Listening to the crickets.
My family has owned a small cottage on a lake for the past fifty years. Recently, the current inhabitant sprung for internet access, so it seemed like a good time to make a visit home. See the family, be able to go to class, and yet enjoy a small measure of disconnection due to the fact that there’s no cell signal up here and the phone can’t ring off the hook.
It’s been a wonderful four days. I’ve seen family that I haven’t seen in ages. I’ve spent quality time with my mom, with whom I shared my Ravelry and friends’ Talk to Me Tuesdays. I visited the cemetery, and planted some lavender asters in the urns for my grandmother and grand-aunt and some dusky red mums for my dad. I even got the balance of the work remaining on my incomplete from the summer finished and sent off to the professor.
I’m parked on the sofa now, with only the white Christmas lights on the loft railing glowing and the crickets singing outside to keep me company. My laundry is in the dryer, ensuring I’ll have clean clothes to wear on the airplane, and all I’ll have left to do is repack my bags as I can, and get some sleep .. not necessarily in that order.
With the outstanding work from this summer no longer hanging over my head, I could even play a little World of Warcraft this evening if I wanted. But I would rather read and summarize an article for tomorrow night’s Archives class, or work on the youth afghan I currently have on hook. And that, of all the blessings and gifts I’ve received this week, may quite possibly be the best one.
I logged in a little earlier to pass a few flasks of great fiery brimstone off to my BFF, who is raiding tonight. And as we were meeting up so that I could give them to him, the usual cacophony of whiners and attention-mongers in my guild started up, and I realized that I had absolutely no interest in wasting a moment more of my relaxing vacation on these people than I absolutely had to.
There are some people in our guild who are wonderful human beings in addition to competent, knowledgable players, and I am blessed beyond words to call a few of them in-person friends. And there are a bunch with whom I’m not interested in interacting in the least bit.
In World of Warcraft, as in real life, I suppose.
But I’m not wasting the last few calm hours of my time away thinking about them. Not when there’s the sweet song of crickets, and the glow of stars to be had.
Rays of light.:
The sun was falling behind the trees as we finished up our work with the fall plants at the cemetery.
WIP: small afghan.:
A small afghan, in progress for a young friend of mine recovering from a serious injury.
WIP: small afghan.:
A small afghan, in progress for a young friend of mine recovering from a serious injury.
WIP: small afghan.:
A small afghan, in progress for a young friend of mine recovering from a serious injury.
No longer settling for muddling.
I am having a bit of a struggle these days. I’m not working, so there seems no real reason not to stay up half the night, then sleep in until 10:45 .. lather, rinse, repeat.
Except I still have things I need to accomplish. I still have schoolwork. I still have housework. And it’s bugging the carp out of me that I can’t seem to get it done when I have absolutely nothing better to be doing. World of Warcraft .. has its fun moments, but more and more frequently those fun moments come when playing a level 50-sommat midrange toon, and less and less frequently when I’m raiding with my armed-to-the-teeth hunter. And I’m in a guild where if you’re not raiding, you’re nothing.
Blegh. I think it’s time to change up the rules a little bit.
NO PIE FOR YOU.
I woke up this morning with every intention of going to the store for apples, so that I could make my husband a pie. (Note how I assign ownership of this pie to him in some futile effort to convince myself that I’m not going to eat half - or more - of the damn thing.) I got up, got dressed, ate breakfast .. and peered out the window, to discover a large moving truck parked in our parking lot. Ramp down, with industrious movers walking up the ramp and coming back out with all of a new neighbor’s worldly possessions.
Blocking in just one car.
Mine.
Perhaps, I tell myself, they will finish up early, and I’ll be able to run out in a couple of hours for pie. If not, I can just make the pie tomorrow. It’s not as if I have ANY lack of things to take care of in the house - and schoolwork to catch up on before my new professors can assign me more.
Everything happens for a reason. I think the Universe is telling me that I have more important concerns than pie today.
Keep calm and carry on.
I have had an affinity for that iconic little piece of British propaganda from the moment I set eyes on it. I’ve got it on notecards, I’ve got it on a blank journal, I’ve got it on a lunch bag.
It didn’t occur to me until just today that I could get it on a blog, too. It seems to be a fitting mantra for the current state of my domestic life, and certainly more personally meaningful than anything else I could have called this thing.
