There aren’t many good quotes about Omaha.

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The two hours that Miss L and I spent manning a Girl Scout cookie booth this weekend seemed to swell and fill up THE ENTIRE WEEKEND. When we got home all we could do was nosh on turkey chili and talk about how much our feet hurt and then go to bed.

All too soon it was Monday and I was on a flight to Omaha. As usual, I ended up between someone who was too large for their seat and so had to take up half of mine (I don’t judge or hold a grudge; anyone who is tall or big-boned is ill-suited to the third world conditions of domestic air travel) and a sick person who did not bother to disguise the non-stop mucus clearing on her side of the armrest. Nor the fact that she was bored and blatantly ogling my Mah Jongg game.

But we landed safely and I made my way to my hotel. I actually really like Omaha. I am a Midwest girl and being in such a place is comforting. The space, the old architecture, the mellowness. Unfortunately the difference between EST and CST always creates a bit of havoc so I inadvertently scheduled a meeting at one of our facilities (an hour and a half away) for 8AM tomorrow.

First, though, before collapsing into am anonymous scratchy hotel chain bed, I ventured to Old Market for chow. Q had nearly strong-armed me toward a weird hipster bar, whilst making his measured restaurant recommendations, and in the face of my demurrals, at the last minute crossly gave me a lower-key secondary option. So I Ubered to Plank Seafood. Oysters are the specialty but I went with fish tacos (really nice). 

Then, feeling that dissatisfaction in my tumicular region, I asked the waiter for a dessert rec. It was between raspberry cobbler and Bananas Foster bread pudding. He made the call.

  
I don’t even like bananas all that much and this dessert was utter perfection.

I love Uber and on the way back to the hotel, I was picked up by my all-time fave (now) driver. He was a tatted, muscled young stud with a sleek BMW. I got in and he instantly confessed that it was only his second night driving. He’d signed up to be a driver while his partner was deployed- Air Force. He was a little lost and after a few minutes getting straight where I needed to be, he showed me a ring and said happily that he had proposed to his boyfriend and the wedding was set for September. Ahead, the bright lights of my hotel loomed and we beamed at each other in the rear view. 

“I wish you and your partner a lifetime of happiness!” I said, clambering out, full of camaraderie and bread pudding.

“Thanks Sara!” he said, and it made me feel like traveling is a very good thing indeed. 

date night

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3.2016_grumpy selfie

On Thursday, it took me almost two hours to get to work, due to Very Bad Drivers on the road. I took this selfie immediately after the man driving the gold minivan behind me honked because I’d let two car lengths grow between myself and the car in front of me. He had a Canadian license plate. Normally I am quite admiring of Canadians so this guy must have been an anomaly. I couldn’t quite believe that anyone would honk over something so trivial, especially considering the 2-3 mile backup ahead of us. Trust me, those two car lengths were not going to get him anywhere any faster.

Today was better. I had a couple of routine doctor appointments this morning so I rolled out of bed past my usual bedtime and had coffee and a nice chat with my gyno whilst I was in the stirrups (TMI, I know) and then took a couple of conference calls before seeing my GP. It was a bright clear day and there were cardinals in the trees. I noticed a sushi restaurant next door to my GP and stopped off for a bowl of warming udon and green tea. The restaurant slowly filled up, mostly with Japanese, which is a pretty good sign in a sushi restaurant. The udon smelled like dishwater but tasted fine and I felt happy. I really enjoy eating by myself. A book, some food, I am golden.

3.2016_udon

Yesterday, after Horrible Commute, I got to swapping stories about dating with “CPA”, one of my single female colleagues. She’s never been married so her roster of horrifying dating stories is longer and more hilarious than mine.  My male colleague, “Q”, much younger than me and also single, whom I definitely think should be writing a blog about the Detroit restaurant and night life scene, or at the very least getting some actual work done between shopping for beautiful dress shirts online all day, and who has longer eyelashes than I do, told me that I really need to get back on Match. Or, he said after a pondering moment, go hang out at happy hour at a certain exclusive Birmingham hotel’s cocktail bar. He said, “Tons of rich old guys. And the women are just bad plastic surgery NIGHTMARES. Reeking of desperation. You’d be the A-team!” I didn’t really know what this meant but I then had to confess that the last time I had a date lined up, I called to cancel on the basis that I had norovirus.

Of course it was a stunning lie – someone had suspected norovirus from the Widget Central workout room and it was the first thing that sprang into my head.

CPA and Q thought this was one of the funniest things they’d ever heard. At some point, the two of them are going to insist that I socialize with them. I’m not good in situations like that and they both drive identical low-slung BMW’s that I struggle to get into and out of and all in all, I’m just a suburban homesteading mom with a used but paid for Camry who likes birds and cats and her kid, and otherwise is super comfortable being alone. I do go out sometimes and I’ve dated since my divorce, and have really liked one or two of them. I continue to see one friend, “Jax”, off and on, but nothing has entirely worked out with that “click” that you feel when it’s right.

I still feel a little bad about the norovirus thing. I didn’t want to hurt the guy’s feelings – I just really wanted to go home and get into pajamas and spend time with my two favorite boys.

3.2016_twins

After I shut down my work computer and had a quick conference at the school with GB and Miss L’s teacher (this is another story entirely and one that likely won’t be told on the blog, as I do try to protect her right to confidentiality and privacy – I will say that while I thought it might involve the inappropriate use of the word “asshole”, it didn’t and that is totally okay with me – even though there ARE kind of a lot of assholes in Miss L’s second grade class, so who can blame her, really) I noticed that I was really hungry and dressed with a modicum of polish.  So I went to a Middle Eastern restaurant nearby and had an enormous plate of hummus, tabbouli, falafel, grape leaves, spinach pie, and a bright salad that quivered with a mouth-puckering acidic dressing. I came home to a bath and a glass of wine, and Marion Cotillard in “Macbeth” and as I sit here in my pajamas, I am thinking that this is the absolute best date that I’ve been on in a really long time. And it didn’t involve low-slung sports cars or bars or anything other than doing things that I really like including reading a JK Rowling / Robert Galbraith book while shoveling pita bread into my gob. I love date night.

 

 

in which i like them apples

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I don’t have any new pictures to post unless you want to see a pic of the cashmere sweater I just sold on Ebay (full price!! score!!!) — wait, I DO have this recently saved to my camera roll:

007

In keeping with the disorganized theme of this post, here are a bunch of random things that I am too impatient to make full, well-written posts about individually so instead I will barf them up in no particular order here.

  • It’s snowing again. Actually, it started with rain, and when I went out to the parking lot my Camry was encased in ice. Given our school district’s antipathy towards educating our children when there is even any HINT of inclement weather, I suspect a snow day for Miss L tomorrow. Please note: It was over 60 degrees on Saturday. #puremichigan #nowonderweareallsickallthetime
  • I was standing around waiting for a meeting to start today (I was early) and idly chatting with some other (prompt) meeting participants and I noticed that two of the heavy grey leather chairs in our commons area were just…gone. There are usually two groupings of four and they are too large to be dragged around to serve as supplement seating for meetings. Plus, oddly shaped and not functional. I mentioned it and HR got a little interested and looked around and yup, NO CHAIRS. Who took them? And why? And is my job really so boring that I actually care?
  • During this same pre-meeting idyll, one of the Finance guys said bitterly, “Kids today are SOFT. We NEVER got snow days when WE were kids. If the f-ing buses couldn’t run – you had to WALK. Or your parents had to take you. Now – two inches and it’s a SNOW DAY.” See my sarcastic commentary about the dedication of our district to keeping schools open – I agree with him. We live in MICHIGAN. We should not be closing schools for anything other than a genuine polar vortex. And I want Jim Cantore over here to authorize it as such.
  • I so, so wish I could tell you all of the odd happenings with my work and my dating life. I really wish I could tell you about my shady former lawyer boss, She of the Sitting In the Parking Lot in Her Mercedes Very Very Late for Meetings Putting On her Makeup In the Rearview Mirror, and about the time one of my dates turned his car into his parking space at his modest rental community and SENT A COLONY OF ENORMOUS RATS SCATTERING INTO THE BUSHES WHERE THEY HAD SET UP A HUGE NEST. But I really try to keep things anonymous and kind over here, I seek not to embarrass anyone or call my work integrity into question, and I don’t always know who reads my blog (hi Mom) – but DAMN I wish I could tell you some things. I can, however, tell you that I am currently interviewing attorneys who will likely serve as my boss. When I tell them firmly that I am NOT a lawyer, and I speak to them forcefully and with complete frankness, I can see them receding into a tight-lipped shell of “WHO DOES SHE THINK SHE IS”. Yes, I inform them, I am not a lawyer, I will likely be reporting to you, and yet I get a say in whether or not you get to come work here. I usually do not add “HOW DO YA LIKE THEM APPLES” but today, interviewing the Donald Trump lookalike with a name like an Edgar Allan Poe novella about a casserole, I almost couldn’t restrain myself.
  • Currently reading: “Career of Evil”, Robert Galbraith – love this series, truly I do.
  • Currently watching: “An Idiot Abroad” which is just wrong. I really shouldn’t laugh myself off the couch when watching it. It’s just – wrong. But I do and I keep coming back.
  • Weather update: Still snowing. Time to go make dinner. Stay safe and warm out there. And if you are in a warmer clime than Michigan, I don’t want to hear about it but feel free to tell me “HOW DO YA LIKE THEM APPLES” because that’s just karma. xoxo

in which i don’t tempt fate

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2.2016_tracks

I have only two goals today – pet store,  before Emmett chews my face off, falsely believing that he is starving, and library, since I’m finally almost done with the seemingly never-ending ‘Eye of the World’ (not a bad book by any means, just LONG, and in tiny tiny type that made it seem even more arduous) – and both of them involve leaving my driveway. This could be a problem – see below.

2.2016_ice boulder

In typical Michigan fashion, the snowplow came by and tossed up a wall of snow at the bottom of my driveway, which froze overnight and is now as dense, heavy, and impenetrable as ice boulders. I gunned my Camry over it twice (this was not well-thought-out) but I fear a third time, my luck would run out and I would leave my axle or some other important car part amidst the Great Wall. So, hopefully it melts a bit. In the meantime, I will just sit inside and eat Girl Scout cookies and watch the below over and over and over again.

Happy weekend. xo

snow day

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I’m sitting in my back den with a glass of wine and the flames in the woodstove crackling merrily. The westerly sun through the pines is casting long shadows on the pristine snow of my backyard, unmarked except by bird tracks like runes. Sarge is sleeping in his Superman pose and the little red-haired girl is finishing up her pre-dinner hot chocolate (a snow day treat). The snow fell all night and most of the morning and so it was one of those no-school holidays.

I worked from home but when posts started popping up in the local elementary school Mom’s Page on FB, asking when everyone was heading to the big sledding hill, I remembered snow days as a kid. Building igloos with my brother, rampaging with the neighborhood kids…I want my little one to grow up with just as many memories of her childhood as I have of mine. Email could wait.

2.2016_sledding hill

There was a mad rush to find snow pants, boots and gloves; the hill was already crowded. She found some of her friends, neighborhood kids, and they were off while I stood at the top of the hill and watched. There was a haystack mogul on the far right side that caused a lot of glee and terror. The local news crews were out in force – all of the major channels with news vans, filming the kids, likely lingering longer than they needed to. Maybe everyone needs a snow day.

Finally, wet and freezing, hungry and thirsty, we came home to eat and relax and back to emails and IM’s from my restless non-snow-day enjoying friends in the office. On breaks, we organized Girl Scout cookie orders for delivery to all of my work friends tomorrow. (Yes, I am the Compliance manager, frequently lecturing people on Conflict of Interest, the Perception of Hawking / Soliciting, yet I still twisted a few arms on the down low to get the little one enough sales for that summertime trip to Mackinac Island. No one minded much. Even the COO was pounding on my door this week demanding his Thin Mints. “I KNOW YOU HAVE THEM. I NEED THEM…It’s been a bad week.”)

2.2016_girl scout cookies

miami, february 22

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margarita

I spent National Margarita Day in Miami. It’s a small office and our hosts are hard-eyed but stiffly elegant and when they heard me talk about the “holiday”, they went to two different restaurants to find a place that served the best kind. They didn’t drink them, instead relaxing over beers and watching us with amused curiosity. They each had flights out that night, to Bolivia, and they were calm until it was absolutely time to go, then, declaring themselves worried about making it to the airport in time, they swiftly disgorged us into the beautiful night. The margarita had left me with a glowing feeling of well-being and the full moon that had caused such a ruckus for our travel and our dreams was hanging precariously in a palm tree overhead.

I gave a presentation to our South American staff and I had a translator. I would go through a few sentences and the translator would watch me and the slides, and then retell my lessons in Spanish. When he first came into the bland conference room, he seemed like nothing other than a gangling and aged schoolboy, lanky with wire-rimmed glasses and silver in his hair. He seemed young and upbeat, spoke English without much of an accent and I didn’t take much notice of him until we began to work together. At that point, I realized the depth of his quick intelligence and how difficult his job was. He had to completely and thoroughly understand the material I was presenting and be able to repeat it back, picking words and phrases that communicated the concepts. It became a very deft symbiosis of my English and his Spanish, stopping every few sentences to check in with each other. He translated the questions to me and my responses and I think by the end he was as tired as I was.

Instead of going back to his office after the presentation was over, he stayed in the conference room with my boss and me, checking his emails. We worked in quiet and focused harmony until he brought back coffee for us, small thick cups of dirty Turkish brew from the restaurant downstairs, and we began to chat. I thought he might have been a native English speaker who had learned Spanish as a second language, but instead I learned that he was Cuban by birth. His parents had immigrated from Cuba when he was five, with the help of a Swiss family friend.

He told me what he remembered about being a small boy in Cuba, the kindergarten exercises when the teachers would divide the class into groups, the Communists and the Revolutionaries, and give them wooden rifles, and have them fight. He laughed and said the Communists always won. He said his grandparents had been well-off, and one had a beautiful ranch there, and thankfully, he said, he had died before he could see it seized by the government.

He said it took his parents years to leave, and when they left, they left with nothing except their children and their parents. Everything remained with the government. They came to Miami with very little and started from scratch. At the end, he said, the government came to “audit” the house to be sure that they weren’t taking anything with them that should be left. His mother and father gave their wedding rings to the Swiss friend so they wouldn’t be taken (“if the soldiers didn’t like you, they would just find a reason to take everything,” he said with a shrug) and didn’t get them back for years. We spoke about Elian Gonzalez, which is the only real news story I knew about Cuba, and about his feelings on the new openness in the country, the restoration of diplomatic ties and the subsequent breaking down of some long-standing barriers with the US.

He said it caused debate in his family. Some, he said, saw it as a positive thing, something that could only help. However, older Cuban-Americas, such as his parents, were distressed and concerned, and worried that the new recognition of the still Castro-run government would indicate some sort of tacit acceptance of the regime, what it had done and would continue to do. He asked his father if he would ever go back, and his father stiffly said that he could never, ever return to the country as long as that regime was in power, as long as there were Castros there. He had friends and family who had been jailed, disappeared, or killed. I asked my translator if he himself would ever want to go back and he gave that expressive shrug, and shook his head. “Because of loyalty to your parents, and what they went through?” I asked. He pondered for a moment. “Yes,” he said finally. “I can’t help it. In the end, I agree, and just wouldn’t want to acknowledge that government by giving tourist dollars to it.”

I flew home from the balmy warmth, blue skies and palm trees, into the grey and brown dullness of Detroit. There’s an incoming snowstorm. I think I might do some reading about Cuba.

 

Hurts like heaven 

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It’s been a disappointing few days here in suburban Elysia. I sat through a bewildering three and a half hour meeting on Friday. An entire hour consisted of my boss showing her old family photos and telling us all about her Uncle Mort and Aunt Connie. It was a baffling slide show. Yet it still wasn’t the weirdest- that honor is entirely reserved for that time in 2003 when the new automotive Vice President spent an hour playing and replaying a film of the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley. My organization has a rich tradition of weirdness.

  
We went to see Hail Caesar on Friday night and that was disappointing. I love the Coen brothers and it had great promise but again I call for greater exercise of editing.

There were other disappointments that I won’t go into; but I had a nice run this morning and my favorite band plays halftime at the Superb Owl tonight. And at this time next week my daughter, mother, and I will be far away from here, enjoying some sun and happiness in the Magic Kingdom. 

“Taking crazy things seriously is a waste of time.” – Haruki Murakami 

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This morning the fields were white with frost but the weather report said ‘thunderstorms likely’ this afternoon. In February! In Michigan! Next thing it will rain frogs. 

I had the worst day of my week as far as what I had to do- presentations- and all I wanted to do was pull off and get lost on a country road and take pictures of barns and desolate landscapes, all the color of Andrew Wyeth paintings.

But I went along to work and had the joy of irony when one of the managers that I was co-presenting with gravely advised the room that it is strictly prohibited to use social media during work hours….after, I noticed, she’d spent the majority of my presentation distractedly scrolling through Facebook. Sigh. 

I wore a scratchy wool skirt all day and I was insufficiently caffeinated because I didn’t want to be jittery or have to go to the bathroom during my 1+ hour first presentation of the day. As a result, I went out into the ominously cloudy evening, with the beginnings of wind and the promised cold rain, with an itchy tummy and a mild headache. I couldn’t wait to get home into comfy Mrs Roper clothes. No shame in my game. 

Sometimes it’s nice when you get your hard day over with early in the week and then later that night there can be wine and bacon avocado pasta with  a very special friend. 

  
Just kidding- Fred doesn’t drink. 

But I might sneak him some bacon. 

Thirty one – a note about the January project 

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Well, here it is the last day and last post for my January project. Thank you for riding this out with me and for displaying interest in the daily life of a divorced, employed, home owning, cat loving, sometimes running mom in Michigan. My posts were mostly written on my iPhone and posted pretty much immediately, without much editing or finessing, which I’m sure shows. And of course I didn’t hit the frequency I’d planned.

But I really enjoyed the exercise as it made me realize that even if I don’t think I have anything to write about, sometimes if I just start, I find that I actually do. I might do it again at some point- maybe in a warm weather month. 

Anyway I love you all and appreciate your presence here. It’s raining and unseasonably warm in Michigan today, so a good day for chili in the crockpot and playing a board game with Miss L (I dug Life out of the basement). I hope you and yours are well and I will talk to you (at you) soon. xo