Pitas require a 500F oven to cook. Consider this next time you decide that pitas are required on a hot day. It’s 88F still in the main room of the house at nearly 10:30pm & now you’re committed to cooking 16 pitas. Standing in front of the oven for approximately the next half hour. At least my Manhattan is cold.

The new Mark Lanegan & Isobel Campbell is like sex on… on… whatever it is that music is recorded to these days. Much like their first. ZOMG. There’s at least one couplet that makes me blush, quite literally, & I gasped the first time I actually caught what he said. And then blushed. Damn. Just hawt. And this is not just the whiskey talking.

Time to go take care of these pitas… And then to see what the whiskey actually has to say… hmmm.

The service itself was nice. My parents’ longtime friend & former pastor did the service, the same fellow who married us, so of course it was nice. The veteran’s part of the service, gun salute/Taps & presenting of the flag to the family was oddly touching for such a highly ritualized ceremony. And Amazing Grace is increasingly a song that I really love. I don’t know why.

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Yesterday I got a rise & shine with, “ZOMG! WE HAVE A SHOWING IN 45 MINUTES!” That was 8:45. They showed up at 9:10 which is a short 45 minutes, if you ask me. They circled the culdesac like vultures, paused in front of the house & peered in as I yelled, ‘They’re here! WTFOMGBBQ!’ Then they drove off. We left on time & they were kind enough to leave a card unlike the other two realtors who wanted to show the house this weekend. We worked in the yard a good chunk of the day, then I went and found birthday presents for my dad.

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This morning there was supposed to be a showing between 10 & 11. They didn’t leave a card, so I don’t know if they bothered to come by even though we scrambled this morning to make sure everything was suitable for showing and managed to get everyone out of the house before 10. And in doing so, we spend a ridiculous amount of money at the local bookstore. Alarming almost, except for the 40% off all used books. Perhaps alarming anyway as we walked away with a shopping bag full of books and… our shelves are in storage. Then someone was supposed to come by with their clients during our open house. Of course, just as I was getting out of the shower around noon they called and said they were five minutes away & could they stop by NOW? Um. How about no? Come on, people! I know my house is for sale, but you’re still freaking guests. If they dropped by when they said they would, they didn’t leave their card either.

This whole house thing is incredibly, stupifyingly, exhaustingly depressing. All the feedback we get is, “oh gosh, that cute little house hasn’t sold yet? < expressions of amazement >” Frustrating. I don’t think I’ve mentioned that one yet. It’s probably obvious though. It’s really sapping my energy. Meh. Stupid house.

———–

During the open house today P and The Girls went with my parents & aunt & uncle & my cousin’s daughter to the Museum of Flight. M2 was transfixed & fascinated. She even went in the flight simulator & thought that was pretty much The Best Thing Ever. P stayed out with M1 who has occasional bouts of motion sickness. Apparently my mom said something to the effect that M2 has no fear. I frequently think that might be true, except that as mommy, I’m privy to such conversations as her deep & abiding fear of smoker’s lung, dying, and the occasional statement when I say we should go bike riding that ‘what if I fall?’ Like that’s ever stopped her from doing anything else. Anyway — they all had a grand time.

*I* went and did my ladies’ thing. We sat around and ate cookies and strawberries and strawberries mostly. It was a very laid back, low key thing today. It was lovely to get away from the house & listen to people talk about things that were mostly not work & mostly not home. Very, very lovely. There was some talk about kids & birth as there was a pregnant lady there, but I’m finally well enough socialized to know that I should just not talk about my experience of having two very non-eventive (except for the length of the first) home births. It just gets everyone’s judgmental panties in a twist and I’m too tired right now to feel like explaining & it’s just so easy to say nothing at all. So I didn’t say anything at all. And it made me kind of sad because diversity of experience is what makes us all interesting, but… apparently I wasn’t interested in being interesting in that way today. I was having a lovely afternoon & I just didn’t want to go there. The very nice pregnant lady’s first pregnancy was, as I understand it, supposed to be a home birth, but she ended up transported, rightly, to the hospital. I tend to think the midwifery model worked as perfectly in her situation as it did in mine — the midwife recognized a situation that required transporting & did so, everyone came out alive & stuff. Ok. Good. It all worked out — right? Right! And anymore than that & I have to start qualifying & justifying & explaining & beating back strawmen & meh.

There seems to be no tack I can take that doesn’t make me come off like some kind of defensive wacko unless the people I’m talking with are already predisposed to accept home birth as within the norm of acceptable birthing situations. So, slowly, I’m learning to hold what’s precious to me a little closer to my heart (shush that part about wearing my heart not on my sleeve as a parent, but two unshielded bundles of girl running about frequently outside of my protection). I had my births, they were what they were & they were lovely & I wouldn’t trade them in for the world. I can’t condense the discussion into a nice tidy sound bite that comes across nicely in a casual social situation. Not yet anyway.

I think that might be a personality defect on my part. I spend so much time so very deep in the gory details of things, making very fine distinctions, and when I miss a fine distinction here or a qualification there, sometimes it doesn’t matter, but sometimes it does, very much so, so I’m sensitive to making sure I cover all those qualifications, and the fine distinctions and it makes it very hard to speak from a… overview point of view? Um… what is it when people pull back and look at the forest? Whatever it is, I don’t do it very well & it’s not that I can’t see the forest for the trees, but that I note that not only is there this forest, but there are also these trees, and these plants, and these animals, which break out into mammals, birds, and insects, and insects aren’t really part of the animal kingdom but part of the insect kingdom and that’s different from the animal kingdom in these ways, and then the interaction between these plants & animals & stuff & the local weather & geographical topology… uh. Yeah. So… It’s a huge asset for what I actually do, not so much in the explaining it all to people…

———–

I have to give a presentation at work about what it is I do. I hope to have it ready by this Thursday, but… see, there’s this forest? And it has these trees? And some plants? And these animals, and… I know the people I’m presenting to are only really interested in the mammals (user experience) and not so much the birds (standards-based controlled vocab/authority lists), but the birds are really a very, very important part of what I do in conjunction with all these other things & I have to figure out how to make this all relevant to them, help them understand when it would be advantageous to use the corporate taxonomy for this particular company (and sometimes it isn’t). Urgh. My dream next week would involve me, a long list of terms to research, rationalize, a big huge complex import spreadsheet to create, & an unlimited budget.

There. Multiple plates of beans: terribly, terribly over-thought. I go from not saying anything at all about what’s going on in my life to the forest, trees, plants, animals, stuff, local weather, geographical topology, and in general probably TMI. And not even the *interesting* TMI! Yeh, no, there isn’t really any interesting TMI to speak of, no sin of omission.

Yes. I think I’m done now. I mean, I’m not, but enough has probably been said for now. It was a surprisingly pleasant long weekend, only the last few hours have been so angst-y. I’m blaming ALL of it on the fact that I’m tired of having the house for sale & I’m fretting about my work presentation. I will now resist the urge to play tetris & sudoku until I fall asleep on the couch in an effort to escape my own brain. Wheeeeee!

Happy Father’s Day, fathers…

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.

M1 went with her friend to see The Music Man last night. Her friend’s brother was in it. Big excitement for M1 frequently translates into big tummy aches. So I was up the better part of the night trying to be comforting and saying a lot of, ‘yes, I know you don’t feel well. I’m so sorry. I know it sucks. Yes, I know your tummy hurts. (wash, rinse, repeat)’.

I have no wit or wisdom to pass on today (ok, I never have wisdom).

M1 found the biggest live crab on the beach.  Its carapace was as big as my hand (M1 says — ‘And that’s without the legs and pinchers!’).  We saw some other cool things out there too.  The kids dug pits in the sand & built dams and got Oh. My. God. Wet.  All “my” children made it back to the classroom (actually all of everyone’s kids did).  Considering I couldn’t tell who they were most of the time since the name tags fell off in the first ten minutes & they were all wearing heavy coats, hats, and stuff, it’s no small miracle.   Good times.

Haha — a co-worker just called it “Junuary.”

Blah blah blah blah.  Blah blah.  Blah blah blah.
I’m exhausted.  Can I go back to bed now?

Of course, I’ve been listening to lots of Utah Phillips, my ’songbook’, a four cd compilation set of his work arrived on Monday (hoorah!) so I’ve been thinking a lot about folk music, and… other things. Contrary to the belief of some people, I do not think about taxonomy 24×7. Only 23.75×7. No, really I don’t even think about it that much. I do think about it a lot, but I think about other stuff too. Like joining the Wobblies. Because I *could*. I don’t think I will, maybe, but it has crossed my mind. But that’s not what this post is about. This post is about the song stuck in my head. Where was I? Oh, right! The song stuck in my head.

I tend to think my musical tastes are pretty broad, and I’m old enough that I am exempt from having to really worry about ‘cred’. I have no cred anymore because I am gleefully OLD and that’s given me a degree of freedom to listen to whatever I want. I did not, however, enjoy hearing Dokken’s Sister Christian today in a desperate search for appropriate beach footwear (tomorrow I’m accompanying M1 on a field trip to the beach. Maude help & protect me!). I don’t think it’s any surprise to anyone who knows me, especially not those close to me & those who’ve known me for a long time that I have a small? (maybe an understatement, maybe an overstatement, using the phrase my MLIS degree taught me, “It depends”) obsession with folk & traditional music. For a long time it was British Isles/Irish, but increasingly American folk music has been creeping in. No real surprise there.

I’ve been collecting folk music nearly since I was old enough to sing songs to myself (there, I said it — it’s folk music I’ve been collecting, maybe not quite to the point of archiving. FOLK. F - O - L - K — music of the folk, owned by them. Look. I told you I’ve been listening to a lot of Utah. Dude pretty much nailed my philosophy on folk music, it passes through me, but doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to *us*). Ah… hrm. The first songs I remember singing were songs about barnyard animals and bawdy sea chanties, Peter, Paul, & Mary, The Kingston Trio, & their elders, being, of course Woodie Guthry, the Carter Family, various Seegers, et al. Pretty sure all of these people have done variations on the song stuck in my head (except maybe the old mariners stuck on their Spanish “ladies”).

I’m fascinated by folk [music/stories]. I’ve never quite felt like I could “own” it. I struggle with the concept of authenticity — which I suppose is a variation on the “cred” issue. I know I have no cred (which hoorah freedom), but I wonder about being authentic to the music that I’ve carried with me as long as I’ve been alive (am I really allowed to keep this tradition? Me of mixed class background, but mostly middle class mutt? And if not me, then… who?). And also I wonder about “ownership” in folk traditions. Sometimes songs become attached to people, or their variations become attached & then my obsession with copyright & giving due respect to others who cover the same or variations on the same music kicks in & then I start wondering about how to go about doing *that* properly. I know it’s all hypothetical because I don’t perform it in front of anyone but Maude & occasionally my children… but I wonder none-the-less…

Anyway. Here’s the Carter Family’s variation on this theme.

Worried Man Blues
It takes a worried man to sing a worried song,
It takes a worried man to sing a worried song.
I’m worried now but I won’t be worried long,

I went across the river and I lay down to sleep,
I went across the river and I lay down to sleep.
When I woke up I had shackles on my feet.

Twenty-nine links of chain around my leg,
Twenty-nine links of chain around my leg.
And on each link an initial of my name.

It takes a worried man to sing a worried song,
It takes a worried man to sing a worried song.
I’m worried now but I won’t be worried long.

I asked the old judge what may be my fine,
I asked the old judge tell me what may be my fine?
“Twenty-one years on the R. C. Mountain line.”

The train arrived sixteen coaches long,
The train arrived sixteen coaches long.
The girl I love is on that train and gone.

It takes a worried man to sing a worried song,
It takes a worried man to sing a worried song.
I’m worried now but I won’t be worried long.

I looked down the track as far as I could see,
I looked down the track as far as I could see.
A little bitty hand was waving back at me.

M1 asked me what I was singing as I made cookies for her field trip tomorrow. I told her. She said it sounded like a lullaby. And then said it was funny, she had the same melody stuck in her head. And tried vaguely to interpret the melody, never actually having heard it before. So sweet, she still thinks I’m neat. :) I guess I should go to bed. Long day with lots of kids in it tomorrow. Eek!

Regardless, it was nice to be welcomed back to work with four *very* kind “peer 360″ reviews. Yes. Where I work, our co-workers can rank us like a book on Amazon. It was also a pleasant day to come back for other reasons. My little team went & did some “retail therapy” — we hit Cost Plus & I got a pint glass, a ceramic bowl, a spoon, fork, & one of those spoons they give you in Chinese restaurants for your wonton soup. I regularly get the wonton soup from the Thai place downstairs & it just seemed right. Now I won’t be using the stoopid plastic cups & paper bowls. I’d already re-purposed metal spoon & fork from the kitchen, but the ones I bought today have a nice heft to them & will be pleasing to use rather than the others which were kinda tinny and thin. Work came in nicely paced & it was just… pleasant.

Not that, at the end of the day, I have anything left for those parts of me that deserve a little more than what’s left, but perhaps it will all come around again.

Folk music is boring. “Black fall, the die doe, blow ye winds, high ho,” hell, that’s boring, but I am a folksinger. This is a folk music organization. You are ostensibly the folk, nest pas? That means we own this song together, right? We have thereby incurred certain social obligation which we will faithfully discharge, right? We’re gonna sing this damn song together, boring or not!

I’ll sing to that…

There’ll be pie in the sky when we die! That’s a lie!

I hope you got enough pie before Friday &… I hope there’s pie where ever you are now, sir.

.

I spent the morning cleaning fish tanks, cleaning little girls’ room, cleaning bathroom, our bedroom, kitchen… Alas, there is still cleaning left to do so I need to get up and do it, but it’s quiet in the house, except for P rustling garbage bags. I looked up just in time to see a faint breeze blow so much pollen off the spruce that there was a giant golden cloud wafting on to the front of our house. Which totally explains the stuffy nose I have this morning.

It’s warm & quiet &, oh, how I want a nap!