Wednesday. Sunny. Temp 74F Humidity 74%. Windows are closed.
I? have ordered in breakfast on the theory that I will eat an omelet if all I have to do is open the damned box and get a fork out of the drawer. I’m flailing around for strategies to get myself interested in eating food — and I don’t at this point care if it’s healthy, particularly — and came to remember that I never had any strategies for that particular quirk in a stupid quirky nature. When I was living with Steve, he cooked 90% of the time, and I’d sit at the table to be sociable, even if I didn’t feel like eating, and would have a bit of this or that while we were talking. Yes, Steve was a genius. However, that solution is no longer operative, and I’m a bit at a loss. And before anyone panics — I’m not sick, my stomach doesn’t hurt. I just — don’t want to eat. The urgency is that I cannot allow this to fall into a habit.
Argh.
Moving on to more amusing topics: The perambulating package is now in! South Portland. USPS promises delivery, but we’ve heard that song before.
We had a bunch of thunder and some lightning, but if there were violent thunderstorms in Maine last night, they were someplace else. While I don’t regret the violence — or the possible tornadoes — I do regret the thunderstorm drama.
Today’s Plan is to read the 100+ pages of the WIP, which will not only hopefully hang together as a tale, but provide sufficient hooks to hang the rest of the story on.
Writer math.
break to eat breakfast Which. Was. Good. Remember this, Self? Food tastes good. Sheesh.
A friend posted a meme yesterday about “When I was growing up, we were thrown out onto the street, helmetless, with our bike after breakfast and told to come home before dark.” Which encouraged some conversation including, “What is this “helmet” you speak of?” And that got me to thinking about How Things Change.
For instance. In my life — which, we do have to factor in the determination that we were writers above all else, which did have an enormous bearing on finances — I think that people who have two homes, or a camp, are well-off. The course of my life being such that we could barely afford one house, and were always skating the edge between solvent and me presenting Steve with a fanned hand of bills and saying, “Pick a bill. Pick any bill. The bill that you pick is the bill we won’t be paying this month.”
So, that. And then I think back to — my parents. Who had land in the mountains of Pennsylvania that they intended to build a camp on. They never did because they’d gotten taken in the matter of boundary lines and water, but that aside — they owned property other than their primary residence. My father was a spotwelder at the General Motors factory in Sparrow’s Point, Maryland. My mother was a stay-at-home mom.
Going back a generation, and the reason I’m so “surprisingly” at ease on the water, my father’s parents had a camp on Middle River in Maryland to which they retired every summer. They also had a mini-farm at what was then the edge of the town of Parkville, Maryland. My grandfather was a tailor for a large tailoring house (I often remember the name, but not this morning) in the city. My grandmother was a stay-at-home mom.
Tailor and spotwelder — these are not positions associated with great amounts of wealth. And yet, they were able to buy “extra” properties.
Well. The past is a different country.
Time to go to work.
What was your childhood summer like?
Sticking my male problem-solving nose in, would having some kind of meal replacement shake that takes no prep help? My step-mother had a similar issue, but possibly worse – these were the only thing she could force down 90+% of the time. https://www.amazon.com/Ensure-Nutrition-Shake-Fiber-Chocolate/dp/B07CWFB9RB/
Regarding summers – while we weren’t kicked out, we were strongly encouraged to be outside the house. My grand-parents had a cabin up north (Sioux Narrows, Ontario) that we went to for a week or two most summers. We did a lot of camping. If my parents hadn’t gotten a divorce when I was in 6th grade, they might have ended up buying some property, or they might have just continued camping – we did have a Winnebago and a boat.
When I was 12 my father (office Manager) worked for a company that went bankrupt, rather than declare bankruptcy himself, he paid off all the outstanding bills for utilities and rent that were in his name using all the family money including house equity. I t put us in a hole that took almost 10 years for my parents to get out of. This meant that my sister and I had full time summer jobs from the time she was 10 and I was 12. Back then you could work younger. I always respected my father for not taking the easy way out. Later in life my folks were very successful but he was still working part time when he died at 78.