barb's day

It is 10 pl. I was awakened by my husband last night fir a midnight surprise. My day started early!

Wake the kids, make the tea and coffee, read the Times, getr Alex to Gunn for Spirit Week. Work to find that someone esle loaded Microsoft office so I can OEn but not change, print or view any files. ARGH! Worked hard on things NOT related to computers (patients, planning, phone call catch up, mail . . old fashioned work).

Scarf a big slice of pizza and a cold coke on a 90 degree Indian summer day. Back to work, alex to the doctor, sam to Hebrew lesson, car to the wash, back for alex, make the dinner ( all cold things salad and chicken too hot to cook or even eat!)

Go GO Go Makw a cup of tea and read the mail. Too hot to drink tea! Drop Alex at ther Air Bands competition. Back to work for 1 hour, clean up at the BBQ with so many interesting parents. Quality time with Gunn parents in 3 minutes slots.

Go Go GO

Make school lunches. Insist on showers and teeth brushing, fginishing homework, "Out with the lights" to the late readers like Sam 12, who is all legs with glasses on top.

crash on the couchto see a doumentary on the uprisings in 1960 esp in 1968, Prague, Mexico City, Chicago. So many assassinations. Where would America (the world) be today had ML King, the Kennedy's and other leaders lived?

PTA work: counting the checks donated to the school. Another 16 families giving $325.

Tomorrow: Girls weekend in Tuburon. THAT might be a day I should write about!

Verena's 29. Juni 2005

June 29th, 2005
Today is Monday, July 23rd, the first morning for weeks I’m home alone, and the first day of the only week I’ll have any amount of time to write worth mentioning - and what do I do? I waste most of it reading the blog of this Stephanie Klein, who was mentioned in the N.Y.T. yesterday. Her dating-shopping-going-out to restaurants life I couldn’t care for less, but still, reading comes so much easier than writing after such a long time, and I must admit, I do admire the fact that she has been consistently blogging for over two years (and now has a book coming out, ‘chick lit” I assume). That made me go back to fotolog, and check out my old “friends” there - again, buster, liisa, meshuga keep posting, still, my last photo is from September 2004. What is the difference between me and all these people who keep going at their thing, taking pictures, writing, whatever it may be? They also have jobs, families, equallly good excuses.
It’s just resistance, says Nathalie Goldberg, and I thank her for that. Yes, even if you have to push yourself hard to really do what you supposedly want to be doing, it could be the right thing. Do what you like doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll like to do it. Isn’t Zen great?
June 29th is hiding behind layers and layers of days driving through the Maritimes, slowly, slowly, my mind is getting there, memories appear. Matthias and I got up in the early morning white fog at Bar Harbor Campground in Maine, got ourselves and the car ready within half and hour and drove for a while before the children even woke up, all four of them mushed together on the less than queen-size sleeping area of the camper. It was raining a bit when we had coffee and doughnuts for breakfast at a gasstation. We crossed back into Canada in the late morning. The young Canadian customs officer asked us where we lived, we truthfully answered “Montreal”, and she still didn’t blink twice when we handed her our two American, four German passports and a work permit that was expiring the day after out of a car with California license plates (and no proof of insurance).
St. Johns, New Brunswick, is famous for its ‘reversing tides” when somehow the pull of the tide is as strong as the flow of the river so the water doesn’t know where to go, and the tourist gets all confused and amazed at the strange forces of nature, but for this spectacle you need to watch that one spot for a lot longer than we had time before the ferry to Digby, Nova Scotia was to leave. So we explored downtown, bought home made cookies that looked better than they tasted at a small arts and crafts market, walked through the old harbor building that had been turned into a mall. Tinu had a major fit over the stuffed animal bird I refused to buy him, didn’t stop till after I dragged him outside, and finally got over it when he had found a sight he deemed worthy of being photographed: A boy totally dug in the sand, with a sock over his nose so that he could breathe. (a new idea that got copied several times during our vacation, not always ending in screams and tears).
On the ferry we had time on our hands, so what did we do? We started a big argument that took days to get over, a lot longer than it took the fog that accompanied us along the Southern coast of Nova Scotia to lift. Matthias had always said he wanted to visit the Gaspesie, and now it had become clear that, if we wanted to actually see and do something along the way, we would have to either skip Cape Breton or the Gaspesie. Nothing complicated about that, nobody would have needed to get emotional about it, but we all did. The whole delicate balance of compromise and influence, of wanting to get along and wanting to dance to your own music came apart. At the end of the journey, we all agreed that we’d accomplished something far-fetched: 9 people, two cars, thousands of miles and as many ad-hoc-decisions about where to sleep, what and when to eat, when to stop, when to go, museum or beach, whale-watching or hiking, and endless decision-making process.
When we got off the ferry, dust was falling already, so we headed for the first campground along the road. The people were so exceptionally friendly. The warden drove Harald around in his golfcart so he could pick a spot. A short hike to town, again, very friendly service at the Captain’s Restaurant.
The next morning I photographed the lush purple, white and pink lupines which looked their best in the damp air.