Snowbound

Grayson and I are wrapping up a four-day weekend, courtesy of the inch of ice and 4 inches of snow that was dumped on us over the course of Thursday and Friday of this week. Grayson's been out of school, and the museum was closed since noon on Thursday. So we've been snowbound, amusing ourselves by watching the birds tussle over the cookie pan of birdseed I set out on the patio for them, and marvelling at the increasing length of the icicle growing on the patio cover.

Yesterday I made some pinecone bird-feeders with peanut butter and birdseed, and by the end of the day they were not only picked clean, they were pecked to fragments, hanging like the corpses of condemned pirates from the crape myrtle bush. Yikes! It will definitely deter me from covering myself with peanut butter and birdseed and stepping outside. It's a feeding frenzy out there!

Today the sky continues gray and threatening. The icicle is still dripping and growing. clock clock clock . The potential for going stir crazy and running amok with an ax increases as well. Better get out of the house.

In fact, I got out yesterday, to staff a booth at the Firehouse Art Center's Chocolate Festival. I had to literally kick through an inch of solid ice that sealed the hatchback of my car before I could get the trade show display out. But the roads were fine. There was this one breathtaking slow-motion moment at the corner of Chautauqua and Lindsey where I stepped on the brake at the light and went sailing gracefully and helplessly out into the intersection. I imagined The Blue Danube playing as I floated past the red light. Fortunately there was no oncoming traffic at 9:30 Saturday morning, so I did no damage to myself or others. There were two college girls standing at the corner, and I waved and shrugged my shoulders as I regained control and went on my way down Lindsey. They laughed and waved back.

While I was at the festival, Grayson stayed home alone. It was the longest he's ever been on his own. He was obliged to feed himself lunch, and I got a couple of funny phonecalls that probably reveal a dark side to my parenting and housekeeping skills. The first one, just after I left, was also after Grayson had fed the dogs (a new chore). "Mom, Kobi won't eat her breakfast."

"Well, just keep the other dogs out of it for a few minutes and she'll probably come around."

"Well, I build a sort of barrier around her so they couldn't get to her bowl, but she's still not eating."

"That's okay, then. You tried. If she won't eat, it's her loss. Thanks for trying."

The next call, an hour later: "Mom, where are the hotdog buns?"

"We don't have any hotdog buns."

"Oh, crap. Okay then, can I use a knife?"

"What do you need to use a knife for?"

"To cut the hotdogs."

(hotdogs? Do we have hotdogs? If we do, they may be from the Bush administration) "Oooohh, honey, I don't think you should eat those hotdogs."

"Why not?"

"I think they've probably been there too long, babe. They're probably no good."

"Well, I can't find the turkey."

"It's in there. Keep looking."

20 minutes later I called back to see how he was doing.

"Did you find the turkey?"

"No, but it's okay, I found some leftover pizza."

(Yikes. That pizza is two weeks old if it's a day) "Ooooh, no honey I don't think you should eat that, either."

"But I can't find the turkey."

"Keep looking, I promise it's in there."

"Jeez Mom, you need to clean out the fridge!"

Yes.... yes, I suppose I do. I know for a fact that there's part of a turkey tetrazini made from leftover Thanksgiving turkey in there. And a tuna casserole that's near achieving consciousness. Maybe that should be my project for the day.

I was a little bit of a nervous wreck leaving G alone for so long, but he did not set the house on fire or die of botulism while I was gone. I got home after three and a half hours to find him curled up on the sofa under a blanket, watching Sponge Bob in his jammies. My boy is growing up.

This in itself is the subject of another post in the future. Fear and loathing of my boy growing up. Got to begin girding my loins now for the challenges ahead.

In the meantime.... the fridge.

Goin' public

I'm in the process of combing through the 200+ entries in the New Scrawlspace, editing out anything that I'm not prepared for the world at large to know. Admittedly, there's not a lot. I'm pretty much a cards-on-the-table kind of gal. But I want to make sure I know what I'm serving up because I'm about to go public with the blog again.

I restricted access to Scrawlspace during my breakup and divorce for fear that there would be some sort of unforeseeable repercussions from making the process public. I wanted my farflung friends and family to be able to keep up, but not necessarily the world. Now I'm much less concerned about that, and in looking back over the entries for the past year, there's really very little that could be considered sensitive information. So I'm purging anything that mentions names of people I think might not want to be named, or that potentially falls into the Too Much Information category. When the survey and edit is complete, I'll remove the need for permissions to get to the blog. Just so ya know.

On the subject of old blog entries: a few months ago, Grayson's computer died. Well, it had help. It was sputtering and I asked Grayson's dad to take a look at it. Apparently he attempted major surgery and NOW it's dead. I asked him to try to recover the photographs from the corpse's hard drive. This is one of the major drawbacks to digital photography. One electronic glitch and ZZZZZZZKK! your kid's entire photographic childhood is gone.

In the process of recovering photos (which, thankfully, he was able to do,) G also ran across the original Scrawlspace... the "online journal" (as we called 'em back then) I kept prior to Grayson's birth and during the early years of his childhood. Back in the day, if you wanted an online journal, you had to get a web design software package like Frontpage and build your own website. I spent untold hundreds of hours designing and crafting my page, plus untold hundreds more writing and posting. Then one day my former husband told me that he had asked our internet provider to take down Scrawlspace because it was too easy for the stalkers on his online chatrooms to find out his RealWorld identity by finding my blog. Then the home computer crashed and after he disassembled and reassembled it, the original Scrawlspace file was mysteriously missing.

Well, now it's been resurrected. God knows how I'll access it, since I have no computer and if I did it sure wouldn't have FrontPage on it. But we'll see. It's nice to know it's out there. Somewhere. Losing a journal, even to cyberspace, is like losing a chunk of your life. Especially when your actual memory of your life is as faulty and thin as mine is. I barely remember what I had for breakfast, much less what my life was like in the heady early-marriage days before Grayson was born. What did I do with all that time?

Oh yeah, that's right.... I built Scrawlspace.

On Saturday night I drove out to Stilwell for part of a board retreat for Dreamer Concepts. The full board (I'm only an intern) spent the whole weekend out there coming up with strategic plans and fundraising ideas and all that other tedious stuff boards do. I had been invited out for the dinner afterward.

It's been awhile since I did much driving around rural Oklahoma. The retreat was set at the family farm of one of the members, and it was well out in the country. The sun was beginning to head downward as I started out, and as I drove south then west then south again, the sunset seemed to rotate around me through a long long dusk.

Oklahoma has fantastic sunsets. The landscape is flat enough to allow you to view the sun all the way down to the horizon in most places, but rolls enough to provide some nice contrast. Up and you see the sunset spread out at your feet like a fiery lake. Down and it seems to blaze up over the hilltop. And the clouds and colors are ridiculous. Anyone naive enough to paint such a skyscape would be ridiculed for being precious. But there it is. Big as life time and time again.

Just as the last light was beginning to leave in the west, a lightning storm started up to the east, and I drove between them: a pool of blue and gold light to my right, and white lightning to my left. A wonderful, wonderful fantasy of a drive.

Later, after dinner we all went outside to find that the sky had cleared and the stars were out. In the pitch black country night you could really see them, and we were trying stupidly to identify constellations and stars until of course someone whipped out their iPhone astronomy app and we were able to hold it up to see what was what. A weird technological twist to an ancient activity.

No More Mean Mommy

It has been a very trying few days. Work is really busy and my stress level has been on a steady rise, until last night when it snapped. Roxy jumped up on me one more time and I came unglued - called her every name in the book and chased her outside. Then about the time I got my breath back and let her back in, she picked a fight with Kobi. Snarling, barking, lunging. Little dog versus big dog. This time I really lost it. I got one of Grayson's crocks and started chasing Roxy around, smacking her with it. On videotape it might be funny in retrospect, if you couldn't see the pitiful look on her face. Her tail tucked under and her head down like a .... well, like a beaten dog. Boy, THAT made me feel good about myself. So I dropped the shoe and sat down on the floor and took her head in my lap and apologized. She just looked up at me with those brown eyes, the tip of her tail quivering, waiting for me to hit her again.

Sometimes I'm such a beast.

We were supposed to have B over for dinner last night but I called and bowed out on the grounds that I would not make good company and would probably pick a fight. Seems like I need to decompress a little bit. Or maybe just take things a little less seriously.

So I'm going to make an effort over the next several days to take note of the upbeat, the funny and the irreverent. Life is not really all that serious all the time.

Like Grayson's current obsession with Youtube videos. His friend introduced him to them, and now it's all he can think about. This one in particular:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QwZqbLpVlM&feature=related

He knows every word and quotes it verbatim over and over and over again: while I'm trying to get him to eat his breakfast, while he's getting dressed, while I'm hustling him into his shoes, his coat, his backpack... all the way to school. It's like a neverending loop. I'm going to have tiny little teeth like an Eskimo woman from grinding them together trying to keep myself from telling him to stop!

It's cute, though. He cracks himself up with every other line, so half the time you can't understand what he's saying, even if you are familiar with the video.

On goldfish and lessons about dying

Well, despite my best efforts, Grayson’s goldfish, Lenny, Zach and Speckles, all expired this week. Zach died mid-week, Lenny yesterday afternoon, and Speckles went to the great aquarium in the sky only this morning. Grayson is with my folks at the lake, and so is – at present – blissfully ignorant of these latest two deaths. Lenny will be a particularly hard blow. We’ve had Lenny for more than a year.

The truth is, this is the second time Lenny has died. Lenny… the first and original Lenny… died when we made the move to the apartment. The change to a new tank got him. But under the stressful circumstances at the time, I just couldn’t bear to tell Grayson that, on top of everything else, his fish had died… so I scurried to the pet store and picked up a lookalike, which I installed in Lenny’s tank before Grayson got home from school.

This time I’m not sure how to handle it. I would love to be able to find another Lenny, another Speckles, and protect him again from the loss of his pets. But I don’t think I can this time. He knew the fish were ill, and though we were doing massive water changes, adding salt, and hoping for the best… it didn’t look good for them. And I don’t think I have time to correct the water problems we were having in time to make a healthy home for a new Lenny. So when he gets home on Sunday, I will have to tell him. This after I spent $30 on Thursday buying water test strips and a goldfish book, trying desperately to save these 38 cent fish.

Today, insanely, I will go back to the fish store and buy a new filter for the tank, and then replace all the water and set it up so it can be clean and safe and ready to receive the next pair of fish. Because I know that, though it will break his heart to learn of Lenny’s death… and he’ll cry and break MY heart… when the tears are dried, he’ll want to get a new fish. This is how we got ourselves into this problem to begin with. Lenny’s long time companion, Popeye, died a couple of weeks ago. And Grayson cried, and then after a few days he wanted a new friend for Lenny. I guess in the process of adding new fish, I tipped the delicate scales of biological balance in the tank, and everything went to hell.

Pets are a constant reminder of the fragility and impermanence of life. I suppose this is a good thing, in a way. Pets die and kids begin to understand that everyone dies, even those we love. Even ourselves. We have seen many dogs, cats, butterflies, tadpoles, turtles ducks and fish pass on to other, unknown dimensions. It is never easy. But maybe it is okay. Someday he will lose a person he loves dearly. Someday – god willing – he will lose us. I say god willing because the reverse is unthinkable, unbearable.

Meanwhile, I bravely (if perhaps foolishly) continue to populate our lives with animals. Our current count is three dogs, one bearded dragon who continues to eat me out of house and home, and anywhere up to 100 crickets at a time (though perhaps they don’t count because they are so fleeting).


At least Mambo is thriving. He’s getting pretty big, though I know he’s barely an adolescent, and has a lot of growing still to do. You can see from these pictures the rate at which is getting bigger. I think he’s quite handsome… with his orange and brown stripes and his bright orange eyes. He’s very alert when he wants to be, and can be so still you would think he was stuffed if you didn’t know better. Grayson continues to take an interest in him, which makes me glad. I was afraid he would be a passing fancy. But G takes him out and holds him every evening, and I admit it’s fun to watch him catch and eat his crickets. He’s quite the predator.

Roxy is still nuts, but she’s a sweet sort of nuts. I have just resigned myself to a certain amount of mess and damage for as long as she’s with us. I’ll try to keep it in check, and then just pay for repairs when she’s gone. I’ll have to replace three screens and possibly a door. And I’ll have to sand down and refinish a windowsill and the door frame to Grayson’s room. But every time I get an email from Roxy’s human mom, it is so full of gratitude that I can’t be irritated by it.

Roxy has adopted a blanket as her own recently, and she drags it around like Linus. When she goes outside, she drags it out, if I don’t get to her and snatch it away in time. She lies on the floor with it, gradually chewing it to bits. She carries it from room to room and teases the other dogs into tug-of-war matches with it. It’s pretty sweet, actually. Even though I am obliged to go around every day and pick up the bits she has chewed off of it.

Rain today. It’s a great excuse to sit inside and veg out. Work has been crazy busy. I’ve suddenly been put in charge of Corporate Sponsorship… an area in which I have no experience whatever. We are up to our ears in projects and deadlines, as well. Newsletter stories, annual report, grant budgets, advertisements, promotional partnerships, design projects, and now a formal presentation to give to the entire staff about what we’ve been doing over the past year. Oh, and annual performance reviews due next week. But today it is raining and I have a fresh pot of very black coffee. The dogs are snoozing comfortably on the sofas and carpet around me. Mambo’s in his vivarium, and all is right with the world.

Back to the Real World

It's Friday. I've been back at work for a week. Just now able to lift my head up enough to think.

Generally, January is a slow month. Everyone is coming down off the holiday high, and things haven't ramped up yet for the spring semester, so it's usually a good slow time to get some filing done, make plans for the months ahead, and ease into working full-tilt again. But not this year. This year we are balls-to-the-wall from the first day back. Not sure what the difference is, but there's a definite difference.

We've also been handed a new project. By "we," I mean my tiny department of two people. We have recently been put in charge of Corporate Sponsorships.

The museum recently lost its so-called Development Officer. I say "so-called" because she was obliged to wear many hats, and though her title was Development, it ended up not being her primary focus. Anyway, in her absence, bits of her former job have been farmed out, and lucky us, we got Corporate Sponsors. Now I have not a clue about corporate sponsorships. I have no development experience or training outside of the annual visit to the Oklahoman and Cox Media for media sponsorships of special exhibitions. I've never had to go in and ask anyone for money before. So I'll be learning a few things this year. I'm a little queasy about it, but also a little excited. It's good to learn new things, take on new projects ... and things were getting a bit stale. So... off we go, into the great unknown wastelands of corporate fundraising. I'll keep you posted.

It was a real relief to get back to work. The holidays were lovely... all that unexpected snow on Christmas Eve, and the subsequent long lazy week during which Grayson was with his dad in OKC and I had the days and nights all to myself. I read books, cooked, futzed around. But after a few days of that, I begin to get a bit bored and then I tend to get depressed, so it was good to get back in the saddle again.

Trying to make good on my New Year's resolutions to Do Everything Right. I managed to get Grayson to school on time every day this week. We went through the school lunch calendar together and marked the days on which he will want me to pack a lunch for him. I started a diet last Saturday and have maintained it all week, with the help of a little iPhone app called "Lose It". Sadly, I have no scale, so I have no idea if I've lost any weight or not. We'll go ahead and believe that I have. When I buy a scale I'll let you know.

Also this week I went to the first in a series of workshops called DivorceCare. It's a 13 week program put on by the First Baptist Church in Moore. I was apprehensive that it might be way too God-Squad for me, and promised myself that the first time I was asked to accept Jesus as my personal Savior I was out the door. But it wasn't too bad in that direction. There was some talk about putting God at the center and maintaining your "Moral Values" during the rocky times just after your divorce. Advice sadly received waaaaaay too late in my case.... But the people leading the program are not too preachy, and it seems like there are a lot of decent people in the group, so I'll go back for a second round.

If nothing else it was some comfort to see that there are so many who are also dealing with post-divorce issues. Some of them in a lot worse shape than me. After a year, I am way better than I was. I'm better now even than I was three months ago, though I know I have plenty of issues still. Sometimes it's just hard to throw off that victim mentality, to get over feeling unlovable. Grayson brought home his new digital camera from his dad's last weekend and when I went through and looked at the pictures, there was a photo of my ex with his girlfriend. She's got to be under 30... blonde, pretty, bland-looking. I just felt old and fat and ugly and rejected. I was useless for the rest of the day, in spite of all the little pep talks I gave myself about how funny and smart and interesting I am. So I'm not out of the woods yet. But there are people in that divorce group who have been divorced for three to five years and are still struggling. I don't see me being in that group two years from now. I know I'm more resilient than that.

Incidentally, earlier this week I got an email from G telling me that he had broken up with her. She was "extremely selfish, needy and insecure" and also that she didn't know how to relate to Grayson. How could anyone not relate to Grayson? He's the world's most approachable, sweet and friendly kid! Can't say I'm sorry they broke up.

Whoops, See what I mean? Issues. Sheesh.