Suburban Island

The Great Thanksgiving Day Potato Peel Crisis

QUESTION: Who can we get to peel the potatoes?

WHAT I LEARNED:  Potato peels are nothing to fool around with.

This is the last Thanksgiving and Christmas that we will be celebrating with both the kids still living at home.

At the turn of the year, my daughter will be moving out of state for her new job. I will miss her so much but I am excited for her too.  This isn’t her first move away from home. She lived out of state for grad school so I’ve had some experience with this. Nevertheless, I’m steeling myself for her departure as best I can as I know this is the big one, the last one, as she heads out for good. I know not having her around on a daily basis will be a bit traumatic for me.

My daughter is the person who likes all the same things I do. She is the person who is always up for a good talk. Everything is fun with her – shopping, watching TV, eating her delicious cooking, watching her many crafting projects take shape, traveling together.  I guess we’ll have to find ways to share some of that fun long distance.

My son will still be home so that will lift my spirits. My son is the kid I can watch the Search for Bigfoot and Grim episodes with. He’s the kid who can talk to me about politics. He was able to explain the ins-and-outs of World of Warcraft to his clueless mom. He has a great business mind and an enterprising spirit that’s very inspiring. When his sister’s birthday came up, he remembered she mentioned wanting a chaise lounge. He decided to barter for one. And he made it happen. I could never do that. I'm very impressed.

Both my kids love traditions and the holidays. My son is the kid who makes sure we have a pumpkin on our doorstep at Halloween. He’s the kid I can count on to make sure his dad doesn’t dodge the annual festooning of Christmas lights on all the available greenery in the front yard.  My daughter is the one who cooks up a storm, helps decorate around the house, and wraps everything in sight.

And I am thankful for all of this. Which brings me back to Thanksgiving.

We like a cozy Thanksgiving. We have our menu which we play around with each year.  This year it included: roast turkey with a cranberry glaze, potato bread dressing muffins, layered potato and sweet potato bake, rutabagas (old school favorite of my mom’s), rolls, cranberry sauce, green and black olives, and  pumpkin pie.

There was a lot of vegetable peeling to be done – a big bag of Yukon gold potatoes, three pounds of sweet potatoes, and 2 rutabagas. My son stepped up to that chore with good grace. I wasn’t supervising him. I was lazing around thinking how nice it was to have a four day weekend, how good the turkey smelled,  and how I was actually getting to sit down and relax for a few minutes before I initiated a flurry of side dish cooking.

I was kidding myself.

Yes, the flurry of side dish cooking was going to happen but not before the great potato peel adventure was put to rest. 

That would take a while.

I could have intervened and stopped the great potato peel adventure if I had thought about how my son would solve the problem of a sink full of potato peels before he even started on the project. I wasn’t thinking about potato peeling instruction though. I was thinking about how lucky I was to have someone in there doing all that work instead of me.

Probably, it was a little too late to intervene anyway by the time I heard the first loud whirls of the garbage disposal and the standard brother sister arguments floating from the kitchen about how potato peels and disposals ought to be managed. Still, it really didn’t hit me just how much trouble we were in until the increasingly strident grinding of the garbage disposal filled the room.

I dragged myself up from my comfy seat on the sofa and headed into the kitchen. The sink was filled with a floating concoction of water, sweet potato peels, regular potato peels, and the waxy-covered rutabaga peels. There were a lot of peels. The garbage disposal was being turned on and off but nothing was going down the drain.

Emergency. Our Thanksgiving dinner was in peril or at least at risk for being seriously delayed.

We brought in the special forces – my husband with a plunger.

All cooking plans were set aside so that my husband and son could wage war with the disposal. Plungers were wielded. A snaky thing appeared. And wrenches. Hungry men crawled under the sink. Instructions were barked. Schedules were torn asunder. A few prayers were said. The patience of all was tested.

After a mighty effort, the disposal did its job. The peels were vanquished. The disposal warriors went back to football. The holiday cooks (my daughter and I) re-entered the kitchen with new urgency.

Dinner was going to be late.  But we all learned a valuable lesson about the proper disposal of potato peels and increasing our basic kitchen skills.

Balancing Life by the Book

I miss Suburban Island. I wish I had kept writing and writing here until my fingers started to hurt. The thing is that you only have so much time and energy and you have to spread it around in different ways at different points in your life. Making family a priority, putting my best effort into my work, and the responsibilities of running a household took precedence. I got spread too thin and so I stepped away from my beloved Suburban Island.

Part of what tipped the scale for me was a new writing venture. For many years I had worked on and off on a novel. That manuscript was set aside, unfinished, for about a decade. I did not believe I could go back to it. Writing at Suburban Island kept me in touch with how much I loved to write though. It was during a particularly grueling stretch of daily living – wake up, work, work, work, do chores, do more chores, do good things with family, work, work, work, sleep a little, repeat – that my guardian angel must have taken it upon herself/himself to whisper a little reminder in my ear about my neglected manuscript. I needed that book to yank me off the treadmill and rebalance my life.

I knew I couldn’t write the same kind of book in the same kind of way—with the same voice, perspective, and tone. I thought that was bad. That this meant I couldn’t use much of what I had written. That it would become a chore instead of a pleasure to take it apart and put it back together again in a way that works for me now. That it might be impossible to do so anyway. That the whole thing was irretrievable.

I was wrong.

I dug up that manuscript and began reading. I couldn’t put it down. I liked the basic concept. I liked aspects of my characters. I knew where I wanted it to go. I would have to tear it apart but I could do things with it that excited me as a writer and I could write it like I couldn’t have written it before. And because it wasn't finished, I could take it places that made sense to me now. I had a writing project. I had my dream firmly back in place. That dream would sustain me and make me better at home, better at work, better at life, than I had been before. Having a dream is important. It enhances your daily life. Having the book was what I needed to jump off the treadmill and start walking my own path. I grasped the opportunity and never looked back.

Do you have a dream you've been putting off? Do you have to set something else aside so you can bring it to the front and start working on it again? What would you be willing to let go to pursue this bigger goal? What are you waiting for? What's holding you back?

I’m not the kind of person who runs around telling people that I’m writing a book which is why I never said anything on Suburban Island about it. It seemed a bit premature. I did tell a very few of my friends. Some, like dear Spritopias, were supportive and for that, I am eternally grateful. A few were clearly unimpressed by my dream. Perhaps they though me presumptuous or simply pedestrian. Why, after all,  everyone is writing a book. Hey, they’re writing a book too. Of course, they don’t have any words on the page but they could, if they could just get to it.

So I shut up about the book.

I wrote quietly for years in between all the day-to-day stuff and the important things like time with family.  I starting up again on the book wihile I was still writing Suburban Island with the intention of doing both. But what I found was that I couldn’t write on Suburban Island and write the book at the same time. I just couldn’t build in the time and I was having trouble with switching between the two because the voices and the themes were so different. I did not think my haitus from Suburban Island would last so long but it ended up serving me well.

The value of not writing on Suburban Island for an extended period of time was that it taught me something about who I am as a writer - that I like to be funny and positive, that sometimes I am a smartass, that if I can't integrate that into whatever I'm writing, I need to step back and ask why. What I found in the end is that I needed to pull in my true voice – my Suburban Island voice – into my novel. Something I did not think I could do. But I did it. And I love it. It works and my book is so much better for it.

Some people will be annoyed at you that you don’t just keep going on as you were. I get that. I have often wished that someone whose blog I regularly visited hadn't suddenly stopped blogging or slowly slipped off the face of the blogosphere. I miss those friends. Sometimes people just stop without an explanation. I wonder how they are. I wish they would write again but I understand they may not put a period on their blog or check back in with an explanation for why the aren't blogging right now for many reasons. Maybe they don't know how to explain. Maybe they keep thinking they're coming back. Maybe they just got tired out or something upset them and they need to walk away. Maybe they procrastinate. Mabye they don't want people to tell them why they shouldn't go. Whatever the reason, it has been my experience that your blogging friends will often find you in the new places that you land. I found many of my blogging friends elsewhere because we almost always land somewhere else these days – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or another blog because in the end, many of us just can’t resist that. 

I learned over these last few years of writing and rewriting that:

• Writing a blog is a powerful and valuable experience that can launch you into following your dreams in many different ways.
• If you love to write, you're going to keep writing...something.
• No matter what you write, what you do, you need to shine through. Don’t hide your true voice, rejoice in it.
• Whatever your dream is, don't neglect it. if writing is your dream, then don't set it aside, Find a way to fit it in. It will sustain you.
• You can’t always do everything at once even though you want to, even though others want you to, even though you feel guilty because you can’t.

Writing in whatever form it takes can keep you happy, keep you sane, keep you out of trouble in life. It may be your dream to write a blog, a journal, a memoir, a bunch of articles, a book, and if it is, at some point you must find a way to follow through on it. I did not want to grow old knowing that writing a book was a treasured goal of mine but I didn't find a way to fit pursuing it into my life.

That book I was writing turned out to be three. And there will be more beyond it. I love a series and now I'm writing one. I'm just about to release Book One in the series. It's one of the scariest and most exciting things I've ever done in my life. It's not the great American novel. I’m happy about that. It’s a paranormal romance. I am writing what I love. I've been hooked on the paranormal since I was a kid. When it’s published I’ll share the info here with all of you. I will probably be ramping up on an author blog and I'll share all that here too.  In rhe meantime, if you're looking for me you can find me @m_m_coleman on Twitter.

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?