Since you were last here:

1)  My four children had early morning dental appointments.  One had a cavity.
2)  A guy came and installed new laminate counter-tops in my kitchen and master bathroom and new vinyl in my laundry room and adjoining bathroom.  He arrived at 8 a.m. two separate mornings.
3)  I painted the laundry room and adjoining bathroom (midnight to 3 a.m. . . . I vow to never paint again.)
4)  I participated in two telephone conference calls with my company.
5)  I worked my regular forty hours.
6)  I had a temporary crown installed in my jaw.  Ouch and ouch and ouch again.
7)  My hair colorist had mercy on me and colored the uppermost portion of my hair so I have no obvious roots.
8)  My husband arrived home for three days!

Tomorrow?  I am leaving my house at 5 a.m. (that is four hours and twenty minutes from now) to catch a 7:30 a.m. flight to New York where I have a work meeting and then will attend the company Christmas party.  I know.  I am very fancy.  Well, not really.  But I will be in Manhattan on business anyway.

While I’m gone my husband will be here.  You’ll recall he’s already working in Southern California.  This is the first time he’s been “home” since October.  It was nice to see him for awhile and to hear him snore while I worked.

And now I’m going to bed to get a hoped-for solid four hours of sleep.

Okay, look.  I had quite a busy weekend visiting my husband and our new church in California.  I wanted to tell you all about it.

But I can’t because it’s 1:30 a.m. and I just finished working and I’m exhausted and at 8 a.m. a guy is going to arrive to install new countertops and at 8:30 a.m. two of my kids have to be at the dentist and then I have to take one of them to school (and bring the other home) and then at 11:00 a.m. I have an important work-related telephone conference and I just don’t time to tell you all about it.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll have time.

Don’t hold your breath.

What did you do last weekend?

It’s a strange thing to wake up every morning and do ordinary things when life has become unmoored.

My husband has been living in another state for almost two months now.  We saw him a week and a half ago and we’ll see him again very soon, but it’s still utterly strange.  I’ve lived with him longer than anyone else in the world and it’s odd to be apart.  (I miss him, even though it’s so easy to make the bed in the mornings without him untucking and flinging the covers everywhere while sleeping.)

The next time I put up a Christmas tree, it will be in a different house in a different state. I’m now marking time by packing away things we won’t need again until next time this year.  Yet, this certainty is draped with uncertainty because we have no idea where exactly we’ll be living.

In the meantime, it’s like we’re still here but not really . . . and yet, we haven’t gone anywhere at all.

We are living in the space between our past and our future.

If you really think about it, though, we are all living in that in between space.  We just don’t recognize it in the clutter and noise of daily life.  So I suppose I should be grateful for this awareness.

As I drove down the rainy street today, I thought about how much I will miss the Douglas firs and the emerald green of our wet climate.

I’m trying to live in the moment.  I really am.  It’s just that I find the moment so fleeting and elusive.

And I hate not knowing exactly what my future looks like.  I guess I’ll know soon enough.

For now, though, I am going to try to be here, heart and soul, in the moment.

So, yesterday I cooked the whole Thanksgiving dinner.  I used to think it was a semi-big deal to cook Thanksgiving dinner, but now I know how to make gravy from scratch and mash potatoes without asking the nearest woman for instructions.

I made pies the night before (pumpkin, pecan and peanut butter chocolate).  I even made the pie crust from scratch.  Be very impressed.  (Not really.)

My mom came over and we six sat at the table and before I knew it, the youngest boy ate and fled to his video games and eventually, my mom and I and my daughter sat at the cleared-off table and looked through the Black Friday ads.  Grace circled things she really, really, really wanted from Kmart.  I never, ever shop at Kmart, though.  I hate Kmart.

I had to work today but between shifts Grace and I dragged out the Christmas decorations, unpacked the pre-lit tree and like magic, the tree was up.  I love that tree.

I ran out of energy before every decoration was put in its place but we made good progress.  I’m glad because that means tomorrow it will be a fairly easy task.

The snow melted . . . hooray.  I never thought I’d be so happy to see forty degree temperatures and rain.

And now, the weekend begins.  Hooray.

Friday afternoon, the kids and I flew to Houston to meet up with my husband and visit his family.  We celebrated an early Thanksgiving with his extended family.  My daughter spent her entire time in Texas running around with second cousins she never knew she had–literally running in the yard–and playing football (I heard she caught a pass and made a touchdown) and jumping on a trampoline.  She completely forgot that she  meant to be afraid of running into a rattlesnake.  (Her grandpa informed me that she was never in danger of running into a rattlesnake since rattlesnakes are mostly in west Texas . . . then he said something about copperheads and I thought to myself, “la la la, I can’t hear you . . . .”)

My boys hung out with distant cousins, playing guitars and joking around.

I helped out in the kitchen and chatted with various womenfolk.

So, we arrived in Texas at 10 p.m. on Friday night.
Did the whole Thanksgiving dinner with extended family on Saturday.
Flew home on Sunday afternoon.

We left Texan temperatures in the seventies, maybe eighties . . . and returned to Seattle where snow had fallen.  Fortunately, the hour drive home was uneventful.  Snow had fallen earlier in the day but the roads were only wet, not frozen.  We were home by 7:30 p.m.

Today, school’s began on time but the early-morning phone call from the district told us that the kids would only attend for half the day.  The roads were a little snowy at 9 a.m. when I drove my daughter to school.  An hour later, as I drove to the dentist, I realized how much worse things had gotten.  Heavy snow was falling.

While sitting in the dental chair, we watched a truck get stuck going uphill.  Not a good sign.

Scary.

But after I finished having my gums poked with sharp metal instruments and my teeth scraped, I bravely climbed into my mini-van and sped up the hills with determination and enough speed to carry me up hill.  I returned home without sliding off the road.

Tonight, as I watched the news coverage of the nightmarish road conditions, I became so thankful our drive home on the freeway last night was so carefree.

Tonight, cars stood on that very same stretch of road for hours in the dark, stranded on the streets of pure ice.  Semi-trucks were jack-knifed, a car caught on fire and a city bus in Tacoma careened out of control and hit a building, ending up rolled over on its side.

I’m so happy to be in my warm home, so grateful that our electricity is still on.  The winds are blowing hard tonight and the temperatures have dropped into the teens.  The high temperature tomorrow is predicted to reach 28 degrees.

Now if I could just recover from the exhaustion of spending nine hours in an airplane and five hours in airports, I’d be all set.

Our weekend promises to be very busy.  In fact, so busy that we’re going to start it tomorrow instead of Saturday.

I’ll tell you all about it after it’s over.

Today, I refrained from crawling back under the covers and instead, went to Macy’s.  They were having their One-Day Sale, which they have pretty much every other week, but I was lured by the idea of bargains and boots.  I did not find boots, but I found bargains.  Just in case you were wondering.

Tomorrow, I need to resist the urge to crawl back under the covers because I have a small load of stuff to drop off at Value Village.  Then I plan to deliver a shelf-thing to a friend who has agreed to accept it.  I just have too much stuff and a really busy weekend planned.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, an American Girl catalog came in the mail and instead of throwing it away as I have every other time it appeared, I offered to 8-year old Grace.  She spent the rest of  the afternoon and the entire evening studying the pages, marking up the most important things with check marks and circles and noting on other things, “whatever you think.”  Once she saw the Bitty Babies, she decided she’d rather have one of those instead of an American Girl doll.  She loves, loves, loves babies, just as I did at her age.

Tonight, I ordered a toilet and a kitchen sink.

Tomorrow, my three boys are getting haircuts.  Trims, really.  They are all long-haired and not parent-approved.

I really need to make dental appointments and an eye-doctor appointment.  Maybe I will remember to do so tomorrow.

The forecast calls for possible snow.

The skies are dark by 5 p.m.

Thanksgiving is next week.  NEXT WEEK!

That is all.

You would not believe the wreckage that is my family room.

This happened, apparently, while I was busy removing all the magnets from my refrigerator and cleaning out my junk drawer and delivering boxes to the storage unit.

Also?  If this feeling in my head is another cold, I will be so mad because Friday I am flying to Texas with my children to visit my in-laws (and my husband who is flying in to meet us).

That is all.

So, I’m working tonight and my twelve-year old come rushing past, muttering something about the toilet overflowing.  “I need towels!”

I said, “Wait.  The toilet is overflowing?  What does that mean?  The water is still rising?  Or . . . ?”

“The water is rising!” he said rather frantically.

I ran upstairs to find water flowing over the toilet bowl.  I splashed across the floor–vinyl now, rather than carpet–and plunged the toilet until the water stopped gushing.

My son appeared with pool towels and every bath towel in the house and I threw the towels into the puddle, the pond, the lake that had formed in the bathroom.

So.  That was fun.

At least the ceiling hasn’t yet been fixed from the last time we had a catastrophic water emergency.

I’ve lost my stickiness.

I’m like a sticker that has been stuck on and pulled off and then covered with lint.  No longer sticky.

*

I feel so unmoored, so disconnected from anything solid.

What is disheartening is that as I’m drifting to the horizon, no one seems to notice that I’m floating away.

*

In other news, today I assembled a desk, yelled at my kids, ate more than one candy bar, took a nap, worked eight hours, and considered crying but found I didn’t have the energy to do so.

Tomorrow is another day.