As If We Never Said Goodbye

Forgive me, Internet people, for I have sinned. It has been 420 days since my last confession.

There is literally no reason for this picture to be here ... and yet, here we are.

(No, wait: that’s not true. It’s been 17 days since my last confession -- yes, really! -- but it’s been 420 days since my last blog post, which is what I really mean. Or, at least, that’s all you care about, anyway. Which is fine, because nobody cares how often I go to confession. Except maybe that poor priest who had to hear my first actual confession in 15 years. But he’s not allowed to rat me out, so you’ll just have to sit there and stew in your own juices and wonder what I had to confess after all that time.)

[Okay, fine. Can’t have you all worrying about me since it’s been so darned long. I’ll give you the short version, which is basically what I gave that priest, anyway: you know those Commandment thingies? I broke just about all of them except the ones about murder and adultery. I’m also pretty sure that I committed all of the Cardinal Sins, too, especially gluttony. I mean, Meghan Trainor might be all about that bass, but my “good-butt” jeans are most decidedly not.]

{Oops, there I go busting out the Pride already. But trust me: I still fit into these pants right now, and I intend to keep it that way, and if that’s sinful pride (prideful sin?), so be it.}

Gaaah, that’s a lot of parenthetical-type markings at the beginning of a blog post. ANYWAY. The point of all of this is to say that one of my resolutions for 2015 is to post more often. You know: like, more than once every 1⅙ years.

INCIDENTALLY, if you happened to find yourself wondering what I did during my mostly unintentional (yes, really!) hiatus, allow me to direct you to my Instagram and Twitter feeds. If you don’t know what those are (hi, Mom!), then let’s just say I spent a lot of time having something vaguely resembling a “normal” life, reading everything I could get my hands on, and trying to figure out (1) what in the Dickens my kid means when the words come out of her mouth and (2) where in the Dickens she picks these things up, anyway.

Oh, and I stopped being a grad student and became an actual, real-life, certified teacher of 7th-12th grade English Language Arts in the state of Pennsylvania. I have all kinds of paperwork to prove it and everything (including the student loan bills). They’re somewhere in this house, anyway. I can tell you where my diploma is, at least. Which, if you know anything about my life, is definitely progress. Victory in our time!

Anyway, I fully intend to get back to business now, beginning with my New Year’s resolutions. Except: I don’t really “do” resolutions, really. I mean, I make them, just like everyone else, but I also break them pretty easily (see: my attempts to learn to make a flaming dessert, which have been ongoing for approximately eleventeen years at this point).

But now that I’m mumble-something years old, I’ve finally gotten around to realizing that broken resolutions aren’t really fractured promises so much as they are detours -- or maybe I mean “scenic routes.” Sometimes you have to break a resolution in order to find out if it was one worth making in the first place. So I guess what I am saying is that I plan to make these resolutions more like guidelines (not unlike recipes and speed limit signs).

Here they are, in no particular order:

1. Blog more often. (See paragraph 5, above … the one after the {squiggle brackets}.) This one is self-explanatory and doesn’t require any clarification; yet here I am, writing at least one whole additional compound-complex sentence about it, including a properly-placed but entirely gratuitous semicolon.
2. Treat myself better. Not necessarily in a “splurge” sort of sense (although I do intend to at least try to get massages and pedicures more often), but more in the “give myself at least a small break once in a while” kind of way. Stop beating myself up for small mistakes and lapses in judgement. Wear my “good-butt” jeans just because. Have an extra pudding cup because I want to.
3. Take better care of myself. Again, not the usual “stop eating food that tastes good and work out 4 hours a day.” I’m 40 years old -- it’s okay, I’m fine with it, really -- and I’ve been on a diet for, like, 39½ of those years. That isn’t what I mean. (Although I do need to lose weight and exercise more.) Of course I’ll refocus my efforts on eating healthy food and not having Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs for dinner four nights a week. But I should also get a mammogram and a Pap smear and maybe some baseline blood work to make sure that my blood isn’t made up of 75% bacon grease. And I should definitely check in with a therapist for a tune-up.
4. Keep learning. One of the things that I learned (or that was reinforced) while I was in grad school was how much I love to learn new things. I completely changed careers and lines of intellectual inquiry, which was so revitalizing for me. I know I was annoying, and I appreciate everyone who tolerated (and continues to tolerate!) my insufferable excitement. But I know I’m not done learning, and I want to keep learning something new every day.
5. Try new things. This is, of course, related to “Keep learning” -- but the differences between those two resolutions are vast. It’s one thing to know who The Doctor is, but something altogether different to experience Doctor Who. I like to know what my students are reading, but it’s important to also read those things as well. Knowing and understanding are not the same, and unless I try to apply the things I have learned, my “personal education” will always be incomplete. (This might mean that I make more Pinterest recipes or try again to tackle Don Quixote; hard to say how this one will pan out. Hopefully this will give me plenty of things to blog about this year.)

So. I guess I’m back. And already it’s as if we never said goodbye. (Probably because we didn’t, but still.)

Coast of Carolina

Oh yeah ... vacation. We've been home for more than a month, so it's probably time to put some pictures up, isn't it?

Truth be told, I haven't written about vacation yet because I'm practicing my usual Zennish strategy of better living through denial. It's like, if I pretend that vacation isn't over yet, then it isn't.

It was our usual family vacation: a chaotic mess of early rising, child limbs, Crocs, pancakes, ice cream, tantrums, Disney movies, mismatched outfits, and missing pacifiers -- and that was all on the first morning.

The weather wasn't the greatest, too hot the first few days and almost too cold after that, and the ocean was cold even by my standards (in the mid-60s, which -- look, I can tolerate A LOT, but I draw the line at hypothermia on vacation, you know?), but we barely even noticed, to be honest.

All the kids were just phenomenal. My sister's boys get more awesome every day, my niece is just the bee's knees, my kid was fairly well behaved most of the time ...

... there are even a couple of photos with ME in them, for a change, although let's be honest here and admit that I have GOT to learn how to pose so that I don't look like I'm made up of, like, 75% boobs and back fat.

I always hesitate to say that I can't wait to do it again, because that's such a gigantic understatement. I'm ready to go on vacation again pretty much the second we get in the car to come home. If I ruled the world and could do whatever I wanted, I'd arrange it so that we could all be together whenever we wanted, always.

Are we going back there, to the coast of Carolina?

As soon as possible.

PS - If you're interested in seeing ALL my vacation photos (all the good ones, anyway), you can view them here, including the Instagrams. If I can figure out how, I'll add my sisters' pictures, too.

I Am The Worst #SorryNotSorry

MY GOD. I am terrible at blogging, which is probably why I'm never going to get a gajillion dollar book deal like Lena Dunham or Aziz Ansari. (Also, they're talented, and I'm ... whatever I am.) You could sue me over the lack of updates, but remember that I'm a broke-ass graduate student with basically NOTHING except a 12-year-old Volkswagen with 185,000 miles on it. Good luck with that.

Pretty much everybody else in the entire blogosphere (is that still a thing, even?) is doing back-to-school posts this week, but Shae doesn't start school until the Wednesday after Labor Day -- next week -- so I'll take this chance to let you know what we've been up to since mid-July when I posted last, and then I'll put up first-day-at-her-new-school pictures when they're taken, and then I'll probably forget I even HAVE a blog for, like, eleventeen weeks at a time. Again.

I mean, I went back to school this week -- my last semester of classes before student teaching, I'm scared, hold me -- but Shae is basically off having adventures with assorted relatives until next Tuesday. Yesterday and today she's with my mother-in-law, getting unauthorized haircuts and mani-pedis and stuff like that, while I'm freebasing caffeine because I'd forgotten how INSANE it is to get up at 6:00 in the morning and got to work and then go to class until 9:30 at night and THEN try to drive home without crashing into a cornfield/cow pasture while driving through the dark, quiet Butter Valley. That is a long-ass day, people.

But, you know, honey badger don't care. Tonight we're going to see her for a very short while before we shuffle her off to the next volunteer, who has been threatening for months to take Shae fishing. That ought to be interesting, because my kid has the same attitude about creatures with fewer than two and greater than four legs that I do (i.e., ewwww!). Then tomorrow night she'll be staying with my parents, who have a tent in the backyard and hopefully gallons of DDT, because the mosquitoes love my kid this year.

I miss her desperately, you know. And I'm so very, very jealous.

Something Fishy

Hey, you guys remember that I have a kid, right? Probably not, because I haven't posted pictures of her in approximately forever.

There she is. She's about a hundred feet tall now.

We've only had one or two days of nice weather since the beginning of winter. This has been, like, a nuclear winter or something. It's awful. We're losing our minds.

Which may explain why we're making a fish mouth while we're sticking our face through the eye hole of a giant metal fish statue at the fish hatchery.

I keep trying to remember that Shelley poem, "Ode to the West Wind": If Winter comes, can spring be far behind?

We're all skeptical, but DEAR GOD I HOPE SO.

Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio?

Last time I blogged it was Christmas Eve and I said I'd "see you in a few days" which was obviously a LIE because here were are nearly at Valentine's Day and I am just finding time to blog again. I mean, unless your definition of "a few" equals "39," I am a LIAR and my pants are on FIRE.

I mean, COME ON, I don't even think people are on "Survivor" island for 39 whole days, not even if they win. (Although if anyone asks, go right on ahead and tell them that's where I've been, okay? I have a buff. It's a good cover story.)

By the way, I make no excuses for my disappearance. I've been busy, just like everyone else, and if I'd like to keep my head firmly affixed to my person and not all explodey like the Death Star, then I needed to prioritize stuff, and between school and work and child and husband and eating and breathing and occasionally sleeping, unfortunately blogging fell to the bottom of the list. I hope to rectify this situation, but I am taking nine credits this semester, so maybe don't hold your breath?

(Here's how bad it is right now: I originally wrote "I've been busty, just like everyone else" in the previous paragraph, and I ALMOST LEFT IT IN BECAUSE I'M NOT SURE I EVEN HAVE READERS ANY MORE, and I figured if I was going to keep getting weirdo spam comments in my inbox, it might as well be for an interesting reason.)

(Also, before you even ask, smoking falls under either "eating" or "breathing" and I DO NOT WISH TO ENTERTAIN YOUR COMPLAINTS.)

(Sorry about being all shouty already. Long week, and they're calling for another Snowpocalypse or whatever we're calling it this year, and I'm pretty sure I'm not prepared, although we do have a new next-door neighbor with a snowblower, so there's that, at least.)

ANYWAY. Even though I haven't been writing, I have been trying to take photos whenever I can. Mostly they've been cell phone shots (I got a fancy new camera bag for Christmas and I have maybe taken a dozen pictures since because BUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUSY!) but at least you can see what we've been up to.

It snowed a couple of times. Nothing major, but enough to at least attempt snow angels, anyway.

Andy Reid finally got fired, and so now at least we no longer have the #occupyfireandyreid movement taking up what little of my free time still exists. (I'm sure it's only a matter of time before the #occupyfirechipkelly movement begins.)

We lost some more teeth. And, I mean, this happened so long ago that the permanent are already almost in and knocking some OTHER teeth loose. The Tooth Fairy is going broke.

Swimming lessons started up again, with a new swimsuit to boot. (And we've grown so much ALREADY that this suit almost doesn't fit any more, so thank God for Costco.)

My kid proposed to a boy in her Kindergarten class via crayon drawing on the back of a receipt. He accepted, but they have since called off the engagement. (I think. I'm honestly not sure what's going on there. It's like "Dallas" or "Dynasty" in the classroom. KIDS!)

I discovered that my kid (1) knows what a glockenspiel is, and (2) can play it (sort of). Of course she was the best glockenspielier at the Kindergarten concert (and also the loudest). Apparently next year they learn to start reading music (something that I never really managed to do, even after all those years of chorus and musical theater), and the kids get to start thinking about whether they want to play an instrument.

(Is anyone surprised that my kid wants to learn to play the drums? I didn't think so.)

So It Goes

When I started grad school, I expected things to be different. I just didn't expect them to be, you know, THIS different.

I didn't expect to go almost an entire month without updating my blog.

I didn't expect that my kid's first day of kindergarten would pass with barely so much as a mention.

I didn't expect that my poor camera would sit in the bag, barely touched, for days, weeks, practically months at a time.

I didn't expect to miss my kid or my husband or my bed or my DVR or my free time quite so much.

I am not complaining here, or at least, not exactly. I am glad that I finally got my shit together for long enough to develop an "exit strategy" and stick with it. You know me: I have my moments when I'm not entirely sure that I am doing the "right thing" here, but by and large I am glad I made the move before I could talk myself out of it.

I expected to love being back in school, and I really, really do, but I didn't expect that I would have such trouble getting back into the "swing" of being a college student. I know my schedule, but I can't seem to set up a routine. I have class on Wednesday and Thursday nights this semester, plus an online class through the middle of October, and I know what I need to do, but I keep finding myself in the middle of a "crunch," and I'm still not sure how to work it all out, sometimes.

I expect that it will take me another two semesters to get myself all the way together, and by then it will be time to student teach, which is a whole 'nother can of worms.

I didn't expect that I would have so much to want to say, and so little time or authority to actually do it. I'd love to discuss my theories and plans and ideas with all of you, but I'm not sure what I'm actually allowed to talk about. At the end of all this, I would like to get employed, and I imagine that anything I say might be used against me.

I definitely didn't expect to feel so frustrated about so many things now. I want to be done with school and get on with "the rest of my life," but I still have a day job to do. If I rush through my classes I won't do as well as I'd like to, but if I slow down so I don't feel so much angst about it, I might end up convincing myself that I am frustrated because I'm doing the wrong thing at the wrong time.

I expected the sheer panic I felt when I actually got into grad school to settle down some once I got started.

I didn't expect that there would be days when it would be worse.

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Here is a random picture of a BLT, because of reasons:

Right now, the reasons are that bacon is basically the only thing I still understand any more. As long as there is bacon at the end of the tunnel, I WILL BE OKAY. (Right? RIGHT?)