Stories, most involving screaming

The end of the school year is chaos.  There's a ceremony or event every day at one of the kids' schools. None of them are very fun and they all seem designed to make parents insane by being either emotionally manipulative (Her "graduation"? What? She's four years old!) or too overwhelming ("Come to the school carnival where a constant stream of screaming kids are going to step on your toes as they run past you. And you have to work at a booth. And it's going to be hell.")

School stuff aside, our general contractor showed up on our driveway recently and started to cry.  His wife of 30 years just left him and now he can barely get out of bed.  It's hard to pressure a guy in a situation like that so our exterior project may never be finished.  We may have to be OK with a half painted house.

(We're giving him some time to regroup and then will gently suggest he focus on his work, that his work will give him strength and pull him through...)

I chaperoned Coco's preschool field trip to a nearby farm a couple weeks ago.  I spent most of the farm visit shielding a little girl from view of the pigs, of which she was inexplicably terrified.  If she happened to look up when my body wasn't blocking her view of said demon pigs, she would start screaming.

 this is how far we had to stand from the pigs

At one point we had to walk past the pig pen and that was a tense moment indeed.  I picked up the little girl, her screams in my ears and her kicky legs landing directly on my kneecaps, and ran past the pigs.  I deposited her safely on the other side of the pig pen in front of a cow who had her nose stuck through the slats of her fence.  The little girl didn't like that cow either so I had to pick her up again and run past the cows.  Rinse and repeat at the goats.

That was exhausting but the worst part of the field trip was the constant singing of "Frozen" songs from the four little girls packed into my car there and back.  It seems I wasn't the only one suffering; when we got back to school, a fellow chaperone threw open his car door and fell helplessly to the pavement pleading, "If I hear one more "Frozen" song I'm going to lose my mind, please make them stop, please, please."  But they didn't stop, they'll never stop.

Coco had another sleepover with her aunts recently.  She did their nails because Coco is convinced she's good at giving manicures. (She isn't.)  The worst part is when she blots your still-wet nails with a napkin and tells you "It helps them dry faster" when you protest.  Then you have to spend the next week walking around with pieces of napkin stuck to your nails because if you remove her manicure, so help you God, she will glare you to death.


I volunteered to work the Prize Booth at the elementary school carnival last night.   That's a brutal job, especially at the end of the evening when all the kids swarm the prize booth to redeem their tickets for prizes.  I'm well suited to that kind of chaos for some reason (it's because I'm raising Lucien).  I can usually roll with yelling and jostling kids but this event stretched even my limitations.  I lost my voice halfway through and needed water so badly I began grabbing the wrists of friends as they passed and croaking, "water....please..." in a hoarse voice that frightened them.

Alex eventually joined me at the Prize Booth.  If I'm well suited for that kind of work, Alex is born for it.  He immediately morphed into a carnival barker.  He held up crappy toys, declared them the "must-have toy of the carnival" and then held an auction for the hot ticket item when the kids started fighting over a toy they weren't interested in five seconds prior.  Alex cleared the prize table of a lot of crap with his wheeling dealing methods.

Some big news around here is Lucien finally learned how to ride a bike.  He's resisted learning to ride a bike for years, always told me he was happy with his scooter and didn't care about bikes.  I would tell him bikes are faster than scooters but he never believed me.  He would then challenge me to a bike/scooter race down the sidewalk and would always win because he has less concern for smacking into the many pedestrians on that sidewalk than I do.

The turning point was a sleepover at a friend's house.  His friends wanted to ride bikes but Lucien told them he didn't know how.  So his friends -- two on either side of the bike and one standing in front yelling directions and encouragement -- taught him how to ride in about five minutes.  He took off around the block and hasn't gotten off the bike since.

Maybe I can convince his friends to teach Lucien how to tie his shoes, too.  All I get on that is, "Meh, just keep buying me these kinds of shoes" as he points down to his slip-on Vans.

I played a game of chess with Lucien this evening.  I had him cornered and said, "checkmate."  Lucien then grabbed his king and, arm stiff like a windshield wiper, wiped all the remaining pieces off the board while yelling, "Oh my God, my king's gone crazy, what is he doing, I don't know what's going on!"  He then ran out of the room and up the stairs into his bedroom where he locked the king inside a storage bin.  He still claims I haven't won the game.

I texted the chess story to Alex, out for drinks at the time with his old European posse who are in town for a work meeting.  Alex relayed the story to his friends and the German guy responded, "I think that's how the French won all their wars."

Please, Coco, please no more manicures,
MJ

Lizard Disco

Lucien just turned eight.  It's a number that makes me say "wow" but not yet a number that freaks me out.  My guess is that will come around 10.

Lucien wanted to take a birthday treat to school to share with his classmates.  His teacher said, due to all the food allergies in the class this year, the only "treat" allowed was fruit.  So I sent him to school with a bag of bananas.  Happy Birthday, son, get buckwild.

I'm confused about my own school days, back when our parents were free to send in piles of gluten-filled gut bombs for classroom birthday celebrations.  Were there fewer allergies when I was a kid?  Or were there a bunch of miserable moaning kids on the ground out in the hallway I just didn't notice? 

I'm not making light of food allergies.  I know kids with severe food allergies; if they come into contact with the wrong thing, it could kill them.  It's scary as hell.  I'm just trying to understand how food allergies got so omnipresent that kids now have to blow out birthday candles stuck into browned pieces of pear.

Lucien has wanted a lizard for a long time. Whenever we went to Petco to get something for one of our other animals, Lucien stood transfixed in front of the lizards.  He especially liked the baby bearded dragons because they would always come check him out, pressing their tiny bearded dragon faces against the glass with their heads cocked to the side.

Then the begging would begin and I'd have to remind him of the cold hard truth -- no way we're getting a bearded dragon, those things can live up to 15 years and that's more of a commitment than I'm willing to make to a lizard.

But lizard fate is funny.  A middle-aged bearded dragon dropped into our laps last week when a woman posted on a local parenting listserve that her son was headed to college in the fall and was leaving behind his beloved pet bearded dragon named Bobo.  She wanted Bobo to go to a good home, preferably a home with a kid who would love Bobo as much as her son had.

We went to meet Bobo the next day after school.  The woman who welcomed us was visibly moved; Lucien reminded her so very much of her son at the age of almost-eight.  There were other people interested in Bobo, too, but the woman and her family discussed and decided to tell them to BUZZ OFF.  As soon as they met, it was obvious Bobo belonged with The Loosh.

When Lucien met Bobo

I wanted Bobo to be a surprise for Lucien on his birthday so had to stall for a week.  I hemmed and hawwed and made up all sorts of reasons why we couldn't get Bobo, at least not yet.  It made Lucien crazy to the brink of disowning me as a mother.  He pulled his hair out and cried, "What?? His eyes are too blinky for your liking?  How is that even a thing!?"

The crisis was solved by telling Lucien he had to "earn" Bobo.  He had to take exclusive care of our other pets for one week to prove he was up to the responsibility of caring for Bobo.  It was a pretty brilliant idea; Lucien stopped pestering me AND I no longer had to clean the bird cage. 

The plan may have backfired on our pets, though.  Lucien was so excited to be working towards Bobo he arose early every morning and completed the entire pet care checklist by 6:00 a.m.  Oscar was groggy and confused as Lucien dragged him outside to go to the bathroom and gave him a bath before dawn.  Stella no doubt grew concerned when the kid with the crazed eyes and shaky excited hands changed her water every five minutes.

On Lucien's birthday, while he was at school eating his celebratory banana, my sister Raba met me at Bobo's house to help carry his 50 gallon tank to my car.  Carrying that tank was similar to carrying a Volkswagen -- as in, you know it's going to be heavy in theory but you have no idea what "heavy" means until you're up under the thing.

Bobo's owner had to jump in and help as we descended the steep and uneven concrete stairs outside her house.  All three of us felt it necessary to holler "Careful! Careful!" every few seconds just in case the other two had suffered sudden mental impairment and were about to go all gangbusters with the thing.

It was slow treacherous going made more exciting by the fact we all decided to wear stylish heeled boots that day.  Not the most practical footwear for what we were doing but dang we looked good doing it.

Raba and I were on our own once we got back to our house but after a pep talk, some stretches and some heeled shoe removal, we successfully installed Bobo in the newly redesigned kid room.  I rushed to finish the room last week because I was concerned about the possible effects of paint fumes on bearded dragons.

Kid room before --

 

Kid and lizard room after --

The look on Lucien's face when he came home from school that day and saw Bobo in the middle of his room was worth all the effort it took to get him there. Even my severely bruised thighs, which had been used several times as a tank resting place until feeling returned to my arms, ached a little less because of all of the happiness.

Bobo is the coolest animal.  He's docile and likes to be picked up and held.  He loves basking under his basking lamp.  He enjoys being outside in the grass in warmer months.

 He also likes piña coladas and getting caught in the rain

We've never had a reptile before so there were some things to get used to.  For instance, as soon as Bobo's basking light turns off (it's on a timer), Bobo immediately flattens himself against the floor and falls into a deep, impenetrable sleep as his body temperature drops.  We thought we'd killed him the first time he did that.

Bobo was fine again the next morning but Oscar the schnauzer was a jittery mess.  He sniffed and pawed and whined all over the kids' room in an attempt to understand what kind of creature had just invaded his territory.  In a spastic fit of nerves, Oscar knocked over Bobo's cricket container.  Dozens of crickets poured out and hopped every which way in joyful freedom.  The Great Cricket Escape of 2014 was unfortunately timed given we were supposed to be in the car headed to school at that very moment.

I screamed for Lucien to help me and he came running.  We grabbed crickets as fast as we could, stuffed them back into their cage and held Oscar at bay with our feet because he was intent on capturing ALL THE CRICKETS NOM NOM NOM with his mouth.  Alex stood in the doorway and laughed until he doubled over. That man's worthless sometimes.

We're pretty sure we got all the crickets back into their cage except the two who hopped under Coco's bed never to be seen again.  God I hope they aren't a male and a female and, if they are, don't find each other irresistibly attractive.

Later that morning, the men working on our house showed up and started messing around with some exterior electrical work.  This involved a few crossed wires and a few tripped fuses.  Bobo's heat lamp was on one of the affected circuits.  When the circuit blew, his lamp turned off so Bobo would flatten himself down and go to sleep.  Then I, worried about the lizard, would re-set the fuse and he'd get back up again.  A few minutes later the circuit would trip again so he would lie down again.  I would run and re-set.  Repeat. 

His first full day of life with us and he was living in some kind of surreal lizard disco.

So Happy Birthday to you, Lucien, our sweet, funny, loud animal-loving boy.  You are a unique individual and a wonderful son and a source of great joy and amusement in our lives.  I never could have imagined all the ways you'd change my life for the better in just eight years. 

 For starters, I never thought I'd see a big lizard in a bed

GO SEAHAWKS!
MJ

Little John he always tells the truth

Our family went for a hike together last weekend.  Here's an example of what it's like to be an anxious person out for a hike on a beautiful day; Alex and the kids hiked merrily on after we noticed this sign but I stopped in my tracks, heart racing --

QUICK, HOW MUCH DO THE FOUR OF US WEIGH ALL TOGETHER?

After doing math and realizing we had over 4500 lbs. leeway, I continued to worry about imminent trail collapse for no reason.  You should have seen my wild eyes when a group of people riding horses passed us. I grabbed my babies around their waists and took off into the forest.

How can you enjoy that beautiful waterfall
when you're about to plunge into the abandoned mines below?

Alex works for a BIG COMPANY.  There are several biggies here in Seattle so take your pick and go with it.  I've promised him I'll never discuss his work on the blog so don't ask, I will neither confirm nor deny.

BIG COMPANY holds their annual party every winter.  It's generally something we skip but this year there was a band playing the event with whom I have a long history -- one very delicious Vampire Weekend.

I've been with Vampire Weekend since their first release many years ago.  We broke up for a little while because I reached saturation -- their jaunty syncopated rhythms suddenly made me want to punch myself in the face.  But I'm happy to report, with their newest release that is pretty much the best thing ever, we're back together and it's looking permanent.



You had me back at A-Punk but you're keeping me with Hannah Hunt.

If you ever wondered what an annual party for a BIG COMPANY looks like, here's the answer --

Ice fairy women rollerskating in a boxing ring.   No party's complete without them.

So many people

Acrobats dangling from the ceiling

So many lights 

Motherf*cking igloos

Pictures taken in front of green screens.
We had no idea we were in a cozy lodge

In this one we were going for "bored."

We had fun walking around the gigantic party but then it was time to do what I had to do.  I had to be in front of that stage when Vampire Weekend took it.  Alex doesn't know Vampire Weekend but he was a good sport, tagging along behind me as I cashed in all our free drink tickets then cradled our drinks in my arms in front of the stage, double-fisting those suckers while waiting and waiting because I WILL NOT LOSE MY SPOT.

The anticipation was delicious.  And then Ezra Koenig came out onto the stage.  He was right there in front of me, slipping into his famous Epiphone Sheraton, as it always should be.

Some live shows I've seen recently were so good, they forever cemented my love for the band but others were so disappointing I haven't listened to the band since (I'm looking at you, Cave Singers, with your snooozefest set list and ten-minute long flute solo).

When a show is good, I enter a euphoric state.  Nothing exists but the music and the dancing and the singing loudly with the people next to you, people who used to be strangers but now are your very close fellow fan friends.  It's bliss when a band sounds the way they should sound and that's the kind of show Vampire Weekend gave -- the very best kind.  I banged my two beers together over my head in lieu of applause because I had no free hands.

Alex isn't as obsessive a music fan as I am but he hung in there, watching me with a bemused expression and saying things like, "Wow you're really in your element right now, aren't you."  I think he was happy I was finally happy with some aspect of his job.  His job is stressful and takes a lot of hours away from our family life.  But his job also just gave me Vampire Weekend so we're going to call a truce for a little while.

When the show was over, Ezra Koenig gave a grin and a nod to the audience then strolled off the stage with his hands in his pockets as if to say, "So I just rocked pretty hard, wonder what I should do to fill the rest of this lovely evening."

Thanks much, V.W.

Leaving the BIG COMPANY party, we stepped out into a Seattle pulsing with excitement. It was the night before the NFC championship game and this city loves its Seahawks.  Everywhere we looked, the 12th man was pumped up and ready --

We had some friends over for the game the next day and they all turned into rabid lunatics.  You could be having a perfectly normal conversation with a person and then all of a sudden they start yelling, "NO, NO, NO!!  WHAT ARE YOU DOING, NO, GODDAMMIT, NO!" and fall to the ground.  Perfectly normal, just watching football.

We collectively moaned and screamed and fist-pumped our Seattle Seahawks all the way to beautiful, exquisite victory.

We're going to the Super Bowl!

The best part is we're going to play the Denver Broncos in the Super Bowl.  My parents, of course, live in Denver so the trash-talking has already begun.  I just wish I knew what some of it meant.

I hope we're all still family after the game

Lucien turned eight years old this week.  I'll write about that next time, some interesting tales to tell.

I love Lucien the most profoundly when I watch him take off from our car every morning and run into his school.  He grins, his hair flops, his feet, so comically large and paddle-like these days, slap the pavement.  Lucien never walks away from the car, he always runs with that unbridled enthusiasm for life only an eight-year-old boy can have.  It puts a lump in my throat every time and I have to resist calling him back to the car for just one more hug.

I felt that same feeling last weekend when Coco had her first sleepover with Auntie Raba and Auntie Z.  She didn't even look back at me, just went forward to have the greatest night of her life, a night that involved eating spaghetti in her underwear, many unicorn tattoos, and some godawful Barbie movie.

I'm glad my sister lives in Seattle now so my daughter can know her awesomeness up close and personal.  I'm glad Coco has come to love her aunts to the point of delirium.  I'm also glad I'll know where to find her when she runs away from home in ten years.

I give a f*ck about an Oxford comma, Vampire Weekend.
MJ

Oh the wonderful things we'll make you do

Lucien flipped someone the bird in math class last week.  He pried his middle finger up out of his clenched fist and said, "I'm going to show you my middle finger now."

He got in trouble and I got a call from the teacher.  She said he didn't seem to know exactly what it meant to flip the bird but he knew it wasn't nice.  I explained the subtle yet loaded sociological meaning of the middle finger to him later that evening and he said, "OK, I'll only use it when I get real mad."

I went out with a friend, Seattle Twin Mom, Saturday night and mentioned the middle finger story.  She told me when she was about Lucien's age, her brother (who is six years older) told her showing your middle finger meant "Have a nice day."  So there sweet little Seattle Twin Mom went, flipping the bird all over her small hometown.  Her mom got a few phone calls from concerned citizens wondering why that cute little girl down the street suddenly turned into a real a**hole.

Alex and I try hard to do fun things with the kids on the weekends.  The kids don't always enjoy our "fun" ideas but they are still dependent and small and semi-portable so don't have much choice in the matter. 

Alex took the kids to a Japanese restaurant for lunch recently, one of those places where food circles the room on a conveyor belt and you have to grab your lunch as it passes by your table.  Lucien and Coco initially thought food whizzing by on a conveyor belt was awesome.  Their enthusiasm fizzled when they realized those containers of mackerel bits and octopus were lunch.

At first she was merely suspicious

 But then the sushi made her sad

So much for Japanese.  Let's try Vietnamese.  We've got a great Vietnamese place down the street from our house so we attempted more food horizon broadening.

We knew it was a failed experiment when Coco started eating plain lettuce

There's one food the kids will never turn down -- crappy U.S. macarons.

I'm not a food snob in general (raised on wiener bean casserole, after all) but there's something about the French macaron that's sacred and holds a very special place in my heart.  I have yet to find a macaron in the U.S. that truly captures what's happening over there in Paris.  Whenever a new French bakery-type place is recommended to me -- seriously, their macarons are the real deal! -- I take a bite and realize it is merely another pale ghostly imitation of the real deal. 

 exactly

The highlight of our most recent macaron attempt was when Lucien pointed to the counter and said, "Look, they have Macklemores!"  It couldn't have been a better fusion of our son's Paris and Seattle lives.

(For those wondering what the hell that meant, Macklemore is a rapper from Seattle)

There's just something off with the texture

There was a Life Sciences exposition at the Pacific Science Center over the weekend.  Lucien is a science-loving kid so we knew he would love it.

Except he didn't.  The brain table, which had real human brains cut in half and reeking of formaldehyde, made him knead his hands nervously and ask to go home. Guess we should stick to bugs and leave people out of it.

The kids are going to start refusing to leave the house with us

It was the most glorious Fall day on Sunday so we pulled out the scooters and went on a nice long walk through our fine city.   We didn't fully take into account Seattle's topography when planning our route.  There are lots of hills up in here.

We realized we weren't going to make it home easily when we saw Lucien, two blocks behind us and trying to scoot up a large San Francisco-style hill, yelling around about hating his scooter a whole, whole lot.  We eventually grabbed both of them by their jackets and began pushing/pulling them home. This would have been manageable except I wore slippery-soled boots.  I would slip while pulling on a kid, lose my grip on the kid, and the kid would start rolling backwards screaming before leaping off his scooter into some bushes.

It's family fun, kids.

Al and I left the kids with a sitter later that afternoon to go watch the Seahawks game at a rowdy Capitol Hill bar.  It was nice to get out together.  The kids were also thrilled because we were far away and no longer inflicting our ideas upon them.

I was reading a local news blog lately.  There was a story about some recent robberies in the C.D., one in particular in which a police helicopter located the burglary suspect hiding on someone's roof.   The following was written in the comments.

"...If it was a random 9pm burglary – then that is a freaky deal. We should all be up in arms and patroling the streets with pick handles.  We really need more detail on this kind of stuff. It makes a huge difference in the perception of risk. If it’s just thug on thug crime – I’m going to be leary of thugs. But if they be bustin into just anybody's house I’m gonna be all hillbilly."

What does it mean to get all hillbilly?  I'm picturing a lot of straw chewing and wearing of tank tops.  Is the idea to confuse burglars until they forget where they are, become disoriented and wander out of the C.D.?  I guess it's worth a try -- yee-haw, y'all.

Hillbilly is a decent idea but an even better way to fight crime is karate.  Lucien's pretty good at karate but Coco has a ferocity about her never before seen in a four-year-old karate novice.  Sure, sometimes she turns a somersault for no dang reason in the middle of the mat but other than that, she gets mean out there.

Hang in there, kids,

MJ

Crime, Auctions and Fish Parties

Ain't no party like a pumpkin party

If you're a parent of a school-aged child, you know the joys of curriculum night.  Curriculum night is when you go to your kid's school in the evening and squeeze into tiny chairs underneath trapezoids and parallelograms dangling from the ceiling by strings.  Then the teachers tell you all the ways they're going to force learning into your kid's brain.

I appreciate the teachers at our school but sometimes they offer unsolicited advice.  At curriculum night they told us, "9:00 p.m. is too late a bedtime for a second grader."  My impulse was to raise my hand and ask,  "What if I put my second grader to bed at the respectable hour of 8:00 but he's still awake in his bed at 9:00?  Should I then club him over the head like a baby seal to get him his much needed rest?" 

In a newsletter sent home last month the teachers asked parents to make sure girls wear tights or shorts underneath their skirts because glimpses of underwear were distracting the boys and "it's never too early to teach our girls a little modesty."  Finally, an answer to the nagging question "at what age do we start teaching girls they're responsible for boys' behavior?"  The answer is seven-ish!

Ugh ugh ugggghhhhh.  Hey Lucien, if you catch a glimpse of a girl's underwear, it's probably embarrassing for her so don't make a big deal about it and get your eyes back on your work where they belong.  Personal responsibility and being respectful of others -- internalize it.

So how many 911 calls have you made in the past 18 months?  I've made four.  One was the suspected bomb around the 4th of July last year.  One was the angry guy walking down the middle of our street yelling and throwing rocks.  One was the person who plowed over our traffic island in the middle of the night and knocked down the tree which had been lovingly planted there by our green thumb neighbor.

The fire department came and chopped down the tree because it was bent over and lying in the middle of the road.  They chucked it onto the front lawn of Banister Abbey where I found my sad neighbor standing over it the next morning.  He asked if I cut it down and I was slightly offended.  I admit it didn't look good, tree being in my yard and all, but why would I cut down a tree in the middle of the night?  I'm a very important room mother with numerous mysterious responsibilities.  I must get my rest.

(This just in -- as room mother I was recently asked to purchase several pumpkins with which to decorate the preschool classroom.  I accomplished my mission and stand at the ready awaiting further instructions.)  

My fourth 911 call was this past weekend.  I looked out my window around midnight while brushing my teeth and saw three young men trying to take down our street sign.  They threw rocks at it and climbed on each others backs trying to get at it.  When they began taking blocks from our retaining wall and stacking them at the base of the pole,  I said "OK THAT'S QUITE ENOUGH, A**HOLES."  I called my friends at 911, "Yo, it's MJ again."

Our city neighborhood is a hotbed of strange activity at all times.  We've had friends who live in more suburban neighborhoods ask, "Do you feel SAFE in this neighborhood?"  I would be sleeping with one eye open tonight if I was a street sign but other than that, yeah, I feel OK.

Maybe their question is as surprising to us as ours is to them when we go visit their neighborhood -- "What the hell do you guys DO out here?"  Here in the C.D. we watch dozens of people walk past daily and say "hi."  We walk a handful of minutes to restaurants, bars, theaters, and live music venues.  We stare at a city skyline from up close.  And yes, we call 911 when someone's acting the fool. 

Speaking of criminals, this is me getting fingerprinted --

I wish I could just leave it there, leave you wondering and guessing why this is happening.  

Hey wait, I can!  It's so fun to have a blog.

Al and I attended another charity auction over the weekend.  This is the 1,276,588nd auction we've attended since returning from France.

Our table at the auction was a rowdy one.  We badgered each other into buying things none of us wanted or needed.  They pressured Al and I into bidding on 12 pounds of fresh seafood ("just think of the party you can have!").  Yes, that's true!  So we kept bidding until we won it.  Yee-haw, fish party!

Now that sounds like a really terrible party.  I hate auctions.

The auction was held to benefit L'Arche, an organization I've mentioned before.  It was the place where Alex and I met, the very place where we banded together to fight street crime side-by-side for the next 15 years.

I won a painting in the silent auction. It was painted by Carol, a woman I used to live with in the Seattle L'Arche community.  She was 52 years old with Down Syndrome and barely verbal.  We were friends and loved each other very much.  I shared more belly laughs with her than I've shared with just about anyone.  We also got mad at each other sometimes.  She hit me hard in the arm once while visiting the zoo.  Carol, you were so stubborn.

My grandma died while I was living in L'Arche.  After I heard the news from my parents over the phone and came downstairs, Carol saw the look on my face before I said a word to anyone.  She squinted at me for a second, then rushed to me and wrapped me in a bear hug.  I cried into her shirt as she stroked my hair and said, "Oh Bustabee.....Bustabee...."  (Carol called everyone she loved "Bustabee")  She saw me through that grief unlike anyone else could.

Carol passed away while we were living in Paris.  I tried to write something for her memorial service but couldn't adequately articulate the importance of her well enough to send anything good.  I deeply regret it.

I'm so happy to have a piece of her -- her fun-loving self, her contagious laugh, her enthusiasm for life, her sweet soul -- now hanging in the Abbey.

 You were awesome, Bustabee.

So maybe I don't hate auctions.

We're busily preparing for our 2nd annual Halloween party.  This year I've added a giant glow-in-the-dark spiderweb and a blacklight to the decorations.  Should be fun when people get drunk, become hopelessly entangled, and fall down.

I hope our guests really like fish.
MJ