Autumn Journal

Resolutions

I am still working on my resolutions – I really work on them all year long. I realized last year that they are perpetually in draft form which doesn't get in the way of me working on them and keeps them fresh and vital all year long.

I moved over the holidays from one state to another as well as one job to another which has left me feeling a little disconnected and insubstantial. I left two of my kids in the other state – they are young adults, not kids, but still. They are my babies regardless of age.

My employer has a very rich and robust intranet with all of the customary business related data as well as a lot of more employee focused, not necessarily business related features. One of the articles up this week is focused around New Year's Resolutions. It has some pointers that you would expect, check your finances, get in shape, track your performance with an eye toward the mid and year end reviews, but there are also a couple of points that made me sit back and think Wow. I really like the company I work for. I know there are underlying reasons – happier employees equal more productivity, yadda, yadda. I get that Mr. Employer is not more concerned about me than about the health of the company. But still. They don't have to include things like this on the intranet, either. Take a look at these, taken verbatim, but not credited due to privacy concerns.

• Try to be a better listener. Whether at home or at work, listening is a gift you can give that costs you nothing. Listening does not involve solving the other person's dilemma - that's their job. When offering support by listening actively you can give family and friends just what they need to approach their own concerns in a new way.
• Reach out to your elderly relatives. They may covet their independence - but still need your help. Open a conversation aimed at finding out what kinds of assistance they might need and would accept. Even simple things like help with lawn-care or shoveling snow can be a good first step.
• For those with young children, try to take the words "Hurry up" out of your vocabulary. Sit yourself down and strategize ways to make your morning and bedtime routines a little slower and saner. Your kids will thank you.
• Consider volunteer work. There is certainly no shortage of need in the world - resolve to do your part to make the world a better place. If you choose a volunteer activity like helping rehab a home for the homeless, or coaching a baseball team, you get the benefit of adding exercise as you help the world.

 

So, for my 2009 Resolutions as they are right now:

1. Write. Just write. Write something. A poem, journal, scenes, a break out novel, a song, a prayer… write!
2. Work on a richer financial plan
3. Get back to a size where I am comfortable in my clothes
4. Exercise weekly - options
   1. Walks with Leah
   2. wii fit (but more than just slalom skiing and the soccer ball head butting thing)
   3. A Yoga class
   4. Salsa dancing
   5. Learn to play tennis with Sammie
5. Reengage in life
6. Find a church
7. Volunteer -ideas
   1. Reservation
   2. Soup kitchen or food pantry
   3. JDRF or ADA
   4. Voting precinct
8. Laugh out loud every day
9. Hug my monsters several times a day

And thanks to the employer:

1. Work to be a better listener
2. Eliminate "hurry up", sighs, any passive aggressive communication of a hurry up emotion from every morning
3. Reach out to Great Grandma and Great Grandpa. They may not need much from me but more and better company and I can provide that readily enough – just have to do it.

 

Resolutions

Resolutions The time for resolutions will be upon us in no time.  It’s always a surprise when New Year’s day arrives immediately after the mad rush of the holidays.  One New Years I am little more than exhausted, hardly ready to leap into a whole new me.  So I decided to pull out my resolutions from last year and keep them in front of me for the next several weeks.  Maybe I can modify, adjust, tweak and improve them so they are ready to go for New Years this time.

2008 Resolutions….

1. Write a scene a week - absolute bare minimum

2. “Attend” the Crusie/Mayer online class
3. Save toward a Barbara Samuel class
4. Get back to a size where I am comfortable in my clothes
5. Exercise weekly - options
   1. Walks with Leah
   2. Back to Lifetime
   3. A Yoga class
   4. Salsa dancing
   5. DDR
   6. The purple ball
   7. ….
6. Reengage in life
7. Find a church
8. Work toward a finished initial draft by the end of 2007
9. Volunteer -ideas
   1. Reservation
   2. Soup kitchen, although I am not sure I am comfortable going into sop kitchen areas of Detroit
   3. JDRF or ADA
   4. Voting precinct
10. Laugh out loud every day
11. Hug my monsters several times a day

Still a WIP…. is there a deadline for finalizing resolutions?

New WIP

I have a new WIP stirring in the depths of my mind, playing hide-and-seek with the girls in the basement.  From the first paragraph I created this wordle which I find delightful!

Baby steps

Removed a couple of ugly shrubs and a dear little red Japanese looking tree that just didn’t fit in with my plan. Planted two low growing red rose bushes, a higher shrub white rose and two yellow with pink climbing roses along with some low growing purple annuals and some… hm, forgot the name. The purple sage I planted last year against the house is also coming back in. Got the rest of the old leaves cleaned out… cut back and tamed some of the berries… baby steps.

See more progress on: Have a garden worth photographing

China Diary… on NPR

Last night as I drove home from work I listened to NPR's "All Things Considered" as I do almost every night. I joined the broadcast already in the midst of a story from Dujiangyan, a city in China devastated by the recent earthquake.

Melissa Block's voice came through my radio speakers, quiet, subdued and often shaking with emotion. Two people, a couple, a young man in his early thirties and a young woman in her mid-twenties were frantically seeking help to locate their two year old son and his grandparents who were in their apartment when the earthquake hit on Monday morning. It had been two days and no one had yet searched the building rubble.

The loss of this family and so many others was brought home so clearly, far more clearly than any other story I have seen or heard. The simplicity, the sparseness, the pauses, the quaver in Melissa Block's voice accompanied by the sounds of the heavy machinery and the frantic, raw voices of the grieving family are crushing, stabbing, aching. So many losses these days, in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the ongoing violence in Israel, Palestine, Lebanon; the unbelievable losses in Burma's cyclone. I don't know anymore how to process these great, grievous losses to these individuals, families, nations and all of us who share this world.

I ache for all of us and I fear the impact and effect of despair. I am a great believer in strength through adversity. I am one of the people who find they are at their best, accomplish more and greater things when challenged, when my back is against the wall. But sometimes the ache is such that you can do no more than curl in on yourself, cling to your loved ones if you are lucky enough to still have them. And pray.

43 Things updated

Chelsea Morning

When I was in high school in the mid-eighties I had a fabulously diverse group of friends who, to this day, remain as enchanted almost magical characters in the story of my life. When I get lost or deeply blue or begin feeling that I have somehow missed the point those people – my people – come back to me and remind me that I too was a magical faerie princess once who lived in an enchanted kingdom and was charming and intelligent and artistic and made people happy.

About a year ago I came home from a Saturday wandering with a record player. One of those quaint reproductions in a wooden housing with vintage-look knobs and switches and speakers. Since then I stop at garage sales and antique malls and thrift stores snatching up all of the records from my youth that I sold at my own garage sale years and years ago. While I haven't found Prince's Purple Rain or Madonna's Borderline yet I have found lots of older records.

Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass (which I LOVE)
Harry Belafonte
Dan Fogelberg
Simon and Garfunkel
Helen Reddy
The Music Man
My Fair Lady
Grease
Annie
ABBA

And yesterday I found Neil Diamond's Love at the Greek and Stones both of which are albums played in my childhood home nearly every weekend.

Lucas, one of those magical friends from high school fell in love with another of our group (a phenomenon which happened with startling frequency. We were quite in-bred our group). That year, and for many years after, Secily became known as Chelsea. As in ~

"I woke up it was a Chelsea morning
And the first thing that I knew
There was milk and toast and honey
And a bowl of oranges too
And the light poured in like butterscotch
And stuck to all my senses"

I know it isn't cool to like Neil Diamond these days, and definitely not at my age – my parents maybe, but a forty year old should not be a Neil Diamond fan. But what fantastic poets that generation created.

"Won't you stay
We'll put on the day
And wear it 'til the night comes"

And how wonderful that an ultra-cool surfer dude in 1985 was inspired by and sang a Neil Diamond song to the girl who made him feel like a morning with "milk and toast and honey and a bowl of oranges, too…"

Isn't it amazing how a song can bring back and entire period in your life including scents and tastes and emotions?

Tomorrow

Tomorrow is Primary Day in Michigan and it is my father's birthday.  I will vote and I will think about my father.  I have one of those ubiquitous complex relationships with my father.  I adore him and admire him and am so incredibly glad that he is mine and he makes me feel like I am twelve years old and incompetent and that I am never quite living up.  And I imagine that I will feel that way until we both are gone.

I will vote for Hillary Clinton tomorrow.  There aren't a plethora of choices on the Democratic ballot in Michigan this Primary. We are being Punished for Acting Out and not Playing Nicely.  Michigan moved up the primary in order to gain some visibility in the process.  Not being a politico I don't know the ins and outs of the rules well enough to understand what all the hoopla is about, but I have to say having all the major candidates but Mrs. Clinton remove themselves from the ballot and NONE of the major candidates campaigning in Michigan really makes it seem that someone one (or many someones) has missed the whole point here.  Either the delegates and therefore the people of Michigan matter or they don't.  Seems to me the message from the entire left side of the ballot is that we don't matter.  I am not okay with that.

I took the "Choose and Candidate" quiz on NPR and I lined up exactly where I thought I would.  My closest candidate is Edwards followed closely by Clinton. 

So, I vote for Clinton tomorrow and I really hope that I am not the only Dem out at the poles in the snow tomorrow before the crack of dawn.

Now some Niquil and a shot of whiskey and I am off to sleep in hopes of beating this bug that has got a hold of me.  No insurance = no doctor and therefore this HAS to be an innocuous  cold and the fact that it is deep in my chest is  meaningless....

Watching the snow from my front porch… and feeling a little lonely

This has been an odd week for me, kind of a time-out-of-time, or almost suspended animation. You know those special effects in movies when the whole world freezes and the hero or heroine moves through the frozen tableau? It feels like that a little bit. On Monday I begin a new job; one I have been very excited about, but the month long notice and full court press (including heavy, heavy guilt trips) from my current employer to convince me to stay has taken some of the shine off of the expectation and high hopes. In fact, I am feeling rather melancholy this week.

The two "big kids" (I can't believe they still let me get away with calling them that. B, the oldest is 19 and C is a senior in high school and will be 18 in less than a month.) are in Kentucky with friends on a farm – how fun that must be? The girls are staying in the Carriage House and B is staying the main house with the other adults. So, it's just the "little one" S (15, I know, I know, not so little. In fact she is taller than I am…), me and Leah Maya the dog. For a house that is usually bursting with teenagers it has been too quite for me to be comfortable. Tonight S has some friends over and Guitar Hero is rattling the windows and all is right with the world.

We went to the grocery store and bought junk food and then signed up at Blockbuster for the first time in years and years. Sam and I sat on the couch feeding Leah Fritos and watching the Nanny Diaries which I had read and Sam had listened to. It was good. Then Leah and I took a walk – cold, but dry and so, so beautiful. Look at the great colors of fallen leaves and green moss layered with snow! We hadn't been back in the house for more than five minutes when the snow started coming down. I stood on my porch and watched it snow and felt… okay. But I am still suspended in time and not sure how to break out of this bubble.

I know that I am lonely. It's the holidays and I have no sweet man to share it with. And I am leaving some really great friends when I leave my job. And my grandmother passed away only a couple of months ago. And my kids are growing up… ah me. I am clearly feeling sorry for myself. How unattractive and destructive!

So, I will share these pictures here, pour a glass of red wine and watch last night's Private Practice. Oh! And it's time for wishes and dreams and goals and … a list of guilty pleasures! And Jennifer Crusie's List of Indulgences! Lots to think about and lists to make… I am feeling better already! Where is that new moleskine…?

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