The kids were on Spring break last week.  I’m always glad when break begins, and always just as glad when it ends.

This year I was happy to see them go back for a whole new reason:

Toby has joined the ranks of the Great American Male On Vacation.  He refused to shave for the duration of his break.

I’ve done my best to remain neutral about my kids’ appearances over the years, especially as they got into teenager-hood.  I draw the line only at things that require my signature (tattoos), or things that will get me a phone call from the school.*

I have found, with my children, at least, that the less I give them to push up against, the less they feel compelled to push.  Besides, young children feel better about themselves, more competent, more satisfied, when they can do for themselves (that’s one of the things I loved about Montessori when they were small).  So they learned to dress themselves at an early age, and all I had to do was get out of the way.

Luckily (and when I go to the school and see the ridiculous clothes most teenagers wear, I know just how lucky I am), both of my kids tend heavily toward the pragmatic.  Delaney has no interest in short skirts or hooker-esque high heels.  Toby wears his pants a little low, but he keeps his hair tidy and his fingernails clean, so I have no complaints.

Stubble, however–this is a whole new arena.

My baby boy is growing up.

*Things that get the kid in trouble at school?  Not my problem.  As a matter of fact, I think that public disapprobation is sometimes (usually?) the best possible way to learn the limits of what’s socially acceptable, especially in sartorial matters.

Pardon me while I put on my kids these days cranky-old-woman voice.

Whatever you remember about your life when you were fourteen?  Forget it.  Just dump those memories right on out the window; as a frame of reference, they’re completely useless.  Even if it was only five or six years ago, and you’re my one and only twenty-year-old reader–your fourteenth year would be downright quaint in the eyes of a fourteen-year-old today.

Case in point:  Delaney is, as I write this, hanging out with a friend.

Let me paint a picture for you.  She is walking around the house, carrying her laptop, headphones in her ears.  I started to ask her a question, and she shushed me, pointing to the computer.

She is on Skype, hanging out with her friend–WHO IS TAKING A NAP.  I know she is; I peeked.  She’s sound asleep.

“Shhh.  She’s sleeping.  She wants me to wake her up in twenty minutes.”

The same friend hung out with us while we ate dinner (Lee’s out of town).  Delaney put her computer on the table so we could chat.   Actually, it gives me the weird feeling that the girl’s head is hanging out with us, sort of hovering on the table, like the Make-Over Barbie I had when I was a kid.

I know we talked on the phone a lot when we were kids.  I remember.  And I know that half of you are remembering how you fell asleep with the phone pressed up to your ear, while your boyfriend/girlfriend was sound asleep on the other end of the line.  I know.

But video just feels different (see what I mean?  This is where I start using my old geezer voice).  It’s like they’re almost in the same room, but not quite.  THEY CAN HEAR WHAT GOES ON IN EACH OTHERS’ HOUSES.

It wasn’t like that when I was a kid.  Not at all.

This makes me utterly happy.  Lee ran across it while he was cleaning out and digitizing a box of stuff he’d been dragging around forever.  It was originally a slide show, that he’d cued to music.  Yay for technology–now it’s a Youtube video, and all we have to do is click the play button.

It’s worth watching, just for the clothes.  Those high-waisted pants . . .

He thinks he made this (took the photos, printed them as slides, etc.) when he was in the 11th grade.  I think it’s kind of awesome, both that he was so into photography, and that he was so good at it.  I also love that technology (that brilliant little camera in the iPhone) has rekindled his passion for taking pictures.

It’s distressing to think, though, that you’d never be able to do something like this today.  I try to imagine Toby hanging out at the park near our house taking pictures of random kids he’d never seen before, and, well, not so much.  I can see a mob of angry moms wrestling his camera away and stomping on it, or him being arrested and shoved into the back of a police car.  It’s sad, really, that we’re all so paranoid.

Anyway.  That’s another rant for another day.  Enjoy the video.

Dear faithful readers–

I owe you an apology.  I took a break from the blog, and in so doing, broke a cardinal rule of blogging:  I left you hanging, with no explanation.

Sorry ’bout that.

I’m glad I took the time, though, because it gave me a little distance in which I could think about what I’m doing here.

This is what I’ve concluded:

1–I like my tiny little space in the blogosphere, and I have no desire to give it up.

2–I do not, however, enjoy feeling pressured to blog every day, so I’m not going to do that any more.  My blog, my rules.

3–Sometimes I don’t have enough creative energy to devote to the blog and the novel, so when I’m feeling that way, the novel wins.  Priorities.

And that’s it.  From now on, I’m going to write blog posts only when I have something I’m excited to tell you all, and only when I have time.   That’s the only way I can think of to maintain some semblance of balance in my life.

So for now, I’m off to clear up a little point-of-view problem in chapter 3, then I’m going to make my Thanksgiving grocery list and wash the pile of laundry Toby brought home from his weekend away.

I’ll be back, I promise.

My mentor, Peggy Payne*, had an essay in Sunday’s New York Times.  It’s a lovely piece, and I’m over-the-moon excited for her.  I think being published in the “paper of record” is pretty good vindication, don’t you?

Revenge is sweet, indeed.

*I’m a little embarrassed to use the word mentor.  It feels like I’m saying “Hello!  I think you’re totally awesome and I want to sit at your feet and soak up everything you say!”  And while that’s not something I’d ever say to anyone’s face, it is, in this case, exactly what I feel, so there you have it.  I am owning my awkward adoration.

You have read Sister India, haven’t you?  If not, go get it right now.  You’ll love it.

In our peregrinations around New York, Delaney and I took note of some interesting trends.  I list them here for your edification, in case you want to know what the cool kids are doing, eating, and wearing.

–Dogs in shoes.  Dogs are everywhere in New York, but the cutest canines are all wearing sneakers.  It’s all the pavement, I suppose; their poor little feet need protection, since they don’t have dog-friendly grass to run around in.

–Oatmeal.  Yay!  Oatmeal has finally hit the big-time.  Restaurants are serving the humble oat in ways that that range from predictable (berries, dried fruit, nuts) to surprising (bruleed, baked, and topped with every decadent dairy product you can imagine).

–Rainboots.  Well, boots in general (even with shorts, which I find utterly perplexing), but rainboots are especially dear to my heart.  There’s nothing so pleasant as having toasty dry feet on a cold, wet day.

–Ukraine.  Yes, I realize this is a former Soviet republic, and therefore not even a little bit close to New York, geographically speaking, but we were surprised (in a good way) to find ourselves in a sort of Ukrainian neighborhood, complete with restaurants, a church, and signs in Cyrillic.  That was fun.

–Eating local.  This just kind of cracks me up.  I mean, it’s great.  If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you know I’m a huge fan of the locavore movement.  And it’s wonderful to go into a coffee shop in New York that’s using local milk, but I did sort of wonder how they’re defining local.  I mean, I’ve roamed all over that island in the last couple of weeks, and I never did see any cows grazing.  And yes–the milk that we drink at home?  I’ve seen those cows.  I know where they live.

–Riot gear.  Totally trendy, especially amongst the crowd-control types.

–Protesting.  Just as trendy as the riot gear, and usually found in the same parts of town.

–The Highline.  This is a new-ish park, built on an abandoned elevated rail line, and it’s going on my official list of Favorite Places In The World.  Apparently I’m not the only one who feels that way–it was packed on the (chilly, windy) day Delaney and I were there.

–Barbecue, southern-style.  Oh, puh-leeze.

–Niceness.  Delaney and I concluded that the people who live in New York are pretty much all very nice.  Tourists?  Not so much.

–Books.  It warmed my heart to see people reading–in parks, on the subway, in coffee shops.  And books are being advertised on billboards and trains and the sides of busses.  I’m glad to know we still love to read.

Earlier this week, I finally mastered a technological challenge that’s been stumping me for several years.

You’re going to laugh, but I don’t care.  I’m totally excited that I figured this out.

I LEARNED HOW TO MAKE MY OWN MAP.

This has been bugging me for ages.  It seems like I ought to be able to go to Google maps, drop those handy little pushpins on all the addresses that interest me in, say, Manhattan (or Charlotte, or Asheville, or Timbuctoo), and create my own little points-of-interest map.

And then I ought to be able to look at it on my iPhone.  This way, when I step out of, say, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and I want a snack, I can whip out my trusty iPhone, pull up my own personal map that I have pre-loaded with all the outstanding bakeries that I want to visit while I’m in the city, and, at a glance, know which ones are closest to where I am at that moment (ie, the Metropolitan).

After years of thinking about it, several frustrating episodes of dropping little virtual pushpins, only to have them disappear, one very useful tip from techno-son, and one amazing google search (“how can I access a Google map from iPhone”–duh!)–I’ve got it!  It works!

Have a great weekend, y’all.  Delaney and I are off to contemplate ancient art and modern pastries.

I’m writing this at the airport; Delaney and I are waiting for our flight to LaGuardia.  My big resolution for this post is to proofread it before it goes live.  Several of my posts in the last couple of weeks were written in, um, unusual settings (one on a plane, another in the car while we were barreling down I-26), and when I looked at them later, online, I realized that they were riddled with typos and misspellings.

I am mortified.

Sloppy language errors drive me crazy.  Actually, sloppy language in general sets my teeth on edge.  I’ve always been fussy about grammar–occupational hazard–but lately I’ve been on a bit of a tear.

It started with a series of odd emails from a random stranger, who apparently doesn’t have any punctuation keys on his computer.  At first it cracked me up, but then it started to get on my nerves.  And then . . . punctuation and spelling errors started jumping out at me, everywhere I turned, even worse than usual.

Even on my own blog!  Quelle horreur!

The worst thing, though, the most egregious error, the one that makes me want to tear my hair out and smash my head into the nearest wall, is plain old imprecise language.  It’s insidious and sneaky and DOES NOT WORK.  I’m not talking about anything that’s an actual error, per se.  I’m talking about words and phrases that, while grammatically correct and perfectly acceptable, mean absolutely nothing, or at least nothing useful.  The point of language, remember, its raison d’être, is communication.  Words are meant to convey meaning.

The example that’s stuck in my head at the moment:  someone asked me recently if I wanted to get a bite to eat.  Heard in a vacuum, without any reference point, this is not a particularly useful phrase.  Does it mean lunch?  Dinner?  A bag of potato chips eaten in the car?  I have a choice–I can attempt to pin down someone who (whether consciously or not) is avoiding a specific commitment, or I can try to ferret out the meaning.  Neither option is comfortable for the person trying to answer the question (me).

“Over there” is another one, or “That way,” if I don’t have a visual reference (i.e., when I’m driving, looking at the road, and the person giving directions is in the back seat.  Hello–please use specific directional words!  I can’t take my eyes off of the 18-wheeler in the next lane to look at you in the back seat, waving and pointing–just tell me right or left!)

Rant over. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

Latest update on the Great De-clutter of 2011:

Photographs.

Those of you who came of age since the digital revolution can just skip today’s post–you won’t understand.

But the rest of us?  Those of us who used to have old-timey cameras that used that weird stuff called film?  We’re still living with the detritus of that now-defunct form of photography:  actual physical photographs.  Albums, bags, boxes, crates full of them.  They take up space under beds, in the bottoms of closets, piled haphazardly in the eaves of our attics and stacked on bookshelf after bookshelf.  Some of us are tidy and organized, treasuring the photos, labeling each one, filing them carefully, bringing out albums to show off to friends and relations.  The rest of us can never find the one we want because they’re all jumbled willy-nilly in dusty old shoeboxes.

Regardless of the system, we’re drowning in a sea of photographs.  It’s hard to be a minimalist when you’re stumbling over the evidence of every trip you’ve ever taken, every milestone in your children’s lives, every cute moment or fake smile.

What to do?

We had ours scanned.  Every last one (we sent them our negatives, but they’ll use whatever you have).  Lee sent them here; they scanned them and mailed the scans back to us on a disc.  We could’ve chosen to have them upload them for us, but we can do that ourselves.

Now I have to go into our online photo album and transfer the labels from the backs of the photos onto the website (and that’s years’ worth of photos–it’s going to be tedious and will require a great deal of caffeine and some really good podcasts), and then throw away the boxes of photos (which will require taking a deep breath and tossing them in the garbage–I’ve learned that it doesn’t bother me to get rid of anything, once it’s done.  The only hard part is the actual moment of dropping it in the trash).

And just like that, presto-change-o, that’s another whole stack of boxes, gone.  We’re getting there, slowly but surely.

October is always busy (not sure why; we just always seem to have lots going on at this time of year), but this year it’s even crazier than usual.  I’m turning the laundry around and headed back to New York–not tomorrow, actually, but Thursday, which might as well be tomorrow given how much I have to get done between now and then.

For her fourteenth birthday, which was back in April (world’s worst slacker mom), Delaney asked for a trip to Paris.  Sadly, Paris really wasn’t in the budget this year, which is too bad, because I’d have loved to have gone myself.  But it wasn’t an option, so as an alternative I suggested . . . Hoboken.  Delaney, being the flexible soul that she is, jumped on it.  There’s a bakery she wants to visit, so here we are, six months after her birthday, finally making her birthday present happen (poor kid–her birthday always feels like a bit of an afterthought, but I swear her actual birth was totally intentional).  –sigh–

Anyway.  Because I’m in travel-to-New-York mode, I have several travel tips fresh in my mind, and am now going to share them, because I’m thoughtful like that.

1:  Lee has convinced me that checking luggage is a thing of the past.  I hereby vow to be a carry-on-only traveler for the rest of my life, or at least until teleportation becomes a reality.  We didn’t check bags last week, and when we got to the airport, the flight ahead of ours had been delayed, and we were able to get on it as stand-by passengers (which wouldn’t have been an option if we’d already checked luggage–the TSA doesn’t want you and your bags on different planes, which is understandable), thereby completely eliminating that hour of waiting-for-the-flight-because-you-have-to-get-there-so-early.  And carry-on sizes are so generous these days that I had room to spare in my bag.  Dear Lee:  I’m convinced.  Thank you.

2:  Air BNB.  If you aren’t familiar with this service, you should be.  It’s fabulous.  It started with the idea that people with spare rooms (or even just spare air mattresses–thus the name) could use the site to connect with people who needed somewhere to sleep.  It has exploded, and now you can find a place to sleep almost anywhere in the world.  The choices range from air mattresses to lavish apartments with private pools.  Lee and I loved the apartment we found in New York; I’m looking forward to going back with Delaney.  Staying in a private apartment instead of a (much more expensive) hotel is a completely different way to experience the city, from the foundation of an actual neighborhood, rather than the touristy parts of town.  I can’t recommend it highly enough.

3:  Sit or Squat.  I downloaded this app to my iPhone (yes, at Lee’s suggestion–he pretty much gets credit for this whole post), and relied heavily on it.  New York is notoriously low on public toilets, and sometimes you really need one.  Sit or Squat uses the GPS in the phone to determine where you are, and pulls up a map pinpointing all the accessible toilets in the immediate vicinity.  It’s brilliant.  Everyone needs this app.  YOU need this app.  Bonus:  it’s free!

Question:  What are YOUR favorite travel tips?  If you have any suggestions that’ll help my next few days go even more smoothly (that’s my optimism speaking), please leave them in the comments.