Current mood:	hot
Entry tags:	aefb

Pictures
Kind of a hasty entry, like many/most of my entries nowadays...

Yesterday was Father's Day and we didn't do anything particularly special, but we had fun. Elyse and I went to the Party Source and stocked up on special foods--cheese, crackers, various salsas and jellies and chocolates--and then we made a pizza and set up a spread, and then the three of us played three games of Settlers of Catan. Elyse won twice and I won once, rather guiltily because if not for the fateful roll of seven that halved my dad's cards, he would have won in the turn before mine. ("I'm sorry, Daddy!" I said. "You're not even!" he said.)

One thing I requested for my birthday, out of interest and attempting to find cool cheap stuff people could give me and thinking of a kind of art projecty thing to do, was black-and-white pictures of as many of my relatives as possible at around the age of twenty-three. My mom delivered with a nice selection of her parents, brother and sisters, and herself; Rob sent a gorgeous one of Val and a couple of him and Val, and my dad...promised me some pictures. Which he never delivered on.

So yesterday I asked if I could look at some old pictures, and then we somehow ended up spending an hour sitting on the couch looking at old, old family photos, and I gathered up quite a collection of people, not just at the age of twenty-three. My personal favorite turned out to be my great-uncle Malcolm, younger brother of my grandmother by six years. I don't know if I've even met him, but I quickly learned to identify him in pictures because he was always making a face (usually a smirk), which led to me referring to him as "Uncle Smarmo". I have two excellent pictures of him, a few of my grandmother as a young woman (one gorgeous off-center one of her a few years shy of thirty, holding my father just over a year old), also one--one of my favorite pictures ever--of her as a young girl of three or five with a delightful smarmy smirk on her face, and many of my father at varying ages--as a baby, as a child, as a teenager, college graduate. I laughed at his frizzy hair and what I eventually referred to as "monkey ears" (it's okay, I have both features too--Rob also has the ears but Elyse managed to escape that), both very evident in his school pictures.

Now I have an extremely beautiful selection of pictures that I have to take to Staples to copy. Soon. Then they can join the small collection on the wall above my bed, which I have decided will be nothing but black-and-white pictures or artwork.

Anyway, I figure it was time well spent: I always enjoy Settlers of Catan, I enjoy good spreads, and I enjoy old family photos in black-and-white. I was pleased with the day.

Today was our first rehearsal and it went well, except that it (or something) depleted me of energy. Tomorrow will be better.

Lately I have been feeling pretty bummed, not much like myself. Possibly for months? I hate to angst all over the place, but the past couple of weeks it has really been bothering me, and I kept wondering what was wrong with me and why I kept feeling like this (a variety of reasons which I shall not go into here). Lately I have decided to peg "stress" as the biggest reason, but tonight I breezed home after the parent meeting and an extremely long (about twelve hours, though that includes driving time) day feeling better and lighter somehow, without knowing why.

It occurs to me, too, that I could very easily link this dissatisfaction with the lack of writing (putting words down into sentences) in my life. I finished the first draft of AEFB in March. I could start the second draft anytime, were it not for more pressing matters. I am determined to squish writing into my life somehow, but... not tonight. Hacking away at notes is important, but it's not writing. It's not expressive, it's not me making a point of sitting at my desk every night to work and going to bed feeling as though I'd accomplished something and maybe let something out of myself.

...I need another project to work on while I'm fine-tuning AEFB, I think.

And now for my summertime nightly ritual of cold shower, ice pack (my mom calls it a Cozee, but I think that is a stupid name, so I've always called it--a bag filled with rice and flaxseed or something, with a flannel cover--a heat pack because that's how I've always used it, zapping it in the microwave in the winter for something to help keep my feet warm, but I've discovered that when stashed in the freezer, it's also excellent for cooling down), and book. I'm kind of loving Little, Big and its comfortable rambling and ambling and slow build to something. Now that I've thought of Jonathan Strange, it reminds me of it strongly all the time.