Single Parent

DH is gone for two weeks. He has a job that gives him enormous freedom in the summertime. That means instead of hours of structured time standing in front of students, he has hours of unstructured time to do research. He left for ten days to catch lizards just three weeks ago. Now he's gone for two weeks helping his parents move; then he'll attend a molecular biology teaching workshop in NYC for which he gets free room and board, free air fare, and a stipend.

Meanwhile, I get to grind away at the fast food franchise fixing printer problems and planning a roll-out for centralized updates of the POS. I actually like the work, and I'm learning a lot about the business, but it's not exactly camping in the desert in the spring, a trip to the Rockies, or an intellectual all-expense-paid week in New York, y'know? I'm more than a little jealous.

This single-parenting event will be better than the last, though, because older son is home from college. That means there is another adult in the house at night, and when I hear a strange noise I won't lay paralyzed in bed for a half-hour waiting for a recently escaped psychotic to burst in and stab me with his hook. Plus, little boy is out of school, so I can sleep until glorious 6:45 a.m. instead of waking at 6:15.

Regrets

Craig's comment about coming up first on the list when you Google "Mormon Craig Lastname" made me try it with my own name. I found some archives of old stuff (18+ months ago) I wrote on soc.religion.mormon (a usenet group I don't read much any more). In one discussion, my husband, under an alias, wrote an eloquent and beautiful post about belief and human nature and flaws and finding divinity there.

And in response, I said something snippy and flippant. I blew him off.

Damn. That was cold. I can only guess that he's forgiven me.

You are what you seem

Over on the Folk of the Fringe, Zenobia posted a 1977 article from the NYT - What You See is the Real You. I particularly like this quote:

You are for the most part what you seem to be, not what you would wish to be, nor, indeed, what you believe yourself to be.

I have been thinking about it off and on ever since I read it last night.

Over on Dumpster Dive, I asked Randy if he ever felt like a fraud - like all of us say wonderful things to him that we really believe but that he discards because he knows what he's "really" like. He said he feels like a fraud all the time. I feel like that all the time, too, which is why I asked him about it.

I'm rather active in the Disaffected Mormon Underground. I try to help people who are coming to grips with the idea that the LDS church is not only the shiny happy story they've always heard about from the missionaries. Sometimes these people are angry, and bitter, and mean. Sometimes their marriages are at risk. And sometimes, I help.

Lots of my readers and on-line buddies here and in other places say really nice things about me, to me. Until just yesterday, I just assumed that if they knew the "real me," they would know better. But now, I think that how I seem may actually be the real me. Which would make them right.

Twelve months of therapy...and this has been almost as helpful. Go figure.

By the way, I'm feeling much better. Thanks for the kind thoughts.

Home Sick

My company seems to have a culture of working even when you're sick. Which is why I'm home right now, with a sore throat and a headache and generally feeling like crap.

I pulled over some stuff to work on, but mostly I've just slept. I picked up some stuff at the grocery store, because we needed stuff, and it was a short project. But now I'm pretty wiped out.

Hopefully I will be better by tomorrow.

My Sons

Older Son is done with school. He's moving home on Saturday. He got a 3.4375 again this semester; exactly the same as last semester. 7 hours of A's and 9 hours of B's. I'm very proud of him. Next year, he gets to do it with a job!

Little boy had water play day at school yesterday. Even though the instructions from school very clearly said, "If you want them to wear sunscreen, put it on before they come to school, because we aren't allowed to put it on them"...I did not put sunscreen on him. My little boy is very fair-skinned. And now, he's quite sun-burned. I goofed big time. He is better today. Hopefully by tomorrow it will be all better.

The Big Boss's E-mail

Speaking of anxiety: yesterday, the CEO's e-mail stopped working. I am the IT department. After an hour with no success during the late afternoon, I took his computer home (it's a laptop) and virus scanned and virus updated, to no avail.

Today I re-installed Office and updated all the service packs. No go. Then I hit the Microsoft web site. Under the software "Outlook 2000", the keywords "not responding" have pages and pages of hits. I tried starting up with the preview pane off. No go. Then I got aggressive and tried the next close match to the problem description, and deleted all the Outlook registry keys and reinstalled (again).

It wasn't until after I deleted the keys that I thought, "Bad Word! What's going to happen to his e-mail?" Fortunately, the .pst file was intact and the keys were not relevent. It took forever for Outlook to come up, but it did. The CEO can send and read mail again.

He plugs the computer right into the wall, and power in our building is VERY erratic. I'm guessing it was an inopportune "spike."

Twitchy eyebrows

My right eyebrow was twitching earlier this evening. It was an involuntary thing, and I couldn't make it stop (because it was involuntary). Man, was it annoying!

Coming Home

DH will be home tomorrow night. He left nine days, seven and a half hours ago.

He stopped in Lubbock last night, and did some work today with some people he's collaborating on a paper with. We lived there for several years, and I used to work in the same department (doing totally different stuff) so lots of people sent their regards. He saw Lynda. I am jealous of that. I wish I could've seen Lynda.

But in any event, he is coming home, dead lizards and all. He'll be leaving again in about two weeks, for about two weeks, but I'm not going to stress about it.

OK, that's a lie.

Anxiety

I seem to have traded one thing for another. On the Burns Depression Evaluation, I come up "borderline to mildly depressed" - a huge, huge improvement. However, on the Burns Anxiety Evaluation, I have progressed from "mild" to "moderate to severe" anxiety.

Most of the symptoms are physical. Muscle tension, shakiness, gastro-intestinal distress, headaches.

I'm pretty sure it's about money. If nothing goes wrong, we can be okay in five years. What do you suppose are the odds that nothing will go wrong for five years?

According to an old friend who is a psychologist, one facet of my interpersonal style is that I use time in the future. I want to know what's going to happen next. I'm not engaged in the here and now; I'm more attentive to what's coming. And even though we never know what's coming, we can sometimes tell from what's already happened. Perhaps that's why I'm so anxious. The past year and a half has been mostly bad. Really really bad. Maybe because things are OK now, I'm anxious because I keep expecting things to go back to "normal." And "normal" was, for quite a long while, very bad.

On the other hand, anxiety is also a common side effect of Wellbutrin. Anxious is better than depressed.

Why just comment?

Rather than answer the question in Heather's comment in the comments, I will make a post out of my answer.

DH is a biologist. He studies the systematics and evolution of mammals and reptiles. I like listening to him talk about the different aspects of his work. At the end of the semester, he comes home with interesting stories about his students' unreasonable demands. When he is working in the lab, he will often describe the processes he is undertaking using a words I don't understand. He is not being a smart-aleck, just using the accurate words to describe what he's doing. (By the way, when this happens, it's quite a turn-on. Smart guys are hot!) When he is planning a field trip, he turns into a tall, middle-aged boy scout. He consults maps, buys gear, and constructs interesting devices to use as traps.

Killing the lizards is part of the work. He will preserve some tissues and probably the skeletons as best he can, and maybe the skin, too (not so sure about that) and deposit them, along with collection notes (like locality, etc.) and identification in the museum at Big State University. He will keep some of the tissues and reduce them to samples of DNA, which he will sequence. The goal of all this, of course, is not only the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, but funding.

Road Trip

DH is off for ten days or so to catch lizards in the Chihuahuan desert. I am a bit jealous, not that he's catching lizards, but that "work" for him is what many people would call "vacation." I mean, he's camping in the desert! OK, so kill lizards and pulling their tissues and putting them on dry ice is not what most people do for vacation. But the camping part is pretty cool.

He made a noose out of a telescoping fishing pole and fishing line. He noosed a couple of lizards around here for practice. I wish I had a picture of that lizard he brought in the house, dangling in mid-air with a fishing line around its midsection, and my husband smiling from ear to ear.

Etouffee

We peeled all the crawfish we brought home from the boil yesterday and peeled them today. A friend here (a local) told me that Zatarain's Etouffee Base makes an excellent, fast crawfish etouffee - just follow the directions and add a pound of peeled crawfish tails.

I bear witness that this is true. It's such a little box, that I was concerned it wouldn't make much. But DH and I had enough for dinner, and oh my was it yummy. Yum yum yum. MMMMMMM. Teeny tiny little lobster tails in a spicy tomato cream sauce over rice.

We had fewer crawfish to bring home last year, but this year we peeled them faster. Maybe we're getting more efficient.

You know you're from New Orleans when: No matter where else you go in the world, you are always disappointed in the food.

No Card

I didn't get my mom a card this year. I lived nearby for so long, that it was easy to get mom a card. Even if I waited until Sunday, I could go pick one up on the way over. We often went out for dinner with the whole family (all four of us siblings, plus spouses and children). That kind of tapered off as my parents acquired more grandchildren, and the moms stayed home with their own kids. My sisters-in-law probably send a card every year. I'm still not accustomed to not being able to go see Mom on Mother's Day.

Pretty lame excuse, I guess.

My mom and I were talking the other day about talent. She said she was never able to do anything artistic, and she wishes she had been able to draw, or paint, or make pretty things. I disagree with her on that. My mother never got into music, I think, but she has a lovely voice. Some of my earliest memories are of my mom singing pop music while she did "mom stuff" in the kitchen.

She also is that rarest of things, a really good listener. Mom was infinitely patient with her four little children, and even when we got to be older and more self-reliant, she had available whatever time we were willing to give her. As an adult, I really appreciate that rare talent, which really is a talent...you just can't hang it on a wall.

One of my favorite bloggers wrote this essay about her mother.

And I ripped this song from a CD (Windows Media Player required, probably) that the children sang in church today. I first noticed this song when an online friend posted the lyrics, but today was the first time in my 17 years as a LdS that I heard it sung. I cried.

Happy Mother's Day.

Yard work

I really don't like doing yard work. I think I would like gardening if I didn't also have to cut the grass.

I love thinking about gardens, and how they could look in my yard. But because I'm in such poor physical condition, the actual work of yard work is really, really hard for me. I spent an hour cutting the front yard this morning, and by the time I was done it took me fifteen minutes to catch my breath.

The back yard is large and has a lot of potential. I think I would like to put raised plant beds in some strategic places, because it's a swamp, and to plant some large native plants and shrubs (vs. trees) along the fences. I would like a nice covered patio off the back door, perhaps even screened in ('cause we got bugs here) and a gravelly walkway meandering around the raised beds and native plants. There would be some yard for little boy to play in, and maybe even some neat plant/play areas, where he could crawl around and look for bugs and lizards. It would be nice to have a shallow pond, with some moving water in it, to bring in the frogs. We had frogs in the yard in January in a shallow marshy area (four inches of muck=happy frogs).

Of course, it would take big $$ to pay someone to do this, and is just too physically demanding for me right now. Maybe that's an incentive to become more physically fit.

Large return with little effort

We are running out of space on our server. It's not a very big drive to begin with, and nobody ever deletes or cleans up anything.

I downloaded a utility that shows how much space each folder uses. By moving one ancient application off the server onto a local drive (mine has over 75GB available), and deleting one folder and one additional file, I will be able to free up three times the amount of space we have available now.

On the other hand, there are hundreds and hundreds of folders with hundreds and hundreds of documents that could be cleaned up a little here and a little there and it would probably free even more space. But it would take weeks to sort through them to make sure only truly unneeded stuff was deleted. This way, I'm not cleaning up nearly as much space as I could, but it took just a couple of hours to figure out how to make it happen, instead of a couple of weeks.

I'm sure there's a metaphor in there somewhere.

Strange answers to prayers

A friend sent me an e-mail in which she described feeling "freed" when she had prayed to know if she should stay with her husband, and she finally felt like it was OK to leave. The exact same thing happened to me. I prayed and prayed and prayed to be able to get a divorce. I kept getting the same answer: No. Stay. Eventually after some time in Alanon, the answer changed. And I was free.

I think the reason I needed to stay was because without recovery, in Alanon, I would have just gone into the same relationship with a different guy. Instead, though, I was able to see how my own behavior made the situation much worse, and how I couldn't control him, but I could control me.

Once I learned that, it was OK to move on.

Working on my day off

I was going to make some extra $$ setting up a PC for a colleague. Augh! They have an internal DSL modem, and Bellsouth told me the wrong driver to download. And you can't get internet access without the driver. I spent most of the day there and accomplished very little.

I don't like to charge by the hour, because if I was a professional, it would only take two hours or so even under those difficult conditions. I have mentally prepared myself to finish the job in a timely manner; I hope to get that done pretty quickly this week.

A week from tomorrow, DH is going to drive all the way across Texas to catch lizards (various species of the genus aspidoscilis) in New Mexico and Arizona. He'll probably be gone for about ten days or so. It'll be just me and Little Boy for most of that time; Older Son finishes school a week from Friday. This will definitely involved "working on my time off," because I'll be a single parent. Well, I did it to him twice already this year; I guess it's my turn.