Back home again

Tomorrow, provided it isn't storming, I guess I start chasing bees again.

I DID find the titles of a couple books that may be useful - one may be out of print but possibly a bit of searching will at least get a copy I can obtain on loan through ILL. (Our inter-library loan is pretty good on my campus. It has to be, given the typical dwindling library budget...). I found another one, a more general book, of which I want to buy my own copy. It's $95 (or at least that was the price on the library copy) but will be well worth it - it is a huge book on the insects of North America, and as I am the closest thing my department has to an entomologist right now, I am the one people come to with "mystery bugs." Most of the time it's pretty basic stuff like, "I killed these 'bees' that were chasing my kid. Did I do a bad thing?" (And it turns out the "bees" were yellow jackets, and honestly, I don't have a lot of compunctions against killing yellow jackets if they are harassing people in their living areas. I had some bad experiences with some ground nesting ones that took up residence in our backyard when I was a kid....) Or it's some kind of garden-eating beetle, like a bean beetle or a Colorado potato beetle, both of which I already knew when I was 8 or so (thanks to my mother paying me a penny for every one I caught and removed from the garden). But once in a while there are weird things I don't know, and Bugguide.com can take a long time to search.

I knitted a lot. I finished (totally, even got the buttons sewn on) the Central Park Hoodie. That was the biggest thing. The other things are all "starts" of new projects.

The biggest thing was that my brother, sister-in-law, and niece came for a visit. She has changed a lot - she was six weeks old when I last saw her, now she is almost 8 months. She's not talking yet, but she laughs a lot and sometimes will babble. (I noticed the babbling the most when we went out for lunch in a noisy restaurant; it seemed like she either felt she needed to compete or that that kind of noise was "the thing to do." Oh, she did make sounds other times, just not to the extent she did at the restaurant). She has surprising expressions. I find it really hard not to read too much into them.... she has a very odd "dubious" look where she kind of wrinkles up her brow and really does look like she's not sure about whatever is going on. Or her smiles....there's almost a *knowing* quality to them that is a little unsettling. (Don't some cultures believe that very small babies know all the secrets of the universe, but forget them as they grow into the "adult" world?)

When I was holding her - typically, I'd have her on my lap facing "out" so she could see (and anyway, I'm close enough to needing bifocals that it was hard to focus on her face if I had her turned and lying against my chest, facing me with her face close to mine) - she'd periodically turn and look at me, like "Who on earth are you and why am I sitting on your lap?" But eventually she got to the point that she'd smile at me when she saw me, which I guess is a good thing. (Like most babies of that age, she finds any kind of peek-a-boo game pretty compelling and amusing)

She erupted her first tooth while she was there. Her parents are starting her on trying solid food. (I know, it seems very early to me as well, but their pediatrician suggested it....) Lots of different things....she likes avocado slices, which I suppose makes sense (easy to gum) and she also liked the red cabbage my mom made one evening for dinner. (They say her favorite thing is small bits of plain cut-up meat: cooked chicken, pork roast....). I will admit that one way in which I am not very maternal is that I find it very hard to watch a small baby who is learning to eat without losing my appetite a little. I know she can't help being uncoordinated and a bit drooly so I just tried not to watch her.

(Actually, in general I do not think I am very maternal. The degree of attention a small child requires must be exhausting, and I wonder at the people who do it as single parents - between my brother and sister-in-law it seemed like a great deal of effort and worry. I would find it mildly terrifying to be that responsible for another life, a life that can't even get its own food or water or even really tell you what's wrong when something's wrong, other than by a generalized cry. No, I never babysat as a kid, the closest thing I did was tutoring kids who were already 10 or 11.... I know people figure it out and do it, but looking from the outside, the amount of care required, the amount of "Am I doing it right?" just seems really scary to me.)

Then again, there is something kind of magical about being able to make someone SO HAPPY by just playing peek-a-boo with them....

The weather while I was up there was cool and mostly sort of overcast. It reminded me of some of the early-summer days when I was a kid. I do think one thing I miss about the climate where I had my childhood summers is that occasional overcast day....here, once summer arrives, it's almost solid white-hot sunshine and cloudy skies until October. And it also doesn't cool down as much at night - one night while I was in Illinois it got down into the 40s. And every morning was something I remembered as a kid, but don't notice here - it's cool and dampish and the birds are singing and it feels kind of like the world was remade all new overnight. Here, in the summer, a lot of the time it feels like the same old sticky overbaked world. Funny. I didn't know if that feeling was more the result of the weather/climate differences, or if it was because, as a kid, I was in many ways more happy-go-lucky and more optimistic than I am as an adult. (And yes, for all my worrying as a child, all my real or imagined rejections at the hands of my peers, I think I was still more optimistic than I am now. Or perhaps, more expecting good surprises. Now, I generally expect surprises to be bad. I don't know when that started but coming home to a blinking phone-message light, or getting an e-mail at work that isn't something I'm expecting....I immediately worry and assume the worst. Perhaps it's because at a few key moments, like my first attempt at grad school, when I totally was not expecting the worst, it turned out to be. I don't know how to re-learn expecting surprises to be good or at least neutral, or if it's even wise to do so, but I kind of wish I could....)