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2003-09-08 | 10:40 a.m.

Today is the first day of our second week of homeschooling. Felony wants to go back to public school, so after one o'clock today I am going to call Lowtide Elementary and speak with one of the teachers about letting Felony try it out for a day. I did not come to this decision without considerable hand-wringing.

Looking on the bright side, if Felony goes to Lowtide it will give us all a reason to walk over there every school day morning and afternoon. I seem to need a concrete excuse to perform physical exercise. "Because it's good for you" doesn't seem to do the trick.

Felony is at my mother's, where she fell asleep on the couch last night. We were there so Duff could watch the Raiders game on ESPN, since our cable doesn't seem to be working. While we were there, I made nachos for dinner. Trying to cook at my mother's new apartment is like cooking in a child's playhouse. All her pans are too small for the five of us (six, including her). Even her cheese grater is cutely diminutive. I made the nachos on a cookie sheet and set them down on top of an overturned cast-iron pan. Want to try to remember to get her a nice trivet and a plastic cutting board.

The other two kids are here next to me, wrestling on my bed. Felony is so demanding that it's fun for them to play without her. This morning I had Jinx lie down on a big sheet of butcher paper and Criminy outlined him in pencil. I'll have the girls trace each other after we pick up Fel.

I went to the neurologist last Tuesday. I had all the kids with me and my Mom, and he was running late, so I was trying to hurry up and get out of there. When he asked me how I was doing, I said, "Fine." The month before I had told him all my complaints: that the Effexor was making me nauseated, that I was sleeping too much, that I thought I needed more Adderall. He basically ignored me, wrote new prescriptions, and shooed me out the door. This time I go in there and say I'm fine, and he says, "Well, you've been on this Adderall dosage for a while now. Maybe we should try raising it a bit." I guess he just wanted it to seem like it was his idea.

But I like him a hundred and twelve times better than the guy I had at first.

So I am on Effexor 150 mg, Adderall 40 mg, and Neurontin 300-600 mg a day. It gets me out of bed and moving through my day but I fall far short of the efficiency machine I'd like to be.

Jinx's birthday is in less than three weeks. He wants to have a pirate party. I beg your pardon--he wants a pirate luau party. Wish I knew where to get a whole bunch of palm fronds. I want to use a staple gun to staple palm fronds and split bamboo all over the outside of the treehouse. I've wanted to do this forever. When I was a kid, my favorite "attraction" at Disneyland was the Swiss Family Robinson treehouse. It was like an A ticket, one of maybe three in the whole park, but I loved it. In those days I also wanted my house to have a firepole, so I could get downstairs quickly. I suppose I imagined that as an adult, I would want to move quickly on a regular basis.

Anyway, I should pick up Felony. Also need to start thinking piratical.

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