Suburban Island

Everything and Nothing

Suburban Island is back and has moved to: http://www.asuburbanisland.com. If you're reading this post, then you already know that. Glad to see you. It's been awhile.

Suburban Island has been on a break--okay, a long break. It more turned into a break than started off as one. It started off as just a few missed posts. Thanks to the power of procrastination, it snowballed into a full blown hiatus.

Have you ever noticed that the reasons for not keeping up with your blog grow exponentially the longer you go without posting? The blog moves from being a pleasure, to being a challenge, to being a chore, to being on a hiatus just like that. Saying you are on hiatus sounds so lofty too--like maybe you are working on a cure for a dreaded disease, writing the next great American novel, or just keeping up with daily life in such an extraordinary way that everyone around you is impressed and secretly jealous as hell.

It has been my personal experience that in actuality nothing newsworthy is likely to occur during a hiatus. That's okay. If you are taking it, even via the path of procrastination, maybe you need it anyway. There are a lot of reasons for the why of that. Maybe it’s just so you can finally catch up on your laundry, and watch all 7 seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer back-to-back because you never saw it when everyone else was watching it, and read as many paperback books as you like. Maybe it’s just so you put some extra energy into work without begrudging it too much. Maybe it’s just so you can spend some time with your kids because they won’t be in the house forever and you can see the time coming when you’ll miss having them there everyday so you can nag them about closing the fridge and picking up after themselves. Maybe it’s just because mixed in with the chores and the work and the nagging of your kids, is some of the important stuff in life that you’ve been losing track of and you need a little time to rediscover it.

At some point though, the process begins to turn back the other way. The hiatus starts to lose its luster. Great blog posts appear everywhere in your daily life and you neglect them. The great tales of laundry wars, cabbage soup diets, coffee quandaries, airport adventures, as well as the miracle of the found earring, all go untold. This fact disturb you. Your inner blogger says: This is just so wrong. These stories need to be told.

And, because that's where I am, I feel drawn to start up again on Suburban Island, telling these ordinary tales of life in suburbia - the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful, the philosophical and the slightly hysterical.

The bottom line... stay tuned for more Suburban Island.

No Nap Zone

I am go-to-bed-at-9:00-at-night tired. Of course, I am not going to bed at 9 at night. In my mind, Friday nights are for staying up late with the whole weekend stretched before me. I love that feeling and don't intent to sleep through the official start of my weekend.

And if you must know, I already tried to sneak in a nap right after dinner and it didn't work. That is because the activity in this house, which encompasses early-bird and night-owl schedules, never really settles down. When I snuggled up on the sofa this evening, suddenly so exhausted that I couldn't seem to move, I experienced the impact of this in a big-time way. First, there was the sound of my husband's voice drifting into the house from outside. Okay, I can block that out. Next, a door opens and closes. It opens and closes again. Maybe they are done. The phone rings. It's my daughter so I talk to her for a couple minutes. I snuggle down again, hopeful that it will quiet down now. The door to the garage opens. My husband starts running an air compressor. It sounds like a jackhammer. He leaves the door open for a minute to enhance the effect. It works.

I would go upstairs and cuddle up under the covers in bed but I know that someone will follow me as if drawn by an invisible magnet. They will turn on the light, open drawers, run the shower, ask me questions, or the phone will ring again. Even worse, I could actually fall asleep in spite of all this and miss my Friday night. So I get up and force myself to get going.

I said goodbye to my daughter as she went out the door to a baby shower and headed down to my office. As I started writing this post, my husband came in and out of the office (since it leads to the laundry room) several times. His power to disturb my sleep was gone now so it probably wasn't as much fun for him as it could have been and he had to do some laundry while he was at it.

So, with laundry in the washer and dryer, this post almost finished, and a nice big iced tea within easy reach, I am starting to feel that this Friday night is working out just fine after all.

Procrastination

Do you ever notice how when you don't do something for awhile that you should do, and maybe even like to do a lot, that not starting up again begins to take on a life of its own. It's like something inside of you starts embracing procrastination until you almost feel overwhelmed at the very idea of picking up where you left off. The devil is in the details and it seems like there is always some little detail that gets in the way of just doing it.

This happens to me in lots of different areas of my life. For instance, This spring I struggled for weeks to find my exercise shoes, workout clothes, and class schedule all in the same span of time so I could go to the gym. Solution: I quit the gym this summer and saved $65 a month. Bonus: I never had to actually find all that stuff for working out or buy it over again.

Or take dieting. Dieting is great for putting off because there are so many ways you can go wrong. I can't find the copy of the diet, haven't made a shopping list yet, keep forgetting to weigh myself in the morning I am supposed to begin so I must wait another day to start, cannot locate the food scale, and so much more. Diet and exercise provide a cornucopia of potential excuses for not getting on with things.

I find this with blogging too. I have lots of good excuses for not blogging lately. My favorite one is where I say I will write again soon. But not this minute. And the minutes go by and turn into days, and weeks, and yes, now months. I guess that's how it got to be September and Suburban Island has been ridiculously quiet since the end of June.

Don't worry. Suburban Island is still brimming with adventures even if I have not been very good about writing them up lately.

Travel Constraints

I don't know whether it is better to never go anywhere when you are a mom or go wherever you want and just let the chips fall where they may until you come back to create some vestige of order in the universe again.

A few weeks ago I went to Seattle for a conference. When I came home my son had no car (he had totalled it), the AC/Heating in our house had finally given up the ghost (nobody's fault), a retired Sid Dickens memory block had been knocked from the wall and glued back together (look, you can barely tell, my husband says to me with a straight face). And in the laundry room our dying dryer had been replaced with a "new" dryer that has to be about 20 years old. That's how he knocked the Sid Dickens block off the wall. Believe me when I tell you that this would not have happened on my watch (dryer or disaster).

While he was dragging in dryers and knocking artwork off the wall, he also managed to rearrange my whole office including undoing a cable for the wireless. It took me two days to find the problem after my return. I spent hours moving furniture, crawling around on the floor, and fighting dustballs in my little home office trying to figure out how to get it to work again. All the time the mysterious cable that turned out to be the key to creating harmony and efficiency in the daily lives of most of the inhabitants of our household was curled like a little black garden snake in a pile of nearby cords. That's what was wrong! My husband is very neat. Once the cable was out of the router he must have tidied up by adding it to the group where it might never have been discovered except for my persistence and the desperate prayers I shouted to the high Heaven's at strategic intervals for assistance in solving the lost wireless problem. Both tactics were necessary for as you can imagine, all the kids in the house are nearly weeping for want of the web while I tried to figure this one out. It did allow me to dust behind my desk and discover a foot massager had been deposited next to the wireless router while my husband was reorganizing things for me.

I don't know about you but I believe we all need a little space of our own. My office is my sanctuary. There is no room in it for my husband to store a foot massager and no call for anyone to rearrange my abundance of knick-knacks, papers, books, movies, and music. This is my landscape. My oasis. Hands off. How quickly the world will impinge on our sacred places if we give them an inch. He's going to find another place for that foot massager or it is going to find its way to the garage (his sacred space). I have a feeling I will be putting my stuff back the way that it was for months. I have just spotted a bobble head elephant stuffed behind a picture of my daughter and I at Dunn's River Falls in Ocho Rios. Now obviously the glass bag of goldfish that I bought from the Dollar store belongs next to that. If you are going to move things around at least use some common sense.

This isn't the first time that calamity has struck while I am away. Last time I took a trip my son stabbed himself in the leg with a pocket knife that opened up while he was sitting down.

Perhaps next time I should confiscate all car keys, potentially injurious possessions, and lock the office - the perfect center of life as we know it at our house - until I return.

But then, where would my sense of adventure be?

Banking for Dummies

Sometimes bloggers are sitting there minding their own business when something so blog-able happens that it is all we can do not to jump up and push people out of the way so we can get to a keyboard. I had one of those moments today at the drive-in window of the bank.

I was glad for it because I have been bad about blogging and had been tossing around some potential posts for a while with no actual post to show for it. Yes, I do want to tell you about the cruise I took to Alaska, and the conference I went to in Seattle, and the earthquake that occurred in my quiet Virginia neighborhood, but I just couldn’t write about those things because life got in the way or the words could not congeal as they should into a proper post.

But this – this was perfect. Imagine a yellow Toyota MR2 Spyder shining in the summer sunshine – top down, guy with baseball cap sitting inside it. He is happy with the world, happy with himself, happy with himself in this yellow convertible. He’s feeling pretty damn good. Little does he know that life is going to rain on his parade before he can lift the top on his spiffy little car or even pull out a tiny umbrella such as the ones we sometimes stuff under car seats for emergencies.

He was sitting at the drive-in window in all his happy ignorance as I pulled up behind him in the happy knowledge that I was about to check off one of my must-do chores for the day from my list. It looks like he is finishing up when a pivotal event occurs that sets everything into motion and it occurs in a clumsy flash. Mr. Cool Sports Car Guy drops the canister that goes into the pneumatic tube on the ground. This is not any tube but one of the tubes that belongs to the brand new pneumatic tube system just installed by the bank to replace the old beat up stuff they had in place before.

My friends, in life it is the little things that bite you in the ass. And so it is for this gentleman. He now makes what I like to call “a lazy-ass decision”. He doesn’t really want to get out of his car to retrieve the canister and so he makes a half-hearted effort to find it and then begins to pull away. Crunch. Grind. Oh my!

I am pretty sure that it was stuck under his car. Now he has upped the ante because he has to get this canister out from under the vehicle after all. And besides, to make the whole thing even better, it turns out that he had not quite finished his transaction. My brain is screaming – Blog post! Blog post!

So he has to back up. And that means that I have to back up too. I don’t mind because after all, as entertaining as all of this is, I have to get some banking done too. I pull up into an empty drive-through lane and start my banking transaction. In the meantime the guy is out of his car and he is holding the shattered tube in his hand. He asks the teller, “Do you have any more of these? I’m not done with my transaction.” He takes the broken tube and stuffs it down on the side of the booth and begins to conduct his business standing in front of the glass window with a whole new little container. I’m sure that it’s pretty hard to do this without feeling like an ass. Finally, business transacted, he hops back into his car with a slightly hunted look and drives away like he is expecting to be stopped and made to pay up for damage done at any second. A moment later a bank teller appears and makes a visual sweep of the area with great dignity edged in disbelief until her eyes fix on the demolished tool of business that had been so cruelly crushed beneath the wheels of a bright yellow MR2 Spyder.

Knowing my bank as I do, once a friendly community member and now a grasping heartless business entity, I believe Mr. Cool Sports Car Guy should not be surprised to discover a charge on his account.

As the teller said to him as he pulled away: "Have a nice day, sir."

Desperate Pottery

One of my friends had a birthday party at one of those paint your own pottery places. She's innately creative and perhaps she also recognizes the need for stress reduction through art therapy in her community of friends as well.

I attend such events with a certain trepidation mixed with bravado. I am not good at painting, drawing, or anything crafty. I envy those who are. Those people seem to surround me. My best friend is felting. Her pieces are exquisite. Another friend at work in knitting the most intricate tops. Yet another is making blankets for the needy. I can't do that stuff.

Still a birthday party is a birthday party. I went. It was interesting to see the approach to the pottery painting taken by the group. Some of us were meticulous. Some of us undertook sweeping pottery projects. Others chose very small do-able projects and lavished loving care of the piece. Some of us just picked out a small round plate and hoped for the best as we jumped into what we knew would end up being another artistic cautionary tale. I fell into the artistic cautionary tale category as one can see from the results of my pottery painting efforts as shown in the photo below.

Note the underlying sunshiny Suburban Island feel that ozzed from my brush without any conscious effort.

One of us got her pottery project displayed in the window after it was fired. Others were relegated to "the shelf". Not only was mine not in the window, when one of my officemates picked some of the pieces up for us she said that my piece was in a bag UNDER the window of her office. It was an act of kindness.

Like many artistic endeavors by those of us who really haven't done anything since we wove potholders during summer camp, we think our little project is going to turn out better than it actually does. I was grateful that my sunshine face was wrapped in a lot of paper so I was able to smuggle it out of the office with no displaying required.

It's on my living room table right now. I want to see how long it is before someone asked me where the hell it came from and what in heaven's name I was thinking when I took brush and paints in hand.

My daughter just arrived home. She said in essence: Don't quite your day job.