Confetti

Doesn't it look just like the trees had a wedding and threw confetti to celebrate?


I didn't realize there were so many different kinds of them within wind-blowing distance...

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.

What Mondays used to be like

Over the summer I visited a train museum with a lot of office-type equipment in it. I don't know whether it was the lack of chocolate that day, or the really good setup in the retired train station (or ghosts!) but I had a vivid sense the whole time of the life all this tired old equipment once led.





Things would have moved slower, though the people doing those things likely didn't.

Even if you were running around or tapping furiously on keys, though, you'd probably spend most of your talking time with the people in the same room. A lot of your other contact would be on paper.



This phone probably rang off the hook during business hours.


I wonder if you were more likely to get carpal tunnel from the crank-up phone, or the adding machines and typewriter?

The lonely brain

I've been enjoying The Morville Hours, an exceptional book that is part garden, part social history, part memoir, part unexpected and thought-provoking science.

For example, I didn't know that the only physical contact the brain has with the outside world is through smell. Apparently scent goes directly to the relevant brain bits necessary to process it; every other sense hands off the information through a long series of cells.

Can you imagine? Our brains never 'see' anything, never 'touch'. Even our awareness of sight and touch may be watered down because of the delivery process from these senses, as vivid as they often are. Maybe they would be unbearable to us if we had them without interference.

And how strange to be such a powerful organ, almost completely isolated inside bone, as if in a space suit. Protected, yes - but separate too. Perhaps this is why humans, however generous and kind individuals may be, are so attentive to the self: we are built that way.

Rain rain come and stay

In spite of needing new rubber boots, I am so loving this autumn rain business.

We've been having summer weather again where I live, so it's hot, and we even passed through a record number of dry days. Later, clouds kept lurching across the sky and then checking their watches and debating whether to fall here or push on to Chicago, and the few that threw a tantrum about it and shed a little water on us eventually gave in and followed the pack and left us with more sun.

But yesterday we got some real rain. It was fabulous. The temperature came down, the breeze was soft, I got to listen to birds calling over the sound of water dripping from the leaves outside my office window...

bliss.

(plus, I made it home pre-downpour with two fresh chocolate croissants. It does not get any better than that.)

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.

Mondays - now with 90% less doom

I wasn't expecting to get much done yesterday, now that my local coffeeshop features flashing neon signs for procrastination in the form of free wireless.

So I mostly stayed home and hoped for the best and here's what had happened by the time I packed it in:

I finished a complete draft of my short story
I did all the laundry and folded it and put it away
I went to the dentist, who found no cavities
I made an actual supper with real-food ingredients and
I heard that my submission was selected for inclusion in an anthology.

(admittedly, it is a knitting anthology, which is just going to fuel my procrastinatory efforts in that direction, but still - not to be confused with doom!!)

In fact the only thing that was doomy about the whole day was that I ate no chocolate.

No, wait. I ate three chocolate covered cookies and, um, a lot more than that of the chocolate covered ice cream bars clogging up the freezer. As you were.