Day: December 2, 2006

I now have a matching pair of toy cupboards in my family room. They stand one on either side of the fireplace. They are a monument to order and cleanliness. They have plenty of space to house all of our toys. I have the sneaking suspicion that they will spend significant portions of time emptied of their contents. This is one of the drawbacks to having cupboards large enough for kids to play hide and seek in. Sigh.

I had a joyful surprise in my email last night. A friend that I love visiting with, but never seem to run into, discovered my blog here and emailed me. it turns out that she has her own blog. So now I can keep up with all her stuff conveniently from my computer. Perhaps this will serve as a reminder to me to actually call her and schedule that luncheon we always talk about having, but always forget to do. Her blog is very artsy and cool. After I’ve obtained permission, I’ll send all you fine folks over to look at it. It makes me remember how much I loved studying humanities in college. Someday I’ll have time to study it again I hope.

Oh, and in case anyone is interested, I’ve enabled anonymous comments on my journal here. I realized that I want non livejournal users to be able to comment. This also allows random trolls and spammers to comment. I’m not sure how much of a problem it will be, hopefully not a problem at all.

A final point of interest for today is that our house has been invaded by latin pigs. Kiki has been joyfully using pig latin to communicate things with me without letting the other kids know what she is saying. Only, they can tell she’s saying things sneaky and they invariably want to know what she said. It tends to cause more interest than it keeps secrets. Also parsing hesitantly spoken pig latin is tiresome for me. Fortunately Link is starting to comprehend it, so soon they should be able to speak it to each other and leave me out of the loop.

It is fascinating to watch this folklore get passed from one child to another. They’ve also been teaching alternate versions of Jingle bells. The kids delightedly sing these versions as if they’re new, but I heard them and sang them when I was a child. The approved curriculum is not the only thing that is taught at school. These folkloric songs and rhymes have a life of their own as they are passed from one generation of children to the next. I took a folklore class in college that discussed this phenomenon. It was fascinating to think about. Now it is fascinating to see in action.

Today I feel accomplished. As of yesterday I finished an entire month of blogging every single day. It was my own private writing goal and I did it. I wanted to do it because when life gets busy/interesting that is exactly when I am least likely to write an entry. But those are exactly the times I’d like to have recorded for my own reference later. So as of the 30th I had 32 consecutive days. Then of course I missed December 1st by about 20 minutes, which makes my crowing about writing every day a bit ironic. Oh well. Can it count as yesterday if I haven’t slept yet?

Today I also rearranged my office. I did this with the wonderful and willing help of my friend raisinfish. We shuffled furniture around to create table space next to my desk. Now I actually have a space that I can work with. This makes me very glad indeed. I’m sure that within a week I will have piled things all over the wonderful open space, but I still believe that the arrangement will be much better. I probably should have taken before and after pictures, but I was in too much of a hurry to get the job done. Oh well.

Yesterday I purchased a pair of free standing cupboards which are destined to hold the toys in my family room. Last night I assembled one and placed toys in it. It looks so much better than what we had. I’m looking forward to getting the other one in place.

After almost two weeks of fairly aimless drifting I feel like I’m gaining control of the chaos again. It is a good feeling.