Feelings

It’s been so dark and gray this week, and chilly. I cleaned the school room on purpose that we could go out there and be productive, but no one has the heart to continue to huddle up around the heaters. It’s just too much. So we’ve retreated the living room where, even though it’s very dark, even with all the lights on, at least it’s warm. And now, because we’ve been in there for three days, it’s trashed, I mean “lived in”.

See, the problem is that, when you get a second dining room table, but don’t immediately remove the first one, everyone settles in to use them both. One for eating and hanging around, one for painting and doing Legos. And, well, I must have undergone some kind of massive personality change, because I don’t do the whole painting thing, not in the living room, nor the Lego thing, anywhere but in the rooms of children. But here I am, three or four days into the week, sitting in a big chair with my feet on the coffee table, reading books and trying to force math problems on people, while everyone does whatever is right in their own eyes.

Later in the evening, when we were all gathered around the living room window with the lights off, you know, so that we could see better, wondering aloud to each other if the two flashing police cars were there for a car accident or a drug bust (it turned out to be a car accident) I looked over the first dining room table and found that Elphine had taken a lot of little sandwich bags and painted pictures on them and then sort of blown them up, as much as they could be, and tied string to them. I guess because I’m too cheep to buy balloons? Well, she’s right, I’m not going out and buying balloons. What is this? Some kind of insane party So there we are. The table is probably going to live there for a while because I don’t feel like cleaning the house this weekend, or figuring out where to put the big pile of pictures we dug out on our week off, or catching up on the laundry.

I love the word “feel”. It’s so much better than the word “think”. I happened to be out with a friend for a little light super and a glass of something at a little restaurant, and when asked about the ingredients of a certain item on the menu, the lovely wait person (I can’t say waitress, can I?) said, and it was so charming to hear, “I feel like it should be fine.” But she did really mean that she was sure that the offending ingredient did not lie there in. I have adopted this so much myself because it’s so wonderful. “I feel like it will be fine” I say to Matt all the time, and he scowls at me. That’s where I am with all the tables and the boxes of stuff. I feel like it will be fine. And my feelings are sort of based in reality so don’t question me.

I feel like you will have a lovely day. Pip Pip.