Observables #52

on construction projects, testing riddles and a dress that says "Optimist"

My father-in-law and Simon building stairs. You start with a stringer—the support for the treads “or structural member” as google says.

My father-in-law cut out two stringers. Then he went to bed and dreamed about them. When he woke up he had a new solution. They needed to be six inches shorter so he didn’t have to knock into the adjacent room for extra head room. These are the construction details that I like to hear about! Pretty soon Violet and I were going up and down the new stairs and marvelling at what was created…out of planks of wood!

Violet’s creating too. At the piano. Because we made a deal. Said deal: she could watch TikTok for a nebulous amount of time if she played the piano for 5 minutes. A hard summer bargain, I know. She decided for her time at the piano to write a song. Whenever one of my children has said, “Can you print me off that paper so I can write the notes down?” I cringe because I know frustration is coming. There are so many things to know to get to the music notes you’re drawing on staff paper sounding the way you hear in your head.

And of course, Violet ended up in tears on the couch because I said that’s a G not a B. And why did I say that? I don’t know. To be helpful. Motivational? Then I said maybe she could solve her frustration by playing the G and the B together and then she cried some more. Later she revealed that she thought I was saying playing G and B together was better than her idea.

Better. Worse. These are hard words.

It’s Sunday. Normally I publish on a Tuesday. Then I pushed it to a Thursday. Then I pushed it to today because I was struggling with those words too.

This book on writing which so far seems to be about Ferrante finding containers (aka, structure) and then going wild inside those containers as she tries to access the more unbounded parts of her mind. This is useful advice for me because I’m a fairly intuitive writer that balks at structure. But Ferrante has me seeing things from a different perspective and celebrating both.

A dress that says “optimist”—it’s a conversation starter.

I ask Violet if she’s a glass half full or glass half empty girl. She says half full.

If you said glass half empty, Mommy, I wouldn’t even know what you mean.

Riddles courtesy of Violet:

What do you call an illegally parked frog?

Toad.

I’m game for a few riddles but all I really want these days is the sound of the birds…

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