1:1...

some of you readers may be among the blessed ones and know my lovely wifeband, d. she is a real charmer. not to mention quirky as hell. (clearly, a quality shared by every member of the family.)

one of her surprising quirks is her obsession with her own hair. to her credit, she does have great hair. thick, manageable, can-wear-any-style-and-look-great hair. she can often be found checking herself out in the mirror when she's having a good hair day (and even more often when she's having a bad one); and she will talk endlessly about which stage between cuts she is in when someone is foolish enough to compliment her on her hair.

she claims this obsession started early due to her mother running a beauty shop in the basement of her childhood home. she says there were mirrors everywhere and her mom taught her "it's all about teeth and hair". yikes. now i am paying the price for this shotty parenting mantra by listening to the endless queries from my spouse, "how's my hair?"

unfortunately her attentiveness to her hair doesn't translate to an ability to actually fix her own hair. more often than not she asks if i can "tweak" it. i was not blessed with such lustrous locks myself so i don't know why i can fix it better than she, but i can. i attribute this fact to my understanding, and her lack of understanding, of what i call: the hair ratio.

over the years i have noticed that she has a tendency to fix the back of her hair, and then fix the front of her hair. as if they were two separate entities. (they're not honey, they're really not.) i have repeatedly told her over the years that she should treat her hair as one unit. eventually i came up with my hair ratio idea as a way of explaining to her, and amusing myself.

i ask her, "how many heads do you have my love?" she answers, "one" (rather sheepishly). i continue (intentionally condescending), "that's right! one head. one hairstyle. it's a one to one ratio. not two to one. one to one. one head, one hairstyle. not two, just one... one. do you understand? one!" she laughs, assuming i'm just poking fun. i'm not just poking fun. i'm serious. one head+one hairstyle= good. the mullet clearly taught us that one head+two hairstyles= bad. we must heed these lessons and learn from our ancestors.

now, i must be clear here. my wifeband does not now, nor has she ever, sported a mullet. i simply use that illustration to show how far down the dark road a 1:2 ratio can take us.

my wonderful wifeband is well aware that i use her for blog fodder now and again, and she is ok with it. i would even say she's charmed a little. but i'm not telling you this story to charm you, i am doing my part to provide a valuable psa. all of you need to go look in the mirror and consider if you have violated this sacred truth of the 1:1 hair ratio. do it now, do it for the children.

Spac n' peas

i've been draggin' arse on the home front all week; and (might i add) drinking my fair share of wine. i haven't felt inspired to do much. including talk to people, wash my hair, tend to daily chores, or even cook. tonight when i looked in the cupboards and tried to think of what to make for dinner i was surprised to find that i didn't want to just give my kids whatever i could find that was semi-healthy. i wanted to cook something, r-style. i haven't done that in a week, which is extremely rare for me. this is what i came up with:

SPAC 'N PEAS (naming my concoctions is one of my favorite parts of creating them)

-simple homemade cheese sauce (roux, skim milk, monterey, sharp cheddar, and parm, garlic, s &p)

-whole wheat spaghetti- very al dente. (my children's fave form of pasta)

-petite green peas

toss and serve.

YUM.

i feel better. i'm even thinking of other ways to make it down the road. Spac n' Greens with some blanched swiss chard will be next...

Oh Ann... 9/14/1927- 10/10/2008

my gram died on friday afternoon. she had struggled in so many ways, for so many years and then on friday she took a nap and never woke up. no more struggling. i miss her tremendously after only these few days. a shit storm of family lunacy and drama are swirling around me right now and i miss my grounding force, gram.

my sweet z. gave her the name "oh-ann" when she was 2 years old. she thought it was her name because everyone has a tendency to say, "oh ann..." to my gram after she has dropped a verbal bomb on them. she was salty, sassy, and a powerful source of love in my life. she was a flawed and beautiful woman who never gave herself a break.

gram didn't take shit from anybody, and she taught me to do the same. she loved hard. laughed often (at the expense of others:). and cried much. she was a good and strong woman. she was a wonderful gram.

*see previous posting "have you ever been all of the way back to nowhere?" for more.

that's all she wrote...

from z. to me. 10-6-08

written during free time in her 3rd grade class.

sweet and low...

there is no sweeter sound to me these days than the sound of d's car pulling in the driveway with my girls after school. the sound i relish is not from the car specifically, it's the sound of all three of them singing loudly with the windows rolled down.

d. and i are both music fiends and we have made sure it is a centerpiece of our family life. often we have the same taste in music, sometimes we diverge. we're all loving augustana's new song "sweet and low". d. keeps the cd in her car and rocks out with the girls every chance she gets. i, too, enjoy rocking out with the girls each day. currently we are feeling the "sex and the city" soundtrack. :-) g. is addicted to fergie's "labels or love", while z. and myself are hooked on india arie singing "heart of the matter". (although car dancing and singing along with fergie is crazyfun!)

music is such an important part of our family life. in the car, in the house, while we sleep, everywhere. all four of us connect deeply to ourselves and each other through music. it makes us laugh, think, feel, cry.

for both d. and i music was our escape from the lunacy that raged in each of our family homes as children. d. recalls her credit woes as a 3rd grader indebted to columbia tapes and records. i was a paul simon enthusiast, and played my 45 of slip slidin' away on my little blue record player so much i wore it out. (yes, i was a dark child).

our kids rarely choose straight up kids music, although they have the full collection. z. is a U2 junkie, has been since she was 4. g's tastes range from annie lennox to usher, much like my own. d. is a musical hound dog, meaning she is always sniffing out who is new and great on the music scene, and her tastes run a wide range.

d. and i were continuous concerts goers as youngins, both as a couple and before we met. our concert going fell off dramatically when the parenthood set in, but we are happily and steadily regaining that part of our life. the only issue has been explaining to our children that they can't come with if it's not an all ages show. last week we saw shawn colvin at the dakota in minneapolis. it was a great show, just shawn and her guitar. we had a table and ordered wine and french fries. (pretty different than hanging off the stage next to the speakers at first ave, sandwiched between a smelly guy and another smelly guy.) it was great! if you haven't seen a show at the dakota, i highly recommend. my favorite quote of the evening was after she sang "sunny came home" she leaned into the mic and sort of whispered, "sometimes you just need to write a good murder ballad". so true.

here is what else i have in my 5 disc changer in the car:

*jason mraz
*joshua radin
*sex and the city soundtrack
*shawn colvin
*lifehouse

what are you listening to?

somebody get my shovel...

it is becoming abundantly clear that my neighbors landscaper is not well. they have apparently hired him to prune some shrubbery, make some brick borders, and fill in their rock beds. no big deal, right? that's what i thought when he started this job more than 2 weeks ago.

being that i live on what i call an inverted cul-de-sac, our neighbors backyards blend with ours in the way that slices of pie blend to make the whole. we each have our own wedge and they all meet in the middle. this landscaper guy is working in the wedge next to ours.

he shows up at random times, on any of the seven days in a week. he's been there at noon on a tuesday and 6pm on a sunday, and every other possible time in between. sometimes he stays and works for 30 minutes, other times a few hours. he always brings his enormous chocolate lab, and he always leaves his shovels and whathaveyou strewn about their yard when he makes his hasty exits. he wears large radio earphones and shouts greetings to my dogs as they bark furiously at his lab while he marks the yard. it would appear that he is unable to fully complete one task in one area at a time. he fills in a little rock on one side, and before finishing moves to the other side to work there for a while. he doesn't appear to be planting anything, just pruning old shrubs and laying rock. this whole thing is maybe a 2 day job, at most. did i mention he's been working on it for more than 2 weeks?

each day he returns (maybe) and my dogs go crazy, barking wildly at him and his dog . as an at-home parent i am forced to be a witness to this madness, held hostage by his noisy whims. some of you may know that i provide childcare for a 5 month old baby. it's like he's got some sort of radar and shows up to make a bunch of noise at all of the worst times. the baby just fell asleep? let me get out my weed wapper (or is it weed whacker?) and just trim up this grass along the fence. another perfect example came this morning at 6:30. my husky, steve, wanted to go outside. i let him out and he instantly began to howl. i thought to myself, "it can't be. that maniac can't actually be out there at this time of morning! it's still dark out for chrissakes". steve is not typically a barker, in fact this visiting dog and his unstable owner are the only thing that really makes him howl out in the yard. so i squinted my eyes to see if i could make anything out in the darkness and sure enough, loony landscaper was moving piles of dirt around in the dark. piles of dirt! what's loonier, if you need something to be loonier than that, is that he was gone by 7:30, leaving behind random piles of dirt throughout their yard.

this situation is vexing me! i can't figure him out. at first i thought he had adhd or something because of his random task swapping and sudden comings and goings, but now i am beginning to think that he might actually be mentally ill and having some sort of episode. the questions plague me. i wonder what he's listening to on those headphones? why are my neighbors allowing this strangeness in their yard? are they paying this nut-job by the hour? is he ever going to be done? i have actually contemplated going over there and finishing the job myself, just to make it stop. now who's crazy? (yea, it's me.) based on what he's accomplished so far i can safely say that i could have completed the same work in one afternoon with my 5 year playing next to me, and my baby friend strapped to me in the bjorn. i have considered it, believe me.

the other thing i have considered? sneaking up behind him when he's wearing those headphones and hitting him over the head with one of the many shovels laying around. i could bury the body under all that rock, and it wouldn't take me 2 weeks to do it.

will you be my friend?

it seems the older we get the more difficult it becomes to spontaneously make a new friend. we probably all have the experience of meeting someone new and thinking, "man, they're cool i would like to hang out with them". but if you're out of college and don't have school as a means for crossing paths frequently and establishing a pattern of witty exchanges or shared eye rolls, how do you make friends when you're a grown up? sure there are these new fangled social networks where you can click a button to add new friends to your life, but i'm not talking about that. i'm talking about seeing someone in real time in the real world and approaching them with actual words out of your actual mouth. radical, i know.

the youngest of my brood, g., is in kindergarten, where making friends is actually a part of the curriculum. being a bit of an overachiever she has made it her personal homework assignment to "make friends" with every single kid in her class. (she would prefer to also be the first one to make friends with everyone, but that is another issue:) she comes home each day with the 'new friend report'. it usually goes like this:

monday: " hey mommy, today i asked ben to be my friend, and he just looked at the floor and walked away.

tuesday: "hey mommy, today i asked ella to me friend and she said yes and we played pretend just-got-born-babies at the zoo"

wednesday: "hey mommy, today verinnia and sahetta got to be my friends because they played with me and i didn't even ask 'em to and i can tell they really like me a a lot so i didn't even ask 'em if they wanted to my friends because i just know they do. isn't that weird? (deep breath) their moms let them color on their faces and they make dots on their heads. how come you don't let me make dots on my head?" (they wear bindi's:-)

thursday: "hey mommy, guess what?!?! i asked ben again to be my friend and this time he said yes! i guess he was just shy before."

friday: "hey mommy, today i was gonna ask charlie to my friend but then he kept touching my hair so i didn't ask him"
ME: "which one is charlie, point him out to me."
G: "over there, jumping on that other boy"
ME: "hey chuck! this one here is my girl, keep your hands OFF! are we clear?"
based on the look of terror in his eye, i think we're clear.

everyday as g. is recounting her list of new friends and how she simply approached them each with one simple request, "will you be my friend?" i think, first of all, i'm raising one brave and confident girl! secondly, i wish grown ups could do that to (without seeming like a creepy stalker). i think we, as grown folks, are just so tied to conversation as a cornerstone of friendship that it becomes a lot more difficult. g. makes her request, gets an answer, and plays. often in silence, next to someone else. happy just to share the space and maybe the activity at hand. can you imagine if i tried that. let's say i see another mom waiting in the hall after school, and i've seen her each day. we have the same bumper stickers on our non-suvs, and we both wear keens. we are from a similar tribe and we both know it. we exchange the pleasant mouth-closed half-smile as we stand and wait for our kids each day. we even make some small talk from time to time about weather. let's say that my next move is to simply say to her, "will you be my friend?" and let's pretend (for the story's sake) that she replies, "sure". what then? can we silently go about our activities in tandem? side by side, without feeling awkward and uncomfortable? (sadly, the answer here is no). if you are in the workforce than the option for work friends exists, and you are guaranteed to have at least your choice of career in common, and that is pretty significant. if you are an at-home parent like myself than it's a little dicier. just being a parent isn't really enough to establish the lasting bonds of friendship. primarily because there are so many different ways to parent. i consider myself a progressive non-traditional mom type, which makes that pool of potential friends even smaller. fortunately for me i am blessed to have good friends left over from the school days/ work days when i made 'em, but some fresh blood would be nice to throw in the mix too. for a minute i thought it would be nice if there were some sort of "will you be my friend" personals. but that would never work because you would always wonder if people wanted to be your friend or if they wanted to be your (as my father says) special friend. ick. who needs the hassle.

the other issue is the issue of couple friends. my wifeband and i are very different, socially speaking. she could make pleasant conversation and deep connection talking to a catatonic. i, am a little more awkward. although i am known to be very vocal, i am initially pretty shy in social situations. i am closeted-shy i guess one might say. i feel uncomfortable when i first enter most social situations, but i fake it til i make it, have a glass of wine, and do my best. after you know me, as sure most readers here can attest to, it's hard to shut me up. "so i got that goin' for me, which is nice." (bill murray circa caddyshack) all of these factors make it difficult for us to meet other couples that we both connect to. i'll tell you this though, when we do meet them it's magical and wacky fun times ensue!

having good friends to rely on for laughter, advice, and just general merriment is one of the best parts of life. seeing g. boldly making new ones each day is inspiring. although they come along less frequently as adults, i am thankful for those friends in my life that i have weathered the years, hairstyles, fashion missteps, and stupid boys/girls with. and even though it makes me a little uncomfortable just thinking about it, i look forward to the friends i will (awkwardly) make in the future.