How to Spend a Saturday

Everyone's sleeping, except for the dogs.  Saturday mornings are cherished here.  After the busy, busy week before, it's like a fresh clean slate, with a reprieve given the next day... just in case.  At least for me, that's how it feels.

There are a million things I could use the day for... taxes, budgeting, household chores, gardening, yoga, working out, working on volunteer efforts.  What I would really like to do, if I weren't still so sleepy feeling, is take a long, hot bath.  It's chilly in here!

But instead, I find myself tapping out these characters on my keyboard, downloading the thoughts that flitter through my head.  

It's one of those times when I feel like not only is my calendar filling up and the busy season approaching, but my current task list has deadlines and I just don't feel like doing them.  

Maybe it's too early in the day.  Maybe my brain isn't in a high enough gear just yet.  A hot shower sounds nice, and a clean room, fresh sheets, getting the day started on the right foot... but I'm too tired just yet. ;)

I like to wake up slow.  None of that "the alarm went off, time to jump out of bed and get moving" crap.  I can't do that, never have.  Well, I take that back.  There was a time when I was in the U.S. Army... yeah, 'nough said.  I was miserable then.  Spaceman says he likes to wake up slowly, too.  Merridian suspects my kind of slow might dwarf his. lol  We will know soon enough! :)

It's kind of exciting to begin planning a life with someone.  I think a great deal about how I can welcome him and make him feel at home.  He's picking up and walking out of a daily life he loves, one that has sustained him for years now.  From the country to to the city... well suburbs, but you get my point.  It's temporary, but not.  It's long enough to settle in and find comfort.  At least, I hope he finds comfort here, probably with a similar spirit in which he hopes I will find comfort in a more rural setting one day.  The spirit of these hopes and dreams is genuine.  We know we want to live somewhere more simply, with a big garden, canning food for the winter, working with nature and sustainability practices to provide the whole year through... as best we can, as we learn, anyway.  That's not exactly the kind of life that suburbia brings about naturally.  Things like keeping chickens aren't legal in my neighborhood.  BUT... we can do what we can do, and we can prepare for that lifestyle where we are, as we are.  We can plan to enter it with our best feet forward, on solid ground.  We can do all that while doing many other things... things that are important to all of us, especially, right now, my kids and I... for that's what life currently calls for.  After all, just because one area of life takes off like wild-fire doesn't mean that what's been in existence for so long fades away.  I wouldn't want it to, anyway.  

I am in a stage of my life that is necessarily focused on my kids.  An empty nest may be around the next few bends, but it's not quite here yet.  There are at least a couple of years left in that, probably more.  My plan is always to make the best of whatever stage of life I am at.  Right now, that's graduating my teens and getting them into adulthood.  

Currently my oldest is 19 and learning how to adult in the workplace.  He's also not quite ready to dive right into life on his own.  He's working, paying off some car repairs, keeping up on car insurance, enjoying having a steady girlfriend, and using his free time to play airsoft games (think paintball but with tiny plastic pellets instead).  He spends his money on airsoft gear.  So, you see, he's playing.  He works to play.  While I see nothing inherently wrong with ensuring your free time is enjoyable, he's living on borrowed time.  Soon enough, a new phase of life will kick in and his priorities will necessarily change.  I don't feel I need to hound him too much, so much as just continue with my own plans and let him come to his own conclusions all in due time.  There is far too much time spent in each of our lives living to work rather than working to really live.  He's close to that razor's edge and just as I know he will step up when the time comes, I also know that I want him to enjoy the enjoyable times while they last.  My lackadaisical attitude about parenting is quite on purpose and simply a part of who and how I am.  I trust inherently in the fact that nothing ever stays the same and therefore there is no need for me to rush people or try to force them into changing before the desire is felt first from within.

My 16 year old is currently a junior in high school.  She's been dating her boyfriend for over a year.  They spend a great deal of time together and seem very well suited for one another.  You know... I am half expecting they will stay together for years and years to come.  One never truly knows about these things.  He's a great kid, gets good grades, is never in trouble, and helps his mom out a great deal.  His mother is currently going through a very serious health condition, one that could be fatal.  I inquire with my daughter how things are going with all that, but the general response is one of optimism and status quo.  I don't know how they maintain such things, other than... the need to deal with life never stops, even when sick, especially for a single mother like she is.  But enough of her story; it isn't mine to tell, nor am I privy to the details.  

My daughter is, let's just say, Type A.  She's driven to do things immediately and be done with it.  Soooo not me lol.  We don't see eye to eye in this way.  She's constantly frustrated with me and my lackadaisical attitude.  lol  But it's not too stressful.  She's a really great kid.  She means well and is capable of so much!  She challenges me to up my game as a parent.  She's also very full of attitude like any teenage girl!  The default reaction is typically frustration-inducing on me... and I wish she would take a page from my book and relax more.  She asks more of me than I am used to giving, and let's not forget... now, now, now! lol  I am so NOT type A.  But she is doing well in school, studies often with her boyfriend, and is planning on going to college the last two periods of her senior year next year.  In order to do this, she has to take both her Phys. Ed. semesters in summer school this summer.  So, I forked over the $300 earlier this week.  As for paying for college a year sooner than planned... she and her boyfriend both swear to me that there is some kind of program that pays for high schoolers to attend college during their senior year for free.  I'm all for that. :)  Of course, there is one thing she's asking for, that well, I did promise... just did not see it playing out in this way.  I promised both the kids I would buy them a laptop when they started college.  The boy child went one semester and I had bought him his as his high school graduation gift.  (He's talking about going back and/or getting on at Fed Ex.)  So now that the girl child is suddenly poised to begin college as a senior in high school, that gift is being demanded (yes, demanded, she's a Leo after all) as fulfillment of that promise.  Parenting = making magical financial shit happen. 

So as I sit here this morning... still in the quietness of the morning... I have the items of my ToDo List flitting through my mind, shuffling the tasks according to deadlines and pioritites.  Taxes.  Taxes keep floating to the top.  I must get an idea of how much I am going to need to pay by April 15th.  That's my #1.  Then I need a list of things that I can tackle financially to set the finances on even keel again.  Boy do I have a very different attitude about money than I used to have, pre-bankruptcy.  There are other roads to pursuing goals in life, than to be slave to the 1% and their financial pyramid schemes.  Balancing my goals with the needs and wants of those I love and the current structures of society... it's not easy as you all well know.  

At least on Saturday mornings I have the chance to reconsider it all in new light... or, just sleep through the opportunity if sleep is what is most needed.  And oftentimes, that's exactly what's needed!

Today I would like to be out in the backyard preparing my garden.  I feel like our weather is a full month ahead of schedule and I'm therefore behind schedule.  It may say March on the calendar, but it's definitely April rains here.  Thus my yard is too soggy to trudge through.  There are inches of water in some places.  So, I just look out the window wistfully, waiting...  And thus today is "inside" work.  Taxes.  Yep, it's decided.  Let's take in the spirit of the 16 year old and get it done, now, now, now!  She will be happier when I have more answers to her questions anyway. <3

An Almost-Empty Nest

Yes, I'm the completely Caucasian chick that prefers to eat with chopsticks.  And I love that I'm getting so much better at it.  Tonight's dinner is the same as the past 2 nights, a Greek salad: 50/50 spring mix lettuces, an intense balsamic vinaigrette, feta cheese, and Kalamata olives (the saltiest and tenderest black olives).... with chopsticks.  *shrugs*  Dare I mention... in the candlelit dark in my jammies, in bed already.  

...I shouldn't be eating the feta, but every once in a while... mmmmmhmm.

Today was my physical.  I would say "annual physical" but I haven't had one in... well I can only recall one other in my adult life (outside of my army days).  In fact, before I had my leg pain in early December, I hadn't been to the doctor for even a sick visit in at least two years.  But I decided to make one after my leg pain issue.  A vessel in my right thigh, the main one, swelled up near bedtime and became really painful.  Not even moving around it was still painful.  I had an ultrasound, which found absolutely nothing (of course).  Doctors never find anything wrong with me when I complain of anything.  I guess I'm too sensitive to the slightest of changes.  I don't know.  How can a person have that much pain and it just go away and can no longer be detected like that?  That can't bode well.  

I had already decided to start working out and eating better before that happened.  For all I know, that's what brought it on.  In late November I had edema of the lower calves.  That's when I started working out, eating more cleanly, and quit the mtn dew again.  I've only lost a measley 6 lbs.  But hey, it was over the holidays and the numbers are going in the right direction, if ever so slowly.  I'm currently trying to break my second plateau.  Gawd, I can remember when I could lose 10 lbs in the first week. *smh*  The 40's suck in that regard.

In other ways, 41 (nearly 42) isn't so bad.  I was done having kids at 25.  That means my oldest is 19 and my youngest is 16.  She will be 17 when she graduates high school.  An empty nest is just around the corner.  And boy do I have plans for it! My poor kids, they won't be coddled.  They have been reminded from time to time, while growing up, that mom intends to pursue her own dreams once they're grown, which could including living anywhere, stateside or not.  Mom may not be one of those always-around grandmas for their kids.  

And it's really getting close.  I mean, I've already gone through the stage when, after wanting the years to speed up, I started wishing they would really slow down - it was going too fast, they were growing up too quickly, I wasn't sure I wanted to let go of this period of my life any time too soon.  Now... well now there are plans forming.... nebulous plans, but directions and desires swirling about in more and more specific ways.  

It's just that I need to polish off the edges where my multi-year depression had alchemically changed my spirit and body.  It's not just the coming empty nest.  No.  It's spaceman.  Of course, it's also spaceman.  This man is the love of my life.  I swear to it.  Every time I'm having a bad or not so great day and I think about our coming conversation and might not be as up for it as usual... just feeling blah, you know?  Once we are chatting or talking, a certain cadence kicks in and my heart lifts.  He brings life to my light.  And I'm sure that if you could see auras, ours would glow a little brighter while we are "together".  

Of course, we aren't really together-together in the sense that we live 6 hours apart.  In fact, I have not laid eyes on this man in over 10 years.  Scary, eh?  Kind of, but kind of not.  Like I told him last night, this sweet, sweet flavor of romantic love that we have going on in recent months is all wonderful, but it is not the basis of our love.  The basis of our love is the 10 years worth of cherishing one another through frequent letter exchanging.  Our romantic reconnection may bring us closer, but "we" have always been.  There's going to be a lot of dreams coming true.  I can just feel it.  And, so can he.

That brings me back to these nebulous plans that are developing.  Oh so many hopes and dreams, co-mingling, forming in thought first and later in actuality.  What exactly that will be, we do not know yet.  I like to watch things unfold in real time, and so does he.  It's a living in the moment balancing act that is far more difficult to achieve than conceive. Yet somehow, with him, I feel calm and patient.  I feel confident and truly loved.  I am liberated in a way I cannot describe.  

And so, I'm making progress towards what I want.  After all, just because you yearn for something doesn't mean it will come about.  You have to meet it in the middle.  You walk towards what you prefer and expect wonderful outcomes without being attached to any, but welcoming whatever the universe forms to deliver.  Positive intention is key here... an intention with open-endedness.  Don't focus on the hows.  Just focus on the feelings you want to have.

Right now, I'm having the feeling that I would like to eat something yummy!  It just needs to be healthy, too.  

hmmm... it cannot be that awesome cottage cheese and homemade strawberry jelly I have sitting in the fridge.  I've already had too much dairy (feta; lactose intolerant).  A fuji apple then... with peanut butter... better yet cashew or almond butter if I can find some.