Random-dee-dom-dom

We were able to have our first soccer game of the season last weekend.  There was a big opening ceremony, with mayors and councilmen and reverends--Oh my!  I had my camera out and was snapping away.  I may have gotten a little carried away with taking pictures of my own child, as he so eloquently informed me.

Okay, okay! I parked myself on a lawn chair with all the other moms and put the camera away.  Zane's team played beautifully, and they won.  Zane had one almost goal, but more importantly, he remembered what he was supposed to do during the game without anybody telling him, and he passed the ball instead of hogging it.  That's progress in my book!

I am completely shocked these days when I read about how other countries treat their little girls.  Supposedly a 40 year old man married an 8 year old girl.  In this day?  That has to be a sign of a backwards society--a 40 year old man marrying an 8 year old girl. That's pedophilia, by any definition.  India has all but killed off most of their girls by aborting them, because they don't want to be saddled with a dowry. Now men in India who want to marry have to buy their brides instead of wooing them; CNN says there are poor girls stolen from their parents and sold for that purpose. What is wrong with these other countries that they treat their women so poorly?  Girls are not property, they are not a burden, they are not to be sold by the pound.  They are to be loved and cherished and nurtured into adulthood so they can love and cherish and nurture the next generation!  I just need to stop reading or listening to the news.  I always end up upset.  

Hurricane season seemed to start with a whimper, but it certainly heated up in a hurry.  I think that last week there were three storms in the Atlantic--Gabrielle, Humberto, and Ingrid. We are supposed to be getting rain from Ingrid in the Gulf and Manuel from the Pacific.  I feel strongly that we need a hurricane Millicent.  That just seems like a good name for a hurricane.  Also, perhaps they can have a season where all the hurricanes are named after characters from the Harry Potter universe?

We FINALLY got to see the last Star Trek movie.  My husband went out and bought the blu ray, and we watched at home, with commentary by Zane.  He wasn't really watching the movie, he was hiding in his Boy Nest and playing games on his tablet.  Every now and then he'd pop up, make some comment, then burrow back underneath his pile of pillows.  He decided that he liked the character of Chekov, but I think that was mostly because of the accent.  The accent made Zane giggle.

Yes, that is indeed a Christmas tree.  They were putting them up at Macy's when we were there on Sunday.  Here it is, not even the end of September, and Macy's is putting out Christmas stuff.  There is something wrong with that!  Everyone knows that the everlasting candy of Halloween(I still have some on the shelf!) comes before the evergreens!!!!

Let's try this visiting Stacy again, even if it is a little early.  Last week there was some sort of glitch. Have a great day/week!

Barely Random

Believe it or not, I do not sit around all day thinking of blog posts.  Occasionally, I'll think of something, but most of the time I sit down in front of my computer and stare at it blankly.  I wish that I could just talk to the computer, like they did on Star Trek.  "Computer," I'd say.  "Look into my brain and find a good topic to blog about."

Yep.  Random Window Picture.

Of course, there's always the possibility that the Star Trek computer would self-destruct at the task of looking into my brain.  Remember that scene in Mary Poppins, when she opens up her little satchel, and she has all sorts of really cool stuff tucked in there?  That's my brain.  So many things jammy-packed in there!  If it were a room it would be full to bursting, and when you opened a door Groucho Marx would fall out(hint: that was a reference to Duck Soup).   And that's just my stuff.  I don't even what to discuss how adding Larry's stuff and Zane's stuff has my brain overflowing.

On the night before Easter, I took a bunch of plastic eggs.  Inside each egg I placed the usual, plus I added a glow stick.  Actually, I added a glow bracelet, but the result was the same:  Eggs that could be hidden at night, but found easily.  Zane loved it.  I even put an egg up in a tree where it was eye level, and he thought that was terrific.  This all fit in very well with the movie Rise of the Guardians, which we saw on Friday evening. Those guardians left a group of children on the ice in the middle of a lake, but well...nobody else noticed, I'm sure.  Zane loved Jack Frost, and the Easter Bunny, the best.  Explaining the Tooth Fairy took a little time, as did the Sandman.  Santa needed no explanation.  The Boogeyman was tricky.  I didn't want to say that he was just bad.  He serves a purpose, the Boogeyman does.  The idea of him scares people, and makes them do things.  If you're scared of starving, you do things to help yourself so that you don't starve, right?   See, necessary.  I know that guy scares me into getting out of bed most mornings so I can earn a paycheck. 

My boy is a ridiculous flirt.  He smiles and giggles around women and they fall for him.  While anyone who likes my child is wonderful in my book, I have concerns about raising a boy who always gets what he wants from women. He's going to have to work to get what he wants in life, I think, just like everyone else, and he may as well get used to it now.   But then I consider my brother and remember how everyone thought he was adorable when he was a kid.  He turned out okay, I guess.  I still occasionally want to grab him and give him a noogie, but for the most part he's a good guy.  So maybe Zane will turn out okay, as well.  I suppose that since life is so rough, any help we can get should be appreciated. 

I did a terrible thing this past weekend--I paid two boys to mow our lawn.  I thought it would be something nice for Larry. He'd been saying that he was going to mow for two weeks, and hadn't worked up the energy to tackle the job.  I thought that he would appreciate that I was taking care of the job so he didn't have to.  Instead I heard a lot of complaints.  First it was that I was spending the money.  Then it was that it took them so long.  Then they were going to break something.  I was starting to get irritated, that he just couldn't be grateful for this one thing.  And yes, they did cut the grass too short, and yes, they did pull off the pipe that drains the A/C.  But at least the grass has been cut, and we were able to put out the eggs for Zane's Egg Hunt.  

This past weekend was gorged, not only with chocolate, but also with television. Game of Thrones began their third season, and The Walking Dead ended their third season.  We can watch neither show while Zane is awake, of course.  The DVR is our friend! 

Go visit Stacy today.  She may have some new batches of wine prepared...it won't take a minute out of your A to Z blog reading!

RemembeRED: TV shows

Prompt: TV is something that people either watch a lot of or have definite feelings about. This week, we want you to think about a tv show from your past. Maybe you watched it, maybe you didn't and it was just something that everyone else talked about.

What feelings does the show evoke? What memories does it trigger?

Growing up, watching television was something that my family did together. I can remember watching Gunsmoke, and all of us rooting for Marshall Dillon to save the day. I can remember Charlie's Angels, The Six Million Dollar Man, and The Bionic Woman.

But the show I remember loving best is the original Star Trek. I was four when the show first went on the air, and I don't remember that, of course. However, we went to Germany when I was 8, and the only channel we had to watch that was in English was the one the military piped in. That channel showed reruns of Star Trek. I could hardly wait to hear the intro.

"Space: The final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before."

I loved Captain Kirk. He was smart, he was bold, he was decisive, and he got the job done, even if he had to break the rules sometimes. Captain Kirk was born to lead--you could see it in his body language, his voice, his expressions. Captain Kirk believed in himself and his abilities; he had healthy self-esteem, the psychologists would say. I guess that one would have to have good self-esteem, to believe in yourself, in order to lead a bunch of people into uncharted space, but that hadn't occurred to me as a child.

But I had an affinity for Spock. I wanted to be more like him, with his unemotional view of the situations the crew encountered. Personality-wise, I was probably more like Dr. McCoy, passionate and caring, but I wanted to be Spock. Even back then, however, I noticed that Kirk usually made decisions that fell between the viewpoints of his two colleagues. A leader does have to listen to the opinions of his crew, I learned, but he also has to make his own decisions, because he's the leader.

I can remember watching episodes of Star Trek and being scared. The episode with the Horta, a creature that melted rock, gave me a nightmare or two. I can also remember wanting a tribble, and laughing at the sight of Kirk being bombarded with tribbles from a grain storage unit. In all those episodes, I felt that I was a bona fide member of the Enterprise.

In some ways, I still do.

When I was in college as an undergrad, my friends and I would go to a boy's dorm to watch the original Star Trek; a station played reruns every weekday at 4pm.

My answering machine, once upon a time, was the intro to Star Trek. People often called me just to hear it.

One of the reasons I became interested in my husband was his love of all things Star Trek, although he is more of a Next Generation fan than I am.

And my husband sits with my son these days and watches remastered Star Trek episodes on our Blu-ray player. When I can, I watch them as well.

I want to see my son, as an adult, to explore, to seek, and to boldly go toward whatever life has to offer him.

Lesson learned, Captain Kirk.

Very Important Philosophical Questions

This morning my husband attempted to show my son Star Wars. Zane was only interested in the first five minutes, like he is with most movies...except Star Trek. And secretly I think that is awesome.

I am a Star Trek person. My husband claimed to be a Star Trek geek. In fact, that's sort of how we met: we were waiting for a parent to show up for a meeting, and in the course of our conversation Star Trek was mentioned. My husband claims that he was smitten at that moment. Except he's not really a ST geek, because he really only likes The Next Generation and Captain Picard. I let this slide in the name of love. Unfortunately, my husband also loves Star Wars. He's bi-sci-fi, I guess you could say. While I was as enamored of Han Solo as every other woman on Planet Earth, I was never quite converted to the Church of Star Wars.

I use the word "church" because when the average ST geeks and the SW geeks get together, it almost seems to approach the fervor of a Pentecostal revival the way the arguments fly over which is best and why. These people don't seem to practice religious tolerance, either: I've known perfectly calm and rational individuals to come out fighting if you slander "their show" by saying that Jar Jar was adorable or that Spock's ears are crooked.

We've already decided to raise Zane as Catholic with a side of Methodist, but we have not discussed the ST vs. SW question. My feeling is that there are advantages to both 'religions'. With SW you get to play with a light saber a lot, hang out in seedy bars with bounty hunters, and use the Force to smack people around. With ST you get to dance with some scantily clad green women, time travel, fight Klingons, and drink Romulan ale(throw in Duran Duran and we are describing my college years). Both ST and SW have characters that are archetypes that offer guidance on how to approach life, so that's not necessarily a deal breaker. But dammit, ST has George Takei! I think George Takei trumps Chewbacca any day!

Once the ST vs. SW question is resolved, hopefully before Zane is in his forties, there's an even bigger philosophical question we as parents will have to address, one that could have long-term repercussions for Zane and his ability to live in the state of Texas: Beans in the chili or no beans?

This parenting gig is tough!!