A Post about Nothing

I haven’t written in such long time. I’d like to blame a whole lot of other people for this. For certainly there have been distractions. Camping trips and play dates and classes at the library and general running around. But I just never seem to have the time to do anything I really want to do. Almost every night I go to sleep vowing to get certain things done the next day: clear the clutter from my desk, weed the garden, clean the bathrooms, write the blog. But each night I seem to go to bed with the same list.

I just don’t have enough time, what with the daily trials of raising three kids, fielding phone calls, paying bills etc. I know I know, I need to stop complaining. I don’t even work outside the home, right? Not yet anyway. How will I get all this stuff done if and when I DO have a job. The days are just too short.

So, last night I made a new vow. I will start my day earlier. I will wake up at 6:30 with my husband. Why not? He wakes me anyway. And then, once I settle back to sleep, I wind up sleeping until 9:00. No, I resolved. I must get up early and start my day.

So here I am. Of course it’s only the first day, so I'd decided it ease into it and set my alarm for 6:45. DH (dear husband) woke me at 6:30 to say goodbye, so I rolled over for 10 minutes, and then sprang up – refreshed! Ready to start my day!!

Well, it was kind of like that. I’m not a morning person. If it weren’t for the thought of an oversized mug of coffee I wouldn’t be able to rise at all. And it was more of a roll than a spring. These days (since I turned 40 – almost to the day!) I feel very stiff and sore in the morning, so I kind of limped around the bed to the bedroom door.

But nonetheless, I was up, and I was proud of myself. So I made my coffee (note to self: get the pot ready the night before), fed the cat and headed straight for the computer. First problem: my computer mouse is completely shot. Useless. Going to the store to buy a replacement was on my list yesterday, but I didn’t get to it.

So on to plan B – DH’s laptop. The thing with this option, though, is that there are a couple of technical impediments with this contraption: Everything moves much slower on here, Internet and otherwise so I had to be patient (not one of my strong points) and, since the keyboard is so “compact”, I kept hitting the page up key with the heal of my hand. Often I found my cursor up in the middle of one of the previous paragraphs and I’d have typed, “start my dlimped around theay” or something similar.

Still and all, I was up, I had a cup of coffee and there was a computer in front of me, just calling out to me to write. But, I should probably just check my email first, right? Just see what’s going on. And then, since I haven’t subscribed to a newspaper in ages, I checked out the headlines at the NY Times.com. Oh and I’d better check my bank balances, make sure that’s cool. And I still need to pay that bill I’d almost forgotten.

Ok all ready to blog. But I haven’t checked the other blogs on northforkparents.com so let me just read everyone else’s stuff. And then make comments. I love to see comments on my blog, so I’d better contribute to others’.

Man, everyone else writes so well and so frequently and about such interesting things. Now I’m a little intimidated.

After taking 2 phone calls, one of which obligated me to a lunch date and talking to my boy for a while, about his friends and other boys, then about different kinds of fish that he knows about, (he is really such an incredible boy – a worthwhile distraction), I fed the cat again, and brushed all the loose hair off of him.

Ok, now I can get back to writing. As I was saying…It’s 9:37am. How did I kill all that time?

(if you can relate, check out this video: "procrastination" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4P785j15Tzk )

Family Reunion

“Family love is this dynastic awareness of time, this shared belonging to a chain of generations… We collaborate together to root each other in a dimension of time longer than our own lives.”
- Michael Ignatieff

I am blessed to be a part of a very large, very close family. It is full of loudness and ethnicity and food and craziness. Our gatherings are full of the same. Saturday was the most recent of these gatherings: The Family Reunion.

Both my mother and father came from close families. My mother grew up with three brothers, her mother and her grandmother. In addition she had many aunts, uncles and cousins. My mother’s connection with her family is a deep part of who she is. She has passed this value on to my sister and me.

My dad was the fifth son of Italian immigrants. The “boys” for the most part settled down close to home and raised their own families. Nana and GrandPop had a homestead in Queens, with a vegetable garden and a grove of fig trees. We gathered there often.

My childhood was full of get-togethers for Sunday dinners, holidays, Baptisms and Communions. Thanksgiving dinner was always a feast. Every year we traveled on Christmas Eve to Nana Helen’s apartment. Aunt Pat’s house was Christmas Day. Aunt Alice and Uncle Bernie had the bet pets – first Smokey and then Ollie. And there were the cousins. About a dozen on each side. Most were older than my sister and me, but those closest in age became our “sisters” and “brothers.”

As a teenager, I continued to see my extended family often. Some of my first teen angst was felt at the Knights of Columbus hall in College Point. There were weddings all throughout the 80’s. I was asked to be Godmother to my cousins’ babies. And when I went off to college in Albany, my “big brother” Cousin Gerard would be there to “keep an eye on me.” (Turns out the best off-campus parties were at his house!)

At funerals, we joined together to remind each other of the love and connection that would never depart. The family served as solace, support and memoir. I was reminded that I would always be a part of something much larger than just my own daily trials.

Recently, at weddings of the baby cousins I once held, I’ve become philosophical about the role of my family: It puts me in mind of a tree.

There are the roots – my grandparents, their parents and those who came before them.

There are the branches, growing outward and upward each year – my parents, their brothers, my cousins, their children and my own.

But it’s the trunk I’ve thought a great deal about recently. The trunk is the tall, sturdy, mostly unchanging aspect of the tree. Against the trunk I can measure and reflect my own stature. I have been a little girl, a shy adolescent, a responsible teenager who’s “good with babies,” all in the presence of my family. I have been a student, a traveler, a hostess, a bride and a mother – all these things witnessed by my family.

My family has offered me a perspective on myself that I could obtain nowhere else. As daughter, granddaughter, niece, cousin, sister, mother and aunt, my personal experience deepened. I became myself.

Thanks to my large, loving and sometimes overwhelming family, I am Nicole.

Blogging Blunder

Oh well. I'd just written, edited and re-written and nice long post about the Harry Potter book release tonight. I wasn't sure how I felt about it and I'd been reading it as a preview and then I tried to get back to the post to edit something and then it disappeared. To tell the truth, I wasn't sure it was that great, but I did spend about 25 minutes working on it. Now it's gone. I'm too tired to be upset about this.

Why is it that when the post is published it looks like there's only one space after a period? I'm typing two, but it doesn't look like once it's published. What's up with that?

'Night

Cleaning the Kitchen Floor

Today I cleaned the kitchen floor. I don't mean that I vacuumed or used the swiffer, or even that I damp-mopped it, which is usually the ultimate in cleaning for me. I mean I cleaned it the way our fore-mothers did it: with a bucket of hot soapy water, a scrub brush, and elbow grease. I haven't cleaned the floor this way in ... well... um... not since the floor was laid in 2004.

I decided to scrub the floor around where the cat eats and near the cabinets at first. But then I tackled the whole thing. It would be good for my constitution, I thought. Plus, I love my wide-plank wood floors. They deserved a really good cleaning.

I gained the following wisdom while on my hands and knees:

1. Old sparkle glue does not come off hard-wood floors, no matter how hard you scrub.

2. The guy who finished the floors left a long hair in the polyurethane.

3. An hour is a long time for the kids to stay out of the kitchen.

4. Dried up burnt onion, once reconstituted with soapy water, smells like good food.

5. Cinderella's plight was under-rated.

And so the adventure continues...

The morning after

I woke up this morning full of ideas for my new blog. I can't say that I woke up exactly "fresh" or "early," though. This was due to several factors.

First, after last night's weekly session with my favorite psychologist (and I'm not being sarcastic), I decided I needed some alone time so I went to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. It was late, but I have been dying to see it - I'm a Harry Potter maven- and my young children weren't certain they were ready for it. So I took off, alone, to the Island 16 cinemas de lux (the guy on moviephone actually pronounced it with french accent - "de-lueh" - this is true!) for the 10:15 showing. It was fun being at the movies, since I don't go often and have only been to a "de-lueh" theater twice before. I thought the movie was great, but as always with movies that follow books, not nearly as great as the book. I didn't get home until almost 1:00.

Second, I slept with my baby last night. Let me clarify. My baby is not the baby in the picture. (That is my new niece who was born in March). No my "baby" is the youngest of my brood, a wonderful, smart, adorable little 6-year-old whose name I've been advised I should not publish. let's just call her "Nana Fanelli" since she reminds me of my deceased Italian grandmother - both in her stature and her attitude. We dont usually have the kids sleep in our bed, but since it was hot and we have the only air conditioner, I guess my husband made an exeption last night. She was only half dressed and my admiration of the beauty of her soft tan skin kept me awake even later. She also kicks all night long.

Third, I was awakened at 8:00 am by the loud, mechanical sucking sound of a huge vacuum-cleaner truck at the end of my driveway. The reason I knew what the noise was is that I'd called the town yesterday to ask them to do something about all the sand that's been accumulating at the grates on either side of my driveway since February. There was a jungle of grass and weeds there too. So when the whining noise of large equipment reached my ears through the closed windows, I knew what it was. It woke me just the same.

So now I'm ready to write. But wait, I've already written a pageful. Wow. I can talk, can't I? What a cool thing, a blog. I can write and you can read and then I can write again. Well, I guess that's enough for now. More tomorrow - or later.

Thanks for reading!

A First Attempt

OK. Here I go. I'm startin' a blog. I'm bloggin'.
How'm I doing?