The rest of the weekend passed without incident and was mostly spent in some sort of prone position catching up on lost sleep. The whiskerfaces helped a lot with this project.

  

I don’t know what I would do without their support.

I had a proper dinner – movie date night on Saturday and we saw “The Revenant”. Normally I really love movies of this type. The history is fascinating and the scenery…well, every shot was spectacular. I wanted to build a cabin on every view. 

Unfortunately we are old and the movie was almost THREE HOURS long. (I am not a big fan of the whole movement toward movies longer than 1.5 hours or so. I feel like they’re bloated and self-indulgent. And for God’s sake don’t divide a story into three or four movies when it can easily be told in two with some expert editing. I’m looking at you, Hobbit and Mockingjay.) So by the time we’d watched Leo crawl across half of the US, grunting and, as my date said, talking like Batman, we were both sodden with exhaustion. When the last shot faded to black, my date passionately said THANK GOD and drew shocked and angry glances from other affected moviegoers sobbing into their jumbo buckets.

And then, all too soon, it was Monday again. I got up early and put dinner in the crockpot with a feeling of enormous self satisfaction (BBQ chicken to shred for sandwiches for me & Miss L). There’s nothing better than coming home after a frantic Monday and having dinner already made. Then it was back to work with to-do lists and documents and a lunch hour spent here.

  
And probably more of the same tomorrow. Happy Monday all. 

 

 
I’m on my way to bed at 930 in the morning and I’m feeling like I had waaaay too much fun last night. I know, I’m too old for this, right? I’ve learned these lessons, right? The party lifestyle doesn’t pay. 

I know what you’re thinking and let me clue you in on something that I learned firsthand last night – which is that the aftereffect of spending a night on the floor of a museum with a bunch of Brownies and their mothers is very similar to a tequila hangover. 

  
The troop got to spend a night in the museum courtesy of the Cranbrook Institute of Science. It’s a lavish and privileged private school in the old automobile money part of Bloomfield Hills. Think curving roads through stands of pine woods, brick mansions tucked back behind long drives and wrought iron gates. Think sprawling campus with museums, art & science, glorious landscapes, stone dormitories and chapels. 

Cranbrook is kind of a big deal. However, with a troop of seven year olds, I figured, it’s essentially camping. I wore yoga pants and a sweatshirt, put our toothbrushes and a change of underwear in a backpack, and L & I were off. 

Upon arriving at the museum, the first thing I saw was one of my fellow moms toiling uphill from the parking lot carrying what looked like a twin size mattress on her back, and pulling wheeled luggage so large that I think her actual child could have fit in it. Either she overpacked or I underpacked.

The programs were pretty excellent- kitchen chemistry, electricity demonstrations with a Jacobs Ladder and a large scale conductor a la Tesla, fossils, and native people. I like scientists. They tend to be extremely intense and passionate about their work, and more than a little weird. For example, the woman educating the girls about native people was excessively fond of her pelts. She stroked them and stuck her fingers through their eye sockets and turned our troop leader green. “The fox pelt is missing a paw,” our leader said from behind her sweatshirt, which she had pulled up over her mouth and nose. “We call him Tripod,” the scientist responded seriously, and moments later the adults were severely told to please be quiet because we were disrupting the workshop. “The badger still has whiskers,” our leader moaned, and set us all off again, and the scientist wrapped “Tripod” around her neck like a jaunty scarf, and shot us a single malevolent glare.

It was a long night and by 9, while we were touring the bat exhibition, I could have rolled out my sleeping bag under the fruit bat cage and slept right there. The bats were intensely fascinating, with their tiny delicate ears swiveling constantly, cuddled into hanging clutches, every now and then spreading a wing to glow in translucent membrane under the lamps. 

  
However, they didn’t smell the best, so I was glad enough to retire to our allotted hallway outside the observatory. One of the moms had plugged in her air mattress, which grated to life and expanded to the size of an actual bed. She donned a headscarf and a set of matching pajamas and eyeshade a la Holly Golightly. On the floor, rolled onto a half-inch blowup pad and swathed in an ancient sleeping bag borrowed hastily from my ex, wearing the same clothes that smelled vaguely like bat, I felt a little bitter.  

Lights out and the girls took another two hours to settle. There were trips to the bathroom and much arranging and rearranging of bags. There were murmured conversations about why they didn’t shut the emergency light off, far down at the end of the hall. I ended up next to a girl who wasn’t my daughter and tried to avoid her flailing as she gradually encroached on my pad, the deeper into sleep she slipped. The floor was hard and cold. It seemed that they were piping some sort of new age whale song through the echoing and cavernous halls, or maybe it was the wind echoing in the elevator shaft. 

Then, like the rise of frog song all at once on a summer night, the deafening roar and gurgle of a herd of somnolent wildebeests as the Brownie Moms drifted into open-mouthed slumber. I lay awake for awhile. There are more than a few deviated septums in that group. When I finally drifted off, I dreamt of mastodons and the small flutter of bats and dead-eyed frogs blinking at me from behind the thick glass of laboratory jars.

It was the worst night of sleep I’ve had in awhile but the girls will probably remember it for a long time, and as we drove home in the delicate morning sunrise, I had to admit that I probably will, too. Next time I spend a night in a museum, though, I’m bringing earplugs and getting one of those big air mattresses. 

  
I started counting calories and steps on my phone app last week and it was one of the most annoying and demotivating activities I’ve undertaken. Okay, it’s not even in the top 5, but those are things I won’t talk about on the Internet.

Number one, counting calories makes me think about what I put in my mouth, and that’s good. I am sure that I did a better job meal planning and making my meager allowance count. But it also makes me obsess about what I put in my mouth, and that’s not cool. I don’t want to live a life where I count out twelve raw almonds or turn down a cookie because it will ruin my day. 

I walked into the kitchen at work today and someone was toasting a croissant and I almost fainted at the heavenly aroma. Then I went and ran 3 miles on the treadmill and had to eat a Lean Cuisine and I just thought, fuck this. 

I’m also a calorie liar. I don’t really want to know what my choices add up to so I frequently “forget” to count that glass of wine or the impact of cleaning up the rest of Miss L’s breakfast. 

I think it’s great that counting things made me park further afield in the parking lot and feeling pumped when I got to 10,000 steps and made me eat a more reasonable portion of something or eat a salad because my day’s nutrition breakdown was light on the veggies. But it’s not cool that I felt like I couldn’t get flavored oatmeal because it’s more calories, and I couldn’t eat a banana before my run because it’s 100 too many calories.

I need to think more about this. But in the meantime, I parked in the far lot when I picked L up, took a picture of the winter twilight, and got my 10,000 steps. 

  
No shortage of pics of Sarge doing the Superman, his favorite relaxation pose.
January and February are really tough months in Michigan. Maybe they are everywhere, but I’ve lived for short times in different climates and I don’t remember them being this challenging. The days are short, dark, and crushingly cold. It is a challenge to get enough sunlight or vitamin D or sleep (even though it feels like all I do is sleep). It feels like I see the inside of the same walls ceaselessly, grey car interior, beige work walls, fluorescent lights. I don’t want to work out or even work, for that matter. My productivity comes in short bursts and I feel depressed that I spend so much of my time flogging myself to do basic things that suddenly seem insurmountable. The thought of taking the trash out or waking up one more morning to shower and do my goddamn hair and go to the same place I always go to struggle to complete the same tasks makes me just want to throw something. 

The only lovely times of these unlovely days are the beginnings and the ends. The sky becomes electric and then translucent. For a moment, everything stands out in sharp relief against its pale opal light; the lacy silhouettes of bare branches and the lonely span of sagging electrical wires like looping careless songs. In the mornings there is the small stabbing light of faraway planets in the pristine dawn, and at night, it is the more crude violet of streetlights as they pop on one by one. The streets are dark and empty with arctic cold except the other night, when I stood at my bedroom window and watched a lone walker pace down the middle of the street, as though he was the only one and everyone else was dead or fled from an abandoned city. Out of nowhere, a sleek black shape darted out of the shadows down the block, loped gangly and otherworldly up onto the curb and across a driveway. The walker paused, uncertain. To continue? A fox or a coyote? Just a neighborhood dog? In such a winter, one can never tell. 

I’m trying to float with my biorhythms and not get too down on myself if it’s hard to work out, hard to say no to a 730 bedtime with a book. It’s like this every year and we will drift back to the light. 

Homes are important. I love my house and work hard to stay here. I can’t explain how and why it matters to me, except to say that it does. Maybe homes soak up some part of their owners. This blog is named after my first real home. My parents live in another of my homes, and there is this house. 

It just matters, is all. During my labor pains, giving birth to L. in the hospital, the place I fixed in my mind was this home. The walls breathed with me and I rode the waves of pain with the pine branches outside the windows of this house. And when we brought Miss L home, we brought her here. 

I know that at its core, home is where the people you love are. But when the pale winter light suddenly glows through these rooms and casts shadows of branches on these walls, I feel that it’s a tiny bit more, too. 

  

  
Clearly I’m not very good at this “posting every day” thing but it will get better when I have a working personal laptop. It’s in the works but in the meantime, thumb blogging progresses. 

It’s a long girls weekend here in Michigan and we are bunkered in. I have been counting calories in an attempt to lose the five pounds of fluff I’ve gained this fall / winter and I have actually gained five more. I guess I have some dates with Tony Horton and Bob Harper (convivially known as Fuck You Bob Harper in the dark recesses of my mind). 

Last night Miss L & I picked our way across crusted ice tundra streets to visit our little 1940’s theater for a movie night. We came home and stoked up a fire and stayed up too late. Miss L is absorbed in watching Jackson Galaxy Cat Mojo videos and I was finishing my second book of the new year, “Fates and Furies” by Lauren Groff. Today it’s back to the library for more books. 

  

Sometimes I just run out of steam. This usually manifests in a headache or extreme torpor and is exacerbated by monthly hormonal issues. Usually I can push through until the weekend and recharge but sometimes it’s a perfect storm, a migraine like I’ve had for the past few days, and I have to take a few hours of vacation or sick time and unplug. I pushed through a presentation this morning with a vicious stabbing pain in my head. By all accounts it was a good presentation- I sucked all the air out of the room and rendered my mostly non-native English speaking audience dumb with the unspoken desire for me to Stop Talking. I still don’t like public speaking but forced necessity has made me adept and I take bitter delight in going over my allotted time and numbing the shit out of everyone. Hey – you want me to talk? By God I will talk. This delighted my CEO who is nearing retirement and becoming almost pixieish in his glee. He knew I wasn’t feeling 100% so he spent some time pulling faces at me from his Big Chair – thumb to nose waggling his fingers at me- and bawling at me in his broad brogue on the break to pay attention. Then relenting and telling me crossly that I needed to move away from the window because it is too bloody cold over there and what was I trying to do to myself? I have an odd relationship with executive staff, and they take great pleasure in pushing me this way and that in my career as though I am a species of amoeba that reacts in particularly fascinating ways to being gently needled.  

I drove home at midday pondering the concept of self-driving cars. The University is testing them at their mock-city which they built under the pale blue clouded water tower a few miles fromWidget Central HQ. Who wants to trust a driverless car? Wouldn’t we be better off spending money on better public transportation, efficient high speed rail, etc? Perplexing to a Luddite such as myself. I came home and Sarge was exactly where I left him, face down in the duvet, and I was happy to join him.

  
Now, a few hours later, my headache has dwindled somewhat, a hurricane becoming a tropical storm, downgrading in intensity. It’s the type of headache that I will feel after it’s gone, an empty hollow space of remembered pain. 

  
In my defense, I did post yesterday, but something went awry with the thumb posting and by the time I figured it out, I was already in bed and my thumbs were tired. We had a snowpocolypse scare last night and the gas station was packed with hysterical SUV drivers not bothering to politely wait their turn. I eschewed the grocery store and went home to eat too much pasta and watch “Making a Murderer” which upset me so I turned it off. I don’t know if I can finish it. 

It was a slow but undeniably beautiful drive this morning, the first real snowy and sloppy commute of the year, with fat flakes dressing all of the trees. I am almost finished with a big project at work and that makes me very cheerful. I didn’t even mind sitting in on what was possibly the least helpful and instructive mentoring session ever. 

I tend to feel annoyed that I have a mentor. I’m in my ’40’s and have been in my company for 13 years. No one has taken much notice of me til now, and I have no plans to be moved much higher. I’m pretty content to sit in my office and read documents. Yet in an organizational guilt spasm, they gave me a mentor and enrolled me in this Developmental Opportunity. I like my mentor but as usual HR has sucked all the fun out of it. We can’t just sit around together and gossip, I have to Set Goals and update them. I also had to sit through the aforementioned Perplexing Session which was entirely designed to help me assess my level of incompetence. Lest you think I jest:

  
I mean, honestly. Someone sat around and thought this up and now gets paid for it and feels pleased with themselves. And I have to pretend to take it seriously instead of spending time working on reading documents and studiously avoiding eating the orange (A Very Healthy Snack) that I brought several days ago and is slowly rotting next to my gargoyle pen holder. 

I know that I sound exceptionally jaded but yesterday, I asked HR for a copy of my job description and my actual title so I could respond to an audit self-assessment. I’m still waiting. HR isn’t sure of my title and despite the fact that I continue to be paid, no one is sure of my job description, either. This sounds an awful lot like Conscious Incompetence to me.

On the tenth day of the New Year, shortly after midnight it started to rain. It rained and rained, and when we woke at seven it was still raining. The rain ticked against the windows and the wind gained intensity and at daybreak, the rain turned to sleet and snow.

  
There was nothing for it except to light a fire and relax all day, after Miss L had pancakes and strawberries and the birds were fed. 

  
I still have Christmas decorations to put away and laundry to do, and the breakfast dishes pined in the sink, but I have the new Philippa Gregory and so as long as the wind blows and Sunday lasts, I can’t be bothered. 

Still typing with my thumbs. It’s nice that I am shelling out money every month and paid additional money today for Internet and cable television, neither of which I can access. I hate to think that a new,unbudgeted laptop is in the cards but I think it’s time. 😦

On the upside, Miss L got a haircut today, and we ran errands and ate Swedish Fish and had lunch at Qdoba (“their tacos are quite excellent.”) We bellowed along with Adele. We stopped at the library in our shirtsleeves, because after pouring rain all night, the temps climbed near 50 today and people were using all sorts of unseasonable transportation to get around. 

  
The library was unexpectedly hosting a craft – coloring paper sacks to fill with treats as a “thank you” for the police, firefighters, and EMTs who worked over the holidays to keep us safe. 

  
We like a good library craft and if it includes gratitude, we’re in.