Lazy pants and life mottos.

You guys, did you know Ashley Madison was a thing? I always feel badly for hacked websites but I had no idea this was a thing and I am as shocked as a little old lady learning for the first time about Brazilian bikini waxes. They do what?

The boys now have a two week break from karate; last Friday they had a mini-tournament to finish off their camp week, and then there was a shiah on Saturday. I was a bit worried since Mark had what I thought was the beginning of a cold, but which I now think was maybe a bad allergy attack. Thursday night he was up coughing much of the night, and for those of you who have known me for a while, I have some kind of PTSD from when he had pneumonia at age 7, and so I didn’t sleep at all. This also coincided with my hormonal pre-ladies’-holiday insomnia, so I felt like I had been run over by a truck on Friday.

Does anyone else suffer from this? I find about a week or ten days before Ladies’ Holidays, I have a few nights where I can hardly sleep at all. This is very unusual for me since I’m generally a solid sleeper, albeit one who wakes up at four in the morning. Anyway, I find this hormonal insomnia very annoying and it makes me fear for my menopausal days.

Thursday and Friday were terribly cold – 8 degrees Celsius – and rainy and windy as well. One of my heavy lawn chairs blew over and rain came down in sheets. Therefore, I was a bit surprised to hear that they went swimming at the outdoor pool at camp on Thursday. I feel fairly sure this didn’t help Mark’s cough, but after almost twelve hours of sleep on Friday night he was basically recovered and full of his usual energy.

Hilariously, because of the cold, the boys had to forego their shorts for track pants. They wear track pants very rarely; basically only for long plane trips and not much else, but they were perfect for cold days at camp. Mark sighed a bit when he came home, and said “I like track pants, but they really make me feel lazy.” I thought this idea could be extrapolated to any elasticized pants: yoga, track, sweat. In fact, maybe this could be a classification system: lazy pants versus non-lazy pants. I am currently still wearing this morning’s sweaty yoga pants. I know of what I speak.

Speaking of camp, my husband took the kids actual TENT CAMPING yesterday. He is a fairly outdoorsy kind of guy, and being married to me probably doesn’t help his outdoorsy-ness. A few months ago the boys decided that an annual boys’ camping trip would be a fun idea, starting now and continuing, apparently, for the rest of time. It sounded good to me, especially since I wasn’t really invited. They’ve been preparing for this for the past few weeks, gathering the things that they need and making lists of the food they wanted (all meat, all the time). Amidst all this merry chatter, my husband looked at me with concern and wondered if I was feeling sad or left out. Um. No. It’s no hardship for me not to go camping.

It is a hardship for someone in our house, and that someone is Barkley. Poor puppy. They’ve been gone less than 24 hours and they will be coming home soon, but such a sad thing has never happened to him in his life. WHERE IS EVERYBODY. Every weeknight at 6:30, Barkley sits at the top of the steps and stares out the back door window, waiting for my husband to come home. He did this yesterday, slowly slumping to the floor by 8:30 pm, when I decided enough was enough and put him to bed. This morning he went to all the empty bedrooms and flopped sadly back into his crate. It’s heartbreaking!

Meanwhile I’ve enjoyed my solo time by eating food no one else really likes (kale salad and roasted chickpeas), watching TV shows no one else wants to watch (NYPD Blue), and reading Gone With The Wind. I last read Gone With The Wind in 1989, when I was fourteen, and I can safely say it reads very different now. For one thing, when I was fourteen I had zero concept of US politics, the economy, or industrialization. I mostly just focused on the sexy romantic parts, of which there are many. I’m finding that I feel a bond with Scarlett, which is something I have sort of mixed feelings about. It’s not like we are the same person, but the line “Even if you think such things, why do you say them? If you’d just think what you please but keep your mouth shut, everything would be so much nicer.” speaks to me. I feel like that could be the entire basis of a life motto. Maybe Margaret Mitchell was clairvoyant, seeing into the internet age and the comments sections of sociopolitical columns.