Still love this month

Well, it was sad to say goodbye to Rocket Boy again, and I admit to feeling some desolation around his leaving. But I got over it pretty quickly and now I'm happily enjoying October again. (I can't speak for the kids.) He'll be back in less than a month, because he has another dentist appointment on November 22nd and he'll probably come out the week before that, maybe as early as the 18th or so, which is only, like, three and a half weeks. 

Of course, he'll miss Halloween and Teen B's band concert. But you can't have everything.

It's awful, but I have to admit I don't mind him being gone in one way. He is so cold-blooded! And it's getting worse as he gets older. He's cold ALL the time, and insists on turning the heat up higher than the rest of us like it. We were thrilled to have him get the furnace working, change the filter and all that, but he set the temperature at 68 and that is just too warm. I like it at 65. Now, I should note that in the depths of winter, it's different. The house gets very cold around the edges, and 68 is a better choice. But in the fall, when it's in the 50s and 60s outside during the day, it doesn't need to be 68 in the house. And the nights! In cool weather, I like to wear a warm nightgown to bed, snuggle under warm covers -- and leave the window over our bed open and set the furnace temperature down low. Poor Rocket Boy. He likes to sleep in the buff, with the shade pulled down and the window closed and the temperature set to at least 68, if not higher. 

Again, this controversy improves in the winter. Even I don't like the window wide open if it's getting down around zero at night. So when he's here at Christmas, we'll probably be fine. But fall is a struggle. 

On the other hand, when he's sleeping next to me and I wake up in the middle of the night, I don't think, "what was that noise, is there someone in the house, is it a murderer, is it a raccoon, is it a ghost, am I going to die, what should I do," etc., etc. I just think, "Oh, Rocket Boy will deal with it," and I roll over and go back to sleep.

His presence is also important when it's October and I'm reading ghost books. As that familiar tingle creeps through me (while reading something enjoyably scary), I sometimes look up and notice an odd shadow in the hallway beyond the bedroom. And what was that noise? I screwed up -- at one point, I had planned to read super scary books during the week he was here, so that I wouldn't get too scared. But then I got the idea that I should save the super scary books for the last week of October, in the same way when I was younger I used to wear more and more black as the 31st approached. So now he's back in St. Louis and I'm left with my pile of scary books, and hmm. What to do, what to do.

I have been having a lot of fun with reading this month, I must admit. I've finished 14 books so far, with a whole week left to go. And none of them were serious books, with the possible exception of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, which Teen A had to "read" for school (meaning, his class listened to a recording of it and then I re-read it to him and Teen B while they played computer games -- Teen B is now "reading" it for his Language Arts class), and, oh, maybe the book group book, The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, which I didn't enjoy, but it wasn't as bad as I'd expected. 

It got me thinking about regrets, what I regret doing, or not doing, in my life. For many years I regretted our move to Ridgecrest and quitting my good government job, though that's faded a lot. I don't care so much about the job anymore, and I'm glad we had all those crazy Ridgecrest experiences, but I do regret spending all my inheritance from my mother on maintaining our Ridgecrest lifestyle (renting a house there while not renting out our Boulder house, etc.). Oh well, money comes and money goes. 

But I have some other regrets that are oddly strong, considering the years that have gone by since. I intensely regret not having taken voice lessons when I was a teenager. I had a pretty voice, and I think with voice lessons I could have done more with it. What that "more" would have consisted of, I don't know. I realize that I could take voice lessons now, but at 61, it doesn't interest me. The instrument is fading. I do sometimes think about taking piano lessons again, but for the most part I am happy to be a music appreciator, not a performer.

Here's another goofy one that lingers: I regret moving into a single room in my student co-op in Berkeley during my senior year. My number came up (for a single room) a few days after the fall quarter started and I was already starting to become friends with a new roommate, Abby. I could have said no, I could have said, give the room to someone else. But I thought I wanted the privacy (I had a boyfriend, sigh), so I moved. It turned out to be such a lonely move and I got so depressed in that single room. The boyfriend and I were not getting along (unbeknownst to me, he was falling in love with someone else who'd just moved into the co-op). At the end of the quarter I got word that I had been approved to move into a room in a co-op apartment across town, and so I did that, too, which enabled me to break up with the boyfriend, about a year too late. But when I remember my last year of college one thing that comes to mind is Abby -- I think she could have been a good friend, someone I would still know now. Instead, I have no idea what happened to her. Abby Green, I think her name was, or Greene. See, I don't even remember that. 

I became good friends with someone in the co-op apartment, Laurie, but the friendship didn't last. She wanted to live in Israel, and just now I managed to find her online (she had a less common last name). Sure enough, she's in Israel, married with three children. I suppose we wouldn't have much in common. 

Anyway, regrets. They aren't worth much unless they help you to make better decisions later on. So what do my regrets tell me? Use your gifts, don't take friendship lightly, don't be a total moron about money. Those are good things to remember. Maybe I do.

We didn't do a lot while Rocket Boy was here -- for one thing, both kids were mildly sick and stayed home a lot. Rocket Boy arrived on Thursday, Teen B stayed home from school Thursday and Friday (covid test = negative), Monday was a holiday for the kids, Teen A stayed home from school Tuesday and Wednesday (covid test = negative), and Rocket Boy flew back to St. Louis Wednesday afternoon. We did go to the cabin on Sunday (I wrote about that last week), and we went to Munson's pumpkin patch in Boulder on Monday (see photo, which captures the twins mid-fight). We bought five pumpkins, the smallest of which was stolen off our front porch a few nights ago! What has happened to this neighborhood? Or perhaps it was a squirrel. We took some walks and did some cleaning and cooking and decorating. I had signed us up for online conferences with some of the kids' teachers Tuesday night and then totally forgot about them (sigh). I managed to reschedule one for Thursday, but RB missed it. Rocket Boy got to hear (and be thoroughly puzzled by) the last seven chapters of The Witches of Worm by Zilpha Keatley Snyder, a rather odd book that I had always meant to read. It was quite appropriate as an October bedtime book.

I brought out all my little Halloween dolls, which make me so happy, and as usual, ordered one new one from eBay. She arrived yesterday and she's up there with the rest (the witch in a blue and orange outfit, 3rd from the left, bottom row). There are 33 dolls in the photo: 24 Kelly Halloween Party dolls, 6 Chelsea Halloween dolls, 1 Chelsea not specifically Halloween but dressed as an avocado for some reason, and 2 Madame Alexander Halloween dolls. I still don't have a complete set of the Kelly Halloween Party dolls -- I have several years to go before it's complete, assuming I buy one new one each year. It occurred to me that the dolls will get rarer each year, so maybe I should buy all the rest of them now, whatever I can find, but I don't want to. I don't actually NEED to have a complete set. The collecting process is fun; I shouldn't hurry it.

My book group comes tomorrow and I still have a lot to do to get ready, but it will be fine. I didn't tell Rocket Boy they were coming until after he went back to St. Louis, so he cleaned without knowing why he was cleaning. I still need to vacuum and take another stab at the bathroom, but it doesn't look bad right now. I'm so pleased that they will be here at Halloween. I can't remember whether they have ever seen my little dolls. Of course, no one will like them as much as I do. I suspect no one in the book group except me played with dolls. I'm a bit of an anomaly that way. I find that a lot of women who grew up to do intellectual things had no use for dolls as children. Why is that, I wonder? I played with Barbies, paper dolls, my dollhouse, and what we called "big dolls." For several years, my life revolved around my dolls, and it was a great loss when I became an adolescent and somehow lost the ability to play with them. And then, of course, as an adult, I can't seem to stop adding dolls to my life. All those Barbies. My Playmobil dollhouse. I look at doll websites. I'm attracted to anything miniature.

I associate all that doll-playing with creativity. While I played with my dolls, I made up stories about them. I lived in my own world, but also the various worlds of the dolls. I've heard other women (who didn't play with dolls) talk about doll-playing as something "conventional" girls did; they were unconventional and didn't bother with stupid dolls. But I don't think there was anything conventional about the way my sister and I and our friends played with dolls. It's a puzzle (another type of plaything I adored as a child, and still do).

It may have more to do with whether there were boys in the family -- I think some girls don't play with dolls because they have older brothers who don't. Some people say they were more interested in playing out of doors, but I certainly did that too. And I read all the time, too. (How is it that I had so much time to do all these things?) It could be financial, too, but my mother grew up in a very poor home and still played with dolls obsessively -- paper dolls, in her case, which is what she could afford. My parents bought me lovely toys, and I'm sure that helped, but I don't think it's the only reason I liked dolls. My sister and I had bare bones dollhouses made by our Uncle Bob out of a Sunset Magazine pattern.

Speaking of dolls, and creativity, I spent several hours on my writing projects this week after Rocket Boy left and the twins went back to school. I guess that's only two days, Thursday and Friday, but they were enjoyable ones. I finally got past the block I was experiencing in Chapter 4 of my novel and moved on to Chapter 5. I hope I can get a few more chapters drafted this week, since we are coming up to the actual days of the story. It takes place over eight days, from October 25th to November 1st, and I wanted to be sure I got the weather right, so I kind of wanted to wait until those days were here. It's slightly ridiculous, since October weather in Boulder can be anything from hot to snowy. 

I also looked at some other writing. Toward the end of Rocket Boy's visit, I suddenly got the idea that I would like to put together a collection of short stories -- not to do anything with, you understand, just to have. I have written several stories over the years, and I thought it would be interesting to collect them, just in case I ever wanted to (self-)publish them, not that I ever will. So I started a new folder in my "Writing" folder, called "Story Collection," and I started going through all my old writing, looking for stories and copying them over to the new folder. At the moment there are eight, but there will be more. Some of them are more memoirs than stories, so it's possible they should be in a separate file. Or the "Story Collection" could have two parts, memoirs and stories. It's mine, so I can do what I want with it.

Using my talents. It's not my singing voice, but it's still my voice. And it's very satisfying.

So now we have one more glorious week of this wonderful month. The book group will come, the kids will go to school, and I hope I'll do a lot of writing and reading. I'll also have to do laundry (doing some right now, since it's Sunday) and dishes and other cleaning. I'll have to plan meals and grocery shop. We're supposed to have a bit of weather on Tuesday afternoon/evening, though probably nothing much. One of my tires looks low, so a visit to the tire store is in order, probably tomorrow. And then there will be all the other things that pop up out of nowhere. But it looks like a pretty nice week. Hope yours is too!