Nine Layers

I found this somewhere on the internets months and months ago. I copied it into my Opera Notes and forgot about it. I saw it today while I was looking for something else and it seemed kinda fun. Feel free to give it a try yourself.

LAYER ONE:
Name: Allison Simpson
Birth date: October 3
Birthplace: Norfolk, Virginia
Current Location: Dallas-Fort Worth Texas
Eye Color: Brown
Hair Color: Brown, although I sporadically henna it to a bright auburn
Height: 5′5″
Righty or Lefty: Very right-handed
Zodiac Sign: Libra

LAYER TWO:
Your heritage: Italian & Hungarian from Dad and German & Irish (I think) from Mom
The shoes you wore today: Dr. Martens, specifically 1460 8-hole boots in smooth black.
Your weakness: naivete, if you mean what is one of my character weakness.  French fries if you are asking what thing can’t I resist.
Your fears: Loss, pain.  Oh, and rats.  Can’t stand rats.
Your perfect pizza: hand-tossed crust, marinara sauce, caramelized onions, buffalo mozzerella, baked in a wood-burning oven, served with an ice cold Peroni.
Goal you’d like to achieve: Sewing a quilt for my bed (Getting pregnant and bringing home a baby seemed too obvious)

LAYER THREE:
Your most overused phrase on AIM: I rarely use any instant messengers.  But I suppose based on when I do it would be “Almost done at work?”.
Your first waking thoughts: “Too early!”
Your best physical feature: My eyes
What you miss the most: Zoë and Lennox (sorry, had to go with the obvious there).

LAYER FOUR:
Pepsi or Coke: Coke, preferably in a glass bottle, made with cane sugar. But really, Ginger Ale is my soda of choice.
McDonald’s or Burger King: Ick. Neither. Chik-Fil-A.
Single or group dates: Single
Adidas or Nike: New Balance
Lipton Ice Tea or Nestea: Lipton. I can’t stand instant iced tea.
Chocolate or vanilla: If it’s dark chocolate, and I mean dark, then gimme.
Cappuccino or coffee: Depends on my mood. A well-made cappuccino is a true favorite.

LAYER FIVE:
Smoke: Never
Cuss: Um. Once or twice.
Sing: Not where there are witnesses. It’s better for all of us that way.
Take a shower everyday: As a general rule.
Do you think you’ve been in love: Yes
Want to go to college: Did that. Wouldn’t mind doing it some more.
Liked high school: It had its moments. I don’t want to go back, but it beat the hell out of middle school.
Want to get married: Did that too. It also has its moments!
Believe in yourself: Sometimes. Hard to do these days.
Get motion sickness: Oh yes. I can get motion sick watching a video game.
Think you’re attractive: Children don’t run away screaming and no one has asked me to wear a bag. I think I’m above average with room for improvement.
Think you’re a health freak: Freak? No. I try to be health conscious.
Get along with your parent(s): Yeppers!
Like thunderstorms: Sitting in front of a big window with popcorn and a blanket watching the light, yes. Caught out in the ocean on an open boat in one, not so much. It was a July 4th I’ll never forget, but I could have done without the experience.
Play an instrument: Piano

LAYER SIX: In the past month…
Drank alcohol: Rarely
Smoked: No
Done a drug: Yes, daily. Oh, wait, do they mean prescription or recreational? I don’t do the recreational drugs. I have a hard enough time keeping up with the prescription ones.
Made out: Yeah, baby!
Gone on a date: Absolutely
Gone to the mall: Unfortunately, yes. I try to avoid it though.
Eaten an entire box of Oreos: I haven’t had oreos in ten years. I did eat an entire pint of Ben and Jerry’s Light Strawberries and Cream. (Is it bad that the control freak in me first thought “Oreos don’t come in boxes”?)
Eaten sushi: Not in the past month, which means I’m waaaay overdue for some.
Been on stage: Not years.
Been dumped: No. I’d definitely be blogging about that if I had!
Gone skating: No, although we have been talking about getting some inline skates recently.
Made homeade cookies: No. Well, does that imply actually baking them? We ate raw cookie dough. It wasn’t homeade though. Damn you Pillsbury Dough Boy!
Gone skinny dipping: No. Not in the past month, anyway.
Dyed your hair: No. I’m out of the henna I use.
Stolen anything: No!

LAYER SEVEN: Ever…
Played a game that required removal of clothing: Yep
If so, was it mixed company: Yes (sorry mom and dad).  So was the skinny dipping, but that was in almost total darkness.
Been trashed or extremely intoxicated: Once and only once. I learned very quickly that I do not like hangovers.
Been caught “doing something”: Sort of. We weren’t actually doing something….yet.
Been called a tease: No, at least not that I know of.  I was told in high school that I intimidated the boys, but no one ever called me a tease.
Gotten beaten up: No
Shoplifted: I don’t think so. I mean, I may have as a little kid, but I’ve never intentionally gone into a store and taken something without paying for it.
Changed who you were to fit in: Hasn’t everyone? I like to think I don’t do it anymore, but that wouldn’t be entirely true.

LAYER EIGHT:
Age you hope to be married: Well, since I’m already married, um, this one?
Numbers and Names of Children: 1 boy, 1 girl; Lennox Maximilian and Zoë Harper
Describe your Dream Wedding: The one I had.
How do you want to die: Sorry, this isn’t something I think about these days. I’m trying to focus on how I want to live.
Where you want to go to college: This list must have been made for much younger people. I went to the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
What do you want to be when you grow up: Fun
What country would you most like to visit: Japan. I’d also really like to go back to England and Italy. Greece would be fun too, if you’re listening, Aliki!

LAYER NINE:
Number of people I could trust with my life: That’s an odd question. There are a lot of people I’d trust with my life. I may not trust them with my money or my secrets, but I’m fairly certain they’d do whatever they could to protect my life.
Number of CDs that I own: More than I feel like counting for a meme. Let’s say between 150 and 300.
Number of piercings: Five. Two in each ear and one in my nose.
Number of tattoos: None. We have a rule about tattoos. You have to want the same design in the same place for 12 months or you can’t get it. Neither of us has passed that test.
Number of times my name has appeared in the newspaper: Four that I know of.
Number of scars on my body: Let’s see…one on my left leg from a dog bite, one on each knee from a spectacular fall from my bike, one on my right knee from surgery, nine on my abdomen from four different surgeries, one on my right hand from a close encounter with a tin can lid, one across three fingertips on my left hand from a campfire burn, and finally one on my face from a dog bite (I think it was a dog bite…I was really little).
Number of things in my past that I regret: Ha! HAHAHAHA! HAHAHAHAHA!

Now, how about you?

Anxiety

Busted has a post up about anxiety. We talk a lot about the pain of grief, about the cost, the emotion, and the sensation of loss. Those aspects of it are all easy to understand. They have a clear source. Just about everyone can comprehend those emotions (even if some people have a hard time realizing how long we continue to feel them). But I think the anxiety surprises everyone. I know it caught me unprepared and when I try to explain it to people outside of a select few, they get this look on their face like they think maybe I’ve slipped a gear or two.

I didn’t notice it until we went back to work outside of the house. From the day I went into the hospital until seven days after Zoë died, I hadn’t been alone for more than an hour or two. Shannon worked from home, I couldn’t drive. But then, Shannon went back to work in the office and I stayed home for one more week. He walked out the door that first morning to start his 35 mile drive to work and I felt my heart leap up into my throat. It seemed like someone was squeezing my chest so I couldn’t breathe. Suddenly I could imagine a hundred different scenarios that could happen and, as you can probably guess, none of them included his stopping at the coffee place, driving uneventfully to work while listening to NPR, and arriving safe and sound, which is how his drive usually goes.

It’s only been about two months that I haven’t needed him to call me when he arrives at his destination or before he leaves to come home. He’s still pretty good about sending me an email shortly after getting to work, just so I know he’s there, but if he forgets I don’t feel so strong a need to call. His wreck a few weeks ago undid a lot of my progress, but I’m definitely doing better.

In a similar vein, I also can’t stand the thought of going somewhere he isn’t. I haven’t travelled on my own. Normally, I’d have taken one or two trips back east by now. I try to see myself getting on a plane and going to visit my family while he stays here, but I get queasy. It isn’t fear that something might happen to me…it’s that something might happen to him if I’m not nearby. Of course, my presence didn’t save Lennox or Zoë. It’s a very helpless, hopeless feeling. You fear being too far away to do anything all the while knowing that being nearby won’t do anything either. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t so you end up frozen in place unable to go either way.

Crowds are still a problem. It doesn’t matter if they are friends, family, or strangers. I can understand the anxiety over Shannon being out of my sight. The intensity of the anxiety surprised me, the amount of time it has taken for me to start to deal with it has surprised me, but the feelings themselves were no shock. I wasn’t prepared for the fear of people though and I don’t really understand it. The thought of being in a group makes me ill. I’ve left more than one almost full shopping cart in a store because being around so many people made my skin crawl. I’ve had to psych myself up to attend parties and evenings out with friends and even those I’ve cut short. Is it because I feel so out of sync with the rest of the world? Am I trying to protect myself from a poorly considered comment, from the sight of a happy family? Is it the fear that I’ll start shaking people and screaming, “Don’t you know how quickly it can all go wrong?” What is it I’m so afraid of?

I know it gets better. I know it IS getting better. I believe in making myself push my boundaries. I let him go out on his own on the weekend and don’t demand that he check in, just that he take his phone. I’ve been to the parties, I just make excuses to leave after an hour or two. I grit my teeth, take deep breaths, and finish the grocery shopping with my head down. I’ve learned that if I’m not feeling well, if I’m tired, it takes less to trigger it. I practice deep breathing when I’m in the car and the other drivers seem intent on running us down.

When it first happened, Shannon and I got lots of lectures of things to watch for, things to be aware of. If I was sleeping too much, if I wasn’t sleeping enough; If I was too detached, unemotional. No one warned us about the anxiety we’d both feel. The fact that a migraine headache, which I’ve dealt with for 15 years, would now make Shannon’s stomach clench and have him hovering next to me trying to anticipate every need came as a complete shock. The thought that if it took longer than he thought it should for me to run to the car and back to where he was sitting outside the store, he’d start to imagine me collapsed on the ground seemed laughable, until now.

When your whole world gets turned upside down and you learn just how little control you really have? Is it any wonder that afterwards, you see the overwhelming uncertainty in everything? Maybe they didn’t warn us because it seemed obvious. But as I’ve read more and more blogs and seen how many people beat themselves up because they can’t seem to shake the fear, I think it needs to be the FIRST thing they warn us about. We’re smart people. We know we shouldn’t be so worked up about these things, so we start to think it’s silly or stupid and we get angry at ourselves. Maybe if I’d gone to a therapist or read a book I’d have known. I’m stubborn like that. The books all made me roll my eyes and I really didn’t think a therapist would offer me much comfort and I couldn’t bring myself to going through the process of finding someone I thought I could really work with. So, I stumble along and learn each new aspect of this new existence and I find as I read about others’ journeys down this same path that I’m not so alone, so different. And I start to feel a little less anxious.

It’s a quotey kind of week

I think I’ve written about it before; I collect quotations. I think it’s a habit I picked up in high school. They were always an easy way to pad a paper for AP English. Somewhere along the way, I found a very old book of quotations in an antique/junk store. Then, I started carrying around a small notebook to record things that caught my interest…song lyrics, passages from books, a few sentences from an interview on the radio. Four years as a lit major, then four more years as a liberal arts grad student, they came in handy more times than I can count. The web is full of pages of quotations on just about any topic you can imagine. Sometimes, I just like to pick a subject blindly and read a few pages. Other days, I get a randomly generated list. I scribble some down on little slips of paper and eventually copy them into my notebook. I think it’s when I feel less than creative myself, when the only thoughts in my head are of the mundane variety that I go quote-hunting. I like to feel the gears start spinning again.

These days, it’s hard to blog. I’m an infertility blogger who isn’t currently going through any treatment. I’m a mommy blogger without any children. I don’t want to bore you all to tears with photos of the cats and stories of my early attempts to learn to be graceful on the dance floor (I managed to knock the substitute instructor’s glasses off his face while helping to demonstrate a swing step). I’m looking for inspiration. I haven’t found it yet, but I did find these. So, on the off chance that you too are suffering from mundane brain, I thought I’d post a few. Since I don’t have any words of my own lately, I’m sharing the words of others.

To laugh often and love much; to win the respect of intelligent persons and the affection of children; to earn the approbation of honest citizens and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to give of one’s self; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to have played and laughed with enthusiasm and sung with exultation; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived - this is to have succeeded. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort. ~Herm Albright

Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane. ~Philip K. Dick (1928 - 1982), Valise

Do not pursue what is illusory - property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade and can be confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life - don’t be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is after all, all the same: the bitter doesn’t last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. ~Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918 - )

Making a living and having a life are not the same thing. Making a living and making a life that´s worthwhile are not the same thing. Living the good life and living a good life are not the same thing. A job title doesn’t even come close to answering the question “What do you do?” ~Robert Fulghum (1937 - )

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library. ~Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)

Thoughts give birth to a creative force that is neither elemental nor sidereal. Thoughts create a new heaven, a new firmament, a new source of energy, from which new arts flow. When a man undertakes to create something, he establishes a new heaven, as it were and from it the work that he desires to create flows into him. For such is the immensity of man that he is greater than heaven and earth. ~Philipus Aureolus Paracelsus (1493 - 1541)

I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend!

Because I’m also a research geek

I hope this doesn’t kill the fun. I sort of feel like I’m pulling off Santa’s fake beard but I was curious about the source of that list of books for yesterday’s meme.  There were some titles left off it that I would have thought the NEA would include and some were included that surprised me.  After some digging, I’ve come to the conclusion that this meme, wherever it originated, combined two separate and quite different things.

First, I found this article from February 2007.  That list of books was created as the result of a poll for World Book Day, in which the British public were asked what 10 books they couldn’t live without.

Then, I found the National Endowment for the Arts “Big Read” initiative.

The Big Read is an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts, designed to restore reading to the center of American culture. The NEA presents The Big Read in partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services and in cooperation with Arts Midwest. The Big Read brings together partners across the country to encourage reading for pleasure and enlightenment.

The Big Read answers a big need. Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, a 2004 report by the National Endowment for the Arts, found that not only is literary reading in America declining rapidly among all groups, but that the rate of decline has accelerated, especially among the young. The concerned citizen in search of good news about American literary culture would study the pages of this report in vain.

The Big Read aims to address this crisis squarely and effectively. It provides citizens with the opportunity to read and discuss a single book within their communities. The initiative includes innovative reading programs in selected cities and towns, comprehensive resources for discussing classic literature, an ambitious national publicity campaign, and an extensive Web site providing comprehensive information on authors and their works.

Each community event lasts approximately one month and includes a kick-off event to launch the program locally, ideally attended by the mayor and other local luminaries; major events devoted specifically to the book (panel discussions, author reading, and the like); events using the book as a point of departure (film screenings, theatrical readings, and so forth); and book discussions in diverse locations and aimed at a wide range of audiences.

The NEA inaugurated The Big Read as a pilot project in 2006 with ten communities featuring four books. The Big Read continues to expand to include more communities and additional books. By 2009, approximately 400 communities in the U.S. will have hosted a Big Read since the program’s 2007 national launch.

I haven’t finished reading the 2004 study (you can download it from the NEA Big Read site if you are interested) but their findings show that less than half of the adult American population now reads literature. By literature, they mean any novel, short story, play or poetry read in leisure time. In the ten years between 1992 and 2002, the percentage of the U.S. adult population that read ANY book dropped 7% and the percentage that read literature dropped 14%.

So, Aliki, that explains your question about why they didn’t have to read them in school. It also explains why pop fiction is on the list (’cause after reading Busted’s comments, you know she was curious as to how The Da Vinci Code made the cut!). Still, it’s a fun meme and I’m always curious to see what everyone is reading/has read/wants to read.

While I’m thinking about it, if this has made you want to read some of the classics but you don’t feel like heading to the bookstore to shell out $14 for a trade paperback and you don’t have a good used bookstore around…check out The Gutenberg Project. When I spend my lunch at my desk, I frequently find something there to read while I eat.

I am such a book geek

I saw this over on Busted’s blog and thought I’d take a shot at it.

Here’s how it works:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline (or mark in a different color) the books you LOVE - mine are in red
4) Reprint this list in your blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them

The premise of this exercise is that the National Endowment for the Arts apparently believes that the average American has only read 6 books from the list below.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien ~ I keep trying to read this one, but I never make  it past Crickhollow before I get bored.
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott ~ I tried to read this when I was 7 or 8 but I never really got into it.  I doubt I made it past the first 20 pages.
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy ~This was a favorite for years.  I may have to go reread it now.
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare ~ The Complete Works? No.  I have read a lot of them though.
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot ~But I did read The Mill on the Floss.
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis ~ I’m not sure why this is separate from #33. 
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres ~ Don’t bother with the movie.  Honestly, does Nicholas Cage have the ability to express any emotion?
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden ~ After reading this, I strongly recommend reading Geisha: A Life by Mineko Iwasaki. She wrote her autobiography after being disappointed by the way Golden misrepresented aspects of the Geisha.
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery ~ I read so fast and so much when I was a kid, I tended to pick really long series.
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert ~Shannon loves Dune.  I think it’s incredibly dull.
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville ~can I have extra credit for also having read Billy Bud and Bartleby the Scrivener?
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce ~but I did read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and The Dubliners
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro ~This is one of my favorite movies.  You know the one you HAVE to watch if it’s being shown on cable?
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo ~ I read this in the sixth grade because I’d heard that it contained the longest sentence published.  I TOLD you I’m a book geek!

How ’bout you?

If only…

The true secret of giving advice is, after you have honestly given it, to be perfectly indifferent whether it is taken or not, and never persist in trying to set people right.  ~Hannah Whitall Smith, 1902

I try to cultivate that attitude as much as possible. I’ve encountered too many who don’t.

Talisman

tal·is·man ~ Pronunciation:\ˈta-ləs-mən, -ləz-\
noun
Etymology:
French talisman or Spanish talismán or Italian talismano; all from Arabic ṭilsam, from Middle Greek telesma, from Greek, consecration, from telein to initiate into the mysteries, complete, from telos end — more at telos
Date:
1638
1 : an object held to act as a charm to avert evil and bring good fortune
2 : something producing apparently magical or miraculous effects

I have been searching for just the right thing for months. I didn’t know exactly what form it would take, but I knew I’d recognize it the moment I saw it. It would be simple, but it would speak volumes. It would be something that I could keep close always.

After a long hunt, many many websites, and more attempts to make all the letters fit, I finally found it. As soon as I saw the picture on her catalog, I recognized it as mine. I was touched by her own story.

It took me awhile, but I finally have my talisman.

If you would like to see her other pieces, visit Lisa Leonard Designs

Too deep inside my head

It’s so curious: one can resist tears and ‘behave’ very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer… and everything collapses. ~Colette

There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it.  I don’t wake up thinking, “Today is going to be one of those days.”  I’m not even sure what sets it off, what sends me to look at the photos again, to read the old posts.  Just like I could never leave a skinned knee alone to heal cleanly, I can’t seem to stop poking at this.  I guess I just need to check to see how much it still hurts. This is one of those days.

I guess it’s because I have so little of it available.  So few moments, so many of which were rushed and anxious and now are fading oh so quickly.

It’s not the debilitating, crushing agony anymore.  I’ve managed to climb out of that deepest pit of despair.  I can breathe through these moments now.

She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts. ~George Eliot

I don’t know when that happened; when I stopped fighting it, when it just became a part of who I am now.

In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on. ~Robert Frost

If you’re tangled up just tango on

Second to last dance class last night.  We missed last week to go to Shannon’s company Fourth of July fireworks-watching party.

I’m amazed at how far we’ve come in just five weeks!  While we were waiting for everyone to arrive, she played music for us to practice to.  We must be doing pretty good, at least with the foxtrot, rumba, and waltz.  She didn’t make too many comments about anyone’s technique. We spent a big portion of the class adding steps to our single count swing, then we struggled to add a crossover step and a spin to the chacha.  I’m not cut out for the chacha, I’m afraid.  The class we missed last week was the tango, but she gave everyone a quick review.  Then we gave it a try.

Ok, here’s the dirty truth.  It’s a fantastic dance to watch.  Haven’t we all seen Al Pacino sweep Gabrielle Anwar around that parquet floor, telling her if she gets tangled up to just tango on and wished that were us?  Here’s what I learned last night.  If it feels good while you are dancing it (ladies, I mean) you are doing it wrong.  It’s awkward.  It’s unnatural.  I cannot imagine doing it in real heeled dance shoes and a long skirt.  THIS is the dance that gets your toes stepped on.  I’m determined to get it right, but I’m no longer as dreamily enamored of it as I was.  I do enjoy the swing though.  I think after this, we’ll take one more survey class to get some more practice in on all of the dances…to learn some turns and move beyond just the basic step-step-side-together part so that we wouldn’t be lost on a dance floor, but then, I think I’d like to get really good at East Coast Swing.  Funny, that’s the one I was the most nervous about learning!

Cat photos

Stacie asked, so blame her! These aren’t the best. She’s tiny, she’s fast, and she’s black, which made it hard to take decent photos.

I don’t recommend force feeding a kitten. It gets messy.

Nom nom nom.

And I had to come out from under the couch because…?

A very sleepy itty bitty kitty.

She’s mostly just fluff.