City Daze

For most of July, Mark and I are essentially switching roles.  He does a lot of his work at home these days in any case, but Dylan has a gig all day every day in Seattle, and I am juggling a combination of commuting and crashing at a city friend's house to make it all work.  So, Mark is for now chiefly responsible for animal health and safety and garden and tree survival.

Being in the city during the week without my usual laundry list of Costco and TJ's trips in hand is both confusing and exhilarating.  Only on Day 3 of a 3-week tenure, I find myself cherishing the ability to single-task, blessed, blessed single task.  How sweet art thou?

To sit here and type this without dog fur or dirty forks or disgruntled baaing pulling at my gaze and conscience - pure decadence.  Two mornings in a row, I have spent hours at a time at large conglomerate coffee purveyor, laptop wi-fi'd, cell phone poised, stretching my single double-tall latte as far as it could go.  Other wifi-ers come and go and still I remain tippy-tapping by the window.  Have I mentioned this is Bliss?

No, I am not surfing the web or engaging in endless email debate about health care reform or the economy or the contribution of Michael Jackson.  I'm actually working. Working!  Working for hours and hours and hours.  Writing and thinking about writing and thinking of other ways and things to write.  Researching.  Coordinating.  Planning.  Writing some more.

Sigh.

The bane of all of our modern existences, the requirement to have seventeen things coming at us at once, can only really be appreciated for its true drain when we turn our back on it, I think.  It is not the jurisdiction of town or farm, work or family.  It seems to be our own inability to put one foot in front of the other, over and over.

The beauty of this time for me is that tomorrow I will stay on the farm and do only farm and house things - no blog, no coordinating, no computer work really at all.  Just the physical acts of purging and cleaning and washing and folding and dusting and vacuuming and scrubbing.  I will feel satisfied that the "head work" is done and will throw my back into housework with zeal.  Then, on Saturday, back into the garden for a couple hours to dedicate that part of my brain and body for that part of our life.  Weeding.  Watering.  Harvesting.  Planting.

And on Monday, we start over.

One main thing at a time.  Let's try this for a few weeks and see if the crabbiness subsides.