Northern Noise

Things I can't believe I'm saying.  Even as they leave my mouth. Please take your pants off the dog.  Yes, the belt too. Tell the dog to quit sitting on your head so you can clean your room. You're totally hot when you cook peas. Please quit kicking the ceiling; yes, I know most folks half your age can't do it. I don't care if Hank the cowdog pees on tires, he doesn't live where it's 20 below. Such is my day.  Gotta love it.

February   by Margaret Atwood Winter. Time to eat fat and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,    a black fur sausage with yellow Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries    to get onto my head. It’s his way of telling whether or not I’m dead. If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am    He’ll think of something. He settles on my chest, breathing his breath of burped-up meat and musty sofas, purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,    not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,    declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,    which are what will finish us off in the long run. Some cat owners around here    should snip a few testicles. If we wise    hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,    or eat our young, like sharks. But it’s love that does us in. Over and over    again, He shoots, he scores! and famine crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing    eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits    thirty below, and pollution pours

My mom just flew back to Oregon after a week here in Fairbanks.  Bob and I presented at the state special ed conference, so mom agreed to hang out here with the kids and hold down the fort.  Jed was preparing me for her visit before she even arrived:  "When Grammie's here, I get to follow Grammie's rules cuz she's your mom and she's the boss of you."    Hmm.  I know where I stand. So mom watched Jed and hung out with Ali from Friday - Monday when I returned.  The went to the movies, watched a lot of television, stayed in their jammies for days at a time, survived 22" of fresh snow, and seemed to do generally just fine.  In fact, my arrival was anti-climatic; the kids were fine with me gone.  I'm thankful that my mom gets to spend time with my kids, enough time to see both their cute & cuddly sides and their real sides, which often aren't so cute and cuddly.  I'm glad they get chocolate milk for breakfast.  I'm glad she gives them (

A friend brought her 7 year old boy over to play with my 7 year old boy while she and her husband went to a peaceful dinner.  The boys are a lot alike; both are only children (Jed in basic terms, since he's so much younger than his sisters who are only here part of the time).  They're used to playing by themselves, used to being around adults (hence great vocabularies on them both) and used to having no one to rough house with.  As such, they're roughhousing.  Within minutes of meeting one another they had open the toy weapons tub and were chasing each other through the house.  Since that time they've made fart jokes, wrestled, chased each other, shot each other, stabbed each other, fought and rolled around over the bean bag chair, run back and forth, tormented the dog and chased some more.  I'm pretty worried that, in the words of my mother, "someone is gonna end up crying."  But nothing is working to get them to stop. So maybe I need to not worry.  I cam

Today we came home and the dog was less happy than normal to see us.  We quickly learned that it was because the last one out of the house neglected to put up the barrier gate to keep her out of the living room and the kids' rooms.  I hadn't even gotten my boots off when I heard Jed's angry outcry.  Sigh.  A mess. Della the devil dog from Delta had delivered my dapper Danskos to the living room.  Luckily for us both she hadn't chewed on them, just piled them in the living room.  Also in the pile were Bob's good running shoes, a pair + 1 of Jed's socks, Ali's spandex ski pants, a chewed up piece of paper (hopefully it wasn't important), Jed's face mask and one mitten. The other mitten turned up in Ali's room, along with the splintered remains of a drumstick, a shredded party bag, and a completely destroyed shake up flashlight that Jed got for Christmas.  Oh, and part of a stuffed penguin, various remains of toy knights and soldiers, half a big

Why is it that whenever Bob has to leave town, the weather prediction turns to -30 degrees???  Let's hope Murphy's Law freezes before it springs into action.

Watching the movie Cloverfield with Ali.  It's a horror / sci-fi about fleeing the attack of hostile aliens.  These folks in New York City are trying to navigate without bridges and subways and cell phones.  Ali just looked at me and said, "What would you do if that happened here?"  Good question, Ali. I think part of the reason I live in the hills of Goldstream Valley is because both Bob and I keep an escape route in the back of our heads.  When I only knew him a short while I once saw him making a list in his workout log.  I asked what it was and he said "A list of what to grab if we had to head for the hills."  Funny thing is, I have the same kind of list in my journal. I don't know if its because I grew up watching movies like Red Dawn or reading The Handmaid's Tale , but I've always kept the idea that I might need to go underground in the back of my mind, even to reading books like For Whom the Bell Tolls so I know how the resistance oper

So today I organized the district Poetry Out Loud event.  I think it went pretty well.  I don't really know a lot about Poetry Out Loud, but I'm learning and I think the organization for the judges went okay.  I think it's amazing how talented teens can be.  They get a bad rap in the news, and can be kind of scary when packs of them run wild in public, but they're pretty neat as well.