It’s another parenting morning during which I can feel the hairs on my head repainting themselves silver and the fist in my gut tightening. A typical morning with a teenager under stress and it’s become the rhythm of every morning for the most part, and I’ll sum it by saying: it’s rough. No matter how […]
Send Saint Bernards. Kegs of coffee. Or another pair of hands and eyes.
Reality: I have been writing through continuing sludge these past days – and very quickly. I’m not sure how I”m managing to do it (the “quickly” part helps); I’ve been struggling through an on-again off-again migraine, blurred vision, physical exhaustion. But no matter how I feel, there are tasks that need addressing. And there is […]
Heartbreak Hill
Sludge. It’s a good word. Satisfying. And it sounds like what it is. You know. Onomatopoeia. And right now, while I don’t think I could pronounce onomatopoeia (or anything much over two syllables), sludge works fine for me. It describes the sensation of my brain function, not to mention the manner in which I am […]
All-Nighter
You know when you look at a document and you see what you want to see? You know when you pull someone else into the process, and that person looks, and verifies what you (think you) saw? You know when you check one last time out of some deeply rooted obsessive quality, or perhaps a […]
Broken Fingers
Objects of Beauty Have you ever seen a Buddha’s Hand Lemon? It’s an extraordinary thing, somewhat floral in form, with curling tentacles. But from the side it has a squid-like shape, and resembles a prop in a sci-fi movie. I held one yesterday for the first time. I was fascinated by its waxy surface and […]
Sweet Sixteen
I have reason to feel sad today, just a little. And I do. And happy, and I do. No. My sweet teen is seventeen, not sixteen. And no, it’s not his birthday. But last night as I was finishing up some writing and checking on my son, thinking about how early I needed to rise […]
No Knowledge
It was an odd night of even odder dreams; an odd night because I slept eight hours (exceptional), and odd dreams as I found myself sitting behind a massive wooden desk, part of a management directive to motivate my staff with plastic boy toys. Now, now – not those toys. Strange morphing, scoping, bending wheeled […]
Backups
We’ve experienced our share of nasty computer issues this past year; recovery was slow and expensive – money I could ill afford. But given that I make my way through life tap-tapping on a keyboard, and my kid needed to finish out his high school years tap-tapping as well, costly or not, fixing and replacing […]
Top 10 Reasons My Teens ROCK!
My teens? The best on the planet, naturally. One is a bit of a world wanderer – give him a backpack and a cheap ticket to Europe, and he’s a happy camper. A little factory work, a little office work, a few music festivals… and plenty of adventure, some of which he tells me about, […]
Free Range… Chicken
Last night I came across this – on Free Range Kids, about an incident in which the authorities were called when a mother allowed her 8-year old to play in a nearby park, alone. I was struck by how much has changed in a generation. I grew up “set loose” in the afternoon after school, […]