After everything stopped gushing, P went upstairs to read & listen to music (big headaches + noisy splashy swimming pools just don’t mix), and the girls & I went swimming. M2 is getting braver about the whole getting her face wet, I think a few more times noodling around in the pool & she might be ok with swimming lessons. I hope. I know. So domestic.

Tomorrow such exciting things as fish tank cleaning & general house cleaning. And then going back to the Y so the little girls will stop begging. It’s new. You know.

In other completely unsurprising news, I <3 Dethklok.

I finished the book I was reading, borrowed from a friend at work: The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature. It was interesting, mostly for the natural world facts along the way. Kinda preaching to the choir as far as the message goes — yeah, sustainability. I don’t need justification for sustainability. I get it. So, it was an interesting read, but not really world view changing. Now I have to decide what to read next. I have a huge stack of books to read. I have the original Girl Scout handbook which I’ll probably read in bits and pieces interspersed between the other stuff, but the three I’m trying to decide between that I just can’t seem to settle on one — Information Ethics: Privacy, Property, and Power by Adam D. Moore, Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition by Umberto Eco, or Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences by Bowker & Star. I want to read all of them at once & that… I think that would just be not good. Since I have been trying to decide what to read next since, like, Xmas, I’m going to go alphabetically. No, I think actually I just want to start with Info Ethics because that’s where I think I want to start, because when I thought about going with LoC classification, which would have given me Sorting Things Out, and I decided I preferred to go with alphabetical, so I seem to have *some* preference here. Info Ethics it is. Woo! Been a while since I read any Eco, but after 18 years, I’m still a little stung from having a professor snidely say ‘oh semiotics is so two years ago, now it’s all about deconstruction.” Pretty sure he said it to be a jackass, but w’evs. Both are interesting theories.

ANYWAY. I’ve apparently decided what to read next. Did I mention I love Dethklok? I love Dethklok.

Other things: We took the house down *another* $15K today. We’ll drop no further & anyone wanting fixes or things paid for or whatever can go… you know. Hopefully this does the trick. I’m sore tired of the selling routine & am ready to move. on.

That is all.

This morning we got another call, three realtors brought clients by today, this morning. We vacated and went to Barnes and Nobles to browse for books and things. On our way, my dad called & said their house sold. He wasn’t happy about what it sold for, but… it sold! In a market that makes the one we’re in look really, really good. Actually the inspection is tomorrow and closing is on June 16th. I’ll feel better about saying their house is sold when it’s through inspections… and then through final closing… but, it’s more than we’ve gotten so far. I’m happy for them though — that means they’ll be up in Seattle & a little closer to their grandkids who adore them. And the house that my Dad has wanted to live in I think probably since he left it as a young man.

Anyway, back to B&N… Their linguistics & philosophy sections are sadly understocked. I did find an entertaining looking linguistics book though — Far From the Maddening Gerund: and other dispatches from Language Log. Not quite what I was looking for, but it will do betwixt the other three or so books I’m paging through.

M2 found a book on fairies that’s so sweetly drawn & pretty much perfect for her age when we’re not doing the ABC thing. M1 had a gift certificate from her birthday? Christmas? She got The Secret Garden, The Little Princess, & Little House in the Big Woods. I think she’s half way through The Secret Garden already. She’s thanked me several times for recommending it to her. Sweet girl. Then we bought lunch and ended our adventure.

Then we came home & I napped most of the afternoon. All I wanted to do was lie down. Though I did get sourdough pizza crust (and pizza!) made. Artichoke heart & goat cheese was one of them, pineapple was the other. OM NOM NOM NOM. After dinner, the girls and I read, two chapters out of the Cat Who book that M1 & I are working through, and two chapters of the fairy book we got today for M2. They both crashed out, and… my hair is hennaing, the Mariners are bombing, and TimTheCat is curled up next to me. I think I’ll sleep well again tonight despite all the napping this afternoon.

I got the tomatoes planted today. In the ground. Sigh. And the marigolds. I dug up the star lilies that were coming up & potted them so we can, if we ever move, take them with us. One bulb broke off deep, so either we’ll have one left out there next year or whoever buys the house will have a pleasant surprise. Last weekend was a baking weekend. This week was a planting weekend. With a little baking thrown in for good measure. We are, apparently, out of bread so I made some. :)

I did some yoga for the first time since I was sick. Lots of tension and peculiar points of resistance. Or maybe not so peculiar, but noted and all that. As I was coming out of savasana a realtor called and wanted to come over — “how does now sound?” P begged 10 minutes. All the beds were unmade, our sheets were being washed, the kids’ stuff scattered everywhere. We made a mad dash to get everything cleaned up & were walking out the side door as they drove up. I hate this routine. I hate it hate it hate it. The kids were over at the neighbor’s playing & knew a realtor was at our house, so P & I took a walk around the block. They were still here, so we crossed the house & went to look at the creek a block from our house. Some time since last fall, it had done a wild sinkhole thing nearly up to the main thoroughfare street. The creek had been sent through a big cement pipe under the street, and… I don’t know — the pipe or tunnel or whatever must not have held. Before we moved in, there’d been a sinkhole that took out, sweartagod, part of a gas station. But this was new damage and it was much bigger than before. I wish I’d taken my camera, but I didn’t. The creek that runs through the far back of the backyard at the Creek House is a small finger stream off the main creek, it’s not The Main Creek, not by a long shot. I’d have substantial reservations if it were The Main Creek. Concerns & reservations are all a moot point though until we know if this one is getting sold.

I can hear M1 snoring in the other room. Heh.

We finished the chapter with the man with red eyes tonight. She didn’t want me to stop reading & pitched a major fit. I think she’s getting really into the book & it’s at a little bit of a scary spot right now, so I think the tantruming was all less about me stopping reading, than me stopping reading and not relieving the scary tension by bringing us to a point of, at least less, if not neutral, tension. It’s fascinating watching a piece of literature affect a child — you can almost see the different parts of their brains lighting up as they’re reacting and processing.

This book is definitely beyond M2, but she has other books that affect her developmentally appropriately. She’s at that point where she has more or less memorized certain books & now she’ll say, “Stop Mommy, I want to read this line.” And then she’ll recite the line while moving her fingers across what line of text that corresponds with her recitation. Sometimes I have her say it again while I hold her hand so her finger is on the words she’s saying a little more accurately. Brains are really amazing.

I was warned, when we got the referral by the woman who recommended to the publishing rep that we might be interested, that it was a little like little bits of Christmas showing up all year long. Indeed it is! There’s nothing quite so delightful as arriving home to new books. That said, I am not a parent having trouble with my grown child, nor do I have the time or energy to make my kids bilingual (esp. since I am not bi/multilingual myself), though I would support them if they were inspired to take a second language up… Still, I’ll probably read them because that’s what I do. We (speaking from my position of exec producer of hipmama/mamaphonic) have a policy — not being the Sunday edition of the New York Times, or the Reader’s Advisory from the ALA — that we only publish reviews for material we like. Good times.

Sadly, all my library school stuff is packed & besides having promised the content writers/analysis team at work to put together a presentation on competitive intelligence, I was also recently wishing to access the section from 520, 520? I think it was 520, on reader advisory/book reviews. On the upside, for the book review stuff — there is teh intartubes that bring information right up to my computer! Hoorah! Yeah, it does that with competitive intelligence too, but I can’t remember the name of this one analytic matrix (not SWOT), and I can almost picture right where it is in one of my books. Which is of course packed, like 90% of my life right now. Indeed.

So anyway. That’s the only exciting thing that’s happened in the last few days. We have someone coming to look at the house tomorrow. Surely someone will soon buy it, yes?

Time to practice guitar. I’ve slacked off on that & exercising with the zillions of things going on lately & I’m trying to get back to some sense of routine to round my day out. Bedtime keeps getting later & later because I get distracted by other things & not doing the routine things that signal end of day stuff. Yeah, I know exercising isn’t really end of day stuff, but it’s when I have time to do it, ergo, it is end of day stuff. Crap. It’s 11:48. I’ll practice tomorrow. Or… something.

I’m up to 397 books in my librarything. I’m still missing a few in the bedroom. And. Ok. None of the erotica has been entered yet. I’m still trying to decide if I want that content available for random (and perhaps more alarmingly, not so random) folks to peruse… Most of the remaining will require hand entry rather than my cuecat. As it is, I think I’ve had to enter around 33% by hand anyway because they’re so old that they only have the isbn printed on them without the barcode, or I have to enter with the loc card number because they have no isbns. At this point, with the exception of the few left in the bedroom that I didn’t get to tonight, I have most everything that isn’t boxed away in the attic. I hope the next house will have enough space for lots of big book cases so we can unbox our books… If not, it’ll have to be time to go through for a more brutal cull, unless they’re boxed & stored somewhere I can actually access them, unlike the attic space they’re currently in.

Need to figure out the crate situation we’re going to use for the cats when we show the house. I haven’t decided if one big thing will work for all three, or if I should get three separate ones (obviously with room for litterboxes, etc). If Siobhan weren’t stranger aggressive, and if they were indoor/outdoor, it would probably not be a big deal, but she is & they are indoor kitties… and knowing that Siobhan does take flying leaps at people & not trusting people not to wander out the back door to look at the backyard & leave the back door wide open while they amble around, it just seems crating, somehow, is for the best. Which will be interesting since TimTheCat is half feral dude. He’s very affectionate with us, but he’ll hide & all interactions are absolutely on his terms. He’s not into being carried around or being approached or anything so crating could be interesting. When/if we do an open house, we’ll be taking them out with us, but those random walk throughs while we’re at work?

Time to get my guitar on so I can get a move on with my evening…

I have made it around to reading The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show. Initially I knew I’d finish it, it was decent, but last night it made me cry & there are, at last count two pages with dog-ears because I’ve tried to give up the habit of underlining things I want to remember… I might have to come back to those pages with pencil and underline the lines I want to remember off those pages though. Truth is contextual but I present with open heart (and hungry stomach? it’s *sooo* past breakfast) the two lines that I would underline.

…the cure for both alienation and loneliness is solitude (pg. 109).
and
“The important thing is not to think much,” Teresa said, “but to love much; do, then, whatever most arouses you to love” (pg. 163).

I have always sucked at book reviews so I’ll just end with A+++++, would read again.