Miser Family Update: happy in your nose edition

Life continues to be rich and full in the Miser Family household, in spite of a head cold that seems have moved into my bedroom recently.  When I was a little kid, my preschool teachers would sing that cheerful song,

If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands . . .

But what I used to hear was,

If you're happy in your nose, clap your hands . . . 

It didn't make sense, but neither did a bunch of other little-kid-songs people sang to me.  Why would This Old Man play Two on your Shoe?  Why would Old MacDonald grow vowels on his farm (e-i-e-i-o . . . ), and what happened to the other vowels?   So I sang about being happy in my nose, and I dutifully imagined some tiny person in a tiny armchair, sitting comfy and happy in my nose, clapping hands, patting heads, stomping feet, doing all three. 

All that is to say, I'm not happy in my nose right now.   But the rest of my life is pretty darned good. 

For one thing, I got to see my long-lost I-daughter, who'd been consumed by her theater show for the past few months.   She's sad it's over, and I'm sad for her, but I'm also glad that at our annual Purple Dress Dinner I got to put my arms around her again, and to meet one of the many friends she'd made during her foray into musical theater.

N-son has heard that his orientation for his culinary arts school is scheduled (yay) for October (ooooh . . . okay). We're kicking the job search into a much higher gear, since we now know that the earliest he can actually start school will be January, and we want to fill his time between now and then productively.  N-son to his credit is actively engaged and cheerful about all the paperwork and searching and such he's taking on. 

K-daughter watching A-child, mid-somersault 

My granddaughter A-child has started gymnastics.  She's had two or three lessons so far, and I get to see pictures of her on balance beam, and doing twirls on a bar.  At this point, she's clearly nowhere as good as my niece who teaches gymnastics, but she's probably surpassed her grandfather, who can do the balance beam just fine but would not want to attempt the twirl-bar thing.

Speaking of her grandfather, my husband had a wonderful trip down to Charlotte for the AICHE meeting that he volunteered at, and he had a long, sloggy, storm-delayed set of flights back . . . but now he's back.  Yay!   I'm reading bits and pieces of the excellent book, Strangers Drowning, to him.  I recommend that book to anyone who loves to try to imagine lives of extreme dedication to a charitable cause.   How can people be both inspiring and truly weird at the same time?  I want to be half of those people.

As for me, in spite of my nose, I'm floating around because the reviews for the draft of our book came in, finally, and our publisher has green-lighted the project.  Better yet, the reviews don't even require major revisions --- they're filled with words like "groundbreaking", "innovative", "impressive".   But apparently, I can't spell "pixilated".  "pixalated".  Some word that looks something like that.  So I have some cheerful work ahead of me. 

And that's the latest news from the Miser Family, which continues to be wealthy in our adventures.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous, and may you also be happy in your nose.