So Far So Good

I think I'm a big fan of pre-blogging. Instead of blogging about the predictable and so-so 'what's been going on around here"...pre-blogging registers some wishes with the good folks at Karma4U. Who knows what pantheon of deities might just be reading this blog and be kind of interested in what I hope for.

I'm referring of course to my scripting out of yesterday on my blog before everyone woke up. Sure, I missed on many points, but overall (and this is the important part) a Rachel Portman score would have been just perfect. I made an obnoxiously large omelet for my dad before we all went off to school and then after school we went to Gymnastics.

Sitting in those bleachers between my parents was perfect. My mother got a digital camera just over a year ago. Since that time she has out-shot Ansel Adams, Man Ray and Henri Cartier-Bresson. She does not go anywhere without her history-establishing device, and so her persistence in looking for the Perfect Shot at gymnastics was very comical. She was hanging off of the balcony, balancing her tripod on the knee of the man in the bleachers next to her ("Would you *mind* terribly if I just, balanced, this, just...Now hold still.") Of course the comic nature of the quest was only enhanced by the fact that she was trying to capture the perfect shot of her grandchildren, zooomed across a football field's distance of gymnasitcs mats, jumping. And in case it was hard to read that sentence because of the way that I situated the distance clause: She was going to great lengths to take pictures of my kids, jumping.

In a less heightened reality script, I may have let her know that I would have the kids jump for her in the living room when we got home, but as it was, her passionate quest in the middle of a bunch of tired sububan dual income parents and a few desperate housewives was much more enjoyable to watch.

We had birthday dinner at a joint just north of town, owned by Bill and Molly, two seventy year-old bohemians who gave up being beatnicks to become big game hunters. The restaurant is FULL of stuffed game and they serve steaks by the slab. In a reversal I couldn't have predicted, my in-laws arrived to join us for dinner. Happily, the conversation went bumping along well. My mother may be the most animated story teller currently living and her stories about Greek Immigrants to Chicago at the beginning of the last century and the state of smog in Thailand were riviting and hilarious. But all of her stories are. Unlike the average humiliated crew of quarterlifecrisis-ridden-waitstaff, our waiters sang a blustery anthem of happy birthday which combined shouts, whistles and clapping. Once Addison was allocated a bit of Daddy's ice cream (we were celebrating Jaelyn & My birthday), peace was restored and dinner was completed or wrapped to go.

We ended the day as my dad fired up the old slide projector and screen and we watched seven trays of slides detailing the travelogue of my parents trip to Thailand. Apparently my father ate a dog, preached wearing an Ahka vest, and Thai people who live in the suburbs (which, apparently in Thailand, means living in grass huts on stilts on the tops of mountains -- the lengths people will go to in order to be trendy!) in general have the curious habit of looking unnaturally young until they are thirty and then when they are forty, suddenly, they look eighty. I found this claim to be a little suspicious, but it was a travelogue and there were pictures involved with these claims. And who can argue with pictures.

We all had warm brandies and ambled off to bed.

So today's pre-blog is going to be a little terse, since the rehearsal of yesterday's Act One took a bit longer than I thought: Today, I'm aiming for a turn of adventure. Someone will get lost. Someone will have Very High Stakes. And one of the pictures my mom takes will end up having implications for international intrigue.

Alright. Let's see how that goes. Seems promising, eh?

*some literary license may have been taken occasionally in this retelling, but hey. we all tell stories, right? my mother's got her camera. I've got this blog. We all do what we can to reshape history in our interests....