So Much Yuckiness

January 31 -- I just completed one month out of 12 and wrote in this blog every single day -- yay me.  I have to say I am not sorry to see January go but the way Feb 1st and 2nd are shaping up weatherwise, I don't hold much promise out for February either.

Writing, for me, is a way to get things off of my high body-fat chest.  So here I go.

The leak in the garage started again tonight even after my poor husband spent hours hanging out of the bathroom window yesterday chipping away at the ice.

My son, who didn't study for his exams because he thought he didn't have to (even though I kept reminding him to study but apparently he knew his skill level far better than I did), told me tonight that he failed an exam.  Well, there's a surprise.  I have to say that is an absolute first in the history of my life as a student and as a mother.  Apparently, he didn't think he had to study.  Huh.  Go figure.

I can't lose weight.  All last month I tried to increase exercise and eat less overall and make meals with healthy foods.  Yeah, yeah, yeah.  I get the wine and chocolate and cookie thing,  but honestly?  I am talking one cookie.  One Hershey kiss.  (Okay.  Sometimes two on a bad day.)  And the wine?  Really, not too much.  (Is a bottle a day a lot of calories??)  Just kidding.  One glass.  Maybe two on a bad day.  :)  The rest of my intake is all vegetables and fruit and mostly good, healthy stuff.  And still, I have lost like, no pounds.  Nada.

Why?  Because I am getting OLD; that's why.  (Yucky item number four btw.)

College costs too much money.  Need I say more?

Job hunting is making me very sad.  I know there are a lot of unemployed people and I should be grateful for the small part time job I have but seriously?  I am bored out of my mind.

It will all work out.  I know it will.  I just hope that in February, it stops snowing so damn much, the ice melts and goes away from my house, things look up on the job hunt trail, my kid starts to realize that school isn't going to be easy peasey and he has to ummmmm, work at it??, And maybe, maybe this gym thing will be just what I need to take a few pounds off.  Oh yeah.  And we win the lottery.  Hahaha.

So there.  I end January by laughing.  Not bad, eh??

Hey! Is that Pee on the Kitchen Ceiling?!

January 30 --And the horribleness (is that even a word??!) of this unbelievably snowy winter continues...

On Friday, (today is Sunday) the leaking started.  As I frantically put buckets in various strategic positions in the garage, I thought to myself -- at least it's not happening inside the house.  And then yesterday, I was in the kitchen consoling Riley who had somehow started to read the TIME article about the Arizona shooting.  When he turned the page and saw the picture of the little girl (his age) who was shot and killed, he started bawling.  I went into the kitchen, like, whaaaat?!  Poor thing.  So I am standing there, holding him in my arms and all of a sudden he stops crying.  "Mommy?" he says.  "What are those spots on the ceiling?"  I turn to follow his gaze and there, in the corner of the room are the disgusting brown spots that can only mean one thing.  Water leak!  Sure enough, with all of the snow still up on the roof, the ice dams were finally forcing the water into the house.  (Yes, I said "dam"?!!)  I was so bummed.  I looked up at them and my stomach turned.  They are like, the worst kind of spots -- all brownish yellow with distinctive outer rings like dried urine stains on the rim of the toilet.

Later, I told the older boys what I thought it looked like and they stood there quietly staring at the ceiling, examining the stains which  had now spread to the other side of the kitchen.  They cocked their heads sideways and I could  see them trying to figure out if it was truly possible,  if there really was a way that somebody could actually pee on the ceiling.

So today was spent trying to chip away the ice on the roof so the melting snow could take a different course.  Our roof lines are very high and very steep.  At one point, I held Brian's legs while he leaned out the bathroom window to chip at the ice which was almost 5" thick!  We poured boiling water on it and used a mallet, a hammer and a chisel to work the ice chunks free from their grasp on the shingles.  Connor went up on the roof for awhile.  Needless to say, I was terrified.

In the scheme of things, I realize this isn't too bad.  People have leaky roofs all the time.  It's just one more lesson though, how nature is so unbelievably powerful.  Our house is fairly new.  But with all of it's hip, contemporary roof lines, it's actually a really dumb design for a winter with this much snow.  But who knew?  This is the worst winter on record since before we built the house!

In the end, I am just totally glad Connor didn't fall off of the roof.

We Join a Gym

January 29 --   Brian has been calling local gyms lately, trying to get a good price at a good gym.  What is a good gym exactly?  who knows -- it's incredibly subjective.  In this case, with his blown out knee, he is looking for a place with a pool.  And he finally found one.  At a reasonable price to boot.

So we joined.  it was heady -- I felt like we were buying a new car with the "manager" who had been working there longer coming over to show us the prices on the computer.  If Brian hadn't just realized he had forgotten his phone in the rental car we had just dropped off at the car repair place, we would have probably signed on the dotted line right then and there.  But we raced out to get the phone and then went home to talk about it.

The kicker of the whole experience was this.  I found out I have a LOT of body fat.  Really.  There was this chart, this wheel thing I had to grab and, poof!!  There was my number which, yes, indicated that even though I have worn the same size pants for the last like, 6 years, (maybe more), I was definitely high in the body fat content.  Brian, in comparison, was in the friggin'  "excellent" columnn.  Am I competitive?  yes.  Did this really bother me?  Yup.  Absolutely.

Did we end up joining the gym?  Totally.

Now I just have to go there to work out.  Apparently, all of the walking and running I have been pushing myself to do is helping me gain nothing in the fat reduction department.  Nooooo.  Apparently, I have to "trick" my body into using different muscles by trying different exercises like weight lifting and cycling.  Hmmmm.

I don't know. The more I think about it?  When I consider the body fat content?  I have to wonder...lately I have noticed something.   My ummmm...(is there a polite way to say this?) chest has DEFINITELY gotten bigger.  And I am not a doctor but I think that's mostly body fat, right?  So is that a bad thing?  I don't know.  Something tells me that it is just fine, thank you very much, Mr. Body Fat Counter.  (Or, since I am the one who is getting all worked up about it -- MRS. Body Fat Counter :)

Control? What Control?

January 28  --  Today I had a staging for a couple who is in the downsizing stage of their lives.  Their two boys are in the twenties and early thirties and they decided it was time to sell their raised ranch where they had lived for the past 40 years.

I actually envied them for their clarity of vision.  There was no emotional whining -- she was quite clear about how much she hated living there, how excited she was to move on.   "The sad thing," she said, "is that we have to sell every single piece of furniture we have.  Nothing is going to fit in our new place."  She turned to me then and gave me a wide grin.  "Oh well," she said with a little shrug of her shoulder. "Oh well."

Like I said, there was a part of me that listened to her and was immensely jealous.

I arrived home from that appointment with a few minutes to spare before I had to leave to meet up with my friend Lori for an hour or so of snowshoeing.   I had already stopped on the way home to fill up the tank with gas, to pick up some grinders for the kids for tonight's snowboard excursion to the local mountain and to stop at the library to get the issue of TIME magazine article about Jonathan Franzen, the next great American novelist.  (I had just completed "Corrections" and "Freedom," his last two books.)   I did a mental fist pumping over my head as I entered my house.  I was starving and there was leftover soup in the fridge I could heat up for a quick lunch before I left to meet Lori.  All was right with the world.

Not.

When I quickly checked the voice mail, I saw that there was no phone message from the dept chair I had phoned yesterday about my possible application for employment at the school where she worked.  (I had met her in the fall and thought we hit it off -- an evening of four chicks hanging out together at a wake -- I thought she might be able to give me some insight about a position which had opened up at the school where she worked.  Silly me.  No call back.)  And the unravelling continued.  A text from my girlfriend saying she would pick up Tessa after school followed by another text saying Tessa had forgotten about the meeting,  a phone call from the garage saying Luke's car had been repaired and could I be there before 5pm to pick it up? ( No!)  Couldn't find my snowshoes, completely forgot about a task I needed to complete TODAY at work,  and finally -- my favorite part -- the ceiling in the garage drenched in water and dripping all over the bay.  Ice damage had finally struck at our home.   I was like, holy sh*t!!  20 minutes and all hell breaks loose.

So I left.  Went to meet Lori.  Water was gushing out of the electric outlet in the garage ceiling and I was like, I. Don't. Care.

I have no control.  So the least I can do is go snowshoeing.  And so I did.  And it was beautiful.

Omigod I am Raising A Princess - Not!!

January 27 --  So today was another snow day.  Again.  When the phone rang at five-thirty and Brian hung up I was certain it would be a delayed opening.  When he said school had been canceled I felt like I had been punched in the stomach.  Unbelievable.

Anyway, the one good thing is that our driveway is almost a quarter of a mile long so when the kids go out to snowblow and shovel, they are out there for a nice, long time.  So that brought it down to just me and Tessa in the house.  I put a moratorium on any screen activity and she curled up for a while with a book.  I was able to work uninterrupted.  Not bad.

After a while, I decided to see how the boys were faring and to tell Riley his father wanted him to go into work for the afternoon.  (hooray!)  I reminded Tessa that since she didn't have to go out to shovel snow, I expected her to clean up the kitchen and run a load of laundry.   When I went outside, I saw some areas where I could help the boys.  I picked up a shovel and got to work.  We scraped the ice off the car, swept the garage floor and then, grabbing a spade, I started to smash up the ice which was forming at the end of the bay.  And that's when I had my epiphany.  Banging at the ice made me remember back so many years ago, when I would break up the ice on my parents' driveway.  They had one of those half moon metal ice picks and I would stand there and just bang, bang, bang at the asphalt.  It was annoying but there was always a sense of gratification when the ice was broken and cleared away.

I stopped for a minute and thought to myself, I was always out there.  Every storm.  There was never a question how the workload would be distributed.  We bundled up, girls and boys, and headed out to shovel.  I was NEVER allowed to stay inside because I was a girl.  And, quite frankly, I wouldn't have wanted it any other way.  Truly.  Girls who let boys do their dirty work annoyed me.  And yet...omigod...it occurred to me that Brian and I were raising the very kind of girl I resented.  The ones who always whined at hard labor and couldn't do "boy chores" like cut the grass or change the car oil.  A princess, through and through.

Tessa is very athletic and tough.  She could definitely be outside shoveling.  She's a peanut, for sure but she can be pretty fierce out on the lacrosse field, all 4'11" of her.  So why was I letting her stay inside, all sheltered?  I have to say, I am wary of letting this pattern continue.  I am 100% guilty of feeding the stereotype.   I want her to be strong and tough and self-reliant.  Keeping her away from shoveling while the boys head out into the cold will not help at all.

And I am not even going to discuss the state of the house when I got inside.  Needless to say, she is the quintessential, social 13 year old girl.  When I came in the keys on the computer keyboard were still warm from her touch.

So Brian just jumped up from the computer himself.  It's 8:45pm and, completely absorbed in our work/writing, we forgot all about our little princess...ballet class ended 15 minutes ago!  Ughh.  We are failing!!

Yup.  We've got some work ahead of us for sure.

Writing Ideas

January 27 -- I feel like I am running out of things to write about. I like that every day I sit in front of this blank screen and come up with a topic because one of the hardest things to do is to start writing when the screen is blank.  But truly, I feel like I am running out of things to write about.

What did Thoreau do when he was stuck (okay, he wanted to go live at the pond and leave society so I guess he wasn't "stuck") at Walden Pond?  He wrote all the time but didn't he get sick of it?   Although, he didn't know at the time that anyone else would read his words so he didn't feel any type of pressure.  I don't feel pressure either but then again, a blog by it's very definition is meant to be read by others.  So right from the get-go, there is an entirely different type of mien, a unique objective whenever I sit down and start tapping at the keys.  Pressure?  Yes and no.  There are certainly off-limit topics and, one of the most interesting things that has happened in the last few days which I would love to write about -- I can't.  Too personal.  :)

That Julie chick had a good thing going when she discussed each recipe she made.  I could do that too but I guess but I don't want to.  (Although I did make this really cool and easy recipe with potatoes and the kielbasa my dad gave Brian for shoveling the ice away from the mailbox last Saturday.  It had a cheese sauce that was seasoned with oregano and basil.   And the kids loved it.) 

Boring Blog.  I fail.  Not really; but it sure seems like that sometimes. But I am okay with that feeling.  Like I used to say when I was huffing and puffing on the running trail, at least I am out here doing something instead of sitting home doing nothing.  This too shall pass.

Snow Sucks (sounds harsh but it's not)

January 26 –  I like snow.  I really do.  It's beautiful and clean and when you look out the window at the pristine landscape whitewashed by the new-fallen snow, there is always a moment of softening, a sense of awe at the breathtaking beauty of the vista.  But then the kids start to fight and the dog barks and a plate falls onto the floor and suddenly, reality hits.  It's a snow day, a delayed opening, an early dismissal.  No matter how you slice it, my schedule for the day has been uprooted and now the kids are in my armpit.

Not cool.

I mean, a snow day here and there is not a bad thing.  Kind of nice actually.  But too many snow days, like too much candy, can leave a nasty feeling in your stomach.  At least that's what it does for me.  This morning, when the phone rang at 5:30 am with the horrible message that the schools would have a delayed opening I wanted to scream nooooooo!!  And then I would take the phone and throw it across the room. That was my impulse anyway.  Instead I just rolled over and put a pillow over my head.  It didn't work.  I was awake.  The kids, however, slept through everything.  The phone call, the tv going on with the morning weather announcements and the sound of Brian firing up the snowblower.

As I write this entry, there is yet another Nor'easter heading ominously up the Eastern seaboard tracking its way north to dump more snow on an already beleaguered region.  No rest for the weary.  Like ants at the beach who just keep digging through the sand to reach the air, we just have to brace ourselves for the barrage of snow, make some nice soup, and dig out once again.  Inevitably, nature wins.  Always.