I slept until almost 8 today. Got up with the three-legged cat at my hip, I think he might have had concerns about my well-being.
Opie
I fed everyone, made my coffee and hung out with Nala. She was in a very “dancing” mood.
Stripped my bed and even removed the electric blanket. Got the roomba going and vacuumed with the real vacuum, too.
My room smells like roses.
I promised the teenager we’d have poached eggs and Lidl croissants for breakfast, and we did. Her contribution was to display her Pennsylvania Dutch heritage (on her father’s side) and fry up some scrapple.
I’ve never been a fan.
I’m still not. Tastes like meat and cornbread.
The teenager let me know this was not good scrapple, and that scrapple is pretty much cornbread made of meat.
I’m going to work for a little while doing some volunteer editing work for a anti-human trafficking group I’ve recently joined. I also had my second library board meeting since I rejoined the trustees there.
This afternoon, the teenager and I will be visiting a good friend and mentor, under a tree, socially distanced of course.
I woke today with no clear idea of what I wanted to achieve today except that I promised my teenager that we could go to Lidl and get supplies to grill again.
I even called my blind friend Nan (who’s now on twitter and just published a NASA poem as a tweet) and got her shopping list.
Macaroni salad
Peanut butter cookies
Riced cauliflower
Ice cream
I got up and fed the menagerie. One quietly sad little leftover tidbit of having formerly feral kittens is that sometimes they really do eat anything.
Fog, who was on his own a month longer than his brother Misty (Mistofelees), tends to eat the cockatoo’s kibble.
But I do feed them— as I grind my whole bean espresso blend and feed it into my little espresso machine.
This morning I started laundry, washed the bathroom floor and reassembled it now that it’s been thoroughly scrubbed. I had my last birthday cupcake for breakfast.
I saw a got the last of my anticipated packages, a shirt and necklace from Doll’s Kill. (Unboxing here: My last birthday package.)
I also got two pairs of slacks and a purple tunic from White House Black Market. I thought the necklace would look amazing with the tunic. (Another unboxing here: New Pants)
Top from White House Black Market
White Blouse and Gingham Slacks from White House Black Market
My Goffin’s cockatoo, Nala, had her morning talking session and woke the teenager up at 11 a.m.
The teenager and I went to Lidl and the Dollar Tree. Our finds at Lidl included super cheap scrapple and super cheap hot dogs and super cheap maple breakfast sausages. We got two bags of instant light charcoal. Dill pickle pita chips. Some varieties of veggie burgers. Provolone because it was on sale and the teenager adores provolone. The teenager even got break and bake chocolate chip cookies to make in her father’s new toaster oven. (His apartment does not have a stove/oven.)
At the Dollar Tree, I got tuna. A vase because for the life of me I can’t find the one I made in college that I use to display my roses. Frozen appetizers. A can of corn so we can make my mother-in-law’s corn bake. A can of Chef Boyardee Beef Ravioli because it might be the second time the teenager ever had it. Some grill utensils. Matches. And Ajax. Because the teenager wanted Comet for cleaning but the Dollar Store only had Ajax. And instant decaf coffee. Because Lidl didn’t have any decaf coffee and I need to detox.
Nala got really hot this afternoon and started swimming in her water bowl.
The teenager started the grill again. This time we were more determined than ever to succeed. Read about last night’s attempt here: Yesterday’s BBQ
We even invited her dad for dinner. And do you know what? Those cheap hot dogs were really good.
And I had a library board meeting at 7 p.m., so I poured a Diet Coke and mango nectar.
I can feel my tension fade away and it feels delightful. I ate well today, though I’m hungry now. I even had a ton of fruit. A serving of cantaloupe. An apple made in the grill like at Girl Scout camp. And probably 8 pieces of watermelon.
I noticed I was oddly content and relaxed last night and that got me thinking.
I had a great weekend.
Did I have a great weekend because it was my birthday?
Because it was a three-day weekend?
Because I’m starting my vacation and sharing the teenager’s first week of summer vacation?
Or…
Did I have a good weekend because I didn’t waste time worrying about Monday?
I’m not even sure what I did Friday, but I think it involved visiting with neighbors, watched The Call of the Wild with the teenager and ate potato chips and cheese dip for dinner.
On Saturday, I went to Tucker and got a coffee and our burger kit. (Another Trip to Tucker) I had a great time at my Dad’s just seeing the teenager gather treasures from the woods and shooting her bow and arrow. (Vacation Day 1; Birthday day 4)
Yesterday my mom and I cleaned the downstairs, I ate too much pizza and organized my closet.
So I went to bed relaxed.
And now today I worked with my friend Nan, typing her latest essay and submitting it to Pennsylvania Council for the Blind’s newsletter.
The teenager’s father stopped by with a work friend to get some furniture from my garage. Imagine my surprise when the two of them couldn’t move the hutch. My great-grandmother’s hutch. He wants to use it for storage in his small kitchen. I’d rather see it used than sitting in my garage.
So, I asked him— how did it get there if you can’t lift it?
Apparently, the teenager did it.
The teenager was sleeping. So instead of waking her up, he and his friend went to the office and got a hand truck.
She woke up when they returned and found the whole situation amusing.
While they took the hutch to the teenager’s father’s apartment, she asked me to help her move her favorite recliner outside so they didn’t have to struggle.
We did.
She went with her dad for a while so I stared scrubbing the upstairs bathroom.
I also gave Nala a shower.
When the teenager got home, she did a load of blankets and we hung them on the line.
Then we went to the Family Dollar so she could get a new planner now that the school year has ended.
I suppose I have to let go of my birthday and start referring to my time on vacation— but how awesome is it that my birthday bled right into a holiday weekend and then into paid time off from work!
I’ve been with my agency for 14 months now. I think in that time I took off my daughter’s birthday, two days before my daughter went back to school (and to go the Iron Pigs baseball Game and see her marching band perform the national anthem—Warrior Band at Iron Pigs), one planned day when my daughter had surgery, and one sick day.
So this time is deserved.
And before I left I learned I got the PA Food Recovery Infrastructure Grant for our food pantry which will pay for a new commercial freezer for our food pantry.
So after my delicious burgers from Tucker Provisions (who with the generosity of their customers and via Easton Hunger Coalition donated cases of eggs from the Zimmerman farm to ProJeCt of Easton’s food pantry), I got home late last night and between the kittens getting wound up and myself feeling a second wind, I didn’t get to bed until 1 a.m.
Luckily the animals let me sleep until 8. Even Nala, my Goffin’s cockatoo, was patient.
I got up, fed the menagerie, started dishes and laundry and my mom came down to help me clean. We gave the downstairs a thorough dusting, shining, vacuuming… and I’d like to say Mom and I made a good tag team. The teenager worked on her room.
I told her I’d buy her a pizza for lunch.
We ordered Domino’s. I got a spinach feta pizza with black olives, Parmesan bread bites, and since Mom was here a bacon jalapeño cheesy bread. The teenager asked for wings. We also ordered Diet Coke, which we mixed with mango nectar.
I’ve been drinking it all afternoon. If I had peach schnapps or vanilla rum, it would be even better.
I organized my closet— since I recently got some new clothes from White House Black Market some of the old ones had to go. I have a small wardrobe. And a small bedroom.
I took a 30-minute or so nap.
And Mom might be coming back Tuesday to have coffee and bagels and help me clean and organize my kitchen cupboards.
As one of the perks of the online writing community, I have had the pleasure to meet Fausta, a life coach and therapist who has a wide range of capacities and wicked sharp writing skills. She has been working on her blog, and her business, Fausta’s Place to Ponder.
People often influence and inspire each other in the most unexpected ways—often without trying—and I’ve admired and respected Fausta for a long time in just that kind of subtle way.
Like most of us, she’s a real and imperfect woman with a quiet vibrancy. She’s touched me with her honesty about life as a woman and the everyday struggles as a mother, building/continuing her career/business, dealing with her own and her family’s health and keeping her heart and emotional state strong and well.
Isn’t that what most of us are trying to do? In a recent blog post (linked below) she talks about our attitudes and how our mental framing of tasks impact how we perform them. I have continued to ponder this.
I love routine, order and cleanliness. But with 4 cats, 4 birds, 1 teenager, a full-time job, my own physical and emotional issues and a coronavirus pandemic, I can’t always achieve/complete/do everything I want to do.
I have to employ more mindful self compassion, and with the teenager’s help I am growing in this regard. She and I have been discussing the differences in how our brains are wired. This helps me look at my setting from multiple points of view.
My goal, in what used to be Standard American Life, was to workout either at the gym or at home 3-5 times per week and never leave dirty dishes in the sink overnight.
Now, the gyms are closed. I’m eating too much fast food. And my goal is to clean the kitchen every morning— as my energy levels are higher and it reinforces the idea that every day is a clean start.
But I still need to examine my motivations. There’s a flip side to chores.
Today is Sunday. Yesterday, I got up, did a load of laundry and started the dishwasher. I cleaned all the litter boxes— no small chore with four cats, but oh so worth it.
Two kittens and 3-legged Overlord
I did some other odds and ends too but I’ll be darned if I remember them.
And then I attended a business meeting, had coffee with a neighbor, cleaned up after the birds, let the teenager give me a haircut (a rather severe one that doesn’t exactly match the crazy hair I have, but give it two weeks and it will be perfect), split a ginormous, super-sweet cinnamon bun from Cake and Corolla, enjoyed dinner from Dairy Queen, and watched Hell’s Kitchen for the rest of the day.
What yesterday looked like
And I’m not beating myself up over “not doing more.”
But this morning— I got up, washed the pots and pans, unloaded and reloaded the dishwasher, did two loads of laundry and hung them on the line, fed the menagerie, scrubbed them kitchen counter, took out the compost, emptied the garbage, carried the garbage outside, and vacuumed and washed the kitchen floor.
All before 9:30.
And I feel good about the work I got done. Even if I am still worrying about cutting the grass, working out this week’s budget, and dealing with this week’s groceries and work stress. I dread both. I *don’t* want to do the grocery shopping and I never know what will happen at work on Monday.
So I have a delicate balancing act— what can I do to feel good about myself and my house and what can I do to not exhaust myself?
Because you see, I know I also do chores and scrub the bathtub to avoid facing my fears and emotions in the stillness.
Chores let me use the energy of my angst to achieve something positive, but in the end, that’s not always the best approach to my emotional health and physical self.
PS—
Early on in this pandemic I invested in good old fashioned cleaning products: Pine Sol, Ammonia, Fels Naptha, Borax, etc. I opened up the Pine Sol today. Just felt like my neglected floor needed something extra. I got this at the Grocery Outlet and as you can see it’s not traditional Pine Sol. It’s like super floral. “Fresh Scent” by patooty. Someone just exploded a fake floral bomb in my house.
Yes, I know the title is nonsense— but the world has turned a tad upside down as the world tends to do as having billions of people and billions of animals on a planet will erupt into some unexpected situations from time to time.
The teenager loves to eat lemons. I love to cook with lemons. For a while, especially when I first discovered Gaz Oakley the Avant Garde Vegan (Check him out on YouTube—amazing falafel, his own recipe for peri-peri sauce) I always kept fresh lemons in the house.
That was also about the time I would have lemon water first thing in the morning. The juice of half a lemon with tap water.
I did that again this morning. First time in probably a year. Or more.
Today was also the first time in a week I haven’t gained weight. The first month of this pandemic, I was eating better but stopped because… Easter… or so I claim. I am a jelly bean addict and once I start eating the jelly beans I launch onto a sugar and caffeine roller coaster.
This was breakfast. Not ALL of them.
So maybe this post should be called “bad habits.” I originally lost about 5 pounds due to stress in the beginning of the pandemic, but between beer, pizza, Easter candy, homemade cookies and triple jalapeño bacon cheeseburgers from Wendy’s they have found their way back.
But look— I got a salad
It’s been rough. More pressure than ever at work. A good friend walked away coldly without even saying goodbye. A work colleague who often made me smile left unexpectedly. Medical bills still coming in.
But in the end, I still feel inside these struggles help us grow and bring us to the next level— as another work colleague likes to say— we don’t age, we gain experience like in a video game. So I’m less than a month away from my 45th Level with the teenager two months away from Level 16 and a drivers license.
Designated Driver AND babysitter, mom friends out there!!!!
Yesterday was a sunny day amidst a forecast of rain. Last week the teenager did not complete her three weekly gym assignments and she told her teacher in her log that she “got lazy” and he wrote back that sometimes he gets lazy, too. This is a great lesson for our (older) kids in communication and work ethic. Those of you with younger kids, God Bless You and Keep You.
I would be screaming every day if the teenager were, say, six. Our brains are wired too differently.
But back to gym. We got out the tandem bike. (Yes, we have a bicycle built for two— it was a gift.) I wanted the teen to “win” gym this week. And she should get extra credit for captaining a bike with her mom, who has cerebral palsy and no real balance skills.
Tandem biking
Then her dad came over and brought his famous hot buffalo chicken dip for dinner, at the teen’s request, and included beer for us grown-ups. And he even got on the bike! (He doesn’t ride bikes.)
I excused myself to work on some more chapters of Bill’s novel Debauchery (and reached the first sex scene— those characters are so in love it hurts). Please don’t be scared by the violence and BDSM in this novel/series. The real theme here is the beauty of acceptance no matter who you are.
And the first of several pet related packages came. So here is a Petco unboxing and some animal videos:
Everything I have every read about emotional health has very stringent ideas about the bedroom— it is for sleeping and intimacy. No work, no screens, etc.
But this morning at 7 a.m., I decided to try and carve a home office space in my bedroom.
In part, because our 9-year-old cat, Oz, either has urinary crystals again and doesn’t feel well or he’s depressed that we’re all home but never paying attention to him. And he’s jealous of the kittens.
Oz sitting on Misty to steal attention from the teenager
The weather has been 50 degrees and windy, so my brick house is retaining winter cold which makes the dining room table a frigid workspace.
In the beginning, I worked at the dining room table, we ate at the kitchen table and things seemed fine.
But now, the teen took a desk and kitchen chair to her room to do schoolwork and so I’d like to have the dining room table clear to eat.
My room is my sanctuary. Home of the birds. Promised land for the cats. Bright. Sunny. Warm.
I’m going to try it.
Oz is the cat in the first and last photo. Opie is the big cat in the middle. Misty is the kitten. They are all— Fog, too, but she’s unpictured— over me. Let’s hope it’s the newness because otherwise I may have to throw some of them out and close the door.
There is just something about life in these pandemic times that I find uplifting.
Maybe the sense of nowhere to go or a certain carefreeness that reminds me of being on summer vacation as a teen.
Our grocery trips focus on the present more than ever. I normally only grocery shop once every two weeks but find that now I’m going once a week, buying less and rotating stores.
Today I went to a local small independent grocer, Park Avenue Market, where they are known for their amazing sandwiches and in store meats.
I treated the teenager to her first taste of olive loaf from the deli, slab bacon and their own feta spinach sausage patties. I also bought some stew beef and a small steak.
I discovered, in the middle of the store, with my order and my blind friend’s order, that I did not have my wallet. I found myself staring straight at a local cop and wondering where my wallet at fallen out of the back pocket of my jeans.
I told the teen to keep shopping and went home to look for it— it had fallen out of my pocket when I used the toilet before beginning our journey.
After the market, I took Nan her items and took the teen home before heading to Weis. There I got bananas, muffins, some discounted chicken and frozen vegetables. Half off fresh bakery products that weren’t so fresh any more. Milk, eggs, half and half and two six packs— one of Yuengling and one of a raspberry ale with a name I don’t recall.
We got some other items between the two trips: broccoli and cheese whipped into something akin to mashed potatoes, bread, mini shoo fly pies, A-Treat soda and lord knows what else.
Because suddenly life is shorter and the carbohydrates and sweets provide a taste of celebration.
I ate a vat of spaghetti squash when I arrived home and helped my daughter design a marching band show for her music assignment. Her dream has long been to play Cake’s Short Skirt Long Jacket in band. So she was ecstatic when the web sure her teacher posted had the music.
It was hard to unify songs since we didn’t have enough Cake songs to do a Cake theme. She found a lot of Green Day and thought maybe she should do all Green Day. But I couldn’t let her dream die.
She found the theme from Die Another Day— which I believe is Madonna performing in the James Bond film. I didn’t think mixing a movie theme and alternative would work. And her band director has done a Bond show.
Finally I researched early 2000s alternative rock in a Google search and we decided on Nickelback. Green Day’s Basket Case for the Opener, followed by the Cake song, closed by some Nickelback song that I’ve forgotten already.
So the theme would be alternative rock from the era in which these musicians were born.
And here’s Nala, my Goffin’s cockatoo, rocking out to Green Day.
I started today with the debate of whether to blog about Nala, my Goffin’s cockatoo, or my thoughts on what makes a good day or a good weekend, something the teenager seemed insistent upon us having.
But the cats started climbing the parakeet cage, I made the “mistake” of reviewing some news coverage of Donald Trump’s handling of the Coronavirus pandemic, and frankly, I’ve lost my train of thought more times than I can count.
So while I’m still lost in a sea of randomness, watching Mistofelees (my daughter’s formerly feral/stray kitten) decide how to get off the budgie cage without crossing Nala’s path, let me also say I used the hydrating hair mask from last month’s Ipsy Glam bag and my dry curly hair is remarkably not puffy today.
The first time I tried it, I didn’t see any results. This time was very different.
It’s Easter Sunday, but the teenager opened her basket on Good Friday (I’m suddenly realizing how disrespectful that was of traditional Christian culture). Oops.
To see our silliness on that, I have YouTube videos:
I washed her new sheets and hung them on the line yesterday. I helped her make her bed and I hope she had a lovely night of sleep on them. She picked the most colorful ones first.
In the next order of randomness, I think I’m going to make a Buffalo chicken spaghetti squash casserole for Easter dinner.
Now, shall I even expound on my thoughts on the Coronavirus situation. Perhaps briefly.
I think the isolation vs. develop herd immunity arguments both have merit. It’s hard for anyone to know what is “right” in any major situation. What makes a good leader is the depth of response, the logic behind it and how organized the implementation is.
Those who have resources and power will always sacrifice those who have less to maintain their resources and power. It is true of most humanity. Even those will less. Look at the hoopla over toilet paper.
I think this change in how we live and work could have some broad implications. I would like to see, in my Pollyanna nirvana, a world where we all slow down, shop less, and spend more time with our loved ones. But in reality, I think we will see shifts in service delivery (perhaps huge changes in public education), reductions in consumer goods available/continued shortages, and more poverty.
Our civil liberties have changed since 9/11/2001 and they will continue to decrease. The notion of privacy is almost completely dead if not buried. I remember when science fiction warned us we would all be microchipped and have our physical money taken away. Now, the core of our lives are tracked, spied on and connected to a mini-supercomputer we carry with us everywhere we go. We call it a smart phone.
Technology companies are developing identifiers for each of us via our phones to track who may have been exposed to Covid-19 and alert those they with whom they came in contact. This technology will no doubt track us all in other ways in the future but I’m not against it. Because, see previous bullet, in today’s world there is no real privacy boundaries left.
So let’s enjoy this sunny Easter and celebrate life and spring.
With the pandemic looming, and people still struggling in the every day ways, you have to rejoice one moment at a time.
The governor has canceled school for the rest of the school year as of today so for the next seven weeks the teenager will be completing her sophomore year at home.
For dinner I did something decadent— I made thick cut black pepper bacon and cooked cabbage in the bacon grease. I piled the bacon, cabbage and some extra sharp New York cheddar onto a bagel.
And the teenager spent some time today recreating her mother on the Sims. Here I am:
And thanks to a college friend getting a vibrage wringer washer for her birthday I actually spent some time today watching YouTube videos of men doing laundry on washing machines more than 50 years old. The teenager found that amusing. And so dreadfully boring of me. I subscribed to this appliance man’s channel. I love this 1952 Frigidaire with the antique box of Tide.
After all, this washing machine is older than my mother. Give it a watch. Go on.
