Thoughts on being a Mom and everything else
Sometimes, words get in the way. Or they aren’t right to convey the meaning. That’s when we turn to more creative expressions. If a picture’s worth a thousand words, what’s a song worth?
This song was composed on Noteflight.com, which is a pretty amazing website.
“What is the most important step a man can take?”
The first one.
That was my first thought upon reading the question in Oathbringer. As it turns out, that was the character’s initial response too. It made me think about some significant first steps I’ve taken in recent years.
As it turns out, the answer was actually “The next step.” Those were, of course, significant too:
According to my cats, my first step should be to feed them. My next step should be to feed them again. They’re about to be disappointed at least once.
Some days, I have trouble deciding what craft project to work on, and it’s largely because I have too many in progress at any time. At the moment, I can count three that are started, none of which have deadlines, and one more that has a deadline near the end of this month.
And yet, I’m having trouble deciding which one to work on next. That’s not even counting bits of the mending pile, like the large plush dog sitting on my couch because he has a minute seam tear.
“Crafting?,” you may say. ” That’s not on your list of goals.”
True enough, yet here I am, looking at my craft projects. I bought fabric last weekend to make a caftan. I thought I’d be buying blue fabric, but what jumped out at me was a brown fabric with embroidered patterns.
I have a crocheted Cthulhu barely started from before my accident; I had to take a break from crocheting after it for a bit because my shoulder was hurting. Instead of going back to it when I was ready to crochet again, I started a blanket. Ideally, I’ll finish that blanket before it gets too warm; it’s a fairly thick yarn, and I don’t want to be working with it during the summer.
I’m also working on a painting, which is really outside my realm of expertise; I’m far better at crocheting. But I’m enjoying painting as an artistic outlet, and have an idea for the one that will come after this one. I only have one spot where I store a painting in progress, so I do actually have to finish that one before starting the next.
Do websites count as craft projects? I have a couple of those that I need to work on too. Plus all my goals… it’s going to be a busy year.
Last Saturday was the second annual Women’s March, held in cities across the country and around the world. There really isn’t a single cause to march for; there’s a plethora of causes, all meaningful to some of the people attending.
Last year’s march was a direct response to the election of a man who brags, not confesses – as that would imply remorse – about sexually assaulting women because he is rich and can get away with it, as well as responding to a political movement that seeks to reduce choice and equality for anybody outside their core support base, which is typically white men. And so we march for equality and choice, and the right to fight back against sexual assault and harassment.
Our political system is a mess of contradictions. In the Gettysburg Address, President Lincoln described our government as “of the people, by the people, for the people,” but the people elected at the federal level are increasingly out of touch with the average person. The base congressional salary is $174,000 a year; assuming a standard 40-hour work week for 52 weeks, that calculates out to over $83 per hour. Yet the federal minimum wage is $7.25 – an annual salary of $15,080, assuming it’s a full-time job, and the highest state-level minimum wage is only $11. There are no specific set skills required to run for Congress… what exactly is it that makes them worth $83 an hour compared to people we rely on daily in every aspect of our lives, from restaurant employees to retail workers to teachers and more? At best, to run for Congress you need enough money to start the process – it’s not an appealing process to the average person who is struggling to put food on their tables. As so we march for a living wage.
Our federal representatives have affordable health care provided by our government as one of their many benefits, yet debate whether the rest of us should. Most are college educated, yet again, seem too willing to pull federal money from education at all levels. And we march for education and health care, which are key to being one of the great nations of the world.
There’s a declining number of veterans in Congress – at one point, the House and Senate included significant percentages (see here), and has moved away from that – which is perhaps how the support for our active military and veterans has declined. I don’t mean supporting the wars – that’s a different political discussion – but the people who are willing to put themselves in danger to protect our country’s interests. Congress, having shut down (again) specifically declined to fund our active military salaries, yet continue to fund their own salaries. Our active military make far less money than our federal representatives; they live on those funds. As so we march for the people who have and are putting their lives on the line for us, only to be forgotten by our government whenever they become inconvenient.
Over the years, the laws have evolved to ban slavery, extend voting rights to women and minorities, and more, recognizing in particular that we are a secular nation and as such, our laws should reflect that separation of church and state in order to allow diversity to feed into our system and improve our country. We know the United States can do better, because we have repeatedly improved ourselves. To paraphrase The Last Jedi, we’re not fighting what we hate, we’re marching for what we love.
And we vote.
We are taught at karate that goals we set are goals we get, and are encouraged to set goals for the year. These are some of the goals I have set for myself this year:
Garage door projects – this is actually two projects in one. The door from the kitchen to the garage is an interior door; it allows a bit of light and air in. It’s not terrible, but combined with the need to replace or improve the garage door seal, I’m paying more for heat than I should be.
I’ll come back to these later in the year with updates.
It’s been a couple months now since my car accident, and I realized that the details get fuzzy the further past it I get. While part of me would love to forget it, I’m still dealing with some of the aftermath and do want to preserve the details somewhere.
There’s not much I can say about the commute that day. It was a Tuesday, and it was raining, so there was stop and go traffic on I-355. I was in the middle lane, because there’s a pot hole in the right lane a little bit after the toll, and you feel it more when you’re moving slow, so I try to switch back to my normal lane after that point. It was a little chilly, I had switched to my winter coat instead of a sweatshirt, but I wasn’t wearing a hat, and my gloves were in the pockets.
I was in the open road tolling lanes, very solidly stopped in traffic around 7am, when I happened to look in my rear view mirror and saw a pickup truck barreling towards me. I had just enough time to swear (and believe me, the word was not “fudge”) and glance at the distance to the car in front of me before the pickup slammed into me and pushed me into the next car. My steering wheel airbag deployed and caught my face, I could feel it on my lips. My foot airbag also deployed – I didn’t realize that existed – but it pushed my foot off the brake. After a stunned moment, I realized I was moving again as I slid into the back doors of two cars, one in my lane and one in the right lane. I swore again (still not “fudge”) and slammed my foot onto the brake.
When I was sure I was done moving, I shifted my car into park and turned off the engine. I think I glanced behind me and registered that the pickup was attached to my car. I’m not sure of the order immediately after that. At some point, the pickup driver came up to the trio of cars stuck together and called out, asking if everybody was OK. I remember turning the engine back on, so I could lower my window and respond – it hadn’t registered yet that the back window was gone, shattered across the back seat. I texted my co-worker to let her know I’d been rear-ended and would be late, called and left my boss a voicemail (as it turns out, he was behind me in traffic – he passed after the accident, but didn’t recognize my car because “the truck was still on [my] trunk”), then called my mother-in-law a couple minutes before my daughter left for school. This is, as it turns out, a way to panic your child; by the time I next looked at my phone, I had a text message asking for details. I declined the offer of a ride from my mother-in-law, since I had no clue what the process or timing would be, saying I’d call back later if I needed one.
That done, and with my front doors wedged against two other cars, I used my phone to take photos – of the pickup sitting on my trunk, and of the two cars I was wedged between. At some point, the pickup driver told me he was going to try backing up off my trunk, so I made sure my foot was solidly on the brake again, just in case. Once that was done, I sat waiting until emergency personnel came through checking on everybody. When asked if I was OK, I said I was, but was feeling a bit trapped. (I’m not claustrophobic, I just don’t like sitting idle.) Traffic had been passing in the left lane and on the shoulder; the firefighters closed off the shoulder so the accident vehicles could gradually move into that space.
Once the cars in front of me had moved, I turned the engine on again and eased over to the shoulder, and finally got out of the car. I walked around to the trunk, checked my work laptop (survived!), and took a couple photos. I sent a photo of my trunk to my co-workers and my daughter, and posted it to Facebook. And then I began the arduous task of gathering everything in the car into reusable shopping bags from the trunk before the tow truck picked up my poor car. I did fairly well – I missed my sunglasses and a chocolate in a back door pocket, and the tow truck driver later reminded me to grab my iPass. It was about an hour after the accident when I finally sat down in the tow truck; it was almost another hour before the police officer finished writing up the report with the details on all six cars involved.
I received the first copy of the accident report and permission to leave the scene, so I rode to the tow yard and called my insurance from their entry hall. If you’ve never had to do this, it is a tedious process, as the insurance needs all of the details from the accident report – details on all of the drivers and vehicles. Once that was done, we moved to the next step of arranging a rental vehicle through the insurance, and having the rental company pick me up from the tow yard. I ended up driving a lovely Kia minivan for most of a week.
I’d love to say that I then went about my day as normal. I did go to work, but only for a couple hours, as several coworkers were urging me to go to Immediate Care, particularly once a bruise started appearing on the bridge of my nose. As it turns out, I had a mild concussion and was told to take a few days off of work… and in no uncertain terms, not to participate in the black belt test three days later.
This has been a whirlwind years, with plenty of ups and downs to keep things interesting. I am grateful that the ups far outweigh the downs. Here are some of the things I’m grateful for this Thanksgiving:
I’m delighted by the kitten we adopted earlier this week, it’s probably not what my parents expected me to spend my holiday money on…
I hope everybody had a fabulous Thanksgiving!
It doesn’t happen often, but I ran out of spoons today. After arriving home, I realized that my energy levels were too low and my aches from the accident were too many to go back out, and I rescheduled my dentist appointment. It’s not a huge deal, they were accommodating about it, it’s just not something I would usually do.
I’ve spent a lot of the last week and a half, since the accident, thinking about little things, some good, some bad… the fact that my blog just deleted the whole list is on the bad side.
I was supposed to test for my first degree black belt tonight. Was. Unfortunately, a driver who was supposed to be paying attention to the road, and presumably wasn’t, rear-ended me on Tuesday, leaving me in a rental car and with a mild concussion. Per doctor’s orders, I’ve missed a couple days of work and have to avoid extreme physical activities and contact sports for at least a week. A black belt test certainly qualifies as both.
But enough whining, there will be another opportunity in the spring to test for my black belt. I was lucky to walk away from the accident. And my Camry, Roheryn, has been all about luck, from the moment I won him at a Cubs game in 2012.
I entered a sweepstakes through the local Toyota dealership, winning a pair of tickets to a Cubs game and a spot as a finalist to win a Toyota Camry. On the day of the game, one of the finalists didn’t show up, bring my changes of winning to 1 in 5. We were each given a baseball with a number on it, and most of us had the player who was drawing the winning ball sign that one. Then he reached into a bag and picked one of the five balls in there; the number matched mine and happened to be his jersey number.
We took this car on our big road trip in 2013, visiting national monuments and parks on an eleven day drive. I drove this car to each of the out-of-state regional karate tournaments we’ve gone to, and loaded unseemly amounts of cargo from trips to Menard’s and other stores into the trunk and back seat.
Apparently the good luck was mine. Everything that’s supposed to happen in a car accident to protect the people inside did – the back window shattered appropriately, two airbags went off (did you know there’s a foot airbag?), and the back and front crumpled up rather than letting the other vehicles injure me.
I hope my next car is lucky too. Preferably without an accident.
I usually peer in the window, then wander off. It’s safer that way. But I was spotted and invited in, so I took a chance.
It feels like speed dating – is that still a thing? – where you rush in and meet everybody with at most a couple minutes to grasp each personality before moving onto the next. It’s not as structured, it just seems pointless to backtrack if your first impression is that you won’t click. Or that the rest of the household won’t click.
My girls have fairly aggressive personalities. They’re not outright hostile, simply a handful, and I won’t subject a timid personality to that. I’m also not sure how they’d react if I brought someone new home. We walked out of PetSmart without adopting another cat.
It’s been over two years since we lost our third cat, Mungojerrie, at the ripe old age of 19. Well, our first cat really, since he was the oldest. I adopted him at 10 weeks old, along with his brother, Rumpelteazer. (Yes, they lived up to their names.) We had lost Rumpel to cancer eight years before. At the time, we had a third cat, Missy, who almost became friends with Mungo before she passed away. When we lost her, he was lonely, howling for attention in the middle of the night until we (quickly) conceded and adopted Diane, our beautiful black and white cat.
A few months later, we had a brief, and tragic, interlude with Marianna, a cat who gave the most wonderful hugs, but didn’t absorb salt properly into her system. This caused her to pursue odd food sources, including climbing into a garbage can for some French fries that had been thrown out. She was a strange one.
After losing her, we adopted June, our polydactyl tortoise shell (she’s a Hemingway cat… an extra toe on each front paw). She was a young mother, being adopted out at the same time as her “kittens” (they were as large as her already, and she’s not particularly small), and she rounded out the family perfectly.
This was the first time since we Mungo passed away that I’ve stepped into the room to meet the adoptable cats. I’m not sure we need a third cat, or that we’re ready for one, but there was a cute Siamese I wanted to meet. As it turns out, he was sweet, but too shy for this house. Maybe next time.