150,000 Words. 121 Days. Three CD Programs. One Textbook. One Woman.

After Dean and I had been married a short while and my thrill with being in charge of all things housewifely had worn thin, we worked a deal whereby we divided some of the household chores.  We shared the cooking and the cleaning up and we even shared the bathroom cleaning.  In addition, I did all the laundry, I did all the ironing, and I did all the other house cleaning.  Dean took over all the manly chores, like organizing the record collection.   This arrangement continued on and worked nicely as our family grew busier and more chaotic when children were added.  The girls knew that on Sunday morning they could always count on my sour cream waffles for breakfast.  On Saturday morning they knew they could always count on their dad's music blasting away in the kitchen even though they never knew what would be placed on the table in front of them for breakfast. 

One evening as we were having dinner with friends, our arrangement came up in conversation.  Our friends listened with admiration as we told them how this whole sharing-of-the-chores process worked.  During this explanation I mentioned that I hated coming up with an idea of what to cook each night for dinner, I didn't much enjoy cooking it anyway, and I was glad I didn't have to do it every night.  Dean responded with, "I love cooking but I hate cleaning the bathroom."  Renegotiation immediately ensued and when our dinner ended, a new chapter in shared chores had begun.  From then on Dean did all the cooking and those manly chores, like arranging the cd collection.  I cleaned the bathrooms.  In addition, I also cleaned up after he cooked, I cleaned the house, I did the laundry, I ironed the clothes, and I mowed the lawn.  And that's the deal that is still in place.

A while ago as I was watching Julie and Julia, I was almost inspired to want to cook.  I was almost inspired to renegotiate that long-standing chore-sharing deal and try cooking.  And then I came to my senses.  But what I was inspired to do was learn Spanish.  I have a daughter living in Ecuador after all.  It seems the right thing to do.  I was so inspired that I have been thinking about learning Spanish for exactly 22 days.  Seriously learning Spanish.  Not trying to learn it by loading up my Spanish-on-cd-program three whole days in a row, and then not opening the program again for two months.  No, this time I am inspired to be Julie.

If Julie could cook 536 recipes in 365 days while working full-time, surely I can find the time to learn Spanish.  In the 22 days I've been inspired to think about seriously learning Spanish, I've been seriously considering how to go about it.  I don't enter into this lightly.  I am negotiating a deal with myself and I intend to fully live up to the terms of the contract.  That's been the hard part.   Comng up with the terms of the deal.  My goal is to be able to speak enough Spanish so that when I take Abby her wedding dress I can talk to her future family without making a total idiot of myself.  How hard can I push myself?    Who will I practice with?  Who's going to tell me that when I meant to say "have a great day" I really said, "have a big god" ?  Which tool do I even use?  I have four  of them!  What am I willing to give up in order to add one more task to my daily routine?  Geez, there's already important stuff taking up my days....like working and eating and sleeping and sometimes even blogging.  And not only that, this might make me fat.  What's going to happen when I try and shove 150,000 words into my brain?   

So after 22 days of pondering, (and let's be honest, putting this off), here are the terms of the contract I have set for myself:

1.  I will spend thirty minutes, five days per week, either listening to one of the cd programs or working with the textbook. 

2.  More time may be added during each session but that extra time does not carry over to the next day.

4.  Less than 30 minutes each session does not meet the requirement.

5.  The terms of this contract begin Monday, February 1, 2010 and end on the day I fly to Ecuador with Abby's wedding dress in hand.

6.  Since I don't know when I will be taking Abby's wedding dress to Ecuador I set a minimum final date of June 1, 2010. 

So the next step is to load those cd programs onto my computer, take a big breath and prepare myself for tomorrow.  I'm going to do that.  Now.  Right after I go check my supply of chocolate.◦

150,000 Words. 121 Days. Three CD Programs. One Textbook. One Woman.

Unleaded or Regular?

I was driving to the gym tonight after work and patting myself on the back because tonight was the fifth day in a row that I have pulled on my neon green shorts (purchased for a mere 50 cents from the Salvation Army) and my extra-large t-shirt with frayed neck, tied up my grass stained tennis shoes, planted my sorry, now somewhat larger, butt in the car, drove two minutes to the health club, parked, walked in and actually participated in physical activity.  In the past six months I am pretty positive that I have seen the inside of this health club a total of approximately 10 times.  I could blame myself for not placing exercise high on my list of priorities.  I could blame myself for not having the fortitude to suck it up and go even when there really wasn't a free moment.  I could have forced myself to get up and on that elliptical at 5:00 a.m..  Um, not really.  I tried the early workout once and almost threw up on the machine. 

What I choose to blame for my lack of healthy exercise, however, is acronyms.  Yes, acronyms.  Two, to be specific, which monopolized my time for months.  One I promised not to speak of til summer (hint....it begins with B and ends with D).  The other begins with a P and ends with an D and now resides in Ecuador.   And okay, there was Thanksgiving and Christmas, leisure trips on my favorite interstates, laundry, rare fits of cleaning, and those annoying habits of eating and sleeping.

So, as I was saying, I was driving to gym, congratulating myself on getting back in the saddle, so to speak, and I noticed my windshield was dirty.  I really hate driving with a dirty windshield so I regularly hit the little handle on the steering wheel that squirts water on your windshield and then automatically kicks on the wipers so next thing you know, voila! you have a clean windshield.   Recently I've noticed that when I wash my windshield with the wiper solution I smell this weird sweet fragrance.  I'm not sure what it is, but I'm 99.9% sure it's coming from my wiper fluid.  I'm not sure, but I think the last time I got my oil changed and they topped off my fluids, they must have put in some kind of sweetened wiper water.  Why would anybody want sweet wiper fluid?  I only smell it while the water is squirting so it's not like it would freshen your car.  I find it a bit too sweet for my taste anyway.  But there you have it.  My wiper fluid smells sweet when I clean my windshield.

Smelling that sweet scent tonight reminded me of other aromas.  One day I thought my car smelled like cat pee when I drove to work.  I don't think I had cleaned my windshield that morning so it's not like the wiper water rotted and started smelling.  And anyway, it smelled sweet the next time I used it so it couldn't have been that.  I didn't hear any cat screams when my engine started so I know there wasn't any cat up under my hood that sprayed itself in fear when I turned the key.  I only smelled it that one morning and it wasn't there when I drove home but I'm pretty sure it was cat pee.

And then tonight as I was on the elliptical, an overwhelming smell of cigarette smoke engulfed me.  I looked over and a guy had just gotten on the machine to my right.  He stunk.  Like cigarette smoke.  I tried to make excuses for him because he was a solidly built bald guy with a goatee and I'm partial to  bald guys with beards.  I wanted to believe he didn't want to walk into a health club, a place people go to be healthy, stinking like an ashtray.  It could be that his New Years Resolution is to quit smoking and get in better shape.  He was there, after all.  He was on the elliptical.  Maybe he is down to only one cigarette a day and he smoked it just before he walked into the gym. Maybe he really wants to quit smoking and he just hasn't been able to.  I tried to be sympathetic to the difficulty he's having trying to quit smoking but I just couldn't get past the fact that he stunk.  He reeked of smoke.  I had to breathe in those noxious fumes while I was sweating on the elliptical.  And I was breathing hard because I was working hard and that meant I was sucking in volumes, liters, gallons, cubic inches, pretty much most of the stinky smoky air surrounding him.  I might have lost minutes off my life instead of adding them.

There are things that happen in your body when you are working out.  There's something about physical activity that improves the flow of the blood and air through all your veins and arteries.  Gases that are normally under control discover new unimpeded pathways and routes of release.  Your guts are pushed and squashed and jostled so that little bubbles of air begin flowing and moving and gaining speed and momentum and in their excitement to be free it becomes more difficult to control their escape.  Of course there are some situations when control is easier than others.  Pilates, for example can be a challenge when you're throwing your legs up in the air and back over your head.  Pilates takes a great deal of concentration and control.  It can even require some preventive and proactive action before the class begins.  The elliptical, on the other hand, is just legs moving up and down.  There's not alot of jostling or pressing of innards.   It's rare to be surprised by freedom-seeking effluvium while on the elliptical. 

So, tonight, while I was inhaling stale cigarette smoke I felt no compunction to keep my gases in control.  I pumped my legs.  I sweat.  I stared straight ahead and yes, I did.  My silent mephitic gift to him.  My only regret is knowing Mr. Lucky Strike probably didn't even notice over the smell of his own cigarette smoke.◦

Unleaded or Regular?

Distraction is the name of the game

You know how in your head you know something is going to happen but in your heart you don't really believe it will?  Saturday was kind of like that.  Even as we helped Abby lug into the airport her two suitcases weighing a total of 3,219 pounds, a carry-on weighing 562 pounds, and a laptop bag weighing a mere 95 pounds (are you okay, Jorge?  no suitcase hefting injuries?) I couldn't quite get my head around the fact that she was really and truly going to be leaving and living in Ecuador.  I'm kinda thinkin' Dean had the same feeling because Friday night after dinner on our way to the airport hotel, when he and Abby couldn't agree on how many miles it was to the tollway exit, he challenged her to a bet with the stakes being you lose, you don't go.  Dr. Stilwell enlisted scientific reasoning and determined not to take him up on it.  She didn't have to stay behind, but she did have to admit to her father that she would have lost.

The pain of saying goodbye was as hard as I imagined it to be.  Walking into an empty house and bedroom was as hard as I thought it would be.  The tears I knew would flow, did flow but my face wasn't covered in snot not at the airport anyway so that was good.   We stretched out the misery of the moment as long as possible.  We tortured ourselves with watching Abby through the whole security process.  Yup, we ran up the escalator so we could get shots of her from above as she began snaking her way through security.

See her with the red bag?

Then we ran down the escalator so we could take photos of her partway through the security line. 

And as she worked her way closer to the final end of the line, we worked ourselves along the wall separating her from us, taking more pictures until that glass wall became a solid wall and ended our photo session.

There she is.......see her.........see the wall......to the right........?  we're over there........watching.....taking this picture.

We are all home now and adjusting in our own way and at our own pace.  Dean chose to distract himself by using some of the 815 hangers Abby left behind to reorganize his shirts.  They are now color-coded.  Green hangers for office shirts, white hangers for dress shirts, blue hangers for work-around-the-house shirts.  I plan to distract myself by looking into therapy options for him when he discovers I've placed his freshly ironed shirts on the wrong color of hanger.

One of us woke up this morning to the sounds of so many birds singing she thought she was in a forest and then walked outside her house and picked a starfruit for breakfast.   It wasn't me.

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Distraction is the name of the game

How many tears can the body produce?

It's the 24-hour countdown.  As I type this Abby is having breakfast with her dad and then will be going to say goodbye to her sister, nieces and nephew.  One of the many goodbyes she's been saying recently, but this will be a hard one.   The tears will flow and even though the kids won't really understand why, they will cry too because everyone else is.

Her bags are packed, ready and waiting.  I am waiting but not ready.

I stood in her bedroom inhaling her perfume and absorbing aura of the room, hoping that when I walk into it again, walk into a room empty of all the things that have filled it for the past two weeks, it will be less painful.  But really, I know that I will be crying when I pull off the sheets, crying when I vacuum the floor, crying as I dust the windowsills, because I am crying as I type this.

There are piles of stuff all over the house that Abby wants us to store or donate or keep, depending upon what it is.  Life before and since Christmas has been busy and chaotic and fun which meant that the piles that I should have looked through just got moved from one spot to another as the need for space arose.  I am hoping that I will be able to distract myself once we come home from the airport by finally sorting through, putting away, donating, getting rid of all those piles.  What am I thinking?  How is looking through things Abby had to decide she could not bring with her, but are/were part of her life going to distract me?  Duh.

I thought I could write a light-hearted post about this whole last day thing but it turns out I can't.  I'm sad and I don't care who knows it.  But I know a week from today, or maybe even a couple of days from now I'll be better.  I know that I have it easy.  Staying in contact is so much easier and instantaneous than when I moved away and long-distance phone calls were expensive and a luxury and a hand-written letter once a week was the best way to keep in touch.  I know that when Abby walks through the airport to the waiting arms of Jorge she will be fine.  It doesn't matter where you are.  It matters who you are with.  And even if we aren't together physically, we are together in our hearts........and on Skype........and e-mail................and phone calls with cheap (cheap being a relative term) international phone cards. 

I promise the next post will be happy.....ier..........not totally sad...........less sad.......................or maybe the post after that........................◦

How many tears can the body produce?

The Next Stage...

On New Years Day in 1979 Dean and I pulled out of Lincoln with our first-born, 3-week old daughter securely strapped in her car seat in the back of our 1976 Datsun B-210.  A moving van had departed days earlier for Denver with all of our worldly possessions.  I left with tears in my eyes but full of anticipation for the beginning of the next stage of our life.  31 years later on New Years Day, Dean and I once again pulled out of Lincoln.   This time we were a caravan of a Budget truck, a Honda Accord and our youngest 29-year old doctor daughter securely strapped in the seatbelt of her our yippee! Subaru. 

We drove 9 1/2 hours to Lincoln, arriving at 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, picked up a Budget truck, loaded it and two cars, and departed a mere 18 hours later for another 9 1/2 hour drive to Casper.  The down side was we had to carry all the worldly possessions Abby had chosen to take with her to Ecuador, store at our house, or bequeath to us or her sister, through a path dug into 15 inches of snow, with temps ranging from 9 to 15 degrees.  The up side was that I was too exhausted to even consider shedding a tear or two when we pulled away for the trip to Casper.  A few of those tears came later, after hours of total boredom on the interstate, when my mind began wandering over the memories of the past 5 1/2 years and the knowledge that a new and exciting part of Abby's life is beginning.  A part in which I will play a much smaller part.

So far my emotions range from one extreme to the other and they literally change from moment to moment.  One minute I am totally fine with this whole move and feel completely confident I will be able to smile and say goodbye to Abby (on Saturday, January 16 at 7 a.m.) in front of hundreds of weary travellers at the security line in Denver.  Then out of the blue, in the next moment, my throat aches, tears threaten to spill over and sometimes do and I am positive I will never, never, never, ever be able to say goodbye to Abby.  Hundreds of weary travellers are going to be distracted during their wait at the security line by watching a sobbing, blubbering, snot-covered woman being dragged away by a bald and bearded man shaking his head and pretending like he doesn't really know her.  Bets anyone?

Now begins the work of sorting and divvying up precious possessions.

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The Next Stage...