Some pretty things

It's definitely autumn here, with either bright blue skies behind starkly orange tree canopies or grey days that could stand in for murky movie scenes in a graveyard.

The local church has had its big fall rummage sale, and I got some vintage linens, one of which makes a nice background for the white bowls I bought recently:

The excitement about those is, they match my current dishes.  White dishes are pretty boring in their way, but they look very peaceful in the cupboard with strong clear glasses that all match each other from size to size.  My dish cupboard is one of my favourite things about my kitchen: even in the most chaotic moment, I can open that door and take a deep breath knowing that some things get to stay orderly no matter what.

I found a mug in the same shop - Anthropologie, if you're shopping - with an M on it.

It's not a great mug, or rather, it's a great big huge mug with a terrible handle.  The position is wrong for balance and the size is wrong for fingers and you can't really carry the mug at all without burning your knuckles.  On the other hand, it's got an M on it!  And pretty scrolly flowery things.  And you can fill it once and then sit down for a really long time.

Also: I discovered that the local posh grocer makes a cranberry-orange loaf every bit as good as the one mum taught me to make, which means I can have it without having to make it.  Not that I don't like making it.  But if I did make it, it would use up all the time I might otherwise spend eating it.  You can see my difficulty.

Since August I've been thinking a lot about writing, by which I mean writing has been happening in my head, but my hands are busy knitting.  I don't know why that is.  I used to think all those other interests are me putting a barrier between myself and my writing and feel quite annoyed with myself for not being more responsible and focused.  Now, at least some of the time, I wonder whether the other interests are feeding future writing, like random plants do a fallow field. 

It's a pretty thought, isn't it?  And it leaves me free to do what I like, which at the moment is to drink another cup of tea.

Murky Grey Mornings (how I love them)

I'm sure this is a product of having read Wuthering Heights so many times as a kid

(seriously, is that any kind of example a 12-year old should be getting for adult relationships?  apparently yes, since I've always been better off than Catherine.  read it lately?  whoa)

but I do love a murky grey morning in fall.  There are so many possibilities for the day, all of them layered - from rain clothes and boots to the many ingredients in the cookies you'll probably bake or the pages of the book you'll read since it's too crummy to go out gallivanting through the heather. 

No sun to make you squinty or too warm.

Leaves standing out but softly against the sky if they are still on their trees; the ones on the ground bright against the darkened pavements.

Air wet and chilly enough for a good strong sweater

A hot drink that much more comforting

A nap that much more enticing

and anything you actually accomplish so much more rewarding.

Also, I get to go out and hear music while knitting later, and then have supper in a restaurant with friends.  And I tracked down my favourite weird skirt to wear. So even if it was gorgeous and sunny and warm it'd still be a pretty fab day.  Yay!

Procrastinatory Guilt

Well, here we are at the last day of the first two weeks of my New Writing Life and I have written...

nothing, including this blog.

Though I did buy a spinning wheel, which I needed for research for some of the short stories, because it's much better to experience something than to just watch somebody else do it, if you're writing it. And experiencing spinning on somebody else's wheel just wouldn't be the same at all, honestly.

I also haven't pursued any of the felted wool art ideas I had in August while collecting sweaters, which makes me feel even more guilty about the fact that I am spending all my writing hours thinking about or playing with my spinning wheel.

That's not why I popped in though.

Last night while knitting for a change, I watched a profile on Mavis Gallant that included a personal appearance in a bookstore in which she was asked questions from the audience about how she writes, and suddenly I thought

GAH

that is a part of the job I'm not sure I would enjoy, should I ever reach the point of bookstore appearances, which at my present rate of inactivity is unlikely. It really threw me off my stride, I'll tell you. Not that there's any striding going on, but you know what I mean.

I also watched a special presentation of popular performances from Andy Williams' old TV show and whoa! was he ever dishy around the time I was born. His intro to his rendition of 'Call Me Irresponsible' reminded me that another thing he was doing around the time I was born was singing the title song for the film Charade, which I love and now want to see again, which prompted a very messy hunt through my old video tape collection looking for my copy which appears to have gone missing.

So now instead of just not writing I am
a/ spinning
b/ stealth knitting
c/ hunting to replace a movie so I can watch it.

I guess on the bright side, I'm good at guilt. Maybe I should include some guilt in the spinning stories to balance out what I don't know?

Nope

Probably not writing today. Might write! but probably not.

If I'm going to procrastinate though, it's nice when I pick 'cleaning' over, say, 'watching a movie'. Well, nice for people who come to the house or were hoping I would be able to find something they needed that I offered to loan. For me, nice is blinders + movie. This is why knitting is such a good fit for me, because I can watch the movie and still be accomplishing something (even if I make a mistake early on and then have to rip it all out again. It still counts, just like ice cream eaten on a day that ends in 'y' between 3-3:15pm has no calories.)

Anyway judging by the increasingly bad feelings I get every time I go to hang up laundry in there, today might be the day I tear apart the junk heap that's been building in the workshop since Christmas, and that definitely means no writing.

Or cooking of supper!

Bonus.

(or maybe I will just watch the movie.)

(or get that satchel tutorial together.)

(or both?)

The last frontier

June 4th is like the edge of a cliff to me, because if I haven't taken and passed a road test by then my driver's license expires entirely and I have to go back to driving with a friend until I can take the test again. Thank you graduated licensing system and also, me, for not just getting this stuff taken care of when I was 16 or even driving as much as once a month over the past year or two.

(I'd rather walk.)

To take the test I have to book one, and to book one I have to call my driving school friend and get some new lessons in. I've put up a few speedbumps on the calendar to make me stop and do this and all I've done is slow down and panic. But let's be serious:

This weekend is Easter.

If I can't make the call in the week that follows Easter, I am in real trouble.

But if I make the call and don't get out driving a lot I am also in trouble because my driving instructor is going to put me on the highway as fast as it takes to get there from my house and I will probably have a heart attack from the shock. So....

This week is all about not procrastinating. I gotta clear the slate of all distractions!

And that means finishing making some stuff for a gift swap, starting making some Easter decorations, knitting more sweater for a friend's book, and maybe using the vacuum cleaner, all before Monday.

Plus maybe coming up with a few more plausible excuses for not driving. You think?

Fallow

I got to thinking last night how much my life has changed in the past year - some sudden shifts that shocked, and some others that crept quietly through the undergrowth and produced a subtle sense of unease until they stepped out in front of me.

That kind of upheaval happens everywhere, even in the economy and the environment, and it seems to me to be cyclical. I've had up to 15 years of a comfortable routine, before some critical component is yanked away and I have to replace it or adapt to getting along without it.

Some people even seek that experience, giving up their jobs to travel or teach a second language in a foreign country.

What I want to know is, how many of us are able to write about it while it's happening?

Because I don't seem to be able to do it. Before this round, I was finally capturing the essence of things I witnessed twenty years ago or more; it seems to take a long time for ideas to filter down to my fingers.

Well, I guess it's better than having no filter at all! and there are worse things, aren't there, than not writing. (hard as that is to believe, some days.)

Studio Ghibli gorgefest

A little while ago I got hooked on Hayao Miyazaki's films. And a little while after that I decided I needed the entire collection, several of which arrived recently in one compact box from Disney.


I've seen all but one now and, even though I've watched them out of order without even checking to see what year they were released, it's been possible for me to see the evolution of the stories and the style in which they're told. It interested me yesterday to find that the ones I love best - the ones where the magical themes are explored with the most enjoyment and confidence - are among the most recent.

Is that a reflection of the audience's changing taste I wonder, or of a refinement on the part of the storytelling process?

Whatever the explanation, I do feel that watching all the films a few times is going to be a great way to pursue creative research.

Also: a great way to spend an awful lot of rainy afternoons. Because you know, it's either that or write something myself.

Embroidering things

Embroidering: it's what writers are supposed do, right?

Maybe not literally but... I can't help it! I really like blanket stitch!

Yep. I actually enjoy taking out a length of embroidery satin and threading a needle and painstakingly working my way across an unfinished edge of something or other at what I hope will be (and never is) regular intervals. Since I finished the 2009 Christmas Mitten Extravaganza, I find myself sewing things out of felted wool leftovers pretty much for an excuse to do more of it. It's kinda like meditation except you have something to hold in your hand and look at afterward.

My favourite shade is a bright salmon pink I found in a discount pile at the local fabric chain store. It's a weird colour but surprisingly matchy for a lot of my felted sweaters and the projects emerging from them.

Like for example the bottom of a pair of sleeves I turned into fingerless gloves last month:


The colours are perfect together, yes? And the gloves - so useful in a house with no insulation.

Marshmallow day

Today will either shape up into something interesting, or sit there like a blob while I decide what to do with it for so long that suddenly it's over anyway.

I know that there will be a fair amount of pondering the process of grieving, because there has been a fair amount of that every day since I read an article in The New Yorker on the subject. Do you think grieving was more effective when people did it collectively - and personally, not at a distance as with celebrities - wearing black, having noisy wakes, or otherwise being with the primary recipients of the force of the blow?

I'm not so sure. Collective grief is a comfort, but I also feel that however social we are as a species we are also quite solitary, and grief is buried so deep anyway it would be difficult for others to touch it. To say nothing of how long grief lasts - a lifetime, for many. Nobody wants to hang around long enough for that to pass, not even the person who's grieving. Maybe especially that person.

While I'm pondering all that I will be eating some of this:


It's bread with pecans and dried cherries (among other fruits) baked in - fabulous when plain, possibly more fabulous toasted with cream cheese.

And I will be thinking more possible craft projects with old sheets I wish I had some of... h'mmm, maybe a trip to the thrift store is in order? because of this thought-provoking bit of Tiny Happy.

Maybe I will go to a Posh Shopping Neighbourhood to see if I can find some Ghirardelli milk chocolate hot chocolate mix, which is no longer stocked where I live.

Or maybe I will take some long naps, and imagine I'm sleeping on a big marshmallow.

Friday already?

In case you're keeping count,

I didn't do any fiction writing this week, again.

Seriously, how fast are these weeks going, and is it just because we haven't had as much snow as I usually associate with winter? It's like somebody sped up the conveyor belt.

Here's a short list of more things I won't be doing today, or this weekend probably:

fiction writing

finishing anything on my knitting needles

cooking supper

staying away from the computer

tap dancing (though I feel a little tap shoe viewing coming on; mine look like my mother's old saddle shoes and even though I never learned to do a single one of the steps nicely I do love dreaming of figuring it out some day)

and

eating chocolate.

That last one? That's because I ate all the chocolate yesterday while not writing fiction.

Get thee behind me distraction

Ugh. I seem to have entered troubled waters, in which many competing issues are capturing my attention, few of them happily. The other night I had a momentary flickering of an idea for revising one of my short stories and then it was out again - stomped on, as it were, by something that wouldn't even burn its foot.

(Fortunately I had the sense to write down the idea and mention it to a couple of people, two things that tend to reinforce ideas in my mind so I don't forget them.)

This is where knitting is handy, because you have something very tangible in your hands on which to focus. But even there I'm having trouble because I am obsessed with working out a particular project, design and structure, and there is math and logic and aesthetic beauty to consider all at once. This is tough to do while wading through the aforementioned troubled waters.

But the worst: I had to stop watching a movie the other day about fifteen minutes in, when some new crisis erupted. That night I woke up thinking,

what happened next?

And the next day I thought,

what was the terrible secret whatsherface was going to find out? and was she really going to hook up with Vincent Price?

And today too. So frustrating. The movie is Dragonwyck, and my local library does not have a copy.

I think this week's episode of comfort shopping should include purchasing it, don't you? It's that or go on watching Greatest Tank Battles with my knitting on a Monday night. And when a stint in a nice safe tank (preferably one sitting in the Used Tank lot) looks attractive, you've got to do something.

Instead

I didn't do any work on my short story yesterday.

Instead,

I remembered to warm some eggs to make another batch of meringues (and then I made the meringues, and only ate some)


I enjoyed a shortbread cookie from the tin my mum gives me every year


and I shoveled some snow


and then I had a little nap while it snowed some more, so now I have to do it again.

After that, the day went very very far south, vertically, in what some might call a 'handbasket', which just goes to show that Wayson Choy was right when he told me to write as though every moment is my last because you never know when it's really going to be.

It just better not be today, because I definitely won't get any writing time. In fact now that I think of it, the whole rest of the week is a washout on that front - something I should have considered when I squandered my only free morning on cookies.

Still... if you've gotta squander time, is there any better way to do it?

Cookies

Just a year or two ago I was baking cookies all the time, as opposed to buying cookies in the grocery store. I'm not sure why I stopped, though the fact that I eat homemade cookies and resist store-bought ones may have been a factor.

(in which case, given the ample supply of leftover Halloween candy, I am in Big Trouble, because...)

I'm addressing that today, having remembered that the key to getting cookies made is to pre-measure as much as possible the night before, when the kitchen is cleaned up from supper and the dishwasher is humming warmly away in the corner, and the house is peaceful.


In the bowls are the makings for 'Quick Oatmeal or Wheat Flake Cookies' from The Joy of Cooking, a great standby and base recipe for interesting additions such as, say, CHOCOLATE. The cookies come out nice and chewy, which I like for oatmeal. And they don't crumble, which is helpful for eating while wandering around the house thinking of what to do (or avoid doing) next.

With luck, they'll even keep me too busy for forays into the aforementioned Halloween candy. Hey, I can dream, can't I?

Hell, meet handbasket

Ever wonder where "going to hell in a handbasket" came from? Well, I can't tell you, and neither can Wikipedia, really.

Wikipedia does offer a nice definition though:

"a situation headed for disaster without effort or in great haste."

My definition:

"this week."

(I celebrated by watching Poltergeist last night, and some of The Power, while trying to finish the next big deadline project on my list. Didn't help much, but next time I stumble across paranormalisms in the bedroom closet I won't mistake them for overwrought dust bunnies. And that's something, isn't it?)

Fabric in, books... tumbling

My Betz White books about making new stuff with old materials (from castoff shirts and sweaters and jeans and so on) arrived this week and they are enthralling. I think there was only one pattern I felt I absolutely must make, preferably 6-8 times, but I got ideas for several more as I studied the pages.

When I was ready to set them aside, though...

I discovered there is no place left to set them. My already-right bookshelf space is stretched to the max, and I still have at least two more essential reference (oh, all right, KNITTING) books to acquire and jam in there.

I've decided to not think about this problem for a few days: I'm going to go shopping for castoff shirts and sweaters instead. Hey, you never know! Maybe I can dream up a way to build a bookshelf out of them.

I am my father's daughter

A few years short of retirement, my dad had a heart attack. He stayed in the hospital for quite a while, and then he had to stay home from work a while more, while he recovered.

He decided it was the perfect time to learn to play guitar, but - alas - he couldn't manage to keep the guitar positioned comfortably on his leg. Clearly a little footstool was in order. We didn't have any, so he decided to build one. He also decided to sand and stain it, a process requiring many trips to the hardware store. You never touched anything so perfectly smooth as the top of that footstool when he was done with it.

When another family member expressed admiration, Dad gladly handed it over and built himself another. He built several, in fact, and by the time he was done he'd lost all interest in the guitar and it was time to go back to work anyway.



Last night after a long rainy miserable day I thought, h'mmmm, wouldn't it be nice to take a nice long bath?

But the tub looked a bit manky, so I decided to clean it first. While I was getting the stuff to do that I tried to remember the last time I'd done the sink or the toilet, always a challenge since I tend to block out any excessive bursts of housecleaning. I decided that whenever it was, it was probably time to do it again.

Once they were looked after, it was back to the tub, where I noticed there was really a lot of dust on the shower curtain rod. I couldn't remember the last time I'd washed the shower curtain, either, and the shower curtain liner always looks so much more cheerful after it's had a baking soda and vinegar bath, so I took them down and put them into the washer.

I wiped down the shower curtain rod and found it's a lot easier to do that without the curtain rings in the way, and after all, they looked like they could use a good soak too. So I took them off. Once that was done it was natural to think I should do the same with the curtain rod over the window, but those rings were older and of the six, five snapped in two when I tried to remove them.

Disaster was averted when I remembered stashing more rings in my storage room, left over from when I replaced the main shower curtain rings about 10 hours before a visit years ago from my friend Susan, who was coming in from Chicago. I used to see Susan a lot at conferences but never for more than a few hours at a time, and apparently I believed that she would deeply regret giving me a whole weekend if I did not replace my dollar store shower curtain rings with something nicer. (As it happened, we had a great time - from the moment I met her at the airport to the moment I took her back three days later, we did Not. Stop. Talking.)

By some miracle, the shower curtain rings were just visible under a pile of other stuff in the storage room, and I threw a few into the soapy water with the others. Then I put the original ones - very, very carefully - back onto the shower curtain rod.

Only to discover that I was one short. I got back down off the stepladder, washed another and slipped it into place, washed the window's curtain rod, and put the Susan rings on that.

And then I cleaned the tub.

And waited for the washer to finish working its magic, and hung up all the wet curtains to dry.

And then it was too late to have a bath.


Dad died of a different heart attack twenty years ago this week: it's nice to know he's still a little bit with me, even if I didn't become an engineer like him.

Perspectives on procrastination

Naps are my best friend (sorry, Bob!) But it's a love hate thing, as in, I hate myself when I love the thought of having one a couple of hours after I got out of bed in the first place.

I particularly hate early-day snooziness within 24 hours of finishing one project and having another accepted. I feel that this is a time I should be uber-productive and high-powered and generally resembling a responsible adult.

All of which is to say that I felt beyond guilty taking a 9:30 nap yesterday. And nothing washed that guilt away.

Not jotting down an idea, writing up some numbers, and knitting an entire project before the day was done.

And definitely not thinking about how to make the short story better, and pondering how it fits in with my other short stories, and considering whether I have enough yet for a collection?

(No.)

Because let's face it: if you can't get yourself out of the house and over to the nearest baker of chocolate croissants, can you even think about calling yourself 'productive'?

I am totally getting on that today.

Signs of doom

Remember how I used to go write at my other office (aka, the coffeeshop)? Having been unable to get any writing done at home the last two weeks, I was planning to work there today. But on Friday, I walked past it, and saw

THE SIGN OF DOOM.


"Free wireless internet."


Yeah, I know I have a thingy on my laptop I can turn off to keep it from hunting for a wireless connection. I also have hands I can use to push chocolate away and out of sight. Not. gonna. happen.

Still, I'd like to do some writing today. Maybe I could find a nice traffic island somewhere?

The Garden Unveiled

Before: an annual border of sunflowers and columbines.



After: a living boxwood vase for lime hydrangeas... not as tall or colourful, but with year-round prettiness potential and minimal watering requirements.



Bringing new meaning to the phrase 'put your money in the pot'. Throw in some roots from a dead tree, call it sculpture, dress it up with some winter-hardy ivy to climb and cover said sculpture, and yer done. At least until the roots rot.



In the spring I'll plant an ivy that changes colour in fall to turn this into a 3-season cover for the eyesore fence. And I might even trim back the flowering shrub on the left (ya think?)

In Which Voicelessness is Explained

Last night I went out for dinner--an event that, unusually, involved two hours' uninterrupted conversation. This combined with the menu led me to the following discoveries:

1/ I am not a capon girl.

2/ Given the choice between artisanal goat cheeses imported from Italy served with tomato chutney and rosemary toast, or dense chocolate cake served with caramel sauce and paper-thin chocolate hazelnut toffee, chocolate still wins. Barely.

3/ I'm writing a horror story.

So today I feel both nicely sugared up, and free to stop whining about not having a really strong character voice for the story I get to work more on today. The fear that envelops my main character is gonna do the talking and the residual sugar is gonna keep my fingers on the keyboard - NOT mousing over to find out how much longer I'm Ravelry-deprived.