fraught

When you’ve been talking about something for many moons, planning it, anticipating it, preparing for it and generally almost-doing it, why is it that when a concrete symbol comes along, you invariably stop dead in your tracks and say to yourself something like “Damn! This is for-real HAPPENING?!”

Which is how I felt when I walked out the door last week and saw this in my own for-real front yard:

We moved into this house in the summer of 2003, when Megan wasn’t yet a year and Kira was way off on the horizon. Fast-forward through kitchen and bath remodels and vats of paint and thousands of dollars of landscaping and a decade of years, and moving wasn’t in our minds.

In fact, we had met with a contractor and were slated to embark on a major renovation over the summer to properly situate ourselves to hunker down for teenage years to come – but one evening this past May the MPM and I looked at each other and had the dawning thought that perhaps another house might really suit us better. One that didn’t require a major renovation to accommodate us.

Because in truth, this house has a small handful of permanent problems we couldn’t solve with a renovation of any scope. And because while moving is hell, it is only hell for a short, and discrete, time. Renovation is hell for several months. And then a few more weeks. And probably a few more. And then there is punch-list purgatory to wander around in for a while.

The trick was going to be finding the right house. Because we knew we wanted to stay in this ‘hood. Because this is where I have my village, and when you are raising kids, you need you a tribe.

And it had to REALLY suit us. No sorta-suiting, leading to major remodeling projects down the road (see: hell/purgatory, above). And it needed to be aging-in-place friendly, because the MPM has made it known that he has exactly one (1) move left in him.

I looked at everything on the market, which wasn’t much, and then after a week or so I sat down one morning with the neighborhood map and traced my finger along the grid of about 7 streets by 5 streets, visiting them in my mind as I traced. Was it even possible to find a house we might want and could reasonably afford?

Because we had a lot of must-haves: Flat lot, not much maintenance required. Brick. Front porch. Playmates within walking distance. Flow for entertaining. 4 bedrooms plus an office. A kitchen I could remodel to suit myself. A teen hangout space. Space to grow food, and sun for same. Garage, highly desirable. Screen porch, ditto.

It was a little daunting. But as I traced, my fingers came to rest on a crossways street, and I mentally inventoried and thought, Y’know, maybe. And I picked up the phone and dialed a business acquaintance of many years and asked if he happened to know if anyone on his street was perhaps thinking to move. And he paused for the briefest of moments and then said, Why yes, in fact I do.

And went on to say that he and his longtime girlfriend had gone out to look for houses together for the first time… the night before. And then he gave me the particulars on his house, while I strove to remind myself that fate is not part of my world view and this perfect-on-paper house would likely smack me with disappointment face-to-face. And then we agreed the MPM and I would pop over the following weekend. Just to take a look.

And so it came to pass that we recently signed a contract on that very house. 5 bedrooms with a flat yard, front porch, garden space, kitchen for remodel. Office, screen porch, deck, garage? Check, check, checkitty check. Friends nearby AND the most awesome teen hangout basement ever. Really.

So. All to the good, and being swept away on a tide of fate serendipity is pretty fun, though not without its verklempt moments.

Putting my garden to bed this autumn weekend, and recalling the vast span of hours I’ve spent inside those fenceposts. The angle of the light coming in through the sunroom windows in the morning. Imagining leaving this carefully designed kitchen that suits me so utterly and efficiently… for one that I’ll need to live in for a good while as-is. Realizing that the window over the sink in my future doesn’t look out into the back yard, nor does it frame a view like this:

And in the packing-up, perhaps packing up some pieces of childhood too. Toys that we might have kept around for another year or two will likely find their way downline a little sooner. And that playset there… weighing its useful life against the hassle of moving it.

And the enormity of knowing that the next house will be our last. Sensing that its nest-emptying will come all too soon – just about precisely as long as we’ve lived here, which some days seems like it’s only been since maybe a little after breakfast yesterday.

But overall, a quiet calm of knowing it is the right move for us. Providential? Depends on your world view, I suppose. But I’ll gracefully, gratefully accept that sort of serendipity any day.

You know, I am still here. Here in my life. Not so much here at Fraught-The-Blog. I know.

What’s keeping me occupied?

Well, there is the gardening, and the children, and the cooking cleaning washing driving. Some biking and running and general combating of the Earth’s gravitational effect on the physical plant that is me. And I have a job! Did I tell you that? No, not the cycle-instructing job – though I still have that one – but a job that gets me out in the world and interacting with cool people and thinking about interesting things. Fun!

I have never in my whole entire adult life had a job where I went in at a prescribed hour, worked for a certain number of hours, and then went home at a set hour and didn’t think about it again until the next prescribed hour. A leave-it-at-the-office job. Nor do I have that job now. But I have one that lets me work mostly when I want to, and that’s pretty freaking awesome. I get paid reasonably and I do things that I enjoy and I feel appreciated and I’m learning new things. Not much more to ask from a mid-life part-time job, methinks.

The girls? Oh, them. Those growin’ thangs. They are SOMETHING. Megs starts middle school next year and while we still have a gracious plenty of Moments, I’ve realized that we are going to be friends. She trusts me. I can tell her when I’ve screwed up, and I can hear her apologize when she does, and there is a foundation of respect, be it at times deeply subterranean. Every once in a while she’s more mature than I feel. I feel quite blessed by our relationship, and though I am occasionally nervous about  what the next years hold in the way of conflict for us, most days I think we’re going to weather it just fine.

Kira was, at the close of her 2nd-grade year, invited to the same program that her sister attended in grades 3-5. Pupils Learning Appropriately TOgether is the acronym. Gahh. Her scores were such that her daddy and I have looked at her with different eyes. Because Megan is, after all, the gifted one, the wicked-bright one; Kira is the sweet one, the personable one.

Those labels, they are dangerous things. Why do we do that to our kids? Megan shows herself incredibly sweet, and Kira is going to whip some math ass, and I for sure am going to try to remember not to box them up and limn their life-roles for them.

Probably some peeps will read this and think I am a little too braggy on my kids today. My blog, my braggy. Yup. They are beautiful and funny, too.

Let’s see, what else? Well, I have a quinoa recipe to share. Is it just me, or has quinoa rocketed into the chi-chi sphere of late? I’ve seen it on more menus in the past six months than I did in the six years before. I know a secret about quinoa, though, and it’s not just how it’s pronounced. (No, that would not be “Kwih-no-ah.”) It’s about how to keep it from being gummy and sticky!

Stay tuned. I might even post said recipe over the summer, since it is a summer-style dish.

I have made some friends lately who are just about exactly half my age. That is a funny thing. And a learnin’ one. Some of them, they are so freakin’ smart – it is an awesome thing to see.

One thing I have decided is that the best indicator of intellect is the questions people ask.

Another thing I have decided is that in my advancing years I have winnowed my rules for friends to two: 1. Be kind. 2. rsvp.   In that same vein, I like to think I am softer, and more forgiving, and have left some of my peskier expectations along the road.

And I am sometimes astonished at the serendipity of life. In a few weeks or months I may get to tell you a story about that, if things go down the way they are looking like they might.

My brother and his wife have adopted/rescued a new Keeshond, and we get to meet this little furry niece soon. I am happy for them, and happy that we get to stay with them for our Yellow Springs time next month. It is a tradition we love, and I often think the best memories are built on the bedrock of tradition – maybe to do with the memory being created one layer at a time, and over the years it takes on depth and luster. Like a pearl!

Or something like that. Whatevs, we love us a tradition, and ones that involve family are the best.

And with that, it’s bedtime here at Casa Fraught, and the girls are coming in from outside with volume and spirits both high, and it is time to be a-settling them down. I’m already in my jammies, so I’m going to go nuzzle some sweet necks and breathe in some outdoor skin smell and then get myself into bed too. And count my blessings, because I have a bunch. Some of you are among them, and thank you for that.

Hugs, A

So I was at Kroger today and noticed a section of crackers about 4 linear feet long, different flavors of the same variety, each flavor with its own temporary shelf tag reflecting the excitement! and eye appeal! of Yellow Pricing! 2/7.00. For an item ordinarily priced at … 3.59.

Multiply by a thousand or so items in 3600 Krogers across our great land, and suddenly you have a  truckful of temporary yellow shelf tags reflecting such alluring “savings” EACH WEEK. A landfill-bound truckful. I hereby deem this Wanton and Wasteful. Not to mention Annoying and Ludicrous. Perhaps even verging on Downright Stupid, given that employees are being paid to affix, and then un-affix, each of those thousands of tags.

Note: “Look for the yellow tags!”

Blog-worthy? Maybe not. But I’ve got to get back on track somehow, right?

Hugs from me to you. I hope your summer is packed full of goodness thus far.

It is late spring, and the season of fully sanctioned worship in our public schools. Separation of church and state, perhaps, but now let us bow down for the great portion of the school day and pay obeisance at the feet of the god of standardized testing.

At Kira’s school, during this holy time of year trite pleasures of art and music are put aside, that proper devotion to all things memorized may more fully be made. And for three blessed weeks the gym is redeemed from its lowly purpose of physical activity and sanctified as a holy temple of test-taking. So while only the 3rd, 4th, and 5th-graders are eligible to receive the bubble-test communion at this K-5 school, the lives of all students are irredeemably touched by the sacramental offering.

I’ve written before, at some length, about my feelings as a non-believer, and I won’t rehash here today. But this year I’ve decided to make a little log of Megan’s instructional day. (By all means put little air quotes around the word “instructional” as you read that sentence aloud to your spouse,  your dog, or your Boston fern).

I do think that the teachers in the gifted program that she attends try pretty hard to keep giving their classes new material as May rolls on. But they’re under the gun, and the amount of review that the kids belly up to not just in May, but all quarter long, would choke a hippo. The teachers are no happier about it than the students, and my heart goes out to them.

Megan’s recounting of yesterday’s hours between 7:45 and 2:15 did not paint a picture of a day brimming over with innovative instructional time. Although she did get to play some dodgeball and was quite pleased about that. (Aside: I don’t personally recall loving dodgeball. Did you? Of course, I’m sure I wasn’t any good at it, and she is.)

On the bright side, her class IS engaged in an original and rather inspired project that she’s quite enthusiastic about. It’s a group endeavor, brainchild of one of her classmates, that’s supposed to culminate in a 100-page book titled “Kill Bobbie J. Cutlip.”

I suppose I should be correctly, politically, horrified, but my understanding is that BJC is the author of the “What I Need to Know To Pass the [fill in history subject] Standards of Learning Test” catechism that the poor stultified students in Megan’s generally overachieving class are drilled on daily commencing in May.

And in truth, there’s no murder or even mayhem at hand. Rather, the exercise is to come up with imaginative and innovative ways to dispose of the book. For instance? Sandwiching it between two large pieces of meat and driving over a bayou bridge in Louisiana in search of a hungry alligator, as one girl in Megan’s class has suggested.

With apologies to the lady herself, I’m all for killing Bobbie J. Cutlip. Bring on the premeditation, all 100 creative pages of it.

You could say that I failed to hold up my Post-A-Day promise for the month of April. And you’d be dead right.

Or you could choose to say that I managed to throw down a post 20 days in a month featuring a calendar already full to the brim, and be right happy about that. And you know, despite highly public failure to follow through on something I said I’d do, that’s where I’m standing. Since it’s that or hara-kiri.

I’ll be back in May, I promise. There’s lots to tell, but just not much time today to tell it. Vote your favorite and it might actually get featured in a post!

1. Houseguests.

2. PTA thoughts and fears.

3. Cycle 101, or My Dream Comes True.

4. Kira and her lonely recess days of late.

5. Stuff I’m growing. And stuff I might.

6. That bathroom remodeling project.

Dearest readers,

The MPM and I are hosting wonderful friends through Monday. Daily blogging is suspended until their departure, as I’m unwilling to give up any of our too-few-and-far-between hours with them to hold firm to my commitment to you. See how I am?

Just so you know I’m not simply slacking off, but busy with face time and memory-building.

Hugs, and I’ll see you next week. xoxo

Because nothing says Spring like a pedicure, am I right? One of my few self-indulgent splurges. The scrubby stuff, the massage, the shiny topcoat… I love it all.

I’m not much of a girlie-girl, but the fact is colorful toes make me happy. A few years back I pioneered the teal-green look. Last year was purple. And I think I’ve nailed it for summer 2013 with this cerulean shade.

But that was actually yesterday. Today, I taught an hour-long class at the civilized hour of 8:30a.m., which was a relief after far too many 5a.m. wakenings over the past week. The problem isn’t so much getting up at 5 as it is failing to make the proper adjustment on the front end.

This time of year is the stretch we’ve come to know as Red Pen Hell here at Casa Fraught. The MPM, well-prepared in so (so, SO) many things, tends to put off grading student work about three days longer than he perhaps ought to. Which means bedtime becomes a drifting target, shifting off out there on the horizon, getting farther out of view each day as exam week draws closer. And then? Then comes Grading o’ the Exams, which is a purgatory from which he emerges, shaking and drawn, at midnight on the day of Final Grade Submittal.

Yes, I could go to bed without him, and sometimes I do. But I’m not well suited to it. Especially when there is daily blogging to be done. Or other tasks that call me. Cuing a new ride. Scrubbing the tub. Sorting pony beads. Snuggling up with my sweet Spotify for a while.

What else did I do today? Piles of laundry. More grocery shopping. A haircut. Some outgrown-clothing culling and general organization. Oh – and I found my favorite and ancient red leather driving gloves, presumed lost to me forever after they went missing at the end of last winter and never surfaced again. Until today, that is; at the bottom of a bag of hand-me-downs gifted to us and sitting in the closet all year. Why there, I haven’t the foggiest.

I haven’t got a good wrap-up here, but am closing anyway as the brain fog has begun rolling in. Come back soon – I’m here all month. Hugs, A

Y’all, I am as exhausted as if I’d run that marathon myself, and I have a wicked sinus headache to boot. But I know full well I’ve already slacked on my 13/15ths daily blogging commitment once this week, and thus I am also in the throes of guilt. Although as Katie reminds me, I’m not actually obligated to anyone. Nor is anyone paying me.

But I’m so that person. If I say I’m going to do it, I generally do feel obligated. Even if no one is keeping track but me.

So, back to Sunday, just because. A month or so ago one of the MPM’s high-school buddies let us know that he was going to be coming through town with his wife and teenage son in the afternoon, on their way to catch a flight back home to Minnesota.

The morning dawned bright and I toddled downstairs for a refresher of vitamin C and a quick dalliance with the neti pot, part of my voodoo dance to keep the cold the MPM had tried to share at bay.

And then I looked at the kitchen, which was right much a wreck, and at the rest of the house, which was cluttered up in fine style due to our full-on Saturday schedule of marathons and lacrosse games and such, and said, “I’m going back to bed. Because if I get started tidying now, I’ll never get around to a nap.”

Truth is, I seldom nap, and even more seldom sleep in. But I’d just read the night before that sleep is really the very best way to help fight off a viral attack. And since for various reasons I’d logged precious little horizontal time over the past week, going back to bed seemed oh so very prudent. Because really? The last thing I needed heading into this  jam-packed week was a cold.

The MPM promised to wake me as soon as his friend called to announce their  departure from his conference hotel two hours to the north, and I yawned my way up the stairs.

And woke, hours later, to near-noon sun and the thought that I’d best rustle out of bed. Stretched, feet on the floor, t-shirt clad… and reached for the ringing house phone, which I saw was the friend, calling to let us know they were on their way.

Or, alternately, to announce that he was at the front door.

I met the man once, almost a decade ago, at their very lovely home in Minnesota. Much as I wished otherwise, there was nothing to do but fess up that I was just that minute getting out of bed and didn’t know where the MPM was, and that to look for him would necessitate coming down the stairs in my current state of deshabille and passing in full view of all of them, given our all-glass front door.

I yanked on some clothes and a ball cap while dialling the MPM’s cell phone and learned that he’d left the building entirely and was a half-mile away, on foot, out for a run.

I ushered our guests in, and asked them to excuse me while I brushed my teeth.

The MPM hustled on up the hill, and I suggested we all take a stroll around the ‘hood so they could stretch their legs and take in some sights beyond the strew of our weekend. After that we went out to lunch, and after that they went on their way.

I can only imagine their report back to the gang.

“Oh, yeah, he married a winner all right. He gets the kids breakfast and she sleeps till noon, and believe me, the house is a wreck. And to think he dated that cute cheerleader all those years. Poor guy.”

Ah well. Maybe they’ll come back in another decade or so. Perhaps I can arrange to be passed out on the couch with a fifth of vodka empty on the floor beside me.

Today marked the fourth running of our local marathon, billed as America’s Toughest Road Marathon. There used to be some contention about the title, but that was solved by adding another thousand or so feet of climbing onto the initial, brutal course.

I didn’t run it. I never will. I’m good with saying that.

Last year I was on my Girlz Trip, so I didn’t get to be a part of the day. The years before that, I helped head up a neighborhood water stop. (Since this post is likely to be short, if you’re in the mood for another serving of Fraught, by all means read about the inaugural party aid station here.)

I woke up at 5 to meet the group of crazies who began running the course at 2a.m., so as to get 26.2 miles in and be at the start line in time to run it again, officially timed and all. Craaaaazy. The Mayor and I, we figure anyone who is that touched in the head motivated deserves to be served coffee and doughnuts 20 miles or so into their 52.4-mile day. Head-turner Gretchen took over for us last year in our absence, and joined us again today.

(A tribute to her high-wattage personality and smile came in the form of “Hey! I remember you. You were here last year!” — from a man who had only seen her once. In the dark. After running 20 miles or so.)

Then I — unrecognized by Mr. Double-Marathon — taught two classes, covering for the amazing athlete who normally teaches them but was running in a women’s relay for the event. Which, to no one’s surprise, they won. Handily.

Then I made my way home, tortuously, as many of the roads I’d normally take were closed, noting the crystal clarity of the sky and the bright sunshine. A fine day for a 26.2-mile run.

The MPM was our corner cheering on runners and, as it turned out, keeping them on track. There’s an odd angle to the intersection, and without benefit of the police lead escort accompanying the first runner, the second guy actually turned up our street instead of staying straight. The MPM hailed him and set him right.

The girls were down at the official water stop a block or so away. I went home, changed quickly into dry and warm clothing, and remembered that last night when I was at Kroger to replenish our beer supply, along with our more usual Negro Modelo and Newcastle, I grabbed a six of Sam Adams that caught my eye: “Boston Lager.”

For fun, I took a couple of bottles with me down to the corner, and soon discovered it was the hit of the day. “Sam Adams Boston Lager? I’m pouring!” Far fewer took it than didn’t, but the offer almost unilaterally garnered a smile, a thumbs-up, or an appreciative comment. Soon I sent the MPM for more cups, and he returned with the rest of the six-pack. And by the time the I’m-for-sure-walking-this-last-freakin-hill crew were coming through, around 1p.m., I was tapped out.

My first taker, who actually wanted the whole thing and not just a pour:

Had to snap the pic in a hurry, so forgive the odd angle.

And here is Kira, who spent the entire winter walking to school in a thin sweater and no tights. I didn’t think she even knew where her pants resided, but she trucked herself home and found a pair. It was BRISK out there in the wind, despite the sun, unless you’d been running for 20 miles or so perhaps.

Along with a winning smile, she had grapes to offer, brought down by a neighbor who said he’d heard from the MPM that they were the ticket. Frozen, no less.

The eye-popping appeal of her outfit may have been marginally outdone by this matched pair:

Though for sheer impromptu whimsy, she was surely without match.

I didn’t run 26.2 miles, but I am done in and fighting a cold. Off to bed for me, friends. Before the sun even! Hugs, A

I don’t know how I failed to do it earlier in her life, but I just recently began teaching Puff The Magic Dragon to Kira. Somehow it slipped out of rotation before she came along; Megan certainly knew it at a tender age.

Only recently did I confess there are two more verses. “But they’re sad, and I don’t like to sing them.”

There was some insistence, and after a few days I agreed to sing them. But after the penultimate one, I said “The last one is even sadder. Do you want to hear it?”

No one did. So we’re making up our own, we decided.

In the meantime, Kira has really taken to the rest of the song. I can hear her humming it when she’s playing by herself, and on Wednesday she was lustily singing it in the tub. “This is my favorite part, Mommy.”

“Together they would travel, in a boat with billowed sails. Jackie kept a lookout perched on Puff’s ginormous tail….”

I tried very, very hard to keep a straight face. Dragons may not evolve, but language certainly does.

Speed blogging. Like speed dating — something that surfaced around the time I no longer needed to subject myself to such atrocities.

5:45a: Teach first crack o’ dawn class.

6:30a: Take first full-on TRX class. Yowza. This is good stuff. How good? I guess I’ll have a better idea tomorrow, if I see this when I look in the mirror:

9a-1p: Yardwork, emails, phonecalls, plus a little FB, kitchen-cleaning and folding o’ the laundry. Contractor stops by to observe that the grout in the shower still isn’t right. Mend a dress of Kira’s that appeared in the laundry hamper with a 1-inch rent in the back. ?

1p: Lunch.

1:30: Shower and phonecall about custom bike jerseys with an amusing (and everlastingly talkative) shop owner.

2:20: Ride the 2 blocks down to school on the cross bike. I did it a few weeks ago because I was running so late, and Kira was over the moon to be transported back, sitting high up and holding on to the handlebars while I pushed her home. She begs for me to do it. I love the huge smile she gets when she sees me roll up on it, and it buys me another 2 minutes to boot.

3:15: Score last-minute transport for Megan from running club to a friend’s house two miles away from Kira’s music lesson, Way Over There, buying myself an extra 30 minutes.

3:45: Embark on 20-minute journey to music.

3:58: Phone rings. Fabulous and unanticipated news of nominee acceptance for PTA president-elect position.

3:59: Angels sing.

4:05: Drop Kira off.

4:10: Retrieve Megan.

4:25: Purchase dress for Megan to wear to piano recital.

4:50: Arrive home. Facilitate recital preparations. Prepare a pre-recital something to eat. Clean kitchen.

5:35: Depart for recital.

5:50 – 7:50: Attend recital.

8:10 – 8:35: Prepare post-recital something to eat. Attempt to facilitate bedtime routine. Announce patience wearing thin. Check weather for venue of Big Bike Adventure (aka Girlz Trip) tomorrow of 84 hilly, beautiful and remote miles skirting the WV border. Observe 100% chance of showers, winds at 20mph gusting to 30. Decide adverse weather merely heightens epic nature and improves stories; adventure not to be missed.

8:40: Read brief chapter excerpt of Cheaper By The Dozen to eager & appreciative audience. Tuck in slightly less eager & appreciative audience.

8:55: Discover (early) arrival of period.

9p: Bail on Big Bike Adventure. Briefly contemplate divulging why, to quash the certain torment and calls of wimpitude about to come my way.

9:01: Think better of sharing. It’s hard to maintain an image as One Of The Guys when you’re whining about perimenopause.

9:05: Clean kitchen. Again.

9:25: Commence blogging.

Today was a trying, trying day. Not all of it, surely, but parts of it IN SPADES.

Almost all of that trying centered around one 52-pound 10-year-old.

I don’t want to dwell on it. I really just want it to be behind me.

A month or so ago I had a different trying day, and shortly before dinner announced I was going to go for a walk to “get rid of my grumpies.” The MPM was home and able to pull the final details of dinner together, so that was feasible. (Today, not so much).

And after my walk that day, which did much to dispel those grumpies, I returned to this, penned by the same individual:

The note says “Please put these slippers on.” And do take note of the contractor paper and blue tape… part of my living-room decor for two solid months.

The drawing on the card with the pop-up Perler heart and the bold “I LOVE YOU” across the bottom depicts both of us. She’s wearing her purple hat, and I’m wearing my teal-green one. And we both have our slippers on, matching ones I bought from LLBean.

And that’s the image I’m going to take to bed with me tonight, to try to dispel all the ones from today I wish had never happened.

Oh, this parenting gig is hard. Both in the moment, and in the anticipation of the future, and most of all in the not-knowing: will this course of action improve the underlying problem, or will it actually exacerbate? Who the hell knows?

Because it is daily blogging I sometimes feel like I should blog about today, like live-blogging my slow trek through the tasks of my day, but some days don’t so much lend themselves to that. I could tell you about the score of emails I exchanged with the fella at Kraus, the company that manufactured our very nice faucets, during which I began wondering if it was actually the same person responding each time, or just a fungible crop of slightly inattentive people all with a disdain for the nuances of subtle communication.

My original email stated, “I have are two identical sinks equipped with a matched set of your faucets and drains. One of them drains despite the stopper being engaged. The other does not.”

First “he” (it says Spencer on the emails, but it is probably Venkiryama, along with three of his, or her, cousins, all taking turns) answers in such a way — asking for a video of the leak, with the underside of the sink shown — that I realize he has interpreted my mis-draining as an actual water-on-the-floor type leak.

Three emails later, he wants to confirm my address to send me a new drain-stopper cap. I remind him that I had already told him — in the same email in which I assured him that I had, yes, in fact, screwed the cap on snugly — that when I swapped the caps, the same sink presented with the drainage problem. (ergo, it couldn’t be the cap. Because I switched it! And, yes, screwed it on tightly! Not. Cap.)

Several more emails down this arid road of  “customer assistance” is where he diagnoses the problem as an incompatibility between my sink and their product. My Kohler Caxton sink, one of eight hundred bazillion sold in this country this year. Which is where I sort of lose my shit and remind him, slightly less gently, that only one of the sinks exhibits this problem. ERGO, NOT INCOMPATIBLE. I follow that by asking him to simply mail me out a new drain assembly and howzabout we see if the problem goes away, even if he wants to continue to entertain the airy notion of incompatibility.

I guess I get to wait until tomorrow to continue the saga, as my email must have arrived during his ciggy break at 4:45p. Or whatever time it was where he was.

Oh. I said I could tell you, and then look. I went ahead and did it, even though it  was utterly unblogworthy.

I suppose the lesson there is that when daily blogging, all is worthy.

There was the irregular gathering of our Hole In The Wall Lunch Bunch at a fine Seafood Grill. No dine-in, and on a corner that, while fine at high noon, probably would have been rather frightening as dusk approached. As with all of our outings to date, the food was really quite decent. Happily there were picnic tables under a tree at the after-school center catty-corner, and the weather couldn’t have been improved on. I ate a few too many hush puppies. Or maybe it was the clam strips or the crabcake.

Tempting fate, I know. But they were all out of the arugula salad with organic heirloom tomatoes, toasted pignoli and shaved manchego.

In any event, it took my stomach a few hours to recuperate. I hung laundry as the girls arrived home and then I did a bit more marketing and such for my Cycle101 program, which I’m very, very excited about but I did promise not to turn this in to one of those Indoor Cycle blogs.

And then I stopped myself midsentence, in kneejerk “No” mode, to say yes to Kira, who wanted me to turn the sprinkler on, and watched her lithe 6-year-old legs and giggly delight from the screen porch for a bit. Later the MPM came home and I went for a painful run. After I stopped going downhill from the house, it became rather apparent that my legs haven’t really — or even remotely — recovered from the 40 miles and two major climbs of Sunday. The only thing that made it bearable was a This American Life podcast. I do heart Ira Flatow*. Apparently some other people do too, and maybe in a different way? Because when I went to Google his name to be sure about the spelling, the auto-fill dropped down “Ira Flatow wife” as the third option. Hmmm.

Well, heck. It’s time for me to toddle off to bed. Hope to hear from you. Hugs, Amy

*Added footnote: One of my Kates brought to my attention that I had a little brain lapse. I would edit that name to correctly read “Ira Glass,” but no one seems interested in his wife at all. Megan recently went down in her school spelling bee by confidently stating “Basket. B-A-S-K-A-T, basket.” She later said to me, after the torrent of tears, “How could that have come out of my mouth when I’ve known how to spell ‘basket’ since I was in kindergarten?”

I know just how she felt.

Oh, people. It is Monday, April 15th, and I am a bit heartsick. And that is all I am going to say about that.

As for what else is surely on all my readers’ minds, being my bathroom mirrors, well, Saturday was spectacularly gorgeous and not only did I fail to blog (it is Katie’s fault; she gave me permission!) but I also failed to even take the photos as promised. I just “did around,” as they say around here, outside.

That should have manifested itself in progress on the Hell Strip, but I had a deep longing for a project that I could at the end of the day look at and think, There, I did something. I completed that. It is DONE.

Across the driveway from the Hell Strip is its young cousin. Call it the Hell Patch. It, too, gets blistering sun and no water. It, too, has gone through several iterations of improvement, none of which did much to accomplish the task.

Friday I found myself at the market, at the greenhouse stand in pursuit of lemon verbena, because you can’t make a lemon verbena margarita to sip on your porch in mid-summer without it. As I stood in front of the lush herbs, my eye fell upon a beautiful mint with rounded leaves and some height to it. Orange mint, the marker said. And I thought, Mint grows anywhere.

In fact, genus mentha is a nuisance and a pest if you’re trying to grow anything other than mint in a given area, because not only does it grow anywhere, it grows EVERYWHERE.

I bought it.  And then I bought apple mint, and Kentucky Gentleman mint (the best for cocktails, said my knowing friend manning the stand as she added it to the flat with my lemon verbena), and chocolate mint.I’m going to let them fight it out, in a true turf war. It will be, if nothing else, a fragrant and tasty battle.

To the right in the photo is some dianthus. I’m thinking the mints will begin making inroads that direction not long after it blooms and I’ll just rip it out. Behind are daylilies, to which I have little attachment. That skirmish could get interesting, but if I had to put money on it, I’d wager they’ll stand their ground in the scuffle to come.