Now I can give up the day job

As many of you may know, Jami and I edited a book (to which we both contributed essays).  It's been over a year now, and in our contract it says we get royalties every year.  Jami actually got hers a while back, but I had to call and ask for mine.  The lady at the royalties desk, who sounded about 100, said that mine would be shipped September 22nd (it was about August 22nd when I called).  When I asked why mine should have to wait that long, when Jami had already got hers, she said "I guess it's the luck of the draw," as if this was some mysterious random process, completely out of her power to influence.  Okay... Anyway, she (or the Royalty Gods) must have relented, because this arrived last week, and I just had to photograph it, I was so proud.  I don't care if it's immodest or whatever, I just want to immortalize my first ever payment for publishing something!  I knew getting that poem published in the Milverton Weekly News in 1978 was the start of something big.

I immediately blew most of it on a new red pair of design-it-yourself Converse Chuck Taylors.

The right call, I think we can all agree.

Celebrity!

Today was "dress like a celebrity" day at Thomas's school.  This is what he thinks a celebrity looks like.  (Those are mirror shades, in case it's not obvious.  Because, duh!  Celebrity!)  And the cane was the one he shipped back especially from Ireland.  Home of celebrities.

Suddenly Winter

It's been pretty sweltering recently, until a big storm midweek cooled things off, and now we have arrived at several Seasonal Firsts: last night we lit our first fire since the Spring (with some trepidation: the company we bought the stove from and who have cleaned the chimney at least once a year ever since have gone out of business - the old man, Al Sorge, retired, and his (very nice) sons have obviously decided not to continue the family business, so we have to find new chimney sweeps); this morning I had my first oatmeal, and, the kicker, this morning the garage door refused to close, which only happens when the temperature drops below a certain point for an extended period.  The good thing about this is that it kills off the bloody mosquitoes, so Frederick and I went off to Grand Blanc Commons, which I've been avoiding for a while because it gets so buggy.  First thing we noticed was new map signs, so that we would know where we were:

Nonetheless, we managed to get thoroughly lost (probably because I was emboldened to go a new way, thinking the signs would be there to bail us out):

Help!  (At least I got to wear my birthday coat for the first time.)

Frederick's Latest Pedagogical Experiment

Every September we begin Frederick's school year with high levels of anxiety:  Will anyone bother to work with him?  Will anyone bother to feed him or get him to the bathroom regularly?  Will anyone ensure that he is participating in gym class or during recess?  So far, the past seven years have been...disappointing.  This year, we went rogue and decided to no longer entrust Frederick's education with any experts and are coordinating his education ourselves.  Starting next week I will be taking him to art classes at the FIA every Monday and Tuesday morning from 9:30 until noon.  The classes are designed for home schooled kids and are a mix of museum tours which include art theory instruction followed by time in the classroom for "art lab."  On Friday evenings we continue to head to Ann Arbor for music with Mr. Mike (we just entered our 8th year of doing that) and Saturday I take Frederick to the FIM for his private dance classes which we started early this past summer.  The rest of his weekdays are spent with Emily, who is leading his humanities and science education with "self help" lessons thrown in (including complete meal preparation and self-cleaning which includes, among other things, fairly extensive tooth cleaning after lunch) as well as "life skills" (which includes making shopping lists, finding things in stores and paying for them as well as a LOT of physical ed, which so far has included yoga, swimming, stretching and massage).  Last week, the first week of school, concentrated on the life cycle and featured reading about and tracking the life cycle of sunflowers, including harvesting (and saving for next year) the seeds.  Last Friday he brought home a painting of sunflowers, a book he had written explaining plant growth as well as a HUGE flower pot he had made filled with transplanted sunflowers from Linda's farm.  This week features frogs (which, for reasons I am not entirely clear on, are hopping about by the thousands on Linda's farm--little ones, according to Frederick, about the size of one of his fingernails).  He brought home this picture earlier this week:

Frederick was initially a little suspicious about this new arrangement. During the first two days of school, he was very shy and didn't seem to understand that he wasn't heading off to a very early play date but in fact a school day, though (oddly) one at Emily's house. But the other night when I went into turn off his lights and retuck his blankets I found him half asleep, fully clothed. I asked, "What happened to your pajamas?" which I could see had been flung wildly about the room. "All ready for tomorrow!" he announced happily.

Wild beasts!

Something else that grew this year

We shall become Vintners!

And Now a Little Something for the Gardeners in the Audience

This summer has been non-standard: winter lingered on to the end of April, and we didn't have a "real Spring" (with tulips and daffodils) until late June. July was very cool, we closed up the house to run the air conditioning maybe 4 or 5 times (think back two years ago when July 4th started a 5 day run of temps well over 100 which sparked a power outage that lasted 4 days...so I guess we weren't running the air conditioning then, either) and we have only really had unpleasant weather for the past 10 days or so: overcast, very humid, always on the edge of a thunderstorm but never quite getting there (perfect migraine weather) which is very odd for August, which usually has hot dry days and cooler nights. Despite everything being either reversed or upside down, the flowers and trees all throughout Flint are better than ever and, best of all, have seemed to require no maintenance whatsoever. For the first time EVER, we have been able to grow basil, parsley and chives in our yard. I should have put something in here to give a sense of scale, but those basil plants are at least 3 feet tall and the parsley is a small floppy hedge. The chives are off to the right, but they are equally lush and healthy. They haven't quite reached the "Burpee Seed Catalog" measure of success. (This is a catalog I used to get before people stopped sending out catalogs in the mail. It hyped every single plant as producing flowers "the size of dinner plates." The pictures always featured miniature children happily posing next to seemingly elephantine plants. Every morning I walk past a house in our neighborhood that has a hedge of towering hollyhock plants with truly humongous flowers. They really are the size of dinner plates.)