Well, that poor old lilac bush is sitting out there with green leaves all right. But they appear to be frozen solid. They haven't turned brown yet. Things are not always as they appear to be. They appear to be alive, but obviously they can't be with the temperature as it is.
Suddenly I am popular again, and I have lots of work to do. Doing legal research is fun and I like it. I have to write it up on Monday. And then, I have "document preparation jobs", i.e., two bankruptcies to finish up for people. I am also doing taxes for a couple of small businesses....and one bookkeeping job for a small business.
I really love the "right brain" functioning jobs, but the "left brain" jobs though not hard, require me to concentrate. Well, here's where the weird comes in...in order to do the left brain jobs, I have to "move my thinking" over to the left brain through this tiny little passage-way in my brain, and once I get over there, I pretty much have to stay there until the job is done or I get frustrated and have to start over again. See, I told you it was weird.
I am preparing Christmas presents for my family. I am going to have to figure out how to mail Zach's presents to him.
I hate that, I would rather someone shipped Zach to me for Christmas, but it's highly likely he is going to be spending the holiday with his father. That's okay, but his dad's family never did know how to do Christmas. We used to show up at my inlaws.... (there were two sets and a grandma, so rather than one mother-in-law I had the Grandma who raised him, plus the mother-in-law, plus the step-mother-in-law. I loved Granny and I loved the step-mother-in-law, but the regular mother-in-law was apparently one of my karmic punishments.) ...and no one had even bothered to clean off the table, or wash dishes (whole counter-tops, plus boxes on the floor and in the next room full of dirty pots, pans and dishes and the floor in the living room two feet deep in old newspapers encrusted with dog hair....yikes!!!) Needless to say I hadn't met the in-laws prior to the marriage!! Granny, on the other hand was a very good housekeeper, and she always had a Christmas tree. But neither his mother or his father had any concept of a "family" Christmas. I helped start a tradition, and his one half-sister (his Dad's child) and his half-brother's wives helped to begin a family Christmas tradition.
This thing about "holiday family fights" that I keep hearing about on television is a totally foreign concept to me as well. Our family never had any holiday fights. Unfortunately my brother somehow turned out to be a bleeding heart liberal (I thought that with age comes wisdom...I started out with that concept, but soon outgrew it...) My son somehow slipped over that line as well, and believes himself to be a liberal, but inasmuch as he does things the way I did them, I am confident that he will come around and see the reasonableness of remedying that viewpoint in the very near future. I think I was about 30 when I figured out it was far better to be conservative. At any rate, in our family we steer away from politics at family gatherings. It's best to avoid that topic in a family gathering. My mother bites her tongue if my brother slips up. She will give him a look.
No, the only family fights we ever see are usually among the very, very young. My niece, Ally's kids (Allison) are somewhat rambunctious. There is Nate who was born on my birthday and will be 12 in '07, and then his sisters, Savannah and Dakota, and the baby Cameron. They tussle with one another, but you can't really call it a fight.
We used to call my father "the curmudgeon", and when he died, I guess my brother decided it was his job to be the curmudgeon of the family. I'd have liked to have taken on that job, but mother says I am too sweet to be curmudgeonly. My brother thinks I am too weird, so I get to be eccentric, rather than curmudgeonly. I'm not eccentric, I just am open to all sorts of ideas, and when I express them, sometimes people look at me strangely.
I guess the thing to remember about me is that although I may seem to be stubborn and very set in my ways, I am actually fairly flexible if you can give me a good reason why I ought to "flex".
I believe that laziness is the mother of invention, and figuring out the most efficient and least time-consuming way of accomplishing a task is merely clever, and not in any way lacking in diligence. But it does allow one to have more free time to play. Playing is something everyone should do from time to time.
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