Chief Complaint

Five for Friday
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Five for Friday

Hooray for a few calm minutes in which I can sit and write a blog post! I have been so nonstop gogogo this school year that when I do have a few free moments, I feel certain I am forgetting something. Should I be at an appointment? Should I be picking up Carla for an appointment? Have I made dinner? Probably I could be exercising, but I am choosing to sit in a non-ergonomic position with my laptop on my thighs instead.

Absent-Minded or Mind Is Absent:

Forgetting something important is not, sadly, a hypothetical. This year so far I have already had a very embarrassing memory lapse. Carla had an orthodontist appointment; it was on my calendar; I got a text reminder the day before that I didn’t bother to open because I was already On Top Of It. I remembered to contact her school in advance to let them know I’d be picking her up. I reminded Carla about the appointment the night before and the morning of and reminded her both times that she would need to bring her retainer.

In the car on the way to school that morning, Carla wailed that she’d forgotten her retainer at home! The retainer she needed for the appointment, which was a retainer check. Fine. I will grab it for you, Carla! And yet, on my way to pick her up – like, literally five minutes away from her school – I realized that I, too, had forgotten her retainer at home.

My brain went immediately into project solving mode. Okay! I had arranged to pick her up early, so I would swoop in, grab her, race home, get the retainer, and race back to the orthodontist. If all went well, I might be ten or fifteen minutes late for her appointment. Not ideal. But we could still make it!

I called the orthodontist’s office to let them know the plan. But… no sound of the phone ringing on their end. No sound of the call being connected. I hung up and tried again. Same thing. I pulled up to Carla’s school. No Carla. The whole point of letting the school know in advance that she has an appointment is so that someone will go get her out of class and make sure she’s waiting in the lobby for me when I arrive. I tried the orthodontist again. Same issue. I went inside to get Carla. No one was in the reception office. Shit. I lurked in the lobby for a few minutes until the principal walked by, noticed me, and said he would go find Carla. After he left, Carla’s science teacher walked by and asked if I need help, and I said the principal was looking for Carla, and the science teacher said he would ALSO go look for Carla. I tried the orthodontist again. No answer. Okay, fine – they are having Phone Issues. But! They texted me a reminder the day before the appointment, so presumably I could text them back!

I opened the unread text reminder. Which is when I discovered that I was ALREADY AN HOUR LATE for the appointment. This is, of course, when the principal and science teacher reappeared, Carla in tow. And because they’d already gone to all this trouble of fetching her, I took her out of school even though we had missed her appointment. We went and got fast food for lunch and I brought her back to school. She pretty much thought it was The Best Thing Ever, but I felt (and still feel) like a massive dumbass.

Finger Embellishment:

I painted my nails burgundy in advance of my dressy event. I think they look lovely. How long will the nail color last? Hopefully through the event; I have learned that’s all I can really ask for. By the way, my kid and I got pedicures with my mother-in-law for her birthday, and I did my toes in this version of burgundy, which is so good. I would have bought it if the salon had sold it, but alas they did not.

Listen, I didn’t say I was GOOD at painting my nails. But no one is going to be looking at my old hands closely enough to see the mistakes.

Sandwich Success:

I have been doing The Bare Minimum when it comes to meals this school year. This was all fine and good when I was (not) feeding my own immediate family, but we’ve had houseguests for the past week. I ended up making some Actual Meals, one of which was the balsamic pork I’ve made a million times since my friend served it at her house many years ago. It’s a super easy slow cooker meal the results in shredded pork tenderloin. We serve it with brown rice, feta cheese, kalamata olives, and caramelized onions. (My husband adds diced sundried tomatoes, as well.) It’s delicious and different from most of the lemon- or soy-sauce-based meals I usually gravitate toward.

Because the only pork tenderloins I had in my freezer were a) giant and b) a two pack and c) frozen inextricably together, I had a mountain of shredded pork left over. Fortunately, I thought ahead and also had a ton of caramelized onions leftover. Instead of allowing all the leftovers to languish unused in my fridge until I finally threw them out, I decided to figure out how to repurpose them.

This is what I came up with: a vat of butternut squash soup with a fancy grilled cheese on the side. Sourdough bread, bacon onion jam, provolone cheese, leftover pork on one half, leftover caramelized onions on the other half. DELICIOUS.

I swear this is SO MUCH tastier than my photography skills might indicate.

Homophonic Hiccup:

As a former editor, I am prone to spotting errors in text. I like to think I’ve grown much less judgmental over the years when I come across a spelling, grammar, or usage error. We all make mistakes. Even the finest toothed comb of a copyeditor can overlook a typo. I make errors all the time, simply consult this here weblog for innumerable mistakes. And yet I still have my pet peeves. One of which is GLARING ERRORS in headlines, especially when those headlines come from major publications who should have careful editors on staff. “Lead” being misused as “led” really grates my teeth. Of course, this kind of thing happens, it does. Often I can overlook it; glass houses and all. But sometimes it makes me very grumpy and judge-y. This is one of those times.

You know, on second look, this headline has more issues than just the spelling error.

Little Golden Girls Books:

A dear friend of mine and I have a longstanding joke that I am Dorothy Zbornak and she is Blanche Devereaux from Golden Girls. (Which Golden Girl are you?) So when I saw this post about what the Golden Girls would be reading, I was delighted to see that I have read all three of the books assigned to Dorothy. (Depending on which book the group selects for Engie’s next round of the CBBC, perhaps we are ALL Dorothy????)

We have an action-packed weekend ahead of us. You will not be surprised to learn that I do not want to participate in any action. I want to sit at home with my cat and finish reading my new book (it’s so good and I have no idea where it’s going) and maybe eat another fancy grilled cheese sandwich. Instead, I’m going to go put on my fancy dress and shoes and try to muster up some social energy.

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Waiting Room Woolgathering

I am in a waiting room at the car place while my vehicle undergoes repairs for yet another recall. In fact, this is a re-recall because I already had this particular issue addressed a couple of years ago. Or, not addressed, apparently.

There is one other woman-presenting person in the waiting room with me. She just consented to a $160 tire alignment. I am 95% sure that the service member who came to speak with her referred to her as Suzanne, and the service person who checked me in already told me my car’s alignment failed. What are the chances that two Suzannes would both have failed tire alignments at the exact same time?!

It’s been kind of a rough start to the school year. Or maybe not rough so much as nonstop busy? None of it is BAD stuff; it’s all stuff that we’ve done or chosen on purpose. Well, except for the leak in our pool. No one wants that. I think it’s like this every year, and I simply block out the memory of the frenetic bustle of it all during the relative calm of the summer months. Annual or not, I currently feel like I’ve jumped into the middle of an ice-cold lake and I’m not that strong a swimmer.  

What I really want to be doing is spending my days walking, writing, and hanging out with my cat. That sounds like my ideal level of interpersonal interaction right about now.

Ignore the doorbell and the dishes and the laundry and the fact that you need to pick up your kid and the neighbor’s children from school and lie down with meeeeeeeeeee…

In practice, I’ve been spending an average of two hours a day in a school gymnasium, making conversation with other parents, cheering for our kids, and trying to stave off butt and back pain from the relentless discomfort of the bleachers. (This little purchase has helped quite a bit with the latter.) Or rushing to/waiting around my house to discuss various home maintenance and repair and improvement projects with a parade of vendors. Or scrolling aimlessly on my phone in an attempt to stay awake while my daughter finishes her homework (she hasn’t gone to bed before eleven a single time this school year). Or driving to or from school and/or sporting events. Or working on a volunteer project, which involves both in-person meetings and a group chat. I remain terrified of group chats.

This is all, like, totally normal parent and life stuff and yet I am feeling overwhelmed and overextended and wholly unsuited to any of it.

Let’s just hope this is all an ADJUSTMENT period, to which I will ADJUST. My kiddo, by the way – who is the one DOING THE SPORTS AND HOMEWORK which is quite a bit more strenuous than observing those things – seems to be handling everything with much more grace and much less whining than I am.

On the plus side, I have not cooked a single meal all week. On the minus side, I did buy ingredients to make a giant salad several days ago and I am pretty sure they are all gradually rotting into inedibility in my fridge.

There are five of us in the waiting room now. One of the staff members has chosen this very moment to vacuum the floor of the waiting room. Why now, buddy? It’s not like someone just spilled a bag of chip crumbs or anything. The floor looks perfectly clean. Is this a conscientious objection to the inanity of Jenna & Sheinelle, which I didn’t know was a show? Is it passive aggressive proof to his manager that he is Doing His Job? Puzzling.

Those of you with better memories and/or experience with middle school and high school kids, is this just… How Things Are? Carla goes to school, goes to sports, scarfs a quick and less-nutritionally-balanced-than-I’d-prefer dinner, immerses herself in homework, goes to bed, repeat. There is literally no time to do anything else. She doesn’t have a spare ten minutes to tidy her room or practice her instrument or go visit the neighbor dogs. The only time we talk is in the car or over a hasty meal of fast-food nuggets. We’ve been sacrificing a traditional breakfast in favor of a few more minutes of sleep, and she’s been eating ants on a log or drinking a smoothie in the car on the way to school. Our only “non productive” time is the five minutes of cat videos we watch together every morning, and the ten minutes I spend reading to her in bed every night.

(By the way, I am currently reading her this book, which I remember liking when I was a kid, although not enough to read any of the other books in the series. But I am finding it boring and kind of dumb???)

My husband thinks that it was like this for him when he was in school. My mom thinks it was like this for me when I was in school. But I have no recollection of doing three to five hours of schoolwork every night. Maybe in college, but even then, only when I had a paper due the next day. Three to five hours of schoolwork seems BONKERS, let alone doing it on top of two to three hours of Sports.

I keep spiraling about Carla’s commitments. The spiral starts with: This is too much! This school isn’t right for Carla! Something must be wrong, either with the teachers or with Carla’s ability to do the work! Should I email the teachers? The principal? Should I encourage Carla to email the teachers? The principal? Should I make her quit Sports?

Then eventually (sometimes with help from my much chiller husband) the spiral makes its way around to this: But Carla seems to be doing okay. She’s tired, sure, but isn’t that true of ALL teenagers, EVERYWHERE? The other parents I’ve talked to say their kids are doing similar amounts of homework, and going to bed similarly late. And none of them are pulling their kids out of school or making them quit the team or marching into the principal’s office demanding Action. And Carla really seems to enjoy Sports! She’s getting better, she seems to be making a positive contribution to the team. The physical activity is certainly good for her. As is the social interaction. She seems to be completing her homework, even if it’s late when she finishes it. Her grades are fine, so far. And her own father says that this is How It Was even back in the golden era of the nineteen-nineties.

The calm doesn’t last particularly long, though. It doesn’t help that I am also getting less sleep than I prefer, and I’m much busier than I prefer. Maybe once those things resolve (will they resolve?) I will be more zen about Carla’s level of busyness.

Speaking of being more zen: The last time I posted here, which was eons and eons ago, I mentioned my fret about feeding the sports team. THANK YOU for pointing out that doing such a thing is inadvisable. I spent the first three weeks of school not signing up, and simply taking Carla some nourishment to eat between games. She eats WRAPS now, can you believe it? Ham, tomato, and lettuce. (I wrap the tomato and lettuce in the ham, so they don’t soggify the tortilla.) (Yes, we have decided to throw caution to the wind and get back on the lettuce train.) Other parents have been signing up to provide sustenance, and I have been observing what they bring. They are not bringing dinner, they are bringing SNACKS. I can totally bring snacks for the team. That’s much less daunting than providing an entire meal. Thanks for talking me down, internet.

And there’s the service guy who checked me in. My car is done, and so is this post.