Ulric’s Neighborhood

the syllabus of life

typewriter
10 hours ago
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Sorry about last night. I actually did get up, believe it or not, and worked on that child's speech until 4 a.m. Which is crazy, of course. And wrong. I do realize this. But it was only a draft. She'll have to write the final draft herself.

Mostly I was reading stuff and jotting down notes. Research is not her strong suit. I need to teach them how to do it. There are literally hundreds of important things I have yet to teach my children. It's frustrating because if I manage to scrape together the time to do it, inevitably they are not interested. Or they say they are interested, except there's that thing at the place, and it's starting in fifteen minutes, so can we do it later?

Sometimes I think about making a kind of syllabus that I can refer to when I want to teach them something. The way we've been doing it is too haphazard. Like I'll spend ten minutes explaining something absurdly unimportant, such as the vogue (in my youth) for paper-bag pants, when that time could be better spent providing moral instruction and teaching library skills.

Shirl is coming tomorrow; I have to work in the morning, and my house still looks as if it could be condemned. Unless it can learn to clean itself in the next eighteen hours, it is likely to stay that way.

Tired

typewriter
Yesterday
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Tired

It is tired. I am. You? I promised to proofreader the speech but I am deliriousing, about to fall asleep in my bra, which makes me feel sort of ... institutionalized. Free the boobs! Arm the torpedoes! Spare the rod and spoil the child!

Sent from my iPhone

Tired

It is tired. I am. You? I promised to proofreader the speech but I am deliriousing, about to fall asleep in my bra, which makes me feel sort of ... institutionalized. Free the boobs! Arm the torpedoes! Spare the rod and spoil the child!

Sent from my iPhone

overscheduled

typewriter
2 days ago
2 comments

Wanted to post yesterday to keep up with my pledge, but Dingle was on the computer until after I went to bed, trying to do her English class "DEJs," or double-entry journals, on To Kill a Mockingbird. She said she was supposed to turn them in for chapters eleven through twenty-two or -three. I asked her how many she'd gotten done, and she said, "I'm finishing eleven now." I doubt she made it to chapter twelve.

We are having a hard time keeping up with our own lives these days, to be honest. Felony's soccer schedule is grueling, for one. I pushed the girls to take this Academic Decathlon class, along with their primary elective (French), and to do that, they have to be on the "early bird" schedule. That means they have to be in their first class at 7 a.m. I'm at work from 5 to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday, and their father doesn't cook, which means they're typically eating fast food and often not until 8:30 or 9 o'clock at night. Especially on soccer nights, when Felony's practice doesn't end until 8:30. The other two kids finish up their soccer seasons this weekend, which is a relief, but Felony's team is a traveling team and they will continue practicing twice a week for the Association Cup, which I believe happens in January.

I have trouble falling asleep by 11 when I'm getting home at 9:30 or 10 o'clock at night. As often as not, I drift off around 1 a.m. But then I have to get up to take one or more of the kids to school. Duff regularly takes the girls, but not always. It's hardest when I have to take them all to school, because Jinx doesn't have to be to school until 8:25. So I can't really go back to sleep in between. If I am going to get more sleep--and I often do, because otherwise, I'm a mushbrain at work--I fall back to sleep around 9 or 9:30 a.m. Which means I'm waking up between 10:30 and 11:30 a.m., struggling to get something done before I have to pick up the kids at 3 p.m., then leave town by 4:15 or so to get to work by 5 p.m. I feel guilty about trying to write when there is so much other work to be done. Especially housework.

I'm not trying to complain so much as explain why I get so little accomplished. Nor does it help that I'm lazy anyway.

Meanwhile, my best friend from high school is coming to visit this weekend. I haven't seen her for a few years. She knows me well enough to know I'm a slob, but the house is a real disaster area right now. Not sure how or if I'll be able to get it straightened out before she gets here. I wouldn't care all that much if it was only her, but she's bringing our other good friend's daughter with her, and I hate to frighten the poor thing.

So that's my update for today. It's time to go pick up the kids now. Tomorrow I'm off; maybe I'll find the energy to make a difference around here. Maybe I won't--but at least I posted.

Three for three

typewriter
3 days ago
1 comment

Today--ok, yesterday--was my birthday, and for some reason exhausting, which is why I am lying in bed, typing into my phone with one thumb. Just because I don't want to ruin my streak.

Look at me, I'm three for three!

to tat or not to tat; I tot I taw a puddytat.

I signed up for NaNoWriMo and one of my Facebook friends said she is doing NaBloPoMo (I had to giggle at this mouthful, though of course NaNoWriMo must have seemed just as bad the first few times I encountered it) instead. While it's true I have never made it to 50,000 words--hell, I've never even come close, haven't even tried, really--I don't think it would be terribly difficult to post to my blog every day for a month. I mean, gee whiz, how hard could it be? So I thought, what the hell, I can do that. Which is why I scuttled over here and am writing this twelve minutes before midnight on the first day of November. My biggest obstacle won't be fodder, it'll be my own incompetent memory. Maybe I can spend my last eleven minutes brainstorming strategies that will help me remember to come here every day. You know, like the Bounty Hunter on KOL. Maybe I should get a tattoo. I could never think of anything to have tattooed on myself before, but some sort of exhortation to write, not just in a blog for a month but overall, indefinitely, why, that might be just the thing.

Paris

typewriter
Oct 21, 2009
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I've been to France, but I've never been to Paris. I have to go to Paris before I die.

But that's not all. I want to live in France. For a couple of years. Maybe five years. There must be a way I can do this. If I am diligent, and cheap, and save everything. First I have to pay off everything, then save everything after that. Yeah.

this peach is ripe

The truth is, I have everything I need to write. I have time, in the form of two weeks' vacation (almost), I have new headphones, with which to drown out the rest of the universe, and I have the bathroom floor, which will accommodate me should I fail to find a more suitable space. I have notebooks and pens to use when a computer is unavailable. I have ideas. I even have access to an air-conditioned public library, just a few blocks from my home, with a special soundproofed room full of individual study carrels and electrical outlets. When my vacation is over, my work won't really take that much out of me, as long as I don't stay up too late at night (as I am doing right now). I mean, come on! It doesn't get much better than this, so stop dithering and start DOing. This peach is ripe. You are ready to do this. So do it.

vigilante

typewriter
Jun 14, 2009
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It's time to get back on the bus. I go back to work tomorrow, but only for an hour and a half a day. Instead of looking at it as a black hole in the middle of my sunny summer days, I've decided to re-imagine it as an incentive to keep a sensible schedule. In other words, I can't stay up all night if I've got to get up and go to work. Even if it is only for an hour and a half. Especially if it is only an hour and a half! And then because I am yoked to this strange schedule, I plan to exploit the trace element of discipline involved to build a writing schedule around it. I have also told the kids that I when I get back home, around 12:30, I want to have two hours of electronics-free living. From 12:30 to 2:30, we can eat lunch, read, clean, exercise, study, or work on projects. What we cannot do is sit on the computer, growing ever larger asses, talk on the phone, play video games on the phone, send text messages, play on Jinx's new XBOX (that he bought himself with his own savings), or anything else of that nature, with the possible exception of digital photography. (What do you think? Should shooting pictures or videos with an electronic camera be an exception to my no-electronics edict?) I will write during that time on paper, as the ancients did, avoiding the temptations of the machine.

So that's my plan. I still expect to be doing stuff on the computer outside the luddite frame, of course, including my self-publishing project, which I hope to finish and hold in my hands by the end of the summer. But summer is a fleeting thing, as you know, so I've got to be vigilant.