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Happy Halloween


It’s been a full day. Katy has been in her Dancing Princess costume since 10AM and as I type this Rob and Katy have been home once to get a bigger bad for her “collection taking” (and to drop off our cat who has followed them up and down the street playfully attacking swinging goody bags and trying to gain entry to our neighbors homes when they open their doors).

Katy’s new school is not like the one she attended back in Des Moines. My old school district was very careful with Halloween, as they were with all holidays. Never acknowledging by name. No parties. No costume parades. In fact, the city of Des Moines and its surrounding suburbs neutered the holiday long ago by refusing to allow it to be held on the 31st and changing its name. They referred to it as Beggar’s Night and with the exception of only one year in the twenty that I lived there, it was always held on the 30th for two hours. This was supposed to cut down on vandalism and maybe take some of the “satanic” taint away from it. I find it ironic that Halloween is thought to be a holiday of evil. It’s druid origins have more to do with acknowledgment of the departed than the calling up of demons, which is actually Christian nonsense anyway.

I volunteered to help out in Katy’s class again today. It was fun. The kids from all the grades gathered in the gym. We sang – okay, they sang – O Canada and then each class got to parade across the stage to show off their costumes. Katy’s teacher had an assortment of party stations waiting for them back in the room, and we helped the kids make Mardi Gras type masks and decorate those tiny “pumpkins” and make tracings of familiar Halloween images like bats and ghosts which they labeled themselves.

Katy was so impatient to get out a trick or treat tonight. She decided that Rob should take her because he couldn’t be trusted at home with the candy. Katy was sure he would eat most of it before anyone could come knocking for it. I don’t think he would have. Eaten all of it that is. Some would be a given though.

After they returned, we set out for the bookmobile as Wednesday night is library night. Rob, me, the little dancing princess and our cat tagging along. We probably made a very heart-warming sight and looked quite the nuclear perfect family. Little would anyone guess where we all were at just a year ago, though I don’t like to make those comparisons. I didn’t decorate this year because Rob isn’t ready for tombstones in the front yard, even if they aren’t real, but I was ready in a way. I listened jealously to my best friend describe the haunted house that our Jaycees friends build every fall to raise money for charities. Will and I fell in love while building one in the fall of 1998 and shared our first kiss in the shower scene I created. There amidst the splayed body in a tub full of blood with spooky music in the background and strobes blinking was were it all began for us. Couldn’t have been anymore romantic. And those memories are good ones. Decorating and remembering creations past feels okay these days. There are things that don’t come back. Priorities change and continue to evolve for some time after the loss of a loved one. It’s inevitable and probably not a bad thing at all. Some people go the whole of their lives without ever given a second thought to how they live their lives and in my opinion that doesn’t make them luckier than I am.

So, Happy Halloween, my friends.

Lost Blog Entries and the Moon at Noon


I had this beautiful piece about Rob written this morning , but for some reason known only to the geeks at Apple Tech, the program “unexpectedly quit” and I hadn’t saved. Let that be a lesson to us all, I suppose. When I told Rob what had happened and that the topic of the day was him, he wondered if I had used the anecdote he told me last evening when we were snuggled up after just getting in bed for the night. He had apparently been 40 minutes late for a site safety meeting he is on the committee to oversee. It’s one of those committees that no one wants to take part in but they do it anyway simply because it’s a good way to rack up brownie points with the powers that be. Anyway, as Rob walked in to the meeting yesterday morning, more than a little late, he observed that nearly everyone in attendance looked as though they were having the mental equivalent of a root canal. Sour and dour and painfully uptight looking. And as he observed the situation and slid into his seat he thought to himself (with not a little bit of Virgo smugness), “Yep, bet none of you got laid this morning.” It’s moments like these – and there are many – that I know my soul is well-mated.

This morning I was so proud of myself for getting the blog entry done early because I wanted to spend the day working on my novel. Yes, I have started the Nonawrimo thing a few days early but I am am justifying this because we are taking a trip to Rob’s mom in the middle of the month and that will be a good five days of getting nothing done as far as writing goes, so I am actually going to end up two days short of the 30 days anyway. In the end all that matters is the novel, and it’s starting to actually take a shape – and not the one I had originally envisioned either.

So, with my best intentions thwarted, I was going to camp at the Starbucks and write for a bit after dropping my little girl at kindergarten. But, it’s lunch hour and the tiny Starbucks resides in the local Safeway where many people visit the store’s deli and then feel free to eat in the Starbucks sitting area. Yeah, I don’t get that either. So, there were no tables, and though I could have taken my chai latte over to the Fort library, I decided to come home and write in the office Rob set up for us a few weeks ago. Yesterday, the cat sat in my lap as I wrote but today she is angry with me for leaving her outdoors while Katy and I went to the gym. As I explained to her when we returned to find her curled up on the welcome mat at the door, this is what happens to little cats who don’t come when they are called (she’s learning but slowly).

On the way into the Fort I noticed the moon was still up. It often is. Not something I ever saw back in Iowa. I still can’t get over the sky here. Rob says it is the same sky but it just looks so different. Perhaps it is the wide openness or the latitude, but the clouds and the moon and the stars even never fail to catch and hold my attention like they were paintings in the Louvre.

What I had wanted to say today was how I love to watch my husband. In the mornings he is so deliberate in his actions as he dresses for the day. He is a powerful looking man and it fascinates me, the way his muscles move under his skin and how the light shades and shadows him. Of course, my first version was far more poetic. Rob wondered if being so often my topic he would lose his Canadian sensibilities. I am not sure that Canadians are anymore sensible than the Iowan’s I lived around all my life, but he is certainly the least affected man I have ever known. Sensible is certainly among his many middle names.

I am sorry I lost that earlier entry but I guess I was supposed to write this piece you are reading instead. Sometimes things work out better than originally planned.

Late


I sometimes wonder if I will ever have a proper schedule or be up early enough to accomplish things without constantly running into time constraints. Or, if I will ever have a schedule that is me-driven as opposed to working around other people’s schedules. If that sounds selfish, it’s because it is. I have the least amount of responsibility and the most amount of free (remembering that it is all relative) time of anyone and I still end up feeling the most constrained. Since the beginning of the school year, I have tried to get myself on some sort of schedule that would allow me time to write and to work-out properly and I am still having to steal time from the evenings to get some of this accomplished or nothing gets accomplished at all. Some of these conflicts exist outside my control. My deep water exercise class only meets on Mondays and Wednesdays from 8 to 9Pm. I can nothing about that. I am also unable to find writing groups that meet during the day or that meet only once a month. The two I have joined meet every other week and unfortunately they are on the same biweekly schedule, so weeks with writing groups means two evening out for several hours at a time back to back, and to top it off I end up missing one of the deep water classes that week. With Katy needing to be at school for the afternoon kindergarten session, and it only being two and a half hours – not counting the half hour on the bus home, this ends up being just enough time to allow me to accomplish one thing at best and lands precisely in the middle of my day just to mess up any attempts I make at a schedule and that mainly because I have to drive in to town from where we live. It’s not a long drive but again, long enough to really screw things up if traffic is bad or I am running just the slightest bit late. Take this morning as an example. I thought I would have enough time to run into the gym and workout and be back home to feed Katy quickly and then drive back in and drop her at school so I would have the afternoon to work on my novel. But, the iPod was on red and the car charger has been missing since we got back from Iowa. A quick call to Rob at the office yielded me nothing and by this time, it’s now too late to zip into town and be back for lunch. I have tried packing her lunch but this either ends up with her not eating because the child-minders didn’t get her going soon enough or me having to cut my workout quite short to feed her in the car before school and then we were either too early or too late. Neither of which was a serenity enhancing option. Writing in the morning and then working out after dropping Katy off at school doesn’t work either. First, I never get much done writing-wise because if Katy isn’t interrupting me there are household chores that need doing and after lunch is the worst time for me to try and do anything strenuous. I am just not an early afternoon exerciser, so I don’t work out as hard or as long as I need to. Late afternoon was always a good time to run, but that cuts into supper time. Evenings? I think I pointed out what a cluster-fuck those were turning into already.

I already know that the writing groups have to be pared down to two a month and I may have to let the Fort group go entirely because, though I like them and the discussions, the Wednesday night meeting times don’t work well for me. I don’t know what to do about writing and working out around Katy’s school schedule. Afternoon is proving to be a good time of day for her but it’s a crappy time for me. Part of the difficultly has to do with not having a set time to get up in the morning. I know I can’t go back to 5:30 AM again but sleeping in to 7 or 8 is not working either. Sigh. It is a sorry thing to know that you are only capable of scheduling yourself when it is something like a job or school forcing it on you. How pathetic am I?

And I realize that I am the envy of others who are not as fortunate to be able to take time away from employment to parent and/or pursue a dream, I just never considered that life would still be so occupied with obstacles and such. Or that it would be as hard to do as it is turning out.