What's a funeral without gastroenteritis 5 days later?

Currently, in this house our physical health matches our internal turmoil. There's a word for that, but I can't remember what it is. I want to say onomatapoeia and not type it because then I'll have to doublecheck its spelling and it's wrong.

Younger daughter was stricken last night and elder daughter is contorting over the commode every 20 minutes or so. Poor thing.

So, in addition to sadness and compassion, a little dose of gastro-bug was given during the visitation and funeral for my husband's brother. Normally, this kind of sickness makes me angry, but I've already been dealing with monumental anger issues since Simon died.

I've surrendered to the vomiting.

Nothing keeps one as grounded as vomit. So, my grief-stricken-zombie state has been replaced with frantic mopping, head holding and frequent "poor, poor baby". My poor older sickling is now producing only water and bile and I would do anything to spare her. I can't, so I think of mothers all over the world who watch over their seriously (cholera or typhoid) sick children and I send them my compassion. I'll try and keep the gastroenteritis to myself though.

Taking care of my stricken sicklings has me hopping and motivated. Motivated to clean all the toilets in the house, especially the one off the master bedroom.

I figure that in the next 24 to 48 hours, when I'm kneeling at the porcelain altar myself, I don't want to be contemplating the shit stains. Know what I'm saying? And that thought made me smile. Shit is also quite grounding.

Merry Christmas—I stole your iPod

Just before Christmas, my husband and I decided to treat ourselves to a cross-country ski date (without children). So we hired a sitter and headed to Nakkertok.

The weather was perfect. We had a nice lunch of paté and crackers and fruit in the lodge afterwards and met up with old friends.

We returned home; I paid the sitter; she left; Oli looked over at the kitchen windowsill and said, “Where’s your iPod?”

And there it was, THAT SINKING FEELING. The iPod nano was a gift I had received the week before from my employer after working for months on a big project. I used it only a few times.

“I thought it was right there,” I said, hoping I was wrong and misplaced it.

“It was exactly there,” he said. “And the cord for my phone charger is missing too.”

You see, my husband seems to have a photographic spatial memory. He seems to always know exactly where things are. I’m very spoiled because I use this memory remotely, never having to wonder where my keys or glasses are.

He picked up the phone and called her. This sitter is a high-school student who had babysat for us once before.

He asked her where the iPod was. She said she didn’t touch it. He asked her if she perhaps borrowed it and forgot to put it back.

“I wouldn’t do that to you guys,” she said. The denials continued.

Then, my husband suggested that perhaps it was dropped outside when she was playing with the kids and that she should go look for it. He offered her a reward for returning it, but warned that if it wasn’t returned he would be calling her principal and employer (where she works part time).

She agreed to look.

I felt sick about this, but marveled at how calm, kind and persistent he was in questioning her.

When he took the kids out to play a little more, our “former” sitter showed up, handed me the iPod and told me a story about how she found it in the snow.

She refused the reward and then said, “I want to work for you again.”

I tried not to laugh. Then I shut the door.

All this had me thinking about some things:

1. Dealing with behaviour like this is a skill and one that my husband demonstrated handily. He was clear about the consequences, provided a face-saving option for recovery and never lost his cool.
2. I’m really naïve. I can’t believe that someone would go for instant gratification, forgoing a future income in excess of the value of the stolen item. She’s never going to work for me again, nor for any of my friends. The sad part of this is that my kids really like her and pestered us for weeks to call her.
3. Thank goodness, I packed the laptop away. Mind you, that's much tougher to hide, even in a bulky winter jacket.
   
4. I wonder what went “missing” the last time she was here. But if we never noticed, it couldn’t have been that important.
5. Bad shit seems to happen when I go skiing.
6. I don’t see many dates in our future now.
7. Sometimes the greatest gifts are the ones you get back.
   

Me soooo sorry

Maggie deeply regrets her lack of control around paper towel the other day. Doesn't she look contrite?

Here I am complaining about the cost, but she must have been deeply uncomfortable. She added much vegetation to her paper indulgence. Interestingly, her vegetation of choice was the dessicated mint plants growing in the backyard. How do I know this? Guess. Mint is an herb known for improving digestion. Didn't work though.

Maggie doesn't look like her bouncy self in this picture. In fact, she kinda looks like me when I eat the WHOLE bag of Doritos and then feel like I'm going to go into labour (which would be miraculous because I'm not pregnant. I just have a LOOOOOONG memory).

But my whiskers are much darker.

Sparkling snow and dog vomit: Taking the bad with the good

Bright sun and a 20-cm snow base--it was a perfect morning to ski, so I did.

My husband dug out my skis and waxed them up for me. Not well enough to go out himself, he was determined to send me out to enjoy an hour of sun and snow. He’s wonderful that way.

Out the door Maggie and I went. I skied along the river parkway where an earlier skier put down perfectly straight tracks, which eventually gave way to a lumpy walking trail. But I didn’t care.

It was -10C, with a wind chill factor that supposedly made it feel like -16C and I was warm and happy.

In the past, if a cross-country ski wasn’t at least 90 minutes of significant effort on groomed trails, it didn’t count. Of course, that was before children and before THE SHIT happened. (For my other thoughts on shit, go here or here.)

Today, I was thrilled just to be out and ski alongside the sparkling river with its growing patches of ice that bobbed on its wind-ruffled surface. Maggie chased squirrels and collected burrs in her fur.

When I got home, I had coffee and laughed and chatted with my little family.

Then Maggie vomited and vomited all over the place.

Setting your intention: a practical approach

Hag with a big bag of sh--

I used a little positive thinking to apply to my conundrum of the other day, and it worked.

See, I lost track of Maggie’s “output” again. The brown leaves of late autumn make that one special chore of responsible dog ownership a little tough.

With this light dusting of snow we got today, scooping the poop will be so much easier. I sound like a total lame-ass. Why do I like winter? “Well, there’s skiing and it’s easier to find and bag the dog shit.”

So, I made a point of looking for other shit and disposing of it in order to balance things out in the universe—that little bit.

Boy, did I find it. The first pile I happened upon looked like it was left by a small pony. Definitely not Maggie’s. She would have needed stitches.

After I set my intention to pick up shit wherever I found it, I found it in spades:

• near the schoolyard
• on the sidewalk with shoe treads squashed into it
• bagged and hanging on a tree
• at work (just kidding!)

But, luckily not on the bottom of my shoe. See, I find that lucky. It’s all about having the right aspirations.

Looking for shit in all the wrong places

Watching my dog run and jump and chase the ball makes me very happy. At the risk of anthropomorphizing my little Australian Shepherd, Maggie: she looks so joyful when she’s outside.

And that makes me joyful.

But when I’m bending down to the ground, trying to locate her brown shiny turds on the brown shiny leaves of late autumn, I get frustrated.

Here I am trying to scoop her poop like a responsible pet owner and I can’t find it. I’m being thwarted by the frickin’ environment.

Then I get philosophical and start thinking about “shit” in existential terms.

When we look for shit (in the form of offense or things that piss us off--like lice), we often find it. It’s a the-glass-ain’t-just-half-empty-it-has exploded-into-tiny-shards-on-the-tile-floor-and-a-piece-just-got-stuck-in-my-foot kinda thinking.

My grandmother called it fault finding. You may have forgiven someone their trespasses against you, but you’ve always got your hairy eyeball out for the next transgression.

And most of the time, we get offended because we’re so egotistical that we think that a person’s sole motivation was to hurt our feelings in some way. More often than not, people are just doing what they’re doing to get by, but we misread the situation completely.

I like to say that if you walk around with your head in the toilet, you’ll always find shit.

But, when you’re looking on the brown shiny ground for the remains of last night’s Alpo, it’s nowhere to be found.

Sometimes, you just have to let things go.

After I resolve to locate it next time, I call Maggie and take that first step on our return journey. Then, there’s that squishy, sinking feeling under my shoe and the smell hits me in the nose.

There are two ways to interpret this situation:

1. Sometimes even when you let go, the shit finds you, or
2. When you surrender, you find what you’re looking for…sort of.