Camp Ennis

We've made it until Friday at last. Spring Break has been completely action packed - I'll need at least a week to recover myself. "Camp Ennis" has been an ongoing endeavor, playing outside in the backyard tent, roasting hotdogs and marshmallows and sleeping in tents in the living room. We stayed in a hotel with a mini indoor waterpark to kick things off and we've been to the Tulsa Air & Space Museum, the Jenks Aquarium and the Tulsa Zoo - and renewed our memberships for the year, insuring many many more visits. Today I'm setting up a mystery to be solved by my little detectives (I'm thinking a jewel heist of some sort.) I have a migraine, so my heart isn't in it like I hoped it would be. Naturally, Josh and I are having the first date night we've had in months tonight. Yesterday, he tilled the garden for me, so the plan is to start planting on Easter, after the snow is over. (I thought we would make Easter a symbolic day for planting "new life.") I'm hoping to add a touch of Alice in Wonderland to the garden this year. I'm all about whimsy.

Good Day Sunshine

I was right about Spring waiting in the wings. Today was so warm and sunny. Kasey and I spent all afternoon hauling rocks and shoveling dirt and repairing all the damage the backhow did to the front yard during the water leak repair. There was enough rock and dirt to do a little free landscaping; it killed my back, but it looks pretty good. I can't wait to plant flowers...and don't even get me started on my vegetable garden. It's going to be spectacular.

Today is the first day of the rest...

Spring is coming. I heard it yesterday. I had begun to think Winter had set up camp and begun working on a permanent residence, but I smelled watermelon and sunshine on the breeze yesterday afternoon and I knew Spring was waiting at the airport. It should be no time at all until I'm complaining about how hot it is.
As you can see from my intro, I'm feeling poetic and a little nosalgic today, so I thought I'd go for another Top 5.
You know those moments in time, when everything is absolutely perfect for just a fleeting second, and if you could stop the world and live in that moment, you would? Here are my Top 5, in no particular order. I'm hoping for plenty more to follow.

1. I've just turned 11. Junior high and adolescence and all the angst and drama that go with it are on the horizon, but for the moment, I am truly a child. The fireworks are exploding in a bright stream of noise and magnificence behind Cinderella's Castle. I'm riding a carousel horse, with my brand new satin princess hat on my head, purchased just minutes earlier at the Mad Hatter's Shop. "When You Wish Upon a Star," is playing overhead, my cousins, aka my best friends in the whole wide world, are sitting on either side of me, and tears are running down my face because the experience is a million times more magical than I had ever expected it to be.

2. I've just started college. I've left my easel and canvas, with all the smells of oil paint and turpentine and liquin indoors and gone outside to sketch the students milling around on the lawn. The sun is shining and reflecting off the pond and the breeze is warm. After an hour or so, I decide to skip my next class and throw everything into the car, where I spend the next couple of hours doing nothing but driving with the windows down and the music turned up.

3. It's the summer before my junior year of high school. I've been dating this guy for a couple of months and watching him play hockey with his friends for weeks now. I bring my skates and waste time skating around by myself, waiting to skate with him. I'm sitting down to take my skates off, when their leader, who is everyone's hero and far above questioning, tells me I'm no longer allowed to skate there without playing some hockey (which I've secretly been dying to do) and hands me a stick. I've been accepted into this boys' club and I'm excited and yet, I don't want to disappoint anyone. I live and breathe hockey for the rest of the summer.

4. We're on vacation together and the weather's still a little chilly. We've been through museums and malls, a zoo and a lot of pasta, steak and cheesecake. He hasn't proposed yet, but I know it's only a matter of time. When you're with someone you want to spend the rest of your life with, you can feel it. It seems like we have all the time in the world and our lives are stretched out before us, ready to become whatever we decide to make of them.

5. It's just last summer. The sun is high in the sky and you almost have to squint in the brightness. It's Kasey's first time at the lake and she has absolutely no fear of the water, bounding right in, splashing water everywhere. We spend the afternoon swimming, snacking and building an elaborate sand castle. We leave exhausted, sand-covered and deliriously happy.

I was pleased to discover how hard it was to narrow this down to just five. :)

Alfred & Stephen King

I think Google changes my login info every time I log out. I love that there's a little warning box each time, like my own personal butler, Alfred, to tilt his head and "tsk, tsk" me each time. "Oooh...are you sure that's the password you want to enter? *cringing face* It's not what you typed in last time. *whispering and leaning in closer* I'd try something else first, if I were you." (I think my Alfred may be gay.) It would be more useful if he'd just remember the password for me.
It's cold. Again. I'm thinking of making the inflatable bed a permanent part of our living room arrangement. We'll all just recline while we eat and hang out, like the ancient Greeks and Romans. I think we could make it fashionable. Speaking of which, I think we should go back to dressing like them as well. I feel like the last few decades have spewed themselves back onto the shelves in some sort of awful, mismatched assortment of ripped jeans and tie-dye and flannel and leg warmers. I'm not really sure what's going on there, but I don't want to be a part of it and Miley Cyrus can't make me. Though, Alice in Wonderland is cool again and quite frankly, I'm more than a little excited about that.
The books got the best of me yesterday and I've had trouble putting them down, just as I knew I would. I love Stephen King for so many reasons (and I won't go into all of them, or we'll be here for hours) but the thing I love the very most is that he is the only author who uses the intro as a chance to have a conversation with his "Constant Reader" (an especially un-facied up conversation with profanity and vulgarity when necessary) and update you on the goings-on in the King household and whatnot and then includes all his notes about where he was and what he was doing when he wrote whatever it was. If I may steal your opening, Mr. King, in Just After Sunset he concludes the intro with this:
"And now, let me get out of your way. But before I go, I want to thank you for coming. Would I still do what I do if you didn't? Yes, indeed I would. Because it makes me happy when the words fall together and the picture comes and the make-believe people do things that delight me. But it's better with you, Constant Reader. Always better with you."
How can you not love this man? Reading him makes me want to write, and writing nearly always leads me straight back to reading. It's a vicious cycle.

Back in the saddle

I'm back by popular demand [insert fanfare here.] I will spare the details of the domino effect stomach virus, in the midst of the water main leak/repair in our front yard. (Besides, I tried writing about it a couple of weeks ago and it was eaten by that notorious internet email/blog eater, second cousin to the sock gnome. I shall call him Harold from this point forward.) Since that time, Kasey has gotten sick not once, but twice, Josh had a vesectomy, and Zac is going through bronchitis/pneumonia round 2. Today, I have a migraine and I have spent the last 3 hours lying on our inflatable mattress in the living room, eating, watching old movies and of course, feeding my Facebook addiction. I have a stack of books from the library whispering my name from the coffeetable, but I've successfully ignored them thus far. I haven't worked on any real writing in weeks either. I need some motivation.
I'm ready for Spring. I want warm breezes and open windows and digging in the dirt. I've been compiling a list of all the things I want to do with the kids this summer: museums and gardening and ice skating and weekend road trips and a million visits to the zoo and the aquarium. I think Zac may be old enough to do some of the behind-the-scenes zoo clinics this year. We're also going to try a new fruit and a new vegetable each week, in hopes that we find SOMETHING they'll eat. Last night, I let them squeeze oranges into glasses and Zac said "It tastes just like orange juice!" Yeah, we definitely have some work to do.

Zoo

Yesterday was absolutely beautiful. George Harrison said he wrote "Here Comes the Sun" on the first warm day after a long, cold winter. Yesterday felt just like that. I loaded the kids up and we spent 3 hours walking around the zoo. Kasey had a minor meltdown, but it was nothing that a bag of Cheetos couldn't fix. Come to think of it, there's not much that a bag of Cheetos can't fix.

Resolutions

I didn't realize Taddy Porter's "private party" began with opening the Times Square New Year's Eve party live on stage - I cried like a big baby; I was so proud of them.

It's day 4 of my New Year's resolutions and so far, so good. Here is my list for this year:

- Write something every day

- Put away every load of laundry the second it comes out of the dryer (so I have no chance at
procrastinating)

- Be more positive

- Become more self-sufficient

- Learn a new skill

- Read more