Our kitchen is now purple. The color’s name, to be exact, is “soapy water.” I can’t imagine what was going through the mind of the person who generated such a color name. But, it seems appropriate for a kitchen.

Pictures!

Soapy water!

Note the child locks on the cabinets under the sink...to keep Oliver out of the trash.

Cheap souvenir from Paris

Cat clock! Black and white, because the purple in this picture looked funny...

Sometime last week, Jesse observed: “You never just sit.” I may stop for a moment, but even in my times of “rest,” I’m always consuming something or doing something—reading, checking the news online, planning something I’m about to do, or regretting something I should have already done. I’m always on.

Sadly, this doesn’t result in great amounts of productivity. If you want to see productivity, just look to Sabrina, who accomplishes more while napping than I do in a normal day.

It does, however, result in a lot of procrastination. See, when my brain decides it’s done and can’t stand to edit or write or whatever, I just end up on Facebook, wasting time. Then, I feel guilty for not getting more done and overwhelmed thinking of all that needs doing. Even when I do something I enjoy, say reading a book or something, I feel guilty for it afterwards.

So, the epiphany. Sunday afternoon, I had a Congo meeting and afterward Rachael and I stood out in the parking lot of the church and realized we were looking forward to the trip because in Congo, we’d be less stressed out. I wanted to laugh. Who goes to a third-world country to relax? Well, me, apparently. Because here, in my comfy first-world existence, I don’t.

The other day, I forced myself to take a bubble bath without a book or magazine with me. I filled up the tub and then stared at the ceiling and every three minutes thought, Is that enough? Am I done? Can I do something else now? NO, I told myself, and stayed put, determined to rest.

I think a lot of this stems from the fact that Jesse’s basically working two jobs right now while I babysit and try to finish this book. I feel like a freeloader, and that drives me crazy. Sure, I do all the household chores, I cook, I pay the bills and keep the budget, I grocery shop, and so on. Most of the time, Jesse comes home to a fairly clean house and a home-cooked dinner, and I’m sure that’s kind of nice. But, I’m not bringing in a whole lot of cash, and try as I might, I still have that linked to my feelings of self-worth. (Stupid, I know. Sorry.)

So, when I do things I enjoy, somewhere in the back of my mind is a picture of Jesse, slaving away, not getting to do the things he enjoys. And it’s all my fault.

Well. I guess he and I need to do some more talking about our current situation. But, in the meantime, I can’t keep this up, this whole never-really-resting/feeling-guilty-for-not-doing-more song and dance I’ve got going.

I made a list, because that’s what I do, and at the top I wrote Things I Enjoy. It goes like this:

Being outside
Gardening
Photography
Reading
Cooking/Baking
Reading cookbooks
Spending time w/friends
Spending time w/Jesse
Having a clean house (not so much the actual cleaning)
Listening to music
Drinking tea

(Note that Facebook didn’t make the list. Neither did checking online news.)

This week, I’ve been trying to do at least one thing from the list each day. These things are relaxing to me, restorative. The trick is, it doesn’t count if I feel guilty for it later.

The funny thing? Since I’ve started this, I’ve been more productive. Because when I’m tempted to procrastinate or waste time, the pull isn’t as strong because I know I’ll be able to do something restful that I enjoy if I make the time for it. It’s really just an attitude shift. Today, I mopped the floors and vacuumed and cleaned the dishes, and while I was doing it, I told myself I was doing it because having a clean house is on the list, and I knew I’d feel better once the floors were sparkly and smelling nice.

Today, I spent the first half of the day with A. and we took a long walk, played outside, read books, worked on learning colors, shapes, letters, and numbers. Then I came home and ate lunch while sitting at the little table on our back patio (er, concrete slab). While talking to Simona on the phone, I dusted the house and tidied up, and after hanging up I performed the aforementioned chores, then washed Jesse’s car (outside and in!). Earlier this morning, I’d put a pot roast in the slow cooker, so I didn’t need to make dinner, but on a whim I decided to go for a batch of cornbread. Jesse had to work late, so I ate by myself, cleaned up the kitchen, then decided I’d bake a lemon buttermilk pound cake (I’ve never made a pound cake before, so we’ll see how it turns out).

And the day’s not done. I may read, I may drink some tea, I may tackle some editing. Or, I might sit in the tub, doing absolutely nothing.

Happy Monday!

Let’s back up. The past few days have been a whirlwind—fun, nearly every moment of them, but packed. Thursday, I got up early to clean the house, wash linens, make the guest bed (er, futon), pick up a pork tenderloin and some good balsamic vinegar from Harris Teeter, and prep said tenderloin so it could marinate for the rest of the day. I watched A. for the afternoon, playing outside with him and the family’s Australian Shepherd, feeding him peas, and singing to him while stacking blocks. Every time I finish singing him a song, he claps, grins, and says, “Yay! Yay!” I have no idea how I managed that, but let me tell you, with that reaction, I’m singing all the time now. Sometimes, when I forget the words to “Hush Little Baby” (I can get started, but then I forget what order things are supposed to be given…) or run out of alphabet- or farm-themed songs, I resort to Elton John.

Thursday afternoon, about a half hour after I came home from watching A., Beth and her mom Cheryl drove up and we commenced the requisite hugging-and-squealing phase of the visit, which we followed with a house tour (about thirty seconds is all it takes to see the whole thing) and conversation in the living room. We then started dinner, popping the tenderloin in the oven and starting in on the mashed potatoes, Brussels sprouts, green beans, and bread. Jesse came home and we poured lemon Italian soda into champagne glasses and got out the tablecloth and had ourselves a nice little dinner. Jesse ran out to the store afterward to grab ice cream, which I’d forgotten earlier, and we had brownie and hot fudge sundaes. We stayed up late playing card games and something called Speed Scrabble (fun, fun, fun).

Friday morning, Jesse left for work early and Beth, Cheryl, and I had a lazy morning at home. We took our time getting up and getting ready, and then we set up a waffle bar for breakfast. Aunt Joannie got me this fabulous waffle maker for Christmas, the kind you flip over to make two waffles at once, and it’s red and shiny and, apparently, it makes The Best Waffles Ever. I took my mom’s suggestion and separated the eggs, beating the whites separately and folding them in at the end, and the waffles were light and fluffy but with perfectly crispy outsides. Yum. We improvised a blueberry-lemon syrup and we whipped cream and served the waffles with strawberries and macadamia nuts. Beth had brought a tea called Lady Grey, and we drank nearly a pot of it as we sat around the table, making and eating our waffles, and talking—so much talking!

Beth and I have known each other our whole lives. Our parents lived next door to one another in Nitro before we were born. Then we showed up, three months apart, and we’ve been friends ever since, even though both our families left West Virginia when we were children, even though we’ve not lived in the same state since we were four. Beth is kind and mild mannered and smart. In college, she majored in chemistry and French, and now she works in a hospital pharmacy, in a place so clean she wears a hairnet and cannot wear any makeup for fear it might flake off and contaminate someone’s IV bag. That fact alone puts her job into the category of Jobs I Will Never Do, but Beth does it because she’s not as vain as I am and has a very lovely complexion anyway.

Beth and her mom had to leave in the afternoon, so we took leftover veggie soup to the church and had lunch with Jesse before they headed out of town. After they left, I did a little copyediting and then went shopping. Because it was Friday and because I had a gift card and because it was warm enough to wear a skirt and flip flops, and that made life oh-so-good. At the mall, I found sales and managed to leave with $10 still on my gift card, and I drove to Ulta to pick up some makeup I was running out of (no hospital pharmacy for me) and I kept the windows down, which made my hair unhappy, but I didn’t care, because it made the rest of me happy and my hair is unhappy so often that its desires cannot be taken too seriously.

And then that evening I nearly forgot that Jamie Oliver’s new show was on, but I remembered in time to see three-fourths of it (so good!) and found the rest of it on Hulu today. (You can watch it there if you didn’t catch it.)

That brings us to yesterday, when we got up early and left for Charlotte to help Joannie move in to her new apartment. It’s in a fantastic part of town with a shopping center across the street that has a Target, a Harris Teeter, a movie theater, just about every kind of restaurant you could want, and dozens of other shops, including one that rents out audio books. Lovely! Mom and I cooked chicken fajitas for dinner and we drove around the area to see what we could see and we cooed at Joannie’s cats and tried to reassure them everything was fine, even though they were not quite sure what was going on. Jesse and I left after eight that night and made a wrong turn, which meant we pulled into our driveway about four hours later, just about cross-eyed with fatigue. And Oliver and Gracie were waiting at the door, meowing for dinner, which, they made clear to us, was far too late for their liking.

The reason for my early morning was a dentist appointment. I don’t dislike dentist appointments in the same way some people do, but, generally, getting my teeth cleaned, poked, scraped, and x-rayed doesn’t rank very high on my “Things to Wake Up Early For” list. But, I dutifully show up at my dentist’s office every six months because that’s the kind of person I like to believe I am. I once went three years without going to the dentist, and this was cause for some embarrassment and a general sense of dismay when I finally got an appointment and had to admit I’d not been to a dentist in three years. But then the hygienist said she couldn’t believe it had been that long since my last cleaning and pronounced my teeth in good shape, and I felt enormously better. My teeth are not particularly attractive (I was one of those kids who didn’t need braces, so now I admire the perfectly straight post-braces teeth of my peers and smile for pictures with my mouth closed), but they are clean. I don’t, however, floss. I feel you should know that, lest you think I’m someone I’m not.

Now that you know my dental history and the condition of my teeth, we can move on. I left the dentist’s office and spent the rest of the morning watching the two-year-old I babysit. We played outside, took a walk, worked on learning the shapes, talked about colors (“What color is this?” “Boo.” “Yes! Blue! Very good! Blue!”), and read a stack of library books about ducks and numbers and heavy machinery. When I came home, I poked around online looking for information about education for two-year-olds because I want to make sure I’m maximizing the time I spend with him. If I could be nanny-and-teacher, that would be a win-win for everyone—the parents would get more for their money; the little boy would learn things and become a prodigy and star in a YouTube video where he names all the states and their capitals in the order they joined the union; and I would feel productive and useful. Today I felt we did a good amount of educational play, and I do think it’s important to have times of objective-free play, but I’d like to learn more.

The rest of the day was a chiropractor appointment and a variety of errands and chores. For dinner, I made vegetable soup, cleaning out my veggie drawer. Basically, if it was in my fridge or freezer and was some variety of edible plant, it went in the soup. Oh, plus macaroni. Super easy, super tasty, and it made the house smell great. Tomorrow, my friend Beth and her mom will be in town, and that means tomorrow morning will be another early one for me. But this time, I’ll spend those pre-dawn moments cleaning my house and setting up the futon and buying a pork loin and some good balsamic vinegar for dinner. Much better—sorry, Dr. L—than a visit to the dentist.

The blog I thought I was going to write today was full of enthusiasm, my typical gushing, my typical excitement. Because things really are going quite well. Another draft of the book is finished. I watch several lovely children who are growing and learning things. I lead a group of amazing women I absolutely love, and they are going to change the world. Against all odds, the checkbook stays balanced, and we are in the black. I’m going back to Congo in t-minus ten weeks and four days.

But, right now, everything is just so heavy. I’m not doing anything that I can let slide. Everything is important, and everything has implications that affect other people. This is going to sound stupid, and probably painfully lazy, but I wish I had something I could just slack off on. Not because I want to do a so-so job at something—but because I feel, especially after last night, the weight of what I’m carrying, and there are days when it feels particularly heavy.

Last night I stood in front of a room full of people—of advocates, leaders—and told them I believed that small group leaders are the leaders of the church. Which makes us—the advocates—the leaders of the leaders. So, it’s our ship. And it’s either going down, or it’s going to sail. And I don’t know if anyone else heard it louder than I did, the level of responsibility and authority in that. I’m not even twenty-seven yet! I can’t lead a church! I don’t know Greek! (Actually, wouldn’t it be kind of cool to know Greek? But unfortunately I don’t think that gets you any closer to understanding, because most of us can barely understand things written in modern English, so I’m not even sure that knowing Greek really means as much as we think it does.)

I posted on Facebook a line about pod stuff, and I think some context is appropriate. Our church has groups called “small groups”—they’re meant to be little communities where people can love each other and challenge each other. They’re supposed to make a big church feel small. And each small group leader is put into a “pod” with other small group leaders. And those pods are led by advocates. I’m an advocate, so I’ve got a pod, four women who lead groups, and my job is to make sure they’re the best leaders they can be, that they’re constantly growing, and that their groups are as healthy as possible.

We meet once a month as a group; we eat together, we listen to a message, we talk about the leadership book we’re studying. If it’s someone’s birthday month, she wears a tiara (a real one—no plastic tiara for my girls! Okay, but they are rhinestones, not diamonds, but I’m going to say that’s not because I’m poor but because I don’t want to put a bunch of conflict diamonds on one of their precious heads. Ha!) and the rest of us wear birthday hats and bring her presents. Everyone else looks at us like we’re crazy, but we know they’re secretly jealous. (Is that okay in a church environment? Probably not. Well, I’ve never claimed to be a role model.) One of the things that works best is we have a group identity. The pod is its own character, and we love the pod. We’re committed to the pod.

I’m currently doing evaluations on their groups and their leadership, something I’ve never done before, and I think it’s going to be another game-changer for our group, because we’re about to get real specific, real intentional. The proverbial rubber will meet the road. I’m excited because I’ve never felt like I had the authority to come into their groups and intentionally observe them as leaders. But that’s changed in recent months, and here we are. And I think it will work because I think they know I’m on their team. I so desperately want them to succeed, and when that means telling them the truth, no matter how brutal, that’s what I’ll do. Because I want their success as leaders above everything else, including my popularity or “nice girl” image.

And I told the group of advocates that I spoke to last night that I feel I have yet to reach the level of “bare minimum” of what an advocate should do and be. Heavy. But that’s how big I feel the job is, and I slacked off on this job for a year and a half, and I’m not going back, not ever. I’ll quit this before I go back to not really leading the group, to being a “facilitator.”

Which brings me back around. Look at that. There really isn’t anything in my life that I can slack on. Part of that is because I’ve jettisoned—or am in the process of jettisoning—the commitments I could slack on. The outliers, the ones my heart wasn’t in. But the unintended result of that is a night like last night, a morning like this one, where I feel the weight.

I’ve got the day off today. I’m going to write. I’m working on an essay I’d like to start shopping around (if it goes well, which we’ve yet to determine). I’m going to do yoga in my living room. I’m going to make biscuits. I’m going call Simona and lie around in my PJs and maybe watch a Rob Bell video. And I’m going to pray and read and just be at home, with my cats, with no audience but Oliver and Gracie, who love me no matter what…as long as I’m on time with their dinner.

I spent the rest of the day, the non-writing part, chasing a two-year-old, running errands, and paying bills. I hate paying bills. Actually, that’s not entirely true. I hate paying bills when we have so little money. I rather enjoy the nuts and bolts of the bill-paying experience, the writing of the checks, the updating of the checkbook register, the simple math I feel entirely capable of doing. It’s therapeutically simple. Until I see the number to the far right going down…down…down, and I’m mentally tallying the bills that are still to be paid this month. Fabulous.

I’d say chocolate would be in order, except I read on the New York Times website today that the mood-lifting properties of chocolate are exaggerated. “One… study showed that a 130-pound person would have to eat 25 pounds of chocolate in one sitting to significantly alter the mood.”

And the problem is…what exactly?

I think I’d better go get some caffeine instead, though. The light’s fading and I’m fading with it, and I’m meeting some girlfriends (if I were not aging, I’d probably use the term “gal pals,” but heck, thirty’s coming fast) for fondue at 8:45 tonight and I’d like to be awake for that. If possible.

It actually starts on Thursday night, when Jesse showed me this short film about a three-legged dog who dies. The film (“Last Minutes with Oden”) was well made, and I was fine in the beginning, before I realized that Oden was a dog. The dog who loves and accepts everyone, no matter how outcast they are. The dog who loves his tattooed owner and his balding friends, who doesn’t care who you are or what you’ve done. A dog who has cancer and is in pain. I lost it when Oden stood, revealing one front leg missing. One thing you must know about me is that I will instantly bawl upon seeing an animal of any variety that is missing a limb. You know that two-legged dog they parade around on talk shows? Yeah. I cry like a baby.

“But why?” Jesse asks. “It’s happy! It’s triumphing over adversity!”

That’s just it. I don’t think I can fully explain it, but there is something about a creature who has never hurt someone, never been obnoxious or rude, who (probably) cannot understand what is happening to it, there’s something about a creature like that, who shouldn’t even have lived, hopping around the stage of The Ellen DeGeneres Show. There’s something about it.

So you can imagine my state as the tattooed man carried the three-legged Oden to the car, as his friends said goodbye, asking the dog to tell Jesus hello for them, as they drove to the vet’s office. As a grown man covered in ink, his hands looking worn and his face gently lined, sobbed on the floor of the vet’s office, sobbed as the needle went into one of the remaining legs, sobbed as the dog closed his eyes, as his head sunk in the man’s hands.

I was a mess.

That was Thursday night, just before bed. Friday started early, because I had the Pampered Chef party to prepare for. The day was normal for about twenty minutes. The sun wasn’t up, not because it was too early for that, but because the sky was a stubborn mess of clouds. I got a phone call with some bad news and spent the rest of the morning a complete mess again. Finally I pulled it together and went to my babysitting job. At which I whimpered again, looking at a precious blond two-year-old and telling him he didn’t need to know about the sad parts of life yet, that he could wait longer for that, knowing he wasn’t understanding what I was saying.

At naptime, I took the boy upstairs and we went through the nap-rituals, and I sang “Old MacDonald” to him as I rocked him, as his head fell back onto my shoulder, heavy and tired. I sang until I ran out of barnyard animals, and then I kept singing, adding things like monkeys and, when I became really desperate, cheese. Finally, I put him in his crib and went downstairs.

The house is a lovely older home, eclectically decorated, with a large window in the kitchen that overlooks the backyard and a series of birdfeeders and squirrel feeders, which are densely populated in the mornings. The neighborhood is nice—no, more than nice. But a couple weeks ago, the boy’s father told me to keep the doors locked if we left for a walk, as there’d been some incidents of people looking for open doors, looking for easy targets for a burglary.

So, after the singing and the sleepy baby, I tiptoed downstairs, a dirty diaper in my right hand to throw into the trash can on the back porch. I walked into the kitchen. Where the back door stood open.

I instantly freaked out, spinning around, sure I would see someone standing behind me. No one was there, so I spun back toward the open door, and then stood frozen in the kitchen, the diaper raised like a weapon. If I were in my own house, I would have grabbed a kitchen knife or a broom or something. But, there, in a house that wasn’t foreign but also wasn’t my own, I just raised the diaper and turned back and forth, from the open door to the rest of the house. The sky outside was still a slate gray, the sun hidden, and the house was dark, except for the weak light from the windows. I listened for a moment, then finally became conscious of the diaper, which I quickly threw away before searching the downstairs for the intruder I thought was surely there.

But the dog was in the playroom, asleep. And I found no one in the house. I pushed the door closed, and locked it, hoping it had opened because of the wind. And for the next two hours I stayed very still and very quiet, listening, watching.

After that, the day was a shocking flurry of errands, which I performed without excitement or drive, my mind preoccupied with the news I received that morning, with the open door, which seemed like an omen. The sky never brightened, the sun having given up at some point in the afternoon, the clouds staying the meanest shade of gray, so that the whole day felt like the morning had never ended, that time was not really passing.

Little things that would normally be annoyingly amusing got under my skin. In the Wal-Mart parking lot, the trunk of my car kept slamming shut, so that by the time I turned to my cart to get another bag, it would blow shut, and I would have to open it again. I finally propped it open with one hand and loaded it with the other, which given my back injuries, the weight of the my trunk lid, and the fact that the remaining purchases were cat litter, soda, and other heavier items, meant I could add a backache to the festivities of the day. When I unloaded the groceries at home, a two-liter tore its bag and landed on my foot. When I went to move a bag of cereal to the pantry, it came open and spilled generic Golden Grahams all over my clean kitchen floor. Oliver took the opportunity to jump onto my clean kitchen counters, and when I chased him to put him into the master bedroom to keep him out of trouble, I skidded onto the carpet next to the dining room table he had run under. Only then did I remember the jeans I wore had holes in the knees. (Knees which, therefore, were rug-burned.)

The evening went on. The house was cleaned, the kitchen prepped, the carpets vacuumed. The party was fun. It wrapped up late and a few girlfriends stayed and we talked some more, and the conversation turned to child predators, and it felt fitting somehow that the day would end there, that the sun would not in fact ever show itself.

And today the sun is out, and all I want to do is go outside in a bathing suit and soak it up, all I want to do is be in warmth, to be internalizing the sun. But I know it’s far too cold for that. I know it will be months before I will warm up. But I also know that summer will come, one day when I’m not expecting it, and I will go to the beach by myself, and I will lie flat, face-up, and spread my arms and feel relief.

Also, The Great Calendar Hunt of Twenty-Ten. I thought I’d be clever and wait until after New Year’s to get my calendar. Thought I’d get a good deal. Ha. Apparently, in a recession, everyone waits until January for their new wall calendars. The selection at Barnes and Nobel consisted of Betty Boop, Playboy, and Twilight. None of which I want on my kitchen wall. So, after a day of searching in what apparently were all the wrong places, I went home calendar-less. Which, for me, means: disoriented and slightly panicked, with no idea what she’s supposed to be doing the next day.

After much lament, I decided to give my computer’s calendar program another whirl. In the past, I just haven’t warmed to the digital calendar. But this year might be different. Twenty-ten, you know, it’s the future. Right? And of course, since deciding this and taking the time to set up my recurring appointments and obligations, I found plenty of calendars, all half-off, just lying around waiting to be bought by me. But I still want to give the (free) iCal a chance, a really fair shake this time. And paying six bucks for a wall calendar when January is practically over (okay, fine, almost half over) makes me feel I just won’t be getting my money’s worth. You don’t just get those two weeks back.

And there’s the Pampered Chef party I’m having next Friday. (If you’re in town, come over. If not, order kitchen stuff here: http://www.pamperedchef.biz/amydegler — just put in “Erin Bond” and buy stuff! I want free kitchen accessories! I’m poor!) Sending postcards and setting up online invites and realizing I really have to have my house cleaned up by then. Just tonight I finally did the last load of laundry from the holidays. Said load is still in the dryer and must be put away, but I’m nearly there…

Tonight was nice—easy, calming, a late dinner of bone-in chicken breasts roasted in garlic butter, and one or our favorites, corn maque choux, a creamy, buttery, tangy mess of deliciousness. Corn maque choux is comfort food at its ideal—even making it is comforting. Chopping the onion and the red pepper, slicing the kernels off the corncobs, stirring in the cream. While the chicken roasted, I prepped everything on the enormous butcher block that came home with me over the holidays. It’s so nice and big that I could push each veggie off to the side while I chopped the next one. When it was time to make the dish, I just scooped each new ingredient into my hands and dumped it into the waiting pan. Like a cooking-show host, just without the cool glass bowls.

The slow evening was the perfect follow up to a blissfully productive day. I had a meeting with Sue, who has agreed to mentor me in leadership, and she’s just a brilliant woman. Girl knows her stuff. I’m doing this for the pod, because I want it to be incredible, because I want us all to grow, because I want twenty-ten to be transformative, to have an unstoppable momentum. And Sue was perfect; I left her place charged up and ready to go. We talked about vision, about leading with the end in mind, about scheduling, about communication, about flowers. (More on that later.) I came home and made a master task list and got to work, not allowing myself to get on Facebook until this evening. Tonight, before bed I’ll make my “six things” list for tomorrow, the six things that must get done (and no more, so I won’t get frustrated if I don’t finish the list).

Until today, twenty-ten has felt busy without being particularly productive, freezing cold with no snow, time passing both quickly and slowly. Is January not over yet? Memories of a rough January last year. But it’s supposed to be sixty-four on Friday, and tomorrow I’ll have six things that will get done, and disappointments will eventually fade into memories, and there’s a whole year of changes still in this story.

As Story and I cuddled on a giant bean bag, reading and re-reading books with happy pictures printed in primary colors onto glossy-finished cardboard, I think I regained a shred of the sanity that had threatened to high-tail it maybe an hour previous. That night, I went to the last party of the week and stayed late to help clean up (we got home sometime before midnight). Little sleep and hours of chocolate fondue probably got rid of my recovered shred.

Wednesday morning was more child-watching, and then the afternoon was nearly blissful as I realized the Thursday block on the calendar was empty. Big, white blankness. Bolstered by the thought of nothing scheduled the very next day, I went into a wave of productiveness, breezing through the grocery store and stopping by the bank. I made the good old beans-and-rice “stoup” for dinner, which we ate after nine because Jesse had to work late. And then, around ten, I suddenly felt the need to bake. I managed to botch chocolate sugar cookies, whose directions consisted of little more than “mix well, shape, bake.” Well, they were still tasty, even if the texture was all wrong.

Then, a Facebook friend posted that she would be attending something called K-K-K-K-K-Karaoke, and I posted the joke—and this is literally what I wrote—“Is that bowling for white people only?” And it took me a full second to realize what I’d written. I scrambled for the “delete” button. I’m still not sure how my brain confused the off-key singing of cheesy songs from the ‘90s with pushing glossy, heavy round things down glossy lanes at a collection of red-ringed pins. But it did.

Today was surprisingly productive. I put away the approximately three loads of clean laundry that had been piling up in our bedroom. And then I washed the three loads of dirty laundry waiting in the hamper. I knocked out the dishes. I wrote like three thousand words. Three freaking thousand words! I rushed to the library before it closed to snag a book on tape about Nixon and Kissinger and a few Vietnam-themed movies. Another trip to the grocery store for cold-related items for poor Jesse, who was working late, again, and whose immune system is in protest.

On the way home, I stopped by the gas station, which apparently is what everyone else in our town was also doing. I waited in line behind a van whose driver was nowhere in sight. I figured the driver was paying and would soon return and drive the vehicle away. Turns out, she was prepaying. So, I waited still longer as she pumped her gas. Finally, she drove away and I pulled my car into her slot. I climbed out, credit card in hand, and looked at the side of my car. The side the gas tank is not on. I’ve driven the same type of car since I was seventeen. The gas tank has, shockingly, never been on that side.

If I continue at this rate, I’m not sure what state I’ll be in by Christmas, but I believe this picture might sum it up: