Uni-tasking. Because multi-tasking leads to bourbon.

Time for a Mid-Year's Resolution: No more multi-tasking.

I read on the Internet (when I was supposed to be downloading registration forms for high school soccer) that when people are multi-tasking, they usually aren't doing two things at once. Most of the time they are task-switching -- stopping one activity to take up another. And it's not as efficient or effective as doing things one at time, to completion.

So from now on, I'm gonna be all about uni-tasking. If I go down to the basement to get a jar of Ragu from the pantry, I'm not going to throw in a load of laundry while I'm down there. 'Cuz if I stop to throw in a load of laundry, then I'm gonna have to unload Sweaty Soccer Boy's backpack. And that backpack is going to stink, so I'm gonna start hunting down the Febreze. And while I'm doing that, the hamburger browning on the stove is going to burn. And then I'm just gonna be pissed. And I'll want to skip dinner altogether and drink Bourbon Slushies all night.

So... Here's to Uni-tasking!!

And the first task on the list is... Make more Bourbon Slushies.

Hey, I know what my track record with resolutions is like. And if yours is the same, here's the recipe for Suz's Bourbon Slushies. (Try to say that after you've had a few and let me know how that turns out.)

2 liters ginger ale

1 liter bourbon

12 oz frozen limeade concentrate, thawed

12 oz frozen lemonade concentrate, thawed

Mix all ingredients in a plastic 1 gallon+ pail. Freeze for 24 hours, stirring occasionally. Serve with maraschino cherries (and a little cherry juice) and an extra splash of ginger ale (if it's too icy to sip).

 

Enjoy!

Bourbon makes almost everything better.
Bacon fixes the rest.

What gives?

I'm falling behind. In everything.

I want a full life, really I do. But some days an empty one looks almost appealing.

Of course I couldn't give up the kids. Or my husband, parents, siblings, relatives, friends.... The house? No, we have to live somewhere. And I've really gotta keep the job. And if we want to eat, I have to go to the grocery store. Clothing is kind of important -- and a lot nicer if it's clean -- so I suppose I can't stop doing laundry. The dog is never going to stop shedding, or barfing on the kitchen floor, but she is pretty darn cute, so I guess she stays. I could give up exercising -- no, wait, I already did that and now my pants don't fit and I said I wasn't going to buy new ones, so I have to drag my ass out for a walk in the morning. Reading and writing keep me sane and I'm already going a little crazy from lack of time with those loved ones.

So what gives?

Everything, apparently. The house is getting dustier, the lawn weedier. I consider it a triumph if I can get half of the things knocked off my to-do list every day, but what kind of victory is that if it just means 50% more stuff on tomorrow's list? And who the hell keeps adding all this stuff to the list anyway?

Me?

Okay, fine. If you're going to be that way. Yes, me. I'm the one who decided to do landscaping, to throw a backyard barbecue for 75 of my closest friends, to write a book, start a blog, drive to Michigan to visit my grandma. And, yes, I did have a hand in the decision to get married, have children and buy a house, so you can implicate me in the soccer carpool, college visits and fence-repair appointments on the calendar, too.

So, all right, I asked for it. In other words (the ones my siblings and I have discussed having printed on t-shirts): "I'm living the dream and I can't handle it!"

But I'll keep trying.

And I just wanted to apologize for falling behind on the blog. And to reassure you that it's still on the to-do list. Along with the rest of my life.

The Road to Flowers

I haven't been writing. Or reading. Or cleaning my house. (Guess which two out of the three I miss.) No, with all my free time, I've been gardening. Setting brick edging, planting perennials, shoveling mulch.

We've owned our late-1960s house for six years, and let's just say that our backyard has been "unfinished" for all of them. We did take down a few old pines and shrubs, and put up a fence after the adoption of our rescue dog. And two summers ago I planted lilac bushes across the back because I couldn't take another spring of stealing my favorite blooms from my neighbors. But we still had (and still have, albeit less now) places that were waiting and wanting. Places where we had torn things out but ran out of time, money and energy to put things in.

Every spring, though, I would brighten the entryway and patio with annuals. Pots and planters of impatients, begonias, geraniums, coleus. Annuals are easy. Pull down the pots from the garage, fill them with potting soil, and stuff with plants. Done. In the fall, dump everything in the yard-waste barrel. No tilling, no weeding, no long-term commitment.

But this year was different. I wanted permanence. I wanted to dig deep and plant things that would sprout again next spring. (Which, if you think about it, is labor-intensive on the front-end, but having things come up by themselves next year means I don't even have to get the pots down from the shelves in order to have flowers! Kind of like teaching kids to make their own mac-and-cheese.)

So I've got no words on the page, but I've got dirt under my nails. (And mosquito bites in places I didn't think mosquitos could reach!) And when you're outside with no radio, you have time to think. For me that means mulling over my writing. Old writing, new writing, things that need editing, things that need publishing. And lately, the publishing thing has been on my mind a lot.

The agent search has been going considerably slower than I thought it would, probably because I treat each prospective agent as "The One" and spend way too much time agonizing over each query letter. Unfortunately, none of the 11 agents I've queried so far have thought I'm "The One," so it often seems like I'm back to Square One.

Then, last week, my sister sent me a note directing me to the Amazon home page, where there was an article by a successful author extolling the virtues of self-publishing. I was fascinated by her insight as both a traditionally-published and self-published author. From that article, I linked to several indie-writer websites and blogs. I won't bore you with the details, but basically, there is good stuff being self-published and money to be made doing it. Self-publishers have control over their work. But they are on their own, too. There are pros and cons to both methods of getting your stories to the masses. Just different ways of getting flowers, I guess.

I don't know what route to take, yet. And deciding won't be easy. I'll have to give it some more thought. But I've got lots of time to think -- as I sit making wire cages for all my new plants.

Damn rabbits.

FHQ

The house is silent. For the moment.

No refrigerator hum. No squeaking floor. No slamming door. I am the only one up at 9:00 on a Wednesday morning. Well, okay, Hubby is up, too, but he's at work. The Teens -- and the dog -- are all still asleep. And the house is quiet. Summer-morning quiet. Full-House Quiet.

Full-House Quiet is different from Empty-House Quiet. FHQ has potential. It has the stored energy of a firework just sitting there in its little paper box, waiting for a light.

EHQ is peaceful, no doubt. And sometimes it's all a mother could wish for: a few hours alone in her own home. A month or so ago, Hubby and I were alone on a Saturday morning. (The kids had all slept over somewhere else.) He and I got up, sat in the sunny family room, read the paper, sipped our coffee and tea. The house wasn't exactly empty, but it was still EHQ. And it was nice. For a while.

It didn't take me long to realize that while I appreciate EHQ, I actually prefer FHQ. I like knowing they're up there; that soon someone's feet will hit the floor, the stairs will creak, and a lanky, sleepy-headed body will stagger into the kitchen. I like knowing that today holds the potential for many kids (not just my own) to waft through the house like summer heat.

Yes, they will eat all the food and dirty all the dishes. If they've been playing soccer or wiffle-ball, they will be hot and sweaty and will smell bad. They will track in dirt and let in flies. They may lie for hours in front of the TV playing video games. Voices will shout, doors will smack, the dog will bark. I may wish, once again, for peace and quiet.

But it will be for Full-House Quiet.

High school -- the second time around

My 9th and 11th graders are studying for finals this week, and I'm sitting on the couch beside them, doing my best to help out keep up. When I was in high school, I don't think I learned half of what they have to know, but I'm trying my damnedest to look like I did. We can't let 'em think school is harder now than it was then! Back in the old days, life was tougher. Up-hill, both ways, in a snowstorm! You remember!

Of course kids have it easier these days. They've got computers -- an entire world of knowledge at their fingertips, not to mention in their living rooms, at 11:00 at night. We had Encyclopedia Britannica. In the LIBRARY!

Need to translate something into Spanish? There's an app for that. Gotta locate Brazzaville? Type it into Google. Didn't read the book? No need to wait for the stores to open to buy Cliffs Notes.

And have you seen their calculators? NASA launched astronauts into space with less sophisticated instruments.

So, yes, my kids have tools. Lots of them. But it also seems like they are covering subjects more thoroughly and delving deeper into topics than I ever recall doing. Or maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm looking at that Chem text or that classic novel and trying to understand it instead of just learn it. I suppose it's because when you have to help someone, you do have to "get it" more than just "know it." So, yeah, this second shot at high school hasn't been easy. But I can't say that learning -- or relearning -- this stuff hasn't been kind of fun.

I'm just glad I don't have to take the final.

Left to Right

I am a writer. I like words. I'm not a big fan of emoticons, though I do occasionally employ a traditional smiley face. The noseless one. So it looks more like the old-fashioned, yellow-circle, "Have a Nice Day" emblem.  :)

Whenever I come across an emoticon, I always tilt my head to the left so I can see it in a more upright presentation. Because most of the time I can't figure out what those odd combinations of punctuation marks are supposed to look like. Because they're perpendicular to everything else on the page, for Pete's sake!

Anyway. Recently I started coming across one -- mostly in comments on blog posts -- that I could not decipher. I even went to the Wikipedia List of Emoticons for help, but no luck, it wasn't there.

The first character in the mystery emoticon was < and the only face on the list that had a hat like that was supposed to mean "dumb or dunce-like" -- which I though was kind of a rude reply to an entertaining blog post, especially considering the second character was a 3, which I thought looked like boobs, and when you put the two together the face would be a what? A dumb bimbo? Nice. Except there were no eyes. Whatever. I shrugged and let it go.

But it kept popping up, and I kept thinking, What the hell? And then tonight I was reading replies to a Bloggess post, and these people kept putting the Dumb Bimbo emoticon in their comments on a touching post about depression, and I was feeling frustrated, left out and stupid because I couldn't understand their language, and then all of a sudden, something across the room caught my attention and I tilted my head to the right and -- voila! There it was! I finally got it!

And all I could think was: What user of the English language would create something that had to be read Right to Left when the rest of the sentence went Left to Right??

Some emoticon junkie, apparently.

<3

(Yes, I now know it's a heart, and I realize that probably the majority of Web users know it's a heart, but I still think it looks more like an ice cream cone. Or a halter top. Depending on how you tilt your head.)

Me and my shadow

My depression and I haven't been getting along very well lately. I thought we'd kind of had things worked out, but she's unpredictable that way.

You haven't met her, you say? Well, that's because I try to leave her at home. Because not only is she unpredictable, she's a pain in the ass.

She's a worst-case-scenario thinker. And she dwells. Plus, she's critical. Not of everyone. Just me. She has a knack for finding that one fault -- the mistake I made, the dumb thing I said, the task that didn't get done -- in an otherwise perfectly pleasant day, and then holding on tight to it and waving it around. Like a toddler with a big sucker. Hey, look it! Look it!

The spin she puts on everything is counterclockwise.

HER: You know, even if you do find an agent and a publisher, very few people actually make a living as novelists these days. In fact, I read that unless your last name is Rowling, King or Patterson -- or the book you're writing has the working title "Twelve Shades of Teal" -- you're statistically more likely to have "state lottery" listed as your source of income on your tax return.

ME: Well, shoot, if I can't be a writer, I'd be happy to make my living as a lottery winner.

HER: Yeah, except studies show lottery winners aren't all that happy. And chances are still better you'll be hit by a bus.

At least once a week she'll keep me up all night, only to hound me twenty times the next day with how tired she is. Sometimes she eats too much. Sometimes she drinks too much. Most of the time she doesn't want to do anything at all. Occasionally she stands in the shower -- completely inert -- until the hot water runs out. She can't make decisions.

I haven't known her long, only a few years. And her strength waxes and wanes. She has the ability to cloak me. But I've learned some tricks for fighting her off. With any luck, I'll soon be able to get her behind me again. And I'll try to keep my face to the sun.