Don’t worry, Mr. Kiveat. I’ve seen how they do it on TV.

This week is turning out to be much harder on Sophia than last week. Tonight she was a whiny wreck, crying at the least provocation. At one point after turning suddenly and banging into Sergei so hard she lost her balance and fell down, she started bawling and telling me that he’d “pushed” her. She tells me she misses daddy. Now that the grandparents are gone and it’s just me and her in the huge house, she feels her father’s absence more strongly. I call him at the drop of a hat and let her talk to him, but leave it to today to be the day when she got his voice mail instead of him and started crying into it before I could hang up. It’s going to be a long week. She actually cried herself to sleep, for the first time in….well, ever.

I often have spelling pet peeves. There’s a number of words that are perfectly easy to spell and yet people get them wrong all the time, and it never fails to set my teeth on edge. In the D&D world “rogue” is one of these. People are always spelling it rouge, which is a completely different thing. Today I received the monthly publication from my public radio and public television unit (in my state, they are one conglomerated entity) and I’m reading through an article and pleasantly enjoying the tenor of it when I get to “lightening”. GAH. It’s the third or fourth time in as many days that I’ve seen this and it makes me crazy. It’s lightning, ok? LIGHTNING. And it can strike all of you down for all I care unless you learn how to spell it. I was also stunned on reading a children’s book to Sophia at the library today and coming across the line “the cat lept”…are there no copy editors left on the planet? Is every printed piece of media subject to the same indifferent sloppiness as your average web comic? I looked at that line in silence long enough for Sophia to say, “Read it, mama, read it.” Because it was printed there – lept – I kept wondering if my brain had gotten broken and my conviction that it should have been leapt wavered.

I am thinking of adding a wish list to the column on the right the next time I fiddle with the layout. I was thinking about the satin pillowcase I want but not enough to do the research to get the right one. The other night, during the eclipse, I wished for a good, cheap pair of binoculars, which I could also be using to look after birds. Again, trying to figure out what a good pair of binoculars are for me right now is discouraging me from making a purchase.

It’s All Saints day and Day of the Dead, not just election day, today. I don’t come from the type of Christian background that emphasizes the dead. We don’t pray for them and they don’t pray for us. Still, as with many death related things, I come into a new perspective on these holidays this year. I can understand why you might want to take a day of the year to commemorate your dead, either with prayers or festivities or reflection or some combination of all three. One of the hardest things about Simone’s absence in my life is the impassable gulf between us. I cannot get to where she is without dying; she cannot come back from where she has gone, even for a moment.