Summer continues to be manageable around here. I started out using a notebook to write down what we did each day, but then I realized I wouldn’t end up saving that notebook or wanting to look at it again. I ALREADY keep a family journal, in which I write down anecdotes, milestones, and descriptions of the children’s terrible behavior so we can get the story straight when they’re grown and remembering their childhood as unjust; I’m putting our summer days in there instead.

At first I was a little agitated about this because I had a couple of weeks’ worth written in my summer journal and with the new system none of that was in the regular journal and if I copied it in NOW it would be OUT OF ORDER, but if I DIDN’T copy it then there’d be NO RECORD OF MY EXCELLENT EFFORT—and then I just wrote a sentence in my regular journal saying what I was doing, and then I copied things over in a few minutes while the kids were in karate and I was bored anyway. Now I’ll have it the way I want it, and my future self is not going to care about things being a little messy in the journal for a page or two. My future self is going to say, “Oh, good, I’m glad you did that, because this way it’s all HERE for my argument with the Grown Children about whether it’s true we ‘never did anything fun in summer’.”

The summer notebook will still be useful: I’m going to tear out the few pages where I wrote daily activities, and use the rest of the notebook for a continuation of the Things We Might Want To Do This Summer list. I was already planning to save THAT, because that’ll be a good way to accumulate ideas we might otherwise forget about from year to year. Plus, it’ll show the kids how THEIR list corresponded to what we DID DO.

In the meantime, the kids have added several more summer requests of the kind I find fun to grant:

1. They want to try Lucky Charms
2. They want to have Pop-Tarts

It seems to me that the phrase “fly like a bird” has been fully, FULLY used and that there is no sense using it for any further purposes. It’s a little like saying “meow like a cat.” I suppose a person might write a song in which they wish to express their feelings of flying like a helicopter, or flying like a thrown baseball, but I think if they don’t clarify it we’ll all just ASSUME more of a bird-like flight and there’s no need to specify.

I do think the phrase could be revived if songwriters/poets/etc. started specifying the TYPE of bird, especially if it were a bird with a pretty-sounding name. “Fly like a sparrow.” “Fly like a nightingale.” (Perhaps not “Fly like a flamingo.”)

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We are getting back into our Webkinz craze around here. It happened, I think, because after a year the Webkinz account shifts from Bought-a-Pet Mode to Free Mode: you still have some limited features of the account (and you don’t lose the online version of your pet), but it’s frustrating to keep encountering things you can’t do. Elizabeth and I each have several pets, and each pet adds a year to the account (I THINK/HOPE they run consecutively rather than overlapping, though I haven’t looked into it), but Edward and Henry only had one pet each so their accounts got bumped down to Free Mode. I like to buy some Fun Summer Stuff anyway, so I had each of them choose a new Webkinz, with the general guideline that it should be in the $6-or-less category. Edward chose the Lil’Kinz Persian cat and Henry chose the Silversoft cat.

Well, and then it seemed a little unfair that Elizabeth wouldn’t get a new one, considering the reason HER account hadn’t expired is that she’d asked for a Webkinz for Christmas and also saved up for one with her allowance. So I let her choose one too, and she chose a whale, and now she has TWO whales and is all happy and excited and dressing her online whales in virtual top hats and so forth, and having new pets has reignited ALL of us.

Awhile ago I read a book that made me want to try a liquor called Tyrconnell. The book is Traveling Sprinkler by Nicholson Baker, and the narrator’s girlfriend describes how each sip of the drink tastes. I should be doing a block quote for the description, but I jotted down the sip descriptions at the library without thinking of that, so none of this is my wording and yet it’s not an exact quote either. That is, the descriptions are exactly quoted (including punctuation), but there was material in between: it wasn’t just a list like I’ve done it. Let’s block-quote it anyway, to make it clear it’s not mine:

First sip: primeval forest
Second sip: slate patio
Third sip: patio furniture with slippery steps down to the garden
Fourth sip: meat, meat with heavy, dark green vegetable matter on an earthenware plate
Fifth sip: swallowing the platter
Sixth sip: recovery, bisque-colored envelopes

Well. You can see why I had to investigate further. This is like that Willy Wonka three-course-dinner gum. Except with things we don’t eat. (Except the meat and vegetable matter.)

I looked tentatively at our liquor store, but didn’t see the Tyrconnell. On the other hand, I wasn’t sure what section to look in or what the bottle looked like, and that made me unsure my search could be called thorough. I knew it was a whiskey, but whiskey is confusing to me (it was only recently I learned that scotch and bourbon and rye are also whiskey, and that whisky and whiskey can be different; plus there’s all this stuff about how many malts and what kind of cask), and there are several sections for it. And I couldn’t remember/pronounce the name, but I kept going to the liquor store without writing it down, and I was too embarrassed to ask if they had it. “It starts with a T and I think it ends in an -ell, and it tastes like slate patios?”

Finally I remembered to write it down, and then I did find it. It’s a single-malt Irish whiskey. It comes in a lovely, lovely cylinder-shaped box:

(photo from tyrconnellwhiskey.com)

The box made me REALLY WANT to love the liquor itself, so that I could make it my Signature Drink and always have one of those boxes around. Very successful packaging. I have to think of something to use the empty box for, when it’s empty.

This is not a CHEAP liquor, I will warn you. I found it on a good sale, but STILL. Definitely most of the cost had to be chalked up to a concept I learned from my mom, which is Experiment/Experience Cost. That is, if you want to try something, and it costs money, and the only reasonable way to find out if you like it is to buy it, and you pay the money and don’t like the thing, the money isn’t WASTED: it’s not so much the cost of the THING as the cost of INVESTIGATION. Generally my mom and I apply this concept as a comfort, after something has been purchased but has failed to please; however, it can also be applied ahead of time, for emboldening purposes. (I have also found it helpful to “split up” the cost by letting other people try it if possible, or to make a blog post out of it ahem.)

Here’s how Tyrconnell describes their own product:

(screenshot from tyrconnellwhiskey.com)

No mention of patios, envelopes, or platters, but this sounds interesting too. Honey hanging from the nose! Oily sweetness!

So. Here I am; it is Friday night; I have a glass of Tyrconnell before me. The smell of it is….discouraging. The color is indeed golden yellow, as described. I am going to take a sip. Here we go.

First sip. Predicted to be: “primeval forest.” Actual taste: ACK WHAT DID I PUT INTO MY MOUTH, THIS IS NOT TO EAT. Oh, okay, that’s better now. Pleasant warmth in the throat. No taste of trees, fruit, citrus, honey, spice, or oily sweetness. Just whiskey.

Second sip. Predicted to be: “slate patio.” Actual taste: *shudder* That was even worse than the first sip. But I think I detected a little honey flavor that time. A repeat of the pleasant throat-warmth. No slate. No patio.

Third sip. Predicted to be: “patio furniture with slippery steps down to the garden.” Actual taste: Do I have to? Okay, fine. Boy, that is a WHISKEY taste, huh? There was a slight sweetness as I took the sip, and I guess now that someone mentions it I do think it was a little oily, though I think if I were the marketer I would have selected a different word. Throat now has a pleasant slight tingly sensation in addition to the warmth. Nose also feeling slightly tingly; perhaps that is the feeling of honey hanging from it? No furniture. No steps, though perhaps “slippery” can go with the “oily.” No garden.

Fourth sip. Predicted to be: “meat, meat with heavy, dark green vegetable matter on an earthenware plate.” Actual taste: Okay, I don’t much mind taking another! Same as before: some detectable sweetness, and I’d be willing to go with “honey” on that. No citrus or spices or fruit. No meat. No spinach. No earthenware plate.

Fifth sip. Predicted to be: “swallowing the platter.” (This makes me wonder if Sip Four was supposed to be food on an earthenware platter instead of plate. It’s possible I have inadvertently slightly misquoted.) Actual taste: Whiskey. Just basically whiskey. Warmth in throat; no sensation of platter-swallowing. Mouth is starting to feel a little numb in addition to feeling kind of icky and bitter. I would not want to breathe near anyone right now, nor would I want to breathe near an open flame.

Sixth sip. Predicted to be: “recovery, bisque-colored envelopes.” I assume this means it tastes like recovery AND bisque-colored envelopes. Actual taste: Oh, cool, I accidentally poured exactly six sips! Of whiskey. It tastes like whiskey. For me, recovery tastes less like whiskey and more like chicken caeser salad wraps and waffles and chocolate chip cookies, or else chicken noodle soup and saltines and tea, depending on what I’m recovering from. No flavor of bisque-colored envelopes, though my fingers are getting tingly if that’s the same thing. I looked up bisque to see what color it might be, and apparently it’s the color I’d call manilla.

Seventh sip. Oh, no thank you! I’m good! Let’s instead figure out what to use the pretty cylindrical box for.

I have such exciting news! You’ll never guess! Except that you already saw the post title!

Elizabeth and I were away at an all-day activity and I got a text from Paul saying he had found my lost wedding ring. He was trying to figure out why our bathroom sink was draining so slowly, and as part of this process he got the bucket out of the bathroom closet. He noticed after he removed the bucket from the closet how many bandaid wrappers and fallen q-tips were on the floor behind it, so he was scooping those up (this is proof that although you shouldn’t EXPECT people to change, they sometimes DO) and he noticed that something in the scoop was heavy and clanky instead of light and soft, and he looked down and IT WAS MY RING.

This is EXACTLY the kind of place I’d hoped/feared it would be: somewhere in the vast expanse of our house (nothing makes a house seem enormous like looking for something that takes up significantly less than a cubic inch of it), somewhere I’d only find it by going over the whole house carefully (and maybe not even then), somewhere I might not find it for YEARS if EVER. I mean, the floor of the bathroom closet? My HEIRS might have found it there, when they hired a cleaning company to get the house ready for sale.

And yet I can easily see how it got there: I would have dried my hands on the towel, and the ring would have been softly scraped off my finger. I wouldn’t have heard it fall, because William always kicks his clothes into that closet (it’s a doorless closet) when he takes a shower and then forgets to bring them to his laundry. When I nagged him about the clothes and he finally moved them, he wouldn’t have noticed/cared if picking up his clothes led to a clanking sound on the floor.

I’m SO GLAD to have it back. I hadn’t given up ALL hope, but most. I’d been pre-fretting that my plan of going back on a Significant Anniversary (20? 25?) trip (air travel would need to be involved) to the shop where we got it would fail because the proprietors would retire before then or something.

Well! So now, clearly, I need to get it re-sized. (It needs to be embiggened: at the time I lost it I was wearing it on my pinky finger after struggling mightily and at length to remove it from my ring finger.) When I lost the ring, I thought “WHY didn’t I get it RE-SIZED when I had the chance, when that would have been so EASY and WORTH IT???” Now that I have it back, I’ve RUSHED IMMEDIATELY to…put it in my jewelry box so I won’t lose it while I wait for myself to get around to having it re-sized.

Part of the issue is the usual Procrastination, plus Nervousness About Things I’ve Never Done Before At Places I’ve Never Been To. Right now there’s also the issue of kids home for the summer, though when I was despairing over the loss of the ring that would have seemed like nothing, NOTHING, who CARES if I had to bring children?

Another part of the issue is that I very much like the ring Paul made for me as a replacement. First he made one out of brass, which initially looked very much like gold but then quickly looked yellow-brown and dull. So then he bought a chunk of stainless steel and made the ring out of that and I think it looks GREAT. I can’t tell the difference between stainless steel and a more expensive metal, so it’s been fun trying out what it would have looked like if we’d gone with sterling silver or white gold instead of yellow gold. Also, the ring he made me is narrower than the rings we chose, and I’m enjoying the more delicate look. I DO want my wider gold ring back, I DON’T want to replace it with a narrower white gold band or anything, but what I mean is that I don’t feel the same urgency about it that I felt when I was wearing no ring, or a cheap Target fashion ring, or the brass ring that was leaving a greenish stain on my finger.

When I am flailing around in despair at how much power other people have to affect my life, one of the worst parts is realizing how little I can do about it. I can…hold up a protest sign? I guess? Or come up with a REALLY SCATHING remark to post on Twitter! Or I suppose I could acquire a skill that would be useful in the fight, then devote my life to an organization working on the situation that is currently upsetting me—though then what about all the OTHER situations that upset me?

So as I say, one of the worst parts is realizing that practically speaking, there is very little I personally can do to change anything. The United States is a republic (“and to the republic for which it stands”), not a democracy, and the individual vote is as important as when M&Ms was choosing a new color and wanted customer input before they (THEY, not the people they asked to vote) made the decision.

And this is where Spite Charity comes in, except in this case I guess I’d call it Comfort Charity, or Feeling Like I CAN Change Things Charity. I may not want to quit my life to work on one cause, but I can send money to the people who are doing that very thing. It may be crap that the work has to be done, but I can donate to a cause that’s doing it. Supporting the people who ARE in a position to change things is an important way to help change things.

I am going to make it through this summer more cheerfully than last summer, and I’m going to tell you how I plan to do it.

Firstly and most importantly, I’m going into this with the memory of last summer. And one of the worst things about last summer was that I went into it thinking it was going to be GOOD: I’d signed the youngest and most difficult child up for all-day camp, and signed the others up for lots of other fun stuff, and I thought it was going to be GOOD and FUN. And then it was just crazy-awful, and I spent so much of the day in a hot car driving children to/from activities, and every morning I had to write out a minute-by-minute schedule just to remember everything and/or figure out how it was going to work, and I hated my whole life and everyone in it. THIS summer I’m going into it with that dread, which means it is BOUND to feel like it’s going very well indeed.

And the kids ARE older every year, and it helps to look at it from that perspective. I was remembering the summers where I had to use a double stroller for the twins. Urrrrrrrrrrrg. Or what about the summer where I had to use the double stroller for one twin plus Henry, and hold the hand of a walking toddler? URRRRRRRRRRG. And I had to bring DIAPERS with me everywhere! And couldn’t supervise them all in the water because so many of them couldn’t swim! No, it is much much better now, and we can do actual fun things, and they can all get into their own swimsuits and put on their own seatbelts, and there are no swim diapers, and they can get themselves to and from the pool bathroom, and none of them eat sand or run out into parking lots, and really it is all much better.

Another of the Worst Parts of last summer was that I kept trying to write posts and I’d get SO FRUSTRATED with the kids. It reminded me of housecleaning, where cleaning the house and/or trying to keep it clean makes me dislike my children. But while keeping the house clean is toward the bottom of my priority list so I don’t mind dropping it for The Greater Good, writing posts is near the TOP of my priority list and I don’t WANT to drop it—and yet it’s hard to do any post-writing with distractions, and it’s not fair to the kids to keep hollering at them to be QUIET, so how to DO it?

What I’m trying is this. I get up at my usual school-day time, which is 5:10. (This also keeps me on the same sleep schedule as Paul, since he still has to get up every day for work.) After I’ve showered and dressed, I make a cup of tea (have I mentioned coffee is giving me a very unpleasant mood recently? it is extremely sad and annoying), I go to the computer, and I WRITE POSTS. I don’t check email, even though it beckons me; I don’t check Facebook or my saved searches on eBay or the daily Children’s Place one-day-only sale—those are things I can manage with the children roiling around me, so I save those for later. I JUST write posts. When the first child gets up, I stop—and part of the reason I don’t mind stopping is that I think “Oh, good: once I help him with his breakfast I get to check email!” So far this has been terrific: I usually have a quiet house for about an hour, which is enough to get quite a bit done. (This would also work if my priority were housecleaning, or exercising, or reading, or gardening, or crafts, or sewing, or studying for a class, or playing Sims, or watching Sports Night—anything that has a version quiet enough not to wake the children.)

ALSO, after lunch, on days where we’re not doing something else right after lunch, I have all five kids go to separate areas of the house (separate from me and separate from each other) for an hour of Quiet. During that time, I’ve been working on my Big Tedious-but-Satisfying Project, which is going through every single one of the posts from before I switched to WordPress and changing all the links and photos so they live on THIS site instead of on the OLD site. We’ve only tried this hour of quiet a few times so far, but it seems to work well for the kids, too: they don’t think they like it, but they seem refreshed and calm when it’s over. I might reduce it from an hour to 45 minutes: half an hour was too short, but right at the 45/50-minute mark is when they start popping out saying they just need to go to the bathroom, or asking how many minutes are left.

Another thing we did was have a Summer Household Meeting on the first day of vacation, where I told the kids that all this was going to happen, and how I expected it to cut down on the hollering. I also had them tell me all the things they wanted to do this summer, and we made a list. That yielded some interesting things, such as that Edward doesn’t want to go to the pool more than once or twice a week, and that Rob is still interested in a visit to one of those places with giant inflated structures to play on. Also, all of us think of ice cream and popsicles as a priority.

I find it very motivating to write things down and to make a lasting record of my righteousness, so I wrote that list in a notebook I took from the pile of notebooks I can’t resist when I find them on clearance and then am so pleased to have for just this sort of need, and then I skipped a page and started a record of each day. It is very pleasing to me to see the little list of all the summery things we did on a particular day:

June 25, 2014
——————–
Tennis lessons – Rob and Edward
Playground during lessons – William and Elizabeth and Henry
Pool – all
Ice cream cones at home – all

I include anything that feels summery or that we did because it was summer, even things like “BLTs for lunch.” It makes me think things such as “What summery things will we do today?” instead of “How will we get through this relentless summer?”

I’m also using the notebook to write down ideas for managing summer, such as the one about writing in the morning.

Because all these things are in one notebook, and because I’m opening the notebook every day to record what an active and involved and long-suffering mother I am being, I find it helps keep me focused on what I WANT for the summer, which is for it to be Good and Fun rather than A Torment. As I flip past the list the kids made, I glance at it and I think “I wonder how many of these we can get to?,” which is a motivating way to think. As I flip past the days I’ve already filled out, I think, “Oh, yes, ice cream cones! We should do that again soon! And maybe we can go to that ice cream place.”

Another thing I did was to break the summer down into pieces, using various cutting methods. This is what I did to help manage the miseries of pregnancy, too: sometimes it feels better to think of it in trimester-long chunks; sometimes it feels better to think of months (with subcategories for “calendar months” and “months that start/end on the same day of the month as the due date”); sometimes it feels better to think of weeks; sometimes it feels better to think of it in sets of ten weeks; sometimes it helps to cross off each day; and so on. I figured out that summer vacation is 47 days this year: that’s just the weekdays when I’m home with the kids, not the weekends which will be pretty much the same as during the school year. I also figured out that it’s 9.5 weeks. And our town’s recreation department does most of their lessons in 2-week sessions, so summer is also four 2-week sessions plus a 1.5-week time of no lessons available.

This helps to focus my planning, too. If I want to take them on an outing that’s going to take all day, I can first look at the 2-week chunks to see if any of them are ruled out because of, say, a 1:00 tennis lesson. Then as we approach one of the weeks that doesn’t have any mid-day plans, I can start looking at the week’s weather.

Also, each day when I write down what we did that day, I include which Day it is: Day 3, Day 5, etc. Right now that’s a little depressing, but it changes my mindset so I think of the days as A Limited Number of Opportunities to Do Fun Stuff, as well as letting me see that they ARE passing by.

One mistake I made last year was to sign up for a lot of stuff that was pretty much every day, such as swimming lessons. I’d thought that would give our days some structure, and also give us a nice automatic daily dose of Summer Activity. But not only did it instead contribute to the Relentless Summer feeling, it also made it very difficult to do anything that would take all day, or anything that happened to meet at the same time as the lessons. The daily-lessons plan worked way better when the kids were littler and I wasn’t planning to do much else ANYWAY: having a daily lesson meant I was at least leaving the house every day and that was good for morale, and also the daily pool water meant fewer baths. This summer I’m signing up for only 2-week sessions at a time; if the kids LOVE the activity and want to keep doing it, then I will CONSIDER another 2-week chunk. But mostly I am thinking like this: “This is the 2-week chunk when we’re doing tennis lessons; next session, we won’t have anything scheduled in a daily way so that’s when we should consider doing the hike and the day-trip to a lake. The session after that is the 2-week chunk when we’ll do swimming lessons.” And so on.

I’m also doing an idea I’m pretty sure I got from Stimey, which is to post a list of the things the kids need to do before they can play computer games. This solved one of my problems, which was “How are we going to remember the morning tooth-brushing without the school routine to remind us?” With this method, I could put it on the list and now it’s getting done AND keeping them in the habit. It’s also good for the chronic problem of the kids leaving their laundry in little abandoned heaps wherever they happened to get dressed that day: I added “Put laundry in the laundry” (they find this phrasing funny and say it repeatedly until I get a headache) to the list.

Several of the kids wanted to do playdates this summer, and I think we’ve talked here before about how much I dislike playdates. I love the concept of them and I think they can be SO GOOD for kids, but I don’t like hosting them and I don’t like letting someone else host them, and I don’t like arranging them. So. This summer I’m trying to keep my wits about me, because one of my favorite ways to do a playdate is to say “We’re going to be at the park from 10:00-11:00 today!” and see if other people want to MEET us there. And then even if it doesn’t work out, I get credit for making friendly contact.

And finally, I’m trying to do MORE stuff toward the BEGINNING of summer. Last year I’d thought I should save some fun things for the end, but then I found when we got to the last month I was very unmotivated to do anything at all: I was worn out by then, and sick of everything, and it seemed like a waste of time to do Fun! Summer! Things! when school was so close. If we get to the end and still feel like playing, we can REdo some things.

This morning I am a bundle of minor irritations. I will share them with you:

1. One of the little nose-pieces broke off of my favorite glasses. In rummaging around for another pair of glasses to wear, I found that my OTHER favorite pair of glasses had the SAME nose-piece broken off, and apparently I never got around to fixing them. The nose-pieces are the kind that SCREW on, and I only have the kind that SNAP on.

2. Then I discovered that now that I’ve become accustomed to these two pairs of glasses (both are thin black metal half-rim frames), I no longer like the way I look in colorful frames. I am wearing glasses I don’t even like, and I think they’re my previous prescription because I’m feeling a little headachey. Plus, the earpiece keeps snagging and pulling my hair.

3. I don’t like summer clothes. I don’t like shorts or capris. I don’t like pants made out of lightweight material. I don’t like sleeveless shirts. I don’t like sandals AT ALL: I hate the dry, dusty feeling of them, and I keep tripping on them and/or stubbing my toes on things. I can see how people love all these items, but my whole body feels uncomfortable and wrong in them.

4. I don’t like sunscreen. It’s messy. It’s a pain to put on. It stings my eyes even when it says it won’t. It gets in my hair. I’m supposed to apply MORE of it every HOUR. I hate it.

5. The air-conditioning in the minivan is at best a little bit cool. It takes FOREVER to cool down a large, hot car, especially when only two windows really open (the way-back ones open an inch or so, but that doesn’t really help). When the minvan is hot and the children are bickering, I feel like this whole parenting idea was a giant mistake.

6. It’s still only June.

7. We put the swimming towels outside to dry, and it rained.

8. An acquaintance I dislike recently said on the subject of 100% whole-wheat bread, “You might as well eat a candy bar.” My immediate reaction to this was NOT, as she intended, to be shamed/scorned into eating the way she thinks we all should, but instead to think “Excellent! I WILL, then! I’d PREFER to eat a candy bar anyway so, yay!, I’m so glad to hear they’re nutritionally equivalent/superior!”

9. I use a watch that has three alarms; I depend on them to help me get kids to and from the bus stop on time. In summer, I don’t need those alarms. EVERY YEAR I struggle to figure out how to turn them off. LAST year I wrote myself a note about how to do it. I STILL COULDN’T FIGURE IT OUT. Finally I gave it to Paul and he figured it out in less than 5 minutes.

10. The kids look so GRUBBY in summer, and cleaning them is so TEMPORARY and FUTILE.

I am VERY KEEN on the trend I keep hearing about, where various offices will have more and more online services available until we will all be able to make appointments online and so forth. That will be GREAT.

I am less keen on the steps our dentist and allergist have taken toward this goal: they’ve set up “online patient portals,” and now all their emails to us (appointment reminders and so forth) are posted online, and we get an email TELLING US that we have a new email online in our secure mailbox. So then I have to click through to the patient portal; then I have to remember my user name and password and sometimes the answer to a security question; then I have to click over to my inbox—and I open an email sent to all the patients, with the subject “Happy spring!” and then a general message about spring allergy season being here and how all patients should remember to request refills on allergy medication if needed. THIS IS NOT TOP-SECRET INFORMATION. THIS CAN SAFELY BE SENT THROUGH NON-PASSWORD-PROTECTED CHANNELS. WE ARE NOT EVEN PRESCRIBED ANY ALLERGY MEDICATION.

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I’ve noticed as I sign my kids up for summer programs that all of the programs have liability waivers: by signing on the line, I promise I will not hold the program or its employees liable for ANYTHING. ANYTHING AT ALL. Including, I see, any claims of negligence, even if they ARE negligent and it results in injury/death. With incredulity I see that the final item I agree to on this particular form is to PERSONALLY DEFEND THE ORGANIZATION (including compensating them for any damage or expense) if anyone ELSE tries to sue them on behalf of my child. Oh, yes, I can completely see myself standing up in court like Atticus Finch, delivering a scathing defense of the organization that hurt my child. That will definitely happen, and also I will write a check for the court fees on my way out, plus a few hundred thousand extra for their loss of reputation and hurt feelings. You can count on me, Youth Tennis Lesson Program.

I’d be surprised if that kind of liability was something I could in fact sign away. Like, you can ASK people to sign ANYTHING, and you can hope it’s enough to deter lawsuits, but that doesn’t mean it’s actually legally enforceable. I remember reading a long time ago that, for example, if a woman asks a guy-friend for a sperm donation and offers to sign away all her rights to his paternal responsibility, that’s not actually something she can sign away unless it goes through certain official channels; she can’t just write it up herself and sign her name. Still, I feel a little stupid every time I sign. “Sure, hurt my child on purpose! I agree my hands are tied and that nothing is ever your fault!”

There is an elderly man who walks a lot in our neighborhood; if we are outside at the same time, he will stop and talk. At first I thought he might be deaf, because it doesn’t seem to matter what my half of the conversation is; after repeated conversations, I’m pretty sure it’s not deafness—though he may ALSO be a bit hard of hearing. He tells me the same things again and again, and he can get at most two sentences into a topic before he trails off and seems to forget what he was saying. He calls out “I love you! I love all of you!” as he leaves. It’s sweet and upsetting.

One thing I’m wondering is what it FEELS like. He seems happy when we see him. He seems happily sentimental about seeing kids playing and people out biking/walking, and very pleased by the prettiness of the day. What do things feel like from his point of view? I remember reading a long time ago that the worst part of Alzheimer’s is when the person can feel something is wrong—but then the condition worsens-yet-improves when the person can no longer tell.

Well! That’s a discouraging potential future for us to contemplate first thing in the morning! “Good news: at some point you can’t TELL how bad you’ve gotten, so you feel MUCH BETTER!”

I also wonder a lot about what he was like before things went this way. For all I know he’s ALWAYS been like this, his whole life. When he tells us about his career, it could be imaginary. But my guess would be that no, this is something that descended on him late in life. It’s sad to think of his former self observing his current self. On the other hand, his current self seems very happy, and his former self ISN’T observing it. It’s hard to know HOW to feel, isn’t it!

I have three reasons to be thinking about this as much as I do:

1. One of the job possibilities in my future is something at the local nursing home. I’ve wondered if that’s something I’d even be good at, but I don’t think there’s a good way to know without trying it. (My plan is to do some volunteering there when the next school year starts up, to see.)

2. While thinking about those possibilities (the job and the volunteering), I realized that if I continue to live in this same town, I could VERY WELL end up living at that nursing home MYSELF. That was a very odd thought: picturing myself working there, and then perhaps retiring, and then perhaps returning.

3. Thinking about my parents, and the various possible paths of THEIR futures. If I think it’s hard to know how to feel about a guy in our neighborhood, I’ll bet there are TONS of mental treats ahead! I am attempting the very smart “Wait to see what happens so you can think about just THAT path rather than ALL THE PATHS” method, but I don’t find that method compatible with my factory settings.

Plus, I ALSO think it’s sensible to be aware of the possibilities, to avoid making an assumption without realizing it and then being SHOCKED when things don’t go that way. I noticed it had never occurred to me that the nursing home I frequently drive past could be MY PERSONAL NURSING HOME one day; that seems like a fairly big Awareness Gap. I don’t want to fret to the point of overfretfullness about things that might never even happen, but if it’s an interesting thing to think about and it helps keep us realistic and empathetic, the other method suddenly seems a bit “La la la, I’ll worry about it tomorrow!”

There. Factory settings rationalized.

It took me until now to realize that to avoid the frustration of the string pulling out of the staple of the teabag, I can pinch the staple as I pull the string.

Writing that sentence was not easy. It’s like that elementary school assignment where you have to write how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and then the teacher does exactly what you said and hilarity ensues. And if you don’t drink tea, or if you drink tea but you don’t use teabags, or if you don’t use the kind of teabag where the string has to be pulled out of a notch before it’s long enough to use, then you’ll be even more baffled. You will just have to trust me that this is one of those discoveries that is life-changing in a slightly sheepish way.

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The school has sent home the Next Year’s School Supplies list, which would be so extremely considerate if the list were accurate. I have pre-rage about it as I remember other years. One year we were very hard-up for money but I conscientiously bought every single item on the list; then when we brought it all in, the teacher said, “Oh, I don’t use those—I just have them use classroom supplies. I mean, if you want to donate it you can, but I have plenty.” So the next year I didn’t buy anything, and the teacher had her own list which she sent home the first day, completely different than the office’s list, and by then I’d missed all the school supply sales and in fact had quite a hard time even finding some of the things on the list. Another year, a teacher sent home a note on the first day asking parents to PLEASE (bold, double-underlined) not send in x, y, or z—all of which were items on the list the school had sent home. The teacher’s tone was aggrieved, as if she could NOT understand why parents kept INSISTING on sending in these TOTALLY UNNECESSARY ITEMS.

I think the problem is that the office staff makes the list based on a sort of classroom-average of what the teachers want. Some individual teachers then go by what the list says; most don’t. Some teachers use a system with a lot of folders, or a lot of binders, or a lot of notebooks; some teachers use individual white boards and need white-board markers; some teachers combine everyone’s supplies (this drives me crazy unless I know about it ahead of time) and some want everything down to the last pencil labeled so they’ll stay separate. I am just going to do what I do every year, which is to buy everything on the list during the summer when it’s available and on sale—and if that particular teacher doesn’t want those particular items and wants different items instead, I will breathe deeply and put the unwanted items aside for another year, and I will clench my teeth as I search store after store for the now-unavailable/full-price wanted items, and I will not have angry thoughts, because no one is TRYING to Do Wrong here.