Saturday A.M. Nest

I'm usually the first one up on Saturdays and I really love the quiet time. I've made a little nest in the couch corner where, cuddled under a red fleece throw I sip coffee or tea and listen to the music of the birds and house waking up. I also listen to the local station on a small battery powered radio while letting my thoughts run where they will.  Today I was thinking about music and those who have talent enough to create it. I admire people who can use either their voice, or an inanimate object to make pleasant sounds. I tried to make music when I was a kid, not very successfully I'm afraid. In our house you were expected to be in school chorus and church choir, and play a brass instrument. I learned French horn. I even took private lessons. Alas! The music gene did not manifest itself in me! My mother played the piano and had a pleasant soprano singing voice.My three brothers all had and still have good singing voices and all play or played brass instruments well. Two of them hold degrees in music and the other married a music teacher. My husband also sings, has played brass and currently plays bagpipes. My older daughter learned piano, violin, and flute, and still plays on occasion. When I was a freshman in high school I broke my front teeth trying to learn the trumpet for marching band. I then switched to percussion. Let me just say that this girl's got no rhythm. Poor Mr. Taylor, the assistant music teacher was tasked with giving me cymbal lessons. Yes, cymbal lessons. I clearly recall his red face as we sat in a small practice room with him shouting out "one, two, crash, crash, crash, two, crash crash!" cueing me waving his arm in time to the beat. I tried, but somehow I was never quite in time. Poor Mr. Taylor! I wonder if he remembers? I guess that like my father, I play the radio quite well, and that is all. I look at it this way, if everyone is making music, who is there to listen and applaud? I clap quite well; just as long as it doesn't have to be in time to the music. So that's where my mind went this morning. I hope you have a place to snuggle into and allow your mind to roam.

Here's a picture of my radio & my nest.

Monday is Not My Friend

         I find Mondays (or Monderdays as I like to call them) to be generally tough.  Sunday’s too short and then Monday is here and I’m showering at 5:00 a.m. so I can start the 5 days of madness known as the work week.  Somehow the first day is the hardest for getting both myself and the princess motivated to get ready for school.  It’s a wrestling match trying to get her dressed and put together on time for the bus.  I always win but she sure puts up a good passive aggressive fight.  Once at work my five hours of fun begins and we run around preparing food to sell to the hungry teenagers that are our clientele, all the while sounding like a gaggle of geese exchanging pleasantries and stories of our respective weekend activities with occasional bouts of venting thrown in for good measure. Nine women in a kitchen is going to be a noisy affair! At the end of the workday I’m exhausted yet find the energy to run an errand or two on the way home.  Once there, in the safe haven, a quick cup of coffee is downed and I’m on to home responsibilities.  Take something out of the freezer to defrost for dinner, make a phone call, laundry, garbage night, and assorted other house duties we all need to take care of. So I coped with my Monderday stress the best way I know how—with chips and dip and cake left over from the weekend.  I don’t want to give the impression that the day was all bad, there were laughs at work and the mailman brought a pleasant surprise.  It was an early birthday card and letter from a dear friend which really ended the day on a positive note.  So that’s my take on Monday, I hope you survive every one with at least one positive thing so that before you go to bed you feel that Monday just might be your friend after all.

What Day Is It?

Guess what day it is?!  So says a camel in a popular commercial for car insurance. This has become a daily question for me.  In the past two weeks we’ve had school & work cancelled due to bad weather 3 times, (or is it 4? I lost track), and a day off in observance of Presidents’ Day, plus the weekend.  We’ve shoveled more snow and chopped more ice than I can even talk about.  I spent 2 days feeling ill from a mild stomach bug which had me sleeping a good portion of the day.  That was mostly Thursday, and part of Friday which was Valentine’s Day. We exchanged cards and treats for V-day, the girls, my husband and I.  We had our V-day date the weekend before because Anna was able to stay with Hillary while we went out to dinner.
The next day (Saturday) we had another “little” snow storm during which I went to the dentist for what I thought was going to begin the repair of a tooth.  The tooth was beyond repair and I was in “luck”—the oral surgeon was able to fit me in right away!  My dreams of pizza for dinner were now dashed and later that evening while my family was munching away on eggrolls and other Chinese take-out I was hungrily slurping down egg drop soup—no small feat considering half my head, including my lips, was numb and I was trying to keep the soup off the stitched up vacancy in my mouth.  The following day we spent outside trying to scrape 4” of ice and compacted snow off the roof of my van, the driveway, and the roof on the house. Do we know how to have fun or what!?  My favorite thing was pulling the huge icicles off the house and stabbing them into the snowbanks. We gave up on the driveway; Mother Nature is going to have to take care of that. After our beef stew and cheddar biscuit dinner I decided to use a cake mix I found in the cabinet.  There were 2 pouches of mix in the box; one red velvet and one green velvet.  I thought it would be nice to make the red one as a V-day weekend celebration.  Mix in the bowl, oil in the bowl, then on the way to the sink for water the bowl slipped out of my hand and made a mess on the floor.  At least it missed my pants and slippers.  I cleaned it up and made the green one.  It tasted really good, but I guess it was more of a “come on spring, hurry up!” wish cake. 
   Yesterday I made a trip to the supermarket through the luge track that our local roads have become.  The cashier noted how it was busier than the weekend had been which is unusual.  I suggested that perhaps, like me, people had been digging out over the weekend and making the trek before the next snow event.  She agreed that was likely. 
 Now here I sit today, writing this when I ordinarily would be at work but, the “nuisance snow” the weather forecasters spoke about yesterday has turned into a “big pain in the you-know-where” snow.  I’m going to have to go out there before Bruce gets home and shovel the new snow off the top of the 4” ice base. I guess Mother Nature isn’t ready to take care of that yet.  At least I’ll burn up some calories to counteract the green cake; and I still have no concept of what day it is.

Silliness

I love being silly.  I love it so much I am silly almost every day.  I feel like being silly is like a mini vacation from the realities of life.  Laughing follows silliness and spurs it on.  Sometimes at work, for instance, I’ll just start singing the theme from the Magilla Gorilla cartoon show from my childhood. Laughter generally follows.  Once one of my coworkers and I sang the whole Zippity Do Dah song.  I’m not sure which Disney movie that’s from, but we sang it all the way through.  Just because we can is why.  Recently when I signed onto Facebook there was a friend suggestion waiting for me.  I am now friends with one of my friends’ pet bird. Yesterday we Puffy-Bird and I) had a short conversation on her timeline.  My husband and daughter looked at me as if I’d lost my mind when they found out.  I defended myself by telling them that I have been Facebook friends with another friend’s cat, and I play Words With Friends with her (the cat) so why shouldn’t I be friends with the bird?  My husband went back to what he was doing and my daughter said that although she never thought she’d say it, she’s glad we have no pets.    Sometimes I remember silly things that happened in the past and just start giggling to myself.  Usually I’m alone when this happens but there are occasions when my husband and daughter are sitting in the same room as me.  They’ve learned to ignore it, unless I insist on telling them what I’m thinking about.  Sometimes they chuckle but usually they just give some noncommittal remark like “oh” before turning their attention back to what they were doing.  I really don’t care.  Better I should be sitting here breaking out into giggles than sobs.  I have learned to embrace the silly part of me, the part that delights in the absurdities of life.  I hope you can get silly sometimes too and give your brain a rest from the worries of your life for a few moments time.

Butterfly Clips

They say that your hair changes every seven years.  If so then I shouldn’t be surprised by the way Hillary’s hair has been acting lately, after all she turned 21 almost 6 months ago. That would make it the third time in her life that it changed.  For some reason, the wispy hair around her face always seems to be hanging in her eyes by the end of the day no matter what I do to control it.  I know that wearing the hood on her winter poncho doesn’t help, but I really don’t recall it being this out of control before. I need to go barrette shopping for her.  In the mean time when she’s home I’ve been using the ones I have on hand left from when the girls were little.  So far the ones that work best are the little ones shaped like butterflies as they have a claw like part that hold the hair in place.  They’re cute, but not particularly appropriate for my 21 year old; at least in my mind.  Those little shiny plastic clips bring back so many memories though.  In my mind’s eye I can picture my Anna, four years old, a long braid running down the length of her back all decorated with the little butterflies as she skipped up the center aisle of church to sit on the floor, her skirt puddled around her, with her friends for the children’s sermon.  My vision fast forwards a few years to a 5 year old Hillary, her hair in a bun on top of her head decorated with the same little butterflies, sitting on her physical therapist’s lap.  As her head bobbled around the therapist had to dodge the little plastic doo dads so as to avoid her chin being scratched. She used to joke that it was Hillary’s defense weapon. I used those clips a lot.  When Hillary turned 16 we were at the mall one day, and looking at her from a distance as my husband stood with her I realized how “not right” she looked in her little kid style clothes on her adult sized frame and butterflies in her hair.  I asked Anna what she thought and we agreed that it was time to redo the wardrobe so Hillary would look more her age, and fit in better with her school peers.  When I see those clips I recall the Halloween that we dressed Hillary as the Butterfly Queen.  She was dressed in black from head to toe, we made a large petaled flower out of her lap tray and put wings behind her, and topped her hair off with a small tiara and all the butterfly clasps and hairpins we had. She looked quite regal as we wheeled her around.  It’s funny how finding a solution to out of control hair led me to such sweet memories.  I like that.