Category: Current Affairs

The universe is cruel.

July 29 update: the universe trying to make up with me.

We are back from our road trip through northern California. I left a pair of really cute pants from Anthropologie somewhere; when you spend the night at a different place every night, it’s hard to keep track of things. First night in Mt Shasta, then to Nevada City to see Lulu and Evan and the ever-loveable Logan and Christina. Then to my sister’s cabin for the 4th of July, fireworks on the lake. Two glorious nights at Lake Tahoe with my parents. Also saw Serge and Adrianna and Anya for the rafting trip that didn’t happen. Stefan got so sick the last night in Tahoe, “don’t cover me up, I think that’s what’s making me sick,” he said after throwing up for the 10th time. Poor thingie. We stayed in Mt Shasta on our way home.

It was really difficult to say goodbye, but I reminded my mom that I will call her tomorrow. Then my mom went home and promptly got Stefan’s flu. Peter’s work party was here yesterday, it was sooooo hot. Peter and both felt sick, I spent most of the party feeling very rude, but dozing on the bed.

Peter is off to buy wood to finish the deck, I have a dentist appointment and want to run by Sephora (again!) it’s that Cosmedicine tinted moisturizer!

Last night Camille had her third sleep over. She went to Paris’s house for the evening and then is going to Willowbrook for the day. When I was little I felt so taken care of when my mom would wrap up the money I might need, like a quarter and two dimes, and tie it in a hankercheif and pin it to my clothes. I thought of this as I wrote a check to Willowbrook and put a five dollar bill in a zip lock bag.

We came home from work and the last-day-of-school party, opened the door and one hundred flies went past me in a swarm. Huge flies, so big that you could see their feet. I got sick of smashing them, because they left such big, goopy spots and started vacuuming them. They were big and dumb and slow and when I vacuumed them up they went flook, flook, flook up the vacuum hose. It took me a few days to realize they were coming out the chimney. I was a little disapointed that the chimney sweep didn’t have a cockney accent, but they came with an even bigger vacuum and sucked up a dead animal from the chimney and the flies are gone.

But yesterday was even better!

On the way to pick up Camille, Ana and Stefan at Willowbrook, the car started smoking. Three hours we waited for a tow truck in a gas station in 103 degree heat. At least there were lots of snacks. Our car never breaks down! "Yes it does, remember when the clutch cable snapped?" said Stefan, age four.

What a pleasure to go into work at Hanna today, lovely air-conditioning, no flies, and my to-do list is much shorter than the one at home. I spilled tea on my new capri blue t-shirt, but Shelley, the women’s clothing designer let me go through the samples and get a new Banana Republic tee to wear since I had to wash my shirt in the sink.

As Dakota says, the best of days!

We have 5 weeks left in Portland. My parents are half-way through a two-week visit. A birthday party weekend for Stefan, Peter stocked up at Office Depot, barely got a dinner together for my parents, but we managed to make it nice, Peter bbq-ed. Yesterday Eric and Elisa threw a great party for probably 70 people, kids sword-fighting and the third-grade class parents and teachers raiding the liquor cabinet.

Wow, it was fun. And tomorrow is school, a week and half left; and I’ve decided tomorrow is Take Your Mother to Work day at Hanna. After dinner, when really they should have already been in bed, I walked the kids down the street, roses, and people out eating dinner in their yards, the green, green grass of home. Stefan discovered that his bike leaves skid marks if he stops fast.

I took a beeswax encaustic class from Linda Womack at Collage today. It was so fun.

Cleaning out the garage, I got on Camille’s bicycle to see if it’s rideable. You can ride it, but with the training wheels, which she says make the bike “tippy” it takes a whole street width to make a u-turn. “It’s harder with the training wheels,” we decided. But she is a modern kid who is only allowed to ride when and where we can see her, so she hasn’t put in as much time on a bike as any of us did when we were learning to ride. I haven’t been sure she would ever learn to ride a bike, she might be like my grandmother who won turn-of-the-century auto races, but never learned to ride a bike. Next thing I notice she is having our neighbor remove the training wheels and she and their daughter are goofing around on their bikes. Then Camille goes riding down the sidewalk without training wheels! I run and get the camera.

Stefan announces that his miniature bike “Cherry” is tippy, and he wants the training wheels off. “You have to pedal fast, that’s what makes you balance,” I tell him. He nods, staring straight ahead like an Olympian listening to his coach. I held onto the back of his teeny bike, he pedaled his four-year-old legs fast, and took off.

So it was a big day for me.

Today Peter, Camille and Stefan all had appointments with my cousin the dentist (one of Portland Monthly’s Best Dentists I might add. I don’t go to him because he’s my cousin, I go because he graduated #1 in his class, and he gives Peter all the happy pills he needs to get him to show up and get his teeth cleaned.) We camped out in the waiting room with trucks and homework and knitting and the crossword and books and the ipod and Martha Stewart; we made a day of it

After about oh, 16 hours, I needed to get the kids out while Peter was still in the dentist chair. I groaned when the receptionist suggested it, but the zoo is right next door practically. I’d been scheming on how I could drag them to a second-hand store. The kids knew I would say no, so I surprised them by saying yes to the zoo. Every dentist should be next to a zoo. It was like getting an epidural to go from the dentist’s waiting room to the sunny, leafy zoo in a matter of five minutes. Lemonades in hand, we walked around admiring the giraffes’ stride and spots, watching a chimpanzee lay on his back and chew leaves and seeing pretty birds hop around in the sunshine. It was a balm. I usually hate going to the zoo, but I want to go back tomorrow; don’t tell the kids.

Then we went to Uwajimaya. I was too distracted by Stefan, who would not stop asking for some thirty dollar Japanese fire engine book, to figure out which of the hundreds of craft books I wanted to buy. I will regret that. I should have just bought five of them without even looking. I loaded up on British Harcourt tea, Uwajimaya is the only place I know that carries it, besides a grocery store in Toulouse. I’ve squirrelled it away in the wine cellar to find later when we unpack, along with the champagne, costco-sized mega ketchups and cases of Two-Buck Chuck that I am hording. Every time I go to Trader Joe’s I buy an extra maple syrup. That’s the extent of my planning for this thingie called moving overseas.

We got travel orders. Portland > Washington DC > London > Niamey. Also many confusing emails about per diems and appointments and shipments and authorizations. I have too many details today–Oregon state taxes, reimbursement for medical expenses, getting the kitchen cabinets painted–to get worked up about things I can worry about later. Official travel orders make going to the dentist, the zoo, and Uwajimaya so poignant.

The zoo. The zoo was just what we needed.

I’m on the fifth day of missing Peter and Cast (CAmille and STefan.) I was suppose to be missing out on a week of Rainy-Camping-With-No-Bathrooms. Instead I am at home, working most of the days during a busy model casting for the holiday catalog, doing our taxes and missing Stay-in-a-House-on the Medocino-Coast-Drinking-Multiple-Bottles-Wine-From-Heush-Vineyards.

I’ve seen three movies in the last five days. This is triple the amount of movies I’ve seen in the last year. Putting kids to bed, enriching in terms of reading aloud the entire series of the Borrowers and most of Edward Eager’s canon (which includes Half Magic, but all of them are wonderful), really cuts into my movie-watching. I hadn’t been to an actual theater since last summer’s debacle when I took Camille to Charlie et la chocolaterie and lost Stefan on the streets of Toulouse for half an hour. So. Actual theater. I saw Inside Man.

Jodie Foster is in Inside Man, and she rules and rocks. We are the same age and you know how I look just like her. Except that I have dark hair, brown eyes and an extra 20 pounds. But other than that, wow, it’s uncanny. Also in the movie: Denzel Washington. ( I don’t look much like him. Boy, is he good looking though.) Spike Lee doesn’t seem to get women, they are two-dimensonal, but Jodie Foster can create her own third dimension regardless of the material given her, so see what a good director he is by making that choice? The movie was funny, a smart bank heist caper with a likable villain. A little violence that you can just close your eyes through. Enjoyable, but not as good as:

Monsieur Ibraham. (on DVD) Now this is a movie. Last night I saw Camille’s adorable sports teacher, married to her equally adorable third-grade teacher–honestly, they both look like they’ve just tumbled out of bed, in the most wholesome and charming way–and when I mentioned the film he said, “Oh yes! With the Arab that runs the store? And then they drive to Turkey? Magnifique!” All true. One of the best movies I’ve ever seen. Somehow, in the last scene the boy-now-grown-up running the grocery with great 1960’s music, it seemed to paint such a picture of how simple and good life can be.

How do you know your kids go to a school that is french? The PE teacher smokes.

So I have today and tomorrow before everyone heads home and it’s back to making a different breakfasts for everyone and tripping over brio trains. I miss hugging all of them.