Fall in Ohio

Well, the leaves have mostly fallen off the trees. JT spent the past few weeks trying to earn money by raking leaves with his friends. They are now looking forward to snow with the hope that they will earn even more money that way.

The autumn leaves are always gorgeous. I love the red ones that are almost iridescent, and I love the multitude of colors and the layers of shapes and shades. We had a good fall with many sunny blue sky days (at least for Ohio). I am sure many will disagree and complain about the weather, but there were enough good days for me, and more than we often see.

I can't imagine living somewhere I couldn't see, hear and smell this season.

walking down the street again...

Well, I can't believe it's been months since I last posted. Life has transitions after transitions - I have been through a series of changes since I last posted. But at the moment I am treading water. I cannot get it together to do the multitude of things which will bring closure to any of the things I need to bring closure to. So the list sits there and depresses me further.

But I read an article which was talking about the value of blogging in helping people to cope with cancer, and blogging to help cope with stress, and it occurred to me that I could start blogging again.

The title of this post is a reference to the teaching tale (poem?) which is I think titled or subtitled "Autobiography in Five Short Chapters," about walking down the street and falling into the hole and taking forever to get out and walking down the street again and falling in again and taking forever to get out again, and eventually it ends by walking down a different street.

boxes boxes everywhere

So, I went through 4 boxes of my parents' stuff tonight. Two boxes of fabric scraps - truly little tiny scraps and worn out pieces of fabric and old nylons and ohmygoodness what were they thinking?!?!? And a box of wrapping paper used and saved since we were small children, which also contained 3 open boxes of heavy duty aluminum foil - were they planning on aliens trying to invade? And a huge box containing other boxes including wands to long gone vacuum cleaners, warranties of anything they ever owned in their lives, checks from every checking account they ever had, the record player we had as small children...

But I still have half a garage full of boxes. I still can't get a car into the garage.

They are predicting snow by the end of the weekend and perhaps a significant snowfall before the election...
I have a paper due Monday which I am stuck in the process of writing. My kids need my attention and I promised them something fun this weekend. My mother is not doing well and was in tears earlier today because she feels the staff people aren't being nice to her. And the cars have to go in the garage before the snow flies.

But here I am blogging. My excuse is that I did a lot of work while everyone else was watching a movie tonight...

Heroes

I think I like Heroes because it is so totally unrelated to reality. Reality is too painful -- One wants to escape.
Anyway "Heroes" is intriguing and confusing and has so much potential. Although I have been disappointed before. Like "Lost" seemed to have that same potential and then it just got so convoluted and rather boring. So I know Heroes runs this risk. After all we had "Twin Peaks" which just imploded - at least in my mind. Good television is so hard to do!
I mean I watch lots of mediocre TV because it's vaguely entertaining and requires so little that I can work on other things while watching it. And most TV is really mediocre or sometimes just really bad. (the really bad stuff is the bulk of TV- duh).

But I hold out hope for "Heroes" - let's hope they don't let us down...

don't take it personally

mantra for the day:
DON'T TAKE IT PERSONALLY!

I am having one of those days where every thing goes wrong, and I have to keep repeating to myself, don't take it personally.

Cat in Tree

The news keeps running a "teaser" about a cat stuck in a tree and asking audience members to call in with their ideas how to get the cat out of the tree. B keeps saying to just leave it alone and it will come down on it's own. While I am not 100% convinced that is the case, I am not clear how this rates news coverage. It's kind of like the old "Dog Bites Man = not news" thing...

but hey - it's not like there's anything else going on in the world - no hurricanes, fires, wars, or even book reviews or thought-provoking discussions!!!

How we spend our time...

So there was an article in the paper about some guy who blogs every hour (I think I remember that correctly) and how he manages his life around blogging. I can't imagine having that kind of time. Obviously I am lucky to blog every few weeks at this point!

I am on the other hand getting through the boxes in my mother's new apartment slowly but surely. Some of the stuff has been broken but it is hard to know whether the movers broke it or whether it was broken ahead of time.

And then there are the conversations with my mother about her stuff.

She can't unpack the boxes herself - it is too much of a strain physically and emotionally. So she'll ask me if there is anyway she can help... and occasionally I'll try different strategies. Like on Tuesday I was trying to fit books into her book case and there were 2 I thought had no significance - I'm not sure how they made it this far (with all our culling) so I asked her if we could remove them and donate them - and she insisted that she wanted to hold onto them a little while longer & look through them.

These 2 books that my father had bought at a used book sale at some point and which were not in particularly good shape or of particular interest... but she couldn't imagine letting go of them.

Then today I finally got to the one record cabinet (I know, who listens to records any more) but I found that the record cabinet had been broken by the movers - which made me really angry. It was a nice piece of maple furniture, and they had really broken it in a major way - but you couldn't tell until you tried to open it. But her reaction was "oh, well things get broken."

I know that the records and music mean more to me than to her - they represent my father in many ways to me - and I am not ready to let go of those memories yet. It also allows for some entertainment other than TV when I spend time there. But it was one of those moments when clearly we were on 2 very different pages.