Travelling again

Well, it seems the time has come again for me to travel. I tried to avoid it but this week has been quite a financial setback for us from our already precarious position. With Sage needing dentures and the car needing an engine (not so urgent as it was as we will have the van to get out of town) it was looking like we needed to save up quite a while before we have the money to do any of those things. The dentures in particular are concerning me as the dentist said that the state of Sage’s teeth is actually affecting her day to day health due to a pretty much constant low-grade infection.

Anyway, a few days ago we got a fat envelope from the IRS. I worried immediately since they generally don’t give you a fat envelope to tell about how your taxes were messed up in your favor. And true to my expectations, we found out that we owe about $1,700 for a mistake we made on our 1999 return.

Then yesterday I had my first dental exam in like 15 years (forgive me father for I have sinned, it’s been 15 years since my last dental exam….) and surprisingly I only had two very minor cavities – the kind that are just soft spots on the teeth – not holes. But it turns out that I need some periodontal work – about $700 worth in fact and the sooner the better to keep my teeth.

So it looks like if all goes well I’ll be driving or taking a train (I’m still not ready to fly again and don’t expect I shall be anytime soon) to either Michigan or more likely to the suburbs of New York City to stay a little while to make a bit fo money to cover our expenses.

Sage and I deliberated over it quite a lot – trying to think of ways to make our finances work at least in the short term and considered everything from one of us working in town here to commuting to Springfield to just relocating and one of us getting a real job again. This solution – working for a few weeks to free me up for a few months again seems to be the most attractive solution in terms of maximizing Sage’s and my time at home and keeping us in the area which is important because Sage’s mom has no intention of relocating herself.

I am not, of course, looking forward to an extended separation from my family – 2-6 weeks is what I’m estimating but if it gets me 2-6 months of time at home I think it could well be a good bargain. Just doing the math and calculating waking hours away from home I come out way better working away from home for a few weeks here and there than I would working 40 hours/week, 50 weeks/year (not including overtime, commuting and travel for that job) Sage and I also talked about their coming along again, but felt that would be a horrible idea as Paul had such a miserable time in Michigan that he was throwing up almost daily and had a horrible cough the whole time also due to stress. He didn’t do nearly as poorly home alone with Sage and his granny.

So now I’m doing my best to get excited about the good things on the trip – the journey by car or train, delicious food at various restaurants along the way, possibly a chance to visit the Zen center of Roshi Bernie Glassman and connecting with Buddhists in the area. It was that sort of thing, those connections, that not only got me through my time in Michigan but has helped me almost daily ever since. If I’m gone for a while I might even manage to get to Vermont to see some family and friends which could be a real treat. I haven’t seen my brother since 1995 – and that’s been far too long. I joked also that I should probably rent a car to drive there so that I can come back with the trunk filled with decent bagels and Entenmanns – neither of which are available in this part of the country.

Today we’re not doing a whole lot special – Sage and I are working together to make a meal for us all – Sage is making mashed potatoes and banana bread and I’m frying some catfish – just fried for Paul and Kite and fried and made into crispy Thai catfish for Sage and I which we’ll serve along with rice and whatever vegetable I can dig up.

I’ll keep everyone posted as to how things work out and try to keep the entries coming while I’m away.

Not Drinking Coffee

Sage is out doing errands, I’ve finished work for the day and Paul is off at his granny’s so I’ve got a few minutes that I can’t pass up to write at least a short entry.

I’m still caffeine-free at going on three (or is it four) weeks. Well, with one exception – I had a bit of soda on Saturday morning because I was getting a migraine (or rather just the aura – if I catch it then with caffeine and tylenol I’m okay). Anyway, it’s going pretty well now with most of the withdrawal symptoms behind me. Well, except for one – I still feel stultified much of the time. Like the minute I stopped drinking coffee my IQ went down several points. I think it’s partly due to the fact that my thought speed has in fact gone down. That was the tradeoff with giving up caffeine with me, I guess. Much less anxiety but I think slower (for now anyway). Kind of feels like Flowers for Algernon, though, in a much less serious way. Of course the other probability is that I still need more sleep if I’m going to live without coffee. Paul has been waking up by 6:00 and often earlier lately while I, and Sage to a lesser degree haven’t adjusted our bedtimes accordingly. So we were both up to almost 11:00 last night again watching “Night at McCools” – a pretty fun movie that fascinated us both by it’s filming the same events as viewed by several different people (and of course the people remembering the events are at their best). It was absolutely hilarious at times, and I was quite surprised to find that Andrew Dice Clay did a fairly good job of acting (if you call basically being himself acting). His characters were quite funny. But Michael Douglas’ character was pretty scary – he’s looking so old these days – and this time he looked just like his father.

Today we haven’t much planned – I have a similar “this will be a fun day” feeling but it didn’t particularly pan out yesterday probably due to the fact that I was exhausted and didn’t really do anything about it. We only have one real plan – to get the van. It’s been too long without being able to get out of town. Tomorrow we’re doing a playgroup at the park again and as I recall we have something going on this weekend but I can’t for the life of me remember what it is and I’m too lazy to look at our calendar.

I think it’s particularly difficult for me these days to shift back and forth between parenting and working. I say this as if nobody else in the world does this switch. But what I mean is that I felt way more confident as a parent before going back to work this summer and basically continuing to work a few hours a day since then. My patience has been fairly low lately and I think that’s a good part of it. Probably also my being tired and not drinking coffee. Of course drinking coffee resulted in impatience at different times – namely when it wore off and I was needing (or making) another cup. I know I’ll get past this one, though. it feels quite attainable in part because I realize it’s just a change in my behavior, not something I need to wait for to happen from outside of me. And even in my tired crabbiness or my inactivity – not initiating interesting things to do with Paul, I am well aware of what needs to happen to change the situation and just chose not to do it because it’s too hard or for whatever reason. So I just need to change my attitude and do it because it needs to be done and we’ll get somewhere fast. I think I need to start meditating again (he says as he writes a journal entry and plans to have a bath afterwards instead of meditating). I always felt better when I did. I just seem to always find something better to do or feel like my time is so limited anyway. I guess I just need to get in a routine again.

Perhaps if I go have my bath now I might be able to squeeze it in.

The Malibu goes home

I have to say that while I’m glad to have work, or more accurately I suppose, I’m glad to have money, I’m also glad that my work seems to be slowing down and possibly petering out in a few weeks. I’d like nothing more than to be able to take some time off from working again and let Sage do the work for a few months. I think that this could well be the longest stretch of work I’ve done since coming to Missouri – with the exception of July and half of August I’ve been working since late May. I know, I know, poor me – most people only get a couple weeks off a year and are happy with that. But I think that it really works for us (Sage and I anyway) to set goals and shoot for them no matter how unreasonable they may seem. And my goal is to get walking and writing and let Sage do the work for a while, possibly permanently. She definitely enjoys what she’s doing far more than I do.

It looks like we’ll have the van sometime tomorrow evening. I’m so excited to be able to get to the library again and also to start our walk. While the weather is a bit cooler it’s still unseasonably warm. But it’s been cool enough to do a good job clearing the underbrush and killing the ticks. Oh right, though, I just realized that we’ll need to wait a little while before getting started anyway as it’s deer hunting season. I want to finish this trip alive and mostly unscathed and wandering the woods along with a bunch of people with guns and “buck fever” isn’t a good way to accomplish that. I don’t think it’ll be much longer.

Oh, and here’s yet another reason I think it would be hard to leave the area – even for me (which is saying a great deal): Yesterday a friend of ours had a virus on their computer and I went to help them. It took longer than expected and so Sage had to go meet someone and decided to walk there since I had the car. I got home a few minutes after they left. As soon as I got out of the car, an eight year old boy (or thereabouts) stopped and said “Hi, your wife and son are out taking a walk.” It was very sweet of him, though I don’t think I’ve ever met him, to just tell me where they were so I wouldn’t worry.

Oh, and we got rid of our old Malibu. It was pretty funny, actually. The people we bought it from came by last week and asked if they could buy it back since we weren’t using it. We said sure and agreed on a price pretty much equal to what we put into it (about $500). They came back a few days later asking if they could take it before they paid (we had suggested they could as it wasn’t doing us any good where it was, it might as well help them out). Sage said sure and gave them the title to transfer over to them. And it turns out that they know how to install an engine so we were able to do it entirely for barter as that’s about what we’d pay to switch the engines over. And even if we didn’t do it with them, it was nice to give a car to them that they obviously needed more than we did. Nice also to get the car out from our parking space to make room for the van.

In the realm of getting (usually buying) stuff means you’re taking yourself more seriously in a particular role, today I finally got a copy of “Writers’ Market” from the library and that can sit next to “Travel Writing” on my desk. I may not have written much more yet but at least I look more serious anyway. Seriously, though, I do want to investigate places where I could submit articles or even the entirity of the manuscript of the walking to the ocean piece.

Today I have a “something interesting is going to happen” feeling. Ever get that? We do all the time though I can’t tell you for sure if it actually ever has meant anything. I just can’t get rid of the feeling that there’s something really fun in store for Paul and I while Sage is working this afternoon. I suppose I could make something happen easily enough if I could think of something.

I finally broke out of my cooking rut last night. I made something I’ve never made before – a quiche. I know, someone who talks about cooking as much as I have should have made one by now. But no, I never did. Paul has been really on about pies lately and I figured that it might be a fun idea to make a “pie” for dinner. It was a “Broccoli Bleu Cheese” quiche. I made it from the Cabbagetown Cafe Cookbook – and true to form it came out perfectly. The only thing that didn’t work was that my pie crust was a bit too small – I think it might well have been written for a deep dish crust. No matter, though, it was delicious despite my annoying Sage the entire time it cooked predicting that it was going to be a terrible flop Unfortunately Paul decided to go to sleep before it was done so he didn’t get to try any of that and instead had his cheese quesadilla and a few snacks before he went to sleep at about 7:00. He’s been gradually switching to his winter sleep schedule for a while now and it seems like that’s where we’re going now. He wakes up really early (6:00 this morning, 5:10 yesterday morning) but also goes to bed shortly after the sun goes down. There were times last winter where he would nurse to sleep as early as 5:00 PM. In the summers, though, he’s up until 9:00 or later.

Oh gad, I need to get a loaf of bread started before too long. Perhaps if I keep it short, Sage will find it easier to get these entries up. They really are piling up on her!

More on Fathering

Getting an early start today – I already got a bunch of paying work done and in the interest of trying to write something as often as possible (I won’t say every day lest I set myself up for failure) I thought I’d do another journal entry.

Yesterday was a good day for Paul. He finally got to have his pumpkin pie. We tried on his birthday to buy one and cook it in our failing oven but since the top (broiler) element was dead the pie pretty much remained soup no matter how long we cooked it. He was beyond disappointed. We tried to replace the element but that resulted in the oven not working at all, simply making horrible electrical humming noises and dimming the lights in the house. So a few weeks ago we bought a brand new stove and yesterday morning Paul finally got to make a pumpkin pie with Sage (it’s one of the only things she doesn’t mind cooking) while I worked. By the time the pie was done, Kite had arrived and we all had a short hangout. They all ate pie and I had my “roasted beverage alternative to coffee”. I’m not a fan of pumpkin pie I’ll tell you. I don’t know why. I also don’t know why I have to remind Sage of that fact every time she cooks it but it seems I do. I’ll be leaning over smelling the pie saying “This smells great – but I’m not much of one for pumpkin pie so I won’t have any.”

While I was writing yesterday’s entry Paul left with Kite for the afternoon and Sage worked while I browsed the web looking for some decent fathering sites. I read a bit more of Fathering magazine and managed to find a couple articles that I could stand but still can’t get behind most of what I see on the web for fathers. Much of it seems devoted to how to make things a little better without doing anything differently. For example, how to make the most of your time while you’re home but isn’t brave enough to suggest perhaps quitting the job you have that demands travel all the time and taking a pay cut in favor of spending more time with the kids. I know, I know, write something your own self if you have such a big problem with it. I’m working on it…

Sage and I worked a bit together on an ad campaign for Nesting Tyrtle Designs. Yes, that’s changed a little – Sage is doing logos, business cards and other print work. Sage had a ball yesterday making up bad ads (that were convincingly real and representative of what we see around town) and then doing a redesign of them. Then we went out and put up a few of those fliers around town. I think we might want to do that in Springfield, too, and maybe even some print advertising as well with the same theme.

When we got back from putting up the fliers we browsed eLance for some work for her and made a few bids. We got one response this morning but for mutual reasons we turned each other down. We’re hopeful, though, that eLance and others like it might be useful in building up some more business so I can spend less of my time working for money even than I currently do.

At 5:00, we went over to pick Paul up. He’d been running with Kite all day outside and was pretty exhausted. He got home, brought me a book, sat down next to me on the couch and fell asleep almost immediately for the night.

Sage and I didn’t get to spend that much time together, though – Sage was as tired as he was and went to sleep at about 7:00 herself, leaving me to stay up until 11:00 writing email and playing stupid computer games. It was nice having that much time to mess around on the computer by myself but I was pretty exhausted by the end and almost fell asleep reading The Bonesetter’s Daughter by Amy Tan which I’m almost finished with. Yet another good book by Amy Tan – can this woman write a bad novel? Seems like everything she writes is incredible.

I’m thinking of making a quiche today. Paul is so fond of pie and we have a few frozen pie crusts left over from what I bought for the pumpkin pie that I think he might enjoy a quiche. I’ve never made one before but how hard can it be? He also seems to be more interested in cooking together than he was before – he made bread with me this morning and the pies yesterday so perhaps he’ll help. I also have a plan to possibly make some peanut butter cookies too but need to make a small recipe and/or give some away so that they don’t become something that he decides he wants to eat to the exclusion of “real” food. Not that we’d let him feast on cookies, just that I don’t want to set up a power struggle if I can help it.

This morning I got an invitation to fly to New York to do some work for a week. It’s odd, six months ago I probably would’ve done it – after all, it’s only a week and I could probably bring everyone with. But now I don’t want to do it on so many levels. Of course there’s the not wanting to be in a plane or near a big city these days feeling. But there’s also just the comfort we’re feeling in just staying in the area. We’ve got quite a comfortable life right now – I don’t mean financially, but just the way our days go is really comfortable and I hate to leave it if I can help it. On the other hand a part of me still likes the idea of travelling and seeing other places (even ones like New York that I’ve seen before) and getting paid to do it. Maybe when things settle down a bit I’ll be up for a train trip somewhere. Sage and I are also feeling like we’d like to get out of the area some when we can – perhaps to Colorado or even just a bigger city in Missouri.

I’m going through a bit of a lull in my cooking life these days. I know I go through these periodically – where nothing seems fun to cook or interesting to eat so I just cook the same old stuff. I think we need some new staples. They’ve changed from our yurt days of red beans and rice and burritos but it’s still getting old to be eating the same things. And it’s hard while Sage’s teeth are so bad off – some things hurt her teeth to eat either due to how sweet they are (a sweet tomato sauce for example) or that they either don’t fill her up or make her stomach feel acidic (probably due to the fact that she can’t really chew properly). Add to that that Paul only likes a few things it seems and you can see how it might be difficult to get inspired about cooking. One good thing, though, about Paul’s cooking needs is that he seems to have a really hard time with processed foods – either affecting his behavior if they have sugar in them or making him cough and his eyes run if they have corn in them. At first this was a difficult thing to work around but as we get more knowlegeable about what has acceptible ingredients we find ourselves just cooking more from scratch and eating more whole foods as a family.

I’m rambling now and I think I might well be able to squeeze in a short nap before Sage and Paul come back so I’m going to try to do that now…

Any decent fathering sites?

Well, we were meant to get the van yesterday but it didn’t quite work out – turns out it needed a thermostat and will be going in the shop to get that done. As it gets closer I find myself waffling more and more as to how to publish this work. Part of me wants to keep it a big secret and publish it in print at the end. On the other hand, I feel moved to just go ahead and make it an online piece. So I’m at loose ends. There are advantages and disadvantages to ech, of course.

The advantage of publishing it in print is that it might lead down uncharted career waters so to speak. It could be an interesting adventure and work me into more “right livelihood” than I currently am. Of course the other side of that coin is that it is much more difficult and perhaps even not possible – especially if I don’t clean up my writing style a little from my all over the map disorganized way that I write for this journal. Oh right, and there is also the potential for failure staring me in the face in this path.

If I just were to publish it online I think it could potentially reach more people with what I believe is a good message (why would I write it otherwise?). And there are a whole host of selfish reasons. Less potential for failure being a big one, of course, but also the fact that I don’t have to wait as long for feedback. You may have gathered this already but at this stage in my life I feel like I need feedback throughout the writing process in order to continue to be motivated to write. Dumb, huh? I bet you could even plot it out on graph paper – the frequency of journal entries vs. the amount of (positive) email I received regarding them.

Allow me to blame our schooled culture for this one for a bit if you will. Consider that throughout my life, any opus of mine, if you will, whether it be a paper for school, a drawing or a project for work was judged throughout the process as well as at the end. And not only was it judged, it was judged in a way that had consequences. For example, I was never that good at drawing but was great at science and math. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy drawing and painting, I did. But I got better grades and more encouragement from getting an “A” on a biology exam than I did from doing a mediocre drawing.

And at work it gets worse, of course. Good work gets you more money. And more money, in our consumerist world, buys us more things to take our minds off the fact that we aren’t really doing what we enjoy and are spending hours and whole days away from our families.

Which leads me over to fathering in general. Has anyone here even tried to find decent fathering sites? Everything I could find recently in that vein was mediocre at best. Are dads just interested in “Mr. Mom” jokes on at-home dad sites or quizzes designed to help you see if you need to spend more time with your family that have questions like “Do you spend more than 50 days a year away from home on business?” Let’s be honest, folks, I’d say 70-90% of dads spend more than that away from home each year simply because they’re working full time. If you work 40 hours a week away from home and take two weeks of vacation a year you’re spending 83 1/3 days (23% of the available hours every year) away from home. If you sleep eight hours a night that means that 56% of your time you are unavailable to your family. And that doesn’t count overtime, commuting time or time spent getting ready for or decompressing from work. And a look at the sponsors for the fathering pages at about.com shows that the majority of them are divorce lawyers.

Anyway – it’s pretty maddening. Why isn’t there an alternadads like alternamoms? Why isn’t there a fathering magazine on par with Mothering. Sure there’s Fathering but it isn’t anywhere near the same quality. Ah – perhaps that’s what I’m crabby about. It looks to me like in the web (and in the real world from what I see in friends, and read in my email) women are willing to be different as parents – to go into wild uncharted waters with the hopes of changing something that doesn’t really work right now. Dads, though, seem to be just the opposite. They’re often the ones at home opposing extended nursing, homeschooling, unschooling, attachment parenting and the family bed. And the sites for fathers online show this. They do their best to present information that while helpful on some levels sometimes, still seems to keep the old paradigms alive. The most common things I see for at-home dad sites seem to be Mr. Mom sorts of jokes, at-home fathering being shown as just being a 50’s housewife/90’s soccer-mom stereotype, or articles on how to work at home. This last one I do appreciate, doing it myself, but I don’t see any articles on not picking an already established role and going with it. There are no articles by fathering pioneers, it would seem out there that I can find, let alone a site with several articles and discussion groups.

Okay – enough ranting for a while, you see where I’m going with this. It’s just maddening. And I know, the answer is fairly obvious though it’s just occuring to me at this moment. If I don’t like what I’m reading out there, I can jolly well write something myself. And if nobody will publish it I can certainly create the site to do that – we have the technology after all. And in fact, this site is doing that to some extent as long as I continue to be unable to find other cool dads out there who are up for talking about something different than the same old stuff.

Funny – it seems like I always have something to write about somewhere. I confess, I started this entry knowing that I should write but feeling that I hadn’t a thing to say. I know – I really should write something every day whether I feel inspired or not.

Paul’s Memories

Not a great deal of time to spend before I need to go to bed but I wanted to write something nonetheless if only a disconnected series of things I keep meaning to write about. Though work seems to be slowing down I don’t seem to have any more time to write than I did in the worst of my busy-ness.

Today I had an interesting conversation with Paul. We were reading a “Child’s History of Palestine” or something like that – a book from the late 40’s/early 50’s about early Palestine and how people lived. Not so much from the religious standpoint as from the day to day life view. At one point they talked in the book about swaddling clothes and I was reminded about how tightly they bound Paul up at the hospital and in how many blankets he was in in the middle of August. I asked if he remembered that and he said he did. Then for the heck of it I asked if he remembered what it was like when he was “inside mama”. He said he did and so I asked what he remembered hearing. He said he remembered “mama’s stomach bumping, and granny and someone else talking.” I then asked what he saw and he said that it was dark and he was scared. Then I asked him what he felt and he said: “I felt a worm – it was my friend.” It truly sounds like he actually remembers some of his prenatal time – what a trip.

Things are shifting in our lives again I think towards Sage working and me possibly actually starting this trip to the ocean project with Paul. Work is petering out a bit and there’ve been some major management shakeups there that I’m unsure of how they’ll affect my possibilities for getting contracts. Meanwhile Sage has two paying jobs now redesigning two sites and a third paying job designing business cards and fliers for someone. And on the transportation front a friend has a van she’s not using that she’s allowing us to use for a while as she doesn’t need it. This will allow Sage, once she gets used to driving the van, to pick Paul, Kite and I up along the way when we need breaks.

So now I just need to work more on my writing. I realize I’m not as good as I could be, or should be for that matter. I haven’t a great deal of experience. Not only that, I don’t edit these entries – they are all stream of consciousness. In three years I’ve never actually proofread or anything so it’ll be interesting to see what happens when I actually do that. I’m struggling some with this shift – to even be able to think of myself as an “aspiring writer” let alone a writer. I have a plan to check into the county writers’ guild and see about going to a meeting but I have to admit that I am worried they’ll see I’m an impostor or somesuch. Isn’t that crazy? But it’s true – for the past 20 years or more I’ve thought of myself as someone good at science, math and computers but not really posessing much else in talent. I realize that much of that has been shaped by some of my early interests and aptitudes and was siezed upon by the schools I went to as a “track” I should be on and that that can be overcome so I’m hopeful. And if not it’ll certainly be a fun walk for us all.

Paul’s got a cold and so he might be awake in the night so I need to be getting to sleep soon so I’m cutting it shorter than planned to allow myself the time to get a good rest in case he wakes up in the night.

Halloween

I realized when I finished the last entry and saw what Sage wrote about our time at the “Fall Festival” at the Christian school I wanted to mention one of the things that struck me a great deal about my time there. And that was the “lunch menu”. It was absolutely horrifying. Apparently they don’t have a cafeteria. So instead they order out from a different restaurant every day. But not good healthy food. Nope, not them. They had (not in order), Sonic (fast food drive-in burgers & fries for those of you outside the midwest), McDonalds, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and one local cafe (they seem to call places that serve diner food in this part of the country “cafes” for some odd reason). I don’t know about you, but I can’t see any kid getting a healthy meal from any of those places. Certainly they won’t get a balanced one from the fast food places. Is this legal? Or are private schools exempted from USDA rules on what should be served for school lunches. Not that those are any better. After all, it was Ronald Reagan’s administration as I remember that declared ketchup a vegetable. And when I was a kid a salad at school was a small pile of iceberg lettuce with “salad dressing” (read: miracle whip) on it. But there were actual real vegetables to be found if only canned ones. And it’s further scary to see a school, ostensibly a place designed to teach children how to live serving nothing but high fat low nutrition snacks. No wonder obesity is a problem more than ever with our children and that kids and even infants are now showing arterial plaque.

We had a great time on Halloween, by the way. Paul actually managed to have a nap in the afternoon and was awakened by a couple kids trick or treating at the door. Which reminds me once again to say what really amazing kids live in our town. Sure I’m sure there are some exceptions but for the most part we’ve loved most of the kids we met. The kids that came to our door were about 11 or so and we gave them organic raisins, apologizing to them as we realized that Sage and I weren’t fond of the houses giving out healthy stuff. They were all excited and gave us a little bit of a (joking) hard time about it. Then they said “We’re going to egg your house!!!” As they walked away, one of the kids turned around and said “We’re just kidding.” and grinned. Then we noticed that groups of teenagers were riding around in the back of pickup trucks and being loud and boisterous. But instead of tossing eggs or otherwise giving us a hard time they would yell “Trick or Treat!” or “Happy Halloween!” instead. In fact the worst thing that happened was someone yelled “BOO!” at us from a passing car as we were walking and scared the hell out of us which gave everyone a good laugh.

Yes, we do in fact live in a Jimmy Stewart movie. Thanks for asking.

Yesterday I had a lovely day which could’ve been a pretty awful one given it’s start. Despite Paul’s going to bed at about 9:00 or so and having had only 3-4 treats (mostly lollypops only slightly touched before moving on) he woke up at 5:00 AM. Sage and I had made the mistake of staying up until like 10:30 or so and so we were tired grumps and it was dark outside and everything seemed beyond dismal. But Sage very graciously let me go back to bed for two hours after which I was fairly well refreshed. Then she slept for a couple hours herself while Paul stayed up and played, and helped me some with the dishes. Then we all ate lunch and I worked for a few hours while Paul and Sage played. When it was my turn, Paul and I got in the car and went to the health food store to get a few things and then went to the park. What a great time that was. It was a sort of cloudy cool day so there weren’t many people there and so we just flew the kite together and ran around the field before he decided we should act out the “Three Little Dinosaurs” (from a book similar in theme to the three little pigs) with him being one of the dinosaurs in his soccer-net house. It was a lovely time.

Then we headed out and decided to check out a new grocery salvage that opened up just outside of town (close enough that our car didn’t get scared and quit). What a find. This one had amazingly cheap prices and tons of health food, organic food and gourmet stuff. And the prices were insanely low. In particular I regretted having bought soy milk at the health food store at about $2.50 as they were selling it for $0.50 each there. But our best find was finding Raos pasta sauce again. They had one jar left and we got it for about $0.99. It still had it’s original price tag of $8.59 on it. I can’t imagine anyone willingly paying that for a jar of sauce. Sure it is delicious but that’s truly unecessarily excessive if you ask me. But at $0.99 it can’t be beat. It seems to be missing it’s label so I’m not sure which variety it is but given the color it seems to be a vodka sauce. I haven’t had pasta with vodka sauce since the last time I was in NJ. What a treat.

Today is sort of up in the air as to what’s going to happen. There’s a chance that Kite and Paul will be going to the womens’ land for the afternoon. If that’s the case we’ll have to skip today’s playgroup. But we haven’t seen Kite yet so it might be cancelled. We’ll see.

Sage is back from the library (she’s got a story there that I’m guessing she’ll share sometime) and is about to have a bath so I need to cut this short.