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Birthday fantasy granted. My day was everything I'd asked for and more.

Part one is on me: I want to wake up to a house that doesn't make me feel crazy. So I folded and put away all the laundry, scoured the stove top, mopped the kitchen floor and did a bit of general tidying.

Saturday:
I sleep in. This means Drew gets the monkeys out of our room right when they wake up, not an hour later after me getting up repeatedly and coaxing/bribing them to do something quiet in their rooms until "seven oh oh"

I am served breakfast in bed. Waffles, bacon, tea. We open some presents that are really some t-shirts I bought for the monkeys. Then they go away and leave me with my tea and my latest clever murder mystery.

They leave. They run errands, go to playgrounds, buy food, whatever. Just stay gone long enough for me to get some gardening done without any monkeys underfoot.

After they return, I go out and get a pedicure, and hopefully a massage, although I've neglected to book one in advance.

While I'm out the monkeys and papa make my birthday cake - the best carrot cake ever.

We'll eat cake after monkey dinner, and after they go to bed we will have our dinner of some yummy Thai-ish chicken thing that Drew's so good at.

Sounds like a lovely day, doesn't it? Let's see how it goes.

The day began with Leo crawling into bed and snuggling with me. Then he leaned over, kissed me and said "Happy birthday mama!" Well, needless to say, it doesn't get much better than that.  He's going to make some lucky person a very fine boyfriend/husband. 

This Week's AWAD

desideratum

noun: Something considered necessary or desirable.
From Latin desideratum (something desired), from desiderare (to desire).

quiescence
noun: A state of rest, inactivity, or quietness.
From Latin quiescere (to become quiet), from quies (quiet).

limen
noun: A threshold of response: point at which a stimulus is of sufficient intensity to generate a response.
From Latin limen (threshold).

obdurate
adjective: 1. Stubborn: not easily moved. 2. Hard-hearted: resistant to emotions.
From Latin obdurare (to harden), from durus (hard). Ultimately from the Indo-European root deru- (to be firm) that's the source of such other words as truth, trust, betroth, tree, endure, druid, during, durable, duress, trow, and indurate.


The first two and the second two go together in very particular ways for me. I will be thinking about this and continue later.

Finding the light

I get stuck under the weight of over thinking, generally and specifically. Can I write about topic x, or will so and so read it and get hurt/mad?? I can spew out several paragraphs in the blink of an eye in response to a fb post, but it's so easy when my buttons get pushed.

I read this last night. I think If I keep reading it every day, I'll be able to fill some space here.

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March 16, 2010
WHY A BLOG?
Posted by Susan Orlean

To misquote Chico Marx, who posed the enduring existential question “Why a duck?,” I can’t help but ask, Why a blog? Why a blog at all, and why a blog rather than print, and why me? Now, as I prepare to launch Free Range, I offer these attempts to answer:

1. Why not? Writers like to write, and writing in different forms—short, long, bite-sized, done on the fly, done with painstaking attention—all interest me.

2. I love print, and always will. I love writing traditional magazine pieces, and especially their breadth of reporting and the deliberateness of the writing. But I also think there’s a place in the world for something that takes advantage of the immediacy the Internet allows—namely, that you can form a thought, type it out, and within no time broadcast it to the world. In particular, there ought to be a place for thoughts and observations that are too small to develop into a magazine story, or so fleeting that they would evaporate by the time they could be put into print, or so particular (an ongoing observation, an unspooling thread of an idea) that they would feel out of place in a magazine. These all seem to fit quite snugly into a blog.

3. Why me? Well, I seem to have lots of those blog-sized thoughts, but never had anywhere to air them before. (I just never could get the hang of graffiti.)

After Chico raised his duck question, he went on to ask another, even more profound one: “Why-a no chicken?” To this, Groucho replied, “Well, I don’t know why-a no chicken. I’m a stranger here myself.” I know the feeling. I’m a stranger here in blogland myself, but I’m looking forward to the visit.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/susanorlean/?xrail#ixzz0ko9dwMGn

No Bunny

I don't usually look for, focus on or follow the darker, more disturbing stories in the news. But the ones about child abuse are the hardest to move on from. Since I didn't intend this blog to be a forum for expressing my displeasure, rage, etc. I've got to work on lightening the tone.
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I love the quotes of the day feature on my iGoogle home page. They are a great way to start my brain first thing in the morning. Better than coffee really.
"The reason lightning doesn't strike twice in the same place is that the same place isn't there the second time."
- Willie Tyler

Good job paraphrasing Heraclitis. This from Wiki: "Heraclitus is famous for his doctrine of change being central to the universe, as stated in his famous saying, "You cannot step twice into the same river." He believed in the unity of opposites, stating that "the path up and down is one and the same," existing things being characterized by pairs of contrary properties."

Yin and Yang. Zen comes way later. The Greeks were there first, as usual.

More horror

A South Korean couple addicted to an Internet game about raising a virtual child were arrested for neglecting their real 3-month-old daughter and letting her starve to death, news reports said.
Reports: SKorean Internet Addicts Let Baby Starve

REALLY???  If I hadn't heard this on NPR I would have thought it was an Onion headline -- although they usually aren't that dark. What the hell is wrong with people? Give her to a damn orphanage if you don't want to take care of her. Is it just pointless to be mad at people for being/doing something this horrible. Words escape me. Neglect doesn't begin to name what they've done. Any person with normal feelings would despise them for this, but it goes even deeper for me. After the pain I went though trying practically every means known to medical science to create my beautiful monkeys ... well I can't even talk about this. I'm sorry I brought it up.