Blue-Footed Musings

It may sound silly, but I feel more like myself since I started studying French again. Maybe it’s because of that fascination I had for it as a child. It’s something that’s been with me always, and something that I worked hard on during many years of my schooling. Then I simply dropped it. Once school was over, I had no easy way to continue my studies or any strong motivation to do so. I always thought I’d return to it someday, but without an actual deadline or a reason to take it up again, I didn’t. I allowed a whole aspect of my personality to wither up and nearly die.

It’s natural, I suppose. Over the course of our lives we have to let some dreams die. We grow up, and we grow out of things. That’s all fine and necessary. I just wonder if perhaps I should have been more careful about which dreams I let go of. Maybe some of them were the wrong ones.

As a child, I loved the sound of the French language. I begged my mother to teach me simple French phrases and how to say the alphabet in French (I remember writing the alphabet down like this: ah, bay, say, day, eh, eff, zhay, . . . ). I still love the sound of the language, even as I struggle to understand it. Among my favorite words learned over the last few months are “la libellule” (dragonfly), “le hululement” (hooting), and “mordre” (to bite).

• I am sick again. It must be a holiday. (Ha-ha. Almost. Valentine’s is just around the corner.)
• I have been playing around with Crossword Compiler, a program for constructing and editing crosswords. The ultimate goal is to get a crossword published in The New York Times. But I also downloaded the WordPress plug-in and figured out how to publish a crossword here on the blog (see previous post). The blog stuff was easy. Too bad creating an NYT-worthy puzzle is so hard.

• My husband bought a ton of books for the kids. Like we don’t have enough books. There are books everywhere. The books are taking over the house. Soon, like in an episode of Hoarders, we will have to give over this house to our stuff and buy a second home for us to live in.
• Some days my body seems to actively hate me, and some days the feeling is mutual.

• My parents visited us over the weekend. It was great to see them
• It didn’t feel like Christmas, though. I was hoping that it would somehow, and I had even left the tree up, but the magic wasn’t quite there. Anyway, my parents seemed to like their gifts, and we liked ours. I got some new books to read, which is of course the last thing that I needed but still one of the things I like most.
• I had thought that when my parents left they were going to take their car and leave us with their SUV, the reason being that the car is easier for my mom to drive. So I was really confused when my father insisted on taking the SUV instead. Oh, well. I prefer the car anyway. And it just goes to show that you can know people for your entire life but still not always be able to predict what they’re going to do.
• My father accidentally left behind his hiking gear: scarf, gloves, hat, jacket, and shoes. Now that I could have predicted! This is not the first time we’ve had to mail their stuff back to them.
• The house is cleaner than it had been for a long time. I hope we can keep it up for a while.
• Alas, now I have to put the Christmas tree away. 🙁

• Yesterday I got my annual mammogram done. Mammograms aren’t fun, but at least they’re fast. I was home within an hour of having left, and that was with at least 30 minutes of drive time. I wish all medical-related visits were so quick.
• This week we got a letter from the school vice principal about Marshall’s attendance, because he has missed more days than the school deems appropriate. The school has stopped caring about Covid and kids’ health. All they care about now is keeping the desks filled. I mean, at Livia’s middle school orientation, the principal said, “Don’t come to school when you’re sick. But also, don’t miss any school.” (Those weren’t her exact words, of course, but it’s what Livia and I both understood her to be saying.) I knew then that it was only a matter of time before we got one of these letters, but it still made me angry to get one, especially because I believe that we all got sick for Christmas because other parents are sending their kids to school sick. Once upon a time I would have called up the school to give them a piece of my mind. Instead, I bitched them out in my head and otherwise ignored the letter. Experience has taught me that that’s the best way to deal with such things.