On the other hand, I guess I know of several other teachers at my school who wanted to do something and found subs, and nobody really said boo about it.

So getting a sub shouldn’t be too big of a deal, really, and that might mean taking 4 days of driving and having 5 or maybe even 6 days of being there. That would tip the scales some.

I’m still concerned about where we’ll stay.  I mean, it’s fine to flop on a couch bed when it’s just one person (me) but trying to sleep all tangled up with my two sweet children… well, let’s face it, they take up a lot of space. And one of them wets the bed about half the time.  She’s volunteered to sleep on the floor with her sleeping bag, but still.

So that’s really not too bad. I don’t mind snuggling up with Annie. She’s smaller, and Carla could be on the floor.

So that’s not that bad of a concession.

Thinking about this, I’m really, thinking thinking thinking about this.

It’s a LOT of driving for one person. Me. I’m a good driver, though, and have done marathon drives before. But not this long of a drive, by myself.  Cammy and I split the driving last time and it was still exhausting.

On the other hand, it would be really lovely to get to Florida, again. Spring as you drive down the coast is fun to witness. The south is having spring of course, earlier than here. So it’s going to be pretttttty.

On the other hand, we’ll be driving on stupid I-95 most of the time, and what’s pretty about that, anyway?

On the other hand, we’ll have all that quality time in the car together, listening to great books on CD.  We love audio books.

On the other hand, on the other hand, on the other hand…. what am I, an eight handed octo-mom?

Ugh, don’t answer that.

What my reader might envy about my life is the time that I have to do things at home. Like most humans, I squander my resources. I am sorry to say, that here I am at home, while the kids are at school and sometimes I really waste that time.

Sometimes, I use it industriously to do egregious tasks.

Sometimes, I squander it in personally enjoyable activities, such as reading or napping.

Sometimes, I decide I should memorize speeches from Hamlet. That’s one thing I did today.  I am trying to commit to memory the speech in which Hamlet describes his depression, how he really knows that the world, the air, mankind, etc., are amazing and all that, but his attitude sucks and he is Not Pleased.

To test my learning of it so far, I am going to try to write it out now.

I have of late, wherefore I know not , lost all my mirth.  … What a piece of work is  a man, how noble in reason. How infinite in faculty. In form and moving how admirable, in action.  How like an angel, in apprehension… How like a God!

It’s close, but not quite right. If you are a Shakespearean scholar, you’ll notice my funny punctuation.  A quick trip to Wikipedia and you may talk like a scholar, too, for there it explains how in different places where this brilliant speech is committed to paper, there are different punctuation marks. I don’t recall which is what, and why, but I did decide to memorize and say this speech to myself as it most made sense. So, I am saying that in apprehension, man is like an angel, rather than in action.  Daring, I know. That’s me.

When I was first taking an anti-depressant drug, I think it was Lexapro, I was finding that my dreams were ultra vivid, and much like movies in my head.  They were fully visual, with complete colors, details, sounds, even smells.  They were very real.  I figured that my mind was simply responding to a stimulation due to an increase in serotonin from the medicine.

I actually stopped taking anti-depressants approximately 10 months ago, and dreams were the least of my concerns at this radical departure.  Because I’ve had a variety of symptoms of mental depression, the worst of which were the suicidal thoughts, I took anti-depressants for a few years.  But sometime last summer I came to a place in my life that felt safe, secure, happy, and I began to wonder if I really needed the anti-depressants anymore.

I decreased them, and eventually was off entirely. All was well. I’m still well, and have made it through most of winter, including the difficulties associated with the winter holidays.  I have weathered quite a bit of anxiety about our financial situation– and a big concern that our children would not only have stop going to private school next year, but be forced to stay home THIS YEAR as well, because we didn’t have enough money to pay up on our current tuition.

All of this uncertainty, anxiety and fear are real, and I feel so proud to have coped so far.  I still have uncertainty but things are looking up.

And I’m pleased to say, I still dream lot.  What is the meaning of our dreams? If they are merely the idle playtime of the brain, why do some dreams seem to guide us, others just seem to be there to please us, and yet others make us wake in fearful sweats, grasping for reality as much as the blankets bunched up at our feet?

I woke up this morning feeling sweet.  My dreams had been good, so very good. I didn’t seek reality in the morning light to try to figure out whether a feeling of well-being was really called for.  I just accepted my good mood and went on to make pancakes and coffee.

After dropping off the kids to school, I put away laundry, and made my bed.  Then I had the urge to write, and write and write. Could be the  coffee, but it could be the dreams, too.

Because my parking spot was taken.

I blew my top. I blew my horn.  I got out of the car and yelled at the empty street. I got into the car and sat there fuming. I used choice vocabulary.  All because of a parking space, you ask?  What the hell?

It was an emotional reaction, so there’s part of me that wants to say, hey look, I can’t really explain it.  I was just mad. Really mad.  I can tell you the rationalizations that I have for expressing so much rage.

It’s fairly simple to rationalize this reaction.  You have to know something about my geographic location:  I’m live in a neighborhood in the city of Philadelphia, in which day after day, our particular streets are usually pretty empty and there’s ample parking. This is not true of many neighborhoods in my city, but it is true here. Usually, if someone is in “my spot” I just park a few feet down from there.  However, it’s February, and our street is still extremely cluttered with a foot of snow that fell several weeks ago.  There are two spots on my side street, which are clear of snow, and which are MY SPOTS because I spent several hours clearing them.  Shoveling heavy snow and ice to make it possible to park there.

The custom around these parts is not to park in people’s spots. It’s just considered bad manners.  People will put out chairs, or other obstacles to make this clear, most of the time.  I had recycling bins out to mark our spots.  It turns out that my husband hadn’t put them on the street, however, when he had gone to work, so someone had parked a big pickup truck right in the middle of my hard-earned parking places.

What particularly made me angry was the fact that a driver of such a large, rugged truck with its large, rugged wheels really should not have had much trouble parking on the un-claimed, poorly cleared, icy areas on the other side of the main street.  He or she did not need to park on my clear, dry, parking spots. Yes, spots. For this truck had not only taken up ONE space, no indeed. He or she had parked in such a way as to block BOTH of them. It made me unreasonably angry.

I had my tantrum in front of my two girls. My girls rarely see me angry.  Sure, there’s the occasional spat with my husband.  Or I get peeved about politics or other idiocy. But they hardly ever see an example of my on a full-on, furious, demon-like rampage.  I was beyond agitated. I was loud, and outrageous. I wrote a nasty note, which my seven year old read over my shoulder.  She commented that she wouldn’t say the note out loud as it evidently contained a word which she’s not supposed to know, let alone use.

Smart kid.

But now, it’s quite a few days since my tantrum, and I’m thinking it all over, trying to see what part of the human condition is illuminated by all that noise and bluster. I simply didn’t need to make such a big deal over having to park somewhere else. There was another place to park, after all, even though it was trickier, further from home and covered with a dangerous, slippery, pile of ice.  But I did, because I just felt like I had to, express that rage.

I’ve gone through a range of emotions while processing my own “bad” behavior.   I was self-righteous at first, because I am a hard worker and I shouldn’t have had to work for some jerk to take away my hard-earned prize. I was embarrassed, after a bit, because of making such a fuss.  But now I’ve come to the new rationalization, that I did myself some good that evening.  I let myself and my kids know that when I feel, really feel mad, that I can express that emotion.

I can let it out, and then let it go. Let it out, people.  And then let it go.  That’s is the moral of this blog post.

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?

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.

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.

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!

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!

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?