Updates and Unique Unicorns [RANT]

Playdates and lack of sleep have thrown off the summer schedule but we are muddling through. Well, I am muddling through. Everyone else seems determined to consciously create chaos wherever we may be. 

My oldest child has a friend who has a pool, so both kids want to go over there every day. My new friend (the mother of my child’s friend) says we are welcome to pop over everyday. I am not sure she realizes what such an invitation brings. I think I have to let people enjoy my uniqueness in doses, so I will not take advantage of her kindness.

Aside from that, even with just two fabulous playdates this week, my house feels neglected. The piles get bigger and not in a good way. For instance, they are not huge piles of money that make me dream of being like Scrooge McDuck and swimming in my money. Instead, I soak my hands in soapy water and try to knock back funny smells by giving my new washer a workout. 

I got behind on my writing goals. Since I posted a poem and then realized I did a horrible job editing it last week, I need to get ahead of this goal and not behind it. I also owe my potential substack readers one more post of actual prose since I am planning to make most of the content there only available to paid subscribers in July.

No, I will not be offended if you subscribe to my substack as my birthday gift. I might be sad if you never read my posts or give me feedback though. Not sure why I am so needy about these things. It is good to know that what you create brings joy in to the world.

Why else would I keep subjecting people to cake, brownies, cookies, muffins, and other treats? It isn’t because I make too much for one. Or because my freezer is overflowing with goodies. Well, maybe a little.

That doesn’t stop me from popping out for an ice cream date with a friend. Sometimes, you need to step away from everything you need to do and relax. Tonight, our waitress seemed surprised that I ordered the Cookie Monster ice cream. She warned me that it was VERY blue and would stain my lips and teeth. I reassured her that I did want it and I do know how to use a toothbrush. She seemed satisfied.

After I had a chance to partake of some of my treat, she came back to check on us. I beamed at her and asked if I looked like a Smurf yet. She responded in the affirmative and wandered off again. The evening culminated with her commenting that no one had ever finished the blue menace before. I wonder what her response would have been if I licked up the dribbles from the side of the glass. I always amaze people when I eat ice cream. Want to know what I mean? You can buy my ice cream and find out…

Clearly, I know how to party like it is summer!!!

Bonding, Balancing, and Brainstorming [RANT]

Another week has come and gone. Summer is truly upon us. Lovers of heat and barbecues and being seasonal mermaids rejoice. Polar bears contemplate diving into the neighbors’ pool, preferably with permission and the payment of an acceptable treat. Small children want to run through sprinklers and mud and track it through the house as a memento for their mama despite the horror evident on her face at this action.

Then the rain rolls in. And it always chooses to do this when we are at Nana’s house. So Nana is sad that no one gets in the pool. And the kids just watch other people play computer games on television. That pretty much sums up the first half of my week. That and eating out and dutifully eating brownies that were purchased from Costco for a party of twenty when only four guests were expected. So if you see me and wonder if you are seeing more of me, signs point to yes.

It doesn’t help that I am an accommodating creature. As a guest in someone’s home, I try to fade into the furniture unless I can be helpful. But if my help just gets me told how I am doing everything, including breathing, incorrectly, I wrap up in my cloak of invisibility and keep quiet watch over my tiny clones while catching up on music I want to peruse and my to be read pile. These are a few artists that spoke to me this week:

Lisa Marie Presley: Yes, that Lisa Marie. Her music is kind of gritty. I want to hug her daughters because I know they miss her.

Wolfgang Van Halen: I was on a kick for the babies of famous singers and actresses. That doesn’t mean their music doesn’t have merit of its own.

Brigitte Calls Me Baby: Their music makes me think of the 80s and I enjoyed the 80s. Though some of the music now traumatizes me as my brain keeps telling me what those lyrics really mean.

The Heavy Heavy: Not sure if they give me nostalgia for the 60s or the 70s, but I dig their music. Plus that one band member looks familiar. Odd.

Red Wanting Blue: Southern rock speaks to me for some reasons. Might figure out why at the end of this post.

J J Heller: She posts light-hearted and worship music that soothes me.

I have returned home, where my obsession’s center around finding balance in not just my own life but hopefully the lives of the three blue-eyed cuties who live with me.  I have small children, so I am trying to keep them on a schedule over the summer, so life doesn’t devolve into the chaos. The first week went well. The second week occurred in someone else’s space, so we were schedule free and stayed up late and ran wild. We are trying to get back into the groove of things, but yesterday was exhausting. Today looks like it wants to follow suit.

I shall find my balance. Or I shall vent about it to myself, since I feel like the only person reading my new substack, but I plan to keep posting there. And those who have enjoyed my rantings and writings for years can feel free to get a paid subscription and say it doubles as my birthday and Christmas present for this year. I still need to decide on a reasonable rate since I am currently only promising four to five pieces a month. We’ll see how feisty my muse gets if I receive some appreciative feedback, shall we?

~~~

Help me brainstorm by offering your input on the following questions. Please!

1. How much would you be willing to pay to read four to five pieces of my writing a month?

2. What creeps you out?

3. What brightens your day?

If you don’t want to share with the rest of my readers, message me somewhere. I have a feeling you got here from Facebook, so say “hello, weirdo” and then answer my questions. Thanks in advance!

~~

And your excuse to eat cake today:

Happy Birthday, West Virginia!

The best went west in 1863!

Here’s to another 162 years of being wild and wonderful! 

Burdens and New Projects [RANT]

As my readers know, I am never short on things to obsess over. Even if it doesn’t happen to be Friday the 13th and I didn’t find a shirt with cats dressed as ghosts to wear in celebration, my life always has a certain bustle to it.

All my mom friends are nodding in understanding right now, particularly those who don’t homeschool their kids. Who doesn’t appreciate teachers more when we find ourselves as the sole providers of entertainment, direction, food, and education all day every day for three months? My daughters benefit from a consistent schedule, so I worked one out in my head. Then I wrote it down on paper. Then I posted it on a dry erase board, so they know what my expectations are? We are on day five of this fun experiment. 

They haven’t fought me as much as I thought they would. I think this is because I give them a whole hour to play outside (if the weather permits) in the morning and then give them ample free time in the afternoon for watching movies and playing. I also outsourced science and social studies to the television because mama needs some time to clean and cook. (No matter how often my husband extols the virtues of our kitchen fairies, the only person I ever see tidying up in there is me and occasionally him putting a dish in the dishwasher with enough enthusiasm to make me feel I should throw a parade.) 

They have, however, started yelling at me if we end or start an activity a minute before or after the posted time. This has made me aware that all of our clocks are on the exact same time. They also get easily off task when daddy pops down for a snack. How dare he be so irresistible?

The Bananarama song “Cruel, Cruel Summer” has been ear worming me this morning. June is determined to make me sad. I was wasting time on Facebook when I should have been sleeping and saw an obituary for a friend of mine. This friend is a decade younger than me and seemed to be getting her life back on track after it got derailed by a divorce. She was reclaiming her life in record time, too, and her resilience is one of the reasons so many loved her. I have seen clickbait posts like this before, so I just closed Facebook and decided to hope for the best until morning.

Morning revealed, that this particular light had indeed gone out. I wasn’t as close to this amazing woman as I would have liked, but her posts tended to bring joy and hope to my life. She was always helping people, bragging about her adorable kids and pups, and sharing her latest ventures. She also shared stories about overcoming a troubled past. Honestly, I hope she knows she is amazing. I hope people don’t forget her stories and that others still find hope in how she overcame addiction.

I know her sister and mother and admire them as well. Along with other her siblings and friends who equate to family, she left three adorable kids behind. I hope they know they will see her again. I hope they know she wishes she would still hold them close and wipe away their tears.

Obviously, I have been trying not to be blubbery and sad this week. I mostly succeeded though I attended a memorial at an ice cream shop the other day and found myself fighting a lump in my throat. Unfortunately, bedtime arrived before the moment of silence, so I didn’t get to participate with others in a moment of silence. That might have been for the best. I would have probably melted myself with tears if I had been able to participate.

Then, this morning, I returned from my walk, which featured a podcast about burdens and how we can carry them better when yoked to someone else, specifically Jesus the Christ, to find out a dear friend had passed. She started out as my boss, but I couldn’t help but think of her as a friend. Her number one rule was “don’t hurt yourself”. She clearly understood the silliness of college students when motivated too carry heavy boxes and huge piles of books around the library.

In more recent years, she has brightened my feed with posts about helping others and her cats. Imagine how much her efforts brightened the lives of others. She supported causes to help assure healthy food for people throughout her community and, of course, the protection of animals. Clearly, she and I are kindred spirits. I just wish we could have shared tomato soup, Chinese food, and French fries a few more times in this life.

Send some positive energy out into the universe for the loved ones of my two friends and make sure you hug your loved ones and appreciate them in the moments we have.

In other news, it looks like this particular page might be more rants than fiction. I’ve moved my fiction to substack, where I intend to start paid subscriptions after I figure out how much would be reasonable to charge for approximately four posts a month. I can’t promise more than that until I shape up and motivate myself better. Think monetary appreciation will do it?

Contemplation [POETRY] + [RANT]

 

Come to me

Let this be

Our moment of sun

Say you’re the one

Whose belief

Offers relief

And catch this

Chaste kiss

Before the fall

That takes all

Before the rise

Phoenix eyes

Feathers aflame

To lay claim

To my name

~~~

So I have been contemplating substack. I have a couple of friends who are already using it to share their work Would that motivate me to follow my own self-appointed deadline of worthwhile content? Would my friends still want to read my ramblings if there was a small fee associated?

If so what would be my focus?

Poetry

Faith

Food

Short stories

I feel like these rants would still reside here . No one wants to miss out on what is on my mind, right? Especially, the other moms who don’t realize how much they did each day until they are lying in bed exhausted and wondering why this hurts and that aches.

This week, I have been procrastinating writing to conquer laundry mountain. My washing machine gave up the spin cycle around Memorial Day and its replacement arrived on Wednesday. Four people plus no washer equals hugs piles of clothes. My new washer is definitely getting a workout this week.

But I have conquered enough that I sat down to update dear readers. Of course, I listened to a talk on charity this morning and decided to mow the front lawn, so my husband has that much less to do. Will he appreciate it? Or take it as his due?

My summer procrastination centers around today being the last day of school for my two lovely clones. I caught up with a few friends over the past couple of weeks because my focus this summer will be trying to keep my babies active and engaged. So wish me luck because it is going to be a fight to convince them we aren’t watching television all summer. No matter how much we want to watch every episode of every 80s cartoon…

Life’s a Party: Part 2 [RANT]

One of the many roles I take on as a mom is party planner. My youngest decided to make her arrival at the beginning of May, so sometimes her birthday falls on Mother’s Day. Not this year, but I already had a commitment on the Saturday closest to her birthday, so I got to plan multiple celebrations.

Technically, her first party was at Nana’s. This preceded me falling down the well of microfilm of obsession and was planned by Nana. My duties for event centered around releasing new friends from packaging as fast as presents could be unwrapped and consolidating Christmas, Easter, and birthday gifts, so we left behind as little as possible. We succeeded to the point that no meltdowns resulted.  I think I was also expected to eat a quarter of a sheet cake in a twenty-four hour period, but I did not accept that challenge.

So the first celebration that required my attention was a treat to be shared with friends. Some parents send in little gift bags, but I am a major slacker and skipped that stress. I decided to send in Tastycake Krimpets. The kids love them. We are close to Philadelphia. Perfect, right?

Nope. As I walked my daughter home from the bus stop, which happens to be on a busy road with cars zipping by and revving their engines as they blow past buses with their stop sign out, she informed me that I didn’t send in enough treats. I strained to hear her explanation until it finally made sense.

I sent in twenty-four cakes for a class of eighteen. They happened to be twin packs, which I have sent in before. It just means the teacher has to separate them and give each child one krimpet not a two pack. But there was a sub. And the sub didn’t do math. And the sub told my daughter to start passing out packages of cakes. Luckily, it sounds like the first graders figured it out and shared, but I still got whined at all the way home. And I am a mama who doesn’t like my child to be upset or disappointed if I can help it. There are enough disappointments in life that I can do nothing about.

Part of the reason I didn’t load all the kids up on sugar is that this was my daughter’s actual birthday. I knew that she would be having cake at home with just the family. We did place a video call so her aunt and nana could watch her open gifts. She seemed excited about all of my carefully selected offerings. Dad got credit. Nana commented on how much stuff we bought her though it was significantly less than the birthday gifts she got at her first event. Then we sang and let her have her tiny cake from Nothing Bundt Cakes that I made look like Hello Kitty. Then, she played with her toys and insisted that all of them needed to join the hoard already overflowing her bed. Happy Baby! Happy Mama! Goal Achieved.

Now, I needed to focus on her actual party with friends not just people who share her genetics. At this point, none of the seventeen kids from her class had responded to the invitations I sent in. Thankfully, I bravely invited some other friends, so I knew at least four other kids could make it. This meant squeezing them into our house, the three usable rooms between me not wanting to tidy the upstairs and the basement still needing remediation from a flood in December.

I spent the next week monitoring the weather and tidying and re-tidying my house because rain and the threat of rain made it impossible to prep or plan for an outdoor party. Saturday ended up being a sunny day, but our backyard was still wet and overgrown, so we squeezed into the house. I dubbed it a success. Confetti cake was enjoyed. Gifts were opened and appreciated Even the adults seemed to have fun.

Of course, my tasks didn’t end there. I needed to tidy again. And someday, I need to find more room for all of the goodies Thing 2 got before Thing 1 has a birthday. 

And why didn’t I post? I got asked to give a talk at church last Sunday, so I got sidetracked by that. (Would you like me to post that for your perusal?)

Then Memorial Day wanted celebrated. I joined friends from church for breakfast in the park. I made some apple cider donuts. Boiling down the cider to make it more concentrated took more time than shaping the donuts.

We also had friends over for dinner, so I decided to make four desserts. I get excited when other people who eat a variety of foods show up. One of the desserts was brownies, so everyone could be happy. I made a yummy blueberry cobbler and save a couple of donut holes for sharing. I also made lemon strawberry pie, which didn’t set well, but I had ice cream because it goes with every dessert I chose, so it became a topping.

I may still be cleaning up from that  event by eating the few stray brownies.

So life is a party and I am the planner.

And it is not a small task.

Life’s A Party: Part 1 [RANT]

I hinted at the tale of my nerdy obsession with microfilm, so I shall try update interested readers on that particular endeavor.

First, you need to know that my church is about twenty minutes from my house on a good day. Second, you need to know that I kept finding construction workers turning a short street into a one way road. This also blocked my view of people turning the corner. So the real excitement involved getting there.

Third, a lot of people are afraid or disinterested in microfilm. Some of them seem to think they will instantly age or be attacked by spies if they think about this form of data storage for very long. Some people still want to access information this way. Not everything has made its way to the internet yet. And this nerd would argue that this is the ultimate backup. 

Anyway, since the scanner connects to a computer, I sought help from the church’s tech support team. I explained the scanner works but to get better quality images, it needs to be able to communicate with an ancient computer which was fabricated around 2016. We quickly discovered that it wasn’t connecting to the computer. She suggested an adapter cord. I placed an order on Amazon, and it arrived the next day.

I rushed down to connect with the new cord. This led me to two realizations. First, whoever got my beloved scanner working before hadn’t seated the card correctly in the tower. Probably because it came from an even older computer. When I disconnected the scanner, the card tried to come with it. I have trouble wearing watches because even a good one stops working after two weeks of contact with my magnetic personality, so I make it a general rule not to muck around with hardware. But we had a work around involving converting it to USB, so the computer was safe from my tinkering. 

Then my second realization hit. It had the wrong port to connect to the machine. So I took some pictures to guarantee success and started terrifying local nerds, geeks, and wannabes with my SCSI (usually pronounced scussy) needs. I feel nerdy hearts jumping with joy out there.

In two stores and one tech shop, however, I saw eyes widen with fear and confusion cloud friendly faces. I can just imagine the thoughts filling their minds.

“This woman wants what?”

“Does she know what she is asking?”

“Microfilm? No!”

Of course, that didn’t deter me. I rambled to a few friends, scoured the internet, and checked in with my geek guru. The common consensus came back as “what you want does not exist” and “no one uses microfilm anymore.”

But a friend of mine relayed my quest to her geeky husband and he volunteered to come reseat the SCSI card for me. So back we journeyed to the nice peaceful church. He attached the card more securely. I kept my magnetism out of the way. Then I waited for my tech support call, only to find out that our wires got crossed and she wasn’t available that day.

Back in the holding pattern, I began obsessing over the kind of party most people can get into: one involving cake. I will tell that story in my next post as I am hoping to post this one today. It is already four days late, and I need to stop slacking.

When tech support and I reconnected, we realized that getting drivers for my dear microfilm scanner required jumping through more hoops than us old souls had energy for. The scanner works to read microfilm, but our dear patrons will have to take a picture of its lovely screen to document their findings. So it was a wild journey, but it didn’t have quite the conclusion I wanted.

Still a good excuse to have a piece of pie in celebration though, right?

The Day Approaches [RANT]

Many years ago, in a small town known as Grafton, West Virginia, a little girl loved her mother very much. As she grew into womanhood, her love for her mother deepened. People celebrated Columbus for discovering America and  Saint Patrick for driving the snakes out of Ireland. Why wasn’t there a day to celebrate mom’s?

Thanks to Anna Jarvis, the second Sunday in May offers us reflection on the everyday superheroes who go by such names as Mom, Mama, Mother, Maman, Madre, and to some confused youth: Bruh. 

Even mothers who seem unworthy of the name find their children thinking of them on this of all days. I have seen a daughter excited to spend all her meager savings for a mother who couldn’t bother to see her kids when their residences were less than a half mile apart. I’ve seen a mother insult her adult child, only to have said child come running the moment she was needed.

There is a bond between mother’s and their children. It grows stronger when the mother cares for and nurtures her young. So we should celebrate mothers and the millions of little ways they say, “I love you?”

Has your mother ever:

Kissed your injured knee

Or held your hand when you were nervous

Or hummed or sung you to sleep

Has she ever made you breakfast

Or remembered your favorite treat

Or baked you a cake

Or told you about where you came from 

Or cleaned up after you

Or offered you advice

Or listened when you went on endlessly about your favorite thing

Or made sure you had at least one present under the tree

Do you know that she probably:

Prayed for you every day

Worried about the world you are born into 

Gave up something she wanted for something you wanted

Felt like she could never do enough for you

We are lucky to have mothers. And, of course, the wise ones know that they are lucky to have children. And we are lucky to have our aunties and friends and peers who help to nurture us in our own way.

So even if you can’t make it to a little church in a little town, make time to be grateful that one woman chose to give you life and that she or another woman raised you and cared for you. And if you weren’t fortunate enough to have the that second part, my heart goes out to you.