One of the best parts of living here is that we can leave our house at 6:15 p.m. and spend half an hour at the beach while the sun sets.

Way back in the day when I had a one year old baby I used to write in this blog every single day.  Sometimes twice a day, as a matter of fact.

And now?  That baby turned 9 years old (last Friday) and I can’t seem to spare fifteen or twenty minutes to type 100 wpm which makes exactly, um, 1,500 words.  Right?  I mean, I ought to be able to sum up my life in a thousand words a day, more or less, as my blog header promises.  Or used to promise.  I can’t remember.

This morning after Grace woke me at 9:23 a.m. with the news that the fountain in our back yard was not working, I dragged myself from bed, threw on my bathrobe and went into the back yard to investigate.

The ground was squishy which was strange.  It rained last night which was even stranger.

The fountain had stopped flowing.  The water should have been cascading from three pools into the bottom reservoir, but nothing was happening, other than a faint humming sound.  I stood looking at the greenish water–apparently I need to add something to the water to prevent algae?–and decided to add some water.

I turned on the faucet and used the hose to fill up the bottom reservoir, but the fountain did not flow.

I puzzled over this.  The humming sound drew my attention again and I lifted up the pump and realized that the day before I must have caused it to come loose from the connection–so the water stopped pumping and partially drained out.

So I reconnected that.

Then the water began to flow into the upper pools and it was then that I saw the floppy dead body of a kind of large lizard bobbing in the left hand pool.

And to think that just the day before I swept my fingers through the murky fountain water in search of floating leaves and debris.

At some point, the scary dead lizard paused at the lip of the pool, ready to plunge into the main reservoir.  The idea freaked me out for no logical reason at all and I sprayed it back where it disappeared back into the murk.

I never saw it again.

But I know that somewhere in that fountain a dead lizard circulates. It’s as long as my hand, skinny and speckled from what I could tell.

A more grown up homeowner would have just . . . snatched it up with her bare hands and flung it over the fence where the dead-lizard-eating animals would eat it?

In other news, I survived the first five days of September.  This is noteworthy because I managed to stack up a bunch of things in the first part of the month.  I had a devotional writing assignment due on September 1.  Not a big deal, really, but I should have started writing long before I did so I wouldn’t have had to stay up until 2:30 a.m. completing that task.

Then my daughter’s birthday arrived on Friday . . . but not before we had a meeting with her charter-school teacher.  We went to the meeting, then to lunch, followed by C0ld Stone Creamery . . . followed by a really fast trip to Costco where we bought hamburger and buns and condiments and a birthday cake for the surprise birthday party that night.  (All that running around and I was at my desk ready for work at 1 p.m.)

We planned the party very last  minute because we are pathetic and also, over-scheduled and too busy and losers.  And when I say “we”, I mean “me.”

But it turned out fine and everyone had fun.  The stress of getting ready for the 6 p.m. party after I finished working at 5 p.m. was multiplied times 100 because as I was in the kitchen Grace said, “Hey, I see ants under the sink!’ and sure enough, I looked under the sink and found a convention of ants meeting in the trash cans with a column of ants leading to the corner of the cupboard.

Outside, I could see a scary swath of ants on a coordinated march into my kitchen trash.  I sprayed them all with pesticide and expect that we’ll be dead by next Tuesday from poisoning.  But what’s a girl to do?  Share the kitchen with ants?

So the party began and ended. And I survived even though my hair looked hideous.

Sunday we went to Legoland to continue the birthday celebration.

And now another week has started.  My calendar is filled with arrows and scrawled handwriting but at least I don’t have to think about any more birthdays until February.  I just wish I didn’t know that there’s a dead lizard in my fountain.

Between work shifts, I drove Grace down to the beach.  I went to watch the sunset.  She went to jump in and over and through and under the waves.

For awhile, a seagull stood near me facing the waves, apparently watching alongside me.

If we looked south, clouds.

But to the right, we watched the sun slide slowly toward the horizon as the sky turned from blue to orange to pink to blue-gray.

When I say “we”, I mean the seagull and me.

Grace was too busy welcoming every foamy wave that came to shore.

A family arrived at the beach shortly before sunset: three little girls in dresses.

“Can we get wet?” the oldest one asked.

I never heard the answer, but soon two of the three girls were frolicking in the waves.  (The littlest one, just barely toddling was tended by grandma who kept her out of the surf.)  Their little sun-dresses were drenched in salt water and their giggles filled the air.  Mom photographed the entire event with a fancy camera with a big lens.  It looked like they were on vacation.

I was kind of jealous because I am not on vacation.  But I do live near the beach.  Sort of.

And then, a dolphin leaped out of the water, just beyond the waves.

I tried to get a shot of it jumping from waves to air, but missed every time.  And then it was gone.

The sun sunk lower, disappeared over the horizon. The sky brightened to a pink, then faded.

I motioned for Grace to come out of the waves.

It was a lovely hour, that hour before dark.

And then we came home.

So tonight I went to get my son’s water-bottle from his backpack so I could fill it and freeze it for after-school football practice tomorrow.

Guess what I found?

Ants?  No.

Spiders?  No.

A thank-you note?  No.

Damp math workbooks?  Why, yes, yes, indeed!

And not just one, but two of them with the bottom corner of every page dampened with water.  And they were brand new.

Luckily for us, I happened to have paper towels–a rare occurrence around here–and I painstakingly placed an absorbent strip of paper towel between each page so that they will dry without sticking together.

Some nights I’m afraid to go to sleep for fear of what I will encounter the next day.

Because, what’s next?  A plague of frogs?  Lice?  A whole lot of flies?

I was working last night and headed toward the kitchen for a drink of water.  I detoured through the living room to grab 13-year old Zach’s lunchbox so I could leave it in the kitchen.  I’m forever doing that . . . moving items in small increments toward their ultimate destinations.

Standing in the darkened living room, I pulled the lunchbox from his backpack.  Curious to see if he’d eaten his whole lunch, I unzipped the lunchbox and found a swarm of teeny tiny ants.

I believe I yelled.  I know that I raced through the house with the buggy lunchbox.  I was heading to the kitchen, then realized that was a bad idea and instead I went out the back door.

I dropped the lunchbox on the patio as far from the house as possible.

Then I grabbed the plastic containers that had held his sandwich and cantaloupe.  They were both dotted with teeny tiny ants, moving in their aimless busy paths.

I washed the ants down the drain with soap and hot water while smashing as many with my fingers as I could.

Immediate crisis over, I realized I should check the backpack and there I found more teeny tiny ants.

I checked his cleats.  More teeny tiny ants.

Teeny tiny ants on the living room chair where I’d rested the backpack.

Teeny tiny ants on the kitchen floor where I emptied the backpack.

Teeny tiny ants here, there and everywhere.

I knelt on the tile floor and smashed ants with my bare fingers.  They were so teeny tiny that I couldn’t feel them.  (Later, however, I would feel phantom ants on my skin and itch all night long.)

After I’d smashed all the teeny tiny ants and assured myself that the ants were eliminated, I went upstairs to mention this to my son.

I told him to be sure to close the plastic containers after lunch so ants wouldn’t be attracted to his lunchbox.

He said maybe he shouldn’t have left his backpack containing his lunchbox on the ground near a trashcan during football practice.

I said please close the food containers when you’re done eating.

Then I scratched myself and wondered if I’d get teeny tiny ants in my granulated sugar.

Today he was ant-free.  But I’m still itchy and twitchy.

Tomorrow is my baby boy’s first day of school in a new school in this new city in this new state.  And I’m freaked out.

He’s 13 and he seems pretty unconcerned about school supplies and the dress code and about finding his way from class to class.  And I’m worried.

And why in the world are they starting on August 15?  It’s still summertime in my head.  It will be summertime in my head until Labor Day.

My baby boy won’t stop growing too fast and it makes me feel like I’m running after a bus which hasn’t noticed that I’m trying to get its attention.  (Did you ever miss a bus because you were just thirty seconds too late?)

I bought school supplies–random ones, because I had no supply list and also because I discovered I had twenty-four boxes of crayons when I was packing up and moving here–and managed to not buy any pencils (Ticonderogas only, please) because I thought I had boxes of them.  Which I probably do, but where?  Where are you, Pencils?  And why weren’t they on sale at Costco, as usual?

I did find two stray pencils which I tucked into his notebook.

The rest of the kids–75% of my kids–are not going to school tomorrow.  They are all going to be doing school at home–the twins have one last year of homeschool and Grace is enrolled at a charter school which allows her to do school at home four days a week.  (They’ll all start in a week.)

So,  it’s not like I”ll be lonely.  Or free.

But I’m full of anxiety about my baby boy’s first day of eighth grade in this strange land of palm trees and ocean breezes.

And now I’m going to make his lunch because I am most certainly not about to pay $5.25 per school lunch.

Oh dear.

I’m so busy.  My full-time job just got a little more full-time.  My son starts football practice on Monday.  Soccer practice for Grace will start up soon.

I’m trying to fit in some lunches and conversations to get to know a few people around here.  It’s tough to find the time.

The former owner of this house called and asked me if I could please return the modem to Cox Communications since he’s being charged for it still.  (There’s a different modem here I need to set up instead.)

My roses are being eaten by little green worms. I need to figure out how to fix this.

I guess things really aren’t going to slow down.  Ever.  At least that’s how it feels.

My husband was supposed to fly home from a conference in Cleveland last Friday.  The flight was delayed by three hours, so he missed his connecting flight in Houston.  We agreed that he should stay in Houston over the weekend to spend some time with his family.  And while he was gone, yesterday I:

• Took son to school for football equipment pick-up
• Took son and daughter to Old Navy to buy school clothes
• Dropped off a package at the UPS store
• Ate lunch with son and daughter at Rubio’s
• Dropped off son at home; daughter and I got back into the van and . . .
• Returned wrong-size jeans to Costco; shopped for necessary items like sourdough pretzels
• Located thrift store recommended by friend where we found a bunch of great stuff, including four kitchen chairs
• Tried and failed to locate Goodwill
• Headed back to Carlsbad to pick up son’s guitar from repair shop
• Discovered local Farmer’s Market; bought zucchini and corn
• Created and ate our own frozen yogurt sundaes

This could explain why I was so tired today . . . but despite that, we went to Sunday School this morning.  Then we came home and I took an accidental nap.

I finally unpacked and hung pictures in my house.

Then I took three out of four of my kids to the beach.  A lovely time was had by all . . . and we got to see our first lifeguard rescue at the beach by a lifeguard guy with a red rescue can.

We left before the sun set because I had to get to work.

And now you know . . . the rest of the story.  (Not really, but I suddenly heard Paul Harvey in my head.)

I was going to say something else, but I can’t remember what it was.

The end.

I wake up confused.  What time is it?  Why is it so bright in my room?

I can’t see the clock but the light seems as bright as the noon-day sun.  Is it noon?

I keep my eyes closed, reluctant as ever to get out of bed.  I have never been a fan of getting out of bed.  (Is that bad?)

Finally, I stretch over to reach my phone so I can see the time.  Sometimes it’s only 7:21 a.m.; other times it’s 9:23 a.m.  I can’t tell the difference.  I’m weary no matter the hour.

I’m in Southern California now and the sun sets earlier than in Seattle, but during the day, the sun shines with endless cheer.  It’s weird for a Pacific Northwest girl to have so much bright light all the time.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love it.  It’s just so different.

Yesterday, my daughter and I met a blogging friend (Carrien of She Laughs at the Days) at the park.  Carrien (pronounced “Careen” not “Carry-en” as I’ve been pronouncing it in my head for years) and her four adorable children was running late.  I had decided that she either chickened out or got lost or was simply running late.  After all, four kids, including  a baby.  Haven’t we all been there?

So, she arrived.  The children played and we chatted–it’s always kind of strange to meet a blogging friend in real life–they already know some of your stories and they remember things about you that you don’t remember yourself.  After exploring some trails, we all came back to my house to have lunch.  It was fun to have a house full of kids–eight kids between just the two of us.  Carrien herself was lovely and showed me on a map a bunch of important destinations:  good pizza, good thrift stores and the local YMCA.

In the late afternoon, my daughter and I took the twins to their first music lessons here.  After we delivered them to the music studios, we walked down the street to the Carlsbad Visitor Center where we picked up brochures.  Then we walked another block and served ourselves frozen yogurt with do-it-yourself toppings.  It felt like twenty minutes of vacation.  And then we had to pick up the boys.

We delivered them at home and picked up 13-year old Zach and returned to Carlsbad to go to the beach.  We drove up and down the shore and finally found a good parking spot.  We walked down a trail that looked like a gully created by a rushing flood of water and emerged on the beach.

The sun glowed low in the sky as we walked down to an empty spot of shore.  I stood up to my knees in the waves, watching the kids for awhile before deciding to boogie board, too.  Why not?  Life is too short and all that.

The kids were shocked, I think.  We had fun.  At some point, I abandoned the board and simply jumped in the waves as the sun sank lower and lower on the horizon.

We watched the last sliver of sun sink below the border of waves and sky.

“That was the first time I ever saw the sun set,” Zach said.

It will not be the last.  I love spending those last moment of light watching the sun glow and slide out of sight.

Goodnight, Sun.

So, as it turns out, when you move you carry along all the clutter that has accumulated in your head, all the slights and rejections and misunderstandings and hurts and unmet expectations.  And the unanswered questions.

But, of course, I can’t really discuss much of that here because it has come to my attention that the Internet is quite a bit less private that those spiral notebooks I used to fill with my youthful angst.

You know what else you can’t really discuss on a public blog?  Your kids, once they reach a particular age.  And if you are a mother who lives full-time with kids, what else are you to discuss?

Certainly not the teenager who will agree to go to the beach but who refuses to actually get out of the van.

Being a mother of older children is complicated.  Boy, isn’t that a nice sanitized way to putting it?  I love my kids and I would do anything for them–short of buying them a new video game–but some days I wonder if anything I’ve ever said or done has made any sort of positive impact on them.

For instance, even though I have asked approximately eight billion times, they still do not think to wash the pans they’ve used to cook macaroni and cheese.  I feel like a failure.

The other day, I discovered a broken piece of glass in the kitchen sink . . . but not the actual glass it broke from.  No one would confess, either, so I went outside to the trash can and SURE ENOUGH, I found the broken glass.  What?  I am the kind of mom that kids feel they must hide broken glasses from.  But really, I just want information.  Who broke it?  Why?  When?  How?  I do not want to mete punishment–accidents happen–but I want to know the details.  Is that too much to ask?

Do you know what I lost?  My paring knife.  It disappeared long before we moved but since we have moved and I have touched every single item in my household as I packed it, I know that it is gone.  How does that happen?

I’ll tell you how.  It happens when you live with kids.  At least blaming kids offsets the exasperation.

As it turns out, four weeks after leaving my house in Steilacoom, I have way too many boxes in the garage and stacks and stacks of unsorted and unorganized books in my office.  I haven’t hung anything on the walls yet so it seems like we’re living in someone else’s house, kind of.

But I have an office.  My very own office with a patio door and a television and a door I can close.  It’s pretty exciting considering I worked almost four years smack dab in the center of the family room.  Working at home is the best of all worlds but also the worst of all worlds.  Imagine working in an office with four kids and their friends traipsing through and playing electric guitars while you try to do your office job.

But the books everywhere?  And the four boxes on the floor?  And the empty walls?  All of it is making me kind of discouraged.

The moral of this lesson?

Wherever you go, there you are.  And so is your stuff.  And the mishmash of crazy in your head.

When “Super 8” opened on June 10, I wanted to see it.  But that was impossible since I was in the midst of working and keeping children alive and packing my household belongings.  (My calendar page from that week is covered in my stressed-out scrawl.)

Finally, a few days ago, I went to see the movie.

First of all, I had to find the movie theater.  Thanks to my iPhone app (Flixster), I located the theater and the time of the show.  Thanks to my GPS, I was able to find the theater.

To my great delight, the theater was blocks from the ocean and I had enough time to park and walk down to the beach and stroll down to end of the Oceanside pier.  The sun shone, the surfers surfed, the swimmers swam, the fishermen fished and I tried to observe it all and remind myself that I was not on vacation but a resident of this idyllic place.  Sunshine!  Palm trees!  Sea breezes!

Then I walked back to the theater.

Ahead of me in line were four black-haired girls.  The ticket-seller said, “Harry Potter?” and they said, “Super 8.”  That was my first clue.

I bought my ticket and my popcorn and headed down the hallway.  I noticed the four black-haired girls in the theater–and no one else–and so I made my way to the upper row of seats, one down from the top.

As I sat and nibbled my popcorn while waiting for the show, more and more Asian kids came into the theater.  I realized that I was in the midst of a school group of some kind.  I listened to the chatter and counted the kids–a dozen or so–and waited some more.

Then a young woman (teenage girl?) came right up to me and said, “Hello?  May I sit next to you?” and I said, “Sure,” even though I was thinking NO NO NO, I came alone and I want to sit alone!

She sat down and said, “There is someone I do not want to sit by,” and I understood that so completely that I forgave her for invading my solitude.

My curiosity got the best of me and soon I leaned closer to her and said, “Are you all in a group together?” and she said, “Yes.”

As it turned out, I watched Super 8 in a small theater with forty Chinese exchange students who had been in the States for one week.  (I’ve never been in an audience which paid such close attention to the pre-preview commercials–they giggled at the Jennifer Lopez razor commercial and I was aghast at a commercial for a feminine hygiene product.)

Many of the boy students chattered in Chinese during the whole movie . . . which was oddly enough not distracting because I had no idea what they said.  More distracting was the fact that some of them pulled out Tupperware and silverware and ate the lunches they brought from home.

The movie was excellent.

My fellow movie-goers were entertaining.

All in all, two thumbs up.  I love the odd communal experience of watching movies with an audience and this particular experience did not disappoint.