Category: Family

Family, Humor, Weekend

Weekend Roundup

“Sunday clears away the rust of the whole week.”
– Joseph Addison

Small Dog would like it noted that they looked a lot more glamorous than this.

On Saturday, J. went golfing with Atticus while Darling and I went downtown and shopped.  Janssen, who apart from her fabulous fist blog Everyday Reading also does an equally fabulous blog about saving money (Frugal Wife = Wealthy Life), would have been very proud of me.  I returned two shirts, which I originally bought on sale but didn’t like as much as I thought I would, and in exchange got three shirts that I loved and still put money back in the bank.  Darling told me all about their recent trip to Hawaii while we ate lunch, I gossiped about work.  Then we headed home, J. and I went to a comedy show on campus with Hennessy and her husband Tony.

Sunday we went to dinner at my godparents’ house, played with Elle, had long talks and debates (and some irreverent humor), ate cheesecake, and generally had a delightful time.  In spite of the fact that we were celebrating GBIL’s and a family friend’s birthday…and I left both the cards and presents at home on the kitchen table (facepalm).

How did you spend your weekends, ducklings?

Drama, Family, Home, Humor, Office, Work

Coming to America, and Other Challenges

“Is this Plymouth?  We’ve just come from Plymouth.  We’ve gone round in circles, lads…”
– Eddie Izzard

I’ve decided to just stop panicking.  First of all it’s exhausting and unsustainable, and second panicking will have absolutely no effect on my fate anyway.  For all I know, Chief is just as puzzled as the rest of us seem to be and just wants to get my side of the story.  Of course, he could also be preparing the Iron Maiden and Rack, but I’m choosing to be optimistic.

So, we’ll continue as if nothing is wrong until next Monday.  Play along.  There’s every chance that I’ll lose my cool and completely disintegrate into a useless puddle sometime over the weekend and I may need you to drag me out of whatever darkened corner I’ve thrown myself, in the fetal position, into.

In other news, my whole family seems to be finding life Stateside a bit of a chore.  Mum is putting a house together, Dad is job hunting and running his small business, Gio is pacing rings in the carpet trying to work (in spite of torrential rains at our Uncle’s house where he is staying) and waiting for university to start, Buddy and Snickers are “looking forward” to (another) new school.

Books, Family, Humor, Movies, PBS

For My Future Spawn: Austen

“How quick come the reasons for approving what we like!”
– Jane Austen

However, I will agree, some Austen fans take it WAY too far.

J. and I were talking about Jane Austen a while back (he hates her) and he voiced a common male complaint about Pride and Prejudice, “Women like it just because they want to end up with Mr. Darcy.”
“I don’t think so,” was my response.   “I think smart women like it because they want to be like Elizabeth.”

And I stand by that.   Literary-ily speaking, she was one of the first admirable heroines in the relatively new form known as the novel.  Previously, women generally were getting carried off by brigands/lecherous squires, fainting at every available opportunity, and dealing with ghosts, vampires, and monks who sell themselves to the Devil.  Alternatively, she is intelligent, lively, has a sense of humor, has a strained relationship with her mother but is fiercely loyal to her family, has personality quirks, won’t marry a repulsive man just because he’ll inherit her house someday, and makes mistakes.  In other words, a fairly normal woman.

Suddenly, shoveling through the supernatural and sentimentality, along came Jane Austen who decided to write about the sphere she moved in, the concerns she and her peers dealt with from day to day, and to make the everyday interesting.  Austen is one of my favorite writers, not because of the romance, but because she is historically important.  And because of this skill in skewering the foibles of society and people with wit and sarcasm.

Now, not all Austen adaptations are created equal, and I should know.  Mum, Snickers, and I have spent many a Sunday afternoon enjoying them:

Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice (A&E, 1996) is the definitive P&P version.  It’s basically the book in film form, which can hardly be said of most novel adaptations.  It’s certainly the top Austen film, in my opinion.  Lovely score, good costuming, and excellent acting.  J., when his protests against me watching it have been overcome, will grudgingly hunker down with his laptop on the sofa ignoring it, but will invariably make some kind of commentary, “Darcy’s awkward,” or more likely, “Wow.  Her mother needs a sock stuffed in her mouth.”  My only real complaint with this version is that Jane is not attractive in the slightest.  Rosamund Pike of the Keira Knightley Pride & Prejudice is a better beauty, although the only really good thing about that version is the music.  “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

Emma

I already know I’m going to catch it from Marie for this but Emma (A&E, 1997) with Kate Beckinsale is my favorite version.  She loves the Emma with Gwyenth Paltrwo, which I don’t at all.  And the latest Emma with Ramola Garai, though it got mixed reviews from the crazed Austenites (with whom I do not see eye to eye), I quite liked too.  In fact, this novel seems to be the most debated because main character is a bit spoiled, a busybody, and stupidly manipulative in only the way young girls who think they are more clever than they actually are can be.  But I like the character of Emma quite a lot.  All of Austen’s characters grow, but this is an instance of one of them growing up.  “Silly things do not cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way.”

Sense and Sensibility

Up until recently, I liked the 1995 Sense & Sensibility with the divine Emma Thompson, but the BBC recently did a version (which aired on my beloved PBS stateside) which I think a lot better.  The ages of the actresses were more appropriate and much of the novel which had been left out of the first adaptation was put back in, making the story a bit more as rich as it should have been.  And as much as I love Alan Rickman’s broodiness (in everything he’s ever done), I thought Col. Brandon seemed much more noble and likable, which he ought to be, instead of lurking in corners and sighing dramatically.  I don’t go much for the Byronic types.  They’re aggravating.  “She was stronger alone; and her own good sense so well supported her, that her firmness was as unshaken, her appearance of cheerfulness as invariable, as, with regrets so poignant and so fresh, it was possible for them to be.”

Others

Masterpiece Theatre’s version of Northanger Abbey is really fun.  It’s Austen’s lone almost purely satirical novel, mercilessly lampooning those Gothic monks and ghosts previously mentioned. Both this and this version of Persuasion are really very good so it’s a coin toss there.  And if I had to choose between this verision and this version of Mansfield park, I lean toward the latter, even though neither are very good.  Mostly because Fanny Price is the dullest of dull heroines and does next to nothing throughout the course of the book and the second film tried to make her likable.

And because, as with Shakespeare, the most annoying sorts of people are those who take things too seriously, I’m flat out ordering all of you to hop on over to the bookstore and buy Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance – Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem! Partly because it is uproariously funny, partly because even J. liked it.  Spoiler alert.  Darcy, on the occasion of his first, pompous proposal is rewarded for his pains with a roundhouse kick to the face.  Alas, Mrs. Bennett is little changed: her husband is trying to keep his daughters from the clutches of the undead…but she’s still trying to get them married.

And lest we forget…there is that hilarious “post-modern moment” in Lost in in Austen.

Family, Humor, Travel

Hither and Yon

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only a page.”
– St. Augustine

Sorry for the hiatus, darlings, J. and I went on a roadtrip with parents, brother, sister, brother-in-law, and five assorted nieces and nephews and a partridge in a pear tree.  The purpose for this jaunt was to celebrate J.’s grandmother’s 90th birthday.

Let's not dwell on the grossness that is the unnamed Small Dog and focus rather on my nice husband and his awesome grandmother!

And she is well worth celebrating!  She was a nurse in WWII and was stationed in Wales, but made it all over the place, including France, Luxembourg, Ireland, and England.  She brought her uniforms for the kids to try on and dozens of books filled with pictures and memorabilia.  Apart from that she raised a large family by herself after her husband, a police officer, was killed in action.  And she is one of the happiest people I have ever met!  I’ve never seen her without a smile.  And she manages to make it to ever family function in spite of age, distance, or inconvenience.

In case you can't tell, that's a horse's, er, bum as it's grazing by the local salon.

Now, as to the vacation itself, it was a novelty.  My family hasn’t done much in the way of small trips.  We’ve either been living on a forsaken island in the Pacific that required a dozen hours flying to escape, or in Europe where if you drive an hour you’re in another country.  My parents just had a trip to Sicily (where they were waylaid by a volcano).  In the past few years we’ve gone to Australia, China, Italy, Austria, and my parents also got Thailand squeezed in there while J. and I visited England for Christmas.  Plus a rather lot of traipsing back and forth across the Atlantic.  But short roadtrips to and through towns with a population of less that 600 are foreign!

Atticus tries on his old high school jacket...and it fits!

One of the uncles made homemade root beer with dry ice that bubbled away like witches brew, another made cotton candy.  An aunt was in charge of the whole thing and sent everyone out on treasure hunts, got the entire clan to play dress up (and in some cases, Cross Dress, which in less capable hands is normally an awkward game…), and organized enough food for everyone.

Sidenote: people pronouncing this sort of sign "Yee old" anything drives me absolutely up the wall. It's an Anglo-Saxon character pronounced "th." Nerd rant over. You may be seated.

Which was good, because other than that almost every meal we ate was deep fried in some capacity and my internal workings have not yet recovered.  I mean, deep friend bread!  I thought that was just in the South…I was so wrong.  These foolish Americans actually call such things scones!  And while I remain adamant that scones are something of a more biscuit variety to be consumed with tea, eating something (anything) deep friend and slathered in honey butter is not something to turn one’s nose up at.

And finally, despite living here for years, I’ve not actually seen a lot of the American West.  Las Vegas, some parts of Colorado, fin. And while it will never convert me away from trees and lush grass…the mountains, rugged emptiness of it, and the oases of vibrant life are quite lovely!

We stopped to watch this go off a couple of times, and even ate dinner at a turn of the century hotel overlooking the site. It smelled of eggs and spattered the car with minerals, but isn't it fun?
Family, Friends, Home

To Paraphrase…

“I had to scrap and entire post about my future library because you beat me to the punch.”
“That just means you have good taste too!”
– C. and Vodka

The term “Someday House” entered my vocabulary at a very young age.  My family has had many houses as we’ve flitted from country to country and continent to continent, but my mother and father would often (usually in the middle of a Great Purge) get a far-off look in their eyes and say, “In our Someday House, we’ll have…”

The insides change, but for some reason, my SH's exterior is invariably Georgian. This particular house with a yard for dogs, kids, and croquet please!

A Someday House is more than a Dream House.  The latter you just wish for, the former you actively plan for and will absolutely achieve one day.

The first time I used the phrase, “In our Someday House-” to J. he was completely baffled.  These days I can smugly note that it’s part of the Small Dog Family common vernacular.  We are slowly building our Someday House in our head together (awww…) and it’s shaping up to be a rather nice one, though I say so myself.

I was talking with Sav and Vodka the other day about future homes, and let the phrase “Someday House” slip.  I felt a bit silly saying it to Outsiders, but it turns out they both loved it!  We then had a long in depth conversation about our Someday Houses, and I was planning on blogging about my desire for a library…when Vodka did it first!

Go check it out, she said everything I was thinking, only better!

Family, Friends, Humor, Travel

Everything Must Go

“To keep your balance you must keep moving.”
– Albert Einstein

Small Dog is not coping well.

Venice, leaving in just a week (cue fits of rage and denial), is in the process of packing up and getting rid of things. It’s stressful.  I have personally benefited in the form of several pairs of pants which she wanted to get rid of…which does nothing to lessen the approaching pain.

My family, hopping the world as we did, got really good at moving.  The formula is very simple: keep the necessities and get rid of half of your personal belongings each time you pack up.  To explain: books stay, your old T-shirts acquired from work, community events, and concerts must go.

The funny bit about moving is when you are going through your things and sorting your treasures from the expendables.  You will inevitably come to the realization that half of the clothes in your closet haven’t been worn in months, a third of your shoes have ragged heels, give you blisters, or are too ludicrously high/colored/pinching to be kept, and you have a wealth of old garbage (shopping bags, boxes, receipts, hair pins, loose change) taking up an inexplicable amount of space.

And thus, The Great Purge.  You sit down in the piles of the stuff you had utterly forgotten you owned and have a candid talk with yourself (which can border on the schizophrenic to outside observers).  The end result of which is that several large garbage bags are stuffed with the things you don’t use, don’t want, or can admit you don’t need.  These items are either claimed by friends, donated, or unceremoniously chucked.  The remaining items are lovingly horded because, after all, you have carefully and considerately come to the conclusion that you absolutely need them.

"What do you mean, Kyrgyzstan? I said Kazakhstan, you fool!"

And a few years later when NATO, the UN, James Bond’s M., etc. tell you that you’re off to Zanzibar, Tokyo, or Belgium, you go through the same harrowing, soul wracking process all over again.  And invariably, all of the things you saved previously will be looked over with disdain (“Why on earth did I keep this?”), and end up in a garbage bag by the front door.

And, depending on the country you’re off to, a good portion of your household belongings will have to go as well.  All of your electronics, for example, because for some reason the world cannot get it together on matching plugs to outlets, much less voltages.  In our area of Suffolk, the building codes demand four houses per quarter acre, an unthinkable thing for the US, which meant that when Dad left NATO and Brussels, a good portion of the house went into storage in Switzerland, or something.

Soon the things we’ve left in small hordes all over the world will converge on our new US doorstep.  Mum, already thinking of decorating, will have boxes, bins, and whole trucks of tables, chairs, bookshelves, books, antiques, artwork, and knick knacks to contend with.  I’m willing to bet the entire family will be surprised to see what turns up.  I certainly don’t remember half of it.

People don’t need nearly as much as they think they do.

Family, Friends, Humor, Life

Soundoff Part II

“Nothing but heaven itself is better than a friend who is really a friend.”
– Plautus

Remember this list?

Well, J. took the GMAT today and scored a 720 (way to go, love!), Venice is going to be interviewed by the local paper tomorrow for a petition she’s started, Lexie is engaged, Hennessy is getting married any second now, my brother Gio got an impressive scholarship to virtually any school in the US and he’ll be making a final decision about where to go by the end of the week, my father retired and has decided to move…to the States!  Which makes little sense to me, I’d have picked Tuscany, personally.  My mother, her Classics degree from Cambridge fresh under her belt, is in the US already going through an intense Latin program that should make her a nice candidate to teach Classical Studies Stateside.

Our family is already dreading moving.  Apparently, one of the highest accolades that the kids’ school gave itself this past year was getting in fewer fights than the year before.  And they chief form of entertainment was lighting fires in the school and then calling the bomb squad.  Interesting.  “We’re going to be the weirdos now.  Don’t tell them where you’re from, where you’ve lived, or what you’ve done,” is my father’s advice, “LIE.”  You know that when your pretty spectacular family, though I say so myself, is planning very hard to be inconspicuous that life is about get odd.

My whole family and I are going to be on the same continent for the first time in six years.  Permanently.  Bizarre!

Books, Family, History, Humor

For My Future Spawn: History

“History: gossip well-told.”
– Elbert Hubbard

Hands down my favorite family holiday was trekking along this thing. Glean from this confession what you will.

In case you forgot, I love history.  I find it fascinating.  I joyfully memorized dates in school and wrote fantastic papers.  Not that I had a hope or prayer of doing otherwise – my family’s library is a massive thing divided into Theology, my father’s collection of Modern Library first editions, classics, children/young adult literature, and history with an emphasis in the development of Western Culture.  Our family vacations are not to theme parks as much as hiking Hadrian’s Wall, Normandy, Colonial Williamsburg, museums, castles, palaces, and ruins (true story about how all four kids, aged 20, 14, 12, and 10 climbed all over a Roman fort that was partially submerged in a stream looking for the carved symbols hidden at the base meant to protect it – which may or may not have been relief carvings of genitalia – because it was something we had never seen before in our many adventures in various Roman piles of rocks) .  We are DORKS.

And everyone knows the best way to grow a dork is to start young!  Ergo I bring you, Horrible Histories: a humorous, outrageous, and engrossing (emphasis on the “gross”) medium for bringing history to the masses.  “It’s history, with all the horrible bits left in.”  Timelines, explanations, and facts interspersed with tidbits of the unusual, gory, or just plain bizarre.  And Britishly funny!

Titles such as The Savage Stone Age (Horrible Histories), Villainous Victorians (Horrible Histories), and The Vicious Vikings and the Measly Middle Ages (Horrible Histories) virtually speak for themselves.  Illustrated by the delightful Martin Brown and others, there are puns, jokes, incredible stories, side-splitting captions, and all manner of fun.  I’d recommend them to anyone who wants to stuff their kids’ heads with something without the child catching on to the parent’s nefarious scheme to make them enjoy getting smarter.  You can buy them on the cheap, often starting as low as $.01 on Amazon, I already own a sizable (and growing) collection that still makes me laugh.

It’s history, almost as if told by Monty Python.  Oh, I own that too.
Terry Jones’ Medieval Lives

Family, Humor, Satisfaction

Mothers’ Day, or Why We Shouldn’t Have Kids Soon

“For the record, I hate it when people do things to celebrate ‘future mothers’ on Mothers’ Day, like giving out flowers in church, so I don’t want to do anything with the holiday until we actually have kids.  However, if I’m pregnant on Mothers’ Day, I will expect you to do something, in the name of the fetus.”
“Duly noted.”
– C. and J.

While kids are a long ways off for us, we do have fun thinking about, arguing over, and speculating on our future family.  “You know you can’t swear in front of the kids, right?”,  “They will learn proper grammar, so help me!”, and “Piano lessons and a language are mandatory, ok?”  He looks forward to wrestling with them on the floor and playing catch, I look forward to answering questions and watching them discover the world.  And forcing them to read (though with us as parents, I don’t foresee too great a struggle in that vein).  I like to tease him about how, by marrying a petite woman like me, he’s forfeited his chance at a child playing basketball, and he counters that he’s switched his plans to baseball.  He takes a great deal of pleasure in shooting down all my potential baby names, and I smugly let him think what he wants because after nine months toting the little parasite around, gaining weight, going mental, being violently ill, and forcibly expelling it through a grueling multi-hour ordeal, I think I’ll manage to get the final say. 

 However, we are firmly on the same page regarding one thing about children: slave labor.  Oh, yes.  They will have chores.  Starting young.  It’s going to be fun to make them pull weeds, mow the lawn, and dust the house.  Mummy loves you, darlings!

Family, Humor, Husband, School, University, Work

I Need a Weekend…

“It’s a sin to be tired.”
-Kate Moss

Round about finals, we all get a little loopy.  J.’s schedule affects me just as much as it does him because we only have one car so where one goes, the other must follow.  Meaning, that because J.’s exams start at 7am, guess who also gets to come into work an hour early?

The disruption to our sleep schedule means that C. becomes a walking zombie of ludicrousness.

Our flat hasn’t been cleaned in over a week, I reach a point of exhausted hysteria by 9pm every night, I can’t speak properly, the smallest and most basic tasks become incomprehensible, and I have a perma-migraine raging behind my right eye.

Pictured: J.'s friends Tim and Heidi. As seen by C. at 10pm.

But I knew I’d reached critical mass last night when driving home from my sister-in-law’s (Milly) bridal shower (her fiance spent his evening with the future-brothers-in-law and assorted children), J. was talking about his friends, “Tim and Heidi,” and I furrowed my brow in tired confusion.
“Wait?  Tim and Heidi?  As in Gunn and Klum?”

Sidenote: do they not (his friends, I mean) have the potentially most awesome Halloween costume?