This is my birthday month.  I’m turning forty-nine.  Does that sound old to you?  It sounds old to me even though I will insist that “old” people are at least eighty or ninety or maybe a hundred.  But mathematically, forty-nine is practically fifty and fifty is twenty years old than thirty and didn’t thirty seem like a grown-up age when you were thirty?  I’m old enough to have children who are doctors and lawyers and who have children of their own.  (Not that my own children do because they aren’t old enough for such things but mathematically, you know, it’s possible.)

I’m at the age where plain old eyeglasses are no longer adequate.  The eye doctor has set me up with progressive contact lenses.  This last time, he gave me a lens for my left eye that will help me see up close and a lens for the right that sees distances.  The issue is that I see blurry when I’m driving, especially at night.  And I’m the kind of person who will put a hand over one eye and then the next to figure out which eye is not working right.  So if you see a woman driving with one hand over her left eye, then one hand over her right, you’ll know why.  I’m trying to figure out which eye is making things blurry.

I can see up close perfectly fine without any lenses or glasses, so I’d rather see perfectly at a distance.  I can always  use reading glasses to undo what the contact lenses have done.  At night I take out my contacts and wear glasses for distances.  I take them off while I’m reading. I just really want to see the signs when I’m driving.  I don’t think that’s too much to ask.  It is, however, awfully complicated.

Yeah, so this is what it’s like being oldish.  You start talking about your ailments and frailties and it’s super boring for you whippersnappers.  But why are you reading an old lady blog anyway?  That’s the question.

I thought it would be fun to use this month to recall moments from days gone by.  I thought maybe I’d start today with my earliest memories and move forward through the years but as fate would have it, I spent all my time and space talking about my eyesight, so an actual story will have to wait until tomorrow.

Try to contain your enthusiasm.  At least I didn’t mention what happens at my advanced age when you cough.  Ha.  (Raise your hand if you know what I’m talking about.)

Now get to bed.  You need your beauty rest!  (Or if you’re reading this in the morning . . . Good morning, Merry Sunshine!  You look so dewy and well-rested this morning!)

I cannot tell you how tired I was today.

Sunday night, I slept a mere three hours and forty-five minutes before waking up early to take kids to Disneyland.  (I took my 11-year old, my 15-year old and his girlfriend.)

We stayed at the parks (Disneyland and California Adventure) for eleven hours.  Then I drove home (an hour!) and worked for four hours.

Today, I worked my regular shifts and drove three of my kids around. (School drop-off, school pick-up, work drop-off.)

I am just thankful that my husband took my daughter to soccer practice tonight so I could take a nap before work.

I have some iPhone photos of Disneyland . . . but I’m in a hurry to get to bed, so maybe tomorrow.

I do have to say that it was kind of weird to be warm at Disneyland (79 degrees at one point!) while the rest of the country is experiencing such freezing weather.  It was the last day of Christmas decorations at the parks, so it was also like turning back the calendar pages a couple of weeks . . . how fun and strange.

We’re heading to Disneyland tomorrow so I’m trying to get to bed quickly.  (So far, that’s a complete failure.)

I spent my weekend putting Christmas away and napping and watching my daughter play soccer while holding an umbrella to shield myself from the sun.  Supposedly it was sixty degrees but it felt warmer.  No breeze, just sunny blue skies.

I’ve also been working on laundry, but to keep the universe in balance, my kitchen is a wreck.

Here’s to balance.

I wanted to walk somewhere new (also somewhere without the hills that are in my neighborhood) so I volunteered to drive my son to work.  Then I continued on to the beach.

Unfortunately, low clouds obscured the sunset, but the gray sky and smooth ocean were beautiful anyway.  When I first arrived, I noticed dolphins cresting the surface of the water.

The tide was very low, so I crossed the sand to walk on the flat wet sand near the waves.

I took a few photos with my iPhone but they didn’t really capture the beauty of the scene.

I walked for an hour, returning to my car in the dark.  I stopped on the way home at Albertson’s to pick up some fresh French bread.

We ate homemade soup I’d cooked and put in the CrockPot before I left for my walk.

All day I’d planned for the soccer game in the morning but tonight when my daughter asked what color jersey she should wear, I looked up the information in an email from the coach and realized that the game is actually on Sunday morning, not tomorrow.  (I can’t tell you how often this sort of thing happens to me lately.)

And so, tomorrow I get to sleep in, unless you count the twenty minutes when I have to drive my son to work.  I plan to immediately return to bed after dropping him off because that’s how I roll.

Now, the question is . . . will I put away Christmas tomorrow and help my daughter rearrange her room (a complicated situation involving disassembling her twin beds and stashing them in the garage and then moving a daybed into her room–which will probably also have to be taken apart and then put back together) . . . or will I go to a movie?

Diligent Mel will have to convince Lazy Mel to do the right thing.  But Lazy Mel can be very convincing.

 

I really just want to go to bed but I feel obligated to write something here.

I thought about finding one of those fill-in-the-blank end of the year summary things.  Have you seen them?  But now I can’t even find one, let alone fill one out.

I thought about talking about my day but the most exciting thing I did was wash a million dishes and walk 10,000 steps.  (I have a broken dishwasher that an actual repairman told me it was pointless to have repaired since a new one will cost less than the repair would cost.  And I have a new Fitbit Flex, a pedometer that’s worn on the wrist like a watch.  It tracks my sleep and my steps and for all I know, my IQ points and how often I trade them in for something shiny.)

It pretty much comes down to talking about the weather but if you live anywhere but here, you probably don’t want to hear about 70 degrees and sunshine.  The only downside of being here now is that the sun sets so early that it’s tough to get to the beach at 4:45 PM to see it.  I know.  Who wants to hear about sandy beaches when your world is blanketed with snow?

Snow is pretty and there’s a part of me that remembers fondly the coziness of being inside while a storm ranged outside when we lived in northern Michigan.  But that part of me also got really sick of six months of snow-covered ground.

So, basically here’s how my day went:

1)  Wake up at 8 or 8:30 AM.  Doze until 9 AM.
2)  Shower and get to work (downstairs, while wearing slippers).
3)  Work until 3 PM, stopping only to pick up son from his job.
4)  Wash dishes while watching The People’s Court.
5)  Roast and eat cauliflower for dinner.  (My husband bought the boys teriyaki but my daughter and I ate cauliflower before soccer practice.)
6)  Take daughter to soccer practice and walk for an hour while she practiced.
7)  Return home.  Nap!
8)  Work.
9)  Wonder why I have nothing to blog about.
10)  The end.

Time to lure the dog upstairs with a bit of cheese and go to bed.

Please tell me I am not the most boring woman in America.

I never sit quietly.

If I’m sitting, I’m watching television or reading or fiddling with my phone (reading blogs or Facebook or crushing candy) or working.  If I’m not doing anything, I go to sleep.

I feel sorry for my poor brain.  She never gets a rest.  Even while my body is sleeping, my brain is concocting crazy dramas.

So this evening while I was just about finished making dinner but before the meatloaf was done baking, I decided to set my phone timer for five measly minutes.  I went outside and brushed the dog hair off the patio furniture and sat down to be still and quiet for five minutes.

About two minutes later, I remembered that I needed to get a dish out of the oven.

I went back into the kitchen, took the dish from the oven and then returned to the back yard.

Then I got a text.

I reset my phone for five more minutes.  I tried again to sit quietly.  I had to resist the urge to investigate the fountain.  It sounded clogged or like maybe it needed to have more water added.  I noticed that the lawn needs to be “pooper-scooped.”  I saw the flower pot on the table that needed to be trimmed.

I sat there.  Quiet.  Wondered if I should sit facing the other direction.

Three minutes later, I heard someone in the house calling my name.

I ignored it.

The timer rang.

I swiped my  hand across the clogged pump in the fountain, trimmed the plant in the pot and went to the kitchen to get some water for it.  Then I finished cooking dinner.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll see if I can sit quietly for six minutes.

I thought about trying to summarize 2013, but not tonight.

And as I sit here trying to think of what to say, I got a text from my 11-year old.  She’s spending the night at someone’s house, celebrating New Year’s Eve.  I am surprised she is still awake.  She asked me, “Please feed Annabelle and go in and say hi to her, could you?”  It’s 12:55 AM but she is thinking Annabella the Guinea Pig would like conversation and a snack.

Okay.  I fed Annabelle and said hello to her.

Now I wait for my 15-year old to get home.  He went ice-skating with his girlfriend.  I refuse to even open the door to the knocking worrier at the door of my brain who suggests that children are only safe at home, here under my roof where I know there are no drunk drivers or lunatic serial killers or mean people to threaten my beloved babies.  Why can’t the kids just stay home forever where they are safe?

Oh, and he just walked in the door.  So the children are all accounted for and safe for another night.

Now, to bring in the New Year I have done several very important things.

In no particular order:

1)  I cleaned out my refrigerator, throwing old old broccoli and scary jam from another year and washing out the door shelves where a pickle jar seemed to be morphing into an oozing vinegar volcano.

2)  I cleaned off my desk, though you’d never really know it unless you saw it Before and After.

3)  I cleaned out my pantry and tossed all the cereal, even an unopened box of Cheerios that “expired” six months ago.  I argued that the Cheerios were still fresh because they were unopened but the two biggest skeptics in my house refused to acknowledge my point and since they would be the main consumers of the outdated Cheerios, I gave up and threw them away.  (The Cheerios, not the skeptics.) I don’t really eat cereal and the cereal eaters in my house seldom actually finish a box.  They just abandon it when they deem it too stale to eat because someone–not THEM–didn’t close it very well.

4)  I bought a new shower curtain and a shower curtain rod for the “kid’s bathroom.”  The existing shower curtain rod is rusty and the shower curtain rings never stay on and so the curtain sags and it’s been an altogether unpleasant situation.  Since I had $10 of “Kohl’s cash,” and the items were on sale, it didn’t cost much, either.

5)  I went to Costco and purchased food, including a lot of vegetables and some meat and these tortillas that are uncooked until you cook them up in a pan.  I also bought bacon because everyone knows that Costco has the best bacon and what is a new year without a large quantity of bacon?   I put all the unexpired food in the clean fridge and the cereal-free pantry and now we’re ready to welcome 2014. Except I may have forgotten to buy cereal.

So, in summary, here’s how I recommend you prepare for the New Year:

1)  Clean out your fridge.
2)  Clean off your desk.
3)  Clean up your pantry.  Throw out all your stale cereal all willy-nilly.
4)   Purchase new shower curtain and put up an unrusted, shiny new shower curtain rod.
5)  Go to Costco along with three thousand of your closest friends and buy bacon.

Happy New Year!

I spent most of the afternoon puttering around my office, cleaning out drawers and sorting through junk mail and carrying baskets of my kids’ clothing to their rooms.  I’m so sick of my office being a family closet.  The laundry room is next to my office, so doing the laundry is super convenient.  I really don’t mind it at all.

But I draw the line at 1) bringing dirty laundry downstairs and 2) returning clean, folded laundry upstairs.  Weirdly, all of my kids don’t seem to find it even slightly inconvenient to come downstairs every morning to find a clean bath towel and an outfit for the day.  (A normal mother might insist that the children carry their laundry baskets of clean clothes to their rooms.  Why don’t I do that?  I don’t know.  Send a therapist.)

Anyway, it was out of hand.  My office looked like an unorganized Goodwill store minus the mismatched kitchenware and cash register.  If, in fact, a Goodwill store allowed shedding dogs inside.

Puttering takes a surprising amount of time and energy, so by early evening, I was reading in bed until I felt drowsy.  Then I took a nap, the kind of long nap visited by dreams.  This nap exceeded the length generally recommended by sleep experts.  For sure.

When I woke up, I coughed a bit which was weird because my lingering cough had all but disappeared.

Then, while working later tonight, I noticed that my throat seemed not-normal and that’s when I realized that maybe I’m getting sick again.

I hope I’m not getting sick again.

For one thing, I need to undecorate this week and other fun stuff.

Oh, but in other news, here’s a picture from the sunset the other night:

We’d just gotten to the beach and I spied this seagull flying our direction and managed to snap an iPhone photo. It’s a minor miracle that the bird isn’t blurry since I took the photo so quickly.

Seems like I just spent a day putting up Christmas decorations and now it’s time to take them down.  I didn’t even have time to get sick of them.

Christmas Day was a rousing success.  Everyone received something they loved and there were no fistfights.  Actually, there are never any fistfights here but isn’t that a reason to rejoice?  No fistfights?

I’m back to work but the kids are on school break, of course, until January 6/7 (depending on which kid you are).  The older kids are back to work tomorrow.  Me, too.  My husband, too.  Too bad we can’t just all stay in our pajamas and eat cut-out cookies and nap and play games and read for another two or three weeks.  Or months.

But instead, the Christmas tree beckons and not to revel in its glory.  No.  It’s time to undecorate and return to a life devoid of twinkly lights.