Love getting older....

I'm feeling totally, completely awful today. First I came down with my first cold in about 3 yrs. yesterday. I woke up this morning feeling worse than when I went to bed (at 9:50) last night. And today is the "prep day" for a colonoscopy tomorrow. Oh how I wish it were tomorrow already! Ask anyone who's had one of these and ALL--totally unanimous and I don't even have to know how many there are--will say that the procedure is nothing; it's the prep. You have to "cleanse" your colon. Why medicine has not figured out a way to do that for me is a mystery. But the cleansing is drinking a purgative (look it up). That's not so bad. It's just that you have to drink 64 oz. of it in about 3 hours. Good lord. Who has a system capable of holding that much liquid? I guess that's the idea: Keep putting it in the top and it has to come out the bottom! Right now I'm almost finished with the first hour--read: 4 8-oz. glasses. And I will make it through; I've done it before. But I just needed to whine a little here.

So I'm going to weigh myself tomorrow because I usually do on Tuesdays and I'm going to VERY interested to see the results. Not only am I dehydrated from this cold (blowing my nose amazingly often) but I'm also going to "cleanse" everything else. Anyone want to wager on how much less I'll weigh tomorrow as compared to Wednesday morning?

And the weather is gray and rainy/windy. Not so much rain but it is gray. At least it's not snow, all you poor folks to the east of me. And that would be almost all of you except for the Seattlite.

Okay, whining done. I'm going to go rest somewhere for awhile.

Back in not-Tampa

So I got home about 1 1/2 weeks ago. The weather has been bearable for the most part, especially yesterday and today: highs in the 40s & 50s, tomorrow it may get to the 60s. It rained last night and that sounded so good. I like the not-snow part of it.

The trip back from FL was fine, except for the fact that I should have listened to Elise and bought the $79 ticket online on Tuesday. To save the $13.50 "convenience fee" for online purchase, I figured we'd go to the airport and buy directly. Yeah. Brilliant. At the airport on Wednesday the ticket was $169!!!! Plus all the fees and taxes it came to $194. AAAARRRRGGGGHHHH. It really felt like bait-and-switch to me. I should have stayed for another week and bought the $79 ticket for the next Wednesday online. I'm still kicking myself for that.

Being home is nice, though. I really did miss Bruce and my house & neighborhood. The walks in Tampa could be 4 miles because they were over totally flat terrain; here there are two hills, one of which is truly a killer, so my walks are only 2.5 miles. But I never panted in FL and I do here! However, I did get some color in my face which, walking in the spring sunshine here, will only increase. I know all the medical stuff about tanning but dang, it looks good to have a face that isn't winter-pallor white!

I had to create an answer key for my textbook this week. Yuck. That was a royal pain. The assignments I wrote look perfectly understandable to me, but I guess I can understand why someone buying the book might want a clue on how to grade them! So I put my nose to the grindstone and churned it out, finishing yesterday. It felt good to just get it done.

Spring seems to be improving nearly everyone's lives: Jane is brightening up and her job sounds like it's evolving into a better one; Elise is less hormonal now that beautiful Courtney is here; Linda has her ranch on the market and there are people interested in it (!); and Lana is looking at job changes that can only be positive. Thank goodness for spring. As I said in earlier posts, this has been a nasty winter.

Bruce didn't like it either and is actually open to the idea of my ex finding us a student to house-sit for about a month next winter while we explore our reactions to living in Florida. I've looked at the Homosassa area and now will try to check out, just online, the Venice area that Elise likes a lot for us. And the central part of the state is something Bruce might be interested in too. Being there for a month would give us a chance to explore those areas in the flesh. The one VERY exciting thing is that we've agreed to get a realtor into the house sometime before the end of the year to give us an idea of what we could expect to ask, and as Jane & Elise both suggested, to tell us what we'd need to do to get the best price. Maybe we'll do a TV segment! (Joke)

Gotta go. I have errands to run and it'll be nice to be outside without my down jacket!

Tampa, cont.

I'm probably going home on Wednesday--a $79 flight that won't be that price again until next Wednesday, so this one is looking good. I'm going to try to remember to ask why the Wed. flight is $79 and the Saturday one is ... $309!! What?!? But a non-stop here to P'burgh is the best.

Living with two little girls is funny. It sort of takes me back but not completely because I've forgotten so much. But that time was, I'm pretty sure, THE happiest of my life. E & J were perfect in my eyes: smart and beautiful to boot. (They still are.) Kaitlyn is in the process of beginning her adjustment to having a sister. What she doesn't realize is that, like being a parent, being a sibling is a lifelong adjustment! She can do a 2-yr-old whine, but her parents are pretty good about telling her to "use her words." And like my girls learned with Grandmarie, Mimi is definitely not as soft a touch as either Mommy or Daddy! (That would be the dark side of grandparents--they're tougher because they got toughened up raising Mommy or Daddy!) So Emily will have a blast being a stay-at-home mommy for awhile. I'd worked for so long by the time I was "off" for our first year in P'burgh that I went nuts. But we also had NONONONO $$ and that's not a problem here. So Emily will love it, I'm guessing.

Meanwhile, I looked into an area where some friends lived for a year--Homosassa, FL. It's about 90 minutes north of Tampa and there's a world of difference. It's much more rural--you pass pastures with beef cattle and fields with what look like feed crops on the way up. We drove around the area a bit and had lunch at Chili's, so it's not the total boonies (uh, like P'burgh, which has no Chili's?). Anyway, I looked online at houses for sale and there are a number that we could probably afford if we sold ours. But the idea of actually permanently relocating is not one I'm really ready for yet, I think. I'd love to be a snowbird, and think that if Bruce would be willing to let a student house-sit we could try it. I'll have to talk to my ex about finding us a student candidate; Bruce might find that acceptable. The idea of missing a month of winter is so attractive....

Okay, I only have about 1 - 1 1/2 hrs. to wait for the little Peapod to wake up for her feeding. So this is a sign-off till who knows when. Ta ta and sunshine to ye', all you Irishpersons-for-a-day!

New Life, Great Time of Year

It's spring (of course, I'm in Florida where it is spring, not Cadyville where we skip that season entirely) and all kinds of new growth is appearing, including a little auburn-haired girl named Courtney. She's Emily's second daughter; Kaitlyn was turning 27 months old when Courtney was born on Feb. 21. And where Kaitlyn was pretty much bald from birth to 18 months or so, Courtney has straight, deep red hair. I'm not sure if it'll look quite so red once her little pink skin isn't visible anymore, but for now, it is red. She looks a bit like Katie did at birth but I'll have to compare pictures, and I can't add any here right now because I don't have the proper software for uploading them from my camera to the Macs in this house. Drat.

It's been a tough winter. I've been a working "mom" to all four of my daughters, mine and "the steps" too. Their plans have fallen through, jobs aren't working out, hormones took them hostage, neurochemistry tried to sabotage their lives. I believe I earned my Counseling degree this semester because I did my required internship spending many hours thinking about their situations and trying to offer sound ideas ... without running anyone's life. What a balancing act. I feel so good that they can talk to me, and actually often want to. But it is really exhausting. One half-hour phone conversation can wipe me out emotionally for hours, and I get physically very tired too. Wow. It's sort of "fun," in a very non-laughing sense of that word, to do this work, but boy do I feel the lack of education and training in that area. You know how you worry when the kids are tiny that every action of yours will somehow lead to their therapy couch later? Well, now I'm scared it really could! So I'm careful to not give anything but practical ideas.

(I just had to interrupt myself to feed Courtney. It is so ... what? wonderful isn't quite right ... to hold a tiny baby who's just getting her eyes to focus, and then she looks at you, unafraid, a completely blank slate. Anyway.....

I haven't been writing here at all, obviously. Facebook is nice for the Hi-how-are-you kind of stuff and I enjoy it, but I really have missed doing this. Nobody's fault but mine. I guess
I've kind of thought I haven't had much to say. And now you're saying, "You? You with nothing to say? Could someone check the temperature in hell? It must be freezing." But my life, apart from my work on that Counseling degree, has been pretty quiet.

Bruce and I have been sharing our hatred of the weather this year. I've taken a couple of bone-rattling falls and am convinced that my osteopenia must be better because if I had it badly or, god help us, full-blown osteoporosis, I would have broken something. And the first one gave me, I think, a very mild concussion or an almost-concussion, if there is such a thing. I hit my head without knowing it--saw my earmuffs an arms's length away and they had been on my ears--and got an instant headache, a bad one. I wound up taking Advil pretty much all day and woke up with whiplash. Man! I can only imagine what a car crash would do. This was a flat on my back legs and arms out smack onto sheet ice that was covered by snow at the end of my driveway. In addition to feeling like an untrained circus performer I felt like the village idiot: I'd walked on that same ice in my outside clogs to get the paper in my bathrobe about 2 hrs. before the fall. DUH. And about 2 weeks later I almost fell again, same spot, same idiocy.

-------Certainly lost my train of thought--it's 2 days later. Guess I'll post this and come back another time. That baby needs feeding again!

February musing

I'm surrounded by fog. I walk through the house late at night and there is fog lurking outside every window. The lights in the the street show just deep enough into the yard to convince me that there's no escaping it. I am surrounded by fog.

I drove into town earlier tonight. The fog was some of the thickest I've encountered, and pretty predictable: wherever there were big spans of open land, make that open frozen land, there was thick fog. A large farmer's field that I love, planted in corn in mid-summer and not harvested until late, late summer, and then not cleared--or whatever you call chopping the cornstalks but not clearing completely--until the ground is frozen, often late November - mid-December, created the thickest fog tonight. It was the warm air hitting the ultra-cold ground that made the fog. Unfortunately I got behind a woman who'd apparently never experienced fog before while driving home. She went 30-35 and then 25-30 in an area where I'd felt pretty comfortable at 45 on the way into town. Oh well. She was probably white-knuckling it and that's completely understandable.

I was that lady in 1996 or '97. I was bringing Emily home from college in our van, stuffed to the hilt with her stuff--literally no space left--when we met suffocating fog on Route 11B outside Potsdam and had to make it to Malone on this back road. I could barely see the white line for more than 4 feet ahead of me on the right. And so I was driving about 10-15 mph and being passed--passed!-- by cars who obviously knew this road better than I did. And I was supposed to be home in time to see Jenny at her prom. That was one of the scariest times I've ever been driving; probably THE scariest time, come to think of it. But I did see Jenny at her prom--just dropped Emily at the house and went with the car still loaded, I'm pretty sure. She was beautiful and worth the effort!

The fog makes me think things I have to write tomorrow. I've been neglecting my writing endeavors because I'm scared of 1) not being successful and 2) being successful. And I have to stop focusing on writing about Nancy and just ... writing.

Tomorrow.

One Person's Junco ...

We have a birdfeeder in our back yard and one on our front living room window. And this year, more than previous years, we have a local small flock of juncos visiting. They've become my favorite bird. They apparently come "south" to here for the winter (?!), living in Canada in the summers. We used to get them passing through for a few days, but I'm convinced it's global warming that's making this their southernmost stop. Whatever the reason, I'm so glad they're hanging around. They're pretty and their behavior is too cute for description. The best I can do is to remind you of the song and scene in "The Music Man" where the women of the town get together and gossip. They sing "Pick a little, talk a little, pick a little, talk a little, cheep! cheep! cheep! Talk a lot, pick a little more." That's exactly what juncos look like when they look for food. They're mostly ground feeders and like bare ground where they can kick things about to look for seeds. So under our birdfeeders is usually where you'll see them. But the front feeder, the one with a mirrored back that sticks on the window, is apparently close enough to a ground feel for them to get into the feeder sometimes and then I can watch them closer. What adorable birds--a little bigger than chickadees and busy, busy, busy.

Here's my photo of a chickadee in the front
feeder. It was determined to get its breakfast! I got relatively close and shot this. I love this feeder ... and so does Susie the cat. The other day she thought for sure she'd catch one of the birds. We call it birdievision.

I know this is probably not the "right" way to use a blog--I should maybe be more introspective but you can bet that won't happen this publicly, even if only 2 or 3 people read this--but I just had to share.

What birds do you watch?

First things first: I have decided not to buy a car. My beloved Beetle will stay for an indefinite period because I don't really need to change now. If, at the end of 2009, I've put a gazillion dollars into it, I'll consider the Accent again. But maybe I'll look at some sort of energy-smart hybrid at that point. So bye-bye Accent. It was nice to meet you.

And I've already had a most successful morning with one simple action: I changed my kitchen table so that it now sits perpendicular to what it had been. It changes the room completely. I'm very happy that what I saw in my mind's eye is exactly what happened. The flow of the room is much more pleasing to me, and as an added bonus, we could bring in our too-big-for-the-house Norfolk Island pine from our beautiful but unheated sunroom/porch where it was dying. Literally. We'll probably have to lop off the top but I think we've saved the rest of it. It's now 10 years old, grown to about 5' tall from a potted plant that my ex-husband gave to me as a gone-away gift at Christmas in 1998. It's done very well and, like the Beetle, it's something I'd like to hang on to. (That's different from "hang onto" you know, as in, I'd hang onto a life raft but hang on to a memory. I think it's sort of more hang-on than hang onto. What do you think? Am I too picky? Am I ungrammatical?) So now we can, at least for another year or two.

Other than that my uneventful life continues to be so. It puts me at a loss, conversation-wise, but you who know me realize that's probably an overstatement. I mean, when can I NOT come up with something to talk about, always more than you'd ever wanted to know. As Mr. Monk would say, "It's a blessing ... and a curse." But I would switch that around for me.

Enough public introspection. Catch you later. I'll be off in a bit to catch "Gran Torino." (BTW, "Marley and Me" was good, but the book is way better, IMHO.)