It’s here, the milestone is here. I’m 40! I don’t remember the specifics of when I turned 30, but apparently I was in a cruddy mood all day (thank you, 11 years of blogging). I wasn’t taking photos of myself regularly then, and I thought I should start. When I’m 50, I want to know what I looked like today.
Tag: Thoughts
I am still trying to get a handle on my collage game in a post-Picasa world. It’s not pretty, but I’ll get there. Adam tells me I’m the last person on Earth who just wants a grid template of vertical pictures. I’m very old fashioned in my collage, apparently.
I do. I want to post about good things, about stuff we’re making here, things we’re doing, how cute my dog is. How cute my kid is, even. But to talk about this stuff and pretend that the country isn’t in a dark place right now is disingenuous, it’s pretending that everything is fine, everything is normal.
Read more on I Really Want to Talk About Books and Crafts and Dogs…
This week. This week has been an awful week in the news. It’s been difficult to pull away from the endless analyses, anger, video, heartbreak, and outrage. From every side. And it’s only been four days. I started to just feel depressed, and hopeless, and tired of arguing with people I like but disagree with intensely over huge issues of race and inequality. My stomach hurt, my head hurt, I couldn’t stop reading everything that popped up on my feed.
It’s been a great fall, and also a really weird one. I’ve stepped away from a few organizations I was really involved with because I just need a break. I’ve made some big decisions about work. And we hosted a great Thanksgiving.
2013 did not go as planned. At the beginning of the year I fully expected to still be a teacher at the end of it. That’s not how the year worked out, and I’ve spent the last six months trying to figure out this new identity. Stay at home mom? Work at home mom? Temporarily at home mom?
The truth is that I have no idea what 2014 will look like, at least not professionally. I’m pretty sure my home life will still be as warm and fulfilling, and my friends and family will still be amazing. I hope it will be full of creativity and new knowledge. I hope I try lots of things and don’t completely fail at them all.
I’ve been thinking about getting a laptop for months now, and I finally bought one a couple of weeks ago. Best Buy was having a pretty good sale, and between writing, chasing H around, and some new courses I’m taking we kind of figured I needed to be a little more mobile. So, this was an investment in me. And my new endeavors.
I took a blogging break for the second half of August to go on vacation (more on that later), host in-laws, get H ready for toddler school, deal with lots of paperwork, apply for stuff, try (and fail!) to organize the house. We got home Thursday night, and I still don’t have the wherewithal to go through trip photos, or recipe photos, or any kind of photos. But, it’s September 1st (well, for 5 more minutes, anyway). So I figured at the very least I should post a paragraph to burst that block that I often get when I’ve been away from blogging for a bit. After a while it’s hard to decide where to jump back in, so I like to go with short explanations.
I’ve been busy since getting the news that my contract would not be renewed next year.
Obviously the left photo is before, even though I had long since retired wearing my hair down in favor of my classic, time-for-a-haircut, Det. Odafin Tutuola braid. I decided to chop my hair off, and it is shorter than it’s been in almost 20 years.
I’m trying out glasses.com for my new frames, so I picked 5 frames to try on at home. I have to send them back ASAP and make my choices, and I’m stuck. I’m definitely getting pair #2, but I can’t decide on the second pair. I was leaning towards #3 (bottom left), but seeing them in photos I’m not sure. I was going for kind of a dorky chic thing, but they may be neither. Adam says #1 makes me look like Will.I.Am, and they are BabyPhat frames so I see where he’s going with that. I have no idea, any thoughts?