Trying to think positively about September

September's not a bad month, right? School is buzzing along, the weather is still warm (but getting cooler), the leaves on the trees are still green.

But the hummingbirds are gone. No! Not true! I heard one this morning when I went out to get the paper. But they're almost gone. I saw one at the feeder yesterday, just one. I haven't seen one yet today. I will miss them so much! 

I was thinking, maybe I could put a regular bird feeder on the porch instead, one of those tube feeders. Would regular birds come to a feeder on the porch? It seems too exposed. But I could try it. Or maybe I could hang it in the trees nearby. But Rocket Boy wouldn't appreciate having birds poop on his old Montero if I hung it over there. And I don't really want to encourage squirrels to come onto the front porch. 

I'll think about it.

Rocket Boy left yesterday, so I am kind of down. I know in a day or two I'll pick myself back up and get my routines re-established, but the transition is always hard. Yesterday morning I woke up early and took my phone into the bathroom with me -- where I proceeded to blow my 112-day streak on Wordle. The word I was trying to get was "lucky" and I guessed first "heart" (my usual starting word) and then four other wrong words, at which point I was so close... and my sixth guess was "yucky." Wrong. Why would I guess "yucky" when "lucky" was a possibility? Well, of course I decided this was an omen, and it meant that Rocket Boy's plane would crash.

It didn't. He made it to St. Louis just fine and had dinner at some restaurant called the Golden Pancake House. I could just picture him there, tucking into a nice spinach omelet. No yuckiness. I realized that my Wordle guess wasn't an omen, it was a reflection of my mood that morning: yucky, because Rocket Boy was leaving.

Before he caught his 11:36 bus to the airport, we all walked over to the park to attend the neighborhood Pancake Breakfast, which is always held on a Saturday in early September -- except when there's a pandemic and they don't have it for two years running. Last year (I checked my blog) it was raining and they didn't get much of a turnout. Rocket Boy wasn't home, but the twins and I went, and Teen A ate nine pancakes and Teen B ate six. This year it was warm and sunny and there was a long line and we only got one pancake each because they couldn't cook them fast enough for the crowd. 

Still, it was really nice to be there. I don't know why we like the pancake breakfast so much, but we do. I can't remember whether Rocket Boy and I used to go before the twins were born, and of course when they were little we were in Ridgecrest. But as soon as we got back to Boulder, we started going to it. Except, hmm, I don't think there was one in September 2013 because we had a 100-year flood instead. What about 2014? I didn't write about it if we went. Same with 2015, 2016. I guess I have no idea when we started going, but I do remember standing in long lines with the hot sun beating down on us and seeing lots of their elementary school friends in line too.

Rocket Boy would have preferred that I drive him to the airport, but I hate that drive, and the bus is so much easier. I checked the schedule and found $10.50 to pay his fare and walked him to the bus stop on time. Probably the bus wasn't as crowded as the day I left for San Diego, because that was Labor Day weekend and this is just an ordinary weekend.

I went back to the house and sunk into gloom. I should have done a bunch of stuff, taken the twins out driving and all that, but I didn't. I did manage to go for a walk myself around 7pm. And around 8 I pulled myself together and went to MacDonald's to get "food" for the twins, and then I fed the cats and got Teen B to choose a new bedtime book.

We finished our last book -- Jackaby by William Ritter -- Friday night, because Rocket Boy wanted to hear the ending. So we needed to start a new book on Saturday. I had some books in the pile that looked interesting (to me), but Teen B ended up choosing Betsy in Spite of Herself by Maud Hart Lovelace, because it's about Betsy's sophomore year of high school (and of course they're sophomores now). It's a good thing no one reads this blog, otherwise the twins would probably be subjected to public shaming for reading such a dumb book. Old-fashioned. Girly. Teen B looked at the cover and said, "That's not Betsy! That looks like Barbie!" I explained that it must be Betsy getting ready to go to a dance, but I was amused that he would have an opinion about how Betsy should look.

The twins asked me if there were more books about Betsy, and I said yes, there was a book about her junior year of high school, and her senior year, and then there's a book where she goes around the world and a book where she gets married. They were horrified -- or something. I'm not sure how to describe their reaction. 

Then I did the dishes and went to bed, and this morning things were a tiny bit better. That is, I'm feeling really gloomy -- aided by the gloomy weather -- but I'm marching along, not sitting around glumly staring at my phone. I fed the cats, put away the clean dishes, and started a load of the twins' laundry, took Teen B on our Starbucks run, started this blog post, and so far have worked on homework with Teen A twice and Teen B once (and I'm gearing up for the second time with him). Teen B has to write the draft of a paper for Language Arts, due tomorrow, so we're slogging through that. His teacher has fortunately provided a lot of "scaffolding," since otherwise we'd have no idea what to do. He's writing about "archetypes" in a movie they watched. We chose black, white, and Mentor as the archetypes. They're supposed to be the most important ones in the movie. I don't know if they are the most important ones. He claims to have no idea. We are winging it here.

It is getting ready to rain and I really should go out and do some yardwork, even though it's Sunday, because I need to put some stuff in the compost bin. When I got home from my trip last Monday, I walked in the house and said "Oh yuck, what's that smell?!" Rocket Boy said, "What smell?" He and the twins really couldn't smell it, even though it was totally nauseating. 

For the next two days I tried to understand what the smell was -- at first I thought it was the shells from the shrimp he'd cooked the day before. But I took out the compost and the smell was just as strong. Finally we figured out that it was the uncooked cod in the fridge. He'd bought some cod on Friday and cooked it the same day -- but only half of it. The rest of it sat in the fridge. You wouldn't think it would go bad that quickly, but it did. Oh, it did. When I finally realized that it was the problem, and untangled it from all its wrappings and put it in the compost bin, the smell was just unspeakable. I quickly took the compost to the outside bin (and took the trash, including the fish wrappings, to the trash bin), but then we could smell it every time we stepped outside. I have no idea why a bear hasn't come by and raided the bin.

The smell was so strong that it lingers on everything in the fridge. Last night I got a container of Ben & Jerry's out of the freezer and sure enough, it smelled of rotting fish.

So I need to rake up some old leaves or something to put in the compost bin on top of the fish. I should do that now.

Maybe later.

Rocket Boy actually did quite a good job of taking care of the house and the cats and the twins while I was gone last weekend, but he does have these lapses. 

But I miss him.