Smoke gets in your eyes

And no, I don't mean the song...

For meteorological reasons that I will never entirely understand, no matter how well they're explained to me, I am lucky enough to live in the place that all the smoke goes to. We get it from fires up here in the Sierra foothills, the Santa Cruz fires, the Santa Barbara fires, you name it. Just from taking puppykins out to go potty, I'm having major throat & lung irritation and a big headache.

Lordy, I hate fire season!! I hate the smoke, and I hate worrying about friends and family. We finally went so far as to put up a California map in the game room - it serves a dual purpose: Lloyd marks every place he's ridden to on his death machine with small colored pins, and I mark everywhere we have a friend or relative living with bigger white pins. That way I can always run upstairs and check out the map to see how close a fire is to someone whenever I need to, instead of trying to figure it out from news or online maps.

So anyway... The big news from up here is that the kids are home. The first couple weeks of them being home are always a major adjustment period for all of us. I think of it as the Mommy Hangover period. They always come home completely different human beings (in a number of ways) from who they were when they left. Mommy always manages to make some sort of change, usually on a random impulse, that affects us a lot, because we're the ones who have to handle the follow-up for the rest of the year.

This year, for example, Trevor came home with contacts. The reason for getting him contacts? When he was at the beach swimming in the ocean, he couldn't wear his glasses, so when

he got out of the water he couldn't see her. Goodness knows he'll be in THAT situation constantly, right? So she says she'll pay for them, but it's now on us to replace them regularly, make sure he's using them right, cleaning them, etc. from here on out. Gee.....um, thanks.

It's also a rough couple of weeks because leaving Mommy is genuinely hard on the kids, but especially because they have to come back to reality. No more staying up till midnight (we got email from Anna timestamped after 11:30), no more 100% playtime at the beach, pool, museums, etc - instead, it's back to a normal bedtime, cleaning rooms, unpacking their suitcases, doing laundry, daily chores and getting ready to go back to school. Like I said: reality, and we all know reality bites. I just have to remind myself that they're always like this at first, and that the Mommy effect does wear off in a week or two. It's just hard while it lasts.

I KNOW I shouldn't be so annoyed and upset by this stuff though. I know that. But I am anyway... I raise them for 11 months of the year, and in 1 month, suddenly everything is disrupted and I freak out. She and I do talk about things, and our conversations are good, both for us and for the kids. It's just that we all know I do not handle change well at all, for one,

and there is a distinct jealousy issue there that she will always be loved so much more just for being Mommy, and her time with them is all about fun and games and playtime, while I get the job of actually raising them and don't get to be the one who has so much fun with them.

ANYWAY............

On the medical front, there is blessedly little to report. My new medication for my bladder seems to be helping, just in that there is less pain from that area and fewer feelings like I have a bladder infection. I'm still working on those evil disability forms to get them done, and Andy sent me a copy of what he wrote up for them, and it's wonderful. He kicks ass. Hopefully everything can be done and mailed off to the lawyer by the end of this coming week. I'd been using my early morning time to work on it, before Lloyd got up, but I learned rather quickly that I'd have to get up a LOT earlier for that to work out now that the kids are home! Anna popped out of bed before 7 yesterday. I'll figure it out somehow though.

What else... I'm trying to get back into cooking for the family far more often. That's one of my big goals of my recovery, and I figured that them coming home, and school starting was the perfect time for me to get into that. Of course, we also need to watch our budget dramatically, so the two things are going hand in hand. I'm trying to plan out most of the week's meals so that we can go to the store once and know we have everything we need on hand for that week. To start, I'm only committing myself to cooking 3 times. I figure if I commit to more, I'll just end up burning out really quick - I need to ease into it. So, that's a major thing in my recovery. It might not sound like it, but it really, really is.

So, to that end, I'm doing a lot of skimming my magazines for new recipes to try out, to see if we can expand our repertoire, looking in my cookbooks, etc. I'm trying very, very hard to get back to knitting, too. It's been so long since my fingers were able to stand it, it almost feels alien to me and I'm really borderline frantic to get it back. I have sewing I want to do too, and felting and spinning, and it frustrates the hell out of me when I can't manage to get any of it done - sometimes because I don't feel well enough, or hurt too much, but sometimes because I piddle away my free/awake time with minutiae of the day and never get to it.

I honestly think that's about it! I didn't do so good with trying to update more than once a week, but there just hasn't been that much to talk about! I will keep trying to be better, I promise Mom! ;-)

For now, I'm going to quit piddling and get to doing something productive. Sedentary, but productive!