I had a hearing this morning that should have gone smoothly ("Su caso es muy facil," I assured her as we waited for her case to be called) except that it went crazy.

The names of both the Plaintiff and Defendant were wrong.  The last names were flipped.  The translator reviewed my notes with me and helped me understand the difference between asking "?Cual es su segundo nombre?" y ?Cual es sus apellidos?" (What is your second name and what are your last names?)  He suggested "?Cual es su apellindo del padre y cual es su apellindo de la madre?" (What is the last name of your father and what is the last name of your mother?).  Gracias.

I speak about as much Spanish as my clients speak English.  We limp through with smiles and dictionaries.  I feel like I do well, but then something like this happens where I am asking my client if she has a middle name (second name) and she thinks I am asking her about her second last name.  So they got switched.  We were both trying to understand the respective cultures - she knew that white people struggle with the two last name business and I knew enough at least to ask if she had plural last names.

Since I got the names switched for the husband I didn't get service and since I didn't get service she didn't get a divorce today.  Gah.

There is an influx of Karen refugees in Lincoln.  One of the things I admire about them the most is their fluency in multiple languages - Karen, Burmese, Thai and English are common.  (What I actually covet more than fluency in four languages is one of those fringed bags that I see them carrying.)  Likewise, African refugees frequently have fluency in more than one language and one of them may not be English.  "Dinka, Arabic or French," I will tell the court bailiff when I schedule the hearing and request an interpreter.

I am grateful for my education, but I wish that a second language was routinely taught at a younger age.

"Lo siento," I said.  "Esta bien," she said.  She smiled and hugged me before kissing my cheeks.  We never talked about bilingual interviews or physical affection in my client counseling class.

This is more of a survey than a blog.

We have a long break at Christmas and I am planning on taking the kids somewhere the first week of the new year.  Our time is pretty flexible, so I say "week" and it could be more than that.  We'll probably leave sometime in the week after Christmas and come back in the new year.  How awesome would it be to watch the sunrise at the Grand Canyon on New Year's Day?

So.  Me the lone driver, two kids, my golden retriever and our tent.  I would be happy to stay in a couple of motels, but will also tent camp.  My original plan was to drive south to the Gulf of Mexico - like Corpus Christi or something.  My mom suggested Big Bend National Park which looks very cool (I have my parents in OK and my sister in TX on the way).  We could also dirve Southwest and go to the Grand Canyon.  I could stay with an Uncle and his family outside of Denver and then camp / hotel it the rest of the way.

i am terrified of scoprions.  I would love to see a javalina.  I am familiar with West Texas and love it (in the way that you can love West Texas) but have never been to Big Bend or the Grand Canyon.

Thoughts?  This is just insane?  This is awesome?

I went to my Uncle Jim's funeral last month.  My dad comes from a family of 8 kids and with the exception of Jim, they all married and had kids.  There are a LOT of us.

It was strange for me to be in Lexington.  I haven't really been there since my Grandma died over 20 years ago.  All of the kids moved away with the exception of my Aunt Patty who married a farmer and stayed.  My Uncle Jim lived in Denver and had no other family.  He made arrangements to be be cremated and brought to Lexington to have his ashes buried next to his parents.

The Mass was a little weird.  I did like going out to the cemetery.  We had a lunch at the church hosted by the Church Ladies and then spent the day with cousins, aunts and uncles and then had a big family dinner at my aunt and uncle's farm.  The kids played football in the yard and drove the four wheeler.  There were plans made for horse back riding the next day.  With the exception of one aunt (there is always one, isn't there?) my dad and his siblings really love each other and have fond memories of each other and stay in touch.  There are some that are closer than others, like my dad and his brother who are the two oldest, and what people used to call "Irish Twins" (they are 10 months apart and were best friends who did everything together - Scouts, hunting, football, etc. - they still talk every week even though they live across the country and they see each other every year to camp if there isn't some other family event to bring them together - all this despite some very serious political differences), but they are all actually very fond of each other.  It is nice to see.

The story goes that when I was a baby and my dad got stationed in Denver with the Air Force, that they stopped in Lexington to visit my dad's parents on their way to Denver.  My Uncle Jim had just graduated with a BA in English (cue "Avenue Q" soundtrack) and was sitting at his mom's kitchen table with no plans.  "Denver?  That sounds nice.  Let me get my backpack," the legend goes.  So he hopped in the car with us and moved to Denver.  He slept on the floor of my room for months.  And he eventually bought a condo and made Denver his home.  Except that he also traveled to Japan and the Middle East to teach English and he taught English as a second language in Denver.

His sexuality has always been curious to me.  I am sure he was gay, but no one has ever talked about it.  And he never had a partner that he introduced to anyone.  My parents are cool and have always been cool about that sort of thing and I would think that if he told family that he would have told them.

This is kind of all an aside, but it is needed to set the context for what I really want to talk about, which is dying when you never married, don't have a partner or children, and have lived a full life.  My Uncle Bill, who lived in Denver as well, loaded his van with my Uncle Jim's personal belongings and brought them to share with everyone.  I picked a small painting to hang in my reading corner.  Then my dad took me aside.  "We have all of Jim's journals and we don't know what to do with them."  "What do you mean?" I asked.  And that is how I ended up with two seats filled with journals filled with my Uncle's life.  A quick look let me know that this is not all of them.  They seem to start at age 36 or so, so about 25 years worth?  And there are folders of creative writing - short stories, mostly.

I called my Grams, my grandma on my mother's side, on my way home.  91 years old and I can call her at 10pm.  The woman is sharp as anyone I know.

"Hey, Grams, I have an ethical dilemma," I said when she answered her phone.

"Sure, Lea Anne, shoot."

"So I have all my Uncle Jim's journals."

"<Insert the usual stuff that Grandmas say when someone dies> I am glad you have them," she said.

"Should I read them?  I mean, he didn't necessarily write them for me to read."

"Of course you should read them.  He knew he was dying (he had MS and had been deteriorating for years) and he would have gotten rid of them if he didn't want anyone to read them."

"That makes sense," I said.

"Of course it does," she snapped.  "Anything else?  How are the kids?  When are you going to come see me?"

So I hauled them all into the house and brought them upstairs and put them next to my reading chair.  They prompted my Nanowrimo novel this year - the first in years - and I can't help but think of him as I blog this month on Xanga with the friend lock and Xanga lock and protected lock and whatever.  What do you write and what do you share and with whom?  It's fascinating.

Thanks, Uncle Jim.  Love you bunches.

My first baby was easy going and pleasant.  She smiled all the time.  My second baby was difficult to please and extremely sensitive to changes in light, sound and was frequently just very, very unhappy for reasons that I could not fathom.  She has continued her prickly approach to the world as she ages.  She was actually evaluated in elementary school when her behavior was disrupting the classroom and the school psychologist informed me that she did in fact have a behavior problem, but that it was not interfering with her ability to learn, just everyone else's.  That has always stood out to me.  Her sensitivities manifest themselves in all kinds of ways, but the most concerning is food.  She has issues.

This is not a "picky eater" who wants chicken nuggets and ranch dressing with every meal.  This is a picky eater of a whole different type.  She has clear ideas about what she wants to eat, but she can't always say it.  She is a vegetarian, which is ok, because she loves beans, nuts, vegetables and eggs.  The hard part is getting it exactly right.  Her favorite lunch is a spinach salad with craisins, pecans, and balsamic dressing.  It can't be lettuce.  It can't be blueberry flavored craisins.  It can't be almonds.  It has to be exactly right, or she won't eat it.  And I mean that she will leave it completely untouched.  She can easily go an entire day without eating anything.  She will lay oon the floor and moan that her stomach hurts and that she is hungry but that everything is gross.  She likes hummus, but won't eat it if we don't have Wheat thins.  She likes clementine oranges, but won't eat them if they are too "squishy."  So even if I think I have the right food to offer her, sometimes I don't.

I worry that she has a true eating disorder.  A couple of years ago I took her to a counselor and the doctor.  She is definitely on the thin side, but does not appear to be anorexic or bulemic in any other way, she just truly has food issues.  A couple of nights ago she ate several bowls of lentil dal over rice exclaiming all the time how delicious it is.  Picky eaters don't eat lentil dal, do they?

I have come to believe that her food issues are related to her environmental sensitivities and I include her in shopping and food preparation, which helps.  On nights that she is with friends or at a school activity I make my son pork chops or minute steak, because I love him as well, and he complains that he doesn't get enough meat.    I always have my back up, which I got from Rache, actually, which is to offer Instant Breakfast.  Sometimes she has it for dinner, even (you know, like if the rice "looks gross" or I put lemon on the brocoli).  Instant Breakfast only works if we haven't reached the Point of No Return (see above writhing on floor/nothing is right point).

This morning I packed sack lunches for my oldest and youngest kids - peanut butter and jelly sandwich, granola bar, cupcake and an apple.  And I packed a bento box for my middle kid - nut crackers, cheese, a cucumber, clementine and a cupcake.  Middle also had a sack of canned food to take to school for the canned food drive.  I left it in the plastic sack from the grocery store.  She was digging through the cupboard when I was ready to leave.

"I need a canvas bag," she said.

"For what?"

"The canned food."

"It's in a sack."

"I know but it's a grocery sack."

"They're groceries," I said.

"Groceries are gross," she said.

Some issues I will try and help with.  Others?  Get over it.  I left.

I am in love with my dog.  She is beautiful.  She is so beautiful that people have stopped their cars, rolled down the window and told me how beautiful she is.  I generally walk her in the very early morning and late at night when there aren't a lot pf people out, but today we walked in sunshine and crunchy fall leaves.  People were out working in their yard and came over to pet her and tell me how beautiful she is.  A woman on her porch came down to the sidewalk to pet her and give her a tennis ball.  She exudes friendliness.  I have had Golden Retrievers before, but there is something very engaging about this one.

I am biased and will tell you that I think that all Golden Retrievers are beautiful.  They are also smart and good natured.  She rarely barks.

I named her Stella so that when I open the back door to let her in I can yell, "Stellllllllla!"

I have blogged every day in November so far.  I need to clean my house and do laundry and go grocery shopping.  I am behind on my Nanowrimo novel.  Also, I want to go to a movie today with my son.

I spent the day at an International Day of Dance event.  It was awesome.  I love dancing.  I am an improvisational tribal dancer.  We are based on Fat Chance Bellydance from San Francisco.  This is a variation of that - not the restaurant/cabaret sequins and hair tosses, this dance is costume-wise more ethnic and traditional.  And we generally don't solo (I never fucking solo) - it is a group effort.  When dancers are rehearsing choreography in the dressing room or giggling offstage, "This was a 4 person choreography with 3 people," I don't know what to say except that I don't know what the fuck I am doing on stage.  Music happens in 8 counts.  So does dance.  So we have a language that speaks in 8s and allows us to dance to any music any time with any number of people.  I feel very good about my performance today.

After school plans fell through yesterday, so I brought my 12 year old to the office with me.  He got a soda from the basement and then poked around my office.

"Tea?  Why do you have a basket of tea in your office?" he asked.

On the radio cabinet in my office, next to my little conference table where I meet with clients, I have a basket of condoms.  These are not your usual condoms.  These are flavored and colored and they are well packaged.  I work with the Nebraska AIDS Project and they hook me up with the best condom selection in town.  I keep the basket in my office and I have been pleased at how many of my clients take a few.  Usually they have a reaction like my son.  "Is that candy?" and then they realize what they are.

"Help yourself.  Take some for a friend," I say. 

And then they giggle and take a mint condom and a red condom or whatever.

I would like to have them in the lobby of my office.  Hell, I would like to have them in the waiting room at the juvenile court.  I think that there is power in not only distributing condoms but making people comfortable with them.  It is not a big deal.  I know that you have sex.  Have safe sex.  It's ok to take a condom.

But of course it was slightly different with my own kid.  Who was standing there holding a condom.

"That's not tea, that's a condom," I said.

"Oh!" he said as he dropped it back in the basket.  "Why do you have these?  Vanilla?!"

"I have them so that if people need them they can take them.  Condoms prevent the spread of disease and stop unwanted pregnancies."

He shrugged and lay on my office couch reading his book.

My son held a condom in his hand yesterday and we were both calm about it (though it took a lot of effort on my allegedly open minded, liberal part).  We can do this.

I am remodeling the bathroom (painted, scraped caulk, hung new mirror and cabinet, etc.) and I am at that stage where I need to have a plumber come put in the new faucet that I bought for the tub.  The cold water faucet leaks when you turn it on, so I have perfected the art of running a hot bath (entirely hot water) and then let it cool as I walk the dog and make coffee and clean the litter box, etc.  If you have ever had a shitty old house you know what I mean when I say that you get used to shit being broken and don't realize how oddly you are living until you have to explain to someone that the gas burner knob fell off so you use a wrench to turn on the stove or whatever.  I bought a new toilet paper roll dispenser and a hand towel ring for the bathroom and I have not been able to figure out how to hang them up.  I literally spent an hour trying to get the goddamn allen wrench to tighten the little bitty screw at the bottom of the dispenser and it would. not. stay. in.  (Incidentally, remember the periods after every word?  I think of that as a Xanga thing.)

Bill is even less of a handy man than me and he was skeptical when I asked for his help.  He gamely tried to hang the damn things and suggested pounding them into the wall, which I agreed to.  Anything.  I just want toilet paper hanging from the wall again.

But this morning he stumbled out of the bathroom with a smile on his face.  "Look!" he said with a flourish.

The toilet paper roll was hanging from the wall.

"We were putting the bracket on backwards," he explained.  "I needed to be half conscious apparently to figure out what we were doing wrong."

It's been a rough couple of years with Bill.  Several of you noted that you haven't blogged because you're happy and don't need to.  I haven't blogged for a lot of reasons, but when I think of my personal life I am unhappy and sad.  The last two years that Bill's oldest lived with us were really rough and harmful.  My teenagers are great, but also hurtful.  And my marriage has been battered around through a lot over the last few years.  We seem to continue to find ways to hurt each other and yet cling to each other.  I stopped running and drank much, much more.  We are doing very concrete things to fix things - counseling and exercise and cutting back on drinking / cutting drinking out completely, etc.  I recognize that it is hard to respond to blogs when people are in crisis.  Particularly when it is long term.  You offer advice or are irritated that the person can't see what needs to change or you just tire of hearing the same things over and over.  It's also just hard to not feel like you're being breezy.  Someone pours their hurt feelings out and what do you say without sounding flippant?  It's already happened to me as I have been reading blogs again.  I like the "like" button.  And the eprops, actually.  Read you, love you, don't know what to say, right?

Bill and I recently moved our room to the attic to give ourselves a bigger and more equitable space.  It prompted the other remodeling projects and right now the house is in not only disrepair, but disarray.  I could not find a comb or brush this morning when I was doing my hair, but there on the ledge in the bathroom was that goddamn allen wrench for the toilet paper roll.  I used it to part my hair, and then I got dressed and came into work.  Which is how I do things these days.  I just do what needs to get done and hope that I get some help along the way.  Like Bill hanging the toilet paper roll dispenser for me.

My two girls are in speech and debate.  This requires a different sort of dress up clothes than usual.  My Senior is in speech and at Target she easily picked out two skirts and tops that can interchange.  My Freshman is in debate, which means that she should wear a suit (because everyone in debate wears a suit, I guess?).  She did not have any luck at Target.  She tried on a brown tweed pantsuit that was too long, so she cuffed the pants to see if the rest fit, but when she came out of the dressing room, her older sister said, "Oh look!  It's Bilbo Baggins!"  We all laughed, because she did look a bit hobbit like.

Last night was a typical insane schedule night at my house with the added pressure of suit shopping at the end of it.  I was at the Hispanic Center until after 5pm and then had to feed everyone and get my son to his band concert.  I stayed just through his pieces and made sure that he had a ride home, and then I left the concert.  I rushed home to get my freshman to head to the mall.

I was amazed at how many people were there.  I hate the mall.  Mostly I hate the parking lot, but I also hate the mall.  It's outside my zone (midtown) and has those curving roads that make me insane (roads should be on a grid).  Who goes to the mall on a Tuesday night?  Apparently a lot of people.  So we hit the petite sections of the department stores and couldn't agree on anything.  So we branched out of the department store and tried a couple more shops with no success.  It helped to have a specific purpose.

"Can I help you?"

"Yes, we need a skirt suit in a size zero."

The answer is either yes or no. 

We finally got lucky at Charlotte Russe and she ended up with two little suits - one in a light brown and the other a black and red combination.  The construction seems flimsy to me and I don't think the suits will hold up past this debate season, but it will get us through to next year.  And hey, maybe she'll be a size 2 next year.  She'll have more clothing options.

Technically my son is 12 and not a teenager.  He and I spent two hours yesterday looking for a Detroit Tigers hat in Lincoln, Nebraska.  It took three sport shops, but we found one.  We added a Hawaiian shirt of his dad's, a moustache and his sister drew on some chest hair coming out of his shirt.

I filled the crock pot with cider, popped pop corn and heated up soup.

"Dinner?" I asked as he came in the kitchen.

"No, I need to get to Tommy's," Magnum PI said, and he went out the door with a pillowcase.

I got a text from the 17 year old. "Watching horror movies with Elena - home at 9," it said.

My 14 year old and her best friend came down the stairs wearing my huge dance skirts and scarves and too much makeup.

"What's the plan tonight?" I asked.

"We're gypsys!" she said.

"I see that, do you want some soup?  I also have pretzel bread and cheese."

Three boys knocked and stood on the front porch wearing vests, hats and holding instruments - a violin, a guitar made out of a cigar box, and tambourines.

"We're a gypsy band!" my daughter explained.

"Would the gypsys like some dinner?" I asked.

"Maybe later," they said politely.

It was a beautiful fall evening.  The streets are full of leaves and acorns.  I watched the gypsys move down the block singing about brains to a bluesy sounding song and decided that they were more trick than treat.  I took a bowl of soup to the porch and lit the jack o lanterns.  My husband texted me to let me know that he was still on the road and would be home in an hour.  The dog and I greeted trick or treaters and wished them all a Happy Halloween.

At 9 everyone came home and they all wanted soup, cider and bread.  The kids were clammoring for a bonfire, which would have been a nice end to the evening, but it was a school night, so I sent the other kids home and sent my own kids to bed.

I have clear memories of many childhood Halloweens.  I think that in some ways it is more memorable than Christmas.  At least I remember more Halloweens than Christmases.  And I feel the transition as my kids leave childhood.  I can only hope that they keep coming home for hot cider.