the honey home

them apples

Wilting spearmint, an almost-finished cup of coffee, a stray apple, and the two-year-old who’s after it. She’s already eaten an apple this morning, so I won’t let her eat another, yet. She’s contented herself, instead, with peeling off the stickers and placing them on herself.

For the last half-hour I have sat in the oversized easy chair and nursed the baby–the baby that now contorts himself every which way instead of lying contentedly against my chest. A friend said recently that nursing a baby boy is like trying to nurse an alligator. I wrangle him, and Elvie brings me apples until I tell her to stop. Then she brings me “abocados” instead.

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self-portrait, april sixteenth

self portrait april 16

Myself, as I am at around 8:00 a.m. on Wednesday, April 16, 2014. It is cold in my house, and in the kitchen (where I am standing,) so I have a sweater on. It’s over a shirt that is supposed to be a pajama shirt, but I’ve never worn it as such, yet. I do get dressed every morning as a finely crafted habit, but don’t let that fool you in to thinking I somehow have things together. Once I decided to take this picture, it took me a solid five minutes to remember where I put my camera. When I remembered and went to the closet where it was located, it took me another five minutes to remember what I had gone there to get. Insert coined phrase about newborns and sleep deprivation here. It’s 8:00 a.m. and it’s all downhill from here (memory-wise.)

There’s decaf coffee in that mug. Actually, there’s nothing in that mug, since the coffee was still brewing at that point. But there’s decaf in it now, and will be for the next twelve months or so while I’m breastfeeding, since I’ve discovered my littlest is highly sensitive to caffeine. It’s not too big of a deal. The caffeine headaches are mostly tapering off. Is anxiety a sign of caffeine withdrawal? I don’t know. Is taking self-portraits coupled with borderline narcissistic blog narrative? Maybe.

I realized recently that I really don’t like red. In decor, in clothing, in cars. When I play trains with Ephraim, I always pick the blue one. When we play cars, I choose the turquoise Corvette over the red Porsche. There’s something about red that is too predictable, too bold, too bright, too likely to color-cast. I don’t care for it. Except this mug–I like this mug. Maybe its bold predictability will make me forget that there’s no caffeine in that coffee. Or, contrariwise–maybe it’ll jog my memory.

So far all that’s been seen of the sun today is the light buttermilk-and-pink concoction near the horizon. The rest of the sky is a luminous grey–matching the rooftops of the apartment buildings–a tad lighter but no less gloomy than the soon ending night. I do enjoy the “big city” but I miss my Kentucky sunrises. It seems like there was ever so much more color there, even in the winter, even in the bleak greyness of early dawn.

I broke my coffee pot last week while trying to clean it; somehow I was left with a pot with a one-and-one-half-inch hole in the side. I’m not sure what happened–I do know it doesn’t work anymore. In one moment of desperation I did try making coffee without the pot, bending over the kitchen counter with a mug in one hand and a knife in the other; the former I held delicately above the hot plate to catch the coffee, the latter I used to trip the trap-door mechanism under the filter so that the coffee would come out. It was a precarious business, though it didn’t take as long as I thought it would–this morning I am feeling neither so desperate nor so resourceful, and am drinking tea instead.

The recent news around the apartments is that the sell is still going through, presumably in April, though that’s all were allowed to know (by law, apparently). The good news is that should the new owners not want to keep us as a team here there is another property open where we could go. Another nice thing to know is that the regional manager of the company that currently owns our complex likes us so much that she wants to keep us in the company, just move us to another property. Unfortunately the only other two properties they have open are on the south side of the metro area (we are on the north, is case you didn’t know). So, that won’t be happening. It is still very encouraging though. I tend to be overly critical of my own work, so it’s nice to know the regional management thinks we’re doing pretty well.


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