Wordjanitor Strikes Again

It's October. Don't ask me how that happened. I've decked the halls of my porch with spiderwebbing and orange squash things. @ was so excited to decorate the porch. Gotta love the dollar store for decorations -- he got to go hog wild and buy all sorts of nutty stuff for under ten bucks. At least I don't go broke

I have a picture of tornadoes on my refrigerator. Each is a different color and hovers precariously close to the ground, about to touch down. In the midst of all the swirling is a little stick figure with a small umbrella saying "Hey tornadoes, one at a time. Get in line!" Sure, I can yell at a tornado and it will listen! Hmmm... Last week was less than fun. Lots of different dramas emerged from various quadrants of my existence. I had some health stuff to handle;

I have a titanium screw in my toe. There, I've said it. It's out in the world. Judge me for it if you must. This toe is primary digit of my left foot. Not the film My Left Foot. Mine. My actual left foot. I seem to have picked up a habit of damaging said recalcitrant foot every now and then since the first "incident" almost exactly 11 years ago in August 1999. What happens when you damage your foot?

Avoiding danger in the long run is no safer than outright exposure.  Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. - Helen Keller I recently decided to do something for myself. Pedicures and massages are great and all that. I guess shopping does it for some girls. OK, lots of them. Maybe even legions of them, given stacks of evidence ranging from

I got a boo-boo on my knee. A good friend invited me to go hiking yesterday. Yes, absolutely, ok, let's go. I didn't bother asking where, how far, and all of those details. It didn't really concern me. And who am I to turn down an excuse to be outside with trees and dirt and stuff? So off we went to Sunol Regional Wilderness and hopped on the trail along Alameda Creek to Little Yosemite. It looked to be a pretty mellow ambling walk along a well-maintained

Somehow or other, I've been back at work for nearly a month. Time flies when you're trying to catch your breath and remember how to tie your shoes . Within a quick blink, it was as if I'd never been gone. Except now I have this weird eating schedule and people keep asking me if I'm better now. Well, yes, better than I was before. Cured, no. But that's just how it is. In the scheme of things, I don't consider the health thing

@ had an art project at school for which he created a pot of gold. The pot was titled "I wish everyone in the world had..." and he had labeled each coin with a different thing. His choices a bed peace books a dog a tent to play in a giant excavator Practical, altruistic, while at the same time uniquely @. Sometimes he just makes me laugh out loud.

Chapter 1 About a week ago, @ was crying rather dramatically at bedtime. When I asked what was wrong, he said he was worried about me. I certainly didn't expect him to say that. I thought maybe it was because he knew I'd been sick. It wasn't. "Mommy, you're not married. You're all by yourself. You need someone to marry you." Wha huh? Bam, that was certainly out of the clear blue sky. Or maybe it was cloudy that day. I don't recall. Obviously the weather

This Saturday was one of @'s favorite days of the year, the annual March for Babies walk. He was six months old and still on oxygen the first time I did the walk, but he has been there every year since, making it his sixth walk and my seventh. In @'s world, the first few years were about the balloons and the noise, then it was about being a surviving preemie, and now it's about helping babies and walking for his twin brother. It's a tiring day for me, both physically and emotionally. It's a reminder of