Inadequate Materials

Before we had kids, the Captain and I dreamed of living in the middle of nowhere, with a big chunk of land to call our own. The idea of growing our own vegetables, chopping our own firewood and working on an old fixer-upper was our idea of heaven. But after a couple of years (and a couple of winters) out here on the farm, I've learned something about myself that I think is pretty key. I am all about convenience. Today I will tackle the last 30 pounds of home-grown tomatoes. They will be stewed, strained through a seive, cooked down to a sauce and canned, to be stored in the pantry for those cold winter days when I want a taste of proper summer tomatoes on my spaghetti that you just can't find in a tin at Wal Mart. By the time Firstborn gets off the bus at the end of our driveway and demands an after-school snack, I will have finally finished the week-long process of canning a total of just over 100 pounds of tomatoes from our garden. And it's been hell. Last year, it was su...

Technology waits for no man, and this weekend marked a new scientific breakthrough for me. For the couple of you following my little blog, you may note that there has been a layout change, and I've also learned to include photos in my posts. While these skills are certainly basic, for me they're actually pretty exciting. But, as ever, my quantum leap also brought with it the inevitable frustrations that made me want to throw a lamp through a window. The Captain usually takes care of things like setting up the stereo system and fixing the computer when it unavoidably starts crashing every 4 months or so. So, when he's gone I like to steer clear of rocking the boat. If I can just keep the computer on an even keel, I figure I'm doing okay. But being a military spouse is about being independent, being able to fix problems yourself, even if they are what I like to call " Man-jobs ". So, this weekend, I decided it was time to stop namby-pambying around and figure ou...

Here we have Firstborn and Rosemary's Baby on the sled hill our wonderful neighbour made for us last year out of snow from our driveway. If this makes it successfully into my blog, it will mark a technological breakthrough for me, and will open up a whole new world of opportunity in terms of my blogging! Proper post tomorrow!

There are advantages to having the Captain gone for weeks or months at a time. Sleep is a big one. No one is there to steal all the blankets, accuse ME of stealing the blankets, snore all night or (my personal favourite) decide at 3AM that he has insomnia, turn the lights on and start reading without clue-ing in that this might bother me. Food is another. I can go on whatever diet I like and not have to deal with his complaints when I refuse to keep potato chips in the house, and I can have cereal for dinner, cake for breakfast and eat at whatever time of day or night I please. But the best thing about the Captain's absence is, by far, the music. When our family is together, Saturday and Sunday mornings are lazy. We eat a big breakfast and rarely get out of our pajamas before 11AM. The kids eat, watch TV and play while we surf the internet or read magazines over a third or fourth cup of coffee. The atmosphere would be heavenly if it wasn't for the Captain's nasty little hab...

The wedding is over, and the verdict is in. The bride was gorgeous, and everyone in attendance had a fantastic time. So, why do I feel like crap? It's not like I hoped it'd be a disaster in my absence. Quite the contrary. That everything went off without a hitch was the best news I could've heard. But there's something about hearing it from other people instead of witnessing it myself that has sent me into a bit of a downward spiral today. Yesterday, I felt a little miserable, but also like it wasn't the end of the world. I was at least able to focus on my most shallow losses. Today, the real disappointment of having no wedding memories to speak of has kicked in, and I just plain feel blue. Some people really revel in feeling depressed. They make sure everyone around them knows it, don't get out of their pajamas all day and cry into their ice cream bowls while watching old episodes of The Waltons . This doesn't do it for me. When I feel gloomy, I want out. N...

Today is an extremely important day for our family. My second-youngest sister (let's call her Sister #3--I have a lot of sisters...) is getting married today. And I won't be there. Suffice it to say that, with the Captain gone, Firstborn both in school and suffering from some pretty severe separation anxiety since his father's departure, doing the 40-hour round-trip alone with 2 small children just wasn't possible. It's at times like these that I question what on earth we were thinking plunging our little family into military life. But, what's done is done, and I will simply have to live with the disappointment of being absent from yet another family portrait. I could go on about this disappointment all day, all the important things I've missed, all the meaningful speeches I haven't heard and all those small moments that will never linger in my memory. But that's just not me. At this very second, as miserable as I feel for missing the wedding, what...

The Captain and I were fortunate enough to attend a wedding this past weekend. And, while it wasn't the wedding I desperately hoped to attend this month (I'm missing one next weekend and am gutted about it), I'm glad we went. With apologies to all the devout Roman Catholics out there, sitting on the groom's side of the church, we prepared ourselves for what we expected to be a mind-numbingly long mass. So, we were surprised to find ourselves in and out of there within about a half-hour, but this didn't mean the ceremony itself wasn't meaningful or thought-provoking. As usual, given a few minutes of quiet, I got to thinking. And what I thought about was my own wedding. Nothing was particularly wrong with my wedding. It was, in fact, quite nice. The Captain and I, being up to our ears in the kind of debt reserved only for students and idiots, couldn't afford a five-figure affair. So we accepted my father in-law's gracious (and likely drunk) offer to host o...