Vacation Log: Day 2

Well, my cell phone died a horrible, sputtering, phone number eating death (you'd think I'd have learned to back up my phone book after the last two times this has happened to me!), one of my coolest friends is, as we speak, packing up her two boys, husband and crusading law career to move to Vermont and make cheese, I am dying to bring Sullivan back to Minnesota to hang out with my Mom before she can't remember us anymore but am seriously low on funds, I still have bed bugs, my classes have been cancelled for the summer, and Sullivan is missing his friends from school and will be saying "good bye" to his oldest and dearest friend as he heads out to Vermont. Yeah, I should be more depressed than I am.

I attribute my decent mental state to my new grocery service. I started doing Urban Organic which is a produce delivery service that just brings you a box of seasonal produce every week. The box is assembled by them and you just tell them what you don't want, they do the rest. We've been eating out of the box this week so my diet has been vegetarian by accident rather than by design. I've had homemade parmesan gnocchi, baked zucchini, many salads, swiss chard and goat cheese quiche, alu-mottir kabi (which is cauliflower, potatoes and peas in a spicy sauce), and tonight I will be taking it easy on the boys and making turkey burgers and roasted cauliflower for movie night tonight. Hey, if things are going to fall apart, you might as well eat good food.

Home improvement has also brightened my day. Yesterday, Sullivan and I painted our hallway bright blue so we have a good few walls to make his "museum". This afternoon (after we say good bye to our friends and their moving van) we are going to the dollar store to pick up frames for his artwork and hang his art in the musuem. The next battle is convincing Tommer to let me radically change the layout of the house. Then I am going to repaint the kitchen, patch the window sills that were comsetically destroyed when new windows were put in last fall, re-point the masonry in the bedroom, and do a mass purging of crap we just don't need anymore. Can anyone say "stoop sale"?

This is the magic balm that is going to heal the bad attitude toward my bummer summer where all my happy expectations have come to rot. By the time September rolls around I will have a house that works well, a boy that can get things for himself (including his lunch!), perhaps a slightly trimmer physique- just in time for crock pot season, and maybe some perspective. That has been seriously lacking in my life.

So here we go. Positive Attitude Construction Phase 2.