Monday with Kirby

It's Monday night, we've figure out who's sleeping where and how we'll get out quietly early tomorrow. Kirby will need to sleep several hours after we leave. He works tomorrow afternoon. Keith works Wednesday morning, so tomorrow we drive and drive. We're playing board games a while and then sleeping. Today we went here and there, errands, goofing around, and to the LBJ presidential library and museum. I really liked it. Some of the photos had particular people in mind. We couldn't use flash in the museum, so they're fuzzy. Holly was excited about phone booths. I was excited about seeing Kirby and Marty together.

Kirby in April

We have done it. We have visited one of our children where he lives, and it's not where we live.

Kirby's apartment is nice, and his roommate is great, and I can picture him now, when I'm home, and picture his neighborhood. This is good.

There's our Ford Taurus (blue) next to Kirby's Chevy Monte Carlo (white/silver). Photos like this are boring when they're new, but lots of fun thirty years later when the cars are quaint.




We were waiting on the porch for him to get out of the shower. The Hannah Montana poster is inside the pantry door. It has a long story, but not as long as it will have after Holly has some time at home with that photo, I bet.


We went to eat at Bill Miller's, a local place that quite honestly puts Blake's Lotaburger and Mac's Steak in the Rough to shame. It was a nice place to be, the food was good, and there's Holly sitting at another table with (on the phone) her boyfriend, helping answer our questions about what was going on back home, who it was he and Marty were helping move yesterday, and so forth.



Kirby told us that a bunch of the Albuquerque transplants had a meal there just after they came down from New Mexico, and the food was so good and inexpensive that they felt much better about their move. Good for Bill Miller.

I'm awake early and everyone else is asleep.

Holly this morning

Holly's very happy at what the humidity is doing to her hair. She's hair-obsessed. Bummer the video was pre-primp. There will be more photos, though. At the moment she's thinking she can decide where to move when she's older by where her hair looks best. She loved New Mexico until her hair got all fluffy on a rainy day in Texas.

While I was writing this, Holly was in the bathroom. I posted, and then said "Okay, you can go on MySpace and say how pretty your hair is."

She said, "Thanks. I don't have a picture yet. Actually I have about thirty pictures..." and she laughed. When she uploads them to photobucket, I'll lift some and bring them here. So this post will be ongoing.

Birds in Texas

What are these little birds? They were at a rest stop somewhere before Fredericksburg; I don't know exactly where we were. You can click for closeups.

Here is Keith, our heroic driver who got us here safely in thirteen hours.

Other photos of the day (not so many) are http://s26.photobucket.com/albums/c111/SandraDodd/Kirby/texasApril08/
  
Kirby called a bit ago, on his lunch break. He works until 11:00 tonight, and we'll see him tomorrow morning 11:00ish. We'll keep adding photos from time to time.

We're going to see Kirby!

...and here's the Friday Fill-In, with cheese:

Friday Fill-In


1. When I fell in love with Keith, I was married to Jimbo. That's embarrassing!


There we are, New Year's Eve 1977 or early 1978. Keith is the one looking at me like he thinks I'm wonderful. I wasn't yet looking at him then, but I did before long. We were kinda half in SCA costume, half not. I loved those Adidas, but they did not go with that dress.

Some of my readers weren't born yet. Keith and I have been together 30 years, married for 24, but it's still a shame I carry.

2.I like to open the windows when the flowers bloom and it heats up outside! ...because it won't be long before I have to keep them closed again because it's too hot outside; such is life in the desert.

3. Oh no! The internet connection is down, so I might as well do the laundry..

4. Wife Swap is the craziest tv show ever. Three different times I've been asked if our family wants to participate. We don't.

5a. Cheese and beans make a great meal!
5b. Cheese and apples make a great meal!
5c. Cheese and homemade bread make a great meal!
5d. Cheese and eggs make a great meal!
5e. Cheese and a baked potato make a great meal!
5f. Cheese and a hamburger wrapped around it make a GREAT meal!
5g. Cheese and gee, anything makes a great meal!


6. I don't want my life to depend on a garden.

7. And as for the weekend, tonight I'm looking forward to tomorrow, tomorrow my plans include sleeping all the way to Texas and Sunday, I want to HUG AND KISS KIRBY DODD!!!!

Keith and I are going to do something we've never done before. We're going to visit our own child in his own place that's not another room in our house. We're driving to Austin, with Holly, to be with Kirby for his two days off.

Photos will be uploaded to a folder in a couple of days, and thereafter maybe, so check if you want to.
http://s26.photobucket.com/albums/c111/SandraDodd/Kirby/texasApril08/

Things Holly taken with Holly's camera phone will be uploaded here first and then moved:
http://s26.photobucket.com/albums/c111/SandraDodd/ The photo of the woody station wagon was our test run. Nice for a phone-camera photo! I don't know whose car it is; we saw it passing by and I made a u-turn because I don't think Holly had ever seen a real, true "woody." The word itself has moved onward and not so upward. Oh wait... Oh never mind...

I would be asleep, except I told Marty I would make him some bread, and I burned it. The middle's still good, but it's not sliceable. So I'm making some more, but in the machine, and not loaves out in the oven. Marty worked two shifts today at the restaurant where he's bussing tables. He's liking that job. I'm glad. The only bad thing is it's keeping him from going with us to see Kirby, but he went last fall.

The Moon in the Trees

The photo is for its own sake.

The writing is in reference to a couple of discussions on lists this week. One involves teens and rebellion, vaguely punishments and parenting.

Before 6:00 a.m. this morning, when Keith had just left for work, I was gathering up trash and putting bird seed in feeders. I saw the moon and wanted to take this photo, but the camera wasn't in the drawer in Kirby's room (now a public gaming room, while he's in Texas) where we've decided is a good place for it. It wasn't in my office (second likeliest place).

I opened the door to Holly's room quietly and said "Where's the camera?"

"It's on my desk," she said in an informational and neutral way.

"Thanks."

I was quiet, she was quiet, and nobody was mad about anything.

Had this happened with me and anyone when I was younger (in my teens or 20's) I figure there would've been shame and defense and criticism and maybe insults and yelling. This, though, was just about a camera and not about people's doings or motives or worth.

The other discussion had to do with the physical-plant recommendations of unschoolers. The photo was taken from the deck that opens off the library, a two-car-garage-sized room not coincidentally above a two-car garage. There's what it looks like now with the sun up.

The building visible to the right is the room where Keith and I sleep. When the kids were younger, I didn't always sleep there all night. Holly was just turning six when we moved here and we slept in the same bed or same room a lot. When Keith was working in Minneapolis, the kids and I would puppy-dog it in one room or another sometimes.

As the boys got older they would stay up late, playing CCG and RPG games, in this room from which I saw the moon. They'd have the door closed. Keith was WAY, way down through the house and physically under a different roof, on a different foundation. That has made for a GREAT deal of peace in this family. It is possible for someone to sleep in peace and quiet while others are in the other end of the house not being quiet!

The moon was framed between two Arizona cypress trees, the big evergreens along the edge of our yard, and the branches of a just-now-leafing-out fruitless mulberry which was mostly dead when we moved here eleven years ago, and every year fills in more and more. I didn't get exactly the same angle, but at least you can see what you were looking at in the dark.

bread...umbrellas

bread, lilacs, post card from France and little umbrellas

unexpected beauty (and some flowers)

We expect flowers to be pretty, but the compost bucket surprised me pleasantly this morning. It was like an arrangement, accidentally. The light through the plastic was pretty, too.





And this one will be harder to see, so I've left clickable thumbnails with bigger images there. We have a couple of sets of Marbleworks, which feature spirally pieces for marbles to go down into, and hyperbolic funnels in which the marbles go around several times before dropping. The box has sat untouched all winter.



Of all the spider webs to find in such a place, there's a funnelweb.

It's on the right, near the box seam.

And flowers... I did expect the flowers to be pretty.