CarpeBanana

Back to my brain again.

Mr Music is hard on jeans. “Hard on jeans” means a new pair is doing well to last a month without holes in at least one knee. Even a short month like February. So, every time we want to leave the house, I have to say, “Go put on some pants without holes in them.” What a mean mom.

Only today I said, “Pants with no holes,” and for some reason I am blaming on faulty wiring in my brain, have found myself humming “Horse with No Name” ever since.

So, in his honor:

In the first basket of laundry

I was lookin’ at all his pants

There were jeans and sweats and church pants, too

There were shorts, pjs, a kilt

The first thing I saw were Levis with a tear

And some Hanes with a hole

The knees were shot and the buttons popped

But still he says they’re fine

I’ve been through the wardrobe of a boy who must move

and he likes to do slides on his knees

when he’s with you, can’t forget ’bout his knees

’cause there ain’t no fabric a-coverin’ them

La, la…

My brain and I ramble through life, with one thing leading to another, like cars on a train, connected to each other, only not like a train, more like a rabbit warren or even an ant hill with constant turns and sidetrips.

I tend to assume everyone does this, and that all brains and owners ramble on either the same course I choose, or at least one parallel.

So, think of this entry as a test. See if you flow along with this track or if you would follow a different course.

Last night Miss Language & I had a walk to, through, and home from the mall. The bookstore had this on the clearance rack:

First stop for my brain: (stop and fill in your own)

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Hmmm… Van Gogh has a complete ear in that portrait.

Second stop: (and yours is?)

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So… is this before he cut off the lobe?

Third stop: (where are you in this?)

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Or maybe it was the other ear?

Fourth stop: (again, are you still thinking?)

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Or maybe he did the portrait in a mirror and so this is the reverse?

And then we pull into the station: (what is at your station?)

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I have got to blog this.

Two bonus points for anyone who has stayed aboard this long: First, Miss Language was able to parallel my tracks. Frightening, eh? And second, it was the left ear… so we still don’t have enough information to know why it appears intact here. Art history unit, anyone?

Discussion after lunch today:

Miss Language was reading random quotes from the Hitchhiker’s Guide books. She hit this one, “No one really knows what mattresses are meant to gain from their lives either. They are large, friendly, pocket-sprung creatures that live quiet private lives in the marshes of Sqornshellous Zeta. Many of them get caught, slaughtered, dried out, shipped out and slept on. None of them seems to mind this and all of them are called Zem.”

After a pause of just a second or so, Miss Dog Lover tersely and authoritatively replied, “That’s rubbish.”

Proverbs 19:21 Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand.

To A Mouse

~~~ Robert Burns

Some years back, this poem inspired a discussion between Miss Language and myself about just what the past tense of “gang” would be, anyhow. “Ganged?” “Gangled?” “Gung?”

You probably don’t want to know how long, and how many creative verbs we went through before we decided to keep it simple and settle on “Went.”

Every now and then I see something that makes me wonder if I am just on Candid Camera, or, if not, what has gone fundamentally wrong in the world, anyhow.

Today there was a discussion about PedEggs. We are TV free here, so I had no idea what a PedEgg was and felt deprived. I asked Google and now am somewhat sorry I did. Seems it is some sort of device for shredding cells (hopefully dead ones) off your feet. Yuck.

If you bop over to their site, you can read “testimonials”: “I could not believe what I saw when I dumped the shavings after just one use.” Yuck.

You get two Ped Eggs in an offer. You can even buy them wholesale. I’m thinking what a perfect item they’d be in among the jelly beans and chocolate bunnies in Easter baskets. Yuck.

And, tell me, which feature is better in this part of the blurb: #1 ~ The unique “egg” shape of the PedEgg not only looks great… or #2 ~ “Best of all, PedEgg has been designed to collect all the skin shavings in a convenient storage compartment… just what are we storing these skin shavings for?  Yuck.

We here are deep in the depths of grey February, and, as the Pirates of Penzance Pirate King sings:

For some ridiculous reason, to which, however, I’ve no desire to be disloyal,

Some person in authority, I don’t know who, very likely the Astronomer Royal,

Has decided that, although for such a beastly month as February, twenty-eight days as a rule are plenty,

One year in every four his days shall be reckoned as nine and-twenty.

And this is that year with nine and-twenty days, all of them grey and bonechilling.

SO ~~

there is nothing to be done about it but rejoice in a new word of the day, which this past week was:

echt

yes, you got it, echt. Sounds like a throat-clearing noise and how appropriate is that for what is so sweetly called “cold and flu season”?

The people at A Word A Day tell us this is an adjective meaning “authentic or typical.”

Well, the snow, ice, and sleet around here is all too echt for me. Echt, echt, echt.

This morning there was Miss Language, smiling in the midst of her schoolwork. I frown on too much smiling during the schoolday, so I asked what she was doing.

“Taking an Ogden Nash break.”

Naturally I had to have one, too. This particular gem stood out in light of election year news:

Everybody Tells Me Everything

I find it very difficult to enthuse

Over the current news.

Just when you think that at least the outlook is so black that it can grow no blacker, it worsens,

And that is why I do not like the news, because there has never been an era when so many things

were going right for so many of the wrong persons.

And in bad, sad Ogden Nash news, I found the poem I have quoted for years as:

Celery raw is good for the jaw:

Celery stewed’s more easily chewed.

is generally listed as being written as:

Celery, raw

Develops the jaw,

But celery, stewed,

Is more quietly chewed.

Clearly Thursday Next has been on the job here.

The world’s battlefields have been in the heart chiefly; more heroism has been displayed in the household and the closet, than on the most memorable battlefields in history. ~~ Henry Ward Beecher

The first and the great work of a Christian is about his heart.  Do not be content with seeming to do good in “outward acts” while your heart is bad, and you are a stranger to the greater internal heart duties. ~~ Jonathan Edwards

Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life. ~~ Proverbs 4:23

If you are a bit obsessive, you can read the First Annual SOS post here.

Mr Music knows I am watching for signs of Spring. Sunday he came to me with the sighting of the first robins in our yard. He explained they “do not look happy to be there” and later went so far as to say they had “a grumpy look on their faces.” He then demonstrated just what a grumpy robin face looks like but it only succeeded in making us all laugh.

Then in worship, we sang Loved with Everlasting Love and (though I did not especially like the hymn), I thought the second verse related well to musings of Spring: “Heav’n above is deeper blue, earth around is sweeter green,/that which glows in every hue Christless eyes have never seen” and I began thinking about what things Christless eyes do not see. I am reminding myself to watch for signs of Christ’s kingdom growing around me, not just for the buds and birds.

Background: Part of Miss Language’s assigned reading this week is The Communist Manifesto.

So, it was no surprise when I reminded her of her chore and she replied, “Yes. I have a few more pages to finish reading about the poor oppressed masses, then I will hang the laundry.”

Poor oppressed child.

She reminds me that this is in keeping with the time some years past when she was reading Dante’s Inferno and would leave with her book after lunch, and a merry, “Off to hell I go!”