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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.

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