Missed the Bus

Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it come to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.
-- Henry David Thoreau

Monday, September 17, 2001
One year ago: Bring It On
Three years ago: A Sore Point

Today Jack started a class in developing for Office XP. This was free, since it's a beta class, and he'll be giving feedback on the class structure, content, and so on. He fit the background they were looking for perfectly! And he might get some good concepts for our business stuff.

Unfortunately, his daughter H---- picked this morning to miss the bus to school! Rats! When she looked at the clock and said, "Seven fourteen! The bus comes at eleven minutes after!" I asked her to run to the bus stop and check if everyone was gone. (It's less than a block away, just around the corner.) In the meantime, I put in my contact lenses and prepared to drive her to school. I was rather aggravated, though.

"Let's go!" I said. "But school doesn't start until seven forty; we don't have to leave right away..." "We're leaving now." I wouldn't mind if she had to wait outside the building for a few minutes -- sheesh! As we were walking to my car, we talked, and I'm afraid I was rather short with her. Suggestions last night about getting her clothes ready the night before, and so on, hadn't been followed. "I was so tired last night!" But she'd been sitting on the couch for an hour and a half after we'd gotten back from Olympia, so I replied, "I don't want to hear those excuses."

I was over it by the time we got to the school, but I definitely don't want this to become an ongoing situation. I don't even think we should be prompting her to wake up, or to get moving in the morning; this is her responsibility, and we have neighbors who will certainly be disturbed if we (I mean Jack) bellow down the basement stairs, "H----, are you awake?!" at six thirty in the morning.

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I've gotten addicted to the Organizedhome.com discussion boards. The site itself has lots of good ideas and suggestions, but I'm always attracted to first-person testimony and such. It's also filling up the gap left by the DECLUTTR email list, which is down due to the WTC attack. The server that hosts that list is located at a college in Manhattan, and their connectivity has been damaged.

Jack and H---- have cooperated with my efforts on the house, which I appreciate. Now, while living as a household is new, is the time to set habits and patterns, I'm convinced. I need this myself, now that I'm not living alone. Jack is doing the laundry, and I do the dishes. We may need to work out a schedule for other household cleaning and maintenance. H--- does her own clothing (her choice), which is convenient since her room is next to the washer and dryer.

The positive news today was H---, unprompted, asking what she should make for dinner tomorrow. In the future she'll be able to decide this herself (I think that would be more fun, don't you?), but for this time, I picked out something from Peg Bracken's I Hate to Cook Book that was simple and that I knew we had the ingredients for already.

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The crisis this evening was H---'s uniform for Civil Air Patrol (C.A.P.). She needed to get some patches and insignia attached to her BDU (battle dress, uniform). I'd suggested that she and her dad work on this last night, but that hadn't happened. So we got out my old Singer Featherweight, and the ironing board, and Jack and she began the stressful project of ironing on the patches in the Exact Right Place, then sewing them down to reinforce this. I just tried to stay out of the way, after getting the dark blue thread loaded on the bobbin and threaded through the needle. But it's not easy sewing a round patch, on the outside of a sleeve, with an unfamiliar machine. Jack did get rather heated about it. There was time pressure, too, since the meeting was supposed to start at six forty five. H--- was upset about the uniform not looking good enough, or being exactly right. Yikes!

Finally they left and I returned to the office. But they returned in just a few minutes! The meeting had been canceled due to the heightened security and all, but they hadn't let us know. Shouldn't they have called or something? But H--- didn't go hang her uniform up; instead she left the jacket (called a "blouse") on the couch and her jungle boots on the floor. (Oh yeah, another crisis at dinner time -- the black shoe polish, when Jack found it, was so old that it had cracked up into a powder, so no polished boots. This was only a mini-crisis since the boots are new and still look ok.) But this bodes ill for next week. If the uniform is crumpled on the floor, that makes more work for H---- trying to get it ironed and wrinkle-free then. Maybe I'll go out to dinner Monday night!

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I got some interesting email from a long-time reader the other day:

"Your sunniness always puzzled me, especially at the beginning, since I was so depressed and didn't see a whole lot of reason why you should feel so much better. I remember wanting to ask you why the journal wasn't more introspective. I wondered why you didn't write about 'important' stuff like why you had never married (or had you?), or your feelings about the increasing likelihood that you wouldn't have children. Of course, I've read many online journals that were introspective up the wazoo, for a bit - but yours is the only one I come back to. I couldn't stand Jack at first. I didn't think he appreciated you enough. I was sure you could do better! My goodness."

By the way, I love getting feedback and comments, so don't feel shy. I've had readers comment before on my cheerfulness (Pep, Vim and Verve, Titanic). I think it's the way I write; I know I'm not always perfectly happy and perky but it doesn't come across. Perky! I don't think of myself that way at all.

I've never been too introspective in my writing. I think that's the part of me I'm private about, though I tell a fair amount about what I'm actually doing in my life.

I think I probably never married because I didn't take steps to get out there and meet potential partners! My besetting flaw is getting stuck in a rut, and when I left college and broke up with my college boyfriend, I worked in a job where I didn't meet compatible guys much. But I enjoyed my life and drifted along, until I needed to uproot myself, move here to Seattle, and be my parents' caregiver. It took some time to get over that, but finally, in 1997, I did take steps to meet men!

No kids -- that was a tough one. But if I'd been craving them earlier in life, I should have done more about it then! I do think about the fact that no one in my family has daughters. Who will take care of us in our old age? If Jack weren't so set on no more child-raising, I'd think about adopting a girl from overseas.

I giggled when I read about Jack not being "good enough" for me. Naturally, I think he's great! He's very appreciative of me, too.