Back from Duluth

 And busy as ever, of course. I've been absorbed in a project of which more at a later date (nothing life-changing, just absorbing) and the baseball tournaments continue unabated. Mostly without me, too, I am sorry to say. I am planning to attend a game today (but only one) and with the one I went on Friday that makes the most games of any one tournament I've attended this season. This makes me sad, less for the loss of all those games I could have been watching than for the way, when I show up, none of the other parents know me. Sigh. C'est la vie. Even if I attended every game and every practice, these parents live all over creation. Or the greater Denver metro area, anyway. It is not a situation conducive to grownup bond-forming.

These photos make it look so sunny and pleasant.

 But! Enough complaining. It was a hectic week, I spent much of it in airplanes/airports, and the second night I got home Silas's old long-suffering gerbil died (quietly in his sleep, I am relieved to report). Silas was distraught and felt that his grief required a day off of school (denied.) He also began researching replacement pets and was disappointed to find that the more playful an animal is, the less likely I am to approve it. (Ferrets? In your dreams, buddy.)

In fact, it was 33 degrees and snowing most of the time.

 The garden is growing in greenish bounds and could be using my constant attention (this is really what I want to be doing, rather than driving to baseball games/ soccer games/ birthday parties/ the store). I finished Undaunted Courage, felt bad for Lewis, and signed Helen up for swim team (since baseball is clearly NOT ENOUGH.) At least that's with friends and other neighbors, the same ones I am delighted to see and gossip with at soccer games. Yesterday, in fact, as I drove Helen from the soccer game to the American Girl Doll store to buy a present for the party she was going to later, and reflected pleasantly on the chats I'd had on the sidelines (these chats tend to rather overshadow the game, which is surely as it should be, unlike the tense silence at baseball games), I thought, Raising Arizona-style, of the distant gray-haired future, in which perhaps these women would be my actual friends with whom I would actually do things, like drive into the city and attend concerts and shows or drive into the mountains and drink beer in the sunset.

My annual Duluth run.

It could happen, I suppose. Or there will be others. I have to assume that there will be somebody, that once the hectic smash of the current nontimes have passed (and they will pass, that is certain, with the swiftness of a freight train), that we will actually pick ourselves up in the ensuing silence and go about having a life of our own again.