Wow. Who knew that writing about babies would bring so many to the conversation? Thanks for the validation, y'all. I mean, I know my path is right for me, but I get so much negative feedback in the world outside the computer about being childless that I forget sometimes that there are plenty others who feel as I do.

Last night, I went out to dinner with my in-laws to celebrate DH's birthday. I was thinking about the baby stuff again, because no sooner was our party seated than another large table right next to us was also seated with 3 kids all under the age of two. Baby-baby, a 1 year old, and the oldest wasn't, I think, older than about 18 months. DH and I commenced with the eye-rolling immediately; dinner with his family has its own set of...um.... interesting fallout, and 3 screaming kids don't add good things to that already awkward ambiance. I ordered a second drink.

But my worries were for naught, all of the parents looked after their charges and it was early enough in the evening that no one was falling asleep at the table or having a meltdown because they were hungry. Plus everyone at our table mostly behaved, so that was a good thing too.

................

What I set out to write about today, though, was a bitching about the weather post. It is January, it is Ohio, it is cold, grey, overcast, and raining. Not news. Also? Bo-ring. I'd rather have the snow, honestly. When it snows, the world is enveloped in white silence, a hush that quiets the traffic and blankets the world with a pretty new coat. Everything looks clean, white-washed. When the snow melts, and it is too warm to snow, we get this super-ugly dingy greyness to everything. No surprise, I don't like it much. I'm thinking of my parents in Florida with envy in my heart; "winter" there means that it might get around 4o at night. Although they did have that long cold snap this year, so perhaps there are places where it is worse to be than grey Ohio at the moment.

......................

Like, um, Haiti?

How incredibly useless it feels to just donate some money to the cause. I've done that, given to both the Red Cross and MSF, but I'd like to do more. Sadly, I don't speak French or Creole, and would therefore be useless as a translator; I have no disaster recovery skills, no search and rescue skills, no medical training, nothing to offer to the relief effort other than money, so that's what I've done.

The Yarn Harlot has been keeping track of her readers who have donated to MSF by way of having them send her an e-mail with their donation amount, and I'm astonished to read today that the amount is over 1 million now. Right before the earthquake, it was around 500 or 600K, so that's pretty impressive in a week's time.

How sadly arrogant, then, to be whining about the weather and the cold when I have a roof over my head, enough food to eat, and your basic 1st world complaints? Clean water? Turn on the tap at any sink in the house and I've got that. Sanitation? I pay a monthly bill for that, and when the toilet flushes or the washing machine drains, I don't have to think about cleaning up waste water. Food? The mega-mart two miles from my house has more food on its shelves than many will see in their entire lives.

You hear that? It's the world's smallest violin playing "my heart cries for you, pampered princess".

................................

Someone asked recently if I'll be talking about what I do for a living when I take Well-Behaved private next month. I don't know. I'm so afraid to do that; right now for fear that my employer wouldn't like my writings about work (see: Armstrong, Heather: dooced) when this is public. If it goes private, though, theoretically the employer would never see it. The thing is that once something is out on teh intertubes, it is no longer private at all. If you don't want the world to know, what the hell are you doing writing an online journal any way? Along the same line, will I stop writing as Lucy and use my real name? Hm. There's a lot left to decide.

.........

Right now, though, I've been informed that BBC America is showing a Top Gear marathon this afternoon, so I'm going to drink hot cocoa, sit in front of the telly, knit, and get the laundry done. Such an exciting life.

Untitled

"Summer is over and gone, over and gone, over and gone. Summer is dying, dying." The cricket's song.

~Charlotte's Web, EB White

In elementary school, one of my teachers read Charlotte's Web to us, page by page, doing all the voices and acting out the scenes. I had read the book on my own, but really enjoyed her reading it to us. The passage above is from one of my favorite parts of the book, although it always makes me sad to read those lines.

I was thinking about the crickets and their song over the weekend, when I was out on the lake in my parent's boat. My favorite spot on that boat is the lounge chair/couch at the stern, right above the engines. Quite literally on top of the engines. Which are loud. As you can imagine, this does little to help my already poor hearing, but I enjoy watching the wake behind the boat, and the jet-skiers who play in the waves the boat makes. This particular boat ride was probably the last of the season, always a bittersweet thing.

It was a chilly ride, even though it was a sunny and reasonably warm day. Soon, it will be too cold (and impossible, but I'll get to that in a minute) to cruise around the lake. The leaves around the lake are starting to change, just small hints of red and orange on sporadic trees. There isn't much undeveloped land on the lake, and we drove past some of the showpiece houses on the northern end. Everyone is getting ready for the closure of the season - the state drains about 20% of the water out of the reservoir in October - and it is always sad to see people pulling out their boats, securing the docks and boat lifts so that they survive the harsh wind and ice of the winter.

The lake is a man-made reservoir, and like many in Ohio, has a muddy bottom. So the water isn't the crystal clear blue of the Gulf of Mexico, or even the bluish green of the big lake, Erie. More brown-ish, although in the right light in the summer, it appears to be a deep, navy blue. Once the wind picks up, and you get a passel of boats on the lake, it gets rather stirred up, and can look as muddy as the Ganges sometimes.

Uncle State of Ohio lowers the level of the water in the fall because the ice in the winter would destroy the dam at the lake's northern edge, between the expansion of the water when it freezes and the enormous pressure brought to bear on the dam from a lake full of ice. Understanding the reason behind the lower level of water doesn't make it any nicer to see; if you ask me, the lake looks forlorn when landside docks don't reach the water, and the muddy bottom is exposed to the cold light of day.

I grew up around boats and water, am comfortable on the water even though one of my greatest fears is dying by drowning. Fatalistic? Yeah, maybe. Hey, I've never claimed that I'm reliably sane. But there isn't much that is more soothing to me than floating along on a body of water, be it on a powerboat or sailing, or even on a pool float.

Watching the wake a powerboat makes has always fascinated me. In the Gulf down in Florida, if you're in the right spot and going the right speed, dolphins will come and play in the wake, leaping out of the water to plunge back into the slipstream the wake makes, seemingly so close that you could reach over the stern and pet them. You never know when or where they will pop up, so it is always a thrill when they do. I half expect to see them here up nawth, too, even though I know full well that there's nothing even close to the size of a dolphin in any of the fresh water lakes where I play in the summer time.

I remember an animated film from my childhood about unicorns that did a neat trick of changing the waves and the spray from the ocean rolling in on a beach into galloping unicorns. (The Last Unicorn, for those who care.) The Swedes use an expression that translates literally as "white horses" when describing rough seas, and I have enough imagination and am enough of a six year old in my head -still- to be able to see those vita hästar in the powerboat's wake.

The light changes as the summer dies; the diamonds dancing on the water are something you don't see in the wintertime, even on the sunniest of days. I'm sure there's a reasonable explanation for that; the changes in the proximity of the earth to the sun from summer to winter; the change of the amount of daylight, something scientific, but I don't know (or care) what that reason is; to me, it signifies the death of the summer, and I can hear the words "summer is over" in the crickets' songs. (Active imagination or actively insane, one or the other!)

Fall is my favorite time of the year here, so bittersweet indeed is the change of the seasons to me. As much as I love the crisp, cool days the fall brings, the occasional whiff of (illegally) burning leaves, cold apple cider, pumpkin cookies, the gingerbread I begin craving as soon as the temperature drops, and the beautiful color show that nature puts on for us in September and October, there is something inherently sad in summer leaving us. I understand the Greeks and the Romans for coming up with mythology that explained the winter as a season of Demeter mourning Persephone. The shorter days ARE sad. Beautiful, colorful, crisp and near-perfect, but sad nonetheless.

Hate being hot

The weather is finally summertime here in Ohio, and while I spend time in the winter bitching about the abysmal cold weather, I don't care for the heat, either.

I don't like to sweat. And I don't like to stink. But they go hand in hand as soon as the weather warms up.

I woke up last night soaked to the skin with sweat. Why, you ask, did that happen in my air conditioned house? Because the upstairs gets warm, and we run fans to cool it off. The fans annoy my DH, and he turns them off because he doesn't like the noise.

Ask me if I was happy when I woke up in the middle of the night, sweating. Go on. Ask.

Green, Green, Green

No, I am not done writing about Sweden. Not by a long shot! I still want to write about The White Buses, being "on" the whole time I was there, some stories about stupid things I did (like...um...accidentally putting train tickets into a mail slot, thus losing them for all time) and some cultural observations. Today, though, I'm taking a short post to note a few random things.

When I left for Sweden on April 19, spring had hardly begun in Ohio. It was a chilly and overcast day, but not so cold that I actually needed my winter coat. DH and I left to head towards the airport long before I actually needed to be there, because there's a mall near that airport that we don't get to as often as we'd like. I had tossed the coat on the back seat of the car, and was on the fence about taking it with me. (I did, and I'm really glad I did, but that's an upcoming story.)

I got back to Ohio on May 22, and it was warm. Spring had come and was rapidly rushing headlong into summer. Within days of my return, I cranked the air conditioning in the house, turning the temperature to about 72 (22C), because it was 80+ (26C) and I hate the heat.

Driving along a busy road near my house yesterday, I noticed how absolutely green everything is. Trees that were winter-bare when I left are in full leaf. A small yellow rosebush by the side of the road, carefully tended, has beautiful full flowers.

I didn't get to plant much of a garden this year. I was in Sweden during planting season, and I planted nothing before I left because I knew, sure as the sun rises, that DH would not water a single thing, and it would have all been in vain. I had tomato plants last year, and cucumbers and lettuce and mint and basil and cilantro and flowers and all sorts of things. This year, I have lettuce, cucumbers, beets (an experiment) and my herbs, a few flowers, and nothing else. No tomatoes. I am sad about that.

I glanced outside of my kitchen window yesterday and was surprised to see the flowers I had started from seed have sprouted and are looking like they might turn into something other than tiny green shoots.

As I drove to work the other day, I thought about the folks who start work super-early, bakers and the like, and as we approach the summer solstice, the days are long and if you drive to work at 5:30 in the morning, your drive is much lighter than it was in April.

Summer is so short here. It disappears in the blink of an eye. While it lasts, I savor the green.

Ladies and Gents, welcome to 2009

This is a storytelling post.  Unfortunately, unlike the other storytelling posts, this story has no end.  Yet.

Laundry might be the bane of my existence.  It is never, ever, ever done.  If things are running along swimmingly (which, um, when, exactly does that happen?) I would start a load of laundry in the morning, allowing it to run mostly while I'm at work, because it is loud, and obnoxious.  That load would be tossed in the dryer when I got home, and folded before I went to bed.  Then, there would not be what the Fly Lady calls  "Mt Wash-More."

Instead, what actually happens is I manage to wash about 3 loads a week, and the clean clothes get tossed on the couch in the living room, and I fold them on Saturdays, catching up with whatever is left over then, too.

One weeknight last week, I came home and took off my coat, hat, scarf.  Have I mentioned lately that it is bloody freezing?  Anyway, I turned away from the closet, and I noticed that a sock had fallen off of the couch.  It makes the house look even messier than really is, and bothers my OCD-urge to have everything put in its place, even when its current place is not where it really  belongs.  So I walked over and picked up the sock, and that, my friends, is where the true trouble began.  Because that innocent black sock was soaking wet.  Not damp from the dryer being out of order, but soaking wet, dripping wet.   From the ceiling above, a drip, drip, drip from a crack we had repaired before we moved into this house.   Dammit.  There went my planned evening of a few glasses of sangria, dinner at a nearby Mexican place, folding the laundry, and going to bed.

Following the trail of water across the ceiling led us upstairs to our bedroom, which is the largest room in the house.  The wall in question had a desk up against it, and we pulled that back to discover a patch of damp drywall, damp enough to push our hands through to the insulation behind.

DH, once upon a time, was a firefighter and had to pull walls down searching for any errant flames, so he attacked the wall and pulled out insulation that was dripping wet, just like my sock.  Bugger.

We pulled off about a 3 square foot area of  that drywall, and discovered a hell of a mess.  Behind the soaking wet insulation was not a pretty picture.  I know almost nothing about construction, so my terminology may be inaccurate, but sometimes that's the way it goes.  The studs that frame the house are covered with a composite material, which looks like particle board.  I know, I know, it is not particle board,  rather, it is an insulating material that is between the pink fiberglass insulation INSIDE the house and the aluminum siding, OUTSIDE the house.  The wall joins up with my neighbor's section of our duplex and creates a 90 degree angle very close to where we ripped all that wet drywall off.  With a flashlight, we took a peek at that angle, and discovered a wall of ice between the aluminum siding and the particle board stuff.  You can reach into it, run your hand up and down that ice wall.  

What I don't know about construction could fill a library full of novels, but I do know that ice shouldn't really be *behind* the aluminum siding.  We had a contractor come the next day, someone we have worked with in the past, so we trust him.  

I have no idea what he did to fix it.

The ice, however, remains a problem, because it is still there.  Whatever contractor J did, it was to keep more water from coming into the house.  The ice that is already there has to go out the same way it came it; via the path of least resistance, and as liquid.  Which means that we will be cleaning up water for quite some time to come. 

Sigh.  

In the meantime, two rooms of my house are torn up, furniture shoved away from its usual spots, and, while not quite the hassle and expense that the leak has caused, something that adds little bit of fuel to this already messy fire.....

My laundry still isn't done.

On Keeping Yer Fat Yap Shut. Or....not.

It is a fine line I walk between over-sharing (hello, mental illness) and keeping myself from being too personal, writing about things that I probably shouldn't.

Its...just...

When something good happens, I want to shout it from the rooftops, even when I maybe shouldn't.  When something is sucking in my life, writing about it is cathartic for me, even therapeutic.  It is very difficult for me to just not dump it all out in a verbal barrage of often meaningless drivel.

(Hi, interweb, BTW.  I sorta missed you while I was away, and sorta didn't, too.  Being back to my usual routine is good.  Being back in the freezing-ass-cold north is *not* good.)

This time around, it is a good thing that I want to over-share about.  A great thing.  A wonderful honor and amazing opportunity, and I. Can't. Talk. About. It.  And of, course, I'm dying to.  Urgh.

Shall we talk about the news instead?  We shall.  The topic du jour upsetting me:

The Israel/Palestinian conflict.  Or, should I say, the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  There is no "right" side to this, IMESHO.  That said, it really bothers me on many levels that Israel is working hard to unseat a democratically elected government.  Like Hamas, don't like Hamas (and I don't) they are the party that was elected in free and fair elections by the Palestinian people.  Where do you get off bleating about "democracy" if you are working to get rid of a democratically elected government?  Regime Change begins at home, people.

I have been watching with much fascination the various cabinet appointments of President-Elect Obama.  An interesting distinction between the Idiot Administration and Obama....daily press conferences.  What a concept!!!  Government operating without stonewalling.  Wow.  I say watching with fascination because it seems to me that he is choosing moderates, across the board.  Not the super-radical liberal nuts that I think many on the opposite side of the aisle feared.  I don't envy the work that the incoming administration has in front of them; fixing the economy is one huge m-effing job.

Oh, and of course, I can't close the post without mentioning my perennial bitch, the weather.  It is January in Ohio.  Bleh!!!  Cold, overcast, and with the added delight of freezing rain today, I'm so glad to have a roof over my head, warm slippers on my feet, and a warm bed to crawl into.  I miss the Florida sunshine already.

It is NOT winter.

Not yet.  December 21, more than a month away, is the official start of winter.  But you wouldn't know that from the weather today.  

Why yes, that is what it looks like outside.  The picture is fuzzy because it is snowing so hard that it made the scene blurry.

I like snow.  I don't like the heat, when it is 90 degrees and 100% humidity.  But I do not like snow in November, especially 6+ inches of snow in November.  We're forecast a grand total of about 7 inches, if (and that's a big if) we get everything the weatherman says we will.

November.  Not even the start of winter.  We've got a long way to go until spring, usually late March in this part of the country.  Winter.  I'm already over it.

Overly Sensitive

I'm spending more time than usual walking around outside. We don't need to get into where, or why, suffice to say that I'm in the out of doors more than usual. (This is NOT a complaint. I like walking around outside.) In the summertime, even when the weather is cloudy, I wear sunscreen. Yes, every day. Usually 30 or higher. I'm not in the habit of re-applying, but now that I'm out more often in the daytime, I probably should.

For the days when I forget the sunscreen, or when the Oh-hia-ia sun peeks out from the pervasive grey skies, I've been thinking about buying a parasol. Yep, just like the Victorian ladies carried. Although the one I've been looking at is Oriental, not frilly Victorian lace. Lacy-frilly-frou-frou is so not my style, and worthless for sun protection anyway.

I do have an umbrella that I've added to my bag o' stuff that I carry around every day, which changes from day-to-day. Most of those bags o' stuff are too large to be called purses. Because you never know when the skies are going to open up and pour torrential rain down on you. Why not use that? I don't know. Perhaps because it is counter to my inclination to buy more stuff. Or perhaps because it looks like an umbrella, and I get all sorts of weird looks when I carry it when it isn't raining. Honestly, I don't care what people think, my comfort of being both cooler and not sunburned is more important to me. I think a rice-paper parasol with cranes painted on it might be less.....what? Noticeable? Not. Conspicuous? Not. I don't really know what I'm thinking there.

(Acquisition? Maybe? Perhaps? An excuse to shop? Ya think? ~editor)

I know that this would be looked on with less disdain and amusement if I lived in Miami or Los Angeles, heck, any of the major cities it probably wouldn't get a second glance. Here in the rustbelt, where the skin cancer epidemic is treated with the "that's never going to happen to me" attitude, yeah, it looks strange.

Being sunburned sucks. I've been there, done that, often enough to know. Several very bad burns in my teens served not only to increase my awareness, but also to exponentially heighten my risk of skin cancer. Every bad burn you get only makes it worse. I'm so careful with the sun that I rarely even end up with pinken-ed cheeks after a day on the water. I don't think of color from the sun as adding a "healthy glow".

Am I pale? Yeah. I like to joke that ya just don't get much whiter than me. Scandinavian, Slovak, Danish, Czech, and British heritage basically means that my skin is really fair. Fair enough that I have a hard time finding concealer, powder, foundation make-up to match the tone of my skin, even if we just drop the I'm-allergic-to-everything-in-the-whole-world part of the equation.

So carrying a parasol ought to really be a forgone conclusion. Plus it is pretty. The last thing, though, is something that my vanity doesn't want to allow me to admit out loud. My hair is very thin, and I've actually had a sunburned skull. Hats are fine, but I think the parasol would be more fun.

Bad pop rant, and weather randomness.

I am a pop culture junkie. When we're listing our bad habits, i.e., drinking too much caffeine, eating too much chocolate, those sorts of things, I add to my list the fact that I'll read the gossip columns, watch E!, read People magazine. Other than being part of the MTV generation, I'm not sure what fuels this. I do know that often, the antics of Brit-Brit, La Lohan, and Paris make MY life seem....well....normal. Or as normal as any of us ever is.

I don't, however, listen to commercial radio. Ever. Ev-er. I despise it. Hilariously, though, that's all DH listens to and as we're in his car together more frequently than we are in mine, often I'm subjected to large chunks of time listening to exactly the sort of crapola I can't stand; "morning zoo" types of early AM programs. The rotten afternoon-drive stuff that plays the same ten songs over, over, over, over again. Ugh.

I like all kinds of music, but there's a certain group of current pop that really bothers me. I realize that this is going to make me sound like quite the curmudgeon, but it is just so much dreck. And this will probably bring her fans out in droves to flame me, but the song is so obnoxious that I can't take it anymore! I can't stand Jordin Sparks and her awful "No Air" song that she sings with Chris Brown. I'm not even sure why I've developed a nearly irrational distaste for the song, other than its prevalence every-freaking-where.

Then I heard an Ashlee Simpson song that made me shudder.

But this phenomenon isn't limited to the music spectrum of the pop-culture world. I've read some stuff lately that I have wondered about: how did this crap get published? You know that television has been a kvetch of mine for a long, long time....there're reality shows galore that I wonder...who green-lighted this stuff? Is there some television executive genius that listens to pitches for things like "Farmer wants a wife" and says, "Right on, man, that's going to be a big hit! Let's make that show!" Really?

I'm setting completely aside the definition of 'bad' that means immoral, I'm just talking about poor quality.

In Sam's Club the other day, I picked up a cookbook by a popular television cook, one who uses a lot of butter and has a pronounced Georgia drawl. I like the show; like the cook, too. But the book remained on the shelf for one reason, and one reason alone. It has terrible readability. Not bad grammar, but bad form. I don't know how anyone ever typed it up without their word-processing program having fits; every single sentence had a word or three with the ends clipped off. Reading became readin'. Watching became watchin'. I couldn't read it, after two paragraphs I set it down and walked away. No matter how compelling the story, or what fun the recipes might be, I can't read 300 pages of "I was goin' to the store."

I think it very sad that this sort of thing slips through the cracks. We don't complain about it, we just shrug and ignore that which we don't agree with, not voting with our dollars but rather endorsing things through our terrible apathy.

Wow, what a little ray of sunshine from me, eh?

Let's talk about something else before I bring everyone to all sorts of ire.

The weather in Oh-hia-ia is nothing if not changeable. We had some unexpectedly hot days in early June, unseasonably hot. Then that disappeared into chilly days where I pulled out several warm shawls for the part of my daily commute that involves a long walk. Our late spring was surprisingly devoid of typical Midwestern thunderstorms. Grey skies aplenty, but lacking in big thunder-bumpers.

Yesterday, the date of the summer solstice (Glad Midsommar, y'all!) we had a thunder-and-lightening storm that came out of nowhere, a bruising, crashing, noisy thunderstorm. I celebrate the Swedish holiday of Midsummer here in America because I want to; in Sweden, it marks the start of their very short summer, and is a leftover from pagan rituals. Here in the US, for me, it is just an excuse to gather some friends, drink some Southern Comfort Punch, stay up far too late on the longest day of the year. Unfortunately, we greeted the Midsummer evening by having a hail storm.


Our big thunderstorms have never frightened me. I revel in a wild thunderstorm. Last night's storm came up so suddenly, though, and the hail was out of nowhere. I've been through several tornadoes, seen funnel clouds that didn't touch down (thankfully, b/c I never want to see a tornado up close and personal) but since we moved to our current residence, I've never thought that I might need to seek shelter in our closet under the stairs until last night. (We lack a basement here at Chez Arin.)

Thankfully, the storm moved along, but not without a few casualties. My carefully cultivated garden, which is teaching me patience at long last, lost a handful of tomato plants. As an inexperienced gardener, I probably have too many plants crammed into a a space that is too small for them, but I'm still bummed about the loss of even a few to something that is beyond my control.

Something is eating some of the plants, too. Marigolds, which I thought that pests disliked, clipped most efficiently. But my lettuce is unharmed. Herbs, left alone. Sunflowers, completely destroyed. What gives?

Dawn of the Day

With the days getting longer, and the sun showing its face here in Oh-hia-ia, it makes me wonder how I was having so much trouble getting out of bed and on my feet all winter.

I start my new job today. I'm a little nervous, a lot excited, and as usual, running late, so you'll have to forgive the brevity of the post.

My biggest problem this morning?

I don't know what to wear.

We don't every really grow up. I have proof.

Once upon a time, when I was a little girl, my mother purchased Tupperware Ice Tup molds. Like these.Except that ours were all white plastic.

My mum made ice pops (popsicle is a trademark of Good Humor, and I am not infringing copyrights, y'see) with Jell-o, Kool-Aide, and I don't know what else, and they were good. Really good.

A news item in last Sunday's paper suggested updating classic cocktails for summer by freezing them in ice-pop molds, and serving them as frozen-on-a-stick rather than blended in the blender with ice to make a slushie.

Excellent idea.

So I asked my mother: did she still have those ice-pop molds? Unfortunately, the answer was no. Bummer. But she did suggest that she had seen the molds at Target et cetera, in the store's patio furniture/summer celebration sections. Sweet, that shouldn't be so hard to track down, then.

I decided that the first experiment should be with my good for you protein smoothie, due entirely to my bad eating habits of late. The smoothie recipe is as follows:

1 c pureed strawberries
1 banana, cut into chunks
1/4 to 1/2 c organic lowfat vanilla yogurt (I am partial to this brand)
2-3 scoops whey protein, based on volume of smoothie; 1 scoop per 8 oz.

Blend all until desired consistency in blender.

I found some molds of my own at a local bargain outlet, intended, I think, as accessories to a smoothie-maker that has been discontinued by the manufacturer. Bonus for me, because I got 2 sets of 4 molds for $0.99. They are conjoined, so to get just one ice-pop out is a pain in the keister, but not an insurmountable problem.

Accordingly, I poured the smoothie recipe into the molds and waited 10+ hours. They're delish as a frozen treat, satisfying the sweet-tooth and making you feel full, thanks to the protein.

Amazon has a bunch of ice-pop molds for sale. IKEA also supposedly has some cool ones, but they're not for sale on-line, and the closest IKEA store to me is going through some huge re-vamp, or something, and they can't tell me for certain if they have any. With gas at $4 a gallon, I do not intend to take a random drive over an hour away just to see if maybe they have some.

But I want these from Amazon, because I think they're way cool.


Not that I need more plastic "stuff" in my life, but I do think that my annual summer party (which is coming soon!) needs the addition of alcoholic ice-pops. C'mon, who ISN'T going to think those are cool?

I am a grown up! I am! ! !

The question remains, can a Mojito Pop be made? Or a Southern Comfort Punch Pop? (I have to make those just because of the name alone, don't I? Say that 5 times fast...) I'd love to locate the recipe my mother used for the cherry pops she made using a powdered drink mix and an instant dessert. Or better yet, perhaps the powdered drink mix I'm currently a fan of, with vanilla vodka....oooooooo.

Sorry to leave you hanging on this one, but for now we'll let the question stand. Possible? Yup, I think so. Can we wait around long enough in this house for the alcohol-pops to freeze? Ummmm.....I'll get back to ya on that one.

Oooo-h-eye-oooo

During football games at the Ohio State University, the marching band will play "Hang on Sloopy" and the crowd will chant the state's letters during the chorus...which herre, sounds completely ridiculous when I type that out. I guess you'd have to hear it to understand, if you've never heard it, but it goes something like this

Hang on Sloopy, Sloopy hang on
O-H-I-O
Hang on Sloopy, Sloopy, hang on
O-H-I-O

and wow, it looks even sillier with the words typed out.

(If that's not enough of a visual for you, check out the YouTube version, and you will see what insane nutcases most of the state of Ohio's residents are; there's a dance that goes along with that o-h-i-o chant.)

It has been running though my head this week (and now it will be running though YOUR head, too, you're welcome) as Ohio residents have been treated to typically heartbreaking early spring Ohio weather. Yes, end of April/beginning of May counts as early spring here. March is still winter, any way you care to look at it.

I've planted some seeds in yet another (probably vain) attempt to grow some vegetables, herbs, and flowers. I was not smart enough to plant them inside the house during the month of February as any gardener worth her salt in Ohio would have done. Expert gardener I am most assuredly NOT. No, no, instead I planted them outside on my side porch a few weekends ago, and have kept very close daily tabs on them, watching most anxiously for seedlings to appear.

Seedlings astonishingly have appeared, often in between my checking them each morning and returning from work to check them again each evening. It is beyond cool to see those little tiny things sprout. I think of everything I planted, I'm most enjoying watching the sunflowers. Because they pop out of the ground with the seed casing still attached, shedding it when the leaves begin to grow, and if it isn't the most obvious 'hey, this plant came from THAT seed' example I've ever seen, then I don't know what I would put in that category.

I even have proof!


Aren't they cute? Just so tiny, it is hard to believe that will turn in to a huge and very unusual colored sunflower. The name on the seed packet was "Chianti Hybrid" and I chose them out of all the other sunflowers (and I lurves me some sunflowers) because I've never seen any this color before, a deep burgundy wine-y sort of color. There were somewhere around 24 seeds in the packet, and they've all sprouted. Of course, that's too many for the spot I alloted to the sunflowers, so I'll have a few left over. I've got some ideas about where to stash them, but I'll probably write about that at some future point, when I am able to put the plants in the ground.

Then there's the salad mix; mesclun greens that are of a very mixed variety, and there were thousands of seeds in that packet. So many that after harvesting the first batch, I have enough to have a second crop of them. I like my mixed greens as baby greens, so they won't be in the ground long once they are planted. They need to be a bit bigger before I can do that, though.



And the happy little daisies. I choose painted daisies because they're all kinds of colors. I love shasta daises, but they're only white. These are a full spectrum of colors.

So I planted these all several weeks ago, and then...what happens? It gets cold again. We go from 70 degree days (21C) to a frost advisory for two nights in a row. The novice gardener could lose absolutely every-freaking-thing. The first night, I covered all the baby seedlings with a huge sheet, folded in half, that has been banned from my bed for having holes in it. (I guess it didn't like being washed in hot water with a lot of bleach....all of my bed linens are white, and I use bleach to kill the dust mites and other creepy-crawlies that are in EVERYONE'S bed.) The sheet protected the seedlings, even when it got wet from a typical spring heavy rain.

The next night, though, the temp was supposed to dip down even further, and as I've never managed to keep anything alive for an entire growing season, I was very worried that a sheet just wasn't going to cut it when it came to frost protection.

Not long after I planted everything, I broke the seed trays down into little individual 4-packs, because I am a complete moron. Had I left them in their original state, they would be far easier to move, but nooooo, I thought the little 4-packs were easier to handle and cute. *headdesk*

When the bitter cold weather threatened, my choices for saving the seedlings were pretty limited. I could 1) bring them inside the house or 2) take them into the garage. Bringing them in the house would mean that any little 6 or 8-legged things that had attached themselves to the plastic trays would be sharing my home. I hate bugs. Anything that has more legs than I do, I am not a fan. A huge amount of soil would be tracked through my house. Not that I'd mind cleaning it up, but it was also raining when I was doing this, and there's a good chance I would have ruined the wooden floor that DH put into the house last year as I tracked in water, the clay-like muddy soil we have in the ground and the potting soil I purchased, because of course there's potting soil spilled on the side patio, where the seedlings live.

Garage it was. Thirty trips or so later, the seedlings were lined up in a spot in the garage where they wouldn't be stepped on (or run over with the cars) and where they'd stay warm. They survived the night unscathed. (Big sigh of relief.) Score one for the girl without the green thumbs.

Then it was time to move them back outside.

Those little white sticks that identify the seedlings, because you need them until the plants are large enough to identify? I don't have one of those in every single 4-pack of plants. Which means what? The ones that haven't sprouted yet are unidentifiable if they get separated from their fellows. Of course I have them lined up in neat little rows, with the markers at the beginning and ending of each section of plants, but what happens if they get out of their orderly little rows? I'd be guessing what was in each one.

Not a disaster, unless you have OCD.

If you have OCD, then your NICE NEAT PLAN is messed up if one goes stray and it makes you want to CURL UP IN THE CORNER AND POUT.

Not that I'd know. Really.

Within, Without

Last night, the mild temperatures in the 50-degree (13/14C) range belied a coming storm. After dark, the wind kicked up, and later still, rain came pouring down. I think (maybe, possibly, perhaps) that we might be done with the bitterly cold blizzard weather for the season. The tulips I planted several years ago are sprouting, daffodils are a few inches tall, and the pollen count is up, because I'm sneezing rather more than usual.

One of my neighbors (and I don't even know which one) has a set of wind chimes that I only hear during high winds. The apple falls not far from the tree; at my parent's house on the lake, the wind chimes that were on the porch when they moved in have been permanently silenced. I've been given gifts of wind chimes over the years, that are beautiful, but will never hang up outside because the noise would drive me crazy. Deep, bell-like chimes, or high-pitched tinkles, matters not, I can't stand the noise.

My neighbor's chimes are delicate, twinkling chimes, which make me think of fairies and the wee folk whenever I hear them. I could hear them only in certain parts of the house, which ought to clue me in as to who they belong to, but that doesn't matter much. Because I only hear them during stormy weather, and not when I'm trying to sleep, I don't care where they are.

If you'll allow me to be whimsical for a moment, go ahead and continue reading the post. Otherwise, skip it and read something else.

I've never been afraid of weather. Thunderstorms don't scare me. Living as I do in the MidWest, tornadoes are a reality, rather than special effects on a movie screen. They bring devastation, destruction of property, death. But somehow, there's a fierce, feral beauty to them, when for just a moment, you witness one of Mother Nature's raw creations.

The prelude to a thunderstorm brings darkening of skies, and an increase in the wind. Birds quiet down, seek shelter, and insects fall silent. That relative calm before the storm has always called to me, pulled me to wander outside, and witness the birth of a storm.

Before I left home and got married, my parents lived across the street from a large forest preserve, and a coming storm in the twilight might find me on a path listening to the wind in the trees. The air seems cleaner. The night holds a potential, possibilities. A mild shower, or a wild, howling terror, either is possible in that moment.

I wanted to wander outside last night, allow the wind to pull at my clothes and short hair, smell the dampness of the earth, the spring smell of earthworms all squiggly (and icky) on the sidewalks, listen to the wind, even get rained on a bit. Instead, I stayed inside and listened to the wind around the roof of the house, eventually heading to bed where I couldn't hear the chimes anymore.

Where has that child-like wonder and delight in a rainstorm gone? My delight in a solitary walk diminished, when, exactly?

Left foot in, left foot out, and ya do

the hokey-pokey and you turn yourself about.....

Now that you'll have that running through your head all day (you're welcome, I'm sure)....

I was originally going to write about being buried under more snow than I remember for a long, long, loooong time, but then, going out the garage to get my 2nd can of soda to mix my 2nd drink, I caught myself dancing a bit and had another idea.

The weather is shit. No two ways about that, not at all. Without t'internets, life would be dull indeed under a level 2 or 3 snow emergency. (I've lost track, and anyway, either one means you're supposed to stay off the roads so that the guv can clear the streets, dangerous road conditions, blah, blah, blah, blah.)

By all rights, I ought to be bored out of my pretty little skull. What's a girl to do other than drink some rhum and zero-calorie vanilla soda? Normally, I don't condone drinking soda at all for myself, its full of corn syrup and other things that are bad for the whole body, not just bad for the diet. But...we're home, not going anywhere, there's a ton of booze in the house, there's no reason not to.

I've also got a whole bunch of yarn, and three or four projects on the needles that just might get finished over the weekend, with nothing better to do. I finished the eyelash scarf, shorter than I planned, but I got bored with just 15 stitches knit every single row, so I cast it off at about 7 feet long and started making a matching hat with the leftover yarn.

But what I was thinking about as I was mixing my drink was that I'm doing much better mentally. The last week has been better. And I don't just feel that way because I've been boozing a little, either. It seems that the Lexapro has kicked in, and with the combination of the two meds added to the fact that things have picked up on the job front, I'm doing better.

My shrink and I had a discussion where she urged me to work on having my sense of self-worth tied to what I do for a living. Still workin' on that one.

My resume has been out on the web on various job sites for years. Since I worked for ye olde evile bank. I left there in 2004, so let's guess from at least 2003. I get e-mails from recruiters for financial service companies all the time...they see my 7 years of banking experience, and want me to come be a securities broker for them. T'anks, but NO. All of a sudden, though, I'm getting hits on the resume from every angle. I have no idea what's changed; the economy's in the shitter (sorry, but how would YOU describe it?) and I've not updated my information on any of those sites since about 2006.

So I'm popular all of a sudden?

Mystifying, but fun.

If I get the job that I'm going to interview for next week in a place far, far away, WellBehaved will be updated infrequently for a little while. Going dark, if you will. But I'll keep ya updated on how that goes.

Am I excited about that interview? Sure. At various moments so hyped that I want to jump up and down like a little kid, and at others, so nervous that I'd like to vomit. I want this job. I want to knock their socks off in the interview. Keep your fingers crossed. I know I will be.

At the moment, though, rhum and vanilla cola are calling me. Loudly. And my hat knitting project, and an interesting movie on the telly....

Chill

I like the winter.

I like watching the snow fall, I like curling up under a warm blanket with a good book, a cup of rich hot cocoa (laced with a dash of Frangelico, if you please) and settling in for the night while I listen to the wind outside.

I like seeing the world covered in a blanket of white, looking clean and new. Its almost as if everything that was dirty is suddenly clean, anything that was broken down and disused suddenly has new life.

I love the pine trees around my home right after a big snowfall, when the branches are covered with snow, which falls off or blows away in the wind over the subsequent days.

I like the sun (when we do see it, which isn't often) bouncing a dazzling reflection off of the snow, so bright that sunglasses are just a minor help, looking like tiny diamonds scattered across the ground.

I like when the cold in the air steals your breath away, shocking cold, even though you knew it was cold outside, you're still surprised by the intensity of it.

But.

Somehow, it seems as each winter passes, I'm affected more by the cold each year.

I dress in layers all winter long; yep, I wear long underwear and I don't give a shit who knows it. Being warm is far more important. That extra layer or sometimes two when it is particularly bitter, makes a big difference. If I didn't tell you, you'd never know, anyway, because it is thin enough to hide under even my tightest jeans.

I learned how to layer properly in Sweden; where I lived, just off of Lake Malaren, the wind was biting and bitter, especially when you got close to the lake shore. The whole town is on the shore, practically. I learned the importance of a scarf in keeping warm; hence, perhaps, the obsessive scarf-knitting this winter.

This winter hasn't been particularly bitterly cold; I remember colder ones. But I don't remember being so cold myself in winters past. The only time my toes are warm is right when I get out of bed in the morning, or right after stepping out of a hot shower. Otherwise, they're like little blocks of ice.


Last night, after work and dinner and even a little time spent writing, I changed out of my corporate slave clothes into jammies, thick sock, slippers, and a robe, then wrapped myself in a blanket before beginning to work on my latest hat, a cable-knit dazzling white, made with super-bulky yarn. DH watched me wrap the blanket securely around my legs, and raised an eyebrow over the robe, which is very heavy.

"Cold?" he asked, sarcastically.

"Does it show?" I asked, snarky.

He laughed, and chuckled again later when I pulled another blanket out to wrap up in.

Jeebus, I'm cold.

Cool

The end of 2007 was somewhat typical of the rest of the year for the weather around here. Unseasonably warm, weather that is very unusual for the time of year. Our summer was cooler than usual, which was nice 'cause I detest the heat, but the fall and winter thus far have been much warmer than they ought to be.

Hey, Mr. President? Global Warming? Is real. I'm so not in the mood for politics today.

On New Year's Eve, the temp was in the mid-40s. Weather that we should have at the end of March, or near the middle to end of October. Not in December. And then the next day, New Year's Day, it snowed like a sonavabitch, with high winds, blowing and drifting snow...we were forecast at least 4 inches, but didn't get that much around my home.

I am one of those rare lunatics who LIKES the cold. Yes, really. I'd prefer an inch of snow on the ground to 90+ temperatures. My logic goes something like this...in the winter, you can pile on lots of layers to keep warm, or attempt to keep warm, anyway. In the summer, there's only so much you can take off and not be arrested!

We keep the temp fairly low in the winter in the house, partly to save money, partly because we like it that way, and partly to conserve natural gas. Rarely is the thermostat set higher than 68, and overnight it goes down to I think 62. All I know is that woe betide thee if you get out of bed in the middle of the night, because it is COLD in here. It isn't set that low in the summer (our electric bill would be un-payable) but it is pleasantly cool in here in the summer too.

Like so many other things I see going wrong with the country, the weather's anomalies make me nervous. Will my niece and nephew and greats and grands see true Oh-hia-ia winters? Sledding used to be something that we all did (even my parents) every winter. I don't see kids do that these days. There weren't a lot of crisp, cool fall days last year. Days when you feel like you ought to buy some #2 pencils and new notebooks, drink some apple cider. The temps stayed in the high 60s until nearly November; Auntie H's funeral, held 1 November, was sunny and warm, not a cloud in the sky.

I know I'm mostly preaching to the choir. If you read this blog all the time, chances are high that you agree with my POV mostly always. But.

Recycling and making a conscious effort to reduce our consumption of natural resources are, in my ever-so-humble, about the only way the average person can attempt to assist in slowing the destruction of the planet. Even though I don't plan to have kids, I'd like the next 3 generations to be able to continue to live on this planet. I'm working on doing my share; part of my next paycheck is going to one of these. Composting is something I feel I should have been doing for a long, long time. Cutting down on the amount of waste I contribute is a goal for the year.

Cool, eh?

41:28

The goal? Was to finish the race 1) running 2) on my own two feet and 3) not last. I succeeded in those 3 endeavors, although I did not manage to run the entire 3.1 miles. I walked some of it. I'm disappointed by that, but not deeply so.

I had some pain that I've never had running, and was upset by that. Shin splits, I've had plenty of experience with those, but that wasn't the problem. I developed a....cramp, maybe, for lack of a better term...in my right ankle, near the Achilles tendon, but closer to my ankle bone. It hurt, quite a bit. It developed before the first mile was up, and by the time I was finished with the race, I was limping. And wheezing, but we'll get to that.

This race, as I have explained before, was the one I chose because it was a FLAT course. It was a 2 laps of the fairgrounds it was held on. Before the first lap was done, I was wondering why the fuck I thought I could ever do this; I felt like something was trying to claw its way out of my chest, and right at that moment, I'd have gladly allowed someone to crack my chest with bolt cutters to let it out. Took a while for that to fade, too. I've felt that on the treadmill before, but I've just slowed down or stopped until I could catch my breath.

I say to people all the time: "It ISN'T a race, dude, slow down." But this WAS a race, and I was determined to not finish dead last, so slowing, well, wasn't so much of an option, really. I did walk for a portion of each lap, but I didn't stop, not even once, not even when my left shoe came untied with a mile of the race remaining.

DH took a few pictures, and aren't I the fashion plate in them! Grey stretch pants; a long-sleeved t from a public radio station, a black nylon pullover over the t, an orange-and-blue-and-burgundy striped beanie, a black & white number pinned to my tummy, a timer mechanism strapped to my ankle, two pairs of gloves, one cream, one burgundy (which did NOT match the burgundy in the hat, FYI) a red handkerchief, and a red neck-thingy, which I usually wear skiing. It takes the place of a scarf. Oh, and a jingle bell pinned to my left shoe, and my silver iPod in its black case strapped to my right arm in its usual place. The gloves didn't last past the first mile, and by the end of the race, the hat was off, too. Sharp, lemme tell ya.


The only reason I'm posting this picture is that it is a bit blurry, you can't make out the number on my stomach, and I think that if you don't know me very well, you wouldn't recognize me. I'm enough of a paranoid freak that it probably won't stay attached to the post for more than 24 hours.

I had decided previously to run to a Podrunner mix, one of my current favorites, Radiant Dark. At 166 BPM, it is a bit faster than I can really run, but I really like the music, so that was my choice. Additionally, at always at least an hour long, Podrunner mixes are pretty ideal for a race like this.

I couldn't run without music at all, and crossed the finish line to Eminem's Lose Yourself, from the 8 Mile soundtrack. While I'm not a huge fan of Em's anti-woman lyrics or a lot of his ideology, say whatever you like about the guy, Lose Yourself is hugely inspiring and something that gets me revved every time I listen to it. I had listened to it about 5 times before the race, and when I was thinking that I wasn't going to get across the finish line at all, I turned from the Radiant Dark mix to Lose Yourself, which brought me back up to speed.

I was looking at DJ Steveboy's blog a few hours after the race, and I'm so excited about his newest project; Podrunner Intervals. Click the linky above to read about it yourself, but the idea is to bring beginner runners from couch potato to half-marathon. Release date is Feb 1, 2008, and you bet your bottom dollar that I'll be adding that to my list of podcast subscriptions.

The aftermath of the race is that I hurt. I ache. My legs, that spot on my ankle, my lower back, and the base of each of my shoulder blades. I'm exhausted, have a headache, and it took several hours for asthmatic me to return to normal breathing. For all that, I can't wait to do this again. I'm on a high, one that I don't want to end.

I'll tell you this, too. I don't have plans anytime soon to run in temperatures much warmer than it was here today, about 40F or about 4C. No matter what the outside temp, you still sweat, and I was HOT. Any warmer, and I might've been faint.

Here's the best part. Today, my weight stands at 161, up a few pounds from my 40 lb loss, but I'm blaming that on the holidays and all the parties I've been at the last 2 weeks. It'll drop. The best part is that a year ago this time, I weighed 190, and couldn't walk up a flight of steps without wheezing. What an amazing long way I've come.

Look, if you had one shot, or one opportunity
To seize everything you ever wanted

One moment
Would you capture it?

or just let it slip?

~Eminem, Lose Yourself, 8 Mile Soundtrack

Unnecessary

The weather is ever-changing here in Oh-hia-ia. One of the very few things that I like about living here is that we have four distinct seasons; there's no mistaking summer for winter or vice-versa.

Although the actual date of winter is a few weeks away yet, we've been having a sample of winter's fury over the last few days. The wind, bitter, biting, and at near gale-force over the past few days has blown down power lines and trees. Overnight last night, each time I woke, I was reminded of people interviewed on the news after tornadoes; they always say that it sounds like a train. As it whipped around our home last night, I wondered if we were about to have an out-of-season tornado, because it sounded like a train had taken up residence on tracks that must invisibly circle the house.

And then it started to snow.

All day Monday, the snow was propelled to the ground with such stinging force, were you silly enough to leave any skin exposed, you'd be sorry.

I went to see my hairdresser, and was frozen walking across the parking lot. The salon is near my old place of employment, and for no reason other than self-torture, I drove past the old office.

It was dark, cold, snowing. Really, it couldn't have been more bleak. The signs identifying the place have been removed; I took the sign off of the front of the building myself, back in June. The bigger sign, near the sidewalk, was still there the last time I had been there. I don't know when it was removed, nor where it went. The blinds are all drawn, making the windows look like dead, empty eyes.

There was a time when this action would have sent me into a tailspin of agony, a long bout of self-flagellation, wondering why I couldn't have done something, anything, to save the facility from closing.

I'm mostly past that; circumstances far beyond my control converged into a unique situation that forced the closure. I know that now. I hate it when people tell me that something, "isn't my fault." Own up to your mistakes, take some responsibility for your own actions. But the loss of my old job wasn't my fault.

I'm still not to the point that I think that the loss of my job was a good thing; I can finally view it as an opportunity for a new direction. My new job is taking me on avenues I never expected, an adventure that I'm still not sure I can see the end of.

Needless torture, that walk down memory lane. It is still too painful to remember the good, fun, positive things that happened there. But it hurts a little less than it did a few months ago.

I found some of my old business cards in a bag I hadn't used for a while. Losing a job you love is like experiencing a death of a person, someone you loved. Just when you think that you're mostly over the grief, you stumble across something, like those business cards, that bowls you over and makes you catch your breath, trying to hold in the grief until the moment passes you by. So perhaps voluntarily choosing to drive past the old office was foolish, opening me to more grief needlessly.

To my extreme surprise, in the light of a new day, it isn't painful. But yes, it was unnecessary.

It IS still snowing, and fucking freezing.

Fall Color

I'm too exhausted to string more than a few sentences together. So today I'm posting pictures of the fall color in the area, which is the main reason that I like Oh-hia-ia at this time of year.


This tree is at the end of my driveway, and I noticed its magnificent hues driving home from the hospice yesterday. Instead of immediately heading to bed as I should have, I walked the neighborhood taking pictures.



Except for the ugly power lines in the way, I really like those two pictures because they show the variations in color that we have.


Amazing, isn't it, the colors that are on just one tree? Red, orange, yellow, green..

Dark reds, with many of the leaves already gone.

Again the tree at the end of the driveway.


More variations in color, a few houses down from mine.


The group of trees at the end of the driveway.

Attempting, yet again, to show the many colors on one tree.

Finally, a little dogwood that is right next to my garage. There's another dogwood in between my house and my neighbor's that is still green, but I couldn't get a clean shot of it so you'll have to take my word for it.

Changeability

A poet once said, "April is the cruelest month." I understand the sentiment, but I disagree with it. For me, it is October, always has been.

Autumn is the only time of year that I don't mind living in Oh-hia-ia. The extreme heat and humidity of the summer is gone, leaving behind a cooler and eminently more pleasant general climate. The bitter, bone-chilling winds of January are in the not-too-distant future, but not close enough to worry about. Snow rarely makes its first appearance until November or December.

The fall colors, more than rival to the famous colors in New England, are beautiful. We have the full spectrum of fall color, and it is spectacular to behold. The palest yellows, the same color as the light of a new dawn. Greens that were lush fade to mere memories of themselves. Gold, just like the fields of wheat that are being harvested. Reds, stunning in their brilliance. The 'red maples' have leaves of a nearly maroon tint, and they too fade to a lighter shade of themselves. Even the more common and less showy oranges and browns add to the display.

It happens gradually, leaves from beech or ornamental trees littering the ground in early September, before the rest begin to change. And then one morning we all wake to hints of red and orange in the trees. I live near a large metropolitan park, and driving along its twisting byways is a delight. As teenagers, we played 'road rally' on the park's drives, a stupid and dangerous (and fun) thing to do, because the hairpin turns don't allow you to see oncoming traffic. I drive slower there these days.

And yet, the weather is changing, and we have days like we've had over the last week, overcast, cloudy, rainy, and COLD. That is what makes this a cruel month; we go from flip-flops one day to needing jackets the next. Generally, I tell friends and family to complain to me about the cold after they've survived a winter in Scandinavia, because it isn't cold here. I normally don't bother with a coat until the temperature hovers in the 20-degree F (-7 C) range. But in the last week I've found myself reaching for a light jacket almost every day. Advancing age? Perish the thought.

My asthma always acts up in October, frustrating me, because most of the rest of the year it leaves me alone. The tickle in the back of my throat that signals an oncoming attack is nearly ever-present as soon as the leaves begin to fall. Each day with lower temperatures begins with an attack, deep, wracking coughs that make my eyes water, my nose run, and leave me gasping for air. Each evening, after dinner, as DH and I settle into watching television (him, usually) or reading (me), I have another small attack. It is these smaller evening attacks that end up making me more breathless, occasionally reaching for the rescue inhaler to stop them, something I'm too stubborn to do the rest of the year. But when I feel like I can't get enough air sitting in a recliner, it is time to accept that I might need the assistance that only the inhaler can provide.

As the month winds down, we go from skies of perfect autumnal blue to grey, where they stay for the rest of the year. We see brief peeks of sunshine between the stormy skies. I find myself looking at the ground rather than face that overcast sky. The days grow shorter and shorter, heading to the winter equinox. Losing the light is especially cruel. While I detest the heat and humidity of the summer, at least the days are long.

It is beautiful, though. This is a chill beauty, sometimes damp, but constantly changing. I miss the leaves when they're gone. The only upside to the falling leaves, as I see it, is that living in a condo, we are spared having to clean up the downed leaves. Instead we can simply enjoy their beauty (and bitch about the way the landscaper cleans them up). As a child, Saturdays in October were spent helping my father to round up thousands of pounds of leaves (no joke or exaggeration) so that the grass could be cut until the snow fell.


I turned the furnace on today, the biggest sign of the weather change of all. And I'm still freezing. Hand me that blanket, will ya?