Curse The Heat!

This is what happens when you go to a chocolate boutique and buy six beautiful chocolate confections with names like "Fleur de Sel Caramel" and "Lychee Rose" and you gently put them in your purse where they will not get smashed so you can take them home and savor their hand-made goodness with your brother and his girlfriend in celebration of their impending child and then you walk onto the streets of Sacramento where it's 500 degress in the shade and stop in at a few more shops and wait patiently while your son gets the Chinese symbol for courage airbrushed onto his arm before you head home.

They melt.

And then, when you sample what should have been ambrosial goodness (because you couldn't just throw them away!), you are disappointed to discover, though you suspected it was true, that chocolate and caramel and mint and hazelnut and rose don't taste very good when they're all mashed up together. In fact, they taste bad. Very, very bad.

I just thought you should know.

Topic Overload

I'm suffering from post idea paralysis brought on by too many things going through my head at once. It's probably because Jerry and I are in a holding pattern here at my mom's as we wait for the HSC conference to begin, so we're not really doing anything other than hanging out and having fun. But that's not really a very interesting subject. I do have a bunch of other things I'd like to write about, but I can't pick one. So I'm just going to summarize all the things that have been going through my mind. Things I might have written an entire post about--but didn't.

1. I should have been a race car driver. That's all I could think as I was sailing around the curves on the road to pick Jerry up at camp. It was awesome! But since everything I know about racing I learned from the Herbie movies I don't think I can even call myself a fan. I might become one, though.
   
2. A sister should not pick up and move to Ireland with her husband and two young children indefinitely. If someone's sister says she is moving back home in two years she should move home in two years. When asked "Are you still coming home in June?" she should not pause for five long seconds before saying, in a very unconvincing tone of voice, "Um, yeah, we are...It's just so expensive." She should just say "YES!" (Grrrrrrrr! Can you see my mad face? I. Want. My. Sister. Back!)
   
3. I'm giddy with excitement over the HSC conference because they have some of the coolest workshops ever (video game making, ukelele playing, and other great schooly and unschooly lectures) and because I'm going to meet Becky from Life Without School. It's so exciting when the blogging world and the real world collide!
   
4. When Jerry and I were at the Exploratrorium in San Francisco (where we unexpectedly ran into some of our favorite people from our homeschool group in L.A.!) we got the coolest toy ever. It's called Stringthing Limbo. You can limbo with it but it's much more fun just to touch it while it's moving and see what happens to the string.
5. My brother's girlfriend is pregnant! Yippee! We're going to have another person to love!!

Disorder Without Borders

The topic was physics, but I'm just self-centered enough to think maybe the author was describing my office.
"Order, by definition, has restrictions and limitations, while disorder knows no bounds."
-Natalie Angier, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science

Together Again

I have my boy back! The drive to camp was long--I had to take a detour along a dirt road because of road construction--but I made it to camp around 3:00 Friday afternoon. The campers were having rest hour on their platforms so I waited on the tree swing just outside the boy's area while someone went to tell Jerry I'd arrived. I barely had time to take in my surroundings (huge oak trees, barn, horses grazing in the pasture, Gates Mountain in the distance) before Jerry came running up the hill with a huge smile on his face.

There were mosquito bites all over his face and legs; he was so covered in dirt his belly button might have sprouted something given seed and a bit of water; and an angry rash (courtesy of the California campers' nemesis, poison oak) ran up one arm and down the other. He didn't quite look like the Jerry I'd left three weeks earlier.

We did the standard sappy movie reunion: ran toward one another and threw our arms around each other then held on for dear life--we even stayed put while the sprinkler shot a blast of water straight at us (it was hot).

For the rest of the day we just hung out together. He took me down to his platform, we sat under the apple trees and talked, went to the wood shop where I watched him make a couple mini skateboard ramps. We ate dinner with the campers and went to the dance to celebrate the final night, then we sat around the campfire and sung while the stars slowly filled the sky above us. At bedtime we went off to our separate sleeping quarters (Jerry on his platform and me in one of the little cabins) but Jerry came up to see me bright and early the next morning after he'd waved good-bye to all the campers leaving on the bus and we had a nice cuddle before heading down for breakfast.

We could have left anytime but Jerry lingered. He didn't seem quite ready for camp to end. But eventually we said our goodbyes and headed down the road. We stopped for lunch in the nearest town, and stopped a few more times along the way because Jerry was carsick.

Finally, though, we made it back to my mom and dad's where the boy was reunited with his dog.
We'll be staying here for the week while we wait for the HSC Homeschooling Conference to begin. My parents have gone off to visit my sister in Ireland so it's kind of quiet. Since we got here we've gone to the movies, spent lots of time in the pool, listened to some Harry Potter on CD and done lots of lounging. Today we're heading down to the bay area to pick up Jerry's camp duffle bag (wouldn'tcha know it ended up on the bus?!), visit some friends and go to the Exploratorium in San Francisco. We're definitely enjoying being together again.

Lucky Squared

Warren and I met in 1989 when I was 20. A friend of his had offered to give me a ride up to Shoreline Amphitheater in Northern California to see the Grateful Dead. I had only just met the guy but he was a friend of a friend so I took him up on his offer. A couple weeks later I found myself in his tiny Hollywood apartment, just off the Sunset Strip, being introduced to my weekend traveling companions. Warren was one of them. Within two months we were engaged.

I'm just telling you this because one of the benefits of having no kids in the house is having your partner to yourself. It's not that we've done anything special--we haven't. But boy has it been nice to have time together, alone.

This morning, our last morning as a couple without Jerry, Warren said he felt like he was beyond lucky to have found me. Is there something beyond lucky? I asked. Lucky squared, he said.

This is the man who my mother only ever referred to as "Poor Warren" for the first fifteen years of our relationship. (She finally eased up when I started referring to my father as "Poor Dad".) This is the super organized, ultra prepared (if he were a super hero he'd be Ready Man), neat and orderly guy who somehow ended up with messy, disorganized, fly by the seat of her pants, always waiting until the very last minute to meet deadlines, me. It's amazing, really.

What's even more amazing is that we're still together. Between his long work weeks (the record is 106 hours in one week on Titanic) and our radically different lifestyle habits (I still maintain that living next door to each other--duplex, anyone?--might not be such a bad thing) we had a lot working against us. But a few years of heavy drugs--okay, it was marriage counseling but it cost just as much as a drug habit--and a more realistic definition of marriage (for me, anyway) helped us get through the rough patches.

What really saved us during the toughest years, though, was the fact that Warren never ever stopped believing we could make it work. No matter how much I kicked and screamed, no matter how despondent and infuriating I became, no matter how I wished we could just throw in the towel, he just wouldn't stop trying to make it work. It was pretty annoying, actually.

But now, here we are. Still together. Still driving each other crazy. Still in love. Can you guess what that makes me?

Lucky cubed.

Funny Stuff & Self-Control

Jerry's camp called me today to remind me to pick him up on Saturday. Like I could forget. Now that's funny!

What's not so funny is the fact that I cannot drive within a mile of a Krispy Creme Doughnuts without stopping in for a plain glazed creme-filled doughnut. This is a problem. Seriously. Where is my self-control!? I keep saying I want to lose the 15 pounds that's crept up on me in the last decade but then I do things like stop in at Krispy Kreme just because I'm "in the neighborhood," which loosely translates to anywhere in the city of Burbank. Thankfully I don't go to Burbank very often.

And, I keep saying I want to get stronger so I can show up all those talented teenagers in my circus class who make flipping upside down on a trapeze look as easy as breathing (actually, I'd settle for just not making a fool of myself) but do I do push ups? Sit ups? Have I installed the chin up bar I bought a month ago so I can actually lift myself more than a 1/32nd of an inch off the trapeze when I try to pull myself up? No. No. And no.

This has got to change! When I get back from picking Jerry up (which could be this Monday or next depending on if we go to the HSC homeschooling conference in Sacramento) I am going to start building up my strength. I'll probably still stop at Krispy Kreme, though, if I'm in Burbank. And Glendale really isn't too far from Burbank so maybe if I'm Glendale, too. Actually, Krispy Kreme is right off the 5 freeway so really anytime I have to get on the freeway it's just a hop skip and a jump to creme-filled bliss.

See what I mean about self-control?

Contact!

I've talked to Jerry three times since I last wrote. He's doing fine. He's having fun. He misses home. He got poison oak on his arm, but he's glad he went to camp. What a relief!

I think finally talking to him made his absence much easier for me. I started to enjoy my time alone much more once I knew he was happy. I should rephrase that, actually, because I did enjoy it before, it's just that I was working most of the time--cleaning and organizing and stuff. But towards the end of last week I gave myself permission to relax and enjoy myself so I've been watching movies and reading and just enjoying the silence in our house. I've watched "In Bruges," "Into the Wild," lots of "Get Smart" and "Daily Show." I had lunch with a friend, which was great, and we had friends over on Saturday and stayed up late talking and drinking and playing games. Warren and I took the dog for a walk in Griffith Park on Sunday, went to see "American Teen," walked around old town Pasadena and went to a bookstore where I bought Eat, Pray, Love for a friend (I can't stop giving that book to people!) and Breaking Dawn, the final book in the Twilight trilogy, for me. So now I'm deep into the book (it's gooooooood!). I plan on finishing it today.

Things are looking up. It turns out I can survive without Jerry at home as long as I know he is happy. Phew!