Category: another day in the life

Adventures of the local sort.

1 Comment
Sunday we went to the Fall Fiber Festival up at Montpelier.   Every year, Edie likes to sit and watch the sheepdog trials (I think she’s waiting for Babe, the sheep pig to show up.  Sort of like Linus and the Great Pumpkin.We even watched Babe Saturday night as a warm up).  This year, a knitting friend told me she had signed her daughters up for a felting workshop, so I signed Edie & a friend up, and we had TWO child free hours left to wander.  It was quite glorious. 
I swore I was not adding to my stash, and I did pretty good with that.  I fell in love with some recycled silk yarn that was yummy orange, but as I already have a scarf I knit myself out of recycled silk yarn, I passed.  I found some equally yummy orange bamboo yarn for a third of the price, so I grabbed a few balls of that instead.  I really feel the need for a new orange scarf.  I also got some ideas to use up the stash I have acquired – mostly through friends sharing theirs, as I do not need a yarn stash.  I have quite the fabric stash and we simply do not have room for it all.  Pictures of all that to come, as I came home and started some new projects last night. 

After they finished their workshop (I have not yet been allowed to photograph her finished product. Someone is practicing hard to be a teenager these days.), we had lunch and watched a wee bit of the sheepdog trials.  It was cold, damp and windy, so we didn’t stay too long.  Babe, the sheep pig, did not make an appearance.  There’s always next year, right?

Today I headed out to Virginia Wineworks for a tour, in the name of research for my monthly column, Beneath the Cork  for In the Kitchen Magazine.  (The October issue is up – you should definitely go check it out!).  Philip Stafford was kind enough to spend some time with me, showing me around.  I got to see some of their brand spanking new packaging equipment and definitely got inspired for more than a few articles to come.  Thank you Philip for taking time for me today.  If you have the chance to go hang out at a winery during harvest, I highly recommend it.   I don’t want to give too much away from the articles I plan on writing from today’s visit, but they are doing some really great stuff for the entire Virginia wine industry down there at Virginia Wineworks.  It shouldn’t surprise anyone that I love to drink local as much as I love to eat local. Should I ever get inspired to plant my own grapes, I am definitely taking them to those guys to turn into some tasty wine.

Well Hello Sun!

1 Comment

The sun made an appearance today and what a welcome sight it was.  And finally, the air isn’t grossly humid!

Someone said to me a few months back that they adored old, musty southern houses.  As do I, except when I have to live in one the month of September.  Our house, like many others in this neighborhood, doesn’t have central AC.  We find we only wish we had it a few days in July and then again in September, when the muggies really set in.  This month, it has been grey and muggy since Labor Day.  We’ve had I can’t even remember how many inches of rain this month, but for the last few weeks, we haven’t gotten anything significant.  It’s just been foggy every morning, grey all day and oh, so humid.  We’ve had to close the house up and run the window units we use during those July days just to keep the musty smell at bay.  Thankfully, everyone I know says their house smells musty these days, so I feel slightly better about things. 

Despite this, I’m pretty sure our dining room is ground zero for odor and what I call ‘mildew dust’.  It gets absolutely no natural light and has no air circulation, so the dust starts turning a bit blue and growing things this time of year.  We inherited my grandparent’s dining room furniture – and they were smokers, and we spent years getting the smell and the stains out of the furniture.  Every September, the dining room really starts to exhibit a certain odor that isn’t smoky, but isn’t entirely musty either.  Sunday morning I woke up and realized I couldn’t take the smell anymore, so I did my annual scrub down – where I wipe all the furniture down, everything gets moved and not only do I vacuum, but I break out the bleach, and use it to wipe down the baseboards.  This year I even pulled all my linens out – tablecloths, placemats, napkins, etc, etc – and washed them.  I have tried using baking soda and vinegar to absorb odors and they help, but not enough.  Recently I read that leaving coffee grinds out helps – so I’m trying that.  It’s slightly working.  This year has definitely been worse than usual.  Pat & I have been tag teaming scrubbing the house down – having done Edie’s room while she was at camp, we were quite relieved to discover the smell developing over the weekend in her room was merely a pair of wet soccer socks thrown in her laundry basket, left to steep. 

This morning the fog seemed especially thick, and with the forecast calling for more showers, I really started to feel like this weather was never going to lift. Worse, I noticed the smell coming back.  The smell I thought we’d scrubbed and laundered out…….and then, suddenly, the sun came out.  And stayed out all afternoon.  I noticed the air outside was cool AND dry.  So I opened the house up and let in fresh air, first time in weeks.  And suddenly, the house smells….normal again. 

Yay.  Thank you sun.

We were going to give it two years.

4 Comments
Fourteen years ago this week, we moved here to Charlottesville, sight unseen.  We had spent the better part of that year looking for jobs outside of Birmingham, AL, where we’d been living since we’d graduated from Auburn.  We had turned down jobs in locations like Hilton Head and New Orleans.  We were newly engaged and looking to start a life somewhere other than where we were.  It didn’t matter which one of us got a job that moved us out, as long one of us did.  We figured we’d make it work once we got to where we were going.  Pat had gotten an interview with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, and then a second one.  We really thought that if he got an offer from them, it would be for their Pennsylvania canoe rig, based out of Harrisburg, near the town I grew up in, good old York, PA.  I wasn’t wild about moving back there, but, I knew this was a job he was quite interested in.  When they called and offered him a job that Monday night about 6 pm, they needed an answer by 8 pm.  Could he start in less than a week? It was in Charlottesville, VA,  a place we had never heard of.  So, we looked it up on a map.  Called a friend who had gone to college outside of Richmond, who told us, oh yeah, it’s cool, you should move there.
So, with that recommendation, we did just that.  It was hands down, the biggest snap decision we’ve ever made.  (Although making on an offer on this house is a close second.) I’m pretty sure most of our friends had no idea we’d been looking to move and most of them were shocked to hear that Pat was up and gone in less than a week, without saying goodbye to everyone.  I followed a few weeks later, having gotten a bunch of our friends (and future groomsmen) to help pack up the U-Haul full of our things.  When I pulled into town at 3 am, it was the first time I had laid eyes on the place.  We agreed, we’d try it for 2 years, and if we didn’t like it, we’d move on. 
That was 14 years ago. 
I have to admit, I didn’t like Charlottesville at first.  I had a hard time finding a job to suit my Interior Design degree from Auburn, in a town full of architects with University of Virginia degrees.  My first job here was doing billing for the University Hospital, in the old Sears building on Main Street, in row after row of cubicles. I started as a temp and ended up being hired as a regular, with benefits and mandatory overtime that paid time and a half.   Pat’s job had him out of town quite a bit – our first winter here, he had a plethora of trainings and internships and conferences and was gone, 5 out of 6 weeks straight.  Our first house was a dump, in a neighborhood that was even worse, because most of the good rentals had been scooped up by the end of September. 
Eventually though, we found a really sweet apartment down by the river in Woolen Mills, that we found by just driving around one day and stopping at a for rent sign.  We ended up with good neighbors – one of whom mentioned the architecture firm she worked for was looking for help and I might be a good fit.  People I’d met working at the University told me to wait until summer, that summer was a great time to live in Charlottesville and if I still didn’t like it by the next September, then there would be no selling me on C-ville.
By the end of our trial two year period, we had bought a house, I had a job in my field and life was good.  Summer, among other things,  had definitely helped sell me on Charlottesville. 
12 years after buying that house, we’re still in it  We’ve put an addition on the house, we cleaned up the yard (which was totally overgrown), built a garden and a playhouse in the backyard.  We’ve realized that this really is a small town and everyone knows each other 6 different ways.   We’ll be at the grocery store and a shopowner from the downtown mall will come up and say hello and tell Edie how tall she’s gotten and when they walk away, she never fails to ask, “Who is that and why do they know my name?”  Sweetie, that man owns the ice cream shop and let your mother run a tab for my chocolate banana milkshakes when I was pregnant with you.  Last fall we joked that our soccer team was “Six Degrees of the Calverts”, because on that team were families we had played with before, families we knew from working together before we had kids, families we knew from when I worked at the wine bar, families from preschool playgroups, families from school…..somehow we knew everyone on that team previously. 
This is the longest I have lived anywhere.  I like that Edie has only known living in this house and has had some of the same friends since before time began.  There are things we swore we would never, ever do, like take our kid trick or treating on The Lawn at UVa, that we ended up doing anyway, because, oh yeah, once we had a kid, we realized how awesome it was for little kids.  Once Edie was old enough to go to a few neighbor’s houses, we stopped going to The Lawn – several thousand preschoolers on sugar can get ugly pretty quick.  There are some things we really won’t do – like Foxfields.  I’ve always said there’s a fine line between a toddler on a sugar meltdown and a bad drunk – it can go either way and end in tears at any time.  But with a toddler, you can pick up them and carry them away.  Not so much with a drunk college kid, so no, you will never see me at Foxfields.  Ever. 
We’ve seen alot of changes in our time here. Some good, some bad.  I miss the old amphitheater at the end of the downtown mall.  Sure, I love the good shows I’ve seen at the new Pavilion, but Fridays after Five haven’t been the same in years.  In fact, I don’t think we even went to one Fridays this year.  I think we went to just one last year.  We used to never miss those.  And honestly?  They were what helped sell me on this town.  That and happy hour at Miller’s.  This past summer we finally decided to stop going there on Date Night.  They reworked their beer list, and yes, while it might seem better, they no longer have our favorites on there.   We’ve changed too. We moved here, still technically single, and have become a family here.  Our little May get-together has become a bash of legendary proportions (or so we’ve heard).  We’ve gone from being the newlyweds that just moved into the house on the corner to being the family that organizes the neighborhood Halloween party at the park.  On one hand, I can’t believe we’re still here.  On the other, I sort of knew when I pulled into the first parking lot I saw, which turned out to be Durty Nelly’s that night 14 years ago, that we were home. 

Growth.

3 Comments

For some time now, I have been working to undo some of my worst traits, at the very least, be more aware of them and the damage they do and maybe even try to avoid giving into them.  I realize that I make assumptions, sometimes based on nothing but the negative voices in my head, I take things personally (and the most ridiculous things too), which then feeds into my urge to make everything about me, I tend to react immediately to something, generally based on my assumptions, and then there is my need to be right and have the last word.  Fun stuff, yes?  Especially when you combine them all together and throw in my quick temper. They all seem to be hard wired into me, many of them are the results of my family dynamic that I have been trying to shed most of my adult life, but even more so the last two years.  I’m tired of these things interfering in my relationships.  Most of all, I want my child to be more in control of her emotional well being.  Just because I wasn’t raised with the tools for this doesn’t mean she has to be.  And if I expect her to be able to do this, I need to set the example.  I need to know the tools to teach her, yes?  So I’ve spent a good bit of time in therapy, I’ve read a good bit about the lasting effects of my parents behaviors and issues, and I’ve realized quite a bit about myself.  Over time, I’ve found myself making progress here and there, but I’ve also found myself slipping.  I’ve learned to take it easy on myself when I slip, while I am always pleasantly self satisfied when I discover myself making progress.

Last week, I had evidence of that progress all over the place. There were a few things that popped up and I found myself being able to work through them in ways I had never been able to before. I was impressed with myself, and felt like I had made real progress.  One day in particular seemed to be one reward after another for learning to stop, wait for more information before responding and not making it all about me. When I went to bed that night, I felt like I had really grown as a person, in big ways that day. 

This weekend, I saw a headline Huffington Post’s food page that just grabbed my attention, “Are you preventing your own happiness?”.  Why, yes, I know I do, and  I am in the process of working quite hard to stop doing just that.  How does that relate to food I wondered?  Well, it was this article about Paula Deen, and how she had gotten her start and her philosophy on life, which, stunningly enough, is similar to where I find myself these days.  Although quite happily married, I decided a few months ago I wanted to do something that made me happy and contributed to our family income while I was doing it.  When I wrote about starting up Dinnaah, Lesa commented that Paula Deen got her start that way.  I have never been a Paula Deen fan, despite our shared love of things like butter, cream, bacon and fat.  I don’t even remember why I don’t like her, it had something to do with what I felt was a grave misuse of mayonnaise and grilled asparagus.  I have to admit, I wasn’t entirely flattered by the comment, I think I would have liked it more if it had been someone I admire a bit more, but I did like knowing that someone wildly successful started out the same way I am attempting to do.  And in reading that article on Saturday, I realized that I was having another little lesson in throwing out my assumptions.  Yet another experience in growth. 

A few months ago, right after I was laid off and considering starting up something on my own, Clarabelle  called and wanted to offer me some unsolicited advice on the whole thing.  She had just launched her own business and wanted to talk nuts and bolts about what it was going to take.  Over the years, I couldn’t help but notice that when she shows up and offers advice, it’s always right on and exactly what I need.  She is definitely one of the people I feel the universe has dropped into my life on purpose.  While we have had our ups and downs over the years, she still pops up in my life in very good, unexpected ways.  That chat that day was epically wonderful for me and our friendship.  For the first time probably ever, I really opened up to her, on a number of topics, and I felt we had reached a new level in our friendship.  I was touched, and still am, that she reached out the way she did.  When she called Saturday morning, I had been sitting there thinking about her when the phone rang and before I even looked at the caller ID, I knew it was her.  For how better to cap a week of growth than a good chat with her?  Not that I mentioned any of this- most of the situations I found myself in this week where I noticed the growth aren’t really worth recounting here.  But, I felt I had made serious progress on myself and I was proud.  And she was calling to tell me she was proud of me for just jumping in, for she knew I had to get over myself too.

The universe moves in mysterious ways. Sometimes I think it bonks me over the head to get it’s point across, even when I feel I’m listening. I’ve come a long way. In forcing myself out of old, destructive habits, I find myself doing things that are good for myself – like exercising more, eating better, drinking less, rather than sitting and stewing. This growth thing is good for me on so many levels.  After going so long feeling like I couldn’t shake some of these traits, it was fantastic to discover I could indeed shake them.  The best part of all may have been that I started the week off with this overwhelming feeling of anxiety that really tried it’s best to throw me.  In the past, I might have given in.  Instead, I recognized it for what it was, and worked to not let it get the best of me.  I don’t know that I fully succeeded, but in looking back over the last week and seeing where I started and where I ended, there was a marked difference.  It was growth.

I’m still not ready to let go of summer.

Leave a comment

Really summer? This is how you want to end it? We’ve had such a lovely run and now you go and end it like this?  So uncool.  Frankly, I’m a little bitter with you right now.  This is so not a good break up.

It’s done nothing but rain since our return from our labor day weekend trip to Annapolis.  It’s been cold and rainy and at one point yesterday, Pat said it felt like winter.  Nothing gets in the way of your denial that summer is coming to an end like having to break out your jeans and long sleeve tshirts and cardigans that have been stashed away all summer.  I even thought about breaking out my wool socks yesterday, because my toes were so cold.  The horrors.

Sigh.  At least we had one last lovely weekend by the water. 

And with Girl Scouts, PTO and my other little side project gearing up, I will certainly be busy, so it’s not like I have lots of time to sit by the pool these days anyway.  Despite my last few posts about all the changes going on currently in my life, things are going pretty smoothly. Thanks to all of you for all the support you’ve given me.  It really does help inspire me, which is part of the reason why I started this little blog – hoping to nuture that inspiration.  I always hate to see summer fade and this year is a bit worse than usual, no doubt because of everything else going on.  Although the return of college football has helped smooth things over….

Jumping In.

7 Comments

So, a while back, a friend suggested that I just start cooking dinner for my friends on a daily basis.  Tell them what’s for dinner, a price and then tell them what time it will be ready to come pick up. Cook like I cook for my family.  And that this could be, should be, my job.

I didn’t pay it much attention, but then when I got laid off last May, I thought about it some.  I kicked around a few ideas as to what to do with myself, other than work for someone else for a living, and this one kept rising to the top as the most well, everything, with feasible at the top of the list of pros.   So I spent some time this summer talking about it, reading about it, from a slew of incredible food blogs getting ideas about food to books on starting my own business, my own home based business, my own catering business and writing a business plan, among others, but really haven’t been quite sure exactly where to start. 

I’ve talked to just about every chef I know about this.  A few told me to just start cooking and figure it out from there. I really wanted to have a set, written business plan, I wanted to be organized and thoughtful about this, but after debating this fly by the seat of my pants approach, which, honestly, is how I seem to end up doing everything I do most of the time anyway, I decided to just do it.  Really, just jumping in and seeing what it took, at least once, might really be more helpful.  Yes?  I have an outline in my head.  I have a vision.  I know I have to start from somewhere….. but in the process of that, I find myself getting caught up in the minutia, I find myself getting overwhelmed and stalling out.  And a number of thoughtful people told me to just jump in and do it. People whom I thought might know what they are talking about.

So, yesterday, I had my first test run.  I emailed some of the people I’ve babbled to about this over the summer with a dish (black bean/spinach/goat cheese enchiladas), a price and a pick up time.  RSVP please.   I had 6 families sign up.  I had a few others interested but either missed the RSVP cut off time or weren’t sure about goat cheese.  (Something I learned – to note when I’m willing to make a substitution for something like goat cheese.)

I spent my day cooking and figuring out some of the how.  Which at times was work, but at times, wasn’t.  I don’t measure things when I cook – I eyeball it.  To take that method of cooking and make it not only precise, but to quintuple it was a challenge.  I did okay.  I got some things wrong, but nothing too major, nothing I couldn’t fix.  I got a feel for what my kitchen and equipment could handle.  There’s alot of math involved and I’ve always said I hate when math is on the quiz for the day.  So many details to figure out.  I’m not sure what my next step is.  Keep going, of course.  

I met with someone from the local chapter of  SCORE today.  I set this appointment up a few weeks ago, as a self imposed deadline to do something on my big idea.  I had grand plans of having a fully written business plan by now, instead, I’m just trying to figure out what else I need to do, besides keep cooking.  There’s a whole legal, business side to this that I need to get a handle on.  And while he did help with that, he also gave me the same advice I’m getting from a few different corners – just cook.  Start small and just take it from there.  Figure out my plan, but right now, it’s okay to just put one foot in front of the other and see where the path leads me.

After spending the summer brainstorming a name with everyone we saw, Virginia came up with one a few weeks ago.   Dinnaah. Dinn-aah, as I’m calling it.   Once I had that, I felt much better about moving on.   I’m going to cook as if I’m cooking for my family, so it’s local, seasonal and mostly vegetarian, with any meat that we do serve being local and humanely raised. I might even include some of my own produce – yesterday’s dish helped with the avalanche of peppers I have going on.   I’m going to keep it small and try out different recipes and see what works, what doesn’t.  I think I’ll need another stock pot and maybe a back up fridge.  Yesterday’s first run was met with much applause and praise.  Thanks Robyn, for the huge shout out on Facebook that started a little buzz this morning.  I definitely feel like I’m moving in the right direction.  There are going to be mistakes, but that’s life.  I want to find a way to make money and have it be something I enjoy.  This just feels right, no matter how much I get lost in the details.  So, I’m just going to cook.

Yesterday I got a good feel for how things could work in my kitchen.  I definitely need to take some time and get myself organized around here, so it will be a slow start at first.  I’ll probably only do dinner one or two nights next week.  And I need to figure out our Wednesdays, because I somehow have lined up the most inefficient schedule imaginable for a certain someone and will need to figure out how to juggle that along with serving dinner to not just my family, but others.  But, hopefully, by the end of September, I can be be serving dinner at least 3 nights a week.  That’s a good goal, yes? 

What’s shaking around here.

Leave a comment
As if Betty’s departure and the beginning of school wasn’t enough to shake things up, Mother Nature has really thrown us for a few loops around here this week.  The little earthquake over in Mineral apparently had quite an impact all over the place.  We’ve felt a few of them before, but were absolutely shocked that it was felt so far away this time!  I think the 4.5 aftershock at 1 a.m. the next night threw us for more of a loop than the ‘big’ one, especially with the weather report as we were heading to bed predicting widespread destruction from Hurricane Irene. (or maybe because I was at the pool with a gaggle of girls for the first one and sound asleep in my bed for the big aftershock, which is infinitely more jarring in my opinion).   Thankfully for us, she stayed east, and we got to stay on the western most fringe, which meant a rainy, breezy day that felt like it should have been a college football Saturday.  One more week….
Meanwhile, school started, soccer practice started, I attended my first PTO board member meeting, I vaguely started planning the year for our Girl Scout troop AND, inspiration has happened on my plan to not really go back to work for someone else!!!  Turns out reality has thus far been quite kind. (See, I knew if I ignored it, it would be fine. It always is.) Although, I am sort of not too pleased that I am suddenly back to waking up every morning at 5:30 again.  I suppose it will make it easier to get back into that early morning gym routine that I swear I’m going to get back into one of these days…
And that’s not all that we’ve been up to.
We dog sat our favorite old, brown dog this week, who handled the earthquakes much better than the hurricane.  (Although he certainly dilly dallied on our walk in the middle of the storm on Saturday, which bothered a certain someone to no end.)

I braved the muggy, windy, rainy morning to haul my rear to market early Saturday morning and picked up this case of scratch and dent tomatoes for $10 and spent my Saturday canning ‘maters.  I got 18 pints out of it, bringing my stash to 3 full cases for the upcoming winter season.  Not too shabby.
I also whipped up a wicked roasted salsa the other night and then canned the leftovers (after adding vinegar to maintain the acidity).  I’ll open a jar this week to see how it fares. 
Saturday night, we had friends over to try this out for dinner.  We let the kids roll their own and they loved it.  I added some marinated tofu to the mix, which just hit the spot.  In this cookbook there is an eggplant teriyaki recipe that has a quick and easy sauce that is my go to.  Basically, it’s equal parts sesame oil, OJ, and tamari, with some garlic.  Boiling your tofu beforehand makes it firmer, and I’ve heard that it also makes it more amicable to soaking up a marinade.  I use Twin Oaks tofu, which is local and infinitely better than any other tofu I’ve found in any grocery store.  It’s one of those things that’s always in my fridge.
And last, but certainly not least, the squirrels finally decided to back off the garden and I picked a whole bowl of tomatoes!  Okay, so it’s a candy dish and it’s grape tomatoes.  Still, on principle, I’m pretty darn tooting happy about them.  I broke out the china for them!

Denial is the name of the creek running through my back yard.

2 Comments

12 years ago when we moved to this neighborhood, I wondered if I could ever be friends with the women that lived around me.   Back then, I couldn’t imagine what a difference motherhood makes.  When Edie was born, I found myself at the park, every afternoon, no matter what, and I seemed to always be there with the same group of neighborhood women, who were also there with their kids, everyday, no matter what, because you just had to get those kids out of the house.  Those women have over the years become my dearest friends, my motherhood mentors, my support group, my family.   Betty, in particular, who lives just 2 doors down.  When her son, 3 years older than Edie, started school, we’d see her walking to the bus stop to wait for the bus every afternoon.  At some point in Ben’s kindergarten year, it became a thing for us to walk out and wait with Betty, so that for years before Edie started school, the highlight of our day was sometimes sitting and waiting for Ben to get home from school.  Maybe because that was when all the neighborhood kids would gather at the park.  But it was also our daily check in with Betty.  In time, Edie got on the bus with Ben, and then it was just me & Betty waiting for the bus.  And then Ben moved up to the Upper Elementary school, but we’d still pass each other in the flurry of the morning, Edie off to the bus stop, Ben off to school up the street…. and Betty and I would still end up having coffee together at least one morning a week.  And maybe lunch one day,  happy hour another….We spend holidays and birthdays together, we can together, how many times I’ve helped her rearrange her house, I can’t count.  She is a big part of my everyday world.  When I have news to share, I generally pop over there first, especially if Pat’s away or out of cell phone range, as has been known to happen.   When I need a dash of this or that, I run down to her house and vice versa.  She is my friend, my neighbor, my family, and a big part of my everyday world. 

And she is moving to New York City.

I’ve known this day was coming.  She announced the news when we came back from our big June roadtrip.  She had been chattering about it for some time as a possibility, but of course, as I do when I don’t really want to deal with something, I pretty much tuned it out.  She said it would happen at the end of summer, that it’s just for a year or two, she’s keeping her house here, and going to return often.  She’ll still have work here and it won’t be that different.  Except that I won’t see her every day, won’t have coffee with her, won’t be having afternoon tea with her on a regular basis, won’t her have her popping in to borrow a can of black beans….it will be different.  My reasons for not wanting her to go are all about me, all about the hole her leaving is going to create in MY world, which in my mind, is making it all about me.  And since that is something my mother does, and a behavior I desperately want to not follow, I have pretty much kept mum about her upcoming move.  I have tried to be supportive and whenever anyone asks how I feel about this (which has come up with pretty much everyone when they hear the news), I just smile and say I’m just trying to be supportive.  Of course, I’m also known to deny things are happening until they actually happen – and yes, I’ve done that with this move.  But then, in quite alot of ways, I’ve done that with my entire summer.  I told myself and everyone around me, I’d have figured out my job thing by the time school started.  That I had all summer to figure out what I wanted to do and how I was going to do it.  That I was just going to relax and enjoy the summer.
School starts tomorrow.   And Betty came down this morning to tell me she’s leaving today.  This afternoon. 
My world is going to be vastly different come tomorrow morning.  These lazy days of sleeping in, of taking my time at getting things done, of throwing something together for dinner at any hour, of wandering down to Betty’s for a quick cocktail……done. At least for the time being.   I can’t wrap my head around it, nor do I want to until I have to face it. Which is what I do.  And it always seems to work out for me.  I’ve known for some time reality is going to kick in tomorrow and I realize it’s going to kick in HARD.  Thankfully, I’m pretty sure everyone around me knows it’s going to be hard, so I’m going to hope that my little bubble continues to somehow protect and insulate me.  Or is that just part of my ongoing denial?   Either way, tomorrow will bring a brand new day with plenty of changes.  At least I know this going into it.   And I also know, that no matter what, I will adjust and get used to it  and face it head on.  In the meantime, I’m going to continue to enjoy today for what it is.   I’m headed to the pool, we’ve got a host of friends meeting us there, and I’m going to watch a gaggle of girls have one last afternoon of pool time, until it’s time to head home and whip up dinner and then, reality will slowly start to hit us, as I’ll have to have a real dinner on the table at a decent hour and have Edie in bed at a decent hour, because we will have to be up at what right now seems like an ungodly hour of 7 am in order to catch that big yellow angel.

Ugh.

Granny had a point.

1 Comment

My Granny was not what you would call a sweet old lady.  She drank, she smoked, she cursed like a sailor.  She had a number of phrases that her grandchildren recall, most of which are quite savory, like where exactly to look for sympathy.  (In the dictionary….between, well, two not so polite words.). 

When my Aunt Loretta was 8 and a half months pregnant with who would be my cousin John, she ran to the grocery store.  As it was July and she was incredibly pregnant, she wore what had to have been the most comfortable shoes – flip flops.  Walking in her front door, she tripped and fell and shattered her ankle, landing her in a cast from her toes to her hip.  In July.  Did I mention she was pregnant as well?  My not quite 12 year old self was shipped down to help her until at least the baby was born.  This was when I learned to make coffee and heard my grandmother, on an almost daily basis, rant about the dangers of flip flops.  She had never been a fan, but now, clearly, we could all see they were life threatening.

Of course I haven’t heeded her warnings over the years and yes, I’ve had some flip flop incidents.  I have a tendency to get plantar fasciitis thanks to my ridiculously high arches and my complete hatred of wearing shoes during the warmer months.  For the last 3 months, I have worn nothing but flip flops (except of course when at the gym.).  I know better and now that my foot is really bothering me, going all the way up to my bad knee and I’m having to wear good supportive shoes ALL THE TIME in this ridiculously hot weather when really all I should be wearing is flip flops, I can hear my Granny telling me I should know better.  Yes, I should.  I do.  Still doesn’t mean I listen to her. 

Granny was right.  Flip flops are dangerous.