Party on the roof! roof! roof! roof!

Sorry for the barfilicious pic, but now we know: THIS is why the house smells of mold.

Better

This is mostly what's been making me feel bad: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/kentucky/obituary.aspx?n=kelly-jo-feinberg&pid=142854594. I met Kelly in grad school and while it would be a presumptuous lie to say that we were good friends, she was one of the lights of grad school. We shared an office during the first and only semester that I taught and I remember giggling with her about our insecurities and awkwardnesses and as I've awkwardly tried to write a condolence letter this week to her husband, I keep imagining that I'm going to be able to laugh with Kelly about it--and then remembered, oh. But she was younger and nicer than me and the whole unfairness of it all has been pissing me off.

Anyhow. I am feeling better. Helen had her much-anticipated Kindergarten Orientation last night, and it cheered me right up. I'd feel even better if *I* got to go to kindergarten in the fall, because it sounds so awesome, but luckily I'm good at vicariously living through my kids.

Happy Wednesday.

Sad

My mood this Monday morning is toeing the "bummed" line, wavering between actual local sadnesses and crises and occasionally veering out into "let's surf the internet and find out what WORSE things could be happening and then imagine them and weep." Occasionally I'm foraying into mad territory--sometimes life steps in and fucks up all your plans and there's nothing you can do about it! This sucks!--and then also into the more midlife crisis-y "so you wanted to be a ranger at Yellowstone National Park and raise your kids to happily roam the woods AND be fluent in Spanish AND physically close to all of the important relatives and look how things turned out instead"--which upon examination looks less like a "life interfered with my dreams" crisis and more of a "reality interfered with my dreams."

Which doesn't actually make the non-actualization of those dreams any less bitter. Plus, there are the actual local sadnesses and crises, none of which are new but which are kind of wearing me down right now.

Anyhow. Apparently it's Monday or something. (*signficant glance at sulking self*)

Friday Favorites

My oldest threw up on the bus today. Rite of passage, right? Poor kid. (also: guilt. He said he felt dizzy this morning, but did I listen? No.)

Now I'm kind of feeling like sickness lurks around the corner. My throat is...not sore yet, but drippy, if you know what I mean.

So. A Friday Favorites post about the great things about being sick. Because feeling crummy sucks--but it's always nice to have an excuse to glug down some Nyquil (off brand, of course).

1. Sleeping in, taking naps, and more sleeping in general. This really only works if it's not a coughing cold.

2. Watching TV/ movies and feeling like this is good. This is exactly what I should be doing vs Don't you have some laundry you need to do? Only that laundry never goes away, does it? Damn.

3. Nyquil, benadryl, and etc. Duh.

Well, that's it. I hope this isn't a really involved cold. I also hope it isn't a big one for the coughing.

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.

Boring garden post

Baby steps: it's not really possible to tell in this picture, but the back yard is looking better.

In the beds: two kinds of peas, three kinds of beans, tomatoes, zucchini, patty pan squash, radishes, carrots, and cucumbers. I *may* have overplanted just a bit.

Also, I'm too tired from working all weekend to post (*lame*). But I will say this: the trailer bike, and Helen's total and utter fear of riding on it and my resulting frustration, may have figured prominently.

Hope y'all have a good Monday.

Friday Favorites - Mother's Day Edition

My to-do list for the weekend:

- make Si and Helen make appreciation cards for their teachers before we procrastinate so much that it's too late to give them
- clean the house, esp the bathrooms
- pry ant-ridden timbers out of the landscaping and pile them for easy access to the roll-off dumpster we're going to get next weekend
- take Helen to gymnastics, preferably by bike
- go to Si's baseball game on Sat
- run with Si at least once (I've been making him run a mile four or five times a week--separate story)
- do the laundry
- help the kids plant their herb garden
- mow
- water the garden (the peas are coming up! and the carrots and the radishes and the chard!)
- weed
- go to the store
- go for a longish run
- finish a pitch for a magazine story I've been working on
- call our Littleton friends to see if they're still on for Saturday night dinner
- have our Littleton friends over for dinner
- figure what to do for Mother's Day

Note that last item? That's always how this holiday seems for me: one more damn thing to fit in. I'm not opposed to it per se, although I do grade into the camp of it's a holiday invented by card companies to sell more cards. I used to enjoy it, back before we had kids and Mother's Day was an excuse to go with my MIL to a nicer-than-usual brunch place. Sometimes I still feel nostalgia for the old brunch days, but then I remember that this was back in the days when I didn't know what to do with all my time. On Sunday we'd sleep in, laze about staring hungrily at the walls, drag ourselves to the brunch place, wait for hours, cram as much pancakes and French toast into our food-holes as we could, then roll home to laze about for the rest of the day. If I was feeling ambitious I'd go for a run or work in the yard. But the whole brunch thing would mean that the day wouldn't really get started until 1 o'clock or so--which is why brunching has pretty much become a thing of the past. I mean, please. One o'clock? That's like dinnertime, practically.

Anyhow. My five favorite things about NOT going out for brunch:

1. Breakfast takes 15 minutes to make, including the coffee, and I'm done eating in ten.
2. I can eat what I really feel like at breakfastime, which is cereal.
3. I don't spend the next three hours on a carbohydrate-fueled food bonk.
4. I can eat when I'm hungry and move on with my life.
5. No lines.

Weekend recap

Oh yeah, baby. It's spring.

Well, OBVIOUSLY it's Monday, since one of my children is having a meltdown at the breakfast table. Technically he is now out of the house, walking to school after having missed the bus, but the meltdown still lingers (and really, if I opened a window I could probably hear it). Subject of meltdown: it's teacher appreciation week, so our lovely, highly-organized school moms had the sweet idea of having every student bring a single flower to school for his/her teacher.

I'm guessing the moms who organized this have girls. Or kindergarteners. Not third-grade boys.

Nevertheless, thanks to my Monday-morning inflexibility on random points, I made him go through with it. I had my regrets, of course. I'm not sure if I really believe in making him comply with the sweet but slightly clueless appreciation choreographing of the PTA Moms--it feels a bit like being the sort of mom who throws a sulking fit if the Hallmark card does not arrive for the Hallmark-developed Mother's Day celebration or is not accompanied by the approved Hallmark-designed gifts. However. He loves his teacher, and as I did point out in my tactless Monday-morning mood, she daily does all sorts of awkward and humiliating things for her students. The least they can do is reciprocate.

Bah.

Moving on, this was a weekend about restaurants (we are going to start trying to save money ANY DAY NOW). On Friday I dragged Hubs away from house misery and we had a date night in the city: dinner at Sasa Sushi, which was perfectly delicious but not necessarily worth a special trip into the city, and then we went to the Denver Art Museum's last-Friday-of-the-month Untitled program, which was quietly awesome, and also crowded. The Buntport Theater Troop was doing a little sketch/riff on the subject of the evening (the F-stop), and this was a) why I wanted to go and b) totally and completely worth it.

Then on Sunday after Si's team got creamed YET AGAIN in their baseball game, we went to Don Carlos, an awesome little Mexican restaurant in Littleton. Awesomeness example: they make their own refried beans from scratch, using a special bean from their home state that they import. Also, they're pretty cheap. AND, they're housed in an old Howard Johnson shack. What's not to love?

Okay, enough with the crosslinks. The final highlight: goose gossip. On my Sunday run I passed a pond where a bunch of geese were having a cacophonous COW. Honk honk honk honk! Honk honk honk honk! It went on and on and on so that even though I usually ignore the doings of Canada Geese, I stopped to watch. This is what I saw: two geese in the water, shouting at two geese up on a concrete block island (which makes a perfect nest spot). I assumed the two in the water maybe wanted the nest spot for themselves and were trying to shout the other two geese away. Then I saw that there were already some eggs up on the concrete block. THEN one of the two geese up on the concrete block slowly and deliberately rolled an egg off the block and into the water. The cold-blooded nerve! This made the geese in the water so mad/distraught that they flew up and bit the other geese, and won back their nest, at least for now. The other two geese swam off and pretended to look for a new nest spot in the grass on the side of the pond. I resisted the urge to go chase them off. Egg-drowning creeps.

Have a great Monday!