STELLLAAAA!

This is our new parakeet, Stella.  When we first placed her in her cage, Stella flapped around desperately searching for a place to hide where the scary leering people couldn't see her anymore.

Nailed it

That was a little over a week ago.  Stella eventually crawled out from under her seed dish but spent most of her first week lying low and evaluating her new situation.

 If I walked too close to the cage, she panicked and became a pretty blur. 

When I walked away, she simmered down but remained on high alert.

After one week, we've reached the point where she no longer suffers a hysterical flapping panic attack when I reach in to change her water.  We're getting somewhere.

A couple days ago, Stella thought she might possibly be comfortable enough in her new home to chirp.

Which made all of us very excited and caused a family stampede into the kitchen --

Stella did not like the sudden overwhelming attention --

And since then has made herself very small.

I put a mirror in her cage so now Stella thinks she has company.

 Parakeets aren't the brightest bulbs in the animal world

I come from a parakeet family.  There was always a parakeet flapping around somewhere in my childhood home.  My favorite, named Magoo, loved to eat cereal.  He dive-bombed my dad's cereal bowl every morning, usually skimming the surface and stealing a flake in the process but occasionally missing and landing right in the middle of the bowl.  He had a need, and the need was Wheaties.


Magoo was trained to sit on our fingers and could talk.  He was eventually killed by our dog but that's not a memory I care to relive.

My mom had parakeets before she had children.  She had a parakeet back when she and my dad were dating.  Dad poked at that parakeet so many times, it became a very angry parakeet and began attacking any hand that entered the cage, including my mom's.  It's still a point of contention in their relationship.

Years later, when she was pregnant with my sister, my mom's parakeet got profoundly sick.  The bird lost all its feathers during the course of its illness and became a naked, shivering, blinking, miserable presence in Mom's everyday life.  Mom, pregnant and hormonally challenged, couldn't take it anymore.

She took the bird to the vet but was unable to say she wanted it put down.  She hemmed and hawed and beat around the parakeet-killing bush until the lady behind the desk said, loud enough for the entire waiting room to hear, "OH, SO YOU WANT US TO KILL YOUR BIRD?"

Heads swiveled.  Mom whispered "yes" and ran.  The lady behind the counter called after her, "YOU WANNA KEEP THE CAGE AFTERWARDS OR WHAT?" but Mom said "KEEP IT" as she pushed out the office door with her belly. 

All this to say parakeets are in my DNA.  And by saying that, maybe I can convince myself it's OK to add yet another pet to our burgeoning galley of pets which now includes a praying mantis, an ant farm, about fifty aquatic snails, a schnauzer, the mouse living under our refrigerator, and a bunch of crickets which really shouldn't count since they're only here to be Mantisy's dinner.  But still, I gotta feed those little f*ckers. 

It takes some time to train a bird to love you but we'll get there.  I look forward to the day she does this --

Wheatie bomb!

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

Worms, bloody brains, and singing bacon

I love throwing Halloween parties.  Halloween is a holiday that doesn't take itself seriously.  The menu planning, the decorating, the wardrobe consideration -- all are more fun for Halloween because they're based on what's weirder/funnier/grosser and deliberated while eating handfuls of mini Snickers.

Indeed, I love throwing Halloween parties right up until the hour before the party begins.  At that point I hate throwing Halloween parties.  No matter how seamless party preparations have been up until then, the hour before is when everything suddenly goes inexplicably wrong.

That's when the sound system crashes, annihilating the carefully constructed Halloween playlist, and the mixologist friend who was in charge of making the rosemary-infused Aperol punch cancels so I have to learn how to make it myself in five minutes-- and there's math involved because ounces and milliliters are different -- and I burn the last batch of my mummy wieners, and I realize we're hopelessly short on ice, and my "blood spattered popcorn" becomes "dirt spattered popcorn" when I drop half of it on the floor.

My Halloween costume was inspirational...

"We CAN throw a party," says Rosie

...but it didn't stop me from muttering "I'm never doing this again" while scooping handfuls of popcorn off the floor into my mouth and yelling at Alex to get up on a chair in the middle of the room.  Plan B for the missing music was him singing the playlist into a toy microphone.

A piece of bacon singing "Thriller."  Best party ever.

The sound system got its sh*t together and started working after the first people arrived.
Thankfully.

As soon as our friends started showing up, all party-throwing angst disappeared. 

I could never regret you, Green Fairy.

Or you, Government Shutdown. 

You're worth it, Early-Onset Dementia. 

A sign of a successful Halloween menu is when guests not only won't eat the food, they won't stand within several feet of the table.

they don't want the worms

or the kitty litter

or the bloody brain

My sister -- I'll call her Raba -- recently moved to Seattle!  She moved here to be with her girlfriend, Zee.  They've since gotten engaged and we're all very excited.  I love those all-girl weddings.

 Yep, Raba and Zee are vampires. Get over it already!

Raba and I have always been told we look alike. One friend at the Halloween party talked at length to Raba not realizing she was my sister.  At one point he interrupted her to say, "It's so, so weird but you and MJ could honestly be twins." 

He eventually found out we were sisters.  I think he was relieved by the DNA explanation but also a little disappointed -- because for just a moment, the world was a mystical and wondrous place.

It ended up being a late night involving dancing by the drunker guests.  In a profound moment of reconciliation, Contractor God showed up (he's alive!) and danced solo to "Rump Shaker." I decided to forgive him for abandoning our house project.  It's hard to stay mad at a middle-aged man twerking in your living room under a blacklight.

All I wanna do is zooma zoom zoom zoom and a boom boom.

Have some pumpkin vomit 

Halloween isn't just for adults. We shared it with the kids, too.  On Halloween we joined our circle of C.D. friends at the neighborhood cinema to watch Halloween cartoons, eat some dinner and drink some beers.

That's Snow White and Zombie Doctor mesmerized by Frankenweenie.

Then we all descended upon the neighborhood.  Trick or treat chaos ensued.

Here in the C.D. we cross streets in groups of 50 

And take group photos in front of corner stores 

Hey, that's a pretty good deal on those packs of Newports...

Bummer Halloween is over.  But in happy holiday news, I've already found Alex's Christmas present --

or maybe I'll go with this --

Either way, I'm wrapping that guy in something.

And lastly, this just happened to Oscar the schnauzer --

He had surgery on his eye and is now the most despondent animal on the planet.  Not only is he pain-medicated to the hilt, he can't navigate doorways with his cone.  He often catches the side of the cone on the door frame.  He then stands there frozen, confused, groggily swaying, and makes quiet whining sounds until I come get him.  Oscar's Halloween costume was misery this year.


See you next time, goofy holiday,
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

Room Mother

 

It's tough restoring a grand old house like Banister Abbey because everyone is watching you and giving you lots of opinions.  Our neighbors peer at our every design decision and occasionally offer the very unhelpful, "ya know, what you should have done is..."  It's a real dick move, in my opinion.

We like our neighbors very much.  I think the problem is they've been staring at our house for many years in its disrepaired state and have developed many ideas over those years they're itching to finally share.

One neighbor suggested we paint each of the newly-installed dentils a different color.

No.

The contractors and I regularly inspect old photos of the house procured from the city in our attempts to put her back the way she was in 1904.  We stand in a circle on the driveway, photos in hand, heads bowed, squinting, silent.  To passersby, it may look like we're praying and that's not too far from the truth -- if we don't get the soffit detail right, we're surely going to hell.

 I hope we did right by the corbels

As I put the kids to bed a few weeks back on a very rainy night, Lucien said, "You left the faucet running in the bathroom, Mom."  And indeed, that's what it sounded like.  But I was pretty sure we did not have a sink out on the stairwell landing.

I investigated the source of the sound and found a lovely cascading waterfall entering from the corner of a  piece of plywood (which is currently standing in for a transom window) and landing on a brand new piece of wood furniture directly below.

Lots of swear words later, the water is gone but that lovely new piece of furniture will never be the same.  Welcome to renovation hell,  furniture, where windows are luxuries and pieces of plywood are sometimes your only defense against a very wet climate.  Accept it, and try to enjoy your new warped and wavy texture.

Oscar has fleas.  Correction: Oscar has "really really bad" fleas, according to our vet.  The vet looked at me strangely when I replied, "Oh, good! Can I feed fleas to a praying mantis?"

The vet gave me a giant spray can with instructions to spray all fabric and carpet surfaces in our house then stay out of the house for a few hours while it dries.  Before I unleashed the toxic flea-killing fumes this past weekend,  I gave my family strict orders:  these are dangerous chemicals, go outside and wait for me in the car.

Those were the only instructions I gave and I honestly don't think they were too difficult to understand.

I sprayed upstairs. It was pretty intense. When I came downstairs I found my entire family in the entryway, just standing there staring up at me like a bunch of dummies.  "What are you doing in here?  Get out, get out, get out, you imbecilic idiots!"  I screamed, light-headed from the fumes, possibly flailing a bit in the arms area.

Maybe it was a harsh critique of my loved ones but come on, people.  There was only one instruction -- "Go" -- and you botched it.

I managed to get my instruction-averse family out the door, hopefully without any further brain damage, and we drove up north to a pumpkin patch.  Did you know pumpkins can talk?  They talk all wonky and slow out of their sideways mouths.  Never mind, possibly still the flea fumes.

We met up with some friends at the pumpkin patch.

This photo is more awesome if you zoom in on what Lucien is doing to Coco's face --

Why can't men just push a wheelbarrow normally, without getting all nuts about it?

There was a pumpkin cannon at the farm.  We stood in line at the cannon watching pumpkins soar off into the distance with very loud booms.  Alex looked down at the youngest and smallest of our posse members and said, "You ready to fly, little buddy?"  The boy's eyes widened and he whispered  "no" before hiding behind his dad's legs.  And a lifelong fear of hairy men with accents is born.

The pumpkin patch/farm was awesome until the point of absolute saturation, which is the very second you realize you can't be in a place for one more second and are ready to chew your arm off if that's what it takes to free you.  It's also the exact point in time all the children in your group will scatter in different directions, leaving parents glassy-eyed, desperate to herd yet unable to move and wondering aloud if they can go home without the kids because OH MY GOD WE'VE GOT TO GET OUT OF HERE.

My friend, Seattle Mom, and I are room mothers for Coco's preschool class.  So far we have no idea what that means.  We've asked several times what we're supposed to do as room mothers but our questions have yet to be satisfactorily answered. 

Until we understand our responsibilities as room mothers, we will continue to abuse the imagined privilege that comes with such a lofty rank.  Cutting people off in the parking lot, stealing shoes from that little girl because they're cuter than Coco's, letting the door slam in that kid's face because my arm is tired and I don't want to hold it open -- B*tches, I'm room mother, I do what I please.  

(This just in -- we're responsible for sending emails and gathering money for a teacher appreciation week present.)

I'm finally a somebody!
MJ