Keep Moving Forward

So much time has passed since my last blog post, I find myself at a bit of a loss of where to start... which is where I've been with it for at least two weeks, and why I haven't posted before now. The overfullness of my life has continued on through May and June, but became a little more manageable with the purchase of a new dishwasher about seven weeks ago. We spent the big bucks and got a stainless steel interior, which has now saved me the additional work of de-rusting it every two months—after heavy use all this time, not a single part of the interior of the dishwasher is turning orange. Yay! Another perk of spending the big bucks is that the thing is so quiet, it is sometimes hard to tell if it is actually running. The dryer at the other end of the house drowns it out... *quiet smile*

I guess I could talk about the forest tent moth caterpillar infestation that ravaged the Peace Country this spring, and made all of our trees naked.* Thank goodness the grass is still green, because the trees make it look like January outside. Now, two weeks after the caterpillars started starving to death en masse, the trees are just starting to get a dusting of green on them again, but for several weeks, I found it depressing to look out the window. I wasn't alone.

"Poor trees," Noah sighed one day on our way into town. Where gaily-fluttering foliage should have been were wooden skeletons cobwebbed in sheets of caterpillar silk, with the occasional "cocoon tree", looking like it had managed to bud out its fluff without the benefit of leaves.

We did not have them quite as bad as some people I know, who literally had a layer over an inch thick and solid covering house, yard, and vehicles, but it was bad enough. They especially seemed to favour our south-facing front sidewalk and the corner beside our steps--which is a very difficult place to remove all the little carcasses from, and made it quite stinky there once they started dying.

Everyone say it with me: "EEEEEEEEWWWWWW!"

Once they started diminishing in numbers to something reasonable (e.g. 1/sq. ft. as opposed to 1/sq. in.), we actually managed to get our lawn mowed, and I even got the garden in. (Didn't seem to be much point in trying when the beds were covered in greenery-chomping nasties before that. Sadly, I was a little behind this spring, and hadn't got a thing in the ground before the plague hit.)

In my last post, I alluded to the fact that we had been in Sylvan Lake. We were there for Jason's grandma Joan Morrison's memorial service—a small family celebration of her life. Unfortunately, little Levi got a nasty stomach flu the night before the service. He had managed to keep a few things down for an hour or two by the time we needed to leave for the event, so I decided to go and take him, anyway. (Previously, I had been planning to stay home with him so Jason could go, at least.) All was well until I got distracted with visiting while feeding him a bottle and let him drink way more than I planned. The eruption of Mount Leviticus was epic, and followed by a first for Jason and me—washing our baby's hair together in the sink of the handicap washroom. :-)

Other than that, the weekend was great, and we were glad to have even a short visit with family members that we don't see nearly often enough.

After sudden jolts to a life system like adding Levi was for us, your habits and ways of doing things take a while to reconfigure themselves into something workable. But slowly, it does happen. My garden is in. The taxes aren't done, but at least progress on finishing my year-end has resumed, and taxes will hopefully be finished in the next couple of weeks. My boys are wrapping up their school subjects, with only one or two that will not be completed until sometime in July. While I still feel overwhelmed a good portion of the time, I am beginning to see a light at the end of the tunnel.

This morning, the boys and I went to a registration interview at the school they will be attending in the fall. I had expected to be upset about it, but I'm really not. I feel like I am under a huge, rainy cloud of pressures and responsibilities right now, and I can look across the field of summer to see some golden-leaved autumn trees on the other side—and that's where the sun is shining. But not here. Not yet.

I find myself wondering how long it will take for my mind to slow down, for me to not feel like every moment I am awake must be a productive one? How long to revert to a time when blogging could happen several times a week (on the actual computer instead of only in my head), I could occasionally sew myself a dress over a couple of days (instead of only buying fabric that sits collecting dust in a pile somewhere), and making a scrapbook page was a healthy, self-nurturing habit, not something I only do in stolen moments--with the guilt of things not being done whispering through the window screens of my mind's art gallery all the while? I am really looking forward to that "reset", when I don't feel like my whole life is lived on a deadline... to pick up the writing course I was doing... finally go through a few other educational books I have had calling my name on the shelf for a year or several. To compose again. To not be too exhausted to go out with my friends once in a while. To spend my evenings with my husband instead of my office work.

Wow. I am really, really looking forward to that. I know it's up the road a ways, yet, so for now, I'll just keep putting one foot in front of the other. 'Cause the only way to get past where you are is to keep moving forward.

Happy summer, friends. I hope the sun is shining on you.

*In light of the floods ravaging southern Alberta at the moment, I want to clarify that I mention this not by way of complaint, but posterity. I'll take caterpillars over floods any day.