KattyWilly

My version of Halley’s Balancing Act

Yoga — Bending myself backwards to try and get both kids to different places at almost the same time so they can both enjoy their day. Today it’s trying to get Chelsey off to her friends house so they can go to the movies while I’m off to Lindsey’s concert to pretend I’m part of the road crew for Samurai Cafe. I’ll have a cool new band crew t-shirt sort of like these.

Walking — Walking around the mall trying to find the perfect birthday gifts for the upcoming birthday parties.

Lifting Weights — Carrying the skate bags, back packs, guitar amps, and other miscellaneous junk for the girls.

Swimming — Swimming through the sea of bills, legal paperwork, school permission slips, school picture forms, fund raiser forms, insurance forms etc.

Skiing — Hmm…..

Skating — The girls do all the skating. Some days I get to sit in the stands and freeze my butt off watching, but not often enough.

Running — I’ve been running most of today and it’s not even noon. Ran Lindsey up to her boyfriends to practice for the concert. Ran through the area around the park trying to find some Wi-Fi so I could blog the concert. (There is some across the street, so I’ll give it a try, no guarantees though.) Next it’s time to run past Chelsey’s friends house to drop her off, and then run back up to the park to be the road crew for the band. After the concert it’s time to run back to pick up Chelsey to run her over to her friend’s birthday party. Somewhere in there I have to retrieve Lindsey too.

Tennis — Tennis is nice.

Golf — Golf is really cool. I used to be able to play once a week with the guys after work in the summer. Golf now takes way too much time to play. I can’t imagine having 3-4 hours of free time to do anything.

Back from my first “run” of the day. Dropped of Lindsey at the band’s warm-up practice, and of course had to stop on the way home to get a Mighty Kids Meal for Chelsey. Makes me think about all the terrible convenience food I get to eat. This is another of those things that I’m thinking that other parents get. Some kids don’t eat anything so we end up trying to find something, anything that they will eat. We buy the mini-corndog nugget things, the twelve different shapes – sizes and composition of chicken nuggets, shrimp poppers, clam strips, mini pizza bites, the crappy spaghetti TV dinner that had a cool dessert, the spaghetti o’s that weren’t supposed to have meatballs or have the wrong shaped noodles, the breakfast bars, yogurt bars, and weird cereals.

I mention all this because I’m getting ready to sit down to some frozen chicken nuggets, but not just plain chicken nuggets, these have the added “bonus” of being stuffed with delightful ham and cheese filling. Now, I’m sure there isn’t any part of a chicken that normally looks like a hollowed out ping-pong ball, and these things look like a perfectly formed chicken ball with a congealed pinkish mass oozing out of the middle. Some sort of strange miniature volcano school science project made with Armour Star Treet and cream cheese. Yum, I can’t wait for them to finish cooking in the microwave.

Halley says come on and write somethign new.  She also talks about doing things for ourselves, and a bunch of other stuff that right now I don’t even have time to read much less write.  Off to start driving kids from one oend of the county to the other.

I like reading Halley.  She writes about the stuff that happens to me on a daily basis so I don’t have to.  It is scary sometimes though.  Last night Chelsey informed me that I needed to buy cupcakes for her geography class because they did so well on something that they earned a party of some sort.  No note in the backpack, no notice on the website, just “dad, you need to get cupcakes for school.”  This morning I read Halley’s Comment and she says, “I had the habit of mentioning after dinner that I needed 32 cupcakes for my class the next morning and stuff like that.”  Makes me wonder if she’s reading my mind or something.  I need to start writing my stuff earlier so it looks like she’s copying from me instead of me from her 🙂

Anyway she goes on to talk about the trials and tribulations of being a double parent and trying to juggle the world of our children and the world of our work.  And for some I would assume there is the additional world of their personal lives, which I don’t have to worry about at this time.

Halley has wise words, “Notice the nice things about this day … and it might simply be a cup of coffee that tastes great.” and wouldn’t you know for some reason, for the first time ever, I stopped at the Circle K at the corner and got coffee this morning. Check the link at the end of her post for a little gift.

Here is more music, this time from Beth Nielsen Chapman, a song she wrote after her husband died.

“All alone I didn’t like the feeling
All alone I sat and cried
All alone I had to find some meaning
In the center of the pain I felt inside”

Sand and Water

I’m begining to wonder if all country singers have been through this experience or what.

Today was United States Figure Skating Association (USFSA) testing for Lindsey.  She tests when she is ready to move up a level.  Today she tested moves in the field which is a set of specified footwork sequences.  This is as close as skaters get to the figures that skated used to do.  She also tested Freestyle which is the traditional choreographed routine to music.  I took some captures from the camcorder and posted those.

I also posted a few more analog photos from a while back, and a few from the other night.  One of the other complaints I have about analog photography is you have to finish the roll before you take it in to get prints.  With digital I just shoot a few and post/print a few.

They are analog, and I just did quick scans, but here are the photos from the show last night.  The actual photos don’t look too bad.  For the most part they are almost properly exposed, a little over exposed if anything, and most all are in focus, that is something in the frame is in focus.  This is way to painful to do very often, and rather expensive too.  It is still cheaper in my mind to take a bazillion digital photos, pick out the best shots and print those, either on the printer here at home or one of the online photo sites.  I looked at some digicams today and more and more I’m leaning to getting a compact digital camera like the Canon S400, or one of the Olympus Stylus digitals, that would fit very comfortable in a pants pocket.

Grieving is such a unique experience.  No two people grieve in the same way.  That said everyone seems to go through the same phases at one point or another.  One of these is the process of saying goodbye.  See my earlier post about Jackie Kennedy to see her comments on this phase.

I wonder, if for those who have no children, the saying goodbye phase is easier.  For me it seems impossible.  How can I say goodbye to my daughters’ mother?  There is a feeling of having to sever ties to the past before being able to move forward.  See the movie “Always” for scenes on this experience.  How can I possible say goodbye to their mother.  She will always be such an important part of our lives.  This can be so hard.  You want to progress, move forward, into the future, and yet I am so tied to the past, what is gone.