I have a date with Harry this weekend.

Not that Harry.

THIS Harry:

I abandoned the Science Fiction/Fantasy genre a long time ago because the writing simply got bad. Plots were okay, but oh-my-god did everyone forget how to write dialogue? And, um, character development? The genre was simply suffering from Romance Novel Syndrome – it got popular enough that people would consume dreck just to fuel the addiction.

My exodus was also fueled by my discovery of mystery writing at a time when hands-down some of the most skillful writing was taking place (Deaver is the bomb). Add my love affair with Patrick O’Brian, who had the audacity to die of old age and leave me breathless and hanging in the middle of book 21 of the Master and Commander series. Patrick O’ Brian was one of the few serial authors who kept me interested past book three, but Butcher is proving to be another. He just keeps getting better and better with practice. And I hope he keeps practicing, because so very few men keep me breathless nowadays. Harry Dresden is one.

Jim Butcher’s Dresden books are at the fringe of mystery, but are firmly in the Fantasy arena, and he has enticed me back by introducing me to Harry. So this weekend I will be looking with sweet anticipation for that little brown box with Amazon smile to arrive at my doorstep.

Don’t keep me waiting.

This is a Public Service Announcement

After perusing the search terms by which many of you have arrived here,  I feel I should perform a bit of bloggy service, just for you.

“La vie dansante” translates to “the dancing life.”  It means a carefree way of living, a life of joy, “going with the flow.”

It is also a song by Jimmy Buffet.

And now I will direct you to the original blog entry by that title.

This entry just a lagniappe from the friendly staff here at My Level of Awareness.

(PS – lagniappe (LAN-yopp) – a little something extra)

Life has been busy here in our Level of Awareness.

Maybe a little TOO busy, and not in that conventional overworked kind of way.

If you are the parent of a toddler I want to share with you a hypothetical situation that may save you almost infinite amounts of grief later. Listen, think, and learn.

Let’s just say, hypothetically, that you are working on A Big Project. A Big Project that, hypothetically, involves your embroidery machine. If you had one. Picture if you will, all your crafty thingies spread out on a craft table in your living room or den or craft room or whatever, with your toddler playing happily at your feet, intermittently watching a video. A nice, wholesome, Disney video. It’s an idyllic scene of domestic bliss.

The one ant in the picnic is that the embroidery machine is a bitchy little piece of machinery, because they must hire cut-rate third-world programmers to write software that run the things. In exasperation, you realize that you must reload, for the fiftieth time, the guidance software for the machine. So you trudge to the upstairs room where such things are kept. And, as you are, in your imaginary situation, a computer and gadget geek, there are many, many of “such things” to sort through. Thankfully, your husband, who is, hypothetically, a bigger computer and gadget geek than you are, comes in from cutting the lawn to find exactly what you have been searching for.

As he hands you the software, he mentions incidentally (and hypothetically) that your son let the dogs out into the yard, and oh-by-the-way, where IS Harry?

…

There is that long, hypothetical moment where you look at each other in blank stupidity as it dawns on your that your clever little toddler has learned to unlock the outside door locks.

Which, hypothetically, results in wild, panicked, screaming searches of the house and the back yard, with your heart in your throat, and eighty million tableaus, none of which end happily, running through your brain.

At which point, in your scenerio, you cave into the fact that your toddler, who hates being in a room without you, has indeed simply wandered off, and you, the hypothetically WORST PARENT IN THE UNIVERSE, somehow missed that fact.

Oh. But it gets MUCH better than that.

MUCH.

Because, at the point where you are starting your full-scale dogs-and-helicopters assault on the neighborhood, two, count them, TWO, hypothetical police cruisers pull up in front of your house and ask you if you are looking for a lost child.

WHO IS IN THE BACK SEAT. GRINNING.

And who does NOT understand why his mommy, the WORST MOMMY IN THE UNIVERSE, is screaming hysterically, when he had a wonderful adventure with the nice policemen. The nice policemen who brought him home and told his, hypothetical parents, that their precious little bundle was picked up two blocks away, on a street that is notoriously known for speeding cars, and in a few minutes was about to be bundled off to the DHS. The nice policemen who never thought to ASK him where he lived, which he was perfectly capable of telling them – as he later demonstrated with 100% accuracy over fifty times in the next two days. Hypothetically, anyway.

A scene of domestic bliss gone horribly, horribly wrong.

I’m not saying this happened.

But it could.

So you might want to think about it.

 

Our little postcard to you.

And like all good postcards, it arrives AFTER we return.

To my little man, almost three,

I know I will be saying this next year, and the next, but every night when I go to bed I think you are at the sweetest, most amazing stage of your life.

And every morning I wake up to something new and wonderful.

How lonely my life must have been before you came along with your morning conversations.  How boring without the make-believe of your world, where I am the princess to your prince, the Elmo to your Baby David, the Tasha to your Pablo.  Your life is a wonderland of imagination that I can only half-remember from my own childhood.  It swirls in cartoon color around us every morning as we eat our breakfast and brush our teeth.

How jaded I was before you showed me the renewed pleasure of being simply nice.  Of sharing spontaneously and joyously. How sad I would be without you to run through the house, melting chocolate grasped in each warm fist, untouched until you find me to share the sweet treasure.  “Here Mommy, this is for you..” always precedes the greatest gifts I have ever received; gifts straight from an open, honest heart, uncomplicated and pure.

How much of  life must have passed by me unnoticed before your insistence at the world’s wonders slowed me down to crouch to see a beetle’s crawl,  trace the path of a newly falling leaf, watch gentle breathing of a spiderweb in the window.  And those moments where you have grasped my face in both hands, looked in my eyes and just broke out in a smile of joy from ear to ear have enlarged my heart to bursting.  Is that what real joy is all about? I had forgotten.

With your wide brush of childhood you have drenched my days in light and song.

I love you, my son.

And I love the life you have given me.

We took my son to a baby shower this weekend. My sister-in-law is having her first child in June, so my mother-in-law gathered the umpteen-cousins-to-the-nth-degree-whose-attendance-is-necessary for all social rites of passage, and we ate lots of finger sandwiches, punch, and cake and shared newborn horror stories.

I took pictures from the corner of the room and avoided conversation.

That’s what I am best at.

Harry ran around and charmed the hairpins out of little blue-haired old ladies.

That’s what he is best at.

As everyone filed out at shower’s-end, Harry was showered with compliments.

“He’s such a sweet boy!”

“What a well-behaved little man!”

As I fielded the wave of Harry commentary, I found myself dropping into an old engrained habit.

“He is most of the time, but OH, when he’s not…”

“Right NOW he’s well behaved…”

“You should have seen him last night…”

Some time in my youth, I learned that it was not okay to be proud of yourself. I have learned to downplay accomplishments in the face of praise. I learned to minimize.

And suddenly it dawned on me where.  Because I was already doing it to my son.

Why can I not just say “Thank you. I am proud of him. He is a good boy.”

My son is not the next Albert Einstein. He isn’t Miss Manners perfect and he doesn’t pick up his pinky finger when he sips his milk.

But he IS a good kid.

He is a well-adjusted, well-socialized child.

He is sweet and sharing and plays well with others.

I don’t want him to have an overinflated view of his own accomplishments.

But I never, ever, EVER want him to feel that he cannot feel justifiably proud of what he can do.

So…

Thank you. He is a good boy. We are proud of him.

I am about to do a rare thing on this blog:

Make a recommendation that ISN’T technology related.

I am not a completely uncultured geek.

I am also not a white wine drinker.  Specifically, I do not like chardonnay. 

But while we were in Napa Valley, we toured the St. Supéry winery and I bought a bottle of their 2007 Sauvignon Blanc and a bottle of their 2005 Cabernet Sauvignon.  The Cabernet was excellent.  Very silky and smooth, with a hint of vanilla and that perfect velvety mouth-feel you expect from a good red wine.  It was what I expected for its price class (about $30-35).

But the 2007 Sauvignon Blanc. Was. Heavenly.

It completely changed my opinion of white wines.  It was light and crisp and dry without being harsh.  It was fantastic.  And I have independent confirmation – the friends I shared it with concurred that it was a fine bottle of wine.

It’s not pricey, but not cheap either.  Expect to pay about $20-23 if you can find it. 

They don’t ship to AR right now, so I am just sh**-out-of-luck until I travel somewhere with saner liquor laws.  I will just have to learn to live with my new-found craving. 

If you like whites – you will LOVE this wine.

If you like reds – try it anyway.  You won’t be disappointed.  I still don’t think I am ready to hop the white wine bandwagon, but THIS white was just lovely.

The note I am about to post on the office refrigerator:

If your financial situation is dire enough that you feel compelled to eat my food, please see me for a raise.

~The Director

I am on a diet.  Come between me and my paltry portions at your own risk.

My son’s daycare is two blocks from where I work.

This means that I can indulge my overprotective fantasies without the usual bounds of work requirements.  For instance, when the tornado sirens start going off at 11am, I can (stupidly) run to his daycare to be with him.

Practically, I am not sure what exactly the anticipated benefit was supposed to be from this act of self-sacrifice.  I guess if we were going to get sucked up to Oz, at least were were going together.

The net result was somewhat short of Oz.  I am not quite the kind of person cut out to sit on exactly 25 square feet of interior bathroom floor with one other adult and twelve children under the age of four – all of whom decide they need to use the potty during the half hour that the sirens were blaring.

Did I mention that I am the older parent of ONE child? 

After the sirens stopped blaring, I made the (also overindulgently overprotective) decision to take him back to my office with me, since we are anticipating waves of severe thunderstorms coming through for the remainder of the day.  Again, I supposed this was an attempt to keep us together on that Oz trip.

Net result?

My office IS Oz.  I get to work surrounded by a pile of toy cars, crayons and stuffed animals, with a leaking juice box and the scattered remains of a granola bar on my conference table.  My lovely coworker, Trixie, got to have her office invaded by a butterfly-chasing toddler during an hour and a half meeting.  This meant she was subjected to the added indignity of a “Dirty Harry” without a clean pullup in sight and a popcorn explosion on her office carpet that will stand as a test to our new cleaning company.

 Sheer mayhem, and not a tornado in sight.

 Toto, I don’t think we are in (ar)Kansas anymore.

More on our vacation later.  The worst thing about it was that it was far, far too short. And the return trip was unexpectedly too long.

At least it gave me the opportunity to finish The Thirteenth Tale.

Oh.  My.  This is old-fashioned story telling at its finest.  This is a modern version of gothic romance – and by romance I don’t mean love-story.

If you love books, you aren’t going to want to miss this.