A Garage Door and a Dublin Mudslide

This looks harmless, but don’t be fooled. It’s three inches of plastic pain-in-the-you-know-what and the reason I practically had to crawl under our van the other day. Ok, so it was the Dublin Mudslide ice cream that made me do it, but it all started with that three-inch red nemesis.

The basic storyline is this. I’ve been doing the mommy-runs-around-town in frigid temps thing for a while. I needed a break, nap, drink, but I had to get a kid to school, another home to nap, and we were out of milk, bread, water, you get it. I summoned up the strength to get the first one to school and headed to the store. I’d made a mental list of essentials, but I knew with more snow coming, I’d better get what I could and get out. Then, there it was. The decadent flavors calling to me – Dublin Mudslide. Figures – ice cream in a snowstorm.

I get everything I can, mudslide included, and get on the way home. By the time we get there, my little one has had it, needs a nap. He’s unloaded first, since I only have a few bags. Unloading the rest, I bump my Siberian faux-fur hood on the plastic hanging from the ceiling and sit a bag back in the van so I can move the handle out of my way. You know what happens? The bag falls open and the only thing I bought for myself drops out and rolls under the van. Sigh. It may be cold, but the ice cream’s mine and I’m getting it. Somehow, it rolled almost exactly in the middle of the space under the van, so I couldn’t just reach for it. I had to get on my hands and knees as the snow is puddling in our garage to get my delectable treat.

And so I did. Then as I went to rush inside and clean myself off, I accidentally shut the sliding door on the garage handle. This is the same handle that controls the garage door. Snows coming and I can’t get it shut for anything. Plus, I have no idea what I’m supposed to do to make it work again.

I fuss and fidget. Running from one side of the van to the other in order to find out, again, and again, nothing was working. Nearly 20 minutes later, it worked. Some combination of jerking and pulling freed it so it could move the door. I was so cold when it was over I ended up having coffee instead. My Dublin Mudslide would have to wait, and it was well worth it. Just imagine – Irish cream liqueur ice cream with chocolate-chocolate chip cookies and a coffee fudge swirl. Yum, brr! Happy winter!

Too busy to write?

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.

- Gertrude Stein

Believing in Ourselves: The Wisdom on Women

I recently read a blog post ‘Busy or Productive?’ from Something to Believe in (Purple Song Project Blog). It was a response to a recent post by Christina Katz asking writers to consider what ‘busy’ means. I think that this is an important to our lives and careers. If we are busy, but lack productivity, are we just spinning our wheels needlessly? If we lack direction or focus, where are we going and why?

The quote above makes me think of these blogs, and question my version of busy. I think that sometimes, especially in creative pursuits, a person needs time to meander, wander a bit and take everything in before they can produce. If we take time to take things in and contemplate we are sometimes rewarded with great creativity. It’s important to make sure we can get ourselves back on track.

This week I’m going to try something different. I’m going to let myself get off track, and relax about it. What I’ll do differently is make sure I commit the same amount of time to writing that I do to other things like daydreaming (Ha, like I have time for that!). If I take 30 minutes for web surfing and e-mails, then my writing gets the same 30 minutes. I hope that learning how much time I spend doing writing-adjacent or non-writing tasks – when what I want to do is advance my writing projects – will show me just how much time there is to do just that.