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It is what it is. |
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This is my third blog (if you only count the ones I didn't get sick of and delete after only a handful of entries). There has been a lot of water under the bridge since I first started blogging here. I know that "Here" is not the place it used to be, I also know I'm not the person I used to be. That's okay. Maybe there's still some of that old spark left. |
| Anyone else remember the Margaret Wise Brown book A Home for a Bunny? It was one of my favorite Little Golden Books. "Spring! Spring! Spring!" said the Bunny. Well we've had a fabulous preview of spring this weekend and my daughter and I have been quoting that line of the story over and over to each other. If we see a bird it becomes "Spring! Spring! Spring!" said the Birdy. You get the idea. It feels like spring and we are thrilled. Sadly there isn't a Bunny emoticon, but there are lots of eggs, and we all know Bunny's lay eggs, right?       Today was one of those non-stop go-go-go kind of days, but I feel I accomplished a lot. I decided to make a good old fashion Sunday night kind of dinner this evening, so I made a pork roast with apples. The recipe called for me to start the meal in a skillet on the stove and then move it into the over. Well, the only skillet I have that I can do that with is my cast iron skillet. I don't use it very often and tend to forget that it behaves a bit differently than my usual cookware. Mostly, I shouldn't cook on high in cast iron because it gets REALLY hot. Not thinking about that, I followed the recipe and put the pan on high and added two TBSP of oil. Then I started rubbing salt and pepper on the meat. Per the recipe I was "generously" rubbing my meat when I notice the oil was smoking quite a bit. I put the fan on and was about to turn the heat down when it burst into flames. Now... I'm not always great about following directions so it really annoys me when I follow them to the letter and things don't work out. I quickly scanned for anything flammable in the immediate vicinity, and grabbed a lid to snuff out the flames. That mishap aside, dinner turned out really nice. When we were sitting around the dinner table I told Zack the room was a little chilly because I'd opened windows to air out the smoke because I'd had a small fire. He said "I know," which surprised me. I asked him how he knew and he said he heard me say "Oh no! There's a fire!" This made me shake my head and laugh. "You were in your room and heard me say there was a fire and you didn't bother to come out and see what was up?" "Well I didn't figure it was big." "Hmmm... I guess you must really trust me to take care of things around here," I said. "Now that I think about it," he said with the tiniest of smiles, "yeah." I'm glad that my son has faith in my ability to make dinner without burning down the kitchen. I know that blind faith in the competence of parents is usually one of the first casualties of adolescence, so it was damn near heart warming.  In other news, my divorce papers arrived on Saturday. The civil complaint has officially been filed and I have been duly notified. "Spring! Spring! Spring!" said the Divorce Attorney... spring being a time of new beginnings and all.    |
| Somehow I lost a month. Not exactly sure what went wrong there, but... well... it is what it is. It was a crappy month anyway. So here we are in March and even though the weather hasn't given any hints yet, there is that promise that spring is just around the corner and the promise is enough to shoo away the February funk. And the days are getting longer! And my state and federal taxes are done! Life could be a lot worse. Tony has redeployed. Supposedly this is going to be a 4-6 month cruise, but with the sequester, I just don't know. I have a feeling they will keep them out for as long as they can get away with because once they come back the USS Eisenhower is due to go into the yards for major interval servicing of what ever the aircraft carrier equivalent of that is. So although I'd been trying to at least tentatively figure in time over the summer for Zack to spend with his Dad, I am thinking the summer will be over before Tony is back in port. While he was ashore though, he did contact a lawyer and filed for divorce. At least, that's what I was told. I haven't received any notice however. I'm not sure how long the filing takes, but I think any further legal proceedings will have to wait til he is back from deployment. I guess we'll just wait and see how this all unfolds. |
| Here's a little game I like to play. It is a little morbid and twisted, but it entertains me all the same. Okay, so the game goes like this... suppose you or I were to die suddenly under suspicious circumstances, what would anyone deduce about us and our last days by looking around our living space or work spaces. Now, admittedly I've been watching the BBC series Sherlock as of late, but this is not a new game for me. I used to play it even as a little kid, but then it was my parents who were the ones dying under mysterious circumstances. Seriously, I would look at receipts and notes and try to put together their where abouts in their last 24 hours. I'm sure all 12 year olds do this. But you see my investigation would be more challenging. I have a tendency to jot strange and incomplete thoughts on note pads and sticky notes. For example, as I type there is a note pad by my left elbow on which I wrote the words "choose one." I have no recollection of the context. How much time would an investigator spend trying to assign meaning to that? In my desk drawer at work there is a sticky note that says "$10 Whore." Why? Well... it seems that the more attempts it takes me to reset a password with all the required alpha-numeric characters and symbols, the less "workplace appropriate" the resulting password is likely to be. So I end up with a password like "$10Whore" on a Friday afternoon and I make a quick note of it so I won't forget it by Monday morning. I imagine it'd be very Citizen Kane-esque as they tried to decipher the meaning of a word or phrase that may have been one of the last things I wrote. As an aside, I used to have this lamp on my desk at work that my friend Denise really admired. So much so, that I stuck a note on the bottom of it that says "In the unlikely event of my death, it is my final wish that Denise should have this lamp. In the even more unlikely event that my death is deemed suspicious, you may want to consider this as motive. She really loves this lamp." Denise now has that lamp in her office. It just seemed safer to give it to her. Most incriminating of all is my husband's now open credit card bill. Did I mention he has a girlfriend? He does. He apparently bought her flowers and jewelry this month. That doesn't bother me terribly. The fact that he took my son with him to the jewelry store... okay... that bugs me, but otherwise I'm pretty apathetic. The fact that he hasn't figured out how to go paperless so that his credit card bill isn't delivered to my home address is kind of ridiculous. In any case, I'm sure anyone investigating my death would take note of the credit card bill. LOL. And then there are all the phone numbers scribbled on the backs of envelopes and school papers. Lots of those lately thanks to my Freecycling. I suppose they'd have to identify all those numbers... So really... is it just me or do other people look at the flotsam of their life and wonder what meaning and shape it would take on if you suddenly died. |
| Pinterest keeps making me look bad. Up until now, I've done pretty well in the eyes of my kids. Most of the comparisons to other Mom's has been favorable. "I'm glad I have you for a Mom and not here," and my personal favorite, "I'm glad you didn't spoil me." (I asked her why she thinks she wasn't spoiled. She's certainly been indulged enough. She says the difference is that she doesn't expect things and genuine appreciates what she does get.) Now though... my daughter has a Pinterest account. Unlike reality television, which can make us all feel really good about ourselves, Pinterest goes the other way. "Hey Mom... why don't you ever make us heart-shaped pancakes on Valentine's Day?" "Look how cool this is... see how the money is sprayed with glitter. Why didn't the tooth fairly leave us glittery money?" "Look at the fancy braids. You never braided my hair like that when I was little." Truth be told, I was lucky if she would let me comb it. Pinterest is insidiously evil because it creates this illusion that heart-shaped pancakes are the norm, and that if it has been repinned 6000 times by other Mom's who average 2 kids each, then 12000 kids will be getting heart-shaped pancakes this year. But I know better. I used to tear pages out of magazines and stick them in a drawer thinking "one day I'm going to try that," and I know how rarely it happened. And Pinterest is just like a drawer of magazine clippings showing what we aspire to and yet all fall a bit short on. Clever cakes, perfectly plated meals, meticulously organized homes, completed arts and crafts projects, exotic vacations and flawless hair, skin and make up. Do we really enhance out lives by constantly looking to see how much better they could be? ...asks the woman who'll be curled under a throw tonight watching other people shop for condos in Belize. Buddhists believe the root of all suffering is desire. I think they may be on to something. |
| Since my neighbor was so kind as to give me a very large flat screen TV that she was upgrading, my old TV and TV cabinet needed to go. Tony said he would like the TV and I offered to hang on to it until the summer when he'd be able to move it into his new place. After some discussion though, we determined that the cabinet probably needed to just go. It is a nice solid cabinet made out of actual wood so it weighs a ton. The size and weight of it made removing it from my living room a daunting task, so has been just pushed aside for about a week now. This afternoon I decided to do something about that and put a post on Free Cycle. Within an hour, I had multiple inquiries. I replied to the first email and surprisingly enough, she came to the house this evening with four men and a trailer and they took the TV cabinet. It worked out well all around. This gal was thrilled with the cabinet. She has a big, heavy TV and, as she put it, pressed board does not hold up to the weight of it. Tony will tell me I should have tried to sell it, but I'm glad I didn't... especially after getting the free TV from my neighbor. Tomorrow I will be getting a visit from the cable company, and I will switch from DSL to cable internet. I am hoping it will greatly improve speed. I spent a good chunk of the day today rearranging the garage so that the cable guy will have fewer obstacles to work around tomorrow since he needs to run some new lines. I found out I don't have nearly as much crap in my garage as what I thought I did. It was just very poorly arranged. I was feeling very accomplished after getting it straightened. I could even park a car in there with a little more work. In other news... I haven't done anything about my oven yet, but as my mother recently bought a new house, and has plans for a complete kitchen remodel that will include new appliances, she has offered me the oven there if I'd like it. Sometimes things work out pretty well. |
| Today has just been one of those days. My oven stopped working. My bank account dipped into the over draft protection range because my husband's pay check didn't go into the account. I knew he was redirecting a portion of it into his own account, but we'd agreed on an amount that would continue to go into the household account. He was paid on the 15th and wherever it went, it wasn't our joint account. Not cool. Fortunately I got paid yesterday so it is more an annoyance than an immediate crisis. Went to the climbing gym with my friend Emma today. Had a great time. Got to experience a bit of a free fall though when Emma allowed a bit too much slack in the rope as I started to come down the wall. Later she ended up swinging upside down across the gym floor. It is always nice to see the safety equipment in action and know that it works. She did look a bit like a pinata though. Such is life. |
| I never thought I'd reach the age of 40 and still not know what it is I want to be when I grow up. On the bright side, I seem to have a lot of company. It's nice not to feel alone, but kind of depressing to know so many people feel stuck in unhappy relationships and dead end, soul sapping jobs. I shouldn't bad mouth it too much. As always, my job does have perks. Awesome boss, incredibly short commute, flexibility, autonomy, and lots of people I enjoy working with. On the downside... the work itself is frustrating, and unproductive. The larger system has been irredeemable broken. It is a small scale example of how things often go wrong. In hopes of creating efficiency and consistency across the commonwealth, everything was centralized. In doing so, all of the years of building relationships with providers, planning for needs, and yes... cost containment have gone out the window. State run programs are cumbersome, expensive, and unable to respond to respond to any local concerns. It just doesn't work. Now they are proposing a managed care model that would return local control and that would be a good thing, BUT it is a long way off because current regulations would all need to be rewritten to support it. Anyway, it is just not good for the soul to go to work every day knowing you are part of something that doesn't work and has no hope of working and, in fact, hurts the very people it is meant to serve. Really need to find a new line of work. Some of you may recall that I'd enrolled in a program to pursue a Master's in Public Administration. I'd registered for a class, but dropped it in the first week. Public Administration will not get me away from the whole issue of working in a broken and, more often than not, BROKE system. So what do I want to do? I really don't know. On days like this, I comb the job sites looking for interesting job descriptions, then I read the qualifications and research what I would need to do education-wise to get qualified to do the jobs that appeal. The problem is... the graduate programs that appeal to me do not seem to coincide with available jobs that I'd like to have. I'd like to do a job that provides me some sense of accomplishment. A finished product. The closest I get to that now is crossing tasks off a list as they are completed, but I yearn for something more tangible. Back in the day when I had to put together the semi annual quality management reports, I literally filled a binder with data and that went into the report. That was back in pre-paperless days when we still printed everything out, but you know what... I loved those binders because it was a finished product that I could look at and SEE my work. Unfortunately the job market is mostly about services or information, and neither produces much in the way of tangibles. That's just the way of things. The jobs that produce tangibles require skill sets and aptitudes that I have little hope of acquiring. And where does that leave me? I read somewhere that if you put a frog in hot water, it will hop out, but if you put it in cold water and keep raising the temp, the frog will boil alive without hopping out. I'd like to think I have more sense than a frog and yet, in terms of my career, I've been rather immovable. |
| I think I am overdue for a return to normal. First it was Christmas, and that was barely over before I needed to start preparing for Tony's visit and break the news to Zack about the divorce. This past week has been chaotic with Tony in town. He returned to Norfolk today, and I am feeling relieved. It wasn't as hard to be around him as I anticipated. I think we pulled it off pretty well, but it was weird and somewhat disruptive because in typical Tony fashion he didn't communicate his plans and I didn't know when he'd just show up at the house. I'm really glad I don't have a guest room. He stayed with his Mom and that was close enough for all of us. He had Zack with him for Friday and Saturday night, and I must say, I enjoyed the break. Zack has this new habit of whistling a lot. Not whistling a tune at all, just this monotonous tone like someone blowing across a bottle opening. It starts wearing on me after a couple hours of continued exposure. I'm thinking that Zack might enjoy spending a couple weeks in Virginia with his Dad this summer. I love that boy, but the thought of that much freedom is pretty awesome. This morning I got up and did a morning workout before getting ready for work, and it just felt good to be back to the normal routine. Funny that when things get busy the workout is one of the first things that gets sacrificed to the time crunch, and yet I seem to have more energy and am more productive and even sleep better when I get the exercise. I am thinking of joining a gym soon. Membership is very reasonable and includes yoga classes, and I'd really like to get back into yoga. I also want to get back down to the rock climbing gym this weekend. I got a 10 visit pass for Christmas and can't wait to start using it. I've also been checking out some of the activities on meetup.com. Has anyone else gotten involved in that site. I registered back when I was actively seeking new experiences, but then I got complacent and yeah... stressed. Now that things are getting back to normal I need to get back into try-new-things mode. There are some upcoming group hikes that look like a fun time depending on the weather. Along those lines, I've promised to take my daughter skydiving for her 18th birthday in May. It promises to be an exciting year. |
| I really need to stop watching Home and Garden Television. Last night I got caught in that trap again and Katie and I were watching some extreme version of House hunters international where people were trying to decide which private island to purchase. God I wish I had problems like that! Gee... I don't know... I'm not sure this island is rustic enough for my liking. Or my favorite concern, I'm not sure this private island offers enough privacy because it is pretty close to that private island over there. Really? There was one guy who kept making comments about how he wanted to live on an island because Zombies can't swim. Either he knows something the rest of us don't, or he was trying to be funny. He asked how deep the water was around the island and when the Island broker said 10 ft. he said "That's good. Zombie proof." Like Zombie's can't paddle a kayak! Let's get real.  Of course, after watching the show, I had to Google "private islands for sale," and then proceeded to play the game of imagine I just won the lottery and had a few extra million dollars to invest in real estate. Where would I buy my private island? There are some pretty awesome islands out there, Apparently Greece is having some sort of liquidation sale. The variety and settings are so amazing. Gorgeous Alaskan islands, An island complete with a lighthouse in the St. Lawrence River in upstate New York, Islands in Lake Michigan and off the coast of Maine. And that's just the US. Then there are the breathtaking tropical islands in the Caribbean and South Pacific. If I ever could buy a private island, I think I'd like something tropical. Definitely tropical. On the other hand, if we are going to factor zombies to the equation, then I think I go with this island instead. http://www.vladi-private-islands.de/en/island+buy+middelgrunds-fort+denmark+euro... That's right Middelgrunds Fort off the coast of Denmark is for sale. It is the largest artificial island in the world and features a 200 room fortress crafted from 2.5 million tons of solid granite. Not to mention the pretty sunsets and ocean views. So yeah, this is where I'd ride out the Zombie Apocalypse. If I could just win the lottery... |
| Yesterday I took Katie to the title place to get things sorted for her new car. While we were there, we were making the expected small talk with Ryan, the Notary Public, which means we talked about the weather. It has been a warm, wet weekend here by January standards. We've had highs in the 50's and the ski resorts are NOT happy about it. Ryan said that he'd recently heard that no one under the age of 27 had lived through a colder than average winter. It took me a minute to process that. Basically we haven't had a colder than average winter in 27 years! At least locally. It makes me wonder how often they update the data about what is considered an average winter. Obviously if you only averaged the last 27 years, statistically some of those years would be colder than average, right? I've gotta say, one of the things I've come to count on with winter are the warmer spells breaking up the cold. I remember being a kid in Iowa and how frostbite was always a worry. It was just continuous, oppressive cold from November to March. At least that's how I remember it. Here in PA a deep cold lasting a week or more really stands out because it doesn't happen that often. This might be a bad sign for the environment, but I have to admit that as someone standing out at the bus stop with my kids at 6:30 every morning... I'm grateful for every less than frigid morning. |
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I too am house hunting. I'm off to do some viewing tomorrow. Not moved house in 33 years so it should be an eye opener. Don't think I'll be looking under any kitchen sinks, but will keep the advice about unwanted furry visitors in mind. I rather like mice though, but don't want to cohabit with any. 