Today, I drove all four of us to the kids’ school. The H and I had breakfast, then went to the market and I dropped him in Great Barrington while I went to see my shrink (how badly did I need that appointment today? Oh, badly.) I picked him up, and drove him an hour to catch the train to NYC where he has a meeting tomorrow morning. I drove back to the kids’ school (an hour and five minutes) to pick them up to take them to get their flu shots. I drove them to the pediatrician (20 minutes.) We drove back to school, so Dido could finish his day. The Babe and I went for lunch (for me) at 3 p.m., and then to her ballet class. We drove back to school, and then home. Let’s not even discuss my carbon footprint, shall we?

I am quite relaxed, actually about all this; my biggest dilemma is how to manage the animals: the dog can’t stay home alone all day, so she’s going to need to ride along with us most mornings; I will hike her (good for us both) and then leave her with the H at his office while I go about my day. The horses have to be fed and turned out in the morning, every morning, so I now have to do that before taking everyone to school, rather than my prior routine of doing it after they leave. But there’s no way for me to get up early enough (5:30? not happening) to do stalls before school, too. As a result, over the last few days, the kids and I have gotten into an evening routine. Dido does his homework, then we all go down to the barn together. They, who have steadfastly resisted much barn work for the last eight months, have suddenly gotten with the program (fear of maternal meltdown perhaps? though that’s never had an impact before, really) and have started helping, a lot, with cleaning stalls, feeding, watering and stocking the paddock with hay and water for morning. By the end of the half hour “shift”, they’re done working and are just running and playing by the barn while I finish the last details, but that’s lovely, too; then we go back up to the house for dinner. Between that and the time change, they’ve been falling into bed at 7:30, and mostly are asleep by 8, which is, no exaggeration, bliss.

The H was in L.A. for work last week, and without getting into too much gorey detail, had a seizure, something that has never happened before. He was driving at the time, and so wrecked his rental car and shook himself up quite badly. Thankfully, he wasn’t hurt much and mercifully, neither was anyone else, for which we are both beyond grateful. Even so, it was a terrifying experience for both of us, and I was happy beyond happy to have him home, safe if not completely sound, on Friday night.

Until we know why this happened (and we suspect a reaction to some medication he’s been taking) he can’t drive. This means that I am back in the twice a day commuting gig, one which made me nearly insane when we first moved here. There’s nothing to be done about it, so I am trying to figure out how best to integrate the extra hour of commuting into my already packed days. My first sane step was to decline the opportunity to take on yet another volunteer responsibility at the kids’ school.

We’ll muddle through this, but it was a shock. Ah, the chaos of life.

I could make all kinds of excuses about how I muck stalls and exercise horses nearly every day (true); or about how my mother moved in with me three weeks ago (also true); or about how one kid had vacation for two weeks and one kid was sick at home for half of said vacation (sadly, true); but the truth is–I lost my blog mojo there for a while. I have been pushing on so many other fronts, with so little time to keep the loose ends from flying into the gas flame and igniting in a ball of fire, that all my writing energy has gone to posting at The Sister Project and concocting recipes for Rural Intelligence (you all read every word I write in both of those places, right??) and none, NONE, has gone into this, my treasured and psychologically important personal blog.

I hope to remedy this, and begin posting regularly again. (I also hope to begin running again, and to learn to sew, and to be an endlessly patient mom, so you know, hope is a slippery thing.) But stay tuned.

Fast Tube 2.2 by Casper

For the H–not so much. Last Tuesday was the first morning when I had a morning appointment that meant I had to leave him home alone to turn out the horses and deal with the morning chores, which are: giving the horses their grain; stocking the paddock with hay and full water buckets; haltering the horses and leading them out to the paddock; mucking out the stalls, removing manure and wet bedding and replacing it with fresh, clean bedding; and finally, putting hay and clean water in the stalls so that the evening chore will be simple: just haltering and leading them in, then turning over the buckets in the paddock and bringing them into the barn, ready for the next morning. Grooms and boy scouts may not have the same motto, but they should: be prepared, because routine is everything with horse care.

I’ve done most of this by myself, with some help in the evenings with stall prep and bringing them in, on days when the mornings didn’t have enough hours to complete the whole routine. But Tuesday was the H’s first time flying solo.

At about 10 a.m. Tuesday, I was sitting at our favorite coffee shop in Lenox, drinking tea and killing time between dropping off the short people and heading off to have my hair cut and my roots erased. It was a moment of blissful solitude–until the phone rang.

It was the H, breathless, and slightly panicked. Turns out–barn chores are hard work. Harder, I learned, if it’s 25 degrees outside, and you wear (strong) glasses, and your glasses fog, blinding you, so you try to take them off, but then you’re really blind, and can’t see the manure or mucking fork to save your life…and the wheelbarrow is heavy! And you have two whole wheelbarrow loads to haul out, just to clean the two stalls!

You can probably guess who pulled stall duty for the rest of the week.

Yesterday, we went down as a family (now a family of five, as my mother moved in with us yesterday, having come from L.A. to join us here) and everyone found a helpful rhythm: Dido and the H worked emptying and filling water buckets; my mom kept an eye on the kids, checked on the chickens and kept me company; the Babe, no surprise, turns out to be a highly-motivated little worker bee, and a mucking whiz. It was also 40 degrees, so it was practically steamy inside the barn, compared to last week’s horrible, frigid temperatures.

“Your glasses won’t fog today,” I said in an aside to the H. He busied himself with cutting the baling twine around some fresh hay. “Uh huh,” he answered, and marched right out of the barn.

Today, I tried again. Everything else was done. I handed him the high-tech muck fork (yes, there is such a thing) and lured him into the stall I had already half-cleaned. “Just try this one.”

“This one’s much easier. It’s lighter. It works better,” he said, referring to the miracle fork (aluminum; deeper basket for shaking the shavings off the manure; ergodynamically bent handle.) When in doubt, give the man a gadget.

We worked together and apart, in adjoining stalls. Dido avoided mucking (like father, like son?), but was eager to spread the fresh shavings in the cleaned stalls. The Babe felt cold, so my mom took her back up the house. “It’s nice working, just the three of us,” said my big boy.

Indeed. It was.

So, what I’ve noticed is that some women DO accomplish some (maybe all?) of these desired things, so the answer must be that they prioritize/organize their time differently than I do. Maybe, just maybe, if I were able to gain a window into their daily schedules, I’d get a sense of how to reorganize my own. (Say: don’t spend three and a half hours in the morning online redesigning your blog page. Just as an example.) So…there’s a new tab at the top of the page. If you want to play, click there, and leave your daily breakdown (in whatever form makes sense to you) in the comments. The other great thing about this semi-tedious exercise: you get to give yourself credit for the things you do manage to get done.

Like yesterday, a hellish snowday: I trekked down to the barn to check on and water the chickens. (We’re going on week 2 of broken pipes in the barn–a hassle for me and a big hassle for our patient friends/tenants.) I sorted one of the two remaining giant toy dump boxes in my son’s rooms, threw out a huge box of broken toys and organized a bunch more. I culled all the broke crayons from the playroom crayon graveyard, and the Babe and I melted them down into big, madeleine-shaped crayons (I think I like this more than she does, though she loves sorting them by color.) She and I filled the birdfeeder. I tested not one but two (sucky) recipes that I had hoped to publish on Rural Intelligence. I got the remaining images and info I needed for my next gallery show on The Sister Project. Then it all went to s^*%, but hey–I did some things. And now I can see where the day went, even if it’s not exactly where I wanted it to go.

Well, so much for every day. Holidays and inaugurations and recovery from 8 years  of, you know, left me with no blogging mojo whatsoever. That link up above is to a site I wanted to share; it’s lovely. And Ive made some other changes which have been great–exercising more often again,which has,as it always does, changed my entire mood (though I get extremely peevish when I then CAN’T get my workouts in.) But I’ll try to do better–I’ve again gotten comments and phone calls, all so flattering, wondering where the hell I am, so I’d best get back to it.