How Busy Am I?

So busy I forget to eat lunch over my keyboard at my desk. (Too busy to obsess about food is a new experience for me.) So busy I haven't been able to call my "cat lady" to make an appointment to pay her and get my house key back after my European sojourn lo these many moons ago. So busy my luminous gold pearl tomatoes are dropping off the vine and onto the hard clay rather than the palm of my hand. So busy that when I sleep, I dream and know I'm dreaming which means I'm not at work which means I'm really behind. So busy I have to chant my Four C's while climbing the three flights of stairs to my new office ("I am cool, calm, collected and charming, cool, calm, collected and charming…") So busy I feel guilty bantering with coworkers and guilty not answering personal email or reading up on my blog pals at midnight. Guilty that I'm planning to have a great time at a clothing swap and dinner at the Greek belly dancing place this Saturday rather than trying to dig out of the blizzard that is my email inbox.

So busy I don't know how you parent types do it.

Really guilty that my beloved husband and I don't have much interaction at all. But absence makes the heart grow fonder, right? He's really busy too. His new job is selling ads in the local Yellow Pages book, by the way. He's supposed to spend several hours a day making cold calls to businesses that don't want to speak with him. You can imagine how utterly horrible that is.

Too busy to blog much. But I'm here now, for a little while. And I'm happy that our company reorg happened, I'm settling into my new role as constant channeler of General Axtell, and that it meant I received a little more of a promotion than I was anticipating--I have a lot to learn, that's for sure. But I'm ready for it, and glad to be learning how to manage colleagues. And oh lordy how I can't wait to receive that first paycheck with my raise in it. I have a big hole to backfill.

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But not too busy to visit my grandma.

Once again it was a lovely, quick trip, filled with looking at pictures, and talk of politics, family, health, the coming economic debacle, and cougars roaming the streets of Wilbur. I had my traditional plain cake donut and triple shot latte at Sandy's. And a couple of orders of fries at Billy Burger, which in a addition to a really fabulous collection of salt and pepper shakers displayed in the restaurant (a teensy ceramic wedge of cake paired with a miniature cup of coffee, a tiny pipe and slippers, nesting birds, a donkey bearing savory barrels, on and on…), has what must be the most evil sign ever.

One nice thing about traveling--with all that waiting to board, waiting to land, waiting to fall asleep--is that I read a book! A beautiful book, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, published in 1943 and purchased in 1944 by my grandma, with a lovely cloth binding and uneven pages on good cotton rag paper. It's hard to feel hardship in my life after reading that novel.

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I have a Google alert for my last name, and I received this note today:

Williams owned and campaigned the 1889 world record holder, a Standardbred trotting stallion named Axtell, whose name would later become synonymous with lithographs bearing the surnames Currier and Ives.

Who knew that I had such artistic and equine ancestry?

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Did you hear that a single-engine plane crashed into an apartment building in New York's upper East side today? We did, and M called my mom to find out about our cousins, who live about ten blocks away from where it happened. Mom called them, and we were all relieved to find out that my cousin had only found out about the crash from her father, who called from Rome to check up on her too. Funny to think of how information spreads nowadays, in this case from thousands of miles away back to its place of origin, rather than the other way around.