Last night (~11:30pm), Drew got really restless and threw his half of the comforter on me. He sat up and was feeling all around.
Syche: What are you doing?
Drew: Looking for something.
Syche: What are you looking for?
Drew: A piece of chocolate I dropped.
*beat*
Drew: But now that I say it out loud, I don’t think that really happened.
So he’s getting self-aware. Which is a little bittersweet. I hope this doesn’t mean the end of the days of having to convince him that I don’t own a hot air balloon, or that Words with Friends isn’t out to get him.
They’ve already sat through my graduations, all of ’em – from kindergarten to eighth grade to high school to college. So you’d think that this would be old hat. But apparently it’s weirder when it’s not you graduating, and you get to evaluate someone else’s major life choice.
Of course, they’ve also spent way more time in school than I did. When you’re a student, every step has such a firm expiration date on it (usually four years, if you’re doing it right) and so, while I felt like graduating college was an accomplishment, it wasn’t exactly a surprise, and I hadn’t been there that long anyway, and also I had to get out of this ceremony and over to Sacramento for a matinee.
But my parents have been teaching FOREVER. I know my mom started officially teaching long after I was in school, but she was there as an aide before that. I have memories from all ages of my mom at school, from monitoring the playground in elementary school, all the way up to middle school. As a substitute teacher, she took my sixth-grade class on one of our end-of-year field trips.
In high school it was my dad who was always around, whether he was actually teaching the class I was in, or just letting me and all my friends use the computers in his classroom during lunch. (I know, we were the most awesome kids ever, right?) He was one of my class advisors, which meant he led all the class meetings and was all over the prom planning. And probably the prom. Which was fine with me, since me and my parents have always been pretty cool.
But they’re graduating today. And I’m pretty sure they will still have to finish cleaning out their rooms next week (I mean, I could be wrong, but I’m just guessing here – teachers tend to accumulate a lot of stuff), but this is it. I’ve known this was coming for awhile now, but I guess it’s just sinking in.
Everyone keeps asking me, “What are they going to do??” and I just keep saying, “They will be busy.” Neither of them is a sit-around-and-do-nothing kind of person. I mean, maybe for a day. But not for much longer than that. So I’m pretty sure they’ll have things to do. I hope we will get to see each other more often.
Whatever they decide, I am super proud of them and they are extremely deserving of this chance to do whatever they want. So congratulations, you two, and definitely take at least a couple days to sit around and do nothing! (And then come visit me!) I love you both!
In sticking with the theme of Drew finding old board games in his attic and us playing them…today we played Forbidden Bridge, a game I’ve never heard of before but that his parents both seemed to have fond memories of when their boys were little.
But it’s hard to remember the rules to a game you played in 1992, and the instructions were missing. So Drew went online to try and find the rules. He found not just the rules, but the exact instruction manual from 20 years ago. So we read through all the rules (when do you ever do that, even with a new game?) and set up the game.
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The game was over pretty quick, but actually not as quick as I expected. You have to get up and across this bridge, and pick up jewels from the idol, and then get them back into your boat. But you spend a lot of time getting knocked off the bridge when the idol “wakes up.” It’s actually kind of freaky.
I don’t think this is going to become a regular party game, like Taboo or Scattergories, but it’s fun, and I can see why boys would like it. Drew and his brother definitely had a lot more “boy” games than I ever had growing up.
Bonus: this game, despite the moving parts, doesn’t take batteries. I guess it’s all, like, a wind-up mechanism. A board game in 2012 would never work like that. I am way impressed that this 1992 game still works perfectly. (Hope I didn’t just jinx it.)
I remember my dad teaching me to parallel park. The way it goes in my memory is that during one driving lesson when I was 15, he just announced that we were going to cover parallel parking so that I wasn’t one of those girls who can never do it. (He may not have actually said that, but that’s how it goes in my memory.)
I guess I took that very seriously. I have never liked anyone suggesting that I fit into the stereotype of the “female driver.” But I have taken special pride in parallel parking. I’m pretty good at it. It helps that I’m driving the same car I’ve been driving for 11 years, so I have a really stellar feel for the dimensions of the thing.
This is my parallel parking job from when I got home this evening. And yes, the spot I was parking in was a pretty good size. And honestly, this is slightly closer to the curb than I would usually shoot for. But still. This is one shot, on the first try.
This weekend felt longer than three days, but in that kind of weird draggy way. Allow me to explain.
On Saturday we had a dinner-and-game-night at our place, which I spent the day kind of stressing about, since it was an eclectic crowd of people and I’m not quite used to playing hostess yet. But overall everything went very well (possibly better than I had expected) and I learned that I love the game Balderdash, which I have never played before but now want to play all the time.
On Sunday, Drew and I went with Erin to San Jose to help out her dad with this steampunk convention he was doing. It was part of FanimeCon, but apparently only sort of? We didn’t really have all the details, but we were mostly there to do little odd jobs and make sure no one stole any of the equipment. It was…nerdy, honestly, and I don’t need to get into it but there was some major judging going on there. (By us; of the people attending the convention.) It was a fun day though, and it’s always good to branch out and spend some time around people wearing full out Victorian costumes (with steampunk accessories) and speaking in bad British accents.
Also, this bag of heads. But I have no idea why.
On Sunday night Drew and I started our Modern Family marathon – we hadn’t watched any of this most recent season, which ended last Wednesday. At least, we thought we hadn’t, until we started watching episodes and realized we’d actually seen about 4. But marathoning it is more fun than watching a half-hour episode once a week.
That’s mostly what we did on Sunday (after finishing reading Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in the morning), until after 9 episodes I said, “I need a break,” and then right after that Hulu Plus said “You’ve been watching for 3 hours, need a break?” Oh how we laughed.
We went for a walk but didn’t really accomplish anything while on it. Well, we did pick up a menu from this Thai place near us that we may try out later this week.
We watched some more episodes that night, but we still have maybe 8 or 9 to go, which I think is a nice amount. Although, I do want to finish them this week because I think I’d like to cancel Hulu Plus before I have to pay for another month. (That’s how I roll.)
When I came into work this morning, I found a post-it saying “Gotcha!” taped over the laser on my mouse (so it wouldn’t work). I also found these people taped under the handset of my phone:
If you’re not familiar with Game of Thrones, that’s Cersei (she’s sort of a bad guy) and Tyrion (he’s totally the best guy). Tonight we watch episode 9 of season 2, which aired on Sunday, and which I have heard is an amazing episode. I am pretty stoked. (And I highly recommend if you’re not watching, you begin immediately.)
And, finally, if you’re keeping score, today marks 22 weeks pregnant for me, which is the end of the 5th month. (The counting is complicated, but trust me: 22 weeks = 5 months.) This week the baby is the size of a papaya, and probably weighs about a pound. This isn’t a particularly huge landmark, but we’re celebrating every single little one, plus I just kind of like this picture I took this morning. So please enjoy this relatively infrequent pregnancy update!
This weekend has been all about cleaning. Yesterday we went down to Redwood City and, along with Drew’s parents, cleaned the heck out of his grandma’s house, since she’s on her way back from Hawaii. It was a warm day down there and by the time we were done, I was seriously worn out.
So this morning we got up and started in on our place – there have been all these things we just haven’t done yet since getting all our stuff into the apartment, and we tackled ’em all. I started with a short(ish) list of things I wanted to get done scribbled on the back of a bill, and then Drew added some things he wanted to accomplish…and 4-5 hours later it looks completely different in here.
At one point near the end of the frenzy, I had this flashback to being a kid, and spending the whole day cleaning my room (thanks Mom and Dad, because I’m pretty sure I didn’t do the bulk of that work myself), and how great it would feel at the end of the day. Peeling back the clean covers on a freshly made bed, straightening the alarm clock on a cleaned and organized nightstand, seeing everything around my room sorted and placed precisely in its spot…is there anything better?
And yeah, I’d say there’s still stuff we can do around here, but it feels more like maintenance now, than “finishing moving in.” And I even dusted things that didn’t look dusty, because that’s the way you keep them from getting dusty! Holy cow, it’s like I’m seriously an adult now. (Wasn’t one of my 2012 resolutions to become an adult? Or something like that?)
I just keep looking around at all the vacuum marks on the carpet, and how there are no clothes on the floor. It just feels so great. This afternoon, once we were done, I was stretched out on the (made) bed in a patch of sunlight, reading a fluffy nonsense book. It was a really great Sunday afternoon moment.
I will use this post – and this feeling – as motivation to keep this up for the rest of my life.
Yesterday I brought up the old adage that all quotes are either from the Bible or Shakespeare. Last night I was thinking about this. Before the internet, how did we know whether any particular quote was Shakespeare or Scripture?
If I had wanted to know where “Not with a bang but a whimper” came from, I would probably have to first have an idea (my idea was Yeats) and then I’d have to go through my poetry books from high school and college and try to find “that Yeats poem” that the quote was from.
If I were trying to narrow it down between the Bible and the Bard, I guess it’s possible that I would have a concordance of one or both of those things (my parents had a Bible concordance) and I could search for it that way. Is it likely, though, that I would have either of those books? (Maybe…as I was an English major, they would have been great pre-internet gifts.)
But then what happens in this situation, when all my guesses are wrong? I would have to just ask people if they knew, and keep an eye out for it in the future? Or maybe in a non-internet society I would be trained to remember these things better? And like a good English major, I would have just known: “Oh, that’s from TS Eliot’s The Hollow Men. It’s a reference to the Gunpowder Plot, and how instead of ending with the planned explosion, it ended with Guy Fawkes’ whimper as he was caught and executed.”
Man, I’d feel so smart all the time. And probably do better on Jeopardy!
But instead, the second I come up against something I’m not sure of (or something I’m pretty sure of) I run to Google to double check it.
New project: instead of just Googling things all the time* I’m going to try to remember some of them, using my brain power. Let’s see how this goes.
*Things I have Googled while writing this post: Yeats (correct spelling?); concordance (correct spelling?); “not with a bang but a whimper” (which Eliot poem was that again?); Shakespeare concordance (does such a thing exist?), “if I were” vs “if I was” (and now I finally understand the different between these two – so today is a success).
I wanted to go back through my Google search terms in my phone, because I like revisiting the things I’ve needed to look up while I’m on the go. It’s amusing and can bring back some happy memories. (Like all the Harry Potter stuff I’ve googled.) Unfortunately, I realize that my phone actually only keeps the terms for a couple weeks – major bummer.
So, in order from most to least recent, here they are:
Rampion – photo from flickr.com (click for direct link)
Rampion – I had radicchio at dinner last night…which led to me wondering if that was in the Witch’s “rap” in the opening song of Into the Woods…which led to us doing the rap…which led to Drew saying, “Do you think she entered her rampion in competitions?” (“my rampion, my champion”)…which led to me googling rampion to see exactly what it was. (I was positive that it was a type of lettuce, but it’s just a flower.)
BART schedule – took BART to Berkeley the other day. Checked the schedule a lot.
Lakeport English Inn – I had to find their phone number so I could call and double check that they weren’t cash only. (They’re not.)
Not with a bang but a whimper – The title of the final Dexter episode is “This is the way the world ends,” so then I said, “Not with a bang but a whimper,” and then Erin and I were debating what that quote was from. Then we were talking about how in The Westing Game (the best kids’ mystery book ever), one of the characters says that every quote is from the Bible or Shakespeare. I guessed that this was actually a quote from a Yeats poem, but it’s TS Eliot, which I totally should have known.
AJ Jacobs Drop Dead Healthy – Potentially my next book club pick, although it’s just come out and I’d like to wait to get it until it’s in paperback. At any rate, I love AJ Jacobs!
Fiona Fullerton – there was an oldschool version of Alice in Wonderland on TV, and I thought the actress playing Alice looked familiar, so I googled her. I do not know who she is at all.
Lego game of thrones – Someone recreated the Game of Thrones opening sequence in Legos. It’s okay. It would have been better if they had used the actual theme song, rather than using a weird “brand X” version of it.
Mahogany – On Facebook, The Hunger Games posts daily typography images that fans have done. Good examples are here and here. (That second one is worth a look around – she has some really stellar work, not just The Hunger Games but also Harry Potter stuff, and others.) A bad example is one that used the quote “That is mahogany” but spelled mahogany wrong. I was just double checking that I was spelling it right. Because I’m an insufferable know-it-all like that. (I did not comment on the post or anything.)
Just look at her.
Whore of Babylon – Dexter again. Just wanted to get some background info on the whore of Babylon.
How long does it take to get from London to Hogwarts? – Well this is self-explanatory. And the answer is, all afternoon. The train leaves at 11am and arrives sometime around 6 or 7 in the evening.
Low blood pressure – Just wanted to know what was considered low blood pressure. Just keeping healthy.
Handicapped parking san Francisco – Just curious if it’s true that if you have a handicapped placard, you don’t have to pay for parking in the city.
5k miles – The Arthritis Walk was 5k and I wanted to double check what I got myself into. (3.1 miles…so not much.)
Professor kettleburn – He taught Care of Magical Creatures at Hogwarts before Hagrid took over.
Professor sprout – We needed to double check her first name. (Drew was right, it’s Pomona.)
Carrie underwood blown away – I wanted to show Drew the cover for Carrie Underwood’s new album. Mostly because Jonathan said it looks like the winner of a Judith Light drag queen contest, and I knew that Drew would think that was funny.
Sorry, Carrie Underwood, you know I love you. (But I like you so much more when you’re all country and down-home kinda girl. This is just a lot of glitter, and a lot of leg.)
On Saturday morning Erin, Sam, Lysandra, Robert, and I had our monthly book club at Lovejoy’s in San Francisco. Lovejoy’s is Erin’s happy place, and if you give her a chance to choose a “special occasion” place, this will be it.
I had some delicous vanilla rooibos, and a sandwich plate. Half cucumber and dill, half tomato and cheese. They were both good, but now I can’t stop making tomato and cheese sandwiches at home.
The book club conversation was sparkling as usual. It wasn’t all about the book (it never is), but it covered all kinds of topics about women’s rights and parenting. (It was more fun than I just made it sound.)
Then for Mother’s Day I drove up to Lakeport and took my mom out for a “high tea.” I use the quotes because I know technically high tea isn’t the right word for the spread we had.
“High tea” is traditionally served after 5 pm to the working class, and made up of meat dishes and other heavy foods. It was more of a family meal. The ladies’ social occasion that Americans think of is called “afternoon tea” or “low tea” (it is traditionally served on low tables). The more you know!
So, a Mother’s Day afternoon tea, then. We had several types of sandwiches, and several types of sweets, and by the end of the meal I was several types of stuffed, which is silly, since everything is so tiny. But I mean, you’re also drinking pots of tea, which probably fills you up.
Both teas were fun and cute (is cute the wrong word?), although the Mother’s Day tea was slightly classier, since at Lovejoy’s we were having an intense conversation about all types of things that we had to come up with acronyms for so that the fancy ladies around us weren’t shocked. A good weekend!
I was going to say I probably don’t need any tea for awhile, but then I realized I’m drinking iced tea right now.
Oh also – I hope the color change of sychela.com (if you noticed it) didn’t freak you out. It’s something I’ve been debating for awhile, and finally took the plunge.
Do you ever have conversations in your head with someone? The other day, Imaginary Drew was asking me which of my parents was my favorite. This may be an actual conversation that’s happened out loud at some point. I thought I would have an answer for Imaginary Drew (I don’t like getting into fake conversations when I don’t know exactly what my platform is), but it turned out I had no idea which is my favorite parent.
I thought I would have reasons for why I favor either parent in a certain situation, but I couldn’t even make that work. Really what it comes down to is that I adore both my parents and that has nothing to do with the scenario. I am equally happy whenever either of them picks up the phone. (And I am basically over the moon if they actually pick up the phone before the answering machines picks up.) When I’m home for the afternoon or the weekend, I prefer it if they stay in the same room so I can stay there with them – if they split up it gets complicated.
I have a vague memory of being a kid, and of having divvied them up, into the times of day I preferred each of them. (No offense, parents, this is a weird little kid memory, and I was probably hopped up on Ovaltine.) I think I remember, but I could be wrong, deciding with my brother that we liked playing games with my dad during the day, but my mom was better at tucking us in at night.** Does that even make sense now? I don’t know. Would Robb back me up? Probably not.
Once I’d realized that I really don’t have a favorite, I realized how lucky that is. Lots of people don’t even know one parent, some people hate one (or both) of their parents…and I get two parents. Still together after all these years, and still as interested in me as I am in them. (I presume.)
Imaginary Drew, by the way, agrees with me that it’s impossible to name one favorite parent. This is corroborated by Real Drew. And really, haven’t we totally beaten the odds? By having two sets of parents who are still happy together? I mean, what are the chances? Hashtag lucky!
**A memory: I went through this phase where I had this deep fear that the toilet seat would be left up and one of our cats would fall in. This horrified me, and every night I would have to ask the parent tucking me in to double check that the seat was down. But I was too embarrassed to say the word “toilet” (I had the weirdest, shyest neuroses) so we made a deal that I would just sign the word for toilet and they would double check. Such patience!
The Cameraphone Diaries 