There are 263 items in my email inbox, not counting those items which are linked together in one long Conga-line. My head aches because I need to eat and imbibe some caffeine. I haven’t even considered the urgency of the laundry pile. The Crock-Pot is full of shredded roast beef, but no sauce. The younger children are home from school already–the first of many half-days–but the teenagers didn’t drag their bodies from bed until after 11:00 a.m., so they are in the thick of schoolwork.

I have a cluttery pile of stuff near my desk, writing materials, items I’ve reviewed, a mini-library of diet books, old magazines, a “Tammy’s Family” doll from the 1950s or 1960s that someone gave my daughter at a garage sale, a couple of leather bags, and a few random toys . . . and I should deal with all this. I should also put all the sheet music back into the piano bench which I repaired a month or two ago. And I should hang up the curtain rods and new curtains in the kids’ bedrooms upstairs. (This will involve a power drill and a level and I can’t bear the thought today.)

On Saturday, I must attend a baby shower. Sunday is church, plus a funeral in the late afternoon.

At the moment, all these competing demands on my time and attention blast me like a fire hose. Run! Run away!

I drove over the mountain pass yesterday.  I very rarely leave the Puget Sound and venture into the drier half of our state.  In fact, I’ve visited Eastern Washington only a handful of times in my whole life.   And I grew up in Western Washington, mere hours from Eastern Washington.  Anyway, why would I venture three hours from my home?  Why, to visit my friends Ann and Shelly, the girls I hung out with in high school.

The Memory Keeper’s Daughter divx

I last saw Shelly about 15 years ago.  I saw Ann ten years ago.

We met at Shelly’s house in Yakima in the early afternoon.  We stopped talking long enough to drive to a Mexican restaurant, where we resumed our conversation.  Then we drove back to her house where we chatted until 1:00 a.m.

By 9:30 a.m., we were talking again while eating breakfast, then continuing our discussion as we ate lunch at Applebee’s and shopped.  (Clearance racks, of course.  I bought a pair of black linen pants for $15.  They were originally priced $129.)  We talked our way through each store until I noticed it was already 4:00 p.m., time to think about going home.

I drove fast, singing along to Chicago’s Greatest Hits some of the time.

Three hours later, back home, I was shocked at the amount of laundry piled up.  I can’t stop yawning now.

I rarely see people who knew me when I was growing up, so it was delightful to share stories without having to explain the whole background.  These women knew me when I was thirteen years old, when I was fourteen, when I was seventeen and wondering what to do with my life.  Picking up the decades-old conversation where we left off was so satisfying.  The decades of near silence were nothing more than a comma in the paragraph of our lives.  I love that we are all happily married, doing well despite the normal human struggles everyone has.  We laughed a lot, nodded a lot, understood deeply.
I told them we’ll have to do it again in fifteen years.  Or maybe sooner.  (We will be almost 60 then, which blows my mind.)

Meanwhile, laundry beckons.

Today, my daughter walked into my room wearing a short-sleeved shirt (a “short-shirt”, according to her) and jeans.  She points to her shirt and demands, “Why did you put a short shirt in my long shirt drawer?”

Last week, we put a new dresser in her room and I explained where all the clothes would go.  Long sleeved shirts and long pants in separate drawers and short-sleeved shirts and shorts in another dresser altogether.

My boys have never, not once in their life, even noticed what clothes belong where.  But my daughter knows and cares.

This warms my heart.

I contemplated calling my walking partner this morning at 6:17 a.m. I dialed her number in my head and rehearsed the words, “I just can’t walk today. I’ve got to sleep.” And yet, a miracle propelled me out of bed at 6:19 a.m. I threw back the covers, stood and felt around in the gloom for my walking clothes. My daughter woke up as I was brushing my teeth and with great distress informed me, “I don’t want you to exercise!” and I said, “Yeah, well, I don’t have time to argue. Go get into my bed.”

Once I’m awake and in motion, I’m fine, although I did consider today that my life has been a long struggle to simply get enough sleep. I’m a night-owl who has always had early morning obligations. I returned home after walking, fixed my 9-year old’s school lunch, ate some oatmeal and showered in preparation for the arrival of the kindergarten boy. He’s supposed to arrive at 9 a.m. and at 8:40 a.m., his mother called to let me know he wasn’t coming.

And I did what any sane person who slept only five hours the night before would do: with a towel still like a turban on my wet hair, I laid down on the bed and slept in fits and starts until 10:00 a.m. (Interruptions: turning off daughter’s shower, opening a packaged Rice Krispie treat, hearing odd news-stories on the television, noticing boys coming upstairs to shower, thinking that I must get up . . . ).

* * *

I started this post hours ago . . . life interfered and now I’m heading to bed, after midnight . . . and I’ll have to talk myself into getting up again when the alarm rings in only six hours . . .

By the way, I must say that the high-school version of online school makes me want to stab myself with my red pencil. We just started on Monday. I’m doing my best to hide my hatred of the set-up.

Carrien, from She Laughs at the Days.

Here was her comment:

I read about the stroller giveaway the other day, and then I clicked on without thinking about it. I have a double jogging stroller that we affectionately call my car, (because I don’t actually have a car) I take it everywhere, I have patched gigantic holes in the seats with upholstery thread, I have used it to carry home 25 lbs of gravel for potted plants, and soil and groceries. MY children rode in it when we lived in Vancouver and walked everywhere as well. I have happy memories of hauling that thing up steep hills from the beach, convincing them that they needed to get out and walk the hills, and getting the Girl to fall asleep.

It’s a gigantic beast of a thing, I doesn’t fit through many single shop doors and I have to actually slide the side wheel off, hold it up with my shoulder and tilt it to get through the door and then slide the wheel back on, and then repeat when I leave the store, which is irritating, but I’ve been doing it so long that I barely notice and for our immediately close to home needs it’s quite adequate.

So why am I back to leave a comment?
Well, yesterday I took the bus, with my three children, my getting very heavy 8 month old strapped to me and three bags with everything we would need for our day. It got really heavy, really fast. There are many great places that I could take my children to this year that are too far to walk, but a relatively short bus ride away. Places like the beach, and lakes, and rivers and outdoor sanctuaries that are just outside of our concrete walking radius, or even to the library when it rains. Honestly, though, I’m not likely to do it without a stroller because of how it’s beginning to hurt to carry the Baby around and she’s only getting heavier.

I started fantasizing about the beautiful single stroller that I gave away before we left Canada to a single mom and her kids and kind of wishing I still had it, and then I remembered your giveaway, so here I am.

I can’t take the stroller I have on the bus, it’s way to big. The one you are giving away though would fit, and it looks sturdy enough to withstand many adventures.

This homeschooling year is likely to be much more interactive if we could have something cool like that so I am here giving it a shot.

Congratulations, Carrien!  Email me your address so I can give it to the Chicco folks.  Your stroller will be mailed directly to your house.

As for everyone else who entered, I’m sorry you couldn’t all have won!  Thank you for entering my contest and don’t forget to enter the Chicco contest at their website.

Sometime today (between taking the boys to P.E. at the YMCA, babysitting a kindergartener, watching a one-year old, going to the store for laundry detergent and a candy bar for my daughter, taking the kindergartener to school, and driving afternoon carpool) I will narrow down the entrants to five and then conduct a random drawing for the winner.

I promise to have this done by midnight today!  (Pacific Standard Time!)

Stuart Little 2 film

So, the suspense continues.  Meanwhile, go over and enter the drawing at the Chicco website.

I’ve been gone. I left Friday afternoon and spend a night at a women’s conference out in the middle of nowhere. I slept in a room with four women, but had the not-so-bright, yet effective idea, to stay awake very late so I would be able to fall asleep. I am notorious for being unable to sleep in unfamiliar places. As it turned out, I stayed up chatting with a few other women until 3:00 a.m. and had no problem falling into an exhausted, dreamless sleep.

And I woke up at 7:00 a.m. to walk with a woman who runs marathons for fun. Then, I walked out of a morning session at 10:00 a.m. to return to my room to nap. I had been sitting in the meeting fantasizing about crawling onto the floor to snooze. (George Costanza sleeping under his desk . . . remember that? That was me, in my wakeful dreams.)

I am still utterly exhausted, but have to say that I haven’t enjoyed listening to a speaker so much in a very long time. Cynthia Ulrich Tobias was the keynote speaker and she delivered her message with such a funny, deadpan style that I laughed and laughed. She has some really interesting information on her website about learning styles, among other things. I am going to use the information as the school year begins for my twins, and hopefully I will not drive them as crazy as they drive me. (We are such different people, with opposite learning styles, opposite ways of dealing with the world.)

[As I write this, squinting at my computer screen, one of my 14-year olds came out to report to me that his twin brother mistakenly put dishwashing liquid into my high-efficiency washing machine . . . and suds are now pouring out of the machine. Honestly, parenting is like being stuck in a rip tide, always swimming, but never getting any closer to shore.]

More tomorrow, unless I die from fatigue.

Mary Winkler shot her minister husband dead while he slept.  Now, she’s free.  (I wrote about this a few months ago The Wanderers ipod .)
This causes my husband, the minister, some alarm.

(Okay, just kidding about that part.)  Still, I am shocked at our legal system, really.

Last year, I wrote about a victim of the 9/11 attacks.  I remembered Thomas Kuveikis.  I still remember him.  I will never forget.

So, where was I?  Oh yes, I was telling you about my water-spurting heat-pump.

The repairman returned yesterday to fix the problem.  Obviously, the drain is not draining.  I suspected a clog somewhere in the line.  The repairman’s solution to this problem was to jam a plug of silicone into the overflow drain hole.  (He couldn’t find a clog anywhere.)  I said, “Well, what happens now if the drain is clogged and the water overflows?”  “Oh,” he said, “The water will just flow out from all sides of the unit,” as if that would somehow be better.

Okay, though.  His solution made no sense, but I foolishly accepted his shaky explanation that the water came out of the overflow hole because it shouldn’t have been an open hole anyway (it has been open for 9 years, however and I’ve never had this problem) and how in most homes, it’s capped off.

Did I mention that my husband came home and switched vehicles because an indicator light came on in the van?  After paging through the manual, I discovered that a tire is under-inflated.  Minor in the scheme of things, but annoying nonetheless.

I did not want to go to the pool yesterday . . . I feel like there is so much I need to do around house (housework, for instance, or cooking dinner) and how can I do that while sitting at the pool?  But a mom called me and asked if my kids were going and they wanted to go and so I took them so they could play with her kids.  Because I’m nice like that.
We came home to discover my new vacuum had arrived.  (Ordered through Amazon with gift certificates and free shipping!)  I was so thrilled that I set about vacuuming immediately.  I was just finishing up when I looked up at the ceiling in the family room and said to myself, “Self, that spot sure looks weird.  I wonder if it’s wet?”  Then, I stood on the child-sized rocker, pressed on the spot and punched a three-inch hole into the ceiling with my fingers.  Yes, it was wet.

My husband walked in and I escorted him over to see the hole in the ceiling.  Lucky for us, we have friends who can cope with these sorts of situations, so he called Mark.  Soon, I was answering Mark’s questions.  He told me, “Have your husband cut a hole from ceiling joist to ceiling joist,” and I had to interrupt to inform him that not only do we not have a saw, we don’t know what a ceiling joist is.

He sent over his capable, twentysomething son to cut a hole in my ceiling.  Josh felt around and said it felt like the drain pipe from the shower was dripping.  I said, “Is that a job for a plumber?” with dread because I remember the last time the plumber came (bye-bye four hundred and fifty dollars), but Josh said, “No, it’s probably a dad job.”

So, fine.  Not really, but what can you do?

Fast-forward an hour or two and I’m riding my exercise bike.  “Mom!” a voice calls from downstairs.

“WHAT?!” I say.

“Mom, you’ve got to see this!”

“See what?” I say.

“Water is coming out from the radiator.”  (That makes me laugh that he calls it a “radiator” because I have no idea where he got that term.)
I run downstairs, find a waterfall cascading from all sides of my heat pump.  I rush to the laundry room to find a towel, but of course, for once, I have finished washing, drying and putting away all the towels and so none are handy.  I grab for old cloth diapers, yell at the kids to find towels, and panic, but only a little.  I realize that the stupid little silicone plug needs to come out so the water can drain from one place, not from all over.  I dig it out with my fingertips and water shoots out as if I’d turned on the tap.  I call for a container while grabbing two glasses sitting on a nearby coffee-table.  (All this excitement is happening in the twin boys’ room, which is in the space that used to be a garage years and years ago.)

My son returns with a big Rubbermaid container and the water is now contained.

Except for the big puddle on the floor, which has yet again seeped into the carpet.

Let’s review:

1)  Flooding heat pump with mysterious clog lurking in its bowels.

2)  Hole in ceiling caused by leaking shower.

3)  Screaming 4-year old.

4)  Indicator light on in van.

It could be worse.  So I’m not complaining, mind you.  I’m just enumerating.