Here We Are Again

Inspirational song: Songbird (Fleetwood Mac)

I was fully prepared to go through an entire year of the special days by myself. Now, as some of the really big ones come around a second time, and I'm alone, it's much less fun. Today was our anniversary, the second one I've gotten to spend alone in a row. It's not like I haven't been through this before. This is definitely not my first solo special day. I couldn't possibly count how many anniversaries, birthdays, holidays, school awards ceremonies, graduations, and crisis days I've gone stag. I've even done consecutive solo holidays, without much whining. But those were usually separated by months with Mr Man at home. No such luck this year. Didn't even get to Skype. (Haven't in ages. Months maybe?) I got an extra long time chatting with him on Facebook. It will have to do. As for me, I didn't even try to go out to dinner. My back strain from Saturday is actually getting worse, and I decided sitting in a restaurant chair, or worse, a booth, would be one torture too many. As it was, I barely survived the walk around Publix, to load up on gluten free junk food for my pity party (pizza, veggie chips, and the only balm for a lonely heart, ice cream).

I'm not sure what it is about July that ends up being so incredibly challenging for us, nor how we managed to put our wedding during what always ends up being the worst month. One year, in the week leading up to our anniversary, his work crisis was so bad, everything changed dramatically for the worse for him, so he was in a horrible mood, and I was so stressed out I ended up in the emergency room with chest pains. Early in our relationship, while I was pregnant with our first child, we went to a Who outdoor concert where they opened the doors late (didn't they learn in the 70s?), and in the rush daughter number one and I were nearly crushed out of existence on a ramp to our seats, until someone overlooking the ramp saw the man trying to hold back the crowd with his body, arms framing me, and they lifted us straight up to safety. Another year, our annual group camping party was kicked out of the Great Sand Dunes national monument (for stupid reasons), and one of our little convoy rolled her car, ejecting her passenger (who survived, relatively unscathed). For our tenth anniversary, the man and I flew to London, rented a car, and drove up to Gretna Green in Scotland to renew our vows. Halfway there, the tiny roads and wrong-side traffic had me so terrified, I had a nervous breakdown on the side of a country road, so hysterical it was unclear whether we were going to proceed with our mock elopement or give up and go back to the states, and possibly give up on the marriage. (It was a hell of a breakdown, let me tell you.) This year, while the his assignment is in overtime, he's in a paperwork nightmare, so bad that he is literally stuck at work until it is resolved, needing someone to take care of the cats and handicapped dog that he keeps. If we are lucky, this will just be a few days. I doubt we will be so lucky. You know, July sucks. No two ways about it.

Next year is a milestone anniversary. As badly as this year went, I am determined to make next year's celebration a great one. Unless the zombie apocalypse all the movies predict actually comes and plunges the world into chaos, we have guaranteed that the man will be home for it. We have taken drastic steps that should assure it will be so. I am determined to throw a silver anniversary party at least as good as the quarter century party we had we back when I turned twenty-five. I don't know whether it will be as big an event, but it will be as memorable. I will probably even recreate the adorable "quarter" cakes that the man made me (albeit gluten free, of course).

The Analog World

Inspirational song: Be Like You (Asylum Street Spankers)

I have a new obsession. Several months ago, I got wrapped up in one of the Masterpiece Mystery series, Endeavour. It's set in 1960s Oxford, and it is absolutely riveting to me. I know the big PBS craze of the last few years is Downton Abbey, but I haven't been bitten by that particular bug yet. Endeavour is entirely my bag. It's not just how well-written are the mysteries and complex are the characters. It is filmed so seductively, with quiet closeups of absolutely perfect vintage costumes and set decorations. I cannot look away when it's on. My fingers itch to touch the props, the little leather notebooks and pencils, the tiny keys fitting into dark bronze locks, the perfect paste jewelry. I can smell the air and taste the food and drink in each scene. I swear even the relative humidity in my house changes when I watch misty English cityscapes on this show. It makes me wonder, what can I do to recreate a little of that world in my own lifestyle. I've often thought that I could easily slip into the persona of a hipster, in the current definition of that term. I don't use it disparagingly. I mean the people who appreciate hand-made crafts, "artisinal" foods, and simple mechanical designs, as opposed to the digital, mass-produced offerings that surround us. I don't want to give up my smart phone, but I could probably switch back to a hand-crank egg beater once in a while. I have mad sewing skills. I could easily, if not necessarily quickly, transform my wardrobe to fit in completely with the cast of Endeavour. I keep an awful lot of family antiques in my home. As my older daughter says, they are wasted if they are not used once in a while. It feels magical to me when I cook with my grandmother's utensils. I feel transported when I open the 80 year old china hutch, and the smell of old wood and lacquer puffs out. I touch old linens, and I can feel my ancestors hands still on them, like they just held them seconds earlier. I think it might be time to look critically at my belongings, to see what can swap out to give me the nostalgia I crave.

Yesterday's carpentry adventure (and today's aborted attempt to extend it) has given me a setback physically. Fighting with the power drill and the square-drive pocket screws (Which-I-Hate) made me tense up and put stress on my hips in ways I shouldn't have. I am going to have to confess all to Bones on Tuesday, and beg him to straighten me out again. That is, if I make it that long. All day, I haven't been able to get comfortable. I can't sit still for more than a minute. I can't stand up for much longer. Trying to stretch out and use the floor to massage sore muscles was a nightmare. And telling myself that it was an important learning experience, so I could relay exactly what sets me off is cold comfort. Nothing is helping me right now.

I don't own the rights to Masterpiece Mystery, so I can't use any photos from it to illustrate for today. Best I've got are the Minions, who desperately wanted to go use their cat skills to murder the squirrel who was foraging on the deck this morning, and the Professional Eater dog who successfully lobbied for and won the rights to eat the last two broccoli florets from my lunch. The carpentry project will remain a mystery until it is completed, whenever that may be.

Over and Over

Inspirational song: The Game Pieces (Fairport Convention)

I think I learned something new about spiders today, something that may be obvious to other people or not. It wasn't to me. For days we were told to expect rain, but until today, it really didn't come down here. Today made up for it, and it rained in sheets, for hours. Naturally, I went out and took some pictures of Carlotta's web, glistening with raindrops. She and Mr Carlotta were both hanging the same way. They were clinging to the web with only their top legs (...I'm going to say hind legs?), and dangling with their two front sets of legs straight down, with tiny raindrops shedding from them. I have never really studied spiders during rainstorms, but now I'm so curious whether they all do this, all the time, so they don't get soaked in rain. The only other web I'm really following is the tiny orb weaver over top of my front walk, but she is disc-shaped, so I don't know that her rain pose will be similar. After the rain, I went out and watched Carlotta refresh several rows of her web, calmly and methodically, completely unfazed by her handicap. The way she compensated for the missing leg was cool. It sort of reminded me of the way I used to switch which hand held the crochet hook as I went back and forth across projects when I was a kid.

There are a lot of new activities I keep wanting to try, but so far I have been stopping myself from picking up anything new while I have so many unfinished projects around the house. For weeks I have been telling myself that it was the day to re-tackle the carpentry project I dropped in anger when I kept failing to get the drill bit properly tightened while I made holes for pocket screws. Today I finished the last few boards, and put together the upper half of the frame I'm building, before sitting on the floor in uncomfortable positions wore me out. I had only promised myself I'd spend ten minutes at the task, so getting an hour or so was a victory. But it also means a big setback in the progress I've been making with physical therapy. Or at least, it means I can properly describe to Bones exactly what it is that causes me strain, and what I want to get out of all of these visits. It will probably mean I have to do the exercises a lot longer than the referral calls for. The game goes on forever...

I rediscovered an old friend today. While I was upstairs, trying to make progress on that carpentry project, I played random songs from the week's worth of music loaded on my old Model T desktop computer. Early in the rotation was today's inspirational song, The Game Pieces. It's bouncy and lilting and very fun to listen to. I knew immediately that it was my song for the night. But I thought that for the wrong reasons, or at least for very superficial ones. Most nights, even with songs I know well, I Google the lyrics, just to be sure I'm saying what I want to say, or not implying something more than I'm prepared for, as well as to be sure that I have the title and artist exactly right. I looked and looked for the lyrics for The Game Pieces, with no success. One one page, there was a video that claimed it was associated with my song, but when I started it, it was a two-hour long Fairport Convention concert. I sighed, and left it playing while I watched television, hoping it would at least get around to the song, so I could re-hear it before I started writing. It ended up being the second song they played, with an explanatory intro. I listened to the intro three times, looked up the subject on Wikipedia, and listened to the song twice through. By the time I was done, I realized that ten or twelve years ago, when we got this particular album, I had really listened to this song closely, totally got it, and then over the years I forgot it existed. The writer and singer (Chris Leslie) said that he was inspired by a set of chess pieces in an Edinburgh museum that came from the Isle of Lewis. He said he thought the king and queen, the way they were carved, looked "fed up." Weary of being played, they decided to play the players, and the song told their story from their loss by the bay of Lewis, through theft and murder, then discovery in the mud, before they landed in their eventual museum home. The pieces were self-aware with long memories. I have enjoyed rediscovering this story, wondering how carefully I must have listened to this album to have such a strong attraction to this song buried in the deep files of my mind. It was even better to dig into the deeper story. And now I want one of the replica sets of chess pieces. They're adorable.

In or Of the Mountains

Inspirational song: Who's That Girl? (Eurythmics)

I admit it. I'm cheating on my Park. At least, in an internet-affair sort of way. I have spent a couple weeks on Zillow, looking at building sites, sending links back and forth with the man. We don't have a big stack of cash to go buy acreage with a six-figure price tag right now, but it's still pretty fun to look. We want at least a full acre, but upwards of ten or twenty of them would be ideal. Most of the time, we are looking in the mountains of Colorado, but the man keeps sneaking in a few other states out west, just to see whether I'll bite. So far, not so much. I'm not even very enthused about the listings that are in the southern half of Colorado. If I'm going to move back there, I want to be closer to our old stomping grounds. In fact, I should clarify. He is looking at properties IN the mountains. I am looking at properties with views OF the mountains. We are still pretty far apart. I think this is what happens when a girl from the rolling hills of Oklahoma marries a boy who wishes he was Grizzly Adams. I want some level land, and room to spread my arms wide. He wants rocks and trees and snow, and he's okay with living on a steep slope to get it. I would be willing to give him a little elevation, if he's willing to give me a road that is actually a road. An awful lot of his suggestions are up seriously rough four-wheeling tracks. I can't do it. And the closer we get to our golden years, the less interested I am in living down (up?) a long, twisty mountain road, away from hospitals, vet clinics, and grocery stores. Unfortunately for me, the lots closer to town come with bigger asking prices. Until I actually get a couple books published and selling well, he has the upper hand in this negotiation.

I have been watching this current fad of Kickstarter campaigns for people to do goofy stunts. You know, the thought dashed through my mind, we ought to start a crowdfunding campaign to get a mountain property for my mountain man. Hell, if I'm imagining something outrageous, I might as well ask for enough to buy a set of shipping containers to use to build the house too. Am I bold enough to do something like that? Eh, probably not. Ever since the guy crowdfunded to make potato salad, the whole idea has most likely already jumped the shark. But if it hasn't...

In just a few short weeks of looking, I've grown more informed and sophisticated about the kind of property we need. I have to think about so many things I'd never considered before, like well water, septic, and south-facing slopes so we can have a year-round greenhouse and solar electric. The man has been studying this longer, and can dismiss a property quickly like he did yesterday, for being only an acre and a half, and being bisected by a stream that would require unobtainable permissions to re-route. Another one was a fantastic property, but the road to the neighbor's house went through the side of the lot. He poo-poohed that too. I've learned how to infer a lot from a Google map quickly, and I eliminate anyplace where the ambulance would have to take more than half an hour to show up. I'm just trying to be practical, but he thinks I'm being an alarmist. Good thing we have a lot of time before we actually have to choose one of these places. It's going to take a miracle for us to find the right spot.

Mis en Bouteille

Inspirational song: Cup of Wonder (Jethro Tull)

Even when I'm not working outside of the house, I live and die by my digital calendar. If an appointment doesn't appear in the calendar in my phone, it doesn't really exist, and I will not show up for it. When I was working, or volunteering with the spouses club, this made me appear far more organized than I really am. It was all just a clever illusion, but it helped immensely. So today, when a third notification popped up on the phone (with the screen of the phone concealed by the pile of books and purse guts next to me), I thought to myself, "What am I missing? What am I supposed to do today?" Then it occurred to me. After I wrote last night's blog, I left instructions for myself. No lie, the appointment reminder read, "start drinking and writing." Most of my non-appointment notes to myself are onerous tasks or just nit-picky things that I really don't want to do, like "go get blood tests," or "buy dog food." I've had to start swearing at myself to make sure I don't put forget the important ones, like the "take dogs to the kennel, you f-------" (non pc-epithet) from last month. But today's reminder was the most pleasant one I've had in ages. I am all too happy to comply.

I had a bottle in the fridge of a super sweet white merlot that a friend brought to a party, that we never opened. It made a nice choice for this experiment. It went down like Kool-aid, and my sugar addicted brain kept me reaching for it, instead of forgetting about it as I often do. The whole point was to loosen me up a bit. The first two glasses each seemed to be worth a half a page of notes, that will work out to at least eight long sections (chapters? vignettes?). The third glass is going much slower, post-dinner, and it appears to only be worth a blog post and a movie that makes me dance on the verge of tears every time I watch it, even though it's supposed to be a sweet romantic picture. I can't look at the little girl in this movie, with her long blonde hair and big ugly glasses, and not remember my own baby at that age. It fires all my protective instincts, especially when she's crying for her daddy.

I'm still trying to dig deep, to see what I'm willing to write about. The wine is lowering my defenses enough to offer up the more painful memories, and to find the memories that lurk behind a lot of locked doors. I am good at compartmentalizing, hiding difficult things from myself. It's going to take a lot more nights like this to ferret them all out, and probably a quart or so of brown liquor to organize them and flesh them out. I keep trying to chicken out, to tell myself I'll keep my darkest secrets hidden, but that's disingenuous. I can't pretend that I'm perfect and then tell my story accurately. I have to suck it up and be brave, and tell the things that embarrass and shame me, in order to explain how I got to where I am now, and why the strength I've found is meaningful to me. And it will take many more bottles of wine before I'm done.

General Consumption

Inspirational song: Dancing With Myself (Generation X)

It's a lot harder than I thought it would be, trying to shine a light in all the darkest corners of my mind, all at once, to make notes and an outline of everything I want to write. It's too big. It's unorganized. I'm overwhelmed, and it's starting to slow me down. I've got about seven pages of coded references to stories so far, little phrases that hint at much larger events. Not sure whether any of it will end up being as interesting as I thought it all was. I'm having a crisis of confidence, one of many I will experience as I travel down this path. In my stronger moments, I know I can tell this story in such a way to make it compelling to read. But getting past the roadblocks, to the frenzied stream of consciousness writing that I know is coming is the hard part. I think I know what will make it flow: wine. That's what got us going when I was in Oklahoma. It's too late to start drinking now, but tomorrow, after my appointments are done, all bets are off.

I couldn't say whether it was the extra cup of coffee this morning, or the steady improvement of what I hate to flippantly term diet and exercise, but I found myself feeling awfully good today. Like dancing around the house, making the dogs follow me in confusion good. Two years ago, I was miserable. I hurt everywhere from my frequent migraines to the soles of my feet. I thought I was used up. It's amazing what a year or two of self-discovery can do for one's physical well-being. I might fantasize about the occasional soft, sugar-coated jelly donut or triple-crispy, batter-dipped fried chicken, but I sure don't miss the stomach pain, bloating, and the general feeling of malaise that would return in a New York minute if I ate those things. I don't always feel like doing the home exercises that Bones assigns me, but discovering that strengthening and stretching the muscles in the low back actually does help alleviate plantar fasciitis in the heels compels me to follow his directions. Pain is an incredible motivator, and the lack thereof is addictive. I don't have to take drugs to kill pain. I eat real food and move in ways that keep me strong and flexible, and all that crap that comes with a standard American diet just vanishes. I wish I'd thought of this five years ago, when my stomach hurt so bad I was begging my doctors for any kind of relief (including asking my surgeon to just physically look, while he had me open for pelvic surgery.) There was nothing there, just bad food. And the worse it felt, the worse I ate. I hurt so bad, the only thing I was willing to eat was handed to me through the car window -- just Coke and french fries. No really. I ate that as a meal every other day. I can't imagine doing that now. The pain in my stomach is gone, as is the crazy amount of bloating. The desire to drink sodas has mostly gone away. The answer was there all along. I just had to be ready for it.

I keep checking on the beautiful little lemon tree I planted in a pot and put on the deck last week. It came with five small green lemons on it, and a trio of bud clusters that have bloomed and smell amazing. Today I found something odd. I read that Meyer lemons need a lot of sunlight to ripen, and can take months to ripen if they don't get enough light. So how do I interpret the tiny yellow fruit I found on it today? It's no bigger than a pea, but it's fully yellowed. I'm almost tempted to pick it, and keep the Barbie-sized lemon. It's adorable.

While I watered yesterday, there was a mostly-blue dragonfly buzzing around the deck. I've heard those traditional sayings that dragonflies are like ghosts from your past coming to visit you, which I admit I think is sweet. I saw the blue on this one, and thought how similar in color it was to the blue in Torden's eyes. And then this afternoon, I noticed that hapless dragonfly had gotten snagged in Carlotta's web. It took her at most a couple hours to completely finish him off. There's no sign of him in the web, or of the two June bugs she ate yesterday. I've seen pictures of these kinds of spiders actually eating birds. I am terrified that by Labor Day, I'm going to come out and see her chowing down on one of my cardinals. She's a force of nature.

Don't Go Away Mad, Just Go Away

Inspirational song: Missed Me (Dresden Dolls)

I can't shake the feeling that I'm forgetting something. I keep checking the calendar in my phone, but there's nothing jumping out at me. I stand in doorways, staring into rooms, hoping that something will trigger a memory of what is just out of reach of my consciousness, but so far I have failed to bring anything to mind. It's anxiety-inducing, this feeling of forgetting something important. I'm worried that it's a bill or an appointment. I know my home owners association bill is due this month, but there must be something bigger than that lurking out there to leave me with this sense of dread.

I felt trapped inside for half the day today, or at least I felt like the deck was off limits. Despite our rude introduction, I've come to terms with Carlotta the Seven-Legged Spider. She stays off to the side, against the windows (where I hear occasional thumps at night - what exactly does she catch?), out of the way of me getting in and out of the house. This morning, as I let the dogs out, I was surprised by a new spider, about half the size of Carlotta (so still larger than any other species of spider here). She strung her web across the doorframe, and was camped out directly in line of my nose. If I had been in the habit of walking outside with the dogs in the morning, bleary-eyed on first waking, I would have had two and a half inches of angry golden orb weaver touching my screaming mouth. I kept telling her she had to move all day, and I even swiped at the bottom of her web with a broom a few times, hoping she would get the hint and move it up and out of my way. She was the most obstinate little thing, and when I pushed her to the edge of the doorway, she stayed there, acting like she was ready to rebuild as soon as I turned my back. I needed basil for my dinner, and couldn't wait any longer. I used the broom to move her completely off the doorframe, and I watched with trepidation as she angrily stomped off toward the patio table. I really hope she's not the vindictive type. I don't think I've seen the last of her.