Monday, February 8, 2010 at 10:38AM We all do, and things have been busy. So I don’t have a big post or an update post. I do have my first DIY project post up over here, though, with pics.
ephemera Tuesday, February 2, 2010 at 10:16PM And with apologies to Achebe.
With luck, bait, and caulk guns, we turned back the invaders. They entered the kitchen from behind the shelves in the pantry, an invisible opening if you merely empty the cabinet. Patrick yanked out the plywood shelves to find the hole and several very large ants (drones or a queen, p’raps). We think the colony was re-locating and not splitting, and we still think they were pavement ants. Multiple colonies? La la la I CAN’T HEAR YOUUUUUUU.
So everything is sealed shut in there and we’re waiting for the next attack with crossed fingers.
The dog tore a huge hole in the front yard this afternoon. Tomorrow’s playgroup visit is cancelled in favor of playing “garden”. On the bright side, the clover needs pulling.
Saturday, January 23, 2010 at 9:12AM This was supposed to be a picture-infested post on how Seamus has discovered painting and Jackson Pollock all at once, but I’m beset with ants, and until late last night, a complately backed up kitchen sink and disposal. Fortunately they’re pavement ants, which, while a right pain in the ass, are better controlled than odorous house ants, which can create massive multi-queen colonies. Patrick’s in Southern California at a wedding, so I’m limited in my current pest-control options, since it all has to be done without child care. I think we’ll clean up the back yard and go up to the hardware store for diatomaceous earth, since that’s fairly safe and will let me atone for forcing the kitchen pipes open with eighty ounces of Liquid Plumr gel in a time of declining fish stocks and dying otters.
The house we live in was built in the middle of the last century as part of the massive development of our neighborhood. The sand dunes braced by Golden Gate Park and Lake Merced were split between two developers who brought a hodgepode of external details to their stucco-jacketed junior-fives: Morocccan keyholes mixed with Spanish tile, plaster friezes, and the occasional turret.
View of our nabe from the reservoir, eleven blocks from our place, Novemeber 24, 1945. Photo from SFPL.The houses from this era have wiggled and settled into the sand, dripped wet with the fog that covers the skies eight months a year. It’s not unusual to see houses defaced to the studs during the dryer seasons as contractors repair water damage. The western edge of the city is home to a wide variety of birds, bugs and beasts, many of which interact with this crumbling shelter stock in ways which irk the human inhabitants. Our first year of renting we thought we had a broken hood fan. Patrick opened it up to look for part numbers and a mummified baby bird tumbled to the stove. Our downstairs neighbor revealed that a roof rat used the ivy covering part of the back fence to travel between the adjacent yard and ours. And the ants return each winter with the rains, finding new entry points. It’s very bad this year.
We’re lucky that we rent. Despite five years here, we can pack up and go if we wish. We can whittle down our accumulated trash and offer it up as another’s treasure, whittle down our choice of cities and neighborhoods, and go fishing among the rental ads or MLS listings. Since we have chosen not to go vagabonding about the country, the latter appeals to me. I’m not looking to play the real estate game, I just want a space that’s ours, with a yard that will let me grow vegetables and raise some chickens. I want to paint walls and kick the pets outside a bit more. I want to host playdates where the kids pull up some veggies for their snack, or plant seedlings in milk cartons to take home. I want my son to have his own room with a door and enough room along a wall for a twin bed.
Till then, I keep practicing my homemaking and caretaking efforts here in our post-war starter, and hope to keep up. I worry that I’m failing, and that at the very least, we will not be getting back out deposit.
Friday, January 22, 2010 at 4:05PM Happy Blog for Choice Day, everyone. I’m soloing today and tomorrow as Patrick is at a wedding and my computer time is short. Rather than dredge up my own polemical post about choice, I’ll point to Bitch PhD’s very thoughtful post. Go read it, it’s excellent. And instead of digging through my own dross to find a brilliant paragraph, I’ll simply say that without having the choices I’ve had, the lovely little boy who challenges and delights me would not be playing guitar in the living room, and I would not be posting here today. Such, my dears, is the role of choice in history.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 12:55PM Seamus and I started a shorties and parents class at Acroports last week. I figure he’s two, it’s time for some good old fashioned conforming into one of tomorrow’s achievers group activities. I want him to learn to take turns and sit in a circle and and not horn in on another kid’s activity, and I’m pretty damn sure now that M, his daycare provider, has opened her new preschool and left the daycare in the hands of English language-learning relatives that there is no preschool structure going on over there anymore. Which bums me the fuck out, but unless we stay in the neighborhood past this summer, I am not ready to change the situation. Thus beginneth the enrichment activities. I have become one of “those parents”. If I start getting indignant about someone telling my kid to not be an asshole when he is clearly acting like one, I’d like one of you to take me out behind the chemical sheds (hopefully, whoever it is will get that reference).
Acrosports is fantastic. The classes are in one of the old gymnasiums belonging to Polytechnic High. The school closed when my high school opened in 1972, and most of the campus was later demolished for townhouses. the two gyms remain: Acrosports in one, a circus school in the other. I think the wee lunatic classes are held in the old locker room, which is outfitted now with a giant trampoline, some bars and beams for their size, and plenty of crash pads and mats. The teachers don’t give me any grief about Seamus’ lack of immediate compliance; they all say that he’ll slowly start to follow along with the other kids.
The parents are pretty friendly. This is huge for me, as I spent the first year of his life looking for a place to go after we aged out of the new parents’ group at Kaiser and running into um, people I wasn’t enjoying spending money to be around. Some of you may remember the little problem I had last year with my neighborhood playgroup. I never went back after that incident. I tried, I’d get within a block and just veer for the playground instead. Of course, it may be obvious that I’m trying to get him to play well and be a part of the class rather than adjacent to it, what with the chasing and the somewhat burnt-out attempts at re-directing. (Seamus doesn’t really re-direct. Not through my negligence in trying, he simply refuses about ninety-seven percent of the time.)
He appears to be having a good time, enough that I fantasize about trying to stay in the city and move into the Haight where I grew up, and eventually enrolling him in Parkour classes so we don’t have to sweat school sports, and watching him graduate from Lowell or Wallenburg before sending him off to Deep Springs. Not that I have an active imagination or anything (he also knits complex geometric lace and plays the fiddle). Since a gigantic pile of additional income isn’t raining down on us anytime soon, I’ll re-up these classes if it’s a sustained hit, and then knit next to him while he plays at home in the afternoons.
