#lullabyes

A bit more of @lullabyes22-blog’s fanfic "Mal de Mer" combined with the face of our First Chancellor Silco and I’m a full-blown addict. Of course I had Eye of Zaun Radio playing in the background. And which artist could possibly be more fitting to a twisted, addicting beauty like Silco than Chris Isaak?

„there is a woman, far over the sea“

a.k.a.

@lullabyes22-blog is to blame for the necklace hanging out over my vintage fairy tales. I bought it in 2018 after 10-ish years of wanting a bloodstone, thanks to the incredible fic Bloodstone (AO3 | FFN). If you're a fan of Blood+, lyrical prose, and bold storytelling, I highly recommend it.

(no hurry tho bc i'm half-asleep so i wouldn't see it before tomorrow either way)

1. sure by hatchie

2. strawberry blond by mitski

3. family tree by ezi

4. god, help me by leah blevins

5. week without you by miley cyrus

October 21 and 22 I have been thinking that it might be time to let the journal go down to once every couple of days or a few times a week, since it really has been quite a long time since the start of lockdown, but then I went to write tonight about what happened yesterday and I can't remember a goddamned thing. Many things have changed since the start of quarantine, but that pernicious "time isn't a real thing anymore" feeling has yet to go away. One of the original purposes of doing this was for me to record my own days so I would remember what happened when, and that's still useful. So I guess you're all still coming along for the ride, because I am terrible at keeping a private journal but have managed to do this thing for more than half a year now.  Anyway, yesterday was a day. It was a day in which things happened, I'm sure. It's weird to not be able to remember what I did. It was Wednesday, so that means it was asynchronous learning day... ah, right. Kiddo had his morning meeting and at the end of it I happened to hear his teacher ask him if he'd gotten her email. I asked him what the email was, and he admitted that he might have actually not been keeping up with his core subject work in the same way he hadn't been keeping up with his resources lessons. To the tune of about ten days worth of assignments, in fact. So that wasn't great. I had a quick exchange with his teacher and promised we were going to get the work turned in, and we spent the day with him doing school in the living room instead of his bedroom, so I could actually watch him and make sure he was doing it. He got all his daily work done and two old assignments in both math and language arts, so it was a decent start. Can't get everything done in one day.  I noticed while I was working with him that he seems to have slipped backwards some in his math skills. I know he learned long multiplication last year, but he seemed to have forgotten the nuances of it, and he was very bad at remembering basic multiplication facts. I like common-core style math, mostly, but I think it's bullshit that they've gotten away from memorizing the multiplication charts. Yes he can use his skills to do them in his head, but he shouldn't have to do them, they should just _be_ there. I had to have multiplication tables down cold by the end of fourth grade, and we'd all recite them every day as a class. It was annoying and boring, yes, but it worked. I don't really think you can do much higher math without just knowing multiplication and division facts. So we're working on that. He's got the two times table down fine, and everybody knows tens, so we're working now on the extremely useful threes table. It'll be a process.  Anyway, we worked on the basic processes of long multiplication for a little bit, both the basic way I learned and the common core style "split one factor into easy component pieces like tens and single digits, multiply and add all those together." I have gotten so much better at math in my head since I picked that trick up. Getting him to write a complete sentence for language arts is still like pulling teeth, but we got through a couple of assignments: a powerpoint presentation on inferences that he had to complete and a writing web to prepare him for the five paragraph paper they've got coming up. That is going to be so unfun, you have no idea. Hopefully we'll at least be caught up by then.  We didn't go anywhere or do anything yesterday except that Husband got out to vote. Apparently over 17,000 of the 49,000 registered voters in this county have already cast their ballots, with 950 of those just on Tuesday. Maybe we won't have anybody left to vote by election day and we'll just sit around with our well-staffed precincts, eating potluck dinner and picking at our nails. At least the gym at the high school is fixed from the fire they had last winter (Oh for the naivete of 2019, when we thought that having to distribute the students from one high school and middle school into the other schools was massive disruption of the learning process!), so our precinct is no longer left orphaned and shoved into any public space that will have us.  The Democratic primary was brutal this year because they made us do it in the registrar's office itself, which means that everybody who has no idea where they were supposed to vote would just come to the registrar's office, see that people were voting, and try to vote too. The upside is that I learned the location of nearly every other precinct in the county from having to tell people where to go. For the Republican primary we were in the senior center, which was better because nobody cared about the Republican primary and also we were at least around the corner from the registrar's office. People were still lured in by our sultry "vote here" signs, but not as many. Once we are tucked back into our gymnasium where people sort of have to know we are there, I think that problem will mostly solve itself. The masks and shields are going to be awful, though. Working a sixteen hour day is hard enough without them!  And that brings us to today, which I at least have not forgotten about yet. Kiddo had a doctor's appointment (no blood test so it went fine) and we checked out a new Cub Scout troop. Unfortunately it seems there Webelos only meet every other week and we were in the off week, but he was perfectly content to hang around with the Wolves and enjoy an extremely unstructured meeting that consisted mainly of ball-throwing-and-chasing games. That's fine with me; at this point I could care less about his patches and I just want him to have a little fun. And he did, so we'll definitely go back next week.  On the way home from Cub Scouts I was singing TMBG's We Want A Rock, a delightfully nonsensical song, when the kiddo mentioned wistfully that I never sang his favorite lullaby anymore even though I used to sing it all the time. I was a little surprised because I have a pretty stable rotation of lullabies for the increasingly rare occasions when he wants sung to at night. Sweet Baby James, That's What Living is To Me, Chanson Por Les Petits Enfants, and Return to Pooh Corner are the usual suspects, but he reminded me of an old Chad and Terri Sigafus lullaby I used to sing him.  Hush my darling, now close your eyes And mama will sing you a lullaby Soon you'll be dreaming of rainbows and colors And all of the good things tomorrow will bring And we'll laugh, dance, play in the sun Whisper and giggle, hop, skip and run We'll build a castle as high as a mountain And talk to the dragons, just you and me. And we'll sail out on a crystal clear ocean You'll be the captain and I'll be the crew We'll play bows and arrows and be superheroes There's nothing that I'd rather do Than play Let's Pretend with you. 

It's a lovely little song that I cannot find in playable format anywhere online, too bad. I did used to sing it to him a lot because it was from a tape I had when I was a kid, and I used to sing it to my youngest sister when she was a baby. In more recent years I made the unfortunate discovery that the artists were uncomfortably close to the Christian Identity Movement, which is big bad news racist bullshit, and I kinda stopped liking their music as much. But the kiddo loves this song more than I had realized, and once I sang it for him he got very excited and made me sing it three more times so he could learn the words better. Death of the author, I guess. It's nice to know that he does listen to and appreciate some of the music I've sung for him over the years, and that my subpar singing voice is special to him because I am his mom. 

Only other thing of major note today was that I got an update on Barry and Bixby, my feral orange boys from midsummer. Things didn’t go well for them in their second foster, which created some friction between me and the rescue coordinator as to whose fault it was that feral kittens are (gasp) afraid of crowds and loud noises. But we’re over that now, and the kitties found a caretaker who is okay with friendly boys who are not precisely housecats. They get lots of treats and petting, and look like the kings of their domain. Look how much they’ve grown! I’m so pleased. 

‘Cause this is all we know This feeling’s all we know 

Song ---> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEi_XBg2Fpk