Magazine Mogul Killed By Own House!

All week I have had a swollen scratchy throat and thought I was either coming down with a cold or having really bad allergies. I have never been stuck in stage one of a cold for more than two days so by the fifth day I finally believed I was going to slowly die of my allergy attack.

But then it occurred to me, when I saw what looked like roadkill stuck to my bare feet in my house...maybe it isn't allergies...maybe I'm dying of the dust and fur balls that are traveling in mighty little caravans across the wide expanses of my floor?!

This picture was taken after the first sweep through. I wanted to spare you the real horror.

I decided I needed to drink some more water just to deal with this startling train of thought and approached my fridge with deep trepidation. That's not a good sign. One should never feel they have to sneak up on their own fridge to grab a glass of water. But DUDE! Do you know what kind of stuff was living in there? There was a liquefied cucumber oozing around. No wonder I haven't been in the mood for salad lately. There were other scarier things too. Things you should never say out loud for fear that naming them will give them the power to spring to life and come get into bed with you in the middle of the night.

I have a very special fear of old meat. On several different occasions I decided to give the babies a little treat and served them up some yummy wet food. They didn't eat it all right away so the flies in our house, which we always have because we never shut our doors when we're home until we go to sleep (why bother? Chick will wrestle down any intruders*.), so the flies (as I was saying) decided that the wet food was a marvelous nursery for baby flies. There are few things more disgusting than seeing fly eggs on cat food**. And let me tell you- those flies work fast! They laid eggs within two hours of the food being out.

So I accumulated a few cans of wet food in the fridge. I got too grossed out to give it to the cats but felt too guilty about not using it up to actually throw it away.

I don't eat meat for a number of very good reasons, but one of the most compelling is that old meat is one of the most disturbing things in the world. Putrid meat is fifty times worse than liquefied cucumber. If I don't eat meat then I never have to deal with it going bad and leaving its smell in my nose.

By the way, this is the only reason why I never pursued a career as a mortician or a CSI. Oh, that and not going to college. Or even knowing that those were job options.

I was brave enough to open the top of the cans of cat food but once I saw inside I could not bring myself to clean out the cans to put in recycling. I realize this will make your respect for me plummet. I am grieved that I couldn't just deal with the festering ground beef bits. I will have to make up for this in some way.

So much was tossed out. I think this is an excellent moment to point out that if one keeps on top of the contents of their fridge there is less chance for this kind of waste. Waste is the enemy of economy and responsible landfill stewardship. Every single item that ended up in my trash can yesterday represented dollars that I spent and then threw out. That makes me a little sick when I realize how little we have right now.

I cleaned my fridge, my kitchen, one bathroom, and the floors. I don't know where I got the energy to do it but boy did it feel great. My throat is still swollen. So I'm going to have to conclude that it's allergies after all. I have to say though that I sure do hope to get the rest of my house cleaner because it feels so much brighter.

I am going to make kitchen curtains today. I've been meaning to make some for months. Every day I say to myself "Maybe I can carve out some time to make them today." and then I don't. I need a punch of color in there to tide me over until we get the walls painted. They're going to be Dustpan Alley blue (a retro looking dusty turquoise, see top of blog). The cabinets will remain egg shell colored but Philip is going to paint medieval scenes on them in a light brown.


*I really can't say for sure, but I wouldn't count on her to keep an intruder intact. Especially if they are men and have poor hygiene.

**Fly eggs that have hatched are worse, of course.

ROOST

modern homesteading for everyone

After discussing all the possible magazine titles with Philip while lounging in bed (not naked, you dirty minded people!) drinking beer, it was immediately clear that his favorite title was "Roost" (a contribution from Danielle). I happen to love this one too but worry that it isn't direct enough. However, that's what tag lines are for: clarification. I really liked the tag line "civil disobedience you can eat" but I'm not sure it goes with this title.

The next task was to plan the departments. This can change if I ever manage to do a second issue, but knowing what departments you'll have helps to organize content and direct it. It sets the tone and firms up the driving purpose of a publication. Like a chapter index it allows you to quickly asses the contents and decide how interesting or pertinent it sounds to your interests. Truly, any time I see that the main theme of a book or magazine is:

"How to develop leather-skin under the hot sun of Cabo San Lucas."

I pretty much feel alienated right away.

Here are my departments:

Into the pot- cooking, recipes, tips, methods, food prep, and interesting articles about food and eating.

Kitchen Garden- growing your own food and herbs, vegetables, mini orchards, planning, getting the most out of small spaces, raised beds, garden methods, function vs. form, choosing varieties, winter gardening, tips, features of people's gardens.

The Pantry Shelf- food preserving, using your pantry food in menu planning, menu planning, storing food, root cellaring, brewing beverages, How tos on all these things, shelf life of food.

On The Work Bench- how to use power tools, wood projects, fixing household things, making what you need, building, projects, techniques.

The Stitch Box- sewing projects, crafts, making household things that don't require power tools, techniques for more professional sewing, textiles, gluing, cutting, decorating, useful crafts.

Home Ec- organizing, budgeting, saving, reusing, recycling, cleaning, anything that helps you run a house more efficiently, greening up your house, household management.

DIY Apothecary- making your own body products, medicine from the garden, salves, salts, herbs, tinctures, herb features, herb lore, teas, stress management, recipes and How Tos.

Hutch and Coop- how to raise small animals, chickens, rabbits, sometimes goats and pigs, coop plans, raising tips, breed highlights, keeping them safe, butchering, healthy animal husbandry.

Are you excited? I am!! This is exactly what I keep looking for on the magazine racks. I never see it. Mary Jane's Farm is pretty cool, but way too soft/fuzzy to truly satisfy my hunger for more homesteading matter. Remember that magazine called "Victoria"? I loved that magazine but after I had bought maybe my seventh copy of it I started experiencing a nasty case of N.O. (nostalgia overload). Everything is so gentle, so soft focus, people are all pretty with long wavy hair, delicate skin, and having precious tea parties every day. Mary Jane's Farm is threatening to be just as preciously nostalgic for "the good old days when life was simple and we all shat in holes in the ground".

A lot of people were really glad for indoor plumbing. And vacuums. Television was like a miracle of entertainment. Kids were not all that sad to stop playing with wooden tops and instead take up playing with Barbies and Legos. Our grandparents may have lived in a simpler time but I've listened to a lot of old people in my time (because I have always loved and related to them) and I've got to tell you that while all of them like to look back, the main thing they long for is the price of everything as they knew it in their youth. Inflation of cost of living is their number one gripe.

Those of us who are tired of gang killings, violent movies, the apathy of modern youth, corrupted governments, and who look back to a "simpler" time forget that back when our grandmothers were canning all their own food and baking their own bread, they were also really poor and they didn't have a whole lot of choice. The governments were just as corrupted then as they are now. People were robbing banks and going on killing sprees, committing suicide rather than face starvation, living on dust and hope alone. Our grandparents did a lot of what they did because they had to.

I still recognize the value of the things they did for themselves and I emulate their life skills and I want to get to a place where I don't need Lowe's to do everything for me. I want to do for myself. But I don't have blinders on about the past. It wasn't a gentle life for most people. My grandfather was one of thirteen children in a fairly poor family. Before he died, if you asked him about the "gentler" past you will hear of child abuse, poverty, harsh winters, and setting off at fourteen to go work.

So when I look at the past I don't idealize it and I don't want other people to do it either. I think it robs our history of its truth. Paris is a city with a lot less disease since it got plumbing. Most of us are living much higher quality lives because of our harsher more industrialized world. That doesn't mean we shouldn't get back our independence- we need to strike a balance between our modern convenient lives and the blessings of running water, and our ability to feed ourselves and care for ourselves without the grocery store.

*****************

I've already begun fleshing out what articles I would like to have in my first issue. I have many wonderful friends who happen to be craft and urban homesteading genius' and many of them are excellent writers and photographers. You know, I almost cried last night in a rare fit of emotional gratitude for the kind of support I've received in so many ways on my blog. (Don't worry, I choked all the tears down. I don't even like to cry in private. I'm tough that way.) I'm not actually sure what I've done to inspire it- but I definitely don't take it for granted.

I was thinking how cool it will be to open a magazine and see some of my favorite blog people featured in it. I won't be using up all my friends' genius at once, just in case I manage to get a second issue out, I'll need to be able to drag invite others into my project later.

Around the Farmhouse

Pippa, stalking scraps and moths in the kitchen.

Feet. Not Philip's.

Tomatillos waiting to hit the stew pot. Think they smell the fear of the ones that just got cut and dumped?

The top of our town. Not technically a shot from the farmhouse.

Philip and Max enjoy chess in the morning.

All of these pictures are the first batch from my Rebel XT that I bought used from Mary at "Confessions Of A Craft Addict" several months ago and am still scared of. I am finally playing with it and Mary sent me this book to help me take better pictures...Thanks Mary!!!

Chick would like you to know that you should really give her that thing you're eating right now. She also would like to know why the chickens get all the scraps while she only gets the ones she steals?

Something I saw today: a book of pictures of dogs that live in vineyards with little bios on each one. It is so funny! The pictures are really cool too. Someday when I can afford to buy a special treat of a book- this one is coming home to me! I saw the American version and the dogs in it are sweet, hilarious, pretty, and just make me want to know them all. I'm not even really a "dog" person but this book had me laughing out loud.

I don't know how I lived for twenty five years without seeing why people love dogs. (I was twenty five when I started overcoming my intense fear of dogs)

A random question I would like to ask myself- why continue eating a cinnamon roll that is squishy like half cooked dough and tastes like perfume? There's no sense in finishing something so gross.

I've come to realize that I am joyously obsessed with photography. I'm working on my first professional photography job too with Walnut City Wineworks.* Isn't that funny? I mean, I didn't really see it creeping up on me. It just did. Now that I look back, I recall being obsessed with my very first camera that took square pictures. I spent hours setting up my barbies in different "scenes" and actually did some on-location shoots in Lithia Park. I still have some of those pictures somewhere.

I know there are a lot of purists out there, and I respect it, but I prefer digital photography over actual film. I think you have so much creative control over the outcome and it's so much less expensive to learn to take good pictures when you can instantly delete all the bad ones.

It is largely thanks to Angela that I take decent pictures at all. And now Mary is pushing me deeper into the world of digital photography than I ever imagined I'd go.

Ultimately I have Hope to thank for making me realize that I'm a budding photographer.

Thank you Hope!

Now it's time to fight some mighty Bionicle battles at the top of the stairs for which I need a freshly cracked brewski. Happy Friday everyone!



*None of the pictures on their website are mine right now.

Anxiety

What if you spent your entire life training for the last breath you take? What if every shadow had a face, a possible name, a criminal history, and it wanted you? What if every day you had to get up like a shot out of a hot cannon? What if you woke with your heart racing, as though you'd already been running a marathon for all the hours you were sleeping, so that, in fact, you wake up exhausted but in motion? What if every time you step out on a balcony a voice in your head compels you to see what would happen if you jumped? Right now.

What if your world was never quiet? What if every situation in life presents you with five hundred angles that require close examination before you can proceed?

And what if you hear all the people in the world crying, laughing, hacking, dying, grabbing, loving, hating, bleeding out, escaping like little whisps of natural scentless gas into the atmosphere with the smallest whoosh, the smallest exhalation before sliding away. What if you always heard the entire world all at once and could never turn it off?

What if you couldn't sleep for weeks? What if you spent every night listening, because you had no other choice, and you become exhausted with living, with breathing, with not sleeping, and you begin to see life on separate planes all at the same time? Like a clairvoyant with no answers. Like a prophet with no wisdom. You just get more tired; hungry for sleep like a wild beast in a trap, waiting and hoping for something else.

I remember the 70' tree in our yard in Santa Rosa which caused me some fairly serious "concern". We had had some pretty intense storms and I was afraid that the tree, which was absolutely tilting, was going to kill the neighbors behind our house who lived directly in the trajectory of the great tree- I had figured out which way it was going to fall by close unscientific observation. There was no question in my mind that it was going to kill some people and that there was no amount of insurance that was going to make that come out alright.

Philip did not see understand my concerns at all. He said it was solid, even if it was tilting, and no storm was just gonna blow it over. I thought he was awfully condescending to think I had no solid basis for concern. Because I'm just a person that worries. About everything. We had unresolved discussions about the tree. I would have felt a lot better just chopping it down. Because then it wouldn't be able to kill anyone. We settled for getting an arborist to make sure the tree was healthy and not about to topple.

Meanwhile, our neighbors Matt and Sue (who we loved!), were having a similar quiet unresolved disagreement about their own Douglas Fir tree which had been topped at one point and Matt thought was quite dangerous. It had dropped some branches. Sue thought Matt was just worrying too much. Being a real ninny about this stupid tree thing. We all four of us chatted about our dangerous trees and Philip and Sue rolled their eyes while Matt and I completely supported each other in the debate. I absolutely agreed with Matt that a tremendously tall (but topped) fir tree is a danger in a terrible storm. He agreed that a 70' tilting fir tree was enough of a menace to look into.

But then we were relating the very same situation over the fence with another neighbor and he said to me "You worry way too much about everything!" And I looked at him keenly, like I'd just seen my first human and thought "If this dude even knew a quarter of what was going through my brain all day he would cry like a baby and beg for shock therapy."

Some time later I was talking with Matt, Sue, and Mike again and I mentioned casually how I had never had a license to drive a car and they all became slightly more electric, but polite, and asked me why. I said that I never wanted to be the person behind the wheel that kills other people's children. I'm not sure what they expected me to say. Mike said, again, "You really worry way too much. You've got to stop worrying!"

"Yes. It's a clinical problem. I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder."

I said it very matter of factly and to do my neighbors justice they all just took it in stride and never again cajoled me for worrying too much.

You have to imagine what life would be like if everything you did, and every person you met, and even your own brain, was a dangerous entity full of constant threat. It isn't rational and that's what's maddening. I am cognizant of the irrationality of my brain but helpless to enforce more rational thought. The impulses of my brain have been reinforced by my life experiences. I was literally never in a safe environment from the place where I was born until I found myself living alone. There has never been a day in my life when I have felt protected, safe, or sheltered. I lived in a physically and emotionally dangerous place for every single year of my life until maybe it became safer, more sheltered, and calm when I lived by myself when I was nineteen years old.

Who would you be if you could never trust a soul? Who would you be if you couldn't count on love, family, or any adult in your life, to make you safe? Who would you be if your whole experience of life was that you had to protect yourself and know that when you were a very small being you couldn't protect yourself?

You carry it with you.

There is no recrimination here. I do not look back on my life with any bitterness. Truly. I save all my bitterness for the vicissitudes of fortune in the past few years. Those I've loved, those who've loved me, my family, my friends, there is no blame and no need for sorrow, digressing into those tense years of the past. I don't wish to punish, to accuse or open old wounds. I wish only to tell those who might not know, how a person gets to be like me.

How a person lives a life never once truly trusting another human being.

I have said before that I am the master at appearing alright. It is true. You will never see all my true colors. No one ever has. I attempt to show them here on my blog because in spite of its exposure to the public, it feels more safe and private than any other place I've ever been. Because I can turn everyone off here. If I feel attacked I can moderate comments. I can shut you all out if I need to.

You can't shut out the people you'd die for.

It is so difficult for me to reveal any truths that involve my family because we are a fragile group. There are secrets that aren't only mine to tell. I can't say a lot. Partly it's because I love my family more than I think they ever really know.

My mom: who I always wanted to protect more than myself because she is one of those incredible exotic rare flowers that burst wide open into the desert heat- fearless for the burns she will inevitably suffer- she is the most gorgeous human I have ever met and she lives large and is generous in her heart and unwise in every way a heart can be. She is part child and part wise woman. It is almost impossible for people to not love her on contact because she is so breathtakingly daring and when she loves she loves with all of her.

My Dad: whose enjoyment of life and whose loyalty to kin have given me a great example to live by. Our relationship is fraught with thorns, yet he has always been there like a solid wall- paying for my root canal when I was 21 years old and broker than the ocean- encouraging me to get to know my biological father though it must have cost him something to seem so casual about it. I love his laugh, his enjoyment of the silly, his simple expectation that we will continue to work things out. He has gone through transformations gorgeous.

My brother: whose tough spirit I so relate to. Whose obsessive need for control is like a second heartbeat to mine. When we were growing up I would have given up my soul to protect him from his constant malevolent harm and abuse. I think he will never know how much I saw in him a warm heart, a genius artist, and a funny brother. It broke my heart a thousand times that I could not be an effective big sister. That I was powerless to stop the abuse. That I was so paralyzed by fear that I could only watch and fall apart inside. He was my second soul.

My sister: whose sweet/tart nature I abused because I was too envious to appreciate her properly, for which I've been ashamed for years. Whose love I have been striving to earn ever since. A woman with whom I have the most piquant things in common such as our love of airports. I watch her now and see that she is as beautiful and swelling with generosity as the mother we share. I see her like a movie star and I want to be worthy of her admiration. She has grown up alone in so many ways and I wish I'd known she needed me as our brother did. I love her so much that sometimes I think I'll explode with it.

All of them have their own part in my life. Things I can't tell because it's their story too.

I have often felt invisible to them all. I've begun to feel my mother's eyes on me. I'm so damn far from perfect, her little mentally ill first born. But I have heard her speak now in ways I swear my little infant self never heard. Maybe I wasn't listening loudly enough.

There are ways that those like me become who we are. Some of it is because of the way we're wired when we're born. And then there's the rest of it. Some us can say why, some of us are bound not to. Secrets can be corrosive but sometimes just knowing why is enough. Telling others may not change a damn thing.

I have never, a single day in my life that I can remember, not felt this pressing fear. A sense of vague (or acute) danger. It has been present in my body my whole life. Getting a diagnosis was, therefore, a relief. It helps to know that it's not something I can just wish away. It's not something I can meditate away. It pulses in my blood. I will worry about the texture of the paper I'm writing on because I can hear the pen moving across the fibers as though it was a sound that everyone can hear.

There were many days of my life when the fear was a rational response to the unsafe environment I lived in. So for me it is always real. Even when it's not.

Every morning I wake up I kind of hope it's all over. The worrying. The vague dread. The panic. The sense of danger. And every day I wake up to the same anxiety about what today will bring.

Today was pretty wonderful. I got stuff done, I hung out with friends, I rode my bike with my son, I enjoyed my wonderful spouse's company, I enjoyed the setting sun on a rooftop bar in the town I've settled down in, and just enjoyed myself royally. Really, I did. But the point of this post is that in spite of all this enjoyment there is still a shadow of anxiety that lives in my flesh. It is unshakable. Like a heart defect, or a cancer. This is what my legacy is. My neurological challenge. My brain doing it's own thing.

The main thing, at the end of the day, is that I still love my family and friends, no matter what.

Job Skill: Multi Tasking Genius

now everyone will want to hire me

Today has already been jam packed even though I've had my friend Lisa B and her three kids for a visit, Max had a sleep over with his friend, I stayed in my PJ's until 10am and it's only 3pm. But that's not all I did. I did the dishes. I put a bunch of stuff away in the kitchen. And then I finished my blueberry project. I was freezing them and you have to do it in two steps. Wash and freeze them, then you package them up. Freezing takes a few hours so it's easy to walk away from them for several weeks while you start a rock band in your garage.

You can't leave food unprotected in the freezer for very long before the freezer begins to eat away at the quality. I learned this lesson well with my strawberries. So it's been hanging over my head. I did it. They are all done.

This is not urine.

Another thing that's been hanging over my head is my limoncello project. Remember that? Cindy sent me lemons when I couldn't buy them myself (from her own tree) and I was making her limoncello recipe. Well, after letting the peels steep in the vodka for the requisite 40 days, and then another 100 days after that...the peels have no color left in them and I still have not completed the project. Which is stupid because I think it's about time for some chilled limoncello, don't you?

Because I'm an incredible multi tasker I strained the limoncello while making a batch of sugar syrup to sweeten it (the last step) and AT THE VERY SAME TIME I was heating some questionable* milk to make into ricotta.

I know what you're thinking.

"How the hell does she do it?!"

I was thinking about how I was going to write a post about my awesome multi-tasking which is the employers gold standard skill when suddenly my milk (while I was straining the peels) went from 185 degrees to 207 degrees and boiling over.

In case you don't know it, you are not supposed to boil milk while making ricotta. Ooops!

What is it they say about pride cometh-ing before a fall?

Yeah, so I'm going to use it anyway because the last time I made panir cheese it turned out more like ricotta, and you do boil the milk to make panir. Maybe I'll rename it "panatta"?

Maybe not.

Meanwhile.... Now we are going to bicycle downtown while my sugar syrup cools down and then when we get home we will get to combine it with my lemony vodka. It will involve tasting it until I get it just how I like it. I'll probably be prepping the last of my peaches for freezing while I do it.

*5 days past it's date, but it didn't smell bad so what the heck?

The Name Of A Thing

This is my all time favorite magazine. It was well made, well written, had some ads but not intrusive, useful information, wonderfully inspiring (but not annoying) pictures, and it covered both growing and cooking food. I have every copy they ever printed of it. Sadly, they stopped publishing it. Perhaps it was just a year before it's time?

Cook's Illustrated uses almost identical format and paper and also has very high quality content. I always wish for more photographs though. Everything is tested out very well (their trademark, practically) and it treats the reader like an intelligent and curious being who loves cooking not just because home cooking is better for you but because it's fun, it's science, and it's gorgeous.

What neither of those magazines have is a more thorough coverage of the topics that generally interest people who cook and garden. They are often also interested in canning, preserving, sewing, household management, politics, the environment, family, community, and levity. "Household" magazine also lacked levity. Sadly, most publications don't take irreverence as seriously as they take Paris Hilton. However, this ad came from a magazine I love from the early thirties (and it was published all the way through the forties as well) and it had recipes, household hints which featured the constant theme of how to make things last, how to make food and money go further, and how to be more efficient.

It also included a very embarrassing racist cartoon series that it shocks me to see. Not something I tolerate at all in my life.

If you take these three magazines and give it an edgy urban sensibility and some irreverence, you will get the essence of what I want to publish.

Coming up with a name is quite a process. What's in a name? I'm not going to trot out Shakespeare. I promise. Names are important. Anyone in marketing can tell you that. It's a miracle that I, a marketing flop, also know it. I always have. Names are the essence of a thing. It's not always easy to catch that in a phrase, in a breath, in a word.

My publication will be about Urban Homesteading. I can't seem to come up with a better word for what it will encompass. Here's what urban homesteading means to me in plain words:

growing
building
fixing
cooking
preserving
making
learning
thinking
changing
brewing

I have come up with a list of possible names:

Urban Homesteading
Journal of Urban Homesteading
Urban Homesteader's Companion
Modern Homestead

Of course, I could use "Dustpan Alley" as the title. But, on a newsstand that will mean nothing to almost all people.

I've looked up variations of "Urban Homesteading" in the United States copyright library and it seems fine but I don't know how deep a search I need to do. Any ideas on how to make sure a name isn't taken?

Everyone knows about Path To Freedom, right?

And Homegrown Evolution, the writers that recently released a book called "The Urban Homestead"

Interesting that their book title didn't show up in the copyright library search.

Name ideas? I'm going to brainstorm some more and will hopefully return with more ideas. This is one of the hardest parts of the project.

I like this: "Urban Homesteading...civil disobedience you can eat"

She Don't Shave Well

This one's for Capello

Talent is a funny thing. Some of us have it, and some of us don't. I've been accused, many times in my life, of putting myself down. People have expressed concern for the health of my self esteem because I readily admit to my million shortcomings, generally using a megaphone to admit them to the most possible ears at one time.

You might almost say I have a talent for exposing my foibles to others.

A talent is generally anything we seem to have a knack for doing well, as opposed to skill, which is something we work hard to achieve. Talent comes to us like a fluid extension of who we are. It comes to us the way rivers rush to the ocean. Almost without thinking we can do things that others have to work harder at.

So when I said (in a previous post) "I don't come up with clever phrases like 'It's a good thing' because they make me want to shave my ass and roll in salt afterwards" I mistakenly assumed that shaving is a special torture for everyone and that everyone consistently nicks themselves and gets razor burn every single time.

Salt on nicked skin is no gentle frolic. Hence my comment.

What I didn't recognize is that I actually have a special TALENT for nicking myself every time I shave and no matter what razor I use or products I slather on my legs or in my arm pits, I effortlessly get the most fabulous razor-burn. You couldn't get a better one than me even if you trained for it like an Olympian. If it weren't for Capello's comment I might never have recognized my own shaving achievements.

Talent is malleable. You can look at it from different angles. So, in honor of discovering one's hidden talents and yelling them into the mega-phone, here are a few more of my talents you all may not be aware of:

• I have a talent for not walking the dog. It's not as easy as you might think to get the spouse to do all the dog walking. You really have to be capable of tuning out the dog's constant eyeful reproach and become impervious to her long doleful stares at her leash. Plus you have to have incredible debating skills in order to convince others to pick up your own slack.

• I have a talent for ruining clothes in the laundry. For an activity that used to involve rubbing your garments against a washboard in the creek and hanging them to dry, you'd think it would be hard to ruin clothes while washing them. And you'd be right! You have to concentrate hard to forget to empty the pockets of hard candy, lip balm, frogs, sharp bike tools, and spare kittens.

• I have a talent for not getting things done. Some people see this as a "fault" but I like to think of how good it feels, most of the time, to do nothing remarkable. The trick is to avoid guilt. For most people this is near impossible. They cannot let go of the "should haves" and "could haves". I tell guilt to go to hell and consequently enjoy the time I spent picking at my nail polish, checking my empty in-box, and day dreaming about all the ways I could be spending my time.

I'll save the rest for later. I don't want to overwhelm anyone with my unbelievable talents. How about you tell me some of yours?

Etsy Shop Announcement

Now with fat quarters!

I have just uploaded the first batch of fat quarters in my Etsy shop. By the end of today I will have all of the ones pictured above listed and ready for sale.

This one is already listed.

And so is this charming witch and cat Halloween fabric.

Come see them at Dustpan Alley Etsy!

All My Eggs

and no basket to put them in

I found out today that my book proposal did not get accepted by Lark Books. To say that I don't give a damn would be a lie. Just like it would be a flaming lie if I said it didn't hurt that I got passed over for the library job- even though I had some pretty great endorsements from people whose opinion means something to the person doing the hiring- yeah, it was a fresh crush in the chest. On both counts.

You know what's really nice? It's nice that I don't have to worry about getting pregnant. Because my eggs are starting to do the New York Times crossword while I drink coffee in the morning and I could swear I heard one of them say "Yo bitch! Gimme some sugar!" today.

You can count on me to see the sunny side of the street.*

You know how sometimes you have an itch to read something, though you're not sure what exactly, so you look on the library shelves for it and only find Oprah looking back from every book spine? So then you go to your local book store hoping to find that book you're in the mood to read, the book you know will lift your spirits and raise the bar on the status quo, and you don't find anything but the memoirs of people who are filthy rich already, vapid, and wearing the most stupid clothes you've ever seen?

I know how that is.

Sometimes you have the write the damn book yourself.

And publish it yourself because no one will ever believe in you enough to hire you to do it for them. Maybe because your tongue gets tied when you try to explain your ideas.

So, here I am. Point blank. The empty page.

Writing will almost certainly never make me a living. So thank god for the wonderfulness of my boss at Hopscotch, for hiring me to work for her in the toy store. It really does help us that I'm working there. Then there's my Etsy shop. I've been working much harder at keeping it stocked and I've been getting more orders. Those orders have been so incredibly helpful! I want to demure and say I don't need them, but every time it looks like the power might have to be turned off here, I get enough orders to get us through the tight spot. So maybe, just maybe, I can do what I'm doing right now and we'll be able to stop using the credit cards and start paying them down. It feels like an awful lot to ask the Universe to keep up this more hopeful trend.

So, about that empty page.

It's time to make that magazine I was talking about. Tonight I will write my outline. I flesh out the real details. I aim to get the first issue ready by November first. I don't intend to share the content of it here because if I did that there would be no reason to produce this mythical beast. However, I intend to share the whole process of producing it. I intend to invite you to participate and try not to be offended when you don't. I intend to elicit the help of my friends to get this thing made (you know who you are!!) for trade. I have lots of great stuff with no where to sell it. I can't pay a dime. Even if I had one I am not allowed to embark on any ventures which require capital investments. I fail at those kind of ventures.

This one's for me.

Because I know I can do it.

Because I know what I have to offer is worth page space.

Because no one has done it yet.

Because I'll never be able to explain to Lark, Chronicle, or Quirk books why they need me and unless I can convince them myself they will never pick me.

Because I talked to Capello this week-end on the actual phone and she is such a ROCK STAR! (OK, that's not really a reason why I'm going to publish my own magazine, but I have been dying to say that and have had a hell of a time finding the appropriate moment to slip that in.)

Basically what I'm doing is starting my own team and picking myself first.

For me that's profound.

Sometimes it's the only way to show other people what they're missing. Sometimes it's the only way to get others to listen and to see your vision: to set them free of any obligation to recognize it until everyone else does. By then you don't need anyone.

I promise not to put myself on every cover.

I promise not to preach.

I promise never to stare you down from the front of every cracker and cereal box in the grocery store.

I promise not to coin every clever phrase I can come up with (this one's easy because I don't come up with clever phrases like "It's a good thing." because they make me want to shave my ass and roll in salt afterwards.**)

I promise to continue to seek the light while never running from the dark.

That's it. That's all my eggs.




*(And run like hell.)
**Oh, excuse me for that little coarse outburst.

Tomatillo Salsa
the recipe

Ingredients:

5 1/2 cups husked, cored, and chopped tomatillos
1 cup chopped onion
1 cup chopped jalapenos
1/2 cup white vinegar
4 tbsp lime juice
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp salt

• Prepare canner, jars, and lids.

• In a large stainless steel saucepan, combine all of the ingredients. Bring to a boil over a medium high heat, stirring constantly. Reduce heat and boil gently, stirring frequently, for 10 minutes.

• Ladle hot salsa into jars, leaving 1/2" headspace. Remove air bubbles and adjust headspace if necessary by adding more hot salsa. Wipe rim. Center lid on jar. Screw band down until resistance is met, then increase to fingertip tight.

• Place jars in canner, ensuring they are completely covered in water. Bring to a boil and process both 8 ounce and pint jars for 15 minutes.

You should know that the amounts I've given are for one batch, which is ridiculously small. I made 5 batches all at once. If you're like me and would like to make a lot at once multiply all of the ingredients by five. It's nice to know you can do smaller batches, though, because if you have a lot of these ingredients in your garden you may only be able to make a little at a time as things ripen.

You can use other types of hot chili peppers, according to your tastes. I only have eyes for jalapenos because they don't make me burp as much as other peppers. I like serranos too but they tend to be too hot for me. If you used a cup of serranos per recipe I think you'd be breathing fire and then you might die. So if you like things hotter, try a blend. Just be sure that the total amount of peppers you use remains the same.

You can also use a little more garlic if you like.

This salsa is quite soupy. Philip wanted to know if it can be made thicker. I'm not sure about that yet. I have to do a little canning research before I know how much I can safely adjust the liquid content. (If I was just making it for fresh eating, instead of for canning, I would just cook it down til it was as thick as I liked). Until I find out, or some other experienced canner gives us the answer, don't mess with it. It's amazing just as it is.

Kelly, my good friend Chelsea, and Edot also mention roasting tomatillos first and I think that sounds great, so I might have to try that for the next batch.

Hey, if any of you are posting about your own canning projects, will you mention it in the comments with links so I (and anyone else) can share the canning love? I love seeing what everyone else is putting up for the winter right now. I've shown you mine, now you show me yours...

Tomatillo Salsa

14 pints is not enough

Tomatillos are a queer fruit. They hide demurely in their husks until they come of age when suddenly they are splitting all their seams and bursting out like exuberant teenagers who have just discovered music. You expect them to be full of juice and lusty sharp flavor but they are strangely dry until cooked.

Strange cousin to the tomato both belonging to my favorite plant family Solanaceae. Other notorious family members include: potatoes, mandrake root, peppers, deadly nightshade, eggplant, and Angel's Trumpet (Brugmansia).

The skin of the tomatillo is waxy and sticky. Not a tactile treat for those of us who don't enjoy having tacky residue stuck to our skin. The smell of a raw tomatillo isn't particularly enticing. In fact, it has a strange almost fleshy scent. So what made humans decide to try the fruit of this plant which obviously belongs to a family of Borgias? Good question. If I had come across this plant in the wild I would have expected it to be like a tomato. But I would have been suspicious of its likeness to its poisonous kin. Will it kill me? Or will it be nourishing?

Most importantly: will it taste good? If I had decided to risk death and hallucinations to answer this important question I would have been very disappointed in it right off the vine. What on earth leads humans to cook things that don't taste good raw? Dogged determination? Complete stupidity? Someone found out that tomatillos, when cooked, have a very different flavor than when they are raw; that it is pleasantly tart and sprightly. Someone, eventually paired them up with all the ingredients to make it into *an incredible salsa.

This salsa is so good (in my estimation) that 14 pints of it is not sufficient. I intend to use it in many applications. Obviously it's great eaten with tortilla chips. It is also amazing with eggs. I'm eager to pair it with black beans. I would also like to make tomales and use this as a sauce for them.

I will be thinking of the brave person who uncovered this fruits merits all winter long. Cooking without the Solanaceae family would be devastating. I think European food, before the arrival of these south and central American treats, must have been very dull. What would Italian food be without tomatoes? Or British food without potatoes?

The salsa took a long time to prep. I found myself wondering if any salsa could possibly be worth so much effort and drama. Yes: DRAMA. My spouse generously offered to help so I had him cut the jalapenos with the warning not to touch his face or eyeballs until he had thoroughly washed his hands. If I had had gloves for him to wear, I would have given him some.

Sometimes crazy people hear things differently than non-crazy people. Sometimes you need a translator to understand how their ear hears things. For example:

When I said "Be sure not to touch your face or your eyeballs until you've washed your hands" what Philip heard me say was:

"Be sure to touch your face IMMEDIATELY!" Which he did within a couple of minutes. Without washing his hands.

His forehead started burning and he was sweating so the burning began to spread. He washed his face and then dried it with a towel. Which made the burning spread more. So he started to panic. Panic makes us humans do irrational things. Normally, if something you just did to help a bad situation, ended up actually making the situation worse, you would not continue to do it. In a panic you don't recognize rationality. So Philip, in a panic because his whole face was burning, washed his face again! His panic also made him sweat more profusely and this had him very concerned that the pepper burn would soon be in his eyes.

I told him to stop. To just stop making it worse. A spouse, whether male or female, never enjoys hearing this.

The thing is, I should have considered his asthma before setting him on pepper duty. I felt so bad afterwards. He started wheezing which is what he does when he eats food that is too hot for him. It has an immediate effect on his breathing. Guys are notorious for believing that there is some connection with an ability to ingest super spicy food with the strength of their manhood. Very curious that women rarely suffer this same issue. Philip used to be a very typical male in his macho love of spicy foods. However, over the years it became impossible to ignore the reaction his lungs had after he would eat really spicy food.

It's easy for a lot of people to dismiss asthma as an imaginary complaint if they've never experienced it for themselves. If you've never had difficulty breathing you don't worry that you might suddenly not be able to breath. You take breathing for granted. But people with asthma do not have that luxury. Asthma can be life threatening. So it's actually quite understandable that Philip, who started wheezing, might be worried about how bad it could get.

That didn't stop me from wanting to tell him what a delicate flower he has turned out to be.

This all made me wonder what people did to protect themselves when processing large quantities of hot peppers before there was such a thing as latex gloves? I think about these things because they are disposable, made of latex, and will sit in landfills for a long time. How do things like this fit into a "slow" or a "green" life? My inclination is to not use them. I felt the burn on my hands for at least an hour after cutting up just twelve of the remaining peppers. I didn't mind so much. But it really can hurt.

So, was it all worth it? Oh HELL YEAH!! There was a little left over and I tried it. Oh yes! Clearly I need more. Tomatoes might not be as prolific this year but I can do a lot with this tomatillo sauce/salsa. I do want to note that I had had tomatillo salsa from Trader Joe's before and it was nothing to write home about. Very boring. You have to try it home made. I thought I didn't like tomatillos until my friend Lisa E. made some and I tried it.

Go make some yourself!!

*There are many recipes out there. I used the one from the Ball "Complete Book of Home Preserving" but it can also be found in their "Blue Book". The link I've given here is to a recipe by Rick Bayless, a well known chef and author whose specialty is Central American style cooking.
The one thing I see missing from most of the recipes I just saw is lime juice. Lime juice is, in my opinion (and my friend Nicole's opinion) A MUST. If any of you would like me to put an actual recipe for this on my blog here, request it and I shall deliver.

Home Preserving
weird recipe hall of fame

This salsa is good, but not good enough to warrant making as much of it as I did last year. I am much more excited about tomatillo salsa which I am making and canning today. Canning what you like takes experimentation, it means sometimes you spend time canning things you don't like first.

It's the same with eating. I accidentally bought this yellow watermelon. I'm not a fan. It doesn't have as strong a flavor as the red kind does and it looks anemic to me. I can't feed it to my child who already has very strong views on what constitutes edible food, he has been eating lots of watermelon in the past couple of weeks which is fantastic! But I know without asking him that he will not take kindly to his watermelon changing color on him. He likes things to be "how they're supposed to be".

I've already admitted that there are some canned items that I would never have tried if my friends didn't make them first and twist my arm to force me to try them. Peach salsa is one of them. I actually like the peach salsa, but not enough to make some for myself. Jalapeno jelly sounded wrong. Just plain WRONG. Until I had some poured over cream cheese and eaten on crackers. I found myself unable to stop eating it. Pickled peaches- doesn't sound all that great but I actually liked it. Another one I tried was bread and butter pickles. I already knew I loathe sweet pickles so I was pretty sure I wouldn't like these. Yep. Any amount of sugar with my dills makes me want to gag.

See how, with ease, I bring us all back in time to the eighties with my words?

There are some recipes in my "Complete Book of Home Preserving" by Ball that I am reasonably sure I would rather be poked in the eye with a dirty needle than eat, and here they are:


Carrot Cake Jam- not only does it just sound awful...the idea of cake pulverized into a spread to put on toast, it uses canned pineapple. I have a problem canning foods whose ingredients include already canned foods. Twice canned pineapple- will there be any nutritive value left? And how old will it be when you finally get in the mood to eat your cake-jam? It's already likely at least a year old. I get in the mood for cake jam NEVER, so I'm guessing that pineapple will get very very old.

Sundae In A Jar- why do humans want to put everything in a jar? What is this twisted urge we have? What's good about a sundae, in my opinion, is the separate ingredients coming together suddenly on your spoon, and maybe beginning to mix as the ice cream melts. The idea of taking an ice cream sundae, letting the ice cream melt, and stirring all of the ingredients together in one great big sugar soup sounds repulsive to me. Granted, this recipe is just adding chocolate flavored liqueur to a batch of jam style fruit...but why? Why not open up a jar of strawberry sauce to pour over some ice cream and then pour some chocolate fudge on it?

Tropical Breeze Freezer Jam- again, with the previously canned ingredients! Add some mashed banana to the "jam", shredded coconut, and mandarin orange slices and you have food not fit for my chickens. Who would eat this on toast? I don't even want to think about how much like clumps of slug guts the banana must be like...nasty. This recipe is proof that humans will eat anything.

Jelly Bean Jelly- this is the worst of the worst. The only real food ingredient is apple juice. Dudes- this is a recipe for a jelly that will taste like jelly beans using flavoring oil concentrates and, if you like your jelly on the festive side, food coloring. This is not food. There is no reason to eat this. If you want the flavor of jelly beans, what is wrong with just eating some jelly beans? It's that charming notion of "food in a jar" which is Ball's way of trying to drum up interest in their jars in the non-canning sector of the populace. Anyway- is it true that some people, while eating jam on toast, really wish their jam tasted like jelly beans? No, don't tell me. I can't know this kind of stuff, it will make my head explode!


You must bear in mind that if you twist my arm hard enough I just might give in and try your proudly canned "Twinkies In A Jar" jam, but beware what I will force you to eat in return.

Caramelized Onions

If you have never caramelized onions, it's time you did. I realize that they sound ever so slightly haughty like something a crazed "foodie" would make that the rest of us would find stupid (like "caramelized oyster juice"?!@)...but they are amazing. It takes a little time to do them right and that's one half of the caramelized onion trick. It's very easy:

Onions + Medium-Low Heat + time = Perfect Caramelized Onions

That is your equation. You must follow it. Do not be tempted to rush yourself. Be making other things at the same time and do at least three onions at a time so that you'll have plenty. You need to let the onions brown ever so slowly. If you're a punk in a rush you will burn them with too high of a heat. You need to scrape them from the bottom of the pan moderately often. You want them to brown, but then you want them to brown all over.

Then what do you do with them? If you made ten of them at once you have the perfect base for a heavenly French onion soup. If you made less you can use it for topping on a home made pizza. If you don't feel like making pizza dough, use bread. Toast your bread, spread it with either marinara sauce or pesto sauce, liberally top it with the onions, and then cheese. Or use it for appetizers on crackers: cracker, then cheese, and then small pile of sticky sweet onions. Add them to sandwiches. Use them with ricotta in a manicotti stuffing.

I'm sure they must be able to make meat a lot nicer too.

Once you do these onions right, everyone will think you're a cooking star.

You will also never get over them.

Suicide For Beginners

It can easily be argued that an appropriate response to losing someone to suicide is to feel anger. Not only does the bible consider suicide to be an unforgivable sin* but the law ridiculously forbids suicide and so if you attempt it you can be arrested. So why not be angry if someone you love has performed the ultimate gesture of hopelessness and exhaustion? You have God and the law on your side, not to mention the many psychologists who will say that it's perfectly natural for you to feel that way.

I strongly disagree.

Anger at a suicide is a wholly self indulgent emotion. A lot of suicides live life feeling alone, unheard, and hopeless. Their motivations for leaving this earth aren't usually** to spite the living, to thwart them, to inconvenience them, or to hurt them. Suicide itself has been thought of as a selfish act, so why not have selfish emotions around it too?

I'm not entirely sure that once you've courted death, as a suicidal person does, that you ever lose your connection to those feelings of what it's like to really not want to exist. You may come through suicidal periods in life knowing that you don't want to die if it's not your time; you may find happiness and joy in life that you never thought possible when you reeked of the end of the life tracks; covered in the grease of despair; but it leaves an imprint in your consciousness that colors how you view life no matter how strongly you wish to live.

You develop a language and an understanding that the average person doesn't have. Most people, at one time or another, go through such a hard time that they briefly entertain the thought of offing themselves. Most people don't live in that head space for long enough to spare compassion and empathy when they hear that someone has killed themselves. Instead they trot out anger, pity (not the same as empathy by a long shot), or grey indifference because they're scared of the whole subject.

In high school I had an English teacher who was reputed to be one of the hardest in the school; the kind of teacher whose name was hissed fearfully in the dark corners of long scrubbed hallways for fear of invoking the teacher beast itself. His name was Mr. Pierce. Not that that matters. I figured it didn't matter what teacher I had because I was headed for hell in a great molten basket anyway. What difference would it make if I got there with one more D on my record?

As it turned out Mr. Pierce was one of the very first English teachers to inspire in me a longing to become a better writer. His strictness, his reverence for literature, language, and words made me see in him a person whose admiration was actually worth achieving. It was one of the first times in a very long time that I found myself actually caring about my homework because this guy, Mr. Pierce, was a stickler for a well turned phrase, or at the very least a great effort towards one. He wanted to foster a better vocabulary in his hormonal students and hadn't lost his own great passion for his subject. No teen-ager's indifference could wear him down.

We had to write a creative writing paper. He gave a number of examples of the kind of story lines we could use. I could sense the great upsurge of fear and dread amongst my classmates even as I found my mind racing with a million possibilities in excitement. In the end there was only one story I had to tell at that moment.

I wrote a first person narrative about a youth locked in a bathroom preparing to kill themselves. It was something like a stream of consciousness piece of work. I honestly can't claim it was a masterpiece. Yet the teacher, bored with every student doing a riff directly off of his proffered examples, must have felt some kind of frisson of life explode from the page because after turning it in he approached me and made the first real personal contact with me of the whole semester. He said "I think you must read a lot."

I nodded in the affirmative.

He then recommended a few books to me that I might enjoy, some of which I was happy to say I'd already read.

He then had me read my piece out loud to the classroom. Which I did reluctantly. I do not enjoy public speaking or being in the limelight in that way. I was honored that he had chosen my story to be read out loud. So I did.

As I predicted, when I finished reading my story and put down the paper, the class was completely silent. They squirmed. The teacher looked at them sternly. The bell released them.

I felt exposed and icky. That was the first time I'd ever shared my most private thoughts. Out loud. The teacher knew. The other students knew. Thank god I didn't have many friends already or I might have had to experience the agony of losing a couple.

The appropriate response to hearing that someone you know has killed themselves is to feel sorrow. Sorrow is appropriate. Missing them, if you liked or loved them, is entirely appropriate. Shedding tears and wondering what you might have done to help, had you known they needed help, is appropriate. Torturing yourself with that thought is not. Wishing they could come back, that you could replay experiences you had with them, perhaps rewriting a few, is natural. In the end I want to suggest you express your love for them and give them what they sorely lacked in life- give them the ear of your spirit and remember them not as you wish they had been but as they really were. They won't mind if you remember the drool sliding down their cheeks as they slept like babies, so long as you remember it kindly.

You should know that sometimes the people in a suicide's life could have done a lot to help and didn't, and sometimes they couldn't have done anything to prevent death. Each of us knows the real answer in ourselves. No one else can tell us what we might have done different. By the time we're processing our pain over the loss of a loved one to suicide it's too late to ask what we might have done for the dead, but it's never too late to ask what we can do differently for the living.

I cannot speak for all suicides. I wish I could because lord knows someone needs to speak for the ones who have no mouths where they have gone. I remember when I was sixteen and had just found out that a poem I wrote made a friend cry. I remember thinking about the power of words. About how my spirit and my pen and paper seemed like the same entity and that if I had any power at all in using them the most meaningful thing I could do is to help another suicidal person come through the other side, as I had done. If anything I could write would help them feel less alone, more hopeful, like someone out there spoke their own language without rebuke...I would have used my gift truly well.

So if you know someone you suspect is contemplating suicide, please check out the following resources. You may get some answers, some ideas how to help, and be less afraid to stick your foot in. Think of this: if someone is determined to commit suicide, what's the worst you can do? The worst you can do is nothing. You might be concerned about making mistakes, making it worse, but the truth is, if someone is determined there may be nothing you can do to stop it. But many people contemplating or attempting suicide desperately need to be seen and heard. So even if you don't know all the right words to say or the right things to do, just listening-seeing-and most of all- hearing them can make a world of difference.

Don't let them be invisible and soundless.

And if you lose someone to suicide? If anger rises, ask yourself- NOT HOW IT'S AFFECTED YOU- but what it meant to that person to exit life. Spend some time sending them love. LOVE. They need it. Even post mortem. We all need a lot more love.

Suicide Resources:

• McMinnville Suicide Hotline: (503) 434-7465 or 1-800-560-5535

• The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is a 24-hour, toll-free suicide prevention service available to anyone in suicidal crisis. If you need help, please dial 1-800-273-TALK (8255)

• San Francisco Suicide Prevention -I checked this site out and they have some really useful information and pointers on dealing with suicidal people.

• Untied States Department of Health and Human Services while I'm not crazy about any governmental institutions, this site has some good information and doesn't mention George Bush anywhere, always encouraging.

• National Institute of Mental Health I consider this site to be a reliable source for information on mental illness and mental health. There is tons of information available here.

*I don't read the bible so I have only heard this second hand. There is no way I can believe in a God that will forgive the molestation of children but not suicide, a frequent result of those who've been molested as children.

**This may rarely be the case but isn't generally the motivating factor behind suicide.

Cooking At Home

I've been spending more time in my kitchen in the past two weeks. I wonder what would happen if we all turned the necessary activities of living into activities we get enjoyment out of?

I keep thinking of what my good friend Kelly (at Her Able Hands) said in a comment about considering the monetary value of our time at home "I've never added up the cost of the things I do with my time at home...well... I should say never again...not since Ty was 2 and I spent a day writing down all of the things I did as a homemaker and assigned low-end salaries to those things--and concluded that I should have been making about $120K a year."

I keep thinking about that because so many people think of what they do at home as either drudgery or as time wasters unless it's "for fun". It's no wonder that I've heard so many people talk about their time being money. Remember how annoying I find that comment? There's no one person whom I attribute this attitude to. I've met so many people who've had it. Because of other people's attitudes about housewifery, I have certainly considered the question myself. When I was a housewife without a child my brother once accused me of "doing nothing" because I wasn't working for money outside the home, or going to school, or being a mom which, for some reason, is a much more acceptable reason to be home for most people than that you really love being a home maker.

What I learned being home is that having someone at home to take care of everything like laundry, growing food, preserving food, cooking every day, cleaning, and doing other household maintenance is far less expensive, in general, than having to pay others to do all of this for you. There are only so many hours in the day. If you work full time, and your spouse works full time, you are probably not doing some of these things for yourself. You are probably eating out frequently which means you're paying someone else to cook for you. Perhaps you are sometimes paying them minimum wage, but often you are probably paying others a good living to do for you what you could be doing for yourself if one of you could stay home.

When I stayed home I considered the work I did as professional. I took it seriously. I mean, I had fun doing it, but I knew that what I was providing for myself and my spouse was quality services. So I felt good about myself.

I love cooking. I'd rather be cooking than golfing and it is cheaper to have someone cooking at home than taking up golf as a past time. I like to think of the distant past when people weren't consumed by the need to constantly pursue entertainment. Oh, the royals and the upper class people always have, but people like me...our entertainment was simple and cheap and mostly we spent our time making things for ourselves like food, like furniture, and all the things we pay others for now.

Why shouldn't we enjoy doing for ourselves? I am in love with the DIY revolution! Why shouldn't it be fun to can our own food? Or to grow our own cut flowers? Or to travel the world in our kitchens once in a while?

On another note, I had the weirdest most annoying long dream/nightmare in which a royal wedding was going to take place and I was part of the huge party of guests but kept pissing everyone off by not knowing how to behave in polite society and doing things like falling asleep at the dinner table or wearing the wrong kind of clothes. I have rarely had such a complicated long dream following the same story line from beginning to end. I'm a pretty polite person but I definitely don't know what fork to use for what course and I have never learned to use a knife properly because vegetarians rarely have to grapple with tough flesh at the dinner table.

I'm glad to be awake.

It's Just As Bad As You Think

Finally! Definitive proof of alien life right here on earth! Yes, my friends, that is an alien emerging from the skin (the SKIN) of a regular farm tomato. This leaves me wondering why the hell the aliens are always honing in on farms? What is it with them and corn patches, farmer's barns, and probing all those poor rural folk? Don't they know there is plenty of strange city meat folk to experiment on?

This appears to be the first ever tomato live birth. I find it just as fascinating as I find it distressing that what is supposed to be a piece of highly coveted fruit has just given birth to itself three or four times. This is not a reasonable fruit.

Today I acquired far more produce than I will have time to process. It still isn't officially tomato canning season here because tomatoes are very late this year, however, I managed to get enough to make a big pot of tomato sauce for eating this week. I also got tomatillos to make tomatillo salsa with, plus some jalapenos, eggplants and squash for ratatouille, and I finally picked a bunch of the yellow plums that are overhanging our yard. We didn't have to go far to forage for those!

The plums don't have a strong plum flavor but they do have a pleasing sweet/tart fruitiness that will lend itself well to being a glaze on things like fruit tarts and other fancy dishes if the jam I made with them doesn't thrill us. I still have more and my friend Chelsea suggested making a plum sauce with them and I am going to do it! Most Asian style plum sauces are made with red or purple plums but the golden color of these plums will look nice too. I will use more sugar than the regular recipe calls for so that I can use this sauce like a sweet and sour Chinese dipping sauce. You know the kind I'm talking about? Bright pink syrupy sauce that has a sourness that tastes so good when spring rolls are dipped into it? I'm going to attempt to make a golden version of that.

So, that's a lot of work cut out for me. Luckily the kid has a friend over and so I can putz around in the kitchen all I want. Til my back falls off of my bones.

I want to say right here, right now, that I have not been overly sympathetic to my friends and family members who have deep aversions to yellow jackets. I have been followed around by them but generally found that if I didn't freak out they would eventually buzz off. Today I saw a different side of those wasps. I experienced the side that makes people quiver in their shoes and piddle on their carpets.

I was in my kitchen, pretty much minding my own business and not bounty hunting innocent flying creatures when, while trying to wash out my small enamel canner, I felt an intense sting in my arm. I looked at my arm and saw a yellow jacket attached to me by it's nasty syringe-size stinger and started swatting at it. I guess wasps don't like it when people swat at them so it starts lunging in at me trying to attack. Yes, it tried for my hip and I could almost feel the sting before I brushed it off again at which point it made for my chest. I'm thinking this dude had female issues.

Obviously I dropped my canner on the floor in this age old scuffle between people and nature (I'm thinking a Jack London style movie could be made from this epic saga) and ran screaming outside. My kid and his friend came to see what the big deal is. There's nothing like a couple of partially toothless skeptical seven year olds to make you feel foolish.

What I really wanted to do was leave the brave little men alone in the house and hightail it down to the pub to drink my shivers away and not come back until the natural life span of this evil winged beast was over. Naturally I'm not allowed to do things like that as a parent. So I had no choice but to show those two kids that I am a woman not to be messed with by some puny hairy looking punk.

So about two false entries into the danger zone I finally faced my foe like a man and caught him in a glass jar and released him outside in the front of the house.

I'll be damned if he didn't wing his way back to my porch within forty five minutes.

All this is to say: I understand now. I won't mock you guys any more. I promise. My sting still hurts and while it hardly compares to having given birth on the pain-o-meter it is a memorable moment.

I'm off to make sauces. I will be the sauce queen. Another time I'll tell you about how Max is teaching me to play chess and how scary it is how good he is at it for a seven year old.

Etsy Shop Update

My newest multi-dollar idea is the mystery craft bag: a grab bag for the crafty crowd! Yes, I know, it's pure genius and even now you are kicking your own ass for not thinking this one up first. Even Martha's minions are squirming in their executive seats because now that I've done it Martha will look like a loser if she does one too.

The concept is simple: I have about five million craft supplies here at my house that I made us lose all our money on trying to make a living running my own business. No, don't cry, we're past that now. I want to sell them off but couldn't figure out how to package them up...until now! Each bag contains craft supplies from five categories but you won't know exactly which items you will get- so it's a surprise!

Each bag will contain at least 5 decorative craft doo-dads which may include: vintage or new buttons, small millinery flowers, funny dress up rings, miniatures, mushroom birds and bugs, and random bits of interesting uncategorizable things that might be fun to use to decorate a craft.

Each bag will contain 1 yard of quality trim: ribbon, lace, or fringe may be included.

Each bag will contain something to decorate: paper mache shapes or boxes, ornaments, or over sized matchboxes. So if all you have is a glue gun and paint on hand, you could open this mystery craft bag and make something right now.

Each bag contains one type of craft finding: key rings, magnets, pin backs, barrette blanks, or cork coaster bottoms. This category is useful rather than fun. So, in theory, with this mystery craft bag you could not only decorate something- you could also make something else like a fridge magnet. It's all up to you and what you get in your bag!

Each bag will also contain one cellophane bag of hand selected ephemera from my personal collection: Dresden die cuts, cut up dictionary pages, bits from my collection of antique magazines, craft paper, and other odds and ends that are great for stirring the collager's imagination.

Admit it, I should be working for Martha! I have always loved grab bags in spite of my well documented loathing for surprises. I still have a plastic octopus I got in a grab bag from Magic Mountain when I was thirteen. His name is Oscar. Now Max has Oscar. Grab bags are great because you don't know what you'll get but you know just enough to be certain you'll like it. My genius mystery craft bag costs only $9.95!

You can buy this amazing bag of surprises HERE.

Also in my Etsy shop are a bunch of new fabrics. I'm filling it up with lots of great fabrics like a Michael Miller retro style fabric in which happy hot dogs are eating...hot dogs. How twisted is that? Come see if there's anything you can't live without!

Prison Camp Vs. Southern Life
which do you think is more depressing?

I guess it depends on who's writing the book.

Yesterday was a slow quiet day. Max played computer games from morning until bedtime. Philip prepared some wood with gesso and I got to read a great book called "Secret Lives of Great Authors" by Robert Schnakenberg. It's another irreverent treat published by Quirk Books, a company that needs to hire me. I especially loved the chapter on J.D. Salinger, a favorite author of mine. I had no idea he drank his own urine! The profiling of Salinger's fans is pretty funny too.

I also enjoyed the bit about William Faulkner working in the post office throwing people's mail away. I happen to hate Faulkner's work. I've argued with other writers about his supposed "genius" and how I think he's a pompous wind bag. A little man with a big complex. I read "Absalom, Absalom!" and by the end of the book I had reached a peak of hopelessness and despair for the whole human race that I almost wished we would all get erased from the planet.

What I think is funny is how reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's* book about Russian prison camps was so much more hopeful and funny. While reading "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" I did have to drink strong black coffee and smoke unfiltered cigarettes to get in the mood, but what I loved about the main character was that his spirit couldn't be crushed. No matter how he was starved and worked and beaten down, he always maintained his sense of hope for humanity and loved life in spite of how his had turned out. Now that is the kind of book I love.

However, it's been many years since I read it and if I reread it now it's entirely possible that it would depress me beyond belief. I once rented the movie "Dancing at Lughnasa" and Philip said "but isn't that a really depressing movie?" and I said "No! It's got great music and lots of great characters in it..." So when all of the great characters die off after terribly depressing lives Philip gives me the hairy eyeball and pretty much says he'll never believe a word I say ever again. Yeah, I forgot about all the poverty, retardation, ineffectual relationships, madness, more poverty, homelessness, and death.

The music really was great though.

I love that Kurt Vonnegut was as bad at selling things as I am. Apparently he ran a Saab dealership for a few years to help ends meet between books. Authors often don't make a very good living. So it's pretty perfect that I think I'm supposed to write books in my life. I wish I had it in me to write best sellers like Stephen King. Truth is, I'll probably write the kind of book that will get critical acclaim but not particularly grab the masses.

I'm wondering what kind of living craft book writers make? Is there a living in it?

There aren't a lot of jobs to apply for here in town right now. I found out that I missed out on applying for a library assistant job at our community college here in town. Damn it. There's a temporary job doing maintenance for the correctional facility that pays well and I think I can clean a toilet, mow a lawn, and trim hedges just about as well as anyone but they want someone with experience maintaining a "facility". From the job ads I'd say that the best work to get around here is in the health industry. Medical billing and nursing crop up all the time.

I have often wondered if I shouldn't try to write a romance novel? It would be ironic considering what an unromantic person I am.

It's cooler today and I'm seriously thankful for it. This is the first morning in a week that I haven't been sweating buckets by now. Philip gets paid today and so we can pay a couple of bills that are impatiently waiting. I am going to do an Etsy shop update here on my blog today too. I haven't done one in a long time and I have another multi-dollar** craft idea that I want to tell everyone about. No one needs to buy anything, I just want you all to confirm what I have long suspected: that I am a craft GENIUS!!!!! Ha ha ha ha.

Happy Monday everyone!!!




*I just found out that Solzhenitsyn just died this month! That is so sad!!

**I'm not allowed to work on any ideas that involve the investment of money. This is an idea I had for selling some of my craft supplies in a fun way. I already have everything here at the house.

While You Were Sleeping

(I was not.)

It's almost 1am. Hot. My skin is sticky in a non-sexy way. The thought of sex makes me feel like I'm going to suffocate. What is wrong with me? Isn't hot humid air supposed to get us all sexed up and ready for fun in the sack? I can't stand the feeling of hot sticky skin on mine. Warm skin is like an airless blanket. When I sleep I prefer to be somewhat cold. Does this mean I'm an awful bloodless woman? I like windows open, cold air flowing in, my skin brushed with sleet.

This was day four in the triple digits. We were all cranky and ready to implode. Others explode, I implode. Suddenly I'm remembering dangerous forays to the park across the street from Grace Cathedral in San Francisco in the middle of the AM, when the night crawlers are out. I would go to be alone. To think. To get air. I wish I could do that right now. San Francisco may have the very most ideal temperature of all cities for me. Which wouldn't be all that strange since I was born there. In a hospital that no longer exists.

I wonder who's awake and who's asleep, dreaming of hunky firemen? Another hemisphere is opening their eyes now. There are so many people on this planet already I'm wondering where we'll keep all the new ones getting born? I can feel everyone crowding right now. Yes, I know, I'm crazy. I have a medical file to prove it.

It's too hot to sleep. Sometimes when I can't sleep I worry that I will never sleep again. Not sleeping is one of my greatest fears. It's part of why I stay awake drinking into the wee hours. If I prolong the effort I will be so tired and full of soporific alcohol that I will not be able to help myself but to sleep. I will crash down into unconsciousness like I have a concussion.

Cold showers in the heat are awesome. I might have to take one in a little while. Normally I'm not all that fond of cold wet water on my skin. Amanda suggested it a couple of posts ago and I tried it and DAMN! Feels so good.

I am a winter flower. Calling myself a flower is my personal little joke. I'm so large that describing myself as anything delicate is ridiculous. No, I'm not dissing myself. Just being honest. If you could see my soul I think you'd see that no matter what shell I wear my spirit is robed in gossamer fabric and my love is complete. Love for this damned planet, its damned people, and all the damned animals on it.


Rarely has a body and a spirit been so mismatched. I have constantly blamed it on breaking my hip since that's when I metamorphosed from a stout but normal sized person to a very large person. The past two weeks my hip has been hurting me again. It's an easy excuse. It never really leaves me. I long to stretch my legs in a jog. To make my body burn with the effort of motion- but the consequent pain in my hip keeps me still. I'm not allowed to jog. Doctor's orders. Ever again. I long to take off in lengthy sinuous strides. Put some miles between myself and the present.

But that's all just excuse. It's harder to pretend at this time in the morning.

I don't like being up right now. In the quiet of night I can hear everything. I can hear you breathing right now. You think I can't, you think I'm speaking metaphorically, or poetically.

Have you read my poetry?

Then erase such thoughts from your brain. I hear you right now. I am almost a guest in your dreams. That's how loud your spirit exhales.

Thunder is here. I've seen the lightening. Heard the rumbling. I thought at first it was some kind of late night mud monster truck demolition derby. We have things like that around here. But it lit up the sky and made me think of the apocalypse. The one I don't believe in.

I think you're dreaming of Tom Selleck right now and you don't want anyone to know it.

Lightening again.

There was a time when I felt completely connected with the forces that be. When I could close my eyes and almost know what was coming. I could feel it out there. Not like a moving Ouija board but like opaque messages from the stars. Years ago a quiet fell down on me and clouded my vision, my hearing.

I was listening to music but now I'm listening to the thunder and lightening. There's no rain. Yet.

Ah. Here it is. I sat outside to watch the sky light up and thunder. I actually saw lightning. My thought was "Oh god, why didn't I take out life insurance on myself so that if it takes me Philip and Max can keep on going?"

I'm drinking the very last drops of my Santa Rosa plum liqueur, made three years ago. It is so rich and full of plum flavor. Incredible!

Am I ready for bed?

I don't know. I want to know what's coming. I want to know, before I go to sleep if we will lose everything or find a way to keep it. Can someone please tell me that? I love my life here in this house. I love the raised beds I've built, the roses I've planted, my funky cool kitchen, my chickens, my kittens, my dog, my family, my town, my part time job, my marriage, and I really like breathing.

Can I please stay here forever? Can I please not lose anything else for a long time? Can I please keep us from going under? I'm so tired of worry. I'm so tired of anxiety. I'm so tired of depression and loss. I'm tired of my own devices, tired of heat, tired of hanging by a thread at the neck.

I used to cast runes. I used to believe. I used to feel it. The churning of the earth and the answers hidden in the rubble.

I know, you'd like to know if I'm certifiable. Yes, and no.

Remember, I can hear you. Right now.

The wonderful thing is this cooler weather the thunder brings. Brushes of air not brought to us by the furnaces of hell. I'm going to sleep. I'm going to dream. I wonder if you'll be able to hear me too?

Listen.

Like a mockingbird I will sound an awfully lot like you. Like a reflection. Like a mirror turned light in the dark.

Listen.

Is your sky in thunder too?

Sleep.

Color Punch

using color in design

Sometimes I want drink color. Or eat it. My eyes get stuck on patches of it and can't move on because color has grabbed my retina. When I was sixteen I started painting with oil on canvas using that citrus scented turpentine substitute. Although I worked to improve my brush strokes and shadowing, the truth is, I mostly sat in front of my work day after day to smell the chemical solvent and play with the tubes of color; mixing them, diluting them, or applying them in big thick swathes. I began to understand why some modern artists, eschewing the more traditional representational art made paintings with giant blocks of thick color. They wanted to cover themselves in the paint but settled for the canvas. They wanted to share their hunger for the glossy pigment.

I feel that way sometimes with design. Sometimes design is more about the color of a project than it is about the shape or cut. I see a trim in lime green and it makes me summer-thirsty and a design begins to evolve from the pool of acidic refreshing punch of green. Shapes begin to emerge after the initial hunger that the color evoked. A hunger for more of it. Trim an apron in it. Or perhaps curtains. Something you'll see often so your eyes will eventually become satiated with it. Though the truth is, they never really do. A good color will make you want it forever.

Not everyone understands the emotional nature of color. Many years ago I visited the Musee D'Orsay in Paris and they happened to have a showing of Theo Van Gogh's collection of art, including a lot of work by his brother Vincent. For the first time I saw Vincent Van Gogh's work in person: right in front of me I could take in the wonderful azure color of his painting "Almond Branches In Bloom" which is the only painting of his I truly love.

Right next to this colorful beautiful painting were some still-lifes of Vincent's done in ochres, muted greens, and dirty browns. The word that came to mind was "pish" which was my family's euphemism for baby poop. These studies in brown were of vases of flowers and arrangements of fruit, things I associate with opulent color. It struck me as such a crime to use all ochres and browns to describe them with. What was he thinking? What was he trying to do to me?! Jesus!! Why would someone make something so hideous?!!

I felt anger well up from my spleen. I was angry the way I feel when seeing photographs of sea birds covered with oil spill. Angry at senseless injustices.

Then I felt stupid for being so angry about color. It felt like a punch in the gut and I reacted on instinct. When I started examining how I felt and why it should be so offensive to me I thought that maybe Vincent used only those dull, spiritless, dark colors because he couldn't afford the prettier ones. Maybe he was making do with what he had. Who am I to judge him for it? Yet I did. In doing more reading, later, I found out that his early paintings were done in somber colors by choice.

This is why the colors you use in designing anything are so important. You could make the most wonderful dress in the world but if you neglect to employ the power of color to evoke an emotional response in people, your design may fall flat. This doesn't mean you have to use bright colors or "cheery" ones. It just means you need to understand what color will say for your design and use it to your advantage. Use color to say what you mean.

Nothing that is lime green is going to say "elegant", for example. Not even Christian Dior could make a garment in lime green that says "elegance". Finding the right color voice for a design means learning to see the subtle differences in shades, tints, and hues.

You don't have to take color theory classes to learn how to work with color, though it wouldn't hurt. Practice is good. Playing around with pigments on a canvas is a good way to see what happens when hues are mixed with other hues, versus what happens when you mix white or black with colors. You can see how different combinations make you feel when you look at them. You can test combinations out on friends and family to find out why they like certain color combinations and not others. Look around you, what colors make you happy? Calm? Depressed? Ask yourself what it is about the colors that evoke different responses.

The best advice I received while I owned my brick and mortar retail store was from Bethany of Bitter Betty Industries who was, for many years, a merchandising manager for Nordstrom. I was trying to figure out how to make better window displays and she said "Always start with your color story and work outwards from there." I followed her advice and like magic my window displays pulled together, started looking more professional.

I'm going to give that same advice to all of you and entreat you to apply it not just to your designs, but to your whole life.

Start with your color story first.

Accursed Heat Wave

OK. I'm done with the stupid heat. Done. I can live without tomatoes* and eggplants. I am asking myself: why didn't I move to Canada or Alaska? Surely it isn't 90 degrees all night long there in the summer? 90 degrees might not sound that bad to some of you heat loving freaks out there, but after a three digit day all you want is for a cool breeze to come and bring the night air down to a comfortable 60 degrees. That's all you want.

But when it was 105 all day and then you try to sleep in a stew pot of human flesh and fur in air that stays steady and breeze-less all night at 90 degrees...it's enough to make me want to rip my own skin off so that my soul can sit around in its birthday suit unfettered.

It's going to be hot today too. Which means another night of no sleep. We've already had two steaming hot no-sleep nights and I'm not sure our fragile family unit can take another one.

I know Max and I went downstairs for some water at around 4am but apparently he was wondering the house by himself around 3am too.

In other slightly less cranky news... Penny and Pippa are getting their reproductive organs tampered with today so that they can't make cute little babies. I wonder if I had asked to get myself spayed with them if we could have gotten a discount?


Update: The kittens are home and feeling under the weather. Plus it's still flippin' HOT. We tried our air conditioning but I don't think it works because after two hours with it on it has only dropped from 91 degrees inside the house to 89 degrees. I'm sweating delightful buckets of sweat. Gorgeous sunset though. And we ate a wonderful salad with Sungold tomatoes and steamed potatoes I grew on my plot at the community garden, green beans, some cheese, lettuce, cold lentil salad, and a hard boiled egg. I ate it too fast to get a picture. Anyway, looks like another close suffocating night here at the farmhouse. I hope yours will be cooler!!!



*GASP!!!

I'D RATHER BE PICKLING

The slogan for my summer should be: I'D RATHER BE PICKLING!

My friend April has a picture up on her flickr pages of watermelon with feta, salt, and pepper which really tripped me up and out because the only other time when I have heard of such an odd pairing of fruit and cheese was when my Israeli step cousin was visiting and made me try it. I must confess that I didn't enjoy it. Which made me feel lousy because I also wouldn't go nightclubbing and I'm pretty sure we were written off as elaborately boring people. In April's comments she writes that the first bite was pretty good but she had to conclude that she is a "watermelon minimalist" which I enjoyed a lot.

I didn't know one could be a fruit minimalist. It made me wonder if I'm a "joy minimalist"? This would explain so much..."I'm not depressed all the time, I'm just a joy minimalist."

Not too long ago, maybe two days ago, I realized in a flash that I'm going to be one of those old people in my town that everyone knows and has stories about but I'll probably never hear them myself. I will shuffle around on my scooter, barely able to hoist my leg over the seat to get on or off because of my gimpy hip, and the shocking red lipstick I fearlessly wear will feather out from my lips in fine radial etchings so that I look like I've got a much bigger mouth than I do which will scare small children, and I'm going to smell like face powder and old perfume. I'm going to be teetering through the blueberry fields talking to myself and cursing at bumpkins who get too close to my jealously guarded buckets.

Either that or I'm going to be like the bald blond homeless guy with the bottle thick lenses who I'm not sure is completely cognizant of the same reality that I am. He's like kin*, so I cut him slack. How terrible to be homeless anywhere at all.

Remember that time that I was in a really dark place? And that other time when things were really bad and I wrote all those dark posts? Or how about that really blue period I went through when I was feeling so low and I sucked all the light out of the world? I know, I was thinking it's always kind of dark over here too. That's why I'm so pleased that I painted my nails glitter pink the night before last. There is really, literally, only two specks of it left on my actual nails, but the punch of silly color really added a boost to my morning. The rest of it is probably at the bottom of my pickle jars.

Just kidding! I peeled most of it off over the sink when I noticed it coming off. Now I miss my silly glitter. I rarely paint my nails. With so few vanities left to me I couldn't help but enjoy the sparkly dash of pink nails picking humble green beans against a searing summer sky and hard baked dirt.

My new friend Sarah and I had a pickling adventure. She picked (and pickled) her first ever batch of cucumbers while I picked and pickled some beans. I refuse to say "dilly beans". I'll just call them "dilled beans" because I just want to suck a little more light away from the happy people. Anyway, teaching friends to can and pickle things makes me happy. Sarah is a cheese maker and is going to teach me to make feta cheese. I love reciprocity like that!

There's been a lot of talk lately in canning circles about the cost of canning your own food. I think that people have an idea that canning food or growing it should be cheaper than buying it. I would like to say right now that monetary motivation for doing something for yourself is really cheap. When you're looking at it like that it's like you're looking at life through the wrong lens prescription. Why should you grow some of your own food when you can buy it for so much cheaper? Why should you can your own tomatoes when Trader Joe's sells huge cans of it for a fraction of the cost?

Do we count the hours of labor we invest in our children and calculate the cost to determine whether they are really "worth" the value of our time? Do we only cook food at home for ourselves if it costs less than going out?

I have a very long history of being pissed off with the whole "time is money" thing. Time is money when you're doing work for pay. If all the hours of your day boil down to what money you could be making if you weren't doing something that doesn't pay then your life is a very hard and sad one.

Why would I rather be pickling? I'd rather be pickling because doing things for myself is fully as important as taking care of my child. I don't count the hours I spend playing legos with Max in terms of money and I don't count my own labor into the cost of making dinner for myself and my family because there have to be some things I do purely for love, for deeper values, for our spirits, or I will die empty and cold.

So when I figure the cost of canning my own food I NEVER calculate the hours I spend doing it. Yes, time is money when you're on the clock, but when I'm home I'm not on the clock. I can my own food because it tastes better to me, I enjoy canning, I can count on there being no rat tails included in my jars, I know where it came from, and how it was produced. That kind of quality control is priceless.

I don't think everyone needs to can their own food. I'm not a proselytizer for preserving food at home. If you don't enjoy it, if you'd rather be...(I don't know what people do with their time who don't can their own food, garden, and other homesteading things)...whatever it is you do with your time- then don't. I don't care. Just don't tell me you don't can because it isn't cheaper than buying canned goods in the store. Because I just might sock you.

If I didn't continue to be the H.M.R. that I am I would want to make a t-shirt that reads "I'd Rather Be Pickling". I'm not even going to ask who else would want one. Because I'm not allowed to do anything but try to find another job that actually pays money.

For a treat that we're not allowed to have (because it is one more thing that goes on the credit card) Philip rented me some CSI episodes. So I'm going to go watch them and just pretend I am a worry-less person with adequate income and no tears. Life is good in the microcosm of the next few minutes. And the few minutes after that. Can I really ask for more? Is it rude to ask the universe to allow us to be alright for longer than today, tomorrow, and next week?

I hope you're all pickling too!





*Kin in the sense that he appears to be off-kilter and I'm sure I'll be no less crazy when I become a bag lady. Do you think I will somehow find a way to blog even when I'm in rags on the streets digging through the trash?

**Human. Money. Repellent.

Cheese And Fruit
a worthy food tradition

Everyone knows that apples and cheese pair well together. Cheese-and-fruit is a classic combination but I confess I rarely eat my cheese with anything fruity. I was working on a project for someone and she was suggesting good food pairings with wine. For one of them she suggested a cheese with a blueberry compote. I thought this sounded like one of those combinations you might come up with to help the Blueberry Commission sell more blueberries to the fancy crowd.

Even though I thought eating cheese with a blueberry compote was about as appetizing as eating goose fat on a cracker, I prepared a cracker with Dutch Fontina cheese and some of my blueberry lime sauce to take a picture of it. The glossy purple sauce was striking against the pale cheese and photographed well. When I was done with it I couldn't bear to throw out a perfectly good slice of Fontina and decided that I must eat it regardless of the blueberry weirdness.

Apparently my prejudice against eating my cheese with fruit has been denying me a world of pleasure. The sweetness of the sauce (with that delicate hint of lime) set off the nutty creamy Fontina so well I'd almost be willing to believe that they were developed specifically for each other.

My food education is a slow deliberate process. I am selective in what I will try. Because I don't eat meat, there are a ton of things I will happily never put in my mouth that are surely better put in yours. However, it is wonderful when these moments of discovery happen unexpectedly that open a whole new food vocabulary for me.

Now I can't help but wonder what unexpected food peaches can be paired with? Any ideas?

New Garden Bed Update

Enough with all this philosophical crap going on around here! My beet seedlings are up. My lettuce seedlings are up too. One kale seedling has made an appearance. The carrots have yet to pop up but they take longer usually and are fussier as to heat and moisture conditions. Even if I don't end up with beets for steaming I will end up with great beet greens to put on polenta this winter. Beet greens are tender and melting.

My winter squash didn't get planted early enough to produce so I will be ripping them out in the next couple of days and putting in more carrot and beet seedlings. Or I could leave the space open for fall planted favas. Hmmm. I may do that.

Second Sister

under a canopy of light

Human relationships are curious fragile volatile vessels of hope, expectation, baggage, need, remembrance; like dark blind rooms where shiftless spirits continually crash and burn, crash and burn until enough light leaks in through the pulled shades that we begin to see our own shape in the gloom and we learn the boundaries of those others we are shuffling with in these dark chambers here on earth.

Hazelnut orchards are eerie low canopied rows of green leaves shimmering like exotic feathers absorbing sound so that time has no real value in them. These hard edges of our tangled relationships become like so much moss gathering in the elbows of wiser beings. Beings that need no speech, no legs, no president to scoff at, and no crooked health insurance to keep them limping chronologically to the finish line.

I have been suspicious of of hazelnut orchards of which there are many in my area. I have smelt magic in them and felt their ominous quietness reaching out to engulf me, to absorb me, to subsume me. I have edged closer and closer to hear the melancholy music that seems to be pocketed inside the rows, muffled by the velvet dimness within tidy row after row after row.

Today we visited some new friends at their hazelnut orchard. At last I walked the barky lanes and looked up at the light from within, from the filbert underbelly, and I think now that all the peace in the world is right there. Everything is muffled; footsteps are soft even as they crush leaves, voices mute against the close air, and the light is filtered in such a way that you can see into the heart of the sun.

This has all reminded me of my gold fall-fairy glitter that I'm afraid may have been lost at last in all my many moves. I need to send some to a friend who is a second sister to me and needs it. My mother used it to make me my first (and only) magic wand when I was five years old and needed to turn some stupid mean twin girls into elephants. My mom had a big bag of this glitter and kept it for years. Not tiny squares of foil but big flaky chunky opulent flakes of magic. When I was twelve or thirteen I had completely forgotten about the magic gold "dust" because I had grown so old with worry and things I couldn't yet name that festered and threatened everything. I had no time to think of stupid glitter.

One day my mother had a garage sale. I remember looking through the things she piled in the driveway somewhat dispassionately, as though all those things hadn't really been ours but belonged to strangers. I flipped through books and casually opened a couple of boxes she was unloading when I saw the paper bag. With a slight stirring of genuine interest I opened the bag. It was like all the stars in the world had burst open in my eyes.

I am not a particularly sentimental person. The only reason I tear up at weddings is the same reason I have to choke down inappropriate laughter at funerals: a reaction I have to crowds of people gathered for any reason they care deeply about. It annoys the Jesus H. Christ out of me that I find myself choking up when I see people marching solemnly and that I am completely lost if the marching is accompanied by a band.

Suddenly I remember being woken up by that eerie funeral piping music in Glasgow that still haunts my head and I'd give anything to hear it again because it sounded so pure and sad and gorgeous like all the pride and sorrow and laughter that humans experience in life gathered into a chorus of sweet fight...I am going hopelessly off track. I wasn't kidding when I said hazelnut orchards are enchanted places and you can't be untouched by them if you listen to them.

When I opened that bag and saw the glitter sparkling back at me I felt that I had found all the good magic in the world. Glenda the good witch has nothing on this magic. When I waved that wand at those horrid blond ringleted princess girls and told them I had turned them into elephants the most incredible thing happened: THEY BELIEVED ME AND CRIED. Don't feel too sorry for them. They had spent plenty of time making fun of me. Me with the straight bowl haircut. Me with my funky hand-me-down clothes. Me who had my metal lunch boxes smashed every week because I was different. Or because I wore the scarlet letter "L" for loser on my chest for all to see. Those girls were mean. Lots of people in that rough grade school were mean.

I got mugged for my milk money by a classmate's sister if that gives you some idea of the kind of area we lived in at the time*.

By the time I reunited with that glitter I was already a very weary citizen of the world. I knew what kinds of things corrode families so that each person in them lives like a lonely planet on its own orbit in the same house. Sex held little mystery for me even though I myself was still a virgin. I knew who was president at the time and that I wouldn't have voted for the bastard. I knew about wars and nuclear power. I already knew that unrequited love sucks and that religion is an elastic thing when you want to win an argument but excessively rigid when you want to kill someone. I want you to understand that seeing that glitter was like finding hope in a garbage bag.

That glitter reminded me that sometimes magic isn't about tangible rewards but about manipulating other people to believe the fantastic so that you can win just once in your life. It reminded me that sometimes a person is an elephant just because you wish they were. It reminded me to laugh. It reminded me that there is power in being different, in being set apart. I was still a summer away from discovering the true power of not giving a god damned shit whether popular girls liked me or not and that not caring made the popular girls kind of itchy with irritation because me not caring meant that they had no power over me. They became nothing more than adolescent windbags while I became interesting and, if not loved**, at least more noticed than any of the cheer leaders.

That glitter gave me courage and hope.

Relationships hang in the balance all the time because so many humans choose to live in the dark. I was thinking a lot about this as I was picking blueberries and it came back to me in the hazelnut orchard: that there are a couple of very special people that I wish I could claim as siblings. I have a blood brother and sister that I love so much it hurts me that I can't give them the whole world in a basket and I'm not even sure they feel my love like that because we also kind of drive each other crazy.

So listen to me, second sister, go to an orchard and lay down with your face to the canopy of light and hear the music pocketed in the leaves, humming through the grooves of bark scrawled with lichen. Feel the rhythm in the soil beneath you rising up through your bones; your heartbeat, your breath, the soughing air through the leaves, and let the music run through your veins like a broken dam washing the ravines free of branches and debris; just as though the whole earth was starting over.

Your scrappy wild full spirit has finally found purchase and it takes my breath away.






*We lived in Richmond right near the boundary of El Cerrito and the school "Mira Vista" was in El Cerrito. Richmond has many areas. Areas for rich mostly white people in the hills. Areas for the middle and lower classes of mixed races to live- where we were- and then there were the flat areas where you didn't go alone if you were white.

**Not loved is right. While many people who had previously written me off suddenly respected me when I stopped dressing and acting to try to fit in and started being myself, there were rocks thrown at me, my locker at school was spit on, and scariest to me because I hate loud noises: a firecracker thrown at me and my friend. Nice.

The Great Wide Sky

One of the things I love best about Oregon are the gorgeous skies. California doesn't have them like we do here. Vast skies of clouds and blue and always moving, shifting, changing, and breathing. It makes my breath spread out farther and go slower. Especially when I'm on farmland and I can see so far all around me.

Picking fruit and vegetables is meditative. Rhythmic. I like doing it with friends but last summer I found that I liked doing it alone best of all. Alone in the tall bean rows with the sky talking to me above. I like to bring my headphones and listen to music. I let my thoughts do what they like to do best: live a life all their own. I have an obsessive mind. It can be a great weight on me at times playing the same tapes over and over and over until I want to rip them out of my skull. Often times, though, when I let my mind wander it's like my dreams. It says what it needs to say without filtering or trying to cover up its irrationality.

It usually runs through old unsatisfactory conversations or situations and comes up with new endings, better endings. A frequent activity in my head is letter writing. I don't write letters much anymore in actuality but I write them constantly in my head. I also have these great long monologues, stories that the universe keeps waiting for me to tell. Sometimes I speak so eloquently in my quiet reverie of picking fruit that I wonder who is really speaking and I know I'll never speak so eloquently when I race home and try to recall the perfect words.

Sometimes I want to sing along to the words in my music out loud. I wish I was the only person in the entire world. Because if I was then there would be no one to question me or wonder if I'm on enough medication.

I miss playing my favorite game. My favorite game is dress up as another version of myself- who I could have been, who I might become. My whole life has been one long dress up session in which everything I do becomes a separate life: when I was a costumer I was a poor dressmaker working 14 hour days to make beautiful clothes for rich patrons that I would never myself be able to wear. I had needle holes in my fingers from hand stitching corsets* and I imagined myself hunched over candle light in a bare stone walled room to stitch gold bullion trim to the hems of gowns.

I dressed the part and my life unfolded accordingly. When naked I want to crawl out of my own skin. I have never felt I belonged in a body at all but when I dress up I can do anything, be anyone, and shine. I didn't love my body or hate my body for its faults or virtues. I never really had body issues exactly. I mean, like any young person I would complain about my thighs or my sizable ass which even when I was at my thinnest never disappeared. But I did always appreciate that I could dress my body up well and become invincible.

It isn't an acting bug either. This is something else. I hate acting. Trying to get me to do some "fun" improvisational acting workshop is like trying to pull teeth from a giant agitated steaming buffalo. There is nothing I want less than to dress up to go on stage. I have never wanted to literally play roles. The enjoyment for me is that we all play roles in life anyway and I enjoy dressing the part for them. Making an occasion out of the ordinary. I have always appreciated the ambiance and the story one garment can tell. I am never not me when I dress up. I am always myself; a self amplified perhaps, but still the same self.

I have always enjoyed watching others to see if they see behind the curtain. If they see that today I am a poet of rare grace. I wonder if they see that today I am a spirit wandering the ragged moors of my imagination in a gown gathering moss and fragile fibers of earth behind me like reluctant ghosts. I wonder if they see that I am a baker in a small town with flour on my cheeks and skill in my hands, I wonder if they can smell the warm yeast and taste the crust in their own mouths as I walk by. Does anyone actually ever really see me?

Now there is nothing to see. I have become ridiculous. I have made a disaster of my body; breaking my bones and becoming too large for any dream but one of being the bearded** fat lady which holds no romance for me. No aura of interest and no hidden treasures wait there. I know there is a reason I have come to this point and until I figure it out I will not be able to exit this nightmare that my own shell is. I have made dressing up impossible. Which makes me feel lost.

In spite of these reflections I did feel answers stirring as my hands reached again and again for more berries. I commune with the plants and become like a branch myself. covered in fruit. I'm not sure sometimes if the trees and grasses can all hear me. I think they do.

*I really did, as a matter of fact.

**My "beard" consists of five chin hairs but I suspect that there are more waiting to sprout. I bet I'll get one new one each birth day until I look like a real treat.

A Year Of Pickles

It's hard to feel let down, bitter, or cold inside when your own two hands have coaxed a bucket of cucumbers into a year's worth of pickles. Pickles to eat in the dead of winter with cheddar cheese. Pickles to add to potato salad and to egg sandwiches.

It's hard to feel lonely when you are making the most basic thing in life (sustenance) with someone you feel wholly comfortable with and who you'd share your last jar with, if it ever came to that.

A friend who doesn't mind you spazzing out or your quirks and who gets you to try things that sound utterly disgusting* because you know there's a good chance you'll actually like it. Because she says so.

It's wonderful to wake up in the morning, go to a vast farm to pick cucumbers, and after hours of fun work...sit back and know that today you made enough dill pickles to last you an entire year. It's great to be a CEO** (I guess) but your work is so much less tangible or tasty. Your family appreciates the bills you pay but at the end of the day what did you MAKE? Making things is the best boost human beings can give their self esteem.

Homesteaders, housewives, or househusbands who make things, who cook, or garden, who fix things or build things, generally don't sit around feeling inadequate or worry about contributing enough to their family. Money isn't everything, but making things really is. You don't know how to cook? Go learn! You will feel more pride than you ever imagined you could over something so basic. It is the easiest way to make others feel cared for, nourished, loved, and safe. Including yourself.

When I looked at the rows of jars (56 of them!!) I felt capable, industrious, giddy, satisfied, and good about myself. Did you know that preserving your own food could make you feel like that? This was the official opening of my canning and preserving season. I've frozen some cherries and blueberries (in progress) but until the canner comes out and starts boiling and steaming like a locomotive through the thick summer air, it doesn't feel real.

While the dill heads are still ripe and full I have dilled beans to make. There's blueberries to freeze (and send to friends) and make into liqueur. Peaches to make into preserves and to freeze for smoothies when late spring brings every kind of hope but luscious fresh fruit. Tomatoes to sauce and dice and dry. There's eggplant to pickle, soups to can, and wild blackberries to eat straight from the center of a thorny hell.

These are the things that ground me when I don't know what the future holds. When I don't know what will come of us. One thing I can know for sure is that we have one whole year of pickles in the pantry.

*I can't believe I ever thought jalapeno jelly sounded gross.

**I personally can't think of a worse occupation besides being a prostitute. In a way I think prostitution is more honest work. No, that doesn't mean I "approve" of hooking, but as long as us humans need men, it will exist. Because men go in for that kind of thing. I know, I don't get it. For crying out loud though, why on earth don't men get arrested more often for employing prostitutes? And why do they think it's manly but the same men who think it's manly to be a "john" don't respect the women turning tricks for them? It's the johns who are the real losers in my opinion. But this isn't the subject of this post. I've gone wildly off topic with this footnote.

Hot Like Sweat

I seem to sweat a lot. Sweat is not sexy. Not on you either. Oh yeah, I was raised by proper hippies and I know it's completely "natural" and therefore a benign force of the universe. You can say the same thing about shit but no one wants to be dripping with that, do they? See what I mean? The weirdest thing is how sometimes my sweat smells and sometimes it doesn't. Why is that? I forgot to apply my deodorant this morning.* I didn't remember that I forgot it until I was drenched and dabbing myself dry with paper towels at work.

Yeah, I could have let it flow all natural style. I could have.

But I couldn't help thinking that customers might be put off if the sales clerk splashed them with sweat when turning her friendly face to greet them. I couldn't help thinking that a person like me, with a sweat streamed nose, might look more like a seedy desperado in a dusty hot western B movie than a delicate DRY flower of a lady. Who never swears. Ha ha.

I just gave my pits the sniff test (essential on days like this) and there is no off-putting acrid smell there. How can that be? I wonder if my sweat only smells when it's the sweat-of-fear? I have lots of sweat like that when I'm in uncomfortable social situations. Which is most of them.

On the other hand, the shirt I'm wearing is one of those cheap but surprisingly well made cotton ones you rarely find at Ross and are therefore super-stoked when you do and buy seven of the same one, well, the one I'm wearing today is about three years old and believe it or not, fibers don't last forever. Not these days they don't. What happens to old cotton knits that have a little bit of Lycra in it is that the fibers wear out. There comes a day when they just won't get fresh in the wash. They start to smell like unwashed skin. Yep. UNWASHED SKIN.

You might be interested (or not?) to know that I have a very sensitive nose. Towels eventually get to this point and I find it incredibly distressing to dry myself off with a piece of material that smells WORSE than I did before I washed myself.

That's what my shirt smells like. It makes me sad because it's been my favorite shirt for three years. That's why I have seven of the same one. All of them are the same age.

It continues to be very hot here in McMinnville. Tomorrow promises to be hot too. And I'm going to be canning dill pickles right after stooping over to pick them under the blazing sun. Obviously I'll be wearing sun screen. And a whole crap load more of my own sweat (which is certainly a lot better than wearing a crap load of someone else's sweat).

Someone once told me she thought man-sweat was sexy. I think my jaw may have dropped open and invited a flock of seagulls to land in it. She said she thought it was very "manly". Isn't it possible to be "manly" without stinking like a bitter stew of old nuts? What's wrong with deodorant? What's wrong with not smelling at all? Or how about just smelling like soap? I love the smell of soap!

Paris Hilton's namesake perfume is much worse than the smell of sweat because it smells like cheap aged urine.

So if it comes down to a choice between being engulfed in the smell of sweat or the smell of Paris Hilton's perfume I'm going to choose the sweat smell.

I wonder what my dog would choose?





*Tom's of Maine lavender. Supposedly natural but now owned by Crest or some other huge corporation. Dammit. I hate that.

Eat Local Challenge
redesigned

Ten months ago we embarked on our eat local challenge which was our own not too stringent version of the 100 mile diet. The main point of it was to learn about the food that comes from my area by trying to limit ourselves to what has been grown and/or produced locally. I wanted to see what it was like to get through the winter eating seasonally. It wasn't nearly as hard as I thought. It wasn't nearly as expensive as I thought it would be either.

We know a lot now about the food that is produced (and not produced) in our area that we probably never would have known if we hadn't embarked on this adventure. Do you sense closure in my tone? Yes, I've been thinking about our challenge for the last month and seeing its meaning in the bigger picture of change. I've been assessing my needs versus the things that need to change for the earth to keep on spinning on its axis.

As our life has been restructuring (I'm working 3 days a week and spending the rest of the week looking for work etc.) its been getting more difficult to stick with our challenge. A lot of the things that make cooking healthy food quickly can't be bought (at reasonable prices) from local sources. Pasta, for example. Tofu. Rice. I haven't bought any of these things in 10 months. I've made pasta from scratch quite a lot but I just can't do it quickly and as a consequence we rely a lot on grilled cheese sandwiches for quick food.

I've gained more weight in the past year. It's true that that needn't have been the case if I wasn't a beer chugging cheese gulping freak without sense enough to stop at ONE beer and ONE thin slice of Tillamook. One doesn't have to turn to grilled cheese sandwiches whenever there's no time to make pasta from scratch. Yet we do because we love them (!!!) and they are satisfying. Since I can't get feta from local sources I eat everything with cheddar. I have no self control when it comes to cheddar. You get the picture.

I miss garbanzo beans. I haven't bought them in 10 months either.

So while I dripped rivers of sweat off my sun screened nose out in the great sweltering blueberry fields today I thought about all these things for the hundredth time this month. And I came to a decision. I have learned all I can learn from my challenge as it is. I've decided not to engage in any more "challenges" because just being me is challenging enough. The point of challenges is to stretch ourselves in new and positive directions. To find out our limitations and also to learn new things.

Rather than engage in more challenges with rules and time periods I am just going to commit to change. Steady change. It never happens over night. I've become not just enamored with the effort to eat local and shop local- I am committed to it in that my eyes are always open now to both the contents on labels but the origins of everything I buy. I don't buy anything without looking. That is change. I not only know the ingredients I know as much as a person can about where it came from. I will always choose local when I can.

I intend to buy more of my food in bulk to reduce overall packaging waste. I still won't buy much produce that isn't seasonal and doesn't come from within my general region. I may sometimes buy bananas for smoothies but I won't ever again buy apples from New Zealand or kiwis from out of state. I won't buy avocados but for very special occasions and the same goes for oranges and tangerines which do not grow here. I may buy some lemons and limes on special occasions but only until I grow my own (which will have to be protected in the winter).

I will buy feta cheese again but only until my new friend Sarah teaches me to make my own. I won't buy store bought ricotta because I learned how to make my own from scratch while on my local food challenge.

I will buy tofu again. My friend April has found locally made tofu in Portland but I've yet to find any here.

I will wait until things are in season here to buy them. Watermelons from Hermiston instead of from California or Mexico. Tomatoes from Bernards Farm or from my own yard.

The big picture is that there is life as a whole to make decisions about that impact everyone. It isn't just where your food comes from but what's in it and how much packaging or energy it took to get to you. You have to consider what you can afford and not surprisingly- buying in bulk and using u-pick options whenever you can will make your groceries cheaper. Learning to make things from scratch will bring you closer to your roots, to your familial food history, and is hugely satisfying. But being able to rely on dried staples that may not come from your region makes life a whole lot more comfortable.

How are you getting your groceries? Do you take four trips a week to the grocery store? Do you bring your own bags? Do you drive a giant SUV? Or do you ride your bike (I don't and need to!!)? These are all important things that go into the equation.

What all our problems boil down to is that we often don't live thoughtfully enough. We don't weigh our choices and make decisions with an equation that includes all these factors. We don't look at ourselves and the choices we're making and why enough. Taking on challenges helps us hone in on areas in our lives that we want to see change.

In a couple of more posts I'll go over more of what I've learned from my challenge and share with you the most pertinent and permanent changes we've made to our diet as a result. Then I'll move on to share the other changes that are on my mind. Things I'd like to accomplish, not as a part of a specific challenge but just in my ongoing quest to make good change.

Right now the kid is clamoring for a good old Bionicle battle at the top of the stairs. I'm tired from frying myself in the 100 degree heat. It's time for some beer (my mom bought us lots this week!!) and after a rousing game of Bionicle ball busting I intend to watch some Sponge Bob (or whatever Max wants) and pretend I'm not a giant cut of roast human.

A Funny Family Of Freaks

(and gorgeous creatures too)

My mom and her newly adopted Bernese Mountain dog Nadia. This is my mom's favorite breed. She likes her animals to be long haired, showy, fancy, and very special. Having said that, I must add that she loves our Chick and appreciates our mutt's superfine qualities unreservedly. But when picking an animal for herself she would never choose a dog that's part pit bull. Which is so funny to me because I prefer mixed breed animals and have a queer attraction to pit bulls specifically.

Max and Penny snuggle up. Max is like the cat whisperer. Penny won't let everyone just snatch her up and insist on a snuggle. With Max she just stays with him. With everyone else she squirms away and then finds a high spot from which to groom as though to clean off the unwanted human attention.

I had a nightmare last night that repeated itself exactly five times. Slightly different every single time. I unwittingly end up in a house in which a hostage situation is in progress with random executions. There's a lot of blood and bodies. I escape each time, sometimes with help and sometimes not. I make a frantic dash to get out of firing range running down the suburban street grabbing at plants to help propel me forward since my legs never go fast enough in dreams. Each time I get away I end up in uncomfortably close proximity to the hostage house I'm trying to get away from.

And then I start over. In the house with the crazy executioner.

I wonder if my bad dreams were somehow related to Philip and I staying up late to talk about how great it is to have OCD.

There's a part of me that believes I have these dreams to prepare me for real life events. There's a part of me that believes I'm going to die a very violent death or narrowly escape it.

For at least one entire year* I was certain that my mother or some other family member was going to die. Every time the phone rang I was sure it was going to be the phone call with the news of death. It wasn't that I worried that someone I loved was going to die- I was CERTAIN of it. I spent an entire year waiting for the news that never came.

If I was a witch and had a familiar I think it would be a chicken.

I could never be a "pagan" or a "wiccan" either because they like nakedness too much. I like wearing clothes. I feel most happy when I'm in clothes. Even when I was thin.

It was very hot in our house yesterday and during dessert time Max took his shirt off to cool down. Right after eating dessert he went to wash his hands but came running back and said "I need to put a shirt on really fast!"

I said "Why 'really fast'?"

He says "Because my skin is allergic to the air. If I have my shirt off for too long I get itchy and I have to put a shirt on right away." After struggling to put his jammie top on at lightning speed he adds "It doesn't happen to girls because they don't ever get to take their shirts off. "

("Hmmmph!" I think to myself "Depends what girls you know!!")

The other night he woke up at 3:30am from a spider nightmare. after calming him down and snuggling with him for a half an hour he spotted a spider on the ceiling. It's bizarre to me how he can go through periods where he'll fearlessly (and to my great alarm) pick spiders up and then other periods where he will not eat, breath, or sleep in any room he so much as suspects a spider is also eating, breathing, or sleeping in.

In our house our general policy is to put spiders outside. While I have a mild arachnophobia (which used to be severe, incidentally) I recognize the global worth of spiders and appreciate the immense work they do for the environment. The only time we kill spiders is if they look like they are particularly dangerous (such as bear a striking resemblance to a hobo spider).

And at 3:30 in the morning. I kill spiders at 3:30 in the morning.

So I rolled up a magazine and made a carefully calculated lunge toward the spider on the ceiling. I knew that I had exactly one shot or Max wouldn't ever sleep again. I had to definitively kill it. I was balanced precariously as it was because the spider was directly above the carefully set up Lego battleground that takes up a lot of space and doesn't allow room for grown up feet.

In one beautiful motion I struck the poor spider, dropped the magazine, flew through the air, gracefully landing on a lot of sharp Lego vehicles (crushing them) and in a continuing fluid motion scraped my arm across them as my body kept sliding forward until it came to a grinding halt and broke Max's "favorite" Lego spaceship.

Twenty minutes later I got Max to stop bawling by impressing him with the blood on my arm and the fact that I killed the poor spider dead and tried to set myself up as a wounded hero. His skepticism at the "wounded hero" bit was less than flattering but it diverted his attention enough that he stopped crying to scoff at me. And to be grossed out by my blood.

Which is funny since he's shown me buckets of his and he's never so much as hinted that blood grosses him out.

The first spider nightmare he had was when he was probably about 2 years old. He woke up inconsolably frightened of a "red spider". And then his nose started bleeding for maybe the second time in his life.** Philip came to see what was up, saw the bloody nose, went white, escaped to the hallway where he promptly slid to the floor passed out. Max was burning with a 105 degree fever. So I called our neighbors. I borrowed some fever medicine.

Us Williamsons sure do like to partay in the wee hours.

*A year is a convenient length of time...this went on for a lot longer than a year but the severity of my obsessive thinking about it and actually waiting for it to happen was most pronounced for the entire year of 1991.

**It's good we had no idea then how enormous a feature his bloody noses were going to become in all of our lives. We would have committed ourselves to the loony bin as a family.

A Bowl Of Plums

I didn't get the job I most wanted of all jobs in this town. At least I had a chance, (I'm telling myself). Plus I got a really thoughtful personal call about not getting the job. In this day and age of job hunting that's pretty amazing.

Still...

I'll just stare at this bowl of plums gleaned from the tree overhanging my yard and concentrate really hard on not crying or feeling hopeless.

I will pretend that this is a world in which everyone recognizes my value and doesn't pick me last for the team.

Happy Monday.

Passing For Normal

In a routine that is as unbreakable as the rushing force of a rising speeding tsunami I cannot sleep until I have watched some old familiar episodes of "Friends" or "Frasier" or some other soothing DVD old news. Before I quit smoking it was books. I had to read before bed. Even if it was just for two minutes of slurring blurred sentences bringing on a comfortable dark. Routine is everything to me.

We are suddenly too broke to even rent DVD's from the video store so the indulgence of watching CSI episodes is over for the moment. So for the two hundredth time I am going through my collection of "Friends", watching favorite episodes that bring on that deep soothing white noise in my brain that I have come to depend on to recover the stresses of a day necessarily spent amongst people, animals, babies, noise, complications, stress, obligations, shortcomings, brain twitches, and the all important effort not to stand out too much for the wrong reasons.

Brain white noise is essential to my peace of mind. In fact, white noise in my head is essential to my survival. It's how I wake up the next morning refreshed and able to function in a world that largely doesn't understand how much work it is to be people like me.

As I mentioned before, I recently checked some books out of the library hoping to break into my DVD evening routine and work my way back into my very old tried and true deep love for reading. I got myself a couple of Mary Stewart books for familiar comfort and I also brought three books home from the psychology section. That book on cutting turned out to be a very dangerous jolt in the gut for a person like me with no health insurance (and therefore no access to mental health support). I had no idea a book could shake me up so much, make me feel so exposed, raw, broken; like a specimen dragged up from the deep sea- rarely seen and fascinating in a science fiction style extravaganza of unbelievably large breasted assistants getting caught up in the tentacles of raving toothy half squid/half human beasts.

There were two other books I brought home. For one whole week I have eyed my stack of books with rightfully deep suspicion. I can't afford to go into a tailspin. My family is depending on me. I can't be peeling my layers of precious denial and protection away just so I am not tied to some iron-clad routine that I am partly ashamed of.

While one of my favorite episodes of "Friends" played (the one with Ross's sandwich) I skimmed the other two nonfiction books. Books that I checked out in the hopes that they might have strength to impart. One of them, called "Passing For Normal" by Amy S. Wilensky, grabbed me like a hand by the wrist and dragged me through 32 pages before I realized that my episode of "Friends" had ended and I was reading in silence. Just like I used to almost every day and night of my life since I could read.

It is almost two in the morning and I have read almost half the book. It's about Amy (the author) who has Tourette's Syndrome and OCD and how much of her life has been consumed by her efforts to "pass for normal". It's also about how people like her never do really pass for normal because people always know. Even if it's just out of the corners of their eyes, they know.

Reading this book feels like being with my own tribe. I don't have Tourette's. But I know all about OCD. The great thing about mental illness is that you don't have to have the exact same mental illness as someone else to understand them. There are universalities. Ties that bind. That make us into a kind of family. So many of us have clusters of issues and between us we often share one, if not more, challenges in common.

Every time I think that thought, the things we have in common, I think of Danette. I saw her every week for a couple of years. She was the brightest light at the local grocery store. She easily outshone every other employee there in light, in grace, love, acceptance. She was like an incredible embrace. I loved her. I never realized that we were the same. Like mirror images in spirit. I didn't realize, until talking to her, how I must seem to others. One day we got confessional and it was like unveiling a great secret. We mutually admitted to suffering depression and that to counter the devastating effect of depression on our lives we spent every possible ounce of energy seeking light. Reflecting it off of our skin, soaking it in where our body would accept it, and giving freely every bit of ourselves we could.

Which made our darkest struggles invisible to the naked eye.

Danette killed herself a few years ago. It's something that happens to my tribe from time to time.

Reading this book makes me feel like the nebulous world of mental illness is surfacing from the bottom of the pond in medicine to the part where sunshine skims and slips through. It gives me hope that more stories are to come. Less from the professionals and more from the trenches.

Tell me how you live.

Tell me how you breathe.

The more our stories reach oxygen the more research will go into answering all the murky questions. The more you know how our brains don't work the more you will understand how we compensate. The more everyone understands the more stigma fades. When stigma fades a place is made for coexistence.

What's wonderful about my tribe are the colorful stories we have to tell. We are a shiny group. We can see things that others can't see, know things you wouldn't believe, and we can distill the essentials of the everyday into an irresistible elixir of entertainment.

I believe that there is a point at which all of our minds can meet. No matter where on the spectrum of "normal" you fall, there is some point where all of our minds meet. Where we are all just humans learning to navigate life, where we are all on the verge of something magnificent, where we can realize some incredible human potential. It's a gorgeous point from which we all diverge. If we work at it we can find that spot, that common ground, and discover that we understand each other.

Public Speaker

McMinnville's Finest

I started life as a lisper. My mom says it's because I sucked my thumb until I was seven and pushed all my front teeth out. Like all very special fourth grade girls I had to attend speech therapy in the "special" room of the school. I was also very shy. My own family didn't realize this because around them I was the mile-a-minute talker. How could such a child be shy? But I was. Reading passages from books out loud in class, as all kids were expected to do, was a special kind of torture. I would stutter, lisp, break out in a sweat, and blush madly every time I said a word wrong with all those hostile eyes fixed on me.

One of the reasons I knew I couldn't be a teacher as a profession, aside from the fact that young people often make me want to wring their necks, is that a job which calls for standing in front of thirty pairs of alien eyes every day would absolutely give me a stroke within the first year.

I've heard it suggested that no one likes public speaking but that can't be true because some people seek it out. I really think that stand up comedians are bizarre human beings- they not only stand in front of hundreds of people with a spot light on them but they do it with the intention of making people laugh. I'd rather die. Actors seem to thrive on this sort of attention. And then there are the professors who love to hear themselves talk...c'mon, you know what I'm talking about.

I have taught friends to make bread and to can food but with friends I am my dorky self. I can wander through parentheticals like paths in a beautiful garden and my friends never make fun of me or let me know if they're having mean thoughts. I am actually a very good teacher of the things I know when I can do it in my style.

Today Nicole and I are going to stand up in front of people and give them an introduction to food preserving, provided people come. Maybe no one will come? But we want people to come because both of us are passionate food preserving geeks who want to inspire other people to dive in and become more self sufficient. We want people to listen to us and leave thinking "I can totally make my own pickles!"

Nicole is also a shy person. We're quite a pair to be giving a talk. We're like Abbot and Costello.

I've been feeling a little rejected by my city lately. The only business that has really embraced me is the toy store for which I couldn't be more grateful*. It's actually quite fun working there and I don't worry before I come in. But I still have to find another part time job. I know so many people in my town. I have so many great connections. I care about my community here more than I've ever cared about other communities I've lived in. I have so much to offer my county but my county doesn't really have a place for me.

Except as a free public speaker, apparently.

Here's what I keep thinking: I am an excellent employee. I'm loyal, I have a strong work ethic, I am independent when independence is called for but am also an excellent team player. It's rare to find both qualities in one person. I don't have a lot of ego about my work- I don't need to get petted and coddled to perform well. My work ego is only concerned about providing what my employers and my coworkers need. I am a vibrant person and in spite of my private challenges what I bring to work with me is an overflowing positive energy, sunshine, an ability to stay calm under pressure, and a deep pleasure in bringing satisfaction to others through my work. I learn computer programs quickly, I have a ton of experience with customer service, office procedures, I'm organized, I'm an excellent multi tasker, I have an exquisite eye for detail without losing the big picture.

What employer wouldn't want those qualities?

What keeps coming to me is the possibility that my town doesn't value these things. My town hasn't come to a full realization how talented I am at learning new things and bringing sunshine with me everywhere even when it's pretty dark under my own skin. My town, perhaps, doesn't know how to use a person who is so flexible. Is it possible that the only way my talents will be recognized and used professionally is to get hired in someone else's community?

I keep thinking there is nowhere for me. I keep thinking that I made a giant mistake ten years ago when I left my swatching job to go back to school. Education is considered so important to so many people but even though I took two years of academic classes and got a 4.0 gpa, it counts for nothing since I didn't get a degree out of it. I made a detour to enrich myself and it seems that all I did was damn myself for all future employment. I should have stayed the course I was on.

And think on this, all of you who want to embark on your own business: owning your own business is like the kiss of death for future employment. Supposedly it will show off what a multi-talented person you are but all it really does is make you seem over qualified for most jobs. I've heard of this happening before I had my own business. Since I was my own administrative person you'd think that I would now be considered qualified for all administrative positions. And that's where you'd be wrong. It only counts if you've done it for someone else.

So today I am going to perform a public service for my community at great cost to my comfort; performing the one task that I have no talent for and dread above all others. That's all my community wants from me (right now) and I'm going to give it the best I can. That's how much I love where I live and the people who share this county with me. It's true love and I will forgive it for not recognizing everything I have and want to share with it.

At least we'll always have Paris The Carnegie Room.

Kisses, McMinnville!!!!

*Safeway also embraced me and Diane and Sue couldn't have been nicer. With more on-the-till training I could have been Safeway material but Safeway's method of training wasn't enough for me. I learn very quickly by actually doing a job with a mentor at my side. Clearly I'm not talented enough for Safeway but I was grateful for the opportunity to give it a try.