Nothing To See Here

The post I didn't post.

So, here's the happy little post I was writing over the weekend and didn't post in favor of sharing my obsession with the c**** spiders.  I did, by the way, give the student who introduced me to those spiders a good talking-to.

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I have discovered that Paul and Ian can happily hang out together without fighting for hours, as long as they are supposed to be doing something else.  After they pick up the the living room, they are allowed to walk down to the candy shop. Despite being excited about the candy shop, and despite the fact there are only about five things on the living room floor that need to be picked up, they have spent the last two hours lolling about and talking about video games and middle school.  Now Ian is hopping around the house in a pillowcase and Paul is rolling around in a wicker laundry hamper.

And now for something musical...

Paul is not a particularly skilled violinist, nor is he particularly devoted to the art.  Playing violin, in Paul's eyes, is just something he does.  He plays very matter-of-factly, neither complaining about practicing (usually) nor eager to do it.  He is not competitive; it would simply not occur to him, for example, to worry about the fact that the one other kid who started the same January he did has progressed considerably faster.  Yesterday, however, I saw him suddenly more invested in playing well than he ever has been.

We arrived at Paul's group class a little bit early, so for a few minutes Paul and another boy were the only kids there.  This other kid is a little older than Paul and quite a bit more advanced, and as far as I know, the two have never spoken directly to one another.  While they were waiting for the rest of the class (and the teacher) to trickle in, the other boy started to play one of the Christmas songs the kids are working on for the upcoming Christmas concert.  Since, as I said, this kid is a much better player than Paul, it sounded good.  Almost immediately, but casually, as if he had JUST BEEN about to start playing anyway, Paul began to play a different one.  Paying more attention to his form than usual, he carefully held his violin just as high as the other kid's, a look of concentration on his dirt-smudged face.  The kid went on to another song. At first they just occasionally glanced at each other, as if they Oh! just happened to notice there was another kid playing, but soon they were having an honest-to-goodness show down. 

The kid starts "Joy to the World."  Paul counters with "Jolly Old St. Nicholas."  The kid comes back with "Away in a Manger;" Paul launches into "We Wish You a Merry Christmas."  They circle each other, eyes locked, fierce gunslingers in the Old West.  Short, carol-playing gunslingers, trying to look casual.

Unpleasant.

I've been gradually writing a nice post about the kids this weekend, but I have an urge to unload my latest problem here instead.

It's camel spiders.

Also known as camelback spiders.

These are hideous, aggressive, terrible spiders that can be the size of dinner plates.  DINNER PLATES.  They can run ten miles an hour, which I will point out is faster than many people can run.  More to the point, faster than I can run.  The only good thing about camel spiders is that they live in deserts far away from me, mainly in Iraq.  I have never seen one in person; indeed, I had never heard of them until a few days ago.  You'll notice I did not put up a nice photo like I did with the muskrat.  That is because I do not hate all of you.

But then one of my 101 students turned in a essay profiling his combat boots.  It was a pretty good essay, but one of the things his combat boots had done when he was stationed in Iraq was help him "run away from camelback spiders the size of my two hands together."  "You have GOT to be kidding!" I wrote in the margins, not thinking too much more about it at the time, but over the weekend that phrase kept coming back to me.  "My two hands together."  People, this is not a small man.  His hands are not tiny.

So finally, after these horrible words had been rattling around in my head for a couple of days, I Googled "camelback spider." 

Oh. My. Word.

The more common name seems to be camel spider, and technically they're not spiders at all because they have ten (count 'em TEN!) legs.  Those extra two legs, by the way, do not make them less scary.  "Oh, well, I'm only afraid of spiders, and that giant monstrosity is technically a related arachnid called a solpugid, so therefore my skin does not crawl when I see enormous tan spiders-with-ten-legs that eat lizards."  No, that is not what happens (though you can see the lizard-eating on YouTube).  I don't give a rat's ass about those two legs; camel spiders are the most terrifying things I have ever seen in my life, and now my poor crazy mind is in a groove where I keep seeing them.  I open the cabinets to put away dishes and imagine a camel spider spread out over the stack of dinner plates.  I look at the flower pattern on my bedspread and I see interlocking camel spiders.  I am afraid to go to sleep tonight.

Don't think about camel spiders.  Don't think about camel spiders. Don't think about camel spiders.

So I'm feeling pretty good about my parenting just now.

Not because my kids are evidence of any kind of good parenting.  On the contrary.  Paul, for example, defies the most basic standards of personal hygiene.  He's a nice kid, sure, but he consistently embodies a level of filth that leaves me in the mind of Pig Pen, or perhaps a Dickensian orphan who has time-traveled to gain access to markers. I wince when we're in public and I suddenly realize his filthy shirt and pants are complemented by brown smudges on his neck, dirt up to his elbows, and blue Sticky-Tack in his hair.  Even washing doesn't seem to make all that much difference.  He is the only person I know who can come out of the shower with shampooed hair but dirty hands.  Dirty hands?  Even if you skimp and don't get around to washing all the parts of yourself, wouldn't you have to at least be holding soap in your hand part of the time?

Lest this post turn into a list of my children's faults, allow me to (ironically) get back to complimenting myself on my parenting.  An article on Time.com, "Can These Parents Be Saved?" addresses the issue of over-parenting.  This has always kind of baffled me, probably because I am too selfish and lazy to do it myself.  I can check every one of Ian's grades and assignments online now that he is in middle school, but I hardly ever think to do it.  Paul walks the half-mile to and from school by himself because he did it with Ian last year, he likes to, and I like not having to transport him. The kids are great at making their own healthy breakfasts and lunches--something I consider a valuable skill--but they are great at it mainly because otherwise they might not get any.  My mother considers this actual neglect, by the way, but I want to go on record as saying that Matt or I do always make them dinner, and I usually remember to shout "Eat something!" in their direction at regular intervals.

Anyway, my favorite paragraph of this article states what I have maintained for years: that kids in America are the safest kids have ever been in the history of humankind.  The paranoia so many parents have about their kids' safety is pretty much unfounded.  Sure, there are dangers, but the biggest dangers to children's well-being seem to be issues like obesity and stress, not abduction or trick-or-treating. 

And on that note, I'm going to send Ian and Paul outside to run laps around the block in the pitch dark.  Just kidding.  It's time for Paul's shower.

No cheerful woodland creatures in this one.

Today I'm going to interrupt my regularly-scheduled narcissism with a few words about someone else, my husband.  It will only be a few words, though, since Matt has a more-highly developed sense of privacy and personal pride than I seem to have.  "Do you have any boundaries?" he used to occasionally ask in response to my tell-all posts on Paul's old Caringbridge site.  "Any at all?"  Hmm. Good question.  However, nothing I'm going to say today is anything people who know us don't already know.

My whole family helped write the little description under this blog title.  My kids are  "description-resistant" because Ian kept coming up with more and more superlatives to describe himself but didn't care for some of my more-realistic adjectives, while Paul just wanted to be called "nice."  Matt and I together came up with his descriptive phrase, "increasingly-gimpy-but-charming."  We had a discussion about the placement of hypens, with Matt initially lobbying for no hyphen between "increasingly" and "gimpy."  This, I pointed out, would imply that he was becoming more charming with every passing day as well as becoming more gimpy, when in fact his level of charmingness has remained fairly stable over the years. 

If you're thinking that "gimpy", by the way, is not a very nice word to describe someone who a physical disability that results in a gait disturbance, you would be correct.  I think it's one of those words that you get to use only if you actually have such a disability, or are married to someone who uses it.

Matt has a rare and incurable neurological condition called adrenomyeloneuropathy (AMN), which is the adult-onset form of adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD).  AMN/ALD is an x-linked genetic disorder, which means that it is passed down through the X-chromosone and only seriously affects males.  Females with the gene are carriers.  All males who inherit the gene will develop either ALD or AMN.  Symptoms are caused by demyelination of the nerve sheaths.  Without myelin, nerve signals cannot travel where they need to go.  If signals cannot travel, the nerves themselves become not so much useful.

If symptoms present in childhood as adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD), the disease is devastating.  Demyelination happens in the brain, causing a boy to lose all his faculties one by one until he is in a vegetative state, a process that typically takes about two years.  It is always fatal.  For those of you old enough to remember the 1993 Susan Sarandon/Nick Nolte movie "Lorenzo's Oil," that movie is about ALD.  

If symptoms present in adulthood, the disease is called adrenomyeloneuropathy (AMN) and is usually much milder, though there is a wide variation of symptoms and severity.  More than half the time, demyelination is confined to the spine. 

Matt (along with his two brothers) inherited AMN/ALD from his mother's x-chromosone.  It also means that if Matt had had daughters, they would have had a 50% chance of inheriting the gene.  More to the point, though, it means that Matt's sons are 100% free and clear.  Instead of Matt's problematic X-chromosone, they have my stellar, disease-free one.  No worries there.

If you click on the links above, and if you know Matt and have seen him walking around,  you will quickly realize that so far, Matt has been extraordinarily lucky in the mildness of his symptoms.  There is no doubt that they will progress, and we don't know when, how, or how quickly, but so far he has been incredibly fortunate. 

Not everyone in his family has been.  Both of Matt's brothers are far more severely affected than he is.  Also, about 14 years ago, when Matt and I had been married just a couple of years, his cousin Zach was diagnosed with ALD at age 7 or so; it is because of Zach that the rest of the family was tested and diagnosed.  Zach passed away a few years ago.

And finally, the fact that prompted this post.  Today, Matt is attending the funeral of his cousin Chris, who died of AMN this past Wednesday.  He was 43.

I do a lot of walking.  I do this because I hate exercise and am pretty sure I will live the rest of my life without ever joining a gym, and yet I like sleep.  When I walk, I sleep.  When I don't walk, I don't sleep.  Also, walking seems to make me better fit for human company; when I go too many days without walking, people don't seem to like me as much.  I would go running, but I need to save up all the running energy I may have.  If I'm ever being chased by a bad guy or a bear, I want to be fresh.

So I walk.  It's always the same walk, a loop from my house that is part sidewalk, part bike path, and part nature trail that circles through a marsh.  This is a perfect walk for me, for a couple of reasons.  One, I don't usually see people I have to say hello to, and two, this walk allows me to experience nature.  I don't really like nature.  I'm not likely to seek the natural world out on my own, but my walk forces me into it and I end up noticing the way the marsh changes through the seasons.  Feeling connected to the earth, the cycle of life...all that crap. 

My walk can be dangerous, though.  Unless I am with a friend, I'm always listening to podcasts as I walk, earbuds stuffed in my ears, which means I am easily startled.  Bicyclists zoom by, calling "On your left!" as if that's supposed to mean something, and terrifying dogs lunge at me from the other side of fences.  Yesterday I almost had a heart attack when a duck suddenly took off through the water a few feet away from me, and frankly, even the fierce little attitudes of squirrels in the fall can make me uncomfortable.

I do have a marsh friend now, though, and this afternoon I saw him for the first time since spring.  It's a muskrat.  Last spring I first saw what I thought was some kind of big nest, maybe for a goose or something, but then one day I saw this little head moving through the water.  Feeling like the children's character Stanley with his Great Big Book of Everything (in the later episodes, once the book had turned into a computer), I looked up the aquatic mammals living in the area and decided the creature was a muskrat. 

Somehow, this twenty minutes I spent on the internet back in April has made me feel very close to my muskrat, as if by naming him (as a muskrat, not Frank or Bob) I am at least partially responsible for his existence.  So today when I saw him gliding through the still water I got so excited I even took out my ear buds for a moment.  Muskrats are fairly silent animals, so having them out was much like having them in, but for me, that's about as intense as communing with nature gets.  So I stood there watching for a minute, until my muskrat swam away into the reeds.

Too lazy to pour....

This post is nothing but a testament to my laziness.  I am sitting on the couch with my laptop, thinking I should get up and make the pie I plan to make for dinner, but I cannot bring myself to move.  I have read a bunch of salon.com articles, checked the weather, and my crops are all harvested in Farmville, so what else do I have to do? 

Well, nothing.  I'm sort of on vacation, because my college is closed tomorrow for Veteran's Day and I'm in some sort of bizarre in-between time where I have no grading or class planning to do.  Also, my yard is leaf-free, or at least it will be if we're lucky enough to get a good stiff wind out of the west.  So I'm totally free until Friday.  (Unless, of course, you were planning to call me to see if I could help you move furniture or do yard work, in which case I just remembered I have some important stuff I have to do.)

So, what to say?  The children are well.  Ian has taken up a new hobby, the Japanese art of dorodango, which sounds a lot fancier than what it actually is, which is making balls out of mud.  Paul gave me a long description of a "very fun" game he played at recess that seemed to involve being pushed off the playground equipment.  He didn't mention being "surprisingly good" at that, but we'll wait and see.  After a bit of a break last week, Matt is back to being very busy with his work.  As for myself, of course, I'm burning the candle at both ends what with all the books and TV shows and Guitar Hero vying for my attention.

A fantastic day of invigorating physical labor while enjoying the wonders of nature *

Our house has a lot of trees around it.  One time over the summer I heard something on the radio about calculating your carbon footprint.  One fact that gave me comfort as I was feeling vaguely guilty about the amount of energy it takes to heat and cool a a drafty 135-year-old house was hearing that having big trees shading your house made a lot of difference in its summertime energy use.  We have lots of big trees shading our house.  Good for us, I thought.

Bad for us, I think now.  I hate trees.

This morning, our entire yard was one of the few on the block that was still ankle-deep in leaves.  This evening, after spending almost all day raking and bagging forty-five (45!!!) bags of leaves, part of our yard is still ankle-deep in leaves.  How is that possible?  It was like the reverse of one of those tiny cars that clowns keep coming out of.  Matt and I would fill bag after bag of leaves, and the giant heaps of leaves we'd raked up never seemed to get any smaller.

Matt and I started the day with the best of intentions, raking-wise.  The whole family was going to rake (this was made very clear to the children), everyone would stay in good humor, no one would argue or nag, and we were all going to sleep soundly this evening enjoying the satisfaction of a job well done.

One out of four ain't bad.

There was rather more bad humor than good humor, there was both arguing and nagging (more so, I must admit, on the part of the grown-ups than the children), and the job's not actually done.

I am fairly sure, though, that Matt and I will sleep pretty damn soundly.

                                                                                           * heavy sarcasm