Full of Surprises

Not that I really WANT lots of surprises…

Got home Friday and it was like tripping into a riot—walk in the door and am met with everyone yakking at top volume and running around and clothes and bags and fish and WHOA! First things first!

Reba said Jonathan’s practice had been called off, which meant that the invitation extended earlier in the week by the grandparents to come spend the night for the kiddies could be accepted, which was nice for them, but GREAT for Miss Reba and me because we could go on a DATE! I was willing to go see any kind of a chick flick she could imagine.

But first, we had to finish getting the kids packed, and I was a blur of thrown clothing—“HERE! HERE! HERE’S THIS!” Finally got everyone ready, and oh, yeah, fish.

“What fish are you talking about?”

Little Boy piped up, “One of the moms brought a BIG bag full of GUPPIES to school today and she had NINETY-NINE and she gave us all some for our ECOSYSTEM!!” Ecosystem in this case being a rather loose definition for a sawn-in-half half-liter water bottle with some gravel and about twenty guppies in the bottom part, and the top part with some dirt and grass sprouts. “That one’s Boompa, and that one’s Cheechee!” They both have icky egg-sac things pooching out their sides. “They’re gonna have BABIES!!”

Ah, the miracle of life, in all of its tiny, fishy, smelly, grotesque glory.

Luckily, we have a little tabletop cylinder aquarium from the last time someone gave us fish to kil—raise—and so they got moved to more spacious digs later in the weekend. But until then, the chorus was, “We have to feed them, Dad!” Yes, Daddy knows. Only too well.

“We’ll have to get some more food later, but right now, DADDY HAS TO GO ON A DATE WITH MOMMY SO ALL OF YOU NEED TO LEAVE! NOW!”

Into the van, off to Reba’s mom and dad’s house, shove them in the door and run.

Off to the theater—the movie start time was 7:10, which is when we got in line for the tickets, then we had to get popcorn, and so by the time we got in there, it was 7:30. Still got to see two more previews before the movie started. The movie being Under the Tuscan Sun, based upon the memoir of the same name by Francis Mayes.

Movie Review Time (might include spoilers)

I had heard only a little bit about this one, some of it to the effect that it was a bit like Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, a.k.a. The Money Pit, but that’s a stretch.

There is an old house, and contractors, and dust—but there are also itinerant Polish laborers, and gourmet food, and olives, and nuns, and exploring the stereotypes of internationalism in general and Italy in particular by wallowing in them as heartily as the episode of I Love Lucy when she stomps grapes, and a Romeo and Juliet subplot, and a Fellini prima donna subplot, and a trendy lesbian power-couple subplot (moviemaking has now gotten to the point of much early-‘70s dreck, which included swingers as the titillating, gasp-inducing taboo sexual proclivity du jour, except now instead of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, we have Bob & Ted, and Carol & Alice) and little old men with flowers, and flag flinging, and, and, and! all rolled up in some really beautiful cinematography shot on location.

Eh.

It has some nice moments, and maybe the book is far less of a cudgel when is comes to making ‘A Point’ about ‘Life’, and ‘Greater Meanings’, and such. You know, some people think of the richness of Italian cooking, and they think of garlic, and they think if you want it REALLY authentic, you gotta add LOTS of garlic. Kind of the same thing going on with the movie—subtlety really has its charm, and a little garlic goes a long way. The parts that are obviously intended to be subtle and shy and coy go and ruin it with all the all the winking and nudging and elbowing and, “Hey, d’you get it? This is ARTISTIC, and we’re being SUBTLE! SEE?!” that it becomes an exercise in patience to get through it. Almost like those movies where you can tell who paid for product placements, as the star taps on an Apple while drinking a Coke, and then hops into his new Escalade and drives to a GAP.

It sounds like I hated it, but I really didn’t—it’s not bad, really. Lots of architectural eye-candy (enough to make a Picture of Tuscany a Day calendar), and Diane Lane is winsome. Just too much garlic. BUT, I got to go on a date, which was the best part.

And then we got to go to Kohl’s!

A new one just opened up across the highway from the theater, so, this being a date, we had to go shopping at a department store. ::sigh:: Ostensibly, this was to look for a new bedspread for Jonathan, but Reba just wanted to go look. Thank heavens we got there thirty minutes before it closed.

Then home, then to bed, then for once, up not quite so early in a nice, quiet house. We even had a real breakfast for a change, with real, honest to goodness coffee. Mmm.

Thus braced for the day, we went and picked up Boy to take him to his game. The girls decided they wanted to stay behind and play, which was fine, because I get tired of hearing Oldest complain about having to go to the park.

Jonathan’s team lost again. 3-0. But, he played his little heart out again—he is FINALLY running with some vigor, and he did a good job at his position. We played a co-ed team out of Leeds, and they were very well coached, and the girls played just as well as their boy teammates. We had the loudmouthed Yankee dad.

Oh well.

Then, on to more stores for yet more shopping! First up to Wal-Mart for fish food (“Did you feed my fish this morning, Daddy?”—he’s so worried about them), and to pick up a genuine plastic broken pirate’s chest for the little things to swim around, and some other stuff. I was just in a hurry to get back to the van to listen to the Auburn game. (It turned out to be a pretty ugly win, but that’s just fine.)

Then off to JCPenney’s to look for this bedspread thing again, then back to the grandparent’s house, then back to our house for more housework and laundry and cleaning the table off.

Our kitchen table, being one of those handy horizontal surfaces common to households, attracts all manner of ephemera and detritus and flotsam and jetsam and junk and cast-offs until it’s about six feet high in the middle and leaves us with about a quarter of an inch of space on the perimeter to balance plates and glasses. It was about to slide off and seriously harm someone, so I did the chore of cleaning it all off. There was enough stuff on there to break a dumpster, but it’s all gone now. (Actually, relocated, but we won’t say where.)

More clothes folding, and child scrubbing, and then to bed with the lot of them, then back up Sunday for church, and afterwards across town for Bible Bowl (both our junior and our senior team won again) and then back to the building for a meeting that never happened, and then I found out I am supposed to be adding a new class for our college age kids right here in the middle of the quarter, which means that even though I had given myself a quarter’s break that I’ll have to wind up teaching anyway and which means I have to come up with something to talk about, and then we had evening worship, and then we had to go BACK to the grandparent’s house because a certain small girl had left her baby doll over there, and then back to the house for supper, and then after they were in the bed, I had to go to the stinkin’ grocery store.

Which actually was a very nice respite.

Home again, groceries put away, then upstairs to find that the same Tiny Girl who had left her doll at Grandmom’s had gathered every single stuffed animal in the house and put them on my side of the bed and crawled on top of them and was snoring soundly. ::sigh::

SO, I gathered up the animals and marched them all back to her bed, then attempted to get her up and back with them. Less successfully than the animals, it turned out. She went, but under extreme protest, which I really didn’t mind as long as I had a place to sleep. Which I did, until I came here.

AND NOW, I have a ton of junk to get done, and no time to do it in. Which means for the next week, updates are going to be sporadic here on el Blog con Possum. I know all both of you will be not the least bit disappointed, as there is plenty to read elsewheres in the old blogroll.

I’ll still be posting junk, but it will be a junk of both lesser quality and quantity than usual, so please bear with me. At some point, the quantity will increase, although the quality will remain at the level to which you should have by now grown accustomed.
posted by Terry at 11:12:00 AM