This Happened

[Ronster]

so here is an ancestor, not from the surname line, but the ancestor to one of my great, great,great great......grandmamas

Sir Roger Le Strange 5th Baron Le Strange of Knockyn

I knew I was a Slytherin!

[Elle]

LOL, Le Strange! Your distant cousins must be Barons or Earls or something right now - you should pay them a visit, obviously. My family tree boasts a couple of actual "mad hatters" (they made hats), tavern owners (ya, obviously) and musicians. One lady died when a fruit tree fell on her. I am guessing most of my people dug potatoes for a living and stuff, or milked goats. It would explain the powerful inborn affinity for milk and potatoes.

[Elle]

When you go out for a walk, get sweaty, and your sunscreen runs into your eyes because you ran out of your usual SPF moisturizer.

And of course...
When you are so tired, and FINALLY grab ten private moments for a shower, and manage to shave one leg... and the dog starts barking crazily at you because OMG that shower looks DANGEROUS and YOU ARE SCARY when soaking wet and have totally different hair and smell like eucalyptus suddenly!!! So you forget to shave the other leg. And it's hot every day. Well... ugh.

[Elle]

Breaking: dog discovers to his shock and dismay that cars are driven by human beings. Only barking furiously at these agents of Destruction and evil can save us!

[Elle]

Chloe and Jim are playing Minecraft and are singing over and over again, "I have a FORTRESSSSS!" and I cannot stop thinking of Goblins.

[Elle]

Out of the entire universe of pictures, Buffy has plucked out one of my favorites to put on her phone or whatever. I would have blamed Google except she found it somewhere else on instagram or whatever they use today.

I cannot tell whether someone is trying to sandbag me at work in a serious way that I should care about or whether I am capable of totally ignoring such paltry efforts. Totally new kinds of issues, it's interesting. Learning never ceases.

Speaking of learning never ceasing, I recall saying a bunch of stupid things about how I would handle my kids and the internet or social media. I had these deep plans, you know! I had principles, I didn't want to spy on anyone without ruling out spying under certain conditions, and everything would be all worked out rationally between us like rational adults do. Instead, it amounts to realizing your kid knows how to operate the equipment about a thousand times better than you do, is laughing at your feeble effort, and mostly complies with your requests but sometimes not. So you use Any Means Necessary, regardless of principle, to deal with this because you're utterly outclassed. You use your 4 year old to get into the 13 year old's phone because only he remembers all the passwords to everything, even though the 13 year old does at least obligingly tell you her password. But you're old and can't remember everything.

[Elle]

My offspring says to me, "HA HA, I can kick my foot up way higher than your head! HA HA"

Go to bed.

[Elle]

People came to my house in the wee hours of the night, the next morning literally watched me make blueberry pancakes in about 6.2 minutes right in front of their eyes, and then left without even trying the pancakes. And that is before we got to the eggs and sausage and fruit portion of the meal. It's like I'm from another planet, walking among an alien species. Do they have to feed themselves nutrition pellets, or maybe an IV in the car? I accidentally dropped a giant hair in the batter without realizing it, right? Maybe... snot? Or... or... it was the unexplained poop... somewhere?

One time my mom had to stay with one of her relatives for a night while on vacation and the woman's cats peed on the table and she saw bugs crawling up the wall, and she high-tailed it out of there in the morning without breakfast. So in theory I get this is possible. Something could have gone wrong.

[Eliahad]

It t'were not you, it t'were me. A recording session was added to my schedule tomorrow as I was at GENCON, not to mention the demonstration that was already on the calendar, multiplied by not touching my cello for five days. I had a lot of warming up to do and five new pieces to learn and a night to do it in. I needed the extra hours. Your hospitality was amazing, your couch super comfortable and next time I hope to have a schedule where I can actually hang out for a while, whether it's in one year or two years!

[Elle]

It's okay, she said, sniffling into her tissue, if you had stayed for breakfast I wouldn't have had extra pancakes in the fridge to heat up for lunch today. AND THEN WHAT?!

[Eliahad]

You will be happy to know that I used all of my available minutes to exactly the right amount of getting things done, such that, with the last minute remaining, I successfully achieved all of the things that needed to get done today. Your sacrifice (and pancakal gain) allowed me to survive today.

*raises a glass*

[Zen]

On Sunday, right before I left for Gencon, I dropped my son and his girlfriend off at the train station for a trip to Michigan to visit his grandparents. Yesterday I went to pick them up. Before I went, my wife informed me that while they were there, her mother made his girlfriend try on ALL of my wife and sister-in-law's old formal dresses, and is sending the ones that fit, including the 1988 teal bridesmaid's gown my sister-in-law wore in our wedding (that is so horribly out of style it is criminal) and the "Juliette" dress that she wore when she sang Ave Maria in a friends wedding at some point, that has paisley trim at the bottom... She hasn't left him yet...

When I picked them up we talked about it and I asked, "So, do you have new appreciation for your mother being 'not so bad'?" and she agreed... When my daughter was there, she flat out refused to try any of them on. "No, Grandma! I don't wear dresses!" (Though she has a few she wears, she just always wears them over leggings and treats them like really long shirts I think...) Perhaps the asymmetrical haircut with one side practically a buzz cut helped win that argument? (I personally think she looks great with her new haircut! I haven't asked what the grandparents thought of it... I'm sure it is totally not what they expected their little girl to look like... It is a bit punk...)

[Elle]

Hee hee!!

I have discovered that I am incapable of playing the Kodaly cello sonata. I can play "certain measures" of it, and by that I mean tiny phrases that don't require the left hand to be doing two things at once, playing up in the ether on three strings at once, or generally playing way too many confusing notes too quickly. So mostly none of the piece, in other words. But it was my dream to someday play some of it, so by golly At My Age I had better start trying or it ain't gonna happen.

[Eliahad]

If I might offer a little bit of advice, though I am not an expert on the Kodaly Sonata specifically, I have read through it and I have a way of thinking of some of the passages that might help. With this piece, like so many others of this insane difficulty level, thinking of the technique as choreography instead of well, the notes, actually helps. You have to have your shapes and your spots and then you go Simone Biles on it. Like nail that shit. I believe in you!

[Elle]

I know exactly what you mean. The same thing would work when I played a lot more in past years of life. If I started to think about the notes themselves -- especially the ones way up high or the kinds of double stops and string crossings that make everything sound muddy and Out Of Tune -- I would completely screw up. But if I thought about my hand being in a certain shape and being located in a certain place on the strings, or simply moving in certain ways and patterns, then it would all fall into place.

And so far the only way that has helped me is by obsessively watching Janos Starker's hands and admiring how easily they make the various shapes and patterns!

But this is a fifteen year project.

[Elle]

Activity programs for kids can be a ridiculous financial racket. Why does no one look into this, when it affects so many people and is so egregious? And your choice is basically to start your own racket instead or just not let your kid do the thing, which sucks. I don't understand why people want to use these things as moneymaking ventures.

My kid is involved in one such activity which charges FABULOUS sums. The organization appears to employ at least a dozen people, most of whom are full-time. It needs to employ exactly 5 people and maybe, maybe, a part time student assistant for odd jobs. So the money we pay is definitely going toward the salary of a half-dozen useless people, and I know they are useless in part because they literally cannot do anything correctly. Over multiple years of interactions they have lost payments, failed to process payments correctly, gotten our emails wrong god knows how many times, failed to provide appropriate information in a manner that caused us to miss important things, and it's not just me, this happens to other parents too. Yet we have no alternative organization that I know of, so we persist with this madness. Argh! AND their policies are completely draconian, which would be okay if the organization was run in a similarly draconian fashion that resulted in a well-oiled machine, but instead it's total chaos. They have no standards for themselves, especially when it comes to paying attention to what they do with your credit card and your kids (I have personally witnessed them essentially lose a group of kids, who only found their parents after a very long wait because I realized what was going on and decided to make the necessary phone calls and walk all over searching until I had matched kid to parent properly), but they demand everything from you. And you are extorted into paying additional fees if you don't want to donate even more time and money to the group than you have already provided. I would feel so much better if they just said, hey, everyone has to pay this higher fee X, and then we will stop extorting you. But no.

This is why I go to the YMCA for sports, because it's well organized, and even though coaches aren't getting paid, the referees do get paid, and there's a responsive person you can contact if you have problems, and they don't screw up the finances. Apart from the obvious of misplacing the actual children, the screwups on the financial side bug me the most - like if you're going to take in THAT much money and charge that much, you really need to not fuck up.

[Mike]

You should name the organization or at least describe the activities that are involved. Otherwise, I'm assuming this is your fault for signing your kids up for a doomsday cult.

Vague non-illustrative hints make this very unsatisfying.

[Elle]

I would love to but I'm afraid. It's like a non-violent mafia in that way.

[Eliahad]

They'll stage sit-ins and banner waving at your house?

[Elle]

An Eternal Truth:
When my mother in law's undergarments unexpectedly appear in my laundry, as happens regularly, it is never my fault. It's just not the kind of thing that could in any way be my responsibility, nor is it my issue to handle.