Month: October 2005 (Page 3 of 4)

I’d recommend sleeping with one eye open. And hope your dog doesn’t figure out how to harness “The Force” and kill you from across the room.

(This ‘outfit’ is featured in this week’s Target circular. Don’t worry, I’m not planning any Star Wars Themed Shenanigans for JWo & the dogs!)

Ohhhh baby. From the New Moosewood Cookbook, tart apples are topped with sharp cheddar cheese and streusel, combining savory & sweet in perfect harmony…..

Baked it on Tuesday – it’s already gone. Good thing we still have apples…..

Vintage Velvet is finished, and has been for a week now – but I haven’t felted it! That will happen this weekend. In the meantime, here’s a couple of pictures in all its softness & glory:

This is a quick-knit scarf; Knit with Crown Mountain Farms Corriedale Pencil Roving, color: Twilight. The yarn is so soft, and the colors are just beautiful. Pattern is from Knit Ponchos, Wraps & Scarves – it’s a super fast, super easy K2tog, YO kinda pattern! I highly recommend the book, too – many beautiful, unique patterns. This scarf didn’t even use a full skein, so I know I’m going to be cranking out the Xmas presents quickly with this pencil roving!

I’m ready for the weekend: more garage-cleaning, knitting, getting caught up on TV, cleaning, a birthday party, and tonight? a date with my hubby. We’re gonna see the Wallace & Gromit movie. How can you NOT love a dog who knits????

Oh yes, Miss Polly got herself a new tag! From Fetching Tags, hers says, “Greatest Thing Ever!” – because that is how she treats everything to cross her path. Her Busy Bee, a bone, ice cubes, (unfortunately) other dog’s poop – SQUIRRELS – you name it, in Polly’s world, it is the Greatest Thing Ever. I’m going to try to adopt her attitude today! It will be hard with some of the billing discrepancies I have to do, but let’s give it a go….

Growing up in the middle of nowhere (rural Iowa), being raised by hippies & not having TV, it would be an understatement to say that I got some interesting ideas about Life.

My father has had a subscription to the New Yorker magazine for as long as I can remember. Except for the Tina Brown years. I’ll cover that in a separate post. It requires its own space, it’s that combustible. In any event, one of my great joys in Life was to sit down & read all the cartoons & scour the magazine for all the little droll, dry observations that were tucked in at the end of articles, in the back, etc. Many times they featured a horrible typo, grammatical error or misused word, and their only comment was, “Noted.” It’s still a word we use to indicate extreme snobbishness, complete with a raised eyebrow.

But the other thing I noticed were all the ads. I was fascinated by Clinique, even though I didn’t always understand what the products were supposed to DO. Movado watches seemed to be the end-all be-all. Same for Salvadore Ferragamo shoes. And then there were my favorites: Oh how I loved them. There she was, not an attractive woman by any stretch of the imagination, BUT SHE WORE A TIARA. And when you’re a chunky kid who doesn’t fit in, all it takes sometimes is a tiara. Oh yes, I’m talking about THE Queen of Mean: Leona Helmsley. The ads were a series, so sometimes you’d have several quarter-page ads in a row, featuring The Queen. She was always saying something, about the quality of the items in the room. “I don’t settle for anything but wooden hangers. Why should you?” Wooden Hangers? Wha? I am only familiar with the plastic kind. I AM MISSING OUT. She had a whole host of things she wouldn’t live without, and none of them were in my house. Every week, I reconciled my existence to the fact we did not live at the Helmsley Palace. Of course, she was later exposed as a greedy, evil bitch & sent to prison, but there are things you can’t undo in life. The impressions were made & the damage was done. I was not living my life as a queen, and dammit, that was another one of Life’s Great Misfortunes.

Well, we still have plastic hangers, and not all the pillows are down-filled. I don’t spend thousands of dollars on sheets, but they are cotton & a decent thread-count. We have dogs instead of doormen, and I prefer their greetings because I know they’re genuine. We aren’t worth 1.8 billion, but hey, anybody can buy a tiara. And, I’m happy to report, I’ve never been incarcerated. (How DOES one wear a tiara and a jumpsuit? It’s just a giant mixed message.) In addition to being characterized as having “naked greed” and a whole host of unpleasant things, apparently she hated gay people, which to me is just a nail in the ol’ coffin. Sister Leona, you canNOT run a palace without assistance from The Family. At least not as tastefully as you say you do.

This is where you raise an eyebrow and say it:

“Noted.”

We had a busy weekend, filled with things to do & lots of projects screeching for attention – including the Dreaded Garage, which has been chock-full-o-boxes for a year now, and I’ve been dragging my feet on The Cleaning Out Of It All. I did finally start this summer, which is an excellent time to do such a project in Missouri, if you enjoy sweat in your eyes and getting cranky in under five minutes. I had high hopes of having it done last month, and those hopes were FOLLY and LOFTY and did not pan out. But I’m making headway! And one thing we needed to do was get some of the trash/toss stuff OUT so I could continue to organize/pile (and have a sense of accomplishment.)

So on Sunday, we loaded up JWo’s trailer? And went to the dump. I’ve never really been to a dump before. We went to the “community” dump when I was a kid, I rode along once, in the winter. There’s a good reason to go to the dump in the winter, and I’m sure you can connect the dots there. It was all rather exciting, and disheartening, and amazing, and revolting, ALL AT ONCE. We pulled up to a structure that was not unlike a Checkpoint Charlie, where we paid $52 for the honor of dumping our own trash. We also got little one-size-fits-all orange vests, in a package that described them as “blaze green”, and signs everywhere instructing us to wear HIGHLY VISIBLE CLOTHING AT ALL TIMES. Also a sign that photography was not allowed! Can I just tell you how mad I was at that point for not bringing the camera?

We drive in, and you drive up up up and then around and down and up and side to side, and all you see for a little while is lots of earth-moving action. Bulldozers and many other big pieces of equipment, pushing gravel and stone and dirt. It was quite dusty, that was the first sensory perception. Then you come down and around and wind by a sea of porta-pottys. You don’t think about where those things go, do you? You’re usually drunk, and wishing you could just hold it ’til you get home…. but somebody’s gotta empty them. These were, blessedly, and assumably, empty. Wind wind wind around and down and now the pavement ends and more signs telling us to WEAR VISIBLE CLOTHING and then the smell hits. Faint at first, sickly-sweet and rotting. Now we’re driving up up up again, and the next thing I see? Buzzards. Circling, swooping. The smell gets stronger. And then we turn and go straight down this HUUUUUGE hill, to the bottom, where I see a couple other vehicles, and people are dumping their trash. It’s SO not organized, like, follow these lines & back up to this point. You just back up to the edge, and breathe through your mouth, and unload stuff as fast as you can, pell-mell and crazy. I was wearing a bright pink sweatshirt hoodie cardigan & I decreed I was NOT going to wear the vest on top of that, I was HIGHLY VISIBLE in what I had on, thank you very much. In less than ten minutes, we were done & climbing back up the hill and then on out of the giant gash in the earth, where allllllll our trash goes. Deffenbaugh empties all their trucks there, so if you live in the KC area, I pretty much guarantee all your stuff you leave at the curb ends up in the same place I stood. It made me feel bad, for what we’re doing to our earth, how much crap we buy gets thrown away and buried back in a hole in the ground, and how much more trash I have still that has to get hauled away. (I’m buying those little trash stickers though, I can guarantee I don’t have 52 bags of trash, and the stickers are a dollar each.) The good news is, I’m donating almost as much as I’m throwing away & at least someone else will benefit from my pack-rattedness.

But it was an experience, and made hilarious at the onset by my husband wailing out the sounds to the theme song from “Sanford & Sons” the whole time. And I recalled how, when my packrat father had left town, my mother did some cleaning & made a trip to the dump, and threw out a pair of his boots. My dad came back home, and made his OWN trip to the dump, where, lo & behold, he saw a nice pair of boots that looked awfully familiar & weren’t ready to be thrown away yet, and back home they went……much to my mother’s chagrin!

(If you want a little flashback, just go to this website & his intro music is exactly what we’ve been singing around here the past couple of days…)

Go JWo, it’s your punkin, Go JWo, you grew it….

One Hundred & Forty-Two & a Half POUNDS!!!

Beer can on top for scale. It’s gorgeous. I will probably carve it into a Buddha. Oh, yes, there will be pictures of that…..

Congratulations, James! (I am already bracing myself for next year’s endeavours…)

When we were in Oregon, MO last weekend, I took a few pictures. The place had the general feeling that time had stood still here and there ….. Things we don’t think about NOT being around anymore, because we’re so used to the new things – like cell phones instead of phone booths, or digital gas pumps instead of the old kind with the little flicking numbers…..

So when you see them again, it’s enough to make you stop & realize just how much things have changed. And yet the leaves will fall, and the wind will blow, and Mother Nature will continue to do her thing, no matter how much we invent or develop…. and, kids & puppies will always grab our hearts. This family had the winning auction bid on the 10-week black lab pup, and their kids were so flippin’ cute, I had them pose for pictures, with their new puppy. There’s a joke about advertising, how you can always take the easy way and go with puppies & kids. There’s a reason why it’s true:

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten to the point where I rather enjoy the wistfulness & melancholy that accompanies the transition from Summer into Fall. The leaves on the trees have taken on a tinge of what is to come, certainly still describable as “green”, but they are hinting at the future. The air has changed, and the clouds fill in the sky with a grayer hue.

While driving home the other night, my mind bounced around and I thought of all the Falls I’ve spent alone, and how much harder my “melancholera” was back then. (I’m all about making up words this week.) I think growing up, and having my husband, have helped me feel more grounded, more centered, and so the feelings I have now are more like gentle reminders to be grateful and enjoy what is here, now.

My mind also skittered to a memory, one that never fails to bring tears to my eyes, and I think it also explains who I am. I don’t think I’m that different from everybody else, but I know that I am incredibly sensitive to everything, and it’s been a long haul to work on insulating myself so I can cope “normally”. After all, one can’t just spend every day weeping! Back to the story: my mom is a school psychologist (yes, even the trained can have f-d up relationships), and she came home every day with stories. But there was one little boy, a 1st or 2nd grader, who will always stay stuck in my mind and heart. He had a speech impediment, and coke-bottle glasses. My mother had to go out and pick him up to bring him to school one day, because his mother “forgot” to get him out to the bus in time. The little boy was also forgetful, but with his speech impediment, his explanations came out as: “I dah-dot.” Back to this little shrimp of a boy, sitting in my mom’s passenger seat, feet not touching the floor, talking to her in his nasal voice. He told her he was saving his money. She asked him why – and he said it was to buy him & his mom a Christmas tree. Because they’d never had one. I begged my mother to let him come and live with us.

I’ve had to stop typing this twice, because it still makes me cry. My little Insulating Gnomes rush around my heart & put up plywood barriers, because I know there are a million other little kids, just like him, still out there today, and if I think about that I may never come up for air. Who knows what became of him. All I know is in that moment, hearing his heartbreaking wish for one simple thing, that symbolized happiness to him, and his desire to please his mother, I realized how fortunate I am and how much I take for granted. And I was maybe 10? Obviously, I’ve not gone on to live a great life of sacrifice and selflessness, and I’m the first to admit I’m materialistic & want nice things surrounding me. But fuck, people. They say you can judge a man by how well he tips, or by how well he treats a dog. I say we as a society are judged on how well we care for our indigent, for the mentally handicapped, for those who have less. I think we’ve neglected the poor for so long, they’re pissed & desperate, and somehow that attitude fuels the dominant belief that if they’re ungrateful, they don’t deserve anything. The current stuff doesn’t work. We have too many smart people in this world for me to believe we can’t find a better way.

That’s my rant for the week. I think of that little boy every year, and blink back my tears. I am grateful to have a job, a secure and happy marriage filled with love & laughter, dear friends I can clutch to my heart, great people out there who send me nice emails & like me just from what they read. If there’s a lesson in this, it’s to appreciate the moment, what you have, and if there’s an opportunity to help someone less fortunate, to take it. On an up-note, I can’t wait to take pictures this year of the maples on Ward Parkway, one of the many things that make my commute each day so contemplative & beautiful. It’ll be a few weeks, but they truly are breathtaking.

I keep thinking about the word “Blogeur”, which is probably not original, but I did come up with it on my own, & the definition of the word (as I’ve defined it) speaks to the very nature of blogs and specifically, reading other people’s blogs. You know, the voyeuristic nature it takes. Blogger – voyeur – blogyeur, blogeur, blogheur. A quick search shows that Blogeur is how they spell blogger in France. Feh. It’s interesting, though. All these little cyber-windows in which to peep, some of which become daily stops, friendly waves back & forth, like little Blog Village neighbors….

As another Random Ort, in all my years on this planet, I continue to marvel at the human body’s ability to generate mucus. Mmmm. That’s a nice word, too.