Mellow(drama).

This morning I am playing the fun game of Are these side-effects or am I having a heart attack? and I'm honestly not concerned so probably side-effects. It's going to be so sad and pointless if I'm wrong. 

In the meantime I have shipped the remaining vodka back to my former friends at great expense to make a point, in spite of Caleb's efforts to not rock any boats (this after changing doctors) and received a lovely call whereby a voicemail was left acknowledging his (not Caleb's) distaste for the current 'situation' and complete understanding for my actions as a result. It won't do anything in the long run aside from denying myself my favourite imported vodka but you know what? I don't care. This war is bullshit. 

I have give up McDonalds and we all know how hard that is. Unless they withdraw from Russia. Who do I call?

It's going to be sad if this is my very last post though I'm fairly certain this is not a heart attack and just a muscular ache from scraping the door frame for painting prep or lifting boxes of bottles. Or side effects. Because THOSE aren't driving me nuts.

Wish me luck. I need a finger oxygen meter thingie. Maybe I'll order one on Amazon (gosh are they doing sanctions? If not I am fucked) and it will ironically arrive ten minutes after I die.

And I wore heels today! First time in ever.

 I was so sick last night and then I slept fitfully and was out the door at six-thirty this morning for (distanced) meetings and I have to make four pans of meatloaf for dinner but I think Lochlan is going to call a change and take over or let everyone fend because I don't think I have any steam left for anything. I still feel sick though I did have breakfast and lunch, a croissant and some coffee at the meeting and then dumplings on the run (living dangerously) and I did have an orange when we got home and now some tea to try and settle my stomach but I don't know. It would probably be wiser not to eat anything tonight and see how it goes. I did get my chores done this morning and then some, lots of extras in there but there are always things that need to be done, for sure. 

Food poisoning?

I don't know. We all ate the same things and everyone else was good but it sure felt like it. 

They have iron stomachs, Bridge. You...don't. 

I know. Hopefully it's gone. I feel better today. Just weak. 

Well, take a break and do nothing for a day. 

(*Snort*)

Don't snort at me. 

It wasn't 'at' you, PJ, it was a generalized noise. 

Same difference.

Pancake Princess.

Everyone wants to know what I gave up for Lent. Lent was a blur, frankly. These pills continue to kick my ass but in a good way, oddly. I don't feel all that creative and I can't concentrate and last night my heartbeat was in my throat and I was like this feels interesting but I didn't care about it either. 

I gave up my Diabhal for Lent. That's what I did. He is exceedingly unhappy about it but somehow takes comfort in the fact that as per Sam's rules it has to be something meaningful, something I will miss and struggle to avoid.

LOL.

Glass castles.

Storm doors are all done and after two days of being helpful, holding up this piece of trim or that mechanism and fetching t-squares and then drill batteries and then another trip to the hardware store I am freshly showered for like the fourth time here, sore and now the one to paint the trim to seal it against the elements sometime this week, I think. They all look amazing and it's nice to have a locked glass door that we can put the window down and have a breeze or simply have the glass and have light pouring in from outside with more security (the real reason I think my screen doors were changed out) without sacrificing heat or cold, depending on the season. 

There was only a little swearing, and boy, paint prices have increased a lot in the past year or two. Also we lost a bunch of drill bits halfway through and took forever to find them because I had put them in the box with the leftover nails and then promptly forgot. 

Also ladders. Ladders are so fun. And so is caulking but really not and it doesn't go very far but we bought a bunch of extra tubes so we're good now and now we have a whole raft of old wooden screen doors that aren't really salvageable because they were just about falling apart. 

Especially the side door to the driveway which has borne the brunt of Caleb and Lochlan pushing each other into it just about every third or fourth day for the past half-dozen years if not longer. 

But yeah they're done. Yay.

Rollercoasters and timeskips.

Yesterday was waylaid completely by an eleventh-hour invitation from Ruth to go wedding dress shopping. It began as a casual effort to go look around and then before I knew it she had found the dress and the women at the bridal store were losing their minds over it and her in it, zipping it up into a garment bag and making appointments for alterations to come as we don't have a lot of time but we have some. She wasn't sure what she wanted, even with ideas, though after trying on the dream idea it wasn't right in the end and she did a full turnaround. 

She even tried on my last actual wedding dress (the princess one) and deemed it not right which was fine as I didn't think it was either, and she talked alot about colour before we left, before finally going with a blush pink satin under cream lace. It's incredible. It's Ruth. And we are two months away from her wedding suddenly, all at once and yet every time I look at her I still see this little girl rocking out to Avril Lavigne and asking for Dunakroos. I'm almost in shock here and can't get over how fast life moves just when you think you're getting comfortable. 

My children continue to impress me with their poise and confidence. I'm envious but also so so proud.

Is it Wednesday?

 I'll be watching kpop videos today and maybe making cod and caesar salads for dinner since it's my night and probably going to bed even earlier than usual because I'm godsmackingly tired. 

Last night I had my first really weird dream on this medication, which I'm bearing with in terms of having decided I need to take it to fix a specific illness, versus it being an optional trial kind of thing. That's helping me accept the side effects and even those are slightly better than they were last week. 

But the dream. I can remember every detail. I walked up to the playground way up the hill and the mail for the whole neighborhood was laid out on the grass, everything opened but only valuable things taken, like gift cards out of birthday greetings and parcels. I stacked it all up and called for people to come out of their houses and get their mail and I gathered mine up and stuffed it into my satchel and then I was suddenly downtown and I met up with someone from work (I don't know the person or the job, actually) and she said the bus was leaving but I opened my wallet and my bus pass was cut into pieces and I told her it expired and she was like just pay cash but I didn't have any. 

I got on the bus anyway and ignored the driver as he called for me to pay and I went to the back and sat down. When I got home I lived in this tiny attic with Lochlan's mother and she had boxes stacked up everywhere and they were all addressed to me and I was trying to gather everything up and I told her I had to buy a new bus pass but my phone was dead so I would do it before work in the morning. I climbed way up into this wooden bed that was so high in the air and when I went to plug my phone in the charger was gone. I asked her if she had it and she said it was probably lost under all these boxes and so I went to sleep. 

My alarm woke me out of that, thankfully before I had to deal with figuring out who was stealing the mail and how I was going to get my new bus pass. 

Goddamn. I hate dreams like that but they're also weirdly fascinating.

Grooves in the pavement.

We're not coordinated. An early walk with Sam. An after-breakfast walk with Lochlan. A mid-morning walk with Dalton. An after-lunch walk with Benjamin and Duncan. A late afternoon walk with PJ and then after dinner Caleb asked me if I wanted to go for a walk and I had to beg off as I've already logged fifty kilometres today and I just want to stop moving. He understood and didn't feel singled out as I also had refused one from Batman earlier but damn. Why can't we just go for a group walk?

Lady luck.

It's cold, dark and raining on this atypical Monday and I have a house full of men in flannel shirts and jeans, all of which seem to be perpetually with coffee cup and phone in hand. It's so loud outside I turned off the music as it was just noise competing for my attention and it's kind of nice to listen to. I think I will miss it whenever or if ever I leave here. 

We had some really exciting news in amongst the screen door wars and I am so looking forward to the spring suddenly.

Your thoughtless words are breaking my heart.

Jacob is on the wall in the rain with his guitar. I can see him from here but it's pouring in sheets, turning the grass to mud and the skies to graphite and if I open that glass door the chimes will sound and they'll come running so I am content to sit in the big easy chair and watch him from the great room. From this chair I have a wider view of the backyard, and can just see the lower portion of the rock wall. He's just up from the platform where we set up the telescope on clear evenings in the summer, and I'm guessing his guitar is probably so far out of tune it's not in the genre he's playing any more which would be something by Stone Temple Pilots, Billy Joel or maybe Joe Jackson. Maybe a love song I no longer listen to, maybe a Beatles arrangement. Maybe some unconnected notes, like the song between us now that has been forgotten, no longer played on the record player or radio, no longer in the back of my mind, a soundtrack for a film that's over and been remade already. 

Or, 'reimagined', as it were. 

I look over at PJ on the big couch. He is nodding along to whatever's in his headphones and reading, swiping down the screen of his phone, content, coffee cup in his left hand, feet up on the tabletop, warm by the fire. He looks up, feeling my gaze and I look away. He is in charge this morning while everyone else sleeps away the rain after such a busy day yesterday. He didn't come out with the group and yet he's thrilled the rickety, warped screen doors are soon to be history. We also cleared out an extraordinary amount of things over the past several months from previous lives, a cobbled collective history of belongings that were redundant and copious. It's a spring-clean for our souls, and he is a big part of what keeps us organized and productive, though he is always perpetually worried that I might find things move too fast and regress, or worse. 

I'm doing okay. Things are good. He is cautiously optimistic for that, that the darker period now ebbs once more and we come out into the light. I take a deep breath through my nose, exhaling through my mouth. I take a sip of my ever-present water bottle and meet his gaze again with my reassuring smile, but only with my eyes. He winks and goes back to his reading. It's a content Sunday so I don't know why they let Jake sit there and play. They were supposed to banish him from my existence. That was the plan, I know now.

Shim it and skim it.

Replacing my beautiful wooden screen doors today with actual storm doors. Metal ones with slide-open windows and locking latches and far more quality than my country-farmhouse shabby chic painted doors that never matched the house style at all. It's too modern and austere and I was still in my Prairie Victorian stage, I guess. 

Next week will be twelve years here in the Pacific Northwest. Twelve years on the wrong coast, but here we are. 

But storm doors meant two trips to the hardware store, replacing all of the brick moulding around the doors too (all of them, not a one was exempt) and also a weird discussion, complete with procreate for visual charts, in the aisle of a Home Depot while we tried to figure out how to make it work. Oh, and latches for each door that are patent-pending that added almost a hundred bucks to each door, which was funny but also not. 

And we got all the stuff but now it's dark and it's raining and we've missed our chance to actually do the work. 

This is good, this is normal. This is how we roll.