Barnmaven

Getting them unplugged

 

Saturday morning started out much like most every other Saturday morning when the kids are at my house.  By 6 am one or the other of them is at my bedroom door asking whose turn it is to get on the computer.  I randomly choose one of them and try to sleep for a few more minutes through the cacophony of disappointment and victory.  I drag myself out of bed, search for my eyeglasses and stub my toe walking down the hall to make coffee.

Fall has finally hit us here in the interior of Washington State, and this weekend had a forecast that called for staying home in ones' PJ's.  The arrival of fall also means that the available hours of daylight to get on my horse are dwindling.  So, despite the dire weather reports, I made plans to go to my friend's place.  She has a lovely covered arena and we decided that if it rained we could practice for the schooling show this weekend, and if it didn't rain, we could go out on the trails that lead from her place out along the Oregon side of the Columbia River.  SG and her partner get along quite well so we packed lunch items and some wine and decided to make a good half-day of it.

Getting horses fed and the trailer hooked up and loaded is always the easy part.  Getting my kids out of the house requires earplugs, a cattle prod and kevlar protective wear.

"I don't WANT to go!" my daughter cried, stamping her feet.  "I want to stay home and play Animal Jam!"  "NOOOOOOOO!" my son screams as I instruct him to end his Wii game. 

Their protests, though heartfelt, don't move me.  There are going to be plenty of inclement weather days this winter for them to turn into screen-watching slugs.  Bugs is already starting to grow his winter coat which leads me to believe we are in for a cold, icy November.  For now, I intend for my children to be outside as much as possible, even if I have to force them.

Once we got to Julie's, they forgot all about their games at home.  Ted had a burn pile going over by the pig pens and they couldn't get out of the truck fast enough.  They scrambled like puppies down to watch the flames, and for the next couple of hours I didn't hear one single whine, complaint or "I have nothing to DOOOOOOO".

They got to see the big 700 pound sow and her piglets and touch the noses of the weaner pigs.  They "helped" Ted do chores and played with the 6 year old son of the lovely young lady who trains horses at Julie's.  They got dirty and wet and generally had a wonderful time.  

SG got to hang out with Ted and make plans for butchering a pig next week (hel-LO Bacon!).  I not only got to ride my horse in the arena but on the trail as well when the rain gave us a nice intermission and we scurried out to the trailhead.  Just about the time we got back the wind started to pick up and big raindrops splattered my back. 

I guess we all got to unplug a little bit.  It was nice.

Quality Time

Friday evening, after a long day at work, the last thing I wanted to do was go out, so I kissed my husband goodbye as he went off to represent us at a night out with his parents and brother/sister in law, and I dialed up the local delivery guy for pizza for me and the kids. 

I was fairly exhausted from the long week and the late 4th of July fireworks and all I was really interested in doing was my best imitation of a couch potato.  Race Car Man had other ideas.

He really, really wanted me to go out in the pool with him.  He knows he is not allowed to go swimming unless he is supervised by an adult.  The water comes up to his shoulders in our pool, but he is not a good swimmer and I won't take the risk.   

He's so enthusiastic about this pool that one night last week one afternoon when it was time for a break he wouldn't even buy into my offer of an hour playing Minecraft.  Yes, the pool is THAT AWESOME.  His bravery has grown by leaps and bounds.  Last summer he wouldn't get his face or head wet at all and wasn't happy without floaties or a life vest on.  By last Friday he was dog paddling without assistance and timing how long he could stay underwater.  My insistence that evening that I was not ready to swimming with him until after dinner didn't go over very well at all.

As I sat browsing Facebook and waiting for our dinner to arrive, I could hear him slamming things around in his room and muttering to himself.

He came stomping down the hallway and through the kitchen, and just before I heared him open the door to the garage he shouted "I'm going to the wilderness so I can swim when I want!"

lolwut?

 I hurried up and out the door in time to see him starting to march around the corner of the yard to the side street.

"Where are you going?"

He stopped and turned, glaring.   He had his Sponge Bob bacpack on his back.

"I'm going to the WILDERNESS!"

"Where exactly is the wilderness?  Because unless its somewhere in our pasture, I'm going to have to insist not."

"Well I want to go swimming and unless you agree to go in the pool with me, I'm leaving.  FOR THE WILDERNESS."

This is one of the many moments of parenting where my sense of humor undermines my authority.  Its so hard to sound stern when you're laughing.  Plus he hates it when he's serious and I'm laughing.

"Honey, you can't go live in the wilderness.  They don't have Minecraft.  Or swimming pools."

"I can go swimmng in the RIVER."

"Honey, the river runs too fast, and its too deep.  Plus, remember how you don't like going in the pool unless the water temperature is at least 85 degrees?  Its not even close to that warm in the river."

He stomped his feet.  "I WANT TO GO SWIM."

At this point, the pizza arrived.  

"Look, come in and have some dinner and then I'll go out back so you can swim."

"I'm not eating!  Not until you let me go swimming!"

"Will you at least come in the house?"

It took another five minutes of cajoling before he would come back into the house, but only after he first decided he'd just move into the front yard for the rest of the summer. Lack of a tent and the realization that it would be really uncomfortable when the irrigation clicked on at 10 pm convinced him his own bed might make swankier accomodations.

Yesterday after getting some chores accomplished, he got plenty of time to show me his fancy swim moves.  After we splashed around for an hour or two we took a walk down the street to the river and watched folks zipping around in their boats and jet skis.  He put his hands in the water to test the temperature.

"How cold is it?" I ask.

"Oh, its not bad," he replies.

"'Not bad' enough to swim in?" I query, grinning.

He threw a rock, then another rock.

"Mommy, little kids shouldn't swim in the river.  Its too deep, you know."

I guess I won that argument, but then he declared his little legs too tired to walk all the way home and guilted me into giving him a piggyback ride up our street.  

 

 

 

 

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Rest, Play, Rest, Play

What do you mean its halfway through June already?

Aside from being a great source of career satisfaction, my recent changes in job duties have also played whack-a-mole with my ability to meet deadlines and get things accomplished.  My normal duties didn't go away with the move to our business partner's offices, and so I where I used to work in shorter, intense spurts, now I find I have to increase the intensity and the amount of time involved in order to have any hope of getting even the minimum done needed to keep the hungry hordes at bay.  

By the time I get home I'm mentally wiped out, but with SG working the outage, I'm still flying a bit solo when it comes to laundry and kids and animals.  He's a huge help when he gets home in the mornings, covering those last details of getting the kids ready so I can leave for work.  Evenings when the kids are home are a chaotic, lovely jumble of feeding humans and animals and trying to skim at least the worst of the days' messes before I collapse in my chair with an ice pack on my sciatica.

Despite feeling tired and sore, I'm making more effort this year to ride as often as possible and engage in more social activities.  Last year when SG was out of town I had a tendency to hide when i was down or lonely (which was a lot) and I think that was not so good for me.  This year I'm committed to every other week dressage lessons and riding every single weekend.  I have plans for going out with friends and with SG (once the outage is over.  TWO MORE DAYS!)  Last weekend was the only weekend in months I didn't ride, but it was my 30th high school class reunion, so I have a good excuse.  I was too busy having fun and waxing nostalgic over days gone by, and after being out of town since last week I'm now paying the price at home and at work.  Not to mention I've been trying to get the pool put up for the last three weeks - not by actually doing anything but by continually reminding SG to call his nephew to help me do it.  Monday night I finally bit the bullet and started working on it.  Damn if I didn't get it half done when the skies started thundering and flashing lightning before dumping rain all over me.  Its rained every day since.  

The kids are on their second week of summer break.  I didn't get much scheduled for the month of June, but come July and August they've both got camps to go to.  Amazon Girl will take swimming lessons again and go to a horse camp and then two art camps and a music camp.   It was harder to find camps for Race Car Man.  There are some science camps locally but none with the appropriate staffing or resources to deal with his complex behaviors.  I was torn about signing him up for camps through a local disability resource center, but when I reviewed the curriculum I felt like it would be a lot more enriching for him than just having him at home or at daycare.  I've managed to set up a schedule for him that inludes several weeks at the ARC camp, a vacation bible school, some time at daycare and some time off with me and time at his dad's.  Overall I'm satisfied that both kids will have an enjoyable summer.  I'm avoiding adding up all the various costs for the camps because I'm pretty sure I don't want to look at the total.  Oh, its worth every penny of it.  But its a lot of pennies.  

The last week of school for the kids was a bit poignant for me.  The moving up ceremony for the fifth graders was on Wednesday.  I managed not to cry when Amazon Girl was handed her certificate for a Presidential Award for Academic Excellence.  Thursday was field day, and I spent the morning with Race Car Man.  He wanted very much to do two activities - the rope climb and the sack race.  He was not at all interested in trying anything else.  We talked about it for a little bit and eventually he agreed to try a few things.  When the 11:30 bell rang for his group to go back to class he'd thrown the football through a hoop, tried the frisbee toss, rolled a ball at a stack of cans and chucked a nerf ball as far as he could get it.  I was proud of him not only for making the effort to try new things as I was for his ability to change his mind about doing so.  It was a little bittersweet;  spending time with him in the comapny of other boys his age reminds me in a way I'm not used to just how different he is from neurotypicals.  At the same time, I recognize that those differences aren't necessarily bad.  Yes, he has what might be considered deficits, but he has an amazing number of positive attributes as well.  

Next fall Amazon Girl starts middle school.  It will be a big change for her -- for both of them, really.  Race Car Man has had his sister to lean on ever since kindergarten.  They ride the bus together, go to aftercare together.  In some respects its probably been as hard for them as anything.  They're typical siblings in the way that they both fight with and love one another fiercely.  Next year Race Car Man will have to learn to navigate alone, and as much as I think it will be a challenge I also think it will be really good for him.  Amazon Girl will finally have the chance to concentrate on herself and not need to worry about trying to keep her brother out of trouble.  It will be a most decidedly interesting year, for all of us.

I have a feeling it will be here sooner than I'm prepared for.

Only a guy would think of this

I'm driving to work this morning admiring the big black pickup in front of me.  I'm a truck girl, what can I say?  I like trucks.

Suddenly something a little odd caught my eye.  Something pink, hanging down below the hitch.

See it? Or rather, them?

Truck balls? Is this a thing and I didn't know about it?

A few minutes later I pass the truck and I notice the driver is a woman.

Now I'm really full of questions.

Does she worry about her balls getting wet when she's driving in the rain?  Or about them getting shriveled when she's driving in the snow?  

What does she do with them when she's offroading?  Is she worried they'll get bruised if she drives over a speed bump?  

Does she keep them in her purse when she's not driving her truck?

Do they come in bigger or smaller sizes than this?  Are they made of hard plastic or are they squishy?  

But the biggest question of all, really:  Why?

 

 

 

What Cowgirls do on the weekends

Saturday morning we loaded up and headed down the road a ways and across the river to a bomb-proofing clinic at one of the local arenas.bomb

Contrary to how it sounds, this is not an event where we endeavor to get our horses to calmly stand still during explosions by subjecting them to hand grenades and cannons, although from the reactions of some of the participants it might as well have been.

You can quote me on this:  There is no such thing as a bombproof horse.  Unless he's blind, deaf and cemented in place, most horses have at least one thing they will spook at or at the very least react to.  There are horses that accept most everything you throw at 'em, who you could trust to carry a toddler around on them safely - but  they are all capable of getting frightened by something new, even the most level-headed of them.  If they weren't born like calm, cool cats, the best way to get them there is - you guessed it - to throw everything at 'em.  Rinse, wash, repeat.

When we got to where the clinic was being held the fun had already started.  Right behind the fence line where the trailers lined up there was a pen with a great big black and white sow in it.  More than one horse decided to break loose and head south when they got a gander at her.  Unlike cows, who tend to be more curious than frightened of new things, horses tend to react with a great deal of self-preservation.  Until they've determined (or been convinced) that something isn't going to kill and eat them, they'll just assume otherwise and vacate the premises with haste.  Also?  (And this is anecdotal so feel free to Snopes me on it) Pigs supposedly smell very similar to bears.

Fortunately Bugsy Boy wasn'tt all too concerned about the pig.  The llama and the sheep, on the other hand, had him snorting and jumping around until the llama was kind enough to touch noses with him through the field wire.  After that, Bugs was all, hey, I don't know how to get in there with you but would you mind sharing some of that hay?

The entire facility was covered with various obstacles - bridges, gates, tarps, water obstacles.  There were obstacles set up inside the covered arena, and obstacles set out on the grounds as well.  Did you know that a water obstacle inside the barn is not the same as a water obstacle outside in the daylight?  No?  Just ask Bugs, who successfully (after a lot of coaxing and the help of a buddy horse) walked through the water inside the barn but not once set foot in the outside water.  Those plastic ducks looked pretty threatening to me too, come to think of it.  Sometimes you measure success by your proximity to the desired result. 

He did great on the tilty bridge and the "car wash" (a frame made of PVC pipes with streamers and pool noodles hanging off it).  Once he figured out he could put his head down and the streamers wouldn't touch his ears he didn't mind it a bit.  He did not like going through the obstacle where a whole bunch of plastic bottles and jugs were strewn on the ground inside of a square made of wooden poles.  The first time his foot crunched on one I thought I was going to have to pull my hat out of the rafters.  By the sixth or seventh time through it, though, he was a lot calmer.

We also successfully negotiated the Black Tarp of Death, which a couple of years ago was what I referred to as his "kryptonite."   When he put his head down, sniffed it and walked right over it I had to turn around and do it a few more times just to convince myself I hadn't dreamed it or maybe was on the wrong horse.  I was sure the tilting bridge would unnerve him but he handled it like a pro.

By afternoon we had put in a good three or four hours and both of us were ready to go home, Bugs to have a nice roll and me to have a nice hot shower.  It was a really good day, seeing old friends and making new ones. 

A lot about improving your riding and helping your horse learn is about the miles you put into them.  Except for rare cases, the spookiest of horses can be gotten used to a variety of things.  I like to expose my horse to everything I can, it just makes him safer for me on the trail - and that makes the trail a lot more fun for both of us.

 

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The first week always sucks

Remember weeks ago when I said SG had a job offer here in our area? The start date finally materialized.  He had to wait until the holidays were over for the HR people, who are located in another state, to get their stuff together and get him scheduled for his background check, a DMV report and a physical.  The DMV apparently is slower than the social security office because after a whole month they decided to just get him started with the DMV report as a contingency.  (They also made him get a spinal x-ray - but no drug screen.  Weirdest hiring protocol I've EVER heard of.)

So he passes all his screens, gets his offer, quibbles over it for a few days, then accepts.  He finally started on Monday of this week.

While the weeks at a time of wrangling life at home on my own was a serious challenge, the upside was is that SG was also home for weeks at a time.  Home to get the kids dressed and fed and on the bus, the animals fed, dinner made, groceries shopped for and household chores done.  If a child ended up needing to be picked up at school due to illness or behavior, he was there to take care of it.  I got used to coming home to dinner on the stove and kids with finished homework every day. 

I was spoiled.  I had a househusband.

About Thursday of last week panic set in.  We had considered that this would mean drastic changes to our routines at home, but until it was staring us in the face we hadn't really thought it out in detail.  Kids going to before- and after-school care would be kids who needed to get out of bed and ready to go an hour and a half earlier than they were used to.  Dinners, especially when we wanted to create time at the end of our day to exercise, would need to be planned and cooked in advance.  Bedtime would need to be pushed up, undoubtedly spawning cries of outrage.  We'd need to plan around guitar lessons, obedience classes, homework and workouts. 

We laid out plans for meals, we bought groceries.  We identified who was responsible for what each morning and each evening.  We were the parenting equivalent of Rocky training for a fight against the seemingly unbeatable Ivan Drogo.

(What was that line of Dolph Lundgren's from Rocky IV?  "If he dies...he dies."  Yikes.)

Sunday night, groceries are bought and stowed.  Dinner has been eaten and put away and the kids have showered and are enjoying computer time before getting ready for bed.  I pull all the meat out of the fridge we will need for the meal plan I've written up for the next few days.

"Honey, there's only one package of chicken in the freezer.  Didn't you buy any?"

"No, I thought we didn't need chicken.  Do we?"

"I don't think four legs are gonna cut it."

Swap Tuesday for Wednesday on the menu plan and forge ahead.  Its only a minor setback, we're still on our feet and swinging.

So far we've dealt with:

• SG forgetting to set out all of his daily supplements and leaving the house about twenty minutes later than he planned and THEN forgetting his phone on top of it, causing him to have to go back to the house after dropping the kids at daycare
• Me forgetting to fill out Race Car Man's medication log resulting in a phone call in the middle of a meeting after I'd forgotten to silence my phone
• SG spending an hour on another day looking for his desk key, which just happened to be in his desk at work.  In the keyhole of his desk at work.
• Guitar lessons being missed
• I forgot to buy the M&M's for Race Car Man's class party
• Wednesday dinner being changed at the last minute from homemade Ginger Glazed Chicken to McDonald's.
• At least three separate instances of me dramatically announcing "I SWEAR I'm going to CUT MY HAIR OFF!"

On top of all of it, the Chihuahua has had diarrhea for three days which has added an extra half hour to each morning of changing crate bedding, cleaning the carpets with my steam cleaner, extra loads of laundry and lots of air freshener.  Because we were out of clean bedding last night we had to let the dogs sleep loose in our room.  Did I mention Zoey's favorite place to sleep is the bed?  Between her insistence on putting her big head so close to my face I couldn't breathe and SG's habit of hogging the covers I finally ended up retreating in a huff to the couch where Iwas then assailed by the cats trying to take advantage of available human real estate to curl up on.

Its only Thursday and I'm starting to feel afraid we're headed for a TKO.  Not to mention its Valentine's Day.  I'm here to tell you its a sheepish thing to give your husband his Valentine's Day card when you've spent the night in a huff on the couch.  To be honest, I didn't actually give the card to him, I just tossed it over onto his side of the bed after I finished getting dressed this morning.  I'm not usually this chickenshit, but I'm just wiped out.

Hey, we're still in one piece.  No one's lost a finger or gotten left behind at the grocery store, at least at the last head count.  

I'm sure we'll have this down in a week or two.  I just hope to God the Chihauahua's butt dries up.

 

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Carnivore

When I was in my 20's I toyed with vegetarianism for a while.  I still ate fish, but eschewed any other meat.  (For some reason, it didn't occur to me that fish are alive, too.  Perhaps I mentally disqualified them due to their lack of innate cuteness.  When something looks at you with warm brown eyes its easy to not want to eat it, but fish, well, they're coated with slime, they never blink, and would anyone want to cuddle with a fish? )

I'm not much of a vegetable eater (which in retrospect makes me question how I ever thought I'd be a successful vegetarian) so my diet consisted mostly of carbs.  Pasta, bread.  Ice cream.  It didn't take more than a year or two of staring longingly at other peoples' prime rib dinners for me to admit I was living a lie.  I wanted meat.  Even though it stung my pride to eat my words, I finally came out to my family:  "I'm not a vegetarian anymore.  Can I have a one of those hamburgers?"  Bless them all for only saying "I told you so" with the voices inside their heads.

I like my steak rare.  Once on a trip to Boston for work my then-boss took me to a little steak house.  That sirloin was the best tasting steak I've ever eaten.  I don't know what they used for seasoning, but I've never been able to replicate it.  I'm starting to salivate a little just thinking about it.  Every steak I've ever cooked since that meal has been a vain attempt to seek carnivore nirvana.

When I "accidentally" ended up with a small flock of chickens (another story for a rainy day) and they started gifting me with fresh free-range eggs, I was reminded of living on our little hobby farm as a kid.  We had our own eggs, our own garden, and every year a deer and half a grass-fed angus in the freezer.  Still, the money aspect.

Last year we had the opportunity to buy part of a steer from a friend.  It weighed out at about 700 lbs, and my brother, a friend and SG and I bought a half and sorted it out into three relatively even piles of beef.  Those steaks, those roasts, they were excellent.  Worth every penny. 

With SG on the road and earning, we felt emboldened to buy another half a beef this year, but this time a whole half.  The steer went to the butcher just after Thanksgiving, and two weeks ago Stephen went up there and brought home 325 lbs of steaks, roasts, ribs, hamburger, stew meat and carne asada.  We had to clean out the box freezer to make room for it all. 

Whenever I put a steak on the grill or a roast in the oven, my taste buds remember that perfect Bostonian steak.  Sometimes I get it right, sometimes its a miss, but always, especially when you know the meat you're eating is hormone-, pesticide- and drug-free, its better than good.  So far I've cooked a couple of roasts and made one batch of chili in the crock pot. 

I am a happy, happy carnivore.

 

If its Halloween I must be hiding in the dark

This year's Halloween was the epitome of anticlimactic.  I took the kids costume shopping a few weeks ago.  Amazon Girl wanted to dress up in a devil outfit.  We couldn't find a child's costume in her size, so we found the one adult costume that didn't look like it needed fishnet stockings  and six-inch fuck-me stilettos to go with it.  She looked absolutely adorable in it, but nobody will believe she's satan.  She's just too stinking sweet.

Race Car Man went as Atom, the robot character from a movie about fighting robots the name of which escapes me at the moment and which I am absolutely too lazy to bother Googling. 

Our parenting agreement says we each get two hours for Halloween.  My ex texted me to say he wanted to have his two hours early.  Well, from my perspective that really makes no sense. Its HIS week to have them, they're getting off the bus at my house.  Is it really going to be an enjoyable Halloween for them to get picked up, trick-or-treat for two hours, get driven back to my house to trick or treat for two more hours and then have to make yet another twenty minute drive back to dad's house?  On a school night?  And still have showers and homework?  Yeah, I didn't think so either.   

I decided to just opt out of my two hour slot and let them go to enjoy their evening with their Dad.  Our rural street is lousy for trick-or-treating anyway - there aren't any streetlamps so its pitch black out, and most of the neighbors either don't celebrate Halloween or go somewhere else to do it.

That left me free to do whatever I wanted for the evening.  Except I'm not really high on everyone's social invite list what with me never going out to anything anywhere.  At the same time, I really didn't want to deal with the low-level anxiety that always accompanies a Halloween where we entertain trick-or-treaters.  Every time the doorbell rings or someone knocks, there is a chorus of angry barking from the House Pack.  Since I always keep the cats inside on Halloween, inevitably one of them will try to make an escape while I'm shoveling candy into buckets which then necessitates me wandering around calling "Heeeere kitty kitty kitty" for a half hour.   Its absolutely nervewracking.  And because of the aforementioned Reasons My Neighborhood Sucks on Halloween, the reality is that I could sit there and be anxious and keep my poor dogs in the crate all night and get no kids at the door at ALL.  Or I could get one trick-or-treater or I could get ten.  There's never been any consistency to it. 

Since I couldn't be bothered to take my "Middle Aged Woman who can't decide what to be" costume and go out somewhere, I decided to roll over and play dead instead.  What with the events on the East Coast which have affected so many people, including close friends who still don't know if they have a house or any of their belongings left, it seemed appropriate to keep a quiet evening. 

I turned off all the lights in the house, including the front-porch light, made sure all the dogs and cats were safely inside, and then made sure for the rest of the night the house looked as if no one was home.  This entailed holing up in my kitchen with only the light over the stove and the light of the laptop; bathroom trips involved first quickly looking around the corner and out the living room window to make sure there were no little goblins and witches standing at the corner of the yard trying to decide whether to ring my doorbell and then using the light from my cell phone screen to make it down the hall so I could pee in the dark.

I felt a lot like the Halloween version of Scrooge, but it was still better than handing out candy while the dogs raised hell and the cats tried to dash out the door.

How was your Halloween?

All its cracked up to be

Someday when I write my autobiography - or someday when I'm dead and someone has the notion to make a television sitcom about my life - the title should be "Six of one," except I'd be borrowing the title from Rita Mae Brown and it wouldn't be a fictional funny drama about one woman's coming out story.  It would be the story of the woman whose life story seems to consistently be pointing how life is this continual mishmash of good stuff and hard stuff - ALL THE TIME with the good stuff and the hard stuff.

I suppose that's my blog theme.  I wish I'd figured that out a few years ago.  Here all this time I thought I was writing about horses and special needs.  See what the wine does?

I hit the grocery store yesterday after dropping the kids off with their dad (hint:  if you take your kids halloween costume shopping do not finish the trip by dropping them off with their other parent.  Kids with new halloween costumes want to go home and put them on, not leave them with you and go to their other parent's house).  Since my Mom has been picking up the kids after school , she does their homework and feeds them dinner, which makes my grocery list rather sparse.  Unless there's someone to cook for, I don't cook.  What's the point?  Its cereal for breakfast and dinner is eggs or soup.  So I'm at the grocery store and putting my things on the moving belt at the checkstand and I realize that everyone in line behind me probably thinks I'm a middle-aged single woman with no kids and a house full of cats. I was half tempted to throw a True Confessions in with everything just to say "La la la, I don't care what you think!" but actually no one even has True Confessions on the shelf anymore and I at least just managed to establish the fact that I'm getting a bit long in the tooth.

Its a big silence to wrap my thoughts around, those first hours after the kids have gone.  With SG on the road everything is at the same time both more and less meaningful.  I put away the groceries, empty the dishwasher, wash the few dishes in the sink.  I have six more hours before I have to go to bed, and I can pick and choose how I want to spend the time.  I'm lonely and not lonely, all at the same time.  I do realize that with a house full of pushy cats and large, noisy dogs that I'm never really alone, but since I'm the only one who can actually talk, its a lot quieter.  Being alone with my thoughts is a really dicey proposition.  I'm one of those people who can go either way -- and sometimes its a matter of a few minutes between happy as a lark and sooooooo lonely and sad.

Is this just part of the human process, learning how to accept while still retaining the option to complain when we don't like what's happening?  There's a distinct line between "doormat" and "punch life in the face." 

Last night life gave me a 90 pound puppy who thinks she's a lap dog and a 22 year old horse who was on the verge of colicking, a chicken intent on sitting on eggs I do not wish her to hatch and a husband whose phone couldn't get a clear connection to give us a chance to connect for five damn minutes.  Life also gave me a nice bottle of wine, a friend on the other end of the phone to be a substitute shoulder, and a nice cold evening to make my dinner of soup ever so enjoyable.  So who am I to complain?

Six of one.  Half a dozen of the other.  It all balances out in the end.  Its all good.

Pick your cliche'.  Any one of 'em will do. 

 

Bounce

Sometime around 5:30 this morning I went to take the garbage bag from under the sink out to the bin.  It was still dark, and as I lifted the lid I lifted my face away from the stink and scanned the sky.

About two blocks away I could see an enormous billowing cloud of smoke, full of sparks and backlit by orange flames and street lamps.  "Oh, crap," I said.  Because, you know, I'm all eloquent and shit like that.

I grabbed my coffee cup (when your dad is a retired firefighter, fires are spectacles, not events), stuck my flip flops on my feet and moseyed up the street.  I don't really know the people who lived in the house, but their outbuildings were ablaze and they were frantically spraying water on their vehicles and their roof to keep their house safe.  Its an old farmhouse, and probably would have been in as bad shape as their garage and barn except right about then the first firetrucks arrived.

By the time I left for work, the fire was pretty well out.  I stopped and got out of the car to see if they needed anything.  They had an old skinny horse tied up to a tree, and I inquired if they needed a place to put him.  The two young guys that were there said the man who owned the horse was at work, and they didn't really know.  I checked him over - he was a little shocky, but more concerning he was clearly underweight and his feet looked like they hadn't seen a rasp in about 10 years.  He was very kind and patient and let me look in his mouth and pick up his feet without protest.  I suggested they get him some water and then I went back home and threw a bale of hay in the truck to give them.  He was eating and drinking water when I left, so I was encouraged.  By now I'm late for work, but its not every day you wake up to a fire in the neighborhood.

Yesterday SG left for Nebraska.  Oh, I know we thought he'd not have to go back on the road, but at some point the not-finding of the local work and the pile of bills (not to mention getting hay put in for an embarassing number of horses) dictated otherwise.  He'll be back mid-November.  If there was anyone as conflicted as this man about leaving for a job I've yet to meet them.  Granted, it was a short notice scramble as he got the call about this job on Wednesday for a Monday start.  The adrenaline rush gets you booked and packed before you've had a chance to really think about whether you really want to go to Nebraska of all places in October and November.

Still, it was three or four in the afternoon on Saturday, his flight was leaving at 10 am Sunday and he was still waffling on whether he was staying or going.  I finally threw my hands up in despair and headed out to the barn to escape the anxious pacing and the muttering.  

It shouldn't be THAT hard a decision to go to work or not, especially in a down economy.  You just don't question the gift of paying work - even if it DOES require packing your long underwear.  But then you think back to the last couple of outages which all went much shorter than they were supposed to, which meant the private contractors didn't make nearly as much bank as they were counting on, and you count weeks and paychecks and you think that maybe it won't pan out - but in the end its still a job, and so the decision gets made.

And so we kiss goodbye before his folks come to take him on the two hour drive to the airport and then later on that afternoon the kids' dad comes to get them and suddenly I'm alone, trying to decide if I'm happy about it or not.  On the one hand, there's all of the ALL that is our crazy little farm and that's challenging when there's two adults to handle it.  And there's the lonely part of things, especially on the nights when the only warm bodies you can find to cuddle with are furry and don't have opposable thumbs with which to rub your back.  But then you think about how nice it is to have a bathroom to yourself and how much less laundry there'll be, and dishes too, and then you wake up to see your neighbor's whole life going up in flames.

And then you read a post on Facebook from a friend you've known for years who just lost her husband.  And you realize pretty quickly how good you have it.

My man might not be home right now, but I still get to talk to him and hold him again in a few weeks' time.  My house might be a little quiet and empty, but it is standing.  My husband might not get as much work out of this as he wants, but it is still work. 

This is how you bounce back.