Category Archives: monthly recaps

i know, i know.

I know, I know. This is why I will never have a famously well-read blog that I can actually make money from and then melodramatically complain about the stress of writing sponsored posts for a living. I am lucky if I post once a quarter and look, not even a big splashy photograph to set the theme.

It’s autumn here in southeastern Michigan but still feels like summer. I am still stubbornly single and it looks like it’s going to stay that way for awhile if not longer, since the only male that I can remotely see myself marrying is Jim Harbaugh and he is taken. And would likely be no better equipped to put up with me than any of the other hapless, deer in headlights men that have blithely attempted to date me and quickly realized that for one reason or another they were utterly and completely in over their heads. (I always thought I was a pretty normal person, but based on the state of my interpersonal relations with the opposite sex, I am now willing to concede MAYBE NO). Mercury Retrograde has once again wreaked havoc personally and professionally with an influx of busyness, tasks, stress, and annoyances but I am largely unconcerned with all of them. Morning meditations and evening tea.

Miss L is joyfully back to school and already has math homework that I can’t figure out. (Common core…!#$%) I haven’t vacuumed in a couple of weeks and there is a spider living in the mailbox that is SO BIG that I can hear its legs tinking against the metal when the lid is closed. I am astonished that the mailman is still brave enough to put his hand in the box to put mail in there since I can barely bring myself to pull the mail OUT and have to shake every piece vigorously to ensure that the goliath isn’t clinging to it.

I haven’t vacuumed in a couple of weeks but am keeping well up with laundry. You’d think that this lack of household cleaning would mean that my attention has been focused on the yard, but no. It is mostly dead or dying. The chipmunks have decimated what’s left of the heirlooms, my house was stalked by a raccoon, and the leaves are starting to fall. This will continue until it snows. The maples lose their leaves first, before anyone is remotely ready to rake. My house looks like a Peanuts cartoon – all green lawns up and down the block and then MINE, hidden under a red and gold mound. I will curse bitterly and get these raked up and then the tulip tree will wait until the very end and drop all of its leaves, so I will be raking in the sun and heat and raking in the cold and sleet. Or not raking at all, which will make the neighbors grit their teeth. I don’t mind so much about Snow Hag on the one side, but I do feel sorry for the dentist on the other. He has a really beautiful lawn and gardens and I am quite sure that when GB moved out, the dentist wept, realizing that a divorcee would never be able to keep pace with yardwork. I try, but have become reduced to just mowing the one strip of grass on his side of my driveway so that in comparison, things don’t look so bad.

Rather than doing chores, I am taking naps and reading ‘1Q84’ by Haruki Murakami. I’ve read some really good books this summer / fall but will save that for another post, as well as my running update. I have a goal of publishing once a week (hahahaha…WHEW) I’ve also been helping Miss L’s Daisy troop – we did a great trip to Gleaner’s in Detroit, and I was a parent helper at their last troop meeting. I thought this would be the equivalent of a child’s birthday party (read: painful) but it was actually pretty fun and I made myself proud by getting all of her badges affixed to her vest (finally). I’m scheduling work trips and getting my passport renewed and watching the Weather Channel and ‘Orphan Black’ and wondering why my DVR won’t record the new ‘Muppets’. (Is that a sign from the universe?)

So, the world proceeds apace. See you next week (hahahaha….WHEW) for my next post.

PS – What does it mean when one has dreams over two nights about someone who they haven’t thought about in years? I haven’t thought about my friend from high school in a long time, but the past two nights I’ve dreamt of her and this concerns me vaguely. I’m also dreaming about packing, which is easier to symbolically deconstruct.

mostly catch up.

in which i try to cope with january.

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not sure if i took this picture because of the pretty sunrise, or to prove that it is possible for me to get to work before 8AM.

This post was originally going to start out with the emphatic statement, January fucking sucks but then I remembered that one of the things I am most proud of over the last year has been my vastly improved capability to see silver linings. So I will back off that statement and simply say, January is a very challenging month for me personally. Better?

I think January is tough because I feel so relaxed and reset after a nice break, I have all of this clarity of insight about things I can do to feel better about myself, everything feels like a clean slate – then I go back to work and am plunged back into the same hectic routine and nothing is clean, nothing is new, everything is still the same old mess it was before Christmas, and on top of it, the weather usually turns, making everything more difficult. More difficult to travel anywhere, even work; more difficult to get any sort of natural light or vitamin D when it is always dark and the wind chills are perilous; more difficult to muster the energy to work out, to eat right, to drink enough water. January is a dark, cold, long month where everything takes more effort for me and I am usually going through the motions feeling numb with exhaustion, no matter how much sleep I get. This week has seemed like the Longest Week Ever. We had a green Christmas but winter has hit with a vengeance and we had a snow squall and a day off from school for Miss L due to the extremely cold temperatures which still persist around here.

(Sidebar. I have to ask. How do children get educated in Alaska? Or the upper Midwest which I heard on NPR now wants to secede from the Midwest and create its own region called the ‘North’? It’s much colder in those places than in Michigan. Those kids must NEVER go to school if education is contingent upon Mother Nature. And you know, look. I am a teacher fan, I support teachers and am full of gratitude for the very difficult job they do. I could never do it myself. But my teacher friends on FB are downright obnoxious about snow days. Yes, I understand that everyone gets happy about having a day off. But to the rest of us who have to go to work no matter what the temperature outside, and additionally have to find child care for a child that has a snow day, often by spending one of our limited vacation days to do so, it can be a little annoying when you open up FB in the midst of one of these hectic mornings and see a bunch of teachers high-fiving themselves in jammies about not having to work.)

On the silver lining side, GB & I pulled together as usual and tag-teamed, and Miss L & I sought refuge with a special snow day lunch, as is one of our traditions.

In other news, somewhat on the spur of the moment, I decided to try a Bikram yoga class. I love yoga and have wanted to work it back into my fitness routine for some time, but I’d always resisted this specific type of fitness based on the yuck factor of doing it in a hot studio full of other people’s fug, sweat, and germs. But one of the lawyers I work with said the studio in Northville is quite clean and so I gave it a try on Thursday night. It was the night of our snow squall, so there was something very Scandinavian about working out in a sweatbox, watching through humidity-streaked windows as the snow filtered down in drifts on the street outside. Then bursting outside into a dark, quiet street of blessed arctic cold. I resisted the urge to roll around in the fresh snow – that would likely be acceptable in Ann Arbor, but in Northville I believe it would likely be frowned upon, the zoning is much more strict there….Anyway, the class was really good, I made it through with only a few moments of seeing dark spots floating over my vision while thinking numbly ‘oh my Christ I’m going to vomit’. The instructor was a fair little waif with a head full of blonde dreadlocks who smiled angelically through the class and went on several gentle metaphysical tangents that I enjoyed through my pain. However, I was underhydrated going in and at 2AM, I woke up with a savage dehydration headache that didn’t abate until after lunchtime the following day. I told someone that I felt like I’d been pounding tequila all night and it took vast amounts of water & Gatorade to get me back to normal. My body felt great – very limber & stretched – but my head was a wreck. I will definitely go back, I just really have to address my hydration and try to figure that out.

January is a dry month for me so my normal soothing glass of red wine is out of the picture for awhile, which I haven’t missed at all, oddly. This made the Bikram hangover more bitter in some ways… as usual, Emmett, however, was sympathetic. He always encourages me to go back to bed whenever I need it. And that is a good friend to have in January.

july recap

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So July is over and not to complain, but except for our beautiful Up North vacation, it just wasn’t the best month. Maybe my expectations were set too high by the rapturous astrological predictions of all planets finally out of retrograde and a full moon in Leo and whatnot.

Maybe those things were just offset by a variety of personal issues currently unraveling slowly toward some sort of resolution after many, many months, and not getting much easier along the way.

Whatever it was, for most of the month I felt a lot like that baby bunny that I snapped a pic of last night. (One of three currently using our yard as a buffet slash crash pad. Emmett hates them and I thought they were adorably cute until I started finding sheared-off coneflower stalks missing their big berry-colored flowers…)

I felt disconnected and listless. Lots of Travis McGee novels kept my mind occupied. I didn’t want to do anything except sleep and retreat, but when I indulged in those things, the lack of routine and accomplishment was depressing. Floors went unvacuumed and clutter crept back. Work was exasperating and joyless, the first ripe heirloom tomato off my JD Special C-Tex plant got chomped by an earwig, I wanted little to do with interpersonal relationships outside of my daughter and my cats, and my fitness went to hell.

During the now-infamous tubing trip, I strained a muscle in my back and missed about two weeks of running. Now, let’s be honest. I don’t tend to run much in the hot weeks of late June / most of July anyway. I am not a good hot weather runner and most of my favorite runs are in the late summer and fall. Also, my favorite running partner has been out of commission all year due to a knee injury, and I could always count on him to push me; without him yelling at me I just haven’t kept up.

But now that my needle has edged past the big 4-0, if I miss a couple of weeks of activity and still eat at my normal rate, things can get nasty. My workplace does a health incentive with our medical insurance and every summer we get screened – blood tests, weight, BMI, etc. It’s kinda neat because you can see how you measure up against past years. Now, over the past 2 years I was very active and last year I was quite underweight, but according to my health screening last week I have MORE THAN bounced back from that low point and then some and then some more, and now it is time for me to start getting serious about my running, not just running for a mile and getting winded and walking for two and running the last quarter mile in and calling that a run.

Emmett agrees and has signed on to be my personal coach.

Lastly, after a summer spent punishing my hair for my feelings of unrelated dissatisfaction, I finally had to admit that although I like to do things myself, doing my own hair is not something I can do well. My college roommate once said that spending money on your hair is a necessity, since, as she logically pointed out, you have to look at it every day.

I went to the salon, and put myself in the capable hands of a professional, and caught up on the celebrity gossip magazines. When I was released into the humid air of the summer evening, with the overly sprayed coif that the stylists are fond of, smelling expensive, I wandered across the parking lot and thought that August will be a much better month.

Six Ten

of this be sure: you do not find a happy life, you make it.