Four Corners trip

We are back from our trip and Middle School has started, but I'll save that for a later post, maybe this weekend. I want to post about the trip first because it was so special -- and not only because we'd been meaning to take it for several years.

It was a five-day trip, with two of the days spent mostly driving I-70. Last Wednesday, August 7th, the twins and I set off around 10:30 am -- or maybe it was 10:45 -- it was supposed to have been 9:30 -- oh well -- and drove to Grand Junction, where we met Dad at the airport. We realized too late that it would have made more sense (read: been a lot cheaper) to have picked Dad up at the Denver airport, but I'm kind of glad we did it this way. It was really fun to drive for 250 miles and have Dad waiting for us at the end of the trip. And then we drove on to Fruita, to our first hotel. It was a good thing this was the first hotel, because it was really not very exciting -- yet the twins loved it! Because it was a hotel! And hotels are fun! Even though this was not a fun hotel at all. It was clean, though, and the TV worked, and there was a tiny free breakfast, and it was a quick walk from a Walgreens where I had to buy a toothbrush because I had forgotten to pack mine. Unfortunately there are no restaurants in Fruita, so we drove back to Grand Junction to eat dinner at Denny's. To get there, we drove through our first "sight": the Colorado National Monument. It was quite lovely, but it was also a winding 22-mile road, which made us very late for dinner. But Denny's is open late, so no worries.

Thursday, we got an early start and drove across the border to Utah, dropped down for a brief stop at the (formerly ghost) town of Cisco (it seems to have people living there now), and then on to Moab through some beautiful scenery, 90 miles in all.

In Moab we ate lunch at the highly-recommended (by us) Moab Diner, which has delicious milkshakes and delicious everything else we tried. And good service. And not too expensive. Seriously, check it out the next time you're in Moab!

While we were eating I said to Rocket Boy, "You know, it seems a shame to just drive down to the Four Corners without seeing any of Utah's National Parks. What if we made a quick stop at Arches?" RB agreed, so we headed over there (it's like 5 minutes from Moab) and spent maybe 90 minutes in the park. What an awesome place! Definitely worth more than 90 minutes. I took lots of photos and it's very hard to choose just one. The only downside of our visit was that it was over 90 degrees at the time, and hiking around the rock formations in that heat was challenging. I'd like to go back in April or November.

The afternoon was dwindling and we still had a long way to go to reach our next hotel. So around 3 pm we left the park and headed down Highway 191 for 130 miles to Mexican Hat, in Navajoland, where we spent the night at the San Juan Inn. We had stayed here before, when we visited the Four Corners area with my mother back in April, 2003, but I hadn't remembered much about it. In fact, my only memory was that my mother had ordered a Navajo Taco for dinner in the adjoining restaurant and liked it so much that the next morning she tried to order more fry bread for breakfast. But the waitress said sternly, "No fry bread in the morning," and my mother was sorry. I noticed that fry bread is now available in the morning too, but (perhaps superstitiously) I didn't order it. Rocket Boy and I did both have (vegetarian) Navajo Tacos for dinner, and both twins ate some of mine and pronounced it delicious.

Anyway, the San Juan Inn is a very cool place to stay, my favorite hotel of the trip -- and I say that even though it was terribly hot there and the A/C didn't work well, so I was hot all night and didn't sleep well. I still loved it. I splurged on a room with three beds, since the twins are almost too big to share a bed happily, and this may have been part of the problem: the A/C couldn't handle the larger room. The inn is right by the San Juan River, and you can sit out on patio furniture and look at the river and read, which is what I did after dinner until it got dark. The twins stayed in the room and played with their stupid devices, but Rocket Boy came and joined me by the river. Just sublime.

The next morning after breakfast we drove to Valley of the Gods, also known as the poor man's Monument Valley because it's free (for MV you have to pay a tour guide). I was nervous about going there because it's just BLM land and we read that the roads are not good. But the roads are fine (I guess they're maybe not so great after a rain), and the rock formations are amazing. The whole area seemed very green, too, which we weren't expecting. It was so lovely. We didn't spend too long there -- didn't do the whole drive -- because we were worried about getting to the Four Corners monument too late. So after half an hour or so, we turned around, retraced our steps to the highway, and were off to the Four Corners.

I had read that the lines to take pictures at the Four Corners monument were terribly long in the summer, so I was worried. I don't know what was so special about the day we were there -- maybe a little too close to the first day of school? -- but there were only about three people in line! Everyone still more or less obeyed the rules, though, only three or so photos per group, and everyone very nicely took photos for the group before or after them. The twins were really impressed by the whole experience. Then we walked around, visiting the four states, and looked at all the booths that rim the edges of the monument. Kid B chose a handpainted magnet and the artist showed him how he decorates the magnets with glitter. It was getting windy, with a few drops of rain, so we said goodbye to the monument and headed for Cortez.

I don't know how I got this idea, but when I was making our various hotel reservations I had the impression that Cortez was kind of a cool little town, something like Moab. And it isn't. It seemed fairly depressed, actually. We couldn't find anywhere to eat lunch except Denny's, so that was our second Denny's meal of the trip. After eating, we went to Mesa Verde National Park and signed up for a tour the next morning, since it was already too late for a tour that day. We retreated to our hotel (the Best Western), which was all the twins really wanted to do anyway. I had splurged on this hotel too, and gotten a room that included a little living room with a sofa bed, so Kid A happily slept on that. This hotel had very good WiFi, which was convenient since our iPad had just gotten unlocked (long long story) and needed to be wiped and restarted.

Saturday morning we got up early, ate the free breakfast, and were checked out and on our way by 8:45 am. We drove to Mesa Verde and went to the Cliff Palace area, where Rocket Boy and the twins checked in for their 10 am tour. I had decided not to accompany them when I found out it involved climbing ladders. I figured I'd hang out at the museum instead. But after dropping them off, I thought, do I really want to come all this way and not see anything? So I stopped at the parking for the Soda Canyon Overlook Trail and hiked the 1.2 mile round trip to see good views of Balcony House. It was a very pleasant hike, though hot, and afterwards I found out that the rest of the family had hiked only about a quarter mile!

After lunch at the Far View Terrace, we got back on the road, drove back through Cortez, and headed for Grand Junction. I somehow couldn't bear the thought of driving back through Utah again, so we took Highway 491 to Highway 141 through Uravan, which turned out to be a great choice. We started out in kind of an agricultural area (where they grow a lot of pinto beans), but ended up in the middle of more crazy rock formations, and until the very end of the 205 miles there was almost no one on the road with us. We made good time and checked into our hotel in Grand Junction around 6 pm.

This last hotel was called the Mesa Inn, and it was cheap and kind of tired. Lots of smokers (our room smelled slightly of smoke and I think it was coming from the air intake), lots of old people on a budget. The people in the room above us sounded like elephants. But it had a very nice pool, and our room was a few feet from the pool! We saw our neighbor using it as we left for our anniversary dinner at the Village Inn (see photo), but when we got back it was empty, so we all went in. It wasn't heated, but the air temperature was still around 90 degrees, so the water felt heavenly. I didn't want to get out, spent maybe 45 minutes in there, swimming slowly back and forth. Also, the air conditioner in our room was the best of the trip and I slept very well. And in the morning there were DOUGHNUTS with the free breakfast! (I don't like doughnuts, but the twins were in heaven.) The twins declared this hotel the best of the trip, even though they had to share a bed.

After we finished breakfast we loaded up the car and took Rocket Boy back to the Grand Junction airport. It was really sad to say goodbye to him, especially since that meant I had to start driving back to Boulder. It took me seven hours to drive the 250 miles, complete with heavy rain over Vail Pass and an unbelievable traffic jam on I-70 (Sunday afternoon right before school starting, yeah, it was expected). We got home a little after 4 pm and I was almost dizzy with fatigue by then. It's taken me a few days to recover and I'm still longing for the weekend when I can sleep in later than 7:15. But it was an awesome trip. Worth every penny. I hope we can take some more trips like this one over the next few years.

Summer drawing to a close

It's actually summer vacation that's drawing to a close -- we've got a lot of summer left. It's hot and dry right now, that Augusty feeling, when the sky is sort of white and all the plants are half dead. We haven't mowed our lawn in a month, but it's fine, because the grass has grown barely an inch in that time. We keep getting thunderstorms, so I don't actually have to WATER the lawn, but if I cared about having a lush green lawn I would.

The twins go back to school in 10 days, so we are going to squeeze in a little vacation before then. Normally we go to California to visit family in June, but that didn't work out this year. And normally we go camping with the Twins Club in late July, but we aren't members of the club anymore, so that didn't happen. So this little trip we've got coming up is really the only special thing we will have done for the whole summer break. Without Rocket Boy around we didn't even go on any day trips anywhere. I said I would do it, I promised I'd take the twins somewhere special every weekend -- and I have not done it once. (This is some of the negativity I left out of the last very negative blog post.)

So anyway, we're going to try to make up for that with a trip to the Four Corners (including Rocket Boy). There are so many things that can go wrong with this trip I can hardly bear to think about it. But we've got it all set up, reservations for a different hotel each night, cat-sitters visiting twice a day, the neighbors alerted. I still have a long to-do list left, but I've done a lot already. Most of what's left is things like "Clean bathroom," and yeah, I'll do a little, but I'm not going to scour it. Just enough so that if the cat-sitters go in there they won't be shocked.

I don't have much to share tonight, just wanted to keep on my blogging schedule. I've felt my life becoming more constrained this summer, since Rocket Boy left. I wonder if this is how I will live if I'm on my own someday (I always assume I'll outlive RB, but he's pretty healthy and I'm not, so you never know). I've got my job, which takes up about 4 hours a day. I've got the twins -- making dinner and other meals, reading to them at bedtime, transporting them to camps, playing the occasional game. I've got the house, which takes up a lot of time, even though it's a disaster (but note the clean-ish kitchen in the photo). Shopping, laundry. I've got the cats and all their meals and litter boxes. Time for myself is usually spent reading or doing puzzles. Once in a while I get a movie from the library. I almost never watch TV. I spend some time messing around on the computer. But that's about it. It's a little life. I feel too young to have such a little life, but this is how things are right now.

I'm up to 71 books for the year so far, so it looks like I'm going to hit 100 (the goal was 52). Some of the most interesting reading I've been doing has been for the Classics Challenge. I read two books this summer that I had been meaning to read basically my whole life (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne) and now I don't have to wish I'd read them anymore -- they are done. The Scarlet Letter was nothing like I thought it would be -- I counted it as my "Classic Tragic Novel" but it's very mildly tragic, more funny than anything. And Huck Finn has entered my consciousness and I think about him quite often, especially since he journeyed through Missouri and that's where Rocket Boy lives now. I'm currently reading a "Classic from a Place You've Lived," The Valley of the Moon by Jack London, and now that's got me thinking about it constantly. Among other things, it shows (unintentionally) how/why some people become white supremacists.

Anyway, I guess I'll stop here and get ready for bed -- a lot to do tomorrow and the rest of the week. Wish us luck on our travels. Next time I blog the twins may be back in school. Middle school. So amazing.

Coping/Not coping

Rocket Boy has been gone for two and a half months, and I really thought by now I'd be coping quite well. I'd have the housework down to a system, I'd be reorganizing the house the way I like it, fixing the meals I want to eat, I'd have time for hobbies, the twins and I would be going on outings every weekend... Instead, none of that is true.

The housework is a disaster. I can't keep anything clean or organized. It is -- not surprisingly -- much worse than when Rocket Boy lived here. Part of the problem is that I still haven't gotten my sleep figured out, still not getting enough of it, though I have good days. When you're tired all the time, and you still have to go to work every day, you (that is, I) have no energy for housework. I work frantically to keep things from falling apart completely. I have a big weekly to-do list that I try to hack away at every day. Yet every day, things get worse.

Positive counter-examples: for every negative thing in this blog post I'm going to try to say something positive. So here are a couple of positive housekeeping things.

1. The toilet broke last week and I fixed it. Yes, that's right, me. At first the toilet was running all the time. It actually kept me from falling asleep one night, and the next morning it wouldn't flush (I had to use a bucket of water to flush it, shocking the twins). I googled "toilet running all the time" and discovered that it was probably a problem with the flapper, a part I was unfamiliar with. I texted Rocket Boy and he agreed that the flapper was probably the problem and gave me some advice on how to buy a new one. He claimed they were all alike and I could just buy a standard one. But this turned out not to be true. We have an old toilet and cannot use the new style of flappers. So I had to go back to the hardware store and get one we could use. The photo shows, on the right our old crummy broken one, in the middle the new one I bought that didn't work, and on the left the second new one I bought that DID work. It was hard to do this, especially since I also had to scrub out the filthy toilet tank, but the alternative was calling a plumber which would have meant I would have had to clean the bathroom first. So I did it myself.

I actually need to go back in and adjust the chain, so the job isn't completely done. But the toilet flushes and I did it myself.

2. I organized the twins' sock drawer. The twins share a dresser, and it's so big that for the most part I can just put Kid A's stuff on the left side of each drawer and Kid B's stuff on the right side, and the clothes stay apart and it's fine. But the top drawer is different. It's divided into two sections and we keep socks on the left and underwear on the right. The underwear stays put; the socks don't. Rolled-up socks are round and they roll, and the socks get all mixed up, and this is annoying early in the morning. So, I made a drawer organizer out of cardboard. Actually, originally I bought a ready-made drawer organizer at Target, back in March, but it was too tall for the drawer. That stymied me until today, when I googled "how to make a sock drawer organizer" and learned that it was very easy, you just had to cut up some cardboard. Of course, for that I decided I needed an X-acto knife, and for that I had to call Rocket Boy in St. Louis, because although I was sure we HAD an X-acto knife, I had no idea where it was. I assumed it was in a junk drawer, but we have a LOT of junk drawers scattered throughout the house. Rocket Boy had several ideas about where an X-acto knife might be (he claimed we had two), but it was not in the first two places he suggested. I finally found it in the third place (a drawer in the workbench in the garage) and then I cut up my cardboard and put it together to form a drawer organizer. As you can see, it's really crummy looking, but it does the job. I'm very pleased.

Back to the negatives.

Food is a much bigger problem than I thought it would be. I had pictured myself making simple, healthy meals -- small, of course, because Rocket Boy wouldn't be here to eat them, but nevertheless lovely. Instead, I have trouble putting anything on the table at all. Several times we've just skipped dinner -- around 7:30 or so one of the twins will say, "Did we have dinner?" or "What are we having for dinner?" and I'll say, "Um, we're not having dinner tonight, can you just eat snacks?" At first this upset them, but they've gotten used to it, and THAT upsets me as much as anything. Rocket Boy and I have always been so good about preserving "dinner time" and here I am ruining it. And then on the nights that I do manage to make dinner (or heat up something frozen), it's almost always an entree and nothing else. No side dishes. No vegetables. Once in a great while I'll manage to heat up a package of frozen veggies, and occasionally I'll put out a fruit, like slices of watermelon. But that's it. I can't think when the twins last had a piece of broccoli. I'm planning that things will improve in the fall, but we've got a long way to go. The truth is that I hate cooking, and when I'm struggling, cooking is hard to make happen.

Positive counter-example: The refrigerator (as you can see above) is full of fruit, with some veggies too. I can see some bell peppers, apples, an orange, and a sack of grapes in the crispers, and in the main part of the fridge there's a thing of watermelon slices, a thing of strawberries, a thing of blueberries, a sack of cherries... We also have milk, orange juice, eggs, cheese... We're not starving and I will pull myself together on this front eventually. I will, I will. I hope I will.

I guess I'll stop here -- it's my bedtime, and I'm not in the mood to write more depressing things about my lack of time for hobbies and how I never take the twins anywhere. Suffice it to say that this is all a lot harder than I thought it would be -- or maybe it would be more accurate to say it's exactly as hard as I feared it would be. But we're still here, the kitties too. The kids go back to school in two and a half weeks, and we're even planning a little vacation for right before that. And the toilet flushes (though I do need to adjust that chain). We're coping.

Money

Now that Rocket Boy is earning a good salary, we should be doing great financially. And maybe we are, I can't tell. There are several new expenses in our lives because of his job, of course: his rent, food, gas, the cost of flying him back to visit us every month or so, and next month we'll have to start paying $500/month on his student loans again. But even so, we still have more money than we did before, especially since we still have my part-time salary and the money from the rental house. So then the question arises: what do we do with that money?

The first thing I decided to do was start saving. We get $1440/month from the rental house and I have started putting $1000 of that in a regular savings account where I can get at it easily. It's not really savings, it's to pay our insurance and property tax bills, and whatever needs doing on the house. It's thus also meant as a sort of emergency fund, something we haven't had for a while. Last month I decided to start putting another $500/month in another savings account. I'm not sure what this is for -- maybe it's my new car fund or some such (my car is fine, but it's almost 12 years old). Eventually I'll probably put that money somewhere where it might earn a little interest, but I want to keep it liquid for now.

I don't know whether I should be stashing more money away. Probably I should be. If I made a budget I might be able to figure that out. But I've never really been a budget person. I have two basic approaches to money: (1) If I have very little, try to spend as little as possible. (2) If I have more than I need, then spend a little more and save the rest. Those are actually fairly workable approaches, but they do lack detail.

The one thing I am trying not to do -- and I don't think I've done -- is change our style of living, increase our day to day expenses. For instance, I haven't signed up for cable/satellite TV, even though we currently get almost no channels over the air. And the boys and I are still going out to eat only once a week -- mostly. I don't know if getting deli items or sushi from the grocery store counts as eating out. It's certainly not cooking. But anyway, I was doing things like that before our income increased. One nice change is that I paid off my credit card (I'd carried a balance for a year, starting with some expensive car repairs), and I will pay it off every month from now on.

A few things I am spending more on, and one of those is books. When I was younger I used to spend a lot of money on books, new books, not just used bookstore/library book sale books. Our house is so full of stuff that it doesn't make sense for me to buy a lot of ANYTHING -- there's no room on any bookshelf for more books. But I do still buy books -- carefully, now, because of our space issues -- and of course I use the library a lot too -- but I do still buy books. And now with more income I have bought a few in the last month that I wouldn't have bought before.

Additionally, I have bought some new clothes. My wardrobe is horrible, pathetic, partly because I keep growing out of everything, but also because I feel like I can't justify the expense of buying clothes for me. The twins, yes, they have to have clothes that fit and look decent. But who cares what I look like? My raincoat has a big rip right in the front and my winter coat doesn't meet around my belly. Though he doesn't outgrow his clothes, Rocket Boy is in a similar situation: most of his shirts and pants have been patched and mended. For Father's Day I bought him three new pairs of pants so he won't look like a homeless person at work. For my part, I had (until my recent shopping trips) just a few summer tops that fit, so I had to do my laundry every few days during hot spells. Now I am the proud owner of seven sleeveless tops and two sleeveless dresses (that fit), and I only have to do my laundry once a week. I also have a new summer nightgown, and I'm planning to work on the coat problem in the fall. Oh, and I ordered a new swimsuit. When I wanted to take the twins swimming I discovered that last year's suit doesn't fit (to be honest, it didn't really fit last year either), so I took a deep breath and ordered the next size up.

But there's another spending issue, actually somewhat related to the clothes thing, and that is that we haven't spent the money we should have been spending all along on our house and the rental, and thus there are so many things that need fixing. It would take all our money and more to do everything, so I've been trying to figure out a priority list. The first thing on the list was new gutters for our house -- but, as so often happens, that has had to be set aside. Our neighbor on the other side of the rental is very upset about the overgrown bushes at the rental, which he believes harbor the rats that he's seen on his property. So I hired the guy who both this neighbor and the neighbor on the other side of us recommended, and he's started doing a massive, almost unbelievable pruning job. Unfortunately I don't have a "before" picture, but just imagine this yard completely drowning in bushes and volunteer trees. They took all of that out this week, and now you can see the roses again! And the decorative rocks. And a lot of other smaller plants that have been in hiding for many years.

The guy is only coming by every two or three days (he worked two days this past week, about three hours each time), and we agreed that he'll bill me every couple of weeks, so that I keep close track of what I'm spending. He didn't try to quote the job because it's so massive -- the side yard and backyard are worse than the front. He'll just work along, and when he's done here I'll probably ask him to work on our backyard, because it's just as bad (our front yard is mostly OK). So after a month or two maybe it'll be time to think about gutters. Or maybe there will be some other squeaky wheel demanding grease, such as a failing major appliance, or maybe our rotting kitchen floor will collapse.

So I guess that's why a budget seems impossible -- we really need to just spend and spend and spend until we get the houses under control. I'm still going to set aside $1500/month, but other than that, I probably need to spend the rest of our earnings as soon as they hit our joint account. Whenever I miss Rocket Boy and wish I didn't have to be a single parent, I think about all the things we're able to pay for now, and that helps. A little.

Happy birthday weekend

I am 59! And thus beginneth the last year of my 50s. My 50s! I honestly still haven't adjusted even to being 50, and now I've got one year left until I'm 60. It's nuts. Is this how everyone else feels? Do all older people feel like this is some kind of joke? When I turned 30, I welcomed my 30s. I had heard good things about them. My 20s were very stressful, and I was ready for a change. And I really enjoyed my 30s, all the way through. Since then, though, I've had trouble. I felt that 40 sounded fat, 50 was impossibly elderly (considering that I had two-year-old twins at the time), and now 60 seems absurd. Well, I've got one more year to get used to the idea. Haven't enjoyed the first nine years of my 50s, so maybe the last year will be OK.

I had a nice birthday to kick it off. Longtime readers of my blogs know that I usually don't like my birthdays, but I did like this one. For starters, Rocket Boy came home for a visit. I'm really enjoying his visits, even though he and I do start sniping at each other eventually. But I feel a lot of stress ease off when he shows up -- for a little while I don't have to be responsible for EVERYTHING.

He arrived on Thursday, the 4th of July -- dead tired, because he'd had to get up at 4:30 to catch the MetroLink to the airport, and even then he almost missed his flight because there was a problem (a body) on the tracks and his train had to be rerouted. They held the airplane doors for him, but his suitcase came on a later flight. We had lunch at Great Scott's on the way home, but then he had to turn around and go back to the airport for his suitcase. Still, he was up for a barbecue on the patio that night, and even a quick trip up the hill to watch fireworks. He didn't save enough strength to play games with the kids that day, but there were games on the 5th, 6th, and 7th. Playing board games with Dad is one of their favorite things to do.

My birthday was Friday, and I didn't want to do anything special that day. We worked on chores, did errands, and ate a nice lunch out at the Southside Walnut Cafe. After lunch we picked up Kid A's new glasses and then went shopping for a new (bigger) bike for him -- something he badly needed and we couldn't afford until Rocket Boy got his new job. Kid B had expressed interest in getting a new bike too, but in the store he denied this, so we skipped it. I really hope he'll get back into riding -- he stopped several years ago after a bad accident -- but it's going to take more time. Kid A's bike is beautiful, kind of an orangey-red, and he LOVES it. When we got it home, he went speeding off on a ride, almost missing the Opening of the Presents.

I had ensured a good haul by ordering some gifts for myself -- clothes for my Barbie dolls. But it wasn't necessary, because I was so well remembered by my family. The kids (with RB's help) got me a lovely Barbie Closet, which included two more outfits and not enough hangers (my dolls have a lot of clothes). Rocket Boy brought me two iron garden decorations from St. Louis: a cardinal on a stick, and a red rose. I particularly like the cardinal (you can see it in the clump of flowers/weeds to the right of Kid B). My sisters were extremely generous with gift cards, and my older sister included some silly things like pudding mixes and little stuffed animals. Our next-door neighbor, Arlene, brought me a purple chrysanthemum, which I need to plant. Rocket Boy picked up a cake at the grocery store, we had leftovers for dinner, and there was an enormous, glorious thunderstorm, complete with hail the size of grapes! The streets flooded (briefly) and my flowers got smooshed, but they are recovering. My, I do love thunderstorms. The kids and I watched it from the porch (Rocket Boy and the cats, none of whom like thunderstorms, stayed in the house).

The goofiest part of the weekend had to be the Ridgecrest earthquakes, on the 4th and the 5th. Rocket Boy was sorry we missed them, but I wasn't. It sounded just awful, no power and no water in the desert in July. Trona, as usual, got the worst part of the deal.


Also this weekend, the reconstituted Grateful Dead (Dead & Co.) played at CU, so the city was crawling with out of state license plates and slightly-too-happy people. I decided my Barbie dolls were going to the Dead and did my best to dress them appropriately. They are all wearing sunglasses due to consumption of marijuana products, and Man-bun Ken is dressed like a crazy person because he took way too many drugs. Happiness is having enough tiny sunglasses for all your Barbie dolls to wear (though we did lose a pair when Rainbow Barbie toppled off the table, but I'm hopeful they'll show up).

Saturday was more errands and chores. Kid B had a birthday party to go to (just as Kid A did the last time Rocket Boy was home), so I had to drive him to Flatirons Crossing at 3:30 and then we picked him up at about 6:45. This made it hard to schedule dinner, but since Kid A said he wasn't hungry and Kid B had eaten pizza at the party, we left them alone in the house and went out to eat at Murphy's. We dubbed this a combination "paying off the credit card" and "early anniversary" dinner, since RB won't be home for that. In fact, right now he isn't scheduled to come back until Labor Day weekend (almost 2 months), so that will be a long stretch of aloneness. The kids will have been back in school for two weeks by the time he makes it home again.

So now it's Monday and I'm in charge of EVERYTHING once more. There's a real letdown after Rocket Boy leaves, but the sun is shining and I slept well, so I have some energy. The kids went to summer school (they have two more weeks of it) and I worked at home from 9:15 to 1:30. After school, Kid A rode his new bike to the library to play on the computers and Kid B came home to play on his computer here. (Sigh. At least they used their brains at school.) I have done the dishes and fed the cats twice, started a load of laundry and written this blog post. Now I need to do another cleaning task and decide what to have for dinner. After dinner I might do a little pruning and/or take a walk. Unless we have another thunderstorm, which would be awesome.

Making it through June

Well, sorry about that! I knew I hadn't blogged for a while, but I didn't realize it had been four weeks. I'm having trouble finding time to blog, because the kids have started going to bed so late at night. Our 8:30/9 pm bedtime has become a 10 pm bedtime, without my really noticing, and sometimes it's 10:30 before I manage to close the door of their room. It's the light, of course -- how can you go to bed when it's still fully light outside? How can you even start getting ready for bed? I'm often working in the yard at 9 pm. Also, we don't have to get up early these days. They've been in summer school the last three weeks, but they don't have to catch the bus to Casey until 8:49 am. Plus, they can eat a late breakfast when they get there, before class starts, so I don't really even have to feed them. They can roll out of bed at 8:25 and be out the door and walking to the bus at 8:35. In other words, even with that late bedtime, they're still getting around 10 hours of sleep.

I, however, have to get up somewhat earlier. I have to feed the cats, which is time-consuming. Pie Bear needs an insulin shot and Chester needs his new special diet cat food -- see photo of large white blob at left -- but I also give him a little bit of regular food and of course Pie gets regular food, and it takes time to find two clean cat dishes, fill a needle for Pie, measure out the various foods, distribute them, and then put away the leftovers and mark Pie's shot on the calendar. Then I have to scoop Chester's litter box and take that out to the garbage bin, bring the newspaper in, make a pot of tea, get dressed, and wake up the twins. All this is to say that I can't go to bed too late, so I feel like I never have time to blog. Only on hot Saturday afternoons like this one, when the twins are doing their own stuff.

I'm trying to think of what we've been doing over the past month. Surviving, mostly. For me, it's just one day after another trying to get the twins sorted (fed, in clean clothes, teeth brushed, hair brushed, off to whatever activity, and not 100% on the computer or TV all the time), enough work done for my job that I don't get fired, the house at least not worse off than it was, the yard ditto. I mostly fail at everything. That's not me being gloomy, it's an objective assessment. Of course, me being gloomy/depressed factors into everything too. Although I loved rain as a young person, in my old age I find that cloudy/rainy days make me depressed. And we've had a LOT of rainy days this month, leading to a LOT of days when I found myself incapable of making dinner or doing other chores. Now the weather's switched -- it's so hot. And I don't do heat well either. But at least I don't get more depressed, I just get very very slow.

The kids finished four weeks of advanced swim lessons this past Thursday, and that was a nice addition to our lives (you can see them in the back of the photo -- Kid A in the orange swim shirt and Kid B in the blue). It was good exercise and their teacher told me that they're both great swimmers. Tuesdays and Thursdays at 6:10 pm -- it meant I didn't really have to come up with a formal dinner on those days (that's my definition of a good day). I made muffins or some other snacky food on those days, and when Kid B would ask, "Did we have dinner?" I'd say, "Oh, we don't really have dinner on swim lesson days."

But now swim lessons are over. I tried to sign them up for the July session, but all the classes are already full. I'm bummed. Think of all those dinners I'm going to have to make.

We had our first regular visit from Rocket Boy (other than the one-day-in-next-day-out visit he made in May). He came a few weeks ago, for Father's Day weekend, not that it was much of a Father's Day for him. I had made a long list of tasks for him, and he diligently worked away at them. He had wanted to take the twins on some sort of special outing, but all he ended up having time for was a quick trip to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science on Sunday afternoon (his flight left around 11 pm that night). I was sad for a long time after he left and so were the boys. He's coming back for 4th of July and my birthday and I have another long list of tasks for him then.

We talk almost every night. He seems to be managing OK in St. Louis, doing a lot of exploring during his time off. He goes to the Botanical Gardens quite often -- seems to find it almost a refuge -- and he went to Shakespeare in the park last weekend, which amazed me (the photo is from that experience). He's found a place to live, the basement in a shared house, but yesterday apparently both the refrigerator and the air conditioning died -- and it's horribly hot and humid, not a place you can live without a fridge and A/C. I imagine today he's trying to work on sorting that out. Right now (I just checked) the temperature in his city and our city are about the same, around 90 degrees, but the humidity in Boulder is 21% and the humidity in St. Louis is 41% (and often it's worse -- this must be a good day). I'm glad I'm in Boulder...

But in Boulder I have to be in charge of everything, including the cats and all their needs. We got some unexpected news about Pie Bear a few weeks ago, when he had his biopsy. The thing growing in his mouth is not cancer, it is a rare amyloid producing odontogenic tumor, which does not metastasize, but does grow and make the cat uncomfortable. The vet did not recommend surgery to remove it, given Pie's age (14 or more) and his diabetes, etc. So now we have to wait and try to figure out when it's time to let him go -- or rather, when it's time to actively end his life by having him put to sleep. "Letting him go" sounds easier than calling up the vet and making an appointment for euthanasia. If I try to look in his mouth to see how the tumor is growing, he snarls and tries to bite me. I have also heard him yelp once when he bumped his mouth against something. On the other hand, he's eating normally, including chunky food that he has to chew. He still likes to go outside and sit in the sunshine, and he likes to nuzzle up to me when I'm reading in bed. So, is it time? And if not, how will I know when it is?

Pie ran out of insulin a week ago, so that would have been a logical time to euthanize him. But I couldn't do it. It didn't feel like the right time. So I called the vet and asked her to call in a new prescription for him. We get his insulin at Costco, which seems to be cheaper than other pharmacies even if you're not a member, but I thought -- hey, why not join Costco? I've always wondered about doing so. It isn't terribly expensive -- I think it was $60 for a basic membership. Before Rocket Boy got his job, $60 was too much, but now it isn't. So I joined, and the twins and I went to Costco to see what all the fuss was about.

Kid A of course wanted to buy everything he saw. "Can we get this? Can we get this?" For example, he wanted to buy a very large seal (a stuffed animal) that wasn't even all that cute. "Where would you PUT that?" I asked him. People with low impulse control like Kid A should not have Costco memberships. I was sorely tempted by several things, including a large plastic jar of jelly beans, but I resisted. But even with me saying no constantly, we bought several things, such as a box containing 30 small bags of Sun Chips, a flat of organic peaches, a large plastic container of cookies, and two large bottles of chocolate sauce. I wonder how much the existence of Costco contributes to America's obesity epidemic. And of course we picked up Pie's insulin -- $325. For a cat who is about to be euthanized.

We finished the cookies within a day. The peaches ripened faster than I expected and I ended up having to make an emergency peach crisp -- which was more like peach soup. We have only 7 bags of Sun Chips left, mostly the flavor that no one likes (Garden Salsa). The chocolate sauce will last forever. And now I have a new question: how long do I have to keep Pie Bear alive to justify the cost of that insulin?

Being a single mom

Well, Memorial Day week is over and I got a good dose of what it's like to be a single parent -- especially one who's trying to work for a living at the same time. Maybe it would actually be easier if I had a regular job where I had to go in to the office and all that. I don't know what I'd do with the twins in that case, possibly leave them at home to burn the house down.

Instead, though, I work as a research assistant, and my hours are pretty flexible. I can work at home, unless there's a meeting to attend, and as long as I get the work done, no one's going to be too fussy about when I get it done.

This week was not a week in which I got a lot of work done, however. I won't say I got nothing done, because I did a little bit. But I was supposed to work for 16 hours somewhere in there and I didn't come anywhere close. Part of the problem was that I'm not sleeping well. Part of the problem was all the housework that's building up. Part of the problem was that my two main co-workers were both out of town, one on vacation and the other at a conference, so there were no meetings to attend. I did take the twins to the office with me on Wednesday and Thursday, but I wasn't very productive with them there. And I wasn't productive at ALL on Tuesday and Friday, when I tried to work at home.

On Thursday, trying to work in the office while the twins played on their laptops behind me, I really was on the verge of quitting my job. Oh screw this, I can't do this, I'm no good at this, I can't work on top of everything else I have to deal with right now. And then, while continuing to berate myself, I clicked on the website where many of the products of our work are displayed for public use. I was trying to find some examples of a type of document I was supposed to be writing, but I also noticed three documents that I myself had been very active in producing this past year. Here's one, and here's another. They're not brilliant, but without me they would have been lesser things -- or not have existed at all. (They don't have my name on them -- this stuff is mostly anonymous.) I've produced a number of other things this past year as well, some that haven't gone through the final editing stage yet, others published in other venues.

Hey, you're not worthless, I told myself, and with this evidence to back me up I was almost convinced I shouldn't quit. I still had trouble getting any work done, though. Maybe this coming week -- the kids have a half-day camp.

On Wednesday after work, the twins and I went home for lunch and then back to CU to go bowling. This was not a good choice of activity for someone with a broken toe, and I was in pain the whole time. But we had fun. I won the first game and Kid A won the second (we're both very competitive), but Kid B did much better than he ever used to. I would say bowling has become a fun activity for us, one we'll definitely do again soon (maybe when the toe is better). It's not expensive at CU, and I get an employee discount.

On Thursday after work, we went to Starbucks for lunch/snacks. I had my usual chai latte, but I let the twins order sandwiches and treats and drinks. On Friday night, we went out for ice cream at Sweet Cow, and on Saturday, we ate out for dinner at Panera Bread. Today, Sunday, Kid B is having a playdate (is it still called that when you're going to middle school in two months?) with some friends of his from school -- they're hanging out at one kid's house and then going to a movie. Kid A played with Z from next door for a while and then (with my permission) walked to our local branch library to play on the computers. I don't like the extra computer time, but at least he gets a good walk to and fro.

I'm trying to assign an area of the house to clean each week (this is a slight modification of a cleaning program I set up a few months ago) and this past week the "area" was the front yard. It was rainy the first few days, but when it dried up a bit I started pruning. I cut off two leaf bags full of juniper bushes and then started on the volunteer Siberian elm. And then Kid A saw what I was doing and wanted to help. He took over the saw and began sawing off gigantic limbs. Now this tree desperately needs to be removed by a professional. It's considered a "junk tree" in this area (maybe everywhere except Siberia, I don't know), but more importantly, it's growing in a very inappropriate place, right next to the sidewalk, and I'm sure it's interfering with sewer lines and whatnot. It needs to come out, and that's on my list of things to pay for once we get a few paychecks into the bank. But in the meantime I thought I could remove sections of it.

Between us, Kid A and I removed so much of the tree that the driveway was covered with branches. Which I then had to put into leaf bags (the smaller branches) or cut down to size and bundle with other branches for compost pick-up on Friday (which actually turned out to be Saturday, due to the Memorial Day holiday earlier in the week). I worked and worked on this project on both Thursday and Friday, but finally gave up. We put out our big compost bin and five leaf bags, and the rest will have to wait two weeks. It's a big job, and oh boy I missed Rocket Boy while I was working on it. Of course, if he were here he wouldn't have done the pruning (he hates pruning, thinks it's akin to killing) and then he would have criticized me for doing it wrong. I do think, though, if I had managed to do it, he would have helped saw the branches down to size and helped bag and tie everything up for the compost pick-up. Almost everything's harder with him gone.