Category: Ellery

It’s been a miserable week.

While everyone is finally healthy, work has crashed down on me. I have been at war with a printer. Not the small, desktop kind, but the big professional corporate kind.

I don’t even want to go into it, but it involves a whole of me screaming and yelling at people over the phone. And they’re people who don’t really deserve to be yelled at, but they are my representatives to The Organization. Young children, who were likely in diapers when I learned to use Photoshop. Yet, they’re attempting to school me in it.

And somewhere in between there was me doing a really crappy job at everything else in my life, including motherhood, Halloween preparation, parades, and field trips.

I came out of the week knowing that I ache for people whose lives are that stressful all the time, and I understand why they keel over prematurely from a massive heart attack. I can’t take that kind of stress on a daily basis.

I also know that I need more of the good stuff. Much more.

Friday was one of our last glorious days, and I was facing it solo. So I made plans to pick up Neko from school and head to the Big City. Mary Beth and her mom, Nancy, jumped in as an unexpected bonus. We traveled down to the purple bridge. Hiked across. Played. Laughed. Hiked back. We tried to get a table at the pizza place, but the wait was too long. So we took our order to go, and ate outside, listening to a live musician.

Not much pizza was eaten. Neko and Mary Beth ran and swung around in a way I remember so clearly from my youth. The decibels were a little much for Shep, who planted himself firmly in my lap. But Ellery? She danced her can off, the whole night, without a break for pizza.

In the future? Less yelling at 24-year-old printing reps. More of this kind of goodness.