![\"IMG_0978\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/578\/2017\/04\/IMG_0978.jpg\")
<\/a>\nOne<\/strong>
\nThis is truly brilliant. <\/a>I have watched more disembodied food video hands this week than at probably any other moment in my existence and the refreshing flair of this one is truly wondrous.<\/p>\n
I really have not been able to pin down what is so mesmerizing about the food video. I have not once spent a minute and a half watching anything<\/i> that I would make, ever<\/i>, so why do I Always Pause? Why? I ask myself.
\nTwo<\/b>
\nThis has been kind of a slow week around here. Some days I haven\u2019t managed to drag myself out of bed before noon. I wake up at the usual time and then just stay, for an entire half day, propped up on my pillow just Thinking about getting up. But then it\u2019s luncheon so I do get up and hobble downstairs and sit in a chair. The tense fast pace is probably going to kill me.
\nThree<\/b>
\nBut Wednesday was seriously exciting because while we were sitting pleasantly in our Binghamton Garden, watching a plane flying back and forth across the cloudy sky dragging a large banner behind it, a green and white banner indicating the availability of new student housing in the place where new student housing has been being conspicuously built for many a long month, and Matt saying out loud to me\u2013\u2018Wow, there\u2019s a new housing development for college age students next to the university, how should we get the word out? What forms of modern communication do we have at our finger tips? The telegraph? The pony express? Paul Revere and his midnight ride? The telephone game? What should we do? Oh! I know! Let\u2019s get a plane and fly a large banner behind it.That\u2019ll fix em.\u2019\u2013while he was saying these cruel things and scrolling through, well, the Internet, the man in the house behind us was engaged in a riotous game of Hit the Golf Ball With a Hockey Stick While Shouting Loudly. We sat and listened to this heretofore unknown pastime for a while and then retired to the indoors. More specifically to our Very Well Positioned upstairs sunporch with the picture window where we stood, all of us, for a couple of hours watching the fascinating unfolding drama of our neighbor, who may have had slightly too much to drink, drive his car out of his drive way and into the opposite curb whereupon the kind, compassionate, and extremely patient Police of Binghamton chatted with him for the rest of the afternoon. We watched transfixed, of course, but with no sound. But still, the youngest child announced, when everyone seemed to have drifted away, \u2018This is way better than TV.\u2019 Which just goes to show you how bad television programming has gotten to be and how someone should do something. Really.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t really deserve Quick Takes after a lame-o week of blogging, but I\u2019m going to have them anyway. So sue me. Actually, please don\u2019t sue me. One This is truly brilliant. I have watched more disembodied food video hands this week than at probably any other moment in my existence and the refreshing flair […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2373,"featured_media":6155,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,11,15,18],"tags":[26,44,45,50],"class_list":["post-6165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","category-in-conversation-with-children","category-life-going-on","category-reading-the-bible","tag-binghamton","tag-homeschooling","tag-jens-7-quick-takes","tag-life-with-girls"],"yoast_head":"\n<\/a>
\nFour<\/b>
\nI\u2019m referring to this astute and well reasoned article<\/a> and why I Will Not be watching the new Anne of Green Gables and if you try to show it to my children I will burn you with my piercing and terrible gaze equal to the fury of a thousand suns<\/i><\/b>. You think I\u2019m kidding? I am not. If you show that series to my children I will wreak a havoc upon you like unto Achilles dragging Hector around the walls of Troy. You can tell it\u2019s wrong just by looking at the expression on everyone\u2019s faces in the previews. No. No. No. A thousand times No.
\nFive<\/b>
\nReally, if you want realism, you can just keep plugging through the Bible, and then temper it with the Odyssey. The child, head cocked to one side, trying to work out the hapless Odysseus making his way home to his wife, and yet every hinderance involving a beautiful woman and inconveniently losing all your own clothes in the ocean. \u2018O come on,\u2019 says the teenager. Followed up with, \u2018As if.\u2019
\nSix<\/b>
\nReally, having these two teenage people (what am I supposed to call them?) is eerily reminiscent of the toddler period. Not that they behave like toddlers. I\u2019m not saying that. But later childhood is possessed of a charming competent independence. The child from 4 to 11 is busy and not really underfoot, too wrapped up in careening from one side of the cosmos to the other, yelling and bashing his way from one discovery to the next. Whereas, I suddenly find myself wedged on the couch practically draped in two people who are basically the same size I am (!) and who are trying to insert themselves into everything that I\u2019m doing. Elphine, because she knows it drives me crazy, won\u2019t do anything without coming to tell me about it first. Then she stands and simpers, lowers her laughing eyes and says, sarcastically, \u2018If that\u2019s all right with you.\u2019 It may seem like a nice gesture, but now enumerate to yourself all the things that a person does in a day. All of them. And then interrupt every single one of those tasks with the refrain, \u2018If that\u2019s alright with you.\u2019 At some point you will find yourself shrieking, \u2018I have No Opinion Whatsoever about what you wear, what you eat for breakfast, if you need the loo, which math problem you do next, how many cups of tea you\u2019ve had, for the Love of All that is Good and Holy (which does not include that new Anne abomination) just Do Something without telling me.\u2019 Child then retires into a satisfied silence, having won. What I don\u2019t know. That\u2019s part of my problem.
\nSeven<\/b>
\nThis morning I\u2019m going to retreat into my own baffled silence to paint the church kitchen. I\u2019m not taking anyone with me. They can all stay here and chatter away at their father, who, I am sure, has nothing he\u2019d rather do than just listen, occasionally interrupting the discourse to admonish the gathered throng to Stop Screaming. Go check out more and better takes<\/a>. It\u2019ll be good for you.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"