Ugh

So if one more person tells me my resume is “very impressive” I will probably pitch a fit. Seriously. That’s like a woman telling a man who’s interested in her romantically that he’s a great friend. 

Kiss of death, people, kiss of death.

Milk carton rings

Wally loves it that I'm eating cereal in the mornings again because that means I'm buying milk. And that means he gets new milk carton rings on a regular basis. He carries them around the apartment and will meow at us to play fetch with him.

This morning, he had a blast batting the current one into boxes, but of course that stopped when I got the camera out.

What's in that shoe?

Saturday night, our friends Fiona and David came over for dinner. At their house, everyone takes off their shoes at the door and even though we tell them they don’t need to do that at our place, they do anyway. That night, I mentioned that given the condition of the floors (aka bare crumbly concrete) they might want to reconsider, but they were both more comfy wandering around in their socks.

After dinner, we all noticed that Wally and Eddie were inordinately interested in David’s shoes. By inordinately interested, I mean that both of them took turns shoving their little heads as far in his shoes as possible and using their front paws to pull themselves in even further. I have no idea what they smelled—David seems like a perfectly ordinary man and I can’t imagine he sprinkles cat nip in his boots. But the boys could not pull themselves away from his shoes.

Of course, every time we tried to get a photo or a video, they both immediately stopped what they were doing and walked away. So this picture is all I’ve got. Just imagine, though, two cats absolutely obsessing on those shoes as though they were precious treasures.

Of hand grenades

TLDR: I’m tired of all the crap.

Years ago when my older son was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, another mother who went to our church was just absolutely devastated by the situation. She also had two sons and one of them had had serious health issues. For whatever reason, she completely identified with what we were going through. Maybe our situation allowed her to feel things she hadn’t let herself feel with her own child’s problems, I don’t really know. I do remember being surprised by her reaction.

Similarly, a few years ago, a co-worker lost his toddler daughter; she died in a freak accident in her babysitter’s home. That death just rippled through our workplace. For me, I immediately relieved Jordan’s fall from our babysitter’s window, his skull fracture and all the terror I felt then. At least two friends of mine took voluntary separation packages from our employer to stay home with their children because they couldn’t contemplate the possibility their children might also have accidents like that.

And here’s the point of today’s blog. On Friday, a friend—I’ll call her by her initials—was laid off. LAU and I worked together at Sprint. We share the same birthday and when we worked together, we were both finishing our bachelor’s degrees while still working full time. She was married and had two daughters and a son; her son was born prematurely, just as my younger son was, although hers was born much early. I don’t know that he was expected to live, but he did pull through.

Then one of her daughters developed cancer. I think she was four? I’m not sure. She underwent a lot of chemo and whatever else she needed and seemed OK for a bit. But the cancer returned and the daughter died. As can often happen, LAU’s marriage didn’t survive the death of her child.

LAU had done so well and stayed almost entirely off the bitter divorce bus even though she was truly mistreated by her ex. She’d been working two jobs to keep her house and seemed to have really turned the corner in just about every way. Now this.

Her news has devastated me. I am sitting here in Boston wanting to lash out at someone, anyone, on her behalf. My reaction is out of proportion and I imagine she would be as surprised by it as I was by my friend at church all those years ago.

But I’ve had enough. Enough bad news, enough with the economy, family illnesses, my own health situation, yet another round of water damage and destruction and more reconstruction and mess and chaos, enough joblessness, just enough, enough, enough.

Kent and I were talking the other night. We’ve definitely lived the “in bad times” part of our marriage vows. We’d really like a chance to live the “in good times” too. 

A birthday

Today is my older son's birthday.

He's five days old in this picture, and we had just been released from the hospital earlier that day.

When Jordan's dad and I looked at all the newborns in the nursery, we commented on how tiny the other babies' eyes were and how they had no eye lashes. Well compared to Jordan, their eyes were tiny and hairless but it didn't take long for us to realize that Jordan was the one who was different.



Here he is today:

Happy birthday, son!

Hanging in here

I’m still really tired here in Boston, but from everything I’ve read that’s part of having this asthma flare up. In fact, I think a lot of what I’d been attributing to lack of sleep ie constantly tired and just having no energy is due to the asthma. It’s been eye-opening to realize that all three times I’ve had severe coughing and exhaustion like this have each occurred after serious water damage to our apartment.

We had one documented case of mold—last May when our floors were being replaced for the second time, the reconstruction company found it, immediately left (Kent said it was like a fire drill) and sent in a mold remediation team. I’m pretty sure we had it after the flood in 2009 and of course the  damn hatch that leads into the mold room got left open in January for a couple of weeks. After the first flood, I had a very bad time with coughing in January 2010, so much so that I pulled muscles in my chest (but thought it must be a cold, everyone gets colds only um no wait, I actually don’t get colds). Last May/June I was in bad shape and got in to see the nurse practitioner for drugs so I could fly on my next business trip without getting thrown off the plane for coughing my lungs out. And of course, I had all those problems last month.

And on a very positive note, the condominium association’s master insurance policy has already approved the claim and cut the check. That means we can get moving with actual repairs, although I’ll need to figure out where to go during that time. I’ve been here during reconstruction before and the amount of debris in the air is truly mind- and lung-boggling. Still, this is real progress. 

March is a worthless month

Dedicated to Jeanne, who hates February more than anyone I know.

I don’t mind February. It’s short month, even in leap year. Plus it’s got my birthday, a silly holiday (Groundhog’s Day), a federal holiday (Presidents’ Day) and a sappy commercial holiday (Valentine’s Day). February makes no promises about warmer weather, or sunnier days, you’ll hear no talk of plants starting to grow, or at least not usually. February deals you a straight hand—it’s winter, you’ll get snow or sleet or ice, or maybe cold, dreary rain. You won’t get false promises about spring coming in, or warmer weather or even very many sunny days. February plays it straight.

March is a different story. March is supposed to roar in like a lion and go out like a lamb thus leading to lovelier spring weather. Nonsense. What we get is more cold, dreary rainy weather and maybe snow too. Tiny little plants that may have finally poked through the ground run a real risk of getting blasted by frost here in New England or covered by a blanket of snow. And we have to put up with this month for thirty-one days. Then it’s April, where we’ll get slightly less cold dreary weather for another 30 days. Spring doesn’t show up around here until May, if we’re lucky.

Yes, yes, both my children were born in March and those are very good events to celebrate. They do help ease the pain (and honestly when they were born, I was too distracted by being a new mother to feel the full misery of March), but now that they are grown, it’s not like I can even really throw them a fun birthday party or anything. Nope, I get to suffer through the endless dreary month of March with no distractions. And don’t offer up St. Patrick’s Day either. That’s no holiday, it’s just an excuse for people to drink to numb the pain of this month.

It's raining today (of course), although the rain is supposed to turn to snow by 10 AM and we may get between one and four inches. Whatever, it's March and the weather is just going to stink. I'll be over sitting on the couch with a blanket and a book. Let me know when it's nice outside. 

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(Interesting useless bit of knowledge I found while tracking down the poem linked above: lamb used to be called spring lamb because you could only get it in the spring.)