This is probably the opposite of how most people feel, but the further I get from my teenage years the more I love going back to my parent’s house in the town where I went to high school. Even though I no longer run into people I know at Starbucks and I barely recognize parts of the county thanks to tons and tons of development I get more and more comfortable there. My current life as I know it fits into my teenage year memories better than I ever expected it to – like at the party on Christmas night where my mean, scary 9th grade French teacher played with my kids for an hour. If you had told 15 year old Suzanne that would happen some day she would have laughed right in your face. Or when another high school friend’s mom hugged E, greeted him by name and said it was great to see him again. I have been dragging him around to my social stuff for such a long time now that he KNOWS these people, people I sort of hoped figured I’d never see again after graduation but have somehow continued to reappear in extremely pleasant ways.

Of course, it’s also impossible to go back to the place where you went to high school without being FLOODED with memories. I think I drove E a little crazy, pointing out that one road where that one guy I knew once almost ran into a tree. But honestly, the number of memories I DIDN’T say out loud was somewhere in the thousands. It was exhausting, both mentally and emotionally, to be surrounded by so much personal history.

Swistle posted earlier this week about imagining life as a choose-your-own-adventure book, which is something I’ve been sort of obsessing about for the last week. Except instead of imagining how things would be different if I changed BIG things – like going to a different college or marrying someone else or buying a different house – I change teeny tiny things. What if I hadn’t come home late from curfew that one time and been grounded? What if I hadn’t gotten that part in the play my senior year? What if I hadn’t gone on that one date? Or that other one? What if my first car had been different? I have a habit of getting carried away with “what if” thoughts whenever something bad (BAD bad or broken dish bad, doesn’t matter) happens, especially as a result of my choices. Like, what if I hadn’t skipped that french exam to leave early the Friday before Thanksgiving break in 2000? I could have been on the road at a different time, I could have been in an accident, I could have met someone at a rest stop who changed the course of my life. I know it sounds like I’m exaggerating but if you think about how many tiny coincidences you CAN trace directly to visible things in your life (the best example of course seems to be getting pregnant – SO MANY tiny things worked together to create THAT SPECIFIC baby) it’s not too much of a stretch.

Of course, all that imagining is pointless and time consuming and although it gives me something to distract me from what I’m pretty sure is an extremely painful collapsed lung* on my right hand side, it’s also starting to prevent me from focusing on IMPORTANT and HAPPY and REAL things happening in my life. I especially need happy thoughts now, since we’re starting that dark, cold, boring part of the year where I expend all my energy practicing for the non-existent Moping Olympics. Maybe this year I won’t even enter!

*Not actually a collapsed lung.

Eastern Connecticut is a black hole for a lot of things – chain restaurants, free public beaches, Anthropologies – but this time of year I am totally in love with everything about it. TOTALLY. I drive around on my regular every day errands literally GASPING at how gorgeous the trees are. Out loud. GASP. And just when I think I’ve found the most spectacular, fall postcard worthy stretch of road I round a corner and IT’S EVEN MORE GORGEOUS HOLY CRAP I CAN’T EVEN. Throw in trips to do photo-shooty fall-type things with my children in plaid shirts and tiny overalls and it’s a miracle I don’t pee my pants with excitement. Or maybe that’s why I’m wearing black pants.

Of course, my blissful land of red and oranges and yellows and pumpkins and caramel apples and chicken pot pie lasts for approximately two weeks (IF WE’RE LUCKY and it doesn’t rain for all of October). The rest of fall is cold and dreary and brown, and I reserve my right to complain about it on the daily right up until we get our first real snow of the winter and/or/usually at the same time Christmas. Then everything is AMAZING and GORGEOUS and A FAIRYLAND OF MAGICALNESS for exactly the amount of time it takes for the snow plow to come and spew dirty slush all over the place. After that it’s just one long stretch of misery until spring shows up in April (or May, more likely) when all the flowers bloom and I once again remember why I love New England.

I never said it was a HEALTHY relationship, but it’s one I don’t plan to get out of any time soon.

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I got new glasses this week, for the first time in years. My old ones were thin and gold and half-rimless and totally considered fashionable when I bought them, if that gives you an idea of how long it has been. I bought two pairs from the place that did my exam and then asked them for my prescription. Because I am SMART, I also looked up what exactly one needs to order glasses from the interwebs BEFORE I asked for it, to make sure I got all the parts I needed.

Turns out – SURPRISE! – they don’t actually give you all the information you need! Because they are jerks and want you to be forced to buy their $350 Tory Burch frames! The woman who was helping me wrote down the extra number I needed in teeny tiny letters at the bottom of the page and whispered “You can take this anywhere. THEY will know what it means” as if she was giving me the secret recipe for Coca-Cola instead of just the distance between my eyeballs. When I said I was planning to get a zillion pairs of $6 frames from the internet (thanks to a fantastic tip from Swistle) she got all scoldy and mean and told me I was wasting my money because those cheap glasses would probably break after two weeks anyway. To which I say YES, EXACTLY, which is why they are SIX DOLLARS. But with two grabby little kids I am just as likely to break my $350 Tory Burch glasses (yeah, they got me) and I don’t see you offering to replace them out of the kindness of your heart.

Besides, I am finally getting used to seeing things again. It’s kind of nice and I don’t want a pair of broken glasses to ruin that.

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I want to write about how I am surviving some temporary single parenting LIKE A CHAMP – not only am I keeping the kids alive, I’m cooking dinner from scratch! Knitting things! The house isn’t a disaster! I have put away folded laundry! TWICE! – but that would be tempting fate just a little too much and I have TOO MANY DAYS left before I get my husband back, so that is all I will say about that.

Post-script: I HADN’T EVEN SCHEDULED this post yet and shit started to fall apart. I will NEVER LEARN.

My most recent BlogHer Book Club review for What Happened To Goodbye is up today over on the book club site. This month was a nice summery young adult/teen fiction that would make a good beach read.

What Happened to Goodbye by Sarah Dessen isn’t so much about goodbyes as about choices. Mclean Sweet’s life is all about choices — who to live with after her parents get divorced, what to call herself, whether or not to forgive her mother for the betrayal that tore her family apart, and what to do about the fascinating boy next door who seems intent on being more than friends. How do we choose who we are and can you reallychoose to be someone you’re not?

Read more on BlogHer Book Club…

I totally forgot to tell you my friend (and future roommie) Molly asked me to be part of her guest series this week on some of our favorite Pinterest finds. So go check that out, and definitely look at what her other guest posters this week pinned too – there were some GREAT finds!

And before yet ANOTHER week goes by without my mentioning it, I have to tell you that the (now not so) new blog design is courtesy of the AMAZING Marjorie at Color by Letter Design. I mentioned on Twitter I was terrified to make the jump to Thesis (a blog design template all the cool kids use but that requires some technical skills) and she said “We should talk. I’ll email you” and then BAM! She had a concept and a color scheme and did a fantastic job (at an extremely reasonable price) and now I’ve got my grown up blog all set up. I THINK we’ve gotten all the kinks worked out now too, but if you click something and it takes you down the rabbit hole or are looking for something and can’t find it anywhere let me know and I’ll see if she can help.

p.s. I know I mentioned it once before, but Sarah from One Starry Night designed my social media buttons and I just love them so much I wanted to tell you again. She is also extremely affordable and does great custom work, so drop her a line!

Today I present a list of stuff that makes me anxious:

1. Wondering if I do every day things the “normal” way. Brushing my teeth, putting on mascara, folding laundry, sweeping, taking off my socks…do other people have better ways of doing these things?

2. Thinking about whether or not houses in commercials are ACTUAL HOUSES or just SETS MADE TO LOOK AT HOUSES. I think it’s probably about a 50/50 split but which ones are which??

3. The part of tv or radio interviews right at the end when the interviewer is wrapping it up and transitioning to the next part of the show. I always worry on behalf of both parties that something awkward will happen and they’ll end up talking over each other or the interviewee won’t get a chance to say “thanks for having me” in a gracious way. I actually SIGH WITH RELIEF when interviews end smoothly.

4. Parking. I have been a licensed driver for almost 13 years and yet I still get nervous EVERY TIME I have to park anywhere near another car. Also, I would rather park two miles away than turn right into a parking spot.

5. Wearing shorts. No explanation needed.

6. Watching movies/tv shows where all the characters (usually involving lots of men) look the same or reading books where all the names start with the same letter (Example movie: Lord of the Rings). Instead of just NOT WATCHING/READING them I get all sweaty palmed and confused and asking people around me “wait, who is that person related to? didn’t he just kill that other guy? or was that whats-his-name?”

7. Coming up with three more things for this list so I can have an even 10 because who does a “Top 7” list? That’s not even a thing! How can I publish a list with ONLY SEVEN THINGS?  But thinking about the first six items is giving me heart palpitations so I’m quitting now.

TUESDAY MORNING EDIT: I thought of more stuff! Because why read a nice book at 11 pm when you can instead anxiously make lists of more things that make you anxious and then worry so much you will forget them in the morning you can’t sleep?

8. Anything involving a telephone (answering calls, ordering food, calling the doctor’s office, making appointments, even calling my friends), but ESPECIALLY checking my voicemail. I get sort of nervous as soon as the phone starts to ring but the thought of letting the person calling leave a message that I then have to CHECK and maybe even RETURN THE CALL is just ridiculous. I would prefer all interaction take place over the internet.

9. Remembering specific incidents I handled badly at the time but later thought of just the thing I SHOULD have done/said. These are not usually recent incidents, but instead stuff that happened years ago, maybe in college or in high school. Something reminds me of that moment in my past and I spend ALL DAY replaying it in my head and worrying about whether or not the entire course of my life would be different if I had just said the RIGHT THING.

I had a really clever and original idea for tomorrow’s Baby Evan is 10 Months Old! post, and in preparation I did an internet image search for “eHarmony profile”. This was the third most popular search result:

Now, I’m not saying a drawing of a hippo playing a harp is the WORST choice ever for a dating website profile, but it may not give potential suitors the best possible first impression. May I suggest a robot playing volleyball or a cat doing geometry instead?

Out of curiosity I then searched “bad dating profile photos” and was disappointed the results weren’t especially funny or terrible. I suspect Google didn’t understand the question at all, since this was on the front page of my search:

Clearly, the BEST dating profile picture EVER. I would totally date that guy. He’s a doctor with excellent taste in ties. I wonder if I’m his type?