Today is my daughter’s birthday. She’s 15. I can’t believe it. And she spent her birthday in a Driver’s Education class, it’s a week-long class and she’ll have her Learner’s Permit by Friday. OMG! How did she get this old? It feels like she’ll be in college before I can catch my breath.

I remember when she was little. It felt like she would be little forever. Those first few years seemed endless. But then when she hit about age 5 it was as if she started to race through life, and the years started to tick by so fast that it made my head spin.

And now she’s 15. And the airlines will let her fly to visit me unaccompanied (yay) and she’ll be driving soon (scary) and I’m wondering where the years went. Wow, time flies.

She comes to visit next week, so we’ll have a little time together before she heads of for 10th grade in the Fall. But seriously, I’m pinching myself, I can’t believe she’s so OLD! OMG!

Boy are we lazy around here. I’m not sure if it’s a bad thing. But it sure is a thing to be reckoned with. My daughter is here, for Xmas, and we are having a very nice time. But we aren’t DOING anything. I mean we are walking the dogs, and cooking, and cheating when we play Trivial Pursuit, but besides that…we are just being really lazy.

I guess with her here I feel that trying to work would be rude, and likely frustrating, so I’m not even attempting any work. And she has no agenda. So it’s been easy to fall into not having any goals at all.

Christmas was nice and mellow here. I cooked much of the day. And we watched the movie Wall-E on DVD (cute). And we played our own special version of Trivial Pursuit where we don’t even bother to ask the useless pink questions that are always about some long-dead movie star neither of us can name and instead we hand-pick better questions about science, geography or history.

As far as loot went we all pretty much picked out our own gifts and then wrapped them for each other. So the actual Christmas gift-giving didn’t involve much surprise. But everyone was getting what they wanted, so it was satisfying.

The one gift I wanted which I didn’t get was a new patio table umbrella.

The old umbrella has a problem. Well, it has two problems. One of my cats, who shall remain nameless, decided to climb a ladder that was leaning against the house. And when she reached the top of the ladder she decided to jump onto the top of the patio umbrella. Well, that umbrella is 4 years old, so she went right through it and made a big hole in it.

But wait, there’s more. A few days after the cat jumped through my patio umbrella a second cat, who shall also remain nameless (only because I’m not sure which of the 8 it is), did the same thing AGAIN. So now the patio umbrella has 2 huge rips in it from cats falling through it.

The story is cute. But the umbrella really looks awful now. So I think we should either buy a whole new umbrella or replace the fabric on this one (its parts all work fine). But we haven’t gotten around to deciding which choice is better. So we do nothing.

I do hate that doing nothing thing. Though I am awfully good at it.

My 14 year old daughter has been visiting for the last two weeks. Since she’s been here she’s been busy writing short stories. She writes like someone far older…and far more twisted. One day I encouraged her to put up a blog with her stories on it and 20 minutes later she had published her first story.

You can check out her writing here at Auroraphobia’s Senseless Ranting. Auroraphobia is the “fear of the Northern Lights.” She actually has hemaphobia “fear of blood”, not auroraphobia, but you would never know it from her writing. [Her hemaphobia is attributable to seeing me almost bleed to death when she was about three, poor kid. I hope she gets over it.]

Aside from her visit I’ve been walking around with an unshakable sense that I’m doing something wrong, but don’t know what it is. I’ve felt this before, but never this clearly or for this long. The feeling comes and goes, but is altogether too prevalent for comfort.

One bright spot is that someone gave my husband two free plane tickets to Costa Rica. So we are going hiking in the rain forest sometime soon (I can’t wait to be in the mountains). Now we just need a pet sitter for 5 days. Anybody feel like house-sitting for our eight cats and one very cowed dog?

And finally, I have a game to share. It totally takes me back to my 9th grade Earth Sciences class wherein we spent the whole year calculating planetary orbits and making fun of our poor geeky brilliant teacher. I warn you though, it gets hard fast when you have to contend with more than one planet and orbiting moons. Makes you feel sorry for the sun. Play Orbitrunner. Hope you enjoy it.

She turns 14 this week. My daughter. My one and only. She looks like me, but not all the way. She thinks like me, only faster and better. She’s taller than me. And she’s smarter than me. She reads faster. She types faster. She doesn’t like chocolate?! She thinks she’s all hip and modern, but she dresses EXACTLY like I did at her age. She reads several books a week.

I taught her to slam doors when she is mad, and she learned WELL! She has friends of all ages, colors and sexual orientations. She still has the same ski-jump nose that she had when she was little. She likes and listens to all the music that I played too loudly in my car while I was pregnant with her.

When I asked her what she wanted for her birthday she said “I have everything I want.” What 14 year old has everything they want?

But then later she said: “The only thing I want that I don’t have, is to have you move back here so I can live with you.” You and me both baby!

I’m here in the U.S. (in Maine) for 2 weeks. We shall see what effect it has on my state of mind. So far it’s been nice to see family. But my husband and I have some very troubling things unfolding in Mexico right now (related to his job), and it’s hard for me to not be there in case things go (more) wrong. So I’m divided, I feel I should be home in Cancun but I need this vacation. I guess what will happen will happen. And I promise to fill you all in on what I’m talking about when the crap has come unstuck from the fan…

My sister took me to a 4th of July party, it was the first time I’d celebrated that holiday in 5 years. The culture here is pretty interesting and as a result the party was full of educated, well-traveled, book-reading, left-leaning, smart people, I had a great time.

People here are suffering and complaining about the heat. Of course I’m cold. I’m walking around in a warm pile jacket that I sometimes wear in the winter in Cancun. And I have to wear socks for most of the day to keep my toes from turning blue and falling off. But apparently fans are selling out quickly here, people are pining for air conditioning, it’s hot and I’m the one who’s crazy…

My daughter is elsewhere in the state at the moment, she’s visiting her dad’s extended family at their summer house. She’ll be heading up to visit us in a few days. So I’m really looking forward to that. She and I have all kinds of plans to hang around and do nothing together. It will be good.

My daughter’s school is really something. Today the kids flew from Denver, CO to San Diego, CA, then they took a van across the border into Mexico. Her 8th grade class is headed to Tijuana for a week.

They will be volunteering at, and also staying at, an orphanage there. My daughter says that they will, among other things, help build a wall. The concept of a bunch of rich American kids going to Mexico to work illegally as construction workers just cracks me up.

I’m sure the trip will be great, it’s a whole new experience for all of them. I’m glad to see the school pushing the kids this way. And I’m very glad for my daughter to see somewhere in Mexico besides the Yucatan, even though by all reports Tijuana is pretty skanky.

The school told my daughter that she wasn’t allowed to spike her hair with colored gel in case her colors could be mistaken for gang colors. What a thing to worry about.

They also told the kids that this trip was about total immersion, which means they weren’t allowed to bring cell phones. So no contact for a week…I will spend a lot of time this week wondering how things are going.