2008 parto tres.

Yes I am a member of the Spanish speaking population who wing it by tossing the random "O" on the end of words I don't know.

Like this...Si, Yo amo membero de la espanol populationo...

You get the general idea. Really I think I should move to a place where people don't speak English. It would be very much less embarrassing. Except when I wipe out. I was in Prague, which is called Praha in whatever language they speak in the Czech Republic, the scene of a classic Julie wipe out. And where they don't speak alot of English, which was great, because we could talk without fear that people would overhear and call Child Protective Services.

Unfortunately falling flat on your face is one of those universal language things...

We were at the Karlstein Castle, outside Prague, at the top of a big steep hill. Because that way there was comic relief when invaders fell down that big steep hill. Or else it was some really forward thinking people who knew I would someday show up and provide the entertainment for an entire terrace of Europeans having lunch.

We had toured the castle, which was completely awesome, by the way, and as long as they installed central heating, hot and cold running water and internet access, I would be happy to move right in. I am so a Gothic girl.

We were walking back down the steep steep hill, on our way to a traditional Czech lunch (which was soup and some sort of meat and potatoes and very delicious, even through my haze of humiliation...). I had neglected to notice that there was a rounded gutter running along the edge of the road. Bad plan.

Because I stepped into that gutter, completely unaware that the gutter was there. Which means the ground was a good four inches further away than I was expecting. Since I was facing downhill, steep downhill, I went down hard. Face first. I cannot emphasize enough that it was a steep hill, and when I fell, I fell downhill. Which means I ended up on my hands and knees, and my butt was higher than my head. Lovely.

The children were immediately concerned, because I happened to be carrying the bag with their new pewter dragons in it, and I could have damaged their dragons. (They call me mean. I think it's a totally two way mean street happenin' at our house. They made me mean. I was totally sweet and loving and non-sarcastic pre-kidlets. Really. It's true. Ask anyone, except, well, maybe Mark. Ask any complete stranger that met me on the street, briefly, pre-kidlet. They would totally tell you I was not mean in the teeny tiny slightest bit.)

I stood up, looked up, and noticed there was a very full terrace of Europeans having lunch right there. Twenty feet away from where I had just eaten pavement.

So I took a bow, and then went on around a curve to dig around and find bandaids, since I had scraped the hell outta both hands.

This didn't happen this year. It's not at all part of 2008. It is completely beside the point, but what the hay. It's not like there are blogging rules, right? And even if there were blogging rules, I think we all know I suck at following arbitrary rules and have a tendency to go wildly off topic at the slightest provocation.

Really, I had no intention of telling you all about my greatest moments when I started...

Back to March 2008.

Tess was in a school play. She got to be in a big fight scene. She loved it.
Tess is the one smacking heads together.

My son's girlfriend is great. We adore Jessica. Jessica is very cute. Jessica is awesome and fun. Jessica ends up in insanely bad photographs regularly. I think it is because she is high energy and funny and very expressive, and that just doesn't always come across well in still photos.

But sometimes it's pretty humorous.

Sometimes, it's kinda scary. I took one photo, a very blurry photo that looked nothing like her, but instead looked like something out of a horror movie. The kids made me delete it.

(I did get permission, through Zach, to post these slightly unflattering photos of Jess. Hi, Jess!)

(Jessica got an award for being a super genius and doing really extra great on standardized testing.)

But don't worry, Jessica. I have lots of photos of Zachary looking less than completely handsome..

Tess's school in Tucson did a talent show at the end of each quarter. It was fun. It was charming.

I am lying. It was excruciating. Six year olds who had had twenty seven minutes of piano lessons playing "hot cross buns" and screechy violins and "interesting" five minute plays. Dancing and singing.

Two hours of torture. Torture inflicted by wonderful cute adorable children, but torture nonetheless. Great for the kids, great for them to have experience in being in front of an audience. But torturous. Like being waterboarded by Muppets.

C'mon. Tess is my third kid. I have so put in my time in recitals and school plays and band concerts and Christmas pageants.

So Tess was playing some music by Beethoven with a couple friends, on recorder. They were really good. It was enjoyable and maybe even pleasant.

It lasted EIGHTEEN SECONDS. That's right -- two hours of torture, for EIGHTEEN SECONDS of my kid playing a song on recorder that I have heard her play approximately 9.2 million times. A song I have heard her play so much that I bought her three recorder music books for Christmas. Pure self-defense.


Thor made that yellow elephant/frog hybrid in art class.

Thor and Zach in the hot hot desert sun.

my secret shame: my Mom throws like a girl.


This is my pal Jack. Jack was on the high school art class trip to Italy. He gives me this look a lot. Admit it. You are not surprised. ( I decided that our trip to Italy deserves its own recap post. It was too awesome to cram into a post with all this other stuff.)

So that's March 2008. Zachary turned 18, Abe I think finally started to heal, Mark was still in Anchorage without us, and it was hot. It may also be the month the Suburban died, temporarily, and the dryer died, not so temporarily. I don't know for sure. I remember crap happened, but I didn't feel the need to take notes. I would much rather sit through Muppet waterboarding and attempt to take the worst portraits ever.

2008 part two.

In February I drove to San Diego for a reunion with my sister and girl cousins. Had an awesome time.

Zachary finished his Eagle Scout project and had the Scoutmaster conference or whatever you call it and became an Eagle Boy Scout.

And as usual, we took photos of stuff we did and the desert. Mojo was the one to tangle with a cholla this month.

February.

the elevator ceiling at the hotel in San Diego

pelicans. I love pelicans. I don't know why.

Zach talking to his dad right after he knew he made Eagle.

cool train, great photo, but it made Thor late to school.

playing wit the macro

the entire desert is like this. pointy and mean and unfriendly and hostile and sharp. this is the mequite version of "stay the hell away from me."

such noble suffering. look at that face.

I have two favorites this time...Mojo, for all he can look all noble and regal and majestic, is really an enormous goof. the goofiest dog ever.

I really really like pelicans. they are so prehistoric, you know?

(I hope all these photos don't mean endless downloading time for anyone, or if they do they are worth it!)

2008. In Photos. Part One.

I was going to do one photo a month.

Ha.

You know me. I take hundreds of photos a month. Hundreds. Thousands, if I happen to be in Italy.

So pick one photo for each month? Not possible.

January, do I pick the fantastic desert shots? Tess's school winning "All Small and Mighty's Greenest Grade School in America?" Abe's second or third surgery? My favorite Day of the Dead shoes? Or my new glasses?

Right. I pick them all. Here's my January. In no particular order, except my personal favorite is the last and biggest one....

January, 2008


my shoes

Poor Abe. Four surgeries.

Civano Community School, Tucson, Arizona

new glasses!

driving at night

never ever ever kick a cholla. ever.

the Arizona desert. 107 degrees suck, but the desert is gorgeous. in a dusty dry desiccated way.

Oops.

Mark was wrapping up a package of hiking socks for Zachary, and was chatting with me while doing it. Which was his first mistake, apparently. He handed me the tag he had written out, with a disgusted look on his face. The tag said "to Zach from socks". He was either not paying attention to what he was doing, or he didn't want Zach to get too excited about a package of socks. Warning him maybe, just some socks, no money, no video games, nothing to see here.

On the 23rd, Zach and Thor and I went to Costco to buy Mark an acoustic guitar for Christmas. Mark decided he wanted one, and Costco had a package with guitar, lessons DVD, gig bag, stand, strap for not big big bucks.

Let me jump back here for a second...this Christmas was not a successful one for surprising Mark. I bought several of his gifts when he was there, because we shopped together rather too much. Actually there was at least one thing -- snow shoe poles, adjustable fancy shmancy snow shoe poles (like ski poles, pretty much) -- that he bought and handed to me to give to him for Christmas.

So I was kinda jazzed at the idea that he wouldn't know he was getting a guitar until he opened it. Until we walked into the house when we got home from Costco, Zachary walked up to Mark and said "we have your guitar." Then he clamped his hands over his mouth and had the most shocked and appalled look on his face. I laughed so hard I collapsed against Mark. Zach was devastated. He had meant to say "we have your Christmas present, so you have to get lost so we can wrap it." But he shortcut that accidentally to "we have your guitar."



Turns out that Mark had assumed that we were buying him a guitar at Costco. I should have told him we were going to Best Buy or Target or JoAnn Fabrics.

Poor Zachary has inherited a tendency to blurt, coupled with a manic mind that is racing ahead to the next eight things we have to do. My Mom almost killed my dog once, because of that tendency...

She tied poor Theo to the garage door and then went around the corner of the garage (I know I just told this story to somebody on another blog, sorry if I just told it here too...) and into the garage through the side door. Then she opened the garage door. Yup. The one my dog was tied to, the one she had just tied the dog to thirty seconds before opening it. She turned around to see poor Theo dangling from the door. Lucky for Theo he wasn't a big fat dog, so she could get him down pretty easily.

But it just goes to show, Zach has zero hope of avoiding future "we have your guitar" type incidents. Ze. Ro.

To change the subject completely...

Is it just me, or did my neighbors make a little snowman that looks rather too much like a penis?


Yeah. I thought so. It is just me. But in my defense, Mark has been gone a lot lately...

Ship Creek.

Ship Creek is near our house. I have been wanting to take photographs of it this winter. It froze over and then the ice broke up again, which looked really cool. Thick chunks of ice on top of ice -- chunks of ice that are a foot thick. Didn't make it to take those photos. On Christmas Day, after sledding, we drove past the bridge over Ship Creek and on into Cottonwood Park. The Creek runs along the park, but it is frozen over where the parking is, and plus the kids saw the big wooden fort playground, covered with untouched snow. So the photos that day were not the creek, but instead I photographed the kids and Mark playing in the snow -- those photos were in my Weekly Winners.

So a couple days ago, we were coming home, I had my camera, we were going over Ship Creek, we had a plan to park along the road so I could hop out and take a couple of photos...

Except that there was a snowplow ahead of us and one behind us, so there was no chance to stop along the road. And we had had a bunch of snow, so the road to the park was a no-go. It hadn't been plowed and I was not wearing my snow boots, so hiking through drifts was out.

I said "roll down the window" as I prepared to take a couple photos as we drove slowly over the bridge (the one silver lining in being sandwiched between snowplows, being able to go 10 miles an hour) . Mark rolled his window down. I guess driving behind a snowplow at almost dusk on a snow covered road with our three kids in the back seat is more important than me getting a decent photograph. Men.

So these are my placeholder photos, until I manage to get to Ship Creek to take photos I actually frame and format and think about, instead of sticking the camera out the window as we roll by...I am happy with these photos but running water! I love running water and I love taking photos of running water! I lived in the desert where the only running water came out of a tap, so running water!

In other news, the sun is now so low in the sky it is blocked by the two story house south of us. And it is ten below. A high today of zero, if we are really lucky.

And yes, Lou, I still love it. The air is crisp and cold and fresh, the snow is white and fluffy, and the dogs like to sleep on my feet.

And oh, yeah...the snow on the branches? It's always there. We have had a very calm windless winter, so it doesn't blow off, and the sun is so low in the sky it doesn't stand a chance of melting anything, and it's been well below freezing for months, so no melting there either.

It is colder than normal. Usual for this time of year in Anchorage is 20-ish...I seem to attract weather extremes. I cannot tell you how many times I have been places on record hot and record cold days. It's a curse, bad karma, something. Apparently I was mildly evil in a previous life.