Some random thoughts of randomness

1. My dad bought a new bike recently. He's always been a big walker, and goes around the White Estates neighborhood where I grew up, picking up trash with his grabbin-claw or whatever that thing is called and a Wal-Mart sack. He enjoys biking around now too, although I don't think he can still pick up trash, because wouldn't that be kind of hard? You might have to pedal in circles around, say, a cast-off paper McDonald's bag, before you could actually pick it up. ANYWAY, my mom was talking about getting a bike for herself so that she could join him, and I brightly suggested, "Why don't you get a bicycle built for two?"

My dad, who was sitting in an armchair with his eyes fixed intently on SportsCenter, snorted. Mom cast him a brief glance and said, "The last time we rode on a two-person bike, on Mackinac Island? He said he had to do all the work."

"I did," my father said emphatically, his focus on the television unwavering.

"Well, maybe you could promise to pedal really hard," I said soothingly.

My mother sat thinking for a moment and then announced, "I think I'd rather just get a rickshaw. We've been married forty-nine years. Why bother with pretense?"

2. Our new school year starts this Thursday, September 1. Meelyn will be a senior and Aisling will be a junior. I AM STARING DOWN THE TWIGS OF AN EMPTY NEST, PEOPLE.

3. Since school is starting up, I think I'll start Menu Plan Monday next Monday, which is Labor Day, so maybe I'll start next Tuesday. Just keepin' it real.

4. Dobby was barking at the people across the street, who were doing nothing more threatening than sitting on their front porch, talking and drinking iced tea. I know, I can't believe the nerve of those trolls either. Dobby barked at them so violently, he fell off the back of the couch onto the floor. Epic fail.

5. I'm teaching a class in British literature this first semester, plus my usual Shakespeare class. The Shakespeare play for this semester is Julius Caesar, and by some amazing happenstance, because I promise I did not know about this earlier, the Indiana Repertory Theater is doing Julius Caesar this fall! I am very excited, because although I have the three extant copies of Julius Caesar on DVD (one starring Marlon Brando as Mark Antony and the other starring Charlton Heston as Marc Antony and the other one starring no one I've heard of before and ALL THREE OF THEM SUCK LIKE A SHOP VAC.

6. This morning in water aerobics class, the music of the day was the greatest hits of Elton John and I knew the lyrics to every single song. Did some great in-pool jumping jacks to "Philadelphia Freedom."

7. I've been accused by several people of shamefully neglecting my blog. It's been a very busy summer - that's the only excuse I have. I'll try to do better.

Prom Night - behind the scenes

This picture, taken outside the Indiana Roof Ballroom at about 12:30 Saturday morning, is proof positive that the prom finally got here after months and months of waiting. We bought the tickets in late January. We bought the dresses in early May. We found the shoes, the jewelry, the desired hairstyles....as well as a glittery hair spray that made the girls' hair look like it had been sprinkled with diamonds. Everything was very lovely.

Unless you were at our house about ninety minutes before we left to take the girls to the dance.

You probably suspected that all had not gone smoothly, right? Because these things just never do. Formal dances exist, I believe, to give families practice for weddings, so that when a groomsman's shiny shoes aren't included with his tux, or when the cake turns out to be not exactly what the bride had asked for, or when certain individuals on one side of the family come to the celebration wearing faces more appropriate for a funeral with matching attitudes, or when the service is unaccountably messed up, or when the matron of honor turns out to be three months pregnant by the time the wedding rolls around and can just barely zip up her dress, people can deal with these things without flying into a thousand screaming pieces. I know, because all of the above things happened at my wedding. And see how normal and calm I am, all these years later?

Our only enormous problem with prom arose from something I told Meelyn she should do to treat herself, and that was have her makeup done by an associate at the local Salon Professional Academy. True, the associates are still students, I told her, but by the time they get to the point of being allowed to do prom makeup and hair, as the sign outside the academy advertised, they are competent and well-equipped to make a girl look like a fairy princess.

Or so I thought.

Aisling's appointment was first because she opted for the whole hair and makeup package. The associate who did her face came in, Aisling said, with an enormous suitcase fitted with different compartments for her huge collection of cosmetics. They talked about the look Aisling wanted -- pretty and pastel, no harsh colors -- and the student-artist went to work, creating a look that Aisling was thrilled with, and indeed she did look very lovely when the girls came home later.

But Meelyn, my poor Meelyn....

Meelyn was asked to work the lunch shift at the fast-food restaurant she's been employed at for the past couple of years: the manager is finding it difficult, despite these hard economic times, to find employees who will actually come in when they're scheduled to work, and then lift a finger once they're there. So Meelyn went in to pick up the slack, which meant that she didn't get to go for her makeup appointment until 3:30 (since her hair is short, she felt she could manage it by herself, unlike the updo Aisling had for her longer hair.) Meelyn drove home and took a quick shower and then set out for the salon, where I'd dropped Aisling off an hour before.

Thankfully, Aisling chose to sit in a nearby chair and watch Meelyn's makeup being done instead of sitting in the waiting area with her book: otherwise, we probably would have had to have Meelyn's face sandblasted to remove the thick layer of orange pancake makeup the technician -- not the same one who did Aisling's face -- trowelled on. While watching the student smear the awful stuff on her sister's face, Aisling, whose personality is more, well, forthright like mine, rather than sweet and more aquiescent like Meelyn's, said, "Uhhm, should you be trying to blend that a little more?" when a traffic-cone-colored line appeared along Meelyn's jaw.

"She looked at me and rolled her eyes," Aisling said indignantly. "She ROLLED HER EYES. Like she knew what she was doing over there with her stupid Cheeto foundation!"

"I was turned away from the mirror, so I didn't know anything bad was happening," Meelyn sobbed, bright-white tear streaks marked on her face. "But when Aisli said that about the blending, I could tell something was wrong. And then there was the look on her face, like she was about to scream or vomit or both."

Apparently, the technician replied, "That's all the foundation we have" and went back to slapping the orange on Meelyn's face. You see, the students at the salon academy have to supply their own beauty products, whether those products be for hair or skin or whatever, and somehow, someone missed the fact that Ms. Facepaint was not exactly ready for that advertised prom makeup, especially since her only other accoutrment was a black Sharpie marker, which she used to color in Meelyn's eyebrows.

That was the point where both girls cracked.

Aisling said, "Okay, that is just not right," and she went up to the front desk to request that an instructor be sent over to parlay. When the instructor came over and surveyed Meelyn, sitting tensely in the chair while the associate carried on with the eyebrows, she immediately offered the services of the same technician who did Aisling's makeup.

"The instructor turned me around in the chair so that I could see myself and I knew I was going to start bawling in front of them all, so I said I didn't want anyone else to work on me and that I just wanted to leave," Meelyn sniffled, scrubbing her face with a face cloth and about a pound of cleansing wash.

Horrified, I said, "You didn't PAY for this mess, did you?"

"No," said Meelyn. "I just walked out and Aisling scampered out behind me. She'd already paid for her hair and makeup."

The two of them spent the drive back across the city to our house with Meelyn sobbing and bewailing her fate and Aisling trying to hold back her own sympathetic tears as she came as close to the line between Cussing and Not Cussing as she could without incurring parental wrath, yelping the story out to me via mobile phone. When they flung themselves into the house, I was standing in the foyer, uselessly flapping my hands and trying to keep myself from reeling and writhing and fainting in coils.

"LOOK AT ME!" Meelyn screeched. "I'M A FREAK! HOW'S COME AISLI ALWAYS GETS THE GOOD PERSON AND I GET THE IDIOTS WHO WOULDN'T KNOW A MASCARA WAND FROM A GARDEN RAKE??!!"

I hugged her and she cried into my shoulder and I don't know if I'll ever get that dreadful orange color out of my top, so my Oxy-Clean has its work cut out for it. Meelyn charged up the stairs to go to work with the aforementioned facial wash and warm cloth and I threw myself into one of the chairs in the foyer, aghast.

"What on earth happened?" I asked Aisling. "How could this have gone so wrong?"

"That student was a....a....complete and total beeyotch," Aisling replied flatly.

I gave her a narrow-eyed stare. "Be very careful."

"Well, she was. How could you be that bad without knowing how bad you were? How could you agree to do someone's PROM MAKEUP and not even have a basic understanding of skin tones. And how could you make someone's eyebrows look like that?"

"I don't know," I responded wearily. "It's beyond me. But I do know that I'm going to place a strongly-worded telephone call just as soon as I can do it without screaming."

When Meelyn's skin was purged of the horrible color and the drawn-on black eyebrows, she and Aisling went to work and made her look very lovely indeed. How fortunate to have a young, fresh complexion, because I guarantee if we'd been trying to make ME look better, it just wouldn't. Have. Happened. Once her makeup was sorted and she was glowing, Meelyn did her hair, which looked very cute: a quick spritz with that really very nice glittery hairspray, and the two girls were ready to get into their formal gowns -- classic black and white for Meelyn, apple green for Aisling -- and then into their chariot (otherwise known as the minivan) to be taken to the ballroom for an evening of dining and dancing - the most grown-uppy fancy party they'd ever been to, especially without us.

We picked them up, yawning, five hours later. As we drove home, their happy voices spilled over each other as they told us about the dinner, their friends, the music, the dancing, and most of all, the beautiful Indiana Roof Ballroom, which looked like a fairyland with slowly swirling stars projected onto the floor all evening.

"When I went to the prom," I said reminiscently, "it was in the Girls' Gym at the high school and there were paper streamers hanging off the basketball goals."

"We know," said Meelyn. "You've told us a thousand times."

"Ten thousand," corrected Aisling.

"You both look beautiful, even after dancing for hours," my husband said. He took my hand and squeezed it. "Two young ladies, barely girls anymore."

"Unless they say 'beeyotch,'" I declared.

May I?

It's May, the glorious, blooming month of May. The month when our school year, like everyone else's, starts winding down, but in lots of ways the "winding down" is more like an application of sharp, pointy spurs than a gradual lessening of activity that winds up on Memorial Day weekend with a graceful fall into a hammock.

No, we are going all-out around here. The girls, at my insistence, have to finish every last chapter down to the final period in every book they have. Firstly, because I remember what it was like as a public school teacher, feeling so frustrated because there was never, ever enough time to complete a textbook. Could I honestly say that my students had taken a complete course in American Literature when they didn't finish the last four-chapter unit in the book? Maddening. Secondly, home schooling is really expensive and I want to know that we're getting every last penny's worth out of those books, darn it!

Thirdly, I'm a tiger mom. My friend Shaun called me that last week and I was thrilled. I admit that I have worked the girls really hard: they take about eleven subjects per semester and doing so has given them opportunities that they never would have had in either public or private school. Using the Indiana Core 40 webpage at the website of the Indiana Department of Education, I planned coursework for them that would give them the best education we could manage, so I feel like it's only fair to make sure they work to the back cover of every book. Rowr!!!

So they are working at top speed, remembering that I (tiger-mom) grade them on the 96-100 = A grading scale, trying to finish their books before our last day, which is Tuesday, May 31. On Wednesday, June 1, they're hoping to start Chemistry as a summer school course. Whew.

I am in the midst of preparing transcripts and we're all waiting with bated breath for Mee's SAT scores to show up on May 26. It doesn't leave a lot of time for blogging.

Typing is difficult for tigers, after all.

Why no snow days for the home schoolers?

Last night we all tumbled into bed with a gentle rain pattering down and the (mistaken) idea that we were going to have little to no snow accumulation, according to the posted Winter Weather Advisory. I woke up coughing at about 5:15 and when I got out of bed to get a drink, I couldn't help but notice how strangely bright it seemed in the room. With a feeling of foreboding, I peeked through the blind and sure enough - there was snow. A LOT of snow. And it was blowing horizontally.

"Whuzzerdoin'?" my husband asked me drowsily, burrowing his head into his pillow. Zuzu, sleeping beside him, turned over on her back with all four paws in the air and sighed contentedly.

"Looking at the snow," I replied.

That woke him up a bit. "Diddit znow?" he mumbled, eyes blissfully closed. "Ow mudge?"

"Oh, about FIVE INCHES AND COUNTING," I announced with weary bitterness. Really, this is just ridiculous.

That woke him right up. He thrashed around in the blankets and began spluttering things at me that sounded like this: ARRRGH!!! LITTLE TO NO ACCUMULATION!! SICK OF THIS FRIGGING WINTER!! WHERE'S MY SHOVEL??!! ARRRGHHH!!!! %$#&$!!!!

I silently started getting dressed, thinking that I know two other people who were going to have the same reaction: Meelyn and Aisling. There have been so many snow days for the public schools this year -- and today is another one -- I've lost count. I've mentioned several times on Facebook that we don't have snow days here at Our Lady of Good Counsel and keep on pegging away through snow, sleet, hail and gloom of stormy afternoon. Several people have expressed surprise that I am such a big meanie, so I wanted to explain my bit of homeschooling philosophy in a place that allows me significantly more words-per-post than Facebook does.

First of all, home schooling is a completely different animal than public or private schooling. It just doesn't operate the same way, being a lot more efficient in the way time is managed. We don't have travel time, for one thing, and that makes the girls very happy because they're generally just yawning their way out of bed when their public/private school counterparts are already gathering their books from their lockers and heading off to their first class of the day.

Another way that home schooling is more efficient is that we don't have passing periods between classes or those moments of unavoidable delay when the students are filing into the room and taking their seats while the teacher does the attendance count. And we never have to deal with delaying the start of a lesson because someone doesn't have a book and someone else doesn't have paper and someone else doesn't have a pen and someone else's boyfriend just broke up with her so that she has to sit there and cry while her friends try to soothe her. And we don't have the discipline problems that keep so many teachers from being able to conduct their business and actually get through a planned lesson. These things were enormously frustrating to me as a classroom teacher.

The girls work for about six to six and a half hours a day and that is just what they spend on schoolwork; public and private school kids are actually at their schools for about six and a half hours, but only a portion of that time is actually allocated to study -- the books in the picture above are Aisling's and they include one of our many SAT reference books for her prep course, traditional logic, French vocabulary and world literature....and that's only part of them.

Meelyn and Aisling take a lunch break somewhere around noon and spend half an hour eating and relaxing. Both girls do geometry and composition and classes that require writing downstairs at the dining room table, but for subjects that require a lot of reading (world history and world lit this year) they have their favorite places to go: Meelyn goes upstairs to her room, which is cozily outfitted with a comfy place to read and Aisling curls up in the chair in front of the big window. They're usually accompanied by the dogs, Dobby upstairs and Zuzu down.

They'll be working today when everybody else is having a break for this reason: public and private schools go until the end of the school year: home schoolers go until the end of the books. In other words, even with make up days, there's only so long public schools can convene. Sooner or later, they're going to have to turn the kids loose in the summer. From my own experience I know that every single teacher out there HOPES to come to the end of the textbooks used in his or her classes, but that rarely happens. There's too much interruption, whether it's because of winter weather or too short a class period or a spirit convocation or whatever. It is a constant frustration and worry. One of the most freeing things about homeschooling is that we don't have a break off point where we have to abandon the books and go: the class continues until the very last page of each and every subject.

This is where the superior education of the typical home schooler really comes forward. We know a lot of public school kids and none of them are big, unmotivated dunces; they're great kids and I don't think they're receiving a horrible education by any means. I just think that home schoolers receive a better education. We can do so much more with our six hours, including taking on subjects like logic that most public school kids will never get a crack at. My kids have also studied more than a dozen of Shakespeare's plays (and even been to the Stratford Festival a couple of times), compared to the three studied in public school. Our physical education classes are real workouts at a real gym. (If it's extracurricular activites you want, there's really nothing closed to home schoolers anymore. If my husband and I weren't adamant about having family time and a life free of the stress of constant running, the girls could be in just about any activity you could name, up to and including speech and debate, girls' volleyball - which we participated in for three seasons during their middle school years - and all sorts of other tempting offerings.)

So when it comes to snow days, we just don't have the time. The girls have a lot to accomplish each day and they have to get it done in a timely manner so that they won't wind up sitting at the side of the pool at the swim club finishing up geometry in August. Meelyn had that experience a couple of years ago with Biology I and that was not an experience she'd care to repeat. Aisling learned from that mistake and has kept up with her work diligently.

Home schooling's ways and means are just....different. Snow days are one thing for the majority of students in the area - they have a chance to have a day to sleep in and be free from their normal daily responsibilities. But for the home schoolers, it's pay now so that they can play later, with the knowledge that every single subject has been completed down to the very last sentence in each textbook.

Getting to know you (again)

How could it possibly be that it's been TWO WEEKS since I last wrote on my blog? And perhaps an even bigger question is how have all of you, my twenty-four faithful blog followers (and maybe a few more people who accidentally stumbled across InsomniMom while doing an internet search for hasenpfeffer) been surviving without knowing what I've been serving my family for dinner for the past fourteen nights? How? How?

I'd like to think it's not a question of what Aisling just said as she was peering over my shoulder just now, watching me type: "I never read your blog because I'm already kind of sick of you from just being in the house with you all the time."

Gee, thanks.

Anyway, here's a list of my excuses. I have committed them to bandwidth because I may need to use them again someday and want to remember what they were.

1. I had some kitchen renovation stuff being done that started right after I posted the first French Fridays with Dorie recipe (gougeres) and it continued all week last week. Those of you who cook know that the kitchen is the heart of the home and when your kitchen is in pieces (at one time, I had two large refrigerators in the (small) room, one of which was partially blocking the laundry room door and plugged into the wall where I usually plug in the toaster. My microwave was not plugged in because it has to be plugged in to a special outlet. There was a third refrigerator in the laundry room. My portable dishwasher was in the middle of the room, requiring people to squeeze around it if they wanted, say, a slice of cheese for a sandwich. But if they actually got the slice of cheese it wouldn't have done them any good anyway because no one could find the bread.

2. I made the second French Fridays with Dorie recipe (Gerard's Mustard Tarte) last Friday and took some great photos, but then later that afternoon took the camera with me to a family birthday party at my parents' house -- and left it there. We live just far enough away from one another that there was no just popping over to get it, so I had to wait until they were running an errand in my town and brought it to me yesterday. It seems that I've grown so used to accompanying every post I make with a photograph, I am CRIPPLED without my camera.

3. Blogger has made a lot of changes to the website lately that I find irritating and discommoding, so I was in a snit. It's not as much fun blogging when it's harder to post images than it was before their "upgrade," not to mention all kinds of other glitches that have reared their hissing heads.

4. Shakespeare class, as always, keeps me very busy for the weeks the class is running, in this case, until mid-November. But my students are wonderful and so receptive and Hamlet is just as interesting as always.

5. Then there are my own two students, Meelyn and Aisling, who just took the PSAT last Wednesday. They have a lot more work to do this year, naturally -- Meelyn is a junior and Aisling is a sophomore -- and there are a few classes of theirs that I'm taking right along with them, namely Bible study, composition and SAT prep. It takes up a lot of time, but it is all great fun.

6. And we've been doing a lot of stuff at church. Aisling is doing child care for our parish mothers' group -- she likes it very much because the kids are funny and adorable and they pay her well -- plus all three of us are providing child care for the same mothers' group we worked with last year that meets at a Protesant church in our city, so we're busier than usual. That picture at the top of this post is one I took at our annual Pet Blessing which was held on the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi on October 4. It's fun being at the church more often. I use the time while Aisling is babysitting to work on my religious education lesson plans, as well as my Shakespeare stuff.

7. We've had colds. With fevers and headaches and sore throats and a severe lack of energy. Very unpleasant.

So! That's my list of excuses. I think they seem plausible, but I think it's going to be very hard to make my yearly goal.

Little bit of Rosalind on my mind

A few random thoughts, nothing enough to write an entire post about....

The Stratford trip is coming up in a week -- ONE WEEK -- and I am flying around getting things ready for the group and for my own family. Must not, on any account, forget to call the bank and tell them we plan to use our debit cards internationally. Also would be a good idea to remember to bring passports. And I need to get the mail stopped. Wondering about As You Like It and if the actress playing Rosalind will also be able to pull off her role as Ganymede.

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In my city, tattoo places are springing up EVERYWHERE. As the recession grows worse, other businesses fail -- a small used car lot, a former dry cleaner's establishment, a Midas muffler place, a Mom-n-Pop donut shop -- and abandon their premises, leaving them open for these awful tattoo place to move in. The one in the picture above is the nicest place of all, the one place out of all of them that doesn't look you could get a free case of hepatitis B thrown in with your new ink.

One of the others, sadly, is near my house in the historic district, in a building that used to be the office for the used car lot I mentioned. The car lot was small and cute and there were always flowers planted outside in tubs and in the tiny yard. But now? Ugh. The building has been painted black and the name of the joint is painted on the outdoor sign, unprofessionally. It looks like the kind of place that might send you off with the added bonus of typhus with your hep B.

How many tattoo businesses can one city of 60,000 people support?

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Today is our first day of school. I have a junior and a sophomore. PSATs are coming up next month, SATs in February. This is our tenth year of homeschooling. The dining room table is piled nearly up to the ceiling with school books. Meelyn is doing geometry and Aisling is working on French. I am trying to summon the will to soldier through the next hour until 5:00 p.m. when I will legitimately be able to have a glass of wine. I should go fold some towels. The only problem is that the refrigerator where the wine lives is on the way to the laundry room.

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Today is Nanny and Poppy's 48th wedding anniversary -- two more years 'til the Big one. It will take at least that long to convince Poppy that Pat, Angie, my husband and I should throw them a party. It may take that long for him to agree to having a nice little write-up in the Courier-Times. I should get started on this, like, yesterday.

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The girls are practicing saying "à tout à l'heure" really fast so that it won't sound like saying, in English, "I'LL.....SEE.....YOU.....LATER!" They were laughing and laughing, but both of them stopped when I said, "I hope you'll be able to use this admittedly limited French when you're in college; it would be so wonderful if you could both go abroad to study for a semester." They both looked at me like a couple of owls. "Wow, that would be really far from home," said Meelyn, a worried look on her face. "Sacré bleu!" Aisling breathed solemnly. Awwww....they are mes petits choux, alors.

There are some things that make me angry

I firmly believe that every profession has this kind of person in it, but my field is teaching, so I know the kind of person I'm talking about, but I'm sure you'll be able to relate to this kind of person in your profession. If you're moved to make roll your eyes or mime sticking your finger down your throat, please feel free.

But before I explain the person, I want to explain myself: I'm a teacher. It's the only thing I ever wanted to do, other than be, like, a ballerina when I was five. I also wanted to be Ann Wilson for a while, but my singing voice makes the birds fall out of the trees, dead on the sidewalk. So anyway. I kind of feel compelled to teach people stuff and whether that's because I'm really bossy and bossy people enjoy being in classrooms or whether because I enjoy being in classrooms because it gives me a chance to boss people around, I don't know. It's a chicken/egg conundrum.

I love teaching.

But you know what I don't love? Educrats. Educrats are the kind of people who are so bent on EDUCATION that they forget all about teaching. They're about the process and the methods and the theories and all those classes in the university course catalog that start with ED. You can tell who they are because when they get up to talk to a classroom full of people, it's like each person being hit, on an individual basis, in the head with a baseball bat.

Stuffy. Boring. Droning. Dull.

They don't teach. They educate. They are educators or even educationists. Quite often, they're smug.

They are definitely not teachers.

I hate it when I have to spend time with those people. It makes me angry.

My, how you've grown!!!

This is a picture of the Fishers Police Department in Fishers, Indiana, a building which we frequently drive by on our way to the Fishers Public Library. I teach my Shakespeare classes at the library, so maybe I should have taken a picture of it, but I like this picture of the police department much better. Because in spite of the fact that the city I live in is more than twice the size of Fishers, the police department building is about ten times the size of my city's, plus nicer.

Our police are housed in a cramped little building that is supposed to be "historical," which is the nice way of saying the structure is a total dump that probably ought to be condemned but can't be because of the historic preservation that runs my city's downtown area with an iron grip and I ought to know because I live there and would like to paint my back steps but can't without twenty pages of paperwork detailing why I need to paint the back steps when it ought to be perfectly apparent that they're just fine the way they are. (They're not.)

Anyhoo.

Fishers, Indiana has been around for a long time, since 1872. It was connected to other parts of Indiana by a series of Indian trails and then by a railroad, but in spite of those two means of ingress, hardly anyone wanted to go there. According to the census of 1960, Fishers was home to three hundred eighty-eight people and I believe the population of the town had increased only by a couple hundred when I first became aware of Fishers in the late 1970s.

On the way to Indianapolis, my dad would occasionally say, "Let's try the scenic route" and there we'd be, driving through Fishers, which at that time consisted of a decrepit service station, a bait shop and a corner grocery so old that looked as if it would still accept ration coupons from World War II in exchange for meat. There were some houses scattered around, all in various degrees of dereliction; Fishers was not the kind of place back then to make you clap your hands and say, "I know where we should go eat lunch today!"

Today, however, my childhood friend, Todd, lives there with his family, as do a bunch of other families we know. Plus our church is in Fishers. Todd referred to Fishers recently as "the suburban jungle," which I found very funny, not only because it's true -- Fishers is not just a suburb, but a Suburb, pugnaciously shoving against Carmel to the west and Noblesville to its north -- but because of what it used to be: bait shop, corner grocery, service station. As it turns out, there were also schools there (elementary, middle and high) but the town was so small, there were hardly any students in them.

Because of the construction of Interstate 69 and the development of Geist Reservoir, Fishers has grown tremendously in the past few decades. It has every sort of shop, any chain store you'd care to mention, a really good snow-cone emporium on 116th Street, plus that fancy police headquarters. I like Fishers a lot because I feel like we kind of came of age together.

(Oh, for heaven's sake. You know I'm old, but I was NOT born in 1872, so just shut up.)

Fishers, you are a fun and friendly city.

Teacher let the monkeys out!

This is what a ninth grade home schooler looks like on the last day of school at Our Lady of Good Counsel high school. This winds up our ninth year of home schooling, and I have to say that it's been a very good year.

This summer will see Meelyn and Aisling finishing up a couple of their courses, since I unreasonably insist on every textbook being finished to the very last page. Meelyn is finishing up the last few lessons in her Traditional Logic text and is carrying on with reading The Federalist Papers and The Great Gatsby. Aisling still has six lessons left in Algebra I and two lessons in her vocabulary book. She's going to start reading The Red Badge of Courage shortly.

We have lots of American Lit reading to do in these next few months, along with an SAT prep workshop the girls will be attending for two days in August. Aisling continues with piano all summer and Meelyn will soon mark her one year anniversary of being a smiling face behind the counter of a local fast food establishment -- she's already got a substantial savings tucked away so that she can buy a car next summer.

Next year, a sophomore and a junior. Phew, that sounds old, for them and for me!

Fuuuhhhhh-ryyyyyyyyy-dayyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!!

Yep, Friday it is! Friday is our last day of school for this year. Not Thursday, not Wednesday but FRIDAY FRIDAY FRIDAY, that's our last day. The last day of this school year, the very last one before we start our summer vacation. It's Friday. This coming Friday, not the week after or even the week after that. THIS Friday.

I wish we could work up some excitement about it.

Triumph!!!!

Yesterday, Aisling came up to me and gave me a sour look.

"You've ruined me," she said flatly. "Completely ruined me."

I was suffering yesterday with what I'll term a "stomach complaint" (I'll spare you the details), so I was feeling a little ruined myself. "What are you talking about?" I asked plaintively. "Can you get me a cup of ginger tea? And maybe one saltine cracker?"

"I mean it. You have ruined me. Every time I see a road sign or some internet posting or whatever that uses there, they're or their incorrectly, it just goes all over my nerves like vomit on a Ferris wheel."

"Nice image," I said approvingly. "Very descriptive and imaginative. Now, tell me....what about to, too and two?"

"Ruined."

"Were and we're?"

"Crushed."

"Its and it's?"

"Devastated."

"You're and your?"

"Utterly demolished. I can no longer tolerate usage errors and want to beat people with a large and heavy grammar book when I read them."

Joy suffused my entire being and my stomach complaint quieted down as I clasped my hands beneath my chin and closed my eyes in delight. "My work here is done. Finished! I have climbed the mountain, braved the elements, struggled over stony paths and come to this place to claim my victory."

She looked at me, one eyebrow raised. "We're out of saltines."

"Okay. Just a cup of tea, then," I said, crestfallen.

Art and the home schooled student

Meelyn is taking an art theory and appreciation course this semester, one of Alpha-Omega Publication's excellent Lifepacs series for middle and high school students. Today's lesson was a study in color-mixing, and although Mee complained that she felt like her next assignment might be finger-painting (an activity she scorned even as a pre-schooler), when she finished up with her brushes and her tempera paint, she said in an amazed voice, "I actually learned something in that lesson!"

Bingo!

Overheard at my house on Friday

An unspecified teenager, murmuring to herself: "How many states are there? Fifty? No, that doesn't sound right. Fifty-TWO! Fifty-two states. No, wait, that doesn't sound right either. Oh, hang on, I'm thinking of playing cards. There are fifty-two playing cards and fifty states. Okay. I'm good."

Me [dropping head into hands]: Aaarrrrrrrrgghhhhh!!!!!

Unspecified teenager: Do you have a headache?

Me [darkly]: I do now.

And to think that we spent an entire school year with a rather demanding course in social studies/geography on the United States.

Royally literate

Aisling just asked me, "What's the difference between a participial phrase and an adverb clause?"

I sat and thought for a moment. "I have no idea," I finally admitted.

She gave me a bleak look. "I thought you were, like, the QUEEN of grammar."

"No, I replied with dignity. "I am the QUEEN of literature. I am merely the lady-in-waiting of grammar."

Teengirl sleepover night

Meelyn and Aisling have really been suffering through this first half of January. First of all because January is the very divil of a month. Second of all, because January is the very divil of a month. Thirdly, because January....ah, well, I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this.

Mixing the end of the joyous Christmas festivities with the onset of the truly horrible weather we've been having -- snow out the wazoo, temperatures plummeting into the single digits -- and the resumption of SCHOOL has been a bitter, bitter pill.

"I hate school," Aisling declared frankly. "I hate biology, I hate Spanish, I hate algebra, I hate grammar, I hate-...."

"I sense you're working on a theme, here," I interrupted.

"Yes," she said shortly. "I hate history, I hate American Literature and, oh yeah, I hate doing chores and having chili for dinner forty-eight times a month." She opened her Biology I book with a snarled-up look on her face and said, "OH GREAT. AN EXPERIMENT. Do we have clear dishwashing liquid, an onion, some meat tenderizer, isopropyl alcohol and some sugar?"

"Yes to all of those things. Why is this experiment coming as such a surprise?" I queried, typing an email to Carol and Susie while I talked. "You told me you had an experiment for today on Monday and asked me then if we had all that stuff."

"I forgot," she said. "Hey. Why do you get to mess around on the computer while Meelyn and I have to sit here doing schoolwork."

Silently, I lifted one hand from the keyboard and pointed at my college diploma, which I have displayed on the top shelf of my desk's bookcase.

Aisling heaved a heavy sigh, grabbed up her biology textbook and left the room, murmuring. Meelyn, suffering in stoic silence, bent her head a little farther over her U.S. History text, so close that her forehead was almost touching the page.

"Didn't you put in your contacts this morning?" I asked.

"Yes," she replied wanly. "But life is so bleak and meaningless, all the words are running together in a dark grey blob."

I sighed and brought out my Secret Winter Weapon. "Why don't we plan a sleepover and invite a few of your friends over in a couple of weeks?"

Meelyn's head snapped up and a happy smile irradiated her face. Aisling burst through the kichen door, similarly glowy. The very air suddenly began to sparkle and the sweet golden warmth of a May morning suffused the room. I looked around, startled. It was like the spirits of fourteen Disney princess had suddenly invaded my home.

"Can we, Mommy?" they chanted, eyes bright. "Oh, can we? We won't complain about anything. We'll do all our chores really nice the first time and we won't complain about chili or school or the dumb weather, we promise. Oh, Mommy, you're the BEST MOM IN THE WHOLE WORLD!"

So we planned the party and three girls were invited, although one wasn't able to come. Because the girls both dearly wanted that one particular guest, I was somehow talked in to letting them have another sleepover at the end of February. I don't know what I was thinking. It must have been that sudden change from the frowny faces and the general air of doom and being made to feel as if I should be turned in to Child Protective Services for requiring my two home schooled teenagers to do algebra. I don't know. I guess I'm easy that way.

So! Sleepover! Home made pizza and monkey bread and popcorn and Season One of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The guests will be here between three o'clock and three-thirty and I'm guessing that the waiting for that time to arrive will be almost as difficult as waiting for Christmas a month ago.

First day back

Today is our first day back at school -- actually, the dining room table -- after two blissful weeks of Christmas break, and it hasn't been a marked success. It rarely is. *sigh*

It seems like both Meelyn and Aisling have experienced an unprecedented amount of brain drain in the past fortnight. How? How? I can't explain it. Meelyn has fared better than her sister, but Aisling has complicated the entire day by not being able to find her Biology 1 notebook, her U.S. History notebook and some other notebook...I'm so frazzled, I can't remember which. It is incredibly frustrating and the mood has been dour. To say the least.

Aisling did have a good piano lesson and came out to the van toting her suitcase full of music, as cheerful as a cricket. Meelyn had to work today at the lunch shift and had a pleasant day of it; she came home and immediately went to the gym, where she ran four miles in forty minutes, an excellent time.

Hershey has driven me nearly round the bend by asking to be let out a thousand and three times. "Come on, pleeeeaaaaaaaaase?" he says with his ears aloft and eyes all bright and hopeful. "Pleeeeeeaaaaaase? Just for a minute, I swear. ONE MINUTE. So I can bark at that nanny pushing her little charge in a stroller down the street. They need to be barked at."

I also ordered several books for Meelyn's second semester work, which starts on January 18. I bought the Traditional Logic 2, the next part of her Spanish 2 course and a computer literacy course covering Microsoft Word.

The day is very cold and snowy and to while away the afternoon, I am baking biscotti. The recipe I made, which I put together out of several I found online, features Splenda instead of sugar, chopped pecans and dried cranberries. They're just about ready to go in for their second baking and if they're good, I'll take their picture and post the recipe.

Whoops! Timer just went off! Back to the biscotti I go, while Aisling continues searching for that pesky U.S. History notebook.

Early Christmas

Today was one of those little unexpected gifts that you sometimes get before Christmas Day has even arrived.

Meelyn, Aisling and I went to a local church's mother's group today to babysit from 8:15 until 1:30 while the children's mommies went Christmas shopping, or, in the case of a few with whom I clearly and immediately identified, home to take a nap. This is the same group that we caregive for approximately every two weeks and it brings in a small amount of welcome money, but since we're with the same children every time, it also brings the simple pleasure of being around young kids for a few hours.

Now don't get me wrong: Babysitting for pre-school aged children is not always a task that has me jumping up and down and pumping my fist in the air with a big "YESSSSSS!" There's one little boy in the room in which Aisling and I work who has the habit of slapping or pushing or pulling the hair of any child who so much as looks at a toy that he once sneezed on three weeks earlier, to the accompaniment blood-curdling screams of MY TOY! MY TOY! MINE! MINE! He also narrows his eyes, plants his feet and utters a defiant "NO" to any request given him: I swear I could say, "Little Jimmy, come here and I'll give you your weight in M&Ms and let you beat the holy heck out of Little Tommy" and that wee divvil would still say "NO" even as he started making his purposeful way across the playroom to where Tommy was peacefully playing with the Brio trains. Thankfully, Jimmy wasn't there today.

The other three children in our classroom are a constant source of amusement though and they all love me and Aisling and offer big hugs and sticky kisses when they see us. We have two small girls, Mari and Charlotte, and a little boy named Keenan and they just couldn't be cuter.

Like today, for example, Keenan wanted to get into the foot-propelled Little Tykes car and drive it around the room. He's about two and a half, still fairly speechless, and came up to pat me on the knee, point to the car and say "Drive."

"You're going to drive the car?" I asked.

"Yah."

"Where are you going?"

"Work," he said firmly, and climbed into the car, placing a toy blow dryer on the seat beside him.

"Okay!" I called cheerfully as he rolled away. "See you tonight! Call me! Dinner's at six!"

"'Kay!" he said over his shoulder. He made one lap around the room and then pulled up back in front of me, smiling from ear to ear. "Home!" he announced.

"Well, hi!" I exclaimed. "I'm awfully glad to see you. Come on in, dinner's ready."

"Hug," he said, and threw himself on me, giggling. I hugged him back, relishing the squeeziness of his warm little body and the sweet smell of his hair. Cute!

Keenan released my legs and went to climb back into the car. "Work!" he said with that same ear-to-ear grin. He drove off in the car, hair dryer still in place (he later took to referring to it as a gun - maybe his dad is a police officer?) and made another round, where we repeated the whole home-dinner-hug process. We did it about fifteen times and the frequent repetition never diminished his delight until he got distracted by soap bubbles.

The toddler playroom at this church stocks bubbles in these handy little non-spill bottles, which is the only way I will consent to play with them unless I am outside on a summer's day, sitting in a plastic chair under a shady tree with a garden hose and a raincoat nearby: stickiness is not a tactile sensation I'm particularly fond of. Naturally, the children love them, and since the bubbles are there to be played with and it isn't my carpet, Aisling and I obligingly blew bubbles to the intense gratification of the littlelies.

There's just something about the combination of soap bubbles and wee toddling childerns that can make a person laugh out loud, you know? First of all, the babies just get drunk on the bubbles and stagger around, flailing their arms and saying, "Bubbles! See? I get bubbles! Bubble on your nose? You eat bubbles? Bubbles yucky! Look, BUBBLES!!!" and that's enough to make you a little giddy yourself, even though you know it's just some cheap dishwashing detergent and a little wand thingie.

Charlotte and Keenan were the only babies left in our room when the Great Bubble Extravaganza began, so they had plenty of room to move. All that space didn't prevent them from crashing into one another occasionally, which made them both tumble over, their mouths O's of surprise, as if it hadn't just happened thirty seconds before.

"Bubbles! Look! Up! Get bubbles!" they were both clamoring, clapping their fat little hands with the sweet dimpled knuckles. They were turning around and about and catching the bubbles mid-air and stomping them when they landed on the floor and then all of a sudden *BANG!* They'd whomp into each other and sprawl onto the floor, good-naturedly commenting, "I fall down! I go boom!" Ah, the innocence of youth! Because on the rare occasions when I fall down? I cuss a blue streak.

Nothing like cute babies to bring in some Christmas cheer. They're better than spiked eggnog.

Moms' Night Out

Tonight was Moms' Night Out, the last one until next year. We won't be getting together again until January, since the last Monday in December falls during the Christmas season and we will all be too busy putting batteries into things and too exhausted from all the late nights staying up eating sugar cookies and Chex Party Mix to come out to dinner. And maybe too full.

We had a big group: Mary Jo, Katie, Michelle, Cynthia, Stephanie, Debbie, Julie, Dawn and Gloria. And me. We had the same waitress we had last month, the one who called us all amiga and beamed from ear to ear when we told her the food was so good, which it was. I got the beef and cheese nachos and guacamole, more than even I could ever hope to eat in one sitting, for $7.99. Delicious!

We talked a lot, naturally. About home schooling and husbands and history books and buying really nice but gently used board games on e-Bay for so much cheaper than you can get them brand new. We talked about the Colts and cliques and candy -- how some kids would rather work for mini-Snickers than for money.

Three and a half hours flew by before we even realized, and we hurriedly began digging through our pocketbooks for our wallets, counting out our tips, shrugging into coats and heading off to the restroom for one last stop before the drive home.

It was a bittersweet night because this was Debbie's last night. Her husband got a job after being out of steady work for way over a year. His job is an answer to prayer and they are so happy and grateful, but it is hard to lose Debbie to a city ninety minutes away because she's funny and salty and truly devout and one of the easiest people in the world to love.

We filed out of the restaurant's front door, buttoning and zipping our coats, our breath frosty on the cold night air. "Well, I guess we probably won't be seeing each other much because of the holidays," Michelle said.

"Yes, this is a busy time of year," said Katie. "So much going on even beyond the regular stuff."

We all hugged goodbye then, wishing each other Merry Christmas and calling to one another to drive home safely. It was a good time. We laughed a lot. We teared up over Debbie. We enjoyed being truly ourselves for a few hours. A good time was had by all.

All about Mom's Night Out

Last night, I went out for a Mom's Night Out gathering with home schooling mothers Katie, Michelle, Gloria, Stephanie and Mary Jo and had the best time. We went to a Mexican restaurant in Noblesville and our waitress was sweeter than sopaipillas with honey. When Gloria asked her for another glass of water, the waitress brought it back and said, "Here you are, amiga." And when I thanked her for the Diet Coke she brought me, she patted me on the shoulder and said, "De nada."

There's just something about being with a group of friends in a cozy little restaurant on a cool October evening with a hint of rain in the air to make you feel that life is very good indeed.

Katie and I had taco salads and Gloria had fajitas and Michelle had some kind of steak with onions all over the top of it, and guacamole.

"Onions," she groaned, one hand on her baby bump. "I've started carrying Tums with me in my purse. I have heartburn, like, all the time."

"I'm middle-aged," Katie said dryly. "I have heartburn all the time and I'm not pregnant."

"I'm middle-aged and I have some pills I have to swallow right here at the table," I said brightly.

"My parents have to do that," said one of the YOUNGER MEMBERS OF THE GROUP in a sympathetic voice.

We did a little minor complaining about our husbands and their tendency to listen to us telling them about our day with one eye on Sports Center and the other eye on our irresistible selves.

"Not in my house," said Gloria, who is tiny and beautiful and from the Philippines. "In my house, Mike comes home and he wants to talk during The Amazing Race and I have to say, 'Sssh, honey, talk to me during the commercials.'"

This made us all laugh really hard. Also the fact that Gloria likes those hard-boiled crime shows. Michelle prefers reality television, I weep over Buffy the Vampire Slayer and stay glued to Survivor, Top Chef and the odd home improvement shows and Katie said she hasn't turned on her television in three years.

In respectful silence, we all turned our eyes on her.

"Three years?" said Michelle.

"Three years?!?" I squeaked.

"Wow. Three years," said Stephanie, wide-eyed.

I nearly had to lay my head down to absorb this information. Because, three years? Golly.

Since Michelle is pregnant and Mary Jo has a three month old baby, we talked about babies for a while. Childbirth. Food we craved during pregnancy (Michelle is finding solace in chocolate chip vanilla ice cream, which she insists she eats for medicinal reasons only). Which led, of course, to talking about all the things we eat now.

"In the Crock-Pot," said Michelle. "Pork chops. Two cans of chicken and rice soup poured over it, really easy and good. Everyone ate it, and hardly anyone in my house wants to eat anything I cook. It really ticks me off."

We had a discussion on how hard it is to make sloppy joes without using onions and concluded that it's impossible: what non-onion-loving members of the family don't know won't hurt them in terms of onion powder. Katie said that Gary has his own special recipe for sloppy joes and I told everyone that my sloppy joe recipe comes from a church cook book and its secret ingredient is half a can of Coke.

Mary Jo told us that the herb valerian is a good sleep aid and that her mother was trying four drops of essential oil in a capsule that very night; I'm still waiting on an email to find out if it worked, because if it did, I'm going to get some.

I didn't have any sort of sleep aid for last night, and I drove home at 10:00 p.m., my blood whizzing through my veins due to those five glasses of Diet Coke I'd injudiciously consumed after emptying half a bottle of habanera pepper sauce on my salad. I ended up being awake until 2:30.

But it was fun! I would do it again tonight if I could. Love the lovely friends.

Faster than the speed of, er....The Scarlet Letter

Okay, so The Scarlet Letter hasn't exactly gone quickly. Meelyn says she likes it, although she uttered the word "like" in a doubtful tone that made me wonder if she was being completely straight with me. Aisling, when I asked just now what her opinion is, said, "Lukewarm. At best."

At any rate, the first grading period here at Our Lady of Good Counsel is coming to a screeching halt on Thursday. Both readers have been informed that they must finish with The Scarlet Letter on Wednesday. Grades will be figured and posted here on InsomniMom on Monday - or at least that's my intention.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the American Literature classic I plan to assign for the second grading period and both girls are expressing limited enthusiasm for this project, both claiming that I "ruined" and "tortured" them by having them read Tom Sawyer two years ago.

This Friday is -- hallelujah -- our holiday break for All Saints and All Souls. Our enthusiasm for this brief vacation hovers somewhere on the SAT word list between inordinate and profligate.