Tag Archives: roses

Slowly Returning

single rose small

 

I think.

At least that’s the plan.

I’ve been “on staycation” for about two months now, with posting here pretty sporadic.

A lot of stuff has happened. Most recently the shingles came back to my eye, and for the last three weeks I’ve been dealing with that, complicated by the fact that I seem to be reacting adversely to the antiviral the doctor wants me to take.

We had a wedding here of one of “our own,”,that is one of the members of our local congregation, a young lady who happened to be one of the students in my Sunday School class, and went on to become one of my dear friends.

Friends and family came in for the event, and such things always cram a lot of things into a very short time, where you spend days after recovering, not only from the simple exhaustion of late nights, longish drives and lots of talking, but having your head and heart full of wonderful moments that surface in a disjointed parade of memories afterward. (See my Introvert post, Static and the Need to Recharge, about needing to “process” the sudden high-volume of “deposits” that have been made into your soul)

At the same time as this was happening, my hubby was away elk hunting, and I had full charge of walking Quigley. (I don’t usually walk him every day — we take turns.) Hubby returned successful, so then we had, well, A LOT of meat to deal with. YAY! (We were completely out of wild game and I detest store-bought hamburger, and am not much fonder of ground turkey…) He did most of the work, but the kitchen and refrigerator were commandeered for about a week, I think, which was… distracting at a minimum.

Then there was the matter of my car failing its emissions test, twice, and various  trips to the repair shop, until finally it was decided that we could get a waiver on the whole thing. And all of this pretty much happening concurrently.

So it’s not really been the most “restful” staycation, and it’s not like I’ve had nothing to do but play… though I have managed a bit of that.  In fact, I actually went on 2 Artist’s dates!  And  yes, a month ago or so, I picked up the next Artist’s Way book, Vein of Gold, and started working through it…  only to stop not far in as the Lord took me off in another direction… but that, I think, is for another post.

In fact, I’ve already written a good deal more than I had thought I would. I just wanted to take a tiny step back toward regular blogging, and here I’ve got a full-sized post already. 🙂

Me vs the Space-Time Continuum

Today I fertilized the plants. It was only supposed to take a minute…

I woke up at 6:15am. My hubby had gone off to run earlier, and I was mentally ready for him to return, shower and take a short nap on the couch before leaving for work. That meant I would not be able to do my normal sequence of routine, so I planned to get up, make the bed, maybe water, then go into the office and get to work on Sky. Yay!

Recalling that it had rained last night, I was pleased at the notion that I wouldn’t have to water the grass and could get started on writing that much earlier. I’d just take a minute to fertilize the plants front and back. It’s better to fertilize early when it’s cool, after all, and it’s only 8 plants in pots. No big deal.

Except, I have this problem with the space/time continuum. Despite my many years on the planet, during which the space/time continuum has never changed, I nevertheless assume this time that it will. It’s not a conscious assumption, mind you. It’s just that I continually think as if a minute can be both a real minute, sixty seconds, and yet elastic enough to accommodate tasks that easily take half an hour or even an hour, and still remain a minute.

Filling the gallon jug, measuring the fertilizer, going from the kitchen to the back yard to dispense the fertilizer, returning to the kitchen to repeat the process – several times – how could I ever think it would “only take a minute?”

Denial. It must be denial. I want to get started right away on writing. I want to get the fertilizing done early, so I guess I just compress the two in my mind as if in so doing I can make it so. But I can’t and it takes “waaay longer” than I expected and then I’m disappointed…

When really, all that’s happened is that once again, I’ve discovered I’m not God. (And a good thing or the Universe would have long ago spiraled out of control.)

Unlike God, I am bound to the space/time continuum and no amount of hoping or assuming or thinking is going to change that.

But I have to wonder… does anyone else do this? Or am I the only one?

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This post is in response to a WordPress Writing Challenge on the topic From Mundane to Meaningful. To learn more about the challenge and see some other entries, click here.

The Post That Wouldn’t and Other Things

A gaggle of geese in So California

 

Well, for two days I’ve been working on a post that just will not go right, so I decided to set it aside and dash off an update of sorts. (I thought I had it almost done last night, then realized I’d misread the quote I was commenting on. So back to the drawing board this morning, stripping out all the parts that didn’t apply. I keep rewriting it and seeing something else amiss, wondering if I should just ditch it, but for some reason keep feeling like I should go on.)

Anyway yesterday I pruned the second of the pair of my mother’s roses I brought home last summer. Now I will get to see with my own eyes how the pruning process works (this after all those lessons last fall about God pruning us). Already there are tons of buds on both plants. And in some cases even tiny bunches of leaves. This may not be a good thing on February 1, since if we get another cold spell everything would be killed. But it wouldn’t be the first time. It was 71 here this afternoon, blue skies, wispy clouds…absolutely BEAUTIFUL weather.

When I called the City of Tucson last week, I was told by the recording to leave a message and that someone would call me back as soon as they could. I left a message. They never called me back. I didn’t call them back, either, because later that day I discovered the mail forwarding order for getting my mother’s mail sent to me, and it didn’t expire for a year. So I was able to relax about all that. A couple of days later I got the tax forms I was waiting for. Now there’s just one left.

Also last week I read Dean Koontz’s The Darkest Evening of the Year.  I liked it fairly well. (it’s about dogs) (Golden Retrievers to be exact) (which are so unlike hounds that it’s hard to believe they’re both in the same species) Then I went to Amazon and was amazed at the criticisms people leveled at it. Some I thought were so off base I wondered if they were multi-tasking while trying to read the book. Texting while baking biscuits perhaps… Maybe I’ll do a post on it.

I finished the Don Nardo book, Life in Ancient Rome and still have a few things to say about that — if I can ever complete the post I’ve been stuck on.

And finally —  I may have had a breakthrough on all my struggles with working on the book and routines in the house and interruptions and hindrances and “allowing myself” to be distracted and leaving the details and trusting God for it all… But I want to wait a few days and see what happens.