We went to the local We Hate Evil Pagans celebration.

Last night we went to the local We Hate the Evil Pagans celebration. Last night we went to the local We Hate the Evil Pagans celebration. (I know, I know, some people choose not to celebrate Halloween, just like we don’t celebrate Christmas and I shouldn’t have an attitude about it but I DO.) A local private Christian school was having a fall festival, with all sorts of games, in an effort to soothe the disappointed not-celebrating-Halloween students.

See? There I go again. I’m so bad. (Lately people all over town have been offering Paul free candy. I say no, they ignore me and offer it to him again. No, I say, and, looking at him, they say pleadingly, “It’s just a little piece!” or “Gosh, what a shame.” On the one hand, yay, they’re treating him like an independant human being, on the other hand boo, they think it’s a great idea but they don’t have to deal with the sugar high/crash.)

Anyway. I made a big point of not making a bunch of sarcastic comments or having preconceived notions, and on the whole it was really a quite nice evening, except for the scary-eyes-lady who had to ask if Paul attended the school and when we said no, she asked us why we came and then gave us not the 8 tickets we’d paid for but 15 instead - why? I don’t know why. We ran away screaming.

I was pleasantly surprised by the lack of gender-stereotyping. Not only were most of the girls in pants (there’s this local religious group that only allows the girls and women to wear, I’m not kidding, demin skirts. Even in the middle of very humid 98 degree days) but there weren’t any drawings on the walls of 50s-era depictions of men or women. I have to say, though, the oil painting of the dinosaur in Eden gave me the giggles.

Thought Processes

Submitted entry: I actually have a few minutes to write since I got done with my work a little early today and so my plan is to write this, send it and then assemble the lasagne I’ve been meaning to make for days now. It would seem that I have gotten through the worst of the caffeine withdrawal now. It was about a week of achy joints (one night I could hardly walk) and headaches. I haven’t had any symptoms like that since last Thursday - about 6 days after I gave up coffee. I was told to expect 5-7 days of flu-like symptoms and headaches and I got everything I was promised.

Interestingly enough it’s been way easier this time. I am taking some Chinese herbs to help get my energy level back to normal and for that reason I think it’s being easier. I don’t feel like quite the zombie I did when I tried to quit before. Of course this time I don’t have to drive to work, work long hours and worry about being awake on the commute home. That helps a great deal I’m sure. My energy level has been way more even, actually. When I was drinking coffee I would have productive and energetic highs but could expect pretty low lows - usually in the afternoon when I was working with Paul. I’d just be praying with every cell in my body that he’d have a nap. And of course he wouldn’t so I’d have another cup of coffee or two. Those cups would keep me awake until 11:00-12:00 or so. Then I’d have to wake up at 7:00 again - tired as usual then have coffee, be awake until the afternoon crash and so on. Now I don’t feel wired at any time, but at the same time I rarely feel dog-tired as I would on a daily basis.

It’s funny, though, as I feel very different inside. Different in terms of thought “speed” and level of control I have over my thought processes. The anxiety I felt recently had a lot to do with my being fixated on possible outcomes of what’s going on in the world or a simple symptom like a cough or ache. I’d get some crazy idea and completely run with it. Now that I’ve cut out coffee I’m able to let go of those trains of thought. Funnily enough, I don’t really feel like me anymore as a result. I think that my sense of self was really based upon myself when I was really wired. And of course it would be - after much thought I realized that I’ve been drinking some form of caffeine since I was maybe twelve. In other words, I haven’t experienced life as an adult without caffeine. Scary thought, eh?

Let’s see what else is going on these days. Well, I’m in the market for a bicycle now. I have thought about it for some time anyway as our town is pretty small and it seems silly to drive across town for something, but at the same time it seems tedious to walk. A friend of ours gave us a bike of theirs to try to see if we want to buy it but unfortunately it’s a little too small. So I’m calling around and looking for something more my size and perhaps a little newer. I rode this one long enough to realize that I like having one again and that it could be quite a good thing to have. With our mild winters (okay, sometimes punctuated by horrible storms) it is likely that I could ride year round.

Oh, and we found something interesting out about our house last week. There were a couple holes in the floor in the living room that as it turns out came from the previous tenants leaving windows and doors open in rainstorms. Anyway, a person came in to fix them and we asked him about the floor in Sage’s office which isn’t very level. He said that it’s settling as that room is on a block foundation. In fact, he said, this house used to be our neighbors garage. Well, the living room and bathroom that is. They added a kitchen on one side, the office on the other and the playroom/bedroom on the back and put some nice siding on and it became the house you see above. It’s the nicest garage we’ve lived in!

Sage is still on her redecorating train. Yesterday she started repainting the bathroom. In fact, every room in this house needs painting. In Pennsylvania it was a requirement that all landlords paint in between tenants but apparently not here. Well, that mayn’t be true, actually. Our landlady offered to paint, drywall and recarpet the whole house before we moved in. The down side of that would’ve been that we’d have been in the yurt that much longer which was an uncomfortable place to be (interpersonally, not physically) and she also would’ve raised the rent. Instead we’re doing all the improvements and as a result pay only $190/month.

And now I’m off to check the pawn shop for bicycles and assemble the lasagne.

My Scariest Halloween

I actually did have something written up, but decided instead that I had to put my best (okay, only) Halloween story in instead. This is from Coffee Shakes, dated October 31, 1995. The scariest halloween I ever had was a night I was waiting for Marian and another friend to be driven to my house and pick me up to go trick or treating, I think I must have been about thirteen. I was all by myself in the apartment, and I had all the lights off so that people would think I wasn’t home and I wouldn’t have to explain to anyone that I didn’t have any candy. I started watching the beginning of the movie “Halloween”, which I’d recorded when it was on earlier that night, and was really creeping myself out, I mean, if you’ve ever seen the movie you know how creepy the beginning is, with that awful music, and was walking around in circles in the living room because I was nerve-wracked, and watching the clock so I’d know how long I had before Marian and the other friend arrived, and suddenly there was this

BANG! BANG! BANG!

on the door and I squeaked because it was so unexpected and then these kids started shouting through the door, “WE KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE!” which was also highly creepy because they didn’t sound cute and amusing, they sounded like they were going to break through the door if they didn’t get some candy right that minute.

Desperate for Decent Reading Material

Submitted entry: I’m having a short lull before I can work (waiting for some information to be sent) so I’m going to take the opportunity to write a bit. Work is still going steadily though we’re coming to the end of the project. We’ve got a fair amount saved up, though which is helpful in the case that there’s time before the next paying job (Sage’s or mine) comes in. We did wind up spending a lot of what we made on this job already though. But, Sage reminds me, we spent it on things that we needed for a while, and will either last a while due to how they were built (handmade shelves for Paul’s playroom, for instance, or new flooring in the playroom and bathroom) or have warranties like our new stove (the old one died last week - it started making very bad popping sounds that dimmed the lights in the house when I’d turn on the oven) and stereo. We should also have quite enough to buy Sage’s dentures this winter. There may be a short wait, however, before we can get the new engine for the car.

The car still is working wonderfully in town - runs great in fact. However, a friend has diagnosed it with agoraphobia. Back in the summer we went to a yard sale way out of town and didn’t quite make it because the car started sputtering and backfiring when it hit this one hill. So we turned around and made it home just fine. Then we had the spark plugs changed and it ran great. Well, except I couldn’t get out of town very far with it - I tried one and it didn’t sputter like it did but wasn’t happy about it.

Anyway - this Sunday we were really desperate for decent reading material so I woke up in the morning and Sage and I discussed that perhaps we were mistaken that the car wasn’t having problems at all and that I was being overly critical of how it ran after it was fixed. So I took it for a ride up the same road I tried it on the last time and it ran great. So we packed us all in the car and headed for Springfield. We made it ten miles and were quite confident at that point that we were going to make it all the way to Springfield. Then Sage and I each did a stupid thing. First I said, jokingly, “Sage, do you see that Plexiglass wall up ahead?” (we’ve been joking that we’re either in the Truman Show or in the Twilight Zone episode where people couldn’t leave town and it turned out in the end that it was because they were in a model railroad). At about the same time Sage starts being a little concerned - mostly in a joking way - what all our friends will think given that we’ve been telling them that our car couldn’t make it out of town and here we were off to Springfield. Well, our car obliged us at that point and started sputtering and we had to turn around. And interestingly enough, the closer we got to home the better the car ran. See? Agoraphobia. Our car’s a homebody.

Tonight we’re doing our first trick-or-treating time with Paul. He never was interested in previous years (okay - this is only the fourth Halloween he was alive for). This year he has been so excited about the holiday. It started back when we were snowed in at the yurt with an audiobook of “Scary Scary Halloween” by Eve Bunting. He was fascinated with the whole thing then and the more decorations he saw recently (as far off as August) the more he wanted to celebrate it. So now his playroom is decorated, he’s got his witch costume and he’s really excited to go out this evening. We’re going to go to several houses in town as well as the businesses on the square. There’s also a costume contest and parade that we might go to.

We’re also giving out treats this year. No, nobody ever came to visit us at the yurt and we never gave treats out when we lived in the city before. So this’ll be a first for us. Sadly we’re going to be that house that nobody’s very interested in, I think. Why? Raisins, that’s why. We’re giving them out - we’ll be the disappointing new age family whose treats we were disappointed with as kids. Of course we understand now. We’ll have enough candy to deal with (and live with the results of in terms of sugar highs) without leftover candy from our own giveaways. With Paul we’ve figured out that he can have three treats tonight and then one per day thereafter. Given that he gets a bit crazed with raisins or fruit, this is not only us being concerned about his health, I think it’s a self preservation move!

Oh, and just a note of advice - you can make up the story as you like around this one because I’m not going to stoop to the level of giving details out. Don’t give your child a bag of dried apricots without supervision just a few hours before bed. You’ll wind up with rather a larger and more distasteful cleanup project than you want to take on at 11:00 PM.

Y’all can scowl at me.

Oooo, my bad. Y’all can scowl at me - Todd did write an entry on September 16, but I never got around to posting it. It’s up now. I’ve got bifocals, the dentist tells me I need dentures and I can’t drive at night. Perhaps I should just check myself into the local nursing home and be done with it. I’ll be especially careful of my hip this winter, you bet.

Actually, the thought of being done with tooth pain forever is extremely attractive. After two root canals (by two different dentists, both failures), I have little faith that anything short of a divine miracle could save my teeth. I go in on December 4, then spend 4-6 weeks toothless ("So sorry, Sage cannot come to the phone as every word she says is completely incomprehensible and she has to communicate by sign") before getting my false teeth. Apparently the drug they’ll sedate me with is so powerful that for 24 hours my skill levels with be about that of a 9 month old baby. Whee!

My five current video rental recommendations:

Cast Away - How embarassing to love a movie that has been so popular in the mainstream, but really - the themes in this movie (family before work, especially) made so much sense to me. Yes, I cried when Wilson floated away. See? I’m a bigger sap than you are. If I could find sound clips, I’d put the "It’s gone. I DON’T KNOW WHY!" clip from when the sail blows away in the storm to play whenever Windows ME crashes, which happens a scant three to four times a day…

Addicted to Love - Who could have predicted that Meg Ryan and Matthew Broderick would have good comic timing and even better romantic chemistry?

Bridget Jones’s Diary - Another mainstream movie, but fun to see Hugh Grant play a part that suits him: a creep with a degenerate hairdo. Again, Zwillinger and Firth have excellent chemistry, a phenomenon that seems to be disappearing in recent movies.

Popcorn Chutney - So nice to see a movie with lesbians in it (GASP!) after being subjected to the local video store which thinks carrying movies like As Good as It Gets is daring. The first assistant DA from Law & Order plays one half of the couple beautifully, and those of you familiar with her cookbooks will be surprised to learn that Madhur Jaffrey does a fantastic job of playing the main character’s mother.

Noises Off - I have never laughed so hard while watching a movie. We watched it once, then immediately rewound it and watched it again - then again the next day. Usually we need 3-5 years before we’ll watch a movie again. Don’t be put off by the cast. It’s worth watching.

Without coffee, I am nothing.

Submitted entry: Well, you’ll have to forgive me - not just for not doing an entry in over a month and not posting an entry since August - but also for the quality of this entry. I’m out of practice and out of my usual state as well. I feel as if I’ve lost my voice so to speak. See, I haven’t had a cup of coffee since two mornings ago. And in retrospect I am pretty certain that I am well-caffeinated whenever I write an entry. Anyway, I sat looking at this screen in that stereotypical way that Hollywood portrays blocked authors looking at their paper/typewriter/computer screen. Finally I just realized that I could talk about why I was staring blankly at the screen instead of just diving in.

It seems to have worked, somewhat anyway. Why, do you ask, haven’t I had my morning cup of coffee? Well, it’s quite simple really. Lately, I am finding that more than a cup of coffee drives me absolutely crazy. I mean, I like the energy boost and all, but lately it also makes me incredibly anxious. Not about anything actually going on in my life - just a general anxiety that I focus on whatever is slightly stressful in my life - the headache I have, the ping in the car, whatever. So anyway, I haven’t had a cup since the day before yesterday morning - my last cup.

I tried to cut down a few weeks ago with the help of some Chinese herbs given by a friend of ours who is an acupuncturist/Chinese herbalist and I think it would’ve worked save one thing. I didn’t really cut down on the caffeine and took the energizing herbs on top of it. Ugh. I was worse off. I did start out by cutting down, though but what wound up happening was that I would have my morning cup intending on it being my last, or maybe one of two that I’d have that day. Instead I’d have such a crash from the first cup that I’d crave the subsequent cup(s) more than the first.

How’s it been not having caffeine? In some ways it’s been better than expected. I haven’t been as grumpy as I expected I’d be. The headaches I’d planned on enduring for days actually only happened the first night (the day of my last cup) and they were gone by yesterday morning. I effectively slept through them. But then I started to get achy in a flu-like way. By the end of the evening after a short walk to the square for dinner with Paul and Sage my legs were really sore. Fortunately that lasted only through the night and was gone this morning.

So what else has been going on in our lives? Well, let’s see. I’m still working about 20 hours/week. Still all at home, of course. Sage and I finally seem to have figured out how to balance our working times. There was a time where we seemed to be running around getting things done in the morning and then either one or both of us wouldn’t get the time in to work that we did. So now we set ourselves some better guidelines. Now we made it so that one of us starts working within an hour after Paul wakes up (which is what usually wakes me). If, by some chance, Sage and I wake up before him we allow ourselves 15 minutes to read our email and such before we start our morning chores. Then I work for 3-4 hours (6 days/week) before we switch and Sage works for five hours (or until 6:00 PM - whichever comes first). True to our habits I’m sure this will change sometime but for now it works great for us.

In fact, I’m sure it will change. I still hope to be able to fully “retire” and be with Paul all day and maybe do some writing. Where we’re at now, though, work-wise is sort of difficult. See, I’m working to support us right now. Sage is working as well, though mostly for barter as the work she’s doing is all local. The barter’s great, though - handmade clothes, shelves, desks, acupuncture, craniosacral work, massage, bath salts, bubble bath for Paul. Lots of stuff we wouldn’t normally spend money on. And of course it fills Sage’s portfolio out nicely. Sometime though, I’m confident that Sage will be doing the majority of the financial support of us and I can do my thing (though to be quite honest I haven’t quite figured out entirely what my thing is!)

We’re still trapped in town (did I mention this?). Our little Geo needs a new engine - it sputters on hills and seems to need new rings and then some. So it runs great for getting around town but as we are surrounded by hills we’re stuck here until we buy a new engine. We’ve got the money right now but I haven’t really shopped around much and there’s another larger expense coming up that we want to save up a few more weeks for - Sage needs dentures - I’ll let her tell the whole story. So anyway it’ll be a few weeks at least before we get out of town on our own. In the meantime it works great to just stay in town, catch a ride out once in a while, and order things online as necessary. The only pain is getting library books. We can’t get to the Springfield library regularly so we’re using our local one. Fortunately we haven’t really the time to read so it works out just fine.

Also, embarassingly enough, we’ve been aquiring stuff again. We have as many appliances and more furniture than we had before we moved to Missouri. I suppose the difference now is that we’re actually using them. While we bought ourselves a breadmaker - something I always considered too suburban for words 5 years ago - we’re actually using it. Since we bought it a little over a month ago we’ve used it several times/week and haven’t bought any bread since. We paid only $50 for it and as whole grain bread costs in excess of $3 for a loaf at the health food store (and we eat 3-5 loaves/week) we figure it’s already paid for itself. Sage and I joke that we were “traumatized” by our time at the yurt living without modern conveniences and all. In all honesty, though, there really isn’t much truth to that - for me at least. Our needs remain the same - heat, food (we are sort of picky in this respect, though), water (it’s nice to have it coming out of the pipes in hot and cold, though), a net connection for social and business contact and music.

Sage and I have also started watching movies together again a few times a week. It’s a good way to veg out in the evening and Sage is back crocheting again while she watches. The local video stores haven’t much in the way of DVD selection so we’ve joined DVD Barn which has worked out well for us. We pay a flat monthly rate and they ship us DVDs, as many as three at once that we keep as long as we want. That last part is good as we rarely are awake enough to watch a whole movie in one evening after Paul goes to sleep.

Sage meanwhile is on the train of redecorating this house - we’ve replaced the playroom floor (green shag carpeting) with linoleum as it’s more suitable for playing on, doing art projects and so forth. She just painted her office a few weeks ago.

What, you ask? Have Sage and Todd turned into these crazy suburbanites? Is their next step to send their child into an expensive and exclusive Waldorf preschool? Fear not - it isn’t as bad as it sounds. We’re just in the process of cleaning up this house that when we moved in was in pretty bad shape.

Meanwhile in other areas things are going as you might expect. Paul and I are doing playgroups still and are hoping to host a few here soon. And a friend of ours and I have been talking about setting up some sort of co-op learning center. Probably something as simple as sharing the rent on a house where we’d have shared toys, books and other resources, maybe do a few workshops (adults and children) and whatever else it evolves into. It’s still in the very early stages and we’re still getting our own lives organized but I think it’d be a great winter project.

Oh, and Sage and I celebrated our 10th anniversary on the 25th of September - that’s anniversary of meeting - more meaningful to us than our marriage anniversary. We thought a long time about how we would spend it and came up with what turned out to be a fun idea. A friend of ours made us a ton of veggie sushi and then we rented the local movie theatre for a couple hours that afternoon to watch a movie. Yes, only in our town can most people afford to do this. It cost us all of $25 and we could have had as many as 5 people (but we just wanted the two of us) and so they set up a VCR and LCD projector and we watched Cast Away (our recent favorite - I think we’ve seen it about four times now) on the big screen.

I haven’t forgotten, by the way, about our walking to the ocean project. As soon as we came up with the idea our car died. And with no transportation back from wherever we wind up we can’t get too far out of town. Soon it will be fixed and it should work out well - the ticks in the forest won’t be quite so bad, nor will the undergrowth.

Seems as if a great number of our friends (couples) with kids have broken up this year. None of the breakups were particularly surprising but what is surprising is how many of them have ended up with not only the people breaking up but the mom moving out of state. It’s all really sad to see the childrens’ lives changed like this. So now of all the parents we knew, there are only three sets of intact families left. And on top of that, two of those three families are very seriously considering leaving the Ozarks. Fortunately people haven’t stopped moving into the area so I’m sure we’ll meet more parents and did indeed meet one aunt (who takes care of her sister’s kids every day) this Friday so all is not lost I’m sure. It’s just weird to see things change, and hard for us to see these childrens’ lives changing so drastically.

Almost time for me to make dinner and free up Sage to work. Hope I was fairly coherent in this entry - it was an experience writing this without caffeine to say the least.

Is that God?

Sage is working on a package design for a client that involves a gingerbread man. Paul comes in and points to the monitor. Paul Mama, is that god?

Sage, taken off guard Er…uh…well, god can look whatever way you think god should look. So sure, that could be god.

***

And the award for tackiest capitalization on a tragedy goes to…Wal-Mart! What a stunning surprise.

A velvet Elvis is more tasteful than this disgusting thing I saw yesterday. It’s a 6 x 2 framed picture, gold on black, skyline of New York City, with "1976 - 2001. We will remember."

Yes, people who wish they’d designed the velvet Elvis tapestry first: we will remember your unmitigated gall. You bet.

And as regards September 11: I’m not paying any attention to the news because the newsanchor’s design is to panic the listener. Call me an ostrich, I don’t care.

Soon we’ll put up a peace flag on our house.

***

Ding-dong, the fleas are gone, let them know the fleas are gone, ding-dong, the nasty fleas are gone… It seems incredible now, but we can hardly remember having fleas. Hooray for salt! Three cheers for salt! Hip hip hooray!

Anita died soon after Claire did, and I think she just felt rudderless without her sister. I miss them both. It feels very strange to put out wet food for just four cats. On the up side, we found good homes for the two kittens and their mama cat and feel confident that we’ll be able to take in local cats when need be, and keep them if Paul isn’t allergic, and find homes for them if he is.

Todd went out to the local ATM the other night and came home laughing, saying he was running around the bank in the dark after a lovely cat who didn’t seem to have a home and wouldn’t come to him. He was lucky no one called the cops.

I recently had a psychic reading as barter for web work, and was told that Todd and I have the most compatible charts of anyone she’s ever run across. To think I spent my high school years pouring over astrology books to see how compatible I was with my current crush, and then found Todd by accident.

***

And, because I’m completely stuck for anything else to say, I’ll just put a little tidbit in from Coffee Shakes, circa September 16, 1996:

Todd loves maps. He can spend hours looking at a road atlas. I’m not kidding! He says it’s like an adventure story that hasn’t been written yet, what a dingbat. So we were in the car on Sunday and he said we were 120 miles from some town and I said, "Oh?" and he looked crushed and said, "You’re not even interested," and I laughed and said, "Okay, what would your dream girl say? Wait, wait, don’t tell me, let me guess. ‘One hundred and twenty miles? REALLY? That’s fascinating! Wow, I’m going to look it up in the road atlas right now, and see how many miles it is to Maine, and Ohio, and Oregon…’ " He grinned and said, "Yes! That’s exactly the way my dream girl would reply." I turned on the radio and was trying to find a station I could stand and Todd said, "Here, now I’ll be your dream boy. ‘Can you please find an easy listening station? Something with Anne Murray would be perfect.’ "

09/11/01

Submitted entry: Well, unbeknownst to most of you I sort of temporarily abandoned this journaling enterprise. Part of me had decided that I really had very little interesting to say - and frankly that could still be true, and another part of me had come up with an idea with the help of Paul and Kite for a book based upon an offline journal that I am about to start. But after this week, I’m in a place where writing - where communicating is something I could really use.

Of course there’s the obvious - part of me just wants to avoid writing a journal entry because of the tragedy that happened this week. It sounds crazy and selfish but it seems as if all that can be said has been said. It was a horrifying thing to wake up to. In fact, I didn’t even know what happened when I started the day. Our routine of listening to the radio seems to have fallen by the wayside. This Tuesday I woke up early and called my client in Yonkers, NY. After several tries to get through where I checked and rechecked the number I was dialing I finally got through and was put on hold and listened to some people concernedly talking about some airplane. When I asked my client how he was doing he broke the news. I don’t think it really sank in at the moment and so instead I made some silly joke about it being like a bad b-movie or something. When I heard it on NPR and then from a friend who called it started to become more and more real. At that point I began to worry - not about my safety from terrorists in our neck of the woods but for what everyone we know here continues to worry about - what George Bush’s reaction is going to be and what trouble that is going to cause for the world. Paul was expecting to have a friend over and he decided that he didn’t want to have her over after all and so instead I called and cancelled with them. Then Paul wanted to go to see his granny and so we got in the car and headed over. Good move as I could really use some help with childcare. Not only was I somewhat of a mess emotionally but the headache I woke up with was rapidly getting worse.

So where am I now? Anxious would be a good word. I feel a sense of general anxiety which I am applying towards anything that I can possibly worry about. What might those be?

The disasters of course are high on the list. I am reminded of it quite frequently for various reasons. You can’t go anywhere without being reminded whether it’s the tv in Wal Mart or the clerk at the thrift store. Everyone’s talking about it.

Then there’re the cats. I don’t know if I mentioned (or wrote since then) but with the flea problem we had earlier in the summer we bought some Hartz Advanced Care flea treatment (the stuff between the shoulders you buy in department stores). Big BIG mistake, that. Within hours of administering it to four cats - Claire, Anita, Shelly and Harriet they were all acting weird and sick. Claire, being the scrawniest progressed the quickest. The next night she was having trouble getting around, didn’t want to eat or drink. I looked up the product on the net and found that there were a number of lawsuits against Hartz for just this product. They suggested washing it off them and we started washing cats. Claire continued to worsen and we called a vet who suggested we give her pedialyte to keep her hydrated and just wait it out and hope. We did that but it wasn’t enough. Claire died. Meanwhile Shelly and Anita started losing weight and looking unkempt. Harriet, mysteriously, looked fine. Last week Shelly couldn’t really get around and so we started everyone on wet food. Shelly improved but Anita didn’t. Last night we took her to the vet who gave her a steroid shot which seems to have helped. He was somewhat hopeful that that, combined with the feeding of liver to the cats, would help them get through it. Shelly looks way better as does Anita. We’re still worried, though.

Meanwhile, Paul appears to be allergic to cats - not so much the ones he grew up with but it’s helping that they prefer to be outside most of the time. But if that wasn’t enough there was a family of cats - mom and two kittens - dumped in the neighborhood. Nobody else was doing much about them except one person who kept dumping them all out of the neighborhood. The kittens kept bugging the neighbors plants and so we’ve taken them in. They’re now living in the office which is now off limits to Paul. With frequent vacuuming he seems to be okay with them in there. We’re trying to adopt them all out but so far haven’t had much luck. Meanwhile we’ve spayed the mom and put her outside as she seems to have some particularly irritating dander for Paul.

It’s no longer working for us, also, to have our sleeping arrangements - the futon we had mildewed a few months back and we’d been sleeping on the floor which previously had been tolerable for us all - with one of us sleeping on the comfy couch. Sadly that hasn’t remained that way. Sage and I are having back trouble and I’ve developed a worrisome twinge that goes from my armpit to my wrist. It’s definitely time to get something to sleep on. We’re going tomorrow to the store to buy a bed - they’re out of futons and we need something now. We’re leaning towards a full or queen size with a twin sized one that could go right next to it for Paul (that we could later move to his own room if he was ready for it. Me being the hypochondriac I figured for a while it was some serious horrible thing - a swelling of a lymph node or something but thank goodness a friend of ours had a look and it appears to be a pinched nerve/pulled muscle instead. But you know me - I was figuring on it being something really horrible. What it seems like now is some combination of sleeping on the floor (it started two nights ago after I slept on the floor and had a particularly uncomfortable time of it) and an emotional thing like what happened when I went to the powwow last summer and bottled up all my emotions from that resulting in my experiencing horrible shortness of breath (anxiety attack?) for several hours thereafter.

Yup, you guessed it, I’ve been “stuffing” my emotions - or had been for several days - about everything that happened on Tuesday and my concerns about what will happen next. It took me until today to even be able to cry about it which I’ve felt like doing since Tuesday but was never in a place where I felt comfortable (depending on the company I was keeping or where I was). It helped a lot to be able to do that but I know that there’s more where that came from so to speak.

So I’m sure that all the anxiety I’m feeling about this - and that of everyone else in the world (the atmosphere is weird all around, wouldn’t you agree?) is being sublimated into wherever it can get out - will the car make it until we get it fixed, will the cats live through this poisoning, will we find a home for the new cats in the neighborhood?

Paul’s needing to see the dentist soon - he appears to have at least one cavity that hurts him now when he eats. He’s okay with the idea in theory (not knowing what it really is all about). My plan is to go with him to the dentist and have him work on me first so he can get an idea of what happens.

I realized today during an acupuncture treatment that a lot of this has been chemically induced or enhanced, anyway. I am still using caffeine - 1-4 cups/day of coffee and that can’t be good. Up until yesterday I was also taking a vitamin suppliment that contained ginseng which the acupuncturist, also a chinese herbalist, strongly recommended me to stop and thought it could have lots to do with how I’ve been feeling lately. So I decided to cut down and eventually (hopefully) quit the caffeine and she promises to help me with my energy levels through acupuncture and herbs. I only had one cup today and had a cup of tea this afternoon instead which I thought at the time was a mistake and at this time I’m realizing was correct. I did great all day but now when I’m tired but still caffeinated is when my worries can get the best of me.

Meanwhile there are several good things happening in our lives:

First, I’m not in NY. For the past month or so I’ve been very seriously considering flying up to Yonkers to visit this client of mine. And had things gone as planned I would’ve headed up sometime a week or two ago. Meanwhile, one of Sage’s clients called and asked if he could move her deadline forward. As my work’s flexible I decided to hold off on going to NY and have since permanently cancelled this trip and any subsequent business trips.

A friend of ours’ daughter, who wasn’t really getting along with Paul several months ago is now getting along much better with him and so he has another playmate with cool parents. We’ve seen them several times over the past couple of weeks and have made several trips together including one to the Discovery Center and library last Thursday.

Saturday we had several friends and kids over including a couple we hadn’t seen in about 8 months. What a great time - five kids age 18 months to 6 years old all playing together. At one point they were all in Paul’s (newly linoleumed) playroom painting on huge sheets of rolled-out newsprint together.

Along those lines, the mom of our friend’s daughter and I are hatching several plots ranging from seeing if we can do a short library storytime series through renting a local house to use as a playhouse for all our homeschooled kids with various rooms: art room, music room, kitchen, playroom where all of us parents could share resources and perhaps give workshops (for parents and kids) as well.

So you can see how it’s been a sort of roller coaster ride for me. I think meditation will help and I had a short time of it today and hopefully will get back on that train soon. I always feel better when I do it but haven’t quite got it down yet as to doing it regularly.

Oh, and I almost forgot - the project Paul and I and Kite came up with. Lately Paul’s been grasping the idea that all water eventually goes to the ocean one way or another and has mentioned that he wants to walk down the creek here to the ocean. Kite and I talked about it quite a lot and realized that we could do just that with him. I told him “no” initially but we all realized that while it may be too early for us to plan a walk-straight-through trip with him from here to the Gulf of Mexico we can certainly walk it in stages with Sage picking us up and dropping us off as we do various bits a little at a time. As we get farther from home Paul gets a bit older and more capable of the longer, overnight journeys that will be necessary later in the project. I like it because it’s a perfect unschooling project. I challenge you to name any school “subject” that isn’t covered in a prolonged walk down a watershed. And my plan is to write about it as it goes (offline) for future publication. We’re just waiting for this latest paycheck to get in so we can have the engine in our little Geo replaced - seems like the rings and/or valves are shot and we’re burning tons of oil now. I keep meaning to do a net search on rebuilt motors for it - I found one a while back for $1600 and another just recently for $1200 but haven’t done any real thorough searching yet. As this car is going to be our ride to/from where we leave off in this project we’ll need it before starting.

Oh, and the flea problem is over as far as we can tell. Our last resort was to put down over 50 lbs of salt on all the carpets. It didn’t seem to work as well as people promised and after a week of having it down we decided it wasn’t working. We vacuumed it up, and I think in vacuuming we ground it deeper into the carpet - at least that which we didn’t suck up with the vacuum. And so in a couple days after that the fleas were dramatically reduced. Then we pulled the (ugly green shag) carpet out of the playroom and that seemed to be the end of it completely. I’ve only seen a couple fleas in the past few weeks as compared to as many as 3-5 on me in the course of my waking up to go to the bathroom at night.

I don’t know if this happened since I last wrote but Paul seems to have weaned himself. He decided one day (after four days of not nursing) that he was all done nursing and on his birthday two days later he had a short couple of nurses and then he hasn’t nursed since. Paul has done really well since then and is learning quite well how to go to sleep on his own. However, it seems to be the end of the afternoon nap except when we’re riding in the car. Yet another reason I’m not keeping up with this as I should - that was the time I did much of my writing (both work and otherwise)

And as I expected, it did make me feel a great deal better to write about all this. Do you all feel taken advantage of now?

Cain’t ‘chr man fix it?

Sage calls a car dealer to ask if he has any compact cars.

Dealer Yup, sure, we have a nice four door, ‘86 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. Runs fine.

Sage Great! I don’t know when we’ll be able to get up there, though, our car keeps overheating. Our mechanic will be back next week and we can ask him what he thinks.

Dealer Your mechanic? Who’s your husband?

Sage [long pause] What?

Dealer You are married, right?

Sage Er…yes.

Dealer What’s his name?

Sage Todd.

Dealer I don’t guess I know him. But surely you can ask him if the car will make it up here. He’ll be able to tell.

Sage My husband knows how to open the hood of the car. I think he can check the oil. That’s it.

Dealer Really?

Sage Really.

I recently saw a web ad that said nothing more than, “A new purple pill. Click here for details,” with a lovely close-up of said pill. Is America really so desperate for a cure-all that they don’t even care what the pill is for?

I recently saw “Where the Heart Is”, even though I’m embarassed that I read the book (because it was an Oprah’s Book Club selection) and I swear, it’s a movie about our town. I was driving down the road and two teenage boys saw the car, looked up, and made a gesture at me. Did they flip me off? Did they do something obscene? No. They flashed the PEACE SIGN at me. Truly. I couldn’t make this stuff up.

Then a few days ago I was in the kitchen while Paul was watching the garbage collectors empty our trash from the screen door in the living room. He suddenly started crying as if his heart would break, saying, “NO NO NO!” and I came into the living room only to see his stroller disappearing into the garbage truck. I ran outside, calling, “Wait!” and they politely did, and when I explained that the stroller wasn’t trash at all, they obligingly took it out of the garbage truck, apologized and said they were very glad that I’d caught them in time. In New Jersey they would have stuffed it into the truck, then driven away while laughing maniacally.

The Sure Thing was a great movie.

Submitted entry: I’ve decided, and I think that Sage will agree with me on this one that John Cusack should just retire. Surely he has enough money now for a lovely retirement in the country and a small income to live off of for the rest of his life. Instead he seems to get himself into worse and worse movies.

Take High Fidelity for instance. Sage and I rented that one a few days ago and were so disappointed. His character was so unlikable it wasn’t funny. But, the movie did provide some amusement for us. I don’t know if anyone else noticed this but we certainly noticed the number of times the director tried to evoke some of the feelings from his other movies by shooting him from a second story window or in the rain (or both!). Yes, we all wished that this movie was Say Anything but keep trying - the movie’s nowhere near as good.

And tonight we saw, oh god, a movie so unmemorable that I’m going to have to ask Sage to insert the movie title here because I can’t remember it an hour after having seen it. You do remember, right Sage? [”American Sweethearts”. Maybe John Cusack never had any charisma, and the crying-in-the-rain scene in “Say Anything” was touching because we were in the midst of raging hormones. Kind of like how I still love “One More Night” by Phil Collins. It’s a mystery. - Sage] If not, I’m sure anyone who cares will remember. Anyway - once again he plays a not-so-likable character in a dumb movie (Billy Crystal should stay away from writing screenplays).

Of course I still keep getting tricked by these sorts of things. I still think Prefab Sprout is going to put out another decent album. Or Depeche Mode for that matter. I still turn on the “alternative” radio station in hopes that something truly alternative will be played instead of the same four songs. But no, it isn’t meant to be. So here I am, like Charlie Brown and the football falling for the same old tricks time and time again.

Of course I’ve talked about this before, haven’t I, in more serious ways? About how going into anything with any expectations is a bad idea - expecting bad things usually taints the situtation with one’s constant internal questioning of “has it gone south yet? Surely this movie (conversation, meeting, job) is going to be dumb like I expected.” and if you have positive expectations of any sort you’re almost always setting yourself up for disappointment.

So the trick is to give up our expectations. How do we do that you ask? Well, if you read the books I read the answer is always meditation. And to be truthful I believe it too. Yet what am I doing when everyone else is asleep? If it’s morning I’m making coffee and checking and catching up on my email. If it’s evening I’m reading or catching up on email. What am I waiting for? I don’t know, to be truthful. Perhaps I think of the time meditating as time “not mine.” Or perhaps cutting into time that I could be spending doing fun things that I can only do alone. I think I need an attitude adjustment. Of course I realize that I could just sit down and start now and put this aside. Or I could do it after I finish (but I won’t - tonight’s excuse? Too tired). So there you go. Mr. Procrastination, that’s me.

So how are things going, you ask? Very well, for the most part. Sage and I have just conquered a small flea invasion without resorting to chemical warfare. I just didn’t want to resort to “flea bombs” as most everyone we know has” and so looked far and wide for more holistic alternatives. What did we finally find? Simple, actually. Vacuum, steam clean the carpets (boiling and drowning them), and then bathe the cats. Not in flea shampoo but just regular cat shampoo as that’ll drown the fleas.

Of course it wasn’t easy, bathing six cats. And my usual solution in this situation is to just get on the net and look for tips. But due to the widespread proliferation of a joke by email I figured I’d only find the silly “how to bathe a cat” post that involves a cat and a large garbage can with water. So we just dove in so to speak.

At the start, after the steam cleaning everyone was outside. So we brought in Shelly, my cat, and one of the more gentle as our first victim, I mean patient. I did her by myself which was a mistake as two extra hands came in handy later and would’ve here as well. She yowled as if her heart would break (she’s “my cat” and was being betrayed don’t you know) But soon it was done.

Going up the ladder of difficulty we went to Harriet next. Harriet’s not a particularly crabby cat but she has quite a voice on her. So we expected great yowls of betrayal. And she didn’t disappoint us. But she also had some surprises we didn’t count on. No, she didn’t scratch - worse, actually. She just exuded the most foul smell imaginable. We were told once that this smell (previously only created by Habanero and his deceased sister) comes from a gland charmingly known as the “anal gland” of the cat and is done when a cat is distressed. Fortunately her bath was short or I would’ve become distressed and who knows what would’ve happened then!?

Anita was pretty nondescript - lots of yelling, a little squirming but not much else. Habanero, on the other hand. He was a challenge. But first a bit about our method. My job was to hold the cat. Depending on the cat that could be anything from a gentle hand on the back to the feline version of a full nelson. Sage, meanwhile would first pour water over their heads and bodies with a one quart pitcher. Then she’d soap them up, pour more water over them and dry them off. Paul, meanwhile, would offer words of encouragement “You’re doing a great job, Shelly!” “It’s alright Anita!” and so forth. Habanero hated the whole affair (who wouldn’t?) and expressed it not by exuding a smell like Harriet (as I was expecting) but instead leaping with all his strength - easily stronger than Paul - every time Sage poured water on him. Fortunately I held him well enough to get the job done. But then was the matter of getting him out. With his strength Sage couldn’t dry him off without worrying about being eviscerated so we forgot about that. So expecting a possible bolt over us to get out we told Paul to get far away and let him go.

Karma, on the other hand, our biggest cat at easily 25 pounds - probably 5 lbs or more in excess of Habanero was the proverbial kitten. He sat in the water, had his bath almost enjoying the extra attention and then was done.

Claire, I’m told was something else again. I was away when she came home and Sage bathed her but she tells me that Claire was the worst of the six. And I believe it. She’s wiry and strong. Not only that, she’s not very steady on her feet and for her being in the water is actually life threatening. Were she to fall in Paul’s pool she’d likely drown as she couldn’t get out where the other cats would just leap out.

Meanwhile back in the working world…I’m not working yet. But I’ll probably start on Monday - I talked with my client and got the information I need and as soon as I receive a fax of what I’m looking for I should be ready to start. Which is a good thing as we’ve spent more money.

Yes, you guessed it, or probably you didn’t, we got another car. The Malibu was just being too balky and even after a new thermostat seemed to still overheat. So rather than troubleshoot a car that probably needs even more work we just thought about what we wanted and started looking. We were hoping for a small car, good on gas and fairly reliable. After a search we found a 1995 Geo Metro in “Tropical Green” for only $2,000. It does have high miles on it - 114K to be exact and burns oil on hard accelleration but it still runs great, has a manual transmission (we’re both glad about that) that works great and gets great milage. Not only that, it’s a small car which is what we’re really appreciating. I figure an engine rebuild or purchasing a new rebuilt one is in order but we’ve already priced a factory rebuild at about $1,500. Still way cheaper than a new car but almost as reliable. We might be able to get away with rings or even just valve seals being replaced which could be fairly expensive in labor but our mechanic is cheap ($35/hr) and fast so we’re hoping for the best.

So we haven’t been living the simplest these days for sure but we’re hoping that the purchases we made will be ones that last us quite a while.

Meanwhile it’s getting really late and I should get to bed. Paul is so unpredictable these days as far as when he wakes up. He could wake up anywhere between 5:30 and 8:30 tomorrow morning with no easy way to predict which one. It sure stinks to get the 5:30 wakeup call after a midnight bedtime for me I can tell you!