Home Alone

Home Alone 5¹
Synopsis: A 40-year-old mother of two is left behind when the kids’ father takes the family to the grandparents’ house for the weekend. Mayhem and hilarity ensue.

That’s right, I have the house to myself this weekend. John took the kids down to his parents’ last night, and I stayed home. (Except that I wasn’t home, I was at a conference hosted by my program in Boston. Minor details. I still came home. And was alone.) John’s brother is visiting my in-laws, and leaving tomorrow, so John wanted to get down there while he was still in town. I, however, had committed to being in Boston for the conference. The miraculous result is that I have a whole weekend free of parenting responsibilities.³

Can you guess what it is that I most fantasize about doing?

Not setting the alarm.

I didn’t get to do that this morning, my first morning home alone. I had to leave the house by 7:30 to get back to the conference, as I was scheduled to chair the morning session. But tomorrow… tomorrow, I have not committed to going in. In fact, I have committed to not going in. I have committed to sleeping in.

I realize that there is a strong possibility that my sleep binge fantasy will not be realized. I can envision any or all of the following happening:

  1. I will wake up early with a cough or cold
  2. I will wake up early with a headache or a stomachache
  3. I will wake up early with leprosy or rabies
  4. I will dream that the house is on fire and wake early in a panic
  5. The power will go out, causing the smoke detector to beep, which will make me wake early in a panic
  6. I will dream that I am back in high school and it’s finals day and I haven’t been to a class all semester and I don’t even know what room it’s in and wake early in a panic
  7. The kids will figure out how to use the phone and call me at 6:30 in the morning
  8. I will get a wrong number phone call from India at 5:30 in the morning
  9. Bumbling burglars will attempt to break in at 4:30 in the morning
  10. Aliens will come and abduct me at 3:30 in the morning

I can only hope that if it’s aliens, they put me in a quiet cell and let me sleep some more.

Beyond the goal of sleeping in, I also plan to work up some data, review some journal articles for a paper I need to write, read up on logistic regression and maybe mixed models, as well as clean out the refrigerator, bake some muffins and do some laundry. Hilarity and mayhem will ensue.

¹ Can you believe that there have been 4 Home Alone movies? I haven’t actually seen any of them.²
² Can you believe that Macauley Culkin is over 30 years old now? Holy crap.
³ I suppose I will have to parent again when they come home tomorrow evening. But I’ll have most of the day, right?

make one that goes up to 11

In just a week, it will be the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

What’s more, seeing as it is 2011, it will be 11/11/11. I plan to celebrate the day by making something that goes up to eleven. I haven’t decide yet what sort of thing I’ll make, but there’s a good chance it will be a list.¹

Won’t you join me? Post something that goes up to 11 for 11/11/11.²(You know you want to.) If you feel so inclined, set your post to be published at 11:11. And then we can have some elevenses.

11:11

Together, we can crank things up to 11.

¹ I’ve already done a list of 11 eleven things, so it won’t be that. Unless I wait till the eleventh hour.
² Edited to add: And if you don’t have a blog of your own and still want to play along, you can leave yours in the comments of my 11/11/11 post.

Image of the dials that go up to 11 is a screenshot from This is Spinal Tap.

stopping time

I’ve often found myself wishing that I could somehow stop time. As I’ve grown older, I’ve felt, more and more often, the sense that I am standing still and the world is moving around me. I want to stop time so that I can have a chance to catch up. (To catch up with sleep, to catch up with work, to catch up with all the things I like to do but don’t seem to find time for anymore.)

Wouldn’t it be great if there were a button you could press to stop time?

It turns out I’ve had such a button all along. Or at least for a few years. I just hadn’t noticed it:

Unfortunately, while I have found button (on my stove, of all places), I haven’t managed to work out the interface. I have yet to successfully stop time. I’ll continue with my efforts and keep you posted.

Meanwhile, it’s late and I need to go to bed. It’s time to stop.

a little crabby

The trouble with committing to doing something like writing a blog post every day is that you feel this irritating compulsion to write a blog post every day. Even when you are tired and crabby and should really get to bed. And then you find yourself trying to work up any of the dozen or so blog post ideas that you have recently had, but find yourself too tired to follow through. You find some drafts that are half-written, but you don’t have the energy to half-write the other half. So you putter through your photos again and again looking for something quick to post. But you just posted cute photos of your kids last night when you were tired, so you want to vary the subject matter a bit more. And then you have all this work to do, which you’d probably do better if you got a decent night’s sleep, which you didn’t last night, probably due largely to an unfortunate binge of Halloween candy. So you putter around on your laptop some more, not doing your work, and just getting more and more tired and crabby.

This is all purely hypothetical, of course. You know, the generic you. Not YOU you. And certainly not at all me. I am only imagining these things, and not in any way speaking from personal experience. I am cheerful and perky. Why, right this very moment I am totally not slumping into the dents of my couch cushions and scowling at my laptop, but dancing around the house making everything sparkle. With bluebirds singing and everything. I’m like the love child of Donna Reed and Mary Tyler Moore.

Oh, but I did remember these photos. I took these during my hike with YTSL during my trip to Hong Kong. See the cute little crabs?


These first two were in a stream that we crossed over.


I think this one looks like it’s wearing boxing gloves.


This third one was a land crab. (Land crab makes me think of Land Shark.)

obligatory Halloween photos

Here are my witch and frog.

The frog refused to wear the hood for most of the night.


Here, the witch completes the transformation of her brother into a frog.

We didn’t manage to carve pumpkins this year. However, we did manage to make some snowmen. Here’s hoping that this is not a new Halloween tradition.


Here was Saturday night’s pre-dinnertime snowman. My only contribution was to bring out a carrot.


This is one Phoebe made all by herself on Sunday. (Should I be concerned that she made a right-leaning snowman?)

We really lucked out with the storm, actually. You may have heard that much of the Northeast lost power, and many are still without even days later. There have been lots of trees down on powerlines in our town and neighboring towns. At least when we lost power back in August it was warm! So, again, we were lucky.


For us, it just looked like a lovely December snowstorm. With more leaves.

the ghosts of Halloween costumes past

Halloween is probably my favorite holiday. I have always loved costumes, plus the goth in me¹ loves the dark and creepy trappings of the holiday. While I may not be able to tell you every costume I’ve ever worn for Halloween, I can sure remember a lot of them. What’s more, I’m a big fan of making my own costumes. While I do like to see so many people get fired up about getting into the holiday spirit, all those cheaply made polyester costumes you see in stores these days make me a little sad. Part of the joy for me is in the creation, or at least the assembly, of the costume.

You may well be wondering what great schemes I have devised for this year’s costumes. The sad answer is “not much.” I have been very focused on work and other life things. Having perhaps gone a bit overboard with last year (cf. last Halloween’s post: “Quiz: How compulsive are you? (Halloween costume edition“), I decided that I would try to meet Halloween with a better attempt at sanity.

Phoebe had decide a few months ago that she wanted to be a witch, and I heartily approved. I thought I might be able to make her a dress. But then I was shopping at the second hand children’s store (and no, they don’t sell second hand children), I found a witch’s dress and hat on the rack. In Phoebe’s size. Since I had made a point of not asking Theo about what he wanted to be (in part so that I could have a chance to run with a theme, and in part because I didn’t want to get stuck committing to something tricky when he’s not likely to even remember this costume by the time he’s 6), I didn’t have anything particular in mind for him. I thought I could go with another traditional Halloweeny costume (ghost, mummy, frankenstein, bat…), but didn’t find any such costumes on the rack in his size. I did, however, find a rather cute green frog. Theo likes frogs. And green. I bought it.

So, while one might be able to relate the witch and the frog in a more narrative way, I’m not really working with a theme. And I don’t have any schemes for a costume for myself that would tie things together. So be it.

Instead, I will have to console myself by looking back at some of the fun costume themes I have put together in the past:

  • butterfly (Phoebe), caterpillar (Theo) and munched-looking plant (me) (2010)
  • firefighter (Phoebe), dalmatian (Theo) and fire (me) (2009)
  • bunny (Phoebe) and carrot (Theo) (2008)
  • squirrel (Phoebe) and tree (me) (2007)

carrot squirrel

Other Halloween costumes that I have worn as an adult have included:

  • a witch
  • a spider
  • Morticia Addams
  • a ghost
  • a mummy
  • half man/half woman

At some point, I’ll have to dig up descriptions and/or photos of some of these. (Well, I already wrote about the mummy.) For the record, none of these were pre-fab or packaged costumes, though I did buy and assemble occasional pre-made parts. I’m rather pleased that some of my descriptions of past costume creations have been of use to others out there. I even once heard from someone who modelled her daughter’s squirrel costume after the one I made, and she and her husband were trees following my tree costume.²

I’m going to declare this post to be among the posts on Things I Like: I like costumes. This is only number 4 of the proposed 40 posts on things I like. I’ve realized that my slowness is in part due to my wanting to give each of the Things I Like its due attention, and in part to my having trouble deciding how to sort out the things I like into individual posts. (There is often overlap. I mean, I like costumes, and Halloween, and Halloween costumes, and themes, and themed Halloween costumes.) There is also this desire to have them presented in some sort of logical order. I need to get over that. (Screw logic!)

—

¹ The goth in me shares space with the hippy in me, the uptight schoolmarm, the curious 12-year-old, and a variety of other characters, including a short balding guy named Ned who won’t share his Cheetos with any of the others.

² If a tree costume falls in the closet, and nobody hears it, do you still have to pick it up? ³

³ No. But you may later need to rake.

capitalist dictators

As November approaches, I find myself hankering to join in on that mad month of collective daily blog posting known as NaBloPoMo. I’ve been crazy busy with work and life, but having now participated for 4 years running, I still want to give it a go. The NaBloPoMo headquarters have been relocated from their previous home at Ning to BlogHer. I went to the page where I needed to go to list my blog for the November blogroll, and stopped short.

I found myself very irritated, perhaps unreasonably so, by the instructions “Please enter your blog name, capitalizing the words as you would any title.” The trouble is, I do not capitalize my blog title. My blog title is collecting tokens, not Collecting Tokens. I don’t really mind when people capitalize it, when, say, mentioning me in a post, or listing me on a blogroll. But I do mind being told that I should capitalize it when I list it somewhere.

Putting the title in lower case was a deliberate stylistic choice I made when I started my blog nearly 5 years ago. I can’t exactly say why, but given my Propensity for using Capitalization in a Tongue-in-Cheek way to signal Pomposity and Officiousness (c.f. The Ministry of Silly Blogs, which is decidedly Capitalized), I suspect that I wasn’t feeling all that Serious. This blog, my main blog, is an informal place for me to unload my thoughts, memories, creative outbursts, and so on. The lower case perhaps reflects the lower bar; this site is a work in progress. (For that matter, I also decided on the blogging name of alejna, which, while it bears a striking similarity to my legal first name, is not the same. The stylistic difference is meaningful to me.)

So, I was about to sign up for NaBloPoMo, but I have hesitated. I mean, I hate to look like I can’t follow directions. I am predisposed to Following Directions when dealing with Bureaucracy. But to capitalize my blog name feels just Wrong™.

Here’s the thing: blogging is a new medium. (Well, it may seem old in today’s whirlwind of social media, but it hasn’t been around all that many years.) It is a form of self-publishing that has been revolutionary. Individuals have the power to put their written words out there to reach potentially large audiences without the constraints dictated by traditional printed media. Yes, this does lead to a wide range of writing and grammar skills sharing space on the web. Sure, there may be plenty of downright errors. Spelling errors, word misuse, typos, and all that jazz. Yes, some people could clearly benefit from an editor. But this medium also encourages stylistic liberties. We can choose to boldly split infinitives. Use sentence fragments. Or we can decide to begin sentences with conjunctions. And dammit, we can choose how to capitalize our own freakin’ blog titles.

Looking through my blogroll, I see that I am not alone in my capitalizing choices. Many bloggers have even chosen to further eschew capitalization norms, such as the writers of baggage carousel 4, crib chronicles, Wrekehavoc.com. These three women are well-educated (highly educated, even), intelligent, and fantastic writers. They certainly know how to capitalize according to the style guides. (And my guess is that there are contexts in which they choose to go along with the capitalization norms.) They choose to write without capitalizing their sentence-initial words or first person singular subject pronouns.

Dictating how bloggers should present their blog titles is stylistic prescriptivism that I don’t feel should be part of blogging. If you publish a scholarly journal, by all means tell people how to capitalize and punctuate their section headers. Tell them, if you feel so strongly about it, what font to use and when, exactly, to italicize. But if you are a blogging hub and listing the blogs of many across the diverse blogosphere, respect the stylistic fluidity of the medium. (And dudes, with a name like NaBloPoMo, making an issue out of archaic style guidelines just makes you look Silly™.)

What about you? How do you feel about capitalization? If you have a blog, do you, too, feel that your choice of capitalization is integral to the blog name?

p.s. Having gotten this rant out of my system, I went ahead and just filled out the form. But I used lower case. Because I am a Rebel like that.

making excuses

For the first time in my life, I am finding myself in the position of needing to write a bona fide excuse note for someone else. Phoebe has had a fever the last couple of days, and we kept her home today.¹ Now that she’s in kindergarten, we have to go along with The System. I must play the role of the Responsible Adult.

Anyhow, I need to write an excuse note. And I have this urge to…make something up.

  • Dear Ms. X,

    Please excuse Phoebe’s absence from school yesterday. She came down with a mild case of leprosy, slight hydrophobia and severe anthracnose. She’s all better now, though.

    Sincerely,
    Phoebe’s mother

  • Dear Ms. X,

    Please excuse Phoebe’s absence from school yesterday. We had misunderstood the upcoming “Fall back” time change, and set our clocks back 3 months. We thought it was late summer and spent the day at the beach. Please accept this envelope full of sand in lieu of any schoolwork that Phoebe may have missed.

    Sincerely,
    The woman on the couch

  • Dear Ms. X,

    Please excuse Phoebe’s absence from school yesterday. She was abducted by a roving band of barracuda rabbits, who forced her to peel carrots and sing “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” all day. She was returned safely upon our payment of a ransom of 12 sock monkeys and a bag of potato chips.

    Sincerely,
    Phoebe’s mother, who is clearly not insane

  • Dear Ms. X,

    Please excuse Phoebe’s absence from school yesterday. She was sick in bed with a hangnail.

    Dispasssionately yours,
    Phoebe’s mother

  • Dear Ms. X,

    Phoebe wasn’t at school. I’m tired of making excuses.

    A

    • As for me, I have my own set of excuses for why I haven’t posted here in over a week. I’ve been busy with, believe it or not, work. My own research, even. Also, I have a hangnail.

    —
    ¹ Well, not actually home for all of the day, but out of school. The school rules ask that you not send your child to school with a fever, but they don’t specify where you should put her. She ended up spending some of the day at John’s office.

    Hong Kong trip recap: days 3 and 4

    My third full day in Hong Kong was the first day of the conference. The conference is a very high-quality international meeting with hundreds of phoneticians presenting their cutting edge research. The program looked fantastic. However, I found myself resenting the conference for keeping me from exploring more of Hong Kong. (Not very fair to the conference, given that it’s what got me over to Hong Kong in the first place.) I got over my grudge and plunged in. I started to enjoy myself, attending talks and poster sessions and catching up with people I typically only get to see at conferences. By the afternoon, though, the tiredness kicked in big time. Rather than falling asleep during the talks, I ended up skipping out of the conference for a couple of hours to go back to the hotel for a nap.

    The fourth day was better, and I managed to attend sessions without risk of falling asleep. It was also the day of our group’s presentation, and then a follow-up dinner with some of the other participants of the special session we were in.

    Day 3: Wednesday, August 17

    • headed to conference at the HKCEC
    • sat in talks, attended poster sessions
    • got really tired by afternoon
    • went back to hotel for a nap
    • returned to conference for reception
    • had dinner with a group of linguists in a Vietnamese restaurant near my hotel

    Day 4: Thursday, August 18

    • more conference
    • late for my own group’s talk (but happily wasn’t the one presenting)
    • attended organizational meeting for a professional society
    • saw that the conference venue had windows!
    • had dinner with special session organizers and speakers at a Cantonese restaurant in the HKCEC


    There was apparently a visiting VIP at the HKCEC (the convention center) or nearby. There were swarms of police officers.


    The cluster of police officers from the previous photo were standing near this set-up. I interpreted the scene as some sort of protest or demonstration, but I am only guessing. Can anyone read the signs?


    Since I was pretty tied up with the conference, I didn’t get out and about much these days. But the walk between the hotel and the conference venue was pretty long (~20 minutes), and there were still many interesting sights to be seen. This was when I was returning to the conference after my afternoon nap on Wednesday. I was quite taken by the patterns made by reflected light on the building in the center of the photo.


    This fire station was across from the conference venue.


    Look! Here I am again. I ended up wearing my hair in a braid most days on my trip, which I don’t do at home. (Usually I wear a ponytail.) I was inspired both by the comfort of keeping my hair of my neck in the heat and humidity, and by the extra time I had to get myself ready in the morning since I had only myself to get ready.


    A typical Hong Kong scene: colorful buildings, bamboo scaffolding, and laundry hanging out.


    Another view from a pedestrian overpass heading to the conference. It seems like a very large percentage of the vehicles on the road were either cabs (all red in this part of Hong Kong) or buses.


    The view of Hong Kong harbour from the conference venue was stunning. (No wonder they kept the drapes closed during the day; people would have just stared out the windows slack-jawed instead of attending to the talks.)

    I’ve got a few more photos from these 2 days up on my Flickr site.

    Next up: 2 days when I really got out and about.