Snow/Sleet, and sunny happy aprons

My camera is finally working again, thank god. Not having it was really irritating. Like mot having a coffee pot. Which is near calamity here at the Williamson Ranch. These aprons are the newest batch from Casa de Lulu, my good friend Chelsea's budding new company.

The inspiration was Chinese New Year. There's a black one that is exactly like this, but I'm buying it for myself. Right now I would look ridiculous in it, like a hippo in a tutu, but I hold onto hope that I will return to my previous shape which was mostly human. When I do, I will wear my Chinese New Year apron all the time. Like a little girl who wears her favorite grubby princess costume every single day. Except that it really makes me want to vomit to compare myself to little girls in any way. I'm much too cantankerous to be doing that. So that's the last time I'll do that.

It's snowing/sleeting outside. Lovely. It's super wet and stormy so not a flake will stick. I just enjoy this good Pacific Northwest display. Oh my, the sun popped out just as I typed those words. How weird, as though some one up there has a special message just for me. What could it be? Ooh, maybe the message is that I can now drink all the beer I want and eat all the cheese I desire and I will miraculously become normal sized again....I don't think that's the message because that weird ray of sun instantly disappeared when I suggested that. You can't blame a gal for dreaming, can you?

Well here's a message for anyone up there who might be listening: you make that miracle happen and I will believe in God. Walking on water is a monkey's trick. Turning water into wine is pretty handy, but wine isn't beer. Turning anything into loaves is great...impregnating virgins is, is actually pretty lecherous... but if you can make it so that I can drink beer as though it was youth dew, and eat grilled cheese sandwiches as though it was the sparest spa food... a miracle like that would definitely send me to church post haste.

We'll see about miracles. I know what's what, and that is one miracle I will never see happen.

So, my favorite sunny happy word... effervescent. It rolls out just as it sounds: light, sparkling, new-shoot green, fresh and barely touching the ground, bright without blinding. How I feel when I see the first tomato fruits set. How I feel when my hens make a fuss over one of them laying an egg. How a thick layer of snow on my town makes me almost float with giddiness.

Today will be spent mostly in bed. Not in luxurious laziness, unfortunately. Cleaning the house yesterday has made my back hurt. I can't afford for it to go out. So it's Advil (I still haven't gotten myself a bottle of Alieve PKM, but I will!) and a heating pad for me. I wanted to make some pasta today, especially because I can now photograph the process, but that may not happen. I've decided to give chiropractic medicine a twirl, just as soon as I'm not laid up. I don't know whether it's all hokey quackery, or whether it really helps people. I figure it's worth a shot. I have a slight curve in my back, a periodically gimpy hip, and a bad back. I am the prime candidate for this kind of work. Philip has heard horror stories about people actually being messed up for life by chiropractors, but I think that must be pretty rare.

Philip leaves for California this Friday. Four days of just me and Max. The store will have to be closed on Sunday and for Friday and Saturday I'll do half days. It's not going to be easy to have Philip gone, but he really deserves a little break. I got to go to the trade shows in Seattle. He hasn't gone away by himself since we moved here. So it's time. He's going to take Amtrack to San Jose to see some bicycle show. Then he'll head north to Santa Rosa where he'll pick up a few barrels we left with my friend Sharon. This is a special concession Philip is making to my rare show of sentimentality. Those barrels are little eco-systems I created in our old garden. They have bulbs, a rare rose, a fig tree, some dahlias, and some really amazing volunteers. I love them. The rose, Kaiserin Freidrich, is rare and beautiful. It took me a year to get it.

I'm off to get cozy with the heating pad and "The Omnivore's Dilemma".

My black little heart

First off: all women named Frankie are cool. Secondly, a couple of minor miracles have occurred today. I finished these key chains which I designed for Pam Kitty Morning's daughter Frankie. They will get sent out this week just as soon as I find the address. In so many ways I think these black heart designs are so much better than the red ones. I think I'll make some more and if they ever end up on the style sheet I'll call them "The Frankies". Because not everyone thinks Valentine's Day is a luscious lust fest. Some of us have black hearts inside the left chest cavity.

Another small miracle is that I have finally finished labelling the pet gift sets. They are on the floor now. I'm really happy with the results. I realize the pictures are crappy. I usually try harder, but my camera battery is basically busy doing the death scene from Romeo and Juliette and I couldn't trust it was going to sit through an artisanal photo session. I may never get to take pictures with my camera again. Philip assures me that we can buy a replacement battery. OK. See, I know a secret, all technology is actually poised in a permanent strike against me for having been a technophobe for about thirty two seconds in my life.

Isn't that handwritten element just totally couture? I wonder if anyone gets this as a gift and they see the handwriting if they will wonder about the person who wrote it. (Me.) You know the inspection tags that sometimes spill out of factory made garments? I have always wondered about the person who was "inspector #97". I have wondered if while I'm wondering about them they can feel a little frisson in the air, a kind of psychic connection? Do they feel me out here too?

On our second trip to Abberfoyle Scotland I bought a hand knit sweater with the name of the knitter in it. I kept the tag for a long time. And then somewhere along the way I lost it. The knitter's name was something obvious like "Mrs. MacEntyre". I enjoyed picturing her knitting my rough wool cable knit deep into the night. Unfortunately this kind of thought made me uncomfortable because if it was, in fact, knitted by a "Mrs. MacEntyre" then she probably didn't make squat on my luxuriously itchy (yet warm) piece of Scotland.

Getting beautiful gifts in the mail is not something that happens to me often. This week I received a package from my friend Lucille of Forest Whimsy. I am constantly amazed by and envious of her ability to know exactly what to get any given person as a gift, and her ability to make it seem like magic. These little plastic mushrooms are just so, I don't know, scrumptious and poisonous at the same time. Like a toddler I want to pop them into my mouth because they look so bright and alluring. I avoid behaviors like this because while my husband knows how crazy I am, he doesn't know how crazy I could be. I'd like to keep him in the dark so he doesn't drop me for some lithe nymphomaniac who happens to enjoy balanced brain function.

I have a passion for fake fruit and food. Always have had. It all started with the marble grapes, fig, and pear that my mom got from her mom which always graced the middle of our dining table. There were also, if I'm not imagining this, some large glass grapes with a real stem. I loved the feel of them, the imitation to living fruit seemed so charming. The fact that it was artful and couldn't rot was wonderful. I especially loved the heft and the coolness of the marble to the touch. You could kill a person with the pear.

I had the most fantastic collection before they all melted in our attic fire a few years ago. There were only three things that got destroyed in the attic that I actually felt a kind of painful pull in the heart for having lost: my great grandmother's china set which was one of my most prized possessions, the trunk of costumes I had made over the years which I was saving to share with all the cool girls my friends might give birth to, and my collection of fake fruit.

Lucille knows my childish passion for artificial food and sent me this charming basket complete with an avocado, strawberries (very life-like!), tomatoes, and best of all? The BREAD! I had a fake baguette from my newer collection that Chick tore apart...so it was really exciting to have these new pieces. I don't know why it makes me so happy. I suppose it doesn't really matter.

Which makes me think of the value of THINGS in our lives. It is very popular not be "materialistic" in the conscientious crowd. It's entirely understandable how so many of us have come to view THINGS as having a kind of intrinsic evil. Wanting to have lots of THINGS is part and parcel of this American dream of ours in which we want everything that is big, bigger, and also MORE. This American dream which has gone sour and caused so much greed. THINGS can begin to control us, our morals, and color our judgement. Sometimes faster and more viciously than alcohol.

What is the allure of THINGS in the first place? What is it's power over us reasonable people? The power is the ability to grow sunshine in the shade. The power is highly individual too. The power is that for someone of a sentimental bent who loves all things sweet and nostalgic there are "Precious Moments' figurines which can remind a person of how their lives might have been if they had been a porcelain alien-eyed figurine instead of a human being, and it reaches out with compassion and solace that this could not be so. It offers balm to wounded spirits.

Though "Precious Moments" figurines and ornaments have a violent affect on me, making me want to commit heinous crimes if only so I can go to jail for the rest of my life-probably the only place I would never have to fear running into one of those creepy-ass products, there are other THINGS that have a more soporific effect on me. Other objects which inspire in me that joy that only useless objects can.

FAKE FRUIT. What I love about fake fruit is that it's so damn silly. It can never compare to the real thing. I relate to it as an underdog of objects. It tries to make us salivate, it reminds us of the most pleasant taste sensations, sensual flavors rolling across our tongues with tropical warm abandon, yet fake fruit can never truly lure us in. Because it can never look as good as the real thing. Plus it can never deliver the goods. No one is fooled by the plastic pineapple. But I'm charmed by it. A Carmen Miranda cornucopia of fruity goodness. An irreverent romp through South America. The one without all the U.S. political sabotaging. It's bright and sassy. Other fake food is the same, just a little tease. It tries so hard to fool.

Fake food is like the "Mystery Men" of the super hero world. The underdogs that deliver. They just don't deliver what they think they're delivering.

Now I have a fake avocado, my favorite fruit in the entire world. Now every time I look at it I will think of my Andrews Sisters 78 with the song "Avocado" on it. A rarely heard song that I like to sing really loud in between fits of laughter.

Thank you Lucille for being so amazingly thoughtful!