Month: August 2006

It should arrive in 3-5 days. Rejoice!

I volunteered to put together the newsletter for Edda’s school. It has been more than 4 years since I used my computer for anything more demanding than surfing the web and wasting time. I’m such a luddite. (How could I possibly be an engineer? If I had my way, we would still be watching black and white TVs with TV dinners baked in the oven.)

Of course, the school has been very nice and not setting any sort of deadline, but I have a personal deadline of this Friday, I’m not sure if I can make it.

I spoke with the previous layout person who somehow managed to put the newsletter together (beautifully!) between chemotherapy treatments. Hmmm.. And I thought I my hands were full.

I have cooked week day dinner for three consecutive weeks. During the weekends, Mom cooks. She washes dishes during week days and I wash dishes during week ends.

Besides, cutting my finger on the first day and burning my finger on the second, so far so good. Well, right now, I still don’t have the overall pictures on cooking. Like, time, amounts, flavors, intensity of the heat, what kind of sequencing that it requires?, etc. But, I believe I will familiar myself on that, hopefully, pretty soon. After that, I think then I can follow recipes more closely. The only recipe I am using right now is “better ingredients, better food [pizza]” by Papa Johns. It works. It can gloss over a lot of my in-experience on cooking. And Mom is gracious enough to finish her portions of my cooking and has never complained.

On our 36th wedding anniversary, Mom said it was more practical to buy this pot of shrubs than to buy a dozen of gorgeous roses. I did just that and it turns into a pot of lovely flowers. Just look.That evening, we went to a restaurant to have dinner together around 5:30 PM. It was pretty early for dinner. Anyway, there was a couple sitting right next to us and celebrating their anniversary too. They have married for, oh just 53 years. Time really flies.

There are many things I did not know about becoming a parent when I became a mother 4.5 years ago. One of the things I didn’t know about was how much I would learn from the little goobers.

Vince is teaching me about becoming more social and not to take things too seriously when it comes to hanging out with other folks. I watch him on the playground and I see him fearlessly go up to kids and say hi and then try and corral them into playing with him. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t and either way is OK with him. He’s teaching me that you just have to try and hang out with people, you never know who will be your next friend.

Edda is teaching me that everyday that I am alive and well is a gift. She is teaching me that no one can predict the future – so each day you need to do what you think is important and good.

My two children are teaching me that I must not take for granted the people that are around me – they are what make my world interesting and meaningful. I have made an effort this week to make dates – going to the zoo, hanging out and having coffee, having a playdate – with people I’ve known and people I’m getting to know and people I don’t know very well at all. You never know who is going to be your next friend or if a friend that you’ve known for a long time will move far away sometime soon and you won’t be able to see them for a long time. I’m trying not to procrastinate or be too busy (or too lazy) for these things.

So it’s been an interesting couple of days. I walked into the shop today, after not being there for 3 weeks, and I found this letter here waiting for me. Who writes letters these days?!! It’s pretty cool actually. I’ve never had someone mail a letter commending me on my salesmanship. I was helping this girl out the week before I left. We must have gone thru 3 bikes. She didn’t quite want the girlie pastel pink or pastel blue bikes.

Too bad, I’m thinking about sending a reply – after all she seemed cool and was kinda cute – but seems like too much a business thing, and it’s a bit shady for me to cross that line.

  

Today we walked around the hot, hot zoo with J. and R., the kids of one of Jeremy’s coworkers. Did I say it was hot? It was hot.

In the afternoon, Vince had his 2nd swim lesson.

I was proud of my forward progress in knitting until I saw this mistake. Grrr…

I try and make Thursday “Vince” days. It is one of the few afternoons during the week that we don’t have therapy scheduled for Edda and we aren’t trucking all over town. For two weeks in a row, I’ve invited a friend over and for one reason or another, we’ve had to cancel. I feel pretty bad, but Vince takes it all in stride.

Tonight, Jeremy’s company had a party at our condo. Four of Jeremy’s coworkers live where we live and one of them decided to have a catered party and invite 30 coworkers over to the function room. At the beginning of the party, Edda was starving and was screaming her head off, so she and Jeremy retreated to our apt while Vince worked the room.

I’m at home. it’s 6am.. sigh… 🙂