Kate the Great's Merry Adventures!

Ben has lots of random crazy ideas that I frankly have to shut down at their conception. Several weeks ago, he characteristically had a new one:

“Hey, want to move to Cleveland?”

On our very first date he pre-screened me by asking me what I thought of his undying ambition to settle in the American West. And here we have been since 2011.

“Hey, want to move to Cleveland?” he asked.

“Um. Sure. Yeah, let’s look into that,” I replied.

I’ve never even BEEN to Ohio. Or driven through it. Or flown over it.

But, looking into it, “on paper” (that is, the internet) it checks all the boxes. Except cloudy long winters. But this year’s fire season so thoroughly blotted out the sun for two months that I came thisclose to buying a light therapy lamp, and even my kid’s chipper, guitar-playing, singing principal posted for all to see that he was having a really hard time with all that darkness.

I look at the eerie pink sky and my infant snoozing in our stroller, and I need a better life for him.

If I need a light therapy lamp and allergy medicine, by all means let it be from nature doing its thing and not from my world burning. It will feel so much less apocalyptic. I know climate change is gonna get everyone, but I can outrun the worst of it for a bit and care without beinng oppressively reminded of its effects every minute of every day for months at a time every year.

So yeah. Cleveland?? We’d be there scoping it out if not for Covid. At least the sun shone clear and bright this past weekend. I forgot how bright the sun was. Our Air Quality Index reached “good” for the first time since.... I don’t know. Long long time ago. It was a refreshing weekend. I’m thankful for the respite.

Time feels like such a precious commodity that I don’t entirely want to write, as if it were a waste of time. But I can start thinking of it as an exercise; I find time to exercise. I can’t run a metaphorical marathon if I can’t run a 5k... and I can’t run a 5K unless I do the Couch 2 5K!

See how I transitioned there? ;)

The real Couch 2 5K that so excited me has fallen by the wayside. But I have so many good excuses!

1. I busted my toe, somehow, by walking to forcefully into the heel of my second-born. It was painful and dreadfully bruised for a week or so.

I want to write a bit of general life updates and memories, so they're not gone forever. 

Every Saturday night, my little family has "Family Movie Night," where we take turns choosing a movie (taking turns from tallest to shortest) and all gather to watch together. The tradition started over a year ago, perhaps even two years ago (none of us can quite remember), as planned by my little daughter. <3

This weekend it was my turn to choose the movie, and I chose Inside Out. I'd been planning on that movie for weeks, and by a nice coincidence we got a Disney+ subscription just last week to watch my husband's choice of Star Wars Episode IV. (Midweek in about four sittings (because, responsibilities) my husband and I watched Hamilton! Now, he says, we need to watch the Curb Your Enthusiasm season that has a Hamilton subplot... and quickly, because when we added Disney+ we gave the HBO streaming service the axe, so we only have it until the 8th or something.)

But I digress. Inside Out. I knew the basic premise, that the different emotions were persons unto themselves and it helps us think about our emotions. I really wanted my daughter to see it (though it turns out she had already at after school program or somewhere) because she has a hard time figuring out her emotions... just like me. She's more like me all the time. 

Anyway. It was bright, colorful Pixar animation. I was expecting a really fun good time.

Well! I finished some books. A lot of Diary of a Wimpy Kid books — so thankful that my son has moved on from Dog Man and that he wants to read books all the way through. His older sister had me read random excerpts, which meant I never knew quite all that was going on!

Hmm, that reminds me of reading bits and pieces of the Bible, or even entire books, versus the whole thing in chronological order. Yes, I know characters and a lot of things, but so much makes new sense when read from start to finish. Just like those Wimpy Kid books.

Yes, I just compared the Bible to Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

Anyway. I also completed Sacred Pathways and Dream Big! I have more work to do with questions and action points at the end of both, but they are technically finished! I’m so excited to be finishing books! I typically dive in to a new book and then dive into another one and then another and rarely go back to finish what I started. It’s so satisfying to know a book is FINISHED!

Speaking of books, I want to write one. Or some. I always have, and I even drafted one and a half very different from each other books back in college, so here I am, announcing my ambition like Bob Goff said to do in his book. I’ve always wanted to write, but yesterday I got an IDEA. For what to actually write about. It’s young adult fiction (not gonna lie, I still love that stuff) and I’m really interested in the story. So, if nothing else, I’ll enjoy myself and slap it on Wattpad. I did great stuff with fan fiction back in high school. Like, it’s really good, for what it is.

I’m excited to have some author friends by now. :)

A woman I work with actually is a YA author and I’ve been working through the six books she’s published with Harper Collins. My book club at school read one of her books and invited her to speak with our group. By the types of questions I kept asking, she finally asked me if I wanted to write, too. Her story was so much like mine: she wanted to write, majored in English, needed to make a living and became an English teacher, had some kids, lost touch with her dreams, and so on. Then at thirty she went for it.

After talking with her, I felt excited to wake up in the morning for the first time in years. That sounds really depressing. And maybe it is. But it’s honest.

That was seve

It's been so interesting lately to reflect on differences between people. As a teacher I've had to learn a lot about cultural differences, both from textbooks and through sometimes awkward incidents of trial and error. But there are so many differences between people, too! That should be obvious. It is obvious. But I'm still surprised. 

Like, Ben's dad said a couple weeks ago that he wondered how many billions of pounds Americans have collectively gained in quarantine. And I *knew* about the "quarantine fifteen" and stress eating and sales of junk food going up. But I was still surprised and baffled, since I actually lost weight *while pregnant* from taking extra care to eat healthfully to help me *actually* feel good as well as rationing to prevent nonessential trips to the grocery store. If people were so serious about staying at home, why were they scarfing down so much food? 

And I totally *just* broke my own habit of stress eating in 2019. Like, I KNOW HOW THIS WORKS. Why is it so hard to really digest other people's experiences?

Haha. "Digest." 

Hahahahahahahahahaha!

Anyway. Similarly with other conversations. Trying to make pleasant conversation with my mother-in-law, I asked her about some of her silver linings from all these shutdowns.

"SILVER LININGS?!" she exclaimed, with some tone of horror. I wondered if maybe she had misheard me, but she did repeat my words accurately. Or maybe we had different understandings of the phrase?

Since church started being online-only back in mid-March (a week before the governor required it — I'm a little proud that my church was so considerate), I haven't watched many online services. Actually I watched exactly one. Or perhaps half of one. I have an intellectual bent, so I love that whenever the pastor opens his mouth one can tell that he's a PhD who reads a lot (lots of Biblical history and such accompany all the Scripture teaching, yet he's accessible enough to draw a few thousand viewers every week). BUUUUUUUT without being there in person with a notes page and some free-yet-surprisingly-high-quality coffee, I just can't seem to stay awake for a videotaped 40-minute sermon.

My husband has the same problem, but being there in person with coffee doesn't help. Thus, in the last few months before the shutdowns he started going back to mass on at least some Sundays.

Soooo instead I've been reading a book on Sundays called Sacred Pathways. I did buy the book at my church's bookstore, so it counts as doing my own church in some way in my mind. I really like reading spiritual books. This one is all about different Christian spiritual traditions to help us understand ourselves and the tendencies of different Christians better.

I really like the book, but some of the chapters make me really miss going to Catholic mass. Elements of mass and other practices used routinely by Catholics (such as the Stations of the Cross) really get me *righthere.*

Shortly after my previous post, I was horror-struck to discover that my LiveJournal password had expired. I was still logged in on the app on my phone (which I proceeded to drop in a toilet!), but I needed to retrieve a link to reset my LJ password via email.

Since my LJ was created in 2002, I went wayyyyy back to the email I used back then. For my security, that email required me to use additional verification of my identity, linking me to either a phone number I no longer have or a Hotmail account that apparently no longer exists.

This LiveJournal was a goner.

Until a few minutes ago, when I had a fabulous light bulb moment and checked an email not from 2002, but from the later 2000s using my maiden name.

Voila! THAT was the email! My password is reset. My LJ's future is secure.

Oh, happy day! 

Seriously. That's the best news I've had all day.

Now... does that say more about how my day went or about how happy I am to have my LiveJournal? I'm reading Bob Goff's book Dream Big, and I glanced ahead a bit to a part that said to write 1,000 words per day, whether or not one is actually writing a book, and so here I am, kids in bed (but — most unusually -- getting up to interrupt me already... get behind me, Satan!), tapping away on the keys. I am serious about life change.

I've been surprised (to put it mildly) by how much my sense of well-being has improved overall since everything has shut down over the past week. 

Here are some things I've been thankful for:

1. I usually spend a full hour every day just driving my kids to school and back, not including the multitude of after-school activities we allow our daughter to sign up for (she wants to do even more but would need a time-turner). Driving, for me, is an activity laden with fear of accidents (I was in not one but two accidents that weren't my fault a year and a half ago and I don't trust any of y'all out on the roads anymore), as well as guilt over my carbon footprint. I knew driving was stressful, but it seems to have been THE major stressor in my life. No driving those kids has been the single most relaxing life change I may have ever experienced.

2. My husband is an amazing provider of groceries.
"You mean the same stuff I always do?" he said when I thanked him.
"Yes," I replied, "but it means so much more all of a sudden."

3. The groceries we keep are relatively "clean," especially compared to the stuff I have access to at work, so a somewhat improved diet is helping me feel fantastic.

4. With almost two months of pregnancy to go, I've already never weighed more and I'd been low-key stressing about that. Not a worry anymore: gluttony is pretty much a non-option for me because I care so deeply about making these precious, hard-won groceries last.

I'm a teacher, but my school goes year-round. ;-)

So... my kids' elementary school had this thing where they locked all the gates but one on the first day, with a frank admission right in the flyer that parking is always tricky on the first day regardless — which led me to literally have at least one restless night filled with strange nightmares about not being able to find parking. (Also, the new school year kind of snuck up on me and the day before school was jam-packed with the kids' physical therapy, work, a theatre meeting, and gymnastics, so I was really stuck!) The school laid out a red carpet and had a big balloon archway thing. It was cute, I guess? But I'm rather pragmatic, so... *shrug* Parking, yo. 

We brought my son's new mobility scooter, parked illegally in front of the dumpsters/next to the sidewalk, and rolled across campus to get to that one open gate. (Otherwise all parking is either across streets or along unpaved areas far from the main gate. Kiddo's handicap placard is on the way but not here yet... though I don't seem to remember the handicap spaces even being available on this drop-off morning.) Then I took the scooter home.

I was greeted on that red carpet, among a mingling crowd of parents, students, and staff, by several teachers. His PE teacher went over the gym class plan again.