Before:

Add bleach, wait 2 hours:

Add bleach, wait 2 hours:

Add Manic Panic® Voodoo™ Blue, wait 2 hours:

Result!!

Let’s start with the newest change: Spring is here!! Here’s my humble contribution to today’s equinoctial celebrations, via my Instagram feed:

In other change news, I seem to have utterly abandoned this blog. I believe the settings are to show the last month’s posts on the front page, and as I write this the front page is completely empty. Um, oops. As I keep saying, I am on Facebook a lot, where I mostly share links, and comment on other people’s posts. I’m also putting a lot of pictures up on Instagram lately, which is a certain kind of document of my life, but only the really photogenic parts (and accompanied only by pithy captions and smart-ass hashtags).

It’s not that I don’t have blog-length thoughts any more. Well, some days I don’t. *sigh* But some days I do actually manage to string together more than two cars on my train of thought, but I’m either not at my computer, or I wimp out before I can actually get the words down here. The less I blog, the harder it is to come up with something that seems worth blogging about, you know? If I’m only gonna put 37 words here per month, I feel like they’d better be 37 pure droplets of absolute wisdom. And that isn’t happening, because nothing I think ever feels like it’s got wisdom droplets in it. So you get silence. Or funny links on my Facebook.

I am profoundly tired these days, and that increases that feeling of inertia and unworthiness. I’m off my routine, not exercising enough, eating poorly, sleeping inadequately. Switching to Daylight Saving Time was the last nail in the coffin containing my functioning brain. Before I lost that hour, I was just barely getting enough sleep to be functional — asleep around 11, awake by 6. After the change, I adapted pretty quickly to the new bedtime, but my brain decided that 4:45 was an excellent time to wake up and start worrying about things. All the things. Every day.

And what have I been worrying about? Change. Mostly the changes happening vis-à-vis my kids.

For example: Their school is planning to move to a new location. For the past few decades the school has been situated in a very rural spot, on several acres of land (including a section of woods with a meandering stream, rocks to climb on, and other natural loveliness), with many buildings to enjoy (including a gym with classroom space above it, a soundproofed music shed, an art studio with kiln, a freestanding office building, and a gorgeous converted stone farmhouse containing classroom space, a full kitchen, and a fantastic meeting area called the Big Room). Although there are various maintenance headaches associated with the current property, overall it’s been a really wonderful place to have a school. The problem is that it was perfectly sized when they had 100+ students, but now they’ve got fewer than 50 and it’s just not a good fit any more.

So the search is on for a new place. This is stressing me out unbelievably, for several reasons. For one thing, the current location is less than 10 minutes away from our house, which has been so wonderful and convenient for us. You have no idea. I love being able to take my kids to and from school each day; the conversations that we have in the car before and after school are some of the most interesting and engaging conversations we have each day, and I get to hear about everything that happened at school while it’s still fresh in their minds.

But the hope is to move somewhere closer to the train line (for the kids who commute in from Philly every day), and closer to an active town or city center (because right now the school is on a dead-end street in a very backwoods area that people can’t even find half the time). This means that they will certainly be moving farther away from us, and they very probably will be moving more like 30-40 minutes away from us.

And here I am in the middle of this huge blog post and I’ve just gotten the impulse to delete the whole thing and forget about blogging again because I’m having a hard time figuring out how to write about this school stuff in a sequential and coherent manner, and so my instinct is to bail. *sigh* Well, let me just try to get this down as succinctly as I can. Sorry for the tone shift.

So if they move farther away, either they’d have to start taking the train or bus (which might not even be an option depending on which district they end up in and/or the schedule of the trains), which would mean we’d lose all of that great talking time in the car, or I’d still drive them in and home each day (which would mean I’d be in the car for upwards of two hours per day, which is a little bit sucky for me, and gas ain’t cheap these days, either). So I’m worrying about that.

Also, it just breaks my heart to think about leaving the current location. My kids have been going to school there for more than a decade (this is Alice’s 11th year there, counting her kindergarten year, and Sammi has been coming to visit since she was a baby). Those buildings, that land, those rooms are the school for me. I mean, I know that the school is the people and the philosophy, but I literally can’t stand to sit in the Big Room any more because all I can think about is how we will never find a room as cool and beautiful as this, all dark wood and high ceilings, in any new place ever. When I wake at 4:45 and can’t get back to sleep, all I can think about is all of the big and little things that I’ve come to love about that place, and how sad it’s going to be to lose them. The other day I was upset thinking about the drinking fountain, fercryinoutloud. I am a wreck.

Part of why this all is bothering me so much, besides the basic “I don’t like change” angle, is that the decision to move was made early last school year, so it’s been gnawing at me for over 18 months now, but a new location has not yet been found. So I can’t look forward to a new place with new and exciting possibilities; I can only look back at the impending loss of what we have and love now, and it’s just eating away at my soul.

And speaking of impending loss, let’s talk about Alice, okay? She is very close to finishing 10th grade, people. She took the PSATs this year (just for practice, and she did really really well, thanks). She’s getting mail from colleges. She’s got a job, and she’s thinking about finding some additional volunteer work to do this summer because it will look good on her resume. My tiny tiny baby bean is making like she’s getting ready to fly the coop, to mix a metaphor, and can we talk about how much that is stressing me out? Oy. For the first year ever, I am having a hard time looking forward to the end of the school year (72 days away according to my little sidebar counter), because all I can think about is (a) any fun things we plan to do over summer break will have to be done on a schedule that accommodates her job and (b) she only has a few summer breaks left before she graduates. Augh.

So yeah, changes are changing, and I’m not coping. That’s the gist of my life these days, and a large part of why you don’t really see me around these parts any more. If you read this far, I salute you. I do have at least one other blog post cooking in my brain; it’s a much less heavy topic, and it’s not going to be anywhere near as long as this one is, but I think I’ll leave it for another day. Or maybe later today. I dunno. I’ve been writing this for an hour…

- I’m also doing a lot on Instagram. I post there as often as I can, but I can’t always find something to take a picture of. The kids rarely give me permission to share pictures of them, the outside world is gray and dead, and I don’t often go to interesting places these days.

- As may be guessed from the item above, I’m depressed right now. Things are stressing me out and I’m really really tired.

- Despite that, I’m desperately trying to get back into cooking regularly. It’s not that big of a deal to make something for dinner, but in the past year there were too many nights when I just dropped the ball.

- I’m also really into making apple pies right now — I want to figure out my ideal recipe, and regain my comfort in throwing a pie together without a bunch of angst or intimidation. I’d like to be making a pie a week, but my body doesn’t want me to be eating sugar right now, so I’ve only made two pies so far this year. I’m chomping at the bit to make another one. Man, I love apple pie.

- Alice got an honest-to-goodness for-reals no-fooling job. She’s helping out in the office of a friend who’s a tax accountant, doing light filing and similar paperworky stuff. She’s there two days a week after school, for two hours a day. She got her first paycheck today, with deductions for social security and everything. *boggle*

- I saw snowdrops getting ready to bloom in a neighbor’s yard today! Spring is coming (eventually)!!!

- I had a mammogram last week, and it was normal.

- Alice saw the oral surgeon today for a consultation about her wisdom teeth. They recommended that we wait another full year before getting them extracted, because 3 of the 4 are still very high up in her jaw, and waiting will bring them down and make the procedure (and recovery) much easier. As long as naughty #4, which is closest to the surface but also closest to impacting against the tooth in front of it, doesn’t start causing her pain or crowding her other teeth, we’ve got a year’s reprieve. We will use this year to (a) figure out how to get dental coverage, because our current “super basic” insurance plan covers zero of the procedure, even though the teeth are fully impacted, and (b) help Alice forget how scary she found the little speech on possible complications of extraction.

- I see our new dentist at the end of next week, and Sammi sees them the week after that. Yay for new dentists who will presumably not yell at any of us.

- I neeeeeed new glasses — my prescription has changed very noticeably in the past couple of months and my current lenses are not working comfortably for me any more.

- Argh, I wish we had better insurance, because all of this stuff is expensive, y’all! Bleh.

2012 Reading Challenge

Jennifer has
completed her goal of reading 150 books in 2012!

hide

150 of 150 (100%)

view books

Note: This total includes not only “book” books, but also manga, graphic novels, and the chapter books that Sammi and I read together.

Sugru Is the Answer

(More: How to Make Lego Bendy & Gallery. Buy here.)

Turkey: coming to room temp in sink (still in wrappings).

Mashed potatoes: Made, chilling in the fridge.

Gravy: It will happen.

Stuffing: In the crockpot.

Baked corn: Ingredients are assembled.

Dessert (cheesecake bites from Sam’s Club), rolls (pre-made dinner rolls from Sam’s Club), and peas (frozen peas) will accompany. Wine for the adults, sparkling grape juice for the under-18 set.

By special request from our youngest associate, a port wine cheese ball and assorted crackers will precede the meal. (I couldn’t find a cheese ball, but I got a tub of port wine cheese spread and some crushed walnuts and I’m gonna roll my own. Wish me luck!)