Today is Thursday (news flash), and tomorrow U-Haul is going to pick up the pods in the in-laws’ driveway unless we call them and extend our rental for another month. But that will cost TWO HUNDRED AND EIGHTY DOLLARS. We do not want to spend that money. It’s so frustrating, as we rented them in the first place so that we wouldn’t have to move everything in and then move it back out again when the carpet got installed, only of course, as I’ve mentioned, they’re having to re-stretch the carpet in the main living space and so it all has to be emptied out anyway. At least we don’t have to re-do the bedroom.
Sunday evening, May 21: Here I sit on the stairs of our soon-not-to-be-ours house, and I’m so tired that this is the only thing I can do. It’s too early to go to bed, I don’t have any books I want to read, and there’s no TV. And pretty much no internet, although once in awhile I can get a faint waft of Xfinity wifi. So I’m writing a post! Aren’t you flattered!
Before I get to the subject of today’s post, I have to ask: Did you notice that the website looks different? New lettering and new features on the sidebar and at the bottom. I’m pretty sure I’ve posted about this upcoming change in a previous post, but it has taken a very long time. Jim has labored to get all of my sites onto the WordPress platform, which has its own challenges, but which gives me much more in the way of flexibility and features.
I just went over the calendar from now until May 13, which is 52 days (not counting today, but counting that last day). Sometimes we get really ramped up over the very short term (what’s going to happen this week) or the very long term (what’s going to happen in the next year), and we don’t think in the medium term. So it struck me this morning that there are several pretty big events (PBE’s) that are going to take place over these next 7 ½ weeks:
Periodically I’ll get into a discussion about the question above. My dear friend Cecelia and I used to argue (sort of–she’s too nice of a person to really get into it) about this issue. She’d say, “I think you need to accept people the way they are” and I’d say, “But Cecelia, then how will they ever change?” We would have this discussion in particular about a mutual friend who . . . well, I won’t give any details. Suffice it to say that what Cecelia thought of as harmless eccentricities I thought of as remediable faults. (Not that I was being judgy or anything.)
Although I’ve temporarily discontinued my posting on the “Intentional Hospitality” blog I’m still cooking away. Last night I provided the desserts and punches for my church’s Christmas banquet. This turned out to be yet another one of those “I-thought-I-was-going-to-have-an-easy-time-of-it-but-I-was-wrong” episodes in my life. I had made my famous orange-almond biscotti before the Cherry Creek Chorale’s concert over a week ago with the intention of putting them together into tree shapes held together by frosting, but I just ran out of steam and time, so I ended up putting the baked biscotti into the freezer with the intention of building the trees for this party.
You know the type of thing I’m talking about:
Yesterday I wrote about what was going on in our lives one year ago as we finally got a diagnosis for our son Gideon and started him on the treatment that cured his cancer. So you’d think that I’d be rejoicing at any and everything that happened this week, since nothing could be as bad as that was. Right? Right. You would think that. And yet, there I was on Tuesday, grumbling and complaining to myself about the dinner I was making for my beloved community chorale’s annual business meeting. “I wish this were over with,” I thought. I had the sensation that I often have when I’m doing something I don’t particularly want to do, feeling as if I’m being dragged along unwillingly towards the event I’m preparing for.