Not Inadequate

Okay, so here’s what happened.

In this neighborhood, there lives a tiny pack of six geese. All the locals seem to feed them and they wander around the neighborhood, fat and happy. They are cute, and we make honking noises when we see them. A couple of days ago, they were right down the street eating some corn a neighbor had set out, and me and the kids walked down to see them.

We stayed across the street from them; and when the kids wanted to get closer, I took the opportunity to tell them that animals will protect their food and their babies, and that the geese might LOOK all soft and cuddly, but they are wild animals who could hurt us if they wanted to.

It was all nature-lesson-y and stuff.

So we watched and talked and the geese were very cute and ate their corn.

And then the geese had enough.

They started walking across the street toward us, making little screechy chirping noises, hissing, and puffing up their feathers.

WELL.

I knew this was a bad sign, what with being an expert birder and everything, and started to hustle the kids back down the street. But our retreat was not hasty enough for the geese, and they kept advancing. Faster and faster on their little geese legs.

Of course, in my mind I was all, “walk backwards. make eye contact. NO! don’t make eye contact! wait, that’s dogs. Run down a hill! They can’t run down a hill! or is that bears? they are getting closer!” etc. etc. etc. After about three seconds of being stalked by a flock of geese, I calmly invited the kids to run back to the house, and I told the geese “OKAY! We’re leaving!”

I did not run, but kept backing away as fast as I could, keeping myself between the geese and my kids. For all I knew, running would provoke them, and I steeled myself to take a bird DOWN.

Eventually they were satisfied they’d chased us off and went back to the corner for a victory lap around the corn.

When I got back, the kids were hysterical, having flung themselves at their Daddy, sobbing that “the geese were ATTACKING US!”

I recounted the whole story to him, but when I got to the part where I had heroically put myself in danger to protect my children, he only looked skeptical and said, “THAT’S why you didn’t run?” and didn’t give me any credit at all for being a self-sacrificing SUPER HERO.

Which I so obviously AM, JIM

OBVIOUSLY.

I swear. Rude.

Six Severe Weather Alerts. SIX.

GUSTS ABOVE 100 MPH ARE LIKELY.

I’m not gonna lie, it’s a little scary.

** When I wrote this yesterday, there were 5 alerts. I had to change it to 6 last night. This morning when I woke up, there were 8. EIGHT. Lots of ominous warnings about houses falling of the edge of the hill and cars being swept away by less than a foot of rushing water. Oy.

It was Big’s birthday last week and we went to the beach when Jim got off work. We happened to get there during a very low tide, and felt SO lucky to see all kinds of creatures -

Ochre Sea Stars

More Sea Stars

This guy (we think it’s a sea anemone – this kind maybe?

I love it here

So we are here, on the Oregon coast, about which we have been dreaming for over a year.

It’s pretty swell, mostly.

I’ve been so worried about how the kids will adapt and how Jim will manage to work and making sure everyone had enough books and Legos and room, that I kind of forgot that all this is a big adjustment for me, too.

In fact, it’s probably been a bigger adjustment for me than the rest of them. Which in the spirit of being totally neurotic, makes me feel guilty. After all, this whole crazypants idea was mine. I should be totally unshakable in my conviction that this is the best thing for us. Right? Instead I have Vague Uncertainty mixed with occasional Panic Attacks.

Here are a few of the things that make my stomach crawl -

• Will we ever be able to buy a house again? The first time we bought a house, we got a VA loan and sailed through closing by handing over a measly $700. Easy! Then we sold that house when I got pregnant with Little and Jim’s company started making noises about relocating us. We rented a townhouse while we waited to see what was going to happen. After renting for seven months, we bought our second house. We had to turn over every scrap of financial information we possessed even though we had a large down payment and had been homeowners before. It was a giant hassle. Who knows what the requirements are now? I can’t imagine that being essentially homeless for a yet-to-be-determined amount of time will look good to lenders.

• Because we sold in the worst real estate market since the Great Depression, we are broke. Broke-broke-broke-ity-broke. I don’t like it. The cushion we had saved was all but demolished by the sale of the house. Since all this was my idea, our broke state is my fault. Obviously.

• What if we spend so much time on the beach and traveling and doing nothing that I continue to suck at school? I mean, let’s face it – school has been on the back burner for a while now, what with the selling and packing and traveling and all that. Actually, it’s not even on a burner. It’s more like in an old whipped cream container in the back of the fridge. I HAVE to get back on track. What if life is so different and so constantly changing that Little suffers? Big is off to the races with his reading, but Little needs some one-on-one time with mom and our phonics books. The cost of The Adventure can’t be that she starts out behind in reading. Reading is a big deal. Not optional.

Those are the biggies. There are plenty of little things too, though. Like I miss my kitchen. I miss my king-sized bed. I miss my shower, as crappy as it was, because at least I could move around in it without rubbing up against a mildew-y shower curtain (note: buy new shower curtain). I miss being the person in charge of where the couch goes, or how the kitchen is arranged. All my nesting instincts are being foiled and I feel slightly restless. I miss making bread – none of the kitchens have been suitable (as in they haven’t had an oven). The kids are, um, irregular without homemade bread, so if they are backed up – you guessed it! – my fault.

What if everyone loves doing this and I’m the killjoy who needs a place to call home?

What if everyone gets mad at me for being such a whiner? This was, after all, a choice we made freely. No one made us do this. Are you allowed to complain about problems you created by deliberately choosing to turn your life upside down?

What if they really have discontinued the one style of jeans that fits me?

AND THEN after fretting about all this stuff for a while, it finally occurred to me that all these things are….well, I don’t want to say silly, but the fact that I’m a worrier and the degree to which I worry is a shortcoming. Of mine. Something I really need to work on – for my own sake. Everyone is fine. My family is fine. They are healthy and fed and bathed and having fun. They have mom and dad and each other and a giant pile of Legos. Instead of giving in to hours of worry that is not accomplishing anything but wearing away my stomach lining, I need to find a way to roll my eyes at Neurotic Deb and tell her to shut the eff up.

Dang it.

Self-awareness: So. Unpleasant.

We’re here!

I have about 8 zillion pictures of those rocks, but I will spare you.

We got here last Tuesday, just in time for some kind of hurricane-ish thing. It was wild. Supposedly there were 90 mile-an-hour gusts. Ninety miles an hour! That’s hurricane-y, right? I felt like Giraldo, practically.

On Wednesday afternoon, we made our way to the next town over, which has a Safeway and a Walmart. We went to both, because why not double down on the shopping fun the day before Thanksgiving? I pretty much refused to do a big turkey dinner, and bought regular groceries instead. On Thursday morning, we went to the beach.

The Beach!

When we got home, I made chicken-sausage-mushroom-noodle soup and cornbread and called it dinner.

It was terrific.

Yesterday was the most difficult day so far – even worse than Wyoming, which was a walk in the park comparatively. There are a lot of mountains all up in the way when driving to the Oregon Coast and not a lot of ways to get across them.

We could either dip way south and drive up, or drive way up and come down. OR! Look – the map shows a teeeny, tiiiiiny red road that seems to cut across to exactly where we want to go.

Note: No more teeeeny, tiiiiiiiny red roads on the Adventure.

I have lived in Colorado my whole life. Mountain passes ain’t nothing but a thang. Until yesterday, when we were cruising along on our little two-lane, no shoulder, no traffic tiny red road, blasting Lenny Kravitz and all of a sudden encountered a sign that said 10% Downgrade Next 6 Miles.

NOW we were on a little two-lane, no shoulder, no traffic tiny road that was covered in snow and ice and had a very scary drop off about 3 inches away. And we were going down at what felt like a 45 degree angle.

Oh, and no guardrails. What’s up, Oregon? I gotta pay extra because I’m not allowed to pump my own gas in this state, but you can’t spring for a few guardrails?

I moved the car from Drive to 3. Then to 2. Then to Low. I white-knuckled it down the side of that freaking mountain going 10 miles an hour, chanting to myself “just don’t look, just don’t look”  at the side of the cliff and telling Jim to pray.

And when we finally made it to the bottom, I burst into tears. I kept blubbering “I was so scared, I was so scared, I was so scared.”

I was, y’all. I was SO SCARED.

Thanks to everyone who has been praying for us. I felt it yesterday.

Saturday we drove from Boulder to Rock Springs, Wyoming. It’s about 350 miles and it took us 8 hours.

Now I know you might be thinking That’s Some Sissy Driving You Did There - What Are You, A Bunch Of Weenies? (or if you’re Kristy, you not only thought it, you texted it to me directly.)

However.

Bear in mind that I have two little kids and they are insufferable in the car. Big kept saying “I just need to move my body!” Poor babies, only Indy drivers are strapped in tighter than kids in carseats. Plus also think how much progress can be made when kids who didn’t have to pee in the nice, clean Starbucks 5 miles ago are suddenly verging on an accident when the only option is the side of the road. Not to mention that they both had been….irregular, shall we say, since we left home 2 weeks ago and Concerned Mom gave them some PediaLax tablets on Friday. Which both happily and unhappily kicked in on Saturday. Of course it would make it too easy if they coordinated those efforts, so we had to stop multiple times for THAT, too.

It’s a post about poop, people. Deal with it.

And that doesn’t even count all the stops to get snacks to shove in their pie-holes so they would be quiet for half a second.

PLUS it was windy and snowy and blowing snow and very scary for a good portion of Wyoming.

We also saw TONS of antelope. Very cute, the antelope.

Anyway.

That was day one.

• I am writing this on Friday night, and we are getting ready for the drive to Oregon. We went to Target to pick up the requisite snacks for the drive, and I saw this -

SQUEEZABLE FRUIT. What is that? Just mashed up fruit? In a bag? Is chewing too much work now? I see the bag has some kind of spout to suck your fruit from. I suppose that would come in handy if you were an astronaut. Or if gravity disappeared suddenly. It’s organic. That’s…something.

Horrifying.

• Here’s what bugs me when I go into a Walmart or a Target – the entrance doors are on the left and the exit doors are on the right. Every time I try to go into a store, I have to negotiate a stream of people with full buggys exiting the store.

We walk on the RIGHT in this country. The RIGHT. I want to  enter a store on the RIGHT.

• As we were checking out, I saw that the checker was bagging cleaning supplies with  food. I don’t know if they don’t teach checkers this stuff anymore or what. It seems like common sense to me, but when I started rearranging stuff, she gave me A Look. I said apologetically, “I don’t want chemicals in with food”  and she goes “oh” with a blank look on her face. And then she asks, “what about a magazine, can that go in there?”

And I was all like MAGAZINES are FINE, just don’t put the ATHLETES FOOT CREAM in with the CHEERIOS, YOU NINNY. But not out loud. Because I have self-control like that.

We are driving from Colorado to Oregon.

I wonder how often I will be relying on these:

I don’t want to be overly dramatic here, but I may have stumbled upon The Key to Driving with Small Children.

Okay, this is the Boulder VRBO we have stayed in for the past two weeks -

Living Room, with legos and dollhouse stuff strewn about. Jim has an almost visceral hatred of wicker furniture for some reason, so every day I tell him how much I like it.

I don’t, in fact, like it even a little; but it’s more fun if he thinks I do.

The kids’ room, with two twin beds covered in ancient floral -

Our room, with a queen bed. QUEEN! We have slept on a king bed for 15 years. The next place has a queen also, and frankly I don’t know if our relationship can survive this downgrade. It’s so…..crowded.

And finally, the teacup-sized kitchen. Last night Jim was pulling some break-and-bake cookies out of the oven and could not find the hotpad.

This kitchen has THREE drawers. And he couldn’t find the hotpad.

I mocked him.

Obviously.

I mean, it’s practically my DUTY in these kinds of situations. He got mad at me for making fun of him, which surprised me a little because it’s not his first day here.

Since we are only in Boulder for two weeks, this place is perfectly serviceable, if not ideal. I have learned a few things already about how Adventuring this way might go.

Firstly, the kitchen was filthy. FILTHY. Like, chunks of food from who-knows-when on the dishes filthy. After I recovered from the shock, I took myself down to Target, bought some cleaning supplies, and washed every single dish in the place.

I was really grossed out and horrified, as anyone who knows me in real life can probably imagine. But New and Improved Relaxed Deb realized that this might just be how kitchens in rentals are, and that a thorough cleaning might be part of the first-day festivities no matter where we stay.

Secondly, my life-long hatred of dust ruffles has been validated all over again. I cannot make the beds and re-tuck in the sheets (because of course, my husband kicks like a rabbit all night and rips the bed apart) without tucking in the stupid dust ruffle too.

Then I pull out the dust ruffle.

Which in turn untucks the sheets.

Which I then re-tuck in.

Which starts the whole thing all over again. But with cursing.

Dust Ruffles: Stupid. Maybe even Evil.

Driving to Oregon tomorrow!