Tag: Morning Meanderings

Sitting here this morning with COFFEE CUP close by.  I have been up for HOURS but that is nothing new.  I finished a book this morning, cleaned my kitchen, started laundry, cleaned the deck furniture, cleaned out the fridge.  I helped my husband pick up the empty boxes in the garage.  I cleaned up all the papers on my kitchen table, the cards I need to still enter into my spreadsheet.

“Be kind to yourself” is the repeated mantra I hear from friends and family. SO often I am told this I have to look around and wonder…

how?

Life does not stop for my grief.  I still have commitments and even though I take on a reduced role, I still feel for whatever reason (right or wrong) that I need to function at some level.  I helped at this past weekends Children’s Book Sale.  I  had two meetings for the library and coming up the next two days I am going to try to help out at camp.  Each time I do these things it costs me.  Each time I hold it together while in a public setting or trying to handle my normal things… once I am alone I lose control.

Life does not stop for my grief.

All I think I can do right now is remind those that I am on committees/boards with is to please understand that I am nowhere near 100%.  At times I think I can look like I am but inside my heart is racing like a scared rabbit.  Please please please by kind to my heart.  Please please please understand I am so broken and can’t handle being pushed.  I can get things done.  I can function.  Just let me move at my own pace for now.

As I type this I wonder why I am saying this here.  You probably were looking for some bookish topic and instead you picked up on my head ramblings like a radio that was moved to the wrong station.

I am unbelievably sad.  Even when I smile and carry on what appears to be a normal conversation please know that it is taking everything I have to hold it together.  Some day soon I will put a message like this on Facebook.  Maybe today.  I don’t know.

Anyhoo…  books.  Still listening to Out Of Orange on audio.  I finished The Lost Recipe For Happiness this morning and if all goes as planned (plans…. ) I will have a review up today.

Next up I am vacuuming ans shampooing carpets.  If the weather holds I will mow my lawn a bit. This afternoon some great gals and EXCELLENT friends are coming over to my home for a little book event on Dorthea Benton Frank’s new book, All The Single Ladies.  It’s a small gathering of people who “get me”.  I am hopeful to enjoy a couple of hours of relaxing with friends.  I am still working on doing small things as I can.

Enjoy your Sunday everyone.  One of these days soon I will start posting the Monday What Are You Reading again.

 

60 days.   How does that even register? It doesn’t.  Yesterday I spent most of the day in bed.  After company for 4 days and lots of activity around a wedding I was wiped out.  It is amazing how quickly my energy drains.  I read between napping and found myself all over the board there too…. I am listening to…

 

The real-life Alex Vause from the critically acclaimed, top-rated Netflix show Orange Is the New Black tells her story in her own words for the first time – a powerful, surprising memoir about crime and punishment, friendship and marriage, and a life caught in the ruinous drug trade and beyond. I have been fascinated with Pipers story and now hearing the side of Alex Vause has been very interesting.     

 

 

 

This one I found at the last Library Sale.  Wally Lamb has run a writing workshop at the York Correctional Institution, Connecticut’s only maximum-security prison for women. Writing, Lamb discovered, was a way for these women to face their fears and failures and begin to imagine better lives. Couldn’t Keep It to Myself, a collection of their essays, was published in 2003 to great critical acclaim. With I’ll Fly Away, Lamb offers readers a new volume of intimate pieces from the York workshop. Startling, heartbreaking, and inspiring, these stories are as varied as the individuals who wrote them, but each illuminates an important core truth: that a life can be altered through self-awareness and the power of the written word.  

 

 

My speed of reading right now draws me to books like this. It’s the opportunity Elena Alvarez has been waiting for–the challenge of running her own kitchen in a world-class restaurant. Haunted by an accident of which she was the lone survivor, Elena knows better than anyone how to survive the odds. With her faithful dog, Alvin, and her grandmother’s recipes, Elena arrives in Colorado to find a restaurant in as desperate need of a fresh start as she is–and a man whose passionate approach to food and life rivals her own. Owner Julian Liswood is a name many people know but a man few do. He’s come to Aspen with a troubled teenage daughter and a dream of the kind of stability and love only a family can provide. But for Elena, old ghosts don’t die quietly, yet a chance to find happiness at last is worth the risk.  

 

So that’s what I am doing.  Day to day doing what I can.  Working a bit on projects I have to get done but making the steps slowly.  So slowly.

Morning.  It’s been a long weekend of activity.  On Friday my husband Al’s brother’s Joe and Chris came to Minnesota for Al’s sisters wedding.  On Friday afternoon I drove the 3 1/2 hours to the North Shore to our cabin to stay there with Al, Chris, and Joe, and on Saturday we drove to Wisconsin to the wedding.  On Sunday We drove back to Brainerd where the boys stayed with us the last two days and this morning they will leave.

It’s been nice to hang out with family yet it still amazes me how much energy it takes for me to be with people constantly.  It is of course also hard to be at events that I know Justin would have loved to have been a part of which kept me n a pretty subdued state all through the weekend and wedding.  I am still struggling through day-to-day.

Today I plan to lay low and read a bit and definitely nap.  My sleeping is off and the end of this week is the Children’s Book Sale that I am a part of  and that will be both time-consuming and exhausting all rolled into one.  I also hope – it is fun.

Review should be up today of Tamarack County by William Kent Krueger.  He is a Minnesota author and one that will be at Wine and Words this year.  Have several books I would like to start we will see which on e actually takes.

 

Good morning.  3:26 am when I am writing this.  I popped out of bed at 2:30 am this morning.  My sleep schedule is all over the board and for now I just go with it.  Yesterday morning I woke up TIRED.  I think the full schedule of the day before – company most of the day and then a City Library Board Meeting in the evening over exhausted me.  Too much of me being “on” or “present” wipes me out.  I completed a couple of tasks yesterday morning and went back to bed by 11:30 and up around 3 pm.

See?  Crazy sleep patterns.

So today….

Since my early rise this morning I have….

Stood out on the deck staring into the night

sent two emails out to the Friends Of The Brainerd Public Library

Created an agenda for the Monday Friends Meeting

Put clothes in dryer

Folded other clothes and prepped to put away

had a glass of ice tea

wrote a review

I am hopeful that by the time I write this post I will be able to go back to bed.  I have a 9 am coffee date here at the house and a wedding tomorrow in Duluth I need to prep for.  Being up this early does not appeal to me.

 

As for weekend reading the above is what will be traveling with me over the weekend.  I am looking forward to Jon Cryer on audio during my drive time.  A Hundred Summers sounds like it will be good cabin reading and I am not sure if I can handle The Rules – but we will find out.

This morning, in an alternative world, I would be flying back in from New York and the Book Expo today.

I think I am ready to go back to bed.

Tuesday.  Mornings are hard and they start early.  I usually wake up between 4 and 5 am these days.  It is not ideal as it just makes the day L O N G E R.  With the constant rain of late I can not get outside to plant flowers, tend to my hostas, and mow the lawn – all things I would rather do than sit within these 4 walls.  I have plenty I could be working on and no desire to do any of it.  I get a few things done each day but I am not the whirlwind of production I once was by any means.

I do read and started the Butternut Lake series a couple of days ago and find comfort in this gentle Minnesota based book.  I know I have all three books in the series and while I am reading the first and can visibly see the third book, I am hopeful to find the middle book around here somewhere.  I am sure I have it.

I have a friend coming over this morning for coffee and another one this afternoon who will help me go through some boxes and work on a project.  This helps to move me through the day.  Today I hope to read… and I hope to write.

Maybe…

the sun will come out.

 

Sunday.  Yesterday made six weeks since my life changed forever.  There are days I want to write… I open up a new post… and then I walk away. I am still struggling fitting into a new normal and stubbornly I don’t even want a new normal.

I want everything back the way it was.

I miss writing.  I miss reviewing.  I want to do something besides sitting in my house trying to escape this new reality but having no idea how.  I do read.  I do get out a little. I am signed up for BEA (Book Expo America) on May 26 – 29 in New York but even now I go back and forth on if that is what I can do.  I want to… I am nervous to… I am giving myself until this Tuesday to fully fully decide.

I am doing a little.  This past Tuesday we had book club and we skyped with the author, Susan Gloss.  Her book Vintage inspired us to dress up and since that was what we had planned to do when we originally discussed this book in March, we stuck with it.  These little outings while probably good for me to do, are exhausting.

This past Friday a group of friends met at a cabin on a lake and we sat around and talked around a camp fire, grilled good food, and were just together.  It was both sweet and also hard to do but I am glad I did it.

 

Below are the books and audio that have come in the last 6 weeks since I posted.  I have picked away at a few of them finding that while I am unable to watch TV I am able to read a bit to take my mind off things.

Today is another rainy day in Central Minnesota.  The last week + has been cold and rainy and while it fits my mood…it is getting old.  After I post this I will probably try to read a bit before I lay down for a nap.  I do have reviews to write, today I hope to start writing reviews and posting them but I have also learned these past 6 weeks that nothing happens on my schedule any more as it takes me forever to do the simplest tasks.

Until I write again.  Thank you for reading whatever I am saying and thank you for being the amazing people on the other side of my posts.

 

Sheila

Checking in.  At 31 days since the accident, life has taken on a new normal.  I cry every day, yet every day I wake up and wonder if this will be the day I have no tears left.  Every day to this point I have had more than enough tears.  I have been surrounded with friends and family from morning to night and that has brought me through many HARD days.  At this point I am trying not to lean so heavily on these amazing people who come to sit with me, text me, message me, or bring me coffee or provide dinner for my family or encourage me to go out for a walk or a bike ride. I am learning ever so cautiously to stand in this new world breathing this unfamiliar air and trying (trying trying trying) to imagine a world without the amazing light and love of Justin.

Quite honestly…. I don’t like it.

Which brings me to my point today.  I can not sit and watch TV.  My mind will not settle into the story line and something will leave me unsettled – a laugh in a comedy, a family… a pregnant woman.  However, I have found that over the last couple of weeks I have been able to settle my mind into a book which does not surprise me.  Through the tragedies of my life – it has been books I have always been able to turn to for escape and release of the pain of the real world.  So slowly I am reading when I go to bed at 7 pm because I am done with what the day has to offer and I don’t know what else to do, I pick up a book and I read a little each night.  I will write reviews because I love to talk about books. As easy as it would be to stop doing all the things I used to do I know that would make Justin very sad.

I always referred to him as the male version of me.  If it was fun, unique, and crazy – we would encourage each other to do it. He loved that I lived life the way I did. I have to remember that.  I will continue Book Journey.  I imagine that my morning posts will become hopefully lighter than this one.  I know I am changed forever and that will reflect on how I write, for better of for worse.  That kid though, he is worth every bit of pain I am going through right now.  I love him so much… and for that reason.  I will continue to live life out loud.  He would have wanted me to stay that way.

I am still here.