The Season of Preparation

It's raining, but there have been recent days of spring-like warmth and sun, and that coupled with circumstance--new President, upcoming surgery, deadlines for High School--has pushed our household toward the work that comes with, and brings, hope.

We've eschewed the local public high schools for R. in favor of two private high schools, and the related applications, essays, paperwork and financial aid applications have taken time, as have interviews and visits and the SSAT test one of the schools required. We'll have to prepare our taxes within the next week to meet a deadline for "individualized tuition" for the schools, because we simply cannot afford either otherwise. Fortunately, we've been told both schools are helpful in this area.

We've also tackled various projects at home. One of these projects is the ever-popular “We’re going to clean our rooms!” game my daughters enjoy in which they pull everything out of closets or off shelves and put the gazillion resulting toys, socks, hair-bands, pens, scraps of paper, gum wrappers, beeswax sculptures, rollerblades, homework assignments, Legos, Barbie shoes, scissors, Polly Pockets and books in huge piles on the living-room or bedroom floors, thereby illustrating the dictum that is the sister to “it’s always calmest before a storm”: “it’s always messiest before a mess.”

But after several weeks of to-be-sorted piles in every corner, and a trip to the hospice thrift store with a carload of donations, things feel a bit cleaner. Costumes that had been put in the attic have been used for J's recent birthday party and then put up in the new garage storage area. Christmas things have been put away, finally, and also in new lighter boxes--rather than the historically interesting but very heavy WWII medical chest we've always used. D. has started, and finished, a new walkway in the front courtyard. Progress.

On an unrelated note, I’m seeing dogs everywhere I go. Lots of people walking dogs in the teasing sunshine, dogs in cars with tongues lolling and tails wagging, dogs in the laps of patrons sitting in coffee house patio. The girls and I have started asking about another dog, thinking about taking the plunge into being a dog-owning family again. The one year anniversary of Albion’s death is approaching, and as sometimes happens, I was aware of it subconsciously before I realized why I had suddenly started to think of him and miss him. But D. is nowhere near ready to open himself up to the potential heartache of loving another pet as much as he loved Alby, only to lose it to its shorter allotment of years. So we'll stick to the current more-than-sufficient menagerie of 2 big outdoor hutched rabbits, two noisy indoor caged parakeets, a spoiled rat who spends her afternoons on R's shoulder (or in her shirtsleeve, nose poked out), and the 400-gallon fish tank. The corey catfish have been laying eggs, and D. devised a way to save them from the two giant greedy koi (who are not pescavores but like eggs). And now we have a couple dozen of the tiny things in a nursery, getting bigger every day. Maybe Spring is not that far away after all.

New Year, New Post

Rather than the contrived and apologetic back-dating that would mean I had a fake entry to show for January 1st, I'm writing the second day into the month to wish one and all a Joyful, Healthy, Prosperous New Year.

This year I will write more poems.
I will spend less money.
I will take more time to be alone and contemplative because it feeds me.
This year I will donate a kidney to a friend. And recover. And celebrate his recovery.
I will laugh more and fret less.
I will be grateful for every gift, large and small, understood and mysterious.
This is a year of change, but all of it
good.


For those who did not receive a Holiday card from us (yet), here's a link to the picture we sent out this year. It's a change from tradition because D and I are actually pictured, and the girls look rather silly. I've been calling it "goofy but happy" and it's from our trip to Vancouver Island in June. This is from the ferry ride back to the mainland.

And by the way K & B and Tom, if you're reading this... I believe you have moved (not together, but separately) so here's a public appeal (although I know an email to each would have sufficed): I need addresses from you guys so I can send a card your way. Please and thank you.

Blessings and warmest wishes to all. Here's to 2009!!!







Wind-blown self-portraiture at its best.

Mary Oliver

I went and saw Mary Oliver read tonight. And. Well.

Wow. For more detail regarding my reaction, see the Practical Poet Blog.

Among other things, she read from a memoir she's written about Molly Malone Cook, with whom she lived for many years. She said that Cook taught her to observe the world differently. She read, "..attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report."



Note to Self: You got that?

Thanksgiving weekend, belatedly posted

Four days away from the usual routine is such a blessing.

Our Thanksgiving was simple. I cooked for an army even though it was just the four of us and D's mother. On the menu (as usual, from Bon Appétit for November 1994 unless otherwise noted):

Turkey with maple herb butter
Broccoli casserole (family recipe)
Bacon and buttermilk mashed potatoes (R. helped with this one)
Brown sugar-glazed sweet potatoes with spices, almond slivers and mini marshmallows
Popovers (another family recipe)
Cranberry sauce with raspberry vinegar
Glazed pearl onions with raisins and almonds
stuffing
pecan & pumpkin pie, vanilla bean ice cream

I've gotten full just writing about this meal!



Grandmère & the girls at the table.

Lightly touching down

About a month ago, I felt like there was a larger than usual number of issues hanging in the air above me all the time. They were a mix of serious and trivial Unknowns, and even though I knew that they would all be resolved eventually, it was stressful waiting for those resolutions. I'm a control freak, right? And these were all things I really couldn't control. I listed some to a co-worker at the time:

Where will R. going to be going to High School next year?
Who will be our next President?
Will I or won't I be donating a kidney in the next few months?
If not, will it be becuase I'm actually borderline or pre-diabetic?
When will I really be starting my new job at the office?
What will my new hours be, and how will they affect the 6-family school carpool?
How will S. be cast in the Nutcracker?
When will D. finish the under-construction awning in the back yard?
Is the rat's tumor operable?

Like I said, some of that is pretty trivial, but I'm still so grateful that most of these things have, in fact, resolved themselves in the best possible way.

The rat's tumor was removed for a reasonable charge and she's doing great. We probably extended her life by 6-12 months with the operation, and I can't say enough good things about the compassionate, reasonably-priced vet who did the job.

The Presidential issue worked out as I was hoping and praying it would, and we probably won't be moving to Canada in the near future. :)

S. will be playing a Mouse and an Angel in the Nutcracker - and she'll even have a 20-second solo as the angel who delivers Clara's crown to the Sugar Plum Fairy.

The awning was completed in record time, and it's absolutely beautiful, especially with the white LEDs adorning it. I'll have to put in a picture (writing with my Writers Group pals a cafe at the moment, so it'll have to wait...)

I have started in my new position in Customer Service at work, and my hours have shifted enough to allow me to sleep a little more every night but not so much that I had to change the carpool.

I am not pre-diabetic, and the kidney donation is still a go, pending a couple more tests. (See Nephronotes for more).

R. has visited a couple of High Schools and has 2 more to visit, but she's very excited about the local Waldorf school in particular, and it happens to be the place that I had felt would be her best fit, too.

Is that it? I think that's it.

All those heavy things hanging above my head, lightly touching down.


How many of the heavy burdens that we let fall from our shoulders become stumbling blocks, and how many are transformed into firm stepping stones that we use to move ahead?

Satire. Or not.

I'm so close to the target demographic for this, it's almost not funny. If you know what I mean. Eh.

Heaven help me

I've created a Facebook account.
I guess I've finally started to catch up with the social networking 21st century.
I don't even know how to direct you to my site or what becoming a friend entails, but I'm sure I'll get up to speed.

You know, in my copious free time.

In the meantime, my friends can become my friends in a whole new way.

Um. Wait.

That didn't sound right.

But you know what I mean.

One Month Later. Here's where I've been

So check out this new blog for a little update for you all:

www.nephro-notes.blogspot.com

If I've seen silent it's because life has been busy, with this added element that may come as a surprise to some of you.

It's all good, though, and I hope you'll be able to offer support as I travel down this new road.

The girls are doing great with their schooling and various activities, both blooming a little more every day, but sufficiently silly and geeky to assure me that they are, in fact, our children.

D's shoulder (he has a small tear in his cuff) is actually better, and the PT and Glucosamine may have made a difference.

Work is going well too. I've had a great time working more directly with the rest of the inbound sales staff. And although I miss being in the same room as the recovery engineers, and although I'm really looking forward to transitioning to Customer Service November 1st, I've learned a lot from the very professional, very hard-working bunch on the third floor.

I am in the middle of the annual weight-loss competition at work. Down to about as low as I've ever been as an adult, with a few more pounds to go. I get to the gym as often as possible, and write more and more. But mostly for the benefit of that other blog (SEE ABOVE).

I hope to spend November writing furiously, too. While the family prepares for Winter, and Nutcracker, and the holidays. They have Christmas decorations in all the stores, and I'm pretty sure it's for Christmas 2009, because it's too late for the 2008 marketing, the way the world works these days.

And let me also say this, even though not all my readers may feel the same way. (And if you don't agree, call me. We'll talk about it.) Go Obama!!!

ARRRR!

It be talk like a pirate day, mateys!

What I'd Rather

When I wake up, all sorts of doors open in my head, and the day's concerns and duties, things I must do or remember, stride in and all start talking at once, vying for attention. It's like a bad party scene where no one is listening to one another, and everyone has had just enough to drink to make them loud and selfish. I grit my teeth and marshal whatever order I can, and give myself a pep talk in the din.

But what I want is this: to wake to peaceful stillness, silent and rested, and walk alone out well-washed French doors into a morning just blooming into color out of the gray of dawn. I want to walk down a path through hills with the birds making their declarations of existence, and the sky high and open.

I want the particles of my body to be loosely held together by whatever joyful contract they originally made with one another, instead of being bound tightly in corporeal mass by the glue of stress and will.

Still here

Still alive.
And well, too.
Just not blogging these days.

But I thought I'd break radio silence with this tiny note.
A (re)start.

Confession

Forgive me reader, for I have committed the sin of hubris.

I thought I could write daily.

Well, I thought I could write daily and do a lot of other things daily too.

But every morning, I launch myself out of bed (after multiple bargaining sessions with the snooze alarm - my earliest waking moments are measured by 7-minute intervals), throw myself into the day, and am hurtled from one thing to another until I give up sometime around 10:30 (give or take) and surrender to the reality that I can't do it all.

And this in spite of my capacity to believe, over and over again, that if only I marshaled myself better, I could accomplish what I've set out to do.

Well, drat.

Today my goal is to be gentle with myself. I think my mother's somewhere telling me to slow down and take it easy. Yeah. Like I've ever listened to that advice.

Returning late

Another full day of conference, and then home just before midnight after an uneventful flight.

Before I left Phoenix, I had dinner with my half-sister M. and her family at a somewhat questionable restaurant near the airport. It was so good to see them and catch up, even if it was only for a short time. (Thanks for the visit and ride to the airport, M!)

It was, as it always is, so nice to come home.

Geekiness and Buffets

The last few days at the developer's conference have been a combination of lots of new information - I now know even more painfully how little I know and how many new, exciting things I *could* be doing, if I only I had the time to learn the steps better - and these thrice-daily buffets where I could, theoretically, eat plate after plate of food. I limit myself to one plate per meal, but I don't pass on dessert either.

Sunday 7/13/08

Immersed in FileMaker Developer Conference stuff all day, feeling a little flu-like in the evening. But nothing an early night in the nice JW Marriott Desert Ridge hotel room won't cure.

Kids home, Mom away

This morning I drove out west past pastures and redwoods and tiny towns to pick up S from her Presbyterian camp. She didn't seem any taller or dirtier than she'd been when I dropped her off, but after a few hours at the pool, this girl tans like nobody's business, and her skin was a consistent shade darker than I remembered (the consistency is how I knew it wasn't dirt). She had a good time, she said, but she was definitely saddened by the fact that I was going to be leaving almost as soon as we got home, and wouldn't be back for a few days.

D took me to the airporter on his way to pick up R and her friend from their designated Girl Scout Camp bus stop a couple of hours south. Apparently, S babbled the whole drive down. And the whole drive back.

I got to the airport hours before my flight was to leave, but I didn't mind. I've probably mentioned this before, but I love to hang out at airports and people watch. I think I like the idea of seeing a concrete representation of something that's true at a metaphysical level. We're all on journeys. We're going away. We're coming home. We're leaving old for new, or vice versa. And we're not alone.

Everyone seems to be represented - old, young, all races and religions and social classes. I know there are some who can't afford to fly, some who are afraid to fly, some who are too ill or otherwise unable to fly, and some who just plain have nowhere they want or need to go via plane.

But enough of us pass through airports at one point or another that it feels like I'm seeing a cross-section of the world. And each of us brings to the gate our own story of our own journey, like some kind of internal carry-on item that we couldn't check if we wanted to.

Date Night #2

I went to the gym this afternoon - after a nap in my car in the gym parking lot! - and then did a little more cleaning of the girls' rooms. And laundry. You would think that without the kids around I'd do something more exotic - like, I don't know, blast 80's music and drink a dessert wine in the afternoon. But cleaning without anyone else in the house is sheer bliss for me. What can I say?

We didn't make it out to a movie two nights ago, but last night, D & I went out & saw Get Smart, which was a bit of a treat for us primarily because we'd both grown up watching the show, and both like the actors. We're probably the target audience for the film. We also went out to dinner at D's new favorite burger restaurant afterwards. It was good food, but I'm really better off not eating so late.

D and I love spending time just talking. We have every reason to believe that we'll still be friends and still enjoy hanging out together after the nest is empty. Especially if we keep the conversation going between then and now.

Tonight, we went out for sushi. We sat at the bar and chatted with the sushi chef - something we never do with the kids - and just relaxed. Rented a couple of movies and watched one of them. Tomorrow I pick up S and then D picks up R while I'm off on a business trip. I'm still preparing to pack, which means doing all the laundry I can. It's bizarre, but familiar, behavior. I don't know when I'll move beyond the stage of recognizing it to the point of changing it. Hmmm.

Workaholic wannabee

It's apparently a good thing that I am forced to leave the office more or less "on time" every day to pick up kids, because apparently otherwise I'd habitually work 50 hour weeks.

There was a quarterly meeting for my current department today that kept me there until 2, and I didn't really leave until 2:30, but I didn't mind at all. So much of my life feels like I'm playing catch-up that putting in a little extra effort or time somewhere helps me feel closer to successful. As much as I enjoy the process more than the results in most of what I do, it's horrible to know that there is so much unfinished business. Especially hard for a Virgo. :)

At home, I got to work on house cleaning and cleaning the girls' rooms in particular. After all, I did warn them I'd be doing so, and I got their permission for me to get rid of things that they really truly don't use. I was surprised how quickly they agreed - especially R, as a teenager who is starting to guard her privacy - but I think they understand as well as I do that they have just too much stuff, and it gets in the way, makes it hard for them to find things, and probably clutters their inner life in some way as much as it trips them up in their outer life.

I didn't get far, and that's probably because of the weird ADHD way I have of cleaning. It's If You Give a Mouse a Cookie re-titled If You Give a Mom a Room to Clean. On my way to putting one thing away I'd see something else that needed to be done, which would take me to another room, and a third thing that could be moved, and a fourth task that was begging to be completed. It was pathetic. In the end I got more things done or half-done than not done, but nothing completed. Which makes me grateful that I have another day and a bit more before the kids are back and I leave for the next business trip.

Camper number two away

After work, and a frantic bout of labeling items with our 8-character last name and packing them up, I got S. to camp. We missed the official check-in time by "that much" but it only took a couple of minutes to do a "late-reg" check-in at the office. The camp is nestled in the redwoods, but even with that aromatic green shadiness, it was very hot when I dropped her off, and I anticipate three really hot days for her.

There was a little added excitement in the flurry of packing and leaving - S had a tooth come out (with her helpful yanking), and even though I encouraged her to leave it at home so the tooth fairy could pick it up under her pillow in her room, S decided to take it with her at the last possible second. This necessitated a quick dash into the house for a dollar coin and a fast scrub with brass polish to get the tarnish off - because the Tooth Fairy always leaves a shiny coin.

I left the campsite hoping the delivery instructions and the hidden coin would make it to the right counselor without S any the wiser, and I drove home a "free" woman with no one but myself and my husband to answer to. I love my kids. But I also love time to myself. This may be only the first of an increasing number of events that will mean both kids are away from the house, and maybe it's good preparation for the day when they're more gone than home. But I don't have to worry about being at loose ends or wondering what to do with myself when that day does come.

Check!

Checking off my list for the week:

Survive another day of temperatures over 100.

Swim at local public pool with S (more mommy-daughter time)

Read at poetry reading at bookstore 15 miles south of home as part of Traveling Poetry Show. (I always feel like a circus act when I hear that title.)

Delegate camp packing to S and D while at said reading.

Blog. How self-referential. Blogging about blogging about blogging. Reminds me of what you see if you angle a couple of mirrors just right - endless self. This is like digital narcissism, I guess.

Mommy-daughter time

S had her first day of Dance Camp today. The camp is 3 days a week, with various classes for ballet, tap, jaz, character (folk) and choreography, as well as pre-pointe. I think the pre-pointe is just stretching because the girls are so young, but she and her classmates are very excited about it. It marks a move toward the Big Time for them.

After work, I picked her up from dance & we had tea and coffee at the Tea Room before heading out to visit the camp she'll be going to later in the week. We got a tour from the very patient Camp Director, and hung out for about an hour and a half at the playground and walking along the creek. We also walked a prayer labyrinth - a narrow path in the dirt lined with rounded river stones that wraps around in a spiral not unlike this:




The idea, I believe, is to walk it while praying or meditating. It's not the kind of thing you dash through fast or skip over, but either response might be normal for an 8-ear old, and I was pleasantly surprised at how quietly and respectfully S. walked it.

I thought of the labyrinth as a metaphor for life. We think we're making no progress, because we double-back on ourselves as we go. But we are indeed moving from point A to point B. And when we think we're as far as we can go, we're not - but again, we must wind back and around to get to the end - only to find that there is no end, and we have to loop back yet again to the beginning once more - sometimes passing close to one another, sometimes far from one another - but on our own journey, if on a common road.

The last half of the walk, as we passed each other, we would reach out and brush our hands together. Kind of a meditative hi-five.

We drove the 45 minutes back to home, I napped (exhausted) on the couch for an hour - which S later claimed was "like, 2 hours" and then took her to her Math club - more of a games night than anything.

Some time in the evening, she said, "We should spend some mommy-daughter time together." I said, "Um. What was this afternoon, then?" I guess 4 hours in 8 years doesn't cut it. Especially if you nap. I'll work on that.

Day of rest. Or not.

Sabbath. Hmmm. I worked 5am-1pm today (weekend pay is a good incentive), then got home & double-checked R's "I got everything!" packing job for camp. She's getting better at the art of packing light - rolling her clothes, not bringing too much and yet remembering the essentials like more than one pair of underwear. She did chose the biggest, fluffiest and heaviest towel she could have, and forgot a mess kit and canteen, but it didn't take too long to finish up and drop her off at her friend's house for their early morning 90 minute drive to the Monday morning bus for camp.

We'd wanted to visit the closer-to-home campgrounds where S will be going later in the week - to familiarize her with it, since she has a hard time when left "alone" in new/unknown environments. But it was too late to make it out there today, so we'll do it tomorrow instead.

D has completed the move of the water heater in the laundry room - we have hot water again, hooray! And the washer & dryer are re-hooked up. So I have no excuse not to do the piles of dirty laundry. Except for that wanting to sleep thing...

The time it takes to be green

So the girls and I decided to do what we could to avoid using the car today, and we biked instead. Sounds easy enough, but the first step was finding locks in the garage, and then biking to Longs and then KMart, to find and buy chains to use with the locks. The only chain I found was made in Japan (to the US co's specifications, as though that made up for the foreign manufacture). I got it anyway. Then we biked to the pool, locked the girls bikes up, and I biked to the gym - two workouts in one! - and then I biked to a coffee shop to have an iced coffee and negate the benefits of the biking while filling out bills and a letter for R to receive in camp next week.

When I went to pay for my drink, I found to my dismay that my little wallet was missing. I ended up racing back (on bike, of course) to KMart to try to track it down, assuming that it was probably long gone if I'd dropped it there. By some miracle (thank you, guardian angel!), someone had turned it in and it had all of its contents still in it.

After I biked to the pool and escorted the girls home, we gave up on being green and used the car for the couple of additional errands we had to run for the day.

It was a good exercise - both physically and in terms of adapting to a new lifestyle. But it's taught me that this kind of living requires really good planning. Also, it means allowing for additional time as well as becoming adept at keeping track of all the details as you go - like wallets, for example.

Fourth

I posted an old 4th of July poem on The Practical Poet page to celebrate the day, but we mostly spent the day at home, puttering and doing chores, and (in my case) just being lazy in a post-stressful-times way. We'd had invitation to 4 great parties, and originally had planned to visit all of them if possible, but in the end we only went to the traditional gathering for fireworks at our friend's place on the other side of town.

The girls and I did run the Kenwood 3K at 7:30am - which meant waking up before 6am to get there on time. We took a friend with us - the ex-next door neighbor's girl, who is only 3 weeks younger than S. She and S. and I jogged, then walked, then jogged, then walked most of the route, until I finally got S. to agree to let me run ahead. She'd been anxious at the start of the race because we'd been briefly separated, and it made her clingy for the first mile plus of the 1.8 mile race. In the end, I passed R. (who had run ahead of all of us from the beginning), and got to the finish in time to snap shots of all of the girls as they came in. We also waited for our neighbor's mom to cross the finish line - she'd run the 10k, which I normally do, except she'd really been training for it and posted a respectable time for such an unkind, hilly course.

The fireworks were fun - the kids and adults all got along swimmingly, and we made it home at a decent hour. As always, I was relieved to find our house not on fire upon our return. I tell you. I can be so paranoid sometimes.

It's Official

The announcement went out at work today that I'm moving from the Inbound Sales group to the Customer Service department. This means my focus will be on giving customers news about their recoveries (including billing and invoicing for the work), as well as making sure that the customers are happy (or, hopefully, thrilled) and that the engineers and shipping folks all have what they need to perform the recoveries and get the jobs out the door. It's a problem-solving, colleague and customer supporting kind of role, and I'm super excited about the move. I think it suits my disposition and utilizes my strengths better than does a position in sales, with its related competitiveness.

And I'll still be able to provide whatever support I can (based on experience and knowledge that I've gathered over the last 10 years) to my colleagues in sales.
I'll also be able to use my foreign language and writing skills more. ¡Necesito aprender cómo hablar más español!

I probably won't start my new duties until late this month, as they have to find and hire a replacement in my current department. And apparently, no one is super eager about taking the 5am-1pm shift. But by the end of August, anyway, I should expect the transition will be complete. Also by then, the Customer Service department itself will have moved to a remodeled area on the first floor of the building, and I won't be sitting among the buzz of dozens of computers and servers or the cacophony of ringing phones and quoting salespeople.

D. insisted on going out for a sushi dinner to celebrate. Yeah. Twist my arm.

Sustenance

I've joined a discussion group where we're looking at Sustainable Living,
and judging by the first meeting tonight, it's exactly what I need when I need it in my path to living more responsibly and intentionally on this piece of rock.

Since probably a third of the readership of this blog is also in the group, you already know what I mean.

For the rest of you, I'll try to expand.

But not now.

I've been told that my 4 hours a night of sleep are worrying my spouse.

New Years in July

It's a time of change.

We recently got a new dishwasher (the previous one being 30+ years old), and a new front-loading stackable washer and dryer. These have already lowered our utility bill.

D's work on the remodel is moving along steadily, and what's emerging is gorgeous. Of course.

We've also got new toilets, which may not sound so glamorous but believe me when I tell you that one's quality of life is directly related to the minutes spent plunging vs not plunging.


We're just back from a trip to Seattle, Vancouver Island and Crater Lake, and it was the BEST family vacation I could have imagined, and we've got a new outlook and broadened horizons as a result.


It looks like there will be changes in my role at work in the not-so-distant future, and I'm very excited about that too.

And I'm shifting my focus in general - away from half-marathons and toward 20 minute workouts and more time to write. Sent out a poem for a local contest last night. Am glad I pushed myself to write it and get it out there.


And about that Writing thing.

Let's see if posting daily in July (starting yesterday, today) helps me keep it at the front of my mind. One can hope.

Greetings from Klamath Falls, OR

It's day 2 of our family vacation. Yesterday, we beat our own usual 2-hours behind schedule record by adding another 2 hours to it! After many hours of folding clean laundry and cleaning out pet cages (a standard courtesy for the pet-sitters), R. said, "For once, couldn't we just go on a trip without cleaning the whole house first?"

I really do appreciate my family's patience with my get-it-all-in-order now compulsive issues. And for the record, I held myself back a lot (otherwise we'd still be at home, I suspect.) I didn't have the girls clean their rooms, and I didn't wash the kitchen and bathroom floors like I wanted to so desperately. So we all make sacrifices.

I'll write more as I can on the road. We're about to leave for the train station, now!

A Quarter of A Century

That's how long it's been since D asked me to be his girlfriend. Standing under the stars in the driveway of my friend's house, after D had snuck out (I think he'd been grounded) to bike the few necessary blocks and crash a girl-only party to talk to me, I distinctly remember thinking, "Ah! This must be what Juliette felt about Romeo."

And I remember that even in that head-spinning, heart-thudding moment, part of me was observing, analyzing, and assessing how cliche it all was. But that doesn't mean I could stop myself from being swept of my feet. Detachment only goes so far in the face of wild first love.

I was 16. He was 18. (It tells you something about his home life that he'd been grounded at 18.) He was my first and only boyfriend, and to this day is my best friend, confidant, lover, the father of my children, and the smartest, funniest, most creative and most complex person I know.

We officially became a couple June 11, 1983. We broke up around September 1986 and got back together again somewhere around February 1988, and we've had our rough patches here and there since then - but we proudly count that time apart when calculating the longevity of our relationship, because without that dramatic breakup and the subsequent maturation, we wouldn't be where we are today.

So here's to you, D. Thanks for everything.

And in the interest of embarrassing us both, a couple of shots from Marin Sierra, July 1983:





















(We've come a long way, baby!)

Such is the age

...and such is the insular geeky nature of my family.

S. said Saturday night, "I know what a clone is. But what's a cyclone?"

It wasn't because of Myanmar that she was asking - we don't have TV, don't take a paper, and D hadn't yet read about Nargis in the Japan Times online, nor had I yet heard about it on NPR.

We'd been watching an episode of "Jeeves and Wooster" and the word came up.

And of course, R. speculated that a "cyclone" might be a cyber-clone.

World events? Meteorological phenomena? not a clue
BBC comedies? Replicants? oh yeah, we got that covered

Something new

The new site, one that I'll use as a "professional" web page, at least for now, is called The Practical Poet, and can be found here.

I actually have two reasons to break out the bubbly - the new site, and the amazing news I received yesterday that one of my poems I'd sent out into the wide world of competitions in March has won first place. I'll share the details once the journal has announced the results officially. I'm still reeling a bit - wondering if there's been some mistake, but enjoying the whirly ride.

Ping post

Still here, alive and kicking, and working on a new (!), more professional-use blog site to be "launched" this month, as part of my celebration of National ("forced recognition") Poetry Month.

Doesn't "launched" sound like there should be a bottle of champagne involved?

Back in the game

I've mailed off poems to five separate competitions this month - all reputable and fairly judged, from what I can tell - with the added benefit in almost all cases of a subscription in exchange for the reading fee, and significant prizes for first and other places.

We shall see!

It feels so good, at any rate, to put those SASE's in the envelope and send them off. As Suzanne and I discussed recently, the anticipation of responses is like the hope one might feel in the time between the buying of the lottery ticket and the revelation of the winning numbers.

And even though I know my chances for winning the contests are not fantastic - yet! wait until next year, when I'm that much improved! - they probably are better than those of winning the lottery.

Mis Mawrth Happus Iawn i Chi! And about the ficus...

Or "Happy March to You!" for my non-Welsh speaking readers.

I missed officially celebrating Saint David's Day this year because I wasn't at work to bring in scones & show off my Red Dragon flag, and I didn't post a blog entry Saturday either. But Mother Nature in our corner of the world celebrated for me, with good weather and daffodils trumpeting the advent of spring everywhere.

A year ago, I see, I had just sent off poems for inclusion in an anthology. Saturday, I mailed poems to be considered for a contest - the first of many such mailings. (Really, Julia.)

D and I did a ton of work around the house over the weekend. His big project was getting rid of the now-defunct 50 gallon saltwater tank that had been "temporarily" moved to the livingroom when we started the garage remodel. Inspired by his hard work, I was up until 12:30am this morning trying to find a new configuration for couches, chairs & the 26-year old ficus in the room - something that was feng-shui and would keep us from feeling like the place is just a jungle with a TV in the corner. But the tree is more bush than tree, and until we do some kind of topiary chiropractics with it, it insists on dominating the room.

In looking for a nice generic image of a ficus to add to the post, I found this quirky link www.theficus.com.


That link in turn lead me (2 links later) to this article & quote by Donald Trump:

There's no plant as beautiful as the ficus, and no plant that does the trick like the ficus.

(Hmmm. Maybe Mr. Trump would like to provide us with a small stipend as a reward for having lovingly coexisted with our plant for so long? A girl can only hope...)

How many times

...will I re-affirm my desire to write or my intention to be a better-published, better poet?

How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?

Thanks to Suzanne for the re-inspiration yesterday,and for this great poetry resource link.

The work progresses. I was re-inspired by hearing Rebecca Foust speak at a panel last Thursday sponsored by Marin Poetry Center. The discussion was on "The Professionalization of Poetry," and she was by far the most articulate, informed and relevant speaker for me. She's a woman who had a career as a lawyer, raised three children, and is now getting her MFA at a low residency program. She has gained a great deal of recognition and won several awards in a short period of time. How? By writing well and sending those well-written poems out there. Sounds like a plan to me.


The rain is still relentless. And this little snippet of a blog entry skirts around the thing that really must be recorded: the fact that our dog died a week ago today. I want to gather pictures, though, and perhaps also the little video clip that R. has of him nosing the camera and wagging his tail, and make a proper tribute post. But for now, Quiescat in Pace.

Oh. My.

**warning. mush follows. not for the cynical of heart.**


The first love note I found this morning was attached to my car keys when I went to start my daily half-pot of decaf.

(Um. Not that I need my keys to start the coffee maker. They were just near it on the counter.)

That one post-it note would have been enough to have me secretly smiling to myself all day.

But then I found another note on the bathroom mirror.

And another on the dashboard of my car.

It seemed like a note had been placed in every spot I might run into one at oh-dark-thirty when I prepare for work in the morning.

Short and simple.
(The notes, not their author.)

I came to work feeling like I was the best-loved woman on the planet.

And to make it even better, I'm loved by the coolest, smartest, funniest, dearest man I could ever hope to meet.


***


I divide my workdays between two desks in two departments in the office, so I wouldn't have found the last note until after 9am if my coworker hadn't emailed me to come to my other department early to see what had been left there.

I can't believe the lush beauty of the bouquet of red roses D. had delivered.

The note attached to the blooms is the same short message that I'd seen on the post-its.

There's hardly room on my desk (either desk) for the arrangement.

There's hardly room in my heart for how grateful I am to have such a sweetheart as a best friend and husband.

undulation

i.
the first grief is a white water slam
dashing into itself, erupting again
a tattoo beat in spikes and dips
like green blips on a screen.
between breakers this abrupt there is no
almost forgetting you are gone.

ii.
later, waves swell and fall like hills
spills of starlings twist and spin
in the blushing dusk. without counting
days or distance, here is the farthest away
you’ve been, now the longest
we’ve spent without your kiss.
orgasm, seasickness, the heat of
fire, the wind, and this. what else
comes in waves and goes in waves?

iii.
even now when we think ourselves
becalmed, sneaker waves capsize us.
we look for the horizon, everything
moves. terra infirma, the world reincarnates daily.
what of you? you in the flocks of fish wheeling
up and down in deep water. you in the modulation of bees
in the breeze-stricken apple boughs.

Slightly modified version

I like this better. Am wiping out the last version.

Rain on Fresh Concrete



The sound of the downpour draws us
to the window like the circus come to town.
All that we had left outside is now initiated by rain.
True, much had been well on the road to rust and mold
anyhow. But the concrete, newly poured, was not yet set in its ways.
We rush the storm: wheel in the mixer, toss empty bags,
fling tarps over the new path. The rain never pauses for breath.
We are alone in our remorse. We, who celebrated
every square inch of adobe we buried with bricks and cement:
that much less mud the next time it pours.
Cover it up in lining, rebar, gravel, concrete.
Planter boxes on top filled with dirt.
Dirt in boxes over concrete over dirt.
The strata we make of our lives.

An old one, in honor of recent rains

Rain on Fresh Concrete

Darkroom in Samoa

(an old one, posted for Kate. And written for her, and Joe, to begin with)

Darkroom in Samoa

We swim through green abundance,
one last breath before the glade. Before the
schoolroom mausoleum, chalk dust and damp
cement. One last breath before the closet
where we inter ourselves.
There are chemicals used for this in the dark or
near dark; developer, stop bath, fixing bath, wash.
Acrid attacks on the senses, vinegar alchemies,
each in turn.
Faces surface from oddly bent buildings;
lovers; horizons. Not always what was meant,
yet each one making its own sense.
We inhale the fumes and the faces together,
exhale a sigh of the same.
Our nostrils still burn when we step out of the room
and raise ourselves from the dead.
We make hardcopies of a wasteland,
here where the breezes are lush,
where the air is ginger and palm.

First published in Disquieting Muses, February 2000
Quoted in full again in pifmagazine, May 2000, in their review of DM.

New Years Eve, Post the First

Like so many people, on December 31st I am prone to rank, rate and ruminate. I don't like to look back and analyze much in detail, but I do take stock. I look at where the accumulated year has brought me. I look at myself in this moment, now, and ponder where I'll be in the Nows to come.

I've just spent the last half hour or so chopping wood. We've been going through the knotty, hard, stubborn stumps that are all that are left of the free cord plus that we were lucky enough to get a couple of years ago. And so my lower back is itself knotted and I have a stinging callus starting on my left palm. But the blood blister from when I chopped with my wedding ring on a couple of weeks ago has finally healed, and the wheels in my head are spinning with the same inspiration that a brisk walk in the hills normally brings. It's one of those times when if I could forsake my family, the dinner the girls are so excitedly preparing, the groceries I need to buy and money I need to deposit at the bank, I would sit and write. And write. Poems, prose, emails, blog entries. I always get the desire to write on New Year's Eve.

But even as I type these very words, R comes in asking me to open a new jar of tomato sauce.

[Here the blogger weighs out whether to insert long suffering sigh or philosophical observation...]

More later.

Is there something my husband isn't telling me?

Yesterday, we received a Christmas box from my mother-in-law. It was addressed:

Mr. and Mrs. P*******
and Becky


Here are my questions:

Where has he been keeping this other wife?

Does the box contain fruitcake? (I've been afraid to look)
If it does, how long will fruitcake keep?

I guess this sort of thing is to be expected from my mother-in-law, the woman who once installed hospital wall colored pastel floral vertical blinds in our bedroom while we were away from our house one day. The woman who gave us a BRASS SADDLE BAG mailbox with "The Patrascu" engraved in it. In black. Come to think of it, maybe she's just confused about who lives at our house. Sometimes it's just one Patrascu. Sometimes it's D., the Mrs., and me. Apparently.


I may have told this story before, but for years we talked about "losing" the mailbox and then reporting to D's mom that it had been taken. I practiced saying incredulously, "Somebody stole our mailbox!" but I just knew I couldn't pull it off. It was only after a remodel when D. built a mail slot into our garage that we were able to justify taking down the saddlebag. I know she meant well. I'm sorry if I sound like an ingrate. But here's my point: there are some items that one should allow a person to pick out for his or herself. You know, items that display prominently by default at one's home.

Pics from the Company Party

You can tell from his hunched shoulders that D is not 100% happy. But for someone in tremendous back pain and medicated, I think he looks pretty good! I hadn't posted a pic of us here in forever, and thought I might as well take advantage of us being dressed up...








...and this is after I let my hair down,
although I didn't even get near the dance floor all night,
and in fact didn't even have a drop of alcohol either.
How tame is that?

The only benefit I can see

of blogging daily this month - or, I should say, of having an entry recorded for every day this month - is that I proved to myself that I could do so.

I might have stretched myself a little here or there, I might have gotten back into the grove of daily writing.

By thinking about something worthwhile to say every day, I realized both how much I get lost in trivia and logistics and how little I allow myself to sink down and contemplate and write about more meaningful stuff. So much for being a philosophy minor in college.

Honest review of monthly writing goals reached:
wrote 3 new poems, edited a couple of old ones
wrote most of one more chapter in the novel - the most I've added to it in probably a year

bah.
Onward, McDuff! (which allusion, by the way, I must have slightly wrong - because I cannot find the source for it online, only other allusions that must also be wrong. MacDuff doesn't get me any closer to the answer - suggestions, oh my 2 readers?)

Poetry

Ellen Bass' poem "If You Knew" was featured in Garrison Keillor The Writer's Almanac on 11/25/07. That's the second time in a week someone has pointed me to Keillor's page, and now I see from other poems that I like his selection, even if I don't always like the way he reads a poem.

The link to Ellen's web site, where she shares the poem from The Human Line, is here. But I hope she doesn't mind me quoting the poem itself. I consider it another way of pointing readers to her work.



If You Knew

What if you knew you'd be the last
to touch someone?
If you were taking tickets, for example,
at the theater, tearing them,
giving back the ragged stubs,
you might take care to touch that palm,
brush your fingertips
along the life line's crease.

When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase
too slowly through the airport, when
the car in front of me doesn't signal,
when the clerk at the pharmacy
won't say Thank you, I don't remember
they're going to die.

A friend told me she'd been with her aunt.
They'd just had lunch and the waiter,
a young gay man with plum black eyes,
joked as he served the coffee, kissed
her aunt's powdered cheek when they left.
Then they walked half a block and her aunt
dropped dead on the sidewalk.

How close does the dragon's spume
have to come? How wide does the crack
in heaven have to split?
What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?

Remind me again

Why I'm attempting to post daily this month?

Was it because I was feeling my life was too dull and I wanted to add something to my to-do list?

Yeah. That was probably it.


My schedule today, for my own future amusement:
4:07 drag myself out of bed by telling myself what a good person I am for getting up
5:00-1:13 work and all it entails
1:50-2:20 work out at gym (climbed around 100 flights of stairs while reading the beginning of a Connie Willis short story. I love Connie Willis)
2:30-3:00 go with D to his chiropractic appointment. See x-rays, the curvature, the results. Good news: no "underlying pathology" to worry about ("it's not a tumor!") Bad news: 60 weeks of appointments.
3:00-3:10 pick up S and one of her friends at school.
3:10-3:30 vacuum classroom
3:40-6:00 supervise playdate, make dinner (ratatouille from the Moosewood cookbook. My favorite)
6:00-6:30 take other child home, pick up R from her playdate, take R to math club
6:40-7:20 kill time with S at the outlet mall. Don't know what I was thinking. It only ended with bitterness because we walked away without buying her anything. Her. Life. Is. So. Hard. Sometimes.
7:30-8:00 pick up R at math club, talk to math teacher. He thinks she's extremely bright. Always nice to hear that from a teacher who is himself brilliant.
8:00-9:15 come home, take care of incapacitated husband and wound up children. Get all to bed.

D. had an acupuncture appointment at 5:00 and class at 6:00 (a quiz he couldn't miss), and maybe because of that or the above schedule, the rest of the night went like this:

9:16 realize that we COMPLETELY MISSED a rehearsal for S for the Nutcracker. Not good. Especially so close to the performance. I called the studio & left a message right away apologizing, and I'll probably call again today and grovel. I have advanced permission to use the "my husband is in so much pain and going to so many Dr. appointments it distracted me from my focus on the rehearsal schedule and it won't happen again" excuse. Fortunately, it's not like she's dancing the part of Clara this year or anything.

9:18-10:15 fret over what a failure I am for missing the rehearsal. Let dog out. Cover birds. Lock doors. Let dog in. Fret some more. Tell myself to lighten up on myself. Rationalize. Feel bad that I didn't write. Tell myself I'll get up extra early to wash the dishes and write. Recognize that this is probably a lie I am telling myself. Fret over lying to myself.

It's not a pretty picture, is it? But it's sometimes hard to jump off our treadmills, and I've been running on this one for a while, chewing the worry cud for years.

On a lighter and much more vain and shallow note, I've just bought new pants and they're 2 sizes smaller than what I was wearing a year ago. And they fit. Comfortably. I'm now smaller than I've been since I was 15, and have much more strength and tone to boot. Couldn't have done it without the support group I have, though. Kudos to them.

Currently listening to

The Stolen Child by Keith Donohue. It's a story about changelings. In Donohue's page describing the creatures, I'm reminded of myself as a child. I don't know that I was especially frightened of adults (apart from my terror over possibly making a mistake, heaven forbid). But my favorite thing to do (and therapists could have a field day with this) was to hide away in small spaces, like cupboards or under desks. Or to read. Or, ideally, do both at the same time. I also loved the woods, and was certain until I was in my mid-twenties that my ideal home would be a small house somewhere with trees on all sides. Ideally Oak, the Druid's tree, and Rowan, with its magical ability to fend of evil. Here's part of what Donohue says about hobgoblins:

they are hypersensitive; they can squeeze into small spaces; they are all we used to be. Hiding in the woods, burrowing under the library, holding on to their mythical nature, they are as frightened of us, as we are of them.

The book is interesting, and narrated fairly well, with alternating narrators taking the chapters that are told by the point of view of the stolen child and the changeling who took his place. But it's hard to say how much it would grip me if I were reading it and not listening to it. I've become so critical lately. No movies or books seem perfect enough. It probably reflects some deeply hidden dissatisfaction with my life or myself. Which makes me want to crawl into a cabinet, actually.

Consumerism Countdown

Christmas shopping.

I haven’t done any yet. Zilch. Zero. Zip.

And Saturday, according to the calendars I’ve been reading lately, is December first. Golly!

Usually, because of my controlling nature, adherence to traditional gender roles, and tendency to be a martyr, I do the majority of the Christmas shopping. But some years, D and I tackle the holidays together. This year promises to be one of those collaborative efforts, provided D has a diagnosis and better treatment for his back and isn’t in a fog of pain killers. (Actually, maybe one is better able to pick out presents in a freer, less inhibited manner, when one has had a little percocet...)

One year, when I was in college and before our year-long Break Up (after which we got back together again better, stronger, wiser) during the brief time when D and I (chastely, I might note) shared an apartment with a couple of other young adults our age, we made all of our presents out of gingerbread. We made gingerbread Victorians for the three people we knew who lived in Victorian houses. We made log cabins. We made classic gingerbread houses. We made our D&D playing friend a long sword out of gingerbread. And true to form, the piece de resistance (and I am not making this up) was a gingerbread Millennium Falcon. Ah, those were the good old geekier-than-thou days.

One year after we were married but when we were still broke, we made, with mixed success, about thirty candles for people on our lists. And yes, some of them were melted down from other candles we already owned. We were that broke.

This year, I may follow through with my annual threat to just get everyone a potholder in the interest of fairness and frugality (not to mention practicality). But the reality is, at some point, I’ll make a heroic effort to get everyone something good-enough-if-not-perfect, and will undoubtedly over-compensate in some areas and fall short in others, and do too much of it all last minute.

At least I can count on help from D again, as I can every year, with the Christmas cards. I just have to find or take the right Pictures of the Girls to send out. And I have the names and addresses of new relatives to add to the list – hooray!

Day of nonrest

The upside to working a Sunday is how much more productive I am once I come home; I know I have only a few hours to accomplish whatever else (like washing the last of the pans and filing papers in the office) I might want to accomplish over the weekend.

After we did work, homework, chores, the girls and I brought the bunnies in and let them play in the living room. It's hard to tell when a rabbit is truly happy, but they seemed to have fun.

Saturday, and Done with the Cooking

This morning I dropped off R. at the riding clinic, which was taught by an Olympic trainer. I delivered her to the barn just after 7am. It was 27 degrees outside. Brrrr!

I went to the gym (Dude. I had seconds and pie Thursday), and then got today's bird in the oven. The mangling and wrestling and negotiating that goes on between me and still-partially-frozen turkeys every year makes me feel like I'm living an episode of I Love Lucy. Today, for example, I spent twenty minutes running water into the cavity of the bird trying to defrost the ice that was holding its neck in place, periodically pulling and tugging at the neck in the hopes of yanking it free. The recipe I use calls for rubbing a special herb butter under the skin of the breast, and if that isn't a weird sensation, I might as well start delivering babies for fun.

D's dad came over for the dinner (as opposed to supper), and I picked up R and we all ate the traditional two-hours-later-than-I-think-the-turkey-will-be-done. We're having a friend of R's over for the night, as an act of compassion for a fellow human being in difficult circumstances. (Her 10-year-old brother has 4 friends staying the night for his birthday.) R had a great time at the clinic, and by all accounts, did very well with the flatwork and jumping. She shines after she's had time with horses. No amount of dirt and grime and horse drool on her shoulders takes away from how happy she looks after she's cantered a few jumps.

D's back is still hurting, but Monday he'll see a Dr. and a chiropractor about it, and I'm starting to preach P.T. I can't imagine how frustrating this is for him, and my heart again goes out to those folks (including the ones near and dear to me) who are living with chronic pain. It takes superhuman strength and grace to bear that kind of load.


...
Off to supervise the night-time routine, but I can't leave without wishing Kate a very happy birthday. Celebrate, K!

The day between

This is the day between two Thanksgiving meals, where I worked 7-3 then did errands and chores and spent the evening watching a fair-to-middling movie with my family. Sometimes what makes quality time with D and the kids is just that it's downtime, and we're together.

Having said that, I'm also so grateful to them for letting me dash off to the gym while they had dinner without me, because I so needed the workout!

Was up way way too late tonight cooking for tomorrow, and tomorrow I'll be up very early to take R to a riding clinic, and then I'll focus on getting the next turkey in the oven. With any luck, I'll manage to work on my poetry too, somewhere in there...

Grateful

I started to write out a Thanksgiving list - the expected "what I'm thankful for."
The short list: Everything
The details:
life on this planet, at this place & in this time
the people I'm sharing that time with: my husband,
my daughters, the rest of my family - relatives by upbringing, birth and marriage
my few but valued friends
my health - physical, emotional, mental (holding steady at the moment)
my home - even when it's at its cluttered worst, it's a roof over my head and a blessing

but all that seemed so EXPECTED, that I didn't want to put it down.

And I thought about writing the MENU from today's meal (just to impress you all, because there were more different gourmet dishes than there were diners), but that, too, seemed contrived.

So I'm just saying that it's a day-after retro-post, I don't have enough time to say anything profound because of clamoring children, and for those of you who are disappointed, I say if you're relying on me for entertainment or enlightenment, you should should consider alternatives. At least for the next few days of cooking, serving, cleaning, working, repeat.

The downside to aquarium ownership

The day was unremarkable, but the evening was marked by the loss of our youngest and (at the time of his demise) largest koi, Nanashi. His name meant "nameless" or "anonymous," and you would think that it's silly to be sad about the loss of a fish (especially compared to the loss of a dog or cat, as friends who have recently suffered in that way can attest). But we got him when he was about 2" long, and he was 18" long when he died, and we're mourning all the same. It's a little different when the fish are as big as a cat, and are hand-fed every morning in 400 gallon tank in your living room.

Nanashi is the gold & white fellow (or gal, it's hard to tell with koi) in the pictures from February below. We still have the light orange Lao Tsu, our elder koi, and the silver Yosho, but whatever suddenly affected Nanashi in the tank water was affecting them too, which meant a 200+ gallon water change tonight in the hopes of saving everyone else. They're all fine as of now, and we may never know what happened. It wasn't old age, though - koi can live 100 to 200 years, apparently, if kept right. Apparently, a pond in Japan is the best method, so we're already handicapped with our tank in northern California. But D does an amazing job with keeping everything running well, and it's hard to realize that one's best efforts can mean nothing in the face of some unknown agent of mortality.

























Post-script - those 18" are body only and don't include the tail, probably another 3" or more. And he was only 2 years old....

Consumerism and Mortality

Watching the ebb & flow of people through Costco today while I waited for new tires made me think about death, about how we're all going to die and buying things is not so much life-affirming as death-denying.

Apparently my negative feelings about shopping go deeper than I thought. There's a poem in there. I'm working on it.

Sick child went to school (well enough), well child had an all-day play date. I cleaned the birdcage, bought - more shopping! - most of what I still needed for tomorrow and Saturday (2 dinners again this year). And I drove R's classmates to the ballroom dance class last night although R herself didn't go. After I got back at 8:45 I made a frantic but incomplete attempt to clean the house for today's babysitter. I'm comforted by the fact that I've seen said babysitter's bedroom and can only hope that she doesn't hold others to standards of tidiness that are higher than those to which she holds herself.

And the bird cage waits one more day

But I promise I'll clean it out tomorrow. Honest. Not that the parakeets seem to mind, but I do.

I did manage to move the hutch and all the antique glasses (my great-grandmother's) from its temporary wall to it's original wall, now that the pantry piece of the remodel work is done.

Also cared for the sick child, met with the well child's teacher for a conference, made copious cups of tea and soup, and ferried the Little Tea to Nutcracker rehearsal. Not necessarily in that order.

Cursed dusk and the demise of energy

The good news is that after one acupuncture session, D. is much, much better (and to my relief off the questionably effective pain pills). The bad news is that R. is now sick. She missed school Friday - math assignment due, Spanish quiz, but I'm sure that has nothing to do with it - and rallied over the weekend enough that against my better maternal judgment I let her go to the barn & have her riding lesson today. Now she's miserable with a fever and bad sore throat and we have only ourselves to blame. I only hope she'll make it to school tomorrow.

S is fine and I'm fine. In fact, I was buzzing with energy and even feeling downright inspired most of the day, craving a top-to-bottom housecleaning binge after running up to R's school for my turn to clean her classroom. (The truth is, I think I made regular coffee instead of decaf by mistake. After a couple of months of decaf, it's amazing how optimistic and motivated 10 ounces of the real stuff can make me.)

I got quite a bit done - S and I cleaned out the rabbit hutch, I swept and raked the leaves off the front yard, did dishes, tidied in general. But sure enough, as the day grew darker and the hour later, I felt myself incapable of anything but getting the girls to bed (lots of soup and then tea for R) and crashing myself. So sad. If ONLY I could maintain the momentum I feel in the afternoon past 6pm, I could get SO MUCH done. Coffee at 4pm would probably do the trick, but that's a slippery slope for me, and best left alone. Besides, on the occasions when I do get a second wind, I'm often up to 10:30 or later, and back to the less-than-five-hours-of-sleep dilemma. As Pooh would say, "Oh, bother."

In the groove

Today, I wrote for about 3 hours: an hour and a half in two different cafes with two different sets of writerly companions: a duo of Nanowrimo novelists, and then another third of my writer's group. This creativity is a state of mind, and I just don't let myself go into that dreamy what-if, play it out, mark it down mode often enough. It's not magic. It's just work, and not always hard work at that.

And they all had lung cancer in the end...

Wednesday, R's math tutor and R. and I solved Einstein's Riddle. There are links to it online, and some claim that Einstein said that only 2% of the population could solve the riddle, but I think that's hogwash. There may be a small percentage of the population that would have the persistence to bother, I suppose, but it's certainly do-able. It's also known as the Zebra Puzzle, and this wikipedia entry gives more history and tips for solving it.

Here's the riddle as we saw it, if you feel inspired. It's a logic problem, and I could work on these all day compulsively like I do a jigsaw puzzle (and I don't look at the picture for one of those, btw, because I consider that cheating).

There are no tricks to this riddle. It might help to have a pencil and paper handy. We used a big white board and dry-erase markers and worked out it together.

1. In a street there are five houses, painted five different colours.
2. In each house lives a person of different nationality
3. These five homeowners each drink a different kind of beverage, smoke different brand of cigar and keep a different pet.

THE QUESTION: WHO OWNS THE FISH?

HINTS

1. The Brit lives in a red house.
2. The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
3. The Dane drinks tea.
4. The Green house is next to, and on the left of the White house.
5. The owner of the Green house drinks coffee.
6. The person who smokes Pall Mall rears birds.
7. The owner of the Yellow house smokes Dunhill.
8. The man living in the centre house drinks milk.
9. The Norwegian lives in the first house.
10. The man who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats.
11. The man who keeps horses lives next to the man who smokes Dunhill.
12. The man who smokes Blue Master drinks beer.
13. The German smokes Prince.
14. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
15. The man who smokes Blends has a neighbour who drinks water.


We solved it in about 15 minutes, and it was more fun for me than eating a box of truffles.
(I also didn't have to jog it off afterwards as I would have the chocolate...)

Creativity deferred

It's the working mother/wife/artist's dilemma: which to put first?
the family, with it's legitimate needs and requirements for being healthy, happy & cohesive?
or the work, that pays for some of that health and happiness?
or the creative acts and time alone that feed the soul of the person who helps feed the family?

There are days when these demands truly conflict, and even the most creative juggling won't include everything.

My priorities are nearly always:
1) kids and husband
2) work
3) self

Not that 1 & 2 don't contribute to 3 - I get a great deal of satisfaction out of my work, and my children and husband do so much good for me in so many ways (both intentionally and in spite of what feels like their best efforts to the contrary). But I know that if I put off that third priority for any length of time, I'm a bitter, cranky woman and about as much fun to be around as Dick Cheney on a hunting trip.

So to put this in practical terms, here's a what I mean. D is still in (undiagnosed) excruciating pain in his upper spine. The lab results are apparently in but his doctor hasn't called him, and meanwhile he's taking pain medication - a necessary evil for him to function at all - and will be seeing a friend who is an acupuncturist tomorrow. He's maintained amazingly good spirits in spite of the agony, and I know it's not because of the drugs, because they've had limited effects in general. (Except that his reading tonight of Heckedy Peg was inspired.) The girls' schedules are as full as they can be without it tipping over into "too much" (okay, maybe they're tottering on that edge in the overbooked direction), so most days this week I spent no more than 30 minutes at home between the hours of 4:30am and 6:00pm. The rest of the time I'm a Soccer Mom for kids that don't play soccer. And I can't exactly complain (note: iamnotcomplaining) because I'm the ambitious idiot who signed them up for ballet, math, riding, French, and violin. And they truly love these things and benefit from them, and their school work doesn't suffer from them. In fact, the activities support their academics as well as their creative lives. I make it to the gym for my 20-30 minutes of work out 4 days a week. Between that and the personal training I get at work 2 days a week, I'm physically in about the best shape I've ever been in, and am more than 20 lbs lighter and a dress size smaller than I was before I had kids. But what has been getting short shrift, still, in spite of those road-to-hell pavers, is my writing. My poetry. My, if you will, craft.

We'll see how that changes now that I've committed myself to writing and submitting a poem a week to an online workshop with a small but elite group of poets. Yes, something one loves should not require dares or pride (aka the fear of shame) to come into being. But if it works as a jump start - I have written an entry per day this month, after all - then perhaps the ends justify the (temporary) means.

Opportunity

You have to be careful what you put out there in the Universe. You just might get it all coming back at you.

I've got an embarrassment of riches right now when it comes to writing opportunities: writer's groups soliciting me to join (one in particular for poetry, started by an editor who has published my poems in the past), contests that different writer friends have suddenly told me about, local workshops, requests for poems from new acquaintances...even the dare to blog daily in November - it all leads to a heightened focus and more output.

Maybe you can't force creativity or mug the Muse, but you certainly have a better chance of writing something good if you're actually, say, writing, than if you're only thinking of writing....

Onward!

Tuesday

I guess there's no real advantage to blogging late at night when I literally can't see straight and can't summon the energy to write anything profound or creative. I'll stick to describing one thing from the long day.


Tonight S's 2nd grade class had its Lantern Walk. After dark, we formed a parade on campus. We wove along a path lit by about a hundred luminaries. Sophia held a stick in front of her as we walked; from the stick dangled a tin can poked through with holes (she'd poked the pattern into the can with a nail & hammer). Inside the can, a lit candle flickered as we paraded, with all the other parents and students and their flickering candles, singing songs to ward off the dark. S's voice was high and clear, her own light shining brighter than that of the candle. A sickle moon hung low in the sky as we headed back to the car afterwards. She sang Au Clair de la Lune (as much as she knows from French class, anyway), which was the perfect end to the night.

Nothing [significant] to report, sir

The day off was filled primarily by Cleaning S's Room - a significant undertaking. When we were finished, she said, "Mommy, what's that big brown thing?" Sarcastic kid. She was pointing to the floor. It had been a long time since we'd seen it.

The girls and I had friends over briefly in the late afternoon, which was really nice. Although I could never get 45 people to come to my wedding right now (my sister is really so much better at friendship than I), I cherish the few close friends I have.

On another note, D went to the Dr. for the horrific back pain he's had for the last 5 days. Because the pain is in an unusual spot, mid-back & higher than one might usually see for pulled muscles, etc., the Dr. wants to "get pictures." D. was given a shot & some pills that made him only a little loopy. I'm also trying to get him to see a friend of ours who is an acupuncturist.

Tomorrow it's back to getting up at 4am for work, etc. The usual routine. I went to bed around 9:30 and only got up for this brief tea-with-the-Smiths post. Not too creative, I realize. But what I have to say at the moment nevertheless.

Terra firma

After a long day of travel and many more adventures, the girls and I made it home not long ago: safe and sound, but weary. Poor R. has school tomorrow too (which was the cause of much bitter teen mutterings and gnashing of teeth, especially because her sister's school is closed for the holiday). The girls fell asleep the minute their heads hit their pillows.

I'm so grateful to be back. And so grateful for the experiences we've just had. The travel alone (5 plane flights in 4 days with two kids in two) was a character-building experience.

It's truly only minutes before midnight (as opposed to the fudged times on my last 2 posts), and the day started a million years and many custom lines ago. So I'm signing out for now.

Hasta mañana...

El Dia de la Boda

I'm sorry to say that limited internet access time means that this is just a place-holder post.
The full details of the wedding day will have to follow. These things (and so many other things) happen.

Hola de Mexico

We have arrived in Cabo. I have only a minute of internet access to say we're here, all is well (after only a few adventures), and I hope to blog more later....

Hasta Luego

I'm not sure what kind of internet access I'll have when in Mexico, so I thought I'd blog while I can. We're about to go beg like idiots (or at least, I will - D's rightly too proud) for the bank people to let us in early to the safe deposit box....

Ouch

You know, I spend my workdays trying to be compassionate when telling people how their mistakes (like not backing up, or assuming a backup is good) are going to cost them. A lot.

And now I have an even deeper, more profound, understanding of how wretched they feel when they realize the price-tag carried by stupidity, assumption, laziness, disorganization, or procrastination.

So.

Um.

Some advice for those of you who are traveling outside of the U.S. and who think it's a good idea to keep your passports in a safe deposit box at the bank: it's only a good idea if you realize that they're not in the house firesafe, but really, actually are at the bank, where you dutifully took them - if you realize all this BEFORE the bank closes for the day. Especially if your flight leaves only minutes after said bank opens.

I'll just minimize the last few hours of drama and intense ticket searching frenzy and the way my credit card is on fire right now, and say that oh well! oopsie! We'll be arriving in Cabo about 6.5 hours later than planned, and will be leaving a few hours earlier than we'd expected. (And that we really hope there are no accidents between home and SFO during the precious little time we'll have to make the newly booked flight to Cabo by way of Constantinople.) The girls will get to see all sorts of parts of Mexico on the way home that they may not have expected to see. And I have a nice credit (less the fee) from the original airline for future tickets. Ha ha! Isn't life just crazy sometimes? Ha ha ha ha.

And now, I think I'll pack.

Remind me to laugh ruefully about all this.

In about five years.

Sleepy Post

Went to bed around 9pm when the girls did, in spite of all my intentions to stay up late and Get Stuff Done. D. is fighting a horrible cold and has no voice or energy left, so he also was asleep.

I'm feeling especially ill-prepared for the trip, but that's only because I always want to Get Everything Done before I go somewhere, as I'm sure I've mentioned in previous blog entries.

Set an alarm only for getting up to satisfy the quotidian requirement.
Work went well enough today, and tomorrow I work a shortened day, having planned for a few hours to run errands, wash clothes, pack.
J's surgery is over, and she's recovering, thank God.
I got some shopping for the trip done while I had the car serviced (small tube of toothpaste, suntan lotion, etc.), then picked up my new glasses on the way home. The last pair are from 3 prescriptions and 4 years ago!

This post was started at 11:53pm, and if the time shown is anything other than that, all I can say is grrrr.

Anxiety

Had about 40 minutes of strong anxiety this evening, but couldn't pinpoint why. It might be that work was especially difficult today, and I left with more hairy issues unresolved than usual. Or it could be because of the surgery that my half-sister J. is having tomorrow in Denver. Or how ill-prepared I am to leave the country with the girls for 4 days Thursday.

At any rate, it was the kind of anxiety that made me call home on my way to a night out - just to tell D. that I love him, and love the girls. Stress makes me paranoid. I think this anxiety is just a manifestation of that same kind of thing. (Um. Not to say that it take stress, paranoia, or anxiety for me to express my love for my family...)

I suspect that resolving things at work, checking in on J. after surgery, and making a To Do list for the packing & preparation will make all the difference in the world. So will sleep.

What I Won't Be Doing This Month

It's November, which means it's also nanowrimo (national novel writing month), when thousands of people set themselves the goal of creating 50,000 or more words toward a novel. I managed (by the skin of my teeth) to do this a couple of years ago.

This year, my November goal is to finish the first fat rough draft of that book - emphasis on the word "rough" - and to write and compile 100 poems towards a book-length manuscript. I already have 100 or so poems kicking around, but they need to be good poems that would work together in a single collection. So I have my work cut out for me, still.

S. finished her performances of the ballet version of Alice in Wonderland put on by her ballet company and school. This time, she played the roles of a lobster (from the Mock Turtle's story about the Lobster Quadrille) and a card (the 8 of Hearts, which she said was perfect since 8 is also her age). But while we set the dinner table, R. and I joked that she should be cast as The Queen the next time the show comes around, since she often, Leo that she is, acts the part of She Who Must Be Obeyed. S. would be the first to agree.

R. made dinner - the last of the angel hair (I've gone to rice pasta), and wonderful stir-fried green beans, red pepper and garlic. She added lemon juice and a little squeezed mandarin orange juice to the pan, and it gave the veggies a great flavor. She'd like to cook dinner more often, she says. I told her this was a great idea, since I have tons of recipes that I've never tried. "I don't need your recipes. I'm going to make my own recipes," she said. So it might get fairly interesting!

Permission

Another note to self, while I bang my head against the wall that is entitled What Can I Possibly Blog About Today? (with the subtitle: And It's Only Day Three Of the Month. Lord!)

You have permission to love. Yourself, and other people. All of them. As much as you can. But yourself first, since that seems to be the tricky one. (When I feel love for myself, it stinks like a pity date.)

You have permission to try and fail. But not to not try. There's a difference between surrendering to the Now and passively expressing Denial of What Is through immobility. Move!

You have permission to try and succeed. Really. It's okay. Those painful years of being resented for being "daddy's girl," "teacher's pet," "favorite employee" can fall away. The resentment of others is not who you are. Do good things, and do them well for the joy of it and, let the accomplishment be its own reward. There's no shame in shining, in spite of what some might say. That's their own stuff clouding the skies. [The weight loss thing is a classic example. Reaching a target should be celebrated, not torn down by the insecurity of others. It's not you they're angry at, after all.]

You have permission to leave some things undone in the interest of getting a full night's sleep. Although you can get by on 5 hours a night, it doesn't do your body, mind or soul any good. Getting a full night's sleep -now, that's the way to healing and wholeness.

Write.
It will encourage the writing.

Friday. Amen.

By the end of most weeks, I feel wrung out but victorious, with the gratitude of someone who has just received a miracle diagnosis: the dreaded symptoms actually only pointed to something benign. I've swum safely to the rock of another weekend.

I love weekends, when I can sleep past 4am, be home in the daylight longer than ten minutes, and chauffeur only here and there instead of everywhere. I get caught up a little in the housework, I see my husband before noon. I have breakfast with my daughters: crepes with chocolate and strawberries and powdered sugar, bacon for them, turkey sausage, eggs, melon, and coffee out of a mug that doesn't have a lid or a company logo.

The leaves are starting to drop in the courtyard, we've lit the furnace, Thanksgiving is fast approaching - and I haven't even sat down to say yet what the light in October means to me.

First retro-post of November: day 1

Apparently, I'm still a sucker for a dare. So.

To the motivating individual who has dared me to blog daily this month, I hope you will accept this after-the-fact post (written November 2nd, early a.m.), since I only got the message about the challenge you issued just now. And we'll just have to see how this works when I'm in Mexico next week.

November 1, Day of the Dead.
I'd wanted to build an alter for Mom. I bought flowers. I knew which picture to add. I had a few other odds and ends to put in place. I had the morning off work because S didn't have school, so I thought I had time in which to do it.

Instead, I spent the day playing taxi driver/personal assistant for children. They were my children, so I didn't begrudge them their dependency on me, or resent their bake sale, Ortho appointment, Math Club, horse riding, and ballet rehearsal. I'm increasingly aware of how quickly they will be grown and (we hope) out of the house. But I have to admit that a little frustration was creeping through the cracks that for the second day in a row (after a 4 day streak) I wasn't able to sit down for an uninterrupted 30 minutes and write yesterday, let alone build that alter.

Then, while herding kids at the school bake sale (which R & I really did BAKE for, as opposed to just "distressing" the crust on a store-bought pie) - and these were kids who had barely come down from their Halloween sugar highs and were chomping at the bit to have MORE quick-and-dirty carbs - I noticed that the school had set up a table with a number of Día de los Muertos alters, and among them was one R had made for her grandmother

It was simple: a photo of Mom with the girls, all three smiling real smiles, as opposed to the "just take the damn picture" grimace you sometimes see in posed photos; a couple of little rubber ducks (which Mom always got for the girls to have in baths when they visited her), some glitter and sequins to represent a sandy beach and her southern California home, and a very touching poem in Spanish that served as a tribute. R had known they were making alters for her Spanish class. She'd gathered the pieces. and brought them to school, and crafted the alter - all without saying a word to me. I told her how much it meant to me that she'd done it, but she'd done it for herself and for Mom, and that was what really mattered.

Renewed commitment

Like Suzanne, I want to say thanks to Julia for the encouragement (read: push) to re-commit to writing. And doing so daily.

I've spent the last several weeks extremely focused on improving my body; daily short but intense workouts, smaller portions, healthier food, decaf coffee - and all of it has paid off in terms of both my waistline and my self-esteem. High time to move toward the same sort of dedication to my spirit. (Yes, cart before the horse would have been better, I know, but as long as both arrive at the same destination, that works for me.)

'Nuff said. For now.

I'm Here. Really.

How I can let so very long go by without posting is neither here nor there.

Life continues to be good. I could be very specific and long-winded, but in the words of Inigo Montoya, "No, there is too much. Let me sum up.”

We've had birthday parties and the hosting of Japanese businessmen, celebrations and stresses and much shuttling of children from place to place to place. I have written both poetry and prose, attended workshops and readings (my own and others). I have climbed miles of stairs at the gym which lead nowhere but, theoretically, a smaller waistline.

D. continues to all but break himself working on The Remodel. The drywall is up in about half of the rooms. Taping and mudding and texturing has started. There is tongue and groove pine on the ceilings. The horrible huge white POD that had squatted like a Giant Storage Box from Hell is gone (and there was much rejoicing).

The tomatoes in the garden are doing well. We have one string bean and what may eventually be 3-4 zucchinis.

When R. plays the violin, it sounds like music.

We've lost one rat to old age and have acquired two young bunnies (both female, thanks for asking) who live in a hutch outside which D. and S. designed and built together.

And that, sadly, is all I have time for. I just figured better something than nothing, after all this time.