Inconsequential Meanderings

 The other day, Husband showed me this cartoon. He couldn't stop laughing. He laughed for a solid ten minutes. Of course, the longer and harder he laughed, the more it made me laugh, too.

You know how it is when something just hits you right. 

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The other day, I was in the shower when I heard the bathroom door quietly open and close. A moment later, Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights" started blaring through the room, and since the bluetooth speaker was all the way across the room (and I was soaking wet), I couldn't throw the speaker against the wall. There are a few songs I just can't stand, and Husband knows that is one of them. 

A few minutes later, Neil Diamond's "I Am, I Said" started up. I gave up shouting at Husband to shut it off and started singing along at the top of my lungs, lamenting with Neil that our furniture refuses to acknowledge our existence. Husband just giggled to himself from the bedroom. 

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My Italian friend, Marco, and his wife are visiting family in Italy at the moment. He sent me this pic from the white beaches south of Livorno to make me jealous. 

Jerk.

Wait, is he flexing his legs to show off the muscles he has from playing tennis? Probably. I would, too, if I had any muscles.

And this one.

He lives in Seattle. I guess I can't begrudge him a little sunshine. 

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I thought of a good plot for a story: a girl excels at a sport and gets recruited to professional competition teams only to discover that, at those levels, the entire system is rigged because there is entirely too much money to be made to let anything happen by chance--or even skill. Once she learns this, she faces a serious choice.

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My son, Gary, asked me today what my earliest memory is. It is when I was two years old. My dad brought me into my parents' room to see my newborn baby brother, whom my mother had given birth to at home (on purpose). I remember some mild curiosity but no attachment to the small thing lying next to my mother.

Don't worry, we got to be very good friends as we got older.

My next memory is when that brother was now two years old and I was four. We had a gerbera daisy in a vase, and the stem had split in two, and both ends had curled up in opposite directions. I thought that was the coolest thing in the world, so I took the daisy and my little brother outside to show it to any of the dozens of kids who lived in my neighborhood. The first kids we encountered were a group of older boys (probably about seven or eight years old), and when I showed them the daisy, they grabbed it and stomped on it and laughed. I remember being a little sad about the daisy and curious as to why the boys had felt the need to destroy it, but I don't remember feeling fear that the boys would hurt me, too. 

Also from that time period: my parents owned a lot of 5-gallon buckets--probably for food storage, which they have always taken very seriously. I would stack the buckets in the living room and sit in the top one while watching cartoons (in the brief time that my parents actually owned a TV before I was a teenager). In my memory, I was so high up off the ground that it was like sitting in the top of a teetering tower, but I was probably only three or four buckets high at the most. 

This isn't an early memory, but I very clearly remember the satisfaction I used to get as a tween by arranging my mother's spice cabinet several times a month. Also taking all the ornaments off the Christmas tree and rehanging them in a different (more beautiful) way. I often wonder where that deep sense of satisfaction in organizing and arranging things went to. 

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I had to go to the high school today to get updated class rosters for each of our seminary periods. The counseling office was too busy, so I went and bothered one of the secretaries in the main office. They are all still struggling with the new system the school district is using, but she took some time to learn how to get me the information that I needed, which was very kind. On the way in and out, walking down the very long hallway to the exit closest to the seminary building, I encountered some seminary students and actually remembered their names. Small wins! There are plenty of times when I'm helping a student and know the student has been at seminary for a couple years, and I know their face, but I just can't remember their name, and I have to ask, and I watch them be just a little disappointed. 

Today I also enrolled Gary in seminary, even though he is still homeschooling. That means I have to run home and get him right before his class, but he enjoyed his class today. I put him in Kim's class. I wasn't playing favorites with the teachers. Kim's class had the lowest enrollment number at the time, so that's where I put Gary. 

Thanks. I'm done rambling.

And Just Like That, Summer Is Over

 Don't worry: I'm not going to regale you with lengthy tales of soybeans yet again, though I will say that the nut milk maker is awesome and worth every penny. I throw in a couple handfuls of raw soybeans, push a button, and thirty minutes later I have a liter of delicious hot soy milk before the thing starts cleaning itself. If I soak and boil a big batch of beans and store them in the fridge beforehand, I can have a liter of cold soy milk in three minutes (I just use the almond milk setting in that situation).

Did I mention it cleans itself? I made this video for my mom.

I have started taking both DHEA and 5-HTP, both of which help regulate female hormones, and I am happy to tell you that I have noticed a significant reduction in the frequency and intensity of hot flashes. I don't think the soy was having much of an effect on its own--delicious as it is--but maybe the combination of the DHEA and 5-HTP with the soy is what is making a big difference. I'm just happy to get some relief!

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Summer is over. I've been back at work for a couple weeks, and the students recently started their new school year. I have the best job. When kids yell, "Sister Aurora! I missed you so much!" it makes me smile. I spend all day having positive interactions with students and faculty. 

One of the students (a lovely young woman) left me this note yesterday:

How does it get better than that? I really didn't do anything special except be excited to see her and invite her into my office for chats because I knew she was going through some rough times. People just want to be seen and heard and loved for who they are. 

The former sophomore boys who decided I was their seminary mom last year all turned into high school juniors, sprouted a foot or two over the summer, are quietly proud of their (slightly) thickening facial hair, and are even more supremely confident that they are always welcome in my office--even at the most inconvenient of times. Well, they are always welcome as long as they refrain from turning all my paper clips into chains or using my office as a place to hide from classes they should be attending. As crazy busy as the first few days of school have been, I've managed to have some great talks with quite a few of them.

Working with the new faculty is turning out well. It's a different vibe, but everyone is learning to mesh. Griff is a strong leader, even if he is suddenly the youngest faculty member, and he has a knack for getting different personalities to work together without anyone feeling slighted. I have known Denise, one of the new teachers, for over a decade now, and I'm happy to say that we also work well together. As a former administrative assistant herself until three years ago, she has been a source of some really good tips and tricks for doing my job, though she is careful not to try to do my job for me and I am careful not to go to her with most of my questions. Griff is soft-training the other new teacher to our building, Josh, on the ins and outs of administration as a principal, so I try to include Josh as much as possible in the questions and conversations I have with Griff about day-to-day operations. Ryan, who ran a one-man-show in a Wyoming seminary for three decades before moving here for the 2021-22 school year, has now established himself as a trusted, loved, and respected teacher at this seminary and trusted assistant track coach at the high school. He only has four years until retirement, and he is happy to just be a teacher again. He is so good at building up the students he teaches and coaches, and many students love him. Kim still laughs at my jokes and still has an almost cult-like following amongst some of the students. Some of them will only talk to Kim about their troubles.

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Recently, our leather couch broke in a way that couldn't be repaired. There was no way I was going to put all that lovely leather out on the curb for trash day, so Husband helped me dismantle the couch for parts. 

We saved all the leather and the stretchy bands, to be used in future small upholstery projects. The dissected mess that ended up on the curb prompted some humorous comments from the neighbors about what must be going on in our house.

With some of the leather, I decided to make a traveler's notebook. I found a nicely-sized scrap and measured it out against some inexpensive composition books I bought from Walmart.

I ordered some eyelets and some elastic cording from Amazon, but because the cording will take a while to arrive, I bought some elastic cording from Walmart in the interim. The jewelry cording, the only kind I could find, is too thin, and the eyelets I ordered are too large, but it worked for now.

This is a blurry photo. Sorry! But you can see the eyelets I inserted in the spine in order to thread the elastic cording to the inside of the traveler's notebook. The cording provides four places for the composition books to be inserted by opening each of them to the middle and sliding one of the elastic cords into the spine. In the middle of the notebook's leather spine, I threaded another long piece of leather that wraps around and closes the notebook. 

I don't have a lot of leather tools, so I just rounded the square edges of the leather with scissors. I must say that the finished traveler's notebook feels very good in my hands. The leather is already soft and pliable after being on a couch for years and years, and it has a great patina. 

Aside from using smaller eyelets and thicker elastic cording in the future, I will also make a few handmade paper inserts and use the heavier composition books for something else. This will make the traveler's notebook a little lighter, and I can also include pockets for ephemera like receipts or other pieces of paper.

Now I guess I need to break it in by traveling somewhere. I currently have it in the purse that goes to work with me, but I believe it wants a much more ambitious adventure. 

My son, Gary, and his friend, JJ, saw my traveler's notebook and fell instantly in love. They both adore that kind of thing. I figured making a couple more would give me some more experience, so I found some pieces of leather large enough and crafted each of them their own traveler's notebook. They are both very happy with them, but, as fifteen-year-old boys, they will probably forget about them as soon as the immediate rush wears off, and the notebooks will gather dust under their beds or on a shelf somewhere. 

I am going to use more of the leather to make some bags, maybe as a gift for my MIL, who loves bags. The leather is thin enough for me to sew on my sewing machine with a special leather needle and heavy-duty thread. 

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Can you tell I'm going through the camera roll on my phone?

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Earlier this summer, Husband and I took Gary and his friend, Molly (with whom he has been besties since they were seven years old), on an impromptu trip to Crystal Hot Springs in Honeyville, Utah. Whenever we pass through Layton, Utah, we make a point of stopping at A Little Taste of Britain to get some fish and chips. 

Of all the pictures I took of these two, this one was, surprisingly, the least goofy. 

Husband dug into beef-and-onion pie and chips doused with malt vinegar and smothered with curry sauce. I chose fish and chips--also heavily doused in malt vinegar--and they were delicious. 

After lunch, we spent the rest of the afternoon simmering gently in the mineral hot springs. It was really hot outside, but it was still incredibly relaxing to be there. I just floated in the huge Olympic-sized pool that is kept at 85 deg. F between trips to the much warmer pools. Husband and the kids bought passes for the two water slides, but I had no interest in all of that and stuck with lazy floating and transdermal mineral absorption.

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In order to celebrate all the August birthdays, we got together as a family at a bowling alley. 

(I realize that, in all of the pics I have of Husband, he's wearing a dark gray t-shirt. The pics were taken weeks apart, at times, but he does own a lot of gray shirts. I promise he does not wear the same thing every day. Also, I do laundry regularly.)

Husband holding Nicholas next to our daughter, Sian, Nicholas's beautiful mommy.

Tyler and his daddy rode the roller coaster ride. Tyler did his very best to enjoy it, but he didn't really appreciate all the shaking.

Tyler loved bowling for the first time. He was so happy when he knocked down even one pin, and he cheered for everyone else's successes, as well. My daughter, Elannah, took particular pleasure in treating him to arcade games and winning him tickets for prizes. 

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I don't have pictures of this, but Husband recently turned 50 years old. I'm the best wife because I did not throw him a surprise party, which would have been his idea of the worst possible turn of events. Instead, I made him homemade beef-and-onion pies and roasted potatoes for his birthday dinner, and we spent a quiet evening at home with the boys. 

Speaking of roasted potatoes, my roasted potatoes came up spontaneously in conversation again last week at work. Griff occasionally talks about them with longing, reminiscing about the times I made them for the faculty, describing their crunchy, crispy exteriors and tender interiors to the new faculty members. I think he's hinting at something...

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I didn't accomplish all the things I planned to accomplish over the summer, but I really enjoyed it despite that. My older son, Joseph, made some great strides with coping with his anxiety/depression by finding a great therapist and working on positive coping methods. Husband managed to nearly finish the rough draft of his third book in his middle-grades series about a boy trying to prevent Ragnarok. My daughters each accomplished some of their own goals. 

I am content.