Tag: summer

Moving Anxiety Has Finally Set Up Camp in My Head

There is no way we’re going to be able to fit everything we own on a 27′ truck.  There is no way I can get everything packed in two weeks.  How the hell are we going to manage the whole move?  My mom shouldn’t drive 600 miles on her own because she has vertigo and isn’t supposed to drive much at all.  I can’t help her drive.  Philip will have to drive the truck.  Where will all the animals go?  Where will the kid go?  In the cab of a 27′ truck with his dad, his dog, and two cats?  Or with his vertiginous Grandma and her dog and her two cats?  Will Philip be flying up and then driving down with us or driving?  Also – Philip has two days only to move us.  So that’s one day to pack the truck which means I need someone to pick up the truck in the first place and bring it to our house and then I will need people to help us start loading it or it will be too much for Philip and I to do in one day.  What about my precious plants that must come with me?!

I’m in official moving freak-out mode.  Cause this whole thing is so impossible.  Moving up here was much easier – we paid a moving company to move us for the first (and only, I think) time in our lives.  It was fantastic!  It also cost a fortune.

Do I need to leave a bunch of furniture behind?  I’m already making a mental list of what I’m willing to let go of and what I’m deeply attached to.

-two days and mucho panic later-

I’m much calmer now.  We got a lot of packing done while Philip was here.  He’s headed back south today and won’t come back for two weeks when he’ll come back just to pack up the moving truck and drive us back home.  Last night I went through my desk and my files and wonder why I’ve let it all go for so long.  I love having my things organized and cleaned out.

Oh right.  That bitch, depression.

Anyway – I have rediscovered how cool my desk is.  Now I can’t wait to be set up in my new office.  I’m trying to focus on how great our new house is and not on how we’re going to get there.  I’m definitely enjoying how much less shit is coming down with us than came up with us.  The feeling of shedding belongings continues to refresh me in the midst of all my anxiety.

Max is out of school now too.  Summer is almost officially here.  Philip has a good new job he’s really excited about.  I have artichokes to eat from the garden.  There is fresh cool air rushing through my window which I’m grateful for after yesterday’s heat.  I’m lucky in my friends.  I have so many good friends looking out for me and rooting for me.  I still don’t like radishes.  The sight of my calendula blooming always makes me happy.

And now I have to catch up on my paid work and get back to packing and organizing and not freaking out.

The Weather Wars

Summer has hit me between the eyes.  I’m gross from all the sweating because I insist on still being mobile (if you sit super still, sometimes you don’t sweat as much in the heat).  The fans are running.  The hiding has begun.  The great big festival of discomfort also known as MY MOST HATED SEASON has opened up.

(Full disclosure: it hasn’t actually hit 90º yet.)

(Other full disclosure: I think it’s hot when it gets above 70º because I’m an arctic being)

I am sharing my complaints here on my blog because I’m trying really hard (only barely successfully) to refrain from complaining hatefully on Facebook about the warm weather and summer vacations and stupid things like al fresco picnics and basking on hot rocks.  I didn’t used to complain so bitterly until I got sick and tired of summer people infecting my every enjoyable winter day with endless complaints about the horrible cold weather, the wet dreary conditions, how cruel and bleak it all is and how damn much they wished the damn sun would fucking come the hell out already because they’re just so damn fucking tired of the cold wet hateful weather.

These rampant attitudes expressed en-mass during my favorite season have had a corrosive effect on me over time.  I have become increasingly less gracious about respecting other people’s favorite season which is my least favorite for ALL the same reasons.  Yes.  The SAME reasons.  Summer makes me depressed exactly the same way winter depresses so many of my friends.  Too much light makes me angry.  Too much warmth makes me uncomfortable physically with heat rashes, headaches, sunburns, nausea, passing out.  No lies with that list.  It’s 100% literal, right down to passing out from the heat.

(I know it’s hard to believe that a 245 lb woman with big bones and large feet can be such a delicate tissue of a human.  You just have to believe it.)

I decided, last summer, to tone down the angry hateful slurs against the majority’s favorite season/weather.  I decided to attempt to enjoy the fact that when the sun comes out everyone stops bitching and moaning and gets much happier.  There’s a benefit in that for me.  If the majority of the community of humans I associate with is happy and dreamy and joyful and full of love when the sun is beating down on them relentlessly:

  • They are easier to control so you can take over the world.
  • They’re nicer to you in general.
  • They are so enriched with sunscreen chemicals they don’t notice when you steal their food.
  • They’re much more likely to do you outrageous favors.
  • Or give you money.
  • Or babysit your kid (that’s a broad hint).

See what I mean?  If summer loving people applied this wisdom in winter, I’d be done for.  Luckily, they are too busy complaining to take full advantage of people like me who are blissing out in the rainy cold storms.  (And you all know who you are, my winter loving friends!  I salute you!  I also say- take heed to what I say here- it could be very useful!)

I am working on this reform.  Naturally I’m not perfect.  This “not complaining” thing is super hard.  I already let a grouchy comment or two slip and there’s only been about 8 totally uncomfortable days for me so far.  Clearly I must work harder.  My blog is exempt from this whole not complaining deal because very few people come here anyway, whereas 144 people might be adversely affected by my complaining on Facebook or alternately… 144 people could be potentially milked for all kinds of favors if only I charmed them with my magnanimity about this whole crapload of sunshine settling in the Western Hemisphere.

In an effort to remark on all the things I don’t hate about summer, nay, all the things I actively and actually ENJOY about summer, I will make a list here as a starting point:

  • Ice water never tastes so good as when your entire body is disintegrating in the heat.
  • Dinners out on the patio with friends and family after the sun is behind the house, making a nice big shadow.
  • The abundance of flowers everywhere.
  • The summer produce.  I’m waiting anxiously for my first summer tomato.  I wait many months for this pleasure.
  • Summer provides excuses for me to: not do anything, not do much, stay in a supine position, decline to socialize, get better acquainted with the inside of my house, flop onto the floor wherever I go with heat exhaustion.
  • Preserving food.  I love preserving food!
  • Picking food at farms to preserve.
  • The vastly amusing fashion show that is thrown by all the town’s people all summer long in the form of tank tops that accentuate triple boob action, ultra short shorts designed to show off both maximum amounts of plummer’s butt as well as butt cheeks, the teeny tiny skirts that show way way too much underwear, the ever popular wife beaters in all levels of cleanliness, the crazy shoes and sort-of shoes worn by ladies and gents alike.  Oh the local summer fashion is delicious!
  • The smell of barbecuing all over the land.  It’s the summer version of fireplace woodsmoke which I also love.
  • Riding my scooter through air heavy with the scent of ripe blackberries.

That’s it.  I’m tapped.

The honest truth is- I don’t actually truly hate summer and if I want winter haters to try and see the positive about the cold season beyond Christmas, I have to work harder at seeing the positive about the warm weather even though it brings me such discomfort.  I have to be willing to appreciate what I can in a difficult season for me because so many of my friends are so happy right now and maybe, just maybe, if I try to celebrate that WITH them, they’ll be more inclined to admit to good things about winter and celebrate it with me.

The First Day of Summer

First of all, because this is very very important, I want to say that I’m almost certain I lost a few grey cells to the heat of the first day of summer.  It was a WHOPPING 80º today.  (That isn’t the degree symbol, is it?  I can’t tell, my eyes are bleary from the waves of sunshine…)  So on the first official day of summer I got myself my official first sunburn.

I also bought, after some agonizing amounts of research, a new point & shoot camera.  I got the Canon S95.  I would like to observe that getting a new camera is like starting a new affair.  There is so much awkwardness in handling, fidgeting with the features, and learning its limitations (or my own).  Naturally the manual is very brief because they’ve supplied me with a disc to read.  I don’t like that.  I like paper manuals. I hope we’re going to fall in love.  Otherwise I might become bitter and leave it for a Nikon.

I’m working on a freelance project that has  been filling my head today as I prepared to get going on the first post.  I’m helping my friend Autumn build up some content on her corset blog.  Remember how I tried to get my own fashion blog going but then decided it I didn’t need 500 blogs to manage?  I still love design and especially historical design so I’m excited to write some posts for them.  I just posted the first one.  I didn’t do any actual writing for this one, just uploading, editing, and arranging.  However, I think you should go look at it because the customer being highlighted is a) gorgeous b) has brows so amazing I want to hate her and c) has on the most wonderful corset whose design was inspired by a photograph of a tea set.

Dark Garden customer highlight: Carla Gonzalez

Go on- who doesn’t want to look at gorgeous women in corsets?  Only dead people.  Or total prudes.  Or 85% of the people in my town.*  I am planning to do some posts on design influences and also some corset history because in case any of you still don’t know it, I happen to love historical undergarments and in one of my many fantasy lives I was a lingerie designer.  Autumn actually did it.  I stopped working with her because I planned to run away on a cruise to write cutting poetry while mopping decks and arranging pretty people on lounge chairs while secretly plotting how I might commit the perfect-

I ate two small avocados today.  That was like eating one giant one.  This makes me want to listen to my 78 record of the Andrews Sisters singing the Avocado Song.  I don’t have a 78 record player anymore though.  If you knew what else I ate you would understand how come I think I’ll just skip dinner.

I hope you all were out there turning into lobsters and roasted chestnuts in the hot sunshine since that’s what so many of you love to do.  (Except for those of you who are like me, and I know who you are, we will huddle in the shade and dream of snow machines together…)

Summer has begun.

 

*That is SO unfair of me to make up such a lie-ful number.  It’s really only the modest dressers in my town who don’t want to see gorgeous women in elaborate undergarments.  So let’s call it 76%.  And then if you subtract the ones who really do want to look at underwear on people with perfect eyebrows but who won’t admit it, we’re talking more like 13% of the people in my town.