A post that can only be titled "arrgh!"

Ready for a bit of complaining?

I am super stressed out right now. Not only has the pace at work picked up, with TONS of activities going on and record high attendance numbers (81 participants in religious education last Sunday!), but the family arrangements this year with two kids in two different schools is also really hectic.

I'm like a duck - I'm trying to look all serene on the top while I'm paddling like hell under the surface.

Not sure how serene I'm managing to look, anyway. :)

It's amazing to me how my home is becoming less a "how do I want to live and how do I want it to look in here" issue and more of a "is there clean laundry and food to eat?" issue. Any time I have at home that I'm not sleeping, I am working hard to keep up with dirty dishes, laundry, and food preparation. The toilet is still getting scrubbed once a week, and the floor vacuumed about as often, but I just don't have time to really clean. And yardwork has to be squeezed in as well, so I'm out there mowing and weeding and repairing fences in the little windows of time I can find.

I just got a book from the library about bathroom remodeling and "fix-ups" written for women. I should be excited to become empowered to go ahead and fix my bathrooms myself, but it also raises a feeling of bitterness in me. Yes, I'm going to wear the pants in this family, as the saying goes, but darn it - I still have to wash those pants! And iron them if they need it, and mend them and shop for them in the first place.

I can do it all. But to be honest, I don't want to. I would welcome old-fashioned divisions of labor if that actually took some of the stuff off my To Do List.

This is only half about my particular partner in life and his particular ability and eagerness to do housework. So many people, like my husband, have jobs that don't allow for them to be any help at home at all. Maybe in the past that situation would mean that we would hire Help. I can't hire Help, but man, do I NEED some Help.

20 Things I'm Loving Right Now

Inspired by Salt and Chocolate, I've been keeping a list in my personal diary of things I'm loving right now.

Here is the first 20 from that list:

1. Take-out or dining at a place that knows your regular order.

2. local food from the Farmer's Market

3. My Reisenthel basket and cart. They make shopping at the market easy.

4. The quiet of the new prius

5. My Queen Bee purse and wallet, so durable and easy to use.

6. Marinated artichoke hearts in jumbo jars from Costco

7. String cheese

8. super crisp fall apples

9. photo postcards from snapfish and how much fun they are to send to grandparents

10. coffee flavor syrup, and my own coffee from home in a travel cup

11. the local library

12. Netflix Instant Watch

13. my children's schools

14. my yoga practice

15. Snap circuits

16. John Stewart and Stephen Colbert

17. brie with rice crackers

18. my community

19. great, guilt-free clothing bought from thrift stores, consignment shops, or ebay

20. Having a washing machine again

Food is a big part of what makes me happy, as you can see. What is making you happy right now? What do you love?

Recent notes from my urban homestead

• We just ate the last jar of the applesauce I made in 2008. It was still good, and very tasty warmed up and served with french toast.
• Since we had to kill the one chicken, now the other chickens are all doing well and laying lots of eggs. We have plenty of eggs to eat.
• In related issues, it turned out that a 6 year old laying hen really was NOT good eating. But we had a memorial dinner to her anyway, when I made Hungarian paprikash. And then I made broth, which was incredibly rich and flavored two soups.
• I bought 20 pounds of apples at the market, which I plan to just store in the garage and eat. When they start to go soft, I can bake them or make some more sauce.
• Our garden hasn't done well at all this year, but we are still getting small harvests, such as this week's pictured here.
• We've had a series of sick days for my husband and myself in the last few weeks, leading to way too much carry out food and styrofoam containers and wasted veggies that just went bad in our frige, uncooked. We're drinking lots of tea and taking our Vitamin C and echinecea, but there's still some nasty bugs knocking us down.

Celebrate the Seasons

The part of paganism that I love is the connection to the turnings of the seasons and to nature. It used to drive me crazy that I couldn't celebrate the sabbats the "right" way, because of not having time off work or because whatever special thing was called for wasn't actually, well, in season here.

That is paganism from a book - and a dogmatic and I think silly approach. Now, my eclectic spiritual tapestry holds a different thread - a sincere and hands on appreciation of nature and the seasons. Rather than worry about celebrating pagan sabbats, I instead try to live my life seasonally.

When the apples come in, we should celebrate the apples.

Blessed Be.

I Love My Community

pictured: some of my church community making apple cider together at a member's home - an event they sold at the church auction to raise funds for the church.

I love my community: my church community and the larger community that I live in. I enjoy seeing people I know everywhere I go, stopping to chat, knowing folks and being a small part of their lives. But most of all, I enjoy participating in the life of the community - in events, in work, and in all the other things that are part of our shared lives together.

For the most part, I find that being part of the community in this way requires that we actually leave our own little homes and go out and show up for stuff. That's about it. I've read several book recently that seemed to suggest that in this day and age you will have to build your community from scratch. Naw - you might feel moved to add another option to those already out there but really, community is already available to you.

• If you have kids in a school, volunteer there. Show up for things.
• Join a church, and then do more than just attend Sunday mornings. Jump right in with both feet!
• Join your neighborhood association. Go to association meetings. Especially volunteer to help with block parties of any kind.
• Become a "regular". Go to the same restaurant over and over again. Be like clockwork with your errands so that the librarian is expecting you on Friday morning.
• Join the YMCA, and attend the exercise classes and get your kids involved in sports. Volunteer to coach!
• Support community theater and the arts and buy tickets to lots of shows.
• Attend as many community festivals and events as you can fit in your calendar. Better yet, join in - be in the parade or volunteer to help with the watershed festival.
• Find another organization to volunteer for: meals on wheels, big brothers/big sisters, etc.
• Even if you don't have kids in school, volunteer there. Be a lunch buddy or a reading buddy.

Sure, all this takes time. You don't have to do it all. And don't expect to make best friends everywhere you go. Good friends are different from community - something that took me a long time to realize. You need a few good friends. You need a lot of community.

Owl Pellets and Rebels

What wonderful timing, just as we are reading the Ga'Hoole series, that Carbon's science workshop series should include a workshop on Owls and he got to dissect a pellet. It was "just like in the pelletorium!" Carbon got very lucky with the pellet he was given, and it contained the remains of two small birds and a small mouse, with 2 intact (ish) skulls. He sorted it down to the level where he found catepillar larva as well, possibly what the birds or mouse had eaten - the stomach contents of the meal!

These workshops are offered through the local Children's Museum (the same place the girl goes to preschool) and are intended for homeschoolers. They do one series of four in the fall and another in the spring. I'm pulling him out of school early on Fridays so he can attend, because they are super fun and cool! Mostly, this is fine with Carbon's school, although this time we didn't quite follow proper procedure so I did get a very mild request from the attendance clerk that "next time" Carbon make a formal proposal to school meeting and get his excused absence approved by a vote of the meeting.

We have one more (unapproved!) absence next week for a workshop on chemistry and color. I'm feeling a bit like an educational rebel, not fitting in any boxes and taking a very unconventional "I want it all for my kids" approach. It's very much like Grace Llewellyn's book Guerrilla Learning: How to Give Your Kids a Real Education With or Without School. Love that book.

Things will get easier, people's minds will change, and you should be alive to see it.