With this post, I will have published blog posts seven days in a row. I went through a dry spell where I barely published at all, and now, I’ve published every day for a week. I’m not sure what happened.
Actually, that’s not true. I know what happened. I stopped caring about whether what I wrote was worth publishing. I recently told a friend that I was bummed that I hadn’t been blogging lately. I like blogging; writing publicly brings me joy. It’s more satisfying than rambling in my journal. My friend asked what was stopping me from publishing. And my answer was the eternal, “I don’t have anything interesting to say.”
In other words, the “Who cares?” question. Who cares if my daughter and I made a boba run, or that I refreshed my office? “Who cares?” is an easy question to get blocked by. If you’re putting something out in the world, it’s a valid question to ask. And it’s a great question to get me overthinking and to determine, “Nobody cares,” and therefore not post.
But the thing is, that’s not true. I enjoy reading others’ random life outtakes. Especially if they’re well-written, and even better if they’re funny.
So I started writing for my blog again. About random junk that may or may not be interesting. I’m just not going to think about the question of interest or import, because if I do, I’ll stop writing again.
Our daughter loves bubble tea. If you’ve not had bubble tea, it doesn’t sound appetizing no matter how I describe it, but I’ll try anyway. Bubble tea, or at least the bubble tea we order at our local Ninja Café — Large Classic Kung Fu Milk Tea with Boba — reminds me of Thai iced tea, which is a milky sweet tea. The difference with iced bubble tea is that the bottom of the cup is filled with tapioca pearls (boba) that are chewy like gummy bears (though they don’t taste like gummy bears). You drink the tea with a fat straw, as big around as those fat pencils kids use in Kindergarten, to accommodate the boba, which you suck up the straw along with the sweet milky tea.
At least once a week, on our way home from swim practice, or if we’re just out and about, or even if we’re sitting at home and nobody is going anywhere or making any move to go anywhere, our daughter will ask if we can go get bubble tea. She frequently requests iced coffee as well, and the garbage can in our garage is filled with her discarded clear plastic cups from Starbucks, Panera, and Ninja Café.
Like most kids of her generation, she is rightfully alarmed about environmental destruction and climate change. She’s learning the connection between her actions and how they impact the world around her, and she’s trying to think beyond herself. She opted for a smaller car that gets better gas mileage once she considered that aspect of the SUV she first thought she wanted. And when she sees the plastic cups in the garbage (along with the dent in her checking account from all those $5 drinks), she feels bad for contributing to the devastating pile of plastic garbage that already exists in the world.
She’s been thinking for a while that she’d like to make her own bubble tea to take those plastic cups down a notch. But she needed two key components that don’t exist at our regular supermarket: boba and big fat straws.
There’s a world market across town that is not convenient to anywhere we ever go, but we’d heard they had boba. So last weekend, as part of her driving lesson, she drove us to Oasis, and lo, they had both boba and fat straws.
The package of tapioca pearls contained enough for five drinks. She was out of boba by the end of the week.
For her driving lesson this week, we drove from our house to the aquatic center, then on the way back home, we made a pit stop at Oasis. She practiced getting on and off the highway, lane changes, traffic, parking, and plenty of left turns. I got myself some marzipan at the market (without having to drive myself there!), she got practice driving to and from the pool, plus some extra exits on and off the highway, and we got her more boba so she can make bubble tea at home. This time, we bought two packages.
This afternoon, I’ll take our daughter out so she can practice driving. She wants to drive the route from our house to the pool when there’s no traffic. This will prepare her to start driving the route the six times a week we currently take her, usually in rush hour, such as rush hour is in our little town. She’ll rack up miles behind the wheel in no time if she starts driving to and from the pool.
And then once she graduates from learner’s permit to real license, we’ll probably never see her again.
I’m continually amazed by how different our kids are, despite both of them being made by the two of us and despite both of them growing up in all the same conditions in our household. I mean, they’re similar in a million ways, too, like they both have wry senses of humor that kill me. I’m very pleased that they are funny; humor and kindness are pretty high up there on my values list.
But they’re different in a million ways, too. Our son prefers to be home, hang out with his friends online via gaming, keep his thoughts to himself until he’s ready to share, and was pretty chill about getting his license or a car. Our daughter prefers to be on the go, hang out with her friends in real life any time there is a possibility to (weekends are all sleepovers these days), wears her heart on her sleeve, wanted to get her learners permit the second she became eligible, and is the one pushing us for her to practice driving.
It shouldn’t surprise me that they’re different, of course they’re different. All humans are different, and everyone I know who has a sibling is pretty different from their siblings. As a parent it’s kind of amazing to watch those differences play out right in front of you, in your house, in the people you made and raised. It’s wonderful — I love that they are fully themselves and are so different from one another, despite all the sameness in their nature and nurture. But still. It’s bizarre.
Another weird thing about parenting is how often your perspective shifts. There was a time, when our kids were young and needed so much from us, that I daydreamed about how glorious it would be to escape for a weekend, to get a hotel room just for myself so I could have silence and read books and not have to be responsible for anyone else’s needs. I’d daydream about when they’d grow up and move out, and I’d be free again.
“Sixteen more years.”
“Ten more years.”
“Five more years. Wait.”
“Two more years. WHAT?”
“One more year. Noooooooo. 😭.”
Our son is filling out college applications this week, and I want to slam on the brakes. Our kids don’t need us that much anymore. I mean, aside from the obvious food and shelter and helping them along through life. Now that I’ve had those nights alone in hotel rooms, and our oldest, my first baby, will likely move out in less than a year, I’m rethinking how much I want them to move out. And really, I’d be okay with them staying a while. Or, like, forever.
Spoiler alert: I don’t have big plans. I’m writing this before I perform my Saturday morning ritual of taking our daughter to swim practice, then pushing a cart up and down the aisles at our Kroger supermarket to do the grocery shopping for the week. My biggest plan this weekend is to finish reading my book (Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo) before the library takes it back. It’s due Monday and I have about 175 pages left. I can totally do that. The hammock is ready for me.
I’m not sure what else is on the docket. We have entered the time of year where, though the garden is a riotous mess, I won’t cut anything back. The fat monarch caterpillars — I counted 24 on the seven milkweed plants they stripped completely bare — have all crawled off to make chrysalises. This is the culmination of all of my butterfly gardening work. I can’t cut back the spent perennials that really look ratty this time of year: there may be caterpillars turning into butterflies in there.
I love having weekends with no plans. Especially since swim season has started up again, and swim season means swim meets. I’ll be at one from Friday to Sunday next weekend. So this weekend has to be a weekend of chill. The chiller it is, the longer it feels. I’ll read. I’ll write. I’ll walk around the garden looking for chrysalises. Maybe I’ll bake something. I’m sure a bunch of stuff will come up that will make the weekend fly by, but for now, I’m just grateful for the time to read my novel.
Every couple of months, I get a notification from Apple: “Your iCloud storage is almost full.” When I first started getting the email, it inspired me to go through my Apple photos and cull the blurry, mediocre, meaningless, and unnecessary shots, like the pictures of the grocery list on the kitchen chalkboard.
After 5 minutes, I’d get bored and give up. I opted to pay $0.99 per month for extra storage instead.
That bump in storage relieved me of emails from Apple for a good while. But recently, I started getting them again. And again, I made half-hearted attempts to go through my Apple photos. I’d try to narrow the ten shots of a monarch butterfly down to one or two, the seven shots of the daisy down to the one best shot. My photo library goes back to 2013, though, and if I’m lucky, I might make it through the past six months before saying, okay, that’s good enough.
My digital backlog is starting to weigh on me the same way clutter in my house or office does. There’s a bunch of unused junk in there, taking up space on servers, creating messy piles of crap photos that make it hard for me to find the good shots I actually care about. I want to keep what’s beautiful, useful, and meaningful, and I want to pitch the rest.
The task is overwhelming though. How am I ever going to get through eight years of phone photos, often with multiple shots of the same thing that require me to look closely before choosing which ones to delete? And photos from my phone are only half of what’s on my iCloud drive. Photos from my real camera are in there too. Large files. Thousands of them, often with twenty pictures of the same thing instead of just five or ten.
I’m going to try to tackle this in the same way I trained for triathlons or approach big tasks at work: break it into small, achievable pieces, and focus only on finishing the portion I’m working on rather than the whole thing all at once. For my first attempt, not really knowing what I’m getting into at all, so really winging it here, I’m going to aim to clean up one year of files per month. So maybe by June of 2022 I’ll be able to click into any year in my photographs and find the year, beautifully curated, photos labeled, zero clutter. That sounds dreamy.
A few weeks ago, I found myself avoiding my home office. I’d start my day down there, but by midmorning I was desperate to get out. My office space is a diminutive utility room in our finished basement. It’s half underground, and along with my desk and bookshelf, it houses the fuse boxes, water heater, and the unit for our central heat and air. It doesn’t sound glamorous, but it’s got a little window under our deck, and a door that closes, and it’s my own private space to work.
I’ve been working from home, from this room, since 2015. Aside from a new coat of paint in 2018, it hasn’t changed a lot. My massive desk was too big in the small space to move into any configuration that didn’t put me in a dark corner, facing a wall. I tried different lighting options (and bright paint, obviously), but lamps and ring lights cluttered the space, and they shone too bright in my eyes.
In summer, I could escape to the back deck under a sun umbrella to work, or out front in the garden under my dogwood tree. But then it got really hot. And though I moved back inside, I found myself trying to find other places in the house where I could plop down with my laptop and focus. Anywhere but my office.
My left shoulder soon started aching, which always happens when I work from the living room or garden chair or back deck. My standing desk and my Steelcase chair — both of which are in my office — make a huge difference in my ability to work with comfort.
The pain alerted me to my avoidance; my office space wasn’t a place I wanted to be.
When I realized this, I decided to finally make some changes after six years of sameness. I ordered a smaller, lighter colored desk, so the desk itself adds brightness, and now I can arrange my office in a variety of configurations if I need a change. I put my bookshelf behind me for easy access to reference books, and I now have a nice background for video calls instead of the weird vents that used to be my backdrop.
Happy office!
I updated my monitor to one that’s much crisper and easier on my aging eyes, and I mounted it on a monitor arm so I can easily adjust the monitor’s height or move it out of the way when I need to clear my desk to think. My desk is a Jarvis adjustable height desk, so I can stand in the morning and sit in the afternoon, which is how I seem to do things.
Cat! Jumping! Something new to investigate!
After arranging my furniture and equipment, I finished the space off with art from Jenny Gray of Gray’s Modern. The colors and shapes make me happy. I keep walking down there even after my workday is done, just to look at it all and smile.
And best of all, thanks to my smaller desk, I can now face the window that looks out on the garden. That was the true inspiration for this office refresh. I wanted badly to face natural light and the outside world. The window and the garden are good for my soul.
