Summer Fun -- or Not.

Well, I was going to take the kids to the laser show at Coney. Had everything set up except buying the ticket and finalizing what vehicle. Wasn't going to take my loud easy bake oven if I didn't have to.

The show was/is this weekend only. July 8 thru 11.  
Then the weather forecast changed.
From a pleasant (hot and humid ) summer weekend to a rainy stormy one.
Well, this event was being held outdoors. The webpage even said bring a tent if you were worried about rain. Said the rain would enhance the lasers, and I could see that. If it was a nice gentle rain.
Didn't think lightning would enhance very much. And the kids are iffy about storms, especially out of their home territory.
Plus my own problems with driving in darkness, in wetness, and in lightning.
So, I cancelled. Didn't buy the tickets, didn't finalize borrowing a car.
I said, when I told them, that it probably wouldn't storm if we didn't go, but it probably would of we went. I didn't want to take a chance with them along. The weather report for both Saturday and Sunday was late evening (about sundown) storms, possibly severe..
Yeah it didn't rain much (here) on Saturday night.
We must wait and see about Sunday night.
Anybody want to place a bet with me about rain then?

Rent-2-Own hosts Back to School

The owners of the Rent-2-Own in Georgetown hosted a back to school festival. They combined a generous community giveaway with fun and play, and the result was a lot of fun.

They provided school supplies for children in the county, and they made it a party for parents and children alike.

Who can do that? 

Even when they can, how many people take the time to actually put it into action? 

There was food, there was music, there were (sorta) rides, some with water. I never knew you could take a ride in a bouncy-house. 

Guess I got some schooling, too.

I don't know what the employees (I assumed) thought of the day. Many wore tags saying "Volunteer." The day was humid, the crowd was crowded. Kids pushed and shoved and cut line, tattled and pushed and shoved.

They also held hands to run together, jump together, climb together. Grown-ups walked around trying to keep track of children. There were lots of "Mammaw" and "Hey, Mom" and "Daddy, lookame!"

Through it all, I never saw any of these volunteer/employee/ helpers lose their patience. In the heat and the humidity and the hollering, the personnel kept their cool. Every one of these people should be recognized and awarded with, at the very least, a smile and a heartfelt "Thank you. You made our day."

From the owners of the venue, who have made this community giveaway a shining example of "Charity Begins At Home" to the Church across the street that allowed its parking lot to be used for parking, to the many many WONDERFUL people who were there before after and during the event -- it was a fantastic experience. 

A lot of work and a lot of fun.

Thank you all.

(And thanks for the notebooks, too.)

Back to the schoolroom

It's back to school time, and the news is out. All over the broadcasts are good schools, bad schools, charter schools, school levies, buses, teachers, backpack programs, and a lot of discussions. Most of the discussions are about costs.

Anyone who thinks free public schools are free hasn't gone to one for more than two generations. When I was a child, we had school fees every year  to pay for workbooks to go along with the textbooks. These workbooks were not and are not optional. There are more programs today than there used to be to help parents pay for them, but that's not the point.
The point is that free schools aren't free.

There's been discussion, too, about the school year. About the whole school year concept. The September-to-May concept is fairly recent .  School, in my lifetimes, started after Labor Day and ended by Memorial Day. Many things have happened to change that -- standardized Monday holidays, for one thing. Memorial Day isn't the 30th of May anymore.

The school year somehow changed into a certain number of days in school instead of a season of education. I have a lot to say about this ridiculous concept. My daughter had to make up absent days one year by going to school during her Christmas vacation. She didn't have to learn anything -- she wasn't making up tests, or reviewing chapters she missed due to her injury. She just had to have her butt in a seat at the school building, so they could have the requisite numbers of students on the minimum number of days.

Education is not the goal of school. Attendance is.

Some of this -- most of it -- is due to funding formulas. #of students, multiplied by # of days = $$$. Never mind the learning. No child can learn in 52 days, they absolutely need to have 53 days. It's the law.

It's the law.

Schooling should never have been made a matter of law.
Once it was a matter of law, it should have remained a matter of local law.
Not state.
Not Federal.
Not run by dollar dictators who want only a return on their investment.

To get that return, they turned to athletics. The games children play at recess for fun have become big business and are the secondary purpose of having school.
Again, if you think school athletics are about equal opportunity, you haven't been living in the real world. All sorts of personal gear and equipment have to be purchased. One year it was name brand shoes decided by the coach, because they were best and safest. Problem was, the shoes cost more than the monthly electric bill. Without the proper shoes, the students aren't allowed to play.

Doesn't sound very free or equal to me,and kids have always been pretty good at playing games without help. Just because the town council can get a cut of the gate and the state can run the concessions doesn't seem to me a sound educational platform.

It's back to school time.

At least we don't have to worry (too much) about what's required of us or our children. All we have to do is make sure they get there (Attendance) and encourage them to play games (Athletics.)

That's what school is all about.

Dark Shadows. (No, not mine.)

Spent the weekend browsing the old show. YouTube has quite a bit, if you have the patience to weed out the Johnny Depp- Tim Burton overwhelming publicity. YouTube has quite a few clips from the old show, including one with the very beginning. Fan club events and interviews, from then and a few from now.

I saw a few clips that might have been from the short run evening version with Ben Cross as Barnabas. I didn't look at those.

What I did not see anything of, is the two movies they made from the show: Dark Shadows and House of Dark Shadows. Not surprising. The movies were pretty bad. By the time the movies were made, the show had lost focus and was campy. Blood and guts and 'boos' and very little story. An adventure into variations of time travel and ghosts and vampires and werewolfs and anything else 'not normal'.  It created a lifelong interest in these things for me, led me to some good reading that led to better research that led to more reading that leads to more research.

Interesting the bizarre storylines were, and even educational. Entertaining they often were not.

Over time, everyone seems to have lost sight of the fact that Dark Shadows didn't start out as a vampire-and-werewolf chiller and thriller.

It started out as a Gothic Romance.

"My name is Victoria Winters.My journey is beginning. A journey that I hope will open the doors of life to me.and link my past to my future."

Victoria Winters, you see, is an orphan. She has been pulled out of her orphanage to be a governess in a big old house by the sea. The residents of the house consist of an angry young boy, an angsty teenaged girl (and could anyone be more angsty than a teen in the late 60s?), the boy's drunken irresponsible father and the girl's mother who hasn't left the house for nearly twenty years.

Pure Gothic as far as genre goes. Nowadays cliched, but back then the genre was undergoing a revival. (Maybe as an outlet for all that built-up angst?)

It took Barnabas almost a year to appear. The first few months were dedicated to straight out mysterious events that had logical explanations. Then the supernatural began creeping in -- ghosts and premonitions and dreams.

Oh my lord, the Dream! I don't remember the details of the dream, but the storyline was that each person would have the dream, but each person added something to it. And when the next person had the dream, the last person who'd had it died. It was one of the most intricate and well developed plot arcs I have ever watched grow daily. Just seeing bits of it, and sometimes the actors, can give me thrill-chills because it was such a creepy story. (It was also a good way to kill off a bunch of characters that no longer fit, which as an author, I appreciate today and didn't realize then.)

The Barnabas-Josette- Jeremiah- Angelique story was well done as well. The ghost stepping out of her picture and opening her music box and waltzing through the big empty room. WOW! This story would be reworked over and over again throughout the show, but the first incarnation was damned good storytelling. So were a few of the others as Barnabas keeps going back to try and change the past, and Angelique or/and her cohorts follow to prevent him from doing so.

This is pretty much where the evening television remake started, and they didn't do a bad job with it. I would have continued watching. But too many people turned it off or turned away from it when it wasn't played for thrills or laughs. A common complaint was that there was too much sex.

Really? It was a soap opera. Or a Gothic Romance. Romance IS usually about sex, is it not? And exactly why was Angelique so obsessed with Barnabas? If it had just been for his money or his standing, his brother would have fit the bill just as well. No, she wanted Barnabas, and it wasn't so she'd have someone to talk to during meals.

So much good drama in there. Good plotlines, good story arcs.

It's a shame that it is being remembered as camp and memorialized for new generations as a comedy. although I don't mind the laughs. From what I've seen, they are mostly clever, if campy, laughs.

But I sure do wish they'd revive the "it was a dark and stormy night" genre of serials. The endings are so much more satisfactory than the endings to the current reality spooky shows.

Badly made by today's standards (and even their own) but entertaining and mysterious and fun.
I guess that's what most people remember -- the fun. 

Flow of Family Fun

My brother's wedding Saturday made me think of how we, as a family, handle the ebb and flow of these get-togethers. Summer means there will be a few, and maybe a few more.

I opted out of many family events because I wanted to avoid conflict with my dad, who is gone now. He and I were on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, and he was always outspoken about his beliefs. I don't think he ever meant to start any fuss and bother, he just wanted to convince everyone of how he believed.

Add to his firmness, the fact that he was deaf, and whether one agreed or disagreed, one had to shout and make prolonged eye contact to converse. I don't know how it works for others, but shouting, even over innocuous topics, ends up with me becoming angry. Shouting as a physical function, raises the blood pressure, which causes a flood of other reactions.

Anyway, because of the situation, I avoided. Didn't stop my girls from knowing their grandfather, did prevent them from seeing me act like a shrewish lunatic with him.

Now, I see my own daughter mirroring this behavior. Because of work and also because of some personal issues with family members, she has avoided the family get-togethers. No one wants to be involved in a fight, or to be the person everyone in the family fights with or becomes angry over the fighting.
Anyway, she has chosen to abstain from the possibility of conflict.

But she worries about her child not getting to know this side of her family, and the solution Tam reached was the same one I did. To allow the child to attend in the care of another family member. (In her case. me.)

Maybe it's wrong, but it seems to me the best solution. Not in every situation, not for every event, but in general it's a good thing. It acknowledges the importance of family, it keeps up traditions. even starts a new one -- tradition by proxy.

Like all families, we disagree. Sometimes we take sides against one another, and we'll talk to a third member about how stupid so-and-so is about whatever. We can be vicious or angry, or vicious and angry.
But when we get together as a group, we try to enjoy one another's company without conflict. We aren't perfect, sometimes a forbidden topic slips in and someone feels attacked.

We respect one another. We know we are available to each-and-every in at least some way. Making an effort to keep the young ones connected even when we can't teaches them, by example, that family IS important. The events that Family is Fun. No matter if it's you or they who are the stupid or wrong ones. Family IS.

As the worldly world whirls by, as weather wreaks havoc, as all our institutions are besieged, there can be no stronger message to leave our children.

Shower: A Blessing

One of the many, many things we take for granted these days is the ability to take a shower. Or a daily bath. Try to imagine your life without these amenities.

No big deal, you may think. One can wash in the sink, do a sponge bath, use plenty of deodorant and change clothes several times a day.
Yes, but how long will that be effective for the personal hygienic standards we have for ourselves?  How long before you just feel that these makeshift measures are overwhelmingly inadequate?
Because they are indeed inadequate in the long run.

My bathroom is being remodeled. Actually, the floor is being replaced. Everything had to be taken out, and new floor joists put in, which means the foundation had to be adjusted or braced in a couple of places. Nothing is being done quickly, all is being done thoroughly. In the meantime, the only source of water to eash with is the kitchen sink.

To make it worse, I live in town, with house to the right of me, house to the left of me, houses behind me. There is really little expectation of privacy, even with blankets covering the windows and all the doors locked. One doesn't linger over ablutions in those circumstances.
Can't even put up a camp shower because of too-close neighbors and too many out of school children. They like to inspect and question and look.

I never thought I was a person overly concerned with bathing. All the years I worked in fast food ingrained some things more deeply than I knew. One of those things was bathing regularly.

I'm embarrassed.
I don't want to go out.

My baby-est brother (they are all younger than me) is getting married this weekend. One of the reasons I'm not going is because I don't want to embarrass him (them) by being the most malodorous guest, These days I not only look like an elephant, I feel that I am beginning to smell like one.
I picture myself as Pigpen, with clouds of body-stink emanating from me, instead of good clean dirt.

Now, I know some of this may be exaggerated, but I've had persistent body-odor issues in my life. And I just plain don't, can't,  feel clean.

So, don't take your shower for granted. Hug it, kiss it, thank god for it. Add it to your list of things third world people would like to have, like broccoli. Microwaveable broccoli. Bathe with indulgence, just that you have water and soap, and more water to remove the soap, all the soap.

And, oh yeah, if you encounter someone smelly, spend some time conversing with them. It may not be their fault, and you shouldn't be a snob.

Sad Day. Good Day.

Yesterday, my sisters and brothers and I sorted through my dad's left-behinds. It wasn't too bad. He had everything in order, knew what he wanted done and how he wanted it done, and since most of us are now adults, we went with it.

I don't think anyone who hasn't been through this can appreciate how wonderful it is to have adult siblings. One sees and hears so much of fighting and brawling that can go on at these 'events'. Surely those things are a dishonor to the Dear Departed, however much they may have promised both Bub and Sissy that each could have the Elvis collection for their children.

We had none of that. What few things were grabbed by two people, they were discussed, and usually ended with each sibling saying "Go ahead" to the other.

That's a legacy any father could be proud of. Mine certainly should be

still a cold

This is a nasty one, and it's going through the inhabitants of this house like crazy. It was Hailey who started it, and then me. Now Rex has it, and Hailey's mommy and daddy are both sick. Tam's working in the window in the snow and cold, too, all while washing dishes she tells me. And they are here, for now. Can't throw them out ,sick, in the snow. Although in one case I am extremely tempted.
At least she can get medicine if she needs it.
If Rex can handle it, he can get medicine after the first of February, when his Medicare Drug Plan kicks in. Before that, I guess we'll muddle along as we usually do. It's less then three weeks.

Me, I get to survive on thera-flu and chicken noodle soup. So far it's working, and Hailey and I seem to be feeling better. She's a handful, running me ragged -- which isn't hard to do these days. The overwhelming symptom of this nasty cold has been a need to sleep. Except for Hailey -- she's two. Nothing makes her want to sleep.
If it did, I'd have her at the hospital downtown, you can bet.

Anyway, she's healing, I'm rebounding, and everyone else is expecting me to wave my magic wand and make it all better.

Situation Normal. You know the rest of it.