Kirby's birthday, part 1

Another batch of people are here. Some had to leave for Friday night obligations, work shifts, etc., so Kirby cut the smaller cake, which is carrot cake. The big one will be saved a bit. It's nearly his birth hour/moment. But he's involved in big conversations about games and costumes and things they've all done. There are people here who used to be over here once or twice a week (or more), and it's interesting to see them as grown men, not teenagers--more confident, better dressed, muscular. :-) Facial hair that's intentional rather than awkwardly accidental. Kirby has some very nice friends.

These are the photos from the set above that I like best:


Jeremy cutting; Kirby, Joey, Holly and Katie watching.


Mikey Hale cutting; same audience.


Holly, Katie, Mikey


Elijah, Holly (behind), Marty, and Bo, acting out some celebratory thought.


Elijah Trujillo, Kirby's four-months-older cousin, cutting water. Josh watching.


Keith, Elijah with beer, Kirby in front, Bo, Marty, Ashlee

New blog template, and what I'm doing

My blog hasn't opened well for a week or more, so I stripped it down gradually. Nothing helped. Following some random suggestions in discussions of blogs-gone-slow, I changed the template. I'm sorry not to have the "minima lefty stretch" I was used to, but it's no longer offered as a new option. This will do for a while, then.

Tomorrow is Kirby's 25th birthday. I've been a mom for a long time now.

Things I've been doing online lately are Just Add Light and Stir and information on several pages (still building) about the ALL Unschooling Symposium here in December 2011.

This afternoon, Brett Henry, Kirby, Keith and Marty Dodd at Dion's on Montgomery:

Sights, no sounds

Today Holly and I went on errands and I picked Kirby up from the airport. He's the out-of-focus guy in the black t-shirt. The bicycle is a descanso. Holly in the chiton is from yesterday.

Birthday report

I'm fifty-eight years old, as of yesterday. The "party" unfolded thusly:


Just before midnight Saturday, Holly and her boyfriend Will picked me up at the airport and took me to the Waffle House on Yale, where we sat and talked for a fairly long time and then took me home. I looked at e-mail enough to know there was an overwhelming amount of Birthday stuff, and so I went to sleep, 2:00 a.m., and slept until 8:30.




That's a photo of Will and Holly taken by Will's brother, Doug, when there was a forest fire in the Gila that was smoking up Albuquerque. Will has shorter hair now.

8:30 a.m., I turned on CBS Sunday morning, a favorite show I haven't seen since May, to watch what I thought was the last half hour of it. Happy Birthday to me! They've changed the broadcast time so now it starts at 8:00 and ends at 9:30! I got to watch it an hour's worth.



Got up and came to read birthday greetings. There were some very, very touching wonderful sweet things, and some plain ones from people I really liked seeing in my box, and both were wonderful. Keith brought me two actual-paper-in-the-mail cards I had received. Holly got up, and Will. She hadn't taken him home. So in discussing what was up for the day, I said nothing for me; just be. (Daniel Wooten, nice guy but not always a great speller, created the greatest phrase. He wrote "Happy be day." And now I want that to be IT, what birthdays are. I'm 48 and I still am being.)

I said to Holly that we maybe go and see Justin Timberlake pretend to have sex with the chick from "That 70's Show," and she seemed interested, so turns out Will was willing to go to the movies with us, too. "Check the High Ridge," Holly said. The High Ridge is close, and tends to have little old ladies at many of the showings. It's less expensive and less fancy than some other theatres. It has eight screens, but not the giant, theatre, new-carpet 24 screen extravaganza that young adults in Albuquerque usually opt for. We joked about that, but I was already looking, and the next showing was in eight minutes. They were willing to grab and go, and we made it, WITH popcorn and a soda to share, before the previews were done.
It was fun. I really liked it. And it was peaceful, and calming, and I really liked that. We took Will home on the way, came back, Holly said she was going to sleep, I read birthday greetings until I fell asleep, and that was most of my birthday. I woke up at 7:00 p.m., ate two hotdogs, and read e-mail and facebook until I FINALLY caught up, just before midnight. Posted to Just Add Light and Stir, and went to real bed.

There was more I didn't know about.

This morning when I was straightening up around the bed, I picked up the jeans I did NOT wear yesterday, to put them up somewhere, and they were oddly heavy. My phone was in the pocket. That means that my WHOLE BIRTHDAY (after 2:00 a.m.) I was without my phone, and didn't even notice. :-) Two months in the UK without the phone got me out of the habit. And there was a sweet message from Kirby in there. I get to see him Wednesday night.

And that was my birthday, and it was a good one, even though maybe the quietest one ever. Marty was at Rebecca Tynker's birthday. She's had the same birthday I have for her entire life. She might be half my age about now, but when I first knew we shared a birthday, I think she was six or so. :-)

All photos are lifted from other sites. I didn't take any pictures yesterday. The good photos I found of Rebecca were rudely copyrighted and blocked, but she's pretty and you would have enjoyed seeing a photo of her. Sorry.

Albuquerque sights today

Spider warning.

Some photos are out and about, and others are in our yard. A sunflower grew in our compost pile. There's a trompe l'oeil bunch of cars (with interesting cars near it, today) right behind our house. An interesting spare tire cover on a jeep.

The theme seems to be yellow. :-)



I left the fuzzy spider image so you could more easily distinguish the shadow from the equally black spider, in the better photograph.


In the video below, when I said "him" I knew it was a female but just said "him" because it was big and dangerous. I had killed eight of them, and decided to let this one go so you could see it move (you who watch my blog). One I killed was a small male. One was nearly as big as this one (and is in the photos above, but didn't get away). The others were smaller females.



Mostly I was out stepping on and swatting the big black water beetles (cockroaches, they call them, but they're not the little brown cockroaches that live in houses sometimes). Lost count of those. Fifty or seventy. Each one will fail to reproduce from tonight on.

No one in my family does these late-night raids on obnoxious fauna, so the population was up because I was away for two months.

The moon out back, the dawn in front

About 5:30 this morning, the moon from my back deck:

Half an hour or so later, in the front yard:

The importance to me today is that it's so familiar and dry and warm and so unlike the skies I saw in the places I've been since May—England, Scotland, France, Northern Ireland.

For others now, and more in the future, the cars might be the most interesting part. They'll get older and older as long as the video survives in a viewable format.

Some of Holly's friends

Last night I went with Holly to a show at The Gasworks. It would have been at the old Amped, but they closed before the month was up, so it was moved. The space is still being set up, but some of the sitting-around stuff was interesting, too.





Will on the left, David in the middle, and Holly.











The rest of my photos and two more videos from last night are here:

(The other video; sorry I left it out before:)