What I see is so much more than I can say

Yesterday I posted a lengthy and photo-rich account of some overdyeing experiments. You can read it all at Toxophily, or if you aren't interested in the details, just revel in the eye candy.



But I know that what Noel and other family members are craving isn't pictures of yarn. So to go along with the above photo snapped as we were heading toward the exhibits at EcoFest 2012, here's a short piece of writing that Cady Gray brought home from school.

The Tye-Dye

Once upon a time, I went to Tennessee with my Grandma Libby. We Tye-Dyed one day with a tye-dye kit. We did three swirl patterns and two bullseyes. I did a freehand and one of the swirls. I did a swirl pair of socks and a pair of splatter socks too. We used a neon color kit, but we have a primary one at home. I hope I get to do it again someday.

Sundance season

Noel has been in Park City, Utah since last Wednesday, attending the Sundance Film Festival. You can read his daily dispatches here at the A.V. Club.  By all accounts, he's had a good run in the screening rooms.  And clearly, he's worked very hard, as can be seen by how many films he's logged and how many thousands of words worth of capsules he's written in the wee hours of the morning.

Here at home, we have our own "Sundance Film Festival." It consists of trying to cobble together babysitters, grandparents, and my work schedule so that the kids are delivered to and from school on time, and receive regular meals.

That's been difficult in our 2012 outing.  A combination of regularly scheduled spring events -- a freshman book discussion, a sophomore orientation -- and two faculty candidate visits back to back, meant that this is the first weekday night since Noel left home that I have not had to head out in the evening darkness for some work-related event.

I couldn't have managed without my parents coming to handle kid transport and kitchen duties while I was otherwise occupied.  They left this morning for the grueling two-day drive back to their home on the Georgia coast.

Noel's last day at the festival is tomorrow; he flies home on Thursday, arriving around the time the kids are getting into their pajamas.  I have done a decent job keeping things together (knock on wood).  But I've done a poor job communicating with my absent spouse.  Normally I post status updates and blog entries regularly, supplementing the occasional phone conversation with public information about how we're getting along.  But the faculty candidate visits have thrown any concept of "regularly" out the window.  I've had neither the time nor the energy to write, even a hundred and forty characters.

When a big push like faculty hiring coincides with the stressful and difficult conditions of half parental strength, you put your head down and power through it.  But it always surprises me how much effort, mental and physical, that it takes.  Several nights in the past week, I've sat down in my recliner an hour or so away from bedtime, finally done with everything on my plate, and have felt the bone weariness seep through my shoulders.

Noel knows that feeling well, I'm aware. No one works harder, especially through the 20-hour days of film festival madness. My parents know it, as they bunk down in some motel midway through Alabama, still a day away from their home after driving all day.  We all look forward to getting back to the normal pile of deadlines and the usual routine of too much on our plates, rather than this crazy displaced double-time version of our lives.

The haze I'm wandering around in

Today's post about a sweater that was fated to be is at Toxophily.



Granny Lou and Papa are here, Noel is in Utah, and we're warm, well-fed, and strong. Further dispatches as events warrant.

Detour

For the first time anyone can remember, Interstate 40 in Arkansas is closed due to flooding.  The White River has reached heights not seen since the 1930's, long before the levee systems were completed.  A temporary gauge installed at the 1-40 crossing shows water reaching the top of the guard rail in the median strip -- meaning that the roadway is under a few feet of water.

My mom and dad were on their way up to see us from their home in coastal Georgia when the interstate was closed, and decided to come on ahead from their halfway stop in Alexander, Alabama.  It took them 11 hours, a few of which were spent stopped or crawling on the detour that thousands of trucks were taking, more than 100 miles out of their way.

Although the river seems to be cresting in the central part of the state, it will take quite a while for things to get back to normal.  Granny Lou and Papa were originally planning to attend church with us tomorrow and leave after lunch, making their leisurely way back south, but given the uncertainty of travel on the back roads and detours they'll now have to take, their departure has been moved up to early morning.  I wish they could stay until the road opens up and things are more settled, but they have appointments and more trips coming up, and we can't predict how long the flooding will disrupt travel.

It's been a very short stay -- only two full days and part of an evening -- especially when you consider it took two full days to get here and might take as long going back.  You wouldn't ask any one to go through that willingly.  Yet the kids have adored having them here, keeping them hopping with games of all kinds, along with bike-riding and other outdoor activities on the loveliest weekend of the spring so far.

A day in the car dodging floodwaters and studying maps isn't my idea of the perfect Mother's Day.  I hope Granny Lou can accept the two days of grandchild love she got while here in exchange.

Cupid, draw back your bow

Today's post about creation on a tight schedule is at Toxophily.

We've had a great week with my mom and dad here. The kids have taken this opportunity seriously. Archer organized an "Uno marathon" -- four sessions of ten games each, adding some of the optional special rules in various sessions. Cady Gray has lobbied for tickles and hugs at every opportunity. It's a two-day drive for them to get here, two more days to get back. So we really appreciate it when they make that effort. Thanks, Granny Lou and Papa!

Undercover

Today's post about candid photography is at Toxophily.

Not much to report from the Natural State, thanks to my folks who have helped make the weekend quite uneventful (and, speaking particularly of my mother, delicious). The kids are healthy and happy, and the relatively warm weather has allowed them to play outside two days in a row. Mom and Dad are leaving tomorrow, and we should be in great shape to handle the three days until Noel's return. You can follow his Sundance odyssey here, by the way; sounds like it's been a very solid festival so far.

World's best grandparents

Grandparents always bring you something. The kids both got magic t-shirts that are black and white until they go out in the sun, when colors appear. But having read this, I'm sure you can all understand what excited me most:



Archer was pretty excited, too; he expressed it by running into the room repeatedly and tumbling onto the carpet with an expression of delight.

Then he and Cady Gray got down the serious business of playing.





Later Papa helped them practice on their bikes.





Happy kids riding off into the sunset ... that's what grandparents can do.



At lunch today:

Me: Cady Gray, what's your favorite thing about Granny Lou?
CG: That she loves me.
Me: Archer, what's your favorite thing about Granny Lou?
Archer: That she is 72 years old.
Me: Cady Gray, what's your favorite thing about Papa?
CG: That he loves me, too.
Me: Archer, what's your favorite thing about Papa?
Archer: That he is always the same age as Granny Lou -- 72 years old.

You forgot to say Uno

Uno is probably one of the first card games a lot of kids learn to play. I know that our kids were playing it from the moment they could recognize numbers. You've got to hand it to the Mattel folks -- they've managed to translate public-domain card games into merchandising empires. Uno, of course, is basically Crazy-Eights.

My mom and dad sent the kids Skip-Bo for their birthdays, and tonight after dinner they broke it out and played. I couldn't figure out what card game it was emulating until I looked it up on Wikipedia -- Spite and Malice! I had totally forgotten about that game. Our family went on a serious Spite and Malice kick sometime in the eighties, a few years after our King's Corner craze.

Now that the grandparents are here, I imagine we'll be playing games just about every night. They haven't stopped cycling through new games; a couple of years ago it was dominos, and now it's Rummikub. Maybe someday we'll make it all the way back around to the games we played growing up.

Mamie

My maternal grandmother lived near my family all of my life. In my earliest memories of her, she's a petite figure with whitening reddish hair and a lilting brogue, living in a little white house situated somewhere in a cul-de-sac of winding streets a couple of miles from us. As I got older, I would sometimes ride my bike across Germantown Road, past our church, all the way down into the little valley near the creek where she lived. Later still, she moved into an apartment downtown, far from our suburban home, and then finally into a nursing home a few miles away from the farm where I spent my teenage years. It was a longer haul, but I was still able to ride my bike over to see her when I was home from college.

Gradually I absorbed more information about her life -- how she immigrated from Scotland as a teenager, married and divorced, taught art at a local Christian college. She died at the age of 99, and my daughter is named after her. For as long as I live, there will always be certain things I associate with Mary Gray Jorges, the grandmother I called Mamie:

• The Hershey bars she gave us as snacks when my brother and I visited her apartment.
• The Cokes in twelve-ounce glass bottles she would get from the vending machine in the basement storage area for us.
• A square flexidisc of bird songs that came in a book on birds she kept at her house, which I would put on her portable record player and watch go round and round -- or square and square, as it were.
• Chicken pot pies, dumped upside down on a plate and cut to pieces, the default meal at the little white house.
• The plaque in her apartment kitchen that read "All I want is a little peace and quiet."
• Rust and yellow shag carpet, on behalf of which she would cackle "Don't feed the floor!" if we dropped something at dinner.
• Flannel, like the backings of the flannelgraph Bible figures and backdrops that she painted in oils.
• Reader's Digest condensed books.
• The tropical fish food that she used to let me shake into the tank.
• Frozen Pepperidge Farm devil's food cake.
• Chocolate icebox dessert, a classic from the fifties and still one of my favorite sweets: chocolate wafers layered with whipped cream and softened in the fridge.
  

No secrets

I'm afraid we aren't going to be able to put on our pious lifestyle hats for the grandparents and expect to look like we've been wearing them every day. At the dinner table tonight:

Cady Gray: Let's say the blessing.

Me: (surprised but game) OK.

Everyone: God is great, God is good, let us thank him for our food. Amen.

Archer: That's what we say when Granny Lou and Papa are here!

And speaking of grandparents, we're off to see Noel's folks tomorrow through Sunday. Blogging should continue apace, barring unforeseen network outages. See y'all in Nashville.