I am always extra cautious when trying to guess how strangers are coping. It is so easy to imagine how you you yourself might feel under the same circumstances, project this onto the other person and get it wrong. I know this from much personal experience. 

For example, when I have a lot to do in a short time or there is a crisis, I go into overdrive, and zip about doing everything quickly and barking orders. I call this efficient. Others seem to interpret this as “panicking” and tell me to “calm down“. 

(Let me just interrupt myself a moment here to point out that this has happened to me only since I became A Mommy of Three . Before I saw fit to bear multiple children, way back when it was my job to solve crises as rapidly as possible, the same behavior used to win me praise for my clear-headed troubleshooting under pressure. Newsflash! The rules change for “Little Ladies”.)

In another example, if I am at a park, unless we magically click and/or you strike up an enthusiastic conversation with me (and I do love enthusiastic conversations of the right nature!), I will not exchange more than a smile, a hello and a few polite comments. Also, unless you shoot me an obvious panicked look and/or ask explicitly, I will not intervene with the care of your children. Well, I might pick up a dropped sippy cup, or save a lost child from walking into the lake (what is it with these playgrounds built right next to water ???) but I won’t go further than that.

I call this kind of behavior not bothering a random stranger with unwanted attention.  Some people, however, call it reserved. 

Recently, Anymommy wrote a post which really resonated with me. She thinks she is a Magnet for Crazies. I wonder if she just has My Kind of Face? Because apparently I have the kind of face which says helpless. It seems that what I think of as my “Mommy is the boss and everything is under control” expression, to other people says “Not handling this. Help!” And then they feel obliged to step in, undermine my authority and generally create a three ringed circus. 

A  circus where the clown has pushed aside the ringmaster and tried to take over the show. 

Oh yeah, and then there is one more thing. By pointing this out, I think I am just calmly and rationally signaling my frustration with the state of affairs. You know the perceived change from capable adult to not-coping neurotic which came about when I became a breeder. I think I am just stating facts. 

But I know that someone, somewhere, will see fit to call me defensive. Another surprise:  I really don’t care. No, really. And that is so not defensiveness speaking. 

At least my kids think I am SuperMommy…

Not mine, his.

After a few false starts my new online store launched today, and the excitement was, I guess, infectious. The T-Bot decided that he too needed a retail operation and disappeared into his room for ages. When he came out his eyes were shining with pride as he invited me to look.

“Mommy,” he said, “I know that stores don’t have junk all over the floor, because people could trip over it and hurt themselves.”

I was very impressed. His floor was clear of the usual Legos, Transformers, miscellaneous building projects and random bits of plastic. Then I saw the bed:

OK. So he has nowhere to sleep tonight, but at least he is well on the way to making his fortune. He is going to be one rich little boy with a store where every item costs $100.

Now, why didn’t *I* think of that?

Just a quick note to say thank you to everyone who has commented and emailed, and not to forget those who spent the day in their nightwear, tracking Ike’s progress minute by minute on the internet. It gives me a warm fuzzy feeling to know you care. 

The Ike experience will be ongoing for weeks and months for so many people, for us it has become merely a slight inconvenience, so we will leave it there. I am just hoping nobody asks my kids what they did during the hurricane. They are likely to come out with statements such as

“Mommy and Daddy put us in the closet”,  and

“Mommy was mad she couldn’t use her shower because of the squirrel in there”. 

The squirrel, by the way,  is finally gone. The Daddy finally had to admit that she had recovered, especially after she ate a whole granola bar and a handful of raisins and later deposited the resulting waste all over the shower floor. The shower has been severely scrubbed with bleach, but still her smell lingers, and in case anybody is wondering, a squirrel smells like RAT, only stronger.  

Goodbye Sandy Squirrel, and good luck. 

Power came back on around 8pm tonight and one minute we were all whiny and “how come the other side of the street has had power all day while we are sitting here steaming and getting snarky at each other” and the next we were all “whoop! whoop!” and feeling repentant because really the loss of air conditioning and a functioning coffee machine is nothing when others have lost their homes, their livelihoods, their lives. 

I am not kidding about the “whoop whoop” either. When the lights went on, the neighborhood was ringing. Truly, it was like Party Central in our street. And oh, the blessed relief of cooled air. 

Ike was noisy and he was not pretty. But we were lucky to be inland and fairly sheltered. Still, it is not a comfortable sight to look out into your yard and see the trees whipping their heads in circles and almost to the ground. Or to hear random booms and not know what is happening. This morning we noticed the wind had rolled the neighbor’s full-size steel basketball hoop about 15 feet across her driveway. Before the hurricane hit an evacuating friend listening to NPR phoned me with tips and so I had braced the garage doors with 2 X 4s. Half of them ended up being forced out. I can only imagine that Ike was trying to get in. 

We don’t have the recommended “interior room” in our open plan house so instead we transformed my walk in closet into a nest for the children, so they could be near us and away from the windows. It worked out well. They were shielded from the worst of the noise and slept for most of the night, and we were all together without actually having to host them in our room. Except for The Wictor, who had to be extracted halfway through after kicking Baby Sister in the face, and spent the rest of the night kicking me in the face. I was mostly awake anyway, listening to the progress of the hurricane on the radio. 

This morning we went out and surveyed the damage, and we got off pretty lightly. Apart from a lawn strewn with minor snapped-off branches, there is just this: 

What used to be a fence and the remains of a tree. We finally got to meet the back door neighbors. I am sure will be learning a lot more about each other in the days to come, now that we can see into each others houses. 

Of course, there was also the problem of what to do all day with the kids when you can’t go out and there is no power. And you are not a board-game loving kind of family. Mostly they amused themselves. And then, if they asked for TV or the internet too much, we put them to work doing useful stuff:

We were hoping for power by dinner time but it wasn’t to be. As we were debating whether to eat sandwiches or try and light a fire on the patio, The Daddy came up with this idea. It’s kind of like a camp fire, but indoors. I started to regret not buying marshmallows. 

So, that was our Ike experience. Yet again, we have been lucky. Reports are that parts of Houston will be without power for two to four weeks. Buildings have been torn apart in the central city, and let’s not even talk about the coast. We’re still waiting to hear exactly how bad that is. 

One more thing. We have a house guest, a refugee from the storm. We found her in the fetal position on our doorstep this morning, cold and shivering. We think she was probably out in it the whole time, and maybe even fell from a tree. We wrapped her up and she slept all day, this evening she was still pretty weak but managed to eat and drink something.

 And she is making an enormous racket in our shower right now, banging and crashing about. It was the only place I could think to put her. I actually wanted her put out in the street but The Daddy won’t hear of it until he is sure she is strong enough. 

The Daddy wants to call her Agrippina. The kids and I are calling her Sandy. 

So I figured that since I am not getting much done right now - and by not much I mean wandering around gathering up hurricane supplies and trying to put them in some semblance of order, while wondering if I should be trying to board up the big window in the master bathroom, and how do you board up an aluminum window anyway? - 

So anyway, I figured I may as well take a few minutes out here and there to blog a little about what is happening. Especially since, unlike some folk, we are not in an evacuation zone, so are not on the road right now, desperately watching our gas meter and hoping that all those non-evacuees won’t have bled the gas stations dry by the time we have to pull off the I-10 to fill up.

Seriously, in 2005 when we lived further North in a community people were evacuating to,  all our neighbors had filled up all their cars so that they could sit them in the garage, just in case. Leaving people who had evacuated from the coast stranded the length of the I-45. This morning, The Daddy went to gas up at 6.30am (because both our cars were near empty) and there were people there filling up dozens of canisters sat in the beds of their F-150s. I have since been told that you use gas to power generators and this makes sense, but dude, I just hope you are going to share your generator with your neighborhood, and any stranded motorists who come your way. 

(I am looking across the road. Our neighbors appear to be evacuating now, as I write. I am quite relieved to note that they backed out and then came back to drop their basketball hoop to the ground. I don’t fancy that through my window…) 

So, this morning after the school drop-off The Wictor and I made a run to Wal-Mart, your one stop shop for hurricane essentials. The lines were long but everyone was in good spirits. I was just happy that I did the bulk of my hurricane grocery shopping yesterday, before everybody else had the idea. It was around 85 degrees today, but the humidity has been very high and truly it has felt like 100. 

Really nothing is happening here, everybody is just waiting and watching, and although the hurricane is forecast to go more or less over the top of us, we are far enough inland not to expect anything but wind damage, unless we are incredibly unlucky. Friends of ours from town were planning to come ride out the storm with us, but have since changed their mind. The most exciting event of the day was caused by The Daddy, who put oil in a pan for hamburgers before coming out to help move garden furniture into the garage, let himself get sidetracked by garden ornaments and an impromptu soccer game, and burned a hole halfway through the pan.  We had to open all the doors and windows and invite the mosquitoes in before the hurricane had even arrived. I am calling it a dry run. 

I haven’t blogged in a long time. There just seems to be so much going on right now and if there is one thing I have learned in my thirty(coughcough) years it is how to prioritize.

I thought once the kids were back at school I would have more free time but I had forgotten about all those little tasks that had been neglected over the summer, ones you try very hard not to undertake with three children in tow - visits to doctors and dentists, car services, repainting of water stained ceilings (requiring, incidentally, many coats of primer and paint to the point of extreme frustration. When taking a shower at my house, please do not look up). Then, The T-Bot and his school have not been seeing eye to eye and that is an understatement. My mental energy has mostly been focused there over the past two weeks. And my physical energy? Well, apart form the above mentioned tasks, there has been housework and lots of it. My cleaning lady hasn’t been for two weeks and OMG I had forgotten how much I hate housework. 

To add to that (and being me of course I would add to that, can I never be satisfied???) there is the not insignificant task of launching a new website and supporting blog. The launch of my new website is the first step in the expansion of my business and we all know that expanding a business takes work, work and more work. When necessary until 2am. And then something will still go slightly wrong and make a liar out of you when you say “launching  July! August! September 8th!”  I have The Wictor at home and so my little issue is not being solved fast. Maybe tomorrow. I am just thankful I don’t have a boss to call me into meetings about it. 

That has basically been my life the last few weeks.  So, imagine how excited I was when a friend invited me to lunch on Friday! Better than just lunch actually, Childless Lunch! Our lunch date coincided perfectly with two estate sales I had planned for the morning and the restaurant was just around the corner from both sales, which in this city is like saying the planets had aligned.

Everything was perfect. Well, almost perfect. Because I found treasures! Lots of treasures! And wanted to take them all home and drool over them Gollum-like, but then I remembered I had a lunch date.  At a nice restaurant, except of course I didn’t know it was a nice restaurant because I had never been there, given that it is not the sort of place you turn up to with three little people in tow…

It was a lovely environment with good food and good company and (as The Daddy put it) I felt like a “real person”. And if there is something else I have learned in my [redacted] years, it is not to show any sign of embarassment when you walk into an unexpectedly fancy restaurant dressed in shorts, T-shirt and sandals.

At least I didn’t have 1950s dust on my hands because I had wiped it all off.

With a baby wipe, but nobody could tell. 

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I am not sure when I will next have time to write here. It would be great if blogging was my day job, but it isn’t. I have two day jobs, here and here&here, and I feel guilty when I neglect them to ramble about my day. I’m sure I will be back, probably sooner rather than later, but something has to give… 

In the meantime, if I read your blog, here is a little secret. I have proven to be as terrible at social networking online as I am in real life. I just can’t bring myself to fish for visitors. So if I visit you and leave comments, it is because I want to. (See how I just shot myself in the foot? Proof at how I suck at this game. I’ll never get another visitor now. Except maybe Mum and Dad. Hi Mum and Dad).

In other words, you will still be seeing me around :-)