The “Seize the Day Summer” has not started well. The children and I have not yet had a real meal this week. I have not taken them or myself to the gym once. We have done zero adventures.
It all started on Monday, midday, when I dashed downtown for a quick dental cleaning. It’s a ten minute drive each way, plus a half hour for the cleaning – I left home at 11:30 expecting to return shortly after noon. Instead, as I was parking our beast of a car (Ford Expedition Max) as close to the curb as possible, I ripped the ever-loving shitake out of the sidewall of the front driver side tire. The gash was about two inches long, air just gushing out of it as I stepped out of the car. I called roadside assist and then just went ahead and had the dental cleaning. Roadside assist estimated 37-67 minutes – perhaps this would time out perfectly!
Alas, it was not to be. My nationwide roadside assistance coverage partners with local providers to provide support, and the first local provider they chose strung me along adding a half hour, then another half hour, then another and another until it was almost 4:00 pm. And then they canceled. I notified Roadside Assist and they got another provider assigned. About ten minutes later, that provider called and said they had no one to help and would have to cancel – annoying but I appreciated them at least telling me immediately. At this point I was in despair – I had not brought my laptop so was getting no work done, and had not gone home because I kept thinking they would come any minute, and it was 100 degrees out and I was in one of my cuter dresses and not feeling empowered to do it myself. I wrote a desperate facebook post asking locals for help, and they came through with an awesome recommendation of a towing company that came five minutes after I called. The guy – an older Iranian man – practically had to put his head in the sewer to get the jack in place. “Hey, next time you rip you tire” he said in a thick accent, “you do in nicer place, yeah? The smell down here is – ” he pinched his nose and mimed waving stench away, a twinkle in his eye. “Next tire problem you pick nice field, wildflowers and grass, yes?”
I did not get home until after 5pm, and I was so nervey and annoyed. I ordered pizza, ate way too much of it, and went to bed grumpy. Liam, of all people, actually came to my bed at 2 am that night because he’d had a nightmare. He crawled in on the Prof’s side of the bed and slept by me the rest of the night – which he has not done in years.
Tuesday was just a particularly busy one at work – busy enough that I had to skip the gym. Not unhappy or bad, but just one of those days with one call after another after another. I also had to drop Liam at piano practice uptown and take Jack to see a movie with friends downtown right at the same time, so that was hectic. I had to get a policy draft finished so I stayed up working til almost midnight – something I don’t do so often these days. I presume the boys ate enough to stay alive – I made neither lunch nor dinner. We did manage to watch our show before bed, at least, and they lectured me soundly for not knowing every character’s name and then kept pausing it and testing my knowledge and reacting with mock outrage at my wrong answers. It was genuinely kinda cute – their exasperation with their out of touch ma. I wasn’t faking though – these characters in Arcane have weird names and a lot of them kinda look the same and I don’t have room in my brain to store this data.
Today is a fresh new day. I slept poorly last night but still popped up bright and early as usual. Took the dog on a half hour walk before the heat gets completely unbearable, and now I’m settling in for the workday. The boys are on screens – my carefully drafted daily routine schedule has gone right out the window. Perhaps I just need to write a new, more realistic one. It’s ok to have unstructured time, my goal with the schedule was merely to keep them from mind-melding with video games for over 10 hours a day, and also to have short daily adventures where we leave the house. I can manage that without a detailed schedule, I suppose.
Two other short things – my Happier App has prompted me to choose a signature color, and also choose a song to characterize my summer. The song I chose is “Worship” by Lizzo – that song is a bop and always perks me up, and I listen to it every day when I walk the dog. As for a signature color – the sisters make clear in their podcast that they don’t expect people to go out and buy clothes or accessories in this color. Instead, they suggest picking a color and then searching for it in the world. For example, look for royal blue throughout the Metropolitan Museum – see how many places you can spot it. It turns mundane errands into quests, and refreshes sights that have turned invisible to us from over-exposure. So, I initially chose Pantone 336, a peacock green, but then looked out my window and realized that everything is green in NOLA right now and that might not be a challenging quest. And who wants an unchallenging quest! The challenge is the point! So I’ve switched it to Pantone’s color of the year – Viva Magenta. I might even order a Pantone paint chip to carry around with me and look for it.