Soccer woes

I am learning firsthand that the single biggest negative factor in children's sports is the off-the-hook PARENTS.

Goodness.

They are 5-years old, people. For these tiny children, soccer is a big game of chase the ball down the field and take turns kicking at it in bewteen hugging your teammates and giggling. It's fun, not competition. Let it go.

If only we all took our words at face value when we tell our children, "the most important thing is to HAVE FUN."

In Loving Memory Of

Jacob Matthew Oder

My dear cousin, Chad and his wife lost their beloved son, Jacob, this morning.

He was three years old.

Jacob suddenly and unexpectedly passed away in his parents' embrace early this morning of an tragic and unexpected complication to a surgery he had 10 days ago.

My cousin and his wife released their son from their own arms into Jesus' after he was declared brain dead, only mere hours after he had eaten dinner with his family at their table. As parents, there is no way to be prepared for the sudden loss of our child. And yet it has touched my family tonight.

May the Lord bless and keep my cousin and his wife as they emerge from the valley of the shadow of death. And as they face their first night as a family of four, where they had been five. As they wrap their hearts around the hurt and the Jacob-shaped void that will forever be a part of their lives.

And for Lilly and Elijah, who now have become twins, my heart weeps openly for your pain and for the loss of your triplet brother. May you come to know the presence of the Lord deeper in your heart and lives all the more richly because of the deposit your family has made in heaven today.

God bless you Jacob. May God hold the Oder family under His wing as darkness falls tonight.

And may we all be reminded to never live our lives as though our next breath is guaranteed.

Cars and casualties

I've always been one of those people for whom the act of driving sheer joy. Give me a car with a radio or CD player, the open road, and a destination, and I am fulfilled. I *love* to drive. I love to be on the road and going somewhere. I find joy in being in the drivers' seat of a car with music blaring and my heart pumping. Going, moving, driving ~ it all makes me happy ~ having a car represents a great degree of freedom for me.

Granted, I don't particularly care what kind of car I drive. Not one for brands in general, I just can't be bothered with the distinguishing features of a Ford vs. Chevy. And the BMW, Jaguars', Hummers, or Mercedes of the world are a bit wasted on me. The concept of luxury just doesn't factor in to my thinking in regards to vehicles. My criteria: Does it run? (and, now that I am a mother): Is it safe for children? OK ~ then let's go! This laissez faire attitude may explain why I currently own a Kia, and also why my automobiles tend to come to rather fantastical, and sometimes fiery, ends.

This love affair with the road and ~ by extension ~ the cars in which to drive upon the road, began early. My adventures in automobiles has quite a legacy to it. You see, I tend to literally drive cars into the ground (no fault of myself, naturally). And I think I may be one of a rare few people on the planet who has actually been driving their car when it a.) fell apart and b.) burst into flames. It has been a fun ride so far.

My first car was a rather forgettable Honda something-or-other. It lasted just long enough to graduate high school and then literally fell apart in abruptly cartoonish fashion: while driving to the market, a portion of my bumper fell off on one block with a "clang!". Shortly thereafter, my taillight plastic fell off somewhere on the next block and was summarily (if accidentally) run over by the car behind me. I managed to litter the entire route to the market with various metal, plastic, and wire parts that fell off my car in rapid succession. By the time I coasted into the parking lot of the supermarket, my little Honda no longer resembled a vehicle, exactly ~ it looked more like a mangled heap of metallic light blue metal scraps. I called my Mom for a ride home, and we had the remains of the former car towed to the salvage yard.

This was my second car:
Yes, it was a YUGO. It did represent a definite step up from my Honda p.o.c., in that it was operational. Usually. However, as a rule of thumb, Yugoslavia is not known for its outstanding quality imported automobiles. This little thing resembled an animal cracker box on wheels, and managed to both rattle and shake at any speed greater than 40 m.p.h. My friends called it the "Blue Bomber", which was sadly, fitting. It had all the acceleration power of a bicycle with two flat tires. When I drove uphill, it was not uncommon for me to be passed by street sweepers, big rigs, and the occasional marathon runner. And indeed, when driving this automotive masterpiece, one would not have been surprised to see Fred Flintstones' Feet sticking out from underneath the bottom, spurring it along at a dizzying, Nascar-worthy top odometer speed of 65 m.p.h.

This car bit the dust in my junior year of college, when it literally caught fire on the freeway while I was driving a friend home. Thankfully, it was raining, which helped extinguish the flames, and neither one of us was hurt. In fact, after we safely exited the smoldering car, we stood on the shoulder of the road, staring at this ridiculous scene and laughing so hard, tears were rolling down both our faces. Apparently I missed the rather important warning label, "engine may burst into flames spontaneously for no reason whatsoever."

But I'm not bitter. This Yugo was a good little car ~ definitely worth the $800 I paid for it. Nope, I'm not kidding: the Yugo set me back Eight. Hundred. Dollars. I spent more than that for the gas I put into it over my almost 2-year period of ownership. And, as it happens, about four times as much to REPAIR the $800.00 money pit.

And the Yugo, along with it's replacement car, an old beater Mercury Lynx, managed to take me where I wanted to go ~ right up until the moment they each decidedly died. In my early years of college, my to my roommates dismay, I used to pack up my Fred Flintstone car and drive down to the U.S./ Mexico border, cross it, and just drive till I found a great beach. There, I'd check into a beach hotel (it was cheaper in Mexico than in the U.S.) and would spend the weekend surfing, reading, and just being. Yes, I was a young blonde American woman, alone in Mexico. That is the start of many a tragic epic. But I was both naive and careful, checking in with friends along the way and south of the border as well. I never once encountered a problem or unsavory situation. What I found instead was a few weekends of utter peace. I found my many collegiate Mexican forays incredibly nourishing, relaxing, and inspiring.

My friends called it dangerous.

And they were probably right.

But then again, considering that my cars had a tendency to blow up or disintegrate while I am driving them, the drive was almost certainly more dangerous than the destination.

Sharing Sam's Sentiments

Courtesy of my girlfriend, Jen, who has an uncanny knack to both sharpen and encourage me with all kinds of news articles and other information I routinely miss while my head is buried in a book or fixated on mesmerizing TV programming (I'm not apologetic ~ "The Office" is classic entertaiment), I offer a full reprint of this fascinating and relevant (especially to our discussion on this blog over the past few months) article which appeared in the Los Angeles Times this week. It inspires and encourages me that people are beginning to see the truth across political aisles and in spite of political affiliations. The day American politics begins to altruistically serve the people instead of people bowing before political agendas will be one to celebrate! I have hope I'll see it.

*~*~*~*~*~*

Head-in-the-Sand Liberals: Western civilization really is at risk from Muslim extremists.
~ By Sam Harris
SAM HARRIS is the author of "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason." His next book, "Letter to a Christian Nation," will be published this week by Knopf.

September 18, 2006

"TWO YEARS AGO I published a book highly critical of religion, "The End of Faith." In it, I argued that the world's major religions are genuinely incompatible, inevitably cause conflict and now prevent the emergence of a viable, global civilization. In response, I have received many thousands of letters and e-mails from priests, journalists, scientists, politicians, soldiers, rabbis, actors, aid workers, students — from people young and old who occupy every point on the spectrum of belief and nonbelief.

This has offered me a special opportunity to see how people of all creeds and political persuasions react when religion is criticized. I am here to report that liberals and conservatives respond very differently to the notion that religion can be a direct cause of human conflict.

This difference does not bode well for the future of liberalism.

Perhaps I should establish my liberal bone fides at the outset. I'd like to see taxes raised on the wealthy, drugs decriminalized and homosexuals free to marry. I also think that the Bush administration deserves most of the criticism it has received in the last six years — especially with respect to its waging of the war in Iraq, its scuttling of science and its fiscal irresponsibility.

But my correspondence with liberals has convinced me that liberalism has grown dangerously out of touch with the realities of our world — specifically with what devout Muslims actually believe about the West, about paradise and about the ultimate ascendance of their faith.

On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right.This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that "liberals are soft on terrorism." It is, and they are.

A cult of death is forming in the Muslim world — for reasons that are perfectly explicable in terms of the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad. The truth is that we are not fighting a "war on terror." We are fighting a pestilential theology and a longing for paradise.

This is not to say that we are at war with all Muslims. But we are absolutely at war with those who believe that death in defense of the faith is the highest possible good, that cartoonists should be killed for caricaturing the prophet and that any Muslim who loses his faith should be butchered for apostasy.

Unfortunately, such religious extremism is not as fringe a phenomenon as we might hope. Numerous studies have found that the most radicalized Muslims tend to have better-than-average educations and economic opportunities.

Given the degree to which religious ideas are still sheltered from criticism in every society, it is actually possible for a person to have the economic and intellectual resources to build a nuclear bomb — and to believe that he will get 72 virgins in paradise. And yet, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, liberals continue to imagine that Muslim terrorism springs from economic despair, lack of education and American militarism.

At its most extreme, liberal denial has found expression in a growing subculture of conspiracy theorists who believe that the atrocities of 9/11 were orchestrated by our own government. A nationwide poll conducted by the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University found that more than a third of Americans suspect that the federal government "assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East;" 16% believe that the twin towers collapsed not because fully-fueled passenger jets smashed into them but because agents of the Bush administration had secretly rigged them to explode.

Such an astonishing eruption of masochistic unreason could well mark the decline of liberalism, if not the decline of Western civilization. There are books, films and conferences organized around this phantasmagoria, and they offer an unusually clear view of the debilitating dogma that lurks at the heart of liberalism: Western power is utterly malevolent, while the powerless people of the Earth can be counted on to embrace reason and tolerance, if only given sufficient economic opportunities.

I don't know how many more engineers and architects need to blow themselves up, fly planes into buildings or saw the heads off of journalists before this fantasy will dissipate. The truth is that there is every reason to believe that a terrifying number of the world's Muslims now view all political and moral questions in terms of their affiliation with Islam. This leads them to rally to the cause of other Muslims no matter how sociopathic their behavior. This benighted religious solidarity may be the greatest problem facing civilization and yet it is regularly misconstrued, ignored or obfuscated by liberals.

Given the mendacity and shocking incompetence of the Bush administration — especially its mishandling of the war in Iraq — liberals can find much to lament in the conservative approach to fighting the war on terror. Unfortunately, liberals hate the current administration with such fury that they regularly fail to acknowledge just how dangerous and depraved our enemies in the Muslim world are.

Recent condemnations of the Bush administration's use of the phrase "Islamic fascism" are a case in point. There is no question that the phrase is imprecise — Islamists are not technically fascists, and the term ignores a variety of schisms that exist even among Islamists — but it is by no means an example of wartime propaganda, as has been repeatedly alleged by liberals.

In their analyses of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy, liberals can be relied on to overlook the most basic moral distinctions. For instance, they ignore the fact that Muslims intentionally murder noncombatants, while we and the Israelis (as a rule) seek to avoid doing so. Muslims routinely use human shields, and this accounts for much of the collateral damage we and the Israelis cause; the political discourse throughout much of the Muslim world, especially with respect to Jews, is explicitly and unabashedly genocidal.

Given these distinctions, there is no question that the Israelis now hold the moral high ground in their conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah. And yet liberals in the United States and Europe often speak as though the truth were otherwise.

We are entering an age of unchecked nuclear proliferation and, it seems likely, nuclear terrorism. There is, therefore, no future in which aspiring martyrs will make good neighbors for us. Unless liberals realize that there are tens of millions of people in the Muslim world who are far scarier than Dick Cheney, they will be unable to protect civilization from its genuine enemies.

Increasingly, Americans will come to believe that the only people hard-headed enough to fight the religious lunatics of the Muslim world are the religious lunatics of the West. Indeed, it is telling that the people who speak with the greatest moral clarity about the current wars in the Middle East are members of the Christian right, whose infatuation with biblical prophecy is nearly as troubling as the ideology of our enemies. Religious dogmatism is now playing both sides of the board in a very dangerous game.

While liberals should be the ones pointing the way beyond this Iron Age madness, they are rendering themselves increasingly irrelevant. Being generally reasonable and tolerant of diversity, liberals should be especially sensitive to the dangers of religious literalism. But they aren't.

The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.

To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization.

*~*~*~*~*~*

sticker shock

I saw the following bumper stickers on 3 different cars over the last few days. I think I would have felt better if it was only ONE car - then I could have written this off as one possibly not-sober individual with an outgoing personality. Rather, these were noted on three seperate cars. I actually had to write them down to make sure I got them correctly:

"Show Me the Plane That Hit The Pentagon. You Can't Do It!"

"I Wish You Had Not Voted For Bush - GOD."

"Katrina didn't exist. Bush flooded the levees. Know the truth. (then some tiny-printed website I could not make out)"

I ask you: who ARE these people that their lives rise and fall on the vilification of ONE MAN (hey guys, he's out of office soon enough and then your misplaced anger will have to be misdirected onto a new target. Start looking around for one now ~ there is always someone available to blame for all that ills us if we look around with that intention)?

And how did I miss the apparently thriving cottage industry of far~fetched~conspiracy~theory bumper~sticker~makers out there until now?

grouch buster

Am I the only one who has noticed the stark absence of JOY from the everyday faces around us lately?

You haven't noticed? Really?

There's ample evidence of this grouchy trend: the waiters at various restaurants, the checker at the supermarket, the lawn man, the lady who walks her dog past your house at 6:18 every evening, the news anchors, drivers and passengers of cars around you, the kid who throws your neighbor's newspaper onto your wet lawn every morning. Lotsa people looking like they are under lotsa stress. There is just a hardness and an edge to the expressions of our fellow humans, isn't there?

Conduct this basic, simple experiment today. I promise, you'll notice this trend. Just take a look around while you are driving. Doing errands, dropping the kids ar school, driving to the church, beach, store, infernal post office ~ whatever. Now, don't do it so obviously that you will either a.) get into an accident or b.) risk being on the receiving end of an obscene gesture (or worse!) for overtly staring at someone next to you in a dark Cadillac who may or may not be a member of the mob.

Just gently and discreetly check out the mugs of your fellow drivers on the road. They may be chatting on their cell phones, trying to tame unruly children, or smoking (!), but they are all tending to look pretty darned grim these days.

OK, there are lots of potential reasons for the grouchy faces I've been noticing around me. High gas prices. Maybe that's it. We're at war. That's could be the reason for the grouchy/pained/wan expression epidemic I've been noticing. Possibly. But you know what? Even before airplanes slammed into buildings and then more airplanes delivered bombs over remote mountain caves, even before gas began to cost $17.00 a gallon ~ people were walking around with unhappiness etched deeply into their faces like scars from battle. It is as if a pall of sadness descended on people lately - and I continue to note it around me. And it seems to be worsening.

As for me, I am ebullient by nature. Put me in a car as the driver, and I am utterly content. Add music and I am downright giddy. I find myself just constantly reminded of God and the fact that I am breathing in and out, and am just thrilled to contemplate that miracle most days. Yes, I have troubles, too. No, my life is not perfect. But perfection is not required to experience or share joy, is it? So I tend to CHOOSE joy, choose to find grace and purpose and fun and silliness and hope in the everyday life I lead here in my everyday corner of the everyday world. Even though I am burdened, even when I am bothered, even when...

My response to the current epidemic of palpable grouch has been to smile widely at those people around me. It's my personal effort to spread a little sunshine around and let others know that someone, in that moment, cares about them enough to try to penetrate the cloud cover over their spirit. It's not always effective. Sometimes it is distinctly ineffective. I have had people offer me various fingers or other fascinating gestures in response to my smiles of joy. I have had people frown at me or roll up their car windows or lock their doors in response to me. I have had people look the other way, ignore me, or actually look scared (to their credit, I guess an intently smiley woman can weird you out after awhile), or look at me through their windows as though I was from Venus. No guys, I am not an alien. It's called a smile. Alien. Smile. Very, very different entities.

Never mind.

So today, I venture out onto the streets with another hopeful plan. A plan to influence those around me towards a more joyful place by inducing them to laugh... at me. It is a generally well known thought by those who spend any degree of time with me that music moves me to sing along. Alright, a caveat: GOOD music that I relate to an actually appreciate causes me to sing along. Today, it was the CARS soundtrack Copper bought on Friday for the kids, and especially Dash, who has been utterly taken with Lightening McQueen since we first locked eyes on that movie (it's coming out on DVD November 7th! See? more evidence of the rather useless trivia I have banging around inside my cranium at any given time). The tune "Life Is A Highway" is a delight, an played repeatedly in my car this afternoon (Dash requested it, and I was all too happy to oblige!) Singing it at top volume while also be-bopping my head around and playing air drums on my steering wheel must make me look like quite ridiculous from the average bystander's perspective. Or it could look alarming, as though I have a seizure disorder that also involves singing loudly.

But in any case, my jubilant all-body contact singing seemed to have an unexpected side effect today. It caused spontaneous grins to burst to the surface all around me. Which then fueled my joy even more, and increased my vocals and instrumentals, thereby perpetuating more pleasant (or bewildered, but bewilderment that wore a SMILE) responses around me.

So I venture out with a renewed desire to sing in the car: it delights me and seems to bring joy to the surface for others around me. At least I am doing my part to cure this epidemic of GROUCH before it infects me first.

It is a pre-emptive strike. Well, my own version of it anyway.

phoney baloney

Something happens here in this house when the phone rings. It is best envisioned somewhere between oblivion, determined denial, and utter contempt. We are, as a family, not phone people. Which is odd, since we both spend a lamentably large portion of time during any given day ON.THE.PHONE.

You see, I am a Realtor. This really means I am a psycho~therapist who sells houses to or for typically overwrought, stressed out people who may or may not genuinely need professional help (which may or may not be a result of trying to navigate this difficult and rather obscenely expensive enclave of California). Granted, the current Real Estate market and the consuming process of transacting business within it is enough to cause a mental breakdown. But must you feel compelled to call to share the intracacies of your Real Estate-induced mental breakdown with your Realtor in excess of eleven times a day? And at my HOME, no less, which is a number I give out only for emergencies. An emotional seller calling me at 9:02 p.m. to ask me to choose between two colors of sage green paint for the walls in her master bathroom (an actual call I received this week, complete with photos sent through my cell phone of both color choices) does NOT constitute an emergency. I mean it. I have learned the value of screening every single call. Because otherwise, it would be me who needs the therapy. A lot of it.

And Copper, my beloved soul mate, is a Police Sergeant. Which, according to our son, Dash, means he spends his working days "catching the bad guys". But it also means that every manner of judge, D.A., officer, dispatcher, supervisor, and administrator calls him at all hours. If I make the diasterous mistake of picking up the phone and speaking with these callers, I am bombarded with a barrage of numbers which are supposed to make potent sense to me: "This is OFC 16734, OIC on the 514 incident at 0937 on Road 14 involving the PC549 and a 5150 subject. Please have Copper call me at my phone: 555-0913."

Sure, got it. Right.

That message, when translated through my brain, ends up as something like this: "Hey Copper, one of the officers called - his last two numbers were 43 or 34. He wants to talk to you about buying a vowel." I just plain give up and don't answer anything that could be from the Police Department under any circumstances, lest I be repsonsible for the destruction of mankind with my inability to decipher and properly relay police speak code.

So Lachen stays away from the phone in general. Couple this with actual WORK going on at my house in addition to the business of parenting, teaching, and loving (often involving rolling around on the ground playing an elaborate game of Jay Jay the Jet Plane) two delightful children, and the phone becomes a fairly perpetually annoying little interruption device. Not a luxury. More like that barky little neighbor's dog that just goes off in the corner about 8 times an hour for no reason whatsoever. That's enough to make bats fly out of your nose some days.

Today was one of those days - can anyone tell? (insert wan smile here)

So I have developed a minor brain storm: get rid of the phone in our house! As in, altogether. Copper and I each have cell phones which are generally stapled to our body most of our waking hours, so why do we need the home phone as well? Because we never answer it anyway, it has become a message repository, not a communication device. And if each of us has an individual cell phone, I will never be forced to impressively blunder an important phone message for my husband from a uniformed officer or court personnel again. I think this NO PHONE concept is not so much desperation as inspiration. Even though I doubt Copper will go for my genius plan, I am getting excited about the possibility.

Because I would like to dream of a home without the constancy of the ringing, ringing, ringing, ringing, ringing, ringing, ringing, ringing, ringing, ringing, ringing, ringing, ringing, ringing, ringing, ringing, ringing, ringing, ringing, ringing, ringing, ringing, ringing, ringing, ringing, ringing, ringing, ringing...

telephone.

Someone else thinks so too...

...permit me to link to a little news clip from the Chicago Sun Times. Islamic Fascism sure may not be a polite term, but it is dead on accurate if we are paying attention globally, hoenstly, and Biblically, not just politically. (yes, I know... dead horses and something about beating them with a stick... I know, I know...)

Our September eleventh

grace or gunpoint

Are we all actually paying attention to the startling growth and vile practices of Fascist, Violently Forced-Upon-Us Islam? Or are we just content to go about our lives with our behinds up in the air and our heads buried in sand up to our necks? Because the rampant "convert or be killed" tactics employed by these people would seem enough to cause alarms to ring throughout the world. Instead, though, it seems there is a collective YAWN resonating from the masses. What on earth is going on? Who gave these people a pass to torture others and force them to convert to THEIR brand of THEIR religion or die? When did we become so content to turn a blind eye to the truth while creating alternative convenient scapegoats (America, anyone?)out of thin air?

Goodnesssakes. Isn't it about time we all collectively, as a family, neighborhood, state, region, nation, WORLD ~ stand against this clear and present danger to our lives, our children's, our freedom, and Biblical truth?

F.I.B. s not just a series of initials - it is the pressing threat that must be faced. And it is the pressing need that must be met. Beause at the core of the F.I.B.'s heart is a lost, vacant soul in need of truth. And love. And whose vacancy can only be overcome through the power, the grace, and the mercy of the cross. I hereby encourage us to PRAY, to BELIEVE, and to LOVE each of these lost souls who seek conversions to Islam at gunpoint. If we fail at sharing the love of Christ with the world, we have not only failed ourselves and those who will remain lost due to our apathy, we will have failed He from whom all blessings flow. Let us replace gunpoint conversions with Gods abiding grace, while we still can...

Because THIS was what I needed to hear...

This really happened. Can you believe it?

Some people behave like unmitigated idiots. This warped idea of a "prank" is absolutely horrifying. I will be driving to the cleaners in the morning to pick up that trusty purple chenille turtleneck sweater. I might suddenly need it again.

Carpe Laundrum

Come With Me on a Magical Journey...

Sorta.

Laundry is a passion of mine. For those of you who just read that sentence and snorted (you know who you are), I forgive you. For those who just read that sentence and thought all measure of mean-spirited sentiments in my general direction about needing to get a life, perhaps?, I forgive you too. For those of you who read that sentence and felt your mind drift to a wonderful place where freshly tumbled, vanilla fabric softened clothes swirl around you in a ballet of cozy warmth, you get it. You know. It is so simple, really: dirty, smelly things go in ~~ wait 90 minutes ~~ and lovely, soft, snuggly things come out. It is the antedote to delayed gratification in my world.

We are the few. The proud. The LAUNDERERS.

Actually, you'd never know my love of doing laundry for how seldom the pile ever goes completely away in this house. That is a poor measurement of my enjoyment of this task, in fact, because as much as I do laundry ~ there is always more laundry being made dirty simultaneously. As soon as I empty the basket, it begins filling again. And our baskets tend to fill disporportionately by individual measure here at Casa Lachen. I am the LEAST messy and least laundry producing member of this household. By a LOT. My son, Dash, comes in a distant second, followed closely by his sister, Miss Sauce. Bringing up the rear in unapologetic fashion, is my beloved husband, Copper. Now, I don't mind doing the 712 thousand pounds of laundry that process through my machines annually, but there is one little laundry quirk Copper has which, after nearly 10 years of marrige, continues to baffle and amuse me.

I find this laundry habit of Coppers' fairly giggly: because he fills up the basket in our closet at least twice a week (my clothes are in there too, but I soil 1 thing for every 14 of his), I have to bring that basket to the laundry room twice a week, dump he dirty clothes out into the laundry room baskets, and then bring it back to our closet. Somtimes, our closet laundry basket it stays in the laundry room with me while I fold a load of laundry and then bring it back to our bedroom with me. Sometimes, it stays in there longer because I got distracted while folding said laundry by any number of dawning experiments involving my children, duct tape, toothpaste, and the neighbor's cat which I feel compelled to put the kibosh on immediately.

INEVITABLY, during this time when the laundry basket is temporarily removed from our closet, Copper will throw his dirty clothes onto the ground in our closet where the laundry basket usually sits. As though it is still there when it really is not.

Now, he knows the laundry basket IS NOT THERE.

But he knows it is SUPPOSED to be there.

That is, apparently, enough reason to toss dirty clothes onto that vacant space where the laundry basket is usually, but isn't right now.

He knows where it is, this missing laundry basket. He knows that wifey dragged it to the laundry room because it was full. Mostly of stuff HE put there. He also knows where the laundry room is. Really, he does. The laundry room is located exactly twenty-seven paces away from the closet in our bedroom. Twenty-seven little steps. I measured.


Yet his clothes get blithely tossed into a pile on the floor of our closet where the laundry basket is SUPPOSED to be.
Because that makes sense to my beloved man. My beloved, strange, sweet husband. Who grins like the cat that ate the canary every time I mention this little idiosyncracy of his. He knows. And because he reads my blog semi-regularly (but never comments - ahem!), he extra-specially-super-duper knows.

But just in case, I offered this special map for him tonight, hoping to illustrate how simple a journey this is: this business of walking from our closet (where the laundry basket is NOT) to the laundry room (where the laundry basket IS). I plan to put this little visual aid in the place where the laundry basket USUALLY sits in our closet, hoping for the Mapquest effect. We'll see. I am kind of thinking he may not even see it lying there on the carpet before he throws his dirty shirt on top of it. I love this man. He makes my whole life fun.

MAPQUEST for LACHEN'S LAUNDRY

Starting Location: Lachen's Bedroom Closet

Ending Location: Lachen's Laundry Room

Directions: Go due west for six paces. Cross bathroom floor. Turn right. Walk three paces to bedroom door. Go through bedroom door and turn left. Walk eighteen paces to the laundry room. Enter door and deposit laundry. In a BASKET of some sort.



Our closet laundry Basket: HERE.

Our closet laundry Basket: NOT HERE.








Step One ~ Walking out of our closet








Step Six ~ Walking across our bathroom floor. See how easy this is?

Step somewhere around 20 ~ in the hallway on my way to the laundry room. Does anyone else notice I seem to be walking exclusively on my right foot?

Et Voila! 27 steps from closet to laundry central: we made it!

CARPE LAUNDRUM:

"Seize the Laundry..."

...and put it in a basket.

kindergarten, fox news style

Tuesday morning at 8:25 (well, as it's us, 8:27) a.m. will find us, well the 5-year old one of us, returning to kindergarten.

Though we experienced both a brilliant and disheartening start to kindergarten, we've committed to give it the old college try and at least weather the full month of September before making any rash decisions about the future of the Family Lachen and Public School Kindergarten. Miss Sauce simultaneously manages to both love and hate it, which harmonizes very well with my own sentiments. We are simply not sure if it is the ideal or appropriate place for our strong~willed, sweet, gifted, vastly intelligent, almost painfully sensitive, ADHD child. The two time-outs she received in class on her second day of instruction (which were appropriate to her behavior and supported by both Copper and I), and the resulting ongoing emotional obsession and anxiety over the last two days about being in trouble at school are leading us to wonder. Again. And again.

More bulletins can be expected here in blogger land as events warrant here in Decision 2006: Kindergartengate. Maybe I should start a rolling scroll at the bottom of my blog page like the news channels do. Here's a little preview of what that might look like on any given day, if the first two are a solid example (you have to imagine this information whirring by you in a blue band at the bottom of your screen, tantalizingly slow...):

8:27 a.m. ~ Miss Sauce arrives for another day of kindergarten *** 10:19 ~ Miss Sauce is still in kindergarten. Reading group, to be precise. The behavioral Treaty of Temperament is still being upheld. *** 11:44 p.m. ~ Miss Sauce is still in kindergarten, but received a dreaded Time~Out. The UN may get involved in peacekeeping efforts. France is considering sending 3 1/2 troops. *** 12:00 ~ Lunchtime. Too many carbs and not enough water may cause restlessness and overexuberance. Warning! This may lead to yet another Time Out. *** 12:48 p.m. ~ Second Time~Out received. The classroom is now on ORANGE ALERT ~ the second highest alert level. Expect Mrs. Thompson to address the nation of Lachen shortly.


Yeah, maybe not.