Frozen fall

So it is fall, usually my favorite time of the year. Some falls are better than others, though, and this one is definitely challenging me.

To everyone's surprise, our first snow of the year arrived on October 10th (3.5 inches). On the 9th it was a balmy 78 degrees, but on the morning of the 10th, it was 18 degrees on our front porch, a 60-degree drop. This did not make me happy. The snow didn't last -- in fact, when Rocket Boy showed up a day later, there was barely a trace left on anyone's roof or lawn. But because it got so cold, especially the night of the 10th, many trees' leaves froze. This means they're not turning beautiful colors as they should be. They're just kind of greyish and unpleasant.

Rocket Boy's monthly visit went well -- much better than September. We agreed it must have been partly because he stayed longer. He arrived the night of Friday the 11th, in time to cuddle with the twins while I read from our current chapter book, and left around 11:30 am on Tuesday the 15th, a couple of hours after we sent the twins off on an Outdoor Education trip with their school. So we had three full days plus the two travel days. Even my bad cold didn't detract from it (Kid B was mostly over his cold by then and Kid A didn't come down with his until Outdoor Ed). We worked on lots of tasks, he took the boys and two friends on a Denver trip (museum and botanical garden), we watched silly movies at night (he got the "Tremors" series from the library) and both he and Kid A had dentist appointments. He changed the furnace filter, brought down the Halloween decorations, and dragged an old filing cabinet down to the curb (someone nabbed it a few days later).

But when you have a great visit, it's so hard to say goodbye.  I've been missing him a lot this time. Of course, the same day he left, the twins also left, and they didn't come home until after 4 pm on Friday the 18th. So I had three and a half days alone, which I did not enjoy.

Last year when the twins did Outdoor Ed with their 5th grade class, Rocket Boy and I had a blast. We ate at non-kid-friendly restaurants and just generally enjoyed ourselves. But I found that it was no fun to be all alone, just me and the cats. My book group met the first night, Tuesday, and that kept the loneliness at bay for a little while. Wednesday I took a walk, and saw one person I knew, but that night I ended up driving to Target, just for some human interaction. I felt very lonely wandering the aisles. Thursday I went to the library and the post office, but otherwise was alone. When I woke up Friday morning I was so relieved! The photo shows the buses arriving back at the school -- I did not manage to take even ONE photo of either twin, packed up to go or coming home, but I got those buses! (Actually, the kids weren't even on these two -- they were on bus #3, which arrived about half an hour later.)

So now the weekend is drawing to a close and the poor twins have to go back to school tomorrow (their last day in the classroom was October 11th). Today was cold and very windy, and tomorrow will be similar. I woke up a few times during the night, the wind was so strong. I tried to take a photo of the blowing trees this morning -- not sure you can get a sense of that, but see how greyish everything is? Still a little green, too, but mostly the leaves just look sad. I didn't go outside today at all (except to take these photos). Too cold and blowy for a walk, plus the wind makes my cough worse.

I need a fall project, something to remind me of how much I like this time of year. I've already read some books with "ghost" in the title this month (American Ghost by Hannah Nordhaus and Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss) but I decided that I needed to read a whole lot more scary books, so I got an armload of them at the library yesterday. So far I've read Alice Isn't Dead and tried The Turn of the Key but decided I didn't like it. I think I'll try Midnight Riot next. There are 11 more days until the end of the month, so we'll see how many I can get through by then. (Come November, I switch back to serious books.) It's a little tricky reading scary books without Rocket Boy next to me in bed. I try to get the cats to come sit on the bed with me, but they won't comply. So I read alone, nervously, telling myself that the creaking noise is the wind, or a twin turning over in bed.

Oh yes, you may be wondering what the news is on the job front. There's no news -- I've thought of some things to pursue, but haven't pursued them. One conclusion I have come to is that I really need to stop taking jobs that I'm likely to quit in misery -- which is what happened with three of my last four jobs (with the IRS, the second teaching job, and my research assistant job). So I've been thinking about why I quit those jobs. Some of the reasons: (1) the jobs were low level, not "careers," so I didn't feel like I was losing much by quitting; (2) I had very little control over what I did, had to follow silly rules and orders from people who kept changing their minds; (3) I didn't enjoy the work, wouldn't have chosen it voluntarily; and (4) I didn't value the work enough. I don't think I can do anything about #1. No one is going to hire a 59-year-old for some big career type job, and I don't think I want one anyway. #2 kind of goes along with #1 -- low-level jobs don't usually have much autonomy, although it might be possible to find a more rational boss. So what about #3 and #4? Can I think of something that I would enjoy doing? And/or can I find something to do that I consider important? It's not so bad to be a little cog in a wheel if you value the wheel. Part of what went wrong with my last job was that I wasn't terribly interested in what we were doing. I would tell people about it and they would nod and say, oh yes, very important work. But I didn't really think it was. So that's where I am, trying to think of something I could do that I would find valuable.

Onward to Halloween! I put my little dolls out today and that always cheers me up. Neither boy has decided on a Halloween costume, which worries me -- I don't want to be frantically trying to put something together for them at the last minute. But their trick-or-treating years are coming to an end, and maybe the lack of interest in costumes is what precedes that. I told them I'm not going with them this year -- have to stay home and hand out candy, which is usually Rocket Boy's job. I wonder if he'll get trick-or-treaters in St. Louis? Trader Joe's is already out of their wonderful pumpkin bread mix (should have bought two packages last time we were there), but I can think of something to make from scratch. We're finishing off a very good pumpkin cake that I made while Rocket Boy was here. Maybe just Halloween shaped sugar cookies would be good? I'll see. Gotta do something to salvage the month -- real winter will be here before we know it.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Some big changes around here recently, as if we needed more of those! But that's life, right? Stuff keeps changing.

Let's start with the least problematic change. My niece Risa came to visit us September 13-15, and helped me do some cleaning, sorting, and furniture moving. The biggest thing we did was get rid of our old couch, which had been in Rocket Boy's family for at least 40 years, probably more, and whose springs were gone, and whose upholstery was disintegrating. I had been trying to get RB to get rid of it since we got married back in 2002. He had recently agreed to let it go, but we hadn't managed to do anything about it on his last visit and I knew it would be emotionally hard for him to take it to the dump. So Risa and I (with a little help from the twins) carried it outside and left it at the bottom of the driveway, where it stayed until Friday the 20th, when the garbage truck came and took it away (I had scheduled the pick-up). I figured the fact that no one lifted it for the five days that it sat out there is proof that no one would have wanted it if we'd posted it on craigslist, etc. I saw a few people stop, get out of their vehicle, and look at it, but they always drove away quickly. And with good reason -- it was junk. But still, hard to let go. Now we just have a bunch of cat-protected chairs where the couch was. The next time Rocket Boy visits, maybe we'll go couch-hunting or maybe we won't. No worries.

The next big change happened two days after Risa left, and I'm still processing this one. I quit my job. Yep, I did it. I'd been thinking about quitting for months and months -- almost since the job began. I wanted to quit last fall, and also last winter and also this summer. But each time I managed to pull myself together and not quit, mainly because we needed the money and the health insurance. I've experienced a lot of anxiety and misery related to this job and I guess I hit the breaking point on Tuesday, September 17th. Monday had been an extremely stressful day, following the previous Friday, which had also been bad. The tasks I'd been given that were worrying me were increasing in number, and my boss had informed us she was too busy to help with anything this semester. (But not too busy to continue doling out assignments and criticism.) I had decided to work at home on Tuesday, to avoid the high stress of the office, and when I looked at my email and saw a cluster of messages about something I'd done wrong, I just snapped.

We won't die: the kids and I are transitioning over to Rocket Boy's health insurance as of October 1st, and we still have his salary to live on. Fortunately, I hadn't made any major changes to our lifestyle -- there's no house cleaner I'll need to fire, no services I'll have to cancel. But we'll have to stop fixing things, and I won't be able to save as much money. I'll save as much as I can, but it will be less.

I'm trying to think about what to do next. Obviously I need another job, but what on earth could it be? Mainly, I want to retire. But 59 is too young, especially when you have 11-year-old twins. However, 59 is very old when you're job-hunting, and then there's my enormous weight, and the fact that I walked out of this job in the middle of a project, presumably alienating everyone who might have served as a reference. (I SO wish I had just quit on August 31st, as I had been planning to, instead of letting people convince me not to. It would have been a cleaner break.) On the plus side, I updated my resume this morning and it looks pretty good. Not necessarily the kind of resume anyone would want to see right now, but it makes me look like a competent person -- which is not how I feel.

I periodically think of something I'm not going to have to do now and I feel a weight lift off my chest. But I wouldn't say I'm happy. And I've still got all the single parent woes, and the depression, and the what are we going to have for dinner misery. So life is challenging. I have a to-do list each day and I try to work along and check things off. Yesterday I mended five pairs of Kid B's shorts. Of course, he's almost outgrown them, but they'll work for a little while longer.

And now the third big recent change. Our next door neighbor Eugene -- our tenant, along with his wife and kids -- is on hospice. This photo shows the view through our front door last Sunday afternoon.

Eugene, who is 86, had been behaving oddly a few days before this. In fact, it was the day before I quit my job, and may have contributed to my own anxiety. He came to our door that Monday morning, very upset, and asked how he could reach Rocket Boy. I explained that I can't reach RB during the day -- he can't bring his cell phone into his workplace and he doesn't have a secretary, etc. Eugene acted like he didn't believe me, but he left. Later, RB called me at work and said he'd gone to his car to check his phone on a break and found four voicemails from Eugene, all about how someone was trying to kill him and he needed RB's help. RB was very upset and didn't know what to do. After I got home from work I went over to their house and asked Aspen what was going on. She sighed and said they'd watched a scary movie the night before and apparently it had gotten wrapped into Eugene's dreams and when he woke he couldn't distinguish between the dream and reality. Later I saw a police car outside the house, and still later Eugene called me and apologized for his behavior, explaining that the police had very kindly managed to reassure him that he was not in danger. Throughout the evening, Rocket Boy kept calling me and calling me, trying to find out what was going on.

So then I quit my job and that absorbed me for several days, but on Sunday there were suddenly all those emergency vehicles. Eventually I saw Eugene going out to the ambulance in a chair and they drove away with him. I thought about going over to ask what was wrong, but I felt as though I would be intruding. Finally, last night Aspen came over and told me Eugene was on hospice, at the Longmont facility. He'd been going downhill for a few weeks, and apparently the delusion that his life was in danger was part of that. (Except, from this perspective, was it really a delusion?) Aspen looked sad and stressed. On top of everything else she now has to worry about money, because she's been his caregiver and those payments will be ending. I told her we hoped they would stay in the house and we'd figure something out.

So now we wait. Rocket Boy wondered if he should fly home this weekend, but Aspen said Eugene might live a month (or, of course, die tomorrow). They don't really know. RB has known Eugene a long time -- at least 30 years, maybe 40. I know Eugene wanted to live to see all his kids graduate from high school. The youngest is only in 7th grade.

I was wandering around in a daze last night, unable to concentrate on anything. Kid B said to me, "Mom, do you LIKE Eugene?" And I thought for a moment about all he has to learn in life, such as how whether you "like" someone becomes rather beside the point when they go on hospice.

Postscript: Eugene died this afternoon. So it's over.

Back to school again

I just realized it's been more than three weeks since I last wrote a post. I guess we've been busy. After our vacation, we had just a few days until middle school began, and that was a very exciting time. I remember how huge the transition to junior high school was, back in the day. I remember sitting around with my friends, talking and talking and talking, and every so often someone would scream, "gym suits!" or "lockers!" and we would all scream too. After seven years of elementary school, it was such a huge change.

The boys only went to elementary school for six years, since middle school begins in 6th grade and they didn't go to preschool. But still, such a long time of walking down our street to and from school. Kid A asserted his independence early, and would zoom off on his bike by himself. But Kid B liked having one of us walk him to school and he also liked being picked up at the end of the day, so we kept doing that through the end of 5th grade. Often we would just walk quietly, but sometimes he liked to talk, and it was nice to be there when that happened.

Now it's all different, though they still walk down our street to get to school. But now they turn off at the creek path and walk to their bus stop on Martin Drive -- and I am not allowed to accompany them. I went with them on the first day of school, and a few other days early on, but after that they laid down the law. Other kids wait at the bus stop too, and nobody's parents are there. Way too embarrassing. So I stay home. I am not allowed to meet their bus in the late afternoon, either. It's nice, not having to interrupt what I'm doing, but I'm also getting less exercise. It's kind of like when they got too big for their stroller. Pushing the stroller I could go anywhere, long lovely walks. But once they were out and running around, I stopped walking nearly so much.

Adjusting to middle school is full of challenges. For instance, that bus! For the first two weeks the bus was late every day -- scheduled to leave their stop at 8:21, it wasn't getting there until 8:30 or later, and the kids would get to school (which starts at 8:40) after the bell rang. A couple of times they were marked absent in their 1st period class. I called the Transportation department repeatedly and eventually they got the problem fixed. But now the bus comes early! On Friday the kids actually missed the bus, even though I'm sure they were there before 8:15 (its new departure time), and they had to run home and have me drive them. So now we've decided they'll leave to walk to the bus at 8, which should solve the problem.

Another middle school issue involves Kid B's hair, which he's worn long for a few years. In P.E. class he was told he'd have to tie it back, so we experimented with scrunchies, but he had a hard time doing it himself. Each day another kid would have to help him, and he didn't like that. "I want to get my hair cut," he told me. I was shocked, but hey, maybe he was ready for a change. So I took him to my stylist, who's cut his hair before, and she did a quick and dirty layered cut that had kind of a long feel but was much shorter than it had been (see photo). He went back to P.E. class the next day -- and was told to tie it back! This is when I freaked out and started writing emails. A few days later, after involving the counselor, the assistant principal, and the gym teacher, I learned that the real issue was hair getting in his eyes, which the gym teacher feels is a safety issue. My stylist had cut his bangs a little too long. So I took out my sewing scissors and hacked away at it, and now he's "legal" for P.E. It looks pretty bad, though. We need to go back for a repair trim. But he doesn't seem terribly concerned about it. I guess middle school boys don't care that much about their looks -- or maybe not yet?

We've also been having cat problems -- sweet Chester has a bladder infection, a drug-resistant bug that requires treatment with Clindamycin (the other choices have worse side effects). I paid an enormous amount of money to have the drug formulated into soft chicken-flavored chews, and the medicine took a long time to arrive, but Chester likes it, so maybe he'll get better. Silly Fluff, thinks he's getting special treats twice a day. Pie Bear soldiers on, despite his oral tumor -- which can't feel good, but he doesn't complain. He likes to spend a lot of time outdoors, mostly observing the world from the soft chair on our front porch. He's also my alarm clock -- sleeps on Rocket Boy's empty side of the bed and begins walking on me and purring a few minutes before my real alarm goes off. This is helpful on weekdays and very very sad on Saturdays and Sundays, when there is no real alarm.

Rocket Boy came for another visit over Labor Day (see photo up above -- everyone in a warm-toned shirt except the unseen Mom, who was wearing blue and white stripes). It wasn't one of our better visits. He flew in late Saturday afternoon, after I had spent six hours cleaning the house. But he's forgotten what our house looks like. Sometimes I wonder if he's remembering when his mother was alive and it was spotless. I don't know. Anyway, when he walked in the door he started talking about the mess. And all weekend he kept going on and on about it. He seemed to be in a critical mood just in general -- in the McGuckin's parking lot he yelled at me for being too timid, and later for not parking in the space he thought was best. On the plus side, he fixed some things (such as our back door which wouldn't open -- a real safety hazard) and cleaned some things, such as the horrid shower curtain. I appreciated the help and told him so. I'm not, after all, the maid -- we both have jobs, we co-own this house, and it's his responsibility too.

After he left, or actually while he was packing to go, I fell into a depression from which I have not yet emerged. It will get better, I think -- it doesn't feel like the beginning of something really serious -- but it's so hard to function when I feel like this. Work is hard. Cooking is hard (cooking is always hard). Cleaning is hard.

Fortunately, today is Saturday and it is a lovely day. Supposed to get to 87 -- better than the 90s we've been having, but not by much -- but there's a nice breeze. I did my laundry and have several things hanging out on the porch, waving in the wind. The neighborhood pancake breakfast was this morning, so of course we went. I ate one pancake with delicious fresh peach compote and an odd vegetarian sausage. After the kids finished eating they asked if they could go to the library by themselves and of course I said yes. They go in order to play games on the computers there, but I still love it that they're spending so much time at the library, which seems a very safe place for them to be. And I walked home in the warm breezy weather, feeling not too bad at all.

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.