joy ride (friday foto finder: horse)

In June, Phoebe got to go on a field trip with her Daisy troop to a horse stable, and the visit included a ride on one of the stable’s horses. Given her current love of all things equine, Phoebe was over the moon.


The horse was very tolerant. (Not shown are the photos of the horse being surrounded by 10 excited 6-year-old girls.)


Phoebe would love to be able to do this more often…


The visit also included a lesson on how to care for horses. Phoebe was enthralled to be brushing a real horse.

This week’s friday foto finder theme is “horse¹.” To see what horses others have corralled, check out the friday foto finder blog.

¹ Coincidentally, we watched National Velvet for the first time tonight. It was rather startling to see Angela Lansbury playing the role of a teenager. (She played one of Elizabeth Taylor’s sisters.) I suppose it would have been more startling to see her playing the role of horse. Though come to think of it, she did play the role of a teapot.

barely balanced


I liked the way that these tall piles of snow managed to stay upright, nestled in the branches of this tree in our front yard. In the afternoon light, it even had a bit of a glow.

This photo was from Sunday. Now, remarkably, much of the snow is gone. We had a warm stretch, and lots of rain, melting and compacting the 2 feet of snow from Saturday down to maybe 4 inches. I thought that much snow would stick around for weeks! 2 years ago, we had a winter where the snow just kept coming, without the melting in between. There were a number of roof cave-ins around the area from the weight of all that snow. I like the quick melting snow much better!

Speaking of balance, I’m having a bit of trouble getting all the things done I need to do. It’s been another crazy stretch, with all kinds of commitments left and right. Valentine’s Day stuff for the kids. Work stuff. Home stuff. I have an early meeting in Boston tomorrow, and then I will collect my mother at the airport. The house is a mess, and I still haven’t found the guest bed. And I really, really want to share a story about a Big Thing I did last week. But I need to go to bed!

I also feel compelled to say that now that I’ve publicly announced my intentions to post every day this month, it suddenly feels like more of a burden to post every day this month. I know that’s sort of silly, especially given that I don’t actually *have* to post every day this month. And I certainly don’t need to do anything spectacular when I post every day this month. But now I have this strange compulsion to repeat the phrase “post every day this month.”

Did I mention that I need to get to bed?

I don’t remember growing older

Today I registered Theo for kindergarten. Come fall, we’ll have two elementary school students in the house. I feel a bit sappy and nostalgic (my baby!), but I am also really looking forward to the easier schedule we’ll have when the bus comes to the house to collect both children. (The pick up and drop off at Theo’s preschool take about 45 minutes on either end, what with the 15 minute drive plus the time it takes to deliver or collect. It’s like I have a commute even on days when I work from home. I can’t seem to manage to get Theo to his preschool and be back before Phoebe’s bus, so I don’t get back home to start working until around 9:30. )

My post title is, in case you don’t recognize it, a reference to “Sunrise, Sunset” from Fiddler on the Roof, which has been running through my head much of the day. Of course, I feel like I’ve just grown older tonight, as in the course of choosing a photo to go with this post, I managed, with the help of a very annoying bug, to completely screw up the keyword tagging system I’ve been using in iPhoto the last few years. I’ve noticed that a bunch of my keywords were showing up on photos that I hadn’t tagged as such, and in the course of “fixing” some of these, I witnessed the bug in action. As I watched, I saw keywords getting applied to thousands of photos that shouldn’t have had them. So now those keywords are completely meaningless. Years worth of tagging rendered useless. So, you see, I can measure my aging by means of the technology that torments me. Why 10 years ago, I didn’t even have a digital camera of my own, let alone a digital photo library of many thousands of photos to mismanage.

In other (less cranky) news, the wave of nostalgia triggered by getting ready to send my baby out into the wild world led me to go poking into my blog archives from the time when Theo was a new arrival. In addition to finding the expected ramblings about having a new baby, I also found this other post, which (if I do say so myself) is quite entertaining:
Advanced Topics in Procrastination. If you are a procrastinator, you should definitely put it on your list of things to do later on.

digging in


Our array of snow shovels.

Some of you may have noticed that I have been posting rather frequently of late. I decided, you see, that I would post every day this month. I have so many photos and stories to share, I decided to just dig in. I don’t really have a plan, beyond that. I’m just picking from among the photos in my digital hoard, or posting as things come up. I hope to share some more of my travel stories, and other posts I’ve started to draft. Maybe, when I’ve laid it all out, some sort of pattern will emerge. Or maybe it will be just a big pile. But it will be my pile.


There are some bushes hiding under these piles.


Our front path.

And now I should try to dig back into my work, which has been entirely neglected for the past few days. Not only have I spent a lot of time shovelling snow, but I have also not had any time without at least one young child since Thursday.

Happy Year of the Snake!

Today is the day to ring in the Year of the Snake.


These are some Japanese clay bells that I bought in San Francisco’s Japantown 12 years ago. I’m quite fond of them. Who knew that snakes could be so cute?

digging out

As you may have heard, the US East Coast was hit by a blizzard over the past couple of days. We weathered the storm without any incident (happily, we didn’t lose power), and by mid-morning today the skies had cleared and the sun came out. All told, it looks like we got somewhere between 18 inches and 2 feet of snow. (It was crazy-windy last night, so there was much drifting.)

John had shovelled several times during the night, so the driveway only had about 8 inches when the snow stopped. He had, however, left the car untouched. Come 3 in the afternoon, pretty much all of the other necessary shovelling was done. It was time to deal with this:


Dude, where’s my car?

Theo, who often enjoys brushing the snow off the car with our long-handled snow brush, decided that he would take on the job.


2:54:28 p.m. Trying the side of the car first, but having trouble reaching the car.


2:54:46 p.m. Around to the back, and looking determined.


2:55:09 p.m.


2:55:16 p.m.


2:55:59 p.m. “You can get the rest, Mommy.”

So it was up to me.


4:09 Close enough? I think this is kind of a good look for the car. And we didn’t have to go anywhere.


What do you see? (Please participate in the snow Rorschach test.)

pushing buttons (friday foto finder: buttons)

Little kids love to push buttons, and my children are no exceptions.¹ Whenever we ride elevators with the kids, we have to give each one a chance to push the buttons. One will get to push the outside call button, and the other the floor selection. There have been moments of great disappointment when other elevator passengers have helpfully pushed a button for us.

Here is Theo pushing a button at the Boston Museum of Science, which is a great place to take kids who love to press buttons. Not only do they have more than one elevator, but they also have a number of exhibits with interactive displays that involve pushing buttons. This photo was from September, 2011, when Theo was 3 years old.

This week’s friday foto finder theme is “button.” Go check out the fff blog to see what other sorts of buttons people have found.

—

¹ Remember that time Phoebe called 911 as a toddler? I do. Grammy & Grampa’s phone had a big, pretty red button on it.²
² My kids have also been know to press each other’s buttons, but those moments don’t tend to make the best photo ops…

Here be Dragons

With Chinese New Year on the way this Sunday, we have almost run out of the year of the dragon. I started putting this list together as the Year of the Dragon entered, but now am barely managing to post it before the Dragon departs.

Dragons are creatures that have appeared in the mythologies of many cultures in Europe and Asia, and they are featured in many a song and story, among other things. Here are a dozen arbitrarily chosen dragon things to usher out the Year of the Dragon:

  1. Custard the Dragon: A poem by Ogden Nash from 1936

    Custard the dragon had big sharp teeth,
    And spikes on top of him and scales underneath,
    Mouth like a fireplace, chimney for a nose,
    And realio, trulio, daggers on his toes.

  2. Puff, the Magic Dragon: A song by Peter, Paul & Mary that was inspired by Custard. (The dragon, that is. Not the dessert. But you never know. Sometimes if I eat dessert right before going to bed I get really weird dreams.)
  3. Dragonfire: A song written by Sandra Boynton in/on the book/album Dogtrain [mp3 sample]

  4. St George and the Dragon: a European legend of a man who slays a dragon.
  5. Smaug: the treasure-hoarding dragon from J. R. R. Tolkiens classic novel, The Hobbit.
  6. dragonfly: an insect that is neither a dragon nor a fly. Dragonflies are of the order odonata.
  7. dragonfruit: a thing that is neither dragon nor fruit. No, wait. It *is* a fruit. But I’m mostly sure it’s not a dragon.

    8. dragonfruit

  8. dragon dance: a Chinese tradition involving a large costume of a dragon, which is operated by multiple people. The dragon dance is often part of Chinese New Year celebrations.

  9. Dragon Ball: While it sounds like it could be a formal-dress version of a dragon dance, it’s actually a media franchise including manga, anime, and video games. But they do feature dragons who can grant wishes.
  10. Dungeons & Dragons: Sometimes known as D & D. A role-playing game, or universe of games. To be honest, I have no idea what role dragons play in any of it.
  11. Enter the Dragon (1973): Bruce Lee’s legendary martial arts movie. Bruce Lee does not actually enter a dragon in this movie. But he does enter a sort of dungeon, come to think of it.
  12. Here be dragons: A phrase associated with unexplored territories on old maps. Possibly this is based on only one such map, The Hunt-Lenox Globe. According to its wiki page,

    It is notable as the only instance on a historical map of the actual phrase HC SVNT DRACONES (in Latin hic sunt dracones means “here be dragons“.)

There are loads more great books, movies, legends, and things with dragons. I could easily add another few dozen dragons to the list, but we’d be well into the year of the snake by that time. Instead, I’ll wrap up and get to bed. But please feel free to add more dragons in the comments!