"Madness"

2009?

I am officially referring to 2009 as my lost year! People go on a party tear and have a lost weekend or even a lost week, but I think one only loses a full year when one has amnesia, and that only happens in soap operas. So basically the past year has been like 365 days of the sand passing through the hourglass. Or maybe, so much happened and it all went by in such a blur that it just feels like a blip (but isn't all of life just a nano-secondth of a blip?).

At the end of 2008 a long lost friend from Ireland reconnected with me after several years, via this very blog, and I was so excited and so full of all the things I wanted to share regarding the past 10 years, that I got totally overwhelmed and never really resumed contact. Now it's a full year later, but it seems like just last week I received this:

sarah cottle said: Pam, Pam Fazier, formerly of Seattle, then Bozeman? Pam who I've been trying to trace for years? Pam who took me whale watching on the Pugeot Sound? Pam who made Vicki, Kirstin and myself dress in silly clothes, drink booze and attend a barn dance one thanksgiving eve before eating an overcooked, exploding turkey? Pam who visited myself and brothers Mark and Andrew in Timsbury, England then drove around Devon and Cornwall in a rickety camper van where we 'surfed' and ate 'fish and chips with vinegar' washed down with beer every evening for two solid weeks? Lord! can this be you? Please, please find this message and get in touch or if anyone out there can make the connection tell her its SARAH COTTLE from ENGLAND who loves and misses her... Soon...x

Of course I contacted her by email and told how thrilled I was to have been found, and that I'd been trying to track her down as well, but I never really took the time to write a proper letter and reconnect. And in a way, it doesn't even feel like a year went by, and I'm just as thrilled to know that I can at least write her a catch-you-up-on-the-past-10 years letter, because I know where she is in the world. Although, it has been a year and she might have moved, right?

The blurry bits I do remember from my 2009 fugue state are as follows:

• My sister had a baby girl, Hazel Coyne Sehlhorst, born 3/13/09-I went to Seattle to attend the birth, but she decided to arrive late and I had to return home.
• John and I took classes to become foster/adoptive parents.
• I went to Seattle in May to meet my niece.
• In June we started our transition plan to adopt Katherine, a beautiful 9 y/o mini tornado, by having her for weekends. She brought "MADNESS" into our lives.
• In July John's mom died.
• In August Katherine became a part of our family, my sister et famille came out for a week, I got sick, and the month was over.
• Back to school in September, Erlan starting middle school and Katherine in 4th grade. Two kids, two different schools.
• Turned 47, working full time, NextGen, H1N1*.
• The holiday season.

How's that, a whole year in 9 bullets?

Main Accomplishment--living through a hatch and a dispatch** with sanity (and hopefully sense of humor) in tact.

Thankful for--my family, especially John; my job which, in a sense, is also family; that we are still housed, clothed, and fed, as so many are not.

Haunted by--the fallout from reporting a coworker and friend to the state licensing board.

Regret--any pain caused by my unintentional unkindness.***

Resolve--to write a proper letter to my friend Sarah; to try to do 2010 more intentionally; exercise; ditch j-screwed.

* I did not have H1N1, but it and NextGen (our new electronic health record system), were all consuming work phenomenons.

** My brother Steve married his pregnant wife the day after our mother died, and at the wedding a good friend (the mother of one of Steve's high school friends) after a few glasses of wine came up to me and said, we used to call this "a match, a hatch, and a dispatch". That phrase has always stayed with me as a sort of circle-of-life type thing.

*** Any intentional unkindness has either been accounted for, or hugely enjoyed.

             

laid low at the beginning of nablopomo

I've had the crud since last Saturday. I do not have the flu or strep throat, but I have had the worst sore throat of my life, a cough that drops me to my knees or has me twisted like a pretzel to prevent urinary incontinence. I've had low grade fevers, body aches and congestion. I've not been sleeping very well. Wah wah wah. Hence, no daily post.
Yesterday was early release from school so John assisted Erlan with his homework. I had instructed Erlan that he was to practice his spelling words and write each of them in a sentence. He's an excellent and intuitive speller, but damned if knows what half the words mean. So, with quite a bit of help from his father, here are Erlan's spelling words in sentence form as instructed:

I propose that we will obtain some religious employment down at the salvation mission.

We will give donations to the prisoners on the anniversary of their journeys in search of medicine deep in the unfriendly wilderness.

The government contractor recognized his trousers which he had left while walking through the orchards in search of his book about pneumonia.

In matters mechanical, one could do worse than study a cylinder.

Good job boys!