live like grass

I’m more exhausted than I’ve been in a LONGGGGG time. This weekend was full of good things, but I went into it tired already & came out of it even tireder.

So please forgive me for letting go of reading everyone’s updates & distributing cheers for a while. I hate to miss your news, but I need to recover sanity.

I’ll still post the last few napowrimo prompts!

as long as the job isn’t TOO huge, & as long as I’m not in a rush, & as long as I have a good shovel to work with. I like shovels with bent handles.

I like making & drinking hot chocolate after shoveling. I like having pleasantly sore shoveling muscles in my shoulders & back.

(so sorry, you lovely birthday celebraters!), & at this point I expect this will be my last post till sometime after we return from Cartagena, on Colombia’s Caribbean coast! We shall see whether my current work project has to be left hanging in the interim – maybe by some miracle I can get the editing done before I take off. Am working on it tonight at home.

I’ll be vacationing with my husband, a sister & brother-in-law, & a brother. We are going to explore the city, snorkel in some gorgeous reefs, & sleep in hammocks (under mosquito nets, definitely!) in a national park one night. Among other things.

Take good care, friends! I look forward to catching up with you when I get back – & seeing some of you in Chicago on Oct. 26!

My body has reverted to nasty insomnia, & my doctor doesn’t have any medical fixes to suggest (we don’t want to use regular sleeping pills, since they create dependency). Right now I just don’t have much energy & am in a minimalist mode. Definitely grassy.

Better said, I’m crazy—I try absurdly hard to have it all. Right now I really need to remember that I am grass.

Went running today: fabulous.

Got one chapter edited: only half of what I’d hoped.

Made pesto & an especially wonderful dinner to go with it: my husband & I enjoyed every single bite.

Made plans for being “worship host” tomorrow at church, but did NOT identify people to help me do the readings. There was supposed to be somebody assigned to work with me on this, but the coordinator didn’t respond to multiple e-mails about it.

I’ll also be singing on the music team; fortunately that only requires showing up an hour early to practice.

Also tomorrow is the day of our monthly potluck after church, by the lake. I dithered & finally figured out that I could make baked beans in the crockpot overnight, from scratch but with minimal effort. The beans are on fast soak right now & when the timer goes off I’ll get them boiling.

Now I need to make up an order of worship for the service tomorrow.

It will be a beautiful service, because its success does not depend on me but on the Spirit of God.

Oh, & somehow I’ll catch up with the editing one of these days . . . or maybe I won’t quite make the deadline, & that won’t be the end of the world.

All flesh is as grass. I need not be the rock.

1. a friend visiting from Colombia invited us to dinner Monday night, and that ended up occupying the whole evening
2. an aunt, my father’s last surviving sibling, died and her funeral will be Sat. July 12; I need to attend, especially since none of my siblings can make it
3. my dad & his wife will be coming for the funeral & staying at our home, so a bit of cleaning/bedmaking will be required
4. my daughter is having knee surgery on Monday July 14 & I’ve agreed to spend the day with her

In spite of these complications, the work time that I do have is proving very productive. Last night I blitzed through a whole chapter in the freelance project, catching up with my interim schedule there. I’ll keep plugging away at it, & on Monday I’ll actually be able to use my daughter’s laptop so I’ll probably get the final pieces done on time. Meanwhile at work, I’m moving through my monster project more quickly than I had anticipated!

Grace is the breeze that blows through my grass.

We ordered a Swiss-made pressure cooker recently because we cook a lot of legumes from scratch, which takes forever. Now it’s incredibly quick & doesn’t heat up the kitchen. Right now I am making spicy cilantro hummus with chickpeas/garbanzos cooked in it. Bliss!

I loved being with my family of origin & assorted kids, in-laws & outlaws (two, with whom I have little contact, actually did recently do jail time!).

The portrait of my dad got done midday Saturday while some of my sisters were off buying cake & ice cream for the party that evening. Because of the messiness of chalk pastels, I cleared the sitting with the front desk person at the hotel; she OKed our use of the well-lit breakfast area. I got my son & my brother to sit & chat with my dad so he wouldn’t be bored. I didn’t give him peeks during the process, but others came by, watched & made comments. It felt a bit like my happy porch afternoons in remote NW Colombia, when community members would sit for portraits while children crowded around & commented & clamored for their turn. :-)

It was really, really wonderful to be painting with pastels again. And the portrait turned out well; the likeness is quite striking. (It helps that he’s a handsome 80-year-old!) I’m going to scan it so as to print copies for family members, then frame the original for my dad & his wife.

I need to express it!

1. Last month my husband was one of many passengers left in the lurch when [airline beginning with A] had to ground many of its planes for inspection. When he presented himself at the San Francisco airport to fly back to Chicago, he was told that he could either (a) take a different, overnight flight that would zigzag between several eastern cities over a period of many hours before depositing him in Chicago at 6 a.m. or (b) fly on another airline the following day.

He opted for the latter, but the staff told him there would be no reimbursement for hotel or meals because this was a situation outside of Airline A’s control. However, they did have a table laden with free cookies to console stranded passengers. He was not consoled; he called me on his cell phone on the spot & I verified that the New York Times had quoted an Airline A spokesperson assuring customers that the airline WAS responsible & would therefore reimburse any extra expenses. The SF staff denied it.

So he stayed in SF overnight, kept his receipts from his modest hotel & two modest meals, & came to Chicago the next day. The other day we went to Airline A’s website & found that in its feedback section it now has a category exclusively for complaints about the April groundings. We wrote a succinct note explaining what had happened, giving the total of expenses, and offering to provide the receipts.

Today he got a response from Airline A: please do send us the receipts, & here’s a link to a voucher to be used on future travel with us. The voucher is worth $500! That’s 4x the extra he had to spend.

We are delighted. Encouragement to others: If you were inconvenienced by this airline & not reimbursed for what was their fault, it’s definitely worth your time to pursue it.

And there’s more . . .

2. Recently my husband ordered a couple of things from Online Seller A, well known for selling books, music & many other products. The items were due to arrive May 5 but they haven’t showed up. Turns out Online Seller A sent them with a courier service that is notoriously unreliable; my husband found scads of online complaints about it. Coincidentally, its initial is also A. Using our tracking number, we were told by its website that our package had been delivered. Uh, not to us.

We called Online Seller A on Saturday; they got someone at Courier A who knew nothing about it & said to call on Monday. The person from Online Seller A, though, told me that if our package wasn’t delivered by noon today, I should call her company back & they would generate a new order & ship it to us free. That’s what I did today, & they happily complied. Hopefully Courier A will NOT be asked to deliver the order this time.

Saturday p.m. & tromped through a lovely forest full of spring wildflowers: spring beauties, violets, red trefoil & white trefoil, May-apples, cutleaf tooth-wort (I think that’s the right name!), marsh marigolds, & a couple of others I don’t remember.

When I stepped onto squishy low-lying land to photograph some marsh marigolds, the eyes of a man from Burundi (recently settled in Chicago after experiencing some terrifying things & fleeing with his family to a refugee camp where they lived for a couple of years) lit up. A friend translated: “It’s like our rice field back home.”

Somehow that moment was precious to me.

The retreat speaker was rather bland & didn’t know how to frame good questions for our group discussions, though he is a nice person. But we loved the time in the woods & by the lake, & there were some good conversations over meals & in our cabins. I came back full of clean air & woodsy smells. :-)