Care to sit? You can’t! I discovered they locked the doors due to ice falling off the building! 

SexyPoutyK, sepia toned 

Kristin, as coloring book 

The view of the front yard 

The giant hackberry in the back yard 

As I was driving home last night (pre-moving adventure) I was thinking about how the conditions were primo for black ice. I’ve only had one encounter with black ice in my life, and while it scared the spittle out of me, I was unharmed.

Minneapolis, MN. January, February, who knows, one of those months where it gets dark at 3 in the afternoon and the air is so sharp it just might shatter all around you. It’s after 9 at night and I’m driving around Lake of the Isles to get back to my apartment at the intersection of Hennepin & Franklin. (I miss Liquor Lyle’s SO MUCH right now just thinking about it.) If you’ve ever been around the lakes, you know that they’ve got wide spots here and there so you can park & then get out & enjoy the bike trails or walking tails. Fortunately for me, no cars were parked in one of these wide spots! I hit the black ice in my little tank of a car (1986 Ford Ecort, and have we got some stories there – It almost seems prophetic that the Escort later died by fire. Fire & Ice! Pat Benatar, where’d ya go?), anyway, I hit the black ice, SPUN 450 DEGREES, and came to a stop. It was like instant teacups at the fair, the spinning was so fast & sudden, but fortunately my ride did not last as long. I had NO clue where I was, what direction I was facing, it was pitch black outside, and then I realized I was facing the lake! I had made a complete circle plus another 90 degrees, and was pointed westward ho! Shaking, I got my car turned in the right direction, and made it home without further incident.

So, when I left for knit night last night, hubby said, “Watch out for black ice!” and I thought, “You can’t SEE black ice! I don’t know how to watch for it!” but I knew what he meant was, “Don’t speed demon drive the Civic because you might never be so lucky again if you hit black ice!” There wasn’t any black ice (that I saw), but I sure was cautious.

If you’re wondering, I now have TWO loveseats, TWO chairs and the old sofa in my living room & dining room. It’s that overstuffed-overfilled-we-need-14-cats-to-complete-this-picture look!

Hopefully it will change, because if it doesn’t get done tonight? GRIN. I’m calling my guy friends tomorrow while hubby’s out of town for a meeting. Heh. I can be my own version of black ice, baby.

I had this fantabulous therapist in Minneapolis, she was a crazy-haired earth mamma who was sharp as a whip, and energy & confidence just emanated from her pores. She had several of those hard plastic tubes filled with corn-syrup-like liquid & glitter in her office (you know what I’m talking about?) and any time I started to whine about wanting things to be different, immediately, she would point at the “magic wands” and tell me to pick one up & wave it around because I was obviously engaged in magical thinking, and perhaps I could make it happen with one of her wands.

Now, that sounds really snarky, and she wasn’t snarky at ALL, in fact, it was funny when it happened, because it was this gentle way of saying, “Wise up, you will not change that and quit thinking you will.” So I got a lot of really good, useful tools from her, but the best one of all came after several long sessions of me describing my strained relationship with my parents, and how they had so much influence over me and how upset they could make me, blah blah blah, and I described them as being able to storm my defenses & burn down the gates and get deep inside where I felt safe & then I was left in a heap. And she said to me, “The handle opens from the inside, Jennifer.” And it was like she’d waved that little wand, because BING, a little light went off as I imagined my small submarine tank with my parents on the imaginary doorstep and that I was the one, indeed, who let them in. Obviously I had the power all along, I just didn’t recognize it because I was the child, and the parents are supposed to trump child – but that doesn’t work so well when you’re 26.

Not surprisingly, the workplace also gives you GREAT opportunity to practice things you learn in therapy, even if those sessions were focused on your family. And that is why I have some days where I sit at my desk and shake my head a little and say to myself, “The handle opens from the inside.” And I sure could use one of those magic wands!

I am going to leave the office in five minutes, to go home and move a loveseat & chair IN to the living room, and then move the existing sofa and loveseat OUT of the living room, all before I leave for my knit night.

The couch is its own special living, sentient beast that must be tackled separately, it seems. Perhaps that will be for tomorrow night’s entertainment? It will be nice when all of this is over!

I’m thinking of having a giant button made with “I CARE” on it, in as big a font as will fit on my imaginary giant button.

Because to wear it would be so funny! Because it just isn’t true anymore. I find this to be a fascinating phenomena when I step outside myself. When I was a freshman in college, and blathering on about something at one of those “get to know each other before you sleep together” dorm functions, and yes, I’d been drinking, this guy just looked at me and said, “You are really a passionate person.” He went on to say this in three different ways, but it boiled down to him saying (about me!) that I had a lot of passion. (No, we didn’t sleep together, either.) But I was stunned, nay, STUNNED! Nobody’d ever described me like that before. Never ever ever. I was always on the outside looking in, stranger in a small town, exiled and reviled for being different, exiling & defiling myself on the inside from depression & self-hatred & so I adopted a pattern of deflecting and attracting attention with humor and being smart, neither of which have to be about emotion, which is what Passion means to me. So once that bottle got uncorked (and I’m not talking about the alcohol, which was consumed in dangerously copious amounts all through college), I found myself being VERY passionate about EVERYthing. We’re protesting something? I was there at the rally, angrily asking questions and hearing my voice waver in indignation & feeling terrified because I was speaking emotionally, not thinking it out first. A cardinal sin under my father’s watch, back in those days. But hey, that’s sort of what college is supposed to be about, I think. A safe(r) haven to get all riled up in about stuff you still think you can impact.

Right now, I don’t see myself having a snowball’s chance in hell at impacting the infrastructure here at work. I can’t fix it, I can’t make it better, I can only make it a little more colorful and entertaining. Despite the inner beast in me railing at what I see is “right & wrong” and passionately shrieking about what is “fair”. So that means, sit under a support beam & keep your head down, or get the hell out of the structure. Right now I’m under that beam, but I still have to find a way to laugh – and that takes the form of a giant button emblazoned with “I CARE”. I’m disappointed that I have to stop caring (so much). I won’t lie and say I don’t care AT ALL. I just can’t keep Fred-Flintstone peddling with my feet & charging at the salt mine, thinking my force of will, my great passion will bring about some form of impact. I just hurt my feet and head and pride, and make myself nutters.

So, in tiny type under “I CARE”, I would list the things I do care about. I care about knitting. And Yarn. And my husband and our dogs and our families’ lives, and my friends’ lives, and I care about the external world and even people I work with, as individuals. I care about anyone going through misfortune, or depression, or great sadness, and I care about essential Life Necessities, like ethics and honesty and responsibility and respect and intelligence and humor. I feel anger, and sadness for the individuals who walk around with monkeys on their backs the size of baboons, but when they look at me and say “What monkey?” I have to run my fingers around the edge of my very large “I CARE” button and remind myself that I AM NOT A MONKEY TRAINER. And that the handle opens from the inside.

I will explain that tomorrow.

So I called Kristin on her cell phone & she was already at work. I was driving through slush and ice and generally badly-maintained (read=”untreated”) roads, because all the rich people on Ward Parkway told their employees they wouldn’t be in to work today and therefore their big road didn’t need to be scraped, salted, sanded, pick ONE I’d be happy!

Kristin confirmed that the phones were indeed down at the office.

My next questions was, “Is there INTERNET?”

And there was.

And I didn’t turn around and go home, because if there wasn’t internet? I wasn’t coming in.

Called the hubby right afterwards to report on the sorry state of the roads, and also told him the phones at work were down. “Is there INTERNET?” he asked.

I love him so.

And Chelle, no, the sofa’s still on it’s end in the garage. It was too nasty last night to attempt it & I’m hoping one of our male friends will happen by & I can extricate myself from the entire process. My “Y” chromosome just does not have that telepathic, how-to-move-big-objects genetic material and besides, I don’t like to lift things that much anyway. But if it’s not in the house by Friday I’m going to have to take matters into my own hands and call some more guys to come over. Two of them were eagerly showing me moving maneuvers with my guest chair & office door yesterday, so I have some helper candidates. :) And next time? $50. Gonna spend it.