Halalala

Dodge: “What was that country? It was on TV last night. Something with an H…”
Poncho: “Halalala?”
Dodge: “You should never be allowed to name a country.”

Well, I am having terrible allergic reactions, or it might be a cold. Not really sure of anything except the fact that I can’t breathe properly, and my head feels like it weighs a ton. Last night I was sitting in the dining room with a headache and I felt like my forehead must have become like Poe’s in “The Exiles”, overly huge and faintly glowing. Plus, I think my subconscious has been affected because I had a dream that involved Lady Gaga, my new Irish dance steps, and a yellow ceramic chicken.

And a few nights ago I had a dream that I was reciting Lincoln’s Gettysburg address in the rain, in the middle of a strip-mall parking lot, in order to convince someone to lend me their cell phone because I was lost. Weirdly, my tactics worked and I got the phone. Unfortunately, I realized I didn’t know the number. Then I said, “What the heck? I can memorize the Gettyburg address, but not my best friend’s phone number?”

Maybe the point of the dream was that I need to rethink my memorizational priorities. However, there was also a sinister pumpkin-murder scene, so… what? ‘By the way, be on the lookout for vengeful jack-o-lanterns?’ Thanks, Subconscious. Very helpful.

Anyway… Randomness commence!

I am turning into a squirrel… I am harvesting things madly and storing them away in all manner of ways. My bedroom (or should I say nest?) smells “earthy” as Mom says. Also, I ran into the road and was nearly hit by a car.

This weekend I am going to see “The Taming of the Shrew” with Mom. (Hopefully I will not cough/sneeze in the middle of it.) Yay, Shakespeare! And here is the illustrious Bard himself, on my closet door, helpfully saying one of his best quotes.

"If words be wind, then break them in your face!"

That, my friends, is why Shakespeare is classic. Sure, his language is different, but the main points are things we all experience. (Also: proof that boys never change.)

The cricket outside my window just made a depressed little “crick-crick” noise. Usually he is enthusiastic to the point of almost becoming obnoxious, but now I feel bad for the poor guy. “Crick-crick”, there he goes again, slow and quiet. I know, little guy, summer is o-ver.
Mom: “Remember just a few weeks ago, it was so hot we couldn’t stay at our house?”
Me: “Remember how I had a mental breakdown like every five minutes?”
Mom: (with a pained look) ”Yes.”
Me: “I think my brain cells were getting baked or something.”
Mom: just sips her Coke knowingly.
Me: “I’m going to say I’m sad summer’s over. But I’m really not.”

(Augh! A gnat was flying at me so I waved it away, and touched it by accident! Gross.)

Well, I think I shall bid thee good day…

~Pen

 

Poncho’s Diner

My little bro Poncho just got his own blog! It’s called Poncho’s Diner, and he’ll be posting things that he writes, which includes stories such as the very renouned (in our house) one titled “Submarine”, which he already posted! Go check it out, seriously, because:
1) he’s quite a budding writer
2) he uses the phrase “we’re going in the drink”
3) If he gets no views he will totally blame me, and by extension, readers of my blog. Just saying… ;)

I’m sticking the link on my blogroll as well, but you could also click HERE.

So excited to see what he will come up with…
~Pen

 

Men of the House

I went out to water the garden this morning. Unrolled the hose, watered, started walking back to turn off the water. That was when I saw it.

A clump of feathers lying in the middle of our driveway. I peered closer. It was a dead sparrow, looked like it might have been there since yesterday morning (when I didn’t water), ants all over the place. I turned to the dogs.

Me: “Lily! Daisy! Come!”
Them: come over and sit.
Me: (pointing to the bird) “Did you do this?”
Daisy: slinks off
Lily: looks away guiltily
Me: sigh.

Dad, our designated picker-upper of dead things, squisher of bugs, etc, had just left the house and was expected to be gone for any length of time. So I found Mom and informed her of the problem.

Mom: “Have the boys do it. It’s a man job.”

I found my brothers playing a video game upstairs…
Me: “Hey guys… Mom has a quick job for you to do.”
Dodge: “Oh great.”
Poncho: “Me too??? She said ME??” He jumpes up. “Are you sure she said Poncho???”
Me: “Both of you.”
Dodge: “Okay, fine, what is it?”
Me: “Go outside and get the flat shovel–”
Dodge: “Already not quick.”
Me: “–and pick up the dead bird lying in our driveway.”
Dodge: “Are you serious?”
Poncho: “Eww!”
Dodge: “Why did they have to kill a bird again? Why?”

I think it was last summer that there was a smiliar incident where Mom saw Lily tossing around a dead bird, got it from her, then said, “oh, where’s the bird?” and Lily ran off and returned three seconds later with a second dead one. Don’t ask me how they do it– kill birds like that. Although Daisy is a good stalker, and Lily likes to snatch things out of the air (she eats butterflies!). It was after that first incident that Dodge took this picture:

in case you can't make it out, the sign on the fence reads: "Instant Disposal-- DANGER!" which is apt.

So anyway. I followed the boys out to the back yard where Poncho strugged with getting the bird onto the shovel, succeeding only in pushing it (and the ginat crowd of ants) halfway around the yard. Finally, the bird was shoveled into a plastic bag, which Dodge used to transport the bird out front, where he dumped it into the sewer drain.

Mom: “Why the sewer?”
Dodge: “That’s what Dad does!”
Because everything Dad does is a good idea. But I digress.

I am so, so glad I have brothers. They shoot thousand-leggers and clean up half-eaten sparrows. Thanks for being guys, guys. :)

 

Awake, My Soul

[Poncho just came in and singing, "Greeeen Giant, Yum!" which I am not even sure is their slogan, but whatever. Now he is jumping around going "In the face, in the face" about something. Brothers are so... I don't know. Half annoying, and half awesome.]

Anyway… what was I going to talk about? Originally I was going to write about Easter, but I don’t much feel like it anymore. My brain dies on inspiration whenever it comes to writing about holidays, I think. I mean, I really like Easter, but it’s un-blog-ish. So I will take the related topic of joy and talk about that instead.

Because yesterday, oh my. It was 80-some degrees in the midafternoon, and never got below mid-70′s as far as I know. I transplanted strawberries from the front flowerbed into a nice pot, and then I got the great idea to go get some lemon balm. I’d found a patch of it growing right near my church. So I dashed across the street and went right up to the church, thinking no one would be there on a Tuesday afternoon. But there were hordes of cars there! So I kind of had a freak-out moment, and felt the Panopticon pressuring me, so I grabbed two plants in haste and ran out of there. I may have to go back because I don’t know if these hurriedly-grabbed plants are going to make it. We’ll see. Darn Panopticon. I felt like the whatever-director lady was going to randomly appear beside me and be like “YOU! PLANT STEALER!” I mean, I can’t even imagine trying to explain responsible foraging to her.
So. Then I went for a long walk to the library. To the library is not a long walk, but I went the long way home for reasons that I care not to admit. (“Blind puppy!” as Jane Eyre would say.) I found some pretty epic patches of purple dead nettle by the abandoned school. Actually, there is a ton of purple dead nettle everywhere around the neighborhood. Now whenever I see it, I laugh, because my herb book says it grows in “wasteland”.
I also found a feather, a flower to press, weird parsely-looking plants, and some blueish flowers growing wild in a field. I was going to transplant one and take it home before the field is cut and the flowers detstroyed. Maybe I’ll make a mini woodland garden, full of transplanted flowers/weeds/plants that I come across in the wild. After I identify them, of course.

I can’t believe I used to not like spring. Everyone makes it seem cheesy, but it’s really not. Usually people describe the flowers, or the tra-la-la stuff like cherry blossoms. And I mean, that stuff’s nice and all, but the real heart of spring is when you go outside and you take a deep breath and you feel like you’ve just awakened. 

I felt so alive yesterday. I felt like I could run and run and never stop. Then I went to bed and dreamed that every lawn was taken over by wildflowers.

OK, so I did end up talking about Easter. That’s how it felt, too, to be in the church as the light in the tomb came on and revealed it to be empty… 

~Pen

 

Spring Break

Yesterday, it being spring break and all, my family drove down to Columbus so we could go to Cosi. Poncho was there in November with Mom and Dad, and they thought we would all like to see it. So we got up early and packed into the car to set off on our journey.

Usually I like long drives. I like looking out the window at the woody scenes passing silently by, at the farm houses and tumbledown sheds and old barns, at the spreading fields and thickly forested hillsides.
Instead, the ride was not so peaceful.
Dad blasted the music and “put the pedal to the metal” (as Grandpa Vegas would say… he would have also remarked that we “musta been flyin’” and then probably made some car noises… vrrrrrrrrrrrr….). I watched the spedometer and found that we were going 90 mph!
Me: (clenching my teeth and bracing for my surely inevitable death) “Slow down, man!”
Dad: “I’m going with the flow of traffic, see? I wanna catch up with that horse trailer up there, he’s making good time.”
I tried not to watch the road.
Apparently, so did Dad.
Dad: “Hey, look, deer!”
Dodge: “Keep your eyes on the road!”
Dad: “That wouldn’t last long. Shreds your eyeballs right up.”
Yep, that’s my dad. Always has a smarty-pants answer.

Every once in a while, though, we did manage to slow down…
Dad: “There’s a snake in the grass!”
Me: “Huh?”
Dad: “Hey, Smoky, get off the road! Look at him, he’s causing a hazardous scenario.”
I noticed the state trooper car Dad was pointing at. All around us, the drivers were slowing down to the actual speed limit– which now felt like a crawl– and everyone was getting cramped.
Dad: “There’s a snake in the grass! There’s a bear in the air!”

We finally did make it to Columbus unharmed. Well, my eardrums may have suffered some damage. But oh well. I was just happy to see Columbus. I really want to spend more time in the actual city, rather than some attraction such as Cosi, next time we go down. I want to see if it really is better than Cleveland (which is how it seems, but who knows? Maybe it’s full of snotty people like in Lakewood, or maybe its public transportation is just as crappy as RTA, or maybe it’s insipid and fakey. Only one way to find out). 
We got into Cosi and there was a huge line of people wrapping around the entrance area. Luckily, we got to skip it since Mom and Dad bought a membership last time they went.
We went up to the members desk, where a guy greeted us with “How are you folks today?”
Dad: “Horrible, thank you.”
And the guy didn’t even notice.

Thus began our Cosi adventure. The boys and Dad and I did the Adventure exhibit, which is an interactive thing where you go into this big setup that looks like caverns, and you have to solve puzzles and go through mazes and such to find clues and get into this Observatory thing. When we got out, we found Mom and set off looking at all the other exhibits. My favorite was Progress, which is a set that you can roam around on. It’s supposed to be the same street but at different time periods. One was “Dr Quinn time” as we called it, and the other was the 60′s.
Near lunchtime, Dad and the boys decided they were going to go outside into the science park thing. There was a tiny green house out there. When they came back in, they told me that it was a Pod, an super-efficient eco house. Of course I had to go see it. Dodge came with me, and as we gazed into the tiny dwelling, we were both struck with what shall be heretofore referred to as Obsessive-ComPodsiveness. We started dreaming up Pods for ourselves. Single-person Pods, family Pods, Pod villages.

Dad and Poncho hung out at the oceans exhibit for a while as Mom took Dodge and I through the whole museum in search of more information on the Pod. She’d seen it while we were in Adventure, but she couldn’t remember where it was. Along the way, we ended up stopping to play with a voice changer, a metal dinosaur, a slow-mo video thing, optical illusions, and a wheel race thing (where I tripped over a metal post and got a nasty bruise). We finally found the Pod information after meeting up with Dad and Poncho again. Dodge and I swore we would build a Pod this summer.

When we finally left, hungry and tired, it was snowing. We stopped at the Scariest Fakeworld EVER, and then we went all the way home. Dad drove the speed limit on the way back, although this time I thought he would fall asleep, which was just as scary. And the roads were not too good from all the snow.
Before we got home we stopped at Grandma and Grandpa Vegas’ house, where Mom told me to tell them about the ride to Columbus.
Me: “Dad was going 90! I was so scared! And then he was getting all hyper, he kept saying stuff like ‘there’s a snake in the grass! There’s a bear in the air!’”
Grandpa: “Oh yeah, Smoky.”

So that was our grand adventure for the week. Dodge is as we speak drawing plans for the Pod he is going to build, and he’s even got Dad thinking about where we can get materials… So, things are interesting around here. :)

Peace,
Pen

 

Photographic Memory

A picture is worth a thousand words…. But I can’t seem to resist captions.

Owen-ito El Burrito!

ripping up carpet. My bedroom looks much better now.

Dodge, Mom, and I all went to the Lego Store on the way to the Columbus Feis. The Lego store was located in...

...the scariest Fakeworld EVER.

Driving to Queen Right Colonies with Dad. Now you have proof of my city-slicker-ness.

Poncho is the family food critic. Five stars for my pasta dinner!

Speaking of food... apple scone = YUM.

Daisy wanted a taste.

It looks like snow. But its actually fluff from the dogwood/cottonwood trees.

 

clover for drying.

My fleet of sprouts, most of which have since ventured bravely into the out-of-doors.

Daisy, with her "Please? / "It wasn't me" face.

Fond "Lost" memories...

This is what it's like to live with boys.

My first spinach crop!!!

Dodge took this picture of "the accidental strawberry".

The strawberries came up because Dodge threw some moldy strawberries in here last fall. We were surprised come spring! Unfortunately, the slugs had a picnic.

That is our yard. How do you like me now, Mr Perfect Lawn? Dodge took this picture, too, btw.

Tis all for now.

Love,
Pen

 

Dear God: I know they might’ve seemed like a good idea at the time… but thousand-leggers need to go.

Dodge: “Hey, are you a good shot?” He comes running down here breathlessly to ask me this.
Me: “Er… why?”
Dodge: “I’m trying to shoot a thousand legger THIS BIG with the nerf rifle, but I need a second shooter.”
Me: “I’ll pass.”

Right now the basement is my shelter. The chair is high enough that the bugs can’t get me!! So begins summer. EWW EWWW EWWWWWWW. Unless Dad does the “early strike” we’re likely to be infested with ginormous black ants soon, as companions to the massive, hairy thousand-leggers that already come out every so often just to give me nightmares. Yes, I have nightmares about bugs. Always have. I mean, I am not the kind of girl who screams and cries when there’s like a little speck on the floor that may or may not be a spider; in fact, there are several different spider buddies of mine living in my room. (I like spiders. They’re cute. And I like honey bees, too. What can I say, I’m weird.) But I simply cannot coexist with creatures that have a bajillion legs and grow to be longer and thicker than my fingers. Which are quite long, I assure you.

Well, anyway. I digress. I suppose the reason there are thousand leggers is so that I can be trapped in the basement and forced to update my blog. Mom has been bugging me (no pun intended, hahaha) about putting up a new post. But I needed something lighthearted… No more educational stuff for a while. Time for a break, for our brains to be filled with dust and bits of fluff, as a certain headmaster would say.

Dodge just came downstairs… “The bug is dead. I repeat, the bug is dead. We are commencing vaccuum disposal.”

Well, thank goodness. Okay, so what was I talking about? Oh, yes. Randomness. Well, and kind of my likes/dislikes.
Wanna know something I really like?
Eating dark chocolate while listening to Rush’s “Madrigal” and staring out at the rain. Most relaxing. And…..
Driking chamomile tea with buttered home-made bread, or my special secret-recipie muffins. (I really want to make those again. Like, now. Or, I want to learn to do rasin scones.) While reading my copy of Jane Eyre. Because my copy is special and smooshy and smells nice. 

And lastly, I love having brothers who use words like “commencing”.

Love,
Pen

 

My Darling Clementine

Dodge has named all of his playmobil horses Clementine. I don’t know why, but I was just thinking about that, and had to put it in the title somehow. :)

Well, it is Tuesday, almost time for Girl Scouts. I am feeling kind of down becuase of that, but not becuase I don’t like going to Girl Scouts. I just…well, there’s a lot of reasons. Abd plus it doesn’t help that Allie is moving on Saturday and I won’t get to see her before she goes. I am going to call, though. And plus I wanted to make her a bracelet, but all the special beads got messed up. So I’ll have to make her a better one and send it in the mail to her new house. Sigh. It’s like four hours away, I think.

I am just kind of bummed on my entire friend situation. I feel like all my friends are becoming friends with each other and kind of forgetting about me, but of course that could just be my perception. Well, my DHFs are still on the same page as me, so that is a good thing. If I ever lose them I don’t know how I would manage. I wouldn’t. That’s what would happen.

But off of these marsh-wiggle-y topics!!! Enough melodrama from me!!!! Becuase I do have some really cool news. Last night I made this awesome cloak thing!!! It’s red and it was made from a poncho pattern that I altered so it would be like Lina’s Messenger cloak in the City of Ember. I love that book… and the movie was actually pretty good too. I think the costumes were my favorite part. (I could definitely have done without the stupid giant mole, though. I mean, really? whatever.) And this is the weirdest part: the people looked just like I imagined them! Ok, not all of them, but definitely Lina and Doon! And then I look back at the book and find that Lina is supposed to have dark hair, but I always imagined her blond. Weird, right??

Well, I have to go now. Short posting today. Oh! Wait! I wanted to say…. I also wrote a song, and posted it on AP as a poem. I am rather proud of it, actually. :)

 

it’s a hard-knock life

I just finished cleaning up for when my dad gets home from his work training. He’s been gone all week and it’s been really weird. Like, I could actually sit on the couch becuase he wasn’t there asleep! He works night shift, so that’s why he’s always sleeping there. My brothers used to call him “Cluck-Cluck” and “Coffee Bean” but now they call him “Sleeping Bear”. I have no idea where the other names came from, though. My brothers are so random.

So yeah… now our tables are cleaned off, the living room is semi-neat and the bathroom is sparkly. This will last about a day. I think the mess of our house is driving me toward ONF disorder, aka Obsessive Neat Freak disorder. I mean really, how hard is it to restrain yourself from putting ten thousand things everywhere??? Dodge never puts any of his stuff anywhere, becuase he knows he will have to clean it up, but Poncho, the youngest, is loony tunes!!! He tosses stuff all around the house: toys, guns, binoculars, papers, schoolbooks, drawings, crayons, stuffed animals…. OMG. that kid will be the doom of me. Not that I’m any less guilty, becuase my own room is a disaster. ah, well. at least with that you can close the door. and the desk is cleared off, so that’s somewhat of an improvement.

Every time I clean, I think of my old 4th grade teacher (now my confirmation sponsor.). She used to turn on the song “Hard-Knock Life” whenever we cleaned the classroom. It made it so much more fun. :)

Dodge is singing a song that he found on youtube. It is very funny but also too catchy that it gets stuck in your head. My favorite part is when it goes, “And now Jacob’s kaput, in a giiiiant foot!” LOL. it is a veeeeery funny joke if you watch Lost. ha-ha.

My mom just called to say that she’ll be here any minute…. oh drat. I hope she’s satisfied with my housecleaning– it could look better. I mean, really—– OH NO!!! I WAS SUPPODSED TO VACCUUM!!!!!

which reminds me: did I ever tell you about the vaccuum, I mean, “cleaning system” guy that came to our house? It was very weird. Hm. If I have not told the story before, I will tell it tomorrow. Must go vaccuum. is that even how you spell vaccuum???

ciao,
Pen