Winter of my discontent

Tuesday morning we woke to this:

Again.

See that stuff on the road? That's ice. Ice. In April. Snow I can do, but ice? Come on.

Third Tuesday in row, besides. Soccer was cancelled. Baseball was cancelled. All activities celebrating the great outdoors were shut down, possibly forever, because how exactly are we going to do swim season, or camping season, or anything season, with a blizzard every Tuesday? Helen's soccer team hasn't had a practice in over a month (games, though. They've had those. All I will say  is that apparently the other teams are finding space to practice.)

It's had an effect on my mood.

Technically the shores of Duluth, but it could be my heart.

 Not helping is my annual freak out about summer. This year, oddly, has mostly been better: perhaps I have come to accept certain truths, such as that my platonic ideal of summer - a blend of a few childhood experiences, the farm from Charlotte's Web, and various other cultural suitcases that I have not had time to unpack - does not actually exist in the universe as we know it. Also that staying home with my children all day every day would be an unmitigated disaster, one that would have to begin with quitting my job. Therefore: I'm signing the kids up for a blend of camps, sports and babysitters, with a goal of minimizing drive time and camp time, and I'm fine with that. Mostly. We did run into one stumbling block: when I went to sign Helen up for swim team, the team she was on last year, the one with all her friends, was full. I briefly lost my will to live. Just to put in context, this was three days after the bombing in Boston killed three and shattered lives and limbs. So I pulled myself together and decided I had just lost the will to live here, in this competitive, crowded, rat race of a suburb where everything is a fight and a struggle and I'm always having to hustle and bark.

Then I signed Helen up for a different swim team and moved on.

Meanwhile, we are going about our days. It's supposed to be seventy-five this Saturday: that's a good thing. Not all of the tulips and daffodils got snapped in the superfreeze we had at the beginning of April ( 6 degrees. It got down to 6 degrees Fahrenheit), so that's also something. (The lilacs, though, are toast, and one looks as though it might be permanent toast.) Helen and I went for a run slash bike ride yesterday after work; it was warm, or warmish, so long as we kept moving. We saw kingfishers and muskrat and sparrows and turtles and talked about returning to the ponds in the summer with a friend. I found a program for Silas for next year where he can serve as a volunteer in the local parks & rec offices: perfect, I'm thinking, because what he needs more than anything right now is a job. I mean, he'll have to wait until next year, but still. Just knowing that is out there eases my mind.

Wolf Creek Ski Report

We made a family ski trip this past weekend. This is one of those things that sounds a little like a Beautiful People activity when you casually mention it, that feels like an exercise in exhaustion and forced toleration while you're in it, and when you're home, washed and rested, seems like the kind of thing that Makes Life Worthwhile.

I'm still waiting to get fully rested. Also, our ski gear is still "airing out" all over the bedroom floor. So we haven't reached stage three yet. But we're headed there.

The Beautiful People part was not just the ski aspect - skiing can sometimes feel like just another soccer game death march, what with the rush-hour-style drive up I-70, full parking lots, endless schlepping of gear, squished peanut butter sandwiches in the locker by the ski school, and the regular running into people we know on the slopes (figuratively. Not literally. Yet.) It was the getaway part - we made the long haul down south to one of my favorite parts of the state, to a distant ski area in a place without lines (I'm pretty sure unicorns can be found in the San Juans too), without the brassy me-too glitz of the centrally located ski scene. We went to Wolf Creek, which is a holy combination of legendary snow and low-key digs. Wolf Creek is the kind of place the ski guys go, the young men with nothing better to do than drive half the night for consistently awesome powder. It's not really a place that suburban Denver families go - except that it works for us, too, in all the same ways.

However, I'm still kind of stuck in the exhaustion stage: I'm remembering in a full-body way how we left straight after work on Friday - after a week of cramming in laundry and snack-buying and gassing up between all the usual tasks, we threw the stuff in the car, fed the birdies and headed south. We got up early both days and spent all the nonskiing hours hopping from bed to bed in the motel room so we wouldn't step in all the chunks of tracked-in snow on the floor. We were cold pretty much eight hours a day for two days straight. We spent over fourteen hours in the car. I didn't get my usual weekend run; Silas basically insisted on skin-to-skin contact with his personal electronic devices every minute that he wasn't actually wearing skis and I was too exhausted to urge a better path, despite how much it bothered me. To the enjoyment of everyone, it turned out I was *not* too exhausted to nag.

Both children are wearing skis.

So: will it turn out to have been a trip that Makes Life Worthwhile? Definitely. Just knowing that this part of world is a place we can go in the midst of a regular working month makes it feel already like we have an escape hatch. As we drove across the long dark vastness of the San Luis valley on Friday night I leaned forward into the windshield and watched the stars; even through the reflection of the dashboard lights I could see more than I ever can back in the suburbs. I wanted to stop the car and stand in the freezing night air and really look at them; I didn't, because I wanted to get to the motel even more, but the fact that I was that close and I could have has made returning to the cramped routines of daily life feel more open, like there's air getting in.

It's not a new fact to me, that this is what I need. Some people need spa weekends and pampering and luxury (or cooking, or shopping, or reading) to make them feel like the universe has room for them; I need space, and I don't really get that in the life I've made now. What I'm not sure about yet is if the Wolf Creek trip filled that hole or made it deeper.

Friday favorites

1. Favorite book I've been reading this week: The Little Princess, to Helen at bedtime. This is actually one of my favorite books of all time, and I look forward all day to reading it, even as my adult mind keeps getting tripped up by some of the details (what part of two adult men spying on a child through her window, and then sneaking into her room as she sleeps, is NOT CREEPY? Also, the happy ending where the rich youngish man finds the love of his life in, I mean becomes the legal guardian of, his dead business partner's 11-year-old daughter - well, it's great and all until she wants to be a grownup with HER OWN LIFE and get married and stuff, and THEN WHAT HAPPENS?)

2. Favorite meal: a made a pork chop thing with red cabbage, and a crock pot chicken and yam thing that I didn't even get to eat because I was so busy going to a wine-tasting tupperware party up the street (my life can be SO HARD sometimes), but I think my favorite thing this week was the lentil salad with goat cheese and sundried tomatoes that I managed not to burn. Needless to say I was alone, all alone, with my privileged bowl of lentils in the corner. Everyone else ate cereal and cheese quesadillas.

3. Favorite weather this week: it snowed on Thursday, real snow that stuck on the ground and everything. We built a fire and lay around reading books/ building Minecraft thingies (sets? scenarios? I don't even know).

4. Favorite work run. This fall I've been doing runs at work. These are way, way better now that the temperature at noon is no longer 92 degrees in the shade. It's still a barren, bleak, warehouse-filled landscape, though, and while most days I run over and do laps around the windy expanse of soccer fields, once a week I give myself permission to drive to the bikepath and run along Cherry Creek.

Welp, it's a Thursday

My head has been otherwise engaged this week, what with a regular storm of craptacular news, the attendant bad sleeping, and, oh yeah, SNOW. In May. Insert Colorado Weather disclaimer here, and I KNOW, it's weather, get OVER it, but still. The low pressure shit is messing with my mood, and there wasn't much of it to be messed with to begin with.

Anyhow. Things are actually going fairly well in the Melospiza household, objectively speaking, and from the perspective of the healing power of self-pity this just doesn't help. I mean, a year ago, if we'd found out that we needed a roof repair to the tune of ten grand, I would have been in red alert panic mode. Now, thanks to being employed, I can say philosophically, "Eh. It sucks, but what can you do?" And, thanks to even worse news out there, even this problem seems small and of the we're-lucky-to-have-it variety. Man. The words "hospice" and "under 40" shouldn't legally allowed to be in the same sentence and I don't want to talk about it but I just want to say that the people involved are about the kindest, funniest, warmest people on the planet and it just SUCKS.

Meanwhile, my son's baseball team continues to lose (but with talent!), we've got ongoing battles with the Wii and exactly how much time should be spent playing it (ranging from a high of 22 hours a day to a low of zero), and half of my daughter's friends are not going to be at her daycare this summer. Although she seems to be dealing with this fact just fine, and we actually have a good history of playdates and parent-to-parent communication with the friends involved, so it isn't nearly the break that it might at first seem (And? she's likely to be at the same middle school as these girls, which is unimaginable and awesome.)

So. It's a Thursday. Enjoy yours.

Winter

I have been experiencing an excess of winter lately. Yes, there is this (10 more inches! March snow, I love you, but please! be done!); but I seem to be accidentally augmenting real winter with fictional otherplace winter.

First, in January, I read a book that took place mostly in winter in upstate New York (Amateur Barbarians). Then I read a book that took place entirely in winter in New York City, and then it was a symbolic, dystopian winter that extended past winter into summer and beyond (Chronic City). Then I started reading a book that so far takes place in wintry Wisconsin (A Gate at the Stairs). Then I listened to The Places in Between, Rory Stewart's (wonderful) account of his walk across Afghanistan in the winter of 2002. Now I'm listening to Endurance, an account of Ernest Shackleton's 1914 Antarctic adventure (now there's a book to make winter seem mild. At least I'm not stuck in a 22-foot boat with fifteen other men in a raging Antartic Sea, drenched and rotting and reduced to eating frozen penguins for food! Things are good!)

So, uh...I'm kind of ready for plants. And dry sidewalks. And drinking a beer on a warm summer evening, and riding a bike across town, and dashing about the yard checking on which bulbs have come up. I'm ready for spring, in other words.

How about you?

Seasoning

Just in case I might have been worried, back in October, about getting into the Christmassy mood too soon, what with the 12 inches of snow and all, and then being sort of past the whole Christmas thing come mid-December, when chances were that the weather would be 60 degrees and dry...well, no more need to worry. Since the snow is still here, or was here and is here again, or is here and is coming tomorrow also and also the day after that...or something. We're in the Season. White on white, and cold, mama.

Yesterday we went up and cut a tree from Golden Gate State Park (by permit!), and by "we" I mean Hubs, Silas, and Sister-in-Law + Nephew, because Helen had a cough and I decided to prudently stay home with her. And also get some laundry done, and clean the house, and um, oh yeah, avoid driving sixty miles in a winter storm warning. I love being out in the snow and cold, but not if I'm in a vehicle. "Call when you get there!" I said cheerily, and put on the water for another pot of coffee. "Drive safe!"

It's a fine tree, a fir, 11 feet and 10 inches tall, so it fit in our living room with two inches to spare. It was also reported to be a fine hike, if we use Ernest Shackleton's definition of fine. That is, it was long, cold, windy, snowy, and cold, and while I actually think that would have been kind of fun, doing it with kids, especially "I hate hikes" Helen, would have started out notfun and proceeded straight to Death March.

The good news about staying home was that I managed to keep so busy that I didn't think once about the purchasing part of Christmas. Which means that we're still on square one: giftfail. Which means the chances of me being one of those poor souls running out to the Quickie Mart at 10 o'clock on December 24 just bumped a little higher.

So: happy holidays!

Foul-Weather Runner

So, I've been trying to stick to the following running schedule: Tuesday through Friday I wake up at 5:30 and run for two or three miles. On Saturday I "rest" by dusting, vacuuming, scrubbing porcelain fixtures, and going to the store. On Sunday I go for my long run, which currently means about seven or eight miles, which I'm trying to push up to nine or ten. I seem to have settled into this pattern pretty solidly, and even when the week's evening activities force me to tweak it a bit (last week I went to Wicked with my MIL and SIL and it was unexpectedly AWESOME, but I didn't get into bed until midnight. So I gave myself a pass for Friday and ran on Saturday instead). However, the first real challenge came yesterday, when it snowed half a foot (for the THIRD TIME THIS SEASON I AM DYING HERE). I was determined--determined--to run nine miles, even though there were six inches of wet, sloppy snow on the ground.

And, ladies and gentlemen, I did it. Even though the bike path was unplowed, meaning that I ran nine miles in ankle-deep snow, with slippery chunks of snow ice trapped in my socks. Even though it was like trying to run on sand, slop-slop-slop. There were benefits, of course: I had to pee at one point, and since I had seen exactly one person during my entire run I decided to risk it and pee on the trail (the risk paid off, BTW, and I was not slapped with an indecent exposure citation). The world was beautiful, in a cold kind of way. The virtue--or something--poured off me in visible waves, which was helpful, as once I got home I was basically useless and lay about on the couch shivering and drinking hot chocolate while other people (= my spouse) did the child-wrangling. I was protected by my Virtue Force Field from feeling the need to help in any way. I'm sure Hubs appreciated it.

As I loafed about on the couch I was reminded of my pre-kid self--back when I had excessive free time, didn't know many people, and was frequently housed in a small apartment. I used to go out in all kinds of weather for hours--tromping through snow, through mud, through rain, through withering heat. It wasn't really exercise so much as restlessness; also, once I got past the discomfort, I kind of loved the bad weather. Snow is exhilarating, and fantastically quiet; rain has mystery and promotes encounters with unusual animals. It got to be that traipsing about in storms become sort of a personal trademark. I may have had a lackluster personality but boy, I could outhike the best of them, especially if precipitation was heavy.

I miss that life. My life now has so much more going for it, really--but still. I was so free.

Friday Favorites

A break from my transportation kick to bring you my five favorite things about snow days:

1. Sleeping in.
2. That awesome, "and now we take a break from our regularly scheduled programming" feeling. Regular life is having some technical difficulties...so let's all sit around in our PJs and play Memory.
3. I'm often inspired to take up outlandish and totally uncharacteristic house projects. Like: I made a sock doll yesterday. People! A sock doll!
4. Hot chocolate and cookies are obviously medical necessities.
5. The snow.

The Wheels on the Bus

I don't know anyone over the age of five who loves buses. If they do, they keep their passions to themselves, which is just as well, since buses are big, ugly, unglamorous, move in a cloud of diesel exhaust, and apparently are one of the top causes of death in the United States (as evidenced by the phrase, "I could get run over by a bus tomorrow and then where would you be" and variations thereof). They're also the public transportation option I've used most often in my life.

Every weekend during the winter of 1994-1995 I took an RTD bus from Boulder to Denver (free with my student ID), walked to the urine-y and exhaust-y Greyhound Bus Station on the ungentrified part of downtown, and then took a bus to Glenwood Springs. I made this trip in snow and ice and riotous game crowds and was delayed only a handful of times. I had my share of strange seat mates (the well-dressed giggling man in his forties who claimed to have a sports car and tried to leave me with his phone number; the earnest and lugubrious former truck driver who wanted to impress upon me the wisdom of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, which he claimed could have saved his marriage, if only he'd read it in time; the man who carried on an entire, merry, give-and-take conversation with himself during the course of the four-hour ride)--but mostly it wasn't too crowded, and I rode alone and worked on my physics homework. Once we were in an accident ("Bus driver! Somebody hit us!"); once we had to wait for an hour on a pass after a semi jackknifed and closed both lanes. Mostly, though, it was a sturdy, stodgy, reliable way to get to Glenwood, and most of my fellow passengers were regular folks who didn't want to risk driving the mountain passes in the winter.

So, when I took this job, one of the first things I did was look at possible bus schedules (especially, uh, for days like today. Holy TOLEDO is it snowing out there.) The Denver RTD site has a handy "route finder" function, where you can plug in your starting and destination intersections and get instructions on which buses to take and how long it should take to get from A to B. Being me, I wasn't satisfied to just plunk in my address and my work address, but had to try to game the system a bit and put in large, obvious intersections that I knew were serviced by bus. Even so, the route they suggested took ONE HOUR AND FORTY-FIVE MINUTES. I mean, WHAT? In what universe would a normal person opt to take an hour and forty-five minutes to go 13 miles? I could BIKE it in less time. I mean, not today, obviously. But STILL. That's RETARDED. No wonder ninety percent of the people who use the buses are clearly obligated to use them due to their unfitness to drive/ own cars (Note: that stereotype is based on my experience with buses in other midsize cities. Maybe here the buses are populated by young professionals. Who just happen to want to TRIPLE THEIR COMMUTE time by riding the bus.)

So. Buses don't work. Trains don't work. Bikes don't work. What's a girl to do? Drive, of course. And voila: global warming. Also Denver's brown cloud. Parking lots. Acidic runoff. A drive-thru culture. I want something DIFFERENT.

Snow Day

Over the weekend we had a little bit of this:















Two feet of this, to be precise. It came at exactly the right time to tweak our weekend into mellowness: the out-of-town guest had to cancel (stuck in Wyoming), the baseball games were canceled (we're three weeks into the baseball season and the boy has had exactly zero games so far. Which is fine, but might be giving me an unduly leisurely idea of what it's like to be a Baseball Mom. [I can't believe I just called myself a Baseball Mom.]), and the outdoors proved so snowy and delicious, and also so warm, that we had to practically drag the kids indoors when bedtime rolled around.


There was lots of this:















Very dapper, this fellow. Also, very flattened. Silas and his cousin built him up, and then pummeled him into submission. I did rescue my scarf.

After snowing all day Friday and Saturday, Sunday it was sunny and 60 degrees (helLO Colorado), so we spent half the day at the creek. I should have just made a recording of myself saying "The creek is really high! You need to be careful!" and then left it at home. I could have saved my voice and my anxiety a lot of trouble. The kids were magnetically drawn to the high water, of course, but luckily neither fell in, and we all got a lot of sun time.















Bring out the sandbags, the bike path's flooded.















Got to get a closer look...

While I took this photo I imagined telling the officer what I was doing snapping photographs while my children climbed into the flooded creek and drowned. I kept such worries at bay by repeating, "Those rocks look really slippery! Be careful!" about fifty thousand times during the course of taking this picture. It obviously worked, because they're still here.