With a little help from my friends

This month is the "perfect storm"... there are two maaaaahjah events at school that yours truly has to run. One is a fundrasier is a raffle that raises all of its money at the last possible friggin' moment, so that I can lose sleep for at least a week if not a month before we flip over from failure to profit. We have flipped, by the way. Amen. Amen- I-don't-want-to- run-this-next-year. But you know how that goes.

The other is a social event that's kind of cute and fun, but doesn't play well down south, but nevertheless I have that pretty well under control (cue ominous music... ) as far as I know.

Add our trip to Manhattan (we are going down in! a! limo!) which I will blog either during, or when it's over, so that I don't come home to an empty house.

Shake in our pending home renovation, (read as: destruction and reconstruction....) which might start any day now or not for a week or a month or who the eff knows and I need to pack and think about things like paint and carpet and stuff and whether to pay my mortgage this month or blow that money in Manhattan on pretzels from a grungy cart on the street somewhere near Rockefeller.

Various things are getting me through this:

• my gift from Scrappy... mine is blue and I love it. I will SO take a picture of a Starbuck's cup, wearing one of these bad boys, in Times Square. Yes I am that cornball, and I will do it.
• an even better gift of knowing that the long chemo winter is over and my friend will be around to add her wit and wisdom to my life for quite some... if I still had that pink ribbon magnet you know I'd be mailing you the pieces now, woman!! Or better yet I would fly down there and we could put bits of it all over the most expensive cars driving around your town
• my other friend from London describing Borough Market to me just when I really really needed to think about fun places like this and cooking with fresh ingredients, and not think about people who steal from other people who are doing fundraising
• friends who give me wine.... just saying...
• my daughter saying to me "do you know if I connect the freckles on my left leg with a Sharpie it would look like the big dipper?" and just generally being really cool and hilarious
• my son trying to be all BIG even when I want him to still be my munchkin, and not lashing out at me when I rein in his independence a little bit because I just CAN'T HANDLE him driving waaaaaaaaay away from me and out of sight at the park on his scooter, helmet or no helmet
• daffodils, which are repugnant to rodents who root in my garden, but infinitely less so to me. Flowers are my friends...
• vitamin B-12.... really... I didn't read the literature, but my sister/ best friend suggested I start taking it, and it kept me from wanting to bulldoze something this month. Maybe those pretty pink pills are placebos but I swear, it helped me.