhood started designating us as AT Siena (note: Siena is a consolidated school made up of several parishes--so there is a difference saying the church vs. the school). I never walk into Siena. We don't meet there. And we are less and less connected all the time.

Once I was the troop organizer at Sophia's school, and established the brownies and daisies, I debated just swinging over and making our troop based at our school. The problem is that it's in a different neighborhood designation, and that means we'd have to drop our troop number and close our checking account and start over. So I let it slide, really, because it didn't matter where we were based, right?

Well, now that there's this daisy/brownie troop there, it kind of does matter. Suddenly we were lumped in with them for April Showers, and I've already gone over how frustrating that was. And that really isn't that big of a deal, sure, it's only once a year, but then I had this conversation at pick-up time at school.

Carol babysits a kid at Sophia's school, so I see her every afternoon. And we're friendly enough even though I know she has probably had some things to say about me in the past. That street runs both ways, frankly. I also know she's friends with Violet's mom. And I was trying to see what Violet's plans were for the rest of the year (were we to expect her on the camping trip in May?) and for next year.

The brownie/daisy troop will, next year, be a junior/brownie/daisy troop. I have no idea how they will balance this, although this mom says they have lots of adult volunteers so that may be fine. And if they have one leader, like me, with a high tolerance for paperwork, then one troop makes sense. There are schools in the area who have one troop and break out into patrols, more like a boy scout model.

So, talking with her, she says that since Violet's little sister is a daisy in their troop this year, and since next year they'll have juniors, they've invited Violet to join them. I told Carol this sounded good--Violet didn't do anything this year, really, and so juniors would be practically new for her next year. I asked her if there was a problem between Violet's mother/grandmother and my troop set-up, because she hadn't made but one meeting, but came to both big field trips. And then she told me.

Grandma feels like we don't communicate with her. She's angry because Violet doesn't get to do things with the money SHE raised by selling cookies. I've heard this song and dance before and it rolls off my back. Grandma doesn't know when meetings happen and doesn't get notes. Mom thinks we don't approve of her because she's a single mom (umm, so is my coleader) and therefore we have cut her out of the loop. Mom works evenings and Sundays (my meeting day) and Grandma is, well, nutty.

I nod through all of this. It doesn't upset me. I ask Carol what I might do better--does Violet's mom have email, for instance? I mention that Sunday is our meeting day and she says that this is probably the problem, frankly. Sunday afternoons are busy and they forget things. Well, that's a shame, because Sunday meetings were a huge relief to so many of my parents that we're not changing it. We can't meet after school (I'm saying this out loud to her) because my coleader doesn't get home until 5:30, and our girls come from so many different schools. And we didn't want to pick one evening because so many evenings are already busy.

"Oh, that's another thing," Carol stops me. "A lot of people at Siena don't like that you have girls from other schools in your troop. Girls at Siena just aren't comfortable with outside girls being in the troop. I know that my daughter, I mean, your troop was great, but she wasn't comfortable because of all your outside girls."

"I understand that feeling," I TOTALLY LIE. I think the school-based diversity in my troop is one of its strengths. "That's just the way my troop evolved."

"I know," Carol continues. "And I think because you were the top leader at Siena, having the older girls, but so many outsiders, it kind of stifled the growth of girl scouts at Siena over all. Your troop, and you and your coleader, are seen as kind of separate, as not open to new girls, not meeting people halfway, not really being attached to Siena and not friendly."

Smack. It's been a week of smacking Bridgett. Wow.

"Really?" I ask her.

"Yeah. It wasn't until me and the other moms decided to do our own thing and not depend on you anymore that girl scouts really even got a footing at Siena. And now our girls can be in a troop with girls from Siena and not from all over the neighborhood and feel comfortable and do things together. And now we have a good girl scout program set up."

Ok.

Granted, I'm not going to hold anyone's hand anymore because these girls are in 4th and 5th grade and they need to figure out how to get to meetings or talk to me about it. And my coleader and I have stopped bending over backwards for families who can't get their acts together. I will totally cop to that. Looking back, we have lost quite a few Siena girls: Violet, Ursula, the two sisters--those were this year alone. And over the years, I've lost Jenny, Katie, Paula Jean, Olga. But for some reason my coleader has stayed with me, and then there's Jackie, too. What's going on at Siena that doesn't match what's going on in my troop? Where is the disconnect?

I thanked Carol for her honesty and she said that the leaders at Siena were interested in drawing ALL the Siena girls into their troop--basically, take the few that were left with me and bring them into their fold. "Who else goes to Siena and is in your troop, anyway?"

"Well, there's my coleader's daughter, and I assume she isn't going to leave, and one of my girls is transferring there next year. But they're going to be cadettes, and that seems pretty far-fetched to have two cadettes with all those young girls. And there's Jackie--"

"Oh, Jackie and Violet HATE each other," she shakes her head.

"Yeah, I got that impression at our camping trip in Januar. Violet and her friends kind of morphed into mean girls--"

"Yeah, Violet's mom knows. There's been some problems in the classroom. Siena doesn't have a bullying problem, but that class really, wow."

"I can see that," I nod.

"So you can keep Jackie and the older girls but we'll go ahead and take over and be the Siena troop."

Well then.

I ask again: what is going on at Siena that is so opposed to my set up? Is it that I'm just too montessori-based, or is it some kind of frustration or anger that I didn't send Sophia the Dyslexic to the traditional parish school that would have crushed her? And perhaps made her into a xenophobe with an underdog complex? I'm not impressed.

Telling this whole story to my coleader, she said we should just wash our hands of the troop connection to Siena. So now my task is to find out how and be as diplomatic as I can. We SHOULDN'T be a Siena troop. There's nothing Siena about us, frankly. We have girls from there, but we have one girl from a magnet school and one from a private school in Clayton. We're not based THERE either. Logically, we should switch to Sophia's school. But maybe we don't have to be school based at all. Seriously. Do we really need to? There are homeschool troops. We could be a neighborhood troop. Because I think I'm done with this snitchy-cat BS coming from Siena.

So there's my rant for today. Now I need to go do dishes and work in the yard briefly in the (again) cold. Feed Leo some lunch and change the sheets on the beds. Yay me.

UPDATE: Called council. There's a form. I fill it out and we'll be based at Sophia's school in that neighborhood and life is easy again and Siena folks can stop worrying about me.

We're All Fine Here, How Are You?

The storm got us into the basement for the evening. The girls were wound up afterward and it took a long time to get kids to bed. I was gentle about it. They're probably paying for it today but it was hard to get to sleep after such a storm blaring through and those horrific sirens (I remember them going off so rarely as a child, and now that we live a block away from one, it happens all the dang time).

Tornado season started on New Year's Eve this year and has continued at a good pace. I've spent quite a few evenings in the basement and a couple of nights in the living room away from the windows watching the moment-to-moment updates on the news. Our house, while it probably would not fare well in an earthquake, is sturdy for things like tornadoes. It's not going to get blasted away like the ones you see on the news. It may wind up losing its roof, which of course is the layer right on top of where my daughters sleep, but the living room is probably not too much safer than the basement. We go to the basement when it looks really bad, but the first floor away from windows otherwise.

Are there more storms these days, or is it just more obvious because as a kid I didn't always live in Tornado Alley? I spent time in Wisconsin, Southern California, Georgia, and Houston (there are tornadoes there but they're during hurricanes). I don't know--maybe it's just more of a hair trigger on the sirens? Better forecasting? Overprotective fire stations? Hmm.

30DMC: Day 20

Favorite movie from my favorite actor (tomorrow is actress).

Ok, here's one where you have to see it coming: Colin Firth. And the list of movies I like that have Colin Firth involved is pretty long. If he's in it, and I've seen it, I like it. End of story. And I've already written extensively a few weeks ago about my favorite of his, The King's Speech. It is my favorite. But maybe only because it is the most recent. And because I got totally wrapped up in the accommodations.

But I will add that I have A Single Man on my netflix list. The trailer is compelling. I haven't seen it yet but will soon, and maybe this will change, because I will have seen it most recently.

But probably not. King's Speech is beautiful and my kind of movie: hopeful, but makes me think.

Fun for None

A SIGNIFICANT OUTBREAK OF SEVERE THUNDERSTORMS IS EXPECTED OVER MUCH OF THE AREA THAT WILL PERSIST THROUGH THE EVENING HOURS BEFORE COMING TO AN END. THE STRONGEST THUNDERSTORMS WILL BE CAPABLE OF PRODUCING STRONG TORNADOES...HAIL LARGER THAN GOLF BALL SIZE AND DAMAGING STRAIGHT LINE WIND GUSTS. LOCALLY HEAVY RAINFALL IS ALSO POSSIBLE.

So...yeah.

Mittens for Lent

I gave up Starbucks for lent. Today was the only day I was tempted, and that's because I was at Target (there's a Starbucks inside our Target). And I had gone from house to school to Target, and hadn't had breakfast or any coffee yet due to the fact that I hadn't taken the danged medication I have to take an hour before eating until 7:30. So, there I was at 9:00 and it called to me. But I said no.

I went to Penzey's to pick up more Ozark Seasoning, which we always seem to be running out of, along with ground cloves and cumin, always cumin. I thought about it again. I could get a coffee....

So I went over to St. Louis Bread Co (Panera to the rest of you who live in the midwest and wherever else they are) on Landsdowne and got a cup of coffee. Leo had a milk. We split a scone. I was amused by my fellow coffee drinkers: a woman saying the rosary and sipping from her mug. The two 60-something men holding court, knowing half the people who walked through the door. The priest trying to look casual. The girl Sophia's age in short-shorts (REALLY?)--although she wasn't drinking coffee. Leo sat and drank his milk and the rosary woman told me he had beautiful blond hair.

"How old is he?" And I told her he'd turned 2 in January. "He's going to be tall."

"Could be," I grant her.

"I love the hair," she repeats. And she doesn't add what many women her age and ilk add--wasted on a girl--but instead asks if I think he'll keep it.

"No, probably not. His dad was blond as a baby, so was my dad, and they both lost it by 5 or 6."

"Shame. Enjoy it while it lasts. My oldest went from curly blond to straight black by the time he was 15."

I walk out with my to-go cup, happy that I didn't just go through the way-too-easy drive through across the street at the Starbucks, thus breaking my promise and, really, missing out on all this.

I came home and knit the smaller of these two pairs. I have 4 pair now, of various sizes, ready for next November when I'll drop them at school for kids who forgot their own. Everybody should be able to play in the snow.

30DMC: Day 19

Favorite Movie Based on a Book or Comic:

Well, finally an easy one.

To Kill A Mockingbird. Without a doubt, it is the best book-to-movie adaptation I have ever seen. It is good. It is so good. Magical good.

That is all.

Note to self

This is just to say
That you are too old
To still be up at one.

Say What? Or, the one where Bridgett gets smacked down

It was the bikes.

We went across the street to see the house for sale. The consensus was too pricey, especially considering that houses are popping up for sale all over this area of town.

It is the house directly across the street. It has the same door arrangement I have. I have always thought we were mirror images of each other. But we're not. The house across the street is what happens after my house goes on a diet. It's slimmer, and not as deep. It didn't strike me or Zelda completely until we made it up to the second floor and the bedrooms were definitely more narrow than mine. It just felt, well, narrow.

But that's not the owner's fault, so I didn't feel bad saying it. Nobody else was in the house at the time, either, so I really didn't feel bad.

Some other things were not what I would have done, but then again, my house is pretty rough around the edges so I don't often have much to say when these subjects come up.

But Zelda and I were still saying "narrow" as we walked out the front door. The agent stopped us.

"Was it not what you expected?" she asked.

I explained I lived across the street, that I had never been inside in 13 years, that I was surprised that it wasn't a mirror image like I thought it would be.

I think she took offense.

But I didn't catch it. Zelda asked if maybe it was the front hall illusion. Was this front hall bigger than mine, thus shifting the center of the house a bit and making the living room and dining room smaller.

"I don't think so," I ducked my head back in. "I have a bench, the phone table, and of course the bikes all fit over here," I gesture around the other side.

"Oh, that must do a lot for your decor," the agent said, dripping sarcasm with every word.

Now, there are things about my house I don't like (the painted floors) and things I'd like to redo (the awful front porch). There are things that aren't quite done (baseboards throughout various rooms) and every original window has a diagonal crack. I often feel like I should apologize when people come in my house for the first time. But never because of the bikes in my front hall. I don't have a garage and my basement access is cumbersome. Bikes in the front hall is my psychological impact statement for visitors: we bike. We are a family that does things outside and being together is more important than a lawyer foyer. If it wasn't more important, we would live in a different place and have different priorities and no bikes in the front hall.

"Well," I tried to deflect it, thinking, man, you don't know me well enough to say that to me. "I'm not trying to sell my house."

"As long as you like the neighborhood," she continues in the same tone, and then I focus on her again. Zelda starts talking about how she should really sell the house by selling the block (she should) and the agent obviously doesn't understand what Zelda means. And then in the next few minutes the following things happened:

1. She argued that the house had once been a two-family flat. It hadn't. It is OBVIOUS BEYOND OBVIOUSNESS that it had never been a two-family. Probably not even a boarding house from the looks of things (mine was, and let me tell ya, you can tell).

2. She kind of bad-mouthed the owners, who are still our neighbors, living across the alley from me in another one of their properties. I was stunned by this. She didn't know anything about me or Zelda. The owner could have been the godfather of my son for all she knew (and on my block, this happens: Leo's godmother lives 3 houses down).

3. She and the assistant talked smack about some other owner who had "overdone" his house and trying to get his money back in the sale was nearly impossible--I mean, in the course of 10 minutes, no, less, she managed to insult me, ignore our advice, expose her incorrect assumptions about the house's history, insult the client and former clients, and really, what a charmer.

Zelda, because she is a much better person than I will ever be (and I don't mean that in any other way than how it sounds), investigated this further with the owner of the house. The agent attends the church they're involved in, although her office is in Ladue (and therefore, the ignorance about the house and the neighborhood). He didn't want to go with her. He has his suspicions that she's not going to work to sell it. He was the one who set the price (too high) but he thinks she's not so great. Hearing that Zelda talked to him made me decide I needed to as well. Because he needs to hear it from more than one source. And frankly, she doesn't deserve any of his money.

And certainly none of my goodwill.

30DMC: Day 18

Ok, I'm balking at this one because it's "A movie you wish more people would see" and if that isn't Smoke or Big Night I just don't know what to say. Hmm.

Like books, it is hard to recommend movies that are more than fluff. I can whole-heartedly tell other moms about my opinions on Toy Story III, for instance, but I have a harder time telling friends that they'd just love Trainspotting. Because really? No they wouldn't.

But I have one. I saw Babette's Feast while on a parish women's retreat back when Maeve was a baby. It must have been Autumn '05. It's a story in itself, actually, involving a strident young mother about my age with serious issues with religion. She left, in fact, during the retreat, she was so upset by the marvelous woman who was leading us. That retreat, in fact, is where I learned first about Hildegard of Bingen, which led me to the Rule of Benedict, which led me to becoming an oblate. So it was an important event for me.

But anyway. Babette's Feast. It's in Danish and French, and it's a movie set in this godforsaken Danish village on the ocean. Two spinster sisters, the daughters of a severe protestant minister, live there and still sort of run the religious sect he left when he died. There is no enjoyment in life. Then Babette arrives, a refugee from France (during the revolution). She comes with a letter of recommendation from someone the sisters know, and they employ her as housekeeper and cook. Lots of boiled fish. They are suspicious because she is French and Catholic, but they let her live there.

And, like Big Night, it is a story about a meal. But it's different from Big Night. A little bit of Guy de Maupassant at the end, and there is quite a bit of Eucharistic imagery. Watch it while drinking a glass of red wine.

Girl Scouts Continue to Take All My Crazy Time

So much of the time I allot to crazy (which is a large amount of time, actually, considering my family and all the spheres I have any influence on) is taken up by girl scout things. Here is the current list of items that have taken up my crazy-time in the past few weeks:

1. My daisy troop accidentally (new troop, new cookie manager, new problem) turned in too much money for their cookies AND reported a mom for non-payment. At first the council told me that as long as they had their money, they wouldn't pursue a non-payment. She even said the phrase "what a shame" to me. As my neighbor Travis said this evening, accounting must have realized the potential of my going completely crazy and showing up with a weapon and "Decided it was wise" to refund the extra money and pursue the non-payment anyway. So all was well in the end. Thank goodness.

2. But before they wised up, I had to call and leave a message for non-payment mom (who also isn't showing her face at school anymore, I mean, she's stolen quite a bit of money from a group of kindergarten girls) that made me sound like a hitman for some sort of organized crime syndicate. My last line was "Corey, I'm not going away." But now I am--council can send their own knee-cappers.

3. Girl X in my junior troop. The girl who has come to a whopping total of one meeting and then made such a terrible scene at our January camping trip...by the time my co-leader and I got our acts together, we felt it was too late to ban her from attending the March trip, but now the May trip is upon us and she's been to nothing except those two trips and the one meeting (not surprisingly, the one when cookie forms got distributed). The majority of the troop has earned bronze awards and done lots of work towards that and has planned fun things for the daisies and brownie visitors to this May trip. Girl X has done none of these things. Co-leader and I are thinking it's time to tell her mom that it's over. On the other hand, co-leader and I are JUST SO TIRED of the mother and the grandmother (this is the 1000 boxes of cookies family and all of the crazy in my troop, well, 85% of the crazy). A big part of each of us is thinking "let's just let it slide and then slap every girl with a behavior contract in the fall". But the nagging "Don't let her get away with it" side of me is growing bigger. She didn't show for either date of April Showers (our charity drive in town--we distribute bags and then collect them the next Saturday, hopefully containing personal care items like toothpaste and soap, etc). She hasn't done jack this year except sell some cookies and go on two trips. It's time.

4. Speaking of April Showers, the troop we partnered with from the parish school is chock full of ninnies. Not the girls. The adults. I have no problem believing they are nice people and they are good with their girls and probably have a good time. But they were so hard to get organized on the first Saturday ("Two blocks. East. Just the two blocks." You would be surprised how many times I had to rephrase that) and the second date involved one mom turning to me and saying that she had "never done anything so stupid" in her life. What were we doing? Sorting personal care items by type so the food pantry could better organize it all. The NERVE of them to want the shampoo all in one bin and the toothpaste in another. I explained things very calmly but also very teacher/parent like to this mom and she backed off. But now I think I've probably spent all my goodwill in that direction and am left with...

5. Wait, I didn't want to be a part of that troop's business anyway. But the leader wants me to--our troop is technically (but not really) based out of their school and she's hoping, at least out loud to me, that we will partner next year and the juniors and cadettes in my troop that go to her school (there are 3--and my troop is big, so you can see how we're not really part of that school) will join HER troop, along with my coleader. No no no. You can't have her. You can't have my co-leader or the 3 girls. Girl X, sure--since it's unlikely she'll want to be part of my troop next year--but not the coleader, her daughter, or the two neighbors who attend. Really? They're staying.

6. So then I told her I thought we were happy with the way things were, and that I'd be happy to sit down with her and her coleaders (but probably not the mom who thought sorting was stupid) and go over how to run a mixed-level troop. It occurred to me later that nowhere in my job description is it listed to take care of these folks. I'm not their troop organizer or have any personal connection to any of them. So I'll wait and see what happens there.

7. Which led me to consider abandoning our troop number and neighborhood, which would involve giving up the best troop number ever (we are Troop 66), and switching officially over to Sophia's school's neighborhood. But this would also involve shutting down and reopening a checking account. And changing all those sashes. I'm balking at this idea. And considering how I can list us as a troop without a school designation since we're really a neighborhood troop after all.

8. Not to even mention that the Girl Scouts have asked me to become a trainer for them. I will have to check most of my cynicism at the door because there are sure to be ninnies in my classes along with people who hate going to classes and people who are hoping to learn something useful (I was usually in those two categories, actually). I am bound to be better at it than the woman who taught me archery, from a chair, with an oxygen tube up her nose. I'm self-taught. But becoming a trainer involves two letters of reference and an application. I'm stalling. It makes my head hurt.

9. Add in the frustration of the whole program changing, the program that is already watered down from what it could be, and not being able to do any tangible planning until the new books come out in September...

10. And trying to sign up for canoeing class involved phone tag with the Red Cross and then a pdf file of how to sign up for canoeing class (reminds me of Appendix 5: How to Read Appendix 5). I want to do this. Why can't I just do it?

Plus the normal non-crazy: bridging ceremonies, camping plans, finishing up the bronze award stuff, scheduling a drop off for that, and so forth. But camping plans involve a daisy troop full of energy (that's putting it nicely) and one mom has already expressed doubt that this will go well (a DAISY mom). She may be right, frankly. Yet we forge ahead.

Because I'm crazy.

30DMC: Day 17

The movie that most disappointed me.

Wow.

I have a top ten list instead.

10. My Own Private Idaho. My best friend in high school loved this film. She talked about the dang thing all the time. And it was bad. Really bad.

9. What Dreams May Come: I think this was pitched to me as something else, something beautiful. But it sucked the life out of me.

8. Hudsucker Proxy. Mike will argue with this one, but it was so dull. I like a lot of the Coen Brothers films. But not this one. Yawn.

7. Bram Stoker's Dracula. The one with Anthony Hopkins. Silly waste of time. So bad.

6. Prince of Tides. Ok...this was based on some other book because it's hardly recognizable and Barbara Streisand, I hates her.

5. Waterworld: in a world where there is no land and earth is precious, why is everyone so dirty?

4. The other Matrix movies. I liked the first one all right (not like my sister liked the first one). But after that? Eh. I don't even know how many there are or how many I saw.

3. Pay it Forward. I guess it just wasn't good enough without a meaningless death. Meaningless death worked in American History X. It doesn't work here.

2. Speaking of Kevin Spacey, let's add American Beauty right here. As my friend Maloki put it, "I couldn't even look at the screen. Not a single character was redeemable."

1. Star Wars Volumes I, II (I didn't see III). Really? REALLY?

Maeve Moment

We pulled up at home after a trip to Crown Candy (because we can, mostly, no good reason). I started getting Leo out of the car when Maeve said, "I know that cat."

I looked across the street to a little tuxedo (black and white) kitty, not very big.

"You do?" I ask. It looked like a stray to me.

"Yes, it's the cat from the posters on all the poles," she explained. Ah yes. Vic and Wendy. A couple weeks back she asked us if we'd seen her cat, a little black and white thing with a puffy tail. We hadn't, of course, and although I'd seen the posters I hadn't put much thought into it.

I approached it slowly, across the street. It dashed away from me and so I knew I'd have to make a quick move. I told Maeve to stand there and watch it while I went to knock on Vic's door.

I explained to him. He was, of course, interested. He followed me, even with my caveats that it was my 6 year old who thought maybe it was his cat, that I hadn't seen the tail, that I just couldn't be sure, there were so many strays.

He knew her immediately. "It's been two weeks," he exclaimed. He called her name and made little click noises that she obviously had heard before. She meowed and moved tactically, from the porch to the bush to the tree to the steps, until finally coming in reach.

"She's so skinny," he said, holding her. "I'm going to get her inside right now."

I couldn't have been prouder of Maeve, frankly. To notice the poster, remember the story (she explained that she'd asked Nate's dad why there were pictures of cats on the light poles, when she'd been over visiting on the other side of the street last week), see the cat, make the connection. It was a lot of steps for a tired 6 year old full of ice cream.

I saw Vic from my window step out on his porch and pull down the missing cat poster from his mailbox. Hooray.