That’s my halloween decoration. The only one I have.
The real focus of the holiday is this little flower child:
Of course, the dog loves her too.
The flower is too small to eat candy, and also too small to be awake during the trick or treating hours.
The dog, however, is extra vigilant because the flower is small and helpless. When the doorbell rings, she will bark as loud as and long as she can. Therefore, the dog is in exile at the grandmother’s house. Flowers need their beauty sleep.
Went to the grocery store yesterday, and of course I brought my daughter with me. She’s been frustrated a lot this week, and cried a lot for indeterminate reasons.
I thought a trip to the store would give her other things to think about. It worked for a while, but then she started fussing. I had to hold her, and try to push the cart. But that wasn’t working so well, because the cart was too heavy.
I fell back on an old trick. When she started to cry, which usually included some sort of yell, I’d yell with her and try to match her tone. Whatever key she was crying in, I would chime in. I’d done it before and it seemed to interest her. She would stop crying, and just concentrate on yelling with me. It was kind of fun.
So instead of her crying in the store, we rolled around yelling in unison. I am not sure what the other customers thought, but it amused me.
Here is a demonstration of what I’m talking about:
..we can purely enjoy.
Enjoy!
Driving to the Long Beach Hilton yesterday for a convention, I saw a line of picketers in front. I was driving past to find the parking, but they seemed to be listless, and all the signs were professionally printed.
Hired picketers, I thought. I was early, so I wanted to go speak to them to see what they could tell me about their cause. Not much, I figured, if they were temp workers hired by the union to hold signs.
As sign holding gigs go, this one would be less taxing than the one where the guy has to hold the arrow ON SALE sign and dance while waving it around.
But by the time I got to the picketers, they had turned up the volume. Literally. There was a bullhorn in use, and some marching that could be interpreted as angry. Now I felt too intimidated to go up and talk to them.
Two people were standing in an alcove to take a better look so i joined them. The woman there said “What do those signs say? What are they protesting?”
My thoughts exactly. “Unite!” I answered her, reading the signs. “But that doesn’t tell us anything. What’s the deal?”
I looked over at the second person in our alcove, and saw he was a cop. He sighed, with his thumbs hooked into his belt.
“The Union wanted the workers at this Hilton to unionize. They had a vote and the workers didn’t want it. Hilton doesn’t care; a lot of their hotels are union already. But they don’t think the workers should be forced to unionize if they don’t want to. And we are caught in the middle.”
Didn’t expect that answer. “But…They are being pretty loud…Can they do that? I’m not feeling very peaceful. Perhaps they are disturbing my peace?”
Policeman said, “That’s why I’m here. Caught in the middle.”
Hmm. “Don’ t they have a red line? I mean, when I lived in an apartment, there was a limit to how high I could turn the volume up before I got in trouble.”
Apparently the city of Long Beach does not have red line legislation.
And not only October, but halfway THROUGH October.
I’m glad. This year will end, and I will be there to see it. It began rather tumultuously for me, but It’s fine now.
I’m making progress on a lot of things I want to accomplish. In fact, I’ve been living much more in the moment.
Which mean, I haven’t got a lot of brain cells to float on whimsy and deep thoughts. My blog has suffered.
As a matter of fact, I am wondering how this new me will accomplish writing. I still want to write, but the mental space is a lot harder to come by.
Maybe when I finish a project and put a bow on it, I can trust time enough to let go of the ticking seconds and slow down enough to float.
I’m close to being done with One project:
A day at the fair!
She was very excited to pet the sheep:
okay, technically that is a goat. Here she is reaching for a sheep:
She could have stayed there much longer, but she is getting too heavy to hold that way.
The sheep were gentle.
Or maybe I should say, they were disinterested in us.
I hope I can take her to another petting zoo soon.
By the end of the day, tho’, she was tired:
Me too.
We went to the fair today. I love the fair.
I was so looking forward to it, and I really wanted Veronica to meet the animals. But I was nervous; she’s never done anything this adventurous. She’s only 8 months old, and want to make sure I don’t ask more of her than she can do.
There was a missed nap we’d have to negotiate, not to mention the huge amount of overstimulation that is the essence of the fair.
Long story short, we went for 3 hours. She was great!
She pet a lot of critters, including an alligator:
I got to visit the pigs:
We also visited a dinosaur exhibit. It was pretty realistic for a county fair. Some kids were brought in and started screaming.
Veronica was cool with it:
In fact, she was pretty cool with almost everything. She had big huge eyes and wanted to see everything. She did want to be held pretty often, but she was cheerful.
She slept in the car on the way home, but when we got home, she had a lot of thoughts to think.
For her, the thinking had to do with jumping up and down and playing with a lot of toys. I could just see those new ideas marching across her little baby brain.
“There is such a thing as a goat. I must jump! There is such a thing as a sheep. I must kick!”
The world had gotten bigger for her. When she was seeing all the new stuff, she took it calmly with big eyes. But coming home, she cut loose and got all excited.
There will be more adventures.