Author: wrekehavoc

happy birthday, julian pie

happy birthday, julian pie

Posted on by wrekehavoc

our neighbor has season tix to see the (cough cough) nationals. i happened to be returning from grocery shopping in the 90 degree heat when he stopped me and asked me if i wanted his tickets for 5/30 since he was about to hop a plane for a business trip in an hour. (in that case, the ice cream can melt, thankyouverymuch.) oh, and did he mention i could have his parking pass, too? oh, and the seats — right behind home plate in the 300 level. “does your family like baseball?” he asked. ha. enough that it was a negotiation point before we got married 😉

so for julian’s birthday, we went to see the nats get clobbered by the dodgers (well, they only lost 5-0 this time. the night before was worse.) but how often do you get amazing seats — and a parking pass — for free? throw in the racing presidents and you’ve got some fine entertainment, even if the kids don’t quite understand why RFK doesn’t have a playground like Philly or Bowie. of course, my kids and husband wore their phillies phinest. fortunately, no one lynched them.

thank you, mr. p. and happy birthday, julian pie.

my obsession this memorial day weekend…

my obsession this memorial day weekend…

Posted on by wrekehavoc

… is partially with sugar-free, fat-free jello chocolate pudding, which is keeping me sane (well, my version of it) on weight watchers.

but my main obsession for the weekend concerns a bumper sticker we saw while driving west on 66. (lemme ‘splain, and then you can write me hate notes 😉

we saw rolling thunder rambling down I-66 eastbound toward the District, stopping miles of traffic as they forged ahead to DC. some people on the westbound side were flashing peace signs and honking their horns in support. motorcyclists had pretty much taken over our neck of the woods over the weekend; we couldn’t even go to the frozen dairy bar because the sheer numbers of the motorbike folks. it’s one of the hazards of living in/near Our Nation’s Capitol ™. everyone from anywhere thinks the place belongs to them. they pay taxes, ya see, so dammit, they own the place. every protester, every mom and pop bringing the family to see, every yahoo from paducah lays claim on this area. apparently, this land is your land doesn’t apply to those of us who have to live here.

anywho, i’m trying to explain to my kids that some of the folks in rolling thunder are veterans, and we are celebrating a day that commemorates the sacrifices that these veterans have made for the US. (and no, i don’t use the word commemorates; that would sail over jools’ head.) i explain that both their granddads and two of their uncles served in the armed forces as well. even so, i get really irritated by rolling thunder every year. nearly half the folks in it aren’t veterans. they do good work, according to their website. they champion POWs and MIAs, which isn’t really as relevant now since sadly, i suspect the vietnam-era missing, their original cause, are likely dead; and the iraqi war MIAs are usuallly found floating in the euphrates these days.

like most visitors, they don’t always behave the way they would if it really was their town. and since there are more of them, the problem magnifies; they take over roads, they take up time, they make messes. but we natives, we deal with it. some even make them welcome, i daresay. we get over ourselves. we have to.

which brings me back to my original obsession: a bumpersticker i saw. and it read:

YOU’RE IN AMERICA. SPEAK AMERICAN.

what exactly does that mean? use bad grammar? end sentences with prepositional phrases? last time i checked, the language was called english. and yes, it would be helpful if people could speak it. but to be technical about it, the country is the united states of america. the continents are the americas. and so it isn’t like “american” is the only language of the americas.

maybe someone needs to roll their thunder across the border to see what the rest of the americas is like.

top of the pops. at least, in our house.

top of the pops. at least, in our house.

Posted on by wrekehavoc

someone asked julian to sing a song the other day. i forget who it was and why. i do recall thinking they expected him to break into a nursery rhyme or something.

he started to sing this.

this is currently the song that both kids request in the car. just something catchy about singing: take it to the bridge/throw it overboard/see if it can swim/back into the shore.

kicks london bridge is falling down in the ass anyday.

the benefits of randomness

the benefits of randomness

Posted on by wrekehavoc

i’m attending weight watchers meetings now (yes, go and laugh all you want. i gotta get some of this weight from the steroids off me, so i’m doing what i’ve got to do.) the leader was talking this week about the benefits of planning, which, when you’ve got a bit of weight to lose, is certainly a good thing to do. she asked us to think about our best vacation. surely, she said, it was good because you took the time to plan it and do what you wanted to do.

well, yes and no.

when we were younger and childless, sometimes, BS and i would just get in the car and wind up somewhere. we ended up exploring historic places, seeing farms, or just sort of enjoying the ride. the weight watchers leader would pooh-pooh this sort of thinking, as it wouldn’t illustrate her point too well. i kept my mouth shut.

and now i’m remembering the best vacation BS and i had (pre-kids, once again): renting a flat in london for a week, then taking the chunnel train to paris and renting a place for a week there.

i adore london, and i could go on ad nauseum on the reasons why. i’ll refrain. but also on that trip, we took the train one day to bath to see the ruins; we took the train one day to canterbury to see the cathedral. one of the best memories i have was the decision, random as it was, to get off the train on the way back from canterbury in the middle of nowhere. we walked and found a village that was having a little fair. we toured the outside grounds of a stately home and wandered around til we decided we’d best find the train back. it’s crazy when i think of it now; and i don’t even think we ever learned the name of the village.

but it remains one of my most favorite days.

best. toy. ever.

best. toy. ever.

Posted on by wrekehavoc

BC was home sick from school today. she’s been barking like a seal, her throat is a mess, and she hasn’t been eating a whole lot due to nausea. we hit the doctor’s office, where she was swabbed and pronounced initially strep-free, but she now has a five-day course of steroids to help her lung inflammation go down. so she feels relatively ok (well enough to cajole me into buying her brittney spears-like purple sunglasses while waiting at eckerd for her meds. yeah, well, i guess the girl needed sunglasses, and they DO provide 100% UV protection… right?) she painted and bejeweled a little musical jewelry box for fun. and then?

the SWIFFER!

BC loveloveloves the swiffer. she swiffered the upstairs bathroom, she swiffered the kitchen, the dining area — why, she swiffered the dust bunnies under BS’s and my bed [motto: jimmy hoffa was here, but now he’s gone.] i thought i’d achieved nirvana when jools got a toy dirt devil for chrismakah, but was sadly disappointed when the damn thing kept falling apart and didn’t really pick up a lot of dirt (don’t judge me — a girl can dream, right?) so the day i bought the swiffer was a banner day around here.

BC has asked to swiffer aplenty ever since. i’m paying her a little for her efforts, but i’m thrilled that she actually likes doing this.

pity she won’t do windows…

what my daughter and audrey hepburn have in common

what my daughter and audrey hepburn have in common

Posted on by wrekehavoc

this morning, i bumped into the principal of BC’s hebrew school, a bubbly and wonderful lady who just got engaged. she said, “your daughter was in my dream last night!”

i, of course, ever the optimist, replied, “she wasn’t an axe murderer, i trust.”

“no no no,” she continued. “most of the dream wasn’t important. but i knew it was a dream because i was taking a shower and watching the TV at the same time in it. anyway, while i was watching TV, there was your daughter, and she was the spokesperson for UNICEF.”

i’m sure if BC knew who audrey hepburn was, she’d be completely all about emulating her. i know i wanted to for awhile — the whole elegant gamine thing. but how cool — people’s subconsciouses think highly of my girl.

in truth, no one could think higher of her than i do 😉

thank you

thank you

Posted on by wrekehavoc

recently, i had a bizarre brain fart. i discovered the rockabye lullaby series of CDs. some brilliant person decided that people in our generation go insane over listening to children’s lullabye pap. so, instead, they’ve started covering songs by everyone from the Ramones to Green Day to Pink Floyd to Radiohead, adapting them into gentle nighttime treats. (although i will admit i was a bit creeped-out when i heard the lullabye version of Mother.)

i was always the mom who made mix CDs for her babies. next week, BC will do her book report on rock and roll stars she read about in a book; and with the CD playing that we burned together, she will proudly, among other things, tell her classmates that this is the song her mama sang to her every night, alternating between the joni mitchell version and the CNSY one. so i broke down and bought two CDs, one for BC (the Cure lullabyes) and one for jools (led zeppelin lullabyes).

so tonight, we broke open the zeppelin CD, me and my boy. stairway to heaven sounded so mournful as a lullabye, but he liked it. i started to sing along to it. eventually, he told me, “please stop singing, mama.” so i complied. we talked about his trip to the natural history museum and the scary moment when he saw a T-Rex fighting a triceratops. then, the song thank you came on, a zeppelin song i’ve always thought intensely beautiful.

“this song is called thank you,” i told jools. (we’re big on please and thank you in this house, and i thought it would make him laugh. which it did.)

“mama, will you sing some of it to me?” he asked. brave boy that he is. so i looked at my boy in the eyes, and i sang.

If the sun refused to shine, I would still be loving you.

When mountains crumble to the sea, there will still be you and me.

thank you, little one, for giving this moment to me.

keeping the wolfowitz from the door

keeping the wolfowitz from the door

Posted on by wrekehavoc

apparently, paul wolfowitz is now negotiating the terms under which he’ll resign. must be nice. admittedly, no one has ever tried to oust me from a job (at least, not that i know of) since i’m not a morally-bankrupt ass-hat; but usually, people are permitted to create terms when they’ve decided to leave on positive terms. i don’t think there’s much that’s positive about what paul wolfowitz did; and if he didn’t have ties to the Administration (motto: Wolfowitz, Gonzalez, and Wartime Instability, too!), he’d not only be out on his ass, but he’d probably be prosecuted.

now, since i usually talk about parenthood — you know, those amusing anecdotes that help me understand my world and my role — you might wonder just what the hell paul wolfowitz has to do with my children (or me, for that matter), beyond helping to make the world incredibly unstable due to his earlier foreign policy dilettantism. the world has never been a perfect place — not when i was a child, not when my parents were children, etc. but at the risk of sounding like a nutball, right-wing moral majority member (and i won’t even start on my feelings for jerry falwell other than to say that tinky-winky would be better suited as a leader of a major movement, in my book — but what do i know, since the reverend last month pointed out that i, a jew, am damned to never enter heaven), it really, really pisses me off when public figures are rewarded for their morally-suspect actions. it results in a nation of kids who think that there shouldn’t be consequences for their actions — after all, if the people in charge aren’t held accountable, then why should they be, either? look at paris hilton. they’re cutting HER sentence down because she’s such a paragon of virtue. and all the while, she was indignantly pleading that she shouldn’t have to serve. boo fucking hoo.

so we seem to have a culture that permits famous people to act with relative impunity, as long as they have the money, fame, or connections. i was hoping that with a more transparent society, this would happen less and less. boy, i clearly don’t know shit.

as for you, paul wolfowitz, don’t let the door smack you on the ass as you go.

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Cape Town, South Africa