About 6 or 8 weeks ago, we gave up using oleomargarine in our house.  I read a somewhat inflammatory (yet still scary) Internet story about how oleo was invented and how it ended up in our diet.  I did some fact checking, and some of it isn’t true, but some of it…yikes.  That stuff is really bad for you.  Whether it is the stick kind we all use for baking cookies, or the soft tub kind we use on our toast, the crux of it is, this is not a food.  It is a food-like substance.  And as a food-like substance, it probably does not belong in our bellies.

The last two years, but really the last six months, have found me taking extra effort to be sure what I’m putting in my body is real food.  This, of course, extends to what I’m putting in my family’s body, too, at least for the meals I have control over.  I’ve been buying better quality bread (or making it myself), not buying convenience or quick-cook foods, adding more fresh as opposed to canned veggies (although canned tomatoes are still on my pantry shelves because they are actually better for you than fresh), and cooking the majority of what we eat together as a family from scratch.

And this meant that oleomargarine had to go.  My first worry was that butter wasn’t convenient – it is hard as a rock when it comes out of the refrigerator, which makes it pretty terrible for spreading on bread.  My second worry was that the family wouldn’t adjust.  The third worry was that the family would overeat the butter, and that would poke a huge hole in my budget.   All of my fears, however, were for naught.

Turns out you don’t have to refrigerate butter.  No, not even in our hot environment here in Colorado.  They make this nifty little thing called a “butter bell.”  The butter bell holds a little water in the bottom, and the lid, which is an inverted bell, then holds the butter.  You put the lid on and the water forms a seal to keep out floating whatevers in the air.  The butter itself will not go bad, even in the heat.  Butter is, unbeknownst to me, quite a stable product!  Without the whey, it does not go rancid.  Seriously, it doesn’t!  So I have a butter bell on the dining room table with salted butter in it, and I have a small container with a lid I keep on the counter by the stove to hold the unsalted butter I use for cooking.  Here is a picture of my butter bell:

Second, the family actually adjusted pretty quickly.  Klown was my biggest worry, and he actually has been fine with it.  I just keep it full, and he uses it.  After three weeks of keeping the giant tub of oleomargarine in the refrigerator, I tossed it.  Everyone was eating the butter instead.  The third worry, the expense, is a valid one.  However, butter consumption compared to oleo consumption is way less. When I cook with butter, it is stable and isn’t completely absorbed by the food it is cooking, the way oleo was.  I had to use twice as much oleo to saute a pile of squash.  With the butter, it’s just a tablespoon or so, and it works just as good.  I watch for it to go on sale and stock up, putting it in the freezer until I need it.  I buy both salted and unsalted, and yes, it’s more expensive than oleo, but we don’t seem to go through it as fast.

So, so far this has been a good switch for us.  And as a bonus, I think it has helped me to lose weight and feel better.  I can’t blame it all on butter, because there are other major changes in my diet that went along with the butter change (more fresh or frozen veggies, no more canned veggies, very limited ingestion of convenience or easy-to-make foods, less bread/white flour).  I am using more olive oil and less vegetable oil.  I am not eating anything that has “high fructose corn syrup” in the list of ingredients.  I am down 8 pounds in about five weeks or so, which is surprising to me.  I have not changed my level of physical activity or the amount of food I’m eating.  It’s just that I am eating better food.  Better quality food.

I am glad I can afford to do this, that I can afford to shop for the best of the freshest stuff (although I am always buying on sale, because I’m smart like that).  I’m thankful that I know how to prepare foods from scratch, and that I have the time to invest in cooking well.  I know my family is still visiting McDonald’s when I’m not around, and eating junk food.  But what I put on the table, is the good stuff.

Have you tried giving up non-foods like oleomargarine?  What was your experience?

I do not have the luxury of time.  I work full time, and then sometimes part time on top of that.  I take care of a household, and I have a plot at the community garden.  I belong to two writing groups, and I have other things I like to do – thrift shopping, crochet, reading, meeting with friends.  My life is busy, and always has been.

I have friends who have the luxury of time.  They for whatever reason don’t work, or don’t have kids, or just don’t have the busy life that I have.

I am so jealous of that sometimes.  I want to write.  I’d love to have 2 to 4 hour blocks of time to write.  I’d love to have 1 to 3 hour blocks of time to work in the garden or take on a bigger task in the yard – pulling out bushes or trimming trees or digging a new garden bed.  I’d like to have uninterrupted time to do some sewing.  I’ve had fabric to make several summer dresses, for at least three years.  I still don’t have summer dresses.  There are curtains to be made for my daughter’s bedroom.

I don’t have the luxury of time.  I have plenty of energy, and I have plenty of resources.  I just don’t have that luxury of time.  Every minute of my time is packed full – I’m fitting in 2-minute tasks while I’m waiting for the pot of water to boil on the stove.  I’m fitting 10 minutes tasks in between feeding the cat and when it is time to leave for work.  In 3 minutes, I can unload and reload the dishwasher.  In fifteen minutes, I can cut up a full bowl of fruit for use later.  In four minutes, I can fold a load of laundry and start another.  A half-hour is enough time to clean a bathroom or sweep and mop a floor.

I know I will have time when I am old, and retired.  My biggest fear – will I still have the energy and the resources to get those things done?  Will it be too late to do those things?  Or will there just be other things taking up my time, and I still won’t have the luxury of time?

This past weekend was a scorcher, with temps nearing 100 degrees each day.  But it was a 3-day weekend, and I had a to-do list a mile long.  I got up early and did as much as I could before the heat of the day, and then after the heat of the day, but it was still hot, and I sweated up a storm.  Here in Colorado, generally if you stay in the shade, even on a hot day and even when doing physical labor, it isn’t too bad.  But my work was in the sun, so I was getting toasted.

It reminded me of my days back in Missouri, helping my mom run her organic CSA farm, Sunny Days.  I spent many a hot July day in the 1/2 acre garden, picking tomatoes, beans, cucumbers, melons, and cabbages.  I dug potatoes, and wandered about the rest of the 7 acre property looking for suitable wildflowers to take home for my dining room table.  I pulled weeds and made bundles of fresh herbs and ran my hands over the basil and sage enough to make myself hungry.  It would be in the 90’s or close to 100, with humidity in the high steamy range.  It was hard work, and I took breaks when I could, but the truth is, even in the shade it was hot and I was just HOT.

But there was a wonderful thing awaiting me after the end of all my hot hard work on the farm.  In the shade of three threes, halfway hidden behind the old trailer that needed to be rehabbed, was an old cast-iron bathtub.  That tub was not perfect — it was missing its faucets and had a somewhat rough interior and rust spots on the outside.  But filled with well water in the morning when I arrived, by late afternoon it was at least tepid, sometimes even lukewarm.  I would strip in the sunshine, scoop leaves and the errant bug out of the water, and sink in to my neck.

Not the actual tub, but it looked like this.

Heaven.  On those hot days, it was the closest I could get to heaven.  The cool water would wrap around me, pulling the heat from my skin, giving me a catch in my breath for a few short seconds.  Every hot minute spent in the garden dodging randy grasshoppers, squinting my eyes against the sweat that rolled into them, getting dirty and sandy and salty, was quickly forgotten as I sat in that tub.

My mom said that she could be alone all day, no one to bother her, but the minute she got in the tub, here would come someone down the drive.  That only happened to me once, but it was always a risk.

Maybe someday, I’ll build an outdoor bathroom.  It will have a big cast-iron tub, and it will be surrounded by walls, but open to the sky.  Being a good Coloradan, I will heat water with a passive solar setup, and when I drain the tub, the grey water will go to water a tree or my garden.  After the hot outside work I did this past weekend, getting neck-deep in tepid water sounded awesome.  A cool shower did the trick, but it just wasn’t the same.

Ah, a bathtub in the woods.  Sometimes it’s the simple pleasures in life.

Yesterday’s holiday was something I was looking forward to.  It has been a rough few weeks at work and having a three-day weekend to help me get caught up on some household/garden/garage chores was just what I needed.  An extra day!  Always a good thing.

But more than that, I was looking forward to the holiday.  Ever since we moved to this big little town, holidays are so much more fun.  Fourth of July is no exception.  The highlight of the day is a gathering in a small park to listen to the Longmont Symphony Orchestra play.  This little park, taking up about half a city block, becomes crammed full of families with picnics, and four hours of excellent music.  This little park’s claim to fame is that it has more trees in it than any other of the 34 parks in town.

Last year, my mother, Tater, and I biked to the park to hear the concert.  We slung our lawn chairs on our backs, filled our water bottles, and headed off.  Little did we know that this was a Big To-Do.  Scattered around the park were elaborate setups – families had brought out their best and set up pop-ups, laying out a spread of food that would rival any celebratory feast.  Other families came with chairs, blankets, coolers, and portable bbq pits, opening up patio umbrellas to give themselves shade.  It turns out there was a contest, and families had been showing up at the park to win for many years.

This year it was just Tater and I, as mom is still in Missouri.  We packed a cooler bag with sandwiches, baby carrots, plums, and oreos, plus some soda and water.  We didn’t bike, but drove.  We parked and walked a couple of blocks to the park, and found a shady spot big enough for our two lawn chairs.  The Longmont Youth Orchestra was playing, and we settled in.  Well, I settled in, Tater went running off to find friends to play with.  I pulled out my book and sat comfortably in the shade listening to the music.  After the youth finished, a folk singer stepped up, and finally, the Longmont Symphony Orchestra.

The event was bittersweet for me. Several times I felt tear-y, and memories were flooding me like crazy.  There was the symphony playing John Phillips Sousa’s Stars and Stripes Forever, which just reminded me of the days when I and my piccolo played that same song in Marching Band in the late 70’s.  There were the cute kids in their red-white-and-blue clothing, which reminded me of when my kids were little and I would dress them up for the holidays.  There were the tables of food – bbq, fried chicken, potato salad, fruit salad, and at one table, a lemon layer cake as big as a Volkswagon.  his just reminded me of the parties we used to have, with amazing food that everyone brought.   There were the groups of friends, the gatherings of families, which just reminded me of my own family back in Missouri, and my friends.  I have not been able to make the kind of new friends here that would give me a group to gather with for holidays or special events.  And there was the fact that I was sitting there reading a book, instead of chatting with my mom, like we did last year.

The kids played hard on the playground, and the dads carried their little ones around on their shoulders, weaving in and out of trees as they went.  There were moms wiping dirty faces with wet wipes, and moms laying out food on quilts on the ground.  The music was good, and while the sun was hot and it was 95 degrees, in the shade and the breeze, it was a fine summer day.

I hope next year that my mom can be here, or maybe by then I’ll have made some friends that would love to enjoy the afternoon with me at such an event.  I think I probably missed that most of all.

Just about 18 months ago, I broke my leg in three places in a simple fall in the mountains.  As the incident gets further away, and I can take the experience for what it was – a weird accident and a chance to learn a few things about myself –  I still look down at it and think of it as a sort of an alien.  As if that leg somehow doesn’t belong to me anymore.

I know part of it is because of the continued numbness, which will likely never go away, and the weird way it feels when it suddenly decides to have some sort of feeling.  There are days when it feels like a marshmallow; it can’t support me or doesn’t feel like it can.  There are days when it just decides that in needs to ache and creak and buckle, and days when it feels like the giant screws in the bottom of my tibia are trying to work themselves back out.    There are days when it acts like the ankle I knew for the first 51 1/2 years of its life.  Weather doesn’t seem to affect it, and I never know from one day to the next how it will behave or feel.  When I get out of bed in the morning, it is completely stiff, the ankle unwilling to bend even the slightest bit.  By the time I get to the bathroom, it is moving, but not stable.  By the time I get back to the bedroom to get dressed, it feels fine.

But I still walk on it, hike on it, ride a bike with it, and dance those Zumba dance moves with it.  I climb stairs and go down stairs, mostly foot over foot, and I am able to use the foot to work a shovel.  I can mow the grass in our bumpy yard, although the ankle is not so happy when I do.  There are things I still can’t do, most notably stand on tip-toe. I can point my toes, stretching the ankle completely out, but cannot do the tip-toe thing.  This makes it a bit hard to reach things on the top shelf.   I still can’t wear shoes with any kind of heel.  The right foot is definitely fatter than the left foot, which is a problem when I’m trying to wear something other than tennis shoes or flip flops.  There are days when it is pretty fat, and days when it looks pretty normal.  I can walk, balance, and lean on the foot, as long as I don’t twist it or try to lift up on the balls of my feet.  The pain with that kind of move comes on slowly, but hits a high note that takes a long time to go away, as if someone is twisting my tibia by its ends like a dishrag.

And it still looks funky.  I am prone to spider veins anyway, and the area below the tibia break is laced through with them now.  The divot from the fracture blister has filled in somewhat, but you can still see it, along with the strangely shiny and wrinkled scar.  When I pull my toes up, contracting my ankle fully, I have extra skin the puffs out over the top of my shoes.  It’s quite attractive.  When I put the ankles side by side, they don’t match at all, and likely never will again.  This is my new “normal.”

My surgeon was amazing.  I know I would not be walking, hiking, biking and doing Zumba without his most excellent skills.  My husband is about to see him for his blown-out knee.  I’m sure he’ll be in good hands.  I also know that I was also responsible for my recovery.  I did what I was told (no weight on that leg until he said so, which ended up being just shy of 7 weeks), and I ate very well during those months of recovery (lots of calcium, veggies, and lean protein).  When I broke it, I wasn’t sure it could be repaired.  Even though I didn’t know the extent of my injury, I knew it was bad.  It wasn’t until I was home that I got to see the xrays showing the break, and the xrays showing the hardware that now held my tibia and fibula together.  It was much worse than my mind had let me believe.

Yet here I am, walking, hiking, biking, dancing my butt off at Zumba.  I am very very grateful, and very very blessed.

The spider veins…it’s a whole network in there!  You can also see the surgical scar, and what’s left of the blister scarring above.

Outside of the ankle.  You can clearly see the scar. 

Ankle comparison…that right one (left side of the picture) is all bumpy and lumpy!

There are days at work when all I can do is repeat a mantra:  “I love my job.”  I will repeat it over and over in my head, reminding myself why I stay there.

And the truth is, I do love my job.  I love working with students, I have amazing student staff who do wonderful work and also help to keep me young.  I love what my office does, and I love doing the work that I do.  I can truly say I love my job.

What I don’t love is the Bully Next Door.

For three years, I’ve walked on eggshells, tried to determine if it was a “good day” or a “bad day” for the bully, measured my actions and my words very carefully at all times.  I nodded silently, mumbled “I’m sorry” and “I understand” more times than I can count.  All to keep the bully happy and appeased.  But as with most bullies, and with most irrational people in general, keeping the bully happy is actually in impossible task.  You can’t keep the bully happy.  Their goal is to berate, belittle, and push around anyone they possibly can.  They are so unhappy with themselves that they can’t live any other way.

I was bullied as a child.  Many children are bullied.  I was bullied as a fourth grader for my name, which sounded vaguely similar to a cleaning product that was on the market at the time.  I was bullied as a middle schooler for being 13 and having boobs.  I was bullied in high school because I was the fat girl.  My usual defense was to be as invisible as possible, not react, to just let it slide.  Turn the other cheek, ignore it, all of those wonderful things you are taught by your parents.  In all those years, I was only involved in one fight.  My dad had told me that I could never hit; unless they hit me first, THEN I had full permission to hit back.  I bided my time.  The bully shoved me.  I took a swat at her face and drew blood.  I didn’t stop until someone pulled me off of her.  I got suspended, and so did she.  But that particular bully never messed with me again.

I probably didn’t learn a lesson from that, or I’d not be where I am right now.  The fact is, if I had a spouse who treated me the way this bully does, I’d have left him in a heartbeat.  If I wouldn’t accept this in my home, why would I accept this in a place I spent a third of my life?  But still, I kept silent, nodded my way through her outbursts, and avoided conflict. I have immense patience about certain things — this is one of those things.  I weigh risk and reward, risk and outcome.  My silence and appearance of acquiescence was because the return on the risk was negative.

That is, until she hit me on Monday.  Oh it was not a physical, literal hit, as we are all adults now and there are much more sophisticated ways to bully when you’re an adult.  But it was a hit nonetheless.  When her bullying was about me saying the wrong thing, or, in her opinion, me overstepping my place in her warped hierarchy, I could nod or mumble an apology and just let it go.  But this time, it was personal.  She took it to a personal level.  It wasn’t just “we don’t say ___.”  It was angry words, an angry tone, said while leaning over me as I sat at my desk, and included a personal insult hurled at me with deep-throated anger.  Direct hit.

The line was crossed.  And once that line was crossed, my only recourse is to fight back.  Since I’m not in the fifth grade anymore, my fighting back takes a very calculated, risk-assessed course.  I involved my supervisor, and as she is already aware there is a problem (a bully never has just ONE victim) she was not surprised.  She took it to our department director, her boss.  The bully was talked to that day, in a casual, “let’s see if we can nip this in the bud” way.  But I had already moved on from there.  I met with our campus ombudsman, to be sure I was not violating policy, and worked out three things I needed to say to the bully:

“Your words to me were inappropriate and unprofessional,” “I will not tolerate being talked to like that again,” and “If you have a problem with my behavior or something I have said or done, please take it up with my supervisor or our department director.”

The ombudsman asked me what kind of reaction I was expecting, and praised me for offering an “expectation” in my statements.  I said one of two things would happen:  either the bully would react with defensiveness and not let me speak, or she would burst into an emotional response.  She had used both techniques in the past when she’d been called on for her belligerence.  It was really a crapshoot as to which one I would see.  You know, that whole “good day” or “bad day” thing.  But I left the ombud office ready to take on the dragon.  It was time.

As a person who doesn’t much care for conflict, and avoids it whenever she can, overcoming my “flight” nature in order to fight was going to be difficult.  For whatever reason, on Tuesday she avoided me. She also had a second, then a third meeting with my boss and the department director.  On Wednesday (today), she acted like everything was hunky-dory, that we were good, that we were “pals.”  She even joined our department for lunch with the new guy who was just hired, something she NEVER does.  She made a point of having conversation with me, smiling, laughing, as if we were the best of friends.  I’d seen the behavior before.  She wasn’t fooling me.  She wasn’t fooling too many people around the table.  Before I left for the day, I stood in her office door, announced that I had something to say to her, and started my first sentence.  I did not get to complete it before she started talking over me, justifying why she’d said what she’d said to me on Monday, and I thought, “she doesn’t get it.”  She’s been talked to about it THREE times and she’s still just going on the defensive.  I waited for her to take a breath and repeated my sentence, and kept talking until I’d said all three sentences.  I then added that I was not in a position to discuss it, that I had said what I needed to say, and walked away.  She was still talking.

And I guess I’ve been listening to it for so long from her that it didn’t occur to me that she never apologizes.  She doesn’t even make excuses.  She just reiterates that she is right.  Every single time, she just repeats why she is superior, why she has a “right” to do what she did (whatever it is).  She doesn’t get it.  She really doesn’t get it.  And suddenly, I saw what I should have seen all along.  She is very much like my ex-husband.  Oh, she has a bit more finesse, and a bit more education and has this technique of smiling and laughing to put you off guard so she can twist the knife a little harder before you feel the pain.  She’s really good at it.  And she has the ability to convince people that she is right, and everyone else is wrong.

In other words, I’ve been in this bad relationship before.  And no matter what I say, it won’t matter to her, and it won’t change her behavior.  That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t take a stand.  I most certainly need to take a stand, for my own well-being and personal safety.  And because bullies need to be stood up to.  And because, enough is simply enough.

Where will it go from here?  Who knows.  I will continue down the path the ombudsman has helped me lay out.  I will continue to push for those in power to take appropriate (and swift) reaction.  I will reiterate as often as I need to that I do not need or want an apology.  I want the problem solved.  And I have the voice to make sure it gets solved, whether it is through the management structure in my own office, or through a much more complicated path of grievance through the human resources department.  I could make it all go away by finding another job and moving on, but I love my job, and I want to keep it.  I deserve to keep it.  I am good at what I do, and I am where I belong.

Bully will have to be the one to move on.  And I will stay the course and be sure things are resolved.

About three weeks ago, on a Friday afternoon, there was an incident at Tater’s school.  It was a Friday afternoon, three weeks until school was getting out for the summer.  There was a report of a kid with a gun at the school.

This is every parent’s nightmare these days.  Since the first big school shooting (Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado 15 years ago), parents have had to have this fear.  No matter what kind of controls are put in place, no matter how many “resource officers” are on staff, the potential exists for children to be killed at school by a classmate or outsider.  As a parent, you really do think it can never happen to you, but the reality is, it may just happen to your child’s school.

The first reports started filtering out to the media around lunchtime.  “Police activity reported at TimberlineK-8.”  “Student removed in handcuffs, school on lockdown.”  “Police searching school for weapon.” “Students being evacuated from school, parents asked to stay away until given permission to pick up their child(ren).”

I probably wouldn’t have even known anything was going on, except that I’m a bit of a news junky, and I am usually checking local news sites several times an hour.  The incident began at 11:30 a.m. I finally received a robo-call from  the school at 2 p.m., indicating that the children were safe, and were being transported to the local high school, where parents could then be reunited with their kids.

I  drove home that afternoon, straight to the school, and followed the procedure to pick up Tater from the high school.  We were routed to one side of the high school, where we stood in line to show our ID and have a school administrator match our ID to the list of people authorized to pick up a child.  Then we walked to the other side of the school, and waited until our child(ren) were brought to us.  Tater looked teary-eyed when she saw me, and she was hot from spending time in a crowded gymnasium with all of the other 500 kids from her school, but she was fine.  I think the teary eyes were because she had to walk through a gauntlet of cops and school administrators, and past a few sobbing parents, before she could get to me.

I’m an experienced mom.  I’ve been doing this mom thing for a while.  My oldest is now 24, and Tater is the baby, at 12.  One of the things I was most sure of was that I was going to remain calm, at least on the surface, until there was a damned good reason not to be.  Klown had already panicked, and left work early to “be closer.”  I purposely kept the information I gave him limited.  Tater is his first and only child, and he tends to over-react.  Did I feel guilty about doing that?  Yes, I did.  But I also knew it was the best thing to do.

What Tater needed was someone calm, to handle things matter-of-factly, and to get her home.  There were plenty of parents out there, waiting beside me around the high school, that were in full-on panic mode.  There were noisy tears, speculative discussions, and much noise as they were reunited with their kids.  Their panic only served to panic the children and those around them.  The fact was, the student in question (a sixth grader) was in custody, all of the children were safe, albeit with a little extra adventure thrown in, and the police had everything well under control.  In fact, by the time Tater and I got home about 4 p.m., the gun had been located in the school.  It turns out it wasn’t a even real gun, but an air-soft pistol painted black. And the kid in question had been working with a school psychologist at the time the school was put on lockdown.

When Tater came out, she was still wearing her jacket, which she’d been wearing at recess when the school had first went on lockdown.  It had been cool then, still in the 60s.  It was near 80 degrees when I got to the school at 3:45.  She was sweaty, but she wasn’t taking off her jacket.  She complained immediately that she didn’t have her backpack.  I think this was the thing that bothered her most.  There was nothing in the backpack, nothing important, but to her it was a symbol of how out of place everything was.  Her routine had been disrupted.

In the car on the way home, we talked about what happened, and I told her what I knew about what happened.  Her class had been out to recess, following lunch, and when the lockdown was put in place, all of the kids on the playground were hustled into the large community room.  Several classes’ worth of kids were together in this room with their teachers, and that is where they stayed for the next two hours, sitting quietly on the floor, not really knowing what was going on.  Then they were put on buses and taken two blocks up the street to the high school, where the entire student body was gathered in the gym.  The biggest complaint Katie had was that it was hot – hot in the community room, and hot in the gym.  I thought about all the kids who’d not had lunch that day.  This happened right during the lunch cycle, and at least half the kids in the school had not gotten lunch because of the lockdown.

In the end, everything was okay.  The student with the gun is getting the help he needs.  No one was hurt in the incident.  As scary as it was, everyone acted as they’d been trained – teachers and school staff were there to keep the kids calm and allay their fears, every cop in our town was at the school to assess and then eliminate the threat.  During the reunification, police were  providing a solid, protective shield in a very visible way.  I honestly didn’t know we had that many cops in our town.  The majority of parents were behaving like adults, patiently waiting in the identification lines.  Tater and I talked about things a bit, I reminded her that she was safe, that all the kids were safe, and that the teachers and police had done what they needed to do.  Then we cooked dinner, watched some television, and had ice cream.  Kind of a normal night for us.

I am thankful this happened on a Friday.  It gave us as a family time to process through what had happened, without having to go back to “the scene of the crime” the next day.  It allowed the police to continue to do their investigative work at the school, and it allowed school personnel to get the school ready for the return of the students on Monday.  It was just the kind of buffer needed for everyone.

Was I scared?  Yes.  But what I did was pay attention.  I paid attention to the information that was coming out in the news.  I paid attention to the police saying  “parents, please stay away so you don’t clog the campus while we do our investigation and evacuate the children.”  I paid attention to the robo-call from the school that told us where our kids were, that they were safe, and that we would be notified when it was time to pick up our kids.  I paid attention, followed he rules, kept my head screwed on straight, and everything went smoothly.  I know that being calm and in control for Tater was more important than how scared I was. That’s what it means to be an adult.  That is what it means to be a parent.

I actually started working in my garden more than a month ago, but between the move and other stressors, I have not been good about posting about it.  I also haven’t been all that great about working in it, either.  However, I have been planting, and things are sprouting.  Now that we’ve moved (as of this past weekend) I should have time to work in the garden more regularly.

As soon as we signed the lease on the current house, I planted lettuce seed in two of the four small beds next to the house.  The yard here is atrocious, and needs tons of work, but the little garden plot was ready to go.  And I wasn’t going to pass up an opportunity to get decent gardening started.  After just about four weeks, I am now seeing the lettuce grow almost right before my eyes.  Each time I water it, it seems to shoot up another 1/2 inch.  We should be eating salad from that garden in another two weeks, if I keep up with watering.  The two other garden plots will get squash in them; they are small, about 3 foot by 3 foot plots, so one squash each should be about all I can have there.

Here is the lettuce right now.  Yes, I know there are weeds, and I’m working on it, but there are only so many daylight hours for me to get things done.

There has been a rabbit in the yard pretty regularly.  He or she has not yet found my garden, but I’ve put up fencing anyway to keep the furball out.  Once it finds my lettuce, it is all over!  I do hope to get the squash in by Mother’s Day.  It has really outgrown the peat pots.

Over at the community garden, I turned dirt to see how much moisture there is, and was pleasantly surprised.  We did have a wet winter and so far a relatively wet spring, although raindrops are now few and far between.  Thankfully, we can water as much as we want, and while I haven’t gotten on track with it yet, I should within the next few days.  Like I said, now that the move is over, I will have more time to devote to the garden.  So far I’ve planted beets, several kinds of lettuce, spinach, kale, and peas.  Tonight I spent a good hour at the garden watering and digging up the few weeds that are making a go at coming up.  One of my plot neighbors, a young couple that have worked on organic farms and raise seedlings, had some extra kohlrabi plants, and some Savoy cabbage, which I’ve been looking desperately for.  So I planted those tonight.  I have also laid in a nice layer of alpaca manure that someone brought to the garden.  There isn’t a lot of it, but whatever I can put down, I’m putting down.  I worked that garden plot pretty good last year, and it needs the boost.

My biggest triumph as of now, however, is my potato experiment.  Space in my plot is at a premium – I only have a plot that is 17 x 17 feet.  So taking up a big row with potatoes seems like a bad idea.  So I planted six seed potatoes in a “basket” I built with fencing and a length of ground cover.  I curled the 3-foot-tall metal fencing into a tube about 3 feet across, and wired the ends together.  I then set it where I wanted it (in a corner of the garden) and laid in about a four-inch layer of loose green compost.  I then poured in and smoothed out 2 cubic yards of purchased organic mulch, and laid in the potatoes (six in all).  I covered them with another 2 cubic yards of the purchased organic mulch.  I’ve watered it once a week or so for a month.  Five of the potatoes have sent up leaves.  I’m still hopeful for the sixth.  As the plants grow and get above the soil, I will fill in with more organic matter, until the “basket” is filled to about 30 inches high.

Like I said, this is an experiment.  I want to grow potatoes, but I need to do it in a way that saves space for other things in the garden.  We shall see how this goes.  I’m pleased so far.

Here in Colorado, at 5,000 feet, we have a shorter growing season, and have to start later.  Our average last frost is about Mother’s Day, and I fully expect there to be a lot of people in the garden getting things into the ground.  I will be one of them, as I’ve asked Klown and the girls to get me a gift certificate from the local garden center for Mother’s Day.  It will be time for eggplant, and squash, and maybe even some winter squash this year.  Yeah, baby!

The potato “basket” before growth.

The potatoes have sprouted!

Beet sprouts.

Kale and Pea sprouts.

Lettuce in the garden.

Spinach in the garden.

Kohlrabi and Savoy cabbage plants in the ground.

My in-house seedlings…ready to hit the garden this weekend! (Basil/Parsley, Crookneck squash, pumpkins and butterstick squash)

I know I’ve not been doing a good job of keeping up with my blog.  It is not that I have not had the time (I do seem to manage to have time for other things), but I sure have been in a funk. Winter has just been dragging along, which means I haven’t been able to be outside much, and work has been stressful and not so much fun.

Then, right after the first of March, our current landlord informed us that he was selling our beautiful townhouse and that we would have to move.  That threw me into a complete tailspin that took several days to recover from.  I couldn’t sleep or eat, and was just going through the motions, while I was completely distracted in going about finding a new place to live.  All along, he’d been telling us we were awesome tenants, and that he was very happy continuing to have the house as a rental.  So his decision came out of the blue, and I reacted poorly.

There were all the usual worries – money, how would we find a place quickly in a market that was extremely tight due to last year’s flooding, moving Katie to a new school midyear.  In those first few days I didn’t have a lot of information, either, which certainly did not help.  As the first week progressed, we were assured that we would not have to move until the first of May, that he would be giving us some money to help us move, and that he was sorry he had to sell.  We actually did find a place to move within that first week, although we didn’t sign the leas until last week.  The price is a bit more than we’re paying here, but it is manageable.  And in the ensuing three weeks, the townhouse was put on the market, shown a handful of times, and sold.

Much of my time has been spent keeping the house spotless, and shooing everyone out for the showings.  We have been packing, as well, taking down about half of our odds and ends and knicknacks so the house doesn’t look so cluttered.  Last weekend I packed 80% of the clothes in Klown’s closet.  The man has a lot of clothes.  This will continue until we move, which isn’t for another month.

It’s also spring.  Well, as much spring as we manage to get here.  Still cold, still getting snow, although it melts fast.  I paid my dues for my plot at the community garden and it’s time to be getting things in the ground.  This takes a lot of work, and a lot of time.  I am not opposed to hard work, and do it often.  But the time is a little harder to come by.  Within the next two weeks I need to get potatoes in, and peas, and lettuce and kale.  I’ve already started squash, pumpkin, and cucumber seed in the house, along with basil and parsley.  All are sprouted and doing well.  I have also put in some of my workshare hours already, to get them out of the way.

Our new house has a wonderful yard and garden space.  The house itself is large, but weirdly laid out, and I think it’s going to get some getting used to.  It is also all electric, something I’ve never had to deal with.  Should be an interesting learning curve for me, with electric heat and hot water instead of gas.  We will, for the first time since moving to Colorado, have a two-car garage.  The yard is huge, which means I can have a fire pit and patio and outdoor eating space again.  The owners are an older couple, and seem to be decent landlords.  We are now in the phase of being anxious to move, even though it will still be another month.  I think it’s more “let’s get this over with” than anything else.

I have now had to give my long-range plans a hard look.  I had anticipated living in the townhouse until retirement, or close to it, then would be buying a house to get me through retirement.  But in less than three years in Colorado, this will be our third move.  I tend to put down roots, and the constant moving is killing me.  I love the townhouse.  It is beautiful and in a good neighborhood and everything I wanted.  I had anticipated being here a very long time.  And while the new house is decent, and I’ll make it ours for as long as we are there, I don’t want to be in a position of having our housing be out of our control ever again.  For now, I’m looking toward the future and will be planning to buy within 3-5 years.  I’m already thinking about what I want in a house I will be retiring to.  Once The Perfect Child is no longer under our roof (and we are not in a hurry to get her out of here), I can start making serious plans about what I want in a house, versus how much I am willing to pay.

Transitions are hard.  Change is hard, no matter how good it is.  I know there are things I haven’t liked about the townhouse – the kitchen being prime among them, the trouble with the HOA being second.  But it has been a lovely house, and I will miss our fireplace and not having to cut the grass, and being able to bike to my garden plot down the street.

You give and you get, I suppose.  And I just have to keep reminding myself that change is good.

A few weeks ago, my Aunt Grace passed away.  I’m at an age when many of my older relatives are beginning to leave this plane and move to the Next Great Thing.  I know it will happen more and more as I age.  And I know I could easily let myself be pulled down into dark thoughts of my own mortality, but I won’t.  Instead, I will celebrate my memories of her.

My memories see her as a stoic, hard-working, patient woman.  She had a lot of kids (9 that survived, one set of twins), so patience was required.  Being a farm woman, she spent her days fixing meals, growing and preserving food for the winter months, laundry, keeping the kids on their chores, and doing more than her fair share by herself.  I thought the ringer-washer she had was pure magic.  I’m sure she thought it was a time-saver, but horrifying nonetheless.  I have great memories of the food – bread baked in coffee cans (so it was beautifully round), homemade ice cream in the freezer, jars of plump, sweet peaches over slices of yellow cake.  There was homemade butter, and cream floated on top of our glasses of milk in the morning.  There was bacon and eggs in the morning, and something called “panas,” which was a sort of polenta but made with pork broth and fried in bacon fat.

Of course, my memories are mostly about the times we were there as a family, visiting for a weekend.  They lived about 2 hours from us, and we visited at least once a month, and often there would be a week we would spend there as a family.  There were so many kids; how anyone kept track of anything at all is a miracle.  We kids would be in and out of the house, snagging snacks, leaving mud trails, and then disappearing back out into the fresh air.  We would ride the ponies they had, help gather eggs, wrinkle our noses while walking with our cousins along the fence where the pigs were.  There were fields of green (some grazing land, some growing alfalfa for baling), there were dairy cows and beef cattle, and huge chicken houses full of pullets being raised for meat.  The farm was most definitely a working farm, and I rode more than one tractor-fender in my times there.  I was there when there was butchering (beef, swine, chicken, and the occasional deer), I was there when it was time to peel the horseradish (you did it under water or you would die of tears), I was there when peaches and tomatoes and green beans were canned.  I was there when my uncle would drag out the giant barbecue pit made from a barrel sawed in half lengthwise.  I loved look at my dad and his brother (my uncle) and seeing all the resemblance there.  At home, my dad was one of a kind, a rarity, something I never saw anywhere else.  Down on the farm, he was one of many.  There were others just like him.

My cousins were tall and short, big and small, ranged in age from grown to preschool, and were mostly boys.  My aunt certainly had her hands full, even when we weren’t there.

Which is where the patience came in.  And that is how I will remember her.  If she ever lost her temper, I never saw it.  If she was ever tired, I never saw it.  If she was ever hurting, I never saw it.  Many of us could learn from her example.  Not that her life was perfect, as I’m sure it wasn’t.  Were her needs met?  Did she feel that she got to be her own person, despite the kids and hard work of a farm wife?  I feel myself chafe against my responsibilities as a wife and mother all the time, and I know I express it, sometimes in not-so-healthy ways.  I do not have her patience, although I mostly have that hard work thing down.  There are things about her life I know would fit me well – the cooking and baking and working in the garden.  But there are things that wouldn’t fit me well.  I would not be the person I am without a job, without having the freedom to come and go as I wanted, to make decisions that are selfish and all about me.

But my Aunt Grace lived up to her name, and I am the better for having known her.  She leaves behind children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren, as well as her husband.  She is certainly being missed among all of us.  And none of us could ever expect to fill her shoes, or carry ourselves with the patience that she did.