driving conditions: hazardous or: back in the saddle again

Last MLK weekend 2007 I got into a car accident. No one else involved but me, my Rodeo a highway divider protecting me from 20+ foot drop...I was able to drive away from it, but would never truly drive my car again after that white knuckled drive home. Through a wild set of extenuating circumstances I didn't have to drive in winter weather again.

Until this weekend. Yesterday, I woke up to another batch of snow (pre-Christmas snow and arctic weather -- everything I had always heard about Minnesota but had never experienced in the 6 years I've lived here) (side note: can it really be 6 years? Crazy! That's nearly a third of my life!). As I drove to pick up a few kids this morning, I had to laugh: it's amazing what comes back. Slushy, wet, snow still freaks me out to drive in. But the ice that had formed overnight after the fresh batch of snow had thawed and re-frozen? No problem. Because in Kansas, we don't get snowy conditions, we get ice. And you grow up learning how to drive in ice. Rationally, should it be the other way around? Should the snow scare me less than the ice? Definately, but there you go, no one ever claimed that anything weather-related was rational from Kansas.

concentration? shot.

Hello December 21. My, you came early this year. Despite the fact that the Christmas madness was extended for a week, I'm not sure where the time since Thanksgiving has gone. What I do know is that it is terribly difficult to work on a day such as today. What with the every third hour email from Viagra (no, no thanx YOU), the lack of people in the office and my uncanny ability to "wing it" (aka procrastinate the inevitable away)...work is becoming increasingly difficult to concentrate on. I'm giving myself 30 more minutes to hammer things out and then it's time to work from home.

Not that I am any more motivated to work on things at home. :)

In-laws are coming over tonight, Christmas presents will be given, and tastey food will be consumed. Happy Christmas everyone!

Pineapple Chicken

So, I'm pretty proud of myself. We've been cutting back on eating out and trying to make better food choices. We're still trying to get better at the whole "plan out a menu so you always have enough of the right food in the house." So, I'm left on Monday night with half of a chicken in the freezer and little in mind to do with it. Half a chicken and a can of pineapple slices in 100% juice.

As Dan is fond of telling his student workers: Google is your friend. I Googled chicken and pineapple recipes and came up with the following yumminess:

1/4 c . pineapple juice
1/4 c. low-sodium soy sauce
1/2 tsp. garlic powder
1/4 tsp. ginger
Combine to form a sauce, pour over chicken. Turn chicken in roasting pan skin-side up (I had already removed the skin, it still came out nicely done). Cook at 350 degrees for 45-55 minutes. Remove from oven, lay pineapple slices on top of chicken, return to oven for 5 minutes.

I served it with brown rice. It has a great sweet and salty taste, and I am a SUCKER for pineapple (baked, grilled, roasted, regular, whatever). It's a winner for sure...and I used a can from the cupboard we didn't anticipate using. :)

Today was a good "catch your breath" day. I'm not sure why it seems like we haven't had a proper Saturday since before the wedding (I know that one or two slipped in there, surely!, in the past two months) but...there you go. A day spent relaxing, sleeping, getting some shopping in and some things done around the house. Not overly having to worry about deadlines or whatnot.

Back to the grind in a few hours. I'm antsy to get home to KC. I miss my family, I miss seeing my KC friends. Life here, while incredibly good, incredibly amazing and exactly what I chose for myself, leaves me disconnected at the same time as well. I'm anxious to spend time with my family. It grows smaller more quickly these days, it seems, I keep getting the feeling that these are moments to savor, they won't come around again anytime in this lifetime. Thinking back to last Christmas, did I love enough? Did I share life enough? Did I stop to truly enjoy the moments before everything changed, irrevocably? Refusing to look back, one must believe -- I did what I could do. We all come to this Christmas changed. Happy changes, sad changes, life changes...just as we do every year.

Listening to my high school girls bemoan the lack of Christmas spirit in their own hearts, I found myself wondering, at what age did I start to notice that Christmas took time and effort, significant preparation in the soul for the meaning of the day to not be lost? I was their age or younger, I am sure. And even today, the house feels Christmas-y, but how have I been doing at keeping Advent in my heart? /Sigh. Many thoughts, few answers.

We are often at our best and our worst with those we most love. Something about the safety to push, something about the trust that we have that they will love us at our best, our worst, in our beauty and when our ugly rears it's head. At times, it is as difficult when we are at our best as it is when we are at our worst. Both involve a deep and wide swath of truth and honesty. That is to say, we are interconnected. We struggle through this together. To hear and be heard. To love and be loved. To know and be known. In the tension of moments, hopes for longevity are formed. Spouses, friends, parents, people on the street. All are interconnected. Will we trust? Will we hear? Will we learn? We are all weak and broken. It's in our ability to be interconnected that we are strongest.

I am selfish
I am wrong
I am right
I swear I'm right
Swear I knew it all along
And I am flawed, but I am cleaning up so well
I am seeing in me now the things you swore you saw yourself

One of my (many) self-mantras is "live thoughtfully." I've been thinking about what the idea of thoughtful living actually means. And, in this season, I am increasingly aware of how good at living thoughtfully I am.

/Pause for self-congratulations and pats on back

Of course, I should mention, I am good at living thoughtfully when my thoughts are only focused on myself.

Self-indulgent navel-gazing blogging aside (did you sense the irony in the sarcasm too?) it is a sad fact. Our lives (mine included) are increasingly over burdened by thoughts of self: self satisfaction and filling some deeper self need. We are so insistent on grasping on tightly to our rights, our freedoms, our opinions, our time and commodities and space, our blessed need to be heard and loved and paid attention to, dammit, that it is so very easy to lose sight of the fact that our only thoughts are on ourselves. We have promoted ourselves above others, which is easy when we never intended to think about them in the first place.

At it's heart, that is why living thoughtfully is so hard, so unpleasant, so terribly unpopular. Not that we are called to loathe ourselves, or not think towards our own needs and safety and wants. But life is more about the focus on self, it's about thinking about others more and better than we think about ourselves. It's about putting the needs of others before our own, it's about thinking beyond the comfortable, thinking beyond the people and things that we know. It's about holding our tongue and not exerting our need for an opinion, or our rights, and thinking about how they may be perceived or who those words and actions may hurt. Even if we do not harm ourselves (or care if we do) harming others is thoughtless.

This does not, of course, mean that your person, your self, who you value yourself to be, is in any way diminished. Living thoughtfully, living by putting others first, by putting myself last, living in an other-centered mentality...only compromises and diminishes who I am if I let it. I am me, I am true to myself, I am authentically Kate when I live to the fullest extent of who I was created to be. It takes wisdom and discernment, speaking the truth in love is much more than stating an opinion because you can. People may get hurt all the same, but the intent is the difference. The rub is found in the delivery.

Living thoughtfully. I want to do better. I hope to do better.

stuck

Stuck in sick mode. Sleeping long and hard. Waking with ouchy glands and snot in the head, dead behind the eyes. It's hard to not be able to spark, to find yourself staring off into the distance as if you're waiting.

For me, I'm waiting to be un-sick. Waiting to feel better. Waiting to not be stuck. Stuck between wanting to make plans and to let timing go. Stuck between knowing what I ought to do and not always (usually) doing it. Stuck knowing I need to clean and do laundry and not having the enthusiasm to muster some energy to get it done (or vice versa). Stuck not seeing some people enough on purpose and by life design. Stuck between forward and backward momentum (sometimes). Stuck between wanting and needing. Stuck waiting for some sort of future leading.

Stuck isn't a bad place to be, it's mostly just a place like any other place. Instead of making your hands and feet busy going somewhere or doing something, you keep yourself busy while you wait. You learn, you heal, you persevere and you move on eventually. I'm very aware that I'm in this holding pattern, and have been. But in the same breath, I get to love my wonderful husband, enjoy my job, enjoy my co-workers, enjoy my time here in Minnesota, enjoy my new family and new aspects of life...being stuck affords you time. I suppose that we are only truly stuck when we are not accountable to the time we are afforded. Have you loved enough, laughed enough, cried enough and smiled enough today? Have I learned something about life or myself recently? Have I peeked into the future to see if it's starting to make itself evident lately? Have I prayed, looked, listened or thought at all? Have you?

wanderlust

I think I'm getting sick. I've been wiped out all week and today my glands are starting to hurt. I hope to have this out of the way soon, though. No good being sick during the holidays!

I stumbled across a new blog the other day: dailycoyote.blogspot.com -- this woman lives in a one-bedroom cabin in Wyoming and had an orphaned 10-day old coyote come into her life. She's not attempting to domesticate him, but allow him to grow and develop -- and of course, leave when he's ready. This read lead me to her other journal, about her cross-country road trip on a Vespa. I love reading travel memoirs and books about the wild...which leads me to wonder: can our hearts be judged by our book's covers?

There is an innate beauty, at least to me, about the northwest of our country: Wyoming, Montana, Washington, Oregon (and Idaho has to count, although it doesn't hold the same appeal to me). Maybe it's the difference in lifestyle, or the enormity of the sky, or the wealth of Native American history and folklore surrounding the area. I read Into the Wild, books by Barbara Kingsolver and Nicolas Evans and my heart yearns to travel, to live that life, to be on the open road, if not on a Vespa, then on a motorcycle. With a camera in hand and my husband at my side as we go towards the road not traveled. Not just for a day or two: but an extended trip over a month or two. Looking for unfindable monsters and wonders, exploring this country before we get to be too tied down.

Of course, I am already tied down. I'm not a country girl -- as much as the books I read may want to speak to the opposite -- and I know that. I have a job, committments, a limited amount of time off. Motherhood and further education are in the not-too-distant future (though, thankfuly, not yet.) An exploration of that sort would come on the cusp of some other life change. And as fabulous as I imagine it to be now, in reality it would be sore muscles, no creature comforts, riding in bugs and rain and more of those things that put you in touch with your personhood. We don't go on these trips not because we can't find the time or place to go...but because we are afraid of who we will be when we return.

What I do know, is that at least today, I want to go. I am taken back to whipping across the Montana highways, seemingly unchanging despite our 100+mph velocity. The state stretching out vast and wide. The impending storm bearing down on the bleached brown land and a pure white horizon line running along beside us. There are adventures yet to be had and places yet to explore. I know I will get there, that I don't go alone, but when I haven't a clue.

Dan keeps telling me that I overthink things. That life will happen and things will fall into place. I've never not had a plan, I've never not known what was going to happen, not had options and a safety net in place. Today, surrounded by snow and swollen glands....it's hard to not think to planning. To not think about where life will take me...to not plan for the detailed future, but keep what is coming in mind. The wanderer is shelved for another day, another time, another dream.