Trying to blog more lately, which might be a fool’s errand if nobody is reading my writing anyway.

So it’s for myself. Hey, look, a blog! written by me! how lame.

Punctuation, spelling, feh! who needs it?!

I am  just watching my sanity go away a little at a time. I don’t mind that much. I mean, what is sanity anyway? If I do a good job at my work, and take good care of my kids and treat other people well, then I am sane.

And it doesn’t matter how I feel inside. Behavior is the king of all things, right?

I am behaving nicely.  i can haz cooky?

I’m just totally going to go out on a limb here and discuss the weather.

No, not really.

I’m going to talk about LOSS.

My laptop died and I miss it.

A bunch of kids transfered out of our school to different ones and I miss them.

I think I lost my mind, and I miss it a little bit, but I’m learning to basically get along without it.

I got an email recently from my dad’s wife. He’s remarried, for the second time since he and my mom divorced many years ago. I never felt like he really had anything super special with his current wife, but he’s the kind of guy who kind of needs a woman, so there you have it. I’m glad he’s not alone.

Anyway, she emailed me, along with a bunch of other relatives, to let us know that the family house (ie, my inheritance, though that makes it sound a lot more glamorous) will be rented out to a tenant starting this fall and that she and my dad are moving to Florida. This seemed rather sudden and made me uneasy.

Actually it’s not that sudden since they’ve been snow birds for several years now. They have a cute little double wide in a 55+ community in Fort Myers, Florida. I visited there several times. It’s quite beautiful there and I can understand why as they get older they might not want to keep making the trek each year.

I am sad about seeing our family house rented to strangers, though it’s probably the most practical thing to do.  I feel guilty that I hadn’t visited the family home this year at all. I am sentimental about a place that I haven’t even visited this year.

Five years, or more, it’s been since Dad had major life-or-death surgery for colon and kidney cancer.  He has been through hell with this stuff.  I think he is surprised as hell to still be alive. I keep thinking I’m not doing enough and he’s going to die and then that will be that.

I should really visit him this month, before he heads south permanently.

It’s the start of October and I’m here to tell about how our Back to School routines are working for us.

During our summer vacation, D and I sat down (actually we were in the car, doing a long drive for a medical procedure, but that’s another story for another time) and we worked out a plan to make our fall back to school season more smooth.

I highly recommend doing this kind of planning if you are someone who has to coordinate a family’s set of activities. It may be obvious to some people who are just naturally good at being organized and planning, but for our family it’s a huge effort. The planning and thinking ahead are just not a natural thing we do.  So now we’ve got a Plan and that helps.

Our mornings before school are chiefly improved by the following factors:

- have the kids wake up to music (alarm clocks) in their own rooms and be responsible for showering/ getting dressed

- have the adults have specific benchmarks for the morning, such as having breakfast ready by 7:30 each day. Our kids have to be at school at 8:30 and we have to drive them there. It’s only a 5 minute drive, so we leave by 8:20 each day to ensure that they are on time every day.

- the kids are responsible for brushing their teeth after breakfast, and I remind them to do it

- my older daughter has to pack her own lunch, and her sister has to kind of help me pack hers. By having them be very involved, the lunches are more to their liking, and I am not left trying to pack everything myself.

That’s about all in the mornings, but in general we are involving the kids in helping around the house a lot more than we used to.  Dishes are put away, or brought to the kitchen.  Snacks are not left out in the living room.  Toys are brought back to their rooms.  It’s not perfect but it helps!

My advice to other families who are looking for a way to make their lives more manageable is to a) plan ahead and b) make sure everyone in the family has a role to play. I wish I’d started this when my kids were even younger!

For a long time, I have romanticized farming. The daily work load, surely, is awesome and weighty. But the beauty of working the land, of the animals, of the growing of food has an attraction to me.

Lately though, I’ve been feeling like I must have been nuts. It is so much work, so much dirty work! My friend moved his family from Brooklyn to a rural farm life in Texas where they raise goats and try to do life on the farm. He recently posted about which method he was going to use to castrate his male baby goats.  I’m in awe of him but I’m squeamish as hell.

I don’t think I could handle it.

He actually believes that the apocalypse is coming– the end of civilization. The destruction of society as a whole. Okaaay.  He’ll be ready, with his castrated goats.

I’ll be starving in the city.

Bleak thoughts for a bleak day!

I spent a lot of time yesterday trying to get my garden to be more naked.

After D left the house in the morning to take the girls to school, I checked the weather forecast.  It was 77 degree and 100% humidity and raining lightly. Perfect time to go to the garden, right? I must be crazy.

Further proof of this insanity: I left the house immediately and did not take with me: my purse or my cell phone. Just my keys.  ”I’ll be back in under an hour,” I thought.

I wanted to see if the spinach seeds I’d planted over the weekend had been kind enough to sprout.  They didn’t. I pulled a bunch of crab grass and made a big messy pile of it over an area of the garden that was essentially weedy terrain. I picked a handful of sungold tomatoes, and checked for ripe tomatilloes.

Disappointed, I headed back to the car.  My keys, were still dangling from my shirt edge, where I had clipped the carabiner.  I got to the  car and discovered that somewhere along the walk, which is about 400 feet through ankle deep grass, my car key had wriggled itself from from the chain and all I had left were my work and house keys.  SH*T!

Back through the wet grass, in my crocs. Wet feet, muddy feet. EW. Back to the garden again. Searching the grass, and surveying the enormous pile of weeds that is my garden plot. It’s a 20 foot by about 15 foot plot in a community garden. I haven’t done a good job of it and only within the last week or so have I tried to bring it back from the brink of weediness. There’s a lot of mess and not a lot of healthy plants. My garden had eaten my car key and I didn’t know where to find it.

So I went back to the car and searched there. No luck.

Searched the path again. And again. And again. NO KEY.

Finally I walked to a nearby establishment and asked to borrow a phone. I called D and found out that all this time, he’d been trying to find me because he was locked out of the house.  Because he’d given his house key to Carla the day before so she wouldn’t be locked out.

Eventually D came and rescued me from the muddy rainy garden. I need to remember to ALWAYS take my phone with me. Being impulsive is one thing, but is it really necessary to be stupid too?