April doings

It's been a few weeks since I posted, so I thought I'd better post again before April is over. We are now 12 days away from Rocket Boy's departure, if he leaves on May 6th as planned. It still doesn't seem real.

Part of the reason it doesn't seem real is that we have been so busy, our minds on other things. The huge fundraising event for the kids' school that I'm involved in is this Friday, two days from now. I managed to sew 47 drawstring bags and another mom sewed 28, and I stuffed all 75 of them with candy and trinkets, so that's ready to go (we'll sell them for $5 each at the event). My latest assigned task is to buy 5 rolls of blue painter's tape. Then on Friday I have to work at the school from 2 to 5 to help set up, and from 7 to 8 as a cashier. From 5 to 7 I will float around, helping with what needs doing, and also (I hope) eating dinner, as served by Kid A. Kid A will be a waiter and Kid B will be a host. It will probably be a blast, but I'm very much looking forward to it being over.

Another thing that's been going on is a mild disaster -- Rocket Boy's blue Ford Escape hybrid died. This is the car he was planning to drive to St. Louis, so we are glad it died BEFORE he tried to do that. The car had been making a strange noise for a while and was finally determined to have rusted so much that the shocks separated from the body. His mechanic was very impressed and took a photo of the damage to show us. So we're selling him the car (for parts) for $300 and Rocket Boy is going to drive his dad's old Mitsubishi Montero to St. Louis instead. The Montero is 28 years old and not in great shape, but we spent $580 getting it into better shape and it should last the trip. I have been complaining about the Montero for years -- WHY do we still have this old car, we NEVER drive it, WHY do I have to keep paying for the registration and insurance? And now here we have the answer to all those questions: so we don't have to try to buy a new used car now, when we have no money and no time. Rocket Boy wins that round.

The "no money" thing has been making itself really obvious of late. Rocket Boy needs to find a place to live in St. Louis, but it seemed too complicated to send him out there to house hunt. So instead he arranged an Airbnb for May 8-31, hoping to find a more permanent place to stay after that. It's a relatively cheap Airbnb, but it still cost over $800 for that time period. So we decided to put it on my credit card (RB hasn't had a credit card for many years). He hit "purchase" or whatever on the screen, and the Airbnb website magically lifted the $800 from our checking account, because he had his debit card listed as the default for payment. We tried to get the money back, but it would have taken 8-10 days. Fortunately we did have that much in our checking account, because the money from our rental house had just landed there. But we'd also mailed a check for $400 to our tax preparer a few days before. We didn't have $1200 in the account. After some major freaking out on my part, I begged our tax preparer not to cash her check, we arranged to sell some mutual funds, and nothing terrible ended up happening. But it was scary.

On a more pleasant note, a few days later it was Easter. I feel strongly that we are too old for egg hunts -- the kids of course do not believe in the Easter Bunny any more, etc., etc. But it's such a small investment for a substantial amount of fun. We save all the baskets, plastic grass, plastic eggs, and stuffed rabbits & birds from year to year -- I haven't bought anything new in ages. All we have to buy is candy -- and then hide everything. Rocket Boy and I have this down to a system. Each boy has five baskets and we have maybe 72 plastic eggs. I fill the baskets with grass and chocolate and hide them around the living room. Then together we put six jelly beans in each plastic egg (matching the color, if possible) and Rocket Boy hides them in every room in the house, including the bathroom, including the twins' room while they sleep, including our dresser drawers, including the microwave... When they get up on Easter morning, the hunt begins -- and it lasts and lasts for days and days, because it takes forever to find all the eggs. Kid B is the champion hunter, so Kid A spends a lot of time complaining, but it's still fun. Yesterday I bought a bag of half-price leftover jelly beans at the grocery store, and after the boos went to bed I sprinkled a few jelly beans in all the baskets again. This afternoon Kid B said, "I swear there weren't any jelly beans left in that basket," but I denied everything. It's fun. We also dyed a dozen hardboiled eggs, using dye that Rocket Boy saves from year to year in little water bottles.

I should end this post and go make dinner -- we splurged on a ham and this will be the fourth night we've had it for dinner, but we do run out of sides and have to make more. We still have vegetables left, so I'm just going to make some biscuits. Oh, one more recent disaster -- on Sunday, the first night of the ham, I put some spicy mustard on my slice, dissolved into a coughing fit -- and threw out my back again. It's only been a month since the March back episode, so I obviously didn't heal properly from that. So I'm taking pain pills and trying to be careful about bending over and lifting things. And hoping for the best. What the heck I'm going to do when RB leaves and my back goes out again, I don't know. Burn that bridge when we come to it.

Welcome April

March went by very quickly, it seemed to me, and although we had a few inches of snow on the next to last day, the snow melted almost immediately. As you can see in the picture, the pavement was too warm for the snow to stick (I love snow you don't have to shovel). It rained heavily before it snowed, so it was a very wet snow, but nothing's in bloom yet, so nothing was damaged. Anyway, I guess you can say March went out like a lamb, but kind of a wet lamb.

I read 9 books in March, for a total of 39 for the first three months of the year. It's tempting to try to maintain an average of 13 books/month, but that would add up to 156 books for the year, which isn't going to happen. I read 2 memoirs, 2 mysteries, 2 adult novels, and 3 children's books. I think the book that made me think the most was the last one I read, The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America by Tommy Tomlinson. That was an interesting book, especially for a fat person, i.e., me. I found it amusing that the book made me feel thin, since Tomlinson starts the book weighing 460 pounds. Yowzers, that's fat. But he's also taller than I am. In fact, he's the same height as Rocket Boy, 6'1". Rocket Boy weighs 150 pounds. Imagine adding 310 pounds to Rocket Boy. Crazy.

In some ways the book is a diet book, because he loses some weight during it and explains how he does it. But mostly it's an exploration of how he happened to gain all that weight and what prevents him from losing it. He and I have very different favorite foods -- at one point he says, "It always makes me laugh to hear people say fast food doesn't taste good. They are obviously trying to convince themselves. Fast food tastes FANTASTIC." I couldn't agree less. I used to enjoy going to McDonald's, like maybe 30 years ago, but now I only eat fast food if there's absolutely no other choice. I think it's gross and it gives me reflux. Sorry, Tommy.

On the other hand, on the weekends I often buy myself a pint of Ben & Jerry's Phish Food ice cream (the best ice cream there is) and eat the whole thing while watching a movie with Rocket Boy. That's probably my major indulgence these days. Years ago, before I was married, I used to eat a pound of M&M's every night. Every. Single. Night. I would buy them from different stores so the employees wouldn't realize what an addict I was. In the first few months of our marriage I used to lie to Rocket Boy that I needed to stay late at work, and then after everyone else left I would lock my office door and stuff myself with M&M's. Committing to being married meant giving up that habit, but I did still sneak them sometimes when he wasn't around. What really ended M&M's for me was taking the diet drug Contrave, which blocked the effect of chocolate on my mind. I've been off Contrave for about two years now, and it no longer blocks chocolate, but I still am not interested in M&M's.

However, I'm still fat, fatter than ever. Right now I think I weigh almost as much as I did when I went to the hospital to deliver the twins. I spend a lot of time thinking that this isn't fair. I compare what I used to eat with what I eat now. In my M&M's days, I also ate a lot of Ben & Jerry's. Many nights I'd follow my pound of candy with a pint of premium ice cream, while vegging out in front of the TV. I was fat, sure, but I deserved to be a lot fatter. It's like I'm making up for it now -- the junk I ate in my 20's and 30's has somehow come home to roost on my 58-year-old body.

Anyway, I didn't mean to write a blog post all about food and weight, but the book has really made me think. What Tomlinson does in the book is make "a searching and fearless moral inventory" of himself and his relationship with food -- he's not in a 12-step program, but that's what this reminds me of. He goes back through his history and looks at everything he did to get fat, everything he continues to do, all his triggers, all his lies. His history is quite different from mine, but I realized while reading his that it would be worthwhile for me to write my own -- for myself, not the blog necessarily. Something to think about for the future, since I'm obviously too busy right now making little drawstring bags. I've only made 26 so far. How will I get to 50 by next Wednesday?

Of course, I keep wondering what my relationship with food will be like after Rocket Boy moves to St. Louis. Will I go back to eating chocolate in bed or will I actually eat better, when I'm totally in charge of what we have for dinner? He's quite a healthy eater, so I'll have to remind myself to buy more fruit and vegetables. But he's also a very big eater, so until the twins start eating more, we'll be able to have smaller dinners without him. Hmm.

Everything these days comes back around to that: how will life be different when Rocket Boy is gone? It's only about 5 weeks until he leaves. Still trying to take it all in.