Alecto's Ophelia

2010 - Coming Home

The last 90 minutes of 2009 frizzled out while I was sleeping. When my contacts are fogged enough I'm stabbing myself with a needle every third stitch it's time to go to bed. I left the girls in front of the television, gathered up my animals, peeled the contacts off my eyeballs (and I do hope I'm going to find them in solution) and went to bed. I wish I'd brushed my teeth. Sometime in the night a small tribe of Pygmies set up camp and decided to have a rain dance on my tongue. It was dry, dry, dry in there. This morning I staggered to the bathroom,spit them unceremoniously into the sink and proceeded to beat the hell out of my mouth until I looked into the mirror and noticed I was just South of rabid. That's usually a good indicator.

The alarm on the iPod went off at 7:30 like it does every weekday morning. I was dreaming it was something else until I woke up enough to turn it off and then climb back into bed warning the dog that it was technically still the middle of the night. Somewhere. I haven't bothered to turn that alarm off because it makes a good 15 minute warning before Little Girl needs to head out to the bus stop (which is the end of the driveway) and on weekends it doesn't go off at all although Simon will generally put his great slobbery face right up against mine (or the back of my head if I'm lucky) and breathe heavily while moaning pathetically about the fact that he's not going to be able to keep his legs crossed forever. Simon has no trouble getting my attention in the morning. He is 79 inches long snout to tail tip, 31 inches at the whithers and his head is massive. Someday I'll figure out how to weigh it. Maybe I can slide the flat digital kitchen scale under his head while he's sleeping. Remind me to try that. The drop from the top of my mattress to the floor is 36 inches and while that's five inches above his whithers we must consider the length between whithers and snout. Unless I'm sleeping in the middle of the bed there's really no escape and if I don't want St. Bernard slobber ON my sheets I need to respond fairly quickly even if it means telling him to lay the hell back down and go to sleep. If his need is not immanent he will. He's a good boy. 

Little Girl let him out this morning. I was out cold. I have no recollection of the door opening and closing again after my baby boy lumbered across the threshold, made an abrupt 90 degree right turn and galloped down the hall coming to his usual skidding stop at the top of the stairs. When he's got his bearings he tip toes down the six carpeted stairs and stands patiently at the front door followed shortly by the manic Rat Terrier. The only time the Rat Terrier is not manic is when he's overslept and slinks up the stairs from the lower level hoping I won't notice but knowing perfectly well he's been caught sleeping on the couch again. Sometimes he hides until I'm back upstairs. He's sly and has great bladder control.

I nuked a cup of yesterday's coffee and here I sit thinking about what to write while my fingers typed out three paragraphs (which I just read) while I wasn't looking. I was thinking about resolutions.

I have no resolutions. I don't do resolutions. The only time I made a resolution was in the first few minutes of the last year of the twentieth century and that was more of an invocation to the fertility gods (it worked too, I delivered Little Girl on December 11, 2000).

I have nothing to invoke this year except maybe patience, perseverance and the strength to let be the things I have no right to control. I know perfectly well what those are too I just have a really hard time not panicking and grasping a float that has no intention of being grasped. The float does like to be grasped at though. I think it makes him feel wanted and needed. I think that's poison for me.However, invoking a negative does not create a positive. So here they are, my resolutions in spite of not doing resolutions (because God forbid I don't keep them):

1. Bake more bread. We lost that in 2009.
2. Order the seeds and actually start the seedlings.
3. Repair the fence and till the garden hopefully one week after the last hard freeze (sometime in March most years).
4. Compost. Everything that ought to be composted. Lost that in 2009 too.
5. Put the seedlings in just after Mother's Day and protect the tomato plants with plastic bottle hot houses. Pay attention to the weather and don't boil them.
6. This year pull UP all the volunteers from last year. That was fun but unproductive.
7. Cultivate early and often.
8. Order more broiler chicks. Maybe even eggs if I can work out an incubator and commit to turning them every day.
9. Get back on the elliptical in the morning at least until the heavier garden work is in full swing. Bikram is not enough.
10. Walk away from 2009 and don't look back. I can't imagine turning into a pillar of salt particularly pleasant.

That's it. I'm stopping at ten because I'm an over achiever and usually bite off more than I can chew without choking. Those ten are probably a big mouthful but maybe there should be an 11th:

    11. Give myself permission to fall down and get up again. You know, permission to be a bona fide member of he human race. The expectation of perfection is a horrible conceit.

Happy New Year, peoples. I wish you joy, love, passion, strength and surrender.

Peace out - Alecto

 
Borrowed without permission from an artist who's name I can no longer locate.

I Loves me my Blasted Bluestar Range... (heh)

 
I haven't quite worked it out yet but no doubt I'll work something out and here we go again.

Bluestar the very best gas/propane range for the home kitchen; as close to commercial as you're going to get. So sayeth the ads anyway and having spent a significant amount of time in commercial kitchens I'm inclined to agree. However.

We live in an area with a lot of power surges which I guess beats the heck out of an extended power outage (see A Reed Shaken with the Wind for an exceptional example). Twenty-five years ago I lived here before moving into the Valley where you could count on extended power outages and I remember how often we lost power. So much so that it was a joke in the area and we received no less than three housewarming gifts of propane and oil lanterns. We had a kerosene heater that lived in the house during the winter in the living room where we slept if it got really bad. When my son was two or three weeks old we lost power for eleven days. I don't think we panicked much but we were young and just about anything was acceptable at that point. We cooked on the kerosene heater; it was fine. Shoveling the 1,100 foot driveway with an infant in a front carrier (or even without) was a serious nuisance.

So. In late June or July we had a power surge that took out our electric stove top. I'm pretty sure the oven was still operating but the fact that we'd lost use of the stove top was really irritating. This was the second time in about 18 months and while it didn't take all that long for parts and service it was the perfect opportunity to put in a gas range (which turned out to be propane because we don't have gas lines out here). We selected the Bluestar for a lot of reasons, price included but mostly functionality and expectation.

We lived without a stove for about a month. It was OK. It was even fun. I learned a lot about what you can actually do with a charcoal grill. And also we had a week at the beach which helped. I made bread and rice on the grill in addition to meat and veggies. I was very pleased with myself. When the Bluestar arrived and was functional I went nuts. I went so nuts that I actually ran out of propane because I used far more far faster than would have been expected and when we called the propane people they asked what on earth we'd been doing and did we maybe have a leak. No leak, just exuberance.

In June or July of 2008 we lost the door. Well, we didn't exactly lose it. It's not like it ran off or anything but right after (thank God it was right after) a rhubarb pie came out of the oven and then the door simply refused to open again. The door was getting harder and harder to open but I wasn't particularly concerned. I was too busy being smitten. It took about four weeks to get a new door installed. Again, it was summer and I learned to make pizza and naan on the grill but I was beginning to get a bit irritated. Within about six months of furious use the door started getting sticky again. We called the manufacturer and were told to use a cooking spray like Pam on the door hinges. Again, should have questioned that but I didn't want to wait for service again and we got used to it and that was that.

And then the unthinkable, unacceptable, so very much more than irritating occurred. The door got stuck again in the middle of all the Christmas baking and I'm pretty sure there was bread in the oven this time. I didn't want to actually break the door hinges and the thought of leaving bread in the oven for a month didn't scare me as much as say, a whole chicken. Bread will petrify, chicken will continue to decompose in a furious stench of rot and decay. But I needed the oven so I sprayed and I sprayed and gradually worked it open. I breathed a great sigh of relief and then nearly emptied a can of spray stuff before I stopped and actually thought about this. Alecto, I said, does this really make sense? Just look at the gunk in those hinges. I took out a can of oven cleaner and went to town on the door and the hinges. Awesome! Finally, at least four out of six cylinders firing and all that.

The very next day I started round two of furious baking. I had six little cheese bread loaves in the oven, Stollen on deck and Panetone on the second rise. I had actual Panetone paper this time and was ecstatic over the improved elasticity of both sets of Christmas bread (a serious improvement over the first round). The cheese bread was taking too long. The oven light was on. I turned it down to see where the temp was. I went down to about 250 before I opened the oven. Shit. I played with that thing for quite awhile as the almost cooked cheese bread collapsed on itself. I tried a manual light with a match. Nuthin. I turned on all four burners one at a time. No propane issues. I closed the door and wondered if I'd killed my oven with oven cleaner on the hinges. Um, seriously doubtful.

I had a fire going in the wood stove but it wasn't hot enough. I stoked it up to 400 hoping the top would be hot enough to bake bread in a covered pot. I put the Panetone in the toaster oven and took them out five minutes later with their tops on fire. I wish I'd photographed that because it was really cool. Inedible, but cool. That was Sunday. Last Sunday. I called Bluestar on Monday and got the name and number of an independent service company in, of all places, the Valley. I called the service company and was told they'd have someone out the very next day. Awesome. Cletus was home to let the guy in which meant I didn't have to ask for another work at home day. We need a new safety valve and ignition thingie. OK, I can accept that. It's nearly 2.5 years old and something was bound to go eventually. For about $180 I had that information. Cletus said they'd call with a quote. They called with a quote this morning. Must have gotten it yesterday because Bluestar is closed today and tomorrow.

I asked how long it would take to get the parts because I really do need to finish the second batch of breads. I heard the conversation in the background. Four to six weeks. Huh? For a door I kind of understand. Kind of. For a safety valve and an ignition thingie? Really? And $250? Really?. OK. I gave the man my credit card number. He called back in a little while to tell me Bluestar was closed until Monday. Sigh. OK. I am to be without an oven again and it's snowing out there. And.

I. am. excited. Really, seriously excited about this. Hot damn! Another opportunity to figure stuff out all by myself the same way I did before and kind of like I worked out how to roast the most amazing chicken on a spit over an open fire in the back yard (and somehow was not arrested for doing so which in this town is flat out amazing).

You think I'm  being facetious, don't you? If you've been around awhile, you don't think that at all. And if you haven't, stay tuned! I'll be reporting on progress and results with pictures and everything. Even if we do lose power for an extended period. I'll get the camera battery charged immediately.

How cool is this?

By the way, the photograph above are the loaves of Stollen. They were disgusting. Clearly not the result I want but I've learned a few things.

Oh yeah - Bikram Yoga - bring it on, baby!

Yeah, I know, this site's on hiatus and all that but I really do have something relevant to share.

Did something called Bikram Yoga today. 90 minutes in a 105 degree room with relative humidity at or about 40%.

Yikes.

I'm 44 and while not out of shape by any means, not so much your super flexible yoga goddess either.

There were moments when I thought I'd pass out. There were moments when I thought all that stuff I've got would just come pouring out of me in this incredible torrent. There were moments when I just could not believe what it felt like to just lay there and breathe. There were moments when I surprised myself and stepped back up into it again.

And then there was the moment when I tried to get my pants back on.

Pause.

We're in the changing room and it's full of half or totally naked women who have just sweat out sixteen tons of water and what have you. I think I have toweled off and I try to pull on a pair of jeans that are too big for me. I've lost about 10 pounds in the last two weeks.

I cannot get them on. There I stand in my itty bitty thong with my 44 year old ass in what I so dearly wished was a breeze and I'm fucking stuck! Halfway up the thighs.

I look desperately at my WORK friend and make whimpering sounds. She is sympathetic but working out her own modesty (I have 14 years on her for God's sake). The woman next to me says, yeah, I never get how people try to put jeans on after this, it's like when we were little kids after swimming trying to pull our pants back up.

I wondered how I was going to get home.

Lets just say they did finally and I did and next week I'll bring something else to change into.

Bikram Yoga, highly recommend it. Seriously. Not just for laughs anymore.

Why I loves the Internet

 This is a pictorial waltz through a day in the life except it starts at 7:50 PM and ends now, at 8:36 PM. Stage is set; assume I've been working all day (I have) and that I have to drive to work and home again (I do) and that I walked in the door in my cfm boots, took the dog out, chastised one or two girls, got the fire going again, looked at homework, signed some homework, checked the roasting chicken that daughter number one put in at 6, put my coat back on, went down the back steps with a flashlight and a bowl of water, tucked the girls (chickens) in and changed their water, picked up another egg, locked the side door, kissed a chicken one more time and then went upstairs to make dinner. There was a glass of wine involved in all this as well.

And we ate dinner in the living room in front of the television and the wood burning stove inserted in what used to be a fire place (yes, I did feed my family in front of the Barry Manilow infomercial on Entertainment tonight and NO I do not want to hear about it). And when dinner was just about done and I was tired of hearing the sniveling coming from three directions (I think we were all cranky tonight) I thought I needed some nummies and of course we don't keep ready made nummies in the house.

Problem.

I do, however, keep lots of supplies on hand hidden in various and assorted locations (chocolate chips back left corner of lower shelf of the indoor freezer (there are two more freezers in the garage and while they might contain half a cow and other various and assorted frozen things they do not contain any chocolate parts)).

Here is what after dinner looks like in my kitchen:

 

Here is the Internet in my kitchen (cute, huh?):

   

In case you didn't notice, the Internet has provided a loose recipe for chocolate chip cookies which I have chopped in half, eliminated some of the butter (because I only had 3/4 stick soft) and added some vinegar because I kind of like it that way and also I had an accident with the vanilla bottle because I do not measure often and had at least half a glass of wine in me and well, I spilled). In the mean time, NoMans is being a pain in the ass because he needs the microwave which is in the kitchen to soup up his tobacco curing chamber which we have because I grew a butt load of tobacco this summer kind of by accident and he refuses to waste it despite the fact that we quit smoking over two years ago.

 

By the way, that's the box our turkey arrived in. Please do not ask me to explain that or the brick of dry ice or the carbon footprint involved in obtaining a pastured bird in the state of Connecticut where everything I want to do is illegal (J Saladin). Because my guilt is legion. Really, people, it is.

Here is little girl licking the bowl:

 

Here are the cookies right out of the oven. Notice they needed about 90 seconds more? I lost my mind and pulled them out anyway.

 

Here they are on the cooling rack. You know, I fail to see the problem here. 46 minutes start to finish from the initial desire to the sitting down to write about it.

Heh.

Mr. Fluffy Tinklekins

 

The dog is a beast. He's gaining close to a pound a day with no end in sight. Last checked he was 40 pounds at 12 weeks and 22 pound Homer (on a good day) has lost what little fur like substance he had left due to the constant nomming of the over grown baby.

We were trying not to crate him. It seemed like a good idea at the time. You know, big dogs, fast growing boys, should not be confined and all that. So we installed gates in the kitchen and installed an over sized puppy playpen on the lower level so that he and Homer could cohabitate and I wouldn't have to listen to it all night. And then it became VERY apparent that no one was EVER going to make Simon do anything he didn't actually feel like doing. Ever. His strength is, and will continue to be, greatly disproportionate to his actual weight. The good news is he really wants to please. And we are prepared to make good use of that willingness every second of his very impressionable puppy hood.

So we bought the biggest crate known to man. I swear you could put an elephant in there and it surely will never fit through a door again now that it's been assembled. We assembled said crate and then attempted to insert tab A (Mr. Fluffy Tinklekins, don't worry, I'll get to that) into slot B (door of crate) and failed miserably. He was only 30 pounds at the time. Nomans and I, we are very strong people. Lots of upper body strength and all that. It took two of us. One inside the crate pulling and the other outside the crate pushing. It was very demoralizing to the both of us and not a little disturbing to the puppy.

We bought treats. We bought treats and we slowed the hell down. For the first week it took me an extra twenty minutes in the morning after Little Girl's bus left just to sweet talk him to the door of the crate. But that works, you know, the whole sweet talking thing, because he wants to please so very, very much. And now he's crate trained and goes right in without a fuss and stays in too if you remember to toss in a bit of puppy candy. But here's the kicker, normally you would insert a divider so that the crate was just barely big enough for the puppy. This encourages them not to pee in the crate (or worse). We can't do that too him, I don't think it would be good for him. And in the end I don't intend to use the crate forever, I just need to be able to ask him to go if I really need him there.

Which brings me to the next point. If I ever hope to have friends or family in my house ever again I'm going to have to be able to put him away. Most people do not appreciate 240 pounds of slobbering fur in their lap and as I mentioned above, Simon pretty much does what he wants to do. And that doesn't mean he's not being socialized, he is. It just means I really don't have the physical control to fall back on.

Did I mention he has complete respect for the gates in the kitchen right up until he doesn't?

So here's poor Simon locked up in this cavernous crate and he still wets the bed at night. Not that we would do anything so silly as to leave him a bed in there, it would be consumed by morning. He wets the bed and then rolls in it. Or at least lays about in it. And since we can't wash him easily in the winter and have to rely on baby wipes for the most part he's kind of ripe.

We don't really mind.

We took him to Main Street Westport on Sunday. Main Street Westport wants to be Rodeo Drive East (it's not, that would be The Avenue in Greenwich but please try not to disillusion Westport in these current economic times). We figured that's a perfect place to start socializing him because nobody walking up and down that street has any manners to speak of (including me based on the level of snark in this post). Or sense but don't get me started. He's guaranteed to get a boat load of attention wanted or otherwise.

He was brilliantly well behaved with the possible exception of stopping to have a pee on every possible patch of leaves because that's where he potties at home. You know, on the leaves in the yard. He doesn't know sidewalks from Adam. He was pet, hugged, cuddled, kissed and slobbered on by at least 50% of the population. He ate it up. He didn't even try to climb into any laps although I wonder what will happen when he realizes he can pretty much make a lap happen anytime he wants.

By the time we made it down one side and back up the other he was exhausted and we weren't much better. I looked down at my angelic fluffy white pumpkin and realized that Mr. Fluffy Tinklekins is mostly yellow these days.

Three years might not seem like so much...

  Typepad is still almost unusable. Therefore you get no story, only pictures. Madeline told a great story and she doesn't use Typepad.

  

 

 

Friday morning and I'm still feeling all right

Every day, against my better judgment, I look at the Yahoo Finance front page and watch the market go UPPPPP and DOWWWWN and I read the headlines that blare off the page like some crusty old dude selling National Enquirer copies in his bathrobe and slippers with a nasty old cigar stub in his teeth and a racing form in his pocket on a street corner in Queens (I'm thinking Long Island City by OTB specifically in case anybody's interested).

I am reading headlines that could only have been written by Captain Obvious (specifically my almost eight year old, Little Girl, in case anybody's interested because that's what third graders and Yahoo Finance (or any media now that I think of it) have in common). This morning's headline reads:

US Stocks Set To Open Lower After Housing Data.

And following in smaller print:

Wall Street is headed for a lower open after the government said new home construction dropped to the lowest pace since 1991.

Duh. (and halleluiah while I'm at it)

Every day there are one or more DUHs on the finance page and every day I read them, smack my head and think, why the hell didn't I think of that? Yesterday it was the decline in retail sales, the day before it was the unemployment rates and last Friday when the market jumped something like 700 points (UPPPPP) it had something to do with that elusive and possibly imaginary money. There's nothing rational or even slightly reasonable going on here folks. So why am I looking? Train wrecks. It's all about the train wrecks.

This is almost as mind boggling as the sign I read each day on my walk from the train to work. Passing under an overpass where the city bus terminal hunkers like a diesel belching nine headed dragon I see a sign that reads:

WHEN your car is towed, call xxx-xxxx.

WHEN your car is towed? Not IF your car is towed, but WHEN. Maybe they should just do away with parking spaces altogether.

All righty then, on with the morning. I have not had an entertaining travel story in months. Nothing entertaining on the train other than the stalker I dispatched with a few weeks ago (I did not push him off the platform but I thought about it, is that bad and wrong?). Nothing entertaining on the periodic occasions where I find myself having to navigate an actual automobile from home to work (gak). Until this morning. This morning was a doozy. Still trying to figure out if I want to cry or laugh my ass off.

I was driving my husband's car. I do not like to drive that damn thing because it's embarrassing and I have this unreasonable fear I might break it or something and then he might just crawl under a rock and die over the potential sadness of it all. I drive old cars. Not bottom feeders but old cars. Cars that I drive until they go no more. I'm funny that way. My husband has one of those three letter acronym cars he bought off lease when his truck got smashed about a year ago. It makes him very happy and honestly I'm OK riding in it now. I can pretend I've been taken prisoner or I'm somebody's cosseted princess, whichever fantasy suits my mood in the moment. I can't pretend either of those things if I'm driving it.

So I'm cautious, nervous, all those things I never am in my own car. And I do my level best to stay calm and unruffled no matter what lest I make a big assed boo boo and destroy the thing. Oh, and that would be bad today because Cletus has my car, Nanny is out and I have to pick up Nomans from the airport at 5:30 and then we go to Vermont and then we pick up the puppy on Sunday and then we come home and you see I need a car for all four of those events. Not having a car would be bad and that's what I'm thinking when I'm trying to make a right turn off Dudley onto 33.

There's a very small person driving a late model Subaru and she's not pulled all the way up in anticipation of a break in the traffic and I think we're going to be here for awhile but lets just be patient and wait it out. Sure enough, break after break occurs and she doesn't even pull forward. I practice thinking Zen non-thoughts while staring at the back of her head (well not really because she's so short I can only see the back of her head when she leans into the passenger seat to drink water below dash level which she does frequently). Then a school bus turns left from 33 to Dudley creating a perfect path for three to four cars to scoot right onto 33. She's drinking water below dash level when this occurs and I start laughing at about the same time the woman in the big hair and sunglasses driving one of those behemoth SUVs lays on her horn AND DOES NOT LET UP. Eventually Subaru turns right and I ride her wake onto 33 and SUV leaves rubber on Dudley cutting off a fairly large truck as she pulls out behind me.

At the next intersection we wait for a left turn arrow to follow the Route 7 corridor but when the light turns green three or four vehicles are still running the red in the opposite direction so there's really not much Subaru can do but wait it out but SUV lays on the horn anyway and won't let up. I can feel a head ache coming on which I partially deserve for consuming three quarters of a bottle of Pinot all by myself because I was home alone with the remote last night.

Eventually SUV lets up and I drive like a little old lady behind Subaru (whom I am beginning to believe is indeed a bona fide LOL (hey, that's actually funny)). We make the turn onto the connector to the connector and I pull into the left lane to get around the LOL, turn left onto the connector and I am behind another LOL doing 30 while my Subaru LOL goes zooming by in the right lane doing 50 and people, this is a highway. I get behind Subaru LOL and mind my Ps and Qs.

I was late this morning. I was late enough that the line at the on ramp to I95 should have been nearly non-existent. Instead it is terminal and I scoot around to get off and bypass all of it. Subaru LOL remains in line like a good girl. I am thankful because she makes me a bit nervous. All that below dash water drinking.

The middle and left lanes are backed up too. This means something bad has happened. As it turns out, Something Bad has JUST happened. By the way, this is where I seem to witness the most tragic accidents and where NoMans had his truck vaporized by one of those three letter acronym vehicles except it was the other end and I digress...

This is a four car pile up. Two cars are pulled off to the right. One is a big SUV (I'm guessing not the original SUV but who knows, she did go around us). There is an older red sedan in the road. There is a fairly new Mazda3 at an odd angle to the red sedan. The front of the red sedan is gone. I mean GONE. The door is open and a young person is on his or her knees in the road speaking intensely to, as if to wake up, the driver of the of the red sedan who is another LOL, probably in  her eighties and she looks dead. I tell myself she's just in shock and I must not pull over because I can hear the sirens and she will be all right and I pull onto I95 and I am sobbing because I'm pretty sure she's dead or worse because somebody just couldn't wait on a Friday rush hour morning and played chicken one too many times.

I merge into traffic and pull myself together because I'm driving the special car and I take deep cleansing breaths and prepare to let it all go. Then this LOL in a humongous SUV wearing a humongous cowboy hat pulls off the shoulder right in front of me just missing my front right quarter panel. I scream like a cut moose and manage not to hit her. She sees me screaming in her rear view mirror and shakes her middle finger over the back seat at me at which point I laugh so hard my head hits the steering wheel and traffic comes to a complete halt and I am afraid she's going to get out of her big ass SUV and beat me within an inch of my life she's so mad but I. Cannot. Stop. Laughing.

Eventually we move again and I see LOL Subaru cruising by me in the middle lane and if that just doesn't reduce me to a fit of hysterical giggles and LOL cowboy shakes her middle finger yet again and careens back off the highway and into the truck stop.

I proceed with great caution to the parking garage and make my way into the building.

And here I sit. Have a great weekend. I'm turning the keys over to Nomans post haste. Just as soon as I fight my way though Friday night traffic heading North toward Hartford.

I sure do hope Cletus remembers to let the chickens in and out.

Completely Gratuitous Puppy Picture

On Sunday. He mine.

(I'm pretty sure he's winking at me too)

Chickins and Bugs, Chickins and Bugs

I have two step sons who are being raised on high fructose corn syrup and processed white flour. They are both highly medicated and highly suspect. OK, that last part isn't true but it's funny and when it comes to coping with the reality of who they are versus who I am, I often need all the humor I can find.

In the six years I've cohabitated with their father we've come face to face in a state of abject discomfort more times than I care to think about. Many of these occasions has stopped just short of bloodshed (mine and / or their father's, not theirs (don't worry, I wouldn't (probably (but you never know))). In the last year and a half alone it got bad enough that he (Nomans) traveled South to visit but they (Thing One and Thing Two and I name them that most affectionately) did not come North at all. Last summer we had one weekend that went well enough (although there was a bit of bloodshed over some communications that I filed under the category of entitlement that nearly caused WW III yet again) and then an actual week at the beach (and no one died but oh my goodness it took super human efforts from every single one of us). After that there was nothing due to the holidays and some other such scheduling conflicts as you've got to understand that all nineteen moons (I made that up, I don't actually know how many moons are required) must be in full alignment or god help us all.

The other thing, and this is a bit of an aside, is that in the past Nomans spent a full twelve hours in the car each weekend (three down three up three down three up) on the bloody New Jersey Turnpike until he could no longer and then the trips spread further apart and the whole darn thing just broke down until something finally gave and those boys took the train to and fro.

So you can imagine that I greeted this most recent arrival with some level of trepidation because I have to tell you that when I hear a child recoil in horror from the sight of swamp dirt it just makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck and I want to drag them into the muck until they get it about not being separate. Plus dirt is good. We need to eat a lot more of it than we do. And... that might just get me started on classroom allergies.... yadda yadda yadda moving right along now...

I was worried about the chickens. I was worried about the garden. I was worried about the fact that we don't have chicken nuggets or anything even close. And I was worried about my ability to withstand the assault of constant whining without ending up back on the psyche ward and / or in divorce court. In short, I was freaking fatigued with panic. Neat visual, isn't it?

Something gave, that's all I can say. Something caved in like a sink hole in Pennsylvania except in a good way and one of those boys ran down the back stairs on Sunday morning as fast as his growing boy legs would carry him and barefoot ran through the chicken pen (with a boat load of requisite chicken poop) and into the coop to release the ladies to their breakfast buffet (called my late fall garden) and help himself to the three morning eggs. The other boy stared hard at said eggs on the table an hour later and asked if I'd added cheese. No way, no chance, no how, they just grow that color when you don't do anything to them but let them eat veggies and bugs and then he proceeded to inhale every last bite and then some.

Somehow in the magic of the frogs and the bugs and the tree houses (it's on the ground but she and nanny built it themselves)and the swamps and the dirts and the Little Girl on the swing with a chicken in her lap (oh WHY does this one chicken permit this?) Thing One and Thing Two fell down the looking glass and came out grass stained and grinning without a single smidge of processed anythings anywhere about their bodies all weekend long. (OK, nice story but we did go for Hibachi on Saturday night and it was the holy hell of bad food but nobody died and it was Thing One's fifteenth birthday and he was so very happy with it all)

And at lunch which involved a veggie lasagne that did not come out of any sort of can or box followed by a Dutch Apple pie made before their very eyes, before the ride to the train, Thing One has been thinking that if all of us just ate a little more locally and with a little bit less fosile fuel involved (well, yeah, OK, I was ranting a bit over the weekend) and took a little bit more care of the world and maybe took care to eat food that was really food that we might just be, well, um, a little bit happier and a little bit healthier and maybe, just maybe a lot less likely to blow each other up.

And we all lived happily ever after until the very next adventure which might have started three minutes after.

Sometimes you just have to wait for it.

When the world is spinning, spin yourself the other direction to unravel the tilt

OK, I think can say (write) this now. If not, I'll delete with the rest of my miserably failed attempts at sorting through my own feelings and realities (since, really, we do make it all up, every one of us).

I,we, my family and and I, stand to lose quite a bit. Maybe we already have (I'm not looking at the moment). We stand to lose our retirement funds, our jobs, our home, our four remaining minor children's college funds. We stand to lose it all. We always have, day in and day out just like anybody might lose anything. Today, just like any other day in the last few weeks, it is horribly and painfully evident.

There is no right or wrong to this. We do not live in debt (oh, wait, there's the mortgage, right?), we do not take part in manipulating the market (oh wait, we do trade, don't we?) and we have busted our proverbial asses getting to where we are today and that might be all gone now or tomorrow. It really might.

I did not support the bailout. I do not support the bailout. I firmly believe this economy, this country needs a reset, and not a free and painless reset either because we are all compliant, one way or another. I say that in the face of what I still refer to as a horrible loss. I quake in my space boots (to borrow a Cletus phrase) and cry out in the night. I am terrified. But I still don't support the bailout.

It makes you take stock of what matters though, I'll tell you that. I sit at a chair in my kitchen, head and shoulders bent over two pots on the floor. One is full of apple peelings and the other salt water and apple bits. I peel, peel, peel, core, core, core, chop, chop, chop until after no time at all half a bushel is processed and set aside for the winter. I go to the farmers market and my own garden and I buy up all the fresh produce I can store away. I take that home and can and freeze and cook and eat and feed my family one step closer to the earth. I have set aside a ridiculous quantity of flour and rice but in reality, is 300 pounds really so ridiculous?

On Mondays I go to work with tiny cuts and abrasions on my finger tips from all the peeling, cutting, processing, cooking and I type on the keyboard for enough money to keep paying the mortgage and those cuts remind me that I am far from helpless after all.

None of this changes or alters in any way the level of fear I experience on a pretty regular basis these days. However, when I turn my face away from my fear and toward that which is hopeful, real, and living, I find it far easier to breathe.