I’m not saying that I’ll suddenly start writing the time again, but I am saying that most of the time, when I do have an impulse, I don’t have a keyboard anywhere nearby. And I LOATHE typing on a phone unless I’m trying to look illiterate.
I’ve been thinking about getting a laptop for a while but haven’t gotten around to it because it’s too much work to find something that
- Isn’t garbage
- Is cheap
so I briefly mentioned it to Jeremy a few weeks ago. Didn’t bring it up again. Then last week he messaged me
–Happy birthday
What did you do?–
–Ordered you a laptop
–It was really cheap
which sounds like crappy gift giving, but I’m neurotic about money that’s spent on me for things I don’t need, so this is part of our love language. Other say it with flowers. Jeremy knows flowers just say, “These were expensive and will be dead by Tuesday, so I hope you love eating ramen for life.”
(My neurosis isn’t rational, which is why it’s called “neurosis” and not “prudence.”)
“It was cheap” says, “I love you more than my pride in being a pretty romantic dude,” and that is actually very romantic.
Also. It’s an adorable little laptop with a tiny screen, which is EXACTLY WHAT I WANTED. It’s barely bigger than my MacBook from 2006 (RIP) and weighs even less. It has almost zero bells and whistles, other than a solid state drive (which isn’t really a bell or whistle anymore, but I can’t tell you how great it is to reenter the world of laptoppery and not have a fan screeching about its miserable lot in life, or to not have blisters forming on my thighs as I do important work like Facebooking).
Now, there is a good chance that I will be writing more because my children have joined a sort of intro to swim team sort of group, and I’m here every Tuesday and Thursday for an hour. Once the weather gets colder, it will be even longer because they will have to re-clothe their shivering bodies after practice. And when I was on swim team, my post-practice showers were rarely under 30 minutes. I could never get warm enough. And then I would get home and couldn’t eat enough. I think most of my free time as a teenager was spent eating literally anything that would restore my calorie deficit. Alas. Those days are certainly over.
Which, what HAVE I been doing? A whole lot of just normal people life stuff that, B.A. (Before Adderall), was too overwhelming. I have:
- Done five Tough Mudders. I think three of those since the last time I was regularly writing here? They combine my lifelong love of being outdoors with my other lifelong love of being a disgusting animal. This last year’s was stupidly easy, so, less fun. But I do it with a group of some of my favorite people, and I stay at my sister’s house in the meantime. So it’s worth it. I do think I’d like to try a Spartan sometime, though.
- Ah. Yes. I helped my sister put a floor in half of her downstairs this last time. It was a LOT of work (expected) with a lot of surprises (also kind of expected, but some things were SURPRISES, like the time I was detaching the pipes from her bathroom vanity, and the pipe going out of the house just crumbled in flakes of rust), but it looks amazing, and we did a super cool thing.
- I got into yardwork. I’ve written about our apocalypse lawn before. I decided to do something about it this year, so I ordered some drought resistant grass seed and a tiller and went to work. It looks almost respectable now, if you don’t look at 2/3 of it. I’m doing it in phases.
- I started teaching myself guitar. I’m hilariously bad at it (mainly because I don’t have time to do that and everything else I suddenly have energy to do), but it’s fun. I think once the weather is too cold, I will have more time for indoor hobbies.
- The kids and I are learning to sew. My main motivation is Pants That Fit, but it’s also fun to just create random things that occur to me. Or to fix my race shirts that only come in men’s sizes (UNISEX IS MEN’S).
There’s more, but I think that’s the big stuff. It’s been over a year since I switched from Strattera to Adderall, and I still marvel at my ability to
1) Do things I want to do
2) Sustain interest past the point of it becoming mildly difficult
which are not things I ever thought would be possible. Don’t get me wrong, I still struggle to get myself out of loops, but it’s a difficult hurdle, not an impossible feat.
Emmy is definitely my mini-me, and we really need to find her a med that works. She was doing ok through the latter half of last school year and summer break with just coffee, but these first two weeks of school have been rough. She takes one thing that at least helps her sleep, by which I mean that she rarely goes to sleep after 11pm and rarely wakes up spontaneously at 3am, and she never does both on the same night anymore. But I can see her frantic grasping at basic life management–even in a class where there’s no homework–, and I feel the panic welling up in the back of my throat. She also has interests (trumpet! there is no more fitting instrument for her) and gifts (her drawings literally get better every day, and she’s well past my skill level). I want her to enjoy them without risking a mental breakdown.
Grace is Jeremy’s mini-me, but a lot prettier. She’s nearly as tall as I am, and it’s both exciting (she’s turning into such a cool person! she’s responsible and thoughtful!) and terrifying (no you cannot look like that yet). She plays the flute and makes the cutest clay sculptures.
I know every mom thinks her kids are extra special gifted–and, I think, most human beings do have at least a few special gifts, or the gift of being pretty good at a lot of things–, but I’m in constant awe of them. I can’t wait to see what they do with their lives, but I also want them to just STOP because they’re really fun right now, and I don’t want them to grow up and move away.
So that’s where we are. On the whole, it’s been a pretty good year.
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