Actual Unretouched Photo

Friday afternoon, the kids and I flew to Houston to meet up with my husband and visit his family.  We celebrated an early Thanksgiving with his extended family.  My daughter spent her entire time in Texas running around with second cousins she never knew she had–literally running in the yard–and playing football (I heard she caught a pass and made a touchdown) and jumping on a trampoline.  She completely forgot that she  meant to be afraid of running into a rattlesnake.  (Her grandpa informed me that she was never in danger of running into a rattlesnake since rattlesnakes are mostly in west Texas . . . then he said something about copperheads and I thought to myself, “la la la, I can’t hear you . . . .”)

My boys hung out with distant cousins, playing guitars and joking around.

I helped out in the kitchen and chatted with various womenfolk.

So, we arrived in Texas at 10 p.m. on Friday night.
Did the whole Thanksgiving dinner with extended family on Saturday.
Flew home on Sunday afternoon.

We left Texan temperatures in the seventies, maybe eighties . . . and returned to Seattle where snow had fallen.  Fortunately, the hour drive home was uneventful.  Snow had fallen earlier in the day but the roads were only wet, not frozen.  We were home by 7:30 p.m.

Today, school’s began on time but the early-morning phone call from the district told us that the kids would only attend for half the day.  The roads were a little snowy at 9 a.m. when I drove my daughter to school.  An hour later, as I drove to the dentist, I realized how much worse things had gotten.  Heavy snow was falling.

While sitting in the dental chair, we watched a truck get stuck going uphill.  Not a good sign.

Scary.

But after I finished having my gums poked with sharp metal instruments and my teeth scraped, I bravely climbed into my mini-van and sped up the hills with determination and enough speed to carry me up hill.  I returned home without sliding off the road.

Tonight, as I watched the news coverage of the nightmarish road conditions, I became so thankful our drive home on the freeway last night was so carefree.

Tonight, cars stood on that very same stretch of road for hours in the dark, stranded on the streets of pure ice.  Semi-trucks were jack-knifed, a car caught on fire and a city bus in Tacoma careened out of control and hit a building, ending up rolled over on its side.

I’m so happy to be in my warm home, so grateful that our electricity is still on.  The winds are blowing hard tonight and the temperatures have dropped into the teens.  The high temperature tomorrow is predicted to reach 28 degrees.

Now if I could just recover from the exhaustion of spending nine hours in an airplane and five hours in airports, I’d be all set.

Our weekend promises to be very busy.  In fact, so busy that we’re going to start it tomorrow instead of Saturday.

I’ll tell you all about it after it’s over.

My friend, Mary, of Owlhaven, posted something that really resonated with me.  Maybe you’ll find it encouraging, too.

Today, I refrained from crawling back under the covers and instead, went to Macy’s.  They were having their One-Day Sale, which they have pretty much every other week, but I was lured by the idea of bargains and boots.  I did not find boots, but I found bargains.  Just in case you were wondering.

Tomorrow, I need to resist the urge to crawl back under the covers because I have a small load of stuff to drop off at Value Village.  Then I plan to deliver a shelf-thing to a friend who has agreed to accept it.  I just have too much stuff and a really busy weekend planned.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, an American Girl catalog came in the mail and instead of throwing it away as I have every other time it appeared, I offered to 8-year old Grace.  She spent the rest of  the afternoon and the entire evening studying the pages, marking up the most important things with check marks and circles and noting on other things, “whatever you think.”  Once she saw the Bitty Babies, she decided she’d rather have one of those instead of an American Girl doll.  She loves, loves, loves babies, just as I did at her age.

Tonight, I ordered a toilet and a kitchen sink.

Tomorrow, my three boys are getting haircuts.  Trims, really.  They are all long-haired and not parent-approved.

I really need to make dental appointments and an eye-doctor appointment.  Maybe I will remember to do so tomorrow.

The forecast calls for possible snow.

The skies are dark by 5 p.m.

Thanksgiving is next week.  NEXT WEEK!

That is all.

You would not believe the wreckage that is my family room.

This happened, apparently, while I was busy removing all the magnets from my refrigerator and cleaning out my junk drawer and delivering boxes to the storage unit.

Also?  If this feeling in my head is another cold, I will be so mad because Friday I am flying to Texas with my children to visit my in-laws (and my husband who is flying in to meet us).

That is all.

So, I’m working tonight and my twelve-year old come rushing past, muttering something about the toilet overflowing.  “I need towels!”

I said, “Wait.  The toilet is overflowing?  What does that mean?  The water is still rising?  Or . . . ?”

“The water is rising!” he said rather frantically.

I ran upstairs to find water flowing over the toilet bowl.  I splashed across the floor–vinyl now, rather than carpet–and plunged the toilet until the water stopped gushing.

My son appeared with pool towels and every bath towel in the house and I threw the towels into the puddle, the pond, the lake that had formed in the bathroom.

So.  That was fun.

At least the ceiling hasn’t yet been fixed from the last time we had a catastrophic water emergency.

I’ve lost my stickiness.

I’m like a sticker that has been stuck on and pulled off and then covered with lint.  No longer sticky.

*

I feel so unmoored, so disconnected from anything solid.

What is disheartening is that as I’m drifting to the horizon, no one seems to notice that I’m floating away.

*

In other news, today I assembled a desk, yelled at my kids, ate more than one candy bar, took a nap, worked eight hours, and considered crying but found I didn’t have the energy to do so.

Tomorrow is another day.

I have an old piano with an old decrepit bench.  The fabric had worn away and the children had picked at the deteriorating foam cushion and finally I had enough.

A few days ago I bought a slab of foam at Fred Meyer.

Today I bought a length of fabric at Value Village.

Tonight, I pried old staples and fabric from the wood.  I glued the foam on the board, then stapled on an old towel.  I topped that with the new fabric and then spent some time puzzling over the empty staple gun, retrieving more staples and then wondering why I couldn’t get the staples to discharge from the staple gun.  I did not curse or stab myself with a screwdriver or drive a staple into my eyeball.

Eventually, I prevailed.

I stapled the fabric on the board and finished the whole thing with the backing fabric.

So it looks better.

I also filled some half-filled paint cans with kitty litter so I can dispose of them.

I know!  You wish your life were this full of excitement!

The end.

I wondered this afternoon if I will ever do anything again besides pack and clean, sort and purge, organize and rearrange.

I also thought how strange it is to live in limbo.  I feel myself withdrawing emotionally from my community and I’m not sure what to do about that.  I have no energy to care very much about it because I’m too busy deciding what can be donated to Value Village and what needs to be packed into a box.

I did manage today to finally move the extra moving boxes into the storage room so my living room looks more like a living room and less like a U-Haul truck.

That makes up for yesterday which felt like one-hundred percent work and yielded paltry results.  I was at the soccer field at 8:20 a.m. and the streetlights were still on.  My daughter’s team lost badly.

We went home and I went straight back to bed which was kind of awesome.  My toes thawed by the time I got up again.  A family friend took my two youngest kids to a movie, so while they were gone I ran some errands.  When we were all home again, I had to leave to pick up my teenagers.

Anyway, so the weekend’s over.

I wish we could get an extra hour of sleep every night.

I feel so accomplished today.  Not only did I drop off a sturdy metal filing cabinet and a cheap wooden microwave stand at Value Village, but I also located a place willing to take my old dead computer and gigantic monitor.

I researched the issue online and found this particular computer shop that recycles old computers and monitors and had to laugh at the extremely geeky and young employees.  They were a sitcom stereotype of the kind of smart twentysomething nerds who understand the inner workings of computers.  And I do mean that in the nicest way possible.

Anyway, I was happy to fork over $17 to be rid of the electronics.  Some Facebook friends informed me that there are easier and free (!) ways to unburden yourself of dead computers and monitors, but who knew?  I didn’t find any other way while consulting Google.  I was very close to just tucking them into my trash can and covering them with kitchen garbage to fool the trashman, so I felt quite responsible disposing of them properly.

Then I managed a quick trip to Target before I returned home at noon to work.

I worked until five–with a quick interruption to drive the neighbor girl to her volleyball practice and to pick up my own daughter from school.  The rain began as I ventured out at 3:30 p.m.  Great.  Because that is exactly what we need for Saturday morning’s soccer game.

A little after five, I drove my teens to meet their friend and his mom.  They are spending the night at their friend’s house.   So it’s quiet and no one will be eating a snack at 2:00 a.m.

I’m living a life crammed full with tedium.

In seven hours and twelve minutes, I need to be showered and dressed for rain and ready to leave the house for Grace’s soccer game.  She has team pictures first and we have to arrive by 8:20 a.m., which is a crime, if you ask me.

But no one asked me.