Gazing at you, I get the beat.

It turns out I am easily unmoored.

My parents took the kids up to the lake yesterday, and I was faced with thirty childless hours in which to get some things done. Productivity! It’s actually amazing how much can be accomplished when the children are not around. It’s also kind of startling how much of my time is spent preparing food and washing dishes. My husband wanted to take me out for dinner – to a restaurant, on a Tuesday night, the apocalypse – and so I really had a vast amount of time on my hands. What does one do with the hours between 4:00 and 6:00 if not make dinner, eat dinner, clean up from dinner, supervise children’s cleaning of the table? If you’re me, you guiltily curl up on the couch and watch an old episode of Mad Men, read an Alice Munro short story, and feel despair because you STILL haven’t written the article for the community newsletter but DAMN you really don’t want to write about the bridge club and senior’s tea.

It’s strange not having the kids around, and the dog seems to have lapsed into a depression. When the kids are at school, Barkley generally has the air of someone who has been left with the world’s most boring person, but who is bravely making the best of it: namely flopping bonelessly on the mat outside the door or the dog bed, perking up only to go for a walk. The kids being gone overnight, though, is a whole different story. Barkley is currently lying at the top of the steps, with his head hanging over the top step in what appears to be a terribly uncomfortable position but possibly represents all the effort he is currently willing to put into life.

Yesterday I had finished quite a bit of writing – not about the senior’s tea, mind you, but quite a bit – and buoyed by my no-adult-responsibilities lunch of grapes and popcorn, I started pruning the giant spirea shrub beside the garage. This shrub had grown fairly out of control, such that anyone of any height coming out of the garage would get hit in the face by a number of branches, and so I grabbed the pruning shears and went to town. I looked down and there was Barkley, standing silently, covered with leaves and branches that he didn’t even bother to shake off. Poor puppy! I vowed to take him for a walk immediately but then realized that I was still in my sweaty yoga pants at 1:30 in the afternoon, my yoga practice having ended five hours prior.

This is what happens when I have no kids and no schedule, apparently. Another day like this and the next thing you know I’ll be a total unwashed hippie, busted flat in Baton Rouge, putting daisies in bazookas, dropping the bad brown acid at Woodstock, and contracting STD’s from all that free loving. Because it’s a slippery slope, don’t you know. One day a person wears sweaty yoga clothes all day long, the next day that person is on an acid freakout and passes out in a field of mud, with chlamydia and syphilis. TIME TO SHOWER.

For a trippy Woodstocky experience, check out this “director’s cut” of The Who’s See Me Feel Me. I love that song and I think this video is quite awesome, but yet I find myself obsessed with the fact that Roger Daltry is shirtless underneath that enormously fringed leather jacket. You can practically smell the body odour, just watching that video. Ah, the Sixties. So much musical talent. So little personal hygiene.

Ooh, I just discovered this Jefferson Airplane clip from Woodstock, and if you want to see some REALLY HIGH people with some funky-ass hair, check it out. Fun fact: Grace Slick is still alive and is 73! Man, that’s remarkable on a number of levels.

All right, enough about Woodstock (how did I get on that topic? Oh yeah, showers.) My life will resume regular programming tout de suite, since I’m heading out to pick the kids up today, albeit a little nervously, since there are severe thunderstorm warnings in the direction I’m driving. “Significant storm activity” is not something I want to be driving into, especially since I am not, exactly, someone who loves highway driving. Wish me luck! Also wish me luck on actually finishing this article on the bridge club. It’s not going to write itself. xo