Missing in Action

Today I had an email from Amazon informing me that I hadn’t posted for 60 days and if I did not hurry and update my blog they would summarily remove MTFF from Kindle subscriptions.

I was quite taken aback by this.

Not the threat of being kicked off the Kindle – I think I only have one actual subscriber and that is my father who unwittingly receives (but never reads) my posts on his because I gave him the device  and set up the account.  It was more the stark realisation that I haven’t actually written anything for that long.

So much has happened here, not all of it publishable, and the time I once spent happily tapping at the computer about the children or my mad meandering thoughts is somehow eaten up by the day to day busy-ness of life and I have little appetite to regurgitate it on to the blog at the end of the day. It could also be said that now I’m out of wretched Stepford my level of  human interaction has increased considerably so I’ve used my daily quota of words up IRL before I can think of a post.

But I do feel badly that my original objective, which was to keep a record of the growing children and the funny and touching things they do and say, has fallen by the wayside. Seven is so very TALL now, full of interesting thoughts and silly jokes that actually make sense and are occasionally really funny (although perhaps not the 3rd and 4th time) while Four is a proper little boy, my toddler gone forever, and is interested in numbers, pirates, doughnuts and skateboards.

I have delightful neighbours on this pretty San Francisco street with many other children of similar ages to my two. We have a small park at the bottom of the road with an immaculately clean playground, tennis courts and a baseball diamond, and our corner coffeeshop, run by a handsome and enterprising Greek who drives a giant yellow Hummer, is friendly and welcoming. I love it here.

Husband and I started a new business this summer and to our delight we gained our first client about a month ago. After celebrating this roaring success I settled into a temporary gloom at the realisation that I’d have to do some actual, erm, work, and this quickly gave way to panic once I sensed I had no fucking idea at all what I was doing, just making it up and hoping that Husband would correct my mistakes. There would be a lot of them.  But we’ve muddled on and I think it will be alright. Sort of. Plus I can feel my brain s t r e t c h i n g  in a way it hasn’t ever before. There is lots of science involved which I like, but I am the sort of person who likes to gloss over details and give grand accounts of the matter at hand and our proposition is exactly the opposite of that. No, not exactly the opposite. I have to give grand accounts but I also have to research and understand complex details which is exhausting but good for me, a bit like eating a large plate of crudites. Lots of healthy, edifying crunching.

In fact here is my business model:

Crunch, munch, crunch, munch, chew, ruminate, swallow, digest, burp, want to lie down and have a nap but can’t because Husband is looking, take deep breath,  regurgitate in fabulous manner and produce dazzling gourmet platter of facts that make frugal consumption seem glamorous, clever and compelling.

Any takers?

I think I’ll lie down now.

Something I haven’t done in a long time is write any music. I don’t know why. I just haven’t. I thought it was perhaps because I was sort of over it and couldn’t be bothered, or nobody was paying me to do it so I wasn’t going to turn on the machines that go ping and get lost in synths when I could be doing something edifying like, erm, something or other. Or maybe because I am getting older and I have nothing more to sing.

However, about a month ago when I heard my own dulcet tones on the sound system in the aforementioned coffeeshop ( a record, you understand, not me gripped by desperation and yodelling into the mike) I was very thrown and suddenly consumed by a tearful longing to compose again. Or maybe I was just wistful for a life when I could sit and roll spliffs and write music all day, or maybe it was the sorrow of the knowledge of the burden of my woeful middle-aged lumber towards death.

That might sound extreme, but I am not given to emotional modulation and went all funny for at least a week or two and made Husband’s life very unpleasant which wasn’t his fault at all though naturally it was his responsibility to put up with it and perhaps compensate me in some way for my existential angst.

I think perhaps it might be better for all of us if I just turned the damn machine on and wrote something.

In other news, Seven hates her current school because everyone is loud and rude to one another (her report) and she is doing the same work she did last year. Poor kid is bored and anxious, a terrible combination. We toured some other schools last week and she did a ‘shadow’ day at a couple of them and have now made the decision to pull her out of her San Francisco public (state) school and put her into a very nice, quiet, local Catholic school which looks like it will be a better fit. Husband was skeptical at first when I spoke of Catholic schools – he was concerned about the potential constriction of personal freedom through school uniform, abundance of religious dogma and has a deep, abiding loathing of the current Pope (actually can’t say he’s actively liked any of them). However he was swayed by the orderly, quiet classrooms, impressive academic standards, cheerful, polite students and, at the school we have chosen, the amazingly warm, friendly  principal who is clearly beloved by students, teachers and parents alike. He was faintly astonished later, when he asked me why she was called “Sister Shirley”, to discover that she was a nun.

cue overture, Hollywood musical of the 1940’s style, big voicover:

St. Ignatius school, starring Sister Shirley! The friendly neighborhood nun who hasn’t got a habit!

Especially as she emphasised how it we could be Catholic, not catholic, buddhist, atheist (what?), it was more important that the basic values of the church (kindness, respect, care for others etc) are embraced by the family. Seems reasonable enough. They also have several LGBT families and the last principal was openly gay so I’m thinking they’re not going to crush my precious flower with too much brand-specific holiness.
Seven is very excited about changing schools. She can’t wait to have a uniform (neither can I) and is especially happy that each child has his/her own desk and sits in formal rows. She seems to revel in the very old-fashioned-ness of their approach to schooling which is reminiscent of my own, very distant primary in Trinidad where time had stood still in ex-Colonial education for 30 years, and THAT was in the late 1970’s. Oh, except they are not allowed to hit you over the knuckles with a ruler any more if you whisper in chapel. I think the biggest sell might have been that she happened to shadow on the day of St. Francis, so school let out early in order to have a ‘pet blessing’ ceremony where the local priest flung holy water over 200 excited children and their even more excited dogs, cats and budgies brought in by the parents. It was quite a party, and she intends to be part of the in-crowd.

This post has rambled on slightly. I’m clearly out of practice and don’t have a pithy or succinct ending so I will sign off with a vague resolution that I won’t leave it another 60 days before I check in again. After all, I regard myself as a consummate professional and it just won’t do to get kicked off the Kindle and let my one (Hi Dad!) paid subscriber down.

If anyone is still out there reading, please say hello in the comments! It’s nice to know I’m not just talking to the wall.