Smoking Radishes

Actually, I just want to buy some time to pull these posts out of here and not lose this journal.

That is all. :)

So, I've been trying to write about my experiences of the last 24 hours of my time in New Zealand as if it were fiction, but I just can't do it. The story keeps coming out sounding so trite. It's either too long or leaves out too many important details, and the attempts to strip my personality and my identity out of the mother character just make the whole thing thin and uninteresting. I desperately want to write about the events, but it feels wrong just blogging about it all in a straight first person account.

( I give up trying to make it poetic... Here's the basic story )

I don't expect to fly Air New Zealand again for many, many years, since I have no intention of returning to that country at least until Andrew is in his mid to late teens. However, I am SO thankful for their handling of this particularly difficult incident, that I urge any of you considering a trip down to Australia or New Zealand to give them your custom. And if you weren't thinking about going down there, you should. New Zealand is gorgeous and there is SO much to do there. So go, and fly Air New Zealand. Thank you.

Roo and I got onto the plane with much elation and sighs of relief. There were high fives, low fives, in the sky fives, and some general silliness.

As I write this now, I'm somewhere over the Pacific on my way to Los Angeles. It's going to take me a while to integrate this whole experience. I went down to New Zealand expecting some sort of major shift in me personally and in my life. I think I see where this shift has taken me, but I'm not sure how I feel about the shift, so I have a lot of work ahead. The results of that work will be blogged for sure, but not publicly. Some may make it into friend readable posts, but a lot of it will just be for me.

On a completely side note, when I sat down in the airplane seat today I thought to myself, "Wow! These seats are much wider than the ones on my flight here." and then I realized that it was not the seats that were wider at all. My pants are falling off, too. I'm going to need to do some shopping pretty soon here! (Maybe I should take a special trip up to Idaho so that Matt can pick out clothes for me the way he used to. That way I can get new clothes without actually having to shop for them. hehehe)

Today, Roo beat me at chess. I didn't let him win. I didn't even see it coming until just before it happened. He strategized. He plotted. His first plan was foiled, and so he aggressively went for a plan B, and then he informed me proudly that he got me by a "corridor or back ranks checkmate". Of course I took a picture.

I should mention that he has been studying very hard, and practicing and practicing. Over the last few days it has gotten harder and harder to beat him, even as my own skills have been improving by working with him through different chess strategies and things. I'm sure it helps that he loves chess, and I'm not all that interested in it except as a way to spend some quality time with my kid. But, you know how it is, when you love someone and you spend time doing something they love with them, sometimes some of the joy of the thing rubs off on you.

So, yay Roo!

Yeah, I know, it's sad when all you can blog about is another blog you've found, but, what can I say. I like it when other people write about all the joy and weirdness that is my Home. (No, not Berkeley, silly... the other Home.)

Check out Isrealli. There were lots of posts that I enjoyed, but of course, when I got to the post about Idan Raichel, while listening to the album I got last week for the millionth time, well, I knew I just had to give them a nod. *grin* Don't miss their discussions of gay culture in Israel, or Israeli taxi cabs or Israeli artists who are making it elsewhere... Oh, just read the whole thing, OK?

But don't forget to come back to me, or I'll cry.

It's because I am a PS3. "Haven't you heard of the Blue Ray?!" hehehehehe...

If you've never seen the Land Before Time, then you won't know the title's reference, but trust me, it fits tonight.

My son's dad currently has my son's US passport in his possession, and he doesn't want to hand it over. He also hasn't paid for my son's ticket back to the US. This is unacceptable. He claims that I don't need either until the day before I leave. But reasonably, I can't wait that long. I'm not going to wait until the day before I'm supposed to leave only to find then that he's not going to give it to me or claims to have "lost" it, thereby stranding me in this country for even longer.

I told him to bring the passport and proof that he'd paid the ticket when he came to pick up Roo today. I messaged him twice more to remind him to bring the passport (I would have been flexible if he'd done one or the other, honestly). He didn't bring the passport and he hasn't paid the ticket, still. So, I told him that he'd could go home, get the passport and then he could pick Roo up.

He got mad, so I explained why it is that I have good reason to be like this. He was supposed to hand over Roo's New Zealand passport years ago. He was ordered by the courts not once, but over and over again. He never did it. He refused to give me a copy of Roo's medical immunization records, which included shots on four different schedules in four different countries by the time he was 18 months old. (You can see why knowing exactly which shots he'd gotten by that time might be a little important...) Eventually, I had to subpoena those records from the doctor's office in New Zealand. So, now, of course I'm not sitting here all calm and reassured that he's going to give me the passport on the day before I go. Give it to me now. Period.

He left. He didn't come back. He didn't call back. Didn't message back. I don't know what he is thinking now, or planning. I'm planning my next move. At this moment, I can't imagine letting Roo travel down here to New Zealand alone again before he's at least 16 or so, when he can get his own bee-hind over to the US Embassy if necessary and get himself home.

As I finished up the conversation with Adam, and turned to head upstairs to my apartment, Roo was standing at the elevator. He said, "Wow, mum. Remind me never to get you mad."

Here are some cool things to look at on Google Maps. Can you figure out what they are? (The answers are in the tool tips.)

42.701936359N, 115.993694935E

48.85818600 2.29419000

51.50113559719755 -0.1236487948684726

37.81704600 -122.47487300

We hope you enjoy the tour!!!

- Lisha and Roo

Today at dinner Roo and I got into another interesting conversation. He was going on and on about military things, blending reality with video game militarism. He talked about wanting to go into the Marines and about why his uncle Wade thinks he should try to be in Special Forces ( (they get the really cool weapons). )

Then he went back to his talk about video game weapons and dropped the stuff about the real military. This kept up, and I patiently listened to him, hoping he'd switch topics soon. We finished dinner and left the food court where we were eating. He started discussing some of the specifics of Halo on the XBox. He kept with that as we walked home. Finally, as we reached the last intersection before home I finally had enough.

"Hun," I started, "You know what? I'm trying to act interested because I love you, but I'm really pretty tired of this topic. I'm not interested in these games and I don't want to hear about them any more right now."

He paused. And then he responded, "They're fun. Don't you like blowing things up?"

"Well, yeah, sure. I like to blow things up in controlled situations... but not people, and not nice things. I mean, like an old building that needs to be demolished? That's fun to watch get blown up. Or a model rocket that explodes instead of launching. That's pretty cool, too. But no one is getting hurt, and no one's stuff is being destroyed. I don't like that stuff."

And here's where my son said something a little too insightful for a seven year old, "But, you like Lord of the Rings. Lots of people got killed in Lord of the Rings. So you DO like death and destruction!"

( Oo, he got me there. )

We were both left with some things to think about.

If there was one thing I could change about myself, I'd be quieter. I'd laugh just as much, but I wouldn't be so loud about it, and when I talked I would be the sort of person that people lean in to listen to, because whatever I was saying would be interesting enough on it's own, so I shouldn't have to shout it. This seems like an easy concept, but I've never managed it. I'm really much too loud. (Proof positive I'm American, I guess.)

This morning I had coffee and a muffin at my favorite little organic, fair trade cafe just down the street from the apartment where I'm staying here in Auckland. They usually play music from the Putumayo collection (http://www.putumayo.com), but there was something different on the speakers today. I turned off my MP3 player and listened to their music. Wait, wait... that's Arabic. No, wait, that's Hebrew. Amharic? Hebrew again. I don't remember any Putumayo CD with music like this!! I sat there for a really long time after I finished my coffee and muffin.

The music inspired a poem, scribbled in the journal that I carry in my bag for just such moments. I finished the poem and listened to the music a bit longer, feeling torn between the idea that I should go do something with my day and the wish to stay put until the music was done. I decided to just buy that CD and go.

I walked up to the Putumayo display and looked for the CD there. Nothing. So I asked at the cafe counter. The lady came over, looked over the available CD's and suggested it might be the Italian one. "Nope. The music that is playing is Israeli," I told her. "Mmm.. Maybe the Turkish one?" she suggested. "No. The Turkish CD would be in Turkish, not Hebrew, Amharic and Arabic." She was stumped. She offered to run back to the CD player and find out what it was. She came back a moment later with the CD in her hand. "It's none of those. I don't know who put this on." She apologized.

The CD was brown and said, "The Idan Raichel Project." I thanked the lady and headed straight over to Borders Books. This album must be popular because I found it easily in the World Music section under Israel. Or maybe it was just meant to be.

Of course, I was in Borders, so I couldn't just pick up a single CD and leave. I browsed the books, and what did I find? A new collection of short stories by Neil Gaiman.

Now, I'm certain that someone told me about this book. I thought that it was Noé, but he says it wasn't him. Who it was, I cannot recall, and I guess it doesn't matter so much. What I do know is that Gaiman always inspires me to write more. So, of course, I had to buy a copy of Fragile Things.

The first thing I read was the poem "The Fairy Reel". I read it again and again. And when Roo showed up at the house, I read it aloud to him, partly because he's a Gaiman fan, too, and partly just so I'd have an excuse to read it again.

And before I left Borders, I made one other stop at the card display. I've been feeling like writing old-fashioned snail mail. I love snail mail. It's different than email. You write it differently, and it's different when you get an envelope in a real mailbox than when you see the bold number of unread messages in your electronic inbox. I picked out three cards with photos from different parts of New Zealand, and thought about who would receive each one. Then, I payed for everything and wandered out to Aotea Square to sit under a tree and write a note to some friends.

Back home, now, Roo is running around the common room playing and I'm listening to the Idan Raichel Project and letting stories tell themselves in magical rearrangements of 26 and 22 letters... This is the life.