High School Parking Lot Slow Roll, explained.

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I intended on posting this at the end of the school year, which came very unexpectedly early. This was the backbone of our mornings these last four years and I couldn’t let my girl’s high school career end without one last word on the High School Parking Lot Slow Roll Facebook posts that have been a regular occurrence for the duration.

A portion of the graffiti wall at CHS, which stretches along side a length of the parking lot

I’m pretty sure it started with Freebird.

I’ve long been That Mom rolling through the carpool line at school with the music just a little too loud. I’m the sort of person who thinks that life is indeed a musical, that there is a proper soundtrack for everything, that people walking down the street are liable to break into a dance at any moment, that music should always be on in the background and yes, it’s probably a little too loud for some people’s taste.

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Unexpected Chicken.

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How’s it going out there? I spent three days this week thinking it was Thursday, with only one of them actually being Thursday. Even the dog is out of sorts and anxious from the lack of routine these days. We’re not making any sort of attempt to homeschool because it’s the end of senior year and to be honest, AP Stats is leap years beyond my skill set.

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Really being the gardener I write about being.

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For the first time ever, I got a proper spring garden planted. I’m not at all sure why I’ve never been able to accomplish this in all my years gardening. Despite the fact that I get paid to offer unsolicited gardening advice to complete strangers in a some pretty magazines, I really am sort of a half ass lazy gardener. I am death to houseplants. I stick to perennials in my yard because once they are established, I don’t need to do anything for them on a regular basis. It’s a tough love style of gardening, where plants just have to get themselves established by mid-July, because that’s when I kinda start forgetting to water. Pat will catch up the slack on the vegetable garden and thankfully, begonias and geraniums do well with my summer neglect, so for all outward appearances, I pull off looking like a competent gardener. But, to be completely honest, I’m really not at all the gardener I write about being. When people have me to their gardens and want to talk gardening with me, I have to admit the only flower names I know are the ones I like and/or grow well. And vegetables? I stick to greens I know I do well (arugula) and things anyone can grow, like peppers. Growing okra and field peas last year was a bit step outside of my garden comfort zone.

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Invisibility.

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I watched the new Taylor Swift movie, Miss Americana, with my girl recently. I admittedly am not really a fan, but my girl is, so under the guise of quality time, I agreed to watch it with her.  Not only did I walk away with a new-found respect for Miss Swift, I found some of what she had to say resonating with me, specifically, her perceived view that women in entertainment have to reinvent themselves regularly to stay relevant.  As someone who has reinvented herself a few times over, I’d say that experience isn’t relegated to women in entertainment, I’d argue it’s something all of us as women either have or will go through at some point in our lives.

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The Pink Notebook

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Ten years ago this month, I started this blog. It was more of an experiment to see if I could keep my creative mojo around after one of my more rather alarming dry spells than anything else. The idea was that I’d make it a record of things I made, but somehow, keeping the record became yet another creative outlet for me.

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My four legged friend.

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When I first told my family they get could a dog as long as I didn’t have to be involved, I failed to fully think that through. Turns out, Betsy beagle has become my mostly companion which somehow wasn’t a surprise to anyone but myself. We even became those people who bring a dog on a college tour this fall and when I expressed surprise at this, I was generally met with ‘uh-huh’, as if we were the only ones who failed to recognize this about us.

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Out with the old…

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As years go, 2019 wasn’t entirely a bad one. But I wouldn’t necessarily say it was a good one either. Like any year, it had its ups and downs, celebrations and disappointments. We lived through a construction project, I had a milestone birthday and we toured colleges with our not-so-baby girl. We slide into 2020 knowing it’s going to be one filled with changes – change being the one constant you can count on in life. Having spent the last 18 years with my world revolving around being a mom, my every day is clearly about to undergo a vast shift so I’m not going to bother making any sort of sweeping declarations of what I’m going to do in 2020, beyond of course, promise you that I really am not coming back to run the orchestra poinsettia sale, so please, stop asking. Really.

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Settling the dust.

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Construction has wrapped up on our little renovation project so now we are down to setting the house back to rights. Which at first glance probably seems like no big deal, but scope creep combined with the realization that the back half of the house looks so good we now want the rest of the house to match means the remaining part of the project – our portion – is bigger than we had initially realized.

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