A is for boundaries

This week I had some trouble with boundaries. I mean literal boundaries.

First, we had a burglary a couple of weeks ago, which was creepy, but then we had a second one this week. That starts getting into crazy territory.

Then my husband accidentally gave his bicycle away. By which I mean he was bringing our daughter’s bike trailer in and somehow forgot his bike and just left it sitting outside, unlocked.  Someone took off with it of course, and he had a nasty surprise with no way to get to work this morning.

Then today at lunch I went into the kitchen and discovered a swarm of ants around my daughter’s breakfast plate, which I had left at the sink.  We have never had ants before, much less the hundreds of ants I now had exploring my kitchen.

It is nice having a long walk before I pick my daughter up from school, so I have the chance to get less pissed off. But for no apparent reason, there was this big rainbow in the sky. It had not rained, but there it was. My thought?  “Go make your stupid rainbow at someone else!”

I am all for positive thinking and I love stoic philosophers, especially this somewhat recent Epictetus translation, which basically boils down to “trying to control or change what we can’t only results in torment.” As a former slave, he knew what he was talking about, but I still reserve the right to be a cranky you-know-what when life hands me the unremitting lemons.

Lemons or not, painting continues. I am doing these very detailed A patterns, which made me look up the letter A and discover it is one of the oldest letters in the alphabet, probably coming from the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyph of a bull’s head.  Aleph, alpha, A.  In logic, it represents the universal affirmative (I love knowing that even exists). So here’s wishing you a universal affirmative.