Fourth of July, and the ensuing days...

Been a couple of days, I know - a lot happened. Here's the gist...

Fourth of July - went to a barbecue at the house/place of work of a friend of Jeff's, Gavin and his wonderful family. I had a blast. I've missed a couple of opportunities to go see these guys in the past, and now I'm sorry. Gavin manages a motel in Los Gatos, the Los Gatos Motor Inn. They cooked steaks and corn, there was a great potato salad and some watermelon, and I made chocolate cake, while one other lady brought a really yummy strawberry white cake. Someone brought in a wading pool that kept the kids busy for hours. I don't think Elise got out until after dinner and time for sparklers. I left at that point with Charlotte in the truck and we went down to Morgan Hill for our writing weekend. I'm working on editing a video I took of Charlotte playing with Holly, which I'll add here later.

That was a bit of a stressful weekend - there were a bunch of kids there, including Calla Rae, the granddaughter from San Diego, Peggy the tenant's grandkids from Cordelia, and Jordan and Delaney with Laura from Virginia. Doris likes her house to stay her house, and things to go as she feels they should go, and this is a bit hard to maintain with that many kids running around. I felt like I had to run interference for the kids, but I probably caused more problems than I solved.

Jeff brought Elise on Sunday afternoon, and she and I stayed in the trailer for a few nights.

A word about that. When I first started staying in the trailer, it took me a few weeks of tweaking to get comfortable, mostly because I didn't understand the limitations of the electrical system, and the heater kept going out when it was -10 outside, or I didn't have enough blankies so it was impossible to get warm no matter how hard the heater worked. Finally, I figured everything out, and I've been pretty comfy ever since.

This weekend, I had not only Elise, but her new friend Jeannette, one of Peggy's grandkids, who wanted to sleep out in the trailer with me. No one's slept in the bunkbeds since the time I went to Valhalla with Julie and Chris, and I can't remember if Elise was there or not, although I didn't get the trailer until after she was born, so in retrospect she had to be... Anyway, we borrowed an air matress sleeping bag thingy from the nextdoor neighbor McKenna which turned out to have a leak. The first night, Elise had a hard time sleeping because it was a strange new bed, but the second night, the air mattress thingy went flat, so not only did she have problems falling asleep, she also had problems because she was sleeping on bare wood, poor little kid. I got no sleep any night I was there with kids in the trailer because I was worried about them the whole time. Oh well. Lesson learned.

Anyway, I intended to come home Tuesday night to get a change of clothes and some stuff, and wound up leaving Elise because she was so distraught and stressed out. She spent most of the time in Morgan Hill scared to death Grandma Doris was going to yell at her for doing something wrong, and we know how well she deals with that kind of stress from her first grade year at George Mayne. She was sitting in the kitchen, crying her heart out because she wanted to go back to play with her friends, but at the same time, she was too scared to go back.

I went back that night, cleaned up the trailer, made sure everyone knew I had to leave, and wound up coming home around 2pm or thereabouts on Wednesday.

I've felt like I'm recovering from a hangover for the last few days; I had meant to clean on Thursday and Friday, but only got a bit done - mostly laundry, as I've decided to start my decluttering by paring down the clothes, etc, until we have just enough to get by. I don't need 42 t-shirts, Elise doesn't need clothes that haven't fit her in two years, and I don't need to keep every scrap of baby clothes she ever owned. Jeff has keep his stuff decently pared down on his own, but then again he also hasn't bought anything new in a long time.

I've gotten some more clothes packed into bags ready for Goodwill, and we had a dumpster day today at our park - I'm also working on editing THAT video, and it'll go here when it's ready.

We FINALLY got rid of our icky old couch, plus a lot of other crap that was just hanging around being worthless. Day by day it's getting easier to walk through the house, and I have great hopes of being able to get Elise's room entirely cleaned out one of these days soon. Woo hoo!! We can get her bed set up and I can actually sleep in the same room with my husband again! Plus, Elise will be able to have sleepovers now, which she's been waiting to do for awhile.

Here's something I wrote on paper a few days ago, and then I'm done, I promise:

07/09/2009
I'm sitting once again at the Starbuck's near my house. Shar-shar has walked down with me, and we're sitting on the patio, not hte main section but the side that's away from most of the tables.

Shar's been brilliant today, and she continues to be brilliant. We're working on perfecting her heel and her sit-stay. She heels quite well, but she still pulls just a bit, which is tough to deal with when walking her any distance, given she's so big. The goal is a perfect loose leash every time - the biggest barrier right now is that we're a puppy and everything is either exciting or scary. I will say, she's already calmer than she was when I got her, and I can count just a bit more on her own ability to control herself.

Okay, so we just changed seats. I was starting to get both a chill and a neck-ache from the patio seats. Note to self: can only sit there comfortably if I'm willing to sit back in the seat, either talking with someone or reading something.

This is kind of a cool place. I mean, I'm not even slightly into apartment living, but I could ALMOST be convinced by this complex. It's huge, but the buildings are all nicely designed and very old world, so it doesn't really look too much like an apartment complex. Part of the developer's contract with the city of SJ is that they had to put in a public use park, so there's a big open square of grass surrounded by trees and a walking path with water fountains and picnic benches on the outside edge. These benches are great places to sit and write, although it's too bright out to use the laptop, and I'm restricted to paper.

Paper's not so bad, though. There's something to be said for the physical act of writing; it often causes me to slow down and figure things out. Sometimes paper makes a great first draft, as it were. The act of transcribing to the laptop then becomes the second draft.

The other nice thing about Starbuck's is that, if I don't bring Shar-shar, I can move inside when I want, get a sandwich, get a mocha frappucino (and fry my brains with caffeine - woo hoo!), use the poddy.