Scatterbrains

I'm struggling to get my head on straight this morning.  We're about halfway through our second viewing of The Tigger Movie for the day.  I've journalled for The Artist's Way, fed us breakfast, caught up on Facebook, sent emails, and generally kept to our previous schedule.  Except now we're in Arizona, and it feels like nothing is the same.

Part of that is because our circumstances are different.  Everything happens an hour later due to the time difference.  All day yesterday, I kept feeling like I had lots of day time left, and I didn't.  Our Christmas was all over the place because the store we thought would be open to enable us to buy cardamom to make aebleskiver was not, in fact, open.  So we drove around for a long time trying to find an open grocery store, with only partial success. (Partial, because we found an open Mexican grocery store, but their spice section was about a shelf big, and cardamom was not one of the few they carried.)  It was a lovely Christmas, but I still feel like I'm missing something.

The bigger difference, though, is because I don't have free run of everything.  We only have one room we can hang out in until Jeremelon gets up for the day (his work shift is 3:30pm - midnight).  I should be figuring out what to do for lunch, but I have to wait for Jeremelon to get up for the day to find out what he wants to do, because he has opinions about food.  I can't take the berrykin for a walk yet, though I did figure out how to make that happen here (hurray!).  We can go on a short walk tomorrow, I think, and my ankle should be able to handle it.  We've got 3-4 hours until Jeremelon goes to work and we have naptime (very much looking forward to that today), then the in-laws will be home when we get up, and we'll be hanging out in the other room for the rest of the night.  And I have no clue what we're doing for dinner, or if I need to handle it myself.  And even if I decide the latter, I still don't have any idea where anything is here.  Phoenix is a much more confusing city than the little town where my mom lives.  Sure, I haven't had access to stores like BestBuy or Target for the last month, but there's a coziness and calm to simplicity like that.  At least we have money for gas if I decide to go somewhere...oh.  But I don't have a key or an access button to get in the gate.  So I can't really go anywhere, after all.

So what do I do?  I have to figure out how to BE here, and feel a lot more okay with that than I was last time.  I got pretty depressed before leaving for California.  I don't want to go back to that.  Which means, I think, that I have to set up my own space, for one, and for two, I need to make sure I'm being productive and using my time wisely.  Otherwise, I have too much time to think and grow despondent.

Then again, we're only going to be here another eight or nine days before we go to Colorado to stay with my sister.  So part of me is also wondering if it's worth it to modify our routine when we're just going to change it up again.  Of course it is, but that's the stubborn part of me, I guess. :)

And now that I've written my pseudo-whiny problem outline, I must go post a to-do list to try to start a solution going.

Happy 1st Day of Christmas!

Rest In Peace, Bedstemor

In Loving Memory,

Aase Christine H. M.

Born 1916,
Died 12/22/12

Sprained, Again

We were supposed to go back to Arizona on Thursday.  Instead, I sprained my ankle.  I was walking down to meet my mom when she got off work, pushing the Berrykin in his new umbrella stroller.  The stroller is about an inch too short for me to be comfortable while pushing it, but it's SO much better than carrying a 32-pound toddler up and down the abundant hills here.  It was about sunset, so it was still easy to see but the ground was cloaked in shadow.  I was having a good day.  We stopped to say hi to my uncle, who'd just gotten home from work, and headed down the hill.  At the bottom, a gentleman in a pickup let us a cross a small side-street ahead of him.  Whether it's a normal response others feel or it's my social anxiety, I always worry about taking too long.  I usually wave cars through first so I don't have to walk ahead of them while they watch (THAT is social anxiety).  He waved me ahead again, so I went.  Couldn't see the road.  Anxiety levels rose a little, and I walked a little faster.  Right smack in the middle, I rolled my right ankle.  It popped.  Instantaneous pain.  Had I not had the stroller in front of me, I'd have face-planted.  No doubt it kept me from having knees scraped up with bits of broken asphalt embedded in the angry wounds.  So that was a plus.  I limped my way a few feet farther - I couldn't really put weight on that side, but I managed.  By that point, I was pretty sure I was going to need to throw up, and I think that scared me more.  I NEVER throw up.  I had a seat in a cafe chair to let myself feel crappy for a minute and regroup.  I thought I might have to call my mom and have her walk home, get the car, and come pick us up.  After a few minutes, though, the nausea dissipated somewhat and I found I could gingerly hold my own weight.  Still.  It HURT.  There was no way I was getting back up the way we'd come down, so I ended up walking the long way home.  By the time we got here, my ankle felt better.  Using it didn't hurt nearly so much.  I grabbed some ice, sat down and elevated it, and waited for the nausea to go away.

Of course, once home and out of the stroller, Berrykin ran rampant.  I couldn't chase him.  Couldn't stop him.  He pulled all kinds of food out of the fridge.  At one point, he walked into the room with a shriveled old apple and a butter knife.  When I told him to bring them to me, and then to put them down when he wouldn't do that, he threw them across the room.  Thankfully, he didn't throw them AT me, because Berrykin has killer aim.  Seriously.  Most of us practice for years to be as accurate as he is at two.  It was humorous, and it would have made me feel better had I not been worried about his safety.  (Sure, he might still not talk very well, I might only be able to understand him 1% of the time, but he makes up for it physically.  Including the growth.  He's had two growth spurts in the last month!)

My ankle swelled up pretty badly.  It was bad the first night, but the second day was worse.  Looked like I was smuggling an egg in my sock!  And my foot swelled, too.  I think it would have gone done more quickly, except I had a TON of freelance work to get done, and my computer battery doesn't last very long.  My mom's house is old enough that half of the electrical outlets only have two holes, so I can't plug it in in the living room.  I had to sit in the dining room, since it's the only room from which I could keep an eye on the Berrykin at the same time.  It astounds me that I hurt it this badly.  I roll my ankles all the time, probably once or twice a month.  It has NEVER done this.  Usually it hurts, my foot bones crunch pretty audibly, and after a couple of minutes it's like nothing happened.  I've never sprained it before.  It irritates me that A) I did it while walking at no great speed, and B) it's the other ankle.  My left one STILL hurts from the overuse sprain I gave it in February.  Now I have no good side, and walking is generally a bad idea.  :(  But!  The swelling is now mostly gone, and I feel confident that it shouldn't hurt too badly to drive for half a day straight.  Especially if I wrap it.

We haven't done our Christmas shopping yet.  We don't have money to buy much, and we're only buying for each other and Berrykin, but we decided this year we get to spend a little (as opposed to the two Christmases since Berrykin's birth, when we counted him as our present and only bought him a little something).  I'm really not looking forward to shopping on Christmas Eve, but we wanted to go together.  So here we are...  If I don't post in two weeks, I've perished beneath the onslaught of last-minute Christmas horde.

Planning Ahead

I've been working on a freelance project most of the day.  It's a nice change of pace, and really good for the creative part of my brain.  My freelance work always stretches my creativity.  It's difficult, sometimes very much so, but it's also a good sort of challenge.  I have one more thing to write before I'm done for the week (unless my suggestion for Twitter additions goes through, then I'll have that, too).  

I had a break forced on me for food and naptime, and my mom "dragged" me into making Christmas pretzels.  I'm hoping we'll get the chance to make those chocolate drop cookies later tonight, but I'm having such a hard time getting back into writing mode, it might not happen.  Yeah, probably not.  Bummer.

Anyway, I procrastinated by going back through my spreadsheet trackers.  I make these periodically for a variety of things.  I made one waaay back in July to help me with school and exercise and making sure I got all my daily work done.  I only used it for about three days.  Woohoo!  But it was a good idea, and if I can get in the habit of opening it up every night before bed, it'll be an excellent tool to help me keep a routine in Arizona.  But I got into my plans for this week, and I suddenly realized - I'm going back to Arizona on Thursday.  

Now I want to cry.  I like it here, a lot.  There are family stresses I won't speak of, but they're MY family.  There are certain things that eat my time here out of inconvenience, like the lack of a tub or the way doors swell and produce loud squeaks and creaks that wake up toddlers in the middle of the night when opened and closed.  My allergies tried to knock me out last week, and that was NOT OKAY in December.  But it's pretty.  It's relaxing.  I feel at home here.  (And WHY, for the love of all, does the Christmas station here play "Christmas Shoes" EVERY DARN NIGHT??  I hate this song.  It makes me cry EVERY DARN TIME.  Ahem.)  Where was I?  Oh, yes.  I stood at the window earlier, drinking my hot chocolate and watching the fog bank roll over the mountain across the valley.  The neighbors across the street put up fun, blinky lights across their hedge fence.  My mom took Berrykin on a walk earlier with my uncle so I could work, and I didn't worry.  Berrykin even played in the yard by himself for a bit.  I don't want to lose any of that.  I could do without the perpetually wet towels and the irritatingly old wiring that left two-prong sockets in the living room so I can't plug my computer in and sit on the couch at the same time.  I miss Target and the smorgasbord of fast food options found elsewhere, but I can live without them.  I don't know how I'm going to survive in Arizona.  Even for the two weeks we'll be there until we go stay with my sister in Colorado.  Even that trip will be agony.  I don't know how I'm going to do that, either.  I dread uprooting the Berrykin that much.  I dread what I'm going to have to do in the future, but it will be for the best.

I just have to keep reminding myself of that.  It will be for the best.  It WILL be for the best.  Life will go on.  Life will get better!  We just have to make it through the crazy-hard transition period.

Sigh.  I like planning ahead, but sometimes it hurts, too.

Christmas Cookies

Today was a sad, frightening day across the US, China, and likely around the world.  I wanted to bake some chocolate drop cookies to add a little goodness back in.  They're my favorite.  My mom has been taunting me with the possibility that they will get made, but it hasn't happened yet.  We had a good mom-and-daughter talk over dinner, instead.

If it weren't just after midnight, I'd make them now.  That's how much I LOVE these cookies.

Instead, I will leave you with the previously-promised picture of our traditional holiday Danish cookies.

These are klejner.  They are cut out of dough, curled through themselves, and then fried in a pot of oil.  Sounds kind of gross, but they're fantastic.

They're all gone.

Because they were fantastic.

In totally unrelated news, I seem to have gained two pounds this month...

Procrastination, As Always

I should be writing.  I have work due today.
I should be brainstorming.  D'Onion and I have collaborative work that needs to be addressed today and finished over the weekend.

I should be writing.  My novel won't write itself.
I should be brainstorming.  My novellas won't inspire themselves (at least not until they're partially written).

Berrykin is sitting nicely next to me, coloring and being quietly focused (in between bouts of watching all his crayons roll off the table, anyway).  I should be using this time a little more constructively.

Instead, I'm obsessing over things I can't change right now.  I've updated my (messy and highly disorganized) debt ledger.  I fiddled with my FAFSA and then emailed my financial aid advisor (more on that in another post!).  I've gone over all my blogs for reading, added a couple more from last night to the rounds, and contemplated writing posts.  I've trawled Facebook.  I've done a quickie version of my daily job opening watch.  I've updated my iCal.

Granted, all this stuff is stuff that needs to get done.  It's all important, though some of it less so than the rest.  My brain is instead obsessed with the future.  Planning for it.  Making it happen the way I want it to.  Figuring out what "the way I want it" really means.  It's irritating.  Frustrating.  Fruitless.

And now I'm blogging about it, because whining is easier than writing.

So now that this post is complete, I'm going to change a diaper and find out which design I'm supposed to be making a storm in my brain over.

Projects

I have SO MANY projects swirling around in my head, and I want to do them all RIGHT NOW.

Of course, that's not possible within understood limits of human ability, so I have to choose.  I hate choosing.  What if I choose poorly and my body ages a billion times too fast and then disintegrates until all that's left of me is a pile of dust that blows away in the wind?  That would be a really bad day.

Seriously, though, I end up with a Mr. Burns-style problem.  Except instead of a billion different types of disease all fighting for a foothold but being blocked because they get 'stuck in the door,' so to speak, it's a dozen different exciting interests.  There are too many of them.  I get equally excited about all of them, and I want to use all of them.  I would love to be a sustainability engineer as much as I would a human geneticist.  Or an architect.  Or an archaeologist (or really, an archaeological technician; the actual archaeologists have pretty boring careers for a person who likes, nay, needs, to study a multitude of things).  I would be equally thrilled to be a costume designer for historical films or a nutritionist.  Pathways fall into one of two categories: 1) Ohmigosh, that would be SO COOL! and 2) Never in a million, trillion years.  Yes or no.  1 or 0.  Sometimes they will make a switch from one to the other, but there's never any in-between.  It's really annoying.

A big part of the problem is that I don't know that I have what it takes to be any of the above.  I never liked math, but I was good at it (not great, but above average).  I love science, but Physics tends to twist my brain and anything smaller than atomic particles blurs into an amorphous blob called "tiny."  I love artistic endeavors, and yet I have a really hard time thinking outside the box in visual media.  And now, because I've spent so much time without money, pursuing things that don't really make money, the financial realities of the pathway or project figure in with a lot more weight.  I know my limits and my needs, but my knowledge of my skills and capabilities is lacking.  My self-belief and confidence, too.  I believe I could push through most barriers to achieve my goals, and yet I don't actually *know,* and that seems a really wide gap.

I envy people who know what they want to do, even with half of the fibres in their being.  It drives me nuts when I see people who know what they love, who have passion enough and perseverance enough to follow through, and yet choose differently.  It's their right, of course, and I don't hold it against them. Their needs are not mine, nor are their priorities.  But they KNOW, and they still choose a different path.  I KNOW that I need to be a writer.  I had the passion.  I had the dedication.  I finished two (essentially three, given the length of the first) manuscripts and 3/4 of a third.  I shopped them all around year after year through rejection after rejection.  We made the decision, as a married couple, to be starving artists early in our marriage so that I could pursue my dream.  But after a while, it became clear I wasn't *quite* good enough yet.  Something was missing from my writing, so I took some time off.  Now, I'm pretty sure I know what was wrong and have already fixed it.  The problem now is that those years of near-poverty and debt accrual have caught up with us.  We borrowed a lot from our future selves, and now we ARE the future selves.  That sucks, but it was our choice.

My passion drove me onward without quite making anything happen.  And even if I had succeeded, it's not a living wage.  It's a thrice-pay system of lump sums across several years that don't go very far.  So now I have to choose something with which to make money, and I need to be passionate about it.  But because it's a second choice, I can't ever seem to actually choose.

Do I choose the project that will move me closer to getting this ONE job?  Do I choose the project that will take a whole lot longer but open the doors for more jobs?  Do I work on my writing?  My doula certification, even though I have no intention of taking births any time soon?  Do I write or read?  Learn or create?  I can't prioritize.

Hence, the swirl of unfinished, unstarted projects.

Also, if you're not sure what a procrastinating writer looks like, I give you this post. ;)

Tinkering

I'm tinkering with ideas today.  Not story ideas, though I really should be doing that, too.

I have a lot going on in my head.  A lot I need to get done, keep track of, remember, face-forward on.  So I've been tinkering with the notion of restarting my Journey of 1,000 Groans.  It helped me focus and plan, schedule and sort my time.  It helped me structure my priorities as well as my day.  I miss it.  The last time I tried to reboot, though, it didn't work.  The method wasn't conducive to my lifestyle, I guess.  I never remembered to update, and when I did, it was days late.

But...my blog dedicated to my (and a friend's) spiritual wellness journey is done.  We took it as far as we needed it.  Or rather, she did.  I'm not faulting her - if she doesn't need it because she succeeded in her goals, she doesn't need it.  But I can't keep it up without her.  That just feels empty and purposeless.  Our wellness blog was giving me a little structure.  Without it, I'm sort of drifting in a sea of too-much-to-do.  Which is where I was when I started 1000 Groans.  Seems logical to start it back up, right?  I'm worried that my original success had more to do with pregnancy hormones and nesting than anything I can now recreate.  But I still need focus and structure...

Ah well.

In other news, Jeremelon and I decided that the Berrykin and I shall remain here in California a couple more weeks.  There's no reason to go home when we'll see him for maybe two hours that should ideally be spent on naptime.  And when aaaaaaall the rest of my time will be spent either alone in space I can't even partially claim, or with his mega-stressed parents.  I like it here.  I can take the berrykin for walks here (when it's not raining).  Plus, with us here, my mom's not alone (she has family all over town, but it's not the same thing).

So, whether I restart my 1000 Groans blog or not, I'm going to use the next three weeks to really get stuff done.  I've got skills to learn and workbooks to work through; doula tasks to complete and mommy projects to structure; and of course, writing!

We'll see what that means for my blogs later.  For now, I'm off to stir the mac 'n cheese!

December!

How is it December already?  Ever since we moved, time has alternately stalled and zoomed ahead.  It feels like we haven't hit Halloween yet, and here we are, prepping for Christmas!

Today, my mom and are I going to make our traditional Danish holiday cookies, klejner.  I'll see if she has a cord to upload from her camera so I can show them off when we're done.   We have the Christmas station playing, her boyfriend brought her a tree complete with decorations and lights a couple days ago that I think we're going to finish decorating.  She's also going to remind me how to sew, so that I can make Berrykin a new pair of pjs for Christmas.  Woohoo!

I'm trying to decide if 70 degrees is too chilly to go to the beach.  Thoughts?  We don't have to go in the water.  Then again, do I really want to deal with the tar and all that sand in icky places to not go in the water?  Hmmmm...