Cold Spaghetti

This morning, properties behind on taxes went up for auction from the city. This is when properties with deliquent tax bills go to folks willing to pay the back taxes. If the owner doesn’t exercise their right of redemption, you get the property. A great opportunity if you’ve got some cash to sit for a little while. Jefferson Parish (next door to Orleans) had a similar process awhile back — where an inside connection gobbled up everything before the locals had a chance to bid. Orleans Parish pledged to do better, making an online process.

Paul and I registered at the website days ago. We checked out a few properties. This morning, Wonder Woman Hermanita Michelle came and took the kids to school so we could be ready for the 8am opener. We were. When we went to buy, the system did not recognize our payment source. Hmmmmm…..

I sent this note to them and cc:ed the News folks at the T-P, not that any of it means anything. I guess the good news is that someone is investing in the city — the bad news is that it’s the same old people profiting at the expense of others.

Dear New Orleans Tax Sales,

I would like to log a complaint to the “currently open tax sale” and officially request formal documentation of the auction process.

I attempted to buy several properties this morning, having registered myself and payment source several days ago. For some reason, when I attempted to buy these properties, the system refused to recognize my payment source. Whether deliberately manufactured or due to a process — one that was NOT outlined, described, or even suggested on the website — this “systems error” caused loss of auction to both myself and others. The phones to your office have also been unreachable all morning.

Therefore, I would like to know the formal process to protest this process, whom to contact and with what forms, as it arbitrarily denied my right to bid.

UPDATE: At around 8:30, the system magically recognized our payment source and we did purchase a lot on a street not far from the school. We feel certain that the city will say the system was so overwhelmed it randomly worked for some and not for others… but I’d be willing to bet that a search of new owners will not look so random…

Can the world just stop so we can catch up?

Eventually, I will post about the past two weeks. For right now, I just want to give a shout-out to the Big Man in Red, to whom I owe a great debt.

We have been (once again) finding our selves in serious contemplation of leaving Will on the steps of his Grandparents’ house and running for the border. In his highs and lows of development, he recently hit another Very Low Low. Back to having accidents. Biting his nails (not that this is ever stopped, but we noticed it getting worse). Talking in a baby voice. Being incredibly defiant, even having a few crying, stomping, kicking episodes — which were rare to begin and had seemed a thing of the past. Then Emmy pointed out that Ana had begun doing many of the same things, something she chalked up to the situation with the death of their teacher’s husband. (Lightbulb: these were all behaviors mentioned on that handy social-work provided form.) I sort of thought Will had handled it, talked about it, and was okay. Don’t boys tend to move on faster from emotional situations? Maybe not. Either he is acting out from confusion or stress, or he’s regressing at each birthday. Both are distinct possibilities.

Nevertheless, we had company (Paul’s Mom, my parents, my Brother and Sister-in-Law). We had a birthday party. We had a lot of stuff going on. And then, Saturday afternoon, we started to put up the Christmas Tree.

This is where Santa comes in. Will began to ask about presents and Santa and presents. The perfect segway for parental warnings of good behavior, lists of children who do not behave, and keeping to the straight and narrow for a bountiful Christmas morning. Presents from Santa seem to be quite a motivator, because we have had some really nice, helpful, sweet moments with him in the last day. Let’s hope it’s a sign he’s moving on into territory befitting to what Will tells me is more suited to a 4-year old. (He says 4-year olds don’t whine, hit, bite, cry, talk back, act defiant, or have a bad attitude.) Cheers to that!

From Aunt Julie to Will… Mommy’s Most Favorite Birthday Message.

Thank you to everyone for all the birthday wishes!

Deep thoughts to come.

How does a preschooler understand the complexities of love?

One of Will’s teachers was notified during school on Monday that her husband had been killed in a car accident. Just like that. Right before the holidays. Even with the strength of youth, the support of community, and the love of many, how does one survive that kind of loss? How can this terrible thing happen to someone so good, giving, and patient? I do not understand.

Will had questions, too. Thankfully, a social worker had provided talking points for how to address our kids’ questions… not that I had read it with enough detail. I had to wing it on gut and distant training, keeping my own stuff under control. He wanted to know if we could find children “to give Miss. Kynisha since hers got killed by the car.” So, first we talked about people, how we are irreplaceable, nontransferable. “If I lost you, Will,” I told him, “not even a hundred children could take your place.” It occurred to me that maybe he was struggling with understanding relationships and maybe he had placed the event and seeing his teacher so upset within the context of a relationship he could understand: one that involves a child. I tried to address it. I explained that Kynisha’s husband had died, “it would be like if Daddy died. If Daddy died, I would lose my husband.”

“But Daddy is a DADDY, not a husband.”

“Well, Daddy is a Daddy AND a husband. He is YOUR Daddy and MY husband.”

“Just like Katey is my husband.”

“Kate is your sister, Will. She is your sister.”

“Kate is my sister AND my husband.”

Pause. Refocus on the important parts. “Kate is very important to you. If she died, you would be really sad, right?”

Very very quietly: “Yes.” Then, “Mommy? I need to be quiet now because I feel really really sad for Miss. Kynisha.”

“Me too, Will, me too.”

I’m worked up. Too much anxiety to sleep. Too heartsick to be still. Too tired to concentrate on grading.

To wind down, I’m wasting time on an interesting meme BC4 did awhile back. In it, you take the first 106 books from LibraryThing tagged as unread. (I just copied BC4’s list.) Then, you:

Bold what you have read, italicize your did not finishes, strikethrough the ones you hated, put *asterisks next to those you’ve read more than once, and put a + cross in front of the books that are on your bookshelf.

This was the result (with some commentary)…

• Jonathan Strange & M. Norrell
• Anna Karenina
• Crime and Punishment
• +Catch-22
• One hundred years of solitude (On my short-list of ‘books I want to read, and soon, because I can’t believe I haven’t read them’)
• Wuthering Heights
• The Silmarillion
• Life of Pi: a novel
• The Name of the Rose
• Don Quixote
• Moby Dick
• Ulysses
• Madame Bovary
• +*The Odyssey
• Pride and Prejudice
• Jane Eyre
• A Tale of Two Cities
• The Brothers Karamazov
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
• War and Peace
• Vanity Fair
• The Time Traveller’s Wife
• +*The Iliad
• Emma
• The Blind Assassin
• The Kite Runner
• +Mrs. Dalloway
• Great Expectations
• American Gods
• A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
• Atlas Shrugged (I refuse to read Ayn Rand on principle)
• Reading Lolita in Tehran
• Memoirs of a Geisha
• Middlesex
• Quicksilver
• +Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
• The Canterbury Tales
• The Historian
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Love in the Time of Cholera (On my short-list of ‘books I want to read, and soon, because I can’t believe I haven’t read them’)
• Brave new world
• The Fountainhead
• Foucault’s Pendulum (Not read this, but I have read plenty of Foucault)
• Middlemarch
• Frankenstein
• The Count of Monte Cristo
• Dracula
• A Clockwork Orange
• Anansi Boys
• The Once and Future King
• The Grapes of Wrath
• +*The Poisonwood Bible
• 1984
• Angels & Demons (Not read it, but I did read The DaVinci Code, which was enough literary torture to convince me to steer clear of Dan Brown)
• The Inferno
• The Satanic Verses
• Sense and Sensibility
• The Picture of Dorian Gray (I know I started long ago, but I’m not sure if I finished it?)
• Mansfield Park
• One flew over the cuckoo’s nest
• To the Lighthouse
• +*Tess of the D’Urbervilles
• Oliver Twist
• Gulliver’s Travels
• Les Misérables
• The Corrections
• +The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
• The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
• Dune
• The Prince
• The Sound and the Fury
• +Angela’s Ashes
• +The God of Small Things
• A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present
• Cryptonomicon
• Neverwhere
• A Confederacy of Dunces (Another top must-read and soon)
• +A Short History of Nearly Everything
• Dubliners
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• +Beloved
• Slaughterhouse-five (I don’t feel a pressing need to read this, yet I’m a bit embarrassed that I haven’t)
• The Scarlet Letter
• Eats, Shoots & Leaves
• The Mists of Avalon
• Oryx and Crake : a novel
• Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
• Cloud Atlas
• The Confusion
• Lolita
• Persuasion
• Northanger Abbey
• +*The Catcher in the Rye (I can’t believe this book is on this list.)
  
• On the Road
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame
• Freakonomics
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (I refuse to read it on principle)
• The Aeneid
• Watership Down
• Gravity’s Rainbow
• +*The Hobbit
• In Cold Blood
• White Teeth
• Treasure Island
• David Copperfield
• The Three Musketeers

Observations… although some on the list I had “issues” with one way or another, I couldn’t say that I didn’t like any of them. (The only books I can think of that I really haven’t liked are Snow Crash and anything by Hemingway.) I’m also impressed that I’ve got so few on the bookshelf (an academic who purges books!) The “pluses” are therefore, by definition as something I’ve kept, books I really enjoyed. There were a number of books I’d never heard of on the list. A good exercise, if only because it reminded me that there are some fiction books that I really am enthusiastic about reading some day (I tired of fiction awhile back and haven’t been able to re-engage.)

Thanks to the thoughtfulness of some of Paul’s coworkers, he is getting disability for last week and this week — a welcomed relief since now he is not eating through his precious vacation time as he recovers. This has made us feel so much better; Paul may not be able to drive or work long hours, but he can catch up on little things… like pulling the family video off of tapes and burning it onto disc AND drawing up plans on graph paper for the back of the house. We’re trying to look at this as an extra bit of time to get really prepared for the renovation (since we are seriously delayed at starting it)… pricing out doors and windows, deciding on materials.

Paul’s Mom left this morning and we are officially on our own. We were really lucky to have her here; if Paul had to loose his appendix, we’re glad it happened the day his Mom was scheduled to arrive. One more pair of hands offers many moments of respite for me… they let me sleep in little two mornings and have generous time in the bathroom to do things working Moms only dream of… like brush my hair and floss. I’m the only driver now which brings one more logistical issue to the already overwhelming mess of kids, class, guest speakers, assignments, and grading. Through on party-planning, holiday prep, house plans, Paul care-taking, and general things like laundry and meals… wow. I have absolutely no idea how single parents manage. Thank goodness I have the Abeona Village helping out with the kids each day.

The assignments I had intended to turn back in tomorrow? Five are graded out of the two hours I worked on them. I’ve got 38 more to go. I’d really like to finish them on Wednesday before family arrives. I have high hopes for down time this holiday weekend!

In the chaos of the past two months, we had completely dropped the ball with Will’s 4th birthday planning. Actually, maybe that is not quite fair… we had been thinking about it and researching/discussing options, but not made any choices. We knew that any party had to offer decent bouts of physical activity. Ideally, it needed to include Kate. Because we didn’t want to be limiting in our invites, we wanted it to be flexible and open enough that the kids from the school could attend. We also wanted to limit the amount of work we had to do to a minimum — in the party planning, party hosting, and kid-watching departments. The weather is typically beautiful in November, but can turn on a dime… is it safe to plan an outdoor party, we asked? Do we want to rent a big inflatable and put it in the park? (We nixed this for the logistic, kid-watching, ease of event issues.) Maybe at a local gym? We’ve been to one of these and it was great — although it is sort of limited to a set number of kids. (We nixed this for time — too close to the date — and my inability to commit.)

Finally, we decided on Gymrompers. We attended a great 3-year old party there last year and it is a great place for a party… but maybe best for 2s and 3s? I am having a hard time with feeling like a bad Mom (are we choosing a place better for Kate than for Will?) but am hopeful it will be fine. Our worry is that Will (joined by older classmates) may descend into The Crazies and be too much for an indoor space (although it is a big indoor space.) Paul noted that this could be the case anywhere, so we shouldn’t sweat it. I think that I will feel guilty and second-guess myself no matter what I do.

Gymrompers was booked solid for weeks — but suggested the Friday morning after Thanksgiving. This sold us: family in town, folks wanting something to do, and two days after Will’s actual birthday. So, we finally have a date, time, and place.

Thank goodness I remembered the invitations. Without Paul’s reminder last night, they may not have gotten made!

Will made some fantastic TURKEYS — of the hand cut-out variety. On the back of each is the party information. He took great pride in decorating each individually.

For example, this one is happy (note smiley face) and has a tail. (Or is laying an egg, depending on your interpretation.)
This one is happy, has a nose, and one foot.

This one is sad (note frown), has three legs, two tails, and ten eyes (“his name is ‘Ten Eye.'”)This one is both happy AND sad (note smiley and frown), has a belly button, and one very big foot.
This one is also happy and sad (although the frown does look a bit like a nose) and Will tried to write the name of his friend “JAMIE” on it. Will prefers to write backwards, which is why he wrote the letters he remembered (JME) from right to left.
Here he is, hard at work with Nana. He did a GREAT job making his invitations!

Paul is home and pretty chipper, all things considered. He has a two-week reprieve of all strenuous activities, which means the gutting of the back of the house we’d been planning for weeks is out of the question. So is the continued gutting and construction we’d been planning over Thanksgiving… and during the three days vacation Paul had planned to take around the holiday. Plans? What plans? Apparently they are very overrated.

But he’s okay and that is what matters. It matters so much that it is even important enough for us to delay having a bathtub… and really, there is not much out there more important than this.

I finished and submitted the fellowship application. I owe special thanks to my friend in CA – the Sartre to my deBeauvoir – who came through at the last minute to help read when I couldn’t anymore. Won’t know of anything for 6 months, but it’s done. Maybe 2008 will be a better year?

Paul is in one piece, minus an appendix. He went in sometime after 5am and was in recovery by 7:30 and in the room around 9am. Although the surgery went well, he had some post-operative complications with fever and trouble oxygenating. So, he may not go home today.

Right now, he is mostly comfortable, off oxygen, making jokes, and swollen from fluids. I am enjoying the room’s reclining chair and great internet to finish my fellowship application due tomorrow (does the universe try to time these things all together on purpose?) Although he has asked, I’ve refused him access to the computer until he is well enough to proof-read my essays (which means he’ll not be online for awhile). Paul’s Mom arrived this morning (pre-planned trip) and is here in the room, too. The kids are good and at school; we’ll bring them to see Daddy later today.

He loves the well-wishes so please feel free to send ’em on!

Paul is in the hospital awaiting surgery for appendicitis. He is temporarily happy on meds and will be happier when the offending organ is out. Keep thoughts positive for him and will update soon.

UPDATE: 1:21am. Paul is going in for surgery around 5 or 6am. His appendix had not ruptured (as of 7:30pm) so they are letting him wait a few hours to clear out some emergencies. I’ll drop the kids off at school and join him in the hospital. Apparently, they do these things laproscopic-ly now, so he may even get discharged later in the day! Keep hopes high for a quick recovery!