Things I Wrestle With

Here, for Mother’s Day, a short and self-indulgent list of concerns:

Suspending hashing for the summer.  Several years ago I founded a small family hare & hounds running group.  Starting three years ago, we quit setting trail during the hottest months of summer.  It was too hard to find volunteers to lay trail in 100+ degree heat, and even when we did find a hare only one or two diehards would show up.  So … here it is May.  There’s a hash later this morning, and the forecast is for 100 degrees.  Should I try to recruit a hare for June, making next month’s trail the last before the summer hiatus, or should I just call the finish today?

I always feel guilty when I don’t finish a book I’ve started.  Last night I gave up on a fantasy novel 200 pages in, with 200 more to go.  Nevertheless, I wrote a thoughtful review.  Why?  Why does this bother me so?  There are some things I am just not interested in, and fantasy is one of them.

I order movies on DVD from Netflix and review almost all of them.  There are movies I would never knowingly watch; occasionally I misread a Netflix blurb and order one.  Within the first five minutes I realize my mistake and eject it.  As with the books, I feel as if I should write a review, even if it’s only one sentence long.  In cases where I feel Netflix deliberately misleads its customers to get them to order certain DVDs, I think I’m right to write a short review and call Netflix out for false advertising.  But sometimes the mistake is entirely mine.  Should I just ignore the movie?  Probably, but it’s hard.  I see myself becoming obsessive and compulsive about writing reviews of books and movies.

I took the project bike in to the Ducati dealer Friday.  He’ll get it running again, and though it won’t be cheap I should still be able to sell the motorcycle and come out ahead.  But my daughter wants it.  She doesn’t have a car and can’t afford one.  She could, though, pay me back for the repairs, and I told her she could use it if she does.  She wants to use it for daily transportation to & from school and work.  That’s a lot of exposure, and Polly has no motorcycling experience.  I’m worried; Donna even more so.  Yeah, yeah, people all over the world ride motorcycles and motorbikes for transportation, and it’s dangerous everywhere.  Still, given Polly’s lack of experience I’d feel better if the Ducati at least had ABS brakes … maybe I should sell it and help Polly find a motorbike or scooter that does have ABS.

I have three blogs (and three separate Twitter accounts) for three identities: the everyday me, the hasher, and the cook.  There’s not much bleed-through (true, I did lead off this post with a reference to hashing, but I don’t do it often).  On Facebook, though, I make do with one identity, probably because that’s how everyone else does it there, or at least my fellow hashers.  I don’t know about the cooks.

That’s my mom there, and my dad of course.  I’m the one in my mother’s lap.  Mom died a long time ago but my sisters and I think of her all the time.  She was happy, and funny, and wasn’t afraid of lizards or snakes, and no one could possibly have had a better mother.  She was the rock our family rested on.

A long-forgotten friend from junior high school found me through Facebook a couple of months ago; after saying hi the first person he asked about was my mother.  She had that effect on people.

I was lucky enough to find a girl like mom, and she is the rock our family is founded on.  She’s in Las Vegas this weekend, watching our granddaughter Taylor’s last high school fast-pitch games, attending our grandson Quentin’s first communion.  I wish she was here, but she has momly obligations, and she doesn’t stint on those.

Well.  Happy mother’s day.