Turning the World Around
Roddy Frame

Wrestling with the shadows of the night
I feel my whole world slipping through my fists
It's like I've got nothing goin'
and what I know's not worth knowin'
Then the first burst of the yellow morning light
filters through the tracing paper mist
And I find myself freewheelin' through my fear
and those old feelings all take flight

It's like the sun releases my soul as they fall away
They're broken into pieces by the toll of the everyday
Love and small ambitions and good hearts run aground
The pull of our condition, turning the world around

Turning my world over in my head,
memories swimming round me chase their tails
A raging ocean brimming with hungry sharks, still circling
Seven seas all drowning me in dread,
drag me down again and shred my sails
Then she calls to talk and I'm clinging to the rock
of something simple that she said

Rain washed conversations, born from winter blues
Sprung from situations seen from somewhere new
August burned ecstatic, Autumn coming down
Tiny twists of magic, turning the world around

We may lose and we may win
But we will never be here again
-Jackson Browne

I am from white houses with green shutters. I am from cement porches and slammed screen doors.

I am from Sesame Street, I Love Lucy, The Brady Bunch, and Happy Days. I am from Barbies and Hot Wheels. I am from basements and station wagons that have wood paneling. I am from bare feet on hot tar in the summer time. I am from lilacs and petunias. I am from Target and 7-11. I am from scary stories whispered in the dark. I am from lullabies.

I am from the little house, a brown lake house with two bedrooms and eight people.

I am from playing baseball in the grass, raking leaves and jumping in the piles. I am from Dick Van Dyke and M*A*S*H. I am from screaming and fighting. I am from laughing and shared secrets. I am from rusted out cars. I am from swimming in the lake, fishing, and canoeing. I am from walking to A&W in the summer and walking across the frozen lake in the winter. I am from blistered sunburns and frost bite.

I am from a geodesic dome. I am from new homes that never seem quite finished.

I am from The Cosby Show and Cheers and Friday Night Videos. I am from family home evening and family prayer and having the missionaries over for dinner every week. I am from frantic family trips. I am from squabbling and frustration. I am from seminary and stake dances and girls camp. I am from movies and Pizza and Perkins and cruising. I am from no rules and no curfew. I am from late night phone calls with the long cord pulled into my closet. I am from waterbeds and Ford Granadas. I am from good friends and good jokes.

Where are you from?

folks who think their email address begins with www. (this wouldn't bother me if I didn't have to sort through hundreds of emails every day).

mom bloggers who are lovely, smart, funny, and have interesting writing, but think they need to drop a lot of f-bombs to be hip (clearly they don't have children who are old enough to read over their shoulders).

james blunt's You're Beautiful song But we shared a moment that will last 'till the end. Ack, it's the neediest song.

that when I sleep on my face, I have lines from my eyes to my nose all morning.

I'm actually having a great morning and don't feel annoyed at all right now. It's a gorgeous day outside and I got all my work done in the first hour of the day. I just had this list saved in a draft from a few weeks ago and thought I'd post it. Blogs are meant to document the meaningless junk we think about, right?

I'm taking a break from blogging this week. I don't feel like writing. I just want to get my work done and get out of the house.

I hope you have a nice week.

i carry your heart with me
e. e. cummings

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

So, Scooter is now 7 months old. We've had him for a little over 5 months. He's been potty trained for about 3 months (maybe a little less). And, he's great. He's just a lovely little fellow. The girls are still so in love with him. I really like him, too. I was worried about getting a dog. It's a big commitment to get a dog, but it turns out to be one we can handle. Go figure.

He's a good dog. He sleeps in his kennel all night (in fact, he loves his kennel). For the first three or four months, we just shut him in the laundry room at night. But, he started waking me up every morning around 3 or 4 am to go to the bathroom. We were going out of town, so we locked him in his kennel to see how he'd do. He loved it.

He is pretty independent and his main goal in life is the pursuit of food. When he was little he was a glutton for any kind of food. Now, he's a glutton for any kind of food except dog food. We made the mistake of feeding him our food as a reward for sitting and shaking, and now that's almost all he seems to care about. I'm the worst about it, but he's just so cute I can't resist.

It's good to have a dog.

Ahhh.. summer vacation is here. It was a good school year, but I'm happy about the break.

Lillie has decided to go to school next year. At first, she said she would homeschool if she didn't get into the charter school that Grace attends. Then, she decided that another year of homeschool would be "torture". Last year that would have hurt my feelings, but this year has been a lot different. I agree that she should go to school.

Lillie just hasn't had enough kids to play with. She's had some kids to play with some of the time, but not enough. We've gone to homeschool P.E. days and field trips, but we never connected with another family.

So, last Thursday was our last day of homeschool and I wasn't sad. Maybe a little, but not like I was last year on what I thought was our last day of homeschool. Yesterday I dropped off Lillie's registration papers for the school down the street. Just in case she doesn't get into the charter school. And it's good. As much as I loved homeschooling, I know that this is good.

Have you checked out Sketchup yet? It's easy to create all sorts of cool stuff. Grace is having a great time with it.

After a hundred years
Emily Dickinson

After a hundred years
Nobody knows the place,--
Agony, that enacted there,
Motionless as peace.

Weeds triumphant ranged,
Strangers strolled and spelled
At the lone orthography
Of the elder dead.

Winds of summer fields
Recollect the way,--
Instinct picking up the key
Dropped by memory.

Maus
by Art Spiegelman

Spiegelman tells the story of his father's experience as a Holocaust survivor. I was a little put off by the fact that it was a comic book. There's something jarring about combining cartoons with such serious history. But, the immediacy of the comic strip really brings the story and the reality of such an awful time to live. I plan on reading Maus II next.

Housekeeping
by Marilynne Robinson

Imagine the blank light of Judgment falling on you suddenly. It would be like that. For even things lost in a house abide, like forgotten sorrows and incipient dreams, and many household things are of purely sentimental value, like the dim coil of thick hair, saved from my grandmother's girlhood, which was kept in a hatbox on top of the wardrobe, along with my mother's gray purse. In the equal light of disinterested scrutiny such things are not themselves.

Good book. It was incredibly well written. The language was slow and fantastically done. It is about two girls whose mother leaves them at their grandmother's house and then drives herself into a lake. After the grandmother comes, they are cared for by spinster great aunts and then their mother's sister who was (and is at heart) a transient. The story itself lagged for me at times. I really enjoyed the end, though. All of the themes of the book came together. The main character has to choose between her sister and her aunt and, in a sense, her childhood or herself.


These Is My Words
by Nancy Turner

Fabulous book. This is the story of girl who travels with her family from Oregon to Texas to Arizona. The beginning is really intense and awful things happen to the family, but the story grips you and pulls you in.

The Myth of You and Me
by Leah Stewart

This was an interesting, easy read. It is the story of a 30 year old woman who is still dealing with her high school and college experiences. She is unable to put down roots and maintain real relationships. When her best friend from high school writes to her, the story of their relationship slowly comes out. It plays with the idea of who are in relation to our friends and how we change and bend for others.

March

Inconceivable
by Ben Elton

Novel about a British couple in their mid-thirties trying to have a baby. It was good, but not great. It was funny and had some interesting twists, but I don't know if I would have finished it if it didn't deal with infertility.

Songbook
by Nick Hornby
I read a lot of Nick Hornby, and by the time I picked up this book I think I was just a little tired of him. Although I'd probably have enjoyed another book of fiction. This book is self-indulgent meanderings about his favorite songs. It's just alright.


Follies
by Ann Beattie

Well written, but I couldn't care less about the characters or the story, for that matter. Not recommended.

Lillie had a tooth pulled today. The tooth was ankylosed, so she had to go to an oral surgeon and be put under. I was nervous about it. They had a hard time finding her vein, but got her on the third try. She was completely calm about the whole thing even though she had about six wires attached to her, a blood pressure cuff, a thing over her nose, and some thing on her finger monitoring the oxygen in her nail bed.

When it was all over and I picked her up in recovery, she was awake but out of it. She kept asking if they were done yet, insisting she had never gone to sleep, then wanting to know if they had taken the needle out yet. She groggily picked out some toys and then we drove home. The whole time she kept asking if she had really gone to sleep, wanted to know if they had pulled out the tooth, or if they had pulled out the right tooth. She just kept repeating herself and she was pretty upset.

After we got home, she was upset that we wouldn't let her walk on her own (she clearly couldn't, but thought she could) and was in tears that we were treating her like she was sick. It was hard. She was just so sad and out of it. She was making sense, but she wasn't really processing anything we were saying to her.

Then, it seemed like her fog just lifted. She wanted to go to Target to pick out an art project and she wanted to go bike riding and just. like. that. life was back to normal.