My harvest

Ta-da! Seeds+soil+water and more sunshine than we bargained for. It's amazing, really.

I took this so I could show Josh what he was missin' but I thought, why NOT post it on blogger? I promise not to make a habit of it....vegetable pix don't make the most interesting of blogs afterall. Not stunning material. Perhaps I should have washed them first. Eh. It's edible, I grew it. Be impressed.

Summertime

Sometimes I feel like blogging....sometimes I don't. I've been in a "don't" season lately. OBviously. But today, it suits my fancy. I'm trapped here in Oklahoma (along with the rest of the whole mid-to-lower region of the US of A) under this dome I can't see but the weatherman assures me it's there and it's highly pressurized (whatever that means). I may not be able to see it, but man, can I feel it. It's stinkin' hot outside and my garden is proof. Poor little wilty okra plants and my sunflowers are so bowed over they look like they're prayin' for rain. Maybe they ARE prayin' for rain....them and every rancher around. Man, do we need it. In the meantime, I'll just sit in here blogging and look out there at the heat. And with sympathy, toward my garden.

Okay, it's Josh's garden but since he's been called to duty outside the Sooner state...it officially became MY garden. What am I learning? That I love my husband, first and foremost, but I sorta suspected this all along so I'm not very surprised. Gardening is not a cinch. I don't care what Home & Garden says...it's just not. Second day after I took the reins I found a nasty looking beetle the size of a small dog poking holes in my tomatoes. What to do? Well, I whipped out my trusty Samsung, of course, took Josh's advice and didn't mess around gettin what he said to do done. I Sevin dusted. Yes, I'm aware my tomatoes are no longer organic but at least they're there and my salsa appetite loves me for it.

Not only am I now the official gardener of the house, I also inherited charge of 26 newly hatched chickens when Josh hit the road. Precious little things...but just until they're big enough to get on my nerves which shouldn't take too long. So cute when they're little, so irritating when they're big. A lot like teenagers, I guess.

I'm in charge of those now too. All. By. Myself. It's tough bein' a single mom. They're aware my rear guard is temporarily displaced and I just know they're circling for an attack. Good thing I am a firm believer in the use of brooms, two by fours, and 'removal of cell phone' war tactics. Until or unless you have teenagers or have already survived them, don't judge me. You don't know what they can drive you to. Hair dye is only the beginning, trust me. If I didn't love them more than my own life, chaining them to a barrel in the backyard would be a viable, sanity saving option. Yesssss, I'd water them.

I can count on my eight year old to give me the sunny perspective I need most days. He is the happiest kid I can think of. Unless he's bored. Oh how I dread that word and it's somehow woven into the fabric of summer vacation. I'll be SO sunny when school starts again and I need a 'to-do' list just to stay on task long enough to get to work every morning. Some people do well with stillness and lack of mind boggling activity. Tracker and I do not. We invent things to do to pass the time. I can't quite convince him that cleaning is SO not boring.

It's only life!

My life is not perfect. I realize this comes more as a shock to me than to anyone else. As hard as I've worked to achieve order and sanity in the midst of the chaos that is my mind, I'm barely pushin' the 'normal' needle out of the red zone. What most people see of my life is simply an illusion. An illusion very skillfully crafted. Great pains have been taken in its construction. It protects me and what's mine, a comfortable buffer for those I wish to keep at a safe distance. There are those I let in, my "inner circle" who I allow behind the shiny, plastic outer shell. These are people I've deemed safe, those who've watched with me when the shell has sprung a leak and the ugly blackness of what my life can be came pouring out the hole. They stuck around to help clean up the destruction and mess it leaves behind. If not for these, you'd probably find me straight jacket wrapped or a gutter junkie. It takes work to keep patching the holes...and ya know, once you've got a patch, or patchES in my case...well, the illusion just loses some of it's sparkle. It actually becomes quite ugly. Like the neighbor's trash keeps blowing onto your lawn....my mess keeps blowing onto my illusion. It cannot be ignored forever. It will have to be dealt with.

I'm havin' to deal with some mess. That's the simplistic way of expressing life this week. I prefer the simplistic expression because it allows me to remain numb. "Mess" doesn't prick the surface like say, "my family is unravelling before my very eyes" does. "Mess" is a very neutral term that doesn't require much, if any, emotion to be attached. I like the big clump that "mess" embodies. I don't have to think about the specific details of the clump. A clump can be picked up and shoved in a paper sack....tiny little detail pieces require a bit more work to contain. Sorta like mud as opposed to dirt....you're gonna get dirty either way. Which do you prefer to deal with? The wet stuff that sticks together or the dry stuff that you can sweep and sweep but never get totally rid of. I like mud. Yep, a big, muddy mess....that's what life is this week. Thank goodness I get a new one every seven days.

On the lighter and somewhat brighter side of things, the school year is almost complete so I'll get a break from the lists of spelling words, permission slips, parent/teacher conferences, and report cards for a while. Mom is flourishing in the climate of grandkids she's submersed in, even tho she had to put her precious 19 year old kitty down yesterday. He didn't acclimate as well to the new home. It caused him a stroke, in fact. Oh, the memories I have of that cat. Shoot, she'd had him since I was 15...he's as much a part of my family as...well, BILL! I've known them both a fairly equal amount of time anyway. :) She sent me a text with his obituary and a picture of his final resting place last nite. Poor Mom. First, it's Bill not hangin with us Okies (he headed back north pretty quickly) and now, Cooper the Cat.

Nobody gets out alive anyway...

Ugh...blogging. At this point, I'm so clogged up, it'd take a book with chapters inside of chapters and 124 pages of footnotes and references to even categorize all this mess. So, why bother? Because. BECAUSE, dammit, if it doesn't come out in typed words, it runs out in emotion and YELLED words and fits I can't take back. It's sort of started already. I just really wanna stomp my feet and rage a little bit...a LOT, a bunch, actually. But I'm supposed to be like, mature and civilized and stuff....

There are a couple dozen reasons why I'm pissy but for the tip top of the iceberg I'm narrowly navigating around, I own a gas guzzling Durango that makes me cringe every time I hit the gas pedal. If it weren't paid for, I'd run it off the highest point of Goats Bluff while I toasted its watery demise. But this wouldn't BE an issue today if it weren't for my darling daughter. I love her more than life, but she's as dingy as a doorbell. I flip back and forth between, "she's just really that airheaded" and "she's just really that self absorbed". Her latest shining moment being leaving the key to my car, my car that gets 34 precious mpg, in the ON position all nite. The car that I forked over thirty bucks for her to clean out last nite so she could have more cash in her pocket @ state this weekend. The car that I filled up with gas yesterday. The gas that would last all week. The gas that's sitting in the gas tank of my nice, clean, eco friendly car that's DEAD in my driveway this morning. I won't even go into why jumping it wasn't an option. That's a Josh Lloyd blog for another time.

If it hadn't been for the fact that I was already in turbo charge mode just to get to school & work on time and I'd had to track down my contact solution via TAYLOR just so I could SEE what I'm doing today...I might have let the dead battery thing go. Maybe. Since I can't even find half my kitchen counters for the clothing she "doesn't have time" to put away...probably not. Oh, the proverbial straw. Granted, it wasn't Taylor's fault that I was tripping over the size 11 Reeboks laying in my tiny bathroom floor and I couldn't use the hand towel without knocking Matthew's precariously balanced baseball cap onto the floor and then the toilet seat, left in the UP position in true Tracker-style was taunting me...the dried mud from Josh's work boots in a trail all thru the house, the laundry bin that was almost empty before I went to bed was spilling over onto the floor, the dinner I put up was somehow back out and had been, all nite long, and then, it just happened...the cussin' and yellin' just happened. And suddenly, I could see every single thing that needed to be done and hadn't been done, most of them things I've repeatedly asked to BE done and I hit rampage mode. It's never pretty, it's really not even that efficient unless you count the fact that it causes my kids fall in line like little soldiers and actually hurry their butts out the door....SILENTLY.

I feel like I have no personal space, nothing that is just MINE anymore. My house is overrun with every body's every things, my car and Durango double as closets, lockers, and trash bins. The Who I Used To Be got lost somewhere in the Who I Have To Be and most days, I'm good with that. But there are days when I miss that long lost girl and the carefree, albeit messed up, life she lived. And I know, I know, I KNOW I don't have it bad. I really don't. But that doesn't mean it doesn't FEEL bad some days. Like the days I've busted my butt at work only to come home and bust it some more doing homework and housework and all the menial chores that keep five worlds spinning nicely and then I look over at my dear husband all kicked back in his recliner watching Charlie Sheen spew his insanity all over the world and I have the sudden and almost irresistible urge to bash him over the head with a broom handle. (Charlie ain't the only one goin stark ravin' mad.) The sad thing is, he'd seriously wonder what the hell I'd done it for. He, like my teenagers, is oblivious until I have a meltdown...or I take up smoking on the deck after midnite again. That always gets his attention.

Since this is life and there's never an easy answer to its problems and whining never did anyone any good for long, I'm gonna reign in the pity party for now. It's shallow, I know but this IS the shallow end of it all. I SAID the tip top of the iceberg, didn't I??? I've vented sufficiently for today. I know I'm not alone. There's a million moms out there singin' this same song. The choir does not need another soul sick soprano today.