MOMMENTARY |
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Monday, June 23, 2003 ( 3:31 PM ) Elinor Dashwood A bunny lives in our back yard, very likely one of a brood of four that was reared under our big rhododendron this spring. It hops around in the shade, leisurely eating the clover and delighting my eight-year-old daughter. How come fun things like rabbits and ducks never lived near us when I was growing up? I think their presence now is partly owing to Cacciadelia's being a fairy princess. That can't account for their abundance all around here, however - this neighborhood is Bunnytown. Here's what I want to know - could we perhaps get the lapine community organized and instill a work ethic into them? Much pleasanter than the usual roaring lawnmowers would be to arrange for Bunn-Lawn to come round once a week and eat the grass down to a reasonable height. Another reason they seem to like our yard may be that we don't use weedkillers and fertilizers. I'm not especially Green - in fact I rather loathe a lot of what's done in the name of the environment, suspecting that much of it is pure fascism - but I conversely resent being obliged by city ordinances to maintain around my abode a patch of useless, high-maintenance plants that are radically unsuited to this climate. I refer, of course, to lawn-grass. As long as the yard is neither bare nor a hayfield, however, they can't touch me, and if I don't mind that it consists largely of clover, dandelions, and plantain, why should anybody else? The rabbits seem to like it. # Saturday, June 21, 2003 ( 4:49 PM ) Elinor Dashwood My apologies to Blogger, and I have found my early posts, now linked over on the right here. Cacciaguida showed me where they lurk, and I've recovered them all. # ( 4:45 PM ) Elinor Dashwood I knew it. I've just taken the "Which Austen heroine are you?" quiz, and I'm Elinor Dashwood, despite having chosen another actress to play me than Emma Thompson. The trouble with Austen's Elinor is that she hasn't any friend with whom she can speak confidentially, and she's more or less responsible for a sister afflicted with a degree of cluelessness so acute as to verge on suicide. I rather hope that, once hers and Marianne's personal affairs had settled down, she made friends with someone (and she's completely a one-best-friend sort of person) of a similarly unsentimental view of human nature, in whose discretion she has enough confidence to allow her to exercise an underlying sardonic sense of humor. She has the potential to realize Lady Middleton's censure of being "satirical", as soon as she could be let off the task of nursemaiding that exasperating sister of hers. # Wednesday, June 18, 2003 ( 8:44 PM ) Elinor Dashwood A belated Blogger welcome to Two Sleepy Mommies, written jointly by a pair of Catholic mothers. They look like being a very valuable addition to Catholic blogdom. One question - why the noms de blog Pansy and Peony? (I explained why I write under the name Elinor Dashwood, but Blogger seems to have lost it along with my other very early posts.) My second question is, can I join in now and then if I call myself Petunia? # ( 12:19 PM ) Elinor Dashwood You can see a picture of little Miss Cacciaguida in her First Communion dress by going to Cacc's blog and scrolling down past Hume Cronin and Martina Arroyo to where it says "In response to your many requests". Turned out pretty well, I think, and the dress isn't bad, either. Pardon me a moment while I roll into a writhing lump of furious maternal pride. There - all better now. # ( 12:12 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Rejoice with me! For Verizon has, at length, fixed our DSL. It worked fine for a month or two, and then connected only sporadically, and our telephone also got very crackly. Several calls to customer service and tech support resulted in only temporary improvements, and last month I called and said that, if the problem couldn't be altogether fixed so that we'd have a 24-hour connection at full speed, we'd need to cancel. That prompted the CS rep to whom I was speaking to offer to connect me to - and, like Dave Barry, I am not making this up - the tech support people who "understand the system better". Duh! Why didn't I think of that? It made Cacciaguida and me think instantly of Monty Python's new brain sketch - the one in which the shop is supposed to send round a man to adjust the new brain, only the first one they send is a stuffed figure. The customer calls the shop back and tells them somewhat testily that they must send another one, because the first was a dummy. Once connected with the tech support people who were not dummies, we settled that a service guy (a real one) would come out to the house and see if there was anything mechanically wrong with the set-up, since we'd already tweaked all the settings and ruled out the possibility that the neighbors were running a numbers game or a large-scale counterfeiting operation that might be interfering with service. Sure enough, there was loose fleam in the Johnson rod (or something like that), which, when fixed, resulted in a perfect connection. # Friday, May 30, 2003 ( 9:49 AM ) Elinor Dashwood Wednesday was our twentieth anniversary. We started with early Mass and a blessing by the pastor, and went on to a pilgrimage to a local shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe. (Cultural, schmultural - I still say that there's something appallingly tacky about anyone who could suppose that a miraculous image of the Mother of God, given by Our Blessed Lady's own hand, needed to be jazzed up by having gold stars painted all over it. Ugh!) We finished the day with dinner at a very nice steak restaurant near here. Thanks to all who were at Dwight Chapel on the 28th of May, 1983, to see the ship launched, and to all those who have contributed to our happiness ever since. # ( 9:38 AM ) Elinor Dashwood Ha! Brave words! About finishing the First Communion dress. A half-hour after I wrote those words the motor on my sewing machine gave up the struggle, and I had to race to Sears in the rain and replace the machine. The saleswoman in Small Appliances seemed to think that I might change my mind and buy the $1200 computerized whizbang with 187 stitch variations and the feature that plays "You're a Grand Old Flag" while it makes buttonholes. The simplest and cheapest machine is the one I use, since all I really need is straight and zigzag stitch, and I already have a Singer buttonholing attachment which makes the neatest and strongest buttonholes available. But I got the dress done in good time, and it was lovely - white delustered satin with just the minimum of lace and ribbon to make it look really special. Cacciaguida will be posting pictures when they come back, but Miss C definitely got Best Dressed among her group of First Communicants. That she was also the best prepared and far the most beautiful was a foregone conclusion, of course. At first I had been going to make her a dress very like the one she wore to be Zorak's flower girl: short straight sleeves, full skirt, very simple, very chic. She was perfectly sweet about it, but she began haunting the pattern counter at the store, and pulling me over to see dresses that looked like wedding cakes, asking me if they weren't pretty. About the third or fourth time this happened I got the message, and we picked out a pattern a little bit fluffier and with the all-important "princess waist" (the little pointed dip at the front of the waistline seam, a la Cinderella). I figure that one's children are certain to wangle for their own way, and I might as well reward her for finding a good-tempered and tactful way of doing it, instead of throwing a screaming tantrum in the middle of the shop, or sulking and whining at home. # |
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