Things are looking up this morning, oddly enough. Aside from the fact that in the half-sleeping stage between when Matt’s alarm went off and when mine went off, I kept thinking today was Sunday, it’s gone darn well. It’s $1 breakfast burrito day at our favorite coffee shop, so we went out for breakfast. Crazy! We spent $4 total – 2 burritos and 2 cups of coffee.

I need to pay the bills this afternoon when I get home, but the library book sale is over, which means anything that’s still there is free. I’ll go over and look at the potential loot in a bit. And then I’ll be taking Dr. Grounds for a haircut and then home. I’ve got some non-manuscript writing that needs to get done, and I’ve decided that since we’re giving up TV for Lent, and since that’s a much bigger sacrifice for Matt than it is for me, I’m going to seriously cut back on my leisure reading so that we can spend more time doing things together.

This makes it especially ironic that I might have gone overboard a little bit at the library yesterday. You might ask, “How do you go overboard at the library?” And rightly so. It’s hard to go overboard when things are free, wouldn’t you say? But I came home with six big hardback fantasy epics and four paperbacks. . . and I already have about 30 books on my “to read soon” shelf, and that’s not counting the three or four that have come out recently but I haven’t gotten my hands on. It also doesn’t count the stack of four or five nonfiction books that I keep telling myself I’ll read, because darn it I need more nonfiction in my reading diet.

I think it’s also time that I admitted that my stack of books I got part of the way through and meant to come back to just aren’t going to grab my attention again and need to be either returned to their respective owners or replaced on my general fiction shelves. I’ll try them again sooner or later, probably, but for now I’ve lost interest.

And I’m thinking that even though I said I wasn’t going to keep track of the books I’ve read any more, I like doing that more than I realized, so I’ll keep it up in some form or another.

And just in case you have a baby who’s not earning its keep around the house, here’s today’s must-have item:

One: Does anybody know how to get the WordPress Stats page to give me the day-by-day line graph of how many people visit instead of the indecipherable bar chart thing? It will give me the line graph consistently for a while, and then all of a sudden the stupid bar chart, and then after a week or two it goes back. I have no idea how to change it, and I’ve looked everywhere I can think of. Help? Anyone?

Two: I’m fighting depression. Funny, because things have gone so well for over a year now, since I caved and went to the doctor about meds. Not that I haven’t noticed it here and there. Give or take a few days, early December and early March tend to be harder on me than the rest of the year, and that puts me solidly in, well… danger seems like such a dramatic word. Anyway, it’s logical that I’d be having a bit more trouble these days, that’s all I mean to say. And I have been. But I’m doing what I can, moving forward in baby steps, at least. Better than standing still. But it’s wicked hard to focus, and really easy to get frustrated and give up.

Not very witty or melodramatic today, sorry to say. Maybe tomorrow.

Okay, so that might be false advertising, because I’m not at all certain this will be a great update. But it will be an update, so it’s only 50% potentially false.

I’ve been reading a lot lately. I realize that some of you may laugh at such a statement, but I mean that I have been reading even more than usual lately, mostly because I haven’t been able to get my poor brain to focus on spitting out its own original material, so I’ve been inundating it with other people’s stories. I have no idea what I hope to accomplish in so doing, but that seems to be what’s happening.

In positive news, just in case you were wondering, Matt loves me. Do you want to know how I know? Of course you do! And even if you don’t, I’m going to tell you, because it’s my blog and I’ll cry if I want to. Oh, wait. Sorry. I had a Leslie Gore moment, but I think it’s done now. . . . Yeah. We’re clear.

But back to the issue at hand. How do I know Matt loves me, you ask? Because he cleaned the house today AND he made me gravy. That’s right, folks. Gravy. Chicken gravy especially for me to have to biscuits for dinner tonight, and enough to take care of dinner for both of us tomorrow night.

“But Betsy,” you say, “you don’t strike me as a biscuits and gravy kind of girl.”

Ah, and you’d be right. I don’t like just any biscuits and gravy. Well, chances are that I like almost any kind of biscuits. But gravy? I’m picky about my gravy.

That’s right.

And with that, I’m going to try to write a few more pages tonight. Because, you know, this manuscript has to get finished sometime.

Oh, and Bob2 is still alive, as far as I can tell.

It provides too much distraction, as I think all of you know. Or maybe I should say, Facebook provides too much distraction. And chatting. Yes, it’s definitely a leave the laptop at home kind of day.

Remember those things I was going to check off my to-do list a few days ago? Well, as it turns out, I didn’t get everything checked off (hey, don’t look at me like that–it was a long list) so I’ll be finishing those things today, as much as I can. And I’ll do laundry tonight, since rumor has it my husband is perilously close to the Cliff of No Underwear. And, you know, I’ll take care of the toffee that’s been taking up the middle shelf of the fridge for the last week and a half. Okay, two weeks. Otherwise, I’ll be writing thank-you notes I should have sent two weeks ago and rewriting a newsletter article that I already wrote most of once and then managed to delete. Gotta love that.

And when I finish those things, I’ll be writing the book I’ve already finished once, but couldn’t resist tearing up so I could finish it again. Because I felt like it. And it will make the book better. A lot better. Just you wait.

Just you wait, ‘Enry ‘Iggins! Just! You! Wait!

Sorry, I had a Musical Moment there. It won’t happen again. At least, not in this post, because I’m stopping. . . now.

Thanks for the well-wishes for Bob2. He’s survived the week, at least, despite the fact that the little rocks around his base? Yeah, they’re glued in. But never fear. I will find a way to water him. But not too much.

We hope.

I got more done last month than I thought I did, looking at numbers instead of feelings of moving forward, but that just goes to show that if I could actually get my brain to turn on every day, I’d get TONS done. So I feel less bad about completely wasting a month, because I didn’t, but I didn’t use the time all that well, either.

Today is a day for crossing things off my to-do list.

Good quote from Howard Thurman, American theologian, clergyman, and activist:

Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

On October 4, 2006, my husband gave me a cactus as a birthday gift. I was excited about this, not because I particularly like cacti in and of themselves, but because they are notoriously hard to kill. And I am not a green thumb. In fact, you might call mine a plague-infested blackened thumb of DOOM! So I was happy with my hardy cactus, whom I named Bob. Meet Bob:

Hi, Bob!

Look, he’s even got a little Bob-bud! He grew a few more, too, but I didn’t get any photos of them. Bob lived longer than all the other plants I’ve ever cared for, combined. I watered him! But not too much! Or so I thought. Still, he only made it about nine months before his pretty pink head decayed and fell off, and then his stem turned into goop that resembled hair gel inside a thin, waxy skin. It wasn’t pretty. For his sake, I didn’t take pictures of the end times.

When Bob’s headless goop started growing black mold, I had to admit that I had killed a cactus. The plague-infested blackened thumb of DOOM had struck again!

Matt, in a kind-hearted attempt to ease the sting of failure, has developed a theory that Bob was only meant to live for one season, as a clever plot from the cactus-growers to sell more Bobs! Or something. I’m not convinced that he’s right.

This is all going somewhere, I promise. Really. Stick with me.

Fast forward two and a half years: the date is February 10, 2009. (Yes, I know today’s the 11th. I’m setting the scene, people.) Matt went into the grocery store to buy shiitake mushrooms for dinner while I waited in the car. He came back out with–surprise!–my valentine’s day present:

I call him Bob2.

Hi Bob2!

Bob2, according to his handy dandy care tag, is a “resilient” cactus. The “care meter” has three types of cactus listed: Delicate, Tolerant, and Resilient. Resilient means Bob2 “grows virtually anywhere with little care”. Woohoo! I suspect, based on this scale, that Bob was probably “delicate”. Poor Bob.

I tried to take a picture of Bob2′s tag, so you could see this information for yourselves, but had very little luck. I did, however, catch the most important bit without glare or super-fuzzy focus:

Exotic! And, more important–Everlasting!!!

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Okay, I don’t, but I know one thing you might be thinking. It’s that I’ve finally got a plant that even my plague-infested black thumb of DOOM can’t kill. Not so hasty, sir!

There are so many ways this can go bad. Here they are, in rough order from least worrisome to most:

First, Bob2 is supposed to remain in temperatures about 50 degrees. Not a problem. He’ll stay inside during the winter and probably out on the porch railing in the summer, once temperatures are reliably warm enough.

Second, Bob2 needs “High Light”. We’re going to put him in the office in the winter, since that gets the afternoon sun, but we often have all the curtains closed for heat and light conservation. Once summer comes, I suspect he’ll stay out on the porch railing, where he’ll get sun regardless of the state of our curtains. But what if medium or low light for his first few months with us weakens poor Bob2? I wouldn’t be too worried, except that I do have a record of killing cacti.

Third, Bob2 is supposed to be fed every six months. Fed what? And how am I supposed to remember when 6 months has passed? I can’t even remember what the last movie I watched was, and that was two days ago.

And fourth, Bob2 is supposed to be watered only when his soil is completely dry. This, you might think, would be the easy part. But wait. Scroll back up to Bob2′s picture. Go ahead, I’ll wait until you get back. You see those pebbles? Am I allowed to move those? I don’t know. Going off my own initiative has, universally, ended up with death. But they’re in the way! I can’t tell when the soil is dry! I don’t even know for certain that there IS soil under there!

Poor Bob2. Doomed before he really had a chance.

Abraham Lincoln biographer Carl Sandburg, in an address to Congress, 1959:

Not often in the story of mankind does a man arrive on Earth who is both steel and velvet, who is as hard as rock and soft as drifting fog, who holds in his heart and mind the paradox of terrible storm and peace unspeakable and perfect.

It intrigues me as much because of its truth in Lincoln’s case as because such a character, whether male or female, would be a worthwhile challenge to create.

Every so often I force myself to clean out, whether it’s the closet or the file cabinet or my desk or the boxes of history I lug around the country whenever we move. This last move prompted me to go through one of those boxes of history, and I came across some writing from my late high school and early college years.

Most of this writing is. . . existential, shall we say. Even in the pieces in which there is a character doing something, the plot isn’t the point. It was a rough time for me, in a lot of ways, trying to figure out how to be myself and interact with the world, and most of the time I felt wildly unequipped and out of place. Not that it was all terrible, because it wasn’t, just very confusing.

Based on the date, I wrote this about three weeks after arriving in Hungary–foreign place, strange situation, no return home for another three months, and I was trying to make a decision about where to go to college. And so, on February 15, 2000, I wrote this:

I float from place to place, attached and not attached, flying free and bound with chains. The blowing wind forces me forward as the pounding waves crash over me, throwing me flat on my back and rendering me unable to proceed. The sky is under my feet, the earth spreads across the expanse above me, and I tumble through space. I smell the darkness, feel the sunset, and see the song of birds. All is nothing, but nothing is everything and more.

I scare myself but still am happy, content to rise and struggle against the tide once more. Sometimes I retreat and spend my time building sandcastles that I know will be overwhelmed when the waves come again. And still I walk on the sky, my toes whispering through the clouds as I breathe the dirt of the earth above me.

Nothing is as it should be and yet everything is right. The paradoxes blend and mesh until they no longer contradict, but rather complement each other. And still I float.

Have I mentioned that I really like Double Stuf Oreos? Because I do. I know I shouldn’t, but I do.

Thing That Made My Day Today: Got home, picked up the mail, and found a thank-you card from our landlords. Just saying they hope we’re liking the condo and thanks for being such good tenants and here’s a $25 movie gift card so we can have a date night. Ha! How cool is that?? And srsly, they must have had horrible tenants before, because I don’t think we’ve been anything other than average, certainly not excellent enough to merit a $25 prize after two months. But hey, I’m not about to complain. Free date night! Whee! Have I mentioned I really like our landlords? Because I do. I really do.

Plan For The Evening: Laundry, and watching movies from the library while I eat my Double Stuf Oreos. And if catfish is on sale, Matt’s probably going to make me fried beer battered catfish. YUM. It’s a fine evening, folks. I’m going to enjoy it.

I haven’t been doing a very good job of following the news lately. No, seriously, I didn’t even know about a coal train that derailed within three miles of my house a few weeks ago.

But eventually I do hear about things, and the recent peanut butter recall was one that had me sending Matt to the pantry to dig out all his granola bars, because he always gets peanut-buttery ones. So he pulls out a CLIF bar and I read him off the dates that are supposedly contaminated, and he says oh, yeah, this is one of them.

And then he looks again in the pantry and says “That’s all we have.”

“Didn’t we buy a whole bunch a little while ago?”

“Yeah. I already ate them.”

I’m not sure if I can describe why, but this has me laughing so hard my eyes are tearing up. He ate them. No salmonella here, or at least none that affected him.

He ate them. *snorfle*

Good night to all, and may your accidental peanut butter eatings be as uneventful as Matt’s.