My brain is stuck on spin cycle and it’s Not Great Bob.
I have been eating my feelings, and my feelings taste like vanilla ice cream speckled with rainbow Nerds.
Vanilla ice cream not pictured, as it is already in my belly.
All the things that are stressing me are Champagne problems, so it’s a little frustrating to be feeling so riled.
We are having some landscaping work done. It’s been postponed twice, for no clear reason, which is its own mildly stressful thing. Finally, it’s happening this week and I am so jittery. Will the changes look good, or at least better than before? Will the updates reduce maintenance costs, as planned? Will the new plants survive? Will the transplanted plants survive? Will the project be worth the cost?
A bunch of phone calls I have been delaying continue to require resolution. Just make the phone calls! But I don’t want to, because this will be the second or third round of calls to each of the three places and those calls are either going to result in a) another round of phone tag or b) additional questions / appointments / decision points. I don’t wanna.
My husband and I have completely stalled on our furniture-buying plans. Which is fine-ish, but also I still have an old, torn, ugly couch in my front room and plus we pretty much already CHOSE some of the furniture, we just haven’t chosen everything, and now I am afraid the costs of everything are continuing to climb and/or we will end up delaying the purchases until the holidays when we will already be spending a bunch of money.
My cat is afraid of our Halloween décor. Carla put up all the Halloween decorations yesterday, including the many many wall bats I’ve accumulated over the years (they are my favorite), and poor Leo spent the rest of the evening under my bed, which is where he goes when a Very Loud Noise frightens the fluff out of him. He was super jumpy and weird last night after I dragged him out from under the bed, and then this morning he was super jumpy and weird during our morning routine – only half-heartedly chasing things during play time and then doing that thing where he stands and stares intently into the nothingness as though he is seeing something otherworldly. Do I take the Halloween decorations down? Will ALL decorations freak him out? What is going to happen when we have a Christmas tree in our living room?
We cannot decide what to do for an upcoming vacation. Originally, my husband and Carla wanted to go to either England or Japan, and I was opposed to an overseas trip following so close on the heels of our Paris trip. My alternative was to go skiing out west or to go to Canada, land of so many beautiful sites and home to somanyamazing bloggers. My husband would prefer someplace warm and suggested Los Angeles, Santa Fe, or Las Vegas. (Why do they all have two-part names? Do you think he included that in his criteria?) Carla wants to go to Japan, which would be amazing, but also the very idea of flying such a long distance to a country where I speak no more than a single word of the language gives me the vapors. THE VAPORS. I can’t drum up any enthusiasm whatsoever for the US options my husband has come up with, to the point that I have come around about going to England… but my husband thinks we may not have enough time to plan an overseas trip at this point. So we keep going in circles and not deciding and our designated time off is getting closer and closer. (Where would YOU go?)
I have a dumb post in my drafts that I am probably going to publish and then I’ll feel extra dumb about putting it out in the world, but I keep thinking about it and maybe that’s part of why I feel Stuck lately? Just as you are kind and tolerant of not only my whining about non-problems, but doing said whining when the world at large is facing so many real, hard, life-altering things, and when so many of YOU are enduring real, hard, life-altering things, I am guessing you will be kind and tolerant of my forthcoming dumb post, but I am still feeling dumb about it. And feeling dumb about THIS post, too.
An ongoing unbloggable but also Not Actually Bad situation continues to assert itself despite Taking Measures. I have been venting to friends and sending emails and ordering books and trying to collect my thoughts and trying to figure out if there is someone in authority I can talk to who might have the power to address things. This makes it sound worse than it is; it’s nothing serious, it’s just one of those things that you want to FIX if you CAN.
I have a Social Event to attend and I don’t want to. It’s not like social anxiety is anything new to me, and honestly, now that I’m taking an anti-anxiety medication, the symptoms I typically suffer (sweating, blushing, pounding heart, feeling like I’m going to vom, tangled tongue) affect me a lot less. But I still HATE going to events where I’m expected to socialize with a bunch of people. Hate. HATE.
Again, nothing is really wrong. And yet I am so edgy and hand-wringy about everything. I think what the stress comes from is a) decision-making without a clear winner and/or b) my lack of control over a situation or its outcome.
I was texting with a friend the other day about a similar issue making a tough decision, and I tried to reframe it for her by reminding her that no matter what she decides, the outcome will be positive. That’s true for me, too. So what if the decision-making doesn’t have a clear winner? That means it doesn’t have a clear loser, either! Even if there isn’t a genuinely positive outcome, at the very worst, these decisions won’t be irreversibly damaging if we choose wrong. Like if the new landscaping sucks, well. It will be a waste of money and we’ll be annoyed, but no one is going to die (except possibly some transplanted hydrangeas). And if we hate it enough, in a few years we can hire someone else to do something different.
And look. Leo seems to be coming around on his feelings about the bats.
It seems like I have a bunch of things to write about – I have a whole list of post titles in the document above this one – but my brain is insisting on instead perseverating on some grumbles and frets. Sometimes it helps to write those out; clears some space in the garage of the mind.
Speaking of the garage, this is what my garage door currently looks like. We don’t know what happened to the garage door. What we do know is that my husband came home from work yesterday, tried to open his garage door, and it wouldn’t open. After some examination, we discovered that a pin had been pushed through a bracket (these are totally the right words) when it wasn’t supposed to be, preventing the garage door from opening properly. We pulled the pin, the garage door resumed normal function.
The only thing that happened between when my husband left for work – via a working garage door – and returned, is that Carla and a neighborhood friend did some rollerblading in the garage. Carla insists she did not touch the garage door, or anything on it. Okay, fine.
But then when I left the house, my garage door also wouldn’t open. I checked, and sure enough, the pin was pushed through the bracket. When I removed the pin, the door still wouldn’t open, so I did some jiggling and finally got it to go up enough that I could back out onto the driveway. But it wouldn’t close. The motor was working – I could see the little track that maneuvers the door moving – but the door wouldn’t budge. So I pulled the thing that you pull when your electricity is out, so I could manually close the door. And it moved just fine… for a few feet. Until ANOTHER pin, this one with a wheel on it, for maneuvering the door down the outer tracks of the housing (so many terms that are so definitely accurate), popped out and bopped me on the head.
The garage door is ASKEW, as you can see. My husband and I tried to fix it, but we made it much, much worse. At least it’s CLOSED, now. Time to call the garage door guy, probably. But it is a holiday weekend here in the US so who’s to know if garage door guys are even working right now. Plus, the last time I called a garage door guy, one of them tried to tell me I needed a brand new garage door when the other guy said my door was fixable, and then fixed it, and it has remained operable for nearly two years. Is this newest issue related to the one we dealt with back in 2023? Should I have listened to the first guy all along? No one knows. No one knows, either, why the pins were pushed in the first place. Least of all Carla.
It has been Quite A Week for stuff like that. There’s the air conditioner leak, which I am monitoring per my dad’s instructions. He thinks we just need to get a new threaded fitting for the pipe. All my fingers are crossed, of course, and perhaps I am just being hyper-aware, but it feels like our air conditioner is really struggling to keep the house cool. Is this because it is a million degrees outside? Or because the air conditioner is failing? Okay, okay – let’s not fret too intensely about the air conditioner. I want to tell you about my ATM mishap.
Picture this: It is a million degrees outside, I am picking up my child from camp and then picking up her friend so we can have a sleepover. I have a ten minute window in which I can grab some food for dinner and get some cash to tip the furniture delivery people who are due at my house first thing the next morning. Carla and I swing through the grocery store in record time and there’s only one car ahead of me at the ATM. The car takes forever. I always wonder if people behind me think I am taking forever, too. Or are there some people who save up fifty-eight transactions for a single visit to the ATM. Hard to say. When I finally pull up, the machine takes my card, takes my pin, but then there is no “withdraw cash” option. Sigh.
There is a walk-up ATM on the other side of the bank, so I park and go through the whole thing again. This time, the machine takes my card, takes my pin, and there IS a “withdraw cash” option. I click it and a screen pops up that says “validating pin.” I wait. And wait. And wait. The sun helpfully spotlights me against the building. A woman pulls up and asks if this machine has cash, because the drive-up one doesn’t. I told her it ate my card. She suggests that I see if anyone inside can help, which I reluctantly do (I don’t want to leave my card in the machine), but the bank is closed.
I try to call the bank – first the branch, which is closed to callers as well as customers, and then the customer service hotline, which has eight million prompts that I dutifully type in but can’t get it to understand – and then start pounding on the doors. I can see people inside; maybe they will take pity on me? I am not a bank robber, just a damp, flustered, middle-aged woman. Bless them: someone tries to communicate with me via mouthing and sign language (very ineffective), and then eventually a man comes into the lobby and talks to me through the doors. I explain what happened, he explains he’s not allowed to open the doors to the bank after hours, and we discuss options. I am near tears at this point. The frozen screen still says “validating pin” and my main concern is that the computer will eventually start working again and then my card, with validated pin, will be available for anyone to use. I don’t know if I look plaintive enough, or harmless enough, or annoying enough, but the man finally gets a colleague to unlock the doors for him so he can come check on the situation himself.
I am apparently switching verb tenses now. The solution turned out to be: he reset the machine from inside the building. This, he told me, could result in my card being spit back out at me – so I needed to wait until it completely reset – or it could result in my card disappearing forever into the ether. So I called customer service again to see if I could get to a human. Meanwhile, Carla was sitting in the air-conditioned car, fretting about all the other people (total: 3) who were also trying to withdraw money from this bank and were stuck in the same pointless loop we were. She was particularly worried about one elderly man in a convertible who went through the drive-up ATM twice and pulled up to the walk-up ATM also twice, only to be turned away because I was still there.
HALF AN HOUR LATER – drenched in sweat, but unwilling to leave the machine in case my card popped out – the machine reset and my card was nowhere in sight. I’d finally gotten through to a real person via the customer service hotline and was asking him to send me a new card when the banker appeared out of nowhere and asked if I had my ID. I handed it over and he returned it WITH MY CARD.
I was so very grateful. I know he broke all sorts of rules by leaving the bank, even though he took precautions to make sure that even if I was going to threaten him with a weapon, I still couldn’t access the bank. Sometimes people are so bound by rules that they are unable to exercise any sort of judgment call. How fortunate that this man was able to judge that my situation required some rule bending. I did not even get his name, but he is my hero.
The Balloons. This is just pure complaining now, but something else I despise right up there with “unable to exercise judgment calls” is people who gate-keep rules/information. I went to a local business that sells balloons to get a few for Carla’s birthday. (She still adores balloons.) I took my balloons to the register, where two young people were inflating balloons and tying on ribbon. One of the people came to take my order. “When is your event?” Tomorrow morning, I told her. She looked with dismay at the balloons I’d chosen. “Those won’t last that long,” she said, pointing to the latex balloons. I’ve had twelve years of experience with balloons, and I think they’d be fine, but whatever. I told her I would exchange them for mylar balloons. “Would you like to take the balloons with you now?” Sure, that would prevent me from making a second trip, why not? “We can’t, we have a bunch of orders we’re working on right now.” Okay, that’s fine; I had been prepared to come back anyway. I asked her what time they closed that night. “Eight.” Okay, great. I will pick up the balloons at eight. “We don’t fulfill balloon orders that late. The latest we fulfill balloon orders is seven-thirty.” Oh-kay. Seven-thirty, is fine, I will pick them up at seven-thirty. “Well, probably not seven-thirty. Maybe six-thirty, or seven.” Great, I will pick them up at seven. The other person filling balloons piped up: “We have another order to fulfill at seven.” The person who I was dealing with said, “We’re fulfilling another order at seven so I can’t do seven.” Okay, fine. Six-thirty, I do not care. “Do you want your ribbon floor length?” I had no experience with this unit of measurement, or how it could possibly be a standard length, so I said something like, I want the ribbon long because we have tall ceilings. The person filling balloons said, “We do floor length or table length.” My pleasant smile was beginning to feel more like a grimace. Floor length is fine. “What color ribbon do you want?” I started to answer and then asked what colors they haveand chose the first option she gave me.
If there are very specific parameters, TELL ME THEM. Don’t make me guess.
Update on the sleep situation. One of my top health concerns over the past couple of years has been my increasingly, enduringly terrible sleep and resulting fatigue. I did two at-home sleep studies that were inconclusive. The sleep specialist recommended an in-lab sleep study, which I finally did last week (would anyone be interested in a post about what that was like?) and got my results. Basically, I have very mild obstructive sleep apnea. So mild that usually they don’t treat it (and if it’s so mild they don’t typically treat it, is the sleep apnea what’s causing my sleep problems?). (I also have restless limbs, for which I already take copious supplements and have a prescription to use on really bad nights.) My sleep specialist said that I could try a CPAP machine if I wanted, I could get a dental appliance that is not covered by insurance, or I could – wait for it – lose weight. Sigh. Okay, the last one is free and worth doing anyway, so I guess I’ll try that first.
Possibly I am so easily annoyed right now because I have some un-displaceable worry and regret that’s just… percolating. I just heard some news about a friend that was very troubling. It didn’t come from her; it came, in fact, third hand, but you’ll have to trust me that the source is inarguably trustworthy. I suppose there is still room for some blurring of details, so I’m keeping that in mind. Anyway: I learned that she was going through something horrific some years ago and I had no idea. If I had known, I would have tried to help her. But I didn’t know, and she went through this horrific experience and she went through it alone. Because the revelation about her circumstances didn’t come from her, and because we are the type of friends who now keep in touch via text two or three times a year, and who see each other every decade or so if we happen to be in the same state at the same time, I don’t feel comfortable reaching out to her. Not that I’d even know what to say. “I’m sorry you went through that?” “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you?” I don’t know any details, just broad strokes. I have every reason to believe she is okay now, and that the horrific ordeal is in the past. But it still hurts my heart to know this thing was happening right in front of me and I was so totally oblivious.
DRASTIC TONE AND SUBJECT CHANGE. Even though it required turning on my oven, I did some medicinal baking yesterday. I made my favorite summer treat, a purple plum torte. Typically, I make it in a nine-inch pan but this time I made it in a six-inch pan and it was so good. Because it’s taller, the cake had to cook a little longer for the middle to set, and the edges caramelized into a delicious cookie-like crust, and the plums settled in the middle into a gorgeous jam. A plus, would make again.
Comeuppance. Do you remember, lo these many weeks ago, when I was complaining about the neighbors’ kids being outside late at night playing basketball? Well, we had a friend sleep over on a weeknight and due to manyfactors, including my ATM experience, everything took place much later than I planned. The kids got in the pool at… nine. It was dark, which was not ideal, and resulted in some spooked screeching. But a night swim is a novelty and it was the only time they had to swim and I knew they weren’t going to sleep anyway. I shushed them anytime they spoke above normal conversation volume, and they ended up playing a very nice quiet game until about eleven.
The next day, Carla ran into one of her dog friends and its human companion, and she ended up mentioning that she’d been swimming the previous night. The human said, “Oh yes, I heard.”
GULP. I am a noisy inconsiderate neighbor too, it seems.
Don’t worry. I got my comeuppance. My next-door neighbors – not the basketball family – hosted a party the night before Independence Day and released three hours’ worth of massive fireworks into the night, terrifying the cat and stressing my child out with fears of fire. They stopped at about eleven. The next day, we had spent fireworks cartridges all over our driveway, backyard, and even the top of my car. I picked them all up without complaint.
Are we seriously doing this? Last week, when it was still June, I went to Michael’s to buy birthday candles and what did I see? Halloween décor. Why. Just. Why???????? (Also, I really want the tall ghost with the jack-o-lantern candy dish.)
Introvert vs. extrovert. Carla rejected the idea of day camp this summer. I did sign her up for a bunch of short camps – short in terms of duration (2-3 hours) as well as length (weeklong) – but for a lot of the summer so far, she’s been at home with me. This has been exactly as difficult as I imagined it would be. She’s bored. She’s lonely. She’s unwilling to do the things I want her to do in order to make me feel like she’s Doing Things instead of sitting in front of a screen all day. The weather has been too rainy to spend much time outside or in the pool. The kids in the neighborhood have all been at camp. And because I refuse to let her sit in front of a screen all day, she has been by my side pretty much all day long.
This should be fun! It’s a gift, in fact, to spend unstructured time with my kid. We’ve played a bunch of board games, we had a girls’ day during which we went shopping and went out to lunch, we’ve run errands together, we’ve taken the kitten to the vet. We’ve also done a lot of screen time (which I am only now realizing is a loophole in my No Screens Until You’ve Done X Ruling), watching cat videos, having Modern Family and Brooklyn 99 marathons, watching movies.
I have also arranged playdates and mini golf and invited neighbors over to swim and made dates to go visit our old neighbors.
And yet there are so many hours to fill and so many of them seem to be filled with Carla – and the kitten – needing my attention. Which, again, is precious, and also I would just like some time alone for the love. My battery drains very quickly when I don’t get time to myself, even when those people are my beloved child, and I am at my limit. (Yes, I have tried waking up early but the cat is always already awake and ready to eat and then play, and then the playing wakes Carla up, and there’s never any time alone.)
Poor Carla, born an only child to introverted parents, is a social creature who LOVES people and loves chaos and excitement and busyness. I know she is bored and lonely, and I’m trying to secure additional time with her friends, and I’m trying to remind myself that I am the grownup here, and this is my responsibility as her parent as well as a person who loves her. I am also trying to remind myself that being bored is GOOD for kids. Although I think the reason it’s good for kids is that it supposedly inspires them to be creative, while my child is creatively velcroing herself to my side. I am trying to remind myself that she won’t always want to spend time with me, and that, in fact, any moment now she could decide she never wants to speak to me again, and I should treasure this time. I am TRYING; this summer is TRYING as well, but in a different way.
Okay. Now that I’ve whined all over the internet, I’m going on a hunt for outdoor throw pillows with my husband and child. At a store, not, like, in the yard, in case that wasn’t clear.
What complaints and frets are cluttering up your mental garage?
A friend and I were discussing this weekend the tiresome nature of cooking dinner for a family every day. It is just The Worst, isn’t it? And I have a generally very easy audience: my husband will eat anything, and always thanks me for making dinner, even if it wasn’t his favorite thing. My kid eats nothing, so I have to make her separate meals anyway (unless we happen to be eating tacos, which she loves). I recognize that things really could be much worse.
And yet it is still extremely wearying, to constantly be thinking of what to make and what to buy and then having to do the grocery shopping and prepare the meals and eat them. I am so burnt out. I imagine cooking for a larger family or family members with specific dietary restrictions or limited palates would be completely soul sucking.
If you are feeling like you simply cannot make one more meal, or deal with a single comment from the people who eat the meals you make, or think up one more thing to make, or face making the same exact thing one more time… well, I have all the empathy in the world.
And yet. We still must eat. Those of us who are in charge of feeding our families still must feed our families.
Here’s what I may – or may not! the week is young! – make for dinners in my own house this week. And by the way: we have eaten both sandwiches from Jersey Mike’s and delivery pizza this past weekend alone, and I fully endorse making things easy on yourself and leaning on takeout and/or prepared meals as often as makes sense. The thing is that I do PREFER making meals at home, both because it feels healthier and because it is definitely less expensive.
Dinners for the Week of January 8-14
Beef with Sugar Snap Peas: I haven’t made this in a while, and it’s VERY easy. This is because I buy pre-sliced “stir fry meat” from my grocery store, and a bag of pre-washed sugar snap peas. I also don’t use fresh ginger, I use cubes of frozen ginger which is just as good. My husband isn’t crazy about the sugar snap peas, but he will handle it with grace.
Japanese Curry: My husband found a recipe for this curry in a fairly recent issue of Cook’s Country. The linked recipe is very similar, and has lots of details about choosing the right curry and customizing the dish to your tastes. While the first time I made this, we used potato and carrots. But I hate cooked carrots so passionately that we switched to sweet potato the next time, and threw in some frozen peas at the end. I have also used broccoli, and if my husband wasn’t a factor, I would probably skip one variety of potato. We use the S&B Golden Curry, which has two packages of the sauce mixture. My husband likes to have chicken with this dish as well. Depending on the veggies you use, this does require some chopping… but it is nonetheless extremely easy. I think it would work well with frozen veggies, too, which would cut the prep time way down.
Crockpot BBQ Chicken with Apple Slaw: I will not use the recommended BBQ sauce (Sweet Baby Ray’s) because I hate it; but I will use my favorite grocery store brand. And there is no way that I am adding sugar to this recipe. Otherwise, sounds good and easy and allows my crockpot to do the heavy lifting.
Ramen: This is another super simple, easily customizable recipe. I buy ramen noodles and beef broth and then add whatever things I have on hand that sound good. Usually, I start with some frozen cubes of ginger and a good spoonful of crushed-garlic-from-a-jar in a little bit of oil. Then I throw in some beef stock, the cube of ramen, and whatever veggies seem like they would work well. Edamame (frozen or not) is excellent. Peas are good. I like to slice a red and green bell pepper and throw those in at the end. Broccoli is delicious. The best veggie for this dish is whatever veggie is easiest. If I have leftover salmon or shrimp, I add those too. Then I top with sriracha sauce and scallions (if I have them) and go to town.
Tacos: Even though we do a bunch of toppings – iceberg or Romaine lettuce, tomatoes, cheese, onions – this is one of the easiest meals I make. I can have it on the table in thirty minutes flat. My mother taught me that you can slow cook taco meat (same recipe, just use less water!) and that makes this even simpler. Plus, everyone in my house will eat tacos. AND we have leftovers, which means my daughter has something for dinner that isn’t chicken nuggets.
That’s it for this week. I hope your meal plan is full of very simple meals.
