I just love that six, eight weeks after we bought our house, the Fed lowered interest rates by half a percent…
Results For "Month: September 2007"
3/4 of a Year
L turned nine months today. We spent a few moments watching videos of when she was learning to sit and learning to crawl; now, she moves rather quickly, not to mention enjoying things that were impossible a few months ago:
We spent the afternoon wandering around Cleveland Park, and as sometimes happens, I’m in some of the pictures.
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More pictures are at our Flickr account.
The Girl
The Hard Way
Last weekend, I was raking leaves in our backyard, a sizable space that hasn’t been properly maintained for years. It’s a wilderness — in more ways than one, I found out. While raking, I felt a sudden burning sensation on my left wrist. I looked down to find a yellow jacket squirming around, getting ready to hit a second time. Of course, at the moment I didn’t realize it was a yellow jacket. I stood there looking at it, thinking, “How odd. And how painful.” Suddenly, in my left shoulder I felt another, then another sting. The fascination quickly subsided and I began walking away, then running when a swarm began forming around me.
Yellowjackets like to build nests where they won’t be disturbed, I read somewhere on the internet. That’s a perfect description of our backyard — a place a yellow jacket wouldn’t be disturbed. Until the new owner goes out with a $40 monster rake he bought for the express purpose of dealing with the four to six inches of leaves in the backyard.
Fortunately, I only got hit four times. One almost got me above the eye, but somehow I managed to evade him.
Yesterday, I decided to seek revenge. But first some precautions:
Armed with Ortho Hornet and Wasp Killer (because yellow jackets are really just wasps, and so are hornets for that matter), I approached the nest carefully, fired a test shot to the side, then attacked.
Then they attacked.
“This stuff is supposed to kill them on contact,” I thought, running up the hill toward the house.
Madeleine L’Engle
Madeleine L’Engle, author of one of the most famous books in the adolescent literature canon, A Wrinkle in Time, died last week. (Madeleine L’Engle: News)
A Wrinkle in Time was one of the first science fiction books I ever read, and it’s one that has stayed with me for twenty-some years now. I read it again in college for the required course on adolescent lit, and it was just as enchanting in my early twenties as it had been twelve or so years earlier.
Nodding Off
It surely started earlier, but the first time I noticed my tendency to nod off was in high school. It was usually during first period, and that morning after friends and I had traveled to Blacksburg to see the Indigo Girls, it was almost impossible to fight. During church it was tough sometimes as well. It didn’t help that some sermons went for 90 or more minutes…
College wasn’t much better, but at least I finally began creating a nodding-off rhythm for myself. Around four every afternoon, it became unreasonable to do anything other than sleep. Nap, I called it, but it was really much deeper than that.
The triggers were more varied than the time of day, though. Reading often sent me into spasms of yawning, which is particularly problematic for an English major.
These days, it strikes in the early evening. This too can be problematic, for I have evening duty with the Girl, and it’s during that time that she’s particularly needy and wants a lap and snuggles: if we’re sitting in a chair, I’m always a little worried that she might somehow tumble out of my arms and bounce on her head a time or two.
The other evening, as I was nodding off, the Girl on my lap and snuggled into the crook of my arm, I noticed she’d suddenly become very calm as she was looking at her book. I looked over to see her eyes slowly closing, her head drifting forward until a sudden jerk brought her head back up and opened her eyes.
What a thing to inherit.
Oh, what a beautiful morning…
A teacher who wakes up thinking, “Oh my, what lovely light streaming in through the window” on an early-September Thursday morning has such calming thoughts for only a few milliseconds until the realization hits, the panic sets in, and stupid certainty that there’s no way he’ll get to work on time.
The Girl in the Mirror
She’s there every single time L and I head to the bathroom for L’s evening bath. It always takes her a few minutes to notice us, and when she does, she seems just as confused as we are. But then the Girl in the Mirror smiles a little, and somehow L manages to smile at that exact moment, and then it’s laughs and giggles all around.
Week in Review
Friends came over with their son:
And so L had a playmate:
I had someone to play pool with:
The grandparents came over:
And we finally got to have a nice breakfast on the deck:
All in all, a nice week/weekend.