Mini-geek update

Image from here. And only marginally related to the story.

Katie's story was already going viral when I posted about it a little while ago, but it struck a chord with tens of thousands more people after that. Today, Katie's school is hosting "Proud to Be Me Day", and there's an accompanying Facebook Star Wars-geek-pride online happening taking place, too. The only Star Wars shirt I own is not exactly workplace attire, so I'll just say I'm dressing like Chewbacca because my winter coat has a fur collar. I do what I can.

The really cool thing about all the attention this story received is that folks have been sending Katie things like light sabers and Star Wars toys to show their support of her geekdom. She's such a neat kid, she's passing most of the toys along to kids in need, which is only making everyone feel more warm and fuzzy.

Touchdown

When I was in high school, one focus of the sports curriculum was learning how to be sportsmanlike. It was easy to distinguish teams whose coaches rewarded classy behavior, as opposed to teams whose aim was to win at all costs. I never had a prayer (or, honestly, a desire) of qualifying for college-level sports, so I appreciated that, most of the time, my school wasn't on the cutthroat side of the equation.

Even now, when DH and I are watching an NFL game, for instance, we take note when an opposing player helps up the guy he just tackled. Our favorite sports matches are the historic rivalries that involve players who are all friends with each other, like the Packers-Bears game in Chicago a few weeks ago.

I think what makes the story of Zach Beckman's touchdown last weekend in a high school football game in Mount Vernon, Indiana, so nice is that the coaches of both teams involved, as well as the student-athletes on the field, saw an opportunity to give a real lesson about sportsmanship to the rest of the players, and then followed through with it. Or - and this seems more likely - they weren't even thinking about the lesson, they were thinking about the best thing to do.

If high school football was televised, I'd be rooting for Jasper High School all the way.

Getting priorities straight

When this post goes up, I will probably be packing up the car, preparing to pick up my buddy's little sister from college. She's riding with me and DH out of state this weekend, and we've plotted out the music lists, the junk food, the gas money - it's a road trip we've been anticipating. At this point, my buddy's sister is like unto a sister to me, too. She's a cool kid.

The reason for the road trip is, like many trips we've taken in our mid-to-late-20s, a wedding. This wedding, though, is a little different from others I've attended lately.

The groom, whom I will call Bro, is the brother of my fellow traveler, and has been my friend for roughly 26 years, which is fairly impressive when both parties are 28 years old. Bro and I grew up together in our rural town, and each moved away approximately thirty seconds after high school graduation. We both wound up in cities in the Midwest, living the start of the kind of lives we'd both hoped for back in our often-boring farm town. For both of us, those lives (eventually, as I'm glossing over years of hits and misses) included finding someone with whom to share the joy and the mundacity of everyday life.

Each of us sought some kind of seal of approval from the other about our potential life mate. When Bro met DH, the two of them hit it off almost immediately, which was a huge plus in my mind. When I'm not taking it for granted, I appreciate that my oldest friend and my husband are big fans of each other.

A month or two after DH and I got married - an event for which Bro flew himself in, dutifully wore a suit, and proceeded to make friends with both the bartender and everyone in attendance, because that's what he does in social situations - Bro had a date with a woman I'd already heard about many times before.

This is the hard-to-explain part: I'd first heard stories about the Speaker (she's a speech therapist and I'm terrible at nicknames, OK?) from other members of our high school class. She went to college with a couple of them, came back to my home town several time for big events, and met plenty of members of our class and folks from our town. I was probably 19 years old the first time I heard about the Speaker. And what I heard was consistent from all sources: she was cool, she managed to avoid most drama that arises when a group of college women live together, and - everyone said this - she was funny.

Here I will admit that I generally didn't pay much attention to stories about the Speaker, because it seemed unlikely that I would ever meet her. She was a friend of some acquaintances and her inclusion in a story was just one of those details people would leave in.

And then Bro went on a date with her. Followed promptly by a second date.

I wish I could remember where I heard about it first, but I remember thinking it was strange, my friend and this friend-of-all-our-classmates dating. They'd been dating for a few months when they visited Chicago together and stayed with me and DH. The Speaker had heard about me from all our shared sources the way I'd heard about her, which made for this bizarre situation of two people, having heard about each other for years, staying in the same apartment for a weekend.

If there's such a thing as an advantage in such a situation, I had it: we were on my home turf, I was only meeting one new person while she was meeting two, and those two people were her hosts for the weekend. I later learned that she'd been quite nervous about meeting me - she had really wanted to make a good impression. The situation was made a little more strange by the lack of first-meeting formalities. I already knew where she was from, where she'd gone to college, what she did for a living, who many of her friends were... so what does one ask about at that point? It could be awkward.

She needn't have worried. At some point during dinner, Bro said something moderately funny, and the Speaker made a immediate and hilarious comeback quip that almost made me choke. I laughed out loud, but I'm sure I followed that up with staring at her - which probably made her feel like an insect. Because I'm a great hostess like that.

I was staring at her because - and it still hits me sometimes - I cannot believe how perfect she is for my friend. And he for her. They are great together.

So last winter, on another trip to Chicago, Bro proposed to the Speaker, and she accepted, and we celebrated with them all weekend. DH and I were thrilled for them, and we were looking forward to the wedding, but also to, hopefully, years of just hanging out with the two of them as a couple of boring married couples.

When they started planning their wedding, they gave themselves plenty of time - a year and a half - and chose a date in April 2011. Bro would send me the occasional link to a venue, or an idea they had. Over the summer we visited them and we got to see the proof of their invitation suite. The party was going to be amazing and large and lots of fun.

And then, in August, when DH and I had just gotten home from a week's vacation and were just beginning to settle, our phone rang. It was Bro. The tone of his voice was somewhat grave. A disorienting split-second of serious worry struck me: they're breaking up. They're calling it off. Whatever happened, I need to talk him out of this.

"So, I have a question," Bro said.

DH saw the worry on my face and signed that he wanted to know what was wrong. I indicated that he should hold on a second.

"Yeah?" I asked.

"If the Speaker and I... " break up? Have an earlier-than-anticipated baby? Move to Abu Dabi? He was taking way too long with this.

"If we didn't do the wedding in April - " oh, crap. Are they really breaking up? No way.

"But we had a wedding in October, instead - " WHAAAT?

"Would you come to it?"

I hopped up and down. "HELL YES, we'd come to it!"

DH looked totally confused. I put my hand over the receiver and said, "they're eloping! Sort of." To which he replied, "AWESOME!"

Bro explained, "It's just, planning this thing is really starting to stress the Speaker out, and every time I see how much it's going to cost, I start to get sick. And we just want to be married, and buy a house someday, and have kids..."

"So, you want a marriage, but not necessarily a wedding."

"Yeah, exactly."

And thus, in about a week of plan-changing, the enormous springtime wedding in a rented hall with 200 people and a DJ became an intimate autumn ceremony in a park with less than 50 people. DH and I were looking forward to it before. Now we're beyond excited.

Of course, any time this wedding comes up, DH says, "they're doing it right. They're so smart." And I feel compelled to say things like, "We didn't know squat about wedding planning when we got married; we did the best we could."

Then we both remind ourselves that our wedding was really fun. Which it was. But DH is right: there's no denying that we'd do things a bit differently - a bit smaller and simpler - if we'd known then what we know now.

As it is, we get to live vicariously through our brilliant friends. This weekend will be full of good friends, good beer, some tiny pies, a few nerves, some dressy clothes, and a festive dinner after the formalities. As a bonus, my mother - a justice of the peace who's known the groom as long as I have - is officiating the ceremony, so I'll get to see my parents on the wedding day, too.

In that way and in many others, this feels as much like a family wedding as my brother's wedding last month felt. In which case, I'm so happy to welcome the Speaker to the family.

Weekends

I need to tell you about my weekends.

Perhaps because I've spent more weekends than usual traveling this year, I've come to value even more the stretch between 5:00pm Friday and about 11pm Sunday, when I don't have a strict to-do list, I'm not in my windowless office and the only person I have to consult with about activities is, oh, my favorite person on the planet.

At this time in my life, the absolute best weekends are the ones that have zero outside obligations: no family gatherings, no weddings, nada. All those activities are fun, usually, but the Saturday that begins when the cat is head-butting me awake because she's out of food and I didn't set an alarm because I didn't need to are the best.

When faced with a wide open Saturday, my hubs and I always come up with some kind of plan. Often that plan involves rearranging some part of our one-bedroom apartment so it feels more open or works more efficiently. I usually try to sneak in a little cleaning, maybe do our laundry (which is a project because we either have to haul it to the basement laundry room - our building has 9 washers for 100 people - or we go mooch off a relative. We used to do laundromats, but they're not very fun) . I usually get some bit of housekeeping accomplished on a weekend, but the motivation isn't usually that I love cleaning, it's that starting Monday with a clean space is pleasant.

This past weekend was just one of those perfect weekends: No schedule. We moved furniture, washed windows, did all the laundry and the dishes, fixed our bikes after a winter in storage. This was over a two-day period: nothing was rushed. We spent just as much time lounging around, surfing the internet, drinking coffee, reading. We watched an action movie we've seen ten times, and we ate pizza. We got some gin, mixed a couple of drinks, admired the new furniture setup. Stayed up late and slept in late.

Our weekends manage to be lazy and efficient at the same time, but though I enjoy that, that's not really the point. Even if we do have hard work to do or we're heading to my in-laws or we have to go to a wedding or baptism or something, I look forward to weekends and the down time we have together.

I like weekends because I like the person (and the cat) with whom I live.

This reflection has come up because a post by Heather Armstrong, aka dooce, just bothered me considerably. Before anyone points out, "uh, Schmei, you know dooce is mentally ill and on a lot of medications, right?" Let me make it clear that I understand that. The post itself was just her being her neurotic self, I thought. Kind of entertaining, a little uncomfortable - her usual writing style.

But her commenters scared the bejeesus out of me.

Dooce's post - it's here - is all about how she hates weekends. Hates them. She can't relax because she can't work, and she gets all anxious without a schedule and starts cleaning everything compulsively. When I read the post, I thought, "I guess I could see that. If I worked from home I'd have trouble shutting it off for two days when my office is right there, too. Not everyone is able to do that..."

But there are two wrinkles. One is that she has two young children, and I know babies are terrible creatures to live with sometimes, and her six-year-old daughter certainly does not sound like a picnic either, so I guess I can understand her anxiety but I always thought weekends with kids could be nice. I guess I just assumed they'd be like weekends are for us now, only with an additional small person who can't eat pizza just yet and needs poopy diapers changed, and then later that small person might be doing something like playing outside when the weather's nice, but that would be fun, right? I love to get outside on weekends. I don't even mind soccer games that much.

Here's the other wrinkle - and this is the thing I should never do on anything besides this blog - I started reading the comments. And every. single. person. agreed with her. Weekends with kids? Suck. Across the board. They are a terrible period of constant suffering. There is no sleeping in, no enjoying coffee, no quiet time, NO FUN. Children with no routine flip out and abuse their parents, needling them constantly. They never shut up. They don't take naps. Things don't even start to pretend to improve until they're at least 10 years old, but then they're pre-teens and we know how awful THOSE are...

I am not kidding when I say those comments made me want to never reproduce in any way. Not even adoption, which, whenever I hear a horror story about childbirth, is my fallback position - "We'll just adopt!" - it's like takeout for babies. Who has time to gestate anymore?

Anyway, that post and those comments made me try to remember what weekends were like when I was growing up. Did I torture my parents when I was a kid? Sundays were fairly routine: church in the morning and then usually breakfast all together, the whole family passing around sections of the newspaper. I would always read the lame kid's joke aloud to Mom because I found her groan entertaining. (Sigh. I still love awful puns. They still make my loved ones groan.) Some Sunday afternoons Dad would go for a hike and take one or two of us along. Sunday dinner was usually something made of chicken, because it was a dinner with my family.

Did my parents hate that? I always thought Sundays were kind of nice.

Saturdays are harder to recall specifically because they were more nebulous. I do remember a time when all three of us were playing soccer, on different teams, at different places sometimes. I'm sure that was stressful, but once they got the transportation figured out it all worked out all right. And besides, that wasn't the whole day, just a couple of hours, usually, and then we'd all go home or hang out with teammates for a while or something.

I remember playing outside in sun or leaves or snow, or reading books. Entertaining myself, or playing superheroes with my brother. Or boardgames with my sister.

How bad was that? Was it that bad? It didn't seem bad, but I was a kid. Are kids that bad? Do they really ruin weekends? Can I never rearrange furniture with my husband again if we have a kid?

I suppose this is bothering me in part because, while I know plenty of women my age who have "baby fever," I don't really have it. What I would like is a child. Like, a seven-year-old, who will later be a twelve-year-old, and then a twenty-two-year old who I can take out to buy a suit for her job interview like my mom did for me. I would enjoy having a son or daughter, or one of each, or hell, two of each, and watch them grow up. It would be interesting to see what combination of traits kids would get, between my husband and me. I hope they get his mechanical smarts, even if that means they disassemble the thermostat. And they'll hopefully get his height, which will be nice for them... and for me, really. Once they're grown, I'll have more than one person I can ask to get things off high shelves. However, I kind of hope they get my hair. Because I am a vain person.

But I'm just not that in to babies. And the more I learn about newborns (my three-week-old niece, for instance, is both beautiful and a relentlessly demanding tyrant all at once), the less I want one of those. And the more I read articles like dooce's post, I find myself worried that the newborn stage never really ends. According to posts like that, newborns just morph in to kids who are potty trained, able to speak, and still just as awful to live with. If not worse.

All of those commenters sounded like my greatest fear about parenthood: they sounded regretful. And I hate that when I think about potentially being a parent some day, one of the questions I ask myself is "which would you regret more, NOT having kids, or having them and not liking them?"

That is a gross question.

I am happy with my life now. I've always kind of thought I'd be happy with kids, but posts like this make me worry that kids would ruin everything I love about my life, and then I couldn't take them back, and my husband and I would be stuck resenting each other and the little monsters we created for the rest of our lives together.

But there has to be a way to train kids to move furniture, right? Maybe that's all we'll need to do.

Wednesday

Other blogs have "Wordless Wednesdays", and "Wedded Wednesdays", and perhaps my personal favorite, "Unitasker Wednesdays" on Unclutterer.

I just like Wednesdays, but I'm not sure I'm ready to give them an alliterating theme on this here blog just yet.

There is a lot to like so far about this particular Wednesday. It's raining here in Chicago, and I kind of enjoy rainy days. My coworker gave me a surprise coffee-and-donut treat this morning, and oh, how I love coffee and a donut. I don't have class this evening - in fact, I'm finished with class meetings for 2009 - so I can go home this evening and spend time with my husband and our kitty and probably some acoustic musical instruments.

I will probably chat with my mom on the phone this evening, because she and I chat on the phone every Wednesday - something we've done since I moved out of the house 9 years ago. This is the grown-up version of Wednesday afternoons many years ago, when I was in kindergarten in the mornings. Mom would take off work midday and would walk me home from school so we could spend a little time together, just the two of us, before my older siblings got home from all-day school and my dad came home from work and the house got crowded again.

I think this means it's my mom's fault I like Wednesdays. That's OK. I hope my kids like Wednesdays in the future, too.

So, happy rainy/coffee/time-with-loved-ones Wednesday, everybody.

Camping: Giving it another try - Part III.

Haven't read the rest of the camping epic? Get some background here , Part 1 here, and Part 2 here.

On Saturday morning, I awoke in a self-built cocoon. I was wearing:

• Wool socks
  
• Long underwear
• Flannel pajama pants
• Blue jeans
• A long-sleeved technical running shirt
• A hooded sweatshirt
• And a fleece jacket.
  

All this, inside a mummy-style sleeping bag that was rated to 20 degrees Fahrenheit, lying on one of those inflatable camp mattresses that gives you a buffer from the cold ground, and covered over with a thick comforter that we had thrown in the car at the last minute, just in case.

I shuffle-rolled over on to my side, and it took me a moment to figure out where my husband's face was, because he was wearing a winter hat while burrowed deep inside his sleeping bag, which was cinched almost shut.

It was a bit cool that morning.

I should also note that I enjoy cold weather: one of my incentives for moving to Chicago was the winters. My husband is even more of a polar bear than I am: there's a favorite story in his family about how his grandfather slept with the window open until his grandmother put her foot down when she awoke to snow on their bed.

But they were both still indoors, at least.

We climbed out of our tent into the brisk, bright morning and looked around. I had noted the night before that we wouldn't really know what the area looked like until the sun was up, and I was right.

Our campsite was between a thicket of woods and some prairie area. None of the sites near ours were occupied. There was a clearing across the little gravel lane from us, where there wasn't even a site. The other three sides of our site were surrounded by short trees and tall bushes, all of which were in bright autumnal colors.

After a quick hike to the latrine, we got started with cooking. My in-laws had given us their old Coleman camp stove. For those of you unfamiliar with this beast, it looks like this:

That red jigger (note: technical term) on the front is mostly full of liquid fuel. One has to use a little pump to pressurize the fuel, and then light the first burner.

We knew that, once we got this little stove going, we would have coffee and a hot breakfast in no time. We also knew that no one had used this stove in years, possibly decades. It took roughly 30 minutes of pumping, attempted lighting, tossing used matches into the fireplace, rubbing hands to thaw out fingers, and pumping again, but finally hubs got the idea to warm the fuel tube that feeds the burner with a match. Somehow, that got the whole thing rolling.

And with that, the morning was suddenly much warmer.

I scrambled eggs and made pancakes, which I flipped with a spatula fashioned out of wire coat hanger and aluminum foil by the hubs - we had forgotten to pack one. But it worked! We drank instant coffee with powdered milk. We watched the world wake up around us, and we began to notice the fantastic colors of Wisconsin autumn. We were both feeling glad to be there.

There is so much less chaos to report for this camping trip, really. When my last bit of coffee got cold (I take longer to finish a cup of coffee than anyone I know), we decided to head to the nearest town to thaw our feet and explore a little. In town, we found an enormous and charming antique mall, a tiny independent coffee shop and a hardware store that had everything we needed for the rest of the trip : a tent pole repair kit, weenie roasting sticks, another flashlight, and - my new favorite product in the world - toe warmers. We then found a local ancient history/geology station that explained the local topography, and took a series of hikes around the park.

While it was still light out, we returned to our camp site and I began building the fire we would use for cooking hot dogs, and then roasting marshmallows, and then just warming our feet and hands as the night grew colder. Saturday night was crystal clear - not a cloud to be found. We could see the Milky Way, and we spent some time not talking at all, just watching the stars over the clearing.

It was about then that I put the toe warmers in my boots. Are you familiar with these?

People, if you live in a climate that gets cold, check these things out. "6+ hours" is a modest approximation. I slapped these things on my socks as the sun went down, and my feet stayed toasty for most of the night. They're little miracles of modern technology, that's what they are.

Where was I? Oh, right. Sitting by the fire with my favorite person as the night got colder and the stars sparkled in the sky. We were full and (mostly) warm and happy. We schemed and planned about things, and kept watching the stars, and breathing in the cold night air, until we were both yawning.

Another cozy night in the tent (with warm toes!), and I awoke around 6:00 Sunday morning, absolutely relaxed. When I climbed out, I realized it really had gotten much, much colder that night: everything, including our tent and the parked car, was covered with a thick layer of frost.

Like this:

Photo by my taller half.

But my toes were still warm.

The morning required more hot coffee and breakfast, and then it was time to slowly pack up our things and move along back home. Even the traffic cooperated, and we got back to Chicago in the three hours it was supposed to take.

So it turns out we can go camping without near-death experiences, after all.

Until next time, at least...

Camping: Giving it another try - Part II

Just joining the story? Get some background here and the first installment here.

The car was speeding through the darkness, and I was praying we would make it to the state park in time to get a camping site. It was a few minutes after 7:00pm, and we had until 8:00 before the gates closed. Before our hopes were dashed. Before we were left homeless in the cold and dark in the middle of nowhere.

At least, that's what I thought. So I was starting to sweat.

The four-lane freeway began to shrink to two-lane highway, then to verified country lane. We drove through the small town whose name was on the mailing address of the state park headquarters, which gave me hope. But it was 7:17 and there was no time to lose.

My better half used a flashlight to read off the directions to me. These directions, provided by the state park, gave no distances between turns, so every minute or so I would ask, "Turn here? Is this it? I can't see that sign yet... wait... no. OK. Turn here? Is this it?"

I am the most fun person, ever, for whom to navigate.

Finally, at just about 7:30, we saw the sign for the state park. Hallelujah! We wouldn't be stranded! We pulled up to the tiny, lighted guard house at the end of a gravel driveway, and a blond woman opened a little service window. I was feeling very confident, now that I'd gotten us to the park on time.

I leaned out of the car window and said, "We'd like a tent camp site!"

The woman asked, "Which one?"

So, long, confidence!

I stammered: "Uh... one for... a tent? We don't have a camper."

I'm fairly certain she rolled her eyes. "We have 60 sites open tonight. You can drive around and pick one and let me know what you want, but I'm leaving at 8:00."

"Oh... OK, we'll be fast."

"If you get back here after 8:00, you can just write down where you're staying and put your fee in that box out there."

She pointed to the box that was located just outside the guard shed. We both stared at it for a moment. The woman looked like she wanted to yawn.

So, apparently I didn't need to have four conniption fits on the drive up. If we had rolled in at 8:02, we would not have been homeless, we would merely have been deprived the experience of annoying a college student.

Suddenly faced with loads of time, we drove slowly around the grounds and found a remote camp site, and drove back to the guard shed. I walked inside. It was 7:50. The woman was reading a nursing textbook that was roughly the size of her desk, and she seemed annoyed that we hadn't taken ten minutes longer so she could go home without dealing with me a second time. I got through our campsite reservation formalities with time to spare, then we bought some firewood from the nearby woodshed and headed back to our new little home away from home for the weekend.

At a few minutes after 8pm in rural Wisconsin in October, it is very, very dark. It is also, you may not be surprised to learn, cold. We had chosen an uncharacteristically frigid weekend to go camping, so the process of putting up our tent - in the spooky glow of our car headlights - involved some fumbling with numb fingers. Once the main portion of the tent was up and we'd discovered two of the non-structural tent poles were broken, I set about starting a campfire while my husband devised some temporary pole repairs that involved cannibalizing one of my hair elastics. He's crafty that way.

Some differences from our first (disastrous) trip were already showing themselves: Though the drive had been stressful, we were now getting settled and feeling good. Thus far, no sore throats or wonky stomachs had shown themselves. We began to chitchat and joke around. We took note of the stars overhead - something we rarely see in our daily lives in the metropolis. We sat close together on the picnic table, warming our feet by the crackling fire and allowing ourselves first to relax, and then to get sleepy.

Things were looking up.

Camping: Giving it another try - Part I.

When I left off the last camping post, our heroes had limped back from the campsite, early and riddled with disease, in August of 2003.

Six years passed before they really tried camping again.

The camping trip was an important milestone for us (yes, I'm changing back to the first person), as we repeated to ourselves several times that, if that trip didn't break us up, nothing would.

In the intervening six years, we figured out how to live in the same city, dated like normal people for a little while, got engaged, had a wedding and reception that involved my three favorite things (my husband, cake, and dancing) settled into married life, moved a couple of times, survived my changing of jobs and beginning grad school, and so on.

Some friends of ours gave us a tent as a wedding present, and my in-laws gave us some very nice camping gear for our first married Christmas. Clearly, the people who know us considered us People Who Camp.

Only, we never went camping.

Finally, after we'd been married three years, we decided to actually give it another whirl. I blocked off a weekend this October on our little calendar, and as the day approached we found a state park that was still open and bought a bunch of groceries and plotted out a driving map.

The plan was to leave on Friday afternoon for the 3-hour drive to Wisconsin, where we would camp for two nights. Just a little weekend trip.

We were both feeling tired and cranky on Friday, and I was considering calling the whole thing off and staying home so I could lie on the couch and pet our cat all weekend.

The dialogue at roughly 3:00pm that Friday, as he was about to walk some stuff out to the car:

Me:Do you really want to do this? Because if you don't, we don't need to go.

Him: [exerting valiant effort not to roll eyes at me because I just spent the last month obsessing over this camping trip]: Don't ask me that. Let's just go.

Me: That means you don't want to go, right? Right?

Him: [carrying a cooler loaded down with enough food for six people for a week]: I'm taking this out to the car.

About an hour after that conversation, we were sitting in the car, in construction/rush hour/weekend traffic that had been crawling for most of our drive.

Me: [to self] We're not going to make it to the state park before the 8pm closing time, and we'll have to sleep in the car, and that's really uncomfortable, and he's going to be really ticked off, and he'll hate camping forever, and I'm already hungry but we can't even get off the highway if we need to.

Me: [out loud]: Why are you looking cranky? We'll make it! Plenty of time... I'm sure the traffic is going to clear up in a minute.

Him: *sigh*

Two hours after that, we were finally beginning to get out of the horrible traffic... and we were nowhere near the state park yet. We had less than 2 hours left to get there, and we were starving. We stopped at a Wendy's (in Wisconsin! I know, I know... we were blind with hunger and couldn't find a Culver's anywhere) for the fastest dinner ever, and then I drove at unreasonable speeds (unless you're my mom. Mom: I don't speed.) on dark country highways, hoping to make it to the state park before it closed.

(Also: we saw roughly three dozen signs for different Culver's locations after we ate. Figures.)

Did we make it? Tune in later to find out...

OPBs

Note: This is a quick post - I have a few in the hopper that keep growing, so I think a couple of multi-part series posts will happen soon.

I've been enjoying a strange version of baby fever.

On the day before a cousin of mine is scheduled to be induced (Best of luck, Mollie!), I've been thinking a lot about what we in our little household call "OPBs" - Other People's Babies - and how much I love them. Are you, or someone you know, having a child? That's great! Once said child has reached that stage where he or she can hold his or her head up, I'll be happy to babysit. Need someone to hold your 5-month-old for a moment while you do a quick chore? Count me in. Snuggly 10-month old? Yes, please. I will sniff that fuzzy little head with glee. Have a toddler? I am ready for goofy dance parties at any moment.

This morning we rode the elevator down to the first floor with a woman and her two sons who looked to be about 5 and 3 years old. The older boy had a small bike, and he explained with excitement to my husband that "We're going on an ADVENTURE with our BIKES! It's going to be SO SUNNY outside!"

We both smiled and told him it's a great day for an adventure. As we walked out of the building, we talked briefly about how our own someday Far Off In the Future babies will hopefully be so cute and enthusiastic about the great outdoors and bicycles, but those are conversations about Theoretical Events that will happen A Long Time From Now, whereas other people's babies are already birthed and fed and clothed by someone else! How convenient!

I'm fairly certain where the real craziness for OPBs got started: another cousin's redheaded son was born this past June, and he's one of the first babies I've gotten to really watch grow up. People, babies grow fast. Dude was just an intimidatingly delicate lump in late June, but by August his personality was really beginning to present itself. By the time I saw him a few weeks ago at a family party he was sitting up, quietly playing with my hands, reacting to the room around him, and - most striking - keeping tabs on his mom. Anywhere she moved in the crowded room, his gaze would follow.

That constant awareness of his mother's presence tells me that those "Other People" are pretty critical for Other People's Babies, and seeing the obvious bond that little guy has with his mother is both fascinating and daunting. When I think of the level of responsibility being a mom entails, I get a bit anxious... which is why I'm happy, with another new little cousin to hang out with in the very near future, to rest on my laurels as Cousin/Auntie/ Family Friend Schmei for a while longer.

Happier

One of my favorite bloggers, JD Roth, posted today about being happier , and it got me thinking about my own happiness.

I tend to be pretty happy in October: the weather is cooling down; I can go back to my daily uniform of "whatever pants are clean and a sweater I haven't worn yet this week", which makes getting ready for work a snap. Football is on TV on Sunday nights, something that I've inexplicably come to love the last few years. Stores are selling pumpkin-flavored treats. The leaves are changing. I can start making chili again. Classes have started up, and I do find a sense of purpose in my homework - especially this quarter, when both of my classes are quite interesting.

One conspicuously absent part of that list? My job. Monday through Friday, I roll out of bed and take a shower and make coffee and get dressed and walk with my favorite guy to the train stop and I kiss him goodbye and I get on the train. I work nine-ish to five-ish (or six-ish or seven-ish) in an office downtown and then I take another train home. As much as I talk about and complain of my job to whoever will listen (read: my long-suffering spouse), it didn't manage to make it into the making-Schmei-happy list. Which means I need to spend less time doing the job, and less time thinking about the job when I'm not there.

I should be fair: In general, and as recently as last week, I enjoy my coworkers. They're smart, they're doing good work for people who need the help, they are generally funny and often polite. Sometimes one of them will show up with donuts or something, just because. A few of them are folks I can see staying in touch with after I move on. But the job itself does not make me happy.

I need to re-read that sentence to myself every day. My job does not make me happy. And so I should take the advice of Boppa, my grandfather-in-law, and give it no more than the 35 hours a week I'm contractually obligated to give it, and then spend the rest of my time doing things that will, actually, satisfy me. (Baking bread? Happy.)

This job I have - and that I have now had longer than any other job - is a means to a check for rent and a tuition waiver for my master's degree. Because it's helping me avoid homelessness and helping me get an M.A. that I can use for getting a job I really love, I suppose this job may contribute to my long-term happiness. But that doesn't make it worth stressing about.

I can't quit yet, but I can quit making it the biggest part of my life, especially since it's a time-suck that makes me feel like I'm treading water. I've been making small steps toward at least making the best of it: getting off the train a stop early and taking a mile walk before heading in to the office; making note of the cool buildings and interesting people in the city (and telling myself "you'll miss this when you live in the sticks"); heading around the corner at lunchtime to get a salad at the health food store (something I'm sure I really will miss when I live in the sticks). I just need to add the step of leaving at five o'clock on the dot every day no matter what.

So blog? Try to keep me honest. It's in writing now. I will leave my job 8 hours after I get there, every day, and I will take breaks during the day, and I will complain less about it when I'm at home.

And that's enough resolutions for one day. But it could help make me happier.