Itching to Write

Well, the muse is back and wants to be busy 24/7. I have too many little notebooks where I've been jotting ideas. I guess I'll have to do a roundup on Monday before I lose them all. Once I write them down, my mind releases them. I know--my mind releases a lot of stuff whether I write it down or not, but in the case of ideas once I believe they're "safe" in written form they are gone completely from the old noodle.

Workshop yesterday was fantastic. What a group. I learned something, I was encouraged, I got to help, generally felt "useful" shall we say. Sure we shall. :)

Have a busy day ahead. ADD got up early with me and we got the grocery shopping done. I have the day on a tight schedule till about noon, then I hope to crash, watch a movie, and generally veg so that I'm ready for a busy weekend. Which by the way means I may not be around much for the next three days but I will be writing. Right now, I can't help it. :)

My kiddo should have his Acropolis tour behind him. How awesome that must have been! He may be into his evening's activities by now (he's 8 hours ahead of us here in the Central time zone of the USA) which includes a Sirtaki dance show and learning how to do some steps himself. I'll have to ask him to demonstrate at his graduation party! Unfortunately he's inherited my grace. We do okay with practice. LOTS of practice.

Gotta get on with my to-do list, but I had to write something just to show my creative side that I'm not brushing her off entirely.

Have a wonderful weekend!!

Computer Woes and Other Trauma

I'm surviving. You should have seen everything I got done yesterday so that I would keep my mind off of wondering whether or not A was where he needed to be when he needed to be there. As is was I got a phone call from him around 2. I had to laugh. While he was wrapping up the end of his packing and printing out labels to put on postcards (isn't he efficient?) he asked if I would print out three copies of his packing list. I printed out one and asked, "This one?" just to be sure.

"Yes," he replies. "But I don't need that e-mail at the end. That was for you. Just print off the packing list."

Well, I blipped off the e-mail and printed the list but elected not to save the updated version.

Good thing, because he called wanting to know from that very e-mail where he was supposed to be meeting his delegation. This after we had had a lengthy discussion about that very topic--they would meet in Terminal One near the ticket counters and then proceed to the gate in Terminal Five. He had already been to Terminal One, had made his way to Terminal Five and thanks to the phone call was trekking back to Terminal One. At least he could assure his delegation how to get where they needed to be in Terminal Five I guess.

"Well, you sound more rested, anyway," I told him.

"Uh, not really."

"Well, then you'll probably sleep on the plane like you should."

"I hope."

Byes and love-yous were said, and from that point on I tracked him via the Lufthansa website. They left a few minutes early and were due to arrive on time. Since my laptop is down--hence the computer woes, more later--I couldn't track his landing in Munich which corresponded to around 1 in the morning our time, nor his landing in Athens, about 4 AM here. But I've been thinking about him a lot today. I'm not worried, oddly enough. The anxiety seemed to turn off when I didn't have delegation leaders frantically phoning wondering where my son was. :)

As for the computer woes, wouldn't you know. It's quiet and I can have some interrupted time to work and now the laptop won't dial in to the internet. I've gotten a couple of error messages. One says the port is already open, to close the port and retry. The other says there's a hardware conflict that is interfering with the modem. First thing I tried--restarting. No luck. I tried checking the modem in device manager. That's where it says it's functioning and then gives me the hardware conflict message (I have not added any hardware, unless a Flash drive counts, but I've been using it for months now with no problem.) I tried doing a system restore to when it was working--no luck. I haven't given it much thought with everything else going on (this surfaced yesterday morning) and probably won't get to this weekend either. Come Monday, maybe. Hey didn't someone write a song about that? LOL! Thank you Jimmy Buffett.

Okay, can you tell my mind is rambling. It finally has a chance to. I wish it would ramble to where I put that rent check I can't find. I sure hope I can restore some type of order to my life before ds is back and needs to concentrate on ACTs and transcript, etc., etc., and all that jazz. Hope to have that wrapped up too. I'd better get moving on it though.

Okay, enough rambling. If there are any suggestions out there for the computer problem, e-mail me please!!!

It's a little hard to know where to start tonight. The thoughts are swirling just a bit.

"What do you want to be when you grow up?" How many times did people ask me that question?

How many times did I answer them truly believing that some day I would "grow up"?

Answer: Zero.

Because guess what? We're all grown up now! There it is--smack dab in front of my face as undeniable as tomorrow's sunrise. I'm grown up. And I'm not the only one! :) Class of '79. We have kids that are "grown up" and trying to decide what it is that they want to do with themselves and their lives. Our in-between time has been filled with the rather mundane aspects of life that seem so insignificant, but turn out to be the small stitches in the fabric of our own lives and in the lives of those we love. It is an amazing concept, that paying the electricity bill tonight will keep the lights burning so that the young one can read before bed and discover that s/he wants to know more about architecture and starts down the road that leads to a drafting career. And maybe that will be a average drafting career, or maybe that light over the bed of the youngster is switching on the genius of someone like Frank Lloyd Wright. How do we know? We don't. We just pay the electricity bill and let the rest happen. We do our best to hand down our values and help the kids learn from our mistakes and successes but in the end, they choose. They make a life that they pass down to their children, and the cycle goes on and on and on.

I'm not sure that our "grown up" lives are as we imagined they'd be. Mine isn't. Not that we're disappointed with them; I didn't get that feeling at all. It's just that teenagers grow up thinking they're going to be so different than the people who came before them (i.e. parents), and here we are with bills and houses and jobs and worries much the same as those who came before.

How do you tell the kids how quickly it passes in a way that will make them stop and listen? I don't know how many times my mother said, "Once you get out of high school, the time just flies." I heard her, but I didn't understand her. Not back then anyway.

Would I make different choices if I could go back? How can there be an answer to that? To go back and do it over would erase some of the most precious, breathtaking, heart-searching moments of the life I've lived. I do wish I had known how important it was to love what you do. I tell that to my boys over and over again. Having a job you love is such a blessing. And the job I've loved most has been teaching them. But that job will come to an end and then what? I have a rather lengthy laundry list of things I'd like to do, and I'm beginning to see that I need to write them down and start planning now how to make them happen. (Wow, now where have I heard that before?) Because before you know it, we'll be meeting for that 50 year reunion to discuss grandkids, and by golly, I do want to be there. With bells on.

I want to laugh and cry all at the same time. (Is this a mid-life crisis? )

I also discovered last night that it is so true what Without a Trace investigations and "follow in the footsteps" illustrations draw on: A person's gait is something that in unique and travels with him/her through life. I imagine that precludes any injuries that result in a limp. I could have recognized some of my old classmates just by watching them walk. With others it was the smile. Others I would have passed by on the street and never guessed I had once known them.

The night was much like the fireworks. Beautiful, explosive [inwardly, for me], a curious mixture where light depends on darkness, and is all too quickly over, leaving me wanting more.

I have to say that Glencoe really did a fabulous fireworks show. I believe it is the best I've seen in a long time. And the funny thing is, every now and then I dream of crossing those railroad tracks out by where the old cotton gin was and all of the sudden drawing a blank. That area shows up in my dreams, just like the road that curved around to the entrance to our subdivision on Greystone Road. Now I have an impression to fill in after I cross the tracks. It will be interesting to see if that is incorporated the next time I encounter it.

I'm also wondering how soon I'll have that recurring dream about not really having graduated. That at this late date they discovered that I'm half a credit shy and have to give back my diploma. LOL! Glory be--the things I've learned outside those years in a classroom would fill volumes. There's nothing that teaches quite as well as experience.

This life of ours is strangely wonderful. And too precious to be wasted.