It’s Friday and my mind, as per usual, is scattered. Let’s try to shuffle some of the disarray into more manageable piles. (To be clear, by “shuffle” I mean “complain a lot about inconsequential things.”)

• This week has been full of headaches. Literal headaches. Are they from neck tension? Eye strain? Allergies? Too much gum chewing? Not enough water consumption? WHO KNOWS. Advil seems to help, but I need to have something in my stomach before I take Advil (so says my physician husband) and I don’t like eating first thing in the morning and that’s when they are worst. Perhaps I should ask him, how much something do I need to eat? If, like, a handful of cashews would suffice, maybe I could deal with that.
• While I’m whining about aches and pains, let me tell you that my forearm pain persists. The exercises in the video I told you about here helped tremendously, but then the pain returned. I have been babying it. Trying to avoid lifting things with that hand, eschewing weight lifting of any sort, trying to sleep on my back instead of on that arm. Stretches and the exercises that helped so much originally. (I think I may have been a little aggressive with the massage aspect of the exercises yesterday; my arm is kind of throbbing today, when normally it only hurts when I lift something.) Probably I should go to my doctor… but I have been resisting that step because I feel like she won’t be able to DO anything. Offer sympathy? Recommend rest, ice, and pain medication? The very best case (realistic) scenario is that she refers me to a forearm pain specialist… but then I have to make the appointment and wait to see that doctor and do whatever tests and yada yada blah blah blah. Why yes I am aware I am being a HUGE CRABBY BABY about this.
• How are you staying fit if you can’t do your normal fitness routine? My preferred workout is strength training with weights. But I simply cannot do that right now. My second preference is for walking, but I find that lately my back hurts after I come in from a walk. What is THAT about? Probably I need new shoes, but UGH. How am I supposed to participate in Elisabeth’s walking club if I’m not walking? It feels like the only option is yoga, so I guess I will see what Adriene has to offer. It’s just that I feel impatient when I try to do yoga. Impatient and also clunky and off kilter. I am realizing that those are reasons TO do yoga, not to avoid it.
• I am in the process of transitioning to a new blog – with new URL and layout and everything – and that is a HUGE pain. I realize it will also be a bit of a pain for you as well, and I apologize in advance. Hopefully I’ll be able to figure out how to make this blog link automatically to the new one, once it’s all transitioned. I’m still trying to figure out how the new layout works. My free WordPress blog theme is so old that it is no longer supported, so I can’t recreate it on the new blog, which annoys me to no end. And the new blog theme doesn’t seem to work quite the same way, which is also frustrating and makes me feel very old and out of touch with technology. It’s all on WordPress, I don’t know why it doesn’t work the same way. Grump grump, crab crab.
• Death has been on my mind a bit this week, so please skip this bullet if you aren’t up for THAT. I mean, we have the Passover and Easter stories, which are both as full of death as they are of hope. Also, I had a nightmare about my friend – in which I texted her old phone number because I missed her, and she responded, and then was furious at me because I hadn’t reached out to her (because I thought she was dead). In the dream, I so clearly remembered her wake, and yet I got to see her, in person, in the dream, and she was so very alive. I was so grateful that I had been wrong, and felt so guilty for having believed she was dead, and so devastated that I had her back in my life only for her to treat me with anger and coldness. When I finally woke up, I had a whole day of residual grief and guilt, on top of the renewed sense of loss that comes with having to confront that a truth you had accepted for many years is still true.
• If you skipped the previous bullet, you should skip this one too. Death was with us at the Passover seder this week, too. The last time I’d been in our friends’ home, it was to honor the loss of their mother. I was grateful to see all the same faces, gathered this time in celebration instead of in mourning. But their mother’s absence was palpable. I wanted, so many times throughout the evening, to say her name, to acknowledge that she was not there. But in the concentric circles of closeness to the family, I am in one of the outer rings, and it did not feel appropriate. And yet. Isn’t one of the loneliest parts of loss the feeling that you are the only one who remembers your loved one? Wouldn’t it be a comfort to know that others are thinking of her too? The aftermath of loss is so unnecessarily complicated. I think we think that feel we are expected to move on from loss, or that we worry we will bring down the mood if we bring up a lost loved one in a celebratory space, or that we don’t want to provoke additional pain in those who are grieving by calling their loved one to mind (when, of course, our dead do not ever leave our thoughts). In the end, I did not mention her once; it never felt appropriate. And yet I wish I had had the courage to say something, even if it was the wrong thing. My current plan is to try to find the right words to say I missed her in the thank you note I will write to our host.
• Let’s talk about something cheery and frivolous! After your thoughtful responses to my Easter basket conundrum, and a text from my husband that said something like “buy lots of candy and maybe one small present,” I did indeed go buy “lots of candy.” Like, waaaayyyyyyy too much candy. The small present is a book I bought on a whim. I read this book – and, in fact, much of the series – when I was a kid, so the nostalgia factor played a big part in my spur-of-the-moment purchase. I hope Carla likes it, but at the very least I will enjoy rereading it.
• We are back to the dessert drawing board. I mentioned to Carla that her father had requested coconut cake or carrot cake for Easter dessert, and she said she doesn’t like either of those options. Well, neither do I. So we are trying to figure out something that sounds festive and springy and light and not terribly complicated. My vote is for this smashed raspberry cake (even though it sounds a little more complex than I was hoping for), but my husband wants to make a trifle (even though we do not have a trifle dish), and Carla wants a strawberry cake (for which I cannot find a recipe that sounds appealing).  
• While I was shopping for Easter candy, I wandered into the gardening aisle. Every year, I have grand plans to grow a bunch of things, despite a long history of lackluster results with getting things to grow, and this year is no exception. I bought A TON of seeds, tomato and zucchini and basil and dill and cilantro, but also a bunch of flower seeds, hollyhock and calendula and echinacea and more. I have never tried to grow flowers from seed before. We’ll see if I have any success at all. I’m still trying to revive my poor sickly palm plants. I was able to move them out to the sun porch this week, for some tropical weather. Although it is supposed to snow next week. These tumultuous weather patterns are not pleasant.
• Speaking of which, Carla and I had a bit of excitement this week. We were driving home from school when my phone lit up with an emergency tornado warning alert. I thought the tornado warning was for the area around our home, so I kept driving. My husband texted that we should go to the mall or something, but that would have meant turning around, so I suggested I would drive us to his hospital and we could all wait out the tornado warning together. Well, okay, he said, but there’s a tornado warning here, too. Oh, great. I had not realized we were also driving through a tornado warning. If I have fixed any tornado knowledge in my brain, it is that being in a car during a tornado is a Bad Plan. It was at that moment that the wind picked up and rain started coming down in sheets. No one else driving around us seemed the least bit concerned – except, perhaps, for the guy on the motorcycle in front of us, who kept looking up at the sky. When lightning and thunder started out of nowhere, I turned into the nearest parking lot, grabbed Carla, and dashed into a restaurant. I was quite nervous at that point, and it was disorienting to burst into the restaurant, soaking wet, only to see staff and patrons behaving as though everything was totally normal. Carla’s school tornado drill training kicked in and she dragged me toward a table in the back of the restaurant, away from the windows and doors. While I was trying to figure out what to do – do I… order food??? – she said that we’d passed a sign for the bathrooms, which were downstairs, and she wanted us to go into the basement. Yes, good, let’s do that. There were only two other women down there. Apparently, no one seems to feel as freaked out by a tornado warning as I do???? We waited out the storm and everything was fine, but the whole experience was very weird. Tornados would occasionally swirl through my hometown in the summers, and my mother was very, very firm about always going into the basement to ride out the threat. But here, even pulling off the road seemed like an overreaction! Oh well. I would rather overreact than the alternative.
• Carla, who was quite justifiably terrified by this experience, was primarily concerned for the cat. Who was at home, alone. Fortunately, we could watch him. My husband got me a pet camera for my birthday, and then he got a second one so we could check in on the cat while we were gone over spring break. (Lenny also had a cat sitter, he wasn’t alone all day every day.) So Carla was able to watch him while we were hunkered down in the restaurant basement. He spent the entire time on the kitchen table (where he is not allowed) and the kitchen island (where he is also not allowed), completely unperturbed by the thunder and lightning going on outside.

That’s it for today, Internet. Happy holidays, to those who celebrate, and happy weekend to those who don’t.