O, the enemy, that enemy, always always wins. Powerful series of photos, though.
Is the enemy time, or preppy chicks? Maybe it's a multi-front war.
Time is the enemy, Halford. Full stop. Preppy chicks are a mere distraction.
Honestly I have so many enemies.
I don't think FDR was suggesting a raw count as the measure, you know.
I'm about the age of the oldest Brown sister, my evolution can be constructed in part, not in such loving detail from our Flickr page.
They are beautiful, in a way just one person's pictures couldn't capture, and also couldn't without so many images at such regular intervals.
In other news tangential to the link and picking up a theme touched on lately without a place to say it, I have something to share:
The two male fictional characters who've had the most impact on my sense of myself, both encountered in the last 20 years, were created, imagined by women. Pat Barker's Prior, source of my pseud was one. Marilynne Robinson's John Ames was the other.
No reverse Franzenism here.
Heh. I had to read the comments to get who (what) the enemy was supposed to be.
I saw this series in a museum in Fort Worth a few years ago. I liked it then and like it now, even though (or because) there's a hint of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men for the New England UMC.
I assumed the enemy was the Brown sisters. What did they ever do to you?:
||Rory was pissed at me so she texted UNG to come get her, which he did. All of this behind my back. He won't give her back. I am utterly beside myself. |>
13: Ugh, Di, that is completely awful. I'm sorry.
13: Holy shit. So sorry. Sending the biggest hug I can across cyberspace. Please let us know if we can support you.
I'm sorry, Di. For whatever little it's worth, it's developmentally appropriate for teens to be sneaky and manipulative and selfish. You and she will both survive it, and she'll outgrow it eventually.
I'm not so sure she'll outgrow it. After all, she has a parent who not only permitted it, but encouraged it.
Ugh, I'm so very sorry. That must be so extremely upsetting and awful. I do think that it's wholly likely that the permitting and encouraging will backfire on UNG in the end. Creepitude will out.
19: I want to add my support to 19.last as well. I think that is a certainty.
Very horrible to experience, sorry, dk. Is UNG breaking a rule by doing that?
I'm so sorry. How deeply upsetting.
I sent something to your old gmail address which you may no longer use. Let those of us in the area know if we can be of assistance.
22: Yes. He is. But short of calling the cops on him, which is probably not the best for Rory, not much I can do.
Thanks for the words of support, all. He's accomplished exactly what he has always wanted - drove a wedge into my too-good-to-be-true relationship with my daughter. My god how I wish I could punch that smug smirk off his ugly face.
I absolutely believe that long term behavior will win (or lose) out. Rory knows who has been there for her. She's being a teenager, but she will outgrow it.
That sounds awful. Sorry. I second 27.
Oh, Di. UGH!
I do think it'll be an experience that in the end she'll look back on with regret (having been a daughter of a single mother and having pulled some seriously ridiculous shenanigans at about that age) but I am so sorry that you're having to deal with all of this. You have all my sympathy and hope.
27 is surely right.
Can you get him cited for contempt?
What everyone else said about how Rory's a teenager, and they can't help being bratty -- this is a hurtful way of her to show it, but it's just because that's what the situation makes available. And UNG is being a jerk in not backing you up.
(Although 27.last sounds like a terrible idea, for anything short of actual danger to Rory or consistent bad behavior from him over a long period of time.)
I was assuming this wasn't a one-off, and that UNG's culpability here is way beyond 'not backing you up.' It's probably not that good an idea, though.
30 and 31 should feel free to continue debating this. It will give the voices inside my head a chance to rest.
Alternative strategies for wiping his smug smirk off his face also welcomed.
33 is, of course, right.
She's home now and has acknowledged it was a terrible choice. And perhaps implicitly (or wishful thinking on my part) thereby acknowledged that it is sucktastic that her father fed the adolescent impulse rather than helping her make a better choice.
I just feel humiliated and impotent.
34.2: Write a best-selling novel that is a thinly, veiled account of your marriage and divorce except that this time he dies having sex with a horse.
(Glad to hear she's back.)
Moby has some weird ideas about what sorts of novels become best-sellers. At least, I hope he does.
As long as he dies having sex with a horse.
You could call a breeder and have a particularly attractive horse anonymously delivered to his house, and let nature take its course.
Oh, like a horse horse. I thought we were just insulting his wife. (Which I realize would have been an insult to horses.)
I just feel humiliated and impotent.
The sponsors of the baseball playoffs can help with the second of those problems.
And yeah, what everyone else said. Having been through something similar and based on everything you've said about both Rory and UNG, I'm with 19.
35.2: Great to hear.
My only other thought is if there's hard evidence of how UNG behaved (voicemails, texts) you might save them on the (hopefully remote) chance things reach a police/judicial stage later on.
Just me hysterically demanding return of my child.
45.last. Is there a middle ground between reporting him for contempt and ignoring it?
I had friends who went through an acrimonious divorce and the agreement about how children were to be managed was monitored by some appointee of the court. It lasted until the children were adults. The monitor wasn't always terribly helpful but it was on the record without involving police or courts directly. This was in MA, so your mileage may vary.
Also seconding 19.last. The children are close to her now, in spite of some incidents such as this one.
Is Rory just Sally's age (fifteen now) or a little younger? I can't remember.
I've read the internet and we still aren't boarding for another 20 minutes. Tell me about your weekend.
Di, I'm still probably not being helpful, but every teen I've known who had the option of another family of some sort took that at least once. I also can't think of any who don't regret some of those choices and see how short-sighted they were. I had a long conversation with Colton about that sort of thing last night, and at 20 he's got lucid, well-considered views on why he did various things he did and what he could have done differently. I stand by the belief that Rory has a good and solid base and she'll build on that over time. I'm sorry you're hurting and sorry she hurt you. That sucks.
Heebie, Nia and Mara are upstairs cleaning the bathroom! They scrubbed the floor and sink and are now doing the bathtub. If I'm not too scared of the job they've done, I'll take a bath after they're in bed. They're also learning to do laundry, and the treat side of that is that soon I'll get their flannel sheets out of the dryer and tuck them into very warm beds. Then Nia will laboriously read the first page of the next chapter of her stupid nu-Nancy Drew book and I'll finish it and then, as I said, bath or something decadent and not involving children but not Vegas-level or anything.
50 was me, in case that wasn't clear enough from context. I'm not sure how my name disappeared and came back. Magic!
Well, there's this: he'll be ready to hand her back sooner rather than later and at least you know she's somewhere safe. Maybe a night apart for both you and her to calm down a little would be best before resuming the conversation.
Aw, that sounds like a lovely evening.
I'm confused - Rory is back with Di or over at UNG's house? I bought the former.
Awwww! People changed seats, unsolicited, so that Jammies and I could sit next to each other. That was welcome and super nice of them.
57: Do you think they just don't want to be near you if you go into labor?
Or maybe they're scared of pirates.
49: I'm in the Seattle airport waiting to board.
She's back. And remorseful. Would have been nice if, when my teenager (yep, Salty's age, LB) decided to sneak out in a snit, she'd had some responsible person to talk her off that ledge. Instead, she had her dad there eager to rush in and pour fuel on the fire.
Best part? None of it would have happened had I just refused to accommodate his request for a schedule change. But that's a long story.
teo, try to get some people to let you sit next to Jammies. Apparently it improves the flight experience!
Tell me about your weekend.
My students all want last-minute advice on whether to switch to taking my class pass/fail. I am not being very helpful.
Alaska has assigned seating, so that's probably not possible. Also I doubt Jammies is on this flight too.
Tell me about your weekend.
I went all weekend without drinking any Diet Coke, so I've been completely tired and unproductive.
We picked apples today. It was great and New Englandy and autumnal and lovely and now we have four fucking hundred apples.
All three families of deer who live our backyard love apples. So if you bring a few bags over, the deer will feast. And since hunting season started yesterday -- bow only, I'm told -- we could probably stock the freezer with meat for winter.
So are you going to make applejack, or what?
live IN our backyard
I'm having a hard time righting.
Applejack and venison! A true northeastern repast.
Do you have to post if you don't want people hunting on your property where you live? This is a thing I just learned about.
Alaska has assigned seating
Everyone in the state is issued a chair on arrival.
Child and I are rounding out a bachelor weekend with reviewing of Hopscotch, weirdly unremembered movie. Have realized once again that am much more amusing companion with better half around, suppose that bodes well for our life post-child. But maybe dull for chip in present? He does seem fine with filling in any conversational gaps.
My flight to Anchorage is at the exact same hate where my flight from Albuquerque arrived. Convenient!
Yom Kippur yesterday, I was in choir on and off all day. Great music heard at no other time in the liturgical year. High point is Heinrich Schalit's setting of 23rd Psalm, sung during Yiskor in the late afternoon. Broke fast at inlaws, hung out with family until late.
Laundry today, tablecloths and napkins for the next holiday part of the task. Meant to work on my road bike but thought I'd make an adjustment or two to my everyday urban bike. Ended up replacing 7 or 8 spokes on the rear wheel, doing a lot of trueing. Used up the day.
Struck the holiday furniture arrangement, put away table leaves and chairs, washed large pots and pans.
We could at least make cider, I suppose. I wonder if I need specialized hardware to do that...
Man, I knew air travel had gotten bad. But arrival/departure hates is taking it a bit far.
Don't give in to hate. That leads to Anchorage.
The hate is really a more general thing directed at air travel overall.
I'm flying five more times this week, so there will be plenty of time for hate.
Damn, dude. How's Alaska's FF program?
Pretty good. I have elite status this year and at this rate will have no trouble qualifying for next year too. This is an unusually busy week, but I do tend to travel about once a week during spring and fall.
Might get a kick out of The Flying North by the old commie--trying to keep other threads in mind--Jean Potter. Published in 1945, describes how Alaska even then was dependent on air travel like no other place on earth. Great stories of the bush pilots, and the special equipment they evolved to keep a plane serviceable at 30 degrees below zero, the great planes they preferred, like the Fairchild seldom seen anywhere else.
And the five this week are individual flight segments, not all on Alaska, so it's not like I'm doing five separate trips.
89: I don't need, like, a smoosher?
Googling around (1) now I really want to make applejack but (2) I'm not convinced we actually have remotely enough apples to do that and (3) I'm not convinced I wouldn't be much happier just starting with fresh cider and fermenting it.
I was assuming you had a juicer, or wouldn't be contemplating it.
Quality of end product (cider or brandy) very much dependant on type of apples, very unlikely you were picking cider apples. Sorry! Why not make some applesauce and jar it for eating with pancakes, yogurt and maple syrup in da February.
And yes you'd need a press aka smoosher.
92: Or at least he'd ask questions about the equipment needed first.
I have a smoosher for lemons. Since it also works for limes and small oranges, I think it would work for apples.
Think medieval torture device type smoosher, big plates with screw inexorably bearing down.
Now I wish I'd bought a few gallons of cider while we were out there. Anyhow, Blume has plans for the apples which involve, as far as I know, baking. So we're covered on that end.
92: never assume I have a juicer.
http://www.brew-dudes.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/brew-dudes-apple-press-001.jpg
Basic idea.
Would a duck press do in a pinch?
Could be tedious, but sure. Best to use regular size press and have several 10-12 year old kids to power it. Repair to the shade and/or fireside as applicable and let them haul away.
With glass of wine, sorry. As you repair.
God I love this movie. Glenda Jackson is a goddess.
Well, I probably won't get the duck press until sometime after I've bought the popcorn maker that can pop 40,000 bags an hour, so it was a somewhat theoretical question.
Everything most "improbable" in this movie is utterly believable based on Snowden et al disclosures of last few years.
Grinding and pressing the apples is definitely the tedious part and the part I outsource. Once that's done, making tasty fermented cider is really easy.
107: do you outsource it by buying somebody else's cider and then fermenting it or by buying apples and taking them someplace?
So, to my surprise, "duck press" isn't one of those things that gets a funny name unrelated to its use.
Buying somebody else's cider, usually. A couple of places I buy from set up special blends for us fermenting types, with more tannic/bitter apples in the mix.
I do know these folks who do crazy things with bicycle-powered grinders and hydraulic presses.
My kid is eating his way through an immoderate number of Wicksons at the moment, pokey little bitter intense cider apples, he loves them.
Sam Waterston was extremely young once.
66: well, mostly they're asking questions like "if I do really well on every remaining assignment, can I get a good grade?" and the answer to that question strictly construed is "yes" but the real answer is more like "you're kidding, right?"
Anyway, on more important matters, what kind of crazy election schedule does Illinois have that we're only a month away from November and Alicia Florrick can still be deciding whether to run for State's Attorney? And could Castro be anymore of an ass?
I always got that wrong, should have taken those science classes for a letter grade, oh well.
I just dropped my son at his house after he had dinner with us. Things seem to be going really well for him: likes classes, has a new girl he's interested in, housemates aren't bringing the drama.
116: No, I'm watching The Good Wife. Which is kind of like being in Illinois.
116 -- On television, I think. You know, some of us are going to be watching this a bit later . . .
He was a good deal younger in Redford's Great Gatsby, and has acting credits going back to the early 60s.
117: It's not like I'm spoiling anything that hasn't been happening for weeks.
We cut back on cable and I had to give up BeIn, which gave me access to EuroSport and recorded bike races--I could always get up and watch live on the computer, but a race in Europe means getting up early on Sunday morning.
So I'm going to go find a YouTube highlights video for today's Il Lombardia.
Maybe I'll give Hopscotch another try. I watched the start a while back on TCM but didn't really get into it. I think it's streaming on Hulu, since I seem to remember seeing the title somewhere recently and I haven't been using Netflix much lately.
Tell me about your weekend.
Shopping for Halloween costume enhancements, culminating in an encounter with a shopkeeper I'm going to assume was annoying in a particularly Berkeley way. An hour at a wood bank. Un Ballo in Maschera at the opera, something of a dud. Roasting 3.5 lbs of Hatch green chiles. Half an episode of the very bad "How to Get Away with Murder." An episode of "The Gilmore Girls" because there are seven seasons and I'm going to assume it gets better because I need something to watch serially and seven seasons is a big bowl of serial. Now maybe taking another stab at this China Mieville thing that is good but that I'm having trouble getting into because obvious undiagnosed lifelong ADD oh my GOD is there a single book on my shelf that I've actually finished?
I'm guessing Hopscotch is not a Cortázar adaptation that can be watched in multiple ways?
I made it to Anchorage, with a minimum of hate.
Cider presses (here, at any rate) are fairly expensive (£150ish?) but somehow I always feel like I desperately want one when the subject comes up (or when I see them on the PO at work).
Congratulate me, I am now 15 days into the 33-day period in which I am working or travelling every day. Almost halfway and still no psychotic break! (it would have been a 54-day period of working or travelling every day, but I had a Sunday off, and flat out refused to work another weekend).
The local library helpfully keeps the titles of some of the English versions of Geronimo Stilton books in Italian. Just to keep me alert when I look to renew books.
Sorry, ajay, I meant to congratulate you when you asked and hope you haven't had a psychotic break because none of us did any better. That sounds really unpleasant.
So, three weeks from now or so you should be almost recovered?
Three weeks from now I need to be completely recovered because I have to take small god-daughter on a low-level helicopter flight. I'll crush that Disney princess shit with the sheer power of aviation if it's the last thing I do.
Rereading 133, I think that Thorn's congratulations may have been slightly premature.
More power to you.
How small is god-daughter these days? IME, the Disney princess thing is often self-limiting once the kid gets in the 7-9 year old range.
125: I was waiting for that.
Small god-daughter is six years and six months old, including a total of four months spent watching "Frozen" over and over and over again. I hope you're right. (You are in a position to know, I suppose.)
Well, I've got one set of datapoints.
I mean, Sally is still enthusiastically performing a version of femininity, it just hasn't been particularly princessy for a while. Her friends seemed to snap out of it at around the same age.
We didn't go through the full-on princess thing with either girl, but Nia at 8 is definitely well past taking it seriously.
Rory had such a brief princess phase, which I define by the pink and the purple and all the goddam glitter. Thank God it passed because I was so very committed to supporting whatever mode of being she chose but am so very ill-equipped to parent a very girly girl. She likes pretty dresses from time to time now (made her own for Homecoming!) and that is just fine. She likes a lot of things.
I'm all for crushing the princess juggernaut etc but hope ajay you'll be willing to have your mind blown in turn by various interests and pursuits you might otherwise write off as irredeemably feminine.
Also - link in OP intended as advert for persistence with daily sunscreen, right?
ajay, I totally approve of the helicopter god-parenting, but girl x ditched princesses, the color pink, and the color purple completely at 8 and girl y decided to be a boy for a while at 6 so it was over pretty fast. they like frozen but "are over it, already."
the Disney princess thing is often self-limiting once the kid gets in the 7-9 year old range
Uh-oh, those numbers don't look like "3.5-year-old range" to me. Four more weeks of this is going to do me in; four to six more YEARS? Maybe it's that not all kids want their parents to tell them extremely detailed stories about various Disney films for at least a cumulative hour a day? That most kids have access to the films instead? (Clip-viewing enjoyed a brief halcyon period followed by mini-meltdowns every time the videos went away, so we're rolling it back to rarities.) Unfortunately I started out being fairly tolerant, remembering hurt feelings when parents belittled my "girly" interests, so I somehow allowed it to ramp up past a sustainable level, and now I am stuck. Why, for the love of all that is decent, why must it be Cinderella? I have no good angle on Cinderella. The best I am going to be able to do is encourage my daughter to embrace "sequels" and invent a bunch of new stories, which is exactly the fiction I always wanted to write in my 30s. "Okay, this is just called The Castle. Ready?"
"Okay, this is just called The Castle. Ready?"
Cinderella as interpreted by Kafka? Intriguing.
we're rolling it back to rarities.
Sorry, this makes it sound like having to watch nothing but "Humphrey the Bear" and The Black Cauldron; I meant that screenings will be rarer. Apparently screen time is also ruining my mental development. It is pretty awesome to imagine a mash-up of Orson Welles in The Trial and the Cinderella cartoon, with an improvised script, but this may be delirium talking.
"Someone must have been telling lies about Snow W., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, she was banished from the palace..."
141.1 is a good point - I am not trying to crush the Disney princess thing because it is girly but because it is Disney. I would do the same if she were into, god help us, Transformers or something.
It is pretty awesome to imagine a mash-up of Orson Welles in The Trial and the Cinderella cartoon
"No one else but you could ever have obtained that slipper. No one else's feet could ever have fit into it. This slipper is intended only for you. And now I am going to smash it."
Awesome. Entire fairy godmother sequence, then "I don't want to leave you with the belief that there's something you haven't tried."
You're in/near London, right? You have access to some truly amazing live performances along the seems girly on the surface but actually much more complicated spectrum. To supplement the military hardware excursions.
We were complete controlling assholes re strictly limiting exposure to films/video/music/books that we knew would be intolerable if an obsession took hold. It worked for us, but probably mostly luck combined with great willingness to go many extra miles supplying a wide range of stuff we could tolerate if obsession took hold. Still have occasional moments of despair at watching C'est Pas Sorcier episodes for the eleventh gazillion time or listening to certain music again in the car, but all in all have zero regrets at keeping much at bay.
You're in/near London, right? You have access to some truly amazing live performances along the seems girly on the surface but actually much more complicated spectrum.
I'm not sure Soho's nightlife is appropriate for a young child.
