Moving Up, Out, In, and On: One More Trip Around the Sun

Greetings, Dear Reader. It's been a month since we last met, and I have had so much to tell, but I have been holding my breath. I've been waiting for the right moment to exhale, the moment when I can trust that everything is actually happening just as it should, and in the most wonderful way. I think that the moment to exhale is now. So I breathe out. I want to sing and dance and shout with delight from rooftops...instead, I exhale. Whoosh. I exhale, and I write.

Suddenly, I don't know where to begin. There is so much tremendous, unbelievable, wonderful stuff happening in this middle-aged divorcee's life right now! It's all so interconnected that I can't really tell it in chronological order, though. I think I can sum it up with three different champagne celebrations that all happened in the same week, starting with my birthday. Just try to follow along, as life is happening at lightning speed.

Champagne Celebration #1 - Veuve Clicquot

 My 41st birthday was two weeks ago. I wasn't really planning to celebrate for a couple reasons: my birthday was on a Thursday, 41 is not a milestone like 40, and although close, it's not yet the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Really, 41 is just a prime number that signals the start of The Forties. So, I was happy to keep it low-key and accepted a friend's invitation for birthday dinner at her house after work. When I got there, though, I found a whole party with surprise guests, ice cream cake, balloons, a confetti cannon, champagne...truly the best birthday ever! It was my first ever surprise party, but I have always wanted one. Now that it's out on the internet, though, I pretty much expect surprise parties all the time for the rest of my life. Just sayin'.

Champagne Celebration #2 - Perrier Jouet

On my birthday weekend, I went to the casino and gambled for the second time in my life. As a math teacher, I basically subscribe to the old adage that gambling is a sport for people who don't understand mathematics. However, I am evidently living a charmed life, so I won. Clarification: I didn't just win, I haplessly won BIG.

Here's how I did it. I sat down at the Super Fun 21 table and changed $40 that I was fully committed to losing into eight $5 chips. (Step 1: don't bet anything you can't afford to lose.)  I dutifully placed $5 bets until I had 16 $5 chips. Then I made a little stack of my original eight chips and vowed not to touch that pile. (Step 2: set aside the money that you were committed to losing.) From that point, I set little rules for myself: If, and only if (my math peeps will love this: IFF...), I won at least two hands in a row, I allowed myself to add a single $5 chip to my bet. If (not IFF) I lost a hand, I removed that $5 chip. (Step 3: Take a loss as a sign, and take action immediately.) As you can see from the photo, my friend T and I both walked out as happy winners. To be precise, the $320 in my hand is what remained after tipping our dealer and buying the celebratory bottle of PJ on our way home. MathMercy ultimately made ten times her initial bet, walking out with $400 from her initial $40 investment.

Champagne Celebration #3 -Moët & Chandon

This is the big one. This is the huge one. This is the "holy shit life is good" one. This is the one that really symbolizes the rest of my life. A little back story: about a week before my birthday, my casino/surprise birthday party friend was looking at rentals because, for the second time in as many years, her landlord decided to sell her house. She had wistfully strayed from the rentals and was looking at real estate. Around 9:30p on that fateful Thursday, she asked me "Do you want to buy a house?" I sent an email to my parents at 9:58pm asking what they thought about me entering a home-buying partnership. Less than 48 hours later, we had financing approved and were well on our way to gathering what was needed for a down payment on a mini-farm on the Peninsula.

We didn't end up getting that first mini-farm. Thank goodness, because we found another house for $50,000 less that is absolutely perfect for us. Because I am a woman, and women navigate using landmarks, I have to landmark this path. It started on June 8, 2013, when my ex-husband walked out on me. At the time, I was totally blind-sided as the life that I knew came crashing down around me. On June 8, 2015, exactly two years to the day since my ex-husband left, we placed an offer on the house. The next day, our offer was accepted, so now we are just waiting on the sale to close. I bought the Moët & Chandon to celebrate, and to reflect on landmarks.

Life happens, and man, does it happen fast. When I went to the credit union to essentially liquidate all my savings for the down payment on the house, I had a moment of panic. I have worked really hard to build a savings account in these past two years of being a single lady, and withdrawing all of that money was scary. However, it wasn't nearly as scary as the fact that exactly two years prior, I was visiting one of those "cash for gold" places to exchange my single earrings and broken chains for gas money.

As it turns out, when you are living a charmed life, good things happen to you. When you choose to surround yourself with supportive friends and family, you have everything you need. We have been able to utilize friends and family for everything from temporary storage to our mortgage loan to our real estate agent, and it has been so easy. I am reminded of a book I had to read back when I was a dancer, called Zen in the Art of Archery. Clicking the link will download a pdf copy that you can (and should) read. The book teaches that in order to become an archer (or a dancer or just about anything else), one must learn to breathe properly with no knowledge of breathing, to Be without Being. I adapt the lessons for myself as Buy a House without being a Home Buyer. Perhaps after we close, I will write "Zen in the Art of Home Buying". (Step 1: Find a friend with whom you can live for the next 30 years....)

Two years ago, I thought life as I knew it had ended, and I was right. What I didn't realize is that I needed that life to end so I could discover the life that I am meant to live. I am meant to live a life of delicious risks, surrounded by kids, love, chickens, honey bees, friends, family, and walls that I OWN. I feel like I'm dreaming. Every day is the first day of my rest of my life, and I simply can't wait to wake up to greet each morning..

Spring Blossoms

I was briefly inspired to start converting my room-sized junk drawer back into a reading/sewing/guest room today. I say "briefly" because after about 20 minutes, I opened a box that contained all the journals from back before I decided that, for me, writing journals is little more than emotional self-indulgence.

After spending some time on memory lane, I am happy to report that the journals of my teens and twenties aren't all negative. Don't get me wrong: there is plenty of gloom and angst, but there is also a lot of joy. There is even poetry. That's right. MathMercy used to write poetry, and she is about to share some of it with you.

This poem was inspired by irises, and mine just bloomed yesterday. Finding it today was probably kismet.

The Faintest Scent

Spring is just moments away, 
Waiting. 
Breathless and giddy like a first date, 
Not yet late but hesitating 
So as not to seem too eager. 

Never one to give Them exactly 
What They Want, 
She hints at just enough 
To keep Them clamoring for more. 
Spring waits outside the door. 

A sigh heard faintly through the willow, 
Spring whispers.  
(Don't weep, my dear. I'm here.) 
She leaves just the faintest scent on pillows, 
Enough to open windows 
To invite her in. 

Springtime is my sin. 

I had put this poem on Poetry.com back in 2000 or 2001, so I was mildly surprised and amused to find that not only does Poetry.com still exist, but so does my poem. Let that be a lesson to you, kiddos. The internet is your permanent record. No matter how well you think you've hidden it, all of your future boy/girlfriends, college admissions boards, and future employers will know that you used to write poetry (gasp).

Incidentally, I'm not surprised if you don't know the scent of iris. Irises have a delicious honey aroma that will make you melt, but they don't like to broadcast it. You basically have to get right in there and risk walking around with pollen on your nose. You won't care, though, because you will be drunk on the scent of paradise. Drink it in and let springtime be your sin.

Root Ramblings

Have you ever noticed how many different uses there are for the word, "roots"? Yeah, me neither. Today, though, my mind started wandering, and that's where it landed. How many ways can you think of to use "roots" in a sentence? I'll give you a minute.... cue Jeopardy music...

Once you got started, you may have noticed that root definitions are kind of like roots themselves - branching, intertwining, going a lot deeper than you initially thought. I'm not going to bore you with a list of all the different definitions. I'm just going to bore you with a couple that jump out to me personally. If you want to abandon ship, now would be the time. Still here? Let's start rooting around with roots!

I'm pretty sure that when making a list, only my math teacher friends may have included a math definition. For the rest of you, bear with me; I'll make this as painless as possible. In math, "root" is used in a couple different ways. The root of a number is this radical value (pun fully intended) that when multiplied by itself a certain number of times creates another number: the square of a square root, the cube of a cube root, and so on. The roots of a polynomial (also called "solutions" or "zeros") are the values that make the function evaluate to zero. Visually, you can picture roots as the spots where the graph of a function crosses the x-axis.

Since not all functions cross the x-axis, not all roots are real. In fact, lots of numbers and polynomials have imaginary roots. That means there are a lot of imaginary zeros that are really solutions, even though they aren't real solutions. Confused yet? It might start getting complex (another pun!) here, so I'm just going to let you ponder this: The number of complex (including imaginary) roots is infinitely greater than the infinite amount of real ones.

This whole roots thing started as I was in the umpteenth hour of pulling grass and weeds from my flower beds. The grass had really taken root during the course of a particularly wet winter and spring, so I had plenty of time to ponder grass roots as I tried to eradicate them (quite unsuccessfully, I'm sure). Here's the thing about grass roots: they form incredibly strong networks. Spend a few hours trying to infiltrate the network and you will have a new appreciation for the concept of a "grassroots" organization. The roots may not run terribly deep, but they spread and interweave in a way that makes every individual blade a vital, seemingly invincible part of the entire system. (GeekMercy here for you less garden-y and more Star Trek-y folks: I imagine grass roots are something like the Borg collective.)

http://www.ck12.org/book/CK-12-Biology-Concepts/r26/section/9.14/

Taproots are much more solitary creatures than grass roots, and probably even more frustrating. If you have ever tried to remove a dandelion root from your lawn or garden, you know taproots. Taproots are super deep and strong, and virtually impossible to remove completely. I am pretty sure that every dandelion and starchy rumex root that I've left mangled in the soil sprouts three new plants, purely out of spite. Taproots can bite me.

Is there anyone that you keep in your life simply because you have a long history (i.e. deep roots) together? It might be a childhood friend or a significant other, but it's someone with whom you no longer share anything other than tradition. That person is your taproot. You know that the garden of your life would be a lot less messy without that person, but experience has proven that it's a lot harder to get rid of them than you thought. You can't just cut them off because they keep coming back. I think if you really want to get rid of that person, you have to treat them like a taproot. Get your hands dirty and dig really deep to sever the root, making sure to get all the little secondary roots too. It's hard. I mean really really hard. After digging for a while, you start to think that it would just be easier to tolerate the dandelion. It is familiar and not so bad really, so you decide to just leave it alone. Next thing you know, you are overrun with dandelions. Not me. I'm on an emotional taproot eradication campaign, clearing the weeds out again so the lovely things that I've planted have room to grow.

I could go on with more examples of roots. I'm pretty satisfied with my metaphor, though, so I'm going to stop while I'm ahead. Besides, I just spotted a rogue dandelion in my hosta that must be dispatched. Until next time, happy weeding!