Saturdays are hard

Jeesh, it takes a long time to clean a car -- the inside, I mean -- and we have two. That's the major chore I did yesterday. It was so humid I was dripping in just a few minutes and it took a couple of hours to carefully vacuum everything and wipe down all the dusty, grimy surfaces, clean all the winter gloves and old books out, stuff like that.

Saturdays I am often so tired I just want to veg out. When it rains during the week, as it did much of this week, I hope and pray it'll rain all weekend so I have a good excuse to stay inside and do chores. Once Dave finds work I have no idea how we will get everything done. And the conflict is that I should be outside enjoying this lovely place we live in, and Dave of course wants to get outside and have family time.

Chores to do: rebuild my iTunes song list and update all my music. My computer has crashed so much it's all screwed up, about 60 mg of music, which I gather is a lot. At one point I was trying to put all my CDs on my laptop, but if my computer is going to crash all the time, and until I get a Mac, maybe that's not the best idea.

Go through all the papers on my desk and sort and pitch. Clean my office/studio. Go through the papers in my kitchen office -- for some reason the WiFi signal in my office is so poor it can take quite awhile to send and receive email or get to a website, so I set up in the kitchen, and the papers accumulate there. It's not a good system, really. Also my office is so peaceful I really should be spending time out there. Hummm.... Solve the WiFi issues, which is more of a Dave task than me, unfortunately.

Clean something most weekends, and laundry, and cook, per usual. I try to clean the bathrooms every week and change the sheets every other. I think my sister thinks that's way too often, but I really love clean sheets, not to mention towels. The grim that accumulates in the daily use of the bathroom depresses me.

Then we have the other house chores, like putting all the plants outside some place and cleaning the garage and sorting through the camping gear and going through all the storage shelves in the basement and sorting stuff into save and pitch piles. And then take the to-pitch stuff, mostly clothes, some place.

And then what I really want to do is pick strawberries, or whatever might be in season. And hike, even though it's really hot. And borrow my colleague's canoe that's for sale and take it for a spin and see if we want to buy it. And find a new place to swim in this 90-degree humid weather.

And ride my bike. My new personal trainer, the awesome Pamela, wants me to do cardio daily, and the issue is how to build that into my life, especially on the weekends. Biking to work is awesome and one-stop shopping -- it takes me about as long to bike as it does to drive -- but I am not so dedicated as to do it even when it's pouring out. Thursday I rode to work, about three miles, then rode into Florence, about 5 miles? for a meeting, and then rode home, about three miles. That last ride was awesome because it was all downhill except for the last half mile or so.

And the air smells incredible, especially on the bike path. When I got home that night, about 7:30, I was struck by the incredible smell of the yard by the side of our house. Odors are a strong memory trigger, and smelling the deep lush green of the woods, the dirt, and the stream, I immediately flashed on getting out of the car when I was, say, camping, or vacationing some place in the woods. You get in the car in Park Slope and drive, drive, drive, maybe stopping at a rest stop to pee, and several hours later you get out of the car at your cabin or your camp site or your trail head and you can't believe the difference in the air. It's a different world. And now I live in that different world.

I went to the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York last weekend to hear Pema Chodron (that's the next post) and getting out of the car and walking around I was struck by how similar this environment is, rather than how different. I mean, I've been to Omega a couple of times before, when I lived in Brooklyn, and walking around the grounds I always felt that incredible sense the quiet beauty, the birds, the air, the incredible green of the trees and the grounds and the amazing flowers everywhere. Now I live in that. We don't personally have the grounds or the flowers in Northampton but lots of my neighbors do, and especially when I'm on my bike I get whiffs in the air as I pedal by. Lovely.

I really enjoyed Omega, but that visceral, physical difference was not part of this weekend's experience, and I think that threw me. My experience at Omega didn't seem as dramatic or extraordinary, even though I was hearing Pema all weekend. I think one thing that struck home was how Omega had really inspired me to change my life. I am now living closer to that serenity I found at Omega. That's kinda cool. You can change your life, should you choose to. I did.