This morning I woke up around 3:30 needing to pee, and then I lay awake thinking of all the things that needed to be done, and how stressed I was about them. Finally around 5:00 I decided to get up and do OTHER things. That is, at 5:00 a.m. I couldn’t get the Thanksgiving grocery shopping done, and I couldn’t take the car in for what needs to be done, and I couldn’t pick up Edward’s prescription, and I couldn’t call the vet about the cat. But I COULD spray bleach on the mildew that always settles in the seam of the shower, and I could put away the load of laundry I forgot in the dryer last night, and I could spray bleach in the gross toothbrush cups and let them soak, and I could put the bills out in the mailbox, and I could place a Target order for pick-up so that it would be ready when I went to pick up the prescription after work.

None of those things were the things I was lying awake agitating about, but it has gradually over many years managed to sink partially into my brain that doing ANY things that need to be done, even if they are not THE things that MOST need to be done, can reduce that terrible agitating feeling to the point where it is manageable—and in fact, even to the point where it makes it EASIER to do the things that DO need to be done. That is, I hate making phone calls—but somehow the momentum of spritzing the shower mildew and placing a Target pick-up order helps reduce my flapping levels enough that I think I will be able to call the vet this afternoon after I get home with the pick-up order and prescription.

And, because I got up early, and am all showered and dressed and scented delicately with bleach, I will have time before work to zip over the grocery store right when it opens and get the few Thanksgiving things I was most agitating about and couldn’t get in the pick-up order.

Today we bought a car (at one of the worst and most expensive possible times to buy a car) to replace the car one of our children ran into a pillar in a parking garage by “pressing the wrong pedal.” Our mechanic, who had agreed ahead of time to take a look and see what could be done, looked under the hood and said “OH. Oh. Call your insurance.” Happily this is a 10-year-old car with 160,000 miles on it. Still.

Then we came home and completed the FAFSA, the college financial aid form that, for example, says you can import your IRS tax information so you don’t have to fill it all out manually, and then makes you dig out your IRS tax information anyway for the few fields you DO have to fill out manually; and then says that after you sweat your way through the first FAFSA, you can at least click a box to automatically fill out a second FAFSA form for another child and they’ll duplicate all the information so all you’ll have to do is sign it—but when you do that option, it for whatever reason does NOT fill out all the duplicate information and in fact you have to do it all again, including re-importing your IRS tax information and then re-filling-out the IRS tax information that for some reason was not part of the import. Also the FAFSA site is very very very slow and laggy right now, and one child had to fill out their whole account information (including name, date of birth, Social Security number, security questions and answers) four times because each time they clicked “submit,” it just hung there with a little working-on-it circle, but never actually completed.

It was, in retrospect, not the right day to decide to make a cake from scratch.

Anyway, the reason I had to write “cake mix” on the list was not because I didn’t have cake mix on hand (rule one: ALWAYS HAVE CAKE MIX ON HAND, WHO KNOWS WHEN YOU MIGHT NEED TO CELEBRATE), but because I needed to replace the cake mix I used: I made a yellow cake, and in order to compensate for not having room temperature eggs I used hot water, this doesn’t seem like it has to be SO HARD. Then I made one of my favorite mixes, a brownie/cookie thing. (Paul, unwisely entering the kitchen: “Why are you panting?” Swistle: “I’m BUSY.”) At this point the cake is out of the oven and the brownie/cookie thing is in the oven, and I am feeling calmer.

The grocery store has been alarming me again. Today half a dozen things on my list weren’t there, and some of them have been ongoing not-theres: the grocery store has been low on bread (variety and quantity) for weeks; they’ve been patchy on half-and-half and light cream for weeks; they’ve had lots of paper towels and facial tissue but extremely limited variety (like, today you could buy a 6-pack of store-brand paper towels, and that one pack/brand option lined allll the shelves, with the exception of a few packs of one brand name, plus a few two-packs of the store brand); they’ve been extremely limited on granola bar variety.

We’re fully back into the times of having one or two things spread out to artificially fill the shelves that are supposed to hold dozens of things. I am fully back to reminding myself that THERE IS PLENTY OF FOOD IN THIS STORE, even if I can’t get the exact things I want. Like, it is REALLY OKAY that I can’t find my preferred brand and fat-level of dairy to put in my coffee; it is REALLY OKAY that I can’t find my preferred brand and flavor of ice cream; it is REALLY OKAY that I can’t find my preferred brand and type of bread. All of these things are REALLY REALLY OKAY, they just don’t FEEL okay without a little mental management.

Paul and I are recently back from a several-day trip to a big city. The kids are old enough to leave on their own (especially with my supremely competent neighborhood friend on-call Just In Case), and we were only a couple of hours away if something HAD gone amiss. It was fun to be tourists in a city we’ve previously gone to only for medical stuff. But it did remind me that I don’t like cities.

I DO like certain things about cities. I like the way everything is RIGHT THERE: you don’t have to drive 45 minutes for a small art museum and 45 minutes in the opposite direction for a small theater and 45 minutes in yet another direction for a historical site: the big art museum and the big theater and the historical sites and a bunch of other things plus a ton of shopping/food options are all within walking distance.

I don’t like how busy and crowded everything is in a city, and how loud. I don’t like how much CONSTANT HONKING there is. I don’t like how packed-in everything feels: I had intended to do a little shopping, but every single store seemed tiny and cramped and with about enough room for half a dozen shoppers as long as they were all on physically affectionate terms. I don’t like how EXPENSIVE everything is. I don’t like how very often I encounter puddles/piles of things I rarely if ever encounter on the streets/sidewalks in my small town.

There’s another thing I don’t like about cities, and I have been thinking of how to describe it, because the descriptor that first came to mind involved the word “parasitic,” and that’s not nice. But it’s the way everything we encountered seemed designed to squeeeeeeeeze money. We would take a tour, and the tour guide would use various types of manipulative patter to pressure us for tips. We would walk down the street and be approached by someone who would say weird and/or flattering things and then turn to the real point, which was to ask for money; and we are not city-born or city-raised, so neither of us knew what we were supposed to do about that, or how to avoid it. We would look at a city-map board, and someone would come up to us and try to help us, and we would accept the help politely even though we didn’t want it or need it—and then they would ask for money. There were gift shops everywhere, including at the LIBRARY. It was disheartening.

I didn’t actually mind the people performing (musicians, mostly, but also a woman painted to look like a statue), or the endless food/souvenir carts, or the gift shops, because it was low-pressure, money-wise, and felt like it added ambiance—but after a few days, even that started wearing on me. So much HUSTLE, so much ATTEMPTING TO SUCK MONEY OUT OF EVERY ENCOUNTERED PERSON, so many MONEY-MAKING IDEAS. So many $6 bottles of water! So many t-shirts with the city name on them, exactly the same as the ones being sold on the previous block and the next block! So many people offering rides and tours and merchandise and novelties! So much STRIVING for MONEY. I started feeling like a walking wallet, a potential mark; it started feeling as if the only reason anyone would interact with another human being was to achieve a financial transfer.

I don’t know if it’s perimenopause, or something about the keto diet, or mild undiagnosed Raynaud’s syndrome (several family members have it)—but it is pretty common for me to be VERY VERY CHILLY right after eating, and especially to have VERY COLD HANDS, sometimes with numb fingertips. One of the best treatments is to have a hot mug of tea/coffee to wrap my hands around—but the mug cools as the tea/coffee is consumed, and sometimes I don’t want tea/coffee. I don’t know why it took me until TODAY to realize I could just MICROWAVE A MUG OF WATER AND USE IT TO WARM MY HANDS. I have a mug of hot water sitting on my desk right now, and after every sentence I wrap my hands around it for a few seconds. If it gets too cool to be useful, I can simply RE-MICROWAVE IT.

(My feet can also get very chilly after I eat, but I have a foot warmer plugged in under my desk.)

Another warm thing near me right now is Elizabeth’s cat, the 12-14-year-old one who has kidney stone issues that are likely to cause us to make The Difficult Decision sometime in the next year (he has the kind that are highly likely to be recurring, and the surgery to remove them is $3000 each time), if he doesn’t first die of what is probably lung cancer. He has become my little buddy the last couple of months, which is odd not only because he has never liked any of us except Elizabeth (we didn’t acquire him to be Elizabeth’s Cat; he is the one who decided he was Elizabeth’s Cat), but also because I am the one who forces his jaw open every other day to give him a pill, and I am the one who takes him to the vet. (I am, however, the one who gives him wet food three or four times a day on the vet’s instruction, which is probably outweighing all these other factors.)

A couple of times, the vet has one of her techs call us to check on the cat. During one call, I’d asked what we should look for in terms of knowing when it would be Time To Bring Him In, and she said that cats tend to hide their suffering, so most owners bring them in later than they should—which is grim, but good to know, and also makes it feel much easier to call Sooner rather than Later, without worrying that they’ll think I seem over-eager to put the cat down. The tech said the cat would probably lose his appetite, and that we might find little clear puddles around the house: a cat who isn’t eating enough will throw up clear fluid. She also said he would start hiding more, and/or hiding in places he didn’t used to hide, and avoiding people more.

So far the cat has gained back all the weight he lost from his kidney-stone distress, and is looking full and plush. And he is SITTING ON MY LAP, which he has NEVER done: he doesn’t even sit on ELIZABETH’S lap. He has a check-up with the vet at the end of this month, and I am looking forward to asking her what this cat is trying to pull.

On the other hand, in the past few days Elizabeth brought to our attention that the cat’s pupils were not evenly dilated. I’d thought it was just the positioning of the light in the room, but we moved him around a bit and the issue persisted. So…I mean, I looked it up and there are a bunch of innocuous reasons a cat might suddenly have mismatched pupils (it could even be the medication I’m giving him every other day, but he’s been on that for a good long while so it seems like we would have noticed the pupils before now), but there are also a few reasons that would join (1) Expensive Unavoidable Recurring Kidney Stones and (2) Lung Cancer, on The List of Reasons To Put Him Down. So even though I need to pee, and my hand-warming mug of water needs re-heating, I am not moving this cat off my lap.

I just stopped myself from having a yelling episode (proposed theme of yelling: no one ever listens to me; no one cares about anything I say; no one changes their behavior even a tiny bit based on any of my reasonable requests, even when those requests BENEFIT THOSE SAME PEOPLE; I am unable to influence anyone in this house so hey how about I go live by myself; I have said all of this NICELY a THOUSAND times to NO EFFECT) by remembering how bad I felt the last time I yelled, EVEN THOUGH THE YELLING WAS RICHLY EARNED BOTH TIMES, (1) which is progress, let’s call it! and (2) which led me to want to link to the last time I yelled, but putting “yell” or “yelling” or “yelled” in my blog-post search field got too many results, which is discouraging.

I have an additional motivation for remembering when I last yelled, because after I suppressed today’s yelling impulses, noticing as I did so that it was more difficult than usual, I remembered that I donated blood today—and suddenly wondered if the day I last yelled was ALSO a blood-donation day. I do remember it was a Friday, and Friday is when the blood-donation center nearest me has their blood drives. This would be good information to have. If I am going to be yelling-inclined on blood-donation days, there are things I can do about that. I can declare Blood Donation Days to be household-chore holidays for the blood donor (both time the Yelling Impulse occurred while making dinner). I can take to my room, for everyone’s happiness and emotional safety including mine. Etc.

Let’s swing wildly to a different topic. I realized on Wednesday that I had apparently lost my mind: I had not purchased any Halloween candy. And at first this might seem entirely sane to you: we have lived in this house for three Halloweens so far, and we have never had a single trick-or-treater. And that’s what worries me, because that is why it seemed sane to ME to buy no trick-or-treat candy. I had thought it through, concluding that if we DID suddenly get trick-or-treaters, I keep enough individually-wrapped candy and snack-cakes in the house that we could muddle through. It was only on Wednesday that I remembered our household Halloween tradition of filling the two largest plastic mixing bowls with candy and eating it freely while watching Halloween shows. (I do not watch the Halloween shows. Paul and the kids watch the Halloween shows. I take my candy and go into another room.)

And when I say it worries me, I mean it actually does worry me a little! How could I have been coasting along without thinking of that?? It’s a little as if we got to December 20th and I realized, wait, I don’t just put up a Christmas tree for the VIEWERS OUTSIDE OUR HOUSE!! Well. Anyway. After work on Thursday I went to Target and spent…let’s not discuss irrelevant details. I was pretty relieved to see candy choices still available, let’s say THAT—because when I’d tried to arrange curbside pick-up, I’d found that NOTHING was available.

Wow we are getting so much election-related mail. There’s one organization that sends repeated reminders that they can see whether we voted or not in previous elections, and gives us a score based on that attendance, and reminds us that this is public information that can also be seen by our neighbors. It’s super creepy and menacing. We’re also getting stacks of glossy oversized postcards that make me not want to donate any money to any candidate ever again.

We are back from a college open house for which we had two goals: show Elizabeth that this college had a really good art program despite having a non-artsy-sounding name, and help Edward decide between this school and another school that are his top two. Elizabeth did come away with a better feeling for the art program; also, we attended a presentation by the professor in charge of the illustration program (Elizabeth’s current frontrunner major), and we both felt like we came away with a much better idea of what that major would be like, both as a degree and as a future career. Edward was put off by a speaker for his program, an older guy who kept saying things like “You want an example of new tech? Two words: Tik Tok.” So now the other school is his top choice, which is too bad (because I don’t think this one speaker was a good representative of the school) but there it is. And Elizabeth would rather not go to the same college as Edward, so maybe this is for the best (Edward’s current top choice does not have an art program).

Elizabeth is getting increasingly stressed about choosing which colleges to apply to, which in turn is making me increasingly stressed. Her original goal was to go to the art college of a university: she wants non-art-program fellow students, plus the option of taking non-art-program classes, plus the ability to combine art with something else if she finds something else. But both of her high school art teachers are murmuring about this. “The art world is so competitive, and a well-known art school really helps”—that kind of thing. One of the teachers went to an inexpensive small local college and regrets not going to a bigger/better art school; the other teacher went to perhaps THE most well-known art-only college, and is colleagues with the first teacher at our middling small-town high school, so I don’t know if that gives any evidence for the idea that an art-only school is better.

But of course it’s making Elizabeth feel like she’s on the verge of making the wrong decision. And it’s not as if I know anything about it, so I can’t even advise her—but I’d thought her reasons for wanting a university sounded solid. What we’re going with now is something more like “Welp! We don’t know! So we’ll do the best we can here to make this very-hard-to-even-guess-what’s-right choice, and then you can transfer if you need to / get a further degree elsewhere / whatever needs to happen!”

Years ago, my doctor mentioned in an off-hand way that she always gets her flu shot in October, I don’t even remember what she said about the WHY but I assume it was exactly the boring explanation you’d expect about getting it early enough in the season to be helpful, but not so early that it might wear off before the season was over. For some reason this LODGED IN MY BRAIN. As in, I turn the calendar page to October and I think “OCTOBER: FLU SHOT TIME.”

Which is to say that one of the items on this week’s To Do List was getting my flu shot, and getting everyone else THEIR flu shots. As with the new Covid booster, I had to stop trying to maximize the efficiency of this task. When the kids were little, I used to bring them all to the pediatrician at once, and the nurse would herd us all into a room together and give the shots assembly-line-style. Now everybody’s got SCHEDULES I need to work around. So yesterday as soon as Edward came home from school, he and I went to the pharmacy and got our flu shots: I was extra-motivated to bring him, because he’ll be seeing his GI/Crohn’s doctor next week and the GI/Crohn’s doctor is for sure going to ask about the flu shot. And I was motivated for myself, because of the putting-my-own-oxygen-mask-on-first parenting concept, and also because I work in a public space, and also because it seems like if I’m old enough to be getting ARTHRITIS IN MY KNEES then I am old enough to be vigilant about my flu shot.

Henry is in another play so has rehearsal every day after school until dinnertime; I’ll have to bring him this weekend. I would have brought Elizabeth today, but she said “Noooooo not todayyyyyy I’m so busyyyyyyyy.” Paul can get his at a flu-shot clinic at work; William has his internship there but we don’t know if that means he can participate in the clinic or not, so probably I will just bring him when I bring Henry or Elizabeth.

I’ve been so focused on Covid shots/boosters the last couple of years, I’d forgotten what it was like to get something that didn’t need much aforethought. I didn’t think about the brand of my flu shot. I had to remember whether flu shots were normally accompanied by side effects or not. (For me, it’s only a matter of a sore arm.) I felt briefly panicked that I didn’t have a vaccination card with me for the pharmacist to write on, HOW WILL I PROVE I GOT THE FLU SHOT oh yeah they will just believe me.

What I’ve been hearing, mostly on NPR, is that the flu season is predicted to be extra intense this year. Something that puzzled me was that they interviewed someone who was saying that the past two years the flu has been very low because we’ve all been masking and social distancing and staying home. But, like, no we all the hell have not. Some of us have, but at least in my area the VAST MAJORITY have done no such thing for WELL OVER a year now—so why was LAST year a low year for flu? I wondered if it might be because, even in my area, most medical locations (including dental, vision, the people at Edward’s infusion clinic, etc.) are still masking and requiring patients to be masked. Perhaps a lot of the flu used to be spread in medical situations, and THAT’S where it’s been reduced? But surely not in schools and businesses, where even last flu season we felt like people were looking at us funny for wearing masks.

Spirit Day is coming up on Thursday, October 20th; which I mention now, more than 10 days in advance, in case you are going to suddenly realize you don’t have purple shirts for one or more people in your household who would like to wear a purple shirt.

This is definitely easier for women’s/girls’ clothing than men’s/boys’: one year Old Navy had men’s t-shirts in TWO shades of purple, and I bought a ton of them for all the men’s-clothing-wearing members of my household, which I’m particularly glad of because this year I’m not seeing much available. They do have a t-shirt in plum. Target has a purple Hanes men’s t-shirt that seems good.

I keep realizing each year at the last minute that my only purple shirt is a disappointingly wishy-washy pale purple, which is FINE, but now it has a little hole in it; and also I now wear more shirts with pictures on them, so I went looking for something new. I know I know I know but I bought myself one from Amazon: it’s this peony one, if you want to be Spirit Day twins with me.

(This zinnia one in purple was a close second, and now that I look at it again, I wonder if it would have been better: the pink of the peony sort of sways the color impression of the peony one. Well, but I liked the big peony better, and I do plan to wear this shirt all year.)

In case it helps with sizing, I wear an XL Tall in Old Navy t-shirts, and I can wear a women’s XL or 2XL in this brand, depending on whether I want it Fairly Fitted (like, I tuck my knees up under the hem to stretch it a little before going out in public) or Looser and Less Bust-Enhancing (the size I usually buy for my work t-shirts).