Why don't she write?

One of my all-time favorite movies is "Dances with Wolves" and there's a scene where they are traveling across the empty plains and come across a skeleton. One of them jokes, There's a family back East somewhere sayin' "Now why don't he write?!"

That's kinda where I am. Where I've been. Asking myself that same question and never coming up with a good answer. And so I waited. To be able to answer the question and make it a good answer. Somewhere around the two month period of waiting, I realized neither were coming and that while my thoughts about blogging weren't necessarily yet at the skeletal stage, they were definitely frozen and stuck.

It absolutely doesn't feel like I'm "back" but I'm peeking in for a moment because on some levels, I've missed it. And if I'm honest, because I've run out of ways to try to deal with some stuff and so it makes sense to revisit a place that once felt familiar.

I can't possibly go back and catch up, no matter how much the linear thinking planner in me might want to. So in no particular order, life, as always, has been happening. (I'm still comma crazy, some things never change.)

Chris turned 40 in October. Can I just say that it is about dang time? Uhhh yeah, I'm a wee bit older than he is and the big numbers are kind of a buzz kill when I get to them first. I threw him a surprise birthday party, a BYOB. It was a Buy Your Own Breakfast party. To be honest, it just didn't make sense to go into debt in order to celebrate, no matter how good the reason and so I thought, okay, people are apt to be willing to go out to breakfast and pay for their own so that's what I planned. It was at a nice restaurant and I had arranged for a tower of pancakes with candles in it to be brought out when we got there.

I still can't say for sure whether he knew what was up or not, but he was gracious enough to play along if he did know. What surprised us both, though, was that 24 people showed up on a Saturday morning to yell surprise and eat eggs and laugh together. It was a fun day.

Moving along and on a completely different note, we had mice in our house a few weeks ago. Yeah. gross, disgusting turd-leaving rodents got in through our laundry room which is oh-so-conveniently-for-them located next to our pantry. I was skeeved out time and again as I realized that they were getting in there and so we started setting traps. And one after another, we killed six of them. GROSS.

And then my wonderful now-40-year-old husband did what had been scaring the crap out of me for days. He removed every single item from the pantry, threw away about 75% of it, and sterilized the cans that couldn't be questionable as well as bleached the entire pantry from top to bottom. I could barely breathe through the bleach fumes when I got home and I couldn't have been happier.

I bought a couple of large plastic tubs and put the few things that were without question, because that had been the rule when cleaning out the pantry, when in doubt, throw it out. Turns out, pretty much everything that was in a cardboard package was questionable and really, it's the only way I could do it. Just toss it all.

So I've been slowly trying to restock the pantry with things as they go on sale. A couple of weeks ago, I saw boxes of dark chocolate brownie mix on sale for a buck and I like to have it on hand in case I have to take something somewhere so I picked up two boxes. But I'd wanted to wait to put stuff back in the pantry until I was 110% sure that the little ratfinks were gone, once Chris had blocked up the area where we saw they'd gotten in. (A small space around the water source for the washing machine.)

Soon, the bins sitting in the dining room got full and so I'd come home with grocery bags and set them on top of the bins. I went into denial about the growing mountain of things in the dining room, thinking that I'd clean the pantry shelves one more time over break, just to be sure, and then reorganize things when I had time. Except that two days before my break began, Chris came home to find the house smelling amazingly like chocolate. Dark chocolate, even.

He found the empty bag and box somewhere on the first floor and Indi slightly cowering on the couch. He went upstairs into the empty bedroom to find the entire floor strewn with chocolate. The empty bedroom (it's the only thing I can call it, really, and yeah, if you've been around here for a while and think about it, you'll know what I'm not saying) was re-carpeted about 3 years ago and has had maybe 2 overnight guests per year in that whole time. I might start calling it the cocoa room.

I looked at it and was just stunned. Chris had waited to vacuum it so I could see it and yeah, it was the only way. It can't really be described. We need to rent one of the big machines to clean the carpet but I'm not sure it'll ever get it back to its new state. All the time Chris was ranting and raving, I was in a place of resignation. I mean, it was too late to get mad at her, we didn't catch her in the act of doing it. To yell and punish her then would've been a waste of time. More than that, I was worried about what all that chocolate might be doing to her. Not that it was a total surprise because in addition to the cocoa room, she'd been uhhh booting from both ends all. around. the house. We're talkin dark chocolate poop and puke, people.

So while Chris is still cleaning up, I called the vet and told them what happened. They said they'd check with the doctor and call me back and when they did, they instructed me to feed her nothing but plain rice 3 times a day for two full days. If she continued to be sick, she'd need to come in. So off to the store I went to get rice (because of course, that was one of the things lost in the pantry) and came home and cooked it for her. When I put it down for her, she just looked at it, tried a bit of it and walked away. She pretty much did that for 2 straight days. Wouldn't touch it. But she finally stopped puking and so we stayed with it and on the 3rd day, I'm pretty sure I saw a tear in Indi's eye as I placed before her the old dry stuff she was used to. She seems fine now. But I might be off brownies for life.

I'm off work until the 4th and have been pretty much lazing around. We had a very quiet Christmas with church services on the Eve and a lot of lounging on the Day. We made Asian dumplings/potstickers yesterday, to keep up our tradition of eating Chinese food on Christmas. They were delicious and Chris made a dipping sauce that I could've slurped through a straw.

Today I'm struggling to tell what day it is, always a good sign of being on vacation. And yet the day sort of creeped up on me and pounded me on the shoulder. I knew it was coming and yet the true anniversaries of things are sometimes not as hard when you halfway prepare for them. Vague much?

Like anniversaries of bad things, I mean. If I get it in my head, then sometimes it sort of comes and goes without much to them. Of course that pretty much ensures that it'll come out another way but hey, that happens anyway, no matter what I do. Vaguer much? Two years ago today, I got my ultimate gift, my 2nd positive pregnancy test. And then I enjoyed ten weeks of bliss until there was no bliss to be found. I thought about it yesterday and told myself that it's just another day. And it is. But it isn't. Even now, it isn't. Even now, it hurts with a sharpness I didn't know could still be here this far down this road. I can only skim the surface right now because the surface is overwhelming and painful and looms large today.

So I came in to my office to feed the birds and animals outside our building because I was going to a nearby store and the birds don't exactly understand a thing like vacation and are still hungry. And on a whim, I opened blogger and felt like I was revisiting old journals from years ago or remembering a dream that is half fuzzy and doesn't seem quite real. Even finding the link above, I began to linger in the posts of doubling betas and had to leave because it hurts too much.

To those who have sent e-mails both to me or to others on my behalf, I thank you for your concern and your love. I still don't have a good answer as to why I dropped off or even a reasonable promise that I'll post much from now on. But I'm doing the best I can and trying to get past the high emotions of the holidays where I know that both objects and emotions are closer than they appear. Some of you may still see me on Facebook, as a status update has proven much easier than a blog entry. If we know each other here in the blogworld and you'd like to add me, drop me a line. Otherwise, I'll catch you on the flipside sometime down the road in Twenty Ten. How weird is that?

Happy New Year.