Adoption Update

Adoption Update

I finally have acquired all the certificates from my side, the last one came in on Friday.  It came after PB's 14th birthday, which means now he has to agree to be adopted.  BB still needs to collect his forms.   Or give me the info so I can order them.  At the rate this is proceeding, PB will be an adult before I am able to adopt him.

PB is sick again!

Piano Boy is sick again today, fourth time this year, surprise
surprise--I can't get him to eat anything healthy.

I couldn't get him waked up enough to decide whether or not I should
call him in sick. Finally he got up and wanted to go to school (late)
and wanted me to write him a note and drive him--but the CAR was
frozen onto the side of the snowbank and into the ice. Wouldn't
budge. Rocking didn't help. I suggested he walk. He waited. I dug
and chopped and tried again and dug and chopped and tried again and
dug and dug and dug and dug and finally got the car out. So I drove
him to school--not sure he should even be there. :-(

Piano Boy's New Guitar

Here it is! The new guitar!

Spring rolls

Here are the spring rolls I made for myself and BB for lunch. They were scrumptious!

PB is sick. :-(

spring rolls and various whining

I made the spring rolls--they turned out great and not particularly hard except to make them neat. They weren't all neat, but they were very tasty.

This is what I did: I chopped up good lettuce, spinach, mushrooms, etc, cooked some whole wheat thin spaghetti (for vermicelli), put warm water in a plate, soaked the rice paper, laid it on another plate, put the stuff in the center and rolled it up envelope style. The rice paper is a little sticky and sticks to itself. I made a sauce for it (two kinds, actually) with a dab of balsamic vinegar, water, pom pomegranate juice (a dab) and a tiny sprinkle of Chinese 5-spice powder. The other dip was soy sauce based.

Then, since it was still snowing and Biker Buddy and Piano Boy had not returned, I went out and shoveled the driveway again. While I was writing the above, they arrived home with the new guitar. I know this only because I peeked out the window. Neither of them mentioned it to me or told me about it or showed it to me. And I never said that I didn't want to go because Graham was bad. (Not to Graham, anyway). Nor did they mention how he did at Festival. I had a nice lunch made for Biker Buddy, which he thanked me for. (He didn't thank me for shoveling. Which is fine, except I have the feeling that this is turning into one of those things. Those lets all not talk to each other all day sort of things. I didn't start it, at least not intentionally. I just felt he should do his chores FIRST.)

PB called his friend Skater Boy and told him about his guitar--from another room. I could hear some of what he was saying, but not all of it.

Ironically, last night PB sat on my lap for hours and begged to have his back scratched and his cheek and hair stroked. He was bored at the restaurant and was wishing he could be at a sleepover at Skater Boy's, where he'd have been if we were visiting his brother, Soldier Boy. But I reminded him that Soldier Boy would soon be returning to Iraq and we would see him for a while. I was happy holding PB on my lap and hugging him. Today I am sad and unhappy and feeling left out.

Yesterday, the LAST of the required papers from my side came in the mail, a divorce decree from my first husband, PIUS. We were supposed to have completed all the paperwork by Feb 29, but it didn't all arrive on time. Now that PB is 14, he has to agree to being adopted, but he is so immature that if he is annoyed with me, he will not want me to be his mother and refuse to cooperate. I should have asked him last night when he was sitting on my lap.

And I'm so immature that I was thinking while they were gone without me that I should refuse to adopt him and give all my money--lol--to my two older children. BB is telling PB that he can't go to Skater Boy's until he cleans the birdcage and . . . and what? Will he make him do his practicing? Dunno. He should. I guess we disagree about parenting. And since PB is not legally my kid, I'm going to back off and let BB do it--even if he does it all wrong. I guess I am the evil stepmother for wanting him to do what he is supposed to do before he gets rewarded. Not where I want to be in life. It makes me question the whole marriage and move to Detroit. Grow up, self.

Well, PB is down there practicing. I usually go down and listen. But since he didn't bother showing me or telling me about his new guitar or even speaking to me when he got home . . . Now the question is, is it today's practicing or yesterday's--the one he missed? Guess I will find out later. If he practices again for today.

Well, I did get my exercise for today...

Well, I did get my exercise for today, Saturday!  It's snowing like mad.  I shoveled, walked to the store, shoveled some more--53 minutes so far and I may have to shovel more.

I declined to go with Biker Buddy and Piano boy to the piano festival and to buy the guitar.  Piano Boy was being beastly.  He dressed inappropriately, wouldn't do his practicing or clean the bird cage, which he was supposed to have done on Thursday.  He does almost nothing to help out around here and expects us to buy him whatever he wants.  I don't want to be a part of that.  I think relationships should be more reciprocal.  I don't expect perfection from a teenager, but I would not choose to reward him for bad behavior, which is what I think Biker Buddy is doing.  So I simply choose not to participate.  I'm a little sad  because I'd like to be there when he gets his guitar to see his excitement etc.  But I cannot condone getting him something as a gift, no strings attached, when he is refusing his chores.  I think my husband has gone insane.  It's not that I don't want to get him a guitar--I DO!  I just think he should do his chores FIRST.

The fact that it is snowing and blowing pushed me over the edge anyway.

I got everything I need, I think, to make spring rolls, so I am excited to go try it.

It's already tomorrow!

I am just back from a half-hour walk--been SO ridiculously busy that I didn't get my walk in today and I refused to go to bed without it.  Does it count as Friday's walk if it's already Saturday when I get it finished?  I hope so--I haven't been to bed yet.

We had dinner with Soldier Boy and Soccer girl et al tonight at--catch this--a Vietnamese restaurant which was excellent but not as good as Mai Lan, my favorite.  I had spring rolls (raw) and fried spring rolls on vermicelli--the spring rolls raw were super but the fried ones on vermicelli were not as good as the ones at Mai Lan.  I also had some Pho (soup) and everyone had lots of it--except Biker Buddy who had sweet and sour catfish soup which was fantastic.  The three grandchildren ate really well (I always expect kids to be fussy like all 3 of mine were/are) and were incredibly well-behaved.  I took lots of pictures but haven't downloaded them yet.

Then we went to a Chinese grocery where they had dead chickens with their heads still on and live crawdads by the hundreds crawling over each other in a bin and huge live crabs and fish and all kinds of interesting things with Chinese lettering (I didn't know what most of the stuff in the rows and rows of stuff was).  I got some spring roll wraps--the raw kind--and can 't wait to try making some--but I may have to wait if things don't settle a little--if you've been commenting or emailing and haven't gotten a response, I hope to catch up someday.  Call me if it's an emergency!

Then we went to Soldier Boys house and played with the robot vacuum cleaner--I may need to get one of those!!  And I drew a new picture in the car on the way there and drew bunches of pictured for little grandson while I was there.  We got home at 11:30 PM and I went out walking as soon as I could bundle up enough--it is COLD , windy and snowy.

Tomorrow Piano Boy plays at Piano festival and then we are taking him to look at electric guitars because he's singing in a garage band.  But we're expecting lots of snow so maybe they will have to go without me.  There's no end to the chaos in sight right away, sorry to say.  Hope things are good with you!  Don't expect an immediate reply if you comment/email me!  (Sorry!)

Transitions

We had our biggest snowstorm of the year--and the robins arrived, en masse.

Yes, I know they are theoretically around all winter, but suddenly
they are very visible.

Magic in Poetry (The great American P...

Magic in Poetry (The Great American Poem?)

by Mary Stebbins Taitt

Dawn McDuffie, former classmate and current poetry teacher at the Scarab Club in Detroit, Michigan, assigned us to write "that poem we've always wanted to write" (The great American poem, perhaps?), "a magical poem that does all those things we've been learning to do," show senses and emotion, have metaphor and avoids cliche, thesis statements, weak verbs, state-of-being verbs, too many adjective and adverbs, verbosity, etc. The poem that does something new and exciting.

Of course I wrote not the magical great American poem, but the next poem I needed to write. It didn't flow out of the head of the muse like spontaneous music or leap full blown from the head of Zeus; it was a struggle, even more so than normal. It started out more as prose than poetry, which while becoming more common lately, has not always been my modis operendi. I went through and did all those things I always do, revising and editing, deleting unnecessary words, ferreting out cliches (or attempting to), looking for stronger verbs and nouns, and slowly, painfully, it moved from prose toward poetry. I looked at the line breaks and the lines and the sentences. I looked for alliteration, wanting some but not too much. I looked for inadvertent rhyme, to do away with it or make it intentional. I kept thinking of all those things I'd been taught: no surprise for the poet, no surprise for the reader. The turn is the center of the poem. No turn, no poem. And I wondered, can this poem ever become magical, or should I start over from scratch?

How could I know if I needed to start over without knowing what I was looking for? It's all very well to say that I know a magical poems when I see one. But if I don't know what defines it, how can I create it? I guess, theoretically, one could create without being able to articulate. Zen and the art of poetry writing, perhaps. Get into "the zone" and go. Then, being the sort of curious and ambivalent person I am, I wondered if attempting to define, articulate and understand is antithetical to the poetic process. Perhaps it is, but since we are of two minds, I suggest we can do both, though not necessarily at once, and that examining and defining can help in the creative process, because that material, knowledge and comprehension becomes available to those separate minds within us that create.

I thought about a paper I wrote for Natasha Saje in my second semester at Vermont college. I'd been talking about joy in poetry and Natasha suggested that I try to articulate what I meant. I did. She was disappointed. "You just say why you like the poems," she complained. She was right, an a way. My problem was a lack of time in the context of working and attending college full time. I had a list of books I was required to read and write about and insufficient time to explore other work, so I wrote about what was joyful in the poems I was reading. I found no shortage of joy in the assigned work.

Now, I'd like to do it again, with magic, but my available time to cogitate is still very limited and the subject is just as slippery. However, I have no deadline, so I could theoretically work on it a little at a time until I complete it. But I have ADHD and sticking single-mindedly to a project over a long period of time in the midst of multiple ongoing projects and life is very hard for me. I might fail to do so.

But I will surely fail if I do not begin.

What is a magical poem? Is it the same as a joyful poem? A delightful poem? Are there black and white magicks? Can a dark poem be "magical?" What did Dawn mean, what was she suggesting, when she told us to write a magical poem? How did she hope we would understand that?

Dictionary definitions don't do justice to the sense of magic I believe Dawn intended. So I will create my own list of synonyms for this specific use: enchanting, extraordinary, miraculous, spellbinding, marvelous or monstrous, numinous, luminous, wondrous, superhuman, transcending, magnetic, entrancing, astonishing, remarkable, awe-inspiring. I propose that a magical poem is a poem that works, that succeeds at the highest level. All the poetic devices work with the imagination of first the poet and then the reader to evoke a sense of wonder, strong emotion (e.g.: joy & delight or horror) and surprise. The magical poem contains an "aha" and a sense of uncanny rightness. The cliched poem is exactly what the reader expects. The magical poem is unexpected but just as right and far more satisfying. The magical poem simultaneously sings to the senses and whispers to the dream self. It engages the whole reader, body mind and soul.

If a magical poem is simply a highly successful poem, is there anything else to say about it? Thousands of successful poems exist in every language. Much has already been written about them. Have I anything to add? To tell you the truth, I am not certain, but I intend to consider it. But not at this moment, so I will continue later. More to follow.

first student paintings

I painted the vase from a digital painting I had made. The painting
is from scratch, hand done, just looking at the picture. The other is
a required exercise in perspective. Neither is very good, but we
did't have enough time to work--and I am just learning. Also neither
scanned well and the subtle tones were lost.