Christmas Expectations

My "baby", aged 27 has arrived and has now zoomed off to spend the night with a friend, taking my car.-how normal- he'll be back in the morning.

The halls are decked.

I will see step kids, my kids, good friends and a kind hubby. I will lead a beautiful formal concert (the cello part) this Sunday which will be spectacular.I will hug my dogs and cat.

Then I will go to Seattle for a week to see grandbabies-who are now 4 and 7-not babies!

I feel tired, but also excited, thrilled, more than ready.

BUT
O God I want my baby boy back. I just want to see him, whatever he might be- babe in arms, funny schoolboy, ravaged schizophrenic- I will take anything. Please, please let him walk in the door with one of his wonderful Mom hugs.
Just one. Just once.

O Shawn, your Mommy loves you. I love you so much.

In the picture: Shawn aged about 6 and his adored big sister, Jenn, about 8, Christmas 1980

And Then There is Real World Shopping....

bleh.
I thought I would drop into the local Zellers because I wanted P.J.'s for my daughter for Christmas and there are a lot there. But maniacal hordes had picked over everything, and although it wasn't all that crowded, I sort of got hypnotized-I spent a couple of hours in the end. I did get what I wanted (more or less) but I was SO SORE that I had to fall in bed and sleep for a couple of hours as soon as I got home. I don't know what this is really about-well, it is about the fibromyalgia-the pain is, but why is it such an extreme reaction?? It makes me vow to stick to the web shopping! I don't seem to be able to do much in a week-end before I need to crash.
How could pain this bad be "just" fibro?
Off to bed!!!!

Late night shopping

See the two of us in the letter

• 
  

Just as we were in real life?

Oh, my heart.......







It is interesting how things change. We don't really notice day to day as we are such adaptable creatures...I guess for a 59 year old I am a pretty early adapter- I follow blogs. I am keeping again, I hope, my blog. I look everything up on Google. I like Firefox, not Explorer- How do I know any of this really? No one told me..it sort of seeps in.

My Christmas shopping is pretty much done- most of it at 2 AM in my room here.Imagine how much difficulty I would have had finding two Ninja costumes- for a 7 and 4 year old -if I had had to go to a store. And find them I did have to do!

["DEAR GRAMMA I WOULD LIKE A NIHGA MASK THANK YOU XOXOXOXOXOXO"]

It took a lot of time and a phone call to Kansas to check on the sizing, but the Ninja outfits are on their way to Seattle where I will wrap them two days after Christmas and make a little boy and his sister happy. Think of the implications- I doubt I could have found them ten years ago, even when I had more energy to run around in malls. Or even now- I wouldn't have begun to know where to look.

I would feel even more computer savvy if it hadn't taken upwards of three hours trying to down load that picture....

Two Years, Three Months, Twenty Days Later

So. I have been Reading on line.
Lurking.
Dressing up as Grammacello for my Hallowe'en
Concert, along with 30 kids.
Living my life, as we tend to do, but at the same time,
Having A Crisis.
One of my students found this blog and read it. Asked me why I don't I keep it any more?
I have been thinking about this.
Here's the thing....
My tiny perfect life by the lake didn't work out in a big way....Let's see-I'm still married, still teaching, dogs all fine, ditto kids and grandkids. But WHEN: the neighbour from HELL moves into the townhouse next door, reports your innocent cello teaching to the town, after digging up the information that you must be in a detached house to be legal, a small but salient fact that NO-ONE else seems to know, including the 22 other teachers you work with, most of whom are doing the exact same"illegal" thing, you scoff, (at first) ultimately pay $35,000. plus in legal fees fighting, decide to beat a strategic retreat- [note omission of about seventeen million explanatory details here]move to a detached house not on the lake, sell the townhouse (thankfully!)and regroup, it kind of takes something out of you. Like 2 years, three months and twenty days to get to a place where you feel able to crawl out from under the rock -the one that fell on you-
You have been teaching from home for 31 years, now, albeit in a different city where it is, by the way, ALSO illegal, although you were never caught....
Anyway, where you feel slightly more able to put anything of yourself out there.
I still read the blogs of some of my commenters. Have found others as well. But don't even comment. Just hide, licking my wounds and wondering how it is possible to have been SO badly de-railed on the trust front, not even able to comment.
In the world of crises it is way down there- I know this in my own story even, as I am a Mom whose son has died, I know grief. And crisis.
But the last two years have been very hard.
I am changed- in ways hard to articulate.
I am going to post this. Then I will go around and say "hi" in comments to some people with whom I had begun forming some tiny, tentative connections, two years and more ago.
I will see what happens.

Andrea Pratt

I saw this beautiful piece on Andrea's webpage. I like to work in these clear primary colours myself, and HOUSES! I am a Cancer, and(whether or not there is anything to this stuff: I am both a skeptic and a believer) my very favourite place to be is home. I dream of houses; I draw them; I photograph them-they are an archetype in my life.

Plus I just LOVE this painting- the sun, the moon, the rain- I looked at some of the small art "house" paintings but....they weren't MY painting!


And so, dear reader, I BOUGHT it!



Since delivery won't be for a while due to a number of circumstances, I can dreamily wander around my house, mentally putting it"here" or.....maybe "here"

What a thrill! You MUST look at her sites if you haven't done so already.

small art
colouring outside the lines

Daisy!!

Daisy checks out the marina scene before she spies the camera.












Poor sweet photogenic Daisy. I found her online at Petfinder.com a year ago January. It said she was "calm, gentle, good with other dogs".........


John tries to set up a group photo....















(HAHAHAHAHA) and not recommended for kids or cats, since they didn't know about that.
The first thing she did when we met her, at a foster home in Detroit, was say to Frankie, "I adore you", and to John, "Let's go home now."
So, we did. She didn't peep at all on the four hour drive, or indeed, even move. As it turns out, she was terrified. When we got home though, she walked in the house, saw Sophie the cat, went up and touched noses and that was that re: cats.
With kids, well, a two year old once sat on her in the studio and she wagged her tail- she LOVES all people-and has mastered Frankie's heavy head lean into the human leg trick, guaranteed to win over everyone.
But DOGS? WTF?
After she bit the ear (and drew mucho blood) of a neighbour's (admittedly nasty, badly behaved aggressive, uncontrolled- bites small kids- schnauzer) TWICE, and began growling, and then going ballistic at random passing dogs-on-leash on walks, we began to, um, reassess the "good with other dogs" part. The way it stands now:
She must be leashed at ALL times- she may like, or hate, a dog and will attack with no warning, or not, as she sees fit- she might, instead wag her tail and want to play- it is all hit and miss, to the human eye. So after we tried a dog psychologist- mainly to placate the owners of Bootsie the schnauzer, who has since died of old age, by the way- we leash her when she is outside 100% of the time and we have all adjusted. But her own pack? She adores the cats, worships Frankie and mothers Chiwee- taking anything he does, from tail biting, to being climbed on, to sharing a dish, in stride. She is very loyal to her own pack.


She tries to hide behind the legs of some random strangers on the pier










But, she has a weird phobia, about cameras...... They TERRIFY her- she shakes like a leaf and runs away- it is all a mystery-it isn't the flash per se: even seeing the camera in my hand triggers it. As a result, we have very few pics of her. So the other night I decided, after several months' hiatus, to try again. It was marginally better, as in, she only ran to the end of the leash and asked the people sitting next to us on the dock, to adopt her, LOL. At least I got a few and then I couldn't do it to her any more.
Camera put away, Daisy, returns to her own pack,
exhausted by the trauma of it all, where Chiwee
gives her a reassuring kiss.

Some day-to-day news, in pictures

SUMMER ALGAE


The "sand" that appears to be on the beach in this photo is actually washed up algae that has dried in the sun. This is one of the few minuses of living where we do- it can get very stinky after a storm has washed a lot of it up and it hasn't finished drying out. But, our old house had constant traffic day and night streaming by the front door. I will take the stinky lake-(this shot is only yards from our door)-which is only a hot weather phenomenon, any day. Apparently, it is all over several Great Lakes- Erie is worst, then Ontario and Lake Michigan has it too. It grows offshore, from the bottom, breaks off in wavy conditions, washes onshore and rots. It is not dangerous in any way, though, just odiferous.Here, I am checking out the swimming possibilities for the big dogs. Some days the water is quite clear, beyond the wash-up.Sometimes the wash-up washes away entirely and all is idyllic, as it is in spring and fall.


UPDATED PICS OF CHIWEE THE WONDER DOG










JUST SO SOULFUL!-deceptive, however, as he is actually a tiny tornado that seldom stops.








For reference, the toy dog, which he carries around a lot, is from Ikea and is about 2 inches long. Clever Chiwee is learning to read, heh.








He loves stuffed animals. When he first came, this toy came with him from the breeder. he was about the size of its head at that point.












This looks like a standoff over a giant bone, but actually, he is 'play bowing'. Poor guy, he wants so badly to play with the cats and they so totally don't get it. Cats are dumb, if you're a dog.














EARS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!










He doesn't need clothes, at least till the cooler weather but I have been web shopping!

















She is having trouble understanding him. She studies him in his crate as he sleeps like he was a zoo exhibit.










Life is never dull, with a puppy. In some later post I should speculate on why I came so late to being a dog person. I was well on my way to being "The Cat Lady Of Glasgow Street" before we,( when I was ummmm....49, nearly 50) got our Frankie and look at me now. Interesting......can dogs be a midlife crisis?