snake

swim lessons this morning for olive and max.

before that cleaned the kitchen pretty good.

david and zhi went up to ski with her school.  her school goes skiing for pe class.

m, o and me ate lunch at the diner.

took max to school.  his three hours of school.

errand for david.

got new license plates for the new car.  i think i like the new digits.  i think?

sit and drink coffee with olive till it's time to get max.

browse the internet cuz i have nothing to write.  feel stupid for wasting time like that.  i need a new knitting project.  let olive play games on the phone.  feel stupid about that too.

i need a life david would say. (endearingly sort-of??)  like a life for these spare moments where i'm not sure what i'm supposed to be doing.  or where i don't use my time wisely.

coffee is my friend right now.  i've noticed that after my dad died, and now david's, coffee is good for me. have i already said that?  i feel like i have.  how weird my relationship with caffeine.  how thoroughly weird.  or is it wired?  aaaargh.  whatever it is, it is nice to be friends right now.  mmm.  coffee.

that was friday.


this is tuesday.  i've already had coffee.  and oatmeal.  now i have some oolong. (that would be fun to spell in scrabble.)

the kids are swimming with their grandma.   i'm feeling guilty for not swimming with them.  gonna try and let that guilt go very quickly.  it's okay that i want space.  it is okay.  it's okay.  ...........

i'm daydreaming  about getting personalized license plates.   it's a dumb fun thing to ponder.  what would it say? today i keep thinking of the word avatar.  mmmmm.  loving that word.  we need more avatars.  but that would seem really conceited and cocky of me to have it on my license plate.  i'd need an addendum added somehow that it's not me who is the avatar, i just like the concept.  i just think about avatars. i guess i'm getting into bumper sticker territory now too.  my bumper sticker would say, 'i like to think about avatars.'  heh.

thinking on how contractions are necessary for openings again, i mean, as far as i know,  in my tiny experience of this world.   and then last night i was reading, those silly pleiadians again ( i just love them sometimes), i saw that i could apply confusion and clarity to that same concept also.  often before clarity, comes confusion.  it doesn't mean i'm doing anything wrong to feel confusion.  it's natural.   and so is clarity when it comes along.  and if the confusion is feeling contraction and painful like, well, i can just sit down, kneel down, look up, whatever, and pray my butt off if there's no other bright idea coming on how to deal.  that's always an option, just pray.   i have such a fear of doing things the wrong way.


 i have such a love of being shown and taught, over and over again,  how doing things imperfectly/wrongly is just part of the processssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss.  that doing things wrong is not wrong.  it's kind-of sort-of right.



such a sneaky snakey life this can be.  so elusive the mastery of the lessons we desire to tuck away under our belts.  or in our boots.  or in our bras.  or wallets.

tonight is david's mom's last night here for this trip.  i am hoping that after dinner, or during dinner, we can sit and go around taking turns sharing memories we have of pawpaw.  and i will write them down in a special book i got for this purpose.  i hope that is in the flow for us tonight.  and i want to make collard greens.  and rice and beans.  mmmmmm.  simple.

i'm going through a phase with exposure.   it comes around my parts every now and then.  right now i am sitting in a more exposed part of the coffee shop.   i don't like it.  i'm going to move over a table and get more comfortable.

aaaaaaaaaah. so much better.  what the hell took me so long?  i sat there for 20 minutes trying to get into my groovyness and it was all contraction.  instant relief.  a friend and i had to do that the other night when we went out to dinner.  first table we sat down to was too exposed.  we moved over to a corner booth and it was an instant aaaaah.  sometimes i feel like our home is too exposed.  it's all relative i know, but we live on a corner in a mountain neighborhood, and it's like a juncture, an intersection where we live.  lots and lots of cars, relative again i know, and bikes (it's the most popular biking road in town i think) go by our house daily.  compared to all the other neighbors' homes in our hood.  for people who chose to  tuck themselves away in the hills, it's not really tucked.  it's more like, hi!  here we are, living on the hill.  and then there's our livelihood.  we have storefronts.  i certainly didn't bring that reality upon us, but i did most certainly join in to it, knowing full well what i was signing up for.  and then there's motherhood, to children who are entering into the social world.  schools.  no tucking away going on there.  it's a full on outward expression with lots of hi's.  i'm slowly being nudged out of my safe~feeling turtle shell that i tucked myself into since about the time i became an adult and could somehow be that way and still have my life.  like i chose an adult life, pre~children,  that was hermit like.  i chose a social life that was kind of like that.  and now, by the circumstances of our lives that we then chose and created, i am having to come out.  boo.  luckily it happens slowly, sort-of.  but if i were left to my own doings, oh what a hermit i would be.  david too.  i find it confusing and hilarious that we have created this outward life.  that we live at an intersection.  (and oh how hilarious it would be for some of you to see what i'm referring to as an intersection.  but still.  come on.  relativity people.  we feel it.  and just so you know i'm not the only one, the people who lived in our house before us, had issues with this too.  the guy bob who lived here before us, used to yell out obscenities at the bikers who ride by having loud conversations  out loud all the way around our house, telling them to shut it up.  he did it in front of us once.  like a 'shut the fuck up' kind of thing, yelled out with no apprehension at all.  ha.  it's just an anomaly of mountain living, this one house in particular, is just right there asking to play with the world all the time.)   i am cracking up at this.  my sister in brooklyn is probably dying at the words i'm writing here.  to her, we are tucked.  TUCKED.  but anyhow, i've got a desire to tell it in the way that i experience it sometimes.  i like the elusive corner.  hiding.   i like burying my head in the sand.   i like pulling my head into my shell.  but then, the winds change randomly, and i don't like hiding all of a sudden.  how slithery and confusing is all this?  what the hell are us hermits who are being urged to step out of our comfort zone, when we aren't feeling it,  to do?  the moon never has to go off her sweet course.  she is only full when it's time.  right on time.  be brave sweet hermits.  just be fucking brave.  there's a part of your soul wanting to come out, yah?  we are humans, not the moon.   the clarity will come.  and there are often nice hidden corners to go into before those winds of change come and make you want to go out and play.



i gave the kids a large dose of elderberry syrup yesterday.  and myself too.



our mom is so old.


evening now.

dinner was chaos.  not the time for what i was hoping to do with memories.  i will just start the book more organically.  write down things the kids have been saying lately.  things i remember.  we will add to it as it happens.  we will bring it on our next trip to baltimore perhaps.  love.  i went with the flow and didn't force more into the chaos that was dinner tonight.  crazy.  at one point, i look at david's mom and say, 'is the micromanaging just too much?  how can i do this differently?'  you know, referring to what was needed tonight to keep our kids from spinning out completely, from going to the land of no return which they sometimes do and it sucks so i micromanage the hell out of them sometimes to prevent that whole absurdity.  but then the micromanaging feels thoroughly absurd too.  she said, 'there are no short cuts.'  i love that she said that.  thank you.  my wrong is not wrong.  it's just this hard.  and i'm going through the crazy chaos at dinner with my machete in hand, whacking away for us a path to get to bed in one piece.  phew!  such hard work sometimes.

james blake.  lindisfarne I and  lindisfarne II is my favorite song right now.  sending a whole cd of his music to a friend tomorrow.  just burned it for her.  she needs some lovin.  i hope it helps.  it sure helps me lately.  how can this cover he did not help us all?