H. M. S. Pinafore!

UPDATE 2014--- Major OOOOPS!!!  I never actually published this blog post.  I had it ready to publish and assumed I'd done it, and I went looking for it to link it to the new one and found it listed as "draft".  I get the big D'oh for today!  Argh.   So here it is, and I put its original date with it, too.

What a whirlwind of a weekend!  The original plan had been that we would drive to Houston to see

H.M.S. Pinafore, which da Creature was ever so counting on, but da Mama got super sick (actually, I've been super sick and no one seems to be the wiser as to why, which is super frustrating) so we got to have an EXTRA special surprise and go on a AIRPLANE to Houston (special surprise number two?  have you booked airline tickets three days ahead of a trip before?  don't....just....don't... cha-ching!).

Fortunately, United still has non-stop flights to Houston from Jackson, so it was quick and a shuttle ride later had us at the Doubletree safe and sound where I could recover a bit before we'd go to the show the next day.

First, let me say how amazing the folks are over at the Gilbert and Sullivan Socieity of Houston.  They were able to seat us where we needed to be, and let me know they'd put together a goodie bag and he could get his score signed.

So...we got all spiffied up, and headed out for the show.

We had reservations at a restaurant near the theatre, Birraporetti's (an Italian restaurant), and I had promised Eric he'd get to eat there, so we went, even though I couldn't eat.  I got him all his favorites (which we had planned to split) and he had such fun eating all that great looking food, he was just stuffed.  We sat near the back, and he found a poster for Pinafore on the wall behind him, and couldn't get enough of turning around and pointing and telling everyone who came by that he was going to see it in a few minutes and were they going too and it's about....  (at which point I'd have to gently focus him back on the food so as not to give a detailed summary of Pinafore to passerby's).

"Mama, why are you taking pictures of me eating?"

Then we realized we had a LOT of time to kill before the show.  We wandered around the front of the Wortham and found these giant balls, which were fascinating to Eric, and he madly danced from one to the other and we took a LOT of silly pictures and I did not snicker, not once, I promise, not even a little at the Wortham's giant balls...not a peep outta me, I'm respectable, you know.  *snicker*

Such a little boy, with such big dreams

MY score.  MY score.  It's MINE. 

Finally, they let us go in, and we attended the pre-show lecture.  Eric was so giddy, and happy to hear someone talking about things he REALLY understood that I fear he aggravated the man giving the lecture a bit.  Sad, really, since if the man had only really known him, he'd probably have been delighted to be talking to someone who followed every word and could even add details that many adults might never have encountered.  His working knowledge of the period and the corpus of G&S is really extraordinary, I mean, "Rain Man" extraordinary, but he can be a bit of an ass about it at times, but he's only 9, so the fact he knows all of this stuff is kind of cool, if you think about it.

At the lecture before the show!

He has three operas memorized already and is set to learn another one (or two) next year.  He LOVES Gilbert and Sullivan.  And American and British history.  And snarky sarcastic humor.  It's all a match made in heaven.  (...at least he didn't get all the ball jokes I didn't make.  Really, I kept it to myself.  Mostly)

 Before the show, we talked for a while about how theatre works, and he wanted to hear all my silly stories from being in theatre in my much younger days, and we sat in our seats and I tried to not let my dizzy, nauseated self be too distracted and I told stories of falling in the orchestra pit and being fallen on (Papageno straight-up dropped Papagena on the timpani one time during Magic Flute.  I was playing Glockenspiel, so she missed me by about two feet)!

A nice lady in front of us took our picture.  Thank you so much, it's the only photo I have that proves I was there!!!  :D

Afterwards, we went to the Green Room.  He got to meet the cast and get his score signed (a huge big giant deal for Eric), and I took as many pictures as I could.  I was sad to discover when I uploaded them, that I had failed to get some pictures, even though we got everyone's autograph.  *sigh*  (Next year, I'll do better).

Buttercup was his favorite today... "You sounded better than Felicity Palmer!!"

From Britain, the head of the company, Alistair Donkin.  He was FABULOUS as Sir Joseph Porter.  Eric LOVED him so much!!

Thank you, Scott, for EVERYTHING!!!!!

RideAbility First Lesson!

NOTE:  This post is picture heavy, not because I am an inconsiderate blogger, but because Google has taken my ability to just post a slideshow from Picasa away from me.  I personally find it offensive that Google is demanding that we upload ALL of our pictures to Google+ in order to use them, especially since I'd like to just write a blog post and have a slideshow with cool captions rather than photobomb my poor blog at the expense of my readers patience.  Honestly, I'm starting to wonder if I can tolerate the invasive nature of Google anymore...

So, on with our wonderful fun day at the barn with RideAbility and his hippotherapy... (an essay in pictures)

Yay! I'm at the barn! I'm bored! I'm restless!  I want to ride HORSES NOW!

Oh, thank heavens she gave him a job to do...

Talking through grooming and saddling

Rowdy says Hello

Rules and information time while waiting on his horse

Mounting Skip with lots of help

Stirrups and such

da Creature and his entourage...Safety at all times

Practice leading

Back at the Barn

What a wonderful experience this was.  At one point, he was throwing a ball back and forth from one of the men on the side of his horse to the other one while riding.  OT on stirrups!!!  They were so great with him.  I can't wait to see how this progresses.  He had a magnificent time.

Toodles

Well, that was unfortunate...

I have returned to the land of the living mostly now.

It has been an incredibly awful horrible no good very bad two weeks.

Catastrophizing took on a whole new level as I diligently applied it to every aspect of being sick...sure that death would follow, da Firstborn would have to return from her summer job to care for her little brother, leaving her invalid mother to suffer the indignities of Hospice...you know, the usual.  (eyeroll at self)

However much catastrophizing layered on top of my distress and discomfort, all's well that ends well and I am well-ish again.

Word of advice?  If you get a headache for ten days straight, it is important that you not stop paying attention to things like FLUID INTAKE and such because you can become dehydrated.  My only experience with dehydration has always been vomiting and diarrhea so I had ZERO understanding that dehydration when it occurs due to not taking in fluids can manifest itself in a whole other manner...  Guess what happens if you neither understand what is happening nor act quickly and decisively to avoid complications?!?  You get serious complications.  Ugh.  So I guess the topic of poop just loops around.  In your twenties, it's all about baby poop.  In your sixties and seventies, apparently talking about it is as important an activity as watching the weather channel.  I know WAY too many seniors, because my series of unfortunate events alluded to above then led to many many conversations which were, ahem,  awkward at best.

This explains those looks people gave us in our twenties when we were happily chirping away about the various colors and textures of stuff emanating from our baby's behinds.  It's weird to talk about folks.  Just weird.

However, if you are in your late forties, beware the fluid monster.  Danger lurks in your gut, and not knowing how dangerous a gut can be can lead to intelligent folk dying from bowel symptoms which should have been easily managed.  Don't be the tragedy.  Be the googlemaniac and figure it all out.

So, moving on... ba-doomp-cha, I will be all better soon and safe from those imagined catastrophes.

Life's really funny from a distance, and I have to laugh at myself.  If I don't, I get all sad and strange.

Tomorrow will be a happy hyppy post about Horses and da Creature.

Toodles

Inexterminatable Dalek Goodness

Today we had a special treat!  The guys from Krewe du Who came to film the Dalek for the promos for NOLA Time Fest 2013.  It was a hot time in the old garage, but I am quite excited to see how it all comes together.  

Here they are setting up and getting shots laid out:

When you must walk your Dalek...be sure it's guns are facing AWAY from you...

 

Lewis D'Aubin checking his shot....

Recording the promo in EXCELLENT EXTERMINATION VOCALIZATION!!!

So, those of you in NOLA, and our friends around the internet, as soon as they have put the footage to good use, I will share the link with you guys and you can see the magic that can happen when you green screen things.  So excited!

Toodles,
me

Dinner and Dishes

My little one has taken a liking to doing the dishes by hand.  At first, I was skeptical, but like all good things we have forgotten in the rush to be "modern" there is a simplicity and a joy to washing dishes with a person standing beside you with a towel in their hand.  An elegance to the moment. with it's patient pace, it's evening quietude, and it's intimacy. 

I think I hated doing dishes because I did them alone my whole life before I had da Firstborn and a house. 

Being a child abandoned in a dark kitchen while the adults have gone upstairs to the televisions of their choice, alone in the creaking downstairs with the dog, left to do dishes on the rare occasions when we were all home and she cooked something, was an indelible painful mark in my memory.  I hated them for hating each other so much that she left us, hated them for fighting from the time she'd come home on the rare weekend until the very moment we were waving goodbye as the gravel crunched in the driveway under her tires as she left finally and there was again the stubborn silence of discomfort and rage.

Dishes meant she had been home. 

Other nights we just ate at McDonald's. 

I remember though, being very small, and living in a neighborhood.  I remember other people's houses, and food that was cooked by "old-fashioned" women, the ones my militant feminist mother ridiculed in her march toward "independence from men."  Those kitchens were warm, they smelled good, and you never found a kid standing alone after a meal washing the dishes while the adults went off to fight some more.  You found brothers and sisters loudly laughing and the occasional broken dish crashing and water splashing.  Even on calm nights, there was talking and verbal sparring and the clatter of comraderie.

She deprived me of brothers and sisters.  She deprived me of companionship in the mundane tasks of life and deprived me of the revelation that mundane tasks are the fabric through which life is learned and shared and woven together.  I try to forgive her, but I hit this wall sometimes.  She was selfish and ambitious and self-indulgent. 

"Old-fashioned" women raised families.  It was not some archaic throw-back.  It was and is life, shared and lived together.  Cooking (the kind where you start from ingredients, not the kind where you heat something some factory produced) and cleaning things the long way pass the time in a manner that, if done as a collective activity, make life more bearable.  Less isolating. 

When we install the new dishwasher, I plan to also buy a dish drain.  When life is rocking hard against us and time is short, we will eat frozen things we prepared in calmer times and throw the dishes in the machine, but when life is slower (like summer), we'll stand together and laugh and talk and I will wash and he will dry.  I only wish I'd figured this out long ago...my apologies to the Firstborn, who did many dishes alone while I rested from cooking alone.  Lil' bro will have a new set of memories and I promise to be present and cheerful and patient. 

Toodles

Appliances are Hell

Remember when appliances lasted into the two-digit amount of years?!?  

Wow, you're OLD.

Which makes me old and cranky.

Our hot water heater is 23 years old.  I know...I watch the pan for signs of trouble, but yet, there it is.  23 years old.  It probably deserves a medal or something.  The one I can replace it with, even if I spend the most money a person can spend on a hot water will still only last 7-10 years.

And do NOT get me started on dishwashers, or as I have come to understand them, those disposable expensive things that do not ever really work right, or for long...

So, I'm off to Home Depot to give them a chance to fail to install a dishwasher properly.

Meanwhile, I'm back to farm life and no dishwasher.

On a related note...my adolescence was punctuated by this moment of parental glory...

We had a brand new dishwasher in a box in my fathers' workshop for YEARS. One day, I asked him to please install the dishwasher and he responded "Why?  We HAVE a dishwasher."  He meant me, of course and isn't being an only child ever so much fun?  To wit, I responded "an ELECTRIC dishwasher!" His response?  "Okay, we'll wire you to the floor."

Typical shot of my Father's workshop...notably, that's not a dishwasher either...story of my life... (eyeroll)

Visited a Guy Named Van Something...

...and he was not as tall as we had imagined...

We went to the art museum here in town, and they had a traveling collection of "Old Masters" which was about 300 years worth of French art, and there were some Manet's, Monet's and a solitary Van Gogh self portrait.  Da Creature thought it was cool, but seemed mostly impressed with the fact that some of the painters in Paris in the late 1700's probably knew Ben Franklin.  He's a trip, right?  (Not Ben Franklin, ya moog, but da Creature who finds a way to make EVERYTHING about the revolutionary war because he's so obsessed with it currently).

I, on the other hand, was as underwhelmed as usual with the Mississippi Museum of Art, which boasts tiny little collections of mostly irrelevant junk and occasionally has some larger collections travel through on their way to somewhere interesting.  Sorry, those of you in Jackson who really LIKE the Museum, and I'm sure many Bothans died to bring it to us or some other such nonsense about how sacrificial those in charge have had to live in order for us to have even this.... BUT, I've been to real museums and this ain't it, boys and girls.  Still, da Creature enjoyed himself and my $8 or so wasn't terribly wasted.

Someday, I hope to take him to Washington, D.C. and New York.  There are at least more museums there; some of renown, even.  Meanwhile, I will regale him with tales of our days spent trying to get as much seen in the Hermitage as was humanly possible in the little time we had, and talk about being in the cold room at the British Museum, between the Magna Carta and the Gutenberg Bible. He can look at our pictures of the Brownian movement we endured with the thousands of other people crammed into the Vatican museums that day (those few hours) and I can teach him about scultpure and art in the great Cathedrals as best I can in books and photos. In the meantime, though, I suppose this will have to suffice.

And in the WTH files from the art museum...

Steam punk folk do better work than this.  Seriously.  I have seen better art at Sci-fi conventions.