Live in the Moment Friday Round-Up

If you are bored, you have only yourself to blame. This is one of my Puritan mama’s favorite sayings. Actually, she only needed to say it two or three times before it became embedded in my head like a wasp in your ear that takes too many wrong turns and ends up making a life for itself in your brain. There is the constant buzzing of my mother or is it tinnitus. Yes.

I am not bored and have not been bored for a long time. I have layers of things to do, hardly any of which seem like fun to an outside observer, because they revolve around new, updated versions of productivity. And now, at least for the time being, there is a baby to sleep on my chest while I type with one hand. I have done this before although the last time was about fifteen years ago. It’s all come back to me – holding her little back with my left hand and using only words that take letters on the right side of the keyboard. It makes for clipped speed.

My envy of seemingly carefree people has somewhat abated. This is likely because, in my head, I think ‘you may be carefree but you don’t have a baby in your house.’ Still, when I see social media posts of people I know grinning into the camera with their sweet little camping trailer behind them, I get a twinge. A baby could fit in that trailer, I think, but then I go back to my one-handed typing.

I might be tired and a little overwhelmed but I didn’t have Joe Biden’s day. As one commentator said, “How do you piss off France?” So, France has recalled its ambassador after a ‘secret deal’ the U.S. made with Australia, the U.S. military made a grievous error that ended the lives of ten innocents in Afghanistan, and the scientists say no go to 3rd shots for anyone except old people. Joe is going home to Delaware for the weekend which is wise except crazies are showing up in D.C. tomorrow and we can’t have the lights turned off at the White House.

Four years ago, about this time, we were in Nome, Alaska. It was rough and gray with old weathered buildings and heaps of rusting pieces of machinery. It’s a place I’ll likely never visit again but I love Nome. It oddly felt like home.