Ugh, and car thoughts on the way home

I often wish I had a blackberry just for the car because I have some of my best thoughts driving home: makes sense - I'm all alone for a change, nice music to get the brain stirred up just a bit...

 

Anyway, I just got home and the computer is crashing.  Ugh, for the millionth time, I hate Vista.  I get that knot in my stomach when it promises an update is available that will make my computer experience even more wonderful than it already is.  Yeah, right.

 

But before I go about trying to run System Restore to get back the operating system I thought I had, I just want to get down these two completely unrelated thoughts:

 

One.

 

Walking out the door of the store, I spotted somebody who looked like an old friend from high school and I had the fleeting thought, "this isn't how it seems."  Meaning me, almost forty years old, shlepping four grocery bags home from Metro in the middle of the night (well, 11:00 p.m.). 

 

If only he knew:  there are seeds in one of the bags, not just boring old groceries.  I will plant the seeds.  I will make things grow.  Oh, and don't tell my family.  They, especially Elisheva, think it's a real joke how anything with seeds will distract me.  Of course they do.  Of course.  They're SEEDS.

 

Two.

 

There is a family we know, I won't say their name, let's say their name is Weinberg (it's not), and Elisheva says whenever I say their last name, it kind of *shimmers* in the air.  Because I admire them... the wife, the husband, the kids... and I don't like anybody's kids.

 

But the mother is so in control and wonderful and understanding with her kids - at all times, I think I have seen her in all moods and at all different times by now and can truthfully say she is always wonderful with them, or just about.  And the kids are sometimes cranky but generally incredibly well-behaved.  There are a number of them, of course - let's just say that.

 

So I thought, in the car on the way home, it's okay that she makes fun of me for admiring them.  It's great, in fact.  She notices that I admire them, and perhaps, in some small dorky way even aspire to be a little like them, wish our family was a little more like them.  Maybe.

 

That's okay.  And her making fun of me - once I'm finished gently chiding her for mocking a parent - hopefully also means she notices that I have role models, aspirations as a parent, wife, mother.

 

And that these people are great role models.

 

If I tried to sit her down to tell her all of that, she'd just yawn and pick up the phone to call someone more fascinating than Mommy.

 

But by letting her mock me (a little bit), the message gets through FOR FREE.  Gratis.  Amazing to realize some of my messages are getting through, after all.

 

Now if only Bill Gates would listen to me so attentively...