Alecto's Ophelia

Ah Jeeze...

I had to turn off the new compose editor because based on results I must have a very slow connection. Heh, sucky T3 line.

So here's my dog. Notice he's filling up a monogrammed bed? Notice his name is NOT Homer? Poor Homer. Looks cute, yah? He pees constantly. Almost always where he's supposed to (on the paper) and has only pooped in the house once as compared to the seventy-eight times he's pooped outside since Sunday evening when we brought him home. Might have something to do with taking him out every thirty-seven seconds.

It's been a great week. Or something. On Monday Nanny wrecked the nanny mobile. OK, I exaggerate. On Monday Nanny was in an accident that did just under $6,000 in damage to my $14,000 15 month old Honda Civic that has to live another, let me see, six years. At least. Nanny is fine (she's just mad because the woman who pulled out in front of her wouldn't make eye contact after the fact). Little Girl was not in the car.  All right, so that was Monday.

On Tuesday I found a series of photographs that sent me from hot to right off the deep end. They went like this:

1. Photograph taken Friday night at my house while I was in Vermont. Ten nannies having a party. I can draw the conclusion that the photographer was either my seventeen year old daughter left home alone for the first time ever or nanny number eleven. Before we left Nanny asked if she and four friends could have dinner in my kitchen to celebrate her birthday and could she have a bottle of champagne and the answer was a very polite hell no so I thought I'd better explain no parties and for god's sake no house parties and here are all the reasons why the hell not in my house with my kid present much less in my house even if my kid is not present. Could I be any more clear? Apparently I was clear as mud (do I strike any of you as murky?).
2. Pictures of my kid that while harmless were posted on a public site along side some rather questionable photos and while I don't have a huge issue with my kids on the web, it's um, only if I post them, not you the nanny and certainly not after you've been told by me and Au Pair America that we do not post pictures of the children on the Internet.
3. Photographs taken by my nanny at an over 21 club in Stamford. She's 20.
4. Photographs of what appeared to be my nanny at said club hanging upside down from a, um, pole. By her feet. Mostly dressed.

I wanted to drive my nasty-assed rental car (that I have so that she can drive my car to get the kid to and fro all the places the kid needs to go) home immediately and interrogate her within an inch of her life but Nomans and I had an appointment we'd already put off once and really needed to keep. So we fretted the hours away until we both arrived home at about 7:45 and confronted the poor girl with the photographs.

It went badly. Lets see, how'd it go...

• I didn't know ten was a party
• I didn't invite them all they just showed up, I couldn't stop them
• Everyone goes to Hula Hanks, we just walk right in
• I never drink and drive your car, Nora drives
• Cletus had no idea we were downstairs, we were really quiet

Nomans did a pretty good job finishing her off on Tuesday evening. I refused to even look at her until Wednesday morning at which point I assured her that she was (and is) a wonderful nanny but that she absolutely can not behave this way and live in my house and that flagrant disregard for local laws and custom (especially felonies) shows extreme idiocy and sets an absolutely unacceptable example for my seventeen year old. OK, I used slightly stronger words.

On Wednesday evening we all went to dinner as planned to celebrate Nanny's birthday and our anniversary (because it was actually last night). When we got home she took my car and went out. We stood stunned at the audacity at the top of the stairs.

This evening, after taking over Little Girl's care because Nanny apparently can't get her showered and in jammies and to the table on time, we had the car conversation. The Honda will not be fixed for about a month. That's how long it's going to take to get the parts and settle with the insurance company and fix the mess. My car is a train car. It is my car. It is not the nanny mobile. She has it while I have the rental car. She has it for Little Girl and Cletus and class and required nanny events but other than that she's on her own.

She's downstairs sulking in a state of disbelief. (actually last I checked she got somebody to pick her up so she can finish her sulking at Starbucks with the rest of them)

She's a really great nanny as far as my experience with nannies goes (like I nearly killed the one from last year?). I wonder if she's going to make it? How in holy hell do other people do this?

My dog though, how freaking cute is he?

Three years might not seem like so much...

  Typepad is still almost unusable. Therefore you get no story, only pictures. Madeline told a great story and she doesn't use Typepad.

  

 

 

He only cried a little

Dear Typepad,

Whatever you did, please undo it. I'm trying to type but your servers appear to have screwed the pooch.

Sincerely,

Me.

OK, I'm trying but whatever Typepad did it's got me ready to jump ship. I haven't seen a performance degredation quite this bad since Windows 2.x. Seriously, I'll let you know where I go if I decide to shut this site down due to complete system malfunction. And I pay for this crap?

Yeah, so, here's my dog. And my other dog. And what turned out to be their mutual sleeping arrangements. He cried at 3:30 and at 5:30 and both times to potty although at 3:30 we pretended we couldn't hear him.

Friday morning and I'm still feeling all right

Every day, against my better judgment, I look at the Yahoo Finance front page and watch the market go UPPPPP and DOWWWWN and I read the headlines that blare off the page like some crusty old dude selling National Enquirer copies in his bathrobe and slippers with a nasty old cigar stub in his teeth and a racing form in his pocket on a street corner in Queens (I'm thinking Long Island City by OTB specifically in case anybody's interested).

I am reading headlines that could only have been written by Captain Obvious (specifically my almost eight year old, Little Girl, in case anybody's interested because that's what third graders and Yahoo Finance (or any media now that I think of it) have in common). This morning's headline reads:

US Stocks Set To Open Lower After Housing Data.

And following in smaller print:

Wall Street is headed for a lower open after the government said new home construction dropped to the lowest pace since 1991.

Duh. (and halleluiah while I'm at it)

Every day there are one or more DUHs on the finance page and every day I read them, smack my head and think, why the hell didn't I think of that? Yesterday it was the decline in retail sales, the day before it was the unemployment rates and last Friday when the market jumped something like 700 points (UPPPPP) it had something to do with that elusive and possibly imaginary money. There's nothing rational or even slightly reasonable going on here folks. So why am I looking? Train wrecks. It's all about the train wrecks.

This is almost as mind boggling as the sign I read each day on my walk from the train to work. Passing under an overpass where the city bus terminal hunkers like a diesel belching nine headed dragon I see a sign that reads:

WHEN your car is towed, call xxx-xxxx.

WHEN your car is towed? Not IF your car is towed, but WHEN. Maybe they should just do away with parking spaces altogether.

All righty then, on with the morning. I have not had an entertaining travel story in months. Nothing entertaining on the train other than the stalker I dispatched with a few weeks ago (I did not push him off the platform but I thought about it, is that bad and wrong?). Nothing entertaining on the periodic occasions where I find myself having to navigate an actual automobile from home to work (gak). Until this morning. This morning was a doozy. Still trying to figure out if I want to cry or laugh my ass off.

I was driving my husband's car. I do not like to drive that damn thing because it's embarrassing and I have this unreasonable fear I might break it or something and then he might just crawl under a rock and die over the potential sadness of it all. I drive old cars. Not bottom feeders but old cars. Cars that I drive until they go no more. I'm funny that way. My husband has one of those three letter acronym cars he bought off lease when his truck got smashed about a year ago. It makes him very happy and honestly I'm OK riding in it now. I can pretend I've been taken prisoner or I'm somebody's cosseted princess, whichever fantasy suits my mood in the moment. I can't pretend either of those things if I'm driving it.

So I'm cautious, nervous, all those things I never am in my own car. And I do my level best to stay calm and unruffled no matter what lest I make a big assed boo boo and destroy the thing. Oh, and that would be bad today because Cletus has my car, Nanny is out and I have to pick up Nomans from the airport at 5:30 and then we go to Vermont and then we pick up the puppy on Sunday and then we come home and you see I need a car for all four of those events. Not having a car would be bad and that's what I'm thinking when I'm trying to make a right turn off Dudley onto 33.

There's a very small person driving a late model Subaru and she's not pulled all the way up in anticipation of a break in the traffic and I think we're going to be here for awhile but lets just be patient and wait it out. Sure enough, break after break occurs and she doesn't even pull forward. I practice thinking Zen non-thoughts while staring at the back of her head (well not really because she's so short I can only see the back of her head when she leans into the passenger seat to drink water below dash level which she does frequently). Then a school bus turns left from 33 to Dudley creating a perfect path for three to four cars to scoot right onto 33. She's drinking water below dash level when this occurs and I start laughing at about the same time the woman in the big hair and sunglasses driving one of those behemoth SUVs lays on her horn AND DOES NOT LET UP. Eventually Subaru turns right and I ride her wake onto 33 and SUV leaves rubber on Dudley cutting off a fairly large truck as she pulls out behind me.

At the next intersection we wait for a left turn arrow to follow the Route 7 corridor but when the light turns green three or four vehicles are still running the red in the opposite direction so there's really not much Subaru can do but wait it out but SUV lays on the horn anyway and won't let up. I can feel a head ache coming on which I partially deserve for consuming three quarters of a bottle of Pinot all by myself because I was home alone with the remote last night.

Eventually SUV lets up and I drive like a little old lady behind Subaru (whom I am beginning to believe is indeed a bona fide LOL (hey, that's actually funny)). We make the turn onto the connector to the connector and I pull into the left lane to get around the LOL, turn left onto the connector and I am behind another LOL doing 30 while my Subaru LOL goes zooming by in the right lane doing 50 and people, this is a highway. I get behind Subaru LOL and mind my Ps and Qs.

I was late this morning. I was late enough that the line at the on ramp to I95 should have been nearly non-existent. Instead it is terminal and I scoot around to get off and bypass all of it. Subaru LOL remains in line like a good girl. I am thankful because she makes me a bit nervous. All that below dash water drinking.

The middle and left lanes are backed up too. This means something bad has happened. As it turns out, Something Bad has JUST happened. By the way, this is where I seem to witness the most tragic accidents and where NoMans had his truck vaporized by one of those three letter acronym vehicles except it was the other end and I digress...

This is a four car pile up. Two cars are pulled off to the right. One is a big SUV (I'm guessing not the original SUV but who knows, she did go around us). There is an older red sedan in the road. There is a fairly new Mazda3 at an odd angle to the red sedan. The front of the red sedan is gone. I mean GONE. The door is open and a young person is on his or her knees in the road speaking intensely to, as if to wake up, the driver of the of the red sedan who is another LOL, probably in  her eighties and she looks dead. I tell myself she's just in shock and I must not pull over because I can hear the sirens and she will be all right and I pull onto I95 and I am sobbing because I'm pretty sure she's dead or worse because somebody just couldn't wait on a Friday rush hour morning and played chicken one too many times.

I merge into traffic and pull myself together because I'm driving the special car and I take deep cleansing breaths and prepare to let it all go. Then this LOL in a humongous SUV wearing a humongous cowboy hat pulls off the shoulder right in front of me just missing my front right quarter panel. I scream like a cut moose and manage not to hit her. She sees me screaming in her rear view mirror and shakes her middle finger over the back seat at me at which point I laugh so hard my head hits the steering wheel and traffic comes to a complete halt and I am afraid she's going to get out of her big ass SUV and beat me within an inch of my life she's so mad but I. Cannot. Stop. Laughing.

Eventually we move again and I see LOL Subaru cruising by me in the middle lane and if that just doesn't reduce me to a fit of hysterical giggles and LOL cowboy shakes her middle finger yet again and careens back off the highway and into the truck stop.

I proceed with great caution to the parking garage and make my way into the building.

And here I sit. Have a great weekend. I'm turning the keys over to Nomans post haste. Just as soon as I fight my way though Friday night traffic heading North toward Hartford.

I sure do hope Cletus remembers to let the chickens in and out.

Completely Gratuitous Puppy Picture

On Sunday. He mine.

(I'm pretty sure he's winking at me too)

Chickins and Bugs, Chickins and Bugs

I have two step sons who are being raised on high fructose corn syrup and processed white flour. They are both highly medicated and highly suspect. OK, that last part isn't true but it's funny and when it comes to coping with the reality of who they are versus who I am, I often need all the humor I can find.

In the six years I've cohabitated with their father we've come face to face in a state of abject discomfort more times than I care to think about. Many of these occasions has stopped just short of bloodshed (mine and / or their father's, not theirs (don't worry, I wouldn't (probably (but you never know))). In the last year and a half alone it got bad enough that he (Nomans) traveled South to visit but they (Thing One and Thing Two and I name them that most affectionately) did not come North at all. Last summer we had one weekend that went well enough (although there was a bit of bloodshed over some communications that I filed under the category of entitlement that nearly caused WW III yet again) and then an actual week at the beach (and no one died but oh my goodness it took super human efforts from every single one of us). After that there was nothing due to the holidays and some other such scheduling conflicts as you've got to understand that all nineteen moons (I made that up, I don't actually know how many moons are required) must be in full alignment or god help us all.

The other thing, and this is a bit of an aside, is that in the past Nomans spent a full twelve hours in the car each weekend (three down three up three down three up) on the bloody New Jersey Turnpike until he could no longer and then the trips spread further apart and the whole darn thing just broke down until something finally gave and those boys took the train to and fro.

So you can imagine that I greeted this most recent arrival with some level of trepidation because I have to tell you that when I hear a child recoil in horror from the sight of swamp dirt it just makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck and I want to drag them into the muck until they get it about not being separate. Plus dirt is good. We need to eat a lot more of it than we do. And... that might just get me started on classroom allergies.... yadda yadda yadda moving right along now...

I was worried about the chickens. I was worried about the garden. I was worried about the fact that we don't have chicken nuggets or anything even close. And I was worried about my ability to withstand the assault of constant whining without ending up back on the psyche ward and / or in divorce court. In short, I was freaking fatigued with panic. Neat visual, isn't it?

Something gave, that's all I can say. Something caved in like a sink hole in Pennsylvania except in a good way and one of those boys ran down the back stairs on Sunday morning as fast as his growing boy legs would carry him and barefoot ran through the chicken pen (with a boat load of requisite chicken poop) and into the coop to release the ladies to their breakfast buffet (called my late fall garden) and help himself to the three morning eggs. The other boy stared hard at said eggs on the table an hour later and asked if I'd added cheese. No way, no chance, no how, they just grow that color when you don't do anything to them but let them eat veggies and bugs and then he proceeded to inhale every last bite and then some.

Somehow in the magic of the frogs and the bugs and the tree houses (it's on the ground but she and nanny built it themselves)and the swamps and the dirts and the Little Girl on the swing with a chicken in her lap (oh WHY does this one chicken permit this?) Thing One and Thing Two fell down the looking glass and came out grass stained and grinning without a single smidge of processed anythings anywhere about their bodies all weekend long. (OK, nice story but we did go for Hibachi on Saturday night and it was the holy hell of bad food but nobody died and it was Thing One's fifteenth birthday and he was so very happy with it all)

And at lunch which involved a veggie lasagne that did not come out of any sort of can or box followed by a Dutch Apple pie made before their very eyes, before the ride to the train, Thing One has been thinking that if all of us just ate a little more locally and with a little bit less fosile fuel involved (well, yeah, OK, I was ranting a bit over the weekend) and took a little bit more care of the world and maybe took care to eat food that was really food that we might just be, well, um, a little bit happier and a little bit healthier and maybe, just maybe a lot less likely to blow each other up.

And we all lived happily ever after until the very next adventure which might have started three minutes after.

Sometimes you just have to wait for it.

When the world is spinning, spin yourself the other direction to unravel the tilt

OK, I think can say (write) this now. If not, I'll delete with the rest of my miserably failed attempts at sorting through my own feelings and realities (since, really, we do make it all up, every one of us).

I,we, my family and and I, stand to lose quite a bit. Maybe we already have (I'm not looking at the moment). We stand to lose our retirement funds, our jobs, our home, our four remaining minor children's college funds. We stand to lose it all. We always have, day in and day out just like anybody might lose anything. Today, just like any other day in the last few weeks, it is horribly and painfully evident.

There is no right or wrong to this. We do not live in debt (oh, wait, there's the mortgage, right?), we do not take part in manipulating the market (oh wait, we do trade, don't we?) and we have busted our proverbial asses getting to where we are today and that might be all gone now or tomorrow. It really might.

I did not support the bailout. I do not support the bailout. I firmly believe this economy, this country needs a reset, and not a free and painless reset either because we are all compliant, one way or another. I say that in the face of what I still refer to as a horrible loss. I quake in my space boots (to borrow a Cletus phrase) and cry out in the night. I am terrified. But I still don't support the bailout.

It makes you take stock of what matters though, I'll tell you that. I sit at a chair in my kitchen, head and shoulders bent over two pots on the floor. One is full of apple peelings and the other salt water and apple bits. I peel, peel, peel, core, core, core, chop, chop, chop until after no time at all half a bushel is processed and set aside for the winter. I go to the farmers market and my own garden and I buy up all the fresh produce I can store away. I take that home and can and freeze and cook and eat and feed my family one step closer to the earth. I have set aside a ridiculous quantity of flour and rice but in reality, is 300 pounds really so ridiculous?

On Mondays I go to work with tiny cuts and abrasions on my finger tips from all the peeling, cutting, processing, cooking and I type on the keyboard for enough money to keep paying the mortgage and those cuts remind me that I am far from helpless after all.

None of this changes or alters in any way the level of fear I experience on a pretty regular basis these days. However, when I turn my face away from my fear and toward that which is hopeful, real, and living, I find it far easier to breathe.

Saint Simon, the socialist St. Bernard

In the interest of staying current, here's my dog. He's about five weeks old in this picture and can be expected to grow, um, significantly bigger.

On the subject of other posts, I've started about six in the last week and have had to trash every one of them due to massive frothing at the teeth and gums.

Take deep, deep breathes, Alecto, and read some more farming books.

(I have in my hands this week, Eliot Coleman's hoop house book, The Contrary Farmer, Root Cellars (or something like that), the latest Michael Pollan book and Joan Dye Gussow's This Organic Life - awesome train reading.)