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.

Home at Last

"The light is so rich outside," I said to Helen last night as we pulled down the blinds in the front room. "Don't you think the light is so rich?"

She just kind of nodded at me, preoccupied. The blinds are a technical challenge that don't really admit distractions like mom nattering on about the light. But really: it snowed yesterday during the night, after a day of heavy wind that threatened to keep my plane in the air, circling, bumpily, forever, while my house was down there, just right there, and I couldn't get to it; and as night fell, the snow was this deep royal blue and the trees and sidewalks and streets were almost violet. The lights on behind us in the house and superimposed over the deep blue snow were a homey yellow brown and it was so calm and beautiful I wanted to stay in that light forever. However, there was dinner to make, and spelling tests to prepare for, and et cetera et cetera, and when I turned around again it was night and everything outside was invisible.

So: it is good to be home. The kids really missed me this time, especially Silas, which caught me by pleasant surprise. Sometime I think he doesn't really miss anything except his Wii, during those long, long hours he is forced to be at school or asleep, and indeed, one of the stories he was anxious to share when I came to say goodnight was how he rented Modern Warfare Three from the Redbox at King Soopers (ye gods--really, must we go there? Modern Warfare? Isn't that for 16-year-olds?). It's been nice these first few days home to be not rushed, too, so I haven't been snappish at all. That part has been so nice that it's made me wonder if snappishness is something I could actually give up, like, for good. I mean, it's not like it accomplishes anything, and it's not like being rushed as a state of being is really enhanced by also shrieking at people to get their teeth brushed, now, unless you want your teeth to fall out of your head. Hm.

The work trip went fine. I managed meetings and booth duty and sessions and socializing without undue melancholy; I ate some terrific food and went on long runs along the waterfront and tipped the maid appropriately (this is always something I agonize over). I saw the Gum Wall and had tea and crumpets and bought 3 pounds of smoked salmon at the Pike Street Mall. I kept up on typing my meeting notes and came away with a list of action items that was invigorating but not overwhelming. And I read a lot. I finished The Sense of an Ending (blew my mind, a little, although I still prefer Flaubert's Parrot and I'm not sure I ever really had the narrator's back, so to speak) and Heavenly Questions (this one did blow my mind and I'm still amazed that this little blue book can hold so much inside of it). I cried over the tsunami parts in Lives Other Than My Own but otherwise this assemblage of reading material was not as sad as I expected it to be. The essays in Pulphead (by, correction, John Jeremiah Sullivan) are fantastic and humbling--the first few are just good writing, plain and simple (or complex and delicious, David-Foster-Wallace-style, without the desperation), and then he gets into scholarship, for the love of god, and it turns out he's good at that, too, and it kind of makes you reassess your own talents and wonder why, exactly, you don't bring half this energy to your own work? Also, I really want to visit some Midwestern cave paintings, now. And listen to Robert Johnson.

And under all of it, real life. The sword of Damocles that hangs over us all. I'm not forgetting. I just don't like to talk about it.

Heading Home

For the past three days I've been attending a work-related event in Minnesota, and tomorrow I head home and I AM SO GLAD. Even though the weather has been spectacular, the event has been (as ALWAYS) much better than I was expecting (although there was one brief moment at the final banquet tonight at which I happened to sitting at a table all by myself after it seemed that everyone else had been seated and I actually considered getting up to go pee and never coming back)(then a handful of the few people I knew at the event happened to come in THANKYOUPLEASE)--still, I miss everyone at home so badly. I will be so glad to get home, even though my day tomorrow entails two airplane flights, a few hours at work, a screech-over-to-the-school pickup followed by a hasty makeshift dinner from whatever happens to be in the fridge after my being gone for three days, a school meeting, and then a 4th-grade musical performance in which my nonmusical child somehow has a singing solo (which to my knowledge he has not yet sung, ever).

A few years ago, when I'd travel for work, I'd miss the kids in a visceral, physical way. I'd be sitting in a conference, starting to daydream a little, and imagine Helen sitting in my lap in her hot, sticky, gummy baby way. It was the most comforting thing imaginable (and it helped that it was only imagined, and was not actually accompanied by a real live child stage whispering in my ear and shrieking at inopportune moments and demanding to leave the moment things starting going well).

Now I miss the kids and M differently. Sometimes I get visions of disaster, but these mostly happen while I'm still at home, packing. Sometimes I miss them at night--but not always, because I'm usually completely knackered by the end of the day and secretly relieved not to have to nag anyone about brushing their teeth or engage in end-of-the-day conversation. When I miss them most is as I walk around--the waterfront here is beautiful, and I ache with the wish that they could all be here with me, experiencing it too. Or in the evening, if I'm not totally knackered, the hotel room feels empty and cold and I get furiously bored, despite the surfeit of books I inevitably bring.

So: tonight I am chew-my-arm-off bored, and tomorrow I will be snowed under with noise and needs and activities and people and I will probably look back on this very moment that I am writing in and feel a little bit wistful.

But not too much. Not too much, at all.

Friday Favorites

I was out of town for work at the start of this week, and even though it was only three days it somehow felt like three weeks and now I'm really just running on made-up time, or so it feels. Like I'm going to look down, Wil E Coyote-style, and realize that ohmygod I forgot to feed the kids. Or holyshit Christmas is TODAY and we haven't even put up our lights. (We HAVEN'T put up our lights.) (But I did make the kids breakfast, and I'm reasonably sure they're at school). So I'm playing mental catchup, here. But I'll still put up a quick favorites post:

1. Favorite holiday: Christmas. Yes, it is, for real. And you know what else? My second favorite holiday is Easter. Old curmudgeonly, nonChristian, hasn't-belonged-to-a-church-in-over-thirty-years me.

2. Favorite part of my commute: where the highway goes down into the Platte River valley and for a mile or so all you can see are cottonwoods, plains, and mountains.

3. Favorite part of traveling for work: the food. Also, making coffee in my hotel room while I take a shower. Also, check-in. Otherwise I kind of hate it, I'm finding.

4. Favorite thing to dream about: landscape. Those dreams where I'm just setting forth into a new a tangled country, either on foot, or more rarely, in a truck. The world in my dreams seems vast and unpopulated. Lately the land in my dreams has been covered with houses, or is platted to be covered with houses, or is not very far from a large population center. Hmm. Coincidence? Or living in the suburbs with little chance to leave them? [Interestingly and perhaps ironically, my second-favorite dream involves looking at real estate.]

5. Third favorite thing to dream about: my grandpa's house. Always in these dreams there is an undiscovered room or floor filled with fascinating things. Two nights ago, however, I dreamed I was in his house and needing to pee, but every room I went to had been demoed. Apparently we were undertaking a "quick" bathroom remodel during our visit to his house. (I wonder where THAT dream came from?)

In other news, we have drywall, folks. Once we get rid of the drywall dust, the house will be downright habitable. Who NEEDS a kitchen, really?

Duluth

Oh, Lake Superior, how I've missed you:


The conference is nice, too. As conferences go. I'm still missing home dreadfully, and calling home doesn't really help:

"Hello? Hi, Silas, is that you? I miss you, sweetheart!"
"Hi Mom."
"How're doing?"
"Fine."
"Um...what specials did you have today?"
"Gym. I mean music. Only we had a lockdown? So Mrs Parks came to us."
"You had a lockdown? what? why?"
"It was just for practice."
"Oh. You have lockdown drills?"
"Uh-huh."

*crickets chirping*

"Okay, well, goodbye, kiddo. I love you."
"Okay. Goodbye."

Okay, well. Goodbye.

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.)

Trip

So, tomorrow I get on a plane and head south for my first-ever business trip. I have been low-level stressing about this for months, high-level stressing for a few weeks, but at this point I'm just sort of fatalistically resigned slash excited. I mean, I am excited. New city, new people, new hotel, et cetera. I am also sort of mourning all of my disrupted habits in advance--I am a person who thrives on routine, and I can't stop trying to figure out how I'm going to go running every day, or get the breakfast foods I like, or read every night like I'm accustomed to. A lot of my nervousness has to do with the sheer number of new things I will need to accomplish in the next few days, from hiring a cab at the new city's airport to dealing with bellhops (how much to tip? can I just grab my own bag and go?).

Hubs ribbed me gently when I did half my packing this past weekend; I pointed out that the last time we did a big family trip by airplane I broke out in hives. At least I don't have hives, people. Not yet.

That said, I am sort of ridiculously pleased when I casually mention that I'm traveling for work. It seems like a very grownup, real-job thing to do, and while I've never really envied business travelers (and maybe even grumped that if companies didn't see the need to send their employees buzzing all over the globe, maybe we wouldn't have so many CARBON PROBLEMS), I'm still thrilled to experience the fabled Business Trip. Also the fabled Expense Account, which I sort of can't imagine myself using.

So. I'll be gone for a week. Ya'll enjoy yourselves while I'm gone.