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Adventures in glasses-wearing
So a little bit ago my dad, who is notorious for leaving his glasses lying around, was looking for them. We looked in the kitchen. We looked in the library, and I checked the bathroom while he went up to check his room.
Then I went into the living room and called, “I found your glasses, Dad!”
And I HAD found them.
On MY FACE.
*MY* glasses were lying on the coffee table, because I, too, have developed a terrible habit of leaving my glasses lying around (only since my eyes got to be about 45 years old, mind you, and Dad’s been doing it since at least his mid-thirties). I’d picked up Dad’s, which were on the kitchen table, after I’d eaten lunch.
I’d put them on. I’d thought, “Wow, God, how did my glasses get SO DIRTY since I last wore them?”
I took them off. I cleaned them. I thought, “Ugh, I didn’t do a good job, my right eye’s vision is poor.” I took them off again to check, but the lenses looked quite clean. I put them on and, no, my vision was still funny.
I took the glasses off AGAIN and tried to clean out the corner of my eye, in case that was where the vision problem was. Put them back on, nope, still fuzzy. “Christ,” I thought, “I only got a new prescription last July or something, has my vision changed again that much already?”
No. No, it hadn’t. Dad’s prescription and mine have always been quite close to interchangeable, but my right eye has always been worse than his, so while I was fine with the left lens, the right just wasn’t quite strong enough, BUT I DIDN’T REALIZE THE PROBLEM.
And NEITHER DID THE TWO PEOPLE WHO HAD _LOOKED AT ME_ WHILE I WAS WEARING DAD’S GLASSES!
It turns out that our glasses are shaped quite a lot alike, as well as being similar in prescription. Mine are purple, but dark enough, apparently, to be mistaken for Dad’s very similar black-rimmed glasses.
We’ve been laughing about it for about fifteen minutes now. :) :) :)
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several THINGS
Thing One: Ruth Negga is performing the title role in Hamlet in Dublin this fall AND I HAVE TICKETS FOR OPENING NIGHT.
I am trying to convince myself I shouldn’t also buy tickets for closing night, to see how the performance has matured. I really want to. But they’re more expensive. :(
Indy said, “Tickets for HAMLET? Is that like HAMILTON!?!?!?!?!” and was very disappointed to hear that no, it was not, and also that it wasn’t appropriate for 8 year olds. :)
Thing Two: I got the return address stickers for the much-delayed Redeemer Kickstarter, and they’re cute and I love them and I’m very pleased with them.
Thing Three: Indy and I have a game we play on the way to the zoo. There’s an enormous round-crowned tree just a little ways before the entrance, and when he was very small, I told him a dragon lived in it, so we always greet the dragon and have a chat with him on our way in to the zoo.
Last weekend we went to the zoo with the cousins, and Indy (who often pauses a game when we approach other people) thought maybe we shouldn’t say hi to the dragon this time, but I thought we should, and we explained the game to his cousins, who greeted the dragon despite their advanced ages of 13 and 15, and off we went to the zoo.
To my utter, like, eye-stingingly-bright, delight, on the way out, the older cousin said, without prompting, “Goodbye, Dragon,” quite solemnly and as though it was exactly what one always did at the zoo.
They’re good kids.
Thing Four: Deirdre and her younger son and I went to see Black Panther, which Deirdre had not yet seen. We didn’t know if her son would get there in time, nor if we could leave a ticket at the box office for him to collect, so I said, “Well, I’ve seen it three times, so I’ll wait for him so you don’t miss the beginning of the movie.”
“OH GOOD,” she said, “I couldn’t figure out how to ask without it being rude!!” Then we burst out laughing. :)
“WELL I GUESS I’LL STAND HERE AND WAIT FOR SEIRID,” she said, leadingly and not at all artificially.
“OH NO DEIRDRE, I’VE SEEN IT THREE TIMES, I’LL STAND HERE AND WAIT FOR HIM,” I said in the same tones, and then we fell on each other laughing. (Deirdre and I have a great time together. :))
Anyway, he showed up on time, having booked it from school, I CAUGHT A DITTO WHILE WAITING FOR HIM, and we all got into the theatre before the movie started.
During the first challenge scene she seized both our hands and curled up in horror in the chair, terrified of what would happen. During the second, she said, “WHY DO THEY HAVE TO DO THIS ON THE EDGE OF THE WATERFALL!”
She told me I’m not allowed to say she cried, though. :)
Thing Five: Before I’d gotten up this morning, Indy (who is not yet enrolled in a Dublin school, and so is doing school work at home) came up to inform me he’d done his school work already except he needed help with one part of the science experiment.
I came down to help, and he had in fact done his history and geography work already, was nearly finished with his science, and had only his spelling, language and math to go.
I know perfectly well that he did it because he wanted to be able to play his video game, but god damn if he didn’t earn it, AFAIC. :)
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A Brief Lesson on Feminism & Queen Elizabeth I, by Me
On the way home from school, Indy asked about King Henry, and I said there had been several of them, from about 1200 to about 1550 (I was wrong, they started in 1100, but close enough). I said Henry VIII was the last one, and that after him his son Edward had been king, and then his daughter Mary had been queen, and then finally his daughter Elizabeth had been queen for a long time, and she’d never married or had any children.
Why not, queried my child, and I said well, she wanted to be queen, and back then if she’d gotten married her husband would have been considered more important than she was.
Indy, baffled, said, “What?! But she was QUEEN!”
I said yep, but back then, and even still in a lot of ways now, people considered men to be more important than women (Indy gaped disbelievingly), so if she’d gotten married, people would have thought her husband was more important, and listened to him instead of her, and she didn’t want that. I said she’d considered getting married a lot of times, and had pretended she might to build political alliances–
“Oh *no*! That wasn’t nice!”
“Oh,” I said airily, “no, that happened a lot. Most of the time people, especially kings and queens and other nobility, didn’t get married for love. They got married because it would give them more land or more money.”
“So they would share,” Indy said, satisfied.
“Well, no,” I said, “see, if I had a lot of land, and I’d gotten married back then, my land would all become my husband’s. Women were basically owned by their husbands.”
By this time Indy was horrified. “*SLAVERY*!?”
“Yeah, pretty much,” I said.
Indy, completely horrified: “BUT THAT’S *WRONG*!!!! Mommy, I’m going to say this, and you might not like it, but *people weren’t very nice back then*!”
I agreed that they weren’t, and that things were somewhat better now, and that we all had to keep working until everybody believed men and women were equal. And then we talked about Victoria and Elizabeth II and then we were home. :)
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picture post: blue hair & disney & birthdays, oh my
I’ve been threatening for many years to dye my hair blue. Last week I picked up a bottle of temporary hair dye. I had hopes it would stick mostly to the grey, of which I have plenty:
although I had been totally unable to find anything on the internet which suggested it might. After some dithering, I applied it:
To my delight, it in fact did a pretty damn fine job of sticking to the grey without blueing the rest of it up much:
Also to my delight and relief, it does appear to be temporary. Two washes and it’s almost gone (it’s supposed to last 7-12, but I’d rather have it gone faster than not at all). I don’t know what my long term plans are for it, but it was interesting to try and kind of a neat little effect for a couple of days.
Unrelatedly, I popped by the Disney store in Dublin while birthday shopping for my husband and found that their Black Panther figurine set features THREE WOMEN!!!!!
I may have made a noise normally only audible to dogs. Or, in this case, perhaps cats.
They also had individual T’Challa and Shuri figures:
*screams gleefully*
We had a small but pleasant birthday for Ted, in which German chocolate cake and Marvel figures featured heavily, and I began knitting a scarf I owe someone.
I did not own a cat, the last time I knitted something….
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a busy bank holiday weekend
Young Indiana and I had a positively splendid, utterly exhausting bank holiday weekend while Ted was off gaming.
Saturday we defied the not-running trains to go to the zoo (a thing we would not have done if I’d known the trains weren’t running, but I didn’t find out until we got to the train station, at which point a bus was available, so…we went. Later than we intended, but we went.) We had breakfast out and went to the zoo and the lions were in fine form & I got the best picture of the crocodiles I’ve ever gotten:
lazy lion at dublin zoo 
murder logs! and there were magnificent lantern sculptures which will be lit up in the evenings for the next two months’ worth of weekends, which will be really cool and I can’t wait to go to see it (we have tickets for the 10th).
entrance to the Wild Lights display at Dublin Zoo 
DRAGON!!! 
Dinosaur! 
orangutang family Then we were invited, last-minute-like, to a friend’s Halloween party for her kids, and we went to that, which was lovely, and then we went and struggled to get home on the not-running trains, which involved being bussed out to Skerries and then put on the train that WAS running from there to Drogheda. By the time we got home we were utterly shattered but we’d had an astoundingly lovely day.
We started studying Irish together with DuoLingo, which is going pretty badly but we’re having a great time. We’ve done four days in a row! And Indiana’s doing the typing, which means it’s slow going but he’s learning to type and I’m genuinely impressed with how well he’s doing. He gets very annoyed with me if I tell him where the letters are, but he’s remembering them VERY well, so I’m trying VERY hard not to tell him. :)
Deirdre and her boys came out for dinner yesterday and since Ted was gaming I was forced to cook dinner! (Woe!) I made carrot, coconut milk & chickpea soup, which I’ve made before and which is very good indeed. I dug up a bunch of garden carrots and used them in it for texture (it’s a blendered soup, but I prefer my soup to have Things In, so I added chopped garden carrots, which were also colorful, so it was cool to look at) and everybody ate all of it, exclaiming over its numminess. And I fed them a loaf of Ted’s bread. :) And then the apple pie I made. So that was very successful.
homemade apple pie Today we went to see the My Little Pony movie, which, honestly, I expected to be pretty decent and which was in fact pretty decent. Indy was THRILLED with it, and I have become such a smoosh it made me cry at some point, and I was especially pleased with the end, where they did something unexpected that really emphasized the importance of accepting people as they are. And then we went out to lunch and went to the play zone where he ran himself ragged for a while, and then we came home where Dad, to my great relief, played some chess with Indy while I…well, nominally I went to work but actually I read up on the Mueller indictments and the Papadopolous guilty plea.
Ted returned home, having had an excellent weekend himself, and we all sat around talking politics, a discussion in which even Indy managed to make some good points/observations, including the astonished exclamation, upon hearing that there are people who are SO RICH they didn’t really see other people’s problems at all, much less thought they had to help with them in any way, “But that’s SO SELFISH!!!!”
(We’re probably doing okay, as parents. :))
Anyway, it’s been a really great weekend and I’m utterly exhausted from it all.
