A Five-Dog Thanksgiving

I have successfully returned from a Thanksgiving trip to Norman with all three dogs in tow. They were obliged to accompany me because I’m too cheap to board them, and my parents are tolerant enough to put up with the insanity of having five dogs in the house for a few days. So off we went.

Kobi insisted on riding in my lap, and every time the car slowed down, she would get up and press her face to the window in hopes that I would roll it down so she could stick her head out. Normally I don’t mind her doing so, but A)  I wasn’t going to open the window in the cold on the highway, and B)  when Grayson is in the car and Kobi has her head out, he has anxiety attacks that she’s going to fall or jump out the window. 

I used the window lock button to keep the dogs in the back seat from being able to step on the button and lower the windows themselves, but unfortunately this function does not work on the driver’s side window. So periodically when Kobi was hopefully pressing her nose to the glass, she would step on the button and roll down the window, whereupon she would immediately lean as far out as possible and Grayson would gasp in terror, and I would swerve all over the road, trying to get him calmed down, keep her from falling out, and get the window back up without taking off her head.

This is fun.

Half way between Tulsa and Oklahoma City, Roxy decided she needed to ride in Grayson’s lap. She bellied up over the console and army-crawled into his seat, where she remained, looking anxious, until his wriggling and complaining drove her into the floorboard at his feet.  From there she refused to be dislodged.  We finally had to stop and haul her bodily into the back seat. A long hour of ultra-sonic whining followed, punctuated by Grayson and me alternately shouting “Roxy! Shut up!” To no effect.

Upon arrival, we got to enjoy the five-way rodeo of integrating my three with my parents’ two.  Circus hilarity ensued, followed by a brief, but very exciting, dog-fight culminating in all of us running around waving our arms about wildly and chasing all five dogs outside.

Then Roxy and Flower got in the pond.

And brought a lot of it into the living room, via the doggie door.

Much sliding, slippery, wet and smelly chaos ensued… culminating in all of us waving our arms about wildly and chasing them outside again.

And blocking the doggie door.  And mopping.

Things did calm down after a few hours, but my parents’ dogs were completely cowed by my galumphing, bossy hoard, and consequently spent most of the four-day weekend in my father’s lap. 

Ah, it’s good to get home for the Holidays.  No doubt my parents are eagerly awaiting our return at Christmas.

Happy bits

I got this from the Nat'l Geographic Animals site, here

My friend Michael informed me that the Hyperbole and a Half post I recommended as comic relief in my last post was sad, not funny.  I guess jokes about depression are only funny to people who have been depressed. 

So, to make up for my pitiful post, I am hearby determined to make this post an upbeat and entertaining one.  So, here are five things that are happy and/or entertaining

1.    Flower ate the crotch out of my best pair of jeans yesterday.  This is not good news, of course, but it is funny.  My question:  what’s in it for her?  WHY???  Flower is otherwise such a good dog.  Roxy eats holes in everything:  my sheets, my blankets, my sofa… rugs, chairs, washcloths, socks… but never the crotch out of my jeans. That’s a specialty of Flower’s, and it’s not the first time, either.

2.    The Walmart just over the state line in Jane, Missouri, not only has a HUGE liquor and wine section, it is also open all night AND it’s cheap.  Bonus:  they sell soft fuzzy sofa blankets with a giant image of the Virgin of Guadalupe on them.

3.    I wrote a story about the Preparators at CB and they really liked it. It’s always good to write something and have people respond favorably to it, even more so if it’s a story about them. The team seemed flattered and pleased that I had taken the time and effort to profile their work.  They deserve it, though.  They just got done installing 450 works of art.

4.    My parents visited this weekend and I had the pleasure of taking them and my son through the museum for the first time. It was fun to visit the museum as a civilian, and to take the time to really look at all the artwork. My dad also fixed the fallen towel rod in my bathroom, which means I can quit dropping my towels on the floor.  

5.    This is not all that “happy,” I suppose, but it is an entertaining bit of insight into my overall state of organization:  I have missed trash and recycling day three weeks in a row.  This means that both bins are overflowing and I no longer have a place to stash my recycling except in a cardboard box in the garage. Incidentally, I have been throwing the cardboard boxes associated with my favorite cheap box wine into this box in the garage for some time now, because they take up too much space in the plastic bin in my kitchen. I went out there yesterday and realized there were no fewer than eight boxes in there.  So… great. Awesome, on Tuesday I get to take all of that out and put it by the curb and the neighbors will think I drank 24 bottles of wine in a week. A stretch even for me. 

And bonus happy thing:  I saw a handful of bluebirds on the trail on the walk in to the Museum this morning.  And if bluebirds don't make you happy, you're dead. 

Back to Dante's Wood

I was having lunch with a group of co-workers yesterday at Crystal Bridges.  We all sat at a long table in the dining bridge, surrounded by happy museum visitors and the nice, busy, homey sound of clinking dishware and distant conversation.  The museum had been open for four days.  And there we were, in the middle of it.  It had happened and it was all going along merrily and now we were in the New Normal:  the museum as Public Property.  No more super-secret works of art, no more mystery.  There was something so strange about sitting there, surrounded by the public, in a place where it had always been  Just Us.  And someone said something about how amazing it had been to be there for the beginning.  "If this was the coolest gig I'll ever have, at 41, I think I'm okay with that,"  she said.  It made me think.

I've been sort of casting about these past few years, trying to find out what the next "rest of my life" will be, and not, frankly, being all that happy with what it's been so far.  But if I look back on my life, really, I have nothing to complain about.

If you think about what you wanted to be as a child, as some measure of how your life turned out:   well, I wanted to be a veterinarian, a writer, or an actor. And really, in some measure, I've done them all.  I've worked as a vet tech, even assisting in the treatment of big cats. I've helped deliver baby snow leopards by c-section.  I got to do that.  I've also volunteered at the wildlife rehabilitation center and fed the baby birds, got my knees licked by curious fawns, and held the fat-bellied baby opossums.

I've worked at some pretty amazing places.  I have met artists, writers, musicians and performers from all over the country during my time with the Oklahoma Arts Institute. And met some truly gifted kids, as well. Then I spent nearly 12 years in a wonderful natural history museum:  learning about everything from dinosaurs to fish. I've learned and written about all of it.  Now I've been present for the birth of a major art museum in a beautiful location. Science, art, science, art again.  Who gets to do stuff like that?  And how could I really feel as if I've somehow failed?

I've shimmied through a crack in a cave to see the bones of a prehistoric bear lying right where it died 15,000 years ago. I was photographed nude standing at the base of the praying hands at Oral Roberts University. I rode a speedboat around the Italian Cote d'Azur and hung out with traveling circus performers in France.  It really hasn't been that shabby.

Perhaps more importantly, I've lead a charmed life. My parents, who love one another dearly, have weathered nearly 48 years together. I've not lost anyone close to me to illness or accident before their time. I'm healthy and reasonably fit myself.  I have a son who is so full of love and joy that he is like a shining jewel in the eye of the world. And he loves me as much as I love him. He believes in me.

I'm damned lucky, is what I am.  And if I feel as if I haven't done anything with my life because things have taken a small unexpected turn, I'm just pathetic.  I'm lucky to have been there, for all of it.  For any of it.

Yet I'm still putzing around Dante's woods, feeling as if I've somehow come untethered. The straight up fact is that I have yet to find my feet after my divorce. It's ridiculous and embarrassing, but I still feel as if something has been taken from me and I'm not complete without it.  Not HIM, god no... just my sense of What Comes Next.  Of what my life means and where it's going.

I had hoped the move to a new place would jump start me somewhat, but it has not.  It has been an incredibly beneficial move for my son, and for my lifestyle, due to the lower cost of living overall here.  G is much happier here:  so much so that it makes the move completely worth it, regardless of where my own heart lies. He is surrounded by friends, and rattles off their names and what they did together at school every day.  It lightens my heart to hear and see him so happy.

But my heart is heavy. Something is still missing, and I am trying very hard not to give up on watching for it. I am reminded of a party we had for G at Halloween.  We got the invites out late, but we had high hopes, and made tons of food and decorated the house and everything... but only the kids next door came, the ones who come by every day. None of his new friends from school.  He kept going back to the door for over an hour, watching for them.  Finally, a time came when I knew they weren't coming. And I saw him reach that point, as well.... But unlike me, he wouldn't give in to it. He kept watching for them. He didn't want to give up hope, or at least the appearance of hope.  That's about where I am now:  standing at the door, watching for guests who  I strongly suspect aren't coming to my party.

Wow.  Is that pitiful, or what?  Don't worry, I recognize it.  I'm not wallowing in it.  I'm trying to put on a stiff upper lip and all, like G did. But even he gave up eventually and curled up on the sofa to watch The Nightmare Before Christmas with me.  He ran a fever that night, too... as if the disappointment he wouldn't express just had to find a way out of him.

I guess I need to find a way to work off my disappointment at life, so I can pick up where I am and start having fun again.  Nobody's coming to the party... but hey, there's lots and lots of food leftover!


One of the best things I do when I'm low is try to find something to laugh about and to share it with someone. Usually I laugh at myself. If I can't do that,  it's also good to find someone in a similar situation who is able to laugh at herself.  So I direct you to a wonderful entry on Hyperbole and a Half, all about the pitifulness of depression, which ironically cheered me up somewhat... and made me think maybe there was hope.  I'm not up to making a funny just now, but I'll let Hyperbole do it for me.

Meet the Blue Bandicoot

Greetings Scrawlspacers (both of you).

I've launched a new blog called Blue Bandicoot.  You can find it here:  http://bluebandicoot.blogspot.com/

The thinking is that I can leave the Bandicoot open to webcrawlers, which Scrawlspace is not.  This blog is public, but off the grid for the search engines because of its very personal nature in places.  On the Bandicoot, I can start fresh, rather than having to go back through and purge ancient entries of information about myself or other people I might not want the world to be able to search on Google. Its possible for someone to stumble across Scrawlspace, but not to find it when searching say... natural history museums.

Scrawlspace is not dead, but it will remain more private. For now I'm going to focus more on Blue Bandicoot.

Wildcare week two

I volunteered for the second time at Wildcare today. Bob and I hosted a party for several of his colleagues and grad students last night, and it was a late night with plenty of booze, so it was not easy to get up this morning and motivate myself to get dressed and go clean cages, but I'm glad I did. 

As luck would have it, a little bluebird flew into my windshield just about half a mile from the Wildcare entrance. It swooped across the road right in front of me and hit a glancing blow that left it flapping on the road, so I turned around and picked it up, poor little thing.  Such a beautiful little bird!  I expect he will recover, he was doing much better by the time I left for the day.  I suppose if you've got to hit a bird with your car, doing so on the way to the wildlife rehabilitation center is the way to do it.

This stint was much a repeat of the last one.  I cleaned cages,washed bowls,  filled water dishes... but this time I got to help feed the baby birds.  I got a syringe full of bird chow, and went around poking it into the wide open mouths  of some 30 or 40 little birds.  It is surprisingly gratifying, just feeding something that is so very very hungry! 



Some of my charges.  Five hungry baby starlings.

 

We had several bird escapes.  I left a cage open once and three fledgling starlings escaped.  A pair of finches flew the coop, quite literally, and had to be rounded back up.  It's fairly easy to catch them, because they will come begging for food when you get the syringe out.  Some of the starlings that had gotten loose in the outdoor enclosure would fly over and land right on my hands, begging for food as I was making my rounds.  They would perch on the edge of the food dish and gape at me every time I refilled the syringe.  I called them the screamers because they make so much noise when you come around to feed them, it makes your head ring.

A troublesome pair of squirrels,
 just before their escape

The most excitement, however, was the squirrel escape.  There were two very lively little fellows who insisted on hanging on the doors of their cage as I was trying to clean it.  As soon as I cracked the door open a bit, they were trying to nose their way out, and while I was poking one back in, his partner escaped.  There was a fairly interesting 10 minutes or so in which my partner and I ran around with nets and gloves, trying to corral him back into the cage.  Then once he was netted, he managed to weasle his way out of the net and we had the whole thing to do over again. 

My favorites are still the little Opossums.  There's one in particular that comes to investigate me .  I while I'm cleaning his cage.  I brought my camera today so I could get some better pictures, (with mixed results) and he was mighty curious about that, and when I had to put my head  into the cage to scrub the far back corner, he nosed right up to my face, checking me out.

Curious baby opossum checks out my camera.

Finally, when all the cages were cleaned and wheeled outside for some fresh air and sunshine, I got to go look around a bit in the baby room:  this is where hundreds of tiny baby mammals are housed, many of them in incubators, and fed every 3 to 4 hours.  The girls working there told me that they have more than 90 Opossum babies alone. Just 'possums!  I peeked into one incubator and saw the world's most adorable, tiny baby skunks.  I like working with the birds, but I hope someday to be able to feed the little mammals, too.

They don't all make it, of course. Two little birds died in their cages this morning. But so many more survive than would otherwise because of Rondi and her amazing operation. It was well worth getting up and giving a few hours of my time -- even with a hangover -- to help out.

As I w as leaving, Rondi asked me if I would take a pair of gulls out to the lake and release them, so I had the pleasure of getting to see a couple of our charges return to the wild. I shot a little video of the release, and felt good all the way home.

That Darn Dog

It's not Roxy this time... it's Kobi.

I can not keep Kobi in the yard. I put her out the back door when I'm leaving for work and BOOM, she gets to the front porch before I do.  She makes this funny little whimpering sound right before she climbs over the fence, so I can hear her escaping, even as I'm locking the back door.  It's so frustrating, because I know what's coming next...

The chase. 

View of my rearview mirror, with Kobi in hot pursuit.

This used to be cute, but it's escalating into a problem I'm not sure what to do about.  Once  Kobi is out, she's impossible to call or to catch.  I don't even bother trying to corral her because I know she's not coming to me and if I try to catch her I run the risk of just chasing her further away.  When it doesn't matter if she's home right away, I just forget about it and wait for her to turn up on the front porch, or even to climb back over the fence and let herself into the garage.  But when she's out and I need to leave the house, it's a whole different story.

At first I could get in the car and call her and she would jump right in, thinking she was going for a ride.  Then she got wise to that and I had to actually start to back out of the driveway before she would come.  Finally I was reduced to cruising up and down the street with her running behind my car, stopping every few minutes to try to coax her in. But that is taking longer every day, as she is hip to the game and only gets close enough to taunt me before darting off again. 

Sometimes I get frustrated enough to just gun it and leave her in the dust.  Eventually she will quit chasing and go home.  But sometimes she follows me all the way to the main cross street, and I know from experience that she will not hesitate to chase my car out into traffic (she once crossed four lanes of morning traffic to follow me).  So if I can't shake her within half a block, I have to turn around and start over.

This morning I left her standing in the middle of the street when I went to work.  There was a work-crew across from our house that was cutting limbs out of the power lines, and she was a little shy of passing their big, noisy equipment.  But by the time I'd come home for lunch, however... she had gotten over all that.

When I tried to leave, she chased me all the way to the busy cross street, whereupon I turned around and headed back the way I'd come.  We proceeded – her chasing, me stopping every 20 yards or so – back down the street, past our house and all the way to the cross street on the opposite end of the block.  Still no luck.  So I turned around and returned to the house, planning on getting out and hoping she would be fooled into thinking I was "just getting home" and run to me. 

No such luck.  Finally, I resigned myself to just gunning it and leaving her in the street again, so I got in and started to back out my car. 

By this time, the tree crew is cracking up completely.  Can't say that I blame them... it is evident who's in charge here.   As I pulled out this last time, one of the men stopped his work and crossed the street, calling and sweet-talking Kobi, trying to entice her.  I rolled down my window and told him, thanks for the effort, but there was no way he was going to be able to catch her.  He laughed and said "I'm not trying to catch her!  I'm just trying to buy you some time to get away!"

Sigh. Well, it worked, at least.

Tonight, it looks like I'll be hooking up the electric fence... again.  

Wildcare

For Mother's Day, I gifted myself with something I've been meaning to do for several years:  I volunteered at Wildcare. 

I've mentioned it here before:  Wildcare is a wildlife rehabilitation center out near Noble, run by an amazing husband and wife team.  They take in injured and orphaned wild animals of all kinds (well, not exotics or pets), nurse them back to health, and release them into the wild again.  I have a huge amount of respect for what they do, and the focus and hard work it takes to keep on doing it.  Because the animals need care around the clock, and every day of the year, no matter what the weather is like, or how you're feeling or what you might rather be doing.  In baby season they  might have 100 baby squirrels, rabbits, racoons, 'possums and birds to feed, so it takes a lot of hands to get all that work done.

Hungry "baby" crow

And now my hands are helping.  I spent three hours on Sunday morning in the Bird Room, cleaning cages.  It's not glamorous by any stretch.  There's a lot of bird poop involved, some of which can just be wadded up with the old newspaper and thrown out, but some of which has to be scraped off the towels lining the bottom of the cages so it doesn't nasty up the washing machine.  Some birds make a lot of poop.  And some birds, like the crows, eat icky stuff like fish heads and mouse parts. 

Still, I enjoyed interacting with the animals.  There was a trio of juvenile crows who looked like full-grown crows but still begged for food every time I got near the cage.  There were tiny little woodpeckers that hang upside down from the roof of their cage, or cling to the sides, which are draped in towels to give them a nubby surface to climb on.  There were baby jays and mockingbirds and finches. There was a grackle that had lost both his eyes to an infection. There was a fluffy baby barred owl and a baby hawk, both of which looked like they'd been pulled backwards through a hedge.  That's just the way baby raptors look – an unlovely beginning for birds that will be so regal and beautiful as adults.

Curious, adorable baby possum

Every 30 minutes, all the bird babies have to be fed.  The woman running the bird room would stop whatever she was doing and go from cage to cage, feeding each gaping baby bird with whatever specialized bird chow they required.  She used a syringe topped with a short length of rubber tubing to get the food down into their little gullets.  There was a whole nest of tiny, ratty-looking baby starlings in an incubator and every time she opened the door  all the babies would start screaming and begging.  She poked bits of fish or fruit into the crows' mouths, too.  And after she had fed all the little mouths, she set the timer and went back to cleaning cages until DING!  Time to feed the babies again.

Unhappy adult possum!

I also cleaned cages for a pair of young squirrels, an adult opossum, and several baby 'possums.  The baby 'possums are the cutest things in the world.  They are curious and fearless and would pad over to me to investigate when I opened their cages.  With their little black hands, bright eyes and sharp noses they're just adorable.  But the adult was a different story altogether.  She remained covered in her box, hissing and growling furiously at me the whole time I was working in her cage, and when I lifted the box to take a peek at her, she was drooling and wild-eyed, hating me.  They are wild animals, after all.  And even the cute little baby 'possums need to grow up with a healthy fear of humans, so we're not supposed to handle them unnecessarily.  

When I got home I was utterly exhausted.  The work isn't hard, but there's a lot of bending and stooping, and it was three hours of non-stop physical work, which I don't honestly do very often.  Also, sad to say, I'm not as young as I was, and all that bending is rough on my back. 

Nevertheless, I found it very rewarding, and promised to be back again this coming Sunday for another round of cage cleaning and dish washing.  If I'm a good volunteer, and prove to be reliable, I may get a chance to feed the baby squirrels and raccoons someday. 

Critters

There are a pair of finches making a nest in the Boston fern hanging on my porch.  The female is, of course, an unassuming shade of don't-notice-me brown.  The male has a lovely red head and breast.  They have been busily bringing bits of grass and twigs and plunging them down into the heart of this potted fern for the past several days.  When I come and go, I generally find them both perched on the string of Christmas lights that is still, shamefully, circling our carport - watching from a distance as I pass.

I call them Mister and Missus.  They are so small and sweet and adorable.  I'm glad to have them in my fern. 

I was concerned at first as to how I would manage to water the fern without dousing the nest, but a facebook friend of mine told me she had the same situation and had gotten one of those glass watering globes that you fill with water and then plunge into the soil.  Good idea!  So I'll do that next week.

I love backyard wildlife.  I'm such a kid.  At our old house on 40th street, my garden was the home of an enormous brown toad we called "Old Joe."  He had burrowed down into the soft earth of my raised squash bed, and came out at night, or when I watered enough to flood his burrow.  He was hug and fat and we loved seeing him.  I haven't had toads in my yard since then, which I think is a shame.

I have mice.  The dogs chase them around the woodpile (i.e. large, unsightly pile of limbs fallen from the sycamore tree that I have piled next to the shed) at night.  Sometimes they catch one.

When I lived in North Carolina, near the forest, there were hundreds of gabillions of frogs and toads.  Tree frogs filled the night air with their calls, and there were loud-mouthed frogs too tiny to see in the grass around the pond, and giant GaLUMPHing bullfrogs and lots of toads that came up on the patio at night to eat the june bugs.  A horrible little boy lived next door for awhile who used to kill them for fun.  I always gave him the evil eye when I caught him sneaking up on one of MY toads.  What kind of child kills a toad on purpose?  I future serial killer, I'm guessing. I'll be reading about that kid in the news one day. Mark my words.

One of our educators at the museum told me I can go catch toadlets in the spring and relocated them to my garden, as long as I provide them a water source, like a wide shallow dish, and a place to hide.  So I'll be making a trip to the stream alongside the railroad tracks in a few weeks, to pick up some new garden tenants.  They can eat the bugs on my broccoli.

I get these caterpillars on my broccoli that are wreaking havoc.  They are exactly the color of broccoli leaves, so you can be looking right at them and not see them at first.  but they're there... munching away.  I've taken to spraying the leaves vigorously with the hose when I water to blast the little buggers away.  I can't kill them.  They're kind of cute, in a fat green caterpillary sort of way. I just pick them of and toss them out of the garden.  It's probably worse for them than squishing, because they probably starve to death, but it's easier on my conscience. 

Changes?

I'm considering a change... a few changes, in fact. 

First of all, I'm going to start the paperwork required to take back my maiden name.  I want my own identity back.  So Jin and I are going to the county clerk's office tomorrow and we're picking up the paperwork. She wants her name back, too. 

At first I kept my ex's name because I thought it was important to Grayson for us to have the same name.  And it was at first. But he's older now and I think he can understand why I would want my own name back.  It's time, I think.

Also, I'm considering a job change.  I realized, in talking to my wise and perceptive friend Jin, that I am a bit burned out here.  I love the museum, but, as Jin said "you've done everything there is to do there."  And I realized... yeah.  I kind of have.  At least in this position.  All my press releases are boiler plates that I just drop in the new dates and times.  I've covered all the curators' research projects at least once, some several times, and a 20-year study just doesn't ignite the same spark the second or third time I have to frame it up on the page.

So I've been sniffing around a bit today.  Even applied for a few.  I haven't done that in years.  (With the exception of the vet tech job at Free to Live recently, but that doesn't really count)  I need something to shake up my brain in a good way for a change... and a new job changes your perspective on just about everything.

Rain, Cattle and Creosote

Rain!  Glorious Rain!  I was beginning to think we'd never see it again.  I can almost hear my lawn sighing with relief. 

Utter downpour today, and so welcome.  Whatever Christian or Pagan gods you worship, thank them for me.  From the bottom of my dry little roots, I am grateful for the rain.

The downpour did make driving to and from my aunt's house something of an adventure, but it didn't matter... it was RAIN. 

Easter.  I'm not a big fan of easter.  I'm sure I've mentioned that before.  I love my family and enjoy other holidays when we all get together.  I have no idea why I'm biased against Easter.  But it's something of a chore.  I have always considered opting out.  But my mother would be quite put out with me, and really there's no good reason for it, so I go. 

It's one of the few times during the year that I see my grandmothers.  I hereby vow to make an effort to see them more.  Each time I do see them, they hug me tight and tell me they think of me often, and I believe that they do.  So I told them each that I will call them next week and set a date to have each of them over individually.  I don't know why I haven't.  Inertia, I suppose.  Laziness?  Maybe that's closer to the mark.

But I'll remedy that.  I will. 

In the meantime... it has rained virtually all day.  I would love for it to continue to rain all night. What's better than sleeping through a rainstorm? When I was a kid, we spent a lot of weekends at my uncle's farm in St. Louis, Oklahoma.  I slept upstairs, at one end of a long room that ran the length of the cabin, next to a window.  The roof met in a peak overhead, and though the entire interior roof was finished in cedar shingles, the outer roof was corrugated tin.  The rain was wonderful up there.  Particularly when you could open the window and smell the air-- cow manure and grass and creosote and sun-heated dust and rain.  It's a combination that says Oklahoma to me.

At night I would lay in my bed with the window open and listen to coyotes howling, or the low drumming of the oilwell pumps scattered around the property.  In the morning it was cows lowing and birdsong.  If I could bottle and sell the sense of peace and well being those smells and sounds imparted, I'd be a wildly wealthy woman.

Trees I Have Loved

Earth Day!  It's actually kind of  pity that we felt it necessary to name a day to remind ourselves that we're indebted to and dependent upon the planet we live on. But I guess it's a positive step.  Today I'm thinking about the bits of Earth that I have lived on, known and loved in my lifetime.  Here's a composite picture of the mighty, mighty maple tree that grows next to Bob's house.  It is my favorite, favorite tree in all of Norman.

I'm an Oklahoma girl.  I guess you are always embued with the natural spirit of the place you come from.  My ex husband is from El Paso TX, and always had a special affinity for the desert, which to me always looked forbidding and abandoned.  But the wide open sky, red rock and scrappy trees of Oklahoma will always feel like home to me.  There's something so tough about the desert.  It's a hard place, because it has to be.  Oklahoma's tough, too, but not as hard.  Here the land ... and some of the people ... have a sort of self-deprecating "aw shucks, nuthin' much" attitude that hides a wealth of wonder.

As Oklahomans, we know that our environment doesn't have that much of a dramatic nature to distinguish it.  Our land is flat, but not as flat as Kansas (which some students at MIT did a study on a few years ago and determined that it was, in fact, flatter than a pancake).  We've got a lot of rivers, but not a lot of big, impressive rivers.  Some of them flow mostly through a layer of sand, or dry up completely in the brutal summers. Our mountains are short, lumpy and really, really old.  Our lakes are mostly manmade. Our trees are largely scrubby, twisted and not much to look at.

Yet the whole adds up to a landscape that is incredibly diverse, if unassuming.  Salt flats and sand dunes, piney woods and desert scrub, granite mountain and tall grass prairie.  None of it with the sweeping drama of MGM, but something special, nonetheless.

When I was in school in North Carolina I was amazed at the forest.  All those trees!  And their trees grew so much taller than our trees.  Trees of the same species would be twice the height in NC as in OK.  I guess with ample water, and without the wind raging up from the southeast all the time to keep them hunkered down, North Carolina's trees felt free to just stretch out and keep on stretching.  I loved to walk in the woods there when the wind was blowing hard up above.  Below all was peace, but you could hear the wind rushing through the canopy above, and if you placed your hands on the trunk of a pine tree, you could feel it sway, all the way to the roots.


In Oklahoma I was always partial to the scrappy blackjack oak.  post oak.  scrub oak, Crosstimbers... they go by  many names.  Pioneers hated them because they were virtually impassable, with an understory thick with greenbriar and venomous snakes.  They're useless for timber, and a little bit funny-looking, with their twisted branches like crooked fingers and their black bark and dark, tough leaves.There was one on my uncle's farm that grew a little way out into a pasture by itself, where a big owl lived.  If you were lucky you'd hear it, or maybe even see it swoop overhead when you went walking at night near the tree.  The tree it roosted in was a dense, squat thing, black against the sky and scarred with broken limbs, scabbed bark and dead patches, but still hanging on.  I always thought it looked old and wise.  I wonder if it still stands.


On the outskirts of Norman, there's this tree I've been watching for a year. It was dead when I met it, last November, but dead in a pretty striking spectacular way:  black arms against a cloudy sky, and full of crows.  I went back in March and it was much diminished, limbs broken and collapsed, the bark stripping away to reveal the gray wood underneath. Today I went back and it is almost completely without bark, though it doesn't seem to have lost any more major limbs.

November 2010

February 2011

Today

When I was a kid, my dad planted a willow tree outside my window.  And as it grew, he carefully trained a few of its branches to make a comfy seat for me.  By the time I was nine or ten, the tree was big enough to climb, and I spent hours in that leafy seat, reading books or just being with the tree.  Then one year I broke a branch, swinging from it, and the tree got sick.  Beetles or disease got to it, and it began to die.  Finally, my dad had to have it cut down, and I couldn't watch.  After they carried it out, all cut to pieces, I went out and sat on the stump and cried. I felt like I had lost an old friend... and worse, that I was somehow responsible for the tree's death, because of that branch I broke. That I had betrayed my tree in some way.  I still have a strip of my willow's dried leaves pressed in a scrap book in a box in my garage, and pictures of my tree in its last days before we cut it down.

I wish I could have planted a willow for Grayson, that he could be climbing and loving now.  We did plant a sycamore at the house on 20th street, but even though it grew fast, it was still not big enough to climb when we left. Maybe soon we'll be able to plant one together.

Anyway, it's Earth Day.  And I'm thinking about trees. 

Kobi Returns and other night adventures

Last night as Bob was leaving, Kobi and Roxy streaked out the front door into the night. Within 15 minutes or so, Roxy came back, but Kobi was still nowhere to be found when I locked up and went to bed. I don't like to leave her out like that, but I know it's silly to wait up or go looking, and she'll come home and i'll find her waiting on the front porch in the morning.

At 3:30 I woke up and got up to check the front porch, figuring maybe she had scratched at the door and that's what woke me. No Kobi. I checked out back. No Kobi. A little worried, I went back to bed. Tucked my feet down under the covers and.... there she was.

My little dog had come home in the night, climbed the fence into the back yard, come into the garage through the doggie door, pushed open the door to the kitchen, let herself in, and put herself to bed. Clever girl.

After a chilly and gray day, the evening turned warm and moist and wonderful tonight. I went for a walk and smelled the trees and watched mockingbirds swooping through the evening air. It reminds me of something, somewhere else, another time. It reminds me of North Carolina, I think: the smell of the trees. I remember certain evenings there, standing in the forest, which was everywhere, all around and through the town of Chapel Hill, and smelling the trees. One night in particular I was at a party at somebody's house out in the woods. It was October. Just beginning to chill. I was with a group of people and we decided to go on to another party, so we all went out onto the deck to load into our cars. There was a guy in the group and we were doing that subtle, complex ritual you do at the beginning of a new relationship, when you know there's a mutual attraction, and you're both trying to engineer a way to be close, to touch, to share something. He was walking just behind me, and as we stepped off the deck he said "look at the stars!"

I looked up, and I had to look waaaay up, through the sharp ring of pine trees that circled the house, that circled the black, shining piece of sky straight above us. It was alive with stars. I leaned back and he let me lean on him, and that moment – with the holy brightness of the stars and the ring of black trees, the smell of the forest, the cool of the autumn air and the warmth of him at my back... that moment was one of the best moments of my life. Just then.

I think of it sometimes when I smell trees.

Driving Forward, Looking Back

When I was up in the weeeee hours of the morning this morning, I did some hard thinking.
I do a lot of hard thinking in the wee hours. What else is there to do?

I think over the past couple of years, since my divorce, I've pretty much been in a holding pattern. Certainly for the last year I've been sort of coasting, letting things happen, taking it easy.

Lately, however, I have a sense of Life Passing Me By. I look at where I've been and where I am and realize I have no sense of where I go from here. At present I have no real future... just tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

Maybe it's because when I was married I felt like my future – our future together – was more or less mapped out, I didn't think about it much then. Since then I have had a sense of my future being erased, or destroyed, and for over a year all I could see ahead was rubble. But now I see nothing. And there's nothing left behind me when I look back. Certainly there is nowhere back there for me to go. And no reason to cling to it like a shipwreck survivor.

I exist, in one sense, in a Tabula Rasa. A clean slate.

What I'm learning in talking to others is that most people, at some point in their lives, find themselves starting over. I didn't know that until I found myself doing it. But the more I talk with people, the more I see amazing dips and curves and right angles in their lives. Mine is no different. It is just mine.

So I declared this the Year Zero. And set myself some simple touchpoints to guide me. I thought "I need to know what I want from this new life I'm offered, so I can begin now to create it, not just to take what happens." So here is what I came up with. I'll call them The Nine:

1) I want to feel good about myself: physically and emotionally.

2) I want to manage my relationship with alcohol, and with all potentially damaging extremes

3) I want to be financially secure and independent

4) I want to build and maintain a supportive network of friends

5) I want to have a variety of interesting experiences that enrich my life and the life of my son

6) I want to be creative and productive

7) I want a home of my own

8) I want to live in a world in which I seek ways to say a hopeful yes to my heart's desires, not reasons to say a fearful no

9) I want to love and be loved.

Those are the Nine. And every day I think I need to ask myself "What have I done today to further the Nine?"

And finally, I think there is a tenth principle, but since it's one of negativity, not a want, I hold it separate.

10 is "No regrets. No guilt." In other words, my past is behind me and I am who I am. It's okay to seek out the life I want for me.

I realize Grayson does not figure in this list. Of course, he's central to everything in my life. And of course I want a happy, safe and fulfilling life for him as well. But this is the list for myself, so I kept the focus on me and what I want. I think if I can stay true to this list, and just keep moving forward, I'll get somewhere good.

Starting Today.

I can't sleep. I mean, I really can't sleep. It's 4 a.m. and I've done little better than doze since I turned out my light at 10. And the hell of it is, it's all from good intentions.

I decided to try to kick my weight loss and bikini-plan into a higher gear by knocking off the sauce for a week or two. I've been counting calories, and hitting the gym in the mornings a few times a week, but still not moving things along like I want to. It's discouraging because if there are two things I hate to do, they're diet and exercise. Oh, I'm happy to spend the day working like a beast turning over the garden. But I really and truly hate grinding away on an elliptical machine, for even the deadly 20 minutes I do on my super-speedy morning workouts. And just the thought of dieting makes me feel deprived and grouchy.

So naturally I decide to take it one step further and deprive myself of one of the primary pleasures of life: wine.

Problem is, I'm a more or less chronic insomniac even with two glasses of wine on board of an evening. Without it, I'm just sitting in the dark like an owl, making up shit to worry about: Global warming, the plight of the sea turtles, dogs that died 20 years ago, why I had trouble making friends in sixth grade, why I can't remember the ending of Villette. You name it. At last, to save my sanity, I get up and eat a bowl of cereal and sit in the living room for awhile, hollow-eyed and exhausted, until I'm able to quiet my interior monologue enough to go back to bed. Likely I'll fall asleep around 5:30 and be a zombie when the alarm goes off -- rudely -- an hour later.

I'm not sure the few hundred calories worth of wine are worth it, frankly. But I remain steadfast. I have clothes I can't wear, and bathing suit season -- horror of horrors -- is fast approaching. The stark unavoidable fact of my middle-aged body in a bathing suit is sobering in and of itself, without the extra cottage cheese.

In my callow youth I imagined myself aging gracefully, accepting each line and wrinkle with equanimity. But the reality of it is much more distressing. In my 20s, when I gave lip service to aging gracefully, I always imagined that I would have achieved a certain "maturity" by my 40s ... that simply failed to materialize. Nor could I realize in my 30s that my sense of being a grown-up had gone as far as it ever would. Mentally, I never aged beyond about 34, and let me tell you, for 34, my body has gone all to hell. I didn't realize, see, what probably any woman over 40 could have told me. No matter how mature I become, no matter how experienced or wise or worldly my accumulated years might make me, I'm never going to feel any older than about 34. Okay, a tired, achey and jaded 34, but when I look in the mirror, 34 is about what I expect to see.

Imagine my shock, then, on confronting the tired 44-year-old broad that turns up in my bathroom with me every morning. Those roots! That cellulite! That... thing under the chin! Why, it's enough to drive even a mature, grown up woman to drink. For me, it's falling off a log.

So, the upshot is... I'm awake. At what is now turning up to be 4:21 a.m. Worrying about whether tis nobler in the mind to sacrifice the nightly glasses of wine to the gods of bikini or just chuck it in.

Think I'll go lie in bed and worry about it.

In Which I Make a Daring Rescue

Thursday evening I was feeling kind of bummed out after work. I'd been to the pharmacy to pick up my meds and was told that the insurance company had "updated" their formulary and decreed my medicine "out of formulary," thereby jacking the price up from $30 to $60. This forces me to take the generic version, which is only $10, but works about half as well. That would be bad enough if we were talking about an allergy medication, but this is an anti-depressant, so I knew I was looking at near future of increased bouts of sadness and despair.

Enough to bring anyone down, I think. And it's doubly frustrating because there's nothing you can do. There's not even anyone to yell at. It's not the pharmacist's fault. It's not the fault of the guy on the phone from the insurance company (though I did give him a healthy dose of the rough side of my tongue, I assure you). It's not my doctor's fault. The people who made this decision did it in some shadowy, no doubt richly appointed board room somewhere, based solely on the output of their stock portfolio. It's just maddening. You can get to anyone to tell them what their decision has done you. I can't afford $60 a month for these pills. But can I afford to be depressed and crazy more? I have a kid to raise, a life to lead!

I have decided to just ask my doctor to increase my dosage. I don't necessarily need the increase, at least of the brand name medication I don't. But I know I'm not at my maximum dosage, so there's room for an increase, which should make up for the 20% drop in active ingredient allowed in the generic.

I know generics are supposed to be "Just as effective." And I always used to believe that, until I made the switch one time and was longing for death two weeks later.

Anyway, I told you all that to explain why I was feeling a bit low after work on Thursday. I went out to sit on the patio and enjoy the late afternoon sunshine and read a book. I was sipping my wine and reading peacefully when I heard a ruckus in the limbs of the crepe myrtle bush at my back. The ruckus became a scrambling and then the dogs came to attention and leapt at the bush.

A squirrel had apparently missed its footing and fallen through the branches. The dogs were after it in a flash and the poor thing panicked and took off across the patio, practically under my feet! It actually stopped under a chair in front of me and then was off again like a shot, but it ran the wrong way and got itself cornered between a planter and the porch steps.

At this point I realilzed the poor squirrel was truly in mortal danger, and I jumped up from my chair to try to call off the dogs, but just then the squirrel made a desperate run for the yard, right between Roxy's feet, and she had it.

She snatched it up and made for the yard with it, with Flower right alongside her and me in hot pursuit. I snatched up one of the dozens of fallen sycamore branches that are currenty littering my yard and started wailing away at her, trying to get her to let the poor thing go. Twice she dropped it, but snatched it up again before the squirrel could right itself. And then she dropped the poor thing again and Flower caught it. I switched my attack to FLower.

At last Flower let the squirrel drop and I stood over it, swinging my sycamore branch to keep them at bay. I thought the squirrel would run off, but it seemed frozen, its little sides heaving, just standing in the grass at my feet.

I didn't know what to do. I couldn't leave it to go get a towel or box to put it in, because the dogs would grab it immediately. I didn't dare try to pick it up bare-handed. Fortunately about that time Grayson came out to see what all the shouting was about and he helped me out by corralling the dogs into the house and then watching the squirrel while I went into the garage for a box.

The little thing didn't move a whisker all this time. It just stood there, as if it had frozen stiff in the act of running: with one leg out behind it. Grayson said he was afraid the leg was broken, and it may have been, I don't know. When I tried to pick it upwith a towel, it did sort of hobble away and bury itself in a pile of leaves next to the shed, but then it didn't try to escape again when I scooped it up the next time.

It's a young squirrel, which probably explains its poor choices in the melee. I put it in the box with some old baby blankets of Grayson's, and didn't see any blood. Amazingly enough, I don't think the dogs punctured it anywhere, but I do think it was hurt in all the dropping and snatching, but not seriously. Mostly just scared half to death. It held very very still, with its face buried in the blankets, and didn't try to escape or make any move to defend itself, even when I gave in to temptation and petted its soft little sides. I let Grayson pet it once, too, and then I closed it up and we left it alone.

We kept it in the box overnight, with a heating pad underneath to help keep it warm and ward off shock, and some tiny little peanut butter sandwiches and a bit of water. Before I went to bed, I checked on it and saw that it had nibbled on some of the peanutbutter, and was curled up tight and sleeping. On Friday morning I drove the little guy out to Wildcare to be taken care of. The woman who checked him in reached in and picked him up to check him out and again I saw no blood on him. He squeeked and struggled, so I think he'll make a fine recovery.

I'm a hero!

This morning, however, I was out on the patio and heard a scrambling as yet another juvenile squirrel made a miscalculation in the crepe myrtle. He slipped, scrambled, saved himself, and then made an awkward leap to the porch roof, an equally graceless scramble across the cable to the tree and a fairly lumbering climb out of sight. Must be a litter-mate of our rescued squirrel. Lord help him.

A Brief Inventory

I won't say that it necessarily indicates a lack of housekeeping skills on my part, but here's an inventory of what's on my living room coffee table this morning.

• 14 magazines


• A pile of loose notebook paper


• A spiral bound notebook


• A popsicle stick


• a plastic zipper bag filled with colored pencils


• Assorted loose colored pencils


• An electric pencil sharpener


• A hand pencil sharpener


• A glass egg roughly the size of a quail egg


• two remote controls


• A Nintendo DSi


• a blue "gertie"inflated ball


• two pairs of reading glasses, one of which has only one leg


• two strings of mardi gras beads


• A Weight Watchers cookbook


• A folded cloth napkin. Possibly clean. Or not.


• A Webelos Scouts neckerchief


• A bottle of hand lotion


• A bendy straw


• A deck of cards


• Three "Gogos" stickers


• A tin collectors box full of "Gogos"


• Three envelopes of mystery mail


• A plastic box containing almost exactly 10 pounds of marbles


• nail clippers


• A stack of coasters (these, ironically, are at the farthest possible distance from anywhere a person might reasonably be expected to set down a drink)


• A blue paper notice alerting me that the city will be turning off my water from 10 to 2 today for water line repairs


• Two packets of vegetable seeds (corn and okra)


• Instruction booklet for the Cox television system installed several months ago


• A laminated card with a passcode on it to some math website for Grayson


• A manga comic book


• Two paperbacks: one children's, one adults


• A letter from Grayson to his friend in Houston, unposted


• A box of "pop-its" snappers


• An opened package of "pop-its" snappers, leaking sawdust


• A rock


• The plastic cover to a Capri Sun straw


• Two CD cases for audio books: One adult, one children


• A 4 x 4 sample of knitting


• A Blasters album (vinyl) in its sleeve (thanks Michael!)


• A cd with collected songs by James McMurtry (thanks Konrad!)


• A Calvin and Hobbes book


• A large picture book of archaeological findings


• A Yu-gi-Oh card


• A Boomerang gift card (cool!)


• a torn piece of the back cover of a pocket folder, stuck to the table surface with some sticky substance


• My netbook (until I picked it up to post this)


• Three candles in class containers (These actually belong here)


• One candle, still in wrapping (this does not)


• A wooden box filled with glass beads


• A Swiss army knife


• scattered pencil shavings


• A glass holiday coaster that is meant to hold a photograph but doesn't have one in it


• A half-full box of colored pencils


• An emory board for foot calluses (in my defense, I was not using it to sand down my feet in the living room, I was using it to shorten my acrylic nails so I could use my hands again)

That's it. It's possible that some excavation could reveal further treasures, but that's all for now.

You can draw your own conclusions.

Spring Springs

I spent a lot of Spring Break feeling less than springy. The weather was iffy most of the time, and yet I still suffered from the sore throat and nasal issues associated with the spring allergy season. I'm pretty sure that all the red cedar in Oklahoma pollinated that week.

I was also a little blue because I didn't have my kiddo with me much. From Friday through Wednesday he was with my folks at Lake Texoma, and from Thursday through Sunday he was with his dad. It's funny how I can transition from "oh boy! Time all to myself!" to "I want my boy back!" so quickly. I did get an overnight at the lake on Tuesday night, however, and the weather was cooperating pretty well.

The big news for G about the lake is driving the golf cart. I have to admit, it's a pretty fun little thing to drive around. But this time, for the first time, Grayson was able to really and truly drive all on his own. Nobody needed to remind him about keeping his speed steady or not slamming on the brakes or oversteering. My dad said it was like all the lessons and coaching came together and clicked, and he was driving like a champ. I was so proud of him, and it was clear he was proud of himself.

I keep saying it, but it keeps being true... my boy is growing up. I'm not sure how to feel about this. Of course I want him to grow up and mature and be an independent, responsible person, but who will sit in my lap when he's grown up? My lap likes that.
It makes me understand how it is that otherwise perfectly normal adult humans go absolutely goofy over their grandchildren.

Finally, by Sunday I was over my cold and/or allergy bout enough to get outside. The weather, after dithering a bit during the first part of the week, seemed to decide to settle on spring after all, and Sunday was gorgeous. I went out to "just look" at the plants in the nursery and came home with the back of my car full of flowers, veggies and herb plants, ready to go into the garden.

I know I'm running a risk, planting this early, but I just couldn't help myself. After days indoors, and a really nasty winter, I needed some DIRT. So I spent the afternoon digging and weeding, raking and planting, happy as a toad in the garden. Now almost all my veggies (with the exception of the squash) are in, and I'm watching the nighttime temperatures carefully each day to see if I need to run outside and snuggle any tomatoes to keep them warm through the night. I'll do what I have to do. I need gardening!

Strangely, my gardening bug coincided over the break with a sudden and irresistible need to get Girlie, so I went out and got a new set of acrylic nails put on. I realize that this is the height of folly at this time of year, because fake nails and gardening just do not go together. But I did it, I just needed a little pretty in my life. So now I'm out in the garden in my gloves, trying to turn over a new section of brutal Oklahoma clay full of die-hard bermuda grass runners... without peeling off a fingernail. Noone ever said pretty was smart, sadly. So far so good, however. I've managed not to rip my nails off, and the garden did get turned and planted.

I wish I had a picture of my own Big Mama I could post here. I'll have to look for one and scan it in. Every time I plant my garden I think of her. She kept an enormous garden in the yard of her house when I was growing up, and she worked it all herself until she was well into her 90s. I can see her in my mind's eye, in the pocketed pinafore apron and sunbonnet that my mom made for her every year, leaning on her hoe handle and picking off tomato worms or turning over a bed of potatoes or filling a basket with okra pods. I wish she could see me now. I wish she could tell me what to do about the vine borers that get my squash every year, and how to get my onions to grow like hers did: fat and sweet and delicious. I feel close to her when I have my hands in the dirt, and I miss her, then, too.

I laugh and tell Bob that I'm the person to know when the grid goes down, because I'll still be able to grow us food. It's not really true, though. I'm one of those bumbling urban gardeners who produces the $65 tomato every year: putting way more money and sweat into the garden than I probably receive in actual produce. I lose my squash plants to vine borers by the end of June and my tomatoes to spider mites or flower-end-rot by July. By the end of the season I've pretty much given up on about all but my peppers and mint, and am just hoping for better results next year. Most of my successes are accidental: like the crop of cucumbers I put in -- in JULY -- two years ago that took off and scrambled over my whole front flower bed, shooting out so many footlong cukes that I took to giving them to everyone I knew. Or the grape tomato a few years ago that shaded out or strangled everything around it, but showered me with sweet, delicious thumb-sized tomatoes all summer long. Last year I had an explosion of lettuce, next to a crop of radishes that were all tops and no bottoms.

We'll see what surprises I get this year.

In Which I Am Roundly Rejected by a Weiner Dog

As I was one of the ones staying in Norman during Spring Break, I gladly agreed to be the pet-watcher both for Bob's cat Jpeg and for Michael's weinee-dog, Daisy. It's an easy gig: just show up once a day, check the food and water supplies, and provide a little human companionship.

Well, it was easy for Jpeg, at least. But Jpeg knows me. Iarrive, he comes running, I let him in, let him out, top up the food and water bowls, a rub on the noggin and I'm out. Daisy, not so much.

Daisy, the sweet little weiner dog, morphs into Devil Dog from Hell.


She. does. not. like. me.

She dislikes me so much that she actually ran up into the windowsill by the front door and pooped. That's how much she doesn't like me. That's a lot of dislike. She dislikes me so much that just two days into it I got relieved of my pet-sitting duties after Michael heard her growling over the phone when he called to see how we were getting on together.

Who would think a tiny little weiner dog could pack so much rejection?

Changes on the wind

Yesterday, after my wander in the Dark Wood of the Soul on Friday night, I decided that part of Taking My Life in Hand should involve making more of an effort about how I look. I do this periodically, I call it Being Pretty. I'm not very good at it. But I don't want to turn into the Crazy Dog Lady, so I do what I can to step up the effort.

I went out and got new acrylic nails. I don't know why to me this is the Icon for being Well Tended. But it's just something that speaks to me of the Woman who Cares How She Looks. They're pretty, I must say, if completely unnatural looking. My fingertips still hurt from all the grinding and sanding, but they'll get back to normal in a day or two, and eventually I'll get the hang of using my hands again. See, the fake nails are thick, and you can't pick up things like coins, credit cards or slips of paper from a flat surface with them. They're also filed so smooth that scratching with them is a singularly unsatisfying activity. But these are the drawbacks. The upside is that they are pretty, and hopefully will make my middle-aged hands look a little less like those of a farmer. I have big hands, not very dainty, and getting knuckly and lined as I get older.

Aging is a bitch.

I hit the gym yesterday, as well, determined to make good on all those times I swore I was going to lose ten pounds.

Dressing is hard, too, when I'm trying to be Pretty. I have no real taste, I think. I would be happy in an oversized T-shirt, jeans and sneakers every day. I don't like to dress up and I don't like to dress too girly, so I'm at an immediate disadvantage. For pointers, I go out in public and I look around me to see what the Pretty Girls are wearing.

Well, here's the first problem. The real Pretty Girls are all 20 years younger than I am. So what they're wearing is probably the opposite of appropriate for me. Oh, it's probably what my ex husband is looking for. And no doubt it's what his current girlfriend is wearing. He used to tell me how awful my taste was. He hated certain colors that I gravitate toward, and once (shortly before we were divorced, not surprisingly) actually went through my closet and made piles: the things that I could definitely keep, the things that were negotiable, and the things that simply had to go. Needless to say, some of my favorite things were things that had to go. And the things that could stay were all pretty much things he had chosen, and/or were short and tight.

It's uncharitable to talk about him that way here. But it's a true story. The other truth is that I'm upset because of this new girl in Gray's life. Every time there's someone new he gets.... weird... secretive, strange. And then I find out about the new girl in some way, and she's always at least ten years younger than me... sometimes closer to 20. It makes me feel old, fat and ugly. This whole Pretty thing is partly because of her. And because even Bob told me last week that I "just don't give a shit" about how I look. I don't think he meant it meanly... but it just echoed what Gray used to say over and over. He once told me to "just try not to look like shit." I'm torn between making the extra effort to Be Pretty and just telling them all... the whole masculine gender.... to go to hell and embracing my inner Dog Lady.

So to keep her at bay, for now, at least... I have new nails, and gave myself a pedicure. And I am going to the gym. And yesterday I bought a pretty new shirt. I stopped short of buying one of the frilly ones everyone is wearing. But it does have flowers all over it.

Aging is, as I said, a bitch.

The Crazy Dog Lady Within

Lately I've been dissatisfied with Life. Maybe it' the spring(ish) weather... maybe it's something else. But I've been looking around lately and thinking "this is it? Really?"

It seems as though I'm always saying I'm going to do things that never get done. Write that book, buy that house... lose ten pounds. Train my dogs not to greet visitors so exuberantly that they are knocked over onto the front porch.

The other thing I keep saying I'm going to do that I never do is Take My Life in Hand... like I'm probably about to do now.

I worry that I've become Inert. That this period of relative peace and quiet following the turmoil of Divorce has become my way of life. That I have officially decided to settle for Good Enough. And what's wrong with that?

I'm afraid I'm just one step away from being that lady who lives alone with her dogs. That sad lady. Her house is a mess and she no longer makes any effort about how she looks because nobody sees her anymore. She gave up on Being Someone and now she just Is.

Of course, I can't let this happen to me, right? I have to take life by the throat and wring from it every last prescious drop. I have to LIVE.

Or maybe, like Dory says in Finding Nemo.... maybe all I really need to do is "just keep swimming, just keep swimming, just keep swimming, swimming, swimming.... what do we do? We swim, swim, swim."

Or maybe, if I'm going to be the Dog Lady, I should just set my sights on being the Best Damned Dog Lady I can. The world's doggiest Dog Lady. I'll wear funny hats and talk to myself, maybe.

No. No. I don't have an answer. I do think I'm restless for a reason, however. I do think maybe I've Settled, a bit... allowed myself to take the easy road, let things just happen, not make any choices. I like to think I'd Make the Bold Choice if I had a bold choice to make. I don't see any such laid before me. I see mild choices. Quiet choices. But I'm not blazing any new trails.

Last night, I found myself wandering the outskirts of Despair, and thought I'd better catch a cab out of there, so I sent text message SOSes to my friend Jin, who has a much firmer grip on the the throat of Life than I do... and to my friend Michael, who's a good listener and always takes my side.

Jin's message said "you got a minute to talk me down off the tower with my uzi?"

Michael's just said "where you?"

Within minutes, both lifelines were being hauled in. Jin called, laughing that even though her new phone didn't yet have my name associated with my number, she knew instantly who the message was from... me being her only friend with a penchant for clock towers and high powered automatic weapons.

Michael responded with the name of the pub where he was having a cold one before heading home to pack for his Spring Break family trip to Arkansas.

So I poured my heart out to Jin while driving with my dog in my lap to the pub. And Jin told me I was fine just the way I am, and Michael listened intently and took my side. And so, though I was a bit doggy (Kobi had to wait in the car, where she met lots of new friends as they came out of the pub), I was not alone. And there are people in the world who still think I'm funny and likeable and generally worthwhile, even when sometimes I don't.

And maybe that's what Living really is... just keeping in touch with those spider-threads of connection that hold you in time and space -- that keep you from drifting off in the world into sad, lonely dogginess. And maybe that's good enough, and I don't have to do Exciting Things or go on Adventures.

At least I hope so.

On Behaving Badly

G-rex was in trouble at school this week. I'm sure he'd be mortified if he knew I posted that here... but there it is. He was distracted, unfocused and ... downright rude.

I was utterly astonished.

I know no kid is a saint. Lord knows I wasn't. But it is so unlike Grayson to be any kind of discipline problem at all that I was completely bamboozled. And, naturally, like any good mom I assume that it's my fault.

Truly, one of the pitfalls of single parenting an only child is a blurring of the line between Adult and Kid. Most of the time Grayson and I live a pretty symbiotic lifestyle. There's not a lot of structure, and because I know him so well, maybe I let him say or do things that get him in trouble outside in the Real World where the line is harder.

This first manifested itself in troubles over language. Not that Grayson was using foul language. He doesn't (hasn't) pushed it that far. But he was watching these online videos featuring a comedian who used pretty bad language. Even when I was married, we didn't really try to protect G from curse words too much, we just made it abundantly clear that there were words he was not to use. We've really never had any problem with it.

I told him that there were circumstances in which cursing was appropriate, and when those circumstances arose, I expected him to curse accurately and with feeling. So, when he stubs his toe, for example, or loses all the data on his video game, he asks me "can I say a bad word?" and when I've granted permission, he utters a lusty "Shit!"

It makes me so proud.

But apparently he told one of his classmates about the aforementioned videos and the classmate got into trouble for looking them up. Whoops. He of course told his folks that Grayson told him about them, and now said classmate is not allowed to come over to my house.

This, too, is my fault.

But I digress. The problem of the rudeness is a new one, and though I think our peculiar relationship may have something to do with it, I don't think it's really the root cause. I don't know what it is. Maybe my boy is just reaching pre-adolescence and beginning to question authority?

Whatever the cause, I came down on him like a ton of bricks for it. I sat him down and read him the riot act and told him he would apologize to his teachers and straighten up and fly right. So far it seems to have made an improvement. Time will tell if it sticks.

It's hard to believe that my sweet little boy, who still likes to climb into my lap and hold my hand, will soon be a sullen, grumpy adolescent. I hope we both get through it okay. It scares the bejeezus out of me. I am a haphazard mom under the best of circumstances, I fear. And if things got tough, I'm not sure what I would do. I have no system in place for maintaining discipline because frankly, I've never had to. I tell Grayson if he needs to do something and he does it. If he whines I say "uh huh. Too bad. Do it." and he does it. I haven't experienced any kind of back-talk since he was three. If I scold him, he crumbles into tears and climbs into my lap to apologize. He spoils me rotten. If he certainly turns into the Bad Seed I'll be completely and utterly at a loss.

Not, as I said, that my child is an angel. He's just sensitive and eager to please for the most part. He also, however, doesn't get much asked of him. His chores are minimal, and I don't put a lot of heavy expectations on him. Maybe I should. But I don't.

The world is full of things you should do with or for your kids. Eat dinner together (does a meal on our laps in front of the television count?), limit TV time (is it okay if it's on but nobody's really watching it?); practice saving, spending and donating to charity (most weeks I forget even to give him his allowance, and he doesn't even notice); get involved with sports (gag) or some community activity (I'm sure we'll get around to that.... someday); be the adult (remember that thing about Grayson asking me if I wanted him to send me to my room?).

The one thing I can say I've been an unequivocal success at is loving him without condition. In that, at least, I've never faltered. Nor ever will. I comfort myself with that. one. thing.

Freight trains, dinosaurs, and second jobs

I had a job interview on Friday. No, I'm not leaving the museum, but I applied some time ago for part-time job as a vet technician for Second Chance animal sanctuary. They're a no-kill shelter for cats and dogs rescued from Animal Control.

I did the math and realized I haven't done any vet work in 19 years. I wish I could dig up some photos of me on the job at the old Timberlyne Animal Clinic in Chapel Hill in 1992. I'll see what I can dig up. Anyway... I learned it all from scratch on the job the first time, I figured I could pick it up again pretty easily, and I've been wanting to do some work that would "give back" to the community in some way. This way I could give back and get paid for it at the same time. I guess that sort of blows the whole concept of giving back, but at this stage in my life, it would be helpful to get paid to Do Good.

I met Jack, who runs the place, and the first thing he asked me was "Why on Earth do you want this job?"

I guess that should have been a clue that things were a bit off. But I talked with him for 15 minutes or so before I realized I was interviewing for something completely different than I thought I was. Somehow my resumé got put in the stack of interviews for a full-time office manager position, which of course I'm qualified to do... rather over-qualified, I like to think ... but there's no way I could manage and keep my current job, which Jack mentioned. It was at this point that I realized the mix up and told him I was there for the tech job.

"Ooooooh! Man!" He said, "I just hired a bunch of techs last week! You would have been perfect!"

Sigh. Well. The bad news is I didn't get the job. The good news is that I'm hopefully a shoe-in when another tech position opens up... whenever that is. In the meantime, I may try to get out there and do some volunteer work. The animals looked at me so eagerly when I drove up. They all seemed to be saying "Take me Home!" There was one black kitty in particular. He looked like Skeezix (the long-haired black cat Gray and I had that now lives with him), but he had one eye. I would name him Odin, and take pictures of him in a big slouchy hat.

I'm inspired to get a second job because I want to speed up the pay-off time on my debts. I paid off one big credit card bill with my tax refund, but I'd like to get all the rest of the debt paid off as soon as possible so I can get fit to buy a house in a couple of years. Last week Bob told me he got the official letter from his last creditor: he is now officially and completely debt free. I would like to know what that feels like. I started racking up debt in 1992 when I put lein on my parents' van to pay for my last semester of graduate school and I've never really paid it off. That loan got rolled into something else that got rolled into something else, and essentially I've been paying off one long loan since I was about 23. I'd say 20 years of debt is enough.

Things are busy and hectic right now, so I'm pretty glad at present that I don't have a second job. The one I have is wearing me out.

I pulled two twelve-hour days last week: Tuesday for a trade show for which at least I had good company (my compadre and dear friend Michael from the Fred Jones museum whose company always makes work light); and Thursday to emcee a Wine and Chocolate event that got postponed from the week before due to the crazy weather. This is the third "Wine and (fill in the blank)" event I've emceed, and though they are fun, they are exhausting. It's like being the host of a party, only with a microphone, and you have to be all smiley and chipper and jolly everyone along. It is fun, and it makes me feel like I must be really charming and witty, though probably people are just being nice. It wears me out, however, especially at the end of an already long and busy day.

Yesterday wasn't a twelve hour day, but it felt like one. We announced a new dinosaur at the museum, and I spent all afternoon shuttling reporters up to the vertebrate paleontology collection to interview the curator. (click here to learn more about the dinosaur!)Today was more of the same all through the morning, partly for the dinosaur news and partly for media previews of the new permanent exhibit we're building (Black Mesa).

All in all, the past week or so felt like a freight train. Heavy and moving fast. I'm afraid I no longer thrive on that sort of pace the way I did when I was younger. I like to stay busy, but I no longer have to prove how many flaming swords I can juggle. I'm old and wise enough now to realize that juggling flaming swords is highly overrated and exhausting, and everybody's way more interested in the swords than in your skill at juggling. In fact, mostly nobody notices you're juggling them at all unless you drop one.

I wanted to get more photos and stuff in this post, but it has taken me three days just to get it finished, so I'll leave it as is for now. I'm too tired to be witty or graphically interesting. I'll try to be wittier next time around.