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.