Tue. July 22, 2003: Mouse/Mom drove up from A2 & arrived mid afternoon. Walked the beach and swam. Mouse and I simultaneously read Goose’s book, The Lovely Bones — nice light beach reading. Walked the beach a million times. Katie & Kristen are here with kids: triplets plus Katie’s three. They told me about Saddam’s sons being killed at which point i realized I haven’t paid any attention to news ALL SUMMER! 🙂

That was my first post ever. Isn’t it loverly? At the time, I had no intention of continuing my blahg beyond the month or so I spent at the moominbeach that summer. It was a non-telephonic means of communicating with the GG and Lizard Breath, who were staying on the Planet Ann Arbor for most of the time Mouse and I were at the Moominbeach. I hate telephones. Except my loverly iPhone, which I use for just about everything BUT phone calls. Somehow I kept going after I landed back on the planet. And going. And going. Times have changed and now I spend most of my summers slaving away in the coal mines while the GG gallivants up to the moominbeach. Such is the career trajectory of a moom who put her children ahead of her career for many years. Not that I’m complaining. It was what it was and I feel pretty lucky that someone, namely my long-suffering cat-herding boss, decided I was worth hiring to do something more interesting than make peanut butter sandwiches (there’s a story behind that and someday I’ll tell it but not yet).

There’s some old wives’ tale that seven years is often a rocky time for a marriage. The GG and I have somehow made it to four times that number of years but I remember the vicinity of seven years pretty well and I think I get why, at least for us. Lemme see. Seven years was about the time that the GG rediscovered some of the hobbies of too much fun that he knew and loved as a youth. I did NOT like some of those hobbies. For one thing, some of those hobbies involved camping and/or they were NOISY. Right or wrong, I felt strongly that my two and four-year-old daughters came before any of MY hobbies et al and I resented the time he left me with the girls to pursue his interests. Now do not misunderstand. The GG was an equal partner in raising children and he always happily let me have time to do the things I wanted to do. Somehow when the children were young I could not give myself permission to go out and do them. But. Not too many years later, our roles had shifted a bit. The beach urchins were older and more independent and, well, we were all GIRLS, so we did more stuff together and somehow I didn’t resent the GG going off and having his own fun, often with his twin brother. Still later, with teenagers, it was sometimes a relief to have him off camping or having too much fun back in the woods. The Landfill isn’t a large house and I learned that I could actually sort of get it a bit de-cluttered without four full-sized people in it. And then there were the years when the beach urchins were grown and variously off at college or study abroad or working in California. We had an empty nest and I wasn’t working and therefore could actually be available to help out my octogenarians, etc.

Yikes, I’ll stop there! Not sure how I got off on that tangent. A blahg is really not like a marriage although it does get to be a kind of a living thing in its own kind of way. I wonder if my blahg will make it to 28 years… I dunno. I’m not stopping any time soon but who knows. If today was the first day of my blahg, what would I blahg about? I can think of a few things…

• I felt REEAAAALLLLYY slodgy today. It’s hot and humid and I am on the Planet Ann Arbor. And I have a blasted BLISTER on one of my feet and that makes me mad because it’s hard to walk umpteen gazillion miles with a blister but I did it ANYWAY.
• We had a baby shower for a male co-worker today. Let’s just say he isn’t the most warm and fuzzy person but he is good at what he does and we all love him anyway. We played a GAME. Yes. A bunch of geeks played a shower game. We were put into groups and we had to construct a diaper out of tissue paper and a few other flimsy materials, figure out how to hang it from a coat hanger and and then fill it with various things. We actually had fun.
• Tornado sirens were blaring when I walked out of work today. Not sure why because the storms were (still are) all to the west of us.
• Ginger the dog (two years old) had possession of a dead squirrel in the woods this afternoon and wouldn’t even let her owner get near her. We aren’t sure if Ginger killed the squirrel or if it was dead when she found it. Owner had to go home and get oven mitts (for handling Ginger) and ham (for luring Ginger away from the squirrel). Hopefully Ginger’s owner did not have to call the dogcatcher for her own dog. It started raining big-time and I left.

Onward into the probably tornado-filled night!

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