Memorial Day

There are some in France who will also never forget.

Watch this, please, all the way through, and listen to this man's eloquent letter.

Local color

Some thistle I haven't been able to identify yet... doesn't have hugely prickly leaves like most thistles, though. I dunno.



A happy little patch of allium next to a big windmill.



Male Checkered White (Pontia protodice) on Firewheel (Gaillardia pulchella)



I love walking through a patch of this stuff (horsemint, or Monarda citriodora) and getting the aromatics stirred up around me. Lovely smell!!


Plain old daylilies... are anything BUT plain!

Happy little tomatoes

We've harvested some of the grape tomatoes already, but the larger slicing tomatoes are coming along nicely. If we can just keep the birds off them...

Happy Caturday, y'all

If I had money to burn...

I would totally buy this:



A miniature floating Tardis!!!ZOMG!!!1!

It's a completely useless geekery gadget and I love it.

LOVE. IT.

Good morning, y'all

Isaac is out of school for the year, since he passed all his classes and aced his state-mandated exams (literally; I think he missed one question on the whole exam). But he got up this morning at 5AM to get dressed and go down to the school to start a summer running regimen. The cross-country coach has the kids running all summer long in preparation for the season, and even though Isaac won't be old enough to compete formally next year, he's going to spend the summer running with the team anyway. They leave the school at 6AM for the next two weeks, then at 7AM for the rest of the summer.

Yesterday Mom treated him to a new pair of running shoes, which he was itching to put on. "They feel bouncy," he insisted.

In a school that's as small as Ballyhoo, there's a definite divide that shows up between the "athletics" kids and the "PE" kids. I have seen evidence of both groups, and I see that even if he's not particularly wonderful as an athlete, he does NOT want to be lumped in with the "PE" crowd. He probably won't ever be much of a football player, and I know there's no way on God's green earth he'll be able to do basketball, but I figure he can run. So that's where I'm steering him. I told him that even if he's never very fast, it's very important that he do this.

I think that if I'd had to do some sort of athletics, I might have been a little better off physically, but I went to a much larger high school where I was able to track in a different direction (band). Just goes to show that there are benefits to each sort of high school -- even though this place is small, there are some definite advantages.

I like it here, regardless. It's a good fit for us, I think. I just wish the house was in better shape and that we were in better financial condition. Maybe someday. At least we have a few tomatoes in the garden.

Since I'm on a My Fair Lady bent...

Here's a terrific quote from that terrific musical:

Mrs. Higgins: However did you learn good manners with my son around?

Eliza Doolittle: It was very difficult. I should never have known how ladies and gentlemen really behaved, if it hadn't been for Colonel Pickering. He always showed what he thought and felt about me as if I were something better than a common flower girl. You see, Mrs. Higgins, apart from the things one can pick up, the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she is treated. I shall always be a common flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me like a common flower girl, and always will. But I know that I shall always be a lady to Colonel Pickering, because he always treats me like a lady, and always will.

Professor Henry Higgins: The question is not whether I've treated you rudely but whether you've ever heard me treat anyone else better.

Caturday Handsome

With a gaze as intense as any of Mr. Darcy's longing looks...

[sigh]

I indulged myself in a late evening of watching Colin Firth in a wet shirt Pride & Prejudice last night after the kids went to bed.

Happy Eliza Doolittle Day!

One day I'll be famous, I'll be proper and prim,

Gone to St. James so often I will call it St. Jim.

One evening the King will say, "Oh, Liza, old thing,

I want all of England your praises to sing.

Next week on the twentieth of May

I proclaim Eliza Doolittle Day!

Okay, so unless you're a fan of Broadway musicals, Julie Andrews, Audrey Hepburn or Marni Nixon, you'll have absolutely no idea what this is about. But I wanted to send you felicitations for the occasion nonetheless.

It's "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" today!

Reason-Dot-Com's Winners of the Everybody Draw Mohammed Day event

So I'm not big on portraiture... I try, but it's just not my strong suit. Nonetheless, I wanted very much to participate in the Everybody Draw Mohammed Day in hopes of receiving my very own fatwa from some imam in a cave somewhere.

I will NOT be silent, and I will NOT be a coward. I am not afraid of islamo-nazi dirtbags.

Around our yard

Tow Maders!!!





The Dusty Miller is blooming... kind-of an odd plant and not my first choice, but it's interesting, so it stays. I like interesting.




Little fig, little fig, let me come in!!




It's a beautiful day in north Texas today. If you show up, I'll have a big glass of iced tea for ya.

Caturday Neighborhood Watch

I know I'm pretty late posting my usual Caturday photo today... I've been working on the yearbook literally all day and haven't taken a break. I even tried to take a nap and there was so much going on in my mind I couldn't relax and go to sleep. I'll be glad when the next three weeks are done and in the can. It's not anything unusual; I have almost finished getting the photos I need. It's just the little stuff; making sure each photo is the right distance from the other photo, etc. Niggling little stuff that probably no-one else besides me cares a fig about. But it bothers me enough that I must spend an entire Saturday on it. [eye roll]

I am tired and I am irritable and I am hormonal. Hear me roar. Just don't mess with me; I'm in no mood to be trifled with.

Student artwork

We wrapped up the school year's art projects with an assignment where students were to take famous works of art and reproduce them in a mosaic fashion. This student, Haley, chose Dali's The Persistence of Memory to do. I thought she did a remarkable job, don't you?

Who adopts a rejected kid?

An interesting post from The Daily Beast about difficult adoptions... the parents who have to disrupt the adoption AND the parents who step in to pick up the pieces afterward. We here at the Wood household fill both sets of shoes, interestingly enough...

Rita says that she doesn’t think she could ever put her adoptive son on a plane to another country, but the problems she has had with him make her sympathize with the woman from Tennessee who made headlines by doing just that. “I totally understand her desperation and her frustration,” she says, “because you love these kids, you do everything you can, but you have little to no support for what you're doing.”

As Sterkel points out, the families who make the difficult decision to give up an adopted child do not deserve the stigma that has come in the wake of the recent Russian controversy.

“Parents are made to feel badly and they shouldn't because we all have limits to our capabilities,” she says, “and not every parent can do the same thing. I never want to criticize a parent who has felt the need to disrupt.”

Yep. People need to have options... a way out, if necessary, or a bearable way through at the very least. Most of us can't even pull our retirement dollars to put our kid in residential treatment because we've already pulled our retirement just to pay for the meds and the mortgage. My fondest hope is that the Russian adoption debacle opens up a dialogue so that people can at least know what their options are, and that if there aren't any options, someone will step up to provide some.

And at the very least, some freedom from judgment when our troubled adopted kid ends up homeless, jobless, pregnant for the fifth time, breaking into our relatives' homes to steal money or food... these are the nightmares I live with. I promise, I did the best I could. What she becomes is up to her, and I struggle with fear about this. I don't like to take her to see family and friends because I don't want her to know the way to get there if and when she decides to ditch the meds and becomes a psychotic criminal.

[shrug] I press on. Taking it day by day, sometimes hour by hour, is the best I can muster. It's frankly miraculous that I'm even still here; my personality inclines toward the cut-and-run response, and the notion of just disappearing one day is often quite tempting. I don't, because I have two others who need me to stick around. But it's tempting nonetheless.

Such a post for a Mother's Day! We celebrated the big M-D by going out for lunch on Friday, so I don't feel neglected. I did, however, do dishes on Mother's Day. They needed to be done, and nobody wanted to step up, so I did them, and it will come in handy from time to time when I need to leverage some guilt. heh

Caturday skritches

Dude the Cat is happiest when he's sitting in the chair with his favorite human:





That cat follows Rick around like a faithful dog... even if he's getting skritches from someone else, if Rick comes into the room, Dude will make a beeline for him.

Umm, I'm okay with this.

In fact, I think I can easily comply with this one.

How dark chocolate may guard against brain injury from stroke

Researchers at Johns Hopkins have discovered that a compound in dark chocolate may protect the brain after a stroke by increasing cellular signals already known to shield nerve cells from damage.

Ninety minutes after feeding mice a single modest dose of epicatechin, a compound found naturally in dark chocolate, the scientists induced an ischemic stroke by essentially cutting off blood supply to the animals' brains. They found that the animals that had preventively ingested the epicatechin suffered significantly less brain damage than the ones that had not been given the compound.

Eat chocolate early. And often.

While most treatments against stroke in humans have to be given within a two- to three-hour time window to be effective, epicatechin appeared to limit further neuronal damage when given to mice 3.5 hours after a stroke. Given six hours after a stroke, however, the compound offered no protection to brain cells.

So what this article is saying is that I should probably be eating chocolate more often.

I'm good with that.

In other food-related news, the fam celebrated Mother's Day today by taking me to Shogun in Denton, Texas for sushi. Well, I got sushi. Everybody else did the Japanese hibachi thing, so I still got to enjoy the show and the nice warm flame-up (always my favorite part of it, since I'm always cold). I had an order of yellowtail sashimi, some seaweed salad, and a really yummy softshell crab roll with avocado. I was very, very happy. And I got to share a bite of sashimi with Isaac, who gives a hearty thumbs-up (this is an amazing thing, because he may be one of the world's pickiest eaters).

Observation

My husband just made an astute observation. We watch Fox & Friends every morning and they often play a commercial from a home security company that shows a guy breaking in and scaring the homeowner, then shows the homeowner talking immediately to the security company who sends help.

Rick said that they needed to make a commercial more appropriate for Texas, in which the homeowner says, "No rush. I just shot the bastard."

Caturday snack

Dude doesn't really beg for snacks from us, but the one people-food thing he seems to be nutty over is buttermilk. Whenever Rick drains another half-gallon, he puts the jug on the floor and Dude goes bonkers over it.

He was a good kitteh last night, apparently, and brought us a little trophy -- we found a dead sparrow on the floor between the bedroom and the bathroom where he knew we would find it. Hey, he loves us and that's how he shows it, right? hehe