Egg tempera weirdo

 Don't even know how to look at the metrics on this thing anymore, and don't know if it's being read at all anymore, but at this dry point in my writing life - Work is making it clear that the thing it values least in me is my ability to put one word in front of another, and Family is fine but a focus-pulling organizational nightmare until June - I think it's important for me personally to write down the bits of news I have that's fit to print. 

In June things changed, the Wupp place sold, sold well enough to buy down here last month. Our new landlady - the current apartment's heir - is happy enough to see us go early. So go we will to the new place, once the school year is done, and the boys will shift schools for next year. One more massive life shift for them; we're not good at this stability thing. But if we were, we'd be bad at something else. Choose your poison. In the meantime the new place is rented out to students by the room, at a decent enough rate to pretty much cover what we're  paying in rent here.

That is, what I'm paying in rent here. Peril of an overpaid business-type marrying an artist, even one with hustle, is a 3:1 outspend in a good month. With the living situation shifts it's now moving to 2:1. And his studio is going well, so here's hoping for 1:1 by year's end. That's not just about me feeling like I'm saving some money up for the kids' inevitable therapy bills or working towards the freedom to leave my increasingly silly job without having to immediately move into a similarly silly job. It's also about avoiding resentment. When I'm not travelling I'm the lead parent; hustling artists get busy in the evenings. And afternoons. And useless in the mornings. So the Family stuff is pretty 3:1 at the moment too. Something has to give, and what will hopefully give is me starting to have enough casual change in my pocket to take care of myself.

What I would like to give, or be given, is time and focus; people who write their own content seem increasingly like people who are still fucking around with egg tempera after the chemistry revolution of the early 1800's (good subject matter, needed better editor) but nonetheless, that's me. I'm the egg tempera weirdo. The move we're making, the school transfers we're doing, will give me that to some degree.

And so will the kids getting bigger. Godzilla is still a boy, but he's on the cusp of something big, big enough to borrow my winter boots. In some ways in love with independences, in other ways very much not. I'm in the school of children being able to choose their own distance, and he's choosing distance more and more though not actually in a way that puts any more time on my clock. But with this cusp of something big, I can't resent that. I can't resent these last years - months? - of him being my little boy with his warbling voice.