A month ago my life was punctuated by weekends, days, hours, minutes, seconds. I vaguely recall leaving my office at 2 minutes to the hour to be on time for a meeting at 10am. I certainly remember wishing for the weekend or for 5:00. Lately I have been unable to site the day of the week. Weekends are entirely irrelevant and if I am a day late to a meeting (yes I still have them) I figure I’m close enough. ...
I noticed on facebook today that many of my friend’s kids were dressed in fresh new clothes with hair and teeth brushed. Ruby and Olive weren’t actually all that bad considering they had a shower just yesterday (showering when you don’t have one of your own can be a little more of an adventure). When we went out for the morning I decided to drag along Tucker’s good camera to snap a few shots of our first day, and what a beautiful day it was. We had sun and warmth starting in the morning and lasting until evening. Ruby came home from swimming lessons after 6 without wearing her winter hat. Remarkable! Here’s why I’m glad I didn’t send my daughter to school again today. Both kids have fairy dust necklaces (though Olive lost her fairy dust in the bilge). Ruby offered Olive a wish on her fairy dust every five steps so we could make it down the dock in a reasonable amount of time. Yep, stopping every five steps was an improvement. You might think that the B dock was a straight line from our boat to the shore, but for the kids each and every finger has something to explore and they surely can’t be done until they know every boat name (and why they were named that); see every shell left by a sea bird; compare how each boat ties their dock lines; count how many boats have and anchor or two, or not; why one boat has a pirate flag; why someone is cleaning a certain way; why someone left their hose on; ….it could go on and it does, and we needed to get down the dock to go on a bike ride. We managed to drop off the PFDs and sun hats in Tucker’s truck and trade them for bikes and helmets and then they were off. But a bike ride is easily interrupted by a stick that begs to be thrown into the water. That was the end of the bike ride because Olive needed to head back to the bathroom. Then it was time to play on the grass. Ruby’s tag game seemed to be chase Olive and then push her over. She’d get up, she’d chase, she’d push (hard) and eventually she didn’t want to play that anymore. Ruby got mad at me for asking her to be gentle and stormed off to play in the mud at the edge of the grass. Olive joined and and they got pretty darned muddy. I didn’t think it was a terribly big deal because we had access to bathrooms and 64 faucets and hoses between the lawn and our boat that I could rinse them off in. And again it was a remarkably warm day out so we could even string their clothes on the lifelines to dry. ...
Last week I wrote a post on forgeover about the first chapter in my water heater replacement. To summarize, it didn’t go so well. I felt defeated before I even began, and things only went downhill from there. Today was a completely different story. I woke up with the knowledge that I had to install this beast today, and that I was going to have to squeeze the chore in between long anticipated visits with my sister, brother in law, and nephew. Vick got me started on the right foot: “You’re going to do it, it’s going to be easy, and you’re going to feel GREAT when its done.” That was exactly the pep talk I needed and it probably made the difference between 90% success and utter failure. ...