School starts again for me tomorrow, so this week my boys started back to full-time daycare.  When I dropped them off yesterday, as we got out of the car I commented on the fact that daycare’s summer session ended last Friday and all the older kids weren’t there anymore. The new preschool session hasn’t started yet, so the only kids in attendance are the small group of kids that attend daycare in addition to preschool.

“Summer’s gone.” I said.

“Summer all gone?” asked Goose.  “We lost Summer?”

“Yep,” I said.  “Summer’s all gone.”

“Oh,” he replied, a thoughtful look crossing his face. “Den we need to get more Summer.”

If you’ve ever watched The Big Bang Theory, or Dharma & Greg (or any of his other shows), you’ve seen Chuck Lorre’s vanity cards at the end of each show.  On my 40th birthday, one of my favorite ones comes to mind:

Dead is the new unambiguous. Bipolar is the new undecided. Heavily armed is the new born again. Bald is the new head… and the new crotch. Hairy is the new face. Sheepishly admitting to having an STD is the new flirting. Purell is the new face of fear. Finding the time that’s right for you is the new impotence. The smiley-face emoticon is the new “sincerely yours.” Smoking is the new outdoorsy lifestyle. Looking forward to insanely expensive private schooling, thousand dollar a week nannies and soccer is the new yuppie birth control. Misinformed is the new patriotic. Veganism is the new “tastes like chicken.” Serotonin uptake inhibiting is the new crowd control. Texting is the new talking. Talking is the new singing. Singing is the new hubris. Gay marriage is the new “be careful what you wish for.” And finally, and only because I really need this to catch on, fifty-seven years old is the new forty-five.

Here’s hoping this decade will be a great one.

(This one is also a favorite of mine.)

[Set to autopost because I'm at the beach!]

There’s an expression that shows up on a lot of little tchotchkes* meant for teachers that says “The 3 best things about teaching: June, July and August.”

I hate it. I hate the idea that the reason people teach is to get three months off a year. It diminishes the education I earned and the effort I put forth. All that being said, I admit I like having three months off, that staying home with my kids each summer is one perk of being a teacher. I get to metaphorically catch my breath and literally get caught up on all the things I did not get done during the previous nine months.

And that’s the thing. The three months of “summer break” come with a trade off:  nine months of the year I am generally so swamped that my other job — as a mother — takes a back seat. A back-of-the-bus seat.  By the end of the school year my house has arrived at a level of disorder just short of a visit from a TV news camera crew. I would like to stab every person who each summer asks me “Soooo… enjoying your summer off?” with a tone that implies teachers are shiftless good-for-nothings, lounging around drawing a paycheck, while hardworking tax-payers slave to fund them. It seriously takes me the entire summer to get my house and home to a base level of organization  and cleanliness, just so that we can spend the next nine months tearing it all back down again.

And  — ok, fine, whatever – I’ll be honest and admit that summers off is actually one of the reasons I chose teaching: to have time for my family, while still being able to have a career.  I enjoy the extra time I spend with my kids over the summer, but I have to come clean about something else.  As a stay-at-home mom, I kinda suck. A lot.  And by “kinda,” I mean I do. And by “a lot,” I mean a-frickin-lot-to-the-nth-degree.

I’m not an all-around terrible mother.  As a making-sure-your-kids-are-learning mom, I do better than average. As a traveling-with-your-kids mom, I’m a rock star.  As a spending-time-with-your-kids mom, a putting-your-kids-first-most-but-not-all-of-the-time-because-that’s-actually-called-a-martyr mom, I could set the gold fucking standard.

But the stay-at-home, cooking-balanced-meals-served-at-actual-dinner-time, time-for-your-nap, laundry-folded-and-actually-put-away-in-drawers kind of mom?  Yeah, not so much. Even during summer break, while I’m not working outside the home, my kids go to daycare two days a week. And I still can barely get my household management shit together.

I hate the term “mommy wars” like I hate the term “man cave,” with the burning hatred of a thousand… oh, I don’t know, something really hot and flamey… but I have to make the disclaimer “not to start another mommy war,” before saying: how do people do it? I could not stay home every day, I don’t think.  But I also don’t think I could work year-round.  Seriously, how do people do it? Whichever one they do.  Stay at home full-time without letting their house, or children… mostly children, drive them insane or work full-time year-round without living in disorder and filth ad infinitum?

As I type, every clean article of clothing in my household is in a laundry basket.  Oh, go ahead… ask me about my laundry basket collection.  I have about two per person, plus a few extras for things like towels.  Because I basically use them as our dressers during the school year; we live out of them. But school ended two months ago and I still can’t get every single clean article all put away at once.

There are three weeks left  of summer break, one of which will be spent at the beach.  So I have two weeks to finish what I haven’t already accomplished in the last two months before I succumb (willingly) to working mom denial syndrome again.

But one last thing I forgot to mention…  The when-the-going-gets-tough-the-tough-get-going kind of mom?  Look her up in the dictionary.  There’s a picture of me.

*OMG.  I can’t believe I just spelled tchotchke correctly off the top of my head, but I did.  For real.

**I also have to add that the Hubster does a full 50% share of the cooking and cleaning during the school year, so it’s not a case of someone not pulling his weight.

Well, how about that?  It’s July.  And a July that’s almost over at that.

Short recap of the last several months: It was a busy hell of a school year and then with only two days to go, I fried the hard drive in my laptop.  (ThoughtIshutitdown x butjustputittosleep + tuckeditsnuglyintomybag = BAD).  Even when  got it replaced, I wasn’t really back online because our wireless router, well… Sweet Holy Moses, I don’t know what it was doing, but what it wasn’t doing was let us reliably connect to the internet.  Top that all off with my BlackBerry, which had been dying a slow, horrible death.  Like Chinese Water Torture, except I suffered while it died.  Died by tortuous, microscopic increments, none of which were emergent enough for me to immediately replace my phone, but collectively drove me slowly nuts.  I’d been resisting the necessity of getting a new phone because — aside from the fact that nobody likes change — I just didn’t have time to learn a new phone. (I use my phone to micromanage every aspect of my life.)

But here we are. And I’m posting this from my new Droid Incredible! I can’t make any promises that I’ll be posting more regularly (I’ve tried that whole promising thing before and it doesn’t work), but I will say that I hope I can post more often. I miss this place.

(Sorry for the lousy picture of my new phone, but it’s so shiny that the camera keeps trying to autofocus on my reflection on the surface. And I’m to lazy to figure out how to manually focus my camera.)

Or that I should start an underground fighting club set on subverting the dominant paradigm and creating a new world order.  Not really sure which one.

An actual post.  No joke.  I promise.

Just the other day, I tweeted this:

I am so over winter. Seriously. I  mean, we bought a snow plow.

We. Bought. A. Snow. Plow.

Everyone I know is so cabin-feverish that we’re like zombies.  I feel like I’ve lost the will to do anything.  Ugh.

I am so burned out. Not just from the weather, but also at work. This has been such an intensely busy year in my new position that the feeling of mental exhaustion it induces overwhelms every aspect of my life. I’ve been telling myself that I just need to soldier through this school year and next year it will be a little easier, since I can improve upon the foundation that I’m building now.  Nothing is as exhausting as starting from scratch. Until I found out about some curriculum changes in the works and realized I will essentially have to trash everything and reinvent the wheel. Again. Bye-bye, dream of free time.  I’m staring down another year of feeling overworked and isolated.

Last week I found out that BlogHer was almost sold out and even though last year I swore I would go this year, I still didn’t buy a ticket.  I want to go to BlogHer, but I don’t want to go to BlogHer. I’m intimidated by the thought of going alone to a conference in a city where I’ve never been before (the conference and the city, both). I’d love to make more concrete connections with the blogging community, but I also question whether I really belong at BlogHer.  I don’t have a mission or a message.  I’m not trying to make any money from blogging.  I don’t have one specific cause I champion (although I do have a lot of strong opinions). When I say “I blog for myself” I really do mean it, but I admit that I also blog to feel connected. Lack of time these days has created for me a strong feeling of disconnect. My existential crisis is trying to figure where exactly I fit in the blogosphere.  I love blogging (both reading and writing), but I just don’t seem to be able to make time to for it these days. I need blogging, but I don’t have the energy to want blogging right now. (Does that even make sense?)

I had just about decided to woman-up and buy a ticket and just figure out the details later (Like, does anyone ever go to BlogHer without a roommate? Because it seems like everyone talks about roomies and since I wouldn’t have one, I’d feel a little like a friendless dateless wallflower), when I learned it is officially sold out.  There is a wait list, but… again… I don’t know.

I need warmth and human connection but all I can do is hunker down and wait it all out.  Summer is the big, bright light at the end of my dark tunnel for so many reasons, but right now it seems very small and far away.

I need something to relieve the string of posts about snow, snow and more snow. (By the way… it’s going to snow again! Go figure!)  This coming weekend is the annual infamous Ski Weekend (at least there will be snow) and for the first time my little sister is coming. Yay! However, she’s coming without her girlfriend of the past several years.  I have yet to hear the whole story on this (and whether the situation is permanent), but her romantic circumstances — be they what they may or may not turn out to be — had me considering the following.  It’s not original; it’s been all over the Interweb, but I still love the truth of it.  I tried to chase it to its source through a series of links, but the links I was following were so circuitous I couldn’t find the origin.

Yeah.  So it’s been snowing for like eleventy-billion days.  School (meaning, for me, work) was canceled all last week.  And we’ve been back only on an abbreviated two-hour delay schedule all this week.  In the first week of the blizzard, I successfully left my house only once.  And then it started snowing again, so I had to rush home before getting trapped not at home. It has snowed a measurable amount every day for the past two weeks.  So it’s been a little cabin-feverish around here.

Last Thursday, I spent over an hour editing a picture to go along with the Valentine’s Day meme on Facebook that said:

♥ ♥ In celebration of Valentine’s Day, post a picture of you and your significant other as your profile pic for the next week. Post this as a status update and leave a comment stating how long you’ve been together! ♥ ♥

This was the picture:

What?! You’re saying you don’t really believe that a shirtless Ryan Reynolds comes to Ski Weekend?

I think it’s clear I’ve officially lost it. It reminds me a little of this vignette from The Simpsons‘  “Treehouse of Horror V:”

But even more so, I keep thinking of the episode of Northern Exposure* where Joel thinks he hears a ghost and discovers that years ago a snowbound man killed himself in Joel’s cabin.  Below are the relevant parts of the storyline, edited and condensed (please excuse the black bars around the frame, I’m still trying to figure out what went wrong there):

“Alone… alone” indeed.

*The Greatest Television Show That Ever Was

This "snow" stuff? Pretty cool...

What? "Come back?" I can't heeeear you...

Later, people. Going "back inside" is for suckers!

And yes, this is what our driveway looks like at the moment.

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