crocheting and the active mind

for my 33rd birthday, i bought myself a gift.  the first birthday gift i've ever purchased for myself (and lemme tell you, i was so proud of myself).

i purchased a starter set of crochet hooks, knitting needles,various accoutrement (row counters, markers, huge safety pin looking things that hold your spot like a bookmark, etc.), a bag in which to carry said accoutrement, and lots of yarn.

i have to blame my friend Kimberly for this a little.  she's is such an artist extraordinaire, both in textile arts as well as paint and brush, drawing, sculpting, jewelry making... i'm telling you, there is nothing she can't do.  we work together and i would see her constantly with yarn and hook in hand, beautiful creations jumping from her hands while we chatted at lunch everyday.  i wanted to learn how (hence the birthday present to myself when i was scarcely affording anything.  i self-rationalized and justified a self-improvement and expansion of skills purchase, especially since it was my birthday.)

This is my box of patterns.

nearly 2 years later, i am crocheting nearly every day and loving every minute.  it is my active mind meditation.  i can sit, especially if i'm comfortable with a pattern, and just bliss out/zone out and let my fingers fly. crocheting takes my mind off of my daily worries and stresses and allows me to relax.  i can't completely explain it, but it falls in the same vein of people cleaning house, or cooking, or gardening when they need a little relaxation therapy without taking a nap. i'm also learning that i have a hard time relaxing completely.  i can't just sit on the couch and veg, i have to be reading, or writing, or sketching, or crocheting.  i'm learning that i'm maybe a little more ADD than i thought i was when i was growing up.

ok, maybe a lot more.

i don't consider this a bad thing, just a further inward realization of my outward self.

last night i finished the latest in a series of dishcloths.  may not seem like a big deal, but we are going through a big de-cluttering around our house and part of that, is streamlining. how do streamlining and dishcloths go together you ask?

well, i'll tell you.  in cutting the extraneous out of our day to day, one of the very small things we've cut out are sponges.  I'm using eco-friendly recycled yarn to makes dishclothes, so that we can stop buying sponges.  dishcloths are healthier, in that they don't hold bacteria like sponges, can be washed at the end of everyday. by not participating in the cycle anymore, we aren't contributing to the need to constantly reproduce this item. yes, i'm aware that one family can only purchase so many sponges in a year.  but, it makes, me feel good to contribute less in this particular aspect.  hopefully, i'm also teaching the kids that we don't have the luxury of living a disposable life.

 i guess that's partially what my journey of the last few years have been about.  not being disposable.  not living a lifestyle that favors material wealth or running out to buy the latest greatest... whatever.  being happy in who i am, who we are.

living a homemade life. a life of substance and meaning. by crocheting with recycled materials, and using those to make usable items for my family, friends and loved ones, i feel like i'm contributing to being substantial.

yeah...i like that.

lessons from cyndi lauper...

when i was 9 years old, i was mad for cyndi lauper. i wanted to be more like her when i grew up than like madonna (whom everyone else wanted to be like).

this is the cyndi lauper i grew up with.

fast forward to this morning and i'm treated to this on blisschick's site.



how chock full of awesomeness is this?? to see and watch the change (and yes, i've spent half the morning on youtube watching and listening to the progression of cyndi lauper's musical life) from a young woman and talented musician, to a mature woman, displaying an accumulation of life's talents and experiences...

more cyndi...



methinks there's a lesson to be learned here....

Mabon and what the harvest of the year has yielded

Sigh.

It's been a long couple of weeks since my last post, and things have changed completely at home again. I won't go into too much detail, as most of it is just painful. My eldest has moved in with dad full-time. I told her that I'd be a raving hypocrite if I didn't allow and hell, even encourage, her to chase her happiness with as much vehemence as I have.

It hurts like hell to take the high road. I guess the harvest of this is she is taking my lessons learned and applying it to her own life.

On the converse, on the night of our first legacy Reiki circle, my eldest son decided to move in with us full-time. He and dad are like oil and water. And before you ask, this is a little different than eldest daughter moving out. My ex and I always knew, I think that the eldest boy would leave him someday. I feel like this is a shot from left field in regards to my eldest daughter.

It's such a joy to have him here all the time, my warrior.

The harvest of this, I suppose, is that all your chickens will eventually come home to roost.

I know this is rambling, all over the place. I guess that's indicative of how things feel lately.. rambling. Work is incredibly busy and bringing me to a place that I don't think I've ever been, career wise. It's not overtly stressful, it's internally stressful. I'm good at what I do, but it's not soul-nourishing, and that's a good portion of where my conflict comes from.

Some days I feel torn down the middle between the need for soul-nourishment and the desire to excel at my career. If I could be an artist full-time, I would. I just don't know how to get there without leaving my family in the lurch financially. Right now, it seems I must travel in two directions at once. Trying to climb the corporate ladder, and at the same time, completely covet Boho girl's dreads...

This is a very interesting place.

Mabon, and the harvest, have brought me to a place of further growth. Which I guess means I've sown the seeds for this growth over the last year, and these challenges, these opportunities, are things that are coming my way.

My continual harvest of change.

On a cool note.. I found this video on one of my fav sitesSummer Pierre:



I agree... I am not a robot.

And this was found on Bliss Chick



And this amazing piece of art from Goddess Leonie!

Wow!



Enjoy the links and nourish your soul!

simplicity

 

Manifest plainness,
Embrace simplicity,
Reduce selfishness,
Have few desires.
~Lao Tzu

Mothers and daughters and perception

I finished reading Yasmin Crowther’s, The Saffron Kitchen, about an hour ago. The imagery and comparison of pre-Revolution Iran to modern day Iran, with bits and pieces of modern day London, made me feel like I could walk the dirt roads in Mazareh myself, or navigate the Underground. From the moment I closed the back cover of the small, hardcover novel, I felt the tears building, but they wouldn’t quite come. A little over an hour later, the tears fell in large drops, onto the kitchen floor, my shoulders heaving in long, silent sobs. My poor husband just stood there, not quite sure what to do, other than hold me and let me cry.

The story of a mother and daughter, and two worlds, so different and misunderstood, striving to occupy the same space.

Dancing through the pages, I saw myself, my mother, and my daughters, of which I have three. Being misunderstood and striving for acceptance are emotions which are very close to the surface lately. I don’t think I was ever a mama’s girl, but if I was, it was long enough ago that I don’t remember. Even on our best days, there is always tension brewing just underneath the surface, an argument waiting to happen. I wish I was closer to her, but we have this problem of not really understanding one another. I feel like I disappoint her somehow, and sometimes, I’m disappointed in her. Even within that seemingly mutual disappointment, life goes on.

To me, she’s an anachronism. Small and almost frail, not in the greatest of health, she’s quick to judge, and doesn’t tolerate weakness in anyone, especially her grandsons. She wants free reign to speak her mind, and usually does, but can’t/doesn’t/won’t understand how doing so can hurt people. It’s as though the gentile filter is slipping the older she gets, and she has quite often, been angry with me when something she has said doesn’t sit well with me.

Frequently, she tells me as though she feels like she can’t say anything to me without my getting upset. And she may be right. With her, I’m a little thin-skinned and quick to temper. I know it, but I seem at a loss to stop it from happening. At the root of it, I know I don’t understand her or where her emotions come from. I don’t know what’s going on in her heart, her soul, and her thoughts.



A woman’s heart is a deep ocean of secrets. I don’t know my mother’s secrets or how they color her reaction and response to life.

Just within the last 6 months, my eldest daughter and I have been at stiff odds. She’s nearly 15 and therefore, a veritable genius. I, of course, am a functional moron in her eyes, but she tolerates me because I’m her mother, doddering old fool, such as I am. Within the last two weeks, though, things have really come to a head with her, and myself, and actually, my mother.
My eldest had to carry the burden of the children when their dad and I divorced and it took a heavy toll on her. Honestly, we never really talked about the divorce, heavily, until two weeks ago. My mother was here visiting, and in 15 year old stroke of genius, she was rude to her grandmother. Not overtly, but there was a definite, and purposeful slight. Needless to say, Grandma did not handle it well. But, it did lead to opening up a conversation between my eldest and I that was 3 years in the making.

We were up until 2 am, both of us talking and crying, trying to understand one another. There was a point several months ago, wherein she told me she was more comfortable at her father’s house. Until that night of soul sharing with her, I couldn’t understand why. I had been replaying countless nights of staying up late with her, watching sappy movies and having popcorn fights, laughing and talking and wondering how she could possibly be more comfortable with him.

“You’re different than you used to be.” She said.

For a while I didn’t say anything. She was right. To her, I was different. To me, I was the old me, the me of my youth. The me that her father fell in love with. I had reclaimed that part of me that for so long had been lost in soccer games and PTA and crock pot suppers. I had never looked at the last several years from that particular perspective for the kids. I never realized how different I seemed to them, post-separation and divorce. I never realized how NOT being the soccer mom, PTA, crock pot cooking mom that I was before could possibly be hard for them to deal with, because I had been in such abject misery trying to fill that role. I just assumed, I suppose a subconscious supposition, that if I was happy, that they would be happy. Dad was comfortable because, to her, he had not changed.

Don’t get me wrong, by and large they are, but her revelation stopped me in my tracks and made me realize she looks at me the way I look at my mother. I don’t think my daughter and I are as harsh with each other as my mother and I are, far from it. But I do think that if it’s not carefully managed, it could reach that point.

Just as I don’t know the secrets of my mother’s heart, my daughters don’t know mine. All growing up in the city, they don’t completely understand the comfort the country gives to me. My husband is a soft spoken, old-fashioned country boy, in sharp contrast to their father, and that is tough for my daughter to understand as well. I’m much more laid back than I used to be, and good deal more spontaneous, and again for her, that is a lot to which she must adjust.

The mother and daughter in this book face the same struggles in not understanding one another. In making the attempt to learn more about one another, a small bridge to understanding is built. Concessions can be made here and there. However, the more important lesson is that each person’s life is sacrosanct, inviolable, belonging wholly unto that individual.



My life did not become forfeit the day my daughter was born, just like my mother’s life didn’t, and her mother’s and on and on and on. As women, as mothers, we often sacrifice so much of ourselves to be wives and mothers forgetting who we really are, negating years of self development in our own childhood. Knowing how hard I’ve had to fight to get back to my own center, the years and tears and pain that it’s taken, I know that I do not want my own girls to go through that, if I can at all help it, even if that means learning the lessons and sharing my experiences, my secrets with them. Opening that bridge to understanding that my life, my mother’s life, like theirs, is my own, is her own, is their own.



Things with my eldest are better. She is nearly 15, so Goddess only knows how many more tempestuous days we have ahead of us, but in opening up my trove of secrets, maybe she can understand me, and I her, a little better. My younger daughters are 8 and 5, and while they somewhat remember the ‘old’ me, they are growing up more with the ‘older’ me and won’t have such a shock to which they must adjust. I can only try, however, to make my mother see that even though she is most definitely entitled to her opinion and her right to speak her mind, that doesn’t negate the fact that others may very well not like it and not respond in a positive fashion to what she’s said or done. I don’t want to have a negative relationship with her, or even a tense one.





I just have to remember that I don’t know the secrets of her heart anymore than she knows mine. And maybe, just maybe, that’s ok.

“Far away, the stone woman sighed out across the land, a flute, a drum, a song, a whisper, and Maryam walked alone into the foothills beyond Mazareh. She looked up at the sky where clouds tore apart in a slipstream of wind. Soon the seasons would change and coarse grass would grow again through the melting snow. Then there would be new knots for her to tie in the desert straw strands, and fresh wishes to be made, along with other stories to be told of the dead and gone, and of lives just begun.”
~The Saffron Kitchen

small and quiet, by the sea

 

"Self-respect cannot be hunted. It cannot be purchased. It is never for sale. It cannot be fabricated out of public relations. It comes to us when we are alone, in quiet moments, in quiet places, when we suddenly realize that, knowing the good, we have done it; knowing the beautiful, we have served it; knowing the truth, we have spoken it."

Whitney Griswold

Blowing Shit Up... Sarah style...

It's Friday and I have my first physical therapy appointment today... YAY! In the interim, my dear, dear friend Sarah has submitted a guest blog written in her usual stream of consciousness, make-you-laugh-so-hard-you-cry-and-then-maybe-find-a-point-so-touching-you-really-cry, way. Her bio, in her own words: I'm talkative and sassy, with a day-job that most would find utterly boring, but I find fascinating, (I do risk analysis for about $2 billion worth of investment securities, which means that I spend my days staring at Excel spreadsheets). I've been married for a little over three years to a swell guy that's at least as crazy as I am. I am starting to get really snarky when defending myself against the "So-when-are-you-going-to-start-a-family?" question, which seems to be asked more every day. I love to cook, but love to eat even more, and have been trying to lose the same 15 pounds for the past two years. My pasttimes include sleeping, breathing, thinking up new insults to shout at crappy drivers during my daily commute, and watching my ever-changing hairstyle. I read because I can and write because I must.


When I was bothering to enter my food choices in the Weight Watchers "Points Tracker" on Friday, I realized it was July 31st. (Note: I like how the "Points Tracker" doesn't judge me for having hot chocolate, a piece of string cheese, and a mini Mint 3 Musketeers candy bar for lunch.) You'd have thought that I would have realized this before now, being that yesterday was July 30th and the day before that was July 29th, and so on. But, I honestly haven't paid attention to the days recently, which is very unlike me.

For example, my dad's 52nd birthday was July 16th and I totally forgot it. Not like "Oh dad, I bought you a card, I just haven't mailed it yet." More like I was finishing up my mid-year performance review and signing my name at the bottom of the review and saw the date next to my manager's signature and said, (out loud), "Holy crap, it's my dad's birthday". About 20 minutes after I got back to my desk, I got a text from my sister, who was on her lunch break, that said "I completely didn't realize that it was dad's birthday until I had to sign my timecard today. Did you get him a card?" I texted back, "Nope."

I finally got my butt in gear this past weekend, more than a week post-birthday, and got him a card at B&N, patron saint of all things Sarah. Then, two days ago, I was working like mad, minding my own business, when my phone buzzed. It was a text from my sister. "What did you get Mom and Dad for their anniversary?" Shit. "Shit. Nothing. I haven't even mailed Dad's birthday card yet." Text back from sister: "Good, me neither. But, I should." (And this wasn't just any anniversary, it was the big 3-0. Yikes.)

Clearly we are neither of us winning "Daughter of the Year" awards so far this year. But, I digress. That whole spiel was to give you some indication of how oblivious I've been, holed up in Sarahland with my dented iPod nano and a stash of snacks. The year is two-thirds over and I don't think I've done nearly as much as I've wanted to this year. Now, don't ask me what I had hoped to do this year, because I can't tell you definitively. (Incidentally, a lack of goal-setting and not knowing what I want more than likely contributed to not having done what I wanted to, but that's another story.)

Mostly, I'm starting to worry that I'm running out of time.

I'm starting to worry that I'm running out of time with my husband. It's probably not completely unfounded or totally irrational, and I've been told that it's normal, but all of that doesn't make me feel better about it. He's deploying to Afghanistan in October. I know, it's not earth-shattering news, and it's not even surprising. I'm a military wife, I should expect it right? Right. But, I don't think that that's supposed to make the process any easier, especially for a first deployment.

He was supposed to leave last year, about one month into my treatment. We filled out about a forest's worth of paperwork so that we could convince a Department of Defense medical review board that yes, I really did have cancer and yes, my husband really was my only caregiver. That paperwork kept him here for a year. Not that I want to prevent him from deploying- I understand that it's his job, and I knew that he would probably be deployed many times throughout his career when I married him. It will be a great opportunity for him, and he will learn so much.

But, I'm still just a little bit anxious that he won't come back.

When we were first dating and into the first part of our marriage, I sort of worried about him all the time. My husband is brilliant and calculating and analytical, so naturally, when he joined the military, he wanted to be an EOD tech. Well, let me rephrase that- he wanted to be an EOD tech which is why he joined the military. EOD is "Explosive Ordnance Disposal", government jargon for "bomb squad". It's an incredibly hard program that has an attrition rate over 90 percent and is second only to Navy SEAL training in physical, mental, and emotional difficulty. (If you're really intrigued about EOD as a profession, and you should be, because it's horribly fascinating, check out the movie "Hurt Locker" that was released in theaters this May.)

It really took me quite a while to wrap my head around the fact that my husband, (in his own words), "blows shit up", for a living. In the summer of 2006, after I had moved down to Florida with him but before the shindig that was our October wedding, I noticed that the box some of our wedding supplies had come in had a light switch on the side. Hubs had to teach a class on those improvised explosive devices you hear about on the news all the time, and so he partially constructed a fake one for the class with just a little light bulb inside as a prop. Do you know how strange it is to find out that your husband made a fake IED out of the box that some of your wedding stationery came in? Very.

So, you can understand why deployment is a big deal for him. It's not like he's in the military as a mail sorter or an executive assistant or something (not that those jobs are not important); it's just that his career field is directly tied to conflict, so his work suddenly becomes more relevant in a deployment situation.

I'm starting to miss him already, to miss him for the things he's going to miss- holidays, birthdays, and those random sleepy weekend mornings when we don't do anything except hold each other in the hopes that we can make time go slower. (That actually hasn't happened yet, as far as we can tell.) I think he's starting to miss me, too. When he's leaving for work in the mornings, he kisses me just a bit longer than he did just a few months ago. When we're going to sleep at night and he's all cuddled up behind me, (don't tell him that I told you that he's a cuddler), he holds me quite tightly. It's not uncomfortable, but it is a noticeably tighter than usual; normally, he only holds me that tightly when I'm sick or something, (ie: most of last year).

I've always had some trouble falling asleep, and often lie awake for a while every night. These days, I'm lying awake for an hour-and-a-half to two hours because I don't want to miss any time with him. That probably sounds hokey and stupid, and much clichéd like that Aerosmith song from "Armageddon", but it's what I've found myself involuntarily doing, night after night, for the past few months. I even made an appointment with my gyno because I thought my birth control meds were screwing up my sleep cycle. I did get new pills, (which make me less bitchy, so that's a plus), but the insomnia stayed, along with the sporadic weepiness.

It comes along at random times, angry and hot and vicious. It's the nastier older brother of the depression I was treated for when I was in college. That was a crazy time in my life- my maternal grandfather had been diagnosed with leukemia at the age of 83, my parents sold the house that I had grown up in and moved in (next door) with my grandparents, and I was taking an academic overload that semester so that I could graduate in four years with a triple major and three minors. You could say that I pitched a pseudo-grown-up temper tantrum that lasted most of my junior year. The insomnia and sporadic weepiness was driving me nuts. I thought it was the birth control meds, (which I've been on since I was in high school for various and sundry reasons). My gyno gave me an antidepressant instead, and I felt like me again, after a few weeks.

I'm going back to the gyno this coming Friday to discuss how I've been doing on the new pills and to talk about whether I'll need another antidepressant. I stopped taking the other one four years ago when I got better, (turns out my first depressive time was probably situational), and I think I might need one again, not because I'm a slave to pharmaceuticals, but because I hate the way that my brain makes me hate myself sometimes. I didn't tell Hubby this right away, because, well, I'm not sure why I didn't tell him. Probably because I didn't know what to tell him. Plus, I wasn't sure if it was my body adjusting to the new birth control meds that might be causing the funky mood stuff, as they are sometimes wont to do.

But, about a month into the new pills, when I was sure my body had adjusted to them as well as it was going to, I didn't feel that much different. My mood swings were better, but I was still having these little bouts of anger within myself, these little episodes, that were totally irrational. And even when I was thinking these irrational thoughts in one part of my brain, the other part was thinking, "This isn't right, and you know it." And I would stop thinking irrationally and the thoughts would dissipate until the next episode. And when I say irrational, I mean, crazy irrational- thoughts like, "I didn't make a new batch of sweet tea so my husband will get mad at me and leave me".

(If you're backing away from your computer now and wishing that Merci were back so that you wouldn't have to hear crazy talk, I don't blame you.)

My husband is the sweetest guy and so laid back, pretty much the polar opposite of the person my psyche assumed him to be in that particular episode. When I finally got around to telling him about the whole, "Hey-I-might-need-to-go-back-on-antidepressants" thing, and was describing to him why I thought I was going nuts, he didn't understand until I gave him that example. He said "oh", very quietly and hugged me hard, which only made me cry harder, and for someone who cries a lot, (by "a lot", I mean at least once per week), I HATE crying. It makes my already stuffy-from-allergies nose that much stuffier. That was a month or so ago, and the really crazy part of it is that I haven't had any of those thoughts since, and no crying episodes. Ok, so that's a lie- I cried when we watched "Bolt" last weeekend, even though I've seen it before; I always cry towards the end because I'm a total sap.

I told him that I didn't like the way that I felt, that I wanted to feel normal again. "What's normal?" he asked. "Well", I said, "I don't know exactly, but I'm pretty sure that this isn't it. This isn't how I'm used to feeling." So, there might be some antidepressants in my future. We'll see.

As dark and depressing as this blog may have been, I didn't mean for it to be that way. I really didn't. It's just that this is the first really grown-up thing that I'm going to have to do. I'd lived my entire life in a town of 5,000 people until I moved to Florida with my husband, and the change nearly broke me. The traffic was scary-terrible and there were so many people and they weren't friendly like the people back home. (When imagining my home town, think "Mayberry", and you'll get a good approximation.) And I really couldn't have managed it, at first, if it wasn't for my husband, even though that probably makes me sound woefully codependent. I'm just such a homebody that I never would have moved to a place where I knew no one and had never been before if I didn't have him.

But, now, for the next 7-9 months, starting in September (or late August, we don’t know for sure), it will be just little old me, holding down the fort. And we have a house now, as compared to a less-involved apartment, so there's more to do. I have to learn how to cut the grass. The only time that I've ever used a lawnmower, it was my paw-paw's riding mower and I just drove it around the yard without actually mowing anything. This is a much smaller yard, but it's not a riding mower, and I’m paranoid that I'll run over my own foot. I've been assured that this is nearly impossible with the safety features that the mower has, but I am so incredibly spastic that I'm sure if it could happen to anyone, it would be me. I actually cut myself with a teaspoon once. (The thought of using the weed-eater is also starting to become intimidating.)

For minor electrical, automotive, and plumbing-related issues, I'm going to be the first line of defense, before calling up the specialists that will charge so much I'd have to sell my left ovary to pay the bill. I always jokingly referred to Hubs as a "useful mammal", (a line John Malkovich's character says to Nicolas Cage in "Con-Air"), but I'm only now, three years into living with him, realizing how useful he truly is. He does all the maintenance on our cars- oil changes, minor body work, replacing the brakes, etc. He does all the home-repair stuff, and not in an "oh-my-god-the-wiring-is-so-awful-that-the-ceiling-fan-comes-on-when-I-turn-on-the-left-front-stove-burner" kind of way. In a "geez-you-really-are-MacGyver/Tim-the-Toolman-Taylor" kind of way.

It's a lot to live up to. And even though I'll miss him like mad, I'm secretly looking forward to the challenge, like it's the next big step that I'll have to conquer before I'm worthy of calling myself a grown-up. (Though I will take the car to Jiffy Lube for oil changes- my spasticity is such that I wouldn't trust myself to jack the car up and have it stay perched on the jack stands while I'm crawling around underneath it.) I'm not sure what that worthiness would entail, but I think I'll feel quite accomplished when Hubs returns to the States and I can show him that not only is the house still standing and in one piece, but it's clean and habitable and in working order.

It will be a lot easier to keep clean without him in it. Being a boy-type-person, he attracts dirt the way that atoms have electron affinity. And by dirt, I don't mean that he doesn't bathe- he does daily. I mean that he can go outside to the mailbox and return immediately to the house, a journey of maybe 60 feet roundtrip, and have bits of nature attached to him. It's quite strange. So, I'm looking forward to having the house be neater than it usually is.

I'm also looking forward to living on my own schedule only. So, if I want to spend my entire Friday evening at the gym, I could. (I got that gym membership because I need to work out, obviously, but also so that I'd have something to do rather than spending all my evenings at home alone.) I can eat Rice Krispies for dinner and be perfectly content with it, or I can whip up and entire meal out of Bon Appètit and eat it all myself. The past few years, I've been a bit envious of the girls I went to college with who moved off to bigger cities and had amazing social lives and lived for themselves. I think this will be a teeny bit of that- not the scary dating scene bit, (which does not appeal to me), but the glorious solitude that comes with spending time with yourself.

I discovered last year, when nearly all my days were spent alone, that I'm not as extroverted as I once thought. Or maybe not as extroverted as I once was. I still enjoy conversation, even inane conversation, but I really like my quiet time. I once wrote, in the blog that I kept in college as a diary meant for no one else, that I enjoyed being the only one awake- whether it was because I was the last one to go to sleep or the first one to wake up. I think I was starting to realize the value if flying solo then, even if I didn't realize it.

I have scheduled some things for me this fall/winter, to give me something to look forward to every month so that I don’t live only for my job. My dad's flying down to Tampa in October and going to the U2 concert with me as an early Christmas present. I bought a plane ticket for November, so I'll be home for Thanksgiving for the first time since I left home three years ago. I'm going home for Christmas, and possibly going to see my best friend at some point in the early spring. My mother-in-law wants to fly down here and take me seashelling on Sanibel Island some time. I think my schedule of events will help pass the time.

I'm also planning to visit DSW once a month or so for a new pair of shoes. By reviewing my grocery bills, I realize that more than half the money spent on food was for Hubby's food, so I figure I'll use what I would have spent on food for him on shoes for me instead. I plan on having quite a collection when he returns, probably none of them practical. (Well, only just practical enough- in the sense that they will all provide my feet protection from the elements, sort of).

So, if you happen to be in Barnes & Noble or DSW or Sephora or Baskin Robbins any time between now and next spring, there's a good chance that you might run into me, and if you were to ask how I was doing, I'm sure I'd say, "just fine", and actually mean it.