In Which I Recommence Blogging

So what happened was I took an accidental break. Then I noticed the accidental break and decided to follow it up with an on-purpose break. Last year was pretty rocky for me mentally and emotionally, not for any good reason (wait, what would a GOOD reason be? Training for the Depression Olympics?), but it took virtually everything I had just to keep my family fed and in clean(ish) clothes and get everyone where they had to go. So I stopped blogging.

I will now un-stop blogging. Because I missed it a lot. Because when posts come up in my Facebook memories I often read them and think, goodness, I really am incredibly witty on occasion. Because stuff happens and I immediately start shaping it in my mind into blog-post form. Because my memory is absolute shit and this is one good way of remembering anything that happens to me ever.

Besides, Angus is driving now, so I suddenly have more spare time, even when Matt is in L.A. or Bulgaria or whatever. Guess where I'm not right now? Sitting in a gym parking lot in Kanata. Of course, this also means I'm not able to pick up the buttermilk I forgot earlier today at the Kanata Metro on the way home, but... hey, did I mention Angus is driving now?

How many posts can I get out of our summer, which included baseball, Bluesfest and babies? A goodly number, I'm betting. And it's okay if there's no one reading for a while. Like I said, my memory is crap, after a few days I can be my own reader.

Too-Tired-To-Be-Surly Thursday

I'm tired of winter. I don't mind the cold all that much, but even that's annoying because I can't wear a winter coat in the car because I get too hot, so I just throw it in the backseat in case I get stranded somewhere (I'm heat-intolerant, not stupid) and wear a sweater, and strangers keep asking me where my coat is. And my hands get hot if I wear mittens too long, so I take them off and then my skin gets so dry my knuckles bleed because there's no moisture anywhere in the city. I went into Pennington's yesterday and was trying on a shirt and the lady knocked on the door and asked how I was doing and I said fine, except I'm afraid I might spontaneously combust from all the static. When she handed me my bill an actual spark flew between our hands.

I'm tired of all the stuff in my house. I keep cleaning and reorganizing and throwing stuff out and giving stuff away and I STILL can't get it to look the way I feel like it should look. When you walked in the door of the house I grew up in, if you looked around there were clean surfaces and well-placed furniture (ugly floral-patterned beige - it was the seventies, after all - but well-placed) and, I don't know, rake marks in the rug. It was neat and tidy. I don't think I've lived anywhere tidy since I moved out of that house. Why can't I achieve tidiness? Is tidiness just not my destiny?

I'm tired of my hair. For a while I had figured out what to get my stylist to do with it and it was pretty good - not great, but pretty good. Then either I stopped explaining it properly or she stopped understanding, or my hair underwent some weird middle-aged metamorphosis so it doesn't work anymore, and I'm a loser who can't do my hair again. I will never achieve a polished look. Granted, I was never going to work on Wall Street anyway, but I'd like to feel like if I DID want to work on Wall Street, it would be my lack of ambition or inability to do simple arithmetic or tendency to cry when yelled at that would hold me back, not my stupid hair.

I'm tired of wearing a bra. I don't like not wearing one either. I wish my boobs were removable. Yesterday I drove Angus to  school, then went to the eye doctor, then went grocery shopping, then came home and shoveled the driveway before going in, which meant I was still wearing a pretty bra. The pretty bra's underwire ends scraped the skin beside my underarms raw before I was finished (refer back to: I'm tired of winter/ no moisture anywhere in the city). I finished shoveling, went in, took off my bra, got the dog and took her outside to pee. The dog, who has whimpered and shivered and cried to go back in every single other time we take her outside, suddenly decided that OUTSIDE IS AWESOME and we should go prancing down the street and frolic in snowbanks and sniff chunks of dirty ice. Which was all well and good, except I thought we were just going out for a minute and now I was walking braless down the street towards my neighbours who were out shoveling their snow. And no, I wasn't wearing a jacket (refer back to: I'm tired of winter and never wear a winter coat). I explained to the dog that Anna and Elsa were frozen and not ready to be introduced to the neighbours and dragged her back home.

I'm tired of solo parenting. Only one more untidy, unpolished, polysporin-on-my-knuckles-and-armpits sleep before my husband gets home from Japan.

This Performance Totally Unenhanced

I'm drowning in stupid school assignments, and the puppy gets up at five or six and then she goes back to sleep but I usually don't, and Angus is on pitching rest because his elbow hurts and physio should help but he's worried and frustrated so I'm sad and frustrated. And he has an infected ingrown toenail and we had to get his kidneys checked because of the bloodwork because of his acne medication, and I had to take my dad for cataract surgery, so I've visited a goodly proportion of the hospitals and doctors' offices in this area recently. So I'm taking it a little bit easy right now, which I'm almost okay with. I got a fair bit done in the basement in January and anything major there is on hold, although sometimes I go down and do ten minutes of Swistle's little bit of something. Tonight I cleaned out a bag of Christmas gift bags, packaged them together and put all the wrapping paper in the now-empty long bag. Every few days I walk fairly slowly on the treadmill for half an hour. Eve and I went to a play that her friend had a small part in at Angus's school last week and it was fun.

My contacts keep giving me pink eye, which is kind of a first world problem, and I have new glasses that I like quite a bit, but I hate wearing glasses to work out and I'd like to have the option not to wear them occasionally when I'm dressing up. I have an appointment next week to investigate what the hell is up with that.

I'm in a squirrelly reading place; once Lucy's in her crate I can only read on the ipad because if the light is on she won't go to sleep (thank god I didn't get a dog before I had an ipad), and I feel completely daunted by the prospect of reading anything weighty, so I keep reading short stories and YA even though I said I was going to take a break from YA, but I HAVE A BABY DOG AND WE'RE IN NUCLEAR WINTER OVER HERE SO SHUT UP OKAY? Although please learn from my mistakes and do not, under any circumstances, start THIS particular YA train wreck. It sucks you in with a gorgeous cover and an interest-piquing premise and ends in a hot mess.

Anyway, tonight we managed to have dinner together at the table, then we were in the family room while Angus was icing his elbow watching Sportscenter and Matt was reading the paper and I was trying to get the dog to fetch her ball and Eve was reading the second City of Ember book on the couch. She would glance up periodically at the tv, as they were doing a piece on Alex Rodriguez and his use of performance-enhancing drugs. At one point a date span was flashed onscreen, as well as a front page with the headline "Regrets: He Has a Few". Eve burst out "that's so mean! He just died, and he was only, like, sixteen!" To which we all replied, "Huh?" And she said "it said 1996-2000". And Matt said "that was his career, not his lifespan, and you need to check your facts AND your math."

Dear February: Whatever you need to take to improve this performance, PLEASE DO IT FORTHWITH.