auld lang syne

we awake today to a fine dusting of frost on everything. the pine needles glisten in the sun. icicles drip from the traffic lights. very pretty, if not for the underlying treacherousness.

the christmas baubles come down today, and the berry garland goes back into storage.

a box of goodies arrives from over the seas. what a lovely way to end the year.

whimpers from coach class

perhaps we should agree to:
1. not recline the seat, so that the person behind can breathe,
2. not grab the seat in front for traction on the way to the loo, and
3. not stuff the space below our seat, so the guy behind can stretch.

and it would be lovely to have footrests to anchor our bodies onto.

night of miracles - christmas cantata 2009

it's my little night of miracles too, as i sing alto to J2's soprano and J1's tenor solo and HOM handles sound and photography. it is an extravagant joy:

1. to be able to sing in choir with my children as my equals,

2. to be able to serve with my whole family, and

3. to be part of a choir again after almost three decades.

notes from hawaii

most awesome:

surfer dudes rising on their boards as they crest a wave.

most abundant:

abc stores, one on each block. i can't imagine their mortgage.

most over-rated:

mai tai. cloyingly sweet without any other bite.

most appreciated:

the sun! the heat!

most fun:

sitting in the pub with HOM J1 and J2 cheering the dallas cowboys to victory against the washington redskins, although in my uninformed excitement i accidentally cheer the replays.

reflections of a traveler flying coach

my pet peeves:
1. getting the last row so that i cannot recline the seat,
2. getting the inside seat so i jump hoops to get to the loo, and
3. - this is really awful - getting a crying baby on board.

my favorites:
1. the aisle seat,
2. two rows from the loo, and
3. an empty seat next to me.

the journey to hawaii

is long drawn out on miniscule airline seats with outrageously truncated leg room so that even my anorexic frame is contorted into unbelievably unnatural angles.

this is one journey that ends marvelously though, as we emerge from the bowels of the airplane and step into the balmy paradise that is hawai'i, and our aches are miraculously exchanged for something suspiciously like a great vacation.

the journey back, which we are facing now, is going to be a grim reminder of life's realities.

it's just another day

it marks one of the two days on which my organized faith is built.

you wouldn't know it though from the frenzy of activities feasts shopping and meltdowns that occur. it might help if we think of it as the annual support-your-local-business drive.

what i hate about snow

1. the shoveling,
2. the indoor sandpit,
3. the traffic snarls, and
3. the slush.


snow, like cold weather, is best appreciated on a postcard.

impressions from cancun 2

4. walmart is in cancun too! and at the back of the low peso stuff i spy the sticker that says, made in china. in mexico!

5. every other stall is selling mexican blankets, which on closer inspection turn out to be kilim type rugs. we find tight weave and vibrant colors that set our hearts a-tripping and acquire three. it means everything else will get squashed, but hey these are wool kilims.

6. my cultural experience does not get to expand beyond tintin and the temple of the sun god, due to a total lack of higher objectives than food and vegetating.

when i finally lift my head from the food pool shopping and predators and accidentally look out to sea, i am captivated. there is a wildness to the crashing waves under a leaden sky that suggests legends and possibilities, and there is a pristine beauty to the famed cancun beach that bewitches even a beachophobe like me. (at least until the excavators turn up to lay the pipes.)

gratitude

i am grateful to return from my weekend trip with HOM to discover that J1 and J2 have been safe fed resourceful and responsible in our absence. could a parent ask for more than to know that her children are growing into maturity? i cannot think of more joyfully humbling knowledge.

snowstorm in d.c.

payback time.

impressions from cancun

1. sun and sea... the beach is off limits this week due to pipe laying, and it is, er, cold. not quite snowstorm cold, but i have packed for phuket type weather, not temps in the sixties. but 's okay; the bikini looks good poolside.

2. to our shock, it rains in cancun. nay, it storms in cancun, enough to flash flood the roads and puncture the awnings and render obsolete our optimistic bottle of sunscreen. then again, the bikini is mainly for show anyway.

3. the place crawls with predatorial purveyors of tours dives trips and vacations who prey on susceptible looking foreigners. fortunately we are so foreign that we do not understand english spanish japanese or chinese.

the journey to cancun

is riddled with challenges, which begin with HOM and me valiantly shoveling the driveway at four a.m. before driving through the blinding snowfall to the airport, where our flight gets delayed two hours on account of a tardy crew member(!@#!), and they continue as we plod through the cattle ranch that is the cancun immigration process to multiple encounters with time-share program vendors who eagerly wait to feed on us as we make our way to our hotel room.

home

HOM and i fly back from sunny cancun to the unmelted snowy banks left behind by the mother of all snowstorms that has pummeled d.c. over the weekend. J1 and J2 have fended very well in our absence and have been fortunate to celebrate cancellation of school as well as church. getaways can grow on one, really. they are certainly one great perquisite of middle age.

rations

supermom notwithstanding, i find myself back at the store to buy bread cookies and other essentials that we are short of. the entire county seems to be here too. the store is overrun with shoppers grimly driving oversized overflowing carts.

at the checkout line, i investigate my neighbors' carts. plenty of meat and bread and lots of toilet rolls. in comparison, my cart has one loaf of bread bars of chocolate and some drinking water, which makes me wonder if i am stocking up on entirely inappropriate items.

above rubies

we're awaiting HOM's return from his trip and bracing ourselves for another snowstorm. do you see a pattern here?

in any case, the storm promises to be the worst in ten years. i'm not sure what that means, but for now i have:

1. stocked up on coffee, milk, english muffins and tv dinners,

2. broken my back lugging the de-icing salt home, all 25 lb of it,

3. dutifully and prophylactically salted our driveway, per the sweet man i met at the grocer's who bought 50 lb of the stuff, and

4. topped up the gas.

i totally feel like the virtuous wife in proverbs 31.

size matters

us postal service

you can apparently post bananas. witness two green birthday gifts from J2 to her friends.

business trip fatigue

this latest trip exacts a high toll. three time zones in two weeks taxes his orientation to place and our joint orientation to time. just a little more, i suspect, and orientation to person will dim as well, and the mental state exam will be complete.

cyril parkinson says when they wanted to make senior civil servants retire they sent them on multiple trips across incompatible time zones*, and it was diabolically effective.

*parkinson's law: the pursuit of progress (1958)

my year in review 2

i have passed three exams, which comforts HOM that the damage done by a vegetating life of leisure is not overtly detectable yet.

i have started three blogs, evidence that my covert cognitive deficits are nevertheless balanced by increasing acidity and decreasing inhibition.

my year in review

i have finally modified my pavlovian conditioning. in response to hihowareyou, instead of reflexly going i'mgoodhowareyou i actually manage to say, i'm fine, thank you.

new year resolution preview

I expect to pass through this world but once. Any good, therefore, that I can do or any kindness I can show to any fellow creature, let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it for I shall not pass this way again.

a friend reminds me of the above. looking it up, i find it is attributed to gandhi, emily dickinson, and a quaker missionary called grellet, which makes for a rather sneaky analogy. we discuss implications and logistics and alternatives at length and forget the good we set out to do.

carpe diem. iterum.

excuses and excuses

as a result of:

1. HOM's frequent absences,

2. the chinese water torture, and

3. general malaise,

today, i surface to realize that:

1. we have not mailed any christmas cards this year,

2. it's too late to do so meaningfully by now, and

3. the only thing i'm not too late to do is shop the victoria's secret website, which promises to deliver by christmas day if i order by the 18th. it looks like this year my correspondance will primarily be with various vendors hoping to unlock my inner shopaholic.

sudden light

i stumble onto my primary school alumni association, and am suddenly transported into another world. the memories are delicious and hazy and return in fits. the awkward shyness comes back, but not the pain of awkwardness. the years have polished the child.

the language comes back, which i have not used in years. not at the hello how are you level i mean, but something that is more than purely functional. at native level, malay is as gracefully gently lyrical, as chinese is sharply intellectually satisfying. my loss, to have misplaced one and never acquired the other.

remind me - dottie rambo

the things that i love and hold dear to my heart

are just borrowed they're not mine at all

jesus only let me use them to brighten my life

so remind me remind me dear lord

today, perhaps for the first time, i am able to sing this through, peacefully. it has taken pain to sharpen my vision, and to make me realize that whether or not i would grasp on to precious things, they are never truly mine.

hail to the lord's anointed

which is the closing hymn for today, and as we sing it, a quiet oops slides into place, because it is sung to the tune of one of the infamous, considerably more profane, songs that we used to belt out at the height of an inter-hall songfight back in university.

it distinctly went like this, o why were you born so beautiful, o why were you born at all...

the mall christmas music awards

most often massacred... o holy night

most well done... silver bells

most overplayed... all the santa/snowmen/frosty songs

most likely to unlock my wallet... silver bells

my mall favorite, clearly, is silver bells. my all time favorite is o holy night, the steve green version.

the cloister and the clinic

in korsakov's, or in dementia, or other such catastrophes, however great the organic damage and... dissolution, there remains the undiminished possibility of reintegration by art, by communion, by touching the human spirit: and this can be preserved in what seems at first a hopeless state of neurological devastation. - the lost mariner, oliver sacks

a reminder that we know some but not perhaps much, and so hope is a currency that the wise physician would borrow from the priest.

ouch

biting a. stinging;

it's a bitingly cold day.

statick

my layers of protection come off with the inevitable enthusiastic crackle.

my pantyhose peels off and still holds its shape, with flexures at the knees and ankles.

Dog's disembodied hairs take on a life of their own as they latch onto unsuspecting victims.

the clothes from the dryer sizzle in electrostatic glory.

sometimes, just occasionally, i miss a more humid weather.

tiger woods

the golden boy of golf reveals more clay each day. the list of his paramours so far includes night club hostesses waitresses porn stars and one aspiring model.

all i say is,

1. he seems to have a type,

2. this type seems quite happy to tell all, and

3. the idiot seems to be an unbecomingly unfaithful cad.

remembrances

in the basement i discover a yet-to-be-unpacked box from our latest move. it holds the contents of J1's belated toybox - masks, his lego set, model planes and dreams from long ago. what should i do with this box? my son is a senior in high school but i am loath to discard his possessions from elementary school.

when does it become less heart breaking to retire memories?

health care

Dog goes for his annual exam and vaccination, and drives home the pain of not having health insurance. the vet's fees! the mandatory blood work! the got-to-have vaccines! i find myself trimming his to-have list to the absolute minimum and still end up forking out more than any of the rest of us has for doctors' visits this year, if you discount J1's emergency attendance for his laceration, which is another daylight robbery post.

manna

one has to come to the end of every hoarded resource and feel the cold fingers of fear before it is time to wait upon the only possibility left, divine provision, which is sufficient only unto the day and does not obey the economics of insurance.

even this reminder is manna, from a passage i know beyond knowing, in an hour of darkness, out of an impossible source.

oops

in the process of leaving a comment on chinoiserie's blog i appear to have acquired a new persona on some chinese blogspot. this is a direct result of not understanding the majority of the chinese hieroglyphs and happily muddling through what now appears to have been a registration page, so that i have become the proud owner of a rather complicated looking archetypal page that seems to be promising all manner of possiblities in a language i am only nominally acquainted with.

the eagle and the dove

p.c., book

statistics, essays

drill, needle

bullet-points, sentences

dessert, potatoes

his, hers

happy anniversary, partner

anniversary

it's a nineteen year old prayer, to love, to laugh, and to serve together.

by God's mercy, and against odds, it's been a nineteen year answer.
every good and perfect gift is from above... james 1:17

coffee machines

it's been a little rough getting our coffee. first the krups machine hisses and burns the powder, then HOM goes and barbecues the italian espresso kettle to death and now the french press has done a molotov on me.

it's a good thing our various exotic implements come from yard sales.

the hidden meaning of things

i spy a snow shovel.

ithaca (again)

i stumble across some chinese poems with their english translations here and am enchanted. there is an aching unrestrained beauty that lurks behind the spare words and almost mundane imagery. the art of not saying is magical within the confines of a few metered lines. when you apply the same principles to a play, or prose, you end up with melodrama*, which is awful.

in a nutshell, this is my relationship to chinese literature. i love the way the poetry paints an entire world by suggestion alone, but i dislike the heavy hand when they expand that world. although for pure agony, you can't beat the russians.

*e.g. thunderstorm, which put me off an entire genre.

business travel

HOM is home. rather unexpectedly early, fresh from houston's record setting snowstorm, ahead of our own snow day tomorrow, and in time to leave for his next trip in three days. which makes me inexplicably and gloriously glad, and grateful.

balance

i pull up beside a smartcarfortwo at the gas station. the large gentleman is filling up his tank and we chat about my dream car, after which he bids me good day and inserts himself back into the driver's seat.

the car chassis descends a full six inches onto the tires with the load. i think there ought to be a weight restriction on purchasers of cute subcompacts, in order to preserve aesthetic and mechanical congruence.

provisions

autumn and spring rains in season... the regular weeks of harvest. - jer 5:24

so peace and stability, and bounty, or trying times and grief, or quiet, or turmoil, are not accidental bequests of quixotic fate or the result of unpredictable probability, but what God chooses to give in keeping his promise that my strength shall equal my days.

it is a two part promise, but it's easy to forget that days are given, just as strength is promised.

business trip protocol

when HOM is away,
1. reading dinners are standard,
2. we eat what i wouldn't serve him (like fast food), and
3. i get to go to bed as early as i wish,
but it still makes for a cold bed.

nomenclature

J2 bakes up a big batch of double chocolate cookies, denudes the snacks pantry, and lugs the lot to school. she is co-hosting the inaugural meeting of her brainchild food club today.

if you ask me,

1. it sounds like a party, not a meeting, and

2. it sounds like an excuse for more parties, not a club.

a song to old friends

beyond the distant pavilion beside the ancient road

jade green and fragrant high grass joins the sky

evening breeze sways dripping willows dying flute notes linger

on the hill behind the hill the sun sets

to the ends of the earth and corners of the seas

half our friends are scattered

with a jug of thick wine let's enjoy what remains

and keep at bay tonight's cold dreams

-li shutong