what's important

There is a lot of stuff going on in the world around us all right now. BIG STUFF. important stuff. Or is it just URGENT STUFF? One of the differentiations I think we all seem to miss sometimes.....the difference between URGENT and IMPORTANT.

Not to be too light about THE WAR, or THE ECONOMY or HEALTH CARE or, or or..........

But, in reading the blogs of these wonderfully lucid and articulate writers I follow(I hope you know who you are), I find none of those things often mentioned. Not hardly even in passing. These things are BIG. These things are IMPORTANT. But - They're not what matters MOST. Obviously, what matters most to us is our FAMILIES. Politics, Wars, Economies, etc., these things change history. But family IS our history. IS our future, our past and our present.

The election in the U.S. will happen. it will or will not change the course of many things. The economy, likewise will do it's thing. Money will be tight(I'm used to that, though it's tighter lately-ho hum). The War, which ever one you're following or not, will progress. We pray for all those directly in Wars path.

Again, What is Most important to all us is our families.

I find in that something so human, so universal(and not just of humans).

Watch people of different cultures with their small children and I think you will see that we all love our kids most, no matter who we are, where we're from, what our socioeconomic place or ethnographic. Or, watch animals with their babies....it's the same.

It does a heart good.

I thank you for the insights into your lives, and those of your wonderful families.

....and I'm still reeling over Beck's lines about her grandmother, the part about her grandmother's father, coming across the snow to meet his child - on the other side.

Is that not the epitome of what we all hope for in the end?

Doh!

Yes, a big fat Homer Simpson "DOH!!!" I was mistaken. About having always bought Aaron's Haloween costumes(bad sentax, I know). Last year Ginny and his Grandma Doris spent an afternoon making him a beautiful ghost costume-which he LOVED. a lot! Which I will try to find the phot files of.

The forgotten school in service week

Above: Aaron gets out two puzzles. mixes up the pieces. builds one puzzle. builds the other on top of the first.

Aaron's early special ed school is closed down for "in service" this week. Naturally, like a dork, I forgot that yesterday before dropping him off at the sitter's. Now he's convinced that it's "school closed down now" .......like, forever. NO amount of discussion will convince him otherwise. He's kinda bummed about it. Obviously he'll learn that its open next week. This sunday we will go on the Mount Hood Railway's Pumpkin Patch Express. His first train ride. Hay Maze(hmmm, not sure how he'll react to that. it'll be ok, it'll be ok, it'll be ok) Pumpkin Patch(also his first) He'll be wearing his new spiderman costume(which he doesn't yet know about, but has expressed a wanting of)

I or her mother almost always made my daughter's costumes(she's 27 now, she can bloody well make her own;-). partially out of creative intent, partially out of fianancial necessity. I kind of fell guilty about just going out and buying Aarons. Hmmm - fell, not feel guilty - Fruedian slip? We always have bought his. It's not that we have so much more money than Amelia's mother & i did, just less time. He's always enjoyed them. That makes it ok, right? right? not a bad daddy, not a bad daddy....not.....Whew, get a GRIP man! "it's not like yee pee'd in the wee laddie's cherrios ye knoo!" Sorry, too much Terry Pratchet Wee Free Men.......or maybe coffee.........

Going for my six month dental check up at the huge local medical university complex this afternoon (locally it's called Pill-Hill)....no dental insurance and they're really cheap-and good.

Working on reproducing the lost "Schedual-C" from last year's taxes for the City business tax people....Yes, I'm THAT late getting my "I only made this much last year so I get a pass on paying any local biz tax" papers in.

I had it. Of course I had it. I HAD to have had it to file Fed & state taxes(done on time-really)....Just don't know where it got to. filing is not one of my good things.

Re-read Madeline L'Engle's THE WIND IN THE DOOR. Fine Good vs Evil, do what you gotta do, "there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in all your philosophies, Horatio" kinda thing. Yeah, I know it's a "Young Readers" book. Ya wanna make somthin' of it, pork pie?......Pork pie? Where the heck did THAT come from? "never mind"-done in classic Gilda Radner/Emily Lattella character voice.

This doing late tax papers thing must getting to me....no, honest, I'm not like this usually.....oh, ok, so maybe I am.

I've edited the blogs I read gadget to not include the title of most recent posts. It's somehow not keeping up with the timing of the actual new posts.

Check out the latest in my favorite group of entertaining, touching, mostly women bloggers - it's the Killing Flies with a Ukelale one from Queens land, Australia. While it's starting to snow on Beck(frog & toad-still friends) in Canada, they're hating "naughty geckos on my windows" there. good/entertaining stuff, i think.

Maybe I just like Australians...ever since those fine conversationalist/beer buying fellows I met back at Ned Kelley's Last Stand, across the street from the Pennensula Hotel, in Hong Kong, in 1976....'nother story.............

more later

this and that

Arron, hard at coloring, and about to get a hair cut.
Amelia, at some girl-shin-dig, before she got her hair cut

Sunday morning. I actually took yesterday off. two whole days of not working - WOO-HOO! slept most of yesterday, after having worked pretty much straight for a couple of weeks. Just finished a couple of bright work(varnish) refinishing jobs on a 47 foot and a fifty three foot yacht. and then there was the rush coast guard boat fiberglass and gel coat job( about which nothing went right or easily from the word go)

Ah, the joys of self employment, in this the best of all possible worlds.

I've been updating my library thing and music play list this a.m. Intuitive search engines - my butt. I don't need a list of 342, 645 songs that contain 100,000 or so entries of the same song. I want one listing of each and every song by the artist. this is the 21st century...and WHERE'S MY FLYING CAR?! Computers - a blessing and a curse. That for which my linguistically advanced daughter coined the phrase "the perversity of the inanimate".

This afternoon My son and I will go get our hairs cut. Always an adventure. At four, it still takes three people to hold him down and cut his hair, but at least now he's not screaming the whole time(OR DIDN'T THE LAST TIME)

We are still in the evaluation process of the whole Is he high functioning autistic spectrum disordered, and if so(which seems likely) how to best deal with that for him.

a good Autism resource link: http://www.autismspeaks.org/

Tomorrow, My parents will celebrate their fifty-first wedding anniversary back in Kansas. Quite a milestone, which all of us in the family will be thankful for with them, if even at great distance.


more later.......

the coast gaurd boat

I work on boats. Currently I'm deep in the throws of "The Coast Guard wants their boat by when?!" Doing repairs to fiberglass and gel coat on a twenty foot Zodiac owned and operated by the local Coast Guard. Yesterday, Sunday(which I try not to work on) I spent a very frustrating nine hours straight sanding and filling fiberglass and sanding and masking and spraying gel coat on the boat. I am very tired. It's the price I guess for those days when my work doesn't have to be completed by any particular day or time. Even then, fast is an issue.

I'm not good at fast. I used to be fast, but that was literally decades ago. At fifty years of age, I'm just not fast any more, and especially not at the more finesse type aspects of boat repair and maintenance. Our society tends to demand fast. "time is money" NO, Time is Time. Money is money. I long for and hope for a personal future in which fast is not as much of an issue as it is now.

another dad, another story

Reading Blogs about Moms & kids, and Dads and kids. Is it a meme, or just a universal theme? Different lives, in different locales, across the country, around the world(at least the English speaking/writing world - I remain, despite a couple semesters of college Spanish, woefully uni-lingual). What follows is just part of the continuing saga of one dad, one child.

My son, now four, and always small for his age, was recently seen by a very nice, very professional and yet warmly reassuring couple of child development people from the local school district. One a child psychologist, the other a speech pathologist.

After talking with my wife and I and our boy A. for a couple of hours the verdict was in: "Yes our child has speech/language development issues, as well as some social skills issues, that plainly and definitely qualify him the local early development special ed program". This came as a great relief to us. That may seem odd. We have known for some time that he has these issues. It took our state funded child medical providers a couple of years to come to the conclusion that, yes this child has some issues that need to be addressed.

What we somewhat knew, in the backs of our minds, but were less prepared to hear was that he shows a number of "red flag" traits our new specialists relate to high-functioning Autistic Spectrum Disorder.

Our son is very bright, but has problems knowing how to relate or deal with others in social groups. He absolutely will look you in the eye, and has a sense of humor, and initiates warm contact sort of stuff, and, and, and ...doesn't seem at all like what t.v. and movies portray as the severely affected Autistic stereotype.

But,....He does, sometimes, get kind of compulsive obsessive about stuff. He lines up toy cars by type and color. He freaks out if his banana or granola bar gets broken. he's a wizard a jig-saw puzzles, and builds fairly remarkable stuff out of Lego's and tinker toys, he sees spatial relationships and puts together things you never thought would go together in ways that make perfect sense when you see what he's done with them.....he...... he ........Lord...save my child. It will all be OK, but, you know, as a parent we tend to want our children to be all those things that we think will ensure and enable them to deal and survive and thrive out there in the "real" world as they grow up, and later after we're no longer able to shelter and take care of them. Hearing the A word in relation to one's small child is kind of like going to the doctor and hearing the C word. Ultimately deal able with (usually) but causing that momentary catch in the chest - the shift into crisis/survival/protection mode-which of course will give way to more reasonable, more calm well considered thought patterns, realizing it's not quite the end of the world we first felt down deep that it might be.

He is excited about going to school tomorow. The little yellow school bus will pick him up at the sitter's a couple of mornings a week, to a local elementary school, for his early special ed classes/sessions and drop him back off after. After this school year they will re-evaluate him to see where he's at then. Ginny has taken him to the school and introduced him to whoever was around, shown him the place and space, and generally let him getcomfortable with it. It will be OK.

Mathematic co-inky-dinks

1977, somewhere just outside of Coffeyville, Kansas, Driving down a dirt road in a 1969 Volkswagon beatle. It was February 22nd(2/22) I watched the odometer roll over 222 miles. I looked at my watch - the time was 2:22.

2008, somewhere in Portland, Oregon, driving down a street in a 2000 Subaru Outback. the display on my stereo said the station was 92.5. I watched the trip meter come up to 92.5 miles. the clock on my dash said 9:25.

Hmmmmmmm...........