This is the sort of post where I have to combine “wanting to continue to discuss parenting issues, because it seems like parents of teenagers get left in sudden blog blackout after learning to depend on blogging for information/commiseration during the younger-kid years” with “knowing Rob could theoretically read this, even though I assume he won’t, since he and I agree on the topic of whether we want each other eavesdropping on conversations we have online with our friends.”

Here is the situation: Rob would like to go to the movies with a girl. He and the girl are both 15, close to 16. The girl is the daughter of one of my friends. This is an interesting situation.

It hadn’t occurred to me, when thinking ahead to parenting decisions I would need to make about my children and dating, that I wouldn’t necessarily KNOW if something was a date. “May Rob date at 15?” has to be the same as “May Rob go alone to the movies with a female friend at 15?”—because otherwise, ENORMOUS LOOPHOLE.

Furthermore, speaking of enormous, have you already noticed an enormous problem with that last sentence? It’s a holdover from the time period when OUR parents were setting OUR dating rules: the presumption of heterosexuality. Which meant that anyone in a same-sex relationship could have sleepovers with a girlfriend/boyfriend, go on dates with that boyfriend/girlfriend, share a college dorm room with that girlfriend/boyfriend—because the rules were only for OPPOSITE SEX relationships. By no means was this just my parents, or just Christian parents: this was ALL the parents. I mean, it couldn’t have been literally ALL of them: somewhere there must have been parents who thought of this issue and adjusted for it. But in all my growing-up years I never heard of a situation where, for example, a girl couldn’t be alone in her room with a girl, or couldn’t have a girl sleep over, or couldn’t go just the two of them to the movies. Trying to explain this to the kids (that it was presumed not in a “MY kid wouldn’t be gay!” way, but more like in a “We don’t need to make rules about who gets to have the next turn driving the flying car” way) makes me understand a little better why an older person might give up explaining something and just say “It was a different time.”

When I was a teenager, my parents avoided the “is this a boyfriend or a friend?” issue by saying I was not allowed to be alone in my room (or alone in the house, if no one else was home) with any boyfriend or boy friend. I found this extremely exasperating at the time, even though I saw/see how such rules come about. I didn’t/don’t like how it smacked of unfairly presumed sex, with sex clearly considered a negative event: “You can’t be alone with a boy, ANY boy, or the two of you will Get Up to No Good! That’s how TEENAGERS are!” I had lots of guy friends I wouldn’t have even CONSIDERED wanting to kiss, so having to tell them they couldn’t be in my house because my parents weren’t home felt icky, and as if I were also unfairly presuming THEIR intentions.

Well, but what to put in place instead? “You can’t be in your room with anyone?” “The door has to be open?” “You can’t be in the house with friends if there are no parents home?” “You can’t go anywhere with anyone?” No rules of that sort at all?

And age plays a role: surely the rules are different for a 15-year-old than for an 18-year-old. It’s less than three years until Rob is at college and can be alone with any consenting person; it seems like we need a plan that gradually eases him into taking responsibility for his own behavior, rather than a plan that draws a firm line and then shoves him over it all of a sudden.

But I shouldn’t get ahead of myself. This is not Rob asking to have his girlfriend sleep over: this is Rob asking for parental transportation to a movie with a girl whose current official status is friend. I went on my first date (non-friend) when I was fifteen; the guy’s dad had to drive us. I suppose we could have gotten into trouble if we’d been really determined (gone into the theater, waited for his dad to leave, run off, be back before the movie ended), but neither of us was at all that kind of kid at that age: we watched the movie, then went outside and found his dad. I’m inclined to let Rob go on this date/non-date, but it’s made me realize how few established rules we’ve set up. I’m afraid poor Rob is going to end up Firstborn Guinea Pig as usual (“Rule! …No, wait, that’s not working. New Rule!”), and the poor other kids will end up with the consequences of our experience. …Although, actually, it seems like we end up doing the new-rule thing anyway, since a policy that works for one kid often doesn’t fit the next kid—but at least we’ll have a policy to START from.

This is one of the cutest Kickstarter ideas I’ve seen: a little boy wants to teach kids about science.

Of course I backed it: I want a postcard.

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I started up again with my school volunteer job, and it is very pleasant to go back to something that is now familiar: I know where to go, I know what to do, I could do the whole thing on my own at this point if I needed to. I wish I could remember, when considering something new, that the ONLY WAY to get to this point is to PLOW THROUGH the part where it’s weird and unfamiliar and I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s the ONLY way! There’s no way to hop over that part by, say, being anxious and procrastinating and wishing I didn’t have to.

One of the other volunteers asked what was new since the last time we talked, and all I could think of to tell him is that I’m now ordering inhalers from Canada for my CAT. Cats use the same inhalers people use (with a special cat adapter that costs another $60), but without the same insurance people use, and the two inhalers he’s supposed to use cost THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS. But from Canada, they cost one hundred dollars. Two inhalers is considered a one-month supply, though I’m hoping we won’t actually be using them at that rate.

Perhaps a certain cat might consider a JOB?

A person might pause here to put a price on the life of a cat. A person might be tempted to do the math on how many children in other countries could be completely supported for an entire year, for the price of one year of cat inhalers. A person might calculate how many new, non-asthmatic cats could be purchased for the price of the inhalers. But there it is: we are going to pay for the cat inhalers. Thank you, Canada, for being so accommodating about this. I would understand if Canada were a little tempted to make sarcastic remarks about socialism during the ordering process, but no.

Are you interested, as I was, to find out how inhalers are administered to cats? Here is a video:

The other night I was doing laundry and noticed that one of our cats was sniffing at the front door (the one we never use) and he was alllll puffed up. I was not at all concerned, which means I called out to Paul in a voice that was working hard to sound unpanicked, and then I went rapidly down to the laundry room and thought about what weapons were at hand if Paul just, like, OPENED THE DOOR and then there was an intruder in our midst. (I was thinking the bleach spray would be pretty useful.)

Or a ghost! SCIENCE DOESN’T KNOW EVERYTHING.

Or a skunk: I thought it might be a skunk. Here is my Twitter haiku on that topic, from another recent situation:

I’d gone flying out the side door to pick up Rob from a friend’s house, and there was a sudden startled, reactive rustle from our yard, and it was a skunk. The skunk and I agreed to go our separate ways peaceably, but it was tense there for a minute. I wondered if maybe that skunk was still hanging around; I could understand a cat getting agitated about that.

The hope with a story like this is that it will come to a satisfying (and, ideally, interesting) conclusion: “So anyway it turned out it was a _______! I never would have thought!” Instead, what I have is a second, even more unsolved situation, which is that some time after the sniffing/puffing episode, our two cats started fighting, not in the irritated way housecats sometimes fight, but in the vicious scary way cats outside the window sometimes fight: yowls that were probably no louder than the ones outside but seemed much worse because of being inside, and full-on angry-cat-face hissing, and big puffed-up fur, and periodic outbreaks of violent activity that luckily didn’t seem to get TOO violent (no one bleeding), but bad enough that I wondered what we ought to be doing: separate them somehow? spritz them with water? Those were some awful yowls.

What I did was get out the extremely expensive spritz bottle of Feliway we bought a number of years ago at the vet’s recommendation when we were having some other kind of cat-aggression issue. It’s hard to even use something that’s made for cats but costs as much as perfume, but this seemed like exactly the moment to use it, and I spritzed some in the air above the cats, hoping the mist would settle around them like a tranquilizing cloud. (It reminded me of the perfume-application instructions from magazines: spritz some in the air and walk through it.) (Which, NO. I am not putting a Swistle-shaped hole through French perfume and allowing the rest of it to settle on the floor. EVERY MOLECULE IS EXPENSIVE.)

It DID seem to help a bit, though the situation remained uneasy for the next hour or so, and when we went to bed we wondered if we’d be awakened in the night by more hostilities. I also sprayed some Feliway on the door the cat had been sniffing. I have no idea if this stuff works at all (and this particular bottle is likely expired), but it made ME feel better to be DOING something.

This is the second episode we’ve had of this one cat seeming to FREAK OUT. The first time was after a dose of Advantage Multi a month or two ago: he yowled at nothing, puffed up, raced around, had an accident on the floor, didn’t sleep for a day, and the vet said, “Hm, yes, let’s not use that on him ever again.” This more recent time was PROBABLY because of some other cat outside, or perhaps a wild animal outside, but it was such an OVER-THE-TOP freak-out PLUS turning against his buddy, and makes me hope he’s not losing his little cat mind.

So this is what it has come to around here: Weird Cat stories.

Oh! In fact, I have another one. I took one of our cats to the vet the other day, and while we (the cat and I) were waiting our turn, a woman was at the desk paying for her appointment—at which she had discovered that her female cat was male. Her cat she’d had for ten years. I summoned enough nosy bravery to ask the vet tech about it after we were called in, and she said yeah, it can be very challenging to check a cat’s bathing suit parts, and it isn’t a common error for a shelter to make, so they (the veterinary practice) just go with what’s on the paperwork. But this cat had a urinary issue, so they checked—and found another, separate issue. The cat’s owner was quite riveted by this news, as was I. “My husband’s going to call to ask how the appointment went,” I heard her say, “and I’m going to say ‘Good, good…she had a sex change.'”

Last night I went with my dad to pick my mom up at the airport. There was a guy in the waiting area, probably about 30 years old. When my dad went off to ask a guard if we were in the right place, the guy said to me, “Are you picking someone up?,” and I said, in what I hoped was a polite, distracted, don’t-talk-to-me-anymore voice, “Yes, we are.” (For what other reason would we be in the arrivals area, I wonder?) But my tone was unsuccessful, because then he said, “Do I make you uncomfortable?”

On the way home, my parents and I were talking about all the possible reactions to this. The truthful one would have been: “Before you started talking to me: not even remotely uncomfortable. Since then: VERY uncomfortable.” What I actually did was shake my head no and then go back to looking at my dad in the distance, in what I hoped was a distracted, not-at-all-bothered-but-also-not-very-interested-in-this-conversation manner. He responded, “I could tell. I could tell by the way you came right over to me. Thank you.”

The guy then went on to interact with several other people waiting. My dad came back, and the guy said, “I don’t make HIM uncomfortable, either. I noticed. Thank you.” Then he indicated a man standing a little distance off and said, “HIM, though. I make him uncomfortable.” And so on. I reassured myself that my mace was still in my purse. We were glad to leave.

My mom and I agreed that we both wished we were the sorts of people who would think for a second before talking, rather than rushing to say something we’d later regret (such as saying something is fine when it isn’t). We wondered in this case, though, if it were even a good idea to speak frankly to someone who had already crossed a social boundary and might not have a good grasp on OTHER boundaries. That is, would it be okay to say to him, kindly and conversationally, “You weren’t making me uncomfortable, until you asked that question”? Or is that just the “thinking later about what I should have said” answer, and in real life could that potentially make the situation a lot more dangerous, or at least draw it out longer? The goal is to disengage and NOT talk to someone who makes us uncomfortable, rather than to evaluate and engage for his edification. Walking away silently is, I suppose, a possibility, but not one compatible with my temperament: I can picture talking frankly before I can picture walking away, or yelling “GUARD! GUARD!,” or saying “Please don’t talk to me,” or whatever. Plus, I want to be kind to people who are inappropriate for non-dangerous reasons they can’t help, such as mental disability.

My mom and dad and I wondered how other women we knew would have handled it. I have an aunt I can’t imagine shaking her head no in that situation. My mom has a friend we can’t imagine doing that, either. We can picture them looking frankly at the guy, considering for a moment, and then…well, we’re not sure what they’d say then, but if we could figure it out, we might rehearse it for next time.

This is the sort of thing where I’d be interested in knowing the range of responses other people would make. The problem is, it’s hard to know when you’re reading about it: there’s time to think, and also we’re completely removed from the situation: a lot of the responses I come up with when I’m not IN a situation are ones that don’t actually work if I try them the next time; they only work in Lying Awake at Night Thinking About It Land, where they are immensely satisfying. I’ve noticed this on the baby name blog: people are quick to say, “You should tell your mom to BACK OFF! She named her babies, you get to name yours!”—but it’s hard to picture an actual person saying that to an actual, standing-right-there, non-theoretical mother. So in some cases, three separate responses might be needed: “the one I think is the right one,” “the one I would find immensely satisfying,” and “the one I think I’d actually do.”

[Edited to add:]

Two things that seem significant to me as I’ve been thinking about this today:

1. I think one reason I felt less threatened (beside the fact that airport security were within sight) is that he didn’t single me out: he talked to me, but also to other people.

2. I think it’s interesting that the two men I was near enough to see him talk to both responded as I did: polite lie about not being uncomfortable, followed by moving some distance away.

I was looking through a list of posts for things I hadn’t updated on, and I realized this: I could stand to improve my post titles. I couldn’t GUESS what half of them were about, and I am the one who wrote the posts and carefully chose the corresponding titles. At the TIME, they seem right! I mean, some of them I KNOW aren’t helpful, like the last one I did, which I called “Wednesday” because I couldn’t think of anything else, and according to my archives that’s the fourth time I’ve done that. But MOST of them I think are quite fitting—until I’m paging through them later.

Well. In that Wednesday post (the fourth one), I mentioned I would be going to the doctor for discomfort/weakness in my hands. I was greatly motivated by Paul’s aunt, who told a story of letting carpal tunnel go on too long, past the point where much could be done about it. I suppose if I’d had to write down my guess of what the matter was, I would have first guessed carpal tunnel, and second some sort of arthritis, and third some sort of injury I’d gotten without realizing it. Actually, my FIRST guess would have been “Let me get you a referral form.”

What I did not expect was a diagnosis of “playing too much Candy Crush.” I will have to wear wrist/thumb braces for two weeks. People will say to me “Oh my god, what happened to your hands??,” and I will have to say “I played too much Candy Crush.” And it is not REALLY that I played too much Candy Crush, but more that I have flexible hand joints that make gripping things difficult (this post, barely readable since I switched blog platforms, shows how I hold a pen), and then I gripped a phone every day for many days in a row, playing Candy Crush and also Farm Heroes Saga, and gave myself tendonitis. Well, PROBABLY tendonitis. If two weeks in splints doesn’t help, I’m supposed to go back.

Second update: Trees that Cross Property Lines. I looked into the laws for my area, and the law says what most of you said, which is that the trunk-holder is responsible for keeping the tree SAFE, but then the branch-holders are responsible for their own cosmetic/convenience trimming. We wanted to get a couple of trees looked at anyway, and also we wanted to make sure the tree in question WAS safe, so we called in a tree guy. The tree guy says the tree in question should come down. His exact words: “This guy here is Done.” So! That tree will no longer be an issue with the neighbors, which is good news because my favorite outcome here is Never Having to Think About It Again!

Third update: Keeping a cello humid. I thought it was very, very charming how many people clicked through to the comments just to see how one WAS supposed to keep a cello damp, without having any need of such knowledge themselves. I have ordered a Dampit, and it is on its way.

Fourth update: The will/trust. I was very reassured by the number of people (including lawyers) who commented/emailed to say, “Yes, in this case you’d want a trust.” It took me awhile to understand why, but the gist is this: If you are just leaving your stuff to some grown-up people, you need a will. If you have minor children and want to leave your assets to be used for their care/upbringing and eventual inheritance (if there’s anything left after the care/upbringing), it works better to have a trust. Another thing a trust does is make your assets available much more quickly (almost immediately) to the people who need them, without a long court-system process to settle the will and unlock them. A trust SOUNDS like the kind of thing only richy-rich people deal with (because of trust funds, I think, and those big trusts that give out grants), but it isn’t.

Anyway, we set up a trust. Here is how many times we met with the lawyer: two (one for talking about what we wanted, and one for doing the final signing). In between those two meetings, the lawyer emailed us a draft and we went over it and emailed him back with the changes we wanted and questions we had. Here is how much time it took from start to finish: we had our first appointment with the lawyer in April, and we signed the final copy in October. Some of this was our delay (it took us a little while to go through the papers), but most of it was time the lawyer was doing his part, and so could vary depending on the busyness of the lawyer in question.

Here is how much stress was involved: HUGE. But then, when it was done, I found myself hugely less stressed than before we started. The stress of “feeling as if we ought to have a will” (to replace the one we made with will-making software back when Rob was a baby) was low-grade constant with intermittent high-stress attacks (especially after seeing the time-consuming and lawyer-fee-heavy and emotional mess that was involved in dealing with my late mother-in-law’s lack of will), and led to periodic lying awake at night; the stress of “trying to comprehend lawyer language” and “thinking through all the issues involved in setting up a trust” was fairly high, and led to steadily leaking tears and stressful indecision (“WHAT IF PAUL TURNS EVIL AND HAS THE DOCTOR PULL THE PLUG WHEN I WOULD HAVE RECOVERED??”) and periodic lying awake at night; but the relief of “having the trust set up and now we know everything is okay even if everything is not okay” was INCREDIBLE. It’s a trade: we started with a baseline of medium to significant stress, and then we traded a SHORT period of INTENSE stress for a LONG period of LOW/NO stress.

Also, there were a lot of things that seemed stressful when I was looking at them on my own (like with the will-making software, or when looking over the draft from the lawyer) that were MUCH LESS stressful when a lawyer explained them. For example, I got myself all worked up over what if I gave Paul power of attorney, and then he was going to leave me for someone else so he used that to take all our assets OMG I’D BE LEFT DESTITUTE AND POWERLESS TO PREVENT IT!! And the lawyer was like, “Er, he can do all that ALREADY, since you both co-own all your stuff. Plus, there are rules about how power of attorney can/can’t be used, so you’d take him to court and a judge would definitely disapprove.” Or, for another example, I was very upset about having to decide if I’d want a feeding tube if I were unconscious. “Well,” I thought, “Of course I do, if it will keep me alive until I recover consciousness!” But it’s not set up like that: the document says that if you will NEVER recover consciousness, THEN do you want a feeding tube. Really, it makes much more sense that way.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned Captain Awkward here yet, but it’s one of my favorite sites now: http://CaptainAwkward.com. She reminds me strongly of another favorite, Miss Manners: Miss Manners has a reputation for being about stationery sizes and fancy forks, when actually many of her letters are “Dear Miss Manners, My husband is being dumb, but my way of telling you about it is also kind of annoying”/”Dear Gentle Reader, [Piercingly intelligent reply that untangles all the issues and sets everyone straight].” That’s how Captain Awkward is, too: she’s kind, but she GETS TO IT.

Anyway, one of her themes I strongly agree with is that if you’re feeling bad, it’s good to get some practical things done to take care of yourself (haircut, vegetables, walk, face wash) or your living space (clean, tidy, fix). I like this because when I try it, it feels almost like a magic spell: I do some tasks, and they don’t seem like they’d have anything to do with why I’m feeling bad, but I DO feel better. I feel like a rat pressing a lever, but by George it works.

I’m thinking of that today, because I got a couple such things done that I’d been putting off for quite awhile: I got my hair cut (2 inches off the ends—nothing interesting), even though it meant going to a walk-in place because I can’t seem to manage figuring out and scheduling an appointment; and I made an appointment to see the doctor about my hands, which seems silly because they’re not SO bad, but they’re often feeling weak or uncomfortable, and I’m starting to have trouble sometimes with opening jars or whatever, and sometimes I do something normal like opening a drawer and I get a stab of pain, so off I go.

It isn’t even that I don’t think it’s worth going to the doctor about the hands: I think it’s pretty clear I need to. It’s that I don’t want to START A THING, and an appointment like this is STARTING A THING. There might be ideas to try (new keyboard, exercises, not holding the phone that way to play games on it), or questions I have trouble answering since the problem is irregular and hard to figure out, and follow-up appointments; and I will think afterward that I explained things wrong and that if I’d explained differently she would have tried different things; there might be a referral and all the accompanying fuss (calling the insurance, figuring out when to schedule things, calling to make the appointment, calling the doctor back to get the referral sent through, etc.). There will then be insurance screw-ups, more follow-up appointments. Maybe there will be decisions about surgery, which will involve more insurance and referrals and figuring out when to schedule. It will be A THING.

Also, it’s silly but I think there’s a little feeling of “If I don’t go looking for bad news, there won’t be any.”

Well. It still feels good to have the appointment made (despite dreading everything about this), because it is better than knowing I OUGHT to make the appointment. Thinking of it every time my hands hurt, thinking, “Urg, I guess I should make that appointment” and then “Urg, it’s the end of the day and I still haven’t made that appointment”—it was wearying. Accomplishing the making of the appointment feels better.

Laura Lou had the good idea to follow up on some of my guest-related concerns: specifically, how to figure out what they expected, and how to deal with the religion/church issue. I’d also been concerned that there might be hard feelings over Paul and his sister not having a funeral for their dad (his aunt’s brother), and I’d been concerned that his aunt would boss me (those two issues are both mentioned in the church-issue post as well).

1. Figuring out their expectations. For this one, his aunt gave me an opening: she emailed chatting about a fun day they’d had doing various things—things that had equivalents around here. So I emailed back, saying oh, if you like those things, I wonder if you would like to do those things on your visit here? And she emailed back saying that although those things did sound like fun, what they’d prefer to do is just spend time with our family. I would have found this a little puzzling (I consider “doing things together” to be “spending time with family”), except for the context and also Paul’s translation: he says for his family, “spending time with family” means “at the house, chatting.” And that really is what we did: we sat and chatted. I was pretty wrung out afterward from the intensity of that kind of social contact (seriously: 10.5 hours where the only time I wasn’t in a conversation was when I was in the bathroom), but it was also fun: because his aunt and uncle are relatively new to me, I could ask TONS of the fun/easy-to-talk-about questions, like about how they met, whether their kids got along, all about their grandchildren, etc. And I could tell all MY fun/easy stories, too.

2. The church issue. I used Judith’s suggestion of giving them a strong hint framed as an offer to find out information: “Would you like us to get service times / recommendations for churches in the area? We’re not part of a congregation, but we’ve heard good things about Church X and Church Y.” I put it in the same email as the questions about activities. They responded that they would indeed attend church on Sunday but that they would find one themselves. They didn’t question us specifically, but we didn’t pray before meals, and one of our children asked what a hymn was, so it seems like things must have been fairly clear. Paul’s aunt asked a number of questions (“So your dad was a minister?” “So how did you come to attend [Christian college]?”) that told me she would really like to know more, but at least on this trip she didn’t ask directly. (Though I would have been okay if she had: my main concern was that there would be an awkward question that was only awkward because it assumed we were religious, and was hard to answer without first addressing that point.) I think that on this topic, my history leads to very misleading conversations: I’ve had the same trouble with my wine-and-appetizers friends, where I keep telling stories about my minister dad or my Christian schools, and then realizing that might be why people are saying “sorry” to me when they swear.

3. The no-funeral issue. Did not come up.

4. His aunt might try to boss me. It seemed to me that she is Quite Bossy by nature, but that she is self-aware enough to attempt to reign herself in—unlike my late mother-in-law, who would just LET FLY with anything she felt like bossing me about, with the strongly-felt implication that there was The Right Way and The Dumb Way. I think Paul’s aunt ITCHES to tell people The Right Way, but that she is aware that it’s not necessarily The Dumb Way if they want to do it differently; or that even if it IS The Dumb Way, that’s not her concern. Also, she is aware that people don’t necessarily LIKE to be bossed. So for two days, she did well. But by the end of the second day she was starting to Make Suggestions in a way that told me that if I were her daughter-in-law, or if she were staying longer than two days, we would start to have Issues. As neither of those were the case, we got along beautifully and I liked her very much. If Paul and I ever do the road trip we’d like to do someday, I’d want to deliberately route it so that we could stop and see his aunt and uncle.

The visit from Paul’s aunt and uncle went well! Very well indeed! There were no major hitches, and the minor ones were along the lines of “Whoops, forgot to think about napkins, good thing I keep buying pretty paper napkins I have no use for, because now I suddenly have a use for them, SEE PAUL???” I’d also forgotten to think about dishes, and by the time I DID think of them I felt too tired out to lug up the boxes from the basement and wash all the dishes and find a place to keep them, so instead we just used our usual hodge-podge dishes, and if anyone felt this was less than fancy, they kept those thoughts to themselves.

I wondered, in fact, if they might have come away with the impression that we were rather poor: non-matching dishes, shabby recliners with actual rips in the upholstery, coffee table with about half its original finish, kitchen made up of an assortment of non-official fixes (such as having an island made out of what used to be a changing table), etc. When actually, it’s partly procrastination, partly wanting to make do with what we have, partly not wanting to buy nice things while our children are still wrecking them, partly not noticing/caring very much, and only partly a matter of wincing at prices.

The house had reached an acceptable level of cleanliness/tidiness by the time they arrived, so that it did not much embarrass me—and I think it is good to get periodic practice in “not feeling as if the cleanliness of my house MEANS SOMETHING about me,” and “just because some people take pride in a clean house doesn’t mean I have to feel shame in a messy one.” What I’d like to do, now that it is in fairly good shape, is try to KEEP it there. But I am remembering when I had the flu a couple of years ago and lost 20 pounds, and I thought, “I feel so much BETTER this way! Now that I am here, I am going to KEEP it here!” And yet slowly, inexorably, I went right back to my usual weight. In order to maintain a lower weight, I need to be actively ill; in order to maintain a cleaner house, I need to be actively anxious about impending houseguests.

We had a plumber here this morning to install our new toilet, which I hope will end The Decade of Plunging the Toilet Every Time Someone Uses a Little Too Much Toilet Paper or Just Doesn’t Crumple It Right, and I tried out a new coping mechanism that worked BEAUTIFULLY. I know I am not the only one of us who feels all skittery and weird having a worker in the house (I was going to say “workman,” then stopped to adjust it to workperson, which didn’t seem right, and worker isn’t quite right either but is better, and then I realized ALL the workers in our house have ALWAYS been men, which made me think again of the idea of an all-woman construction/repair/plumping/electrician company because that would be SO EXCELLENT and probably illegal) (but I still would feel skittery and weird about having a worker in the house). I am going to go ahead and start a new sentence here, instead of finishing that one.

In fact, let’s have a whole new paragraph. *brushing off clinging strands of sentence* Many of us, perhaps MOST of us, feel weird when a worker is in the house. This coping idea won’t work for when we have someone in the house ALL DAY or whatever, but for the times when someone will be there for an hour or two, this is the idea I tried today: BAKE. Or COOK would work, too. The idea is, I was in the kitchen, so I was:

1. industrious in appearance, rather than appearing to loll around while someone else did work

2. industrious in actual fact, to keep my nervous SOMEONE IS IN MY HOUSE energy occupied and to get stuff done that needed to be done

3. easy to find, without someone having to call through the house if they’re looking for me, and without me having to wonder every time they walked down the hall if they might be looking for me

Really, it was perfect. I made ginger snaps, which I wanted to make to have on hand for our impending guests anyway, and it made the whole house smell great. Then as the plumber was leaving, I said, “Take a couple of cookies with you, if you’d like!,” which made me feel like a easygoing, natural, friendly person who didn’t at ALL mind having a stranger in the house. And he DID take a couple of cookies, which made me feel happy too. Then I had a couple of cookies myself, which made me feel even happier.

The one downside is that it made me feel like SUCH a…I don’t know. Housewife, I guess. I don’t like the word (I’d always use “homemaker”), so I use it deliberately here because it fits very well how I FELT: woman at home in the middle of the day, baking cookies. There’s NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT. And for all he knows, I’m a cut-throat corporate-takeover specialist, and I am just home today for his visit, and I am making cookies because it is rare for me to have time to do such a thing! Perhaps I am planning to use them to manipulate shareholders!

I have made more progress cleaning. I’m concentrating on the four rooms the guests will spend the most time in (living room, dining room, kitchen, bathroom), and pretty much ignoring everything else: maybe they’ll want a tour of the whole house and maybe they won’t, but I am working with limited time and even more limited enthusiasm. I am also remembering when I was getting ready to go on my trip with Elizabeth, and I wanted to get all caught up on laundry before we went, and I left all her laundry and my laundry for last so we’d have exactly what we needed for packing—and the washing machine broke right after I’d finished everyone else’s stuff and right before I’d gotten to ours. Most-important stuff FIRST, not LAST, that is the goal now.

One of the best helps is making everyone clean together at the same time. We’ve done it a few times (we’re aiming for once a day until the guests get here), and it’s surprising what a difference it makes. Each person chooses whatever they want to do, but I emphasized ahead of time that we were looking for tasks that made the biggest impact. The littler kids barely have any effect on anything, but they DO make SOME difference, and the two big kids are big helps, and it’s hugely good for morale to have EVERYONE CLEANING and not JUST ME. (It’s something I’d like to keep doing, maybe an hour every Saturday or something, but why don’t I tell you about it AFTER we actually implement such a plan and keep up with it for awhile, instead of when it’s just me assuming Future Me will be happy to do all that work.) We put the radio on loud and it’s not really FUN but it’s satisfying, and things definitely look better when we’re done. The children are starting to say MY lines, things like “Can’t people put things AWAY when they’re done with them?” and “Ug, look at all these PENCILS! They go in the MUG, not ALL OVER THE PLACE!”

Another excellent development: the annual ladybug invasion has begun, which means it will appear that the speckles up high in the corners are from THIS year, rather than still there from last year!

I removed considerable stress by deciding that for the two dinners, we will make our specialties: tacos (me) and pizza (Paul). Those are the only two meals we seem to be able to make in huge quantities AND that the children will eat without complaining and/or acting as if we normally eat only tacos and pizza (“What’s THIS?”—suspiciously looking at carrot shred as if utterly foreign substance). These are not the meals I think of as ideal for (1) company or (2) people in their mid-70s, but so be it. Making something we know how to make (and know how to shop for) will be much, much, much more peaceful from an Inexperienced Hostess point of view—and maybe they will LOVE it and be GLAD it isn’t Company Food. Also, these are both meals we make with child helpers, which makes us AND our children look good. And the tacos are highly customizable, which is nice for guests, and the pizza can be sliced small and I’ll make a salad, in case they go lightly on pizza-like foods. But Paul’s aunt has made several nervous, self-deprecating comments about eating too much, so my hope is that they are plump and love food and will think of tacos/pizza as treats. I still have to decide about desserts.

For lunches, I’m doing what one of my grandmothers did (perhaps the other grandmother did it as well, but I specifically remember it with only one), which is to put out a great abundance of miscellaneous things and let everyone help themselves: three kinds of bread, peanut butter, two kinds of jam, two kinds of deli meat, two kinds of deli cheese, mayo and mustard, cottage cheese, applesauce, grapes, dried cherries, carrot sticks and celery sticks, nuts, sunflower seeds, chips, crackers, cookies. It’s fun, it’s flexible, it lets everyone eat how they want without making me feel like I have to Guess Correctly, and it’s easy to use up whatever’s left over after the guests leave.