reminding myself

I am not a career person and that is ok. I am not a career person and that is ok. I am not a career person and that is ok. I am not a career person and that is ok. I am not a career person and that is ok. I am not a career person and that is ok. I am not a career person and that is ok.

waiting for me

Today I feel like the chosen one because every time I've pressed an elevator button the doors have opened immediately.

getting back

It has been two years, two years almost exactly! since I've even touched my oboe. I am not even the last person to have played it. Until this afternoon, when snow blindness and thoughts of mortality (I stayed awake last night crying silently in bed next to my sleeping husband imagining what would happen if he were to die) and impatience all collapsed in on me. I bought new reeds a few months ago, knowing I'd need to start fresh if I were to ever begin again. I'm doing ok. I almost am not missing a beat.

I forgot that there are more ways to measure my own strength.

I'm walking a fine line these days. I think I'm just about catching up to who I should have been five years ago. I'm fighting with the kickback that always comes up when there's a host of good choices in one direction and I want to make them, I just don't want to make it seem like I'm being convinced. Sometimes I actually do come around on my own. I always want to make it seem like I do.

I can't believe how long we've been living in a basement and how much longer we have to go. I have this thing where my whole heart is a pendulum and I'm on day two of snow bound ness and I can feel that it's not swinging at all on its own. So I broke a 24 month losing streak. I can't run, I can't do more than clomp around in the snow. But I can nestle an oboe reed in the pillow of my bottom lip and curl it in like a drawsting and I can still make it sing. I have such high hopes for a spring and for making it seem like it's my own idea to cook and clean and volunteer and sweat and push toward filling in all my gaps. Walking that fine line until I have sussed out enough which direction I should jump off. 

buckling in

Sometimes I really do struggle with wanting to wait until after I've been rewarded to do good things rather than doing good things in the hunt for a reward.

I don't have the option of skipping

Well, I had a stink bug in my coffee this morning, which is only marginally better than stink bug in my cheerios, and also today fully 50% of my office is out sick with a stomach bug. Bugs! Also my back muscles are making a fist.

So it is coffee from Starbucks, with a shrug, and open ears. Glad for rice and lentils, glad for warm and strong and patient S. Glad for being not (currently) one of the ill 50% of ILL. Glad for this job and for recovery.

movement

Things I used to be ok with:

backtracking

midnight three-mile walks

shopping at Walmart

performing/wielding power toward an audience

insular thinking

flying by the seat of my pants

the end of crisp sandpaper

I am feeling flush with good cheer, because after seven months of line-dried clothes, yesterday afternoon a dryer was installed in our little home, and after seven months of line-dried jeans, the ones I'm wearing today feel like heaven. Warm, soft heaven.

pounced

Well, this morning the upstairs/outside cat pounced at me out of a basement shadow and oh my heart, and yesterday I stole a faux snowball and almost cried over a sandwich, but I'm still really happy. We have a tiny fake tabletop tree and it's topped with an owl, and my husband likes to light the oil lamp and read in front of it, and I'm doing better with the underpinnings of work stuff and relishing the chance to take a full two weeks away from it soon. I like the fact that I hear band music in my head and I like the fact that cold makes warmth divine.

three snow days

On Sunday morning S and I woke to an empty fridge and snow already drifting down, so we bundled up, even pre-coffee, and within ten minutes were on the way to the grocery store for milk and bananas and cheese doodles, and stopped at Mr J's on the way home for an egg and cheese breakfast bagel for me and everything else they sell for breakfast at once for S. Home through the snowglobe fluffy powder, oil lamps lit, styrofoam containers full of steaming food and eventually coffee and the calm, quiet of a Sunday morning snow with nowhere to be. Later the day included short commute up the basement steps, and red wine and football and roast beef.

Monday morning we woke up to the odd sort of ice that Virginia always gets where it's too warm for straight snow and not warm enough for rain, and so every twig, branch, blade of grass is encased in ice. So were our cars, but S had the day off, even if I didn't, and he good naturedly volunteered to drive me into town, and between the two of us we chipped the solid block of ice back into something resembling a Ford Taurus and puttered in. I don't know what made work crazier--the ice, the non-delay, the start of finals week--the morning was a beast. The day was a beast. Later the day included cookies and a gift exchange and sitting in a living room with three girls I have really grown to love lately and discussing books-->discussing life-->making plans-->staying out much later than normal.

This morning instead of ice, there was a blanket of beautiful wet packing snow. And too much of it to be overruled by the importance of finals week, so the university closed for the morning. S unstuck his car and I made him text me when he made it to work safely and I sat in my robe on the couch and cried while I watched the previous night's Sing Off on hulu and then I put on boots and tramped around outside, turning my face up to catch the flakes and thinking about snowmen. I painted my fingernails gold instead. By 11:00 the snow melt was on, so I just drove the snow off my hood with my arms and inched down the driveway and into town. Everything is heavy and wet, and I'm the first one in the office so far, so I'm listening to Swan Lake and drying the cuffs of my pants and later today will certainly include chai and dripping and being helpful.

recommending kindness and books

I hit a goose--a big white goose--and ran my car off the road. I think the goose lived.
I ate the same meal in the same restaurant twice in one week.
I had a private tear and snot fest over the fact that kindness and benefit-of-the-doubt-i-ness is Very Important to me and I don't know how to handle the fact that sometimes the same is not true of the people I rely on for their kindness. Relatedly, I am bone breakingly thankful for my husband and my husband's brother for how they have deliberately chosen to look at the world.
I read a few books, and watched a few movies. Was at the theater twice in one week, kind of like the restaurant thing. A year's quota at once. Saw Catching Fire, which made me goggle and ache and cry, and The Book Thief, which edged its way to the top of my favorite book ever list when I read it last month, and which, in movie form, made me goggle and ache and cry. Can't recommend either enough. Read, watch. Especially ensconced in the seats between fellow book lovers.
I'm wearing new socks today, and drinking chai, and am back into yarn-craft mode after months of relative apathy, and all of this feels very December. So does the eating gift fudge and sleeping in past workout time thing. Take a deep breath.