Not red wine with a bath, but red wine IN a red wine bath. So what I need right now!

…stay close to me eee  eee…

Unexpected storm in Boulder dumps 4 inches of snow in two hours.  Roads covered with an inch of black ice.  I spend 3.5 hours in a car driving a grand total of 20 miles.  Three of the 3.5 hours are spent with my two tired and hungry children, both of whom have to go to the bathroom well before there is any chance of stopping or getting home.  Mommy did NOT bring the iPad along (probably the first trip since I’ve gotten the thing that I’ve been without it).  Upon arriving home, I find that the four pairs of ski boots I set in the driveway (so that I could fit the dog in the car) are now full of snow.

So, I’m declaring this a “special occasion” night, where I am allowed to break my resolution to skip wine on weekdays.

Bottoms up everyone! 

I’ll preface this story, in my own defense, by letting you know that I was sick when all of this took place.  I was congested, had terrible body aches, a low-grade fever, and stomach cramps from the Ibuprofen I’d taken.  Still…

I did eventually get to see the ocean

Last Thursday, I made my way to the airport to depart for the Big Sur conference.  I got all the way to long-term parking before I realized I had forgotten my briefcase.  The bag that not only had my laptop and all my copies of my manuscripts, but also that pesky little thing called a wallet.  There was nothing for it; I had to drive all the way home, retrieve the briefcase and then head back to the airport.  Luckily, I was able to get a flight that departed only 2 and half hours later than the original, the biggest bummer being that I would now make the drive from San Francisco to Big Sur almost entirely in the dark.

My woes did not end there.  Once at the airport, I managed to leave my wallet up at the check-in kiosk.  I did not notice it was missing until after I’d gone through security.  I had to plead with TSA to give me a pass to go straight to the front of the line upon my return.  Then I had to leg it back up to check-in and admit my dumb-assery to the clerks.  Wallet safely back in possession, I went through the security line – again – and thanked my lucky stars I’d left myself plenty of time.

On the ground in San Francisco, I got my rental car and hit the road.  Not even 30 seconds after I hit Highway 101 South, the GPS increased my travel time by six minutes.  One more minute on the road and my travel time was up by 20 minutes.  I felt disoriented and confused.  Then I realized, “Oh yes, traffic…. I remember traffic…  It happens sometimes in big cities.”  Apparently I’ve become such a bumpkin in Boulder that I forgot that people spend hours of their lives in traffic every single day (as I used to do).  Mulling this revelation over, it dawned on me that it was now past dusk and I still hadn’t turned my headlights on (my own car does this automatically).  Doh!

It got me thinking about how much my life has changed over the course of just one year.  I used to travel extensively for work, and there is no way I could have made the mistakes I made that day.  Not when I was speaking, running a meeting, or presenting to bankers or Board members on the other end.  I used to think I was a fairly efficient, prepared and precise kind of person.  Now I realize that’s not true.  I am able to do what I need to do to get the job done.  In my former job, that required a much more regimented and structured existence.  Now that I am focused on more creative pursuits, it seems those areas of my brain have gone a bit “squishy.”  If necessity is, as they say, the mother of invention, apparently it is also the mother of the ability to keep your act together while traveling.

While pondering the fact of my now-squishy brain, I realized I was driving in the HOV lane.  By the time I noticed, I only had a short way to drive before turning off onto another highway.  So I stayed in the HOV.  I did feel a little guilty, but my desperation was mounting.  I felt terrible.  Besides, I figured, my stomach was distended enough from the wretched cramps that I figured I might be able to get away with the, “I’m driving for two,” excuse if I got caught.

After what seemed like three days driving in the dark and the rain, I arrived at the coast in Monterey.  From there, the road got increasingly twisty and turny.  The GPS became my best friend – warning me just a teeny bit in advance of the curves and giving me hope that I would, sometime in this lifetime, arrive at my destination.  As I concentrated on those hairpin turns, with nothing but mountains on one side and the inky blackness of the ocean I couldn’t see on the other, I noticed the radio was playing Wild Thing by Tone Loc.  Consider yourself lucky if you have never heard this song.

“No, no, NOOO!” I shouted as I frantically switched the radio to scan.  I thought, “Please God do not let this be the last song I hear as I am about to embark upon a three-day writing retreat.”  For as horrible as the song is, it is the kind that will take up permanent residence in your brain, taking you one giant step further toward insanity.  Alas, no other stations would come in.  Not even NPR.  Finally, the radio stopped on a station offering Gregorian chanting.  Awesome!  It seemed appropriate for a drive through the beautiful scenery that I wasn’t seeing.  Anything but Tone Loc.

I finally arrived – cold, exhausted and aching.  I had a quick dinner in the lodge, and I was too frazzled, tired and ill even to drink a glass of wine.  Goes to show you there really is a first time for everything.

Luckily, that was by far the worst of the workshop experience.  I’ve found it’s always good to start at the bottom, so you have no place to go but up.

More on the conference itself in the next post…

Have you ever had days or periods where you felt like your brain just shut down and wouldn’t function the way you needed it to?  Or am I the only scatterbrain out there?

As far as places to spend the Fourth of July go, I really can’t think of a better place than middle America.  This is truly the land of sparklers, the bean bag toss, cold beer and red meat.  I was dreading this family reunion, as horrible as that sounds, because it is the first one without my Dad.  There are times when I am sad, but at the same time, it’s also comforting to be with so many people who also loved him.  This family has always made a point of getting together and staying in touch – through good times and horrible times, for better or for worse.  I’m glad for the chance to model the importance of family to my children.  There has been no small amount of drama through the years, but we persevere.  How?  Well, we love each other for one.  For another, copious amounts of alcohol flow at these gatherings (hey, I’m just being honest!).  Sometimes you did need to numb history a little bit, and that’s okay with me if it keeps everyone together.

ANYWAY, after the detour in Cedar Point and Ann Arbor, I should be able to post more regularly.  I will not be posting Gratitude Sunday tomorrow for lack of Internet access, but it will be back at it’s regularly scheduled time next Sunday.  So until we reunite next week, Happy 4th of July to all the American readers out there!

If you recall from Saturday’s post, step 1 of the “Unclutter Your House in One Week” is to spend the weekend prior clearing out and organizing “sentimental clutter” – photos, letters, cards, and so on.  Since I’ve been meaning to organize my photos for years, I decided to start there.  To give you a sense of what I was up against, how about a visual?  I started with the largest and most unruly collection of photos, all jumbled up in a gargantuan size Rubbermaid tub.

Round One: Me against giant tub FULL of photos

By early evening on Sunday, I had that same tub of photos corralled into ziploc bags, organized by era, year and/or event.  I also had an entire trash bag filled with duplicates, overexposed shots and just plain bad shots.  It was a great feeling, seeing them all organized like that.  BUT…

There was no time to rest.  As of 7:00 p.m. Sunday, I still had the following to contend with:

By 10:30, after several more hours of organizing and a couple of glasses of wine to “make the medicine go down,” I had made it 2/3 of the way through these boxes. Not too shabby.

So is it possible to sort and organize/eliminate sentimental clutter in the span of one weekend?  Uhh… not unless you’ve been religious about organizing your pre-digital age pictures since at least 1982.  Although I have the end of photo organizing in my sights, I haven’t even started on the letters, cards and trinkets I’ve collected over the years.  Even so, am I glad I got started?  Do I feel now that it is possible to do and that there is a light at the end of the tunnel?  I have to answer with a resounding, YES!!  Here are a few other things I learned along the way:

1. It is possible to have too many wedding photos.  Did we really need 2000 photos of this blessed event?  And that’s in addition to our professional album and the one Phil’s mother made us with the “best of the best” from those taken with private cameras.  The answer is no, we did not.
2. I should never, ever cut my hair to chin length again.  Lordie but that is not a good look for me.
3. Organizing can be fun.  There, I said it.  For as much as I had been dreading going through all of those photos, it brought back a lot of memories and turned out to be an enjoyable way to spend some time.  I was especially grateful for the sweet chubster pictures of my kiddos in their baby stages. After spending the better part of the weekend listening to them whine, bicker, yell, complain and sass, it was nice to look back on the halcyon days before they could talk!

Now it’s time to move on to the “official” Day One of the declutter project.  On deck for today: my wardrobe (this means bedroom closet AND dressers), my desk and the “reception station,” or entryway area.  Full report on that tomorrow.

Nathan – agent, writer and blogger extraordinaire – then took the BIC concept a bit further to come up with his own acronyms, the first one being “OMGTWISNTBICGOBINTW: Oh my god the weather is so nice today but I can’t go outside because I need to write.”  There are more.  Check them out here.  After I finished laughing my a$$ off, I decided I just had to get my own acronyms for the writing process, so here goes:

1. TOTIEFLFLIWISBRAM: The only time I ever feel like folding laundry is when I should be revising a manuscript.

2. TNTWTMREOGAIAVETQWFTD: The need to watch the most recent episode of Grey’s Anatomy IS a valid excuse to quit writing for the day.

3. HB?PFFTDBWYGASM: Hello, brilliance? Please feel free to drop by when you get a spare minute.

4. OWBSFCHSBSBDTHMAHGWMBCO: Oprah will be sorry for canceling her show because she’ll be dying to have me as her guest when my book comes out.

5. SACOGOWDNITQOOW: Surely, a couple of glasses of wine does not impede the quality of one’s writing.

I could go on, but I’ll spare you.

So, what would your acronyms be?  It can be related to any type of work, not just writing.  Let’s hear them!

Instead of pulling my hair out chunk by chunk, I’m going to meet my stepmother for dinner and drink some wine.  I am now beginning to understand how many authors produced their best work “under the influence.”  God, but it’s painful!

I suppose I am grouchy because after a long weekend of taking care of four kids (we had two of our nieces visiting for the long weekend), I am now facing a house that looks like a tornado blew through and a mountain of laundry that needs folding.  So instead of reflecting on the fun we had this weekend ice skating, skiing, sledding and playing games, I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to get the house back in order, get the kids where they need to go all week and somehow have time left over to work on my manuscripts.

I tried to get the kids to pick up after themselves, and they did somewhat, but halfway through the weekend I just couldn’t keep up anymore.  Then it became a choice between forcing them to take their extremely limited time together and making them spend it picking up and cleaning, or letting them play and enjoy themselves, figuring the cleaning could come later.  I chose the latter.

I try to tell myself that my focus is in the right place.  We place a big emphasis on spending actual time together as a family.  I cook homemade meals at least five nights out of seven that we sit down and eat together as a family.  I volunteer at the kids’ schools and participate in their education in many different ways, including reading aloud to them multiple times a day.  So, what’s the rub with the housework?

The truth is, when the house is a mess I start feeling overwhelmed, incompetent and resentful.  Overwhelmed because I start to feel like I’ll never catch up.  Incompetent because I go to other people’s houses that are immaculate (or at least more organized than mine) and their family lives do not seem to be suffering in any way.  I start wondering how they do it and why I can’t seem to.  Resentful because I start thinking that I may not be a great housekeeper, but I didn’t exactly get two degrees so that I could spend my life cleaning sinks and doing laundry.  BUT – I like a clean, organized house just as much as the next person.  I do believe that an outer environment that is orderly and serene translates to greater inner calm and serenity.  Space outside=space inside.

So tonight I am sitting reading the book, Living Simply with Children.  I don’t know if getting rid of lots of stuff is the answer.  I don’t know if reading this book will help, but at this point, I’m willing to consider any and all ideas.  So what are yours?  Do you have methods to deal with the household madness?  Any magic bullets you’d like to share?  I know there are many intelligent, hard-working women out there with careers and children who still manage to keep their homes looking nice.  Pearls of wisdom?  Anyone?  Bueller… Bueller…

Putting this program into practice with 6-7 year-olds immediately following a long school day has its challenges.  I always incorporate games, movement and art into the sessions so the kids aren’t sitting still for the entire hour, but that doesn’t change the fact that each session includes at least 30 minutes of listening to the story reading and “shared inquiry” discussion.  Boy do I have a greater appreciation for teachers since I started facilitating this program!  It is so fun and rewarding to work with the kids and see them get excited about literature.  Sometimes though, I do get frustrated – like when they roll around on the floor making fart noises while spreading their snacks to kingdom come.  Last week was a particularly wild one because we did a dramatization of Rumpelstiltskin.  Fun for them; hell for me.  At the end I had kids chasing each other around the library with pencils, necessitating a couple of time-outs, which was a huge bummer for both them and me.  I felt like I needed a red wine IV drip when I got home.

That evening, I pondered how I might structure the next session to curtail some of the goofiness until the end.  The answer came to me immediately after looking at the title for this week’s story – Eeyore has a Birthday (and gets Two Presents).  The wine-induced voice inside my head whispered, “Bribe them.”  So I planned a birthday party for Eeyore, complete with cake, candles, games and balloons.  The only thing the kids had to do was sit (relatively) still during the reading and take part in the discussion.  I also used the candles as an extra carrot:  I promised that the two kids who sat the most still for the reading while contributing thoughtfully to the discussion would get to blow out Eeyore’s candles.

Well, you could have heard a pin drop in that room.  One parent came in during the reading and asked, “Are they supposed to be this quiet?”

We had a great discussion about moods, birthdays and friendship and then I let the kids loose.  We all had cake and each child got a red balloon (the color Eeyore got in the story, only of course his popped).  I came home feeling replenished and rewarded with warm fuzzies abounding for the kids.

This time, the only problem is that I now have the song 99 Red Luft Balloons stuck in my head.  Urgh!

Speaking of movies, I’m reminded of the scene in Annie where Miss Hannigan (aka  Carol Burnett)  laments her lot in life.  Alas, this song has been stuck in my head for the past hour:

“Some women are drippin’ with diamonds.

Some women are drippin’ with pearls.

Lucky me, lucky me, look at what I’m drippin’ with —

Little girls!”

Likewise, this is probably what I will look like after (if!) they finally fall asleep tonight.