Category Archives: Random

2014: A Retrospective.

It’s the fourth day of the new year, so I should probably post something, right? I’ve got it! Let’s take a look back, all the way to the beginning of 2014.

Did you notice that I didn’t post yet about resolutions and goals and stuff? I’m not ready to write about them yet. You’re just going to have to wait on that. I’m sorry, I know the anticipation is killing you.

Nathan turned seven. I could write one of those posts about how I knew from the moment I met him I’d love him forever (true) or how I can’t believe he’s already seven (also true). I could tell you about how every year we tell him it’s the year he has to start going backward, so instead of turning 7 he went back to 5, but there’s not much to tell more than that (except to say he’s not really into that idea and he hasn’t believed it since the year he turned 4 – or when we told him he was 2 again. That year was fun.).

We celebrated his birthday on the first, because the second, his actual day, he had to go to school. It occurred to me that much of his life he will spend his birthday returning to work or school from holiday time off and that’s pretty unfortunate. But then I remembered the he will hopefully spend much of his life with the day before his birthday off from work or school, so I felt less sad. I mean, I rarely get May 23rd off, so really, who is winning out here?

We had a major snowstorm overnight between January 2 and January 3, causing a snow day for my child yesterday. It was not a snow day for me and I spent the better part of the day grumbling about Facebook statuses wherein everyone was all excited about a day off. I work from home. As I pointed out to friends, unless it snows in my hallway, I can’t claim a snow day and not work. Then I said please don’t ever let it snow in my hallway, because with my luck, we all know that’s a possibility. My point is that a snow day with my son means that I’m spending half of the day explaining the concept of cooperation. Clearly I’m not explaining it well, in case you’re wondering.

I don’t think it’s record-breaking or anything, but it’s downright stupid cold outside today. The overnight low was somewhere in the ballpark of zero degrees. I was so cold that I went to sleep last night wearing yoga pants, PJ pants over them, a t-shirt and a sweatshirt, three blankets, and my robe over me. Tomorrow it’s supposed to be a high of 44, so I may just stand outside doing one of those Julie Andrews spread-armed twirls, reveling in the relative warmth.

But I’m not going to complain about the cold because I think it’s fair to say that everyone is sick to death of people living in areas with unpleasant weather complaining about the unpleasant weather. I know I am. I’m almost as sick of it as I am sick of this damn seasonally appropriate weather.

I have to take down the Christmas decorations today. That is a most loathsome task. I hate putting them up, which makes me a grinch. I hate taking them down, that just makes me seem normal. Either way, I’m probably going to be grumbling and swearing later today about the fact that none of the stuff seems to fit in the boxes the same way we packed it up last year.

So, that’s it! That’s my year in review!

Happy New Year, dear readers. I really am hoping for an exciting year and I will share it all with you soon. In the meantime, go check out the moonshine grid where other people wrote stuff and then posted it.

 
Featured image credit.

Unlucky Number 13.

How do you feel about day in the life posts?

Today consisted of the following:

  • Had plans to sell a preschool desk. This meet up was rescheduled from yesterday which was rescheduled from last week. Loaded desk into car. Plans fell through. Relisted desk on kid stuff selling website, made arrangements to sell desk to someone else, changed plans, changed plans back, sold desk.
  • Work. Busy. Blurgh. Started early but barely made a dent. I love end of the year insurance crazy (no I don’t).
  • PTA meeting.
  • Also unearthed from basement, cleaned, and sold a stroller and a highchair.
  • Spent significant time in the basement marveling at the empty space I’ve created.
  • Started laundry that I’ve just now remembered is still in the dryer. Oh well, there’s always tomorrow.
  • Read a few blog posts.
  • Picked at a hangnail.
  • Regretted picking at hangnail.
  • Consumed 6 cups of coffee, a cup of tea, and a soda. Still barely able to keep my eyes open.
  • Counted emails. 540.
  • Remembered fondly the time a few months ago I was down to 200. That was a nice time.

Today I did not:

  • Make the beds.
  • Do the dishes.
  • Pick up a few things I needed from the store.
  • Vacuum. And I assure you it was necessary.
  • Write a decent blog post for NaBloPoMo. But I did write a shitty one, so there’s that.
  • Do that second load of laundry I was contemplating.

Tomorrow I need to:

  • Do all the stuff I didn’t do today.
  • Do all the regular stuff I have to do.
  • Do more stuff.
  • Write a better blog post. A much better post.

Have a good night, folks.

This is NaBloPoMo Day 13.

I Can’t Blog With Paper on the Laptop.

Ten days without an update. Eek! Egads. Yikes. Stuff like that.

I woke up last Thursday (that’s LAST, as in the tenth of October), with a scratchy throat.  I figured it was allergies.  I figured wrong.  I seem to have contracted a small form of death.  Coughing, sneezing, fatigue, general malaise.  It’s fun times.  I’ve been going to bed at 8:50.  Why such an odd time? Well, when one normally goes to sleep around 9:20, there isn’t a whole lot of wiggle room.

Why do I go to sleep at 9:20, you ask, and not just 9:15 or 9:30?  Because. That’s why.

I think I’m finally starting to see the tail end of this cold, which would be great since I’m really tired of feeling like crap.

Next month I’ll be participating in NaBloPoMo.  That’s National Blog Posting Month for those of you unaware. I did this last year, with moderate success (I missed one day that I made up about 8 hours into the following day).  I’m hoping to do better this year by planning my posts via an editorial calendar. The problem is that I was so busy saving posts for next month that I sort of forgot to keep planning posts for this month. And I was in a phlegmy haze too.  You’ll forgive me right?

So I have some good stuff planned for next month, with about 10 days of posts planned. I’ll be hooking up with BlogHer and yeah write this year as well because these things are just more fun when other people are involved. That translates roughly to mean that I want better traffic.  It’s all about the numbers, people. (No, it’s not.) {Yes, it is.}

November is also known as NaNoWriMo, which is National Novel Writing Month wherein people shoot to write a novel during the month.  I don’t write novels, so I’m not doing that.  I decided to make up NaMeWriMo, National Memoir Writing Month.  I won’t finish mine in one month, but I hope to work on it every day of the month.  Maybe if I do that I’ll actually hit my goal of finishing the first draft this year.  I doubt it.

I also acknowledge that I may not have made up NaMeWriMo but I’m too lazy to go look it up. So if I bit off your idea, sorry.

I wanted to give you a quick glimpse into my life these days.  I have done that.  I need to wrap this up because my child has ripped up and crumpled three sheets of paper and he is throwing them at me while I type.  This makes blogging more difficult than you’d think. I’m trying to finish this last sentence while he gathers his scraps into a pumpkin shaped bucket. Too late, he just dumped them on the keyboard.


Hooking up with yeah write’s weekend moonshine grid. That’s fun times, for reals.

Gutted.

I’m depressed again. I realized it a few days ago. I thought I was just tired, but then there was what should have been a slight disappointment that actually felt more like a devastating blow. I cried about nonsense that I knew was nonsense but cried anyway. I didn’t feel better after I cried and that’s when I knew.

And just like I knew I was depressed I know that it will pass. I need to ride out this storm and it will all be over eventually.

I yelled at Nathan the other day. He acted poorly, I asked him for some space and when he not only didn’t go into the other room like I asked but acted even more poorly, I lost it. We’ve been talking a lot about using our words when we are upset and need space. I used my words and he didn’t respect them and I yelled at him. A rational woman would have had better control. A rational woman would not have expected a six year old to respect her need for space.

I don’t want to feel this way. I don’t want to yell at my kid. My mother used to yell at me like this. I’d do something that I knew I wasn’t supposed to do, I’d push buttons, and she’d blow. She’d explode on me in a way I didn’t deserve and was excessive considering the infraction.

I was watching TV later that night and one of the characters had to attend the funeral of his father. He turned and looked at the casket and the reaction was one I understand so well, that feeling when you fully realize that your parent is dead. There in a box, or in my case a marble urn, just utterly and completely dead. No longer alive to complain about, or hope someday things will be better, or to see as a burden, or any of the other feelings one could have when a father/son or mother/daughter relationship is complicated beyond measure.

There’s a certain comfort in the norm, in the same-shit-different-day life with someone. Even though it may seem like it won’t ever end, at some point it does. Things change. People die.

I watched the guy on the sitcom come to terms with his newly dead father by the next commercial break. I remember sobbing in the church at my mother’s funeral, feeling completely gutted. To this day, I do not know why I was crying. I guess it was 34 years of cut-short sobbing that flowed forth, unstoppable, a culmination of everything. To see this guy look at his father’s corpse, feel the gutting and get over it so quickly and neatly, it didn’t feel genuine to me.

I wish I could say I’m depressed about my mother and so I yelled at my kid, but it’s not that linear. The depression, the yelling, the grieving, they all happen in swirls around each other, connected, but no one causing the other. Of course I can see how my relationship with my son conjures up unresolved feelings about my relationship with my mother. How I use what I know to not screw it all up, to not do more harm than good, that escapes me. Keeping the past in the past, being the mother he needs amid the uncertainty of the future, that’s the difficult thing.

Sometimes I’m still standing in that church, gutted, wondering where I go from here.


Joining my pals on the yeah write grid again this week. Stop by.

Spaghetti and Meatballs.

I just finished the dishes. There weren’t that many, just a half dozen or so little plastic bowls from my son’s endless stream of snacks and meals since noon. And one frying pan of bacon grease from his dinner. This whole house smells of bacon right now, and not in a good way. In an old bacon sort of way. I could light some candles, but that sounds like a lot of work.

I contemplated getting a marinade together for tonight’s grown up dinner which is to be some sort of low fat chicken concoction. I’m not in the mood. I don’t want chicken and I don’t want to cook.

What I want is spaghetti and meatballs. Homemade by someone’s Italian grandmother would be ideal, but I’ll even settle for take out. I’m not going to make it though, that’s for sure. If I’m going to cook, it’s going to be that damn low fat chicken concoction.

Last week I was on a major high from being at a blogging conference.  Now, at this moment? Not so much. It’s Sunday night – bath night, get ready for school and work tomorrow night, I’m just too tired from the weekend night. Nathan has been talking to me for about 13 hours now and I’ve heard most of it, except for maybe what he was saying when I was hiding in an exceptionally long shower.

Spaghetti and meatballs would help. Instead, we’ll be having some sort of low fat stupid chicken concoction.

I don’t want to clean up whatever I cook for dinner.  This is the trouble with cooking two dinners (and two lunches and two breakfasts). I have to clean up two dinners. And let’s not forget all the snacks and the half dozen little plastic bowls necessary to deliver such snacks.

I’m supposed to be eating healthy again, but since my trip I’m not in the mood.  I want to eat all sorts of junk. Today, in fact, I stopped to get a coffee and a doughnut in an attempt to pick myself up. You generally can’t beat a sugar/caffeine combo to wake a person up, but sadly, today, it didn’t work. I could still just slip right into a coma if someone would stop talking long enough to let me sleep.

You know what helps ACS (Almost Coma Syndrome)? Spaghetti and meatballs. It’s been proven. Carbs and protein. Sounds reasonable, right?

But we’re not having spaghetti and meatballs for dinner tonight. We’re having the chicken.