entries in the attic

(to plagiarize a title from one of my well-beloved pop stars) Hey! I could plagiariz..., I mean retool Alissa's movie quotes contest with album titles. So retro! Well, we'll all just have to wait and see whether I follow through. It might generate some more comments, though.

AAANyway, I've been sitting on a few musings, but haven't had the time or impetus to get them into cyberprint. And nothing much new is happening right now. The baby of the last entry hasn't arrived yet. My subconscious told me that it wouldn't that night, by sending me a dream about white water lilies that were not yet opened...in a pool...at this mama's house. There's no worries, BTW, she's not yet beyond her date. But she wants this baby born on a weekend, and may just have the stuff to make it happen.

What else? The girl's history class made a Guy Fawkes dummy from her old clothes stuffed with some ornamental grass that I didn't trim last fall and we inuagurated the 'savant's Three King's Day present fire pit. (convoluted and grammatically wrong? too bad, I'm not in the mood to edit today.) But back to the fire. The lesson called for the kids to memorize a poem to chant whilst they burned the dummy. They sounded a little too Children of the Corn-ish for me, but I was already cogitating on the conspiracy theory angle of how creepy it was to promote this holiday anyhow. But the kids loved it. And we ate a gingerbread type cake called 'parkin' that is a traditional dish served for the holiday, so it was quite the event. I got it on the new DVD camera, but haven't the faintest idea how to get on the blog. Maybe if you deluge the 'savant with comments, it'll motivate him to teach me in all our spare moments together.

The 'savant had jokingly suggested that I show the class V for Vendetta, but he did save me from making a serious faux pas. (I had intended on stringing the dummy up in our back yard tree, but he insightfully reminded me that lynching has a cultural connotation here that it wouldn't have in Britain, and the kids didn't need to see that, much less the neighbors or passersby. It was creepy enough burning in the firepit with the kids chanting: "Remember, remember, the 5th of November/ the gunpowder treason and plot/ I see no reason why gunpowder treason/ should ever be forgot..."

Oh? the entry from the attic? I GOT AN IPOD!!!...for my birthday...last August. Being the partner of a techie, one might think that I would have had one a long time ago. But, being such a Luddite, of course I didn't think I needed one, although I had made murmurings about how I wanted to download songs that I wanted to listen to. The 'savant, of course, was less than impressed with Mac technology, even though he caved and got me this handy Macbook that I am typing upon right now (so he wouldn't have to keep running patches for the kids' educational software,) and all the while made mutterings about proprietary software and inferior technology. So, I was a bit surprised when the ipod showed up on my doorstep. Upon later reflection, I am guessing he chose the brand because even tech-retarded me could learn to use it.

And I have...more or less. I had to google "how to shut off ipod today" and I haven't read the manual, but I have imported all my CDs and installed them on it. It took until Christmas for that to happen, and it was probably inspired by the fact that his Christmas present was an mp3 player he chose from Office Max. (I'm not sure he trusted me to pick it out myself, so he even paid for it.) But Christmas Day afternoon, and much of the following days, I spent importing and loading the Ipod while he did the same on his laptop and mp3 player. (Of course, this didn't just happen---he had to show me, with a heroic show of patience and a noble restraint from uttering vile words.) That was the best Christmas present of all.

About a week afterwards, one of the homeschool moms gave me a cassette device that one could hook the Ipod to, so the kids and I, (mostly) have had quite tuneful commutes. The boy is enchanted with R.E.M.'s It's The End of the World As We Know It... (no big surprise there) and the girl has shown some interest in the musical Oliver!, but seem much less impressed by the technology than I am. (Or maybe it's just my old fogey music. I fell off the popular music train about the time the girl was born.) I however, have enjoyed doing some cleaning with it, and I even wore it during my dental appointment today.

For all the build up of an 'attic entry', I am thinking this one remarkably pedestrian for most readers. Or do you just love the minutiae of my existence? :sick: