Quote of the Moment

You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not understand.
- Leonardo da Vinci

Sunday, December 24, 2006

Q: What's worse than finding a dead mouse in your basement?

A: Finding half a dead mouse.

I went down to the basement the other day to do some filing. I got down on the floor in front of the filing cabinet to sort some papers and noticed a strange little gray, flattened lump ending in a perfect question mark. Upon closer inspection, I found it was the back half of a dead mouse, flatter than a pancake. It was on the cement floor near the edge of our room sized rug and I figure it must have, at one point, been under it and gotten pounded down like a tough cut of beef.

I cannot explain where the front half went, but it was clean gone.

Sunday, December 17, 2006

Critical Lawnmower or Critical Teen Parent?

When I started out on this blog, I had it in mind to keep sort of to a gardening/environment theme, but have, of course, ended up all over the place. That's okay, but lately it seems this website is serving as a warning to Christian parents of teenagers, or at the very least a comfort to others like us who know families are far from perfect, no matter what ideals you may have had in your head before you began your childrearing adventures.

This weekend my 14-year old daughter made her debut in a worship team at our relatively conservative Christian church. We have three services, one on Saturday late afternoon and two on Sunday morning. I went last night with a couple of our kids, and my husband went this morning with our oldest son. Our daughter played the violin, and very nicely. I am already prone to seeing the dark side of things, but it did make me sad to see my child standing there with her violin and dyed black hair hanging across her face, dressed in distressed black Converse high tops with multi-colored neon laces, pink fishnet tights, olive drab pants that had been cut off just above the knee and rolled once or twice into long shorts, two layers of camisole tops in black and pink and a red, white and black plaid flannel shirt left open to top it off - and this contrasted with all the beautiful, nicely dressed, washed and combed young adults (some of whom were even smiling and looking glad to be there) who stood on the choir risers and faced the congregation.

Yes, I'm getting over her outward appearances of late, though I somehow feel robbed of the opportunity I never had to braid her hair, share her interests in fashion or even have any say at all in what the kid now chooses to wear as my representative kin. She's only 14, folks. Forget all that stuff about, ". . . as long as you're living under my roof . . ." It simply doesn't work. The hair was dyed anyway, about 10 extra holes just showed up in her ears one day, and those gothic pants with the chains all over them, forbidden though they were, are purchased with her own money.

So, as icing on the most recent teenaged out-of-control cake, my husband sweated through today's services knowing that the newest colorful outfit our daughter was wearing up in front of the congregation included the words "I'M F*CKED UP AND SO ARE YOU" in one-inch high letters she had hand stitched in cream colored yarn around her black pants waistband. The preacher preached, the high school choir sang and my husband sat there and prayed her tight little shirt would stay down low enough to hide this obvious plea for the entire church to gather around our child and lay hands on her.

Come to think of it, that might have been a good idea.

Tuesday, December 12, 2006


Disclaimer: My oldest daughter has not embraced (yet) the Muslim faith, but does know how to dress to severely annoy her Christian parents. Also, I didn't notice the bloody knife painted behind my head until we were back home, but I left it in because I thought it added to the poignant theme that is our family.
Photo by A. Graf

Family Photo, take #2: Hosed!
Photo by A. Graf

Christmas Greetings

Greetings to our friends and family and a blessed holiday season to you!

I wanted to write you all a short letter to catch you up on our family happenings, but didn’t want to bore you by creating an imaginary image of the perfect Midwestern family who loves each other, never gets bad grades, has clean language and reads their Bibles every day together at the dinner table. We do not compare at all with the Waltons, but we can, at times, make you think that Rosemary had a few more babies.

Dean is still teaching art to middle school students in MPS at a gifted and talented specialty school. He is grumpy because they took away his advanced art class and left him with hordes of ordinary, unruly children this year. Then he comes home to more of the same each night.

Ann is either at home, searching through the local Goodwill to find treasures to sell on eBay, volunteering at the kids’ schools, babysitting for a friend’s adorable baby boy, geocaching, or at physical therapy for her finally diagnosed piriformis syndrome with sciatic nerve involvement and both ischeal and greater trochanteric bursitis. The highlight of her week is usually the deep tissue butt massages she gets from her PT.

Laura is a freshman in high school and plotting her way to Germany for a year. Nothing is set in stone, but she hopes to go either sophomore or junior year and get away from her all too controlling parents so she can freely explore her not yet determined sexuality and her religion of choice, whatever that might currently be. We are torn between forbidding her the experience and packing her bags for her to give some other German family the joy of dealing with her teenage attitude, her hair dye, multiple piercings and rejection of anything I prepare with meat in it. She does play violin very nicely.

Sam is in 7th grade at Dean’s gifted and talented middle school. He is utterly disorganized, has an extremely selective attention deficit, has grown as tall as his mother with feet bigger than his father’s, is interested in video games and large snacks and somehow manages to pull in respectable grades. He drives most of us around the bend, but is loved by all those who don’t have to live with him. We do love him, of course, but have to restrain the sometimes twisted manifestations of this love on a daily basis. He plays the trumpet.

Sarah is in 5th grade and her last year at German Immersion. She takes piano lessons and reads voraciously. She is also absorbing Mom’s obsessive-compulsive tendencies and honing them to an art. Her school music teacher tells me that he sometimes enjoys turning one of the books on his music shelf upside-down before Sarah’s class arrives, just to watch her go over and fix it. The good thing is that she makes my bed and vacuums the living room every morning before school.

Gibby is in 2nd grade and doing very well in both languages. He has some of Mom’s OCD traits as well, specializing in the ornate tantrum when he gets not what he wants. He has gained quite a repertoire of cuss words, including, but not limited to idiot, butthead, stupid, I hate you and the ever popular shut up! Thankfully the school psychologist at Dean’s school is now also working two days a week at the elementary school. He knows our children well and is grateful to us for his job security. Gibby plays piano and enjoys it. We hope he learns to channel some of his angst into his music.

As a family, we tinkered with the idea of moving into more spacious digs this past summer, but as the real estate market quickly cooled, we decided instead to use our resources to do things around this little 1200 square foot box. We modified the kitchen a bit, relined our one bathtub, replaced all our windows and a couple guys are replacing our old siding as I type. It’s definitely crowded in here, and more so as the kids get bigger and bigger, but it’s home. It’s warm enough. It’s familiar. It’s cheap. It needs us.

So there’s a portrait of our family from someone who takes medication regularly for depression. Dean could have made it look more cheery, but I specialize in morbid sincerity and have hopefully made you feel very good about your own family at this beautiful time of the year. We love like good Germans, sometimes a bit combatively, but always as best we know how.

God’s peace to you, and when you pray, remember us.

Monday, December 04, 2006


This is the little, overlooked, rusty kind of thing that just thrills me artistically. I found this rusty gas cap in the lawn near Frank Lloyd Wright's Greek Orthodox Church while on a recent geocache.
Photo by A. Graf

Daddy had the kids making Christmas cards yesterday. Our soon to be teenaged son drew these next two pictures, cover and inside of card, respectively.
Photo by A. Graf

Back at the lab, the Easter Bunny hangs out.
Photo by A. Graf