Moor at home

My blog posts tend to be anchored on excursions in which we have pulled anchor from our home port.     Finding a nice pocket of wind and gale of time in which to discover what the world has to offer is sublime bordering on addictive.  I often neglect those thousands of minutes of doldrum days when there is no wind to lend to our wandering.  The word 'routine' is often given a bad rap for being a pirate of creativity, a plunderer of pleasure.  On the contrary, this routine day to day existence is the hull of our family, and what we choose to do with this time is our manifesto of craftsmanship, the defining moments when we are choosing our shape and refining those parts of ourselves that we will offer to the world.    Suggesting that routine sounds like rooting, and as fervently as I love blowing where the wind blows me, I know that we must root ourselves in the routine.   

       There are two things necessary to Emmy's happy existence.  Books and Food.  In that order.  A book-kaneer demanding Emmy to give up her book would elicit the same response as a buccaneer demanding she walk the plank.  

Ansel is still at the age when his eating endeavors are combat attacks, almost exclusively championed by the morsels who somehow manage to resist actually being ingested by smearing themselves up his nose, in the crooks of his fingers, under his eyebrows, and in his hair.  Washing the carnage from his snack-off often requires full baths.  

Ansel is also at the age where tubs are still an adventure at high seas, teaming with hungry sharks, fierce dinosaurs, and other duckivores who prey on various rubber underducks to gain their unjust deserts.   Some days he insists on his water looking more "real".  I am not patient enough to be stagnant long enough to refute  his explanation of why adding an artificial color to something will make it "more real."  I don't know why my timbers continue to be shivered when he disembarks from the tub grubbier than when he took his maiden plunge.

This is the post-it note treasure of a sequencing game that Ansel invents, only after I wisely ignore his 500 or more exclamations of boredom.  Sometimes kids need to be ignored in order for them to rescue their creativity from the locker of Davy Jones.   

Corey never stops shaking his booty.....creating some booty panels to adorn our walls.  

Emmy started playing the trumpet this summer.....and yo ho! ho! and a bottle of ear plugs....we all sighed with relief when she switched to the clarinet.   She is really quite good at playing by ear.  

To soften the blow of the careening trauma of Middle School,  we offered not just one, but two, furry and cuddly kittens to Savanna.    Our way of apologizing for feeding her to those awful juvenile fishes day after day is to at least offer her a soft place to land after she has been chewed up and spit out.  I have fathoms of feelings on this particular subject and will bury them for now.

I always thought it was "land lover."  Apparently, it is landlubber.   Anyway, I am a bike lubber.  

 Corey didn't make it to Bumbershoot with me this year and missed the experience of listening to Hutch Harris of "The Thermals" have a uniquely intense relationship with the last syllable of each of his sentences.  A few weeks later, Hutch came to Spokane and we were able to witness this relationship in a more personal and voyeuristic atmosphere.    I am infatuated with the way that he shing (sing +shout) the word "SICK".

When we leave town, we tend to miss local opportunites to manage and clean our own corners of the world.    This year we attended the annual Spokane River Clean-up.  I really didn't care about cleaning the river.  I just wanted to meet Recycle Man.  My dreams came true.  The memories of getting my picture taken with Recycle-Man should fuel my giddiness for the next year.   And if I was confident enough to not feel the need of alerting my reader to my sarcasm, I would probably not be the type of person who needed validation by meeting superheroes face to face.  

My worthy shipmates and I uncovered vast treasures of garbage.