Month: June 2013

Men will be boys

I know they say that men are just little boys in big bodies and as my boys get older and bigger, I’m actually seeing how that could be true. They are on a Star Wars kick lately and they begged me to buy them all lightsabers so they could have a Jedi Training School and something about a Sith council (I’m sure I’m getting this all wrong). Anyway, the point is that they haven’t played with lightsabers for years — 5 years, as Amazon so kindly reminded me. You purchased this item on October 27th, 2008. Yes, I know Amazon, but I guess 14 isn’t too old for a lightsaber streetfight after all. 

They were putting on a show for Camille and me tonight before bed. The 4th light is our neighbor friend from across the street. It is a fully thought out training program with an entry exam to find out if you are skilled in the ways of the Jedi or the bad guys (are the Siths bad guys?) and that determines the color of your lightsaber and they go on the roof and have meetings and lightsaber training sessions. As long as it gets them out from in front of the TV or the computer I’m happy.

While the boys are mastering the ways of the force, my little girl is turning into Rambo.
A bit cuter than Sly, but just as tough. 

Flopping

It’s been a busy weekend with lots of running around, parties, and fun. Counting down the days until Josh gets home and can share in all the “fun.” Last night was my second rug flop. This is before it started when they were bringing all the carpets from the van into the house. This was just the first pile. 
The guy “flops” them out on the floor in front of everyone. The top 2 are 100% wool and cost around $1500 each. It sounds like it’s crazy expensive, but they would cost way more than that back in the states. And when you think that it took someone months or years to hand knot every little bit of it (the wool ones were something like 200 to 500 knots per square inch) the price sounds much more reasonable. 
This is the end of a runner that I really liked. You don’t see many wool carpets with that much variation in color. His starting price was $1000 and I know I could have gotten it for a bit less than that, but I’m not coughing up that much money for something that my kids are going to wipe their feet on. Not yet anyway. Maybe before we leave the island. Caleb really liked this one and kept saying, “Are we getting the running one?” And you know that’s exactly what he would want to do on my very expensive piece of floor art. 
This one was over $2000 because it’s silk on silk. Really beautiful. It had something like 800 knots per square inch. 
I almost went home with this silk one (and it was more amazing in real life — it even changes colors depending on which way you view it), but in the end couldn’t spend $1500. Check back in a few months after I’ve been to a few more rug flops and $1500 starts sounding like a bargain.  
It was a late night. 11pm and she was done. 

Let’s go to the hop!

As an end of the year celebration, the Elementary school had a parent/student “sock hop.” 
It’s no secret that we started out the year on rough ground since they couldn’t possibly compare to my first love, TAISM. But I begrudgingly admit that my cold, hard heart is warming to their charms after several great events this past month: game night — that I haven’t posted about yet, swim meet/mile swim, promotion ceremony, and now the opportunity to dance with 2 handsome men.
I was thrilled to find that it wasn’t a skeevy dance, nor one where everyone stands around the edges and nibbles on chips. They played tons of 50s music, some classic Elvis, and a few modern standbys, like the “Chicken Dance.” It was really fun seeing parents dancing with their kids, with each other, or taking photos of all the cuteness.
The kids could get photos taken with their friends in the old fashioned “car.”
The sister was not a willing dance partner
This smooth mover insisted on wearing his suit — it goes nicely with the bat face painting on his cheek.
The conga line got going and the party was on!
She wasn’t keen on attaching to the person ahead of her, but she managed to keep up
The sweetest part was that Carter actually wanted to spend time with me and Camille. He said he wasn’t interested in going unless we came. 
I think the kid is growing . . .
Of course, they played Rockin’ Robin. 
That smile from both of us means only one more day of school!

Crash

So I had a post written about how someone crashed into my friend when she was driving on the freeway, but then the webpage crashed and I lost most of it and didn’t feel like rewriting. It wasn’t anything of importance or particularly funny anyway. In short: Murphy’s Law strikes again when husbands are out of the country, the roads here are more dangerous than any protesters or molotov cocktails we might run into, and I see basic safety rules violated by other drivers all the time. The End.

I’m in sort of a mood today. I’m overtired and frustrated. My brother-in-law’s surgery hasn’t been able to diminish his pain as we had hoped and as an extra kick in the nuts he has new and worse pain and loss of sensation. I never cry, but I’m in tears today. I’m supposed to be a writer, but I have no words.

We still don’t have tickets home, but supposedly all that’s left is the formality of actually booking the tickets. It doesn’t really matter. Not today anyway.

So this post isn’t a complete downer, here’s a photo of my girlie crashed on the beanbag in the living room in the middle of the afternoon.

This never happens. 
But this was the day that my friend was in the car accident so we went to pick up her two year old daughter so she wouldn’t have to juggle a kid and the crazy paperwork. 6 hours of jockeying for position, making sure the other little girl didn’t take her Dora the Explorer microphone, her favorite Legos or play with her kitchen wore Camille out. Me too. 

All Quiet on the Middle Eastern Front

I hope that anyone who stopped by yesterday to read the continuing saga of the Chartier family realized that no news was good news.

I did (miraculously) get my car back later that night so we were able to make it to church/birthday party/other commitments without any inconvenience. The car sounds good, the temperature gauge is sitting happily in-between C and H, just like it should be and my A/C works again. It turns out they had to cut off the top of my radiator, clean it out, then weld it back together. And there was a busted hose somewhere that was leaking fluid into the engine and creating the smoking, burning smell. The one thing that made me laugh when I picked up my car and started it up was this:

Yeah engine, I’ll check you. Two weeks from now. 
I’m sure it’s just a computer something or other that needs to be reset after they were poking around in there, but having the light come on after taking the car to be fixed just added to the irony of it all.
I’m thankful I don’t have any stories to tell today. Our weekend has been full of parties and sleepovers, but nothing out of the ordinary. I’m still planning on getting on a plane to head to the US in a little over 2 weeks even though we don’t have tickets yet. Imagine if you had to go to the DMV to take care of all of your health care, your travel arrangements, your paychecks . . . our life is kind of like that. Every now and then we are pleasantly surprised by its efficiency, but this is not one of those times. We’ve been told our travel is approved, but there is a special code that proves there is money to pay for it that hasn’t appeared yet. We’ll just keep waiting . . . 
A little mystery: I came in my gate to find all this trash on my front steps and my dog sitting in the middle of it. A McDonald’s bag and wrappers, soda cans, ice cream cups . . . nothing that would have come from our trash can. My only explanation is that my dog got out of the gate and went scavenging around the neighborhood and brought all of this trash home (people just drop trash on the street here, so gross). But really? Soda cans? An intact McDonald’s bag? Yes, my dog is essentially a goat, but did he really trot home with a paper bag in his mouth containing all these “treasures?” 
The trash collector and his boy.