Tuesday, January 19, 2021
Let's Goooooooooooo!!!!!
Monday, January 18, 2021
I Said, I Say
I'll rearrange for my fingers to speak
to the clouds
unfolding like a migraine confession
I mean, I mean
You've cried so much, your eyes
drop like pebbles
and wait to show you a way home
I try, to free
the mistakes I made as a parent
then I draw you,
my love, as a silent self-portrait
***********************
A detail from a mural in the Children's Garden (early morning walking date with L!).
Sunday, January 17, 2021
Side Eye
Talked to At on Twitter and chat today; and gosh--I miss him fiercely. Spent some time settling things in his room and ended up clearing out a decade's worth of video games, Popular Science, and Make Magazine. We've been in this house only four years and only four years in the Alma house before that, so this stash somehow made it through three moves. Yikes.
Also yikes, as I leaned to get another piece of mail from behind At's bookcase, I twisted something in my knee and it has felt progressively weird. It feels... feeble now, although it didn't when it actually happened.
Finalizing all the syllabuses and diagnostics for first week today. And I'm laughing at myself because the smallest things get me excited sometimes. My latest tweak is so superficial--I changed all the font to Garamond--and I'm so inordinately chuffed about it.
Saturday, January 16, 2021
"Beam Me Up"
Big A was mostly experienced as a napper in various settings around the house (he's coming off a spate of nightshifts).
This "Beam-Me-Up" action in the sky is from a long walk with Nu and B.S. and it made us chuckle. Lots of talk, sharing, support, and a huge, delicious loaf of BS's banana bread that Nu and I loved (i.e. have almost finished) this afternoon.
Rumpus Room sleepover tonight with Nu, Scout, and Huck, because At left for college this morning and this is how we cope.
Friday, January 15, 2021
Snapshot
Here I am, bookended by the two human babies who showed up randomly in their matching Christmas jammies for some Olympic-standard cuddling.
Thursday, January 14, 2021
Pongal 2021
Most years we're already back at school before Pongal comes around and the usual celebration is something hurried when the sun is no longer high in the sky.
This year, we got to celebrate in the sunshine and make our offering at a reasonable daytime hour, with fragrant narcissus and paperwhites rounding out the pongal rice and jaggery laddu on the offering tray. To the millenary vedic sun salutation sloka*, which I was translating for the kids as I went, I added a prayer for enough Vit. D to help us through the pandemic.
Cousin P had sent the cousin groupchat a set of truly lovely pics of their traditional celebration replete with sugarcane, outdoor hearth, and silk-clad kids. So I sent this pic back to balance things out.
Not pictured: The very un-Pongal looking kids, one in the Phoebe Bridgers limited edition Punisher sweater they got from their older sib and the other human kid in the pink Mean Girls/Karl Marx mashup tee I gave them.
Tamorim Sarva Paapagnam Pranathosmi Divakaram
[You radiant as the Japa flower, heir of Kashyapa, the creator of days
destroy my darkness and all corruption I pray to you, O Sun.]
Wednesday, January 13, 2021
You already know
is better than none; I am human,
I love as a reversible history.
You already know
If you call me "sunshine," I will answer
also: "they who love sunshine," try--
I've called prayers into every reverie.
standing in beauty
I saw the most amazing early morning skies over the Maple River as I headed to work today, and had a feeling it would be the harbinger of a ...
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Friends and old neighbors shutting it down in honor of John Crawford. _
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I have the feeling that I’m going to succumb to the season and put out a list of resolutions soon. Just wanted to establish this heads up th...
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At had us pose for this pic up at Aunt R's place on Lake Huron so he could put it up in his dorm. "Don't tur...