fawing over it

On Monday morning it was quiet in the house because my boys were still at their cousin's after traveling to Cedar Point. I missed them and wished that they had called me like I asked them to, so I knew how things were going. I looked out the window at the lake like I always do, and saw a deer standing out on the swampy peninsula that juts into the water behind our house. We see deer all the time, but this was an unusual place and time of day for that. So I looked a little closer and saw something else over to the left.

A baby fawn! Just barely visible. I watched as the doe very cautiously inched away from where the fawn was. She would go a little further each time, and then look around to see if anything saw her. I have heard that does leave their newborns all day so they can forage for food without attracting attention to the helpless little one. Eventually, she left the area, but I knew where her baby was!

I have always known that fawns were being born behind our house, but I usually only get to see them once they are walking around. I couldn't help it, I decided to go look, and sure enough, there it was.

It was so sweet, and tiny.





Later, I went to pick up the boys. I asked Jeff why he didn't call me from the park and he said that I worry too much and shouldn't need to know whether he's okay all the time. I told him about the fawn and he couln't wait to see it. We went to the same spot and there it was. Jeffrey was enthralled. He wanted so badly to reach out and touch it, but understood that he shouldn't do that. He said that he also wanted to pick it up and bring it home and put it in a box and feed it from a bottle. I explained how the mother would come back eventually and take care of it. He didn't think that was very nice of the mother, but I told him that is how they do it. I assured him that when HE was a baby I barely ever put him down or let him out of my sight, which is true.



Still, Jeffrey worried about the fawn and whether the mother would come back for it now that our scent was all around the area. I could tell that he had fallen a little in love with it, just like I did. It was like having our own special, precious secret, and we knew just where it was and could go see it whenever we wanted.

The next morning the first thing we did was go and see if it was still there. Sure enough, it was, but in a slightly different spot, which meant that the mother had come back and was still protecting it. We showed Tim this time, and he loved it too. We could tell that it was already changing, the fuzzy fur was flatter now and the nose looked longer and more deer-like.

And then that evening, Jeff saw the mother deer leading the fawn away, into another more wooded area where we wouldn't be able to find it so easily. Jeffrey was sad that now we wouldn't know exactly where it was and go see it when we wanted to. I told him that we would still probably see it going around as it got old enough to walk, but we both knew that wouldn't be the same. It would be a little less ours now. Kind of like when your child goes far away for the whole day, and you don't know how he's doing. Jeff rolled his eyes and said its not the same at all, but it is, a little, and now he knows it too.

Day in Detroit 2010

Today was the day I put the boys in the car and drive them out of suburbia and into the big city of Detroit to spend some time with their Aunt Becky, who seems to know everyone and everything around there.

First we stopped in the small city within a city of Hamtramck. We went to see Hamtramck Disneyland. If you have never seen it, you should go. This sign will help you find your way:

And this is what you will see there:






It even has Elvis!


After taking that in, we went downtown to the streets of "The D."

Becky knows a man she calls "Old George." He is the caretaker/security person for the building that used to house the Detroit Federal Reserve.


Hardly anyone besides Old George ever goes in there anymore, but we did.
Here you can see his "office" set up in the lobby, as well as those round holes coming off the balcony above which were for security guns to point through.


We got to go all through the place, even the dark parts where we needed to use flashlights. There was a cool balcony where we could see this view of the city:

And we went down into the vaults, where they used to keep the money. Jeffrey looked around, but did NOT find any leftover millions laying in the corners.


The walls of the vaults are five feet thick, and the doors are amazing. I liked the way the combination lock looked:

The hvac room was also scenic:



After that, we took a peek in the Penobscot building, where Becky explained to the boys who the Penobscots were, the style of architecture, the type of metal used, the meaning of the airplanes, and how a letterbox with a mail chute works.

We also checked out the Guardian building, an art deco architectural wonder:








Then we walked through the city center to the teen-pleasing Hard Rock Cafe.

Tim was impressed with the light fixtures in this room, and was able to quickly calculate the value of the cymbals they used to make them.


Last on our tour was this very meaningful historic place:


Where many decades ago if a lovely young typist had not caught a glimpse of the handsome delivery guy...

Okay, so my parents were nerds who met in a library. Now you know where I got it from.

The Detroit Public Library is more interesting inside than you might think:

The boys could not guess what these funny cabinets with the little drawers were for, so Becky showed them how to look up names to trace their geneology.



They also got to meet Anna, another friend of Becky's, who showed them this strange machine called a microfilm.


And that was the end of our day. As usual, it was a day of discovery, and curiously fascinating places and things to see.

Not Hal and Weird Al

Last night I found myself going to a Weird Al Yankovich Concert.

The original plan was for my brother-in-law Mark to take my boys and his kids using tickets that he got half-off through his job. Then my sister Becky and her husband Hal were added to the plans, since they like Weird Al and going places with their nephews and niece. When I went to drop off my boys, Mark offered me the opportunity to take his place at the concert. I agreed.

The tickets had to be picked up at the Will Call desk and Mark was supposed to show a picture ID and his credit card. We decided that Hal would pose as Mark since I probably couldn't pull it off convincingly. Since there were seven of us, we had the idea to take Mark's large Ford Expedition and only pay for parking one car.

Hal drove, and we realized that he was driving Mark's car, had his credit car and ID, and his two kids in the backseat! It was like voluntary identity theft! A weird start to a weird evening.

This was going to be the first real concert experience for all of the kids, and I was excited for them.

I still remember my first concert. I went to see Journey in the late 70's with my friend Tracey, I think it was in Cobo Arena. Our seats were so high up that when we stood on them we could touch the ceiling. I can remember seeing Steve Perry pacing around on the stage, and that the air smelled kind of funny in there.

The Weird Al concert was perfect for these kids. Jeffrey was already a fan, and it had a little bit of everything. I liked it a lot. There were many pop-culture references that had me smiling. Weird Al has been around a long long time, and he made a point about how famous he is. We were all laughing and singing along, having a ball.

Finally, the band thanked everyone and left the stage. My nephew Cale then said to me, "It's over, let's go now."

I told him that if we made enough noise Weird Al would come back and sing another song. He didn't believe me! So he stood there while I screamed and hollered...and then the encore began!

It's a great day when I get be with the kids as they are experiencing something for the first time. The weirdness will always be remembered!

Fancy Cakes

For Mother's Day I had a tea party at my house and I made petite fours, mini scones, tea sandwiches, and other little bite-sized things. I think they came out pretty. Here are some pictures:




Shortly after than Kendrea was looking for someone to take a cake decorating class with her and I agreed to go, and got Lynn to do it too! Here are my creations:







And then I had a party on Memorial Day. Mary Beth brought this ice cream cake that looks like a watermelon:



Hungry yet?

That's no ugly duckling

I'm the kind of person that is always looking out the window to see what the neighbors are doing. Luckily for all you humans out there, my windows look out over a lake instead of houses.

I have enjoyed watching the Sandhill Cranes, Great Blue Herons, Snowy Egrets, Canadian Geese and Mallard Ducks that frequent the area, but I have always wished for my favorite bird of all to settle in: Swans!

For years I would see a single swan (bachelor) come along in the spring and swim around, all lonely-like. After a few weeks, he would leave. Finally, last year there was a pair. He found a lady! (FYI Swans are known to mate for life)

Jeffrey named them Ricco and Daisy, and they were beautiful and not at all mean like people say swans are. I think this might be due to the type, which I think is Mute vs Trumpet.

Last year we watched them build a nest, but then they left it unattended, and when I eventually went to investigate on my kayak, I saw a pile of cracked eggshells on it. There are many possible predators out there such as those cranes, a pair of enormous Red-Tailed Hawks, and muskrats.

They swam around looking all sad for a few weeks and then flew away.

And then this spring they came back! And built another nest! I watched anxiously and was glad to see only one swan at a time swimming around for the last several weeks.

And today, a beautiful, sparkling day, I see this:





Is it possible for birds to look proud and happy? Could be my imagination but that's what I see here. A joyful day!

Now I'm trying not to think about the snapping turtles.

Fish wall window

Jeffrey started complaining early this morning. His room is too cold, because of the double window. But it's too small of a room, why did the builder make it so small? If it was bigger, there would be space for a large fish tank.

And then he had this brilliant idea.

"Mom could you cut a hole in the wall in between my and Tim's bedrooms and put a fish tank in it?"

"That sounds pretty complicated, honey." Visions of chainsaws and reinforcing walls and running electricity and leaks ran quickly through my head.

But Tim said that would be a cool thing to have too.

"We could stand on either side and wave at each other through the water as fish swim by."

And then Jeffrey totally cracked me up as he stated in all seriousness:

"Now there's something I would NEVER get tired of doing!"

It's fun to dream. At least he wasn't complaining anymore.

Snaked

We've been having a beautiful, sunny Spring this year, and I just couldn't wait to get out there an plant some pansies, my favorite flower. I kept asking at the local garden center and actually managed to buy a flat on the very day that they came in.

(In case you don't already know, pansies like the cold and can be planted as early as mid-March around here in Michigan, if you can find some for sale to buy.)

So I put some in pots on the porch, and some more in the ground around the landscaping by the walkway in front of our house. They looked so pretty! I was very pleased and went inside to get a drink of water. I came back out to put away my gardening things and stopped to admire my work again. In the short time that I was inside, a 3 foot long garter snake had made it's way out and wove it's slimy snake body in and out of each plant that I had so carefully placed in the ground.

Naturally, I began screaming like a maniac and got Timmy to come out and get gloves and a bucket and extract the hideous thing from my flowers and my sight. As he bravely performed this heroic feat, I stood there shrieking with a full-blown case of snake induced heebie-jeebies.

With the snake removed my pretty pansies went back to being a happy sight, until first thing the next morning when I came out and saw that each and every plant had been chewed down to the ground. Probably by a rabbit.

Yeah, I know. If I'd let the snake stay there, I'd still have the pansies. Doh!

A picture of Timmy

When I opened up our local newspaper this week, there was a picture of the High School Track Team.

This is what you see:


And here's what it looks like to me:




You might think that it looks like any other High School sports team picture but this one HAS MY KID IN IT!!!! This is the first time for this so far as I know in generations. The closest I ever got to a jock was assigned seating in Geometry class. Sure, my boys have played in different recreational sports for years now, but this is High School, with real uniforms and professional pictures in the newspaper. Where people pay money to go watch them compete. Where you earn a letter like Danny did to impress Sandy in Grease.

I am so very proud.

And who knows, maybe he will even make it over the hurdles.

Ready for Spring

The lake is still frozen so it still looks wintery outside, but there are some signs of spring such as the presence of many more birds around here.

I am delighted that the swans have made an appearance, but they look awful silly standing and sitting around on the ice.

The cranes are back too. Every once in a while they will fly in, stand there on the ice, and then honk like crazy, as if they are complaining about the situation.

Hurry up, spring!

wii little me

Around Christmastime Larry brought home an extra gift he got "for the boys," which was one of those "wii" gaming systems where you stand in front of the TV waving these white controllers in the air in a way that slightly resembles doing a sport. Everyone says that this is better than regular video games because you move your whole arms instead of just the thumbs. Although the boys were happy enough to get it, I wasn't very enthusiastic about bringing yet another time-wasting electronic into the house.

After the initial excitement, guess who was the one spending the most time of all strengthening his elbows? That would be Larry. And then he went and bought another game to upgrade from what came with it, this one called "wii sports resort."

He quickly mastered Frisbee golf and then went on the 100 pin bowling. I observed that he seemed to get a sense of satisfaction out of watching the ball smack down all those bowling pins, sending them flying and bouncing away. It must meet some testosterone-fueled need to dominate, crush and destroy passive objects. Maybe this is a good way to take care of that. But still, not my thing.

But then I found myself with all of this extra free time recently, and the boys have had a lot of days off from school due to breaks and snow days. Desperate to get them away from the TV screen, I had the idea that if I was taking a turn at it then they would be forced to find other things to do. I asked Jeff to show me how the wii worked, and he helped me to set up my avatar. We made a wii little Mindy in a purple shirt, and I kind of liked watching her bopping around on the screen.

I really didn't want to go to all the effort of standing up in front of the TV, so I found a game for flying an airplane that I kind of liked, and I saw that there was one for bicycling that I could do while sitting down.

It seemed silly at first, sitting there on the couch pedaling my arms in the manner that my feet would go, which has very little to do with riding a bicycle, which is the one sportly thing I actually do in real life.

But after a bit of practice I found some things to like about it. The way that the perspective is set up on the screen, you get the feeling that you are actually there, traveling through this happy sunny digitally created place, with the fake wind blowing through my fake avatar hair. And although the pedaling action is weird, to take the corners on the paths you kind of lean over to the side, very similar to steering a real bike, which for me is nearly an instinctive reaction with all of the bike riding I do when there isn't 12 inches of snow on the ground like there is now.

And so I got kind of good at it, and I started to enjoy the false reality of whisking around the island. I think it is the same thing as watching an Imax movie, where your peripheral vision takes in the motion on the screen and your brain and body react as if it was real.

I got so good that I earned the chance to go up a level and unlocked a new course that travels up the side of a volcano on a windy little path. That visual perspective trick was also at work here, and I truly had the feeling that if I didn't keep in control and steer just right, I could fall right to my death by plunging over the rocky cliff.

And then I did!





Ahhhh! It was a horrific moment as I virtually experienced my worst fear of losing control of my bike and plunging to my rocky death below. I closed my eyes because I really didn't want to know if I would see a bloody wii little Mindy lying at the bottom, or being carried off by the wii paramedics to be pronounced dead on arrival and prepped for her wii little funeral.

Alerted by the sound of their mother screaming at the TV, Tim and Jeff appeared to see what was happening. After they got me calmed down, Jeff showed me what to do.

"See mommy, you just go right back to where you were, a little farther behind than before, and then you keep on going."

Of course. As always, he has it exactly right.

Easy come, easy go

I was going to follow up on that last post with some silly speculation about what might have happened to the disappearing workers at my temp job. Such as finding dazed former employees roaming the parking lot with stapled-up flaps on the backs of their heads. Or experimental but dangerous productivity enhancing chemicals being pumped through the air vents. Or some kind of Truman-like fake work environment as cover for some sinister activities.

But all that's not quite so funny anymore, because now I know what happens to their former contract employees.

They get a call on their cell phones on a Sunday evening while they were doing laundry so as to have enough clean dress pants to wear for the week, and it's from the job shop rep saying not to go in to work the next day. No explanation, just a request to turn in the laptop computer.

I'll have to say that I was somewhat stunned, because I had recently gotten to a point where I had figured out how to do the tasks that were assigned to me, and could finally begin producing at the speed they seemed to be expecting. But I also had a feeling that this made some sense, because on Friday I had sent an email to whoever I thought might be the right person to tell that I would not be coming in to work "for all Saturdays in the forseeable future" as a recent mass email had demanded that we either do or provide excuses for.

When I accepted this job assignment I was not told that there would be mandatory overtime, and since I had been there it was very unclear to me what the expectations were for hours of work. But it was made clear by the job shop that I was not to work overtime without "prior approval" which meant to me something more direct than vague whining about "we're way behind and everyone needs to pitch in."

Of course I'm guessing here, because for all I know the reason they let me go was something to do with the way I fix my hair, but if it was the overtime issue then that's a shame because the confusion could have been easily cleared up by someone from the company having a direct conversation with me about what the expectation was.

But that would have been the first and only direct conversation I'd have with anyone there about any subject including how to do the documents, what to wear on Fridays, who to call if there's a snowstorm or when the department meetings were. They just didn't acknowledge the new contractors there as actual people. We were more like a line of boxed up computer monitors along the wall that you look at and think "I wonder when they're going to install those."

And that bothered me. I need my personhood to be acknowledged. Just a little quirk of mine. I do totally get it that we are in a recession and there is an unlimited supply of unemployed people out there plenty willing to step in and take any work they can get, but to me that is still not an excuse to treat people with any less respect, or none at all.

So this is how this goes. Now I need to figure out what I'm going to do next, again.

Suspicion

So this new job of mine, there's a lot to do, which makes the days go by quickly, but the work isn't always all that interesting to me. Also, since I've started there's something about the place that doesn't seem quite right, and I've been thinking about that.

A few days ago, one of the coworker who I hadn't gotten to know very well disappeared without explanation. Suddenly, her desk was empty and her name was off of the work schedule, but nobody was talking about it.

As a new contractor doing the exact same job as she was, I wanted to know more. If she was fired, was it the quality of her work, her attitude, the speed of her work, punctuation, personal hygiene, what? I guess I wanted to know what not to do, in case I wanted to stay here for a while, or the converse. It would be good information.

Since no one was talking, I was left to my own devices. MaryAnn told me that she had gotten one of the assignments from the separated worker. I told her to be on the lookout for anything that might indicate a reason to be fired. She said that she would have organized the topics differently herself, but that was about all that could be said to be wrong with the document.

Meanwhile, I was on the keen lookout for suspicious activity. I started to realize that although everyone around me constantly appears to be frantically busy, I have never seen any actual results of all this work.

Then the other day as I was driving around the series of connected building to get to the spot in the back parking lot, something caught my eye. It was a man in a white lab coat coming through a parting in the chain link fence between some other buildings in the industrial park. I watched as he went to an unmarked door to a building that is connected to my building.

The next time I drove around I took a closer look. The only markings on the door said "CAUTION: eye protection required." I thought it was unusual that this part of the complex is inaccessible from my area, and does not have a sign anywhere. I peered through the fence opening and saw another series of unmarked buildings. And then another lab-coat guy came and went through!

Back at my desk, I had been complaining about how dirty everything seemed to get, and with impressive speed a never-before-seen "maintenance worker" appeared with a ladder and used a paint brush to clean the "dust" off of a large vent that's nearly right over my desk. Most unusual.

I tried to put the pieces together. I told MaryAnn to take another look at that document, to check for things like the first letter of every other word spelling out a secret plea for help when read backwards.

I'm still working on it, but there must be a way to connect these occurrences into a single explanation. There just has to be one. Or not.