Ralph

My week of laziness and indulgence was interrupted last night by a bout of stomach virus on Grayson's part. Poor kid, he started feeling sick around 5:30 last night and spent the 12 hours throwing up. It was a long, long night for both of us. We lay on our individual sofas in the living room, dozing intermittently between Grayson's awful bouts of ralphing. I would hear him start, and rouse myself to go wipe his face with a cool cloth, bring him ice chips to suck on and tuck him back in. Then we would both collapse onto our respective sofas and doze again until the next bout. It went on until about 4:30 this morning.

Today, Grayson is doing much better, just recuperating from the exhaustion and achiness of dehydration that accompanies a night of ralphing. For my part, I feel like I've been on an 2-day bender: groggy, stiff and dopey. We continue to hold down our sofas and stare glassy-eyed at reruns on the Disney Channel.

This is not exactly the sort of lazing about I had in mind for the holiday break.

I had to cancel our participation in the New Year's Eve festivities at Bob's tonight. He told me he'd have bad luck all week if I wasn't there to deliver the lucky New Year's kiss... which made me feel bad at first, but was sort of sweet, actually. No way I'm keeping my kid up 'til midnight tonight. We're both going to bed as early as it's dark enough to be considered "night time."

Hopefully we can make it up to the Dohrmann boys tomorrow by showing up with bells on for their football party. I'm bringing chili. Assuming I don't come down with the Ralph Virus myself between now and then.

So I thought I'd post a few pictures from the holidays.
First, here's Grayson and my dad, preparing the Christmas Turkey for the smoker.














Kobi, happily sucking on her new stuffed Christmas tree toy.














Here's Grayson with the plate of tacos and thermos of coffee he left for Santa on Christmas Eve.












And a nice picture of Grayson sharing this year's Book with his Big Mama and Papa.

It was a wonderful holiday, last night's ralphing notwithstanding.

Christmas past

Christmas. You spend so much time anticipating it and preparing for it, and then all of a sudden, it's over. And you're expected to go back to your normal life. Well, okay, not me, not really. I have a whole week off after Christmas: time spent snuggled under a blankie on the sofa, surrounded by dogs and coffee cups and stacks of books. It's a good week.

It has been a wonderful holiday. I spent way too much on Grayson, but it was so much fun to watch him open presents. He was totally not expecting the Xbox Kinect, and frankly I'm not sure he's all that excited about it, but he'll grow into it, and I'm hoping there will be some games we can play together. I sent it along with him to his dad's so that they can play with it together. Technically Gray paid for half of it, so he should also reap the fun of playing it with G. The big hit this year was the Creepy Bug Maker, which Grayson played with almost nonstop for all of Christmas afternoon and evening.

No. No, the big hit was the gift Grayson gave to me. He was so excited. He went shopping with my parents a week ago and picked out something that he was so thrilled with, he tried several times to get me to open it early. He insisted I open the first gift of Christmas morning, and brought it to me with much ceremony and barely contained excitement.

It's a beautiful white-gold pendant: two open hearts curving into one another. He had seen it on a commercial for Kay jewelers, and I guess I made a comment about how pretty it was and that nobody ever buys me "pretty shiny" things. So he dragged my parents through jewelry store after jewelry store, looking for it. My mom tried to talk him into getting one with diamonds on it, but he had made up his mind that this simple white gold one was the one he wanted. When I opened it, he explained to me that the little heart was for him, and the big heart was for me. It is beautiful, and I did admire it in the commercial...but I love it most because he loves it, and because he chose it for me with a heart full of love. I'll wear it always. What a dear, sweet, boy I have.

Our Solstice party was a great success. We had about 15 guests, which is a very full house for our little space. I bought way more wine and booze than I needed, and prepared way too much food, but it was a really good time, and so nice to have a house full of friends. I was half afraid nobody would come. The terror of the less-than-socially-adept. But plenty of people did come, and I think everyone had a nice evening. Bob brought a stack of vinyl and spun records for us all evening. I wish I had taken some pictures, but I just never got around to it.

I'll do it again. Hell, I've got enough food and booze left over, I could do it this weekend. But I won't. It took me two days to recover! Even the dogs were exhausted.

Now all I need to do is take down the decorations and the tree, and spend the next few days relaxing and preparing for the year to come. Resolutions later. For now, just coffee and that stack of books....

Christmas Yet to Come

I'm at the stage of holiday planning where, like a little kid, I can barely sit still. I'm technically still on the job, still busily getting to work, managing the day-to-day. But in fact, there are visions of sugarplums dancing in my head, and I'm all but useless for anything but gift-wrapping, cookie baking and tree trimming. This Dr. Jeckyl has been taken over completely by Ms. Kringle.

It doesn't help that my Solstice party is tomorrow night. I spent all weekend getting ready: cleaning and decorating the house, hanging lights and clearing surfaces so people would have a place to set their drinks, breaking up sticks in the back yard for kindling for the fireplace, making queso and making lists and lists and lists. Tonight I will do the shopping and a bit of baking and preparing. I'm beside myself with excitement.

I haven't had a party like this since my 30th birthday party nearly 15 years ago! That one was an evening to remember, and this one looks to be shaping up to be an other.

I am almost done with my Christmas shopping, as well. Last night I finished the scarf I was knitting for Bob. It's the first time I've picked up knitting needles in over a year, and I had to unravel the whole thing about 20 rows into it because it was gradually getting wider and wider and wider. It was going to end up as a giant triangle if I didn't do something, so rather than attempt to salvage it somehow, I just pulled it all out and started over.



On Thursday, Grayson brought home this wonderful three-panel drawing he'd done at school of his own personal Christmas Past, Present and Future. It's so sweet. I wonder what the Very Special Gift is that he has acquired for me? I know he is very excited about it. He and my parents went out shopping together and he came back with this small wrapped package for me that could barely contain his enthusiasm. Whatever it is, seeing his excitement about giving it to me is the best gift of all.

Grayson's book arrived this morning! This is always exciting! Even though I've spent months looking at these pages over and over and over, it's still fun to have the actual artifact in hand. I love making Grayson's book each year. It's kind of a let-down when it's all done and I'm not working on it anymore. Though in just a few months, I can get started on next year's book. If you'd like to see the 2010 book, you can flip through it here. If you're one of the people who will be scoring a book for Christmas, you'll just spoil your surprise that way, but please yourself....


Today was Grayson's last day of school for two weeks! I went to "help" with the class party this afternoon. I had to redeem myself, because I missed the Halloween party. It was at 2:00 and I showed up at 2:30... just after school was over for the day. What was I thinking? I couldn't tell you.

So this time I was determined to do it right. I brought some little giveaways for all the kids, and I contributed $5 to the chips and queso the PTA moms were ordering. I even arrived half an hour early, to help set up. But there was nobody there. There was precious little there in the form of snacks, too. Just a single plate of cookies and a cooler of drinks. I peeked into the classroom next to ours, and the moms there were bustling around, setting goodies on plates on the tables they had decorated with red tablecloths. Every kid had a little gift at his or her place, and a pile of treats.

Our room was pathetic.

So I rushed out to Homeland and bought a cookie-cake with a cute snowman on it and rushed back just in time. The other moms were there, and they had set out holiday plates, doled out the chips, queso and cookies... and I realized that my cute cookie cake would have to be cut and I had no knife... AND there was no way there was enough to go around for a class of 30 kids.

So I gave it to the teacher. She was pleased.

Sigh. Well, at least I tried. I will never make homeroom mother, that's for sure.

The party was a smashing success, if a 4th grade classroom party can be said to be so. The kids played a game, transfering M&Ms from one cup to another using a straw. The PTA moms had provided prizes (including really loud, really annoying whistles, which even I know better than to hand out to a room full of 4th graders on sugar). And my little giveaways got added to the prize stack, which was fine... they were actually just leftovers I'd cadged from a Sonic event at the museum anyway.

So school is out for two weeks and tomorrow G goes to see his dad because his grandma is in town for a few days. I will be spending the weekend getting ready for the Big Solstice Bash coming up on Tuesday. Oh, and knitting. I'll be doing a lot of knitting. More on knitting later.

Messages to and from Santa

Earlier this week I found this website that will let you schedule three text messages to your kid from Santa. So I paid my $5.49 and set it up for G-rex. The first one was delivered Monday evening. The next will come on Friday, and the final one on Christmas Eve.

Monday's message said:

Hi Grayson! Santa here. I know you've been good this year, but I have not received your letter yet! Please send ASAP. Merry Christmas! Luv. S.

Well, it came just after Grayson left for Scouts with his dad on Monday, and I didn't remember to point it out to him until last night. He checked his messages and said "Oh my God! Santa has a cell phone!"

He was just about beside himself with joy. I asked him to read me the message and he did and then he said "I knew Santa was real! In your face, Nathan!"

He told me then that a couple of boys in his class no longer believe in Santa. This doesn't surprise me. I expect this is G's last year, as well. But I was touched by the enthusiasm with which he latched onto this "proof" of Santa's existence. It's clear he really wants to believe.

I remember when I was about ten, and some of my friends didn't believe in Santa. I remember talking to my mother about it. She was standing at the sink, washing something... her face very serious, as I told her that my friends told me there was no Santa Claus. I don't remember if I expected her to confirm or deny. But it was A Moment... if you know what I mean. There was something riding on her response. And she thought for a minute and then she asked me, "Well, what do you think?"

I thought a minute myself and answered her: "I think Santa is real."

"Well then," she said. "There you are. "

She never confirmed or denied, just asked me to look into myself and have the strength of character to believe what I believed. It was good advice: for Santa, and for a myriad of other things in life, too.

Last night Grayson sat down and finally wrote his letter to Santa. The last thing he said when he went to bed was "Don't forget to mail my letter to Santa." And he reminded me again this morning on the way to school. This from a kid who can't remember to put his number on his papers, or bring his homework home with him. In fact, he forgot to take his homework to school this morning, he was so busy worrying I wouldn't get his Santa letter in the mail.

Losing a belief in Santa is like losing one of the primary piers of childhood. I'm glad Grayson has held onto his belief for this long, though I worry just a little bit what response he'll get when he marches into his classroom this morning and announces that Santa is real and he has proof because the Jolly Old Elf is text messaging him. I may have made him slightly vulnerable in that. I hope not. I'm glad he believes.

'Cause I do, too.

The Hanging o' the Greens

This weekend I went out and hung lights on the carport and porch. It was much easier than I thought. Somehow hanging lights outside always fell to the men in the family. When I was a child, my dad engaged in a very elaborate lighting scheme which involved a staple gun, a very tall ladder, and shinnying along the roofline in the cold wind every December. It was an arduous, dangerous, all-day job, wrapping up just at dusk. Then he would come in, windblown, cold and smelling of Dad. When it got dark, my mom and I would go out to the street and my dad would turn them on from inside, and then come out with us to oo and Ah and soak up the praise we gave him for lighting another Merry Christmas.

When I was a single woman (the first time), I would put up some lights around the front porch and around the windows inside. I was always really lazy about it, though. I used clear packing tape outside and generally just draped lights over existing curtain rods inside. My father's sense of a Job Well Done was probably appalled when he saw my jerry-rigged systems. The tree was the same way. Always a tangle of lights, sometimes going all the way around, sometimes just zigzagging back and forth across the front of the tree. It was always a nightmare to take them down because they inevitably got tangled.

Then when I was married, Gray would do lights on the house and bushes. He was very particular about how they were done, too, and we never agreed on whether we should have all one color, or mixed lights or if there should be some sort of pattern. I always favored mixed lights, no pattern. He of course always wanted something more organized. I generally won.

I remember the first Christmas after my friend Jin got divorced, and she told me I should stay married just so I would have someone to hang lights for me. We laughed because of course we didn't know then what was coming a few years later for me. But when it happened, I sort of saw her point. Hanging lights outside seemed really really like a pain in the ass.

Last year I reverted to my old single-girl technique and just went out with a chair and wrapped some lights around posts and stair rails on the front porch, but it seemed inadequate. It's time to adapt, I decided. I can't leave gaps where the Man of My Life used to be. And I've got a kid now, I can't do things in the slapdash fashion I did in my twenties. I'll go out and hang my own damned lights.

So I did. I borrowed a ladder from my neighbors – who, being the sweet, grandparently pair they are, were very concerned for my safety due to the wind this weekend – and I got some fancy plastic hookie things from Walmart and I went to work. I had this image of my dad up there on the roof in the wind, wielding his staple gun. But it wasn't such a big deal. There were a few minutes of head-scratching at first to figure out how to use the hooks... but then it went pretty quickly and easily. No packing tape or staples required, and when I plugged them in they (mostly) all worked. And Grayson was delighted when we got home Sunday night after he'd been at his dad's house and they were up and on. So There.

More mortality

Well, it's happened, as we all knew it would... King is dead. I got a teary call from Grayson yesterday when he got home from school, informing me of his passing. I felt terrible, sitting there, listening to my boy sob on the phone for loss of a three-inch fiddler crab, but I was thinking "the creepy little bastard seemed fine this morning, he did it on purpose!"

Seriously, we managed a couple of weeks, and the thing was burrowing happily in the sand and eating god-knows-what just yesterday morning. Seven hours later: kaput. Damn. damn. damn.

I comforted G as best I could over the phone, and then called my parents, who were going to come over in half an hour anyway to take G shopping for Christmas gifts for me and his dad, and asked them to come early to take his mind off of it.

It's been a good year for death, let me tell you. Three chickens, one lizard (I presume he's dead, he's gone, at any rate), a handful of fish, and two fiddler crabs. No more exotic pets! Clearly we can't handle the responsibility!

Of course, it's not like we didn't see it coming. I'm sure there were those who, like Gray, winced when I said we had taken on the crabs.... people who had already talleyed up our batting average and knew the creatures didn't have a chance. I don't know why I keep trying.

On a related subject.... not death, but pets.... Roxy is losing her hair. She's itchy, and she's getting bald patches all over. She is beginning to look slightly leprous, or mangy, or something. I feel sorry for her, because it's miserable to be itchy. But I don't know what else to do. I feed her eggs on her breakfast, vegetable oil on her dinner, I have been giving her weekly baths in Head and Shoulders, and she gets pills at night to help me sleep, because she often sleeps on the bed, and the incessant scratching is like having one of the coin-operated massage beds, but not in a good way. Imagine a massage bed in a really cheap motel, that makes a lot of noise, and causes the headboard to thump against the wall. And sometimes farts.

This morning, at 5:30 a.m., she came into my room, put her face right up against my face and started whining until I got up and let her out. I dozed on the sofa until she came back in, 15 minutes later, then I went back to bed. But the whining didn't stop. She stood there, with her face in mine, WHINING this awful high-pitched whine, non-stop, for a full hour. I could gain a few moments' respite by letting her put her feet up on the bed and tuck her head down against my shoulder while I petted her head and ears. But the moment I stopped moving my hands, the ultra-sonic whine recommenced.

I got up twice to try to let her out, but it wasn't what she wanted. She didn't want water, either. In fact, I have no idea what she wanted except maybe to drive me nuts. This on the morning after I worked until 10:30 at a museum event and didn't get to bed until midnight. Finally, at 6:40, she climbed up on the bed, curled up and lay down at my feet. My alarm went off five minutes later.

If I'm grouchy today, you can blame it on Roxy.

Thoughts on Love and Not Sleeping

Couldn't sleep last night, as so often happens. So I lay here instead and thought Deep Thoughts. I thought about the Nature of Love. Next to the Meaning of Life, I think that's probably one of the Deepest.

I think a lot about Love since I got divorced. I guess I'm still trying to puzzle out What Happened. And What Happens Next. I don't know if it's healthy to think about love so much. I don't know if love can bear much scrutiny. But that may be my jaded point of view. Certainly my love for Grayson knows no bounds, and can be disected under any microscope you like with no ill effects. So maybe all my Ponderment about love applies only to that love which is not biologically rooted. Visceral. I love Grayson like I love having hands and feet and eyes. He is a part of me... yet wonderfully, amazingly separate and always surprising. If he is my hands, it's like magical hands that are suddenly playing concert violin. Wow! Who knew they could do that?

I digress. Here's what I was thinking about Love. There are two kinds of Love (all great philosophical thoughts on love begin this way): The love that is built up over time, brick by brick, through patience and familiarity and will; and the love that grows organically, putting down roots into your heart and sending up leaves and stems and flowers, seemingly of its own volition. In the end, with one you have a structure as sturdy as the stuff you made it from (or the basis on which it was constructed), and with the other you end up with a living, growing thing that may change shape over time.

I lay there pondering the relative merits of each until I fell asleep. I guess the ideal love would be a tree house: something that grows from its own seed, but which you deliberately build and improve upon, with patience and care and forebearance.

Forebearance seems to me to be vital. You have to be willing to let things go, accept and forgive. Don't you?

See? I question my own late-night conclusions. Nothing is certain in this world.

Holiday Home

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I may have contracted a rare brain disease that causes insanity, but I've decided to host a Solstice Party on the 21st. I decided yesterday morning at 7 a.m. and rushed to work to get the invitation out so I couldn't then back out of it.

Every year I tell myself I want to host a Solstice celebration, and every year I don't. This year, I have to. It's official, I've invited people!

Grayson and I went out this past weekend to choose a Christmas tree and got it up and decorated. Grayson insisted on carrying the tree to the register himself. I only had to help a little.

King is still alive. This morning I actually witnessed him eating something, though I'm not sure what. G and I had some shrimp while we were decorating the tree, and I mushed up a bit and put it in the cage near his hidey hole, so maybe he's eating that. He's alive, at least. That's all I care about.

I'm anxious over work. After many weeks of futzing about, it is now time for me to get really serious about recruiting Corporate partners for 2011. I'm behind schedule. It makes me feel sort of queasy, and I'm not sure why. I just hate the idea of asking people for money. I've found all manner of ways to put off the inevitable, and I can't avoid it any further. So this week and next, I'll be on the phone, pitching sponsorship.

Meanwhile, I'd much rather be Christmas shopping. Just this morning, Grayson announced that he has decided what to ask Santa for. I still have a few gifts to buy, and there's the house to be decorated. I love having a decorated house for the holidays. I hate doing the decorating.

I meant to do it the weekend after thanksgiving, but I just couldn't face all those boxes of greenery. Now at last I'm up against the deadline. The Solstice party serves as a goad, as well. So, starting tonight, I'll be trying to get the "hangin' o' the greens" accomplished.

Then there's Christmas cards, which we do actually have, but we haven't yet begun to prepare. We did at least get our portraits taken last weekend. I think they came out very nicely. I deliberately dressed down and let G wear whatever he wanted, because I didn't want it to be formal and stiff. There's nothing formal about either of us, or about our relationship, so I wanted the pictures to reflect that, and I think this one does. We haven't had real pictures taken in a while, and it occurred to me that I need to get that done while G still counts as a little kid. He's starting to grow up fast now, and I need to get my little boy love while I can.

I try not to be sad about it. I know I will always love him just as he is.

We did a little shopping together on Sunday after the photo shoot. We didn't have anything in particular to shop for, but it was fun to be in the mall, looking around. We went into the Brookline store so Grayson could sit in the massage chairs. It's one of his favorite things. He loves all massage chairs. It was funny to watch him try them all out. This one tickled a bit.

He was singing the praises of the foot massager, so I took my shoes off and tried it out. Ooooh my gosh, I could not get my feet out of there fast enough! It tickled so much I was afraid I was going to kick the thing across the room!

The doc told me I have unusually high reflexes, which includes unusually sensitive feet. That foot massager was worse than a torture device to me, but Grayson enjoys being tickled.

Dreaming Crazy

King is still alive. For now.

The past couple of nights have been full of bizarro dreams. Both nights due nights due to storytelling. When I can't sleep, sometimes the little girl in me wants to be read to. It takes me away, and gives my Monkey Mind something to grasp onto so that it doesn't start obsessing over dogs that died twenty years ago. (which is always how I know it's time to simply give up on sleep and get up and vacuum or something because I'm beyond hope)

Sunday night I listened to stories by Neil Gaiman. NOT a good idea at bedtime. Garaunteed to give you H.P. Lovecraft dreams. Last night I went to sleep listening to a murder mystery, which seemed fine when I started, but gradually the story got more and more suspenseful until finally I sat up and shut it off right before they found the second body. It was just too much at bedtime!
I need to listen to Proust or something. In grad school, literary theory was my ticket straight to slumberland. Oh who am I kidding? I never cracked my theory book. Not once. I managed to stay awake through a lot of stuff that might have put others to sleep... had no problem translating Old English, for example. But the 18th century about killed me. Except for Johnson. I have the highest regard for Samuel Johnson.

Tonight, no more books on tape. I have to just go to sleep like normal people.

Grayson is complaining of "feeling like pus" tonight. Not sure exactly what that indicates, but I'm pretty sure it's not good. Lately I'm never sure if I should believe him or not when he says he doesn't feel well. In his favor, he was dozing on the sofa when I got home, which he never does. Against him: he did run around the living room shouting "tickle me! Tickle me!" after dinner. In his favor: he asked for pancakes for dinner ( a special favorite), but then only ate half of one pancake. Against him: he later devoured a bowl of icecream. I just don't know which way to jump.

I reminded him that a day out of school means a full day's worth of schoolwork that will have to be done at home. I'm just hoping he's functional tomorrow.


We got his school pictures back, as you can see. He's never this serious. But in last fall's picture he was wearing this lopsided smirk, and he was determined not to do that again, so I suppose he just opted for the almost-smile instead. He does wear his glasses like this: half sliding down his nose. It drives me nuts: always makes me want to give them a shove into place, but apparently it's how he likes them, because that's where they always are.

He's a handsome boy, isn't he? I mean, aside from the obvious geekiness of being a ten-year-old. I think he will grow up to be handsome. I realize that, as his mother, I may be a bit biased, particularly since people tell me all the time that he looks like me. Lately, though... he just looks more and more like Grayson to me. His Own Self.

Dead in the Water

Still stalled out on the writing. No excuse, just stalled.

Once again I'm resolving to Do something with my life: get off my ass, make something of myself. At least get into shape... and not the shape I'm headed for at present, which is sort of bulbous and squishy. (She heaves a great sigh). So once again I'm off to the gym, which I despise, because otherwise I'm just going to degenerate into a great glob of goo, which won't make me feel very nice about myself, and lord knows I need all the help in that department I can get.

We killed a crab, already. Oh, had I not mentioned the crabs?

I allowed Grayson to adopt two fiddler crabs from his classroom at school. They seemed easy enough to take care of. A little salt water, some banana and dried shrimp... But one of them died within a week. I think it got too hot for them. In typical fashion, as I was trying to do good, I accomplished the exact opposite. I put a warming light on the tank, and it got up to 100 degrees in there... a temperature Mambo probably would have loved, but it was too much for poor Neil, one of the two male fiddlers. Now we are left with only King... who is King of no one now that he doesn't have Neil to push around anymore. Just chalk it up to the long list of creatures I have killed in the name of providing unusual pets for my son, who cried when I told him Neil was no more, and I wanted to kick myself for, once again, breaking his heart.

Gray told me, when I mentioned adopting the crabs, that I don't have a very good history with non-mammalian pets and maybe I should think twice about adopting more. He was right, it seems.

Today King is still alive. I checked. He's boring as all hell. They don't do anything. I never even catch him eating anything. I think they're even more boring than Mambo was.

Today it's windy and I've got nervous dogs to deal with. I don't know what it is about wind that turns Kobi into a neurotic mess, but I've noticed lately that storms, or even just wind, make her very quivery and clingy. It would be sweet if it wasn't so damned annoying. All morning I was shoving her off my lap, or trying to get comfortable with her lying on my chest, panting into my face while I tried to hold a book to read over her shoulder. She's usually such a cheeky little thing, it surprises me to see her come to pieces that way. I finally gave up reading, just to escape her.

Lately, she gets to drive around in the car a lot. She's always out of the yard, and the fastest way to collect her is to simply stop at the side of the road and let her climb into the car and go with you wherever you happen to be going. Consequently, she gets to ride around a lot, but she also spends a certain amount of time cooling her heels in parking lots. The wages of sin, I suppose. I really should fire up the electric wire on the fence again, to keep her in. But it freaks FLower out so much, that I'm reluctant.

Off to the gym now, armed with a new book on my iphone to hopefully keep me entertained enough to keep me there for the required hour. Sigh.

Reach for That Brass Ring aaaaand.....

I've decided not to feel bad about myself for not being Neil Gaiman. Neil's the Super Genius who wrote Coraline, the Sandman series of Graphic Novels and, one of my favorite books ever: Neverwhere. He's prolific and amazing. Me... less so. But I am plodding along, trying to get the hang of this writing thing.

At present I'm stalled out. I haven't written since Monday because I can't figure out What Happens Next. I am familiar with the overall arch of my story, but I am at a point where I need a bridge from Here to There, and I'm in a quandary. I'm going to need to take a few long, hot showers. Maybe then it will come to me.

Writing is hard. I admire the authors, like Neil Gaiman, for whom it seems to just spin forth... and I also admire those others for whom it is a more laborious process, or seems to be, but they just keep at it. Myself, I'll consider it a wild success if I can just manage to finish this one book... this one story I've been carrying in my head for years. If I can just get it on paper, I'll have won.

I am hoping to get back into it soon because I'm wildly bored otherwise. I have to admit that lately my job bores me beyond words. Oh, I love the museum: I love all the crazy specimens and the crazy curators and the exhibits and the visitors and the wonderful volunteers. But I'm heartily sick of writing the same press releases year in and year out, cranking out the same old tripe. Even the newsletter, which used to be a labor of love, has become a chore. The blog is more interesting, but you can't maintain a PR program on blog entries.

Part of my malaise is seasonal. This is a classically slow time of year. Programming trickles to a standstill by the first week of December. I won't have a new exhibition to write about until the spring, curatorial field work is at nil. Part of my problem is the routine. And part of it is this new fundraising function I've been handed.

I've been tasked with raising the next year's crop of corporate sponsors. Whoops. We're now calling them Corporate Partners. Essentially I need to go in and ask a bunch of businesses and corporations for money. Well... at first that was what I was doing. Now it's been revamped so that I'm essentially selling them advertising via the museum. So instead of asking for money, I'm a salesperson. Either way, I'm uniquely ill-suited for it.

I tried to approach this new role with enthusiasm. I tried to tell myself I just needed to hit that learning curve full force and go for it. But I'm petering out. I can pitch the museum all day to anyone who will listen... and plenty of people who won't. But I don't like asking them for money. This is, I think, the main problem with me and work now. This is the Big Thing I should be working on at this time of year, and I just haven't been able to work up any enthusiasm for it. Every day I futz with it a little bit, worry over it, move papers around. Make a couple of phone calls. But I'm not diving into like I know I should. And it's wearing on my conscience.

Today! I tell myself. Today I'll go after this project like Roxy with an unattended steak dinner. And so this morning once more I'm girding my loins, so to speak, to prepare for another day of figuring out which end of this thing to bite.

There. That was my do-gooder talk for the morning.

Yesterday at noon my student assistant and I went over to the OU Art school for the annual "Chili Bowl" fundraiser. For $15 you get to pick your own hand-turned clay bowl and fill it with all the homemade chili you can manage. There were probably 25 crockpots full of chili! Long tables filled the school's Lightwell gallery, and students, faculty, OU staff from every department, staff from the Norman CVB and the Arts Council, just about everyone in town was there, cheek-by-jowl, comparing their bowls and snarfing chili. It has to be a terrific fundraiser. Nearly zero costs: just for the sodas and supplies to make the bowls. The students do the turning and glazing. The staff and faculty come up with the chili. Genius. And fun, too, to see so many different folks piling in together for comfort food and an earthen dish. I sat between an art history faculty member and a first-year art student who was coming back to school to learn photography after spending several years in the oil business with his electrical engineering degree. Go figure.

Bob popped in only briefly, large social scenes being not his Bag, baby. I think it still sort of scandalizes my assistant that her first-year drawing teacher is dating her boss. His contribution to the chili cook-off is several cans of Hormel, dumped into my crock-pot. Its title is "More Fartsy, Less Artsy."

Not exactly GQ material...

Every so often I need a kid for a museum photo shoot, and naturally I press Grayson into service whenever I can. You'd think a kid as animated and dramatic as him would make a pretty good photo model.

It ain't necessarily so. Oh, he's adorable... if you're his mother. But he tends to get very silly when I point the camera at him.

Lately I needed some shots of kids with toys from the museum store, so I brought him in for an hour and turned him loose with various toys. Here are a few funny ones I got:

Grayson's not much at catch... and it shows in this frame.

It's called a Bilibo. Lots of kids wear them on their heads .

Silly face.

Another silly face.

I might look like that, too, if a miniature T. rex was attacking my face!

Cold weather finally has made an entrance here. We had intermittent rain storms, wind and cold all day yesterday. I was home babysitting the workers who were installing the new heating and AC unit in the house. It was a perfect day for sitting at home doing nothing. Cold and gray and rainy. I lay on the sofa under a blanket for most of the day, drinking coffee and reading, with the dogs all around me.

Sadly, the crew was not able to complete the installation of my heater, so this morning dawns clear skied, but COLD. And I've got a bit of a prickle in my throat that may not bode well.

But I'm content. The depression and grim self-loathing I experienced all last week seem to have lifted, and I'm grateful. What's a little cold if you've got your own (mental) sunshine? I feel like I'm on the final stage of recuperation from a long illness or injury.

I've used a little bit of my energy on writing. Still trying to stay in the NaNoWriMo game, though I fell behind this week, and I'm hovering around 15,000 words. The book is giving me some difficulty, sort of twisting under the pen, metaphorically, so I'm not sure exactly where to take up the work next. Things keep changing. I'll be in the shower when suddenly I'll have a realization: "OH! THAT'S what needs to happen next!" Well, but in that case, then I need to go back and add this, or change that, or tuck in another character or change where my characters are or..... I think my brain is always turning over the bits of the story, whatever else I'm doing. Some part of my brain is always working on the book.

It's a good feeling, when it's working. The writing itself is, as all the books say it will be... hard. I resist, I drag my feet. I count words over and over to see if I can be done yet for tonight. I put it off. Amazing that something I've wanted to do all my life can be such a chore. It hurts so good though... I've been going back over and over for more.

Grayson's with his dad this weekend and I'm relishing the quiet. G's not a noisy kid... but he always has to have some sort of background noise going on as accompaniment to whatever he's doing. He may be completely engrossed in making Pokemon creatures on the computer, but he will still have the TV on as well, with Sponge Bob or Zach and Cody or some other dreadful kids show on. I'm sure if I was any kind of mother at all I'd make him turn it off and go outside. But I don't. We all have our little things that help us feel at home. That's his.

His dad and I met with Grayson's teacher last week. I was frankly worried that it would not go well. As I've mentioned, I'm not all that supportive of her classroom discipline technique, and I was afraid that .... I don't know exactly. That I would be driven to tell her so in the meeting. But it went fine. We were all very pleasant and discussed G's shortcomings in a civilized manner. Turns out that she thinks he's a very smart and capable kid, but she's concerned about his level of self-responsibility. i.e: he's forgetful. Also, he rushes through his work so he can spend more time reading.

This last was a bombshell to us. Apparently G reads all day at school. Whenever he has free time to do flashcards or play games, he chooses to read. He does worksheets in under 3 minutes so he can get back to his book, and she says when he's reading he's completely deaf to the rest of the world, utterly absorbed in his book. This is a complete and utter surprise to us. I make G read every evening for half an hour and sometimes it's like pulling teeth. He gets distracted easily, is always wanting to talk about the story with me or read passages aloud. He will ask if it's time to go to bed yet, and suddenly become terribly tired and have to go to bed a few minutes early. This is the kid who can't put his book down at school? Gray and I were bumfoozled. Why is he so different at school? Why doesn't he read at home? It's not like he lives in a non-reader household, for crying out loud. I spend hours and hours every week reading. I'm completely mystified.

I've decided to up our evening reading time to 45 minutes, though. I know now it won't bother him a bit to do so, whatever he may say.

Wild Care

Sunday afternoon, G and I went to the once-a-year open house at the Wildcare facility in Noble, OK. I've mentioned them before, here. They do wildlife rehabilitation, and they're amazing. The woman who runs it, Rondi Large, has essentially given up her life to the constant, year-round, round-the-clock care and feeding of orphaned and injured animals. I admire her hugely.

The weather was gorgeous, and we got to see several animals (all mending well or soon to be grown up enough to be released to the wild, happily). Mainly I was impressed by the extensive facilities and the care and enthusiasm of the volunteers. I'm glad people like this exist. The world needs more of them.

A box of baby opossums!

A bag of bats!

A bobcat. There were some cubs, too. They were not as still, so didn't photograph well in low light.

Grayson took this nice picture of an owl. I can't remember what kind it is.

Sweet squirrel face.

So far so good

I'm pleased to say that my novel-writing experiment is progressing apace. I've crested 11,000 words now, and will start chapter 8 this evening. This is HUGE, considering that this book hovered at 1 chapter for over a year, then lifted off to 5 chapters before being iced for some five years or more. The book has been in my head all this time, getting turned and tumbled and smoothed, but I never had the courage to show up at the page. It's still a hard moment when I open that file and look at the blinking cursor... but I've managed to keep pushing forward. Five days. Just 25 to go.

Friday night Grayson's best friend, John, spent the night. It's the first time John has stayed here with us in Norman. Generally he and Grayson get together when G is at his dad's place in OKC. Grayson was very excited about having his friend here. The first thing he said to me when he woke up Friday morning was "It's JOHN DAY!!" It made me realize that I probably need to make more of an effort to help him get his friends over here on the weekends.

I'm afriad the boys were up waaaay too late. I didn't mean to let them stay up so late, but I fell asleep myself just before midnight and woke an hour later to discover they were still up watching the Disney Channel in Grayson's room. Oops. Bad mom! I marched in and put them summarily to bed They were up again before 7 a.m. Naturally. If it was a school day I'm sure Grayson would be a rock at that hour.

I myself slept terribly. It got damned cold last night. Don't know if I've mentioned that at present we have no heat in our house. Back in June our airconditioner died and -- since we have no landlord because our rental house is in receivorship -- the property manager opted not to replace the fried AC blower unit, but instead bought and installed three window units. Okay, fine, but now it's five months later and the weather is getting colder and the unit is still fried.

It seems the lawsuit still has no clear end in sight, and, as there's no such thing as window heaters, the receivor is now going to be obliged to replace the unit. We've had two companies in during the last week to make estimates. In the meantime... brrrrr! Last night the temperature got down to 33 degrees! I got up in the wee hours and threw extra blankets over the boys. Then a few minutes later I got up again and put on an extra layer of clothes, and was grateful for three warm dogs to cuddle up to.

Hopefully they'll get the heater replaced before it gets much colder, or we'll have to start sleeping on the floor in the kitchen in front of the oven.

Yesterday, I took the boys to the new Osteology museum in OKC. It's run by Skulls Unlimited, the folks who prepare and provide skulls and skeletons of animals to museums and other scientific institutions all over the world. The showroom isn't huge, but it's chocabloc full of skeletons! They have a giraffe, a humpback whale, a hippo, several two-faced callf skulls, a platypus, ant eaters... hundreds of skeletons. It's a very cool place to take a couple of ten-year-old boys. And we were the first ones in the door, so we had the place to ourselves, the boys just ran around, looking at everything. It was really fascinating.

Challenge Accepted

I've been a poor correspondent lately, but with good cause. After a dry spell so long I don't even want to calculate it, I've been writing again. Really writing. Not journaling or blathering stream-of-consciousness incoherencies into a notebook, actual structural writing.

I was struck with inspiration by an email I received from NaNoWriMo. That's an awkward, geeky way of saying "National Novel Writers Month." Every November, the organization challenges writers everywhere to write a novel over the next 30 days. Specifically: 50,000 words in 30 days. You sign up on the site and commit to the challenge... "Permission to Suck, Granted!" as they say.

My friend and colleague Mary Ann Roe, who runs the store at the museum, first introduced me to NaNoWriMo several years ago, but I never registered. Somehow, this time it just seemed right.

So I'm in. I have taken up the gauntlet.

Two days into it I've produced around 3300 words. Now all I have to do is stick with it.

I write for an hour after I put Grayson to bed each night: from 9:30 to around 10:30. Anne Lamott says that if you're having trouble carving out writing time for yourself, you should write when you would normally be watching the evening news. Because what's a bigger waste of time than local news? I don't watch the news, but I do spend that hour sitting on my butt, reading or watching TV. So I have surrendered that hour to NaNoWriMo. Wish me luck.

One of the entertaining things about taking up the challenge was getting the five chapters of a children's novel I started some 8 years ago or more into a modern format. The first chapter of the thing was written originally on the boxy old Mac I had in the early 90s. The subsequent four chapters were produced on a ten-ton Compaq laptop that I got from G. I guess he acquired it when it was retired from the place where he worked at the time, and I fell in love with the idea of having my own portable writing computer. As I said, it weighs a ton, it also takes forever to boot up because it is still looking for the old network it was hooked up to before I acquired it. It also has this funny old-school trackball mouse built into the frame of the screen. You work the trackball with your thumb, and the mouse buttons are built into the back of the screen - or the top of the computer, however you want to look at it. I've never seen that design before.

Anyway, Of course there's no way to download my writing from that computer to this one. The Compaq has a 3.5 inch floppy drive ) no USB ports. So I had to boot up the file and transcribe it by hand. It was actually a good way to refamiliarize myself with The Story Thus Far and get my mind into the idea of writing again.

Grayson was utterly fascinated with this old dinosaur of a computer... and with the idea of a story written by his mom, which he didn't know I could do. He hovered over my shoulder as I was transcribing, reading as I went and alerting me at each typo. He told me he could help me with a title, which I don't have yet, and with chapter titles as needed. I said I would call on him for help very soon. And I asked him if he wanted to read it for me and tell me what he thought. He said Yeah, it seems interesting. So I mean to print out the first chapters and let him read along. That should provide some incentive to keep going.

The Cure For What Ails You

As you know, I have a slight tendency toward the blues. The bad thing about this is that, of course, sometimes I'm inexplicably sad. There is an upside, however. The upside is that I have come to recognize that feeling blue is not necessarily related to actually having any reason to be blue, and so I have learned various ways of counteracting it. There's no sure antidote, sometimes one thing works while another does not. Sometimes, frankly, nothing works. But here are a few things that work pretty well.

1) Puppies or kitties. This is almost a guarantee. I'm not convinced a lap full of puppies wouldn't cure just about anything.

2) Cooking something you love to eat, or baking something really evil and comforting like chocolate chip cookies.

3) Sharing what you've cooked. Sometimes I take cookies to my 90-year-old neighbor

4) Getting outside, particularly in this weather, particularly with the dogs, or with Grayson, or both.

This Sunday, Grayson being absent, I took both big dogs to the Norman dog park. I didn't take them at the same time, because sometimes when they are excited they can pull my arms off, or take me sneaker-skiing, neither of which is any fun. So I took them one at a time.

First Flower.

Then Roxy.

Both dogs had a wonderful time. Flower in particular was as happy as I've ever seen her. All those other dogs to meet! All those new smells! All those people to pet her and make much of her! She enjoyed the park quite a bit, but then I took her over to the nearby pond, and things really got good.

She splashed in the water! She rolled on the grass! She ran and slid, shoulder down, on the grass down the hill. She ran with the other dogs. She gulped so much water out of the pond that she threw up. She sat, wet, drippy and smelly, in my lap, threw her head back, tongue lolling, and smiled at me. She smiled at everyone. She was so happy that I think her happiness was infectious. It certainly lightened my heart, and some of the other dog owners there commented on what a happy dog she was.

At last I loaded her up, – dog smell and dirty paws and all – back into my car, and took her home to trade her out for Roxy.

Roxy takes play much more seriously. She was quite anxious about being in the park at first. Tail tucked, she skulked around the edges, avoiding other dogs, and sticking close to me. I was a bit afraid she wouldn't come out of her shell -- until she found a tennis ball. Then it was Game On. I threw the ball until my arm was tired. Then we crossed to the pond and I threw the tennis ball into the water until I figured enough was enough and I took her back to the park to return the tennis ball.

I was sure Rox would be too tired to keep playing, but an obliging fellow back in the park who had one of those ball-throwers-on-a-stick starting really slinging them for her, and she went after them as hard as ever: hell-bent-for-leather. Finally, fearful that she would have a heart attack and drop dead, I thanked the man with the ball-slinger and took Roxy home, too.

Both dogs slept most of the afternoon. And I felt happy.

Good Enough

I am amazed at how long it takes to heal from Divorce. That capitalization was accidental, but I think I'll go ahead and leave it. It suits.

I'll think I'm All Better Now, and then one day I'm Not. I'm in the shower wondering where my life went and getting weepy over something said four years ago that has now become ironic. Like how, at the height of The Big Fight with G's mother, I shot back at her, in all confidence "G LOVES me!" Only, maybe he didn't, I just didn't know it yet.

Not being loved is the worst. It makes me wonder how long I went unloved and didn't realize it. Maybe there's something fundamentally unlovable about me.

Lately I'm plagued with this idea that I was just Not Good Enough. I'm not a very girly girl. I'm no good at fashion or decorating or making bows. I despise scrapbooking, can't bear Sex in the City, and have no particular fascination with shoes. I can't arrange throw pillows, either. And I'm not much of a cook. But I guess all that is what was important to G... all the stuff I'm not, and not any of the stuff I am. When we split up, he couldn't think of a single thing he admired about me.

This is only partly self pity. Partly, behind and below the self pity, and maybe bubbling beneath, about to burst through, is this rage. Really? Not good enough? It makes me want to bite through steel bars. Because of course I am good enough. I'm more than good enough. I'm funny and irreverent. I can cuss like a sailor and quote shakespeare in the same breath. I love animals and I'm not afraid of snakes. I pay for my own drinks. I laugh at myself if I fall down, and I fall down fairly regularly. I can be showered, coifed, made up and dressed in under 20 minutes. Ican grow a plot of vegetables and make my own pesto. I vastly prefer action films to chick-flicks. And throw pillows are an annoyance. I'm not a woman like all the other women. But I'm good enough. More than good enough.

An Earthquake... or so I'm told

This is a short post.

There was an earthquake in Norman yesterday.

I missed it.

It was a 5.1 earthquake, centered just east of Norman, and it happened at 9:06 a.m. Apparently it was strong enough to be felt as far north as Stillwater, and all across Oklahoma City. Folks here at the office said it really shook the museum (which is a big building). And Grayson said he felt it shaking his chair in the gymnasium at school.

I was driving to work, and so I completely failed to register any movement of the earth. I'm so BUMMED. A real earthquake in Oklahoma - of all places - and I missed it. I was in my car for less than ten minutes. And THAT ten minutes was when we get an earthquake. I was gyped.

Authorities tell us that the temblor was caused, not by movement of tectonic plates, but possibly by deep hidden fault lines OR - most probably, as a by-product of oil or gas drilling.

Heck. Maybe I'll feel the next one... in another 40 years or so.

School Stuff

Lately we've been struggling with difficulties at school. Grayson has a teacher who is, I'll go ahead and say it, a bit of a hard-ass. This is a woman who has rules for her rules, and doles out punishments on a formula. Enter X you always get Y. And Grayson's not integrating all that smoothly into the New World Order. There's just no wiggle room.

Unfortunately, Grayson is all about wiggle room.

So, he is feeling the pinch. The whole household is. Primarily all the drama is caused by his consistent failure to put the number 6 on the upper right hand corner of his papers before he turns them in. Not only does he lose five points from every paper on which he fails to do this, he also as to sit out recess. He has had, consequently, only one recess this week.

I'll go ahead and say this, too, while I'm at it...I totally don't agree with this system of punishment. It's completely counter-productive. I think if you make a kid sit out recess, what you get is a restless, resentful and distracted kid, not a kid who has learned any kind of lesson. Not my kid, anyway. But I don't make the rules, and me thinking they're stupid doesn't change a thing for Grayson. So I'm doing what I can to try to nudge him into compliance. I remind him every morning to put his number on his page. I ask him every afternoon if he got recess. I've taken his TV privileges away. But I don't think piling on more punishments is going to produce any better results. So I will have to come up with something else. I just don't know what. What can I do to make him remember? I can't be there, whispering in his ear. I just have to hope it gets better on its own. He has no recess today because he put his number on the wrong page on work he turned in yesterday. Sheesh. Today, I hope, is the last day of no recess. We've had two difficult weeks. I hope next week will begin a new era.

Today is Book Report Day. Grayson was up late last night, finishing his first-ever "book report:" actually a shoebox diorama accompanied by a five-sentence synopsis of Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone. I was worried that it would be torture getting him to work on this, and it has been a challenge to get him to do some of the preliminary work. He was convinced, of course, that he could complete the whole project in a single night, and resisted when I made him starting drawing the figures for the diorama on Tuesday night. But last night went well. Fortified by milk and cookies, he plowed right into the project and kept at it, not even fighting me on the writing bit at the end.

Grayson hates writing. He'll be the first to tell you so. But turns out he just hates the mechanics of writing. He's actually a bit of a dab hand with a sentence. A chip of the old Mom Block, perhaps. I was worried that the synopsis would be an ordeal, but here's what he came up with:

"Harry has had a mysterious life, but the day he turns eleven, everything changes. He realizes he is a wizard and goes to a school called Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. He meets two friends named Ron and Hermione but once they find the sorceror's stone it leads them on a great adventure. Together they accomplish any obstacle that comes their way, including He Who Must Not Be Named. But then Harry has to say goodbye to his new found friends, but he will see them next year."

Myself, I think the kid may have a career in writing book jacket blurbs.

On Lying Down with Dogs

The weather is cooling off, and that means that I lie down with dogs. Three dogs, in fact. Usually they are arrayed thus:

Flower takes up residence at the foot of the bed near the window, and barely moves. She knows where she can sleep and incur the least disruption from moving feet, moving dogs or incoming kid.

Kobi roots her way under the covers and descends all the way down, often curling up around knee level off to one side. This works fine unless G crawls into bed with me, in which case she sometimes gets squashed a bit.

Roxy find the absolutely most inconvenient and uncomfortable place for her to possibly lie down and then spends most of the night alternately scratching herself bald or chewing on her bone. Usually she lies down right where I want to put my legs. Sometimes, however, if I get up in the middle of the night, she moves to my pillow, where she sticks like a limpet until I either smack her butt or harry her off the bed, whereupon she immediately bounces right back up and reinstalls herself wherever I most want to put my feet.

Roxy really would like to sleep with Grayson, but she just can't bring herself to stay there after lights out. She can't stand it that I'm still up and moving around, so she always comes in to see what I'm up to. Getting Grayson to bed, however, is an exercise is outfoxing the Rox. We go into Grayson's room and Roxy leaps onto the bed and curls up on the covers. I snap my fingers and she jumps down. Then she jumps back up as G is getting under the covers and she lays on them so he can't pull them up. I snap and down she goes. Grayson pulls the covers up. Roxy leaps onto the bed, steps over him, leans down to investigate his face, and then plops down at his side.

I say good night and turn out the light.

If Roxy doesn't jump down right away to follow me out of the room, within minutes the scratching begins. Or the chewing. Or both. Soon I hear Grayson struggling to get Roxy off the bed. Finally, I will call her and she will assume her post at my feet. I choose this martyrdom rather than sacrifice Grayson's sleep.

Sometimes she lies very still and quiet and black on the floor of my bedroom in the dark, waiting for me to trip over her on my way to the bathroom in the wee hours of the morning. That's always fun. And sometimes she comes and prickles my face with her whiskers at 2 a.m. wanting to go outside herself.

Ah dogs.

Urban Wilderness Death March

Yesterday was so beautiful and cool and fallish that, after mowing the lawn, I told Grayson to put his shoes on (okay, and to get out of his pajamas) and we headed out to the Sutton Urban Wilderness area here in Norman.

When we lived in OKC, G and I regularly went up to the Martin Nature Park in the northwest part of the city to enjoy the trails and trees and turtles. But since we moved to Norman, we haven't been out trail-tramping. I'd heard that the Sutton Wilderness had nice trails, so off we went.

Well, it does have nice trails. They are clearly marked, and there are nice trees and a good sized pond. We were trekking along, taking pictures, enjoying the cool weather, and all was well. The path diverged a few times, and each time it did, I let Grayson decide which direction to go, assuming that eventually all trails would lead us back to the trailhead at the parking lot.

Not so.

I'm not sure how we did it, but we ended up on the frisbee golf course that abuts the Nature Park. This is not, in itself, a problem, except that there does not appear to be any rhyme or reason to how the golf course is laid out, and we got hopelessly turned around and could not find our way back to the nature trail. Eventually we found ourselves inside a large barren fenced area next to the nature park, and after walking all the way to the eastern end of it, thinking we could hit northeast 12th street and just trek back along it to the Sutton parking lot, we discovered that it was gated, chained and locked. Now how did we get locked in?

We backtracked to the frisbee golf course, and walked in circles for awhile (with Grayson leaning on me and groaning about our eminent demise all the way) before we encountered a bike trail that took us to the dog park down the road from where we wanted to be. From there we made our way down 12th street back to where we started.

It was not exactly the peaceful nature hike I had in mind, but it did give us a good hour and a half's exercise in the fresh air and sunshine.

What I think about when I should be working

Last night I dreamed in French. It was the strangest thing, to be thinking and speaking in a language I'm really not fluent in and haven't practiced in 20 years or more. The dream was complex and absorbing... all about some competitive reality-show type situation I was involved in in Paris. I was younger, ambitious... speaking French.

I woke feeling heavy and stuffed with wool, my head still partially wreathed in Français, feeling vaguely disappointed, vaguely robbed. Of what, I don't know.

Today I can't seem to concentrate. I move papers around my desk, open email, close it. Move things around again. I realize the restlessness inside me is coming from something that wants to get out. Maybe it's all that language I rolled around with in my sleep. But something in me seeks an outlet.

Today is Mabon: the pagan festival of Thanksgiving and the beginning of fall. Fall has always been my favorite season, despite – or maybe partially because of – its faint sense of sadness, of nostalgia. I love to see the trees begin to change color, and to notice the shortening of the days, week by week... descending toward winter's dark heart. I love the excuse to stay indoors and read books by the window, and finally being able to cook big pots of hot, steamy comfort food that I can freeze and feast off of all winter long. So welcome on those cold, wretched days when you can't think of anything to cook, or your cupboards are bare or you're just too tired or too disheartened to think of preparing anything.

But it also makes me restless... wanting to be doing something... creating something... maybe changing something.

Twice at this time of year we have found Monarch caterpillars curling up to begin the transformation into butterflies. That's how I feel. Like curling up and liquifying inside a beautiful gold-flecked chrysalis – to emerge remade, a creature as different from my past self as the orange and black Monarch is different from its pajama-striped and earth-bound larval form.

I wonder if it hurts the caterpillar? Or if it just enters into a kind of hibernation until it wakes up in its new body. It's a bit painful to me. But mine is because I'm not, of course, transforming. I'm going to wake up tomorrow and the day after that as the same old caterpillar. Eating and making my way back and forth along my twig. I suppose it could be worse.

So I toodle back and forth on my metaphorical twig... twitch my shiny black antennae and think. lately I think these things:

I look at all the lovely houses in Norman – large and small – and I want to live in them. I long for Home. I jealously compare their paint colors, garden designs, architectural styles. I peer in open windows as I pass them at night to get an idea of what kinds of lives are going on inside them. I lust after them and have to tear my eyes away from them when I'm driving to keep my focus on the road. Like mine were the eyes of a dirty old man next to a nubile young starlet in a low-cut dress. I want a home for reasons I can't even express or understand. Everything feels temporary without it. Nothing is mine. Radio stories tell me that now is not necessarily the time to buy... that Americans all around the country are reconsidering the value of home ownership. But I itch to own my own home again. And I feel frozen in amber until I do. Incapable of moving forward, futureless, inert.

I think about books: all the beautiful, wonderful, piled up books in my shelves and on my tables. I would spend part of every day in the book store or library if I could. I want to open them all and read them simultaneously, sucking up the stories and the information, feeling the words roll around in my mouth and mind.

By the time I was in 3rd or 4th grade, I no longer articulated language in my mind as I read. The words went more or less straight to my brain, without being "spoken" in my imagination. But somewhere in college that ability went away. I now feel each word wanting to escape through my lips. Gray used to tease me for whispering as I read... mouthing the words. But I love the way they feel, and I want to enjoy them, like smooth pearls along a string. I want to both take them into me and ride along with them. Sometimes I can't settle on one book, but have several open at any one time, moving from one to another as the mood takes me. And I think about them... which ones I'll read next, which ones I should read...

I think about Life a lot. And I think about Love: what the odds are of its permanence... how you know. (You don't.) I think about what I should expect, what I believe in, and how to know what is real. Sometimes I feel sure I've got a grip on it... and sometimes I'm sure that I do not. This irks me and I worry it like a rough tooth in my mind. Is love a feeling or a choice? Can you create and maintain it out of whole cloth, simply by determining that you will?

Sometimes I think about Quantum physics. I don't really understand it, but it fascinates me. It's magic... explained! That takes me back to books: what I should read to get a better grasp on it... whether or not I should move on to that or go back to Jung's Man and His Symbols, that I was reading before I picked up Aftermath about 2012, that I was reading alternately with a book about the Gaia theory for awhile. There are unfinished books on Buddhism, creativity, writing, spirituality. Books of essays and short stories and self-help books and books of poetry (which I buy even though I'm really bad at reading poetry). From there I feel guilty about all the unread books and want to stack them all up on the coffee table and start plowing through them, one by one.

All in all, it would be more restful to just think about work.

A Brief Pitiful List of Things I'm Tired Of

I'm tired of being broke.
I'm tired of not knowing what direction to go
I'm tired of waiting
I'm tired of missing the things I don't have anymore
I'm tired of not loving myself just fine the way I am, and the way I expect everyone else who loves me to do.
I'm tired of not caring enough about things, so they end up getting lost or broken or spoiled or mishandled or worn out or tired of me.
I'm tired of not believing in anything anymore

I'm tired of this list...


Here's a flying pig to make you smile, instead. This pig makes me happy.

Tuesday Grayson and I drove out to Wildcare to deliver Grayson's donation of critter chow. There had to be 80 to 100 pounds of bird seed, rabbit chow and cracked corn. It took three people a couple of trips to unload all of it.

The staff was helpful and welcoming, and of course grateful for the donation. I could tell Grayson was proud. And I was proud of him.

One of the staff members took G around the entry building and let him see some of the animals in residence: a red-eared slider with a head injury. An orphaned opossum. Some doves or pigeons with a virus. There were several hawks, an owl, some ducks and a porcupine. There was a young roadrunner that raced back and forth the length of its cage that Grayson was very interested in. He's never seen a real roadrunner before, just the one on Wile E. Coyote. He asked lots of questions and the staffer was kind enough to answer all of them very thoughtfully. Grayson offered to help feed all the animals, and was disappointed to learn that he can't volunteer until he's 16.

Then a woman came in with a bat that had been captured in someone's home. At first we just peered into the little fabric tent in which she brought it in, but she was nice enough then to reach in and bring it out so we could see it better. She identified it for us as Mexican freetail bat, and pointed out to us the adorable little mousey tail that gives it its name (the tail hangs "free," rather than being attached by a membrane to the body as it is in other bats). Then she gently turned it around so we could see its wonderful little face with its big ears and upturned snout. "It looks just like a Ferengi on StarTrek" she told us.

It was a good experience for us both, and I'm grateful to the folks at Wildcare for making it so. It's amazing what they are up against, managing, feeding and rehabilitating these orphaned and injured wild things. It's an heroic and noble undertaking.

From there we went right out to Target so Grayson could spend some of his birthday money on a new Nintendo DSi and a game in which huge insects and scorpions do battle with one another.