DAY 105

I was having a bad day last week.  I wasn’t sleeping well.  One of my children had a dime sized glob of gorilla glue in her hair. I have a big project at work which is weighing heavily on my mind.    And as I mentioned in my last post, I had to spend an hour in a Mac store getting a replacement cell phone charger.

It is these worn down days that I feel my Simple Year resolve slipping.  It would be easier to just  stop trolling Ebay for Girl Scout Vests and  go ahead and tell the YMCA that I’ll just order a new jersey for soccer instead of haunting the local thrift stores*.  (Who would know really?).  I felt sorry for myself because I’m here alone and just when I get the kitchen completely cleaned up, someone wants a glass of milk or for me to cut them up an apple.

So anyway, I was feeling  down and then I got an email from my husband from the other side of the world.  He was being particularly chatty and told me that he was flying nights so he was trying to sleep during the day.  His quarters are basically a big metal box and at about noon when it was 105 degrees–and the generator that powers the air conditioning went out, making it difficult to sleep.  He went on to tell me that they’d had a rash of soldiers come to the base hospital with missing limbs.  And, this was not too many days after he had thanked me for sending the videos of the kids because it was nice to hear kids laughing.  He said the only local kids he heard about these days were the ones that were suicide bombers.

You know the worst part about that?  My husband wasn’t really complaining, he was sharing the news of the day.  These are the NON-classified things he had to talk about.  Well that, and how poor the air quality is.

After that, my day didn’t seem so bad anymore.

*On a much more trivial note, our local YMCA does something I wholeheartedly approve of.  They actually have ONE reversible jersey.  One side is red and the other white and the teams switch  from game to game(kind of like a shirts v. skins approach ).  So the kids can buy one jersey and wear them for any YMCA sports they participate in for as long as the fit into the jersey. Isn’t that a great idea?  I have no idea how common place that concept is, but after spending some time in West Texas where every sport has a completely new uniform to include shorts, jersey, socks and in some cases matching hair bows (Yeah, I’m not making that up just to be funny), it is a refreshing change.  Although I still haven’t found a jersey for my oldest yet…