Sweet Yet Sour

Seriously, I feel old. How sad is it that at 35 my back aches when I get up in the morning some days?

Not that we’re as cute as Anna, but I have do have updates on Mike and I anyway.

Mike has just returned yesterday from salmon fishing in Canada with my father and uncle.  My uncle has a home on Vancouver Island, British Columbia where he and my aunt stay during the summer.  Every year there is a salmon fishing tournament in the small town near where they live.  For years my father, grandfather and uncle have participated in the tournament and several years ago Mike and my brother-in-law were invited to join in the tradition.  Mike and my dad flew to Victoria on Friday and the tournament ran all weekend.  It apparently involves being out on the ocean by 6 a.m.!  I don’t think they caught too many salmon, but they did see whales (Orcas and Grays) and seem to have had a nice time.  I’m sure Mike will be posting some of the beautiful pictures he took on his website soon.

Mike has recently gotten into the website hosting/writing business.  He’s creating a website for our friend Angie, who teaches violin out of her home and is enjoying using new technologies to do so.  If you know anyone who needs a website hosted, please let him know!

Mike continues to play roller hockey Tuesday nights with his team, “The Mad Hatters”.  They have a pretty small team with few subs, so he comes home pretty tired, especially from those late 9 or 10 p.m. games.

Mike works for a small software company and with the recession they are seeing some hard times.  There were rumors of a competitor buying the company, but the deal fell through.  In order to balance the budget and make themselves profitable there have been some cutbacks.  Several people that we know and liked (it’s a small company of only about 40 employees) were laid off and salaries across the board have been reduced.  Since we’re living on one income this will mean some budget cutting on our part as well, but we’ll make it work somehow.

I have of course been concentrating on Anna and keeping her busy, happy and off the furniture.

I’m still going to my bookclub meetings once a month. We’re reading, “An Artist of the Floating World”, by Kazuo Ishiguro this month.  I’d tell you how it was but my sister has the only copy that the library owns, so I’m waiting for her to finish it before I can check it out.

I am also part of a fledgling effort to start a chapter of the League of Women Voters (LWV) to our county.  The LWV is a non-partisian group that originally sprung from the suffragist movement.  The purpose of the organization now is to encourage participation in goverment.  The LWV never endorses or opposes political candidates but does provide forums for candidate debate as well as issue debate.  My mother was heavily involved in the LWV when I was a child and so it seems only right that I should join in the movement to bring the LWV to the county in which I live.

Although I would love to be working from home, I haven’t had the time or opportunity to do so for several months.  There was a time when I did some work for Mike’s company, but there has been no work from them for several months.  It would be lovely to have the extra income as well as the mental challenge, but Anna keeps me busy enough.

Recently I have been trying to get better about leaving Anna, especially now that she’s getting bigger.  Twice now I have dropped her off at a local “drop-in” daycare place, where my sister often takes my nephew, for an hour at a time just to see how it goes.  And this week while Mike was gone Anna went to our friend’s Steve and Angie’s for a few hours while I got some things done.  It’s hard, Anna cries a lot, but I know that I need to do it for her sake as well as mine.

Otherwise, we’ve just been hanging out, watching Anna grow and change, watching Cash sleep (that’s certainly his favorite activity) and now enjoying our new deck.  Right now I’m dreaming of sitting on the deck with some wine in the evening and watching the humming birds buzz the feeder…