Snow Storm Shopping

The forecast was looking super nasty on Tuesday and we thought there was a decent chance we’d be snowed in Wednesday and Thursday, and possibly even Friday. Still at work, I realized that although we had plenty of food from my shopping trip the weekend before (my type-A meal planning routine was paying off), we didn’t have enough bread for sandwiches. This might be a problem since now all three of us were going to be lunching at home. Zoe and I had also attacked the bagels pretty hard and our sleeve of six was already down to two. Okay, bread and bagels. The bread might be a little hard to come by on a last-minute trip to the grocery store with a snow storm looming, but I was confident I could score some bagels. I drove straight from work to the grocery store, along with the rest of St. Louis.

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2022 Comes With…Teepees?

Happy New Year, friends! Kicking off 2022 with lots of good intentions for this next trip around the sun. My morning meditation told me I have to be open to new possibilities and to new people but my default position is to sit on my couch and not move so we’ll see how that goes. I did step way out of my comfort zone and sign up for a spring writers retreat in Cabo where I’ll stay in a teepee. Granted, it’s billed as a “luxury teepee” and comes with a king-size bed and a bathroom, so it’s closer to a conical hotel room than an actual teepee. It looks like a teepee on the outside, though, so let’s just stick with that.

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Welcome to Amytown

When M and I were first married, the ink not yet dry on our marriage certificate, he began to act strangely. Instead of coming home each night after work, he went to his grandmother’s. “I am making her a plant stand,” he said. “She wants me to make her a plant stand.” Okay, fine, but when it was taking days, then weeks, I had my doubts. I had seen Grandma’s plant stands. A plant stand was a slab of Formica with a kitchen cabinet handle affixed to each end and casters mounted to the bottom. This allowed her to place tall plants in giant pots wherever she wanted in her house. She already had quite a few, built for her, I suppose, by her incredibly handy husband. He had passed away a couple of years before we got married, though, so I guess she needed another one and it was up to her grandson, who had inherited her husband’s mechanical inclinations, to make one.

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Headed Toward Divorce

It started off so, so good. We were constantly together. I loved the connection. I grew reliant upon it. I altered my lifestyle according to the nudges, the encouragement, and I was happy. Until I wasn’t. Until I realized that I was behaving in ridiculous ways just to avoid the nagging, the subtle comments intended to motivate but that really only induced guilt. Panic would set in if I didn’t conform to expectations. Really, who can live up to that constant pressure? It was time for, at the very least, a trial separation.

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Light’s Out!

Sometimes it’s not the technology that malfunctions…

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