Category Archives: Photos

Thus Spake…

A few quotes from my favorite Nietzsche-reading young philosopher with companion quotes from Thus Spake Zarathustra.

Thus Spake Zarathustra: “Behold, I bring you the Superman!”

Thus Spake Zarathustra: “How lovely it is that there are words and sounds. Are not words and sounds rainbows and illusive bridges between things which are eternally apart?”

Thus Spake Zarathustra: “Good and evil, and joy and pain, and I and you – colored vapors did they seem to me before creative eyes. The creator wished to look away from himself, – and so he created the world.”

Happy Monday!

Football

A few staggering football facts:

Scott Stadium seating capacity: 61,500 vs. population of Charlottesville: 43,500

Coach Mike London’s salary in 2012: $2.1 million vs. President Teresa Sullivan’s salary in 2012: $680,000

Debt for Scott Stadium upgrade: $100 million to be paid off by 2025

You can even get paid to lose:

Coach Al Groh’s severance pay buyout when he was fired in 2009: $4.3 million (I keep offering to lose some football games for half, or even a quarter of that amount, but no one’s taking me up on my offer. Hello? Hello?!)

UVa was paid $1.1 million by the ACC in 2011 to appear at the Chick-fil-A Bowl in Atlanta when they lost to Auburn…

BUT!

It cost $800,000 to transport the team, band, cheerleaders, staff, etc. to the game, and Coach London and his staff earned $277,377 in bonuses for the team’s bowl appearance.

_______________________________________________

Last Saturday I took the kids to watch the University of Virginia’s first football game of the season, and our very first football game ever. Through my work, we’d gotten free tickets to a luxury suite. (Leases for these suites start at $59,000 a season)! Being in the suite proved to be a godsend when the heavens opened and rain started dumping all over the stadium, and especially when the threat of lightning forced an evacuation of the stands that lasted over two hours. We were shocked to see the stadium fill right back up shortly after it reopened for the rest of the game. UVa has some die-hard football fans.

It was a nailbiter, but about six hours after the game began, our team won!

Enhanced by Zemanta

I’m the Worst. Mother. Ever.

I cringed all day whenever I recalled the lecture I gave to my daughter as I dropped her off (late) to school this morning.

Worst Mother Ever:  (in an accusatory voice) What were you doing upstairs when I was calling and calling you to come down?

—Guilty silence—

W.M.E.: What were you doing? You were reading weren’t you?

My daughter: (mumbled, barely audible, sheepish response) Yes.

W.M.E.: You’re not allowed to read in the morning anymore! Got it? NO READING ALLOWED! Now you’re going to be late for school, because you were…READING!”

Poor, poor kid…and it’s only the fifth day of school.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Mutual Bafflement

My husband and I split up on Saturday. It was just for the day, but what caused us to go our separate ways was something that has always divided us and that reveals how very different we are.

My husband loves nothing better than to camp and hike in the great tick-ridden, mosquito-filled, venomous-snake-laced outdoors. I too adore nature. I am enthralled by the writings of naturalists such as Loren Eiseley and Annie Dillard. I am awed by nature photography and documentaries. I am stirred by poetry that celebrates the seasons, the starry firmament, or the miracle of life in all of its myriad manifestations…But Lord knows I certainly don’t want to actually be in nature.

I can’t fathom it. Why would you subject yourself to the hassle and discomfort of camping, if you weren’t homeless? Why would you want to gnaw on dry, uncooked food fished out of a hot, sweaty backpack? We’ve progressed so far beyond this! Flushing toilets, hot showers, comfortable beds, refrigeration, microwaves, air-conditioning, couches! Why would you give that all up on purpose?

…Which brings me back to Saturday. My husband decided it would be the perfect day to go on a hike in the Blue Ridge. I decided it would be the perfect day to take a daytrip to visit my parents and sister in Arlington. We knew the boys would want to go hiking, but we weren’t sure what our daughter’s preference would be. We presented her with the two options, never dreaming that we would be inflicting an agonizing Sophie’s Choice moment on her. Honestly, she looked like she was going to cry as she deliberated out loud.

“I really, really want to go to Grandma and Grandpa’s, but I really, really want to go hiking too!”

“Well,” I reasoned, bewildered by the fact that this was actually a difficult choice, and trying to make the decision a little easier for her, “I’m planning to take you to their house over Labor Day weekend, and that’s only a week away, so maybe you should go hiking.”

“But that’s SEVEN WHOLE DAYS,” she wailed.

Finally, we decided to put the poor girl out of her misery by flipping a coin. She went on the hike.

In Arlington as my sister and I drove to Harris Teeter to pick up some groceries, she asked me what my husband and kids were doing.

“They’re going hiking,” I said, shrugging my shoulders.

“Hiking?! What do you even do on a hike?” she asked.

“Well…I guess you drive to a mountain, find a trail, and then walk up to the top.”

“Why would you do that?” she asked, sincerely mystified.

“I have no idea. It’s not as if they’re being chased by Nazis.”

“Huh! I just don’t get it.”

“Me neither. That’s why I’m here, and not there.”

At that moment my husband called. He and the kids had gotten back from the hike and he was checking on my whereabouts.

“Ask him why he went hiking and if he really thinks that’s an enjoyable activity,” my sister urged.

I relayed her questions to him. He was rendered speechless. All he could muster was a: “Hunh?!?!”

“Oooh, gotta go,” I told him and hurriedly hung up the phone, because just then I witnessed a real spectacle of nature! I saw a flock of little birds taking a dirt bath in the mulch rings around the trees by the grocery store parking lot. I hung out of the window of my sister’s air-conditioned car and took a picture with my camera phone:

Ahhh, nature!

Enhanced by Zemanta

Praying Mantis

She is a predator. She stalks her prey with stealth and ruthless cunning. Once she has set her sights on her victim, (often smaller members of her own species), resistance is futile. She will bite the head off a victim who struggles, even that of her own mate.

So unrelenting is she, that she can even get a praying mantis to crack a smile:

IMG_5696

“She always captures her prey!”

And speaking of praying mantises, check out this little one in training:

Have a wonderful, wonderful weekend!

It’s obligatory…

Aaaaaaaand here it is:

Middle School!
3rd Grade

The annual ritualized torture I inflict on my children, otherwise known as the first day of school photo.

Nicholas’ turn next Monday!

The First Day of School

Tatiana’s first day of school, August 2010
All three kids in school!

The First Day of School

My mother is tired of this world
She is silent and impatient
With the inexorable gravity
That encumbers each step and
Forces surrender to the waiting bed

I’m a middle-aged woman now
Struggling to look jaunty as I run
So as not to shame my children
Riding past me on the school bus

Just a moment ago at the bus stop
My son crouched to whisper
In his sister’s ear, “In Kindergarten
You have to pay attention to your teacher
And listen to every word she says.”

These words are weightless and indissoluble –
As indelibly engraved upon his heart as on mine
These are my mother’s words, flitting now
Like butterflies on the school bus
Lumbering up the hill.

8/25/2010

When I was a child, every morning before I left for school my mother would say, “Pay attention to your teacher. Listen to every word she says.” On my daughter’s first day of Kindergarten, as we were waiting for the bus to come, I was shocked to hear the very same words of advice coming out of her older brother’s mouth. I hadn’t even realized that I’d been echoing my mother’s words to my own children. After seeing all three of my children onto the school bus for the very first time, I started off for a run. I ruminated about the passage of time and the way in which words can be both weighty and weightless. They never age, and they can outlast us all.

Enhanced by Zemanta