Getting Ready
I've been too much on Facebook and people at my other computer haunts are starting to wonder where I am or if I'm okay. I'm sure I'm not the only person who is on Facebook too much, which is of course, the point.
If you have followed this blog at all you know that my son and daughter-in-law were here mid-June for a ten day visit. I hadn't seen them since my trip down South to go to their wedding, and that was three years ago. This made my brain center totally and completely around their visit from, oh, March until their departure.
I began the whole process with procrastination. I figured that if I procrastinated first, then I'd be more likely to actually get something done later. So there were two or three weeks of hard-core procrastination in April. It's hard work to procrastinate on a scale like that. I'd lie awake at night, planning how I'd take the kids to Denali, and Chena Hot Springs and the Hilltop Restaurant. Then I'd get in a couple hours of Farmville, watch Craig Ferguson, wonder at the stupidity of Poker After Dark (could anything on TV be more repugnant?), flip past Carson Daly quickly because he's not young and neither am I, then read a book until I fell asleep.
Procrastinating is hard work. It requires making lots of lists, losing them, and having to make them over again. Then you scribble out thirty percent of what was on the list, get disgusted with how messy it is, and make a new one, and the cycle continues. Until you have to go to work. Damn it, there it is, work impinging on my procrastination process!
Did I need to rearrange all the furniture? Would Bucky bird go nuts night and day with "strangers" in the house? (As it turned out, Bucky got so attached to my son he wouldn't let ME pet him for a week after my son left!) Would Sofia sleep under the futon while they were here and would they bust the futon and then would it smash her underneath? (Turns out Sofia only does that when I'm in the bed. While they were here she either slept on the floor near them or on my foam pad with me downstairs.) Did I have enough food? Should I cook that turkey in the freezer? Would we run out of money? Many ridiculous things ran through my head late at night!
Eventually I started doing some kind of clean-up thing every day, except for the days that I had planned on working on my house all day. You know, the days I had completely free. Of course on those days I'd find myself awfully tired and Farmville got new crops and a great load of llamas and I found out that EJ DiMera was a slimeball and that Hope and Beau were on the rocks.
Miraculously enough, I still got things done. The real things, not the freaked-out 2am ideas such as buying all new furniture. Believe it or not, I got everything ship-shape by the time my kids arrived mid-June. I even surprised myself!
We had great fun, and went to Chena Hot Springs and ever so much more. We had some minor emotional meltdowns, and they had mini-spats and then made up about five times a day. But it was fine because we were all ourselves, instead of trying to be something else. It's lumpy that way sometimes, but lots more real.
Cheechako Moments
After a few days my daughter-in-law sheepishly confided that she thought that if the sun was up for 23 hours that it would be dark night for that one hour it was down. Then we laughed and laughed!
The first day they were here, my son went outside to smoke a cigarette. I latch the door all the time, because it has a tendency to pop open and then the dogs would run away. So he went outside, I latched the door, turned to go back to the kitchen and BAM BAM BAM! "MOM! SOMEBODY!" he yelled, pounding on the door, panic in his voice, "Let me in! There's A HORNET out here!"
It's a good thing he didn't see the other 250 hornets out there, isn't it?
All Good Things
After I put them on their return flight I went home and cried for a while. It wasn't like there was a hole in my life, because after all, they are still there, still looking at the same moon we do. And we talk with the phone and on Skype. But it put my world in order again. For one thing, I must get either an RV or some sort of vehicle I can use to drive down there. Three years is too long.
