Greetings on a Monday…

Aren’t there some weeks where it feels like there’s more than one MONDAY? You know what kind of week I mean…

You wake up late and you’re stumbling toward coffee, barefoot (of course), and one foot lands on a hard dog toy just before the other lands on something soft, wet, and squishy while you vaguely recall the sound that woke you. At least the cat now looks happier…

You bake some sweets for the office party and hand off the pan (brand new, nonstick) with just one request – use this spatula (also handed off) because it will scratch if you use a knife. The spatula comes back clean. The pan comes back full of crumbs with a grid of heavy scratches…

You come back to your car after a stop at a local grocery to find someone has let a cart run into the door…

In a fit of “helpfulness” a neighbor who apparently has golf course fantasies runs a mower across part of your yard you did not want mowed. Especially not down to the roots. Especially when you’ve asked every way you know how in polite language that they not do that. And now you’ll be looking at the damage for several weeks…

Your tire’s flat. Your balloon flew away …

Some weeks just ain’t got no reason. No getting around it. No making the best of it. Your stuff gets beat up, you feel beat up, the world wants to jump on you with muddy paws. And right now, it’s not even cute…

Life’s like a box of chocolates and someone took a bite of everyone and put ’em back. It sucks. And I’m sorry.

Which leaves the question: where do we go from there?

Getting too wrapped up in what’s wrong won’t help. I’ve had my rope wrapped around that axle more than once. I’ve been dragged behind a bad mood until I’m so twisted up and angry there should be a warning sign for explosives over my head. That’s an awful feeling. Better to find another way.

When the stuff that makes me crazy starts piling up, I activate the D.L. No, baseball fans, I don’t mean the Disabled List. I mean Don’t Look. If seeing that scraggly brown strip of yard that the neighbors messed with makes me crazy – Don’t Look. Especially when I know it will just make me angry. And I can’t change it. It’s already in the past.

Don’t Look. As much as I want to find some fix, some things have no solution. I have learned (slowly and sometimes painfully) to leave those things alone and to shift my focus elsewhere. Can’t stand looking at the yard? Take the dogs for a long walk in the other direction. Can’t stand looking at a scratched pan? Wash it and put it in the give away box. (And don’t EVER take your good pans to work again!) Park a little farther away from the cart return at the store (and think about the extra steps you get credit for!)

Sometimes making the best of a bad situation means just walking away. Maybe a better solution will arise. Maybe not. Truthing here: some things have no better solution. That’s rotten, but getting stuck on what I can’t change doesn’t help.

The big lesson I finally learned is this: If what you’re holding on to is hurting you – let go.

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Stay tuned for more on the Here’s a Quarter blog next week! As always, your thoughts and comments are always welcome – they are moderated (I know – adulting again), so they may take a little while to appear, but I read them all and appreciate that you were here. Thank you!

Hello, dear HaQ readers. It’s Sunday afternoon – such a nice little pause in the week! Earlier, I did work that I intended to do and then took my two bouncy dogs for a very long walk. We all came back tired and content. We all fell asleep. What a wonderful thing it is to wake up from easy sleep so profound you forget for a moment why there’s a 3 on the clock when it’s still light out. And what day it is, anyway?  Oh yes. It is blissfully Sunday. Ahh.

Being Sunday, and late afternoon, it was time to think about Sunday dinner. I’m trying a new recipe; I often do on the weekend. It calls for letting the food season a while in the fridge. Uh oh. That’s when my game of kitchen leapfrog started. If your stuff is anything like mine, you’ll know what I mean when I say I had to empty the dishwasher to make some room in my fridge… Really.

On the cooking shows, the chef has approximately six acres of gleaming counter top to display a neat array of fourteen ingredients already measured and chopped and waiting. Mise en place. Stuff gets artistically strewn about a beautifully trussed chicken sitting like a miniature deity on a sheet pan. And the sheet pan is then slid smoothly into a refrigerator on its own completely empty shelf. Ta-da!

Uh-hunh. This is how it goes in my real life:

I know that the bird is supposed to season for a while. I open the fridge to assess the possibilities of pacing a sheet pan in there. Seriously? The chicken itself is laughing at me from its current perch and I eyeball what needs to change. This is where it gets real. In order to make room, I’m going to have to boot some of the seedier items that have outlasted their welcome. They’re all huddled in the back there, contemplating spiky tattoos that say “SPOILED ROTTEN” and conspiring to turn the butter. To evict them I’m going to need a pair of gloves and some room in the sink. To make room in the sink, the stuff in there needs to go in the dishwasher. Which still has clean dishes in it. Right.

So, in order for me to season a chicken, I had to empty the dishwasher, rinse and stow the dishes from the sink, pull the tossable stuff from the fridge, empty it into a trash bag, rinse the containers, get the trash ready to go out to the corner, and then finally rearrange the shelves in the fridge so a sheet pan would fit in there.

Yep. Real life. It’s a little fly-by-the-seat-of-your-sweatpants, but it’s lovely anyway. And there’s going to be a chicken dinner to prove it.

I hope your spring Sunday is a lovely day. I hope you have sunshine, and time for things you love, and an easy ride into the work week. For me – I have some kitchen rabble that needs to go to the corner trash bin, and then I think there is a glass of wine waiting for me while I wait for that chicken.  Cheers!

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Stay tuned for more on the Here’s a Quarter blog next week! As always, your thoughts and comments are always welcome – they are moderated (I know – adulting again), so they may take a little while to appear, but I read them all and appreciate that you were here. Thank you!

Greetings, HaQ readers! As you know by now, I tend to trip over my topics just in the course of ordinary life, and this week is no different. I was thinking about “sharing”. It’s one of those things we know from childhood, that we teach kids as they move out into the world of friends and siblings. I don’t have kids of my own to teach, but I am blessed with eight nieces and nephews in various sibling pairs. They are all incredible young people and I could play the doting aunty that I am and do a bit of – ahem – over-sharing here. However, I will not. (I heard that.)

I will tell just one story: Gorgeous Niece #3 (who is now a freshman in college) was a little over two years old when she gained a little brother and the opportunity to “share”. She realized quickly that this was not always fun, but that it was a two-way street. Thereafter, if you were doing something interesting – like eating candy – she would come and park her adorable self in  your lap, then cock her head and hold out a hand and say “Shaaaaaare?” Who could resist?

As kids we often need to be prodded to share the goodies – candy, or a seat, or a toy. We learn as we get older that with sharing comes connection. It is sweet. As adults, we think we get better at it and, in many ways, we are. We easily share a bag of chips, or half a candy bar, or a bench. We hand around a plate of cookies without even thinking about it. We donate time and money, we give material goods, we offer expertise and advice. I know you have shared much.

But tell me, my dear readers – do you share the best of yourselves? Do you share what is dearest to you and who you are? Do you have a show of your paintings, or plan a reading of your latest screenplay? Do you take your beautiful handmade jewelry to a local shop and say “Would you be interested?” Have you shared with those close to you? Or even with the world? That can be a little harder. And when you do it, it is a little scary. I have been there. Continue reading →

You know the saying, right? “Plus ça change, plus c’est le meme chose” The more things change, the more they are the same. Change is part of what happens every day. It’s part of life. It’s built in. It’s gonna happen. That doesn’t always mean we like it. It very often means we don’t like it.

Take this very platform, for instance. When I loaded up my site to begin typing, I discovered the host had changed the editing page without warning. Everything is still there – but I had to hunt for it, and it’s in a different place and it’s not as easy to just do what I want to do. This engendered some grumbling.

I grumbled. And then I wondered why it annoyed me so much.

Part of it is habit. I’ve done things largely the same way for the better part of a year, and now, suddenly, it’s different. And there’s no way to change it back. It’s as if someone came in and rearranged my office. “Here – we’ve messed with your head. Now deal with it.” That feels like an intrusion, like it’s insulting and not fair, and how dare they! (Imagine awful pouty face here…)

But then – it’s not my software. I just use it regularly. And I suppose there was some reason for the change, even though I can’t see it. What feels bad is that I had no warning of it, no choice about what appeared on my screen, and no instructions about where to find the tools I needed. I just had to click around a while.

And that’s what really gets me – it changes, and I have no choice, and there’s no help figuring it out. AND then I have to spend time and energy re-learning what I already learned once, to continue doing what I just wanted to DO. It’s disconcerting and sometimes infuriating.

When software changes without warning or explanation, we don’t always have the time to adjust our practice to do what needed to be done. It’s as if your hammer suddenly morphed into an electric screwdriver and you have no idea how to use it for the purpose you intend. I wish tech people would recognize this. It’s no big deal to them, because they know what’s coming. It’s hard on end users, because we have no clue why the change was needed, let alone that they worked on this for six months and have ten reasons for everything that changed. To us, it’s just one more unprovoked attack on our time, energy, and attention. We get a little testy…

And then – because it’s what we do – we get another cup of coffee and sit down and figure it out and get on with the day. Because my dogs do not wait for software, and I don’t have time to worry about why some coding ninja stole my sharing panel. I’ll get it done anyway I can and sort out the sorry-a** shapeshifting menus on my website another time.

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Stay tuned for more on the Here’s a Quarter blog next week! As always, your thoughts and comments are always welcome – they are moderated (I know – adulting again), so they may take a little while to appear, but I read them all and appreciate that you were here. Thank you!

Greetings, HaQ readers. I hope this day finds you in a good spot. It’s Sunday morning here and this is how Sunday mornings go in the heresaquarter quarters:

The younger cat wakes me at an hour I don’t recognize because I can’t even read the phone. I stumble out to the front, carrying the older cat because she was asleep on my legs and is annoyed. Appeasement is required. I put her down, let the dogs out because they’re now bouncing around. The clock I can finally read starts with a number below 5. Eeesh. I go into the kitchen, give the cats a little bit of food, then let the dogs back in, and flop on the living room couch. I wake up two hours later, when it is genuinely morning, with the small dog burrowed next to me, the younger cat asleep on my lap, and the other two splayed across the multitude of dog beds I seem to have accumulated. We’re all in a much better mood.

I feed all the fur people, dole out a few extras as needed, and then decide I am due for a little extra myself. I get out a box of lovely scone mix I stashed in the pantry and go to work. I crumble butter into the dry ingredients while the oven heats. I stir in the milk and egg, get my fingers sticky portioning the scones onto a baking sheet lined with parchment, and get them in the oven. While they bake I wash up the bowl and tools and then make myself a pressed pot of fresh ground coffee (Sumatra – dark and smoky). The scones and the coffee come out at about the same time. I inhale the lovely warm scents and begin to fully revive. Sunday is on deck.

I pour of cup of my caffeine redeemer and layer some butter to melt over the top of a warm scone. I carry it all into the office and (with the coffee carefully corralled AWAY from the keyboard) I read the morning news while warm buttery crumbles of cranberry orange goodness restore me. The small dog jumps into my lap and then snuggles in behind me, her favorite spot, where she naps and slowly pushes me out of my own chair.

There is other stuff that will happen today. The errands and the laundry. My floors need attention because everyone else around here seems to be preparing for the Olympic shedding trials. I will need to do some preparation for the work week. The dogs will get a nice walk once the afternoon sun is high enough for the chill to moderate. For the moment, the last taste of scone, a sip of good coffee, and a cheerful phone chat with my mom is enough to start the day in a sweet spot. And that is sweet enough.

Hope your day is sweet, however you start it.

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You’ve probably noticed that my pets play a huge part in my life – Truth! They are such a great part of my real life, I can’t imagine life without them. And they are pretty prominent in my life of imagination, too: there are critters in nearly all of my writing: essays, fiction, even poetry. Here’s the secret I’ve been harboring: I have just completed a collection of short stories, every single one of which features at least one fur-hero. Publication details will come soon. I can’t wait to share it with you. ♥

Stay tuned for more on the Here’s a Quarter blog next week! As always, your thoughts and comments are always welcome – they are moderated (I know – adulting again), so they may take a little while to appear, but I read them all and appreciate that you were here. Thank you!

Some days just go by too fast to even think. Work, the house, the housework, the shopping, the doing, the running – it all takes time, energy, and attention until you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel just to find enough energy to put food in your mouth so you have energy to do the next thing. Been there.

Sometimes when that happens you just need to STOP. I mean – really – cut that out. You have a better place in this world than flat-out crazed and exhausted. If you are way beyond overloaded, the world won’t end if you just throw a small load of essentials in the wash and take a nap. And if there’s someone else in your world complaining about that – well, said person can either operate the washer themselves or find something else to chat about. After you wake up.

For the other times, when you aren’t completely exhausted, but you are fed up, RIGHT TO THERE… (Yeah – been there. Often enough that I’ve been asked to pay rent.) Like when you’re stomping around the house because you got cut off in traffic, and then your coffee spilled, and the cap came off a pen in the bottom of your favorite canvas bag, and you got one more email from that one co-worker who has the combination to EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. of your buttons… In other words: AAACCKKK!!!

Yeah – that.

Well, the antidote to that is this:

I dare you not to melt.

It doesn’t matter what I’m doing, how crazy things are, how mad I was – the sight of my sweet, contented fur-kids slays it all. My pets ground me and call up every bit of love in my heart. The crazy just disappears. Relief and blessing, all in one.

What is it that calls up love for you? It might be family, or a special group of friends, or the flowers nodding in your garden, or a beautifully hand-crafted gift made just for you. There’s a touchstone that says, “There is enough. It is perfect, right here, right now. This is love.” There is. It is.

That one sweet, perfect moment can be enough to fuel the rest of my day.

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Stay tuned for more on the Here’s a Quarter blog next week! As always, your thoughts and comments are always welcome – they are moderated (I know – adulting again), so they may take a little while to appear, but I read them all and appreciate that you were here. Thank you!

Greetings, dear readers. Here we are, well into the new year, working our way through the last month or so of winter, and – well, lets be honest – neither one is new and shiny anymore. When I lived where snow was more frequent, late February was about the time when the drifts started to look stale, grey, and icy, when the puddles got colder, uglier, and muckier, and slush became a four-letter word. (I know – I’m sorry, I shouldn’t remind you.) In late winter, it can feel like spring is still too far away, the news is all about things you wish weren’t happening, “stuff” is just piling up, and you’re not going to get a break any time soon. ACK!

When too many things are going wrong, when nothing feels right and you’re on the brink of exploding or giving up. Don’t do that. Try doing this: Stop. Breathe. JOUST.

Wait – do what??

JOUST – Just One Unabashedly Simple Thing

Do one thing. Be in that moment. Let it have all of your attention. Let it be the only thing, alive, through you. Revel in it. Then feel better and move on.

My one thing is a walk with the dogs. It doesn’t matter what time of day, whether it’s sunny or windy, or what the day has been like up to that point. I just put on my shoes, pick up the leashes, and get myself out the door (and try to keep them from knocking me over in the process – the little one earned the nickname Pogo Shark because when she gets excited she will jump as high as she can and nip at whatever’s within reach.) Shoes. Leash. Door. That simple.

We’re out there for twenty or thirty minutes, they have a blast, and I get reminded that there’s almost nothing so miserable that it can’t be tempered by the joy my dogs get out of just walking with me in the everyday world.

They are my blessing. I hope you find one, too.

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I’ve lived with cats and dogs almost my whole life and I am so grateful for the love and joy they bring. Inspired by my sweet companions, I have an exciting new project to tell you about in the next few weeks – stay tuned!

Look for more on the Here’s a Quarter blog next week! As always, your thoughts and comments are always welcome – they are moderated (I know – adulting again), so they may take a little while to appear, but I read them all and appreciate that you were here. Thank you!

Here’s another of my odd confessions: I have a little black and purple dictator on my wrist. Almost exactly a year ago, after waffling about it for a while, I got my first activity tracker. Hello, daily step goals. Hello, this is why an adult woman is jogging in place in the bedroom just before midnight with a small dog giving me the “What the…” look. I love the thing. It gives me nudges, it gives me reminders, and it gives me several daily targets.

That’s a human thing, isn’t it? Give us a target – we wanna hit it. This is why we like to-do lists, archery, and football. Wait – whaaat? To-do lists? Yup. Nothing but a list of targets. Hit ’em all, win the prize, even (or especially) if  that prize is just ten minutes on the couch with a book and a piece of chocolate. We love reaching goals.

If you set a genuine goal and make it – it feels really good. You finished that paper, washed all the dishes, hit your step count without having to jog around scaring the cats. Even if goal was just getting the trash out to the curb for pick up – it was a goal and you met it and that comes with a nice slice of satisfaction. (In case this feels like a rather low bar – the “curb” my trash goes to is down at the end of the street. Getting it there requires hauling one bag at a time down the driveway and over about 300 feet of gravel road while managing the leash for the small dog who insists on coming.)

And – if hitting goals is good – what’s EVEN better is exceeding them. Going beyond. Bigger, faster, better. Stretching your legs, your abilities, your goals. If it was something you wanted to get done, and you did it more and better than before – how cool is that? If
you were in such wonderful flow with the work that you weren’t even aware you were exceeding your goal, and then… there you were! AWE. SOME. If you were very aware, and you just decided to go for it, because it was meaningful, and you wanted it and you made it – totally awesome. I get such a kick out of it when my wrist band starts boogieing and I look down to discover I’ve already hit my steps for the day, or doubled the stairs, and I was just doing my thing – teaching my classes or walking the dogs or whatever. Hitting the goal is a good feeling. Exceeding the goal is a great feeling. Especially if that goal is meaningful to you. And it’s kind of fun if it comes with a vibrated high-five from the minder strapped to your wrist.

What goals are you going for today?

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I will admit, dear readers, that the blog was a stretch goal for me this week – I love writing it, I’m so grateful that you read it, and some weeks (as you may have noticed), it takes me a while to get there. But we’re here, so high-five to us! And we’ll do it again next week, I promise – because, after 9 months, it’s still my goal. ♥

Stay tuned for more on the Here’s a Quarter blog next week! As always, your thoughts and comments are always welcome – they are moderated (I know – adulting again), so they may take a little while to appear, but I read them all and appreciate that you were here. Thank you!

Greetings, HaQ readers! I have a confession: It’s funny how things go. I had a handful of different topics picked out that I might choose for today – and then something completely different presented itself and … here I am. Keeping up. Sometimes just barely with my own run-away thoughts, but keeping up nonetheless.

We’re six weeks into the new year, resolutions are looking a little dog-eared, and Valentine’s Day – that day of dedication and declaration – is right around the corner. What with time passing and obligations mounting, you may have an occasion for thinking “Oh <find appropriate word here>” “Smithers” would work. Or some such.

There’s a lot of “oh <sumthin’>” going around. Time just seems to get slippery when you have a lot to do. Those of us who teach are well into the spring semester. Students are turning in work (or not), there is always work to evaluate and return; there is always prep work and reading to do. (And I’m not even mentioning the other academic work there is to do…) It can all really pile up. Since taking on twice the usual number of students in one of my classes, I have writing samples to evaluate every week. If I let them get backed up, I would end up with a paralyzing guilt pile of work, and the students wouldn’t have the information they need to keep their projects moving. That is not a place I want to end up. To keep up I designated one morning each week just for that class and I do my marking then – and it’s done. No backlog, no guilt, no trying to squeeze it around other stuff already planned. Done. I know – some of you are thinking “DUH! This is not rocket science.” But it took me a while to get here.

It’s the same at home. Keeping up is keeping me sane. I’m in two book discussion groups – I made myself a schedule, taking into account the page count and the amount of time I had to read. It sounds goofy, but it helps me stay on track and be prepared. I use the same principle for shopping. I shop from a list and I start the new list practically when I get home from the previous shopping trip, because I know – that bag of dry dog food will last another 10 days. It goes on the list now so that when we hit bottom a week from Tuesday, I already have a new bag. (In my house we do not run out of pet food, toilet paper, or coffee – anything else we can deal with.) And – after repeatedly losing track of my paper lists (or forgetting them)  – I use a list app on my phone, so I always have the list with me. Life is too short to spend 30 minutes on the weekend looking for a scribbled piece of paper.

This morning I found myself looking into the sweet crumbly face of my very last homemade granola bar.  Oh dear. BUT – since I already the ingredients, I made a fresh batch and I will be set for another couple weeks. While they baked, I washed all the dishes. No mess and no fuss. I can’t tell you how much of a difference it makes.

When I have the everyday stuff in hand, not only does it mean my home-work and my professional work are done, I have time for other wonderful things. Like a long, lovely walk with those happy well-fed pups.  See you next week, dear readers – I hear the jingle of the leashes!

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Stay tuned for more on the Here’s a Quarter blog next week! As always, your thoughts and comments are always welcome – they are moderated (I know – adulting again), so they may take a little while to appear, but I read them all and appreciate that you were here. Thank you!

 

Greetings, HaQ readers! Here’s the odd bit that’s on my mind today – hands. Specifically, how many words and phrases we use about “hands”: hands in, hands on, hand up, handmade, handiwork, all hands… the list goes on.

I’ve been thinking about it a lot because, as the world moves on and things change, I find there are some things I want for myself that I have to get my hands into. It usually starts with food things. I like to cook (OK – and eat), so I like good products and food that doesn’t make the grade is a little offensive, especially if it’s deliberate.  For example, the granola bars I mentioned a couple weeks ago – my favorite brand changed their recipe and the result is chalky and disappointing. (Seriously. Dudes. What the heck? How did THAT get you anywhere you wanted to go?) I thought, “I can do better than that.” And I did. The homemade ones take a little effort, but the recipe made enough to last several weeks and they are much more satisfying. I can do that. And what’s more – to have food that doesn’t taste like a cheap substitute for the real thing – I’m willing to.

Really, I was raised to do that. I learned to cook, to sew, and to change a tire. We grew vegetables and picked wild berries, eating some, preserving the rest. I remember the year my parents had so many hard small green tomatoes at the end of the season that they pickled them. They were delicious. I know the reason they did that was to feed the family – it takes a lot to raise a pack of growing kids. Somehow, the fact that it was all made by hand, with love, made it special. It’s even more special now.  Continue reading →