Acorn to my mother, gazing after an adult walking with her sons:
“Oh, look at Miss Sonia. She’s so lucky. She has three boys. She’s lucky to have three boys. Mommy just has one boy: me.”
So this morning, I was at work at my new job. (Discount retailer. Toy department. Part time. Just for the holidays.) La-la-la, straightening the shelves, taking the frozen pizzas someone left on a shelf to the grocery department’s ruined items section, disposing of the can of silly string someone sprayed [...]
A camera couldn’t have captured the image: a small person, huddled just inside the door of a dim bedroom under a red flannel sheet. Sound asleep.
“Mommy?” he says when he wakes. Then his face crumples as he remembers. “Mommy, it was too late.”
I know what this means: time to clean the [...]
I chose to vote early specifically so that Acorn could go with me: I thought it would be a good chance to talk with him about how our government works. “We’re going to go vote for who we want to run our government,” I told him.
“Who will win?” he asked.
“We don’t know who will [...]
Autumn.
I don’t get to touch it much these days. I didn’t even get to stop and breathe in the colours last week, when the foliage was at its glowing peak; and now it’s fading, every shade melting to brown.
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland [...]
Where I am sitting: The bed. My desk is small, and thus gets cluttered easily. Also, the chair is filled with wool.
What is around me: Pillows and blankets, obviously. The laptop, ditto. Camera. Camera memory cards newly denuded of data. Card reader.
Books. Books from various continuing education classes, [...]
One of Acorn’s favourite sights around town.
Daily work plus commute: 14 hours
Nightly sleep: 7 hours
Basic personal hygiene: 1 hour
Household maintenance (meals, cleaning, pet care, laundry): 1.5-2 hours
Very small margin of error, that. Good thing Acorn’s perfectly willing to shoehorn in some quality time, forcing me to multitask time spent with him while doing everything but the first item on that [...]
Last night, I rang in the new year with one of my preferred ways to celebrate the occasion: pretending to be an imaginary person, and rolling dice to determine how the imaginary person I’m pretending to be interacts with the imaginary persons populating the rest of the room. Loads of fun.
Eventually, I came [...]
Poke. Poke.
“Acorn, quit poking the cat with your baton.”
“I not poking her. I teaching her. I helping her learn.”
“Oh, really? What are you teaching the cat?”
There passes a long moment filled with frantically rolled eyes, a twisted mouth, and several “um”s. At last, he comes up with an answer he [...]