Chronological Order!!! Darn it!!!

I feel like I'm living out one of my anxiety dreams right now. Not the one where I'm falling off a cliff and I wake up jumping in the bed. And not the one where I'm back in high school in class and suddenly realize I'm naked. And not the one, and I'm the only person I'm aware of that has this recurring dream, that I'm trying to drive my car from the back seat. I usually have a car full of kids, I can miraculously but barely reach the pedals and steering wheel and I'm terrified that I will crash because I have little to no control. Nope, not that one either. It's the one where everyone around me can run, and there's an urgent need to run, but I can't move my legs. I don't know why I can't move my legs right now.

I have this thing about chronological order. I've always been very good with it, it's kind of my calling. I have chronicled the past 20 years of my life in scrapbooks using chronological order.  If you took one of my fat scrapbooks (labeled by the year, of course) off the shelves in my living room, you would learn exactly what our family was up to that year in January first of all, then February, then there would be our Spring Break trip in March....and so on. All of them end in December. Pictures, journals, brochures, tickets, memorabilia, the works! I'm very proud of them.

But all of that organizational energy is gone from me right now. I want to pull up pictures of our fabulous trip we took in the jeep to Colorado this summer and put it on my blog. But it was months ago now. And I can't think of a good reason to bring it up now. And it would take too much thinking and that just isn't my strong suit lately. I can only manage to blog about what takes the least amount of concentration.

So one of these days, in a burst of creative energy, I'm going to pull that vacation up from out of nowhere and blog about it. And it will be WAY out of chronological order, and that will bother me. You all think I'm random thought person, but I'm not. My random thoughts have order to them!

For now, though......I don't know. I didn't even do Christmas cards for the first time in some 20 years, and I'm a little ashamed of that. It's a funk, I guess. And I'm attempting to get out of it. I have surgery to remove gallstones this week, and I'm sort of looking at that as a point to start getting back on track with everything. Here's hoping! 









 

Being "Mom"

My older girl has a class ring now. It's so cool. Not all the kids get one anymore, I was really glad that she wanted one. Traditional things like that really tug at my heart strings, which is why I'm posting about it.

When she was about 4 years old, I thought "There is no way she is ever going to get any cuter, I am really going to miss this when it's gone."

She used to sleep with us every night and I wondered if that would ever end. She pronounced her name "Taynin Owine Tookavich" She wore the Snow White costume every night until it was worn out, and then replaced it with a Little Mermaid costume that she did the same with. I could carry her on my hip until she was 8!

And I do look back fondly at those days, but I kind of found myself enjoying every stage of her growing up pretty much the same. No, actually, I didn't enjoy the 14 year old so much, I would be lying if I said I did. But you know what I mean, I just threw myself into what was going on at the time and never had time to miss the 4 year old Kalyn.

And now she'll be 16 in January. She has a car. And a driver's license, with restrictions, but she drives to her two part time jobs. And she runs Cross Country and is in Journalism. And she has teenage friends and they do teenage things, and I wait up for her on weekends. And I am so much cooler with it all than I ever thought I would be!

Of course I do have an 8 year old, too, (whom I can not carry on my hip!) and I'm sure that softens watching Kalyn grow up. Alina did a birthday party and a hay ride this weekend, and she has a Girl Scout meeting coming up. These are activities of the past for Kalyn, that I still get to be involved with. I still have plenty of Mom time ahead of me!

I never had a clear idea when I was growing up of what I wanted to be when I grew up, save for one thing: I knew I wanted to be a Mom. So here I am, right in the middle of it all.

And I'm taking a moment to be grateful to be here.

Counting Turtles on the Railroad Tracks

15 dead ones, 3 that Troy was able to save. Somehow they crawl under the rails, where there is a hole in the rocks surrounding them big enough for a turtle to crawl through, and are unable to climb back over the rails to get out. Before they starve, I guess. After you see a few it's kind of sad. Troy felt good to be able to save a few. But we weren't out to save the turtles. We were out to hike the rails for the weekend. Backpacks for overnight, building a fire and camping under the trestles. For real!

Troy has been wanting to do this for a while and was waiting for a good weather weekend. With one coming up and no other plans that couldn't be broken, I asked him on Wednesday what he thought about trying for this weekend. He was all for it, but needed to order a water purifier because packing bottles of water isn't feasible, and ours broke on a similar trip last year. (At a muddy lake, where we ended up boiling the mucky lake water to drink. ew.) So I express ordered one, but as of 3:30 Friday afternoon it hadn't been delivered. So I wasn't sure we were going to be able to go after all. Until the UPS guy showed up at 4:30 and it was a go!

Kalyn had plans for the weekend, and Alina always has places to stay, but I hadn't talked to them about what our plans were. I thought they might worry, think it was really weird. Turns out Alina just flat out didn't care and Kalyn didn't think a thing when we asked her to drive us to Arcadia with our gear and drop us off at the railroad tracks and wait for our call in a couple days to pick us up somewhere. They are used to our quirky ways.

So Kalyn dropped us off at the railroad tracks and we took off hiking. It was already evening, so we hiked, I'm guessing 3-4 miles when we came to an old trestle, 1926 carved in the concrete support, and decided to camp there. We gathered wood and dried grass and had a bit of a worry when Troy couldn't seem to get a fire going, but he worked it out, like always. And then we heard a train coming and I got pretty excited about experiencing it from below the trestle in the dark. And it was very cool! I remember saying "wow!". The trains go much faster than I expected out there, so it's pretty amazing to watch the cars just whiz by and feel the wind produced by the train, itself. The thunderous sound of the train on the rails above and the trembling ground beneath the trestle is intimidating and awesome. And the lights under the engines at night are eerie, as is the melancholy moan as the train races away. So we slept there in our sleeping bags, looking up at the stars and listening to tree frogs and also cows bawling after the trains barrel through. Excellent weather to be out there in the open.

 The next morning we used our new water purifier as we got water out the the creek. We think we were on Cox's Creek. We ate and took off hiking again. Another old trestle, beautiful weather and pretty scenery there in the country north of Arcadia. But we hit Garland around 10:30, which is kind of where we tentatively planned to end our trip. Of course we decided to continue on with the whole day ahead of us. So on we trekked.

Notes to selves:
Thicker soled, more substantial shoes would have been nice considering the loose rocks and unevenly spaced railroad ties we were hiking on.

Never leave on this kind of camping trip without your pan  with a handle to cook over the fire in. You will get burned without a handle. (ask Troy)

Troy's backpack is REALLY heavy. (that's more of a whine than a helpful note, though I could have probably carried some of those military ready to eat meals in my pack)

We stopped at one point to rest a bit and ended up taking naps right there on the rocks beside the tracks. We hiked a total of 18 miles, best as I can figure, before we finally found ourselves in Fort Scott, in the industrial park. We realized there wouldn't be any place to camp there, we were tired and it was late afternoon, and there were hotels very nearby. The first one we tried to check into had no vacancies (Pioneer Harvest Festival???) so we asked the desk clerk what else in town there was available. She said "Well, it just depends on what you're looking for." We thought it was amusing that she thought we looked at all picky. I had slept on jagged rocks earlier in the day!

We got a room in the hotel next to McDonalds, which was just fine. A shower felt really good. We walked across the street to eat at Long John Silvers and Troy says he felt really bad about feeding ourselves such greasy, fattening food after the day we spent walking. I didn't mind at all. Truthfully, I crawled into bed about 6:00 that evening and might as well have gone to sleep. We watched tv a little, but we were worn out! 

Kalyn picked us up the next morning with the same unflappable demeanor she had when she dropped us off. She calls these less than normal excursions of ours a mid-life crisis, but Troy explained to her that we have just been waiting for her to get old enough to drive so we could have someone to pick us up after our adventures!

                                           That's me with my backpack.

Autumn Comfort

The part of the world where I live, Kansas, has been dry, dry, crispy dry the past few months. But yesterday we were graced with a long, soul soothing, soaking rain. This afternoon I took off on a drive in the country by myself to check out nature's reaction. I think nature is satisfied today. Anyway, that's the vibe I get.

Summer Snippets (an exercise in alliteration) part 2

Dedicated Dad

Glowing Garden

True Blue Tasty

Playhouse Pals

Flashy Fireworks

Gazing Girls

Frolicking Friends

Jam-packed Jeep













Splendid Summer Morning Rides

Summer Snippets (an exercise in alliteration) part 1

Darling Dancers












Daring Divers

Airborn Amigos

Beautiful Bicyclist

Humorous Hula Hooping

Crazy Cousins

Easy Entertainment

Sweet Sisters

speechless

I just read my last post and felt like I had swallowed my heart. I told myself when school was out I would post pictures of mother's day fun and Alina's dance recital and I had forgotten about mentioning the tornadoes in the South. And how that doesn't happen here. Oh. How wrong I was.

I won't say I never knew it could happen, I remember an F5 tornado that hit Oklahoma City years ago and people saying, basement or not, with winds that powerful (over 200 mph!!) there is nothing you can do to save yourself in some situations.

We'd been having a lot of rain. Troy was miserable with allergies. A family friend was graduating high school in Girard and I was planning for the girls and I to go to her party at her house about 5:30. I went to Arcadia to get Alina from Grandma Helen's and when I got there Alina said "Did you just hear thunder?" I said, "I don't think there are predictions for thunder storms this evening, Alina."

We stopped at the Dollar General store on the way home and the lady working there was on break and outside smoking. She said to us "Is this humidity just killing you?" And I hadn't even noticed the humidity being unusually high. While we were in the store, that awful buzzing/ringing sound that the radio does for storm warnings was playing on the store radio. Alina reached over to me to stop and listen- strong storm about an hour to the west of us, moving about 60 mph, possibility of large hail and damaging winds. So I said "I guess we better get home."

By the time we got home, the tornado sirens were going off in Pittsburg, which made me mad. I had been listening to the radio and I knew the threat was more to the south and east of us by then than Pittsburg. So I wasn't going to take cover. I made dinner for Troy, who was too miserable to go to the graduation party with us, and waited for the worst of the storm to blow over us. It wasn't bad at all. I was hearing on the news that there was a tornado on the ground in Joplin and felt confident that it had moved out of our area. The girls and I took off for Girard.

I figure the tornado was doing it's devastation in Joplin as we were on our way to Girard. We were eating and laughing when Hank, who's family business owns a store in Joplin, received a call that their store sustained minimal damage but that others had been badly damaged. That's all I knew. We joked about it even. It wasn't until much later that evening, after returning home and then out to Helen's again with Troy, that Helen mentioned that St. John's hospital was badly damaged. I thought of my sister's good friend who works there and called Susan to see if she'd talked to her. She said she had, her friend was safe but that several people were not. I said "Oh, I was really hoping there were no fatalities." She hesitated, then said "Oh.........there are fatalities. Go home and look on the internet."

And then I came home and saw pictures on the internet. Un.Believable.

Today, almost one week later, the official death toll is 142 with 105 still unaccounted for. 

And again, I am shocked and saddened.

D'oh! Missed an April post by mere hours!

Good bloggers update frequently, good bloggers update frequently, good bloggers update frequently.... discipline does not come easy to me.

First of all today, I am totally shocked and saddened by the devastation storms have had in the South over the past few weeks. We prepare for tornadoes in Kansas, we have regular drills at school, warnings happen frequently in the Spring and sirens go off and we all know what to do. We have basements or shelters or know where the closest ones are....and we have ALL used them. When big tornadoes come through, and they have, we experience great devastation but minimal loss of life. A couple fatalities, maybe. I can't believe hundreds of lives have been lost in these recent storms. It doesn't seem right.

Though it is the first day of May, it is not a pretty day here. I want to plant my flowers today, but might not. But look at some of the beauty Spring has brought to our yard this year:







Easter day was also not a pretty day. Here we have egg hunts outside regardless.



Oh look! They're all in one basket. No, I thought our eggs were pretty this year. I mixed some of our own dye with food coloring.




And we hunt them even when we're 15 and think an Easter basket is a decent rain hat.


Simple baskets- chocolate and jelly beans. I'm eating some of the sour patch jelly beans as I type this.



Okay. I'm probably not going to accomplish much more than this today. I brought paperwork home from school to do, but have no motivation to do it. And I need to do some work in Troy's office and was going to go up when he goes in to do some work, but I bet that doesn't happen either because he's more difficult to motivate in yucky weather than I am.

Here's hoping for more sunshine and happiness this week.