Author: shainorton

Somewhere between 'once upon a time' and 'they killed it with fire'.

Wondering How We’ll Get Down The Stairs

Clowns behind us, jokers in front of us … Happy Solstice!

Next week will mark six months since I stepped off the hamster wheel. I still receive calls from recruiters, but not as frequently as I did when I started this adventure.1 The credible ones2 are beginning to check in to see if my situation has changed. It hasn’t, nope. Maybe by January, when I’ll also be out from under the shadow of my non-compete, but we’ll see. My son is in a holding pattern, waiting for his third and final site evaluation with his employment training provider.

I’m getting an uptick in ‘you should start a business and employ him’ type advice, as if I seriously need to buy an abandoned stable and turn it into an ice cream and monster milkshake place with vintage arcade games and pinball.

Yes, there is an abandoned stable with an intact, great old barn just down the road from where I live, on heavily traveled road frontage, with plenty of land to support parking and auxiliary buildings. Additionally, farmette-sized housing developments are being built all around it. It’s also conveniently located near sports fields and our local schools. It’s not listed for sale, which suggests a couple of things: the parcel is too small to interest housing developers (it could support only one house in the area zoning plan), or the owners don’t want the great old barn torn down, as it likely would be. They might be amenable to a purchase deal to preserve the barn as part of a business operation…

…or so I would advise someone else looking for a business opportunity in this area. That is, if I were back in the business of doing business development. I’m not, and won’t be, unless I have to be.

I’m also not a YouTuber or Instagrammer and have zero desire to start a channel to share the journey of restoring an old stable and turning it into a business and potential community hub. I won’t be, unless I have to be.

I also don’t think building a business around my son will help him out in the long run — but, we’ll see.

On a less uncertain note, I have motivated myself to start the refresher training I need for my expiring professional certifications. The credible recruiters have given me solid advice to expand on those, based on my preference to remain a generalist, so I might pursue those once I finish the refreshers.

Or I’ll snap and look at data (or education) master’s degrees, or take the LSAT just to see how I do.

We’ll see.

The writing’s still going well, though.

  1. While I’ve been keeping an eye out, I haven’t marked myself as being available for work on any site. The folks I know who have are getting inundated with scam pitches, which show no signs of letting up for them. ↩︎
  2. I define “credible” as corporate-direct, or as coming from a legitimate staffing provider. Not a cat and a couple of AI agents in a closet, or people who don’t know how to read a map (or a resume) crammed into a warehouse call center. ↩︎

Looking Through The Back Glass

I was thinking about Mema last week more than I noticed until yesterday. Sometimes I do that with thoughts: I look them over, nod, and toss them onto the library cart for re-shelving. Better than ninety-five percent of the time, that works like it’s supposed to, despite my mental library’s being staffed by penguins.

That less than five percent, though, y’all? When the system breaks down, it can result in ideas I can’t shake for days, or worse, not until I translate the root disturbance into bad poetry to trap its troublesome ass so it no longer vexes me.

Yesterday’s system failure was not so dramatic. Or maybe I’m understating the drama, because it really doesn’t compare to the current drama going on with our septic system, but … that’s another pile of crap. Literally.

Continue reading “Looking Through The Back Glass” →

Recursed?

I haven’t found someone to do the hand-weeding yet. I’m not sure if it’s genuinely too late in the season to schedule such things, or if I’m scaring people off by explaining why I’m not doing it myself.

It’s not that I’m embarrassed about it and want reassurance.

Okay, I’m probably lying. Neither my husband nor I are comfortable hiring people to do things for us, even when reality puts up a billboard questioning our sanity. He grew up actively avoiding yardwork, whereas I was prohibited from using anything that could be considered “dangerous.” The quotes are intentional because ‘dangerous’ was being scoped by people who were religiously opposed to babyproofing.1 For example, it was my job to remove dead vermin from sprung mousetraps, but I wasn’t allowed to set the traps. I was also tasked with cleaning wire tangles and removing pulped frog skeletons from the lawn mower that I wasn’t permitted to operate.

To be fair, the one and only time I used a riding lawnmower, I did take out a fence, and I’ve had some ah, weird bicycle accidents.

I haven’t ridden a bike, except for a stationary one in a gym, since one sunny morning in 1994. I was running late for work on the Mizzou Campus, cutting across the brick plaza beside Ellis Library, when my bike suddenly stopped moving. I went flying into one of the trees that used to be in the concrete planters there. I’m fuzzy on how I got from being sprawled upside down against the tree to collecting my bike and walking it to work, but I do remember locking it in the rack outside Townshend Hall and Leaving It There to Die Or Be Impounded To A Good Home.

Oh, sure, it wasn’t the bike’s fault, just like it wasn’t to blame for me a) crashing into the trunk of a parked car after being surprised by a dog lunging for my back tire, b) cracking my wrist by grabbing one of the iron fences on the edge of the Stephens College campus while I was speeding downhill and realized I couldn’t stop before hitting the intersection with Broadway, or c) snapping my helmet in two when I miscalculated a turn while riding down one of the ramps at Brady Commons.

That said, though, our relationship was clearly cursed, so it had to end.

I’ve gotten a lot of recommendations to try Ivy Block or IvyX, so I’m going to give that a whirl before giving up on outdoor gardening entirely.

What’s one more layer of protection that I didn’t seem to need when I was a kid?

  1. Instead of moving the laundry detergent out from under the bathroom sink the first time I drank Downy as a toddler, or the second time, or possibly the third time, my mother and grandmother chose to keep the stuff there so I could eventually learn my lesson by trying to wash my hair with Woolite. I got it into my eyes, wasn’t happy about that, and started avoiding everything under the sink, including the apparently tasty tasty Downy. As a side bonus, I wasn’t blinded, and I survived to teach my sister that she needed to Not Do What I Did WITHOUT THINKING SHE JUST HAD TO LEARN FROM EXPERIENCE.

    Why yes, I’m Gen X. How did you guess? ↩︎

A Lack of Chickens

(Shout out to Mele Gaddini for unblocking me from writing this blog post by sharing her struggles with imaginary chickens. Rather, the struggles with a lack of them!)

As I’ve been saying for a while, the local wildlife probably wishes we’d commit to the farmette part of our farmette-with-Internet and buy some chickens already. I’ve begun to suspect that the local flora’s listening to their discussions. Since the vegetation isn’t more scared of me than I am of it1, it’s been doling out encouragement in its usual nefarious mysterious plant-y way.

Continue reading “A Lack of Chickens” →

Understanding the Assignment

Daily writing prompt
Share a story about someone who had a positive impact on your life.
View all responses

A little post-Mother’s Day story about one of the other mothers I’ve had in my life.

Mrs. Gelena Carter Fisk, my fourth grade teacher, gave me a pair of knives at the bridal shower my childhood church held to celebrate my first wedding.

She didn’t want a penny in exchange. Mom was concerned that I didn’t offer her one anyway, never mind that we were standing in a church fellowship hall, and if there was going to be an Old World superstition that could get into the building after me past my grandfather’s ghost (he had died across the street five years prior), we really would need the Good Lord to step in and break it up.

I wasn’t the target. Mrs. Fisk was side-eyeing my ex when she handed me the box and announced what it contained.

Not long after, he decided to use the paring knife as a screwdriver. The tip slipped and snapped: I don’t know if he got cut when it broke, because he didn’t let me see him do it.

I took the carving knife with me when I left. Even after thirty-two years, it’s still super-sharp, though I haven’t done anything to it but make sure I handwash it instead of throwing it into the dishwasher.

I should say we, because my husband now also uses it routinely. Oh, he did wait until after we had our son, and when he uses it, it’s usually to slice something he’s baked from scratch.

Thanks, Mrs. Fisk. Happy Belated Mother’s Day!

The butchered cake behind the knife is my Mother's Day cake, a chocolate raspberry with dark chocolate ganache. It's the second round of my husband's experimentation with amping the protein and reducing the sugar in our baked goods.

The Continued Renegotiation of Ordinary Processes

It hasn’t been exciting here, which is frankly, awesome. I’ve had a few chats with recruiters; I’m still not actively looking, but I do take calls, and if I have a good conversation about one I can’t do, I pass it along to the folks I know who are looking. I still haven’t been able to make myself work on the refresher training I need for my professional certifications, but … I’ll get to it. I will. Really.

The writing’s going great, though! The rest of everything else is also getting there, one step, one wondering why something was put where I found it, one trip over the dog, one lily bulb in the dirt at a time.

I took Metro in to meet the NFCW for lunch last Friday. We didn’t know where we would eat or wander around, I didn’t think I could use my husband’s car1, and if I’m driving my truck, I don’t go anywhere near the Beltway without a pre-established plan to park. While my truck is not obscenely large, I’m not the most confident about how it should occupy space, even though I do have most of the fancy bells and whistles (not auto-parking because I don’t trust it). I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was 23 for … many reasons, but let’s go with being verifiably inept at parallel parking. My beloved Mazda CX-9 also taught me some embarrassing lessons about needing a lot more space between cars than what’s afforded by just being at rest fully inside painted parking lines.

(Hey, automakers? Vehicles aimed at parents who don’t like to drive mini-vans need doors that will not slam into neighboring parked cars even if they are opened carefully by children who have earned the right to open their doors themselves. Or, y’know, by those parents trying to model civilized parking lot behavior.2)

It had been a while since I’ve eaten out in a restaurant; quite literally, the last week of December, when I met the NFCW for lunch after turning my work gear in.

Fortunately, I did not forget how, and the usual disaster associated with the cuisine we picked didn’t happen during the meal3. I thought this might have been a fluke, so, I tested it yesterday: I persuaded the husband to go out with me to grab lunch at a local Thai place before going to the grocery store (also together, which is something else we haven’t done for a lot longer than just the last week of December).

One stumble at a time, y’all. One stumble at a time.

  1. It was in the shop for almost two weeks due to deferred warranty/recall repairs. ↩︎
  2. Shout out to the mother who was yelling at someone on your cell phone while screaming at your kids and flooring your Lincoln Navigator in reverse until you smashed into the cart corral of the Target in Manalapan, NJ, WHERE. I. WAS. PUTTING. UP. MY. CART. WHILE. CARRYING. MY. TODDLER. ON. MY. HIP. YOU. OBLIVIOUS. PIECE. OF. SHIT.

    It’s been almost eighteen years since that incident, and I am happy to report that my son didn’t develop a trauma response to returning shopping carts when he’s done with them!

    Please continue to enjoy your stay in the pits of Hell. ↩︎
  3. We had Chinese food. It’s been my experience that sauces in Asian restaurants have traditionally had a slightly different relationship with gravity than they do at home, or they’re more attracted to the clothes I wear outside the house. ↩︎

Spring Cleaning, Excava-intentionally

Monday would have been my mother’s 76th birthday.

I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t automatically remember her birthday. I have a new OB/GYN, and the realization dawned on me while she and I were reviewing my family history during my first visit. My doctors are generally horrified when they notice that Mom died when she was 66, and yeah, I routinely add to that horror by pointing out that her sister didn’t even make it to 60.1

I’ve just started the late fifties to sixties gauntlet.

I am in much better health than my aunt was when she was my age, though the kidney stone I got last year did scare the crap out of me for a while2 since she did pass due to renal failure. I am also healthier than my mother was; I’ve never smoked, and I added ‘cardiac health’ to my routine of regular checkups years ago because I would really rather have some warning of a potential heart problem in advance than having to deal with the aftermath of having experienced one. The regular checkups have also helped me get a handle on some issues that I could do something about before they became things that required medications to manage.

Not that I’m opposed to medications if they’re necessary. I’d just prefer it if they weren’t, for as long as possible. Like antihistamines, augh. Two weekends ago, I promised myself that I’ll make a habit of taking the damn things every day that I plan to go dig in the dirt this year instead of suffering for weeks or, worse, winding up in my dermatologist’s office because I have a histamine reaction I can’t get under control without help.

So far, I’ve kept that promise! The side effect of keeping that promise, however, is that it deprives me of a ready-made excuse to lounge on the couch and doomscroll instead of gardening. Eh, making myself do things I enjoy is for my own good, right?

  1. On the bright side, I’ve had blood relatives who lived deep into their nineties and even a little beyond. Many of these allegedly had most of their marbles up until the end. However, the truth of this might have been obscured by their pre-existing mental aberrations and/or their storytellers’ magical thinking. ↩︎
  2. …until the cause was pinned to excessive dehydration triggered by mono and COVID. ↩︎

Spring Cleaning, Dementedly

There’s nothing wrong with your eyes: I did change the blog format. Actually, I messed around with it so much last week that I got disgusted and walked away without even writing a blog post. Trust me, you didn’t miss anything exciting. Chaotic? Unexpected? Not great? Also surprisingly good? Yep, all of these things did happen last week.

This week, I talked myself into attending a writers’ social. There were writers. They were social. Nobody ran away screaming, and I didn’t slip out the nearest exit at the first opportunity … okay, I didn’t actually get an opportunity to do that, but it was fine. Completely fine! Everything will be okay, except for the things that aren’t and won’t be.

The spring cleaning continues. I stumbled across a cache of old micro and flash fiction that I used to have posted here and various other places, and decided to put some of it back online. I’ll be doing that gradually over the next few weeks, as I continue to procrastinate about things to blog about my spring cleaning.