Campfyre Stories

It’s pretty much constant that we’re faced with choices in life.  Which sweater am I going to wear today?  What do I want for lunch?  But only occasionally are we faced with life-altering choices and options that could (speaking as a sci fi geek here) potentially create an alternate time line.  Most of the time we don’t even realize when we’re at those forks in the roads.  They seem like any other minor decision that we encounter in the course of a lifetime, but sometimes you can feel that you’re at a point where things are going to change, and the decisions that you make in the next [period of time] are going to have long-reaching outcomes.

I think I’m there, or approaching it.  I may not be standing in the intersection, trying to figure out where I go from here, but I can see that I’m going to have to veer or turn in the not-distant future.

Some of these things are the outcomes of other people’s decisions.  My mother moving 30 minutes out of town, for example, requires that I finally give in a buy a car.  The truth of the matter is that I can’t go and visit without an immediate escape route, so a car it is.  I’m also going to have to move out of my current apartment.  My upstairs neighbor’s antics and the inaction of my landlord have cemented that.  Perhaps the impending crossroad will tie in, but I get the impression that it’s something a little more immediate.  Something that has the potential to grant the unspoken wishes I’ve been making, and maybe some of the ones I’ve said out loud as well.

I can feel a change in the wind.

I actually wish I didn’t, though.  It’s one of those things where I find myself worrying about making the wrong decision before a decision has even presented itself.  I don’t even know what my forks or crossroads will be, but I’m already concerned that I’ll get it wrong, something I won’t even know for months, maybe even years.

I prefer the ones where you go along in your life in ignorance, only seeing where the key decisions were well after the fact.  I don’t think I like this feeling of impending change at my discretion.  I’d much rather prefer being surprised.

I was sick with the flu for a week.  Just about when I was getting better, my niece Moon wound up with the same flu.  I know that my mom has been trying to work at their soon-to-be new house every weekend, so I volunteered to spend the day with Moon yesterday so that they could still get work done, but she could just take it easy.

She came by around 11:30 and we had a breakfast of apple pancakes, then watched cartoons.  She doesn’t get to watch much tv at home, and she loves that I have cable.  I wanted to take her apple picking, but I know that I wasn’t all that energetic by the time I hit the point she was at and, since the sky was threatening rain, we decided not to do that.  Instead, we did a quick grocery shopping and haunted a couple of dollar stores.

She’s so much fun to go shopping with, even if it’s just at a dollar store.  We found a box of personalized pens.  Very cool pens, actually, that just happened to be personalized.  She started going through the box, asking, "What does this say?  What about this one?  What does this say?"  She’s starting to learn to read, and tried to guess that since one pen said "Lydia", all the "L" pens said Lydia, but it was the Kristen pen that most cracked me up.

"Auntie Fyre, what does this one say?"
"Kristen."
"HA!  That’s a silly name for a pen."

We tried on all the halloween stuff and talked about what was cool and what was silly.  We put a quarter in the gumball machine to watch the bells, whistles and converyer belts.  We bought silly, little dollar store things after an hour of just looking at what was available.  It was a blast.  She even ran into an old classmate of hers from dance class.

Often when Moon and I spend too much time together, we make each other a little crazy.  She likes to push my buttons over and over again, but yesterday was not like that at all.  She helped me cook, told me *exactly* what she wanted for dinner.  She was pleasant conversation and a lot of fun to be around.  She stayed until 8pm, which was completely fine with me.

When she left, she was as polite as can be.  "Thank you for having me over, Auntie Fyre.  I had a really good time."  Well I had a really good time, too.  And I had a day of not dwelling on all the crap that seems to surround me pretty often.  It was a really wonderful day.

But the truth is that I can’t care anymore.

My life is falling apart.  That’s the bottom line of it all.  It’s been a slow collapse for the past, I don’t know how long, but now I can see that things are really just falling apart around me and I don’t know how to fix any of it.

Everyone seems to think that they know what’s going on and why I’m, apparently, unbearable to be around, but every single one of them is completely self-absorbed in their thinking.  I’m not even allowed to talk to very many people about what’s actually going on because they are so much worse off than I am, and have no problems telling me so and why.

My son thinks it’s funny and appropriate to call things "gay" or to call people "faggot" and that’s not bigotry.  Having told him that it is, in fact, bigoted to use those words in those ways he decided to stop using them around me.  He still uses them when he thinks I can’t hear him.  I make no difference in his opinions of pretty much anything at all.  As a result, I now just pretend not to notice when he talks about how very disgusting fat people are and how much fun they are to mock.  My pain would do one thing and one thing only, cause him to say those things when he thinks I can’t hear him - essentially behind my back.

At 16, he’s developed a martyr complex.  No one has ever had it worse than him.  He refuses to pitch in around the house, save for the bare minimum of "one productive thing" a day, choosing the simplest of jobs, but to call him ungrateful is hurtful and untrue.  He asks for money regularly and takes it as a personal affront that I don’t make enough money to just throw money at him whenever he asks.  Despite how permissive a parent I am, despite the things I do for him and the concessions that I make, I’m always the bad guy, and there’s nothing I can do to change that perception.

My living situation is terrible.  My landlord makes promises to fix things or to upgrade things that need replacing, but he doesn’t actually DO any of it.  He’s far too busy catering to the squatters upstairs who should have moved out 6 weeks ago.  Every night I fall asleep listening to the neglected dog behind me, whose owners leave him out for hours on end, even when it’s below freezing outside.  In the front, I am subjected to blasting crappy music and little kids screaming "nigga, nigga, nigga".  I want to move, but I don’t have any money right now.  I can’t afford it until the spring at least.

I also have to buy a car.  My mother seems to think that it’s because they are moving 30 minutes outside of the city that I’m 100 different kinds of upset about it.  I don’t particularly want to buy a car, it’s going to be a stretch to afford it, but I don’t care that she’s moving.  The problem is that if I want to visit and not be completely trapped there, I HAVE to have a car, otherwise, there’s no telling what kind of schedule I’d wind up being on.

Friends.  Ha.  What friends?  There was a time when I had a lot of friends and could find something to do most nights, but now my friends are few and far between.  Not to sugar coat it, there are several people whose company I don’t particularly enjoy anymore, but for the most part, my friends have moved away and I have yet to meet anyone new.  People I used to have things in common with aren’t interested in me or are too wrapped up in other things, I don’t know.  I don’t want to guess.  It doesn’t even really matter why, it’s just how things are.

I don’t even know what to say about work.  For the most part, it’s boring and unchallenging.  On the other hand, though I do an exceptional job by all measures, I don’t get paid nearly enough.  I don’t meet people, I don’t talk to people, I don’t have any social interaction through my job, which started well before I became a remote worker, so the only thing I get out of it is a paycheck, and I’m struggling to get by even with that.

But I’m not allowed to talk about those things, because everyone around me is so wrapped up in how bad off they are, that things can’t possibly be bad for me…  my circumstances are better, or so they think.

It’s getting harder and harder for me to function.  I can’t think of anything that I can change that would make a difference.  Sure, get a new job or find a new apartment, but neither of those things are feasible.  I cannot change either of those things right now.  If I had security deposit, I’d move in a heartbeat.  If there was a job that would challenge me better than my current one does, I’d take it.  I don’t know how you change things when everything that needs to change costs money I just don’t have.

Last night, someone told me to buy a lottery ticket.  Maybe I will.  It’s not like I can’t afford a dollar (or even 5), but I don’t feel like that’s enough of a change to really make a difference.  Her argument that winning the lottery would be the change that makes the difference can’t be argued, but…

So, yeah.  If you wondered where I was, why I haven’t blogged, what’s going on…  there you have it.  I’ve been trying not to fall apart, and mostly losing the battle.

I decided something last night.

If I wind up in a wheelchair when I’m older, it will have to be a motorized one.  I’m totally going to start an old lady wheelchair gang.  We will have matching purple jackets with black embroidery that says "Hell on Wheels".  We will terrorize people with small, yappy dogs and cat call at attractive men (old and young alike).

When it’s dinnertime and we go for our Early Bird Special, the waiters will roll their eyes and draw straws to see who draws the short stick and has to put up with our cackling, incessant demands for more coffee, more cream and faster service.  Though we will tip well, we will expect personalized attention.  If we don’t get it, we will unscrew all the lids on the salt and pepper shakers.

People will see us coming and cross the street to avoid us.

If we’re feeling especially saucy and troublesome, we will wheel our chairs down the street, obstructing traffic and flipping off those who DARE to honk at us, or otherwise try to hurry us along.  We will be feared by those who have never encountered us, and assumed to be an urban legend, but we will be real.

What’s your retirement plan?

*I should have written this down last night when I couldn’t sleep.  I think it was less disjointed.  Now that I’m writing it, it’s more stream-of-consciousness than anything else, but I’m going to let it stand as is.*

The older I get, the more of my peers get divorced.  I suppose on some level this is natural, but each time I hear about it it makes me sadder than the last time.

People still tout the 50% divorce rate number, but the vast majority fail to realize where it comes from.  While it’s true that 50% of marriages end in divorce, the vast majority of those are either not a first marriage (since the success of marriage decreases with each additional marriage you have) and people who married before they were 25.  Those two factors constitute a significant percentage of failed marriages, but few people realize it.

It’s gotten to a point where I can see it coming for other people.  There’s not much you can say to people you know have already started down that road.  The longer they’re together, the harder the inevitable end is.  It’s really easy to fall into the traps that were laid by our parents.  People from a broken home may stay longer in a non-working marriage to prove that they can be more successful and make better choices than their parents.  People from a solid home, whose parents are still together may feel they need to live up to their parents’ example.  Either way, it’s a trap, that you can’t leave, that you have something to prove, that you have to stay together for the children.

I don’t buy it.  As someone whose parents stayed together "for the children", I have to say that is one of the worst excuses to stay together.  Remember that you and your spouse are modeling to your children what a romantic relationship is supposed to be.  By staying together so your kids aren’t from a broken home, you’re teaching them that a normal relationship is when people don’t speak, or scream, or belittle each other or are passive-aggressive, or, or, or…  An unhappy marriage teaches children to settle for what they have and live in misery.

Almost all of the marriages I’ve seen fall apart, whether up close or from a distance, have been people who were married too young.  They are also families with children.  There’s a progression that happens.  No one wants to admit to failure, especially in a "’til death do us part" situation, so even after it’s unsalvagable, we try to "fix" things.

Sometimes it’s having a baby or talking about having a baby.  Sometimes it’s making a drastic life change, uprooting yourself and your family from everything familiar.  Sometimes it’s having an affair.  Sometimes something else, but nothing ever actually works.  We wind up fooling ourselves that if only *something* were different, we would be stronger as a couple, we would beat the odds, we would force ourselves to step up to the new challenge and come out on the other side, better than we started out.

It’s never true.  All we do is postpone the inevitable.  We convince ourselves that we change, that he can change, that she can change.  We believe that things will be different , or maybe that things will be the same as they used to be.

We who find ourselves in the high end of the divorce rate start so young that we grow up while we’re married.  We spend our early years of marriage trying to figure out who we are, but that’s all tied up in our spouse and/or children.  Eventually there comes a point where we realize that we have no idea who we are outside of the marriage.  The lucky few who can do that are the ones whose marriages actually work in the longer term.

But when you marry at 18 or 20 or 23, you don’t get a chance to figure out who you are, or what you want, or what you want from a relationship.  Even if you’re lucky enough to figure it out while juggling a spouse and a family, you have to drag them along with you in order to achieve any of your goals.  This isn’t often fair to another adult, who probably doesn’t share your goals, especially if his/her goals were also undefined when you started out on this "life-long" endeavor.

Another issue that (formerly) young couples face is losing an old friend in the process.  Marrying young means that you grow up together and, often, that your spouse was your best friend, at least for part of the time.  A friend of mine, J*, while his marriage was first starting to fall apart, would say over and over again that his wife was his BFF and, no matter what else happened, he would never EVER lose her as his BFF.  We haven’t talked about it, but I’d venture to guess that he’s learned that’s not the case.  Once you even start thinking about a split, that relationship, the friendship part, is over.  No one wants to hear about the dating exploits of their ex.  No one wants to tell the person who is causing their heartbreak that, how and why they’re hurting.  Beyond the death of a relationship, beyond the ending of a marriage, there is no way to salvage the friendship that existed before.  However you both come out the other side, even if you’re still civil and making the effort, neither one of you is the same person who entered that relationship.

It’s interesting to me that the older I get, the more I see, not only the young marriages of my peers falling apart, but the ones that are long dead are replaced, to some extent, with new marriages, often to a young spouse.  I can think of two people off the top of my head who were married very young, had a child, got divorced and then married someone under the age of 25 and started a new family.  It gives them similar odds to their first marriage, since they have a previous marriage as a strike, and their partner has age as a strike.  Don’t get me wrong, I wish them well, but I can’t help wondering whether or not they’ll last.  A woman who marries at 23 has the same odds of divorce as a woman who marries at 18.  A man who marries at 30, for the second time, has similar odds of divorce as a man who married at 19.

I know that it doesn’t get easier to let go the older you get.  I know that a 30 year old woman whose marriage is ending after 10+ years is going to have at least as hard a time as a 24 year old woman who has been married for 6 years, but I wonder if the second marriage is easier.  I wonder if those 30-somethings will have an easier time walking away if the second marriage fails, too, and how that will affect the younger spouse.  With both of the situations I can think of, I don’t see a shadow of doom over the relationships, but they’re new, both marriages having been in effect for only 2 years, give or take.  It’s not until the novelty wears off, some 4, 5, 6 years in that it becomes obvious, at least to people who have seen it before and recognize the signs.

I’d like to see divorce lose some of its stigma, to be honest.  I don’t know if it’s religious or societal or something else or a combination, but the idea that divorce is bad is still pervasive, and people often think it’s the easy way out.  It’s not easy, at least not when children are involved.  What’s hard is figuring out how to raise your children to be whole and healthy people.  Divorce, in and of itself has no bearing on that.  Children should be raised to understand how to treat people with kindness and should be shown what healthy relationships, of all types, look like.  Children should NOT be raised to suffer in silence and to make sacrifices for an imaginary benefit that never actually comes to fruition. 

But divorce isn’t the problem.  The problem is getting married younger than 25.  The problem is thinking that, at 21, you can commit to "forever".  The problem is assuming that tying yourself to another adult for the rest of your life will be enough satisfaction.  The problem is that you probably haven’t had the chance to experience what’s really out there.  The problem is that family is too often defined as marriage and keeping a baby generally means "let’s get hitched!" 

Eventually it falls apart.  People think I’m jaded, but the statistics are on my side.  If you don’t allow yourself to grow up as an individual, if you don’t give yourself a chance to figure out who you are *without* a partner, your marriage will not last.  I’m sure they exist, but people who can truly define themselves before they turn 25 are few and far between.

I’m sad for all the marriages that end, especially those begun in optimism.  It was never going to be happily ever after, not for any of us, but I think it’s time we started really teaching our children how to have a marriage that lasts, really lasts, than to teach them to stay in a marriage that isn’t working and pretend that’s the same thing.  Let’s learn from our OWN mistakes, and the mistakes of our peers, and try to teach our children to do better, and not simply to try to defy the odds out of sheer willpower.

As I’ve mentioned before, I decided not long ago to join the local coop.  Today was my member orientation and I’m feeling very positive about this endeavor as a way to meet new people.

The man running the orientation is someone I’ve known for a long time, but not well.  He’s a friend of my mother’s and he’s one of those people who I expect to not know who I am until I call myself "Deb’s daughter", if I even do that.  I’ve stopped, in recent years, introducing myself by my ties unless it comes up in conversation.  I want to stand on my own as a person and it’s hard to do that sometimes when your family (mother) is as well established locally as mine is.  However, when he called on my to introduce myself and explain why I was joining the coop, he started with "I know you have strong ties to the coop…"  He definitely knew who I was.  It was nice, since I have one of those faces, where people think they know me, and people often recognize that they’ve met me before, but can’t place me out of context.

The crowd was all very young, there were a couple of women who were probably over 40, but most of the group was in their 20’s or 30’s.  It was a perfect crowd for me. 

One of the women mentioned that she was new to town.  She had moved here only three weeks before, from Portland, OR.  She said she had young kids and didn’t know what to do with them.  I told her to talk to me after the orientation, since I know of several excellent resources to share with her.  I had mentioned my "almost 16 year old son" several times and, during our break, another woman in the orientation came up to me and asked me if I had any advice to share about teenagers.  Her daughter was only 8, but she wanted to be prepared - heh.

I told her that no, I had no advice to offer.  I think that teenagers are beyond advice.  I also told her about Spawn and how horrible he was from age 8 or 9 until about 13-14.  She found that useful and helpful, though, because her daughter is similar to what Spawn was like when he was younger, so I gave her hope that maybe it won’t get worse.  I hope it’s not false hope, but, again, I think that teenagers are beyond advice.

I also met a friend of my mom’s and invited her and her husband/partner to mom’s upcoming party.  She overheard me giving my mom’s Music Together contact information to the girl with the multiple small children and said "Wait, I know you…  Deb is your mom?  My husband (partner?) did the art for their CD cover."  We chatted a bit and she seemed genuinely pleased to have run into me.  It was really nice.

I came away from it feeling like this was the right decision and will actually lead me down a good path to meet new people, and people I’m going to have things in common with that maybe I don’t expect yet.

I talked to the Front End people about doing cashier work, then I talked to the Cheese Guy about Spawn working for him in the cheese department.  My membership card will come next week and I’ll start working my hours probably within the next couple of weeks - I have to wait for the Front End manager to come back from her honeymoon

I feel really good about this whole undertaking, though, and I’m looking forward to shopping there, probably exclusively, for at least my produce and cheese

The transition from August to September is difficult for me.  We have, in my family, three birthdays in four days.  My mother kicks it off on the 29th, then we have a day off, then me, then my little brother.  It’s a lot of birthday and a lot of cake and I generally wind up exhausted by the time it’s over.

This year I asked my mother what kind of cake she wanted.  She replied that she wanted "something fruity".  This is pretty vague and I had to think for a while, but I remembered a "cake" that I had made some years back and decided to revisit it.  It’s based on my regular cream puff recipe, but adds fruit to it.  It tastes wonderful and is exceptionally easy to make, so I decided to share it.

Summer’s Last Hurrah, a recipe by FyreGoddess

You start by taking 3/4 cup of water and 1/3 cup of butter and bring them to a boil.  Once they have boiled, remove them from heat and add 3/4 cup of flour.  Add 3 eggs, one at a time.  For cream puffs, you would drop the puffs onto an ungreased cookie sheet, but since this is a single cake, you instead pour all the batter into the center of an ungreased cookie sheet and cook at 400 for 15-25 minutes, or until it’s golden on top.

For the cream, you simply fold together 1 cup of vanilla pudding and 1/4 cup whipped heavy cream.

When it has cooled, cut the puff in half.  Warning:  It will fall after it comes out of the oven, but because we’re stuffing it with goodness, that’s nothing to worry about.

Layer summer fruits with the cream inside the puff shell.  For mom’s birthday I started with thinly sliced peaches and plums, a layer of cream, then a mix of raspberries, blackberries and blueberries, then another layer of cream and the lid.  The reason for the name is that August/September is the last of the summer fruit season, so I take summer fruits to use in the layers.  Were you to use a different season’s fruits, you might call it "Autumn’s Last Hurrah" or something, but I think that summer fruits work best.

Once the cake is assembled, take 4oz of dark chocolate and 1T of butter.  Melt in a double boiler and drizzle over the top of the cake.

Mmmmm.  So delicious.

Mom says she wants this cake every year.  RC2 says he also wants this cake on *his* birthday.  Chaos says I should make more cream puffs.

Heh.

I’ve been talking about it for ages, and it’s always seemed like something that should have existed before now.  Finally, FINALLY, the local bus company has gotten a public transportation option on Google Maps.

I get nothing for this post, just fyi.  It is, however, something I have been wanting and waiting for for YEARS now.  Now, instead of having to sit down with multiple bus schedules and try to figure out which buses connect where and at what time, I can just punch in where I’m starting, where I want to go and what time I want to get there and it tells me exactly what time to catch each bus, where I’m going to transfer and everything I need to know!

This makes my life so much easier.  There are all kinds of places I know I can get to - places where I know the bus goes, but because I’m not familiar with those routes, I don’t even really know how to get there.  Places like my doctor’s office.  It’s in an area of town where I just don’t go, simply because I’m not familiar with the bus(es) that run out there and how to connect to them, but now it’s not an issue!

To me this makes the entire public transit of the city infinitely more accessible to everyone.  Instead of having this vague idea that one can get almost anywhere, people can simply map it out and not have to worry about memorizing schedules or routes. 

The problem is that I doubt very many people are even aware that this exists.  I haven’t seen any real push to get it known…  it’s just a blurb that I happened to find on the Transit Authority’s website.  It’s apparently available in many places around the US, so if you’re not in my area, you can check it out and see if it lists your city, too.

It’s about damned time.

There was a luncheon event at the library.  A woman who had run for local political office and a self-proclaimed "political junkie" was reviewing a book about Obama’s campaign.  She wasn’t a very good speaker, giving a talk peppered with "Ums" and "Ahs" and what she had to say wasn’t particularly interesting.  I wasn’t interested in the book before she reviewed it and was even less interested after.

However, I was intent on making a go of this and trying new things.

"Light refreshments will be served" was the promise and, while I was not expecting much, I was expecting something more than apple juice and Ritz crackers.  Also, considering the library is right downtown and very close to government offices, I was expecting a more mixed audience.  Of the 40 or so people there, more than 75% were OLD and only two were not white.

When the speaker was done making her review, the floor was opened to discussion.  It wasn’t really discussion of the book, though, it was a broader political discussion that was taking place.  One old man stood up to say that he thought that Obama should ressurrect FDR’s fireside chats and find a way to listen to what people thought.  I interjected that this was happening on the internet, quite often in fact, but was completely ignored for having said that.

Well, not completely, since the gentleman in front of me acknowledged me and called it a generation gap.  That he and the rest of the old men and women were not likely to understand the importance or reliance on the internet, so this idea of radio broadcasts or television broadcasts made the most sense.  I disagree and told him so, because most people will just change the channel, especially those who hold the most common misconceptions and embrace them.  It was a nice side conversation we had.

But the general conversation turned to the ridiculousness of the "birthers" - those who question whether or not Obama was born in Hawaii as his birth certificate states.  The question was how do people believe this and, by the way, what is the process for determining citizenship for presidential candidates, anyway?

Because she had run for local office, our speaker explained that she thought that it was a case of citizenship being a presumption and that no one would look into it unless it was challenged.

This is ridiculous, false and a fear-mongering response to make to anyone questioning the process.  I was so angry that I jumped up and interrupted her.  We are forced to produce evidence of citizenship on a regular basis, and that’s just those of us who aren’t involved in politics.  We prove our citizenship with every government document we request, with every passport application, with every new job we apply for.  We regularly have to produce our birth certificate and/or social security card.  That’s just to live a normal life.

Add in security clearance, which top officials need to have.  This requires a background check, which would ferret out any issue of non-citizenship early into the process and would, most likely, cause security clearance to be denied.  Even a standard background check for employment would find that information, but we’re talking about military clearance that is required of higher officials.  The bottom line is that no one could possibly get anywhere near the nomination for President without having been thoroughly vetted and their citizenship proven beyond a doubt.

In return I got blank stares.  Apparently, the only expert in the room was the speaker, who was sharing misinformation with old people, rather than to say "I actually don’t know the answer to that question."  The old people were resentful of me for correcting the misinformation of the speaker.  The speaker was resentful of me for correcting her and for (as far as I can tell) being more knowledgable about the political sphere than she. 

So I left.  I was done with the whole political discussion, such as it was.  I remembered why I dislike the liberals of this area as the speaker went on about how proud she was to have helped elect a black man to office - how difficult it was for the country to choose between the first black president and the first woman president.  In a sea of white faces, she went on and on about how good a person she was for voting for a black man (even though she would have preferred to vote for a woman).

I won’t go back for another political review/discussion/whatever, but I think I will give it another try.  There’s a talk coming up about orangutans in the wild and that sounds interesting.  Also, since it’s someone’s personal experience, the liklihood of them being outright WRONG about the answers to the questions is unlikiely.  We’ll see what happens.

I had three good ideas this weekend on ways to enrich my life and find new ways to meet people and to engage myself in new things.

Getting a new library card was at the crux of the entire thing.  It turns out that the library has all kinds of cool programs going on that I might be able to use to meet new people or to, at least, find new interests.  The one that really appeals to me is a Tuesday lunch program.  Every week they review a different book or discuss a new topic.  I don’t know that I’ll be interested in everything they have to offer, but I’m certainly interested in some of the things.

This is put on by the Friends of the library, who, apparently, are also often looking for volunteers to help with things like book drives and book sales.  I think this is something I could be interested in, so I’m going to see what they’re about and find out if it’s actually something I’m interested in and maybe get some literature about the group that’s putting on the series.  If nothing else, I feel like I’m on the right track.

I’ve also decided to finally join the co-op.  Up to now, it’s been an issue of just not having the time to volunteer but I am significantly less busy than I used to be and I’m sure I can find the time.  Volunteering 3 hours (either a week or a month, I haven’t decided yet) will absolutely introduce me to new people and probably people I have things in common with, since co-op members tend to be at least a little bit fringey.

I doubt I’ll do all my shopping at the coop, but I’d like to at least buy my produce and my cheese there.  With a discount of 10 or 26%, it shouldn’t be any more expensive than at the supermarket, and will be better quality.  The only delay with this is that I need to attend an orientation, which appears to be about 3 hours long.  I won’t be able to attend one until some time in September, but that’s ok, I’m going today to sign up for a session and get the ball rolling.

The third idea I had is probably not going to do a whole lot to introduce me to new people, but will serve to get me out of the house.  I’ve already talked Slockin into this one, which is working from a cafe one afternoon a week.  Since Slockin and I both WFH on Thursdays, we’ll hit up a cafe with free WiFi on Thursday afternoons and force ourselves out of our respective apartments.

Having spent the past week laid up with itchy hives, I’ve had a lot of time to think.  I tried to go out and do things, at least as they came up, but by the weekend I was going pretty stir crazy and trying, desperately, to come up with a way out of this stagnancy.  The library was one of those things where I had the idea, got up and just did it.  Now I need to keep that ball rolling.  I feel pretty good about it.  We’ll see how it goes.