work with me, people...

I have spent my summer dodging real estate agents. We listed our house at the end of May and have shown it 30 times since then. Everyone one says that 30 times in two months is good, but I say I still own it. That said, I've been a good sport, willing to leave my house as pristine as possible on the very shortest of notice. Afterall, the goal is to sell it, right? I need to work with these people. But with two kids--one who is known for her love of projects that usually encompass an entire floor of our little house--our game plan is just not to be in the house if at all possible between the hours of 8 and 6. I've tried staying until we get the call from the listing agency that tells us to get out, but I make both my children and myself crazy with my constant cleaning and barking of imperative statements: "Don't get that out. Pick that up. Just watch some more TV."

Today, we left the house at 9:30 and had a plan involving doctor's appointments, shopping and swimming at the Y that would successfully keep us out of the house until 6 pm. Generally Mondays are not days our house gets shown anyway, but for the girls' sake I thought better safely out and about than home dealing with a neurotic mom. We had almost made it through the day when my cell phone rang. It was 5 and the listing agency was calling to say that our house would be shown between 6 and 7. We were waterlogged and had planned to leave the pool at 5:30. Since that would put us home exactly when we were supposed to still be out, I swung into action with our emergency contingency plan, which is to pick up pizza and crash in on our neighbors until it's safe to return home. They are very gracious people who enjoy a free pizza now and then, so it worked out.

At 7:15 we were home and settling in for the night. The girls were exhausted, and the two year old was in bed and alseep 15 minutes later. I had just got the five year old set up in her evening wind-down routine when the doorbell rang. It was a very perky real estate agent and a lovely young married couple standing in my doorway looking at me like I was rancid turkey on their brunch plate. The agent said, "Didn't you get the call. We made an appointment for 6 to 7. " Um yes, actually, I got that one. Here, let me show you to the front room where we keep our clock.

Sam-isms

For years my mom and I have threatened to collect all of my dad's favorite expressions and compile them into a notebook so that future generations would have some inkling as to the kind of intellectual stock they are derived from. I have been exposed to such country-fried classics as "shit and two is eight and fart's a fraction" for as long as I can remember. Hard to believe, but this phrase actually means something to my father, who apparently has some kind of redneck guidebook to determine its appropriate usage though I have never been able to locate that book and, therefore, have not quite managed to deduce when it can be thrown out there and when not. Others like "it's raining like a cow peeing on a flat rock" have been easier to resolve. I thought, as the saying goes, I had heard it all.

Not so. Yesterday, while discussing the busy-ness that is momdom with another lady, she said of her recent move to the area from Katrina-ravaged Louisiana, "Yes, we're still trying to find our behind with both hands." In Sam-speak, one would need to substitute "ass" for the more demure choice "behind," but in doing so my dad would have found this lady completely adoptable. I shall be sticking that one in my back pocket.

a lesson

Working industriously on another project, the five year old was sitting on the floor amid some drawings of dinosaur bones she'd made that she was gluing together according to a grand plan. I looked down among the various parts and recognized the fossilized head of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Kicking it into supportive mommy mode, I said, "Nice T Rex, sweetie. I like the way you're putting it all together like the dinosaur scientists at the museum."

Pausing just long enough to glance up at me with a look that indicated serious doubts about my education, she said, "Mom, this is Archaeopteryx. T Rex doesn't have wings. "

Right, wings. Ar-kay...how'd you say that again?

Who is that masked marauder of mystery...

...with those infinitely kissable lips?

for KK

Around his thirty-seventh birthday and just after his marriage to Olga, Picasso wrote the following to his friend Guillaume Apollinaire:

"I am seeing high-society people. I have decorated a room here where I have put your verses. I am not very unhappy here and I am working as I told you, but write me long letters."

It is also around this time that he moves out of cubism (mostly) and creates some of my favorite drawings of his lifetime like this one.

my 'duh' moment

My car was burgled. Why? Because as I was gathering up children and the various bags that go with them in the aim of ushering them into childcare so that I could make my shift at a part-time summer job on Saturday morning, I decided that my purse was one bag too many and left it on the floor of the passenger side of the car. It wasn't glinting in the sunlight of the front seat, but it wasn't exactly obscured from vision either. So there it was. Not long after my shift started, a patron came to the front desk of the establishment where I work and said he thought his car had been broken into, but he couldn't be sure and called the police. I looked at the other girls I work with, they nodded, and I went outside to check on the fate of my purse. At first glance, all looked normal--no broken windows, everything was still locked.

But my purse was gone. Later, after I gave my statement to the policer officer, he showed me what I had overlooked.

The thieves had pried up the handle and shoved something into the keyhole.

Mostly I wrote this as a cautionary tale: pick up your purse even when you don't think you have enough time or hands. However there are some interesting yet creepy details that were to surface a few hours later in the day. At about two-thirty in the afternoon, one of my neighbors rang our doorbell. My husband let her in and she handed him four purses, one of them mine and another stuffed with all the cards, receipts and ID's she and her daughter had picked up from where they had been strewn in the ditch near the entrance of my neighborhood. My neighborhood is about 17 miles from my part-time job, which means, yikes, the bad guys had cased our house. After sifting through the mess, we determined that ALL OF MY STUFF including my debit card, credit cards, drivers license and passport were there, but between the other three purses there was only one receipt for one lady and a couple of store-specific credit cards belonging to another. We found out later that the lady with the receipt had also had all of her important documentation in her purse including her green card because she had just started a new job and had brought it all in so personnel could make copies and take the numbers. She didn't get any of those things back. Of course, I've watched one too many episodes of CSI and have lots of theories about everything that has happened. When I called my sister-in-law, a police officer up until recently when she became a mom, to tell her all my theories, she listened sweetly and then said, "You know, Jen, it's usually all just a series of random coincidences." Yes, right, I knew that.

there's a new girl in town

As soon as our car comes to a complete stop in our driveway, my girls go popping out the doors and race up to the house. I have never figured out their hurry since I spend another 3-7 minutes gathering up trash, toys and various other other items from the backseat before I head over to unlock the door for them. Today, while I was struggling to emerge from the car with my wobbly tower of McDonald's boxes and fistful of sandals, my five year old rushed back over to the car flailing an ad flyer that someone had left attached to the door knob of the house while we were out.

"Mommy, can I cut this out and you'll give me magazines to cut a house for it, too?"

Barely noticing the green Geiko gecko on the ad, I quickly made a few computations in my head such as how little I needed another flyer and how many minutes of distraction this cutting activity could provide for my eldest while I put the youngest down for her nap. "Sure, Sweets. Just a minute and I'll get you some magazines."

I opened the door, got rid of boxes, and deposited sandals. I grabbed a couple of magazines out of my unread stack and hollered for my girl to come get them. She quickly snatched them up and then ran upstairs to the guest room where I heard her turn on Sponge Bob and rifle through her craft drawer after her scissors. A minute later, the door shut. She meant business.

All the better for me. I could take on the the two year old one on one. I grabbed a bottle and the less than willing napper and headed to the girls' room to put her in the crib. A few minutes later I emerged victorious from the bedroom and found myself with one child napping and the other industriously building a paper condo for her new lizard friend. I settled into an armchair with my latest Picasso biography and stole some precious minutes for myself. With everyone in the house so happily tucked away, I lost track of the time.

Finally, after what must have been a good hour and a half, I heard the door to the guest room open. The five year old came bounding into view moments later sporting an exceedingly proud countenance.

"Whacha got?" I said

"Look, Mommy. She's a girl."

satisfaction

Today I tried to arrange an afternoon tryst with Picasso.

I began at the Menil Collection to revisit his permanent works housed there, hoping that I had missed one in my previous visits. You see, I'm a Picasso lover of the uncubist variety. But, the visit was to no avail as I saw everything I'd seen before and none of it the Picasso I'm paritcularly enamored with. I was, however, rewarded with Frank Stella of 1958--some very nice color studies. Hot but not bothered.

From there I ventured over to the Museum of Fine Arts Houston where I knew I could at least find one of Picasso's sculptures if not anything else. Appeased but not satisfied, I walked through the Gee's Bend Quilt exhibit (think Frank Stella only more touchable) and then wandered over to the Singular Multiples (the link looks really mundane--apologies) exhibit. The whole exhibit had depth of both concept and process. A welcome surprise when viewing some neo-expressionist stuff. And there I had my tryst, but not with the man I was expecting. I had found Enzo Cucchi. I have tried to find an image on the net to link to, but none of what I've found is like what I saw today. The ones I had wandered onto were these large, maybe 3 by 5 foot, prints. But they were not about line, they were about space and color (or when not color, rich contrast). Most of all there was texture, all these perfectly chosen embossed areas that tempted the fingers and the docent's scorn.

equal airtime

In a lapse of foresight, I left my digital camera locked up in a drawer in my classroom when I left school for the summer. While I realize that statement alone could garner several comments regarding the state of my intellect, I hope that you'll not. Rather, I've already beaten myself up about all the lost photo opportunities my two year old seemed hellbent on providing today. Apparently she got wind of the fact that she was 0-2 in the count of my posts concerning her antics versus those featuring her sister and was determined to even the score. Though I got neither video nor photographic proof of her efforts, suffice it to say that it is much more amusing to try to put her jammies on after I've helped myself to a glass of wine.

working it out

My five year old was holding forth about organized sports in the way that only five year olds can:

"I don't like to run a race because there's cheating."

Taking my motherly, let me explain how the world really works tone, I say, "There doesn't have to be cheating if everyone decides to be a good sport. "

"Yeah, if a mean person is playing sports and they do mean things, they are being a bad sport."

"Unh huh."

"And if everyone is nice and doing nice things then they are being good sports."

"That's right."

"And when I was playing baseball at the YMCA for Daddy, I was a frustrated sport."

Can't argue with logic like that.

the mosaic house

Have you seen the mosaic house in Venice, CA? Scroll though these photos; it's something else. I read an article about it in one of my mom's pottery magazines (probably Clay Times or Ceramics Monthly) and mostly discovered that I know much less about tiling than I thought I did. Someday I have to see this place for myself.

For now, another book.

I just bought my 4th Picasso biography. To most people this seems excessive ("No, I'm not working on a dissertation"). To the people I know and who know art it also appears to be grounds for other judgments, the majority of which call my intelligence into question. For these people there are only two possible explanations for my current fascination: a) I must not realize how very un-PC it is for a woman to admire someone who had several and simultaneous affairs with much younger women, or b) no one has ever set me down and properly explained to me in so many ways how "overrated" Picasso's oeurve is. A colleague of mine summed up these two views quite succinctly, "Jen, Picasso was an asshole who was basically better at marketing than art." Hmm, yes.

Unfortunately, these observations have done little to dissuade me from my preoccupation even though they're rife with "you should know better" inuendo. I can't help myself. One look at a picture of him when he was young, broke and living in Montmartre and I want to know everything I can about the brain behind this mirada fuerte, incubating a piece like Les Desmoiselles d' Avingnon. What would it have been to be his model, his lover, his friend, his canvas, his child?

For now, another book.

Picasso once said,

"Ultimately there is only love."