Two kids in spring soccer. I think that's the tipping point. I've hit that point where I can't keep all the balls in the air. (Insert ball joke here.)
I'm screwing up royally lately. I pride myself on keeping organized and controlled and being on time and getting things done and yet, for some reason, this week I have lost all ability to do so.
We have been late to multiple appointments, I forgot to bring soccer game snack for the whole team, we were late again, had no uniform, almost ran out of gas. Michael's snack bin is empty. I forgot to call the school counselor, I've made commitments to so many people, I can't remember who I've made the commitments to, let alone what they were. 
And Davis has entered the tween phase and I can't understand his reasoning and he finds me idiotic. And Samuel refuses to practice guitar and we are at a stonewall. The boys have spring fever too. They just want to play and do their activities and not study or practice or help. And I've already taken away lego privileges and kindle privileges and I'm running out of consequences I'm willing to implement.
There are so many different spring activities out in the world that we all want to do! Classes for the kids and camps and festivals and shows. I want to let both kids play soccer and do cub scouts and do music lessons and do coding and take skateboarding lessons, and tinker in the garage and Oh! Davis wants/needs to learn to type, he says all the other public school kids learned years ago, but he doesn't want to learn, he just wants to know, can I fit that in please? I want to sing in the church choir and take the UU leadership training, and learn a foreign language and be a CASA and volunteer in the schools and make time for all my friends and be a good listener and be available any time anyone needs me and be outside and picnic and cook some amazing recipes and do all the festivals and travel everywhere, and swim laps, and go to yoga, and, and, and. There's not enough time and money in the world to do all the amazing things that are out there. And even if I managed to pay for them and schedule them, I couldn't remember when and where and how I planned to do them.
I just want to do fun things and not be in charge of making it all happen. I don't want to help my kids be good citizens of the world. I don't want to remember Michael's work/sleep schedule and work around it. I don't want to enforce rules or any schedules. I want to lie around outside in the green grass, smell the purple flowers, bask in sunlight and drink wine and play with my friends. I have spring fever bad and I'm not sure I want the antidote.

My move happened a day early, due to an impending snowstorm. We made it work, and on the first day of Spring, met our neighbors while shoveling snow from the driveway. So, we have a pretty cool moving story to begin the book of memories we'll create in our new home.

What won't be included in the book is my mental state for the past week. The disruption of my physical things was more upsetting than anticipated. Add in a disrupted routine -- scouting out a new route for my morning walk with the dog, not being able to locate favorite shoes or clothes, stepping over boxes in every room -- and I have been a surly person and partner. 

I KNOW the chaos is temporary, but my brain just wouldn't stop turning it over and over and over. My partner called me out on it last night, and rightfully so. I don't want to be medicated right now, and am trying natural alternatives to alleviate anxiety. More sex, more exercise, an occasional drink. I think I'm winning? 

The boxes are being emptied and removed bit by bit, I found a great walking route this morning, my guy has proved more handy around the house than I ever would have imagined, and all of our old-but-good major appliances are running like champs. 

And, having lived in a townhouse for the past 10 years, I had forgotton the victorious feeling of getting the trash to the curb seconds before the truck comes. I did that this morning. I rule. 

"Let's get the band back together!"

By Canadian artist Marian Bantjes, this lovely illustration of a classic spam email is on display as part of the Fraktur exhibit at the Free Library of Philadelphia. I was amused. The show is free and well worth your time.

Wow. Lot of thoughts about leaving lately--looking at my last post, and then this one. At this time of year, I can't help it. That thing I used to do is coming up, and my psyche reacts to it the way it used to react to the start of school in September long after my formal schooling had ended. (That doesn't happen so much anymore. Then again, I work for a university.)

Thorn Coyle, a pagan teacher and leader I respect, wrote this post about having to quit so you can begin. A few years ago I quit a festival I'd been involved with for a long time, one at which I'd had some of the most important spiritual experiences of my life. I left for a number of reasons, among them that I was starting to feel like I was going back to the well too many times, I'm not a minister, and there was drama.

But another reason, a big one, was that there were other things I had to do, and only so many hours in the day, days in the year, years in the life. Since leaving festival work, my writing and martial arts have developed exponentially, not only because I pursued a degree in the former but because I've spent hours every week practicing both. Turns out if you practice, you improve. Who knew?

I miss the spiritual community, though. I can't go back to this particular segment of the pagan community; that ship has sailed. And while I'm still welcome to circle with my former coven, a privilege I appreciate, that's not the right home for me either. I'm working on building a new one, which makes me very happy. It's a lot of work.

Sometimes you have to quit something you love. Sometimes you wonder whether you did the right thing.

Lately, I've been making an effort to connect with other people and groups in the area. The PNW community is incredibly fragmented, without any one real central channel for people to meet and communicate. But I did find a Meetup that gets together regularly not far from my house. I'm going to go to the next one and see what they're about. At this point I'm very picky about getting involved with any groups again...but it'll be nice to meet some new people.

The old associations fade, leaving only the brightest memories that I would never trade. I miss it, I suspect I always will.

There's no going back.

Do you think this t-shirt is a valuable collector's item, considering that Steve's out of the band and Kevin's sick* again?  

The sentimental value outweighs any fiscal value it might have for me, but I'm just curious. 

*Not as sick as my sense of humor. but seriously; according to BNL's blog, he's temporarily "on the bench," as he put it. 

Jesse loved books. He was a bookworm, and a bookhound; one of his pastimes was to go to the local Goodwill store and pick up anything that looked interesting. The upshot of this was that he had a lot of books. When I first started training with him in Pioneer Square around 1998 or so, a heap of these books had accumulated in the basement where we trained. (For my entire time with him, Jesse's gung fu was literally an underground school.) If you could manage to throw someone into the pile of books while sparring, it was like bonus points or something.

After I'd been with him for a few years, training moved to the International District, where the group still works out today. Underneath an apartment lobby, a restaurant, and a Chinese tea shop there's a series of linked basements. We work out in the one under the tea shop, which sounds like the setup for a martial arts movie. The one under the restaurant held the overflow of Jesse's books.

There were hundreds, maybe thousands down there: in boxes, piled on tables made out of plywood and two-by-fours. At some point someone spread tarps over them, because the building's plumbing leaks. (It's an old building, like most of those in the ID. I really hope there isn't an earthquake while we're down there, because I don't like our chances.) And there they stayed, for years.

Then Jesse died. Through the occasionally contentious discussions afterward over what would happen with his students and the future of the space we were training in, the question of what to do with his books and the other stuff he'd stored down there more or less remained on the table. The person who probably knew him best and would have been the best person to go through it all had a certain reluctance to do so, which I really can't fault him for. Meanwhile the books, boxes, and papers sat there, degrading, helped along by what became a fairly epic infestation of rats.

Finally one of the guys took it upon himself to organize a cleanup, with the approval of the person to whom the task had originally fallen. So far we've spent two Saturday mornings going through books, throwing away anything obviously damaged or badly soiled (water, rat shit, rats chewing on the paper), boxing up everything else, and setting aside anything of archival interest or value.

Turns out there's been a fair amount of that. Old photographs of people I don't recognize; advertising flyers from the 1970s and 80s; a poster Jesse's brother Mike Lee used to advertise his martial arts classes (there's a scan of it on that page; it's the black one); dime-store-sized paperbacks about various martial arts, including one in Chinese printed on that pulpy paper from the early to mid 20th century. Finding this stuff makes me glad we're doing this, rather than leaving all that stuff down there until it rots.

We've also found an epic quantity of rat shit, as well as two dessicated corpses. (Yes, we are wearing masks and gloves.) When everything's cleaned out of that room we're bleaching the hell out of that sucker. Hopefully with all the paper and furniture gone, the rats will find that space less attractive. I haven't seen a live one in awhile, but I've seen where they've been, if you catch my drift.

I can't help but think of all the stuff, the physical stuff, we leave behind us when we go. I wouldn't envy whoever got stuck with going through my shit, particularly since some of it only Mr. P would understand, and Mr. Darcy would find the experience overwhelming. Since Jesse's passing, two of his students, people I trained with and knew fairly well, have died as well. We're getting to that time of our lives, it seems—you know, the part where we remember being young and immortal, and realizing what people the age we are now meant by that.

After today's cleanout, I worked out with the guys for almost three hours. One of them is moving next week, taking a job down in San Diego. One of the other students who died was a good friend of his. He's feeling the need to be somewhere else for awhile. I can understand that. I'll miss training with him.

Then I rode my bicycle home under an early spring sun, laboring up a series of steep hills. After dinner I got my fiddle out and played for awhile. Music of late has become devotional, which might just mean that I'm reading too much Nietzsche. But more and more, I find the everyday invested with the sort of significance I used to reserve for ritual and festival. Discarding what the time has come to discard is a sacred act.

I still do ritual. Yesterday I went down to Centralia to see Mr. P and we set up an altar in the field behind his parents' house and I played my fiddle for the gods because in that moment it was called for, and that's just one of those numinous things you're going to have to take my word for. Jesse never had much use for that sort of thing, as far as I can tell, but even though it's something of a cliche, if I'm being honest with myself that a lot of how I think and what I do concerning spirituality came from him.

It was how I knew to put certain things down when the time came, and how I could clean out a basement full of the things he left behind.

So, I was going to post a lovely selfie of this great t-shirt I got from the swap, but my phone was co-opted by an enterprising Beeble.

You can almost see the shirt - it's black with gold flowers and stylized birds, but the Beeble face is much cuter.

This is a terrible picture of me - my hair makes me look like I have an alien head, but with Hunter in the picture, none of you are really looking at me anyway, right?  RIGHT?

When I left Philly for Indianapolis the other day, it was 35 degrees out, there was snow on the ground, and I packed a heavy coat, a scarf, gloves, boots, and ear muffs.  Today it was 60 in both cities. 

Mrs. Elia, my 4th grade teacher, taught us that "March comes in like a lion and out like a lamb." I think the lion has finally taken a hike.  

I am SO FUCKING HAPPY this FUCKING WINTER is now over.  I'm so ready to open the windows and get outside and watch the trees branches turn red and grow buds. 

Tonight as I stood outside abandoned Terminal B for Matt to pick me up from PHL, I almost cried I was so happy because I was wearing a T-shirt and a light jacket, and I was comfortable. My cold has pretty much ended (I'm about 87% better now, which is better than I've been in weeks (save for this past Friday night), and I feel like we're all gonna be allll riiiiight.

Here comes the sun, little darlin'... and it's all right.

 Today I can turn the heat off and open the windows to let in fresh air. 

Squeaky had her first grooming of springtime. She's gone from one stinky, itchy four-legged dreadlock to a streamlined dog. 

I heard this song for the first time this morning while I was making coffee, and it put a spring in my step. 

This also makes me happy. I hate it when people put their feet on the dashboard, but I like the song. I know some of the people in this video, particularly the girl who's driving around with a gorilla. 

I read February by Margaret Atwood, and it resonated pretty strongly. 

That's pretty much it for now.