Where to Begin?

Well, this is about life, which begins at conception, but I don't think I want to go back quite that far. Two weeks? Three weeks? How long has it been?

Anyway.

1. The big girly, as you may remember, went off to the University of Dallas for their two-week Arete program, aimed at high-school students. By Day 4 she was homesick;  by Day 13 she didn't want to leave, ever ever ever. Since her return, a t-shirt bearing the message iThink. You should try it sometime has been getting a lot of airtime, because the next best thing to being there is wearing it, apparently.

2. Helier turned 8. He turned 8 two weeks ago, so the next thing I'm doing when I finish this is to update the ol' sidebar. On his actual birthday, we convinced some friends to go with us to the mountains, where we were rained on torrentially, yea, even more than torrentially, which mattered a lot more to the mothers huddled under umbrellas than it did to the kids in bathing suits in the creek.

Finally the rain stopped, and over on the pile of rocks where Crispina and her friend were setting out a tea party, a fat copperhead decided to step out, so to speak, for a breath of air. Only later did I learn just how closely this tea party and this deadly snake had coincided, but by then everyone had already been safely out of the way for ages, so my nervous breakdown was a very quiet and interior one and didn't last all that long.

Actually, once everyone was safely out of the way, what we all did was watch as the copperhead maneuvered itself this way and that trying to get its mouth around a catfish it had caught, which was wedged between two rocks. For nearly half an hour it paid out thick curves of body in an attempt, I think, to get nose-to-nose with the fish, which might or might not have been still struggling;  I never saw the fish until the very end, when the snake stopped trying to eat it right there, opting instead to writhe away to some more private place, carrying the fish sideways in its mouth like a dog with a bone.

"Aw," said Helier. "He looks so cute like that."

3. The Monday after Helier's birthday, we left for eight days in Memphis, during which time we also drove to Little Rock to retrieve the big girly from Southwest Airlines. She got off the plane wearing the aforementioned iThink t-shirt, and she's been tired ever since. All that thinking . . .

In Memphis, Helier had two more birthday parties:  one at which he shared the birthday honors with Aunt T., and another one which wasn't really much of a birthday party, because I just can't make myself call people the day before and say, "By the way, would you and your numerous children mind running out in all your voluminous spare time to buy my kid some kind of additional toy?" So this was more of a playdate, which was perfect. Helier got to put his new tent up in Grammy's back yard and play in it with his buddy Joseph, whom he had not seen in a year, plus several other friends we don't get to see nearly often enough, so he was a perfectly happy boy.

4. We returned to Fiat on Tuesday in a state of exhaustion. The dog, who had spent this time undergoing the gentle ministrations of Carrie the Dogsitter, was hysterically, vocally glad to see us, but altogether fine -- before we left he had been refusing to go for walks, but Carrie the Dogsitter ministrated him gently somehow, and he seems to be over that.

The air conditioner, on the other hand, is not fine. Nobody gently ministrated it in our absence, and now I guess we're good and sorry. Some of us are sorrier than others;  the kids' rooms upstairs have window units, nice brand spanking new EnergyStar-rated window units which cause frost to form on the insides of the windows, while downstairs, particularly in the kitchen long about four-thirty in the afternoon, frost is not forming on the insides of the windows, let's just put it that way. Rumor has it that a repair consultant might visit us on Monday, but since we rang up and complained that Monday was too long to wait, we've been contemplating the possibility that whoever answers the phones might have slid our work request over to the "Rot in Hell" box. Meanwhile, you might think that come Friday, Monday might not seem so far away, but I assure you that it does. At least, to those of us who live downstairs it does.

5. I got a haircut, which I am now greatly regretting. I like to get my hair cut, and I don't mind it short-ish, which it certainly is right now. It's just that I've had very good cheap haircuts in the past, and this wasn't one of them. In fact, I'd probably still be sitting in the chair, trying to convince the person cutting my hair that I really did want the bottom part layered the way it had been previously, except that I started to think that anything else she did would only make things worse, and that I had better escape with what I had. She kept telling me that if she cut my hair in the way I was describing, it would "look like steps," by which I understood her to say that if she cut it that way, it would "look like steps," and I really didn't want to find out what that might mean. So I paid my money and ran away, and have been grateful ever since to whoever invented the modern barrette.

This is all kind of angst-y. Of course it's all vanity, too, and the experience leads me to consider that, the whole feminist narrative aside, nobody but nobody oppresses women the way we oppress ourselves. Aelred never wants me to get my hair cut. He'd be happy for it to grow out to my feet. When he says, I love you the way you are, he means, Please please please do not go out and try to improve yourself, because you know you'll be sorry, but you'll probably do it anyway, because what do I know about the way women want themselves to look, and then I'll have to tell you whatever you've done is cute, to make you feel better, which I am happy to do, because I love you the way you are, but it would be nice if we didn't have to go through this song and dance all the time.

Which does make me wonder why, exactly, it is that in every commercial you see these days, it's the man who's the idiot. I mean, not that I wonder all that much. I know the answer. These commercials are made by people who think that if you allow a man six inches of intellectual rope, he's going to force some woman to go out and get a bad haircut, because men just naturally like to oppress women, and if they were smarter, that's how they would do it.

Or something like that.

6. The dog ate a bee and came to breakfast yesterday with a strange bulbous nose in place of his normal long sleek one. One hundred eighty-three dollars later, I now know that dogs can take Benadryl.

7. While I was away, I did a good bit of writing. My mother has a guesthouse -- really an apartment above her garage -- which is an excellent writer's retreat, being quiet and away from all the normal question-askers and fight-pickers. I'll have a new chapter of the story blog up soon;  I also had a little epiphany about the other story which I've been posting here in bits and pieces. I know where Michael goes when he goes out, which might not sound like much, but it was like getting a key to a long-locked door and made me very happy.

PS:  I always forget about blog-carnival things -- I'm doing well generally just to get something written, you understand -- but after I'd written this, I realized that what I had were, um, like seven "quick takes," and this was Friday, and . . . anyway, thanks to Jen at Conversion Diary for hosting Seven Quick Takes, and hopefully this won't be the last time the planets line up right.

PPS:  Re the air conditioner:  The person who answers the phones did indeed put our work request in the box marked "Rot in Hell -- Until Tuesday." Sometimes the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and sometimes it just gets greased. On the bright side, the home-warranty company called today to offer us a $100 rebate on some kind of additional cooling appliance for the downstairs, where currently we have none. I'm thinking that if we could affix a window unit to the vent-a-hood above the stove, I could just about bear the thought of cooking dinner for three more days.