This post has been sitting in my drafts folder for almost a month now… I’m feeling a little bit like finding the time and energy to finish it has been difficult mentally – see title of this post. But we are taking some time away and I’m hoping to catch up on life and get back to writing. I also have to remind myself that polished prose is great, but just the act of writing is incredibly fulfilling for me too.
The weekend kicked off with… snow!
The evening before, the ten year old had gone over to the neighbor’s house to swim in their outdoor pool, and then we woke up the next morning to snow. Just when we had thought spring had arrived and we’d be done with cold weather. The daffodils and witch hazel that had just last week exploded in a riot of yellow, were now bending under a layer of snow and ice.
The two little kids greeted the snow with delight. I hunted down the snow gear and got them into it and out we went. It wasn’t terribly fluffy or fun snow- mostly wet and a little slushy but not packing consistency. I half heartedly tried to ball together a tiny snow man, and was pretty unsuccessful. The kids seemed happy enough just to push the snow around and shovel it into stacking cups. The five year old even made a good attempt at cleaning off my car, which I was grateful for as a couple hours later, I got in the car to go to work. It was opening night!
The day after opening night was Daylight Savings. Thank goodness I got to sleep in – the folks working on the other show we are producing at the moment had a Sunday matinee and had to be at the theatre by late morning. Ouf.
I took the kids on Sunday afternoon to give the Husband some childfree time. We dropped the four year old at Mandarin class, and the class was just the right length for us to go grocery shopping then be back in time to pick him up. Then we went on a little adventure to see a very familiar room:
The room was an art installation at a local arts center which houses three floors of artists studios. During opening hours, you can often see artists working on new pieces of art – the works on display range from painting to photography to sculpture, fiber arts, ceramics… it seems every media is represented. I had heard of this place and always wanted to visit, so when I heard about the Good Night Moon Room, figured it was a good reason to visit. The kids were delighted to see so many familiar things brought to life. Afterwards we visited many of the other artists’ studios, though the little ones didn’t last too long. They didn’t have the patience for just looking and not touching. (Notably, the Fiber Arts Guild had a “touching basket” in their studio – which I thought was a great idea.) I’ll have to make plans to return sans kids, and I definitely had my eye on one or two pieces that might make a nice present for the Husband.
I’m not sure why, but the time change has hit me pretty hard this time around. Maybe it’s having gone through the intensity of tech week only to be robbed of an hour of sleep. Ironically, I had a supertitles for a vocal concert a couple days after opening, and this was one of the slides for a song by Rachmaninoff:
At any rate, it’s been kind of hard to motivate and get things done.
A while ago, I had read this snippet from the New York Times’ Little Love Story series (fourth one in the link), It’s titled “Listless, Lost, then Found”, and is a mini essay about how the author, a person of many lists, grapples with having the flu and being so laid low that they are unable to make lists. In contrast their friend says, “I’m listless! I’ve stopped making lists. I’m free!” What an interesting concept wed to a turn of phrase! I was struck by how aptly the term “listless” describes the malaise I feel after a show when I am so exhausted from getting to opening night that I can’t even pull it together to plan the days that follow. Am I listless because I have no lists to guide me, or do I have no lists to guide me because I’m listless? Unlike the author’s friend, I do not feel freedom in having no lists. (Well, maybe when I am on vacation? Though that hasn’t truly happened in a very very long time. )
Somewhat paradoxically, I find the I make better use of my time when I have less free time, than when I have more of it. Knowing that I have to be in rehearsal or onstage for nine hours a day encourages me to make plans for the rest of my time- fitting that run in on my dinner break, getting dinner prepped in the morning, playing Wordle while the toast is toasting. When I have no constraints or obligations on my time, everything, even Wordle, seems less urgent. (I have played definitely played a Wordle round at 11:30pm while sitting in the parking garage after work). Even when things are urgent – taxes!- they seem less so when I feel like I have the entire day to do them.
Well, then, I think I do need to pull out of the listless state. The literal one. Making the list is, I feel, step one for me to get moving on the urgent and important things.
At the same time – I’ve been taking the baby to some Toddler Time sessions at a local nursery school. It’s a morning of free play, crafts, stories, and outdoor play with a sandbox and bubbles at the end of the session. The teacher who organizes the session also leads an open forum for parents while the kids play in the sandbox. The school operates in a co-op model and there are lots of signs up, encouraging parents to engage with their child. This is one of my favorite signs, particularly the last point:
In other news, both older kids’ school have gone mask optional now – the ten year old since mid last week, and the four year old just at the beginning of this week. Lifting mask mandates seems appropriate for the two year anniversary of the world spinning to a stop. The lifting also seemed to happen quite quickly here. I had been hearing in the news of other states and school districts lifting mask mandates – and indeed our indoor mask mandate had been lifted for a couple week now – but the email we got from the school district was literally, “Starting tomorrow…” The 4 year old’s school at least gave us a weekend of warning.
For the five year old, realizing that many of his classmates are still unvaccinated, we have told the teacher that we prefer he keep his mask on while indoors. When we asked him if he had a preference, he actually said that he preferred to keep it on. From what he tells me, all the kids in his class continue to wear masks inside. I wonder if it is because he has always had to wear a mask to school that he is in no hurry to remove it.
We left the choice up to the ten year old, although we told her that she needed to wear her mask indoors at school the week before my family comes to visit and while they are here. I don’t know if any of this is rational or not, to be honest.
One lovely benefit of the time change is longer days and I took advantage of the extra evening light to go on our first post dinner stroll of the year. Since I like to have dinner early, we often have from 7pm – 7:30pm to fill with some kind of activity before bed. The two littles seemed particularly delighted for the first evening constitutional of the year:
I love taking a turn around the block after dinner- the sky is painted orange and pink, the birds and crickets are out. We usually take the same path around our neighborhood, and there is a nice familiarity about it. One neighbor had a fish pond in their front yard and we always like to stop and watch the fish. And this time of year the trees are exploding with puffs of blossoms.
What we ate: (I seem to have large blanks in my memory of dinners this week.
Saturday: ?? Opening night… I’m sure it was some kind of leftovers
Sunday: Sunday leftovers.
Monday: Cornflake fried chicken and Arni’s Jrs. The chicken recipe is from Americas Test Kitchen’s Cookbook for Young Chefs and is actually baked, not fried. Arni’s Jr. are a salad from the Husband’s favorite childhood restaurant. It’s essentially iceberg lettuce, mozzarella cheese, cubed ham, cubed turkey, scallions, and radishes, all topped with blue cheese dressing. Oh, and croutons.
Tuesday: The Husband made Cincinnati Chili. I tried out a new place near work. I was excited to be able to order something with a large variety of veggies, though it was definitely on the salty side.
Wednesday: Kitchen sink yellow curry. I had some yellow curry paste and some yellow squash, eggplant, and tofu to use up.
Thursday: A special St. Patrick’s Day snack meal. Potted salmon, crackers, soda bread made from The Irish Pantry cookbook. Also roasted potatoes and cut up carrots. I had always been interested in the “potted” chapter of the cookbook – the idea of traditional methods of preserving meat with a layer of butter kind of appealed to my inner pioneer girl. I can’t say that the potted salmon was any more tasty than any other method of making salmon, and it was certainly more work than roasting salmon in the oven and then putting it in the fridge to keep it from spoiling. There is something that feels really indulgent in being able to try a preservation technique from hundreds of years ago. These high effort activities that were a necessary part of the every day kitchen of yesteryear have become a quaint kitchen experiment of today, it seems.
Friday: Pizza and March of the Penguins. I had to work and ate leftover curry.
“Somewhat paradoxically, I find the I make better use of my time when I have less free time, than when I have more of it.”
This is so true. It’s just finding the perfect balance that is forever elusive. I need to be just the “right” amount of busy to be able to sustain it. When I become too busy, I eventually, always crash. I’m trying to get better at letting myself just…be…in this state for a while. My body naturally recuperates over time and I do feel more like “myself.”
Every time I get into a listless state (both literally – in that I don’t have a list on the go, which is very unusual for me because I LOVE lists – and in terms of mood), I feel like I will never emerge. It feels like a lifelong switch. And I actually have to tell myself out loud that this too shall pass. It always does and it’s just a normal part of life to have this ebb and flow of routines and exhaustion and rest.
It’s always lovely to hear your voice in this space, but take all the time you need to recover and we’ll be here to read when you post <3
Aw that is so very kind of you, Elisabeth! Yes, I think writing the lists out will help. I need to find the balance between the list being overwhelming and helpful. Or maybe better strategies for coping with the overwhelming lists.