Turtle-ing Around

A cheery President's Day to you. Hopefully you are out enjoying the gorgeous sunshine and warmer weather we are having this weekend. What a nice surprise.

When I checked in this morning, I couldn't believe it's been almost a week since I last felt like I had something to blog about. I actually still don't have much today, but I was starting to miss this place. I've just been turtle-ing around all week. Which basically means moving super slow. But still moving, nonetheless! I just haven't had much energy or motivation to truly get stuff done or be productive. There's no flow, no "aha" moments, no creativity.



When we were in Hawaii a few weeks ago, we had gotten special little disposable underwater cameras to take snorkeling with us. I just got the photos back and they are pretty dumb - colorless, grainy and mostly missing all the gorgeous fish we thought we were seeing. But we putzed around in the water with some giant sea turtle one day, and he started swimming right at me and my camera. I thought for sure I had gotten some extreme Jacque Cousteau footage, and ended up with this one ridiculous head shot which barely made the corner of the photo, plus a bunch of shadowy, murky shapes. My GOD he was close, eh? I thought he was going to smack me with a flipper and I couldn't back away fast enough.

I've been feeling mostly like this guy swimming - clumsy, slow, sort of random and unfocused, underwater and paddling away in a pond of seaweed. I have an ambitious list of projects I wanted to accomplish this month, but I'm just able to get the bare minimum done. I'm grateful for at least that much, though. Orders are getting out on time. Some of the production is still happening, though just enough. And all the big house projects, excursions, exercise plans, etc. are just waiting for a new day. One in which I wake up energized and rarin' to go. That just isn't happening. Maybe I'm just missing the sun. And if that's true, I'm going to need more than 2 days of it.

Let's get spring under way here! I'm so impatiently waiting to see my garden bust open. I go out every day, to nip, to fluff, to shape dead stuff that has just the slightest hint that a leaf or two are approaching. The few bulbs poking out have promptly been chomped off by slugs. The first few new shoots got hit a couple too many nights with frost and have withered. There might be a little pink bud or two on the bushes, yes, yes, I think it's alive. But I'm dying to see how it all turns out.

The neighbors next door spent the week chopping trees. What used to be a row of 4 great big maples is now razored off stumps and decimation. It's so sad. They really did have to go, and I knew it. But it looks worse than awful now. I'm trying to be glad that it's around the corner from my view and not directly across the street. And to be happy that I'll have a lot more sun in the back yard, especially now when I need it most. Change. There's always change. Sometimes it hops along like a jack-rabbit.

But mostly it just turtles along in little stops and starts and small things - only adding up to something significant when you look back on it all much later. The important thing is to just keep moving, I guess. So I'm turtle-ing along until the flow catches up with me again.