Trying to identify trees in our woods

I didn’t enjoy my walk outside today very much at first. It was too drab and too silent. I want the birds to come back, and the trees to leaf out, and the sun to come out. We’ve had a pretty mild winter this year, for around here, at least as far as snow goes. It’s gotten pretty cold sometimes, but we haven’t had that much snow. Instead of bemoaning that fact and wishing for heaps of snow, I’d just rather that the scant bit of snow we have would melt, and we’d go the whole way the other direction.

But once I had reached the top part of the woods, I felt more at home. I’ve been trying to figure out what types of trees are up there lately.  I know what kinds of trees we have in our woods in general, but I’ve been enjoying looking closer at the trees and trying to figure out specifically which type of tree they are.

All throughout the woods, and especially in the lower half of the woods, we have a lot of maples, mostly red maple. At the top part of the woods, it’s mostly beech trees, but there are maples mixed in just like there are some beeches mixed in lower down. There are also some oaks, some quaking aspen (mostly lower down in the woods) and bigtooth aspen (only high up in the woods), and I think there are a few ash trees. There are evergreen trees sprinkled throughout the woods–mostly white pine lower down and eastern hemlock higher up. And there are also a few trees that look like they may be something different.

I love looking at the oaks. They are the biggest and thickest trees up there, and the tallest. Our woods in general has very young trees in it, so it’s not like the woods is full of huge and thick trees. But compared to the other trees up there, the oaks are thick and impressive.

I thought there were more oaks at the top of the woods than there really are, actually–when I looked around today, it seemed there really were only a few. But then again, the neighbors have done a lot of logging over there, and they probably cut down a lot of the oaks on their side.

The other day I was trying to confirm what type of oaks we had up there. I knew I had figured out before that it was mostly northern red oak (Quercus rubra), but I thought I had also thought earlier that there were, perhaps, a couple black oaks (Quercus velutina). I was never sure about that, and after looking up black oaks on the internet, I looked to see if I saw anything like that when I was in the woods today.

I didn’t. Although, it is hard to tell, since whenever I look up the difference between red oak and black oak one of the most reliable differences is: “the end buds are velvety and covered in white hair” for black oak, whereas the red oak end buds are hairless. But when they’re big, thick trees, and their nearest branches are way above your head, how are you going to look at their end buds?

There are other differences, too, such as slight differences in the leaves or the acorns. Also, black oak can have orange-ish inner bark. I think I had originally thought we had some black oaks because I thought I’d seen its leaves and acorns. The appearance of their bark is also different, which is what I was going by on a quick scan to see if we had any up there. Black oak’s bark is “dark and blocky” whereas red oak’s is more furrowed and described as having shiny stripes on the spaces between the furrows. It’s hard to describe, but I think I can see it on the red oaks up there, while I didn’t see anything that particularly looked like black oak.

It makes it hard to do identification because I can’t find any website that shows good, reliable close-up pictures of tree’s barks, saying “See, this is red oak bark, and this is black oak bark!”  (or the same for other trees). I know you shouldn’t go by bark alone when identifying trees, but it would really help as a starting place just to see photos of what different trees barks typically look like when they’re mature and immature. However, we do have a book (and wikipedia and other places will also tell you) which details the technical, reliable differences between trees–and though identification is based upon lots of different characteristics, a definite distinction between two similar tree types usually comes down to small, not easily accessible characteristics  like whether the twigs are hairy or not.

We also do have a book that shows in black-and-white photos the bark of trees and shrubs, which Mom always points me to. But I always find that book hard to use. It’s hard to find whatever specific trees I’m looking for at the time in it, and it seems like 90% of the book is shrubs, not trees. I don’t think it shows the difference between red oak and black oak bark, but I could always look again.

I was going to talk more about the types of trees we have in our woods (I didn’t plan to get stuck on talking about oaks) and the ones I wanted to identify, but I’m tired so I guess I’ll end this post for now. . .

The refreshing outdoors, and more on Caleb’s game mod

Today I got up late (even more late than usual) again. I don’t think I went to bed that late–well, it was late, but not late enough to merit getting up that late–but it took me awhile to fall asleep because I felt really bad.

Today I sent off a package to a friend. Dad said I must want to be a mail-lady, because I keep sending things to people.

Then I took a walk in the woods in the beautiful, wonderful sunshine, and after that I tried to work on a video-editing project. Right now it’s  just at the stage where I’m copying videos I might want to use off of DVD’s of video clips I’ve taken with my digital camera in previous years, onto the computer. I’m going to try to make a sort of compilation out of certain ones. One road bl0ck to doing what I want to is that most of the video clips are in the QuickTime .MOV format, which Windows Movie Maker–the only video-editing software I have–doesn’t let you use. But Lachlan showed me a downloadable video-converter that hopefully should work to convert them to a usable format.

I’ve been trying to take a walk in the woods every day. I hadn’t gone outside in weeks, except to get the mail or something, till just recently. I was really starting to feel the lack of sunshine, so I decided to make it a point to take a walk every day (or else do the exercise bike, since exercise is also something I could use).  So far, I’ve been doing well in this resolution. After all, what’s so terrible or hard about taking a walk every day? I used to go up in the woods all the time, and lately I’ve been avoiding it as if I’m allergic to it. Now that I’m making it a point to go up there again, I find that it feels really good to be out in the fresh air.

Really, really good. For some reason I hadn’t wanted to go outside before. I won’t try to analyze why, although it seems like some level of glumness/depression went into it. But now when I do, it feels like I’ve been in prison and suddenly came out into the world again. It’s hard to describe or explain what being in the outdoors can do to refresh you–not just in the sense of a de-stresser (which I’m sure it also is), because my life is not stressful right now. But to set your eyes on things of nature rather than the walls and confines of a house, to feel the sun on your face and see the blue sky, to have trees surrounding you or to see the view of the hills of the surrounding landscape around you from up on a hill–it’s very refreshing.

I don’t know what to do with myself during the day, and it’s hard to get myself to do anything, and sometimes it seems like it’s a blank page of inactivity. But when I’m outside, it feels like the blankness is okay; instead of being absorbed in my own mind, I can absorb what is surrounding me, so to speak. Usually my mind wanders.

Today I went up to the part of the hill which is past a certain crest–the way the hill is shaped, it slants upward gradually, until it reaches a part near the top where it starts rising more steeply, and if you keep going up the path you’ll be on a higher-up bulge of the hill. If you look backwards, many of the trees lower down in the woods aren’t visible anymore because they’re beyond the crest. So I went up to this point, but not all the way to the stone wall. I sat on a log fallen across the path, and stared back the way I had come at the trees standing near the pathway at the crest of the hill.

But somehow my eyes were drawn the most to some trees to the right of me.  There was a pine tree, and a tree with an interesting shape to its top branches. You can’t see it as well when there are leaves on it, but in the winter time it’s striking. It looks sort of like crooked roots reaching into the sky. The pine tree next to it somehow seems to make a counter-balance to it, or a contrast–it just somehow attracts the attention of your eye so that you find yourself staring off that direction, or I should say, I do. They are also on a part of the hill which is high enough up that the sun is often shining on them, and when you see light gleaming off of something, you naturally look that way.

There were other trees that had interesting shapes that I always characterized in my mind as funny roots grappling into the sky, but some of those trees were cut down when the neighbor’s on that side of the woods had people doing logging there. Technically the trees were on their property, even if I always looked at them and became familiar with them from our property.  Our footpath at the highest part of the hill runs along the edge of our property, so it’s very close to the neighbor’s property.

When I came down from the woods, I noticed again how nice the view is from the top of the fields. It really is pretty neat just that there is a hill rising up some distance away on the other side of our house/street. But the view is expanded even more from higher up. Then you can see more distant hills off toward the northwest (to the right, when you’re at the top of our fields looking down). But the “hills”, or one at least, are still attached to the main hill that is closer–with my eyes I can follow the outline on the horizon of the hill “bumping” downward, as I think of it, off toward the  distant hill in the northwest. Then faintly I can see an even farther hill behind that, I think, blue in the distance. (Yeah, even after seeing the sight many times I still say “I think.”) That’s why I said “hills” plural. One is a continuation of the hill we can see opposite our house, another is a more distant hill behind that.

—-

Caleb has made good progress on his Jazz Jackrabbit “map”. It impresses me a little how he can design it with ease, mostly because it’s not the sort of thing I’m inclined toward. It doesn’t look like it’s very hard to do, in the technical aspect of it, although you do have to figure out how to do it. But it’s just neat to me how he can design a whole “level” of a side-scroller game so easily–I’d be sitting there thinking, “Hmm . . . how should the landscape go . . . how should it go . . . I don’t know!!” whereas he doesn’t seem to think about it much, and it comes out looking good.

He showed me how it was coming along, and he had added a lot to it from yesterday. He even made a secret area to warp to inside of a hill. The level starts out with a plateau which “Jazz” runs along, and when he drops down from it there’s an open area below to the left to run to, as well as spaces to the right. The level continues on in more grassy inclines and plateaus. In one spot there’s a long drop downward (with ammunition all along the drop which Jazz collects as he drops), with little platforms in the air you can also jump to. There are bouncy-things on the ground Caleb put down which makes Jazz jump really high in the game (a frequently-occurring object in the actual game). You can bounce to the mid-air platforms from these springy pads.

There’s a space Caleb made that is filled up with sharp things, which Jazz will fall into and hurt himself unless you keep pressing the jump key, which makes Jazz use his helicopter-ears ability and hover across it at whizzing speed. (Again, the helicopter-ears thing is just part of the way the game-makers made the game.) The first time Caleb showed me the row of spikes, I thought there was no way he could get across without falling down onto them, because from my experience of playing games like that, your guy can never jump that far. But, unconcernedly he made Jazz “helicopter-ear” himself across.

Somewhere after that there’s a plateau which is covered with turtles (turtles are the enemies in that game) which you have to kill by either jumping on them or shooting them. Then the ground drops down to an area where Caleb put down some “boss” bad guys. One looked like the robot and the other like an extra-big turtle, which was probably Devan, the arch-enemy in the game. Last I knew Caleb was trying to figure out how to to get that part to work right, because the game kept ending before you killed one of the main boss bad guys.

And it’s funny, when I think of it, how he is quote-and-quote “obsessed” with Jazz Jackrabbit right now, because around the time when I first started this blog he was obsessed with a different game, One Must Fall. He made a custom tournament for it–making the pictures on the computer for the enemy fighters, using the pictures of the characters in the real game for a starting point–and making the stats for the robots and changing their colors. And he and Owen made up in their heads lots of imaginary robots for the game. They had names for all of them, and Caleb drew detailed pictures of each of the robots they had made up, and the stats of each of the robots. And he was always talking about OMF, and asking me if I remembered what each of the robots were in the game, and telling me about the ones he made up.

—–

I don’t mean to just talk about Caleb–it was the first thing on my mind to continue talking about (in regards to my siblings) since I had been talking about it yesterday.

Moaning about unproductivity and re-telling of profound discussions on Jazz Jackrabbit

Today I didn’t do much. It seems like my days are rather pathetic. I thought that I’d just try to do the same thing I did yesterday, when I made a mental list of some certain things I was going to do in a certain order. Yesterday it was, (after I got back from house-cleaning at Mrs. B’s)  “take a walk in the woods, clean and re-fill the humidifier, mop the floor, then make supper or do something till it’s time to make supper”. Ta-da! I did those things. I should try that more often, I thought. Make a mental list (somehow written lists never help) of things I’m going to do in a certain order, and hold myself to it, instead of just having all these things that I could do, but don’t feel like doing, so I never do anything.

Today, though, it didn’t work so well. To start with, I got up realllyyy late (maybe partly because of my cold, maybe partly because of laying awake last night with ideas for a funny birthday card), and I just couldn’t seem to get myself to do anything with the remaining hours before lunch. I started out by reading a funny Asterix and Obelix comic book with Caleb, and when I quit that I just laid on my bed with my mind wandering. This is an altogether too common occurrence for my mornings. As long as I was up in my room, I couldn’t seem to do anything but lay on my bed. Finally, I made a mental list of 1-2-3 things I was going to do in that order, and got up to do the first one, biking on the exercise bike.

But after that, phut! went the day, leaking out like air from a balloon. My great plan for what I was going to do did not stop me from getting distracted on the computer. Okay, then I cut that out, but after eating lunch–a soup that Mom made and everybody appreciated–and by then it was 2:00–before I could do the next things on the agenda, I had to take a shower, of course. And somehow there was always someone in the bathroom that I was waiting on. In the meantime, I looked up on Google maps a place I might be driving to. I “drove” through the parts that might give me trouble on Streetview. Oh, streetview, how I love you.

Anyway. After that and one of my famously long showers the afternoon was just about gone. However, it was time for the next thing on my agenda (actually, I decided I should just switch to doing number 3) . . . but all my “willpower” was gone. I just didn’t feel like I could do the thing I had been planning on doing. It was too much work, it was too daunting. Or something. So instead I got distracted doing something worthless again . . . kind of despising myself for eschewing work to do something “fun”, and I wasn’t really having “fun” anyway, but what could I do. I didn’t know what I should do.

———

Caleb came along around that time, and he wanted to finish his long discourse to me about a computer game, which he had started to talk to me about this morning, and I had told him to save for later. So he proceeded to continue to explain to me the storyline to the computer game Jazz Jackrabbit. During the morning he was telling me how he was making custom “maps” in Jazz Jackrabbit, and making it based off of something just like the Jazz Jackrabbit game has episodes based off of things, and he was going to explain to me what he meant. When Caleb explains things, he goes on and on for a long time and I have a hard time following him. He tells every last detail (remind you of anyone?) and he keeps going on from one thing to another in a constant stream, with no pauses for you to digest it in parts.

When he was explaining it in the morning, my mind was wandering and I wasn’t absorbing what he was saying. So the great explanation was put off till later. I thought that he mainly wanted to explain to me about his custom map, but as it turned out he just wanted to tell me all about the Jazz Jackrabbit storyline. He had started to compare what he was doing to what the original game makers did, and so before I could understand how what he was doing was similar to what they were doing, he had to explain what they did. That’s my understanding of the working of his mind.

So he got into the Jazz Jackrabbit website, showing me each of the episodes described on it. (Meanwhile, Owen kept calling at him to come back and dry dishes, so he had to keep going back to do that.) “And see,” he kept saying. “And see, in this one such-and-such happens . . . ” (and he’d go on and on.) I began to be a little surprised at his seeming thorough knowledge of it. I thought he had just started playing the game recently (although the boys did get the game a while ago). Pointing to one of the little screenshots of the game shown on the screen, he said, “And see, down there it says Diamondus.” (or maybe he said it was Diamondus, not it said it.)

“How did you know that’s what it said?” I asked. It was too small to be readable.

“Because,” (he switched back to the editing program where he was making a custom Jazz Jackrabbit map), “It also says it right here, see? And also . . . ” he gave some other reason I can’t remember.

The basic summaries he gave me of each of the episodes, I could follow. He pretty much said what they said on the website. But as he got talking about everything that happened in the game, it got pretty convoluted and I couldn’t follow it very well anymore. It involved a bad guy named Devan who is a dragon but turns back into a turtle when you defeat him (that much I understood), and Jazz Jackrabbit going back in time, forward again, back again, forward again and back again and MANY other little details in between and after.

Just now Caleb tells me that some of the things that I thought were part of the convoluted Jazz Jackrabbit storyline were actually parts of storyline he was making up for his custom game. (Although the back and forward in time thing is part of the real game.)

I marvelled at how he could tell it all in such a constant, un-hesitating stream, remembering exactly what happened in what order. This time Jazz went back to the “Medivo” (medieval) time, the next time he went back to the . . . (I don’t even remember), and then he had to go forward again because of such-and-such, and then you get to a place where there’s tons of turtles, etc., etc.

Anyway, when he was done talking about that he wanted to show me a problem he was having in working on his custom game. Again, I had a hard time understanding what he was saying, and I was impatient . . . I wish I wasn’t so impatient. Every time he starts to explain something, he says, “‘Cuz see, I’ll show you,” and goes back to test out the custom map and show it to me. But, not understanding the first thing he said, I don’t know what he’s showing me.

One of the things he said was that the “maps” that the game-makers did seemed to be “hard-coded”, because he couldn’t do it like they did. I wondered how he learned a word like hard-coded. (In the end, at the end of the day Lachlan showed him how to do what he was trying to do.) The way he talked about it mad it sound like he generally knew what he was doing and understood how it worked in a general way–understood enough to be trouble-shooting.

In the end, after a long time of being bored and impatient and not understanding what he was even getting at, I understood all at once what he was saying.  (It usually is something quite simple, but he always seems to talk about it in a way that makes it sound complicated.) Well, one of the things he was saying at least. He was trying to put down background in his scenario/map or whatever you call it. It was a background sky piece. But it never worked out right. As he showed me when he tested it, whenever Jazz jumped into the air it left a trail of images where he had jumped, when he jumped above the sky pieces.

So then why not put more sky background pieces down? “Because! It doesn’t match up that way, I already told you . . . here, I’ll show you . . . “

And he showed me again what he had already shown me: if he used the large chunks of sky pieces, they all matched up fine. But then when he tested out the game, the game acted like the sky pieces were objects, not background, and Jazz would not be able to go past them.

The thin strip of sky pieces, on the other hand, the game recognized as actual background. But if he only put down the thin background pieces, it made a sky background that didn’t seamlessly blend together–it was only a part of the sky-piece image,  so it didn’t match up right when he put down those pieces.

That’s the gist of it. I said, “Well, why don’t you put down the skinny ones where Jazz walks, and then put the bigger ones above it?”

“But they won’t connect together right . . . ” But they did match together. The only problem then was, as he pointed out, “See, Jazz can’t jump at all. Usually he can jump really high.”

“I don’t understand why . . . ” I started to say.

“I don’t understand either!” he exclaimed. We were finally on the same page; after all that not understanding what he was saying, I was finally not understanding the right thing.

“Well, that’s weird that it doesn’t let you do that. I don’t know why it doesn’t let you put down a background,” I said, and he agreed with me.

“And I’ve seen other custom maps with backgrounds,” he said. “And you know what I think I’d see if I looked at their map?”

“What?” I said.

“I bet theirs would just be hard-coded in too.”

When Lachlan came home from work, he showed Caleb how to do it. It turned out there was such a thing as different “layers”, and once Caleb understood that he got it to work, and was very happy.

Turns out there wasn’t some mysterious “hard-coding” preventing him from doing it after all!

(I’m being tongue-in-cheek–the supposed hard coding wasn’t something that would have “prevented” him from doing it, like a blocker. It just meant that it was part of the code of the game makers’ game design which they didn’t make available as an option for the custom mods, as I understood it. However, obviously they did make it possible to make background, only Caleb didn’t know how.)

Annnnnnyway . . .

There’s not much more to say about my day anyway, so I’ll end the post here.

Today, I’m tired.

I haven’t been posting lately . . . I haven’t posted in a long time. I really want to start writing regularly again (even though I sometimes despise my writing at the same time I “love” it . . . I ‘m so weird–thinking that what I have to say is so great, and on the other hand self-deprecating and thinking what I wrote is inane, or something) . . . but I need to start getting into better habits. Every evening after drying supper dishes I feel too tired to write, and I resist it with all of my lazy being. During the day I’m doing something else. Today, I actually have an excuse because I was house-cleaning or making supper/dessert all day long. So, I’ll try to write something tomorrow. Sayonara.

Tuesday, January 19th

I haven’t been writing lately because I’ve been too tired in the evenings. Evenings are when I write best (and I always feel like I have more to say then, at the end of the day) and during the day I’m usually doing other things. But then by the time the evening comes around, and I’m done drying supper dishes . . . it’s bedtime.

Anyway. Today I was house-cleaning for Mrs. B. There wasn’t much to do, because I had just come over on Friday to do touch-up cleaning before company came, besides coming over Tuesday of last week. Usually I/we do organizing, sorting and throwing stuff out, as well, but she didn’t feel like doing that today. Last time, I helped her organize her fabrics, but for the rest of the organizing-fabrics job she says we’ll wait on it till she finishes the quilt she’s working on.

So she said I could do the usual cleaning, except when doing the vacuuming (since the floors didn’t really need it) to look for cobwebs in areas I didn’t usually vacuum. So, although I have vacuumed cobwebs other times I happened to notice them, and vacuumed in the closets previously, today I went about it methodically and thoroughly. I made sure to go through every closet in every room, and get in every crack and cranny, vacuumed under beds and dressers, and vacuumed all the walls and ceilings in any place I thought they might need it.  I pulled out boxes and other stuff in the art room to vacuum behind them, because I knew last time we had tackled the art room I didn’t do that.

She isn’t persnickety about getting the house super-clean, or anything like that. It’s just the principle of it–I might as well find something to clean. Instead of vacuuming floors that didn’t really need it (although I vacuumed them too ) might as well vacuum up cobwebs. And might as well do the job thoroughly (I can’t help doing it thoroughly, because once I start I want to do it all). And if I just did the basic cleaning, I’d be done with it pretty fast, and I know she likes me staying there a little longer than that.

My arms got tired out from holding them up so much to vacuum along walls, and awkward places. I don’t mind, though. The vacuum cleaner she has is not a typical carpet vacuum cleaner (and she doesn’t have carpeting in most of her rooms–it’s wood floor I’m vacuuming mostly).  It’s a–I forget what you call them, maybe Shop-Vac? It’s has a large, circular/cylindrical base, and a tube coming out of that to which you can attach different heads, such as a brush head, crevice-cleaner head, or a broader head. This makes it so that I can move the “tube” around to vacuum wherever I want.

But it also means that instead of  being able to just push a vacuum cleaner around, I have to swish a tube with a relatively small surface area across the floor. Pulling/pushing/swishing that tube head across the floor, in a way such as to get it across the whole surface area of the floor as fast as I can, is how I get my exercise. I also have to be bent over while I do it, because the plastic sections with the different vacuum heads that attach onto the tube aren’t long enough for me to be able to do it in a standing position.

But I don’t meant to be complaining. As I said, I do a little work; I get exercise.

Normally I feel silly to get too caught up in cleaning all the little barely-visible things that no one would notice anyway in her house. Normally I might, for example, get started on vacuuming out the closet quite thoroughly, but stop short of vacuuming under the beds or pulling out a mirror to vacuum the back of the mirror, knowing that she doesn’t expect me to be doing any of those things. But today, since that was what I was supposed to be doing, I went after every area I could think of that could be hiding dust. It was satisfying, like hitting the jackpot, when I found places where there actually were visible “dust bunnies”, which quickly and satisfyingly disappeared under the sucking of my vacuum-tube. Because after awhile, I get tired of vacuuming up “invisible dust”.

Enough about cleaning. Poor Mrs. B is in the winter doldrums. I’m sure we all get them, but it must be worse when you’re all alone. Her Persephones quilt was starting to drive her crazy–the flowing skirt of the dress of Persephones was giving her trouble. She wound up taking off all that she had done on it and changing how it is going to look.

—-

There are some things I wanted to write down–as usual. Such as, Caleb needed to get something the other day. I asked him what.

“Alcohol,” he said.

“What do you need alcohol for?” I asked.

“A drink,” he said.

“What?!” I exclaimed.

“A drink,” he repeated.

“What do you mean, a drink?”

“You know. People drink alcohol all the time.”

LOL.

As he was  walking away, he said “I need the alcohol for cleaning out a [computer] mouse.” (He was actually fetching it for someone else who was cleaning a mouse, I believe.) And yes, he does know that rubbing alcohol is different from the alcohol that is in alcoholic beverages, and no, he doesn’t drink alcoholic beverages. He just likes getting reactions out of me. My youngest brother–and even he likes to get reactions out of me!

Owen, meanwhile, keeps telling me that he’s starting to get a mustache. He peers at his reflection in the mirror and says, “Hey, hey! I think I’m starting to get a mustache!”  Then he forgets that he has already mentioned it to me, and tells me again at various points throughout the day. He recognizes that it’s only a few hairs, but they look a little darker to him, and it’s starting. And once he gets a beard, he proclaims, he’ll braid it in two braids. “Because that’ll be so cool and great, yeah, yeah! I think, probably. Maybe.” (“I think, probably, maybe” is how he ends most of his statements.)

But I can’t see the slightest hint of a mustache. I profess to say I haven’t peered as closely as he has, but my older sister and I tell him he doesn’t have any more of a mustache than we do. Actually, my sister might have gone as far as to say she has more. (After all, everybody has at least a few, however barely visible, hairs above their lip.) When a third party was called in to judge between their respective mustaches, he was inconclusive. But that was a couple of weeks ago.

He’s also proud of getting heavier; his weight has been steadily going up as he steadily stretches out like a string bean. We discovered recently that he is a little taller than Justin now–a fact which Justin would have told you long before it was true, in the same vein of how any time a comparison or an opportunity for a comparison between them arises, he professes how much stronger than him Owen is, how Owen would snap him like a twig if he so much as moved his finger, how Owen is so muscle-y and strong while he is so pathetic and weak, etc. Of course all that doesn’t have any bearing on reality. (Justin has a much thicker build than Owen.) It’s just Justin teasing Owen because Owen always liked/likes the idea of being strong.

Sometimes I gotta feel sorry for Owen, such as the other day when–I don’t remember why–Justin was patting him very vigorously on the back, and then Evan came up and started patting him vigorously, too–in fact, so vigorously it more like hammering. I know I wouldn’t like that, but Owen doesn’t seem to mind too much. “Oh-oh-oh!” he cried out, as the blows rained upon him (I’m speaking tongue-in-cheek–Evan wasn’t really beating him up), but then he laughed. He always thinks Evan’s kind of funny and crazy when he does something like that.

There were more things I was going to mention, but I should go to bed now.

A fun visit

I’ve been remiss in posting! Just have felt too tired in the evenings, or too many other people occupying the computers. As well as some laziness.

[I started writing this post four days ago, so technically it should be dated Jan. 7th.)

Today I went with my older sister as she visited a friend of hers, who has young kids. Owen, Caleb and Deirdre came along to play with the kids, too, although said kids are all girls Deirdre’s age or younger. Nevertheless, these girls greatly enjoy playing with Owen and Caleb, as well as Deirdre. Their mom was saying that the second oldest girl, Annika, had been asking “Is that little boy going to come too?”, referring to Caleb. Of course, this “little boy” is 5 years older than her. I think she called him that to distinguish him from Owen and the other boys, who are taller and/or bigger. Although she has fun with Owen, too.

Anyway, I always feel a little dopey to come along to just play with the little kids, so I don’t always come. It isn’t even that I love playing little kid-ish games, like running around with horsey-heads and whacking each other with them, like they were doing toward the end of the visit, because I don’t. But I enjoy hanging out with them, and doing things like walking in the woods with them or sledding. When Titi suggested I could visit with my friend Debbie, her friend’s sister, that sounded like a great idea, and I decided to come along. (Debbie joined us at her sister’s house to visit.)

Titi’s friend Abby’s girls are all so very cute. More than “cute, oh how cute”, though, they’re fun. They all love their aunt Debbie. When we got there, Debbie was  holding Abby’s youngest girl, who is 1 going on 2, but still very small. She’s a very serene, calm little “baby”–not really a baby anymore, but she’s still small enough I always want to say that. She sat in Debbie’s lap, looking like she was perfectly at home there, and stared at me with her brown eyes. Not a fascinated or wary stare, but just a general curious, calm “taking-in-her-surroundings” sort of stare. I knew instinctively she wouldn’t let me hold her, but that was fine with me.

Later on in the day, I couldn’t resist trying to pick her up, but she’d always wriggle hard and make impatient noises to be put down. Then she’d toddle off toward Debbie again, and crawl into her lap–or pat her leg when Debbie was drinking her hot chocolate, which was her signal for “Give me some of that!” She <em>loved</em> the hot chocolate, and every time time Debbie had the mug moved somewhere that she couldn’t see, she’d keep pointing at and reaching at the spot in used to be. Any time Debbie set her down, she’d pat Debbie’s leg till she let her drink some more hot cocoa. Then she’d turn around, act like she was toddling away, but instead turn around and pat Debbie’s leg again and stare at her insistently for more.

While Debbie and I were talking in the living room at one point, she came toddling in and was opening and closing her mouth as she looked at us. It didn’t look like she was that interested in us, but was doing something in her own little world. “What are you doing, silly?” Debbie asked. It looked like she was whispering to herself. I wonder if she was imitating all the people talking in the other room.

Anyway, the kids all started playing a board game, The Amazing Labrynth, together soon after we got there. After Debbie and I had been talking for a little while in another room, we came to where they all were. Deirdre and Millie, who is Deirdre’s age, played singly while Owen and Caleb each teamed up with one of the younger girls. Caleb was helping the three-year old, who was actually a little more interested in her pretty pink purse than in the game.

Debbie noticed that Annika (the five-year old) was wearing a necklace. “Oh, you’re wearing a necklace, Annika.”

“Thanks,” she said.

“Very feminine,” Debbie complimented her, and said to me, “It’s just like her, with all of her pirates and everything.” Only then did it dawn on me the meaning of her “very feminine” comment. I looked closely at Annika’s necklace, and it was a necklace with a little plastic disembodied hand at the end. That was funny.

Owen was helping Annika in the game, and she was happy. “Caleb, I think we’re gonna win ’cause we only have two more cards left,” she said.  (In that game you are supposed to find the treasures on your cards on the board, by pushing pieces around till there is a clear passageway for your gamepiece to get to it.) “I <em>know</em> you’re going to win,” Caleb agreed, matter-of-factly. He didn’t “think” so; he “knew” so, because she and Owen were so far ahead of the rest of them.

Millie was self-assured and confident, pushing a row down until she suddenly changed her mind and pushed a different row. Deirdre looked more lost, so I took a look at her card to try to help her. It looked pretty difficult to get to her treasure (which was a moth–some treasure). I couldn’t figure out how to do it until, with all the haphazard pushing of the other girls, it seemed they replaced some of the pieces in the wrong spot, and suddenly it was easier to get to it. Deirdre could see how, then, too.

Meanwhile, Piper (the 1-year old) was getting interested in the game, too. In the beginning, she had wrapped her arms around Annika and tugged and tugged, with much grunting. Debbie and I thought she was trying to move Annika out of the way so that she could be in her spot. But it didn’t work, and she wound up having to go back to sitting in Debbie’s lap. She was happy sitting there for the most part, but every now and then she’d get up, walk forward and try to grab a piece. The inadvertent cure to this was me picking her up to keep her from messing up the game. She’d wiggle and wiggle to get out of my arms, and was happy to go back to Debbie.

Another thing that amused me was when Susannah, the three-year old, got hurt–no, not that she got hurt, but Piper’s reaction to it. Susannah had been hiding under the table and peeking out at Debbie, or something like that. She bonked her head on the table, was crying, and wound up being comforted in Debbie’s arms along with Piper. Piper was peering into her face, putting her face up close to Susannah’s. Then she stuck her finger in Susannah’s mouth. Susannah thought that was funny, and stopped crying. “Eat my finger. Eat my finger, Piper!” she said, and Piper obliged. Then Piper, liking the stick-a-finger-in-someone’s-mouth game, stuck her finger in Debbie’s mouth, and started to stick it in mine–but quickly changed her mind, as if she suddenly realized that mouth was attached to a stranger.

Back to the board game–the game wound up dissolving into chaos, as Millie and Annika started being mischievous. Annika was just mixing up the order that her two remaining cards came in. She kept asking Owen, “Which one comes first again?” (Technically, in the game, you’re supposed to look at the cards one at a time and keep them in order, so she was asking him which one came first.) Her “innocent questions” became mischievous-ness as she purposely mixed them up and asked “Which one?” again. “Hey you–you’re doing that on purpose!” Owen said, in good humor, and clamped his hand over hers to keep her from continuing. She laughed and laughed.

Millie, meanwhile, was taking cards/a card and hiding it. Owen pounced on her, and threatened to tickle her if she didn’t tell him where it was.

“Are you going to tell me?” he asked.

“No!” she said, happily.

So he tickled her, and after much shrieking and giggling from her, he gave her a second chance. “Are you going to tell me now?”

“Yes!” She told him, but a little later she pounced on him, and stuck a card down his shirt. First she tried to tickle him, smugly and happily, but when that didn’t work (Owen wasn’t ticklish), she did the stick-the-card-down-his-shirt move.

So as you can see, the horsing around became more fun than the actual board game, so even though they were having great fun playing the board game a few minutes ago, they decided to quit it. The other kids didn’t seem to mind.

After this we were fed chocolate doughnuts and hot cocoa and corn chips by the gracious hostess. All the kids except for Piper were seated around the table. The girls were always laughing about one thing or another, especially Susannah, who in her own little world was laughing continuously at a phrase she was repeating. It reminded me of many years ago, when I’d come downstairs and all my younger brothers were around the table, eating snack, and laughing so hard there was a great din of hysterical laughter and voices squeaking something out before they dissolved into laughter again, and I couldn’t tell what they were laughing about.

Piper was in contrast to the other girls. While the other girls giggled and talked, Piper was silent–she’s so silent and serene you’d almost think she never cried or laughed, though I know that’s not true. You can tell there’s intelligence behind her eyes–she understands a lot–but she has a different personality than her sisters (though, of course, they’re all different). She was doing her silent, insistent communications to Debbie for hot chocolate at that time, which I talked about earlier. She wasn’t interested any time Debbie tried to give her some doughnut–it was like the doughnut was utter Nothing, and the hot chocolate was Everything, the way she gulped it down and wanted nothing else.

After that Millie suggested that we go outside, which the boys were game for. “We’ll go sledding!” she said. “But there’s only three sleds, but that’s okay, because we’ll just have two people in a sled like we did when we went sledding with Debbie.”

We weren’t sure if Susannah was going to be able to come, or if she’d have to take a nap, but we were sure that she’d be dying to if she caught wind of the fact that we were going to, so we waited to ask her mom.

I like watching and listening to Millie. She reminds me a little bit of Caleb and Deirdre–being kind of earnest and detailed in how she says things, like them, but with a certain self-assuredness and readiness to laugh that they don’t have as much; not quite as serious. Millie, dark-haired pony-tails on each side of her head, standing on a tall stool so that she was the same height as her mother, said “Mama, I was going to do something.”

“What were you going to do?” her mama asked.

“We were going to go sledding, outside, and just sit on the sleds two people like we did when we went sledding with Debbie, and we were going to go sledding with Susannah–or not. Because we didn’t know if she had to take a nap. And we didn’t want her to see us if she couldn’t go.”

After this speech, her mama gave her a kiss on the cheek and said they could all go sledding.

Debbie had to go home at that point, because she had work to do at home. Susannah and I went outside together to catch up to the other kids who had already gone out there.

I’m always a little surprised when a little kid outside of our family lets me hold their hand, or help them in any way. I always half-expect them to pull away–either because they can do it by themselves, they’re big enough, or because I’m not familiar enough to them. So it was nice, and appreciated by me, that Susannah let me hold her hand and walk with her.

While we walked across the snow-covered field, she talked to me. She still seems and sounds like such a little kid, but she can talk a lot better than last time I was around her.

“Did you know about my birthday?”

“Well, I know you have a birthday in February,” I replied.

“Do you know about it? Did my mama tell you?  But I can’t tell you, because it’s a secret.”

She repeated the same general thing about her birthday, and it being a secret, and I gathered that she was wondering about her presents, but, as she assured me, it was secret. She talked about other presents she had gotten, and how she liked princess things, and her pink “pohse” (purse).

“Does your purse have princesses on it, or is it just pink?” I asked.

“My pohse is just pink. But I do really like princesses.”

As we continued walking and saw and heard no sign of the other kids, I said “Are we going the right way? Or do you think it’s the other way?”, pointing to the left. Debbie had said Susannah would know the way.

“I think it’s the other way,” Susannah said. I continued following the tracks, straight ahead, and Susannah continued to talk to me, this time about monsters. She said something like (I can’t remember exactly):

“When we were out here before, when it was dark, and sledding, there was monsters. And I couldn’t see the monsters, and I didn’t know where they were. But this time there won’t be any monsters, because you’re here.”

Pretty soon I saw a kid in the distance. We came to a barbed-wire fence, squeezed under it, and there everyone was. The ground dropped off somewhat steeply there, but became a more gradual slope.

Owen was pulling Annika up the hill in a sled. Panting hard, he said that Millie was waiting at the bottom of the hill and needed to be pulled up too, so either I could do it or he could. I said that Millie is Deirdre’s age and she doesn’t need to be pulled up–none of them needed to be.

But, being a complete hypocrite, I wound up pulling them up too. Annika said “Aww” and seemed so disappointed. Of course that isn’t necessarily a good reason to change your mind, but I decided I didn’t mind pulling them up the hill. She had a huge grin on her face as I pulled her up.

One time when I sledded down with Annika and Susannah, the sled tipped when we were only halfway down, and Susannah fell out–face right into the snow–and the sled came to a sudden halt with Annika and I in it. Susannah was just laying there in the snow, and I asked her if she was alright. All of my younger siblings, when they were that age, hated getting snow sprayed in their faces. They were always afraid that was going to happen, and when it did, they usually wanted to stop sledding.

I thought Susannah was going to be crying. Instead, she started laughing. Annika joined in, and they both laughed, laughed, laughed, and I joined in. We tried to go the rest of the way down the hill, but there wasn’t enough of an incline to carry us all the rest of the way down.

Annika said that she wanted to go down with Owen the next time, because “he paddles with his arms and makes it go faster, and he lets me steer.” I said that I’d try to paddle the next time.

I liked seeing them going down–Owen “paddling”, snow flying into the air, Annika holding her mittened hands over her eyes, but grinning hugely, looking like she was having the time of her life.

Millie liked going down by herself, or with Owen or Caleb or one of her sisters.

All three of the girls were having a great time. But they were cautious about not going too far, and run into a second barbed-wire fence at the bottom of the hill, after which they told me the ground sloped steeply down. Annika looked up in alarm one time when Owen was sledding merrily down, heading toward it. She and Millie started shouting his name, trying to alert him.

But before the barbed-wire fence there’s a fairly long stretch of ground where it is leveled off considerably, so that you’d really have to keep pushing hard to get all the way to the barbed wire fence. Owen stopped before he got anywhere close to it.

I’m pretty sure after that one of the girls told me proudly that they and Owen had gone all the way to the fence, because it was actually pretty hard to do.

It was fun seeing how much they enjoyed the sledding. They said they were only allowed to do it when there were big kids with them. Susannah almost always wanted to go down by herself, and she had such a look of utter satisfaction and being pleased with herself as she hopped on and sailed down the hill. I held the sled for her and helped her get positioned with it, because the sled was ready to start going down when she only had one foot in it. Usually, she hopped in at the front of the sled, and pretty soon her sled would tip over. I kept trying to scooch her to the back, because the ride went smoother that way.

Whenever she spilled out of the sled, which was quite often the way she kept trying to ride, her head would pop up and she’d have on her cute three-year-old pleased with herself grin. “Want to keep going?” I’d ask her, and she’d say “Yeah”, and I’d give her a push.

Deirdre went back to the house pretty quickly, so I don’t remember what her reaction to it was. Caleb definitely had fun, but his feet got cold, so he decided to go in before too long, and not too long after the rest of us followed.

Susannah asked me one of the times as we were walking up, “Why did you come here?”

“To see Debbie,” I said. “And to play with you.”

“I know why you came,” she said.

“Why?”

“To play with us!” she declared, as if she had just thought it up. “And to see Debbie,” she added as an afterthought.

She also asked me, “Do you know what a rainbow is?”

Not sure what she meant by that question, I said, “I know what they look like. And I know that they’re caused by the sun shining on little droplets of water in the sky, and making the light break up into a lot of different colors.”

“I know that, too,” she said. Either she had been recently taught what caused a rainbow (I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case) and wanted to know if I knew, or she just meant “I know whatever you said, too, cause you just said it so now I know!”

As we walked back toward the house, I pulled Susannah in the sled and Owen pulled both Annika and Millie.  He refused any help from me, which was an affront to his ability, and said they must both stay in the sled and call him Captain Kangaroo. “Why?” they asked him, mystified.

Susannah urged me to go, “Faster! Faster!” then suddenly, “Now stop,” and the whole thing repeated, as if I were her horse, and I obeyed. I started pulling her in fast circles around Owen and the two girls he was pulling, too, which amused her.

Millie kept getting up out of her sled and running around a little bit. But by that point Owen was determined to pull both of them in the sled, so he told her to get back in, which she did whenever she felt like it. Annika was quite happy to be pulled by Owen. But one time when I had pulled Susannah up alongside them, she and Susannah sneakily switched spots.

“Hey! Hey, why you! Get back in there!” Owen cried, for they were ruining his plans to show that he was strong enough to pull Millie and Annika both. Annika and Susannah–and Millie–laughed delightedly.

Annika laughed even more as I started running, zipping along with her past everyone else, zig-zagging around anything in our way with speed. Her face instantly changed when we reached the driveway and the sled continued to speed down it. I thought she was afraid it wasn’t going to stop, so I stopped it. She told me, “Now the sled won’t work quite as good, ’cause it went onto the driveway.” I said I was sorry I had gone onto the driveway, but she didn’t seem to mind too much.

Once back inside, they all got started on a game where they rode horseys–sticks with stuffed fabric horse heads–around and chased each other, although it was more like chasing each other around and whacking each other with the horse heads. Annika whacked Owen with gusto, delighted to have him to play with. All the kids joined in, racing around the house, except for Susannah, who trailed along but wound up laying down on the floor because she was so tired.

There were two teams–the people who were supposed to hide and the people who were supposed to chase, and it kept changing who was on whose team. They drafted me to join in the game. Then they said I was on one team, and changed their mind and said I was on the other team, and kept changing it so that no one knew who was on what team. It was everyone against me and someone else, then everyone against Owen and Millie, then no–we wanted it to be like such-and-such!

But then someone got hurt with all that stampeding, and they played a little longer but then decided we had to stop so we wouldn’t wake up Susannah, who was drifting off on the couch. And it was time for us to go home, which disappointed them. Millie said about five times that she wished we wouldn’t go. “I wish you’d sleep over!” she said. I said, “We’ll have to come back sometime!”

“Tomorrow!” she cried. And Susannah went around giving everyone a kiss (I guess she got up from the nap), and was aggravated that Owen tried to evade the kiss, crying out in horror (because he’s a boy, and boys think kisses have cooties). “Bring down your face!” she ordered him, and eventually he did so, his face contorted in “pain”, and she got the satisfaction of giving him a kiss too. And all was right in the world.

Okay, I really gotta go to bed now…  I’ll try to get back to posting more regularly.

Monday, December 28th

Today I wasn’t feeling well. It didn’t start till around lunchtime, and then I wound up sleeping on and off the whole afternoon. My stomach hurt and I felt very tired. When I laid down and slept, the feeling subsided, but then when I’d wake up, thinking “Alright already! Let’s stop sleeping!” (the sleeping made me feel really weird–I always start thinking it’s night time when I sleep during the day, just like it starts feeling like daytime when I stay up really late)  it would come back. When I tried to even eat a plain cracker, it made me feel twice as bad. Thankfully, I started feeling better by supper time, and although at first I wasn’t sure if I was going to keep supper down, it wound up making me feel a lot better.

Yesterday I stayed up way too late. The reason was that I felt too tired to be doing something I needed to do, which was narrow down a selection of photos, because Mom had a special offer from Shuttefly for 50 free prints (which was about to expire). Mom picked out 25 and I picked out the other 25. I had my selections at 31, but I just didn’t seem to have the  brainpower to pick which ones to eliminate. (Being me, I had originally gathered over 300 photos in an album in Picasa, selecting large chunks of photos here and there that were possibilities. Then I just picked out about 25 that caught my eye–somehow, it went up to 31–out of those.) I had cropped the photos like they needed to be cropped, and I just needed to get rid of a few out of the folder . . . instead, I got distracted doing something else on the computer.

That was typing in people’s names and birthdays, and names of our ancestors and their birth and death dates. Facebook has a program where you can make a family tree. The application that this family tree thing is part of just recently was re-done; I don’t think it used to have a family tree option to it. It was easy, and mesmerizing, (and addicting) to start adding all my relatives and ancestors. (As far as I know, only your “Friends” can see your family tree, and even then only if they click on the application and go look at it.) It seemed like it was a pointless thing for me to be doing–we already have those dates and names recorded on paper. But it was fun to do. Especially to hover my cursor over the names of our ancestors and see it display when they born and died, and where.

I had to type in that info, of course . . . first I typed in just names, using some info from my mom’s side of the family that I had already typed into into one of my Google docs earlier. Then I got out a genealogy folder for my dad’s side of the family, and couldn’t resist typing in the names and the dates from that. The one thing that annoyed me was that even when you enter in their dates, it doesn’t show siblings in the order they were born.

Both of my parents have been interested in researching our ancestors, or family tree, or whatever is the right way to put it. (Somehow “ancestors” seems to imply the ancient group of peoples we were descended from, when really what I mean is tracing back our great- and great-great- and maybe even great-great-great–as far as they could–grandparents, and their children.) At some points Dad has done research on his side of the family, and written down the info that had been written in the family Bible, but it’s Mom who really persistently researched it–first Dad’s side of the family, then her own. She did research on Ancestry.com, using the library where she had free access to it. She found a lot of information from census records.

One of the neatest things was how she found more information about Dad’s great-great-grandfather (as far back as we’ve been able to go on that side–on Mom’s side of the family we have a lot more information). She found out the name of the church that they were married in in Ireland, found the church’s website, and e-mailed them. She got in touch with a clergyman of that church–I don’t know what his official title was, whether it was vicar or what–and in the vicarage building, he was able to find a book with the record of these ancestor’s marriage, and he e-mailed the information to Mom! It was neat that the info was still there, after all those years, in a book (he said the writing was hard to read in spots), and that Mom was actually able to get in touch with someone from another country, who was able and willing to look it up and tell her.

I had planned to write about Christmas, but not tonight. . . for now I should go to bed.

Tuesday, December 22nd

Today I did house-cleaning for Mrs. B–it was another one of the days where we did deep cleaning. First she was doing it alongside me, going through the stuff in the basement (basically everything needed to be thrown out), then I did it on my own. There was all kinds of stuff down there. We found a little stash of pouches with sunglasses in them. One of them that she pulled out to look at were sunglasses that fold up, to fit inside a very small little pouch. It made her laugh, because it was just the sort of thing her husband would have saved, and obviously he did.

There were a lot of cans of chemically-type stuff like jars of enamel coating, polyurethane coating, and many other strange things–even a jar which said on it “White Lead”. I noticed that it was unusually heavy before I read what it was. One of the jars, which said on it could be used for repairing sheet metal (that’s the only part I can remember of the description of what it was used for), was called “Tiger Stripes”. Mrs. B had told me to throw all this stuff out, but I started to have misgivings as I piled it all into a black garbage bag. Aren’t those sort of things supposed to be disposed of in a some special way? I probably just shouldn’t have worried about it, but when I saw the can of lead it gave me extra hesitation. Mrs. B. didn’t know what to do either, so she said to just put them in a box so that the garbage pick-up men could see what they are.

After that, I got to sweeping many parts of the basement, and picking stuff off the floor. Such as old, crumbled, mildewy cardboard lids. Believe it or not, I like picking up such things (I had gloves on) and throwing them out–because at least then I don’t have these scruples about whether or not it can be chucked in the garbage bag.  It DEFINITELY GOES IN. So nice and simple. As for sweeping, there was a layer of crumbled bits of the cement(?) wall mixed with dirt and other things, all over the place. I enjoyed sweeping it up and getting the basement looking more neat. The only inconvenient thing was that when I swept it, it went into the air like crazy. I just ignored it, but eventually I had to start walking away and sweeping in another part when it was in the air really bad, coming back once it had settled.

I was thinking of how when I sweep out the doormat in the kitchen, everyone who comes in says “Ugh! [they cover their nose] The dust is all going into the air!” while I hardly notice it. This was more than twice as bad as that, and starting to get to even me. Afterward, when I blew my nose (which was irritated, no-duh) nothing but dust came out, or so it seemed. It seemed like it made my drink taste funny too, but I ignored that too. Of course my shoes were full of it too, and I noticed afterward that my hair smelled like it. And what do you think I’m doing? Ignoring it. I should really go take a shower (although at this point I’ll just be butting into someone else’s shower-taking time probably).

After that I did the usual cleaning, which I am getting faster at. After that I brought out the garbage and recycling for her, and brought up some more stuff from the basement to set out at the curb–and suddenly noticed I was leaving muddy tracks all across the floor. Those muddy tracks, caused by dirt from the basement combining with snow I stepped on outside, made the floor more dirty than it was before I had vacuumed it. So, I cleaned it up. It randomly made me imagine a lonely old person with a clean house saying “Please, come over and muddy up my house!” Mrs. B didn’t say that–in fact she wasn’t home at that point–and neither has anyone else I know, but my mind jumped to that in thinking of how dirty-ness comes from life and living going on, and cleanness from the absence of that . . . and how when you’re younger, such things as dirty tracks in the house drive you crazy, but when you’re older you might rather someone making dirty tracks in your house, than to be all alone.

——–

There are several things Caleb and Deirdre have said or done recently that I wanted to tell, but since I didn’t write them down right away, I’ve forgotten.

Just tonight Caleb grinned hugely at me and said, “Hey Cadie, look!” He then proceeded to show me how he could open up the upstairs hallway door using his nose and head, and then close it behind him with his nose. I started laughing as I watched him, which made him laugh too, and I teased him, “A-ha! You’re laughing too hard now so you can’t do it!” He finished closing it, and I heard his voice from behind it saying, “See, I did!”

I told him, “I think I’ve done that before, too.” Now why would I have tried closing the door with my nose, you might ask? I’m not sure if it was my nose; it might have just been my foot. Sometimes I am surprised at some of the random things I have done or tried, or noticed. But usually not nearly to the point that the boys do. I think on second thought that doing it just with the nose is Caleb’s accomplishment alone.

I know one of the things I had meant to write down that Caleb said to me had to do with the acceleration of a car. He said to me something like, “Hey Cadie, if a car started going and then immediately started going twice as fast as it was going, and then just kept on doubling its speed constantly, how fast would it be going in ten minutes?” I was thinking that that sounded like an exponential-equation problem (which I don’t remember how to do, if I ever did). Of course, the way he phrased it it would be impossible to answer precisely, because he didn’t tell me what speed the car was going at the beginning/after its first doubling, or how fast the “immediate” doubling action was (it’s completely unrealistic for a car to be continuing to immediately double its speed, but supposing it did, I think I’d still need to know an exact figure for the “immediate”–1 second?)

What say you to his math problem? My brain is not math-oriented. I know it can’t be solved how he said it, but does it sound like something that could be solved with some figures in it? Actually, if you really do just double the figures and not treat it like an exponential equation problem, then if you say it starts out at 1 mph and continues to double for ten minutes–hmm, but we still need to know the rate at which it’s doubling, don’t we? I had better stop displaying my math-ignorance.

Another thing he said at one point was, “Hey Cadie, don’t you think it’s weird how when there’s two curved things that are the same size next to each other, one of them looks longer than the other?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

So he got out two pieces of toy railroad tracks, and showed them to me. “See? They look like the same size, right?”

“Yup.”

“And now look!–I put them side-by-side, and which one looks longer?”

I can’t remember which one looked longer, but one of them did, and I pointed to it.

“But now–we switch them around, and the other one looks longer!” he said.

“Oh, yeah, I think I’ve noticed that before, too,” I said.

Still–isn’t this a little backward? He’s showing me enlightening things, and not the other way around? And he says that I know everything?

I also thought it was funny that on the piece of paper on the fridge where we are supposed to write what foods we want to have for Christmas, he wrote the “Chex” with the trademark symbol beside it. He had written “Chex (“TM” written in tiny words inside a tiny circle) party mix or Chex (“TM”) Muddy Buddies.” I saw it several days ago, but I only suddenly found it funny tonight.

—-

The other day, Lachlan was enlightening the younger kids about certain basic cool things that everyone should know.

I was in the dining room, and I knew Lachlan and Titi were doing something in the kitchen, but didn’t know what they were doing. Whatever it was, I kept hearing “COOL! COOL!!” from Caleb and Deirdre, and Titi saying, “Pour a little more and see if it still works” -then- “Cool!” from the little kids again. I’d call back, “What? What? What are you guys doing?” and when no one would answer me, I finally went to watch for myself.

Lachlan had mixed together some baking soda and vinegar, and then poured it so that none of the liquid, but only the gas from it, went into an empty jar. Then he poured the seemingly “empty” jar onto the flame of a candle, and the candle would instantly go out, which in turn instantly elicited the “COOL!”’s from Caleb and Deirdre.

All the boys who were home were clustered around watching, except Owen, I realized–he was off somewhere doing homeschooling. He was called down to watch, with proclamations that “it’s even homeschooling!” He was didn’t realize what was happening at first, and seemed to think that they were just trying to trick him, and that a little bit of the liquid was actually getting poured into the empty bottle and putting out the candle.

Titi explained that the gas that the mixture created was heavier than air, so it could be poured (“All gases can be poured” Evan interjected) into the jar, and then the gas put out the candle. Owen didn’t seem to find it as cool as I thought he would, but maybe he just wasn’t in the mood that day.

Then Lachlan showed them the squirting-orange-peel-juices-into-a-candle trick. “You know this trick, don’t you?” he asked them. They didn’t.

There were plenty of orange peels around to use, as people had just eaten some oranges. He picked up a peel and bent it, making the juices squirt into the candle flame, which made it flare up.

More “Cool!”’s from Caleb and Deirdre.

They tried to do it, but couldn’t squeeze the peels quickly and hard enough. Pretty soon I was hearing impressed “Wow! That was a good one!” even from Evan, as Lachlan made the flame flare up particularly spectacularly, which I sometimes caught out of the corner of my eye.

—-

One of  the things Deirdre said that struck me as kind of funny and Deirdre-ish, was: “Whenever I sit still, my body just gives me an urge to run around, and whenever I run around, my body just gives me an urge to sit still!” That was while I was drawing her, during the session that I posted about.

And she found it harder than she thought, I think, to get up to an alarm at first. She thought that if the alarm just got set to 7:00, then she’d get up then. Instead, even when she finally woke up to the alarm (which took quite a while), she’d go back to sleep. (Not like I know anything about that . . . hum de dum . . . )  She told me, “I was going to just lay there and then get up a little while later. Instead, I fell right to sleep for an hour!” To Titi she said, “I try to get up, but my body just keeps going to sleep!” She’s doing better at getting up to it now.

She has always, ever since she was a toddler, spoke about her body as almost like something separate from herself, that makes her do things. I remember her telling me when she was a lot younger, “I try to close my eyes to go to sleep but my eyes just keep opening and opening! And I’m like, ‘Eyes, just close!’ but they keep opening!”, or saying the opposite about trying to get up.

Or, another thing she said a long time ago, (also talking in the context of night-time when she knows she should be sleeping), “Sometimes my mouth just keeps going flippety-flap and talking and talking, and I’m like ‘Argh! Stop talking!’ but it just keeps going flippety-flap!”

That made me laugh.

——-

And since I keep talking so much about Caleb and Deirdre and not saying a word about Owen, I’ll say a word about Owen. He used to (lately he hasn’t been doing it), every night, pat me on the head as he walked by and say, “Good-night, baby Gromit.”

“Baby Gromit”? – That’s a bit of Owen’s zaniness for you. But I don’t question such things.

Not so with Titi. He would call Titi the same thing, so she would ask what exactly is a Baby Gromit, and exclaim that he couldn’t call us both the same thing. She likes to challenge every random goofy thing he says, and then he starts laughing and saying “Um, um . . . ” as he tries to come up with an answer, or just saying something like “Because it’s true!” It always ends up with Titi chasing after him and trying to give him a hug, and him running away and trying to escape the horrifying cootie attack.

That’s all for tonight. . .

Wednesday, December 16th

Today I tried to finish a birthday card, which I had half-way made several years ago for a cousin Caleb’s age. I do actually make and finish birthday cards a lot of times (and send them, yes), but that one for some reason I never did. Now that the cousin’s birthday has come around again, I decided I’d finish it up and send it . . . although I didn’t realize it was his birthday till afterward, so it will be pretty late. (“And late”, I should add to my list of and’s up there.)

I had drawn a jungle scene, with vines all across it, and Birthday Boy swinging from one of the vines. As well as his sister swinging from another, and Caleb swinging from another. The front was pretty much done, but I had never finished the inside, where I had started to draw others of my younger siblings swinging on the vines, as well as Birthday Boy and his sister again. Since he was turning 7 or 8 when I first drew it, the size I drew him on the front is pretty outdated since he has grown so much taller. So I drew a more realistically-sized him swinging on a vine on the inside. No, I don’t have some inch-by-inch conversion chart of how I must draw people in comparison to their real size. But looking at the Birthday Boy I drew on the front of the card, it looks like a 5 or 6 year-old, whereas in reality he was turning 10 this year, so it just bugged me.

I’ll scan that it and post it when it’s done (I said I “tried” to finish it up there . . . I still didn’t.)

I spent a fair amount of time printing out little photos of the faces of the people I was making swinging from the vines in the pictures. They’re just tiny little heads on the card, but still, I wanted to make them look at least generally like the real people they were representing. And in order to do that, I usually have to have a photo reference. To get a face to resemble who it’s supposed to be, on such a small scale, requires a fine subtlety. I can try to draw it exactly like it looks in the photo, but since I’m drawing such a small face, often it doesn’t look like them when I do that. I have to just “base” it off the photo–make the nose look like that, make the head about this shape, etc. It’s kind of a combination of winging it and following a photo reference.

I can usually draw a little Deirdre-head without a photo reference, because she has the characteristic look of two braids, and wispy curly hair coming out, and if you add a face with a big grin to that it pretty much looks like her.

It always feels like a waste of time that I spend so much time to print out some reference photos, and then usually only one each is helpful to me. (And a waste of ink, but since I printed the heads out so small it wasn’t that much ink.) But I never know ahead of time which photo is going to be the helpful one.

Tuesday, December 15th

Last night I stayed up too late, and stayed awake even longer in bed. I was supposed to go house-cleaning at Mrs B.’s the next morning, and I set the alarm to when I meant to wake up, but apparently I turned off the alarm and went right back to sleep without noticing it. I didn’t at all remember the alarm going off and me turning it off. In fact, at one point I was awake, but still feeling so tired, and thinking “I really should get up–but I can just get up when the alarm goes off, which it hasn’t yet”. Then just in case, I sat up and checked the time and saw that it was long past when the alarm must have gone off. “Oh,” I said, which my older sister thought was amusing.

So anyway, I was late for house-cleaning, but she didn’t mind. (And it wasn’t that I normally go house-cleaning that early; it was just that I really slept in that late.) I’ve been going over every week if nothing comes up, and in these winter months she doesn’t have much company coming over, so as she said, she’s very laid back. As I walked over, I was imagining myself saying or doing something silly because I just woke up. The just-woke-up feeling was still in my head pretty strongly. When I first wake up, although I’m not as bad as some of the boys who can’t do anything when they first get up, my mind is definitely a little kooky.

When I got there, I apologized for being late, explained why I was, and she said it was alright, etc. Then I realized I was untying my shoes as I talked to her. I suddenly stopped and said, “Why am I untying my shoes?” That brought it to her attention, too, and she laughed and said I might as well get on my pajamas and go upstairs to bed. Every now and then I provide  comic relief for some people, which is good, even if it’s unintentional on my part.

I’m pretty sure the reason I starting untying my shoes was because at a friends’ house, I always take off my shoes when I come in. But I never have at Mrs. B’s before. It was just an example of the brain-neuron-misfirings that occur when I’ve just gotten up.

Of course, I sometimes do things like that when I haven’t just gotten up either (but not as often). . . I’ll deviate to tell a little story on myself.

We were working in some houses that had been ruined by flooding several years ago, with some friends of ours. “Jo” and I went down to the basement to fill up a bucket with water.  I was holding the bucket, and when I got to the spigot, I started turning the knob to fill up the bucket with water. The only thing was, there was already a hose attached to the spigot. As I looked, expecting to see water coming from the spigot into the bucket, I instead saw the hose and my head turned to follow the length of the hose.

“Jo”, standing beside me, burst out laughing. “That was really funny,” she said. “The way you looked at the hose like that. . . “

And I laughed too, just as hard. It’s hard to describe unless you were there and saw it, but, ah . . . it was funny. It was like my brain–I say “brain” instead of “me” because I was doing it automatically–was so expecting there to be water coming from the faucet, and so oblivious, that when it noticed the hose, I looked at it in bemusement and dawning enlightenment. Which was the expression “Jo” saw.

That’s one of the funny moments of working with “Jo” that I look back at fondly. (I enjoyed working alongside “C” as well, but at a lot of points she was working more with my older sister and I was working with “Jo”. It was different at different times, though, and the only reason I bring up working with “Jo” is because my mind is on it from telling the previous story.) There were other funny/fun times. Such as when she’d say, “Hey Cadie, can I see your crow bar?”

“Sure,” I’d say, and hand it to her.

Then the enlightenment would come to my poor slow brain, as I saw her using it, and here I was empty-handed, that she had meant, “I need to use the crow-bar.”

“Hey ‘Jo’ . . . can I see the crow bar?” I’d retort.

“Sure!” she’d say, laughing, and hand it back.

I should write more sometime about the flood clean-up work we did. But the way I started writing about it here doesn’t seem like a good lead-up to writing about the whole thing in general, so I’ll leave it for another day.

I was going to post the picture (fair scene) that I was talking about the other day, but this computer doesn’t have a good program for re-sizing, so I think I’ll add it later. I suppose I could post it without re-sizing it . . . not sure.