bzzz, bzzz, bzzzz.

my little brain has been buzzing with activity lately.
it's a good thing.
i am filled with curiosity and an honest commitment to learning about things right now.
the problem is an overwhelming amount of things that i would really, really like to be working on, all at the same time.
examples include:
-cooking - reading cookbooks, cruising epicurious, shopping for utensils (hello, food processor!)
-french - i bought a french magazine, and am trying to slog my way through it, with my mom's old french/english dictionary and one of those '500 french verbs' books. slow going.
-design/house stuff - reading house magazines for ideas, set up idea notebook, research eras of design, thrift store shopping, researching green building options
-personal productivity - research various systems, finish reading 'getting things done,'
-chores - reorganize closet, vacuum, find places for all of the stuff i keep bringing home from mom's
-writing - do some, research classes, read some books about writing

see?
it's a lot.
i have been getting a fair amount done, in general, but i'd like to be more organized about it. i am pondering setting my interests up like a school or work schedule, where i set slots of time everyday/week for various subjects, so i am sure that each interest gets its own undivided slot of time. so, say, doing an hour and a half of design research 3 days a week. working on french for an hour every morning. whatever. you get my meaning.
i'm not sure it'll work, but i'm pondering it.

me and shannon brought the dog up to RV yesterday.
i bagged mom's clothes, or, at least some of them. armed with 4 bags of kitchen-sized bio-bags i packed all her pants and long sleeved tops. all undies and bras. all work out clothes. all were put in bags, labeled, and taken to the local goodwill, where they were dumped into bins unceremoniously with other people's crappy stuff. it was hard to see her stuff reduced to so many bags of crap. (clearly she isn't the sum of her belongings, though the staggering quantity of her belongings does go a ways towards representing the vastness of her being, in quantity, if not quality.)
seeing her stuff allowed/forced to mingle with strangers' stuff, her sweatshirt in a pile on top of other people's sweatshirts/jeans/whatever, was terribly painful. it felt like they owed her a special bin of her own, or a ceremony should have been performed to commemorate the magnitude of meaning of them being allowed the privilege of passing along her clothes to others. and, i looked at her faded sweatshirts, with their frayed cuffs or necks cut off or the purple jersey button down with the little cow patch sewn on, and i know that no one will sense the vibrations of my mom, and people will pass these things on the racks because to them they are just ratty sweatshirts, and they can't sense the mana inherent in them. those are just weird old exercise socks, or those are just some bright purple stretchy pants, to them. to me, they are artifacts of the life my mom lived, and proof she existed. i hate that the physical stuff that lasts is always so impersonal and the really important stuff, the intangibles like her voice and smell, are the first to go.
i kept her favorite hat from her radiation days, and it still smells like her. it's been hard finding stuff that still smells like her because everything smells musty in her closet. lots of stuff smells like mildew, from drying too slowly in the freezing cold laundry room during the winter/fall of her malady. but this hat smells like her still. i have been wearing it all morning, periodically taking it off to bury my nose in it. i am both comforted by it and afraid i'm ruining it by wearing it, adding my own smell in and wasting one of the last known repositories of my mom's smell. before this, i couldn't have imagined the panic i'd experience about the loss of something so commonplace. i would have stored things in air-tight canisters if i knew. i would have archived every voicemail.
at this time last year, we had no idea that this year would look the way it did. at this time last year i couldn't have conceived of the idea that mom wouldn't see another thanksgiving, christmas, birthday. i couldn't possibly wrap my brain around that. this time last year i was learning how to walk dogs, settling into our new house in silverlake, making my way through classes i would eventually have to ditch at the last minute.
things can change so dramatically, so quickly.
we packed mom's stuff until we didn't have any more room in the trunk, then headed home. (stopped for my celebratory espresso shake along the way, and to drop off hats and cancer books to the cancer resource center in ukiah).
we cried heading home, about everything, holding hands on top of the center console.
i wonder sometimes if it would be less painful to just never go back to Yumi (mom's ranchlette). it seems really appealing at times. even driving up there, through this heart-grabbingly beautiful scenery, is painful. i have driven up so many more times under duress, because mom had cancer and i was going towards her and the cancer, or away from her and her cancer. i didn't have enough time to lay a foundation of cozy feelings about it. now it's almost solely pain.
i know, i know.
it wouldn't work and i'd never do it anyway.
but i think about it.
being up there, where it's like mom laid out in teeny farm form, just reminds me now of how gone she is, physically.
i am not at a place yet where i can take much comfort in spiritual presence or something like that. mostly i am still pissed about the absence of her familiar form.
plus then i could let allen shamble off into his destiny.
he played a cd of his band at 11 for the last hour we were there. they sounded good, but it's weird that he jams out to his own cd. is that common for musicians to do? my minute experience with such things left me feeling profoundly embarrassed when forced to listen to my own voice on cd. i can think of very few things i'd like to do less. but anyway, he jammed out. they have a gig at the konocti harbor inn and resort, which is a really big deal for them. i snickered in my head, thinking of its old incarnation, packed to the gills with old sun-flayed alcoholics. it's got a white trash history that's hard to shake. it seems to be where bands go to start to die, though it used to be where bands went to finish dying, so perhaps it's coming up in the world. the website looks pretty professional. anyway, allen was stoked on his cd and stoked on the gig. so, kudos to him.
okay, i feel like i could keep going, but i need to get dressed to leave for therapy.
thanks for checking in on me, by the way.
sometimes it seems like everyone else is kind of over mom's death (not really, but you know.) i feel like everyone is going to get bored with my blog, now that i the dramatic stuff has passed.
so, if you're checking in and reading, thanks.