A New Year, an Old Couch

I'm sure I had every intent to write between my last post (mid-November) and today. Truly.

But, see, I had this goal last year to write more posts than my previous annual record (I wrote 70 posts in 2009). So on November 18, I hit post #100 and I thought that was a fantastic number. And when life got busy and I realized there'd be no way to hit 150 or 125 or some other monumental number, I figured a break from both Facebook and the blog would be ok. Just to preserve such a monumental number like 100.

Then there's the fact that my camera jumped off the kitchen counter to the tiled floor last month. That was a pretty awful experience.

Last night we rang in the new year on our couch, hedging bets on whether Jenny McCarthy would get her midnight smooch with my favorite former New Kid. (Donnie. What can I say? I was never a Jordan sort of girl and Joey always looked too young. Danny looked like a caveman and Jonathon just wasn't my type. Donnie it was.)

Somewhere around 11:15, when the east coast had rung in 2014, we went to bed like a couple of old farts.

That's just who we are right now and I'm pretty ok with it.

2014 will pick up speed, I'm sure of it.

I had every plan to write a thoughtful, insightful post, but as I type, my toddler is on our kitchen table launching the four-year old's legos in every direction. He's screaming. She's laughing. And I'm zoned out. I'm pretty sure that sums up much of 2013...where we balanced precariously between moments of awesome (state parks, birthdays, the zoo) and pure junk (broken water pumps, bounced checks, rejection letters).

I don't expect much else out of life, I guess and that's enough for me!

Here's hoping you rang in the new year in style and wishing you love and health in the new year!

...happy, happy...

Hiding Under a Rock

The rock I've been hiding under.

Gah!

It's already November 18?

I had every intention of being useful this month. Honestly. But first there was this amazing trip back East. And then I had to recover from that trip. And then I had to prep for teaching some poetry. And then I had to help a small group of the students put together and edit their very own 4th Grade Newspaper....it comes out this week, by the way. We're excited.

More than anything, I planned on participating in Nanowrimo this month, but it didn't happen.  I always start Nano...for the past five years. Granted, I've only finished once, but I've ALWAYS started. Oh well. There's always Camp Nano this summer if I'm super motivated.

In other news, I'm making like my blog friend Misty and indulging in Hallmark Channel holiday movie sweetness. I'm surprised I haven't put on 20 pounds with this sappy, ooeey, schloppy stuff, but man it's fun. It's also fun watching my kids grimace at all the mistletoe smooching and hugging. Ha!

I also broke my beloved camera last night. Knocked it right off the counter onto the ceramic tile floor, complete with a sickening crack. I almost puked. Then I cried. A lot. My poor husband didn't know what to do. Photos might be harder to come by the next few months, so just bear with me.

Other than that, I started up a genealogy blog (genealogy snoop), mostly for me to document a couple of research projects and to stay connected with some other family history bloggers. Like I needed a new obsession, right?

...happy happy happy...

Five Days in Vermont

Earlier this month, my mom flew my boys and I out to Vermont to attend her 60th birthday bash. (Thanks, mom!) It was a lot of fun traveling with my sons now that they're bigger and (I'll admit it) braver than I am about air travel.

We landed in Boston where my mom and my uncle were waiting for us with the most tricked out of tricked-out minivans for the two-hour trek north.

I'll just say it now: five days wasn't even close to enough time there.  I haven't been back to visit family in ten and a half years....haven't seen the places from my childhood that are just now starting to seem interesting and beautiful and unusual, so leaving was tough. Coming home to my husband and my little girls righted the melancholy, but still. I wanted more time to seek out the places I wanted to revisit and more time with the family members I haven't seen in a decade.

My hope is to take my entire family (brace yourself, Green Mountain State) next fall in time for the color changing...so we can be those obnoxious slow-driving freaks that drive my brother insane each year. Leaf peepers, they're called.

...happy happy happy....

1. Andover, Vermont. This is  the Congregational Church in Andover. I spent time when I was reallllly young at a farm a few hundred yards from this church.

My recent obsession with genealogy has unearthed that I have had TWO sets of ancestors get married in this church. One couple in 1802 and one couple in 1844.

I also found out that while I thought Congregational churches were fairly liberal (I have NO idea why I thought this...seriously), they were very, very, very strict and would spend much of their time up in your business if you were a parishioner, even going so far as to fine attendees who decided to imbibe alcoholic beverages in the privacy of their own homes. Yowza.

Still a beautiful church, though...right?

2. Andover, Vermont. The town sign.

 I know the sign wasn't made in 1761, but the town was.

Vermont has such a fascinating history in the Revolutionary War and Civil War. They even sent a lot of men to "seek revenge" on the French and their Native American allies after the massacre at Fort William Henry during the French and Indian War. (Remember that scene in "Last of the Mohicans" where Cora loses her father to Magwa and the ambush after the retreat? That was based on the massacre at Fort William Henry in 1757.)

3. Springfield, Vermont. The view from Uncle Bob's place.

I spent two summers hanging around that pond and I was lucky enough to meet the granddaughter of the nice man who owned the farm you're looking at. Christina and I would ride horses all over the property and she'd show me the sugar trees her grandfather used when he made maple syrup each spring.

4. Chester, Vermont. The First Baptist Church. I can't say "Chester, Vermont" without thinking about this big red church in the middle of town.

Never been inside, though.

When I was a teenager a friend and I tried to open the doors one evening just to peek inside (I was 17, maybe?) But it was locked down.

5. Chester, Vermont. A little creek at the back of town. I'm standing on a suspension footbridge.

 My kids are off to the left, on solid ground, yelling at me to stop being so immature. I would jump up and down on the bridge to freak them out.

6. Chester, Vermont. I was a former inmate at this elementary school.

Kindergarten and first grade right there, folks. And yes, that's a gravestone in the forefront of the picture. It's not technically in the school yard so much as I'm taking the picture from the colonial-era graveyard that's situated a few yards from the school yard.

Graveyards are fascinating to me now. To my kids? Notsomuch.

7.  Chester, Vermont.  Brookside Cemetery.

I have an ancestor named Philomen Parker buried in this graveyard. After serving in Lexington in the Revolutionary War (his father was the first recorded casualty of that conflict...bummer), he moved to Chester with his wife and six children. A decade or so later, typhus would come through the town and wipe out his wife and three of his oldest children.

This grave is obviously not Philomen's. My children got grumpy after about twenty minutes of searching and decided that graveyards were NOT where they wanted to spend their Vermont vacations.

The Hag by Robert Herrick (1648)

The Hag is astride,
    This night for to ride;
The Devill and shee together:
    Through thick, and through thin,
    Now out, and then in,
Though ne’r so foule be the weather.

    A Thorn or a Burr
    She takes for a Spurre:
With a lash of a Bramble she rides now,
    Through Brakes and through Bryars,
    O’re Ditches, and Mires,
She followes the Spirit that guides now.

    No Beast, for his food,
    Dares now range the wood;
But husht in his laire he lies lurking:
    While mischiefs, by these,
    On Land and on Seas,
At noone of Night are working,

    The storme will arise,
    And trouble the skies;
This night, and more for the wonder,
    The ghost from the Tomb
    Affrighted shall come,
Cal’d out by the clap of the Thunder.


Anybody else ready for Halloween? I know we sure are...

...happy happy happy...

How Can It Be I am No Longer I by Lucie Brock-Broido (1997)

Winter was the ravaging in the scarified Ghost garden, a freak of letters crossing down a rare Path bleak with poplars. Only the yew were a crewel Of kith at the fieldstone wall, annulled As a dulcimer cinched in a green velvet sack. To be damaged is to endanger—taut as the stark Throats of castrati in their choir, lymphless & fawning & pale. The miraculous conjoining Where the beamless air harms our self & lung, Our three-chambered heart & sternum, Where two made a monstrous Braid of other, ravishing. To damage is an animal hunch & urge, thou fallen—the marvelous much Is the piece of Pleiades the underworld calls The nightsky from their mud & rime. Perennials Ghost the ground & underground the coffled Veins, an aneurism of the ice & spectacle. I would not speak again. How flinching The world will seem—in the lynch Of light as I sail home in a winter steeled For the deaths of the few loved left living I will Always love. I was a flint To bliss & barbarous, a bristling Of tracks like a starfish carved on his inner arm, A tindering of tissue, a reliquary, twinned. A singe of salt-hay shrouds the orchard-skin, That I would be—lukewarm, mammalian, even then, In winter when moss sheathes every thing alive & everything not or once alive. That I would be—dryadic, gothic, fanatic against The vanishing; I will not speak to you again.

I'll Turn off the Television Once in a While

Sometimes I get so sick of the television noise that I turn it off. And they get so mad at me. They stomp and pout and swear up and down that they're missing something really important. Eventually they run out of steam and settle down.

And they do this.

And I love it.

Make Like Billy Madison...

And head back to school.

Last week I got my school assignment. I've got a new district, but I'm staying with 4th graders. Yaaaay! I have a soft spot for them...Boy Wonder being one himself and all. Yep, I'm biased.

To start each assignment off, we have a sitdown meeting with the teachers I'll be working with, a member of the WITS office, and myself. It's a short time to get to know each other, get a feel for what the teachers are looking for in the coming weeks and a chance to familiarize myself with the school.

I should jump in and say that I was 20 minutes late to the meeting despite leaving my house 90 minutes ahead of time. I-10 hosed me, ya'll. It HOSED me. What a great first impression I must have made...

This year, instead of four teachers, I have two. Two super nice, extra gentle fourth grader ELA teachers. Is it silly that the nice ones scare me more than the more stand-offish ones do?

Their biggest concern this year is adding voice to the students' work. It makes sense. Most of what their learning is aimed for the annual standardized test in the spring and it seems the rubrics are getting more rigid. Kids are getting dinged for not having enough "voice" in their essays...even the dreaded expository. (Barf.)

I've been thinking long and even longer about how to teach kids what their writing "voice" is. I have no clue where mine comes from and I'm pretty sure that it changes depending on the material and whether or not I got enough sleep. It might even lean on the amount of gas in my truck, truth be told.

It's such a vague notion, isn't it? How do you teach someone how to sound like an individual when they're taught to answer the same thing, the same way, every single time throughout their education. We're creating a generation of test drones, but we want these test drones to have an individual voice inside the 34 lines provided. But then go back to having the exact same answer as everyone else.

Luckily, the awesome teachers get to figure that part out, god bless 'em. I get to show up, make them laugh with my Lumpy Space Princess impression and let them go HAM on the paper, no rules, no censoring, just writing.

But here we are. Tomorrow is week one. We're concentrating on voice.

I'm goin' in folks...

...happy happy happy...

Coe's Grocery

A couple of Sundays ago I posted a list of blogging prompts for folks and managed to get too busy to do them. Why would I do my own homework? That's just silly.

But one of my prompts, one that came completely and most randomly off the top of my head asked people to write about their grocery stores. Why did they go there? Convenience? Products? Did they shop the same route each time?

I've been mulling it around in my head these few weeks because some days it seems like I'm back in the grocery store at least four times a week, no matter how big my weekend haul is. (Truthfully, I feel like those Alaskan fishermen some Sundays when I'm dragging in grocery bags stuffed like crab pots. Give me a yellow rain suit and I'd fit right in.)

I always hated grocery shopping and I've never been a gourmet cook. But hwne you are a family of six, food evaporates like rainwater in El Paso.

I shop at the local Walmart. I'm not really thrilled about it, but given the pros I'd be crazy to go anywhere else.

They price match.

I can use coupons without feeling too bad about holding up the line.

I can overstuff my cart and not wince in shame because all six carts ahead of me and the three behind me are dripping with Cheez Its and cans of condensed soup. One flustered lady back there even has two cars to her name.

Walmart is also the closet store to me and my risk of getting pulled over for my expired registration and Alaska plates runs pretty low. I'm riding so dirty I have one snow tire on because my tires are threadbare and scream in pain whenever I drive too long. I live on the edge, ya'll.

 I'd love to go the HEB more often, but that's a local police hangout and then I'd just be playing the odds like an idiot. Walmart it is.

I hit the back first. If I'm down a kid or two (or heaven help me, with NO kids), I might take a luxurious stroll through the candle aisle and smell 18 versions of pumpkin pie wax melts. I hit the back and grab water and baby supplies because we're always out of both.

Then it's dairy. I haul four gallons of milk in at a time because nothing's worse than putting everyone to bed and realizing you're out for the nighttime bottles. (Don't judge. Just don't.)

I bounce around through the grocery aisles. Up two, back three. Then it's sequential and then back two more because I forgot refried beans. Ignore the old lady who's managed to get the sit'n'scoot lodged sideways in the aisle as best I can (think: Austin Powers) and try not to threaten my  daughter too many times out loud for tossing the cereal boxes out when I'm reaching for bread. I'm a good mom and threaten her in the privacy of the truck. 

I take my time in the produce aisle because it's my favorite and I do my best not to dwell on the fact that most of the veggies were grown in some sort of lab and will never, ever decompose on their own. Do yourself a favor and don't think about it, either.

While I'm at it, I'll stand my ground and finish grabbing all nine of my cucumbers in my own sweet time, impatient man behind me be hammed. (Yes, I said ham on purpose. You're proud, aren't you?)

Then it's line time. If I'm alone without a time frame, I'll pick the longest one on purpose and read three magazines like I'm at the library. It's my alone time in a world where I don't even get to pee without the dog, a dollhouse, and two girls fighting over the green Power Ranger.

Not long ago my mom sent me a photograph collection from our family. One is my great-grandfather, Coe. He died young (at 38, I believe) and in all my genealogy obsession lately, there isn't much about him out there. But there is a census in 1930 when he lived with his father. After his own divorce and after his mother died and when it asked for occupation, it listed "salesperson."

The picture is of Coe in a fanatically clean, well-stocked and simply grocery store. He's well-dressed, looking attentive (and handsome, obviously) and I can't help but wonder how far we've come from those days when there were relatively few ingredients to purchase because everyone made everything from scratch to today.

I'd probably like shopping at the grocery store a lot more if was more like Coe's grocery store.

...happy happy happy....

5-Minute MFA: How I Use the Three Act Structure to Plot (Day 14)

On Saturday I talked about using the Three Act Structure to plot your most basic story line of your novel. (See the post for yourself: Plotting and the Three Act Structure)

I mentioned it was just the beginning for me when I start my plotting journey. It's a small, but very powerful tool I like to use.

I thought today I'd show you how I used the tool to start plotting a recently completed middle grade novel I wrote.

Like I said...there aren't an overload of details, but just enough to get me started. I have two more steps after this before I feel comfortable enough to let 'er rip. More tomorrow!

...happy happy happy...

Miss a day? Check out my 31 Day MFA Challenge Master List!

A Week of Prompts: Blogging

Day One: Talk about a time when you should have helped someone… but didn’t.

Day Two: What’s the most dreadful (or wonderful) experience you’ve ever had as a customer?

Day Three: Talk about something you think is terribly unfair — and explain how you would rectify it.

Day Four: What would it take for you to consider yourself a “successful blogger”? Is that something you strive for?

Day Five: Talk about your favorite pair of shoes, and where they've taken you.

Day Six: When was the last time you really stood out in a crowd? Are you comfortable in that position, or do you wish you could fade into the woodwork?

Day Seven: What bores you?