News From Hawkhill Acres

There’s a lot of talk about balance nowadays. We’re supposed to have it in our lives and in our families and in our priorities. We’re supposed to balance work with play and family time with mommy time. Every other magazine article you read lately is telling you how much time is enough to spend on what you do. (This is after you read the magazine articles that tell you what it is that you’re supposed to do, of course.)

Well, take it from someone who skips most of the articles unless they have recipes in them, balance is a lot of malarkey. If you think about it for a minute, life would be a pretty boring experience if everything was balanced. I mean, there are days when I devour a whole book or cook four meals to freeze or sit on the deck for three hours with a cup of tea and clouds for company. There are days when my kids want to learn and there are days when they pore over their Pokemon cards until the edges curl. Not very balanced, but a lot of fun.

I started thinking about this balance thing last night, when I was three-quarters through a mystery novel and it was time for bed. I knew it was time for bed, because I’d stayed up past midnight the night before and vowed to the geek and the kids that I’d go to bed early to make up for it. I lied. I realized at about ten-thirty that sometimes it’s more important to do what you want to do, rather than what you know you ought to do. I got a lot more pleasure out of finishing the book, Death of a Maid one of M.C. Beaton’s Hamish Macbeth mysteries, than I would have had I gone to bed and probably laid there for an hour sleeplessly wishing I’d found out whodunit and why. (I love Beaton’s Agatha Raisin series also.)

Then there was the day last week when I sat down at the computer with a long list of writing and editing that I needed to do by lunchtime, because I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t come upstairs for lunch until I finished the work that was piling up. An hour later, I surfaced and realized that I had spent all that time on Cosmic Journey, a site I discovered while doing some research for pay. True, I had finished the job, but instead of going on to the next job, thereby insuring that we have a place to live for another month or at least PB&J sandwiches for a week, I’d just stayed there, exploring the whole site. It’s well worth exploring, too.

My whole life is delightfully out of balance it seems to me. We go for days at a time, just staying home, working on learning the new things that we’ve taken up lately and some old projects: learning to sew, knitting more socks, art for the kids and jewelry-making for Son. Then we’ll have a day or several days where we leave the house in the morning and don’t get home until evening or later. Once in awhile, we’re out so late that we have to almost carry Daughter into the house and the geek comes blinking out of his computer cave, surprised to find that it’s after midnight.

Then we’ll have a day or two of just basically hanging around. The kids play video games, read and go outside to throw balls for the dog. I read, cook and do a ton of housework to make up for the housework I didn’t do the week month season before. We “forget” to get dressed and schlep around in our sweats and snack rather than have real meals. We hide when the UPS man knocks on the door and yell to him to leave the package in the mudroom. We let the answering machine get the phone and only call back the people we really want to talk to.

Then, all of a sudden, like a bunch of bipolar bears changing moods, we get all sociable again and search out the groups we’ve neglected for a week. We meet friends at potlucks and over pizza and call all the people whose messages we ignored. If we don’t have somewhere to go, we’re bored and go out to Border’s to cruise the books or to an art gallery or donut shop to see if they’ve released another flavor of donut hole.

So, I guess what I’m saying is that the whole dadblamed family is unbalanced. Too late for us the articles that could save us. We’re too busy wasting time at sites that can only loosely be termed “learning sites.” If you’d like to fritter away waste time spend some quality time balancing out the earnest, worthwhile, edifying sites that you spend time on, try some of these for a change. I’ve included some sites that claim to be learning sites, but they can’t be, because they’re all too much fun.

The Austin Lounge Lizards at the Kennedy Center (a little risque for the younger kids, maybe)

Lou and Peter Berryman at the Kennedy Center

Katerpillars and Mystery Bugs

Maggie’s Earth Adventures

Funology

Mop-Top the Hip-Hop Scientist (meet some African-American scientists)

Silly Books

Rainforest Maths

Women Who Have Made History

Gamequarium

Enjoy and let me know how you liked them.

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