The Blog: Spellbound by our own imperfect lives...

Blech is one of those moods that descend on me from time to time. It came out of nowhere and will go back to the same place eventually, but it wreaks havoc while it hangs around. A nap didn't help. I don't feel like doing the dishes or cleaning up the pile of paper in my office. I refuse to go outside. Shut up with your pithy little platitudes about gratitude, I just want to wallow in my misery. Not a Third World problem as my friend Sharon says. I'm listening to Last Chance for a Thousand Years by Dwight Yoakam, my classic album of despair. Sometimes writing about it reveals it for the big bag of stupid that it is. Not today. I'm reading this and thinking, boy do I have some shit to complain about. It makes me laugh for a minute, then I go right back to my hangdog look. Don't call 911 to tell them your friend is an emotional train wreck. By the time they got here, I would probably have on my coin skirt and be belly dancing to Swing Bop. It ca...

My worry and frustration and wickedness of disposition reached a peak yesterday. You probably would not have know had you been with me all week as most of this goes on in my head. I almost cried once when I was tired and I did cry when I heard some old friends are moving away, but it was just a few tears, not a whole blarney-stone sized crazy wailing and flailing session. I booked a trip (I think that's what people who travel a lot say...) to Phoenix in February. I am a nervous traveler and this will take some major meditation mojo to manage this anxiety. I have so far, managed everything. Read the schedules, bought the tickets, scheduled the transit. Ta da! Elliot has been here since Friday when I picked him up at school. His cousins came for dinner and to play until bedtime. We went to the library, to River Rock, and to open swimming in the afternoon. Last night we had a most delicious chicken pot pie and a caramel apple pie from the Cheese and Pie Monger Shop in town...

Entry Pageviews another post Nov 28, 2010 3322 http://www.teresasaum.com/2010/11/blog-post.html Nov 16, 2010, 1 comment 1866 medical and a busy week Mar 2, 2014, 1 comment 1005 Oh, Betty Aug 17, 2007, 2 comments 948 2000th post Aug 30, 2013, 1 comment 876 I love looking at my blog stats. It cracks me up that some of these silly posts get so many views. I wonder how it happens. With one of these, maybe the first one, there is a Gary Larson cartoon involved so when someone does a search for the floating head of death, my blog pops up. But that doesn't explain oh, betty which is a great story and my friend should be tickled that so many people have read it. We're both famous. I get a charge out of these stats but something in me resists counting and keeping track of other things. Regis bought me an Up24 but it makes me crazy so I don't use it. He likes to know how many hours of deep and light sleep he has a night but I don...

The gym where Regis and I work out recently added a new studio. One of the features is a touch-screen kiosk with a variety of workouts that are shown on a big screen. I am usually the only one in an early morning class which proved to be a very good thing today. I was tired of yoga and core work and weights so I chose a Vibe session called Old School Dance Party. Yeah, I'm 62 so I'm thinking old school will mean music from the 60's give or take a decade. I was way off. This very fit and hip dude with bones of rubber led me though a series of what I would call hip urban dancing. Here is what he looked like: I could do the really simple ones but I was lost plenty and sometimes I would burst into raucous laughter at the thought of what it must look like. Retired school teacher of Norwegian descent tries hip hop dance moves. It was hilarious and so much fun. I'm going to do it again and try to learn some of those cool moves. Haha! I finished my fox cowl last ...

I have six coffee and lunch dates on my calendar this week. Regis doesn't know how I manage and I admit, it is tough. I try to get jobs, really I do. Well, sometimes I do. Mostly I don't. Woody shares my attitude about work. We would much rather take a leisurely stroll though the day, then snuggle into a big, red comforter late in the afternoon.  We should all be more like cats. I am making good progress on my fox cowl. I am about halfway done with the hood part and then on to the ears and the crocheting which may be more challenging as the only crochet I have done is to make a mile-long chain. Mom, do you know how to crochet? I worked at my volunteer job this week which mostly consists of sitting in the sun, visiting, answering the phone a time or two, and posting on social media. You can see I have a life to be envied. Make a snow angel today!

If you see Regis on the street, tell him you'd like to spend the night in our yurt where there is no heat, no running water, no indoor plumbing and the rats and mice are free to come and go. We don't really have one but I woke up dreaming about it and thought it would be a funny prank. Wahaha! I crack myself up sometimes.

I vowed at the beginning of this winter I was not going to complain about the weather and the dark so much. I have been doing fairly well at that...and in trying to embrace the cold and gray. This is not my favorite kind of winter, however. Too much of the same. I want a blizzard, I want some action, I want 4 feet of snow and a bright blue sky. On Saturday when I was coming home from Mankato at 4:45, I saw the sun! The actual round yellow thing in the sky! And it was bright enough to cast shadows at almost 5 o'clock! Regis and I went to the grocery store and at 5:30 there was still enough light that you could see. It was not pitch dark. Oh, what a relief. The sun will come back some day! I've been awake since 3:30 am. I was doing pretty well at not napping and sleeping better at night but the influenza kicked the legs out from under that table. (I almost said the d word that means short person.) I slept and slept for two weeks and now I need to get back in the habit of bein...

This is a great story. All the way home, I thought about how to tell it. I picked Elliot up at 10 in the morning. We were going to make a day of it. We went to a yarn shop and I told him if he was patient and helpful, we would go to the new bakery down the street. I'm not sure he has ever been in a real bakery (not the grocery store kind) but he was game. He knew they had cookies in the bakery and he is a big fan of cookies. We bought our yarn (for the fox cowl!) and went to the bakery. I had coffee and he had juice and a cookie. I bought buns for dinner. We still had plenty of time before we met April and Zoey so we headed to Target. We found some things and went to the check-out. I dug wildly through my purse but could not find my credit card wallet. I apologized, tried a hidden card but it was expired. I left our things and we went back to the car where I was sure it would be. Nope. Back into the store for a frantic search of shelves where we had been. Nope. Back to the car...

We had a spectacular winter storm yesterday. I was lucky that it was a day I was at the Nicollet County Historical Museum so I witnessed the storm from the beautiful front windows that face west. It was a fast-moving storm so we went from heavy snow to no snow to 40 mph winds to no wind to no visibility and back and forth most of the afternoon. At one point the sky cleared but there was bank of dark clouds to the south west. It looked like Armageddon. Nature is so powerful and so beautiful and so frightening sometimes. I worked two days at my volunteer job where it was chilly but fun. I'm finally getting the social media plan in shape, in my head at least. The first time I posted on Facebook, I had the date wrong. I admitted to Alyssa that anything to do with numbers sets off a commotion in my head. I am going to write up the posts prior to posting and have someone double check dates and numbers. Gads. I have been trying to embrace the beauty in winter and in darkness ra...

It's morning but the sun won't be up until almost 8 so it feels like it's still night.  I left for belly dancing a little after five last night and it had been dark for an hour. That means we had almost 8 hours of sunlight and most of that was gray and hazy. The temperature barely got above zero and it was windy. Now, raise your hand if you want to come and live here! I read Ian Frazier's book about his trek across Siberia. He wanted to interview the folks who lived up near the Arctic Circle but the further north he went, the drunker they were. They trucked vodka in kegs in on snow mobiles. At the furthest point north, he couldn't meet them in public places because they were too drunk, he had to go to their homes. I bring this up because I think it's a reasonable and prudent thing to consider how the weather and your surroundings affect your mood. Not saying this is true for everyone. A few years ago, I realized that winter was becoming difficult for...

There are many lessons I keep learning. Most are more profound than this one but it seems this is a simple thing, something that should be easily remembered. So, why do I keep buying false eyelashes? I bought the first ones during my cancer treatment when my eyelashes, eyebrows, and hair all fell out. I was comfortable with the bald head but there is something alarming about a totally bald head. I was in Walgreen's one day and boom, there they were. How hard could this be? I came home and tried and tried. Nothing I did kept them from looking like a pair of hairy centipedes resting on my eyeballs. I watched a Youtube video and thought I had it. Nope. I couldn't get those suckers on straight. I read about how they caused terrible eye infections so I threw those in the trash. Probably ten pair. In the trash. But then I kept being intrigued by them on other people. I wanted those long fluttery eyelashes instead of the skimpy pale ones I have now but I have lost interest in ...

Some very weird things have happened to me in the past few days. First, this morning as I put Christmas junk away...or started to do that by piling things on the table, Woody because curious and started wandering among the ornaments and baskets. He batted my new cardinal to the fool and broke his tail feathers off. I had to get out the super strength glue to repair him and ended up gluing my finger to the bird body but having no impact on the broken piece. I had to rip him off my finger. Ouch. Then Ella and I went to lunch for her birthday to a restaurant where tator tot hotdish was on the menu. This is a staple in Minnesota but not one likely to be found in a restaurant. So as much out of curiosity as anything, I ordered it. It was so odd looking that we stared. It was a soupy bunch of ground meat on the bottom with barely a green bean to be seen, about a dozen tots on top, and the whole business was covered with cheese. Not good. Not good at all. We did have a good laugh over it,...

It's probably a good thing that we don't realize the significance of a new year starting. If, in fact, it is. I read this morning that this construct of January 1st being New Year's Day is not a heavenly creation but a man-made one to fit...probably the calendar industry. Ha! I haven't been out much in the past week so I have robbed photos from previous years. This hasn't been an especially attractive winter anyway. It's been mostly brown...and some gray. I prefer this kind of winter: Which, of course, comes with some of it's own problems. I think this was the year we bought a snow rake and raked 20 inches of snow off the roof of the house. If you don't think that's hard while standing in snow up to your butt, I've got a story for you. This was a much lovelier winter. Lots of snow and bright blue skies. In the picture on the right, I was making a snow angel on the patio to send to our friends at KMSU. It was the winter of snow a...