KattyWilly

Home alone on a Saturday night watching Olympic Women’s Curling.

Actually I’ve been looking forward to women’s curling ever since the calendar came out 🙂

Tonight was the US vs. Italy and some bonus coverage of Norway and Great Britian and Japan and Sweden.

Maybe I should take up curling!

I follow several widow/widower weblogs on the net. One that I read
regularly is Todd’s over at Rhymes With Drowning.

I have tried to describe it in my own words but have been unable to do
it. Instead I will quote from his
brother’s weblog:

“Enough’s enough. I mean, really. Seriously. Enough’s f’ing enough.

Go pick on someone your own size. And for the record, my brother might
be tall, but he’s nowhere near your size.

Taking his wife from cancer was cheap and low. Taking his dad about six
weeks later was even lower. Then flooding his house with raw sewage on
Christmas Eve was like the rotten cherry on the crap-sundae.

So, tell me, universe, why you felt it was important to BURN HIS HOUSE
DOWN today?”

Reading about what he and his children have been through makes me want
to rush home and hug my daughters. Maybe we can go out for Pizza
tonight or something. It just makes me want to be with them and know
that we are okay. Oh, and we just had our ducts replaced too.

We had some rain today.  As of 5pm some areas had 15 inches of rain.

Weird clouds at sunrise last week.

Halley
is talking fruit and veggies.

Every morning I make Lindsey a big container of fruit. I start with a
cored apple and dice it in large chunks. On top I add a variety of
other fruits depending on what looks good at the grocery. Pears,
grapes, straw berries (it’s the beginning of the season down here),
raspberries, blackberries, kiwi, mangoes, oranges, etc.

And Lindsey being vegetarian we usually get some veggies with dinner
when I have time to make it. Last night was stir fry veggies with red
curry, and some homemade veggie pot stickers.

Halley asked about raw vs. coked Broccoli and my first thought was I’ll
ask Cindy. Cindy was a dietitian. Out in the garage I have a file
cabinet that is filled with all her old nutrition files. Much of it is
old, at least 4 years old now.

Time is measured in reference to the accident. I have a built in
calendar to determine how much time has passed. I cleaned out the
pantry a while ago after I found some bugs in a box of crackers. I
found some things that I knew needed to be tossed because I remembered
having them when Cindy was alive.

One of my resolutions for this year is to clean up the house. Cindy was
real good at cleaning up and tossing out junk. It’s taken me up until
just recently when I can throw things out and not fear that I’m throwing
away memories.

So on Sunday I was going through those old files. I bet that somewhere
in the boxes of old nutrition papers I could have found something on
Broccoli nutrition. Or maybe not. But somehow going through the
process of throwing out, what I’m sure Cindy would have thought of as
junk, still felt like I was throwing out a few more little pieces of my
past with her.

And my guess is that raw Broccoli has more nutrition than cooked,
especially if you like smushy broccoli and you boil it.

Rod

For years I’ve tried to use outliners. For some reason I can’t get my
ideas to fit into that kind of structure. I was just thinking that my
thoughts and processing of them aren’t hierarchical, but instead more
like procedural programming.

When I think about things they aren’t structured like outlines they are
like rivers of thought flowing from one idea to the next. When I get
ideas that I want to write about it is usually sparked by reading
something and having the ideas spring forth and connect to other ideas.
My most difficult task is being able to describe the sometimes tenuous
connections that tie my ideas together.

The ideas are interesting and important but it is the stuff that
connects them that is what makes them so. And sometimes it’s hard to
come up with the words to describe the strange and mysterious fibers
that intertwine and connect ideas.

Heaven help me, I have a combined eight teens in the house tonight, two
high schoolers and six middle schoolers, with a breakdown of 5 girls to
three boys, YIKES!

I am a very protective, well probably over protective parent.  I was
always trying to protect the girls from getting hurt as kids.  Cindy
would have to make me go away and let them play otherwise I would force
them to sit quietly and not do anything “dangerous” that might get them
hurt.  We had plastic outlet covers on every outlet, and door locks on
every cabinet.  It was terrible trying to teach them to ride a bike, I
was terrified they might fall and get hurt, and cry.  My natural
instincts were too strong.  If it were up to me the girls would have
spent all their days quietly sitting in a softly padded room with no
sharp corners. 

I eventually was able to let the girls go out and have fun, doing
dangerous things like playing on the swing set, and riding their bikes
without training wheels.  But to do that I had to turn off my natural
protective (or over protective) instincts.  And that is my problem.  I
have a hard time dealing with trying to protect the girls and at the
same time allow them to make mistakes and potentially hurt themselves.

So I sit here carefully listening to the conversations, well it’s not
really conversation, it’s more a cacophony of raised voices, currently
all screaming in unison.  I figure as long as everyone is yelling at
each other nothing “bad” is happening.

And as I listen to the awkwardness of these young teens as they try to
figure out how to act around teens of the opposite sex, I realize my
own feelings of awkwardness as I try to figure out how to act as a
single 40 something person after 20 some years as part of a couple.

Perhaps I’m overly protective of myself.  Too afraid that I may hurt
myself, or at the least afraid that I may act in a way that may
embarrass me.  That I will make a mistake.