my son could easily stay up all night playing little electronic games, and he would have every reason tonight, having been to an evening birthday party (at which he was one of only about five boys, but there were maybe thirty girls)...and having made and uploaded another movie, this one also about pokemon or something like it, and having a camera stand that actually works and holds steady on the screen so he can describe a battle. it's a quite interesting evolution in that we are both learning imovie at the same time but he is so much faster than me, and i am actually held back by my previous experience with an imovie that was simpler and easier to use. it's like each imovie assumes you'd mastered the last ones, and don't need to have explained to you, for example, how to get out of clip mode.

then, i'm mostly using pop arted news photos which aren't really mine, yet his are entirely original, with only his voice and shots of his screen, and his pokemon doing battle with others' pokemon. quite amazing actually, his turning into an original filmmaker, in front of my eyes.

these birthday parties, the other son had one too, were over in the north side of town, and because there were two, and i had to go back and forth each way, i was on a single street maybe eight times tonight, saw that same neighborhood over and over. i used to live out there, so it's all very familiar, but at the same time, with its narrow roads and kind of funky character, it's different every time. at the recycling center near the gym where the parties were i saw an enormous white animal that could have been a rat, it was darting amongst the bins, and didn't seem to have a tail, but was pretty spooky and stealthy tearing around. it's really cold out, and the students are still gone, and not many people are out on the roads unless they have to be, it's not that hard getting around these days. i actually love the winter, wouldn't mind walking around in it, getting some of that fresh air that nobody else wants. or doing winter sports, which never occurs to people here because we just don't have enough of the white stuff. we could, maybe, sled, if we had sleds and just the right amount of snow fell, we could all run out to the hill, we only have one or two and those are probably man-made, but nonetheless, what happens is that lots of people have nothing to do, and they see that snow coming for miles, and they go buy up all the sleds, and there's only maybe a half-dozen in town at any given time, and the rest of us who wait to actually see the snow, we have to use an old piece of cardboard or something, because we don't have a chance in hell of buying a sled.

so i gradually forget how to ski, how to sled, how to even stop on the ice, in a car while driving, we lose all these skills that we used to have and become wimps and pretty soon i'd just as soon stay home also, same as all these others, if it snows even a half-inch. it's enough to make it dangerous for me, because i no longer have a clue, i'm out of the habit.

then i stepped up the advertising campaign, got a $70 coupon for google ads and used it to direct traffic to my kindle books, in hopes of selling one, maybe, someday, and got five people or more to click through even on the first day, though nobody bought anything, or has yet, to my knowledge. these people are tough customers, times are hard, so maybe i won't sell a darned thing, who knows. maybe these people are aware on some subliminal level that all these stories are basically available on this blog if you only know where to find them, as i've been announcing them here one at a time for years. but for the moment i'm kind of bound up in this click-through business...so people actually click on these ads? and then people actually sell stuff based on their click? it's a system, where you can actually make some money????

so i've had this jigsaw puzzle since maybe november, and it has a hundred reindeer in it or something like that, it's massively confusing and i'm add anyway so i get lost one reindeer to the other and it's been around way too long; i got two more jigsaw puzzles for christmas but haven't been able to break out either one, until this big really hard one gets put away. and there are some pieces i'll spend up to a half hour looking for and still not be able to find it; i begin to suspect that some pieces walked away at some point. you want to know what happened to that vacation, those reindeer will tell you. but hey, if i have those stories on kindle, and have a system, and the system works, then this vacation is better than the last three combined. and it's gotten me to move on to the next thing, which is, can i get amazon to make the print copy too, and can i publish some other stuff, like esl reading books or the just passing through autobiography, or, and i forgot to mention a couple other resolutions here, can i move on to making t-shirts for the local quaker meeting, or the school, or both, and, will i ever find time to lay out the lap dulcimer and put entirely new tuning pegs on it. the cats here are betting that i won't.

school starts on tuesday, so i'm running out of time real fast, but a granddaughter came over today and i showed her the quilt and told her with a straight face that it was a saluki quilt and it was being made for her and i was doing the best i could and would fork it over as soon as possible, and after a while she warmed up a little and even smiled at me, several times, which totally charmed me and made me not care if all i did today was sew a few triangles. in fact i have maybe fourteen out of about a hundred and twenty, but that's entirely manageable if you think about it; it's few enough to see the light at the end of the tunnel even as i sew. and, at the grocery store i bought a new york times, not because i have any time to read, i don't, but because it's good to have high quality stuff, to not have time to read, and it'll sit around looking like it needs to be read. like those reindeer need to be pieced together, and the dulcimer. life is busy, and, at the same time, it's quite a hustle for everyone, right down to that white creature under the dumpster. one can't sit still, or the world will turn too fast and all hell will break loose. hang on for dear life, it's a roller coaster, so to speak.