About sixteen years ago, I met him for the first time. My trainwreck sibling brought home this adorable puppy he had no business adopting because he had not one thing in his life that wasn’t a mess. I was furious at my sibling – he didn’t even take care of himself, how could he drag
1. Friday: Some days you say “eat your veggies” until your words sound like a foreign language, some days your kid asks for a double helping of green beans. Take the win.
2. Saturday: HEAT WAVE. The weirdness of our home and the location though is that there are rooms in the house that stay cool through most of the day and our area is usually 5-10 degrees cooler than elsewhere. I hate this during the cold season because it’s always frigid but I revel in the just too warmness we’re experiencing right now.
3. Sunday: I got to line dry two load of clothes! Ours usually gets gross and moldy before it dries. I don’t like crunchy underwear (or towels) but I am happy we saved the cost of a load of drying clothes.
4. Monday: We have a first step to fixing some of the weight that’s been bearing me down at work and I cannot even describe the relief that it’s brought just having the start of a solution. It isn’t everything and not an overnight fix but it’s definitely a start and I’m really glad of it. I’m a much less angry person because of it which means depression hasn’t been creeping up on me, it was stress.
5. Tuesday: Had myself a fabulous mini panic when the IRS told us that we still owed them money – I paid y’all in full! It was less than $100 but that’s real money. After some frantic texting and emailing, our tax preparer discovered that they made a mistake and so they paid the missing tax and fees. Whew. Brow wiped.
6. Tuesday: I have to be mindful of the dogs’ paws and ability to tolerate the heat and we can’t leave food or anything out in the cards because they’ll melt or otherwise be in danger but I can’t deny that it’s really nice, because it’s a short period, to be (even too) warm in my own home. Ice in everyone’s water! A nice fan! No shivering! It’s not nearly so nice for most everyone else though.
7. Wednesday: A friend of wow, over 20 years now!, came to stay with us on their way to the city and it was so so lovely catching up with them. We haven’t seen them in a few years, I’m grateful they remembered we were on their way. (JB was a complete and utter bitter pill all day… which leads me to … )
8. Thursday: HUGE sigh of relief. We got a late start, I could not shake this headache, and my brain is moving at a crawl, but JB was pleasant to be around again and that makes such a big difference in the color of our day.
I haven’t seen Endgame yet, but I don’t mind spoilers myself so if you do, do NOT click this link. For those who don’t mind or have already seen it, Drea’s psychological analysis of the movie is worth reading.
The Same Story About My Mom: The other day, I was teaching a gender studies class — nine teenage girls all anxious to say the right thing, their desks in a circle — and my students and I were talking about mothers. We were talking about the impossible positions they are placed in, the ways in which they are our models; we were talking about what little space moms have to also need and also want.
…
There is a gaping hole perhaps for all of us, where our mother does not match up with mother as we believe it’s meant to mean and all it’s meant to give us. What I cannot tell her is all that I would tell her if I could find a way to not still be sad and angry about that.
I wish relationships with mothers didn’t seem so fraught sometimes.
As much as losing our power irks me, I remind myself that test runs are a good thing. They help you expose the flaws in your otherwise theoretical emergency planning with minimal pain.
With storm season, the winds were glad to oblige us with a couple power outages to highlight our areas of weakness.
The first: a powerful storm blew out our power for almost 2 hours. Gas and water lines were fine but we had no heat because our furnace / thermostat runs on power and didn’t have a back-up battery. I did not know this before, good to know.
We had the basics: food, water, candles and tea lights, and a long-lasting Bic lighter. I make it a habit of using and recharging my power pack regularly so we had two full charges for our phones. JB had a tiny but incredibly bright little flashlight.
I had finished cooking dinner just a few minutes before the storm knocked us offline so we had a hot meal while we dried off after walking the dogs. Had that timing not been in our favor, I know we would have struggled along a bit to get ourselves in order on the food front. I still haven’t put together a safe non-flame heating option for our food but I’m strongly considering a set of flameless heaters. If I can find a really good set that’s not an arm and a leg, that is.
We still had gas so could have cooked in the dark if we had to, but not knowing how long power would be out made me hesitate to open the fridge any more than absolutely necessary. (more…)
The sole focus on just good things in this post isn’t working for me anymore. It was helpful in the first several posts to get myself oriented to seeing the good, but now just focusing entirely on that feels like forced cheerfulness and that doesn’t help. Pollyanna isn’t my normal mode of operation.
Having a bit of perspective here in seeing both good and bad is a better fit for my personality.
1. Friday: Trader Joe’s smoked salmon dip ($4) is a great way to get that bagel and lox taste without springing for the actual full spread of smoked salmon and capers. Since I shouldn’t be having bagels anyway, the dip on other vehicles like cucumbers is a nice way to go.
2. Saturday: I was up way too early for a Saturday but that’s good because it gave me time to prep the crockpot for dinner. We were serving pulled pork, coleslaw, and Hawaiian rolls. I think it should have cooked a little longer but overall the dinner was delicious. Sigh of relief. I’m still not great at hosting and now need to sit down and make a list of menus we should try, ahead of inviting people over.
3. Sunday: First swim lesson! I was a bundle of nerves because JB hasn’t been friends with the water lately, and though there were touch and go moments when zir reluctance looked like the lesson would be a bust, ultimately the lesson was good. Ze came out happy to have done and that’s all that matters here right now.
4. Monday: Woke up to disappointing news – a standing friend date was cancelled and that make me sadder than it should have. In my disappointment, partly because I’ve always been bad at making friends but partly because I’d looked forward to this event with those friends, I remarked to PiC: we need more friends! He later texted that he’d invited another set of parents to join us at the event instead. Proactive spouses FTW!
7. Monday: Not my finest moment but I stole a Twix from JB’s candy bucket. It was good. Terrible for me but my mood was worse and sometimes the cure has to be something that’s not good for you.
8. Tuesday: Complaining to my life Board of Directors almost always produces good results. In this case, clearly stating what has been bothering me for months lead to them making three comments that turned me right around. It’s not fixed but they helped me get my feet back on the right path and it made a world of difference. The long-simmering anger and resentment that I’ve been unable to pin down and pluck out was almost non-existent for a full 24 hours. I am hoping for long-term calm too.
9. Wednesday: I did ALL THE THINGS on this day. All of them. And I didn’t keel over. Calling that a win.
10. Thursday: JB received a lovely gift of books and ze is at least as excited as I am to read them. 😆
Lots of ups and downs this week – cross your fingers I can find the resources I need to make my life run a little more smoothly!
This is, oddly enough, how I think about parenting: what time remains to me to spend with JB (or our dogs). I wonder if this is a side effect of losing so many loved ones in our teens and 20s.
I find this sort of story on kinkeeping that ignores the parent to grandparent relationship to be rather exhausting: “Thus, you hear sorrowful tales like this one of a 72-year-old grandmother whose name I am not using to prevent further discord. She moved to Southern California last year to help her son and his wife with their new baby, her first grandchild. “I expected I’d be hands-on, babysitting in the evenings,” she told me.
It hasn’t worked out that way. Her daughter-in-law, whom she didn’t know well before her pregnancy, “did not want me to be close,” she said, and didn’t accept gifts and offers of help.”
One, I don’t know how it makes sense to uproot your life to be near a new grandchild if you haven’t developed any closeness with one of the new parents, and particularly the one you’re not related to. I don’t understand that presumption. I understand wanting to share this new stage of life, as a parent, but if I wasn’t close to the new grandparent, I think it would be equally presumptuous to assume they’d want to care for my new child. Two, birthing a child didn’t automatically make me want to be any closer to anyone who I hadn’t grown close to before the kid was born. I welcomed it when it happened organically, but basing it solely on the existence of the kid made as much sense to me as basing adult/mom friendships on the existence of kid friendships. It doesn’t work like that for me. I know it does for other people but why is there is automatic assumption that we’re to welcome everyone with open arms and zero discernment? Personally, in that DIL’s shoes, I’d have been quite wary of the new grandmother and her assumptions.
Dividend income. We received $514.98 in dividends this month. Our year to date net dividends are $1,628.42. Our current monthly average dividend income is $325. I currently reinvest all our dividends into new stocks.
1. Friday: On the cusp of a three day weekend and I’m not having a panic over how much work is still left to be done. It’s still a TON but I’m unnaturally calm about it. I do plan to work on the weekend but that’s not usually a calm plan.
2. Saturday: We cuddled a newborn and enjoyed a half deli lunch with friends.
3. Sunday: JB was pleasant 95% of the day. That is unprecedented! I like to think it’s because we did a good mix of play / chores / play / chores throughout the day so that ze also felt like ze was getting an adequate amount of free time. We did a combination of JB+Mom time (while Dad did his thing), family time, JB+Dad time (while I did my work) and then leftovers for dinner.
4. Monday: PiC proposed we take JB to one of those entertainment centers that have an enormous padded jungle gym / maze / tubes / everything you can imagine places. It’s the pricey one down the road where we couldn’t possibly afford a birthday party (starts at $600) but the open play is $12. Having just the one kid makes this seem reasonable, ze can play til ze drops. At least that was the hope. I worked while ze played, then took a break and played too. Ze even took an hour long nap after.
5. Tuesday: JB was allowed to pick all the free bagels from our Monopoly winnings and ze was Very Pleased.
It was such a busy week I had no time to finish this post! May next week be much better. (Last week’s non panic over work was misplaced. I’m drowning in work. ARGH.)
On Money