Project Time Again

Fact: this time of year, EVERY year, I hate my yard. It doesn't really matter which yard we're talking about; they all have patchy grass coming up in tufts like hair after chemo; there's always dog doo everywhere, or, if I've been keeping up with the yard-cleanup duties , there are mysterious brown chunks that look like dog doo but end up being something else; there are always bits and pieces of broken and abandoned toys; there are always little flowers that look like trash. The most vigorous plants in mid-April are always the weeds. I always find the yard exhausting and discouraging.

Not fully capturing the suckitude of the yard.

However, this year we have a plan. By the end of the summer we're going to have a little deck action; we're going to have some raised vegetable beds; and we're going to have some flower beds. What isn't in beds is going to be in some other kind of generally pleasant-to-look-at shape, instead of piles-of-dirt-and-branches shape.

The plan. Also possibly a diagram for an uncomfortable method of birth control.

The deck will be for eating and also for covering up the great grassless region.

See those railroad ties? This is the year I make myself do Freecycle. (Anyone want some railroad ties?)

Raised beds-in-training. They can't really pretty up the back of the house, but my focus here is utility.

The bright side: the yard really can only get better.
The other bright side: I do like doing this kind of work. Even if thinking about it makes me want to crack open a beer and sit down in despair.

Must Be Monday

Breaking news: Mondays suck. Even if I'm feeling cheerful, there will be SOMEONE in the family who resents the fact that it's Monday, and will make everyone else in the house feel their pain. Such as the child who awoke to remember that he left his backpack at school, and proceeded to make it a DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT MAKING ME TAKE MY LUNCH IN A NONREGULATION BAGLIKE CONTAINER kind of morning. Involving weepiness, missing the bus, and having to be walked to school. This was followed by the rising of Child 2, who ALSO didn't want it to be Monday, but had to search harder for a point of contention. She finally settled on not eating her cereal unless it was on the table in the kitchen instead of the table in the dining room. "I want to eat at the OTHER TABLE," she said in a ugh-it's-Monday kind of groan. "That's fine, sweetheart. Pick up your bowl and move it to the Other Table." "I want YOU to move my bowwwwl." Etc.

Question: does my own Monday morning crabbiness sometimes involve being, uh, inflexible on random points of contention?

Answer: maybe.

Ugh. The day at work has been fine, but I'm kind of dreading going home. I'm also hoping Si was able to track down his backpack.

So What Does Twenty Hours in a Car with Three Kids Look Like, Anyway?

Kinda like this: we leave late (ALWAYS). By the time we're pulling out of town, at 4:30, the rain/snow has already begun. Craaaaap, I think. The kids are excited but remarkably good. One is READING. One is doing puzzles. One is playing Leapster. The key point: they are QUIET (even if one wakes from a little doze around Colorado Springs and asks, "Mom! Are we almost to Legoland?!")

Past Colorado Springs, it is dark (and snowing). The drive is slow (and snowing). But the kids are asleep (hallelujah). And the snow, it is blinding, but it isn't sticking, so we keep going. We go over Raton Pass into New Mexico, and it is starting to stick but at this point stopping isn't an option. By the time we get twenty minutes into New Mexico, there is no snow at all, and we pat ourselves on the back.

New Mexico passes in a dream. Later the kids will keep forgetting to count New Mexico when they list the states they've been in for this trip (and, ok, one kid's list goes like this: "Arizona--Legoland, California--New Zealand--what's that other one, mom? oh! and Fort Collins").

In Arizona we stop to geocache (a lot) and have some French Toast. Just before we get to California we stop again, to eat all of our Clementines. The kids are still being good, amusing themselves and mostly not fighting. Although the parents mostly mention this in the context of "Hey! You kids have been SO GOOD so far! Don't mess it up now!"

We geocache across Death Valley:

Stretch the legs, solve a puzzle, get new/ new-to-you toys: what's not to love?

We hit LA just before sunset on the second day. I'd like to say we drove directly to the coast:

It was approximately 35 degrees.

But instead we descended upon the aunt of M and my SIL, completely covered her living room floor with sleeping gear, and got ready to do things like this:

Note: $14 facepaint job was gone within three hours.

All in all, not bad. The one-hour drive to Legoland the next day was VASTLY harder.

Merry Easter to all and to all a good...yeah

"Is it Merry Easter or Happy Easter?" Si asked yesterday, "I can never remember."

"It's Hoppy Easter," Mike said.

"But how do you remember which one?" Si persisted.

"Uh," we said. "You just do. You kind of memorize it. Eventually."

It's been kind of crazy chez Melospiza lately, what with the TWENTY-HOUR DRIVE TO L.A. WITH THREE KIDS IN A BLINDING SNOWSTORM and other spring break fun, and the going back and forth between work and play, and coordinating the visit from the Easter Bunny, and etc. My little quarterly resolution is to write more here, and elsewhere--so stay tuned, I guess, to see if that pans out.

In the meantime, enjoy your Monday, and April, and spring!

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?

Happy St Patrick's, Etc

1. I sent a child off to public school today NOT wearing green. As Hubs says, "everyone has to do that once!" Ha ha ha ha have a good character-building experience, kiddo!

2. I didn't go for a run yesterday or the day before and I thought I would DIE from the antsiness. It's like restless leg syndrome, except it hits you at work. I couldn't sit still! I was too sluggish! I had to get up THIS SECOND and stretch my back! I could barely read the words on the screen before me! Ugh.

3. I did go running this morning, and then for a walk at lunch. Ahhhhh. Even though I'm back to running in the pitch-black dark (thanks, DLS!), it just makes the whole day better.

4. All of my library holds are coming in at the same time so that my evening reading has become a race against time. Normally in this situation I would just bail, but people, I worked HARD for those books. I was hold number 163 of 167 when I requested Barbara Kingsolver's new novel! I'm not going to the back of the line for that one!

5. It's warm, which means a family's heart turns to tearing up the backyard. You would think that our back yard is so crappy and torn-up it just couldn't get much worse, but oh, you'd be so very wrong.

6. This is the first house we've lived in where my husband takes an interest in the yard and actually has ideas for it. On the one hand, great! Maybe we'll actually accomplish some of our more ambitious plans for it. On the other hand, I seem to be having trouble sharing.

Whew

So the big news around chez Melospiza is not that I made it home from Phoenix in one piece (that's OLD news), but that we bought a new vacuum. I know! It's a Hoover Wind Tunnel, and yesterday I vacuumed the whole house and sucked up about five pounds of dust. Sheesh. Our old vacuum was a Bissell, and I'm just going to have to go on the record and say I do not recommend it.

The house is all catfoot clean this morning, which is niiice. And yes, if you're wondering, it actually did take me a week to clean the house after getting home. My first day back I had the day off, so I went for an eight-mile hike; then my parents were here, and then it was back to work.

But none of that answers the big question, which is, How was Phoenix? This is the first time in a couple years that I've been away from home without the kids, and I was looking forward to having a hotel room to myself, having evenings to read or watch TV instead of remind people about the importance of good oral hygiene and regular sleep, and getting to go out to eat without checking the kids' menu and telling people to use their restaurant behavior. And all of that was nice, except that I worked so much I actually didn't get much time in the hotel room--I certainly didn't do any leisurely reading, at least. The TV was annoyingly set so that you couldn't switch from channel to channel but had to go back to the slow-to-load hotel menu every time. And I found myself oddly lonely, both in my room and out of it.

I did visit the Heard Museum, went running through some elegant old Spanish-style neighborhoods, and picked an orange right off a tree. Mostly, though, I was stuck inside, in the cavernous Convention Center. It was a business trip, in other words.

Have a great day, and rock that daylight savings time! (Augh.)