Week ends

We start every week day morning with Breakfast Club; Dean gets his coffee and sits in his spot, right at the door to the dining hall, welcoming friends as they sleepily arrive. I sit in the back, at the table quickly filled by fellow staff and faculty members, where we have made friendships forged by our mutual habits of getting to work early and enjoying a little something to start the day. It's this start of the day that makes my day.

Go see today's photo at Chicken Blog.

And on

(Click on photo for full image.)

I stopped carrying my camera with me today, because it is heavy and I already had a lot to transport to and from work and and and.  And I missed the opportunity to take a photo of the incredible praying mantis that was hanging out on a bush just outside my office door. So THAT tells me something....

I have an idea about doing some little something of clean up in my studio every day for the next thirty days, but the count will not coincide with the calendar because I don't quite have it in me to jump in yet.  I type that and instantly feel lame; I do just need to do it. Kind of so much to juggle every day in life already -- we're in one of those "just need to make it through the next couple of weeks" mode with a zillion things going on for each of us and me feeling in the center needing to hold it all together for every one.

Right. And that's really what's at the heart, for me, about the challenge of choosing to do something every day that will feel positively productive. I will try. I will start now, and I will try. And meanwhile I will see about remembering to carry my camera with me.

Everything changes

It's a constant process -- trying to figure out where you are, trying to decide where you are going and the best way to get there. I miss writing here, but a lack of clarity about my purpose and direction have left me wondering what to write about, how much to say. I have mixed feelings now about what I've been sharing and with whom; I know from my journeys in blogland that this is a common enough struggle but the weight of it hadn't quite hit me before.

In the meantime, I am adoring the feeling of summer's beginning. I'm not tired of sunshine nor of birdsong and only wish for more strains of music from ice cream trucks. I am tired of firecrackers at all hours on any given night, but that's not dimming my enthusiasm overall very much. I'm making lists and researching festivals and hoping to squeeze out every drop from these long days (work notwithstanding).

The beginning of a list

I love the music of Ottmar Liebert. I can rely on him to put out CDs that I will love from beginning to end. He is a contemporary flamenco guitarist; his music is rich, emotional, evocative, restful, joyful, restorative. I think you may love his music, too, if you give it a listen.

Wild. Life.

I'm sorry.

I did not mean to fall off the face of blogland.

I have a very wild story to tell you -- the short version is: While out walking the dog on our street, I was attacked and bitten by a fox. I am fine, but am just finishing up rabies treatment.

I'll tell you a little more when I can. As you can imagine it is a story I have found myself having to tell. A lot. And remember -- I work at an elementary school, and so that's given me a weird kind of celebrity status (and means that a LOT of parents of a LOT of kids are coming up to me because they heard a story from their kid that can't possibly be true...).

Anyway. Seriously -- it's all all right. I'm just tired, and suddenly find myself swept up in the true insanity that is always the end of a school year.

I'll be back, although with the World Cup kicking off tomorrow I realize I shouldn't over-promise!

Meanwhile, remember this: most dogs can defend themselves against foxes. If I should ever meet an aggressive fox out on a walk again, I will release Biscuit and let him do what he's bred to do -- defend me and hunt a wild animal. It's kind of like the whole walking a dog in winter thing and not going out on the ice to 'rescue' it if it falls through, since you're likely to end up dying and the dog has a decent chance at survival. Not that I'm going to die, or anything, but you get the drift.

The Wild

Last weekend, Dean discovered tree climbing (see him in there?). The combination of physical strength, a healthy degree of risk-taking, good sense about how to approach it safely, and a desire to be up in his own place culminated in many happy hours spent in the activity. We have pines like this all over our yard which really are just perfect for climbing; the branches start right from the base of the tree and fan out, all the way up, in just about boy-sized intervals.

It's fairly private in there, too. I have these plans in my head for how it would be possible to build a small platform up there, just big enough for 2 people to sit, with a pulley for bringing up the books, beverages, and snacks. Nothing as grandiose as a "house." And I actually think it would be safer without a railing (because I think that would give a false sense of safety and encourage standing when sitting would really be the purpose). I'm trying to decide if this is a case of my trying to over-engineer something and if it's better just to let Dean make his way in the trees as they are, or if having a perch up there would make for a more magical summer.

The forecast is calling for very cold temperatures toward the end of this week and into the weekend. The upside would be proper conditions for one more fire in the fireplace; the downside could be the shock to the poor plants that have been brave enough to send up shoots....

Daily mail

I realize that I've been trying to send more things, real things, in the regular mail so far this year. Notes, letters, tokens of affection. Things that can leave my hand and arrive in the hand of a loved one, a dear friend. I'm behind on a few packages, but working away at it. Did you know that "checking the mail" is still one of the daily things people most look forward to, even though it fairly rarely delivers real treasures? How's that for the strength of hope?

What I saw on my walk

Twenty-two tiny turtles

Exactly as it was meant to be.

I took Biscuit out for a walk at about 5:30 yesterday afternoon. It was just starting toward evening, with the sun done with its work for the day and darkness just starting to come on. We came upon one very tiny turtle, just hatched, marching across our street and headed toward the river.

I'd been watching, recently, for turtles. We'd seen one back in the spring, laying its eggs, and we've rescued other hatchlings on other fall days from other spring layings. You'd think it would be easy enough to see a turtle crossing the road, but they are incredibly easy to overlook.

I ended up having an experience that would have looked cliched in a movie. First, one turtle. I picked him up gently and moved him forward in his journey, onto the grass headed toward the river and off the road. Walking a little further, I found another. A few more steps, and another. Suddenly, it was as though they were materializing right out of the macadam; I found myself surrounded by turtles. Twenty-two in all. All alive, all rescued off the road.


After making sure I'd gotten them all before any neighbors drove home, I went back to get Dean. He's at the age of being able to beg the question and know the answer -- "can't I keep just one?" and "these belong in the wild." We marveled at the reality that, even given the vast difference in the size of the turtle's brain and the size of our brains, that turtle possesses the knowledge, the instinct to know exactly what to do to survive, while we have no idea how to appropriately care for a turtle to ensure survival.

I wondered if the turtle we'd watched lay her eggs could have been responsible for these babies, but Dean artfully pointed out that we were talking about two different species. Oh yeah. That.


Dean named one Toby, set it down with some mates, and wished them all safe passage. As long as we don't find any dead on the road, I'll be so thrilled.

Oh nine oh nine oh nine!

Couldn't let the date slide by, inasmuch as I've let so many others do just that.

No mix of lame/legitimate excuses, just forging ahead.

With about eleventy million things to catch up on, I begin with some of the most important:


Can you believe I get to say the words, "this is the quilt I won from Gina!"? I still can't believe I get to say those words, and I always refer to it as 'Gina's quilt' because I haven't gotten my head around the fact that I could call it my quilt that Gina made. Dean took the photo and I realize that while he did a fine job, I'll owe you some detail shots because this is truly a thing of beauty. Gina, I can never thank you enough!


Next, I get to say that this was Dean's "best first day of school EVER," because that's what he says. Nothing better than having him so totally love his school, his teacher, his friends. And what a luxury to have Ken home with us after school to enjoy the perfect afternoon.

Even Biscuit is just happy to be alive. More soon -- I promise.

Some things I love

Skipping stones.
Watching soccer games.
Great pens.
Maps.
Interesting paper.
The English language.
Text as art.
Coffee.
Old-fashioned donuts.
Iced tea.
Lemonade.
Fresh air.
The sky.
Good erasers.
Ladybug's Picnic, sung by Elizabeth Mitchell
Rubber stamps.
Sharp pencils.
Peonies.
Sea glass.
Libraries.
Beautiful studio/creative spaces.
Color.
Photography.
Christmas.
Good craft magazines.
Corn on the cob.
Classic board games.
Fishing.
Keen sandals.
Going out for breakfast.
Pirates of the Caribbean/Curse of the Black Pearl
Music from an ice cream truck.

How about you?

Happy Friday

A happy Friday to you.

Happy sunny day, end of the week, ready for adventure day. Happy make some plans, finish up some projects, get it done and start something new day. Happy take a break, review the week, and think about the weekend day.

We have, ahead of us, half a weekend that we 'just have to get through,' and then half a weekend to be home and relax and enjoy. Today I have a half-day of work, and some errands and chores to do, and I plan to make some time for some fun. It feels good, this morning.

You put your right foot in, you take your right foot out

Peony Pink Hawaiian Coral

It's just such a strange thing. I keep having dreams, very real, that are small moments when things in my life are apparently just how I want them to be. For example, I clearly had a dream that the old, brown grass clippings that are littering our front walk had been all swept up. I realized that I'd had the dream when I walked out the front door, down the walk, and saw that the grass clippings are all still there. I was so disappointed. I've had other similar experiences recently but I can't remember the details to be able to share them -- but that same feeling of realizing that I'd dreamt something was taken care of and being disappointed to find that it was not.


This toad was very much really living in our mulch pile. Hello, toad.

Why haven't I been here much lately? It's been hard. Just a lot of other stuff going on, taking my time, using up my energy, making me wonder what it is I'd really like to be doing instead. I'm trying to get a clear idea of what I'd like my time off this summer to be about, so that I can make sure that it comes off that way. I think I want it to include more time to be here.

But I've also been occupied by wonderful things, such as Dean's third piano recital.


When we were out walking the dog together last night in a light, misting rain, Dean stopped to investigate droplets of water on a small leaf. "Isn't it beautiful?" he asked breathlessly. Indeed; it always is.

Seeing

Grate on a storm drain

The complete circuit around the cul-de-sac on which we live is one-third of a mile. I walk the dog around that circle between 6 and 15 times every day (depends on how cold it is, depends on whether or not anyone else helps with the dog-walking effort, depends on how much time the dog needs). It's difficult to go farther afield during winter because the accumulated snow and ice makes the somewhat busy road to which ours connects very narrow and somewhat treacherous to walk. In warmer weather, there's a big stretch of time during which most of the sides of that road are covered in poison ivy and we don't want the dog to carry those oils into the house on his fur. So I've traveled somewhere between 2190 and 5475 times (730 to 1825 miles) on this small stretch of road in a year.

It takes real effort to see each day, to really look at what's out there, what's different, what needs to be noticed. I was thinking about her walks and all the beauty she captures -- with envy. I wondered what was out there that I haven't seen, haven't appreciated.

In memory, Daddy-ola

My dad and me, May 27, 1989

He would have had something funny to say about the fact that he died on Groundhog's Day; he was just that kind of guy. He died 10 years ago today. The pain doesn't go away, it just changes. I think, "how can he possibly not have been a part of the last 10 years?" I take huge comfort in Dean's having been born before he died, so that my dad could know about him. And he was very happy that I married Ken.

I just thought of something -- I know someone who might be able to drop a flower into the Gulf of Mexico today, where we scattered his ashes. This makes me teary and it also makes me feel better, to think of it.

Saturated

I love the quality of light on rainy days. I love the color saturation you get when you bring out the camera. I can feel the sadness in these beach toys; they just seem to know that now summer is on its last, feeble legs.
Despite dire forecasts of nasty flooding and downpours, the weekend's rain managed to stay quite civilized. It was no problem getting into Boston yesterday to see Kooza, the Cirque du Soleil show we'd bought tickets for months ago. Kooza is one of their traveling shows, and I urge you with all my heart to check out the list of cities and see if it's coming near you. And if it is, go see it. We love Cirque du Soleil; all three of us have seen La Nouba, and Ken has seen a bunch of the Vegas shows (he didn't care for Love, though so we don't recommend that one). Anyway, it's hard to describe what these shows are like -- all I can think to say is that it's like an intense dream of a circus; something more rich, more layered, more textural, with more meaning. I'm struck by how, even though it's one "ring" (although that's hardly the word) unlike Ringling Brothers' 3 rings, you still struggle to try to take in and see everything that's happening at once. It is performance art and music and costumes and staging and unforgettable experience -- you'll see things you can't even believe you are seeing and that you will surely never see again. We missed Corteo when it came through -- last year, I think -- and I'm kicking myself. We'll never let one pass by us again and if we had the $$ we'd head down to NYC to see Wintuk.
And then there's 't.' Or, 'T.' Still ABC-Alonging, see?
In June, Dean and his friends spied this turtle laying her eggs out in front of our house, near the road. 'T' is for 'turtle,' and we've been watching and waiting all summer. 'T' is also for tomorrow, and that's when I'll tell you what we've recently discovered....

Energy

As it's a circular story, I'm not exactly sure where it begins. But I'll try to tell it sensibly.

Dean came home last week from school very excited about the lettuce he'd eaten in the school's garden. We've got an ambitious and so far very successful edible schoolyard kind of project going, with children spending time in all aspects of gardening -- including the pleasurable experience of plucking a taste of something from right in front of you that you helped to grow. "I'd like to eat more lettuce like that!" YES! A win for the edible schoolyard!

So I take a look out in the gardens to see exactly what kind of lettuce it was that he loved, and promised to get the closest thing on my next trip to the store. A nice, soft, buttery, open-headed green lettuce. It's too early here to find (at the local supermarket, anyway) the open bins of mache so this overly packaged head had to do. Wasn't until I got home and looked more closely that I saw this lovely thing came all the way from Canada, where I imagine all the energy it took to grow this precious, hydroponic head, given that they are farther from their last frost date than we are. I'd been seduced, as I was meant to be, by all that "no herbicides nor fungicides" business, and by the desire to bring home what my boy wanted.

The irony here (circular) is that before Dean was born, I would have been able to go out to our own garden yesterday and harvest a small salad of tender new leaves. Ken and I were avid vegetable gardeners and used our fenced-in garden to grow all kinds of wonderful fresh vegetables. But we quickly found that gardening like that was one of the things that had to go in order to have time to be parents. That garden is now Dean's own flower garden, although maybe someday he'll change his "no vegetables need apply" stance to what he grows there. Anyway. If Dean weren't here I'd easily be able to give him what he was asking for, but he is here so I can't. And yes, we'd much rather have Dean than the garden.

OK, so I served up this precious Canadian lettuce and starting thinking about the whole 'eat local' thing again. We saw a snip of a report recently that said a recent study of tomatoes in London revealed that it took significantly LESS energy for Londoners to get tomatoes from Spain than from England because of all the energy it takes to grow tomatoes in the colder, rainy-er climate. Spain's the right place for the job, and shipping takes less energy. Take that, locavores! And I'm plugging away at Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (on page 75 after having started in February, which I find both funny and tragic) and I'm getting a little irritated at the author's inability to accept or embrace the ironies in all this. She kinda just lost my support, actually, in the current section where she defends tobacco farming (she says the plant is cancerous because of how it is altered and abused postfarmer -- is that true? -- is it benign as grown?) because she grew up in the tobacco belt and likes small tobacco farms for a host of reasons. I'd rather hear her struggles with the reality of knowing, loving tobacco farmers and understanding the local economics of the crop against the reality of the final product, and I'd rather not hear her question the morality of someone who serves a raspberry out of season. There are a lot of questions and I believe that right now the point is the struggle to answer them and not draw a hard line between who is good and who is evil.

We're back to the local season, or the start of it. I'm looking forward to the opening of the farmers' markets. I'm delighted to have a boy who likes lettuce. So maybe we'll try a porch pot approach and see where that gets us....

When bad crafts happen to good people, or why I should have spent more than 15 minutes on the tutorials before attempting a pattern

Oh dear. I didn't expect perfection, or anything, but I thought I could attempt a stuffed-animal sized ripple blanket as my "learn to crochet" project and end up with something at least usable. Clearly I am having trouble not only following the pattern properly, but there's definitely something (or several somethings) terribly wrong with my overall technique, since...
...I am getting all these raised ridges as I go and...
...it looks NOTHING like the perfectly flat work in the book. Am I yarning over incorrectly? Anyone know why I have those ridges? Dean, being the most amazing young man one could hope for, said, "oh, just keep going -- it will flatten out when we wash it and I love the colors!" But as much time as it has taken me to go this far, I'm on the fence about either starting over by ripping out, starting over by just tossing this bit, or keeping going with the idea that it will just look pathetic but Dean won't mind and I may "learn" as I go. Suggestions? To be honest, this is kind of why I hate attempting new things; I expect to be able to do things passably well right off the bat (although why I operate under that illusion is beyond me) and I don't like to take the time to work through every tutorial project before doing the thing I really want to do. Finding someone to give me some pointers in person would help, or I may do some searches today for some online tutorials. I do suspect that I'm not yarning over, or picking up the yarn for each new stitch (same thing, right?) correctly. I'm also not as keen to start over because I see after just a day that crocheting is going to really kick up the arthritis in my hands and I wonder how worth it that's going to be. But of course I invested in the 8-hook set at JoAnn's the other day (had a coupon!) and I dream of making crocheted softies....

Meanwhile, Operation Fun Town (while the daddy's away, the mice shall play) continues right on schedule. Chinese take-out last night while we watched Enchanted (VERY funny, although the camp-y-ness was a little lost on Dean), coffee cake and coffee for breakfast (it's all right -- his was really coffee milk more than coffee), extra Wii time (for him) and a friend coming over to play today. We need to remember to leave the basement door unlocked so Ken can get it at some point very late tonight, and I need to catch up a little more on the laundry. And get a little more crafting time in.