Mr. Noodle

Mr. Noodle
Mr. Noodle

Monday, April 9, 2012

game face, grinning and bearing it

Easter weekend has been really tough on me. Not because it's Easter, mind, it's just that I have had a lot of time to think (and mope).

Dan has been busy this month already with traveling to a bunch of different states. It's hard enough that we have a three hour time difference, but we manage to connect somehow with fitting wee text conversations into our routines. With his travels this month, and unreliable WiFi access, battery life, and schedules, he is not always available for a pep talk when I need one.

My mood ebbs and flows sometimes just like the tides, but not as predictably. It's hard to feel grounded when it seems more like I am suspended. I have even tried to manifest some movement in my life by applying for jobs around here (but have heard nothing) and applying to volunteer for a local farm (but the process is slower than expected). The chicks we have been waiting for for weeks have arrived, and the final count is five (we started with twelve eggs), so dealing with little deaths has been a bit sad too. How fragile life can be.

This morning Sam went outside, saw that there was another cat in the yard, and chased it out front, down the road, then across the road and into the neighbouring field, about half a kilometer away. This road isn't especially busy, but busy enough to be dangerous. Sam is smart enough to know to watch for traffic it looks like, but it concerned me nonetheless. She was off and potentially fighting with another cat, and who knows what can happen when kitties chase one another. She came back after not too long, entirely unscathed, but during her absence of course I worried about having to take her to the vet or finding her body by the side of the road.

I have felt extremely fatigued all weekend. In company I affect a cheerful disposition, but I think it does take its toll on my energy. Yet if I squirrel myself away for a while, alone for too long, I get broody. Where is the balance? How can I extract myself from this funk?

It's been three months since we were told "five months". I expect to see some movement in the coming weeks. The information packet telling me to go to Vancouver to have my interview and health check. I am ready for this.

In the mean time, my sister is coming to visit next week! She'll be coming alone, she wanted to make sure she saw me before I left for the US. We'll have three days of child-free sister silliness and I am greatly looking forward to that.

The weather is warming up a bit too. I have been wearing shorts the last few days. Yesterday I received a big stack of birthday gifts! (Yes my birthday was two weeks ago, but my birthday season has been extended this year). Among them was this novel, Hugh and Bess, by Susan Higginbotham. For Christmas 2010, I was given the her first book, The Traitor's Wife, and didn't get to reading it until last summer. When I did read it, I swallowed it, I couldn't put it down! Then I discovered the author is from North Carolina. So this morning, seeing how sunny it was, I took the book and my coffee outside and read on the deck for a few hours. I think I'm about halfway done already. After this post I'm going to go read again. I cannot tell you how much I love period fiction, I am particularly fond of this era of history (early 1300s England as well as the time of the Tudors), and lately I have also been enchanted by World War II France. What I'm realizing, is that the best thing to get me out of my head (when I think of things that someone said to me that pissed me off, for example) is to just step into a book and get lost for a while. I have the luxury of time right now, after all.

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