Hello lovelies.
This is the first year Z’s really been excited about Halloween, and we are rocking it hard core. She wanted to decorate, so we put a few tombstones in the vegetable garden and have been creating “mosaics” with bats and witches and other spooky things to hang indoors. In related news, I am now the proud owner of an adult sized unicorn onesie, complete with wings and tail.
Continue reading “The (belated) Sunday Review: Unicorn Onesie Edition”
Hello lovelies.
I’m in New York this week. I thought about flying out on Friday so that I could catch Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer in the Coney Island Mermaid Parade, but decided that, more than anything, I needed a kid-free, work-free day to rest and recharge. By which, of course, I mean fold the 4 baskets of laundry, clear out the dishes in the sink, prep the fridge for a week away from home, and clean up all the clutter left by Hurricane Z.
Hello, lovelies.
It was a rough winter; I didn’t realize how much of a hermit I’d turned into until the weather got nice and I started spending most of my day outside again. I’m going to try to make the weekly roundup a thing again, although I’ve said that before! Let me know in the comments or with the like button if you’re enjoying these, as that’s prime motivation to keep it happening.
1. Flight of whimsy. I bought a plane ticket to go to Hong Kong in September. By myself. For a week. This terrifies me, because it’s adventurous, impractical, and falls solidly in the “things I don’t do” category.
2. #metoo Amanda Palmer and Jasmine Power dropped a new song, Mr. Weinstein Will See You Now. It didn’t hit me nearly as hard as I thought it would, and I’m ok with that.
3. Black is the new green. After six months of feeling guilty every time I put vegetable peels and leftover food in the trash, I bought a compost tumbler. The last one took me six weeks to put together, this one took three hours. Now on my wishlist for the holidays: a proper cordless drill.
4. Not a box. Z has been asking me to take her rock climbing for months. I got the gear during the big REI sale, then went to the gym and took the “intro class” so I could belay her. When I took her a few days later, she went straight for the bouldering section and proceeded to climb up and down the “ladder” for an hour. It felt eerily like spending lots of money on a birthday gift that your child ignores in favor of the box.
5. One of the trees in the back turned out to be a plum tree, and they are thisclose to ripe. Who’s got plum recipes?
Links and Things
This article solidifies my cynicism around donating money to political campaigns: What Happened to Jill Stein’s Recount Millions. As someone who donated a measly $5, I’d like an answer.
I learned to take photos on my dad’s old Canon, which just sold its last film camera. I still miss the magic of immersing the photo paper in the developer and watching the picture appear (less so wrangling the film into the spool in the dark).
A tongue-in-cheek and a more useful guide to indoor plants.
I did what everyone’s saying you should do and read (ok, skimmed) the most recent “we’ve updated our privacy policy” email I received and what do you know, it had two helpful links for opting out of online ads.
1. Avon 39 reflections. There’s a lot I could write about: all the people on the route who cheered us on, including the San Jose bike cops and a local motorcycle club; the fact that I could barely walk on Monday; the incredible rush of finishing and seeing D and M right at the line waiting for us. But what I want to leave you with is this: In among all the cheering, sandwiched between the tutus and the rhinestones and the boobie jokes, was real, unadulterated loss. People walked with pictures, with names, with messages for their dead. We met a woman and her stepdaughter at breakfast. “Her mother died of breast cancer,” the stepmother said. “We’re doing this for her.”
2. 5 years and counting. Let’s face it, marriage is hard. It’s learning to live with all of your spouse’s tics and all of your own. It’s compromise, endless compromise, long after you’ve given in to all the things you said you wouldn’t do. And it is glorious. It’s that smile you share in the morning, when you know all is right with the world because you’ve woken up next to each other. It’s the way your pace changes when you walk next to each other, so that your strides are exactly the same length. It’s striving, constantly, to be a better wife, a better husband, a better parent, a better person. Marriage is change, and it is growth, and it is a celebration of the little victories, day after day.
3. Shut up and write. I made my way to a writing group on Sunday, after a series of messages with a fellow writer that culminated in the realization that the only way I’ll ever have time to write is if I take it. So I did, and got almost 3,000 words down in an hour and a half. Good words. I think I’m setting myself up to fail if I try to make it every week, but once a month would be a good thing.
4. How we speak. I grew up in the era of the phone call, of the enviable coolness of the kids who had their own phone line, of paying the long distance bill for spending hours talking to my friends who lived on the other side of the state. I thought nothing of calling someone just to say hey, while scrupulously observing the 10 am to 10 pm rule. These days? I don’t call unless I have something important to say. I’ll text at all hours of the night, confident that if whomever I’m messaging is asleep, they’ve put their phone on silent. Conversations can take hours or days, snatched in between folding laundry and doing dishes. It changes the way we speak, the way we think about speaking. We are always on, always available – and rarely present.
5. Grace. I’ve moved around too much to have a giant group of friends. Instead, I’ve held onto a few people from each place I’ve lived. The kind of friends I can go without talking to for years, and then fall right back into where we were the next time we see each other. This has been a rough year, with lots of soul searching and self doubt and wondering if I’ve made the right decisions. And just when I needed it, one of those friends came back into my life and said exactly what I needed to hear.
1. Avon 39 update. You guys ROCK! A and I have both hit our fundraising goals for the Avon 39 walk, thanks to the generosity of our friends and families. There’s still time to donate, if you are so inclined, and every dollar we raise helps fund medical care for low income women, treatment for patients, and research to stop breast cancer. Our team page is here, but you’ll need to go to either my page or Adam’s to donate (no more team donations this close to the walk).
2. Farmer’s Market fundraising. A and I signed up to do a fundraising table at the Benicia Farmer’s Market for the month leading up to the Avon Walk. I did the first week, two weeks ago, and had a really incredible time. About ten women came up to me during the afternoon to tell me that they were survivors or were currently undergoing treatment. We chatted for a bit, about why I was walking (to support a very dear friend), and about how different treatment is now, and about the importance of love and prayer and hope. Many of them wrote their names on our support board. I also had two older men come up to me, one of whom lost his mother in the 1950’s, when he was sixteen. He told me there wasn’t anything they could do for her but cut away the disease and give her morphine for the pain. I think perhaps he had not thought about her for a long time. His hand shook as he wrote her name and he pinned it to the “memory” section, but he thanked me as he walked away.
A took the first shift at this week’s market, and his experience could not have been more different. For two and a half hours, nobody was willing to make eye contact with him, let alone talk to him – not even a woman with a chemo port.
It was a stark reminder that sexism works both ways. That we are just as harsh, if not harsher, to the man who steps out of his gender role. That we have a long, long way to go.
3. The gift that keeps on giving. The Mabacle is mostly in pieces in the Silence of the Lambs room downstairs, although the body is still on the street. A’s selling off anything not absolutely necessary to making the car go – seats, a/c system, door trim, headlights – with the goal of making her into a little race car. So far, I think he’s found about $8 in change under the seats and floor mats alone, and gotten another $300 or so from parting it out on Craigslist. If it pays for its own roll cage and the other safety equipment, we might have to stop calling it the Mabacle.
4. Happily ever after. My cousin S got married last weekend, up in Hood River, Oregon. It was breathtakingly gorgeous, the kind of scenery that I would almost-but-not-quite move away from the Bay for. I always forget just how many cousins there are on my mom’s side, and, as always with these kinds of things, I met a few new cousins I haven’t seen before but would like to get to know better. The highlight of the weekend (aside from Z’s first trip down the aisle as a flower girl) was my cousin J’s toast to her sister. As much as I love my brother’s, I still wish a little bit that I’d had a big sister as bold and brave and mischievous as my cousins!
5. On writing with family. Back in January, I told myself that writing is writing is writing, and it didn’t matter if I blogged or noveled or short storied, with the thought that words would beget more words. In one sense this is true. The more I write, the easier and more quickly the words come when I sit down. In another sense, this is a lie. I have a finite space for writing – between 6 and 7 am most days. It is the only time that I have when I am not “on duty” as a mom or an employee or a wife – and even that space is intruded into when there are early morning phone calls or when Z refuses to stay in bed. So if you’re reading and enjoying these, let me know by leaving a comment or a share or a like.