Back to blogging

 I will never be a prolific blogger, but I am happy to see I wrote more posts in 2022 than in 2021, which should be surprising considering the time at home during the pandemic - but then EVERYONE was at home, and I have a hard time blogging with background activity. Hence the reason I never finished that last post before Christmas - I had to watch movies and play games and talk and listen to the kids. 

** Best movie of the season? Maybe Miracle on 34th Street. We've watched some duds - like The Prestige the other night. There were two other magic movies we watched that were better - Now You See Me 1 and 2 - they reminded me of National Treasure, but they were pretty light weight. We rewatched The Greatest Showman and While You Were Sleeping which were both fun, and then the girls got hooked on a Sandra Bullock kick. Bullet Train was way too violent for me, and The Heat suffered from over the top the foul language, and Bullock and her co-star Melissa McCarthy didn't convince me that they were actually good agents - they kept bickering and playing into stereotypes. One of the kids has gotten hooked on Kath and Kim, which is a ridiculous, raunchy Australian sitcom from the early 2000s, but it does make me chuckle.  What I'm really looking forward to is the new season of All Creatures Great and Small, which starts on Sunday. 

I am also happy to see some familiar favorite blogs being updated these past few days. I should be prepping my Blackboard shells for classes, which start next week, but instead I'm distracted by blogs - it's like reconnecting with old friends - I need to check in and see how their gardens and their kids have grown and what pasttimes have changed or stayed the same. I've been enjoying the chatty tone and the quotidian topics - rather than the push for views that so many social media users seem to be about these days or the marketing of some new organizer or motivational series. I think I wrote a while ago about the sympathy I feel for young moms these days - everything seems to be about monetization - how to sell your product and yourself.  Can you just share information any more or do you have to market it? And do you need an expert to tell you how to do everything?  I saw an email from our family practice's office the other day about a series on toilet training that they want patients to pay for. Do you need training to potty train your kid?  Maybe. It is intimidating. So I appreciate these other blogs that write about daily life and what not for free. Free advice here! So while I've never done much to increase traffic to this here space, there is something motivating about recording bits and pieces of daily life for the occasional reader, even if it is only my mom and a record for the kids. If I describe the memories while they are made, the impressions will be stronger.

On that front - today was the first day back at school for the two youngest. After dropping them off, I went to a parent teacher organization meeting (I'm the coffee chair - every other month there is a "community coffee" for parents to hear what's going on at school. It used to be called "coffee with the principal" until the principal resigned after the homecoming kerfluffle. For now the school president is taking on the role of principal, until this spring when they will begin interviewing candidates.) The meeting itself was brief because everyone was still getting used to getting up early this morning and figuring out what's ahead, but I did have an interesting conversation with another parent afterwards about the perils of flying and his grandfather's Naval service.  Another reminder of why recording family history is so important - those memories fade and are lost forever if they aren't captured in time. 

Then the rest of the day, I worked on classwork, updated our budget and started organizing financial info for taxes and financial aid forms. The two middle kids had dentist appointments and one had FIVE cavities - the kid who just started college. I don't think he has been brushing his teeth. I'm thinking I might make him cover part of the cost share to motivate his dental hygiene habits. Either that, or look into another dentist - I am always a little skeptical about dentists. I feel like some look for cavities and fill teeth that just have "soft spots."  Not that it hurts to have those filled, but when they don't do silver fillings anymore, it adds to my suspicion that they are trying to maximize their profit margin because the insurance doesn't cover the amalgam fillings at 100% so they can bill us the overage. Can you tell I am a medical skeptic? 

I feel the same way about car insurance. I'm debating canceling the comprehensive coverage on our teenager car because it costs almost $400 for 6 months - which is about a 10th of the value of the vehicle. The only thing preventing me is the fact that our most recently licensed driver had two major accidents last year.  I hate shopping for cars, but I'm afraid our second car is at the point where we don't really want to drive it even as far as Dallas. It's got 10 years and 140K miles on it. My husband wants to sell the third car - the teen vehicle, demote the second car to teen car, and buy a new/lightly used car for his daily commute. I'd be open to this if we didn't buy two cars last year! (The family vehicle and the teen car, the one that is expensive to cover and which doesn't drive very well - maybe because it is a 4 cylinder, maybe because it is 11 years old. He wants to get rid of it before we have to fix it, but I'm of the mind that fixing it might be easier than doing the research for another vehicle.) Husband also wants to go to Ireland for the Navy - Notre Dame football game and go see his cousins in North Carolina again and take a trip with his brother for his 50th bday and a lot of other things...  hence my budgeting activity today.

Well, it seems I have no real advice - just examples of what you might get advice about. Now I need to get back to work on this course update, but I'm planning to write down some resolutions and book reviews in this space soon - or some plans for the new year if you don't like the idea of resolutions. I love them! But I've already failed to go to bed before midnight every night in 2023, and I bit all my nails off last night. I was doing really well at not biting my nails until I broke one and had to even it out...  yes, I am almost 50, and I still bite my nails. It's a terrible, disgusting habit that I have tried again and again to quit.  There's a resolution I need to make... 

A freebie! Delight of the day: this free illustrated excerpt from The Wind in the Willows from Cricket Magazine.

Oil Spill Apocalypse

I’ve been spending a lot of time getting caught up on blogs since we returned earlier this week. Too much time really. I'm embarrassed to admit that the other night I stayed up past midnight, 1, 2, reading. I will never get this time back, I thought as I crashed into bed. And time was so plentiful when I was on vacation from home and the internet. (Synchronicity to read Elizabeth Foss's reflections on her mixed emotions about blogging and then evologia's similar conclusions.)

But what I really had a hard time pulling myself away from that night were articles about the possible repercussions of the BP oil spill. Being newly returned to the coast, I was eager to get updates on its status, especially the happy news that the leak is capped.  The beach here is still open. I saw a jetskier enjoying a sunny day on the water as I drove down Highway 90.  And a neighbor's son is taking sailing lessons which have only been cancelled one day.  Even the least terns are still around in their roped off "Nest in Peace" area. But there are no pelicans on the pier where we used to see sometimes a dozen or more roosting.  And every morning cleaning crews are out scouting for tarballs on the beach.

It was my brother-in-law who alerted me to some web pages (Helium being one of them. Reputable or not?) that give a rather gloomy, if not downright apocalyptic, view of some of the possible repercussions of oil and methane leaking into the ocean and preparing to split apart the ocean floor causing catastrophic, world-crushing tsunamis. Another mentioned cancer causing amounts of benzene already in the air around New Orleans. Add to this, we watched 2012 while at my in-laws last week. Full of flaws, but I’ve loved John Cusack since The Journey of Natty Gann, (one of the first things I noticed about my husband when we first started dating was that his upper lip resembles JC’s), so I enjoyed watching it, but now all that information blackout business is coming back to me. We will be told of our impending death before the tsunami hits? Will we have time to prepare?

I could very easily get drawn into conspiracy theories. But in the back of my mind, I know that death is always imminent. And I know I’m unprepared. Time to get to confession. Time to get back to a routine that includes more conversation with God and less with myself.

Enmeshment

One of the few things that lodged in our memories after my husband and I took our marriage prep inventory is the categorizing of our families of origins. I can't remember what his family's label was, only that it was the diametric opposite of my family of origin, which was given the title "chaotically enmeshed."

This is obvious when my cousin calls from 500 miles away to ask if I'm pregnant before I've taken a pregnancy test.

Or, like a couple nights ago, when my husband asked if I had a blog. He heard it from my dad who heard it from my sister (who tends to be entangled in many of these grapevines). This was after I had made one post. He was worried I was trying to keep it secret. I was worried about having anything to say. Why did I want to blog?

I admit, I was very anti-blog the first time I heard about them, which was about 5 yrs ago, when a friend told us about his friend's blog. So I logged on and read it and was infuriated at wasting my time and at his semi-illiterate, profanity-laden comments criticizing some girl on the El for reading The Brothers Karamazov. Blogs seemed like the place for ego trips and mommy updates. Neither one did I want to read.

And, sorry, this one will probably be little different: I want to make note of the things I find myself forgetting which I want to remember and wanting to make a story out of the experiences we're going through. And a place to write done what I'm reading - if I can remember.

Plus I don't scrapbook.

Getting Started

Perhaps if I start my own blog, I won't spend so much time reading other people's postings and feeling small for not accomplishing more with my time. And I'm hoping to centralize a place to note thoughts on what I've read, what we've done, what's going on, so that as my memory declines, I'll have a place to come and jog it, instead of trying to remember where I jotted something. The thought of starting a blog has been intimidating because there are so many good ones out there - what's the point of adding more mediocrity to the pool? But a note in a book I was browsing the other night encouraged me to get started. From Katherine Patterson's The Invisible Child: "When I protested to [her mentor] that I didn't want to add another mediocre writer to the world, she gently reminded me that if I didn't dare mediocrity, I would never write anything at all."

So this is the answer to a dare.

And I finally settled on a title that wasn't taken.