Musical Few Days

Jazz Band Concert

Thursday night we went to a jazz concert in the park. It's the band Jamie's joined but he joined too late to participate that night. They were awesome and we had a really great time.





Bedtime Theatah

Last night we were privileged to have original music performed for us in our very own living room!

Jamie and I were relegated to the love seat while Claudia was seated in the VIP section with the sock monkeys and blankey. But still, we had nice seats.



Sammy and Jordan performed songs and dramatic readings about a squashed fly. Then there was a question and answer period followed by them asking us to rate the show and the ratings were recorded in a book.

Homework!

Here's Jamie helping Sammy with her homework.

I have a dream......

One cool thing about Jamie is he's an optimist. I am, too, but sometimes I decide things aren't possible without thinking them through and that's bad because you know what? Sometimes things that seem impossible or unlikely are actually possible if you break it down and examine it instead of dismissing it out of hand. This, I'm learning from him.

Last night Jamie and I were talking about how the time with the kids still living here, before they go off to college, is seeming really finite. And of course, it always *has* been, but we're feeling it more now than ever. I told him one thing I've been dreaming of doing for several years now, and something I want to do before the kids hit 18, is drive from the east coast to the west coast. I want to give them, and I want it for myself, too, a feel for how big the continent is. I was telling him all the reasons I thought it wasn't doable and how sad I was about it and by the time the conversation was over, we had talked it out and I realized it is actually very doable. Yay! So in a few years, when we have a larger, sturdier car and a lot of our debt paid down, we're planning on doing it. We figure we can do it in 8 days and camp in some places and stay in hotels in others. It's not going to be a luxury experience, but that's ok, because that's not what we're looking for anyway.

Sick me home with sick Jordan

It's sick day at our house! Wheee! So Jordan's in pj's watching Foster's House for Imaginary Friends and I'm hanging out and doing work from home. Finding a military honor guard is much harder than one would think, I'm finding.

I've been blog reading this morning and I've run across some things that I *love*!

Look at this adorable bag! Want! But, it's a diaper bag so now I'm going to have to have another baby.



I love this necklace. Jamie does, too.



We need this at our house. All of it. Probably too bad for us! Maybe we can do the frame grouping, though.

Kid Stuff

It's been a social whirlwind around here all of a sudden, and who knows why?

Sammy has a new friend who lives right here in our apartment complex and there have been phone calls, I've met the parents, they've all been to each others' places and this afternoon there was a swimming playdate. Jordan's been invited to see High School Musical on Ice and have a sleepover in December with one friend and she spent all day Saturday at a playdate with another. And Claudia spent the afternoon hanging out with three friends at one of her friends' houses on Sunday after church.

Sam likes her new school quite a lot and she recently tried peel and eat shrimp and loved it! Also, she made an excellent coctail sauce to go with it (we're teaching the girlies to cook because girls need to know how to cook!), but it was too spicey for children.

Jordan likes her new teacher and new class. We're excited about how her teacher is focusing on writing and how it's being taught. She's super excited about the fact that she's joined the dance club and I'm especially super excited that it's in the morning, which is a good thing for working parents.

Interestingly, Sam and Jordan are playing together on the playground pretty much every day, along with other kids, too. It's nice that they get to see each other every day.

Claudia's liking school a lot, I think, even though she claims the contrary when asked directly. She has funny stuff to tell us every day. Her social studies teacher is having them play this really cool game to learn all sorts of history/geography/sciencey sorts of things. Her English teacher seems to be a complete dolt, and also they're reading Steinbeck (God, I so hate Steinbeck. Why do they do that?!? and how shocked was she tonight when she read that the baby had it's head blown away at the end?!?)but we'll just have to deprogram her every night when she gets home. I'm trying to get her to join the academic team, which I think she would love if she would just give it a chance and a new lacrosse team they're forming for the 5th-8th graders. She took her first band test today and I got to practice her piece with her last night and that was pretty fun.

I've hardly taken any photos lately, but here are a few.

Jamie and Jordan completely engrossed in some kind of super hero movie. It looks like it's turned them into zombies.



Jamie teaching Claudia how to play guitar.



Jamie at the highschool football game we took Claudia to on Saturday. Claudia was off purchasing her mommy some nachos.

Jane Kearney Photography

Jamie and I "know" Janey from online and both love her work. Especially the collages. And the photography. And the collages!

They're really amazing. At some point we'll ask her to do one of each of the girls.






Anyway, you should check out more of her work at her new website.

GNO: OMG! WTF?!?

OMG.

I've been invited out for a "girl's night out"/going away party for someone i like really a lot. However, after many ideas were tossed around about how to spend the evening, the potential plans have now landed on watching a movie at someone's house and "foot soaks".

I'm sorry, but WTF?!?

Can't we just go out to dinner?!?

I've been a girl for quite a long time and actually kind of a girly girl at that (don't throw that baseball at me, por favor), but I have never been a party to a gathering that involved foot soaking. This is freaking me out! Will there be pillow fights, too?

Iliad and Odyssey review

Every once in a while I run across a "review" of Jamie's Iliad and Odyssey on the internet, and I just ran across this one from some guy's blog in 2005 and thought it was very nice:

Kevin turned me on to a site, which I'd like to introduce to the lot of you. This guy Jamie Rieger has a site that I might not have thought twice about, but there's something really amazing there. He decided to read Homer's epic poems The Iliad and The Oddysey. Just for shits and giggles. When he discovered how daunting the task would be, he decided to take comedic notes as he read, and he indexed those notes for the Iliad here and the Oddysey here. I strongly encourage you to stop by and give him a read. You might want to empty your bladder first, though. Start with the backstory to the Iliad, which had me in tears.

Now. Here's the question. Who reads The Iliad for funsies? I seriously have to give this guy mad props for undertaking the Sisyphean task of not only reading it, but taking notes the whole time, then taking the time to catalog those notes for our pleasure. And then to make it all be funny?

A Mixed-Bag Roller Coaster of a Week

First of all, Beverly and Walter are celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary. Wow! Beverly posted a really cool, inspirational post about it on her blog. Despite the fact that Jamie and I have both been divorced before, we deeply believe in marriage and with all of our blended family/divorce/etcetera wackiness, it's really nice to have Jamie's parents and my parents (who are approaching their 44th wedding anniversary) as awesome examples for our kids of marriages that work and last.

And--not secondly, because this is also just way too cool, Jason landed an awesome job in Chicago and he starts in September. Way to get a PhD in physics and get an awesome job in Chicago while also running marathons, Jason! WOOO!!!

Third thing: Jamie joined a jazz band this week! So exciting! It's the same group of people I'm playing with, but they have a separate jazz band. He had his first rehearsal on Tuesday and their first concert is on the 30th. The thing about Jamie is, he's really good. He has talent. And it's going to be really interesting to see where he goes with this because playing with other people, especially other people who are really good, like this group of people, is a great experience for so many reasons.

Good things are happening at my job in that it's morphing into a position that affords me a lot more opportunities to be creative and also this week I got permission to start a program to assist people seeking a certain type of assistance (sorry, not comfortable being less vague when discussing my job) and I'm really excited about it. This is something I'm somewhat passionate about in my personal life, but fitting it in with everything else has been a problem in the last several years, so you can imagine how I feel to be able to do this at work.

And.....school started, we had various daughters having sobbing melt-downs around 11pm every single night this week (oh, yes, that IS way after bedtime), and Jamie and I were up until at least 2am every night dealing with stuff and filing out all those fucking forms. Oh, and one night, Jamie was at Kroger after midnight buying construction paper we didn't know was needed, which is a long story but let's just say at this point, we're kind of loathing Claudia's 7th grade advanced english moron of a teacher. But by Friday afternoon, progress was made, settling in was happening, almost all the school supplies had been located and purchased and at this point, I feel that we're poised in a position to make this a really exceptional year for all three. I can see it, it's right there! So rough start (and actually, seems like every year's a rough couple of days at the beginning), but I think this year is going to be awesome.

First Day of School!

Such a great week!

We've had such a great week. We're so happy to have all the girlies home!

Claudia's all registered for school and that went really well. It's nice to be settled in to a school already. She doesn't have PE this year because she's taking Spanish and she's over the moon about that. As much as I hated PE when I was in school, and oh, did I, I can't help but be happy for her, too. Sorry, miserable PE experiences aren't inherently character building--mostly they just suck. I signed us up to volunteer with the PTA again this year, but we went with organizing the school carnival because they meet once a month, so it's a good opportunity to meet other parents. Here's hoping they're not all a bunch of bores.

Jason and Leah spent Wednesday and Thursday nights with us. We love having them here. I've probably said this before, but they're the kind of people you would choose to hang out with even if they weren't your family. They worked a physics booth at the State Fair on Thursday and they brought the kids back some cool sciencey stuff.

Last night and tonight my band played outdoors at Connor Prairie before the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra went on. We did a New Orleans street band thing and it was pretty fun. We got comp tickets for family, so last night Jamie and the girls met me there. I'm not a big fan of symphony commercialism, although I can see why it's necessary, but the atmosphere at these things can be very I-seem-to-be-at-a-minor-league-baseball-game, but that aside, wow. I mean, first of all, the ISO is awesome. It wasn't too hot and we sat under trees on the grass on blankets and when it got dark the stage was lit really beautifully. There were stars and a nice breeze and it's not every day that you can hear that class of music with a child on your lap and a child with her head resting on your shoulder with fireflies flying around. The theme was Mardi Gras (in August?) and they played Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong, Irving Berlin, and a bunch of other stuff in that vein. Byron Stripling was the guest musician and he was amazing and funny, too. They did an Armstrong melody that started off with the trumpet riff from the beginning of West End Blues. Squeee!!!!




Jamie took Claudia and Jordan (Sam's at her mom's) to Ft. Wayne today because Andy's there visiting this weekend.

Last night while we were at Connor Prairie, a cicada fell on Claudia's head (lucky!) so of course, she played with it the entire time and then brought it home and left it in an organizer that wasn't completely closed next to her bed. She figured it would be there the next morning because it's pretty big, as far as bugs go, and no wings. Well, it moulted in the night and after they molt, they have wings so where the bug had been there was only a creepy shell left behind. Gah!! But happy ending/sad ending, she found it in her room, took it to Ft. Wayne with her where it made its final escape while they were having lunch in the back yard.

News

I kind of like Google News

Up until now, CNN has been my go-to news source, just out of sheer laziness. But I'm getting completely sick of them. They have ridiculous headlines--"Only the Lord knows if the miners are alive!" (I don't enjoy the turn-of-the-last-century sensationalistic flavor of that, nor do I like the reference to the LORD in a supposedly secular news source) and just a lot of fluff crap besides. And almost every story has to have a quote by someone talking about The Lord. Guess what? That's not news! THE LORD IS NOT NEWS!

I have yet to read about the assault rifles in a CNN headline (maybe because the pre-adolescents there think guns are oooky), but I do know that someone smuggled a monkey on a plane in his ponytail and a girl killed her father in a filthy apartment and this is a TV headline (note the exclaimation point like it's E! Entertainment, not CNN):

Spice Girl Melanie Brown -- in a paternity battle with Eddie Murphy! She breaks her silence on what she wants from him... in her first TV interview. Tonight, 9 ET.


Squeeeeee!!!!!!! Said the 11-year-old girl who wrote that.

Jamie says he likes the CNN breaking news emails he gets, but other than that, he never goes there. He likes the NY Times, and he said, "the writing for the business/news/health section is very different from the writing in the science/technology section. The science writing is very obviously supposed to be less formal and more breezy and fun. That amuses me. It's like omg you guys, let's talk about quarks!!1!"


I don't like the NY times because I have it in my head (fairly or not) that they're not reputable. I also have it in my head that the Boston Globe is hopelessly left-slanting and all the Fox news peices are written by Rush Limbaugh and not when he's not high.

Wednesday

Well, Claudia's back home safe and sound and she says she had a fabulous two weeks in Memphis and Texas. Thanks to my wonderful Aunt Sandy who she stayed with and palled around with in Memphis and my parents for all the cool things they did with her, including toting her 1000 miles and Rafe and Christine for having her over for a week and doing so many cool things while she was there. Claudia stole Jamie's rubber chicken and took photos of him all along the route to Texas. I'll post those pretty soon--they're very funny. The chicken had some serious adventures!

Jason and Leah are arriving this evening to stay with us for a couple of days. We're so excited! We all love having those two around.

And school is now looming. Looming! First day is next Wednesday and tomorrow is Claudia's registration where she'll get her class schedule, locker assignment, gym clothes, and school photos. Sammy and Jordan have a meet the teacher thing next Monday and then they all have curriculum nights on the 23rd. Wheeee!!!

Friday and Saturday night my band is playing at Connor Prairie before the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra plays and I got tickets for Jamie and the girlies to stay and see them perform (I get to stay because of the band thing). It's supposed to be New Orleans themed so probably fun for the kids.

Saturday

Outside the art museum:













Inside the museum:


Mmm.....candy......



Lunch at the cajun restaurant we sometimes go to:

Miscellany

We have an annoying virus on El Computator, so I haven't been blogging because the virus is annoying. Must take care of that asap. In the meantime, beware our emails!

My parents are back home from their visit here and Memphis. We really enjoyed seeing them, but it was crazy with two jobs, three kids and a dog and it seems like we hardly got to see them at all. And somehow, the week got away from me and I hardly took any pictures! Disappointed!

Claudia'a presently in Texas with Cutter and Co. and from what I understand, she's having an absolute blast. So far, that I know of, they've done the safari thing in the car (a zebra put his entire mouth around one of her hands when she tried to feed him and that was deemed "COOL"!!), they went to the San Antonio Zoo, which is an awesome zoo, did a day trip to Houston and spent the day and into the night at Schlitterbahn, which is a mucho primo water park. We go to pick her up from the Chicago airport on Sunday. I so Can't Wait! Our house is very weird without Claudia.

Jordan and Sam have been having a really fun time with our babysitter this week. She's been taking them to the library, fixing picnic lunches, baking cookies and playing all sorts of games with them.

In other news, Jamie and I are leaning towards supporting Hillary. Yes, it's true. We liked her answers in the last debate better than Obama's and Jamie pointed out that she looks more fetching in pink than Obama does.

Cool thing: Google Earth. We're spying on you!!!

I'm organizing our main livingroom bookshelf by color like this one:



We have a pretty relaxing weekend planned. Jamie and I were invited to a pool party tomorrow by some new people we've met, but we had babysitter issues and some other stuff, so we won't be going. Too bad, because we like the people a lot.

And here are some miscellaneous photos of lately:


Sammy on her tennis award day.




Floating candle Jordan made for us. It was very cool, she had the idea and did it all herself and surprised us with it. It has some pretty marbles at the bottom.


I have about zero experience growing things from seeds, but I'm so excited because this summer I've had pretty phenominal success. The gourds are going like gangbusters. Times like this I wish I could do time lapse photography.






Picking the girls up at camp.

Jamie: He so awesome

Jamie's very-funny summaries of the Iliad and the Odyssey, by that one Homer guy, got a nice writeup at Joel Segal Books, a bookstore in England. Anyway, check it out and read the summaries if you haven't and then be sure to tell Jamie that he really should think about publishing them already!