Spent much of my time working today which means I’m stuck at the computer for hours on end. It’s hard because even in a desk job you can get up and walk around occasionally, but with AA I have to stay physically connected to me phone and desk. Uggg.
Before hand though I did some house work which made the house feel better although it’s not pristine by any means (when is it ever?). I also worked to get more of my postings into my online blog here, now that I finally recovered them from the mySQL database on my old server. The collection is growing. As I posted them some of the words caught my eyes. It’s been an amazing journey, and to think I’ve collected almost 4 years of my life in writing. Now that it’s possible to write online, it makes me do it so much more regularly. Which is a good thing. I wish I could encourage the kids to do more of it.
I continued to work on the whole name change thing. Yesterday when I went to pick up Mark from school, I signed in as my old name. Just bizarre in some ways. After not having my maiden name for 18 years, here I am using it again. It’s going to take a lot of getting used to.
I was also amazed to see what the whole syndication thing has done for my blog. I looked at referrers to my blog and found that I’m actually published in some other places via RSS pick ups. Kind of cool if you ask me. It certainly hiked up the traffic to the site. Guess I’ll have to get political regularly and piss some people off - seems to draw them in.
I’ve been working on what I feel about the holidays over the last week. Thanksgiving is planned. We’re going to the church for a large “church family” gathering. I don’t have Katie or Aaron, so even “just us” would feel very lonely and certainly too small for a turkey. It’s always been hard at holidays anyway without extended family. I am hoping that my increasing involvement in the church will allow me to have people there Thursday that I feel happy and comfortable around, and that there are kids for my kids to hang out with. It is sad to me that I’ve never been able to give my kids the whole extended family thing at holidays. It’s always just been us. I guess I’m sad about me too. I have lots of fond memories about growing up and having all my aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents and even sometimes great aunts and uncles all around me. The house was always alive with so many people, crowded into every corner, kids dashing around from room to room. And the smells of the wonderful cooking and good food. And it just felt right. I always felt safe and happy then.
One particular Thanksgiving, when I was 5 or 6 my older cousins played a trick on us younger ones (there were kind of two sets - the older teens and then a group of us that were pretty young). My grandmother had a bear rug in her house, it was old and ratty and lived on the floor in one of the upstairs bedrooms of her and Grandpa’s farmhouse. The story was that Grandpa had shot it when he was young. It certainly looked that old. The nose was mostly gone, and it was a very small brown bear. It had glass eyes and kind of creeped most of us out. It always was sort of looking at you. And as a little kid, you are never really sure whether it’s going to wake up and eat you anyway.
This particular Thanksgiving one of the older kids picked up the bear and wrapped it around himself. Suddenly all of my older cousins came screaming out of one of the bedrooms with the bear careening towards us behind them. They of course, promptly disappeared down the steps leaving us to the bear. All I remember is a terrified stampede of all of us screaming and running downstairs and scattering around parents legs and hiding behind tables and overturned chairs.
They got a pretty good scolding as I recall, but I also remember the secret smiles on all their faces even after the stern looks and angry words from their parents and aunts and uncles and even Grandma. And trust me, once you’d felt the back side of my grandmother’s tongue you weren’t likely to forget it again for a while.
Anyway, I don’t have those big gatherings for myself and can’t give them to my kids and never have been able to. I suppose more and more people have that problem, thus why people gather together at churches, or like I heard on the radio, friends arranging parties for friends. It is particularly hard this year without having Katie and Aaron at all. Of course, I’ve invited them to spend part of the day with me. I doubt they will. They are very comfortable at their Dad’s. It makes me wonder how Christmas will go.
I know that we (who ever we turns out to be) are going to Melissa’s for Christmas afternoon. I know that I will still make my traditional breakfast of butterscotch rolls and fruit cups. It is likely however, that it will be simply me and Mark waking up on Christmas morning together. So who will I serve breakfast to? I don’t know. Right now I’m not worrying about it. We will see what happens when it happens.
First Turkey Day.
