I know. Where have I been? Why haven’t I written anything here?
I am the Poster Child for How to Lose Your Blog Audience. My Number One Tip: 1) Do not blog for days, weeks, even a fortnight. Or longer.
Well, now that we have that out of the way, let’s proceed.
My husband left me. TEMPORARILY. He went to Micronesia for twenty days to teach some classes and climb a coconut tree and eat freshly caught tuna and to sweat. Hey, it’s a tropical island. What did you expect?
Meanwhile, the day he left, I drove up to Anaheim to have dinner with a friend, but mainly to pick up some other friends from Washington. The woman and her son have been friends for ten years. Our sons met in kindergarten class and we eventually realized they were born on the same day. And my friend, the mom, was born only a few days before I was.
So, they came to visit for a few days.
We had a whirlwind of a weekend. This is what we did:
- Spent the afternoon at the beach.
- Took our kids–five total–to see Iron Man 3. (Everyone loved it.)
- Rode the ferry from Coronado Island to downtown San Diego where we toured the USS Midway Museum.
- Dragged the kids to the other side of Coronado Island to see the Hotel Del Coronado. (The boys thought this was super super boring.)
- Strolled through the Carlsbad Street Fair.
- Visited the Safari Zoo.
- Delivered them to the airport.
A day after those friends left, my mom came to stay for a week. We ate lunch out every day, pretty much, did as much shopping as we could, visited Seafaire Village and ate lunch while watching sailboats glide by. A funny thing happened at the Edgewater Grill–we sat down at our table with a view of the water and a bird drunkenly flapped and fluttered around us. I have a well-documented unease around indoor birds, yet even I was trying to capture the poor thing between a menu and . . . my hand? Eventually, other customers managed to guide the bird to safety. It was an exciting beginning to our lunch.
We had so much fun, my mom, my daughter and me. We ended our afternoon by losing our car in the parking lot which is kind of a regular occurrence for me. I always have a good reason for being unable to find my car, so that’s something.
After my mom left, I had another week or so before my husband returned from his tropical adventure.
My husband’s absence affected me in one major and painful way: I had to wake up every morning at 6:20 AM to make sure my son was awake (he was, every morning) and then again at 7:20 AM to drive him to school. (Normally, my husband, the Early Bird, takes care of morning stuff.) Then I’d come home and sleep some more before working at 10 AM. The problem with early mornings is that I work late nights . . . so I was getting to sleep at 1 AM or 2 AM and . . . boy, that was really exhausting.
My husband came home just in the nick of time . . . to drive my son to school for his last day of school.
I cannot believe that my boy has finished his first year of high school and his second year of school here in California.
Meanwhile, yesterday my daughter saw a coyote behind our house. The coyote saw her, too, and then me, and also, our big dog. We all kind of had a stand-off and then the coyote slunk away.
Oh, I forgot to mention the MOST FUN my mom and I had.
See that picture up there? That’s the back of my head. We went to a taping of the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. My mom uses a walker so we were seated first in the studio . . . in excellent seats right on the floor. I was about ten feet away from Jay Leno during his monologue. Jay Leno shook my hand . . . but the camera panned away from us at that very moment. I think that happened because some idiot guy walked right onto the stage–which we’d been told NOT TO DO.
(That’s my mom’s manicured hand outstretched to the left of my hair. And in front of me is the idiot guy who is standing on the stage in violation of the rules. I should have given him a wedgie or at least a hard shove, but what if he fell into Jay Leno and I got thrown out of the studio? Good thing I just stood there with my hand out, waiting for a handshake.)
Anyway, so I’ve been busy and every night when I finish work after midnight, I think about blogging and then I think how I’m just too tired . . . and sometimes, during the day, I’ll compose fascinating blog posts in my head and then I take a nap before work and work and finish working and realize how tired I am and so I check out Facebook and go to bed.
This is How to Kill Your Blog Without Really Trying.
And this is the pet pig I saw on Coronado Island.
You’re welcome.