One Cobble at a Time

Today began with walnuts. Well, I guess technically it began with breakfast, but walnuts were next an they took up the largest part of this morning. Yesterday the kids spent a lot of time indoors glued to the TV, so I was determined to get them outside. Fortunately our trees have co-operated by dropping leaves all over our yard, so I was able to require the kids to go rake them. This led to hours of raking and jumping with both my kids and neighbor kids as well.

The walnut tree had not only dropped leaves, it had dropped walnuts. Some of these were gathered up last week, but most of them were still on the ground. I made the kids stop raking long enough to help me gather up the nuts. Their co-operation became much more willing after Howard came out to shake the tree. He brought down a veritable hailstorm of nuts and we picked them all up. Then I sat on the steps and pulled husks off of the walnuts while the kids played. Walnut husks are messy. They stain everything. They are even worse when they’ve been left sitting in water for a week. Yuck. I forced myself to finish the job. Now I’ve got 4 buckets and 2 dishpans full of walnuts in their shells. The next step is cracking them all open and drying them. It is a lot of work, but the walnuts from our tree are the yummiest walnuts I’ve ever tasted.

I wish I could say that the afternoon was as fruifully spent as the morning, but it wasn’t. The afternoon slipped away from me until Howard came in saying “Do we have a dinner plan?” I scrounged up a dinner and remained unmotivated to clean up the various messes that filled my home. I did have a burst of energy just before putting little kids to bed. During that I required the kids to help me clean up our family room. I managed it by saying “Let’s surprise Daddy!” They all felt like that would be fun. But Howard wandered out of his office before we were done and Gleek ordered him back in so that he could be surprised when we were done. He disapeared until summoned and was suitably “surprised.”

The last few days I’ve been very busy getting stuff done. I’ve finally tackled the list of yardwork that has been staring at me for most of the summer. But despite the fact that I got stuff done I ended yesterday feeling very discouraged. I have this whole list of things that I feel should be happening in my household regularly. But if I don’t make them happen they won’t. The kids should be putting laundry away once a week. Bathrooms should get cleaned more often than once a month (or less). Floors should be swept at least daily. Clothes do not belong on floors. Shoes belong in closets. Plates with food on them should not be sitting around on the counter for hours let alone days. When I am focused on it I do alright at being a good housekeeper, but there are so many things that I would rather be doing.

In theory I should be training the kids to clean up after themselves so that I don’t have to try to do it all myself. But I get so tired of making them do stuff. When they’re happily playing the last thing I want to do is begin a confrontational hour where I require them to do housework. Yet if I don’t they’ll never learn and I’ll continually feel like a failure because I simply can’t keep up with the various messes left by six people.

Yes Howard helps around the house. But if he is in his office working to put food in our mouths it seems counter-productive for me to haul him off to clean the bathroom. He works incredibly hard already.

No deep thoughts or epiphanies today. Just lingering frustrations left over from the past week.

I wasn’t pleased with how today went. It felt like the day slipped away from me and I was left at the end of it with a messy house and no energy.

The For Sale sign went up on my next door neighbor’s lawn. They’ve been here as long as we have and I’m really sad to see them leave. It would be nice to have a family move in, one with kids to be friends with my kids. I’ll be happy to just settle for good neighbors. The house just beyond their house will also be going up for sale sometime soon. That one belongs to Link’s best friend. I’m working hard to help him develop other friendships so that the blow isn’t as hard, but he is really going to miss his friend when the move happens.

And now I’m up too late again. 6:30 am is going to come far too soon.

A couple of books have come to my awareness. I’ve not read either one, but I’m amused by their existence.

The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists is essentially an instruction book for guys on how to become a pickup artist and get any girl that you want.

The Rules: Time-tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right is essentially and instruction book for women on how to snare a man into marriage.

The researcher in me wants to take 20 or so Rules Girls and 20 or so Game Guys and throw them into a bar, then take notes to see which manipulative system wins.

Halloween season has truly arrived. I know this because today was the day that I pulled out the big red bags o’ costumes and demanded that the kids make their final selections. I have to have time to get costumes made. Even more important I have to have time to scrounge so that I can get costumes made cheaply. Gleek has been telling me what she wants to be for Halloween almost every day for a month. Unfortunately her choices changed each day. Fortunately Kiki has consented to allow Gleek to duplicate her Ice Princess costume and I’m confident that while Gleeks choices will continue to fluxuate from day to day, when the actual day comes she’ll be happy to put on a costume like her sister’s. Link has stuck steadfastly to his decision to be Shark Boy and Patches doesn’t care and so he’ll probably end up wearing the costume that caused Link’s online nickname: Link from legend of Zelda.

All of this is good news for me because I already have most of the large peices that are necessary. All that is left is to accesorize. Well, that isn’t entirely true in Link’s case. For him I’ll be making a tunic & cuffs to go over grey sweats and a gray shirt. A little more work, but still essentially accesories.

I’ve got a cloak that I’m re-working for myself. It was given to me by a friend who no longer wanted the emotional baggage that was attached to it. The cloak has no baggage for me, so I’m happy to have it. Unfortunately it was designed for a person 6 inches taller than me, so I’m having to shorten it some. I also want to put on detail work to make it pretty. I doubt I’ll have the time or energy to make the dress I envision to wear with the cloak. Not to mention fabric. I don’t have the yards of fabric either. Besides a Shark Boy tunic, Ice Princess accesories, and a cloak is probably plenty of sewing to keep me busy from now until Halloween.

It is interesting what can be dredged from the depths of a psyche. I was reading a book today about a character who was regaining consciousness after an unexpected and unauthorized surgery. I had … I don’t think it qualifies as a flashback, but it was certainly a very vivid memory of a post-surgical recovery that I had about 8 years ago. It was vivid enough that I just spent an hour writing down all the things I remember about it in an attempt to purge it from my head. I’m not posting it here though because Howard reads this journal (Hi honey!) and I know it was as unpleasant for him as it was for me. I don’t want to fill his head with angsty thoughts while he is away from home.

Instead I intend to ramble about how the house got cleaned. I bribed the kids with brownies. It worked too. In the afternoon Kiki & Link ran off to a friends and Patches went down for a nap. I sat down with Gleek to watch Annie. She’d never seen it before and I was pretty sure that all the singing & dancing would appeal to her. I was right, she was riveted. Or at least she was until my backyard neighbor called; both she and her husband had come down sick. Her toddler was not sick and they weren’t able to keep him out of stuff, so I got him and brought him over to play. Gleek would rather play with people than watch movies so the rest of Annie only got sporadic attention, but it was enough that she was singing and dancing through the credits.

This morning was unusual as well. Kiki spent the night in the Christa McAulliffe Space Education Center. (www.spacecamputah.org) as far as I know it is the only facility of it’s kind in america. It is located at an elementary school and runs 6 space ship simulators. (Yes that is right, 6 different space ships and each of the ships has 3 or more possible simulations it can run. New simulations are added for each ship each year. This center is an enormous undertaking.) The simulations are based on the star trek universe, but each simulation has educational purposes in teaching kids skills and information. We got to tour the facility and it was amazing. Each simulator was set up like the interior of a space ship with task stations. Each station had a computer and there was a veiwscreen at the front. One ship was wired so that the floor could rumble. The largest ship was even set up with bunk spaces and a kitchen so that they could run multi-day simulations for a crew of 10 without leaving the “ship”. The simulators are primarily available to local schools, but they also run simulations for private groups. Howard went through one once and described it in a convention report. Now that I’ve seen the center I find that I’m spinning plans in my head so that I could go on one. I’ll bet we could round up enough local schlockers to pay for a private event. hmm…

Anyway, Kiki loved it. She wants to go back. I wish we could afford to send her back as often as she’d like to go. As it is, her school class will be taking a day trip there in the spring and maybe we can save up money for her to attend one of the camps in the summer. Link, Gleek, & Patches all got to tour too. Perhaps fortunately for me, they can’t go until they are 10, so I don’t have to listen to that begging yet. They had never seen anything so cool. I just think it is wonderful the way that the visionary behind this center has a whole school district converted to the idea that LARPing can be educational.

And now I need to make kids go to bed.