Friday, August 19 2022

Dear Journal,

Good morning, everyone. How are you feeling today?

This morning, I'm set up to blog from my corner office (the corner of Marissa's art studio, that is). Being the same environment where I slog through my typical workday, I'm a little surprised at how cozy and relaxing it feels this morning. Is it the nice weather? Is it an effect of being surrounded by so much soothing contemporary art? Let's be honest, I think it's just because it's Friday.

Sip. I wanted to get at least one entry in before the weekend, but you may have noticed I took a bit of a hiatus from writing. You haven't missed much. It's been a heads-down kind of week, and even though Rodney is the only member of the family actually returning to school, we've all shared the same "back to school" attitude. Marissa and I are back to flossing (BAM - blood everywhere). We've instituted nightly cleaning parties to get the boys used to this radical new idea of picking up after themselves. We're building a new daily routine.

Rodney relishes in a wardrobe renaissance. Each night, he sifts through a stack of new t-shirts - all of them he personally approved, and all of them feature some kind of dinosaur. When he finds the perfect combination, he lays them out on his floor like he's dressing an invisible boy.

It's only the first week of school, but I can already tell that all this new energy we're feeling might get diverted into side projects that fell by the wayside during the move. One night this week, I grabbed a screwdriver and trudged down into the basement. I found my defunct, forsaken server rack in the back corner of the laundry room. I got to work. Nothing too heavy - I just took apart the server I fried and separated the parts into piles. Twisting velcro ties around the unkempt cables felt like a silent therapy, like I was bringing order to chaos.

Marissa got back to painting dinosaurs on Rodney's wall. Since you've probably last seen it, she's added a smirking long-neck dinosaur. She quickly outlined and painted the shape, but took at least a full day to mull over the color.

"Does this color look weird?" she said. "I don't know if I like it."

"No," I shrugged. "It looks fine to me."

"Just curious," she smiled. "What color would I have to pick for you to think it looked weird? Hot pink? Neon yellow?"

"Colors never look weird to me," I said. "It looks like a dinosaur, the color is just, like, a reference point, right?"

"I think I'll just make it grey instead," she said softly to herself.

How about a napkin drawing - for the road?

That's what I got today. Have a great weekend, everyone.