Tenterhooks

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A true story--two years ago, I was buying R a computer for Christmas. I didn't know when it would arrive exactly and so the day before the holiday, I warned him that "Santa" might not deliver. He told me to check the internet and find out, and when I told him that such a thing was not possible, he went to his grandmother. She took the invoice number from me, and used it to find the tracking number and then the tracking number to find out exactly where his computer was and then that his present would be there before the end of the day. It blew my mind. But not his--he knew, with a faith unbroken by experience, that all knowledge was available to us, if we just knew the way to look for it.

Directly quoted:

Tenterhooks were used as far back as the fourteenth century in the process of making woollen cloth. After the cloth was woven it still contained oil from the fleece and some dirt. A fuller (also called a tucker or walker) cleaned the woolen cloth in a fulling mill, and then had to dry it carefully or the wool would shrink. To prevent this shrinkage, the fuller would place the wet cloth on a large wooden frame, a "tenter", and leave it to dry outside. The lengths of wet cloth were stretched on the tenter (from the Latin "tendere", to stretch) using hooks (nails driven through the wood) all around the perimeter of the frame to which the cloth's edges (selvages) were fixed so that as it dried the cloth would retain its shape and size.^[1] At one time it would have been common in manufacturing areas to see tenter-fields full of these frames.

By the mid-eighteenth century the phrase "on tenterhooks" came into use to mean being in a state of uneasiness, anxiety, or suspense, stretched like the cloth on the tenter.

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Surprise and earnest observations

I am completely surprised to discover that a retainer hurts. I actually want to put a word that starts with f before hurts in that sentence, but I pretty much stopped using that word when I became a mom, and now that I'm a mom of a teenager (!)(a giant teenager--5'9" yesterday!!) I really can't use it. But wow, the retainer f'in hurts. Hey, but my teeth look great so I should not complain. (And yes, that is ironic: I would rather live without pain and be ugly than be pretty and hurting, even if that makes me unAmerican.)

And while I complain--since I really am complaining--why does the internet have to be so bloody earnest? I am really, really, really tired of sites that want to help me be happier or help me market myself better or help me...anything. I want to be reading a few more selfish, totally self-obsessed, and yet completely entertaining sites. And possibly this is just bad RSS work on my part, but wow, my feed just bored me silly today. Where have all the fun people gone? Not the nice fun people, but the fascinatingly bad fun people? I don't like reality television much, but I think maybe I used to get my dose of reality tv through blog-reading and somehow I can't find those people anymore. All the people I read now are distressingly...earnest. No offense to anyone I read, and hey, if you keep chickens, all is forgiven. I can read many an earnest post if there are chickens and/or goats involved. (Ooh, and/or teen lit. I am waiting on tenterhooks--and what would those be, I wonder? wikipedia, here I come--for the sequel to The Hunger Games. One month to go!)

Braces

Tomorrow is the day the orthodontial torture finally ends, and it's almost amazing how anxious I am about it. There's no way that getting braces off can compare to the pain of breaking the damn teeth in the first place, or the pain of having them pulled, or probably even the pain of having random wires break and poke me in the gums. Relatively speaking, this almost has to be easy--after all, kids do it all the time. And yet...I'm authentically scared of how unpleasant tomorrow might be.

I can half-remember back in high school, playing a game with Kim A. while we ran in gym class. The part that isn't quite clear is whether the game was coming up with places we would rather be, or places we would much rather not be. Was it that we could be eating ice cream or that we could be being eaten by bugs? Darned if I know. But at this moment in time, I would rather have food poisoning than get the braces removed and yet, I want nothing (almost) more than to be done with the whole stupid orthodontia thing.

The two Floridas

In my head, there are two Floridas. One, rarely seen, is vacation-land, a comfortable tropical paradise with a little bit of magic to it. It's flowers around every corner, armadillos and alligators and the occasional fox, boat rides at dusk across a quiet lagoon, feeling the slight prickle of a little too much sun, but never the burn. It's the smell of chlorine and french fries, the sound of roller coasters and happy screams but also cicadas and summer music. It's drinking Corona with lime on a quiet porch when it's so hot that just sitting still starts a little sweat.

And then there's the other Florida. It's the one where nobody knows how to drive in traffic, and the only nearby sit-down restaurants are Perkins and Chilis. It's the Florida of shopping malls and too much air-conditioning, grocery stores with aisles of junk food but not a single half gallon of organic milk. It's the Florida where people actually live, the land of dental visits and bug spray.

Only magic Florida and reality Florida seem to have merged.

I forgot to take out the trash last night, so at 5AM I was hauling garbage bags to the curb. But the sounds that early were amazing; not just cicadas, but an entire orchestra of frogs, so loud they could have been percussion instruments. I came back in and put the water on to boil, then let the dog out into the backyard. While I waited for my tea, I followed her out, and sat down to listen. I could see stars in the sky above me--Orion's belt, to be exact. And while I sat there, wondering how long it had been since I'd seen Orion's belt and trying to remember if I'd ever seen it in Florida before, a shooting star flew past. It was gone in a heartbeat, so fast that it was almost as if I'd imagined it. But I didn't. It was real, and just like every shooting star it was magic.

But magic in my very own backyard.

What is not perfect?

The answer is bugs! Zelda's picking up ticks and fleas, the porch has wasps, fire ants are actually building their nests in the walls, and R and I are both getting phobic about the random stray bug bites that keep appearing on our skin. Oh, and let's not even mention the mosquitoes. But all else is absolutely glorious.

In other news, the bird is chewing up my credit card bill, making little pieces with which she will pretend to build a nest. I like this use for a credit card bill better than any other I could have imagined.

Pool ball

The new water game uses the basketball. People get points every time we successfully throw the ball out of the pool and manage to get it to roll under the patio table. The dog tries to block it, of course. We lose points every time Zelda jumps into the water to retrieve the ball because we haven't passed it back out to her quickly enough.

Rory pointed out that if the dog understood the rules she could kill us on this game, but she doesn't really like the water enough to jump in if she doesn't have to. On the other hand, about thirty seconds is all she can stand before she starts to think we might not give the ball back, so we do have to move pretty promptly. She was definitely the big winner in our first game!

I wanted to post a picture of her drooling on her ball, but it appears the only ones we took were when her ball was hidden inside the barbecue. (My desperate move to get a break.) She has the tennis ball instead and she only plays with that when the basketball is well-hidden.

Sunshine on my bed

It doesn't make sense in Florida to love sunny rooms. It's so insanely hot during the summer that it makes sense to hide from the sun, to keep rooms dark and shady and cool. I know that. But I love having sun on my bed. I love lying across the bed at 8AM feeling the sunshine on my closed eyes, and reveling in the sense that there's an entire day ahead of me and it's going to be good, good, good. Sunshine does that for me. Shade does not.