Christmas and a broken camera

Its funny how Christmas always sneaks up on me. Every year just before Thanksgiving I start getting the itch that I should be getting ready for Christmas. But I put it off and get distracted and then Thanksgiving comes and then its bang! Black Friday which is actually Buy Nothing Day for us because i don't like doing the crowded stores with crazy people thing. I tend to buy local as much as possible.
ANYWAY so then before I know it, its like maybe three weeks before Chrsitmas. We start debating our tree..we contemplate a tree with a root ball every year but I want a big tree so we can't afford that and I swear I'll research it in advance but I don't so we go somewhere nearby.
THIS YEAR we really waited until the last moment. This week. 10 days before Christmas. and it hasn't been feeling a Christmas Tree to ME because we had to forego anything fragile because The Beast will attack the tree. And if anything glass broke and I didn't know and he cut himself I would feel like dirt. SO we just aren't using anything glass. SO the tree looks naked.

AND to complicate my habits around Christmas, we had the Ornament Party in NOVEMBER! NEVER again. I need the party to get me in the spirit IF I'm not. Like this year. But we already had it. So its just me and the kidlets and the husband to festoon the house and create the festive atmosphere. I'm feeling a little nervous. I EVEN missed all the goofy Christmas tv programs and a handful of Christmas events around town I wanted to catch. I was REALLY excited for Alistair Sim's Scrooge at the Senator but I mISSED it.
crap.
SOooooooo finally Sophie badgered me into sorting th ornaments and bringing them downstairs and she started putting them on. Still not kicking in the spirit. I'm starting to feel I'm skirting the edges of Scrooge ya know.

For a couple days Soph plugs haphazardly at the ornaments, and Uly shakes the tree and flings low ornaments around the room and I yearn for my glass ornaments because I think the tree looks bare.

Today I jumped in the decorating fray because it was my last hope. Ok a little drama. I plugged away in my annoying perfectionist way getting endlessly frustrated. I finally just say it is what it is and I have to leave it alone.

But just now. In the darkness and quiet of sleeping little ones and no one else in the house, I'm typing and I look over at the tree. It has transformed! Christmas magic arrived while I wasn't paying attention AND IT LOOKS ALL CHRITMAS-Y!!!!!!

This is what I look forward to about Christmas. Its always so hard to explain to the little Scrooges in my life. There's something transformative and reassuring about enacting the rituals. Bringing out the sentimental ornaments, baking cookies, hanging the Christmas cards...doing the things that bring a yearly continuity. And its no ONE thing that marks the arrival of Christmas for me...its the culmination of the little things that seem meaningless on their own.

There is all the adult knowledge of the world and its wrongs and dreads and poverty and death and wars, but Christmas, the holiday season, allows that tiny extra thread of optimism and soulfulness to express itself. Its carrying on despite the impracticality or absuridty of it all because it makes you feel good and helps others feel good too. Even in just small ways. Like hot chocolate, a fireplace crackling, a cookie smell in the oven. But what I'm learning is that these rituals cannot be awakened alone. The performance alone doesn't awaken anything. Both the pageantry and the goodwill require a recipricocity of human beings.

So truly do yourself a favor and let go of the competitive, commercial trauma of the Christmas season and just bask in the simplicities that make the heart feel good.

Once upon a time I was a real writer. I put things on paper and went back later and looked at it and made changes and was happy when it was good.

I'm not a real writer anymore. I'm something else. I don't know what to call that something else.

Ok. I lied. I didn't EVER think I was a REAL writer.

One day in the near future I will put words on paper, go back and read them, change them, pretty them and make them into a real live manuscript and send it to lots of people who may or may not like it. But one of those people is going to find a reason to put it in bookstores and then I will be neurotic and happy simultaneously. I imagine that then I will be a REAL writer but i'm not entirely sure.



In case you were wondering, parenting is HARD.


It keeps dawning on me that I'm never going to get IT all done. not ever.
What I need to figure out is how to be ok with that and WHAT to do when I can do SOMETHING.

I have an aching desire, a twisted, pathological need to be cool. I can't define what cool is.

I'm a pacifist who likes to shoot BIG guns.

I like nature and all that goes with trying to keep some around but I like me some big FAST engines too. Loud ones draped in shiny chrome.

I can't decide if bitching is healthy or just annoying.

I want a media agreement that there must be equal time for good news.


Its emotionally frustrating to have brainstorms and rarely have them come to fruition.

I've recently become a different person financially but I don't feel like a different person.

My kids make me smile.

eating seasonally

dumb title but kinda what I'm about lately.

REALLY concerned about the crap going into our bodies becasue all the food we eat for convenience is just one food-corn.

I've recently read The Omnivore's Dilemma and it was sobering. I intuited a lot of what he was pointing out but here was some validation.

SO I'm working towards eating real food. This means, mostly, cooking from scratch. Tough with a toddler but making the effort anyway.

Today i ate frozen waffles (mostly a no no but its good ingredients ) with farmers market white nectarines. oh man was it good. the nectarines were soo juicy they were the topping
and the syrup.
Meant to take pic but batteries in camera dead.

its nice to be dreaming again

Gosh I just can't get into the blogging habit. It seems like such a theoretically easy thing to do.
I enjoy reading other blogs and I'm inspired by them and I see how absolutely useful they can be. And yet here this poor blog sits abandoned.

There is a learning curve disadvantage. Things I'd like to do here but don't know how and a there are small people in my life who don't like when I sit at the computer.

But the smallest person is getting bigger and

woo hoo The Girl Who Stopped Swimming

Hi!
I'm really excited that this book is about to hit the shelves any second now! Joshilyn Jackson has become one of my really favorite writers...I discovered her blog, Faster Than Kudzu http://www.joshilynjackson.com/mt/
and I have never laughed out loud so much at a blog. SOooooo when I realized she had published real live books I found them and read them voraciously, oh so fast I reached the end and now I have another one to devour yay!

So please do yourself a favor and pick up this new work and prepare to get sucked in.

Here's a little blurb to whet your whistle:

Laurel Gray Hawthorne needs to make things pretty, whether she's helping her mother make sure the very literal family skeleton stays buried or turning scraps of fabric into nationally acclaimed art quilts. Her estranged sister Thalia, an impoverished Actress with a capital A, is her polar opposite, priding herself on exposing the lurid truth lurking behind middle class niceties. While Laurel's life seems neat and on track--a passionate marriage, a treasured daughter, and a lovely home in suburban Victorianna--everything she holds dear is suddenly thrown into question the night she is visited by the ghost of a her 14-year old neighbor Molly Dufresne.

The ghost leads Laurel to the real Molly floating lifelessly in the Hawthorne's backyard pool. Molly's death is inexplicable--an unseemly mystery Laurel knows no one in her whitewashed neighborhood is up to solving. Only her wayward, unpredictable sister is right for the task, but calling in a favor from Thalia is like walking straight into a frying pan protected only by Crisco. Enlisting Thalia's help, Laurel sets out on a life-altering journey that triggers startling revelations about her family's guarded past, the true state of her marriage, and the girl who stopped swimming.

I lost some days somewhere

I am glad to report that I am mostly in the habit of walking now. This weekend was a bit of a bust. I only got a mile-ish walk at 5 year old pace, with a stop at the park, but we needed the sunshine that had poured forth briefly after days of grimness.

Then friday at mall was a goofy walk because Uly was impish and fussy and didn't sleep the whole time but then I probably made up for what I lost by shlepping him all over the mall and then to trader Joe's and then back to the car with a full bag of groceries and then I did something else physical but damned if I know what it was.

I think thursday may have been a day where I walked without Uly but lost track of how many laps I walked. OR Soph had a snow day and I didn't walk at all.
I think that I walked monday and tues.

I find that I am less frustrated in the course of the day if I get out and about. I also remember that I like physical activity and have begun daydreaming about what else I can do.
I really want to add some yoga and strength training because everything but my belly is shrinking. I probably also need to start trimming my food intake since Uly will be weaning soonish. I read the other day you only need 500 more calories a day for breastfeeding. That may be scientifically true but if I don't eat like a horse when I nurse I would probably get to a point where I would start just randomly eating people who crossed my path.

Got major brainstorm fever lately. I hope I can carry them to fruition. I need to do significantly more research and buckle down and get soem words on paper and get some more human beings on board. But I do feel like they are feasible.

I Did Walk The Neighborhood

and surprisingly made better time than i did ever! Like a twenty five minute mile. yeah. groovy.

So that was saturday. It was cold and grey-ish but i went anyway while Carm had Uly. So glad I did it.

Sunday I got a kind of power walk at walk looking for tennis shoes to buy for myself. About 20 minutes or so. some consistency.

Then monday got to mall and got probably 5 or 6 circuits in. At least a 1/2 hour of quick walk. And tuesday too!

SO much better when Uly is in stroller.

Today got nuthin..visit Soph at school day which I missed because Uly was fussy :(

Tomorrow will be back.

Feeling definite attitude improvement and better energy. MUST keep it up.

Why don't human beings hibernate the winter?

still trying

Thursday I made it to the mall and walked for a half hour with Uly in the front carrier. A challenge. I felt like i couldn't get as fast a pace as i wanted. I didn't have much energy but I did it anyway because i need to make it a habit.

nuthin friday not even running up and down the steps 10 times in a row like i planned.

So last week I didn't get back to the mall but we built a snowperson on the one day of snow we had.

The next day we walked to the park but r e a ll y slowly.

About to try to walk the neighborhood.

boring but important to me

I'm going to post my walking consistently efforts here so I feel like there is some accountability.
I won't beat myself up because its not me alone all day trying to walk but me and Uly who is not a quiet kid and Sophie.

Anyway-yesterday I bundled him up and got to the park and back...maybe a dozen blocks, a solid 10 minutes.

This morning I attempted the mall early after dropping Soph. Uly hates the stroller so it didn't really work. I got one complete circuit of the top floor and then he cried. Echoing crying baby ....
nursed and let him walk, tried again. No dice. So tomorrow will try with the carrier instead.

Need some new tennis shoes too.

some pics

I just can't seem to stick to this blog. I won' t give it up entirely. But geez SOME consistency would be nice.

Anyway here are some photos from fall.

I'll come back again soon. REALLY.

Its the little man Uly-he's a pimp.
My mom as a Warrior Princess and Soph as Sally.
A 2005 one of Me as Stimpy and a smaller Soph as fairy.