Blue-Footed Musings

• Healthwise I am feeling better. I’m still a little congested and have a slight cough, but my energy levels have bounced back to near-normal. I’m able to go about my daily business without feeling like the effort might kill me. And though my knee is still totally messed up, I can walk without pain as long as I’m careful going up and down stairs. I have an appointment to see an orthopedist on Thursday.
• Moodwise I’m feeling much better, at least today. Perhaps it’s the anticipation of snow. We’re supposed to get our first snowstorm of the season overnight tonight. According to the meteorologists, we might get as much as 9 inches of the fluffy white stuff. How exciting!

I spent the last three days in bed with a nasty virus. This is not how I had intended to spend my week off from work. 🙁

It has been a bad year for the blog. I haven’t written much. I could blame it on being busier. My music composition lessons have certainly taken up a lot of my time. But, honestly, I really just wasn’t in the mood to write.

No, let me rephrase that. It went beyond “mood.” I stopped wanting to write. I stopped caring about recording the events of my life. I stopped caring about a lot of things. I don’t know exactly what “broke” me, but this year affected me in a way that I didn’t (and still don’t) know how to combat. My coping strategies weren’t cutting it.

Still, I like to think that, outside of the blog, I’ve put on a good act, and that I seemed perfectly normal, maybe even more energetic, because of my music lessons. I doubt my boss would suspect–I met all my deadlines! My kids might even have been fooled. Probably not my husband (he knows, even if he doesn’t know that he knows). But I knew, and I’ve been unhappy about the gaps in my blog this year. I will try to do better from now on, even if my mood continues to be so horrible.

So, here are my thoughts today.

• My son did very well on his first-quarter report card. What he didn’t mention was that he’d made high honors. I just realized it today, when I stumbled across the honor roll in the local newspaper. When I congratulated him, he said he was worried that he’d set too high a standard and that next time he might just be “ordinary honors.” I told him that “ordinary honors” would still be really good and that I was so proud of him. OMG, what a wonderful son I have.
• For Christmas, my daughter asked for some books that might be a little mature for her reading age. I bought them for her anyway, but they arrived late. I gave them to her today and told her that I believed her to be mature enough to handle them, but that if they made her uncomfortable, that she should stop reading them. I added that she could come to me if there was ever anything that she wanted to talk about. She told me that of course she would come to me if she ever wanted to talk about anything. OMG, what a wonderful daughter I have.

• Today I got a got phone message from Barack Obama, asking me to vote for Gabe Amo on Election Day. I was already planning to vote for him, but thanks for the reminder anyway, Obama. It’s always good to hear your voice, even if it’s just a recording. I’m not even being sarcastic. Your voice sounds so reasonable. So sane. As if adults are in the room. As if everything will be taken care of. As if the world isn’t falling apart. I wish you’d leave me a message every day, honestly.
• In my e-mail, I got an e-mail about a class-action suit against Shutterfly, inviting me to join the pile-on. Over the years I’ve been asked to join quite a few class-action suits. I never do, even when I’m thinking to myself, “Yeah, those guys suck!” But I have no beef with Shutterfly. They’re not perfect, but they’ve made some beautiful photo albums and Christmas cards for me, and I can’t imagine suing them.
• In the snail mail, I got some more medical bills. That really cranks my chain. IMHO, either I should pay for all my health costs and my health insurance (in this scenario, very cheap) should only kick when things get really bad. Or, I should pay for none of my health costs, and my health insurance (in this scenario, very expensive) should cover everything. But, as it is now, I pay most of my health costs and my health insurance is very expensive. What a shit system!

I sprained my knee shortly before Halloween. I wasn’t doing anything physically demanding, just taking a step up the stairs, when suddenly I felt a terrible twisting in my knee, followed by pain. I was on my way to bed when it happened, and it was too late at night for me to fuss over it. I just had to hope that it would miraculously feel better when I woke up. That didn’t turn out to be the case. It was stiff and painful, not so bad that I couldn’t go out trick-or-treating with the kids, just bad enough that it bothered me nearly the entire time.

Livia dressed up as Little Red Riding Hood. I would have preferred to buy a premade costume that was complete, but as is so often the case, the manufacturer’s costumes were all trashy looking, really inappropriate for a 12-year-old. I tried to find her an ordinary peasant dress, but hit various snags, including price and shipping times. Ultimately we had to settle for a German barmaid dress, the top of which I adjusted with some stitches and safety pins. The only cape we could get was full-length, so I cut it shorter for her (slightly lopsided, but not worth risking a worse outcome by fiddling with it). We found the perfect basket, and put Cubby (our stuffed-animal wolf pup) into the basket, which we thought was a cute touch and nicer than the bloody wolf’s head we had first considered. That led one person to think that she was dressed as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, but Livia didn’t seem to mind. She was pleased with her costume and enjoyed showing it off.

Let it also be noted that Livia decorated the house with her own homemade Halloween decorations. She’s such a creative self-starter. The decorations were cute, and after the holiday was over, she took them down when she was asked to, no fuss no muss.

Marshall did not dress up for Halloween. I had resolved not to choose a costume for him. I gave him a deadline for choosing, and he didn’t get it done. So, he was wearing ordinary street clothes that night and did not intend to trick-or-treat. His aunt dumped a ton of candy into a bag for him at his grandparents’ house, which was fine, except that then she also encouraged him to trick-or-treat with his sister and cousin. All along the route, people were really nice about giving him candy, too. That kindness was a joy to witness. But, as a mom, I also saw that he was being rewarded for being too lazy to pick a costume and that he was getting far more candy than would be healthy for him to eat. Eventually I had to put my foot down and tell him that he had enough. So, that wasn’t ideal, but it wasn’t entirely his fault, and I’m glad that he went out with us and had a good time.

All things considered, it was another successful Halloween. I’ll treasure it as I do all the others that came before. Will there be more trick-or-treating adventures for us in the future? I hope to get at least one or two more. But, it became obvious to me as we walked around that night that trick-or-treating is becoming a thing of the past. There were fewer kids trick-or-treating, and fewer households handing out candy. Later I discovered that it wasn’t just a local phenomenon. Apparently everyone’s doing trunk-or-treating instead these days. Trunk-or-treat seems lame to me, but no one asked for my opinion, and I guess I’m just happy that I and my kids got to enjoy trick-or-treating while it was still the big thing.

It’s a rainy morning here in Rhode Island, courtesy of Lee, the storm that was once a hurricane and is now a post-tropical cyclone. We weren’t expecting to be hit hard by the storm, but my interpretation of Murphy’s Law is that a failure to prepare for a bad situation is likely to bring on that situation. It’s a form of superstition, not far off from “knock on wood,” but I’d rather be overprepared than underprepared. So, before I went to bed last night, I filled up several bottles and pots with water, just to be safe.

Speaking of water, that’s something we’ve had in abundance lately. This week we had four consecutive days of thunderstorms, one of which brought tornadoes to the area, and all of which brought heavy rain. To my surprise, my phone has started giving me audio alerts, so every time there’s an emergency situation, a woman’s voice suddenly starts coming from the direction of my purse, booming out the details of the alert. It makes the tornado warnings seem even more surreal. The rain killed our nascent crop of grass in the front yard and washed away the top layer of soil, which was heartbreaking given how much we’d paid to get the lawn redone. The back yard became a rapidly expanding lake. I joked that it was God’s way of giving us the swimming pool that we’ve been wishing for, but thank God the rain stopped before the edges of the lake reached the house.

But there was a small bright side to getting all that rain. Our house is on a slab, and a lot of moisture comes into the house through the floors. We often have to run a dehumidifier, which isn’t great, and now that we’re refinishing the downstairs, we’ve decided to try to seal up the concrete floors to block out that moisture. But, whether or not you can effectively seal a concrete floor depends on how much water is actually coming up, and what better time to test that than when the ground is thoroughly saturated. That way you’re getting the “worse case scenario” number. My husband did the test. The results came back higher than expected, but not too high to proceed.

Luckily for me, I was able to join AAA for free and renew my license, complete with Real ID upgrade. But, I’m troubled by how the licensing system appears to be working. While I was at the AAA office, quite a few other people came in for DMV-related business. It seems to me that if the if AAA weren’t picking up so much of its slack, the DMV would never be able to get away with offering so few appointments. But AAA is not a free service (I was only able to join for free because my husband has a paid membership). For something as important as a driver’s license–which is needed not just for driving, but also for voting–there should never be anything standing in your way. You shouldn’t have to drive to distant locations, or pay for a AAA membership, or worse yet, be completely unable to renew your license before it expires. I can’t be the only person to have run into problems finding an appointment, and I wonder how others are faring.

P.S. I found out that the birth certificate that I have always thought of as official because it’s original is in fact totally useless for identification purposes. It was issued by the hospital, not the state, and its fancy seal, which looks at first glance like a notary seal, only has the name of the hospital on it. Huh. What’s the point of the certificate then? Why did my parents give it to me, and why have I bothered to keep it all these years? Anyway, it’s a good thing I have a notarized copy of my “real” birth certificate and that I brought it with me to my license renewal appointment.

P.P.S. I didn’t have to get Real ID at this time, but I decided to do it just because I was going to have to eventually anyway. Yes, I was annoyed at having to jump through the same stupid hoops that I’d had to jump through to get my original driver’s license. But I didn’t say so while I was at my appointment. I had promised myself that I wouldn’t, and when, inevitably, I felt the urge to say it, I turned it into my own private joke and had a quiet little laugh instead, thereby sparing the AAA employee from having to listen to me gripe.

I grow more saintly with every passing year. 😉

After WEEKS of trying to get a Real ID appointment at the DMV, and being offered only appointments at impossible times and improbable locations, today I was FINALLY offered a whole week’s worth of appointments at various times, including some appointments at the closest DMV. It was like finding the Holy Grail.

Or so I thought. When I looked a little closer, I realized that all of the appointments were for the week AFTER my birthday. WTF! Seriously, does the State not want me to get a Real ID, ever?

My next thought was, “You want to play that way, DMV? Fine. I’ll just get a regular renewal.” The DMV’s response was, “Ha-ha, no. This time you need a new picture, so you still have to come in, and you still can’t have an appointment before your birthday. Gotcha!”

So now it looks like my only option for renewing before expiration is through AAA. Am I a member? Good question. If my husband followed through with adding me when there was that “Add a Household Member For Free!” promotion, then I’m a member. If he didn’t, then UGH, I am going to be twice as irritated, because I am going to have to pay extra money to renew my license. The bright side: it looks like AAA does Real ID, so maybe I can get the upgrade while I’m at it.

I recently finished reading A Crossword to Die For by Nero Blanc and gave it a B grade. In this mystery, a crossword editor suspects that her father, who died from a heart attack on his way to visit her, was in fact murdered, so she and her PI husband investigate his death. The story leaned a little too heavily on certain red herrings, but it kept my interest for the duration, which is one of the most important things when it comes to murder mysteries. The book contained six crosswords, some of which provided hints regarding the mystery, but I was disinclined to stop reading long enough to solve the puzzles and also unwilling to write in the book. So, I skipped all but one of them, which kinda defeated the purpose of the crossword gimmick. Whatever. I like reading, and I like crosswords, but I don’t like them together.

Currently reading: This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, Taran Wanderer by Lloyd Alexander (Book 4 in the Chronicles of Prydain), Aimless Love by Billy Collins, and Le petit fantôme by Emma Tennant (traduit de l’anglais par Lan du Chastel)

• It was a long drive, through thunderstorms and flooded roads, to my new music teacher’s house. I went to two wrong houses before I found the right one (so embarrassing). But I did finally get there. And now I have homework…
• Today was Livia’s second day of theater camp. She’s been upgraded from “ensemble member” to a speaking role. Hooray for Livia!
• Last night my father called to tell me that my Aunt Laura had died. Laura was my aunt by marriage, and I didn’t know her well. She was a part of my childhood world, though, and forever a part of my memory. I’m sorry that she’s gone.