later (updated)

EDITED TO ADD: I might as well just go ahead and announce it will be a couple of weeks before I post again. I have half a dozen half-written posts but I've been travelling too much to finish any of them. It's all I can do to get the laundry done, because SUMMER. For those of you who are following my mom's story, she's doing great (I went and stayed with her last week after her knee replacement). We're headed off to visit PellMel this weekend, then a 4-day camping trip the following weekend, etc. Happy August. I'll probably be back the last week in August or the first week in Sept--MadMax starts his senior year on the 31st.

Greetings and Salutations. We got back from the airport about 2 a.m. last night and have spent the day catching up on laundry, grocery shopping, etc etc. The half-written posts I have in my drafts folder aren't anywhere close to being ready. So I'm bagging on you. And since I'm leaving on Saturday to go stay with my mom who is recovering from a knee replacement, I probably won't post again until the week of August 10th. Hope you are having a great summer!

7ToF: These are a Few of My Favorite Cheap Things

I'm writing this several days in advance since I'll be out of town the rest of the week and I have no idea what will be happening with us by the time you read this. This is a post I've had in the back of my head for several months. We so often gripe about how expensive things are ($30 for a hardback book! $5 for a loaf of bread!), I thought maybe I'd pay homage to a few things I love that are under $10.

blonde and proud

After not writing a new "real" post in almost a month, I had several ideas for this week's Tuesday blog post. But they were all about ISSUES, and I'm sure that you (like me) are sick of hearing about ISSUES. So I will tell you a story instead.

A couple of times a year, I round up various tchotchkes and run them through the dishwasher--the green glass bottles I use as bookends, a cup and saucer from my grandmother's dishes, a decorative plate my mother-in-law brought us from France, etc. They get cleaned up shiny and new without me having to dust. Because HOUSEWORK. 

So this afternoon I decided to do that and breezed around the house gathering stuff. Loaded it all in the dishwasher and fired it up. A couple of hours later, I came back to unload and saw this when I opened the door: 

ewwwww! what is that???

I had no idea why a sticky, semi-solid brown substance was coating the floor of the dishwasher. It was nasty, though.

Then I started pulling things out of the dishwasher and they were all coated with this weird, gummy substance. I was starting to get seriously grossed out because it was icky and it was all over everything.  

Had there been some weird food thing still stuck to one of the dishes?? had the coating melted off the brown utensil holder I almost never wash?? what in the world would do this??

Then I found this:

Seriously, HOW DID ONE OF THE DOGS CRAP IN THE DISHWASHER? I was so grossed out I could hardly bring myself to touch it.

Except then I noticed IT HAD A LABEL. A Crate and Barrel label. And it was suspiciously solid. And then it dawned on me that I had PUT A CANDLE in the dishwasher. 

A brown candle. A candle shaped like a pine cone that had dust in between the pine cone bits, because how in the world was I going to get it clean? why, put it in the dishwasher, of course. LIGHT BULB! I even remembered to put it on the top shelf! Because if I put it in the bottom rack, it would MELT!

Seriously, y'all. Dumbest blonde moment ever. I pulled out the, um, turd-like object and ran the dishwasher again just to see if the mess would disappear so I could pretend this never happened. The wax does seem to have melted off all the dishes, but that waxy brown coating on the floor of the machine? Apparently that's going to have to be scrubbed off by hand.

Oh, yeah. A frickin' genius, that's me.

7ToF: it ain't all good baby but it's all right

1. Hilton Head report: We'd never been there before. It's a nice place, but the week of the fourth of July it is really, really crowded. Maybe it's like that all the time, not sure. We had a great time with Dean's family, though-- we always do. It was hot and humid, but that was no surprise. Here's a beach shot for you, and I will spoil the effect by telling you that in order to get a deserted beach shot, I had to a) aim the camera veeeery carefully and b) wait for a timely wave to come along and cover up the people who were out in the water.

2. Next week I'm flying to Detroit for Cheery-o's son's wedding. Then the week after that, I'm off to Texas to help out with my mom who recently had a knee replacement. I'm just a travelin' fool these days. That means lots of time in airports and on planes, so if you have any good, non-depressing books to suggest, I'm in need. I underestimated on my summer reading list-- I've already read all of them except two, and one of those I decided not to read and the other one (Kavalier and Clay) I'm saving up until after I get back from my trips.

3. Cute things around the internet: Oddly, the first time I saw this commercial, I'm pretty sure different music was playing (Edgar Winter's "Frankenstein"), but it's cute no matter what the music is.

4. Remember I told you that MadMax was in the midst of his summer obsession with golf, and we were totally sucked into watching the U.S.Open? It turned out to be well worth it--the finish on Sunday was a nail-biter that came down to the very last putt.  Even the world's worst golfer (me) was sitting on the edge of her seat.

Now we've moved on to the British Open, which I've learned this week is just called THE OPEN. Apparently no other designation is needed when you are playing in the home of golf. MadMax has had lots of time on his hands this week, which has meant the Golf Channel has been on more than I care to admit, and even just being in the same house without really watching I feel like I know more about THE OPEN than can possibly be good for my brain. Anyway, we're sucked in again. Thank god it finally started today so they could quit talking about it and actually play some golf.

5. We finally made it to see Inside Out last night. It's cute, and it goes off in a more intelligent direction than you expect based on the way it starts. Well worth seeing, even if you don't have kids to see it with. It's pretty funny, but there's a two-hanky moment at the end--you've been warned.

6. Laurel sent me a link to this great 21-day meditation series from Deepak Chopra and Oprah, which started this week. I've only done the first one so far but it was really interesting, and will possibly be the topic of a future blog post. You have to register, but each day's recording is free for five days. Check it out: Manifesting Grace Through Gratitude.

7. Both our kids have had milestone birthdays this summer--PellMel turned a quarter century, and MadMax turned 18. Which has made me horribly nostalgic. They really were adorable. So I'm subjecting you to pictures. I would apologize, but I'm not really sorry. :-)

I need to take more pictures--
this is the most recent one I could find
of the two of them. Summer 2014.

p.s. the lyrics in the post title are from my new favorite C&W song, "Real Life" by Jake Owen, here's the video: Real Life music video. For the record, I used to love to eat at Waffle House (I probably still would but there's not one around here). I wonder how many takes it took to get the shot where the waffle drops on his plate? 

further thoughts on marriage at midlife

We had a really nice vacation last week, so of course I'm having a bit of trouble getting back into the normal routine. I thought about skipping yet another post, but I have this one that I wrote a long time ago--before the first one on long-term marriages, as you'll be able to tell. I've had second thoughts (and third and fourth) about posting this (that's why it's been sitting in my drafts folder so long), but I'm sure I've told you worse before, so here you go.

This is a story I'm a little embarrassed to tell you: about a year ago, I discovered what I thought was incontrovertible evidence that Dean was having an affair. Actually, I had discovered it several months previously, but Dean is such a solid guy that it took me that long to suddenly realize, OHMYGOD, what is going on here?

So, I won't keep you in suspense--he wasn't, it was just a remarkably odd series of coincidences. But I didn't know that at first.

I had to figure out what to do, and that took awhile. In fact, it was several months before I said anything to him. Which surprised me. If you had asked me ahead of time, I would have told you in no uncertain terms that if my spouse had an affair, that would be the end of our marriage right then and there.

But when it happened to me (leaving aside for the moment that it really didn't), I had remarkably mixed feelings. A long marriage is a complicated thing. It's being tangled up with each other's families, knowing what it was like when you got your first real job, house-hunting together, inside jokes, taking vacations, changing diapers and going to seventh grade band concerts, making mutual friends, and a million other little ways that your lives get tied up together.

It seriously occurred to me that maybe I should just let it go. If I'd been that much in the dark about how he felt about me, and I didn't really want our marriage to end, maybe I'd be better off just continuing to act like I didn't know. It turns out I wasn't quite as adamant about monogamy as I thought I would be. Once I finally talked to Dean, and realized he wasn't having an affair, I still had a lot to think about.

It was after all that had happened that I read Dan Savage's book American Savage several months ago. The first chapter, it just so happens, is about monogamy, about how much our culture prizes it even though human beings aren't very good at it.

It's a very complicated topic, and Savage does a great job detailing all the ways that we are hypocritical about our ideas of what marriage "should" be like. It's thought-provoking reading, and if it's a topic that interests you, I highly recommend it.

Unusually for Savage, he comes down on the side of conservatives in this one area--he thinks marriage is really important, and that preserving marriages, preserving families, is worth doing, even if it is at the expense of strict monogamy. Is someone who has had one brief affair in 30 years of marriage bad at monogamy? Maybe not. Maybe letting that go is better than tearing a family apart.

Savage goes one step further, though, and says that in some cases, maybe it is OK to cheat if doing so will "save" your marriage. I just can't wrap my head around that. I mean, if both spouses have agreed up front that they're OK with this, I'm not going to argue--everybody gets to set up their marriage the way they want. But like most couples, Dean and I don't have that agreement, and I just can't see that all the lies, deception, and manipulation involved in cheating on your spouse can possibly be a good thing.

It's an argument that's far too complex to deal with in a blog post, but it's an interesting topic to bring up with your spouse. If you're like us, we'd never talked about the basic idea of monogamy, it was just a given in our marriage vows and in the way we thought about our marriage. Neither of us has ever been unfaithful, but it was good to actually talk about it, talk about how hard it has been at times, and how much it means to us that neither of us has ever had sex with anyone else.

So there were two reasons I never posted this--one was because it's probably TMI, and the other was because it didn't really go anywhere. Really it's like shooting fish in a barrel to say that hey, I'm opposed to cheating on your spouse. So, I don't have any wisdom to impart. Just stuff I've been thinking about. I will try to be more interesting next time.

p.s. It's occurring to me a day later that talking to your spouse about monogamy might lead to information you'd rather not know (see above). So, a la Hill Street Blues, be careful out there, people.

7ToF: only worry in the world, is the tide gonna reach my chair

1. Last week was the unplanned vacation, but next week is the planned one. We're headed to the Carolina coast for a week at the beach with Dean's dad and siblings. We do this every year (although the location is new this year) and it's always fun--Dean's family is great. So no posts from me next week.

2. I put myself on the waiting list for several books at our library's ebook site. I've been waiting for some of them for months. Then FOUR of them became available practically all at once (actually, five, but I cancelled one because I do have one or two things I have to do besides sit and read). Since we only get a two week loan on ebooks, I had to read like mad to get through them all.

By the time I was done, I was tired of reading. That has never happened to me before in my life. I've read until I could hardly hold my eyes open and I've read until my hands and arms were numb from holding the book up, but I've never been tired of reading before.

3. Since on average I read a couple of hours a day, it left me with some time to kill. Did I use it wisely, to complete household tasks that have been piling up? Well, maybe a few. But mostly I watched movies: Avengers 2 at the theater one afternoon, Jurassic World one evening with Dean and MadMax, and Monsters University on Amazon Prime while I was folding laundry the next afternoon. All three were fun. By then I was ready to start reading again. :-)

4. A freelance editing job for a local business fell in my lap this week. If I like them and they like me, there's a possibility that it will turn into something long-term. OMG, I might actually earn some money.

5. We inherited more chickens from a friend of a friend of a friend, so now we have eight--the most we've ever had. The new ones are a year old. They've only been here for two days, so they're not laying yet, presumably because they're traumatized from the move. Five of them are black astrolorps, the same kind we've had for awhile now. Then there are two Rhode Island Reds and what we think is a Wyandotte. Here's a picture of some of them hiding behind the coop:

They're beautiful, aren't they?

6. So a couple more thoughts on meditation, which I can tell bores most of you to tears, but it's what I've been thinking about--skip to #7 if you want. I left out a couple of quotations that I meant to put in. "Meditation is a chance to feel what you're feeling": in the name of being polite or socially acceptable or whatever, I often push away emotions I don't want to deal with at the moment. Meditation gives you a chance to process that stuff. Next--believe it or not, Hugh Jackman practices meditation and he said in an interview I read a couple of years ago "Meditation is sitting in the presence of God" or something like that, which reminded me of all the verses in the Old Testament about waiting on God. My soul wait in silence for God only, for my hope is from him (Ps 62.5). They that wait upon the Lord will renew their strength, they shall mount up on wings like eagles (Is 40.31). 

And finally, I wanted to mention that I often don't like meditation while I'm doing it. I get frustrated, or I feel stupid for how bad I am at it, how rarely I am able to maintain that calm distance between my inner self and my monkey mind. It's not until later in the day that I will suddenly realize that I have more inner resources and a better perspective because I took that 3/5/20 minute break. So, that's all. I promise I'm done with that for awhile now.

Random peaceful summer scene

7. The reading report, from all that reading: People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks (3 stars out of 5): beautifully written story of a book restoration expert who gets the chance of a lifetime to work on an ancient Jewish manuscript. Fascinating stories of the history of the book are mixed in with scenes from the book expert's life. Great read but it fell apart for me in the last third. All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (4 stars): I'm late to the party on this one, I think everyone has already read it. Pulitzer Prize-winning book tracing the history of a couple of people who end up living through the siege of St. Malo at the end of WWII. The Liar by Nora Roberts (2 stars): the latest from the grand dame of romance novels. If you're not a Nora fan, this one won't change your mind. The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman (4 stars). Strange, fantasy/fable about a middle aged man who returns to the home of his youth and recovers a surreal set of memories. Its great value is the reminder that childhood is not always the carefree, innocent time our culture wants to believe--and that is not a bad thing. The stresses and worries of childhood make us who we are. I thought about giving it five stars--it is that beautifully written--but I was pretty sure I wouldn't think about it again after I finished it (one of the signs of a truly great book imo is that you think about it for days afterwards), and that has been true. Do or Die by Suzanne Brockmann (4 stars). Former Navy Seal Ian Dunn is released early from prison (where he is serving time for a crime he didn't commit) to solve a problem the feds are having. Not great literature, but as a summer page-turner, it is just about perfect. There's a baby who is always conveniently asleep--more of a prop than a real baby--and there's way too much dialog (but you can skim over that). Other than that, it is a great read.

There. I did this whole thing without complaining about the weather, are you proud? I've complained about it so much I'm starting to feel a little guilty. Suffice it to say that it has been cooler in the Carolinas than it has been here. Have a great week and I will post pictures when I get back.

how not to meditate part 2

There was somewhere I was going with these meditation posts, and as is often the case, I can no longer remember where it was. Maybe it will come back to me later. But at the moment, I need a post for tomorrow and this one is already half-written, so here you go.

- Along the lines of mixing up my meditation practice a little, once or twice a week I do a guided meditation--i.e., someone has recorded meditation instructions, sometimes general, sometimes on a specific topic like reducing stress or dealing with anger, that you can play back while you're meditating. I have a couple I've downloaded from Audible, and there are thousands out there on YouTube (the Honest Guys have a bunch). If you want something specifically Christian, search for Guided Prayer.

- I have an app on my phone (go ahead and laugh) called the Insight Timer. There's a free version that just uses really nice bell/chime tones to start and end your session. I use it enough that I went ahead and paid for the full version, which gives you a wider variety of sounds and also allows sounds that play at an interval--say every two minutes. I like the interval sound, because if my mind has started to wander (and it always does), that reminds me to come back.

- When I first started, I would have a pen and paper next to me. If there was a thought I just couldn't let go of, I'd stop and write it down. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you hear you're supposed to sit utterly still and not move a muscle, but that's way less important than being able to let go of the hamster wheel. If your nose itches, scratch it. If your foot starts to fall asleep, move it. If there's something you're afraid you'll forget while you're relaxing, write it down.

- The Buddhists say that that the mind is innately spacious. All we need to do to experience that sense of spacious, calm ease is to clear away our thoughts. I'm not sure I agree with that. In my experience, that sense of inner spacious ease is something that has to be cultivated, there's nothing inborn about it. If it were innate, that would mean that there was some pre-ordained reason we should all be meditating to reach this pre-existing state. But if it's something that has to be cultivated, it's just another possible function of the human mind. It deepens and enriches my experience, so I think it's worth doing. But I don't know that there's any pre-existing significance to a meditation practice.

- The mental whirlpool that I sometimes experience--what I've been calling the hamster wheel--sometimes takes on a life of it's own. Sometimes when I get really stressed, the whirlpool starts looking for things to obsess about. There's no longer any connection to something real in my life that I really can do something about, it becomes all about the need to feed the brain spins. In grad school, I'd be frantically worrying about a paper that was due, and when it was finally finished and turned in, instead of getting a break from the mental stress, my brain would just grab onto the next thing it could obsess about. Meditation is the one of the few things I've found that breaks that cycle. (vacation is another, but vacations aren't always an option, darn it.)

I told you last week about one of my analogies for meditation--the blinking, flashing, busy helmet that you remove so that you can spend a few minutes away from all that mental chatter. I have a new analogy. I remember when I was a kid, one time when I was swimming with my sisters I got stuck with one of those plastic inflatable rings under my armpits. It was just a little bit too small, so I was flailing around trying to push myself up out of it and getting a little panicky, because I just kept feeling more and more stuck. My older sister called out to me to put my arms straight up over my head and let myself sink down through the middle. It worked perfectly.

Meditation is sort of like that. Your brain is flailing around with all kinds of pointless activity, but if you just relax and let yourself sink down in, you free yourself from the mental trap of the whatever you're stuck in, and down you go into the cool silence of the water. Nice analogy, right?

So give it try sometime this week, and eventually I'll remember where I was going with these posts. Maybe it will be something interesting.

Unplanned Vacay

I have to stay off the computer for a few days because of the physical therapy treatment I had this morning (I'm typing this on Thursday). I'll be back next week.

how not to meditate

Usually if you're reading a how-to post, you can reasonably expect that the person writing it has some competence in the subject. That would not be the case with me and meditation. I do realize the absurdity of me expecting you to read a post about how to meditate from someone who is terrible at meditation.

However, despite my ineptitude, the older I get the more I get out of meditation, even though I'm terrible at it and even though I don't seem to get any "better" at it as time goes by. So rather than giving you a set of instructions, this is just a series of disconnected thoughts intended to get you to try it. The only rationale I have is that I learned more from a yoga teacher who was genetically inflexible than I ever did from the ones who could already put their foot behind their head before they ever tried yoga.

- Although meditation has been used as a spiritual practice in religious settings for millennia, it isn't inherently religious. Meditation is a mental skill that helps you reduce stress and get a better perspective on whatever burdens you're carrying. If you have a set of religious beliefs for context, that works, too.

- The type of Christianity I was raised in is wary of meditation because it seems vaguely Eastern. I wouldn't have been able to tell you anything about it, but it seemed suspicious. But actually there is a long history of Christian meditation going back centuries. For example, John of the Cross, Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Avila, and many others.

- You will hear that meditation works best when you do it at the same time in the same place every day. That's probably true, but it doesn't work for me. I do best at staying with it when I mix it up a little. One day I'll actually sit and meditate the way you're "supposed" to, one day I'll try it while walking. I can't meditate immediately after I wake up because my brain is too foggy, so sometimes I do it after breakfast, sometimes in the afternoon, rarely in the evening. Sometimes I use music designed for meditation, sometimes something else (anything without words), sometimes no music at all. Three minutes, ten minutes, twenty. I have no standard practice.

- How not to meditate: Don't sit there with your jaw clenched trying to CONTROL YOUR THOUGHTS. That will just lead to anger and frustration. Meditation is mental relaxation--a chance to sit and watch your monkey mind jump through all its routines: worry, stress, all the responsibilities you're trying to juggle.

I'm not going to tell you that none of those things are important, because a lot of the things we worry about are important. But as I've practiced meditation, I've come to realize that there's an element of my worry and stress that is just a hamster on a wheel. It's not productive, it's not helping any, it's just my brain whizzing and whirring because it's in the habit of doing that.

Gah. I can't tell you how often I sit down to write a post thinking that it will only be 3-4 paragraphs because I don't have much to say. Then I start typing and I end up going on and on. Believe it or not, I'm only about halfway done. So I guess I'll split this into two. More later.

7ToF: hot fun in the summertime

1. The deadline for scheduling continuing ed courses for this fall came and went last week. So I guess I'm taking a semester off. It seems so far away at the moment-- MadMax's last day of school was barely a week ago, summer is just starting. I couldn't think of anything I wanted to teach. I can't tell yet whether or not I'm glad about this. You perhaps will hear my Wail of Woe in October when I'm bored to death. But maybe I'll find some other fascinating thing to do by then and this will be a Good Thing.

2. MadMax goes through sports phases as the seasons change, and when he's in one of his phases, we go through it with him. In the winter it's skiing (not snowboarding), in the spring it's track & field, right now it's golf. He got a season pass to our local public course for Christmas, so he's been playing a couple of times a week. And we're watching (avidly) the USOpen, which is in Seattle. Who knew Seattle was a golf town?

3. The most remarkable thing about his annual golf phase is the change in clothing. From third grade on, only under the greatest duress (a wedding, Christmas eve service) has he been willing to wear anything but those long gym shorts and a t-shirt. Suddenly when he got interested in golf, he wanted to go shopping because he needed khaki shorts and polo shirts. I couldn't have been more surprised if he'd asked me to buy him a tutu. In fact, a tutu would have made more sense because it fits with his sense of humor.

4. And for the MadMax hat trick: he got his hair cut this week. With both of our kids, in exchange for no piercings (except ears) and no tattoos, we have allowed them to do whatever they want with their hair. That doesn't mean that we will restrain our selves from nagging them to get a haircut or teasing them about certain questionable choices, but:  hair grows. Do with it what you will. So MM's was just about long enough to put in a pony tail when he finally went and got it cut this week. It's not short, but it's an improvement.

5. We got one of those IRS scam calls. The one that says the IRS is bringing a lawsuit against you, and Please call this number immediately. Which of course sends your stomach into a violent clench of terror, until Dean remembered reading about it in the paper a couple of weeks ago-- the article pointed out that the IRS never calls people, they always start with a letter. (so they'll have a paper trail?) Also, when you listen closely (the sound quality was not good), it wasn't quite grammatically correct and there was a bit of an accent. SCAM. At least we hope so, because we deleted the message and did not call the number.

6. My neck. That's all. It has always been touchy, and continues to be. It's better than it was a month ago, but I still get one of my Things on Friday to whine about it: *whine*

7. Summer Reading List Report: People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks. Hanna Heath, an expert in restoring ancient books/codices, is offered the chance of a lifetime when she is called in to work on a gorgeous ancient Jewish manuscript. She finds tiny clues to the book's history buried in the binding. In alternating chapters, the reader gets to find out the story behind the clues, but Hanna only discovers the barest outline of the book's backstory. The opening section is terrific, and several of the history chapters were beautifully done. It's well worth reading, and the writing at times is lovely.

But I ended up being a bit disappointed by the end--not because it was bad, but because I was hoping that it would go in the direction of having some interesting things to say about the long history of religious conflict and coexistence in Europe, and/or the place of sacred objects and personal devotion in collective spiritual life, or anything that would give a little more depth to the story. But it went in another direction instead--she tried to add some thriller-ish plot twists toward the end that seemed a step down from the rest of the book. Great summer read as long as you don't expect profound thought. So: one down, four to go.

And a freebie, in honor of our ongoing unseasonably hot, dry weather (however I am grateful to report that at least it's not in the 90s anymore): I ran across this golden oldie while looking for songs about summer. This isn't the best recording, but it's the only video I found with THE HAIR and THE GLASSES and the SATIN. End of the spring and here she comes back....