Browsing Archives for November 2009

One of my sons went out for wrestling this year.

The middle school season is very short, so we have been attending a a lot of events with peculiar names such as duals, double duals and triangulars. As a result the term ‘triangular’ has become the CD’s new favorite word.

“I think Ethan has a triangular today…” he will say.

“Are you going to go to Ethan’s triangular?” he will ask.

“Which town is hosting Ethan’s next triangular?” he wants to know.

I was unable to let his new frequent usage of the word ‘triangular’ go, as it is not in my nature to let the minuscule details of my husband’s behavior slide by without uh… comment.

“Why are you using the word triangular so much?” I asked. “Do you think it makes you sound wrestling savvy?”

The Country Doctor replied, “I grew up in a wrestling town… I can use the word ‘triangular’ whenever I want.

“Well, I grew up in a wrestling town that could kick your wrestling town’s butt and I don’t have to throw the word triangular around like it was so many reversals on a wrestling mat!” I retorted.

“Triangular! Triangular! Triangular!” The Country Doctor shouted.  To which I responded by taking him down, placing him in a half nelson, reversing him for a few back points and then slowly and excruciatingly using my ever increasing girth to pin him down.  

“Who comes from a wrestling town now Country Doctor!?  Uhuh…  that’s what I thought.”

 

 

 

This is the Little Apple Grapple. This was our first tournament of the season and where I began to learn about the benefits of wrestling therapy. You see, in wrestling you have a certain freedom to shout things at your child to encourage him that under normal circumstances you would never think of saying in public.

For instance, in the above situation, while another kid is smashing my son’s head into the floor, I might say raise my voice slightly and say something like….

“Get out of there Ethan!”

“C’mon buddy!”

“Take control!”

And then when my son takes control, I might calmly suggest that he – “Turn him over! C’mon Ethan! Get him on his back and pin him!”

As the match progresses, I find myself feeling the need to communicate in a manner that will inspire Ethan to go for the kill… I mean win. To go for the WIN.

MASSACRE HIM ETHAN!

SMASH HIS EXOSKELETON!

GRASP HIS SKULL BETWEEN YOUR HANDS AND CRUSH IT INTO POWDER!

EVISCERATE HIM ETHAN!

REACH INTO HIS GUT, PULL OUT HIS SPLEEN AND EAT IT!

JAM HIS SPINE INTO THE FLOORBOARDS!

STEP ON HIS HEAD!

PULL HIS KNEE-CAPS OFF!

BITE HIM ETHAN!

BITE HIM ON THE FACE!

When the match is over it doesn’t even matter if your kid won or if your kid was the one who was eviscerated – what matters is that all that anger… the anger that hides behind your liver… and in between your white corpuscles… and underneath you fingernails …

it is gone now.

At least until the next match starts.

And that is the magic of wrestling therapy.

May your Thanksgiving be filled with mashed potatoes, gravy, pumpkin pie

and plenty of turkeys to go around…

and hopefully – at least one good wrestling match.

We have been working on finishing our basement.

It has been a very slow moving project.

We had the basement sheet-rocked in the spring by Mike the ‘morel mushroom guy‘.

We believed we would paint the basement ourselves, but for some reason…

We could not seem to get it done.

So a month ago, we hired a painter….

And now we are ready for the next step.

Which involves using metal folding chairs, blue plumbers tape, an old desk and planks of plywood to determine if we have enough room to put a small bar in the T.V. room.

The blue tape outlines where a narrow back counter would go against the wall with some shelving above it.  The desk indicates a bar.  The X’s on the floor are actually bar-stools and the planks of plywood represent a sectional couch.    As you can see, it is all pretty tight.  It would be nice to have a bar, but I am not sure there is really room.

In the mean time, the Country Doctor has been putting down slate tile in the basement bathroom and we liked the look of it so much that we decided to put the same tile in the ‘proposed bar area’.

Even if we don’t have room for a bar, we still intend to put a counter along the back wall with a small sink and some upper shelving, so the tile will go down in that area.  Not only will it serve to keep some spills off the carpet, but it will also break up the ocean of carpet that will cover the rest of the basement floor.

And that brings us to the current dilemma of choosing a basement carpet.

Here were the initial round of contenders.  We were leaning towards a dark carpet for the obvious reasons… four boys…. orange soda…. potato chips… slumber parties…. show cats…. etc, etc, etc.  We also wanted a very soft carpet for the wrestling matches that always seem to accompany the orange soda/slumber party/show-cat/potato chip/four boys madness that goes on around here!

The boys decided that the best way to choose the carpet was to have a tournament.  Each carpet square got paired up for the first round, except for the carpet square on the end which received a ‘bye’ – yes – ‘a bye’…  a carpet sample received a bye….

I live in a very strange world.

The boys voted by placing a domino on their favorite choice in each pair.

The winning sample in each pair moved ahead to the next round.  Look at how serious they are!  Sometimes I feel very alone in this house.

These two squares fought it out for the championship.  I guess that dark sample won for my family, but not for me.  I was not satisfied at all, and went out and got some different samples.  This time, there was not a carpet tournament bracket, because I brought in a champion with an unfair advantage.

My mom.

We laid out the new samples in the bathroom that has the slate tile down already and also has the same color on the wall as in the living area.

We were looking for a sample that worked with both elements.

We narrowed it down to these four choices.

And then to these two final choices.

Although, I liked the dark carpet because it covers up a multitude of errors, I was a little worried about making the basement space too dreary.

So we decided on the lighter choice.  It has enough ‘specks’ in it to disguise a lot of orange soda and it will help to keep the space from becoming too dark which is always a problem in basements.

Now back to deciding if we really have enough space for that bar….

Under normal circumstances I don’t think I ever would have watched 17 Again starring Zac Efron and… uh… also some other people.  The movie was released some time ago and I passed it over many times without a single glance back.  It was clearly not my kind of a film as there was no damp English countryside, no ancient vine covered manor, no breeches, no tunics and certainly no clippity clop of horses hooves upon a cobbled path.  Instead, I reached for my more typical fare of Wives and Daughters or The Wings of A Dove, or The Forsythe Saga and passed up 17 Again… and again… and again.  

“How can I be so stupid?”, you might ask.  ”Had I never watched High School Musical?” you might query.  ”Do I live in a cave?” you might wonder.  The answer to all these questions is… well… I am raising four sons and I am sorry to tell you this, but High School Musical is not on their radar.  Aside from all the singing and dancing which instantly repels them, there is also the fact that HSM is about a dilemma they could never comprehend. Why would anyone who has legitimate basketball skills spend one single second of his life contemplating a theater career?  To my kids, this borders on blasphemy.  God gives you gold and you turn it into straw?  Without a child in the house driving the High School Musical bus, we remained hopelessly ignorant of not only High School Musical, but also the considerable charm of Zac Efron. 

So how is it I came to watch 17 Again starring Zac Efron of High School Musical fame?

Well… let me tell you!

It happened on the plane trip back home from London to Houston.  It was a fourteen hour flight.  Each seat on the plane had it’s own video screen, and you could choose from literally hundreds of shows to watch.  I can’t remember everything I watched, as it bleeds together like a bad dream.  I toured a castle, and then Kiera Knightly appeared out of the fog to a Mr. Darcy who was sadly not Colin Firth, while a large foul-mouthed magician and a tiny silent magician took turns shooting each other across a table.  After a while, I got a headache, turned off the screen and took a nap.  When I awoke, I glanced to see what my eldest son was watching and it was a cheerleading routine.

Suddenly my headache disappeared.  The blood vessels in my brain opened.  My heart started pumping blood like a heavy weight.  My gray hair turned to gleaming chestnut, my chin whiskers popped out on their own volition, and the sagging flesh that covers from head to toe sprang upwards to the heavens with a new found vigor.   This is what happens to me whenever I watch a cheerleading routine. It is the fountain of youth.  It just looks so FUN!  SO UPBEAT!  So HAPPY and YOUTHFUL! The cheerleaders BOUNCE and FLIP, and SHAKE and VIBRATE and throw each other in the AIR!  And then there is the music!  It is always the hippest, most happenin’, most now, most space ship soundin’ music EVER! Can someone please put a cheer-leading routine in a bottle?  I need a double dose every day.  

When I saw that my son was watching a cheerleading routine, I didn’t stop to ask why?  Or how?  Or what the…?   I just furiously turned it on and watched 17 Again for myself. Ever since then, I have tirelessly devoted my life to furthering the cheer-leading/dancing/acting career of Zac Efron.  May his reign be long and his cheer moves always stay cutting edge.

Aside from the fabulous cheerleading routine, the movie is really good.  No, really.  REALLY!  IT IS!  There are some great comic moments, some heart rendering scenes, some eternal truths and bonus – CHEERLEADING!  You will enjoy it even if you think you absolutely will not.  It makes for great thanksgiving family movie fare.  But I may be the only person on the planet who didn’t know that already.  

 A few other films I have watched over the past few months that are worth a mention…

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Possession starring Gwyneth Paltrow and some guy with a nice big clefted chin. I loved this film and here are a few blatantly obvious reasons why…

First – The damp English countryside…

Secondly- Crumbling manor with cock-eyed inhabitants…

Thirdly –  A secret love affair wrapped up in a literary mystery…

Fourthly –  Gwyneth wears GREAT TWEEDY CLOTHES…

And lastly –  Did I say damp English countryside yet?  

This is a great movie for anyone who loves great books and who also…  loves the damp English countryside.

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Amazing Grace starring Ioan Gruffud and Romola Garai (Those are their real names – I did not make them up).  I watched this movie against my will.  It kept popping up in my Netflix ‘movies you will love’.  Normally, I whole-heartedly trust my NetFlix ‘movies you will love’.  In fact, I think that my NetFlix ‘movies you will love’ knows me better than anyone on the planet.  Has anyone searched the depths of my soul the way my NetFlix ‘movies you will love’ has?  Has anyone penetrated the very core of my being, always knowing the exact movie that fills my incessant need for the damp English countryside, vine covered cottage, assortment of tweedy wild-eyed people who discover a murder in the garden and promptly serve tea on the veranda?  No one!  NO ONE!  NO ONE HAS EVER CARED SO MUCH BEFORE!  No one has ever even TRIED!  I love my NetFlix ‘movies you will love’ and I will swear unending fidelity until time immemorial!

 

As a result, I eventually gave way to my Netflix ‘movies you will love’ and reluctantly watched Amazing Grace.  It’s wonderful.  It tells the story of William Wilberforce, an English member of parliament who spent his life trying to make the slave trade illegal in England. The movie may sound very harsh and dismal and grim – and those elements are certainly there – but there is also the heroism of a long noble fight, people who never give up, joy in the midst of crushing pain and yes – damp English countryside, crumbling manor, wild eyed people in tweedy breeches, long shots of glorious gardens, and the clippity clop of horses hooves upon a cobbled path.  It really is a great film.  Get all the kids and watch it together. You won’t regret it.

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Under the Greenwood Tree starring Keeley Hawes and James Murray

I watched this movie quite a while ago, but it has stayed with me.  Based on a Thomas Hardy book, I assumed that this story would involve dire situations that people can’t possibly overcome and choose instead to freeze to death in a snow storm only a few feet from shelter and warmth.  But Under the Greenwood Tree was not like that at all.  It is full of mirth and passion and goofy characters.  I did not know old Mr. Thomas Hardy had it in him.  He must have written it either in his youth when he still had hope for humankind, or in his old age to make up for all his grim tales of insufferable sorrow.  In this story, a school teacher and a miller take a very strong likin’ to each other while a drunken dance band/church choir stages a rebellion against a pompous vicar who wants the school marm for hisself. Everyone must decide if sobriety is worth the price of love… or something like that.  A very fun film.  AND!!!!!
 

James Murray….

 

…looks an awful lot like the cheer leading man Zac Efron.  Except with an ENGLISH ACCENT!

Neimann has done it again.  Ingenious post on Fall leaves.

You don’t think you can be bothered to read it – but it is too fun to miss!  

It will make you smile the rest of the day.  

 

Thanks to Kat for bothering to leave the link.

A few weeks ago I collected some leaves from the trees at work thinking I would write a post about you know… Fall leaves.…

 

 

 

 

 

I brought the leaves home and I pressed them in a book for a few days.

 

 

 

 

 

 

During the interim, I had some serious spasms of doubt about writing a post about Fall leaves….

 

 

 

 

Leaves?

Really?

I am going to write about Fall leaves?

 

 

 

 

I am going to arrange the leaves?

I am going to label the leaves?

I am going to pose the leaves on both a black table….?

 

 

 

 

 

And a white table?

Because I need to see which background sets off the Fall color more?

 

 

 

 

 

Eventually – I talked myself out of this post…

Because it just seemed like something A CRAZY PERSON WOULD DO!

 

 

 

 

 

But still…

I really liked the photos.

Something about leaves…

Collecting leaves…

Posing leaves…

Even labelling leaves…

It actually seems like a relatively sane thing to do when I look back at the photos.

In fact, it seems far more sane than a lot of other things that I do.  

In fact, it might be the SANEST thing I have done in a long time!

 

 

 

 

 

So I guess I will stop worrying about all the graveyard photos I took of this statue. 

 

 

 

 

 

It will make sense someday.

Lately, I have had an overwhelming urge to talk about blogging and my own experience with it.  I am one of those people that is always searching for some kind of meaning in what I do.  It doesn’t necessarily have to have a lot of meaning, but I have to feel like there is some value in the way I am spending my time.  I often question the value of blogging.  In fact, I question it so regularly, that I have to fight with myself several times a week just to decide whether or not I should post another entry.  My life is not exactly riveting, mysterious, daunting, heroic, cataclysmic, romantic, important, useful, or surrounded by a backdrop of intense natural beauty.  I live the same life of thousands of other people and there is nothing that distinguishes me in any truly significant way.  So why then blog?  And why not only blog, but attempt to grow the blog? 

I started writing this blog when we were knee deep in building a house.  This was a very exciting time in my life as building the house was a dream come true.  I wrote a lot about the construction process and joined my blog to an umbrella site called houseblogs.net. My blog grew to about a hundred readers a day.  Around this time, my friend Jenny took a trip and while on the plane she picked up the in-flight magazine and read an article about blogging.  The article said that once a blog reaches 100 readers a day it is a benchmark, a point where the blogger should consider taking the blog seriously. When Jenny told me this, I got very excited.  Maybe I was a real writer after all.  I began to think about how to attract a bigger audience.

I did some research on how to gain readers.  The predominant advice was to comment on other people’s blogs.  The idea was that a comment creates a gateway from other blogs to your blog and people would jump over to your site and instantly become devoted readers.  I found this to be very difficult advice to follow. I slave over writing a comment.  I have to go through twenty revisions before I am absolutely sure I am communicating clearly and not sounding too snarky, while retaining a slight edge of the appropriate amount of sarcasm and still being uber friendly.  It was an exhausting process and even on my best days I needed a nap after leaving only four or five comments.  If I simply left encouraging comments… or friendly comments… or comments for the sake of commenting comments – why would anyone follow them back to my blog?  It seemed to me that the comment had to be pretty darn artful for anyone to want to see where it came from.  I read a lot of blogs, but I rarely comment. It is just too much work.

A much more viable option to me seemed to be to buy an ad on a well known blog.  At the time I had a google ad on my site. Every once in a while an an ad would pop up for a blog called Life of a Farm Blog.  I was frequently sucked into following that ad and reading the updates the author had posted about his farm, his farm animals, and strangely, his farm machinery.  I never became a devoted reader of this blog, but I did think that buying an ad was a far more effective way of gaining readers than leaving a trail of comments behind me.  I began to research the various ‘famous blogs’ to decide where to buy an ad.  

Dooce seemed like an obvious choice.  Her blog was the most widely read personal blog that I knew about at the time.  I suppose there might be some debate at this point on who is more widely read –  Dooce or Pioneer Woman – but if you look at the ‘intel’ I think Dooce still wins. She may not have the clicks that P-dub has, but her blog is not set up to suck people into four different areas, nor do you have to click to read her main page. Though her content is often volatile and laced with what seems to be an almost formulaic amount of four letter words, you get the distinct feeling that she cares about what she posts and how she writes it.  Pioneer Woman’s blog, these days at least, seems to just be about generating click-able content.  Did I just say that out loud?  P-Dub’s fans are rabid and her blog may soon be more widely read than Dooce, but even though she wins the click contest, she does not appear to currently be winning the individual reader contest.  Dooce still has a higher Technorati ranking of 568 – while Pioneer Woman is barking at her heels at 526.  Federated Media puts Dooce at having five million page views a month while PW has fifteen million page views a month – but again – Dooce’s site does not require extra clicking to read her posts.  

Dooce and Pioneer Woman were the only two blogs from which I seriously considered buying an ad.  The idea of purchasing an ad from Dooce was outright scary to me and at the time an ad on Dooce was going to cost over a thousand dollars.  This was way beyond what I could afford so I was relieved to cross Dooce off the list.  I decided to go with Pioneer Woman who was far less intimidating and far more affordable.  Still, two years ago, when I was comparing prices, an ad on PW was going to cost over two hundred dollars.  I hesitated at spending that kind of money to promote my web site. Instead, I decided to do a test ad.  I bought an ad on Federated Media’s cheapest parenting blog at the time (Dad Gone Mad).  The ad cost seventy dollars. It ran for a week and resulted in only twenty one visitors or clicks to my site. This was clearly a failure and ended up costing me three bucks a click, but I still thought that an ad on Pioneer Woman was a good idea.  I shut my eyes tight and pushed the button to purchase a small ad on PW.  The Pioneer Woman ad ran for seven days and was clicked fifteen hundred and eighty seven times (costing me thirteen cents a click).  After the debris settled, my readership had doubled. There can be little doubt that this campaign was a success.  I occasionally think about buying another ad for my site. Both PW and Dooce are now far out of my price range, but there are still some affordable sites out there that would probably add a few readers to my site.  I’ll let you know if I ever try one of them out.
These days I have around 1500 visitors on days that I post – with around 900 visitors on days without a post.  The blog earns around one hundred and fifty dollars a month which is just enough to pay for hosting, a small WordPress fee and a few giveaways.  Blogging continues to be an ever evolving process for me.  It has moved past the euphoric- Holy Crap!!! Look!!! Look!!! People are reading what I write!- stage into something far more wobbly and unsettled.  In recent months especially, I have moved beyond the idea of posting a quickly consumable goof goof goofagoof story to writing something that I feel is actually worth reading.  My posts are frequently longer.  I spend a lot more time writing them.  I attempt to include real information and a few facts which means more time spent researching.  I have stopped trying to post daily.  I have also made a personal determination to write more honestly.  This has wreaked havoc on my intestines, but has been very good for my soul.  If I really want to improve as a writer (and I do!) I have to be able to say what I really mean.  It is never my intention to make people angry, but it is certainly my intention to prove (at least to myself) that dissenting commenters are not on the editorial board of My Sisters Farmhouse.  Thank God that David Sedaris, Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde, Shakespeare, Harper Lee, Mark Twain, Thomas Hardy, Helen Hanff, Stella Gibbons, The Bronte girls, T.S. Eliot, C.S Lewis, Charles Dickens and the writers of the Bible did not have a bunch of angry commenters reading their blogs.  They may have given up long before they wrote their masterpieces!  Which opens up another huge can of worms – that of the influence of commenters on a writer.  I will have to cover that subject on another day as this post is clearly way past the quickly consumable goofy goof goofagoof post limit.

We awoke to snowfall this morning.

The first snowfall of the season…

You’ll have to excuse me for a few minutes while I run around like a ninny and take a few photos.

Believe it or not, I planted two flats of strawberries on Friday afternoon after I got home from work.

The strawberries were scheduled to be thrown into the compost pile at the garden center, as the planting season in Kansas is at it’s end.  I snatched a few doomed flats and brought them home.  It was a beautiful day – warm, slightly overcast, but very nice, as I tucked those strawberries into the dirt.  I hope they will make it.

I even picked a few for my breakfast!

And then spent a few quiet moments with my roses.

How long til Spring?

So far three of my boys and the Country Doctor have received the H1N1 vaccine.

That leaves me and my teenage son knocking around the planet without immunity.

The same teenager who is now as tall as his dad.

I’ve had a few friends ask me what I thought about the H1N1 vaccine.  Not because they believe that I have any actual knowledge about the H1N1 vaccine, but because they think that possibly I have discussed it with the Country Doctor.  Sadly, I have not discussed it with the Country Doctor.  I try very hard not to discuss anything medical with the Country Doctor. Medical discussions either make me queasy or bore me to stone… unless it is a funny story.  A while back, the CD was taking care of a very elderly lady who was convinced that the hospital was a hotel.  As you can imagine, she was not very happy with the room service.

As to the medical decisions in our family, the Country Doctor is almost completely in charge.  He’s clearly more qualified than I.  Not that there haven’t been a few times when I have taken my kids to be seen by a different doctor because I felt that my husband’s response to his sick child was somewhat cavalier.  Doctor parents tend to either over diagnose or under diagnose their own family members.  There can be little doubt that our family is severely under diagnosed.  We are are way, way, way under diagnosed.  We may even be completely undiagnosed!  If one of my children has a fever, a cough, or aches and pains and the malady fails to resolve itself in a few days, I start to get a little worried. Call me crazy, but I think that maybe some form of action should be taken if a child is still languishing after two or three days of languishing already.

“Hey!” I say to my husband.

“Maybe you should actually look this sick boy OVER!”

“Maybe get out your little bag of doctor tools and come over here and poke this kid in the gut a little”

“Stick that lighter thing in his ear!”

“Put a popsicle stick down his throat!”

“At least go through the motions!”

“Pretend to examine him!”

“Your wife can not really tell if it is a real exam or a fake exam – but either way it will make her feel better!”

“And isn’t it your job really just about making the moms feel better?”

But the Country Doctor never gets worried about our boys when they are sick.  Every once in a very rare, rare, rare while, he might call out a prescription for an antibiotic, but most of the time?  Nothing.

Nothing, nothing, nothing.

“It’s a virus” he says, “He’ll be better in a few days.”

“He has bronchitis, “he says, “It just takes a while to heal.”

“It’s growing pains” he insists, “He’s fine.”

And then he turns on his heel and leaves me and my sick baby alone… shaking…. feverish… frightened… and also soaked in bright orange cough syrup.

The CD’s bedside manner may be very poor – but so far – none of my children have perished from having a non-responsive dad for a doctor.

Or is that a non-responsive doctor for a dad?

Whichever!

So when the Country Doctor called me and said, “The vaccine is here – bring the boys to the clinic.”

I took them to the clinic.

It was almost as good as being diagnosed!