beautiful

We're packing it in tomorrow and heading out on a ferry to the mainland and back to reality. I could easily get used to this island living. And it's not that I'm overwhelmed with a vacation or the ocean or an island, I've overwhelmed with Nantucket. It's not like anything else I've known and it's all about wonderful. New picts. are up at the end of the set. Click on the Sankaty lighthouse to see them.

There is a rumor that we are sightseeing in NYC on the way home and you know that will put a slightly less cloudy cloud over the fact that I must part from this magical place. Goodnight Nantucket, you Queen of New England!

new picts.

I added some new picts. to flickr. Click the picture below. Finished a book today, go see what I read (to the right). Took a bike ride to the light house, didn't take the camera. Last night we had scallops wrapped in bacon with a spicy mayo sauce. My brother should own a resturant. It was that good. Tomorrow: beach, bike ride, more good food. I could live this life for forever and there will be no mention of tomorrow or the future because those words indicate the loss of something, something so perfect and magical I'm afraid I'll never get it back. I'm a little in love with Nantucket, Siaconset to be exact.

Nantucket

I've created a quick set of photos on flickr so far. Click on the picture to go view the set. I'll write later, too much to do.

first things first

I'm blogging from Nantucket. This is my DREAM home (with wireless). Pictures will come tomorrow, but I don't care what they say about pictures and a thousand words, neither one could describe this place. Unbelievable, speechless, flumuxed, shocked, in awe, and I'll also just let you know that you're jealous, I know I am.

oh chuck it, i’m going to nantucket

A ferry to a fairyland? I hope. A $35 ride with bike in tow to the beach and black and white lighthouses. A little island for the rich, and me, for one week. We’ll see how it all pans out and I plan to take a lot of pictures. Notice the word “plan.” It’s a ten-hour drive and yes, if we were the wealthy set, we’d be flying probably by a chartered propeller plane. We are not and so we are not. We’ve been told it’s good whale watching country. Oh to see a whale. I’ve heard it’s healing, for the soul that is. I’ll let you know.

The weather is mild and that sounds wonderful to me. Wonderful enough for a long sleeve t-shirt. Do you know how much I love long sleeve t-shirts? I’ll be in bliss for a week and then I’ll come back and melt in the humidity that is Virginia.

I’m sure I’ll fall in love with the Sound like I always do. You can have the ocean; just don’t ever take away the Sound for me. The Sound is the playground of my youth and the first and only place I tried to learn to sail a boat. The Sound is what I love.

Of course, we are talking about a Yankee island. We’ll see how they do. We’ll see.

sleep, what’s that?

My mother always said I had my days and night mixed up as a baby. It seems I haven’t grown much out of infancy. I am, in my circle of those who have every slept with or near me- or for that matter ever said “hello” to me, known as one who sleeps a lot. I sleep late. I take naps whenever I can and I will probably -at least twelve times in one conversation- mention how tired I am. This moniker -or shall I say albatross?- I wear is somewhat ironic because I endure a very displeasing condition called “primary insomnia.” This doctor fancy word for what really goes on is just a way to say that I think too much when I try to go to sleep for the night and thus push sleep back and back and back until, sometimes, it doesn’t exist anymore.

Needless to say, this has and has not been the case with my summer of nothing. Since nothing is on the agenda each day, I have found myself taking a nap at the drop of the hat, or every hour I’m actually awake. I have taken to taking naps whenever and for however long I like blatantly ignoring phone calls and putting off whatever anyone needs from me. Sleep has been my only job. Until, of course, I slept too much and withstood 2 entirely sleepless nights watching the worst infomercials of the year and the glances at a censored portion of a “girl gone wild” far too many times. And I won’t lie when I say that being awake at 4 am and knowing the best thing on TV is the CBS “up to the minute” and that those poor souls probably hadn’t slept all night either made me fee sad for them.

The fruitless in these topsy-turvy sleeping patterns, these reckless abandonment of my circadian rhythms have forced me to right the wrongs, grab a normal sleep schedule and then force myself to greet the day and make hide or tail of it. Today, I got errands done and little bit of babysitting and some phone calling. That’s a big day compared to yesterday when I finally did pass out at 12pm to sleep to 5pm. Oh ya’ll it’s not so fun. But, it’s OK, unlike my baby self I have grown up ways to get my mind to settle and my body to breathe slowly and for sleep to come dropping slow, just like it will right now, at 1:22am. Night ya’ll.

stangers in a strange world

“I can’t do this,” I said into the phone standing on the street.

“Oh. Yes you can. What are you wearing?” she asked.

“Jeans and a t-shirt."

"Perfect. It’s casual. If you detach yourself, you can do anything. And then you can write about it. It’s an assignment.”

“OK. You’re right.”

“Now go in.”

It turns out I couldn’t. Well, I did and I didn’t. When it comes to strangers my timid little heart just can’t bare it. I can be brazen and loud, but strangers cause my little mouth to close right up. And so I didn’t. I walked into the room, and even talked to a waitress explaining that I was meeting a group of people I didn’t know. She said that no one else had come in with the same request. So I waited, went to the bathroom and then bolted to eventually end up in the house of an old, old friend where we watched The Passion of the Christ. From one painful excursion to another. Sometimes, it just goes like that.

if i were a hoper

If I were a writer, this is the life I’d live. I’d stay up late doing nothing, or rearranging the rooms in my house. Then I’d sleep in past breakfast hours yet still hunger for an egg something when I awoke. Then I’d meander down to this posh coffee house/ restaurant/ Internet café and sit in this booth seat and watch the people and the cars in downtown Richmond and write. But, I am not a writer. I am a wanna be. But I have the summer off and this leaves me with indulgences such as coming to this café and writing posts that hardly anyone reads. Except you. There is always you. Thank the dear lord for you.

I’m sure though, at some point the amount of café au lait money would quite quickly surpass the freelance or book deal money I was making so that my days as a writer would send me to living in a van down by the river. And that is no life at all and so I will do as a do and spend my afternoons and summers dreaming of the perfect writing life, free of the day to day schedules, giving me freedom to up and go to the beach or New York or oh dear lord London whenever I chose because as a writer, your laptop is your desk, or you classroom as the case may be.

Not about writing, but just generally, someone once called me naïve and I felt then and still do that that was a compliment. For from naiveté comes hope and with hope a great many things can be accomplished.

the ups, the downs

Which way is which?

i think i may be cursed

I hate cleaning. I’ve said it a million times. I may love cooking and baking and decorating and everything else that is domestic, but you will never hear me talk about the joys of cleaning, never. It seems that the gods of dishwashers know this and thus torture me with lackluster machines that force me to wash the dishes before they “wash” the dishes. The dishwashers in my life have really been sanitizers and this displeases me so much in more ways than laziness.

Real Simple magazine this month talks about how pre-washing your dishes before putting them in the dishwasher is a waste of energy and water and in turn, bad for environment. I knew my dishwasher hated the earth, and me. I’m not the biggest earth friendly person. I just put out 5 bags of trash yesterday, but it doesn’t stop me from wishing that I were better in my goodness to the earth. And then, I drive an SUV. Whoops.

After a heated debate with my brothers a week ago I’ve done some research on Ethanol. It seems it’s a pretty little answer to our woes over foreign oil and our mass production of all things bad for the air we breathe. But, the Ethanol mixture in my SUV seems to be causing my gas guzzingly point-A-to-point-B machine to guzzle even more gas because Ethanol may burn cleaner, but it burns faster. I guess whether I want to or not I’m paying for helping reduce emissions. Kinda. And cursed or not, I’m OK with that. I just wish my dishwasher would get on board.

summer lovin’

“It must be nice to have the whole summer off,” someone wrote me in an email. Oh honey, you don’t even know. A friend and co-worker and I went out last week and one of the best questions she asked was, “How does it feel not to have to wake up and go to that place everyday.” Oh honey, you don’t even know.

I love my job, the children, the creativity, the collaboration. Sometimes I feel so lucky and can’t believe that I get paid to help a kid read. It’s like, like gold. Then, summer comes and somehow we teachers have no idea how we struggled through the trials of the past year, because there are trials we go through that would make you cry and sometimes they do. So, summer is our gift, our other golden egg and sometimes we take it and run with it. It’s the third summer in my life since 16 that I’ve truly taken off and not tried in some way to supplement the money I didn’t make during the school year. I don’t need to worry as much anymore because sometimes the taking advantages of the gifts that are given are worth more than the sacrifice that money can bring.

I’m reading a lot. I mean A LOT. I read two books last week alone and if you know me then you know what a struggle that used to be for me. I’ve become obsessed with books lately. I won’t be the old woman with cats. I’ll be the old woman with books billowing from the windows, replacing the tables and the flooring with every word the English language can offer up. It’s OK; I’m totally OK with being a dork. I’m making up for the lost time as a child when I should have been reading rather than trying to climb the social strata.

I hear very smart and famous people say all that time that books where their saviors as children, that they read whatever they could get their hands on, that the library was the favorite place. Oh God. I hated reading. It wasn’t until I graduated from college and truly started reading for pleasure that books made a dent in my brain. And I was and English major. I know, shocking. But, I struggled with reading and now that I teach young ones to read I’m finding out why I may have struggled so. I think I had a bit, a smidgen, a glimpse of an undetected disability called dyslexia. This is all speculation, but my mother says that it wasn’t until my fourth grade teacher went back and re-taught me phonics that my reading caught up with me. From what I know now about reading, that makes sense.

Anyway, I’m making up for lost time. And I seem to be doing it all now. Well, since December at least. Have you even checked out
the books I’ve read lately? Good lord. And I won’t comment on how my friends tell me to get out of the house and stop reading. I can’t. I’m addicted.

whirled peas

I’ve become a little obsessed with the World Cup, not because I’m a huge soccer fan, but because the passion in this game, for some reason, resonates off the screen more so than any other sport I’ve watched from a million miles away.

It happened first with the game betwixt England and Portugal where one little penalty kick ended my British boys’ dreams and sent those beautiful accented men to their knees in tears. Oh, I wanted to be in those stands singing “God Save The Queen” in the hundred and tenth minute trying to rally those lovely boys to a victory. And then the devastation of the loss made me want to hop over the pond and into the pubs to drown my sorrows along with those who speak true English.

Why America reserves soccer for the privileged youth is strange to me because soccer just takes a ball and feet and it’s played in the poorest areas in the world just on the street, in fact, I believe that’s how Pele started out. I wish we loved soccer like the rest of the world and I also wish we called it football because it is.

Tomorrow is the world cup final with France and Italy going at it. I think I’m pulling for Italy because I know that little country will rock its boot off if it wins. They won’t sleep for days and that’s the kind of passion I can get behind.

awesome

I believe in Karma, but not in the sense that it is a part of my whole belief system in that I am Buddhist because I’m not, Buddhist that is. I just believe that what goes around comes around and this is not something that eases my mind for vindication on others. I believe in Karma more for myself, my own wrongs and rights.

Two days ago, Karma came aknockin’ when I fell down some brick stairs. I had a bloody nose (which just happens, it’s genetic or something) and was just thinking about getting it to stop on my car ride home when I lost my footing on a lose brick and before I could correct myself I was on my butt (which is now sore in two places). I couldn’t move for several minutes after I fell and my brother stood behind me frantically and laughingly saying, “What do you want me to do?” “Just get me a tissue or something for my nose,” I demanded since the napkin I had been using was now on the sidewalk below me at an unreachable angle. He came back with a wet paper towel and I decided to try my footing. I couldn’t walk on it, at all. All signs were pointing to a broken foot and flashes of a summer forcibly spent in the reclined position were flashing before me. Eventually, after crawling and hopping, I found that I could put pressure on my heel and so I headed home where I iced, adviled, and elevated the foot as I slept. The next morning the same pain was there, no better, no worse. So, I trudged to the doctor and after X-rays found that it was just a sprain. I was so excited. I was getting a new lease on summer. But, then he wanted to give me some crutches and after I protested, he insisted so I obliged him and secretly decided I would use them to get out of the office and then no more. I hate crutches unless you really really need them, and then I love them. My heel was doing me just fine.

Today I can walk flatfooted and it’s a freeing sensation. The foot is still sore, but the crutches are the in the corner of my bedroom where they will remain. I am thanking the Karmic stars for not breaking my foot. I’m not sure what I did to deserve the sprain, but Karma doesn’t have to be an all out vengeful beast, sometimes it can just be a nudge to tighten up and fly right. I’ll be giving kisses and hugs for the next few weeks to anyone who wants them.

i not going to be your cousin anymore

The four year-old was still swaying in the hammock on the Oceanside porch while the three year-old was clamoring to return to the air-conditioning inside. This was the morning we were leaving, everyone in a state of rushing to pack and clean the rented beach house in preparation for the 2 to 6 hour long car rides home. The three year-old got in trouble for her declaration of a cousin-less future and the four year-old kept swinging. I’d spent a couple of hours myself in that hammock over the week. I read a lot, I swayed a lot and I even took a nap.

Back at home now in my bed with my Internet connection, I feel like the week never happened. Sometimes there are vacations that when you return to your home it’s as if you never left, like there was a hole in the time space continuum that encompassed the week. Sometimes I hate that feeling because if means you didn’t change enough. This beach trip was actually a relaxing one, which hasn’t always been the case for my family. The cousins played in the sand, in the water, and we even made up our own beach song that I continue to have running through my head. I read one and half books and got a little bit of a tan- the beach is not my favorite place on earth and thus I don’t spend hours upon hours on it.

It’s time to get back to my summer of nothing and then traveling again- there’s a trip to Nantucket in my future and maybe Texas too. I’ve got to rearrange my office too, not that that is exciting but it needs to be done even though I really just want to lie in my bed all day and read books and watch movies. Hmmm, maybe that’s what I’ll do anyway.