Category: Uncategorized

Yay, a book post!  I decided to go with this instead of my original topic, which was wifely obedience, because I’m only 37 and I’m not ready to have my first stroke.

As always, if you are inclined to buy any of the books I recommend (or to buy anything from Amazon!), it would be wonderful if you could click through using the links below.  I get a small percentage of the sale.  Thank you so much to my readers who have been clicking through!  It really ads up, and is a huge help.

One Potato, Two Potato By Cynthia DeFelice and Andrea U’ren

The Clown of God by Tomie dePaola

Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak

The Wild Swans by Hans Christian Andersen

Horton Hatches the Egg by Dr. Seuss

Five Chinese Brothers by Claire Huchet Bishop, illustrated by Kurt Weise

The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf, illustrated by Robert Lawson

There used to be a TV commercial that asked, “If your house could speak, what would it say?”  I think they were selling exterior stain, or a home security system or something.  Everyone’s houses were saying things like, “This family understands love” or “Security happens under this roof.”

Well, this is what I found in my bathroom yesterday:

I think my house is saying, in a sort of pleading whisper,

” . . . Truce?”

If your house could speak, what would it say?

Here is my review of the book The Pope and I at Our Sunday Visitor.  It’s an account of lifelong friendship with Karol Wojtyla, better known as Pope John Paul II, and Jerzy Kluger, a Polish Jewish engineer who, even when he’s influencing international policy and Church and state relations, can’t stop talking about food.

If you are thinking of buying this book (or any other item from Amazon!), I would appreciate it if you would do so through this link:

The Pope and I:  How the Lifelong Friendship between a Polish Jew and John Paul II Advanced Jewish-Christian Relations

I get a small percentage of sales through Amazon if you click through from my blog.  Unless maybe you want the little Fishers to have to have another Imagination Christmas this year.  Heh.  No, but really, I know it’s an inconvenience, so I appreciate it when people use my links!  Thank you.

Oh, and Brandon Vogt is on the job with the social media meme!  Love it.

SEVEN GENUINELY QUICK TAKES!

1.  If you were planning to spend the day with nine children at an art museum a few hours away, but decide, when the three-year-old throws up all over you TWICE before you’ve even had your coffee, that you’d be a fool to take her to the art museum, you’d be right.

But if you think that that would be the worst way you could spend your day, you’d be wrong.  (See here.)

2.  If you are going to keep all of your nails, screws, bottles of paint, billions of plastic beads, nuts, bolts, bottles of glue, grout sealant, screwdrivers, paintbrushes, pipe cleaners, bits of felt, googly eyes, sequins, wrenches, pencil sharpeners, bouncy balls, clothespins, curtain rods, broken picture frames,  dried up Play Doh, broken tape measures, and flattened coffee filters that will probably be useful for something some day in two rickety cabinets stacked one on top of the other, it is probably best not — NOT, I repeat — to keep several gallons of loosely closed paint on top of those cabinets.

3.  Or at least, holy crap, why would you keep it so close to the computer?  (Yes, what I learned is “holy crap.”)

4.  Sobbing.*

5.  I always think my husband is going to yell at me and make me feel bad when I do something incredibly stupid, but I learned again today that he never does.  Instead he reassured me that he knows I didn’t do it on purpose, and that he would find a way to retrieve all the photo files from the last seven years somehow, and that we didn’t really need electricity in that part of the house anyway (I actually just silently said that part to myself, and assumed that he would agree, but just thought it too obvious to mention).

7.  A computer that will not turn on is not a computer that will never turn on!  Sometimes it just needs to have each of its 427 individual bits cleaned out so there’s not so much paint on them anymore, and then your husband will devote a mere five hours of his only day off this week to setting up the wireless milgram remote connectivity port mesodrive modulator.

Happy Friday!

*This is not actually something new I learned today.  I was just brushing up.

Even though I know the poem is not really about sand (or is it?), this

[more macro photography of gorgeous grains of sand here]

made me think of this:

Mock On, Mock On, Voltaire, Rousseau

William Blake

This is a personal note to the young woman who entered “i’m 19 i am due september 7,2012 and i am scared about giving birth and dying” into a search window and came to my blog:  how can we help?  There is a whole community of people here who want to help you.  Please contact me at simchafisher@gmail.com

Don’t be scared.  You can do this, and you don’t have to be alone.

And another reason I’m grateful for the snow:  it gives me an excuse to resurrect this post from my old blog.

Jen Fulwiler just celebrated her 35th birthday, and asked people under and above the age of 35 how they feel about this time in their life.  As someone who just turned 37, I can sum up this time in my life by what’s happening today: I’m old and mature and responsible enough to be expecting an assessor from the bank to come over in a few hours to look over the house in preparation for our refinance, which should save us a few hundred dollars on our monthly mortgage payment.

But I’m also tired and cynical and lazy enough to have put very little effort into cleaning said house, even though I know it will cause me considerable embarrassment when the assessor comes over.  Unlike the party guests we recently hosted, he will be (DOOM!  DOOM!) Allowed To Go Upstairs.

I tried to kid myself for a while that the house is simply charmingly cluttered, filled with the sweet, if somewhat chaotic, hallmarks of an enviably happy and bustling family.  I even clung to this fantasy while (not even lying, here) wiping ketchup off the bathroom mirror this morning.  Wiping, not scrubbing — which means it was fairly fresh.  Which means that someone was . . . using ketchup in the middle of the night, in the bathroom?  I don’t want to know.

But when I went to wake up the kids, I had to face the hard fact that — well, all moms say, “It looks like a hurricane hit here!”  Well, my house really looks like a real hurricane really hit, and hit, and hit.  It looks like there should be burnt-out refrigerators scattered here and there.  It looks like there should be people standing on the roof, shooting at helicopters.  Worst of all, there are actual high water marks in one room, even though we have never been flooded.  At least, I think it was water.  Uh.

A few years ago, I would have broken my back to have the place spic and span.  But a few years ago, we couldn’t even have considered owning a house, much less refinancing one.  A few years ago, we would have had more free time to clean, because my husband was working one job, not two, and I wasn’t working at all.  Our kids would  have been home to help clean, because they weren’t going to art classes or field trips or planning sleepovers with their friends, because we didn’t have any friends, because we never left the apartment.  And our credit was shot because we did things like buying things and then not, you know, paying for them.   And I would have done all the cleaning myself, and been furious about it, because my husband and I were not in the habit of communicating with each other, or helping each other, or working together.  Today, the kitchen is kind of grimy, but there are fresh flowers on the counter.  My husband brought them home for me the other day, because he thought I could use some flowers.

So, at age 37, have I broken even in the ledgers of personal responsibility?  Have I really made any progress, or have I only become more adept at making plausible excuses for my failings?  Is today a cause for pride, or a prime opportunity to do an assessment of my own soul, seeing as I’ve repaired my own spiritual credit to the degree that I probably qualify to refinance my own time, and could be saving myself years off purgatory by just getting off my behind and cleaning the bathroom for once?  What if I got a sheriff who so offends the people of Rock Ridge that his very appearance would drive them out of town? Wherever will I find such a man?  Why am I asking you?

Well, happy birthday, Jen!  DOOM!  DOOM!

Share one of my lovely moments with sweet baby Benedicta, who is now over a month old:

She’s a rather solemn baby so far, but for some reason she cannot resist the comic genius of the words, “looby looby loo.”

Don’t forget to check out Conversion Diary for everyone else’s Seven Quick Takes!