Category Archives: Worrying

ruminating

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It’s been a bit quiet around the blog lately, but not in our lives. 

The election was of course a dark time for us, as for many others. I am bitter and I cannot understand my fellow Americans. My heart is broken for all of the people who will suffer under this regime of unbridled ignorance, hate, greed and stupidity – gay and lesbian couples, bi, trans and all others who fear for their safety and their rights to live openly and love freely. The migrants who live in fear for themselves and their family members being harassed, hurt, put into camps and deported. Women and girls who will go without vital health care, contraception, and the right to safe abortions. And who have to know that a man found guilty of rape is considered by a majority of the country to be worthy of the presidency. The kids and families who have survived and those yet to be victimized by school shootings and then see the MAGA deplorables wear their NRA pins and show their AR-15’s in Christmas pictures. I’m disappointed and angry. And more than anything I just hope we have the right to vote again in 4 years. 

However, after the election, Brandon and I got on an airplane in rainy Detroit and after a day of travel, were disgorged, disheveled, in hot and humid St. Croix. We spent the next week there, living in a remote seaside villa with 15 other people that I’ve never met before (childhood friends of Brandon’s). I can guarantee you that we did not see eye to eye on politics with at least half of our fellow houseguests but do you know how many times politics came up? Zero times. For that week we lived quite comfortably and happily in that small community where we were mutually respectful, shared food and time and space and resources, and enjoyed each other’s company. I wanted to love them for the people they are and not even know how they voted and for that brief moment I was able to do that. It was healing to my soul.

I don’t know how to reconcile this with my feeling of deep disappointment in and anger towards MAGA voters. I have wrestled for a long time with my feeling that this is more than a political disagreement, it’s a disagreement on fundamental values and human rights. I don’t have answers about how to reconcile and move forward, but I feel in equal measure that this knowledge and identification of community over and above rage baiting means that we are capable of doing better. I don’t have answers. But if anything, the election and the weeks following have made me think that the answer for me is grassroots. I am motivated to be more kind, to seek to understand and build in my community. I want to work less and volunteer more. I don’t want to argue about politics on the Internet or at all. I don’t want to cut people out of my life but I don’t want to suffer fools or villains. I want to defend and protect those among us who need it. I want to do better, be better and more compassionate while also demanding that same compassion and accountability from the people in my life. And to know how to move forward and beyond them if that isn’t given. I just don’t know the answers on how to seek common ground and live as humans and not parties, and truly if those are even the right questions when such fundamental issues are at stake.

That may be the work of years, not days or weeks. 

Sigh.

Now we are getting ready for Thanksgiving next week – we are hosting my family so this weekend will be housecleaning, menu planning, and shopping, in between the kiddo’s indoor soccer games. We got our first mild snow on Thursday – nothing that really stuck, but after a very mild autumn, it was thrilling to see the weather finally catching up. I hope that you are all well and safe and that you have time to enjoy your people and your communities. 

a few good things

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  1. I bought a cinnamon broom for the den and it smells sooo autumnal.
  2. It has been a very hot and dry month in Michigan yet this evening we are sitting here with the windows open listening to a gentle cool rain.
  3. I just finished a fantastic creepy book – one of the best books I’ve read this year, I think – highly recommend “Mexican Gothic” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. It was EXCELLENT. So atmospheric with a heroine you immediately are staunchly behind and the most chilling and fascinating setting. I’ve just picked up another by her (“Gods of Jade and Shadow”).
  4. We spent all day yesterday at the first marching band competition of the year. Unfortunately it was 85 degrees with a blazing sun on a high school football field with zero shadow (and zero parking which meant street parking blocks away). Wool uniforms are still de rigueur and if we parents in the stands were red faced and running with sweat then the kids were truly suffering. But I love a good marching band and so I was deeply satisfied and even more so when our kids won second place in Class A competition, best percussion, best color guard, and best in music!
  5. Next week is Homecoming. Insert happy face emoji surrounded by hearts.

I need a few good things today because I have a case of the Sunday Scaries. My beloved boss has moved up and out of Widget Central and I am left with a mass of complex tasks, exponentially increasing workload, and instability. I keep telling myself it isn’t my first time at this rodeo but – let me bury my nose in a gothic horror novel and a delicious cinnamon broom for a bit longer, okay?

october friday check-in

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It’s been such a week that I don’t even have a single photograph to add to this post! Unless you want a grocery receipt that I snapped to upload to my Ibotta app.

4 weeks since my Covid diagnosis and I am still struggling to get back to good health. I’m still very congested with a lingering cough and fatigue. I don’t know if it’s remaining Covid impacts, fall allergy symptoms, a couple of small other-type viruses or what, but I am ready to feel better again. Unfortunately no amount of taking it easy seems to be putting a dent in it and I think everyone in my life is getting a little impatient about my inability to operate at 100%.

It’s been a terrible week in the world community. I do not pretend to be knowledgeable about the complex nature of politics in the Middle East. I personally feel anti-Hamas, pro-Israel, pro-free Palestine, and solidly “people are not their governments”. These are most likely naïve statements and I would probably be told by people more knowledgeable than myself that they cannot coexist. These concepts probably put me at odds with everyone in the conflict who demands that a side be chosen. But the thought of all the babies and children and young people being murdered, raped, mutilated and traumatized is so abhorrent that I cannot believe anyone would care whether they were Palestinian or Israeli.

I have to drag my weary and dispirited bones through an ortho appointment, my first workplace-sponsored Spanish class, and a lot of driving of the kiddo for marching band activities before I can lay my head on my Friday night pillow and consider the weekend. I hope you are all as well as can be expected. xo

drinking from a fire hose

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My brother recently said that his week felt like drinking from a fire hose and I thought it was such a perfect description of my 2023 so far. As always, there are things that I can’t / won’t blog about but let me just say that teenagers are no joke, y’all. There are times when I feel like a stranger has taken up residence in my kiddo’s appallingly messy bedroom and is stomping around in her new varsity jacket. I know we all go through this terrifying developmental stage and my own parents advised me on more than one occasion that I was a massive storm cloud during my teen years but sometimes you have to live with it to really get it. And kids these days have very different concerns and stressors than we did with the omnipresent influence of technology and social media. Sooo… deep breath, both hands on the wheel.

Likes this week: A mid-week snow storm which didn’t disrupt my life too badly, just laid down a nice fluffy blanket of white that’s been largely absent so far this winter. Looking up at almost 6pm the other day and seeing that it was still light outside (we’re starting to move out of the dark season now). Keeping up with my 2023 reading challenge and finding a new cozy series (the Dr. Nell Ward mysteries by Sarah Yarwood-Lovett) to keep me occupied. Keeping up with my vitamin D and happily finding the missing 3 cards from the tarot deck that my parents gave me for Christmas when I turned 14.

Dislikes this week: See first paragraph above.

This weekend is a breakfast with my bestie and a big football day on Sunday for Brandon, via his team the Bengals. TGIF!

friday files – in like a lion

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I don’t know what was going on in the stars, but the first half of this week almost crushed me. I spent Monday in tears and on the phone with tech support trying to resolve issues with a new work laptop. I missed my dad horribly. Someone stole the head joint of the kiddo’s flute out of a classroom. Said kiddo had her own issues with middle school stress. Brandon and I had a fight (about NAZIS of all things). The situation in the Ukraine is unbearable, and the Republicans are typical assholes (DeSantis, Boebert, Abbott and Greene, I’m looking at you).

This was after a very calm last-week where I took some time off and the three of us went to Ann Arbor to eat sushi and nose around bookstores. I also made another pine needle basket. It was idyllic.

But in typical fashion, things balance out and swing back the other way. We got a rental flute while the new head piece is on order. Brandon and I are strong, the kiddo is resilient to middle school angst, and tech support did its job (mostly). External events and people can still be awful but focusing on making my own small home and family as peaceful and supportive and nurturing as possible is the response.

Regardless I am looking forward to a weekend.

I’m in the office for a few hours today, and then kiddo and I are having a bonding night together with takeout and a movie. Theater rehearsal tomorrow and a Girl Scout cookie booth on Sunday and the usual housework and errands in between. Regardless, it sounds pretty damn good to me.

Be well and don’t let the news of the world grind you down….at least not irretrievably.

breakthrough

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Last week was a week. Can I just tell you? We were all sick with what we originally thought was a seasonal cold or flu, probably brought home from school. Our immune systems are untested and fragile after a year and a half in a masked bubble, and the illness cut a swathe. I ended up on the couch and unable to work (or do much of anything else) for two days, my kiddo ended up in Urgent Care and on antibiotics for a sinus / ear infection, and my partner in Urgent Care with…breakthrough Covid.

Luckily, he is vaxxed and the doc says that has helped his case be quite mild. His major symptoms are fatigue and a mild loss of smell. He’s on the mend, isolating for the requisite 10 days, quite lonely and bored already as we’ve divided up the house (and kept Miss L at her dad’s house) but it is what it is. I have tested negative, and have no new symptoms. We are very grateful that a year and a half into the pandemic, this is our first household experience with Covid and that all in all it is mild. We are so lucky to have had the vaccine and access to quick, reliable healthcare.

I’m on the upswing health wise and am trying to keep the routine in the house, the refrigerator and oven full of good, nutritious, and comforting foods, and catch up on work missed from my own two days down and out.

All in all things could be much worse!

(Of course this viewpoint has only emerged AFTER my initial storm of panic, anxiety, alarm and guilt – now I can be philosophical and sound like I am rolling with it and have it under control, which, I can assure you, I very much DON’T! But I’m also a proponent of ‘fake it til you make it’ and maybe also a bit of ‘if you build it, they will come’ with a dash of ‘you must imagine your life and then it happens’.)

Keep calm and carry on. I hope you are all in good health and spirits. xo

I was even too sick to knit!!

a long short week

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As expected this week has been a doozy, even if I wasn’t at work for 2 days. I don’t know why it has taken me so long to realize that sometimes a nice normal 40-hour workweek can be far easier than an abbreviated 3-day workweek full of “life stuff”.

The camp dropoff went well and I won’t see or hear from Miss L for over a week. She has entered the stage where she wanted no pictures taken and the sooner I left and stopped cramping her style, the better, ha. I hope she has a great time and meets a lot of nice kids. She’s been a trooper during this last year and a half and she deserves a summer of fun and friends. I already miss her, though, and am thinking about her all the time.

Upon arrival home in Suburban Elysia I was greeted by a storm cell of intense magnitude. It swept through my area with torrential rains, high straight-line winds, and hail. There were loud booms, pops, and cracks and when the rain and gale abated the damage was shocking. Trees uprooted, downed lines and branches, and flooding.

thankfully missed the neighbor’s house by inches

We are still without power in my neighborhood. Which I could look at and be super annoyed by. Instead, I’m choosing to be grateful that I had no property damage; that no one was hurt in the storm; and that it is cool at night and we are perfectly comfortable with no A/C and the windows open.

I am, however, entirely sick of the racket of generators all the time (we don’t have one – YET).

lunch break at a park near my office

The power outage at the home office pushed up my return to my actual office. We are still hybrid, so the office isn’t full, but I did see lots of familiar faces. Everyone looks perky and tanned and fit, as though they experienced major glow-up during isolation. By contrast, I trailed in pale, puffy and unwashed with a bad attitude and very little sleep from the generator racket all night. But I had French press coffee and was able to do my work and recharge all my devices. I’m trying to look for silver linings.

So I’m limping into the homestretch of the week. I’ve survived but not thrived. And that’s okay.

silver lining

another week / august end

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So it’s been another week. A pattern of storms bounced us from high temps earlier this week to a Saturday morning that feels almost autumnal. Everything enjoyed the heavy rains, including Bunter the yard rabbit who sat out in the downpour almost all Wednesday morning.

Bunter is the little brown lump in the lower left.

There are a few bright red leaves on the admittedly stressed maples in the front yard. I’ve been reading up a storm and my home office was peaceful and productive this week except when I had Skype calls and then the jokesters I live with would try to entertain me.

Brandon keeps asking if I want to hang this up anywhere and I think he’s only half-kidding…

School starts on Monday and no one is happy about it. Teachers are stressed and I have enormous sympathy for them. Parents are stressed because the instructions, schedules, and learning platforms seem confusing, and in some cases have only just been released / received at the end of last week. Miss L is not best pleased although I’ve tried to get her excited through a concerted effort to clean and reorganize her desk in her room, creating a dedicated space for learning, and school shopping for supplies that she may not need right away. We had a joint session doing our day planners together with some fun stickers, marking off the holidays and days off we know about. We’ll all just have to do our best and give each other lots of grace.

I’ve been knitting a lot and am excited to say that I am about to embark on SLEEVES for the Pink Memories sweater!

Very poor quality picture of a crinkly pre-blocked mess of a WIP – but it will soon have SLEEVES!

And the Log Cabin blanket that is now a several-years-old WIP continues to meander along at its own pace, mostly for mindless television knitting as it’s just garter stitch, garter stitch, and more garter stitch. Someday I will decide it’s done and bind it off and start a new blanket but I have a lot of rows left in me for this one, I think.

I hope you are well on this Saturday wherever you are – I have no plans except to at some point wander out into the yard and put up the birdfeeders that were raided last night and left on the ground empty, no doubt by our yard raccoon or a squirrel gang. Maybe a nap later.

Be well and enjoy. xo

Reminder! 🙂

this is michigan

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“the furnace is broken AND we have no wood left for the woodstove. someone here isn’t prepared, karen”

I think most folks in the northern hemisphere would see the date on my post and think, hey, April is springtime! Warmer weather and sunshine and buttercups coming up! But (sad trombone) we live in Michigan and this is not the case. It’s been barely pushing mid-40’s F during the day and well below freezing at night and I came back from my walk yesterday covered in snow and soaking wet after being caught in a freezing squall. This is not helping the overall filthy mood of Michigan during the pandemic.

SO, fate being what it is, this is the time that my furnace decided to give up the ghost. It’s not unexpected. It’s from 1994 and honestly, I haven’t done a lick of maintenance on it since I moved in. I’ve barely remembered to replace the filter on any kind of normal basis and when I do so, there’s usually enough cat hair in there to spontaneously regenerate a fourth feline. Yes I feel guilty. But I’m paying the price now as my heat went out. For 24 hours it was 51 in my house. We used a space heater during the day, went to bed last night with hot-water bottles and pissed off (but warm) cats. The repair person came (decked out in full PPE and carrying disinfectant to wipe down everything he touched) and as he pointed out the leak (“HERE”), the condensation damage (“HERE”) and the almost-entirely-rusted-out-bolt-holding-something-together (“HERE”), the look in his eyes over his face mask was reproachful. He got it going, and I’m now luxuriating in blissful warmth, but when the blower motor started up he actually flinched.

“It’s not going to last the summer,” he said.

“It doesn’t NEED TO – it will be SUMMER,” I said, quite reasonably I thought.

“Yes but this is MICHIGAN,” he pointed out, as, on cue, a gentle sleet began to tap against the windowpane.

(The upside of wearing a mask, I’ve found, is that I can stick my tongue out at people and they don’t know I’m doing it. And yes – I am extremely fortunate that I can afford repairs and replacements, I am still working, and that this didn’t happen in say, January when getting by without heat would not have been possible without severe discomfort and possibly frozen pipes. He also consoled me with the fact that there are some really good specials running now. But let me have my moment of childish spite.)

So next week I will have another cadre of PPE-swathed repair people in to replace my furnace and take several thousand of my dollars in exchange for living in Michigan where you need a furnace in frigging July.

How’s your week going?

dark and bright

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I had to get off Facebook last week because I am so angry at some of my fellow Michiganders who felt that they needed to exercise their pique. While we are in the middle of a pandemic, surrounded by families who have loved ones in the hospital, who have passed away, or are working on the front lines, many decided to storm Lansing to protest “government overreach” and what they consider to be overly restrictive stay at home orders. They blocked a driveway at a level-1 trauma center and despite doctors begging them to move their cars to allow ambulances access, they laughed and maintained they were “exercising their rights”. What a selfish, ignorant, uneducated and disrespectful slap in the face to so many working so hard to keep us safe. I’m disgusted and sad. I fully understand people who have lost their jobs or businesses, who are worried and upset about loss of income and loss of security. But clogging streets, waving Confederate flags and wearing MAGA hats instead of masks, and keeping essential workers and healthcare vehicles from accomplishing their tasks is not the way to safely or constructively express this.

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Anyway. Deep breath and move on. I can only control myself, my own priorities and my own actions, not those of others.

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And I can note and take comfort in the fact that spring is here and there is brightness everywhere – in flowers, sky, a red-haired girl, and in the reflection of sun on water.

Be well and take care of yourself and, if you can, others.