March 2009

1. I have a new cellphone! It’s purrrrty! (If you had my old cellphone #, please delete it and email me (or ask me) for the new number.)
2. I slept late both mornings this weekend and oh, it was wonderful.
3. We have a fridge and freezer and cupboards full of food for the week.
4. Everything that’s gone wrong in the past few days is well on its way to being fixed. This is good!
5. We had a really good curry for dinner, thanks to Coffee. Nom!

It’s no secret that I love Guns N Roses. It’s also no secret that my love for the Gunners has long passed its expiry date and is bordering on kind of.. well.. sad.

Having said that, I’m going to share with you one of my top 5 GnR songs. It’s long, and the original video is kind of cheesy (ahem) but I think it’s a beautiful song anyway..

Let me know if you manage to make it through the whole video, ok?

Estranged

When you’re talkin to yourself
And nobody’s home
You can fool yourself
You came in this world alone
(Alone)

So nobody ever told you baby
How it was gonna be
So what’ll happen to you baby
Guess we’ll have to wait and see
One, two

Old at heart but I’m only 28
And I’m much too young
To let love break my heart
Young at heart but it’s getting much too late
To find ourselves so far apart

I don’t know how you’re s’posed
To find me lately
An what more could you ask from me
How could you say that I never needed you
When you took everything
Said you took everything from me

Young at heart an it gets so hard to wait
When no one I know can seem to help me now
Old at heart but I musn’t hesitate
If I’m to find my own way out

Still talkin’ to myself and nobody’s home
(Alone)

So nobody ever told us baby
How it was gonna be
So what’ll happen to us baby
Guess we’ll have to wait and see

When I find out all the reasons
Maybe I’ll find another way
Find another day
With all the changing seasons of my life
Maybe I’ll get it right next time
And now that you’ve been broken down
Got your head out of the clouds
You’re back down on the ground
And you don’t talk so loud
And you don’t walk so proud
Any more, and what for

Well I jumped into the river too many times
to make it home
I’m out here on my own, and drifting all alone
If it doesn’t show give it time
To read between the lines
‘Cause I see the storm getting closer
And the waves they get so high
Seems everything we’ve ever known’s here
Why must it drift away and die?

I’ll never find anyone to replace you
Guess I’ll have to make it through, this time
Oh this time
Without you

I knew the storm was getting closer
And all my friends said I was high
But everything we’ve ever known’s here
I never wanted it to die

1. The sun is shining, the air is fresh, the windows are all open and there are flowers blooming in my front yard. SPRING! (I’m pretending not to know about the freezing rain warning for tonight. La la la.)
2. I didn’t get out of bed until 10:30 this morning. I love weekends!
3. Listening to Maymo talking to himself.
4. Coffee and 2 kids went out to run errands together. I didn’t have to go!
5. Love, laughter and life.

This afternoon I spent a few hours perusing the real estate web site for Canada and drooled over a bunch of gorgeous, well-treed, 100+ acre properties near Lake Superior.

(I would really, really love to live near Lake Superior. )

Many of the properties are in the $30,000 to $60,000 range. Most of them do not currently have homes or other buildings on them. Some of them have “hydro to the road” and some do not. Some are “partially cleared” and some are not.

I spent some time daydreaming about all of those properties and tried to imagine what kind of a life we could create for ourselves if we were to purchase one of them.

What kind of a home would we have? Would we build from a kit or buy a modular or mobile home? Could I convince someone to help me build an earth bag house? Could we build a yurt in a size that would accommodate a family of 5?

And then I considered how the kids would adapt. I suspect they’d all like it on many levels – the freedom to run wild, mainly – but they’d be quite isolated from other kids, definitely homeschooled, and their enjoyment of electronic entertainment would certainly be curtailed. I feel like the benefits would outweigh the drawbacks..

In my daydreams, I figured we’d buy a huge chunk of land – with part already cleared and zoned for building and the rest covered in trees and ponds and marshes and.. more trees.

Then we’d build a custom, small, quirky house that would suit our needs, and plunk down solar panels and, oh, maybe some wind turbines. Who needs to be “on the grid”, right? We’d heat our home with trees from our property (and perhaps a pellet stove?) and drink fresh water from the (unpolluted, of course) spring that feeds the ponds.

We’d plant some gardens. Harvest firewood. Raise some chickens and a goat or two.

(How would we pay our bills? I have no idea. Not even the slightest clue. But that’s not important to my daydreams, of course, because in my daydreams we don’t even NEED any stinkin’ money!)

The boys would learn about the natural world through first-hand encounters. We’d spend our days working together as a family and Coffee could help educate the boys. We’d all be intimately familiar with the elements and spend most of our time outdoors, all year ’round, either gardening or playing or chopping wood.

Perhaps you’d like to join us? We could build a few houses on 100+ acres of land and work together in a small, happy community of hippy freaks and freerange children and.. seriously, whadda’ ya’ say?

1. I have a deliciously mischievous plan in the works and I can’t stop laughing about it and thinking of more and more ways to add to the entire thing. LOVE IT.
2. Friday! Oh, sweet, precious Friday!
3. The song that my most recent YouTube link goes to reminds me of many good things – from my friend Deb to being in university (the good parts of it) to riding my bike in Toronto to hanging out with Chz..
4. That people can be this awesome. Wow!
5. Maymo wore my flower-petal hairband to school today for the Dance-A-Thon’s “Spring” theme. And he was so pleased by the whole idea and kept saying, “I’m a beaaaaaaaaaaautiful flower! I’m a very pretty flower!” the whole way to school.

Your song for the day doesn’t permit embedding, again, so you’ll have to click through for a lovely acoustic sunburst of joy!

Feel free to dance around! Share it with your coworkers! Sing along!

La la la…

1. We had a power outage this morning and when we regained hydro and the computers all booted up, none of them could connect to the internet. I tried all the tricks I could think of – shutting down and rebooting the firewall machine, un-and-re-plugging the router, modem, computers, etc. I tried dancing around and begging. NADA. So I used my cellphone to go online (painful) and email Coffee to beg for help. Once we realized I couldn’t get it working he came home. And he fixed the internet. And ohmygod, I am so grateful. How awesome is my husband?
2. I put gas in my car today and got to talk to the really nice woman who works at the gas station. She’s always very cheerful which, to me, is great customer service. She likes to chat with Maymo, which is another bonus point. In all: she is good people.
3. OneBun, the rabbit who lives in our front yard, has been sitting there all day napping off and on. She was completely unconcerned when we walked by her, though she did open her eyes to peek at us. SPRING!
4. I bought a cellphone charger (for my car) and a new spare battery for my phone – for under $20, including shipping. SWEET! This is particularly awesome because my phone is about 6 years old, now, and finding accessories is nearly impossible.
5. Michelle‘s daughter, toddling around in her pink pants, made me smile.

The astrological sign “cancer”, under which I fall, is known for being moody (amongst other traits) and that’s always a pretty good way to describe me: moody.

(I like to think of moody as being “full of moods” as opposed to the overwhelmingly negative connotations that come along with the word. Just so’s y’know.)

I mention this because, since I weaned my brain off of Celexa, it’s been interesting to pay attention to my feeeeelings.

For the first while, it was like someone was pelting me with water balloons of emotion – both good and bad – and it was quite overwhelming and raw. Not totally unpleasant, but also not totally comfortable. I was likely to feel weepy for the tiniest reasons and equally as likely to laugh, loudly, at something moderately amusing.

Over the course of a few weeks, I discovered that I quite liked this spontaneous emotion-feeling thing. I was growing more comfortable with the whole deal and the rawness of it felt less, well, raw and more natural. It was familiar to me.

And now, well, I’ve almost forgotten how it felt to be the other way.

It’s worth noting that, in my assorted antidepressant use over the years, there have been people who notice a change and either prefer me medicated or not. Apparently I’m more quirky without the meds.. which isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, I s’pose.

Part of the challenge, for me, is to be okay with feeling really down for a day – instead of panicking that I’m going to sink into some sort of year-long depression. My all-or-nothing thinking sure comes slamming back in a hurry!

I have to pick myself up, keep moving, look for things to adjust/change (more sleep, more fish oil, less sugar..) and it works. I wake up feeling better or I manage to chuck aside my bad mood for a bit.

And that’s normal.

I’ve had a few tiny episodes of anxiety and one major one since I’ve been off the Celexa. I didn’t pop any clonazepam on any of those occasions – instead, I tried to think back on what I had done that day and realized I’d been a little strung out on caffeine. Ah! Lightbulb!

Mostly though, I’m just feeling really good and normal and moody. And it’s nice.

(Only 300 more to go! Ha!)

1. The city’s tree-trimming crew came and removed the ugly yellow rope that’s been hanging from a high limb on one of our trees since before we moved in. We haven’t been able to get it down for a variety of reasons (one being that we don’t own a ladder that’s tall enough to get up to the rope). I’m really glad that it’s gone.
2. Although I am feeling “off” and not quite perfect, I seem to be avoiding the plague that everyone else has at the moment. Huzzah for hand-washing!
3. Replacing my tiny-holed strainer thingie so I can rinse my quinoa without pretending I’m MacGuyver.
4. Rediscovering old music that I love as I reorganize our mp3 collection.
5. It’s not Monday. Happy Hump Day Everyone!!

1. Cramming Coffee’s lunch bag with candy and pop this morning made me laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh. I don’t know why it was so funny, but really, IT WAS.
2. Maymo’s cold is improving and he’s feeling much healthier. Less green snot-bubbles all around!
3. Sunshine. I am still exceedingly pleased by the sunshine lately.
4. Maymo was in a big “let me help!” mode yesterday and it was fun(ny) to be a part of that.
5. Having “parent” code words that Coffee and I can mutter to each other to describe the kids’ behaviours without tipping the kid off. (“GEODE!”)