One Day At A Time….

It’s hard, because I just got home (again) and am already wound up about the next trip (and it’s unholy, inconvenient schedule), but I just reminded myself that the next one is a week away, and I have many days and hours in-between now and then before I need to be worrying about it.

Recapping the travels to-date: I took the train for the first time! It was actually pretty fun, and very no-stress, and I listened to podcasts of  This American Life and worked on a new pair of socks. I even toyed with the idea of designing something on the fly that would incorporate railroad tracks intersplicing, but I didn’t spend much time following through on that. If I want to, I still can – the toes are all I got done.  We had a business trip in Rockford IL, and one of my co-workers had a meeting in Galesburg, so we took the train to Galesburg & got a rental car (an ’09 Murano!) for the trip up-state. Our meeting went well, and the only real glitch was the train getting in an hour later than planned. I hardly knit on the ride back, because we spent a lot of time in the observation car (which is the party car, or at least it was that night), chatting and talking – with our group and other folks who wanted to chat as well. The train is full of all sorts of people! And the movement is very soothing – it rocks a bit, so it’s like being on a boat, or in a giant steel bassinette! And they sell wine by the half-bottle, which I drank straight from said bottle. I put the “k” in “Klassy”, friends.

Then we went down to the Lake of the Ozarks on Friday, for the traditional post-4th get-together, complete with a fireworks show that rivals any small town.  Much less drama than last year, and I really feel my role in “the family” – not that I’ve not felt part of the family before, but there are all sorts factors – your own upbringing and then the time you spend with your in-laws, it all contributes to how connected you feel.

I was raised apart from relatives – we rarely saw any family outside of our tiny three-person nucleus. My father hated doing anything that involved my mother’s family, she hated her own mother, so we rarely did anything with her side of the tree. My Auntie K lives in Florida, so our time seeing her was infrequent, and I think my dad just liked his isolation and not having to bend his schedule or wishes or share a bathroom because of any familial obligations.   So I really grew up with these high walls and boundaries – and I still have them. I’m an only child, I’m very selfish about my time, and find it difficult to be flexible if it involves me giving up “my time” if I’ve committed to other things or just carved out a chunk of time in my head for myself.  So, I guess this is a long, roundabout way of saying that I’m embracing and understanding a new sort of family, and it’s good.

And “our” nuclear family – JWo & me, all three dogs, had a good time this afternoon swimming in the lake before we rode home (with the smell of wet dogs permeating our entire trip…).  I spent some time this weekend with a new yarn project – a CROCHET project, lord help us all, I really don’t do anything for the craft and I certainly won’t be pursuing many more projects like this. Oof.  More to blog, and more to come, peeps. I’ll definitely get more posts in this week…..before the next onslaught of travel begins! More on that tomorrow!

~~Jen