Thinning

I have 633 posts here but i’m not sure if WordPress is counting drafts. Although I haven’t written much here in the last year or two I still think about doing it almost every single day. Then I get all busy or lazy and go to Facebook to look for some quick way to say what might have been a blog post. And it’s been great, I love the interactions I have there and it’s so easy to post a quick photo and and and.

Not much writing gets done. Not here (my word gym), not anywhere.

A lot has happened in the last year. Our youngest, Spanky has finished high school and moved away to go to college. Fortunately she chose a school in Austin, a place we’ve always wanted to move to when the kids are all grown up. So we found a place in Austin in October and have slowly been moving things over there, waiting for the spring market to put the house near Dallas up for sale.

Actually it is a little more complicated than that, we have another college-aged daughter living at home who just finished her first two years at community college. She’s going to move to Austin as well and try to get into one of the universities near there.

Right now I’ve got to get the house ready for market. It seems like an impossible task. With each previous move we got a larger house and these new places were just a block from each other. This time we’re downsizing. And that is where the pain comes in. We’re not pack rats, but hell, it just seems like I never had to get rid of anything to fit a new thing in these places.

It’s not a big deal with things like furniture, we’ve been selling that stuff on Craigslist pretty easily. It’s going through boxes of drawings and notes my kids did when they were growing up. Letters from my parents and friends from far away, things my mom and dad made for me, things I made for my kids (I used to sew a lot). I can’t keep everything, I don’t have the room, so I’ve got to thin them out.

Some of these things have been in a box for over ten years. I have long forgotten memories that go with these things, they flood my brain and emotions and I fear if I threw the item away the memory will go with it.

And I miss my children being children. I wish I had a stronger version of myself to go through these things. I know once these things are gone I’ll have an overall feeling of lightness because all of these things are heavy.

Editing is good. I just need to get through it.

Control Freak

Control Freak.

I’m sharing this from my friend Ben’s blog. It is one of the most profound and moving pieces of writing I’ve ever read about alcoholism, codependency, and parenting.

 

…the best way out is always through

“…the best way out is always through.” Robert Frost, A Servant to Servants.

Long time ago we used to have a dwarf rabbit named Bugs, the first pet our family had that wasn’t a fish. When Bugs died, Spanky cried and asked me, “Will I ever get over this?”

She would get over this, I knew she would. She was only about eight years-old at the time, would she remember she’d had a pet rabbit at all? I didn’t tell her she might completely forget Bugs. Or forget this entire conversation when she learned about mortality.

Mortality, I’ll tell you when you worry most about that.

When a child is born, parents start a countdown. I’d like to think most of us, at the very least, want to live to see our child reach adulthood.

So on Spanky’s eighteenth birthday, I felt a great sense of accomplishment. She grew up with both parents, was never orphaned. I’m pointing out Spanky because she is the youngest. I felt the same about the other two but I still had the finish line on the entire parenting thing to think about.

What crept up on me the entire time I was raising my children was the flip-side of this countdown. They’re going to leave. Go to college. Get married. They have to. This is life.

And this is where things are right now and it has my mind in a complete state of fuckery and it hurts and this was a long time coming and I know I’m being selfish…

BUT

Will I ever get over this?

Discovered this Frost quote on a bathroom wall in a bookstore near the campus where Spank is going to college when I took her to orientation this summer

This too, same stall. Walls do talk.

Ripple

Eat or Be Eaten?

I was flicking through the channels one night during the holidays and landed on a show on Animal Planet, “I Shouldn’t Be Alive.” It’s been around since at least 2007, but I’d never seen an episode. I’d seen it in the guide, but the description made it seem like a medical show, one where people come in with a hatchet stuck in the middle of their skull. Or shot with a nail gun between the eyes. I’m a little burnt out on those.

No. This show is recreations of true life stories where people get trapped or stranded out in the Amazon or the freezing mountains of Transylvania. With a broken leg. Or a thigh muscle ripped out of their leg by a bear. No cell phone. Have to crawl eight miles through three foot snows to get help. Wolves, cayotes, or buzzards lurking to eat up the person trying to survive. No food. No water.

That kind of show. And I’m hooked. (the stress of this show could be what caused the blood vessel in my eye to blow, I tell you, it makes my heart race.)

I went looking around the internet to find out more about this show and ran across a funny comment a fan wrote. I can’t find it right now but will paraphrase:
“This is the best show ever on TV. It teaches you all about how to survive being stuck in the freezing mountains, how to fight off wild animals… Eat or be eaten.”

Okay. I’m not that sort of fan. Eat or be eaten? But that really made me laugh.

On Wednesday january 5th, 2011 Animal Planet is having a “I shouldn’t Be Alive” marathon of back to back shows beginning at 2PM eastern time. I got my DVR set to record.

Monstah

While brushing my teeth yesterday morning I looked up at myself in the mirror and saw this:

Actually it wasn’t that bad yesterday because it wasn’t noticeable unless I looked up. Today it is worse, it has spread to the iris (colored part) and it is getting worse by the hour.

I’m not really worried, this is not something to see a doctor about, it just looks scary. And it takes a long time to go away, about two weeks.

My family is freaking out. They have to look at it, I don’t. They also have to deal with my freaky medical self-treatment ideas such as, “I wonder if I could stick a needle in my eye and pop that blood blister?” (seriously, I want to do that)

Good thing this didn’t happen in my brain, that is called a stroke.

2010 in review

This post is from an email I got from WordPress and I thought I’d share it.

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

About 3 million people visit the Taj Mahal every year. This blog was viewed about 42,000 times in 2010. If it were the Taj Mahal, it would take about 5 days for that many people to see it.

In 2010, there were 33 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 546 posts. There were 66 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 15mb. That’s about 1 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was October 28th with 445 views. The most popular post that day was Simple Halloween Costumes.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, reddit.com, search.aol.com, fivestarfriday.com, and holidailies.org.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for halloween yards, simple halloween costumes, punks, grillz, and jared leto.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Simple Halloween Costumes October 2008
14 comments

2

Tricked Out Halloween Yards October 2006
13 comments

3

Crazy Pranks And Other Things Kids Do While Parents Are Away August 2007
16 comments

4

“Teenagers (Scare the Living Shit out of Me)” November 2006
50 comments

5

When is food too old to eat? January 2009
27 comments