The Musings of a Latte Queen: Narratives of Everyday Life

I'm sitting here, on this last day of 2010, last day of a decade, and thinking about the new year. I am in the midwest, so it is not even 7pm yet, still plenty of time to contemplate. I thought about what I want for the new year and what I experienced over the last year, last ten years. Ten years ago, waiting to bring in the new year, I was full of excitement, that was the year I graduated from the University of Iowa with my MBA and got married.  And he got his PhD that year. The chronicle of the ten years include things like graduating, moving, buying a house, starting a corporate job, losing a corporate job, having not one but two unexpected blessings in my girly girls, watching my three sons grow with two of them graduating and leaving home, losing someone immensely close to me, reconnecting with someone immeasurably close to me, making unexpected friends, being a part of history and watching that history being made, taking up the pen to find a national voice, nurturing ...

Winter Break, Holiday Break, Christmas Break....whatever it is called these days...is definitely NOT made-for-parents! The first day was hectic, we are a performing arts family with the period between Thanksgiving to New Years full of artistic endeavors that keep the oil companies in business with our contributions, so getting to the last day of school was a chance to exhale and relax... If you count relaxing trying to decide if your kid really needed that red sweater at the mall or could you come up with something else (I found one at a stand-alone Old Navy, so success) or if you really needed a tree, after all, it was Christmas Eve Eve and there wasn't anything in the townhouse to resemble the holiday except for a stray candy cane. The hustle and bustle of the two days before Christmas included lots of cash flying, lots of tape, wrapping paper, and presents hidden under beds.  The tree is my husband's annual tradition to get and since he is so busy and usually waits unt...

Life has a funny way of interrupting your plans... My husband was admitted to the hospital with blood sugar levels at the stroke, coma, death range - well over 1000.  He was truly covered by angels and in-tuned to his body enough to call his doctor that he felt funny.  We are blessed to have insurance where he could rush right to the ER.  Life can interrupt even the holiday season. I sat in the waiting room and thought a lot about the things that we truly need to sustain life...and how blessed we are to not live in food deserts (like some of the nation's urban areas and like many, many, many of our third world nations) and have free access to clean, and clear water (even without the bottles or the filters).  We can be sheltered (even those homeless can still get a meal and a cot if they were at a shelter, many, many, many nations do not have that).  It all made me think more. I was cruising Huffington Post in the last few days and came across everything fr...