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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2r2I1OR:
last night in Savannah. Tomorrow looked like a really really really full day chez-Sister, so we just said, y’know, why not just… drop us off downtown, we’ll all go out to dinner Friday night, we’ll make our own way to the airport on Saturday. It was her suggestion initially, and she presented it as a “might be more fun for you” kind of thing, but I took the hint and said let’s do that, and Sister looked relieved so I knew that was the right choice. So we went and looked online and found a last-minute Deal at some fancyish-reasonable joint and so we’re there now and
uh (cut for length, also image of this insane hotel room, also World’s Biggest Container Ship, also assorted family stories)
for scale Dude is six feet three in the shoes he’s wearing behind that coffee table. (Chuck Taylors.) That’s uh. That’s some ceiling. (The room is possibly taller than it is wide, I’m not sure.)
Also we’re across the street from the wharf, and a ship keeps blowing its horn.
This morning’s paper informed us that the biggest container ship in the world had just docked at Savannah’s harbor for the first time, after its first-ever journey through the newly-expanded Panama Canal. (OK largest ever to visit the US East Coast, so. 1600 feet long.) Anyway–
Oh shit there it goes! Holy shit. No way can I get a picture, but just now I was lying on the bed and glanced up at the window– we’re on the third floor of an 1850s cotton warehouse, it’s pretty high up, I have the curtains open even though I’m in undies because nobody can see in– and there were lights moving, above the trees and roofs on the other side of the street, higher than us, so we just went and looked and sure enough, an enormous something was moving by slowly, and we know that’s the waterfront right there. Either that or a city block just up and slid away.
It might have been just a regular-ass container ship but it was still fuckin huge and also right goddamn there.
Anyway. Savannah! Woo! We all had dinner together at a lovely little Cuban joint that, incidentally, had a live band, and the children were pretty entranced. The middle boy demolished an entire appetizer of mussels, which he rarely gets because they make his mother sick, to her sorrow. Niece mourned that we didn’t have time or room to stay and dance.
Immediately after checking in, we wandered over to a convenience store and bought a bottle of wine and are going to drink it and pass the fuck out, because this has been a long week. Maybe one of these years we’ll take a Proper Vacation but it’s sort of… not my style. We got the second Pod loaded, and Sister says we actually fit more stuff in this second one than Dad did in the first one, partly because we were a little more willing to just cram things in to keep them in place. Dad meticulously rachet-tied everything down, but this second Pod had no interior wooden struts like the last one– this was a brand-new, all-metal-and-Fiberglass one, so there was nowhere to screw down additional supports and such. And with a long bookshelf on one side blocking the provided tie-down points, we just couldn’t use a bunch of them. So we tried to use furniture to brace each other– everything’s slotted in just so, so that even if something’s loose it can’t go far before it hits something that is tied down– like the chest freezer, the table saw, etc. We used every inch of space, and the last row is interlocked patio furniture that’s all nested and criss-crossed. (Last few things we put in were all the soft goods Sister could bear to part with (“I can’t pack all the blankets, I have to live here for another month and my children can’t sleep on bare mattresses!”)– including, she pointed out, her wedding dress. “I mean,” she said, “I won’t need it again, so I mean, I guess it’s okay if–” “Of course I’ll try not to destroy it, dear,” I said, and crammed it forcefully into a crevice as soon as her back was turned.)
Today we had some time– Sister had to go “do Army work”, and this morning there she was in her uniform, sure enough, rank insignia and all, boots on, rushing her kids around. (“The Army’s evil,” one of her sons said mournfully at one point this week, and then made it clear that he just meant because she paid it more attention than them sometimes, given that that’s where she works and so does their father. I wasn’t really expecting any deep state-of-the-world insights from a preteen, but it still was surprising.) I wanted to get a photo of her all uniformed up putting her daughter’s hair up in ribbons but nobody held still. As they were rushing to the door she yelled, “Drat, where’s my hat?” and had to come back inside to find it, and everyone thought this was hilarious because it rhymed.
So, while she was gone, I went and rounded up patio furniture and brought some inside to be temporary living room furniture, so the kids didn’t have to watch TV on the floor. Not too much, though– they’re enjoying having a big empty dancefloor/ dojo space.
Plane home isn’t until like 8pm tomorrow, so we’ll think of something to do to amuse ourselves in what really is a jewel of a little city, I do recommend it to anyone looking for touristy destinations.
Oh, one last family anecdote– today was a short school day at the elementary school, so the two younger children came home at 11:30 am. I hadn’t been expecting them for another hour at least, so I was in the middle of something. The 4-yo (FIVE NEXT WEEK, she keeps telling us) girl disappeared, and I could hear her singing to herself so I figured she was fine, playing in her room, and so I kept working on my project, and fed the boy lunch. (She’d already eaten, he hadn’t.) She emerged, a good 45 minutes later, and said, “I cleaned up my room.” Skeptical, I went in to look, and sure enough, she’d actually cleaned her room, had put all the clothing back into the suitcase she’s living out of now, had collected all the toys into a pile on the desk she still has for playing on, had really made a pretty presentable job of cleaning her room. I was so astonished I didn’t know what to do. (Her mother, upon arrival home, was delighted.)
She is apparently missing her daddy a lot, he has been at work up in Maryland for a month now, and he is her favorite person in the world. She also was sort of sick this week, nothing serious, but intermittently under the weather and weepy. So she just latched onto my poor dude like a limpet. He is not a big touchy-feely person, but he is also not an asshole, so he put up with it, and was very reasonable about his boundaries– he only said things a couple times like “don’t pull my hair” and “please don’t elbow me so hard” and “I don’t like it when you touch my nose” and such, and refused to let her put her hands into his mouth, quite reasonably– and let her sit on him and didn’t object to being climbed and basically was her playmate whenever her brothers were ignoring her. (They were good buddies in the pool; Dude formally can’t swim, so he only goes in the deep end with a floatie, and she can swim like a fish but is really short (coincidentally, 45 inches and 45 pounds exactly, this week, per the doctor) so it’s easier for her to play in the shallow end especially when her 80-pound brothers are doing speed-cannonball competitions in the deep end.) My sister and i kept joking that he’s not going to touch any other humans for a solid month now, after having spent this week with a nearly-5-year-old girl pretty much attached to him. He is much more sanguine about such things than he was when I first knew him.
(image: niece riding on top of the floatie Dude is in. Yes she’s basically sitting on his head. Yes she’s also wearing flippers and was trying to “be the motor” to propel them around the pool.) But yeah I won’t make him snuggle me for a while, he’s probably about touched-out.
He’s across the room and we’re drinking a bottle of wine and using the hotel wifi to occasionally read webpages to one another. And singing duets of the song the kids listened to on repeat today while they were pretending to beat the stuffing out of one another. (Even in their wildest flailings, they always displayed an exquisite awareness of precisely where the television was, and never once came near it. They are all old enough to understand that kind of Consequences, now.)
last night in Savannah. Tomorrow looked like a really really really full day chez-Sister, so we just said, y’know, why not just… drop us off downtown, we’ll all go out to dinner Friday night, we’ll make our own way to the airport on Saturday. It was her suggestion initially, and she presented it as a “might be more fun for you” kind of thing, but I took the hint and said let’s do that, and Sister looked relieved so I knew that was the right choice. So we went and looked online and found a last-minute Deal at some fancyish-reasonable joint and so we’re there now and
uh (cut for length, also image of this insane hotel room, also World’s Biggest Container Ship, also assorted family stories)
for scale Dude is six feet three in the shoes he’s wearing behind that coffee table. (Chuck Taylors.) That’s uh. That’s some ceiling. (The room is possibly taller than it is wide, I’m not sure.)
Also we’re across the street from the wharf, and a ship keeps blowing its horn.
This morning’s paper informed us that the biggest container ship in the world had just docked at Savannah’s harbor for the first time, after its first-ever journey through the newly-expanded Panama Canal. (OK largest ever to visit the US East Coast, so. 1600 feet long.) Anyway–
Oh shit there it goes! Holy shit. No way can I get a picture, but just now I was lying on the bed and glanced up at the window– we’re on the third floor of an 1850s cotton warehouse, it’s pretty high up, I have the curtains open even though I’m in undies because nobody can see in– and there were lights moving, above the trees and roofs on the other side of the street, higher than us, so we just went and looked and sure enough, an enormous something was moving by slowly, and we know that’s the waterfront right there. Either that or a city block just up and slid away.
It might have been just a regular-ass container ship but it was still fuckin huge and also right goddamn there.
Anyway. Savannah! Woo! We all had dinner together at a lovely little Cuban joint that, incidentally, had a live band, and the children were pretty entranced. The middle boy demolished an entire appetizer of mussels, which he rarely gets because they make his mother sick, to her sorrow. Niece mourned that we didn’t have time or room to stay and dance.
Immediately after checking in, we wandered over to a convenience store and bought a bottle of wine and are going to drink it and pass the fuck out, because this has been a long week. Maybe one of these years we’ll take a Proper Vacation but it’s sort of… not my style. We got the second Pod loaded, and Sister says we actually fit more stuff in this second one than Dad did in the first one, partly because we were a little more willing to just cram things in to keep them in place. Dad meticulously rachet-tied everything down, but this second Pod had no interior wooden struts like the last one– this was a brand-new, all-metal-and-Fiberglass one, so there was nowhere to screw down additional supports and such. And with a long bookshelf on one side blocking the provided tie-down points, we just couldn’t use a bunch of them. So we tried to use furniture to brace each other– everything’s slotted in just so, so that even if something’s loose it can’t go far before it hits something that is tied down– like the chest freezer, the table saw, etc. We used every inch of space, and the last row is interlocked patio furniture that’s all nested and criss-crossed. (Last few things we put in were all the soft goods Sister could bear to part with (“I can’t pack all the blankets, I have to live here for another month and my children can’t sleep on bare mattresses!”)– including, she pointed out, her wedding dress. “I mean,” she said, “I won’t need it again, so I mean, I guess it’s okay if–” “Of course I’ll try not to destroy it, dear,” I said, and crammed it forcefully into a crevice as soon as her back was turned.)
Today we had some time– Sister had to go “do Army work”, and this morning there she was in her uniform, sure enough, rank insignia and all, boots on, rushing her kids around. (“The Army’s evil,” one of her sons said mournfully at one point this week, and then made it clear that he just meant because she paid it more attention than them sometimes, given that that’s where she works and so does their father. I wasn’t really expecting any deep state-of-the-world insights from a preteen, but it still was surprising.) I wanted to get a photo of her all uniformed up putting her daughter’s hair up in ribbons but nobody held still. As they were rushing to the door she yelled, “Drat, where’s my hat?” and had to come back inside to find it, and everyone thought this was hilarious because it rhymed.
So, while she was gone, I went and rounded up patio furniture and brought some inside to be temporary living room furniture, so the kids didn’t have to watch TV on the floor. Not too much, though– they’re enjoying having a big empty dancefloor/ dojo space.
Plane home isn’t until like 8pm tomorrow, so we’ll think of something to do to amuse ourselves in what really is a jewel of a little city, I do recommend it to anyone looking for touristy destinations.
Oh, one last family anecdote– today was a short school day at the elementary school, so the two younger children came home at 11:30 am. I hadn’t been expecting them for another hour at least, so I was in the middle of something. The 4-yo (FIVE NEXT WEEK, she keeps telling us) girl disappeared, and I could hear her singing to herself so I figured she was fine, playing in her room, and so I kept working on my project, and fed the boy lunch. (She’d already eaten, he hadn’t.) She emerged, a good 45 minutes later, and said, “I cleaned up my room.” Skeptical, I went in to look, and sure enough, she’d actually cleaned her room, had put all the clothing back into the suitcase she’s living out of now, had collected all the toys into a pile on the desk she still has for playing on, had really made a pretty presentable job of cleaning her room. I was so astonished I didn’t know what to do. (Her mother, upon arrival home, was delighted.)
She is apparently missing her daddy a lot, he has been at work up in Maryland for a month now, and he is her favorite person in the world. She also was sort of sick this week, nothing serious, but intermittently under the weather and weepy. So she just latched onto my poor dude like a limpet. He is not a big touchy-feely person, but he is also not an asshole, so he put up with it, and was very reasonable about his boundaries– he only said things a couple times like “don’t pull my hair” and “please don’t elbow me so hard” and “I don’t like it when you touch my nose” and such, and refused to let her put her hands into his mouth, quite reasonably– and let her sit on him and didn’t object to being climbed and basically was her playmate whenever her brothers were ignoring her. (They were good buddies in the pool; Dude formally can’t swim, so he only goes in the deep end with a floatie, and she can swim like a fish but is really short (coincidentally, 45 inches and 45 pounds exactly, this week, per the doctor) so it’s easier for her to play in the shallow end especially when her 80-pound brothers are doing speed-cannonball competitions in the deep end.) My sister and i kept joking that he’s not going to touch any other humans for a solid month now, after having spent this week with a nearly-5-year-old girl pretty much attached to him. He is much more sanguine about such things than he was when I first knew him.
(image: niece riding on top of the floatie Dude is in. Yes she’s basically sitting on his head. Yes she’s also wearing flippers and was trying to “be the motor” to propel them around the pool.) But yeah I won’t make him snuggle me for a while, he’s probably about touched-out.
He’s across the room and we’re drinking a bottle of wine and using the hotel wifi to occasionally read webpages to one another. And singing duets of the song the kids listened to on repeat today while they were pretending to beat the stuffing out of one another. (Even in their wildest flailings, they always displayed an exquisite awareness of precisely where the television was, and never once came near it. They are all old enough to understand that kind of Consequences, now.)
