studio ghibli

you know you've shown too many japanese movies to your 2 and a half year old when she bows to you and squeals something that sounds suspiciously like "hai!"

(which is essentially the japanese for 'yes.')

driveways, garages and minivans

my driveway is really steep. we've lived here almost 4 years and i always park on the driveway because my spouse always has the garage full of computer junk. we already had to pay to have the minivan's emergency brake redone once and the other week i realized that it had suddenly gotten really loose again. so i started parking on the street - which is a pain - and my spouse started cleaning out the garage. this took a few weeks of intermittent effort. he's been working late nights at the shop and could really only clean the garage on weekends. i was getting very impatient to park in the garage.

today we finished cleaning out the garage. woot! so i pull my minivan in, and keep pulling, and get in as far as i possibly can without bashing into the deep freezer or the stairs, and lo and behold, the back end is still under the door. yes, my minivan is too big for my garage. argh! aaaand, it's back to parking on the street.

mammogram

my mammogram results came in. i don't need to go back for a year. that's nice to read. :)

Super Poopers

i've been meaning to do this for ages, but only this winter did i get the chance to enroll my son in an acting class. we have a "playwright's project" in our town and they have acting classes for a wide range of ages, but every class i saw for him until this one cost a great deal more than i felt able to spend. razi likes to memorize lines from movies, he's an excellent reader, and i thought acting might help him with focus and concentration.

so when i saw that the playwright's project was offering a class for first and second graders that lasted six weeks and only cost $60, i enrolled razi pretty much immediately. the four kids in the class all chose which superhero they wanted to be, and razi wanted to be "superstitch" - sort of from the movie lilo and stitch. he chose the superpower of "super-claws." lilo and stitch is a cute movie. i have no idea why razi got obsessed with stitch, but there you go.

the other kids were "superowen" - who could walk through walls (and other things), "megaeyes" - who could SEE through walls, and the evil villain "miss stare-a-lot" - who could freeze people with her stare and then steal their superpowers with a mere touch.

the acting teacher wrote a short script for a play with those characters and they practiced for about 6 weeks and then had the actual play.

we'd wanted to hire a sitter for lilah but were unable to, so joshua stayed home with lilah. but zora and i went, and i got almost the whole play on my digital camera, which can make little movies. it's hideously grainy, but it's on my computer for posterity.

the play was what you would expect, i suppose. one kid overacted horribly, one kid was basically fine for an 8 yr old, and two kids - including mine - mostly got their lines right but were pretty distracted and didn't really take it seriously. but it was cute and i'm glad he participated. he was the youngest actor and the only one who hadn't done the class last year, so i think he made a good showing.

i'm certainly not opposed to enrolling him in another class like this again in the future.

38 and counting

I've done plenty of things that have made me feel like I was growing up. Like I was "really an adult now." I finished school, got my first credit card, got married, had babies…. I’ve felt like a “real adult” for quite some time, now.

I seem to have graduated from the milestones that make me feel like a real adult, to the milestones that make me feel like I am aging.

Today I had my first mammogram.

It was… not as awful as I feared it would be. The films will be read on site, and the woman who did the exam told me that it is common to be called back for a second set when one gets a baseline. They won’t really know what is normal for me and what isn’t, and that may lead to questions. I was grateful for the warning.

Now, I wait.

Good thing patience comes with age.