Isn't She Lovely?

Sew Liberated has a blog! I didn't realize!

And her patterns are on sale right now, and she's all that's cool and inventive and modern and competent and stylish about our culture at the moment.

Her philosophy: Sew Liberated is a way of looking at craft that is, at once, traditional and completely modern. Depending on who you are and your own preferences, you can find solace in the "traditional crafts" either as a return to a slower lifestyle, or as a fist-held-high statement of non-conformism with today's commercial culture. Personally? I identify with both reasons and don't see them as mutually exclusive.

See what I mean? I love all her work.

Here's one of her many delicious aprons. Pretty, useful, happy, modern, traditional, practical ... Hooray for Montessori teacher Meg! She's Sew Liberated!

Uh-oh ... Mommy 'piow?

Yes, Mommy spilled. Again.

When our oldest child was still an only child (a condition of her life she has since suspected was an 18-month stay in her own personal Nirvana), she didn't miss much. Ever. She was born paying attention. She was the child who would stop breastfeeding if her mother so much as looked at an open magazine lying beside us on the couch cushions. She could sense my wandering attention, and the slight shift in her surroundings made her stop and wait to see ... and not continue with her work until my attention was back where it belonged. (notice the facial expression on artist Carl Larsson's wife as she attempts the same thing with one of her own eight children?)

At a year old, our daughter had advanced to a much more verbal processing of these environmental shifts. Still aware of everything, she had now learned to comment.

"Doo lou'!" ("Too loud" - a comment on a passing fire truck when we were out on a walk.)

"Gah!" ("All gone," said with chubby hands turned upward and with a small shrug, to cheerfully and adamantly inform us that her food was "gone," apparently because a magic trick had been performed.)

"Cahfooooh...!" ("Careful!" - her first real word, recited like a mantra while she was learning to walk across the room, nearly never falling down in the process.)

All must be noticed. All must be identified. Aloud. Usually with exclamation points.

And so, there was very little hope that the spilled oatmeal would pass unnoticed. It only happened once, but every morning for weeks afterward, we re-lived the moment.

Mommy reaches into the cupboard and picks up the container of dry oatmeal. Mommy puts the container on the counter and begins to pry up the edge of the lid. And this one time? This one time Mommy spilled. The container fell off the counter, and upended its contents onto Mommy's feet. And the child in the highchair, cheerfully waiting for breakfast in this place of contented confinement, up where she could see the breakfast being made, began her shocked commentary.

"Uh-oh!"
(Mommy glaring at her own bare, morning feet)

"Mommy 'piow?"
"Yes, Mommy spilled." (Mommy begins stepping out of the heap of rolled oats)

"Oapmeoh?"
(teeth gritted, voice calm) "Yes, Mommy spilled the oatmeal."

"Toe?"
"Yep - Mommy spilled oatmeal on her toes." (grrr!)

This was the dialogue that continued for weeks, every morning, and every time someone opened the door to the cupboard with the oatmeal container inside.

I thought about this today, more than twenty-five years after the fact. I thought about it because Mommy 'piow'd again. Not oatmeal, but papers and books. (Uh-oh ... Mommy 'piow? Toe?) Mommy's toe made Mommy's brain begin to process a certain sort of awareness today - the awareness of the spillable piles, and what they contain.

I began to look around. From where I stood, I could see books about cinema, because I'm writing my final paper for History of Film. I could see several notebooks - some empty, a couple of notebooks full of notes, and under other piles are notebooks with only a couple of pages used, either because they could not be found after the first bout of writing or because the project had ended almost as soon as it began.

Here are library books about emotions, brain development, perception, and narrative. There are Newspapers. Magazines. That table holds the latest finds from used book stores. This one has some (more) books and booklets for theological and religious education writing. Interestingly enough, the books about writing and poetry, once I own them, cannot be found in this part of the house. Those books are upstairs, in my office, near my desk, and usually shelved properly, where I can easily lay my hands on them again.

In the main part of the house, between clear-outs, the flat surfaces of living and dining rooms also bear their weight in junk mail, catalogs (both the desired and the where'd-this-come-from? variety), and all the mail waiting to go to places in other parts of the house or in other houses (my mother-in-law's mail, mail for the kids who aren't here, bills, etc.). The piles are ever in danger of 'piowing onto Mommy's toes, and Mommy thinks this morning that the myth of the paperless society is an absurdity too laughable to laugh at.

So, what is Mommy going to do about this problem?

(Uh-oh ... Mommy 'pioh? Oapmeoh? Toe?)
Yeah.
Hush up.
There is too much paper and there are too many printed words in this house.
I don't want to talk about it.

But ... wait.

Is that the problem?

Is it a problem that these piles and papers and books and notebooks are here, in my house, all the time? Should I have less paper here? Fewer notebooks and fewer books and fewer projects to generate all of this in the first place?

Is the oapmeoh the problem?

Or ... is this simply the stuff of life in this house?

This is a picture of Gretchen Rubin, writer, and most recently famous because of her Happiness Project and the book she wrote about her year's experiment. Notice, please, that in her New York apartment, where she lives with her husband and children, and where she writes and cooks and reads, and from which she goes out into the world to exercise, or speak, or shop ... where she lives ... she has lined a wall with books. Gretchen Rubin's gorgeous New York apartment has at least as much danger of acquiring piles of papers as my house has, here in mostly rural Stevenson, Washington.

Here is a similar picture of Mireille Guiliano, former CEO of Veuve Clicquot, and author of French Women Don't Get Fat. Another New York apartment. Another wall of books, some vertically shelved, some horizontal, non-matching bindings, hardback and paperback books kept together, not color-displayed ... real books ... lots of words and ideas and pages and pages and pages.

I used to put only a little bit of food at a time onto the high chair tray for the little girl who was sitting there. It was easy to overwhelm her with too much to do - too much to pay attention to - too much to process. (And it's too hard to comment on everything if there are too many things to comment on.) But the answer wasn't to eliminate the food. The answer was to have on the high chair tray only as much as the tiny talking child could pay attention to - and while she was eating (and commenting) the rest of the food in the house was where it belonged.

I need the things in my piles. Although I suppose I could do without the junk mail, I could also probably do without a new container being purchased every time I buy oatmeal. If I haven't sorted the mail at the post office and used their recycling containers, I can use mine for junk mail. If I haven't bought my oatmeal from the bulk aisle and used my own container, I can properly dispose of the purchased packaging on my own. I can fill my bookshelves with the words and words and more words, putting the bound and unbound pages that belong in this house where they need to go, throwing away the stuff I don't need, and filing my course work where I can find it again.

It sounds a little silly, when I type it all out like that. "I can be an organized paper shuffler." (duh) But when a pile falls onto Mommy's toes, Mommy wonders - at least at the first crash - if the contents of the pile need to be eliminated from her reality in some sort of final and definitive way. Today, Mommy has decided again that the possibility of spilled oatmeal is better than having no oatmeal at all, and that it just might be possible to live happily with all this paper in the house.

Now, if you'll excuse me? I have some piles to unpile and a few more books to find homes for. We went to a couple of library booksale places while we were on vacation a couple of weeks ago.

All Good

In the midst of the last week before Christmas, a list of new things I can welcome with joy:

• Continued production of candelabra candles from IKEA, candles I use in this flat black metal candelabra from Michaelmas until Easter

• Adult children who bring presents and food and things like that to the party, making it possible to spread out the responsibilities of party-making -- and many hands make light work

• Readiness for the first year of the grownup tradition of real egg nog to be served to arriving adults

• Tiny little class holders that perfectly fit the tiny little "Glimma" tea lights from IKEA, and can be scattered throughout ... well, throughout everything everywhere

• An old headboard, discovered in one of the garages (or maybe the barn), once owned by and probably made by the same great-grandpa who built this house, ready to be cleaned up and brought into our freshly painted bedroom in time for Christmas

All in all, it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas around here, and even though it looks a little different from any of the others, I think I kinda like it. Hmmmm... yes .... I like it.

Permaculture Brain

(warning: totally internal dialog ahead)

The tune and the song keep looping in my brain.

This is the way we wash our clothes
wash our clothes
wash our clothes
This is the way we wash our clothes
early in the morning!

This is the way we plan our life
plan our life
plan our life
This is the way we plan our life
early in the morning!

Yesterday, a friend who's studying permaculture came here to our place to walk around in the field and yard and garden and everywhere, to talk to me about possibilities and plans and let me know what to do next. She's a published author, married to a published author, and so, of course, a thought occurred, and I concurred, and we will probably write about this entire thing, from its present wildness to its conclusive sustainability and joyful restoration. We'll take pictures and talk about the folklore of the plants and the ways in which we can work with the natural world instead of trying to force it to be something it is not. Comfrey under the orchard trees, and many kinds of trees instead of a monoculture in the orchard. Carrots Love Tomatoes, after all. Might as well admit to nature's power and work with it, right? We can't beat it. It hurts us and it to try. Joining it is better.

As we were talking about all of this, she asked me about the way I come at a project, and said she feels a need for "all" of the facts before she can move - but she's letting go of that perceived need because permaculture is so huge that there's no way to do it! (hahaha! Nothing like a little dose of impossibility to make us stop a behavior, eh?) And I knew just what she meant. It's a habit I've been working on for awhile now, too. There may be wisdom in "look before you leap," but eventually a person setting out on an adventure has to leap, even if the statistics regarding leaping might not be fully memorized, nor the future fully imagined or pre-recorded. After awhile, you just gotta jump if you're ever going to do a thing. And there is also wisdom in knowing that "he who hesitates is lost."

(This is the sort of discussion that happens when Little Miss Huge Ideas plans a landscape with Little Miss Magical World, and neither can stop being a writer looking for the words.)

Anyway, I've been thinking about the way to approach a task - or a life, for that matter. My life. I've realized that I need the Macro-Plan first. Or, that I want it. I don't always get it, sometimes I have to move into the job anyway, but I hate like poison to work that way. I want the zoomed-out map, and I want the ability to zoom in on the particulars. I want the atlas and the guide to the local bacteria. Both, and the movement between them. That's how my brain works.

Before I could start on our landscape here, I needed a way to plan for the whole thing. For me, the plans morph along the way. That's okay. The thing's in motion, or it's dead - so movement and change are good things. But I really must have the Macro-View in my head - and on paper, or else the apparent (to me) futility of working against an ultimately more powerful Reality pulls all the wind out of my sails and makes me sadder than sad. Futility demoralizes me.

Some folks like to complete tasks. Some folks like to think up Ideas. I prefer Ideas to tasks (and now note that I've even capitalized the word Ideas, and evidently do not consider tasks to be a proper noun) but I know I need to be able to move between Ideas and tasks, or I find it very difficult to move at all. After yesterday's first planning meeting for our house inside our yard inside our fields inside our woods (a meeting of two of the most non-task-oriented brains in Skamania county), I think the name of this sort of thinking is Permaculture.

Preserves

This morning, the earth has inhaled. The heat of summer is abating. A few more exhaling days of heat will come before the autumn begins in earnest, but still. There is a breeze that keeps making attempts to release and scatter everything paper tacked to the wall behind my desk, and I know what that breeze means. It's time to preserve the taste of the summer.

My daughter's been doing it for weeks and weeks. She found a farm stand local to where she lives, and she's got freezer jams (and ice cream toppings, aka, the jams that didn't gel) made of all kinds of berries. We've had samples - and man, oh man, is that good jam! Summer in a little jar. (And the lady of the house getting quite irritated with bad recipes and is learning her own methods and preferences so quickly it's like she's been doing this for decades, not days. I'll have to have her show me how. No reason for both of us to blaze this trail. Although, when "we" progress all the way to the pressure cooker stage, it'll be a race to retreat. Pressure cookers are scary.)

Meanwhile, I want to preserve a few things here. In writing. My life now feels reminiscent of the night I sat on our couch, third and last baby in my arms, and thought to myself, "Breathe this in. Remember it," trying and trying to tamp down the memory, embedding it in my brain and bones, knowing the effort was futile and that the only thing I would be able to remember would be the desire to remember.

So, knowing that the feeling will be elusive, but dates and years and diaries are still helpful, here's what I want to preserve from this summer.

1. This was the year the boots and BDUs came home. (A picture being worth a thousand words, the feeling attached to this picture still fresh, and tears have started to roll as I type, glancing at the bizarre feeling of relief and tension of that moment - because she was there - somewhere - (as The Great Husband murmured) "in the sea of sameness.")

She came home, all her body intact, her soul bruised and a bit in shock, but already healing quickly, even now, in this same summer. And for my part, the realization that our country and its military has not traveled more than a couple of psychic inches from the days of Vietnam and war crimes and soldiers stressed beyond imagination and leadership that could have acted and did not ... well, my soul has some healing to do too. But she's home. This was the summer our daughter came home.

2. Graduation at Evergreen State is graduation in a Fellini movie, and few celebrations I've ever seen or will see can touch it. Pure exuberance, complete with balloons, jugglers dressed as circus ladies receiving their degrees, and yes, the distinct smell of something sweet in the air, there, under the stair tower where I went to get pictures. My son in a hat of his own - spurning (with many, many of his classmates) the fee being charged for green rayon, and refusing to have a proper cap and gown. The band playing Dixieland music - in particular, a really tipsy sounding version of The Stripper. Me wondering where the (a-hem!) girl of interest might be in the crowd ... wondering if that boy will EVER introduce her to us.

3. The kid turned twenty-two and introduced us to his girl of interest. That's her - right there - in the red skirt and the stunning smile. We think the kid has great taste. That's what we think.

We also think that the ability of our three now adult children to have a party and dance and drink and laugh and have a lot of fun is ... well ... I mean, look at them! It's impossible to feel anything but unadulterated joy when I look at this picture. Bottles and bottles of unadulterated joy to be preserved this summer, and lined up, sparkling on the shelf, winking red and yellow and orange and purple in the shaft of afternoon sun that hits them right before it's time to serve dinner.

In the next couple of weeks, I'll add "insulated south wall of the house," "access to the attic," and "finished master bedroom" to my list of this summer's preserves. That's how it is at the end of summer. The heat starts to take an occasional break, and everything comes ripe at once. I don't want a morsel of it wasted this year. I want to feast on it this season, and I want to bottle every drop.

Instructional posters as wall art

Here's another one I want!! (Thanks for the heads up, Melanie!) This one, the Ratio one from Michael Ruhlman (which I will definitely order at the next paycheck) ... I keep finding instructional posters. Someday I'm going to have grandchildren, who, I assume, will have more than one set of grandparents. We'll be the ones with the maps and instructional posters on the walls, and an open kitchen. And goats. And a boggling number of books to choose from. And a field to play in. And a stream. And a zillion-piece Fontanini nativity village to set up every Advent. (Is this daydreaming a result of a looming half-century birthday?) (click on the poster to go to its site. And note: you're (you are) going to its (not it's) site.)

Sign of the Season

This is how I know the weather has warmed up.

It's Saturday. We ate our bacon and eggs (and the backs of my hands smell like applewood smoke) with our Trader Joe's croissants (which are perfect every time). We talked about stuff. There are three of us today - no one under the age of thirty. The two not-young giants are thumping about, making working noises in my house and around it. But mostly below it, to be precise. The doors are open to the outside. I descend to their level (ha!) and wonder what's going on. For some reason I am compelled to ask.


Me: What are you guys doing?

Him: Cleaning out the basement so you can use it more.

Me (due to that non-answer): What are you doing?

Him: We're cleaning out the basement. We're going to bring your washer and dryer down here.

Me (even less impressed than before - the basement is all dirt - my washer and dryer are no more going down there than I am): What are you doing?

Him: We're pulling water heaters out of here.

Me: Water heaters? Did you say heaters? Plural?

Him: Yes.

Me: Oh, I don't even want to know about this.

Him: That's why we don't tell you.

Beans!

If it's Holy Week,

and it's also the first week of the spring academic quarter,

and you're also scheduled to work as a sub at the library on a couple of days (which means your schedule never settles down to a rhythm for which days are work days),

and you grind your coffee fresh every morning ...

well, it's just a bad idea to reverse where the coffee maker and the coffee grinder sit on the counter. (And while coffee makers have water reservoirs that can be dumped out, the water that comes with the errant coffee beans is not as easily removed from the coffee grinder.)

Just so you know.

Logjam Sorting

Ever heard of it? These guys are at the sorting jam. The logs are all jammed up and they're being sorted so they can be sent on their way to where they're supposed to go. That's what I need to do next. Sort my logjam.

I've got papers, files, course notes, syllabi, books, and notebooks from last year and last quarter, all mixed up in here with all my church writing projects and ideas, and stuff I want to save and archive, and stuff that needs to be tossed and recycled ... log jam.

And I've got emotional pileups too. New relationships forming, old relationships morphing, and the knowledge that as little as two minutes a day of writing about things is good for my immune system - to say nothing of cognitive and emotional processing.

And classes have started. All online this quarter, with a break in PLA writing because I got confused about tuition and finances and all of that, so I'll finish up PLA in the spring. For winter, I'm playing with the big kids now. Two Human Sciences courses, and one Lit course, and my school adventure is suddenly far more intellectually challenging than it has been yet. All online, though. My driving the Gorge in the winter is not safe for me or anyone else who might be out there with me. Seriously. Not good.

It's time to get back to basics. The List Queen has been long on hiatus, and she needs to come back to her kingdom. Lists, Ahoy! One of the young giants got away with my dry erase board. I need a new one. And a desk calendar. It's Hard to Make a Difference When You Can't Find Your Keys, and it's time to get busy making a difference. I need to start here - or the only difference I will have made in the world will be to have added to the clutter.

This Christmas

• I made a largely successful, but not universally loved trifle.

• My husband found one first edition, one British edition, and one other very well preserved book to buy me the whole Eliot trilogy, by Elizabeth Goudge. And not satisfied with that, he also found and bought for me a very unusual pearl bracelet!

• The newest consensus on Christmas stockings is this: "Having a stocking is not the important part, Mom. If not having a stocking means less candy, I want a stocking. If having a stocking means less candy, I don't want a stocking." (Santa used bags this year. Momma needs newer, larger, more manly stockings to hang.)

• A person who attended Midnight Mass put a drawing into the offering plate and told my husband, the usher, "This is all I have."

• I got a hand painted cross from one of my Sunday School children ... wrapped in the most amazingly spiraled gift wrap, stuck together with bright blue duct tape.

• The next day, I got a handpainted wooden tulip from another of "my" girls ... I feel very loved, and both handpainted wooden items are now part of my growing Fontanini nativity set on top of my piano. (I got camels and camel accessories this year.)
  

• After getting past the initial surprise that my 23-year-old son would rather go back up to school a week earlier than classes start because he has reading to catch up on, I realized that I am relieved to have a week's space before my classes start. I need to do some weeping, and I can only hold it together for a couple more days.

• My daughter has spent "Christmas" in a convoy in Afghanistan. (Hence, the necessary weeping time.) And that same daughter pretty much provided Christmas for us this year. She shopped online, and the nice delivery men have been greeting our dogs every few days for the last couple of weeks. The ... uh ... "tavern puzzle?" Uh, yeah. Now everyone's irritated by it, and the youngest young giant took it home with him, determined to solve it.
  

• I bought some Armagnac soaked prunes stuffed with foie gras for my husband. He has only eaten one of them. We have two Christmas crackers left. I figure we'll crack the crackers and eat the earthy, fragrant, permeating, gorgeous, rich, decadent little bits of amazingness on our first evening alone in our house again.
  

Happy Birthday, Grandpa Les

This is the only Norwegian language I know. I found a kitchen tile with the words painted on it - the words feel like roots to me. Roots under the fjords, and woven into family gatherings, and passed all the way to my generation via the grace at dinner. We used to pray this together on December 23 when we got together for the extended family's "Christmas" on my Norwegian Grandpa's birthday. Happy Birthday, Grandpa. I miss you.

Compiling Christmas

This was on my Quotations widget on my homepage this morning (without the picture, of course):

Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
Arnold Lobel

I did a search. My brain wasn't clicking on the right name, but I knew the name Arnold Lobel was in the file somewhere. Oh!!! Of course! It's the Frog & Toad guy! Those are the most wonderful books! Now, why didn't I know there was this little volume of verses? My children would have loved this book. I am going to have to go find a copy in the store and add it to my collection soon.

I do not currently have books to the ceiling, books to the sky in my office, however. Well, not really. I mean to say, the books to the ceiling, books to the sky are not the ones that were piled in here a couple of weeks ago because of school. I took all those books back to the library libraries from which they came. Next quarter, the piles will be compiled once again. (Best use of the word "compiled," don't you think? Compiling: verb, indicating an action taken with books, done by a researching student during the school term. Compile: To pile books higher and higher.)

About ten years ago, my daughter once threatened to switch my piles with the piles of a family friend - and then sit back and see how long it would take the two of us to figure out we were working on someone else's piles. (She's got a mean streak, that kid.) There are fewer piles in my house these days, though. I don't think it's less stuff - it's just more selective. Fewer categories of time and attention = fewer piles.

Piles I want to compile in the next few weeks are food piles. I want to make bits of things on sticks and toast dollops of things on little toast triangles, and then pile those up onto pretty plates on the table near the bottles of lovely things to drink. The Great Husband seems to be thinking along the same lines. He just sent me this picture of Stilton-Pear Crostini drizzled with pumpkin seed oil. That's what was on his home page this morning. (You can click the pic for the recipe.) See how the little crostini are piled up? There are only two, and yet the photographer/food stylist person felt the need to pile them. We're in a compiling time of year.

People compile lists of things at this time of the year. Gifts, and shopping items, and people being invited to the party. Soon, it will be annual resolutions - and receipts. My lists of compilation are mostly interior right now. I've been compiling memories and prayers and perspectives, largely due to the fact that I've now got three adult children who are spreading my inner world to four corners of the earth. It's an interesting thing nobody ever told me. If you expand your heart so that your children all have access to it, and yet are not confined by it -- if your heart allows their growth and their comings and goings and successes and failures as theirs, not yours -- then you end up expanded and pried open and broken and renewed much, much larger than you'd ever meant to be. It's very odd.

Right now, there is a pile of UPS and FedEx and USPS boxes compiled on a side table, unopened. I'll open them - wrap them - and that pile, all things sent to us by our soldier daughter, will become the bulk of our presents pile under the tree. It's a lean year - for us, and for a lot of people. Those expansive offspring have also expanded our financial obligations for now, and so their Christmas piles are going to be a collaboration between Santa and their soldier sister, with their parents providing bits of things on sticks -- and duck a l'orange -- so it's not like anyone's doing Christmas with Oliver Twist in a cellar or anything. There just won't be compiled toomuchstuff this year. No one will be sad, I'm sure.

We'll compile heaps of branches and clippings in the middle of the living room floor in a few days. Someone asked me if I was going to buy decorative greenery this year, and I had to tell 'em. I live on forty acres of decorative greenery. I just have to go outside and cut some of it. To that pile, I'll add a whole tree for decorating. That I'll have to buy - but I'll go and pick it out where it stands now, growing in the good Pacific Northwest earth, waiting for me to find it.

Then we'll pile up the boxes of decorations, and somehow, inevitably, there will be people in the living room, leaning to the left and right, watching the television while I walk back and forth between them and it. Why is that? Why is there something on the television when the tree is being decorated? Decorate it at another time, you'll say. Yeah, yeah. The theory's sound, but it just never works that way. It's one of life's mysteries - like the fact that the less distance there is to travel, the more likely you are to be late to an appointment. And when the tree is decorated and the various annually displayed oddments are nested into random bookshelves or perched on picture frames, the boxes will all be compiled in the cupboard for a few weeks until they're filled back up and stored away for the year.

Here we are, at the compiling time of the year. We heap up the piles of This Year's Stuff - or, I do, anyway. Look it over. Set it out where I can see it. Take some of it back to the libraries (seasonal work that's over now), throw some of it away (because some packaging's just packaging and how you learned that or where you did that isn't the point of it), wrap some of it for giving to others (right now, I'm very busy packaging a lifetime's study, learning, experience, and enjoyment for a suddenly larger Sunday School), and some of it gets displayed where everyone can see it.

But some of this year's compiling is private. After the shepherds came to worship the Baby, after they left and noised it all abroad, the Blessed Mother began a life that was about to hold all the pain and difficulty of the best of blessings. That Baby of babies was God, and she knew it. Yet she didn't feel the least bit like following the shepherds out the door to help them prove their story. She didn't show that tiny bundle to the folks in house after house, saying, "See him? This is the Incarnate God! Isn't it wonderful?"

No, the Blessed Mother did something I am very glad the Evangelist included in the story. I'm glad I know about this part. I feel a particular fellowship with her this year. She "kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart."

Some compiling is private. This year, on my fiftieth Christmas, pay no attention if you see me cry. I'm just compiling.

Shhh! Don't tell my husband

And for that matter, don't tell my sons either.

I've started listening to Christmas music for part of the day.

I know, I know. It's not even Thanksgiving yet. But it is almost "Stir Up Sunday,"*** and on Stir Up Sunday I have to be ready to stir! And one of the fastest and easiest ways to get ready to do anything is to listen to the right music for it. Music begets inclination, inclination begets planning, planning begets list-making, and list-making begets shopping. And shopping must happen before stirring.

And speaking of planning, I really really really need to make a trip to IKEA. I've burnt up all my candles - or, all the candles that are not those little tinned votive candles. Those little rounds must've had a frisky summer in the drawer because I have zillions of them for some reason. Begetting. That's the only reason I can think of. Candles begetting candles.

I need the box of white candles for my very Nordic looking black IKEA five-candle holder - and I want to add this charming candle holder this year. It's a floor stand for the block candles - a metal one. It's three feet high!!

So ... that's

• block candles
• white candles for the candle stand
• floor stand

...and ironing board. After two decades of hard use, I've actually broken my ironing board. I couldn't have been more surprised if I'd been ironing and suddenly fallen through the floor. (Actually, the longer this house remodel goes on, the less surprising the floor surprise would be. But that's another post.) Does an ironing board count as a household appliance? It'd be my first IKEA household appliance if it does.

I'll add some more votives to my Whole Foods/New Seasons list as well. Those are the real candles that smell like real candles - IKEA candles are for light and fire; real candles are for scent. The WF/NS list is the one that includes high quality dried fruit for the stirring - on Stir Up Sunday - which is on November the 22nd this year - which is the Sunday right before Thanksgiving Day - which is why I'm listening to Pandora's choices for a station called "The Choir of King's College."

But don't tell my husband.

***In the Anglican Church, the Collect for the Sunday before Advent, or the twenty-fifth Sunday after Trinity, which occurs some time in late November, commences ‘Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people’, and all over the country this has given the day the colloquial name of Stir-Up Sunday. Brand reports a verse recited by children: ‘Stir up, we beseech thee, The pudding in the pot, And when we get home, We'll eat it all hot’. The day was taken as a marker to advise the housewife to start her Christmas preparations, and the grocer to see to the Christmas stock of his shop (Sussex Archaeological Collections 33 (1883), 252-3).

Midterm Yawn

So ... we fell back. Yay. An extra hour.

But I think I completely squandered it somehow. Nothing deep or meaningful here today. I can't stop yawning.

Stayed up late on Saturday. Had a reeeeeallly long day on Sunday - which was a good day - All Saints Day on a Sunday this year, capped off by the Oregon Chorale in the evening. It was nice. But it was a lot in one day. And Monday started early and ended late with my Human Studies class, and today I'm absolutely beat. And I don't want to get sick. And I have a lot of writing to do. And I've thought of a good metaphor to explain the condition of this house about a month after I avulsionly fractured my foot (in three places) and acquired my autumn footwear.

My house looks as if it's been carried around for the last month in the bottom of a giant's coat pocket - a sort of woolly coat that tends to harbor lint and things.

What a complainer I am today!

Time to get on with the tasks at hand - namely, the writing of this PLA Children's Lit essay. That's the good news from the Monday marathon that was yesterday. I found a copy of the text I needed for only $5 at Powell's. Today, I get this thing moving. By the end of the week, it needs to be done, done, done. Ready to submit. Injured foot or not, I could use a bit of happy dancing.

Spoon Sisters rock!!

A friend at work showed me this site yesterday. I have to pass it along to my readers. Readers, meet the Spoon Sisters. (Spoon Sisters, these are my readers. Thanks for coming.) There is so much laugh out loud, ingenious, amazing, brilliant, useful stuff on this site that I'm considering asking for a thousand dollar gift certificate. I mean, seriously. How brilliant is this? Brownies, and every piece is an edge piece!

And this is intriguing as well. I can't quite figure out what these are made of. Silicone maybe? What an interesting idea. (What do you do with them when they're all used up, I wonder? Seventh Generation makes a fabric softener sheet that's actually a sheet of brown paper and can be recycled like any other paper.)

I love the Spoon Sisters! Straining ladles, and can strainers, a "Happy Birthday" cake mold and dipping spoons, stuff for babies and parents and weddings and holidays ... it's all good. And since they've dared to sell it (and Anish Sheth, M.D., a gastroenterology fellow at Yale has dared to write it in the first place), and because I really do think this sort of information can be helpful, and because I laughed out loud when I saw it ... well ... here it is: Oh, c'mon. That's funny. And useful. And funny. (I think I'm always going to be eight years old.)

Oh, no I won't!

Okay, listen. I'm all for social justice and a responsible use of the resources we have in this world. I am. I think we have an order from God himself. We're supposed to govern wisely. Be good stewards. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get it. But give up my incandescent lights??? Oh, c'MON!!!

Starting Tuesday of this week, the manufacture and import of the standard 100 watt and the frosted light bulb, which is deemed the most wasteful, will be banned in the EU countries. And over the next three years, all incandescent bulbs will be phased out completely. A similar ban is set to begin in the United States in 2012. Eleanor Beardsley quotes the EU Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs who has tried to reassure Europeans in his blog by telling them, "Much like the car and telephone took time to catch on, you will one day appreciate the new era of lighting."

Oh, no I won't!

I'll use the newfangled things, but I will not like them. There is a time of day that begins to come again in the autumn of the year. It's the time when there is still dinner to put on the table, but it becomes necessary to turn on the lights. It's the time of day when I light candles. And it's the time of day when incandescent light bulbs (that, admittedly, do indeed produce more heat than light) remind me of every late afternoon, waiting for the household Dad to come home. Dinner smells go with that kind of light. Taking your school mess to your room, or setting the table, or putting music on the stereo ... it's that time of day, and I have never seen any alternative to incandescent lighting that can illuminate it properly. I am not happy about this. I must have a drop or two of German blood in my veins.

Consumers in some countries, like Germany, are said to be stockpiling Thomas Edison's old-style bulbs for cost reasons, or even out of nostalgia.

I'm thinking of doing the same thing. It's like finding out that a favorite book is now gone from the library shelves - discarded - sold at a book sale, and no way to track the treasure so that I can buy it myself. Or visiting the old neighborhood only to find out that your grandpa's house has been flattened to make room for something really depressing ("like a Baby GAP" - name that movie). Sometimes progress really stinks. Especially if it's not lit properly.

Elements

It's like planning a garden. Or ... um ... making a complicated recipe ... or, maybe it's more like balancing the five elements. It's like anything that has parts which interact with each other, each retaining its own identity and having its own effects, and together making a thing which could not be made without the collection of the whole.

That is what my Augusts are.

The planning and adding and subtracting of elements, the envisioning and what-iffing, the discussions with the people who will be effected -- the balancing of the elements as I set up another year of my life. They seem to me to be balanced like a tire is balanced. These elements are the spokes of a wheel in motion.

The wheel has turned a full revolution since high school and that first college experience. The first time around, I planned for me. Then, for a short time, I planned for classrooms full of students. Then, for a longer time, I planned for my family - for my own growing, changing kids, while we lived at various addresses and during various times in our lives, absorbing all the shocks and bumps and surprises because that kind of planning is as much life planning as education planning. Now the kids are outa here - and the wheel comes around to planning for me.

Only, along the way, the wheel has covered so much ground that it's not the same. I'm bigger inside. More of me interacts with and effects and is effected by the world around me. It's as if the travel has added strength to the spokes even if the outer rims have sustained a bit of wear and tear. The elements matter more than they used to.

Water, wood, fire, earth, metal. Color, line, shape, value, texture, form. Parish, work, school, home, writing. The elements aren't static. They play with each other and threaten each other and feed each other. What they make together is a life. My life.

"The Interdisciplinary Studies program is designed with serious students in mind - students with eclectic interests, a clear sense of academic mission, and high expectations for their undergraduate experience."

It's August. The wheel is turning.

Did you know that there is a new model for the periodic table of elements? It's not a chart with blocks stacked in order of atomic weight. It's a galaxy in motion. That's what we are. People are galaxies in motion. The creator of the galaxy chart is Philip Stewart.

Philip Stewart decided at an early age that he did not want to choose between arts and sciences. After taking degrees at the University of Oxford in Arabic and in Forestry, he spent seven years in Algeria working in forest and soil conservation. In 1975 he returned to his old university, where for 31 years he taught Economics to Biology students and Ecology to Human Sciences students, occasionally also taking Arabic pupils.

Philip Stewart sees the elements like this. "The intention is not to replace the familiar table, but to complement it and at the same time to stimulate the imagination and to evoke wonder at the order underlying the universe."

Exactly.

(click on any of the images to go to their sources)

Is it time?

I just wondered. Is it time to start worrying about this? This doesn't look like a dangerous project at all - nossir. What could possibly go wrong? Oh. What are they doing, you ask? The brothers are plotting the repair of the barn roof. Most of the bracing under the metal roofing is rotten, all metal roofing slices like a butcher's blade if it's grabbed by bare hands, and the wind in our area of the world is the reason wind-surfers love it here. So ... I ask again, what could possibly go wrong?

Shelved life

Do you think books are alive? I think I kinda do.

I've just finished reading the new espionage novel Jericho's Fall, by Stephen L. Clark, and I have some things to say about it, but there's this paragraph near the end of the story that I could relate to. I could relate to it so strongly that for a few minutes I forgot about the fact that I am ignoring all ordinary responsibilities this morning so that I can finish the book. It's really a good story. But there's this:

"One of the wide windows to the living room had burst, and embers were flaking in through the mesh. Soon the books would catch, and then the house would start. Beck ached, unexpectedly, for the loss of Jericho's vast library, but there was nothing to be done."

I read that, and then all at once I was no longer thinking about the story - despite the fact that my heroine needed to get out of there or be incinerated along with the books. I, too, was aching for the fictional loss of the fictional character's fictional and unnamed books. Sheesh! It didn't bother me when other stuff got destroyed in this story. It didn't even bother me too much when some of the characters got mangled - or killed. (But that, I think, is because this is a very plot-driven book and not a character-driven or relationship-driven one. Interesting to read, but also emotionally safe, involving no necessity of kleenex.)

So, do you think books are living beings? When I think about my own library, I get a bit maternal - the books are not just things for me. I like most of the things I've chosen to be in my household. I like my flatware pattern and my plates, for instance. But I have only the fluffiest of sentimental attachment to them, really. Replacing them would be kind of fun. (And if any more forks go missing, the fun will be a home-making imperative.) The stuff like bed linens and bathroom towels - that's just fabric. There's lots more where that came from, and a zillion patterns, color combinations, and textures, and it's just the same thing as pots of paints. But the books? Each one is a kind of a person somehow.

Only, they're not all of equal value - people are. Books are more or less alive, more or less full of an ability to talk to the bones and heart and imagination of the reader, more or less connected to the incarnate ideas that walk about and eat and vote and couple and hope. And some books get adopted - personally. It's funny to me to watch, but all three of my kids choose books that way. They find volumes to adopt. They stand at the shelves of Powell's, and sort through the volumes available in the title they're looking for, and choose the one volume they want to adopt. (Often, it's an abandoned and marked-down orphan, previously owned by someone obviously too calloused to care for it.)

I don't know what I'd do if embers began to flake in through burst windows in this house. I would lament over losses like my piano - we've been friends and co-conspirators in music and childhood, and then adulthood, parenting, Christmas decorating and household atmosphere for so long that losing the heavily carved wood and sounding board would be losing a friend. I would weep over the loss of photos, too - but the people they captured are alive and real and in possession of immortal souls. Photos are just stuff.

But the books! My library. My husband's library. The books left behind by our kids, boxed up and ready for the next round of, "Have you seen ...?" And the books left behind by the childhoods in this family - the hopes and dreams and ideas and imagination passed to sleepy children at night, and gobbled up by wide-awake, energetic kids in the middles of countless days. Just thinking about it makes my heart push against its edges and makes it hard to breathe.

It would be horrible if this little ramshackle, inherited and constant remodeling project (aka, my house) went up in flames, but knowing that the books were in there would probably kill me in ways other deaths could not. I think it's because most of the books we have in this house are alive.

I hate that skin stuff, but the stains came out

You know about the fried egg skin, right? That crinkled, crackly edge of the egg when the pan was too hot? I really really hate that. Now, this guy says that even at 103 degrees, it's not possible to fry an egg on the sidewalk, and he put this picture up on his Flicker photostream as proof. I think it's just a little underdone - and it looks to me like it's got that skin stuff forming. Blech. (Did you see the spatula behind the shell and think, "spatula?" I thought it was wings or something.)

That is exactly what hot weather does to me. It's been end-of-August weather in the middle of July, and I am not happy about it. It melts my brain, begins to cook my thoughts, and that skin stuff starts to form. So, right now, with a morning coolness wafting in, on the day before several days in a row of far too much heat (the weather guy knows his audience - he was very apologetic on the news this morning), here is a random facts post just in case anyone wants to know if I'm dead or alive.

Random fact #1: If you want to see a book, and the library doesn't have it, use the Interlibrary Loan function. Fort Vancouver Regional Library has purchased many of my requests, and the others have come from other libraries, and I'm currently waiting for:

Ardent Spirits

Leaving Home, Coming Back

By Reynolds Price

and
Native Ferns, Moss, and Grasses: From Emerald Carpet to Amber Wave, serene and sensuous plants for the garden,
by William Cullina





I went ahead and bought The Produce Bible: Essential Ingredient Information and More Than 200 Recipes for Fruits, Vegetables, Herbs & Nuts, by Leanne Kitchen (what else could she have possibly done with her life with a name like that?)

There are others, too. I love Interlibrary Loan and its linked companion site, WorldCat.

Random fact #2: I have changed my major. Again. Interdisciplinary Studies now, with concentrations in Human Studies and Writing. In the course of this, I have talked to three advisors at Marylhurst, and I love, love, love Marylhurst. I makes me blush to realize how little I "know" what I am doing, but maybe that is a good thing about age. I can see far enough to be able to travel a bit ... look around ... choose again ... travel some more ... look around ... and that is how it can work now. I do not have to follow a path already laid down or paved. And now back to our regularly scheduled program.

Random fact #3: Today it's the dentist. Again. Because the edges of two (two!) teeth have fallen off this past month, so I need caps on those teeth. I am trying to be glad that this bit of maintenance waited for the summer to be necessary - instead of irritated at using up my summer driving up and down the freeway to the dentist.

Random fact #4: Being the card lady is working out well. The trick is going to be in keeping accurate records so that I can get paid properly.

Random fact #5: It is inadvisable to keep a full mug of coffee between the computer's mouse and the computer's keyboard. This is especially true if one is lounging a bit, with one's feet up on the desk. Keyboards, it turns out, do not function well when they are suddenly full of coffee. Neither does clothing. Or paper desk calendars.

Random fact #6: This stuff works.