Save Calypso

My dog has an allergic condition. Her treatment will be a minimum of $600, most of it up front. I can’t afford it and so my only other option is to euthanize her. No shelter will take her with a medical condition and finding a family willing to take on her expenses will be next to impossible. I can’t euthanize her. I can’t do it. She’s only TWO, people.

In better times

Her treatment begins at $600, and goes on every year for life.  At least half is required up front to get her a test to show which allergies she has and create a custom twice-yearly vaccination for her.  It could take up to 3 months for that to even be ready to administer.  So we’re looking at another $300+ in temporary meds to quiet her allergy reaction to get her to the point where we can even begin to treat her.  I don’t have it, not with two kids in daycare for the summer. And I can’t stand to watch her suffer, scratching herself bald and bleeding until school starts again. Believe me, we’ve tried EVERYTHING. Diet, prescriptions, prescription foods, supplements, shampoos, you name it.  The only thing that has worked so far has been $150 a month in medicines that aren’t sustainable for her whole life, even if we could afford that amount.  Seriously, we’ve spent close to a grand trying to find a way to help her. This custom vaccine is our last hope.

So I’m doing something I’m very uncomfortable with. I’m asking for help.

This goes to my Paypal account.  If donations reach more than we need, I’ll take the extra and donate it to a local animal charity or the humane society in my area. The internet can be a scary place, but it can also be a wonderful place, and I wouldn’t hesitate to help out someone in whatever way I could. Unfortunately, me and my dog are the ones that need help now.

At the Seams

The following is an email I sent a few days ago to a friend:

Last night, Mike was off doing his own thing (downloading music 2 floors down from me and the kids) and the kids were in tears and screaming because I finally put my foot down about them sleeping I my bed and giving myself some alone time, and I was ready to cry and pull my hair out, and I ended up giving in, which only reinforces for them that they’ll get their way if they throw a big enough fit.  Which is what happens when Mike tries to give me a break and put them to bed for me.  Unless they’re just wiped out, they both end up back in my bed at some point, usually with Daughter in tears and demanding to be held and rocked.  She’s only 2 and I remember Son having these kinds of needs when he was her age.  But man, it’s trying.

I’m coming apart at the seams.  I get no break; we’re not that stable financially though we’re better than we were, but it means I can’t afford retail therapy and I can’t afford a shrink, and I can’t even afford to get my fucking hair colored.  I’m miserable with my health and my weight, and despite the Babysitter of Awesome letting me bring the kids earlier so I can work out before work, I’m having a hard time dragging myself out of bed at 5 am to get them there by 7 so that I can work out.  It’s a vicious cycle.  I come home and it’s all kids, all evening long.  Baths, stories, bed, I knit while I try to get them to sleep in my bed while we catch up on shows on TV, but they’ve started bickering over something, a toy, the covers, who gets to lay next to me, something.  I knit as much as I can (maybe an hour) before I can’t stand it anymore because I constantly have to stop to readjust the covers from their fighting/jumping/flopping all over, or get someone a drink, or help someone brush her teeth, or help someone with her pull up so she can go potty…  My knitting gets interrupted, my reading gets interrupted, they follow me all over the house, and I can’t even play the fucking piano without them coming over to plink on the keys with me.  Most of the time it’s endearing but lately, annoying.  Last night, I put them to bed (together) in Son’s bed and Daughter screamed her head off and Son was crying too, accusing me of things like, “You just never want to snuggle with me AGAIN!”  After the third time putting her back in bed with Son, she came in to my room gasping and hiccupping and desperately saying, “I sorry! I sorry! I sorry!” over and over, so we can add worst mother ever to my emotions.  I am so tired by the end of the evening fights that I go to sleep later than I wanted to feeling awful and so when my alarm goes off at 5, I can’t get up right yet.  So then I’m late dropping the kids off, and late to getting to the gym at work, so I can’t work out fully before I have to shower so I’m not late to my desk.  Then by midmorning, I’m stressed out again over learning another job and waiting forever for my replacement to be found and hired.  I feel so bad about things that I just want to fucking eat.  Eating is comfort, but it’s the reason I’m fat.  It’s the reason I feel like shit.  So I fight it until I can’t anymore and I give in and spend my last dollar on vending machine shit and then beat myself up for my weakness.  Then I just want to eat more to feel better again.  Then I’m done with work and on my way home for today, and then it’s kids, and dinner, and baths, and bedtime… Lather, rinse, repeat.

I hate my temper being so short but I can’t find the time to get away by myself for a couple hours.  I hate the way I feel emotionally, physically, and temperamentally to Mike and the kids.  I’m running out of gas and I seriously need to recharge my batteries, but I don’t know how.

BUT!  I want to go to the vending machine so bad right now, except instead, I got out my Ziploc of edamame and have been snacking on that instead of wasting money on empty calories.  I’ve broken the food/self-hatred/food cycle for the last ten minutes at least.

Things are better than they were when I wrote that email, but it gave me pause.  Something’s gotta give, and on some days, it feels like its my sanity that’s the weak chain link.  I don’t know what the answer is, but something occurred to me, with the help of the friend to whom I sent that email.  I’m letting these things be a reason to not take care of things, bitching about the sad and trying circumstances and yet doing nothing to change them.  I’m playing the martyr, and I HATE martyrdom when it’s not justified.  I was all ‘woe is me’ while stuffing Cheezits in my face.  Not going to help matters in the least.

I fully admit to having an unnatural attachment to food, to emotional eating, and to eating as a form of self-defense.  With a bit of sketchiness in my past, food became my comfort, and frankly, I’m wondering if I’m understanding all of the causes of my comfort eating because the period of time in which I gained most of my extra weight does not coincide with the event I thought was the sole reason I go to the food trough in time of hurt.

I’ve started to keep a food journal and document not just what I’m eating but what I’m feeling before, during, and after to show my feelings, what may trigger my overwhelming need for food in the wrong quantities and wrong times.  I’ve also started thinking about eating better not as a whole picture but a puzzle.  Each piece of the puzzle results in a single decision.  Taken one decision at a time, one good choice after another, I could make an overall very healthy puzzle, if I’m not concerned about the whole picture, not concerned about making sure I have everything for the foreseeable future planned to the T.  I need to get it through my head that to be a successful lifestyle change, I can’t flip a switch.  It’s a day at a time, a decision at a time.  Baby steps can lead to big changes.

The other thing that my friend helped me see was that I need to be selfish to pull this off.  I’m so used to putting myself last, so that Mike can go out with the guys, so that the kids get what they need, so that things are taken care of.  I’m lucky in that I have a husband who is not allergic to housework.  In fact, he’s cleaner than I am, so our home is a product of both our efforts. But Mike and I disagree on some things regarding food, namely what’s healthy.  I want to cut out processed foods, high fructose corn syrup, and buy organic meats as much as we can.  He starts to draw the line there.  We can’t afford organic, he says.  I say we don’t need meat every single meal, and that if I can find good recipes that don’t have meat in them, he’d probably be pretty happy anyway as long as he’s fed.  And then it would also make the meals with meat not only more anticipated, but tastier because it’s better quality meat.  But he’s not ready to take the step to eating less meat.  He grew up with meat every meal (so did I, but I’m more open to change right now) and hasn’t wrapped his brain about feeling full without a meat included.  But I have, so why do I have to eat like he eats to get my own health?  Sure, our budget has some restrictions but again, it doesn’t have to be all or nothing just yet.  A few choices here and there can start the process.

I need to be selfish in asking for workout time, too.  Luckily the Babysitter of Awesome has stepped up to the plate here, but on days like today, when I slept too long through my alarm because of the up late thing again, I’ll have to be worth it to myself to ask for some yoga time when I get home from work.  I have to be more demanding for things like when I ask for something, like asking Mike to blow up my balance ball ~ three times…in the last two weeks ~ that I follow through when it doesn’t get done.  When he was training to try to join the local police force, I most certainly helped him not only keep the kids out of his hair, but we all went to the track with him and I timed his laps so he’d know where he stood.  Sure the kids were bored and hanging off me like monkeys in trees, but he needed me so we all went.

Recently, another friend has needed some help and advice.  I’ve spent hours talking with her, trying to do my level best to be a good friend, a good listener, and be a valuable sounding board and safe landing spot for her in a trying time.  I’ve got another friend who has been dealing with something difficult for months now and I’m always happy to talk to her when she’s upset, or even just wants to talk about anything other than the big elephant in the room.  And yet another friend came to me for quick advice on something and I’ve availed myself to her through email.  Another has opened a bridal shop and I was there for her grand opening, offering to photograph her dresses when they come in, tweeting about her shop and commiserating with her when she realized she’d have to get a part time job to pay for some of the opening expenses she took on since deciding to forego a small business loan.  I’m a generous person, and I try to be kind and caring, treat people as I want to be treated, and be a good friend.  I try to be a safe place for my friends to be selfish when they need to be because everyone needs to feel important at times, especially if they’re dealing with stress and hard to handle things.

It occurred to me that the kindness I show others I should maybe show to myself too.  I should take myself seriously, stop with the “can’t” thinking and give myself some priority over stuff that can wait.  If I treat people the way I want to be treated, why can’t I treat myself that way, too?  It’s a good question, one for which I have no answers.  But I think I’m going to find out.

Baby steps…

I’m Not Even Going To Offer An Excuse for My Blog Absence This Time, Frakking April

So I woke up one day last week and decided my life needs something.  I’m missing something, a je ne sais quoi, a joi de vivre that defies me at every turn.  I’ve undertaken a quest, if you will, to find that elusive thing I’m missing.  It has so many names, but it boils down to one: happiness.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty happy most of the time, but in a self-deprecating way.  I’m more inclined to make fun of myself for my inabilities and if I’ve learned anything from reading Linda’s blog it’s that I should be asking myself why I immediately jump to the conclusion that I can’t/won’t/shouldn’t do something.

I’ve spoken about this a bit on the fitness website I contribute to, My 15 Minutes to Better Fitness that I have special circumstances regarding an old injury that I have to consider when working out.  (If you’re interested in it, it’s under the Andrea Wrote This category.) I’m bound and determined to be a runner, but after going well for a couple weeks, my bum foot would swell to the point where I nearly couldn’t wear shoes, so I’d rest it.  It’d shrink and I’d feel good again, start running again, and boom. Balloon foot.  After three times of this, frustration and bitching to my husband about how I just wanted to run for crying out loud, he very gently (yes, gently, there will be no Mike-bashing today, but stay tuned. I make no promises that I won’t make fun of him in some capacity in the future.) suggested that perhaps if I lost some weight before trying to run that the impact to my bad foot would be less and therefore my foot might be able to handle it if I weigh, say, 150 instead of 210.  He has a point.

So I’ve been researching things to do that have low impact so I can sustain a workout that won’t kill my foot to the point where I have to stop.  I’m playing it by ear, but so far have tried yoga, elliptical machines, and weight machines. When the pools open, perhaps I’ll finally learn to swim (I can only doggy paddle, and drink heavily while floating happily on a noodle) and do some of that.  I have an exercise ball I’m going to blow up tonight.  I may swipe the husband’s bike and go on a ride.

Thing is, I need to believe in myself.  I’ve done some pretty cool things in my life.  I’ve published a poem.  I’ve won writing contests.  I’ve learned to play piano pretty well.  I was a kick ass catcher on a softball team in my teen years, until I blew out a knee.  But all that stuff was done when I was a teenager.  Yes, I was published as a teenager, and by a publishing house, not by a blog software program.  But all my potential has stagnated and I have slothed around enough to get up over 200 pounds and lose all belief that there are awesome things I can do.

I need to prove it to myself again.  I need to believe.  So I’m giving it another go round.  This wouldn’t be possible without the assistance of the Babysitter of Awesome that we now take Daughter, from here on our referred to Renuzit as a result of a shocking and clandestine few minutes left alone in the bathroom, to for our workdays.  This Babysitter of Awesome has earned herself TWO pair of handknit socks in just the two months she’s been watching Renuzit, one for volunteering to take on my stomach bug ridden daughter because four of her six biological children (yes, I said six) also had it.  She took Renuzit so that I wouldn’t miss any more work with the sicknesses.  The second pair comes from our agreement to drop Renuzit off an hour earlier so I can work out before work.  I love her.

I don’t have any pictures for you today.  Maybe if I can get this ball rolling, I will have the nerve to post some before and after pictures when I have some progress to show.  But for now, just my talking about it will have to do.

I’m going after it, that elusive belief in myself, that I can do something other than slut around on the couch with my knitting and the TV.

Adventures in Kitchen Disasters

I once set a stock pot on fire. A few minutes after that, I burned the crap out of my hand, requiring ice.  Don’t believe me?  I have pictures to prove it.

This was after we used flour to put out the oil fire from me reading a recipe wrong.

This after I transferred the food to the crockpot, then burned my fingers on the little metal strip of the heating element beneath the ceramic insert when I pushed the crockpot aside.  It was not a good day.

Last night, the kitchen disasters were almost as bad.  It all started when I ran out of olive oil.  We were having pork sausage and hashbrowns for dinner, and the hashbrowns require a good bit of oil. I looked for vegetable oil before remembering that we took it to our camper for use and it wasn’t easily accessed.  I wasn’t driving across town for it, nor was I going to the store in the middle of cooking dinner.  Mike was covered in grass clippings and new oil was not to be procured.

Then I remembered some peanut oil we bought for frying a turkey.  I retrieved the giant, 3 gallon jug from the top of the fridge where we keep it, spinning my wheels about how to pour out only a little.  I know, I thought.  I’ll get a cup and then use the cup to pour it into our oil decanter.  Brill.  Tipping the giant jug, which inexplicably comes wrapped in a box that we, for some unknown reason, hadn’t removed, I got some oil between the jug and the inside of the box. Whoops.  I hurriedly tipped it back, trying not to spill any more.  For some reason, though, I tried to tip it back while holding the cup to the lip of the pour spout, which then emptied the cup back into the jug, but not gracefully, so there was now more oil in the box. 

Turning on the faucet, I rinsed my slicked hands for better grip and tried again.  Same thing happened.  Shit.  Then, I looked closer and saw a steady stream of oil falling from the corner of the box onto the floor, spreading out on the counters, and splattering up on the front of our dishwasher.  Double shit. 

By this point, the paper towels were flying, the oil was slicking everything, my grip on the floor was fading as was my patience, and my daughter decided to come in and demand a drink. 

To keep any more oil from spilling I quickly poured my cup full, hauled the box, streaming, from the counter and put it in the garage on our crap rug we use to wipe our feet, leaving an oil slick behind.  I turned in time to see the cat coming to the open garage door.  I could just see it, my own version of a tar and feathering.  Only it would be an oil and furring.  I managed to scare the cat off without getting his fur tangled up in the mess and turned to hurriedly get Daughter’s Drank Drank!  As I turned, my feet slid, and the kitchen floor became a skating rink.  Woo!  Barely remaining upright, I banged my elbow on the counter trying to keep from landing on my butt on top of Daughter.

Luckily, then, Mike returned from retrieving our son from the neighbor’s house and was able to help me clean up without injury, further mess, or any other oil slicks.  Unfortunately, the hash browns still didn’t make it.  In my hurry to get the damn dinner done already, I poured too much oil into the pan and drowned them.  Mike ate them, but he was the only one, prounouncing them edible and good, but could be better.  I quickly transferred what was left in the cup to the oil decanter, whipped up a batch of mashed potatoes from the box and called it good. 

At least when I burned my hand and that pot I’d still managed to salvage our dinner.  After that, I bathed the kids and settled in to knit.  At least there’s no way to fall while sitting down knitting.  Or, I haven’t discovered it yet.

Resurfacing

My apologies for the extended absence.  There was some shit going down and my state of mind was not worth sharing in more than little bits and bobs on Twitter. I also didn’t trust myself to post about anything else because I figured my bitter would show through even the most benign of topics.  I don’t know if things are better.  But I do know that I need blogging, bitter seeping in or not.  I need to feel connected to others and a place where I can be open and honest without worrying about super judgy people in my real life. 

So! Onward.  Have you seen these socks?  I saw them and damn near fell over.  How awesome are they?  However it’ll have to wait.  I’m still in baby blanket hell, though I’m staring down the last curve and looking forward to the home stretch of seaming and blocking.  25 blocks is a lot of knitting.  Well, apparently baby blanket hell isn’t enough to stop me.  I’m going to be in baby blanket hell for a few more weeks, so I took the time out to do some selfish knitting.  I’ve kept exactly one thing in the year and a half that I’ve been knitting, so it was high time.  I did the Skew Socks and I love them very much. 

Yarn: Malabrigo Sock in Carabeño.
Needles: 2 US 1 24″ circulars, US0 DPNs for ribbing.
Satisfaction level: astronomical. I love these socks.  I will be wearing them as much as possible.

Not digging the holes on the sides, but knitting them on the bias like that made it hard to keep the increases from having little holes now and then.  I think of them as ‘air conditioning’.

I have also joined the Evenstar Mystery Shawl Knitalong.  It’s engrossing and lovely and the yarn is The Unique Sheep Eos in Silverlode.  I didn’t get the entire gradience set, just the skein second from the left in the picture.  The yarn is delicious and I want sheets made of it, it’s so soft.  I would wear Eos underwear if I dared make such an animal.  It’s that yummy. 

 

I also have finished another baby blanket.  I do not like the colors of this blanket very much.  I thought they would be great together, but the green and charcoal are not contrasting enough for my taste.  Alas, the blanket is done and I’m not redoing it. 

What’s everyone else up to right now?  I need to get back in the loop.

The Ride of a Lifetime

The pains started Monday night.  I was asleep and I had to get up thinking I needed to use the bathroom.  Blearily, I struggled out of bed and tried to obey the pain’s demands but it didn’t work.  So I went back to bed thinking if I laid down again it would go away.  Or if I went back to sleep then maybe I could sleep through it.

Ten minutes later I was up and in the bathroom again.  Again, no joy.  I had the presence of mind to poke Mike and say I didn’t feel very well, but that’s as far as my thought processes went.  I fell back into my pillow and didn’t think about it again.

Until ten minutes later when it woke me up again.  Dayum, I thought, shifting position.  Mike, having been roused by my earlier poke, was the one who suggested maybe I should time the pain.  It hadn’t even occurred to me.  Holy shit, was I in labor?  I timed.  I realized that yes, the pain went away and came back regularly.  Dude, I was having contractions.  After two, three, then four times when Mike told me to time just one more and then we’d see where we stood, and each successive one was between six and eight minutes, I finally said, “I’m not your fucking snooze button.  Get out of bed and call your mother.”

That was six years ago yesterday.  After thirteen hours of labor, our son made his first appearance into the world.  Today is my son’s sixth birthday.  He’s come a long way from the cone-headed baby to the chatty curious boy he is now, the one who throws his arms around me with abandon and says, “I love you, Mommy,” with the heart-meltingest smile on his face.

Happy Birthday, boy.  I can’t wait to see how you blossom in the next year.

The World of Me

So, there was this laundry mishap that I swear has kept me from getting on the treadmill this week.  Would you believe me if I told you that the inside of my dryer eats clothes?  I mean, more than just the socks most people attribute to the Dryer Monster.  There’s a, well, a rip in our drum , so as clothes thump whump thump whump around in the dryer as it’s running, this snag in the drum catches the clothes and eats them or rips them to shreds.  It’s getting wider, too, to the point where if I didn’t know better, I’d swear the dryer ate my running shorts and dammit, I only have one decent pair of running shorts to my name.  I suppose I could wear the maternity shorts I’ve repurposed into pajama shorts but honestly, though the scale hasn’t moved that much I’m reshaping my body (much like my daughter did during our cohabitation phase, and yet this reshaping expedition is so much harder than sitting on the couch pigging down a bag of Doritos and wondering what kind of ice cream I hadn’t hoovered out of our freezer yet) and my bedshorts as I’ve come to think of them aren’t exactly staying put over the giant pseudo-pregs belly I’ve been sporting since Daughter’s eviction.  Plus, my running shorts are slippery basketball short material, which helps with the Thigh Rubbing Friction Fire most of my other options wuss out on.  The slipperiness also helps with that whole Creeping Northward Giant Cameltoe Experiment most shorts seem to try on me, and aren’t you glad you decided to stop by and read today?  I would panhandle on the side of the road for money to buy Lululemon running pants if their largest size would even cross my thigh threshold, but that’s a goal to be set in the future.

I have been frantically looking for my running shorts for three damn days now.  They’re not in the dryer, nor are they in the load I assumed they were in that’s already folded.  They didn’t get shoved in the wrong drawer, nor did their helpful slipperiness cause them to slip from the correct drawer into another one.  I have torn my dresser apart.  I found a rather, shall we say, ambitiously sized bra and panty (gag, hate that word) set gifted to me by a friend who promised they’d come into good use after my breast reduction, but I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I wasn’t getting a tummy tuck or ass lipo while I was being reduced chesticularly. 

By last night, I was getting desperate, wondering if Daughter repurposed them into a blanket like she repurposes everything: remotes become phones, brushes become microphones, purses become toy chests…  Perhaps I would find my shorts in her closet housing her shoes.  Maybe she stuffed them in the cat house that the cat never uses.  I have looked EVERYWHERE, except of course where the shorts actually RESIDE.

I haven’t touched the treadmill this week.  I am pissed at this turn of events, and a saner person would have given up and purchased another pair of shorts so that running could resume, and that when the first pair turned up, there would be a backup pair or some smart shit like that, right?  But have I mentioned birthday party preparations are in full swing?  I have no money for new running shorts because every penny I can spare (and probably more that I can’t) are being sucked up by this party before I can even imagine spending it on something selfish like clothes that would help me regain my health and vitality, and god aren’t kids just the ultimate sacrifice I grumbled to myself last night as I was watching Biggest Loser where Bob was telling Michael (heaviest contestant ever) that even though his mother fell on her face and broke actual no shit bones rather than risk falling into a swimming pool it was okay if Michael had decided to continue putting his own benefit first by finishing the challenge to avoid a 2 pound penalty at the weigh in instead of going to the hospital with his mother and not finishing the challenge.  Does that theory work if the self improvement involves a massage or skin care products that cost a month’s daycare? No? 

This morning, I dejectedly looked around my closet for the fiftieth time and halfheartedly kicked my workout bag out of the way to see if my shorts were under it, and I thought, “Huh.  That bag felt rather substantial for just having a pair of running shoes and a tube of deodorant in it.”  Upon further inspection, I realized that I owed my kids an apology for resenting that their birthdays costs all my spare monies right after Christmas when I’m the one who planned their gestation period in the first place and I’m just a douche canoe for not getting my workout clothes into the freakin’ laundry in the first place.  Yeah, I suck. 

Tonight, a small load of laundry and perhaps 30 Day Shred after bedtime, if I can hitch up my sleep shorts enough. Tomorrow, the treadmill, full stop. I’ll feel better for it and I know it.  Hey, at least I didn’t lose a whole week.

Self-Pep Talk

The ho-hum of life continues humming along in Conniption Land.  We get up, prepare for our weekday exoduses (exodi?) that ferry us to our respective job/school/daycare situations.  We endure.  We eat during prescribed eating times.  We play during prescribed times.  We’re allowed to leave at prescribed times.  Once home, we do dinner and clean up, homework, baths, and bed.  I squeeze in a little knitting before falling asleep, and we lay down only for the alarm to kick on at the beginning of the same thing the next day.

I understand the kids’ lives being dictated in this manner because without a schedule, they become heathens of which there is no stopping their quest for personal gratification, but when did Mike and I submit ourselves to such interference from the powers that be?  It’s revolting.  It’s disheartening.  It’s gross.

It’s also January.

I recognize this time of year as my least favorite.  Perhaps it was my subconscious that set it up so that both my kids were born in January so that I would have something to keep me busy (their combined birthday party next weekend) and help me get through this most trying of months, i.e. their faces as they glut themselves on our family’s generosity in the form of toys upon the toys of Christmas.  Perhaps it was to add some happy into this dreariest of times.  There’s nothing better than fresh new baby when all else seems so bleak and sad.  Despite the limitations of birthday activities in the Month of Icicle, it’s something to which we all look forward.  So, there’s been a hub of activity in my land, from watching sale ads to see who is putting soda on the cheap for Super Bowl a wee early (another timing coup on my part, I do believe) to brainstorming decorations I can make from common everyday items.  Never underestimate the power of Styrofoam. 

We’ve been watching an inordinate amount of TV lately too.  How, without new episodes of Glee, you might ask?  Well, that does leave a pretty bleak wormhole to fill, but we’ve been trying.  We got Uverse a couple months ago and are fully in love with it.  Four shows can record at once. We can watch recorded shows on any TV.  We get Showtime without paying extra.  What’s not to love?  Mike is gorging himself on both the Military Channel and Military History Channel.  If they had a channel named Cojones Engorging Testosterone Fulfilling Big Guns and Machines with some Hero Thrown In, I’d never see him again, for the flicker of the screen would have sucked him in the first week of the new programming schedule.  I’m watching movies, some guilty pleasures (Confessions of a Shopaholic is a horrible movie…that I can’t stop watching. What can I say, I have a weakness for accented men that look good with some five o’clock shadow.)  I’m watching kids’ shows with Son and Daughter.  The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe is a new favorite, as well as Race to Witch Mountain, though I will go to my grave swearing it’s for the special effects rather than watching Dwayne Johnson, a.k.a. The Rock, bulge his arm muscles trying to open various and sundry portals to Earth’s catacombs.  Hubba Hubba.  The Biggest Loser continues to inspire me, infuriate me (why do they insist on bringing people who need help losing weight to the Ranch only to send them home immediately and make them compete to resume their place? That’s like telling a heart patient, here’s your medicine, but hey! you’re going to have to EARN IT, Sit Ubu, sit! Good dog), and move me to tears, but after last season’s contestants I don’t know that I can be as moved by anyone as I was by Abby Rike’s story, losing her whole family in one fell swoop.

I’ve been reading around blogland a bit here and there, watching weight and exercise dustups blow out of proportion.  I’ve been writing at a new site, My 15 Minutes to Better Fitness.  And I’ve been dreaming of warmer weather, busy summer plans, getting out more.  But we always do that.  Our summers are packed to the gills in a way that sometimes gets uncomfortable, both in terms of stamina and wallet strain. 

I feel like it’s all been done.  I don’t want to watch another year pass in the same manner, ho hum.  Taking to heart things that I’ve said lately about my physical lack of fitness and my commitment to doing better, being better, I’m choosing to make this year different than it was last year.  Everyone has their anchor catchphrase that gets them through.  My sister’s is, “It’s not an option to skip working out, to eat junk food.”  Mine has become, “What are my choices? Status quo or better eating/exercising? What will make a difference?” 

I don’t have any answers but I’m hoping that one foot in front of the other, one choice at a time, one decision to get up and moving will be the first and second and third in a chain of decisions that will have me looking back on this time as the beginning of the end of my sloth and the beginning of the beginning of my testing myself, challenging myself, working myself.  Mostly, I want to believe in myself again.  I will believe in myself again.  I want to run a 5K this year, maybe even a 10K.  I want to grow a greater portion of my own food.  I want to have enough to preserve through leaner months.  I want to feed myself and my family healthier.  I want to feel better about the adult I’ve become.  I want to mentally prepare myself for the idea of going back to school for a different degree, something that will shoot my career in a whole different direction.  I want to be someone I can be proud of, instead of a lump on a pickle watching episodes of Biggest Loser while stuffing nachos in my food-hole thinking about someday, maybe when the weather is warmer.

I’m doing it now.  Have been doing it for a few weeks, but I need to keep up the commitment.  January will suck less next year.

Territorial

cross posted at My 15 Minutes to Better Fitness

So there’s a treadmill in Workplace’s facility that I consider ‘mine’.  It’s the one I always run on.  The one where I can see the faint reflection of myself in the window across the room – proof that yes, it really is me running.  I wish the machines faced the mirrors so that I could watch my form as I run, not that I know what I’m looking for, but it might help the more I learn.

With the New Year and all the Resolutioners taking advantage of Workplace’s free facilities, I am feeling protective of my treadmill.  Am I a jerk? Probably.  Am I glad to see these people back there trying to reach whatever goals they may have?  You betcha.  For the last two weeks of December, the workout room was a ghost town.  I was the only one back there most of the time, and if I fell off the treadmill or had a heart attack, there was no way I could call for help and be heard.

But not this week.  This week the place is jumping, the bass is pumping, the hearts and feet are thumping and … I’ll stop now because my mind was going somewhere it shouldn’t.  But anyway, it’s not quite crowded, but the solitude isn’t there.  I hate to admit it, but it was kinda nice, just me and my thoughts, my feet pounding, feeling no self-consciousness when an awesome song shuffled by on the iPod and I threw a goat or if I realized how much I jiggle.  It reminded me of that part in that movie What Women Want with Mel Gibson and Helen Hunt when Gibson’s character wins the advertising account for Nike Women’s Division by making a commercial talking about the relationship with the road — “You don’t stand in front of a mirror before a run wondering what the road will think of your outfit. You don’t have to listen to its jokes and pretend they’re funny in order to run on it. It would not be easier to run if you dressed sexier. The road doesn’t notice if you’re not wearing lipstick.  Does not care how old you are.  You do not feel uncomfortable because you make more money than the road.  And you can call on the road whenever you feel like it, whether it’s been a day… or even a couple of  hours since your last date.  The only thing the road cares about is that you pay it a visit once in awhile.”  Such has been my relationship with the treadmill.  It doesn’t groan under my weight the way I would if 200+ pounds jumped on me.  It doesn’t mock me.  It doesn’t say hurtful things.  And so I have come to trust it to carry me through my workout.  I am a little hardpressed to share that with anyone.  I’ve developed a relationship with my treadmill.

However, these people back there now are people I know already, people with whom I work, people I mostly like.  They are people with whom I can connect over the fitness we are all trying to achieve.  They are another potential community I could get used to and come to respect and discuss goals with.  I don’t want to get too attached right now because of the nature of Resolutioners and their penchant for petering out after a few weeks.  But maybe some of them will stick.  Maybe one of them in the group would be someone who won’t care if I have lipstick on or if I look better than they do and I can let go of this unhealthy thing I have for my treadmill.

Workout Summary Dec 28-Jan 3:
ran 3.14 miles
calories burned 704
pace 15:83 minute mile.
pounds lost 2

Beginning…Again

Son eyes me warily but with a twinkle in his eye.  We’re in a standoff, him on one side of the table, me on the other.  Whenever I move, he moves in the opposite direction.  His 37 pounds is lightning fast and I’m gasping for breath, but I haven’t caught him yet.  I ignore the ragged sound and inch a little to my right.  He inches to his right, and we move in circles.  Daughter stands at the room entrance and screeches with glee.  She’s next.

There! His eyes shifted just a little in her direction.  He looks to be planning to dart out the door.  I wait, my fingers splayed and my stance ready for whichever direction he chooses.  He bolts.  Damn, he’s fast.  He squeezes past his sister and into the living room, me hot on his heels as I pursue.  He screeches a laugh of his own.  “You can’t get me,” he taunts.  He’s probably right, but for the fact that I can out think him, which won’t always be the case.  I lunge.  Grab.  Snag his shirt.  He’s off balance, and I take that second to regain my own balance and close the distance.  Yes!  I’ve got him! 

I pin him to the floor, hold his hand high above his head, exposing his tender underarm, and wiggle my finger in there until he’s crying with laughter, begging to be let up, promising the world just for a little tickle relief.  Daughter has climbed on my back, showing her brother that she will stand in solidarity with me, protecting him regardless of the cost to her physically.  I concede to his promises of early bedtime and eating his veggies after I feel I’ve gotten enough childhood belly laughter to recharge my own batteries, and I let him up.  Gently, I peel Daughter from my back so I don’t conk her on the head or set her down too far from a soft landing.  I lay back.  I breathe, in and out.  I’m sucking wind, cannot breathe, my throat on fire and I need some water pronto.  I groan, roll over, get to my knees, brace my hands on the couch and heave.

When did it get so hard to get up from the floor?  When did it get so hard to have a tickle fight with my kid?  When did I get so out of shape?  When did Orville Redenbacher move into my joints, making them pop pop pop popopopopopoPOPOPOPOPOPOPOPOP when I stretch or exert?  Nasty squatter. 

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“McDonald’s! I wanna go to McDonald’s for dinner!”  This from the backseat as we pass the Golden Arches while we’re out and about.  We look at the time.  We know that our errands will take us through the time we’d normally be cooking something, so a home prepared meal means not eating until after 8 pm.  We look at each other.  We don’t want McD’s again.  We’re sick of McD’s.  Daughter chimes in, “Frrrrriiiiiiiieeeeeessss.”

Great.  She has a total lexicon of about 10 words, and one of them is fries.  Might as well not worry about her saying ‘shit’ or ‘douche canoe’ too.  Perhaps we can get her a carton of cigarrettes for her birthday on Sunday and teach her how to flick a Bic while we’re at it.  After all, while fries aren’t necessarily carcinogenic, they are in no way a healthy thing to eat.  What are we teaching our kids?

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I sit at my desk, feet propped up on my CPU.  I stare blankly at the report I’m looking at.  The same report I’ve done every month for 8 years and three months.  That’s 12 times a year, 8 years, 96 times, plus 3 months, 99 times I’ve done the same report.  I’m the only one in my department who can do the report with any consistency.  It is the reason I have a job, and also the reason I was given a good raise a couple years ago, moreso than average anyway.  But god, if the procedure hasn’t become boring.  What’s so fulfilling about telling a man who inherited millions and a company and didn’t spend one hour in college how much richer he’s gotten that month when, after nearly 10 years, I’m still trying to pay college off?  I curse my mother for not marrying a wealthy business owner.  Then I think of my father, a lawyer and a good man, oxymoron like Captain Jack Sparrow .  He used to take all kinds of payments, knowing his clients couldn’t always afford cash money.  He’s received cookware, a boat, a car, stocks, and all manner of bartered items.  He’s gone to visit clients in the hospital because in their divorce, they’ve alienated everyone they know and he’s the only friendly face they have left.  He’s waived fees for those who truly can’t pay.  He loans his personal vehicles to clients who have no other means to travel when their only living relatives are out of state.  I don’t know that I would trade my dad for a bank account.  But I realize as I sit counting my beans/inventory/standards and variances that I am just a cog in a wealthy man’s grandfather clock, and not a very important one at that.  Except for this report, which honestly, doesn’t move me.  I open the file, save as a new month and begin the report again for the hundredth time.  And daydream of one day finding a purpose to my career beyond making the rich get richer.

——————————————————————–

My alarm blares.  I groan and squint.  5:00 am.  I roll over and sleep for nine more minutes.  It blares again.  Snooze.  Snooze.  Snooze.  Finally, Mike nudges me about getting up since he doesn’t have to get up until 7, when I’m herding the kids out the door.  He used to snooze for an hour (using the same alarm I do, so I’d be the one hitting his snooze.  For years this went on.  I see nothing wrong with a little payback now that he gets to sleep a little later before anyone judges harshly.)  Finally, at 6 I drag my butt out of bed.  My limbs feel utterly incapable of propelling me through the next hour, let alone the day.  It’s only when the spray from the shower hits my face that I truly begin to wake.  Why am I so tired all the time?  I scrutinize myself cruelly in the mirror.  Never did lose that baby weight, but who’m I kidding?  I was this weight before I had my kids.

——————————————————————–

I sit on the floor, my face puffy and swollen, my nose completely clogged.  I cannot talk without a nasally tone, making my words sound more pathetic to my ears.  Mike sits on the bed, his arms crossed, his body half turned away from me.  Look at him, I think.  He couldn’t be more obvious about not wanting to be near me now.  We’ve spat words at each other with such venom and anger that someting inside me broke, releasing a flood of tears.  This isn’t the life I thought I’d have.  This isn’t what I want for myself, and by extension, my family.  His words, “You’re mad all the time,” echo in my head.  I’m miserable.  I can barely drag myself out of bed in the mornings.  I hate my job.  I have a coworker that hates my guts and the feeling is mutual.  But The Crazy sits next to me and the tension wraps itself around me like a slanket/snuggie, making me grumble at the stupidity of the entire situation and I would like to stand up and shout that I’m not this person I’m accused of being.  But much like the stupidity of the slanket, it’s viral and spreading, and I can only ride it out and choose to ignore it while I continue on with my day.  By the time I get home, I’m such a miserable wreck that I snap at my kids.  I snap at my husband.  I make everyone feel as miserable as I am.  I am dragging everything down.  I can’t keep up with my kids when I do find the time/energy to play with them.  I sniffed at my clogged nose, pleaded with Mike not to pack a bag and leave for a few days to let things cool down.  I opened my chest, ripped out my heart, and handed it to him again.  I promised that with understanding of my emotions and what they were doing to me and those around me can come change.  I promised him I would not live a miserable life.  He stayed.

All of this began in October with a crashing realization that this horribleness was avoidable.  There were some financial implications for us that brought everything to a head, ripped the scabs we’d built up over and over off and forced us to take a true look at ourselves, our lives together, and our future.  Mine felt so bleak and awful that I well and truly, for the first time ever, felt hatred for myself and what I’ve let myself become.  They say everyone has a rock bottom.  I hit mine.

With this opening up of long mistreated wounds, I started takin a deeper look at things.  One of the biggest reasons I’m so off the charts miserable all the time is my job.  I looked into going back to school.  I looked at what the local area colleges have to offer and what I might be interested in pursuing.  As I realized that I’d be going back into serious debt and wouldn’t emerge with a new degree for many years, it occurred to me that at this point in our  financial lives, we cannot afford for me to return to school.  I know there are programs, grants, aid that we could get, but frankly, admitting I want to change careers is hard enough, and I don’t want to rush into a new career without truly wanting to study and love it.  I have more soul searching to do to find what I wanna be when I grow up.

The next big thing making me miserable is my health.  If I can improve my health, perhaps my job and career choice won’t seem like such a death sentence to me.  Perhaps if other aspects of my life are improved, I will be able to appreciate the stability of my job and not let the drudgery bog me down.  After all, I bet insurance agents, or house painters, or assembly line workers aren’t all passionate about what they do 100% of the time.  And yet there is pride to be had there too. 

So that’s what’s on my plate.  I’ve already written about eating in a more environmentally sustainable manner.  What I’ve only briefly touched on is that I’ve started running.  On a treadmill.  No one’s chasing me.  No one’s holding’ a gun to my head and saying if I don’t run this mile and a half they’ll filet my dog.  I’m voluntarily getting off my ass and getting some exercise.  It’s slow going.  I think I might have the start of shin splints.  Maybe I have the wrong shoes.  I’ve found some kickass running music (but hey, I’ll take any suggestions anyone might have)!  I’m learning.  I’m actually thinking of running a 5K.  I wanted to last year but slacked off after a couple weeks on the treadmill.  I don’t know if I’ve lost any weight.  In the past, I’ve become a slave to the scale and so this time, I’m not letting anythin deter me.  Weirdly, I’m liking running enough that the point of it (to lose weight) has changed some, so that I can get fit, and accomplish something.  Tell my brain to stfu when it scoffs and says I can’t run that much.  Well, 2010 is coming.  And instead of resolutions which I’ve failed at many many times, I’m just making choices.  What would I have done before?  Is that going to help me change my health?  Is that going to help me change my job?  Is that going to help me change my outlook?

This time, I’m choosing to be better.  Here’s to a new year.

Not So Inert Afterall

Emily Gomol was kind enough to invite me to be a contributing writer over at My 15 Minutes to Fitness.  My first post is up over there if you’re so inclined.  Please to be inclined.  I’m nervous.  But I didn’t want to belabor my knitting blog with life change stuff but I will always link to my posts over there for those who are interested.  I’m still around, still knitting, just not good at getting pictures posted (or even taken) and don’t have much to say except miles of garter stitch in the form of a log cabin blanket and a baby blanket log cabin style.  Yeah, I’m sparing you.  You’re welcome.

It Starts At Home

What do you eat?  Do you eat food?  Well, most of you would scoff at that question.  Who doesn’t eat food?  But it’s a legitimate question, once I clarify what I think of as food.

Food doesn’t contain more than 5 ingredients that most people can’t pronounce immediately.  Sure, we’re smart enough to work out a 17-syllable chemical name after some phonetic reading, or indoctrination in the food ingredient reading cult of Nutritionists.  But do you know what Xanthan gum really is?  (I picked that one because I could spell it, since it’s only 2 syllables.)  I sure don’t.

Food doesn’t have a shelf life of several months without freezing or canning.

The word ‘enriched’ doesn’t enter into food.  It doesn’t have to be chemically altered to put nutrients back into it.

So.  Do you eat food? I know that for most of my life, I haven’t.  I love me a Totino’s Party Pizza as a movie night munch.  I could scarf a whole loaf of fluffy, pillowy white bread with nothing on it.  Mmmmm.  Chips? I can usually take them or leave them.  I take them to the couch, and then leave the empty bag in the trash can when I’m done with them.  Trust me I know my way around the junk food circuit, which is responsible for my ample size.  Don’t even let me start on the fast food chains.  I saw Super Size Me.  If you haven’t, I would suggest it before your next drive thru detour.

But in the last several weeks of trying to learn how to lose the weight, I’ve discovered that what I thought was food really isn’t.  Real food comes from nature, not from a factory.  Real food contains so many antioxidants and phytochemicals that are naturally occurring that food scientists haven’t even begun to isolate all the health benefits of fruits and vegetables. 

I bought some oat flour this morning where the ingredients list consists of one thing: ground whole oats.

Hey!  I can read that the first time through!

I also bought some yeast.  Not the rapid rise stuff either.  The stuff that takes some time.  I will give making a loaf of bread a shot.  Why is this?  Why have I been on the rampage for information on farmers markets, local food options, and humane treatment of livestock for the meat I buy?  Why am I scouring websites looking for ways to make my own bread, my own cheese, and learn how to can and preserve?

Well, to start with, I read Barbara Kingsolver’s book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.  In it, she endeavored to go a year eating as locally as possible, growing much of her own food herself, and finding it locally for what she couldn’t produce on her own.  If there was no viable option for local food, she either did without, or as in the case of wheat flour, she found as close a supplier as possible.  She managed to feed her family of four for about fifty cents per person per meal.

I was under the misperception that eating free-range, hormone and antibiotic free meats and home grown or organic vegetables and fruits was expensive.  You mean it’s not?

I’m learning that the expense of this kind of food is not so much the money handed over to the cashier at the check-out line but the time and effort it takes to find and purchase local foods or produce it yourself.  Plants produce several food units per plant depending on what you choose to grow.  For instance, we planted three tomato plants last season, and for a couple weeks, we had more tomatoes than we could possibly eat before they rotted.  I didn’t know how to can then, so I had no way of preserving them for later use, and I gifted a lot of them to neighbors and family.  Three plants were less than $10 from the nursery in April and we got so many tomatoes out of them in July and August that the equivalent at the grocery store would have likely topped $50 or more.  Since Mike isn’t big on eating tomatoes by themselves or on his sandwiches or salads, I had to get creative with recipes so they didn’t go to waste.  I ate a lot of tomatoes myself.  And believe it or not, it didn’t kill me to slice one of those beauties up and eat it with some salt and pepper instead of getting a bowl of ice cream or some chips for a snack.

So the idea of trying to lose some weight has led to a desire to eat healthier.  In the past, I would have reached for the nearest, most popular fad diet book and tried to eat healthier that way.  But the buzz of late has become not low-fat/low-carb/glycemic index fad dieting, but getting back to nature.  Perhaps American waistlines have increased so much in the last thirty years because we’ve gotten so far away from nature.  The benefits of eating more naturally, more locally become forehead-slapping obvious once they’re pointed out.  Eating locally means you find out what has been done to the food by the grower.  You know if it was chemically treated for pests.  You know if the cattle were fed grains or grass.  You know if the chickens received hormones in their feed.  You know that it didn’t take thousands of gallons of diesel to reach you.  You know that food you grow in your garden has certain nutrients based on soil you tilled and worked yourself. 

And might I remind you, 50¢ a person is less than the boxed stuff on the shelves that has a use by date starting in 2010.

The human body works in a certain way.  Evolutionarily speaking, we’d eventually adapt to bleached and enriched flour if we keep eating it.  Growth hormones fed to cows that transfer into milk will eventually become a non-issue since our bodies would change to handle it.  But that could take hundreds if not thousands of years.  I won’t be around then.  And frankly, I don’t like the idea of my body being the guinea pig of Big Food industry to find out what is healthy and what is not and to continue that way of life until my great great great great great great great grandchildren can metabolize highly processed food in a way that won’t mean heart disease and diabetes for them.

Wow, there’s so much more to this healthy thing than I thought.  I almost don’t know where to start.  I do know that the idea that I eat corn based products from boxed foods and that corn also goes into the packaging of those boxed foods gives me pause.  Why don’t I just eat the cardboard, for all the nutrition involved in those powdered seasoning packets.

I’ve been running on the treadmill at work lately.   That’s where I’ve started.  Learning to eat healthier includes more fruits and vegetables.  Grilling, baking, roasting, and less deep frying, less breaded things, smaller portions.  I find myself less snack hungry when I eat more fruits and veggies with my meals.  And the thing is, I’m actually ENJOYING learning how to do this.  And you know what?  It feels right.  It doesn’t feel like a fad.  It feels like I’ve been trapped inside the ironclad idea that food science held all the answers.  But you know what?  We’re fatter than we’ve ever been and the thing difference in the last thirty years is the industrialization of our food and our penchant for sitting around doing nothing.  I’m going to break that mold.  My ass-dent in the couch is going to get shallower, and hopefully the ass that made the dent will get smaller.    

I don’t want to eat the box.  Not anymore.  But I have no idea what I’m doing, so this is an experiment of sorts.  If anyone has any suggestions, advice, comments, information on local (St. Louis area and Metro East) farmers/markets/locavore groups, I’m all ears.  I’m going to be trying new things, like gardening, growing my own food, composting, finding more local meat and dairy producers, reducing the amount while increasing the quality of meat I eat (namely grass fed, hormone and antibiotic free­), new recipes, new ways to preserve foods so I can capture them at their peak ripeness and enjoy them throughout the year without having to rely on thousands of miles of transportation costs, both monetary and environmental, to bring me and my family those foods in the off season.  It’s gonna be a little crazy.  I’m hoping I will learn a lot.  I have no plan, other than to try to get as much off the interstate food industry grid as I can.  But I don’t want my kids growing up thinking a nutritious meal has to be made in a lab.  Let’s see if I can get the nature back into a natural diet in my house.  It starts at home.

The Goodbye We Never Wanted

Son’s button up white shirt is too small, but if I cover it with a sweater vest, we might get away with it.  He is okay with the dressy clothes because it gives him a chance to wear the clip on tie he got for his Aunt’s wedding.  He sometimes puts the tie on his t-shirts, until I make him take it off so we don’t lose it.  He pretends to be the President giving a speech in his regal attire, the blue-green geometric pattern over the top of his My First Hard Rock Café t-shirt from San Antonio when his daddy was on a work trip.  But the sweater makes him mad.  “Don’t cover up my tie!” he shouts at me.  I try to assure him that we can still see his tie and it looks nice, but he pouts and sulks and declares, “Fine! I’m not going!”  I have no patience.  I grab his chin and force him to look at me.

“You are going. You are going to be respectful.  You are going to remember not to run or yell or act happy.  You will behave.  And you will do what you’re told.  You don’t want to wear this sweater.  I don’t want to wear these shoes.  And I’m sure that Nate’s* mom and dad don’t want to bury their son.  But we have to.”

Son’s face crumples.  He is scared and upset, and not over a sweater, but they don’t teach the vocabulary of death and loss and funerals in Kindergarten.  There, it’s all play grounds, swings, hats, and balls.  Pink and blue and green.  Not black.  Not death.  Not bury.

I sit next to his covered face and try to pull him to me, but he resists.  I say as carefully as I can, “This is important.  We’re going to say goodbye, and it’s important we do so.  Some things hurt.  Some things are awful.  A sweater covering your tie isn’t one of them.  Not right now.  Think of Daddy.  This is his second funeral this weekend.  Yesterday, he went to one for a baby that didn’t even get the chance to live outside her mommy’s body.  That’s hard on Daddy.  So for his sake, and for mine, please, be a good boy.  You’re a big boy, and you can do this.”

He cries for a bit and then goes quietly to his room where he lays down and falls asleep.  A nap might do him good, so I leave him to sleep while I finish getting myself ready and start thinking about Daughter’s outfit.  She has one dress with somber colors.  Everything else is cheery bright pink and purple and blue.  Stores aren’t in the habit of carrying a lot of funeral clothes for toddlers and babies.  A gray and black striped t-shirt dress with black leggings will have to do.  Her cuteness in the dress is like an antidote to the weight of the task we go to do.  A careful ponytail in her hair will complete her look, and I make sure not to make it too jaunty.  I don’t know why I think that her jaunty ponytail of normal days might offend someone, but I still go out of my way to make sure all the bases are covered, all the feelings are considered.

Entering the funeral home, there is a heartbreaking mix of young and old.  Some teenage girls stand huddled together crying.  Nate’s classmates.  They are beside themselves with grief, one in particular catching my eye.  She’s miserable.  I wonder briefly if she was his girlfriend.  Is his girlfriend, I remind myself.  She’s still alive.  I’m glad to see her ring of friends with her, all of them teary and sad, but touching her back, holding her hand.  She breaks away from them to give Nate’s mother a long, sobbing hug.  It is a touching moment, one I hope never to see again.

We find our own family, stand around for a few minutes, comment on the surroundings.  I make sure to sign the guestbook.  Of course, Son has to use the bathroom as soon as we get there.  I’m forced to take the tour of the funeral home in search of a bathroom when I would have preferred to scope out the place quietly, slowly.  This ocean of somber faces hurts in too large of a dose, so I look at my feet.  We find the bathroom and Son is, as usual, too loud and too interested in playing in the water as he washes his hands.  I spy a box of Kleenex and swipe a bunch.  I’ll need them.  I steel myself to usher Son back through the throng, the quietest crowd I’ve ever walked through excepting church.  As we return to the sides of Mike and his family, I look him in the eye with a question on my face.  He ignores me.  He follows his brother in law to a room with more chairs, leaving our kids with their grandparents.  He’s talking about winterizing our camper.  I tell him we should go talk to Nate’s parents.  He looks at me in despair, “I don’t think I can.”  His voice is flat, quiet, scary.  I nod. “You can.  Talk to them.  So they know we’re here for them.  We’ll talk to them together.”  I take his arm and lead him to the room where Nate is laid out.  We see Nate’s aunt, his mom’s sister, a friend who was indispensable in helping us set up the benefit we threw for Mike’s sister last year before her brain surgery.  Mike heads to her, hugs her, and surreptitiously looks around.  He sees Nate’s mom talking to a large group.  She hasn’t seen us yet, but that’s okay.  I think we need a minute to shore up our reserves.

“How are they?” Mike asks the aunt.  She nods.  “She’s keeping busy and hanging in there.  His little sister doesn’t understand.  But he’s not doing as well,” she inclines her head to Nate’s dad.  We see him with some family, nodding solemnly.  An air of despair clouds around him, and his eyes have a far away glassy look.  They are ringed red, and who could blame him?  He’s lost his first born to an illness they spent 13 years fighting.  They’ve become used to hope and optimism because they’d beaten the odds before.  This grief is a new jacket he must don, and he’s unsure of how to wear it.  So his shoulders slump under its weight.  We hope for him that he will grow strong beneath it, so that maybe it won’t feel like a straight jacket and will instead seem less oppressive as time goes on.  Knowing how I would be for my own kids I know that as parents, they will always grieve.  What was lost, what will never be, what could have been. 

Nate’s mom sees us and breaks away to come say hello.  I hug her tight, fighting tears and saying the forever inadequate words of sorrow.  But I try to pull it together.  It is her son in the casket, not mine.  I shouldn’t hug her for my own comfort but to offer it to her should she need it.  She lets go, hugs Mike, whose jaw works as he tries to control himself and say the things he wants to say.  We talk quietly for a bit, and I don’t know how she’s capable of her level of poise.  She is in the role of comforter at this point, accepting sorrow graciously and keeping herself in check.  I don’t know if this is the result of having had years of the word ‘terminal’ hanging over their heads or if she’s just this strong.  Regardless, I let her know our intentions to make them dinner some night in the future, when all the casseroles and pies have dried up and been eaten, when the well wishes have slowed in frequency, and the silence in their home starts to reveal the hole left in Nate’s wake.  We will be there, with pork chops and mushroom wine cream sauce.  We will bring over bread, and steamed broccoli.  Some homemade mashed potatoes.  The good kind, with the lard in them.  We will not skimp for the instant no matter how well we like the brand we found.  They are our friends, and worth the effort.  She thanks us, chuckles a little that she hasn’t eaten yet and we’re making her hungry, all this talk of food.  The conversation begins to lag.  We ask her to convey our condolences to her husband, who is still talking to family.  We don’t wish to intrude. 

“Deep breath,” I say as we both turn to look, finally, at the casket, the large elephant in the room.  He nods, clenches his jaw, and grabs my hand.  I assure him that he can do this.  We walk over, stopping about three feet away.  This is the closest Mike can come to the mortality that stole over the bright and vigorous boy who we knew as Nate.  Mike grips my hand harder.  We stand in silence.  Nate is wearing a Yankees cap, and his baby blanket is draped over the lower half of his body.  A teddy bear and picture are propped up in the corner, the things he wanted with him.  Incongrous, child things, man things, in between things.  He’s in a full sized casket, but he’s not a full sized man.  He was robbed of that opportunity when he was three, diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder that he danced with his entire life.  We note his lack of a tie.  Of course no 13 year old wants to wear a tie.  The smiling face of the large picture next to him will be forever frozen in wry, thirteen year old humor.  

We cannot bring ourselves to stand there long, each in our own way saying goodbye, turning to the easel containing pictures of his life, and then we leave the room, incapable of withstanding the weight bearing on us any longer.  Standing next to our family, I ask Son if he wants to go say goodbye.  He nods quietly.  He once played with Nate, running around and having a good time, not realizing Nate was sick.  He didn’t look sick.  Mike looks at me with bleak eyes and I assure him that I will take Son in myself.  He doesn’t have to go with us.  So I do.  I bring Son to his friend, pick him up so he can see, so he can say his own goodbye.  And then I show him the pictures, turn one more time and we whisper together goodbye.  Son doesn’t cry, but he looks like he’s seen a ghost. 

Soon, we leave, and in the car on the way home, we cry.  It’s not fucking fair.

*Nate’s name has been changed, but his memory has left its indelible mark.

Google Giggles

Just messing around yesterday, I typed some generic beginnings of questions into Google to see what the auto suggestions would be.  Here is my favorite one.

I’m pretty sure your eye is twitching because you’re dumb enough to Google symptoms, and you’ve read all the horrifc things that are possibly wrong with you.

Asparagus makes urine smell because there’s something funny going on in your digestive tract. It’s supposed to turn your urine greenish, not make it smell.  There’s something wrong with you.  I’m thinking brain tumor.  Sorry.  But don’t google that.  You’ll cry.

Love feels like a battlefield because you’re with the wrong guys.  The right one makes love feel like a warm house in the deep of winter, a fluffy puppy so happy to see you that he’s wagging hard enough to shake his entire body, a hot mess of eye poppingly good sex that could furrow even a botoxed brow, and the best book you’ve ever read, all rolled into one.  And it cures eye twitching.

What does your vag smell like?  If it’s pretty floral scents, I’m pretty sure it’s because you’ve gotten yourself some good soap.  However, I’m assuming you wouldn’t google that if it wasn’t a problem.  Perhaps you ate some asparagus and didn’t use enough toilet paper to clean up?  But I predict that’s the least of your problems.  Namely, I hope you find a vegetarian boyfriend who loves asparagus.  Good luck to you.

Dogs eat poop.  It’s a fact of life.  There is no why.

Not all poop floats.  But perhaps it’s fluffier than the stuff that sinks.  Just a guess.  Some things are better left un-googled.

If you can answer the question of hair turning gray and then can find a cure, I’d be your betch for life.  Seriously, I’ll handknit all your socks, draw your baths with floating rose petals on the the water and candles.  I’ll make you from-scratch dinners for life. 

I had to Google the zebra stripe thing myself, and found the answer duh worthy: for camouflage.  Google doesn’t know everything, apparently.

Ice floats so that the liquid passing through your lips has just left the ice and is cold.  It’s so cocktails are tastier.  Go have one.  It’ll help.

Snape kills Dumbledore?  Fuck you, Google, for spoiling that for me.  Asshole.

Metamorphosis

Life nearly changed drastically for me a couple weekends ago.  My husband, whom I love and loves me with every fiber of our collective being, nearly left me for a couple days.  We were fighting, saying things that hadn’t been said before and were hurtful and only partially true and he threw up his hands and yelled, “I give up!” and he walked out the door. 

The problem that sparked the fight isn’t important.  It’s the underlying tension that had been building for months until the fight that’s important.  He left for a couple hours and came back to pack a bag and shower, and then leave.  While he was sitting there in his underwear, I begged him to listen to me.  He did.  We talked.  I realized some truths.

Truth 1: I’ve been miserable for a long time, with my career, with my health, with my weight. 

Truth 2: Misery loves company, and mine was trying to suck Mike down into my quagmire of loathing.  I hate me and I was trying to get him to hate me too.  It nearly worked.  I would come home in a horrible mood from work, from traffic, from worry, and I would yell at the kids for getting in my way when all they wanted was to play with me.  I would yell at him for avoiding me by escaping to the man-cave (basement) to watch TV or to the tub or to bed early.  But who wants to be around a grinch?  He was merely fleeing Medusa hell bent on making him miserable too.

Truth 3: I have some serious life restructuring to do.

The thing is, I have tried in the past to ‘fix’ myself.  I went to therapy and it helped me deal with my issues of doing anything/everything to gain acceptance from people.  I need to remember the lessons taught there.  But there’s a lot I want to change.  I’m not going to dwell a whole bunch on the reasons for the desire to make changes.  I can get trapped in the hamster wheel of why things are the way they are.  If you’ve read here (or my other previous blogs) for any time at all, you’ll know that I’m not happy with several things.

1. My career.  Unfortunately I’m kinda stuck there.  I can’t quit, can’t find something else in my area (already tried), am financially unable to take any kind of pay cut, and don’t have time/resources to return to school.  This is on the back burner.  Things won’t always be like this, and for the sake of my family, I need to stick this out for now.  It could be lots worse.

2. My health/weight.  These things go hand in hand.  I am almost exactly 100 pounds overweight.  This results in triple chins, fatigue, self-loathing, ill-fitting clothes, emotional eating (and that hamster wheel is more like barbed wire) and an inability to keep up with my kids.  It sours my mood, strains my relationships, and I don’t want to be this person anymore.

3. My general attitude.  It’s poor.  I am cynical and while I like helping people, I suspect the worst of people.  I need a new outlook.

So!  While Rome wasn’t built in a day, it was eventually built, and I can make some changes a day at a time to restructure my life and get the most out of it.  My husband has been supportive, and we’ve teamed up on things to help get our marriage back in the swing of things (it didn’t swing that far out, but it’s never been bad enough that either of us wanted to stay somewhere else for a few days.  That’s scary).  It’s amazing how the little things make a difference.  If I’m doing a chore around the house, he helps keep the kids busy and out of my hair.  If he’s tired then I make dinner.  I have decided to start with the things that I can immediately control, namely my fitness level and caloric intake.

Over the last couple of weeks I have begun to do some research into food and ways to eat healthier, and in that vein I’ve discovered a desire to eat more locally, sustainably, organically.  Given that we’ve got some financial troubles, I don’t know that we’ll be able to jump in all at once, but a little at a time, a step at a time, is a place to start.  I’ve been listening on audiobook to Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle book and it’s official: I’m a hippy granola convert.  I’ve discussed with Mike starting up a good sized garden in our backyard with strawberries, tomatoes, squash and cucumbers, broccoli, even asparagus and blackberries and more.  I’ve borrowed more books from the library on cheese making, and on canning.  My father grew up on a farm and knows how to make anything from scratch and how to can, so I can remember homemade strawberry jam in our pantry (and in fact, this spring, he canned some on a visit to our house and I have a couple more jars of yummy red goo for toast and sandwiches) and him making pickles when I was a kid.  I love pickles.  Since his canning experiment this spring, I have some jars and a big canning pot to boil the jars for a proper seal.  I can envision rows upon rows of jars of tomato sauce, whole tomatoes for stew, potatoes, beans, and all kinds of stuff.  I’ve borrowed books about gardening, composting, soil composition, and I’ve studied seed websites for the idea of germinating my own seedlings in the late winter.  I like the idea of heirloom seeds to preserve crops that are dying out due to genetic tampering and pesticides and saving seeds for exchange with other gardeners scratches an anti-establishment itch I’ve always had.  I’ve considered buying a share of a CSA (community supported agriculture) crop from local farmers, but around St. Louis, they sell out fast.  I don’t believe any spots are open for the 2010 year.  I even found a lamb farm and considered broaching the subject of a CSA for undyed yarn.  There are a few on the web, but they’re not local, so there are shipping dollars involved there.  However, I’m not opposed to looking into it more, since the farmers are not giant factories but small, family farmers and it helps them to keep going, farming, running their businesses.

Also along the health lines, I’ve decided to apply for a reality show on NBC called Losing It with Jillian Michaels of The Biggest Loser fame.  I doubt I’ll get picked, but they have to pick someone, right?  I might as well try for it.  Basically, the premise is that she comes to your house and helps you and your family figure out a way to prioritize things, make healthy decisions, lose weight (if that is your goal) and reorganize things for a happier life.  I am a prime candidate for that.  My sister is going to help me with my application video and then I’m all set.  You never know, right?

But I’m not waiting for a show to make improvements.  Last spring, I started running.  I stopped because my bum foot was bothering me.  I was going to rest for a week, and that morphed into the entire summer and into the fall.  That stopped today.  At lunch, I ran half of the time and walked half the time for a mile and a half on the treadmill at work.  Oh, I didn’t mention that my work has a work out facility?  State of the art?  Free weights AND weight machines?  A racquetball court that can be retrofitted with a net for wallyball?  An aerobics room complete with mirrored wall and a TV to play DVDs?  Showers?  That I haven’t been taking advantage of every week for the last 8 years I’ve worked here? 

Whoops.

See, this is another reason I’m not keen to leave my job.  Now that Mike is helping with the kids’ transportation after school and daycare, I may actually have time to use these facilities after work.  Or if I can get him to take the kids to school and daycare in the morning, I could do my workout first thing.  For now, I’m running at lunch on a treadmill.  When the weather warms back up and I’ve had some time to get used to running without horking a lung through my nose then I plan to run outside.  I’ve even got dizzy daydreams of running in a race.  Maybe. 

But in the last couple of weeks, just the act of looking into making changes has given me some hope.  Just the idea that a little at a time can be enough if I can keep it up.  I ran today.  For half an hour.  And I walked some of it.  I sweated.  I put on a sports bra (hate that uni-boob thing, but love that I don’t get smacked in the face) and running shoes and moved my fat around in ungainly and unsightly ways.  Hopefully, if I do that enough, there will be less fat to move around.  Maybe one day I can run without my belly flopping along with my boobs.  Maybe I can even put the treadmill on incline.  Maybe I could get a bike and go bike riding with the kids and Mike next summer.  Get one of those trailer things. 

The thing is, I have plans.  I haven’t had plans for a long time beyond what Mike set up for us to do with his family.  I want to be better, instead of wallowing around in my own misery, bringing everyone around me down.  Maybe, with some happiness and stability at home, and progress towards my weight goals, my career won’t seem so insurmountable.  Maybe I’ll have the energy to stay up late when the kids are in bed and do some writing.  I’m letting my dreams wake up again.  Someday is not so abstract to me anymore.  Someday has become Any Day Now.  I’ve begun.

Adventures in Boxing and Dyeing

Thank you very much for the nice anniversary wishes.  The actual anniversary celebrating, however, was decidedly NOT nice.  Not because Mike fell down on the husband job, or because we have babysitting trouble (like we do every year, but I’m not going to go there now or ever, at least not here), but because my son decided it would be a good time to pretend to be Rocky Balboa and lay Apollo Creed, a.k.a. the little girl sitting next to him in art class, out.  Well, not really out.  He didn’t knock her cold, but he did punch her in the face.  I got a very serious phone call from the principal around lunchtime on Friday and it put me in a strange place for the rest of the afternoon.  I swung between frustrated, appalled, horrified, unable to focus, and frankly inept for the rest of the day.  I probably owe my employer money back for my lack of progress that afternoon.

It’s been sorted out.  The little girl teased him about his art page looking bad, and they jawed at each other a bit.  My son got his feelings hurt and was so mad he didn’t know how to handle the eruption of emotions, so he took a swing.  I’m not condoning in any way what he did, but he’s not the swinging away type, typically.  So the little girl provoked him, and while I’m definitely not saying Son shouldn’t be punished, I’m hopeful that the little girl he struck will get a lesson from the teachers about insulting her peers.  I have done all I can to make sure that Son knows if he gets that mad in the future, he’s to tell a teacher or trusted adult instead of taking matters literally into his own hands.  I have also had him write lines (my brilliant way of having him practice his handwriting as well as dealing him punishment) about not hitting; he’s been confined to his room for the last few days; he wasn’t allowed to play in two basketball games; and Friday night’s sleepover was canceled, which is what canceled our anniversary plans.  Being a responsible parent sucks.  But he will also write the girl a letter of apology and his confinement to his room may continue for the rest of the week.  We haven’t decided just yet. 

Have I mentioned a child confined to their room can bring the apocalypse of misery onto a household?  No?  Between the, “I’m thirsty,” or “I have to potty,” stalling tactics, little kids know right where to strike to the heart of the punisher, specifically with this ditty, “Mama, I can’t go to bed without my hug and kiss.”  So I let him out to come downstairs from his room and give him a minute of hugs and kisses.  While I was hugging him, he whispered, “Mama, I’m gonna miss this tonight.”  See, normally, after I get the baby to sleep, I let Son stay up half an hour or so later, so we spend that time in my bed reading a book or snuggling, or I knit while he talks to me.  It’s one of my favorite times of the day.  Lately, we’ve included Daughter in the mix, though she’s still a little firecracker and the supposedly quiet minutes before bedtime often devolve into a trampoline expedition on my bed.  But we’ll get her trained yet.

It’s in the quiet moments though that I take in their smell, their freshly bathed bodies and their pajama clad edibility.  They are great to tickle right now, and while I try to keep from riling them up, a little tickling is good for the soul.  Some hearty giggles do a body good.  But in the wake of the grounding, Son has been instructed that he must put himself to sleep.  He is not to con me into letting him into my bed, and thus, I’m missing the favorite part of my day too.  Am thinking of lifting the moratorium though after tonight, though Mike disagrees with me.

In the meantime, I dyed my first skein of yarn on Saturday.  It did not go as planned, namely because I was over-dying atop an already dyed (yellow) skein and the red I was going for didn’t materialize. It turned out terracotta with little bits of yellow peeking through.  It’s lovely even if it isn’t what I was hoping for.  I will, however, continue to expand my dyeing attempts to hand painting (using squirt bottles to put the dye right where I want it as opposed to submerging the whole skein) or selectively dipping.  But in an effort to document my first attempt (no pictures – sorry, husband took the camera with him and I didn’t think my only option, the camera phone, would work to convey the colors properly) I will spell it out here.

I have Wilton’s icing dyes already from previous cake making adventures, and so I got out the red and mixed it with nearly boiling water on the stove (about a cup and a half).  It wasn’t dark red enough, so I put in a smidge of black and got a nice black cherry color.  Perfect.  I soaked my yarn in cold water and dish soap in the sink and then rinsed it.  I added the dye to the crock pot, added enough water to cover the yarn (though yarn was not yet immersed) and waited for water to cool enough to add yarn.  At room temperature water, I added about a cup of white vinegar (acid for the yarn to soak up the dye) and the yarn and submerged it as best it could.  Turning the crock pot on high, I let it go until the water cleared.  It was about an hour and I went back to find clear water and burnt orange yarn.  Not what I was going for.  So I got some more red, the last of it, and a bit of burgundy and repeated the process.  After another couple hours, I had an orange brick color, much like a sunset.  It was nice.  I rinsed the yarn, rewound it around my fireplace screen, and left it to dry.  The next day, I took the skein off the screen and twisted it into a hank, replacing the original label on it so I’d have the care instructions and put it away.  Now, I have a hankering to try again.  I need some more undyed yarn and some more red dye.  Then I’m all set.

Bliss

What is Bliss?  Is it knowing you’ve finally met The One, the person who completes you, as Jerry Maguire so eloquently said in the movie of the same title?  Is it rarely disagreeing and finishing each other’s sentences?  Is it finding that one person on whom you know you can land when things get scary or uncertain?  Is it knowing you’ve married your best friend, the one who makes you laugh and smile and love life?

I don’t think so.

Bliss is waking up next to the person who kicked you all night, forced you to scrunch your legs up into the fetal position just so you can fit on the damned bed and you realize that despite the bruises, you still love him and would choose no one else with whom to share your bed.

Bliss is knowing he saw you move your bowels while you pushed your son or daughter out of your hey-nanu-nanu and he can still look in your eyes, call you beautiful, and appreciate the miracle of life that emerged from your ravaged body.

Bliss is when you can scream at each other, get red faced, slamming the door as you leave the house because you need a chance to cool down, and you know when you come back, he’ll be there just as apologetic as you.  And you never once doubted the stability of your relationship, no matter how mad you got.

Bliss is when he eats so much garlic that his morning breath is garlicky, and even though you can’t stand garlic, you’ll kiss him good bye before you leave for work anyway.

Bliss is when he doesn’t like to read, but he’ll say something about a blog post of yours, just to prove to you he does pay attention sometimes.

Marriage is hard.  I’ve learned from my own marriage that it takes work and committment, biting my tongue when I’m about to say something mean-spirited because of something stupid like when I’m aggravated that he forgot to replace the roll of toilet paper and I’ve gotten stuck in a compromising position.  Just because I’m comfortable enough with him to say whatever flies out of my mouth doesn’t mean I should, which takes putting his feelings before my own.  It also means forgiving him for not biting his tongue when he probably should have just because I have six books and three knitting projects scattered over the house and haven’t gone through the mail in three days.  Okay, a week.

When I think of my future, he’s in it.  I don’t even notice that anymore.  It just is.  I do think of him as completing me.  He’s The One.  I finish his sentences, which really gets on his nerves sometimes.  He makes me laugh, and I’m not embarrassed when I snort in front of him.  He is my best friend, the one to hold me when the world gets scary.  I’m the one he calls when one of his bosses treats him like crap and he needsd a reality check before saying something that could get him in trouble.  I’m the one he calls when he’s worried about his new position coming through before the bills are due.  He looks to me for reassurances when he’s wading through uncertain waters, be it for helping him through a surgery or helping him train to pass the police fitness test to be considered for a new job, and maybe something more lucrative so we’re no longer scraping by so thinly.

We are each other’s bridge over the river rapids, and each passing day is a nail driven into that bridge, strengthening it, each month and year another plank, another section across the mighty river of life over which we pass.  Some days, there are storms the likes of which few have seen, when we are scared ourselves, but we always end up finding each other to cling to, hanging on as a team instead of trying to power through the wind and rain alone.  Some days, the view from the bridge is spectacular, splashed with reds and oranges of the glorious sunset and we can see down the bridge as far as our eyes will let us.  The way is clear, and though we know we’ll stumble and fall a few hundred planks away, there’s no doubt the other will be there to help the fallen one regain balance and march on.

Somehow, against all the odds, across three states and through the crackle of a tenuous phone line connection, we found each other (a story I may tell later this week).  I believe I was meant for him, and he for me.  I believe that with every fiber in my body I am exactly where I’m supposed to be: in his arms, smelling his garlicky morning breath and kicking his legs back, fighting for just a little more room on my side of the bed. 

Happy Anniversary, Love.  What an eight years it’s been!

Recruiting the Masses, One Tweet at a Time

Do you talk about knitting and stuff?

I admitted on Twitter the other day that I have a knitting blog.  My name over there is @ShutterBitch and if you’re inclined to follow, I’m pretty uncensored.  I say whatever comes to mind, so that’s my only warning.  Anyway, someone was looking for links to St. Louis blogs and when I sent mine, she admitted that she’d learned to knit just the previous weekend.  I offered her a couple websites, told her to get on Ravelry for some inspiration, and offered to answer any questions.  Then I realized I’m kinda sporadic a poster over here.  I suppose I should rectify that, prove that I do care about this place, and make it my own. So I took pictures of the stash enhancement.

 

 

 

Yarntini Semi Solid Sock, Concord Colorway

  

Colourmart.com Laceweight 20/80 Angora/Merino, 2300 delicious, delicious yards.

 

Cascade Heritage Solids, Navy.

  

Cherry Tree Hill, Foxy Lady Colorway

  

There have been small FOs (Finished Objects for the non-knitters)

 

Baby Leaf Hat

 

And some nearly finished items.

 

The Pinwheel Blanket:

Sock 1 of Dad’s Whitbys

And Baby Blanket Square Hell

Five down, 20 more to go.

But that laceweight up there is calling my name.  It’s 2300 yards, plenty for two projects, but I’m having a hard time deciding on which to do first.  The two candidates are the Meandering Vines Shawl or the Fountain Pen Shawl.  What do you think?  I sort of like the heavier Meandering Vines shawl because I’m not really one to wear traditional triangular shawls.  That one is more scarf-like and also doesn’t appear to be as challenging.  Given that I’ve not knit with lace before, I’m a little skeered by the Fountain Pen Shawl.  However, that’s the one I have needles for, and the Meandering Vines Shawl calls for holding the yarn double.  If I do that then I won’t have enough for the Fountain Pen Shawl and I really want two projects out of the cone.

See the gripping life I lead?  I’m also considering which socks to cast on once the second Whitby is done for my Dad.  My husband needs new wool socks for his work, and what better way to support him (and get him to support my knitting hobby) than to knit him some heavy duty wool socks to keep him warm for when he’s working in a freezer all day?  But boring navy stockinette doesn’t do much for my inner challenge fiend.  So there’s competition for the sock knitting part of my brain.

Wow, it appears that I do have something to say. And that yes, sometimes I do talk about the knitting.

My New Daughter-In-Law & The Fork In the Road

So long time no posty.  Sorry about that.  Things are shakin’ at the ol’ Conniption Household.  Things I can’t talk about.  Oooh, I know.  I hate it when bloggers allude to things they ‘can’t’ talk about, but in this case, I simply can’t.  Not so publicly anyway.

We took a couple trips.  And then my computer decided that it wouldn’t recognize my camera as a device so the posts I had planned after those trips have been postponed.  I have some knitting to show off, but again, that takes camera talking to computer properly.  I’ll hopefully have that worked out shortly.  You’ll also have to forgive me because the Mucous Plague has visited its pestilence upon our house and Son is the only one apparently unscathed.  I’m hopped up on cold medicine.

A few weeks ago, we were sitting down to dinner and I asked Son how his day at Kindergarten had gone.  He said, “Fine. I’m going to marry Billie*.”  Billie is a little girl down the street who is in his class.  I gathered my wits before I brayed laughter in his face and doomed him to a lifetime of peering at girls from behind a locker door and being too afraid to talk to anyone about his crushes, resulting in unnatural tendencies that will result in restraining orders and possibly a spot in US Weekly as the stalker-of-the-month to some celebrity.

Ahem.

Trying to keep the mirth from my voice, I asked him, “Does Billie know this?  Have you discussed it with her to be sure she wants to marry you, too?”  He said, “I chase her every day at school, and she runs from me.  When I stop chasing her, she chases me back.”

Ah, true love.  So uncomplicated in the mind of a five year old.

I asked him last night what he would do if he ever caught her, or let her catch him.  His response was that he wouldn’t kiss her, that’s for sure.  If she wanted to kiss him on the cheek, well, then, he might let her, but he wasn’t doing the planting of the kiss.  I found myself torn because while I think it’s perfectly normal what he and Billie are doing, exploring social tendencies and how to handle their feelings, I also don’t want him to see the inside of the principal’s office, or worse, face suspension or expulsion over a kiss as the media has reported with the advent of Zero Tolerance at schools.  Common sense is not the order of the day, and while I think my kids’ school is more common sensical than some, I don’t want to take the chance. I told him to save the kissing for when he’s older, that he can hold her hand, or give her a quick hug (but not hang on her) but that kissing is for when he’s a teenager. 

Then, this morning, he asked me to fix his hair into ‘fun hair’ for school.  Next, he’ll be checking his labels and making sure none of his clothes come from Wal-Mart.  Does it really start this early?  Really?  I’m not equipped for this.  And relying on my husband to do the guidance bit for Son and his pre-pubescent angst seems like the answer since Mike is a good man, but I feel out of control here, like a delicate flower in a freezer full of sausage. 

Also, it seems like poor timing on my part since we’re embarking on the Candy/Holiday Food season but I’m tired.  Physically, emotionally, and in general my apathy is overwhelming.  All I feel like doing is eating, sleeping, and I’m doing the minimum required to get by.  This has been the norm for a long time, and it’s becoming a problem.  It’s weighing down my attitude, and I can’t remember the last time I smiled a genuine smile.  I am tired of being in a bad mood.  I’m tired of not feeling 100% capable of keeping up with life.  I’m sick of wishing for change instead of making the changes necessary. I am beginning to struggle with depression in a way that I haven’t in a long time, and at the time, I hoped I’d never face such a black abyss again.  I wanted to write about this in a more meaningful way, something with pretty words strung together in awesome ways but I’m not capable of that today what with the cold medicine coursing through my veins.  But I’m afraid if I don’t say it, it won’t be as real and the more tenuous it remains, the less I’ll feel confident in sticking to it.  So I’m saying it now.  There will be changes around here.  They’ve already begun.  My diet and exercise routine is being mapped out as we speak.  I’ve joined Spark People, though I’m a little leery of keeping a tool like that at my fingers because sometimes the actual changes required are lost in the use of tools.  All talk, no walk, if you know what I mean.  I’m also going to apply to be on Losing It with Jillian Michaels.  I don’t know if we’ll be picked to have a camera crew and Jillian descend on our house, and the odds aren’t in our favor, but to have a life coach come to us to analyze and help us reprioritize seems like, I don’t know, a step in the right direction, and we couldn’t afford one on our own.  And if Jillian were really going to visit, I’d have a hard time refraining from humping her leg.  I would at the very least, wish to give her a hug, if only to feel the solidity of her muscles.  Her awesomeness scares me and cowers me as well as inspires me.

So!  That’s what’s up with me.  There will hopefully be some changes coming up.  Unfortunately, I’m in the throes of one of those colds that saps your energy, and while I’m ready to get going on this fork in my life road now that I’ve chosen which fork to take, I know that any effort I expend on the exercise front will only prolong the weakness and sickness that I’ve been plagued with for the last few days.  It is one of those massive mucous parties in my chest that could easily become bronchitis.  However, in an effort to prove that I’m not just making excuses, I’m making small changes already.  I spent some time over the weekend cooking for the week ahead so that I can keep to a healthy diet and get into a new routine to jumpstart what I plan to be a whole turnaround.  I need this.  Or I’m staring into a life where I’ve alienated every person who has ever cared about me and I lose my family.  I’m not willing to go there.  I’ve got some work to do.  I need to get on it before I’m too far gone to care about losing it.  Something’s gotta give, and it’s not gonna be me.  Wish me luck.

*name changed for the sake of the children. Please, won’t you think of the children?

Packing the Knitting

We’ve been traveling here lately.  Last weekend we went to Indiana (Jones, as Son would say) for camping, Halloween themed stuff at the campground, and theme-park visiting at Holiday World in Santa Claus, Indiana.  I love this weekend, one we do every year, and while the mud made it a little harder than usual ~ can you say Baby + Mud Puddle = Instant Face Plant ~ it was still a blast and a half.  I do have pictures, but the camera died before I could get them uploaded. 

We’re also gallivanting off again this weekend for a trip we’ve had planned for coming on a year now.  We’re going to Galena, Illinois, an extremely senic and historic town rich in atmosphere and things to do.  Here are some pictures I took last year.

 

It’s like a Hollywood movie set.  In fact, I believe it was the downtown used in Field of Dreams when Kevin Costner’s character found James Earl Jones’ character. 

 

Even the streetlights are awesome.

 

Last year, we were only there for a day, the point of the trip not being Galena but a nearby town.  After seeing what a treasure it is there, we decided to visit again for longer.  So we found a house to rent that is cheaper than a hotel in the area, which will also save us money in that we can make our own food instead of relying on restaurants the entire weekend.  And off we’ll go.

I’m learning that the packing for these trips is challenging.  Preparation to bring a whole family, plus make sure the pets are covered in our absence, is like trying to build the world’s biggest Dominoes maze.  All the pieces have to be just so, done in the right order and executed carefully, or that first push off to make the whole thing fall into place will fail.  I don’t like starting trips off on the fail side of things.  Taints the whole weekend.

However, packing for the kids, while a pain, is doable.  What’s impossible is packing the knitting.  I need car projects because it’ll be 6+ hours in transit.  Socks or scarves are usually good for that, but I have one pair of socks on the needles right now, and while they do have a deadline, I have a greater deadline on 2 baby blankets.  One is nearly done, just needs the miles of i-cord border done.  I got about 1/3 of the way done on it driving home from Indiana yesterday before my brain quivered and threatened to leak out of my nose.  So I switched to the other blanket, the one I just started that I have to complete 36 squares by Thanksgiving.  Luckily it’s done in squares and so is also really portable, except that every row is different, and the pattern isn’t a repeating thing I could memorize.  Unless I memorize 50 different lines.  So that one is kind of a pain but it won’t knit itself.

The trouble is, I want to pack everything I’m working on.  I have a scarf for myself that’s been hibernating for half a year, a pair of socks I want to do for a friend down in the dumps, a pair of socks for my husband, one for each of my kids, and then a sweater I have had the yarn saved for going on a year now, plus the two baby blankets and endless possibilities for scarves and socks in my fairly small stash.  How in the hades does one choose which knitting to pack and which to leave at home?  Because I don’t want to be stuck with something I don’t feel like working on, nor do I want to run out.  But then, there’s a yarn shop on that gorgeous historic street, and I wasn’t a knitter last year when we were there.  But I plan to put a dent in my yarn budget while there this time.  So there are endless possibilities.  It boggles. 

Bag with both husband’s and my clothes: check
Bag for son: check
Bag for baby: check
Bag for baby stuff, i.e. diapers, wipes, sippy cups: check
Bag for knitting, needles, new projects, patterns, list of things to look for at yarn store, possible patterns  in the future, yarn for them, bigger bag, and maybe a 36 hour day: not so check. 

If you’re a knitter who takes things with you when you travel, how do you choose what to take?

I Shouldn’t Be Posting Today

I’m in a funk.  I don’t know how to get out.  I am still taking my happy pills, but they’re not working or something.  I have no idea.  I’ve been extra dirty stressed lately over things I can’t talk about here.  It’s making me paranoid.  I don’t like the sound of my phone anymore.  I hate getting out of bed in the morning.  I find myself wishing away the day.  It’s ugly.

So, in an effort to give myself new focus, I’m going to write a list.  This list will be things I don’t like about my life that I want to change.

1. Finances.  Don’t know what to do about them.  Have already tried everything.  Short of whoring myself out on the street corner, I don’t see a way out.

2. My job.  It’s less my job and more my chosen field.  Answer is simple.  Change careers.  It’s the doing that’s hard.

3. My body.  I’m fat.  100 pounds overweight.  Son said to me this weekend that he doesn’t want me to have a big belly because he doesn’t want people to think bad things about me.  Nothing like embarrassing your kid with your general presence.

4. My style.  I need a whole new wardrobe.  I don’t like clothes shopping, nor do I have the money for one right now, but none of it is me.  I’m faced with nothing but comfortable baggy clothes that hide my uncomfortable baggy body and I want something cute, sassy, and that screams that I do care how I look.  One step at a time, though.  I need to get a haircut, so that’s on the horizon.

5. My unpublished status.  The answer for that is to put ass in chair and do the writing.  Walk the walk.

Yeah, that’s pretty much all of it.  It’s not asking much is it, just revamp my body and career.  But it’s what I think I need to do to have a happy life.  And Rome wasn’t built in a day.  Nor are books written all at once.  So yeah, there will be a page at a time, a pound lost at a time, and resume writing and submission.  Something has to give, or it’s going to be me that gives.

I Promise, I Really Am a Knitter

So! I swear I still do knit.  I have been a knitting fool!  It’s just that I haven’t had much chance to take pictures of my knitting, but that changed the other night when I found myself bored and waiting for Glee to start.  *cue harmonized a capella singers* Man, if I weren’t already married, I’d be throwing myself at the feet of Mr. Shuster and his pretty crooked smile and curly hair.  Frak me, he’s dreamy. 

As I’ve been watching my shows come back to life with the Fall season kicking in, I’ve made serious progress on my pinwheel blanket for a friend’s baby.  Good thing, because he was born last week.  Knitting like a fiend on this, but it’s slow.  The rows are pushing 500 stitches per, and it takes a good 20 minutes now to finish one.  I have just a little more green to go and then a brown i-cord border, and I can wash it and send it on.  It’s not the prettiest of blankets, but a little baby boy doesn’t need much pretty.  Plus, they didn’t find out the sex, so I needed something neutral.  I love the way the middle turned out.  Looks like a flower.

This photo is better to show the true colors. 

This next FO is a secret.  I call them Pick Me Ups.  That’s all I can say.  I didn’t love the colors when I tried the first pattern I had in mind for this yarn, Malabrigo in the Carabeño colorway.  Hopefully they’ll be winging their way to the recipient this weekend along with some other goodies and I can rest easy knowing they’ll be used and cared for.

 

 These are the first socks I’ve knit for myself.  I love them.  They’re also Malabrigo yarn in the colorway Velvet Grapes.  I don’t like wearing socks much but the Fall weather has necessitated them, and my feet are happy for them.   Handknit socks are far better than commercial packaged socks. 

 

This next FO I’m extremely proud of.  They’re the Viper Pilots I started in June for my sister, and the color is intensely hard to photograph.  It’s Yarntini Semi Solid Sock yarn in the colorway Strawberry Frenzy.  I loved this pattern so much that I bought more yarn to do a pair for myself.  Mine will be in Dream in Color Smooshy in the Midnight Derby colorway.  Yummy.  But I love the swirls along the sides.  I love the cabled design down the front. I love the ribbed heel and toe with the cabled embellishment.  I love these socks.  My sister may not get them.  Just kidding.  Sort of.  I think I’m kidding.

 

 

There has also been stash enhancement.  I have gotten more Yarntini.  Lots more Yarntini. 

Caipirinha

Lemoncello

Summer Sunset

 

I also received my last Sock Club shipment from Yarntini.  It’s the colorway Concord, a deep rich purple with blue and red undertones and it’s gorgeous.  I’m already itching to roll it up and cast it on, which, if you notice the Summer Sunset one, seems to be a common reaction I have to Yarntini yarn. 

Dream in Color Smooshy, Midnight Derby for my own Viper Pilots

I just realized that in this picture, there’s a hair clinging to the yarn, and I keep fighting the urge to reach my hand into it and pluck the hair off. It’s driving me batty.  

I received a package in the mail yesterday from The Loopy Ewe with my latest order, a yarn I thought would work for a scarf for the Red Scarf Fund but it’s not red enough.  The Red Scarf page specifically says no purples and this yarn is way more purple than I expected.  So perhaps I’ll donate it to Norma for prizes, I haven’t yet decided.  I have a cousin who would love it if I were to do it up for her.  Or hell, everything I’ve ever knit has been for someone else.  Maybe I’ll keep it for a change.  Maybe. 

The beauty of the order that came yesterday was that it was my sixth, and frequent shoppers of The Loopy Ewe know what that means.  I’m now officially a Loopy Groupie.  Will Whore for Yarn.  I need to whip up a button for that.  Anyway, the package included an adorable bag, a new sock pattern, some treats that I passed on to my kids, and a free skein of Cherry Tree Hill yarn in Foxy Lady, that has some red in it, among other gorgeous fall type colors that perhaps would look good for the Red Scarf Fun scarf I was going to do.  The wheels, they have been turning.  I didn’t get a chance to get that picture, but I will.  Oh, I will.

The Pinwheel blanket isn’t the only thing on the needles.  I have a pair of socks for my dad coming along nicely.  They’re Whitbys from Knitting on the Road by Nancy Bush.  I love the ease of the pattern, the yarn is springy and soft (Cascade Heritage Solid in Navy) and I think my dad will like them.  I took crappy camera phone pictures and I will burn your retinas with them.  Trust me when I say that they look much better in person than in the pictures.

 

Told you the pictures were bad. 

Anyway, I have two more baby blankets to do in the coming months, and plans for one are in the works, and the other one I have the yarn purchased and have cast on.  And that’s about as far as I’ve gotten on it.  For me right now, it seems to be about socks, socks, socks.  For someone who doesn’t like wearing them that much, I’m interested in knitting way too many pairs.  That’s good for the people I know.  More for them, right?

Next up, finish baby blanket 1, get serious about baby blanket 2, and get yarn for baby blanket 3, knit up that delectable Cherry Tree Hill, consider what I’m going to do with some of this yummy yarn, and wait patiently for a preordered yarn from ThreeIrishGirls that I ordered back in July before Sock Summit that I HAD to have.  As if I don’t have enough to do working full time with two kids.  Luckily, football season is ramping back up, which means Sundays are spent on the couch knitting while husband watches men in tight pants (and truthfully, I’m eyeing them up now and then too) beat the crap out of each other.  Ah, Fall.  I’m so happy you’re here.

My Pale Green Thumb

I’m fighting a battle, one wherein I desire to be taken seriously.  Throughout my life, I’ve discovered that if I’m not learning something, I’m not happy.  When I graduated college, I embarked on a series of adventures trying to keep the student in me happy and full of knowledge.  First, I learned about wedding planning and the suckitude therein.  Then I learned about house building.  That blew harder than the wedding planning, or getting caught in a bear trap in the tundra with no knitting to keep you warm and a strangely-immune-to-the-cold zombie shambling toward you with hunger in his dead and fevered eyes.  Next came procreation and all it entails, from conception to birth, and that naturally flowed into parenthood.  For the first three years of Son’s life, I made it my mission to know everything I could about parenting from trends, advice and which side of the fence I fell on hot button issues like Cry It Out and Formula vs. Breastfeeding, and the unimaginative people behind children’s movies.  When he was four, we got pregnant with his sister, so I reimmersed myself in all things baby.  In the last year and a half, I’ve begun to step outside my little family bubble and remember there are other things than kids kids kids.

So I tried to learn about photography.  I love photography, but find myself so tired at the end of the day and facing so little time with my kids in the evenings before bed that I didn’t feel comfortable using that time to practice taking pictures.  I didn’t want to spend the couple hours a day I get with them watching things happen behind a lens.  That didn’t seem fair to them, and to be truthful, when I did pick up the camera, I didn’t want to be distracted by refereeing kid fights when he’d take her toy from her and she’d screech like a howler monkey on speed and come ram her head into my knees, hobbling me.  I wasn’t going to learn anything that way.  Not to mention that the equipment is mighty pricy. 

Knitting came next.  I’m still in the throes of that. But there’s been something else.  The whole time I’ve been courting knitting, and even before then if truth be told, I’ve been seduced by something else, something completely out of character for me.  Gardening.  I don’t like being outside when it’s hot.  I don’t like getting dirty.  I don’t like bugs.  But gardening keeps beckoning to me with the promise of produce as fresh as can be, bounty large enough to be preserved and saved for year round use, the idea that I can grow the food we eat and therefore can control that which gets put on the plants and in the soil it in which it roots.  The green movement in this country has contributed to my desire to nurture a green thumb to reduce our family’s carbon footprint, as well as save on our grocery bill.  The fact that I like to experiment in the kitchen a bit helps and spurs me on a desire to find new ways to cook veggies, to plant veggies I’ve never tried before and to increase the variety of things we eat in our house.  That I want to have a big garden necessitates a need to learn to can and preserve that which can be saved for the year.  That in itself appeals to me because my dad’s family were farmers and canning was a way of life when he was growing up.  I feel like it brings me closer to my own roots.  When my parents visited in May, my dad bought a bushel of strawberries at our local orchard and made a bunch of jelly out of it.  He bought some of the supplies to do the canning and so I already have a better start than from scratch.  The only thing that scares me is the potential for botulism.  I don’t want to poison my family.

Where does the fight come in?  Well, mainly with my husband.  He likes fresh tomatoes, and he’s all for a small garden with tomatoes, onions, and squash.  But he’s not on board with the big garden with raised beds taking up half our yard, and a compost bin for fertilizer.  He doesn’t get the whole green thing, though he’s the one who got me started a couple years ago when he saw that energy efficient light bulbs could save us on our electric bill.  For him, it’s all about the money.  We drive the more fuel efficient car most of the time because of better gas mileage saving us at the pump; we got a diesel truck because it hauls the camper better but who cares that it’s lower emissions; he wants to plant trees not for the environment, but for their aesthetically pleasing look and their shade which might give our air conditioner some relief in the summer.  A garden to him is simply a means to save money at the grocery store.  So when I mentioned my dream garden to him, all the varieties of veggies, and the work I want to put into it, he poopooed the idea because it would require him to build me some raised beds, fence it in to keep the dog out, and help me with composting and doing some of the work.  He also said he wasn’t interested in many of the vegetables I wanted to plant.  Beets?  I don’t know that I could eat all the beets by myself.  I could try.  I definitely know I couldn’t do the asparagus by myself.  And yes, I want to try asparagus, though I know it takes 7 years to grow and is extremely sensitive. 

But I’m inspired.  I want to make jars of my own spaghetti sauce.  I want to have fresh tomato cucumber salads in the summer.  I want onions that sing in chili mace with my own beans and tomatoes and tomato paste. I want to make strawberry rhubarb pie out of my own strawberries and rhubarb.  I want to grow my own pumpkins for the kids for Halloween.  I want to learn the different things to do in the kitchen with chickpeas.  I want to show my kids how to take care of their environment in a way that is both healthy for the Earth and themselves, how to use what Mother Nature has to offer to live and instill in them a healthy respect for soil that isn’t littered upon or covered over with asphalt.  I want to have a fresh herb garden so I don’t have to pay $5 for a small jar of a spice that is dried out and muted in flavor.  I want to eat as locally as I can, expending my own bodily energy instead of machined energy to harvest my food.  I want to make my own pickles, try different kinds of lettuce, do something besides get in the car and drive to the store, pay too much for food that will go bad before we can eat it, and then throw it away.  But I need to convince my husband.  He’s skeptical, saying this might be like the photography thing in that we’ll invest the money into it and then I’ll find a reason to quit.  I’ll say back that the photography thing isn’t gone, just on hold until a.) I can afford the equipment, and b.) the kids get older and don’t require as much supervision so I can put my face behind the camera and not turn around a second later to find that the baby has upended the cocoa powder on the kitchen floor and is ‘painting’ in it.  True story.  I’ll say that this gives back in a way that photography doesn’t.  This can save us money at the store.  This can make our food taste better (that should appeal to the chef in him).  This is the way

If that doesn’t work, I’ll bribe him with sex.  And hand knit socks.

Anyone have any good gardening tips?  I’m starting from scratch.

She Gets Me

I’ve started and scrapped this post six…teen times in the past and I can’t seem to find a way to articulate it in a way that does it any justice.  So I’m just going to write it and be done with it.  It’s been gnawing on my brain tissue to come out for too long and I’m finally excising the ferret running around doing the chomping.

I don’t make friends very well.  Unlike my sister, who seems to collect awesome people and keep in touch with them forever, I can’t seem to find the awesome ones very often.  In grade school, I was part of a collection of girls who hung out together because we were labeled with the ‘popular’ tag.  Not that I ever thought I was popular or better than anyone else.  But I was part of a gaggle of girls that somehow got others to believe we were the popular ones.  It was a miserable experience.   

One day, we were standing around the building at recess (in grade 6, so we were a bunch of pre-pubescent catty bitches with claws fully extended) in Our Corner, the one where no one else dared to go lest they receive an evil eye from Amelia* who was considered the leader of The Group, which was what we called ourselves.  Original, I know.  Angela* snorted when she looked down at my feet.  “I see your taste in shoes has improved.”  She snickered to the other girls, and Amelia laughed.  The rest of them took their cues from her and laughed, too.  

Puzzled, I said, “What are you talking about, Angela?” 

“Those idiotic shoes with the puffy rainbow hearts on them.  Those are so stupid.” 

I knew which shoes she was talking about,  but they didn’t belong to me.  They belonged to my other friend Betty, who darted a glance at me to see if I’d out her. 

Insecure at being laughed at, I jumped to defend myself.  “Those aren’t my shoes.  Those are Betty’s.”  

Angrily, Betty piped up, “I borrowed them from you one time, because they matched a bow I had in my hair.  But I threw that bow away because it was ugly and gave you your shoes back.”  She glared at me with betrayal, daring me to question her.  Since she was new to school that year, and the novelty of her long blond hair and pretty clothes hadn’t worn off yet, Angela and the other girls jumped to her defense, regardless of her lie. 

The jeering and teasing continued, and I bowed my head, having resigned myself to taking on the shame of a stupid pair of shoes I never even owned.  As soon as school was over and Betty and I were walking home (we only lived a couple blocks away from school and from each other) she apologized for not speaking up in my defense.  “That Angela has a mean streak in her.  I’m sorry I didn’t tell her the truth, but you’ve been at this school for awhile.  They all know you.  They don’t know me well, and the smallest things can send me to the dork side of the fence.  They won’t send you to hang out with the dorks.  You could get away with having stupid shoes.” 

Wordlessly, I nodded.  I knew she was right, and I also knew she was a coward at the same time.  But she was my friend, the best one I’d had and so I took the teasing for her, so she would still be ‘allowed’ to hang out with us.  The next time they criticized my hair or clothes, she told them she liked it.  The next day, two of the other four girls that hung out with us sported the same hair style as I had the day before.  If Pretty Betty thought it was nice, then it must be.  Too bad she couldn’t have defended the shoes.  Betty moved away the next summer, and we all split up to different middle schools.  Happily so, in my case. 

In middle school, I had a few girlfriends that I would hang out with, but the connection was tenuous.  Sure, we were all friends, perfectly pleasant to each other.  I appear to have survived middle school years unscathed by torment that so many others experience.  I had acquaintances.  I had people to talk to.  I had friends with whom I did things like watch movies or stand next to at dances waiting for a boy to have enough guts to ask me to dance (no one ever did) and I even went to a few of the popular crowd’s chaperoned ‘parties’ where the parents relegated us to a basement and we pigged out on chips and soda and listened to loud music that was dictated by a couple guys that played the same songs over and over.  I had crushes, got crushed, had notes to pass and passed to me in the halls, doodled guys’ names on my binder and then scratched them out.  It was typical, and very superficial.  High school was much the same way, but I decided I didn’t much like the parties when alcohol and drugs and sex came into the picture, and the parents disappeared. 

It seemed that even in college, I couldn’t manage to stay away from the one or two toxic people who befriended me only to beat me down for their own enjoyment and self-esteem fulfillment.  I ended my most serious high school relationship when the guy in question moved to his own college and promptly forgot he promised to give a long-distance thing a try; I met the man who would become my husband, and made some friends who forgot me and were forgotten by the next year when I changed residence halls.  Then I moved colleges and went from class to class knowing names and faces, sitting next to the familiar ones in my core classes, and chatting.  I know none of them today. 

The people with whom I interact now are work related, or were friends of my husband’s before I moved to be close to him.  A few of his friends’ wives stand out as confidantes to me, and one particular coworker ‘gets’ me, but I find that my sense of humor is off-putting.  I’m disturbed, and I laugh at disturbing things.  I make rude jokes, or say off color things, cannot stand political correctness stupidity and point out when I think something is dumb.  My husband thinks this is a coping mechanism that I use to keep people at bay because I don’t want to endure The Group kind of thinking again, that I don’t want to open myself up to esteem crushing teasing.  He may be right.  I have a couple friends to whom I relate, but it doesn’t come easy to me.  I have a guard that I keep in place.  I float a few jokes out there and if they don’t get my sense of humor, I dial it back.  I behave myself. 

The result is that a lot of the time, I am snarking in my own head about things, things I wish I could say to a friend out loud and have them snort laughter in understanding.  I have thoughts that I know people would deem inappropriate, so I keep them to myself.  The result of this is that I’m often outwardly a very sanitized version of my true self.  The one place where I’m free to be truly myself is on my blog, and moreso, in 140 character snippets on Twitter.   I often will see a group of women having a great time over drinks somewhere, or two friends shopping together laughing hysterically over something only they know, and I’m jealous.  I feel like the orphan looking into a warm home through a foggy and cold window, standing barefoot out in the snow while a group of girlfriends in pajamas share popcorn and boy stories in front of a warm fireplace.  I don’t know the secret handshakes of sisterhood, or the passwords to even try to break into this place of sacred friendship.  I’ve never been a bridesmaid, though I had 8 myself.  (Yeah, I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.)  I’ve never been the one who gets the phone call from a devastated friend over a breakup.  I have girlfriends, girls with whom I laugh and have a good time, but I can’t geek out over Twilight with any of them, excepting one.  I can’t call and say, “OMG, you HAVE to see this YouTube!” and be understood why the cat jumping clumsily over the gate is so frakking funny.  Or even someone to laugh that I’m using the word ‘frak’ instead of ‘fuck’ and understand where that came from, and my obsession with Battlestar Galactica to the point of knitting BSG themed socks!

I just don’t make friends that easily.  I wish it were different.  It just seems that my friendships tend to cool off or peter out over time.  I hope that isn’t the case with everyone.  So far, it has been.

So imagine my shock when last week, I responded to the tweet of a girl I’ve been following for years, have had a blog author/commenter acquaintance with since my first blog, but whom I’ve never really talked to in depth until I answered this one tweet.  We’ve been emailing constantly back and forth for the last week and a half, texting each other when not near email, and we get each others’ jokes.  She’s as snarky and disturbed as I am and it’s a blast.  We have so much in common, and so many of the same thought processes that it’s sometimes eerie.  Come to find out, I have found my personality clone.  And I may just weep with joy over it.  A new friend.  For me.  Maybe for life.

*names have been changed. I have no idea where most of these people are and they could be perfectly human by now.  I’m assuming maturity may have a hand in some attitudes by now.

The Ass End of Friday

Wow, I’m so glad this week is almost over.  It’s been a rough one.  Three nights in a row, I’ve gotten home well past my normal time of getting home, because I’ve had to deal with camper repairs.  On our float trip a couple weekends ago, we had a failure of the equalizer bars and had to have a piece of metal welded back on.  So last night, I picked up the camper and drove it home.  Now, I’m not that uncomfortable driving the thing.  Wide right turns, that’s the key.  That and not getting irritated with people who don’t know how to drive near a camper.  That’s hard when someone cuts you off and you have to slow down.  A 1-ton truck pulling a 29 foot camper doesn’t stop on a dime.  If you cut me off in traffic and then hit the brakes, don’t be mad at me when you get me shoved up your ass all the way to my sleeper sofa.  It’s not my fault, brake enhancers and all. 

Anyway, I pulled into the alley behind the house where we have gracious friends who let us store the camper on a rock parking pad they have and things were going well.  I thought, huh.  I pulled this thing home in rush hour traffic.  I’m feeling ambitious.  I think I can back this honking camper into its spot.  I’ve seen it done several times.  Mike’s not here to laugh at me and won’t he be surprised when he walks up and I’m unhooking the thing?  Yeah.  I’ll give it a shot.  If I can’t do it, the worst thing is that I can’t do it and Mike has to.

Wrong.

I gave it a shot a couple times, repositioning myself by pulling forward and trying to swing it more sharply into its spot.  I stopped when I heard a screech.  Looking at the side of the truck I hadn’t been looking at, I see that I made the truck get in a fight with an ill-placed tree.  The screech was the bark of the tree taking the paint off the truck.

Um. Shit?

So I pulled forward, assessed the damage and cursed when I saw scratches down the side of the truck bed, about 6 inches long, back near the tail light.  Mike?  Didn’t speak to me much the whole night.  We’ve only had the truck for a couple months, so while I didn’t like that he was giving me the silent treatment, I guess I can understand it.  He’s speaking to me again, but damn.  He’s meticulous about his vehicles and there will be no scratches on his truck.  Nein!

Last night was just last night, thoug, so why am I glad to see the ass end of the whole week?  Mainly Daughter.  We’re weaning her from bottles onto sippy cups.  And we should have done it a long time ago.  I had cut the number of bottles in half over the last few months, but the few that remained, the first morning, naptime, and bedtime bottles were her Achilles heel for comfort.  She would test my patience daily by slapping away a sippy cup, and despite their claim to be spill-proof, they’re not totally leak-proof.  If she fell down and landed on a toy, her sobs were punctuated with requests for her ‘baba.’  She was coming to rely far too heavily on the little plastic drink delivery method, and so we said enough.

The first day was hell.  She sat in front of the fridge at the babysitter’s and slapped the floor.  She slapped my leg.  She shouted, “No!” at me.  She shouted, “STOP!” at me.  She laid down on her back and screamed, red faced, at the ceiling.  She angrily crammed her fists in her mouth and bit, then screamed in pain.  She glared at me as if she would prefer my dying before she’s old enough to remember me so she needn’t be bothered with me at all.  The only thing that works?  Crackers.  So now, instead of letting my daughter take comfort in a bottle, I’m teaching her how to emotionally eat, to associate food with comfort.  WIN!  Welcome to the beginning of the road to obesity, baby girl.  Jebus.

Just when I think that it can’t get any worse, she perfected her fit throwing technique.  Now, instead of flinging herself backwards, slowing her momentum with her elbows so she wouldn’t hit her head (she’s a careful fit thrower) she’s now started a half-twist so she lands on her hands and knees, sobbing at the injustice while hanging her head dejectedly.  Between the screaming, garment rending, accusatory shouts and glares, and complete emotional wretchedness of her behavior, I’m wiped out.  Picking her up results in a limp fish protest of throwing every part of her body as far away from me as she can get, because god forbid my skin touch hers.  A few well placed kicks to my chest and she’s gotten her wish – I no longer try to comfort her when she’s throwing her fit.  I ignore her, stepping over her and leaving the room.

In the meantime, I’ve begun browsing Craigslist for size 2T muzzles or small manacles that will hold her tiny wrists.  But don’t freak out or send me nasty email: I’m looking for fur lined manacles.  Comfort is my top priority here.  And just for the sake of preparing for the future, I’m also seeing what the going rate is on chastity belts.  Just to be sure.  Mama’s sleep is preshus, can’t be up worrying now, can I?

See what I mean?  This week cannot end fast enough.  My mental fortitude is thwacking apart, thread by thread.  The good news? This weekend is remarkably free, so there will be knitting.  Lots and lots of knitting.  And TV watching.  The last disc of Battlestar Galactica Season 3 is in my mailbox as we speak and I’ve requested the entire series collection of Six Feet Under from the library.  Hello, you lovely plasma TV, where’ve you been all my life?

Tears On His Face, On My Face

Two years ago, the tears were on his face, giant tears that were the product of being told he was lacking in some manner, while his cousin who is only six months older and one of his best friends, was not.  I held him on my hip, my heart saddened but understanding the circumstances in a way that he could not.  I tried to tell him it was for safety reasons, that the man who said he wasn’t tall enough to go on the swings ride at the carnival wasn’t trying to be mean, but that he had to be big enough for the safety strap to hold him, and as little as he was, he could slip right out of it.  He didn’t care.  He just rubbed his snot on my shoulder and glared at the man, and at the ride as the swings rose higher and higher and flung round and round, his cousin gleefully enjoying the flinging, oblivious to Son’s jealousy and left-behind status.  It was a bad night.

Still, I tried to turn the bad feelings we all felt over the situation into something positive.  “Eat your food and you’ll be big and strong enough for the swings at the picnic next year!”  It became a mantra.  It seemed at first to be the magic bullet to get him to eat.  Finally!  Forkfuls went into a mouth once closed in tight determination to remain food free.  Before, he wouldn’t try new things, sticking to mostly chicken nuggets and french fries, applesauce, carrots, and macaroni and cheese or spaghetti.  His diet was almost all carbs, and I wondered if he was balanced enough.  I fretted.  I worried.  He went from one season to the next without going up to the next size.  I put jeans away from spring to winter knowing that they’d likely fit in fall the next year.  Frowning, I carefully watched him, not caring as much if he had sugar or junk.  Given the choice between watching him eat crap or not eat at all, I’d reason calories are calories, and if we can get over this hump, then I can worry about realigning his nutrition intake.  If he asked for it, he pretty much got it, because it meant something was going in his belly.  He wasn’t so starved that the doctor was worried, but I obsessively gave him vitamins and found that I couldn’t look at him without gauging his size.  Proportionately, he was fine.  Lean legs and arms, little boy belly, skinny but not emaciated.  Still, I worried.  It’s what mothers do.  But the swings gave him a goal, and so he started to eat.  One bite at a time, he ate.

Time passed.  His palette has expanded.  Last night, he tried toasted ravioli and loved it.  He then tried a tortellini in sun dried tomato alfredo sauce and loved that too, except for the little bits of tomato in it.  But he ate.  He finished the bowl.  It’s become normal to me to see him eat now, so much that in fact somewhere in there, I realized I’d quit scrutinizing him.  I stopped hovering and obsessing about his eating habits.  He was growing by the charts at the doctor’s office, though he’s still in the lowest percentiles. 

That picnic returned over the weekend, and Friday night, he stood in line gleefully with his grandmother to buy his ride pass.  He held out his scrawny wrist for the wristband that would gain him access to unlimited rides until he was barely able to stand, and the first place he wanted to go was the swings.  Last year, he’d been denied access again, with just a half an inch in height to go.  He took it much better but it still hurt.  This year, there was hope in his face as he stood in line.  The kids in front of him rushed to find their seats and he came up to the man running the ride.  The gate swung close to his head.  If he was as tall as or taller than the gate, he was home free.  There were hairs that were thicker than the difference between him and the gate.  He was still too short, but this time, it was close enough for horseshoes and hand grenades… and carnival swings. 

“C’mon,” the Ride Man said gruffly, waving him in.  Son bounced inside the fence surrounding the swings, his cousin hot on his heels.  They were thrilled, him to have gained some form of acceptance he’d been missing for two years and get the chance to finally ride the swings, and his cousin to finally have a riding buddy, and not to feel guilty because he’s taller through no fault of his own.

They jumped up and strapped themselves in, and the Ride Man checked their safety belts, and then started up the ride.  The smile on Son’s face nearly split his whole head in half.  I’m sure he swallowed at least six bugs that first ride (and by the end of the night, he’d probably ingested enough protein in bug form to make up for having cotton candy for dinner – WIN!) and his smile was seriously so big that I wouldn’t be surprised if he had gotten a sparrow or three in there too. The moment was two years in the making, and I sat and watched with glee on my own face, tears standing in my eyes reflecting back the bright carnival lights.  Two years ago, the tears were on his face.  This time, they were on my face.

Crappy camera phone pictures

he’s too blurry to point out, but trust me, he was on there, lighting the world with his smile.  While I stood by and tried not to bawl like a baby over his success.  I can’t WAIT to see what kind of sap I’m going to be when he does more than manage to grow a couple inches.  They don’t tell you just how much you wear your heart on the outside of your body when you have kids. Oy.

Remembering

Ten on Tuesday

I’m going to start doing the Ten on Tuesday as a way to keep the content on this space rotating.  Things have been crazy making lately and I really want to keep up better.  This week’s is 10 Bad Habits You Can’t Break

1. Soda.  I try to quit and I do well for a good bit of time, and then suddenly, if I don’t have a Coke, it’s as if the world has already ended and I’m left in the post-apocalypse and the only thing that can unwind the clock is a nice cold can of Coke.  It will deliver me back to my rightful place and right the world again.  Coke = magic.

2. I don’t wash the makeup off my face before going to bed.  This is a bad bad habit, and I don’t know why I don’t do it.  I always feel so good and clean when I do manage to take care of it.  But at night, after the kids are in bed, I sit propped in bed watching Battlestar Galactica episodes and knitting, and I cannot tear myself out of my comfort zone for the good of my skin.  Horrible.  Acne-inducing.  Bad bad bad habit.

3. I eat way too fast.  I learned on a work trip recently that I wolf down my food at such a speed that people around me should be worried about me sucking down their toupées and broaches and other unsecured items.  I do this because I barely get through my dinner before my kids are in dire need of something, help in the potty, another fork to replace the one they let the dog lick, or some other such thing.  If I don’t inhale then I won’t get to eat while it’s still hot.  This means that I overeat.  It takes something like 20 minutes for your stomach to signal your brain when you’re full.  Slowing down means that you don’t keep eating beyond your capacity if you allow your stomach the chance to get that signal to the brain.  It explains a lot to me, about my weight, my lethargy in general.  I don’t really eat bad things (except mashed potatoes) in large quantities like chips or ice cream, but just eating too much is likely my culprit weight wise.  And the soda up there in #1.

4. I wait way too long to pay bills.  I hate paying bills.  Especially when I have to juggle what gets paid when.  And I relax a lot more when I know things are paid.  But sometimes, I just don’t feel like it, and it’s a bad thing that I need to quit doing.  Don’t get me wrong.  Our bills get paid, and usually not too late, but sometimes a couple extra days that are totally unneccessary.  I need to stop that.

5. I am a yeller.  When the kids have turned the dial of chaos up to eleven and the phone rings, dinner’s burning on the stove, and the dog’s barking to be let in, well, I tend to lose my shit.  I’m not proud of this trait of mine.  I really wish I could be even tempered all the time, that I didn’t react so loudly at first instead of thinking first, and I’m trying to be better.

6. I am a terrible housekeeper.  I hate to clean.  My husband does a much better job than I and more efficiently most of the time.  He’s a wonder of human kind, able to multitask like no one else I’ve ever met.  But I suck at it.  Sure, I can do dishes and laundry and keep things in general order, but to clean.  Yeah, I’m not doing it very well.  I know how.  I don’t have any motivation.

7. I finish people’s sentences for them.  Sometimes it’s helpful if someone can’t think of the proper word, but I hate it when people try to anticipate my thoughts so I really shouldn’t do it to other people.

8. My husband says I tailgate people.  I admit to doing so some of the time, but it’s a bad habit.  I drive in rush hour traffic twice a day all week and if you don’t stay close to the person in front of you, you’ll end up having fifteen people cut you off.  I’ve grown accustomed to a shorter space cushion (and try to still leave enough room to stop should I need to) and so when it’s Saturday and I’m on the way to the library to return or pick up books, I tend to follow the person in front of me closely when I don’t need to.  Mike says I should just drive in the slow lane so I don’t get cut off at all.  Most people aren’t clamoring to get in the slow lane.

9.  I am very prone to fad thinking.  The newest thing?  I fall hook, line, and sinker.  Not so much with fashion but its really bad with TV.  Though I do draw the line at reality shows.  I watch The Biggest Loser and a couple of series on The Discovery Channel like Deadliest Catch and Swords, but other than that, I don’t understand reality TV.  American Idol is not something I find myself compelled by.  However, the rest of bandwagon TV?   Totally there.  Though usually late because I don’t have HBO or Showtime, which is where all the good shows seem to be.  That’s okay, though, since I have Netflix.  God Bless Netflix.

10. I cannot seem to stick to a diet and exercise plan to save my life, literally.  Though I’m hoping to change that soon.

Do you have any bad habits to share?

A New Beginning

Life marches on and time gets away in ways we swear we won’t allow, and yet, we look behind us and see the calendar laughing away, its guffawing maw made up of ever changing pages turning, months going by whole chunks at a time, suddenly an animated being with a will of its own, one that wants to speed up, move faster and faster until the world around is blurs by as if we’re on a train speeding through a city and only catch glimpses of the scenery as it rushes past, barely leaving an impression.

The school doors opened and we stepped in, unsure and yet not given time to be tentative for the throng of parents and students behind us waiting for their own access.  Though not the school of my youth, the smell was familiar, wafting over my nose in a mixture of large amounts of glue, reams of paper, and the anxiety of children milling in the halls.  The returning ones greeted friends warmly and showed off new duds.  The new kids, Son included, stood silent as sentinels, observing the chaos around us and taking it all in.  This was to be their daytime home for the next nine months and they were riveted.  The swirl of grade school society flitted over the students and I silently hoped that Mean Kid Syndrome would bypass my son’s class.  On the other hand, the little kid who told Son last year in preschool that his breath stank made Son vigilant about brushing his teeth, so maybe a little societal chiding could be a good thing. In small doses.  Please let it be very small doses, I thought.

I shook myself and tried not to think of it, tried not to let my own memories translate to misgivings that could unnerve Son as we made our way through the crowded halls to the Kindergarten meeting area.  I wanted to snap some pictures but it wasn’t possible with everyone so close together, standing in personal space.  Also, I had the wrong lens, not that I was trying to turn Son’s first day of school into a photo shoot.  But it was my zoom 200 mm lens, and close ups were not going to happen.

As we herded into the line up area, I found the line for Son’s teacher’s class and led him to the end of it.  Here, there was a little room so I took a few photos and stood off to the side as the teachers started to speak.  Soon, the kids were standing and filing from the gym, heading to their class.  Not sure if I was supposed to, I followed Son through the halls to his classroom, helped him find his desk, snapped a couple more pictures, and then schlepped from the room, the last parent to leave.  It’s not that I was reluctant or hanging on too tightly to an era of childhood that ended with the final closing of the classroom door, but I wanted to make sure Son was okay.  He seemed to be, though he looked a little shell shocked.  At least in his classroom, there were only 25 students.  There were small groups, and the room wasn’t nearly as overwhelming as the gym had been.

I headed back to my car, knowing I had about an hour and a half to kill before school was dismissed.  It wasn’t until the clunk of the driver’s door as it shut that I let the emotion of the morning wash over me.  My eyes, pricking with inevitable tears while I’d walked from the school, brimmed over and let go.  I sobbed, heaving gasps with red blotches blooming on my face.  Son is a student now.  I’m the parent of a Kindergartner.  For the next 12, and maybe 16 or more years, there will be school and Son’s true childhood of playing all day with no responsibilities but to listen to his imagination and perhaps eat a good lunch.  It was time.  His stimulation demands were more than his small daycare could handle and he was becoming a handful.  He needed structure, discipline, and a purpose beyond serving his own whims and ego.  But there was still a part of me that mourned the loss of the ‘toddler’ identity he’d held for so long.  The fat legs and chipmunk cheeks had been gone for a couple years, though in my heart, their ghost remained.  Dropping him off for his first day of school forced a goodbye to those last remnants of his baby and toddlerhood, even though the physical attributes those labels decry had disappeared in long and lanky legs, a giant vocabulary, and a thinning of the face.  The only baby fat left on him was in my heart.  He became a boy to me that day, and while I embraced the change, I mourned the time gone by so fast. 

Then, the thought occurred to me that I had time to myself.  For five years, I haven’t had much time to myself.  What could I do with it?  I headed to the library to return some books and realized I could sit and read, and so I did.  I enjoyed quite a bit of reading time in that hour and then some, where I didn’t have to stop every couple of sentences to answer a question about Santa Claus, the chemical makeup of Silly Putty, or why some farts smell and some don’t.

For each ending, there is a new beginning.

Charming Wife Status: Preserved

 

Today is Mike’s birthday.  I have covered my bases by sending him an e-card.  Let it be said how much I love him that I gave him a clown card.  I hate clowns.

You know I don’t like clowns. Your birthday just happened to be the nearest occasion to celebrate finding a card with a dead clown on it. Happy Birthday!

P.S. be prepared for that hummer later…

(I also got him a real card with honest mush, and some baseball game tickets, right behind the dugout at the Cards/Astros tonight.  I’m not totally mean.)