Blog365: Day 29

Nothing noteworthy again today. Homework in the morning. Book fair in the afternoon. Spent the late afternoon realizing that my computer problems were stemming from a bum UPS, so I had to go out and buy a power strip to get me through until the replacement arrives. Then a band boosters meeting from 5:30 to 7:30. Just another day in paradise.

Why don't you go over and see Annabelle's blog? She has done a little housekeeping and has a spiffy new logo. Also, if you know any famous Thai people, she would be most appreciative.

It's vintage

You know that "fur" coat I'm wearing in the snowman picture I posted a couple days ago? I still have it. Here's a picture of Annabelle wearing it in second grade:

Just keep swimming, just keep swimming . . .

We are absolutely consumed by swimming these days. Two more weeks until Regionals!

Thursday night the kids had a meet here at Knox. Here is Annabelle's 50-yard freestyle:



and Mike's 100-yard breaststroke:



That kid to Mike's left (your right) is somewhat of a god in local swimming circles. At the beginning of the season, he and Mike didn't even swim in the same heats, let alone in side-by-side lanes. So it's really remarkable to see Mike giving him a run swim for his money!

Thursday night was Senior Night, where we honored our graduating swimmers. We had some flowers, and one of the moms made really nice shadow boxes for them:



I snapped a shot of Mike and Annabelle while they were hanging out waiting for their races:



I also got a picture of Annabelle with her friend Katie, who you might remember from the Case of Mistaken Identity:



Here's a picture I snagged from the breaststroke video:



Anybody but me see shades of Edvard Muench there?

Saturday we went up to Louisville for the Brown Bear Sprint at Shawnee High School. This was a fun, relaxed meet. Mike swam the 100-yard IM for the first time in competition:



And Annabelle participated in a most unusual relay:



It's called the corkscrew, and personally I would like to see it added to the lineup for the summer Olympics!

Redirect

I'm busy working on my video clips from the past 2 swim meets, but I don't really have anything ready to post. Please check back tomorrow. In the meantime, why don't you go check out Annabelle's post from yesterday and see her rather exciting news?

Blog365: Day 2

I had another chance to practice with my new camera at today's swim meet. I took some video of Annabelle's 50-yard freestyle:



(Hey, speaking of Annabelle, guess who else is participating in Blog365? Go over there right now and show Annabelle the love!)

I didn't get another chance to take pictures of her, so I practiced on other people's kids instead. Nothing to write home about. Out of 63 photos, I got 2 that were semi-decent or at least interesting. Here is "semi-decent," a somewhat blurry shot of some kid from Trinity (click to see it bigger):



And here is "interesting," one of our guys (again, clicking makes the photo grow):



Damn, I really wish that one had been centered, thus elevating it to semi-decent status!

Of course, they both get even more interesting if I solarize them. Check it out!

Too stupid for my camera?

Did I mention that Fred gave me a new camera for Christmas? It's a beauty, the Panasonic DMC-TZ3. I took it to today's swim meet in Bowling Green and faced the learning curve. After being a Sony girl for over 3 years, it's going to take me a while to get used to some things, but I think in the long run, it's going to be perfect. Today though was not so perfect.

I started off by using the video feature to record Annabelle's 50-yard freestyle. Somehow though, as soon as I started recording I also pushed to stop recording. Therefore, at the end of the race when I pushed again, thinking I was stopping it, I was actually starting it, just in time to capture 12 breathtaking seconds of footage of ceiling, feet, and empty pool as I wandered back to the bleachers.

For her next race, a freestyle relay, I decided to experiment with the burst mode and shoot some stills. I took this picture, which I was quite please with (I'm not down-sizing any of the images in this post, so feel free to click and see the full-size version):



I admired it on my way back to the stands, where I found Fred cheering wildly for some girl in the pool. Who, I inquired, was that? Oh, just Annabelle. Yes, I had taken pictures of the WRONG KID! Everybody around Fred got a good laugh out of that.

Fortunately I also took this picture, thinking it was Annabelle gearing up for her dive, and you can see her cheering and waiting her turn:



I tried video again for Mike's 100-yard breaststroke, because he likes to be able to critique his form afterwards. First, I almost did a repeat of what I did when I tried to tape Annabelle, so I had to start the recording again shortly after his dive. I was a little disappointed in how jerky the quality was:



A practice clip that I shot in the heat before came out fine, so I think it was just a combination of shaky hands and being too close to his lane.

What was NOT disappointing was his performance in the race. He was seeded last in his heat, but he finished fourth. At 1 minute, 17 seconds, and change, he had managed to shave a couple seconds off his time and was ecstatic when he came out of the water:



I shot more stills in burst mode for the freestyle relay that followed immediately. I didn't get anything as good as I got of NOT Annabelle, but here's his dive, which I pulled out of this original photo:



I also managed to get this semi-close up out of this original photo:



It's nice but not as cool as the one I got of NOT Annabelle. Still, swim pictures are really hard, and these are better than any others I've ever taken before, so that is progress. It's a little demoralizing for me to have trouble with something I'm used to being pretty good at. I'll keep working with my new toy though (and maybe even read the instruction book), and I hope to have progressively better pictures to share here soon.

Snowbound

Greetings from snowy Syracuse, NY! We arrived on Friday, and Maya was waiting anxiously for Annabelle:



Fred and I turned Annabelle over to Maya and her mom for safekeeping for the weekend, grabbed our luggage and rental car, and headed 3 hours south to Split Rock Resort in Lake Harmony, PA. We got checked into our "room," which was actually an apartment with a huge whirlpool tub and a gas fireplace, and Fred taught his classes at the conference. We went out for dinner and then started anxiously watching the Weather Channel. We had been lucky in dodging Friday's bad weather and getting everyone where they needed to be, but Sunday (today) was looking dicey.

Fred hated to cut out early on the conference, although he was done teaching on Friday and our only real official event on Saturday was the big dinner. Still, they were predicting a buttload of bad weather for Sunday morning, and I asked him what he would tell one of his captains to do. He had to admit that in that case his advice would be to get the hell out of Dodge, so that's exactly what we did.

We traded our gas fireplace and whirpool tub for a quite acceptable room at the Holiday Inn Express at the Syracuse airport and waited for the bad weather to hit. Sometime around midnight it did indeed hit, snowing all night and then turning into the dreaded "wintery mix" (doesn't that sound like a Chrismas breakfast cereal? "I would like a bowl of wintery mix, please").

Annabelle is continuing to have a fantastic time across town with Maya, and I have to wonder if they didn't pretty much wish this snowstorm into existence. The universe is not equal apparently to the whims of determined 12-year-old girls.

Meanwhile, I'm playing weather detective and trying to figure the likelihood of us getting out of here, through Detroit (ha ha ha ha!), and back to Kentucky tonight. I wouldn't mind being stranded for an extra day too terribly much, although this certainly doesn't get my indexing project done or my Christmas cards and the rest of my Christmas presents sent. I just want to know NOW, not after I have the pleasure of hanging out at the Syracuse airport for hours on end and then stressing about the possibility of getting our hotel room again. Is that too much to ask?!

Picture this

I'm so sorry. I promised a recipe, didn't I? I just couldn't get it together for today though. I sent in my indexing project late last night, and I spent today working on our Christmas card photo, going to the commissary, and going to Walmart (twice--as part of working on our photo). I need to finish shopping for Thanksgiving and get this filthy house clean before Fred's parents arrive on Wednesday, plus I've still got a few weeks of school left this semester, and I really should get cranking on that last paper.

As I've been editing our holiday photo, I've been thinking a lot about a book I'm reading called The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less by Barry Schwartz. Booklist says:

Who woulda thunk it? Here we are, in the early years of the twenty-first century, being driven bonkers by the staggering array of consumer goods from which we must choose. Choosing something as (seemingly) simple as shampoo can force us to wade through dozens, even hundreds, of brands. We are, the author suggests, overwhelmed by choice, and that's not such a good thing. Schwartz tells us that constantly being asked to make choices, even about the simplest things, forces us to "invest time, energy, and no small amount of self-doubt, and dread." There comes a point, he contends, at which choice becomes debilitating rather than liberating. Did I make the right choice? Can I ever make the right choice? It would be easy to write off this book as merely an extended riff on that well-worn phrase "too much of a good thing," but that would be a mistake. Despite a tendency toward highfalutin language ("the counterfactuals we construct can be tilted upward"), Schwartz has plenty of insightful things to say here about the perils of everyday life.

I'm in the middle of a section about 2 types of people: maximizers and satisficers. The quick and dirty is that maximizers agonize over making the best possible choice every time, while satisficers aim for the "good enough." Can you guess which group is happier overall with their choices? It's not the maximizers, and I'm afraid that's me, especially when it comes to my photos.

When I started planning this picture, I was determined to be a satisficer this time. This was not going to be a repeat of the time that I had a friend bury us to our necks on the North Shore of Oahu, stick Santa hats on our heads, and take our picture, only to not use the picture because it just wasn't as good as what I had in mind.



Instead, I wound up sewing a dress for Annabelle and a shirt for Mike, both out of the same Hawaiian print, and dragging them back up to the North Shore. I don't remember which of the photos on the 2 rolls of film that I shot made it as The Picture, but here is a representative sampling:







They look pretty happy considering they each cried at least once that day. Of course, they were probably scared of me. I vaguely recall throwing a hissy fit of my own and saying something about "If YOU don't care if your grandparents have a nice picture to look at on Christmas morning . . . " but it's all fuzzy after that. So I wasn't going to do that! I was gonna be a satisficer if it killed us all.

I started off so well. On the way home from Saturday's swim meet, I told the kids to shower and change into reasonably coordinating clothes when we got home so we could go take the picture and I could get an early start on the cards this year. I already had a location scouted out, just down the street at the credit union, in front of a pretty bush. We tossed a couple barstools in the van and took off for our photoshoot. Not even an hour later, we were back at home with some 50-odd photos to choose from.

And that is where I began the long, lonely slide from satisficer to maximizer. First I had to decide which picture (or pictures, because now some card formats allow for more than one shot) had the best chance of making the grade. I solicited opinions from some friends and family members who are privvy to a sneak preview and wound up even more confused than I had been, as there was no clear winner. Since then, I've spent quite a few hours performing light cosmetic surgery on images of my children, blurring backgrounds, messing with colors and lighting levels, consulting with my aunt the Photoshop goddess, etc., etc., etc. And then, because what you see on the monitor isn't necessarily what is going to come out of that nice, big printer at the store, I've made a total of 3 trips to Walmart (and I loathe going to Walmart!) to pick up trial prints.

I think I have finally narrowed it down to just a couple of pictures and expect to make the final decision any day now. Then I just have to choose the best card format from the bazillion-and-one formats that are available. My inner satisficer is quietly weeping in the darkest corner of my soul, but the maximizer in me is hoping to have these cards out by Easter.

Nothing to write about today

This has been an exhausting few days of blogging, what with all the video editing and such. Not to mention the time it takes to actually going to and doing all the things that I take the video of.

Anyway, I've got a project deadline staring me in the face, and Annabelle has called dibs on blogging about cool bassoonists, so really, what is there for me to say? Go see Annabelle and get your bassoon groove on.

Check back here tomorrow though. I have a recipe I've been meaning to share, and tomorrow might just be the day.

I love the smell of chlorine in the morning

At 8:00 this morning, I dropped the kids off at the high school to catch the bus down to Elizabethtown for the '07 Fall Preview swim meeet. I drove down later, stopping by Barnes and Noble for hot chocolate along the way, and arriving in time for the 10:30 start time. I found a spot on the crowded bleachers and sat there until well into the afternoon.

This was a huge meet, with 15 schools participating. Each event was 50 yards, with the top 30 in each returning in the afternoon to compete in 100-yard heats. Mike participated in breaststroke and freestyle, and Annabelle did freestyle.

In her heat, Annabelle was a little motorboat and came in first! She beat out another seventh grader, 2 eighth graders, a ninth grader, and an eleventh grader, finishing in 38.82 seconds:



Mike's time in the breaststroke (34 seconds) put him in eighteenth place and qualified him to swim in the 100 this afternoon. He was the only boy on our team to qualify for the 100's! He hung with the pack through most of the heat but just wasn't able to pull it out in the end. At 1:21.74, he finished last, but he's even more determined to work hard to improve his time through the rest of the season. You can see that he's got a nice, strong stroke:



Here's Mike at the end of the meet:



You wouldn't believe how exhausting watching swimming can be. I'm beat!

In the swim

Swim season started tonight, with a scrimmage against Meade County. Mike swam last season, but this was Annabelle's first meet. Both kids were really happy with how everything went. Turns out Annabelle is a little motorboat in the water, and I think she'll be able to make some great progress this season. Mike's happy because his times tonight beat his best times from last season. He's hoping to take his 100-yard breaststroke to state.

The best part of the evening for me was watching the kids support each other. After one of Mike's events, I saw them high-fiving down at the other end of the pool. Mike came up to our side of the pool when Annabelle was swimming her 50-yard freestyle and jumped up and down and hollered for her. I got kind of choked up between feeling so proud of her out there swimming her guts out and so touched to see her big brother cheering her on.

It's gonna be a great season!



Editing to add: Here is some video of Mike's 100-yard breaststroke. He's in lane 4 and the second guy out of the pool:

Sh! Do you hear that?

It's silence. Absolute 100% pure silence. Today is the first day of school, Fred is back at work, and I am home alone. I'm trying to remember the last time I was alone, and I honestly can't. It must have been sometime in May.

We got back from Alabama Sunday night, and the kids and I spent yesterday frantically getting ready for school. They are actually quite excited about getting back into the swing of things, which is good. Makes mornings that much easier!

I took first-day-of school photos this morning, and thought it would be fun to have a little "then" and "now" comparison. Here is Mike, setting off for the first day of high school:



And here he is on the first day of 5-year-old pre-kindergarten:



Here is Annabelle this morning, looking forward to the first day of sixth grade:



And here she is on the first day of kindergarten in Hawaii:



I have to draw your attention to Annabelle's rockin' new shoes. They are Josef Seibels, which tend to be very pricey (yet oh so incredibly comfortable) here in the States. We found them on sale in Germany for 20 euros (about $25, including tax). They are part of my ongoing campaign to save Fred millions of dollars by buying stuff on sale:



Now I just have to figure out what to do with my alone time. The possibilities seem endless! I could work on my photos or catch up on my email or clean the house (yuck, not likely) or go to lunch or take a nap. Hmmmm . . . a nap . . .

Was it Mungojerrie?

Heck, no, it was Rumpleteazer:



And there's nothing at all to be done about that!



Annabelle fairly danced her way across Ft. Knox tonight in her Rumpleteazer costume. For those of you who haven't seen the musical Cats (and there must be what? at least 15 of you), Rumpleteazer is the lady half of this mischevious duo:



Mike went out trick or treating with his friends. He wore his prize-winning costume from Friday afternoon and had to come home once to dump off a bag full of candy before heading back out for more.

While Annabelle and I made the rounds for her treats, Fred stayed home and handed out candy. He enjoyed torturing the trick or treaters by making them touch the animatronic rat in order to collect their goodies.

Halloween 2005 is officially over. This is my favorite part of the evening, where I can bask in the afterglow and eat a little (OK, a lot) of chocolate. If Andrew Lloyd Webber is looking for a new leading lady or a makeup artist for his next production, he can find Annabelle and me right here, munching on baby Snickers bars.

Getting ready for the Great Pumpkin

Halloween has always been one of my favorite holidays. I love making costumes for the kids, and I have whipped up some doozies in the past, if I do say so myself.

I spent the entire month of October our second year in Hawaii, for example, transforming Annabelle into a princess on a pink pony. She wore it 2 years in a row, winning prizes with it both times. Here she is modeling her horse in Texas:



That was the same year Mike decided he wanted to be a werewolf. A little makeup and a lot of spirit gum and fake hair and voila! instant werewolf:



With Halloween coming so close on the heels of the neverending move this year, I've had to prioritize where to direct my limited holiday energies. Annabelle has asked for a fairly complicated costume (you'll have to wait until Halloween to see!), so that is sucking most of my energy and causing a wee bit of anxiety for me. Mike's is fairly simple yet fiendishly clever and alarmingly appropriate (again, wait until Monday!). I have all the supplies and just need a little sewing time.

What I haven't had time for this year is decorating, unless you count cardboard boxes and very little furniture as some sort of spooky theme. Fred did pick up one little decorative item the other day though. Let my neighbors deck their houses and yards with pumpkins, baskets of gourds, and bales of hay. Who needs all that? Not me. I have the one, the only (out of a stack of hundreds at Walmart) . . . agonized rat:



(Click on the photo to see the rat writhe in agony.)

Must. Post. More. Often.

I really need to get back in the blogging habit. I'm just pulled in so many different directions these days that it's hard to find the time and equally hard to find anything interesting to talk about.

Right after I posted my "school is going great" post, it temporarily returned to hell in the proverbial handbasket, at least as far as Annabelle was concerned. Earlier this week, she was begging not to go again. I stuck her butt on the bus and went inside to place a call to the guidance counselor, who was able to nab Annabelle in the hallway when she got there and perform a little cheerleader routine for her benefit. Each day since then has been steadily better, and today was downright good.

Annabelle got to choose a pencil out of the prize box for her stellar performance in class today and was very excited about that. Get me drunk sometime and ask me to elaborate on my feelings regarding the use of rewards to motivate kids. To heck with principles right now though--I would have happily paid cold hard cash to see her come off the bus with such spring in her step.

Meanwhile, Mike continues his easy adjustment to middle school. Gym class was showing the potential to be a problem--not because of "Coach Cheney" (Mike actually decided that he was OK) but because of some misbehaved cretins in the locker room. I went to the guidance counselor with that problem and with a possible solution, never really expecting the school to go for it, but they did. As of yesterday, Mike is doing his distance-learning German I class in the library each day instead of taking PE. Gotta love that flexibility!

Both kids are also making friends in the neighborhood as well. There are lots of girls Annabelle's age, and she has been twice now to their weekly sewing circle (I call it "Stitch and Bitch" but only in my head).

There are also a lot of girls Mike's age in the neighborhood, which I suspect might have something to do with his enthusiasm for school. The scene below was on my neighbor's front porch the other day. It's not a very good picture, but there are limits to how artistic one can be when one is shooting from between window blinds, without flash, and while laughing one's ass off. Just call me Spy Mom:



Please fasten your seatbelts. We are approaching the teen years and expect some mild turbulence. (Please, God, let it be mild.)

School update

What a roller coaster week we had! Mike came home from school on the second day, declared it fine, and has been a happy camper ever since. Annabelle, on the other hand, got off the bus in tears for 3 straight days.

Friday morning, she was a little puddle of anxiety on the front porch, begging us not to send her. She already had an appointment scheduled with the guidance counselor for 9 o'clock, so Fred and I went in with her. We got to talk with both the guidance counselor and one of her 2 teachers. Annabelle talked to the counselor and the other teacher, and life has been rosy since then. That afternoon she had a huge smile on her face when she got off the bus.

School daze

When I was a kid, I read books about children who went to boarding school, and more than anything else I longed to get shipped off to some austere academy where people would force me to make my bed. Nobody ever suggested that my parents should help me follow my bliss, although I'm surely it was nothing more than a simple lack of funds that kept them from getting on board.

For the past year, Annabelle has been basting her brain with tales from American Girl magazine, which is heavily skewed in favor of a traditionally educated readership. I suppose a magazine geared toward vagabond children who follow their temporarily single mother around Europe wouldn't have a very large circulation, but think of the recipes and travel tips! When we arrived here in Kentucky, Annabelle began talking about possibly attending the local school so that she might find some friends and be able to make a cool flower magnet for her locker (an AG mag idea). This seemed to be a much more reasonable request than my longings for a convent school high in the Swiss alps, so I figured what the hell. We gave our local intermediate school a cursory examination and signed her up.

Then we started worrying that perhaps Mike would get bored and lonely without Annabelle for companionship, so we investigated our local middle school as well. I didn't have high hopes for the middle school, as they have a rather nitnoid dress code policy and Mike tends not to cope well with control-freaky stuff like that. While Mike didn't exactly leap at the opportunity to go to school, he was a little bit curious and willing to give it a try. And thus yesterday, the first day back after fall break, began our grand experiment, our re-entry into the world of formal education.

Mike was the first one home and frankly the one I had been wondering about the most throughout the day. He reported that the cafeteria food is unfit for human consumption and that his PE teacher reminds him of "Dick Cheney in a gymsuit." (Note to self: Keep this blog a secret from the Ft. Knox educational community!) He did, however, like his math teacher and said there really wasn't much homework. What little homework there was, he sat right down to do. That whooshing sound you heard at approximately 3 p.m. EST? That was me exhaling. Prematurely, as it turned out.

Annabelle slumped off her bus a half hour later looking very solemn indeed. By the time she reached the front door, she was sobbing her heart out. She says she is the slowest person in her class at everything and that she feels like a big dummy and is going to be totally STRESSED! And why, oh why, did she ever have this stupid idea of going to school anyway?! AND they have to take in a picture of their American hero. And Andrew Lloyd Webber? He's BRITISH! And TS Eliot? BRITISH!!! And WHY DON'T YOU TRY DOING 5 DIFFERENT TYPES OF MATH IN ONE PROBLEM AFTER TWO YEARS OF DOING NOTHING, MOM?!? (ouch)

Of course, if there's one thing you can count on in the Taylor household, it's that the emotional weather is guaranteed to change quickly and without warning and chances are you won't be dressed properly for it. By supper time, Annabelle had finished her homework and was regaining her original optimistic outlook. This was helped in no small part by my father, who informed us that TS Eliot was actually born in St. Louis and educated at Harvard. And thus, an American hero project was launched!

Meanwhile, the storm clouds had passed from Annabelle's head to Mike's. The further we got into the evening, the gloomier he became. He had spent the afternoon exploring the neighborhood with a couple of kids he met at school. One might think that this would be a GOOD thing, but not in Mikeville. No, he told us gloomily, this whole school thing flies directly in the face of his plan to make it through 2 years at Ft. Knox without making friends. After all, what is the point of making friends when you're just going to have to say goodbye?

This morning was a brilliant exercise in acid indigestion. Annabelle seemed happy enough, but Mike got on his bus with the enthusiasm one normally reserves for jury duty.

What will the day hold for them? Who knows? Not me, that's for sure. I shall spend the day nibbling my nails in anxious anticipation and trying to sort through some boxes. I wonder if it's too late to get me into a good boarding school in Switzerland . . .

Go read Annabelle's blog!

Annabelle has some big news, and I promised her I wouldn't scoop it here on my blog. So go to her blog RIGHT NOW and check it out.