Just When I thought I Was getting Boring

~ Bitchy After 60

It was frustrating and stressful. It was the first day of high school, and I couldn’t find the right lineup to get into or any one to help me figure out how/where to obtain my class schedule. It was 1975. There was no technology for this type of administrative task back then. There wouldn’t be for years. Then I woke up, agitated and exhausted. It had been a night of restless sleep and burning hot feet. Of a still aching jaw, the result of a Halloween mishap with a peanut M & M, that kept me from opening my mouth wide enough to eat steak for weeks. Almost two months later, and it is still acting up. I still have to cut burritos when we order them in. It was 5:30 in the morning, New Year’s Eve and JT’s birthday; but there was no damn way I was getting up yet. so I rolled over and went back to sleep wondering why on earth I had a dream/nightmare about high school.

Then there was the bat that somehow managed to get into our bedroom where all of us were having a conversation. The Doc, still in bed; me, standing at the foot; and JT, somewhere out of my range of vision. The bat headed straight for The Doc and dove under the covers next to his head. It made me think about when I was little, and my family went to a cabin on vacation where a bat landed on the foot of my bed. I was a stoic kid and didn’t even scream. Then I was trying to figure out how we were going to get that bat out of the bed and why The Doc was still laying there, although it had taken only a half second for the whole event to take place. Then I woke up again. A lot less agitated and with a calmer jaw. Who knew that bats were less stressful than high school? 

Previously to all this, I had been thinking about JT’s birthday, which is always our holiday wrap up, and how easy this year’s season had been. Easy because I did very little of the cooking. Other than making dressing, mulled wine and a cheesecake in advance to take to my stepson’s place Christmas Day, where we numbered seven, I got to sit and enjoy watching someone else prepare the rest of Christmas dinner. And it was delicious. The next day we had charcuterie before heading home. Again no cooking on my part. Someone else cooking is one of the best gifts anyone can give me.

By the time The Doc’s birthday rolled around on the 28th, the restaurant had cancelled our reservation; but JT offered to cook Japanese rice bowls and make fancy cocktails. All very yummy. All I made was a blueberry grunt for dessert, which takes about 15 minutes.

Now all that is left is our New Year’s Eve birthday for JT, which always involves good food. Today, The Doc is cooking Shrimp Pad Thai, because JT loves the Doc’s Pad Thai; and I get off with contributing a lemon meringue pie, because JT, ever since he was very little, prefers pie. Said pie is now complete and sitting on the kitchen counter, zesty with lemon rind and a little bit of the knuckle of my right thumb. 

I had been also trying to come up with a topic for a new blog. I was beginning to think that I, and they, were becoming boring. I had covered the Christmas/Birthday season wrap in our house in previous years. Would you really want to hear about them again? I was guessing not, but my thoughts on new subject matter were lacking. I was feeling pretty content but very far from creative. The most stressful, and possibly creative, thing I did over the holidays was figuring out how to refold the instructions for my new headphones a couple of days ago. And really that wasn’t stressful. So this is where I was when I went to sleep last night. Calm, stress free and boring. Who knows how my brain got from this to high school and bats, but it makes interesting blog fodder for sure. 

Thank you for reading  

Photos:  Jenn Stone

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22 thoughts on “Just When I thought I Was getting Boring”

  2. those were quite the dreams!

    I guess I’ve been spoiled with never having to cook anything for a holiday meal, but I can imagine how nice it must be to take time off from doing so.

    I may be having Pad Thai for dinner tonight also, but with tofu…

    Happy Birthday to JT, and Happy New Year to you and your family.

    by the way, I never find your posts boring!

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  3. Do you have to grunt while eating the blueberry dessert… because that could get rather noisy.
    Having someone else cook is indeed a gift, one I never receive in our home because my husband can’t. Not without setting off the smoke alarm anyway..

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  4. I love bats! Like cute little mice with wings. One got into a Youth Hostel once where I was staying and everyone was flapping around hysterically so it was left to me to catch the poor thing before it died of fright and put it back outside. It was lovely and furry and warm.

    Happy New Year

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  8. Who can explain why we dream what we dream? The mind is a curious instrument. Your bat experience reminded me of when I was painting a two-story house (I used to paint houses in the summer to bring in some extra cash). A deck came off the second floor, and I was up on a ladder painting in a small crevasse where the deck nearly touched the house. The angle was such that I couldn’t see inside the crevasse. My brush pressed against something, and I startled a sleeping bat. It flew off and scared me far more as I nearly fell off the ladder in the process.

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