au lait

Wow, it's been more than a week.

I still haven't really adjusted to my schedule this year. I'm not sure that I ever will. My day has been broken up into awkward chunks of time ever since Tide started preschool 10 years ago.

This year is more challenging because Shout goes to afternoon kindergarten. So by the time I get my 2.5 hours of free time, I have to dash home to eat lunch, try to run any errands, clean up... you know the gig. But at 11:30, there is a lot more TRAFFIC. There's NO PARKING at Starbucks. And Target at 9AM is a dream. At noon, it's a nightmare.

Couple that with a nefarious government plot to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels by tearing up EVERY. SINGLE. FREAKING. ROAD. IN. AMERICA. at the same exact time, and it leads to me spending at least an hour of my 2.5 free hours sitting in my car.

I can't TELL you how annoyed I am by all the construction. One day, it took me 15 minutes of circling my neighborhood just to figure out HOW TO GET INTO MY NEIGHBORHOOD. Every road in was blocked by construction. New water pipes. New sidewalks. New gas lines.

Can we afford all this?

Aren't we in a recession?

I'm wasting SO. MUCH. GAS. (Yes, a few more months of this and I will probably take to my bike. Except remember we had 4 feet of snow last winter? And I have a carpool of 6 kids. Biking will be a challenge, but it's that or a helicopter.)

They also just conveniently passed a law that you can no longer talk on a cell phone while you are driving.

And honestly, I'm all in favor of that. I live just down the street from a college campus and have been nearly killed on a weekly basis by distracted college students, talking on cell phones, waving to their friends and applying mascara all at the same time.

But if I'm going to spend HOURS in my car every day (and I AM), I need something to do. I can't talk on the phone, I can't text. I'm pretty sure blogging is also illegal. (Maybe not specifically, but implied.)

I do have a Bluetooth and I don't know if it's me or the device, but every time I touch the damn thing, it calls my friend, Julie. She finally got sick of getting my calls and asked me to stop using it.

I need to get a regular old plug-in headset, but OF COURSE, my phone has some weird headset connection that requires a special trip to the Verizon store. Except the Verizon store (while only about 3 miles away) is 4 construction projects from here. Which means MORE HOURS IN THE CAR. I just can't take it.`

It's not all bad though.

My schedule does afford me mornings of hanging out in my pajamas with Shout, drinking coffee until 10 o'clock. Not everyone has a gig like that. It's probably the last year of my life I'll be able to pull that off (and not feel like a COMPLETE slug), so I'm trying to look on the bright side. Because what are we without our bright side? (Grouchy and stuck in traffic, that's what.)