Camping Notes 2

I think my "Camping Notes 1" was a Facebook status at least a year ago.  It pretty much just said:

Did you pack the air mattress?


which, incidentally, we did not for our first real camping trip.

So here's what I learned on our second go:
1. 53 degrees when sleeping indoors under a down comforter is NOT the same thing as 53 degrees when sleeping in a tropical weight sleeping bag, with 2 other people in a 6-man tent.
2. The 6-man tent that sounded like a good idea when you thought you might take the dog camping with you is probably not necessary, and will not even be advisable when it comes down to camping in cooler weather than 80 degrees.  You're not going to generate enough body heat to be comfortable.
3. There is no such thing as too much kindling.
4. You're probably not sorry you didn't take the dog with you.
5. Those cargo pants with the zip-off legs are the best $60 you've spent in this whole million-dollar preparation.  You'll wear them for the whole trip.
6. If you can find a campground where there is a curfew for generators: go there.  I loved that it got quiet after 9:00pm.
7. Did you pack the long underwear?

These are the pants in question. They walked home on their own steam.

Do I hear kindling falling?

And I quote: "I'm not sure I can survive 2 days with no screen time."

Dave tolerated my campfire cooking quite well. The addition of spicy chorizo sausage to everything probably helped.  You don't have to refrigerate that stuff.











She can't skip a stone, but she sure can chuck a rock while looking cute.












We will probably go camping again; we have a million dollars' worth of equipment now.  But maybe not at 3300 feet above sea level.  That was just plain cold.  We spent 2 nights in Linville Falls, and wimped out at the prospect of a third night, since it was booked for Pisgah Mountain, at even higher elevation.  I reasoned that we could find an outdoor outfitter store in Asheville and buy enough polar fleece to stave off hypothermia, OR we could spend an equal amount of money on a hotel room.  Dave and Hannah both voted for the Hotel, and who am I to impose my camping will on others?  We grabbed one of the millions of rooms available for hapless campers in Asheville on short notice.  Now we only had to break camp, not set up again, and that freed us up to spend the day at the North Carolina Arboretum, where I dragged Dave and Hannah past every brass plaque I could find.  Plus there was a really cool exhibit based on the book Wicked Plants by Amy Stewart.  Now I have to buy that book.

Hey. It's vacation.  I'm going to have a good time if it kills someone.  Preferably not someone I was hoping would drive me home.

Apparently I have more in common with a flying, screaming monkey than I may want to admit.

I gave one of these monkeys to my sister for a present, because I'm very thoughtful.  Hers did not, sadly, have a super hero cape and hood.  More's the pity.  Hers may, if placed in the right hands, do this kind of production number, however.

You have to watch it to the very end for it be really funny.  Or maybe I'm just really tired, and it's not funny at all to normal people.  That would come as no surprise to me.

Don't get me wrong: I like shoes.

I got forcibly Timelined on Facebook.  I can't figure out the new format on Blogspot.  Upgrades in general irritate me.

Must everything evolve?  Isn't anything ever good enough?  I suppose this mindset is why I live in a tiny house and drive an 11-year-old station wagon.  But I think it's also why I have a resting heart rate of 50, and admirable cholesterol levels and cardiac function, despite my reliance on butter, and bacon grease as my primary source of dietary fats.

I don't think I need to be constantly reaching for some new Thing.  I'm intentionally making that noun proper, because I mean I won't work for objects.  I want to continually learn new things.  I want to do meaningful things in my work, and teach my daughter things that are important to know.  I want to be a better person, a better mother, a better spouse, a better therapist.  But I'm not going to kill myself so I can have more expensive shoes.

I had a job once where everyone got laid off, because the company was being investigated for Medicaid fraud.  Good times were had by all.  One of my co-workers suggested I go to law school.  I had no children and my husband worked nights, leaving me lots of time on my own. I was still in my 20s, and had not yet incurred any student loan debt. (Thanks, Dad.)  I thought about it briefly, and realized that most attorneys work 60 to 80 hours a week.  Now I had NOTHING else to do, but I knew that I was not interested in working that many hours.  It didn't really matter to me what the salary potential was.  I wasn't willing to trade time for money.

Instead I took up cooking.  Enter the butter and bacon fat.  I spend the money that other people would spend on attending sporting events or taking dance lessons on cooking implements and mail-order specialty ingredients. Most of it is unnecessary; when you think about it, so is football.  What both of these things contribute to life is noticeable only qualitatively.  Hobbies give people a point outside of their Things on which to attach meaning.  They give us occasion to strive for excellence outside of our means of making a living.  So when I have a really bad week, where no one shows up to appointments and people just don't seem to be getting any better, I can still go home and make a mountainous lemon meringue pie that provides some sense of achievement.  No. Not just achievement: Mastery.

Some researchers have identified Mastery as a basic need.  The model I'm referring to has about 11 basic needs, so, obviously, it comes after the real basics, like food, shelter, and an adequate supply of oxygen.  But it is a real and observable drive for most human beings.  When people don't find ways to achieve this through academics, athletics, or aesthetic pursuits, they tend to try to achieve it by controlling other people, or by demeaning others' areas of Mastery.  You know, you may have had a brother or cousin who told you your hobby was stupid and you were a loser because you practiced the viola 2 hours a day at age 13.  For some people these pursuits turned out to be career paths.  For the rest of us, it's just a way to really strive for accomplishment and occasionally triumph. 

This week I'm going to try to recognize others for their mastery of being people.  Not for their car or their shoes or the size of their diamond, but the things that are truly central to their humanity; the concepts that those Things represent.  Dedication. Focus. Perseverance. Strength. Love.

How to paint yourself into a corner.

Hannah was an ornery cuss all night, beginning with getting whiney about my insistence that she practice her piano lesson correctly, and ending with holding the bathtub plug out of my reach when I asked for it, under the guise of shaking the excess water off it.  Then she went into her room to get dressed and cry in her mirror.  I took the mirror out, so she had to cry alone.

After she came out, I asked her if she wanted to talk about what had upset her.

Hannah: Well, I just got a little tired.  You know how tired people get cranky?
Me: Oh.  Then I guess you should brush your teeth and get ready for bed now.
Hannah: I was just a little bit tired...
Me: Brush.

As I've mentioned before, this child is inventive, and has no compunction about making stuff up.  Fortunately for me, she has not yet mastered the concept of what comes next after she feeds me a line.  When she figures out how to predict my response and trouble-shoot that, I'm dead in the water.  She's a much better liar than I ever was.

I need a pinch-hitter.

Wednesday night I sat on a park bench and watched Hannah take a tearful swipe at a little boy who was not, at that moment, doing anything visibly wrong.  I called her over to me, and she trudged over, climbed into my lap and started crying.  She said the other kids were being mean to her all night, especially one new friend, who kept telling her that it wasn't her turn at whatever they were doing.  Hannah was upset, because she was keeping track of the order, and she KNEW she when it was supposed to be her turn.  That's just not fair.  Then she fell down, and actually got hurt, but the little boy didn't ask if she was okay. That's just not nice.  He may have also made a joke, which was why she took a very wide swipe at him, which had no chance of connecting, but graphically expressed her deep frustration.  That's just heartbreaking.

My daughter, as an only child, doesn't really have to compete for anything at home.  She can have undivided attention, uninterrupted time at playing with her toys, unlimited turns swinging on the rope in the backyard, all without having to negotiate with other kids.  When there are other kids around, she is usually gracious, and wants to share.  She doesn't understand why other kids don't use the same manners that she does, why they would be mean, hit, or laugh at her.

When things like this happen, I just want to take her home, bundle into our little mom-dad-Hannah cocoon and never let anyone else in.  I want to hold her and rock her and tell her how much I love her, and that she never has to see those rotten kids again if she doesn't want to.

But I don't want to make her emotionally crippled.  I don't really want her living with me when she's 40.  I know the rest of the world is a lot harsher, ruder, and louder than her dad and I are.  And I want her to be able to live on earth like a normal person.

So what I do is reason with her about how important it is to be first, as opposed to second in line, if everyone still gets a turn.  I tell her that boys fall down all the time, and they might not stop to ask one another if they're okay, and maybe that's why this boy didn't ask her.  I tell her that everyone has bad days, and maybe the other kids don't realize they're being mean.  I remind her to tell other people to "Buzz off!" in her "mean voice" when they bother her repeatedly.  I remind her that she doesn't have to give other people the toys she's using when they ask, but it's okay to do so if she wants.  And I let her know that everyone won't be her friend, but she can still be kind to everyone. 

I don't really know how to raise a child to be both assertive and kind.   I'm not always sure how to do those two things at the same time as an adult.  Sometimes I want to backhand other people's children for being a jerk to mine; but I don't want to intervene too quickly, for fear that I'll teach my child that I don't think she can handle her own problems.  It's painful to watch her struggle and sometimes fail, although I know that's the correct way to build self-esteem, because it's the quickest way to break my heart.  Some days I'd like to stay on the bench and let someone else handle the heavy hitting.

Boundaries? What boundaries?

I pulled into the parking lot at work this morning to see a grown woman, easily sixty years old, sitting on the side of a raised planting bed, shirt pulled up, scrutinizing her navel.  I mean her chin was on her chest, and she was prodding at her abdomen for some reason, although I wasn't close enough to see exactly what the reason may have been.  I couldn't be more pleased about my nearsightedness.

When she heard my car, she covered herself, but as I was parking she went right back to what she was doing. I know this because when I got out of the car, I saw she had her shirt hiked up again for another look.  I felt like I'd stumbled upon a man peeing in an alley.  This woman was sitting in front of my building, as though she were doing nothing more intimate than making a phone call.  Why am I the one who feels embarrassed?

Later, coming out of the common rest room in center of our office plaza, I happened upon a man's actual ass.  There is a gentleman who leases an office near ours who commonly sits on a bench in the breezeway to smoke a cigar and mess around on his smart phone.  Today, for some reason, he was sitting on another of these stupid raised planting beds, leaning over to peer into his phone. This left a rather impressive and compulsory view of his butt to anyone coming from west of the shrubbery.  That end of the plaza, incidentally, includes a psychiatrist's office.  No risk for lasting damage there.

Don't tell me, gentlemen, that you are unaware of the exposure of your buttocks to the air in the case of the proverbial plumber's crack.  That guy had to know he was a little too-well ventilated.  And what, short of a stab wound, would be worthy of public examination of one's bare midsection.  Why is it that people don't feel the need to keep their private business private?  Am I the only one disturbed by this?  I'm not that dainty.  I talk about sex, drugs, and body parts with people every day, for legitimate, clinical reasons.  But I don't need to see it in the courtyard, people.

It's a good thing I have other people to do my thinking for me some days.

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm weary.  I've been doing everything that requires 2 hands for over a month now, and I have started forgetting stuff.  Not important stuff, I think.  Everyone's been bathed and fed at least three times this week, so I think I'm doing pretty well.

My aunt called me today and asked what we're doing for Easter.
Um. Going to church?  Eating chocolate bunnies?  What else is there?
Oh!  Dinner!  I forgot.  Maybe I should go buy a ham. Or a ham sandwich.  Or Valium.

She suggested that we go out for brunch.  I love the idea of brunch.  Brunch always sounds like there will be sunshine and mimosas.  And maybe hats.  It sounds crisp and fresh and like there should be whipped cream on most of the things that aren't prime rib.  It's a festive word.  And usually comes with a festive price tag, so I don't bother with it myself.

Except this year.  Because, dang it, I'm not cooking Easter dinner and then cleaning the whole thing up after I'm done.  And because I can't get anyone else to eat asparagus, so I'd have to make two vegetables.  Boo to that.

It never, ever occurred to me to go out to eat on Easter.  I called for reservations just this evening.  Which is why we'll be enjoying the buffet at 5:30 instead of 11:30.  But what I'll really be enjoying is the clean kitchen.  And the not-washing dishes.  And the view.  Dig it.

Why didn't I think of this?

I've gotten myself into the mindset that I can, and must, do everything.  We must have home-cooked meals together every night.  The laundry must be done and bathroom cleaned twice a week. The kitchen must be cleaned daily. The floors must be vacuumed constantly.  Alright, that one's true, or the carpets would be made out of dog hair.  It's this perfect woman thing that we inadvertently buy into.  I am well-acquainted with the concept of good enough.  I fairly shower my clients in it all day long.  I rail against the folly of the "Should" thinking error, and can pick it out of any (anyone else's) rant in record time.  It is my actual business to help other people lighten up and be less hard on themselves.  But I routinely forget to do it myself.  

Sigh.  Anyone know of a good therapist?