vacate.

here are a few pictures (which would have been of much higher quality had my husband realized that my jokes about getting a Canon Rebel weren't jokes at all...) of our recent trip to the Ozarks:

i didn't want to come home.

no rest for the weary

and to think, i used to be annoyed by my husband's 'loud' acoustic guitar playing...

OM

i'm a late riser. since i left the traditional workforce 6+ years ago i very rarely have the opportunity to see the sunrise, or even the dew on the grass. i'm an 8:00 kind of girl.

this weekend, Daylon had an early soccer game and i was sitting in my soccer mom chair drinking coffee at 7:30 in the morning.

the early games are nice, there are very few people there and it's a time of day i don't get to enjoy often. it was a really nice morning and i just sat and soaked it up...until i realized i wasn't soaking up as much as i thought i should be.

there were cars out on the main road, planes overhead, the freeway in the distance, and the low chaotic hum of civilisation.

the sound of the silent chaos of the universe has been obscured.

it is very easy for us to be lost in the tiny insignificant morass of our daily doldrums when we have been so effectively cut off from the simple flow of life energy.

when is the last time you felt the OM?

school daze

the other day i was on the elliptical at the gym and i noticed a situation through the window beside me. school had just gotten out and all the Abercrombie and Hollister covered kids were making their way to the afternoon hangout at the Y. one of the kids had some art work that he was bringing home from school. it was made with construction paper and some sort of translucent paper that made it look like a detailed stained glass. i noticed on the back bottom corner there was the emblem of the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo art competition. you could tell the kid was proud of it, and he had every right to be.

i watched as he stood and visited with his friends who were all about my oldest son's age, then one of his friends started razzing him. he snatched the kids' creation, laughed at it, and held it up out of his reach and verbally ridiculed him. finally he handed it back, but the look on the artist's face told it all.

i think everyone who grew up in public school had a similar incident. doing things well is sure to bring the scorn of your classmates.

i felt really sorry for the kid and the whole situation got me thinking. how much of my personality was shaped by a vicious peer-group? generally i didn't fall into the group of kids getting bullied because i was somewhat rough (because in an animal-like environment, one can be mean or be eaten), but i can still remember trying to find ways to be cooler or funnier or more stylish. i can remember being so concerned with what others thought of me that it hurt. i remember the ends of summers spent planning how i was going to 'be' that school year. how horrifying was dressing out in gym class? how mortifying was the ill-founded rumor? remember all of the things and ideas one needed to be 'acceptable'?

my parents formed me, but my peer-group raised me.

all these things in mind, what sort of people are my children going to be? they may have 8 hours a week in their peer group, not 8 hours a day. the vast majority of their communication is with adults. there is no pressure to be anything they are not. i honestly can't get my head around the whole thing. their experience is going to be so opposite mine.

they are fortunate beyond reason.

what the world needs now

is a little more panic, like i need a hole in my head.

honestly, i can feel it. i'm a germophobe. i live in Texas, which is pretty close to Mexico. some of my neighbors have relatives in Mexico whom they may or may not have visited recently. my kids spend 2 hours a day in a YMCA kid care room.

so i should be all decked out in a hazmat suit and respirator, right?

but somehow, i'm not buying this one. and i may be wrong in the end, this may be all they've hyped it up to be.

i can't help but wonder about the state of the world in relation to how we perceive it. i can't help but hope that the world is in such a messy quandary because we were told it is, and we believed it.

consider the swine flu (or the bird flu, or terrorism, or the economy...etc.) . if there was no television pumping fear in the family rooms of the world, if there was no internet with it's abundance of every sort of information...well, people wouldn't be too worried about all this, now would they?

i want to imagine a utopia where all communication comes from passing travellers and things are slow and simple. i just want to imagine that for a second, ok?

(i'm going to make a confession here: sometimes i really, really wish i lived in Middle Earth. i wish it hard enough that it may actually be a disorder of some sort...)

profiled!

i got one of the most stunningly stereotypical insults hurled at me the night before last, and i thought i'd share...


the neighbors have been real big honkers lately, and when one of the boys rolled up and honked at 11 o'clock the other night, my husband went out to ask if they could refrain from waking my kids up with their laziness. this led to the offender laughing and laying on his horn for about 10 seconds, which obviously agitated my husband just a touch. some words were being exchanged when i popped out to witness the commotion. my horribly offended neighbor hollered in a fit of emotional turmoil:

'Hey, you're white! why don't you go inside and read a f*cking book!?!'

i laughed. i cried. it was a beautiful day in the neigborhood.


this is Baby Emily:



she's been hanging out with us alot. her mom is my neighbor and my friend. she is 34 and got diagnosed with Stage IV skin cancer on her daughter's first birthday. she doesn't have insurance so all of her (exceptionally slow) care is coming from Harris County. it's so damn sad i can't stand it, and i'm notoriously bad at dealing with things like this. all i know how to do is take care of kids and babies, so i'm taking care of Emily.



i've decided on my life goal. when i retire, i want land in the Texas Hill Country. i'm going to raise Borzois and write a novel.

good grief.

this is my house. the motorcycle is not mine, it belongs to my husband's carpool buddy. note the Blessed Holy Oak swaying in the breeze.

our house is right at 3 years old and we got into it with a sub-prime loan. that's right, our credit was nicht so gut but my husband's income qualified us. we paid $500 and they built the house for us. we got $108 of our $500 back at closing. we felt on top of the world and oh-so-fortunate, like we had really pulled one over on someone. until after our first year when we discovered that our escrow was being calculated on the value of the land sans house and we owed our mortgage company an outrageous sum of cash. they were going to be so gracious as to let us pay off the balance over the course of a year, raising our mortgage payment to $1,700 a month! um, no thanks. so we haggled and got a solution we could deal with and all was well...

then we noticed that a lot of, shall we say...brownies were moving into the neighborhood. disheartening to say the least. in light of the mortgage crisis, apparently our builder decided to waive all sorts of legal documentation in order to keep building houses.

so, we bought our 4 bedroom, 2-1/2 bath, 2500 square foot house for $135,000 almost three years ago. last year's appraised value was $139,000. great, right?

friday i got my appraisal for 2009. my house is now worth $117,700.

(enraged silence.)

and to think we'd entertained the idea of selling and moving up around the Woodlands to get away from the less desirable neighborhood. now i'm doomed to live here and receive letters from the homeowners association about how they don't allow the raising of livestock, namely chickens, in the suburban neighborhood. letters addressing the graffiti problem. and tejano bass drops as the theme music playing in the background of my life.

don't get me wrong, i like my house and there are some decent people in the neighborhood...but being upside-down by at least $12,000 makes it hard for me to see a way out if i should desire one.

back in my renting days i thought home ownership was for suckers and chumps. i'm beginning to re-agree with myself.