26 things

Awed:  I am in awe at how blessed I am in my life despite all the trials and tribulations I have faced.

Books:  I haven’t bought one for me in years but my house over floweth with the N-man’s.  He can’t get enough of them.

Comma: A simple punctuation tool that I really REALLY need to learn to use more regularly.

Diet:  I don’t need to out right go on one yet.  I just need to make sure mine is healthier before I do need to go on one.

Exhausted:  What I am and why I am doing this instead of writing something significant.  Although this isn’t as simple as I thought it would be.

Frank Madden:  The trainer I worshiped as a junior rider and who I finally get to ride with next weekend in a clinic.

Garland:  What is no longer on my Christmas tree and instead, is adorning my kitchen floor.

Humble:   I’m trying to be more of this.

Icicle:  I had one on the end of each leg by the time I got off the hoofed one today.  Brrrrrrrr!  I should have stayed home instead.

Jesus Christ:  The real reason we celebrate the season.  The real reason I celebrate anything.

Kindness:  I have set a goal to commit 10 random acts of kindness towards strangers in December.

Lame:  I totally feel like an idiot staring around my house trying to finish up the last few letters on this exercise.

Myra:  My guardian angel who cleans my house 2x a month and whom I could not live without.  If I had the money, I would send her to every single friend and single mom I know as a present.

N-man:  Light of my life.  My reason for being. I love you, Booper.

Ornaments:  What is also no longer on the lower half of my tree.

Pure:  The quality of joy on the N-man’s face when he came home today and saw the Christmas tree standing in our living room.

Quiet:  I never realized how much I cherished it until I had a toddler.

Riding:  It gives me peace and clarity.  I am never so truly me as I am when I am on the back of a horse.

Spring:  I can’t wait for spring to come again so I can sit on my new deck and feel the sun on my face and inhale the smell of fresh blossoms in the air.

Time:  I need more of it in my days.

Ugly:  How I feel about once a week when I look in the mirror and realize I am rapidly nearing the end of another decade soon.  Then I remember that beauty fades but stupid is forever, so I’ll be just fine, even if I don’t look 22 er, um…. 32, forever.

Very:  I am very happy I am finally done with this!  What?  You thought I was going through these letters in order?

Wondering:  Wondering what I am  doing tomorrow.  I need to look at my calendar.

Xylophone:  If my mother follows through and buys one for the N-man for Christmas, I will not be responsible for my actions, especially if she leaves it at my house.

Yawn:  I do it way too much.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Where the boys are

I have officially upgraded from browsing the on line dating sites to buying coffee and taking it on a leisurely stroll through Home Depot.  Yes, I do have several home projects on the mind, the most pressing of which is finding a lighted, holiday lawn sculpture, but until MsSingleMama pointed out that to find a man we first need to open our eyes and look around, I had completely forgotten what a veritable smorgasbord that place is.   Lucky for me I’m going to have a hell of a lot of landscaping to do in the very near future.  Had the N-man not launched into a full blown, desperately in need of a nap, temper tantrum over a tacky, 7 foot tall, inflatable Mickey Mouse dressed as Santa Claus,  I do believe I would have spent another hour, possibly two, just strolling the aisles and day dreaming about various improvements that need to be made in my life.

Let’s get this party started

I am officially in the spirit!!  My mom and I bundled the N-man up in eleventy billion layers and braved the cold to take him to the Christmas tree lighting at the local outdoor shopping area.  He was nothing less than enchanted by the ice skaters on the pond.  He cheered with joy when Santa rode in on the old fashioned fire engine.  And when that giant tree lit up the plaza, so did his face, radiating ten times as brightly with pure, innocent, unbridled joy.  We went out to eat and exited the restaurant just in time for the first wet, white, sticky flakes of the first real snowfall of the year.  N-man stood there in the parking lot in wide eyed wonder giggling and spinning as he looked into the heavens yelling Snowning!! Snowning!! Snowning!!   My eyes welled up and spilled over in a fraction of a fraction of a second.

Now that he’s tucked away for the night in his flannel, footy pajamas, I’m placidly sipping my evening tea in perfect contentment as I watch the snow weave it’s beautiful, blanketing, voodoo magic on the back deck.  I am oozing Christmas spirit and cheer and anxiously counting down the days until he revels in his first cognizant morning under the tree.

Turkey day for the record books

I have a secret.  I’ve been holding out for three days.  I invited X and his mother to come over and join us for Thanksgiving dinner.  As soon as I did it I wondered about exactly how incredibly insane I must be.   But now that it’s behind us, and since I did not slide him out the door in a body bag and cover up the evidence, I’m finally coming clean.  The original plan was that I would do my dinner early afternoon  and X would pick up the N-man at 4:30.  I assumed that they would then have people over for dinner in the evening.  But when I asked earlier this week what their plans were, I was shocked to hear them say they had none.  As far as we’ve come, in the spirit of the season, it just seemed the right thing to do.  So I did it.  And  now I’m glad.   By the time they left it just felt like the white flags had been waived all the way around and that we are all moving forward instead of staying mired in the disgusting, ugly past. I am increasingly hopeful that we really are going to be able to be friends to the extent we need to for the N-man.   I ponder though about how much the N-man should get used to seeing us together as a family.  I worry that at some point X might get the wrong idea.  I also contemplate on the fact that I often ponder, worry, and fret my way into a bad space that doesn’t need to be.  So, right here right now, I shall  just contently smile over my glass of Spanish red and savor the silence now that everyone has left me alone with my thoughts.  The holidays are off to a better than good start. 

For the record,  all boy, all the time,  this is what the N-man thought about getting dressed up and not being allowed to roll in the dirt all day.

Restoring a little faith…

In my hyped-up, chocolate overload coma I almost forgot.  I came home from my painfully long work morning (what was supposed to be one quick hour of work turned into four), which was followed by the dreaded, day before Thanksgiving, Crap I forgot something! dash to the circus act that used to be called a grocery store, and pulled up in front of my house to discover that my previously Carrie-esque, looks like pig’s blood, garage door was now covered in white, primer paint.  There was a sticky note on my front door, no name, no address, no phone number,  saying  I’ll be back Friday to finish painting.  

I think this sums it up nicely!  Thank you secret angel!!

Locked in a closet with a fork

I don’t cook.  I love to do it, and I’m pretty decent when I endeavor to do so, but I don’t.  I don’t have time to do it the way I believe food should be done so I just don’t do it at all.  Except today and tomorrow.  I’m finally hosting my first real thanksgiving and after years of longing to play hostess, I’m going all out.   Now, even when I do cook, I don’t bake.  Totally different ball game that baking stuff.  It’s totally outside my comfort zone.   But seeing as I’m still trying to  redeem myself from certain slacker mommy hell for the store bought Halloween cupcake debacle, I got a random bug up my behind last week and declared that I would die if I did not have a chocolate bourbon pecan pie.  If I didn’t know better I’d swear I was knocked up again because I hate pecan pie.  Until now apparently.

Never doubt the powers of a perfectly plump Southern belle with big hair, a bottle of bourbon, and a kitchen to die for.  Paula Deen is my hero.  I finally settled on one of her recipes after searching high and low, and went for it.  Seeing as I don’t want to  my friends and family to leave my house by ambulance and with a raging case of food poisoning tomorrow, I decided to throw calorie counting to the wind and make an extra pie so I could taste it first and ensure no one would fall to the ground and convulse.   BEST.  CHOCOLATE.  BOURBON.  PECAN. PIE. EVER!!!  It took 15 minutes to put together, about 45 to cook, and upon cooling, about 2 seconds to make me run screaming around my house in blissful, chocolaty heaven delight.  And, as all properly prepared, good, Southern cuisine should be, it is rich beyond all concept of rich, so you might want to give Ben & Jerry a heads up first.  A quarter of a pie gluttonously shoveled into my face later, here you have it.  The secret to my first pie baking attempt success.  Paula, if you were here, I’d pick you up, spin you around the room, and plant one right on ya!!!

Ingredients

• 1 (9-inch) unbaked pie shell
• 2 cups pecan halves
• 3 large eggs beaten
• 3 tablespoons butter, melted
• 1/2 cup dark corn syrup
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 tablespoons good-quality bourbon
• 3 ounces semisweet chocolate, chopped
• (I added 1 tablespoon of vanilla because I love it!)

Directions

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.

Cover bottom of pie crust with pecans.

In a medium bowl, whisk together the eggs and melted butter. Add the corn syrup, sugar, bourbon and the chopped chocolate. Stir until all ingredients are combined. Pour mixture into the pie shell over the pecans and place on a heavy-duty cookie sheet.

Bake for 10 minutes. Lower the oven temperature to 350 degrees F and continue to bake for an additional 25 minutes or until pie is set. Remove from oven and cool on a wire rack.

Fake it ’til you make it

I got out of work today after eight straight, excruciating hours of court, most of it just sitting around waiting and waiting and waiting and thought, Well so much for the peaceful, relaxing start to my day.  I knew it was too good to have lasted too long.  I managed to catch X by phone before he left his house with the N-man to head to mine and told him I’d be driving right by there anyway so I would just pick him up.  The 8 mile drive took me 50 tormenting minutes.  Half way through the drive I made the executive decision, knowing the worst part of the drive lay on the other side of X’s house, to stop and go out for dinner and wait out the traffic.    It was far beyond my capacity for patience and acceptance to withstand an additional hour behind the wheel on a fizzling diet of  only Earl Grey tea and diet coke.  I picked up the N-man and for some unknown reason asked X if he wanted to come with us.  ?????  Don’t ask me where that came from.   I’m thinking mostly I didn’t feel like dealing with a toddler alone in my delirium and needed some back up there just in case.  Regardless, for some unknown reason, he said sure and off we went to a place we frequented back when we were married.  As we approached the door he said to me, I wonder if that old lady is still the hostess here.  (His words, not mine, so calm down now.)  He opened the door and held it for me and we were greeted by none other than the old lady herself.  Guess that answers that question.  Having not seen us in well over a year, she gasped at the sight of the N-man and gushed with a huge grandmotherly smile,  It’s just been so wonderful watching how your family has grown after all this time!   X and I just nodded and smiled uncomfortably and looked away from each other.  

So what’s my point?  Do I ever have one?  I guess what I’m getting at is that you can  never tell.  Really it was just kind of ironic that I pulled off such a charade  by days end because this morning I was listening to this song as I was driving into work. I was kind of internalizing it,  looking at all the people walking around downtown and thinking about their secret lives, wondering what was really there, the things that no one would ever know by just looking at them.  Years of growing up, sitting in airports alone, going between mom and dad made me love to people watch.  I would sit for hours wondering who they all were and then silently answer my own questions.  But things are rarely as they appear to be on the surface.   I’m sure I was wrong at least 90% of the time and those were only my concious assumptions.  We usually only see what we choose to see, or what someone chooses to show us, not the truth.  We script our own scenarios about the world in our minds and live our lives accordingly.    But what if we really did know what was going on under there?  Would you want to know or are you just more comfortable with your script?  Would it change the way you operate?  Would you become more compassionate or do you think you’d just go about your day status quo?   I’m not really asking for answers from anyone.  I’m just thinking  and wondering out loud.   Anyway, going into the holiday season, it’s just a little food for thought.

Early morning confession

It’s 7:15 a.m. The N-man spent his usual Monday night with X.   I slept like a rock last night.  Blissfully lazed in my bed listening to the radio for half an hour before I got up with no fear of waking someone who has crawled into my bed (yes, he’s back in my bed).  Sat on my half built deck in the shivering cold watching the sky morph purple, orange, pink, pale blue over a cup of steaming Earl Grey with honey.  And I am now catching up on the state of the stock market and world on the Today Show, still in my pajamas, in front of the fireplace and savoring the calm, quiet, and profound sound of no children. 

 I am also feeling unbelievably, painfully, incredibly guilty at how much I am loving the absence of morning chores,  trying to diaper a toddler as he climbs the stairs, rushing to make a breakfast that will mostly be fed to the dogs, or  listening to painful howling as I try to pry toys out of his sticky hands while rushing out the door half dressed.  Tuesday mornings, in all their peace and glory,still inevitably lead to such emotional conundrum.